Sophistry and Obfuscation

Once more, my friend Bill Foster has posted something to his Substack that I think deserves a wider audience.

Sophistry and Obfuscation

Why the Actual Defense Budget is More Than Double What You Think It Is

William E Foster

Oct 08, 2025

There has been a lot of talk lately about U.S. defense spending reaching one trillion dollars under the big, beautiful bill. Unfortunately, the amount we spend on defense is routinely underestimated by liberal and conservative sources of like. In recent months, even folks I like and respect and generally find truthful like NPR, Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart have gotten it wrong.

The number you will hear most often is the Department of Defense base budget. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 that was $826 billion. Nuclear weapons are not included in the defense budget as they are under the Department of Energy. If you add that $47 billion, you get $874 billion. You will see this number quite often. The big, beautiful building adds $150 billion to that figure.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush administration pulled one of the biggest bait and switches in history with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Now, I admit that it’s an effective trick. Is Homeland Security defense spending? I would argue that it is right there in the name. What could be more basic to the defense of our nation than the security of the homeland and the protection of our borders? If it makes everyone feel better, we can talk about security spending instead of defense spending, but it seems obvious to me that it should be included. That figure is $112.4 billion in FY 24, up from $30 billion in 2004, its first full year of operation. Under the big, beautiful bill, DHS spending would increase $43.8 billion in 2026.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is not included in the DoD budget. Obviously, caring for those who served in the military is part of the cost of defense and to not include this in the budget is sophistry at best and more probably deliberate deception. The VA budget for FY 2024 was $325 billion. FY 2026 is unclear, but it looks like $369.3 billion. Military retirement pay is in the exact same situation, not included for the purposes of deliberate obfuscation. In Fy 2024, pensions for retired military members cost $260 billion. To be clear, I received 1.015384615384615e-7% of that money.

There are also significant costs for International Affairs throughout the budget that are actually defense spending. These include additional war funding because none of the obscene amounts spent so far include fighting a war. It also includes foreign aid, assistance to foreign militaries, embassy guards, etc. This includes programs like Foreign Military Financing ($3.3 billion), aid to Ukraine (about $107 billion so far), and another $42.36 billion, which includes paying for genocide in Israel.

Finally, we must remember we are issuing Treasury Bills for all this spending, which means we are paying interest on all this spending. This is hard to calculate, but interest on the national debt exceeded defense spending this year as the largest item in the federal budget. Interest is projected to cost $870 billion in FY 2024. The base DoD budget is 13% of the budget. We know now that defense spending is higher than 13%, as that is only the base DoD budget. We want to err on the conservative side, so I’ll use a figure of 20%. That means that $174 billion in the amount of interest on the national debt we pay related to defense spending.

We add all that together and we get:

Defense and DoE nuclear weapons: $1.24 trillion

Homeland Security: $156.2 billion

Veterans’ Affairs: $369.3 billion

Military pensions: $260 billion

International affairs: $150 billion

Interest: $174 billion

Grand Total: $2,349,000,000

This information is difficult to find and parse and this took me awhile. Even for a simple question such as, “what is the FY 2024 VA budget,” I received six different answers (in the same ballpark). You can argue about whether certain things should be included but it is quite clear that the U.S. budget is not $1 trillion but is somewhere far to the north of that and at least double. We should also note that there is credible research done by Stockholm International Peace research Institute that shows that actual spending demonstrated in the National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) – the database where checks are written – shows that money spent is always much higher than what is budgeted. I chose to omit that analysis in the interest of coming up with a conservative figure that is certainly at the low end of the range of possibilities.

How does this compare to other countries? The official figure for the U.S. is that we spend 3.4% of our GDP on defense but if spending is more than twice the commonly acknowledged level then that means we spend more like 7% of our GDP. That means as a percentage of GDP, we exceed every nation except Israel, Ukraine and Algeria (possibly Russia depending on the figure). We outspend China by over $2 trillion. In fact, this budget is the equal of the next, …. I don’t know. I wanted to say how many countries our budget equals but the list I have only goes to 40. The other 39 countries in the top 40 equal to $1.48 trillion. The United States outspends the 40 highest military budgets in the world, combined, by a trillion dollars. The United States probably spends as much as the rest of the world combined and we outspend any meaningful combination of enemies by at least a factor of four.

