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. 

America, the Petri dish

 Freedom's just another word for evolution unchained.

I believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that they were establishing a rational government model based on logic, to be operated by thoughtful people. Don't all people yearn to be free to learn and grow to the fullest extent of their potential? 

As it happens, no. While the letter of the law allows a person to read whatever they want, and public schools are widely available, nothing compels you to get any more out of this than to remain in some kind of tenuous contact with it up to your late teens. You can go to the schools in your district or you can homeschool. No matter what, you have the right to remain as much of a dumbass as you can get away with.

I say this as a career dumbass. I try to be a reformed dumbass, but I wasted lots of educational opportunities back when it would have done some good, just so you know I'm not kicking down. If I had a time machine, I would spend countless trips going back to smack my stupid self upside the head.

As the United States cuts itself off from the rest of the world, we become a Petri dish of uncontrolled conflict between governing ideas. These range from pure libertarian anarchy to hard-core right wing authoritarianism. There's a hard core left wing as well. It has the least traction, but it does exist. True commies are rare in this country, despite the accusations that fly around social media. Most humans are too selfish for true communism. Anything less than true communism, if you lean that way, tuns into Animal Farm pretty quickly. Witness the Soviet Union, et al.

The United States always was the Petri dish of governmental experimentation. We had our Articles of Confederation, then our Constitution, then our amendments to that document through the years. Between 1776 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, settlers messed around with all kinds of variations in the lands that they entered on the way to a coast to coast nation. Enclaves remain today in places like Amish country and other religious communities, or even whole states heavily identified with a particular religious sect. Pretty much just Utah. Aside from religion there are lots of places ranging from quaintly eccentric to probably evil.

In addition to geographical areas prone to various belief systems, we have national and international belief systems allowed to grow out of control here because our Constitution does not restrict freedom of thought and expression. It's a laudable ideal and a perfect breeding ground for whackadoodlery. Whackadoodlery only begins to encompass how bad it can get when dumbassery combines with imagination and fragmentary knowledge unimpeded by critical thought. It's also a rewarding hunting ground for intellectual predators who might or might not believe their own shit. They'll use varying degrees of technical-sounding language and immense personal confidence to collect financial and social power that eventually leads to political leverage.

The educated men who wrote the founding documents for this country and critical commentary that went with or against it operated under the highest intellectual standards of their day. Time, collective experience, and study have revealed where they were wrong, but they acted under sincere belief at the time. The slave owners sincerely believed that the people they enslaved were on average completely inferior to the white people who owned them. Even some abolitionists held racist beliefs. They just thought that slavery was cruel and economically a bad idea. People used to believe in all kinds of dumb stuff like phrenology, and much more. Much of it served to validate their emotional prejudices, but it was based on observations and attempts to identify meaningful patterns in the world around them.

Other countries observed our evolution. Some were inspired. Some were contemptuous. Every nation works its angles in the world in times of peace and war. The United States managed to turn itself into a superpower by the end of the Second World War. We were a military powerhouse that rapidly established itself as a scientific powerhouse. We produced the largest generation of surviving children in human history, and gave them a country to play in that had the highest standard of living in the world. It helped that a lot of the rest of the world had been devastated by the recent war. The width of oceans had protected us from the direct effects of shelling and bombing one last time.

We have no such protection now. We had only our military might and enviable intellectual freedom to make the rest of the world hesitant to launch missiles at us. Now we have neither. We do have an arsenal and military forces, but they will degrade rapidly under the unqualified and insane leadership voted in by dumbasses.

Hitler had some top notch military minds working for his Reich. He was not one of them.  He had been a friggin' corporal. His delusions led to poor decisions that doomed his desire for conquest. Now, today, the United States has equally incompetent people in the presidency and every major cabinet post. There are no highly competent minds to run the country efficiently with a solid goal in mind. Instead we have a coalition of destructive interests at odds with each other as much as with the ideals of the American experiment. Each one pursues its narrow goal, whether it's Christian theocracy, technological dictatorship focused on strip mining the planet, or nihilistic greed focused on strip mining the planet in different ways for mere cash.

