Shifting Toward Violence

                                                                                                         written 21 August 2022

                                                                                                     published 28 August 2022

                                                                                                 

            A Utah based pro-Trump group, fundraising by selling apparel, was recently fined for replacing "Made In China" tags with "Made In USA" tags.  The grift and fraud were not remarkable, but I was struck by the T-shirt slogan: "Give Violence A Chance".  Haven't thousands of years of violence been enough to show the abject failure of this path?  America was designed as a system for the peaceful resolution of differences.  Granted, this works better in theory than in practice, but why the push for violent overthrow?

            J. Keplar, writing in the 7 August, 2022 Daily Kos, lays out why the Republicans, formally a party of law and order, increasingly advocate for violence.  He addresses it in a series of five questions and answers, excerpted here.

            "Q1: Why did Republicans become so extreme?"

            "A1: Because they wished to tap into the fears of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation."

            "Q2: Why did they want to tap into this fear?"

            "A2: Because fear and rage more reliably turn out voters.  No matter its source, and no matter how 'illegitimate' the fear’s foundations may seem, the fear itself is real and it has an impact."

            "Q3: Why do they use these tactics?"

            "A3: Because emotion clouds reason.  Strong emotions short circuit our ability to think long-term and more rationally about the information presented.  This has the effect of making the lie more believable, and the truth feel more dangerous.  Similar to a drug, the longer you use this tactic the more of it you have to use to get the same effect.  The GOP's positions have become progressively more irrational and indefensible."

            "Q4: Why don't they want voters to use reason?"

            "A4: Because they might notice the policies the GOP are pursuing are not for the benefit of a majority of the voters, their communities or the country as a whole.  Strong majorities support reducing fossil fuel usage, stricter gun control laws, and keeping abortion legal, all opposed by Republicans.  In a clear-eyed democracy, the party promoting the more popular policies would have the upper hand.  But a large portion of the populace isn’t clear-eyed, due to tactics that keep them from fully understanding the costs and consequences of their votes."

            "Q5: Why don't they want to pursue policies that would benefit the majority of their voters?"

            "A5: Because the majority of their voters at not providing the majority of their funding.  Upton Sinclair said, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it'.  No other quote seems to encapsulate the psychology at work within the GOP.  While this situation is not unique to the Republicans, it is not accurate simply to say 'both sides do it'.  The GOP have deliberately pursued funding sources that have driven them to extremes to which there are no comparisons on the left.  This has resulted in a process of artificial selection over the decades, where the party funnels the most support to the most extreme candidates in every election.  Each generation becomes more willing to go further to put party line above principles and ignore the consequences to their country and their constituents."            Keplar concludes, "the GOP is being driven to greater and greater extremism due to the party’s desire for ever more money, power and influence in the midst of the dwindling popularity of their policies."

            We are experiencing the conflict between separation and unity.  The illusion of separation, which necessarily demonizes the other, is fundamental to a mindset of violence.  Only very sick people do violence to themselves.  Capitalism is based on the illusion of separation and exclusive gain.  Jeff Bazos is worth more than $387,000 for every hour he has been alive.  Society defines him as a success, but how can that be beneficial for the rest of us, or the planet?  

            Every day, the ravages of the climate crisis are becoming more obvious.  This is the unity of realty demanding acknowledgement for the centuries of ignorance and planetary violence.  We may have only a decade to make changes significant enough to maintain our technological society, yet 100 percent of Senate Republicans refused to support any effort to make those changes.  That is not party over country, but party over sanity.  The only question is: how sane are the majority of US voters?

  

 

 

Inflation

                                                                                                         written 14 August 2022

                                                                                                     published 21 August 2022

                                                                                                 

              Price inflation is the result of changes in three factors: currency value, demand, and supply.

            In 1963, my mother bought a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom tract house in San Diego for $14,000, which Zillow values today at $688,800, almost a 5,000 percent increase.  Despite being remodeled over time, the house is still the same basic structure on the same sized parcel as it was in 1963.  Some of the increase in the price is due to the steady decline in the value of the dollar since 1972.

            Demand is the second factor affecting pricing.  In the 1940's, there were 2 billion people on the planet, and we will hit 8 billion this November.  California has experienced the same four fold increase.  But demand has increased even faster than population growth would indicate.  

            The entire economy had shifted to massive war time production during World War 2, and there was concern about returning to recession after the war.  To avoid this, the government changed us from "citizens" to "consumers", pushing everyone to buy more goods to keep the economy humming.  The GI bill funded education and low interest home loans, making the transition relatively painless.  Everyone was eager to start families and live the American Dream.  

