Tag: methamphetamines

On bias.

On bias.

At the beginning of our poetry class, back when the county jail was still admitting volunteers, two men read some poems they’d written together. 

The first was a love poem – the gist was that any relationship that could survive a partner’s incarceration could probably survive anything. 

The second was a poem about living in a trailer park:

If you’re looking for drugs – not just grass –

Depends where you look, you’ll pro’lly find glass

Pitbulls in the back

Nine times outta ten you’re already in a trap

As it happens, I already knew that one of the authors had a pack of five chihuahuas that road around town in his backpack.  After they finished reading, I mentioned the dogs.

The other guy answered: “Well, yeah, he has those chihuahuas, but I’ve got two pitpulls.”

After we finished talking about their poems, they had a question for me:

“Hey, so you’re a scientist, right?  Cause I heard there’s like this planet where diamonds rain from the sky.  Do you know anything about that?”

I said it sounded ridiculous.  I was imagining walking through a field and suddenly getting hit on the head by a diamond.  Like a really hard hailstone.

Whenever hail falls, my children dart outside to eat ice.  But a fallen diamond would break your teeth.  Doesn’t melt in your mouth or your hand!

During class, we spent a while talking about how diamonds form.  Under extremely high pressure, the hydrogen atoms in an organic molecule can be displaced by carbon-carbon bonds.  There are a few different shapes that work for a molecule made entirely of carbon.  You can have all the atoms in a flat sheet, which we call graphite.  The atoms can form spheres, which we can buckeyballs.  A length of graphite can wrap between the two round caps of a buckeyball.  Or you can have the atoms in a tetrahedral lattice – a diamond.

If you squeeze carbon atoms under really high pressure, you can turn any of the other shapes into diamonds.  Diamonds are the most stable form.  You can make diamonds just by compressing natural gas.

“This pencil, the part it writes with is graphite,” I said.  “If you were strong enough, you could squeeze it until it was a diamond.  But I don’t think they’d fall like rain.”

#

I was wrong.  I was biased about what planets should look like – I live on a small, rocky ball with a thin atmosphere, very different from the gas giants that broil like miniature stars – and biased, unfortunately, against the people who wind up in jail.  I study chemistry, I big expert!

Obviously, there are many occasions when the other people in class know things that I do not.  About poetry, chemistry, and physics.

#

Since 1981, computer models have shown that the extreme heat and pressure deep inside Neptune was likely to create diamonds.  If I’d ever taken an astronomy course – or had borrowed library books about our solar system when I was growing up, instead of reading the same book about Godzilla movies over and over – I could have known this, too.

The sky on Neptune is very different from the sky on Earth.  Our air hugs us with a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch.  Deep inside the clouds of Neptune, though, the air would squeeze you six million times tighter.  Needless to say, you’d be crushed.  Parts of you might compress into diamond. 

Temperature is a measure of how fast molecules are moving.  Hot air bumps into you more often than cold air, and each collision is a little harder.

Deep in the clouds of Neptune, the gravity is so strong that air molecules accelerate dangerously fast between every collision.  This means the air is really, really hot – thousands of degrees.  Any parts of you that weren’t being compressed into diamond would melt, or wisp away into the broiling clouds.

The high temperature means there’s plenty of energy available for chemical reactions, so molecules can adopt their most stable configurations even if there is a high “activation barrier.” 

An activation barrier is like a wall that separates a thing from what it wants.  Maybe you’d like to eat breakfast but dread the thought of leaving your warm bed – that’s an activation barrier, too.  We could make the activation barrier lower by yanking your blankets off, which makes your current circumstance worse.  Or we could increase your odds of overcoming the activation barrier by pumping you full of caffeine.  With more jittery energy, maybe you’d get up on your own. 

The second strategy – caffeine! – is roughly what happens when you raise the temperature of a chemical reaction.  Carbon is very stable once it becomes a diamond, but it’s difficult for methane to slough off the warm security of all those bonds to hydrogen atoms.

