BEGGING FOR IT

Nikki Haley, UN Ambassador, told the world that North Korea is begging for war. Her statement reminds me of the rape defense that bad men used in decades past at trial before court—she was begging for it, they would always insist.

The victim—always a woman—exercised her constitutional right to dress any way she chose. A prowling lunatic observed her and believed instead that she was advertising a willingness to copulate with a grease-ball, so he attacked.

In today’s United States the grease-ball defense no longer works. Women (and countries) have rights. The courts protect them, most of the time. When they don’t, women have recourse to civil suits.


Nikki Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her mother once owned a clothing company, Exotica International, where Nikki worked as a bookkeeper starting at age 12. She served as governor of South Carolina until she became UN Ambassador in the Trump Administration. Note from the Editorial Board: Haley resigned her UN post on December 31, 2018.

All countries (and women) have the right to defend themselves. No one should have to say it. But the United States has mucked-up the waters of international affairs by waging preemptive wars against communist and socialist countries for the past seventy-five years. It seems like these wars will never end.

The policy of the United States is to undermine any country that espouses communism; it attacks using whatever methods are devised and recommended by the brilliant, depraved minds of our intelligence community. Despite all the evidence, despite all the complaints lodged against the United States before international courts and the United Nations, most Americans refuse to believe it.

The USA birthed its war-policy against collectivism in the early 1900s when the first communist revolutions undermined the noble classes of eastern Europe. The well-connected saw what happened in Russia and Hungary and decided to do something about it. Writers like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ayn Rand (We the Living) wrote short, easy to read tracts that portrayed life under communism as a personality-destroying nightmare. The public ate it up. 

After World War II, the job of suppression was handed over to our newly formed intelligence agencies who gave the fight its name: the Cold War. With the recent CIA assisted transformations of the Soviet Union and Red China into oligarchies (marking a putative end to the biggest conflicts) other terms have emerged from inside the intelligence community to describe how the USA is continuing to war against what few holdouts remain. The current buzz phrase is strategic strangulation.

Billionaires don’t look at the world in the same way as the disenfranchised and exploited. In the neglected and overlooked far reaches of the world where billionaires don’t live, common people sometimes try to organize themselves by producing wealth cooperatively and sharing it as best they can. Once they attract the attention of the powerful, the powerful send in missionaries and agricultural-aid workers to undermine and disenfranchise their leaders.

If God and food don’t work, they send in assassins. It’s true. Since WWII, the United States has gone to war with one out of four countries. It has overthrown (or co-opted) many states including Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens more.

Eventually, the USA sends in Coca-Cola and other first-line-of-attack companies to overwhelm the nascent economies of the sharers and cooperators. The wealthy move in to buy the arable land and lock up the country; billionaire power-brokers make it their business to bury every way of governance that might threaten their right to administer an economic empire built for one purpose only: to empower their own families and the families of their friends to rule unimpeded into perpetuity.


This billboard appears all over the island of Cuba. It says: BLOCKADE: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. It shows a Klansman’s noose strangling the island. Inside the USA intelligence community, it’s called strategic strangulation. Our leaders have enforced the embargo of Cuba for 55 years. Odds are it will never end.

The USA is good at undermining socialist countries. It’s why socialism doesn’t do well. When a communist country like Cuba manages to hold on somehow, they are tormented by embargos, infiltration by agents, sabotage, disinformation, slander, assassinations and so on. Radio Free Whatever is beamed into the targeted country to undermine morale and brainwash listeners with the most seductive psychological warfare techniques in our arsenal. It’s why communist countries seal their borders and jam our broadcasters.

The United States makes sure that no administrator can relax; none can kick back without constantly looking over their shoulder and keeping guard. As long as the privately-owned United States exists, countries of the opposite sex — that is, socialist countries — are going to get blamed for however the rich and powerful choose to hurt them. The better these socialist countries do for their people the bigger the target they become. Their success is their mini-skirt; their low-cut blouse. Obviously, they are begging for war as Madame Haley so eloquently put it.

Blaming the victim is as old as Cain and Abel. It’s as old as history. The bullies win. They put on coats and tails, send their kids to exclusive schools, learn to speak with a different accent, and set themselves apart. They tell wonderful stories about themselves on TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, and the internet until people start to actually believe deep in their hearts that wealthy people are more wonderfully made than themselves or their kids.

The poor and disadvantaged admire their employers, because no one is left to help them understand that they are slaves — fools before a noble class that thinks of them as having no more value than farm animals. They live in the cow-pastures outside the gates of the wealthy. A few unlucky cows get a glimpse from time to time of what has been stolen from them; most of the time they are too incredulous before the view to believe their own eyes.

Today, billionaires are planning as they have for the past seventy years to obliterate the North Koreans. Tens of millions of Koreans will die in the first hours. The North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the first countries to challenge America after WWII. Apparently, our arsenal of atomic weapons didn’t intimidate them. The USA has a long memory.

If we use nuclear weapons in a first strike, no one will live on the peninsula again. That this threat has been floated by our new president (fire and fury like the world has never known) makes it easy to understand what the USA is all about.



Despite denials in the press, America may in fact have neutron bombs in its arsenal which kill people but leave infrastructure intact outside the immediate impact zone. Only bunkers constructed from heavy concrete impregnated with barium sulfate can shield against both neutrons and the gamma ray by-products of collisions between neutrons and the proton-rich substrate of heavy concrete.

High level command bunkers are likely to be built with these materials. Otherwise elements like lead and heavy metals are the barriers of choice against most frequencies of nuclear radiation. But heavy metals tend to be transparent and ineffective against neutron bombardment.

Neutron bombs emit little residual radiation so they don’t contaminate the attack zone. An occupying force can be inserted with little risk of radiation poisoning. It’s possible the USA will use neutron bombs against civilians for the first time if the Koreans continue begging our country to kill them. A follow-on insertion of Marine and Airborne divisions would locate and destroy any surviving command bunkers.

