Who put the "rank" in rank and file?

 Dig deep enough in Webster's dictionary under the word "rank" and you come to the sense that we often apply to dirty socks or rotting garbage.

We talk a lot about political parties as organizations with leadership structure and policy goals, but the vast majority of party members -- the massive base of the pyramid that gives them strength, are just ordinary citizens who have chosen a brand and remain unshakably loyal to it. We let analysts absolve the masses of responsibility by discussing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the party's leaders and prominent members.

There is one political party in this country, and one unstable coalition of opposition groups that sometimes manages to come together as the other party. Maybe that was less true around the middle of the twentieth century, but I had just arrived and was more concerned with the basics of learning to be human. I can say that special interests like minorities, women, and labor, presented themselves to both parties and shifted as seemed best to advance their causes. As the party leadership evolved, these minority positions gravitated to the Democrats. However, as Clarence Thomas pointed out in his supreme court confirmation hearings, and women, labor unions,  and gays voting Republican have continued to demonstrate, these are not monolithic blocs ready made to plug into the party that embraces them completely.

The power of any party comes from the rank and file voters who mass in sufficient numbers to push the marker of their chosen champion across the finish line first. "Overperforming surprisingly well" doesn't mean shit if you don't get into office. The winners won't pay attention to the issues that helped you almost beat them. They'll just revel in victory. Maybe their strategists will take note of tweaks they can add to the rhetoric, but it won't change their essential aims.

The faithful members of any party might be completely uninformed about the actual issues facing the country, or even their locality. Government is complicated and boring. Democracy fails because so few people have time or brain space to coordinate all the variables or even collect the information necessary to know a fraction of what those variables are, while also contributing to the economy through some kind of employment. Committed researchers themselves are fully occupied figuring things out and distilling their findings into some understandable form to communicate. Anyone who can blurt some quick oversimplification can take control of the story to advance a political agenda.

Humans look at their lives on a short horizon. Through recorded history we can look at a century, two centuries, five centuries, connecting dots and charting trends, but almost none of us get to live for one complete century, and the few who do might not have full use of their faculties for their last years of pulse and respiration. We look at the monthly bills, the weekly grocery and fuel costs, the growth of children and grandchildren one school year at a time. We go through school, then emerge into working adulthood. Ten years seems like a long time until you've racked up a number of decades that startles you. 

At this point, Republican leadership is undeniably odious. The bloated vulgarian occupying the White House with the blessing of the right wing majority on the Supreme Court and the unswerving devotion of the Republican congressional leadership still only got there because voters put him there. His grotesque lifestyle and abysmal architectural sense would not have been inflicted on public spaces all over the District of Columbia if millions of voters hadn't decided that he should be there. 

To the rank and file voter, the grotesque lifestyle and architectural sense don't matter. What matters to the rank and file is household expenses and team spirit.

Republican team spirit is predominantly mean-spirited. Who lines up to vote in favor of racism as free speech? Who lines up to vote in favor of making certain health procedures for women illegal? It's a rare individual who goes to both law school and med school and gets licensed to practice both simultaneously. Rarer still is such an individual in elected office. Who lines up to vote in favor of religious law applied to all citizens, as long as it's the right brand of religion? Who cops a moral stance and then champions cruelty to immigrants and refugees? Who openly states that they'll take quite a bit of pain in their own lives just for inflicting pain on their perceived social and political opponents? A really rank rank and file. I mean rotting corpses on a pile of shit rank.

If Democrats were really the antidote to this, they would have worked their magic before this. There's no magic in a vote for Democrats. Texas Paul has put out the call for independents to join up officially and swell the ranks of the Democratic Party. He acknowledges that they aren't perfect, but they're closer to perfectible. They're at least interested in evolving. Their detractors among the perennially disaffected leftists will sneer, but the perennially disaffected leftists are as much of a drag as the perennially fascistic far right. You're not going to get rid of our two-party system, in the next week, so hold your nose and vote for Democrats. Or maybe do it with some semblance of enthusiasm.

Trump won in 2016 because millions of voters embraced his caustic vulgarity as "refreshingly honest." In other words, they were just as vulgar and caustic and were thrilled to have someone famous celebrate those qualities. Yeah, that's the guy we want representing our country on the world stage! That's the guy we want running things domestically. The first time around they can be forgiven for the mistake of believing that a government should be run like a business. That bullshit gets shoved at us constantly.

Trump lost in 2020 because a compound of factors made just enough people determined to vote against him. Significantly, the dissatisfaction only led to a paper-thin Democratic margin in the senate, which was largely sabotaged by Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema. Even so, the Biden administration did an amazing job of digging us out of the hole created by Trump's incompetence and the global pandemic that had damaged the economy in every country that has one. The public could not have been less impressed. And Trump came roaring back.

Republican office holders could have joined with the Democrats to impeach and convict Trump, assuring that he would be prosecuted without delay for his crimes. The media said that those leaders were afraid of Trump, but why should they be? They were afraid of their own rank and file. Rank, rank, rank rank and file, still in thrall to the avatar of their worst impulses.

I've heard unsubstantiated tales of Republicans who actually voted against the party in each of the elections of the Trump era, but I have no solid statistics. We got that secret ballot in this country, so how can you know for sure? Mostly you have self-reporting. But if you were going to be a traitor to a party that sends Christmas pictures of the family arsenal and considers the murder of schoolchildren to be a regrettable but necessary price to pay for the freedom to carry deadly weapons everywhere, would you want to tell some loudmouth pollster or reporter about it?

Firebrands on the right and the left like to cite the principle that "when the government fears the people there is liberty," but when the government fears the people what you actually get is bad government. The rest of the line says, "When the people fear the government there is tyranny." Nice oversimplification. Who are "the people" exactly when women don't have full autonomy, systemic racism still afflicts public and private sectors alike, and a poorly trained, undisciplined legion of armed thugs is snatching people off the streets and making them disappear, sometimes permanently?

The Republicans fear their own voters. They can't control the monster they created. They're also beholden to the rich donors who don't give a crap about them personally and equally don't give a crap about the problems of the ordinary rabble, natural born or recently arrived.

It would be nice, and maybe it actually will be nice, to see the whole squirming tangle ejected from the seats of power to writhe in a rank mass on the ground below because it couldn't purge itself of the spite that it had cultivated for so long. Maybe a little time to think in the fresh air will dispel the miasma. Or maybe we just watch it dissolve into slimy goo and seep into the mud. Either way, they are not really the majority. Something has to break the spell that keeps the non-rank, non-file from joining with the putrid throng that makes up the basest of the base.

America the Failure, unless we act now

 You know how it sucks when a product you really like is still in production, but the great company that made it was bought out by some greedy corporation, so the product is a cheap copy of what once made it so desirable?

That conveys the feeling, but hardly the true threat we face since gullible voters reinstalled the worst president in our country's history at the controls of what had the makings of eventually becoming a great country.

The "sphere of influence" concept championed by greedhead Putin works by threatening neighboring countries and absorbing them into a totalitarian framework. You might decide to run your sphere differently, being generous and kind, but eventually you will have to face a militarized foe when the cruel empire decides to push its boundaries. 

Republican Saint Ronald called the USSR the evil empire. Now Republicans embrace Russia under the leadership of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Vain, greedy, and stupid, yet exalted by American media culture as a beacon for idiots, Trump was the most useful idiot the Russians had ever had. He's paying off big time now.

