So you already know about J and myself. And our two kids, The Wast and Little Dinosaur. But we have two other well-loved family members, nicknamed Fluff and Squeak.

Fluff is a blue-point Ragdoll, a grumpy and morose cat with an unhealthy attachment to J. Despite his lack of any sense of humour, Fluff has earnt his place in the family by rescuing The Wast from morning after morning of screaming fits when our son was three years old. Driven to distraction, we introduced the Ragdoll kitten and The Wast was transformed. Fluff let himself be dragged from place to place, hoisted onto bunk beds, buried under blankets at night, all with incredible good grace. The Wast settled down and the screaming fits ended.

Squeak is the Maine Coon we introduced to keep Fluff company. We called him that because he couldn’t meow properly as a kitten. Now, however, he can Maine Coon trill with the best of them. If Fluff is the grumpy one that prefers to fall asleep on J’s feet, Squeak is the life of the party, carrying his favourite toy in his mouth as he moves from room to room, and noisily and enthusiastically playing with it when he reaches a spot he likes. For all his overt cockiness, however, he’s a shy and surprisingly timid 7-kg ball of fluff. He loves the kids, often sitting on a bed and keeping them company while they play, and they love him. The idea of him keeping Fluff company didn’t work out so well (Fluff being a sullen bastard at the best of times), but Squeak’s an entertaining and intelligent cat and we’re happy we got him.

We keep both cats indoors and are lucky enough to have a walled courtyard garden here at Lotus Street, so they can get some fresh air and munch on leaves (then throw up on the tiled floors * sigh *) while still remaining safe and not harming any of the local squirrels or bird life. I’ve read that, here in Malaysia, keeping smaller cats indoors is also recommended due to monkey kidnapping! It appears that, if you live near a tract of established trees, monkeys have been known to drop into a garden and make off with the family pet. Knowing monkeys for the deliberately ill-mannered and implacable animals that they are (I’d much rather keep a pet snake than a pet monkey), I can imagine what fate await the poor, stolen felines.

And there’s some human-initiated kidnapping of pets that I’ve heard also happens, although I don’t know what happens to the victims in such cases. (I know what you’re thinking. As a riposte, I can relate an anecdote about my (Eurasian) mother, after coming back from her first grocery shopping trip in Australia. “These people eat cats!” she wailed. “I saw them skinned in the butcher’s shop!” Further investigation led to the conclusion of rabbits rather than cats, but she never went back to that shop again.)

So, Fusion Despatches would like to extend a warm acknowledgement to the existences of Fluff and Squeak, as I join the legion of authors who keep cats instead of dogs.

I know, I was supposed to be back online by Wednesday past, but it just didn’t happen. And it’s still not happening. At the moment, I’m on a borrowed machine on a borrowed connection, after J had some interesting conversations with the General Manager of a nationwide telecommunications company. He promises us a solid connection … but only in two weeks’ time. So, if anybody out there has sent me an email, you’re out of luck. Our borrowed wireless internet connection client only works on Windows and, with a few tweaks, on Mac and I am — of course — on Linux. Curses.

Still, I should have Chapter Seven of War Games up on my site by the end of today and Chapter Eight will appear the day after tomorrow, with much apologies and bowing and scraping.

With the exception of dozens of boxes still littering every room of the house, life in Lotus Street is starting to look … well, let’s just say that if you could see to the horizon of a forseeable future, it would look kinda nice. Apologies are also due to JoSelle and Maria for running so late with the June Radio Free Bliss interviews that it won’t be June any more by the time I get to them. So much for having boundless faith in human resources and high technology.

Gotta go but will probably drop by with a quick entry on Wednesday, just to let you know that I’m still alive and that War Games is still serialising.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I should have died at the age of 8.9. Here’s the proof, in case you were wondering:

This is part of a Greenhouse calculator in the children’s “Planet Slayer” section of the website. Actually, when I first ran the quiz, I found out I was going to live forever. The next time I ran it, I tried to pick a carbon footprint that was a little bigger than the Average Australian (Pig) to see what would happen. And it told me to commit seppuku at 8.9 years of age.

Now, I don’t consider myself a particularly warm and squishy, Care Bear type. But telling CHILDREN that they should die at a particular age because they’re emittingresponsible for too many greenhouse gases is a bit … um … perverted? Also, although the way Planet Slayer is set out is geared towards kids, the questions are obviously aimed at adults. I mean, how many children you know travel by air on business? Or spend x thousand dollars a year? Or divide their annual expenditure according to “ordinary stuff”, “stuff that’s better for the environment” and — get this — “ethical investments”?

