Human rights depend on what you don't do

 Yesterday marked seventy-six years since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Growing up -- or at least going through childhood -- in the 1960s, I saw human rights advancing all around me, and it seemed great. It was great. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a threat to human survival. But the thing that struck me most was that the drive toward greater human freedom depended not on what we do, on extra efforts, as much as what we don't do. 

Oppressing people is hard work. Its proponents will say that it is necessary to control bad elements that need to be suppressed. It creates jobs for people who will administer controlling agencies and do the actual contact work of whipping and beating the disobedient. But for the average citizen, it's really less effort to relax and let the oppressed rise and mingle.

There are a lot of weird people in the world. They dress funny, speak unintelligibly, eat strange food that might smell yucky. Some of them worship deities that don't play nicely with others. Universal acceptance of each other requires every disparate group to examine its beliefs and trim away the ones that call for friction. That may seem like an effort, but it's still subtracting actions from a daily routine.

Your threshold of weirdness may be high or low. We all have our comfort zones. We all have varied tolerance for pushing the edges of them. The solution to human conflict is simple, but not easy. If you have to spend a lot of time well centered in your comfort zone, that's fine. But to maintain the rights of all, you have to let the adventurous fringe members of your comfort group explore and blend, stitching together the seams of a quilt of humanity that is stronger and cozier together than it is in tatters.

The first and greatest commandment is "Thou shalt lighten up."

Extra effort has been required over the decades since 1948 and the 1960s, because so many people can't bring themselves to lighten up. We have depended on the sacrifices of activists, including their actual deaths at the hands of angry bigots who can't stop making the extra effort to hate and fight. It has been a shoving match because the hardworking oppressors have made it into one, and recruit generation after generation to keep working harder than they have to in service to this drive for inequality.

A smog-shrouded theocracy

When America resoundingly failed its second civics test since 2016, it ushered in what will probably be the most destructive American government of all time.

The fault lies only partly with the hard core of believers who somehow manage to embrace every statement without choking on the paradoxes. The real blame lies with voters who either voted for nonviable candidates or didn't vote at all.

Didn't vote at all? Really? Decided to sit this one out because you didn't like either side? You were going to show that you weren't going to settle for the lesser of two evils by sitting back and letting the greater of the evils secure complete control of the most dangerous country on earth.

Nihilism surely played a role. Scroll social media for more than a few minutes and you're bound to find someone posting longingly for a giant meteor to wipe out all life on earth, just because they themselves have decided that their own beef with life reflects the value of life itself. You want to give up? Go ahead. There are mental health counselors and compassionate bystanders waiting to tell you why you shouldn't, but ultimately the choice does rest with you. Just leave the rest of us out of your suicidal fantasies.

Political protest surely played a role. The current administration didn't slam the brakes on Israel's genocide of the Palestinians, which should have been an easy, almost instantaneous act. Yeah. The Middle East is that simple. Personally, I feel like a region steeped in war for thousands of years is a poor investment for any outsider, but here we are. The cultures that sprung from there have had nothing nice to say about each other as far back as we have written records. The equation 3X(One True God)=Bloodshed has been calculated and recalculated for more than two thousand years. It has extended far beyond the sacred dirt they all insist on owning, and dragged in other deities and their believers.

"We believe in peace and love and we're ready to kick your ass to prove it."

Christ himself, according to the story, refused to break with principle. He took the beating and the gruesome execution, and called upon God to forgive the assholes who either took part or just stood there slack-jawed and watched. Martyrdom became very fashionable for a while, until the political church realized that it was hurting attendance and income.

A life lived according to strict Christian principles would be nasty, saintly, and short. Through generations of rationalization for the sake of extending and enjoying this mortal existence, we have evolved the prosperity gospel, megachurches, and Bible Belters who embrace their firearms with loving arms, and prepare for the final battle with anyone who differs. It could start today, or it could remain a future threat for as long as anyone can profit from it. 

We've already seen how an institution can lose control of dangerous elements it had been wielding as a political weapon. The Republican Party was devoured by its beast in 2015. The evolved Democratic Party, post 1960, never had such a beast at its command. Instead it has repeatedly lost control of factional elements in its untidy coalition. None of them could ever take over a party that has been focused on realistic and sustainable levels of individual liberty.

"Realistic and sustainable levels of individual liberty." See, that right there is the problem. It's not a simple "God, Guns, and General Motors" kind of slogan. It's an honest statement using long words. They're not complex and difficult words, but they don't have the punch of most right wing rhetoric. The right wing fantasy is that everyone can be heavily armed, excessively fertile, and comfortably rich if we can just get rid of all these eggheads pimping science and raising taxes to give to poor people.

Except for the fantasy of universal tax-free wealth, it's true that the collapse of civilization would free up the survivors to fight and fuck with joyous abandon. Infant mortality would jump back up to pre-vaccine-era levels, requiring plenty of replacements to ensure that a sufficient number reach adulthood. As local chieftains gathered their forces, anyone interested in a warrior's life would find plenty of employment. Ambitious types interested in being chieftains would ravage the countryside, culling the weaker players. Would anyone seize and use what was left of nuclear arsenals? Since the whole premise relies on stupidity to collapse civilization in the first place, no doubt someone would give it a shot.

