The current Mideast peace talks are a distraction for the Israelis that they might wish to end sooner than later.  While they are surrounded by enemies, Iran is more a nuclear threat than Palestine.  They could either tell Sec. Clinton to shove it (diplomatically, of course) and focus their attention on Iran.  Or they could broker some kind of peace with the Palestinians, including a continuation of the moratorium on settlement construction, as a temporary measure…and focus their attention on Iran.  While the first option makes the peace talks a complete failure, the second should not be qualified as a complete success.  Israel cannot and will not allow its enemies to have nukes.

In this sense, and in this sense only, the sanctions against Iran just might work.  They may place the Iranian people in such a bind that they will topple their government.  Anything we can do to speed that process up is positive as long as it doesn’t involve outright invasion—we’ve had enough of “nation building,” or better said, we need to do some nation building here at home.  Of course, if the Republican hawks gain control of Congress, there may be pressures to attack Iran on the Senate and House floors.  Moreover, 2012 may see another George Bush in office who has no qualms about pre-emptive attacks on countries he or she doesn’t like (can you say President Palin?).  In fact, the probabilities of this happening are large enough right now that the race against time might be compressed.

If Israel chooses to make Teheran, or the region where the nuclear reactors are located, nuclear slag, will we help them?  Will we set idly by?  Or will we condemn it as an act of aggression?  In any case, the world will be a very different place.  As it would be if some terrorists managed to nuke Tel Aviv…or London, Paris, or New York City.  The world seems to be going slowly but surely insane.  No wonder, upon seeing the A-bomb burst in the Nevada desert, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer recalled the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  A nuclear Mideast is unthinkable.  But is it inevitable?

As a young man I always admired how some European countries required two or more years of service of their young citizens, either in the military or in public service.  Our Peace Corps has always been voluntary as well as most of the local civic groups where young people lend a helping hand.  Now our military is voluntary.  I think the voluntary aspect has to go.  Too many of the young don’t care about what happens in their home town—forget about overseas, where many can’t even locate Pakistan (in desperate need of help after the floods) or Haiti (still in desperate need after the earthquake) or Thailand and Indonesia (in desperate need after the tsunami).  While that might indicate a tremendous fault in our school teaching about basic geography, it is the not caring I’m worried about.  And the implied provincialism.

The United States is a huge country with plenty of problems of its own, one might argue.  My mother and I used to take Thanksgiving and Christmas vittles to families in the farm laborers’ camps near my hometown.  I still remember naked children playing with homemade toy boats in the run-off water filled with raw sewage, a tortilla in one hand and a string to the boat in the other.  I don’t know if this situation has improved, but I suspect that these people can still use some help—organized help that occurs more often than on just two holidays.

I recently watched Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act again.  While the movie is just an extended sitcom, this time I was struck by how the young people in the parish pulled together to improve their neighborhood.  Their motivation was the group of singing nuns, but this pulling together, this spirit of community, this more constant help, should be one thing that a civilian draft supports.  This kind of service would open some youthful eyes, a kind of service that some of our military experienced in trying to bring a war-savaged Iraq back on its feet.

Yes, community service need not be just here.  The ugly American is less ugly when he is lending a helping hand.  By helping out it is hard to build enemies.  The young might build resentment if they lord it over those they help, telling them how great America is.  More likely, they would acquire a new perspective by realizing how lucky they are and how our common bonds of humanity make others pain and suffering their pain.  There are plenty of Third World countries that need some help.  Slumdog Millionaire gave everyone a glimpse into the filthy, hopeless life in the Mombai slums, but I have seen slums like that elsewhere.

As an individual, you feel you’re helpless to make a difference.  That is why you need organization.  I’m not talking bloated bureaucracy but lean, effective organization.  Just as the military has its permanent soldiers, our official community service organizations need their permanent personnel.  And unlike the CEOs of some aid organizations, the top brass in these organizations should not be allowed to get rich.  They should choose this route because they believe in it.  And their “troops” should be allowed repeat deployments if they opt for a life of community service.

My vision of this new draft also does away with the notion of “conscientious objector.”  If for religious reasons you object to carrying a gun or fighting, you automatically go into community service.  The only real way to avoid service would be if you were physically incapacitated.  I mean seriously incapacitated, not that you’re allergic to peanuts or something.  And I would eliminate all ROTC programs on all college campuses and replace them with programs designed to prepare students for their tour in community service. Who knows?  The skills learned might just get them a job after they graduate and perform their tour of duty, something not happening that frequently in today’s economy.

As for the wars the politicians start, too many people are lackadaisical about the deaths of our soldiers, saying that they volunteered.  Whether the war is justified or not, this cavalier attitude belittles our young men and women’s sense of patriotism.  Many that fought in Iraq enlisted after 9/11, for example, and don’t deserve this treatment.  And even the gung-ho professional soldier deserves our support, no matter what our feelings about the war, something I could never understand during the Vietnam War.

Yes, the draft eliminates a cavalier attitude about war, for most people at least.  And with the addition of a community service aspect, it would generalize the concept of service to country beyond the battlefield.  A good thing, to my way of thinking.  Like many ideas, the devil is in the details.  How do we fund such a draft?  Do we have shifting budgets that emphasize the military aspect in time of war and the civilian aspect in time of peace?  How do we rank community service conscripts?  And what determines community service?  One can imagine a strange world where military conscripts and community service conscripts work side-by-side in Afghanistan, for example.  The possibilities are endless.

You learn to view the U.S. differently when you live outside the U.S. for a long period of time.  You learn how others see your country.  You tend to go through the mental exercise of constructing balance sheets, what are the pros and cons about the way we do things and the pros and cons about the way others do things.  In particular, I think living abroad helps a writer, not just for scene and culture but for the psychology of his or her characters.  Foreign experience in most cases is positive.  I really don’t understand how it can be just voluntary.

When I first went to Colombia a dear aunt warned me to be careful of the Indians.  I was heading off to Bogota, a city of six million at the time, seven million now.  She was from another generation, bless her soul, one where America saved the world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  For her, a daughter of Italian immigrants, the U.S. was the center of the universe.  Nowadays the U.S. is not the center of anything.  In many ways we are just a huge market for the Chinese capitalistic juggernaut.  World economy and our economy are forever linked.  It is time we leave our provincialism behind us.

