Category Archives: Politics

Democracy Simplified

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It never fails to impress mariner how Non Sequitur can simplify so many complex issues into one comic frame. Here’s a great example:

Facts are immutable. That is their strength. Truth is culture, also a strength.

When facts are ignored over time, culture fills in the gaps; the longer the time, the more abstract culture becomes. Finally, disparity overcomes rationality.

The fact that the working class has not been given a fair shake when matched against the facts of inflation and loss of benefits since 1980, culture has adapted to accept this situation until disparity could no longer be denied.

Hence Donald. Hence January 6. The pandemic, a factually based circumstance, has magnified culture’s disparity a hundred fold. Today, a disparate culture is in the midst of collapse.

Who will steer culture back to a factually driven reality?

Not The House of Representatives.

Not the Senate.

Not the housing shortage.

Not global warming.

Not China.

Not Russia.

Not even the European Union.

Not big data.

Not the oligarchy.

Not even religion, which has its own disparate issues.

The United States situation has been represented accurately  by Wiley’s cartoon.

Ancient Mariner

2022

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We must be thankful, truly thankful, if we had a good, heartwarming, soul refreshing holiday season. To have been so blessed in these times is a privileged experience. Mariner had such a holiday. His son and daughter-in-law, a four year old, a one year old, a frisky dog and a cat spent Christmas week with mariner and his wife.

It was commotion and noise, of course, and special meals and decorations and presents and special conversations. It is how Christmas should be experienced. Opportunities to have inter-human experiences are growing less common. Some of it is due to the migration of children (or parents) and close relatives to distant geographic locations; some of it is due to the massive interruption of Covid; some of it is due to the powers of the internet; more common than we may think, some is due to debilitating poverty; finally, some of it is due to cultural disruption caused by a failing national ethos and the unknown future that will be created with artificial intelligence.

But it is our duty to hang on, to sustain the normal pleasures and responsibilities that come with being human. It is our mandate to be among humanity. Our saneness depends on unity amongst the species. We should take every opportunity to share time with others, to mingle, to share common courtesies and goals; to take responsibility for the human condition.

Think about this: all things are subject to evolution. Is our house the first evolutionary form that will become our Matrix casket? Will the growing, amoral reality of machines that can think live our lives for us?

We no longer have to shop outside our home. Our bills are paid automatically. We talk to other human beings on the internet rather than in person; it has become common to go to work without leaving the home; we arrange lifelong partners according to internet specifications. Our house, evolutionarily speaking, is our Matrix coffin. For most of us, that final coffin is beyond our lifespan but in the meantime, let’s celebrate face to face human interaction at every opportunity!

Ancient Mariner

 

Thoughts on Evolution

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Mariner writes this blog to avoid picking the last apples to make a year’s supply of apple butter. Why does he defeat himself with laziness? His thoughts turn to what evolution has created in the 900,000 years of creating the hominid line. It certainly hasn’t stood still. Everyone has seen the ascent of man chart. Mariner provides a variation below:

Paleontologists often identify key transitions that mark different physiological species. The most common are when –

֎ Early monkey species came down from the trees. Groups or tribes of the new ape species began to have a more stationery society and expanded their diet to more insects, small creatures and additional low vegetation like roots.

֎ In Northern Africa there were periods of drought that forced the ape-hominid to forage more widely. The demands of this long lasting period demanded the ability to range even farther, taking more energy and stamina to sustain the species. Two key evolutionary improvements were the ability to perspire and a brain that could take charge of basic visceral functions when hunting, thereby allowing man to outrun animals by wearing them down.

֎ But something new was happening. Evolution was changing the brain. By the time these early hominids left Africa, frontal lobes were growing rapidly in the brain. Early man began to have the ability to surmise beyond physical reality. There was a new smartness that required logic to perceive advantage. When the early hominids arrived in the Fertile Crescent, the area had perfect weather and a robust ecosystem. Man surmised, “If we’re going to eat so much of this grass (Kamut/Khorasan, an ancient version of wheat), why not collect the seeds and grow it more conveniently”. Because an excess of resources could be created, this was the beginning of agriculturally-based society and feudal capitalism as well.

