Part of the reason that the government has grown so large is because the community has had to band together to deal with the consequences of our capitalist society, which aims to use people up and throw them away.  If employers took care of their employees as if they were an asset, an investment in training, experience, and knowledge accumulated over time on the job, than government would not be needed to redistribute the wealth through taxation.  Health care, retirement, housing, all would be affordable, and available to all.

Every one wants a bigger slice of the pie.  Even though the pie is not getting larger, and there are more people wanting a slice.  Taking some from somebody else to have more for yourself is called greed.  Greed has betrayed capitalism in the United States, pushed rational thinking aside, and driven us right over the edge.  Instead of investing in the future, to assure that the future is the one that we desire, we have been enticed to spend everything, and more, right now.  In return, our jobs have been outsourced overseas, our taxes are buying less and less services, and everything is horribly expensive.

Only huge, economy-wide growth, on a scale never seen before, can pull us out of an economic implosion.  Asset deflation is likely to set in, as prices drop, values decrease, and people have no money to spend.  Deflation scares the wealthy more than anything else, because it steals away their wealth even through locked vault doors.   To avoid another Great Depression, a new set of rules are needed.

Investment has got to be with the intent of value increasing over the long term, not in order to pay today’s bills.  Cash dividends to stock holders is the single most damaging policy of all modern business practices.  It robs the future to allow luxury for a time, and corrupts the process of management.  Stock should increase in value, and be split, to reward its owners, as the company becomes more and more valuable.  But that can’t happen when the profits are being funneled into cash to pay to stockholders.

Getting people into space is the biggest challenge we face right now, one which the U.S. has decided to avoid.  In spite of doing all of the work necessary to build a safe, reliable, economical way of accessing space, the U.S. is not taking the next step.  Outer space is the key to the survival of the human race, because only there can we find the resources and the energy to lift the human race out of poverty, disease, and eventual extinction.  Everything that we need is out there, in vast quantities, just waiting for us to come along and make use of it.  We can process materials out there without fouling our air and water, or putting more strain on our energy production system.

Getting into space means accelerating to 17,500 miles per hour, or 5 miles per second.  Every pound that goes into orbit requires large amounts of energy to reach that velocity.  Coming back to Earth, that same energy must be dissipated somehow, so that the vehicle is slowed enough to land.  We are going to give up landing on a runway like an airplane for landing in the ocean, like a rock falling from the sky.

Because the space shuttle was vehicle designed by Congress, it was horribly expensive to operate.  But the basic principles that it pioneered are sound, and should be the basis for the design of our next space vehicle.  But we must avoid the problem that the space shuttle faced, and that was trying to do too many things with one vehicle.  We need a space plane that is designed to carry about 10 to 15 people, and only people, into orbit, and to bring them back and land on a runway at the place where the vehicle takes off.

We also need to get beyond vertical launching.  We now have the technology to build an aircraft that would serve as a first stage, taking off horizontally, and carrying the space plane to an altitude where most of the atmosphere is below it.  This would utilize the oxygen in the atmosphere for burning the fuel, instead of having to carry it onboard, and it would take advantage of the thick atmosphere to provide lift.

Building such a system would take less than 100 billion dollars, and could be accomplished in a few years.  We already know everything that we need to now, all of the science has been proven, all we need is the wherewithal to make the future possible.

This holiday is the result of the efforts of a single woman, who organized a campaign to convince President Lincoln to declare a ‘day of thanks’ for the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.  This holiday has nothing to do with celebrating the bountiful harvests the land has yielded, coming long after all harvests are in.  Today, it is used as the kickoff for the Christmas Shopping Season, as well as being clothed in sentiment for home and family.

Holidays, or sabbats as they were called by many in Europe in ancient times, used to mark the turning of the Wheel of the Year.  They were tied to the astronomical calender, falling on the solstices and equinoxes, and the days halfway between.  These sabbats represented the periods of the year associated with renewal, growth, and harvesting, as well as worship of the ancestors.  Their meanings were timeless, beyond everyday life, immutable.

Thanksgiving falls during a time which was thought by many to be a dormant time, a period when conservation of resources was critical.  Winter is just beginning, and one’s stocks of food and fuel had to last for months.  Our genetic heritage is telling us to keep our activities to a minimum, to stay home, to endure the darkness.  We are goaded into action by advertising sponsored by those who want us to spend our money, even if we have none to spare.

Thanksgiving is a totally artificial holiday, having no connection with Nature and the world around us.  Its meaning is being lost in a blitz of advertising and promotions.  More and more, it is merely a celebration of consumption, of spending which keeps the rich getting richer.  Ignore the countdown which starts now, find another way to celebrate the harvest, save your money for more important things.

