I recall you saying in a previous exchange of e-mail that one of the reasons you watched "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is that it’s one of the few TV shows to treat the question of evil seriously. I have to wonder whether you have in fact been working on the show and not mentioning it, especially after watching the episodes concerning Faith and her apparent defection to the forces of evil which aired this past fortnight. Hearing a street kid spout Nietzschean "superman" attitudes was extremely creepy, and having her show up at the Mayor’s office volunteering to replace the vampire leader she’d just killed was even more so. This is going to be one interesting ride.

As for America turning into an empire in the Roman sense, it is certainly arguable that we are already there. We have a bureaucracy that allows the Federal government to survive a Clinton, we have a professional and apolitical military that (like the legions) serves largely without questioning a leader they despise, and we certainly are exhibiting a Roman tendency to meddle in a lot of foreign affairs that don’t concern us. (What is Palestine to us, or we to Palestine? Actually, as Catholics it’s damned important to *us*, but this is not a Catholic state.)

On the other hand, the very political bloc that indulges in imperial behavior seems hell-bent on Balkanizing American society and encouraging Chicano irredentist types. Not that I think *those* particular idiots are at all representative of the great mass of Mexican-Americans, but witness the impact unelected black and Chicano "leaders" have on national politics. It disturbs my sleep quite a bit, and makes me wonder if my children are going to have to take up arms for some future Franco against the Republic. Can you imagine the "dirty wars" of South America on an American scale? It chills the blood.

A thought provoked by the Alt.mail discussions:

Government depends on two resources; force/coercion, and legitimacy. The latter can be broadly defined as a shared definition of the proper sources of authority. All governments need both, and neither can exist in the complete absense of the other. (Eg., even in a very harsh tyranny, the secret police and troops have to be loyal.)

As I mentioned earlier, ‘legitimizing myths’ are the way most societies deal with this. (As an aside, religion usually plays an important role in the conferring of legitimacy.)

However, our era has a problem with this that most earlier ones didn’t, or didn’t to the same degree.

In most societies, the edges of the legitimizing myths are protected by rules, either written or unwritten—if they weren’t, they could be unravelled from the outside in a bit at a time. It’s analagous to the way littering and graffitti make an area more likely to have serious crime—they ‘signal’ that there’s a loss of control. Likewise, continuous destructive criticism and visible dissent dis-empower the governing myths, by opening up a visible alternative space.

Lese Majeste was a serious crime for exactly this reason; the aura of divine authority surrounding the Crown was a very important political asset.

Not coincidentally, the French Revolution was preceeded by a generation of multi-faceted attacks on the legitimacy of Crown, Church and nobility in France; everything from the salons of the philosophes to the scurrilous pamphlets about the "Austrian Queen’s" sex life. This was, to use a metaphor, a prolonged ideological artillery barrage to ‘soften up’ the target; once the Ancien Regime’s censorship broke down from the 1760’s on, it assumed very substantial proportions. But this sort of thing was very rare prior to the modern era, and countermeasures were usually taken.

Up until a few generations ago, the "civic religion" in America served much the same purpose, and was enforced by a very broad degree of consensus, operating through local public opinion and local govenment. Attacks on the _fundamentals_ of the system really weren’t tolerated, except in a few urban enclaves, and they were isolated from the body politic by the media. Most people’s social interactions were on a localized scale, and that limited the flow of information.

Needless to say, this whole system has broken down; not simply in America, but increasingly world-wide. A combination of the spread of individualist/libertarian ‘memes’ and modern communications technology has abolished localism and undermined authority everywhere. Even the force of local public opinion, once so powerful and effective, has been muted by the ability of electronic communications to overleap the boundaries of neighborhood.

In essence, everywhere has been turned into part of the Big City. Even small towns in Utah are turned into suburbs of LA and New York.

Now, no system of legitimizing myths can be protected from being unravelled at the edges; other voices and viewpoints cannot be excluded, except by an isolation so complete and so technologically backward as to endanger the existance of the State itself. (North Korea would be a good example.)