No one can be sure how the conflict between science and superstition would play out. Destroying many modern conveniences would not magically restore the human species exactly to pre-industrial or early industrial parameters. We know what we know. But we're getting far ahead of ourselves anyway.

The problem with post-apocalyptic fantasies is that they tend to skip over the horrors and misery of the collapse itself. That's fine for a fictional diversion, but we're on the wrong side of that sequence. We get to experience the destruction while probably everyone alive today will be dead long before things settle into a new equilibrium.

Space explorers plan "generation ships" in which whole eras of humans will live and die before reaching a habitable planet on which to land and start messing things up again. Or maybe they never arrive. The planet turns out not to be as good as it looked from our far vantage point, or it gets destroyed by something else before the mad, inbred survivors of the generation ship crash onto it. But don't worry. By screwing up our own planet, we turn it into a generation ship. The people we create now will sire generation after generation hurtling through space, hoping to find conditions that support intelligent life.

The smog-shrouded theocracy craved by the winners of the 2024 election is only the first step toward tearing it all down. Maybe that initiative will fail. Hard to say. Elon Musk and other proponents of the destruction of earth to drive enthusiasm toward colonizing other planets want you all to hate it here, so that going there -- wherever there turns out to be -- will look like a better alternative. It's exactly the way consumer goods manufacturers of addictive technology like automobiles, computers, and phones do their best to make sure that you hate your devices just after the warranty period runs out. Ideally, you loved it up to the point that it tragically failed. So you run right out and get a new one of the same thing, even though it's just going to screw you like the last one did, when the time comes. Sounds just like a corporately owned politician.

We may have a chance to wrest back some power and hope in the midterms in 2026. We may have a chance after that to yank the steering wheel completely away from the oligarchs in 2028. But we face the full power of their media machine, far beyond mere legacy media, pounding incessantly on susceptible minds. They did a great job steering voters in this most recent election. They will only get stronger and more active going forward.

No one knows the order in which things will go bad, or how bad they'll get. The administration could start with a big jolt or just teeter and wobble for days, weeks, or months, like an armload of fragile packages falling from your arms.

Arm yourselves!

 A lot of people are talking about arming themselves against the unrest they fear will engulf our relatively safe country. I mean people who weren't already arming themselves and preparing to live in their little fantasy forts when everything collapses. That's fine as far as it goes, but if the apocalypticists get their wish, the period of violence and shortages will outlast the supplies of nearly everyone. The best-prepared of the extremely wealthy will be warlords. Everyone else will live tenuous lives, trying to find a place in their service or a fugitive life avoiding them.

Conflict resolution is difficult at the best of times, and we're definitely not entering the best of times. A slim majority of American voters decided that they're completely finished accommodating anyone they don't like. Some of the voters choosing the dictator cared so little for any of the other branches of government that they didn't bother to fill in any selection below the top spot. They can't wait for that big hammer to fall on everyone that they view as a nail.

Eradication of opposing viewpoints is tempting. Who hasn't had a momentary -- or longer -- flash of rage and imagined carpet bombing an imaginary gathering of opponents in a glorious fireball? There! That'll teach 'em! It might, for a while. But the treatment must be applied frequently. It can get out of control. So we use economic pressure instead. Deny employment and housing to "undesirables" and to people who have failed to thrive in the existing system. As a country, we do use military force and the threat of it. As individuals, armed citizens use the threat of death to stifle disagreement. This is the world they think they want to live in. How soon before shootouts become everyday occurrences? I know they already are, but they're not everywhere yet. How long before we bring back dueling? So many things wrong with that, but it's a natural outgrowth of a society structured on cruelty and force.

Violence can be inserted into society in a number of ways. I'm sure that the people eager to initiate it imagine specific scenes in which they prevail over their clearly inferior foes. When it comes to deadly force, you want to dish it out, not take it. Look at the evolution of warfare: armaments were developed to inflict damage on opponents while receiving as little as possible in return. The ideal battle ends in extermination or rapid surrender by one side. It's not a game. It's pest control.

You might get away with a threat display, but if that fails then what? Your threat is less effective if you yell it from behind a protective object. And that assumes that the object you might hide behind will actually stop a bullet.

Your best defense is often to run like hell. In an unstructured confrontation, it's all variables. Can you run? Where can you run? What can you hide behind? How are you armed? Do you have enough ammunition? Is your adrenaline making you shaky? Are you not as ready as you thought you would be? How can you really be ready for someone trying to kill you?

Whether our country survives this crisis and returns to therapy in search of sanity, or just degenerates the rest of the way, we might consider setting up recreational death facilities where consenting adults can try out deadly confrontation on willing foes in a sealed environment. Forget wussy paintball. The blood is real. Flesh is torn, bone is shattered. Losers die. Even winners might die, depending on how ferocious the exchange was. Whoever draws the last breath is the victor. Just leave everyone else out of your personal drama. But who are we kidding? Dragging in helpless bystanders is part of the fun, isn't it?

Initiators of violence love the power trip. They take control of the lives of everyone around them. Maybe they don't have perfect control of the outcome, but for as long as they present a threat, everyone has to react to them. If they aren't as good at it as they thought, their moment is brief. Just because you start something doesn't mean you will be able to finish it.

Even if you plan to act only defensively, you need to practice, practice, practice, with live rounds, so that your muscle memory is as ingrained as possible with the actual weight and recoil. You need to shoot in different positions and situations, at least some of the time without hearing protection, so you're ready for the actual volume of sound. Or maybe you will get lucky, whip off just the shot you need when you need it, and scamper away to run another day.

