Category Archives: Politics

America – Red, Black and Green (Fear, Hate and Greed in America)

What emotions take queues from the brain’s primitive parts? Which colors attribute to these vibes? Without intellect, these feeling fall subject to who? When a population and its leaders fall victim to primitive feelings, who also falls?

A person counts fear as real until it can be examined. If the thing feared cannot be examined by the individual, trust becomes vested in the state to define and resolve. The state, therefore, holds the power to extinguish fear or inflame it. Genuine action and enlightenment solve actual and unfounded fears. Manipulation, deception and obfuscation exacerbate fear of an unknown.

The media often leads with stories which scream hyperbolic but exist rare in this world. Media confects scary medical facts from myth and conjecture. Predators portrayed as slick and devious, offenders in sophisticated, rehabilitative lockups, documented from questionable sources or phony experts. Generators of fear get what they want via mindless reaction.  National scares morph into trends. Millennial fever burns up the treetops of sane analysis. Profiteers love the slaughter. Minority politicians count majority votes. Fear wins over freedom most of the time these days in this place.

Gated communities, background checks, drug testing loom ore the land. Common social ills become crimes. Punishments plague the poor only and severely. Everyday life sees every citizen as a possible perpetrator of every possible crime. By exploiting vulnerabilities, government at all levels now intrudes on all of us most of the time. Freedom from fear comes not from an overweening government security state but from individuals working individually and together against the real and imminent perpetrators of crime.

Hatred nurtured by experience or upbringing becomes the DNA of a population segment. Something unjust, real or imagined sets hate in motion. It takes a village to keep hatred’s embers burning through generations. When hatred stokes the minds of children early with stories and rites, bystanders can do little to lower the temperature or slow momentum.

Upbringing alone does not present as the only breeder of haters. Media, mentioned above as a fear generator, employs hate to sell papers. Community, through mobility of place and employment, thins and has less impact than it did in the 1950’s. As community thins to the point of collapse, the pillars of hatred erect and thicken and overshadow good sense. As divisive cable news and websites erode common bonds, dignity and mutual interests disintegrate with those bonds. The victors be the haters and the haters be us.

Greed breeds greed. The way one makes money should be more important than making money itself. Money can be made the old-fashioned way by cheating, lying or robbing. But there is profit in fear and hate. Race bating keeps minorities in their ghetto and in their low wage jobs. The big bad wolf needs to be combatted, so security must be increased, and evil must be hunted down. Both the suppression of minorities and the enhancement of security cost money. Money is made on these overemphasized emotions.

The foundational myth that anyone with good idea and strong will can make it in America has been replaced by the reality that American capitalism evolved into a dog-eat-dog system. As far as social advancement, class here offers less mobility than in history’s societies of more rigid class structures. America must jettison the thinking that government is the problem, that corporate responsibility holds no allegiance but to shareholders and that making money adheres to no moral code. Republicans no longer nurture balanced budget and investment in public goods. Nurturing now a no-tax philosophy and letting things take their own course without government interference ends poorly. Supply-side assumptions yield stagnation – leading to workers giving up because hope holds meaning only to the fool. Productive economies treat all people equally and reward them accordingly. Sharing must exist alongside rewards. Profit sharing, antitrust enforcement and limiting special interest money can replenish the stock of social capital.

The colors of the aforementioned emotions are red, black and green. The American landscape has always had a red scare: from redcoats, to redskins, to communist and socialist. Black is the color of racism in the United States…now to include brown for emigrating populations. Our money is green, and we envy those who have it, no matter how they make it. Big money is in racism and fear of socialism. While the population barricades against fear and arms for invasion, the manipulators of such make money from it and lose no sleep.  

More Thoughts on Watership Down

This post was inspired by Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist Oct. 22, 2019.

Read Ross’s opinion piece.

The following are some of my notes on his piece…

What is Ross Douthat’s plot?

A NEW Political Founding is a home resulting from both vision and struggle.

What does liberal order mean? The political structure of a party with tenets in the liberal mindset.

