Out Of Time

                                                                                          written 12 July, 2026

                                                                                      published 19 July, 2026

 

            "Out of time" can mean "running out of time", which is what the Republicans are facing right now.

            Three weeks ago, with the triumphant announcement that the war on Iran was "over" and the Strait of Hormuz was open, the economic system responded like the worries were over: oil prices dropped and stocks rose every day.  We now see that reaction was premature.  Even during that brief pause, shipping traffic was only a quarter of prewar levels, which means the world has at least 10 percent less oil every day.  With no real solution, we are living on borrowed time, daily depleting strategic reserves, ignoring the continued shortfall of the energy source that powers most of the global economy.

            The president started this war as a distraction from his personal political problems, expecting a quick victory, much like Putin did when he invaded Ukraine over four years ago.  Instead, having spent billions of dollars and depleting critical weapons stockpiles, we have a stalemate in the war, a ticking clock on when energy shortages hit home, broken trust with our allies in the region, and only 16 weeks before the midterm election.  

            Even if the Democrats take the House, and possibly the Senate, this president has destroyed so much in America that it will take a long time to repair the damage.  It looks like everything is falling apart, or being corrupted: unaffordable health care, housing, food, fuel, pandemic unpreparedness, disastrous public infrastructure upgrades, defunded national parks and energy efficiency standards.  The list is long, and new disasters make the news each week.  Even Republicans are getting concerned.  It's enough to make people despair. 

            But perspective affects conclusions.  Consider a caterpillar's metamorphosis in the cocoon into a butterfly.  From one perspective, it is death and decomposition, from the other it is assembly and birth, both part of a complete cycle of life.  This can be viewed as the falling away of one form, naturally making room for a new one.

            What is unfolding globally looks like a similar process.  The old pattern is separation, exclusive gain, and domination.  Having existed for thousands of years, it looks like "that's the way it is".  It has failed repeatedly, because the long-term trend is toward inclusion.   

            The miracle of America is the aspiration that all people are equal under the law.  We know this is still a long way from being universally true, but in just 250 years we have included more people: women, non-whites, and the original inhabitants of this continent.  Some still fight to get back to when only white men of property set the rules, but this is so retrograde the country will tear itself apart before that happens again.  The driving force here is not just the ideals of our founders, but the power of the natural world, just like the force that changes the caterpillar into the butterfly.

            The core of all spiritual traditions, as opposed to the dogmas of their religious organizations, recognizes the unity of nature.  Beginning a century ago, even western science came to understand this truth, with the rise of quantum mechanics.  Matter, the foundation for all things, is a form of resonant energy, appearing as individual energy peaks arising out of a vast ocean of energy.  Even though we don't normally experience that truth directly, the resulting powerful technologies have transformed our world.   

            One of the mind twisting elements of quantum mechanics is the concept of non-locality: matter is not bounded by the four-dimensional limitations of space/time.  Sunlight, consisting of photons which have no mass, can only exist at the speed of light, and therefore experience no time or distance, yet is fundamental to all material life.  Reality seems to exist everywhere all at once.

            The antidotal evidence that consciousness is non local has existed for centuries.  While not included in the dominant western culture, it has been part of aboriginal cultures everywhere.

            This current period has been foretold as a time when consciousness evolves, awakening to its unity nature.  Our culture of separation, in the name of ignorant dogma and economic profit, is killing the planet and all life living here.  This exhibits no more wisdom than beer yeast, which overpopulates and dies in its own waste.  

            We can do better.  By consciously choosing love and gratitude in every moment, and opening to non-local processes, such as synchronicity and inspiration, we can experience our unity reality.  We begin to step "out of time".  

 

An Inconvenient Truth

                                                                                            written 5 July, 2026

                                                                                      published 12 July, 2026

 

            On July 1st, 2026, the Ukiah Daily Journal published a critique of Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", written by Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at the Stanford Hoover Institute.  The Hoover Institute is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.  The Copenhagen Consensus seeks to establish priorities based on rational prioritization by economic analysis, assuming the validity of free markets to achieve the best outcomes.

            The article stated that Gore's climate concern was fear based, leading to wasted climate investment, which has produced no discernable benefit.  It acknowledged there is some change in climate, but proposed solutions like sea walls, drought tolerant crops, and early warning systems, while investing in "advanced nuclear" and fusion to be able to undercut fossil fuel prices.  It touted as fact that climate change might reduce global GDP by a few percent by 2100, and a UN report that by that time an average person will be 450% richer.  Nothing to worry about here.

            However, money is a societal convention, while the environment is the reality we inhabit.  It is understandable that monied interests downplay climate concerns, because money is easily divorced from reality, as the long history of financial bubbles demonstrates.  Consider the concept of a "limited liability corporation", which makes financial sense for the corporate owners, but allows unlimited damages to be pushed off onto others, who don't gain any profit from the business.

             It should be remembered these are the folks where gushing about Enron right up until a few weeks before it declared complete bankruptcy in October, 2001.  These were also the people driving the subprime housing boom that crashed in 2007.  That little mistake cost about 40% of GDP in production and income losses, and took 7 years to regain job losses.

            Even if wealth for the average person grows, there is no indication it will be evenly distributed.  With a trillionaire and almost 500 billionaires, income inequity in the U.S. is now 3 times greater than the Gilded Age in the late 1800's, while 60 percent now live pay check to pay check.  