Let us look at this spending in comparison to some other U.S. Spending. Social Security, which comes from its own trust fund, is only $1.4 trillion. All health care together is about $900 billion. Total interest is about the same. All “welfare” together is about $650 billion. The point is that defense is talked about as a significant cost, but it is beyond that. It is more than double any other single item in the ten largest costs the U.S. government incurs.

The public relations budget is illustrative of the scale of this spending. The Department of Defense spends only about .5% of its budget on advertising, but that’s enough to fund 5,000 people and an almost billion dollar a year budget, over half of total federal spending on advertising. That includes such things as paying $53 million over four years on patriotic displays at sporting events, paying retired generals to appear on media programs, even inventing a fictional expert during the Cold War (look up Guy Sims Fitch- fascinating). The DoD employees more people in its PR department than the Department of Education has in total. This is a tremendous effort, and it is all aimed at one thing: convincing you that all of this spending is necessary for your freedom and not mere socialism.

I’ve made this argument before, and people get a bit rowdy about it. My point is merely that socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Boeing last year got 36% of its total revenues from the government and it’s the lowest of them. RTX (Raytheon) got 100% of its revenues from militaries, 75% from the U.S. and the rest from foreign militaries, but those are mostly paid for by America. In fact, 90% of our foreign aid is not humanitarian but is a Pentagon jobs program in which we give Egypt or Saudi Arabia money, and they spend it on U.S. weapons. Lockheed Martin gets 73% of its revenue from the U.S. government. General Dynamics 69%. Northrop Grumman 87%. There is no sense in which these are private companies. Yes, they are publicly traded but they are 100% dependent on the government.

At this scale, this is socialism. I am not against that. I am a democratic socialist. I just want my socialism to help educate and feed and provide medical care for normal people. I don’t want inefficient, bloated Pentagon socialism that distributes money to national security consultants and contractors while ordinary folks bleed in America and poor folk all over the world get bombed.

And there it is. The Blue Angels are cool, but they are designed to make you think how cool and awesome they are and not to think of them incinerating a wedding. We spend all these dollars and stimulate our economy but it’s poor, mostly brown, folks who pay the price for it. One of the saddest things I ever heard was a little Afghan kid talking about how she prayed for cloudy days because on sunny days the drones could see you.

Here is a fact. In 21 years in the military, I didn’t do anything for your freedom. We are constantly told that the military is for freedom. But there wasn’t and isn’t one single thing in the Middle East worth the life of my friend or the wounds the others I know suffered. Contrary to the non-stop deluge of “patriotic” nonsense we all see all the time, no one died protecting your freedom. They protected your interests. They protected your economy or your gas or your job, but your freedom? That has not been in danger since the Civil War.

Dwight Eisenhower said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children ... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

It is common at every major event for someone to thank the military without whom the event would not happen, and I wouldn’t have the freedom to write this. Bullshit. Nothing in American history since 1900 has affected American’s freedom, except our own government at times. I am not saying that we should not have engaged in WW II but even in that major event, had we not entered, your freedom was never in danger. That is simply pernicious hyperbole meant to stop you from questioning our spending priorities.

What is real freedom? What does it mean? We are paying heavily for the military we are encouraged today to worship, paying for a military as large as the rest of the world combined. Is true freedom merely existence in a democracy? Or is it access to a job? To health care? To the chance for your family to have a better life than yours? Ask yourself what would give you more freedom, a universal health care system that costs you nothing (you could easily pay for it with cuts in defense) and an educational system that cost you nothing (as most Western European nations have) or a military the size of the next ninety nations combined? Imagine a world in which your health care and your education cost almost nothing. How much freer would you feel with no health insurance or school loans, something that would be easily affordable with a military only as large as 50% of the rest of the world instead of 100%? Every time a government building flies a giant flag or the military holds a parade or flies a jet over a football game, it costs money. It is your money and false patriotism that is designed to keep you from noticing that is not patriotism at all. It is creeping fascism. It makes you feel good and simultaneously suppresses the urge to ask, what does freedom really mean?

