Farewell to YouTube

I find myself once again in a somewhat familiar position this week.  Over the years, I have been exposed to things that tasted or felt so good that partaking of them quickly became a habit.  However, as time passed, I began to notice that the things which had become habits had some unavoidable downsides - downsides which eventually became too great to ignore.  Thus it was that I was forced eventually and reluctantly to give them up.  Examples include television, sugary sweets, coffee (except in small doses) and talk radio.

This week, YouTube joins that list.  This has been a long time coming.  I have tuned in to YouTube primarily to hear and watch a number of insanely awesome fingerstyle guitar players.  But during the last year - a very traumatic year! - it seemed to me that YouTube's algorithms were deliberately seeking to amplify trauma by showing links to politically provocative videos in their "Recommended For You" sidebar.  I have no idea why these videos were "recommended for me" especially when I think of how most of them were either racist, right-wing, or linked to conspiracy theories.  Perhaps the people at Google thought that by showing me things that are offensive, threatening, terrorizing and outrageous, they could get more pageviews, and hence, earn more advertising revenue.

They were wrong.

The final straw for me has come in learning that YouTube is dragging its feet in removing Donald Thug Trump's YouTube channel - even after the attempted violent seizure of the U.S. Congress by Trump's band of church-going thugs.  Note to these thugs: there is no "grace for your hearts."  Rather, what you can expect for yourselves is spelled out in Hebrews 10:26-31.  You body-slammed police officers; you bashed police officers in the head; you came with guns, zip-ties, rope, racist slogans and rhetoric; you planted pipe bombs; you came ready to murder.  Don't ever again try to give me Bible lessons.  You don't know what you're talking about.

And as for YouTube, I will find alternatives.  But I won't be coming back.

A Time for Celebration and a Time for Caution

It is with great satisfaction that I am enjoying some of the news this evening.  The Democratic Party has just retaken control of the United States Senate.  This was due in no small part to the groundswell of community organizing and constructive resistance in the African-American community.  This encourages me to add diligence to my own organizing plans.  I also find it bitingly funny that the African-American players in the WNBA managed to oust a team owner from the U.S. Senate.  

The news is not all good, however.  The supporters of Donald Trump - consisting mainly of white evangelicals who don't seem to read their Bibles - rioted in Washington DC to prevent the Congressional ratification of Joe Biden as the next President.  These are the people who regularly use the term "thugs" to describe unarmed people of color.  Who are the real thugs here?  Even in this, however, there is a silver lining: those who study strategic nonviolent resistance know that violence always backfires against those who choose to be violent.  As a result of the violence of the pro-Trump rioters (who were incited by Trump himself), some of the Republican members of Congress who had intended to object to Biden's ratification have chosen instead to support him.  Even Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have turned against Trump.  Trump has become a lame duck in every sense of the word, as it was Vice President Pence who coordinated with the military to call National Guard troops to stop the rioting.  Clearly Trump is no longer counted among the adults in the room.

For you who are among the marginalized and oppressed, continue to organize constructive resistance!  Continue to remain nonviolent.  Continue to speak truth to power.  Support those even among the Republicans who are finally beginning to speak truth.

One last thing.  I believe it is time for those of us who desire to be decent people to organize a permanent boycott of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and possibly YouTube as well.  The role of these social media platforms in facilitating the kind of chaos that has characterized the Trump years is undeniable.  The boycott should therefore last until the owners of these platforms are bankrupt.

An Open Letter to the Black Lives Matter Organizers

I am writing as an African-American who really wants us to win our struggle for liberation and who really wants us to succeed in removing Donald Trump from office.  But I am afraid that events that took place yesterday in Seattle may make it more likely that we will lose.  This is why I am writing today.

You know, I am sure, that the world is watching the ongoing protests against the murders of unarmed Black Americans in this country and in Portland.  These protests fall within a certain category of tactics of nonviolent resistance.  (By the way, when I talk about strategic nonviolent resistance, I am not talking about Martin Luther King!  Rather, I mean what Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution is talking about in her TED video.)  In the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, nonviolent resistance actions can take two forms: tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  Tactics of concentration include mass rallies and street protests.  One problem with street rallies is that they can be hijacked by agents of the State who incite violence (including property destruction) in order to discredit the protesters by claiming that they are anarchists.  Thankfully, that narrative had begun to shift because of the Wall of Moms in Portland (joined lately by the Wall of Dads and the Wall of Vets).

But in Seattle yesterday, violent infiltrators disrupted what should have been a peaceful protest and instead provided the world with images that play right into the hands of Donald Trump.  Those images make us look like criminals and undermine our attempts to discredit the system that is oppressing us.  Note also that the NAACP has commented on how what started as a Black expression of struggle against White oppression has been dangerously hijacked.  The protests are no longer really about Black lives, but about attention-seeking White people.  As I said above, I support the Wall of Moms - especially because they have put themselves at the service of their Black and Brown neighbors.  But I agree 100 percent with the NAACP condemnation of the anarchists and other agitators.

Therefore, I am begging you as a fellow African-American to shift your resistance to tactics of dispersion.  I'd also like to ask that you please stop holding mass rallies and protests unless you create a system to make sure that everyone who shows up will remain nonviolent.  This applies especially to White people who show up at a protest, because most of the violence (including property destruction!) that has been perpetrated at protests over the last two months was done by White people.  If you want to see why nonviolent discipline is so important, please watch this video by Professor Erica Chenoweth (and this one also).

I would also ask that you all study not only the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, but that you also study the literature on effective community organizing.  This falls right in line with what the family of George Floyd asked of us all in the aftermath of his murder by the police.  Note that George Floyd's brother condemned the violence that had erupted even in the early days of the protests over George Floyd's murder, and he demanded that those who want to see changes happen work in a positive manner to make those changes happen. 