            Furthermore, stock market levels don't tell the whole economic story.  Almost half of S&P 500 valuation comes from AI companies, most of which have yet to show a profit.  In the last 4 years, AI power demands have increased by 40 percent, much faster than the grid can expand production.  The AI economic bubble is vulnerable, running up against real world power and water limitations.  

            Beyond the questionable economics presented as the foundation of the article, we have real world information about the increasing climate impact.  Last week, extreme heat made global headlines.  Europe, now warming faster than other parts of the inhabited planet, had two heat waves so far this summer.  The last one killed 1,300 people and forced several nuclear power plants to close during the peak power demand.

            In the U.S., fourth of July was the hottest on record, with half the country experiencing extreme heat.  The heat index (temperature and humidity impact) was 113°F in Washington, DC, forcing the Great American State Fair to close midday, and extreme rains delayed the fireworks by two hours.

             Fire dangers are increasing, along with fire insurance bills.  This year in the U.S., over 35,000 fires burned 4,700 square miles, exceeding the 10 year average.  The atmospheric content of carbon dioxide keeps increasing every year, guaranteeing this kind of fire damage will get worse over time.  

            This is a direct consequence of the big money interests focusing only on short term profit, with no regard for larger impacts or long-term consequences.  Within economic thinking, the future is devalued relative to the present.

            There was a recent report that the worst case scenario for future climate impact had been downgrade a bit.  The president, in his infinite wisdom, claimed this proved the entire climate crisis is a hoax.  However, what the report actually recognized was the impact of the global investments away from fossil fuels.  Despite American's head in the sand approach to the issue, the world sees renewables as the path forward, not primarily because of the climate crisis, but because renewables with storage are already cheaper than fossil fuels.  By renewables I mean wind, solar, geothermal, and storage, not the still fictional fusion, nor any form of nuclear, which has a waste problem that hasn't been addressed for 80 years.

 

Lurking In The Depths

                                                                                          written 28 June, 2026

                                                                                         published 5 July, 2026

 

            Once upon a time, a king commanded the tide to halt.  The king knew the limits to his power, and was trying to teach his foolish advisors about those limits.  However, our "king" is the fool, believing he is the boss of reality.  Perhaps this comes from his upbringing by a sociopathic father, or a life of being catered to as a very rich man, or his decades as a reality TV character.  He acts like he is playing president in a reality show, where he gets to decide all the plot twists, just on his say so.

            In fact, our distractor in chief is skilled.  Witness the still unresolved war on Iran, the "vandals" in the reflecting pool, the "taxpayer free" multi-billion dollar ballroom, the constant effort to restrict voters, the quest to fund his goon squad, and the new fear of "godless communist Democrats".  These are all efforts to hide his pedophile involvement with Epstein, and his massive family corruption.  However, behind all the political posturing, there is an even a more profound issue being ignored: the growing climate crisis.

            With the foolish idea that what you don't know can't hurt him, the president has devastated most of the climate science systems in the U.S., pushing climate out of the daily news cycle.  Despite this, there have been a few small victories.  His defunding of the Global Ocean Monitoring network, a valuable, decade long system of tracking what is happening out of sight of land, was reinstated by judicial order.  Motivated individuals have saved vital climate data sets from destruction.  

            The AI economic frenzy, which is driving the stock market to new highs every day, proposes construction of hundreds of data centers.  Whatever the eventual social benefits, if any, the demands for massive amounts of electrical power and cooling water have created public pushback across the country.  The power demands are supposed to be solved by onsite natural gas, or diesel, generators, accelerating the climate crisis, assuming the AI bubble doesn't pop soon.

            But reality doesn't care what foolish humans think or do.  This summer could be an extreme fire hazard.  U.S. acres currently burned are ahead of normal.  Locally, the June like heat in March dried things out, disrupting the normal spring cycle of flowers budding and pollinators hatching.  Last week, temperatures in London were 97°F and France reached 111°F.  Most of Europe doesn't have air conditioners.  Several hundred people have already died of the heat.  The oceans are warmer, stressing food chains, adding more moisture to any storms, and fueling stronger hurricanes.

            The Arctic Ocean has less summer sea ice now than ever previously recorded.  Northern nations are positioning themselves to take economic advantage of newly available Arctic resources, and quicker shipping across the top of the planet.  But less sea ice has decreased the nutrition of that ocean basin, adversely affecting global fish stocks.  

            A more serious concern is lurking in the Arctic Ocean floor: 200-10,000 gigatons of frozen methane.  Dark open ocean water absorbs more solar heat than reflective white ice.  The Arctic basin is relatively shallow, meaning heat can more easily reach the sea floor.  Methane changes directly from solid to gas at -32°F.  Methane is 100 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, over the time frame of a decade.  When enough heat warms the Arctic Ocean floor, massive amounts of methane will be released into the atmosphere, rapidly heating the air, increasing the methane release, potentially building to a catastrophic heat pulse.

            Over the last 200 years, combustion from the industrial revolution has added about 1,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, raising the global temperature almost 3°F.  If just one percent of the frozen Arctic methane is released, we would experience double that additional heat rise in a few months.  New reporting is that the Arctic could be ice free next summer, much sooner than previously expected, as planetary heating is increasing.  That isn't to say the methane burst will happen that soon, but having no summer sea ice is a worrying precondition.

            We just celebrated 250 years of American existence, founded on the radical aspiration that all people deserve respect, not just wealthy men.  Today we are challenged to embrace another radical aspiration that all living systems deserve respect, not just wealthy humans.  If our country, or even our species, expects to survive another 50 years, we need new leadership, not another self-centered rich man.