Will Democrats Have Proper 20 20 Vision?

With the way they're lining up competing egos it's difficult to see them having anything but long range vision for the future, unfortunately.

And certainly the Republicans have given up on vision altogether; relying instead, it would seem, on pure, lower brain, base instincts alone.

And what should 20 20 vision be right now?

It should be about re establishing integrity, honesty, and renewed respect for established process that the rule of law signifies... You know, where nobody is supposed to be above it, or too crazy to even acknowledge it even exists in the first place.

It should also be about, though, re establishing our commitment to our real allies in NATO, in the Pacific Rim, and the rest of the world, as well as accepting our responsibility to help lead the tremendous effort it is going to take to not only heal the planet, but actually deal with the humanitarian crisis that has befallen the world now; finding creative ways to partner with the rest of the world to build new habitat wherever it is practical, and politically possible, to do so.

And in all of that, obviously, for the Dems, should be the dictum, in all talking points, that all of them should be echoing the montra: in these efforts we maintain coordinated unity. Doing all of this, of course, because we recognize that it will be very unlikely that we will win a majority of both houses, even if we win the presidency, while still being able to keep the house in their corner successfully.

In this vein, then, what they should do, as an act of group self sacrifice, is each draw a number out of figurative hat, and then have the chairman of the Party then roll a multi sided dice big enough to include all of their numbers, to see who the candidate will be. Following that up by carrying out the, secret if necessary, negotiations amongst themselves, to agree on what a comprehensive infrastructure measure would be, as well as how to best re engage our allies; and then agree with them on what our re established, mutual security concerns, should be. Following that up to also agree, ahead of time, on how to finance (with a modestly priced package) any actual measures, within our current reality, to actually accomplish these goals.

If they could come out of that unified they might have a chance of not only winning the Presidency, but of actually gaining enough bipartisan support in the Senate, to actually get something useful passed.

We all know, however, that this is not what they are likely to do.

They will not do this because each of them, in their own way, refuses to confront the question of weather Capitalism is obsolete or not. Or weather any of them understand just how dead Liberalism is. And they will demonstrate this, for the largest part, by the very fact that each will fall back to the economic interests that have given them money; money that shows they still think that the very thing that got us into this mess can still get us out. That they, in other words, still think that doing "business as usual," however you try to limit its destructiveness (with a band aid here, or a band aid there), isn't still enabling the infected mutation that electrified experience retrieval has made of Capitalism. They will fall back on those interests, on those sources of money, and they will be made to dance to the specific tunes that each demands; which, if you have been paying much attention at all, are not in much agreement at all on how a truly dysfunctional economy should be run any more; precisely because it has become so chaotic, and contradictory.

And the bottom line there will be destructive debate, fracture, and anything but unity.

In this debacle the rest of us "working people" have to understand just how much of an ultimate failure that the old, "Two Party," political system, has come to. We must recognize this and move on.

We must recognize that these two, supposed "opposition" parties, have become engaged in what has descended into a truly absurd form of mutual, codependency; each relying on the other as foil for enlivening their base to thwart the other guys; because they think they are the only ones who know how to run something that not even modern AI will be able to do... Assuming that living things are still to be involved of course, and where any bio sentients still left have any chance for real, informed, choice making.

Now, To be clear here, I have an additional ax to grind in presenting this in such stark terms (beyond my clear animosity for Capitalism). And that is a specific agenda for how we go about doing what needs to be done to heal the planet. An agenda with specific technologies, and how to apply them, to solve saving the ice at the poles; to solve giving us a better way to a hydrogen economy, and solve what I believe to be a very important issue with critical social logistics. These are technical solutions that I have been trying to promote for decades, but done in the public interest as public utilities. And, admittedly, it would be cool to get credit for that, but that is all I would get.

We should also be clear on one last thing as well.

That the next 4 year administration, whichever party gets it, is likely to be the most pivotal in human history. It will be so because things will get worse in every system we deal with on this planet, social, or geophysical. They will get worse, inevitably forcing the things that make our method of doing social household more chaotic than it has ever been. That unfortunate party, if it doesn't handle things correctly, will be left to pass on nothing but ashes, and the final rise of the kind of very fragmented, and more walled off, authoritarianism, that only very desperate, and very frightened people would ever contemplate otherwise. And in that move will the human race seal the doom of this planet. Because from then on will we be simply fighting over ever less, and less, to hold on to in the first place, until the last, pathetic survivors, within the final walls, finally turn on each other for the final scraps left.