I have not suffered like George Floyd's family (or Tamir Rice's family, or Michael Brown's family, or Stephon Clark's family, or Breonna Taylor's family).  But as a kid I was exposed to a lot of intense racist physical bullying.  I went to White churches where the racism was more subtle, yet just as damaging.  I've been followed by police and even stopped by police simply because I am Black.  I've suffered workplace harassment.  To me, it seems that Donald Trump wants to bring back an America in which it's okay for white supremacy to treat us all like trash.  Trump has been losing this year because of his incompetence.  But if he wants to try to rescue his reelection by picturing himself as a law-and-order president protecting the world from chaos, why do you want to hand him situations where he can "prove" his claims?  I don't want to suffer another four years of his garbage.  Do you?

And if you are White and you are reading this, please stop showing up to BLM protests unless you know that you can control yourself and not vandalize property or provoke law enforcement officers by stupid stunts like throwing firecrackers or other objects at police.  You're not the heroes you seem to think you are when you pull such stunts.

Thanks to all who take the time to read this.

The History of the Suffragettes - Further Proof Of What the ICNC Has Lost

The International Center On Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) has recently tried to advise those protesting the brutal racism against people of color in the United States, and specifically those protesting the murders of unarmed African-Americans.  As I have written previously, I used to be a supporter of the ICNC and greatly enjoyed reading its offerings, as I thought that the ICNC presented an excellent education in strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of neutralizing an oppressor's power.

But during the last several months I became concerned by the appearance of writers and "teachers" attached to the ICNC who suggested that low-level violence (including property destruction!) could help a nonviolent movement succeed faster with better outcomes than strictly nonviolent resistance.  Because of my previous readings on the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance and my understanding that autocrats and oppressors frequently try to inject violence into a nonviolent movement in order to undermine it, I could only conclude that the ICNC had been infiltrated by a person or persons working for Trump, Putin, or the regimes they represent.  One example of my concern lies in the article written by Professor Tom Hastings in which he lays out his opinion of "when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign," as well as his own story of how he was arrested three times for destroying military property.  From his article it is obvious that Mr. Hastings believes that there are times when property destruction is both justified and helpful to a movement.

The only thing is, Mr. Hastings is dead wrong.  And the experience of the suffragette movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Britain and the United States proves it.  According to a 2015 analysis by George Lakey, the British suffragette movement achieved much less than the American movement, and it did so even though it started earlier and many more women were involved.  Why?  Because the American women who agitated for the right of women to vote did so using entirely nonviolent acts, whereas in Britain (oh, such a staid and proper society!), women resorted to arson, blowing up post offices, and smashing windows.  That's why, by 1920, while waging a nonviolent campaign that ran all the way through World War 1, the American suffragettes won equal access to the ballot box, while in Britain (where the women were forced to suspend their campaign during the war), by 1918 only women who were over 30 and owned property were granted the right to vote, even though they had begun their campaign five years before the American suffragettes.  It wasn't until 1928 that British women gained fully equal access to the ballot box - eight years after this victory was won in the United States.  Lakey asks what slowed the British women down, and the answer is that they undermined themselves and their movement by engaging in property destruction.

Mr. Hastings should maybe read the article by George Lakey.  Or he might read the essay by Jack DuVall (formerly of the ICNC) which criticized the property destruction instigated by some supposed "anti-fascists" in the early days of the Trump administration.  That violence played directly into the hands of Trump.

Thankfully, the protesters now facing down Federal troops in Portland do not seem to be listening to Tom Hastings.

(God bless the Wall of Moms!  Now that shows innovation in tactics of protest!  Compare what they are doing with what the Mothers of the Disappeared did to the Argentine military regime before it fell.  They also did it to the Pinochet regime in Chile. And note: the Wall of Moms is spreading to other cities.  How can Chump - er, I mean, Trump - call these women thugs?!)

As long as these protesters continue to remain nonviolent in the face of Federal violence perpetrated against them, they will continue to show the world that the real thug and violent actor is the one and only Donald J. Trump.

The Go To Jail Truth

My worldview during the last five years has been based on the following premises:

1. That the universe which we all inhabit is a moral universe ruled by the moral standard of a righteous Creator;
2. That an essential pillar of that moral standard is the duty of each human being to treat his or her fellow human beings with dignity and charity;
3. That the Creator of the universe stands ready to enforce His righteous moral standard by imposing consequences on those who break that standard;
4. And that since the most privileged members of the United States have broken that moral standard in making themselves great by murdering and oppressing their fellow human beings, the consequences of this moral breach have begun to spread throughout American society.  I have called these consequences the outworkings of damnation. 

The theoretical basis and starting point for my worldview (and especially of point #4 of that worldview) is found in passages such as Proverbs 22:22-23; Jeremiah 7:9-10; Ezekiel 18:4; Ezekiel 22; and James 5:1-6.  Now when a worldview first comes into being, it is nothing more than a hypothesis.  In order for the worldview to become mature, it must be tested by observation.  Therefore, in order for me to be able to confidently assert the worldview I have laid out above, I must be able to point to destructive or damaging consequences which threaten the privileged and which are the direct result of the dirty tricks used by the privileged to gain and keep their privilege.

But what is interesting is that in searching for the evidences of the outworkings of damnation among the privileged, the searcher encounters various flavors and levels of "truth".  The particular flavor of truth which the searcher encounters will depend on whom he asks for that "truth".  If he or she asks the holders of power and privilege, the answer contained in their words will be very different from the answer which might be obtained by planting hidden cameras, listening devices and skillful spies to observe the affairs of the holders of privilege and power.   This is not surprising, since the wealth of the privileged consists not only in the actual physical assets which they have, but in the image of wealth and power which they are able to project to the world.  In fact, if a person's image is strong enough, he can get a lot of what he needs or wants based on image alone - whether it's obtaining a huge line of credit because he looks like he is rich enough to repay his loan, or whether it's successfully intimidating someone else because the bully has made himself look too powerful to resist.  We might call this projection of an idealized image "managed truth."  (Kind of like "managed democracy", isn't it?)

