Before anyone begins throwing a fit about me making some sort of claim that no one should have children, I'm certainly not. You are someone's child, and, more than likely, I'm sure you'll say now that you don't necessarily regret being born. If you have any children currently, I'm sure they're great, and I'm sure they're cute. They'll be a great boon to society one day. But if you don't have any children, and you're thinking about it, think hard. Think about the fact that:

The world population is growing at a rate that the planet cannot support.

All of us already know that the world population growth is, simply put, unsustainable at its current rate.

By some accounts, world population could reach 10 billion in the year 2050, while the Earth's carrying capacity is said to be between 4 billion and 11 billion. According to some experts, we may have already transcended the Earth's carrying capacity. Considering that developed countries, especially America, produce some of the greatest amounts of waste per person in the world, deciding not to have children will do more to reduce your carbon footprint than any of the small steps you may currently take, like walking to work.

The "but my future child will be happy" argument doesn't hold water.

At least that's how it seems to many people fatigued by incessant news coverage of the topic. In reality the race has extended well over a year, with the vast majority of media attention going to the contenders for the Republican Presidential nominee. In the time various candidates have vied for the (still ongoing) Republican nomination, they’ve utilized a wide suite of statistics and figures on domestic policy issues to either bolster their own argument or decry their opponents. Most of these figures pertain to joblessness rates, economic growth, consumer buying trends, and so on, as the US economy has become more or less the central issue of this election cycle.

What’s interesting is that multiple candidates cite the same statistics, and each one seems to find a way to frame that statistic to his benefit. The relativity with which these candidates approach the same statistic is remarkable in this election cycle, and it warrants a closer look.

Sunday was the one-year anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people, and I feel I kind of owe it to myself and others to share my thoughts. I haven’t really gleaned any kind of wisdom in the one year since Japan’s disaster – it could be I’m still a little bit shocked, or still picking up the pieces of my life, or just doing what I have to do – so there hasn’t been any sort of a-ha! moment. I imagine that from the standpoint of the impartial reader, what follows will seem trite and hackneyed. But here it is anyways:

The big one-year anniversary had actually slipped my mind up until Sunday, and I was folding napkins during some downtime at my brunch shift when suddenly I realized what day it was and felt a sudden urge to go home and be with my family. In retrospect, it was probably good that I was engaged in such a mindless task as folding napkins, because there was nothing to be distracted from and no one to talk to.

I decided to let my mind wander freely, since menial tasks often encourage such, and one of the first places my mind went was towards the topic of God. I realized that in any just universe I would be obligated to hate a God that would allow such a thing as the tsunami to happen, if an omnipotent God were not such an absurd proposition to begin with. As embarrassing it is to admit this, I actually became very angry with the idea of God and religion and people continuing to believe and worship indifferently, as I continued folding napkins.  It was a pure, visceral hatred that burned through me, which I do not regret, even if I feel it is not representative of my overall religious views.

I thought of all the children I knew in Soma, where I had worked for a year and a half of my life, and wondered if they were okay, and how I might find such a thing out. I thought of our good friend, Kentaro, who disappeared without a trace last March and no one has seen since. To our knowledge, he was nowhere near the water when everything happened, so why would he be missing? Maybe we’re just out of the loop now. Or maybe he is. Or maybe he’s just depressed and doesn’t want to talk to anyone and has been keeping a low profile for the last year.

I thought of my wife’s next-door neighbor whose family had lived next door for generations and generations; this was an elderly man whom I’d heard lots of funny stories about. Right after the quake, his wife made rice balls for our family using a gas stove, and she brought them over for us to have for dinner in the dark and cold. Her husband was a roofer by trade and semi-retired. A few months ago he was repairing a roof that had been damaged by the earthquake, fell off, and died. At the time I heard it, this was one of the saddest stories I had ever heard.

I let my mind wander to the idea of land in Japan and in the old world being an extension of self, like a limb. Generations and generations had lived and died on the same land, flattening the valleys with their industry. My wife’s parent’s land had once been a great farm, but, with the Twentieth-Century economy and the jobs it brought, there was no one willing to tend to all that land, and my wife’s grandparents and parents gradually subdivided, rented, sold, or dismantled much of it for various purposes: parking lots, subsistence or hobby farms, roads, advertisements, etc. Now that land is poisoned, whether actually or effectively, a great tragedy indeed. But someday it will be alright again, and, if you’re someone with a sixth-generation ethic like many of the Japanese living around Fukushima Daiichi, then this someday is soon enough.

