Author Archives: Tom Lewis

Lemmings on Parade (cont’d)

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We now know that lemmings are too smart to stampede off a cliff to get their population down. But humans aren’t.

Just about the entire population of this country, and those of many others, are sleep-walking toward their own destruction without objection and without any particular effort to avoid it. Sleepily, these folks will agree if asked that something should probably be done, but when that something means that they will be adversely affected in the short term, they lash out. They can be shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that the world will soon run out of cheap petroleum; but when gas prices go up, governments fall. Continue the march.

About 10% of the adult population is ready and willing to run amok in the streets, brandishing guns and hyperventilating about “civil war,” because an idiot lost an election and can’t accept it. Nowhere near that number of people would even consider making a fuss about the approach of a self-engineered doomsday. It has reached the point that thoroughly panicked climate scientists are now publicly advocating civil disobedience.  Continue reading →

God Save Us From the Queen

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This frenzied crowd is taking pictures of the announcement of Queen Elizabeth’s passing, posted on a fence at Buckingham Palace.

As a citizen of a republic, I find the mere idea of a monarchy to be repugnant. Not so long ago in this country, living as subjects of an idiot with absolute power over our lives became unacceptable, and we fought a bloody revolution to free ourselves of it. So it pains me now to watch my fellow citizens swoon over that very monarchy, as they have been doing in droves at least since Elizabeth took the throne 70 years ago.

It does not speak ill of the late queen — by all accounts she was a pleasant and decent lady — to point out that her job all these years, by law, has been to do nothing. People are fulminating about her rule; she didn’t rule anything but her household staff. Wonder is expressed at all the history she witnessed. She saw it, just like you and I did, she had nothing to do with influencing it. They enthuse about how she “guided” this, and “oversaw” that, and “held the country together in hard times.”

Hogwash. Continue reading →

How to Stop a Centipede

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Wait, what? What did you ask me?

It is said that to immobilize a centipede, all you have to do is ask; “What foot do you lead with?” I don’t know if that works, but I do know that all you have to do to bring just about any kind of human activity to a halt is ask; “If we do this, what will they do in response?” It’s a trick question, because it implies the possibility of knowing an unknowable thing — what “they” will do.

In my opinion this question should be labeled the eighth deadly sin, right after “sloth,” as a serial killer of good ideas.

For example: Now and then during my career as a journalist, I have been told by lawyers that if I published or broadcast a story containing information reflecting badly on some public figure, I would be sued. The lawyers were, in every case, impervious to my assertions that I had solid, admissible evidence of the accuracy of the report; that I understood the five elements that any successful libel or slander suit had to satisfy in order to prevail and had solid defenses against all of them; and that in my opinion the public figure in question was a spineless wuss who would never dare to challenge any critic in court.  Continue reading →

Brace for Impact

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For empires, as with people, when it’s over, it’s over.

It is extremely uncomfortable being a citizen of an empire that is circling the drain of history. Like passengers on a doomed airplane, we can watch the onboard movie with all the concentration we can muster, we can pull the shade on the window and deploy earbuds all we want, but we know. We are going down. The whole vast structure of society, stressed by the spiraling descent, groans and warps as it tries to hold together for a little longer. 

There are places, and times, in which it is relatively easy to ignore reality. But not completely, and not for long. Like the knowledge of our own inevitable death, we can avoid thinking about it for years at a time, yet it is never not with us. Events that do not touch us directly cast a shadow over us, darkening our skies — to use Winston Churchill’s brilliant metaphor — like a gathering storm.  Continue reading →

Afraid? So What?

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There has been a profound change lately in the nature of my conversations with younger people. (These days, 99.9% of the people I talk with are younger, but never mind.) Admittedly I don’t talk to many people at all, so this is hardly a valid sample. Still, I am struck by a new emotion that frequently appears these days when young people talk about the future: fear.

Fifteen years or so ago, at a social gathering, a lovely young woman I had just met asked me what I was working on. I told her I was writing a book (Brace for Impact) whose thesis was that industrial civilization was in the process of an inevitable and irreversible collapse. “Oh,” she said, “is this where I bat my eyes, smile brightly, and edge away?” I assured her it was not necessary, that I could converse on other subjects.  Continue reading →

The Cheshire Act: Disappearing Legislation

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Signing the Cheshire Act — the disappearing remnants of President Biden’s agenda.

You see? We can get things done in Washington! This Congress can pass legislation that the people want! We just did it! We gave Medicare permission for the first time ever to negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical companies! This will save consumers hundreds of billions of dollars!

Not to be curmudgeonly, but the only reason Medicare has been unable to negotiate with drug manufacturers until now is that Congress passed a law forbidding it when it authorized Medicare Part D to pay for prescriptions 16 years ago. It was a corrupt and brazen sop to Big Pharma, with the result that Americans pay more for their medicines than the people of any other civilized country.  Continue reading →

Is This a Great Country or…What!?

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I have admired Joe Biden during his entire career in public service. He became a legend in Washington after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972 — a few weeks after his election to the U.S. Senate — and for nearly four decades thereafter, at the end of each day, he boarded a train and went home to Delaware to care for his two surviving sons. For 50 years, he has conducted himself with grace, intelligence and humor as senator, vice president and now president. As one of his opponents once said, “nobody doesn’t like Joe Biden.”

