All The World's A Stage

I recently listened to a 99% PI interview with Democratic Representative Sharice Davids
It just highlighted bigs flaw in our politics and politicians.

First, they are giddy about procedure and nonchalantly admit it's impossible to get anything done.

"We vote on a procedural matter to even be able to vote on the floor for a bill, so we're like voting on whether not we're gonna vote...The goal isn't always to actually get a piece of legislation done in that term, even though that probably is the ultimate goal...you can often tell when something is meant for 'messaging' and when something is meant to be a piece of substantive legislation."

From the Parliamentarian, to PAYGO, to "bipartisanship," our politicians are obsessed with making things hard, even when they shouldn't be. They are not guided by REASON, they are guided by ritual.

Second, we create these arbitrary term lengths and limits without any rules around WHAT they are going to do during that time.

"I can say that for, from the legislative perspective, I do think about now, I mean, I'm in my fourth term now, so I do think about if there's something that, if there are changes that we're trying to make that might be, um, more substantive...like major infrastructure projects are usually, those are on like a 10 year timeframe, you know? And so there's something really disjointed and ineffective about having people making decisions on two year timeframes for projects that take 10 years to, to come to fruition."

It would make more sense to send them to Congress with a SPECIFIC agenda and their job is to get certain things done, not just occupy a seat for a set number of years. Now yes, we have to make sure they have enough time to get it done, and we don't want them there indefinitely, but our current system is not responsive enough.

Third, our Representatives are saying to our face that "change is impossible"...now I am not certain how much of that is channeling their inner lobbyist, or lack of will, or if they really have locked themselves into worthlessness through procedure, but the message is clear: WE MUST CHANGE THE PROCESS.

"But, you know, you've got the federal government with their policies, you've got the state level government, and in some cases you have local stuff. Um, and that's just on the environmental piece of permitting reform. Then there's, there's all the different touch points of, uh, of getting a project done. And because of that, I mean, it's complex, you know, and if you think you're gonna introduce a piece of legislation, get it through a committee, which like something with permitting reform would touch on like multiple committees, the energy and commerce committee, transportation and infrastructure, probably some other one like, uh, USDA might be impacted. So there's all these different committees that come in to play. And then you have the whole house floor, so 435 members. 

So if you think in two years, you're going to be able to get like, like for the first time, introduce a piece of legislation, get it through the committees, get it through the floor, just in the house, get it, like have the Senate, take it up, go through their process with committees and getting it to the floor and then go to conference and get all of that done in two years. It's just like that, that's just not going to happen."

Lastly, I want to touch on our System on the whole. When our leaders and citizens are reasonable, it seems to work, but when our leaders are corrupt and our public ignorant, it immediately crumbles. A sane/working system should do the opposite, it should allow the most change when people are reasonable and it should slow things to a crawl when dishonest/corrupt/authoritarian entities try to undermine it (It should also -structurally- incentivize citizens to become engaged/knowledgeable and punish corruption). Our problems are only getting more severe, more complicated, and more widespread; and our System is not up to the challenge.

We need a public square untainted by algorithms and money interests. A new PUBLIC institution of journalism that informs and fosters debate. Media can't be left solely to "the market," its effects on the minds of our children and the broader public are now clear.

Sidenote: We don't even have the "Public Service Announcements" on "saturday morning cartoons" of yesteryear (if you're young, lookup the "more you know" and "knowing is half the battle" messaging, I'm sure it's on the Internet somewhere). What we have now are -effectively-YouTubers and Instagram models raising our children; MADNESS.

All this to say, the Congress shouldn't be a place for posturing, partisanship, signalling, and debate; it should be a place where problems are solved, policy is made, and stuff gets DONE.

Those Who Live in Diamond Houses Should Throw Stones

According to a new study published in Nature, sequestering carbon by injection into the ground has 1/10 (10 times less) of the capacity we thought it did.

