Random Thoughts and Sound Bites – Roger Ingalls

Obamacare

Why has the Republican Party turned into an uncoordinated group of domestic terrorists trying to destroy the US economy? It’s a thrash and burn tactic synonymous with defeat; it’s just like Saddam blowing up oil wells as his army retreated from Kuwait. The conservatives know the Affordable Health Care Act won’t cause the world to stop as they’ve predicted and the people will mostly endorse it once underway. The party will have major egg on their face and they know it.

Government Shutdown

Why is a small group of right-wing zealots allowed to do harm to the country? By definition, a group conspiring to harm the USA is committing treason. They should be rounded up and given due process. Calling yourself a political party doesn’t exempt you from prosecution for treasonous acts.

Global Warming

The IPCC has released their fifth report on climate change and it is now 95% certain that this cycle of global warming is being caused by humans. As I’ve said in the past, it doesn’t really matter what’s causing it, we need to prepare for it…build an economy for it. It is here to stay. However, I’m still amazed that pseudo-scientists are still trying to deny the cause. The fakes are now even generating their own report with an almost identical name to further confuse the truth. All one has to do is look at who is backing these deniers and it becomes obvious that they’re shadowy hired guns supported by fossil fuel based corporation.

War on Terror

Listening to the local radio talk show, I was surprised to hear a frank speaking person with opinions seemingly based on real information. Then it became obvious. He was an ex-military higher up who worked under Colin Powell. His name is Lawrence Wilkerson (retired Army Colonel). I didn’t agree with all he said but Wilkerson did confirm something I strongly believe in. The WAR on Terror is misguided. The odds of an American getting killed by a terrorist is less likely than being struck by lightning yet we spend billions on top of billions under this fear mongering program. The military spending serves another hidden purpose.

Can I Order some Democracy, Please? – Tom Rossi

Once in a while, we hear, in the news, about a strange, mysterious concept  known as “gerrymandering.” This is the practice whereby politicians make changes to the geographical shapes of political districts in order to give themselves and/or their political party more power. It’s done on an opportunistic basis by whichever party has power in a certain state at the moment and has no shame whatsoever.

However, in recent years the Republican Party has definitely taken the lead. The Dems are certainly not innocent, but they’ve taken a back seat to the recent flood of Republican gerrymandering.

How might it be possible to make more districts elect Republicans even if a majority of voters are Democrats? Here’s how:

First, identify geographic areas where Dems and Reps are concentrated. In other words, find areas that are not divided somewhat evenly, but where voting for one party is clearly dominant. Usually, this is as simple as separating the rich areas from the middle-class and poor neighborhoods. Then, draw new district borders, no matter how convoluted, around the desired areas, and voila’, you have cemented your power for the foreseeable future.

The Great State of Simplificatia

In the deliberately oversimplified diagram above (which is both a schematic and a fake map), you can see how gerrymandering works. The larger blue area (or population) votes Democrat, and the red area votes Republican. But if the Republicans set the districts, they can form one district that contains most of the Democrats, while the other two districts have a Republican majority. This means that, from this imaginary state with three congressional districts and a Democratic majority, one of the representatives that will be sent to Congress will be a Democrat, while two will be Republicans.

Due to various factors, people more often elect Republicans at the local level. This has to do with people’s (incorrect) perceptions about job creation, for one thing, but also the fact that many Democrats tend only to come out and vote in the “big” elections, for President of the United States, for example.

As a result, Republicans often end up in key positions of power from which they can control periodic redistricting. Of course, this phenomenon can and has taken place the other way ’round, but this is the dominant trend lately.

And it can be incredibly ugly on a real map:

A single district in Maryland

What’s really politically beautiful (in reality, ugly) about this is that it provides the opportunity to whine about Democrats’ “making their seats safe,” even while, as I demonstrated in the diagram above, what’s really happening is the snatching of a seat by the Republicans.

For a much more detailed analysis of this problem, please read Sam Wang’s brilliant pieces: “Gerrymanders, Part 1: Busting the both-sides-do-it myth“, and “Part 2: How many voters were disenfranchised?” One conclusion that Wang reaches (with some good math and statistics) is that ten times as many Democrats have been disenfranchised as Republicans.