This is, as far as I can tell, something of a historically unique situation.

The consequences are likely to be substantial.

On Demographic Collapse

Well, there are now more people over 65 in the world than under 14 -- probably for the first time in human history.

Birth-rates are _collapsing_, decreasing far more rapidly than was expected even a decade ago.

Eg., the average Spanish woman now has 1.15 children in her entire reproductive lifetime—and in some extensive areas (Asturias, for instance) it’s lower; 0.79 per woman, which means that the _average_ woman there has _no children at all_. (And overall birth rates there are _still falling_.) This means that in 30 years, there will be about 30 million people in Spain, down from 39 million now. And, of course, their average age will be much higher. That’s a conservative estimate, assuming birth rates don’t go down further... which they probably will.

It isn’t just a developed-country phenomenon, either. Brazil went from an average of 6 children per woman in the 60’s to barely 2.3 now—just above replacement level, or possibly below it, given that Brazil’s death rate is still higher than ours.

It’s similar throughout Latin America; Mexico is within a few years of ZPG levels, for instance. Demographic inertia—the large ‘bulge’ of people born earlier when fertility was higher and now entering their childbearing years— will keep population growing for a while, but that’s strictly temporary.

China, and most of East Asia, is already that low or lower (South Korea is at 1.8, lower than the US). The Carribean’s population now has an age profile nearly identical to that of the US.

The Muslim countries are experiencing a similar fall in birth rates, though it began later than in most other places.

Even Sub-Saharan Africa is following the same path; Kenya’s fertility rate went from around 8 births per woman to around 3.5 since the 70’s, and the fall is accelerating. Between declining fertility and AIDS, population growth in a broad swath running from South Africa to Zambia has stopped, and will probably go into reverse within the next 2-3 years. By the time the AIDS crisis is past, fertility rates will have dropped below the ZPG level anyway.

About 45% of the world’s people now live in areas with birth-rates at ZPG level or below. With in 10 years, that will be up to 70%, and by the 2040’s, the world as a whole will have a declining population.

That overcrowded world beloved of the cyberpunks seems to have dated awful fast. And it turns out humans don’t have a reproductive instinct after all, just a sexual one.

Subject: Demographics and Electronic Communications:

The Social Security problem will eventually self-solve, barring discovery of a way to reverse aging (which isn’t out of the question, but which would solve the problem another way). The big bulge of older people left over from an era of higher fertility will die off, and the demographic pyramid will become less ‘bulged’ at the top.

If you look within the broad demographic outlines, there are also some interesting sub-pictures.

Eg., the last time US (and Western) birth-rates were very low, in the 1930’s, there was a very strong differentiation between small families and quite _large_ families. That is, the overall birthrate was low, but a large proportion of children were in a small % of families, those of 3 or more children—a substantial share was in families of 6 or more, even though those were a very small percentage of the total number of couples.

This time, there’s a lot less of that. The number of large families has dropped even faster than the overall birth-rate. They haven’t vanished, but they’re not demographically significant; the median child lives in a household with something quite close to the median number of children.

And, of course, this decline in birth-rates is hitting worldwide, not just in the developed nations. My own personal guess is that the spread of electronic mass-media into even the poorest and most backward countries is crucial here.

Eg., there are areas of rural Nepal—that’s as remote as you can get— where the % of arranged marriages has gone from 99% in the 1970’s to less than 2% now. Since open courtship or contact between young men and women remains difficult in those areas, the standard form of marriage there is now a clandestine exchange of letters, followed by elopement!

The village elders are quite upset, since the elopements often cause economic difficulties and cross caste barriers, but there’s nothing they can do about it in the face of a spontaneous and nearly universal rebellion against the old way of doing things.

The crucial variable seems to be satellite TV—Indian soap operas and movies, with their heavy stress on romantic love. Like a saturated solution, the TV ‘crystallized’ opinions among the younger villagers.

What’s really surprising is the _speed_ of changes in areas as fundamental, and previously as hard to change, as marriage and reproduction.

Different _methods_ of birth-control are also starting to have a significant impact.

