How to Help Ukraine

It is heartening to see the outpouring of sympathy for the people of Ukraine from many of the people of the West.  However, we must beware of Russian attempts to hijack and mislead those who want to provide material support to the people of Ukraine at this time.  Yesterday, for instance, I received a spam donations request message from a sender who spoofed the email address of a law firm in northern California.  I am not a particularly trusting type nowadays, so I called the law firm in question and found out that the email message was indeed fake.

For this reason I am glad that the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has published an article listing a number of legitimate organizations to which we can donate in order to help the Ukrainian victims of Russian military aggression.  The link to that article is here.  The article also has information describing steps we can take to protect ourselves from Russian cyberattacks, particularly those that come via spam or phishing emails.

一个奇怪的案例

Note: please read yesterday's post also.

The conflict between China and the West is a conflict of centuries.  And over the last decade and a half, my sympathies have come to lie ever more with the Chinese.  However, the events of the last several weeks have forced those sympathies onto a knife edge.  For Chinese president Xi Jinping has chosen to become an ally of Russian president (and imperialist) Vladimir Putin.  In so doing, I would assert that he has begun to sell out both himself and his nation to a process of subjugation from which China managed to extricate itself only within the last seventy or eighty years.  And he has shown himself to be evil.

To understand the roots of the present conflict between China and the West (and of the sympathy for China which had until recently been growing in me), it is helpful to examine a bit of history.  And the history of European (and later, American) contact with China from the eighteenth century on has been a history of "breaking and entering", to use the lingo of cops.  That breaking and entering involved things like the use of British and American military power to force China to open its economy to trade with the West.  (This was almost exactly like the forced entry of the Japanese economy by the United States in the 1850's.)  This then led to economic, and later, military and political colonization of China.  The aftermath of breaking and entering is usually looting, and the nations of Europe, together with the United States, engaged in a long campaign of rapacious exploitation of China.  (See this and this also.) 

This breaking and entering, along with the resulting looting, was accompanied by a concerted attack on the Chinese soul.  This attack took two forms: the opium trade, and the forced entry of European and American Protestant missionaries into China.  The opium trade was the diabolical way in which Britain sought to correct the deficit it had run up in its trade for Chinese luxury goods.  European goods were not as good as Chinese goods, and the hard currency of European silver was running out, so the British substituted opium for silver, and ensnared millions of Chinese people in crippling addiction as a result.

The damage done by European and American missionaries was of a different sort.  It consisted first of a degrading and infantilizing treatment of Chinese people by the missionaries, a treatment whose source was a smug and arrogant attitude by the missionaries toward the Chinese, as captured in such statements as this:

"It may be interesting for you to know how I go about the country.  I dread laziness in the Chinese helpers.  I have already seen some of it.  If the foreigner rides, his Chinese brother will also expect to ride..." - Goforth of China, page 96.

It is only understandable that such an attitude would anger the native Chinese, for these missionaries did not come with the humility of Christ, but as part of a conquering imperial cabal, a cabal of imperious shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  When the inevitable backlash that was the Boxer Rebellion occurred, these same missionaries forced poor Chinese peasants to pay obscene reparations.  But the most galling thing was that these missionaries sought to teach the Chinese that their duty was to "submit to their earthly masters" (that is, to their European masters), even though these missionaries were citizens of nations which had never turned the other cheek or submitted to even the slightest imagined injustice without a bloody fight.

So we come to the events of the mid-20th century, in which a number of subjugated nonwhite nations were, by means nonviolent in some cases and violent in others, throwing off the yoke of their European oppressors.  At about the same time that the nonviolent Indian struggle for independence under Gandhi was coming to its climax, two leaders of armies in China were slugging it out with both foreign oppressors and with each other.  And it is important to note that neither Chiang Kai-Shek nor Mao Zedong were without a certain hostility toward the West.  Both men sought to establish a separate, self-sufficient Chinese identity.  But theirs was a duel between competing revolutions, a duel which Mao won.

