BLOGS

Topics: African Americans, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Diversity in Science, Environment, Existentialism, Fascism, Global Warming, Human Rights

Trauma at 55

© April 3, 2023, the Griot Poet

Graduation day.

No child smiling because we

Lost Martin Thursday.

April is National Poetry Month. This photo of five-year-old me inspired my haiku about my kindergarten graduation. It should have been a happy day with parents in the audience.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on Thursday, April 4, 1968. Our graduation was scheduled for Friday at Bethlehem Community Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

All thirty-six students were blissfully unaware of the political earthquake that this was or that it had occurred. As we all aged, we probably learned of the death threats and the near assassination by a deranged woman at a book signing. We were unaware of the "Missiles of October" in 1962, barely scratching the planet's surface or taking our first steps before potential Armageddon. Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi in June of 1963, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of the same year in Dallas when we were a little over a year old. Brother Malcolm was assassinated in February 1965 when we were almost three. I don't recall the University of Texas. Clock Tower shooting in 1966, but we were four then. My classmates, like me, probably heard a program on the local radio station, WAAA-AM, on Sundays from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "Martin Luther King Speaks." At that time, the caveat was that he spoke, addressing his audience directly over AM, the complete analog of today's social media. What are now tapes or YouTube videos for later generations: it was him, alive, breathing, and speaking. Martin, then Robert F. Kennedy, June 6, the president's brother running for president, fell that year.

I recall my mother kissing me profusely, promising to be there for the graduation, and saying "I love you" repeatedly. I had no doubts about that.

I also remember my father's eyes: red with bloodshot, dried tears on his cheeks. To that point in my brief existence, the thought of him crying was alien, foreign.

The kindergarten teachers sat us down. We assumed to prepare us for the costumes we would wear – white shorts, shirts, and bow ties for the boys, and skirts for the girls.

"Children, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot yesterday and died."

Stunned silence.

I am on the front row, the photo's first student on the left. The eighth student on that row is a girl who I recall having a crush on: she has her right knee pointing towards her left leg. She would break the silence before our ceremony with an ear-piercing screech, repetitive, inconsolable grief beyond her years, perhaps mimicked from a funeral. We all knew what "died" meant. In some form or fashion, by five, you have lost beloved pets or relatives that you never thought would leave the Earth.

The seed from her grief cascaded through the graduates like a malignant vine. The time was 9:00. We cried for two hours, during which someone with a pickup truck, a rebel flag flying, drove through the parking lot, yelling over and over so our young ears and teachers could hear him, "Martin Luther Coon's dead! Yahoo! The South will rise again!"

I lay on the linoleum, palm heels in my eye sockets, wailing my [own] notes. The teachers were crying with us, trying to console themselves and us, allowing us our grief. We went down for a nap at 11:00. Perhaps our teachers did too.

We went out for a brief recess, probably to clear the fog from our brains, but as I recall, we moved like zombies, with no one on the seesaw, children sitting, staring numbly on the swings, and no action on the monkey bars. Then we went in and got dressed.

Our parents would be there at 1:30 pm. I have described why not a single child graduating in the photo was smiling. Staring at my unsmiling, well, forced smiling parents, I remember this poignant thought post-grief beyond my brief years:

"We're not kids anymore!"

We would all start first grade in the fall without him.

I hugged my big sister tightly that evening, a student activist in the Civil Rights Movement attending Winston-Salem State University, because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, what "died" meant.

*****

Devolution

(Post-Cold War and 9/11)

© April 4, 2023, the Griot Poet

I did duck-and-hide

Drills, kids as cold warriors:

Now, active shooter.

My employer hosted an Active Shooter/Stop the Bleeding training at my facility on probably the most insensitive date they could pick on the calendar: the 55^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King. As the first haiku eludes, time does not heal trauma. For the first half, both instructors had experience in law enforcement and the military. The second set of three instructors from a local trauma center featured a combat medic, who taught us through a cadaver dummy to stuff gauze from a "stop the bleeding kit" (there is a website to order directly).

I participated in the class vigorously to fight the "sugar crash" from the doughnuts offered.