First, Ms. Palin.  What can I say?  This is one mama grizzly, folks.  Or polar bear.  After all, she is white.  No love for brown skin in the Tea Party or from Ms. Palin.  (I recently learned that polar bears and grizzlies are closely related—in fact, they can mate.)  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is yet another Republican that is unseated in a primary, losing to a very right-wing candidate supported by Ms. Palin.  Since Alaska is solidly Republican (it must be that tough Yukon individualism that makes them all John Wayne wannabes), Murkowski’s loss implies that Alaska tilts even more to the regressive than progressive and will consistently vote against anything the Dems and Mr. Obama proposes, no matter what it is or how good it is for the country.

This feud has a history: Ms. Palin beat sitting governor Frank H. Murkowski in a gubernatorial primary.  The Murkowski dynasty has been replaced by the polar bear dynasty.  That’s Alaska’s burden to bear (pun intended).  Mama polar bear has had mixed success elsewhere.  Pandora McCain, who let this Tea Party darling loose to spread chaos in his own party and polarizing pestilence across the political landscape, is a survivor.  His personal regrets (his loss to Mr. Obama is partially due to his choice of Ms. Palin as a running mate) are probably small compared to the regrets of the Republican biggies now faced with the monster polar bear Mr. McCain unleashed.

There is no doubt that Ms. Palin and the Tea Party are ruining any chance of replacing the “big tent” the Democrats offer as their infectious radicalism turns the GOP further to the right.  The Tea Party, pandering to right-wing white bigots with enormous chips on their shoulders, is about as far as it can be from the spirit of independence and progressive thinking that led to the original tea party.  Hijacking a name might be good PR—it’s nothing more than that.

Second, Mideast peace talks.  Here we go again.  I think we could be more effective if we reduced diplomatic negotiations to handing out Uzis at the conference table and telling the Israelis and the Palestinians to go at it.  Forget the photo-op handshakes—these sons of Abraham want blood.  The principal problem, the end of the moratorium on Israeli construction and what Mr. Netanyahu is going to do about it, is understandably both a thorn in the Palestinian’s side and a cause célèbre for the Israeli right wing.  No progress can be made until this issue is resolved.

The truth of the matter is that Israelis feel surrounded by Palestinians and other Arabs whose main goal in life is destroying them.  This is probably more real than imagined, since the bombs and other terrorist attacks continue.  Even if you think the Palestinians have a legitimate complaint that Palestine is their land, the Arabs aren’t going to get squat until they acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.  Then, and only then, it might just be possible to come to some sharing of the sand in the sandbox, creating two nations out of one.  Oh yes, the lobbing of rockets into Israel would also have to stop.  I doubt that any progress along these lines will happen.  Both Netanyahu and Hamas are too obligated to their power bases.  They’ll keep pointing the guns at each other—it’s tradition.

Speaking of traditions, let’s turn to Labor Day.  Like many national holidays, the original purpose of Labor Day has mutated considerably (not as much as Christmas and Easter, the real offenders here, which are hijacked by merchants and secular icons like Santa and the Easter bunny).  Supported by Pres. Grover Cleveland and rushed through Congress only six days after the end of the Pullman Strike in 1894, making Labor Day a national holiday was tantamount to an apology to organized labor for the murders perpetrated by the U.S. military and U.S. marshalls.

By now most people have forgotten what the Pullman Strike was and where we got the name Pullman.  While organized labor probably still sees the day as their special day, both labor and the American public have changed.  The younger generations think of history as that boring subject their elders make them take to get a liberal education (except in Texas, where that phrase is an oxymoron).

During the time of sweatshops and exploitation of laborers (still in existence today, but involving mostly illegal immigrants working for unscrupulous factory owners and farmers), unions became necessary for the survival of the American worker.  The labor unions represented the only protection against the exploitation by greedy companies and the thugs they hired to keep order on the factory floors.  While some of the early labor movement was tainted by graft and corruption among the union leaders and the connections with the mafia or international communism, the power of the unions grew.

Today public opinion is mixed.  While it is certain that graft and corruption still exist, unions have had to make concessions as salaries and benefits achieved in good times become weighty anchors pulling corporations down into deeper waters when they are already in deep due to world-wide competition with similar companies overseas paying far less and providing fewer benefits.  Moreover, unions for public employees have almost become whipping boys as their guaranteed contracts force higher and higher local taxes in an economy where the worker in U.S. private industry can only dream of having similar pensions and medical plans.  Fair or not, unions have received a bad name.

With all this going on in a prolonged recession, is it any wonder that most people now just view Labor Day as the end of summer?  It certainly is far removed from the May Day celebrations in other countries.  It is reduced to that last summer trip to the beach or pool and the last family barbecue.  It has little relation to labor unless you count Mom and Dad’s work to cart the kids off to the beach or Uncle Fred’s flipping of the burgers on the grill.

Finally, consider bedbugs.  I was amused by an article in the N.Y. Times on Wednesday about Boston area landlords telling college students to not bring in bedbugs as roommates.  The little creature is rapidly deserving the name of “bug that ate New York,” so I assume the Boston landlords are referring to the students coming from New York City.  Or not.  There is a bedbug epidemic going on nationwide which baffles scientists—they don’t know where the little pests came from.  For many years, there were none, and now…well, they’re invading all over.  I suspect that the Boston area already has them so the students are being unfairly profiled.

I have two theories.  The first relates to the observation that bedbugs are susceptible to heat.  Previously, with inefficient power distribution, we’d have brownouts and blackouts—in other words, A/C’s would be off and the little beasts just shriveled up and died.  This summer, however, the power companies have seemed to do a good job in keeping the power on in spite of the record temperatures (more than 30 days with 90+ degree heat this summer in the NY area).  Sure, it’s still hot, but not hot enough—the bedbugs are thriving.

