Hello Out There

So Hills is a joke, a psychopath and a moron; Bern is a goner and a fake though his movement lives on; and The Donald is a fascist. So what else is new? Yoo hoo. Is anybody home? This is an emergency. We need someone who really knows what is up and what he is going to do about it. Among this lady and these gents do you see the guy? Like, for example does any of them have a plan for ending the use of fossil fuels, pronto? I mean something that will really work, not merely a challenge to the gray matter of a bureaucracy. Do you think someone who called Putin Hitler will ease tensions? Think the guy who is going to make America great again, has a clue? I know Bern was nice and kind of liberal, but really, he is a lightning rod to draw away your energy. Or are we not yet ready to stop putting our heads up our asses? This is “it”, I-T it, unless “it” is in the past. Must we still play ring around a rosy?

We need someone who knows what’s up and what he is going to do about it. Climate change is real and so is the immanent threat of nuclear war. Both are on the edge of out of control. No mere president could do what must be done with all the procedure and bullshit and who knows what cobwebby so-called thinking mumbled away in the inner sanctum. Could a president simply end the threat of nuclear war? Theoretically, I suppose, but won’t there be someone behind him, the deep state or some such. Surely he will have to feed the military maw. Would they just give up their nukes? What will happen to them if peace breaks out? And what is the real story behind the John Kennedy bump-off again? Just who are the Secret Service who guard the president working for? For many years they were in the Treasury Department. Might there be some influence of the deep state, that is, bankers? So just how far can a president really go away from what up to now has been the norm? Gargantuan fossil fuel use has been the norm. Could a president say, “No more! Industrial civilization has to stop now. Cease everything you have been doing.”? In short, the President is too buried in systemic bullshit to do anything real. Whoever is elected has no chance to do what has to be done now, however much power he will have to fuck everything up irretrievably. Isn’t that obvious from how well we are doing?

Hello? Anyone else out there also had the experience of what I used to call reality? Blinding, isn’t it? This is not an hallucination. We are very, very, nearly fucked, if we aren’t already totally and completely fucked. All you have to do is look. Or am I the only one who cares to prolong the existence of the featherless biped? Do you see it coming and just not care! Will you just let a horribly corrupt and unaccountable system put some ding-dong in the driver’s seat of this old bus we featherless ones nest in and drive it right to the dump? Am I the only one who sees Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove riding the bomb to the end of the world in Hillary Clinton’s mug? Shall that truly be the end of man? Just drop him off at the dump! All his immortal works, dumped! So what!? Is that what you are telling me? All because you want to continue doing the complete and total bullshit you are doing now? This is truly fucking rich!

But you others, who think of rebelling. Getting your movement together? There ain’t time, boychick. Anyway you are rebelling against a broken down jalopy that has been limping along to the dump since the depression. The USA is unredeemable. It has betrayed its own noble ideals. There is no point in rebelling. Language itself has taken care of that. Just look, listen. They are all bat shit. They are threatening nuclear war. They are slaughtering people to no purpose. They are doing nothing, nothing that matters. All they export is death. They have impoverished this rich country for the sake of evil stupid adventures. They can’t see what is in front of their empty puffed-up faces. Are they liars or just goofy? You be the judge. All that has to happen is that everybody realize that to go along as usual, with this bunch of boobies, just because some guys two hundred fifty years ago, besotted with the Enlightenment, made up a system, is stupid. It is stupid because these guys and gals in the driver’s seat don’t know shit from shinola and have no clue how to drive. Is this not obvious? Or is this my reality prejudice again?

All the USA can be from now on is a professional under-the-rug sweeper. Ever wonder why everything is so God damned secret? They are ashamed! They are ashamed and hiding their guilt like naughty children. Sweeping the corpses under the rug like madmen. They can’t utter a fucking syllable without a speech-writer and a teleprompter. Isn’t that what people need to keep their lies from slipping out? Oops. Is it a gaff or, perhaps, a tidbit of truth? Only his/her bullshitter in chief knows for sure. If only they were just naughty. And it is in these overgrown spoiled blood-drenched brats’ hands that the featherless biped and all his works lies. I know you are all puffed up with patriotism, but just one, two, three what are we fighting for? The idea of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave is gone, so what is holding it together? Don’t get mad at me. Ask yourself the question.