We saw a lot of videos, one featuring the shooter in the Naval Shipyards gun massacre. The other was the bodycam video from the recent incident in Tennessee at a Christian School where three adults in their early sixties (around my same age) and three nine-year-old children were sacrificed on the altar of American Moloch. The original intent of particularly white evangelical Christian schools was to protect the "innocence" of their children from sitting next to someone like me. Somehow "thoughts and prayers" for a Christian school, no doubt inspired by Brown vs. Board of Education being actualized in the South, seemed oxymoronic.

"Duck-and-hide," or more accurately, duck-and-cover, where drills were part of civilian preparedness in the event World War Three spontaneously broke out. They gave us manuals we should read (I still have mine). The teachers and manual said that getting under the desk was the best way to survive the nuclear fallout if you were not the center of the blast radius. Preconscious and curious, my parents had bought the complete volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Internet of its day. Foreshadowing my eventual STEM majors in Engineering Physics, Microelectronics, and Nanoengineering, I read the "Nu" volume on nuclear weapons. I sadly concluded after my research that the drills were government-sanctioned gaslighting, a word I now use. The word I used then is a two-syllable word with the popular abbreviation "B.S." Plutonium 239, the ore of choice for thermonuclear weapons, has a half-life of 24,100 years, meaning that it would be half as radioactive in about 24 millennia. This drill wasn't to save lives but to reduce panicked stampeding that, I admit, would help no one. The official nuclear doctrine of deterrence is M.A.D.: mutually assured destruction. We'll see if Russia in Ukraine remembers this at all.

The United States has been in some war 93% of the time from 1775 (before its existence) to 2018. This factum is according to Smithsonian Magazine. The article's caveat is how to interpret "war": declared congressionally, unilaterally by the executive, or (in my opinion) upon one's citizens.

I will attend my precocious granddaughter's fourth birthday party this National Poetry Month. She is one year younger than my five-year-old image. After getting her a "Dr. McStuffin's Medical Kit" for Christmas, she immediately assigned herself as her grandparents' doctor. She even does televisits when we chat on Google Hangout.

Yet she grows up in a world of the continuous threat of Armageddon. Add to that designed scarcity, economic Disaster Capitalism cum neoliberalism, rising global temperatures, and active shooter training when she starts kindergarten in the fall, minus the "stop the bleeding kits," even with her Dr. McStuffin credentials. Because of the malaise of government and gun lobbyists, we've reduced her citizenry to becoming a combat medic in the future, whether she wants to or not.

I bought a "stop the bleeding" kit. It should be here before Easter.

"We're not kids anymore!"

None of us are.

Researchers detected a surprising rise in levels of chlorofluorocarbons between 2010 and 2020 using a monitoring network that includes the Jungfraujoch research station in Switzerland. Credit: Shutterstock

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

From my resume: "I eliminated ozone-depleting materials using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Taguchi Methods of Quality Engineering - using an L16 Orthogonal Array - in the Poly Silicon etch substituting out CFCs in manufacturing processes." How I did it: I substituted our CFC with Sulfur Hexafluoride and Nitrogen (SF6/N2). On the negative photoresist product, the CFC over-etch was 50 seconds. For the positive photoresist, CFC had a 25-second process. I was able to reduce each product line to two seconds, increasing throughput, and the process increased die yields. It is possible to balance the positive impact of product improvement and the environment. I did it in the 90s, so the following report is disappointing.

*****

The Montreal Protocol, which banned most uses of ozone-destroying chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and called for their global phase-out by 2010, has been a great success story: Earth’s ozone layer is projected to recover by the 2060s.

So atmospheric chemists were surprised to see a troubling signal in recent data. They found that the levels of five CFCs rose rapidly in the atmosphere from 2010 to 2020. Their results are published today in Nature Geoscience¹.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” says Martin Vollmer, an atmospheric chemist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dübendorf, who helped to analyze data from an international network of CFC monitors. “We expect the opposite trend. We expect them to slowly go down.”

At current levels, these CFCs do not pose much threat to the ozone layer’s healing, said Luke Western, a chemist at the University of Bristol, UK, at an online press conference on 30 March. CFCs, once used as refrigerants and aerosols, can persist in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Given that they are potent greenhouse gases, eliminating emissions of these CFCs will also have a positive impact on Earth’s climate. The collective annual warming effect of these five chemicals on the planet is equivalent to the emissions produced by a small country like Switzerland.

