BLOGS

In 2012 the 1895 pastel-on-cardboard version fetched almost $120 million (£75 million) at Sotheby’s in New York (Credit: The Scream 1895/Edvard Munch)

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

An entry in Munch’s diary, dated 22 January 1892, recorded the inspiration for The Scream: “I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.” -- What is the meaning of The Scream? Alastair Sooke, BBC, 3 March 2016

If you feel exhaustion from the weeks of nonsense, let me give you some perspective.

In my family, I've experienced two members of my family who had mental health issues. Both were older than me, so by age and station I wanted to afford them respect. One in particular had substance abuse issues. The other was my direct caretaker, as I was too young to have a key to our home. This person did the most bizarre things, like eating chips all day on a couch that attracted mice, the ones I could see scurrying under the couch. Asking why they would do that would engender a defensive argument where no cogent points of logic were used, just emotion, irrationality, and hutzpah. My substance abuse relative was my father's nephew, who couldn't live on his own, so when he got back from Vietnam, he retired to his old bedroom and abused alcohol. When he needed money to get more liquor, he would attack my aunt, and my father often had to intervene.

When you deal with individuals who have mental health issues, they exhaust you because you're constantly trying to get to a modicum of normalcy. You exhaust a considerable amount of brain power trying to come up with the argument, the "zinger" that will put the matter to rest, that will "win" an argument with a sociopath. You'd have better luck playing chess with Hannibal Lecter, hoping not to be in his next pâté.

It always comes to a head.

My cousin decided it was a great idea to break a beer bottle over my father's head. My cousin had the sudden, painful reminder (the hard way) that Pop was ranked Middle Weight Golden Gloves in the United States Navy in World War Two. It wasn't pretty.

My caretaker, in an argument with my mom and me, found a wooden mallet in an old toy tool chest I had and tried to hit my mother! I was big enough to put her in a "full Nelson" like I saw on the National Wrestling Federation. My caretaker was fired, and put on a bus to relatives in Washington. My mother gave me a key with the pronouncement "You're GROWN!" The next day, I opened the house to peaceful, and studious solitude.

Everything in this insanity will come to a head. Reality, whether beer bottle, mallet, new pandemic, war, recession, or depression, will have to be confronted. Gaslighting is the tool of an abuser, but it has zero effects on financial markets, or physics.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin

It will be exhausting, like the storm that hit North Carolina Wednesday: a small tornado touched down in Winston-Salem, there was a watch in Greensboro, and torrential rain where I was sitting in Durham. My three friends and I decided to stay inside and have lunch in the cafeteria. It was a wise choice. After the storms: sunlight and clear skies. As the BBC article eludes in bold and quotes, "We all scream." In confronting insanity, this is normal.

There will be a price for confrontation, and always a prize for confrontation.

Push to sunlight, clear skies past the storm, and off-year elections and midterms.

That is the meaning of "The Scream." We all scream, before sunlight, and clearer skies.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company, the first billionaire of the United States of America, and once the richest man on Earth was asked by a reporter, “How much money is enough?”

He calmly replied, “Just a little bit more.” Siddhartha Rastogi, CNBC TV18

A Body Mass Index is a rough estimate of body composition that is used to define an unhealthy versus healthy weight. It is body mass divided by height squared (kg/m2). A BMI under 18.5 is considered underweight, whereas, a BMI of 25.0 to 29.9 is considered overweight, and a BMI over 30.0 is considered obese.

Fifty percent of the United States population is now considered obese; they have accumulated too much body mass, most specifically fat, and this has placed them at risk for illness, disease, and death. Only 1.5 percent of the United States population lacks adequate body mass and qualifies as underweight and unhealthy. They, too, are at increased risk for illness, disease, and death.

Some wealth is clearly protective and leads to better health and more happiness, but there is a paucity of information regarding the physical and mental health of the ultrarich. Subjectively, we see the ultrarich and their descendants suffer from such things as anxiety, depression, addiction, and loss of meaning and purpose. The individuals and their families appear to have an increased level of dysfunction, but it is unclear whether the dysfunction is greater, less than, or the same as in the general population.

Notably, the ultrarich suffer from the trappings of their wealth. They have more to track, manage, and protect. Their wealth can become isolating for them, as well. They can be resented by many and targeted by others. Healthy and meaningful relationships can be hard to find for the ultrarich. Their wealth can also precipitate and facilitate their seeking of pleasure over happiness, a formula for addiction and dysfunction. The ultrarich have some increased risk factors for illness and disease.

Morbid Wealth, David R. Clawson M.D., Psychology Today

"Just a little bit more." The current richest man on Earth (at least, on paper) is poised to be the world's first trillionaire, according to Fortune magazine. After him, Amazon's and the Washington Post's CEO will likely come. As the title "trillionaire" becomes passe, quadrillionaire is the next obvious goal, and the gulf of wealth inequality will become a bottomless ocean that a nonexistent middle class cannot cross. That is peonage. That is serfdom. For "just a little bit more," democracy becomes a fairy tale.

Remember the rich that were caricatured in these Sci-Fi movies and stories:

“Don’t Look Up?” “Elysium?” “The Handmaid’s Tale?” “The Hunger Games?” “Parable of the Sower?” “Parable of the Talents?” The wealthy were depicted as callous, dismissive, and unfeeling. Note that they own the corporations that produced them. This was them blatantly shoving their resumes in our faces, so we shouldn't be at all surprised that "life imitates art." Now, the South African "Ketamine Kid" has six teenage mutant Ninja turtles sifting through our personal identifying information doing God knows what, without background checks and without security clearances, but, we're supposed to "trust them!"

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Separate but equal” was always an oxymoron, like “military intelligence” or “United States” of America. My kindergarten was Bethlehem Community Center, still in Winston-Salem, and still on the east side. I found out later that the name was given by the Wesleyan Methodists because of its location and clientele: “Bethlehem” was for black kids, and “Wesleyan” was reserved for the better/whiter side of town. I remember the signs for water fountains.

My kindergarten graduation was on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr. King. I remember crying a lot and not a single child smiling in our photo. I remember the thought “We’re not kids anymore!” I don’t know what the kids at Wesleyan were thinking, but I will bet that the Klan wasn’t outside shooting in the air, celebrating.

“All deliberate speed” did not occur for me until 1971 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: 17 years after Brown v Board, and three years after Dr. King's death. I was bussed across town to the suburbs of Rural Hall. The night before, my parents watched the news nervously as riots broke out at the high schools, attackers bringing chains, and bats. It didn’t help that my bus was to pick me up before sunrise: Pop waited until I got on the bus before he drove off. I was going to the 4th grade. We grouped by complexion at first, calling each other names: white crackers, and "black crackers" (which wasn't then or ever has been, a "thing"). We were unconsciously imitating the rioting high school students with a limited vocabulary of epithets. We became friends with a game of football during recess. I assume now in our sixth decade, if they're still alive, many of those friends now wear red hats.

The books were newer at Rural Hall Elementary: no torn pages, no written epithets in spelling, and math books clearly out of date. My first-grade teacher, Ms. Samuel was my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Perry, and she could "pass" to go to bookstores near Wesleyan Community Center, and purchase the actual books they stencil-copied, and taught us from. I felt like we were moving toward Dr. King’s “beloved community,” and closer to Star Trek without the need for their fictional (and our un-survivable) World War III.

“The Corporation” was a 2003 documentary that asked the question “If corporations are people (by the misapplication of the 14th Amendment), what KIND of persons are they?” The answer was a psychopath: “a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies.” That aptly describes the moment that we find ourselves in.

Harry Belafonte describes a conversation with Dr. King the night before he died and Dr. King “feared that he was integrating his people into a burning house.” If there had been no assassination, the next sermon that he relayed by phone to his mother was going to be “Why America May Go To Hell,” a warning to the nation that if we didn’t repent for our sins of militarism, and capitalism with no other thought other than profit for corporations/psychopaths and shareholders, the planet be damned.

