We have been warned to beware of radicals in the Democratic Party by multiple media outlets, pundits and politicians in the last couple of weeks. The progressives are out of touch with mainstream America, we’re told.  These cautionary words and videos will presumably help the Democratic Party win in 2020.  I’m calling bullshit.

If you look at polling, roughly two thirds of Americans were satisfied with the direction the country was heading around the turn of the century.  It began a steady downward trajectory in 2000 excepting momentary boosts from war, after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. For almost two decades, a majority of Americans have been pessimistic about the road we’re on.  For the last ten years, less than a third of Americans think we’re on course. Plain and simple English: people aren’t happy with the way things are, and they haven’t been for a while.

Offering ‘more of the same’ to people who are unhappy with ‘more of the same’ is not a recipe for electoral success.  More of the same has been the goal of elites since the dawn of time because things are already good for them. The problem is that things aren’t so good for everyone else and so the folks on top have to spend money to convince the rest of us that business as usual is in all of our best interests.

Press, pundits, party hacks and P.R. campaigns are paid to define politicians as radical or sensible to influence our feelings about them for the benefit of people paying for commercials or funding think tanks.  Radical conjures up images of hairy, bomb-throwing hippies bent on forcing your family out of their suburban house and onto a beet collective – dangerous. Sensible conjures up images of a clean cut professional who can be relied on to watch over you, your family and your money – safe.

The “radical” du jour is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29 year old former bartender from The Bronx. She is young, smart, direct, media savvy, beautiful and seems to be authentic. Those things might make her Radically Awesome but they don’t make her a radical.  What makes her a “radical” is her stance on a few key issues.

There are five issues which, if more than lip service is paid to, will get a politician labelled as a “radical”: Green New Deal, Medicare For All, Legalized Marijuana, Gun Reform and Income Inequality.

A Green New Deal is a common sense approach to the apocalyptic threat of runaway climate change. A rapid retooling of the economy to renewable/regenerative technology, combined with the infrastructure necessary to mitigate/survive climate change will provide plenty of jobs. Moneyed interests fighting a Green New Deal are the oil and gas industries, agricultural industries, airline industries, financial & securities industries and the utilities industry. A Green New Deal is a rational step forward: Keynesian economics has been scientifically proven to work and we already have most of the technology we need. Option B is to let the clock run out in eleven years and watch the end of the world kick into high gear. Politicians who support option B are called sensible.

Medicare For All is something every other developed country has already. Our current health care system is the most expensive and inefficient in the world.  What people people want is when you’re sick enough, you can go to a hospital, if you need treatment or an operation, you get it. The moneyed interests trying to prevent Medicare For All are the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry. and the securities & investments industries. Politicians who support Medicare For All are called “radical”.  Option B is to continue allowing  wealthy executives and shareholders to shove Americans into poverty while the general health of the nation declines. Politicians who support option B are called sensible.

Gun control is another thing every other developed country implements. It’s reasonable to restrict access to firearms, especially for abusers and the mentally unwell. Countries which have enacted gun control do not suffer from the monthly mass slaughter of innocents. Option B is to continue to allow almost anyone to possess a firearm and let them choose which people should live or die when they’ve had a bad day.  Politicians who support option B are called sensible.

Legalized marijuana seeks to legalize a plant that has been tied to creativity, trade, medicine and religion for thousands of years.  Marijuana’s federal prohibition prevents research into its pain-relieving medicinal compounds at a time Americans are dropping dead in record numbers of opioid addiction. Marijuana’s prohibition costs states over $3 billion a year to enforce and damages the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year arrested for possession.  States with legal recreational marijuana have created multi-billion dollar industries which have led to increased tax revenue, lower opioid use, fewer DUIs, lower alcohol and tobacco  consumption and decreased violent crime. The moneyed interests opposed to legalization are the alcohol industry, pharmaceutical industry and the private prison industry.  Option B is to continue to waste billions and crush the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens a year,  prevent life saving drugs from reaching the sick and invite organized crime participation in a multi-billion dollar domestic market.  Politicians who support Option B are called sensible.

Income inequality has become a steadily worsening problem in the United States.  Essentially, our laws have been written for the benefit of corporations and a few hundred  families for the last generation with predictable results.  Extreme wealth accrues in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population while everyone else gets squeezed by rising costs and diminished lives. This gives the plutocratic elite more money to sink into politics. Public goods like water, education, institutional and physical infrastructure are bankrupted and/or  auctioned off to money making schemes.  Restricting money in politics as well as pushing for higher marginal and capital gains taxes are rational policies to deal with this ever growing problem. Addressing income inequality in the U.S. is opposed by the financial industry,  the real estate industry, business associations and the energy industry. Politicians who advocate for policies to deal with income inequality are labeled as “radical.” Option B is a continuation of business as usual, leaving our children as serfs in a post-apocalyptic feudal dystopia.  Politicians who support Option B are called sensible.

