What I've Recently Been Up To, and A Preview of Coming Attractions

I just got back to the United States from a trip to Shanghai, China.  For a long time I had been wanting to visit China, and I found a perfect opportunity in an engineering conference that was scheduled to be held in Shanghai this month.  Unfortunately, it's late right now, I'm jet-lagged, and I have to get up early tomorrow for work, so I can't now describe my trip in more detail.  Hopefully I shall have the opportunity to do so sometime in the next several days.  Also, I have a few more posts on the role of parallel institutions in nonviolent liberation struggles.  Those of you who are regular readers of this blog, please stay tuned...

Bouncing Around On The Top

In my posts on strategic nonviolent resistance, I have emphasized how the organization of a righteous parallel society is a key component of resistance against a would-be tyrant.  I have also emphasized how the building of independent centers of economic power by, for, and among the oppressed is a key tool for bringing painful economic pressure to bear on the society of the tyrant via massive withdrawal of economic cooperation from the society of the tyrant.  Today I want to highlight how the building of the parallel institutions of a parallel society robs the tyrant's dominant society of its power.  Let's turn again to Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, specifically a passage from Chapter 9, which I quote below:

Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural, and political institutions progressively expands the “democratic space” of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil

institutions of the society become stronger vis-à-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control. If and when the dictatorship intervenes to halt this “escalating freedom,”

nonviolent struggle can be applied in defense of this newly won space and the dictatorship will be faced with yet another “front” in the struggle.

In time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered. Poland in the 1970s and 1980s provides a clear example of the progressive reclaiming of a society’s functions and institutions by the resistance...

 Even under martial law, with many imprisonments and harsh persecution, the new independent institutions of the society continued to function. For example, dozens of illegal newspapers and magazines continued to be published. Illegal publishing houses annually issued hundreds of books, while well-known writers boycotted Communist publications and government publishing houses.  Similar activities continued in other parts of the society.

Under the Jaruselski military regime, the military-Communist government was at one point described as bouncing around on the top of the society. The officials still occupied government offices and buildings. The regime could still strike down into the society, with
punishments, arrests, imprisonment, seizure of printing presses, and the like. The dictatorship, however, could not control the society.  From that point, it was only a matter of time until the society was able to bring down the regime completely. [Emphasis added.]

Turning Trump, his fat-cat brethren (including Musk), and the Rethuglicans into a bunch of irrelevant bouncing balls - now that would be a fine sight indeed!  And it is a worthy goal toward which to work, even though we must now start small and build incrementally.

How Grass Breaks Concrete

In my last few posts, I have discussed the evil foundations of the wealth of the world's richest people.  The loudest-mouthed man among these is of course Elon Musk.  A few months ago, Musk's fanboys (a.k.a. "flying monkeys") proclaimed him the world's first trillionaire, although a more recent valuation shrank the value of his holdings to "only" $684 billion.  Nonetheless, most pundits rank him as the world's richest man.  But Musk is a typical example of all of the world's richest people, in that the wealth of them all is built on similar foundations.  In particular, I wish to point out wealth obtained by exploiting defenseless human beings as well as monopolistic and monopoly-building practices as key elements of those foundations.  Let's zoom in on monopolistic and monopoly-building practices in today's post.

First, let's quickly define a monopoly as a market in which most of the goods or services sold in that market come from a single provider.  In the limit, all of the goods or services come from only one provider.  If this provider is a true saint, then he or she will provide the goods or services at high quality and at a price which can easily be borne by those who need these goods and services.  But monopolists usually are not saints.  Nor do saints usually create monopolies.  So monopolists naturally tend to charge the highest price they can get away with in order to provide the trashiest goods and services they can get away with, so that these monopolists can reap the highest profits they can get away with - even if the combination of high price and trashy quality eventually bankrupts most buyers in the market.  

Monopolies can arise seemingly naturally under certain circumstances.  For instance, in the North American West in the 19th century, executives of powerful railroad companies argued that their monopoly control of certain transportation markets was a natural outcome of the railroad business and therefore should not be opposed or interfered with.  This argument seems to have a certain validity in that sometimes the introduction of a transformative new technology like rail transportation requires so many resources that only a few players can enter the market for this new technology.  Thus a hundred-acre dirt farmer in 19th-century Iowa would not have been able to afford building his own railroad.  To consider space travel as another example, it is certainly true that for a long time, the only entities that were capable of sending rockets (and eventually humans) into orbit were the governments of large and wealthy nations.  Thus a 1960's geeky kid in a working-class family would not have been able to build her own rocket to fly to the moon.  However, it is also true that those players who were able to dominate capital-intensive new markets frequently did so not only because these markets required a potential player to have lots of resources, but also because some of these players relied on dirty tricks.  To see how this played out in the 19th-century North American railroad market, please read "For tech giants, a cautionary tale from 19th century railroads on the limits of competition", The Conversation, March 2018.

I would argue that it is these dirty tricks that are the dominant factor in the creation of the most recent monopolies and oligopolies which have dominated both the American and global economies over the last five or six decades.  One particular dirty trick is the use of "predatory pricing", which is the practice of a player entering a market in order to destroy competitors by selling the goods offered in that market at a price below the price at which other players can offer those same goods.  What is interesting is that the wanna-be monopolist player need not be a very big business at first - just as long as he or she has a huge cash reserve backing him or her up.  That way, he or she can stay afloat even while selling at a loss for a long time, while driving his or her competitors out of business due to the fact that these competitors cannot afford to stay in business if they don't sell at or above a certain price point.  

The harm caused by predatory pricing and the role of this pricing practice in the building of monopolies has been well-documented.  In December 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (under the outgoing presidency of Joe Biden) hosted a virtual workshop titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: How Predatory Pricing Harms Competition, Consumers, and Innovation."  The topics discussed in this workshop are also captured in a January 2025 article written by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: Stacy Mitchell Testifies at FTC Workshop on Predatory Pricing."  Mitchell starts out by describing the predatory pricing practicing of the Amazon businesses of Jeff Bezos over the last 30 years.  But Amazon is by no means the only near-monopoly which has been built over the last several decades in the U.S.  There are also Wal-Mart and other large retail chains which wiped out many locally-owned mom-and-pop small convenience stores, as well as the Whole Foods "health food" store chain which wiped out many locally-owned smaller countercultural health food stores.  There is Uber with its predatory pricing and exploitation of so-called "independent contractor" drivers which wiped out many local taxi companies.  (By the way, at last count, there was a rape or attempted rape in an Uber vehicle every eight minutes in the United States.)  I would also argue that this may be true of the iFixit national electronics repair store chain, although I don't have concrete proof.  Yet all of the businesses I have named in this paragraph are examples either of monopoly or of oligopoly in the making.

I would therefore also argue (as I have in a recent post) that Elon Musk's SpaceX company is an example of attempted monopoly-building via predatory pricing.  Based on a link I provided in that recent post, Musk is selling access to low earth orbit (LEO) at a price per kilogram of payload that is significantly lower than the price at which other launch providers are able to send satellites into LEO.  However, we also know that SpaceX is a money-losing business which has most likely not paid U.S. taxes since it was founded in 2002.  (See also "The Final Frontier of Tax Avoidance: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Has $1.9 Billion to Gain from Defunding the IRS", Matthew Gardner, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, June 2026.)  Thus Musk has a number of ways to cushion the pain (which I'm sure he hopes will be temporary) of selling high-value goods and services at a loss!

Now we can certainly decry and condemn the desires and goals of those businesses which engage in predatory pricing in attempting to create monopolies.  And we can also decry and condemn the effects which these monopolies have on the rest of us once these monopolies are firmly established.  But we must also ask what kind of people we ourselves are that we allow such predatory arrangements to arise in the first place.  To quote Gene Sharp once again,

"Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in this imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones."  

And,

"Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. [Emphasis added.]  Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors."

