When the highest court in the land practices hypocrisy…the end is not far away. While I did say in my last post that “judges and generals” were my new heroes, I was speaking of the judges that refused to aid and abet an overthrow of the government. There are of course grave problems with a conservative-packed judiciary. I will not walk back my hero statement concerning Trumpism, but problems with judges and generals remain. What are my problems with generals? They should be trying to convert this military industrial complex into a space industrial complex. Space Solar Power as the solution to climate change.
Age 62, IQ 101, education GED, yet I can see what all these hundreds of millions of geniuses at the top of the food chain are completely blind to: there is only one way for humankind to escape extinction and that is to end our finite lifespan and make it indefinite. What is true for the least of us is true for our entire species- either we all make it or none of us do. And the first and most obvious challenge to overcome is to delay death by freezing people without damage (The Great Rescue) so they can be revived when aging can be reversed (The Great Awakening).
Yes…when it was going on I figured the military was making sure Trump could not launch nukes. So I am happy about this and it goes along with judges and generals being my new heroes during early January. We all knew, at least the Americans not indoctrinated into his cult, that he was crazy. I knew it from the moment he came down the escalator.
I was talking with a church member the other day, someone with multiple degrees, who had been a military pilot, dean of a college, someone who had done amazing things with his life, and I was surprised how the conversation turned out. He told me I was a pretty intelligent person and inferred I was somehow in the same league with him. He said this because we have a similar worldview and this was a lesson to me. I don’t think he was trying to flatter me as he seemed quite genuine. There is no way I am anywhere close to that person in brainpower. We share a similar worldview because random environmental conditions led me away from all those things the average IQ is attracted to. Instead of sports and cars and endless popular culture distractions I liked to read books. After over half a century of reading those thousands of books, I am an expert at acting like I am smart, but I simply do not qualify as being highly intelligent. Make no mistake, I have a completely average IQ. If given a pass I might be able to learn to fly a military aircraft, and survive doing it a number of times, but it would eventually end badly. As smart as this person is, I, the less intelligent partner in the conversation, knew he was mistaken about me.
My fellow traveler made the mistake that most Americans are making. Most of us are just not that smart. Most of us are about average or below. Complex problem solving and the other aspects of a high IQ do not make a person some kind of higher life form, they just make them even more different when we are already each a unique being. Arguments like “Orchids and Dandelions” can be made explaining that the highly intelligent are in some ways quite fragile and this is why natural selection keeps so many trapped in stupid-world. Perhaps it is true and we need the tough-and-not-so-smart. And perhaps not. My own experience after over half a century of people-watching is that many who I would have certified as above average in intelligence, above me in that regard, were also true believers in some conspiracy theory I could see right through. So it is complicated. I am old now, with most of my life behind me, and what I have learned is there IS a profound mystery concerning our collective self-destructive behavior, and we must solve it if our species is to survive.
Harry Houdini related that it is the smart people who are the easiest to fool with stage illusions. Unfortunately for America the not-so-smart people seem to have their own illusions.
Progressive taxation and elimination of tax shelters would allow the conversion of the military industrial complex into a space industrial complex…along with a Nordic Model of universal health care and paid tuition. Why a space industrial complex? Space Solar Power as the solution to the climate change crisis. I have written about this before; The Green New Space Deal.
At 17:00 the story of when America began to disappear…we should not forget. Now we have been through a pandemic and insurrection and military withdrawal and what happened before that is fading. We must remember that money is the god of this world.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
The quote by Santayana is often used by conservatives as validating the idea of burning down everything and starting over. This is Orwellian in that it is the opposite of what Santayana meant and this is obvious when reading the full quote:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“
The tremendous wealth of America can be used to save humankind from the coming climate catastrophe and insure against other dangers…or continue to enable the obscene spending displays of the super-rich. Progressive taxation has always been the unseen struggle between the survival of civilization and continuing and ever-more-destructive cycles of boom and bust. For now civilization is in full retreat from the Neoliberal ideology driving humankind over a cliff.
“If they cannot be convinced, it is frustrating because any sane relatively intelligent human being will understand what the significance of the filibuster is-”
What Mary Trump is talking about is the Trumpist’s putting Donald Trump back in office if the filibuster is not removed. The filibuster is what will allow the right wing to keep all the recent anti-voting laws in effect and inevitably allow Republican controlled state legislatures to reject election results (and put Trump back in office).
This is going to happen and yet nothing is being done to stop it. Democracy in America may be about to end. If the right wing does not accept election results then a bloody civil war is in our future.