After methane on Neptune is compressed to form a diamond, the diamond will fall.  A diamond is more dense than the air around it.  But the diamond won’t hit the ground like hail, because there’s no ground beneath the hot dense sky of Neptune.  Instead the rocky core seems to be covered by a superheated ocean – well above its boiling point, but still not evaporating because the liquid is kept in place by dense clouds.  Roughly the same way an Instant Pot uses high pressure to cook food in superheated water.

When the diamonds splash into this ocean, they melt.

#

In class that day, I hadn’t yet researched Neptune’s atmosphere. I was mostly scribbling crude schematics of crystal structures. I explained how to read a phase diagram.  We talked about diamond mining and the technology used to create synthetics.

I claimed, incorrectly, that diamonds weren’t likely to fall from the sky.

One of the guys shook his head.

“I mean, yeah, that sounds all smart and all, but I swear I heard this thing about diamond rain.  Can you look it up before next week?”

The guys in jail can pay to use iPads – at a rate of five or ten cents per minute – but they have very limited access to the Internet.  There’s one un-blocked application with some scientific lectures, but that’s very different from being allowed to learn what you want.

So I agreed.  It sounded ridiculous to me, but I jotted “SKY DIAMONDS?” and promised to do some research.

#

The next week, I was ready to deliver my big mea culpa.  But when I got there, we were missing one of the guys who’d been invested in our discussion.  I asked about him.

“Yeah, he’s not coming back,” said the guy sitting next to me.  “Somebody said he was a cho-mo.”

“Oh,” I said, grimacing.  “He went to seg?”

“Yeah,” said the guy, nodding. We left unsaid that this man probably got the shit kicked out of him first.  If somebody convincingly claims that you’re locked up on a child molestation case, bad things happen.  In prison, you might get murdered by a gang looking to bolster their reputation – because child molesters have such a toxic reputation, there are less likely to be reprisals.  And even a county jail can be a violent place.

After the first fight, the guy who got beaten up will usually choose to go to seg.  Segregation, or solitary confinement, is known to cause permanent brain damage – people suffer from depression, anxiety, and hallucinations.  But staying in a cell block with thirty people who want to kick the shit out of you is likely to lead to brain damage, too.

Solitary confinement might be the less bad of two terrible options.

Despite his bias, the guy I was talking to offered a little sympathy.

“It’s rough,” he said.  “But them’s the politics of the place.”

On meditation.

On meditation.

More is different.

In the beginning, subatomic particles careened too quickly to connect.  The universe was “hot.”  (Temperature is a measure of average speed as objects jiggle.  When physics people say that our universe was “hot,” they mean that everything was moving just shy of the speed of light.)

In the beginning, our universe wasn’t very interesting.  But then the homogeneous cloud of fast-moving particles cooled as it expanded.  Speeds slowed.  Soon, particles dawdled long enough in each others’ vicinity that they could interact.  Hydrogen atoms formed, then hydrogen gas, then stars. 

Stars are interesting – when a cloud of gas is big enough, its net gravity can pull everything inward until the density becomes so high that nuclear fusion begins.  This raging cascade of explosions counteracts the force of gravity and the star reaches an unsteady equilibrium until, eventually, it runs out of fuel and collapses or explodes.

An exploding star scatters heavier atoms across the sky.  When these are incorporated into a new star, they can participate in nuclear fusion events in turn, producing even heavier atoms. 

Then that star might explode, too.

Eventually, there were enough heavy atoms floating about the universe that a condensing cloud could form both a star and a set of orbiting satellites.  On these satellites – planets – atoms combine in more interesting ways than inside the bellies of stars. 

After all, the infernal core of a star is pretty hot, too.  Inside that blazing oven, particles can form atoms, and atoms can combine to form heavier atoms, but these are too frantic to form molecules – long strings of atoms bonded together.