֎ Evolution had provided man, by then called Homo erectus, the advantage to breed rapidly and consequently H. erectus had to expand territory across whole continents in order to sustain what was considered a safe survivability. Evolutionary ethics promotes successful survivability; expansion is possible because of a certain advantage to the species. This is not new; today consider the Lionfish, a flourishing invasive species in U.S. Southeast and Caribbean coastal waters. The difference is that Lionfish do not have frontal lobes. Humans, on the other hand, know full well the relationship between investment and profit: “chop those trees down, damn it, there’s money to be made!” or maybe, “Kill those savages, they aren’t Christians!” Both logical in evolutionary terms.

֎ Since Roman times in the West, Human frontal lobes have taken over ethical control of what used to mean ‘survival’ to the planet’s ecosystems – themselves a product of evolution but without frontal lobes. Humans with their ever growing frontal lobes have expanded into Einstein’s universe of time and space and they are eager to expand beyond this planet to leverage the profit motive even while significant numbers of the human species languish on Earth.

– – – –

Mariner stops here to pick apples. What about these frontal lobes? Are they a self-destructive error on evolution’s part? Thousands of species including many Homo precursors have gone extinct because of unintended shortcomings.

Have a happy holiday season!

Ancient Mariner

 

The Next World War

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Understand that mariner and his alter egos do not have the ability to predict anything. Mariner just reads tea leaves . . .

What makes world wars ‘world wars’ is a unification of several nations united against a group of other nations; typically the nations are spread about a bit and share partially unified political, military and economic support. Modern telecommunications have allowed a number of autocratic governments to quickly, by historic standards, share objectives, strategies and resistance to other nations that they consider to be enemies (all democracies). Below is a list of the leaders of these autocratic nations – all of which already plot support for one another in an effort to stave off pressures from democratic nations.

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela

Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus

Vladimir Putin, Russia

Xi Jinping, China

Recep Erdogan, Turkey

There are, all in all, 50 significant dictatorships around the world but the list above actively is plotting to disrupt or weaken democratic influence in world politics and economics. One dictatorship of note is excluded because it lacks the sophistication of the other dictatorships: North Korea, who on its own is an unpredictable and uncontrollable disruption.

The fuses that will ignite destructive behavior are neighboring nations and organizations. For example, not many news cycles go by before mention is made of Poland, NATO, Ukraine, Slovakia and Lithuania – just to name nations adjacent to Russian-controlled Eastern Europe.

China has made it clear that only China will dominate the Pacific; Taiwan definitely is a fuse and, possibly, Australia. Japan has committed to support the U.S. and Taiwan if conflict erupts.

Since the Vietnam War, nuclear agreements have pushed off Armageddon but recently both Russia and China (along with North Korea) have active production of more nuclear rockets. Also, since the Vietnam War economic sanctions have held errant behavior to a degree but this is an increasingly irrelevant strategy – particularly with Russia.

If open conflict occurs, it will not be a typical bullet war like World War II or Vietnam. The war will be fought largely by electronically disrupting the internet, satellites, banks, utilities, military intelligence and international supply chains and, given the added pressures of global warming, immigrants themselves will be weaponized to cause disruption in a nation’s functionality – note Belarus already is using immigrants to disrupt Eastern European politics.

Open conflict will not encircle the planet as it did in past world wars but will be used as a distraction and an aggravated disruption while more economic and technological advantages are pursued. Count on smaller, less affluent nations to be battle zones.

What can’t be predicted is the intense interruption that will be caused by global warming. Whether there is open war or not, every nation will be tested in its own sovereignty by flooding, droughts and continent-sized changes in agricultural stability – not to mention massive human migrations and economies drained by a pure need to physically survive.

A highly speculative thought is if open conflict can be delayed until 2040, global warming may prevent any thought of war as nations shift to survival mode.

The Zees have their hands full.

