Back to Basics or Die!

During the Vietnam War, after the complete destruction of a village called Ben Tre, an American major explained that it had become necessary to “destroy the village in order to save it.”  Angelina Jolie decided to “destroy the village in order to save it” by preemptively having her breasts lopped off to improve her odds of avoiding cancer.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.html?_r=0

She did it for the kids, and the military at Ben Tre did it to the kids, but the theory is the same: “Something bad is probably going to happen here, someday… so we’d better take care of the situation right now, before there’s a situation.”  The latest example of this theory in action is a plan that’s being floated by some people in Africa to save rhinos from poachers by cutting off their horns before the poachers arrive.  http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/15/184135826/can-economics-save-the-african-rhino

Many of our choices are fear-driven, and that’s not always bad.  If you don’t pass on a blind curve because you’re afraid to, that’s good.  If you don’t have unprotected sex with the tattooed stranger you just met at the club because you’re afraid you might “catch something,” that’s probably good too. But one of the problems with modern life is that we are conditioned to be afraid always and about everything.  This results in what we call “stress,” and is one of the reasons why life in Twenty-First Century America is so miserable for so many people so much of the time, despite that this is still one of the most affluent societies on the face of the Earth.

In the jungle, your reptilian brain knows good and well that when danger threatens, you have three options: fight, flight or freeze.  Each one of those responses takes a lot out of you, so you only flee, fight or freeze until the danger is past, and then go back to lazing in the sun, peacefully eating bananas, or picking bugs out of your mate’s hairy ears.  In the natural state, animals (including homo sapien sapiens (“wise wise man”—i.e., us…  and do you detect a little note of hubris in the name we’ve chosen for ourselves? ) don’t spend a lot of time worrying about dangers that might, but might not, ever materialize.  Nor do they lie around brooding about the bad times of yesteryear.  They live in the moment, often the formula cited by mental health professionals for achieving “happiness,” even… and perhaps especially… in the midst of all of our Twenty-First Century lunacy.

Of course, we’re a long way from the jungle now, and we’ve also come a long way from our animal roots, at least psychologically.  Physically, though, it’s another matter, and that’s where we really start to run into some trouble.  You see, our bodies are less malleable than our minds, and they (usually) take a lot longer to change.  When you sit around in traffic worrying about Al Qaeda or your retirement, you know somewhere in your thick head that those things aren’t an immediate threat to your safety, and neither is the traffic since it’s stopped.  But your body thinks it’s still back in the jungle where it should be, and it realizes that you’re trapped in traffic where Al Qaeda can get you, and that even if you escape today and make it to retirement age you’ll starve because you haven’t saved the four million you’ll need to survive until you’re super old and the long-term care insurance that you haven’t bought kicks in. (Don’t screw around with those retirement calculators, by the way; they’re very stressful.)  In other words, most of us are ready to fight, fly or freeze most of the time.  The adrenaline is pumping, the heart is pounding, sleep is hard to come by, for an awful lot of people who’ve never even seen a jungle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response

Which, of course, is one of the primary reasons that we’re so unhealthy.  High blood pressure, heart disease, sleep disorders, problems with the digestive system, and yes, Angelina, even cancer, are associated with stress, which causes inflammation, which in the long-term is associated with just about every bad physical problem that you can imagine.  http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/stress-heart-attack-risk ; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-stress-feed-cancer. But don’t let that stress you out.

If stress is everywhere, what can we do about it?  Well, going back to the jungle isn’t really much of an option, because most of it has been slashed and burned, and the remainder is full of poachers, anti-government rebels, real estate developers, and a few very angry animals.  But you might try living more like an animal.  In other words, try putting some of the garbage in perspective. 

 

There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight... and Every Night From Now On, Looks Like

   
Wonder what your retirement is going to be like?  Wonder what life is going to be like for your kids or grandkids?  Well, that’s natural.  Of course, you have to remember the lesson of the old tale of “The Monkey’s Paw,” namely that you should be careful of what you wish for, because you just might wind up actually getting your wish.