If it weren’t for this, Democrats would very likely hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. That would mean that talk of austerity measures would die, as would talk of privatizing Social Security.

It would also mean that something might be done to prepare for climate change (that is already upon us) and maybe some steps would even be taken to minimize the amount and pace of climate change.

And get this… If Democrats really controlled the government, there would be less spending.

As Sam Wang suggests, gerrymandering disenfranchises voters. That means a hole in our democracy, and that’s unacceptable, whichever party benefits. With so much talk of “bringing democracy” to Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and other countries, many are now saying, “Let’s bring democracy to the United States first.

Video: Stephen Colbert: Win, Lose, or Redraw

-Tom Rossi

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Tom Rossi is a commentator on politics and social issues. He is a Ph.D. student in International Sustainable Development, concentrating in natural resource and economic policy. Tom greatly enjoys a hearty debate, especially over a hearty pint of Guinness.

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San Onofre Nuclear Shutdown – A Medium-Sized Victory – Tom Rossi

It was announced this week that the nuclear power plant at San Onofre, California (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, or SONGS) would be permanently shut down. Finally. But this was not really a victory for what I’ll call the “anti-really-obviously-stupid-nuclear” movement. And I’ll tell you why.

SONGS should never have been built. Its first reactor came on line in 1968. It wasn’t known, at the time of its construction, that the site was almost directly atop a fault line, but what was known? It was well known that California was the home of thousands of fault lines, even if some of those are fairly short.

What’s important is that geologists knew that they didn’t know about all of California’s faults. They knew that it was likely that many more than were known at that time would be discovered in the coming decades. They were right.

San Onofre, like pretty much anywhere in California, was an idiotically dangerous place to build a nuclear power plant. But that wasn’t the only issue.

Nuclear power plants have limited lifespans. This is due to both the inevitable seepage of radiation (and its effects) into various parts of the mechanisms of the plant, and to the fact that tiny flaws due to vibration (as was the case in San Onofre) make the first problem worse and also cause general deterioration that is incredibly difficult and expensive to fix. Mainly because of these problems, the risk of a radioactive leak or release increases with time.

So, nuclear power plants typically are only in operation for around 40 years anyway. As a whole, SONGS had outlived that, even though its second and third reactors had only been on line for about 30 years.

And, in fact, each of the reactors at SONGS had problems. Activists are claiming victory, and I wish it were so, but SONGS has succumbed not to political pressure nearly as much as decay and economics. And the victory gets even more hollow…

The news coverage of the closing of SONGS has been sparse and, as usual, somewhat dominated by the nuclear industry’s PR messages. And while some anti-nuclear activists are celebrating, continued industry control over the media may tell us which way the wind still blows.

Today, almost every story on SONGS is about how many jobs will be lost and how much it will cost to decommission the plant. That’s how dirty businesses are defended, now – they provide jobs. I guess we never should have shut down asbestos production. Think of all the jobs we could have saved!

And the cost of decommissioning any nuclear power plant is almost completely predictable and has to be figured into the total cost-benefit analysis of a nuclear power plant project. Decommissioning cost is part of the reason that nuclear power is an economic failure (a predictable one) as well as a hazard to both human and ecological health.

I pay close attention to corporate influence on the media. It’s visible pretty much everywhere, but often, so is the backlash. Other people who pay attention make lots of noise and usually get some media attention themselves when the media show bias toward war profiteers or oil companies, for example. But the nuclear industry dominates the media much more thoroughly. They act pre-emptively in planting their messages on networks like PBS (on the completely pro-energy-industy program “Need to Know” for example) and the other “mainstream” channels.

It doesn’t bother me so much that some people are pro-nuclear. Some of them are actually real environmentalists that have been convinced that nuclear is a solution to carbon emission and, therefore, climate change. But in the media, there is no debate. That’s because the anti-nuclear side has no money with which to sponsor television programming. The grass-roots movement is still very strong, but the nuclear industry fights top-down.

These days, I always hear about new reactor designs that will be the greatest things since sliced bread – with much less radioactive waste and so forth. I asked famously converted “climate skeptic” and physicist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Labs, Richard Muller (who is a really nice guy, by the way) what he thought about these new reactor designs, and he said, “Well, they look good on paper.” Interesting response.

