The Last Gasp Of The Democratic Party

Let's be clear. The Democratic Party still has a role to play here as we face what ought be seen as our collective, as a species, moment of existential crisis. And that is to make sure we all vote Democratic, just as Mr. Comey has suggested, come the midterm elections.

And just as clear is the notion that we are way beyond "draining" cliches. Now it is time to simply flush the toilet that has become our House of Representatives so as to clear out all the turds with legs, and arms, and money fueled mouths that have spewed such unbelievable filth about our institutions, and the professionals who try to do public service in them. That absolutely has to happen.

After that, however, is another matter altogether.

The problem for the Democrats is that there is nobody who can win on a middle ground platform. And that is for the obvious reason that if there were a middle ground way to successfully run this toxic, mutated monster, we now call an economy, it would have been found already. In point of fact, middle ground, and all of the not really able to define what that ought to be, now that our operating environment is so different, is a big part of why the last person who tried it lost. That and the fact that she had no other really inspiring message to convey at all in the first place. All in the face of most working Americans having endured the last twenty years or so giving the economy an amazing growth in productivity, but getting no real wage growth out of it, as well as a "Great Recession," just to let us know how much the system cares about us. Which was only eight years or so after a major Dot Com bust that also left a lot of us out in the economic cold.

Going to the left, naturally, seems like the only alternative now. And in many respects that is the case in an objective sense, but it is not something that can be done in isolation with the conservatism that still exists in this country, and is still a major part of it, even if it is in great disarray. And in this the left ignores the idea of balance at their peril.

In a sense here the left has to both go all the way to the left, but also, all the way to right, in order to create a compromise government that has any chance of actually getting this country back into leadership role it was always meant to have. It has to go all the way to the left in the sense that it has to understand that Capitalism is done. It is over. It is caput. Finished. And it absolutely must be gotten rid of.

On the other hand, though, we must bring the Libertarian element of the right to the table with us. For it is the Libertarian right that best expresses the best parts of what it means to have rights and responsibilities, as an individual citizen. And it is also the Libertarian right who would have the most to lose if we were to go the kind of Authoritarian Capitalism that seems to be sparking much of the base of our de facto ex president's cabal of always changing support.

If we can make a strong alliance between these two, former antagonists, we can get the middle to come along because they won't have anywhere else to go; especially when former extremists are seen to be the ones now working for both practical, and heartfelt, compromise.

The bottom line here, in my biased opinion, is that we will not be able to save this planet, nor our species, if we do not do this. It is really just that simple. Difficult to carry out, without question, but there just is nothing else for it. And I can say that after working on this for over 20 years.

Centrist Democrats Want A Presidential Candidate To Take On Bernie. They Just Don’t Know Who It Is.

See Also:

WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

You Are Probably Consuming Microscopic Plastic Particles

5 diggs Food

We're laying waste to the earth and, in the process, ourselves.

Earth Overshoot Day -- Humans are using Earth's resources faster than ever, group warns

The Related Issues Of Too Much Heat, Too Much Pollution, And Too Many People Thinking It's Not My Problem.

And Then Thinking That The Money System That Created This Mess Can Fix It.

Only you, and thoughtful, heartfelt, collective action with the people in your community, as well as the rest of the world, will solve this problem. And all it will take is to stop doing "Business As Usual."

In India, Summer Heat May Soon Be Literally Unbearable

The Disturbing Reason Heat Waves Can Kill People In Cooler Climates

Can Florida's Toxic Algae Be Stopped?

See Also:

SUNK COSTS

The Dark Side Of California's Mega Farms

9 diggs The Guardian Nature

The floor of the Central Valley is slumping, and there is arsenic in the tap water. Now it seems the two problems are connected.

This Is The Essential Problem That Democracy Faces

Now that information is pure gold as a commodity that nobody wants to share properly; even as that information is essential to our health, wellbeing, and any notion of a survivable society, let alone a survivable species.

Even worse, information now can be weaponized as it has never been weaponized before (even though propaganda has been with the human race, in one form or another, for almost as long as there has been cave paintings, symbols, icons, and language).

Just another reason why we must start over.

TIME FOR SINGLE PAYER

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

2 diggs ProPublica Health

Without any public scrutiny, insurers and data brokers are predicting your health costs based on data about things like race, marital status, how much TV you watch, whether you pay your bills on time or even buy plus-size clothing.

Both Sides Here Miss The Most Important Point

And that is that both sides are wrong. At least as far as it concerns doing change without also accepting that we have to start over.

I think the majority of folks, in the Pacific Northwest in general, would agree that needed change is upon us. We have great issues, after all, that have been allowed to go festering for far too long. The problem here is that not only can't Socialism fix Capitalism (especially from the inside out), Liberalism cannot fix Capitalism either. Nothing can fix it. Not even if all of the biggest names in tech and science got together and tried to work a Manhattan project on it to do so. And certainly not in the time frame we have left, even if they found alien tech hidden by the government, as a lot of conspiracy hacks like to keep prattling on about (right now, with the priorities we face, who cares if there are aliens or not? If there are, and there certainly might be, even if its a low probability, they haven't shown much inclination to help us. So I would submit to you, what the intercourse good are they too us now?) for far too long.