Dictatorships can be entirely governmental, or they can start out as economic hegemonies that morph into political hegemonies.  And note that what Gene Sharp says about governments that are too strong applies just as firmly to businesses whose owners become too rich, even if the governments in the nations where these rich people reside are weak.  Thus do greedy piece-of-garbage heads of business like Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos become the backers of piece-of-garbage heads of state like Donald Bump and political parties like the Rethuglicans.  But these people can become powerful only if we give them that power.  We too frequently give these people such power by being lured by the store-on-every-street corner convenience, the glitzy gizmo features, and the too-good-to-be-true low prices of their wares.  This convenience, functionality and cheapness act as a sort of bait - rather like the sugar water in certain commercially available ant baits.  However, the poor witless ants who chow down on that sugar water fail to notice that it's laced with borax.  And it's the borax that kills them.

I have mentioned the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is an organization which seeks to use advocacy and political action to eliminate monopolistic and predatory practices in the American economy.  I am all in favor of their aims and goals.  Yet it seems to me that trying to use policy recommendations, advocacy and political action to achieve such goals in these days is about as hard as trying to build my own transcontinental railroad or to build my own rocket to fly to Mars.  To me it's much better and more direct to figure out on a personal and local level how to decouple from a predatory economy.  What can I do at a grassroots level to achieve this?  My answer to this question is as follows: Become frugal and learn to be content with what I have.  Learn to be personally self-sufficient.  Learn not to need or want certain things or to buy things from certain people.  (For instance, I haven't bought anything from Target or Amazon in a long time!)  And find other like-minded people in my local community and in my circle of acquaintances with whom I can form small localized collectives of communal self-reliance.  If enough of us follow this path, we will be to the monopolists what grass eventually is to concrete - namely, a soft, subtle, yet eventually shattering force - an ineluctable, silent, bottom-up change that does not become noticed until it's too late for those at the top.

From Ears Back to Eyes

I am once again extremely busy with work, which has greatly hindered my blogging over the last few weeks.  But one thing that occurred to me these last few days is the manner in which ease of access, convenience, and low cost are used by would-be monopolists as bait in order to ensnare ever-increasing numbers of people into dependence as consumers on monopoly businesses.  We see also how ever-increasing consolidation of businesses leads to ever-shrinking numbers of players in any particular market segment.  (Hopefully I'll have more to say on this subject in a future post.)

Take audiobooks as an example.  To rely solely on audiobooks as a means of consuming either fiction or nonfiction is increasingly an unsatisfying and potentially harmful strategy for people who want to educate themselves.  (That word "consuming" is unfortunate, but right now I'm tired, it's past my bedtime, and I can't think of a better word...)  I'm not too much of a fan of Google's generative AI (or anyone else's generative AI, for that matter), but when just now I typed "shortcomings 'audiobook industry' 'lack of variety'" into Google Search, I got a highly satisfying summary of some suspicions which have been growing in my mind recently.  The Google AI overview of my search results says "The audiobook industry faces a lack of variety due to publishers focusing mainly on bestsellers and popular genres, leaving niche subjects, indie authors, and translated works underrepresented.  Production costs also limit smaller books from getting audio versions..."  I would also say that an increasing number of nonfiction audiobooks in the business genre are turning out to be subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) cheerleading pieces designed to prop up a harmful status quo.  There seems to be a dearth of voices questioning that status quo.

So, because there are writers who are not well-known, yet whose writing interests me, and these writers are not part of the audiobook market, I'm switching back to running my eyes over a set of printed pages instead of just letting the sounds of spoken words hit my eardrums.  I also understand that making the switch will do my brain some good.  Now if only I can find the time...

Humpty Dumpty Part 2: Musk's Further Fallacies

I hinted (not so subtly) in my last post that Elon Musk likes to brag about solving the impossible problem of achieving cheap space flight because he wants to boast of being a totally awesome dude who is smarter than all the rest of us.  I also mentioned that Elon Musk's company SpaceX developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  

However, on further examination I found that this is not true.  SpaceX has not, I repeat, has not developed the world's first fully reusable orbital launch rocket.  In fact, no one has.  It turns out that Musk has merely promised that SpaceX is on the verge of developing the world's first fully reusable rocket.  In an article by Stephen Kuper published in SpaceConnect Magazine in November 2025 titled "‘Next year’ Musk predicts ‘full reusability’ rocket imminent", Musk himself admits that his company has not achieved full reusability yet.  At best, his rockets are only partially reusable.  Also, there is an interesting piece also published in 2025 in Intereconomics Review of European Economic Policy titled, "The Missing Rocket: An Economic and Engineering Analysis of the Reusability Dilemma in the European Space Sector".  This article provides a further examination of the economic viability of reusable orbital launch systems like the SpaceX rockets, and discovers that these rockets have certain unaddressed economic liabilities.  

Lastly, it must be mentioned once again that SpaceX is a money-losing business despite its frequent rocket launches.  It may be that at least part of SpaceX's losses are due to a company policy of predatory pricing in an attempt to drive competitors out of business.

Humpty Dumpty's Orbital Wall

A month ago I wrote that a Chinese friend of mine who is an English-Mandarin practice buddy with me mentioned that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire.  I pointed out that many rich and powerful people in the West (particularly in the U.S.) have skillfully constructed a set of larger-than-life myths and narratives around their own supposed awesomeness, and that too many people in the rest of the world have fallen for these myths and narratives.  I'd like to suggest that the reality of both Musk and of his notional wealth is far less impressive than the myth.  Musk is a major mouthpiece of aspirational propaganda, boasting that he is a self-made man who earned his wealth solely by means of his own vast capabilities and intelligence.  (Oh, if only you imitate and emulate his "atomic habits", you too can become just as rich!  Or maybe not...)

But the actual foundation of Musk's wealth rests on five less than praiseworthy pillars, namely:

• Wealth inherited from a family that got rich and made itself great by exploiting defenseless human beings;
• Monopolistic and monopoly-building practices;
• Corrupt and misanthropic friends in high places (such as his former BFF Donald Grump);
• Corporate welfare obtained via those friends in high places;
• And taking credit for technologies he did not himself invent.  (See also "Tesla Existed Before Elon Musk: Founders On How They Pitched The Idea," Green Car Reports, February 2021.)

One of those technologies is spaceflight, specifically spaceflight via reusable rockets.  It is not surprising that Musk would seek to take credit for this achievement, as doing so would boost his prestige as a supposedly brilliant man who is able to solve problems that no one else can solve.  But the reality of things is very different.  Indeed, anyone with a functioning memory who was born in 1970 or who knows how to read a history book will remember the Space Shuttle developed by the United States in the 1970's, and which first flew in 1981.  It should be noted that all of the components of the Space Shuttle were fully reusable except for the main fuel tank for the liquid-fueled engines on the orbiter portion of the Shuttle launch vehicle.  In addition, the Soviet Union developed its own mostly reusable shuttle, named the Буран (Buran) which flew one mission in 1988.  It is true that SpaceX and other private companies developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  However, please note that for a given payload mass launched into orbit, a fully reusable launch vehicle saves only the expense of the launch vehicle.  A fully reusable launch vehicle which launches a given mass into orbit will actually use more fuel than a fully or partially expendable launch vehicle launching the same mass.  So there is a certain unavoidable price to be paid for spaceflight even when using fully reusable launch vehicles.

Now let's zoom in on a particular example of the use of spaceflight technology: namely, the launching of swarms (or "constellations") of satellites into low Earth orbit (or LEO, for those who like acronyms).  Some of the purposes of launching such swarms include accurate mapping and building of geographic information system (GIS) models, military spying, weather mapping and forecasting, and telecommunications.  Elon Musk's company SpaceX has for several years been building its own proprietary swarm of satellites in low-earth orbit.  Its swarm is, of course, the Starlink "constellation".  But we must note once again that Musk is not the first person to come up with this idea, nor is his company the first to try to implement it.  The first telecommunications satellite constellation was actually conceived by Motorola in 1987 and launched into low Earth orbit from 1993 to 1998 by rockets commissioned by Motorola.  This network is known as the Iridium network, and it is still operational. The only innovation which Musk has brought to the field of launching swarms of LEO satellites is the attempt to use such privately-owned swarms as a tool of monopoly-building.  Toward this goal, Starlink currently has 10,413 satellites in orbit, with plans to increase the number of satellites in its swarm to 42,000 satellites, with the ostensible goal of providing "fast internet service anywhere on earth."