It's a literal confederacy of dunces. It was voted in by a bloc of ignorant and greedy people steeped in a cult of individualism brewed in a melting pot of the dregs of free thought. The stupidest ideas of the past century and a half, including a whole lot added since the middle of the 20th Century, are now the guiding principles of the occupying regime with its fists firmly clenched on the levers of power. They're cutting the brake lines and yanking out the control wires wherever they can. All the while they believe that they're making a formidable machine of war and commerce that will take American dominance from its already high level to a pinnacle of untouchability.

What a crock of utter bullshit. With their sledgehammers, torches, and software, they're destroying all of the prestige and power that the country already held, and digging a hole to drop the remains into. Some of them may know it, since culling the population (remember "death panels?" lol) is a major objective. Yes, they want to increase the birth rate of obedient white people who think that they're free, but they also want poor people, sick people, and old people to die. They want brown people to die. They have a truly impossible dream that they will somehow make the USA completely self sufficient and prosperous at the same time. It's the national version of the myth of the rugged individual. We all be rugged individuals, in a rugged individual country that can kick your ass. You can only come into our clubhouse if we invite you. We hate girls and queers and nigras. We're manly men and real women love us.

Most of the rest of the world is rightly appalled. They're pulling back, watching to see how it plays out. When the United States was just a young little country, European powers looked down on the yokels over here. We had to earn respect. With the current regime, all of that is being squandered. We'll soon be back to our image as a nation of buffoons and yokels, unless we can generate a new wave of self respect in our population.

Self respect is not the same thing as self indulgence or self adulation. As a person or as a nation, you have to keep bringing the quality to maintain true respectability. You can't just coast on collective myths and stale achievements. The people who achieved those things are dead. A lot of the stories were made up crap to justify some reprehensible national policies. Learn history. Face the truth. Realize that our fundamental governing documents provide the framework to do better, now and henceforth. Self respect is not purely self serving. It's the basis by which you recognize that you depend on the society that you support and trade with.

A lot of the people who voted for the regime have job skills. They clearly had enough disposable income to take time off to be in truck convoys, and storm the Capitol, as well as buy tons of crappy merch from the Grifter-in-Chief. They have services and products that appeal to the economy. They're also sure that they're onto the sinister plans of whatever enemy has been presented to their cultivated paranoia. The United Nations, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, the Deep State, the gay agenda, lazy Black folks, socialist hippies, those sneaky trans people, all skulk around them, just out of sight.

The Internet doesn't help. Snappy sayings that actually support bad conclusions have always been a problem for humans, but now they can flash around the world at the speed of light.  I saw one that said, "History is written by people who weren't there." Sounds like a sick burn, doesn't it? It even has a germ of truth in that you can find history books that simply rehash other history books. But you can also find history books based on primary sources -- people who were there -- that overturn long-held myths that generations of people believed were historical facts. This is particularly true of the history of slavery in this country, and of the accomplishments of marginalized people. People who were there chose to tell the story differently to make themselves look better. It took later historians to dig down through the layers to disclose what really happened.

Our view of history changes over time anyway. People with a vested interest in the previously accepted story will fight against changes. Our view of everything changes with further study and reflection. Every generation is born into an argument already in progress. Every faction in the dispute tries to recruit the new people. The young have no experience to help them sort through what's thrown at them. Some learn faster than others. This is a human condition, not just an American one. Eager to figure it out, new minds pick up the flotsam and debris as well as the more carefully researched information.

By equating all sources, our freedom of speech and expression puts all variables onto an equal footing in charting our national course. Everything gets voted on, including whether we will die of formerly treatable and preventable diseases, whether we will stop wasting money on food safety, whether we will destroy what's left of the natural environment, whether we will have a race war, and whether we want our entire government run by incompetent attention whores. The world is watching.

We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.

Revolutions are forced. Evolution happens.

