From Birth to Death

As I said before, the trouble with the pill is that it's not 100% effective, and it's not effective at all if you don't use it. There is nothing wrong with passing out free pills, but vasectomies and tubal litigations are more reliable. Vasectomies can  sometimes be reversed, I'm not sure about tubal litigations. There would be no way to prevent somebody from taking the money and then attempting to have the operation reversed, so my plan isn't 100% foolproof either.

I'm not sure how much we'd have to pay people to make this option attractive, but not too attractive.  We don't want everybody to do this, but I think we should offer it to everybody to avoid being charged with racism or genocide or something like that. If it looks like too many people are choosing the option, we could reduce the payment and vice versa. The program could be financed with a bond issue because it will save money in the long run. We just have to make sure they apply the savings to paying off the bonds instead of diverting the money to some other program.  

I don't think it's a good idea for anybody under the age of 18 to have a baby, married or not, but we can't offer the option to minors because they are not legally capable of making a decision like this. All we can do is give them pills, rubbers, and things like that and hope for the best. Speaking of rubbers, when did they start calling them "condoms"? That  must have been one of the language changes they slipped in when I was out of the country back in the 60s.

Michigan was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to abolish the death penalty, way back in the 19th Century. Legend has it that this initiative was the result of a popular saloon keeper being executed for killing his wife, who was not so popular. For whatever reason, we haven't had the death penalty for a long time, and nobody seems to miss it. I think that what motivates most people to advocate the death penalty is simple revenge. While I agree that there are certain people who deserve to die for their crimes, I think that the death penalty is more trouble than it's worth. With all the endless appeals, there is a good chance the guy will die of old age before he gets executed. Then there's the chance that he might be innocent, and you can't undo death.

I once read a short story by some famous Russian author called "Seven Who Were Hanged". It was about these six people, who were caught conspiring to assassinate a government official, plus one other guy who was arrested on an unrelated charge and thrown in with them. As the title implies, they all were hanged in the end but, before that, an interesting point was brought out. The government official was informed of the plot and assured that it had indeed been foiled. They told him the exact day and time that the assassination had been planned to happen, and assured him again that it wasn't going to happen now. Nevertheless, as the appointed hour approached, the official got more and more nervous. When the clock struck the hour, his heart leaped and a shudder shook his whole body. From this experience, he concluded that killing a person is not nearly as inhumane as telling him ahead of time when he is going to die. This epiphany, however, did not inspire him to extend clemency to the conspirators.

crime and punishment

If you replace the carrot with the stick in your plan we get the red Chinese plan of last midcentury.  Actually that worked out pretty well I think.  The guys who wrote freakonomics correlated the legalization of abortion with slackening of crime twenty or so years later.  You were speaking of tube tying rather than abortion, but either way we get a decrease in population which can only be a good thing, for reasons you elucidated. 

Of course, as you've said, something like this has zero chance of ever happening because most people, besides us crackpots, would hate it, but we're just a couple of old farts flapping out gums so what the hell.  I do prefer the carrot to the stick if we want this to work, because I don't think we could pay people enough, and if you made it voluntary I don't think enough people would sign up to make any kind of difference.

There is religion, people join that voluntarily and in droves.  There were the shakers, but that points to a problem in keeping the religion going.  There were, and still are, monasteries and nunneries, but I think there was a lot of fooling around going on in them.

Is teen pregnancy a problem?  haven't we always had pregnant teens?  I think you mean unwed teens, and more to the point, poor unwed teens.  Wait a minute, did you say consenting adults?  So only people above a certain age are eligible for the tube tying bonus?  That sounds a little strange.  What if we just signed them up for the pill?  I think we already do that in a lot of cases.

But anyway, poor unwed teens, and maybe even poor wed teens, because the problem is how can poor people raise kids.  Murphy Brown can give her kid whatever the kid wants and can send the kid to the finest schools, and it doesn't even have to hurt her career because she can afford daycare.

See the thing is it kind of comes down to the rich vs the poor.  On the other hand, as people rise into the middle class they begin to have fewer kids.  The kids don't die as much because healthcare is available, and you don't need them to help on the family farm, because likely they have moved off the family farm.