There are just a few problems with Starlink, however.  One such problem is the obvious fact that in order for satellite operators to get along peacefully with each other, there must be rules and approvals to determine the altitudes at which satellite swarms can operate.  The Starlink swarms operate in two shells, one at altitudes of between 525 and 614 kilometers (326 to 332 miles), and a lower shell altitude of between 340 and 360 kilometers (210 to 220 miles) above earth.  With so many Starlink-owned satellites operating in these altitude bands, other satellite operators are increasingly being squeezed out.  Thus Musk is constructing the first space-based monopoly.

Is his monopoly sustainable?  I would argue that in the long run, it is not.  Why?  First, because spaceflight in its present state of development is inherently unsustainable.  This is especially true of chemically-powered spaceflight.  Every launch of a launch vehicle represents the consumption of a certain quantity of nonrenewable resources.  This consumption includes the propellants used in chemical rockets as well as the dry mass of rocket and satellite structures that are eventually launched into orbit.  If the satellite is launched into a high enough orbit (or worse yet, into an escape trajectory), in most cases both it and the final stage of the rocket that launched it are never coming back to earth.  If on the other hand the satellite is launched into LEO, sooner or later the materials of which the satellite is made will be turned into a thin cloud of gaseous metal oxides when the satellite's orbit degrades due to atmospheric drag and the satellite burns up in the earth's atmosphere.  This means that most satellites can never be recycled.  If moving to a circular economy is the key to building a sustainable industrial society of the future, then commercial LEO satellite swarms like Starlink are like a hole in a bag of sugar carried outdoors during a rainstorm - a leakage of something precious, a leakage which can never be recovered.

This is true especially because the materials used to make satellites include rare, high-value strategic minerals which are also sought after by nations who want to use these materials to develop other advanced technologies.  As commercial operators of LEO satellite swarms gobble up increasing amounts of these minerals, they will find themselves in increasingly direct conflict with other actors who also want to use these minerals for their own purposes.  They will also face worsening shortages.  I have mentioned that when a LEO satellite burns up in atmospheric re-entry, its materials are turned into unrecoverable smoke.  Because Starlink satellites operate at such low altitudes, they don't last long in orbit.  (See "Decay time estimate for LEO spacecraft", Niccolai and Mengali, Acta Astronautica, December 2024, and "Starlink Constellation: Deployment, Configuration, and Dynamics", Ali, et al, arXiv, March 2026.)    According to at least one source, one to two Starlink satellites burn up each day.  These satellites must be replaced with new ones in order to maintain the desired number of satellites in the swarm.  This replacement represents yet more consumption of nonrenewable rare strategic resources.

Lastly there is the ever-increasing risk of collisions between satellites when a multitude of satellites has to operate in a very narrow altitude range close to the Earth.  Please note that a collision between satellites moving at a relative velocity of thousands of miles per hour with respect to each other is not the same as a collision between two cars driven by a couple of impatient boneheads on the 605 freeway in Los Angeles County.  In the case of the road-bound speedsters, the collision debris will be spread over an area of perhaps a few dozen square yards at the very worst.  But a collision between satellites can produce tens of thousands of small fragments, each of which is traveling at orbital velocity, and each of which is in turn able to destroy or seriously damage other satellites which have been placed into the same orbital zone.  These small collision fragments can stay in orbit for much longer periods than the original satellites involved in the collision.  And as these fragments strike other satellites, they can in turn produce an increasing number of high-speed clouds of debris whose fragments strike still more satellites, in a chain reaction that eventually renders LEO unusable for satellites and unsafe for manned space flight that operates in the LEO altitude region.  Such a scenario is known as a Kessler syndrome.  Should the world experience a Kessler syndrome, either gradually or suddenly, it would be game over for Starlink.

The only reason why Starlink is valuable is because it has built a near-monopoly on satellite internet service.  According to one source, SpaceX (the parent company of Starlink) loses money every time it launches a rocket.  Musk's status as a trillionaire is built largely on a foundation of attempted monopolization of space in order to deliver a service to people who have been tricked into believing that they need this service.  We have seen that this foundation itself rests on some rather shaky ground.  What we can do is to give a bit of a shove to this foundation - namely, by learning not to need Elon Musk.  This should be a key strategic objective of strategic nonviolent resistance - namely, the destruction of monopolists by learning ways to stop needing their monopolies.  Once a sufficiently large number of people figures out how to make that happen, the monopolists will fall.  Then all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put them back together again.

An End To World Cup 2026, Thankfully

I have an upcoming post which will describe what I believe to be the near-term prospects for corporations that make their money by launching swarms (or "constellations") of low Earth orbit satellites.  This post will be a follow-up to a recent post of mine about a man who claims to be the world's first trillionaire.  But right now I'm very, very busy with work, so I don't have time yet to finish writing that post.  Oh, if only I were a house cat!  Then I could get some human to feed me for free...

Anyway, here's a short post for today.  I haven't watched most of the World Cup.  The only footage I saw was this past 4th of July when I was in a hotel restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia.  But I was glad when the U.S. was eliminated from the competition.  Now I'm glad that Spain beat Argentina to win the 2026 World Cup.  Spain's victory is sweet for the following reasons:

• Spain played better football (soccer for us American boneheads) than Argentina.
• Spain's team was vastly more sportsmanlike and civilized than Argentina's team.  Argentina's team acted like a bunch of thuggish toddlers - especially after the game ended.
• Over the last year and a half, Spain's national leadership has courageously stood up against Trump in the realm of geopolitics.
• Both Argentina and the United States have aligned themselves with the goals of the Global Far Right in their zeal to prop up white supremacy and their zeal to Make Themselves Great by violently trashing their fellow human beings.  Therefore they (along with Russia) should properly be regarded as rogue nations.  Such nations are psychically incapable of bringing themselves to share the world equitably with their fellow human beings.  They refuse to follow the Golden Rule.
• The 2026 World Cup was a slap in the face of Trump in that it showed him the limits of his power.  It became yet one more arena of conflict in which he has begun to lose.  I don't have a TV, but it must have been a moment of rich enjoyment to watch him having to hand the World Cup trophy to Spain!

And now let's look at the 2026 World Cup in its historical context.  In that the U.S. was one of the nations hosting this year's World Cup, the event has become for many observers similar to the 1936 Summer Olympic games which were held in Berlin in Nazi Germany.  As Trump sought to turn the 2026 World Cup into a playground for American exceptionalist narcissism, so Adolf Hitler tried to turn the 1936 Summer Olympics into a supposed showcase for supposed Aryan racial superiority.  But athletes such as Jesse Owens did significant damage to Hitler's narcissistic moment.  Then Nazi Germany began to lose in more substantive and self-destructive ways in the ensuing years, even though they seemed to be riding high at the outset.  I wonder what losses lie in wait for the United States in the months and years to come.  Surely those losses can't be very far away.  And they will be far more substantive than merely losing a football match.

A Soccer (Futbol) Game As An Object Lesson

Those who regularly read my blog can tell the ways in which the dominant holders of power in the U.S. have influenced any patriotic spirit I may have had in my younger days.  To be quite blunt, that patriotic spirit has largely been rinsed out of me in the same way that new blue jeans lose their color after several minutes in a bleach bath.  In my case, it's taken years for the spirit of American patriotism to be leached out of me.  This country has done horrible things in its bid to enrich a small cadre of rich parasites at the expense of all the rest of us.