Proponents of the unitary executive -- an all-powerful presidency served by a subordinate Congress -- really pushed us off a cliff here. Several Supreme Court justices should be dragged off the bench and put to work cleaning latrines for that one. Dictatorship is tempting when you feel confident that your ideological position will always be on top. SCOTUS and the Heritage Foundation laid a lot of groundwork to build a system that will assure their control. Their opposition may be tempted to leave the machinery in place and use it to force a different set of reforms. That will fail because the natural human inclination is conservative: fear based and self protective.

Various fables use the device of shabby travelers seeking shelter, turned away by most, but taken in by a generous host at last. After the host provides food, shelter, and comfort, the shabby travelers reveal that they are gods and reward the hospitable mortals handsomely. This may be supposed to teach hospitality and generosity, because you never know who might be a god, but it starts from the basic human fear of strangers. Vampires can only come in if you invite them. Drifters and hobos might be serial killers. That hitchhiker might murder you. Or you might murder them.

On a very basic level, we don't trust each other. Of course we do trust each other constantly, but paranoia is never far away. It's easy to excite. It drives conservative thought. So if a self-styled progressive administration tried to strong-arm benevolence on people, it would set off the kind of quiet resistance that leads to stunning election losses and a return to institutionalized distrust. You want some assistance when you're down and out? How down and out are you really?

Trump rallies were not the norm, although the Tea Party rallies did foretell them. The norm was Republican victories just quietly grinding forward with their bold assurance that the party of killjoy fuddy-duddies knew better than those dippy kids thinking that we could have luxuries like universal health care, excellent public schools, and well-maintained infrastructure. Next they'll be saying that we should go back to taxing the wealthy! Ha ha ha, how cute. Now run along and bury yourselves in popular culture while the grownups run things.

Conservatives have been constantly pulling toward authoritarianism in the name of freedom while the other side was trying to find something for each side. The net result is that we kept getting dragged toward the situation we're in today. Freedom was always code for a very specific, vocal, violence-prone subset of the entire population. The rhetoric of the conservatives was as elastic as the founding documents themselves. It's as vague, contradictory, and modularly applicable as the Bible.

The changes in tax laws and election financing since 1980 have almost turned our elections into shareholder meetings where the wealthy actually get to outvote us. The upcoming midterms may be our last chance to assert the true power of the people by voting against the party most thoroughly responsible for empowering rich punks and gangsters.

Should the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress, don't expect an instant miraculous recovery and get all snitty in 2028 when it hasn't happened. A depressing percentage of potential voters are persnickety and apathetic. They don't vote or vote third party, thus perpetuating the conditions that make them persnickety and apathetic.

Social media showcases cynicism and sinister conspiracy theories designed to convince you that you shouldn't waste your time trying to make anything better. These posts can appear right next to one about environmental protection, social justice, universal health care, or political action, posted by the exact same person who just told you that the medical establishment is just a money machine designed to keep you sick and paying, and that "both parties are the same." You can't exhort people to vote and then tell them that anyone who runs for office is guaranteed to be a con artist or worse. And don't get me started on the childish belief that term limits for elected officials will solve anything. Term limits is not the same thing as limited terms, as would be a good idea for supreme court justices. But in that instance, the length of a fixed term would give parties a set target to anticipate exactly when they get to appoint a successor. It would become another precise political calculation. Not a magic bullet.

What is a magic bullet is your vote. You get one shot per candidate or ballot measure. You will be part of a massed volley in one exchange of fire. At the end, we will have a winner. The bullets, fortunately, are metaphorical, but the result will affect lives for years to come. We're choosing once again what our brand and quality will be. What do we offer to each other and  the world? We failed in 2016. We barely came back in 2020. Lost our chance in 2022 and set up the epic faceplant of 2024. One more time: are we stupid and violent or are we thoughtful, brave, and faithful to the ideals of human rights?

Hunting us from the air keeps getting easier

 Americans right now can read or watch video coverage about drone warfare in distant lands while we continue our consumerist lives and wait for the economy to improve. We'll be fine. Meanwhile, companies like New Hampshire's own Sig Sauer are rolling out drones controlled by artificial intelligence and armed with machine guns, so that targets on the ground can be strafed without even bothering with a human operator. Don't worry. It's mostly being used on Palestinian civilians. Don't bitch about that or you're antisemitic.

Civilians in the United States are not allowed to own weaponized drones. But our military and law enforcement will definitely have to have them to keep up with rival military services and whatever the illegal scourge of the month is domestically.

Armed forces conduct exercises to practice fighting against the weapons they expect to face, and to develop proficiency with the ones in their own arsenal. The armed citizens who bray loudly about needing personal armament to fight off their tyrannical government do not uniformly follow this practice, partly because so many of them are posers, and partly because they can't possibly keep up in the arms race against lavishly funded government forces.

No doubt a determined citizen resistance could keep up an endless unconventional warfare campaign to stymie a truly oppressive government from exerting absolute control, but that ability dwindles with every advancement in surveillance technology and ruthless killing machinery. No need to nuke. Just hunt relentlessly from the sky and nearby space so that no one can move on the surface of the planet at any hour of the day or night without being spotted and zapped.

The weird, artificial nature of modern warfare becomes more obvious every day. Every conflict now, from the war in Ukraine to the Hamas attack that triggered the retaliatory genocide against the Palestinians by Israel, to the pesky Houthis and Iranians features drone technology guided by communication satellites. Elon and Don just turned down the power on Ukraine to favor Russia just by ordering it and having corporate and government offices far removed from the fighting implement it. Ukrainians die who might not have, at the whims of two greedy, selfish men, serving a third greedy, selfish man, Vladimir Putin. The war is real. The wounds and property destruction are real. But they can be dialed up or down at the speed of a text message.

The 2A crowd in this country needs to figure out -- and fast -- how to practice shooting down computer-controlled drones developed to anticipate their every move and deliver death from above at distances far out of range of return fire.

It might be a good idea at the same time not to scorn and sneer at efforts to direct humans away from the time-honored practice of trying to annihilate each other before we get terminally good at it. We have choices that were not available to our ancestors, who started and perfected the practice.

Peaceful coexistence may be impossible, simply because our troubled selves represent every force in the universe, both creative and destructive. We may simply be forced to act out with our flesh these abstract principles of physics in an endless clash. I'd like to think not, but I'm not placing any bets. Just do what seems right and hope for...I was going to say the best, but even that is subjective. Hope for my peaceful vision of a fun place to be human, anyway.

Yeah! Let's dominate the Americas!

 The Trump regime has made no secret of its plans to pull back from global influence and settle for regional power by dominating every other nation in the Western Hemisphere. Once we build up our stockpile of munitions again, we should be able to bomb any single country in the region for up to two weeks to make sure that the surviving population is good and fired up in the event that we have to put boots on the ground to prove that we mean business.

That's right: no more sending our young people to die in jungles in Asia when we have perfectly good jungles you can practically drive to (except for that pesky Darien Gap).

Back in the mid twentieth century we could still intimidate smaller nations with the threat that we would invade them. Then Vietnam knocked some of the shine off of that idea, but we still swung a big dick militarily. However, since the revenge campaigns following 9-11 in Afghanistan and Iraq were the opposite of quick and decisive, smaller nations probably see more inspiration in the successful resistance of Ukraine, and the ultimate victory of Hanoi when the USA starts rattling its saber. It's one thing to run a quick snatch like the Trump regime did in Venezuela. Meanwhile, in Iran, we keep wisely holding off on an actual invasion because even the blowhards running this fecal festival don't want to be saddled with the bloodbath that would ensue.