Ancient Mariner

 

Caste the mote

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Mariner stumbled across a small analysis that suggests the United States is struggling with an ingrown caste system very much like the caste system that exists in India. Americans don’t pay much attention to India (they should, it’s a sumo nation). India covers a large part of Asia and has a cultural history dating back six thousand years. The culture is a mix of authoritarianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and a current political structure instituted by the British occupation during the age of Colonialism (1600s to mid-1900s).  Rather than devote pages of copy to describing India’s history, mariner will provide simplistic comparisons between the two caste systems. A simple chart describes India’s caste system:

The smaller type in parentheses is helpful. Twice Born, loosely interpreted, means those who were born under normal circumstances but remade themselves into successful leaders of the nation, religion or wealth. In the United States a similar structure exists with different terminology. For example, where would the reader put the white-college-successful democratic party? Where would the reader put the labor class? Taking into consideration India’s stronger theocracy, where would the reader put conservative evangelicals? And obviously, where would descendants of slavery be put? And the Oligarchs and capitalists?

Mariner hopes this is enough information to demonstrate how castes work. Certainly the two systems don’t reflect identical cultures but the point of the analysis was how hard it is to deconstruct what are, in fact, culturally cemented castes. The samples mariner used for the United States date back to the nation’s origin. The first settlement introduced slavery from the get-go. Remember the Puritans? Remember Native American genocide? Etc. etc.

That the Declaration of Independence says ‘all men are created equal’ doesn’t displace Western Civilization’s long practiced, class-based social structure.

Having read the analysis – just a paragraph in a larger article about politics – mariner now has a different perspective about the troubles the U.S. is having. Maybe people can’t break embedded castes but a pandemic plus artificial intelligence together are having a go at it. Primarily, the changes are superficial and economic in nature, caused by recent changes in elitist society. Unfortunately the embedded castes like racism, Christian theocracy and plutocracy will be around for the foreseeable future.

Is there a U.S. comparison to India’s sacred cows (in light of the fact that the United States virtually eliminated the existence of the American Buffalo)?

Ancient Mariner

 

Read all about it!

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In the news. Newsy broadcasting had an article about marijuana and the current attempt by Congress to make it nationally legal so it can be taxed. Turns out the marijuana older folk played with had 3 percent THC; today the hybridized weed contains as much as 30 percent. Further, medical cards issued by doctors are relatively easy to acquire (fake). With a medical card a person can buy a tar-like concentrate that often causes serious emotional problems and physical damage to the brain. Newsy interviewed a mother whose son died from abuse.

In the News. Britney Spears wins release from conservatorship. Britney’s father demonstrated an evil, abusive, perhaps even psychotic abuse of his daughter for 14 years. Not that Britney was an angel by any means but those wild times have been behind her for years; it has been made clear that her ongoing career was financially curtailed by her father. Truly, money often is at the root of evil. Conservatorship is supposed to be an aid to those who can’t make rational decisions about money and other decisions that affect one’s wellbeing.

In the news. “The Liberty Way”: How Liberty University Discourages and Dismisses Students’ Reports of Sexual Assaults. Jerry Falwell’s university joins the company of athletic managers allowing sexual abuse of the women’s Olympic gymnastics team. An article published by ProPublica reports that the University ignored reports of rape and threatened to punish accusers for breaking its moral code, say former students. An official who says he was fired for raising concerns calls it a “conspiracy of silence.” Read the full account at

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-liberty-way-how-liberty-university-discourages-and-dismisses-students-reports-of-sexual-assaults?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter&utm_content=feature

In the news. The former chief executive of a tech company in suburban Chicago who lost his job after he threw a chair inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot was sentenced Friday to 30 days imprisonment. Rukstales was forced out as CEO of Cogensia and sold interests in the firm after his participation in the riot became known and the boards of directors for the firm’s clients were ready to cancel contracts. Is it a threatening thought to realize that not everyone at the riot was a gun-toting, white supremacist labor class person? Remember the pillow guy?

This post is a crude attempt to emulate yellow journalism. Similar to TV news, so much sensationalism is thrown at the reader it is hard to determine whether some subtle implication may have importance.

For example, marijuana has had a level, generic aura about it all along except for its early twentieth century association with opiates. Who knew it had morphed into a potent psychedelic? How that was unnoticed is the more important story.