 A lot of our questions about what life on Earth is going to be like for the foreseeable future were answered on the front pages of major newspapers on Saturday, May 11, 2013.  The headline on the front page of the New York Times read “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 The LA Times reported the story on the first page of the “Late Extra” section under the banner “Crucial CO2 gauge hits key level.”  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-carbon-atmosphere-440-ppm-20130510,0,6498056.story To cut to the chase, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that last Thursday, for the very first (but certainly not the last) time, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere as measured by the observatory on Mauna Loa has surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading, meaning that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the last three million years.  Even if you’re not a Biblical scholar, you should know that three million years ago human beings weren’t even around yet.

Last Thursday was the first time that the average level remained above 400 parts per million for an entire day, but it’s predicted that within a very few years there will be no measurement of the gas, in any area of the globe, in any season, that will be below 400 parts per million. The reason that the 400 parts per million threshold is significant is that’s the level that the scientific “consensus” has decreed that CO2 levels must stay below to keep the average global temperature from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from pre-industrial times.    That may not sound like much, but apparently the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was about three million years ago, in the Pliocene Epoch.  It was a lot hotter then, the ice caps were a lot smaller, and scientists estimate that the sea level was perhaps 60 to 80 feet higher than it is now.  Not real good news if you live in Malibu, I’d say.  Or New York City, or Miami, or… well, you get the idea.

 Now of course, the ocean isn’t going to rise 60 or 80 feet overnight.  When you start talking about “epochs,” the time scale gets a lot bigger than what our “weatherpeople” are used to coping with in their forecasts.  But that doesn’t mean that you and yours aren’t going to be seeing some of the effects of the now seemingly inevitable debacle. Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist, is quoted in the LA Times article as saying, “If we don’t reduce carbon soon, we may no longer talk about searing summer temperatures, 100-year storms and intense droughts as something unusual, because they may be the norm.”

 What’s causing this upheaval?  Well, with apologies to BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and their ilk, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the culprit is fossil fuels.  By studying the air bubbles found in Antarctic ice (which is melting pretty fast now) scientists have determined that for at least the last 800 million years the level of CO2 in the atmosphere cycled between 180 parts per million in cooler times to 280 parts per million in warmer times.  (CO2 levels and temperature are “tightly linked,” in other words.)  Throughout the roughly 8000 years of human civilization, the CO2 level fluttered around near the top end of that range—until the “Industrial Revolution” a couple of hundred years ago which kicked off the massive use of fossil fuels.  Since then, there has been a 41% increase in CO2 levels, with no end in sight.

 Why no end in sight?  Well, there are now over 7 billion people in the world, many of them already happily blasting away into the atmosphere with their air conditioners and motor vehicles, and the rest aspiring to join them.  The New York Times article, by Justin Gillis, put it very well:  “Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.”

 Not to mention the fact that we’re frenetically slashing and burning and chopping away at the earth’s forests, getting rid of the trees that, as they taught us even in California public schools, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.  Plus chopping down everything in sight so that we can grow corn and soybeans to feed to factory-farmed animals whose short, miserable lives are mostly spent farting methane.

 Why the hell not, you may ask.  If we know there’s a problem-- a crisis, even-- why aren’t we doing more to try to avert disaster? Well, why did it take so many years to start warning people about the dangers of cigarette smoking?  There are a lot of people, with a lot of money, who benefit from the status quo.  And they own politicians.  Lots of them.  As Mr. Gillis puts it, “[c]limate change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air…”  Well, it’s true that most of the air is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%).  But that’s about the extent of the truth in this absurd argument.  Whether its cobra venom or arsenic, to use a couple of Mr. Gillis’s examples, or a few hundred wackadoos in Al Qaeda, a little badness can go a long way toward ruining your day… or your kids’ and grandkids’ future, for that matter.

 It may already be too late to avert disaster, and in fact probably is.  If this were a movie, and some scientist could somehow get representatives of every country on earth together to act in concert on an emergency basis to go all out to control population growth, implement green technologies, and rein in the great consumer lifestyle expectations of the American and Chinese peoples… well then we’d be living on another planet, anyway, and we probably wouldn’t have had to worry about CO2 in the first place.

Flim Flam

According to the New York Times (and who can argue with that venerable publication and its high journalistic standards?) the U.S. economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the growth in the working-age population.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/business/economy/job-growth-falters-badly-clouding-hope-for-recovery.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=business.

According to the U.S. Board of Labor Statistics (and who can argue with them, either?), about 165,000 non-farm jobs were added in April, 2013.   http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.