Even if we had lived up to our own best selves, the old system is designed for paralysis except where it comes to military adventure. We need to be able to get things done. Try putting “getting things done” and “United States Congress” in the same sentence. I mean Congress is where senior class presidents go to die. We are talking serious dip shit. Just imagine the goof balls, each with a private agenda, prowling the hallowed halls, muttering to themselves, waiting their turn to blovate in front of the august chamber. How long would it take for stuff that should have been done yesterday to ooze out of committee and then, garnished with all kinds of do-do, get volleyed back and forth in the august body itself for umpteen years until, watered down to nothing, it passes or it doesn’t? Do we want to put the fate of the featherless B in their hands? Fine, but just let me know. Cause it ain’t going to work and I can do other things. My affection for the featherless B is not that great that I am going to knock my head against the wall. I’m outta here.

Folks, we have turned the planet away from us. She is moving on to the next new thing, the real next new thing. She is withdrawing her gifts, her wonderful gifts, from the featherless biped (FB), and is bestowing them on, probably, a bug. Evolution marches on. As teams say when they fire the coach, “We are going in a new direction.” We are ending our era. The planet is going in a new direction. Can we save it? Call it back to us. Can we stop what we are doing? Perhaps, if we go all out. All Out. Like athletes who search for every edge. Boys and girls, we are at the mother of all tipping points. We can’t save the FB with just some half-assed side gig. It’s got to be… everything. Not Hills, Bern or The Donald. Not even close, unless extinction is your cup of tea.

So what the fuck are we doing? We are doing pointless things as this happens, pointless things given the immanent catastrophe. Do we really need advertising and stupid movies? Do we really give a shit what other people are doing with their genitals as long as they don’t have babies? Are we really, insanely, building more nuke de nukes? What are our armies doing all over the place spreading hatred that will last forever? Leave one another alone. We haven’t got time for this shit.

We are like ants who have exhausted their lollypop. Darting here and there to no purpose, hiding the truth in busyness, gorging on the scraps of a once great and now rapidly dwindling bounty. But that is too kind. It is more like pigs in a pen. Oinking away. Fighting for every rotten tomato. Is it Fun? More fun than survival of the FB? Then lets toss the slops to the ones who pushed closest to the rail. The rest can just root around or fuck off. If such a creature dies out, so what. Am I to think that the tribe of the FB would rather be this pig than human? Then let me just find those few who would be human. I will go extinct with them. For I have lost my taste for all this fun in the muck.

If we prefer to not go extinct there are some very harsh truths that we have to face along with that of our political institutions being completely worthless and evil and the occupants of our offices so full of shit it is coming out of their ears. We have to stop having fun. Only what is extra can be used for fun, and we don’t have any extra. Everything, everything we have has to go to save old FB, or we might as well pack it in. So we had better decide one way or another right now. If we are going to save the FB, no fun in the sun in Cancun. Fun has to be home made. But it would be a good thing if we thought about fun a lot less. Because there is a shitload of work to do.

It goes without saying that the USA is kaput. Whether it was ever really about Enlightenment freedom is a question, but belief in those Enlightenment ideas was all that held it together, other than self interest. Freedom and so on. The land of the free. Give me your tired, your poor and all that crap. Please. All that is gone now, gone. Any official claim to Enlightenment humanism is a joke. War crimes are us. We have no fucking clue what we are for or against or why. The average American, and most of the rest are terminally befuddled. Rightly so with this crackpot leadership and media scum. Other than to stuff our faces, dip our wicks, and have a fabulous time we have no interests. In truth the Enlightenment itself is coming to pieces like cotton balls in the self-devouring world. The notion of integrity has been lost. With our souls in tatters we await a great big inflation that will flatten the dollar like a fried rotten egg once other currencies can be used on the world market. Sovereign wealth funds will drop it. The rotten egg was once golden. No more. We’re heading for the crapper. Why would the rich states continue to support the poor ones after that? What for?