So they are deciding on the death penalty for that Boston guy and the Colorado movie house guy.  Basically I don't give a shit one way or the other if they kill them or let them live out their lives in prison. 

It always seemed a little odd to me that the left would be for abortion and against capitol punishment, and the right the opposite.  Always seemed to be if you were for one you should be for the other.

Unlike the rest of my ilk I have never been that against the death penalty, but with all these guys on death row turning out to be innocent I have changed my mind.  What is it all about?  Do we want to punish the bad people or cut down crime and make us decent citizens safer?  A little of both, some other reason?

I don't think we have ever discussed this before, have we?

The Final Solution

I guess you're right, I got a little carried away with my metaphors last time. I keep forgetting that we don't get paid by the word here. Okay, here's another idea, and I'll try to be brief this time. It will never pass because both of our ilks will just hate it, but there's no harm in throwing it up and seeing where it lands.

Let's pay the poor, no let's pay everybody to become surgically sterilized. It would have to be strictly voluntary of course, and would be in addition to, not instead of, any existing programs. I seem to remember reading that they were doing this in India, but that was a long time ago, about the time I got my vasectomy, which would make it sometime in the 70s. I never heard how it worked out for them, and I don't know if they're still doing it.

Let's face it, there are way to many people on this planet. All the good land is occupied, and people are starting to fill up the mountains and the deserts too. It's only a matter of time till we are all standing shoulder to shoulder from sea to shinning sea. As the world becomes more crowded, there will be less of everything to pass around. We won't have to worry about the gap between rich and poor, we will all be poor.

Kids are expensive. The more kids you have, the less money you have for yourself. Reducing the birth rate alone will go a long way towards reducing poverty. Since poor people generally have more kids than rich people, reducing their birth rate will eventually result in less poor people to take care of, which means more money will be available to spend on each one. Less people, both poor and otherwise, will mean less competition for jobs, which will reduce unemployment and drive up wages. The wars and plagues of the Middle Ages accomplished the same things, but my way is more humane. It's also more humane than abortion.

My plan may not help much with the problem of teen pregnancy because we would have to limit it to consenting adults. Then again, with less kids being born, there will be less teenagers to become pregnant in a decade or so. Who can argue that the world wouldn't be better off with less teenagers in it?

                       

hells bells and a bucket of blood

Well hells bells Beagles.  Hells bells?  You know what's hellish, looking up a phrase that a rock band has decided would make a groovy name.  Three different  pages is my limit for internet research, and none of them gave me an origin, though one claimed that the phrase was originally hells bells and buckets of blood.  Kind of groovy, if I was forming a rock band, I think I would go with the longer phrase, or maybe just gone with bucket of blood, but that is probably already taken.  Once years ago, I happened to be in the hip part of town and came across a poster advertising the band Piss Bucket.  I never heard of them again, but maybe they changed their name to the Backstreet Boys or something.

Where was I?  Oh I was driving a car with an oil problem and then I abandoned it in Alaska, and the cops never came to tow it away because they were too busy dealing with urban derelict buildings, but actually they weren't dealing with them at all, they were dealing cards, but then they suddenly ran out of cards, and then I woke up and realized I had to get in my Beaglesonian post for the morn, but then I realized I was already writing it, and I wondered hells bells, hells bells and a bucket of blood, what ate we talking about here.

That's the trouble with these metaphors, they can go anywhere.  What if we are the Backstreet Boys driving from town to town, and whenever we run out of oil we just flash a smile and the tween girls buy us quarts of oil, and if we bought a new car they might think we were some other band like Piss Bucket.  And if we were Piss Bucket we would just steal oil from garages after our gigs and we could never buy a new car because none of us would want to sign Piss Bucket on the check.

Oh we were talking about poor people.   I think we were going to bat around ideas for a solution to poverty, but then I claim that we can never really solve that problem because, like terrorists or just nuts who buy a super gun and shoot up a school or movie or someplace, they will always be with us, but I think we should just try to make it a little better.