It’s highly likely that manufacturing plants are accidentally releasing three of the chemicals — CFC-113a, CFC-114a, and CFC-115 — while producing replacements for CFCs. When CFCs were phased out, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were brought in as substitutes. But CFCs can crop up as unintended by-products during HFC manufacture. This accidental production is discouraged by the Montreal Protocol but not prohibited by it.

‘This shouldn’t be happening: levels of banned CFCs rising, Katherine Bourzac, Nature

Ron DeSantis previously said he wouldn’t get involved in Donald Trump’s indictment “in any way.” | John Bazemore/AP Photo, Gary Fineout, Politico

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

NEW YORK — The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has dropped below 50 percent, a transformation fueled by immigration and by growing numbers of people who reject organized religion altogether, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Christians overall remain a large majority in the U.S., at nearly 70 percent of Americans. However, white Christians, once predominant in the country’s religious life, now comprise only 43 percent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, a polling organization based in Washington. Four decades ago, about eight in 10 Americans were white Christians

The change has occurred across the spectrum of Christian traditions in the U.S., including sharp drops in membership in predominantly white mainline Protestant denominations such as Presbyterians and Lutherans; an increasing Latino presence in the Roman Catholic Church as some non-Hispanic white Catholics leave; and shrinking ranks of white evangelicals, who until recently had been viewed as immune to decline.

White Christians are now a minority of the U.S. population, survey says, Rachel Zoll, Associated Press

It was the first panic and the first indication that white evangelicism focused on earthly political concerns more than heavenly meditations. Eighty-one percent of them voted for the vagina-grabber after the Access Hollywood tape. It was soon after this he, or as Michael Cohen's indictment called him, "individual one," directed his then-attorney to pay hush money to Karen McDougal, a Playboy Centerfold, and Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, coordinated with then editor of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, which is the most apropos last name I've seen to be the editor of a supermarket rag. He was called before the Manhattan Grand Jury before they voted on indictment.

Impeachment is a form of federal indictment, but the twice-impeached former president beat the rap in a stacked Senate jury. Then, when he didn't win re-election, a point he was cognizant of, he ordered a mob to Capitol Hill to seize power, an insurrection for the first time since the Civil War, a breach of the Capitol for the first time since the war of 1812. For his new presidential campaign, he upped the ante from Reagan's "states rights" speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by staging his first rally in Waco, Texas, the sight of the standoff between the government and the Branch Davidian Cult. It's talented bigotry to invoke George Soros and call an African American District Attorney an "animal. If dog-whistling, it's best in a gross sense to hit one target with two epithets.

"Individual One" started his first presidential campaign taking birtherism in the gutter with him and raising it from the swill like an anointed Phoenix, with 3,500 lawsuits against him, including Trump University (which he said he would "never settle" until he did). Part of his narcissistic "charm" is he never seems to pay for any crime he commits, no matter how outlandish it might have been, even insurrection. It might explain his follower's attraction to him: he's a reverse Robin Hood; he steals from the poor suckers and gives to himself. They all think they're in on the gag, but in true conman fashion, marks usually are not.

Earlier this week, three children and three adults were gunned down by a former transgender student at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. I have fond memories of variety shows like "The Old Oprey" and "Hee-Haw," based on a soundstage there. Governor Bill Lee asked for prayers. He has written anti-LGBT laws, restricted abortion rights, banned drag shows, banned books, and expanded permit-less carry; without the need for safety training or practice. Tennessee paused further expansion of freedom for guns; contraction of civil liberties in lieu of "thoughts and prayers." Congressman Andy Ogles also sent "thoughts and prayers," yet posed with his family in a 2021 Christmas photo armed to the teeth with assault weapons. Now that the indictment that was supposed to happen last Tuesday happened yesterday, the former president continued to threaten "death and destruction" simultaneously, or soon after that, a photo of him with a baseball bat next to Alvin Bragg's head like Robert De Niro as Al Capone in the movie, "The Untouchables."

"If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck!"