The chemical bonds that hold a molecule together are much weaker than the electrostatic and nuclear forces that maintain an atom.  But planets – even broiling, meteor-bombarded ones – are peaceful places compared to stars.  On the primordial earth, lightning strikes or UV radiation probably catalyzed the formation of complex molecules like amino acids and nucleic acids.

These molecules are just big amalgams of subatomic particles.  The underlying stuff is the same … but there’s more of it.

More is different.

Consider the behaviors of a single amino acid.  An amino acid is complex compared to a quark or electron.  It can do acid-base chemistry!  Its mix of charged and neutral surfaces lets it interact in neat ways with various solvents. 

But if you compare that single amino acid to a protein – and a protein is just more amino acids joined together – you’ll realize that the single amino acid is total snoresville.

Proteins, though … wow!  They can fold into fantastical shapes.  They can function as molecular machines, their parts churning and twisting and flipping as they shuttle other molecules from place to place, or even create whole new molecules.

When you glom more and more and more subatomic particles together, eventually you create things that are complex enough to imprint patterns on the world.  They create more things like themselves.  Proteins and RNA make new proteins and RNA.

And then, a cell!  A cell is an amalgam of molecules all dissolved inside a bubble of fat.  If you thought proteins were cool, check this out!  Cells can swim, they can eat, they can live and die.

Or, what if there were more cells?  Then you can make us!  With many cells, you can make brains, which makes consciousness, which can give all those subatomic particles the ability to work together and realize that they are subatomic particles.

Well, no. One single human animal, in isolation, probably wouldn’t figure that out.  Each human, as an individual, can be pretty great – but to form a culture complex enough to study particle physics, you’ll need more people.  Contemporary physics papers list hundreds of authors, and that doesn’t even credit everybody who worked to build the equipment, and or worked to grow the food, and took care for the children, or taught the physicists, when they were young, allowing them to one day become physicists …

And each of those physicists, and engineers, and farmers, and caregivers, and teachers … each is a collection of cells, which are collections of molecules, which are collections of atoms, which are collections of subatomic particles.  As we transition between scales, we see qualitative differences in behavior from adding more.

This essay is made from a set of just 26 letters, but these can be combined to form a few hundred thousand different words, and those can be combined to convey an infinite number of different ideas.

We blink many thousands of times each day.  Our eyes close, pause, and then open again.  We need to blink.  Staring at screens – as I’m doing now, typing this essay, and as are you, reading it – causes us to blink less frequently, and that can lead to headaches.  But the quality of each blink doesn’t affect us much.  Most blinks pass by without our even noticing.

Meditation is just a long blink.  Close your eyes and let more time elapse before you open them again.

But more is different.  A blink doesn’t disrupt your thoughts.  Meditation, however, can be a psychedelic experience.

Many religions praise the value of meditation, especially in their origin stories.  Before he began his ministry, Jesus meditated in the Judaean Desert – he saw all the world’s kingdoms before him, but rejected that vision of power in order to spread a philosophy of love and charity.  Before he began his ministry, Buddha meditated beneath the Bodhi tree – he saw a path unfurl, a journey that would let travelers escape our world’s cycle of suffering.  Buddha decided to share that vision with others.

Before teaching his fellows to reshape the world with words, Odin meditated from a tree branch – he felt that he had died, transcended life, and could see the secret language of the universe shimmering before him.

I’ve been preparing anti-racist material about paganism and spirituality so that we have more things to send to people who contact Pages to Prisoners.  As part of this project, I’d like to include information about meditation.  After all, neo-paganism is invented – typically quite recently – and, as above, many religions have preserved stories suggesting that their founders’ meditation inspired their faith.  These religions don’t always prioritize meditation as a contemporary practice, but many do: Christian monks repeat prayers in a way that’s strikingly similar to mantra meditation, Hindu adherents are advised to sit and experience a simulacrum of Shiva’s asceticism, and even warrior cultures have prized pre-battle stillness as a way to focus attention and more fully inhabit the present.