Maybe we’re all just finally starting to notice.

Topics: African Americans, African Studies, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Computer Science, Diversity in Science

Inventor of the World's Fastest Computer

Dr. Philip Emeagwali, who has been called the "Bill Gates of Africa," was born in Nigeria in 1954. Like many African schoolchildren, he dropped out of school at age 14 because his father could not continue paying his school fees. However, his father continued teaching him at home, and every day, Emeagwali performed mental exercises such as solving 100 math problems in one hour. His father taught him until Philip "knew more than he did."

Growing up in a country torn by civil war, Emeagwali lived in a building crumbled by rocket shells. He believed his intellect was a way out of the line of fire, so he studied hard and eventually received a scholarship to Oregon State University when he was 17, where he obtained a BS in mathematics. He also earned three other degrees—a Ph.D. in scientific computing from the University of Michigan and two Master's degrees from George Washington University.

The noted black inventor received acclaim based, at least in part, on his study of nature, specifically bees. Emeagwali saw an inherent efficiency in the way bees construct and work with honeycombs and determined computers that emulate this process could be the most efficient and powerful. In 1989, emulating the bees' honeycomb construction, Emeagwali used 65,000 processors to invent the world's fastest computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second.

Dr. Philip Emeagwali's resume is loaded with many other such feats, including ways of making oil fields more productive – which has resulted in the United States saving hundreds of millions of dollars each year. As one of the most famous African-American inventors of the 20th century, Dr. Emeagwali also won the Gordon Bell Prize – the Nobel Prize for computation. His computers are currently being used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.

Source: Black Inventor - Dr. Philip Emeagwali

Topics: African Americans, Biology, Black History Month, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Diversity in Science, Medicine

“Father of the Blood Bank”
June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950
Renowned surgeon and pioneer in the preservation of life-saving blood plasma
Major scientific achievements:

• Discovered method for long-term storage of blood plasma
• Organized America's first large-scale blood bank

Dr. Charles Richard Drew broke barriers in a racially divided America to become one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. His pioneering research and systematic developments in the use and preservation of blood plasma during World War II not only saved thousands of lives but innovated the nation’s blood banking process and standardized procedures for long-term blood preservation and storage techniques adapted by the American Red Cross.

A native Washingtonian, Drew was an average student but a gifted athlete recruited in 1922 on a football and track and field scholarship by Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was one of only 13 African Americans in a student body of 600, where the racial climate exposed him to hostility from opposing teams. His own football team passed him over as captain his senior year even though he was the team’s best athlete.

Beyond sports, Drew didn’t have a clear direction until a biology professor piqued his interest in medicine. Like many other fields, medicine was largely segregated, greatly limiting education and career options for African Americans. For Drew, the narrowed road would lead him to McGill University College of Medicine in Montréal. There, he distinguished himself, winning the annual scholarship prize in neuroanatomy; becoming elected to the medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha; and staffing the McGill Medical Journal. He also won the J. Francis Williams Prize in medicine after beating the top 5 students in an exam competition. In 1933, Drew received his MD and CM (Master of Surgery) degrees, graduating second in a class of 137.

Drew’s interest in transfusion medicine began during his internship and surgical residency at Montreal Hospital (1933-1935) working with bacteriology professor John Beattie on ways to treat shock with fluid replacement. Drew aspired to continue training in transfusion therapy at the Mayo Clinic, but racial prejudices at major American medical centers barred black scholars from their practices. He would instead join the faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, starting as a pathology instructor, and then progressing to surgical instructor and chief surgical resident at Freedmen's Hospital.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew, American Chemical Society

 Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democratic Republic, Existentialism, Fascism

Eugenics is an immoral and pseudoscientific theory that claims it is possible to perfect people and groups through genetics and the scientific laws of inheritance. Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of “racial improvement.”

In their quest for a perfect society, eugenicists labeled many people as “unfit,” including ethnic and religious minorities, people with disabilities, the urban poor, and LGBTQ individuals. Discussions of eugenics began in the late 19th century in England and then spread to other countries, including the United States. Most industrialized countries had organizations devoted to promoting eugenics by the end of World War I.

Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 - Present), National Human Genome Research Institute

Occam’s razor, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle precedes simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

Encyclopedia Britannica Online: Occam's razor

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: 'Move fast and break things.' The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.

Did Mark Zuckerberg Say, 'Move Fast And Break Things'? Jordan Liles, Snopes (yup)

The callousness of the wrecking ball that is pulverizing USAID, threatening the lives of children in Sudan, and AIDS vaccination protocols that will keep the virus from metastasizing into something worse, but it doesn't matter when you don't think that Sudanese children are humans and that the United States Agency for International Development is the extension of soft power. The agency was created in 1961 under the Kennedy administration to counteract the spread of communism (when the Republican Party cared about that sort of thing). Particularly, Ketamine DOGE and the six Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have something against the agency aiding in the dismantling of Apartheid. I can see his sensitivity in this area could send him into "full demon mode." Minus one MNT because of racist posts online (I thought that was a qualifier for the job).

I also thought we were afraid of TikTok and the Chinese government stealing our information.We're apparently cool with man-sized (not sure of their genitalia) mutant-shelled reptiles with grandma's social security number. After "saving" it for Gen Alpha (who will be eighteen in 2028), it's suddenly unavailable in at least the Apple App Stores.

Seizing our social security numbers could be valuable for feeding into a social media AI shredder. Think of an online world where you exhaustively have to question reality.

But in full demon mode, why would you care when your beliefs stem from the belief that resources are only due to a select few, and the undeserving "others," the aliens, and the "feebleminded" should be "pruned" out of the human family. That is eugenics.

"Move fast and break things" is a phrase that comes from privilege. It became a Silicon Valley idiom the moments after Zuckerberg uttered the phrase. It means that you're comfortable flying by the seat of your pants, with a minimal or zero business plan, because you have relatives (usually, a deep-pocketed "daddy") who can clean up your screw-ups. Be the "bull in the China shop" - smash things galore. The well-heeled "clean up on aisle five" also connects with traditional media, giving you favorable coverage in print, cable, and Internet media. Or, just own a platform or two. Thus, you're not an emotionally cold sociopath, you're a titan of industry, a genius.

You become famous for cooking up a cockamamie scheme to place a billion people on Mars: a planet with no oxygen, two years travel at current rocket speeds, if you survive the small asteroids or meteors colliding with your spaceship, or the radiation shielding, or the stir-craziness of floating for two years straight. Mars is 38% of Earth's gravity, thus the new Martians could never come back home and stand up on whatever is LEFT of Mother Earth. After a generation of deadly radiation that if they survive it, will change their DNA to something truly alien, so a Martian and an Earthling could not plan a family. Lastly, sandstorms and Mars quakes. This great exodus idea had to be after the ketamine kicked in.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Of two competing theories, the simplest one is preferable.

Elizabeth Willing Powel's question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

Benjamin Franklin's reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Perhaps, in this case, the simplest explanation is not preferable.

National Park Service, September 17, 1787: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Topics: African Americans, African Studies, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization

The 'Green Book' Was a Travel Guide Just for Black Motorists, Danielle Moodie-Mills, NBCBLK, October 11, 2016

The meaning of SANKOFA, Sankofa.org/about

Happy Black History Month (tomorrow), for what it's worth at the moment.

The Green Book: Guide to Freedom is a documentary about the emergence of the Black middle class in the 1940s and 1950s. The documentary explores the dangerous journeys Black people took outside their cities and the book that helped guide them.

The book, The Negro Motorist Green Book, was a guide for Black people to find places to eat, drink, shop, and stay overnight. The book was no longer needed after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the racial discrimination that made it necessary. Google AI

The Google AI stated that it's "not available on Hulu," which was news to me, as I had just watched it on Hulu (probably because I saved it in my "favorites" and the Hulu streaming gods left me alone - they get paid monthly).

