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From 2017 – and getting truer

Monday, December 9th, 2024

Watching an empire crumble is a slow process. The inertia of so much money, infrastructure and so many people makes the unraveling seem to go quite slowly.

But that same inertia, once in motion, also makes the motion formidable and harder and harder to stop as times goes on.

The world’s order is changing and the United States is slowly dying as a super power. But, it is still early days and most folks haven’t gotten the news. Certainly, most of the U.S.’s public are innocent of such awareness.

Today, I read a financial newsletter I follow and I read the following:

“The Moscow stock exchange will soon issue nearly $1 billion-worth of yuan-denominated bonds. It could become the start of a new financial system not based on the US dollar, analysts say.

Russia will issue the 6 billion yuan (about $900 million) bonds with a five-year maturity in December or January. The Central Bank says it is testing the water for future investments.”

The analyst writing the newsletter went on to say that the U.S. has been bringing this situation upon itself for a long time with its relentless deficit spending.

I’ve been listening to this slowly developing story for years now and it is not hard to understand once you get past the fact that following it is like watching paint dry.

The U.S. creates and sells bonds that are treasured (no pun intended) around the world because the power of the U.S. economy backs them and the U.S. has never, never defaulted on a bond.

But, every year the U.S. goes more into debt.

And every year, the U.S. sells more bonds than last year and then uses the proceeds from the new year’s sales to pay off the bonds from earlier cycles.

Do you know the phrase, “Check Kiting”? You should look it up, if you don’t.

And as the U.S. goes more and more into debt, the probability rises that one day it will not be able to pay the bonds due from previous cycles.

This is a real and growing concern for some nation states who hold large amounts of their funds in the forms of (supposedly) safe U.S. bonds. China is certainly tangled in this web.

If the U.S. defaults, the money they hold in U.S. bonds goes ‘poof’!

The U.S. dollar is the world reference currency. Most large international transactions are done using U.S. dollars as the common medium of exchange.

As I said, the world is changing and major players are slowly initiating changes to get away from:

(1) U.S. Hegemony via its currency

(2) The growing danger that the U.S. will default

They are setting up mechanisms which allow exchanges of goods and services without using the U.S. dollar as the common medium of exchange.

Countries are working to reduce their risk through exposure to U.S. bonds.

BUT WAIT – THERE”S MORE (as they shout on infomercials)

There’s another even more insidious story running through the historical narrative developing in the U.S.

The U.S. is quite literally being looted by its own 1%’ers.

The gap between the wealthiest and the middle and lower class is growing rapidly in the U.S.

The new Tax Law that President Trump and the U.S. Republicans are so excited to be passing just now is a blatant legislative device to further disenfranchise the middle and lower classes of their slice of the American pie.

Something as large and powerful as the U.S. will not crumble quietly. Their military is still the most powerful on the planet. Their currency is still the global reference currency. Their bonds are still held by much of the world.

Sometimes, when I sit by the beach in Sumner, which is a beach town adjacent to Christchurch, New Zealand, where I live, I look out at the vast South Pacific stretching away and I think to myself that I ‘m so glad that I’m here so very far away from the conflicts and power-centers of the world.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, Financial, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Asymmetrical Warfare, anyone?

Sunday, December 8th, 2024

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated on Wednesday, December 4th, in New York City.

One of the first articles I read about this event was on Reuters. Here’s a paragraph from the article:

“UnitedHealth is the largest U.S. health insurer, providing benefits to tens of millions of Americans, who pay more for healthcare than people in any other country. Thompson, a father of two, joined UnitedHealth in 2004 and became the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, in April 2021.”

A link to the article: https://www.reuters.com/…/unitedhealthcare-ceo-fatally…/

I found this paragraph notable. And it tweaked my pattern recognition sense.

You see, on my business card, I call myself a ‘futurist’. And to me what a futurist is, is a person with good predictive pattern-recognition skills. Of course, there’s a lot of room in that definition for errors and unwanted hallucinations as well; so caution is always recommended.

Regardless, the paragraph triggered something in me.

In addition to the already stated fact of the assassination, the paragraph adds three additional facts:

1. Brian Thompson is the CEO at UnitedHealthcare
2. UnitedHealthcare is the largest US health insurer
3. Americans, pay more for healthcare than people in any other country.

Each of those are, indeed, facts. But it is the possibility of a causal relationship among them that draws one’s attention.

The assassination could have been a crime of anger or passion.

And, if so, we’ll probably soon know enough because those who commit crimes under such duress are seldom good and planning and covering their tracks.

But then, it might also not have been crime of anger or passion.

And, if it was a meticulously and well planned assassination, then I think we need to consider if it is a harbinger of things to come.

To get some insight into that question, we need to ask ourselves what viable remedies are available to the poor and middle classes of the United States as they wrestle against the ever growing power and control of the very wealthy over their lives?

Well, they can vote. They can make signs and go out and march and protest. And and they can write letters to the Editor.

Meanwhile, the wealthy have used their wealth and influence to ensure the passage of laws like “Citizens United”; which effectively gives corporations the rights of people and allows them to donate as much as they want to the individuals and political parties they favor.