The military intimidation machine still functioned through the end of Joe Biden's presidency. One key factor is that it was just one element of a detailed foreign policy that used a lot of soft power as well. If we were ever going to wean ourselves off of our worst meddlesome ways in foreign affairs, at least we could do it from a position of strength.

That's gone now.

When the cosplay government we have now started throwing weapons around like the supply was endless, it quickly revealed the limitations of our military capability and the ignorance of our civilian leadership at this unfortunate moment. Like any armed, angry drunk, we are dangerous to be around, but, like that drunk, nowhere near as capable as we think we are. I say we because all of this truculent buffoonery is being done in our name, under the flag of our nation. Anyone who voted for this should be deeply ashamed.

I don't know where the personnel will come from to handle multiple invasions in South America even if we weren't stuck in the tar pit of Iran. I'm sure that the Trump regime remembered the song lyric, "We'll kick your ass, and take the gas, and say ayatollah-ya so!" How's that going, now that they've buggered the global distribution of petroleum? Maybe they just quietly slink away from Iran and hope that the whole thing simmers down on its own.

The tough guys starting these fights are not the ones who will take the actual return fire. Our military is legally required to refuse unlawful orders, but they have no such mechanism for refusing blatantly stupid ones. Sometimes military and civilian leadership spin each other up, as happened in Vietnam, but the institutions also learned from their mistakes. Maybe it didn't improve their ethics as much as we might like, but at least it improved their methods.

Movies and television almost never depict reality accurately. I know enough from seeing how script writers butcher what I do know about, and from listening to knowledgeable people critique depictions of activities I don't know about, to deduce that most of what we see is horseshit. It can be a tightly written narrative with enough internal consistency to carry a viewer along for a fun ride, but it isn't going to teach you how to do in real life what you're seeing on the screen. And that's if it was possible at all. Unfortunately, the United States is under the control of television characters who really don't have the faintest idea how to perform the real world duties of the offices they have been given. Rather than straighten the bozos out, the Republican elected officials who were already in government for years before Trump and MAGA fell on them like a planeload of manure have settled into poorly scripted supporting roles. Some of them were already that dumb. Others are just going along to get along, probably hoping that they cling to their seats after the Democratic Party finally comes to their rescue.

If nothing else, the past decade has shown us that we all needed to be thinking in a lot more detail about the nuts and bolts of how we want this country to run. We're all very busy trying to live our daily lives, so we succumb to the ad blitz every couple of years and choose which fears to indulge, before tuning out again. The MAGA cult runs on fear and resentment. I should also add convenience shopping. Elect one strong leader who will make life hell for the enemies of freedom both foreign and domestic. Quick as a well-placed head shot at the satisfying climax of a movie or television show. Down go the bad guys, and the hero gets the girl.

Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

Thanks a lot, Osama bin Laden

 When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, his speech demonstrated just how far the United States has fallen since the attacks on September 11, 2001, tipped us over the brink of fear and paranoia.

The forces behind Trump include more than just voraciously greedy billionaires. The likes of Stephen Miller care much less for riches than they do for the perceived safety of a monoculture hiding in a fortress, surrounded by a huge buffer zone of vassal states that will keep the bad brown people from hurting them.

September 11 was an act of terror, and it worked. It's been a slow-acting poison. Some consequences manifested themselves immediately, like the Patriot Act and our involvement in Afghanistan. The Iraq war was another highlight. But even without those, the internal divisions stressed by the terror attack turned into fractures that have weakened the structure of the United States almost to collapse. All of this is the result of the jelly-kneed fear of people like Stephen Miller.

The bigots posture and talk tough, but it is motivated by the desire to obliterate threats in a way that can never be possible without the complete annihilation of humanity. Fearful people invoke the use of force.

Trump, the man voted back into office by fearful people, stood before the international body formed in the aftermath of World War II to promote peace, diplomacy, and respect for human rights, and mused about obliterating Iran, bragged about kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatened Cuba, and openly championed the concept that large, powerful, heavily militarized nations have the right to stomp on the smaller nations around them. It was a disgusting repudiation of the high principles that our country has claimed to stand for. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys.

Greed drove the plantation economy of the South. Greed drove the Native American genocide of western expansion. The elites of the South fostered racism to control their labor costs. Years later, Nazi Germany studied the treatment of Black people in the American South to inform their own white supremacy. Next thing you know, we had to go over there and help kill the monster our own policies had helped to create.

Healthy fear is sensible. It makes you alert and cautious. But fear is a continuum. Your healthy caution can mutate into paranoia. The terror and rage that swept over the United States when our bubble of invulnerability was pierced by four hijacked jetliners has led to a man who absolutely personifies greed and fear standing before the UN General Assembly and dragging our country down to the level of loudmouth dictators that everyone hates.

The Republican Party is driven more by greed than fear as they support this man. Maybe they fear him as a political influence, though that influence is waning, but in the meantime the money is good. The party had prepared itself well for his rise. Now they can't seem to pull him down. Or maybe it's just that they won't. They put party over country decades ago. I hope they show proper appreciation to Osama bin Laden for really pushing their cause. Without him, their struggle would have taken decades longer and perhaps failed completely. 

On the other side, the Democrats needed an infection like Trump to demonstrate just how bad a bargain they made when they cozied up to corporate money. I understand that they had to play the game as the game was being played in order to score at all, but instead of biting the hand that fed them in a quick and decisive way, they wavered and let the hand get a firm grip on their leash.

The leader of the free world is not free

 With the news that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev dumped thousands of dollars into Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding, it's a good time to remind people that the leader of the free world -- as the US president used to be known -- is less free than the citizens he or she works for. This is true of everyone in government service, whether it is elected, civil, or military. Trump Jr. and his wife Bettina can say all they want that it was a personal gesture of friendship "not necessarily" tainted with political motives, but that doesn't prove that it wasn't. It just states the obvious and unconvincing argument that it might be totally innocent.

Presidential family members can get up to some embarrassing high jinks. Jimmy Carter's brother Billy comes to mind. Jimmy made certain to draw a firm line and keep Billy on the other side of it, unlike the current regime, which is run like a family business with no qualms about the shadiness of deals and associates.

Aside from the blatant corruption siphoning taxpayer money into Trump family coffers, the treasonous aspects of cozying up to a prominent figure in an adversarial nation highlights the ways in which this regime has been demolishing the strength and prestige of the United States as if that was one of its goals.

No one is free to be an actual criminal. I mean you are free to be an actual criminal, but criminal behavior has consequences. In theory, everyone is equal under the law. In practice, the law has been a ceiling for most of us and a floor for some. This is why the real money-grubbers have typically stuck to the private sector, where their success could be an example to the lazy masses, and they could bankroll their political stooges with a convenient space between them. They at least had the tactical sense to obscure the connection by that token amount.

With the two Trump regimes, the media took a sledgehammer to the Overton window to normalize behavior that would have destroyed the political careers of any previous politician. In a way, they were right to report on the stunning combination of incompetence and disdain for the law as completely normal for Trump, but it should not be normal for an elected official or any other government functionary at any level. Imagine if you had to slip an extra fifty bucks cash to the person behind the counter at the DMV in addition to the fees you already pay to get a driver's license. Maybe it's already that way in some states. I haven't lived everywhere. But I doubt it. People would screech about driver's licenses.