This is important because the corporations and oligarchs, who stand to lose money if we actually pursue Climate Action, have convinced many people that we don't have to stop producing CO2 or change our lifestyles/behaviors because scientists can just innovate it away through sequestration. This has always been a claim that requires a healthy dose of skepticism, but we are now seeing it for what it always was, misdirection.

#1: We must stop emitting carbon! There is no magic wand, and continuing to deny that we must sacrifice some comfort and completely redesign society, will not save us.

#2: It doesn't mean we should stop trying to find ways to sequester carbon or that the practice itself is dubious. We need to find other ways to capture and store this carbon. Let's be creative in our problem solving. (I propose we all build diamond houses.😜)

#3: This is a reminder that Capitalism (or whatever you wish to call this current system) has created a society in which people will cling to power and wealth even until the planet is uninhabitable... they will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to maintain the status quo. This commodification of everything, this "infinite growth" delusion, this religion of the "free market," this corruption of democracy, this parasite that feeds on our bodies and dreams, this sadistic and shallow philosophy that people are just labor and the Earths's resources are just capital... this is not an economic system, this is a collective mental illness.

Climate Destabilization should be the Worlds greatest priority. We can't keep escaping reality, not from the Climate, not from our Institutions, not from our "belief systems," not from our nature as humans. We must embrace reality; only then can we change our fate.

Our Own Stories

I was watching a tv series called "The Sandman" about a familial pantheon of godlike figures, and in one scene one of the "gods" is giving a eulogy for her brother and she says:

"To me, he was arrogant, and judgemental and impossible... and he was all of those things... but then, so am I... so are all of you."

Now in this series, that was probably a particularly true statement for the "people" present in the scene, but it struck me as quite true as a general condition of mankind. We tend to believe we are the hero or tragedy of the universe... the main character of life. Whether we ourselves are "judgmental and impossible," we definitely have little trouble finding those things in others. Everyone else "just doesn't understand."

If you're the 1 person who has perfect judgment, the perfect amount of patience and assertiveness, and always takes the appropriate action in all situations, then forgive me, disregard this, and carry on. For everyone else, a healthy dose of introspection now and again is probably warranted.

I don't know if this is a healthy habit but I find it humbling to make a habit of just calling myself (and humanity) a "dumb monkey." When you find yourself being totally dramatic or unreasonable, you are a dumb monkey doing dumb monkey shit. It doesn't mean we should completely give in to our dumb monkeyness... but it means you are just a human, you feel what you feel, you are compelled to have human reactions and behaviors. You are attracted to other dumb monkeys for dumb monkey reasons... you want to eat/drink/smoke/inject things that are bad for you, you get embarrassed, jealous, arrogant... dumb monkey shit.

Instead, we should create a society that enshrines the wisdom we have accumulated into our goals and laws, but also account for the fact that we are fragile and fallible dumb monkeys at times... intractably so.

On top of all of this, we live in a sensationalist society, completely designed for inhuman creatures... evangelizing the "hero's tale" into every piece of media. We preach "might makes right" in every superhero and action movie. We burden our children with the impossible "standards" of Instagram models, and YouTube stuntmen. Ambition is one thing but we often strive to become impossibly weird and inhuman creatures.

We need to stop designing systems for non-humans, we must appreciate it when we excel beyond normal expectations, but also accept our limitations. We must also admit that we are not in continuous homeostasis, we are always in varying degrees of compromise, energetically, physically and mentally. No system will create good outcomes and reduce suffering as long as we rely on ambition instead of data, designed for inhumans.

"Practical Atheist"

Today the new Pope said that he worries that Catholics are not attending church and that they should avoid becoming "practical atheists"...

What an insult to Atheists. Atheists are atheists because they don't believe in a god, your god, any god. They aren't lazy catholics/christians, they've thought about REALITY and come to the conclusion that sky wizards are an unlikely component of it.