One immediate result of Mao's victory was the beginning of a violent purge of historically corrupting Western influences from Chinese culture.  Thus drug users faced prison (and sometimes, death), drug dealers faced death (almost always), and missionaries faced both prison and death.  But in his drive to establish an ideologically pure expression of "revolution," Mao fell into the error described by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

"However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating 'bureaucracy' the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation."

That is, Mao's revolution became "stagnant" and "turned against the people, using the old repressive, bureaucratic State apparatus."  This was one of the factors which caused Mao's China to stagnate economically and intellectually.  

It was this stagnation which his successor Deng Xiaoping sought to reverse by gradually loosening the strictures of Maoist China to allow more independent thinking, entrepreneurship, and creativity.  The result of Deng's changes was an explosion of prosperity within China, although it was unequally distributed, as noted in Deng's expression "Let some get rich first."  Yet this explosion of prosperity led to an explosion of national economic (and hence political) power, which led to a huge increase in Chinese soft power.  A final result of Deng's reforms was the emergence of a China every bit the peer of any nation of the West - a China that had decisively freed itself from white Anglo/American/European domination.  I suggest that this is what provoked the wrath and opposition of Donald Trump against China.  And because Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, I suggest that Trump's economic aggression against China was an expression of Russian uneasiness about China's emerging power.  You see, China became the big fish that got away - a separate, non-Western, nonwhite, self-sufficient polity that could no longer be subjugated or exploited.

The loosening of strictures and the gradual encouragement of freedom in China was not without its challenges.  For there needed to be a healthy definition of freedom, and not the definition currently in fashion in the United States, where freedom means the freedom to become an addict of capitalist exploitation - that is, the freedom to become enslaved by means of one's addictions.  But the Chinese leadership was also left with a lingering insecurity about the possible effect on their people of any allegiance which might compete with unquestioned and total allegiance to the Chinese government.  This is why, for instance, opposition to Biblical Christianity (and to other religions not sponsored by the state) continues in China.

I do have a certain sympathy for that insecurity, although I also have a sharp criticism of that insecurity.  As a Christian, I am concerned by the persecution of Christians by the Chinese government over the last century - a persecution that continues to this day.  But I must also say that I perfectly understand the reasons for that persecution.  For if goons and thugs had done to me what European and American missionaries did to the Chinese people in the 19th and 20th centuries - if they had also tried to use the Bible to justify what their governments and big businesses and soldiers did - I too would be strongly tempted to reject what was being served up to me as "Christianity"!  In fact, this is what has happened to me as a Black man in my exposure to the toxicity of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church! It is a miracle that I am still a believer.  Every day I have to remind myself that all that garbage is not God's fault.

And yet as a Christian, I must confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and that I must live out my life as a statement of subjection to Him.  I must also say that I support the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.  And regardless of one's religious persuasion, I believe that everyone on earth will one day be forced to accept the fact that they are creatures made by a Creator and accountable ultimately to Him.

But the weakness of the Chinese insecurity is that the Chinese government, in its response to historical oppression, has set itself up as the god to whom its people must give their sole allegiance.  The presence of any other independent authority provokes feelings of massive insecurity among the rulers of China!

This means that the emergence of any sub-groups of self-sufficient, self-determining people among the Chinese population constitutes a threat.  Thus the presence of genuine democracy anywhere in the world, or the possibility of genuine democracy in China comprises a terrifying threat to the leadership of China.  This is why in allying China with Putin, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have shown themselves to be opposed to a world in which any independent group of democratically-organized people exists anywhere, lest awareness of such a group of democrats tempt the Chinese people to want such a free life for themselves.  For the revolution begun during the days of Mao has once again fallen into "bureaucratic" doldrums from which it has not yet been able to rescue itself.