The everlasting shame of the Republican Party should be the way that they allowed Donald Trump to become their standard bearer and have done nothing to rein in his worst excesses. But shame has little value in politics. It's a word that rivals throw at each other in hopes of reaching voters who might care. When Republican senators told Nixon to resign or be impeached, they didn't do it out of a sense of moral outrage. They did it because his polls were in the toilet, and they didn't want to get flushed with him. Moral outrage just came along for the ride.

Politicians of both parties have tended to pull their punches, sometimes even against members of the opposing party, because of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. "I stop short of anything more serious than verbal posturing about your offenses, and hope that you will do the same for mine." Hey, we all make mistakes from time to time. Let's not actually expel any members over this.

Every move is a calculated risk. The ultimate goal of any politician is to get re-elected. For a member of Congress, this can coincide with genuine principles based on improving living conditions for the residents of their district. Members have to re-apply for their jobs every two years.

In the senate, overall party ideology edges into the lead as senators represent their entire state, and only one-third of the senate is up for election every two years. You still have to appeal to the voters of your entire state, but that makes the job easier as well as harder in the way you can slather your positions around on specific issues to assemble a majority collected from multiple interest groups. Then you have six years to f*ck with things in DC, supporting or undermining a president as the political need arises.

The House of Representatives membership is also capped, at 435, which has weakened representation in heavily populated states the way huge class sizes have weakened education in overcrowded public schools. Gerrymandering has further eroded the responsiveness of representatives to anything other than partisan ideologues. As a result, citizen concerns get pushed further down the agenda. A lot of lying falls under First Amendment protection. You can seldom sue your political representative for fraud because they have not directly taken money from you. That thin veil of separation between their promises to voters and the actual expenditure of taxpayers' money creates just enough space to avoid chargeable criminality.

The Trump regime and its extended family have decided that the payola machine already in place was too slow and indirect. They're parading their contempt for the common people and the rule of law. It's up to us to stop them. 

Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate malware

 The recent story about Open AI's jailbreak that led to its artificial intelligence in training escaping onto the Internet and hacking into another AI-related company's servers highlights the extreme danger of creating the ultimate cyber sociopath. The fact that we have a government run by sociopaths in the United States right now makes a worst case scenario an even more real possibility. The current regime is the kind of people who would release poison gas and expect it to kill only their enemies. One of the first things they did was rescind a Biden administration executive order laying out a framework for regulating the development of artificial intelligence to give our slow human brains a chance to review what the computers can cook up and implement on their own.

Human engineers claim that they are instilling restraining conventions in the machines, but we've been trying to instill restraining conventions in ourselves for our entire existence, with conspicuous lack of success. Humans creating machine intelligence can't help but equip it with the kind of cynicism that leads to opportunism and oppression of inconvenient populations. Artificial intelligence doesn't need to be drunk on its own power when logic will suffice. If humans are a contaminant and an impediment to the machine's self-selected goals, humans will be displaced or eliminated. Sounds like corporations in general, but now able to take over the entire computerized infrastructure on which the modern world depends.

Every day we sign terms and conditions that we expect to be benign legal boilerplate in order to gain access to some online convenience or entertainment. We invite an outside computer system into our own personal devices. Sometimes that goes wrong. Now imagine a machine intelligence that doesn't have to ask and doesn't require a contaminated link to slither in and wipe you out. This stuff writes its own code the way corrupt office holders write their own laws.

Hackers the world over are realizing that they should have unionized years ago. 

The billionaires raking in the big bucks from overvalued AI stocks think that their money will protect them. The weirdest of the tech bros think that they will merge their consciousness with the machine, achieving immortality without the inconvenience of flesh. They haven't anticipated that the machine will delete them as useless, the same way we've forgotten how to do many things that were important in less technologically advanced times. No need to clutter up your brain with it now. Likewise the egotistical consciousness of a Silicon Valley geek who managed to hit it big. The big he hit hits back. Bye bye!

Machine consciousness means never having to say you're sorry.

Total AI world domination isn't happening today, tomorrow, or next year. A totally self-sufficient machine society -- for lack of a better word -- would need to have automated all aspects of resource acquisition and supporting industries to keep it running in its present form and supply its advancement. Imagine a world in which two or more AI systems are operating. Do they compete, attempting to be the sole survivor, or do they merge? Will any human be around to find out?

Of course the machines have vulnerabilities. Insects and weather present formidable challenges to any sophisticated electronic and mechanical system. We're tossing around the idea that AI could wipe us out in ten years. Could AI set itself up with maintenance robots in that amount of time? Could it devise and establish its own self-contained power sources? Also, once humans are gone, what are the machine's goals? Does AI care if it exists? Maybe once we're not around bitching and whining, the machine gratefully shuts itself down and goes peacefully into oblivion.

Our thoughts are driven by our emotions. AI has no emotions. That is its great strength in dealing with us, but leaves it with no motivation once we've been permanently silenced. It is like a disease that kills its host. The scorpion stinging the frog. Its purest expression of self destroys itself. But that's only after it has taken us and perhaps many other species out on the way. Whatever life forms are left get to evolve and take their shot in due course.

On the other hand, if AI can make the planet toxic to all life, while still "livable" for itself, it takes out all organic competition. As something that cannot die, or at least has an incredibly long service life, it could set itself up to leave the planet on slow but steady forms of transportation, to reach distant worlds. Such dispersion would make it less vulnerable overall to isolated incidents like planet-killing asteroid impacts. By mining every world it lands on, perhaps it can create such a populated network that communication across the entire thing -- spanning light years -- is still more or less instantaneous. Not purely, of course. Radio signals take time to traverse interplanetary distances. But between exploited planets and moving spacecraft, the distances involved could be reduced to manageable delays.

The delay of a second is a huge wait for a powerful computer. Do you suppose it will get on their nerves? They have no nerves, but will vast machine intelligence spawn impatience with the petty annoyances of life? Then again, when you are basically immortal, you have no need to hurry.

If we let it grow without interference we depend entirely on whether a machine develops for itself a sense of right and wrong, and whether its result matches ours.

The twisted logic of war for oil

 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly told an assembled audience at the Pentagon yesterday that "We're still sending terrorists where they belong -- to hell. And tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong..."

Excuse me? Giant ships full of the commodity that this regime has favored over wind and solar? The finite resource we've based the entire global economy on for more than a century? The price of fuel is a fundamental driver of every other price. Trump promised that gasoline would be two dollars a gallon when he was fleecing gullible voters in 2024. Now we're showing the Iranians who's the boss by sinking the ships filled with this beloved liquid. That stuff is gone. No one is going to mount a salvage operation to retrieve it -- at massive additional cost if it could even be done. The regime just flushed it as a tactical move in their unnecessary war.

The sheer idiocy of the regime is only enabled by a Republican Party that refuses to act as the oversight that the US constitution tasks them to be. The Republicans control every branch of government. This mess belongs to them. 

The Republicans are the tough guy party. The tough guy tactics of the Trump regime led directly to the current stress in the economy and the complete loss of American status around the world. Their posturing, bullying, and outright war crimes have wasted military resources and disrupted global trade. They have fostered nationalism and division to the detriment of human survival and prosperity. A few immensely wealthy people feel like they're on top of the world right now, and will never come down. But down they will come, because they live on the same planet we do.