If we featherless bipeds want to survive, and I don’t say we do, the first order of business is making that decision, firmly, on one side or the other. No more shilly shallying. Live or die. If live, the ending of the use of fossil fuels is next. If die, party on. Drastic action or nothing is all that makes sense. Not just cutting down a few percent here and there and pipe dreams, unless it is cutting down drastically, almost to zero and fast, except for agricultural uses. This will not happen in the present adversarial condition of the world. The stakes will be existential and fossil fuels will be too easy to use when other sources of energy become scarce. Even if treaties succeed in limiting fossil fuel use, the gains will only be temporary. In the great big competitive world people will use fossil fuels to maintain an edge regardless of treaties. There is no concentration of energy like fossil fuels. And if nobody is using them, they are going to be dirt cheap.

This means the great big competitive world must go. We must abandon the entire purpose of our “civilization”, “more”, and nurture a culture of “just the same as last year”. That is going to be the mother of all one eighties, baby. I know this sounds hippy-dippy, but that is the way it is. It’s all or nothing. Get the idea of transitioning to alternative fuels and partying on out of your noggins. The numbers are not even close, and by the time the transformation was made the poor FB would be cooked, his bones picked, and his guts thrown to the dogs. You can transition till you are blue in the face but if we are still churning out consumer goods and arms we are going to use fossil fuels and you know what that means.

The whole thoughtless mess we live in must be tamed and tidied. The party is O-v-e-r. We cannot afford the pointless waste that marks the modern world. Or bye bye FB. Too big a change? It better not be. We must free ourselves from the idea of “natural resources” and look for sustainable cycles where nothing is used up, a way of life that includes the human population and all its works within the yearly cycle. Like all other life. We must reach a point where the concept of natural resources cannot be understood. Nothing to be used that a year can’t replace. So it’s all just part of the cycle. For we all must see that growth over here stimulates growth over there and, as sure as the sun will rise, we will use gigatons of you know what if we keep wanting growth. Growth is over. Vast surpluses ready to be wasted are over. The thoughts that nurtured it must be over. What is required is monumental retrenchment and rethinking, or nothing. If we give up we can party on for a little while longer and send the FB off in s drunken stupor. to go not with a bang or a whimper but with a fart of greenhouse gases. Oh the noble FB! Saving FB is a big, big job. And its got to start now. Now or never. Monumental is too small. Are we up to it?

But let’s push on. Those who dance in the present hurdy-gurdy world will fear boredom. Where are this year’s super models? Panic will cloud their minds and hide the immanent danger to the FB. They will gasp for fun like a fish gasps for water, and thwart the project with their doings. They want Cancun and they want it now. Why do they have to be deprived? We can only remind them of the nobility of our task, the rescue of the featherless biped from himself, and hold it in contrast to the pig pen. This will be a hard task, for many think that everything that is not the pig pen is merely hiding the true reality, the pig pen. Marx is one example, the average American another. They want their share of the slops. If everybody continues to want as much as he can get, we will continue to search desperately for the next new thing, waste resources that we need elsewhere, and fart out the greenhouse gases doing so. We will amuse ourselves to death. One can only wonder how long this fetish for novelty can go on. Boredom is funny. Only suicides get bored of novelty itself. But the ordinary guy gets close. Does that make anyone else suspicious? Is boredom really a secret plot, a drug to ease the pain of nihilism! We must give up boredom and the spurious love of novelty if the FB is to survive. Yes, we must give up boredom. It’s just a bad habit, the stigma of the pigsty.

But if a loss of excitement is worrying you, pilgrim, I’ve got good news. If we succeed, war will probably not go out of style. It will just be back to the good old days. Spears and whatever. Toe to toe. Your guys against mine. Wacky idea right? I know, I know, I’m out of my gourd, right? In a world of hypersonic hot-shit death-dealing cyber-gadgets? Give me a fucking break. At least it’s not hippy-dippy. War will return to its proper place of offering young men a way to gain honor– if we succeed. In modern war we kill the other before our adversary sees us or can do anything about it. What honor does a drone pilot in Nevada get for blowing up a sleeping guy in Iraq? “A vaincre sans peril, on triomphe sans gloire.” So you see. If we can get this done, we have something to look forward to. If the featherless one survives, pale face, there will still be better war and all that good stuff in his future. So there’s some good news.

