100,000 years from now* we will have societies modeled on honey bees. men won't have surnames, since they won't leave the hive. indeed, a number may be sufficient. it would encode his genetic information so the females may select for desired traits, without having to scan a screen. we'll all be sex slaves, of every woman in the hive.

this is the first indication of female domination. you have been warned.

*assuming we survive looming natural disasters and human proclivity to commit racial suicide.

the usa is a federal republic, whose characteristic is rule by a few hundred elected officials. that makes it an (elective) oligarchy in aristotle's language. nader likes 'corporation state', and that has it's obvious claim to accuracy.

but it's certainly not a democracy. not only do the people not set law or policy, they are forbidden from knowing the facts on which decisions are made, while those 'facts' made public are often mere lies.

democracy is rule by the people, and there's not much around. yet california and a few other states are democratic, so there's no lack of examples showing that democracy works. the usa oligarchy clearly isn't working, except for a few. that's what it was meant to do: work for a few.

is close at hand. the american constitution will be subverted by would-be dictators, unless the people establish democracy first.

this is not likely to happen, so put your money on dictatorship.

is that a very large segment of the american population regard non-americans as subhuman. telling them the actual reasons for the war, the actual methods and consequences used to fight it, has no effect. they still vote for the (perceived) good ol' boy, and shrug their shoulders at talk of injustice and brutality.

they are capable of outrage when they suffer at home, as though some dog had the nerve to bite them. instead of asking "why are we so hated", they listen to the big dog (for they are pack animals) when he explains that american foreign policy didn't cause 9/11, it was caused by 'red devils', or 'greasers', or 'gooks', or 'ragheads', all of them terrorists jumped out of hell. don't have to think about resisting the devil.

america has achieved democracy in california and a few other states, but the nation as a whole is still at the baboon troop level of political evolution. one consequence is that obama might give a few years of relatively civilized behavior, but even he cannot cure the damage of a bush or nixon. at best, a few years pause on the course of empire toward degradation, moral, political, and finally economic and military.

people don't waste time on things they can't control. elective oligarchy puts government beyond the reach of ordinary people. they cannot learn what's going on, they cannot say what to do about it. so they turn to the sports pages. as they should.

it doesn't have to be that way. if america were a democracy, it's people would be citizens. the founding fathers were the elite, they intended that the elite should continue to rule and did a good job of preserving their power through the constitution. one consequence is the use of national power to extend and defend the power of american wealth in foreign lands. the rich get the money, the tax-cows and cannon fodder cop the return fire.

yes, americans really are dumb. they put up with this.

the people at the wtt are commonly described as 'innocent victims'. these men may have planned their deaths. a slam dunk, huh?

but i look at it this way: since america, ibn saud, and esso shook hands in the 1930's, this event has been developing. one consequence of supporting a violent dictatorship for 70-odd years is storing up a lot of hatred. it's no accident that most of the 9/11 warriors were saudis. if you're willing to look at underlying causes at all, the usa government is responsible for 9/11, just like those not-so-silly conspiracy theorists suggested.

then there was the assassination and coup in iran, the invasion and conquest of palestine, both supported by the american government. it would be amazing if there were no reprisals for sustained undercover repression of middle eastern arabs, whose crime is to live on top of oil needed by the west, whose weakness was to not have a lobby group in washington.

you can reasonably call the wtt people innocent victims, but alqaeda was just the agent of karma. after screwing people for 70 years, you've got to be prepared for return fire. like a dog that's been kicked for years, alqaeda found a way to bite back.

but the real criminals have been living in washington all along.

"prius ok, bicycle much better". now, as i was saying, "wipe on, wipe off..."

is that any way to run a country? maybe endless war, subprime crises, hopeless medical systems and rotting infra-structure are somehow tied to a medieval political system? could it be?

nah! americans are too smart for that, aren't they?

is as silly as expecting a whore to be virgin. the system is corrupt, the actors play the roles required of them. democracy would cure many of america's problems, and is not hard to achieve or foreign to america's experience.

the citizens of california have put a leash on their politicians without curbing the productivity of the state. citizen initiative would clean up the political game at the federal level too. it just needs an electorate who are tired of being tax-cows, and sick of being the mugs in political three-card tricks.

it's easy to get citizen initiative: just email the candidates, saying: "put cir on the platform, get my vote." or go on wishing you weren't a serf.