One thing I’m sure of is that the crop of older nuclear plants that are still in operation need to be shut down. Any old excuse will do just fine, but shut them down, soon. They are all old and the risk of an accident is increasing, as are stockpiles of radioactive waste.

The closing of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is certainly something to celebrate. But don’t sound the victory gong just yet. We have a long and difficult battle ahead if we want to slow down the energy-addiction-justified poisoning of our planet… and ourselves.

-Tom Rossi

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Tom Rossi is a commentator on politics and social issues. He is a Ph.D. student in International Sustainable Development, concentrating in natural resource and economic policy. Tom greatly enjoys a hearty debate, especially over a hearty pint of Guinness.

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A Whale of a Whaling Tale – Tom Rossi

U.S. appeals judge Alex Kozinski, last week, declared that the actions of the group known as the Sea Shepherds amount to piracy. The Sea Shepherds sail the oceans, chasing whaling vessels and trying to interfere with the killing of whales.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAFx56cd8iM

In 1976, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) set the quota for a certain species of whale found largely in the southern hemisphere at zero in an attempt to get around policy difficulties with bureaucracy. Japan promptly issued itself a permit to hunt whales for research purposes, as allowed by IWC rules, and to dispose of the meat and other valuable components on the Japanese market.

Since then, the Japanese have taken hundreds of these whales per year in the name of research… while making huge profits at around $50 per pound wholesale (and climbing) of whale meat. I’m really hoping they don’t start researching Italian Americans.

Several issues come up, here…

If whales are simply a resource to be harvested for our needs (or wants), then that resource should be preserved at optimum production levels. That isn’t happening.

One of the so-called strengths of our economic system (a system which is in force throughout most of the world) is that, as a resource becomes more scarce, its price rises, creating an incentive to develop new resources as replacements. But in the real world, as the price of a resource rises, the incentive that’s immediately created is to exploit every last molecule of that resource until it disappears.

The Japanese claim that whale populations are healthy and that their hunting, er… research does nothing to harm sustainability. But real research, not funded by those profiting from whaling, shows that whale populations are in decline.

But what if whales are not just a resource, like oil, but are living creatures that have some value, other than “use value?” Whales are intelligent and complex beings. They show surprising depth of emotion and their communications are stunning in their richness. Would westerners accept the hunting of chimpanzees for their meat? Or mountain gorillas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUAUQa8C8zA

The fact is that Americans can’t even stomach horse meat. Why is that? Sure, there are stories that the current horse meat “crisis” has to do with horses from eastern Europe that may have been in poor health before they were slaughtered. But there’s something much bigger than that going on.

Americans would absolutely not accept even good quality horse meat, because America loves horses. Horse lovers cite the animal’s intelligence and sensitivity as reasons that they are so precious to them. And the image of the horse is one of a great friend to us – a partner, not a stock of meat.

Meanwhile, only a few people shed a tear for the cow. Cows are certainly not as intelligent as whales, or even horses. Is that the difference? So where do we draw the line? The Japanese harvest lots of intelligent creatures, such as the incredible cuttle fish. To them, the cuttle fish is a resource too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1T4ZgkCuiM

Being a carnivore myself, I find that I cannot answer this question. It seems it’s another subtle judgement call. Prey animals, like cattle and chickens, make up an important part of the human diet (although vegetarians and vegans would disagree) as fish and deer and prairie dogs make up important parts of the diets of their natural predators.

But if we upset the balance of nature by ourselves hunting ocean predators, such as whales and tuna, the populations of the species that eat the oceans’ algae will explode. This will mean yet another huge insult to the world’s oxygen production, until the algae-eaters crash from an algae shortage. Their decaying bodies will then produce carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change.

By coincidence (not really), it is the predators that happen to be the most intelligent animals, with few exceptions. So maybe there are sentimental as well as practical reasons to curtail activities such as whaling.

A few years ago, I spent six months living in Japan. I really like Japan and its people. I made lots of good friends there and I hated to leave. And one of the great things about that country is its food – delicious, healthy, and incredibly varied.

The Japanese have eating habits that they are loath to change. Japan continues to fish bluefin tuna toward oblivion, for example, as its appetite for it hasn’t slowed in the least with news of crashing bluefin populations.