At 6:14 Sarah Chayes explains what happened in Afghanistan and in my view it is close to what is happening in America. When nobody trusts anything they are told what is left is the grifter and bully doing what they want.
I have voted only three times in my long life…for Ross Perot because he wanted to stop off-shoring U.S. jobs, for Barrack Obama in hopes he would “send the helicopters in” and get us out of the middle east, and for Joe Biden because of Trump. The jobs were offshored, Obama did not get us out, but Biden seems to be trying to get it all done. And the one percent are, as they always have, doing their best to end democracy in America. That white people are not replacing themselves is bad news because it is one of those sparks that can ignite a catastrophe. White grievance could burn it all down. I am scared.
The lesson to be learned from Afghanistan, to make the lives and treasure spent worth the sacrifice, is to realize it is not money that matters, it is we the people. Our loyalty and goodwill depends upon those in authority working for our welfare instead of maintaining the obscene wealth of the few. The Neoliberal monster slowly consuming society will destroy America as surely as corruption corroded Afghanistan till now there is nothing left to steal.
A couple years ago on a break I disagreed with a coworker on some political issues and the question he asked keeps haunting me. I did not realize at that time he was actually inferring I was not really an “American.” I believed we were conversing in good faith as concerned citizens. But now I understand that clearly there was no good faith then and there is none to be found on the right now. Those of us who see through the big lie and see the right working to end democracy face a looming catastrophe. The right has devolved over the last half a decade into a closed culture, a cult, of borderline fascism. They believe in a different America than I and the majority of the population do. The question that follows is which America is going to exist five years from now? Again, there are two contrasting worldviews in direct conflict and our divided nation may actually enter into a civil war over them in the near future.
Since the Reagan Revolution the belief system called Neoliberalism has been the operating system of the human species on planet Earth. Money is the god of this world. There is no argument about this…it is the truth. A truth the right has propagandized in an Orwellian fashion into the greatest good when it is of course fundamentally evil. Neoliberals do not recognize any inherent good in telling the truth and lie like the rest of us breathe. The only good, the only sacred activity, is acquiring wealth. It is an absolutely amoral philosophy deifying profit as the singular holy and all powerful force. We are now dealing with the consequences of four decades of this satanic religion corrupting society.
My coworker is typical of tens of millions of Trumpists who have a profoundly distorted worldview and this leads me to truly believe something really bad could be in store for us all…soon. I am worried. When I speak about “The Nordic Model” to Trumpists they go straight to branding me a socialist and a Marxist every time. There is no hope for these people. It is not only the hardcore right; many have been infected with conspiracy theories and I have repeatedly encountered intelligent college graduate people who believe some of this nonsense. The destruction of credibility is a recently perfected formula for generating chaos. This Firehose of Falsehood, a well known Russian disinformation tactic, is now in full play in America.
Destroying the truth just happens to be the best cover for maintaining obscene wealth. Nobody has the time to vote for progressive taxation when the communists are coming to eat your infant. The masses have been manipulated by the one percent to the point where there is a real danger of a fascist overthrow of the government and where that leads nobody can predict. Reading The Turner Diaries, racists will say a likely outcome of their white nationalist coup will be “The Day Of The Rope.” White grievance is the underlying driver and will spin out of control. Any who doubt this is a possibility should consider the laws being passed by red states blatantly arranging for their coming election results to be thrown out. It is transparently obvious the only way for conservatives to stay in power is to end democracy. Anyone can see it yet nobody knows what to do about it. And when it happens only one avenue will be left. Violence.
“-Stevens argued that the unique qualities of corporations and other artificial legal entities made them dangerous to democratic elections. These legal entities, he argued, have perpetual life, the ability to amass large sums of money, limited liability, no ability to vote, no morality, no purpose outside profit-making, and no loyalty. Therefore, he argued, the courts should permit legislatures to regulate corporate participation in the political process.”
“Full Orwellian Inversion” is a good term to describe the revisionism being attempted. What Mika’s father talked about long ago was “Balkanization”, and every day I am more and more afraid of America melting down. Very few people believe it can happen but some millions want it to happen and that is incredibly dangerous.
A fairly bad sci-fi movie…but this scene has much in it to, as the talking heads say, “unpack.”
America is involved in an invisible civil war right now the rest of the world is very much aware of. Other nations are looking on and talking about it but here we cannot see the forest for the trees. Since 1945 the human race has collectively trembled at the thought of nuclear war and a new dark age, if not extinction. Just when it seemed the threat of nuclear warfare was diminishing we are now faced with civil unrest and the possible unraveling of democracy.