There's a facebook page about Forgotten Champaign and mostly it is about, oh remember that Dog 'n Suds on Second and Green in the fifties, but a day or two ago somebody posted something about the Vietnam protests and then somebody wrote something for them and somebody wrote something against them, and now two days later and a couple pages they are all going at it tooth and fang about who is really supporting the troops.

Why can't they be like us, and get a nice little blog that nobody reads and we don't bother nobody.

The Devil Is In the Details

I first heard of those P&G satanic rumors when I started working there. I thought it was some kind of a joke, but apparently some people took it seriously. When it got to the point that they believed it was actually hurting sales, the company's legal department tracked down some of the rumor mongers and took them to court. At least that's what our managers told us. I don't remember hearing anything about it in the news media, but I wasn't paying much attention to the news in those days.

You're probably right that people think of money spent on their own issue is a wise investment, while money spent on other people's issue is a total waste, but there is another, more objective way to look at it. If your car is leaking oil, the logical solution is to get it fixed so it stops leaking. If it runs out of oil, the engine will seize up and be permanently damaged so, if you don't have the time or money to fix it right now, you can check the oil level more frequently and add oil as needed. If you keep doing that indefinitely, though, you may reach a point when you have spent more on oil than it would have cost you to fix the leak.

Then again, some cars are not worth fixing. If the transmission is going bad, the body's rusted out,  and the engine has 200,000 miles on it, you may elect to keep dumping oil in it for another month or so while you shop around for a better car. When I was driving through Alaska and the Yukon Territory, I frequently saw cars that looked like they had been pushed off the road and abandoned. A guy at one of the gas stations explained to me that it was okay to salvage parts from those cars, if they looked like they had been there for awhile, because the owners were never coming back for them. The cost of having them towed hundreds of miles to where they could be fixed exceeded the total value of the cars. I asked him why the cops didn't have them towed and impounded until the owner paid all associated costs. He said that the cops around there were spread out pretty thin, and they had more important things to do with their time than that.

The same can be said about derelict buildings, some of them aren't worth fixing up, and some of them aren't even worth demolishing. An urban derelict building will eventually be demolished as a matter of public safety if there is money in the budget to do it but, if the city is broke, the building might stand there until looters, arsonists, and the forces of nature reduce it to ruble. Buildings in rural areas are often left to rot like that because the owner has no plans for the site and/or the time and money to do anything about it. One thing the owner isn't likely to do is slap another coat of paint on it just to improve its appearance.

Of course people are more important than cars or buildings, but some of the same principles still apply. When I say that just throwing money at the problem won't help, I don't mean we shouldn't spend money to help people. I mean that we should put the money where it will do the most good instead of just dealing it out like cards in a poker game. Otherwise, we will eventually run out of cards and the players still won't have what they need to play the game effectively.

satan is groovy

Proctor and Gamble?  I'm sure you have mentioned that before but it never clicked, or maybe it clicked and we have been all over the subject and I have forgotten.  I think that happens sometimes, but I don't remember.  Anyway, Proctor and Gamble, the satanists!  C'mon now, at the end of these enlightenment sessions didn't they make you put your fingers to your heads to look like horns and have you chant, "Satan is groovy."

Oh that was a big rumor way back in I think the seventies, and that was before even the internet.  It seems to have died down.  I think the internet just competed with flashier rumors that spread at the speed of DSL, and it seems like we like our rumors more political these days.  Pick any president's name, or anybody well known, and add 'the antichrist," and you will get, well let's see, Hillary gets several pages, but then you expect that.  Justin Bieber gets a lot. Huckabee, surprisingly to me, not so much.  But probably that just proves he is, because isn't the antichrist somebody that nobody thinks is the antichrist?

I personally thought the lame stream media always kept an ear to the Beaglesonian Institute to hear what the finest minds of our time were thinking.  Let's see if they start reviving the rumor about P and G after I post this. 

You know I read a science fiction story once about a man with a hammer.  Okay I didn't, I just didn't want to break my streak of science fiction story inspired insights.  But that story about the man with a hammer to whom every solution is a nail reminds me of the responses to an incident that suddenly pops into the nation's sleepy consciousness.  My ilk, who always wants to help out the poor, think it's because we don't help out the poor enough, the police types think it's because we don't respect the cops enough, the family values types think it's because we, well not them, those other guys, have lost our family values. P and G thinks it's because we don't realize how groovy Satan is.