What the world should be worried about is NOT becoming a "practical atheist", but a "true believer" in nonsense. The ones committing genocides/assisting genocides/warring against other countries because of religion... the ones who teach their children to "learn by authority" and not through evidence and reason.

Whether this pope is better or worse than the last pope, honestly I don't give a crap. Religions are a relic from a time when we didn't understand the world and we created stories to make ourselves feel more secure, but it needs to go away now and we need to build communities around more solid beliefs and traditions that are healthy for humanity.

Head In Sand

I feel like I'm in an Uber and the driver is talking to me instead of paying attention to the road... and I'm like "you almost hit like 3 cars, maybe we can hold off on the conversation"... and he's like "don't worry man, just relax."

This is how society is going right now, the environment is degrading rapidly (especially emissions for stupid stuff like cryptocurrency mining and training AI models -not to replace tedious work- but to replace creative work), the billionaires are literally running the government now, the Mainstream Media has acquiesced to power, social media is now just outrage porn, religious/racist/nationalist nonsense is -once again- inflaming wars around the world... and all the while people are saying either "you are too concerned" or you are not concerned enough about this other culture-war fringe problem. It's easy enough to say "oh, it's just me, I'm not being 'joyful' enough" or something... but should I be? Should we all just throw our hands up and say "it's too big and too hard to stare REAL problems in the eye, I should just distract and/or insulate myself from reality"...?

We live in the Internet Age, access to information is abundant, you cannot UNSEE the problems that the world faces. How long do we plan to try to cope our way past the problems rather than fix them? How long are we going to allow the selfish to distract and divide us? When are we allowed to say Capitalism is a disaster, Religion is wrong, our social norms are trash, and our Institutions are not accomplishing the goals that they were designed for?

At some point we just need to admit, we DESERVE to feel anxious, we should be anxious... but only for the REAL problems... and NO, just because every idiot on the Internet says some culture-war nonsense is a "real" problem, doesn't mean that objective reality doesn't exist. We have to tackle ROOT causes of things, STRUCTURAL things. That is Sustainability, weeding out corruption in governance, creating informed and media-literate citizens, and creating mechanisms that empower/reward society-improving behavior instead of self-interested behavior.

Do "Karens" exist... absolutely; does it mean that you are one if you are concerned... no, it is sane to be concerned with the state of things right now. Don't let the powerful win with their tools of fear, uncertainty, and doubt... they want the Status Quo; they want society to be paralyzed to inaction and ineffective in governance. They want you to tear each other to pieces with purity tests, fringe disagreements, trying to recruit the unrecruitable, and tribalism. Don't fall for it. Pick sensible collaborators, have simple, clear goals, and don't let people water them down. I know it's hard when people are easy to manipulate and hard to reason with... but it's always a minority that leads the way for everyone else, the question is: will we let the selfish lead, or will we ensure the wise lead?

Choose - Reality or Horse Race

If you are reading this, you are probably old enough to have "seen" the end of the Great Barrier Reef. No really, think about it... as long as I can remember we called it "One of the 7 Natural Wonders Of The World"... and we've killed it. How many millenia did it take to grow that biome of life, beauty, and harmony... we kill it in an instant and barely even mention our Genocide.

THIS DECADE was supposed to be the "line in the sand" for critical Climate Action... we are just about half way through and we've done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. One candidate for US President is saying "Drill baby drill"... and the other pledges NOT to ban fracking... one of the most ridiculous practices to ever come out of a feeble human brain.

Meanwhile, everyone is distracted, in a dopamine haze from their social media mind control, and the levers of power are nowhere near SERIOUS people. I can't explain how confounded, frustrated, and exhausted I am with this knowledge; and it feels like there are only a small handful of people who are sane enough to acknowledge the problem, let alone fight it.

I'll leave you with another pleading scientist, because that's all I can do now, shout into the algorithmically deprivileged void.