Worship of the military is death to a democracy. Washington knew this and that’s why we didn’t even have a standing army until after WW II. Having a military is a regretful necessity and we should begrudge every goddamn dime we spend on it because every dime is a theft from educating our young and preparing our nation for the future. We can have a strong military, but it should be as lean, as mean, and as small as possible to protect our interests. It should be for defending America not for defending the interests of an empire. We should never, ever glorify it but solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices people make and hope for a future where those sacrifices are not necessary. Patriotism is not blind worship of the troops but educating oneself about what our military actually does and asking hard questions about what freedom really means. Many more of our citizens are imprisoned by poverty, by hunger, by a lack of hope and opportunity than were ever threatened by foreign enemies. It is time to get our priorities straight.

What A Fool Believes

The disappointment continues.  I get a digital NYT newsletter each morning.  It contains some fluff bits - recipes, games, puff pieces, but it also has a lead story or two that are actual news.  That is where the disappointment comes in.  This morning one of the lead stories about the unconstitutional deployment of the military to cities within the USA included the following, "This is the president’s vision for law enforcement. He believes that crimes should be prosecuted to the max, and that low-level violations set a permissive climate for nastier ones. "

Of course, the NYT did not mention the fact that it is unconstitutional.  They did not mention that it is unprecedented.  Basically they were parroting whatever Felon47 said with damn little in the way of critical analysis.

We humans have some amazing abilities but, (for most of us at least) mind-reading is not one of them.  Given that, in situations where it doesn't matter or if speed is more important or we have no feasible method of proving or disproving a statement, we might generously forgive the simple taking of someone's word for it.  There are situations where that is probably the best and most reasonable choice.  But it is definitely not all situations.

Quite frequently there are actions that are temporally, geographically or, thematically associated with the statement.  Those actions can function as clues in a significant percentage of statements or claims made by humans.  In an essay written for a different project, I make the claim that "Belief Leads Behavior".  While I will make temporary allowances for habit, as a general rule what you actually believe(as opposed to what you say you believe) determines how you behave.  The light switch is my standard example.  When you walk into a room and reach for the light switch, it is because you believe that flipping said switch will result in desired illumination.  If you walk into that room a thousand times and the first hundred or so times nothing happens when you flip the switch, the next nine hundred or so times you will bring a flashlight or make other arrangements.  You no longer believe the light switch will accomplish your goal of illuminating the room so you stop flipping the switch.  Habit might keep you reaching for the switch even after you know it isn't working but that habit will not keep going for long.  

Felon47 has a long public history.  A history that includes several instances of law-breaking and/or law ignoring.  He violated housing laws in refusing to rent to minorities.  He demanded the Central Park Five be put in/kept in prison even after the law declared them innocent of the charges.  He has multiple felony convictions and has been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in illegal behavior on more than one occasion.  He has been accused of rape of young girls and convicted of sexual assault (rape) of an adult female.

Those are simply not the behaviors of someone who has any level of respect for or belief in the law.  The NYT knows this.  They have either reported on or been involved in (or both) any number of his instances of breaking or ignoring the law.  Hell, he took out a full page ad in the NYT in his effort to make sure innocent minority men went to prison for something they did not do.  The NYT knows about all of that.  

Felon47 has undertaken several different methods to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.  He files lawsuit after lawsuit in an effort to complicate things.  He files appeal after appeal of convictions in an effort to financially break his victim(s).  He even ran for POTUS to avoid prosecution and publicly considered preemptively pardoning himself. 