These children were dealing with things which  some adults had difficulty dealing with not too long ago; using a credit card, having it rejected, and making a call on a cellular phone.  The little girl was very adult sounding, but the little boy was still being a little boy.  I saw him as I was walking home.  He was playing with some friends, who were outside the apartments that he lived in, all thoughts of a mission gone.  Then, he must have remembered, because he turned away from his fellows and started walking towards the house.

I  was happy to see that he had not succumbed entirely to responsibility

The only reason that BP was drilling a well nearly a mile under the surface of the ocean was because they stood to make a profit from it.  With gasoline selling for nearly 3 dollars a gallon, oil companies are willing to try to extract crude oil under any conditions.  The hot new area for oil exploration right now is off of the coast of Brazil, in 10,000 feet of water.  The oil deposits lie nearly 3 miles beneath the sea floor, which means having a stick of pipe nearly 5 miles long.  The oil that is recovered is going to be very expensive, but the demand is so great that profits are assured.

The only way to stop this insanity is to reduce our consumption of petroleum products.  As long as huge profits are in the offing, people will do anything to be part of the gravy train.  More regulations won’t help, tighter supervision won’t help, greater accountability won’t help.  In many ways, this is very similar to the war on drugs.  All that we have accomplished by cracking down on drugs is to make selling and producing them even more profitable, which means that someone is ready to step up every time someone else gets busted.

The oil companies are like pushers, trying to get us to use as much of their product as possible, while trying to keep the competition from making any gains in their turf.  We could reduce our dependence on oil substantially, but that is the last thing that the oil companies want us to do.  They want us willing to pay any price for a gallon of gas, willing to stand in long lines to purchase this miracle substance, willing to buy vehicles which get poor mileage.  They don’t want us deciding to ride the bus or the train instead of driving, or carpooling, or riding our bicycle, or walking, because the oil companies can’t make a profit on those activities.

Big business wants the government to do everything possible to keep energy cheap, even if it threatens our survival.  We will do almost anything, pay almost any price, for the illusion of freedom that comes with owning a car.  So we created the demand for oil that induced BP to drill for oil in 5000 feet of water.  We are the ones who are pressuring the government to open up the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for oil production, not the oil companies.  We are the ones who are willing to buy oil from people who want to destroy us.  Changing our lifestyles to ways that are sustainable, which do not degrade the planet, is the only way to stop the oil companies from creating more disasters.  The government can’t do it, special interest groups can’t do it, religion can’t do it.  Every time that we drive a car, we are voting for more exploration, greater acceptance of risk, higher gasoline prices.

All we have to do is to leave the car at home when we commute to work, or to school, and we would reduce the demand for oil considerably.  And we should do so anyway, just to get ready for the days when we can no longer afford all the gasoline that we want.  Because things are going to change, and we will have to change in response.  It is much easier to make a change willingly than it is to be forced to change.  We need to have alternatives in place for when gasoline is just too expensive.

The United States is on the brink of an abyss, a time when there is no American spacecraft to carry our astronauts to their work.  This happened before, during the 1970′s and early 1980′s, between the Apollo spacecraft and the space shuttle.  The space shuttle is being grounded, because NASA does not have enough money to fly it and to do anything else.  The costs have not increased, the money that Congress gives the agency every year has stagnated, and inflation has reduced the ability of the dollars to buy what they used to.

When President Bush announced the Constellation program, it was expected that the new rocket would be ready by 2015, so there would only be a 4 year gap in our space faring ability.  But, because of the new kind of rocket that is to be used in the Constellation program, delays have mounted, and the earliest that it would carry people into orbit had been pushed back to 2018.  Plus, the capsule that was supposed to ride the new rocket into space, the Orion, had been too heavy to begin with, and so the number of people it was supposed to carry shrank from 5 to 3.

The Constellation program had become so expensive that NASA was considering shutting down the International Space Station 5 years early to free up money for Constellation, something which our partners in the space station were not likely to agree to.  NASA was proposing to build a rocket that would have nowhere to go, at least until the year 2020, when a new, larger rocket was supposed to make it possible for people to go to the Moon.  But there had been no money in the budget for developing the equipment needed to explore the Moon, so we would again have a rocket with nowhere to go.

What the three Apollo astronauts did not say was that we are not spending enough on space exploration.  They avoided mentioning budgets, and focused on prestige and scientific standing.  But the sad fact is that we are losing our ability to go into space, unless we reconsider the decision to stop flying the space shuttle.  The Constellation program would not have solved that problem, because there would still have been nowhere to send the rockets once they were finally built.  Our current budget for manned space exploration, including development of new spacecraft, is about 7 billion dollars.  We could double that amount and still not approach what we spend on the War on Drugs, for instance.