So I spent this most recent 4th of July in Canada, in Vancouver, B.C. to be specific.  I slept well on the evening of the 4th, as there were no boneheads shooting off fireworks all hours of the day and night.  And the person who watched my cats while I was gone told me of at least two other people she knew who had made the same decision to spend the 4th in Canada.  Donald Trump's pre-4th speech was also sparsely attended.  Many millions of Americans decided not to celebrate the 4th this year.  I can definitely tell you that there were no flags flying at my house.

And now there is a very sweet icing on the cake of my antipathy toward the country of my birth.  The U.S. soccer (football for everyone else) team was eliminated from the 2026 World Cup, in spite of attempts by Donald Thump to interfere in the adjudication of the game between the U.S. and Belgium.  This makes last night's World Cup match into a very interesting illustration.  It shows how a group of people with guts, determination, and skill can prevail even in situations where powerful agents attempt to stack the deck against them.  Thus it should inspire those of us who have dedicated ourselves to the use of strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of fascists like Chump.  (Or is it Bump?  Maybe Dump?)

P.S. I'm working on more posts on the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance, with a special focus on economic noncooperation and the building of parallel institutions.  Stay tuned.

Podcast Recommendation: The Cult Vault Episode - "Get Away, Amway!"

In my most recent post I wrote the following: "... I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like."  

This week I stumbled across a particularly destructive example of aspirational propaganda as I listened to an episode of a podcast which deals with the cult phenomenon in the U.S. and in Britain in the 21st Century.  The name of the podcast is the Cult Vault, and the name of the particular episode is "Get Away, Amway!"  (Amway is a particular example of what is known as a "business cult.") Feel free to check out the episode; it's quite instructive.

The Fallacy of Aspirational Propaganda

I was recently talking with a friend who lives in eastern China.  I am helping her with English vocabulary and grammar.  她也帮我练习中文的生词，语法，和发音。During the course of our conversation she mentioned to me that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire, as a result of the most recent valuation of Musk's company SpaceX.  I had not known this, as I don't usually pay attention to Musk.  I find Musk to be rather emetic.  

My friend told me that many people in China are quite impressed by Musk because of his achievements.  I told her that it seems to me that many people throughout the rest of the world ought to view the richest and most famous people in the U.S. as a collection of crazy folks.  But afterward I thought about the most famous, wealthy, and immaculately coiffed citizens of the First World (particularly the U.S.) and the psychological impact these people have on many of the rest of us.  For in looking at these people it's easy to get swept up in their propaganda, believing that these people are rich because they possess rare and unique accomplishments of stellar value.  These people prop up the systems of inequity that exist in the world by telling us that if we only imitated them, we could be like them.  This, for instance, is the foundation of the thriving sale of many worthless "business advice" or "life coaching" books, conferences, podcasts, and the like.

But I'd like to say that these rich people are on their way to hell, because the foundation of their wealth is evil, since they have made themselves great by exploiting their fellow human beings.  And what they promise through their aspirational propaganda is impossible.  There is no way we can all be rich - especially not obscenely rich.  Why?  Because the earth is a finite planet.  And no matter how much Elon Musk boasts of how he's going to open up outer space as a "final frontier", at present neither he nor anyone else is even close to colonizing Mars, let alone anywhere else.  So why the aspirational propaganda?  It serves merely as a means of normalizing and legitimizing the really horrible behavior of the world's richest and most powerful people.

What is the implication that the earth is a finite planet?  Simply this: that anyone who wants to get really, really, really rich can lay claim to only a finite amount of stuff as long as they are limited to living on earth.  Once such a person actually lays claim to those resources, there are far fewer unclaimed resources available to the rest of us - even for those of us who wish to imitate the first person who successfully made himself really, really, really rich.  Once a second person succeeds in obtaining wealth similar to the first guy, the remaining unclaimed wealth shared by all the rest of us shrinks drastically yet again.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that once a certain mass of rich people comes into existence, all the rest of the world must subsist on mere crumbs.

To put it another way, imagine a group of ten neighborhood kids who are trying to split a pound cake between them.  The biggest, greediest, and most aggressive kid bites off a 7 ounce piece of the cake.  Then the second most greedy kid manages to bite off another 6 ounce piece.  A fight breaks out between the remaining kids for the remaining part of the cake, and in the process the rest of the cake gets torn to crumbs.  However, one other kid manages to snag a 2 ounce piece.  What will the remaining seven kids eat?

At The Crossroads

For the king of Babylon stands at the mother of the way,

at the head of the two ways, to use divination; 

he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, 

he looks at the liver.

- Ezekiel 21:21

"'We do all agree that Tianming's final words are very important.'... He then went on awkwardly. 'Then let's pick a spot to meet - somewhere other than the Earth.' ... Yun Tianming had very little faith that the Earth would survive."

- Death's End, Liu Cixin

I must report a rather sad fact.  The two cats who first came to live in my present home have died.  I believe one of them (Vashka) succumbed to feline leukemia virus (FELV) and the other (Koshka) began to suffer from severe edema and possible organ damage.  Both of them passed at the end of 2023.  I now have two new cats.  The name of one of them is Paka and the name of the other is Neko.  However, from time to time I do think of Koshka and Vashka as I remember what cool cats they were.

The passing of Koshka was especially significant, as I was intimately involved in the process.  When I returned home from a trip out of state to visit family, I discovered that Koshka had not been eating, and that he was unsteady on his feet.  I put him into a cat carrier and took him to two vets on a Saturday evening during a snow/ice storm.  Those visits forced me to make some difficult decisions, although I was not without a bit of wry irritation during the first visit.  I did not realize it, but that first visit was to a vet from what I would call a "boutique" clinic, who started off by calling me a "pet parent."  He suggested a number of very expensive tests, but I did not have "pet insurance" and was unable to afford his suggested regimen.  What I felt I was getting was someone who wanted to use emotional manipulation to bleed me dry.  What I needed was someone who would do the necessary work to give me a basic diagnosis along with a reasonable prognosis given my limited ability to pay for my cat's treatment.  

The second clinic I visited specialized in emergency veterinary care, and when I brought my cat to them, they told me straight up that he was basically on his last legs, and that even drastic interventions would probably not lengthen his life more that several months.  Thus I made the decision to have him put to sleep.  That decision felt weird - both at the time I made the decision, and on and off for a long time afterward.  Here after all was a cat who had entered a trusting relationship with me, and yet now I was deciding to do this to him.  I seem to remember trying to second-guess my decision on more than one occasion afterward.  Yet objectively, my decision had to be constrained by such facts as my cat's condition, his prognosis, and my ability (or lack thereof) to pay for a heroic intervention.

I think many people can relate to the experience of being in a potentially emotionally charged situation, yet being forced to think objectively in order to make a rational choice.  So we come to the consideration of the United States in these present days, and the consideration of how we who are in the U.S. should choose to live in these days.  And to be a person of conscience in these days will inevitably lead to psychic distress as we see how the rich and powerful are preying on those who are weak.  For instance, the entire foreign policy of the second Trump administration has been and continues to be one long, violent, murderous tantrum against those who are not rich, not white, and not Western.  And Trump even sought to extend that tantrum to Canada, Europe and Greenland.  Trump's domestic policy is similarly poisonous.  And Trump is but the most prominent symptom of a greater American psychic disease, a disease shared by a majority of America's richest and most powerful citizens.  (Note that when I use the word "psychic", it means "pertaining to the soul."  I am not talking about supernatural or preternatural powers.)

Faced with this late-stage American pathology, many people of conscience are grieved.  This is especially true of those who have embraced the narrative that the United States once stood for a great and lofty ideal, and that Trumpism is merely an unfortunate aberration in its departure from that ideal.  Therefore for these people, "resistance" or "civil resistance" or "strategic nonviolent resistance" consists of trying to re-unite Americans around that higher ideal in the hope that those who are promoting the departure from the ideal might reform on their own initiative.  Such people place great hope in "advocacy" and mobilizing (as defined by the late Jane McAlevey).  But I think most objective observers would say by now that mobilizing and "advocacy" have not thus far been able to secure lasting beneficial change in the U.S.