The other theory is that these are alien-designed bugs.  Instead of invading us, the aliens have genetically designed bedbugs to attack us.  The heat treatment (the 130 degree treatment is the new non-chemical way to get rid of them) destroys their programming.  Let’s hope that the aliens don’t have an infinite supply.  I can envision nighttime hordes of bedbugs, something like the beetles in The Mummy, overrunning our bodies, reducing us to skeletons as we sleep.  Who knows?  Maybe the students are aliens and the landlords have the right idea: Men In Black taught us that all the aliens are in New York City.  Or Truro, Massachusetts.  Of course, there might be other reasons to quarantine New York City.  Hurricane Earl will take care of Truro.

Iraq is a sore point, to be sure.  Mr. David Brooks in yesterday’s N.Y. Times declared nation building there a success.  He considered the economic and political fronts, just as Mr. Obama did.  Others are not so positive, including Mr. Obama.  While Iraq this year might end up with the fastest growing economy in the world, growing from zero is a lot different than growing from an already high level.  ABC News even thinks it’s significant that people can now go out in Baghdad and eat ice cream.  I don’t know if that’s economic or political, but it is sophistic.

Politically Iraq has come a long way (again, starting from zero) but it is still in chaos.  There is a power vacuum at the top.  Now that the combat troops have departed (the 50,000 remaining are non-combatant—wink, wink), the Iraqi government has to take charge—but there is no government!  There are Iraqi troops ready to maintain order…in two years, by reasonable estimates.  A thin veneer of democracy hides a situation ripe for a new dictator to step forward.  Ethnic hatred also lies under that thin veneer, so civil war may come first.

Mr. Obama in his speech gilded the lily respect to these problems.  In his defense, he never supported the Iraqi War and was even against “the surge.”  Mr. Boehner, Mr. McCain and other wannabe military experts are shouting that he cannot claim victory if he was against the surge.  I have news for these insolent hawks—the surge was a coin toss.  It could just as easily have gone the other way.  Throwing more troops at Iraq only worked because many Iraqi leaders also turned against al Qaeda in Iraq and the leader of the Shi’ite insurgents fled from Sadr City to Iran.  If this hadn’t happened, Mr. Boehner and Mr. McCain would still be counting the body bags.

American memories are short.  Too many people have forgotten that it was Mr. Bush’s pride and arrogance that got us in Iraq in the first place, and under false pretenses.  A friend of mine commented when the “shock and awe” started that Mr. Bush would never dare to launch a pre-emptive attack without justification.  I said at the time that people supporting the action were naïve—Mr. Bush is a politician and one should always question a politician’s actions.  I also warned and still do about the danger of making pre-emptive military actions a standard part of our defense policy—our enemies like Iran may also adopt that policy.  The 9/11 terrorists certainly did.

Like Kuwait, the initial military action in Iraq demonstrated the overpowering force the American military can throw against a Third World country’s meager and untrained armed forces.  It was a heavy and intoxicating brew that many Americans imbibed, many of them hawkish Republicans like Boehner and McCain.  Unlike Kuwait, or maybe as a continuation of it, the hangover after the drink showed how ineffective the American military is against determined civilian guerrilla forces.  We apparently learned nothing from Vietnam.  We also even forgot how our colonials won the American revolution.

Now that we’re past our hangover we’ve come to our senses and beat a hasty retreat in order to dedicate our full military might to that armpit of the Middle East, Afghanistan.  But problems will remain to haunt us in Iraq.  Our media focuses so much on corruption in the Karzai government (on his way to becoming a dictator supported by the U.S.) that we have lost focus on Iraqi corruption.

By some measure, Iraq is the fourth most corrupt nation on the planet (quoted in the Brooks column).  Now, how does that figure correlate with the economic and political stability needed in order to declare that we’ve built Iraq into a democracy?  Mr. Brooks seems to be interpreting his facts loosely, an emotional and sophistic appeal that seems to be a veiled support of Mr. Bush that makes one recall the bumbling commander-in-chief’s “mission accomplished.”

We have only a few cases where we have been successful at nation building, that is, building a true democracy.  Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after WWII come to mind, but one can argue that Germany already had some experience with democracy and Japan was ready to try anything as long as more A-bombs weren’t coming their way.  The debacle that resulted in Yugoslavia shows what our nation building often reduces to.  Can we declare success when we make a lot of little “democracies”?  The word is in quotes because the answer is that carving out nations to eliminate ethnic strife doesn’t make true democracies.  A true democracy thrives because of its diversity (something the people of McCain’s Arizona apparently can’t comprehend).

There is no “mission accomplished.”  The surge wasn’t a success either, unless you count the body bags as a success for the grim reaper.  Terrorists from Al Qaeda in Iraq are already stepping up their attacks.  It won’t be long before the Iraqi Kurds declare their independence and the Sunnis and the Shi’ites start fighting over how to split their part of the country.  You can’t force people to be nice to each other.  Our Civil War had a clear victor and the victorious weren’t particularly nice to the vanquished.  Mr. Lincoln certainly didn’t have any misconceptions about winning the war by declaring “mission accomplished.”  He knew nation building had to come from the resolve of the body politic.  He could free the slaves; he couldn’t win the war via a proclamation.

Some people would shudder at holding our VP Mr. Joe Biden up as a sage, but I’ve always agreed with him that Iraq is at least three nations.  Splitting it would increase the chances of bringing peace to the region.  It would not be nation building; it would not create true democracies.  Analyses like Mr. Brooks’ and other pundits suffer from being too simplistic.  Human nature is far too complicated to be analyzed in a presidential speech, an op-ed column, or a blog post like this one.  We have to let events play out…and hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

Now to the economy.  That last phrase of the last paragraph applies equally well.  While the Republicans and even some Democrats jump all over the Obama administration for not doing more, they know and the myopic American public should know that there is very little that a president can really do about the economy.  The fact is, Mr. Obama has done most of it already.  One of the last things, tax relief for small business, is a no brainer for creating jobs, and this sits languishing in this do-nothing Congress.  This is not Mr. Obama’s fault.