The Negro Motorist Green Book, popularly known as the Green Book, was a travel guide intended to help African American motorists avoid social obstacles prevalent during the period of racial segregation, commonly referred to as Jim Crow.  The Green Book listed businesses that would accept African American customers.

The book was the vision of Victor Green, an African American US postal employee from Harlem, New York.  The first guide focused on Metropolitan New York.  The next year, in 1937, Green expanded listings to other locations.  His book would eventually include every state and several international destinations before ceasing publication in 1964.  Before its demise, the book was the most popular of several tourist guides created specifically for an African American audience.

These types of travel guides were necessary during the Jim Crow era because African Americans were subject to acts of discrimination and occasional intimidation as many businesses refused to accept them as customers.  African American motorists, for example, were warned to avoid sundown towns which required minorities to be outside the city limits before sundown, hence the name.  African American travel could be fraught with risk and guides like the Green Book were an important resource. 

Black Past dot org: The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936 - 1964)

One of the unintended consequences of the success of the Civil Rights Movement is a lot of businesses that sprang up in reaction to segregation now had to compete with larger corporations during "integration" that could offer more services. Many businesses that advertised in the Green Book no longer exist, boarded up, and condemned, many are not even memorialized with a historical designation in the cities they were located. The FW Woolworth International Civil Rights Museum is a noted exception and the Magnolia House (listed in The Green Book), both in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Tabitha Brown and Melissa Butler have sounded the alarm on the unintended consequences of boycotting businesses that have removed their DEI initiatives. Like the black-owned businesses post-Green Book, they might not survive, and it took years to get their products placed in the "big box" stores. Their sales dropping would mean they would be removed from the shelves they fought so long to occupy, in favor of the products the corporation would promote over theirs. Again, going into spaces that took considerable effort to sell products in gives our (as of 2019) 910 billion dollars, projected to be 1.7 trillion in 2030 consumer impact, it would seem that we lack both focus and vision: that buying power impacts Target and similar businesses giving our dollars on the altar of corporate indifference. We seem to justify finding our own backdoors.

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
― Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

"Who taught you to hate yourself? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? To such an extent you bleach, to get like the white man. Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much so that you don't want to be around each other?"

Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? Malcolm X, May 5, 1962, Genius dot com

Sixty-three years ago, Malcolm called the motives of the Antioch High School shooter. He posted anti-black, antisemitic tropes online. Who taught him to hate himself?

Boycotts are the knee-jerk, go-to tactic we gravitate to without an understanding of the mathematics of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: 30,000 - 40,000 African Americans participated, 90% of the black residents participated, and they comprised 75% of the bus company's customers. Therefore, unless the clientele of Target and Walmart match Montgomery's numbers, any thought of a boycott will only hurt these black businesses.

The irony of these dark times is this blatant white supremacy should drive us closer together. In our 0.9 to 1.7 trillion dollar demographic, only two cents gets to the African American community:

An NAACP study found that a dollar circulates in Asian communities for 30 days, as opposed to six hours in Black communities. It found that only two cents of every dollar African Americans spend goes to Black-owned businesses. One researcher estimated that if Black consumers spent at least one dollar out of every ten with Black businesses, it could generate one million jobs for African Americans. Minority buying power can do far more than purchase; it can become an investment in stronger, local communities.

The Color of Money: Reaping the Dividends of Entrepreneurship [March 2, 2016], National Urban League

One dollar out of every ten is ten cents per dollar of the 0.9 to eventually 1.7 trillion dollars we freely give to this economy for continued disrespect, disheartening policy decisions, and abject hatred of our contributions to this nation. A tithe, and we don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so. This cooperation is beyond reflexive boycotts without clear goals and the will to be uncomfortable for long terms: the Montgomery boycott lasted over a year.

Wakanda and its superhero ruler, T'Challa/The Black Panther, is a fantasy comic book product (the first black superhero) developed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, for Marvel.

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire, and unlike the fictional wealth of the nonexistent element, Vibranium, his wealth was from the conventional element of gold and the mineral salt. He was said to have been the richest person who has ever lived.

This present darkness may be the thing we need to come together again. Ten cents won't get us the Mali Empire, or Wakanda, but it might get us independence, freedom, a sense of control of our own destinies, and peace of mind. It will be as long, or longer than a boycott, but we would have to work together towards a common goal. It would be the last thing they would expect us to do. The dominant society is counting on it that we won't. We will also have to be willing to literally fight for it because as history has shown in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida, success attracts the jealousy of psychopaths.

Sankofa.

Source: Reddit

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

Oligarchy (noun): government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes, Merriam-Webster

In Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address, he warned of the military-industrial complex.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." National Archives

In Joseph R. Biden's Farewell Address, he warned of oligarchy, run by the tech-industrial complex, which ironically spells the acronym: "T.I.C."

"Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." Reuters

Tick (noun): any of a superfamily (Ixodoidea) of bloodsucking acarid arachnids that are larger than the related mites, attach themselves to warm-blooded vertebrates to feed and include important vectors of infectious diseases. Seems appropriate.

From Quora:

Why do Republicans believe so much stuff that is simply not true? What is their problem with reality?

Stay with me on this for a second….

In 1976 Republicans lost a Presidential election with an incumbent candidate to an unknown peanut farmer. This rocked them to the core.

After the election, they used a new methodology (focus group studies) to try to figure out how to win elections in the future. Their efforts identified one narrow path to victory for Republicans in national elections. They had to divide the country along the lines of religion and race to win. Ronald Reagan used this to great effect in 1980. In making this change Republicans switched their base from fiscal conservatives to religious conservatives. This fundamentally changed the nature of the Republican Party.

Previously Republicans were a pragmatic group of people looking for workable solutions to the problems of the country. Here is what Barry Goldwater had to say about this change.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

This switch turned the Republican Party from a group of political pragmatists to a faith community. In short, the most important issues to Republicans were group loyalty and shared belief.

The problem you have when a group is centered on its beliefs as opposed to its goals is that if any of the beliefs do not line up with the facts, it is going to be very hard to change them. This goes double if these beliefs are wrapped up in their religion such that they believe that they came from God.

The solution for Republicans was “alternative facts.” Their beliefs were the most important thing to them, but the facts were less so. They were much more willing to create facts that aligned with their beliefs and then believe those facts than change their beliefs.

This is cowardice and if it continues will create even worse disasters for the U.S. Policy has to align with the facts. Beliefs are not terribly important in politics. The facts and policies that align with those facts need to be the focus.

I haven't watched the confirmation hearings, though I've been asked if I did. I have seen excerpts posted on YouTube that have been decidedly nauseous. Despite that most of the candidates' slim "qualifications" should bar them from selection, they have the votes in the Senate on party lines alone, especially if they throw out the filibuster for the minority party and 60-vote threshold as I expect them to do.

This kabuki theater isn't supposed to put forward the best and brightest minds, or anyone qualified for the positions. Sycophancy is the "secret sauce" of political expediency. "Deconstructing the administrative state" (Bannon, the Leninist) means defying the norms that have held the republic together since its inception, but like any physical momentum, it eventually meets the Entropy of friction over time and distance. Their despise of the "deep state" means what they want is a shallow alternative, where expertise can be ignored for the almighty, all-powerful "gut," "hunch," or claims of communication with spirits through dreams. Preparation can be substituted for crowdsourcing "concepts of plans," otherwise known as conspiracy theories. Quantum mechanics can be mastered in a few clicks: Who needs a degree in Physics? Who needs those stinking, liberal-biased facts?

Where does this lead us?

Kakistocracy (noun): government by the worst people.

Kleptocracy (noun): government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.

Idiocracy (noun): 1. a society governed or populated by idiots 2. government by idiots.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.—Neil deGrasse Tyson

As we lurch toward idiocracy—the real thing, not the movie—we must change course.—John Kass - definitions and quotes from Merriam-Webster.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence - National Archives

The Washington Post's tagline used to be "Democracy Dies in Darkness." The United States: July 4, 1776 - January 20, 2025. Consider this a eulogy.