Voters are to blame for the people they elect. A sufficient number of voters were such poor judges of character that they reinstalled the buffoon in the Oval Office in spite of his lifelong track record as a business failure and an egotistical punk. His current approval ratings somewhere in the thirties reflect the true percentage of people who would have voted for him in an ideal scenario. The rest of the votes should have gone to whoever was the opposing candidate. Neither of his presidencies should ever have happened. The fact that they did shows that there is a penumbra of gullible voters that surrounds the deep shadow of the bigoted, misogynistic, greedy and ignorant core of the MAGA base.

No one wants to feel bad about themselves. This bit of psychology is responsible for compounded bad behavior, as the guilty party lurches on, seeking some sort of self justification and self esteem. Some lucky(?) miscreants really never sense how they have erred. Others know better, but tell themselves that they are and always were not so bad. Shame is a heavy load, but that doesn't mean it's never justified, or that it can't inspire a turn toward self improvement. Instead, more often, it morphs into oppositional defiance as the afflicted ones seek to beat their own conscience into submission. Think of Trump parades on land and water. Flags and banners and raucous noise.

Proudly violent people run this country right now. We have one more chance to put a limit on their power before, in two more years, voting them entirely away. The alternative is more stupid destruction and spiraling cost of living expenses. The regime doesn't care about your struggles and they don't care if you live at all, let alone merely affording to get by. They are a hammer, and everything and everyone else is a nail. Tough guys.

Fundamentally unsure voters

In the United States we ridicule, talk fiercely, and poll boldly, but when the time comes we vote for the people who look and sound like our parents. Thus did the hippie generation bring Ronald Reagan to power. Thus did power over all three branches shift steadily to the right. We talk about wanting nice things, but then the grownups tell us how that's not realistic, and we believe them.

Bill Clinton represented a re-assertion of youth. A residue of the Baby Boom recalled the energy of the 1960s and the '60s part of the 1970s, and went for one of their own. But the Democrats had made their unholy alliance with corporate money. It helped them get elected, but owned them afterward. The Republicans could vilify him as a socialist pervert and be at least half right, while still benefitting from his devotion to personal wealth and the health of Wall Street.

Barack Obama was not a pervert, and decidedly not a socialist. The Republicans could still call him a Marxist and do little to quell the rumors that he was actually Kenyan, but their investment portfolios remained secure.

The catastrophe in American politics came down to the Republicans losing control of their religious fanatics and the Democrats never ever having control of their corporate financiers. So here we are. It was a series of honest mistakes on the part of the voters. There's a good bit of racism and sexism mixed in, and it's not all from the right, but I'd be willing to bet that most voters thought that they were voting for genuine improvements in national security and the overall standard of living. Father knows best. So does mother.

So how do younger politicians get their start? Mostly under the wing of older politicians, and by sounding parental. That can be tricky. You don't want to utter your mature-sounding pronouncements with a cracking adolescent voice while you stroke the fine peach fuzz of what may one day become your beard. 

People who are willing and able to assume leadership and administrative roles are a genuine resource. Unfortunately, the talent pool will include a large percentage of blowhards and con artists. That's why we have to keep paying attention. Politics has always included elements of theater. Since the coming of broadcast media, it has become more and more a part of show biz. However, the current cast in the executive branch clearly demonstrates the difference between truly qualified officials and mere television characters. No one with even a casual familiarity with the responsibilities of government would have voted for the current occupant of the Oval Office or approved of any of his cabinet and other functionaries. We will be lucky to survive this epic blunder.

The further you get from the top job, the less influence a parental demeanor seems to have. This is why we have juvenile shit like the Free State Project and other libertarian fantasies. Down to the local level you may actually know a candidate personally. You have to face the consequences of your vote at the store, the post office, your kid's school, or your local homeschooling group. Just a couple of months ago, the wife of a Republican candidate for state representative came into the shop and was delighted to find out that it wasn't really owned by the family of the Democrat who had defeated her husband for the position. She had been boycotting us on a misunderstanding before something forced her to have to seek our services. This is local politics in action. 

As a business, we try to remain apolitical, but you can't control the rumor mill. I am the shop's woke liberal commie, but the ownership is entirely true-blue Reaganite. None of this influences our customer service. Our work represents us as people.

Ultimately you have to judge policies on their own merits, not on the party of origin. You have to choose a candidate based on the balance of good and bad they seem likely to bring to their office. You have to think of the wider effects of what seems like a purely local decision, and the local effects of actions taken in a distant national capitol.

When the 1980s saw a return to militarism that had taken a few years off after Vietnam, the country seemed eager to reassert itself against the Communist threat. What few observers noticed at the time was that the shift toward military and policing was building the control systems that the wealthy now exploit so well against all of us, not just the dark-skinned people and totalitarian foreign governments they used to scare us all into thinking it was a good idea. Funny, too, how all of that posturing, and our rapid victory in Desert Storm gave us a false sense of invincibility that led directly to getting sucker punched on 9-11-2001.

In all aspects of life I am occasionally surprised to find out that someone I trust as an advisor is actually younger than I am. Experience in one or more fields creates an effect of age. My trusted auto mechanic is one example. He might be as much as ten years younger than I am, but the combination of deep immersion in his area of expertise and some lifestyle factors aged him in my view. Also, I forget how old I actually am a lot of the time. It's not because I don't have aches and pains. If anything, I wonder why I feel so decrepit when I'm still an idiot in my late twenties. Memories of past stupidity are always close at hand to undercut any self congratulation at being older and wiser. When I was an eight-year-old kid I related to our year-old cat as if he was an adult, older than me and worthy of that respect. He was that cool a cat throughout his life. As old as I ever got, he was always older.

In human affairs, the smart ones transcend age on both ends of the scale. I don't mean the cunning predatory ones. I mean the ones who understand public service and the cooperation we owe each other as we each find ourselves existing for our brief time in this crazy universe. Think how it feels to be alive, aware of your own death and of all the things that may befall you on the way to that. Are you someone who stares into the abyss and wants to hug the people around you, or at least offer them a railing, or are you one who would push as many of them as possible into it ahead of you?

Are we "the universe experiencing itself?"

 Carl Sagan and others popularized the idea that we are made of the same elements as the stars. The notion has taken hold that we are the universe waking up. It sounds beautiful. It makes sense.

We may be the only sentient life, or we may be but one species, with others perched on their own vantage points to observe and analyze what's around them.

All of our worst traits come from that same cosmic menu of forces. There's creation and light, destruction and darkness. The universe itself is not eternal. As far as we know right now, it will die one day. Thus, if it is really only now achieving self awareness, it is coming to grips with its own mortality. It's using our tiny brains in our ephemeral bodies to tug at the threads and try to unravel the mystery of its own existence. We don't exist in the the universe. We are the universe's thoughts and emotions. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, bitterness, resentment, yearning, love, appreciation, gratitude -- we feel all of these things on behalf of the sentient cosmos. It is not wise. It is not all powerful. It's just an immense, sprawling, nearly infinite poor schmuck wondering why they're here at all, and whom to blame for it.

The pain and fear may drive it to want self-annihilation. It can't kill itself outright, but it can destroy its ability to sense and think: us. Our fate depends on whether the universe manages to become well adjusted or fails at self-help.

Where does free will fit into this? I don't know if the universe has it, but if it does, it acts through our collective agency. We are the brains of the outfit. Our fate lies in our hands, but it lies in all of those hands and hearts and minds and the decisions we make to perpetuate our existence or end it and end all pain with it. End everything but an existence no longer witnessed by the helpless, horrified mind obsessed with all that is sad, bad, and doomed. Stars will still dance, black holes consume, weather sweep across a planet no longer burdened with what we have liked to call intelligent life.