In Britney’s case it is the regulations for invoking conservatorship. There must be hundreds of abused conservatorships that aren’t reported because the individual doesn’t have a famous profile. The same applies to other decisions like moving someone into a hospice. Living will regulations have been developed as a response to some issues but regulations may be lacking when deciding about someone else’s wellbeing. Morally speaking, no human should be reduced to a simple commodity.

As for the membership of the rioters, the real story is how potent the danger to democracy is given the amount of money involved in weakening elections and the broad but unreported cultural membership of the rioters.

Ancient Mariner

John Wiley

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John Wiley, the artist in Nonsequitur, captures in a few cartoons and few words whole philosophies and behaviors it would take a dozen books to express. Some of mariner’s favorites:

Mariner grows weary of a conflicted world. He knows that more and more he is seen as a zealot. It is hard for a humanist to be considered a zealot but that says a lot about society today.

There are real and validated social reasons for the uprising of the working class; how destructive their political payback will be remains to be seen.

Big data is an immoral capitalist snowball that has grown to a dangerous size. Mariner’s defense of personally owned privacy and the double whammy of not being able to share in the sale of his information are compounded by the fact that it is sold to interests who want to manipulate him for their own purposes, seems to the electorate much ado about nothing.

While his opinions about humanity are supported by many professional thinkers, again the electorate couldn’t care less. As a parting validation to mariner’s ‘zealotry’, the supermarket where mariner’s wife shops pays a handsome discount on her gas station prices in return for tracking her purchases – a fair arrangement in mariner’s mind.

But retreat is inevitable. Mariner is a member of the useless generation, an antique, aspiring middle class person and a humanist. He yearns to be off the grid electrically, politically and spiritually. One day he will buy a donkey cart.

Ancient Mariner

Travelin’

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Autumn is traveling season for mariner and his wife. They are off to visit far flung relatives and friends. As the days grow cool and the wind chills the face in a way that hasn’t been felt since early spring, one is reminded of the passing of time. It is a time when melancholy may leak into one’s thoughts.

This fall in particular may bring on depression and fear. The entire world is in dire straits. No one can truly predict the twists and turns of the near future. In the United States, democracy and Constitutional freedom are frayed and dangling as the nation drifts into a serious split between authoritarian government and individual freedom to choose.

This political cleavage is deep, deep to the core foundations of the American way of life. Like a festering cancer it has been growing since the end of the Second World War. It is a battle between haves and have nots; it is a battle between racial elitism and equality for everyone; it is a battle between government and private enterprise; it a battle between tradition and science; it is a battle been humanity and the planet itself.

When one reads about the great tragedies of history, it is difficult to put one’s self into what it really must have felt like when Vesuvius erupted or the sudden flooding of the Middle East when the Black Sea broke through the Dardanelles or when the Spanish invaded and murdered the innocent cultures of the Americas or even today living under a Syrian dictatorship that gives no quarter with freedom of thought.

But now we know. Poverty is a growing disease growing as fast as any Covid invasion yet it remains invisible to the rest of the nation. The have nots continue to pay for the wealth and indiscretion of the haves, and they are paying with their very lives. This is slavery in modern form. Today the numbers of deprived have spilled out of the barrios into a labor class which has been denied equality of any kind for forty years – and who vent their anger by electing an incompetent President who has set the nation’s self-image back to the Revolutionary War and who blatantly tried to disrupt a national election.

Now we know.

Mariner thinks of an old automobile that is worn and rusted. It is time to buy a new one. What will it look like? How much will it cost? Will the old clunker keep running until then? Mariner, an old folk, thinks longingly about having a donkey cart. But he knows the future will not allow the past.

Does anyone know the future?

Ancient Mariner

 

The countdown begins

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In a couple of weeks, the nation will be exactly one year from the 2022 General Election. Yes, we feel like this is a long way out there but the party troops have been organizing for months. Trump republicans are locked in to win their primaries and have spent a fortune in state promotions. Most elected representatives and senators are from guaranteed republican states.