The Tipping Points of Climate Change

Corrupts Absolutely

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

- Upton Sinclair

The truth about money is, while it may have been "just a tool" in the past, not only does it fail to accurately represent "value"...but it has become a fundamentalist ideology.

All sides of the political spectrum are in this cult, some believing too little money is the problem, some believing too much money is the problem, and most believing that we should strive for a large "middle-class." The reality is, money has become a disastrous tool that measures nothing; it is so removed from environmental constraints, human need, and even sustaining itself systemically/stably, that it is completely broken. It corrupts you if you have too little, it corrupts you if you have too much, but it even corrupts you if you have this -supposed- "right amount"; it just continually corrupts.

Culturally, we must get away from seeing each other as economic units: customers, consumers, employees, servers, donors, soldiers, "content creators," bosses, professionals, "unskilled labor," or even the concession of "essential workers"... boxes within boxes of humanity destroying categories. Serving your fellow man is a great thing, but the bulk of your human worth shouldn't depend on your ability to generate profit for a corporation.

We must move towards a Resource-Based Economy, one where "value" has a relationship with sustainability, meeting needs, and solving problems. Where any abstractions, widgets, or liability limiting entities are there to serve the PEOPLE and planet, not the other way around.

Codification Of Wisdom

As we have seen with the Supreme Court striking down women's reproductive rights, we can't continue to leave laws to be endlessly interpret-able. When societies were less complex, having ambiguous and flexible laws that could be shoehorned to fit the time (like the U.S. Constitution) more or less worked. Now, with an ever more globally interconnected society (and with plenty of documented history about the intricacies of power, corruption, manipulation, and intentionality), we must begin a phase of civilization in which our laws are JUSTIFIED, not just proclaimed and "interpreted." We must agree that laws are there to do something VERY specific, and they must prove through reason, evidence, and in PRACTICE, that they achieve their stated purpose. We must make Government a tool of the people, not special interests. It must be mandated to, and empowered to, serve the good of the people... not corporations, not the rich and powerful, not a certain ethnicity, gender, or religion... but the greater good of all people.

But until we can do complete reform...

The Courts and the lobbyists behind them won't stop at changing social laws... the Corporatists have had their eye on one particular change for ages, that is destroying the "Commerce Clause." It is the foundation from which the Government derives its power to regulate private (i.e. Corporate) powers.

As it stands now, everything is on the chopping block... and the obvious solution, Constitutional change, has serious roadblocks... but however difficult, a few things that we definitely need to work on CODIFYING into law are:

    -Voting Rights, publicly funded, fair elections

    -Our ability to protect the Environment

    -Our ability to Regulate private powers when they have adverse effects on our institutions or large populations

    -Extreme punishment for Corruption

    -Universal Free Speech (not just government)

    -Explicit Freedom FROM religion (no favoritism, tax exemptions, or special privileges)

    -Publicly funded, but Independently operated Media, transparently audited for strong journalistic standards by third parties

Religion Is Not Benign

First, just to vent a little, I want to translate what a reasonable person (i.e. Atheist) hears when a religious person says something like: "I'm being serious, I believe Jesus is my lord and savior, and through faith I hope to be judged worthy of heaven"
WHAT WE HEAR:
"I'm being serious, if you spank enough naughty leprechauns, someday you will be able to ride the magical unicorn to OZ"

You may think I'm just being facetious, but in terms of how ridiculous it sounds to us... it's an accurate account of the "feel."

Okay, so on to why this matters... reality matters. If you believe that nothing in the physical world matters, only the "spiritual," maybe you don't care about Climate Action. If you believe that God will judge and sort people out in the end... creating fair and just societies don't matter. If you believe "faith" is the most important "lesson" to teach children... you don't teach them to think critically, with evidence and reason; worse, you teach them that learning "from authority" is the only way to learn. ("from authority" meaning from an authoritative text [like biblical scripture] or an authority figure [like a pastor or anchorman from your favorite mainstream news station])

Being someone who's run in secular circles at points in my life, I can tell you, even IF people can break out of their religion... the breaking out of the "learning from authority" part is MUCH harder and many tend to replace religion with other self-indulgent identities... like "q-anon believer" or "white nationalist" or "elite professional-managerial class-member" or any other number of identities that are popular and acceptable in the social sphere they exist in. Leaving a religion is hard, but thinking independently, and becoming your own person, is even harder.