Ice sample on the melter during continuous ice core chemical analyses at the Desert Research Institute (Credit: Sylvain Masclin)

Topics: Chemistry, Civilization, Democracy, Environment, Existentialism

It’s perhaps historically appropriate that the word “ironic” contains “iron.” Mining and smelting minerals like iron represented technological highs at the Roman Empire’s peak. But those activities also produced enough lead pollution to impair its citizens’ IQs, according to a new study in PNAS.

“Detailed ice core records of Arctic lead pollution, together with sophisticated atmospheric modeling and modern epidemiology, indicate that human industrial activities were measurably damaging human health more than 2,000 years ago,” says Joe McConnell, a scientist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the study.

Scholars have debated lead poisoning’s impact on Roman history for decades. Some have even argued that lead poisoning played a role in the downfall of the Roman empire. Most of those arguments have focused on ancient writings and archeology that provide hints about lead’s impact — circumstantial evidence, if you will.

Now a team of researchers has provided hard evidence linking pollution and ancient intellect. They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then they compared those levels with how lead pollution affected the general public during its peak in the 1970s, before it was banned from gasoline.

According to the study, the lead in the air in Roman times affected IQs by about a third as much as in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect, and about twice as much as in the early 2010s.

“Elites and non-elites in cities and rural areas alike were affected by the background air pollution — no one could escape the health effects," says McConnell.

Ancient Lead Poisoning May Have Contributed to the Roman Empire’s Downfall, Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism

Ref: https://litkicks.com/ingatsbystracks/, In Gatsby’s Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo. The ash heap was a metaphor for the rot and decay of modern life as the author depicted it in the novel:

The spot where Fitzgerald had a vision would soon become world famous because the trash-burning operation at Flushing Meadows was closed shortly after The Great Gatsby was written. The creeks were drained and turned into artificial lakes, and the Long Island Expressway, Van Wyck Expressway, and Grand Central Parkway were all built to carry the massive automobile traffic between New York City and Long Island that they still carry today. Beautiful Flushing Meadows Park was developed on the large square of land circumscribed by these three highways, encompassing the creek and its valley. This park hosted the 1939 Worlds Fair and then the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. Shea Stadium was built to host the New York Mets on the northern side and was then replaced by CitiField on the same spot. Every year the US Open Tennis Tournament is held at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center south of the baseball fields. Here’s what the same spot looks like in an aerial photograph from 2009. Shea Stadium is on the top left, and the US Open tennis courts are on the bottom left.

The hashtag #FAFO is apropos here. Noam Chomsky's book is a pamphlet. It is short and meant to be absorbed in one sitting. In 1991, Chomsky was 65. He's knocking on the door of his 99th birthday, and we buried President Carter yesterday who was 100. My fear: will anyone ever read anything brief, in paperback, and offline before Chomsky expires?

Chomsky begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky "propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson's Creel Commission "succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population," to Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war.
Chomsky touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann's theory of "spectator democracy," in which the public is seen as a "bewildered herd" that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on "controlling the public mind," and not on informing it.

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky, Seven Stories Press

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. 

Post "Retreat and Aftermath," and "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. The Matrix

I worked alongside H-1B visa recipients with no stigma whatsoever. They worked alongside me, a graduate of the largest HBCU in the nation, and the largest supplier of graduate engineers and scientists in the STEM pipeline. I spoke at conferences. I published proceedings. I never once felt inferior, nor did I feel that Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, or Applied Materials did me a "favor." It's ludicrous. It's self-defeating and stupid. Instead of a faux halcyon "great again," it's the blueprint for the reinstitution of serfdom.

The giveaway was Elon and Vivek disparaging “American” workers, which means all of us, and all ages. This is what I expect in their ketamine-fueled thought process that will lead us to perdition:

1. “Break” the economy (Elon's words) - sending the U.S. into a recession.

2. Layoffs, particularly of African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian-Pacific Islander talent.

3. Wait a few months and lower salary price points.

4. Hire H-1Bs at LOWER than even that lowered rate. Companies don't have to and usually don't, but they have that option and have always had it. What about all of that African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, and white American talent? They can apply for "black jobs," plentiful after the forcible expulsion of undocumented immigrant labor from home and commercial builder sites, fields, and meat processing plants. Someone's got to do it. Don't worry. They won't go anywhere. They'll be working alongside you as leased labor from for-profit prisons. It will keep salaries down. The "minimum wage" will become an urban myth. "Social security" was always a communist plot.

5. All leverage is with the employer. Don’t like your job? Quitting will get your H-1B revoked and you’ll be sent back to your country. Fired at will? Break the law? See the first and third sentences of item 5.

6. (Added) Look for stiff competition on "Who will be the world's first trillionaire?"

A reporter once asked John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company, the first billionaire of the United States of America, and once the richest man on Earth, “How much money is enough?” He calmly replied, "Just a little bit more." CNBCTV

Where does it leave American workers? Well, the pesky, “woke” DEI thing is history. Industries have abandoned it for the simple reason that it's no longer profitable. It's ridiculous to think that corporations will "do the right thing." They only think in quarters and the bank accounts of shareholders, life on Earth be damned. Unions will be in the vein of Tyrannosaurus and the Dodo. Income inequality will be SOLVED because rural and urban workers will be in a goulash of poverty. Training to be in the "specialized class" will become irrelevant. Social mobility will be eliminated by the financial canyon erected between the have-nots by the Hoarding Disorder kleptocratic haves! We're at the same income inequality that preceded the French Revolution. Brian Thomson and Luigi Mangione might be the harbinger of things to come.

I call it “tech bro servitude,” or “lords, and serfs.” If you’re not a billionaire, you’re probably a serf. Again, I fear the result of the blowback. Unfortunately, imposed totalitarian regimes don't crumble without a lot of bloodshed and violence.

“The most dangerous creation of any society is a man who feels he has nothing to lose.”

-James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”

The Palisades Fire on January 7, 2025. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

 “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”—Lauren Olamina, “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler

I called my cousin, our family historian last night, to check on her. She calmly told me she lived about 15 miles from the Palisades, where the fires are fueled by a dry winter and climate change. I was checking to see if she received my payments for our family reunion planned for Los Angeles this summer and my concern for her safety. I signed us up for the tour of Hollywood, thinking that fate and the summer would be "normal" in this environment of climate crisis and science denial. She assured me that she had packed her "Mo-bag" and if the authorities told her to go, she'd go. This post hits home more than any other I've produced. We said "I love you" before we hung up. I'll keep checking on her.

The nature of the Santa Ana winds makes them perfectly suited to fueling blazes like the Palisades Fire, and climate change is increasing the risk.

Editor’s Note (1/8/25): This story is being updated as the situation unfolds.

Another explosive wildfire in California, driven by the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds, has burned hundreds of buildings and has forced thousands to evacuate from their homes. The Palisades Fire began at 10:30 A.M. local time on Tuesday near Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Much of the neighborhood is under evacuation orders, which extended to northern Santa Monica. As of Wednesday afternoon, the fire had scorched more than 15,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,000 structures.

Another blaze, the Eaton Fire, erupted on Tuesday evening in Altadena, Calif., just north of Los Angeles. As of late Wednesday, it had burned more than 10,000 acres and resulted in at least five deaths. Both fires had caused numerous injuries, according to officials.

On Wednesday evening, another fire began in the heart of Los Angeles just north of Hollywood. The fire grew rapidly to cover at least 20 acres as it spread downhill in Runyon Canyon. Though winds were not as high as Tuesday night, they were still pushing the fire and carrying embers that started spot fires.

Forecasters had warned that the risk of fire was extremely high this week, reaching “particularly dangerous situation” status as the ferocious winds combined with tinder-dry vegetation after a lack of rain during the beginning of what would usually be the wet season.

