Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

We are overwhelmed by our world. Events move faster than the people who are supposed to understand these things can discern the patterns that shape our world.
I am thoroughly disgusted with what the media is portraying. CSPAN is having one of its interminable self congratulatory events where media pundants get to admire one another and speak of how wonderful they are.
MSNBC is doing its end of the year best of series of blunders by politicians across the nation.
CNN had a shouting match between ridiculous talking heads who were supposedly talking about policy.
President Obama is trying to cover his ass by sounding more and more like President Bush defending America’s right to unilaterally attack anyone we imagine might be a threat.
The son of wealthy Moslems in Nigeria, radicalized while abroad, a graduate of a good English Public School with a degree in Chemical Engineering, turned into an Al Qaeda bomber.
The fact that Al Qaeda would use such an intelligent and promising young man to kill himself indicates to me a lack of respect for knowledge. I can understand a poor kid trading his life for economic support for his family for the rest of their lives by the jihadi network. But to throw away the life of a well educated young man who could offer so much indicates to me either a radical anti intellectualism or a sense of desperation that is no respecter of persons.
For me to make a statement like that goes against the grain of my own anti academic intelligentsia. But that is because I am a believer in life long learning and am opposed to the economic elitism that comes with academic credentials in the modern world. I am in favor of constant, non-stop learning and I believe in respecting education no matter how it is gained. But to take an educated young person and to deliberately use him as a bomb to destroy others is to me unconscionable. But then that is what being an officer in any army is. Think about that. If you are a graduate of the ROTC or one of the government military schools, you are promising to put your well educated ass in harms way for a certain number of years. Governments throw away intelligent young persons lives all the time. Governments kill innocents around the world and call it collateral damage. The fact that Al Qaeda does the same thing should not shock or surprise anyone. The Unites States and Israel kill thousands of civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan daily. But we don’t make a big deal about that. Nor do we cry especially when our own young men and women die in the line of duty as it is called in those lands. What does get our attention is when the war comes home. We find it perfectly ok to kill people in other nations where we are supposedly fighting a war on terror. But when the freedom fighters for the other side attempt to bring the war home to us,well we get indignant and we get upset and we rattle our sabres and call for more repression of our own civil liberties.
When Obama calls for Bush style preemptive strikes against the warriors on the other side, he is only fueling the fire of their own determination to hit the west where it hurts on the home front. It is only logical. We only scream when it hurts. If we are anaesthetised from the pain we cause others, the logical thing for the other side it to perform actions that will get our attention and more than that cause us an equivalent pain. What other choice do we give them? By fighting with Drones, using high tech killing machines, spending more on our military machine that the entire rest of the world combined, what can you expect any opposition to do? It would be suicidal and stupid to try to fight back in the same manner. Like underdog fighters all through history they fight back by any means nessisary. History is replete with tales of massacres and terrorism. There is a myth of how war is to be fought based on some conventions developed by the victors in 19th and 20th century wars in Europe. They tried to civilize war. But war is by its very nature uncivilized and when you have such radically unequal fighters there is no option for a fair fight by Queens-bury rules.
Perhaps if the Americans would fight with AK 47’s from the back of Toyota jeeps like the enemy and eliminate aircraft, helicopters, drones, jets, and all the other advantages of our high tech civilization then perhaps the enemy would be willing to fight by the same rules because they would have about an equal chance of winning. But only a fool would fight on terms that are guaranteed to let the other side win. Does Obama think the people he calls his enemies are stupid? Are they animals? Are they subhuman? No they are the same, people who want to live free or die, like all of us.
Because of that we need to find ways for humans to live together without killing one another and to do that we have to let everyone have space, respect and a an opportunity to create their place in the sun.

On to another issue. While driving home today I heard on KPFK that the tax on the estates of the wealthiest Americans is going to expire in 2010. There will be no estate tax or Death tax as the Republicans like to call it. Up until this year it applied to all estates for individuals over $3 1/2 Million dollars and on couples estates over $7 million. After next year the law resets back to the as it existed in 2001. The House tried to pass a law to keep the estate tax from expiring but the Senate could not act because the Democrats could not get a 60 member majority to stop a filibuster.
This may not seem like a big deal but it is the lynch pin of progressive taxation. It is the main means to reset the wealth of the nation and keep too much wealth from accumulating into too few hands. As it stands 2% of the population have over half the wealth of the country and that has increased since the Bush Administration raised the limit of tax free income from $1 Million for an individual to $3 1/2 Million and on couples from $2 Million to $7 million. And Bush managed to eliminate it for one year entirely in 2010. The Bush gamble was that a new Republican administration would keep the 0% tax for the wealthy as the new standard. That means according to KPFK that $10 Trillion in taxes over 10 years will not come from the rich. It will come again from the working classes because as we all know the rich simply don’t make enough money as it is.