I admit that it is very disquieting when the national debt goes beyond 90% GDP.  For a family that would be called bankruptcy.  The Afghan war and the remaining obligations in Iraq are still a dollar drain that should be reduced or eliminated and those many earmarked Pentagon projects that the military doesn’t need or want should also be curtailed.  These actions can help to reduce the national debt.  But they won’t solve any economic problems which are endemic to this country and the rest of the world.  The economic malaise might have been started by Wall Street but the Frankenstein monster has acquired a life of its own.  We have to let events play out…and hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

And so it goes….

We visited the D.C. area this weekend.  Usually a city trying to revert back to the swamp that it was, the humidity was low enough that the heat was tolerable.  A good day for demonstrations, I thought.  No, I didn’t go see Professor Mouth, Mr. Glen Beck, lead his mostly white crowd in their push to establish an American theocracy.  I also didn’t mingle with the mostly black crowd in their nostalgia fix of celebrating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I thought that was going to be on the Mall too, but I couldn’t find it.  Just kidding.  I wasn’t looking for either one.  But the drive from New Jersey gave me time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

First, maybe it’s just my perception, but the two competing demonstrations, celebrations of life, memorials to ancient agendas—whatever you want to call them—symbolize the polarization that has gripped our nation.  Professor Mouth’s group, consisting of many Tea Party members and other refined citizens of similar ilk, are so far to the right that they scare even the Republican faithful.  The other group, rightfully proud that the good Dr. King started a civil rights revolution in this country, must contain members that are justifiably saddened by the fact that the ideas expressed in Dr. King’s famous speech are far from being realized, even if we have a black president.  They may also scare middle-of-the-road Democrats who generally try to pander to everyone in the Dems’ “big tent.”

Second, I’m scared that religion is playing such a major role in defining this polarization.  In some sense both sides—if we can be so simplistic to reduce everything to just two sides—both sides are trying to hijack religion for political purposes.  While Professor Mouth and that other Tea Party darlin’, Ms. Palin, reduced the politics to spouting polemics like America will be torn apart unless we return to God, some black ministers use their churches as bully pulpits to foment hatred for what white men have done to black men in this country.  Both scare me.  Please take religion out of the politics.  The relationship between you and your God (or your lack of one) is part of your personal life; it shouldn’t be part of your political life.  The Founding Fathers were smart enough to realize that theocracies don’t work for a pluralistic society.

Third, as we drove past the exits to Fort Meade and Andrews AFB, I thought how lucky we are that this country has a long tradition where civilians elected by the population control the professional military.  Again, we can thank the Founding Fathers for that, Mr. Washington in particular.  This raises the old argument of necessary and sufficient conditions, but the historical evidence is that there are many cases where this relationship is confused—a recent example is Venezuela—and the situation becomes far from ideal.  Or completely authoritarian—Burma is one of the worst examples.

While one can argue that the infamous military-industrial complex so feared by Mr. Eisenhower is tantamount to a substantial control of the government by military interests in this country, in that case we’re really talking about the grip that capitalism has on governments, even socialistically oriented ones like France.  Perhaps that’s what Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin mean when they rant against socialism.  Or do I give them too much credit?

Fourth, as we came across the Wilson Bridge (named in honor of the man Mr. Beck loves to hate) and turned onto U.S. 1 and hit a traffic jam, I was thinking how the world and even this country have too many people.  Or is this just a perception?  It may not be the number of people but our inability to solve the very complicated problems we have created.

We have perhaps passed that point where our numbers and technologies create problems that our outmoded social structures can’t handle.  I call this a singularity and it’s very different and more important than the one sci-fi writers have written about (where computers become sentient and/or men and machines become one).  Katrina, the BP oil spill, global warming, Alexandria traffic—the list of problems we’ve created which don’t seem to have effective solutions, if any, is very long.

Fifth, as we turned onto Alexandria’s King Street, I thought about that man in the White House who is taking the verbal tomatoes tossed in his direction usually with good humor and logic in spite of the fact that there are so many crazies out there.  Mr. Obama is a Muslim (he’s not).  He doesn’t go to church (no one should care, but he does—he just hasn’t chosen a congregation—can you blame him, after many saw him guilty by association with his old minister?).  He’s not native born (he is, unless you consider that being Hawaiian is not American because the U.S. really stole it when it illegitimately overthrew the Hawaiian government).

He’s a socialist (he’s actually a fairly conservative Democrat, a fact that angers the far left as well as the far right).  He has an agenda (yes, he does, and a lot of it was spelled out in his two books before he ran for president).  He hates Wall Street (no, he doesn’t—but he has good reason to—and Wall Street certainly hates him).  He promotes the hedonistic behavior of gays and lesbians (not true—he doesn’t even support gay marriage, coming down on the same side of the issue as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney).

Americans have forgotten how to cut their leaders some slack.  The love or hate for the Clintons has turned into national witch hunts where politicians feel forced to become hypocrites (Mr. McCain is a recent example) or they are forced to run for their lives.

In the last century we had the “greatest generation,” the “baby boomers,” the “generation X-ers,” and so forth.  What will we call the last generation, the one that “turns out the lights” as the American experiment ends and the world sees us fall into a vortex of our own making, the one created by our animosity and intolerance for the very diversity that should be our strength?  I can think of a few names, but they’re more appropriate to Mr. Carlin’s vernacular.

And so it goes….

If UFOs manned by ETs actually exist, they are a solution to Fermi’s paradox.  The story of how the paradox came to be might be scientific folklore, but the question defining the so-called paradox is very real.  The story (legend, folk tale?) has it that back in the 1940s some atomic scientists were chewing the fat and the fat became whether ETs exist.  Mr. Fermi, leaping logically far ahead of the others participating in the discussion, allegedly asked, “So, where is everybody?”  What he meant was: Out of all the billions of stars out there and from all those planets supposedly sustaining a technological civilization, why hasn’t at least one visited us?

Drake’s equation (radio astronomer Frank Drake), which predicts the number of galactic civilizations that might be trying to communicate via radio (often used to provide support to the SETI program), gives us some idea on how many technological civilizations might be out there.  Visiting other star systems is a far step beyond radio, of course, although it’s no problem for sci-fi writers.  Given present theoretical constraints (that bothersome speed-of-light limit, for example), it may well be impossible, in which case, Fermi’s question doesn’t even make sense.