I tend to blame it on smart phones. I do not own one but I have certainly been a witness to the effects of this technology. The worst feature is the time that was previously used watching and contemplating the news from a few trusted sources is now…a thing of the past. There was a time not so long ago that a significant percentage of the population had some knowledge of the history of our species and how the different systems of government mostly have not succeeded. The single most successful attempt at a government seeking to do the most good for the most people as I have explained it to some of my coworkers is incomprehensible. They simply do not have the foundation to understand it. The history of Embedded Liberalism, which sustained America before and after World War II, is now almost completely unknown. Demagoguery has become the new guiding light. Guiding us off a cliff.
Donald Trump took his campaign against American democracy to North Carolina on Saturday and offered a rambling, grievance-laden harangue that ought to catalyze Republican leaders to repudiate a man whose lies, bigotry and irrationality are turning their party into a moral sinkhole.
Fat chance, I know. But Republicans should watch Trump’s 90-minute diatribe in its entirety. They might realize that tying their fate to a washed-up demagogue and the extremists he cultivates is not only an affront to decency. It could also be a colossal political mistake.
Most Washington Republicans say they want to “move on” from Trump. But they avoid anything that might offend his delicate sensibilities or those of his supporters.
Sorry, guys, but you won’t be able to “move on” to the responsible governing you purport to believe in until you confront the anti-democratic virus in your party and the vile man spreading the contagion.
And spread it Trump did during his 90-minute soliloquy at the state GOP convention in Greenville, N.C. Almost everything he said drew raucous cheers — except, curiously, his taking full credit for the pandemic-ending vaccines.
Now, I suspect that a substantial majority of Americans — certainly this one — would prefer to ignore Trump and let him rave into a void.
Alas, there is no void, as his adoring crowd demonstrated Saturday.
They warmed to his staple attacks on “criminal aliens” and “murderers, drug dealers”; his calls for China to pay $10 trillion in global “reparations” for covid-19 damage; all of it peppered with distorted critiques of President Biden’s policies. To cover up his own pandemic failures, he joined his allies’ escalating campaign against Anthony Fauci, whom he called “a hell of a promoter” but also “a radical masker” who had been “wrong on almost every issue.”
Trump’s most energetic moments came in service to two of his favorite causes: the “disgrace” of the 2020 election and defending himself.
One falsehood followed another about “thousands and thousands of people, dead people” casting ballots, dropboxes as tools of fraud in “the most corrupt election in the history of our country” and the supposed manipulation of mail ballots by Democrats.
And referring to the ongoing investigations of his business activities, Trump denounced New York’s “radical-left prosecutors” and their “crusade to inflict pain on me.”
You might dismiss it all as a nostalgic road show but for this: Polls show that most Republicans believe Trump’s preposterous election claims. Republican politicians in at least 14 states have deployed Trump’s fantasies as excuses to pass voter-suppression measures, some of which read as if they were translated directly from the Russian or the Hungarian. Imitating the efforts of strongmen abroad to undercut free electoral competition, some of these laws empower partisan bodies to set aside honest ballot counts.
And while Washington Republicans coddle Trump or fall silent, many in their party embrace the lunatic fringe.
Take the bizarre QAnon conspiracy. Pollsters at PRRI recently asked Americans if they agreed or disagreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
An astonishing 23 percent of Republicans agreed, and 28 percent of Republicans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Not being a rocket scientist myself, it might be well to try and effect that old liberal saw and actually educate the average person (with an IQ of 100). This needs to be done in a reasonably short period of time (45 minutes is, if I recall correctly, how long the average person can pay attention). Unfortunately, as I mentioned, smart phones have chopped that 3 quarters of an hour down to likely less than ten minutes. I suspect four “episodes” of about ten minutes and not too densely packed with information, is what might work. My father once told me there is a “rule of three” that can be applied to most things and three points to each episode seems to be a good idea. So I am going to try and do that…and as my daughter urged me, put it into a podcast.
One Dash One
Communism is an ideology whose main feature is the abolition of private property.
Capitalism is an ideology whose main feature is the unalienable right to private property.
Socialism can be seen as a system utilizing both features in the most utilitarian (the greatest good for the greatest number) way possible. It is not that hard to understand.
There is socialism that leans way to the left and socialism that leans way to the right.
Much of the political violence that has brought down empires through the centuries and is presently plaguing America in the form of Trumpism concerns these three principle talking points- Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism. One of my wife’s teachers in seminary, very famous in theological circles, taught her- and she taught me- about “latifundialization”, and in this first episode I want to talk about the term latifundialization. I believe it is the best way to understand the three principle political talking points in our society today, which are Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism.