The United States always seems to be first to try diabolical things. We used anthrax against Chinese troops during the Korean war back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about it but us of course. We have short memories when it comes to remembering our own sins like the genocidal Vietnam War and other cruelties such as the war against Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East.

And no one seems to remember that it was a CIA agent (yes, he was disgruntled and no longer employed, the agency insists) who blew up the first commercial airliner and wiped out the Cuban Olympic fencing team. It was an act of terrorism that didn’t happen when you ask most Americans. Lee Harvey Oswald was also disgruntled and no longer employed, come to think of it.

Speaking of begging for war, is anyone out there begging for peace?  The USA killed two million North Koreans during aerial bombardments approved by President Truman. What’s stopping us from doing it again?

During the first days of the Korean War, the South rounded up 100,000 of its own citizens and summarily executed them, believing that each of their victims might be a leftist sympathizer of the North. The Korean War was an atrocity — which I won’t devote blog space to explain or explore. Click on links, those who want to know more.


South Korea from North Korea’s point of view. A massive China has their back. South Korea’s capital is close to their border — a tempting target. (Click on map to produce full-size view in a new window.)

The point is, we aren’t listening to the North or South Koreans. Most want the peninsula unified. We don’t. Most folks want to live in a safe and fair place where billionaires don’t reduce the average person to poverty. South Korea doesn’t want us to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in a military strike against the North — possibly triggering a nuclear conflagration — to make a point. It’s simple, really.

The only sensible solution is to leave Korea and to assist reunification as best as we can if the sides invite us. We aren’t leaving obviously, because our policy is to topple socialism wherever it takes root.

In the past the USA demonized so many of its enemies that it has become more confusing for most folks to know who the bad guys are this time around. Immigrants to the Americas once labeled native Americans with the pejorative, savages. We exterminated their food supply (buffalos), then their men, women and children.

Right now, no one knows who to trust. With our new president we will never know what the facts are. We will never know for sure who is begging for war, us or them.

Billy Lee


From the EDITORIAL BOARD:

Billy Lee supports private and public ownership of property (a mixed economy) but advocates for internationally enforced limits on personal incomes and estate sizes to reduce the temptations that drive the wealthy to burn down democracy on altars of greed. Read Billy Lee’s essay Capitalism and Income Inequality.

Billy Lee opposes war on humanitarian grounds. During war people get killed and are maimed in huge numbers. It sometimes takes generations for both winners and losers to emerge from the trauma and horrors.

Billy Lee supports the United States during war but in peacetime reserves his constitutional right to pontificate freely.

OCEAN WAR

Russian hypersonic ship killing missiles fired from submarines and jets pose an existential threat to the US Navy Fleet. From AP Photo. 

UPDATE BY THE EDITORS: 5 AUGUST 2021; The Associated Press reported yesterday the following: A prospective Russian hypersonic missile has been successfully test-fired from a nuclear submarine for the first time, the military said Monday. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Severodvinsk submarine performed two launches of the Zircon cruise missile at mock targets in the Barents Sea.


Editors Note: The January 16, 2018 edition of the New York Times reports that five Naval officers are being charged with negligent homicide related to the incidents described in this essay where seventeen sailors lost their lives, others were injured, and ships were damaged. The decision to take these officers to trial or court-martial is imminent.


The United States Navy insists that it has 277 ships on active-duty. About 132 are combat surface vessels; 75 or so are submarines. About 70 are logistical craft designed to supply the fleet.

Do the math. 132 surface ships patrol the oceans. Yes, the Navy says they have a fleet of 160 or so non-commissioned ships held in reserve, but they are unavailable and ineffective during first strike scenarios.

The New York Times agrees with the Navy. Everyone agrees — we have 277 ships. I hope the Navy and the New York Times are lying, because if they aren’t, we are in big trouble. We don’t have enough boats.

132 surface ships can’t control the Great Lakes, let alone the world’s seven oceans. Submarines, everyone knows, are almost useless except when used for nuclear deterrence.

The Navy’s Seventh Fleet is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan. The fleet is responsible to cover 48 million square miles — from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, unless the faraway reaches of the South China Sea are included; then the square miles are too confusing for anyone to compute.

China claims the whole of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, including all reefs, atolls, and islands.

How many ships bear the awesome duty to keep the sea-lanes open and safe from pirates and hostile powers like North Korea? The Navy says, 70. The USA deploys one aircraft carrier and 69 ships.

Some news outlets have reported that an additional carrier group has been sent into the Sea of Japan to augment the current force configuration. A typical carrier strike group consists of eleven vessels, two of which are submarines. So, the total on the date of this essay might be as high as 81.

Sorry, but someone is ordering our sailors to do an impossible job. The job is too big, the resources are too thin, and guess what? 

A flotilla of 81 vessels scurrying about the South China Sea to keep a lid on China, which is seizing islands that belong to Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines as they build and fortify new ones wherever they want is more than enough problems to exhaust any navy. People get tired. Accidents happen.

We have 70 ships in theater, the Navy says. We probably have 81. What does the other side have?

Well, we don’t really know. They lie. So do we. But we and they both watch; and we and they both spy and calculate.

Hillary Clinton — once upon a time (anyone remember?) she had the security-clearance to know — during a 2016 presidential debate let slip that Russian drone submarines are patrolling our coasts. These are cheap subs that sail apparently with no crews on board.

She said it once. Her assertion was never repeated in the press or public media. Everyone pretended they didn’t hear, for good reason. The number and types of ships in the Russian and Chinese fleets that are arrayed against our tiny arsenal of boats are state secrets. It’s all classified — out of reach of everyone except those with a clearance and a need to know. 

Chinese frigates like this one often stalk US ships in the South China Sea.

It seems clear to more than a few casual observers of Chinese shipping that the Chinese are building the most high-tech navy the world has ever seen. They have been building it for a few decades now.

The Chinese have practiced their sea-going skills in coordination with the Russian navy since 2012. Last year the Russians and Chinese held joint naval exercises in the South China Sea, of all places. Joint land-based military exercises started in 2007.