This, then is the motivation of Xi Jinping's alliance with Vladimir Putin.  For Putin has the same desire to set himself up as a god in opposition to any other authority.  Hence, Putin has the same fear of a free society existing anywhere on earth.  Autocrats such as Putin wish to create a world in which responsible, independent self-determination is unimaginable because no examples of it can be found or seen anywhere, a world in which the only thing that can be seen is the autocracy of the autocrats.  But in allying himself with Putin to create such a world, Xi Jinping is about to discover that he has found a frenemy - or rather, that the frenemy has discovered Xi Jinping to be a chump.  And China may find itself ensnared in yet another relationship of subjugation to an earthly foreign power.   I think of recent studies that show the impact of ambivalent personal relationships on personal health.  Relationships with frenemies are a very world of ambiguity, and Putin has been known as a master of ambiguity.  I expect that Jinping's China will find itself valued only for how useful it is to Putin - while having to endure, from time to time, the dumping of narcissistic Russian ethnic hostility onto some of its citizens, as happened in 2020 during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.  China will be taken on quite a ride.  A certain tail will wag a certain dog.  And Xi Jinping may soon find himself leading quite the dog's life.

P.S.  I forgot to elaborate on the statement I made at the start of this post.  I said that my initial sympathies for China have been forced onto a knife edge by events of the past few weeks.  Let me explain a bit more.  If the government of China continues to support the government of Vladimir Putin IN ANY WAY, I will begin to BOYCOTT ALL Chinese-made goods to the maximum extent possible.  I will not do this with joy, for my sympathies toward the Chinese people remain steadfast.  It is their government, like the government of Russia, which must be resisted, as it is being run by thugs.

The Export of Misery

So...Russia has finally decided to go through with their invasion of Ukraine.  This is Russia's punishment of Ukraine for being Ukraine and not Russia - the revenge wrought by Russia for the intolerable narcissistic injury suffered by the Russians in their encounter with a people that has chosen its own separate identity.  Isn't that the way it always is with narcissists?  Their declaration is always, "You must die because you refuse to be an extension of me!"

God damn Putin's Russia.  And God damn Vladimir Putin, Alexandr Dugin, and the whole apparatus of which they are part.  God damn the Russian leadership's division of the world into zones of conquest arrogantly and presumptuously crisscrossed by Russian "red lines."

There is one silver lining in this present cloud - namely, that it has become blindingly obvious what sort of nation Russia has become and what sort of leadership it now has.  The advantage of stealth possessed by wolves successfully camouflaged in sheep's clothing disappears once the sheep costumes have been abandoned.  But there is also a danger - namely the danger that the depredation of the wolf will both continue and expand by means of a lack of moral courage of the sheep, particularly of the bellwethers, the rams of the flock.  This is what almost happened in the late 1930's when Adolf Hitler chose to play a game remarkably similar to the game now being played by Vladimir Putin.  In this re-run of that earlier game, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson's voice becomes merely a more rabid repeat of the sympathies expressed by Charles Lindbergh toward the Nazi party.  And as for the bellwethers - will the hard necessity of resistance be obfuscated by them as it was by Neville Chamberlain?  That is, will the West lull itself back to sleep with half-measures rather than facing the hard necessities - both moral and intellectual - of successful resistance, of successful defense of a separate identity that one can call one's own, of successful removal of a tyrannical threat?  In the days to come, it won't be good enough merely to say, "I tried."

A further note: many, many ordinary rank-and-file Russians have now begun to make their voices heard by standing against Putin and his narcissistic little war.  They themselves have stated boldly that they want to craft a separate identity of decency and morality for themselves.  They are rejecting the identity of "Putin's Russia."  Pray for them - many of them are now being arrested by Putin's apparatus of goons.  Speaking as I have of wolves in an earlier paragraph, I say now that Putin is expertly acting the part of a son of a dog.

The Stories Prophets Tell

My apologies to anyone who may have been disappointed by the sparseness of my recent posting.  I have come into a season in which once again, to use a favorite expression of mine, I am working like a dog.  But I thought I'd take time tonight to write a few words about something that recently came to my attention.  And I have some upcoming posts in the oven - soon, hopefully, they'll be "ready to eat."