OTHER:

By shedding emotions in order to achieve certain goals, one comes full circle and becomes extremely emotional when those goals are threatened, impaired or ignored.

Every dogged pursuit without human and emotional consideration leads to separation from humanity.

Every suppression of humanity leads to depression and skepticism.

When a society, however large or small, by denying agency to a group or individual plants the seed of decay or segregation in its midst.

When the fundamentals of humanity are sacrificed for order or safety or escape, that society initiates its own demise rather than rebirth.

Societal good results from distributed input of virtues and values rather than one credentialed souls generous or will.

The village of ideas, strong and wise and prescient, contribute more to a society than any one type of mindset.

The impossibility of uninterrupted comfort or impenetrable safety must be accepted as future elements in a establishing a diverse society.

Ignoring reality, a liberal society must choose between dark futures: one that leaves fate to others or cruel nature; the other which constricts society to total control and harsh sanctions while still ignoring the enemies at the gates.

However, when combining ignorance of threat with suppression of descent, a society evolves into the worst of all worlds: societal elites escaping from a lower class of citizen temporarily in a doomed high castle.

Acceptance and integration of the society within hold the only real solution to withstanding the terrible tides without.

Societal success depends on putting politics behind the humanity those politics represent.

This Week in the News: October 2016

Traffic Accidents affect life, spirituality

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
–Stanley Kubrick

Voting faith in Government

  • rigged election
  • Voting as a responsibility
  • Waste
  • Third Party

The electoral map really was rigged by Republicans after the 2010 census.

Polls – are election polls rigged can they be?  Online poll for Justin Bieber, Pitbull.

A restriction-less 2010 poll set up by Faxo.com to pick a destination for Justin Bieber’s “My World” tour saw North Korea steal the top spot…

A Facebook poll launched in the summer of 2012 to sponsor a Pitbull concert at the Walmart franchise  sent Pitbull to the most remote Walmart store in the U.S Kodiak, Alaska.

Can poll results affect beliefs

Jason Kandor TV ad

Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Jason Kander released a television ad last month in which he put an AR-15 assault rifle together blindfolded while reciting a script about gun rights. Mr. Kander’s poll numbers soared IMMEDIATELY. Have you ever changed your opinion due to a stunt? Are your beliefs based on first impressions or lasting principles?

Can one’s ability change your beliefs

AT&T wants to merge with Time Warner. Do you care? Does the phone you have affect your decision?

Galluping Polls and Pew Surveys…Are these Big Riggs?

  1. A restriction-less 2010 poll set up to pick a destination for Justin Bieber’s “My World” tour saw North Korea steal the top spot…  A Facebook poll launched in the summer of 2012 to sponsor a Pitbull concert at the Walmart franchise  sent Pitbull to the most remote Walmart store in the U.S Kodiak, Alaska.  Do you pay attention to online polls?  Have you been influenced by them

2. A 2016 Gallup Poll concluded that Utah was the happiest state in the Union based on ranking well-being, work and community.  Texas finished 29th.  Could you be happier in another state?  Job? Community?

3. Another Gallup Poll found that both men and women were most afraid of snakes and least afraid of the dark.  But 27% more women were afraid of mice than men.  What probable daily encounters do you fear most?  What things do other people fear that you do not?

4. Confidence in the church

Since 1975, confidence in the church as a whole has dropped from 68% to 41% in 2016.  What factors might have influence this poll?

5. Eleven former presidents of the United States were affiliated with the Episcopal Church.  Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were unaffiliated.  Does religious affiliation matter to you?  Does it matter to the majority of Americans?

