Every animal, to be sustainable, requires food, water and cover, and the ability to obtain and maintain a supply of same. These are fundamental issues of the nature of being.

How one goes about getting them is contingent upon the environment--not just the ecological one, but the social and economic aspects as well.

Jean Jacques Rousseau spoke of a social compact, where people, serving their individual needs, also work together to solve problems bigger than any one individual.

Some examples are trade, agriculture, war, lifting a heavy object, brainstorming--you get the idea. Institutions that rely on this concept are government, corporations and associations (i.e., labor unions, special interest groups, etc.).

Like any principle, this idea can go too far, or be twisted for extraordinary--and/or unjust--gains to certain individuals.

Sustainability of the social compact requires, therefore, guiding principles that make predatory behavior, whether initial or responsive, grounds for expulsion and perhaps reasoned (and just) correction by the collective.

Yes, I said it, Ayn Rand fans (and I am one, with reservations), collective. Let no one think that there is not a spontaneous or institutional collective around virtually every corner.

Back to principles of making predatory behavior illegal: thus we have laws. An institution's founding law is a charter or constitution. The people of the collective, wanting it to be sustainable, establish guiding principles and the means of administering and adjusting them.

Such principles must acknowledge that the individual is the building block of the collective, that if individuals are suffering because of the collective, it undermines the collective's sustainability: it will eventually lead to division and probably hostilities, as noted above.

In the end, we can either have an immensely complex, incromprehensible and unnavigable maze of laws and rules, or we can simplify...

"Do whatever you want, but don't harm another, because you will be held accountable."

Hence, the American revolution. The real one, way beyond the war. An understanding of human behavior.

And the U.S. Constitution, which we have never fully understood or lived by.

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The United States is far from its founding principles. The recent election demonstrates this: when the constitutionalist is passed over for those who defy the Constitution (despite their oaths to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic), the people have forgotten, and when that happens, the government is renegade.

I have high hopes for Americans and America, but I think we've chosen captivity for a long time, and we need to start uprooting the ideas that lead us to so choose.

Challenge everything you've been taught. Think it through. Don't do something stupid and impulsive as you challenge, just think. Thinking feels good. Do it.

"Sustainable." Doing a search on the word got me a zillion hits on ecology and on things like sustainable farms, etc.

Well, that's part of what I'm on about. ... Sorta.

Those of us who watch government, the U.N. and other nefarious organizations (that is, those of us who see them as nefarious) have a certain distaste for the word, because it's used in attempts to justify many restrictions and impositions that actually undermine the larger matter of sustainable civilization.

Focusing the concept too much on environmental issues, we've come up with (for example) a thousand ways of decreasing supply of real estate and increasing the legal requirements for building and thus greatly increasing the cost of living. Ack!

Oh, it's great for those, say, in construction trades that supply the required systems, etc. "It's the economy, stupid." Yup, we've created an industry, another one more focused on getting our money than on supplying a real, needed service.

Ok, backing up a little... I have nothing against anyone who wants to plot their property for ecological sustainabiity. I happen to call that self-sufficiency, which is another form of sustainability, one that we aren't generally focusing on as a society.

So I'll focus on it.

I have nothing against any company that thinks about sustainability in, say, marketing and product development. Oh, wait. The kind of sustainability we see most commonly there is the release of products in unnecessarily small increments, or with unnecessarily narrow capabilities, so that you have to buy, buy, buy. Get alowng, li'l dowggies.

Example. I had an HP 27S calculator that I loved. It did everything I wanted in a calculator. It wasn't idealized to any particular function (business, scientific, statistical), but it did everything. And after 20 year of owning it, I finally managed to break it, so I set out to get a replacement.

But "sustainability of market share," I guess, led HP to separate some of these functions--not to offer them on subsequent products.

I don't consider that a sustainable market practice, since it ticks me off so bad, and it should tick YOU off, too. I don't like being herded around like some farm animal by cynical market ploys. Or cynical merchandising, where the store rearranges the shelves just so you have to actually LOOK for that commodity you came to buy, increasing the chance you'll make an impulse purchase. I have the resistance to impulse; no problem there. What irks me is having to go search for the darned thing.