And the size of those donations has, in turn, brought a significant number of law-makers around to seeing things the way that their donors see them. In other words, they’ve effectively bought control of our legislative processes.

And so, as wealth more and more flows upwards in a rigged and controlled system, what viable recourses do lesser mortals actually have?

In 2014, a billionaire, by the name of Nick Hanauer, issued a warning to his fellow billionaires. He said, “No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history were wealth accumulated like this, and the pitchfork didn’t eventually come out.”

Link: https://www.politico.com/…/the-pitchforks-are-coming…/

It would seem that the fellow who killed Brian Thompson in NYC was concerned about greed in the US medical insurance industry.

The bullet casings he left behind at the murder scene had “Delay”, “Deny”and “Depose” written on them. A clear reference to a major criticism often voiced about the medical insurance industry’s efforts to avoid paying claims.

When I read the three facts cited in the paragraph, above, I couldn’t help but wonder if the writer put them together like that intentionally as a bit of subliminal editorializing.

Was he suggesting a cause and effect relationship among the three facts? Consider them again:

1. Brian Thompson is the CEO at UnitedHealthcare
2. UnitedHealthcare is the largest US health insurer
3. Americans, pay more for healthcare than people in any other country.

So, back to the question of what options do the people on the wrong end of the power and money equation have?

Have you heard of Asymmetrical Warfare?

Asymmetrical Warfare refers to conflicts between belligerents with significantly different capabilities. In such conflicts, the weaker side will often employ unconventional methods to offset their disadvantages.

As the rich and powerful continue to increase their wealth, to the detriment of the rest of us, those who are looking into how to effectively oppose them may be beginning to think asymmetrically.

Consider the situation:,

The locations of the wealthy and powerful are often well known.

But the reverse is generally not true. There are literally millions and millions of us poorer people.

In an asymmetrical conflict, a defender has to guard against every possible attack vector whereas an attacker only has to find one avenue that works.

And ask yourself what is the most valuable thing that the wealthy and powerful have?

The one thing that lets them enjoy their wealth and power?

The answer is their LIFE.

And no matter how much wealth and power one might have, none of it matters – if you are dead.

And is there a better way to signal to the wealthy and powerful that there are limits to how far they can push the rest of us into a corner?

When Brian Thompson was killed the other day, I found myself wondered if I was seeing the first instance of Calculated Asymmetrical Warfare writ-large.

But, maybe not. Information, so far, indicates that Brian Thomson’s killer left quite a few traces behind himself and that he may be tracked down soon.

—–

Now, least anyone thinks I’m writing all of this to advocate calculated asymmetrical resistance through assassination, I want to say that I am NOT.

Consider that I could have just as easily written a crime or a spy novel in which all of the same ideas were spelled out in huge detail.

And if I had, no one would have thought that I was advocating for violence.

If this wasn’t so, then we’d have to begin now to arrest at least half the novelist and screenplay writers working today.

No, I am simply describing a pattern that I see – that very well might manifest.

There is, undeniably, a large and increasing gap between the wealth of the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

In the past, such over-the-top inequality has finally resulted in mass violence. Just think about the French Revolution.

No, at some point the obscenity of wealth beyond all reason or need and the resulting poverty of the rest of us will create its own calculus.

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Corporate takeover of Government, Corruption, CounterCurrents, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Letter to a friend about Free-Will

Monday, June 5th, 2023

I watched the video. A brilliant YouTube film. Thanks for sharing it.

See: https://youtu.be/2_BTVN68-ZA

Someone brilliant, maybe Einstein, said that you cannot solve a problem using the same methods that were employed to create the problem. The implication being that we need a new POV in order to resolve the problem. This question of Free Will is a lot like that.

We are the ones who’ve created the conceptual divisions between Body and Mind and between Conscious and Unconscious. And we’ve created them because our minds and our reasoning are simple. We cannot see existence moving interconnected and seamlessly all at once.

But in truth, we human beings are not functionally divided into the divisions we’ve artificially created. We are evolved biological beings. Functionally, we are one thing. My foot is as much a part of me as my memories of childhood or my next desire for an ice-cream.

The self-aware part of us is the observer of our experiences most of the time. This is just as the narrator in the video said.

It is an illusion that our self-awareness (the ‘observer’) suffers that it is is the decider in most cases.

But I stress that while we are just deluded observers most of the time, this is not the case all the time. Sometimes the self-aware part of us does get to be the decider.

Think of yourself as a vertical assembly of parts. Think that this assembly came together over vast periods of time through the processes of biological evolution.

When decisions that concern your biological self need to be made, they are dealt with by the appropriate level of your assembly.

If you suffer a burn, the signal goes directly to your spinal cord. And the spinal cord send bacl signals directing the muscles in the affected area to MOVE now to end the problem. None of this involves the brain. It becomes aware of the event after-the-fact. But, it has the illusion that it played a part.

If you become hungry, motivations to end the problem begin to arise. And the biological unit you are, as as whole, takes action to quell the hunger. Again, the self-aware part of you observes all this, suffers the illusion that is was the ‘decider’ and then it takes credit for the decision to eat.

But sometimes, things collide and in order to resolve what to do, information has to be passed up to a higher level.