In a previous post I mentioned that I have recently been enjoying some of the fiction of David Cornwell, who became famous under the pseudonym of John le Carre.  (le Carre gave us a kind of spy fiction that is actually palatable.  For a long time I had regarded the genre as simply about a bunch of guys in business suits trash talking each other while brandishing semiautomatic pistols.  Boring after a while...)  The most famous of his stories involve a character named George Smiley, through whom le Carre portrays the psychic cost of trying to achieve good ends by bad means.  The same theme runs through many others of le Carre's stories, particularly A Small Town In Germany.  Naturally I grew curious to learn more about Mr. le Carre, as I listened to BBC audio dramatizations of these stories, and later, as I watched the BBC video dramatizations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  What I discovered about le Carre was both intriguing and deeply refreshing - especially his political perspective.

For in describing the outcome of the Cold War, le Carre has often said that "the right side lost, but the wrong side won."  By this he means that the totalitarianism and autocracy of the Soviet Empire had to fall apart.  But in the West, there was nothing to replace it - no grand humanitarian vision that could have elevated all the peoples of the earth.  The West certainly offered nothing that could fill the vacuum left in Russia by the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Thus what happened was a shift from hyper-socialist economic and political control into hyper-capitalism.  Russia became an illustration of the Scripture which says, "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and does not find it.  Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.  Then it goes, and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first..."  For the best-positioned members of the Russian ruling class became the oligarchs and kleptocrats of the new order, and Putin became the chief kleptocrat.

Thus the ruling elite of Russia became very much like the wealthiest and most powerful denizens of the West - especially the wealthiest and most powerful Americans.  For the United States had long been in the process of losing its soul.  And so we come to an interview of Mr. le Carre which was conducted for the Fresh Air show on NPR in 2017.  In that interview, John le Carre said the following:

"Let's look, first of all, at the operation influence, if you like, and how that's exerted, what we suspect the Russians are doing, not only in the United States, what they did in Britain for the referendum, maybe in Britain for the election. They certainly interfered in Macron's election in France. So who are these forces? And what is really spooky, I think, and profoundly disturbing is they come from the West as well as the East - that there are oligarchs in the West who are so far to the right that they make a kind of natural cause with those on the other side of the world. Both of them have in common a great contempt for the ordinary conduct of democracy.

"They want to diminish it. They see it as their enemy. They see - they've made a dirty word of liberalism - one of the most inviting words in politics. They've - and so they're closing in on the same target from different points of view..." [Emphasis added]

Note le Carre's assertion - that the oligarchs of both the East and the West have begun to come together in common cause to destroy freedom throughout the world.   This was blindingly obvious during the reign of Donald Trump.  It has become even more blindingly obvious within the last two months.  For Fox News attack dog/talking head Tucker Carlson has boldly spoken in support of Vladimir Putin and against the independent sovereignty of Ukraine.  And a number of Republican politicians - who were historically well-known for their anti-communist and anti-Soviet stands - have suddenly gone quite soft (if not actually silent) on the crisis of Russian aggression against Ukraine and against the West. 

This has some rather interesting implications.  I would suspect that pro-Putin sentiment is quite high just now among many members of far-Right or white supremacist groups in the United States, as pro-Putin spokespersons managed to make significant headway among many white American evangelicals before and during the reign of Donald Trump.  These people should perhaps learn a lesson from the experiences of the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who got what they were asking for in 2015, and have had to live with the consequences ever since.  Their initial support for Putin has soured, as they have discovered that Putin has not led them to the Promised Land.  They have discovered instead that they have been enslaved by means of sophistry.  (Isn't that frequently how slavery begins?)  The supporters of Putin in the United States will find the same experience waiting for them in due time.  For "the wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands."

But a more interesting complication awaits those who support this unholy joining of oligarchs.  For China and Russia have published a joint statement of intent to remake the world according to an image of their liking.  And that will very soon pose problems for those rank-and-file working-class rubes in the United States who hitched their wagon to the the Republican Party, to Donald Trump, and to the Global Far Right.  Under Trump, they were taught to hate China.  But under the coalescing leadership of the emerging league of global oligarchs, they will be forced to love China - not the rank-and-file people of China, mind you, but the autocratic leadership of China.  That is bound to induce some serious whiplash in the souls of many white supremacists and racists in the United States.  Ambulances should be standing by.