How the Ferocious Santa Ana Winds Are Fueling the Palisades Fire, Andrea Thompson, edited by Dean Visser, Scientific American

CROCUS researchers crossed Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as they collected data on how buildings, streets, and greenspaces impact temperature and air quality. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming, Thermodynamics

CROCUS’s Urban Canyon campaign captured data on heat islands and air quality while also helping scientists understand how to conduct a major research initiative in the heart of one of America’s largest cities.

When you picture atmospheric scientists, you might think of them monitoring cloud cover on the open plains or even chasing a twister through a cornfield. You probably don’t imagine teams of people launching weather balloons in the center of one of the largest cities in the U.S.

But that’s what happened this past July during the CROCUS Urban Canyon Campaign in Chicago. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program, the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) effort studies urban climate change and the impact it has on local homeowners and businesses.

An urban canyon is a dense city street with buildings on both sides. These confined spaces trap heat, leading to an urban heat island effect. This effect is one factor contributing to cities being warmer than surrounding areas. It can impact energy use, air quality, and overall climate patterns. The goal of the Urban Canyon campaign was to collect data at the street level, where people live and work, and in the boundary layer, where air from the city mixes with the atmosphere.

Over two weeks, CROCUS researchers from Chicago and around the region converged on the city to conduct two intensive measurement sessions. They measured temperature, air quality, and airflow in and around Chicago’s mix of skyscrapers, highways, and neighborhoods. Their data will help inform strategies to mitigate extreme heat and weather while protecting property and infrastructure.

Backed by the support of community partners Blacks in Green (BIG) and the Puerto Rican Agenda, more than 40 scientists and staff collaborated to make the campaign successful. Throughout their work, they snapped pictures of research in action.

Snapshots of urban climate science
Researchers study heat islands and air quality in the heart of Chicago, Gillian-King Carlyle, Argonne National Laboratory

Image source: https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/methane-molecule

Topics: Chemistry, Civilization, Climate Change, Entropy, Environment, Global Warming

The "good news": you can download the PDF for free by registering an email, or read the report from the National Academies of Science and Medicine here. Citizenship takes work and effort to be informed. It would be nice to carry on a little longer than the dinosaurs.

2023 shattered global climate records as the warmest year in the modern record, bringing with it devastating impacts on human and natural systems. About 60% of methane emissions come from human activities and are a major contributor to global warming, second only to carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere but is 80 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year period. Together with reducing CO2 emissions, rapid and sustained reductions in methane emissions are critical to limit both near- and long-term warming in future decades. However, given the many barriers to achieving needed emissions reductions at scale, researchers are exploring the potential of technologies to remove methane from the atmosphere.

A Research Agenda Toward Atmospheric Methane Removal is the first report of a two-phase study to assess the need and potential for atmospheric methane removal. This report identifies priority research that should be addressed within 3-5 years so that a second-phase assessment could more robustly assess the technical, economic, and social viability of technologies to remove atmospheric methane at climate-relevant scales. The research agenda presented in this report includes foundational research that would help us better understand atmospheric methane removal while also filling knowledge gaps in related fields, and systems research that seek to address what developing and/or deploying atmospheric methane removal at scale would entail. A Research Agenda Toward Atmospheric Methane Removal also assesses five atmospheric methane removal technologies that would accelerate the conversion of methane to a less radiatively potent form or physically remove methane from the atmosphere and store it elsewhere.

Contributor(s): National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences; Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate; Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology; Board on Energy and Environmental Systems; Committee on Atmospheric Methane Removal: Development of a Research Agenda

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism

September 11, 2001, was on a Tuesday. We were a year from a contested election decided by the Supreme Court. We were scrambling to make sense of the senseless, and trying mightily, not to individually, or collectively go insane.

I remember President George W. Bush being told that we were under attack, and the astonished look on his face. He had received a PDB: Presidential Daily Brief, in Crawford, Texas a month before that was explicit in its description: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The affable person everyone would "like to have a beer with" (though he's a teetotaler) apparently said to the intelligence agent, "You've covered your ass now." He was already setting a precedent, a pattern, for his republican successors in the number of days he vacationed at his ranch rather than actually work in Washington. The presidency from a distance looked like an easy job to anyone who wanted to throw their hat in the ring. Social media and Nielsen Ratings meant the only thing one had to do was something outrageous for attention and "clicks." We have become Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle."

I remember the push after the attacks not to understand why a former intelligence asset, Osama Bin Laden, wanted to smash planes into the symbols of financial and political power, CNN reporter Peter Bergen reported on the former Mujahadeen rebel from the mountains of Afghanistan. He was hard to catch because the CIA taught him their playbook.

I remember the push to "get back to normal," to shop, to "help the economy" as an act of defiance to then, the grossest attack on US soil that had ever been captured on film. It felt like the same push to get the economy "rocking again" during Covid.

I remember that we never collectively, sought counsel about what had then happened to us, and how it might have affected us psychologically as a country.

Posttraumatic stress disorder: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, series of events, or set of circumstances. An individual may experience this as emotionally or physically harmful or life-threatening and may affect mental, physical, social, and/or spiritual well-being. Examples include natural disasters, serious accidents, terrorist acts, war/combat, rape/sexual assault, historical trauma, intimate partner violence and bullying.

PTSD has been known by many names in the past, such as “shell shock” during the years of World War I and “combat fatigue” after World War II, but PTSD does not just happen to combat veterans. PTSD can occur in all people, of any ethnicity, nationality, or culture, and at any age. PTSD affects approximately 3.5 percent of U.S. adults every year. The lifetime prevalence of PTSD in adolescents ages 13 -18 is 8%. An estimated one in 11 people will be diagnosed with PTSD in their lifetime. Women are twice as likely as men to have PTSD. Three ethnic groups – U.S. Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans/Alaska Natives – are disproportionately affected and have higher rates of PTSD than non-Latino whites.

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear, or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.

Psychiatry.org: What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?

*****

At least 14 people are dead and 35 people were injured after a man drove a truck into a crowd at Bourbon and Canal streets in New Orleans on New Year's Day in a terrorist attack, according to the FBI.

It happened around 3:15 a.m. toward the end of New Year’s celebrations in New Orleans and hours before the expected kickoff of the Allstate Sugar Bowl, a college football quarterfinal held in the city’s Caesars Superdome.

The FBI confirmed the identity of the suspected driver of the truck as Shamsud Din Jabbar, 42, of Texas. A new photo of Jabbar was released early Thursday morning:

The FBI confirmed that despite previous reports, investigators believe Jabbar acted alone in the attack.

According to the FBI, Jabbar drove to New Orleans on Dec. 31 and posted on Facebook his support for ISIS.

14 victims dead, 35 hurt as FBI puts call out for tips in terror attack investigation, Erin Lowrey, WDSU News

*****

The suspected driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded Wednesday outside the Trump International Las Vegas Hotel sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head prior to the blast, officials confirmed in a press briefing Thursday.

The Clark County Coroner identified the driver of the vehicle in this incident as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Thursday. His cause of death was as a result of an intraoral gunshot wound by suicide.

No one else suffered serious injuries.

Prior to his official identification, officials found overwhelming evidence -- including credit cards in his name, similar tattoos, Livelsberger purchasing the weapons in the truck, and an ID card -- pointing to him as the individual. The fire and explosion slowed the identification process because of the physical injuries sustained by the driver, officials said.

Suspect in Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion was an Army member on leave, Josh Margolin, Alex Stone, Alexandra Hutzler, David Brennan, Aaron Katersky, and Julia Reinstein, ABC News

Jabbar and Livelsberger were US Army veterans who had been stationed at Fort Bragg/Liberty. Both men had deployed to Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/11. Both were decorated veterans who had "protected and served" their country.

Both men were broken. The country is still broken.

We lost the Vietnam War and the veterans who survived came home and were spat upon as "baby killers." The propaganda movies by Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the 1980s tried to bring back our collective loss of esteem and testosterone. In the Reagan era, we were trying to re-establish the chutzpah of old World War II movies where the "good guys won."

