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.