Civilization is nice. It's comfortable. Only a fucking idiot looks forward to its collapse and the hell that follows. Tough guys of all genders like to growl that anyone who gives up liberty for safety will have neither. That's one of those logic trails that leads to a scorched landscape of constant killing, as we do nothing to restrain murderous impulses because doing so would mean giving up the freedom to indulge our wrath. Freedom in that case belongs only to anyone ruthless, powerful, well-armed, and skillful for exactly as long as it takes for their luck to run out anyway.

The military forces that defend our very own Land of the Free begin their careers by giving up their freedom. It's a very rule-bound life. Freedom of religion means that believers get to give up their personal freedom for the sake of satisfying the rules of their faith. We give up freedom all the time, for very sensible and grownup reasons. You might say it's fine if it's voluntary, but once you're in it it's coercive. The military has disciplinary options including imprisonment and , in extreme cases, death. Religions dangle the threat of eternal damnation over you if you stray. You can resign from the service or be dishonorably discharged. You can serve your hitch and take a regular discharge. You can quit your religion and take your chances with the eternal damnation, or sidestep over to another religion which will curtail your freedom. Point is, if you participate in a society of any kind, you will face restraints.

Even if you're in the militia of your favorite post-apocalyptic warlord you can only engage your enemies in specific ways. Go rogue and you might make your boss nervous. You get no job security when you work for a warlord who doubts your loyalty.

Compassion Deficit

Although New Hampshire went for Harris in the recent election, her opponent enjoys considerable support from people who have flown his banners continuously since 2015. Because the state population is predominantly white and conservative, with a deep puritanical tradition, most of the residents will feel only the generic ill effects of the incoming administration's economic policies, rather than the targeted persecution promised by the winning party's campaign. Hard to say whether anyone in the protected majority right around here will bother to lash out at marginalized people. I expect few serious personal attacks and atrocities, just slurs and shoves.

Legislatively it's a different story. With a Republican governor and legislative majority, and MAGA still controlling the national Republican brand, women's freedom and health remain at risk, education funding is in peril, and the future of federal funding the state has relied on to keep its parsimonious tax system on life support is questionable. The tourism economy depends on at least the appearance of a clean natural environment, but with the economy likely burning down nationwide, who will have the money to be a tourist? And the ski industry is clearly doomed by the abandonment of any efforts to slow climate change.

We always have our wealthy summer residents. They are buying up more and more of the quaint towns and villages they treasure as theme parks of family memory, which stimulates the incomes of building contractors and maintenance staff to keep everything nice for them in the off season. Anyone outside of these bubbles will be struggling, but then they always have. It's a point of pride to work long hours at a brutal job like logging, and vote against anything that might make your life more comfortable. The risk is too great that it might make someone else's life more comfortable, someone who doesn't deserve it. And that is the root of the compassion deficit that fuels MAGA.

Compassion deficit underlies all conservative political philosophy, but MAGA concentrates it to a high potency drug. If a conservative person isn't experiencing difficulties, anyone else who experiences those difficulties brought it on themselves. Difficulties are a sign of poor character. If your unusual circumstances make you a target for hardship, quit being unusual! Being normal isn't so hard. Just be normal!

If your norm is based on being a white male or a white female under the protection of a white male, how do you expect someone of a darker hue or not in a safe, subservient relationship to normalize themselves to your satisfaction? The country was built on incurable disparities. Slave labor built the Southern economy, and much of the early infrastructure of the federal government. The abolition of slavery didn't miraculously transform the freed population into acceptable citizens. The conflicts of the 1840s and '50s continue today. And the country's embrace of immigrants has added more unrest.

The Statue of Liberty will probably be melted down now to make ammunition for the Border Patrol.

A progressive attitude depends on people who realize that our entire species will do better once we make it a priority to help our entire species do better. You can't keep exporting your problems, putting dirty industries in seemingly distant lands. Their smokestacks belch poison into the same atmosphere we all use. You can't exploit labor in countries far away and not expect to pay for it in some other way. You can't ignore massacres because no one happens to be massacring you at the moment. If you make your country good for yourselves, expect displaced people from the ruined lands to want to get in here. If you isolate yourselves from the world, your nation still has to hold its place among rivals all too happy to close in if you let your guard down. The alliances with dictators that led to the installation of the one we are going to coronate on January 20, 2025 obligate our dictator to those other ruthless powers. Our dictator is not a fighter. His counselors are not fighters. They're sleazy quislings who will deal away the lives of ordinary citizens to preserve their own comforts in the hateful world they helped create.

We have a few chances to pull the country back from complete submission to the will of tyrants. It's not tyranny when your old racist jokes aren't funny anymore, and people abandon bigoted attitudes. It's not tyranny to tax businesses and individuals that have grown fat on, among other things, government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. It's not tyranny to release women from second-class citizenship. It's not tyranny to release health care from the grip of insurance and pharmaceutical profiteers. It's tyrannical to deny these things and to codify a tiered society in which some people are more equal than others. That's about to happen.

