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 to 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?