We were taught in school that the American Revolution was a glorious stride in the direction of a better world. What it really did was put a rotating cast of rich white men in place of the British monarchy and its agents as the decision makers for this chunk of North America, without even firmly determined boundaries yet. The men in charge were all beneficiaries of the system of chattel slavery, whether they owned any or not. They continued the policy of displacing and eradicating the existing native population. Women could suggest, as Abigail Adams did, that they be included in this new government of the free, but that had to wait for a later century, and see some women actually killed in the pursuit of it.

"Do what I want or I will kill you," has been a compelling argument throughout our existence. It may be preceded by, "Do what I want or I will beat you up," but it always lies in the background, ready to be used, like a black rifle carried down a city street, or a militarized police force's surplus tank that they just got as a hand-me-down from the real armed forces.

People who deride hippies and other peaceniks in this country assure us that human nature is incorrigibly mean and nasty. One must always be ready to fight for peace. Any peace that you enjoy here is protected by a fortified perimeter keeping the evil forces of worse nations at bay. And within this great land of ours, you need to be able to defend yourself against individual attackers who will inevitably spring up.

This can be a real problem if they are wearing law enforcement uniforms, or you're a woman and he's your boss, or you're black and they're not, or the attackers are using their car as a weapon against you as you ride a bike. And that's just a few of the situations in which the myth of the armed citizen comes up against the realities of the legal system. And if you relax the standards for self defense you also create more cover stories for homicide.

Every so often, someone suggests that humans learn to put aside their animal promptings to force dominance, and instead develop more awareness of the fragility of life and the underlying sadness that we all share, whether we have ever noticed it in ourselves or not. But that sounds really boring, and it also makes you vulnerable to anyone who has not put down the weapons yet. In addition, because it requires that you take less in material wealth, and accept gratefully many amenities that we currently take for granted, it leaves more resources lying around for grabby people to grab. Which they definitely do.

Can humans guide their evolution by learning to do what is better for them, enacted in quiet revolutions of nonviolent change? Or will we be the victims of biological promptings expressed through advanced technology, becoming better and better destroyers until we succeed in destroying ourselves? Consumerism is far more destructive than war, because it uses pleasure instead of pain. There are those who lust for war. Not all of them are sideline profiteers. Some people enjoy the actual killing. There are people crazy enough to hope for a full-on exchange of nuclear missiles. But even if those people never get their way, we can live our peaceful little lives, "not hurting anybody," and burn it all down just as effectively. We've practically accomplished it already.

As the Democratic candidates compete for their party's nomination, polls show the policy positions of  Bernie Sanders seem extremely popular. His detractors on the left are marshaling their considerable resources to prevent him from being nominated. In this information -- and disinformation -- age, it's hard for a political lightweight to know for sure how much of the opposition research is true, but we've also learned that smears don't have to be true at all to do irreparable damage to Democratic candidates. Oddly, the same seems far less true of Republican candidates. But that's another topic entirely. The dirt on Bernie is probably quite verifiable. And, as someone pointed out somewhere on social media today, campaigns that spend all their time on damage control end up losing.

The proposals of the progressive wing of the Democrats trigger the conditioned reflexes of generations of Americans well trained to recoil from "socialism." Even though we've never really lived in a land of unlimited individual liberty, even for white men, the majority of us are conditioned to believe in an economic Utopia just over the horizon, or just behind us in a misty past, in which pure merit will be, or was, rewarded. Merit means hard work and good character. It rejects the controlling and coddling of Big Government in favor of rugged individualism. It is the land of the alpha male, and the underlings who know their place, because the meritocracy has weeded them, and they accept its judgment. It's one of the many things that sound good until you really think about them. But who has time for all that thinking? We have merit to accrue.

In the rest of the Democratic field, the same full-on socially connective and environmentally active positions put forward by Sanders appear in varying levels of dilution, all the way down to practically nothing. So then you have to wonder how much of anyone's formulation will survive actually being elected, and that's only if they manage to win. A couple of days ago, I found a chart that laid them all out nicely, but I didn't bookmark it, and now I can't find it again. Sorry about that. I'm sure you're closing in on a favorite on your own. Go make your mark! There's still a long process to sort it out further.