Cynics will say that we already live in that society, and they're not entirely wrong. However, we still had mechanisms to exert our own leverage, if we had been able to gather enough voters to weigh that plank down. The beneficiaries of our ignorance and distrust have dumped enormous bags of money on the other end of it. They fund all of the information channels that keep us apart. The mechanisms survive, but barely. Mostly dead isn't the same thing as completely dead. But we do have to survive a couple of years, minimum, of whatever chaos the incoming government unleashes on us in their greedy bumbling.

Somehow, we have to get people who don't already understand it to believe that caring about other people and promoting their acceptance doesn't cost most of us a thing. It will undoubtedly chip away portions of the obscene fortunes of a few individuals. That is not a bad thing in the least. Every person alive is a stakeholder in the planet. The few have their fortunes. All we will ever have is each other. We won't agree on everything. We shouldn't agree on everything. But if we don't resuscitate democracy we will lose even the faintest chance to participate in government rather than just submitting to our rulers. Restore the checks and balances. Suffer through the boring slog of learning how government works and why we need one. No one's liberty is absolute, but we can improve everyone's average if we try.

Have they got us by the founding document?

 I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.

Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.

The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.

You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.

Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.

Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.

The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?

We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.

The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.

The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?

To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.

Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.

Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.

It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.

Trump is not the problem

 While the 45th occupant of the Oval Office has dominated the news since he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential primaries in 2015, we lost the chance to make him a one-person problem when we failed to vote against him in sufficient numbers in November, 2016. As soon as he reached the most powerful leadership position in the world, he embodied all of the hopes of the voters and the business interests that put him there. Those hopes already existed before he placed them on the throne, and they will exist long after he is gone. If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can imagine.

When Hitler destroyed Germany with his manic obsessions, it was blatantly obvious. All of Europe was devastated by years of war. World War I failed as the "war to end all wars," but World War II succeeded as the War to Make War Inadvisable. I know it's not as snappy a title, but economic analysis bores most people to sleep. Germany reinvented itself as a bastion of tolerance because the country got to experience the ruinous consequences of bigotry run amok. If Hitler had the sense to keep his hatred within his own borders, the camps would probably still be running, in defiance of world disapproval, but global unwillingness to undermine German sovereignty. Look at how the Soviet Union behaved during its time, and how the "free world" built up arms, muttered threateningly, and stayed carefully on its own side of the line. Nukes made the stakes too high.

Global war became obsolete in the 20th Century. Warfare remains constant all over the globe, but no one with even a bachelor's degree in business wants a no-holds-barred total war for world domination. Small wars are profitable, although they have to be well managed. Big countries can pick on smaller ones, although the United States got its ass handed to it by the Vietnamese. Live and learn. Cough cough -- Afghanistan -- cough cough! Maybe not so much. But in any case the damage to a nation, its morale, its spirit, its compassion, drastic as they may be, don't damage production capacity and drain the resources of the top tier of wealth, for whom the country is run.

In 1984, George Orwell drew a broad, crayon sketch of how real global domination works. While much of the book is oversimplified, as all fiction has to be, many basic principles apply. Most notably, the common people, the most numerous, can be controlled by the information they are fed, and the necessities of life that are dribbled out in just enough of a flow to keep the strivers struggling to get their little bit, believing that their lives will get better, or at least no worse, if they just keep working for as long as they can.

Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is the visible pustule above a deep, systemic infection. You know that squeezing a zit can actually cause sepsis. Popping Trump might release a gratifying shower of pus and a momentary sense of relief, but the underlying infection would grow more entrenched. Indeed, pustule Trump was a shocking but predictable symptom of the poisoning that had been injected in steadily increasing doses since 1980. And, as we are constantly reminded, the real infection dates back to 1619, and further back, to contemptuous colonialism. The heirs to the country's worst aspects hold all of the power right now, because the numerous masses are controlled by the information they are fed, and the glorification of life-devouring work schedules that never seem to lead to that better world we were told must result from greater productivity. "Nobody wants to work anymore." Well, no shit: what has it gotten us?

Because the corrupt Supreme Court has placed Donald Trump out of reach of the law, we won't have the satisfaction of seeing the justice system work the way we were always lied to that it does: bringing any criminal before a jury of their peers, to be tried on the basis of the evidence, in accordance with the law. Until July 1, 2024, we at least could hold out the slim hope that the legal system could be used on anyone who broke the law, even though we saw it applied unequally as a matter of routine. No legal authority had officially codified any aspect of that inequality until now. With that seal broken, the tiers of the justice system may each in turn receive official sanction. The Constitution is only as good as the people who interpret it.

Real change starts from the bottom up. That's why the authoritarians shifted their focus to control at the state level at the same time that they worked diligently to eliminate federal authority. Smaller jurisdictions are easier to manage, because local voters actually have a harder time getting complete information. Sure, you can go to public hearings on upcoming issues, but who has time? Are the meetings during your work day, when you can't leave the job you desperately need for your meager income? Are they at night, when you work your second or third job, or are taking care of your family, or just resting up for the next day's toil? By removing federal oversight on behalf of ordinary citizens, the authoritarian movement guarantees that local bullies reign supreme. Your success at the local level depends on how strong local political machines are, and how dirty they can get without penalties. Like murdering civil rights activists and letting the murderers go free for decades. Authoritarian politics and organized crime are indistinguishable.

Monetizing the Meerkats

 Picture the classic photo of meerkats, with a couple of sentinels standing tall while the rest of the group forages. The group takes turns standing guard and gathering food, so everyone gets what they need.