Last week, the United States was treated to an example of this "managed truth" in the latest employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Trump administration celebrated this report by shouting that the American economy is "coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible" in the face of the coronavirus pandemic because 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy between mid-May and mid-June.  However, as a number of sources have reported (see this, this, and this for instance), this supposed recovery does not reflect the state of the economy as it is today.  For these jobs were added during the hasty and ill-conceived rush by many states to reopen their economies, and those states are being forced now to backtrack their reopenings due to an explosion of COVID-19 cases.  Moreover, the vast majority of jobs that were added are in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors - sectors which are most likely to be shut down again due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some actual figures from the BLS are given below:

• Hospitality and Leisure - 2.1 million jobs added
• Food Service and Drinking Places (bars) - 1.5 million jobs added
• Amusements, Gambling and Recreation - 353,000 jobs added
• Retail Trade - 740,000 jobs added.

That adds up to a total of 4.69 million out of the 4.8 million jobs that were added.  It should be noted that the resurgence of the pandemic threatens all of the job gains in these classes which I have listed.  Not only this, but the last two BLS jobs reports have contained a "misclassification error" which falsely lowered the reported unemployment rate.

So if seekers for the truth of things - especially those who wish to accurately track the outworkings of damnation - cannot rely on official statements from those who are experiencing that damnation, where can they turn?  One possible source of truth is the official reports and communications which the most privileged members of society share with each other, for it is these reports which are most frequently used as the basis for the decisions made by these privileged members.  Petroleum geologist Arthur E. Berman once referred to these reports as "the go to jail truth".  Why refer to these as the "go to jail truth"?  Because if the captains of certain industries lie to each other (or to government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the actual state of their industries and market sectors, a whole lot of people stand to lose great big money - thus (hopefully) obliging the liars to go to jail.  The threat of jail time is usually enough to keep most people honest in their official reporting.

But what if the most privileged members of society have corrupted themselves to such a point that they will stop at nothing in order to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?  For evil is progressive.  The first step is to disregard moral restraints against taking advantage of one's fellow human beings.  The last step is to disregard even the physical or financial realities of one's situation in the desire to be godlike.  Along the way, people who have thus given themselves to evil stop telling even the "go to jail truth", and the organizations, businesses and polities headed by them enter the realm of willful blindness.  Last week the State of Texas entered this realm, as a state which rushed the reopening of its economy and which is now facing the overwhelming of its medical system due to COVID-19 cases that have spiraled out of control.  But if you want to find out how much the Texas medical system has become overwhelmed, good luck asking the State government.  They won't tell you.

According to Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, organizations and polities operating under willful blindness have certain characteristics.  First, most of the lower level inhabitants or employees know that something smells rotten.  Second, many of them can actually see some of the skeletons in closets and/or dead bodies under beds.  Third, the higher-ups in these organizations and polities will have created an environment that is hostile to truth-tellers.  Fourth, such organizations and polities tend to break down rather suddenly and dramatically in a way that surprises the outside world even though the lower level people on the inside could see the breakdown a long time in coming.  The collapse of Enron is a good case in point.

How can seekers of truth track the outworkings of damnation through organizations or polities which have entered the phase of willful blindness?  Ms. Heffernan gives us some suggestions on pages 237 and 238 of her book.  First, we need to have a sense of history - especially the history of the collapse of dysfunctional organizations.  By studying the collapse of a multitude of types of organizations along with a multitude of types of organizational dysfunction, we can get a sense of the general trends along which the outworkings of damnation are likely to propagate.  Once we recognize these trends, we watch the dysfunctional organization to see if we can spot the "weak signals" which indicate a trend.  Where the weak signals accumulate, a trend is likely emerging.  It was attention to these weak signals that enabled a CIA analyst named Herb Meyer to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union several years before it happened.

And this bears thinking about a bit more deeply.  For I'd like to suggest that Putin's Russia may be headed for a second collapse.  As someone living in America, I have focused largely on trying to track the outworkings of damnation in American society - yet the United States is by no means the only nation which is worthy of damnation.  Russia has proven itself over the years to be at least the equal of the U.S. when it comes to national narcissism and the desire to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  (See this, this, this, this, and this for instance.)  Putin's use of dirty tricks (such as election-tampering, promotion of far-Right/racist/skinhead organizations, assassinations, and now bounties) to make Russia great by tearing down the West have also been well-documented over the years.  Indeed, when one reads M. Scott Peck's description of malignant narcissism in his book People of the Lie, one can't help but think of Russia under Putin.  To quote Peck, "As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness."  When observing Russia, therefore, some weak signals to watch out for include watching what happens to truth tellers in Russia who reveal Russia's imperfections.  Another (not-so-weak) signal is the Russian attempt to meddle in other people's lives in order to destroy them. (He who spends all his time minding other people's business doesn't have time to mind his own!)  A third weak signal is seeing how frantic the Russians (and their mouthpieces in the West) become when the fig leaves sewn by Russia to cover its shame slip in the least bit to expose some raw flesh.  Watch the weak signals.

The Scapegoating of the Named Patient

Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").

As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.

The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.

Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.

Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.

Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."

So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.

The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction.  Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted.  And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?

These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility.  We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction.  But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him.  Blame yourself also.

Playing With Matches In A Paper House

Today, 28 March 2020, as I write this, the United States of America has for the last few days been the world leader in confirmed coronavirus cases.  What's worse is that even though the number of confirmed cases has climbed to over 116,000, the growth rate continues to be exponential, as seen here.  The site captured in the last link also shows that the COVID-19 death rate continues to climb exponentially.  In light of these events, I thought it might be helpful to provide a short list of things we now know about the course of coronavirus infection in humans.

• We now know that of all people who become infected with COVID-19, approximately 80 to 81 percent will develop mild illness and fully recover.  However, 19 to 20 percent will develop severe disease, with five percent developing "critical disease" according to this source.

• We also know that while early reports stated that young people were significantly less likely to develop severe disease than older people, later data has shown that young people are still at significant risk of developing severe disease.  This source reports that nearly 40 percent of those hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 were under 55 years old.  The majority of hospitalizations in New York are for people under 50 years old.  And there are sources such as this which present the personal stories of strong, accomplished young athletes who have been seriously sickened by COVID-19.