We started going dark in our entertainment with the Michael Keaton "Batman," and the plethora of clone superhero movies spawned that had to be "grounded" in reality, involving a lot of property damage, and bloodshed. "24" was our revenge porn, and the template for things on television going ... dark. We were the "good guys," even if Jack Bauer had to torture a captive terrorist for info before the hour was up. This was copied in the live-action "Arrow" and in the animated series, Batman Beyond: "This is how you interrogate someone!" It was a subtle, inexorable change into the abyss. The fantasy entertainment made torture "cool," and it morphed soldiers', citizens, and politicians' psyches.

Shamsud Din Jabbar was 42, and Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs, Colorado, was 37. That would make both men 19, and 14, respectively, when 9/11 happened. They joined. They deployed. They were radicalized, and that can take many forms from many venues.

I'm talking about 2 men, a microcosm of 330 million citizens.

Before 9/11, you could walk with your loved ones to the plane they were boarding. Before 9/11, your shoes stayed on your feet, and not fed into an X-ray. Before 9/11, there wasn't an invasive body scan or bomb dogs sniffing as you passed through the line if you didn't have TSA Pre-Check. You weren't separated by personnel incessantly checking your ID. Before 9/11, even if you didn't board the plane, you were a part of the trip, departure, and return. Halcyon days before giving up our civil liberties to sit on an overcrowded bus with wings.

"United States" was always a caveat, an oxymoron for Indigenous Peoples, captured Africans, and the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroads, victims of their efficiency, and the first "war on drugs" that was a war on their competitive labor. "Melting pot" was always self-gaslighting and propaganda, a putty to hide the fissures beneath the surface of an unstable foundation that we just can't lie our way around, or ban its history.

Something broke Jabbar and Livelsberger before they deployed to Afghanistan.

Something broke us as a country, and we still haven't solicited counsel, or been on a couch.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism

Like many people after the election, I retreated from corporate media, which is anything on television and in print now. GE/Comcast, News Corps/Fox, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS: six corporations control 90% of what we passively consume after long hard days of work on what was affectionately dubbed "the boob tube" (and it was not a compliment). The distinction between mainstream media and corporate couldn't be more stark. "Mainstream" (noun) is "a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence," and (adjective) is "having, reflecting, or being compatible with the prevailing attitudes and values of a society or group" - Merriam-Webster. We gravitate towards outlets that reflect and reinforce our viewpoints, and we feel it's "mainstream," but none of these outlets is doing anything for the "public good": they are answering to boards of directors, CEOs, and Wall Street. I began my retreat by rereading an old book that seemed strange when published in 1985. Neil Postman's central argument was the danger of CNN:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

We say something is "Orwellian" when it reminds us of "1984," where the Cambridge dictionary defines it as "a political system in which the government tries to control every part of people's lives." The loss of bodily autonomy by over 50% of the population qualifies as Orwellian. But also, the naming of a device a "smartphone" which is a supercomputer on our hips capable of using global positioning satellites to guide us better than a Rand McNally map (old school), and give us meaningless drivel from TikTok. That qualifies as the "equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy." Yet even though these supercomputers would compete well with Star Trek Tricorders: "21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below a 5th-grade level). Low levels of literacy cost the US up to 2.2 trillion per year." Source: The National Literacy Institute - Literacy Statistics 2024- 2025 (Where we are now)

Our Cellular Ones, I-Phones, Galaxies, and Motorola "centrifugal bumble-puppies" do not appear to be making us, their owners "smarter."

I keep hearing "Don't check out." I haven't checked out. I've checked in to reading actual books offline about history, and science, climate change, and critical thinking.

Even before this dichotomy between Huxley and Orwell, the three original television stations' only incentive structure was based on Nielsen Ratings, which used to go for sitcoms after Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite scared the crap out of you. We needed something then to tamp us down. We currently have nothing of the sort. As "trickledown" was Orwellian doublespeak for "siphon up," every form of media - social, print, and television must engage our emotions before our intelligence, it must strategically induce Intermittent Explosive Disorder (with the ironic initials, "I.E.D."). It's not enough to sell "if it bleeds, it leads," corporate media must induce the bleeding. They must convince us that our neighbor is "the other": alien, dangerous, trying to destroy with liberal or fascistic policies. "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" The movie "Network's" mantra has to be shouted from windows, Capitols have to be stormed and defecated on, billionaire celebrities have to join "joy campaigns" to fight a dreaded, pending tyranny, and when the election is over, we're supposed to go back to "normal" like nothing was ever uttered.

Well, I'm "mad as hell." And I'm reading every book I can get my hands on. Ten so far this year. Read the Financial Times and other overseas journals - there is this new thing called "The Internet." I'm walking two miles a day, meditating, and taking pleasure in my immediate life without thinking that I'm on some great quest for the "Dawn of the Age of Aquarius" by any means necessary! That's where the lit powder keg explodes.

Try it. Breath. Relax. Talk to your neighbors, especially the ones whose political signs you disagreed with. Control the things you can. Play chess. Your blood pressure will lower, I promise. And vote: It pisses off the small cadre of nincompoops who like Brain the Mouse want to "take over the world!" But he, and Pinky, are just that, mice, not men.

Image Source: University of Notre Dame

Topics: African Americans, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Existentialism

Update on what I’ve been doing:

I was on the workgroup out of Washington for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) on this project. Perchloroethylene (Perc) is a common solvent for dry cleaning, selected for its low flash point, in comparison to kerosene and gasoline (yikes). OCSPP found it carcinogenic via inhalation and skin contact, instituting a 10-year phaseout of Perc, and trichloroethylene (T.C.E.):

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/climate/epa-dry-cleaning-chemical-ban-perc-tce.html?smid=em-share

I am the author of the companion Dry Cleaning National Emissions Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) in my Research Triangle Park office, the Minerals and Manufacturing Group (MMG) to be published in the Federal Register and Regulations.gov, pending the Administrator’s signature (soon).

You now have enough government acronyms to last a lifetime.

*****

Now, we all tick-tock to December 20^th at midnight, for hopefully not a government shutdown (an abysmal kabuki theater since Gingrich inaugurated this bloodsport in ‘94).

After reading Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book “Begin Again,” based on the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, I began seeking writings from James Baldwin, particularly to frame the times we’re in now, as what we’re experiencing started somewhere; it had an origin. I found this essay he wrote 40 years ago. To use Eddie’s term of affection, it was as if “Jimmy” was peering into our now.

What strikes me about this essay is that in April 1984, I probably missed it, as my focus and attention were on Ebony and Jet for the monthly centerfold. I was 21 years old, and four months from the first time I would be a “best man” in my A&T college friends Leon (deceased) and Vickie Nowlin’s wedding in Fayetteville, NC, on August 26, 1984, 12 days after my 22nd birthday. 15 years later, my father died on this date. Four years later on this date, Motorola laid me off in 2003, in the fourteenth round of what amounted to a slow torture for those who survived the economic downturn for that long.

What also strikes me about this essay is how timely it still is, forty years from its publication to this date in our calendar, this time of choosing between democracy, or dictatorship. We are here, in 2024, because some have embraced the delusion of “replacement” when brotherhood and sisterhood are more tolerable, reasonable, and survivable. Where we are, in 2024, started here, in 1984, when another president wanted to take us backward to an imagined, glorious, façade past that he often confused with his Hollywood persona, playing soldiers in WWII while not being one, chanting a mantra famous from the KKK and Nazi Germany to “make America (Germany) great again.”

Then, as now, we still don’t know fully what that means. It seems Jimmy did.

*****

On Being White and Other Lies

James Baldwin, in Essence Magazine, April 1984

The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable – and terrifying – because there is, in fact, no white community.

This may seem an enormous statement – and I’m willing to be challenged. I’m also willing to attempt to spell it out.