So we're starting to climb out of the pit, right?  We added a net 15,000 new jobs last month!  Well...

Strangely enough, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 2 million fewer employed people now than there were in 2007.  Since we'd have to have added nearly 4 million more in order to keep up with population growth over the last 6 years (and obviously didn't), it looks like we're about 6 million jobs in the hole, plus however many jobs we were already short in 2007.  No wonder it still feels like hard times, even though those stock indexes are setting records.  But... the good news is that even though there are more unemployed people, the "unemployment rate" is falling!  Down to 7.5% now!  High Five!

The reason that the "unemployment rate" can fall even though the number of unemployed people is increasing is that not everybody who's not working is counted as "unemployed."  See, once somebody gets disgusted and gives up looking for work, they're no longer counted as part of the "labor force," so even though they're not working, they're no longer "unemployed."  And if they give up and retire early, they're not "unemployed," either.  And if you're a teenager or a recent graduate, you might be out there looking for work, but you're not entitled to unemployment benefits, so who's going to notice? 

Another thing... the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are about 8 million of the "employed" who are actually "underemployed," meaning that they're working part time, without benefits for the most part, and would rather work full time.  Unless by some wild coincidence these 8 million are all people I personally know, this statistic must be understated. 

But there is some "good" news, which again comes to us through the venerable New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/business/college-graduates-fare-well-in-jobs-market-even-through-recession.html?_r=0 .  Seems that although more people overall are unemployed, more 4-year college graduates have been able to find at least some kind of work, albeit in many cases it is the work that used to be done by those with only some college... or no college at all.  A particularly depressing example was in the news lately: a McDonald's restaurant in Massachusetts boasts that every single one of its employees is a college graduate.  http://www.examiner.com/article/mcdonald-s-requiring-college-degree-plus-experience-for-cashier-positions .  Jumping back to the Times, seems that employers have figured out that in hard times they can be choosier concerning whom they employ, much to the detriment of the 68% of "civilian, non-institutional population over 25-- that is, the group of people who are not inmates of penal and mental facilities or residents of homes for the disabled or aged and who are not on active military duty" who do not have a college degree.

Oh, and I guess it's to the detriment of those college graduates with an average of $27,000 in student debt who are swabbing the decks at McDonald's, too.

After emerging from this swirling cloud of statistics, what is it that we still think we know?  Well, for one thing, I know why I hate statistics.  They sound scientific and important, but each number, taken alone, is practically meaningless.   Statistics can be easily manipulated-- e.g., by carefully choosing the numbers you reference, you can prove that the stock market-- or terrorism-- or skin cancer correlates with the phases of the moon.  And you can also convince people that the "economy" is improving even though, viewed from a slightly different angle,  the economic outlook for the vast majority of the "working age" population is pretty bleak, indeed.  Maybe it would be a good idea, the next time you read or listen to a story about the "economy," to ask yourself what the story was really saying... if it was really saying anything at all.

Caregivers by Proxy, That's the Plan

My mom is 87 years old.  Yow!  That scares me not just because it sounds so old... it does, though... but also because it sounds like it's not so old that it couldn't happen to me.  In fact, I'm so old that there are times when 87 doesn't sound quite as old as it should.  But even the chills I get contemplating my personal fate and how imminent it probably is are nothing compared to the roiling in my guts that ensues when I think about what's in store for me as Mom blossoms into "old old age."  See, we live so long now that they have to divide old age up into segments.  There's old age, old old age, and "super-centenarians" that I'm aware of.  And even in an age in which when somebody keels over at 70 or 72 people bemoan the fact that he died "so young," the consensus is that 87 is solidly in the "old old age" category.
 
Anyway, apparently when you enter "old old age" it's time to think about things like "independent living," "assisted living," or "the booby hatch," depending on how much you want to scale back your activities.  Many senior seniors lead active lives, as witnessed by the wide, well-lit "Continence" section in most major supermarkets and the fact that they're still showing those James Whitmore commercials on late-night TV.  Plus, the elderly population is growing by leaps and bounds, and even The Fonz is advertising reverse-mortgages during the "news hour."  Oh yeah, and the continued existence of the "news hour" on all three major "networks" (I don't count Fox) and in fact the continued existence of the "networks" themselves, is directly attributable to the avid interest of the "Long Goodbye" set.
 