• We know that the death rate as a percentage of total cases of COVID-19 has been climbing in the United States.  When the first outbreaks occurred, the U.S. death rate was from 1 to 1.5 percent.  However, the latest percentage for New York City is approximately 1.7 percent.  (Click this link and then do the math.)  What happens when the health care systems of the various states are overwhelmed is another matter.  Consider, for instance, what would happen to the 19-to-20 percent of an infected population who develop severe disease, yet who don't have access to health care because their health care systems have been overwhelmed.  Then the U.S. death rate might almost certainly exceed 5 percent, and might even go as high as 10 percent.

We also know a few things about Donald Trump, the terrible titular leader of the United States in these terrible times.  We know that Trump had access to an Obama-era disease management playbook written by the National Security Council as a sort of "lessons-learned" document describing how the Obama administration successfully managed the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015.  We also know that Trump disregarded it.  And we know that Trump was warned by intelligence analysts in January 2020 of the potential severity and impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  He chose to ignore and downplay those warnings.

As I look at the ways in which Trump and his cohort have tried to spin this crisis, I have found myself asking questions, such as, what drives Trump?  What are his strategic motivations?  What is his long-term thinking?  (Sometimes I ask these same questions about either one of my two cats as I see them staring off into space.  But they are cool and not sinister, whereas Trump is evil.)

To the extent that he thinks at all, Trump seeks to rebuild White "great power" autarky as it existed over 100 years ago.  However, it was never really "autarky", was it?  What really happened was that the great colonial powers, after they had exhausted their own resource base, sought to keep themselves great by stealing the bodies, lands, and stuff of all the other peoples on earth, laying claim that "this piece of land which we 'discovered', along with its people, now belongs to this particular Northern nation."  This has been the motivation behind American military and economic interventions under Trump, as well as his thwarted desire to build a wall to keep the nonwhite nations of the earth from coming to the United States in search of that which was stolen from them.  But it has also been the motivation behind the efforts of the United States and Russia to neutralize and destroy any independent power centers that are not European or Slavic.  Hence, Trump has sought to "weaponize" the coronavirus in a soft-power sense by calling it "the Wuhan virus" or "the Chinese virus" in his bid to demonize and other-ize people of Asian descent.  Unfortunately, there are knuckleheads in the United States who have followed his lead and perpetrated recent hate crimes against Asian-Americans.  But this response is typical of the narcissism which says, "If there's any imperfection among us, it can't possibly be with me!  It must belong to someone else!"  Such a response is not helpful, because it ignores the fact that white people can transmit the coronavirus just as easily as anyone else.  Consider Boris Johnson, Rand Paul, and the flocks of high school and college students who went to beaches in Florida on spring break, got infected by each other, and brought the COVID-19 infection back to their fellows at their home campuses.

But while we can acknowledge the possibility that Trump "thinks" in some sense, it is also true that he "feels" - that is, certain situations produce in him strong visceral reactions.  As a narcissist, therefore, he cannot handle having to deal with predicaments that are beyond his control, predicaments which require a collective response shaped by many diverse points of view, a response that patiently takes a long view, a response that acknowledges that there are no quick fixes, a response that is humble and open in the face of difficulty.  The current COVID-19 outbreak is just such a difficulty, and Trump has acted like a fish out of water in the face of it.  Thus he has tried desperately to spin this crisis into something where he can be seen as decisively in charge, the leader of the cavalry coming over the hill with a promised quick fix.  This is what is behind the gaggle of questionable "medical experts" seen on Fox News who have backed Trump's assertions that the coronavirus was no worse than the "seasonal flu" or who have pushed questionable remedies such as chloroquine as a cure.

(Trump's obsession with chloroquine deserves special mention.  The only reason he heard about the drug at all in connection with COVID-19 is because of a certain French microbiologist with sketchy credentials and practices, who contacted Fox News and told them that he had successfully treated COVID-19 infected patients with the drug.  Note that chloroquine has never been used as an antiviral drug.  Note also that the Chinese government ran a study of their own which showed that chloroquine had no effect on the course of COVID-19 in patients.  Lastly, it should be mentioned that at least one person has died from trying to self-medicate using a form of chloroquine found in fish tank cleaner.)

And now, Trump has already long since tired of trying to act "presidential" in the face of a crisis which does not offer quick fixes.  (He and his friends are also tired of losing money to a crisis which they let get out of hand.)  Hence, he wants the United States to return to being "open for business" by Easter, with no restrictions on travel or gatherings (or, most importantly, shopping!).  That brings up some interesting possibilities.  Right now, his approval rating is hovering around 50 percent.  Say that represents 150 million Americans.  Say that they also do what he says and return to "life as normal" starting on Easter.  This means abandoning social distancing and self-isolation.  Say also that 70 percent of these people wind up becoming infected with COVID-19.  That would equate to 105 million people.  To make the numbers easier to deal with, let's say 100 million.  Out of these 100 million, 20 million will get sick enough to require hospitalization.  But long before we reach the 20 million mark, the health care systems throughout much of the United States will be overwhelmed.  That means that between 5 and 10 million could die.

The COVID-19 outbreak will cause an inevitable contraction of the American economy.  If the people of the United States do the right thing and continue to aggressively self-quarantine and self-isolate, the only thing we will lose is money - and we will be taking the shortest route to recovery in the process.  If we try to push our re-opening too soon, our economy will contract for another reason - the economic and social disruption that results from millions of us dying.  In seeking to re-open the country for business by Easter, Trump is playing with matches in a paper house.

Of Houses, Storms, Sand and Bedrock

Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.

- Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible

The words of the Scripture quoted above came to me this week as I pondered the progress of recent events worldwide and nationally.  The quoted parable defines wisdom quite specifically - namely as the willingness to do the things commanded by Jesus.  But it also points out a couple of other facts, namely, that everyone is building something, and that storms come from time to time to test every person's work.  If a person's house gets knocked down by the storm, he can't blame it solely on the storm - he must also admit admit that he was a stupid builder.

