What Do These Two Stories Have In Common?

The notion that fundamental structural change can happen inside the system that is primarily responsible for creating the conditions that present us with the very real problems described within each in the first place.

For instance, think about how easy it is to blithely decry stressful cities, and that they should be set up better, without considering the dynamics inherent with our current economic operating system that pretty much demand that there will be stress no matter what you do with superficial design specs.

Primary in my mind right now, certainly, is the the core element in Capitalism that focuses on insane, personal self interest, at pretty much the expense of everything else. The kind of personal self interest that has no imagination at all for the idea of enlightened self interest.

You could see the advantages of this mode of consideration if you took the time to consider that breaking barriers down so that everybody has a chance to do well will aid you in the long run. And a great deal more effort effectively if this is done proactively, instead of a long ways down the road.

If  people took the time to think it through, perhaps then there would be less incentive to, let's say redline districts, in the sense of who can get access to developmental information (which is both educational opportunity denied with an economically strangled tax base, and what capital, in the form of money, really is) because you might find doing so will return you a great deal less hassle, in the long run, than marginalizing people you don't like; for whatever reason you may have.

Chopping up neighborhoods with various construction projects, simply because your previous neglect made property values cheaper, in areas where you weren't previously making any money, may seem like a good deal in the short term, but in the end, all you are really doing is sowing the seeds for instability, insufficiency and, ultimately, the creation of a whole lot of desperate people. Upon which, of course, you are then tempted to conclude that the conditions thus saturating those you do not like, just proves how deficient those people are. Thus cementing in an attitude you had no right to make in the first place.

I am not saying that you have to like anybody. But you really do have to consider, whatever your complaints are against others, that making them desperate serves you no real purpose whatsoever; despite whatever short term gain you may get. And does, in fact, set up a whole lot of situations where stress is, though ever more pervasive, just a minor player in a whole host of really bad outcomes.

We are all now, in fact, in hot water, and hot air, precisely because of this insane dominance of personal self interests. And until we knock that mental barrier down, stress is going to be the least of our worries.

We Need To Design Less Stressful Cities


Groundbreaking Empirical Research Shows Where Innovation Really Comes From

More Concentration, Whether It's Vertical, Or Lateral, Is Not Going To Help The Majority Of Folks Who Already Can't Afford Healthcare

Whether they intend economies, and efficiencies for the consumer or not, that much increased power, in the hands of a few, never leads to much good, most of the time. Most of the time you can expect power like that to do what it usually does; corrupt one way or another.

CVS Health Buying Aetna For $69 Billion | CNBC

Movement Without Regard To Economic Means Will Become A Very Important Moral Issue

It will because it must.

You only need to look at the horrendous situation with refugees around the world to see this. And lest you think smugly that this doesn't apply here, think again; especially now that more extreme weather events have left their mark, with more sure to be on the way.

This gets complicated not only for the obvious usual, economic, and political, suspects, but also because nobody seems willing to admit at the get go that the world has to unite in figuring out how to rapidly build new living habitat, and then share in the effort to start getting it done, as well as a new means to do air logistics.

My bias, naturally, sees Capitalism as a major impediment to doing this. I think I have made it quite clear why. I can only hope that the rest of media starts taking the notion a good deal more seriously.

In any case, though, I have also outlined quite viable ways to address means tested, regional, and global, mass transit. Ways that do not require vast new constructions through already complicated sets of rights of way, and rights of property owners. New technology that we could set up as part of a meaningful public works project. Just check back a ways into the posts. You'll see the references to my Hybrid Dirigible Blimps, and the possibility of connecting them into actual air trains.

If you look as well you will see reference to the construction method I envision for making sea based, Yen Tornado turbans possible. I think we can use various forms of hemp (a new trading crop for underdeveloped communities -- assuming they had the logistics to support it) composites to make support structures proportionally faster than they were able to turn out Liberty Ship transports back in WW2. Initially, of course, so as to turn wind into liquefied hydrogen for fuel. Such structures will need support people to say the least. Why not combine solving at least part of the clean fuel source problem with also co-locating new floating cities. These two, are quite viable, technical possibilities that could be done as part of that meaningful public works project.

It's time to start taking all of this seriously.

YOU CAN DO THIS

How To Make A Cross-Country Move Without Going Broke And/Or Insane

11 diggs GQ How-To

"If you do have that itch to move west (or east, or south, whatever), here's what I wish I'd known in advance."

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INCREDIBLE FORTITUDE

How The Rohingya Escaped

8 diggs The New York Times Photos

Roughly two-thirds of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar fled this year as soldiers shot them, raped them and torched their homes.

Europe’s most fortified border is in Africa

What Can One Say About An Economic Operating System That Get's This Skittish

Just hearing the truth about an angry general (for being fired from an intelligence post) gone wrong.

What will happen when we learn more truths? Truths that can come from a lot of different spheres of concern because we sure don't lack for those now, do we. Truths, unfortunately, that have a lot to do with how this same skittish system doesn't want to accept any responsibility for much of anything in the first place. Even though it's greedy focus on narrow self interest has so fanned all of the flames of need, desperation, and violent confrontation.