 

 

Summary: Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel peace prize

This opinion essay is inspired by my knowledge of the subject and another more extensive opinion essay written by George Monbiot, titled “Take away Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel peace prize. She no longer deserves it”, and published on The Guardian website:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/05/rohingya-aung-san-suu-kyi-nobel-peace-prize-rohingya-myanmar

We celebrated when she was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991; when she was finally released from house arrest in 2010; and when she won the general election in 2015.  Now, Aung San Suu Kyi has denied the very identity of the people being attacked in 2017, asking the US ambassador not to use the term Rohingya.  With the obvious and often explicit purpose of destroying this group, acts of genocide have been practiced more or less continuously by Myanmar’s armed forces since Aung San Suu Kyi became de facto political leader.  She possesses one power in abundance: the power to speak out, but she does not.  I believe the Nobel committee should retain responsibility for the prizes it awards, and withdraw them if its laureates later violate the principles for which they were recognized.

Aung San Suu Kyi asked the US ambassador not to use the term Rohingya.  Really?  She has upheld the 1982 Citizenship Law, which denies the Rohingya people within Myanmar’s borders their rights.  Seriously?  Her government obstructs humanitarian aid, denies well documented evidence, ignores the UN report on the treatment of the Rohingya.   Unbelieveable!  An abhorrent example: In a well-documented case, Aung San Suu Kyi’s office posted a banner on its Facebook page reading “Fake Rape”.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide describes five acts, any one of which, when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, amounts to genocide.  Myanmar is guilty of these four.

  1. Killing…summary executions of teachers, elders and community leaders
  2. Serious bodily or mental harm…documented mass rape
  3. Destroying conditions of life…destruction of crops and the burning of villages; Malnutrition ravages the Rohingya, afflicting 80,000 children
  4. Prevent births… a woman in labour beaten by soldiers, her baby stamped to death as it was born.

With the obvious and often explicit purpose of destroying this group, acts of genocide have been practiced more or less continuously by Myanmar’s armed forces since Aung San Suu Kyi became de facto political leader.   She has blamed the isolated acts of some Rohingya insurgents to justify the mass extermination efforts of Myanmar’s military.   In her Nobel lecture, Aung San Suu Kyi remarked: “Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.”

Aung San Suu Kyi ~ “It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it.” She has failed to speak out. Excuses for not speaking out include:

  • jeopardize re-election
  • armed forces intimidation
  • keep China happy

Whether out of prejudice or out of fear, she denies to the Rohingya Muslim minority the freedoms she rightly claimed for herself. Her regime excludes – and in some cases, seeks to silence – the very activists who helped to ensure her own rights were recognized.

Nobel committee: Retain responsibility for the prizes you award.  You must withdraw the Aung San Suu Kyi award for her failure to act.  De facto leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi: Acknowledge the identity of Rohingya people who have lived there for centuries.  Myanmar military:  Stop executing the Rohingya.  Again, Aung San Suu Kyi, speak out against these atrocities.  Nobel committee: Change your policy and revoke her award.  Public: There is nothing to prevent you from petitioning for the revocation of the Nobel Prize of the de facto leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, for the genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority.

Analysis: My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump by Jeff Flake

Analysis

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump

How did we ensure the rise of Donald Trump?  Conservatives mocked Obama’s pledge to change even as we worked to assist with that failure.  Conservatives were silent when marginal figures attacked Obama’s legitimacy.  Depicting current happenings as normalcy requires a determined suspension of critical faculties.  This amounts to the conservative mind being diseased and abandons the normal constraints of reason and compassion.  The bitter pill to cure the diseased mind of the conservative is to acknowledge the accumulation of damage raining down from the president and act before the deluge rather than ignoring the obvious, forming a disaster.

Responding with silence to the erratic presidency abdicates responsibility.  Congress must be unified in defense of its prerogatives regardless of presidential affiliation.  When principles become malleable to the heat of power, they soon deform into something of no consequence and are no longer principles.  When a foreign power’s attack on our democracy results in a rejection by the presidency of his own intelligence, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Despotic men are deposed but their ambition resurrects in others who have learned from the departed. Here now, our forebears cry out from their graves, warning us of the foreign transgressors now at the gates of our Republic.  Republicans win bigly when they shortsightedly play to populism and prefer protectionist policy, while handicapping the country without a long view, long term.  The ruling party engages in reckless politics and reenacts history to the detriment of the people that they are here to serve.