The Constitution mandates 435 House members distributed according to population. Currently 220 are democrat, 212 are republican and there are 3 vacancies. Looking at state representation, 22 states are democratic and 28 are republican – including 23 republican states where the Governor, legislature and courts are all republican. Ironically, just 19 percent of the nation’s population lives in these red states.

Both parties have split in two; the republicans have become enchanted by authoritarian capitalism while the democrats have championed a socialist revolution reminiscent of the 1960s. Add to this the results of the 2020 census which moved several representative seats toward the south and west. [Based on population shifts recorded in the 2020 Census, there were six US states that gained congressional House seats: Texas (2), Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida, and North Carolina; and seven states that lost seats: New York, Illinois, California, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.]

This noisy imbalance, in a nation based on one person, one vote has reached a painful cacophony – which falls upon the citizenry like bird droppings (Mariner loves to mix metaphors). At a time when the planet is racing into a totally new reality, the world’s most profound democracy is dropping bird poop.

Another issue is the age of the legislators who stopped experiencing new insights in the 1990s. Below is an excerpt from an HBO interview with republican senator Bill Cassidy. The interviewer is Mike Allen:

 

“1 big thing: Senator backs senility test

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, told me during an interview that he favors cognition tests for aging leaders of all three branches of government.

  • Why it matters: Wisdom comes with age. But science also shows that we lose something. And much of the world is now run by old people — including President Biden, 78 … Speaker Pelosi, 81 … Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 70 … and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 79.

Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, told me during our wide-ranging interview in Chalmette, La., that in your 80s, you begin a “rapid decline.”

  • Noting he wasn’t talking about specific people, Cassidy said: “It’s usually noticeable. So anybody in a position of responsibility who may potentially be on that slope, that is of concern. And I’m saying this as a doctor.”
  • “I’m told that there have been senators in the past who, at the end of their Senate terms were senile,” Cassidy added. “I’m told that was true of senators of both parties.”

Cassidy said it’d be reasonable for Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and executive branch leaders to submit to an annual evaluation in which they would have to establish cognitive sharpness.

  • “We each have a sacred responsibility to the people of the United States,” Cassidy said. “It is not about me. It is about my ability to serve the people.”

Mariner has great expectations for the 2022 election. Don’t you?

Ancient Mariner

It is time.

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Mariner, for the sake of sanity, has stepped back from daily behavioral response to frightful, deliberately agitating news programs. Saner are selected on-line news sources, books and magazines. He is careful, as a citizen, to maintain his obligation to a national democracy; he is responsible to elect meaningful representatives to HIS government.

But mariner has begun to wonder. Is democracy becoming old fashioned? Is it the right philosophy of government for an era where international politics are growing more influential than national politics? Is the new global economy too expensive for a typical citizen to invest in and participate? Will each nation simply play the role of a labor union to reconcile humanistic virtues vis-à-vis international corporate politics? Will, in fact, super-sized corporations replace national governments? Who will govern the corporations?

As though to tease our brains, many of these questions already have emerging answers that seem to be pulling everyone into an age of supersizing – certainly causing stress on religion, secularism, humanism and the old fashioned descriptions of capitalism, socialism and communism. At the moment, without exception, the new frontier is fed and run by money.

Immediately important today is our concept of taxation. The rich have won the war on taxation: the richer one is, the less percentage tax they pay to the point of paying none; the same with corporations. It is the excessive wealth among a few that can launch a global plutocracy.

Ironically, the distrust between citizens has led to populism and identity politics, in effect dividing citizens one against the other while the rich unify their economic purposes.

If humans are to remain the significant influencer in human history, it may be that democracy is the last defense against authoritarian oligarchy. Democracy depends on an identity that evolves from human ethic while authoritarian oligarchy vacuums profit that denies human ethic. An excellent example is that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have the finances to underwrite a useless trip into the solar system while billions of humans live stressed, inadequate lives.

In short, our defense is to unify, to become one human force that controls its ethical experience. It is not a time to destroy democratic election processes; it is not a time to quibble over a measly trillion (many individuals in the world could pay out a trillion by themselves). It is not time to pretend superiority by hiding behind race and other social issues. It is time to defend the very core of humanity.

Will someone tell the electorate?

Ancient Mariner