Ruthlessness is bliss

A recent on line article in Texas Monthly reported how great it was that a man living off-grid in the Scottish highlands was rescued after a distress signal he sent out was received by a response center in Houston, Texas and relayed to Scottish authorities.

I pointed out that the man's happy tale of rescue and support owed a lot to Scotland's universal health care system. This observation received a lot of "likes," but also the predictable flamethrowers from people who take pride in their freedom to pay too much to a system that is designed to profit by denying them health care here in the United States.

"You certainly love to spend my money," one of them commented. Another one tried to say that universal care systems only work in smaller populations, which is the dead opposite of how risk pools work. Managing one database centered on patient care rather than profitability would have to be cheaper for the consumer than the current overlapping bureaucracies of care providers, drug companies, and insurance companies, all trying to protect as much as possible of their profit margin.

On another page, trying to combat the malignant growth that has already obliterated most of Annapolis, Maryland, I mentioned that transportation cycling could be very helpful to reduce traffic congestion. I no longer live in Annapolis, because of the malignant growth and the ridiculously high cost of housing, but I have friends who are still fighting the battle there. It used to be a nice place.

An angry commenter snapped that I must be in favor of the ridiculous waste of tax dollars on a bike lane that no one uses. I admit that my response was not the most level headed and charitable. When someone automatically equates support for alternative transportation with "a waste of tax dollars," it tells me a lot about their world view. So I said, "you sound pretty hot under the collar. You should either loosen your shirt or tighten it the rest of the way and end your suffering." He responded by calling me a libtard, thus confirming my first impression of him. I replied that he sounded like a typical money-obsessed conservative, to which he volleyed back that he wanted to keep the money he makes and leave a nice inheritance for his kids.

Here's the thing about a nice inheritance: unless you're bequeathing a billion, and sticking your kids in the right schools to meet the right people, they're going to have to go out and lick boots and grub for cash like most of the rest of us. The boots they lick might be more expensive and walk the halls of the executive suite, but the model of moneyed power is inescapably hierarchical. And a financial cushion might make them decadent, rather than provide them with a platform from which to reach higher.

As the argument escalated, his closing screed called me a cuck (a cherished pet insult of fascists and racists) and a beta male, and described in detail the kind of anal sex I should be subjected to.

A search on the guy's name disclosed very little. I found a Linkedin profile that seemed to match his name, location, and personality type, listing his occupation as "military professional." If he's active duty military, we all pay his salary through taxation. If he's a defense contractor/mercenary, we still pay his salary through our tax dollars, with less accountability. So of course his posturing about being a lone individual profiting from his own intelligence in a hostile world is a crock of shit. But he and people like him will never acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things, because they feel disconnected and oppressed. That religious tenet underlies all of their thinking. They're blissful in their unhappiness, because they're sure they know what's wrong and who is responsible. They take pride in their strength and ruthlessness. The ones with the most integrity really will accept death if they're unable to maintain life under the harsh terms they have endorsed. But most of your "live free or die" types have already agreed to be a little less free and live a bit longer. You will hardly ever get one to admit it, though.

Collectivists exhibit a similar religious devotion to the virtues of their view. The better future leans more to collective efforts that will improve the average for everyone. Yes, that will make the super-wealthy obsolete, but the super wealthy don't provide much value in return for our investment. The hell of it is that nearly every actual religion has some good principles along with their heavy component of destructive bullshit. You choose a way forward based on what you expect the future to look like.

The ruthless future is full of fire and blood, conflict and conquest, the rise and fall of empires. It unleashes the most ambitious passions, granting freedom to the strong and trampling the weak. For those who fancy themselves strong, it sounds like heaven. However you end up, if you gave it your absolute best shot, you ended up where you deserved to end up. It cannot be a peaceful future, because the super ambitious and greedy will take everything they can get, and hold it until someone more powerful blasts them out of the top spot. Armies will clash over and over across the trampled and scorched fields of endless battle. If too many people refuse to fight, the power structure will freeze in place, leaving most of the population to toil as underlings while a tiny minority controls the wealth and enjoys the leisure.