The "traditional" methods—from barrier methods like condoms through to the pill—require consistent application and, in the case of the barrier methods, very considerable self-control. The latter also require agreement by both parties.

The newer methods, like Deepo-Provera and Norplant, are one-off; they only have to be used once in a very long while (years for Norplant, months for Deepo-Provera), and the other (male) partner doesn’t even know about them unless told. The same applies in spades to surgical sterilization, of course, which has also become much easier and quicker over the last decade or so.

This has extended the reach and effectiveness of birth-control quite dramatically; in this country, it’s had a notable role in the little-noted plunge in births among inner-city black teenagers, now down to levels not seen since the 1950’s.

(_Married_ black Americans now actually have a lower birth-rate than their white counterparts, which disguises the drop mentioned in the previous paragraph. The number of black unmarried mothers is now, proportionate to the total number of black women in that age-group, much lower than it was quite recently, but the percentage of illegitimate births among blacks remains high because of the very low level of _legitimate_ births. It’s an interesting statistical artifact. Without illegitimate births, of course, the number of blacks in America would already be declining.)

PART THREE:

As far as I can tell from the literature, it’s a matter of "reference groups". Women decide on how many children to have (once it’s possible for them to do so) by looking at a "reference group" of other women.

In traditional societies, this meant looking at the neighbors, members of the same religious grouping, etc. (Men have surprisingly little say in the matter, except in some cesspits like Afghanistan.)

In a more modern setting, women tend to look at either (a) the social group just above them, or more recently at (b) women in the mass media.

That way, low-fertility norms either soak (in the case of the (a) type) or torrent (in the case of the (b) type) down the social scale.

That’s particularly apparent and rapid in 3^rd-world settings, where Western cultural influence hits the upper classes first. They then pass on the new patterns down the social scale, both directly and through the media. In Brazil, demographers were puzzled by the immediate and drastic drop in fertility in remote villages which got satellite TV...

... until they investigated, and found out that the younger women in the villages (and city slums) were now using the women they _saw on TV_ as their "reference group". And the women in the soap operas from Sao Paulo all had small families. So, to be fashionable and modern, they started hitting the family-planning clinics. After a while, they noticed that this left them with more money and less work, and from there it was kitty bar the door.

I thought you might be interested in the following item from today’s

Though the Times article doesn’t mention it, the W-88 is the high-yield, relatively compact MIRVable warhead used in the Trident-II D5 SLBM.

While knowing that a thing can be done is half the battle, the other half required to actually do it is still quite a bit of work. Thanks to the Clinton Administration, the Chinese have been given the opportunity to bypass 10-15 years, and billions of dollars, worth of research in developing a MIRVable warhead they can use on both land-and submarine-based ICBMs.

If this isn’t treason, I don’t know what is.

The President being explicitly above the applicable laws. The old question "Is the Constitution a suicide pact?" suddenly seems relevant.

I would love it if 60 Minutes or whoever it was would repeat their big feature on the "Swallow’s Nest," –and add just 3 minutes or so at the end on B.C’s Oxford career and the subsequent trip to Moscow. But I don’t suppose it would matter. Everyone’s minds are set in concrete now, and few will budge.

You mean the ones set to bomb Serbia, I trust.

From: Francisco García Maceda (maceda@pobox.com)

Subject: Alt Mail 5

Dear Jerry:

Maybe you should point out to Mr. Trainor that most of those dirty wars he is alluding to had a lot to do with the US Government and/or US companies. He should read a little history of the CIA, the American Fruit Company, etc. You may also remind him that the US was fully involved in the very first "dirty wars" (the Mexican-American war that ended with the annexation of Texas to the US, the Spanish-American war that ended with the annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam by the US) and in some of the latest ones (Grenada and Panama come to mind).

I simply try to establish a little historical accuracy; I have nothing against the US, but when an illiterate US citizen demeans a Geopolitical area and it’s inhabitants as second class for something in the most part due to US interests and involvement it infuriates me.

Truly yours

Francisco García Maceda

Ed here.