I have no idea how stupid one would actually have to be to know all of that and still harbor some idea that Felon47 has any respect for the law much less being inspired to make some idiotic statement about him "believing" that all crimes should be prosecuted to the max.  Now, you could modify the statement and make it believable.  Make it so that all poor people are prosecuted to the max or so that all minorities are prosecuted to the max or so that all non-wealthy immigrants are prosecuted to the max and I will have no argument to make.  But it could not be more clear from his behavior(s) as to how he actually feels about crime and punishment.

Felon47 treats the law as just another tool for him to use in defrauding business partners or otherwise enriching his family (read: him).  With the assistance of the NYT, we have watched these happen in real time.  My question is "why?"  Why is the NYT attempting to gaslight its readers and subscribers?

This is far from the only example of the NYT doing or saying something at his benefit or behest.  I see them touting Russian advancements in Ukraine while ignoring some very effective retaliatory Ukrainian strikes on refineries and factories that support Russia's war efforts.  Again, the question is "why?"  I refuse to believe that the NYT of all organizations does not understand the difference between journalism and parroting PR releases.

I can't answer my own question.  I do not know the "why".  What I know is that I am increasingly skeptical of any of their reporting of which I cannot immediately find corroboration.  For gaslighting to be most effective it requires the willingness of the victim to be gaslit.  I am unwilling to accept obvious bullshit just so I don't have to think about it, just so my cogitative life is simpler.  I'd like to know there are other folk like me out there.

The Business End Of The Shaft

 

If you sign up for a martial arts class, regardless of cultural origins, all of them will start by teaching you the basics. In the case of karate, once you master the basics, you get a black belt and are considered ready to begin learning how to fight effectively taking into account your own strengths and weaknesses. The basics are just the foundation.

The physical fighters of the military spend a lot of time and effort learning how to fight and maintaining physical fitness. If you added BUD/S to the rest of the disciplines I studied in the USN, I would have never gotten through any of them. An electronics tech should have an idea of how to use anything in their space as a weapon and should know what is more deadly but they should not be derelict in learning electronics so that they can lift weights, run in sand, and spar with martial instructors. We specialize not because we are incompetent to do other things (though some surely are). Rather we specialize because learning everything is impossible and is an impediment to doing anything at the highest level.

If you are ever given a choice to go into a fight carrying just the tip of the spear or, just the shaft of the spear, which would you choose? If the choice is mine, I am choosing the shaft. It can be used like the bo staff of traditional Japanese martial arts. It could be broken in half and used as escrima or Kali sticks from the Filipino martial traditions. The point is that you fight differently if you have the entire spear, just the point or just the shaft. This is the basis of my suggestion that everyone who is eligible for full voting citizenship, should be eligible for military service. No, you should not expect a paraplegic in a wheelchair to pass the Marine PT test but we should expect them to do what they can and the military should have some pretty detailed knowledge about what that is and what they should be taught.

While Pete Hegseth understands beer pong to an Olympic level, his understanding of all things military would not be out of place in a satirical cartoon written for 6 year olds. The overwhelming majority of the military never pulls a trigger or slits a throat.  We drive, mechanic, build, type, decode, cook, paint,  navigate, pilot, nurse, account, play musical instruments, translate, document and and and.  If you were to have everyone that was not a trigger puller stand down, it would not be long before the trigger pullers discovered the value of logistics experts.  Hegseth is so completely wrong that it almost seems intentional.  It is difficult to believe someone could actually be so clueless but either he is or, he is like his boss, working for their Vladdy Daddy.

Dog On A Chain

When I was a kid roughly 60 years ago, we had a bit of a different attitude towards pets than is commonly exhibited currently.  Cats were routinely declawed, a practice that is widely thought to be cruel these days.  Dogs didn't live in the house back then for huge numbers of dog owners.  Quite frequently, the dog was on a chain in the backyard with access to their doghouse with food and water but generally restricted to an area the radius of the chain length.