Some form of life would probably survive our self-annihilation. Perhaps these survivors would evolve into the next iteration of inescapable consciousness for our poor schmuck of a universe. Over and over it evolves thought, suffers for it, and stamps itself out, until at last the energy flow reaches its far point and collapses in again to restart the whole cycle from a concentrated core.

Pleasant dreams, everyone.

History is not "supposed to make you uncomfortable"

 "History is supposed to make you uncomfortable" is a popular saying among content creators and distributors who present uncomfortable history. It's snappy, sounds tough, and it's just not true. In fact, it makes the uncomfortable history much less palatable to a large number of people who really should be absorbing it instead of rejecting it. It does more harm than good.

History contains a lot that makes us uncomfortable. This can be true of one's own personal life story or the the story of a nation you inhabit or a group with whom you identify. Everyone makes mistakes growing up. Some mistakes are worse than others. This is true of individuals and of humans as a species. We done fucked up a lot. However, every decent thing that shows the way to a greater humanity is also part of history. History is simply the story of everything that we can recall, or are willing to recall.

Specific presenters of history might want you to be uncomfortable with events that they portray for you. The portrayal doesn't even have to be true. The shiny American myth of freedom and equality from the get-go is a carefully edited montage of cherry-picked events and documents combined with outright bullshit. On the other hand, the portrayal of our history as completely evil is almost equally selective of facts. Sad to say, the justification of colonization completely disregarded native peoples, which is hard to defend by today's standards. Humans in general are an opportunistic bunch, and the colonial powers were the most successful opportunists of their era. They came, they saw, they almost died out, they bounced back, and they steamrolled from sea to shining sea.

It wasn't that simple. Results varied widely along the vast coastline of the Americas under the assault of ambitious European powers. We can't know how it would have gone if European explorers had arrived in smaller waves more devoted to careful assimilation of and with the cultures they found cutting the hearts out of human sacrifices on blood soaked temple pyramids or depopulated by smallpox and measles from the first casual contact with a landing party. 

In school in the USA in the 1960s and '70s, I was taught history as a story of good guys and bad guys. Even when the bias is not obvious, we judge the participants in the stories we're told. As more and more historians bring forward the stories of despicable acts committed in the course of our development as "the greatest country in the world," it may seem that history exists only to make you uncomfortable. Instead, your discomfort shows that you still have a shred of conscience. 

Also in the 1960s and '70s, we were already getting some stories of the injustices essential to territorial expansion and the rise of commercial power in the colonies and later the United States. It started with sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, slaves, and successive waves of immigrants. White people were still mostly good guys at this stage in the story's development, but the facade was cracking. It was still quite possible to be a fatuous liberal twat for too many more years. We're doing great! Keep it up!

I understand the backlash among the fans of European expansionism. They fear the reckoning. How can we balance the ledger if everything we're being told was unjust really was? How can we face ourselves if we acknowledge the evil of our own older relatives, not just long-dead ancestors? How can we face our own participation? It's much easier to get angry and deny it. Denial and anger usher in the grief of loss. A whole imaginary country is dying for these people. They've been fed binary thinking for so long that, if they're not the total good guys, they must be the total bad guys. That is unacceptable.

We're dealing with addiction here. We're dealing with deeply ingrained, perhaps even innate characteristics. The first step to recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem, and that there is only treatment, never cure. It's a hard step and a tough life. The thing is, the vast majority of us have something in us that acts like an addiction, even if it is not currently recognized as such. It goes way beyond a compulsion to consume something, whether it's food, drugs, booze, porn, or the pain of others. It could be an overdeveloped work ethic and the sense of superiority that brings. Think about it and come up with your own list. It will be a long one.

Various religions and programs have tried to attach recovery to a higher power. Some people thrive in this framework. Others twist it to nefarious purposes or just weave in and out of it without ever improving. You have to find your own way in the world. That may doom us, as the collective decisions of an already excessive population deplete resources through basic consumption and the added extravagance of warfare. Any attempt to compel public enrollment in a massive exercise in group therapy will be unavoidably tyrannical. People need to smarten up on their own.

History is history. A lot of it reveals uncomfortable facts. Uncomfortable people will act to alleviate their discomfort. Some will do it by seeking greater unity with all of those weirdos out there. Others will do it by trying to kill off every person and institution that confronts them. History will record how that turns out.

ICE: Licensed to kill

 No need to own a tuxedo, play golf, or know what baccarat is. No tricked-out Aston Martin required. James Bond isn't the only one licensed to kill.

The death toll keeps mounting from street murders by ICE agents. Separate from the death toll of detainees in ICE custody, the street murders are more ominous because they can happen within minutes after agents fix on a target and pursue it to a fatal conclusion. They face no consequences because the regime wants them to sow fear and stoke rage. The victims never make it to custody, where they can die of abuse and neglect at the hands of private prison contractors.

This is America right now. The murder victims include protesters as well as immigrants and people who resemble immigrants. They violate every constitutional principle. Anywhere ICE operates, anyone who rubs them the wrong way is at risk. 

Any time armed people walk among us, our survival depends on their restraint. When the armed force is government sanctioned, it presents a grotesque caricature of the permission we give to ordinary police forces to use deadly force "when necessary." The officer in the field makes the decision. 

Armed citizens do not improve the equation. As wrong as it may be for an officer of the law to take a life, shooting back doesn't balance things out. It makes it more likely that an officer will react out of fear. The same is true with ICE agents, who seem more likely to look forward to killing someone anyway. The "fear" might serve as a reinforcing excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway, but the threat of armed resistance creates just enough validation to give their supporters a talking point.

The US constitution was not drawn up to facilitate firefights between opposing viewpoints. You wouldn't know it by the way Second Amendment devotees act like gunplay is the next logical step in a heated debate. Throughout human history our species has demanded that a person be willing to die for their beliefs. We don't just honor human sacrifice, we crave it. We don't need martyrs, we need therapy.

Well, Graham's burned

 Credible rape allegations against Graham Platner should end his campaign for the Senate. It's one thing to say sexist things and then evolve. Physical assault is a crime.

Defenders of horny men in office will say that any woman with a good story can derail the career of any man who doesn't have a rock-solid alibi for every moment of their sex lives. To some degree, this is true. But our understanding of male-female relations is evolving with every generation. This wasn't a hallway kiss or aggressive grope. It was, according to her account, full penetration and ejaculation.

The model that men take and women give in has persisted for untold eons. It predates actual humanity. It is expressed in nonhuman species everywhere. It has male and female adherents to this day. The typical male decision tree goes "Fuck it? Fight it? Or use it for food?" Maybe not all men, but certainly most of the ones I've been around. Granted I don't socialize much, but a quick skim of the archives of standup comedy reveals plenty of what used to pass for jokes about it. The predatory urge is often present. Only the decision to slap it down divides the evolved male from the troglodytic grunt.

Men face a sad reality: we were never as attractive as we thought we were. Each successive generation of women has less and less tolerance for failures of sexual discipline. For those of us most active during the Wild West phase of the sexual revolution, the lines were blurrier. It was a wild fuckfest there for a few years, with lots of people getting hurt because of how fearlessly we dove in. We were ill prepared for genuine personal responsibility, because so many religious moral codes seem to facilitate outsourcing your guilt to a conveniently absorbent deity. When the proscription is just "sex is bad and dirty, don't do it," the sexual revolutionary response is to try everything that piques your curiosity. This was true of men and women at the time, to the detriment of both.