China is selling its naval technologies and hardware to smaller countries that don’t normally threaten us. Thailand is buying Chinese subs. With military hi-tech weapons spread among a dozen or more countries in secret alliances with China… well… if it’s happening more than we know, does anyone think it’s good for our side?

But really, what would any reasonable person suspect are the forces arrayed against us? Look around. Hundreds-of-thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba ninety miles from the United States.

Upscale area southwest of the airport in Havana, Cuba. (From Google Earth. Street View not available.)

Go on Google Earth and look at the Cuban neighborhoods. Some nice ones have Russian street names. It’s true. The Russians have a number of wonderfully designed, modern military bases for both subs and ships; and — oh yeah — they have fighter jets and missiles, as well.

Does anyone disagree? Go look.

Am I trying to scare people?

Doesn’t the public have enough to fear? Isn’t terrorism, immigration, climate change, distant war, disease, and precarious health care that could collapse now that the GOP is in charge enough to worry about? Of course it is. 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson helped Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin build Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure. It is the world’s best. Note from the Editors: Tillerson resigned his post on March 31, 2018. 

Besides, our country has thousands of nuclear weapons buried hundreds of feet below the cornfields and deserts of the heartland to extinguish any threats, should we lose our Navy. Until the missiles rot and their plutonium payloads leech into our soils, why worry?

Everyone should sleep well at night, right?  Who wants to alarm anyone?  I don’t.

Secretary of State Tillerson said we should sleep well, so why not? He knows all about the Russians, having helped them build their oil industry over many decades.

Depending on when anyone takes its measure, Russia’s energy industry is the world’s largest and most productive — bigger than Saudi Arabia’s. People don’t believe it, but it’s true.

Russia is the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer and exporter. Secretary Tillerson must know what he’s talking about, right? 

Well, here is some stuff that is not so comforting. It might scare some people. Between 1975 and 2016 (41 years) our Navy experienced nine accidents, mostly between our own ships. Only two accidents involved the boats of foreign countries. That’s not bad. That’s not the scary part. But hear me out.

The Ehime Maru was on a 74-day voyage to train high school students to become commercial fishermen when it was struck on 9 February 2001 by a US submarine. It sank. Of the 35 on board, nine died, including four teenagers.

In 2001 a Japanese fishing-training boat, the Ehime Maru, with thirty-five Japanese citizens aboard, was obliterated near the Hawaiian island of Oahu when the commanding officer of one of our attack submarines allegedly hot-dogged the craft for civilian joy-riders.

Our new president, George W. Bush, went on national TV to apologize to the Japanese, and the United States paid huge fines and compensation to the Japanese government and the grieving families of the nine who died, which included four high school students.

In 2004, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy ran over an Arab sailboat in the Persian Gulf.  15 people died, but the Navy didn’t identify who they were it seems, and no one was compensated, as far as I know. Two jet fighters parked on deck were damaged. The Navy relieved the commanding officer.

USS Belknap, guided-missile cruiser, destroyed in 1975 near Sicily.

The most serious accident was in 1975 when the same U.S.S. John F. Kennedy hit one of our own guided-missile cruisers, the USS Belknap, off the island of Sicily. The Belknap was completely destroyed; seven sailors died.

A fire burned on the Belknap for twenty hours just a few yards from the magazine where Terrier surface-to-air missiles were stored. The ship was constructed with aluminum, which caught fire. The entire above deck structure melted. It took nearly five years to reconstruct the ruined cruiser. In 1995, the Navy struck it from the Naval Registry and began using it for target practice. They sunk it during a live-fire exercise in 1998.

A year after the Belknap accident, the USS John F. Kennedy collided with another ship, this time the aging USS Bordelon destroyer during a refueling. The Navy struck the ship from its registry and sold it to Iran for parts in 1977. No one died.

So, during the forty-one years between 1975 and 2016, the US Navy had nine peacetime accidents, seven of which were friendly-fire and self-inflicted. 24 foreign nationals died; 7 U.S. sailors; 1 U.S. civilian. Ship losses: one cruiser and one obsolete destroyer. Maybe other losses occurred. I haven’t heard about them, if there were any.

The USS John S. McCain collided with a Liberian oil tanker, the Alnic MC, on August 20, 2017 in an early morning incident that killed ten sailors. The crash took the destroyer out of action for at least one year.

And now comes the scary part; hold onto your pants: In the seven months since the inauguration of our comb-over commander-in-chief (and keeper of nuclear codes), the U.S. Navy has suffered four major accidents, which killed 17 sailors and injured scores more.

It’s lost two of its most powerful missile-guided destroyers — the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. John S. McCain. It might be years before they are back in service. Readers can read about the fates of the USS Antietam and the USS Lake Chaplain in the links below.

At least two dozen sailors and officers have been disciplined, including a Vice-Admiral, a Commander, and a Lieutenant Commander. Admiral John Richardson, chief of Naval operations, has ordered an “operational pause” to all fleet commanders. He’s ordered a months-long review of protocols, because, he says, “there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.”

All this commotion is happening during a time when we’re planning to conduct war games against North Korea and are daily challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea.

Can I put things into perspective? If the accident rate of the past seven months was applied to the past forty-one years, the U.S. Navy would be short another 85 ships and 800 sailors. Thousands more young men and women would be maimed and wounded, and 250 promising Naval careers would be wrecked.

In peacetime, essentially, the U.S. Navy might have lost one-third of its fleet and some of its best sailors and officers at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The USS Antietam, a guided missile cruiser, grounded itself in Tokyo Bay January 31, 2017. It released over one thousand gallons of toxic hydraulic oil into the bay and damaged both of its propellers and propeller hubs. Repair costs will exceed $4 million.

