I remember the description of the ideal factory security system. It consisted of a computer console, a dog and one human being.

The reason for computer console was to run the factory.
The reason for the human being was to feed the dog.
The reason for the dog was to keep the human being away from the computer console.

Russia is our friend. They are not so sure that we are their friend. After the collapse of the Soviet Union we moved in and established "relations" with any number of gangsters and rogue politicians in Russia. And we contributed financially to a number of useful people. We bought strategic resources and we bought politicians.

When one of their rogue oligarchs was in the process of trying to sell the Russian oil industry to some outfit in Dallas, the old hardliners decided we were definitely not their friend. - > the return of Putin and friends.

We also promised that we were not going to make Russia's neighboring countries part of NATO. Then we made all of those neighboring countries part of NATO.

Richard S Wheeler is author of "Second Lives", a collection of stories about people who's lives change drastically after some major loss.

Lorenzo Carthage was a mining developer who made and lost fortunes. In his story, he has just lost everything and has had to take a degrading job processing ore just to feed himself. His clothes have been stolen and he cannot even visit his former business associates because he looks like a bum.

But he gets a chance because HAW Tabor agrees to back his latest gold mining idea. He's back on top, the money is flowing and his employees are digging their little hearts out.

And the closer it gets to the opening of the mine, the more Lorenzo takes advantage of his employees. He cuts their wages drastically and more or less announces that once the gold mine is open, there will be even deeper cuts.

And just before the mine is due to open, the miners remember where they stored the excess dynamite. They blow the hell out of the mine and there is no way it can ever be dug out again.

Lorenzo goes insane and becomes incapable of acknowledging that his money is gone. He writes bad checks, and many merchants and restaurants accept them, even knowing they were worthless.

(In California, there was a real person known as "the Emperor Norton" who actually did this, and people accepted those checks because he was charming and in a perverse way entertaining.)

I always expected Steve Jobs to wind up as a kind of Emperor Norton. He was a "control freak" who created Apple and almost sunk it back in the 1980s. Having gotten a new chance, it was obvious that in 30 years he had never learned a thing. I expected Apple to once again wind up with a 10% market share because of his policies.

It's not a matter of hating Apple. People have an innate awareness of what is fair. Beyond a certain point people not only refuse to do business with an unfair company, they become willing to do whatever it takes to insure that cheaters never prosper.

Now that Jobs is gone, it is possible that Apple will learn something as a company - but I wouldn't count on it.

This isn't a solution, but it is something to think about. (It's not totally accurate, but it's a reasonably close description - and there were actually several enclosure acts, not just one.) It could be argued that the enclosure acts were the beginning of our modern concept of "property".

In the 18th century, our then Lords and Masters took over by passing the Enclosure Acts which ran the peasants off of the commons - producing three generations of property-less rabble. They also passed rules regarding privately held land. If you wanted to establish title to the ground that your family had "owned" for several hundred years, you had to enclose your property with a fence or a hedge. The catch was that the cost of the enclosure was ten times the value of the land.

The smart peasants sold their land for a few bucks, got on a boat and came to the "new world". Their goal was to get a chunk of land, draw a circle around it and not have any one screw with them again. The Native Americans never had a chance.

Just as the European nobility "invented" property, our current nobility has invented "intellectual property" and is in the process of producing new generations of property-less rabble.

The states have gotten together and set up an interstate commission to deal with this kind of stuff. It was passed by the legislatures and signed off by the governors, and the final result is you are screwed. You either plead guilty by mail and pay the fine, or they find you guilty in absentia and screw up your license and registration by remote control. And it's all perfectly legal. In general, a judge is not necessarily part of the process.

You can complain all you want - they don't give a damn. What they want is the money and in the case of AZ and NM, in particular, they don't care whether the result is fair or not.

The Arc thing was a steal from The Hitchhikers' Guide and was intended to be sort of sarcastic parody. In the original, a planet's sun was supposed to go nova. All of the "really important" people fought for a place on the B Arc and were blasted into space. Then it was discovered that the sun was not going to go nova. Life on that planet was greatly improved for everyone else. The B Arc wandered thru space, and eventually wound up settling a planet later identified as Earth.

What we need is to construct a collection of arcs to rescue important parts of the population.

The A Arc would be used to protect the president and a few important government officials. The B Arc would rescue essential civilian leaders and members of the .0001%.. The C Arcs when finally constructed, would rescue the rest of us.

It can be done.

I should have saved a link, but somewhere in the last month or so I recall a story that described how spying on factory farms had been defined in law as a form of terrorism. I didn't pay enough attention because lately everything is being redefined as some kind of terrorism. As I vaguely remember it, the offense involved trespassing on private property. Unfortunately you will have to check this out for yourselves if you are interested.

This is a military high command that not only re-floated their sunken fleet, but which told Von Rippers subordinates to ignore his orders and to do it "their way" - and those subordinates did just that. Von Ripper quit for that reason.

If anyone studied the results, I'm very sure they got the lesson and kept their mouths shut.

After the Revolutionary War we were left with the constitution of the First United States Republic, the Articles of Confederation. It wasn't much of a constitution for the simple reason that it wasn't much of a government. There was no president except for the ceremonial office of President of the Congress. There was no federal court let alone a Supreme Court.

The states were mostly independent - of the federal government and of each other. The confederation was more of an organized rabble except that each state ran it's own affairs in about the same way that the British government had run things. The federal government such as it was had no power to do more than beg the states for revenue.

It was a living enactment of "that government is best that governs least".

There was a problem with the common people. The pre-revolutionary smugglers were now "legitimate" merchants and they were busy foreclosing on the people who actually fought in the revolution. See Daniel Shays for the details. The US aristocracy was scared silly that the common man might actually gain some control over his own government (As they did in Rhode Island, by voting not revolution.)

The common people staged a revolution called Shays' Rebellion. The merchants and bankers hired mercenaries. The rebels were beaten down but eventually pardoned after swearing never to do it again.

This was a problem in the minds of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and to some degree in the mind of John Adams. They didn't want a government that governs least, they wanted a government that could get things done - an imperial government. The French and the British had empires, and Alexander Hamilton wanted one for himself. They also had navies - and Alexander Hamilton wanted to be an Admiral.

But you can't run an empire with a rag-tag collection of states that weren't too sure about a federal government in the first place.

Washington, Adams and Hamilton (with the help of a front group called the Society of the Cincinati) tried to put together a constitution that George Bush would have loved.

The leftovers in Massachusetts refused to ratify the new constitution without "reservattions" which turned out to be the Bill of Rights. A number of othe states did the same.

Washington and Hamilton had to settle for something less than the Roman Republic they seemed to want. And when they got their new constitution, they proceeded to ignore the Bill of Rights as in the Alien and Sedition Acts.

So what was our country meant to be - the free country desired by Shays' Rebels - or the Empire desired by Washington and Hamilton?