And, "sustainably," it would appear that the rest of the industry for calculators has all made the switch I noted above, to "specialized" calculators. I see, however, from some comments on forums I visited when I started looking for a 27S to replace mine, that anyone that ever owned one either loves it and still has it, or loved it and resents not being able to replace it.

How sustainable is that, HP? Texas Instruments? Etc? I suppose probably quite sustainable, until some manufacturer comes along who cares more about establishing market share by giving people what they want (duh) than by manipulating them.

And government. How many times have you looked at what's done there, and said, "Follow the money. Yup, someone is being handed gold here." Think about all those golden parachutes for failed banks and bankers, paid for by your--and your babies' and their babies'--hard earned, well, tax burden. Ah, the real estate bubble that government and bankers made together and capitalized on magnificently, and it burst and we bail them out?

How long Americans and others will suffer that sick mercantilist (read also as: socialist, royalist, crooked) approach is a good guess, but I'm seeing an awful lot of aggravation out there, and I smell change in the air. Outright upheaval. I hear it on forums and at the grocery store, and what I hear ain't pretty.

It's getting to be time to know where I'll hide, to weather the storm.

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A sustainable individual, business, government, society or whatever else is sustainable because it doesn't shoot itself in the foot with its policies and practices. What works great for today may blow up in our faces tomorrow, if it isn't thought out in terms of longer term consequences.

All sustainability is, really, is looking a few appropriate increments into the future to see that unintended consequences of your actions today won't kill you. Or cause you other significant problems.

It's really that simple in concept, but it falls under the heading of "common sense ain't so common." And "The devil is in the details."

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My mission in life is to help inspire and teach a nation of self-reliant but sociable people who will help one another in event of need for collective action.

That describes a sustainable nation. And it can never be accomplished as long as we fail to grasp the sustainability of simple, fair dealings and leaving one another alone and free.

In a nutshell, real sustainability in our social and economic systems, including national authorities, will come from respectable behavior, that shows as much respect as it demands.

Watching the U.S. electoral process this year has given me a decidedly gloomy feeling. I don't think either of the "major" candidates understands or cares about his Oath of Office, or much of anything else except manipulation of the electorate and cozying up to powerful funders and media.

Ron Paul would have been an excellent choice, but as you can see, he was ignored by the media and their corporate monster owners. From nickel and dime contributors, Dr. Paul raised record funds. This means he has a great deal of support from the grass roots. But as is also visible, the grass roots is not the concern of the media or the other "elites" that really direct and misguide America.

So now we have two candidates who will be loyal to the mercantile elite and to heck with the everyday citizen. This is a remarkable cause and indication of unsustainability in society and government. And business.

As noted in the Declaration of Independence, governments only exist at the willingness of the people to put up with them--at the "sufferance" of the people, is how they (the Declaration's writers/editors) phrased it. And the people are finding our government increasingly insufferable.

And the great They of our government are quite aware. Police and other law enforcement are on alert for election day, half (or more) expecting there to be unrest and other notable indications of refusal to suffer "business as usual" from our electoral nonsense and governmental mission creep.

The United States was invented by a generation of souls who understood that government was like fire: a dangerous servant and, God forbid, a fearsome master. They set up government to receive a small--a very limited--delegation of power from the people, to protect freedoms and use the concept of rights to assure that we would never again be up against a government that served the purposes of a certain few in office and who influence those offices by threat or purchase.

Well, the Funders did an excellent job. But the people have not held the government to those fundamentals, and this is what we get.

It's time to vote the buggers out, folks. It's time that if you don't like either major candidate, vote third party or write in a valid write-in candidate. Let them know that we are indeed watching and disgusted, that we will keep voting the buggers out until those who get in office understand that their oaths are to the Constitution, to protect it from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic, including their pet pork projects and their corporate masters.

No, it's not a good idea to get forceful and go to unrest or "revolution," as many chant. It's time to really understand the sustainability of a society in which a government does what the U.S. government was designed to do, and little more. And then to teach your friends and acquaintances what that means.

We were supposed to be free of government for the most part. Now it rules in every discoverable area of our lives. Time to push back the tide, using knowledge, persuasion and the vote. If enough people understand this, it can be done. And it must be done, or we'll find ourselves under open martial law, and living worse than the colonists who rejected King George in 1776.