Here are a few of the headlines from our country’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. All headlines are from articles written in 2017. I’ve read every single one of them. Readers can access their content by clicking on the links. The remainder of my essay is written below these headlines:

China and Russia Hold First Joint Naval Drill in the Baltic Sea

Naval Collision Adds to Fears About U.S. Decline in Asia

After U.S. Destroyer Collision, Chinese Paper Says U.S. Navy a Hazard

Filipino Officials: Chinese Navy Stalked Philippine Area

4 Accidents, 2 Deadly, Raise Questions About Navy Operations

USS Lake Champlain Collision at Sea

Bodies of Several Sailors Are Found Aboard Damaged U.S. Destroyer

Sleeping Sailors on U.S.S. Fitzgerald Awoke to a Calamity at Sea

Japan Says Deadly Ship Collision Happened Earlier Than Reported

Maritime Mystery: Why a U.S. Destroyer Failed to Dodge a Cargo Ship

Navy Ship in Collision Named for McCain’s Dad, Grandfather

Previous Collisions Involving U.S. Navy Vessels

After Dangerous Collisions, Navy Will Pause for Safety Check

U.S. Admiral Says Remains Found Inside Damaged Destroyer

Commander of Naval Fleet Relieved of Duty After Collisions

Top Two Officers on Navy Ship in Deadly Collision Off Japan Are Relieved of Duties

10 Missing After U.S. Navy Ship and Oil Tanker Collide Off Singapore

Navy Dismisses 7th Fleet Commander After Warship Accidents

Mississippi Shipyard to Fix Destroyer Hit in June Collision

U.S. Navy Relieves Seventh Fleet Commander in Wake of Collisions in Asia

Wreckage of U.S.S. Indianapolis, Lost for 72 Years, Is Found in the Pacific*

*Some readers may have noticed that the last headline seems to have no connection whatsoever to this essay. But they would be wrong.

Recall that the battleship USS Indianapolis was the fiercest war machine we had during World War II in the Pacific. We used that ship to deliver the atomic bomb Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) to Tinian Island in the western Pacific Ocean sometime during July, 1945. It would be assembled and delivered to the Japanese people with terrifying effect on August 15.

From Tinian the Navy ordered the Indianapolis to advance to Leyte Island in the Philippines to prepare for an all-out assault and invasion of Japan scheduled to follow the atomic blasts that were soon to occur.

On July 30 the lumbering battleship encountered a Japanese submarine which delivered six torpedoes in the wee hours of the night. The sub commander later said that the clouds parted, which permitted the Indianapolis to be silhouetted by moon-light. It made targeting easy. Two torpedo struck the Indianapolis.

The ammunition on board caught fire and blew-off the front quarter. It took twelve minutes for the battleship to sink below the surface. The ship sucked four hundred men to the bottom and left behind an oil slick that would sicken and blind many of the nearly one-thousand sailors and marines who survived to face death by dehydration, drowning, and sharks.

The USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb to the Air Force in the Pacific before being sunk by a Japanese submarine. The ordeal took the lives of nearly a thousand men during five days in the open sea. Read Devil’s Voyage by Jack L Chalker.

The Navy didn’t notice that their prized battleship was missing. After five days of vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations, and shark attacks, three hundred men were still alive (some in lifeboats, including the Commanding Officer) when an aircraft on an unrelated mission saw something suspicious and flew down to take a closer look.

Twenty-two men who were pulled from the water remain alive today. The Navy court-martialed the commander, Captain McVay, and convicted him for not zig-zagging as he sailed. The Japanese sub-commander testified that zig-zagging would not have mattered. The Indianapolis was going to the floor of the ocean, in any event, he insisted. Nothing could have stopped what happened.

Losing a ship, even in war, is a big deal in the Navy. It’s not something that anyone takes lightly, even when there are extenuating circumstances and good reasons for failure. Captain McVay committed suicide in 1968—clutching a toy sailor in one hand and his service revolver in the other.

The Navy has a history of not being able to keep track of its ships. The earth’s oceans are vast, and we don’t have that many boats on them. Hiding ships from our enemies means we sometimes hide them from ourselves.

Civilian boats are another matter. Merchant fleets deploy 51,405 ships on our oceans. Most of them are bigger and longer and heavier than our 277 Navy ships. Almost all run on auto-pilot most of the time, especially at night when the crews sleep. If the computer directs the tanker to ram a boat like the Fitzgerald, that’s what is going to happen. In collisions, chances are Navy ships will lose.

Collision avoidance should be easy. Crews need only have situational awareness and the ability to steer the boat. The problem is that to perform these tasks crews rely on a complicated matrix of technologies that always seem to fail in critical situations like combat or rule violations by other boats.

These technologies should be used to confirm human observation and decisions; instead sailors confirm what the technology tells them, but only when something goes wrong, which is almost always too late. An alarm sounds and a glance at a computer screen shows that a tanker is 500 meters to starboard, so a crew member looks out a window to see if it’s there. No! That’s bassackwards and will get someone killed.

Officers might better demonstrate proficiency in the absence of high-tech aids for situational awareness and steering, then add high-tech proficiencies one skill-set at a time. Maybe they wear merit badges to enable COs to tell at a glance who can handle hydraulic controls and who is good at computer-aided navigation, for example.

Every officer doesn’t have to master every skill-set, and the least skilled officer should be able to turn off the high-tech systems they haven’t mastered in order to steer the boat and stop it using the skills they do have, when necessary.

Laser distance finders (like those used by golfers) and wide-field-of-view night vision binoculars should be standard issue. A half dozen or more sailors should be stationed around the perimeter of every boat and be required to report what they see or don’t see every five minutes or so. No snoozing!

Mischief Reef is the site of a Chinese airstrip and military installation built on a contested atoll in the Philippines.

Anyway, one thing about the four accidents this year (January 31, the USS Antietam; May 9, the USS Lake Champlain; June 17, the USS Fitzgerald; August 20, the USS John S. McCain) bothers me: the destroyer McCain was nearly sunk just two weeks after it challenged the Chinese at a contested atoll named Mischief Reef, which the Chinese have in recent years built-up into a military base.

I have a problem with coincidences that turn out bad for our side. Malevolent intent by an adversary is always possible. Every bridge officer should understand the protocols to avoid intentional (or unintentional) collisions initiated by rogue (or wayward) boats.