The bottom line then is this: working people, of all stripes, and belief systems, must form common cause; even though they don't like what a lot of the folks involved seem to stand for. We must make common cause as the people who actually make society possible in the first place, and create our own "Grand Compromise" between the Right and the Left, so that we can finally end this endless fighting against each other. We must end it because it benefits only those who crave the kind of power that made things so out of balance at the get go. The kind of power that blinds people to the basics of just wanting the freedom to have family, community, and a sense of meaningful belonging, with some semblance of stability, while maintaining it with our own determination of what is "value," and valuable. And not having it dictated by the abstract machinations of markets that have only the interests of profit to guide them.

This is what we all face. The choice is still ours, but not for much longer. Will we have proper 20 20 vision either? Only time will tell.

When Life Becomes Horribly Entertaining

Maybe it's time to do more than just "Change The Channel."

Maybe it's time to consider that the whole, horrible, commoditized mess is the problem, and that having hundreds of billions of dollars spent on pumping more, into our eyes and ears and minds, as a part of everyday, monetizing life, just to keep us distracted, becomes the logical, profitizing, expansion of making sure that nothing will change, until it all falls apart. An epic of an epic, season of the finale. 

Sure, it will be a spectacle a second extravaganza, to out do even a Michael Bay movie, or HBO, or Marvel, franchise, but it isn't going to leave us much, after the credits roll, and nobody's fit to do anything but act out their own brutalizing expressions of striking, tearing, and rending, horror gasams. Everyone expressing, in fact, one last purge of rage, and revenge, as ultimate, ending pleasure. A gestalt of gore and excess that would have made even Caligula blush.

This is where we are heading now. And it will end us unless we stop the mindless consumption in the first place. Stop thinking that work can only be an ever increasing process of competitive destruction; thinking that because the great maw of electrified production will brook no excuses for lessening ever more rounds of "MORE" (making want amplification mandatory); to pour down a planet that can't take any "more," in capital letters. Which only bottom lines to more violence, and more fear, in the name of manipulation, to keep the addiction going. And thus more of the thinking of only one's self, and what you can get, to be the only "values," that matter, exclusively; no matter what it does to the rest of the world, and the people, and other living things, that are in it.

Democratic candidates may find it hard to 'change the channel' from Trump

The Trailer For Netflix's Upcoming Horror Movie 'The Perfection' Is Wild As Hell

The End Of Empathy

What Is Wrong With A Society (or a species) That Spends This Kind Of Money For On Demand Fantasy Escape, And So Little On Everything Else That's Important

Desperate Enough For A Revolutionary, Grand Compromise Yet?

No?

No worries. Just give it time. You will be soon enough.

Circumstances are going to leave you with little other option rather sooner than you might think. Circumstances of Capitalism's own making.

Just remember, though, that the situation is not hopeless... Yet.

We can still heal this planet, but the effort, and the lead times required to put that effort into meaningful effect, leave us very little time to dawdle any longer. Understanding that it will only be by massive, full scale mobilization, that this effort will have any chance of success. Full scale effort by the entire nation; with the further recognition that money would only get in the way; hence the need for compromise in the first place.

The former Republican, and current Democratic, establishments are going to tell you that staying the middle road of old economic nostrums will get us back to economic prosperity; and certainly they can point at what seems like a booming economy; because the jobs numbers appear to look so good; even if most of them still do not pay a living wage, or have any real currency for longevity, given the same instability, and unpredictability, that makes the insurance industry's problems so profound these days.

Just remember this as well, however: the heating up of the economy isn't necessarily because of good economic trends; not when addiction, corruption, and the plain fact that too many capitalists want to just crunch numbers to make more numbers, as opposed to the real goods and services that a working civilization might enjoy; or, said another way, that maintaining an over processed, and  contaminated, sugar rush, is the best way to beat life's adversities; served cold, or hot. Day after day, year after year. Not if you want a body politic that stays capable, and healthy, for the long run, in any case. Especially when so much of what might be fueling that mad rush of activity is simply the scurrying around to try and fix past mistakes; and even then only serving to make things worse; not only because of the layers of complexity former changes have wrought, but also because everyone argues endlessly about who's liable, and so who's pocket the money is going to have to come from.

I have come up with a way to address ice at the poles, as well as shade cities at the equator, and above, or below. An environmentally viable way via "Very Large Scale, Lighter Than Air Constructs." A technology that will have to have some serious aerospace engineering involved to make happen, to be sure. And that's because of the tremendous shear forces that multi cubic mile, floating arrays of "lift doughnut" primitives (to create segmented lift columns, to hold floating sheets of reflecting solar arrays), will have to endure, even in wind speeds up to 300+ miles per hour, precisely because of the new severity of weather.

