Genetic research is just like anything else the human race has come up with.
Prostitution for example. Far better to acknowledge its existence and its necessity in the scheme of things and allow it to do business openly with as little hindrance as possible. Regulate it only as much as is required to protect the participating public and do that only based on scientifically peer reviewed evaluations of actual (not perceived) dangers. (I know – fat political chance of that ever happening).
As a short aside, I once labored atop a mountain top near Ely, Nevada at a NASA Tracking Station. Nevada enjoys the legal, supervised and regulated operation of whore houses. In my three years of living in Ely (which had three houses of prostitution at the time), there was only one legal case of a sexual nature brought before the people’s court. It happened that a cab driver picked up a lovely young lady as a fare and during the ride, exposed himself to her in an obscene manner. The young lady, outraged by such crass behavior, turned in the cabbie who was subsequently arrested and fined appropriately. The young lady was employed by the Green Lantern as a prostitute and obviously preferred to leave her work behind when she was off shift (so to speak).
I was raising two teenage daughters when we lived in Ely – which is tough mining town with a lot of transients. I never worried about them a minute when they were out and about as far as anyone accosting them or doing them harm. It just didn’t happen there (or anywhere else prostitution is legal and practiced openly).
Tells you something about “morality” doesn’t it?
The next item (and possibly the most important) to consider in the “gloom and doom” domain is that of waste, resource management and growth.
The “head in the sand” approach to waste disposal (of everything, for example) , over harvesting of resources (all of them, for example) and a philosophy of the industrialized countries that growth must continue unabated and uncontrolled in order to prosper will furnish the nails to finish our coffin that we will be buried in.
There are not sufficient economically accessible resources available in the world to bring all the people thereon today up to the standard of living now enjoyed by the developed countries of the world. Much less all the extra people being born in droves every day.
We will simply use up the marine, oil, gas, timber, water, land and mineral resources until the price of those resources and the energy to extract them exceed our ability to pay for them. (Please note that I did not say we will “run out of” these resources for that will never happen. Those nasty “Four Horseman” will ride far before that).
We bury millions of tons of perfectly useful metal, plastic and chemical resources a year because it is economically “cheaper” to mine and refine new material. Unfortunately the “economics” applied to this operation do not even come close to presenting the complete costs of extraction, refinement, fabrication, use, disposal and effects of the entire end to end process on our one and only fragile residence in this universe.
Researchers at the University of Washington once calculated that the true economic cost to the world of an automobile from raw material acquisition, fabrication and use through disposal was 25 to 30 times the actual retail monetary cost of the car. The economic cost of the car includes the share cost of the disposal of waste from extraction and manufacture, of the roads the car drives on, fuel it burns (and costs of extracting and refining the fuel), environmental cost/effects (from all segments), people who die in them, resources used to control them (police for a tiny example and the resources they expend – including more cars), and the list continues for about as long as you want to think about it.
And that’s just one item in our arsenal of truly under-priced goods and services.
Unfortunately, capitalism does not measure the full economic cost of anything. It only measures the immediate short term money cost (in real time) involved in extraction of raw materials, production and distribution and is incapable of evaluating the true and overall long term cost to the world at large. Long term end to end costs are not apparent in the corporate short term world of profit calculation for the next three month period.
It so happens that capitalism is so successful at motivating short lived and short memory of human beings to be creative and productive and smart and rich that the cost to the world of all this activity is not even considered. But that unrecognized actual debt is still there, building up and slowly destroying the underpinnings of what enabled it to be created.
What happens when the natural resources run down to the point of being not affordable and our standard of living can no longer be maintained at any cost? Human nature will out and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride yet again.
We are already in a downward spiral of living standards in this country. It is just for the most part, the decline has remained relatively transparent, but that will not continue. The poor are getting poorer, the rich and prosperous getting richer and the middle class has been totally decimated.
Only 40 years ago, it took one person working 40-50 hours a week to maintain a reasonable standard of living for a family of four or five with a little savings left over. Dad worked, Mom stayed home with the kids if she wanted to and it was almost always economically possible to do so.
That is no longer the case.
Now Dad works and Mom must work too in order to maintain the same standard of living we enjoyed 50 years ago.
Yes, I know – we have bigger and better houses now and two SUVs and an RV and a boat but is our standard of living better or do we just have more toys? Do you own those SUVs, RV and boat or does the bank? Is your family any happier or your kids better off and safer? I don’t think so.
End Part VII
Thank You Muck … I find your posts in these regards thought provoking in a positive and timely way.
I was looking for Billy Idol but Andrea True Connection will do. https://youtu.be/hVZKJt4WzxM
Nobody is satisfied with less, certainly not Americans.
Less is not more – despite YoBo’s logic that bad is good and saying the opposite of what you mean is brilliant.
Muck,
Another thank you, for a thoughtful and well-written post.
I certainly agree that the downward spiral has begun, even thought most don’t yet quite see it.
Wish I could have lived in Ely in my single years, and had a chance to contribute to the local economy.
I met a few of these guys who had worked in Ely, China Lake and such. They made cowboys look like metrosexuals.
All of this is a choice. Anyone with intelligence and skills can stop, but it takes a decision to change your perspective. Make your own “fun” instead of buying it. Own a small home instead of renting from the bank with a mortgage. Do for yourself and carefully evaluate the cost in work hours of everything you choose to do and own. I’d say it will be forced on the majority within the near future. Too bad it won’t be a choice .
Good advice.
Sadly, we are ALWAYS renters …. unless you live in a place where government doesn’t tax your property …. a most heinous confiscatory evil.
My parents lived in their home for 50 years …. let’s average the tax to $4k a year ….. $200,000 in property tax …. for a home they bought for $16,500. That’s fucken immoral!
Great article, Muck.
Hardly anyone in power EVER talks about resource depletion … pretending nonrenewable resources are infinite. Stupid bastards!
How many fewer sexual predators would there be if there was access to legal whore houses?
Makes me want to live in a mud hut without potable clean water, electricity, and sewage disposal.
Wait, that is exactly what the Globalists want for the peasants.
I don’t disagree with the views on waste, but the failure to understand why standards of living are going down is inexcusable.
The causes are very obvious: Rent extraction in ever more areas of the economy.
Everyone should know about health care. The US spends nearly twice as much as a percentage of GDP than other 1st world nations – 8% to 10% of GDP.
What about taxes? Ironically, the US spends about 39% of GDP on government – which isn’t a lot lower than the European range of 45% to 55% – but the Europeans get health care, retirement, a socialist safety net and a range of other benefits from their spending.
Look deeper into the major categories of household spending – and you can see the fingers of profiteers and/or banksters on the dial: education, housing, transportation.