You want to go and see your mother. But your car is not working. You can take the bus but now you have to find and read the bus schedule to see if the bus departure times will work for you. And then there’s the issue of buying a fare – do you have enough money?

These decisions are not going to get automatically made by any of the layers of your assembly lower than your self-aware self. These sorts of problems have to be pushed up the stack to the level of your biological being that is best prepared to deal with them.

Your self-aware mind can reason about them, it can imagine and hypothesize about them and it can call up memories relevant to them. All of this will take place in your self-awareness; as will your decision about what to do. The decision will usually arise from an abstract consideration of the facts.

Of course, such decisions do not take place in a state of pure isolation. Your emotional desire to see your mother is speaking there. Your tiredness when you consider the duration of the journey is speaking there. Your calculations about how much money you have are also speaking there.

And sometimes, the emotions will weigh in so heavy that they drive the decision. And sometimes the tiredness is so profound that it becomes the controlling factor. But also, sometimes, it is just the mental juggling of the various pieces within your self-awareness that leads you to a rational, considered decision.

In the video, he talked about how reading a book can affect us and thus it can change the future decisions we make. So, was that an act of Free Will?

I’d say that this is ‘either-or’ reasoning again. It is not one or the other. It is an all seamless interplay – we affect existence and existence affects us.

The biological brain evolved in animals so they could better track what’s happening outside of them. So that they could process the incoming information and then make decisions that benefit our own specific survival.

As evolution has moved along and animals have gotten ever more complex, because of survival of the fitness pressures, so animal brains have gotten smarter. And this wasn’t just random. It was driven by maximizing the survival potential of the animals involved.

Self-awareness developed because it provided survival capabilities that didn’t exist before.

It is not coincidence that we human beings have utterly taken over the planet. This newest evolved capability of ours for self-awareness is the most powerful adaptation nature has ever come up with.

But our self-awareness is a very problematic thing as well.

It suffers under the illusion that it is the sole decider (Free-Will). And it is like putting a Magnum 44 in the hands of a toddler. All the evidence gathering all around us is that we are not using our self-awareness very well at all.

Posted in Mental Irrationality, Philosophical, Science, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

220824 – Meetup Group sample discussion

Wednesday, August 24th, 2022

I run two Meetup discussion groups. One is a local group for people living in or near Christchurch, New Zealand, where I live. The other is a global group intended for people outside of Christchurch. These Meetup Groups can be found here:

www.meetup.com/christchurch-existentialist-discussion-group/

www.meetup.com/existentialism-discussion-group-international/

Below is a post-meeting comment/discussion regarding a recent meeting. I’m sharing to see if readers here might find this sort of thing of interest. If so, then please consider joining. But, before you do, please carefully read the group’s mission statement to ensure your intents are compatible with ours.

===================
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. They provides a good opening to render much that was obscure in last night’s discussion into a clearer light.

From here on I’m going to refer to Existentialism using a big ‘E’ to prevent excessive typing. I’ll toss in other acronyms as I go along, if they seem helpful.

First, our group is called the “E Discussion Group”. But, that doesn’t imply that everything we discuss is part of, or a reflection of, E theory.

One definition of ‘E‘ I read just now on-line says:

“A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.”

I would also add that Es perceive existence as having no apparent meaning. And that, as a consequence of this, they then grapple with how to accommodate themselves to the situation. I.e., how to cope with Existential Angst.

So, I think we laid a fair bit of stuff on the doorstep of E last night. Stuff that didn’t properly belong there.

So, as I conceive it, E says nothing about whether life and consciousness are good or bad and whether they should be preserved or not. E doesn’t care if we survive here or not. All such is irrelevant from the POV of E because E’s central observation is the apparent meaninglessness of everything.

I liked that someone made the point that ‘existence precedes essence’.

——

Now I’m turning this discussion away from E and into a general discussion.

So, here we are on a small planet somewhere out in the middle of the vastness. We are recently evolved semi-smart monkey-like creatures (RESSMLC) and, by many appearances, we’re well on our way to trashing the only planet/biosphere we have and causing a major reset to ourselves and the other life-forms here.

Existence doesn’t care. It is for me, hard to imagine that existence even knows we’re here.

So, we’re very much in our own self-created mess. And our discussion centered upon how to understand our situation and what, if anything, can be effectively be done about the mess.

We discussed authoritarian (A) vs. democratic (D) governments in relationship to our problem. Some would say that A governments are inherently more effective at getting all the ducks marching in the same direction. But A’s take away too much of our personal freedom to be worth their addition efficiency. Or, as someone said, would life be worth living if we did get humanity into a viable Steady-State Balance with the Planet’s Biosphere (SSBPB) but then we had to live here without any personal freedoms?

The question of getting into a SSBPB and how we govern ourselves are independent issues.

The first issue is utterly stark (unless we hold an optimistic view; such a Logan does). Either we achieve a SSBPB or we suffer a massive an unnecessary planet-wide reset.

The 2nd issue of how we should govern ourselves is much harder to discern or to discuss effectively.

Why? Because we are discussing ourselves. We are the RESSMLC. We do not understand ourselves very well at all.

We discussed benevolent dictatorships and perfectly balanced and fair democracies – as if these ideas were plausible.