The scientific literature is also replete with papers about meditation — but most of these are junk. It’s fairly easy to find published studies claiming that mindfulness training can confer disease resistance, immunity to aging, or even paranormal abilities like extra-sensory perception.  Scientific papers aren’t inherently more trustworthy than the internet.

But it’s true that your mind is plastic, and your moods can dramatically alter the way you perceive the world.  Conditions that affect our nervous system – like depression, insomnia, and even chronic pain – can be treated through meditation.  The experiments that scientists use to assess things like “creativity” or “attentiveness” are often open to interpretation, but it’s not unreasonable to imagine that meditation would help.

All people are creative.  Our problem, often, is that our ideas can flit away before we fully grasp them.  Like dreams, they fade, and we’re left with the irksome sensation that “I feel like I just had a good idea, but …”

Meditation can clear the turbid waters of your mind.  Like gazing into a pellucid lake, it could become easier to spot your good ideas when they come.

I’ve never been inside a prison, so I’ll have to collaborate with friends who have spent time there as I make the pamphlets.  But everything I’ve read suggests that most prisons are loud, chaotic, stressful, and dangerous.  Which has obvious implications for how easily people can meditate.  If you live near a beautiful glen, you could probably do well by your brain by simply taking some time each day to sit peacefully beside some flowing water.

Instead, I’ve been learning about mantra meditation.  By silently intoning the same phrase over and over – even if it’s just a nonsense word – you can overcome a fair bit of external distraction.  To test, I’ve tried meditating at the YMCA.  This place is very calm compared to our county jail, which I’ve heard is itself calmer than a prison, but where I sit, people are usually conversing, and there are a variety of rattling exercise machines.

Several of the guide books I’ve read recommend that you pay somebody a bunch of money to teach you transcendental meditation.  During your training, you’ll be given a secret Sanskrit word or phrase.  People who’ve taken these training courses have posted a bunch of the words online, and apparently a mantra is selected based upon your age and gender. 

That seems silly to me – although it’s possible that different people’s minds would respond best to different mantras, my gender isn’t a big component of my identity, nor is my age. 

I did pick out a Sanskrit phrase, which is perhaps a silly choice in and of itself.  After all, I can’t speak Sanskrit.  But I thought it might be nice to have a set of sounds that didn’t carry a lot of semantic meaning in the rest of my daily life.  Although Sanskrit mantras would have held meaning to the original practitioners of this style of meditation, Sanskrit is generally considered a formal, ritual language, not something that people speak at home with their families.  Even for native speakers, the chance of crossed wires, in which people were inadvertently saying their special mantras at other times of day, was probably pretty low.

While meditating, there are times when I’m pretty oblivious to my environs, even though I’m sitting in a crowded, noisy place.  I assume that I should recommend, for people meditating in prison, that they use a buddy system.  Unless somebody you trust immensely was sitting nearby, I assume it would feel too unsafe to allow yourself to completely let go in the way that deep meditation requires.

In case you’re interested in trying, I can tell you what’s worked so far for me.  I’ve been thinking the phrase “sat nam.”  I liked the translation when I looked it up online, and it’s felt convenient to have two discrete sounds – I think the “sat” while breathing in, and “nam” while breathing out.  I’ve read that people aim to spend about six seconds each on inhalation and exhalation, but I breath much more rapidly than that. 

If nothing too distracting is going on nearby – maybe just some clanking from the ellipticals, treadmills, and stairmasters – I breath in and out once every four to eight seconds.  But when people are having a conversation right next to me, I take a breath every one or two seconds, which means I’m intoning my little mantra more often and can do a better job of isolating myself from what’s going on around me.

As far as I can tell, that isolation is the goal of meditation.  Our minds evolved to expect constant stimulus during our waking lives.  If you reduce the degree of outside stimulation, like with a sensory deprivation chamber, you invite your mind to conjure strange thoughts, visions, and sounds to replace the inputs that it expects.  But you have to keep at it long enough.

When particle physicist Richard Feynman described his experience with sensory deprivation tanks, he wrote:

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.  But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.