That’s why the existence of a technological civilization that can visit Earth is such an important piece of evidence.  It would solve the paradox and, at the same time, create a paradigm shift in how humans think about the universe, about religion, and about how we treat old Gaia.  Most religions are Earth-centered in spite of our observations and theories about the Universe.  Imagine!  The existence of ETs would push the xenophobia we have witnessed in Arizona to completely irrational limits!  (If they drop babies here, are they U.S. citizens?)  We might even have to rethink our energy policies—the ETs might punish us for being so wasteful!

I have a theory, though, that explains the 5% or so of unexplained UFO sightings and solves Fermi’s paradox.  The theory’s not altogether mine (although I can find no other references), but I find it to have all the qualifications of a good theory: it’s a concise and complete explanation of the facts.  It’s rather simple: UFOs, piloted by ETs on their galactic joy rides, do exist, and give us that 5% that are not weather balloons and frisbees.  However, when these ETs see our wars, our incapacity to pull together and solve the problems plaguing our planet, our indifference to plagues, natural disasters, and genocide, they don’t want to have anything to do with us!  It’s that simple.

Many years ago I read a short sci-fi story where humans finally developed starflight and began finding other versions of humans strewn along a path of nearby stars ending in Sol.  It turns out vermin developed intelligence and overran an alien spaceship, killing all the ETs on board or driving them away or something on that order.  The starship kept running on autopilot on its course of search and discovery, leaving vermin behind at all the E-type planets along its path.  (Please comment if you know the author and title of this story!)  The vermin are us.  While not flattering, it may be that the ETs in those UFOs see us as not very intelligent vermin.

They may be acting with the very best intentions, not wishing to release the pestilence (us) on the rest of the galaxy.  You know, like if you go to a theater or department store and pick up bedbugs, it’s your civic (read galactic) duty to get them off you and not spread them around.  Same for lice and fleas.  Are the ETs just misinformed?  Have they interpreted their observations incorrectly?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Hey, it’s just a theory.

Note: This post is later than my usual one.  An ET made me think it was Saturday.  Well, I showed him!

Today an article in the N.Y. Times reported on an AARP study showing that the cost of brand name drugs in the U.S. went up 8.3% in 2009, confirming my suspicions.  I’ll be quick to say that I don’t completely trust AARP.  Since they’re in the insurance business, they often have hidden agendas.  This was evident in their support of Bush’s Medicare Part D drug plan, the plan which created the famed “donut hole.”  Recall that, as originally conceived, the hole was the gap from $2700 to $6154 in out-of-pocket expenditures that must be covered by the patient.

However, AARP seems to be reliable with their figures.  If anything, they’re conservative.  The 8.3% figure, because it’s an average over all brand name drugs, is already conservative in the sense that some life-saving drugs may even have a higher percentage increase.  (Yes, I know how averages work—this also means that some went up less than 8.3%.  “Life-saving” is a key qualifier here, but again, all of this is my own perception.  I’m not a drug marketing expert.  Readers are invited to set me straight in comments.)

The donut hole was law before Obamacare.  While the latter gradually phases it out, it is a financial race between the phase out and the Medicare patients’ ability to pay.  Especially in this economy, many people have to choose between taxes, food, utilities, mortgages or rents, and drugs.  For people that have to make this choice, there doesn’t seem to be any hope lurking just around the corner.  Desperation becomes a way of life.  I thought about that this summer, imagining an elderly person in Chicago having a heat stroke (no A/C or an inability to pay for the electricity) with symptoms exacerbated by not taking their blood pressure or diabetes medicine.  You might ask: where is this person’s family or friends?  My answer: The friends might already be dead and the family half a continent away (or sons and daughters off fighting wars we shouldn’t be fighting).

Drug companies are getting rich off people’s pain and suffering.  The mark-up on brand-name prescription drugs is obscene.  And the prices are high because they have to be.  Independent of the actual figure on drug price increases, a cursory examination of drug company profits and drug CEO salaries will show that this is yet another example of the massive transfer of middle class wealth to the wealthy.  Your anger at the Wall Street financiers should be matched by your anger at the drug companies.

We have higher drug costs than any other country in the industrialized world.  I’m convinced that the mark-up here is partly to compensate for the fact that other countries like Canada control the drug prices, even of brand-name drugs.  The rape is not uniformly applied internationally.  And giving out cheap, new drugs in the Third World often just amounts to a legal way for the companies to test drugs on human beings.

Don’t swallow the line that drug companies need to recuperate their research costs.  First, a lot of the research is done at N.I.H. or sponsored by N.I.H.  Second, drug companies tend to push drugs to market only if their marketing experts tell them that the demand will be huge for the drug.  A drug that only saves lives of 0.1% of the population (because that’s the percentage of people that get the disease) is either never marketed or put on the back burner or sold at an exorbitant price.

Third, it’s the CEOs and the stockholders that get the lion’s share of the profits.  The scientists and technicians, while probably living comfortably, don’t get rich, the drug trials are often populated with desperate volunteers, and the actual cost of a new drug often is more than recovered in the first years after its release.  It’s like those tolls on the Garden State Parkway.  If you think they’re just barely enough to cover the yearly upkeep, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you (which will be a traffic nightmare until 2014, by the way).

Yes, I know all about generics.  Their prices tend to go down because the generic manufacturer’s profit margins are a lot smaller and there is more competition, in other words, he is less greedy.  They’re often manufactured overseas and the binding materials are generally inferior, but I’ll gladly be the guinea pig if needs be, since I can’t stand throwing my money away to a greedy drug company.

Moreover, the same drug company that raked in the money selling the brand-name product during the patent period, often makes the generic at a greatly reduced price.  By the way, new drugs are patented and the patent is so generous (17 years for drugs patented before 1995 and 20 for those after 1995) that a patient restricting himself to generics may have to wait twenty years to try a “new drug.”  Of course, if this is a life-saving drug, he or she will be dead before that.  Obscene.