But that’s going to be later, pal, if you’re good. After I’m long gone. When the featherless guy is out of danger, centuries from now. Right now featherlesskind has more pressing needs and cannot have war, period. Those needs are obvious. First, to eliminate industrial civilization and so use a whole hell of a lot less, and, secondly, to dismantle the mad war machine that can end the story in a moment. Right now you have every instrument of death ever devised lined up on one side and on the other a growing pile of shit. Who is going to win, pal? It’s a no brainer. You can’t fight shit with guns.

For now we need peace. That of course means withdrawal of all US forces now beyond the borders back home. Wow! Actual war, of course, is curtains, but so is the possibility of big war, for it forces industrial civilization. What interests did we ever have out there anyway if not to take stuff they didn’t want to sell us at a reasonable price, namely, a couple of pieces of green paper? When the army gets back, demobilize them. This is essential. Without it we are doomed. Keep the army, they keep theirs and nothing changes. Curtains for FB.

It would be pointless to try to force this change on the population. That would guarantee failure. But we need a real leader. We will have to count on the only tool left us, reason. The real argument is irrefutable, if you care whether or not the FB survives you must cease belching out carbon dioxide and never have war, even non-atomic war. Reason dictates no use of fossil fuels and disarmament and all that follows from that, if, and only if, you want to survive. Well do you, punk?

But those without reason, committed to something else, some murky inaccessible pseudo-decision making process that denies the consequences of continued blowing out of you know what in the face of immanent extinction will have to be gently put aside. We must take action now or forget about it. Reason means being sensible, like having plans that actually work. Such things must be done, not argued about. If we make the commitment to save the FB we must develop an efficient human organization that can act not just doodle. Many will call it totalitarian. So be it. If the deniers can continue to thwart all action, then the featherless one will be no more. Nor can there be compromise. We must be able to develop plans that work, not bullshit that satisfies the agents of power brokers.

Strangely, I have an irrational belief that the FB will choose to make a move. If the situation is presented openly and clearly I don’t think many will cling to the good life and fun when the survival of the FB is in question. The good life is not that good. I believe, all evidence to the contrary, that almost everyone would prefer a meaningful life to a life spent rooting for bonbons, pussy and fabulous times like the rich freed slave Trimalchio in the Satyricon.

But people need to trust, and that is in short supply, and rightly so. Money, as whip and reward of last resort, will not be enough. Just as athletes, having made fortunes work harder, proving money is not a powerful enough desire, the FB must dedicate himself to that task with an energy and enthusiasm beyond monetary gain. Since money is the ability to satisfy a desire to be named later, to work for money is to work without passion for something the earth can no longer supply. People must embrace their own part in the monumental task rather than do it grudgingly. It has to be a new way of life embraced enthusiastically and carried forward for generations. And it all must hang on trust, the thinnest of reeds. But what other choice does the FB have if he wants to stick around? Such a thing has long been declared humanly impossible. Is it? It sounds worth doing but that may just be me. Perhaps I am the last to know of a real death wish that grips us all. Have we decided to have a last party to send the FB off to eternity, heaven, hell, or wherever with a slam bang fare-they-well? Wow! Then Hillary is our gal.

This change of culture from thinking in terms of natural resources to one of yearly cycles has to be worldwide. China, Russia, India and others right now want to catch up to us. They want to be us with all our doodads and geegaws. They are building houses that belong in California. If the US has any purpose left it is as a bad and then good example. China, Russia and India must be dissuaded from trying to follow the path we followed. That is a tall order. Nothing could be more stupid than the present tension with Russia and China. We are not going to persuade them of dick with the saber rattling and dirty tricks with which we treat them. China and Russia are going to go full bore ahead with growth, and so will India. And they will build their militaries. And the FB will go extinct. The only way to show them that we have found the pursuit of “more “ disastrous, is for us to abandon it ourselves. We must unilaterally give up “more”, actually lead the way as we always said we should. It is a glorious national purpose. They will only be persuaded if they see the USA demilitarize and deindustrialize in a big way. We are still the big enchilada, the cutting edge enchilada. As its last act, the USA must lead the way to safety for the FB. No other country can do it. Who knows? Success in such an astonishing enterprise might even redeem it in the eyes of humanity. Give the US that “exceptional” sheen it has claimed for so long.