Not only, in my opinion, is this questionnaire in utter bad taste but it also commits a bigger crime of tarring all leftist types with the broad brush of lunacy. Even across the equatorial line, I can almost hear conservatives in Australia decrying the project using the usual tired lament: “Look at what these PC socialists are doing with public money! How irresponsible! They want our children to kill themselves, the immoral, godless, tree-hugging do-gooders!”. And, once more, people like me are lumped in with emotionally immature types that think A Message gives them permission to trample all over other people’s sensitivities.

“But I think that Greenhouse Calculator is entirely the wrong way to approach the subject,” I decry.
“But you think we should all be more sustainable, don’t you?” Conservative Superior snarls.
“Well, yes,” I splutter, “but not, not like thi–”
“You bloody greenie, bleeding hearts are all the same, using taxpayer’s money to come up with that drivel. You lot should be jailed.”

How can a sane socialist win? Here’s the article in the New York Post if you’re interested. The Creative Director, Bernie Hobbs, says: “We wanted to put the important things in perspective, and have a laugh along the way.” You chuckling yet?

For my slice of Internet bandwidth, I think The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree handles another controversial subject in a much better manner that is more entertaining and educational than an exploding pig.

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And, as a footnote, Chapter Six of War Games is up.THE STORY SO FAR: Cheloi can’t fight the attraction she feels for her driver, but her lust is tempered by the knowledge that her entire mission could unravel if she is discovered. After four nights of stolen passion, she knows that — for her own and Garza’s sakes — she has to end the affair.

I was reading about the Olympic torch as it traverses its way across the world. It appears that Coca-Cola is the major sponsor of the Olympic torch relay and that it “donated” US100 million for the sponsorship. I put that word in quotes because there really is no such thing as selfless corporate altruism. Companies always expect some larger revenue bounce from these acts. In fact, I also think there really is no such thing as selfless personal altruism. There is always a pay-off, even in terms of feeling good afterwards. Now that I have established my cynicism credentials, I’ll move on.

We have all heard about the situation in China. And people are picketing Coca-Cola to say that corporate sponsorship of such a significant Olympic event, bearing in mind certain human rights abuses, is unconscionable. In fact, this is not the first time that Coca-Cola (a company founded in the United States) has been associated with a controversial Olympics, because it was also a major sponsor of the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin. That’s right. Yet another American company and Nazi Germany (*). There’s enough material around on the topic to satisfy even the most curious among you. Just search on 1936, olympics, coca-cola.

Can I share one insight with you, from climbing up and tumbling down a number of corporate ladders over the decades? Companies are totalitarian. The guy at the top says something, and everyone below scurries to do his bidding, regardless of whether it makes any sense. This is not the mark of a democracy. This is how totalitarianism operates. You have some outlet for frustration through suggestion boxes, rewards for performance, cutesy competitions to win iPods, and employee bulletin boards, but that’s just whitewash. The truth of the matter is, corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that get on better with other strictly hierarchical entities … such as Nazi Germany or China. It’s like friends meeting up. Each knows, and appreciates, how the other thinks and operates. With a handful of top decision-makers in one body only needing to talk to a handful of top decision-makers in another body (without all of that democracy, rights of citizens, we-the-people nonsense), it makes communication between them easy, efficient and effective. It’s a win-win.

With all this mind, I really don’t get why the protests are happening. The pairing of Coca-Cola and China all sounds completely natural to me.

(*) Because you already know about the Nazi regime and IBM and the Ford motor company, don’t you?

POSTSCRIPT: In case anyone comes up with the observation that most companies are, in fact, at the mercy of their shareholders and thus do not have the kind of tyrannical iron grip I’m suggesting, may I suggest that you read the Annual Reports of several public companies? If you flick to the back and start reading the list of majority shareholders, you’ll find that companies are ruled by … other companies. (Mostly banks and various funds.) The cases of a group (or even one, in the case of Carl Icahn) of concerned shareholders rallying behind one cause to change company policy are few and far between.

I haven’t done one of these grab bags for a long while, so here’s what tickled my fancy this past week.

Firstly, I won second prize at agent Jenny Rappaport’s blog, celebrating the second anniversary of Lit Soup. The idea was to come up with an opening paragraph containing the following words: kerfuffle, whit, lenticular, wimple, and flabbergasted. You can read the three winning entries here. I gets books! And outside the United States, too! Thanks Ms Rappaport. Ah, a lovely start to the day.