Humans divide tasks more completely, using money to ensure that anyone not directly engaged in producing food or making shelter gets some. Our sentinels need to get paid in order to maintain their vigilance and reporting.

The myth of impartial journalism stems from an ideal worth striving for, and from some real life examples of it. But how can a journalist be truly impartial if there is such a thing as right and wrong? The obvious stuff may be easy enough, but, when it comes to conjectural policy, editorial bias skews everything.

In the old model of print journalism, ad revenues would determine the size of the paper. Once the ad banks were laid in, what remained was the "news hole." A paper might run at a deficit for a while, but financial reality is financial reality. In general, a paper would have to keep a sustainable balance. Thus, "All the News that's Fit to Print" becomes, "All the News that Fits." An editor decides what's worthy to make the cut, even more than when coffers are full and a few more things can be shoehorned in.

Now we have many reporters on platforms of all sizes, from a couple of planks sketchily nailed into the top of a swaying tree to concrete monoliths of established corporate media. No one has a monopoly on the truth or any obligation whatsoever to deliver it. Our sentinels keep watch and report.

Corporate media can no longer be trusted. Collectives providing information from lower tiers definitely reflect their own biases. Bias does not always bring inaccuracy. Unfortunately, your sense of accuracy depends on your vision of the present and future of the country. Those opinions are shaped by your beliefs about the past and the principles you derive from those beliefs.

In reality, nothing is secure, as the SCOTUS decision of July 1, 2024 proves. They rendered the entire constitution and Declaration of Independence irrelevant by making the president a king. For our nation to succeed, ruled by a document instead of a personage, we needed people of integrity to uphold and defend that document against all enemies foreign and domestic. Instead, domestic enemies have used the system to destroy the system. But I digress.

To keep our watchful meerkats standing tall, they needed the funds to survive. All media have been holding out the beggar's bowl for years, but it's gotten worse and worse in the past couple of decades. The people who want you uneducated and uninformed have done a good job of vilifying public education and the profession of journalism, while concentrating control of mass media in their own hands. Journalism that doesn't expose the schemes of the powerful is just public relations.

The sides are drawn: it's money versus people. We toil to get some and it gets dragged back from us. Every endeavor that might once have started out based on some intellectual and ethical principle becomes a business and turns toward the pure pursuit of maximum profit margin. This cynical and destructive model warps the entire economy.

An independent journalist does not provide food or shelter. They provide information. The truth is seldom popular, so the income is meager. There's no easy money anywhere. It's hard to rise in the pyramid scheme of capitalism. The "idle rich" have to keep scampering around looking busy, while the descending tiers of their supporters do the dirty work to keep them in power and secure the foundations of cheap labor: us.

I can say for certain that the time to observe, analyze, and write comes directly from either sleep or work. If you can't connect your efforts to a revenue stream, or even a series of discrete splashes, your income will suffer.

A Republic We Couldn't Keep

The thing about a dark day for America is that darkness doesn't fall right away. We will go through the rest of the election, with the media treating the death blow to representative government in this country as just another facet of this perfectly normal contest between the old familiar parties.

The fatal blow has fallen after a long series of maneuvers dating back to 1980. So in that sense it's not really a surprise. It happened sooner thanks to the many factors that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, but it was always the goal of wealthy people who believe fervently that the entire purpose of the United States is to make rich people richer. Everything they have done has undermined trust in the federal government and voting in general.

The flaw in government is that it's run by people. Ours used to run fairly well, but has deteriorated steadily under immense pressure from the private sector bent on proving that it doesn't work. As cooperating elected officials have fed the corporatocracy more and more money, the private sector has been able to construct an unending propaganda campaign supporting their own interests. According to the US Supreme Court, bribery of public officials is now completely legal. And just today they ruled that the president is a king, whose power is beyond the reach of the legal system. All other branches of government -- including the Supreme Court -- became irrelevant. The lesser branches can fight among themselves, but instead of checks and balances among equal members of a triumvirate, the order is hierarchical. The president is at the top, with the Supreme Court in second place, and Congress is dead last. Actually, the American people are dead last. If we continue the now meaningless entertainment of having elections, we might still place some intermediate tormentors above us in the neutered legislature, but all of us are subject to the whims of the tyrant.

Life may seem normal for a time. We will all continue to struggle to pay our bills, and be encouraged to blame the wrong people for our woes, or be told it's all our own fault for lack of a work ethic. The discrimination will become more and more blatant. We will have no recourse. Protesters can be run over, shot, beaten, and jailed indefinitely.

The legal system has long been just another tool of oppression. If we didn't have an unfair legal system, rich people wouldn't get the cushy treatment that they do, while ordinary citizens have to go through the whole wringer. For a time we had crusading lawyers who would use the system to force it to do right from time to time. That's gone now. With the entire judicial system under the control of authoritarians, anyone could get sucked in and convicted. If you displease the rulers, they have no reason to let you slide. Just about everyone will be cheap labor, easily replaced.

I will never understand how this represents freedom to the multitude who will find out the hard way that it does not. We're all going to have to take that rough ride with them. Thanks for nothing, you fucking morons.

Crime definitely pays. It just handed the most powerful military force in the world to whoever wins the next presidential election. And it got the most criminal president in the history of the United States a de facto pardon, because he will never be brought to trial. Whether he wins the election in November or not, the Supreme Court decision stands for the next criminal bold enough to take them up on it. 