Putin's Trojan Horses

I have been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings for a while now.  I like her style and her clear-headedness regarding current events and the hucksters who drive many of these events.  She has done admirable work tracking the shenanigans of the right-wing/white supremacist doofuses who have infected not only the United States but the entire Global North as well.  Her latest post describes the increasingly violent threat posed by these idiots against decent people everywhere.  

I thought it good to add a reminder that the source, the main engine and the leadership of many far-Right/white supremacist organizations nowadays is Russia.  I suggest that the reason for the recent uptick in trouble from these groups is tied closely to the fact that Putin is no longer winning his geopolitical games, and wishes to expand his use of hybrid warfare in his assault against the West.  As I mentioned in my last post, Putin's Russia is now good for nothing.

What We All Are Getting From Your Tax Rubles

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of pride as the deadliest of the sins.  And he notes how proud, arrogant people tend to turn off everyone they encounter.  As he puts it, "I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals.  There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else' and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit..."  I must confess that I myself am guilty of pride, and so I must temper my tendency to condemn pride when I see it in others.  And yet when I encounter those people whose pride - whose narcissism (both personal and national) - moves them to try to turn the world into their own special possession, I do tend to regard as guilt-free pleasure the eventual humiliation of such people.  So we come once again to Russia.

At the time of this writing, Ukraine still exists as a sovereign non-Russian country.  And the events of the last several weeks have shown that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not quite the chessmaster he had made himself out to be.  In fact, he has stumbled rather badly.  Now in the West, many of us have been brought up to believe that the governments of nations exist for the purpose of providing for the common good of their citizens, and that this purpose is the reason why citizens pay taxes.  So I thought it good to enumerate for you who are of the Russian people the things you are getting for your tax rubles.

First, you all know - just from looking around yourselves in day-to-day life - how things are going for you.  I too have some idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  What those sources tell me is that things are not going well for you who are citizens of Russia.  There is the botched response to COVID-19, there is the staggering wealth inequality, the surge in death rates across all regions in Russia, and the death of the Russian middle class.  There have also been awesome ecological disasters, such as the huge wildfires of 2019, 2020 and 2021.  I fully expect that this year, 2022, will see outbreaks of wildfires whose size and extent of damage will dwarf the damage done by the previous years' fires.  I also fully expect your government to do nothing to address these wildfires or any of the other crises I have mentioned.

So then, what exactly are your tax rubles buying?  Perhaps not for you, but for the rest of the world?  Here again I have a fairly strong idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  I know that from at least 2010 until 2020, your tax rubles bought the destabilization of liberal democracies throughout the world.  I also know that your money bought the breaking of sovereign governments in many nations which had been part of the Soviet empire and had managed to break free and re-establish their own national identity after the Soviet collapse.  Such nations include Georgia, Belarus, and Montenegro, among others.  In each of these recaptured nations, the pro-Putin puppet governments have managed to reproduce the same little bits of Putinesque hell on earth that characterize daily life for most Russians.  Your government tried to do the same thing here in the United States, and so for four years we endured the piece-of-garbage presidency of Donald Trump.

Your government has been especially active in the wrongful spending of your money during the last twelve months.  During that time Putin has sent troops into the Czech Republic in order to destroy Czech defense plants.  He has sent troops into Kazakhstan in order to put down a civil resistance uprising against the pro-Putin government there.  Those troops have shot unarmed protesters.  Kazakhstan is interesting, because it is an oil-producing country whose mineral wealth is being stolen by Russia as the pro-Putin government rapes the country to enrich that thieving little man in his bunker.  (It is only natural that ordinary Kazakh citizens would object to this sort of thing.)  And he has sent troops to the Ukraine border in what he thought would be an easy bid to conquer Ukraine.  That bid has turned out to be not so easy.