Drug companies, their CEOs, and their stockholders are having financial S&M orgasms thinking about all the aging baby boomers coming down the pike.  In addition to their numbers, they are generally wealthier than their parents were, so the drug company’s calculus is that they can pay more.  The companies are already anticipating the profits, I’m sure.  But the dollars they see in these numbers might not be realized.  The economy is stressing those baby boomers, who see threats to pare down Social Security, pension plans disappearing, and 401(k)’s going into the toilet.  As they become less healthy, they will be unable to pay more.  They’ll probably end up living fewer years than their parents.  Remember, predictions of life expectancies always have the hidden assumption of improving health care.

Hopefully the baby boomers, in their tradition of rebellion against the status quo, will rebel against the greed of the drug companies.  The patriots of Concord and Lexington, Washington’s army, and other colonials were outnumbered or outgunned by the British, but they still won the revolution.  Let’s hope the boomers and Americans in general can win the war against the drug companies.  And I declare it to be a war.  Someone has to, because congress people have lost interest in it.  Passing Obamacare wore them out, I guess, but the fight for reasonably priced medical care in this country is just ramping up, and that includes the fight for reasonably priced prescription drugs.

In the midterm elections that are coming up and the presidential elections in 2012, let me suggest a question electors should ask every candidate: what is your position on the drug war between consumers and the greedy drug companies?  If you get an ambivalent answer (how ambivalent usually is a function of how much drug company money is in the candidate’s campaign funds), confront the SOB.  Or, be very wary at the least.  Your life is at stake.

The Spaniards traditionally don’t do breakfast or they do it later than is my custom—just café con leche or some other beverage.  Their meal schedule then was generally skewed with respect to ours—I was invited for dinner once during my stay and told to not show up before midnight.  I walked back to my pension from that dinner, about a four-kilometer hike.  There was not a soul to be seen and my footsteps echoed along the concrete canyons of the city, unmixed with the usual sounds of the daytime Madrid traffic.

Some of my new Spanish friends scolded me for taking that long walk.  Once Franco died, they said, crime had picked up in the Spanish capital.  My pension was right downtown near the Plaza del Sol, an area considered a hangout for muggers preying on unsuspecting tourists.  I didn’t see any evidence of this but the description of how Franco had dealt with crime stuck with me.  There was then certain nostalgia for the old dictator.  He might have been an SOB, but he kept the city’s crime down.

Another evening I ate alone in a restaurant on the other side of the plaza from my pension.  I usually not only ate alone but often had the restaurants to myself because my dinnertime was considerably ahead of most Spaniards.  After a wonderful churrasco estilo argentino (Argentine-style steak) and great bottle of Rioja, I leisurely started the walk back to the pension.

As I started crossing the streets that ran into the lower part of the plaza, I began to run across crowds, so I asked a couple what was happening.  I was told the franquistas were in a protest march against the current socialist government.  As I pushed my way through the crowds (they barred the direct route to my pension), the emotional level seemed to increase.  Then I saw why.  There were counter protests from labor unions and other groups.  At one intersection things got ugly, someone was stabbed, police in riot gear moved in, and I ran like hell.

That was twenty-eight years ago.  I don’t know if the Spanish nostalgia for Franco still remains as strong, but back then it was certainly strong enough.  The common story is that as long as you’re not against the dictator, you’re safe walking on his streets.  Maybe this is only world legend (that is, urban legend generalized to world experience), but everywhere I have traveled it seems to be the case.  That’s why I was so surprised to read a report in today’s N.Y. Times on the number of homicides in Venezuela.

Mr. Hugo Chavez has the trappings of a typical dictator.  He claims to be a populist but his promised redistribution of wealth in Venezuela is largely unsuccessful.  He has made a habit of silencing his opposition, like a good dictator should.  He has harbored and supported the FARC, the Colombian terrorist group, known for its rejection of communist orthodox ideology in order to move into the drug trade and the kidnapping industry.

He has established “free” child services for pre-school children which are nothing more than centers of indoctrination.  He seems the typical jackboot strong man, chomping his cigars and swearing at the yanquis imperialistos, blaming the U.S. for everything that’s wrong with Venezuela while squeezing his country’s institutions in his merciless march to strengthen his power.  In short, he seems like the model that Garcia Marquez used in his portrait of the typical South American dictator that can be found in the novel El Otono del Patriarca (Autumn of the Patriarch).

But he fails when you compare him to Franco.  The N.Y. Times reports that Venezuela had more than 16000 homicides in 2009 compared to Iraq’s 4644.  Mexico’s drug war had fewer homicides.  A court in Caracas ordered a local paper, El Nacional, to stop publishing photos of violence.  In the decade since Mr. Chavez came to power there have been 118,541 homicides.

Caracas has 200 homicides per 100,000, Bogota 22.7, and Sao Paulo 14.  90% of these homicides in Venezuela go unsolved.  What’s going on?  This wouldn’t happen in Franco’s Spain.  Most of the homicides there were caused by him or by freedom fighters fighting his fascist troops during the Spanish Civil War.  After he consolidated his power, Franco’s Madrid was very, very safe.

I can only quote the figures from the N.Y. Times.  I have no way of checking them.  If you believe them, though, you have to wonder why this is happening in the land of a fascist leader like Mr. Chavez.  I think the answer is simple: he’s completely incompetent.  He’s a strutting peacock that can’t manage a country even when he’s got all the power.  No one takes him seriously.  He’s a typical sociopathic psychopath that is incompetent.  He’s an atypical dictator.

Usually a strong man lasts until his egotism gets out of hand and he starts thinking he’s a god.  Or some other facet of his sociopathic mental illness pisses people off enough that he’s deposed.  Or the U.S. stops supporting him, like the dictator in Vietnam (what was his name?).  Or he dies, like Franco.  The climb to power usually requires some management skills, though.  Rojas Pinilla, the Colombian general, for example, ended a civil war and brought many improvements to Bogota and Colombia.  It was his daughter that was the sociopath.  Chavez is a nobody by comparison with Rojas, and less than a nobody in comparison with Franco.