Without space, the prospects for the human race are bleak, because we will be trapped in a petri dish, stuck in a closed system, more and more of us competing for a finite amount of resources.  Without space, our consumption of energy will eventually destroy our environment.  Without space, the pie that everyone wants a bigger piece of cannot grow.

Responsibility is what the commission that sparked this diatribe is investigating;  who can get the credit for the American economy collapsing around the remainder of Wall Street.  Somewhere, there has got to be a person or persons whose decisions were instrumental in causing tho worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, or so the thinking goes, apparently.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is charged with establishing just what caused the best party the rich had enjoyed in centuries to come so suddenly to an end.

But, over and over again, executives state they were following sound business practices, and that it was unstoppable market forces which overwhelmed them.  They had no responsibility for all the bad things that happened.  We should not be surprised, because it would take some too dim of wit to survive on Wall Street to stand before a commission and say, “We were greedy, and got in over our heads.”  Which is what the whole crisis amounted to; greed distorting the judgment of everyone from home owners to heads of multinational banks.

How ‘sound’ is a business practice which is based on the market continuing an unprecedented surge, or the willingness of others to loan money?  It sounded great when the money was rolling, but people were so busy putting it in their pockets that they didn’t set any aside for an overcast day.  The smallest disturbance could threaten multi-billion dollar companies with extinction, it worked out, as dominoes fell one right after another, until the whole thing went right off a cliff.  How can you expect to see a cliff when you are driving 100 miles per hour?  The profit taking was so supercharged that no one even considered easing up on the gas a little.

Well, it was nice while it lasted, and some people made a lot of money, but most of us ended up with less.  Is it our money that those people got?

What I am about to say seems off the wall, and very morbid, but I believe that there is some evidence that this widespread ‘disorder’ in elderly people is a survival trait of the race, not of the individual.  Extremely old people are a difficult burden on a small tribal group, because compassion will force the others to help provide for them, as well as to care for them, cleaning them up, feeding them, cleaning them up, putting them to bed, cleaning them up… well, you get the picture.

Commonly, elderly people talk of ‘wanting to go home,’ even when they may be living in the only home that they have ever known.  Wandering out on a January night in much of the Northern Hemisphere is going to be a quick way of solving the problem, because hypothermia will take the very elderly in short time spans.  Perhaps, on some deep level that is beyond expression with words, elderly people don’t want to be a burden on the ones that they love anymore, and decide that it is time to go ‘home’, back into the pool of Life.

I can imagine that everyone would always put themselves at risk by flying out into the night, the woods, the snow, to look for that loved one who had wandered off, but I would bet that many times the person was not found in time, or even for a few days.  So the living are hesitant to put themselves at great risk for someone who is about to pass on anyway.  All of this means that when the spark of life is dim and flickering, when every thing takes somebody to help, when the pain won’t go away, there was a way to end it.

This seems so contrary to our instincts, which goad us to keep on struggling, to believe in the future, to know that things can get better.  But we will not survive forever, and somehow, some of us know that the way to get home is to leave where we are.  When people display a trait over a broad range of cultures, geographic area, and ethnicity, you can bet that that trait is something that has been bred into our genes.  It is called evolution, and it selects for survival traits which express themselves over thousands of years.

Crawling off to die may be a survival trait, similar to jumping into a river to save a child.  Removing a burden which will not go away without loss can be a means of  increasing the chances that the descendants will survive.  What is considered ‘dementia’ may be ‘instinct’ instead.  Decoupling the urge to survive from our actions requires extreme measures, so fogging the thinking might be the way that evolution has made it possible for the elderly to wander off to help the children while they look for home.  It is not lying down and dying, or throwing yourself into a butter churn, but it is a way to possibly shorten your life.

Why is it so difficult for countries to live within their means?  How can governments expect to borrow money endlessly, without ever having to pay back the loans that keep them afloat?  Is it fear of losing power that drives officials to promise what cannot be afforded?  The consequences of continuing the path that we are on are growing steadily more dire, yet no one seems to be suggesting that we change our course.  World trade stands in jeopardy, because who will sell goods to a bankrupt country?

The people of Greece have been living an illusion, fostered by governments which were willing to extend every possible luxury to stay in power.  Civil service workers could not be fired, most workers received 14 months of pay every year, and retirement benefits exceeded the income made while working.  But Greece is only the tip of the iceberg.  Nearly every developed country coddles their people, sheltering them from the true costs of living.  Budget deficits have become standard operating procedure around the world, not just in the U.S.