We know where the money and therefore our Congress stands, but what do the American people think after the avalanche of lies thrown their way by the well-funded soothsayers of the media/political machine?

Surprisingly, we believe our own eyes.

80 percent of all registered voters support a Green New Deal. 70 percent of registered voters support Medicare For All.  62 percent of voters want marijuana legalized. 60 percent of registered voters support stricter  gun control.  63 percent of Americans say the economic system unfairly favors powerful interests. Most people consider policies to address these issues particularly responsible despite what the professionals tell them.

The real radicals are the ones telling you it’s okay if the human race goes extinct from climate change in your children’s lifetime, that Americans can’t afford healthcare unless they’re rich, that guns should be easy for anyone to get a hold of, that draconian marijuana laws are just or that income inequality is no big deal.

The sooner the establishment gets it through their thick skulls that these issues are broadly supported by the American people rather than “radicals” and Russian influence, the sooner they can win a mandate for the White House and give the American people a government we can believe in again.

The government shutdown will continue another day or another year according to President Trump. It is, ostensibly, about a wall and border security. The talking heads on television tell us if the President doesn’t get $5 billion for the wall, federal employees, contractors and beneficiaries will continue to suffer. It is a manufactured crisis. It is not about building a wall, it’s to  create suffering.

The proof of his shutdown intention was Trump’s complaint today about it not being a manufactured crisis, a pathological attempt to further gaslight the American people.

“You know what solves it?” asked Donald Trump in a 2014 interview with Fox News before answering himself, “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great.”

Want to know what causes riots the world over? Hunger.  Want to know when funding for food stamps runs out? March.

If the President can stretch out the government shutdown just seven more weeks, hunger will descend on the 38 million Americans who rely on Food Stamps to get by. They will be joining the million federal employees and contractors whose financial lives will have already been destroyed. There will be no FEMA, CDC, HHS or Agriculture Department to deal with the attendant crisis, thereby magnifying it.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the President’s 2014 interview. There’s also Steve Bannon, the self-proclaimed architect of Trump’s election victory claiming pre and post election that he was a Leninist bent on destroying the establishment. You might remember those articles about it back when he was Trump’s chief strategist and an NSC advisor.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but Russia did help Trump get into office.  Putin would enjoy more civil disorder in the United States. Russian disinformation outlets and their American lackeys have been pushing American Civil War 2.0 for over a year now. Just this morning the head of Roscosmos State Space Corporation, the Russian NASA, said he couldn’t travel to the U.S. because it’s ” engulfed in its second civil war now.”

It seems to me that if people in Trump’s corner keep saying the same thing and share the same goals, maybe we should listen to them.

Ask yourself, why would the President delay the funding for the wall until now? The wall was his primary campaign promise and unofficial slogan (narrowly beating “lock her up”).  He had such control over both houses of Congress his first two years he was able to appoint dozens of nimrods to federal courts, place incompetents and criminals as cabinet secretaries and manage to get a trillion dollar tax cut, plunging the national debt off a cliff. Do you mean to tell me  he could get a trillion dollars for multi millionaires but couldn’t get five billion for a wall?

Trump and his reality show team of villains aren’t as stupid as many believe despite their carelessness..  Crisis are planned out in advance. It’s how the Russians, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone have always operated – create the problem, then be the hero for solving it. The wall wasn’t pushed through with the rest of 2017 and 2018’s Congressionally-approved insanity because it would be needed later as a political weapon. Immigration was to be Trump’s issue in the midterms, hence why we were bombarded with stories about a dangerous migrant caravan that necessitated deploying the army, then promptly disappeared after the election. I fully expect to see another caravan while the government is shut to further incite the base.

If the Democratic Congress caves on the wall, there will be a new ridiculous demand.  The goal isn’t the demand, it’s the chaos and suffering that the President and his die hard supporters believe necessary to create the conditions for truly radical change.  Remember, they’ve told us all of this in advance because they’re so full of braggadocio and menace they literally cannot help themselves.

As the Mueller investigation closes in on Individual 1, Trump and his allies have every incentive to push Humpty Dumpty off the wall.   Psychologists were in agreement from day one of his Presidency that Trump would pull down the country rather than accept justice, humiliation and defeat. There are no longer any adults left in the room to manage Presidential Day Care.

Trump is a cornered animal who sees the only way out of his predicament to be something he’s actually good at – wrecking shit.  He’ll try to make his Hail Mary pass to beat Mueller using lots of incitement and some active measures from his Russian friends.

It’s imperative that people not take the bait and understand the long con. Don’t fall for the head fakes. Keep faith that the wheels of justice will likely grind the administration to dust before the “Destroy America to Make It Great,” crowd can carry through with their plan.

The sooner he’s out of power, the safer we are.

Sabotage – Beastie Boys

Much of our foreign and defense policy has been hidden from us since 9/11.  This decision to render our strategic goals and tactical choices opaque to the American people is inexcusable in a representative system and has not made us safer.