Do we have the cojones to demilitarize unilaterally? Could we do that? For the FB? Could we demilitarize? Holy cow, what the fuck am I saying!. Well, it’s fall back baby or we’re fucked. FB or no FB, that is the question. If we keep the army we keep the industry and China and India and Russia keep on chugging out the you know what to catch up. And of course we do too. Bye, bye featherless biped. If it would make it any more palatable we can keep a few nukes as a security blanket for awhile. But not for long since we will soon lose the ability to dismantle them. How to decommission the nukes du jour already bends the mind of any conscientious realist. But one thing we know for sure: the entire military is superfluous. Nobody is going to cross those Oceans just to end the world as we know it. The next war spells doom for Mr. and Mrs. Featherless. So USA, demilitarize. That is an order. And while you are at it cut out the coups d’é·tat. Overthrowing their legitimate governments makes people mistrust you.

Deindustrialization is a project so vast that it dwarfs anything the human race has ever done before. Manhatten project times maybe a hundred. Undoable? Here are the photos, you be the judge oh featherless one. We are turning the planet into crap. We are raising the temperature. Species are going extinct. Shit is piling up. The oceans are acidifying, droughts, giant storms, melting ice, rising seas, dumb shits in the driver’s seat, add your own. We are despoiling vast landscapes. Huge islands of plastic crap circle in the Pacific. Our armies are toe-to-toe with who knows who, ready to end the world. Here’s a whole pile of before and afters. In another ten years those afters are going to be befores. But you know this and much more. We all know this and much more! How long are we going to hide from this? It would take a hundred Manhattan projects to do something real, true, but wouldn’t it be better to try than just wallowing in the slops? Only lost causes are noble. Can we not embrace the grandness of this desperate effort?! But, let’s sober up. I was getting heady at the thought of something real to do. What else would be necessary to give the featherless B a snowballs chance on earth? Hang onto your hats, ladies and gents. The management will not be responsible if you don’t buckle up.

Food security has to come before any of this. To fuck with the economy before that is in place will bring on unending chaos. The last product of our industrial machine is food security. We need food security and we need it now. If people are starving they are going to look out for numero uno. Vast migrations flaring into war. Alignments and so on. Our whole enterprise requires a level of trust far beyond what is even sane in the hurdy gurdy world we now call home. But it is the only hope. We have to, oh my God I can hardly say it, trust each other. Only that way can we create human organizations that work. We must trust in this emergency. Mistrust beats a path to arming to the teeth, and that way spells doom. We have to stop double crossing one another. If people are screwed people who are not screwed will wonder when they will be screwed. Mistrust and then doom follow. No more slimy bullshit. Good faith is a bird always ready to fly out the window. If people mistrust, fossil fuels will be burned. The FB will go extinct. Maybe we should put up posters of the FB or let people, who knows, look at one another instead of their phones. Perhaps the humanity will shine through. Please note, I am not saying lets all be friends. Just deal in an honest manner.

Our task is to live simply, to shave off every ounce of unnecessary carbon emissions we can and try to increase the biomass through reforestation and other agriculture to soak up carbon we have already released. Our single purpose is survival of the FB. But if we succumb to an us and them approach we will never be able to deindustrialize. Hostility creates carbon dioxide. It’s as simple as that.

So the first thing we need is food security. Of course this might require those eating high on the hog to eat a little lower on the hog. Do it, for the FB. All you rich people out there, get a grip. Your wealth is only guaranteed by a legal system that fewer respect by the day. So any of you who are not warlords can please step to the front of the line. You rich people without armies loyal to you, and I don’t mean mercenaries, are fucked. Mercenaries, when the you-know-what hits the you-know-what, will have no reason to fight and die for you. They will turn against you if it seems like a good move. Just how do you plan to hold on when that happens? And you warlords, stop it. It’s not cool. You, too are an FB.

Now I must admit, I am prejudiced against barbarism. So I may have been biased in suggesting that barbarism must go. My idea that it spreads like a disease may have been wrong, unfair to barbarians. And I want to be fair. So if any of you barbarians out there feel unfairly treated, just write and make your arguments, and I will include them in the FB’s suicide note.