A Philippine-manned cargo ship, the ACX Crystal, rammed the USS Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, on June 17, 2017. Seven US sailors died. The night was clear; the seas calm. The commanding officer and another crew member were severely injured. Repairs will cost hundreds of millions and take years to complete.

Our Navy is a mess. Everyone knows it. The optics of powerful warships limping into port under the power of a dozen or so tugboats emboldens our enemies and demoralizes our patriotic fighting men and women.

We have the wrong ships, designed the wrong way, for the wrong wars, for the wrong reasons. And our Navy is overworked to the max. We all know it’s true. It doesn’t have to be. It’s good to have high-tech systems, but they are useless during a crisis. Everyone must be proficient at low-tech and know how to enable it. Seriously.

Politics and corruption, profiteering and greed, laziness and lack of zeal are going to kill us all if we don’t wake up. It’s time for civilians to step up and defend our way of life. It’s time for corporations and billionaires to do what’s right — not what makes them wealthy at the expense of our country’s defense and the prosperity of our citizens and the people of the world who are looking to us for leadership.

We are going to regret privatizing our military and using contractors instead of citizens to fight our battles. We are going to lose our freedoms and our country if we don’t fight for both. Everyone must do their part. Corruption can have no role in the process.

We must use our power to make the world safer, freer, and better for everyone, not just ourselves. People are sick and tired of “America first.” We have so much, already.

It’s time to share our advantages, with love. If we do what’s right, if we embrace public service and reach out to the disadvantaged in the world (the military, after all, doesn’t have the room or the money for every citizen), we won’t need to kill everyone who hates us like we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.

A year or two of public service by every American in impoverished neighborhoods and blighted communities might make a big difference in the why, how, and who we fight.

Billy Lee

DEATH TAX

It’s un-American for the wealthy to leave fortunes to their children and grandchildren. It creates a caste system, which is what we fought a revolution to avoid. Under current tax policy anyone who dies can leave up to $5.5 million tax-free to relatives. Any excess above $5.5 million is taxed at 40%, generally speaking. It’s a bit more complicated, but taxation always is. Loopholes are important to rich people. They pay tax attorneys a lot of money to maintain their power and financial privileges.

Forty percent is not generous enough for people like our current president and his GOP associates. They want the “death tax” (as they derisively call it) eliminated. I’m arguing that the rate should be increased to 100%. Handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to spoiled brats is destroying the USA. A corrosive degeneracy is creeping into every sphere of the lives of the wealthy.

The billionaire who lived here died at age 82 from cancer in 2009.

It’s not like there is no precedent. It happened in ancient Rome. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon was required reading when I was a young man in the 1960s. Modern printing companies have consolidated the history into three volumes and into an abridged version of one.

Gibbon, an English historian, published his first volume in 1776, the birth-year of the USA. His six-volume masterpiece relied exclusively on original sources and, as the remaining five volumes flowed out over the following thirteen years, heavily influenced the builders of the American republic for seventy years beyond to the brink of the Civil War.

Gibbon disapproved of Catholicism and challenged its version of history and the role of martyrs. His history was controversial, which resulted in revisions that he continued to write until his death in 1794. His work remains controversial to this day for a number of reasons that aren’t going to be discussed in this essay.

Gibbon understood that cruelty and insensitivity in an entitled class of rulers contributed to Rome’s decline. When the barbarians walked into Rome, they were greeted as liberators by ordinary people. Rome fell like a rotting apple. Gibbon’s History was a warning to the future.

In modern-day America creative workarounds have enabled the wealthy to hand out to crazy relatives a lot of clout they didn’t earn. Yes, it’s difficult to stand up to mob bosses, crooks, and their families. It should be obvious that it’s impossible to accumulate billions of dollars legally, but many have. Behind every fortune is a dark secret — sometimes many secrets.

It’s true.

So much for freedom and equal opportunity. Freedom is easily lost to wealthy people who think that those who dare to challenge them are misguided misfits — lower and dumber than farm animals, in many cases.

Wealthy Grandpa, it turns out, had hundreds of legislators on his payroll, which bought him all the advantages of a modern-day emperor. His adult children — who haven’t done a darn thing but argue about which-of-them-should-get-what after Grandpa dies — seem to think that they deserve all the power and perks they didn’t work for and could never earn had they been born into the impoverished family whose mother got her start working in Grandpa’s sweat-shop.

Any American who has traveled outside their comfort zone has seen the poverty these children are experiencing. Is anyone doing anything about it?  This family lives in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act.

I like math, so let’s do some. Divide the Gross National Product (the GNP ($17.1 trillion) by the population (309 million). Use a calculator, anyone who can’t figure it out on their fingers (just kidding!).

If incomes were equally distributed in America, a family of four would earn $221,000 per year. Yes, I agree, it’s not a lot of money — some folks would really suffer trying to raise a family on so little — but try to understand that half of black families earn less than $35,000; half of white families earn less than $70,000.

We have a fairness problem in America that runs far and deep. It includes:

  1. Segregation by race and income;
    .
  2. Unequal administration of legal protections and justice;
    .
  3. No access to health care for tens of millions (despite ObamaCare);
    .
  4. Discriminatory hiring, promotions, and firing based on race, political beliefs, and looks;
    .
  5. Defense by a mercenary military isolated from the general population — a major contributor to the collapse of the Roman Empire, according to Edward Gibbon);
    .
  6. Endemic corruption of politicians, church, civic, and business leaders.

Does anyone disagree with this list?

Go to Florida and try to find a safe place to live. Gated communities dominate the new housing markets. The majority of Americans don’t have enough money to gain access to this private world.

As for legal protections, anyone who has suffered arrest and spent time in custody knows that indigent people rot inside our jails, because they can’t afford bail or high-priced private attorneys. It’s a no-brainer.

Believe it or not, some of the incarcerated are innocent, but they are treated as guilty and forced to plea-bargain; many are unable to articulate a coherent defense. They end up with false criminal records that make staying out of future legal traps more difficult.

