Ran's latest post to his site has some fascinating observations about what is happening in our world. Since the items on his front page often change/disappear, and he has licensed it under creative commons, I'm going to go ahead and reproduce it here.

1. At least a third of Americans do not fit any political category. They're hedonists, living for alchohol/drug highs, or sex, or if they're rich, snowboarding. When circumstances force these people to become aware of politics, I don't know what they're going to do, but it's important.

2. At least another third are in terrible physical shape, slowly shambling down the aisle of the train, huffing up tiny stairways. This phenomenon cuts across all social classes. When things get tough, these people will not participate in a revolution, or attempt to steal your food. They will crumple up and quietly die.

3. Americans demand constant stimulation. There were the cell phone talkers, often calling the same person repeatedly, and the music listeners, and a few book readers, and the chatters, whose conversation was mostly unfunny references to sex and alcohol followed by loud forced laughter. The only person I saw besides myself who could sit quietly for hours was some kind of foreigner.

4. In Havre Montana, they told us the train would make a brief stop for "refueling" and not to leave our seats. Why do we have to stay in our seats for refueling? It turns out the real reason was so the Reichssicherheitshauptamt could come through the train. One agent asked me what country I was a citizen of, and a bit later another agent asked me where I was from and where I was going. Of course I was not permitted to ask them anything, or lock them in a cell if I didn't like the answers. The whole thing was supposedly an immigration check, but as racist foilheads are fond of pointing out, the government doesn't care about illegal immigrants. The real purpose was to more deeply habituate us to obeying people in uniform, and the end of that road, whether we get that far or not, is the death camp.

5. The American right is trying to kill Amtrak, using the excuse that it requires a government subsidy to survive. Nobody mentions that the airlines enjoy much larger subsidies, not to mention the meat industry, the oil industry, the weapons industry, and so on. The right only wants to subsidize the most wasteful and destructive things, because they hate life and want to destroy everything. I can already see the plan: Kill the train lines, then the bus lines, so that the only way to travel between cities is by owning a car, which is highly regulated and unaffordable without a full-time labor assignment, or by flying, which is impossible for dissidents and requires humiliating rituals of submission. Then gas prices will make car travel harder, and when airline prices finally rise to realistic levels, only the rich will be able to travel between regions.