At the same time, his likely challenger in the GOP primary breezed through a clone of his Soros-African-American Attorney bigotry and said that he would not assist in his extradition if he refused to leave Florida for his arraignment.

That is collusion by an officer of the court, and a governor, to break the rule of law.

During the January 6 Hearings, many of the insurrectionists in Congress ignored subpoenas sent to them by the committee. Now that Jim Jordan has actual Judiciary Committee power, he's proven that he got a law degree but didn't pass the bar. Good luck enforcing your subpoenas.

But that shouldn't matter for the goals of today's republican right. The Growth and Opportunity Project (the 2012 GOP Autopsy) called for the party to expand its base beyond white evangelicals, rural dwellers, conspiracy theorists, weirdos, fascists, racists, misogynists, and insurrectionists with irritable bowel syndrome. It called for them to expand to women, minorities, immigrants, the LGBT, and young people. It rightly predicted the diversification of America and assumed that a functional political party would absorb the study's wisdom.

The party and its avatar in 2016, 2020, and apparently, 2024 rejected it.

If Governor DeSantis, like Jim Jordan et al., ignores the New York indictment and “will not assist in the extradition,” it's not very far from that the "rule of law" becomes meaningless.

Past that Rubicon is the rule of the mob boss, warlord, or one man as king. There would be no civics, civil rights, or civil liberties, just lords and serfs, the next logical step of income inequality. Dictators never give up power, so elections, if held, would become meaningless "public spectacles" like they were in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and are in Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation. It simply takes the slow-boiling frog destruction of the rule of law. After that, fascism becomes actionable and functional.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."

Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"

And the world, like old Europe, will become soaked in the blood of our fellow humans. Warlords have a tendency not to get along.

If the world is like Europe in its violence before the world order after the Second World War, where could we run after the Third?

June: We have to run.

Luke: What?

June: We waited last time. We waited too long, and we didn't see how much they hated us. I lost you, and then we lost Hannah.

Luke: Are we just gonna forget about her now?

June: We will never ever forget about her, but we cannot help her if we are dead. It's changing, Luke. This country is changing.

Luke: No, Canada's not Gilead.

June: America wasn't Gilead until it was, and then it was too fuckin' late. Luke, we have to go. We have to run. Now.

Season Five of "The Handmaid's Tale" finale on Hulu, TV Fanatic

Space race: Inside ego-fueled competition of Bezos, Musk, and Branson, Michael Kaplan, New York Post

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

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neo-slavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged the prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by AnotherName unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neo-slavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

Slavery by Another Name is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

—from the book jacket and Pulitzer dot org

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Douglas A. Blackmon, Penguin Random House

Ta-Nehisi Coates penned "The Case for Reparations" for The Atlantic in June of 2014. The country was in the lame-duck of the second term of a political miracle: Barack Hussein Obama carried the popular vote and the electoral college TWICE, despite a blowhard asking for his birth certificate, despite a blowhard asking for his grades at Harvard, then commissioning his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen to threaten his high schools and colleges mob-style if they dared release any of his grades from his "great brainwork." One would think that he had something to hide.

We crossed the Rubicon of 8 billion souls on Terra Firma last November, and we're showing the signs of strain: Candida auris is spreading in healthcare and nursing facilities alarming the CDC: it could easily become more dangerous to the general population. climate change is exacerbating weather patterns, thus affecting food supplies. The thawing permafrost is wakening Paleolithic viruses that haven't seen the light of day (or 8 billion vectors) in several millennia. The brunt of the crisis is being felt by the countries - so-called third world - without enough industry that would create the problem. This is destabilizing governments and fostering authoritarian nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. The US President and Canadian Prime Minister reached an agreement to reject asylum seekers at their respective borders. As we whistle through graveyards, Waiting for Godot and Deas Ex Machina to resolve our issues. Where are these fellow humans supposed to go, other than open earth in whistled graveyards voluntarily? It is eerie, sadistic eugenics in slow motion.

The estimated cost to pay reparations is ~$14 Trillion dollars. The cost would be from the government, not individual "white" taxpayers. We can literally print money out of thin air when we want to do something, proposing austerity measures for things that used to be referred to as the "common good."