Historians have a saying that we are all children of Rome because much of the way the modern world works can be traced back to ancient Rome. Our representative democracy is an example of this. Rome, like most Empires, started out as a rural community of farmers that banded together to collectively protect their individual parcels of land. Collective and individual are two key words here that are often spun and misrepresented by politicians and demagogues. The term “collective” is endlessly demonized as just another word for the great satan known as communism but it is really an idea that must NOT be demonized. Cooperation as a collective operation is what makes human society possible. A poem written in1624, “No Man is an Island”, explains this quite well. No house stands divided against itself.
As Rome became an empire through the centuries the small farmer gradually became no more as rich and powerful individuals and families acquired and combined all the land into giant estates called Latifundia. This same story plays out in the bible and in almost every nation across history. Capitalism is essentially about ownership of land, and in the modern world, possession of that magical property called money. In the ancient world it was also ownership of other human beings. Slavery was the civilization-building fossil fuel of the ancient world and it was slaves that worked the great estates of the rich. In 1917, as the first world war raged, Russia’s impoverished masses, many who were essentially slaves in everything but name, rebelled. The corrupt Czarist regime fell and thus the evil empire known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Union, was soon to be born. Communism was on the march.
The story I am telling leaves many details out of course. How much this misrepresents depends on the preexisting bias of the writer and reader. My favorite telling of the story of the American New Deal is damned as pure nonsense by those on the far right and is also maligned by the left. I have related it on this blog before and it goes like this:
The greatest danger to democracy after the civil war (until recently) was generated by technology. Fossil fuel fired factories and steam engines in ships and locomotives began to pour wealth into individual pockets in amounts never seen before in history. The legend is that Teddy Roosevelt saved America from the Robber Barons at the turn of the century but the corruption they had created finally destroyed the U.S. economy in 1929. The communists and labor unions suddenly became quite powerful as near-starving soon-to-be homeless people tend to come together “in solidarity.” The second President Roosevelt, FDR, was approached and told if he did not fix the problem then another Russian revolution was certain- this time in America. Thus was born The New Deal with progressive taxation as high as 91 percent on the top earners, social security, jobs programs, and unemployment insurance.
This system is called Imbedded Liberalism. The term liberalism here actually has the old meaning which is the opposite of what people think of as liberalism today. It is essentially socialism that leans way to the right. It allows people to be relatively rich and keep a certain amount of the wealth they acquire. This is absolute blasphemy to capitalists and very unsatisfying to communists. It is about redistributing a “fair” part of the wealth from the few to the many by way of progressive taxation. The more you make the more you pay. Capitalists call it blatant theft from the individual and communists consider any private wealth to be theft to start with. See how that works? What this system seeks to accomplish is to prevent a few percent of the population from impoverishing the rest or overthrowing democracy by way of their obscene wealth.
The rich pursue propaganda and demagoguery as the path to preserving their vast wealth while the poor pursue…getting a job so they can pay their bills.
It is the demagogue-
(noun “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.” a gifted demagogue with particular skill in manipulating the press“)
-and the new technology of algorithms used by social media companies that have pushed the mightiest nation in history to the brink of a second civil war.
Out of control capitalism with a few living in luxury owning everything while the many labor in squalor with nothing is nothing new and goes back thousands of years; latifundialization. To manipulate the wage slave into being “happy” and worshipping their semi-divine masters is the oldest game of all. We are told we too can be gods with a little g if we work hard enough. The reality is that only a tiny fraction of our labor is returned to us. Most of it goes in the pockets of those in the layers of control above us who do very little except make decisions. The decisions that benefit us least of all. That is the truth about greed and amassing wealth- it is a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest game and almost all of us are born into the bottom of an artificial food chain. In reality we are not lions and lambs; we are all human. Some are smarter but not deserving of 740,000 times more than the rest (Bezos fortune upon retiring at age 57).
They will tell you they do deserve every penny and the rest of us do not. You decide. In 1789 the French, inspired by the American Revolution, decided the rich did not deserve to own everything while they went hungry and soon after there were many Guillotines.
The anarchy and chaos of revolutions often result in something far worse than the original injustice. The odds are not good. Fascism is not good.
We all seem to have forgotten about Oklahoma City. As Afghanistan is abandoned and about to plunge back into tribal warfare, the U.S. is now facing an army of McVeighs all considering a path to realizing their own destiny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
Ice on the Moon 