Summary: Increasing Voter Turnout for 2018 and Beyond

Below find a summary of this New York Times article (Ctrl Click):

Hillary supporters voted underwhelmingly.  Only 43% of those under 25 voted last year.  Low turnout favors extreme candidates and incumbents.  To inspire turnout, inspire voters with a good candidate.  Also, personal contact increases turnout.  Voter anger increases turnout.  Activism increases turnout.  Voting’s structural obstacles preserve rich, white, old and suppress poor, young, minorities.  Institutional reforms make voting easier.  For example, Denver mailed ballots and allowed registration and voting on same day.  Republican officials make it harder to vote.  Automatic registration does not necessarily increase turnout.  Weekend and holiday elections increase turnout.  The many voting entities cause voting to occur every week and, so, decentralization decreases turnout.  Voting is easier in US than ever before but turnout is declining.  Making voting a habit increases turnout.  All improvements add up.

Analysis: Trump and the True Meaning of ‘Idiot’

A Quinnipiac University poll asked participants for a word that came to mind when they thought of Donald Trump: The No. 1 response was “idiot”.

To access this New York Times article hold ctrl key and click on icon.

Analysis

  • Idiot in modern understanding describes a person who lacks intelligence but it’s original meaning is more appropriate when applying a word to Trump.
    • An idiot in ancient Greece depended on the public for his existence, contributing nothing to it, concerned only with self.
    • Being uninvolved with the community but taking benefits from it, the idiot contributed to both his own demise and also the slow deterioration of society.
    • The idiot does not communicate with the community, he talks only for and to himself.
    • The idiot in ancient Greece existed as prepubescent (not transitioned to public life), parasitic, and self-idiomatic (a language only understood by him).
  • Idiot today means low intelligence thanks to the usurping of the term by early IQ test “Ableists” (characterizes persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non-disabled).
    • As a consequence of this IQ classification, idiots aren’t able to vote in Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio.
    • Keeping idiots off the voters roles was meant to accomplish both self and social preservation.
    • The more power the non-community participating idiot is given the more danger he is to the public.

The choice of the word idiot as an attribution of our president, its current meaning inaccurate, seems to be historically accurate. Just as four states still prevent what are defined as modern day idiots from voting, our country should prevent ancient day idiots from running for public office.  The deterioration of community might not survive the administration of our current idiot.

Review: Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

Who would you say is more like Satan, Trump or McConnell?

Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

At first blush, this question brings to mind my oft quoted line from King Lear: The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.  If the question were rephrased to Who would you say is more like a gentleman?  The query becomes more palatable but far from digestible.  This blog raises the question of personal motive over devil’s intent by the “gentleman” McConnell.

Robin Bates paints parallels here.  With Democrats as God and healthcare as Adam, he seems to state that Adam/healthcare can’t be saved because of some implausible Justice.  McConnell’s determined revenge against Obama sacrifices innocents and achieves payback.  In the scale of Justice there is balance but it can hardly be discerned when weighing revenge against the body/bodies pile(d) in the green of Eden or the morgue of St. Somewhere.

Our current unbounded government is likened to the Hell of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Though Satan has nothing personal against Adam, he rationalizes the carnage as just business.  And so, it is with McConnell.  Cloaking his malice in “public reason” and “honor”, Mitch characterizes his stealthy proceedings on the GOP Senate AHCA as “promise keeping” and ignores the collateral damage (the suffering of innocents) that the promise promises (i.e. repealing Obamacare).   How can one recognize Satan?  Look to the savvy gentleman to your right.

Review: Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

John Semley reviews Naomi Klein’s latest leftie lament No is Not Enough.  Semley begins his review by characterizing Michael Bloomberg’s offer to fund U.S.’s financial commitment to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as mega-billionaire salvation.  He further metaphor’s Bloomberg, likening him to a firefighter saving a cat in a tall tree.  Then further depicts Bloomberg vs Trump as behemoths in a Japanese monster movie battling each other with briefcases.  Somewhere down below his third paragraph is Naomi Klein, pinned in by metaphors, lost in the sea of panicked little people scurrying for safety.