Poor Plato, man of his time, wrote about the perfect dictator, the philosopher king, the sort of man/god the followers wanted Christ to be, the Messiah promised by Isaiah.  It just doesn’t happen.  Sociopaths might be philosophers but hardly people to strive for the betterment of the people they dominate.  Psychopaths are rarely philosophers and not too worried about people at all.  However, Plato might appreciate walking the streets of Madrid unscathed even if Franco was not a philosopher.

So Chavez remains a man of mystery.  Maybe he’s right in saying that he wants to do good but local and foreign opposition stands in his way.  I don’t think so.  I think he’s an incompetent buffoon.  Garcia Marquez’ character and Franco weren’t buffoons.  They were evil types but brilliant manager types (any resemblance to your boss is purely unintentional).  Chavez is a dangerous comedian.  And if he can’t turn the homicide rate around, he’ll be out of a job.

First, there is still no real functioning and stable government in that war torn country.  The forced coalition between Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds welded together by strongman Saddam Hussein has become an extremely weak coalition that is oxidizing fast and will soon become rust, no matter what the Iraqi central government does.

In other words, there will be civil war in Iraq.  VP Joe Biden’s (then Sen. Biden’s) plan to divide the country into three may yet become reality.  We decapitated the government of the country and it became like the scarecrow of Oz—brainless and basically ineffective.  And there is no yellow brick road.  The country is worse off now than it was before the American invasion.

Granted, I had no love for Saddam.  He died a horrible death and probably deserved it.  I shed no tears.  I don’t have much use for dictators no matter how close they might approximate Plato’s philosopher king.  Castro, Mussolini, Chavez, Pinochet, Lenin, Noriega, Stalin, Franco, Hitler—the list is long.  Some are worse than others, I suppose, if you measure them by the number of people they’ve put to death, but Saddam is definitely one of the bad guys.

But Saddam aside, I certainly don’t approve of what we did to Iraq.  Killing Saddam wasn’t worth raping a country.  It’s not our job to overthrow every two-bit dictator around the world.  There probably will never be a reliable count on how many civilians died there or a tally on the cost of the loss in infrastructure.  I’ve also lost count on how many U.S. soldiers we lost and what the seven years of war have cost the U.S.  Dan Quayle’s son has called Mr. Obama the worst president in U.S. history.  I have to differ: Mr. Bush, the man called Dubya, the man that declared “mission accomplished,” is by far the worst.

So here’s my second point: Why hasn’t Dubya and his oil loving neocon cohorts been brought to trial?  If not here, then in the Hague, where they commonly try crimes against humanity?  Just add up the number of people they indirectly killed in Iraq.  It could only be worse if they actually pulled the trigger.  And consider the terrible state in which they left the country.

Maybe present politicians, Mr. Obama included, realize that it’s not over.  The Iraqi’s fat lady has been riddled with bullets and never will be able to sing again.  The maws of war in Iraq will chew up U.S. lives and drain U.S. coffers ad infinitum.  Everything about the so-called withdrawal points to this, and that is my third point.

There are presently 75,000 security contractors, aka mercenaries, in Iraq.  7,000 more will be added.  These soldiers for hire will operate radars, search for roadside bombs, fly surveillance drones, and provide quick reaction forces to rescue civilians in trouble (ours or theirs?).  What will the 50,000 remaining military do?  Yes, 50,000!  They are supposedly not combat troops.  Wink, wink.  That job will be taken over by the Iraqis (and the mercs?).  But 5 large U.S. bases will remain.  I don’t know how this compares to Korea, but we’re certainly not getting out of Iraq.

The other cost, of course, is represented by the tired troops that straggle home.  Instead of returning to their families, many will be redeployed to that other viper pit, Afghanistan.  More American lives, more U.S. dollars.  Those arriving and staying home—the maimed, the PTS boys and girls, those without jobs and the homeless, those with destroyed families—these represent an immeasurable loss of American manpower and spirit.  This terrible cost also rests squarely on Mr. Bush’s shoulders.

On the other hand, the present administration is not doing what it should do to make things right.  They have played the Orwellian double-speak game of relabeling a standing army of 50,000 soldiers and 82,000 mercenaries in Iraq “a withdrawal.”  The Afghan War, which has become America’s longest war, has become pure folly, as Mr. Obama shows more and more his incapacity to lead.  While he could never be as bad as Mr. Bush and maybe we should feel sorry for Barack due to the problems he inherited from Dubya, his hands are just as bloodied as he leads America into more debacles overseas.  What did we do to deserve such incompetence?

Or maybe it’s just that we do deserve what we get, and that’s my fourth point.  Maybe we, the American public, have become too jaded, too polarized, and too hooked on Twitter, sports, ice cream and beer to care about what we do to ourselves or the rest of the world?  Maybe it’s time to bring about the draft so that we start caring?  We are often seen in the world as self-indulgent hypocrites.  I know.  I’ve traveled enough to hear this in the voices and to see this in the eyes of people I’ve met overseas.

The rest of the world pays a lot more attention to political issues, both inside and outside their country.  Many of us care more about what rib sauce we use at a tailgating party than political issues, whether they be local, state, national, or international.  We vote with our guts, not our heads.  So maybe we do deserve what we get, the usual crop of incompetents that can’t lead.

We put Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama in office.  In 2012 Mr. Obama is sure to run again and yet again our choice for president will be between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.  Is Mr. Jeb Bush interested?  Can we say President Palin?  And, no matter the results, will we just be tickled pink with the crop of dullards that form the new Congress after midterms?  Have you lost faith in your government?  Join the crowd.

I’m not ready to become an anarchist since that’s a cop out, but the human race, with all its technical achievement, sure has screwed up in its ability to develop effective political systems.  Ours is one of the best, in spite of my complaining—there’s actually a slim chance that we find a responsible and intelligent leader—but the American system is getting old and creaky too.  The empire may fall soon.

So, for now, let’s make a toast to Iraq.  May “the withdrawal” from Afghanistan go more smoothly.

