Last week when I was reading the international response to our extermination of the dangerous pest known as Osama bin Laden, I was sadly unsurprised to see so many British editorials bemoaning U.S. action. Winston Churchill, for sure, was having a very unpleasant day in his justly commodious afterlife. Somehow or other, the civilization he had bequeathed to his people, rescued from the evil dictatorship others were hell-bent on inflicting upon it, had turned into a nation of quislings.

Imagine, then, how thrilled I was to see this yesterday:  an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Andrew Roberts, a British historian of World War II, apologizing for his countrymen, who seem far removed from the bulldogs of past glory. Quoting Churchill, who was chary of “the long, drawling, dismal tides of drift and surrender,” Roberts wonders whether the British “can be counted upon for much longer.”

It continues to astonish me that in some circles the sentiment carries on that we somehow did wrong by Mr. bin Laden. I can’t explain it, because I can’t understand it.

Scouring our bookshelves for a novel to read with my soon-to-be-nine-year-old son Dietrich, I landed the other night upon The Mote in God’s Eye, a first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle that I’d read in 1976 when I was 13. I wondered if it was too advanced for him — and his almost-13-year-old sister flat-out said it was, even though she’s never read it — but I figured that it’s got lots of space battles, and aliens, and that ultimately we’d make our way through it as successfully as his older brother and I had done with Journey to the Center of the Earth when he was the same age. So we started reading it the other night.

When you’re reading old science fiction, you’re reading what I’ll call projected alternate futures, the sort of things that make up storylines on “Fringe.” The book is set in 3017, but it’s important to remember that in a way that isn’t just over a thousand years in the future — it’s more properly one thousand forty-three years since its writing. So the authors, writing four years before the introduction of the home computer,  and 11 years before the release of the first PDA, are commendably prescient when they write, “Rod Blaine scowled at the words flowing across the screen of his pocket computer” — although one could say that if we’ve got “pocket computers” already, a millennium before the setting of their novel, it follows that we’ll have something far more advanced in the far future. (Unless, paraphrasing Einstein, we’re fighting World War IV with rocks.) At the same time, if  Niven and Pournelle are thoughtful about technology (and weaponry and the military), here’s something they weren’t thinking through in 1974:

“Blaine was rushed down the elevator to the Governor General’s floor. There wasn’t a woman in the building, although Imperial government offices usually bristled with them, and Rod missed the girls. He’d been in space a long time.”

So, somehow, in the future the military returns to all-male service, despite 4,000 years, to date, of  women serving in various military capacities; or the current military service seen in Israel, the U.S., Russia and, I believe, most industrialized or post-industrialized nations; or the projected futures depicted in artifacts of popular culture such as the Halo and Mass Effect games and seemingly every James Cameron movie.  Acceptance is often driven by pop culture (by way of example, see:  interracial relationships, homosexuality, etc.). That very anachronistic point of view seems far more 1974 than 3017.

But then, the best perspective on the skewed time-reality of the book came from  Dietrich himself, who, when I told him that I’d read this book “in the 1970’s,” tittered and said, “The 1970’s? That’s like 300 years ago!”

I read a lot:  newspapers, books, the internet, magazines, labels, you name it. As terrifying as I find, say, the chemical composition of whatever that is that Taco Bell is serving, nothing that I’ve read recently has alarmed me as much as this piece I’m going to link to in the next sentence. That’s because, if you didn’t like what you saw with the Great American Recession, hang on, ’cause here’s what happens if Congress doesn’t lift the debt ceiling. The Recession was merely the warmup; imagine the government failing to pay its vendors — i.e., U.S. businesses — and those businesses failing to pay their vendors, and those vendors and everyone above them in the food chain performing massive layoffs. How long do we have before this scenario starts to play out? About two weeks.

But wait, there’s more.

That particular problem has a solution:  a Congressional vote to increase the debt ceiling. That buys us more than two weeks. But it in no way addresses the actual problem — that most days, the U.S. Treasury takes in far less money than it needs to fund government operations. We’re all aware of this deficit, at least theoretically. But when you look at actual numbers, it gains a new cogency. Here goes:

On Monday, it took in almost $26 billion, but on Tuesday it took in less than $4 billion. Through Tuesday, the Treasury has received a little less than $1.3 trillion in taxes for fiscal year 2011, but has made payments of almost $7 trillion. The reason the payment number is so large is because it includes funds that were paid to Treasury’s lenders, whose securities matured and needed to be paid off. …

… But of course, because the federal government runs a budget deficit, the Treasury must borrow a little more on most days. On Monday, there was a net increase in Treasury borrowing of $33 billion, on Tuesday the increase was $11 billion. This is how much the national debt increased on those days. As of May 3, the total amount of debt outstanding was $14,280,140,000 and the debt limit is $14,294,000,000.