The United States Constitution accidentally provided a mechanism for citizen government that would make the actual bloody warfare unnecessary, if enough citizens could agree on what to demand from their government, and what limits to set on the private sector to keep it from becoming the de facto government. Just as our environmental neglect is at a crisis point, so is our civic neglect at the last intersection before the doors close against us and we have to accept slavery or bloody revolution.

I don't give the bloody revolution very good odds, because the environmental crisis will go all to hell while we're trying to hold off a professional military with our AR-15s and pipe bombs. We can die gloriously on principle, but that's about it. Meanwhile, if we'd gotten our shit together and been a bit more collective, we could have straightened out both the environmental issues and the governmental issues.

I hate the government

Here in the United States we have citizen government. As much as it has become a tool of the wealthy to impose their priorities on the rest of us, it does reflect the values of Americans. United we stand, in squabbling disunity.

Ordinary citizens could take control if we could agree on common values and insist that they be promoted. Unfortunately, the majority values its freedom not to pay attention, and to dislike each other factionally more than it wants to overthrow the influence of concentrated wealth. The problem is not the government. It is us.

I hate the government. I hate how the need to keep an eye on it intrudes on my pleasures. I hate how it has evolved to be hostile to oversight as much as I hate having to be that oversight. I'm terrible at paying attention to what elected representatives and government agencies are doing. But we do have access -- for now -- to those who govern.

The yellow vest protests in France are presented as an example of what committed, bold citizen action can accomplish. True, they pressed the Macron government for concessions, but two questions arise. How did it get that bad in the first place? And will there be meaningful change after the two sides stand down and the news cycle needs to move on to other things?

We have representative government to free up the majority of citizens to do other necessary work. It also provides a filter between the whims of a sometimes volatile majority and the actual implementation of long-term policy. But representatives have power as well as responsibility, which makes them susceptible to corruption. Some are truly incorruptible. Others arrive pre-corrupted. Voters have to decide who is worth keeping. Detailed information can be hard to get. The information itself can be tainted by an underlying agenda.

I hate it. But it's human nature. Even government by a computer system would only be as good as its programmed parameters. And it might be very hard to overthrow. You can pull the plug, but only if you can get to the plug.

The show ponies who run for office are well suited to their roles in show biz. Some of them are as stupid as a box of rocks, but they've all managed to win the reality show contests we call elections. The best ideas in the world do no good if they can't find a champion who can actually get elected. The process is most visible at levels high enough to attract mass media coverage. But it's happening all the way down to little dinky towns scraping together a budget to keep a handful of roads paved, and send their kids to school. Down where most of us actually live, decisions are made at public meetings by people we know, if we happen to be able to take the time to attend.

Time. Citizen government demands your time. As an ordinary voter, you have to dig out the information you need to make what seems like a good choice. As an actual official, you have to perform the duties of your office. In some places, you're expected to do it for free, so you still have to grub for money in the outside world while paying proper attention to the people's business in your governmental capacity. In a country that glorifies wealth for its own sake, that means a constant battle against inflation, and against competitors who would be all too happy to sink you.

Many hands make light work. If a really solid majority of citizens wanted to get involved and take turns doing the mundane, tedious bullshit of governing, it would become a communal activity instead of turning "the government" into this alien overlord run by idiots and scoundrels. How likely is that? No one wants to be in the handful of suckers who get stuck having to sacrifice their time for an ungrateful populace that automatically assumes they're up to no good. And we're all either too busy working or too busy looking for work to devote our best attention to the needs of government. That's how you end up with independently wealthy people and energetic profiteers holding office. No one else can afford to. So back we come to oversight.

Take a short time as soon as possible to jot down a list of what you would like from your government. Brainstorm it. Write down everything that your ideal society would have. If the list is "no government," write down what you're going to have to get from other sources: roads, energy, health care, defense... Then figure out who is going to provide it and how you all are going to pay for it.