Cracked magazine has the top 7 conspiracies that actually happened. It may be a reflection of my general knowledge / conspiracy theory-ness / political breadth / fund of questionable facts that I already know all of them, and assumed other people did too.

This YouTube offering on Hillary Clinton (beware, there’s lots of written profanity), titled “Hillary’s Downfall” is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

And I wonder what Romancelandia is going to make of the latest research into male and female orgasms that’s currently published in Scientific American (via Boing Boing)? Essentially, neuroscientist Gert Holstege, said that (last sentence of page 3, if you’re reading the article): “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” Uh-huh. Climaxing robots. T’riffic.

Have a good weekend, all.

There’s a small resort nestled in the curve of a sandy bay. We’re talking sandy beaches, palm trees, and tropical weather. It has a supermarket, cinema, bowling alley, some fast-food joints, a golf course and, of course, the obligatory souvenir shop. It’s a bit exclusive, but — and, let’s face it, you normally never see this word in conjunction with “exclusive” — cheap. How cheap? From what I’ve read, US$42 (SG$58 / EUR28) will rent you a self-contained apartment for the night. We’re talking several bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, and air-conditioning. It’s not in Hawaii. In fact, it’s surprisingly close to the US mainland. Interested?

The name of the resort is the “Taliban Towers”. And it’s situated in the sun-drenched curve of Guantanamo Bay. The Guantanamo Bay concentration detention camp is part of the US Navy base at the southern end of the bay, so I suppose this little pearl of holiday merry-making must be further north. If you were one of the 3,000 construction workers involved, or one of the 1.5 million servicemen and servicewomen within the US military, you can travel to Taliban Towers for a holiday with your family.

The t-shirts you can buy at the souvenir shop have slogans such as:

• The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort
• Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun
• The proud protectors of freedom

You can get a mug with the slogan “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom”. Here’s a selection of the souvenirs:

I understand that service personnel are humans. I understand that they need time to unwind. But I really wonder at the mentality that enables its soldiers to, not only frolic with their families, near this:

but then also emphasises it by allowing the production of tacky souvenirs with slogans of questionable taste. And by “mentality”, I’m not talking about the soldiers’ mentality, but the mentality of the senior military personnel who made the decision to allow such a thing in the first place.

The full article on this “resort” is here.

As a civilian, I am repulsed by everything Guantanamo Bay represents, and the thought that there may be families swimming in the surf, while people — against whom no charges have been laid for 6 years — are force-fed food through unlubricated and dirty plastic pipes shoved down their throats, a couple of hundred metres away, is enough to make me ill.

As someone with passing familiarity with the military, I am also repulsed by the kind of screwing-over being inflicted on the soldiers, and their families. The handling of prisoners is a very serious matter. There are rules and processes governing this kind of thing. You do not trivialise it (especially if you’re supposedly dealing with “the worst of the worst”) by producing ghoulish dust-collectors for some young child, or non-combat adult, to take home.

Unless…. Unless you don’t agree that War is a nasty business. Unless you want to demean a particular section of the human population and present them as sub-human, and thus not worthy of consideration. If you wanted to, say, start brainwashing the next generation about the superiority of your own country and citizens over everyone else in the world, then I think “Taliban Towers” is an excellent way to do it.

Personally, I don’t think the genius who okayed this decision was really that smart. I can easily imagine a number of senior officers sitting around, saying, “Hey, we could have a place for the soldiers to relax. Y’know, bring their families. Enjoy a little downtime.” And someone else suggesting flippantly, “We can have souvenirs.” The entire room erupts in laughter. “Freakin’ souvenirs! Why not?” And then the next two hours are spent brainstorming the most atrocious strings of words you can put on little dolphins, keychains and t-shirts.

The problem is, what may have started as a joke can easily turn into psychological manipulation. How do you explain the bright and shiny holiday items next to the barbed wire and shuffling, brown-skinned men? Hell, there is even barbed wire on the holiday items themselves, so it’s not like you can run away from it.

What other inference is there but that the brown-skinned men are inferior to you — cowed and beaten. They don’t “deserve” better treatment. They don’t “deserve” any vacation time at the bowling alley or catching “Iron Man” at the cinema. None of these men — lack of charges withstanding — “deserve” to be free. These spouses and children will not only be taking back photos from their holidays at Guantanamo Bay, but also a moral dilemma that they will have to rationalise one way or another. As a student of history, I know which way these rationalisations tend to sort out. And it’s Not Good.

For the kind of holiday shots you can expect from the resort, go here (ironically courtesy of a United States Army officer). And here’s the accompanying article.