For Putin has begun to buy a few unexpected things for himself along the way.  His soft power (as well as the soft power of Russia) has begun to erode.  Soft power is at its maximum when a people or nation genuinely demonstrates itself to be a model worthy of imitation because it brings genuinely good things to the world.  I think of Japan as a case in point.  I am a small business owner and recently I discovered some fascinating Japanese commercial cultural practices that make me think that Japan has some really cool people who are worth getting to know because they have something to offer.  I also think of Indonesia and the musical inventiveness which I have seen in some of the artists from that nation.  For instance, there is an Indonesian fingerstyle guitarist named Alip Ba Ta who in my opinion is the current reigning king of those who play an ax.  In short, there are nations which produce cultural or scientific or commercial artifacts which bring genuine pleasure or benefit to the world.  On the other hand, there is Russia as it now is under Putin.  Putin's Russia seems genuinely to be good for nothing.  Rather, to Putin, the rest of the world exists solely as a source of supply of living human victims to sacrifice on the altar of his narcissism.  We are not interested.

What I Said In My Haste

Today's post is a short break from my essays on the personal, pedagogical work that organizers need to do in order to organize people for liberation.  The title of today's post is a nod to Psalm 116:11, and my use of it is triggered by a few personal events from the last year or so.  While the events are not earth-shaking, they are indeed thought-provoking - as is to be expected when a person loses around $1,000 within the space of a few months.

It started at the end of 2020, when the smartphone I had owned for over five years became hard to charge due to the wearing out of the charger cable and charger port.  That phone had been a budget phone without a lot of bells and whistles, yet it had proved extremely reliable.  When I began to consider replacing it, I looked on my service provider's website for a suitable candidate.  I found that most of the budget smartphones looked extremely clunky and had very poor user ratings.  I also found that the cost of most of the highly rated smartphones was on the order of $1,000.  I hate spending money, but I have been told that buying things that are cheap can cost as much as buying things that are more expensive, due to the cost of regularly replacing the cheap things.  So I narrowed my search to phones in the $500 price range.

This led me to the Google Pixel 4A 5G, a phone whose features included 128 GB of memory, awesome speakers and sound quality, a stunning set of cameras capable of stunning photography even at night, impressive battery life, and a durable front composed of tough Gorilla Glass 3.  I plonked down $500 and soon the phone was delivered to me.  I did not want to take chances with breakage, so along with the phone I bought a highly rated phone case for added protection.

I had hoped that the phone would last me four or five years, but it actually lasted from January to October 2021, when it was destroyed by a drop of less than three feet.  Its tough phone case provided no protection at all, and its Gorilla Glass 3 screen shattered along with the tempered glass screen protector I had installed.  Seeing $500 shattered like a smashed bag of potato chips quite naturally perturbed me, so I contacted Google to find out what recourse I had.  I was directed to an authorized Google repair shop where one of the employees told me that the screen could be repaired for $300, but that the repair shop could not guarantee that the phone would function as it had before it was dropped.  The employee also informed me that in the future I could lower any potential phone repair costs by purchasing either "phone insurance" or a "phone protection plan."  I gave that employee an earful of clean, yet disapproving language, then left.

Finding myself once again in the position of needing a phone that could be reliably charged, I visited one of the stores of my telecom service provider to see what I could find.  I told  my tale of woe to the employees at that store and asked them if they sold a reliable smartphone that could stand being dropped without breaking or being used in the rain without being ruined.  They led me to a phone sold under the Cat brand.  (That's "Cat" as in Caterpillar - you know, the company that makes gas turbines, standby and prime power generators, and earth-moving equipment.)  The particular phone in question was the Cat S62, a phone advertised by Caterpillar as "...the pinnacle of innovation, functional design and rugged durability. Designed primarily for extreme work conditions..."  It too cost around $500!