Deep inside all of us in the modern world lives a hunter gatherer wondering what the hell happened. What happened was evolution. As much as we still get the desire to roam as happy nomads across a relatively pristine environment, the only way to get back to that is to destroy all that came after it. And it was other parts of our own nature that made us evolve into our current condition, simultaneously pampered and stressed out. We can't go back. We can only go forward, trying to improve.

First they came for the...

History repeats itself because it is a product of a species that is generally slow-witted, irritable, and hates change.

The oft-quoted words of Martin Niemöller about the sequential suppression of groups deemed undesirable by the Nazis stir no anxiety in the Nazis themselves. Granted, in a paranoid, authoritarian regime there will be internal strains from time to time. You want to watch your back and try to be sensitive to shifts in power, but that's upper echelon stuff. Down in the middle and lower ranks, you'll be fine if you just don't think for yourself. 

Here in America, the happy followers of rising authoritarianism still talk about freedom, but they've actually given up on the idea of personal advancement. They know that the game has been rigged against them. Now they're just begging for sustenance in return for obedience, and protection in return for nationalism.

What changes as history is added? The population of humans steadily rises. Technology becomes more sophisticated. These should not be brushed off. They're critical variables. Denser populations mean we are forced into contact with each other. Technological advancements mean that people in power can exert control far more easily than control can be wrested from them. You can neither run nor hide. Back in the 1930s, you could still do both.

Because technology can't be rolled back without a pretty widespread catastrophe, our only check on its power is our own will to control it. It can't be made idiot proof. You can't set it and forget it.

I can see why hardworking people are ready to let go of democracy. I learned a few months ago that you have to contact your legislators all the time, even if you are confident that they will vote your way on an upcoming issue, because they need to be able to show supporting numbers when they're arguing for their point of view. So a voter really needs to follow every issue and ring in for or against, just to be sure that representative government is as accurately representative as possible. All this is on top of your virtuous toil in service to the economy. Day off? No such thing. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. The issues never rest. Nor should you.

The realization that the work never ends feeds the desire for Utopian solutions. If everyone believed the same thing, we could all relax, because the natural flow of decision making would support the greater good. Now listen to my beliefs...

Reality is always messier than even our most chaotic imagination. Everything could be destroyed in the competition between Utopian visions. But if it doesn't feel Utopian to you, then it isn't really The One. When, oh lord, will we ever truly be able to set it and forget it?

If freedom isn't free, but nothing else is free either, what's worth the trouble at all? Freedom requires such constant maintenance that it becomes a kind of enslavement all its own. Someone sneaky or overbearing will always try to bend things for personal gain or factional advancement. It's mentally and emotionally exhausting. The simple pressure of tyranny feels like a relief. Then you know who's stepping on you, and you can focus on building up your tolerance to it. As a citizen, you no longer have the constant pressure to make the right decision. You're free to devote yourself to simple survival and pointless griping. You're absolved of guilt.

Civilization by consent of the civilized

Reading an article in the New Yorker about a white collar crime prosecution that was withdrawn against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., it resonated strangely with the bloody carnage of the Las Vegas massacre.

The white collar case involved tons of research and evidence collection. It taxed the ingenuity of investigators not only to put together a case, but to figure out what charges, if any, they could bring. It was an intricate intellectual exercise extended over a couple of years. The exchange with defense attorneys involved all sorts of strategy on both sides. Some of the arguments were legal. Others appear to have been more...intangible. But it was all a brain game.

What does a white collar crime have in common with the brutal slaughter of an unsuspecting crowd? Both of them breach the trust of civil society. While the massacre is clearly worse, both are acts of people who have put aside the restraint of lawfulness to pursue their own gratification.

The massacre represents a far more visceral experience, both to perpetrate and to experience. If you want a laboratory perfect example of the value of civilized behavior, there it is. 

White collar shenanigans can have less obviously bloody, but still far reaching consequences. It may seem like a battle of wits between lawyers and accountants, far removed from the daily lives of ordinary citizens, but the money supply they’re playing with is the one we all use. Sleazy business dealings cost enough on their own, even before you add the bills for the lawyers when the scam goes off the rails. It’s a more sophisticated version of sociopathy, but sociopathic nonetheless.