Dogs that were kept in that manner served as early warning systems if someone (or some thing) walked through the yard or up to the house. Today we recognize that as being the casual cruelty that it was but, back then that was just normal.  

Of course, then as now, things were not perfect.  Sometimes the dog slipped their collar or their repeated jerking on the chain caused it to break or come loose.  Then it was time to go looking for the dog to recapture it before it could do damage or be hit by a car and injured or killed.  I myself was bitten by our neighbor's dog once when he got loose.  The dog knew me and generally we got along but, when he got loose and I happened by on an evil bicycle, he felt he had to defend his home and pack.

Some folks did things a little differently and would put up a kennel with tall enough walls that the dog could not get over it.  The dog house and most everything the dog needed would be inside the kennel.  I would imagine that to the dog it was a lot less cruel than the chain but at the end of the day, we were still isolating pack animals and today, anyone who cares to can know what torture that is.

Keeping the dog in the kennel rather than on the chain did not change much else about the animal's behavior.  They still barked at anything outside of what they considered "normal" and they still occasionally got loose.  When they got loose, they acted pretty much just like a dog that had slipped his chain.  For the most part, whether it was your dog or someone else's, you really did not want to see the dog running loose.  Cars, motorcycles and bicycles were guaranteed to be chased.  Pedestrians were hardly guaranteed safety but walking was better than running if you wanted to avoid inciting the dog's ire.

The chain and the kennel were physical restraints but they were also the method of indoctrinating the dog as to what was his to guard and who he had to respect.  Once the dog was loose, it was their choice.  They might choose to expand the area they were guarding and they would definitely let you know if you were not in the group of humans they chose to respect.  They were not bad dogs.  They were dogs being dogs and doing dog stuff.  

These days we tend to keep the dogs in the house with the humans.  Responsible dog owners will do some level of socialization and training that simply did not happen very frequently back in the day.  Still, dogs and dog trainers/owners understand that there are different acceptable standards of behavior when the dog is on leash or in the house than when the dog is running free in the dog park or accompanying their human on a walk in the woods.

The thing is, dog behavior is not unique.  They do a lot of the same things that humans do in a way that makes sense to dogs.  We can learn from that.  We humans are also animals.  We exhibit some of the same tendencies even if it is not obvious to everyone that we are doing that.  

A human at work will have a different standard of behavior than a human at home or a human running loose.  The human perceives a different level of responsibility in each scenario.  As a general rule, a human is more constrained at work, less so at home and most open to saying and doing atypical stuff when they are "running loose".

Now, I am no spring chicken but I do not predate do gooders.  Even back then there were those who advocated for not using the chain or kennel to isolate pack animals.  Still they did not run around removing chains or opening kennels randomly as they encountered such a situation.  They knew the dog would have to learn a different way of how to be without the chain or kennel as a restraint.

We can apply that attitude to humans and the smart people will.  We understand that at some level, jobs constrain humans.  Our desire for increased income, security for our families(packs), and reluctance to institute drastic change for no apparent reason serve to reinforce that constraint. 

Jobs though, are not handed down from heaven.  They can be taken away or simply become superfluous.  What happens then??  What do humans do when the constraints are removed??  We will probably be finding out soon.  

One of the (in theory) unintended effects of Felon47 instigating the firing of several journalists, comics, lawyers and academics is that firing removes constraints. No longer need they worry about losing their jobs.  They don't have to give a shit what the FCC thinks.  A significant percentage of any audience they have previously cultivated are likely to seek them out wherever they land.

The internet, social media in particular, is collecting quite a few journalists, comics, lawyers and academics that have been randomly released from their chains.  Blue Sky, Substack, Reddit and some smaller outlets are starting to be gifted with the unconstrained musings of those sacrifices to Felon47's ego.  

I sincerely hope that Colbert, Kimmel, Lemon, Phang, Dowd et al remain hyper aware that their metaphorical chains have been removed.  I sincerely hope there is a whole lot of biting that will be happening very soon.