I read in The Register last month that a week-long clerical seminar with the goal of increasing confessional throughput was held at the Vatican in Rome. The result is that many sins that were previously defined as “venial” (a temporary loss of grace that “does not result in a complete separation from God and eternal damnation in Hell” — source, Wikipedia) have now been promoted to “mortal” (your ass is toast ad infinitum — source, Kaz Augustin).

Among the new mortal sins are drug trafficking, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation. Now, this is a fairly nebulous list, and I sincerely hope that the Vatican is applying its usual exactitude to this problem so we may all breathe easier. After all, these were the guys who really figured out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (infinite, but they’ll all need a good foot massage afterwards).

Using generally known principles, if you litter because you’re a forgetful slobasaurus, then that’s a venial sin. Three Hail Marys and we’re sweet. However, if you look around for a bin, can’t find one, don’t want to put your candy wrapper in your pocket/handbag because it’s sticky, and end up flicking it onto the ground when you think nobody’s looking, then that’s mortal, baby … and don’t let the door hit your backside as you descend into the eternal fires of the damned.

Likewise, genetic manipulation. Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to take over the world and turn all humans into mindless automata who’ll obey your every whim, or find a cure to some rare congenital disease. God hates you.

The problem with increasing the moral weight of particular sins is that the minute you upgrade your list, the number of ambiguous situations start multiplying like rabbits in a warm, secure warren. If pollution is a mortal sin, is using a 5-star energy-saver washing machine only a venial sin? What about smoking a cigarette? Are we talking lung cancer and Hades here? Seems a bit harsh, even for a non-smoker like me. What about priests who drink beer (and God knows (no pun intended) there are a few of them around)? Will they go straight to hell because alcohol is a drug, never mind if it’s more socially acceptable than, say, marijuana? Or do they get a special Get Out of Hell card because they’re on the ecclesiastical payroll?

I love lists like this. They are bit like the blog on inflation I penned some months ago. (That is, inflation is only 3% if you don’t own or drive a car, buy insurance, seek medical care, have kids still in education, pay rent, pay rates, own a property or rent a property, use electricity, town water, etc.) If drugs, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation are now mortal sins, then you’re okay, as long as you don’t drink tea, coffee, herbal tea or alcohol; don’t breed animals or plants, not even for that local Terrific Tomato Festival; don’t own a single electricity-inefficient appliance; don’t drive anything bigger than a scooter; don’t buy from supermarkets or businesses whose owners are rich; don’t smoke cigarettes; don’t go for relaxing drives in the countryside; and, to be honest, don’t breathe because, really, you’re nothing more than a carbon dioxide emitter when all’s said and done.

Of course there’s an easy out to all this and it’s actually provided by the Vatican itself. One of the differences between a venial and mortal sin is the amount of deliberate intent there is in your soul. So, if you deliberately cultivate ignorance of everything in life (and, say, forget you ever read this blog), you’re well on the way of needing only a couple of rosaries to get off scot-free. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it’s just as well that our souls are incorporeal or it’ll start to get crowded Down There real quick.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is no substitute for authentic theological advice. In situations of ambiguity, please consult your local cleric. Alternatively, you could also try thinking.

I love Australia. The country is breathtakingly striking, and the people are breathtakingly complacent. They are also inveterate optimists, which has its good and bad sides. Take the last Federal elections. Wine was flowing in the streets following John Howard’s (well deserved) defeat. However, I have to say I wasn’t as hopeful regarding the incoming government. Call me a cynic. But, the year has barely begun, and already something’s happened that smacks more of Howard than A New Beginning under Kevin Rudd. From an article in The Age, dated 14 April (you have to be quick with these news items; some of them have the tendency to disappear off the paper’s website awfully quickly) … Now, before I continue, if you’re after the really important news in Australia, don’t look at the front page of the newspapers. All the important stuff is buried elsewhere, usually in the Opinion pages. This one was buried in the Technology section:

COMPANIES will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack.

The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland … [states that] … “There’s no question that breaches of both government and private sector computer networks have occurred already - in some instances as a result of mischief, in some instances to obtain security-sensitive information and in some cases to obtain commercial information.”

He cited an attack by hackers in Estonia last year that, in effect, shut down its Government for almost two weeks … They used thousands of computers controlled through viruses - known as botnets - to simultaneously access an Estonian Government website, overwhelming the server and crashing its entire network.

And monitoring employees’ email is going to stop a similar attack … how? What is the government expecting? An email like this?