Habits die hard. But we need to see the science by squinting through the fog of political and profit-driven spin. The human population on this Earth is huge and growing. We have long since passed the point where our activities have significant effects on the functioning of the ecology that is our life-support mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brw6JN0lQXY

I’m not really sure if these are chief among the reasons that the Sea Shepherds risk their lives to protect whales and other sea creatures, or if they just want to preserve what little they can of the beautiful life on this planet. Either way, in the face of the unwillingness of politicians, worldwide, to slow the rate at which we change our world down to a level that can be understood in its impacts, they are bravely taking action. I wish we lived in a world were extreme action was unnecessary. But when the rates of destruction of important elements of our world are extreme, the wheels of politics turn too slowly, usually reacting only when it’s too late.

-Tom Rossi

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Tom Rossi is a commentator on politics and social issues. He is a Ph.D. student in International Sustainable Development, concentrating in natural resource and economic policy. Tom greatly enjoys a hearty debate, especially over a hearty pint of Guinness.

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One of the Important Things the Candidates Don’t Talk About – Tom Rossi

Usually, I’m pretty disgusted with the news on TV. In the typical half-hour news broadcast, there are several minutes spent on weather (which is useful, to a large degree), several minutes on sports, a few minutes on either direct entertainment “news,” such as what movie is hot at the box office, or reports of celebrity deaths, incarcerations, marriages, or divorces. The lead-off story is often about some shooting or car accident. All of this leaves precious little time for stories about what’s actually happening in the world that might drastically affect our future.

 But on Sunday night, the CBS evening news shocked me, just a little, with this story: “Scientists warn of rising sea levels in Florida.” The story actually presented rising sea levels (as one result of climate change – implied but not stated) as fact. They didn’t put on “different viewpoints” to “balance” the story, they just showed the science and talked about what it means and what plans we should make to deal with the changes that have already started, but will get much more serious.

When I started to write this, I though I might run down, for the ten billionth time, the evidence that global warming is real. But I’m so tired of making that argument. I’m really tired of telling people that two plus two equals four, and not three. With the people who just don’t want to believe anything that would mean their previous position on something had been wrong, I’ve wasted my breath.

 

So don’t take my word for it. Look to the National Academy of Sciences. This is a large group of elite scientists from all around the United States, with 2,152 members plus 430 foreign associates. The analyses they present are clear. I’ll let you take a look for yourself. Even the handful of legitimate skeptics are finally rubbing their eyes to the morning sun.

 

I’m as surprised as anyone to be saying this, but kudos to CBS news. They still didn’t really come out and say the boogie words: “Global Warming,” or at least: “Climate Change,” but this story was really a step in the right direction.

 

-Tom Rossi

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Tom Rossi is a commentator on politics and social issues. He is a Ph.D. student in International Sustainable Development, concentrating in natural resource and economic policy. Tom greatly enjoys a hearty debate, especially over a hearty pint of Guinness.

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2012: A Year to Remember – Roger Ingalls

Global warming, who cares. We’re only talking about a few degrees so what’s the big deal? The availability of food is the big deal.

Starch based foods, such as; corn, rice and wheat are members of the grass family and the life blood for most people on Earth. Not only do we eat starch-plants but our livestock is primarily fed corn and similar grassy vegetation. In addition, close to 70% of all items found on grocery stores shelves in developed countries have some type of corn byproduct in them (an unintended consequence of subsidized farming). The world depends on starchy grasses so we must have large land masses in climate zones suitable for growing these plants.

Global warming of a few degrees may not seem like much but when compared to temperature ranges required to grow our food, the small change isn’t so little.

For the purposes of this short article we’ll talk about corn. The ideal temperature range for growing corn is 68F to 73F degrees and having an abundant amount of weather in this range is needed to keep food prices affordable and available. The ideal growing range is only 5F degrees (73 – 68 = 5) so a climate shift of 2 or 3 degrees will consume 50% of corn’s growing range budget and that is significant. The average growing season temperature for America’s bread basket region (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois…) is about 72F degrees so an upward shift of just a few degrees takes us out of the ideal condition. This is bad news for high yields.