I submit that our inherent human natures, shaped as they are by our evolutionary heritages, makes such ideas laughable. Few of our species have risen above simply acting out our biological imperatives to go forth and breed and consume.

The world, as we see it now, with all the various forms of governments, wars and injustices is simply a reflection of how we are now in the aggregate.

We are making progress, as evidenced by the rule-of-law, human rights, democracies and the various personalized and institutionalized forms of compassion we have implemented. But least we get too dazzled by these signs of progress, we only need look around and see how very much of the world is still struggling in darkness.

One said:

“Holding political power is immoral because it necessarily strips the authenticity of individuals by threat of violence or violence itself, and it is this immorality that we must contend with in our actions day to day. The only way to minimize this immorality is through democratic means, spreading political power out and making a more egalitarian society.”

I love this. In the best of possible futures, I see this. Such a system holds the greater good for all of us up as a goal to be manifested.

But I temper my enthusiasm with the observation that to achieve such systems, the implementors will have to intentionally and consciously transcend their own unconscious evolutionarily derived human natures. And, if they implement such systems. they will have to make laws and exert intentional legal force to hold the new structures against the onslaughts of those who still want to have things their own way. Those who want political power, the power of excessive riches, the power to rule over others and the power to insist that their personal views and needs should transcend the greater good for all of us. It will be a very long time before such people go away.

And, in the mean time, the clocks are ticking away as the train we are all on travels steadily toward the brink of a massive global reset.

(See: https://samadhisoft.com/philosophy-index/the-train-ride-to-hell-theory/)

We are, most of us, just Nero fiddling while the fires are gathering in Rome.

——

So, as I’m wont to do, I bring us back to considering what we can change and what we cannot change.

And I bring us back to considering that at the end of all our struggles, what most of us are seeking, in so very many different ways, is a sense of subjective peace for ourselves here in this unfathomable world we find ourselves in.

The only treasure you really have are the years still left to you between now and when you die.

Focus on what you can change and simply accept the rest as it is.

And with what you can change, seek your own subjective peace and self-understanding. That’s not a self-serving as it might sound.

Increasing your own subjective peace inevitably renders you more porous to the others around you. And if your actions make others unhappy, then your newly porous nature will open you to feel what they feel. And any subjective peace you have will lessen as theirs does.

Posted in Climate Change, Corruption, Human Rights, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Wealth Disparity, Weather deterioration | No Comments »

220823 – Letter to an American Friend

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

It all sounds like really down the rabbit hole stuff to me.  The world, undoubtedly, is in a terrible mess.  But explanations, such as your paper offered, are not going to help.  They just increase the social tensions.

I had my fourth Covid jab yesterday.  Free, painless, no teeth have fallen out, IQ has not (apparently) dropped.  

If I was still in the USA, I’d be very worried at the rising tide of Republican conservatism.  A tide that threatens to overthrow American democracy as you and I have always known it.  We even have bits of it here in New Zealand.  People who want to swarm into under attended local boards and get onto them with the explicitly stated goal of making the system ungovernable.   

All these motions to resist the governance of the democratic states will, IHMO, simply result in a conversion that ushers in authoritarian states much as when Mussolini rose to power with Fascism.  Then choice did truly disappear.  Santis and/or Trump at the top of an U.S. authoritarian pyramid of consolidated power?   I don’t think I want to be there.

Democracy is a terrible system.  But, as Winston Churchill said, it is the best one we’ve got.  

Consider your options to continue being the edgy, art-centered, always wants to see the alternate POV person that you are.  And consider your chances of being able to do that under any authoritarian government.

American democracy is a fucking mess with unbridled Capitalism simply and insidiously running away, year by year, with more and more of the wealth.  

But balance and Capitalism can work together – if the system is structured to be intentional about it.  And if the public culture supports a balance between egalitarian and Capitalistic  notions.

Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have such systems.  Rather than going off to Palm Springs, I think you should take six months and go and immerse yourself in Nordic culture.  

Trying to appreciate what’s possible from within the silo of Americana is like looking through a telescope backwards.

America is insular and inward looking.  I know – I lived there most of my life.  

I’ve read that only 13% of Americans have passports.  

As a typical American looking out, it is easy to imagine that America is the center jewel of all existence.  And that all the other poor struggling countries are just ‘pretending’ to be real places.   

Read some books, Buddy.  Get out of the silo in an effort to break your American hypnosis.  Go sit in European cafes and coffee shops and philosophize with folks there.   You have the money, you have the intelligence.  Break out of your increasingly personal ‘fortress mentality’ in which you constantly imagine ‘they’ are closing in on your freedoms.

Simply shed your patterns and ego defenses and go and intentionally re-invent yourself.  Trust yourself to survive.  Trust yourself to drop your assumptions and trust that you will be able to see the truth when it is standing in front of you.

I’ve jumped ship several times in this life and re-invented myself.  And each time I ended up better off than I was.  You can either hunker down like a hedgehog or you can fly like a bird.  Either way, the experiences you’ll have will largely be the product of the courage you bring to the table.  And for fuck’s sake – you’ve got nothing to lose.  None of us, NONE, are getting out of here alive.  So there’s nothing really to survive and protect against.