Maybe the best thing then is to ask what is the current condition of the U.S., and whether it is even possible anymore to change that condition for the better.  I believe our condition has the following characteristics:

• Most of the flow of commerce and economic power is concentrated in a very small number of hands.
• Most of us who are not among the privileged live lives of great precarity and inequity.
• To be perfectly blunt, a majority of the members of the dominant culture are radically devoted to the promotion, maintenance, and re-expansion of white privilege.
• This has distorted our view of human rights and of basic morality to such an extent that a large number of Americans no longer wish to treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated, but seek to do the exact opposite to their fellow human beings.
• The vast majority of mainstream American media outlets (yes, including the New York Times and the Washington Post) have shifted and are continuing to shift ever farther to the right.
• The rich and powerful have shifted the political process to such an extent that it will be very hard for ordinary people who are not rich and powerful to use ordinary channels to shift the process back to a more equitable foundation.  Those who seek to restore a right balance will increasingly have to work outside of established systems to do so.
• The moral distortions of the most powerful members of our society are leading to the kinds of distortions of thinking and reasoning that may well destroy the nation.

Can this condition be remedied?  That depends on whether or not there are sufficient numbers of people of conscience in our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states.  How many people are there in your locality who possess a working moral compass?  The essence and starting point of a properly working moral compass is this: "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 7:12.

It also depends on whether it is possible to eliminate the continuation of sources of toxicity in our culture.  I am thinking especially of the overwhelming promotion of right-wing, selfish, libertarian, supremacist propaganda through American mainstream media, and the rabid anti-tax rhetoric that is destroying all the publicly-funded instruments of the public good in this country.  Trying to repair the damage done to our partially-destroyed society while the organs of right-wing media continue to pump out their message is like trying to clean up a basement that has been flooded by a sewage spill even while the broken sewer force main that initially caused the flooding continues to pump sewage.

Faced with the challenge of trying to repair our partially destroyed society, some have concluded that repair and healing are impossible.  These people hold out very little hope for the long-term survival of the United States.  Thus many people are choosing to try to emigrate.  It will be interesting to see how many of them succeed, and what they will find in their new homelands.  Emigration is an extreme example of the withdrawal of economic and political cooperation which I have been promoting in my remarks on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, I can still see other ways of achieving nearly the same level of withdrawal.  What a person chooses will depend on the diagnosis, and hence the prognosis of the American condition which he or she is able to construct.  Here's a hint to my prognosis: I think that there are still many steps of withdrawal that can be taken by people of conscience who must still live in the United States.  But we'll have to be willing for some hard work.

Blog Post Recommendation from "Diary of An Autodidact"

I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to write a new blog post, but I do want to recommend a post from another blogger.  The name of the blog is Diary of an Autodidact, and the post is titled "Underground by Haruki Murakami".  Like me, the author of this blog is a survivor of an American white supremacist fundamentalist/Evangelical cult, and he has noted several similarities between present-day white evangelicalism and the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which perpetrated a massive terrorist attack on Japanese subway commuters in March 1995.  I have myself commented on the lessons which I learned from reading (or in my case, listening to the audiobook version of) Haruki Murakami's book Underground, with its detailed description of the process by which many Aum participants lost their souls to the delusions of the evil man named Shoko Asahara.  It is interesting to see how others are drawing the same lessons in order to understand the present partly destroyed state of much of mainstream American culture.  To quote from the author of Diary of an Autodidact, "In the end, this is the legacy [of cults of narcissism] - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion."  These sentences give us some idea of the final outcome of Trumpism.

And as for white evangelicalism/Protestantism (particularly the American flavor) - which has been the enabler of slavery, attempted genocide, and wars of conquest for centuries - I too am struck - as the author of Diary of an Autodidact was struck - by this quote from Underground:

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, 

where are they to go for salvation?” 

Last Sunday I Washed My Car

...instead of going to church... 

And I put out a little sign so my neighbors could see what I did!

So Then, What Is Soft Power?

In a previous post I mentioned the concept of "hard power" as applied to nations.  A simple definition of hard power is the ability of a particular nation to use economic and/or military means to force other nations to submit to its will.  A question naturally arises: what is the definition of "soft power"?  And what contrasts exist between the definitions of hard power versus soft power, as well as the difference in their mechanisms of action and their effects?

To answer that question, we can look to the sorts of formal, scholarly definitions crafted by well-credentialed academics.  One such academic was the late Joseph S. Nye, who originally developed soft power as a formal concept.  (See Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Chapter 4, 04/05/2004.)  Another academic, Rebecca Kivak, summarized Nye's conclusions as follows: "Soft power refers to a nation's ability to attract and persuade others through culture, political values, and foreign policies, fostering a sense of admiration and shared objectives...Soft power is the capacity of a country to get what it wants by endearing itself to others through attraction...Countries who use soft power rely on earning admiration." ("Soft and Hard Power," Kivak, EBSCO, 2025.)  Kivak also stated that "Soft power operates through the resources of culture, political ideals, and foreign policies...Culture consists of a country's values, ideals, and social practices, including its popular culture."

These formal definitions of soft power may be a mouthful to digest, but I'd like to focus on a few key words: namely, admiration, attraction, and persuasion.  It seems reasonable that admiration would lead to attraction, and attraction would lead to persuasion.  Admiration is the first step, the prerequisite to every other step in the process.  How then does a person or a collective of people (up to and including a nation) go about earning admiration?

It is interesting (and bitingly funny in a dark sort of way) that the nations of the Global North sought to use propaganda as a tool to foster admiration in the people at whom the propaganda was aimed.  Nye's book talks about how in the 20th century, the U.S., Britain, and Germany tried to use propaganda to earn points with audiences in Latin America and other nations of the Global South, and how even when Britain, the U.S., and Germany were at war, each tried to use its organs of propaganda to influence the citizens of the nation which it was fighting.  Thus did propaganda and national mass media (including visual art, movies, novels, music, and TV shows) come to be counted as tools of soft power.  This assessment of soft power was only partially accurate.  To quote one former CCM musician who was "defrocked" after cheating on his wife in the first decade of the 21st century, "the lie is always cheaper than the truth."  Or, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, "Let be be finale of seem."  Propagandists who sell things that don't live up to their hype eventually get found out.

So then, what steps are required to build a durable foundation for admiration?  Let's look at how a single individual might truthfully craft a persona worthy of admiration.  It seems that the first thing such a person needs to do is to manage his own affairs well.  In other words, what's needed is a person who provides for himself by means of honest work, a person who takes care of himself, a person who is not enslaved to addictions, a person who lives within his means, a person who to the utmost of his own personal ability tries to live an orderly, wise, and self-controlled life.  The challenges to such a life are increasing in these days of rampant inequality, yet this ideal is what we should all be aiming for, as encapsulated in the quote: "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing." - 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12.

The second thing our admirable person needs is to cultivate and possess a useful skill, a skill or craft or competency that meets needs in the world at large, even as it says  "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful." - Titus 3:14.  The kinds of skills that meet the emerging needs of the 21st century will require setting aside regular daily and weekly time for self-cultivation and self-education.  Acquiring these skills may also require enrolling as a working adult in continuing education classes and seminars taught by reputable teachers.  I would also like to suggest that for many people, the ultimate goal of this self-cultivation should be to achieve full self-employment.  But self-employment is just my own personal bias.  YMMV.

The third thing our admirable person needs is to actively practice hospitality.  This hospitality should consist of deeds of active charity toward others, and especially toward those who can't repay the favors shown to them by the person practicing hospitality.  In the New Testament, this is seen in the hospitality shown by the Good Samaritan toward the man who was almost killed by robbers (Luke 10:25-37.  Note that this hospitality was cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religion!), and in passages like Luke 14:12-14 and James 1:27 and 2:15-16, and 1 John 3:17.