Thus the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed as a storm of a certain kind, and the leaders of nations might be viewed as those whose house-building is being tested.  In particular, two kinds of leaders are being tested:

• those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
• and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.

In the latter group we can put all of the politicians of the global far right who have become heads of state within the last four years, as well as their chief enabler, a certain Vladimir Putin.  The interesting thing about these people is that they were able to raise a base of certain members of the common people to back them by convincing them that narcissism, greed and selfishness are good things and that by these things they would make their countries (and their base) great again.  This then has been the character of the metaphorical "houses" they have built.

The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses".  Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth.  Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis.  And lastly, consider the response of China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine.  As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China.  Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as one long, continuous fumble.  As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office.  And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.

Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons.  ("God save the Queen," you say?!  How about "God help Britain!"  With friends like these, who needs enemies?)  Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach.  According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths.  Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible.  They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly.  There also seems to be a sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases.  Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.

But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm.  It's individuals and families as well.  I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character.  Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds.  And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding.  It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on.  And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared.  The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow.  Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon.  Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding.  People can be such...people...sometimes...  Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices?  How is your house holding up in all this rain?

No Room At The Realtor's

I am increasingly trying to live a disconnected life - as, in, disconnected from digital media.  It's one of my ways of coping with a world ruled by very bad actors who want to make very bad news.  (Another coping mechanism of mine is to work to create collective expressions of good news via collective constructive organic work.  But I digress.)

This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness.  It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family.  If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates.  Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way.  So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.

This piqued my interest for a number of reasons.  First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy.  Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy.  (NASDAQ sets new records!  Dow sets new records!  Unemployment below 4 percent!)  Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture,  One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.

Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing.  His outrage is therefore hypocritical.

It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society.  I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:

• Homelessness has been a feature of American society since the 1870's, and has been closely linked to two phenomena: the enforcement of the cultural notion that the only respectable living arrangement is for people to own their own homes (thus eliminating shared housing, boarders, and other "non-standard" arrangements), combined with the increasing expense of achieving this ideal.  (Source: "Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities", A. R. Veness, 1991)
• Homelessness was a surprisingly strong feature of the "Roaring Twenties", which has been widely taught to children by historiographers as being a time of rising prosperity for the majority of Americans.  In reality, it was anything but.  (Source: "Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920's and Today," B. Payne, 2013)
• During the 1920's, more than 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.  (Source: BBC GSCE CCEA, Retrieved 27 December 2019)

I want to focus particularly on the first bullet point.  Home ownership in the United States has long been touted as a big step toward respectability, as it is a key component of being able to live a completely individualized life, un-beholden to any responsibility for the collective of which the individual is but a part.  But home ownership has become rapidly unaffordable because the rate of inflation of home prices has far outpaced the rate of increase of most workers' wages for at least two decades.  Housing is an obvious example of the damage that results when oligarchs blow aspirational bubbles.  Post-secondary education is another.

Two further observations.  First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil.  We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia.  If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis.  See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated.  One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.

Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized."  But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties.  Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich.  It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion.  The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle.  And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized."  A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.

The On-Line Airing of National Dirty Laundry

To those who may have missed blog posts from me over the last several months, I offer my apologies.  There are things in realspace which have demanded my attention, and there are only 168 hours in any given week...

But I thought I'd post a few links to information that reveals the extent to which mainstream American culture has become blatantly evil.  First, the Fullerton Observer has kindly rendered a good public service in posting summaries of the key findings of the Mueller Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In the 2016 Presidential Election.  At the end of their final summary, they have also kindly provided a link to audio recordings of a reading of the entire report.  This means that anyone who wants to know what the report says can get it all straight from the horse's mouth - even if they don't have time to read it all.

Secondly, there are a number of new reports exposing the hypocrisy of the white American evangelical/Protestant Church, which continues to staunchly support the presidency of Donald Trump.  Here's a small sample:

• New Study Exposes Hypocrisy of the Religious Right
• "Someone's Gotta Tell the Freakin' Truth": Jerry Falwell's Aides Break Their Silence
• Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World.  Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister.
• Haggard's Law  (Note: in posting this link, let me emphasize that I am a Bible-believing Christian.  However, I object to using "God-talk" to try to gain political leverage to elect candidates to office who use the power of the State to murder dark-skinned people - or to rip the children of these dark-skinned people out of the arms of their parents in order to throw the children into cages - er, I mean, "detention centers.") (A second note: Vladimir Putin may himself be a case of Haggard's Law in action.  Several years ago, during a photo op with Russian citizens, he lifted the t-shirt of a pre-adolescent boy and kissed the boy on his stomach.  You can watch it here.  Recently that boy, who is now a man, stated that he liked the kiss, but if you look at the linked photo, the boy seems to be surprised and slightly revolted.  Maybe he decided that he liked saying he liked it more than he liked the possibility that he would be forced to drink a polonium cocktail!  Putin as Катехон?  Ha, ha!)

Revelations such as these should arouse the kind of moral outrage that should sweep evildoers from power - except that the supporters of these evildoers no longer care about truth or justice or anything else except the naked exercise of power over their fellow human beings.  They have always been like this, but for a few decades between the 1960's and now, they were wolves in badly-done sheep disguise.  At least now they're being straight-up about being wolves.  And no, I don't expect them to listen to the Mueller Report.

One side note: remember all the supposed "terrorist" incidents involving so-called "Arab extremists" in Europe and the United States during the last decade?  These incidents had the convenient effect of turning public sentiment in Europe and the United States against immigrants - especially dark-skinned or non-Christian immigrants.  Many of us wondered at the time who could be behind these attacks, because we considered them to be false flags.  Having examined Russian propaganda over the last few years, I've come to a certain conclusion - a conclusion informed by the fact that Russia actively sought to build a network of regimes in the world's richest countries that worked to exclude the world's dark-skinned and/or non-Christian peoples from the wealth of these nations.  Russia has also become well-known for "hybrid warfare."  You draw your own conclusions...