Travel.  And wherever you are, look up the expats there.  They are all new and from other places.  They want to talk and socialize, they want to discuss politics, they want to feel a sense of flexible, moveable community.  Go Salsa across Europe –  you have the skills.

Stop sending me fucking paranoid missives from down at the bottom of some American silo.   I’ve been there and I’ve been many places and I don’t believe they are anything other than local cultural illusions.

When you’ve sat in Olso, Lisbon, Copenhagen or Amsterdam for six months, send me a note and I’ll come and join you for a few beers and we can talk about how the world looks then.   And I guarantee you that America will look FAR DIFFERENT looking in from the outside than it does looking out from the inside.

Many years ago, you came to my apartment in Long Beach when I was on the brink of turning my life upside down.  You told me a story about the “Sword of no sword” and in those days you were a pirate – the way you lived.  I loved your courage and your example.   You said then that one of the reasons you liked me was that “I owned myself”.

Well, let me  return the favor (and I mean this sincerely).  Break the molds you are in, my friend.  They are not serving you.  They are just driving you further into America-centric silos of distrust.  Meditate on the fact that you have nothing to lose.  You have money, you have time, you have health and all you need to do is rip off the bandages and defenses and go out on a mind-freeing walkabout outside of America.

I absolutely stone-cold promise you that you will scare the fuck out of yourself and feel alive like you have probably not felt in a long time.

Fondly,

Dennis

Posted in Culture - How not to do it, Fundamentalism, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

My Spotify Playlist as of Apr 12, 2022

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

For anyone who might be interested. There is some good stuff here:

https://open.spotify.com/user/evbgbmgjn7sq9du1bm7zolzb4/playlist/29qCiqFDMtstEKksB3V7qP?si=kcECsU1uS72sWsFhLar_Sg

Posted in The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Prognosis

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

If we attempt to divorce ourselves from our human points-of-view and look on dispassionately, it can be seen that 99%+ of existence is simply working its way towards what is called the ‘heat-death’ of existence. Which can also be expressed as the end-game of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But there is a much, much smaller part of existence which is moving the other way. I.e. towards amassing greater complexity and concentration of energy and organization. I’m referring to life. Life can arises in goldilocks zones of excess energy through processes we don’t fully understand. But, arise it does. Life on Earth is the proof.

Indeed, I once expressed this in a cryptic bit of writing a few years ago:

“Energy evaporates down gradients and little creatures arise in the backwash.”

So, do we and the backwash arising of life have a purpose? If so, I cannot see it implied anywhere. But, in spite of that, it is a truly amazing thing that natural processes within existence should be able to create and evolve bits of itself (us) which are aware of itself.

Are we, the pinnacle creatures on this planet, likely to be the pinnacle creatures throughout existence? Given the size of existence, that seems an extremely dubious notion.

I like your idea about what a next intelligent species might be like:

“Maybe the next intelligent species won’t even care about tech. They’ll just float around, eat fish, sing songs, have sex, and raise their babies, happy to be alive on this planet.“

There’s nothing impossible about it. All it requires is the manifested intent of the new species be to live within the limits of the biosphere around it.

We humans could do that now and live on this planet for many hundreds of thousands of years more. Evolving our intelligence up and up and patiently enjoying our lives and seeing what awaits us.

But I strongly doubt we will change and follow that path. I think we are taking the current biosphere into a big reset. After that, life will slowly build again and maybe those who come after will outgrow this inherent self-destructiveness that we seem to have.

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conflict, CrashBlogging, CyberChaos, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Pandemics, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | No Comments »

Stuxnet – a history

Thursday, January 13th, 2022

I haven’t kept this blog up much these last few years. But many of the topics I’ve covered in the past still deeply interest me. Cyber attacks are one such subject. Back in 2010, the Stuxnet Virus waged war on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. I recall the stories that came out back then quite well. Indeed, I’d been following stories in that vein for sometime.

Today, a friend acquainted me with a Podcast that went over how researchers discovered and decoded the Stuxnet Virus and I found listening to it intensely interesting. If this sort of thing interests you, I think you will like this. It is here.

Listening to the Podcast made me recall a post I’d made here on on this blog. The post reported, in May of 2009, the U.S. was convinced that Iran was within three years of obtaining a nuclear weapon. That, in retrospect, may connect some of the dots. Dots that are always a bit vague at the time.

The 2009 post is here.

Posted in Conflict, CyberChaos, Tech-Software, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Letter to a friend

Monday, August 23rd, 2021

My friend,

I found the article on Karl Popper’s ideas interesting the other day.  But, they left me dissatisfied as well.  And I’ve thought more about my reaction since then.

“So lost in the trees that one cannot see the forest”, is the aphorism that comes to mind.

A friend in the U.S. just referred me to Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. I haven’t read the book; though I did read a Wikipedia summary of it.

Not unlike Popper’s thoughts, Klein’s book is a deep analysis of the world that Klein find himself in.  I.e., the world of U.S. politics and the deep and widening gap between the liberals and the conservatives there.

And wasn’t this, again, just the same with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

And can we not think of others, again and again, trying to decipher their world and their times to make sense of things?  

Just pick a country and a period of time.   And there will have been someone in that place trying to understand and make sense of their local world.  I think that implicit in each of their attempts to understand, was an assumption, that if we can understand, then we can have some hope of solving the problems described.