But not all people feel like running for president when they're 80, much less when they're 87, and my Mom has decided that it's time to "scale back."  In her case this means having somebody else worry about it when a light bulb burns out or the lawn needs to be mowed.  In fact, forget about the lawn entirely.  Let somebody else find a reliable cleaning lady and handyman and somebody to buy the groceries, let your kids swing by to drive you to church.  She worked like a mule to raise a passle of kids and tend to her husband's needs, managed on her own for 15 years after those missions were fully accomplished, and now feels like... like what?
 
Well, "weary" is a word that might fit, although you can never tell for sure with Mom.  (What's the song say?  "She may be weary..."  But maybe not.)  Or maybe she wants to live closer to some of her kids.  Well, maybe.  Or maybe she just figures that "it's time."
 
Dangerous phrase, "it's time."  I got married once because somebody decided that "it [was] time."  Remember that old Carly Simon song?  "You say it's time we moved in together/ and raised a family of our own, you and me/ Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be..." A recipe for disaster if I've ever heard one.
 
Of course, according to The Byrds and The Bible, there is a time for everything, and if there's a time to move to a "senior living facility" I guess that Mom would be the one to know it.  And it looks like she's going to be having an awful lot of help making all her decisions, as at least some of my many siblings have plunged into the project with a will.  I guess I can understand the motivation for that.  Once the old lady is safely installed somewhere, we can all stop worrying about the Sword of Damocles that's been hanging over our heads in the form of all the crazy scenarios that might unfold if Mom suddenly became incapacitated while running around loose.  This way, you just pay a monthly maintenance fee and everything's taken care of... sort of like having a property manager or something, I guess.

But here I sit, looking at a picture of Mom in her thirties, still young and strong even though there were bags under her eyes from chasing around the four-- count 'em, four-- kids she already had at that point, and then I look at another picture of her and Dad standing in the pretty little backyard that she designed and landscaped (they were my age, then), and another one of the two of them after his first heart attack and she's in her early sixties I think and they're in the pretty living room that she furnished and decorated... and I hope that she'll be cool ceding so much control over her day-to-day environment and that she'll look before she leaps.

As for me... well, 87 isn't that far away in geologic or historical terms, but it's pretty far away and as for Mom I guess maybe she's right that "it will all work out somehow."  Well, that's for sure, I guess.  Wisdom of the ages, that.  Or should that be "wisdom of the aged?"
 
 

What's Wrong With This Picture?

The paper has articles today about the "disappointing" jobs report for the month of March.  Turns out that employers only added a net of 88,000 jobs last month, not even enough to keep pace with the additions to the "labor force" as the result of people newly entering the job market, much less to reduce the vast legions of the unemployed.  Of course, since the officially-acknowledged "unemployment" or "jobless" rate doesn't include people who've given up looking for a job because the economy (on "Main Street," not "Wall Street") is so bad, some economists estimate that the "true" unemployment rate is 9.8% or greater, not the still-dismal-but-lower-than-last-month 7.6% that the government is touting.

To put this into perspective, as of May, 2012 there were officially 12.6 million people "unemployed."  But there were another 88 million working age adults who weren't working, but were not counted as "unemployed" because they had been defined out of the "workforce" entirely.  As their unemployment runs out, and they give up their job search in frustration, additional persons are dropped from the "workforce" each day.

A more revealing statistic is that the "workforce" is shrinking.  At this point in time, only about 63% percent of the working-age population of the U.S. is working or seeking work.  The rest are either retired, rich, on public assistance or starving.  As for the stock market, which too many people put too much stock in as an indicator of the health of the overall economy, an interesting statistic is that the number of publicly-traded stocks is apparently shrinking, too.  Some of that (O.K., a lot of it) is due to mergers.  Some of it is due to companies being taken private.  Factoring in the flight from equities by the "ordinary" individual investor in the wake of the financial upheavals of the last couple of decades, plus the insanity created by huge banks of computers processing day-trades in nanoseconds, programmed to analyze and take advantage of "trends" in trading, as opposed to fundamentals, and what do you have?  Fantasyland.