After 9/11, we were encouraged to keep faith with the government in order to protect ourselves from another mass casualty terror attack. Since that time our trust has been eaten away by one revelation after another: Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction or an association with Al Qaeda, we ran torture facilities in Iraq and several other countries, we mass-surveilled the American public, we executed people worldwide using drone strikes, we replaced Qaddafi in Libya with chaos, we armed and equipped multiple parties in the Syrian civil war, one of which was Al Qaeda, before placing our own troops on the ground.

We’ve been told that we are operating to protect our country from terrorism ostensibly executed by Islamic extremists.  In over 17 years of operations we’ve caused the number of terror attacks worldwide to skyrocket, collapsed several Middle Eastern regimes, armed and equipped allied terrorists, supported a genocidal war in Yemen and helped create a wave of migrants flooding into Europe, destabilizing out closest allies.

I know I’m not alone in asking “What the fuck are we doing?”

If we’re there to build representative government with first amendment protections and some level of human rights we are failing miserably. If we’re there to block construction of energy pipelines through Afghanistan and Syria in the latest geo-political version of The Great Game, we’re succeeding.  The fact is we don’t know, as none of our leadership has explicitly laid out our goals other than a murky nod towards stability, which seems to produce greater instability with each passing year.

Each of our “allies” in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan) have their own agenda quite different from ours, none of which is geared towards “stability”.  We also have an intermingling of private interests and money going back to the start of this fiasco thanks to Bush/Cheney’s decision to privatize the war to fatten up corporations they owned a stake in.  Add to this mix a media that more or less performs P.R. for corporations and the government and it’s no shock we have a voting public that understands less of what we’re doing around the world than our strategic competitors. Flynn, Russia, MBS, Netanyahu and the incoming administration apparently took advantage of this opacity to try and create a grand bargain to personally enrich themselves two years ago.

The horrific mess continues to play out with millions of lives at stake and no clear strategic goals other than attriting an endless supply of terrorists or spreading the conflagration to perhaps Iran or the Bekaa Valley.

We don’t know where our foreign policy is leading us because we’re not in charge of it. Instead, decision-making is done on the fly by an executive branch beholden to the whims of our “allies”.  Turkey’s Erdogan wishes to supplant Saudi Arabia as leader of the Sunni world and get a share of the oil and gas money from the Middle East and Cyprus. He claims to have proof tying the leader of Saudi Arabia to the murder of a U.S. journalist and the implied receipts of the Trump administration’s forewarning of the event.  Israel’s Netanyahu wants to expand settlements and choke off the remaining Arab population while pushing back Iranian influence in the Levant. He is about to be indicted for corruption and his former intelligence agents meddled in the U.S. 2016 election.  Saudi Arabia’s MBS, in the midst of annihilating his domestic enemies and the Houthis next door, balances using the U.S. to push back Iran in the Gulf while teaming up with Israel to entice the Russians into putting a block on Turkey and ignoring their actions against Tehran. MBS has financial relationships with the President and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. I won’t even go into the separate Kurdish factions with their myriad funders, regional alliances, smuggling and land claims on four neighboring states.

And that’s just our allies.  Meanwhile, Russia seems to own a significant portion of our executive and legislative branch with kompromat while waging self-proclaimed cyberwar war against us. China reinforces its supply and military bases along the route to its newest acquisition, Africa, as we damage our own economy and alliances with trade tariffs.  We let citizens of both these countries run around unimpeded throughout the United States, able to operate organized crime rings that threaten our citizens as well as infiltrate and steal from our institutions.

Our European allies, the ones Trump dumps all over at every opportunity, can see all of this along with our enemies. The only people in the dark about it are a significant proportion of the American public, who maintain faith in a government that treats them like suckers.

We should not be constructing an ad-hoc foreign policy in the dark.  I understand the necessity of tactical and technical secrecy but in a democracy, strategy and goals shouldn’t fall under that umbrella.   We need frank and honest discussion of our nation’s actions and intent abroad, otherwise we cannot make informed decisions as voters.

Hydrocarbon energy supplies and the terrorism funded by them are at the heart of our entanglements in the Middle East. We are currently lead to believe that militarily controlling these supplies will make us more secure because we are always presented with the hard power option – military force.

This may come as a shock to many people, but the United States used to have something called soft power, cultural and economic power, with which it accomplished goals in the world.  Rock and roll, freedom of expression, blue jeans and human rights had more sway in the outcome of the Cold War than M1 tanks or SDI.  Rather than bumble around the Middle East like a blind, rampaging beast guided by our Lilliputian, scheming “allies”, we should be focusing on the root of the problem – hydrocarbon energy.

In a world which was just warned by the IPCC that it has only twelve years to ween itself off hydrocarbons or die, it seems obvious that the way to fix the problem is to render oil and gas obsolete.