But there’s another aphorism that comes to my mind at this point:  “Arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.  And this fits into the earlier aphorism; about not seeing the forest because of all the trees.

Systems thinking has come far enough now to be ubiquitous for most intellectuals.  We all know now that we live within systems within systems. 

For those of us, who really want to be effective at working on the world’s problems and not just to end up as footnotes redolent of the small times and places we found ourselves in nationally and philosophically, we need to refocus on our world’s problems on the largest scales.

We need to think about transcending nationalism, local-ism and ‘isms of all kinds.

If we cannot refocus on and strive to solve our global system level problems concerning how humanity can adapt to live within this planet’s resources sustainably, then we are simply rearranging the deck furniture, pointlessly.  And, in the end, all that we do and all the excellence that we do it with, will be wasted.

There are an abundant number of reasons why we humans are poorly equipped for refocusing like this.
 
I’m thinking now of core issues to do with our human nature, which is, itself, derivative of our evolutionary heritage. (see: https://samadhisoft.com/transcending-our-biological-imperatives/)
  
And I’m thinking now also of our minds and our perceptions; which we are inordinately proud of.  But which we really understand the limitations and shortfalls of so very poorly.

I’m not at all confident, my friend, that we are going to manage the refocusing I am saying is necessary.  But I am utterly certain, that more books composed of deep analysis of local problems and local systems are not going to help.

As always, I am interested to hear you thoughts in response to all of this.

Posted in The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

The state of the U.S

Thursday, July 23rd, 2020
A letter to my son who lives in the U.S.  Basically, it is a statement of how I think things got to where they are now in the States.

—————————–
I feel your pain, my son. There is a lot of terrible stuff going on in the world and in the U.S. just now.
 
I don’t think Hillary is or was the answer. I don’t think Democrats, as they are now in the U.S., are the answer. From my POV, Democrats and Republicans are basically the same.
 
The fights between these two parties are to see who is going to run the U.S. They are not fights between good and evil. They are fights between two corrupt groups; each of whom wants to control and benefit from the wealth of the richest country in the world.
 
People think of the U.S. as a democracy. But, it hasn’t been a democracy for some time. Laws like those that give corporations the same rights as citizens and laws that remove any limits of how much rich people and corporations can donate to political parties are plain evidence that the votes of the rich and of the corporations clearly weigh far more than the votes of the average man. One has to be in serious denial to not see this.
 
All I can say for Hillary is that if she had been elected, I expect that the looting of American would have gone on quietly; as it has been for the last four or five administrations. Most of the presidents who have been elected in recent decades in the U.S. have been quiet figureheads put into place to give the semblance of presidential leadership while the gathering and looting of the national wealth continued by the party in power at that moment.
 
The middle and lower classes in the U.S. have been getting poorer for decades now. It began in the mid-70’s. And since then, the wealthy have been getting more and more of the pie.
 
And as the rich get richer, they spend more on donations to political parties and candidates. And, not amazingly, those parties and candidate vote in laws that benefit their donors. Wealth is essentially ‘buying’ the American democracy.
 
This is not a function of the Democrats or the Republicans. They are both pushed up against the same trough to get what they can.
To see why America is getting poorer and more unstable, we only have to look to see why it was getting wealthier up until the 70’s and why it began to get poorer after that time.
 
And the answer is that then corporations realized that rather than manufacturing things in America, with its well paid workers and strong unions, they could make the same things in the far east in China and cut way down on manufacturing costs. And that, in turn, made their profit margins go way up.
 
So, from the POV of the big corporations and the wealthy, this was a no-brainer, a win-win. They shifted manufacturing to the far east and began making way more money.
 
But no one, seemingly, thought about what effect this would have on America in general. America had been a manufacturing powerhouse all through the 50’s and 60’s. America made things. America manufactured wealth. We made excellent things, we sold excellent things – and life was good.
 
But when manufacturing went overseas, the American dollars, that would have been spent on America workers, and which would have then circulated around inside of the America economy, went overseas to pay for the manufacturing and a lot of cheaply made shit came back.
 
The net effect was that America began to bleed money towards China at the same time that American corporations began to make higher profits from having lower manufacturing costs. But overall the net was that America was losing money and getting poorer. And the money being lost was coming from the middle and lower classes and the profits from lower manufacturing costs was accruing to the wealthy.
 
For awhile the middle and lower classes were happier. They now had places like Walmart where they could buy stuff cheaper and that gave them the impression that life was getting better. But it was an illusion.
 
Union busting began in earnest after that because with manufacturing gone overseas, the unions had little power to negotiate for American workers. And the corporations were happy to bust the unions because that meant they could pay their U.S. workers even less which lead to more profits for them.
 
One particularly nasty side effect of this gutting of American industry by sending manufacturing overseas was that all this money that was going to China, allowed China to build up and ENORMOUS balance of trade with the U.S. They were putting money into their banks hand-over-fist. And that, my son, is how they went from being a third-world military power to a first-world military power in a few decades. And America paid for it. American corporate greed for lower manufacturing costs has trashed the middle and lower American classes and made China a world power. And all of that happened right under our noses.
 