Puerto Rico - A Humanitarian Disaster

The Federal response to the hurricane which recently devastated Puerto Rico is not unexpected.  Indeed, it is symptomatic of the disease of a large swath of American society - a swath who are full of empathy toward those victims of Hurricane Harvey who happened to be wealthy and white - yet full of sleepy neglect or overt hostility toward everyone else.  Now that sleepy neglect has hypnotized many Americans (but not a majority, thank God!), lost as they are in their individualism and addicted to their consumerism, while the overt hostility issues forth sporadically from the current President like projectile emesis from an infant who has been burped too vigorously.  Note, though, that the hostility is provoked only when someone manages to break through the President's own sleepy indifference and his perverted preoccupation with himself.  Then, if you are that someone, watch yourself, lest you get yourself spewed on.

Meanwhile, a lot of people in Puerto Rico are about to die.  This is not because there are no Federal resources available to help them, but because the Federal government is now run by a bunch of rich and incompetent pigs.  Decent people who have the means to find out the actual situation on the island (and not the sanitized FEMA version) should be appalled.  Those evangelicals who supported (and continue to support) the President should take a look at the last half of Luke 16 before they go to bed tonight.

But let's not stop with just being appalled.  Let us do what we can ourselves to contribute to disaster relief in Puerto Rico.   The President, like an alcoholic absentee father, has made himself unavailable to provide for the common good.  Here is a link to a page listing organizations to which you can make a donation for the relief of the suffering of the people of Puerto Rico.

The Emotive Effects of Saturday Night Wrestling, Part 2

If Donald Trump had hoped for some long-lasting boost to his approval ratings from last week's missile strike against a mostly abandoned Syrian airbase, he has another think coming.  The official narrative about the missile strikes and the supposed new animosity between Trump and Putin is unraveling faster than a cheaply made sweater in the paws of a bunch of kittens stoned on crystal meth.

Here's what we now know:

• The Trump administration's warning of the impending attack gave Russian and Syrian troops plenty of time to move personnel and equipment out of the way before the attack.  The Russians and Syrians took advantage of this warning to get out of harm's way.  (But there was no protest from Russia after they had received the warning - only expressions of what appear to be feigned outrage and surprise after the attack had concluded.)
• The attack did very little damage.  (See my previous post.)
• The drama of last week's events occurred against the backdrop of mounting pressure on the Trump administration because of its ties to the Russian government.
• The Trump administration has admitted that the Trump administration never intended to hurt or displace the Assad regime, and that the U.S. remains committed to working with Russia and the Syrian government to "defeat ISIS."  (See this and this.)

What we saw last week seems to be a typical tactic when the personality-disordered center of some train wreck tries to deflect the proper placing of blame by causing drama.  Trump's version of drama seems to involve causing big explosions.

But I'm tired of analyzing his actions just now.  My next post will be on the subject of ontogeny.  Stay tuned...

No Strangers to Самовлюбленность

We humans all have a common tendency, namely, the desire to arrange our surroundings to our liking and personal tastes.  The trouble comes when two or more of us disagree over the extents of "our surroundings."  For instance, I don't have a TV in my house because I don't want a TV in my house, and I don't think people should be watching TV in my house.  However, by and large, most members of many modern societies would acknowledge that I don't have the right to dictate whether people in houses other than mine should be allowed to own or watch a TV.  Most members of such societies would say that only a sick or pathological person would strive to gain the kind of control over his neighbors that would allow him to tell them whether they could have a TV, or what kind of grass they could grow in their yards, or whether or not their kids should be allowed to ride a skateboard, or whether they could have peanut butter with their jelly.  Most such people would say that there would be only a very few justifiable reasons for any human being to be allowed to exercise that sort of control over people who were independent of him.  I can think of only two such reasons:

• That the circumstances are so extraordinary that the person who wants to exercise such control is justified in wanting that control.  For instance, you may or may not be a smoker, and if you are a smoker, you may be a proud smoker.  However, if you are next to an operating gasoline pump at a gas station owned by me, I have a perfect right to tell you not to smoke.
• That the person who wants to exercise such control is such an extraordinary person that he has an intrinsic right to arrange every aspect of the lives of us ordinary people.   He might claim to be (or who knows, he may actually be) a prophet or saint.

I am a Christian; therefore, I believe in a Deity Who has a perfect right to dictate the proper arrangement of each of our lives.  However, under the New Testament, that Deity has "limited" Himself in that He is at present asking for our voluntary obedience, rather than forcing that obedience.  One consequence of my belief is that there are many aspects of our lives for which I do not believe that any mortal man or woman has a right to force us to conform to their wishes.  The times are not extraordinary enough, nor are there any people now alive who are extraordinary enough to warrant allowing one mortal human being to force his or her wishes on every aspect of his or her neighbors' lives.  In other words, there is a barrier where my surroundings end and my neighbor's surroundings begin.

I think there are many people who would agree with me.  However, we still see that there are people in the world who think that their surroundings include all of their neighbors and all of their neighbors' business.  Some of these ambitious people eventually do rise to the level of gaining control over their neighbors and their business.  They do this often by claiming both that the times are  extraordinary enough to demand an extraordinary leader, and that they themselves are the extraordinary people who should have extraordinary powers over their neighbors' business.  Once they gain that control, they usually manage to mess up their neighbor's business like nobody's business.

Some of these people become leaders of empires.  For while there are strong economic, political or military motivations which drive people to found empires, one of the frequently overlooked motivations for empire-building is the psychic need some people have to arrange their "surroundings" to their personal liking - combined with a serious confusion of mind over the limits of those "surroundings".  The imposition of their will over as many of their neighbors as possible fulfills a psychic need in these imperialists, who usually also bolster the enjoyment of their power by a cultural imperialism - that is, the trashing and disparaging of the individual cultures, languages, customs, and personal histories of those hapless victims who become part of the empires of these imperialists.  So the subjects of these empires are taught to despise their own souls, and are taught instead to long to emulate the imperialists.