I was still under the influence of cultural conditioning that told me that I "needed" a smartphone, so once again I parted with my hard-earned cash for a new phone.  I found that the Cat S62 had only a mediocre camera and mediocre speakers.  However, it was possible to hand-wash and hand-disinfect the phone without damaging it.  And the service provider who sold it to me had a 14-day no-questions-asked return/refund policy.  Moreover, Cat had a 30-day no-questions-asked return/refund policy.  Unfortunately for me, my troubles began at about day 60 of my ownership.  I found that the phone would suddenly and randomly change settings without being touched.  Alarm settings, Bluetooth settings, connectivity settings, media playing settings, volume - all would randomly change from time to time - regardless of whether I was holding the phone or not.  At first this happened only occasionally.  But over time, the number and extent of seizures this phone was having began to escalate.  Soon it was turning its flashlight on and off randomly.  The last straw for me came last night, when all by itself the phone called a friend of mine after 11 pm, when he, his wife, and his kids were all in bed.  I realized that once again, $500 of my money had been turned to garbage.  (Perhaps that phone needs an exorcist!)

Today I have bought an old-fashioned flip phone for less than $100.  Once I have waited the obligatory 3 days for any COVID-19 virus particles to die from the packaging, I will try out my latest new phone.  God willing, it will either break within 14 days or last several years.  But buying three phones within a year has got me thinking - first and foremost, about the smartphone industry as a symptom of an unsustainable economy.  For the companies that comprise the tech sector are largely publicly traded.  And as I understand things, that means that like all publicly-traded companies, their share prices on the open market are a function not only of profit levels, but of profit growth.  It is profit growth that drives the passive income streams that form the basis of the retirement incomes of most people and the revenue streams of those aspirational souls who seem to be disciples of people like Tim Ferriss.  Profit growth causes rising share prices and rising dividends.  Profit growth is also the backbone of an economy built on usury.

The problem comes when profits cease to grow.  Slowing or stagnating profit growth can have a variety of causes, but one prime cause is that eventually companies that make durable things face market saturation - that is, they reach the point where if a widget costs $1,000 and lasts 10 years, a stage is reached in which by year seven or eight of a widget-making economy's life, almost everyone who wants a widget now owns one.  That means that the market for widgets declines rapidly to a level in which companies sell only enough widgets to replace the widgets that are wearing out.  This phenomenon is what almost drove the Ford Motor Company out of business during the 1920's.  That means that companies must resort to ever more creative (and unnatural) strategies in order to maintain some semblance of profit growth.

One such strategy is the emergence of a throwaway culture, a culture of restless dissatisfaction with the status quo.  Another such strategy is the strategy of planned obsolescence.  Both these strategies tend to lead to increasingly feature-packed, yet fragile and unreliable products.  The rate of increase of prices of these products tend over time to strongly exceed the rate of inflation.  Thus most cars nowadays cost as much as a four-bedroom house used to cost in the 1970's.  And the price of smartphones has risen to the point that you can buy a smartphone for $2,000 if you so choose.  (That $2000 phone is, not surprisingly, easy to break and hard to fix, according to one source.)  Oh, by the way, have you bought a cutting-edge model of a new home appliance like a washer or dryer lately?  Along with the strategies of throwaway culture and planned obsolescence, there is the rise of "influencer culture" - the creation of armies of paid, immaculately coiffed shills who pretend to be ordinary people who just happened to become famous and who wish to share their tastes in consumerism with the rest of us.

Yet another unnatural and unsustainable strategy is the strategy of rent-seeking.  This is especially prevalent in the world of software nowadays, with the rise of the "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) model of commerce - a model which actually contributes no real value to customers, but which makes businesses vulnerable to data loss and data theft.  Rent-seeking is also now a feature of that portion of the "knowledge" industry that sells textbooks - Pearson, for instance, has begun to offer rent-only versions of textbooks that can only be accessed by an online subscription.  Titles offered under such terms usually cannot be obtained in hardcopy form.  

I believe that a feature of "late capitalism" (as in, "late-stage capitalism") is the seeking of ever-more unnatural and perverse mechanisms and strategies to maintain profit growth.  This is leading to an increasingly distorted society and the creation of ever-higher mountains of freshly obsolete junk.  These mechanisms are the last desperate ploys of the few who have amassed ungodly amounts of capital by fleecing the many who are not rich.  And I believe that the society resulting from these ploys will one day come to an end.  When it does, the times that emerge will require a very different sort of person - one who can be satisfied with living on the fruits of an honest day's labor.  Unfortunately, many people may have a very hard time making the transition.