Civilization as a benign influence relies on the consent of the participants to stay within a certain range of behavior. Here in the Land of the Free, good behavior makes us nervous. Are we really free if we’re not pushing the limit somewhere? Are the rules really for our benefit?

A free society cannot survive if a significant percentage of its citizens don’t agree to accepted conventions of personal restraint. Laws represent nothing but an expensive enforcement hassle if enough people ignore them. I wonder if fatigue and apathy are the real forces protecting us from chaos. Not enough people possess both the armament and the gumption to unleash their own little flames of hell on whoever happens to be around. Whatever the reason, as bad as things are, I can be glad they aren’t worse.

Coexisting strangely with the American obsession with freedom is the American need for control. For some of us, the freedom they cherish the most is the freedom to restrict behavior that makes them uncomfortable. This can take the form of a double standard, in which the dominant group wants rights and privileges that they deny to groups they suppress. Then there are people who have very narrow tastes, and feel that their norm should represent the full scope of permitted behavior. Having accepted their own limits, they want to remain competitive by framing the rules by which everyone else has to play.

Health insurance is an enemy of freedom

In a comment on Senator Jeanne Shaheen's Facebook page, I reported that I could not afford insurance under the ACA:

Senator Jeanne, due to peculiarities in my circumstances, I am unable to afford coverage under the ACA. Health insurance is not health care. And at this point I have neither one anyway. Last month, I had to pass a kidney stone alone at home and then go to work the next day, business as usual. My retirement plan consists of various scenarios for suicide when I can no longer take care of myself. I guess this makes me the ideal citizen, as far as the conservatives are concerned. Work 'em 'til they drop.

Another commenter suggested this:

Really maybe you need to find a better job. personally I have never had a job that didn't offer insur(ance). (Actual post had a typo in the last word.)

I answered:

Forcing people's career choices in search of insurance is not freedom. It indicates a country run for the benefit of insurance companies.

Isn't that pretty obvious? Along with getting people to use the terms health insurance and health care interchangeably, we've conditioned ourselves to seek "benefits" as a survival need, in a wilderness where we have to grub for every resource. Those who control the wealth determine how it is doled out, even if that means working for the destructive economy or choosing to live at risk for the sake of what you believe in. We are all soldiers facing death for a cause, even if we conscientiously avoid using combat for conflict resolution. I happen to have ended up in a place where the job that suited many of my abilities and needs only briefly provided "benefits," regardless of my usefulness to the business or that business's service to the community. Society at large benefits from the unheralded life and death of numerous benefactors for whom no public buildings are ever named.

With a system of universal care, rather than profiteering schemes of insurance, freedom of movement, choice, and work will make our society more innovative and our citizens more free. By making health insurance a marketed commodity, we actually hurt many other aspects of the free market economy. If you want unfettered freedom, live in anarchy now and take whatever happens to you. If you want a reasonably free society with well-maintained infrastructure and civilized amenities, accept that some things cannot be turned to profit. Some things are autonomic functions of society, that need to run quietly in the background. These include health care and energy production. If either of those intrudes on the peace and progress of the human species, we're doing something wrong. Right now, those intrusions make up most of the news. The rest of it hinges on inanities like what color we want our neighbors to be.

Killing and dying for what you believe

Praise the heroes who risk their own death to inflict death upon the forces of evil. Praise the people of principle who die proudly rather than submit to the beliefs they know are wrong. Praise the bravest of the brave, who die while performing acts of courage in the many conflicts that humanity has to resolve. Dealing death and receiving it are indispensable parts of a virtuous life.

Sacrifice does not have to be instantly supreme. You can kill or die by gradual steps guided by high principle. You can dismantle civilization a brick at a time, taking time to throw those bricks at deserving targets as you go along. All the while, blows and insults will be raining back on you as part of the grand melee.