You won’t see this discussed much in the U.S. when folks are analyzing what’s going wrong. Why? Because both parties, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in the entire business.
 
Once big money realized that they could buy votes to get the laws they wanted, they began doing so and they ended up owning the souls of most politicians. And as they got more and more of the laws they wanted, they ended up controlling the American political system better and better. And the rich don’t care of America is being gutted during all of this. They are walking away richer and that is all they care about. It is simple human nature.
 
You are probably wondering what this long essay has to do with rioters, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 and Trump?
 
Well, it is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now
American is a failing empire. And has been for decades now.
Wealth is bleeding out because the country is not longer a net wealth creator. And, of the residual wealth (which is still a hell of a lot) that remains, much is being looted year by year in unreasonable corporate profits, massive bonuses for corporate bigwigs, off-shore tax avoidance schemes, and tax-relief schemes for the wealthy that are enacted by the political parties that those same wealthy folks helped put into power with their donations.
 
There’s no other way to say it. The country is owned by the rich and it being looted by the rich. The much cherished ideas of one-man-one-vote and equality for all are increasingly just mirages.
 
But these things don’t happen overnight. They take decades to slowly unfold.
 
But, before we get into the heart of things, do you know how the U.S. government finances itself from year to year?
 
Each year, the U.S. sells bonds. These bonds don’t payback a huge amount when they mature but they do have one attractive property. They ALWAYS pay back what they promised and they have NEVER failed to do so.
 
The U.S. is still regarded as the wealthiest nation in the world and the U.S. dollar is the de-facto reference currency of the world.
 
These factors mean that buying U.S. bonds is one of the safest things a rich individual or a foreign government can do with their excess wealth. Every year, the U.S. sells U.S. bonds and folks ALWAYS buy them.
 
The U.S. sells bonds each year to the generate the money it uses to run the country next year. Each year, as the size of the national budget goes up, the U.S. sells more bonds to cover it.
 
Does this sound familiar? In banking terms it is called “kiting checks”. The U.S. is essentially paying for the increasing costs of running the country by selling bonds to stay ahead.
 
But, here’s the rub. They can’t do this forever.
 
And given that the U.S. has been bleeding money for decades and getting poorer, the country is getting to be like a big cardboard store-front. There’s not as much real wealth standing behind the cardboard as they’re used to be. And there’s less every year.
 
There is going to come a big, final show-stopper event when the U.S. finally can’t pay back on the bonds it sells. It is going to be a major world-shaking default.
 
The entire world of finance knows about this. They have known for years. And all it will take to bring the U.S. to a full stop is for entities to stop buying U.S. bonds. If they stop, then the U.S. won’t have enough money to run and it won’t have enough money to pay back on the bonds it sold previously and BOOM – big toast.
 
It hasn’t happened yet because if the U.S. defaulted then a lot of countries like China, which holds large amounts of U.S. bonds, would also get badly hurt – because they would not get payed back on their bonds.
 
But everyone knows that things cannot go on like this. The U.S. is standing on financial sand that is seeping away from under its feet. China and the others are buying less and less U.S. bonds each year to minimize their exposure to the problem. China and Russia are trying to rework in the international financial system to make their currencies the de-facto reference currencies so they can get away from the U.S. dollar and make themselves more powerful.
 
So, year by year the U.S. is in a worse and worse financial position. As I said, the U.S. is a failing empire and the irony is that it took out its own ‘greed-gun’ and shot itself in the foot when it chose to sent its manufacturing overseas.
 
Meanwhile, the rich-listers and the multi-national corporations in the U.S. are locking up the political system by buying the politicians left and right to pass the laws to benefit themselves. Why? So they can loot what they can of the remaining U.S. wealth.
 
Son, don’t forget that these folks are wealthy enough that borders don’t mean squat to them. They can buy their way into most countries if they are wealthy enough. So, if the U.S. crumbles into anarchy, they will just move away.
 
So how does all of this backstory relate to what’s going on now? Well, several unusual things have happened all at once in recent years.
First, the normal pattern of voting in one party or the other to continue to the looting has been broken.
 
The American public can sense that the American empire is failing. They may not be able to articulate, it as I have, but they clearly know that they are getting poorer and things are not right. Hence, they were not happy to just put in another figurehead president, like Hillary, to continue with business as usual (make that looting as usual). And in a major surprise, they elected Donald Trump.
 
A billionaire, a businessman, a reality TV host and a serious narcissist. People were tired of more of the same and they wanted big change and he promised it – in big bold letters.
 
But, as a billionaire, was he really the one we should trust to reverse things back to the America that we remember when the country was getting richer and things were good? No matter if electing him was logical or not. The American public wanted a change and he was it.
 
The second factor was the Covid-19 virus. Who could have predicted that? It has come out of left field to body-slam the world.
 
And then the third factor was triggered when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.
 
The first and third factors reveal a deep and growing instability in the way things are being run in the U.S.
 
If things had been handled better and the U.S. had not beggared itself by sending its manufacturing offshore and if the rich hadn’t essentially ‘bought’ the house and senate votes, then I strongly doubt that conditions would have been right to elect someone like Donald Trump. He would have just remaining a self-impressed wealthy showman with a trophy wife.
 