Difficult though that will be by itself, however, it is not the real problem here. The real problem is the size of the production effort we will have to institute to produce enough of these "segmented lift columns," of "lift doughnuts," to make enough difference in the time we have left. An effort of supply, assembly, and maintenance, that will make the Manhattan Project look like a piker. All the while we are also doing the things we need to do to make all of our communities viable places to live again, without the whims of insane market valuations debilitating our own sense of the possible. Of what we can do to work an effort based economy, instead of a cost based one, merely by understanding the value of cooperation, and compromise; even when some of the folks involved are abhorrent to us otherwise. Because there is simply no other choice if we want us, and the planet, to survive.

Put blinders on if you have to, and try to recognize that we must go to some form of the notion of "no direct harm, no foul." Just as long as everybody has the right, as well as the means, to vote with their feet. And everybody who participates in the newly Federated States gets a fair share of the total resources of the Federation. And information, to the greatest extent possible, is allowed to move freely amongst all peoples. So we can all keep an eye on each other and make sure there's no dirty pool being played that will end up costing other states actual harm, down the road.

This is what we must negotiate, and this is what we must live with if we wish to survive.

Make your choice. The sooner the better.

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What's Really Being Suggested, At Least In Part, Here Is the Same Fallacy Suggested In The Movie 2012

That being the notion that doing anything both immensely, technically challenging, as well as equally environmentally complex (including all of the social, and physical, systems that have to be interfaced with successfully; even as a significant combination of them all are already stressed by whatever bad situation that's creating the need in the first place), and for which a major requirement is the, always quite increasingly desperate, need for solutions capable of saving a very important part, of those very same, intermixing systems.

In this case, of course, it is the fate of large urban areas, faced with a great deal of new kinds of change now.

In the movie 2012 the problem was the need to save some fragment of society at all, given an almost completely catastrophic geophysical event. One that would leave little ground above water for a while. The solution for which was to build truly immense, virtual habitat, arcs that could hold enough genetic diversity, and material capability, to start over again with.

The time factor could be argued as considerably greater in the latter example, and the idea that panic would have automatically rained down on all if people were told the truth; and that is certainly a good possibility. It is also possible, however, that, given a lottery where every region would be guaranteed survivors on the arc if they would work the sacrifice it would take to save any at all. And given that everybody could be given as much of everything left, also by lottery, for as much fun as could be had, in mandatory spare time, maybe things could be made to be different enough, than that that old, "we'll all just die with our hands around each other throats," cliche might suggest.

Be that as it may, however, in both cases here it is suggested that the only way to do this would be to allow the rich to finance it. Because, obviously, as we are to led to believe, there would be no other choice to approach doing it other than via the system that created the problems in the first place. And because of that, also, ending up having to have the accommodations be those these people think they deserve, because they would just as obviously end up owning how it all would be run afterwards, anyway.

My contention is that it does not necessarily have to be that way. If we recognize the need to mobilize now, as if we were confronting a great new world threat, we could set working people free as they never have been before.

And let me reiterate here that this includes all folks, salaried, or hourly, working at wages up to at least $10 million a year. The real working majority of us that do not engage in investments in all their ilk: as in marketing, or banking, or speculations of various sorts of abstract instruments of debt. Systems of interaction that we needed because we needed that universal experience translator called money.

Just try to get it through your heads here, though. The electrification of experience retrieval has made that old need obsolete. We do not have to have abstract counters somewhere that have to exchange only in the sense of which server their phantom ones, and zeros, are stored on. Be sort of exchanged so that we can exchange them for the things we need, and want.

What we do have to have are new ways to think about how to manage material flows, and the application of people power, so that the mere act of participating, in your nearly self sufficient community, gives you an equal base share, of what that community is then able to support; with all of the citizenry there, participating in negotiating what are the production, and flow management priorities, for that community.

If the very rich want to continue a life within the belief system of "High Financials" Capitalism, that's fine with me. Let's work with them in figuring out how both sides can go their separate ways in an equitable, and mostly satisfactory way for both. And let's be very clear here. This would be beneficial for both sides.

I can say that because I believe that the planet itself will not be saved unless us working people are allowed to get to healing without having to let all the old problems of money get in the way. Let's take a parting tax from them and them let them do their own thing, with whatever part of the world that wants to stay with Capitalism, and use that as a resource to make our transformation go more smoothly, and cooperatively with those other folks that we will very much want to still be trading partners with (as well as ongoing participants in very important treaties that we agreed to as a nation).