Our NATO, Australian, Japanese and South Korean alliances have served all parties well as we have shared democratic and legal norms. Most of the members, while viewing China and Russia as strategic threats that can be deterred, see climate change as the greatest threat to their well-being.  The Pentagon has also warned us for years about the threat posed by anthropomorphic climate change. Why not adapt a foreign policy pushing for decarbonizing our economies, which would dry up the rationale and funding for this geo-political strife?

This strategic alternative is not addressed in the U.S. because vast sums of money are opaquely poured into our political machine by oil interests.  I wasn’t the only person in America who noticed our Secretary of State was the head of Exxon Mobile.  The more corporate power and foreign money have opportunities to determine our foreign policy behind closed doors, the more out of whack it becomes with our national security and general welfare.

We need a foreign policy that is realistic and conducted in the open that the American people can understand and support.

Blindness – Metric

I liked social media when it first appeared. It gave me the chance to get in touch with old friends and see what they’re up to in life. I became disturbed when I noticed personality quizzes pop up that my friends would share with me and which I never took. The number of these quizzes multiplied rapidly after 2010,  My first thought was that these quizzes would be used to develop personality profiles to manipulate people for advertisers. At the time, I didn’t imagine they would be used to tear apart the United States.

I briefly worked in advertising at the turn of the century during the original dot com bubble.  Aside from first hearing the words “eyeball capture” it was also the dawn of guerrilla marketing in the service of major brands: graffiti tags, hiring attractive infiltrators to go to bars and push specific liquor, fake “events” to push products and on and on. The easiest way to manipulate people is for it to be fun and not let them know they’re being manipulated. The purpose of the manipulation is to suck money out of their pockets for things they don’t need. It all moved online with MySpace and then Facebook.

Social media allows us to present an idealized version of ourselves. Very few people post pictures of what they look like when they wake up, of their dirty old car, of their overgrown or dried up lawn, or of them and how they spend most of their time – alone, hunched over a computer screen. Instead they post those rare moments when they’re happy, surrounded by friends, at an exciting event or when they’re all dressed up and put together. In the movie business it is called hyper-reality. It breeds jealousy among friends, family and acquaintances over the simulated life that the poster doesn’t even have.

The social media companies hired psychologists to figure out how to get us to spend more time on their apps to addict us with little rewards such as likes and page views, to figure out how to more effectively manipulate us for the benefit of advertisers. The effect this has had on adults who grew up in the analog age is alarming, the effect it has on our children is horrific. Genuine human interaction breeds a coming together of opinion as humans are social animals but in the world of social media it leads to an atomization of opinion as people interact with AI, bots and trolls. People forego real relationships and experiences for ersatz life – cold, inhuman and predatory.

The need for clicks, likes and “engagement” causes news organizations and opinion makers to aim for hyperbole and extremism as it’s the surest way to guarantee ad revenue. The dirty secret of youtube and social media political sites is that they get half their views from people who hate them, so their is an incentive to antagonize opponents rather than engage with them.

Our geopolitical opponents knew all this. China could see the likely outcome and protected themselves with the great firewall to prevent foreigners from stirring up malcontent at home.  Our amoral tech companies engaged with Russia and China to create market share at the expense of their fellow citizens, allowing the Chinese to develop a powerful social monitoring system and the Russians to aid the splitting apart of the American people using social media.

Studies have found that the more people use social media, the more depressed they become. I think that is inarguable and it’s only going to get worse as Alexa, our phones and even our TVs now spy on us to continue building our online profiles to offer us up for sale and manipulation to the highest bidder.

I have friends on every side of the political spectrum and I’ve refused to let the divisiveness of social media affect those friendships.  Only by unplugging and having real conversations can we build real community.  I can’t subject myself to the manipulation machine that is social media any longer as I feel it warps us into something we are not.

I’ll be permanently leaving Facebook in a couple of days as I cannot be a part of something that is damaging humanity and causing so much unhappiness, so if you want to check in on my writing, this will soon be the only place you find it as I’ll eventually leave Twitter as well.

My advice to social media “users” is to quit and rejoin the human race.

Freewill – Rush

Fear is the most powerful weapon known to man. Tyrants have used fear to control populations since the dawn of time.  It is an effective, cheap, contagious weapon which short-circuits the rational part of our minds. Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us in 1933 that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and goes on to say, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Fear has been with us from the start. Kings used public torture and execution to instill fear in the hearts of their subjects to control them. Genghis Khan slaughtered entire cities in his conquests to terrorize future adversaries into giving up without a fight.

Understand this about your Republican family members, friends and neighbors: they have been subjected to a concentrated propaganda campaign to make them fearful for decades. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Fox News injected poisonous fear into America’s bloodstream in the 1990s. The internet magnified this fear a thousand-fold. Do you remember how crazy they all sounded a decade ago when they worried about FEMA camps and the end of democracy in America? That was the result of making people fearful. Do not hate your family, friends and neighbors: show them kindness so that their fear may melt away.

