I took my dose of the dismal science at Kansas, back just after the glaciers retreated (you can see the shape of the valleys just south of town), when Jim Quirk was trying to use linear algebra, before the days of Fortran programming, to predict economic utility in plus or minus arrays. His patience exceeded my barriers of frustration.

After an equally frustrating dose of reality in the Kansas City financial world, I have found a comfortable life, at the far edge of the softest time and place in the history of the planet to be a middle-class, middle-aged white guy, making a living by enforcing differentials in the rule of law in the Arkansas Ozarks.

One of the most useful, and frustrating, experiences of living in Paradise has been to try to teach history to a bunch of post-pubescent Ozarks high school graduates, who could not be convinced that 20 years is a lifetime, or that anything useful had happened before they were born.

The knowledge economists are guilty of the same type of short-sightedness. Given a decent time-lag after Sir Isaac Newton, outside of the shaman profession, knowledge has only been a commodity with utility for the last couple of centuries, less than four of my lifetimes, less than an eye-blink in the history of our post Ice Age ancestors, let alone the planet.

It does not matter how much information we have to exchange if we let the need of our DNA to replicate carry us beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We are currently laying the foundation of the greatest human die-off in recent history in the wombs of our loving mothers.

Malthus was not wrong; he was just premature, and he looked at food instead of water. Knowledge is no comfort to the thirsty.

And he was looking at food, not water.

Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution of the '70's doubled the production of grain but tripled the consumption of water. Every technological fix that lets us extend the exponential metastasis of the human population just means that there will be that many billions more humans dying when we finally find by blind experimentation the absolute limits of the carrying capacity of our little rock.

Suddenly, The Matrix doesn't look so fanciful.

Run, girl! Run like the wind!

As you cross the threshold, give a prayer of thanks that fate or courage saved you from a lifetime of bondage.

It's not just a child he wants.

Cary is not quite right, for all that he has never been completely wrong. What I-less is trying to understand is the dynamics of being a beta male.

Alpha only looks to be fun when you're not it.

Son, after you have had enough of them, you will come to realize that the zero birthdays are easy. Forty is just the end of a decade of being thirty. Next year, you and the twin will just be old. (Ask your children.) It probably won't even occur to you to draw about it.

It is a good thing for Republicans that their children are too stupid to read numbers. If they could, they would surely murder their parents as they sleep.

What American children today, even Garrison's latest gap-toothed girl, instinctively sense is that human children are surplus to requirement. Back when Newton triggered the current evolutionary dead-end explosion of knowledge, only about four or Garrison's and my lifetimes ago, it had taken H. sapiens millenia since the retreat of the latest glaciers to reach a billion. Where are we now?

Human children exist today only for the purpose of testing how far we can let our need to breed overshoot the carrying capacity of this tiny rocky shell. What they sense instinctively is that the past has nothing to teach them, and the future has nothing to comfort them.

Al Lewis said "America gets the politicians they deserve. That's it. And you keep struggling."

What America currently deserves is to have the highest court of our land occupied for the next generation by moral and intellectual cripples.

That's it. And we keep struggling.

Google cannot find it for me tonight, but I have a firm memory from the aftermath that someone said that the citizens of 44 different nations died at ground zero on September 11.

It was, after all, the "world" trade center, and for those few weeks afterwards the world was with us, if only because, for all of our strength, our experience of suffering was so touchingly naieve.

A real and realistic policy to reduce abortion?

Not if you're a Republican.

Somewhere north of 40% of the American population still believes that there was a connection between Iraq/Saddam and September 11.

If we could just introduce a basic intelligence test as a prerequisite for voting, there wouldn't be another Republican elected for two generations.

Rumor has it that Satan has filed a slander suit against Hugo Chavez, seeking punitive damages and a permanent injunction. The venue hasn't been determined yet, but given the list of witnesses, it's likely that the trial will be held in Satan's home district.

It's becoming perfectly clear. George Allen would be the perfect successor to George W. Bush. They're a perfect match.

Both fair AND balanced.

As always.

It's a beautiful fall afternoon in the Arkansas Ozarks, and even the dummies are discovering that the Neocons, for all that they are dangerous, are as laughable as those funny little men who want their women hidden.

It really is the best medicine.

If the wine sipper actually gives up his racing for this marriage, and the librarian actually lets him, they both deserve what will come.