We have to stop all the pilferage and corruption that always leaches off food distribution and would make saving the FB impossible. This would require people to create paths for food shepherded by people who know and understand the situation of the FB. People must understand that corruption in food distribution spells species doom. This won’t be easy amidst the panic of food shortages. Food distribution would offer opportunities to impress upon others the dire condition of the featherless biped. The whole population of the planet must be won over very quickly, and that is only possible with food security. Pie in the f’ing sky? I know. But it’s put up or shut up for F Biped, Missus Biped, and all the little Bipeds. We must persuade the population of the necessity of this project or die. We cannot allow the usual corruption.

It also means that procreation must become part of the cycle, something that is not a right but a privilege for those who have a real useful place in a local cyclical economy. No more thoughtless fucking. We cajn’t continue to thoughtlessly pump out featherless ones. People who actually can do things that make sense need proper education. Real education both practical and for the soul. Superfluous people, who can do nothing to save FB, must not reproduce, however fascistic that sounds. They are parasites. Labels should not be a part of the argument about what to do. As I say, I know this sounds harsh, even fascistic. So be it. It is the way it is. Get rid of all those preconceptions. We must not kill anyone, if we are to remain human as well as because war would follow, but humankind must get smaller, through attrition. Pie in the sky? No doubt. Then so is featherless survival.

Think this will be tough? We haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff. No law or written constitution will allow for a change from our competitive world to one fashioned from cycles. Mankind will have to ween itself from the idea that squiggles on a page are inevitably linked to order and good government. They aren’t. The questionable value of law is not a new idea. Plato makes the point in The Republic (425 b-e). Only “musical” education will keep a city orderly, that is education of the soul, from earliest childhood. The idea that living under law is better than living under men will have to go. Real law is not a set of rules like rails for everybody to follow, but an alliance between two or more social classes against another social class, usually the poor. It is that or, far less frequently, an actual treaty among all classes. This last has only worked when laws were given by great lawgivers more because people imitated their virtue than because the laws were so good. Read Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens about Draco’s laws, and then Solon’s. Under law men cede to law the determination of what is good and bad. Good is what you can get away with, bad what you did when you got caught and convicted. Only fools are of good faith. The wise look for and create loopholes. They learn to deceive legally or escape punishment on technicalities, and their consciences are clear. Others use fine print and deceptive language to get what they want. It is all quite legal, so OK. One need only look at some recent legal arguments to see what strange thought law inspires. Read John Woo on the Geneva Conventions be be enlightened. Or if you want a real kick in the butt read Marbury Vs. Madison, the universally acknowledged brilliant piece of legal thinking that established judicial review. The conclusion was that Marbury was entitled to his post but that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to give him redress. Brilliant. The Supreme Court concluded that an injustice was being committed but they couldn’t do anything about it. This is legal thinking in spades. In too many cases real innocence and guilt is a secondary consideration in determining punishment. The routine takes precedence. Criminals should not plead guilty or innocent, but rich or poor. That wealth always wins belies the idea that laws are rules for fairness. Wealth simply replaces aristocratic privilege.

But the real reason law has to go is that we have to learn to act sensibly with what we have learned and what is before our eyes. We need not law, but authority that makes sense. Legislation is a substitute for and abdication of responsibility. The whole legislative apparatus is far too cumbersome and creaky to be used in the emergency. Everything has to be organized quickly and corrections made as seem necessary. This is an emergency. An enormous amount has to get done in a hurry. Good-bye Congress, good-bye Supreme court. It’s been good to know ya. You are in the way of survival of the FB. This whole thing has to be done with a voluntary whole-hearted participation of the vast featherless clan or it won’t work. We have to have authority that people willingly follow. What a fucking unbelievable hope! So who will be the leader? The man with the plan. Choose him well, and follow him once you have. You won’t get a second chance.

Our fetish for the idea that little black marks on a page can provide justice should not be hard to end. We need only notice that there are acknowledged “Conservative’ and “Liberal” judges on the Supreme Court. They read the words on the page differently. Their judgment must be informed by something else, that is, not these little squiggles. Well why not appeal directly to this something else rather than requiring judges to refer to earlier laws and decisions to cobble together arguments that really arise from this source, namely, what they actually think good and what bad? For they already have openly admitted that that is what they rely on. They are going to judge in terms of their sense of right and wrong anyway, as they should. Instead of laws we must rely on common sense and good will. Instead of compelling people to follow orders we must produce people who do so willingly. We are going to have to be more like Sparta than Athens. Athens, as Thucydides tells us, really only functioned as a democracy when actually ruled by Pericles.