Yikes. Reading this made me want to run home to our secret hiding place and cash in every U.S. savings bond and treasury note we have. (Which, of course, would only exacerbate this problem. So please:  If you own bonds or notes, please stop reading this now and don’t do what I may well do.)  The looming debt limit is a cashflow problem that can be addressed; the deficit is the credit card that we’ve charged into oblivion and now can’t make the payments on.

Who is responsible for this? Well, all of us. We want more benefits, but we don’t want to pay for them. We want massive tax cuts and deductions, but we don’t want reduced services. It’s become the American way. If this plays out, the subprime mortgage meltdown will be just the opening act on a nightmarish drama.

Alexander Hamilton, who built history’s most stable currency, a currency that funded an ideal and an empire, is spinning in his grave.

So, apropos yesterday’s post, the Dalai Lama was here in Los Angeles yesterday and here’s what he said with regard to the killing of Osama bin Laden:

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.”

And yes, I went right onto Facebook and started posting that around.

Osama bin Laden may be only recently dead, but we’re already feeling the first attack — in the form of a computer virus disguised as video of his demise. (Click here for information about how to protect yourself from it.)

I wasn’t dancing in the streets Sunday night when I heard the news that bin Laden had been killed, but it felt undeniably good. Like many people, I knew someone killed that day, although only distantly. He was my brother’s best friend, a friend he’d had since high school, who was the original pilot of the second plane to hit the World Trade Center. When the terrorists took over the plane, they killed Victor, moved him out of the way, and plowed it into the tower, taking thousands more with them.  Ten years later, it remains unlikely that my brother will find a new best friend he also went to high school with 45 years ago.

Over on Facebook, I find it infuriating how many people I know have expressed what sounds to my ears like sadness over the killing of Osama bin Laden. Yes, I am mischaracterizing it a bit, but here’s the post that a respected and somewhat-known playwright friend of mine put on her wall:

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

I have several problems with this, not the least being that Martin Luther King Jr. never said this.  If he had said it — which, as I’ve noted, he did not — it would be good to remember that despite his obvious many accomplishments, he was never the leader of a nation so brazenly attacked and explicitly conspired against. With regard to the sentiment in the quote, I think if I’d had the chance to take out Hitler, I would have done plenty of rejoicing. Osama is lower down on that scale, but still makes my list.

In the past couple of days whenever I’ve had a few spare minutes, I’ve trawled around on my Facebook feed, seeking out “Friends” who’ve posted the illegitimate quote from “Martin Luther King Jr.” and responded accordingly. Here’s one of the replies I received:

The Dalai Lama said that if we kill Osama Bin Laden we will create 10 more.

I don’t know if the Dalai Lama said this, and if he did, I don’t know why we should care. His opinion on the matter seems to me irrelevant. And I’m just curious what the perceived alternative was to taking out Osama, now that we’d finally actually found him (with no thanks to the government of Pakistan, which has been pilfering my tax money and yours). This was a person who orchestrated an attack that killed thousands of innocent people and devastated the U.S. economy, and who was eager to do more of the same. Historically, all the accommodation in the world has done little to appease the hunger of terrorists and invaders, from Genghis Khan to Hitler to Osama. I’ve begun to think that Osama bin Laden’s final attack has been on the common sense of some of our own people.

This test helps you determine your knowledge of the wackiest commentators of today, Charlie Sheen, Muammar Qaddafi, and Glenn Beck. It’s amazing how interchangeable their lines are.

When his Tonight Show gig was falling apart, I became one of those millions who started to watch Conan O’Brien. I had never been much of a fan, and I didn’t like his Tonight Show gig at all in the first episode or two that I watched after its debut. But that final week or two had me, and a lot of people, evaluating. As I noted at the time, angry = funny.

As this extremely interesting piece from Fortune points out, O’Brien was the beneficiary of very new tools of his trade:  Twitter and Facebook, among others. Purely by luck, he was able to surf the sort of social-media tidal wave that swamped Hosni Mubarak last week. Everywhere we look, whether it’s on shirtless Congressmen on Craigslist or hapless television executives, the impact of new media has just started to be felt. These are the early days, and we haven’t figured out anywhere near what we think we have. Welcome to Gutenberg 2.0.

To quote my friend Terence Anthony, “Imagine how shitty life under Mubarak must’ve been for people to get this hyped over a military coup.” Precisely. It’s hard to get thrilled when the military assumes power. On the other hand, if Dick Cheney goes out of his way to praise you as an ally, as he did with Mubarak, I need you to go.

According to a new poll put out by the Onion, 1 in 5 Americans believe Barack Obama is a cactus.

Think about it:  Has he ever proved that he isn’t one? He certainly seems to needle some people.

I just heard that Christopher Lee resigned from Congress. It’s a sad day when Dracula is reduced to trolling for women on Craigslist.