As for healthcare: Aided by the complicity of the Supreme Court, twenty-eight states refused to set-up health-care exchanges under ObamaCare. Twenty-one states (where five million low-income persons with no health care live) refused to expand access to the poor under Medicaid despite it being fully funded and paid for by the federal government.

Tens of millions of poor remain outside the care of our state and national health care system of hospitals, medical specialists, and general practice doctors. Wealthy GOP donors hope to destroy health care for the poor and lower-middle class with the help of our newest president, because they don’t want to finance medical aid for indigent people — despite all the privileges and protections that they accrue by forcing a myriad of taxes on middle income folks (like social security and sales taxes), which the wealthy avoid for the most part due to their immense incomes.

Also, many of the super-rich make their money in the stock market, where the capital gains tax rate places them in the lowest tier of tax-payers. It’s hard to believe, but it’s really true.

This scene reminds me of the oft-told Bible story about the day Moses returned from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments from God. He caught his people worshipping a golden calf. In this pic the calf is grey and the worshippers are white-supremacists. It’s Charlottesville, VA, Sunday August 13, 2017. 

Has anyone ever wondered why so many of the racist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, white-supremacists are clean-cut, shaved, symmetrical, and well-dressed men?

A visitor from the Philippines who attends a weekly Bible-study with my wife said that after watching the Charlottesville riots, clean-cut white American men now scare her. The reason these Nazis look the way they do is obvious, of course. They have good jobs!  Another reason is that they hide their nasty tattoos under expensive shirts, many of them.

Mega-millionaire business owners don’t hire people they feel they can’t trust. It’s that simple. Progressive, clear-headed men and women who care about fairness tend to dress and speak freely. They can be troublesome in a workplace, especially if they question unfair practices in pay, hiring, and promotions.

If you are wealthy and run a business, why would you ever hire anyone who thinks for themselves? Hire instead an ignoramus from the alt-right or the NRA. They follow their ideology like lemmings; discrimination against blacks, gays, women, and progressives doesn’t bother them.

Look at professional football, for an example. The billionaire owners of teams (many have the reputation of Neanderthals) hire players who have a PR (public relations) personality. Skill comes in second. Any high school coach in America could recruit a football team out of America’s prisons that could win a Super Bowl nine contests out of ten. Yes, their players would be poor and in some cases, inarticulate.

In America, talent on the field of sport doesn’t work that way. Compliance is a player’s highest virtue, then charisma (as evaluated by billionaire owners), then talent. Hard work? Anyone can be forced to work hard, and most do who aren’t born wealthy. Any thinking fan knows it’s true.

Let’s move on.

How come we don’t require people to fight for their country as a responsibility of citizenship? Everyone knows the reason. The wealthy don’t want to risk their kids in a potential combat where they might be wounded, maimed, or even killed.

In this photo from 2010, reservists are preparing for deployment to Iraq. They are dressed to protect themselves from chemical, biological, and nuclear attack.

And why should they? Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids line up to sign-up for service “voluntarily”, because they need a job and, hopefully, an education they currently are unable to afford, even if they have a job. The military provides both, supposedly, but in recent years cut backs in benefits for non-officers have been enacted, because, once again, the wealthy don’t want to put up the money.

We hire a lot of kids from other countries to serve our military, both as “contractors” and as a “path to citizenship”. In conflict zones, like Afghanistan, the majority of soldiers on “our side” are foreign nationals. It’s the fastest route to failure according to Gibbon. Read his history, those who don’t believe it.

Many kids won’t re-enlist after their first tour. Military service, despite all the ads on TV, is a tour into hell for many of them. Living far from home and being under 24/7 control by officers who can throw anyone in the brig without trial for any reason is too much stress for most people.

The wealthy continue to degrade the benefits of service for the disadvantaged despite the fact that without a military to protect them, the wealthy could not hang onto their privileges. Common, everyday people are not as blind as the self-serving narcissists who refuse to do heavy-lifting, even as they order drones and the young alike into the killing zones of battle.

Moving to number six on the list — endemic corruption — let me ask this question. Is it honest to accept money for political favors? Just asking. Enough said. I’m not going to waste your time or mine discussing the obvious. An encyclopedia could be written about the history of corruption in the United States. At least one volume could be devoted to corruption during the twenty-first century, a short period of seventeen years.

Hillary Clinton warned America about the current president, but few believed her.

The most honest man in the FBI, James Comey, helped the Russians wreck our last presidential election by responding to fake news reports planted by Russian agents. Comey behaved like Inspector Javert in the Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables. He pursued the Democratic nominee relentlessly during her campaign.

Comey grabbed Hillary by the jugular in the final week by reopening a closed investigation; by holding a news conference to smear what little reputation and dignity she retained. He undercut Hillary Clinton in the final week of the 2016 presidential election. Comey tore up the trajectory of the nation’s history in ways that won’t sit well with future generations.

Corruption disguised as virtue is vice. Any idiot can figure it out. And now our country is paying the price. We elected an unqualified buffoon to be our president. We hope against hope that someday he will change. Maybe someday he will.

Who knows?

Let someone else write about graft; about dishonesty; slander; lies; corruption. I haven’t got the energy. Who wants to risk death by lunatics for writing what everybody already knows to be true?

I don’t.

My general statement is this: the United States is hiding behind a pack of lies about its past, present, and future. It’s not so easy to tell the truth to people when large numbers of them start to read your stuff.

Fortunately for me, few people see my essays. Yes, I’ve been threatened, but thus far the threats have been manageable.

I don’t know what the solution is. I do know that our current president is making a bad situation worse and less safe for average people. Character is destiny, some say, and I believe it. The president lies and slimes and slanders pretty much everyone except sycophants. He plays the bad boy on an almost daily basis. It’s not going to end well for him or us, if we refuse to do what’s right.

We are so screwed. Read my essay, RISK, those who don’t believe it.