Racism, at least, would have been a kind of excuse, evidence of a critically planned process. It's almost comforting: Even the most saintly among us has harbored or inspired some racial resentment. Racism is a universal form of bullshit—a lower-social-order attitude, but at least an indicator of some ordered thinking.

Instead, the shooter, allegedly an 11-year veteran, with three tours in Iraq, was probably crazy. Which basically means we're fucked.

Through the power of euphemism, we've come to think of madness as some regrettable and essentially random byproduct of combat instead of an intrinsic part of it. InWartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Marine veteran Paul Fussell documents how we've officially added syllables to this condition to transform it almost into a logistical inconvenience.

In the First World War, it was "shell shock." In the Second, "Combat Fatigue" or "Battle Fatigue." We jumped from two self-evident syllables to four sublime inanities that make it sound as if soldiers only want for more naptime. And, of course, in the present day, we obfuscate via the king-hell syllabic nightmare of "post-traumatic stress disorder." It not only relies on the anodyne stress ("I have a party to plan and am running late! I am so stressed! I'm a Cathy cartoon! Ack, ack, ack!") but the post-trauma modifier, which makes it seem as if the horror has passed and needs only to be endured in a series of diminishing aftershocks.

History maintains a stronger grasp on the matter. Both the Bible and Herodotus chronicle bloodlust and mass rape in wartime. Old Norse sagas speak both of fey warriors already seemingly ethereal and dead, as well as berserkers so consumed by bloodshed that they lose awareness of the world around them in their mad violence. In With the Old Breed, Marine Eugene B. Sledge not only describes his formerly perfectly normal comrades cutting gold teeth out of the mouths of still-living enemies but also watches as someone urinates into the mouth of a dead Japanese soldier.

If that sounds familiar, it's because a similar story emerged a few weeks ago, about four Marineswho urinated on three Taliban corpses while laughing and telling jokes. And the latter, dehumanizing comedy, echoes Philip Caputo's memoir A Rumor of War, in which his men joke, "Oh, excuse me, Mister Charlie," after kicking the corpse of a teen whom they knew was not Viet Cong but shot anyway, for swiping a tree branch at them and running away.

As Fussell notes, conduct similar to the above deserves words more honest than euphemism—words like insane. This is what killing and the fear of being killed fosters. Wanting to preserve the dignity of soldiers (or "heroes," if you will) does them no favor if it requires dishonesty about their condition, especially if such dishonesty allows it to metastasize into the methodical slaughter of women and children.

Even without the alleged shooter's three tours in Iraq (which, conservatively, would amount to more combat time than American soldiers saw in Europe in the Second World War) and a possible nervous breakdown, it's easy to see how service in Afghanistan could drive anyone mad. Outside of the Forward Operating Base, it's difficult to distinguish friends from enemies. The people of Afghanistan increasingly loathe our ability to piss on bodies, burn Qurans and rain bombs on weddings from a great height. The line between resentment and violent malice is a fine one for soldiers to read when they have no objective for striking back, no uniformed enemy, no certain position to attack, clear and defend.

I hesistate to say I am on the edge of a new transformation now, in February 2012, but it just feels that way, even though rationality points to my situation continuing like this for the foreseeable future. Some of the optimism I lost over the summer has come back: my translation workload is increasing, I'm doing well at what I can do well at, and tonight, right before my grateful eyes, my wife and children sleep peacefully. Psychology is important in these things, and my psychological state has moved from a need for present security to a need for future security. Time stands still now; every week is the same. My children become more-and-more enraptured with American culture and more-and-more obsessed with our ubiquitous and inescapable kid's entertainment culture. There is no backyard for them to play in here, but there are Backyardigans. My older daughter speaks no more Japanese in the house. My stepson wants an earring. I grow fatter by the week. During the summer, when I was unemployed, I managed to find outlets for limited exercise. Since August, I've gained fifteen to twenty pounds - despite my best efforts to eat healthy, I have no time for exercise. I seem powerless to stop the creep of apple fat around my midsection that reduces my life expectancy by the minute, but my weight gain still remains pretty far down my list of problems to solve. Exercise is just one of those luxuries that gives way when the threat of an endless and inescapable cycle of late fees and penalties dangles like a tantalizing, decadent bizarro carrot in front of me. One of the few medium-term "dreams" I have is to be able to afford a kayak, so I can paddle around the Boston Harbor Islands each morning.