The people whose economic reality is closely tied to the vicissitudes of stock prices or can derive any information of practical import from poring over indexes of stock prices are becoming fewer and fewer in number.  In fact, fewer than half of all American households own equities in any form, and fewer than half of those own stocks or mutual funds outside of an employer-sponsored plan.  What most people want in order to feel prosperous is a house that is worth something and a job that pays them enough to pay for it, and frankly, my dear, they don't (and probably shouldn't) give a damn about the Dow, which is what most people are referring to when they say "the market is up... or down... or flat).

The Dow is an index of only 30 stocks, anyway.  Big company stocks, it is true.  But only 30 of them, and these companies in the aggregate only employ a small fraction of the American "workforce."  In the aggregate, much of their own "workforce" is elsewhere in the world, and they generate a lot of their revenues overseas.  While it used to be true that "what is good for General Motors is good for America," that was when GM was making and selling most of the cars here and its "workforce" was making a solid middle-class living that involved a lot of spending on other American goods and services.  Now Detroit is pretty much an abandoned area, and the unemployed are driving their Toyotas and Hondas over to the unemployment office to wait for their checks (or they are until their unemployment benefits run out, anyway).  And some companies that are still making lots of money here, like McDonalds or the big tobacco companies, are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone with whom they come in contact.

You have to read between the lines of these statistics a little bit, but if you do you will rapidly come to an understanding of how it is that there are zillions of unemployed people, zillions of underemployed people and a stock market that's through the roof, all at the same time.  If you want to take the advanced course, you'll have to do some reading and thinking.  Start with "The Power Elite" from the 1950's, then stir in a little Mitt Romney and Scrooge McDuck, then a lecture by Professor Richard Wolfe to explain it all.  By the time you're done, you will realize that American workers are in big trouble, partly because they're not working anymore, partly because it is no longer necessary for the financial well-being of their overlords that they work... or even consume.  "Multi-national" companies now make most of their money employing cheap foreign workers to make cheap goods to sell to other cheap foreign workers in far-away places that have lax environmental standards and poor industrial and financial regulation (well, okay, we've still got poor regulation here, too) and the only real domestic market they need to maintain for the comfort of their officers, directors and principal shareholders is the one for imported luxury goods. 

Few of the luxury goods favored by the wealthy, and precious little of anything else, are made in the USA.  They don't manufacture clothing in America anymore, for the most part (and what they do make is only T-shirts and socks), they don't make TV's or I-Phones, either.  And wait a minute... what kind of a car do you drive?

We even import pet food... to the great misfortune of the legions of animals who have ingested the toxin-laced Chinese version, and their human companions who installed that asbestos-laden drywall.  But let's get real. What alternatives to cheap, foreign-made goods do most people really have?  If you want a bargain, shop at Wal-Mart-- it's cheaper than taking a slow boat to China for the same stuff.  And while the stock broker whose bonus you bailed out a couple of years ago is drinking the fine wine that he purchased at the last wine auction advertised in the New York Times, and the plutocrats he serves are plotting their next two trillion dollar heist, you might want to check out the free samples at your local Costco.  If you make a few laps around the store, you can ingest enough calories to make a complete meal, and you don't really want to read about the ingredients in all that stuff anyway.

Infallible Popes and Other Old Poops

You know, just when you start thinking, "Hey, we're living in the future!" and get all worked up over all the fantastic technology and stuff (Ha!  My computer froze for hours today after I foolishly agreed to download Internet Explorer 10) you wind up reading a story about how somebody was burned as a witch someplace or that we still have Kings, Queens and a Pope.

Interesting fact about the Pope:  When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church.  Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility.  This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history.  I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how.  In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment.  Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.

I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine.  It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change.  Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America.  All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them.  And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too. 

It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago.  With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get.  Which makes you wonder:  Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever?  Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead?  After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years.  Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do--  amend our understanding of the document.  Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.

Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility.  And there you have it, his "legacy."  No more Pope Joans.  Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell.  But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.) 

People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined.  Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land.  They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.

Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix.  The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court.  The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word.  Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations.  So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.

Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire.  But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn.  Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me."  As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome.  Wow.

Marriage

The Supreme Court listened to arguments in a couple of cases about "gay marriage" last week.  One case had to do with the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," the other with the validity of California Proposition 8, enactment of which was supposed to outlaw "gay marriage" in America's most populous state.  The Court will probably dispose of the California case with a procedural trick-- they'll simply discover that the people suing to reinstate Proposition 8 have no "standing" to bring the case, and avoid deciding the merits of it that way.  The Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law, may present a little tougher case, but the Court will probably find a way to punt there, too.  There was a lot of rigmarole about how it "might not be time yet" to decide the issue of "gay marriage" on its merits, because "it's such a recent phenomenon."