…

Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of different experiments.  It didn’t seem to make much difference as far as hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was unnecessary.  Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do is sit quietly.

…

I would like to have done it at home, and I don’t doubt that you could meditate and do it if you practice, but I didn’t practice.

I’ve only had a bit of practice, but when I sit still with my eyes closed and block out the outside world with a repeated phrase, my mind will sometimes drift.  I’ve been trying to sit for twenty minutes, although I often inadvertently rouse myself after about fifteen – which hasn’t seemed to be quite enough, for either me or Dr. Feynman.  But I get the feeling that it has to be continuous.  Once I’ve opened my eyes and glanced at the clock, I stop for the day.  Even if nothing much has happened.

On these days, I console myself with a quote from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that I learned from Bob Roth’s Strength in Stillness: “Even in a shallow dive, you still get wet.”

I begin by stretching – although I’m practicing in a relatively distracting environment, it seems reasonable to minimize the distractions of my own body.  I try not to move while meditating, and it’d be harder to maintain a single posture if I could feel my body ache.

After I close my eyes, the first few minutes typically feel like a waste of time.  I’m sitting there repeating a nonsense phrase and I can’t help but think of the myriad other things that I ought to be doing.

As long as I can force myself to keep at it, though, the experience changes.  More becomes different.  Undulating phosphenes blossom in the umber field of my closed eyes.  Sometimes I slip into reverie; if I catch myself daydreaming, I’ll resume intoning my bit of Sanskrit, which helps me set aside whatever vein of thought led me astray.

Nobody is totally sure why we need sleep, but recent results have suggested that nitrogenous waste and other metabolic toxins can only be cleared from brain cells while we’re snoozing.  If you stay awake too long, trash piles up along the roadways of your mind, and all that junk prevents learning, memory formation, and attentiveness. 

During my classes in jail, I often work with men who have stayed awake for weeks at a time by taking methamphetamine – they’ve experienced a wide variety of hallucinations, paranoia, and mental turmoil.  Amphetamines aren’t very toxic, but loss of sleep can seriously damage a person’s brain.

One day without sleep won’t kill you.  Luckily so – since having kids, there have been many nights when a little one wakes up screaming and I never get to rest.  But more is different.  After three days without sleep, the shadow people start talking.  After eight days, my students have started talking back: “I knew they weren’t real … but I still didn’t want to be rude.  But we got into all these arguments.”

Sleep washes away the argumentative shadow people.

When meditation goes well, I sometimes imagine my mind being cleansed – I’ll sit there thinking sat nam, sat nam and envision a cascade of water flowing over me like Heracles used to clean King Augeas’s stables.  But meditation might not help with keeping a brain tidy – those experiments on the waste-clearing function of sleep were done with mice, and (to the best of my knowledge) nobody has taught mice to meditate.

If you trust my spouse’s subjective evaluation, though, meditation seems to help.  I’ve apparently been more pleasant to live with since I started practicing. 

If you’re going to try, aim for at least twenty minutes, maybe once or twice a day for a few weeks.  My apologies if it seems pointless at first.  I’d recommend you keep at it – just like a single minute won’t give you the same benefit as twenty, it seems reasonable to expect that a single day wouldn’t have the same benefit as a month’s daily practice.

After all, more is different.

.

Featured image by Mitchell Joyce on Flickr.

On the moon landing, and who benefits if you believe it was faked.

On the moon landing, and who benefits if you believe it was faked.

If you’re worried that you don’t feel enough stress and anxiety, there’s an easy chemical fix for that.  Habitual methamphetamine use will instill intense paranoia. 

In our poetry classes in jail, I’ve talked with a lot of guys who stayed up for days watching UFO shows on TV.  A few were also stockpiling military grade weaponry. One man used strings and pulleys to link his shotgun’s trigger to a doorknob, ensuring that anyone who tried to enter the house would be rudely greeted. 

They’ve dismantled dozens of computers and phones: sometimes out of suspicion, sometimes because there are valuable components. Although they were rarely organized enough to hawk the proceeds of their dissections.