Fear is also responsible for the strange behavior in Congress the last couple of years. Sexually or financially compromised individuals do enormous amounts of systemic damage because they fear the consequences of their actions if exposed. I know I am a tiny minority in writing this, but I believe they should be offered forgiveness if they repent, because it will take away the fear motivating them. This is the reason forgiveness is the essential message of Christ even though it isn’t put into practice by most modern day Christians.

Make no mistake, you will be assaulted with fear on the internet in the coming years. If you combine AI and your data with propaganda campaigns run by Russia against Ukraine, ISIS against everyone or drug cartels against each other, you can expect them to be personally targeted against you and terrifying. Resist the fear and do not act on it because you will only spread it like a disease, which is the entire point.

I lost respect for a friend of mine of social media last night who mused that if Republicans cheat the election it is time to move to France.  There is no point in moving. France, or Canada for that matter, will not welcome in thousands of America refugees and, because fear spreads, they would likely fall next anyway, and then you are the immigrant. For better or for worse, we are all here.

The only thing we can do is vote. Do not echo or succumb to calls for violence because that will only spread the contagion and all the vets out there can attest to the horrors unleashed on societies when it gets out of control.

I realize many of you reading this do not believe in God but my belief gives me great solace.  The first verse of Psalm 27 comforts my heart – The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?

Do not fear. Believe.

Believer – Imagine Dragons

A week ago, Rudy Giuliani suggested the U.S. would overthrow the Iranian regime. This is a bad idea. Aside from the reality that, despite what you’ve been told, Iran can strike back, it also violates the most basic rules of sovereignty, which were developed to avoid catastrophic war.

Catholic and Protestant powers fought the devastating 30 years war in the 17th Century. The conflict resulted in the widespread destruction of Central Europe as the Hapsburgs and France sought to strangle Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. More than eight million soldiers and civilians were slaughtered before the Peace of Westphalia brought about the modern state system based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

While I support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I’m a believer in the sovereignty of nation states, to include China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.  That doesn’t mean we have to trade with them or allow their citizens access to our schools, technology and territory but we should refrain from attempting to overthrow their governments. We have meddled in the internal affairs of other states, and, now that it’s been done to us, we find we don’t like it.

All politics is local. The unique problems, capabilities and cultures of each state are present in their political system. When we try and change a state’s political regime, we more often than not are engaged in a fool’s errand. Examples of our more recent failures include South Vietnam, the Contra War in Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. Regardless of the amount of money, weapons and destruction unleashed in those states, our interference did not succeed in producing the desired ending despite the tremendous cost in blood and treasure. In fact, our interference had a lot of negative unintended consequences such as destabilizing refugee flows, increased terrorism and, in the case of South Vietnam, the collapse of neighboring countries.

This doesn’t mean we have to ignore crimes like genocide or aggressive war. But, if we’re to take even a passing glance at recent U.S. history, we didn’t lift a finger to stop genocide in Rwanda or Myanmar and are actively participating in a war which may have genocidal results in Yemen (although Yemen is 5 simultaneous wars going on).

When partisans point to “our” success in the Warsaw Pact’s collapse or revolutions in places like Ukraine, they mistakenly take credit for changes implemented by local people who wanted a say in their own governance. One of humanity’s most enduring characteristics is we don’t like being told what to do, especially by people from another tribe.

We’ve currently got troops deployed in over 150 countries. That doesn’t count intelligence operations or military contractors. Aside from the cost, it likely decreases our security by providing targets and allowing whomever we support in that country to be labeled foreign puppets. More importantly, we do not have a shared history with many of these countries, which means we easily get played by their politicians, who, like most of our politicians, are not interested in a greater good but rather power. Our founders warned against entangling alliances primarily because we’d wind up getting wrapped up in their issues instead of our own – two particular examples being Israel and Saudi Arabia.

By interfering in the internal affairs of states we don’t like, we give greater power to the very people we oppose. It gives the dictators and authoritarians an excuse to increase repression, jail opposition leaders and label all who oppose the regime as traitors. Leave them alone and the people will eventually ask, why are we putting up with this unnecessary bullshit?

Two great examples of how this works with other states are China and Russia. China rose through the 80s until a couple of years ago by not appearing as a threat. China was able to wield enormous soft power because they didn’t appear to be actively engaged in the geo-political games other major powers played. Once Xi assumed power, China stepped up its interference in other countries with predictable results: Australia realized it was under threat, Sri Lanka began to understand that it was being taken advantage of, Vietnam grew closer to both the United States and India, resentment in Africa began to rise as people started seeing a replay of colonial interference suffered at the hands of Western powers and the United States began to take China as a serious threat. Likewise, Russian actions under Putin have shattered relations with Britain, Scandinavia and much of Western Europe. Russian interference in the U.S. election has raised legitimate doubts as to the ultimate loyalty of the President and the Republican Party, which will lead to greater antipathy towards Russia when its puppets are no longer in power.