Even amidst widespread unemployment, some people are gaining more wealth.  Are we all being hoodwinked so that a few can continue to rake in the dough?  It seems like it.  Consumer spending has been the engine that keeps the world economy growing, yet consumers have been borrowing to spend.  If consumption were to decline to sustainable levels, who would suffer the most?  The people who have to put up with a 10-year-old car, or the car companies?  If we were forced to buy shoes that could be repaired, instead of spending nearly a week’s wages on disposable shoes, wouldn’t we be better off?  Probably, but the industrialists who have been getting rich selling us shoes over and over again would not be.

Most people have not seen their income increase for nearly ten years, yet the wealthiest people have been getting wealthier the whole time.  Consumer debt is at unprecedented levels, while income growth is ground to a halt.  If taxes are raised enough to pay the costs of government, consumers would be unable to consume.  Instead of raising taxes, governments have resorted to borrowing to meet their costs, trying to keep consumption going.  But it cannot go on.  Consumption is going to decline, tax revenues will follow suit, and then governments will be forced to default on their debt.

We are all headed for the poorhouse, because some people have been getting rich while the rest of us are just scraping by.  Wages have not even come close to growing in proportion to productivity.  Instead of paying shareholders cash bonuses, corporations should be paying their workers wages that reflect the value of the work that they do.  Then consumers would have the money to pay higher taxes and still be able to buy new goods.  But greed has blinded the boards of corporations, and the wealth that the workers create goes to people who do nothing to help create it.

American workers are so productive that they could be paid full-time wages for working half days, allowing full employment.  But that would mean that the wealthy would not get wealthier as fast.  So, the workers are earning what they did when they were much less productive, and unemployment is widespread.  Workers who cannot work don’t buy things that they don’t desperately need, which means that consumption declines, and tax revenues diminish.

We could have avoided all of this pain, but doing so would have cut into the profits that a small number of individuals have enjoyed.  As a result, all of us, wealthy and poor, are going to suffer.  Maybe we can get it right next time.  If there is a next time.

Drill ships have to be able to maintain their position over the well without being anchored to anything, which demands advanced electronics, and huge motors that can spin in 360 degree circles, called thrusters.  Much work must be carried out by remotely controlled robots, working on the sea floor, and the drill ships have to stay on station irregardless of the weather conditions, or else the pipe to the well will break.

To drill a hole over a foot in diameter thousands of feet into the earth takes huge amounts of power, and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of pipe, threaded together.  The work goes on around the clock, seven days a week.  Workers must live on the rig, spending weeks at a time hundreds of miles away from land.  Shift rotation is usually by helicopter, with supplies coming out on barges.

All of this means that the oil that is pumped out of these deep underwater wells is going to be very expensive.  And plans are in the works to drill in much deeper water, in some cases up to 10,000 feet of water, and wells going 3 miles into the earth.  The areas that President Obama wants to open up for production are in much shallower water, closer to the shorelines.  They have been protected from drilling because of concerns over environmental damage due to accidents.

The technology has advanced enough that such wells are fairly safe, because of a great deal of experience with them.  The well that is now leaking into the Gulf is one of the newest wells, in an area which has been undeveloped because of the costs of producing oil in such conditions.  But the steadily increasing price of crude oil has made deep ocean wells profitable, in spite of the costs.

We will never run out of oil, but at some point it is going to be too expensive to use as fuel.  When that point arrives depends on what actions we take to supplement oil as a source of energy.  What we are paying now for oil would have been more than enough to subsidize the development of high speed rail, mass transit, and more fuel efficient vehicles.  Our government believes in letting the market decide what is too expensive, which is fine, except that the market makes no provision for when oil becomes too expensive.

It is not the responsibility of energy companies to ensure that we make a smooth transition to alternate sources of energy, and it would be bad business to do so.  Maximizing profits means maintaining the status quo as long as possible, and then switch to the new source of energy as quickly as possible.  But who is going to assist the consumer, the business person, in making that huge switch?  Changing energy sources can be horribly expensive, especially if it must be done in a short period of time.

So, we are likely to see energy costs related to crude oil rise steadily, until they reach the point of causing economic breakdown, and then, suddenly, a new source of energy will replace oil, which will require new kinds of engines, new kinds of cars, new methods of using the energy, just when the economy is in shambles because energy costs have been so high.  Allowing more off-shore oil production will help keep energy costs down,  for a while, but they are still going to rise.  Will we use this time to prepare for the change to new sources of energy, or will we continue to pay whatever it costs for oil?  It is up to the government to prepare us for this, and the government is avoiding doing so, in order to help the oil companies be as profitable as possible.

Is this how capitalism is supposed to work?  Do we have to drive off a cliff before we realize that the direction we are traveling must change?  Is economic chaos the only way progress can occur?  Stay tuned to this station, because we will find out in the coming years.