Democracy Suppression

A friend of mine has said for years that "Democracy is discussion".  Jesse is correct.  If you want to have real democracy, the constituency has to be able to talk to each other and agree or disagree as you will.  Democracy is a crucible of ideas and to determine which ideas are good, bad or inbetween we must have discussion.

For as much of my life as I have gone to bars, I have heard a canard that does not seem to depend on location or level of intoxication.  It is and has always been bullshit.

Back when I was more active in local politics, I attended a LOT of public meetings.  I went to the public shows of votes but I also went to the wonkish meetings held by committees of or sponsored by elected officials.  I interacted with architects, civil engineers, planners and our local elected officials.  

I am more of a technical sort of guy.  My degree is in engineering.  So planning and architecture were not anything that "came natural" to me.  This was stuff I had to pay attention to and learn about because I wanted to be able to understand what everyone else was saying.  In paying attention, I was introduced to concepts that had never occurred to me as intentional behavior.

While there were several things I learned, of particular interest to me was the concept of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places and the behaviors that were acceptable in/at each place.  (They may have 4th and 5th as well but I didn't catch it.)  As I understood it, the 1st place was home - the place where you sleep and keep your stuff.  The 2nd place for most people was work - office, warehouse, construction site etc etc.  The 3rd place sort of depended on your personal habits.  If you were a religious individual, the 3rd place might well be your church.

Traditionally (at least to hear men tell it) , the home was a "man's castle".  We watched Leave It To Beaver.  We learned that when a man comes home from his stressful day at work, he needs a drink, then dinner and through it all, peace and quiet.  Sooooooooo, discussing issues that were causing a conflict in democracy could only happen if the man brought it up.  The little woman and the offspring could give good news and ask for advice.

The 2nd place was where the man's boss was.  Sure he spent a lot of time at the office but there, one talks about what the boss wants to talk about and if in fact one would like to keep the job, disagreeing with the boss is ill-advised.  It aint much of a discussion if you can't say what you actually think.

The 3rd place is where things, IMNSHO, get interesting.  When I was a kid, the 3rd place for my parents was definitely church.  My dad was a minister at a small church so, he still had to have a "day job".  As such, I strongly suspect there were issues that he did not bring up at work but once we got to the church, I have zero memories of him inviting the congregation to prove him wrong.  No one argued with him while he was in the pulpit nor immediately before or after the service.  Respect and tradition and the fact that my dad was known to slap a MFer on occasion might be the reason he got no pushback.  Of course, it could also have been that everyone was in lockstep agreement with him.  Regardless of the reason, I never noticed anyone trying to discuss or argue issues of democracy with him whilst he was wearing the collar and robes.

But what if you are not a churching sort of person? (like me)  What is your 3rd place?  I can't speak for everyone but for me and several of my friends and acquaintances, our 3rd place is the bar.  Okay, technically it is "a" bar.  One of the several that I sometimes attend but that's not important.  The important thing is that for the entirety of the time I have been going to bars - which started circa 1972 (don't tell mom), there has always been someone willing to spout the bullshit about not discussing politics or religion in bars.  

Now, I have certainly met any number of folks that did not handle conflict well. I have seen no few instances of fisticuffs and even weapons involved interactions.  (okay sure, by "seen" I might mean, "been involved in")  So I get some of the reluctance.  The problem is that we are essentially out of places.  Places where one might discuss issues critical to democracy in one's chosen nation are in short supply if home, work, church and recreation area are off limits.  The truth is that the suppression of discussion, which is effectively the suppression of democracy, only benefits those who are in opposition to democracy.  

If you are not opposed to democracy and you are not being manipulated by those opposed to democracy, why would you be opposed to discussion?  Yes, I know you don't like having your ideas and beliefs questioned.  Unfortunately that puts you in the "opposed to democracy" camp.  If you just wanted peace and quiet, you could have stayed home and drank for less money.  You could have taken a walk in a park instead of going to a bar.  You went to a bar to be social but you only want to be social on your own terms?  Unfortunately that puts you in the "opposed to democracy" camp.