Law does have a limited place, for example as the rules for a sport. Sport is a place where we encourage tricky rule interpretation to gain an advantage. Rule manipulation is part of the game. Neither side is good or evil. But when law is used to determine the right and wrong of a situation, laws corrupt the human sense of justice. And it is just this sense that we all have, but some more than others. In any community it becomes natural to appeal to some person to be judge who is known for probity. A person gets known for sound judgment. This person should be judge, but there is no reason to appoint him. Those involved can choose him at the spur of the moment. He doesn’t need to know anything more than what life has taught him. The details re not hard to work out.

Law is a way of tying the present to the past, the last thing we need now. We must do what we have never done before, make a plan for FB’s survival and carry it out. The evil that rule by men rather than law generates all come from corrupt magistrates and judges. So don’t appoint any. Let judges be chosen at the time by the litigants themselves and rely on their own lights to cast judgments. As of old, everyone tells his side of the story and the judge decides. Plato showed us pretty decisively that there are no experts in right and wrong. Courts appointed from above are a method of control that remains only because of force. Everybody knows it is not justice but money that rules. But if rule by law instead of by men is something we have to keep, bye-bye little featherless friend. Anybody who has ever tried to build anything knows what I am talking about. Laws multiply into voluminous rules and procedures that would all be unnecessary if builders were honest. So, be honest or die.

No doubt I’m a crackpot, so, I might as well go whole hog. Democracy will have to go. Democracy is a bad form of government. This has always been known. The Athenian Democracy totally screwed up with the Sicilian Expedition. Bad news for the left, I know, but hanging your hat on democracy is mealy mouthed. It means you don’t know what you really want. We need to do the right things, not the popular ones. Democracies waver, they are completely unstable. First the New Deal, then role it back. Welfare, then no. Glass-Steagall then repeal it. Half the government is trying to fuck up what the other half does. Nothing can be done, everything is half done. There is no real authority. A dirty stream of cynicism and deception runs under it all. The wheels grind slower and slower as everyone takes a little taste for himself of the fun stuff. The people are fickle. They don’t want war, they do want war. And of course propaganda works, so the mind of the average joe is not really up to snuff. Just look at Hills, Bern and The Donald. That’s democracy. That’s what it threw up for us at this time of emergency. Democracies inevitably slide into tyrannies. It won’t work if we want to save Mr. and Mrs. Featherless.

How about this for a kick in the pants: debt has to go. There has to be a Jubilee, a forgiveness of all debt. Otherwise the FB slips off into eternity. Debt must go. This will send a whole lot of banks and other lending institutions into the crapper. So be it. Good riddance. Debt is an obligation to pay money, and money is the ability to satisfy a desire to be named later. But the earth does not have the capacity to satisfy the desires to be named later represented by the trillions and trillions of dollars of debt outstanding already. Not without making things tough, very tough, for you know who. We cannot afford to satisfy those wayward desires. The earth can’t pay the debts we have already incurred. And they shouldn’t be paid if the featherless biped is to be saved. Whatever might be used to pay debt must be used to save the FB. We are trying to reverse a geological cycle here. Debt enslaves one to anything that pays. Carrying debt is like shipping water on a sinking ship. Look at Greece. Debt is promises, promises we can’t keep, could never keep, and should never have made. We have to break them, as dishonorable as that is. The energy that would have been expended satisfying future desires must be used to restore forests and other plant growth, the only way to reduce CO2. This Jubilee must inaugurate the effort to save featherlesskind, a noble attempt, whatever the outcome. But it will require a huge change of life. Does debt forgiveness tell people they can get away with stuff? Then don’t do it and the hell with the FB. We are already lost. Only a nearly FB wide awareness of our peril and a willingness to take up the task of trying for this long shot in a small window will give the featherless biped the snowball’s proverbial chance.

Well, that’s enough for now. Tall order? You betcha. Rather not? Maybe I’m all wrong? Don’t bother to hit me with the stats, young fella. I’ve been here for awhile and I’ve stood up and looked around. I’m not going to argue. You don’t have to believe me, but…

Michael Doliner studied with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago and has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College. He can be reached at: planeofexistence@gmail.com.