Dear Piotr,
I’ve spoken to Boris and it’s all set. Starting tomorrow, at 6am, Moscow Standard Time, we hit Estonia with all we’ve got. Make sure the local high school chess club has been clued in and have synchronised their watches. I’ve also spoken to the guys in charge of the Storm botnet, and they’ve said this project is eligible under the “charitable griefer” category that they have budgeted for each year. So it all looks good to go! I’ll txt you later. Btw, how’s your sister? I know a great club a few blocks away. Tell her I’ll be happy to meet her there next Saturday.
Maks

Legislation written to monitor the emails of company employees shows an ignorance of how botnets, or even basic security, operate. The truth is, you don’t even need email to crack a company, as various social engineering experiments have shown.

If I may have a word to the Anglo, English speakers among the audience for a moment. Ahem. Those of us of a duskier hue and/or accented voice have a very sensitive ear to machinations such as this. You just have to go up to your local mature-aged 7-Eleven proprietor and say something like, “Hey, Ram, what does it mean when the government is thinking of monitoring everyone’s emails to stop hacker attacks?”

“Stop hacker attacks?” Ram will reply. “How can they stop hacker attacks by reading Sanjay’s aunt’s vadai recipe? More likely they are trying to monitor everyone to see if someone is speaking ill of the government. Ashish’s second cousin’s nephew, who works in Bangalore, told my wife, that a call centre chum recently discovered …” and so on.

You see, our sensitivity to bullshit like this has been honed for generations and, for us of the Global South, it has become an almost genetic trait. “Cut out corruption? Get rid of the other guys so you can put your own cronies in place, more like it!” “Eliminate estate tax? Yes, and increase VAT on staple goods so the poor people end up starving!” “Reinstate the judiciary? Ah, all but one, so you can still shaft the most influential judge!” “Save trees and emissions by changing to Booksurge? Yah, and it also happens to strengthen an impending corporate monopoly! Pfft!”. (Oops, how did that get in there?)

We are your barometer. Where we have been, you are now going. Welcome.

A friend of mine had a birthday last month (hey, Maria!), so I told her (as we live half a world away) to have a drink for me. Specifically, my all-time favouritest drink evah — scotch and water with two ice cubes. Bartenders have asked me if I’m really serious about that ice cube requirement. Well, it depends on the size of ice cube, but yes I am. I take my scotch very seriously, thank you very much. Scotch, of course, is also known as whisky. Not whisKEY, you Americans. WhisKY. No ‘e’. I was reading a Regency recently and the hero helped himself to a whisKEY. And it really pulled me out of the story because I was wondering whether the author was referring to Irish whisKEY or had just used the American spelling when she really meant whisKY. It’s not just me being a pedant because they really all taste different.

My favourite drink used to be a Scotch and dry, but that became just too difficult to order in the States, because most bartenders thought I was asking for a “scotch and rye”. (Swooning followed.) As I got older, it was just easier to top up with water (and some ice) than to go looking for dry ginger ale, which also varies considerably in taste.

This is also apropos a book J is reading at the moment — a collection of essays by lately deceased Polish writer, Zygmunt Kaluzynski. He described seeing the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and said it was a lot like drinking whisky, with a flurry of action, then settling down to nothing, before another flurry of action, followed by utter boredom, and so on. Poles, he said, would never “get” the play because they drink vodka, and vodka drinking is not like that. It is much more straightforward. You have a bottle, you have a tall-sided tumbler, you drink. Simple.

I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but there’s a grain of truth in what Kaluzynski is saying. Drinking scotch is, for me, as much ritual as alcoholic enjoyment. There’s the precise requirements of the drink’s components, the relaxed sipping, the little swirl you give the glass so the ice cubes clink against each other and the side of the glass. There’s the glass itself, which should preferably be clear and heavy, with a thick base and delicate straight sides. (Krosno know how to make kick-ass whisky glasses, even though they have the business sense of retarded cockroaches.*) There should be a little, but not too much, condensation on the glass from the ice; a little, but not too much chill, in the mixture. Yes, I suppose it sounds masturbatory, but what else can you do? It is scotch, after all.

And after you finish your first glass, you go through the process all over again. Ah, bliss. More than any other verboten item during my pregnancies — the cold cuts, the wine, the soft cheeses, the salt, the sushi and sashimi, the coffee and tea — I missed the scotch. I don’t gamble (well, not in organised casino or sports type deals), I’m not into retail therapy, I don’t smoke tobacco, except for the rare sheesha. My biggest vices are swearing like a trooper and drinking scotch, so I think I can be afforded some slack-cutting here. Cheers!