In truth, the bar and other purely social environments are the most reasonable places to discuss politics, religion, sociology and everything else you might not have in common with co-located people.  We intuitively know that discussing positions that are in opposition to your boss is bad for one's advancement potential.  We intuitively know that the folks that live in our homes already know much of what we think.  Discussing politics at home will frequently look like "preaching to the choir".  So either you discuss politics and religion in places that are neither home nor work or you eschew democracy by reasonable understanding.

Yes, there are plenty of places that are neither home nor work nor bar.  However, if one phrases it as I have, as purely social environments, the number of places that do not fall into one of the three categories dwindles to insignificance.  

I doubt those that spout the idiocy that substantive issues should not be discussed anywhere they might actually make a positive difference think that is what they are doing.  (TBF, I doubt they think but that might just be me being judgemental.)  Still, they are actively doing the work of fascists and others who have a bone to pick with democracy.  The Founding Fathers appear to have understood the importance of open discussion to democracy.  The very first Amendment to the Constitution is about that very thing.  While I might understand the descendents of slaves and the indigenous population and the indentured population that built the railroads might be skeptical of said Founding Fathers, I believe they got that 1st Amendment right.  

If you really, honestly are dumb enough to believe that the generalized stifling of discussion anywhere is a perfectly reasonable thing, I can only hope you are smart enough to go out of your way to choose an establishment where I am not.  I am a patriotic American.  I refuse to participate in the suppression of democracy.

Not Event, Process

 I do not think there is a fix for the USA's gun problem.

Now, keep in mind that I fancy myself a bit of a wordsmith and I chose each word in that sentence with intentionality.  Luckily, in this age of wonders I can help you understand that which I write.  Let me hook you up with some punctuation and such.

I do not think there is "a" fix for the USA's gun problem. 

See the difference?

The USA has a history of gun violence.  We used increasingly sophisticated firearms to forcibly take the land from the indigenous peoples that lived here for millennia before the arrival of Europeans in any significant number.  We used firearms as a routine tool in the efforts to keep slaves from escaping.  Then we used firearms to intimidate the freed slaves.  When the folks that mined the coal and the gold and other things decided that they should be fairly paid for their efforts, the oligarchs of the day sent in guys with firearms to convince them to shut up.  They did the same when factory workers thought they should not have to work themselves to death for nearly nothing.

Though the ability to read was not necessarily ubiquitous, the so-called "pulp" novels lionized outlaws and lawmen in the old West through the telling of a mixture of truth and fiction that all but worshiped firearms competence.  The entertainment aspect of firearms did nothing but expand once video recording became possible.

The highest honors given in the military are generally awarded to those that did some incredibly brave shit while being shot or at least shot at OR for doing some incredibly brave shit while shooting or shooting at other humans.  Guys that have never even been to a big city, much less a different country can purchase all of the gear and guns that Hollywood tells us the truly bad dudes in the military use.  That's right, you too can be a Special Forces Operator without bothering to get in shape, join the military, learn military history or philosophy, learn hand-to-hand combat.  All you have to do is to get the right gun(s) and you are just as sexy as any other steely-eyed operator with a scruff beard and a thousand yard stare.

According to where in the nation you reside or visit, you could feasibly encounter venomous snakes, mountain lions, bobcats, black bear, grizzly bear, wolves, wild boar, coyotes, or a host of other wild animals.  Over the years and locales, some of those animals have been infected with rabies or hazardous parasites.  Firearms marketing and Hollywood have convinced us that a firearm is the only reasonable protection from any threat of that type.

Of course, the USA is rather famously a "melting pot".  There are people in the nation that don't look like you and weren't raised like you.  You simply have to have a gun to protect you from those who speak different languages or have a different accent or who eat spicier food than you enjoy (/sarcasm).