Please make your way over to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to read and comment. 

The digital clock on my laptop from Japan read 10:20, which meant it was 8:20 here when CNN’s live feed finally came stuttering onto my screen. Romney was talking – no surprise - and in the first 45 seconds covered balancing the budget, cutting taxes, English immersion schools, life begins at conception, an embryo farming veto, balancing the Salt Lake City Olympic budget and, as a successful businessman, understanding the crucial importance of fiscal conservatism. Nothing, nada, zilch about speeding up the green card process for pregnant wives of US citizens. Strike One Mitt. You are out of touch with my needs.

Moderator John King, who I mistook at first for Anderson Cooper after an extended Valentine’s Day chocolate binge, asked Newt Gingrich a question with more modified phrases than Arizona’s border has snipers. Newt looked as bored as I feel when Sam Harris is trying to make another one of his non-points, but he took advantage of the probability that no one else in America knew what the question was either and proceeded with what would become the theme for the night: support what the last guy said, but then add a caveat of booger-flicking.

Journalist

I say vague because something told me he would be back.

Well now, today, that very possibility seems to be materializing.

Mr. Huntsman is not actually mentioned in this article by Steve Holland, Journalist, but the mere specter of a brokered convention this August gives me hope that the door is still open for him to step up and lead our great country. (I understand that history does not paint a rosy picture for me here but I’m not one to base my political insights on things like reason and considered thought.)

My powers of concentration, or maybe denial, are strong enough to get all this done even as the boys are shoving plastic train tracks in each others’ ear canals. When the bigger one sticks his thumbs in his little brother’s eye sockets, however, it’s time for me to take a break from my assault on the world and give my wife a break from the world’s assault on her.

She came back an hour later, the blood vessels in her forehead having receded. I told her to relax for a while longer, setting the stage for my permissioned escape to Dunkin Donuts.

MOSCOW — In the coldest spot on the earth’s coldest continent, Russian scientists have reached a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario after spending a decade drilling through more than two miles of solid ice, the scientists said Wednesday.

A statement by the chief of the Vostok Research Station, A. M. Yelagin, released by the director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, said the drill made contact with the lake water at a depth of 12,366 feet. As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100 to 130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination. Next Antarctic season, the scientists will return to take samples of the water.

The first hint of contact with the lake was on Saturday, but it was not until Sunday that pressure sensors showed that the drill had fully entered the lake. Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the miles-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent, and the first one to have a drill bit break through to liquid water from the ice that has kept it sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years.

"Thomas Hobbes" by Leon Douglas

<cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

In my last post on this topic, we got through Hobbes as relative and Hobbes as overstated. To continue our discussion:

Claim 3: There is a significant difference between political and personal liberty.

Lockeans love to claim themselves the true lovers of liberty, but their liberty is political by nature: the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to rebel against an unjust leader, etc. Hobbesians are most concerned with the first of Locke's three inalienable rights: the right to a peaceful existence, wherein personally-meaningful activities can be pursued. That is to say, peace and stability trump discussions of essentials. As long as I am effectively free, that is all that counts. Who cares about the structure of our legislative process or checks-and-balances or bipartisanship or whatever so long as I am able to pursue freely my chosen career of saxophonist?

That is not to say structural issues don't matter, but they should be seen as means to an end rather than as ends themselves.

Claim 4: The freest nations are the ones with the most effective court, police, and military systems.

By "most effective" I certainly do not mean most expensive; nor do I mean largest or most powerful. If one dedicated protector of peace is enough to prevent Precinct 13 from being overtaken by those who threaten the social contract, then that dedicated protector is more than enough.