One can certainly understand why gay couples want the benefits of marriage extended to them, and why they don't want to be confirmed as second-class citizens by having it called something like a "civil union" instead.  Besides, I forget who it was who was supposed to have originated the saying, but "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."  If you're going to treat people as married, they're married, and at that point it's pointless to try to make a distinction between different flavors of the same thing.

With apologies to whichever shepherd wrote the Book of Leviticus, I'd have to say it's a no-brainer that if you're going to have such a thing as marriage at all, it ought to apply to anyone who wants to assume its obligations and reap its benefits.  And let's not kid ourselves, this "one man, one woman" stuff is straight out of the Bible.  That's where all our "traditional values" come from in this country, whether it's politically correct to call attention to it or not.  Imagine how hard it was for those anti-gay lawyers at the Supreme Court to get through their arguments without using the "B-word." 

With all the furor over "gay marriage" it's easy to miss the big issue:  Is there a place in the modern world for the institution of "marriage" at all?  And if so, is it something that the government should encourage?

In those Supreme Court arguments, it's been hammered home again and again that there's no rationalization that provides a basis for extending special privileges to all those entering into the institution.  It used to be that marriage essentially involved the transfer of ownership of a woman from one man (her father) to another man (her husband-to-be.)  Women couldn't own property or even live alone, much less earn their own living (except as prostitutes or witches, and you know what the Bible had to say about them!)  So they had to have a man to take care of them (and to serve, while they were being taken care of.)  O.K., there's one of the big reasons that the institution of marriage was developed.

Another major justification for the institution, in addition to providing for the ownership, care and feeding of women, was to provide for the production, care and feeding of kids.  You weren't supposed to have kids outside of wedlock (Catchy word, wot?  Very descriptive.)  If they were born out of wedlock, those kids would be "bastards," and tainted for the rest of their lives.  Marriage, which was supposed to be "until  Death do us part," made sure that both parents would have to be around and be responsible for raising their kids, even if they no longer cared to be together.  So marriage was supposed to "promote the stability of the family." 

A third justification was to promote morality generally, the idea being that to have sex was bad, unless you had it for the purpose of procreation with someone to whom you had been bound for life.  If you wanted to have sex before marriage, or with someone other than your spouse after marriage, that was a sin.  And if you actually did it, you were run out of town on a rail or stoned or something.  And if you were a woman who did it, you were defiled for life, with one of the consequences being, ironically enough, that no "decent" man could ever marry you.  Sort of like a "one strike" law.  Conversely, if you were a married woman, it was your duty to have sex (and since contraception was also a sin, have children) whenever your "lawfully wedded spouse" felt like getting it on.  (Marriage was, historically, basically an "arrangement" negotiated between families, sometimes when the principals were still kids, and often before the bride and groom-to-be had even seen each other, so there was a lot of "duty" involved, and the idea of romantic "love" as a pre-requisite never came into it at all.

Nowadays, of course, we're confronted with a lot of new realities.  Women are supposed to have "equal rights," and they actually do, in many areas (although in many jurisdictions, like North Dakota, not with respect to having control over their own bodies.)  So they don't need a man to support them or rent an apartment or any of that stuff.

As was repeatedly pointed out in the Supreme Court arguments referenced above, there's no showing that kids raised by "one man, one woman" do any better than kids raised in "alternative" circumstances, such as by single or gay parents.  This is a good thing, because statistically the number of "traditional" single family households is shrinking (now fewer than half of all households, according to the Census), half of all first marriages end in divorce (the number rising to 80% for second and third marriages) and at least half of all the marriages that don't end in divorce really should (and would if the participants felt they could afford it.)  One third of kids are raised by single moms, or otherwise without a father in the home.

There are such things as reliable contraceptives now, by the way.  And the world has too many people, as it is.  And, as Hillary says, "it takes a village" to raise kids, anyway.  One way or the other, the "traditional institution of marriage" has got to go, and eventually will go, either by extending the status to any couple (or for that matter, why not any group) of adults that wants it, or by eliminating it entirely, at least as a civil institution.