In my humble opinion, the surest way to influence the world is by example. We didn’t win the Cold War with dirty tricks, we won it with free speech, rule of law, greater political, economic and labor equality, and hard science as objective truth. Our example has faded as our elites attempt to rig the political and economic system, economic inequalities grew and we became superstitious to the point of not accepting the easily observable scientific reality of climate change.

The regime change game has lead to millions of deaths and trillions of dollars flushed down the drain. Let’s quit trying to control the world and instead focus on controlling ourselves.

Games Without Frontiers – Peter Gabriel

Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” It might not have perished from the Earth, but it’s been slipping through our fingers for the last 47 years.

The GOP is currently trying to ram through the supreme court nomination of accused sexual assaulter and corporate tool Brett Kavanaugh over the objections of the majority of Americans. Regardless of the veracity of claims against Kavanaugh, which I happen to believe, the fact remains that Kavanaugh attended the same high school as Neil Gorsuch, another right winger installed on the Supreme Court less than two years ago. How can two men who attended the same elite all-male school understand what justice is for a nation of 325 million people? I guess we could ask John Roberts, the Chief Justice who also attended a Catholic boarding school. Come to think of it, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are also conservative Roman Catholics. If Kavanaugh is confirmed 5 out of our 9 justices will be conservative Roman Catholics, more than double the percentage of Catholics, many of whom are not conservative, to include the current Pope. Is the Supreme Court “of the people”?  Not even close.

Luckily we have two other branches of government to balance things out.

Congress, after all, was meant to more accurately represent the people in both their short term (House of Representatives) and long term (Senate) will.  Our legislative branch is chock full of white millionaires. As of 2012, the median Congressperson was worth over a million dollars. The average American household’s net worth is a mere $56,0000.  Sixty percent of the U.S. population is white while eighty percent of Congress is white. Women make up half our population but only one in five members of Congress.  It’s safe to say that our legislature is not “of the people”.

It’s bad enough that Congress doesn’t represent the American population in terms of wealth, gender, or race but it could still be passing laws “for the people,” right? Not unless those people are legal entities with market caps of over a billion dollars.  The business of Congress isn’t about the people, it’s about business. American business spends over three billion dollars on lobbying. That’s just lobbying, not campaign donations, PAC donations or phony think tanks.  If you wonder why our Congressional representatives can’t come up with a solution to the health care crisis, it could be the 543 million dollars in lobbying spent last year by healthcare organizations (pharmaceutical, insurance and hospitals/nursing homes). Want to know why Congress will let you and your children die from climate change? It could be the 241 million dollars in lobbying spent last year by oil, gas and electric utilities. Congress does not represent the interests of people, Congress represents the interests of capital.  If we’re to take our personal welfare into account (like health and a sustainable environment), Congress is not “for the people,” it works actively against the people.

Which brings us to the final branch of government, the one Abraham Lincoln was a part of, the executive branch.  Our current president, born into a wealthy family, spent his life wrecking businesses, ripping people off, sexually assaulting women and laundering money for the Italian, then Russian mafia. He claims to have superior genetics, excessive wealth and shits on a gold toilet. This is not a man “of the people”. Since taking office he has slashed the social safety net, put children in detention camps, encouraged racism, praised dictators, plunged the nation deeper into debt, alienated our allies, packed our federal court system with unqualified goons, and decimated environmental protections. He is not “for the people”, he is an enemy of the people.

I’d like to lay all our problems at the President’s feet but I can’t. Trump is merely the pus on the head of a painful boil that has been growing for decades. It’s an infection we were born with under an original Constitution that allowed only wealthy, white men of property to have a say in our governance. We grew more representative over the years, thanks to suffragettes, labor unions and the civil rights movement and then something happened: the Powell Memo was written .

Lewis Powell’s name isn’t taught in history books, although he is the man most responsible for the America we live in today: an America of extreme income inequality where corporations run the show. Lewis Powell was director of the board for Phillip Morris in 1971, when he was commissioned to write a confidential memo by the US Chamber of Commerce on how to retake America for the chamber and destroy the New Deal. The memo was a reaction to Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe At Any Speed, which showed that auto-executives put profits over people’s lives. Powell called for constant surveillance of TV and textbook content, creation of foundations, lobbying groups and think tanks to mold America’s opinion, publication of authors and academics who supported corporatism and a purge of left wing elements. The Powell Memo laid out the blueprint for the conservative takeover of America, which is nearing its final stages.

Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court within a few months of writing the memo and it’s been all downhill from there. The rise of corporate power over citizens began with Powell and has steadily accelerated. It is, quite simply, a vast right wing conspiracy to strangle democracy in America and destroy our chance to have a government that is “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

We have been relentlessly mind-fucked by this cabal for 47 years as they’ve captured our politicians, our regulatory agencies, our NGO’s, and our media with their money. The end goal, which they’ve almost reached, is the destruction of our rights and our dignity to put more money in their pockets.

Now that you know the truth, citizens, what are you going to do about it?