            Because capitalism defines itself in terms of growth, demand must increase even if the population is stable.  US consumers take a quarter of the global economy, while making up less than 5 percent of the global population.  Since we advertise our standard of living all over the world, everyone wants to live more like an American, making hyper-consumption a global force.  Unfortunately, we live in the real world, with finite boundaries and resources.

            Supply is the third factor in pricing.  One of the flaws of capitalism is the assumption that the "free market" balances everything out.  When demand exceeds supply, the price goes up, reducing the demand.  This is satisfactory for some items, but is unacceptable for essentials, such as clean air, potable water, healthy food, adequate housing, or affordable health care.  When the demand for these exceeds the supply, people begin to die, or go to war.

            For millions of years, Earth's annual biological productivity supported all life forms.  In the 1970's, when global human population hit 4 billion, we exceeded that productivity limit.  Since then, we have begun consuming the fundamental biosphere of the planet, in addition to the declining annual harvest.  We have increased our population and per-capita consumption by driving other species to extinction, and now risk our own extinction as well.  At today's level of consumption, we use 1.75 times the annual productivity of the planet.  If everyone consumed like Americans, it would take 5 Earth's to support us.  Part of the denial of capitalism is that there is little value assigned to the future, so this over consumption is not factored into the pricing structure until part of the system crashes completely.  We are beginning to see the economic consequences of a system long out of balance with reality.

            Take the recent rise in the price of gasoline as an example.  Oil is a limited resource, but we assume we will always "find" more when our current supply diminishes.  Most of the land based "conventional" oil has been found in about 120 large fields, which have produced for decades.  But new discoveries fell behind consumption rates over 50 years ago, and most of those large fields are now in steep decline or are already depleted.  Newer, "unconventional" oil is found in much smaller quantities, where production declines in a few years, demanding new developments and increasing costs.

            Conventional oil production peaked in 2005.  To fill demand, US fracking boomed, despite increased costs.  Money poured into fracking on the hope it would "turn around", but $30B was lost in a decade.  By 2018, all oil production had peaked.  The recent sanctions from the Russian invasion of Ukraine cut about 10 percent from the global market.  Prices rose abruptly because no other country could increase production to cover that loss.  We have a limited supply of our most common energy source.  The issue is not really price, but availability. 

            Like a naive spendthrift, we have been burning through our finite inheritance of stored solar energy.  If we are lucky, we will make the shift to prudent living on our annual solar income, but time is running out.

Showing True Colors

                                                                                                          written 7 August 2022

                                                                                                    published 14 August 2022

                                                                                                 

            Such interesting times!  Reality is demanding we look deep inside and decide from our heart who we are as a nation.   

            Climate deniers are twisting into pretzels to ignore the heat, fires, and floods that are destroying communities and portions of the economy everywhere.  Extreme heat has increased in extent and duration, hitting parts of the country not tooled up with wide spread air conditioning, killing people, crops, and livestock while disrupting the economy.  Fires in the west have been relatively modest, so far, with nothing like the million acres California blazes of the last few years.  However, there is a new fire east of Eureka and over 100 fires are currently burning in Alaska.  

            The flooding in the east just keeps coming.  This is the result of the wide swings of a jet stream weakened by higher Arctic temperatures, combined with massive moisture from a warmer ocean coming from the monsoons in the southwest and the regular input from the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf is so warm that any hurricanes that come through there could accelerate from category 1 to category 4 within a matter of hours, giving little warning.

            Most Republican "leaders" still proclaim it is all a hoax, and oppose any efforts to do anything different.  Not to be outdone, corporate Democrats like Senator Manchin, with coal wealth, held up climate progress to allow more oil and gas production, and Senator Sinema, funded by Wall Street, protected wealthy hedge fund managers rather than her constituents.

            But the oil industry already knows the end game is near, and exhibits little interest in developing new oil leases.  These multi-decade projects are financially risky, because new fields are more expensive to develop, since the easiest oil has already been produced and depleted.  What we see instead are massive corporate stock buy backs, using the extreme profits from high oil prices to pay off stockholders while there is still value left in the industry.  The fossil fuel corporations have known for decades that they are killing the planet, but they don't care.

            After decades of effort, the Republican packed Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion.  They rarely campaigned on the issue overtly, except when speaking to the faithful, while assuring the general population that they accepted the established legal precedent.  The three Trump Court appointees skillfully avoided declaring their abortion positions to get through the Senate confirmation process.  However, once on the bench, forming a solid 6-3 majority, they ignored the popular support for abortion and overturned 50 years of legal rights, simply because they wanted to.  Suddenly, people are reacting to the reality of dealing with a forced pregnancy, not just the possibility.  