We do a complete inventory, and figure out what this nation is really worth, in its totality, and then we issue a bond in that value. We give the rich a complete buyout of their holdings, minus a final separation/environmental tax, and then help them set up in an enclave, or group of enclaves, of their choice, debt free, as far as we are concerned, from that point on. We do that, and help them establish a kind of commodities, foreign currency, swap and bidding exchange, cooperative; one where we would put the entire sum of their monies into, as well as all of our gold reserves. We then negotiate a decreasing reserve requirement with them that ensures that they have to leave significant portions of their deposits as something other than the demand type. That way they don't go hog wild at the get go with new speculation for the rest of the world's economy, as well as give us an exchange system we can keep our financial commitments for the rest of the world with, as we transform into something new (trading commodities indirectly when we can't do barter directly with certain folks, for whatever reason).

And then we use that bond, from ourselves, to ourselves, to help pay for all of the things that we need a single payer for (including the differential to make everyone have a living wage). And in that payment, from ourselves, to ourselves, because the majority of us will be working, I guarantee you, it will serve to act as the servicing of that debt. Thereby, in the fifteen to twenty years this will take to work through, we all continue working as we have, getting paid, but with each servicing entitie's, controlled profit, going towards the continued creation of the counters we will soon come to see we really do not need anymore. Not if we can become as self sufficient, and sustainable as we have the knowhow to be. Even in the face of continuing disruption from a very chaotic atmospheric system, and the prodigious amounts of effort it is going to take to start getting greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. As well as the further prodigious amounts of effort it will take to start building the "New Ismus" for mass migration that this planet will need, once people can afford to start having babies, and stable families again.

Yes, this is quite a stretch of the imagination. And yes, it will be incredibly difficult to negotiate, at all levels. But if you are honest with yourself, and you look with a clear eye towards the future, how else are we to do the things that will heal the earth, and solve the great issues of inequality of material well being that predominate in most of the world today. Absolutely intolerable amounts of material deficiency between haves, and have nots. For which instability, and the desperation that goes with it, are guarantees of only more turbulence, both social, and environmental, to come.

Money will not solve this. That, in a nutshell, is my bottom line on this. It might help in transition, but it must be got rid of as a fundamental matter of survival. Because it will only make matters worse otherwise.

I Have a Feeling We’re Not in New York Anymore

Who Needs Foreign Dictators Trying To Subvert Our Democracy

When we have plenty of traitors to Democracy at home to do it for them?

One thing this makes clear, though, is how, in significant part at least, certain Republicans were able to create a situation, in various voting districts, where a rabid few could create the possibility of carrying out the new process of being "Primaried;" you know, that other, big elephant, in the room of why getting recalcitrant, former believers in "Conservatism," and compromise, to now tout policies antithetical to the core interests of our nation, by a very non representative fringe. The net effect of which has caused so much government gridlock (in conjunction, of course, with "Liberals," and the
"Progressive Left", having their own problems with compromise).

And so now virtually every Republican member of either the House, or the Senate, shakes in self serving terror at being held hostage, by this ever more boldly acting fringe, that has come to power exactly by traitorous duplicity with anyone who will share their lust for getting what they want, by whatever means is necessary.

And if that means making common cause with morally corrupt dictators (whether actively, and pointedly, coordinated, or only indirectly so) as well, so be it.  It's just no big deal for these people; just as long as they get their lusting hands on more money, and prestige, in their new gilded age of foul aristocracy.

And if you think you will be able to stop it by simply trying to do more piecemeal "Reform" of Capitalism you are sadly mistaken. Just as the last thirty to forty years of such efforts have also clearly shown.

Money is absolutely not the root of all evil. Human frailty is. But saying that does not change the fact that nothing creates a hothouse environment for corruptive influence, into that frailty, more than an economic operating system so hopelessly out of date as this one is. So out of date and corruptible precisely because it wasn't ever meant to handle the changes that the electric amplification of everything has brought to all of the technological extensions of our faculties; precisely the situation that is referred to when one utters the phrase "amazing new instrumentality."

Change is coming. Change you cannot stop with money alone. Change that thinking with money alone got us into in the first place. And until we recognize that sad fact we will continue to frustrate ourselves into total annihilation.

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What If His Own Contradictions Of "Emergency" Aren't Enough?

Even though, obviously, they should be. As it clearly came out of his own mouth yesterday, as well as having been amply demonstrated by his own administration's lackadaisical approach to the matter, in real legislative terms, over the past two years.