Risk has little to do with who is president, but admittedly some presidents increase risk. The verdict is still out on our current president.

I heard Elon Musk say that our country is like an aircraft carrier with a small rudder. The president sits by the rudder — it’s about a foot wide and three feet tall — and tries to steer the carrier to the right. By the end of his term, the carrier will not have turned much. However, its forward momentum is unstoppable. Are we headed toward the correct horizon? Does anyone know for sure?

It’s not good, peeps, what’s about to come. My advice is to take things a bit more seriously and prepare as best as anyone can for the problems that always arise from boorish leadership and its hostility toward minorities, the impoverished, and the disadvantaged.

Billy Lee

RISK

Everyone wants to live as long as possible, right? Well, maybe not everyone.

Someone confided in me that their nightmare was they wouldn’t die; they would never get respite from an existence that terrified them, depressed them, hurt them, disappointed and discouraged them; that humiliated them, abused them; that made them wish they were never born.

Another friend confessed she wished she had never been born because she was afraid to die. Certainty of death made living not worth the trouble. Anxiety about end of life robbed her of joy. She found she was unable to kick back and relax because dark angels circled just outside her field of vision. One day, she was certain, those angels would pounce. Her end would be brutal.

I remember hearing a story about a young mother who lay dying while her family knelt at her bedside. A scene of sweet-sorrow unfolded as the woman struggled to breathe in the presence of loved-ones. A worried husband, anxious toddlers, her parents, and a few close friends sang hymns to reassure and cast comfort. They clung to one another united by the belief that God would carry momma gently to heaven in his caring arms.

Momma didn’t experience death that way. She bolted up, away from her pillow. She stared wild-eyed at something behind her visitors; something no one saw.

She screamed. No! No! No! 

Momma dropped off the bed, slammed to the floor, and rolled onto her back making a loud crack — like a toppled refrigerator. She stared at the ceiling, face frozen, eyes open; crazed, except now she lay dead, too heavy for anyone to move.


Steve McQueen died at age 50 from cardiac arrest at a cancer treatment facility in Mexico in 1980. He made thirty movies; many were blockbusters.

Some people love life and don’t want to leave. I remember Steve McQueen, an actor from yesteryear who had everything to live for. He was a happy race-car enthusiast, leading man in movies, ruggedly handsome, kind, and grateful for every blessing his wonderful life showered on him.

Cancer struck. Stateside doctors said he had no chance. Death was certain. He traveled to Mexico to find a cancer recovery center he learned about from friends.

I remember hearing him weep during a radio interview because, he said, the medical director saved his life. He thanked doctors again and again. He couldn’t say enough. I felt touched. He loved life; his gratitude seemed to resonate with the voices of angels. I would have gladly traded places with him.

Two days later, newspapers & television news reported he died. What went through his mind when he finally understood his life wasn’t going to turn out the way he hoped?

For people who seek death, death is easy to find — if they have courage to face what comes after; if pain of living exceeds risk of non-existence, or being reborn as someone new, or maybe falling into Hell or whatever alternative they imagine for the pain of life. Relief is as close as a closeted gun, the nearest bridge, that lonely bottle of medicine beckoning from the bathroom cabinet.

I feel bad for people who have been ruined, I do. Far more people kill themselves than are killed by others. No one believes it, but it’s true.

I don’t want to dwell on the ruined, because another class of people — a smaller group, I sometimes wonder — want to live.


The man shown in this pic (from 2011) was active and working at age 106. He and hundreds like him have been the subject of scientific studies about human longevity. They are kind and gentle people who enjoy life by all accounts; they wish only to live as long as possible.

These are folks who never suffer depression, experience major illness, spend time in hospital or prison, lose a child or spouse, worry about the sparkle of a crooked tooth or the part in their radiant hair. They don’t worry about lack of symmetry that renders others unattractive — or about getting their way in life, because they always do.

I want to talk about powerful, beautiful, effective people who everyone seems to want to be. I want to talk about happy people like Steve McQueen who will always chase a fantasy, because they want to live in the worst, most desperate way.

I want to talk about people who freeze themselves hoping that a benevolent future will permit them to be thawed, and life will continue. I want to talk about people who take 150 pills a day to prevent every ailment and protect every sinew.

I want to talk about brilliant, optimistic people who believe if they just figure things out right, life awaits them as long as they want.  It’s up to them. They will make life last, achieve eternal success, because they always have.

Time for reality check?

Maybe reveal some truth? — shocking, perhaps, for some?  Why not predict our futures — all our futures — as separate individuals with private lives, and as a species anthropologists describe with Latin words, homo sapiens, (smart folks), which they use to differentiate you & me from other living things we barely notice or think about.

Let’s defend our reputation among the kingdoms of the animals and plants. Consider best case scenarios for survival and figure whether we can make our dreams come true.

One stat easily verified: two-thirds of all deaths are not caused by aging.

Let’s move on.

Who wants to start with species survival? What about life spans? 

Most folks want to know how to live longer, right?  People want to know how long they will live when everything is set right.

So, why not start with a best-case scenario for individuals? 

Here are some simple, best-case-scenario assumptions:

Assume disease is eradicated. We reach a state under protections of Obamacare (or maybe Trump-Care, who knows?) where no one dies in hospital anymore; all diseases have cures and can be prevented; in fact, disease is eliminated from the face of the earth — no bacterial or viral infections; no malevolent genes gone haywire; no Alzheimer’s or mental impairments; no more skin rashes or herpes or warts or annoying ear-wax that morphs into septic brain infections.

Disease gone. Now take another step. Make a leap of faith. Assume that the genetics of aging is solved and no one grows old. No one deteriorates. Skin does not wrinkle; no more age spots or rotting teeth; loss of hair and muscle-mass becomes a thing of the past. Aches, pains, constipation, diarrhea & acid reflux — what be them? They gone!

Our long medical nightmare is over, to paraphrase the words of President Gerald Ford on the night he pardoned Dick Nixon so that no prosecutor could ever charge and convict him for being a crook and throwing an election.