In the abstract the internet has provided the ultimate realization of the freedom of speech.  But we now tend to carry those strong opinions expressed on-line into our daily lives—whether we’re talking about the internet, our work places, cocktail hours, or the evening dinner table.  There is all too often conflict between X groups of people, whether X is political, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, or generational.  It often seems that America is in a verbal war with itself and sometimes the rest of the world.

I’m just as guilty as the next guy, I suppose.  This blog is written for many reasons, but one of these certainly is to express my slant on things.  In some sense it is a free-wheeling op-ed column, but I got started writing it at the suggestion of Ms. Jeniffer Thompson and her colleagues, my friends at Monkey C Media.  Early on I discovered that blogging is another form of writing.  I feel it has been a positive experience and one I thank them for encouraging me to start.  (Authors and others: Monkey C Media will work with you in designing your website and you will like the result—others might just enjoy visually feasting on the delectable delicacies now featured on their home page.  No, I don’t get any commission for promoting their service.)

I also learned early on that not everyone thinks like I do, even before I became a blogger.  The reason for today’s post is to send out this message: Hey, America, tone down the rhetoric!  It is a virtue to agree to disagree.  If the whole world thought as I think, for example, it would be very boring.  First, I already know how I think, although I do surprise myself some times.  Second, unless you’re working in pure science, we are dealing with personal beliefs, so I will generally avoid confrontation and say you’re free to believe what you want.

Believing that the world is flat or that you were abducted by aliens may seem humorous to many, but it’s mostly harmless too.  However, believing that the universe suddenly appeared, complete and ready for Adam and Eve, in the year 6000 B.C. may contradict scientific fact, so a confrontational scientist might ask you to be ready to defend that belief scientifically.  But again, I really don’t care.

This points out a fundamental difference: belief A can be counter to another belief B but neither belief A nor belief B can be scientifically proven.  In this case we might as well agree to disagree if I believe A and you believe B.  It’s not worth fighting about as long as you don’t try to force me to believe B, or vice versa.  Many religious beliefs fall into this category, although history has seen the last suggestion overturned a lot.  Is my God better than your God?  Some people will fight to the death to prove that one way or the other.

Or a belief can go counter to scientific fact.  To avoid confrontation, I still might just agree to disagree and let you go on your merry way as long as you don’t try to make me ignore scientific fact to force me to believe what you believe.  The business about wine into blood and flesh into bread is like that.  I just accept it as a purely symbolic cannibalistic ritual in the Catholic Church.  You can believe what you want about it.  Again, I don’t care.

The point of all this is that we get into trouble when we try to beat the other guy over the head and make him believe what we do.  The problem with fundamentalists, religious or otherwise, is exactly that.  These people can generally be classified into three types:  There are the psychopaths, the greedy exploiters and power mongers, who promote and skillfully use their wild ideas to further their agenda of controlling and manipulating other men’s fates.  Then there are the sociopathic killers, angry with society and their place in it, who do the first guys’ bidding, striking out at the perceived enemy, that is, the enemy determined by the first guys.  Finally there are the poor bastards that swallow all this hook, line, and sinker, that unthinking mob of true believers.

You think I’m talking about al Qaeda and those other jihadists?  Well, yes, but not just them!  The KKK burned crosses on lawns.  In the name of religion they murdered blacks and Jews in the old South.  They had all three types.  Militia members from Michigan to Idaho have all three types.  The dogma of these groups is similar:  White supremacy with its corollary that all other races are inferior.  The last ads devils in the form of those U.N. black helicopters, but you get the idea.  When we rant and rave and verbally bloody other noses on Fox News, MSNBC, or the internet, we are nearly lowering ourselves to that level.  I say nearly.  A lot of people do this for a living—they’re paid to be confrontational, which, in some sense, is worse.

I—like many others—was aghast at the recent stoning the Taliban rendered as a sentence against an eloping couple.  Come on!  The details leading up to the stoning are not all that different than Romeo and Juliet or the Hatfields and the McCoys.  It’s the stuff writers write romance novels about.  The animal viciousness of the proceedings, though, and the obvious enjoyment of the crowd aka mob, were more reminiscent of a pack of wolves.  This kind of thing might belong in Beowulf but not modern times—it is a phenomenon belonging to the Middle Ages, not the 21^st Century.  But the dragging of a black man behind a truck or the beating to death of a gay teenager in the good old U.S. of A. is no different.  Disagreement shouldn’t breed hatred and murder, but it does.

Agreeing to disagree is not turning the other cheek either.  There are virtues and there are stupidities.  You are no less a man or woman if you agree to disagree with another person.  You might be stupid, however, to turn the other cheek, because that other person may knife you in the gut.  Your virtue is not universally recognized by everyone, so beware!  Sci-fi writers love to extrapolate this in their morality plays of humans encountering aliens—for example, Ender’s Game—but the lesson is especially appropriate to men’s dealing with other men.  To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the most fearsome and vile predators on this planet and they are us!

However I think confrontation is way overrated.  During the Vietnam War I participated in peace demos where everyone just stood around and held hands, meditating on the lives being lost.  I suppose some were also silently cursing Johnson and later Nixon, but they mostly kept that to themselves.  I thought this was productive.  Until Kent State, a turning of the other cheek that got people killed.  The virtue of agreeing to disagree is sometimes trampled by the jackboots of the world.

While verbal or physically violent confrontation may seem to be necessary sometimes, it is rarely productive.  Yet it seems to be the elixir of our times.  As I writer, I like to watch people and more often than not wonder how they can think the way they do.  Part of being a writer is figuring out where they’re coming from.  I often become the devil’s advocate and choose an opposing position I don’t even agree with in my effort to ferret this out.  I suppose that’s confrontational.  A social scientist might call it research.  But the only thing practical I achieve is a better understanding of the idiosyncrasies of my fellows.  Useful for writing, perhaps, but not practical otherwise.

Many in my family have roots in the Midwest, Kansas and Missouri, to be specific.  In our family there were even cases of Truman supporters married to Eisenhower supporters.  As I was growing up the family get-togethers were often lively, but people still knew when to back off.  They knew when it became a virtue to agree to disagree.  It seems that America has mostly lost this ability.  And the rest of the world as well.

And so it goes….