My frame of reference is, of course, America, or that portion of the North American continent that calls itself America. And this means I am speaking, essentially, of the European vision of the world, or more precisely, the European vision of the universe. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes, or leaves totally out of account.

There is, for example – at least, in principle – an Irish community: here, there, anywhere, or more precisely, Belfast, Dublin, and Boston.

There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria, and Yorkville. There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost, and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white, we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.

It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington. Without further pursuing the implication of this mutual act of faith, one is nevertheless aware that the Black presence, here, can scarcely hope—at least, not yet—to halt the slaughter in South Africa.

And there is a reason for that.

America became white—the people who, as they claim, “settled” the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans; raping Black women.

This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately, or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic pay a vast amount of attention to athletics: even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their sons!) is merely another aspect of the money-making scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the Black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price Black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay I know that they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it.

There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof of the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions.

Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you.

But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living in the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?

By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men, and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.

However-! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive.

And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers, and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Entropy, Existentialism

The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, Sir John Glubb, Abe Books

In these inspiring essays, Sir John Glubb examines the human race over 4,000 years and finds the same patterns of rise and fall of national greatness on the same timescale.

I. Pioneers - In the video, these are the explorers. They used the technology of their time, usually sailing ships to traverse vast distances to new lands.

II. Conquests—Colonization in Western culture typically involves subjugation of the land and its people, sometimes to the point of depopulation or extinction.

III. Commerce - Global trade in the Americas started with the first genocidal assaults, and kidnapping of Africans to subjugate the land because past the conquering stage, the colonizers remote control their commerce with the crack of whips and brutality.

IV. Affluence - With great wealth from commerce/slave trading and breeding, one can build castles, plantations with wraparound porches and mint julip tea.

V. Intellect—The video alludes to the building of Ivy League institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Public colleges emulate this model. Everyone becomes credentialed.

VI. Decadence - "Internal division, an influx of foreigners, materialism, and frivolity. A welfare state, weakening religion, and a defensive mindset." Sounds eerily familiar.

Entropy (noun): a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

"the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time"

Empires last about 250 years. Ours is now 248.

This land’s semi-quincentennial is 2026.

Topics: African Americans, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism, History

"The End of History and the Last Man," by Francis Fukuyama "a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Wikipedia

I had a short dialogue with two younger relatives:

Me: I canceled my Amazon Prime membership due to Jeff Bezos's cowardice.

Relative: I honestly think this was more so because his Washington Post has been failing, and as a businessman, he's using the non-endorsement as a tactic to get it back on track. I also don't think news outlets should endorse presidential candidates, don't we want reliable, unbiased news?

Me: They started the endorsement after Watergate. It was the daily reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that held Nixon accountable. He went from a landslide victory to almost being removed from office via impeachment.

We had a news media when I was younger. What we had held the powerful accountable. When our media is owned by billionaires, it is more accurately defined as corporate media. When the powerful own our journalism, it's hard, if not impossible to hold the powerful accountable. Google "oligarchy."

Link shared with my young friends: Letters at 3 AM: O is for Oligarchy, Michael Ventura, Austin Chronicle, April 9, 2010

Offline, I have been reading (a lot of) books, mostly on history. In "The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World," by historian John Dickie. I excerpt Chapter 14 - Salamanca: Hyenas And Concubines:

"In Nationalist Spain, the army and right-wing vigilantes imposed a reign of terror. The intention was loudly proclaimed, to 'cleanse' the Fatherland of its political and cultural 'pollutants.' Anyone associated with the Republic and its institutions, with the political Left, and even with secular modernity, was liable to be arrested, tortured, and executed: trade unionists and politicians, workers and peasants, liberals and intellectuals, emancipated women and homosexuals. Tens of thousands died. Among them were many Freemasons." (pages 323 - 324)

Hitler: I will get rid of the communist “vermin.”

Him: Repeated verbatim.

Hitler: I will take care of the “enemy within.”

Him: I will take care of the “threat from within.”

Hitler: Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.

Him: Migrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

Hitler: One people, one realm, one leader.

Him: One people, one family, one GLORIOUS nation.

In The Recount on Instagram, two African American Nevadans explained why they no longer support Democrats (and democracy) and "wish both parties would do better." They also felt that the "him" I mentioned is "the only politician who hasn't lied to them." I assume that means politicians from both parties stretch the truth, and when caught, the news alerts blaring on our cell phones stoke the outrage to Olympian heights. The "him" I mentioned is a pathological liar, always lying, therefore, is "truthful" in his obfuscations.

The problem is that they probably don’t know their relatives, have never paid attention in school, and think that history began with the last thing they Googled on their phones.

They did not have the benefit (and honor) of being raised by a man drafted into the Second World War into the United States Navy, (to fight actual Nazis), only for the "GI Bill" to be bifurcated: white soldiers and sailors received academic and financial benefits like home loans that set them up for generations of prosperity. My father, with all the other black soldiers and sailors got trade school, that set us up for where we lived: the ghetto.

The Civil Rights era scenes are in YouTube videos played as they slept in their high school history classes, and Googled the answers to the take-home exam without meditation. It was never their big sister's bloodied face patched by your nurse mother in the middle of the living room after marching for rights that in east Winston-Salem, NC, did not exist.

It is this proud ignorance of history and refusal to inquire about it from books written by experts, or by inquiring from the experts themselves. It is the modern, and young, notion that history didn't exist before web pages and search engines. It is their overwhelming confidence that they can "get the gist" of any situation, no matter how dire, or life-threatening. If we lose our government in a coup, they'll post something clever, or march and shout to shame the powerful into submission (the "him" wanted to shoot protestors in the leg during George Floyd and COVID). It makes a modern fascist/nationalist movement hard to believe is occurring in America because some of them have not received an alert on their cell phones from Instagram, or TikTok. And nothing exists if it hasn't gone "viral."

Ignorance will kill us all.

Topics: Applied Physics, Astrobiology, Astrophysics, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Exoplanets, SETI, Thermodynamics

Well, this firmly puts a kink in the "Fermi Paradox."

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain around 1760 - 1840, and there was a colloquial saying that "the sun did not set on the British Empire." The former colony, America, cranked up its industrial revolution around 1790. Mary Shelley birthed the science fiction genre in the dystopian Frankenstein in 1818, around the time of climate-induced change of European weather, and a noticeable drop in temperature. It was also a warning of the overconfidence of science, the morality that should be considered when designing new technologies, its impact on the environment, and humans that sadly, don't think themselves a part of the environment. The divide between sci-fi is dystopian and Pollyannish: Star Trek mythology made that delicate balance between their fictional Eugenics Wars, World War III, the "Atomic Horror," and a 21st Century dark age, the discovery of superluminal space travel, and First Contact with benevolent, pointy-eared aliens, leading to Utopia post xenophobia. We somehow abandoned countries and currency, and thus, previous hierarchal power and inequality modalities. Roddenberry's dream was a secular version of Asgard, Heaven, Olympus, and Svarga: a notion of continuance for a species aware of its finite existence, buttressed by science and space lasers.

If aliens had a similar industrial revolution, they perhaps created currencies that allowed for trade and commerce, hierarchies to decide who would hoard resources, and which part of their societies were functionally peasantry. They would separate by tribes, complexions, and perhaps stripes if they're aquatic, and fight territorial wars over resources. Those wars would throw a lot of carbon dioxide in their oxygenated atmospheres. Selfishness, hoarding disorder, and avarice would convince the aliens that the weather patterns were "a hoax," they would pay the equivalent of lawyers to obfuscate the reality of their situations before it was too late on any of their planets to reverse the effects on their worlds. If they were colonizing the stars, it wouldn't be for the altruistic notion of expanding their knowledge by "seeking out life, and new civilizations": they would have exceeded the thermal budgets of their previous planets. Changing their galactic zip codes would only change the locations of their eventual outcomes.

Thermodynamics wins, and Lord Kelvin may have answered Enrico Fermi's question. Far be it for me to adjudicate whether or not anyone has had a "close encounter of the third kind," but I don't see starships coming out of this scenario. Cogito ergo sum homo stultus.