OK. What then become odds for our survival?  How long can one person expect to live?  I think everyone can see, there’s something we didn’t consider; something no one thought of, a missing piece in the puzzle of living-large that is going to leap up and grab each of us sooner or later — unless we live bundled by bubble-wrap in a bunker, miles below the surface of earth. We all know what it is, right?

It happens when we bike on a country road, and a candy-coking cell-talker in a Corvette runs us over. It happens when we climb Mount Everest (just to cross it off our bucket-list) and whoops! someone in the group forgot to tie their shoelaces. People see a video on the evening news — dead people buried in snow.

It happens when flying an airplane — a flock of geese smashes the windscreen. The pilot gets sucked out the opening — shredded by shards of glass.

We visit an amusement park to thrill ourselves on a ride that throws us upside down and — oops again! — an unscheduled stop; a mechanical malfunction. Two hours later, rescued, we’re vegetables. Homo sapiens don’t do well hanging upside down for long periods.

Yes, the one thing no one counts on is accidents.



Accidents kill a lot of people every single day. And nothing is going to change that fact unless people decide to live in virtual reality and never get off the couch to go outdoors or walk their dog.

What exactly are the statistics of accidents?

Well, every year one person in a thousand dies in a screw-up by somebody, usually themselves. It doesn’t sound like much, but for the person who dies it’s one death too many. Anyone who expects to live 25,000 years should perform a statistical analysis to see what the chances are they will live that long.

Why guess?

The way the math works is this: figure the chances of living deadly-accident-free for one year (it’s 999/1000), then multiply this number by itself for each year of life.

Save time by using the exponent key on a calculator to enter years, anyone who doesn’t want to spend a week multiplying the same number over and over 25,000 times. The result will give the chances for survival over a span of that many years. Try some other numbers to make comparisons.

The bottom line is this: no one has any realistic hope at all of living more than 10,000 years or so. Of the seven billion humans alive today, only one in 22,000 can expect to live to the age 10,000.

A mere 2,000 people out of 7,000,000,000 will survive to see year 15,000. There’s a small chance (one in ten) that a solitary person might make it to 25,000 years, but they will be an outlier; a statistical anomaly. Who wants to be an anomaly?  Not me.

In most cases; under the most realistic scenarios, the chances are that everyone alive today is going to be dead at age 25,000 because of accidents alone. They will die healthy though. It might be consolation for some.

No one will make it to year 25,000. That’s my bet. It’s not going to happen 90% of the time. 

Accidents happen.

OK. Now that everybody knows that our individual situation is hopeless, what about the survival of our species — the human race (for those who disdain the scientific term, homo sapiens)?


Not sure why this video, but it’s pretty good, so let’s go with it. 


I am sorry to report that the survival odds for our species are actually far worse than the odds of our survival as individuals. This depressing fact means we can ignore the individual survival scenario we just made so much effort to describe. If our species dies early, individuals die early too.

How can this terrible situation be possible? It seems unfair.

I’ve been reading the book Global Catastrophic Risks — a collection of essays edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic — first published nine years ago (in 2008) when species survival was more certain than it is now. These brilliant forecasters collected essays written by other forward-thinking eggheads who describe in delirious detail 13 or so existential threats to the survival of humans. Some might want to review the list.

1 – Systems-based risks and failures

2 – Super-volcanism

3 – Comets and asteroids

4 – Supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and cosmic rays

5 – Climate change

6 – Plagues and pandemics

7 – Artificial intelligence

8 – Social collapse

9 – Nuclear War

10 – Nuclear Terrorism

11 – Biotechnology

12 – Nanotechnology

13 – Totalitarianism

The authors argue that certain threat scenarios will create an inevitable cascade of events that lead to civilization melt-down, a kill-strike on the species human. I assigned a 1 in 10,000 chance to each of these 13 catastrophes and crunched the numbers to understand how much danger people might be facing.

What I discovered scared me.


A super-volcano eruption in Toba, Indonesia 70,000 years ago reduced the population of humans on Earth to less than 4,000. Volcanoes that we know about today, like the one under Yellowstone National Park, might be larger and more dangerous.  

For one thing, it’s not possible to know if 1 in 10,000 is an optimistic or pessimistic assessment of each of these risks. Nuclear war might be 1 in 100; climate change — 1 in 50; asteroids — 1 in 50,000; supernovae — 1 in 100,000,000; artificial intelligence — 1 in 10.

Who knows?

Can humans survive 10,000 years without a pandemic or nuclear war? No one knows.

Experts resort to heuristics, which erupt from biases even they don’t know they carry. I suppose a gut-check by an expert has more validity than a seat-of-the-pants guess by a pontificator. Will give you that. But irony is regardless who’s right, no one will know because we are all going to die.

Evidence in fossil & genetic record shows at least three human-like species have come and gone during the past several 100,000 years or so, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Extinction of intelligent, human-like species happens more often than not — 3 out of 4 times, maybe more if scientists continue to dig and find.

Number-crunching stats above shows humans have no more than 1 in 4 chance to avoid extinction during the next 1,000 years. Our chance to survive approaches zero as the number of years reaches into the realm of 5,000 years and beyond.

Humans have recorded their stories for 5,000 years. Some call these stories, history. Sometime during the next 5,000 years, history will end unless humans lower the odds of these catastrophes to much less than 1 in 10,000.



We are truly stupid — dumber than earthworms — to refuse to make the effort to increase our survival prospects by lowering these probabilities, these ratios, to one-in-one-hundred-thousand or better still, one-in-a-million or even better, one-in-one-hundred million. Why not one-in-a-gazillion?

How? It’s the big question.

Reducing odds of catastrophe is the most important thing. It’s urgent. Failure seals our fate.

We search the heavens. No one seems to be broadcasting out there. Maybe it’s something simple like Miyake events, which some argue make communication infrastructure near stars impossible to sustain.  

What science hears is silence… and tiny chirps, yes, but not from crickets.

Doomsday clocks? 

They’re ticking.

Billy Lee