Dignity – New Politics

Elon Musk has been making headlines for a decade every time he brings up the idea that we are probably living in a computer simulation. It’s not a new idea but it’s one I happen to agree with. It also makes no difference in how we live our lives.

Philosophers and religions have questioned the nature of reality since the dawn of time. Plato’s allegory of the cave says most of us believe reality is shadows on the wall of a cave, without understanding that there is a fire behind us casting those shadows. A few decades later, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi described having a dream he was a butterfly that felt real but when he woke up being human then felt real.  The monotheistic faiths believe in judgement and life after death, Hindus and Buddhists believe in reincarnation until we get it right. They can all be correct if we’re living in a simulation.

Here is why it seems probable to me. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. The oldest solar system with planets, HIP 11952, formed about 12.8 billion years ago. Our sun, relatively young, formed 4.6 billion years ago.  That’s a long time for life to evolve in other locations, which given its prevalence in every environment on our planet, it surely did.

Homo Sapiens, barely around for 200,000 years, are mere infants in the universe. Yet in the mere 60 years since the invention of the microchip, we have invented technology that can fool two of our most vital senses – sight and hearing. We will likely figure out how to fool our brains with touch, taste and smell in the next century, perhaps sooner, if we survive the climate disaster.

The observable universe has a billion trillion stars, yet we see no evidence of any alien civilization. There are many possible answers to the Fermi Paradox as to why we have not detected these potential civilizations, from alien species inability to get past The Great Filter to periodic natural disasters to our being deliberately isolated and a dozen other possibilities. I would argue that we cannot see them because we are in a simulation.  Such an argument is impossible to prove – if we’re living in a simulation, then we too are a part of it, which is why it doesn’t matter in our day to day lives since we are subject to its rules.

Two justifications I see online (from meta-bullshit sites like Gaia) that we are in a simulation are the Observer Effect and the Fibonacci Sequence – neither of which prove anything.  Quantum physics’ observer effect, whereby the observation of a particle effects its position, isn’t caused by our consciousness but the act of “seeing” the electron by hitting it with a photon. Likewise, those who claim the fibonacci sequence is “everywhere” in nature like some No Man’s Sky-generated algorithm to draw our world  because it’s in trees, flowers, fruit, some DNA, and honeybee ancestry seem to forget that we all evolved from the same single celled organism in the distant past, which is why you share about 50 percent of your genes with a banana. Quasars, planets or stellar gas clouds don’t follow the sequence, just some living stuff on our world, so it’s not the universal algorithm.

Believing that we are in a simulation is like believing in God, it’s neither provable nor disprovable. But I’ll give you my thoughts on it. We haven’t fully figured out consciousness yet. Many of us believe in a soul, an ineffable thing that lives beyond our bodies. Most of our ancestors across most religions believed this soul had something to do with the heavens, which is all the stuff we see in the sky and the place our souls are supposedly from and return to after our death, depending on the life we led.

This idea of judgement is also fairly universal. Our words, our actions, even our thoughts are recorded somehow like a more detailed version of our browser and comment histories. This brings us to the question of why?

I would suggest that Earth is a testing ground.

Human beings are, essentially, violent apes. Going back far enough, we are all the descendants of murderers, rapists and thieves. The good, as Billy Joel says, died young. What advanced civilization would want such creatures turned loose upon the universe?

Our bloody religious texts are surprisingly similar in their definitions of goodness – compassion, kindness, forgiveness, charity and love. It is we who don’t live up to the ideal. It is we who give in to our senses, our desires, to commit selfish acts.  If our senses and desires can fool us into committing selfish acts, I ask again, why would an advanced civilization (or God) want us turned loose upon a universe where such senses can be faked?

Many beliefs hold a oneness to the universe that courses through everything. It stands to reason that we can’t join communion with a oneness as long as we are selfish, jealous, and vain. We are imperfect beings who learn through trial and error. Wisdom doesn’t come easily to us, it takes time and it often takes pain, which is why we need this testing ground.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the secret of the universe anymore than the next human but I choose to believe it’s love.

All You Need Is Love – The Beatles

The Chinese government doesn’t like religion. A quick glance at their recent history shows this hostility.  Chinese communists targeted Tibetan Buddhists since 1950. China began crushing the Falun Gong spiritual movement at the turn of the century.  In 2017, China began incarcerating hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang province and placing them in re-education camps to destroy their Islamic faith. Today, China is demolishing thousands of Christian churches and confiscating bibles.

It’s more than Marxist ideology driving the CCP to annihilate religion, it’s China’s history, in particular the Taiping Rebellion.

China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth but its leaders focus on the “Century of Humiliation,” it suffered between 1839 and 1949.  So what happened?

Let’s back up to the 19th Century. The Qing dynasty, who were Manchurian, ran China.  The Chinese exported tea, silk and porcelain, which UK merchants wanted to buy. As the Europeans didn’t have much the Chinese wanted, silver flowed into China through the only city the Chinese permitted the Europeans to trade in – Canton. The British East India Company found something that sold well in China – opium from India. Within a few years, this resulted in a large Chinese trade deficit and lots of junkies. The emperor found this intolerable and banned the sale of opium. The Royal Navy responded by shelling Chinese cities, forcing the emperor to sue for peace and ceding Hong Kong to the British.