What will happen when these revelations come with a lot of collateral effect? Hard ass, really direct, and in your face, disruptive collateral effect? The kind that takes your ability to ignore them and just craps all over it? Taking away important aspects of your life so you have to pay attention?

You best be thinking about this, because it is coming. And when it does come where do you think this skittish system will be in terms of being able to actually do anything about it.

If you don't think that we are going to have to fix this, with whatever might be left to fix anything with, you are crazier than even you might suspect. So now is the time to start considering that maybe we should start planning for how we can have a great deal more left over with which to fix things after this system falls apart; because you know it will. Don't dawdle too long though. Time is not on your side.

Dow Jones drops 300 points on news that Flynn charged in Mueller probe

by REUTERS and NBC NEWS

You Wanted To Actually Inform The Consumer?

Actually empower them to be able to save some money? Are you mad? That's not how Capitalism works. Well... At least how it works quite well for the Capitalists in any case. And what else can you expect when knowledge itself is private property; enshrined by patents that allow one to garner most of the gain of a thing, without having to bear much of the responsibility should there be unintended consequences from using said knowledge.

But hey. At least the smile when they cram you into those tubes of discomfort and humiliation (speaking in the context of the commercial airline experience as a whole, of course).

How Southwest Airlines kills startups that monitor its prices

When The Money Changers Know No Shame

And you can't be bothered enough to understand just how much you are being screwed; to be either outraged, or roused to action enough to demand an end to this madness, then you deserve to be screwed. Something I thought you might have learned by now; voting for a literal pig in a poke the way a lot of you did for a certain individual; who is not going to be in that high office much longer; leaving guess who to clean up the mess.

So now government will have even less revenue to not be doing all the things that already make us not have adequate essential services; essential, of course if you value a human oriented, caring and just society. Any more than having some sense that concrete steps will be taken to either address the travesty being done to the planet, or all of the terrible suffering that creates so much desperation, and instability, around the world. The very instability that may well bring war down on our heads. As if having the planet already threatened wasn't enough.

So now I say shame on all of us. For letting it get this far. For not doing enough to prevent stupidity from becoming a point of pride. The question now is whether there are enough of us left who still feel shame at all.

Senate passes Republican-backed tax bill along party lines

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What About The Case For Normalizing Changing The Constitution On A More Fundamental Level

As Lawrence O'Donnell points out here, Mr. Klein makes a very good case for normalizing impeachment. The framers left the "High Crimes, and Misdemeanors' clause vague for a reason. It had to have interpretive room because things change; obviously then making the ways various contingencies play out demonstrate evolving factors of causation; thus evolving descriptions of what makes for necessary standards of official behavior.

As Mr. Klein also points out, however, things are changing a lot faster now, with actions having far greater power, and range of effect, so we need to be even more sensitive to being OK with kicking bad actors out of critical positions of legislative, Judicial, or administrative, power. And in that statement does Mr. Klein inform you of the intrinsic substance of what I am talking about when I refer to this new "Operating Environment" we are now in. And in my opinion, it informs it now not only as it regards power in the public sector, it informs it in the private as well, because great wealth has bestowed nearly pharaoh like power on those who possess it. So they may not be the equal of super power presidents, but they are still possible purveyors of great ill, and terrible sufferance of public well being.

My emphasis here, however, is on this part where great new ability has changed things so profoundly, and boy, aren't we glad the creators of our Constitution made it so organically flexible. Unless, of course, we become too timid to actually use that flexibility. And if Mr. Klein can make the case for using the change adaptive capabilities of the constitution for holding various office holders accountable, for evolving, performance based metrics, why can't the rest of us do the same for the current economic operating system; the very system that was put into its "office" of leadership (in a systems encompassing other systems sense) some one hundred years ago at least (I know it came into being further back than that, but the point here is where it became the dominant system). A system that is absolutely subject to a kind of impeachment precisely because it does not perform at all now, in any primary sense, for the public good. And has, in fact, become just as dangerous as any bad player now in public office could be. And this is so precisely because of the condition of the planet now, and all of the social turmoil that centuries of doing the economics of scarcity has bestowed upon us.

Accepting that notion must then lead you to accept the idea that how we have organized ourselves in the past must also, now, be open to honest discussion as to what might be a better way to do things; allowing that we will seek to find this new methodology within the very process of Democratic change the framers of that constitution wanted to preserve. And so that Democracy itself must stay in place so as to effect that proper process of both finding new organizational definitions (with their negotiated rights, and proscriptions) as well as the new physical reality that must flow from that negotiated, and voted on, process. It may not be an ICBM, push of the button threat, but it is an existential threat nonetheless.

THE LAST WORD -- LAWRENCE O’DONNELL [FULL] 11-30-17 BREAKING NEWS MSNBC NOV 30, 2017

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The Case For Normalizing Impeachment