And if the U.S. had really tried to embrace its minorities and had not just kept sweeping the racism problem back under the rug each time it arose, then things like Minneapolis probably would not have happened. And, if they did, they would not have been part of a large pattern that has been ignored over and over again.
 
But factor two, the Covid-19 virus has been the real show-stopper. It has pushed our fragile systems, globally, right to the edge relentlessly and it has pointed up a very deep truth that everyone, especially our politicians, needs to learn.
 
And that is that the virus is part of a reality that doesn’t care what we think, what we believe or what we hope. Like gravity, it just happens and we have no choice about it – none. We either work with it ‘as it is’ or we deny how it is – at our own expense.
 
Donald Trump and many other leaders believe that the world and reality are shaped by their charisma, their leadership and the force of their personalities. When those sorts of beliefs come up against the virus, they are not going to win – it isn’t going to happen. Anyone who doesn’t realize that we have to work around the virus ‘as it is’ – is simply is simply in denial of reality.
 
Reality doesn’t care what we think. Gravity doesn’t ask our permission to do what it does and neither does something like this virus. It is programmed by evolution to do one thing and no matter how many speeches are given that ‘it will go away’ and no matter how many meetings are held trying to balance of the health costs vs. the costs to our economies, it will still just do just what it does because it doesn’t care. It doesn’t even know we are here. It doesn’t know anything. It just does what it does.
 
People like Trump and all those who resist face-masks and social distancing are just walking into the whirling blades of this thing with nothing but denial and bravado in hand.
 
So, what’s a person to make of all of this?
 
Damned if I have a good answer, Son. But I do think it settles the mind and gives some sense of clarity about what’s going on if you have the larger backstory and can see a bit of how things got to where they are.
 
Trump thinks he’s destined to be a great world-changing leader. I think he’s got a bit of Mussolini in him. But he is clearly a product of his times.
 
The U.S. is coming unraveled. And at such times strong leaders emerge and their natural response is to clamp down and to try to hold things together. But Trump’s also got an election coming up and he wants badly to win it. So, he’s playing the cards he’s got. And Law and Order is a big card just now and it clearly appeals to his base.
 
Regarding Portland: Portland belongs to the folks that live there. If they have a democratic governor and mayor, it is because they elected them. And if those leaders choose to deal with the demonstrators as they have been, then that’s their right. And if the locals don’t like it, then they can vote it more law and order oriented governors and mayors. Isn’t that the American way?
 
There’s no place in that equation for outside Federal interference – except that it represents a way for Trump to play the Law and Order card loudly to rally his base and create the impression that he’s saving the world from liberal anarchy.
 
Sending federal soldiers to ‘democrat’ cities? Really?
 
He’s attempting to manufacture a bogus war between liberal and conservatives for his own purposes. And I suspect it has to do with getting re-elected though that is looking less and less likely. And if he cannot win the election, how about he just blows by it by creating a small civil war so he can claim that the nation is in such turmoil that an election is not possible?
 
All this also serves as a way to distract from the fact that for all of his bluster, Trump’s handled the Covid-19 situation abysmally.
 
Yesterday’s headline said that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have no
w exceed 140,000 but Trump claims things are getting better.
 
The U.S. is a failing empire and these sorts of things happen in failing empires.
 
If you are on the inside of the empire and your entire life, family and livelihood depend on stability and predictability and things are falling apart all around you, then I can see how easy it is to get caught up in the good-guy, bad-guy, liberal, conservative rhetoric.
 
It is a game that is currently driven by one man’s desire to dominate the situation and retain the presidency and he will do whatever it takes to it it – even if he pulls the country down around everyone’s ears.

Your asked if I have better suggestions?
  • If he would just back off and govern for the good of the people.
  • If he would stop with all the conservative against liberal agitation.
  • If he would start doing whatever it takes for the U.S. to beat the virus as New Zealand has.
  • If he would start rolling back all the laws that benefit the rich against the poor and middle classes.
  • If he would block the loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid taxes and hide their money offshore.
  • If he would work to bring manufacturing back into the country.
  • If he would stop unlimited campaign financing so that the elected representatives represent the voters who elected them rather than those who donated massive amounts of money too their campaigns.
  • If he would revoke the law that says corporations have the same rights as people.
  • If he would establish universal health care like every other major nation the the world.
  • If he would see to it that the primary ethic of the U.S.’s national government is to maximize the quality of life for all of its citizens.
All of this is possible and it has been done in other countries.
 
How’s that for a list of suggestions about what might be done?
 
But, of course, none of what we say here will matter. You can believe what you want and I can say what I believe and in the end, forces much larger than you or I will control how it all plays out.
 
So, what to do?

Well, anger doesn’t help. It just clouds our judgment. Getting a clear idea of how things got to where they are improves our ability to predict where they might go next and that has good survival value. But becoming part of one hostile faction or the other doesn’t lead to clarity. It just leads to anger and blaming again.
 
In truth, I wish I could transport all of you down here to New Zealand.  Both of your skill sets would work very well for you here.  It is a small place but it is run reasonably and there is good opportunity here.
 
Love you, son
 

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Conflict, Corruption, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, Pandemics, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Wealth Disparity | Comments Closed

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