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* I say this because the company was relying, almost exclusively, on trade with the United States for its viability. With the value of the American dollar, and consumer confidence, tanking (and everyone should have seen that coming, tbh), costs at Krosno have increased markedly, leading to a possible retrenchment of 1,200 people within the town of the same name. No town can afford that kind of attrition. It’s corporate stupidity, plain and simple.

I’m still pretty incensed about Larry Niven’s comment (from my last blog), so thought I’d put together this necessarily sparse little primer regarding finances. Niven thinks that a major cost haemorrhage for the United States are the “illegals” using medical facilities. However, if I may, I’d like to present the following financial reality:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the United States $5,000 per second. $300,000 a minute. $18 million an hour. $432 million a day.(*)

In view of that, do you really think that “illegals” using US medical facilities and then nimbly skipping out sans payment are costing the United States even the equivalent of ONE DAY of warfare? Let’s say, yes. In fact, let’s be really hard-nosed about this and state unequivocally that such payment avoidance is costing the USA a whopping One Billion Dollars a year. We all agree that’s a lot, right? Sorry, that’s only a little more than two days’ worth of warfare.

Whether you like to admit it or not, the war is the elephant in the room that nobody, apparently, can see.

One week’s worth of warfare is about $3 billion. What would one week of warfare funding do for the US economy? Do you think hospitals could use $3 billion? Schools? Infrastructure? Social services? Remember, that’s just one week of fighting we’re talking about.

The obvious objection to this is that this is American money and thus America should be able to dictate how it spends its money and “illegals” “sponging” off the system are really not on that list at all. Okay, but guys, I’m sorry to break this to you, but it isn’t American money. That $432 million a day? It’s not coming from US coffers. A lot of it’s on loan from other countries. As of June 2007, the US owed Japan $644,000,000,000, China $350,000,000,000, the United Kingdom $239,000,000,000 (now, that one raises some interesting questions for me) and sundry oil-producing nations $100,000,000,000. This comes up to a total of $1.3 trillion, on figures that are nine months out of date.

(As a side-note, from someone outside the US completely, this devaluing of the US dollar is a very smooth, sneaky trick on the part of the Fed that essentially devalues the Treasury securities that the foreign governments own (like [US government issued IOUs] on the money countries have loaned the United States). In other words, the $644 billion that Japan now holds in Treasury securities/IOUs is not worth what they were a year ago. Nyuk, nyuk to you, creditor countries.)

And, amidst all this, Niven thinks medical costs are an issue?! I suppose it’s just as well that he’s a science-fiction author because at least he can appreciate the view from that other planet he happens to be on.

Please note that I’m trying very hard not to make any moral statements on any of this; I’m looking at this purely in terms of finances. If you were a person doing this, then you’d essentially be borrowing massive amounts of money from whomever you could, to throw parties for strangers, while ignoring your own livelihood . While the grass grows, the car goes unserviced, the children starve, the mortgage debt increases, and the house slowly decays into the earth, Larry Niven comes along and tells you that someone’s sneaking into your backyard and using your barbeque. Really, is that the most serious problem you have?

I’ve been following the writings of Paul Craig Roberts(**) on the nuts and bolts of the US economy (Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan), and what he says has been consistent over the past few years, and backed up by other articles I’ve cross-referenced. The savings of US citizens is in negative territory. Health, education, public services and facilities are suffering. Jobs in manufacturing and export-type industries are down. Jobs in service industries (which don’t translate into import dollars) are the only ones that are up, thus encouraging further domestic consumption, which encourages further imports, notably from China at this point. And, at the same time, the United States is massively building up debt to other countries to fund “initiatives” in other countries, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.

Seriously, I wish you only had the medical costs of “illegals” to worry about. The truth is much worse … someone shoot off a probe and tell Larry.

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(*) Actually, the Washington Post disagrees with me on this. It says that the cost of the war on Iraq alone is equivalent to $720 million a day, or $8,333 per second (as opposed to my $5,000). I’m just trying to be as conservative as possible, to short-circuit any accusations of exaggeration.

(**) I like reading Paul Craig Roberts because he’s a conservative, and is a lot more difficult a person for Republicans to argue with than a liberal. Roberts still believes in Reaganomics, so if he’s sending a warning to Republican administrations regarding fiscal responsibility, then I certainly perk up. I, on the other hand, am neither Republican nor Libertarian nor Democratic (all of which shade the right side of the political spectrum).