He has done an admirable job as president, repairing much of the damage done to the federal government by the Mad King Donald, and wringing a few pieces of significant  legislation from a dysfunctional Congress. But here’s the problem.

At the end of almost every speech he gives, he delivers a Reaganesque, “shining-city-on-a-hill” peroration in which he expresses his deeply felt vision of America as a country that can do anything, subdue any foe, achieve any goal, meet any challenge. It is at this point that I and a great many Americans wonder, what the hell is he smoking? Continue reading →

Please Excuse Us, We Don’t Feel Very Well.

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The information is out there, available to anyone who looks for it. Few look for it. Any writer wanting to sell a story, or any publication wanting to attract eyeballs, is going to stay away from this subject as one of the many that are just too damn disturbing. It’s disturbing to know a tornado is bearing down on our house, too, but it’s information we need to have.

More and more Americans have been getting sick, and sicker, every year for many years. 

  • Cancer, for example, afflicts more people, and especially more younger people, every year. The number of new cases increases every year, more or less in lockstep with the increase in population. And while it’s bad enough that modern medicine, for all its emphasis on cancer, has not been able to significantly reduce its impact, it’s even more disheartening to see the dramatic increases in cancer rates among people under 50 years old.  
  • Heart disease has been the leading killer of Americans since the 1950s. While its rate of infection declined for the ten years before 2020, in that year it increased by 4%, an increase that apparently continues. And a recent study has predicted far more steep increases in heart disease in the coming decades.
  • Life expectancy, which rose steadily to 79 years in 2019, fell to 77 years in 2020 and to 76 in 2021, the largest decline in 100 years.
  • Birth rates have declined sharply in recent years.  The US has the highest maternal mortality during pregnancy and childbirth among all developed countries in the world. US males, like those in every other developed country, are experiencing a sharp and accelerating decline in sperm counts, a measure of their ability to have children. Globally the decline has been over 60% since 2000.
  • The fastest-rising death rate in the US is of deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholic liver disease. Such deaths have increased between 56% and 387%, depending on the age group, in two decades. 
  • More than three out of four Americans are overweight or obese (one-third are obese) so many that the Armed Services regularly miss their recruitment targets because so many young Americans otherwise eligible for military service are too fat to fight.

If I were a doctor or medical researcher I would be constrained from stipulating  a cause for any one of these conditions and their horrifying trends. More and more people are going to pharmacies like the ones at https://www.pharm-aidrx.com/ just to get OTC medicine. For one thing it’s complicated and for another, stipulating a cause would cost some industry a lot of money and we can’t have that. 

I’m just a writer who has been looking into these matters for four decades or so, and no one pays any attention to me, so I can tell you what’s going on here. Industry — the juggernaut that climate-controls our surroundings, provides us with cheap food and fuel and cheap stuff — is killing us. For a hundred years it has been fouling our air, poisoning our soils, polluting our water, degrading our food and making tons of money.

Until the advent of the Reaganauts in the 1980s, our government made some attempts to reign in the worst offenders, but since that time the dogs of capitalism have all slipped their leashes and gone feral — the banks, oil companies, electric utilities, broadcasters, phone companies,  insurance companies, auto manufacturers, drug companies, all of them. 

As a direct result we all live in a thick soup of toxic industrial waste that sickens us and shortens our lives. Industrial money has so locked down our government at all levels that no significant change in this situation is possible, unless and until it collapses utterly (a collapse I believe has already begun). Afterward, enlightened people of good will and high energy will have a chance to build a brave and kind new world.

The question is, of course, how do enlightened people of good will survive the crash?

Anyone?

We Are All Above Averages

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Of all the mathematical concepts humanity has invented to help deal with reality — such as zero, infinity, numbers, etc. — surely the least useful and most toxic is the notion of “average.” Like empty calories — food that has no nutrition — the idea of an average something is without any real utility. In a heartbeat I can look up the average high temperature for today and it will not tell me what the actual high temperature will be, five or ten degrees above or below the average. So what use is it to know the average?  

Meteorology uses a lot of averages. They rate the likelihood of storms of a certain size and destructiveness by labeling them, for example, storms that on average will occur once in 100 years, or once in 1,000 years. So far this year, the American Midwest has experienced four “once in 1,000 year” storms. In 2018, a single location, Ellicott City, Maryland, experienced two thousand-year storms in two years. Knowing the average chance of a serious storm where you live is content-free information. Continue reading →

The Salt of the Earth

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When the soil becomes laden with salt, only a few sparse weeds will grow in it. That’s becoming a serious problem.

“And all that day Abimelech fought against the city until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he demolished the city and sowed it with salt.” From the Bible, Judges, chapter 9 verse 45. There are other examples of ancient armies sowing the fields of their defeated enemies with salt, making them incapable of producing crops, thus assuring their enemies’ utter destitution. Some 4,000 years ago the fields of southern Mesopotamia, having been over-irrigated for many decades (in a hot region where evaporation was rapid) became so laden with salt that they could not grow crops, and soon Mesopotamia was no more. 

Now, that very thing is being done to us, and not by an occupying army. Like the Mesopotamians, we are doing it to ourselves. Continue reading →