To sum up, a person who manages himself well, possesses and continues to cultivate an occupational skill useful in the larger world, and shows practical, material kindness and charity to those around him (especially those who are poor or marginalized or who can't pay him back) will be regarded by many as an admirable person.  Such a person will then be an attractive person as well.  That admirable character and attractiveness will make him a persuasive person.  And his persuasiveness will not depend on expensive PR/marketing campaigns, propagandists or spin doctors, but on the genuine evidence of the person's genuine beneficial character.  Now when we have not just one such person but entire collectives of such people, they can wield a tremendous amount of soft power.  And the reputation, benevolence, and values of such collectives can serve as a powerful contrast to the societies in which these collectives are embedded when those larger societies have been taken over by autocrats, tyrants, dictators, fascists and others who want to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by trashing everyone else.

Thus a key goal of the people who build parallel institutions in order to resist the society of the tyrant should be to cultivate this kind of genuine soft power.  Those who are part of such parallel institutions should aim to earn the reputation of providing needed works or services which the society of the oppressor is unwilling to provide.  To quote from "How to Undermine Authoritarian Control: On Empowering Parallel Institutions" (Goldman and Levin, Z Magazine, 2 April 2026), 

As authoritarianism attempts to take root in America, there are several time-tested strategies from other countries and contexts on how to fight back most effectively when the ruling regime controls most branches of government. One strategy that has been especially effective across diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts is building parallel institutions: filling the voids of government functions, services, and resources created by authoritarian regimes and their abandonment of obligations to the people. By showing government shortcomings instead of just talking about them, then organizing regular people to help fill those gaps, parallel institutions build alternative power and influence.

 From Brazil to Ukraine and India to Sudan, parallel institutions have been effective at safely and peacefully undermining authoritarian control by taking care of people where the government won’t.   [Emphasis added.]

When such parallel institutions cultivate themselves to such an extent that their soft power exceeds the cultural power of the autocratic society in which they are embedded, the collapse of the autocratic regime is only a short step away.  This power reversal should be simple to achieve in autocratic or dictatorial societies, since the whole goal of the dictator or fascist is to create a society in which one small privileged group of people gets all the goodies of the society while everyone else is starved to death.  I am thinking particularly of Russia just now as a nation that has been so thoroughly cannibalized by rich parasites that it may be on the verge of economic collapse.  As Russia's collapse is being aided and abetted by rampant elite corruption, the United States under Trump and the Rethuglicans has begun to head down the same path.  In these days, let us who count ourselves among the resistance cultivate our individual and collective soft power!

Resistance Gardening

As I mentioned in a previous post, we know that many American farmers - especially farmers who are in red states - solidly support Trump.  We also know that these farmers have begun to feel serious pain from the sanctions imposed on them by the nations to which they used to export their produce.  These sanctions were imposed by these nations in response to the tariffs on these nations' exports which were imposed by Trump.  We can increase the pressure on Trump's base by reducing our dependence on the things produced by his base.  This includes farm produce. Therefore a few months ago, I recharged my garden beds with composted cow manure and in February I started planting vegetables.  I've been planting every couple of weeks since then.  Here's what things look like today:

Snow peas, fava beans and radishes
(along with salsify and potato volunteers from last year).

Fava beans, radishes, and asparagus.

Some of the books I've been using for guidance.

This coming weekend, I intend to plant more.  I'd like to succeed in growing lettuce and bok choy (also known as 白菜）.  Also, my apple and pear trees should do well this year.  This year's garden produce represents things that I won't be buying at the supermarket.  Readers can look at my urban garden as my small step toward imposing my own sanctions on some of the red state farmers who supported Trump.  I expect that my sanctions will be delicious...

P.S. Please do continue to support those farmers who are not aligned with the Trump regime, but who instead are part of the resistance.  In particular please support the farm of Aimee and Homero.  Aimee writes the blog New To Farm Life.

The Unavoidable Cost of Process

I want to open this post with a quote from something I wrote back in January 2021, when there were high hopes among historically oppressed peoples in the United States who thought that the election victory of Biden and Harris meant that we all could put days of horror and oppression permanently behind us.  The quote is as follows:

...Those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

I have further argued that this organization must be the kind of deep organizing that produces lasting structures of power by, for, and of the historically oppressed.  Why is this kind of organizing necessary?  And why is hasty short-term mobilization of people inadequate to produce lasting change? To answer that question, I present the following quotes from Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy:

Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors. [Emphasis added.]

And, 

It should be remembered that against a dictatorship the objective of the grand strategy is not simply to bring down the dictators but to install a democratic system and make the rise of a new dictatorship impossible. To accomplish these objectives, the chosen means of

struggle will need to contribute to a change in the distribution of effective power in the society. Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak... [Emphasis added.]

When we look at a nation such as the United States, we see how government capture by wealthy people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and by wealthy corporations such as Target, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, News Corporation and others has led to a drastic weakening of the power that ordinary people in the United States have over their own lives.  This capture has driven the rapid increase in inequality in the U.S., and is a powerful cause of the capture of the U.S. Federal government by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  While resistance to the present state of affairs can be expressed through economic noncooperation such as refusals to buy things from the owners of such corporations, a robust resistance movement also requires the oppressed to start building structures of collective self-reliance among themselves to replace the structures built by their oppressors.  To quote from another book, Recovering Nonviolent History, by Maciej Bartkowski,

An important element of the indirect form of resistance described in a number of chapters was the development of an autonomous society with every aspect of self-rule well before a formal independence was achieved.  Often, it took the form of society’s own schooling system, self-managed economic cooperatives, social services organizations, and judicial or quasi- governing institutions. The idea was not to take the fight directly—with the use of collective actions—to a more powerful and brutal adversary but rather to transform the society first and, through that transformation, liberate it from the control of the [oppressor]. This was a stealth resistance more than an open confrontation. Society was seen as a social organism that could grow, defy [the oppressor], and defend itself via its own self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement. [Emphasis added.  Words in brackets also added by me.]

To put it quite bluntly, those who are among the historically oppressed are going to have to start building their own collective structures for meeting their own needs.   (Hopefully I can write in more depth on this topic in future posts.) Those structures (also known as organizations) will have to start small, but we must all start somewhere.  Over the long term, moreover, these collectives must become the foundation of a society of equity and equality that can't any longer be dominated by the big, the rich, and the powerful.  This combination of economic and cultural withdrawal from the dominant systems (through such things as frugality and boycotts) along with the creation of parallel structures, collectives, and institutions that are NOT part of the dominant systems is what eventually erodes the power of unjust dominant systems and causes their collapse.  And this approach works far better than simply engaging in repeated mass protest marches.  Those who think that hasty mobilizations and mass protest marches are the only things needed for effective resistance should read the short story 拔苗助长。It's an object lesson on what happens to people who don't understand the proper process which must be followed to make something grow!  Bringing about certain processes involves a certain unavoidable cost, a certain unavoidable investment of effort and time.  In other words, ya gotta pay your dues...

The Shrinking Superbowl?

At present, the most popular televised sporting event in the United States is the Superbowl.  For those readers who do not live in the U.S., the Superbowl is the final championship event of the American football season.  American football is an interesting cultural invention, springing as it did out of the "muscular Christianity" promoted by prominent 19th-century white American and British theologians who rejected the New Testament's commandments to nonviolence.  (See also "In the Hands of God: Theology and the Benefits of American Football", Ethan Levin, Harvard University, 2022; and The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, Paul Emory Putz, Oxford University Press, 2024).  

Because this "muscular Christianity" rejects nonviolence, American football is surprisingly violent - as seen in the large number of concussion injuries sustained in youth football such as played in Pop Warner leagues.  It should be no surprise that the rate of concussions increases as athletes grow, mature, and become stronger.  Thus high school football players face greater concussion risk than Pop Warner players, and the risk increases still further for college football players.  The grand prize for violence (and concussions) goes to the NFL, where really big guys are paid lots of money to crash into each other as hard as they can.  Typical performance statistics for one of these typical living crash test dummies are as follows (information taken from gobigrecruiting.com):

• Height: 6'5"
• Weight: 280 lbs.
• 40 yard dash time: 5.0 seconds
• Bench press: 320 lbs.
• Squat: 450 lbs.