Global warming also has another, more damaging, side effect; prolonged extreme temperature variation. This is what we are now experiencing in the Midwest and it’s having a devastating impact on crops. In past years, it was normal to have a handful of super-hot days but climate change is producing consecutive weeks of scorching heat. More bad news for crop yields. Corn can survive in a range of 50F to 95F degrees for a period of time but will not yield well above 80F or below 60F. Corn can even tolerate extreme temperatures (32F to 110F degrees) but only for a few days. When we have weeks of heat over 100F degrees, as we have seen this year, crops fail.

2012 may become a year to remember. It will be a year of climate records in both high temperatures and protracted heat days. It will be a year of failed crops.

A few degrees does make a difference.

ExxonMobil Says Yes to Global Warming – Roger Ingalls

Denier’s walls are crumbling down. It an astonishing speech, ExxonMobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson, admitted that the burning of fossil fuel is warming the planet. Like many others, I was totally floored when reading about his revelation. Perhaps he had a moment of weakness or maybe the perpetual lying finally got the better of him. More likely reputation played a role; let’s face it, the silly-science arguments used by fossil-energy companies are making them look stupid and lacking in credibility.

Can you imagine the look on the Koch brothers’ faces when they heard about Mr. Tillerson’s speech? I bet they soiled their pants from moaning so hard.

Tillerson wasn’t, by any means, apologetic or gracious. He called the public illiterate, the press lazy and indicated that the risk of spills and accidents were worth the reward. The biggest industry challenge, he said, “taking an illiterate public and try to help them understand why we can manage these risks.”

Interestingly, Tillerson appeared to ignore any discussion relating to remedial activities that would curb global warming. I suppose this is not a surprise. Slowing the release of greenhouse gasses would negatively impact ExxonMobil financially since more energy burn means more profits for them. The CEO believes we can manage in a hotter world. “We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”

I give Mr. Tillerson credit for stepping up and acknowledging the impact fossil fuels have on the environment but I also find it obscene that these Wall Street-massaged companies go from “denying” straight to “it’s too late, the damage is done so let’s adapt to our new climate”. Again, not a surprise, it’s all about lining pockets with gold but obscenely sinister nonetheless.

As much as I hate to agree with Tillerson, it is too late. Even if we drastically reduced carbon emissions today, temperatures are going to rise and so will sea levels for the next 200 to 300 years. Forget about green or sustainable economies, we need to pursue an adaptive economy that makes today’s disasters tomorrow’s normal.

The iPhone Does Not Exist – Roger Ingalls

Imagine you’re sitting in Starbucks holding an iPad, iPhone or iPod and someone walks up to you and says, “that thing in your hand does not exist”. You’d look at them, think they were off their rocker and quickly scurry away. When climate-deniers tell me increased levels of CO2 are not responsible for global warming, I believe they are either brainwashed (followship syndrome), have a political agenda so truth doesn’t matter or they’re just plain crazy.

You may be scratching your head and asking why I’m drawing parallels between Apple products and manmade climate change but the answer is simple. The same technology used to predict how CO2 impacts temperature change is also used in the manufacture of the advanced computer chips (integrated circuits) that go into cell phones, iPhones and all similar devices including computers. However there is one big difference, predicting CO2 related climate change is magnitudes simpler than controlling the manufacturing of integrated circuits.

Destructive SEM Photo of Chip, sciencedirect.com

Computer chips, which are about the size of a finger nail, have millions of components inside them (called gates or transistors) with dimensions smaller than 100 nanometers. For comparison sake, the width of a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers. These chip components are so small they cannot be seen through the lenses of the most advance optical microscopes and aren’t clearly visible with multi-million dollar scanning electron microscopes. The shape and dimensions of these super small parts can only be “inferred” or predicted by analyzing how light (similar to sunlight) reflects, absorbs and scatters off the parts. A special machine shines light onto the part and then captures the light coming off them. The light-data creates a “kind of” fingerprint that resembles an up and down squiggly line. The light-fingerprint is compared to millions upon millions of stored fingerprints, which were created by computer simulations, until a match is made. Once a match is detected, the shape and dimensions are provided.