Bottom line, I'm tired of people treating religion as neutral... the whole "oh there are good people and bad people in religion"... NO, religion IN AND OF ITSELF is harmful. They indoctrinate children, they often have lobbyists and authoritarian political agendas, they espouse nonsense, they insulate you from other ideas/communities, and they teach you how NOT to learn.

The Establishment Vision For The Future

I've recently been exposed to Establishment "perspectives" of the future, and knowing them allows us to understand what they do and why; this is especially useful for those of us who don't believe in their vision(s). First of all, their visions are not people focused... they don't care about dreams, about suffering, about equality... they are based on POWER. Now, there are two "camps" of their vision, we'll call them the "optimistic" and the "pessimistic" versions for simplicity.

The "optimistic" version goes something like this: the world mostly works well right now, but we're moving towards an entangled and completely globalized world with Corporate structure as its basis. Nations will become less and less relevant as they simply become too economically dependent on one another to war on one another, and eventually we'll all just fracture into regional units of consumption defined by our natural resources and human capital. Eventually, all human organization will boil down to their usefulness to the supply chain and our God, the "market." Of course all "externalities" such as pollution and climate change will magically be averted, or substantially mitigated, by "innovation."

Now, there are some things in there that are appealing... I, too, believe in a world that is "interconnected," but not in the dystopian and exploitative way they envision. I, too, believe we can end war, but I believe that it should be based on cooperation, progress, and preservation, more than just fear and desperation. I, too, believe that we will evolve into more elemental regional units of human organization, but based on carrying capacity of regions and sustainability, rather than resource extraction and quantity/quality of labor. I would also point out that "innovation" isn't something that our current system produces... it happens IN SPITE of our current system, largely due to the natural understanding that education, technical and ethical progress are important for everyone... and we try to fund/grow those things despite corporate forces trying to destroy/co-opt/privatize them.

The "pessimistic" version goes something like this: we are comfortable the way things are and aren't willing to change the system in the drastic ways needed to stop climate destabilization. Therefore, we will hoard money and resources, pull away as many "ladders" behind us, because there will only be a limited number of inhabitable places in a world of 4+ degrees Celsius increase. Instead of investing in sustainability, we will invest in, and recruit for, a strong military, in anticipation of water-wars, mass migration, and massive unrest that will come due to climate change. We will glorify the military, suggest that military service is preferable to higher education... in fact we will suggest that higher education is completely useless and that seeking knowledge for its own sake is a fools errand... finding "employment" and serving your tribe is the only acceptable use of time and effort.

The biggest problem with this vision is the complete disconnection from reality; the idea that we can just continue to retreat from the destruction of our planet and ecosystem, and never really address it. It also fails to understand the horrors of war and empire... or acknowledge that perhaps we shouldn't use a "hammer" to try to fix all our problems.

Just a couple of last points: I'd like to point out that these are "visions" for those that even have them. Many of the "elite" are largely just selfish and greedy sociopaths, looking for the easiest buck, with no real ideology or vision at all. The good thing is, the latter can largely be defeated with simple legislation/policy changes; banning private money from elections/governance and heavily penalizing bribery/corrupt activities will be enough to drive them to find profit through easier means. The difficult fight is against the truly ideological Corporatists... the ones willing to buy media empires and change the narratives for generations. We must have a sound vision of a healthy society, so we know where we want to go. We must also "know thine enemy" and the narratives they want to indoctrinate everyone with, so we can fight them effectively.