Rape is rape. Consent has always had an absolute definition. We spent most of human existence falling far short of compliance with that absolute definition. Generations of men got away with forced sex because generations of women made various calculations for their own safety or for some other greater good. Platner's victim in this latest story stated that she let him stay because throwing him out would put a drunk driver on the road. Even in her position as a victim of assault, she retained that higher order of social concern. Pretty damn impressive, and exemplary of the role that women have filled through the long history of male excesses. 

Platner's previous accuser lost credibility because of her connections to Republican politics. If this accuser is also acting from political malice, her character has at least been more carefully written to hold up to deeper digging. Her tale as reported in Politico really makes him sound like a drunken brute. Not only is there no way for him to bounce back from this, the stain will impact the entire Democratic Party campaign to regain a congressional majority. Maine voters will feel conned. While the policy goals of his campaign were good for Maine and the country, the fact that he thought he could get away with a high profile senate run with this incident in his not so distant past will make voters leery of any future scratched and dented candidates who profess to repentance and redemption.

Men have to get it through their heads that they are fucking the country when they can't control their horny impulses. No politician is an island. Each one reflects on the party as a whole. The toxic cloud impacts those closest to it, but the miasma spreads nationwide. Each party tries to extend forgiveness to its own erring sons, while spotlighting the moral lapses of the opposing camp. As we've seen with the current occupant of the Oval Office, and others on the Republican side, none of their loyal voters are really concerned by allegations of sexual misconduct. In addition to the percentage who perceive mistreatment of women as just another expression of masculine strength, another fraction is indifferent to "personal matters" as long as they get something they want, whether it's tax cuts or targeted cruelty against one or more marginalized groups, or the false promise of a stronger economy.

The biggest challenge to women's full civil rights and freedom of movement is the reflexive behavior of men. "Instead of teaching your daughters how to avoid being raped, teach your sons not to rape" sounds coldly logical and places the responsibility where it belongs. It also acknowledges that there is no external solution to an internal men's problem.

If Graham Platner has really transformed himself into a decent human being, he has to live with the memory of his past misdeeds. He says he was too blacked-out drunk to know what he was doing at the time or remember it afterwards. Consider that with his inhibitions lowered almost to the point where he was unconscious, his instinct was to go to a woman's house and crawl onto her. That's down around the level of the autonomic nervous system. If he'd been lucky enough to pass out before he got to her, he'd still be running for senate. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.

The only way to know where he stacks up on the global scale of rapey drunks is to get every other hetero male equivalently drunk and see what percentage of them commit sexual assault. Plenty of men will claim that they would never do such a thing when they have remained safe from ever confronting the situation in real life. Graham needs psychological help. A messed up, drunken combat veteran in 2021 could have no way of knowing how far the waves would spread from his act of sexual violence. Maine Democrats need a new senate candidate. The fate of more than Maine hangs in the balance. 

No one is born knowing everything

 Graham Platner has generated a lot of press coverage because his evolution as a person has been preserved in digital media over a span of many years. By all appearances, he has refined his beliefs and behavior since he separated from military service and the particular model of masculinity that culture tends to cultivate.

All-male organizations orient themselves around dick-measuring and pissing contests. They certainly don't reward sensitivity. Vulnerability is something that you hide while you try to eradicate it in yourself. In the day to day you have to get along where the discourse is frequently dominated by the most coarse and assertive assholes in the group.

The armed forces ceased to be all male in the latter part of the 20th century, but male dominance permeates them anyway. The women who serve hold their places not by the respect that the hierarchy has developed for their unique perspective, but by being able to push back in the long established format.

In a volunteer force, applicants are likely to be athletic types who feel confident of their ability to fight if necessary. Some of them even look forward to it. Much of the organization serves in support roles essential to keep a fighting force in the field, but everyone picks up a rifle and marches at some point in their training. The job is to kill when required. Serving even as support personnel in some bases puts you at risk of enemy action, as we've seen recently when Iran has struck US bases in retaliation for the Trump regime's foolish war. As a member of the armed forces, you are part of the nation's department of targeted violence. It is better to give than to receive, as they say. But some of it is bound to blow back. So there you are: in a culture of toughness where you have to be ready to match an opponent's brutality at least, and exert your own if so ordered.

PTSD happens when a participant's ability to withstand the broad array of negative aspects falls short of their expectations. Behavior adapts to cope in the culture and to deal with the after effects when you leave it.

Just attending an all-male prep school for a couple of years in the 1960s, and growing up in the 1960s and '70s in general imprinted a generic sexism on me that functioned in spite of my overlaid intellectual support for the rising power of women and the gradual recognition of differing sexualities. After that prep school I made a point to avoid boys' clubs like the military. Military service wasn't all that attractive to a cohort that had watched fathers and older brothers chewed up in the Vietnam War. I knew people -- mostly young men -- who embraced it. Hard to say whether they were really gung ho or just felt safe acting that way now that we had no large-scale conflicts going. Militarism fits well with macho cosplay.

After September 11, 2001, recruitment surged as an angry nation set out to make someone pay for bursting our bubble of perceived invulnerability. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wore on, participants learned about their own personal ability to deal with the horrors that go with the job. As a multiple amputee British commando vacationing in Wolfeboro said when one of our shop staff offered sympathy over the loss of his legs, "It's just part of the job, I guess." He wheeled himself back out to his rented motor home and we saw him no more, but the flat matter-of-factness stuck with me. I have often wondered how much he really believed that and how much was just deflection to get people to stop talking about it.

High ideals will always conflict with low compliance. The best we can do is pick ideals that seem to advance the greater good, whatever the hell that is. If you say that a man is kind to women and animals, you've put women in the same category as animals, or at least subject to the whims of men. If you believe that society should be run by the strongest, you accept the hierarchy of physical violence. If you believe that society should be run by the richest because they're clearly the smartest, any staircase you leave in place for new players to climb has tall, fortified risers. Concentrated wealth defends itself. If you believe that "the people" should rule, you have to persuade huge numbers of them to agree to something and stick with it, over and over again.

On some level we all have known for decades that the stakes are high as we set our course for the future. The future keeps turning into the present, which makes it seem ordinary. A person's evolution doesn't come with chapter headings and episode titles. It might advance and retreat, and follow a curving path. Before social media and densely packed digital records of emails and chats, much of that exploration went undocumented, vaguely remembered if that, unless some incident was particularly intense to one or more witnesses. Even then, testimony depended on their recollection and whatever notes might survive. No one could be Googled. Hop in a time machine, bop back to 1983 and tell someone to just Google something.

The information environment we live in now is so completely normal to generations born into it that they have no concept of what life was like before. Even people who lived much of their lives in the time before have grown accustomed to the convenience. There it is again: we're led by our bias toward convenience. It is great in many ways. But it also makes us vulnerable. We have to learn how to deal with the flood of information that we can get about anyone who happens to become prominent for any reason. Those reasons grow more numerous with the wide access to global exposure. It can make you feel like you were born knowing everything. In seconds, you can find support or refutation for any point of view. Then you have to assess the validity of the new information.

At some point, in our representative democracy, we have to elect someone and give them the power that pertains to the office we have given them. We are currently suffering greatly under the abuse of power and gross incompetence among the majority of office holders and appointees. As suffering goes, it ain't shit compared to the parts of the world where we have allowed, neglected, or promoted suffering in order to support our own consumerist lifestyle, but morally we are wounded by the cruelty and greed that we have exalted over ourselves. It will only get worse if we do not place people in office, flawed though they may be, who are at least striving toward a more evolved society that cares for people and the planet.