What if Chief Justice Roberts doesn't rise above interest group ideology, and vote like a true jurist? You know... In the way where you don't try to twist an obvious tear into the Constitution, with tortured, B.S. leagelease, to provide even a pathetic attempt at justification; which recent nominees might be a great deal more inclined to do?

What if money, and people who know no limits, find a way to use that money to get to any of the "packed conservative majority." And they, like the spineless Republican majority in the Senate, vote their sole self interest in staying in those nice, cushy, positions of power (because of the "primary threat," for the legislators certainly, but just because they can't remove you from a judicial office doesn't mean they can't get to you in other ways; especially via your family, and children, and what might be denied to them, let alone done to them, down the road). The very majority that the day before the rose garden grotesquery, that a very sick person put forth, warned the President not to do what he did, but went ahead and cowarded out anyway, the day of that debacle, to suddenly reverse, again, and support him.

What will all of the "Liberals," and the still sane "Conservatives," and even the supposed "Progressives," who think that Capitalism can be saved; what will all of these folks do when our demented "Clown Car Driver-n-Chief" gets his carte blanche ability to declare whatever supposed "National Emergency" he wants to declare. Now, of course, that his best buddies are just dictators, quite adept at whatever kinds of brutality, and villainy, it takes to suppress dissent, and crush all opposition.

What will they do?

Even more importantly, what will you do?

Will you still do nothing as, whatever the foreign power de jour is, using whatever flattery, for a child, that it takes, in this deeply flawed man, occupies this nation just as if they had landed an occupying army. Handing our beautiful experiment in Democracy over to these monsters on the cheap?

Think it possible folks. If not this time around, then the next one. Because there is sure to be a next one, if this one doesn't do it. If for no other reason than the merchants of the "Commoditization of Conflict," will need to egg it on because that is what they must do to keep their very questionable brand of notoriety going.

Make no mistake here. He will try to bring this to whatever kind of cataclysmic conclusion he can conjure to make everybody else blink first. Or catch them apathetic enough, asleep at the switch enough, or just comfortable enough, to not want to be bothered in any case.

Do you think Wall Street will care, as long as stability can be imposed, one way or another?

As always, time will tell.

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The Commoditization Of Conflict

The monetization of which, certainly, provides most of the real, self serving motivation that these people try to portray as conviction based advocacy; knowing full well that certain demographic groups are easy pickings for fear mongering, and manipulation.

In that context, it doesn't matter who you pit against who, to these people, just as long as you can get sufficient numbers enraged up enough to buy whatever they have to sell; which is both a continuing brand as "relevant, controversial persons of note," as well as the books, the seminars, and paid speaking engagements, that earn these people incomes that you'd think would make anybody suspicious, let alone the usual lower income folks that they like to prey upon.

As such, you can see why it matters very little to them that ordinary working people are the ones who are hurt the most here, when they get their "shutdowns."

And the best part of this absurdist, theatre of distraction, is that it makes it all the more likely to keep "Business as usual" going; precisely because it keeps those at the bottom, and the middle, at odds with each other so they can't realize their own common ground here. That they are being played by a mutated system that is not only patently not sustainable, it is one that is making us all sick of spirit, mental and physical health, as well as being threatened by a planet that will have no more of flagrant, individual disregard, of the limits of complex systems, and their carrying capacities.

Make no mistake here. You let all of this continue at your great peril. And you can do this just by continuing to do nothing but what you have been doing, in just trying to get by as best you can now. Understandable though that is, it is only going to make the final rupture, of so many energizing fault lines, inevitable.

We have a window of opportunity still open to us to act. It will just take the choices of a lot of people finally coming to the necessary conclusion that we must start over with something completely new. Something working folks themselves are front and center in determining the shape of. And, in my view, that is going to take something along the lines of the "Grand Compromise" that I have been proposing for several years now. A compromise worked out by a new coalition of the Libertarian Right, and the truly Progressive Left, with what I have been posting in Google Blogs, for the last few years, as simply a starting point with which to begin the discussions.

And all I ask is that you take some time and read back into the posts here, and on the "Containers of Containers..." Cosmolosophy Google Blog. Read as many as you can possibly stand, and then make up your own mind. I don't expect you to agree with me, but I am hoping you will at least get in the habit of asking deeper questions, and then always be trying to find common ground, with all of your neighbors, so that we can have a chance to keep this wonderful experiment in Democracy going.

Fox News keeps forcing Trump into shutdowns