The emergency department of the local hospital is called A&;E, for Accidents and Emergencies. Last Saturday night a woman with a forty-year history of psychiatric illness stuck a needle in her head. It was about 3 cm long. Apparently the surgical resident did not have time to see her, and did not look at the x-rays. But he said that because the area is filled with important blood vessels and nerves (it is near the orbit, the bony casing around the eye), he said that it was in too delicate a situation to operate, and had the emergency physician send the lady home with a "special" (a nurse to sit with the patient to prevent further acts of self harm) and the admonition that the needle should be left to "work itself out". The lady was brought back to A&;E on Sunday, and sent back home. I heard about this Monday and assumed the patient would be seen that day. By that afternoon I relearned that ASSUMED makes an ASS of U and ME: she had not been returrned to the hospital. I called the hospital to talk to the director of A&;E. He was out at cricket (an all-day affair). I called again this morning and got him away from his office. He was a bit disturbed by what I told him (mind you, the psychiatric nurse had seen the x-ray and was under the impression that the needle had gone through the skull; I hoped this was not the case, but I didn’t know). This afternoon he called me from his office and said that he had seen the x-rays and was not at all happy. This was the kind of thing, he said, that he would like to see taken out. It was, after all, near the orbit. I asked if he could "organize" a visit with a surgeon to have the matter tended to. He was able to arrange for a surgical registrar (physician in training) to see the patient at 1 p.m. tomorrow.

Res ipsa loquitur.

The above incident may speak for itself, but it is merely one of the more outrageous episodes in Kiwi medical care. People are on waiting lists to have growths removed, hips replaced, etc. Patients must wait 2 months for EEG’s. The drug-buying agency is forcing patients to switch from meds that control their blood pressure and heart ailments to meds that are cheaper. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera (thank you, Yul).

They budget a certain number of each kind of operation each year. I remember that old joke, "I take a bath once a week, whether I need it or not." Like that. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Club of Rome approach to healthcare (they put out the report Limits to Growth and advocated rationing resources).

And remember, the people affected are most Kiwis. Only the rich have health insurance, and because there is such a small private market there is little in the way of private services.

The only people who find this situation unremarkable are doctors from the UK, where I gather the system is a bit more stingy, at least for psychiatric patients. Doctors from South Africa find the situation shocking. And there are no doctors here from Australia that I have met.

A wonderful place to visit, but don’t get sick here.

Things may differ in Auckland, but not from what I hear.

I have heard a South African doctor describe care here as Third World.

But we on the CAT Team work hard. We go out and make the Kiwi commitment laws work (more on that at a later time). We get people into treatment. We talk on the phone. We Help.

The people I work with are wonderful. But for every take-charge doctor (the head of A&;E, for example) there are several buck-passers. And oh, the bureaucracy. Never have so many labored so fulsomely to deliver so little care to those who need it. It all makes the New York state bureaucracy look simple by comparison.

You may think the US system is iniquitous. It is. But at least most people get adequate care.

I have heard some people advocate a single-payer system for the US. Beware. Come to Kiwi-land to see where that leads you.

I am reminded of what made the Club of Rome’s report irrelevant: the rising price of commodities caused more resources to be developed, and more to be recycled. Companies looking for profits found ways to do the same job using different technologies and fewer and different materials. I can see where a lot of medical care can done with alternative technologies. As long as there is a market, invention will thrive. But a top-down approach won’t work. If you don’t believe it, come here and work.

Now I guess I’m beginning to sound like Donna-June-Harriet. But what a weekend we have in front of us. We are going to see volcanic lakes, geysers, bubbling mud-pots, water theme parks, amusement centers, rides, beaches, a boat ride through the glow worm grotto. Five days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it (with thanks to Mr. Yasgur): Rotorua (no no, NOT Roto-Rooter) and Taupo. Tourists know about Rotorua, but Kiwis all go to Taupo. We’ll do both, with the Waitomo Caves on the side. And it’s up north, where the weather is warmer (not that it’s cold down here, but it’s no longer hot every day all day).

Sue will tell you all about it.

Cheers