This has been the history of the Anglo-American empire, from the time when it was run strictly by the British to the time of its present leadership under the United States.  To be sure, there were economic motivations for that empire - from the vast unconquered lands of the Americas in centuries past to the mineral wealth (and free labor!) of the African continent to the petroleum deposits of the Mideast.  And the masters of the Anglo-American empire were so convinced of their own specialness that they were quite happy to go to other lands in order to murder and enslave the peoples who were the rightful inhabitants of those lands.  In order to quiet their consciences, these imperialists also waged a war against the souls of the people they conquered - a war which had its own propaganda to justify the things that were done to other peoples.

Now an empire that behaves this way soon makes itself widely known as a royal pain in the - uh, er, neck.  Thus this empire quickly begins to generate a crowd of critics.  Some of these critics choose to document as carefully as possible the evils and misdeeds of the existing empire.  Many others rise up to undermine the existing empire by civil resistance or by other means.  And some try to put themselves forward as a righteous, healthy alternative to the existing empire.  But what if, among those critics putting themselves forward as "alternatives" are people who want to start their own empire, and who are criticizing the current empire in order to eliminate the competition?

That's how certain events of the last three or so years seem to me, as I have examined the contest between the United States and Russia.  Truly there has been no shortage of reasons for criticizing the U.S. in recent years - like the 2003 pre-emptive invasion of Iraq which killed over a million Iraqis for the sake of eliminating non-existent WMD's, and the rampant and increasing income inequality in the U.S., and the continued egregious oppression and terrorizing of nonwhite U.S. citizens, and the use of threat of military force in order to maintain dollar hegemony, and the revelations of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, and the fatal tendency of the U.S. to try to bolster civil uprisings in other nations by turning them into armed struggles in order to install regimes favorable to U.S. interests.  In all the criticisms of these things, some of the loudest critical voices were coming from Russia back in 2013 and 2014.  I think especially of the pieces that aired on Russia Today which criticized killings of unarmed African-Americans by racist cops in the U.S.  It was only natural that many of us Americans began to be very sympathetic to the Russian point of view to which we were being exposed, for we thought that Russia was one of the lone agents standing for decency and humanity in the world.

But in 2015 and 2016, the Arab and North African refugee crisis was occurring, and there was a fascist, far right element in the U.S. and in Europe which was saying that these refugees should be forcibly excluded from Europe and the U.S.  Their message was, "Let them drown! Or let them freeze to death!  But do not let them come into our bastion of cultural purity and pollute it!"  And I was mildly (but not altogether) surprised to hear many Russian voices join this chorus, including those who tried to capitalize on a number of false-flag incidents designed to inflame anti-refugee sentiment in Europe.  ("Что?! Это борщ странный!")  As I perused the site to which I have linked in the previous sentence, I also discovered that the Russian central bank had been financing various far-right fascist political organizations over the years, including Marine Le Pen's National Front.  Then the 2016 election season was upon us, and I found that almost the entire Russian media establishment had come out in support of the candidacy of President Chump.  

Needless to say, this led to a great deal of cognitive dissonance in my brain as well as a bad case of indigestion.  This is also what led me to the research that resulted in my post on the occult roots of empire.  And this led to a revised view of Russia - a Russia that I now see as afflicted by a strongly racist element, a nation whose president is not the democrat he was made out to be, but who has moved in recent years to increasingly stifle voices critical of his rule.  It turns out that Russia is also a nation with its own imperial ambitions.  As Trump has his Bannon, Putin has his own fellow traveler and ideologue: a man named Aleksandr Dugin, who is the chief architect of Russian geopolitical strategy.  And Dugin seems to have his own very strong preference for how he wants the world to be arranged.  The trouble is that a lot of us who have done nothing to Dugin and just want to be left alone would suffer greatly under his proposed "arrangement."  ("Stop the Empire's War on Russia," you say?  Лицемер!)

To me, it seems that the chief propaganda weapon employed by Russia over the last few years has been a portrayal of Russia as an ideal construct, an immaculate conception, a nation of supermen ruled by a nearly omniscient ruler.  (A jiu-jitsu expert!  A master chessman!)  But behind the grandiose self projected by Russia, one can frequently find, er, contradictions - like the empty hypodermic syringes and pills that enabled certain strength athletes to cheat their way to Olympic gold medals.  This is a nation whose leaders would have us to believe that it is All That And A Bag of Chips, a nation that cannot stand the thought that the rest of the world might regard it as a collection of rather ordinary, everyday человеки. 

The truth is that behind its Potemkin Village facade is a nation that has for years suffered a crisis of youth suicides (see this and this also), a nation whose death rate has once again begun to exceed its rate of live births (see this, this and this), a nation in which over 600,000 women a year suffer domestic violence, a nation whose government is aiding and abetting the stripping of its assets by wealthy interests for personal gain, as seen in the battles of the Russian environmental movement to try to preserve national forests and parks from commercial development (see this and this).  In other words, this is a nation of ordinary, fallen people in need of a Savior, Who is quite willing to save - as long as the people in need of saving are willing to engage in open, honest dialogue, including the open confession of sins.  (Even a frank discussion with a team of decent mental health professionals would do a lot of good.)  Yet this is the very thing that the leaders of Russian society seem unwilling to do, because such a dialogue would threaten the positions, prestige and image of people who currently enjoy positions of power in that society, and would force the leaders of that society to abandon their image of perfection.  Case in point: for years, there has existed a women's rights movement in Russia which pushed for stronger legal protections for women endangered by domestic violence.  They even managed to win some seeming victories.  However, in this year, 2017, Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill drafted by the Russian Duma to de-criminalize domestic violence except in cases of injury requiring a hospital stay.  That de-criminalization was pushed by the Russian Orthodox Church, by the way.

This is the nation which in our last U.S. election set about to re-arrange the United States according to its own liking, and threatened the lives of people like me in the process.  Mr. Putin and Mr. Dugin, please get out of my living room.