            I was encouraged by the abortion vote in Kansas, where Trump had won by 15 percent in 2020, but a solid 59 percent supported keeping abortion legal.  The Republicans tried to sneak this through in a minor election year, during a Republican primary, expecting mostly Republican voters.  The outcome was the result of hard work by abortion rights supporters to make sure they got out the vote, suggesting the election this fall could be quite different from a typical midterm election.  

            Republicans have also exposed their fundamental fascist inclinations.  The recent week long, Fox News tribute to Hungarian fascist president Victor Orbán, followed by Orbán's keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Committee, shows the party's extreme disrespect for democratic traditions.  Authoritarian 2020 election deniers have become the Republican primary winners in many states, and a significant portion of the party believes QAnon conspiracies.  Fascism incites violence, and per capita murder rates in states Trump won are 40 percent higher than blue states.  The election this fall will determine if this is really the will of America, or just a very vocal, crazy subset, destined for abject failure.

            As I have stated in several previous articles, I believe that America is better than what Republican extremism represents.  Winston Churchill once said, "you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."  Not very complimentary, but hopeful in the end.  We have accepted decades of self-serving principles from the post Reagan Republicans; greed is good and government is bad.  But now the social bankruptcy and cruelty of those limited views are open for all to see.  It's time for something different. 

            

 

Dealing Across The Divide

                                                                                                           written 31 July 2022

                                                                                                    published 7 August 2022

 

            I sit meditation on our back deck, but the neighbor's dogs bark all day when nobody is home.  The contrast between focusing on inner calmness and their exterior noise is emblematic of my larger dilemma; how to deal with people across the partisan divide. 

            This isn't just a conceptual problem as I have a nephew who is a committed Trumper.  I imagine everyone has someone.   For years I have tried to have conversations, sharing information, resources, and facts.  But the feedback from him quickly devolves into anger and personal attacks: never a real discussion of the issues.  He is as convinced of the rightness of his view as I am of mine.  As this felt pointless, I withdrew further communication attempts.  But that also felt depressing, even as a short-term solution.  We are related by family relationships, in addition to living on the same planet.  

            Many cultures have resorted to violence to eliminate this problem, killing or exiling anyone who disagrees with the party line, expunging the rot.  Republican "leaders" claim Democrats are Satan's spawn, and a threat to our nation.  Their solution is to "lock them up", and purge the voting roles.  We are now seeing the rise of Christian Nationalism within the far right.  These CHRINO's (CHRistians In Name Only) are far from Christ's teachings of love, but rigidly self-righteous.  They believe only white Christians should have power in America, a simple-minded solution to a complex issue.  Despite being popular, racist, religious genocide is not an enduring solution.

            This is a very old problem; how to reach out to people holding different perspectives.  Societies have tried just outnumbering them, which creates disgruntled minorities.  Societies have tried ignoring them, leaving dissatisfaction to breed unabated.  Societies have tried killing them, which burns the hatred even deeper.  These times are demanding a new approach.  

            The perspective that impels me to meditate every day is the understanding of a unity reality.  My restless mind is like my neighbor's barking dogs, a distraction from the fundamental reality of life which I desire to experience.  Starting with this concept, I sit to quiet my mind and experience that unity, that my actions in life may be guided from such awareness.  When I am successful, the time passes without being irritated by the dogs.  I believe this can be applied to the rest of the world as well. 

            The following comes from the Arcturian Group, a channeled source, talking about the impact we have in a unity reality.

            "Everything that you do, and think, and say, not only affects your reality and the timeline you are currently on, but affects the multiverse with everything that you are offering vibrationally, energetically, and with your actions.  That is how powerful you are.  When you tap in and you see what is needed, then you know exactly what you need to do.  You know exactly where the love is most needed; you know exactly where to send the healing.  You don’t need to know what to fight against to do the good that you are here to do.  If you are made aware of a reality where something is going on, some sort of conflict, some war between various factions, then you send love to everyone involved instead of picking up your sword and joining the fight.  This is how you raise the level of consciousness on Earth, and this is how you ascend.” 

            It is my belief that the fundamental connection of the world will prevail over the illusion of separation that now dominates our culture.  As the disfunctions of our social forms becomes more manifest, more people will choose to change from opposition to cooperation.  There are indications this is already happening, as the extremes of the authoritarian Republican party are impacting more people every week.  Women are outraged at the assault on their bodies; parents are outraged as more children die of gun violence; people of color are outraged as voting rights are curtailed; veterans are outraged as their health care is sacrificed for political theater; evangelicals are outraged as the CHRINO's become more offensive; everyone is outraged as the climate crisis hits NOW, not in some distant future.

            We are challenged to live from our inner truth, without distraction from the barking dogs.