Suffice it to say that, deprived of sleep and dosed with powerful stimulants, their brains became tumultuous places.

Which is why we spend so much time talking about conspiracy theories.

I’ve written several previous essays about conspiracy theories – that the Santa myth teaches people to doubt expertise (children learn that a cabal of adults really was conspiring to delude them); that oil company executives have been conspiring to destroy the world; that, for all the ways Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow probes at the undercurrents of truth beneath government conspiracy, the text blithely incorporates metaphors from a Disney-promulgated nature conspiracy.

But, with the fiftieth anniversary coming up, the men in my class have been talking more about whether the moon landing was faked.

There’s only so much I can say.  After all, I, personally, have never been to the moon. 

One of my colleagues from Stanford recently conducted molecular biology experiments on the International Space Station, but that’s only zero point one percent of the way to the moon … and she and I were never close enough for me to feel absolutely certain that she wouldn’t lie to me.

Visiting the moon does seem much easier than faking it, though.  Our government has tried to keep a lot of secrets, over the years.  Eventually, they were leaked.

But that line of reasoning is never going to sway somebody. The big leak might be coming soon.

Instead, the strategy that’s worked for me is to get people worried about another layer of conspiracy.

“Let’s just say, hypothetically,” I say, “that we did send people to the moon.  Why would somebody want to convince you, now, that we didn’t?”

When NASA’s project was announced, a lot of people were upset.  Civil rights activist Whitney Young said, “It will cost $35 billion to put two men on the moon.  It would take $10 billion to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year.  Something is wrong somewhere.”  (I learned about this and the following quote from Jill Lepore’s excellent review of several new books about the moon landing.)

During John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he argued that we needed to do it anyway.  Despite the challenge, despite the costs.  “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

We did reach the moon. But, did we use that knowledge to benefit the rights and progress of all people?  Not so much.

A lot of the guys in jail went to crummy schools.  They grew up surrounded by violence and trauma.  They didn’t eat enough as kids. They’ve never had good medical care.  They’ve struggled to gain traction in their dealings with government bureaucracies … we’ve spent years underfunding post offices, schools, the IRS, the DMV, and, surprise, surprise!, find that it’s arduous interacting with these skeletal agencies.

To keep these men complacent, the people in power would rather have them believe that we didn’t visit the moon.  “Eh, our government has never accomplished much, we faked that shit to hoodwink the Russians, no wonder this is a horrible place to live.”

The fact that people in power are maliciously undermining our country’s basic infrastructure would seem way worse if you realized that, 50 years ago, with comically slapdash technologies and computers more rudimentary than we now put into children’s toys, this same government sent people to the moon. 

Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  And he was in a position to make his words true – he was the government, so all he had to do was be incompetent.  And then people would hate the government even more, and become even more distrustful of anyone who claimed that good governance could improve the world.

Needless to say, 45 has taken strategic incompetence to a whole new stratosphere.  Beyond the stories of corruption that pepper the news, there’s also the fact that many appointments were never made; there are agencies that, as of July 2019, still don’t have anybody running them.  These agencies will perform worse.

If people knew how good our government used to be, they might revolt.  Better they believe the moon landing was a sham, that the faked photographs are as good as anybody ever got.

Our one and only.

On extraction.

On extraction.

The womb-suckers are trying to eat your children. Poke a soda straw into the future and sluuurp, away they go.  Hopes and dreams, metabolized today into so many dollar bills.

I spend a fair bit of time with drug dealers. Most are ethical people – they wanted to ingest drugs, and they knew some other people who wanted to ingest drugs, so they started selling.

But there’s an unethical way to push – some dealers focus on getting new users hooked.  That way they’ll have a steady income stream.  Most of the guys in my poetry class, if somebody talks about getting clean, congratulate and encourage the dude.  But some dealers would see rehab as a threat to their own livelihoods.