As for the Superbowl itself, according to one source, over the last fifteen years viewership has never been less than 100 million people.  According to several sources, the 2025 Superbowl was the most watched event in television history in the United States.  However, most media sources report that the 2026 Superbowl suffered a ratings decline.  The most optimistic estimates state that the decline was no more than two percent.  However, other sources question both this statistic and the methodology by which it was derived.  These other sources estimate that the actual decline in viewership was closer to ten percent.  (See also "Samba TV Shows Second Year of Viewership Decline for Super Bowl Halftime Show as Media Touts Record Bad Bunny Viewership", in which more rigorous tracking methods produced an estimate of the actual decline at 13 percent.)

It is interesting to read of the reasons given by certain media pundits for the viewership decline.  Some commentators state that this year's game was simply not that interesting because of weak player and team performance.  Other commentators point to a weakness of the halftime show which featured some guy named "Bad Bunny."  (Who is he? Never heard of him.)  Some have gotten a bit closer to the truth of the matter in their noting that Gen Z seems increasingly disinclined to get wrapped up in sports at all.  But almost none of the usual commentators seems to have noticed that an increasing number of Americans of all ages are consciously, openly, vocally disconnecting from the mainstream American culture that has been vomited onto them by the organs of that mainstream American culture.  This includes an increasing number of people who are choosing not to celebrate the 4th of July, not to participate in Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping orgies, and ... not to watch the Superbowl!  As for myself, I don't give two cents and a stick of chewing gum about American football or the Superbowl, and thus I haven't watched a single televised football game in a very, very long time.  American football stands in my mind as a symbol and symptom of the pathology, emptiness and uselessness of modern mainstream American culture.  Perhaps this year's ratings decline is a sign that other Americans are coming to the same conclusion.  I can't help but wonder if the decline in this year's Superbowl ratings isn't also a collective act of strategic nonviolent resistance - in withdrawing economic and cultural cooperation and patronage from the systems of our oppressors.  Perhaps it's a message to the masters of our present economy that the days of fun and games are over for them as long as they continue to support a murderous and corrupt President and his political party.  Time will tell...

-Facebook -YouTube -X -Threads -Instagram -"Fox News" -Reddit -Quora -Rednote

Over the last few years I have noticed a disturbing trend regarding breaking news or emergent events.  If I when I want to find out about such events I try to use standard commercially-available search engines such as Google or Bing (or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which like Bing, are owned by Microsoft) the top search results are usually links to posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or similar platforms.  Links to articles written by actual professional journalists who follow long-standing codes of journalistic ethics (including fact-checking) are becoming increasingly hard to find.  

Let me just say straight up: posts on social media platforms are not journalism.  Therefore I do not trust these when they offer "breaking news" flashes.  From the Russian aggression against Ukraine to the current mess in the Mideast, I therefore do NOT consult anything found on YouTube, Quora, Rednote, Facebook, or the like.  The fact that posts on these platforms have been displacing genuine journalism can be attributed to multiple causes, such as the corporatization and monopolization of historically independent news outlets, the diversion of advertising revenue from historically independent news outlets to the owners of massively deployed social media platforms, and the massive gaming of the system of page and website rankings on the largest search platforms.  However, one particular cause is the fact that the providers of responsible journalism have increasingly hidden their content behind paywalls.  This in turn is probably an effect of the diversion of advertising revenue from actual news outlets to the owners of social media platforms.

So I'd like to set forth my strategy for coping with this proliferation of hot air and word salad on social media served up by search engines instead of actual journalism.  Whenever I try to find out more details about an emerging story of interest, I use one of the features of advanced search that was originally deployed on Google.  If, for instance, I hear a report or rumor that a dozen giant heads of lettuce grew legs and walked through a town in the Midwest, killing dozens of people, I type in the search box of my search engine of choice something like '"giant heads of lettuce" walking' and see what search results come up.  If the first two or three pages of search results are dominated by links with titles like "Facebook: You've Got to See This! - Giant Heads of Lettuce On the Rampage!" or, "YouTube: Midwest Town Threatened By Lettuce!" then I modify my search query as follows.  I type into the search box '"giant heads of lettuce" walking -Youtube -Facebook -Reddit -Instagram -Threads -X -Quora -"Fox News" -Tiktok' and run a new search query.  The way this works is that whatever I type in quotes such as "giant heads of lettuce" returns search results that contain that quoted phrase verbatim.  On the other hand, whatever keywords have a short dash (-) in front of them are excluded from the search.  This means that any search results offered by a platform that has a dash in front of it are excluded from my search results.

This method works tolerably well for general searches, although it breaks down seriously when I try to search for pictures.  For instance, if I click on the "Images" tab of my search page and type -"baboon brushing teeth" "wikimedia commons"' in the search box, I will definitely get all kinds of images that are NOT hosted by Wikimedia Commons!  If, moreover, I try to use the dash prefix to exclude those images that are not hosted by Wikimedia Commons, they will show up anyway.  So maybe my prefix dash method is not so foolproof after all.  If search providers ruin general search in the same way that they have ruined image search, then my prefix dash method of filtering search results will break down.  But never fear - I still have other methods up my sleeve.

Two Knuckleheads Versus A Near-Peer

So once again I'm so out of touch with the rest of the world that a couple of acquaintances had to tell me today that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran before I became aware of this fact.  Why have I chosen to isolate myself to such a degree that I'm not aware of breaking news? Simply because I already know that the world is a messed-up place, and that this is due in no small part to the United States of America.  We are now reaping the chaos that results from over 45 years of behind-the-scenes machinations by white supremacists and American exceptionalists.  The combination of white supremacy and American exceptionalism has worked synergistically to produce an extremely potent social toxin.  That toxin produced Trumpism, but it certainly did not begin with Trump.  Rather, there is an entire cabal of damnably malignant men to blame, an entire coterie of rich and powerful people, an entire demographic of people whose souls are a pile of garbage.

I'll say at the outset that from my limited reading of the situation, the attack against Iran was unprovoked.  It was not an act of retaliation against any Iranian attack on Israel or the U.S.   In other words, Iran did not throw the first punch.  This shows that the regimes of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are guilty of a criminal act.  (Regarding Israel, my last shreds of sympathy for Israel are evaporating right now.  Netanyahu seems like a singularly rigid, unimaginative, and brittle head of state in such times as these.)  The problem for both nations is that Iran is much closer to a near-peer to the U.S. than Venezuela was, and is much more populous than Israel.  Attacking Iran has probably erased any fault lines that previously existed in Iranian society, and the attack will harden anti-Israel sentiment across the entire Mideast. Israel, having managed to alienate many people by its actions in Gaza, seems bent on escalating the alienation still further.  As for Iran, it has defensive and offensive missile capabilities which pose a serious threat to U.S. military assets in the region.  It has begun to use those capabilities.  And those capabilities are about to be augmented.

It's time for the rest of the world to recognize that the United States is now itself a rogue state.  The rest of the world does indeed have the collective power to bring this rogue state to heel, but only if it presents a united or nearly united front.  As for whether bringing the U.S. to heel involves military responses, I will reserve any comment or opinion.  However, the rest of the world can definitely impose the kinds of steps of economic noncooperation (including even sanctions) that can render the U.S. powerless.  Please decouple from the U.S. - completely.

I'll also say that those members of the U.S. military who choose to obey Trump's orders are men without conscience.  They may be merely people who have chosen to indulge in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or they may have chosen more enthusiastically to support the Trump/America First agenda, but either way they are people who have thereby forever lost my respect.  Right now I don't support our troops.

An additional problem for the U.S. is that this nation's malignant narcissism - expressed through the potent poison of white supremacy and American exceptionalism - may damage and erode the capability of the leaders of the U.S. to discern reality to such an extent that they will choose to launch unprovoked military attacks on nations that are even closer to near-peer status than Iran.  This could result in disastrous consequences for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular.  These consequences may last a very long time.