Trump has a clear path to having any conviction overturned by this Supreme Court if he should happen to face trial. At the state level they'll just have to install GOP governors to grant the pardons, or threaten a Democrat and get them to flip.

 Life goes on, just trying to pay your bills. At least, as Trump himself has said, you don't have to worry about voting anymore. Just try to stay out of trouble.

When you can't tax the rich...

 A recent story about a $400 pineapple has added fuel to the burning resentment against the kind of people who can pay $400 for a pineapple. While such resentment is fully justified, and such casual luxury indicates a sickness in economic philosophy, the disparity exists. We are ruled by a wealthy elite bent on maintaining their position at the top of the pyramid. They fund our elections and bribe our Supreme Court justices to make sure that money keeps flowing to them. They pay their staff handsomely to insure loyalty in the accounting and legal departments. So how do we extract funds from them to disburse to our own little causes? Find out what they're willing to pay stupid amounts of money for.

The process is more complicated than tax policy. With tax policy you decide what the needs of government are. Ideally the needs are based on the needs of the citizens, for functioning infrastructure, safe and sufficient food supplies, fair distribution of proceeds from whatever is produced, and equal justice, to name a few. 

The power of money has distorted the system so that we have to fall back to the tactics of the servant classes in the Gilded Age, to flatter and bamboozle the wealthy into forking out cash for things that they take a fancy to. It's far from efficient. Any industry that does it well achieves so much wealth that it becomes part of the problem, lobbying for subsidies, contracts, and tax exemptions that add to the deficit that we have to fill by selling $400 pineapples, $18,000 bicycles, luxury automobiles, and attractively sited houses that fill the prettiest landscapes, occupied for a couple of weeks a year as the wealthy make the rounds of their domain. Tantalize them with handmade furniture, commissioned artwork, offerings from just the right size business. You'll never get rich, but you might get by.

A $400 pineapple is an act of desperation as much as a shameful display of decadence. Yes, it's shamefully decadent to consider such a purchase, but if rich idiots are forking out for $400 pineapples, take their damn money. Then spend those proceeds where they will do some good. I have no idea whether the luxury fruit purveyors are doing that. And no one will ever sell enough $400 pineapples to fill the holes left by tax cuts that have set us up for decades of deficits. Trickle down economics does not work. You have to find the right bait to get the rich to spend some of their money. It changes all the time, and varies from group to group. With the system constructed in their favor, the wealthy get to sit back and let the commoners guess what will attract a trickle. Most of the time, we grunts only have our lives to trade, expressing proper gratitude for the opportunity to be property caretakers and service providers, on call and cheerful.

Attempts to take a larger chunk of money and make a point, in the form of civil suits, turn out to be less successful. The bigger the settlement, the more tireless the defense. Has Alex Jones paid anything yet? Has Rudy Giuliani? Trump? Anyone? You can win a massive settlement and still have to live on food stamps and endure decades of death threats while you wait for the legal challenges to fade into the outright refusal to pay. While the legal precedents are important, the cash amounts are basically irrelevant. At best they are symbolic. Worse yet, they just put a price tag on immorality. Can you really ruin any of these people financially? It appears not. No one is kicking in doors and dragging any of them away over the refusal to pay out millions in damages, or even fines. The lawyers just keep the ball in the air, back and forth over the net, never landing.

All we have left is $400 pineapples.

The online ad model mutilated journalism

 Eons ago, in the mid 1970s, the basic journalism class required of anyone in the College of Journalism at University of Florida taught news writing as a means of conveying information efficiently to readers who were most likely to skim. This meant that the structure of a hard news story would load as many essentials as possible near the top, including the headline. That way, if a reader was just glancing over the pages, the headlines would provide a summary of the subject matter, and each article's lede paragraph would convey the most important content.

Throughout the era of printed paper, the format held up. The ads had their part of the page and the news and features filled the rest. Front pages had little or no advertising. The purpose of a newspaper was to convey the news. It was a point of pride. Papers might have a known editorial bias, but the straight news was served straight, under headlines that might be downright dry. Cynically, you could say that it didn't matter to the publishers if anyone actually read the news, as long as the advertisers thought that enough people did to make it worth buying ad space. In other words, the paper was prepaid.

As soon as "pages" became digital images that wouldn't appear until a reader asked for them, advertisers had a sure-fire way to audit actual views. Journalistic outlets now desperately needed readers to click though. The clickbait headline was born.

The problem is: people still skim the same way they did. Many of us are even reluctant to click through because the ads fill our devices with trackers and other garbage that we'd rather avoid. Lots of us navigate in a world informed only by inflammatory and misleading headlines composed purposely to upset us. In addition, journalistic standards had already slipped due to the influence of broadcast media and the shift to news as a business rather than a public service.

Granted, journalism has always been used as a way to control and direct opinion about issues important to the publisher. As more persuasive media evolved, they increased opportunities for nefarious actors, against which the stolid and factual reporting has little chance. Printed papers had greater resistance to corrupting influences, and a much wider reach than their audited circulation and projected secondary readership could ever capture. A printed page could blow around for weeks or longer, falling under the gaze of an unimaginably diverse audience for free. Now everything is TV, or at least viewed on a screen, almost obliterated by commercial messages.

