California Courts Uphold Order Making Homeless Man Pay Child Support and Lose Inheritance, Reports NCFM

Off-linked from Drudge today, an article here. But do I think Americans are made of the same stuff they were 200 years back? No, not at all. Look at what has changed. The need to be independent, hardy, and strong makes for a people who have those traits. They don't tolerate others telling them much what they can and cannot do, since they know already they don't need that sort of guidance or management in their lives. So of course we got very rambunctious a lot easier and were 100% ready to duke it out, and did. Are we like that now? Too many of us prefer video games at 6:00 PM over waking up at 3 AM to do 4 hours of hard farm work and then go out to drive fence piles in 2-foot-deep snow while 5 miles away from the nearest help. Independent? Self-willed? Pugnacious? Hardly.

As for the idea of revolution, well, contrast ours in 1776 with the largely bloodless revolutions in Europe following that one and you can see what they were about was fixing parts of their problems that were too much to put up with: monarchs too capricious in their visions to make sound judgments, etc. So to keep that from being much more of a problem, the monarchies would simply be stripped of the power to do much harm but allowed to do good (in the form of the exercise of moral authority), and left with some of their authority but only as long as the people in general (via a parliament) acceded to it. In essence, this was a move to avoid a real and total (ie, a full-on head-to-head rebels vs. loyalists fight and a total replacement of power structures) revolution from occurring so as to keep the body count low. All in all, this worked and it has worked for 200 years since then. Of course people in former-true-monarchies in Europe (eg: Germany, France, the UK, etc.) have their gripes as we do here in the US, but is there enough outrage to bring us or any of those other peoples to the boiling point where they storm the Bastille (or the Congress, or the Parliament, or the White House, or 10 Downing Street, or wherever)?

Any of those places could be overrun by a thousand people, maybe fewer. A flash mob could overrun all three major branches of the US gov't and leave it without office-holders in less than an evening. In the UK, same thing, and Germany and France, too. Really, in any nation's capital today, all it would take is a few thousand people to all get together and apply a selfless level of violence against the main bodies of their gov'ts as they sat in their various seats.

But no, it ain't gonna happen. This is because things have to get so much worse for that to happen. People have to get more than hungry, more than unemployed, more than desperate. They have to get insanely angry, out of any proportion to reason, not caring about their own lives or the consequences of their actions. It would have to be like their minds were overtaken, possessed, as if under a deep level of hypnosis causing them to run into the gunfire of police and national guardsmen/territorials without concern for their own lives. Is that going to happen *any time soon*? No.

Sure, one day, all of our countries will eventually fall out of existence. But it won't be due to popular revolution. It'll be due to a slow breakdown of the authority of the central gov'ts of the nations in question. Powers will devolve either by legal dictate or by force of fact or both. Eventually here in the US, some group of states will decide to form their own nation and unlike in the 19th century, the other states won't care enough to stop them. The federal gov't will stand there looking (and being) powerless to do anything. Other groups will follow. In Europe, provinces and territories will do likewise. Then among these separated groups, there will be internal issues arising, such as taxation powers and styles of governance. The US will go the way of Rome-- steady declines, breakups, a renaming ("Italy"), with other parts doing the same ("Holy Roman Empire", which was none of those), until finally, there will be no part of N. America known as "the United States of America". Similar fates await Russia and China (this last despite predictions they shall be the next great empire-- I have my doubts).

So no, there's no great revolution in America's future. Just the typical historical trends unfolding as they always have. Glad I won't be around to see the worst of it. But after I croak, I'll be able to say to all the rest of the many deceased disembodied spirits I meet that back on Earth, I lived through the Golden Age of America, some time between 1950 and 2000, when America was indisputably the great "BSD" of the world. And they will say "Huh? What was that? Dude, I lived between the years 1001 and 1048 AD, I have NO IDEA what you're on about!" And then of course, I'll just sigh... in a spirit-like way.... :)

"Big Swingin' Dick", ie, head honcho-like...

And yes, the male suicide rate is telling us something very profound and troubling indeed. Just too many people don't seem to care, or don't care enough. All part of business as usual.