The blows need not be actual. Acts of government and commerce can advance various beliefs, forcing compliance or death on whole nations and continents. It takes time, but it's worth it. It all rests on the basic principle that one must willingly kill and die for what's right. One must sacrifice. Let one's own life become more uncomfortable for the sake of taking down our foes. Take pride in your strength and courage to withstand the destruction of a sinful institution, even if the process leaves you poorly fed, unsheltered, bankrupt, maimed or dead. Don't blame the process of killing and dying for beliefs. Blame the opposing beliefs that force you to this extremity. Blame evil. Resist evil. Fight evil.

Don't be overly critical of the very few who seem to live very well, while exhorting the masses to soldier on in hopes of that better day when the good guys finally come out on top. You can come up with many plausible explanations for why they enjoy that status. Maybe a god likes them. Maybe they're just that much smarter and work that much harder than the rest of us. Maybe they really are jerks, but their logic makes sense so we should do what they say.

Species of social insects make war. The defenders fight, knowing that each of them will die. Individual survival does not matter. Colony survival is more important. They don't have flags, let alone coffins. They do not exhibit individuality. They do the right thing, win or lose, because it's their only chance. But it's not a noble fight for freedom. They are not free going in or coming out.

The word freedom is claimed by every person and group to represent their perfect world. Show me a people anywhere on the planet that does not call itself "freedom loving." No one says, "we want to live as slaves and minions for a small minority of overlords who can use us mercilessly for the glory of something or other." Even if they actually do live that way, they dress it up in fine language like submission to the will of God, or a sacrifice for some greater good which might not seem so good to everyone.

Nature is a free-for-all. Cruise through any natural environment and you will find life forms on top of life forms inside of life forms next to life forms, doing their thing and evolving -- successfully or unsuccessfully -- to be able to keep doing that thing, or a thing descended from it. Humans have been the same way, hampered increasingly by our creativity and inventiveness.

At first, creativity and inventiveness conferred advantages in the fight for global domination. Fast transportation and communication, combined with improving weapon technology, allowed certain groups to control large amounts of territory. It's all relative. Humans didn't go right from dugout canoes to aircraft carriers.

Unfortunately for global domination, with increased mobility and faster communication comes a greater ability to get to know each other. Along with this has come a certain distaste for widespread armed conflict. As the many wars raging at any given time will attest, this distaste is hardly universal. But it's gotten a strong enough hold to give humans a chance to interact a bit more politely and develop a sense that the little planet on which we live is going to serve any group better if all groups view it as a shared resource.

Evolutionary survival often hangs by a slender thread. What snips at our thread right now is the belief in too many people that it's better to destroy the whole thing for the greater glory of some deity or principle than it is to share it with "those people." Noble sacrifice is better than a compromised life. Live free or die. And take as many others with you as you have to. Kill them all. God will sort them out. Crap like that.

A world of truly free people would probably have less institutional violence, because the principle of individual freedom would supersede the formation of institutions that could order groups of people to fight each other. Hard to say whether there would also be less small-scale violence. The principle of respecting another person's freedom would preclude killing them, but the unrestrained expression of an individual's freedom might lead to a transgression that resulted in deaths.

Free people have to remember that they have no right to anything beyond arm's length. Go further and you are infringing on someone else's freedom. Say that you have a right to whatever your strength and guile can seize and you have diluted the principle of freedom to substitute the same old battle of competing would-be tyrants. Is life a mellow wander beside each other or an endless war? Is freedom best expressed by pushing as far as you can before you are forcibly stopped, or by renouncing the need for such things?

Is this all there is?

On the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the president announced the escalation of a bombing campaign against more enemies. The "Freedom Isn't Free" crowd would tell you this is the way of the world. Implicit in that statement as it is used today is that "freedom" is always bought at the cost of warfare. The "free" gain their little clearing in the hostile world by laying down a constant barrage to protect its perimeter. War without end, amen.

If there was a God, I would have more respect if He, She, It showed up with something other than wrath and a flaming sword to punish the ungodly and reward the faithful, since that would simply be an eternal perpetuation of the same crap that has spoiled human existence. Psychologically, if you want to punish the wicked, let them truly feel and understand their wickedness. Don't just rough them up to try to make them physically regret getting caught. But that, of course is much harder than the simple application of violence. It would take an all-powerful god to to apply it.