It may take less than 1,000 years for an advanced alien civilization to destroy its own planet with climate change, even if it relies solely on renewable energy, a new model suggests.

When astrophysicists simulated the rise and fall of alien civilizations, they found that, if a civilization were to experience exponential technological growth and energy consumption, it would have less than 1,000 years before the alien planet got too hot to be habitable. This would be true even if the civilization used renewable energy sources, due to inevitable leakage in the form of heat, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics. The new research was posted to the preprint database arXiv and is in the process of being peer-reviewed.

While the astrophysicists wanted to understand the implications for life beyond our planet, their study was initially inspired by human energy use, which has grown exponentially since the 1800s. In 2023, humans used about 180,000 terawatt hours (TWh), which is roughly the same amount of energy that hits Earth from the sun at any given moment. Much of this energy is produced by gas and coal, which is heating up the planet at an unsustainable rate. But even if all that energy were created by renewable sources like wind and solar power, humanity would keep growing, and thus keep needing more energy."

This brought up the question, 'Is this something that is sustainable over a long period of time?'" Manasvi Lingam, an astrophysicist at Florida Tech and a co-author of the study, told Live Science in an interview.

Lingam and his co-author Amedeo Balbi, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Tor Vergata University of Rome, were interested in applying the second law of thermodynamics to this problem. This law says that there is no perfect energy system, where all energy created is efficiently used; some energy must always escape the system. This escaped energy will cause a planet to heat up over time.

"You can think of it like a leaky bathtub," Lingam said. If a bathtub that is holding only a little water has a leak, only a small amount can get out, he explained. But as the bathtub is filled more and more — as energy levels increase exponentially to meet demand — a small leak can suddenly turn into a flooded house.

Alien civilizations are probably killing themselves from climate change, bleak study suggests, Sierra Bouchér, Live Science

Hummocks of moss cover Ardley Island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Credit: Dan Charman

Topics: Antarctica, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming

A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.

“It's the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study¹, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.

From white to green

Bartlett and his colleagues analyzed images taken between 1986 and 2021 of the Antarctic Peninsula — a part of the continent that juts north towards the tip of South America. The pictures were taken by the Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey in March, which is the end of the growing season for vegetation in the Antarctic.

To assess how much of the land was covered with vegetation, the researchers took advantage of the properties of growing plants: healthy plants absorb a lot of red light and reflect a lot of near-infrared light. Scientists can use satellite measurements of light at these wavelengths to determine whether a piece of land is covered by thriving plants.

The team found that the peninsula's area swathed in plants grew from less than one square kilometer in 1986 to nearly 12 square kilometers in 2021 (see ‘An icy land goes green’). The rate of expansion was roughly 33% higher between 2016 and 2021 compared with the four-decade study period as a whole.

Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica, Alix Soliman, Nature

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Diaspora, Existentialism, Fascism

Eugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.

Eugenicists believed in a prejudiced and incorrect understanding of Mendelian genetics, which claimed abstract human qualities (e.g., intelligence, and social behaviors) were inherited in a simple fashion. Similarly, they believed complex diseases and disorders were solely the outcome of genetic inheritance.

The implementation of eugenics practices has caused widespread harm, particularly to populations that are being marginalized.

Eugenics is not a fringe movement. Starting in the late 1800s, leaders and intellectuals worldwide perpetuated eugenic beliefs and policies based on common racist and xenophobic attitudes. Many of these beliefs and policies still exist in the United States.

The genomics communities continue to work to scientifically debunk eugenic myths and combat modern-day manifestations of eugenics and scientific racism, particularly as they affect people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Eugenics, and Scientific Racism – The National Human Genome Research Institute. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

Stare decisis was the Latin term for “precedent” that every Supreme Court Justice candidate invoked to assure their Senate inquisitors that any laws decided in the past were “on the books” and not up to modern interpretation, or revocation.

Roe vs. Wade was overturned in 2022, part of the “Stare decisis” precedent of previously passed laws. The approval of the Court is at the lowest in its history.

“There has to be some form of punishment,” someone said.

Without any data, we could only speculate that women without wealth, and women without means would bear the brunt of losing bodily autonomy more than women with means, which are usually, ethnographically, in the current white majority.

There are now casualties of this ethno-gender war.

*****

At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found. This is one of their stories.

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable. Kavitha Surana, ProPublica

*****

Candi Miller’s family said she didn't visit a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Maternal health experts deemed her death preventable and blamed Georgia’s abortion ban.

Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, that doctors warned having another baby could kill her.

“They said it was going to be more painful and her body may not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.

But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.

At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes, and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So, she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.

Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.

Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

Afraid to Seek Care Amid Georgia’s Abortion Ban, She Stayed at Home and Died. Kavitha Surana, ProPublica

It took us two years to discover the victims’ identities of this judicial malpractice.

“There has to be some form of punishment,” someone said.

As hypothesized, the women affected are part of a marginalized demographic that could not fly out of Georgia and get sophisticated surgery in a “free” state that still allowed the medical procedure. It took months from the decision to murder these black women. It took two years for us to get the results of supreme spitballing.

There must be more who lost their lives in 2022. There must be more who lost their lives in 2023. There must be more who will lose their lives this year, and next year.

We are eighteen years from 2042 when for the first time in the history of the Census, the designed “white majority” will be numerically, in the minority.

The first census asked just six questions: the name of the (white, male) householder, and then the names of all the other people in the household, divided into these categories: Free white males who were at least 16 years old; free white males who were under 16 years old; free white females; all other free persons; and slaves. The census reflected the values of the United States in 1790: “Slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Indians weren’t counted until 1870,” Glass writes.

“The results were used to allocate Congressional seats… electoral votes and funding for government programs,” writes Jeremy Norman for HistoryofInformation.com. The United States Census Bureau also acknowledges that the precise enumeration of free white males was intended “to assess the country’s industrial and military potential.”

The First US Census Only Asked Six Questions

America’s founders agreed that the census was important, but it wasn’t long. Kat Eschner, Smithsonian

Chapter 2, page 33, subsection titled:

Numerical Population Power

In a democratic society, the numerical majority wins, rules, and decides. The theoretical rights of a minority may or may not be respected, especially if they are a planned minority. Numerical population power is the power that comes to those groups that acquire power through their sheer size. The black population peaked in the 1750s when slaves and free blacks accounted for approximately 33 percent of the total population. The high numerical strength of blacks caused fear and concern among whites. They feared the loss of their numerical power. Word of black Haitians' successful slave revolt in the 1790s had spread across America and reportedly ignited several slave revolts in Southern states. The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America to be a nation for “whites only.” The Naturalization Act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnicities, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total percentage of the population declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured its dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins. Source: Black Labor, White Wealth, Dr. Claude Anderson, 1991.

Eugenics is not a fringe movement. Starting in the late 1800s, leaders and intellectuals worldwide perpetuated eugenic beliefs and policies based on common racist and xenophobic attitudes. Many of these beliefs and policies still exist in the United States.

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory? You think we’re so different. You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Trump’s ‘good genes’ speech echoes racial eugenicsm, Gregory J. Wallance, The Hill, September 25, 2020

White supremacy is demonstrably, historically, pathologically, and anxiously numerical.

I weep for Amber and Candi, two black women who were casualties in a war that preceded their births, and the births of their children, and came with our shackled ancestors on Jamestown shores in 1619. It is not just the nation’s “original sin,” it is the foundational framework of psychopathy, and we are trying to pretend that this is “normal,” like school shootings, we should redefine school shootings as “abortions after birth,” that doesn’t happen in similarly industrialized western nations. I am fighting for democracy, because in the never-ending pursuit of a “more perfect union,” we haven’t achieved it yet.

We are deluding ourselves that we have ever achieved the mythical utopia of the “promised land.” For a better future, for all that we now call Americans, we still have work to do.