Finally, we find Naomi, disparaging elite liberals as saviors and advocating grassroots push back for meaningful change.  Populist uprising must be met and pushed back with grassroots movements on the green field of political advocacy.  The reviewer decides the Ms. Klein’s slim offering is a place for anyone to start to make sense of Trump and Trumpism.  Naomi describes a culture that grants indecent impunity to the ultrarich because it is consumed with winning and dominance.  As we have seen with articles of anti-Trump pundits and late-night hosts, the author prescribes making our president look like a puppet (Bannon, Putin).  This tactic and other such bating has proved, in some instances, deliriously successful.

Naomi Klein, with her holy trinity of of contemporary progressive-leftie doctrine (2000’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine and 2014’s This Changes Everything), preaches that major crises precipitate political change, both good and bad.  People unite to build a better world or disband and feel sorry for themselves in a Trump world.  A point that may be missed in John Semley review of Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough lies in the final quote from Belgian cartoonist Jean-Claude Servais:

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

Note the word hour…optimism has a shelf-life, seize it before it spoils.

Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America – my notes

Lauren Duca wrote this article in Teen Vogue December 10, 2016.

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america

Here are my notes on that article.

The CIA determined that Russia intervened in our election.

President-elect Donald Trump dismissed the story as if it were a piece of fake news.

“The election ended in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.

The President-elect’s attempt to undermine the American people’s access to [a foreign government’s interference in our election] undermines the very foundation upon which this country was built

Trump won the Presidency by gas light.

His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception.

Civil rights are now on trial.

We must regain control of the truth.

Listen to “Duel of the Fates.

“Gas lighting” is someone causing another to question reality.

Doubting whether one’s perspective can be trusted, cling to a single shred of evidence, hold one’s conviction, and free oneself from captor’s control.

To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity.

He swore off the lies of politicians but contradicted himself, without bothering to conceal his conflicts.

He lied to us over and over again, and spun them into evidence of bias.

At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.

Long list of Trump’s lies:

  1. Trump saying that he watched thousands of people cheering on 9/11 in Jersey City
  2. Mexican government forces immigrants into the U.S.
  3. “30 or 34 million” immigrants in this country
  4. he never supported the Iraq War
  5. that the unemployment rate is as high as “42 percent”
  6. the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world
  7. that crime is on the rise

The gas lighting part comes in when the fictions are disputed by the media, and Trump:

  • doubles down on his lies
  • paints himself as a victim of unfair coverage
  • threatens to revoke access.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the press:

  • The well-respected publications as the New York Times.
  • He has disseminated a wealth of unsubstantiated attacks on the media
  • Baseless tweets

Trump’s gas lighting was manipulative, a deliberate attempt to destabilize journalism as a check government.

Everyone living under Trump:

  • Radical progressives
  • Hardline Republicans
  • Jill Stein’s weird cousin.

The President of the United States cannot be lying to the American electorate with zero accountability.

The threat of deception is not a partisan issue.

Trump took advantage of the things that divide this country…while lying his way to the Oval Office.

The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we’re not boiling yet.

Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner…

Stop pretending it’s always been so hot in here.

Empower ourselves:

  1. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read
  2. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor
  3. Explain how things should have been clearer.
  4. Inform yourself what outlets are trustworthy and which aren’t.
  5. Seek out a browser extension that flags misleading sites or print out a list of fake outlets
  6. Do a thorough search before believing the agenda Trump distributes on Twitter.
  7. Refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you

If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.

It will be far easier to take on Trump’s words when there is no question of what he’s said

We all must insist on that level of transparency.

Ugliness to untangle:

  • Whether our President can be an admitted sexual predator
  • Figure out how to stop him from threatening the sovereignty of an entire religion.

It’s incredible that any of those things could seem like a distraction from a greater peril, or be only the cherry-picked issues in a seemingly unending list of gaffes, but the gaslights are flickering.

Remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together.

We have nothing without the truth.