The Vulnerability of Oil

During the last century, Western culture imported from Asia a number of Oriental concepts of physiology which have influenced our understanding of medicine, analgesia and hand-to-hand combat.  One of these is the concept of "pressure points."  These points, identified by Asian medical practitioners and martial artists over several hundred years, have been held to be points on a human body where the skillful application of pressure or force could produce widespread bodily effects - for good or for ill - even over organs which did not seem to have a direct connection to the point on the body where external pressure or force was being applied.  The efficacy of the use of these pressure points has been debated between Eastern and Western practitioners of medicine and martial arts, as well as the mechanisms by which such points are supposed to work.  (For an interesting take on the subject, please see this.)  Nevertheless, it can no longer be disputed that there are localized regions of the human body where the application of external pressure or force can produce dramatic effects throughout the entire body.

The body is an integrated whole made of many, many individual cells.  And in the same way, human societies function as integrated wholes made of many, many people.  It is therefore not surprising to discover that entire societies have points where the application of force or pressure can produce widespread effects for good or for ill.  Moreover, as time passes, one or more of those pressure points may become especially sensitive to pressure.

Take a society's energy supplies for instance.  (And here I am getting back to the roots of this blog.)  When those supplies of energy (or other limiting natural resources) are abundant and easy to extract, it is possible for a society's economy to grow, and for its wealthiest members to grow ever richer as long as the rate at which they increase their riches is not so great that they impoverish everyone else in the society.  But suppose the supplies of energy become scarce or the cost of extracting those supplies grows to such an extent that it becomes a significant fraction of the total amount of energy contained in the supplies that are extracted.  Then there is the possibility of significant - er, ahem, drama - depending on how dysfunctional the wealthiest members of the society are.

For instance, the holders of concentrated wealth (and hence, of economic and political power) at the top of the society might be reasonable, moral, decent people.  In that case, they might choose to inform their society of the change in conditions, and to consciously lead their society toward a healthy, righteous, realistic adaptation to the changed conditions - an adaptation which was designed to be as healthy as possible for as many people as possible.

But suppose the people at the top of this society were disturbed and dysfunctional.  Then they might try to play a zero-sum game on everyone else in their society by continuing to try to increase their wealth and power at everyone else's expense.  And they might try to cover up the root cause of their society's impoverishment by scapegoating segments of their population in order to divide the lower rungs of their population against each other.  They might also try to mislead their population into believing that there was some magical formula which could make the good times of consumption and material excess last forever.  But while they continued to waste valuable time on these maladjustments to reality, that reality would continue to take ever-bigger bites out of their daily life.  In the end, they might wind up like the Norse who tried to colonize Greenland several hundred years ago.  (For a couple of perspectives on those Norse, you can refer to this and this.)

That seems to be the society we live in right now in the U.S.  We have a President who heads a regime of asset-strippers, most of whom also are enthusiastic in their support of our President's trashing of the environment and scapegoating, stereotyping and threatening of various nonwhite ethnic groups in the U.S. and abroad while they strip the assets of an entire nation right under our noses.  And among them are voices insisting that they have a magical formula that will return us to the good times of consumerism and material excess if only we follow their formula.  Some of those voices belong to the biggest players in the market of Big Oil, who have insisted that the U.S. can achieve "energy independence" if only this nation removes all environmental restrictions that stand in the way of maximum profits for Big Oil.

But is this claim reasonable?  Even as far back as 2013, the German Energy Watch Group had stated that the worldwide peak of conventional oil production had already happened by 2008, and this agency predicted that the global peak in total petroleum liquids production would have passed by 2016.  (What they say about the picture for coal production in the U.S. is also not very comforting.)  Moreover, a curious thing has happened throughout the world, and especially in the U.S.  Because of the huge amount of debt overloading the global financial system - especially in the U.S. - the ability of increasing numbers of the population to afford high-priced petroleum products has decreased, even as the costs of extracting petroleum have risen.  Some analysts indeed say that the costs which oil companies must pay to extract oil have risen above the level at which most consumers can afford to buy the products made from oil.  One such analyst used some rather colorful language last year to describe what was happening to oil producers when oil prices were between $20 and $30 a barrel.

Now we live in a time in which oil prices have recovered to the range of $53 to $55 per barrel, due primarily to OPEC announcements of production cuts.  However, oil inventories remain very high, and U.S. production has increased, moderating the effect of OPEC cuts.  In addition, there are signs that Russia is not complying with the OPEC agreements to cut production to prop up prices.  The factors which have been causing oil producers (including nations that depend on resource extraction for their revenue) to start bleeding to death in a time of low oil prices are still present.  (See this also.)  And there are signs that the current oil price rally will not last.  The problem is that oil producers cannot meet their obligations to stockholders (for private oil companies) or citizens (for resource extraction-dependent nations), or pay down the principal and interest on their debts, or cover their extraction costs, for anything under $45 to $50 per barrel.  This is why the oil producers cannot cut their production by very much even at low prices, for production cuts mean revenue cuts for these producers.

Which leads to a bit of a problem for these producers, many of whom were instrumental in bringing about a Trump presidency.  They might despise the economic status, environmental policy, language, or skin color of a great many people in the U.S., but there is one color they do like:

Many of us who are among scapegoated groups or who are on the lower rungs of American society or who don't want our environment destroyed have pieces of paper that look like this.  We may not have as many as the asset strippers at the upper rungs of society - but they need our pieces of paper in order to prop up their claims to wealth.  We can withhold this paper if we choose, and if we are willing to do the work needed to live without certain things.  How would things be if U.S. petroleum demand were to continue to decline in 2017 - not only because of the factors listed above, but also because the people at the top of American society had made the rest of us angry enough to engage in massive economic non-cooperation?  Let's say that the majority of us traded tire rubber for shoe leather for the majority of our trips, and that we worked out our anger by striding energetically down sidewalks instead of driving.  The oil majors were among the entities who helped to transform the United States from a one person, one vote society into a one dollar, one vote society.  How much pressure could we exert on these people by taking away a few of their dollars in order to sway some of their votes?