The other part of this that both sides miss is that we must try to work a "Grand Compromise" between the Right and the Left. And the only way that has made any sense to me, over the years as I have considered this, is to do it as a bargain between the two extremes of both sides; because if those two can strike a compromise, based on the foundation of a new way of considering our place in the universe, than what is the middle going to do if the extremes are the ones sounding reasonable over working together? I believe my outline of an alternative provides a template with which to begin to accomplish this.

What do you think?

Seattle and the Socialist: The Battle Raging Between Amazon and the Far Left

Here's Irony For You

Maybe the prospect of not having coffee any more will finally get you to

WAKE THE HELL UP.

Nothing else seems to be working. Not even the prospect of no further circulation systems in either the oceans, or the atmosphere; at least not proper ones anyway. And all you are left with is a lot of water, and air, that just sits there and does not move things to other places, in anything even close to what it use to do; other places that might need the rain, or nutrients, such circulations used to distribute about the globe. And certainly the temperature will likely be moved to some extreme of hot or cold, as the new ambient, because there'll just not be much of any way to provide for variation again; excluding any major new input of change by other means. And just as certainly, if we don't have our coffee, how the hell are we going to be able to figure anything out after that? Especially when the withdrawals cause us the migraines from hell.

Colombia's coffee is in danger. These scientists are fighting to save it.

See Also:

What if economic growth isn’t as positive as you think?

You Have To Understand That This Is About More Than Just One "Reckless" Company

It's about a system that no longer cares of about what matters to people. It only cares about the profits of a few and feeding an enormous waste engine. That engine is what we ordinarily refer to as the American economy.  An engine that always craves more power for precisely that reason. And it doesn't care where it gets that power, or what the long term effects of it might be. Only that it feeds the beast for the moment, and the profits can keep coming, and the few can continue being the swinging big dicks they picture themselves to be. In supposed control, and on top. And all they want from you for is to be quiet, do what your told, and be thankful your betters give you what they do give you; however little, or demeaning it might be.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD

A 'Reckless' Fracking Company, Poisoned Springs And A Family Forced To Buy Water At Walmart

8 diggs theintercept.com Health

"I'm not against the US making progress, but not at the price of ruining our water. Water is the most precious thing we have."

Pain, Unfortunately, Also Lives In A System

That makes it an excellent source for the commoditization of everything, and everybody, who can hope to find another way to make money. And they can come to care less and less about letting go of ever smaller pieces of their own humanity in the process.

I know about this process because I have had to have spinal fusion surgery. Way back around 1999. I broke a bone in my very lower spine, earlier in my life, that helps keep the last vertebrae in place. I did that because my old man was unable to afford to hire professionals to trim what was essentially, though not completely, a dead tree on one side of our house in Burien. One branch that didn't look quite as dead as the others, and which seemed likely to hold me, gave way and I came down hard on my butt; probably six or seven feet of fall easily, some of which I staved off some of the impact of by bringing my hands down to help out with, but still... I couldn't talk for a full minute. And of course we couldn't afford insurance at the time. So the only question my old man had was: "can you walk?" To which I was, after I got my wind back, able to do. And I was in a lot of pain, but I was used to that by then because my knees were also found out to be amazingly able to pop of the sockets, so to speak, at the oddest moments of trying to run, or dance, for that matter. And we couldn't afford to fix them either. Any more than we could fix any of the emotional pain that was a great deal worse (this is the house we lived in when my younger brother died--maybe a year or two after the tree incident, because the only doctor authorized to deliver babies, four to five years earlier, was too drunk to do it--or so my father always claimed--because he was probably trying to deal with too much pain too, so my brother got caught up in his umbilical cord, and had brain damage).

In any case, though, it is at least somewhat ironic that having to be forced to become pain tolerant early on would make for a great way to save money in my retirement.  In a civil, and human, society, however, this cannot become any kind of ideal. Not only is it not a very good way to live, it's a fool's savings more often than not, because trying to not listening to pain because you can't afford treatment is actually more likely to cost you more in the long run because what should have been treated sooner wasn't (I have just been inordinately lucky so far that things haven't gotten any more serious). Which ends up, then, being a sort of tax on everybody as the hospitals have to spread non payment accounts around to those who can pay, by jacking up prices on everything they can. What else can they do, after all, and stay afloat if the Government won't help anymore either?

A proper pain management process, though, would want there to be lots of very involving, and meaningful, ways to be so engagingly occupied, that you can take your mind off of the achs that you know inflammation can only be dealt with so much with drugs, or invasive procedures. Sometimes you have to either stop being quite so active, or be willing to deal with a bit more pain if the activity is truly worth the effort. But all you are talking about then is simply having more balance in all of the things you do; whether it's to avoid pain in the first place, or use all appropriate avenues to help manage it. To do all of that, however, would require having a system in place that valued balance at all, let alone one that might be willing to admit that it has been too much of a source, for far too many kinds of our pain, and for quite some time now. Bad choices are certainly also a part of this, but how can you make good choices if you aren't taught how to, and you aren't taught how to precisely because too many of those who might teach us are still trying to deal with not being taught by their parents, who also had a lot of pain to deal with, and so on for too many generations.

Where pain lives