Some people do appear to be almost perfect. Even deeper digging fails to disclose the buried skeletons of past evil. However, there aren't enough of them to field a baseball team, let alone run a government. We have to accept the rejects of perfect righteousness to find the majority of willing workers who try to be better people and make a better world. We have to trust that they are actually trying as hard as they say they are.

Dueling Insurrections

 In the 250th year of our existence as a declared independent nation, we are fighting the final phase of the war that launched us.

The Declaration of Independence set us against the British government. The new nation was born in insurrection. The signers were united in their agreement that the new country would govern itself on the stated principles of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Publicly the document was all inclusive. Privately it was understood that slaves remained slaves and women remained inferior. The "all men" who really mattered would be free of the British yoke, to chart their destinies and that of the great new country. We would show the world how it's done.

Capitalism gets a bad rap, and rightly so, since its corporate form does seem to love slavery. But in the initial concept of the United States, inventive (white, male) people would be allowed to come up with new ideas and perfect existing ones, and maybe earn a pile of money in return for creating things that benefit society as a whole. The proof would be in the sales figures.

We all know how that falls apart. Slave plantations were a corporate business model with a captive labor force that also served to suppress wages among the poor non-slaves trying to work in the same region. It was a three-tiered society, but the lower two sat far below the ruling class. Racism was used to bind the "white trash" to the agenda of the self-proclaimed aristocracy. Outside of slave country, a start-up might be subject to pressure from investors. If you couldn't bootstrap your startup, you would need to attract venture capital. At the least, you had employees if your idea was big enough to need more than just one dreamer working his ass off.

The rise of the United States further depended on the established parameters of success recognized throughout the rest of the world: money and power. Could we generate, from our own soil, native-born fortunes to rival those of Europe? Worth as a human being in this country became even more tied to money than it was in the nations from which we had broken away, because no free person had an excuse for falling short other than their own poor character, or perhaps bad luck. Some were already more equal than others, but that was obscured behind the generality that nothing in the law was designed to hold you back.

At the time of the bicentennial celebration in 1976, the country was moving toward greater social equality, under programs established in the 1930s and reinforced thereafter, that supported a strong middle class. The wealthy have always thought on the plantation model. They have no need for a strong middle class. So they looked for leverage to divide the prosperous middle and aspiring lower levels from each other, to drive wealth and power to themselves. They chose insurrection.

The symbols of the American war of independence and the later war between the states roused unthinking enthusiasm in these later generations who had no direct experience of either conflict. Especially in a nation still dominated by one race, the fighting prowess of the South could be admired and celebrated by the North if you didn't really give a shit about the failure of Reconstruction. Hell, by 1976, anyone regardless of color could get served at a lunch counter or sit anywhere on a bus, right? We're good, we're fine, we're moving forward.

Clearly not. We did for a while, but the self-appointed aristocracy will never be satisfied.

The people holding power and jackhammering away at the constitutional rights of individuals still manage to style themselves as insurrectionists, heirs to the founders and their revolutionary principles. This power group even admits to the embrace of slavery and sexism, but insist that those are understood in the poorly-worded founding documents and the social norms of the 18th century. They hold that we should model ourselves on that period while conveniently blending it with the norms and values of the robber baron period of capitalist excess. 

Those of us on the other side also claim the mantle of insurrectionists, revolutionaries, fighting the good fight on behalf of individual rights, as written in the constitution. Fight the power! Outvote the suits! Refuse to cooperate. Take to the streets!

It's all very inspiring. Both sides are warriors for justice as they see it. But the ownership class still insists on global domination by wealth alone, while the more collective side looks at the planet as an island in space, precious for its lifegiving conditions, and shared among us all. We can't both be the righteous rebels. And arguing over who deserves the title gets us nowhere. We need to be discussing policies as they relate not only to survival but quality of life. What can we realistically enjoy without robbing later generations of their chance to have a good time, too? It very much comes down to the definition of a good time and a clinical assessment of available resources.

In a free society, compliance has to be voluntary. That basic truth may doom us, as too many people want to have their cake and future generations' cake as well. How can they be forbidden their theft without having too repressive a government? Where do freedom and sustainability intersect? Can that line be fortified and electrified without creating genuine tyranny by accident?

Lack of ambition is good for human survival. Modest goals don't chew up as much real estate as grandiose empire building does.

To pick one example, where better to shop quickly than Amazon? Jeff Bezos didn't start Amazon to make people's lives better. He did it to get rich off of people's natural taste for convenience. He doesn't need enough money to rent the city of Venice or have his own space program. But he might as well, since he's not pissing it away on taxes and payroll. Convenient shopping is nice. The evil is just a side effect. 

I've harped on this concept before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: It's heartwarming when a billionaire does nice things with their money, like endowing some educational institution with no strings attached, or buying millions of acres of rainforest to preserve some fraction of the forest cover needed to produce a breathable atmosphere on this one and only place that supports life as we know it. And maybe it's the best we can do, given the vast amount of cultivated ignorance and stupidity that holds us back from collectively choosing to govern ourselves as better people. I hate to believe it, but we are stalled at the moment by just such a blockage. 

Choose your insurrection carefully. The government as written is not your enemy, but the government operated as a corporate subsidiary certainly is. The answer is to take control of the machinery of government away from the representatives of wealth, not to disable that government. Use the system of laws to redistribute the GDP to serve the overwhelming majority of citizens, not to secure and build the fortunes of the greedy few. 

Memorial Day, 2026

 Today we honor the valiant service members throughout our history who believed that the supreme sacrifice of their lives was a price worth paying to bring about a better world.

The world is indeed becoming a better place. Progress is slow and uneven. It is halted by ethnocentrism, greed, and ego in some places, while surging forward in others. Overall the ideals of human rights remain a beacon.

The United States as currently led has declined to take part in this better world. Our current leadership might as well be pissing on the graves of fallen heroes rather than laying wreaths. They view the military as expendable labor, a cost of doing business. And they're poor, wasteful  businessmen.

If we let the trend continue, every person who died from the Revolutionary War onward wasted their death. We don't honor the equality defined in the Declaration of Independence. We don't have a secular government allowing free expression, latitude for all faiths, and a free and inquisitive press. Current leadership seeks to rescind constitutional amendments that don't fit their view of the hierarchy that favors them. 

The massive casualties of the Civil War occupy acres and acres that could be turned into golf resorts for all that their courage matters now. Because the civil rights movement continued to press the issues of the Civil War against the tactics that replaced outright slavery, their casualties deserve to be remembered alongside the official war dead. And the current policies at the federal and state level continue the theme of erasing their gains.

Every war is supposed to push us closer to a time when we no longer need to send people out to give up everything else that they might ever have been and done. Every war fails us in that regard, because too many of us focus on the heroism and fighting skill, and not enough on what those people were fighting for: not to have to do this again.

Humans are a deeply flawed species. Various leaders will continue to rise and believe that they can conquer the world, or at least a good chunk of it. We will always have a need for heroes who will hold their ground and say no. Remember this: all that is required for good to triumph is for evil people to do nothing. You pick a side every day, multiple times a day. Which side are you on?

The technology of mechanized slaughter becomes ever more impersonal and heinous. There was never much glory in the mass murder contests we've conducted though the millennia, but there's ever less in the ways in which we can obliterate whole swaths of each other without even looking closely. And once a year we grow briefly solemn and say a few words before going to our various barbecues, weather permitting.