The future-eaters are like the second type of dealer.  They’re trying to kill babies – including babies who haven’t even been conceived yet – while proffering incredibly cynical rationalizations.


Yup, you’re right, kid.  Earth is beautiful. 
I’m sorry the grown-ups aren’t trying very hard to keep Earth beautiful.

Here’s the deal: regions of the Earth’s crust that lie beneath territories claimed by the United States contain rich deposits of hydrocarbons.  These could be dug up and combusted to power our factories, our automobiles, our giant arrays of computer servers that enable the internet.  The average person’s lifestyle in the U.S.gobbles energy, and deep below our lands is solar energy that photosynthesizing plants captured millions of years ago.

But we now know that there is only a limited amount of ancient stored sunlight beneath us.  The world’s oil reserves will eventually be depleted.  And so a smart investor, even if that investor believed that all the hydrocarbons beneath us should be combusted, bringing our planet closer to the hellhole that runaway climate change allowed Venus to become, would decide to wait.  Right now, the price of oil is low.  The total supply of oil is decreasing.  The population is rising.  If oil really is the best energy source, then the price will obviously rise. 


Venus was habitable once, but after atmospheric carbon dioxide levels got too high, climate change spiraled out of control.  I certainly wouldn’t want to live there now. Artist rendition from NASA.

I believe this relationship, lower supply = higher price, is taught within the first two lectures of any undergraduate economics course.

Since we’re rich enough to do it, we would make more money by buying oil now from those foolish countries who need cash right away and are currently selling their buried wealth, then extracting our own oil later when the total supply is lower and each barrel is worth more money.

The womb-suckers love money.  So why isn’t this their plan?

After all, we as a nation are wealthy enough to invest.  Throughout the ages, that’s what people blessed with current prosperity have done. By socking away money now – maybe by lending it to a neighbor and charging interest – you gain a constant source of income for the future.

The usual stereotype is that it’s foolish poor people who eat the future.  When you’re starving, you might eat seeds from the granary.  That’ll help you survive another winter, but next year the famine will hit even worse.  Methamphetamines let you trade away future health to do more today.  So do cigarettes.

The womb-suckers rarely pull drags of nicotine into their own bodies.  But they’ll happily light one for our planet.

The president of the U.S. wants to drill for oil beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The president of Brazil wants to cut down the Amazon rain forest for gold mines and hamburgers.

But there is a framework in which their urgency to eat the future is rational.  If people will notice what’s happening and stop them later, they need to get it done now. The window for personal gain is closing: slash and burn while you can.

And there is, of course, the comparison to an unethical drug dealer.  You have to keep selling even when the heat is closing in because otherwise your customers could get clean and then you can’t make money off your product anymore.

We’ve reached a point where many people have realized that the future is in peril –most people who get their news from any source other than the state-endorsed propaganda network – but, let’s face it, people are lazy.  I’m lazy too.  Even though I know that disposable diapers are wasteful to manufacture and then ship off to landfills, my family resorts to them during weeks when we’re too overwhelmed to wash another load of excrement-encrusted rags.

Similarly, everyone knows that a vegan diet is better for the planet. But most people still eat meat. The Republican party’s big-government subsidies make hamburgers cheap … and those burgers are already cooked, waiting at the drive through, chock full of delicious fat, salt, and MSG. Being vegan takes more effort.

But we’re well-meaning, most of us.  And lazy, well-meaning people just need a little nudge to start doing the right thing.

The womb-suckers are justifiably worried that a small hiccup in the rate of extraction now might be the final nudge necessary to get the world to change.  Switch to renewable energy.  Recycle and re-use more of what we’ve already dug from the ground.

The womb-suckers need to flood the market, get what money they can before the rest of us sober up.  It’s the best thing for a murderous hedonist to do; with enough money, they can soar the skies in gold-plated airplanes.  With enough money, even boorish, ugly men have a shot at having sex with pornographic film stars.

The future eaters see no contradiction, calling themselves “pro-life” while they frantically strive to make billions of unborn children die.