The Chinese state’s weakness lead to an economic and security breakdown. Rents and taxes skyrocketed.  Resentment against the emperor’s Manchu ethnic group rose. European and American merchants, mercenaries and missionaries streamed into the Middle Kingdom.  In 1847, a fellow name Hong Xiuquan, who had repeatedly failed the civil service exam, read an American missionary pamphlet and decided he was Jesus Christ’s little brother. Hong founded a new religion called the God Worshipping Society and began preaching to the Hakka ethnic group.

Hong’s version of Christianity was violent and nationalist. In 1850 the emperor cracked down on this new religion. In 1851, the God Worshipping Society called for rebellion against the emperor and labelled the emperor’s followers demons who must be destroyed. On Hong’s birthday they declared themselves the Taping Heavenly Kingdom and the bloodiest civil war in human history began.

The Taiping raised an army to fight Chinese imperial forces and for over a decade rampaged across the fertile and productive Yangtze river valley, seizing cities and laying waste to their enemies. American and European mercenaries joined and even led imperial Chinese forces in suppressing the rebellion. By 1864, the empire retook Nanjing, the Taiping capital, but the rebellion continued for another seven years in remote provinces until it was crushed. Conservative estimates put the death toll at a minimum of 20 million, although some claim more than double that number perished in the conflict.

The rebellion devastated the Chinese economy, led to the rise of private armies and forced a decentralization of the Chinese empire, further weakening it to foreign exploitation.  The widespread destruction burned itself into Chinese memory.

We often say that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. The lesson the Chinese government draws from their own history is that religion can declare war on the central government.  The CCP’s heavy-handed approach to faith is because they do not want history repeated.  Religion will not prosper in China so long as the central government sees it as competition, which could be a very long time indeed.

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

I project-managed wind turbine installs and repairs in the aughts. Wind turbines, like most infrastructure, are managed by SCADA systems.  SCADA stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. The SCADA system interfaced with the turbine’s PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) to control the machinery itself.  In plain English, it meant I could log into the turbine on my computer, check how it’s doing and make any changes needed, like shutting it down, setting a max speed, whatever needed doing without my being there, climbing the tower or turning a wrench. All that was needed were my log in credentials.

Like any electronic device, SCADA systems are vulnerable to hacking. The  Stuxnet virus which infected the Iranian nuclear program used their SCADA system to command the centrifuge PLCs to spin at speeds which destroyed them, crippling the Iranian nuclear program and delaying its progress for a couple of years. It was the first cyber attack to cause real world physical damage. The assailants were likely the United States or Israel.

All of our communications, power and manufacturing infrastructure use SCADA systems.

Unlike the Iranian systems, which were not networked to the internet and therefore needed a thumb drive to infect them, most of our infrastructure is tied into the internet. This allows companies to save fortunes in manpower costs as a lot of work can be done remotely.

This also leaves us wide open to attack.

In 2012, researchers at Crowdstrike reported that a Russian group hacked into multiple oil, gas and energy companies in the United States in attacks they believed were backed by the Russian government due to their sophistication. In June 2014, Symantec reported that Russian hackers had broken into the networks of three major makers of SCADA systems and installed Trojan malware that would be uploaded to users during updates – over 250 oil, gas and energy firms were affected. Symantec warned that these attacks could give the Russians Stuxnet-like control over our systems.

Two months ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the control rooms of multiple U.S. utilities.

Yesterday, an over-pressurized gas line caused three explosions and eighty structural fires in Massachusetts. Columbia Gas was upgrading their aging gas lines beneath the ground. It’s almost certain the cause of this accident was a screw up in the repair work that had nothing to do with SCADA systems or foreign hacking. But consider what would happen should Russia decide to attack our infrastructure and deliberately over-pressurize our gas lines in multiple locations simultaneously.

President Trump has threatened Iran and North Korea since taking office. It’s debatable if either country could launch a successful military strike against the U.S. mainland. What is not debatable is that both countries could launch successful electronic attacks against our infrastructure as they each have copies of our own stolen cyberweapons.  The Sony hack and WannaCry virus demonstrated North Korea’s proficiency and Symantec confirmed this January that the Iranians used the NSA-developed exploit EternalBlue in its operations.  Should we launch a regime-threatening attack against either country, they will respond using our own systems against us.

We have the most powerful military in the world. It is incapable of defending the nation against cyber attacks. The President has made paid scant attention to cyber security, even going so far as to eliminate the White House cyber security coordinator in May of this year. While many in the press are focused on the vulnerability of our electoral system to foreign hacking, it is our physical infrastructure that is most at risk.

We are not in control. We only think we are.

Out Of Control – The Chemical Brothers