The visual dominance of ads emerged in glossy magazines in the 1980s as a harbinger of the trash we have to hack through today to view or read the content we actually wanted. Bike and outdoor magazines in the 1970s were nerdy, with an obvious division between the editorial content and the ads. By the mid 1980s, it was getting hard to tell the difference between ads and articles. Mainstream consumer magazines had gone ad-heavy long before that. But at least in a printed publication you could flip past those pages risking nothing more than a paper cut if you were exceptionally clumsy and unlucky. In digital format, you have to keep whacking back the pop-ups, and you'll still be trailed afterwards by targeted supplicants reaching for your credit card based on an algorithm's perception of your desires.

In this digital age, another problem plagues journalists and readers alike: Is your browser up to date? I'm writing now on a MacBook from 2009. The browser is Firefox, updated as far as it can be. It is slow and lots of pages don't load correctly. I keep scanning idly for a newer used unit, but computer companies keep trying to collect and control their clientele, so the newest of the new may come with numerous sturdy strings attached. Windows computers come with nothing but teasers pre-installed, requiring you to use their cloud services and pay to subscribe to the software itself.

My other option is a 2019 Lenovo that was so slow from the git-go that just booting it up is a chore. I cleaned out a lot of the crap that was dragging it down, but it will never be blazingly fast or fully trustworthy. So that leaves me with my phone. A lot of people use their phones for everything. I use it for more and more because the apps generally work more smoothly, but sometimes I need a bigger screen and a real keyboard. So my connection to the flow of digital information-- and I'm sure I'm not alone in this -- breaks up often.

Print media are still available, with all of their old limitations and then some. I live in a rural area, so good coverage of news at any level has always been hard to find. Someone has to get the story, and a publication has to have space to print the story. The town I live in is between the coverage areas of several papers, so it gets mentioned in passing if at all, except when something exciting happens. Then that item is all that makes the news. Localized web coverage, mostly on social media, is so filled with personal rancor that it soon becomes too stressful to read. Ignorance truly is bliss. In fact, bliss is impossible without it.

Printed matter needed paper. Paper generally came from trees. Cutting trees means cyclic or permanent deforestation, depending on what investors decide to do with the land from which the trees were taken. Investors are looking for profit, not sustainability. If a piece of farmland or timberland will fetch a fat profit being stripped for a housing development or an industrial park, say goodbye to the trees, and don't ask where your food will be grown or your groundwater will percolate. 

Digital media depends on a steady supply of functional devices that the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to make obsolete as quickly as they come out. "Built to last" isn't even a selling point anymore. A scrap of newspaper might be legible in fifty or a hundred years. Will an old computer still boot up? And if it does, and civilization still exists and functions, will it be able to connect to whatever the network is by then? Not in the current business model. And the business model is all we pay attention to anymore. Forget quality of life and acquisition of skill and knowledge for the overall improvement of humanity. Just rake in cash as much as you can.

A Long-Term Plan for Debt Elimination

 In the USA, we've been hearing about "the deficit" for decades. Any nation has to figure out its cash flow to finance all of its domestic and international activities. The not-yet United States came out of its war of separation from Great Britain with a mountain of debt. The amount has gone up and down, but never gone completely away.

For those of us in the lower tiers of the economy, the economics are clear: you need a definite amount of money to service a definite amount of debt. I don't mean people on public assistance or evading social safety nets. I mean the working and lower middle classes. As you go up from there, the lines become blurrier. The more money you have or can make people think you have, the less you have to make every equation balance all the time with solid cash or collateral. Once you reach the status of a billionaire or a nation, it gets very mumbly. 

Large financial entities with whole departments of lawyers and accountants can play off perceived assets against negotiable debts for decades or, in the case of nations, centuries. Somewhere in the US deficit is probably a line item for cannonballs bought with French funds in 1779. Allied nations have been helping each other out in various conflicts throughout history, with the ledgers balanced by returned favors as well as money. As with any friend to whom you owe money, it only becomes a problem if you have friction. These times come and go. The international community bumps along.

Bankruptcy ceased to be the kind of shame that would drive a tycoon to suicide by the mid 20th Century. Now it's just another device in the corporate toolkit to avoid paying back the full amount that you owe. Sometimes it means liquidation and the corporate equivalent of death. Other times it just means a restart with the pesky loans and losses recalculated.

For individuals, the process is a bit more dire. Individuals can declare bankruptcy, as can small businesses, but the consequences weigh on them more heavily and for longer than would be the case for a massive corporation whose collapse sends shock waves through the global economy and plunges thousands of people into unemployment, poverty, and fear. We must be stern with our erring children, and force them to learn from their mistakes. Keep the little people in line.

Starting in 1980, Republicans instituted policies that favored reducing government income. This has had the predictable effect of raising government debt. The other half of the Republican equation was their drive to make government smaller, releasing the controls on businesses, especially large and powerful corporations, while slashing and burning the social safety nets that they asserted were just making hammocks for born losers, and tangling the feet of an agile economy just waiting to sprint to nationwide wealth. In order to get into office at all during these dark times, the Democratic Party has been forced to play along. The players have been more or less reluctant depending on how susceptible they are to the lure of investment income.