Climatologist use the same technique as described above except the problem is much simpler. The sun is the source of light that is analyzed as it reflects, absorbs and scatters through and off the atmosphere as well as the Earth’s surface. Computer chips are more complex because they have forty or more material layers or atmospheres with varying chemistry while the Earth has just one atmosphere with a few elements such as oxygen, CO2, nitrogen and so on. The dimension that climatologist look for is temperature as it relates to CO2 concentration. Computer simulations are used to predict or “infer” temperature change as the chemistry of our atmosphere varies; computer simulations predict a rise in temperature as CO2 amounts go up. CO2 concentrations have increased from 175 ppm (parts per million) to 395 ppm since the start of the industrial revolution. This is the fastest increase in Earth’s history and we know this from another type of scientific analysis but I’ll save that explanation for another day.

If you believe iPhones, high-speed internet and similar products exist, you must also believe in manmade global warming because the computer simulations that allow the manufacture of these gadgets also predict an increase in temperature as CO2 concentrations rise.

You can’t believe in one and not the other, it’s illogical.

I Want a Space Suit – Roger Ingalls

Like many kids growing up in the 60s and 70s, I wanted to be an astronaut. Perched atop a metal tube filled with mega-amounts of explosives, blasting through space would have been an awesome experience. Putting on high-tech gear and floating around an Apollo capsule like Will Robinson hovering above the Jupiter 2 in Lost in Space was every boy’s dream.

My astronaut wishing days are well behind me but, in the coming years, there will be a terrestrial need for space-like attire. So, at least, I may finally get to dress like an astronaut.

MIT developed BioSuit

A few months ago I wrote a piece called Give Global Warming a Hug. This was written because we need to embrace the fact that a hotter world is here to stay for a long time and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And the “better” will not come until humans are extinct. One of the closing lines in the hug piece was, “We need to spend our intellectual energy creating an economy that allows us to survive and prosper in the chaos of a warmer world.” Climate change will create new markets. One of the products introduced during the Warm World Economy will be a Terrestrial Environmental Suit or TES. Resembling a space suit, it will control temperature, humidity and have many other bells and whistle for comfort and entertainment.

The TES is a product of necessity for two primary reasons; sky-rocketing energy cost and the need for humans to navigate their daily existence in a hotter climate. We will soon be a world of 9,000,000,000 (nine billion) people on an already energy stressed planet. All fuels are expensive now and will exponentially increase in the future. The luxury of having cooled spaces in our cars, homes, stores and offices is energy intensive and will soon be economically unsustainable. There is no need to control the climate inside all these big spaces. We only need to manage the space immediately around our bodies and doing so will save tremendous amounts of energy.

So, wal-lah or Viola…expect a climate controlled Terrestrial Environmental Suit in stores near you soon!

Finally, after forty years I’ll get my space suit.

Give Global Warming a Hug – Roger Ingalls

We, the believers, need to embrace global warming; we need to wrap our arms around it and give it a big hug.  It’s here to stay.  We should no longer waste time on climate deniers in hopes of creating a cooperative effort to reduce the activities that are causing the change.

picture from: careforchildrennow.wordpress.com

The deniers are obstructionists that fall in to two categories.  Group One subscribes to an authoritarian ideology and follows the rhetoric of the second group without question.  Group Two deniers are the leaders and the devious ones.  They are corporate-hired guns typically from the political and special-interest arena on a mission to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt – or what we call FUD in the business world.

FUD is a powerful tactic when your audience is an authoritarian-minded followship that doesn’t use intellectual reasoning.  This is why Republican leaders started using FUD twenty years ago; it’s a perfect vice for the members of their party.

It’s important to understand that deniers are a strong coalition of obstructionists not wanting to engage in any activity which is disruptive to the current power structure.  It is not in the best interest of the corporations to endorse environmentally friendly regulations or innovative technologies that could substitute and obsolete their market position.

The current power base controls most of the world’s wealth.  They own the politicians, a majority of the Supreme Court Justices, and have an army of drones.  They can not be beaten so let’s not waste our time. 

A warmer planet and the activities that are creating it are here to stay.  We need to spend our intellectual energy creating an economy that allows us to survive and prosper in the chaos of a warmer world.

Endorse the reality – we need to adapt.  Extinction is the alternative.

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Roger Ingalls is well traveled and has seen the good and bad of many foreign governments. He hopes his blogging will encourage readers to think more deeply about the American political system and its impact on US citizens and the international community.