The Hard Drug of Hard Power

Several months ago, while looking up something on Wikipedia, I came across a striking picture.  It is a digital reproduction of a painting made in 1887 by Viktor Vasnetsov titled, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now I know the saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words", and I've just given the link to the picture so that readers can see it for themselves, but I'd still like to indulge myself in using a few words to describe the painting from my point of view.

The painting is rich in detail, yet what stands out immediately are four men riding four horses. The first is a king with a fierce face who, wielding a bow, is about to shoot someone with an arrow.  He is followed by a large, broad, thick burly guy who is wearing nothing except a loincloth (which I first mistook for an old-fashioned diaper). He is swinging a sword.  He is followed by a gaunt man with a fierce face who is carrying a pair of scales, holding them in his hand in such a way that one gets the impression that he's about to bash someone (or something) with the scales.  He is followed by a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and wielding a sickle.  All four characters are fearsome, yet although Vasnetsov made the large burly guy the central feature of his painting, I personally find the skeleton to be the most unnerving - especially since he is painted with eye sockets in the shape of a scowl and a jaw and teeth in the shape of a snarl.  (Imagine dreaming about that guy at night!)

Let's consider the large burly guy for a minute or two. This broad, thick guy is swinging a sword that looks like it must weigh as much as three or four sledgehammers. One can't help but think that if he went to chop off the head of an opponent, that opponent's head would go flying as if it were a baseball hit by a slugger.  Yet in the lower part of the painting, we see that the effect of this big guy's sword-swinging is not to directly kill men, but to induce men to kill each other.  For he and his horse (a horse that looks as if it had been scared nearly to death) are the artistic embodiment of a passage in the New Testament that reads, "And when He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men should slay one another; and a great sword was given to him." (Revelation 6:3-4)

Today's post is not about making some predictive prophecy (after all, I'm not a certified prophet ;)), but I must say that the Scriptures which I have quoted, as well as the painting which was inspired by these Scriptures, seem to be an apt embodiment of the thinking of certain rich and powerful people in the present day.  For we have a few nations which have recently become fixated on building up their "hard power."  And while economic non-cooperation is a key element of both national hard power and of strategic nonviolent resistance, I'd like to focus on the element of hard power that most attracts the attention of nations that want to be bullies: military might.  

The point of amassing large amounts of hard power is to be able to say to other nations, "Give us what we want from you or we will ruin you."  In the case of the Axis powers prior to World War 2, this statement was usually phrased as, "Give us what we want or we will bash you." The actions of the Axis powers led to a lot of bashing and of counter-bashing as well, and the end result was that the Axis powers that started the bashing got decisively bashed themselves in the end.  Yet we can learn much from analyzing the motives which started the Axis powers on their destructive path.  For I would argue that the same motives are at work in those nations that are at present fixated on acquiring and building up hard power.

I suggest that some of those who are now seeking to build an overwhelming amount of hard power are doing so so because they feel an overwhelming sense of injury at the emergence of a world in which they can't instantly get their way, a world in which they are not worshiped as superior to all other humans and their demands are not instantly and abundantly satisfied. In the case of nations, this sense of injury is often felt by a dominant culture which loses or begins to lose its power over peoples or nations over which it had historically exercised domination. Thus, this feeling of injury is expressed in statements like, "We used to be great! We ruled over X and Y and Z! Now behold our humiliation, in that we must politely ask X and Y and Z for the things we want!  They're forcing us to say please and thank you and to wait our turn!!!!  Such humiliation is utterly unbecoming to a nation as great as ours!"

This sense of injury (an unjust sense, if I may say so) is what motivates the heads of nations which feel thus injured to begin to pursue the building up of hard power.  And the hard power they seek is almost always military hard power.  This is what motivated the arming of Japan in the early 20th century and the rearmament of Germany after World War 1. This is what motivated the Soviet Union to devote such a large percentage of its GDP to military expenditures after World War 2.  And it has been a key motivator of U.S. military expenditures from 1980 onward - especially under Republican presidential administrations. So what does the pursuit of this kind of hard power ultimately gain the pursuers? And what are the risks and costs of the pursuit of this kind of hard power?

First, while it is obvious that hard power deployed in overwhelming force can achieve short-term gains, it is also obvious from the record of history that the continued deployment of such power over a long time loses its effectiveness.  In fact, eventually the continued costs of the use of such power begin to exceed any benefits reaped by those who use this power.  It can be argued that even if there had been no intervention by the U.S. in the Far East or in Europe, in the long run neither Germany nor Japan could have held onto their territorial gains which they achieved from 1930 to 1941.  This is because both nations were so fixated on bullying the people they conquered that they provoked the kind of resistance that would ultimately have destroyed their hard power.  This is the lesson of the French (and later U.S.) failure in Vietnam, the Soviet (and later U.S.) failure in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russian failure in Ukraine. Treating people like trash while threatening them at gunpoint is hardly the way to "win hearts and minds."

Second, the very process of both building up and deploying hard power is itself expensive in terms of human resources.  Fielding an army requires warm bodies to wear uniforms and carry guns.  Yet I would argue that equipping people with uniforms and guns and sending them out to try to bash their fellow humans in other countries is going to be increasingly expensive as the 21st Century continues.  The reason is that birth rates throughout the world are continuing to decline.  Those nations that are most eager to throw their weight around are among the nations whose birth rates are most steeply declining.  Thus it makes very little sense to train one's young men and women to invade other countries if it is likely that a significant number of those young men and women will get shot up during the invasion and subsequent military operations. This is especially likely in a fight between nations that are near peers.  Once those young men and women have gotten killed, who will be left to do the ongoing work of maintaining their societies at home?

Third, consider the material costs of building up and deploying hard power.  In 1983, Seymour Melman wrote a book titled Profits Without Production which accurately diagnosed many of the elements of the disease which is now destroying American industry.  He described the pernicious effect of the American military-industrial complex and how ever-increasing expenditures for "defense" were impoverishing other elements of the American economy and of American scientific and technical research.  His points were amplified and re-broadcast in a recent paper by Julia Gledhill of the Stimson Center titled, "The Ugly Truth about the Permanent War Economy."  The fact is that building war material costs some serious folding money - whether planes (~$100 million each for an F-35 fighter), ships, artillery, drones, tanks, or other instruments of mayhem.  Once natural resources and money are turned into war material, these resources can't easily be repurposed for more productive aims.  What's more, the body of knowledge needed to design and build these items frequently does not transfer well to other sectors of industrial production or of the overall economy.  (I should know - I used to work for a defense contractor who went out of business after the Cold War ended.  The reason why that contractor went out of business was because it was unable to make the switch to inexpensively producing things needed by the civilian market.  Later I worked for an engineering firm whose client base used to include many military agencies, yet which shrank over the years until it was designing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems for fast food joints and amusement parks.)  And the money that is sunk into defense is withdrawn from other necessary elements of national infrastructure such as roads, dams, bridges, and similar civil infrastructure as well as schools and libraries.  Of course, here in the USA, the Rethuglican/conservative/libertarian organs of culture have managed to convince most of us over the last 45 years that only "sssssocialistssss!!!" and "lib-ruls!!!" want to use tax money to maintain roads, dams, bridges, wastewater treatment plants, schools, libraries, and other instruments of the public good.

So our carefully cultivated aversion to collectively contributing to the public good means that our infrastructure of the public good is falling apart. Moreover, we can't even seem to find the political will to pay down our national debt by requiring the rich people who call themselves Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. (By the way, the interest on the U.S. Federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. And this does not even take into account the debt of U.S states, counties, and municipalities.)  Yet Donald Trump wants a $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon in FY 2027. (See also "The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal," Responsible Statecraft, January 2026.) And Trump is not the only fool who wants to use a nation's declining stock of resources in order to build up one last expression of hard power.  There are other nations with declining birthrates, a depleting resource base and increasing government debt who also want to project hard power on the global stage of the 21st century. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It's looking more and more like the burly thick guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post has successfully addled the wits of an increasing number of national leaders by bashing them upside the head with his huge sword.