Step one was to vilify government. Step two was to elect officials who would make government ineffective. The GOP called for unity above all else. There were plenty of disaffected constituencies that could be pulled together with promises to address their particular grievances. Most people have a jaundiced view of the government because, right or left, we've all been let down in one way or another. Find the right framing and you can create party loyalists for life.

At first, the proponents of trickle-down economics may actually have believed their silly theory that increased economic activity would follow when taxes on the top brackets got smaller, and that this would generate the needed revenue. If they really did think that, it wasn't for long. The real long-term goal was to consolidate private wealth and make it the dominant force in government policy. The rich wanted to get richer. It's only natural. Give them the freedom due to all people created equal. Let them use that freedom to become emperors. Equality under the law is a fairy tale you use to get poor people to fight your wars for you.

Modern media made it increasingly difficult to operate the government to the advantage of concentrated wealth without any scrutiny at all. Occasionally, idealistic principles won a round. Overall, however, the trend has been toward feeding money upward and hardship downward, flogging the tired myth of upward mobility to a more and more jaded audience.

Part of the audience has been dragging student debt for years, because a college education was supposed to be a necessary rung on that upward climb, as well as just a nice thing to have for your own intellectual expansion. The encumbrance became a drag on the economy as those workers were less and less able to participate fully in the consumerist gorge that sustains the modern world. While the gorge is itself a major threat to our survival as a species, it remains necessary to the individuals of each generation as they try to extract sustenance from the world they're thrust into. So the current administration in the US decided to extend to the student debt bloc as a whole -- or at least in large part -- the same courtesy extended to major corporations and allied nations, of just writing it off. Let the liberated wallets frolic among the retailers, the real estate market, and the service sector.

The opposition refused to see the student debt population as a large blockage in the national cash flow, and instead continued to see them as little people who needed to live with their mistake of seeking higher education that didn't pay off adequately. Hey, we've all made bad investments! Suck it up! They haven't noticed yet that student debt forgiveness is the perfect metaphor for their plan to shrink the government and drown it in a bathtub. I will explain:

Cutting taxes was supposed to make voters automatically favor politicians who cut government expenses. They've tried, but certain expenses are very hard to reduce, and other categories attract the support of lobbyists to keep the money flowing. Penurious voters keep sending angry representatives to Congress, hoping for the glorious day when the IRS finally falls like a statue of Saddam Hussein, and everyone gets to take home ever dollar they earn. But it keeps not happening! Meanwhile, economists look over their glasses at us and tell us that this deficit thing is going to keep two, three, twenty, a hundred generations enslaved just to the interest payments!! We have reached the point now where a functional percentage of voters might be convinced that the best way out of the mess is just to collapse the government and walk away from the wreckage. It's a young adult fantasy novel come to life. John Galt and his rich buddies hang out in their luxurious compounds waiting to stride out over their newly conquered world after convincing the majority of underlings that democratic government is just too complicated and difficult for them. Y'all couldn't handle the expenses. And yet those expenses miraculously disappear once the nanny state is replaced by the boss state.

I'm not sure where the super rich think their wealth will come from once they have all the money. Huge dollar figures will become even more meaningless than they are already. The key becomes an economy based on job satisfaction rather than money. Tyrants need jobs done. Individuals need intellectual and emotional gratification. And because gratification is itself an emotion, it's all about emotion. Feelings, nothing more than feelings. Put sadistic bastards in charge of security. You don't have to pay them anything. Just make sure that they have the equipment they want, and whatever food, shelter, and company they require to keep them happily on task. Find workaholic drudges for your necessary tasks. Find sycophantic suckups to be your property caretakers and household retainers. There are endless ways to create a barter economy from tendencies already easy to see among people now handled through the cumbersome intermediary of pay rates. Still, the super rich will have to measure themselves against each other somehow. Oh well, I guess that's their problem to solve. We too dumb down here.

The leakiness of Gmail

 When I signed up for Gmail many years ago, you had to be invited by an existing user. My colleague Ralph extended that credential, after which I could invite myself to open more accounts.

The address format specified characters.characters@gmail.com. It was case sensitive and the dots mattered. Then, a few years later, I started receiving emails definitely not addressed to me. Up in the address field was a note from the googs stating "yes, this is you," with a link to explanation. Addresses were no longer case sensitive and dots didn't matter. Thus I would receive email addressed to anyone using the same characters I had used, upper or lower case, dots or no dots. But it's selective. I don't receive every email my doppelgangers get. Their inboxes can't be that sparse unless they ruthlessly prune their contact lists. 

I get snapshots of multiple lives. I even get spam based on their history and preferences. And they're a diverse group. At least two appear to be Black women. One seems to be a southern guy. Someone owns or used to own a Jeep. I've learned some interesting things about California's ecology, the blues music scene in Los Angeles, and The Roosevelt Institute, as well as dental and hair care schedules, notifications about routine automobile service, and the cosmetic products marketed to certain demographics. I even get emails from school administrators to parents, and internal business communications from people I don't know. These are not phishing scams. These are other people's business, delivered to me. Some seem to come and go randomly. Others appear regularly, even daily.

I wonder what they might see from my inbox?

While the experience has been interesting in a way, it's also annoying that Gmail made no effort to secure my communications or those with whom I share my initials. It's a good reminder that most communication on the Internet is not secure. It can be made somewhat more secure by taking specific steps that cost money, but in any case we are submitting our information to a sprawling global system of computers entirely owned by other people. Commit your information accordingly.