My descriptions of reasons to have/carry a firearm are not thought or intended to be comprehensive.  Rather they are meant to demonstrate my initial point.  If you were to ban firearms marketing or force Hollywood to cease glamorizing gun culture, it would not change history and it would not affect population numbers of fauna that have made their home here.

If we are to have a positive effect on gun culture, the changes would have to be incredibly broad.  Those changes would have to include things for which we have shown damn little appetite in this nation.  There would have to be an educational aspect to teach respect for the local wildlife.  There would have to be an economic aspect to get folks that make their money from the manufacture and sales of firearms onboard.  We would need coordinated and comprehensive cultural exposure programs so as to make foreign looking/sounding people less scary.  Songs of peace and love can't do it alone but they certainly should be in the mix.

There is not and cannot be "a" fix for our issues.  Like damn near everything else we deal with, gun control would have to be a process - NOT an event.  There is no switch to throw.  The goal is of sufficient importance to justify our continued efforts but, we need to temper our expectations of speed and effectiveness.  At the end of the day, there are a couple of things you need to be hyper aware of.  If someone says "All you need to do is this one thing" they are either lying, stupid or some combination of the two.  If someone says "There is nothing to be done, it is what it is" they most likely count the firearms industry as a source of their money or power and they do not want that to change.

Do not let perfect be the mortal enemy of significantly better.  Change is a constant in the universe.  We will change.  The only question is of who we let direct that change.  I think it is time that we let sanity drive for a bit.

The Questions We Don't Ask

 

Have you ever taken a ride in a car that you had not fully and completely inspected??  I certainly have.  As a matter of fact, I have taken a ride in such a vehicle when there were people in the vehicle that I did not know.  And it ain't just cars.  Trains, airplanes, boats and, when I was younger and more trusting, even amusement park rides are all things I have taken a ride in/on with no inspection nor necessarily knowing who owned the vehicle or how they made their money.

The truth is, most every youngster I encounter who is not obviously under guard has made some questionable life

choices.  I am not better.  Take for instance, what would have been my response if someone had offered young me

a free or cheap trip to someplace I really wanted to go and all I would have to do is spend 45 minutes or so

loading/unloading all those plain packages?

The reason we have DUE PROCESS is that we do not know what we do not know.  It is being reported that a

"Venezuelan drug boat with 11 people aboard" was bombed in international waters by the U.S. military.  There

was reportedly complete loss of life aboard the boat.

Now, I suppose there could actually be a comprehensive file somewhere on each and every one of the 11.  There

is a chance they were all actually gang members who all came from middle and upper middle-class families but

joined the gang because that is what they wanted.  It could well be that everyone on the Venezuelan coast knows

better than to take free rides on boats.

Or, did we bomb a boat before we got around to asking the questions that could reasonably suffice as due process??

As an aside, I am going to point out that I have never done cocaine or several other drugs.  I know for a fact that

I have been physically close to cocaine, heroin, and no few pills.  The thing is they just sat there.  The drugs didn't

jump me and hold me down while they migrated past the blood/brain barrier in some nefarious plan.  They just

sat there.  If someone wanted to experience whatever the drugs caused, they had to eat, smoke, inject or snort them.  

A quick search will not reveal 11 American drug users that were snuffed out to balance the books.  There is a reason

why economists speak of supply AND demand.  There is also a reason we (are supposed to) have DUE PROCESS. 

So we don't have to figure out the correct question to ask at every couldbe questionable situation.  

In a previous essay I asked a pertinent question related to the case of Breonna Taylor who was negligently

murdered in her sleep. The question I asked was  “What would a neighbor of yours have to do to justify the

authorities killing you?”  Today I am going to ask you, what act of a drug cartel would justify the U/S. government

killing you?  With sufficient due process that becomes an unnecessary question.  As a matter of fact, proper due

process would have eliminated an awful lot of recent past cultural issues in the USA.  You might not be concerned

yet because so far everyone denied due process looks different from you.  

Your turn’s comin’.  If you give them enough time, they will get around to denying due process to you too.