And maybe we can put to rest this whole thing about how throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it.  What people mean when they say this is that throwing money at your problem, which they don't care about, doesn't solve it, but you can be damn sure that they want money thrown at their problems.  Oh and problems never get solved.  We have had some form of welfare forever and we still have poor people, we spend plenty on hospitals and doctors and yet we still die, we spend god awful money on the army and we still have enemies and we have not conquered the world. 

But some of that welfare has helped some people get out of poverty and into the middle class, and we generally live longer, and the military, well we conquered Granada. 

We all like to blame the politicians for our troubles, well generally I blame your politicians, and you mine, but say they were responsible. they are sitting in their offices smoking cigars while the cops in the street are enforcing the laws, so these are the guys that piss off the poor.

And you know for all my bleating about the poor, they are not such nice guys.  They are generally pretty ignorant, some of them are no-goods, and that's why they are poor, and they are constantly fighting each other to get a leg up, and they have lousy manners.  I'm sure they piss the cops off, and then the cops maybe get in an extra punch when cuffing some guy, and that makes them hate the cops more, and so on and so on. 

There are problems we will never solve, we can only try to make them a little better.

I think we should vote in that nice Anne T Christ who the P and G PAC are backing, she seems to have a plan.

Strange People and Angry People

That paper mill crew was a strange bunch to be sure. We used to speculate about what made us that way. Some thought it was working the swing shift, which kept us in a perpetual state of jet lag. Others believed it was because we had been together too long. Many of those guys went to school together, married each other's sisters, and then ended up working together for 20 or 30 years. Of course some of us were transplants from Down Below, but after a decade or so, you almost couldn't tell us from the indigenous natives. Then there were the guys who went Down Below to find work, or did a stitch in the military, and then came back home. The managers were mostly from somewhere else, and were rotated in and out of there every few years, but some of them ended up turning down promotions so they could stay right there. It doesn't necessarily take all kinds, but we had all kinds.

Proctor & Gamble has a long tradition of social engineering. They were one of the first manufacturing companies to provide retirement finds for their hourly employees, way back in the 19th Century. Most of their plants were non-union, and most of their employees were content to remain that way. The Cheboygan plant went union soon after Charmin bought it, and P&G inherited the union when they bought the plant from Charmin. I don't think the management was ever comfortable with that arrangement, believing that you shouldn't need a union when you worked for such a benevolent  company. The guys who had worked in the auto plants for awhile came back with a different idea of what a union should be than the guys who didn't. The United Auto Workers Union was born in strife and violence, and many of its members never got over the mindset that the company was the enemy. Much of the paranoia about brainwashing likely came from the belief that they were trying to socially engineer us out of our union, and there was probably some truth to that. I took it more the way you said. It was a refreshing break from the daily grind, they were paying me to sit on my ass, and providing free coffee and donuts to boot. What's not to like?

I saw a thing on the TV news this evening about all those alleged police brutality incidents. They interviewed several experts who had different opinions about it. They brought out some of the same points that we have been discussing, and I thought that nobody read our blogs. A couple of them blamed the whole thing on poverty. One said we need to spend more money, and the other one said that we shouldn't throw good money after bad. He didn't say we shouldn't help those people, he just said that we need to come up with a plan that works instead of just dumping money on the problem. I have been treating poverty as a separate issue, and I'm still not so sure that it isn't. Why would being poor make you hate the police, or make the police hate you? I can see why it would make you hate the politicians, the bankers, and your boss at work, but the cops are just doing their job, or should be.

I don't think the cops are supposed to go around shooting people just because they find them annoying, and I think that most of them don't, most of the time. I can see how someone might crack under the stress of a job like that, but of course that doesn't make it right. Maybe they should rotate them in and out of the high crime neighborhood assignments periodically, like the military rotates people in and out of combat zones. Too much time on the front lines can ruin the best of soldiers.