Broken down in the documentary, The Big Payback, the estimated bill due (as Dr. King said) for uncompensated labor that built the United States is $14 Trillion Dollars. $14 Trillion Dollars is about $350,000 per African American.

The government keeps from paying what's owed us by stirring divisions: Black Lives Matter are "black identity extremists," but the Klan, Neo Nazis, Boogaloo Boys, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers are NOT to date classified as domestic terrorists.

Reparations would also include levying taxes on the extremely wealthy, who got rich off of Reagan lowering their taxes to 28%. He had to raise taxes periodically when the math and reality came crashing down in the form of a recession. It's why endless tax cuts as a solution have always been a bureaucratic form of magical thinking.

"Trickledown" was always a boondoggle and maintained by always having an "other" to blame for the nation's problems. Before Trump, who is about as subtle as a farting rhinoceros, Reagan's "wink and nod" genteel racism was a form of soft fascism in our faces. The function of fascist hierarchies has always been to separate the Earth's resources from those deemed "undesirable" to those deemed "desirable," "genius," and "blessed" by a deity. India had the Dalets, the base of their hierarchy, and Germany prior to and in WWII had Jews, Gypsies, artists, intellectuals, homosexuals, or as "woke is the new n-word," anything fascists then and now didn't like about modernity. Rinsed, lathered, and repeated, it, along with enslavement, is the oldest grift in the world and probably predates prostitution.

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a 2020 historical and narrative nonfiction work about the nature of inequality in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson is a writer and former journalist best known for her work in the New York Times, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize. She achieved further acclaim with her 2010 work, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson has also taught journalism at many colleges and universities, including Princeton and Emory.

Caste describes the United States from the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 to the current Covid-19 pandemic to explain the nature and consequences of inequality. In the book’s first part, Wilkerson notes that many people were shaken and surprised by the results of the 2016 presidential election. Still, the outcome was really the result of long-buried issues, and she, therefore, calls for a deep dive into the structures of American life. She argues that the key to understanding America is its caste system, a commitment to structures that assign some lives more valuable than others; in the United States, it is based on skin color.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Super Symmetry Summary

It would depend on whether we value people or the toys of billionaires: golf courses consuming copious amounts of water to maintain; mansions, yachts, yachts for helicopters, and penis rockets.

Is Facebook Turning You Into a Troglodyte? Zachary Shtogren, Big Think

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

Framework (noun): (a) a basic conceptional structure (as of ideas), (b) a skeletal, openwork, or structural frame, FRAME OF REFERENCE (Merriam-Webster); ACADEMIC: The theoretical framework is the structure that can hold or support a theory of a research study. The theoretical framework introduces and describes the theory, which explains why the research problem under study exists. https://library.sacredheart.edu/c.php?g=29803&p=185919

"In this present crisis, [the] government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Ronald W. Reagan, 40th President of the United States' inaugural address.

Those who refer to themselves as moderate republicans or "never Trumpers" conveniently forget that Reagan started his campaign spitting on the graves of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. "States rights" was always code for the right to own human beings for uncompensated, unending labor. Reagan said it specifically to pull in Southern Dixiecrats, the "wink and nod," genteel, "aw, shucks" brand of feel-good racism with enough plausible denial for black conservatives that wanted on the train. The three Civil Rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, who STILL, along with Incels, Neo-Nazis, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and QAnon, are NOT designated domestic terrorist organizations - the FBI reserves that for Black Lives Matter and similar groups who put their bodies on the line for justice and typically don't carry AR15s, or AK47s.

The framework for "government is the problem" was the Lewis Powel memo. "Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote “10 percent of its total advertising budget,'” including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology." (Senator Sheldon Whitehouse) Obviously, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Ronald Reagan, and the entire Reich Wing ecosystem echo chamber read the memo. It elevated Powell to Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, which, every day since Taney and the Dred Scott decision, is becoming its own oxymoron.

So it stands to reason if "government is the problem," you CANNOT let the government be the solution. Every elected republican has one mission when getting to office: sabotage and cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors. To perform this insurgency, you have to construct an ecosystem that echoes the same message and reinforces itself like a mantra at a MAGA monastery, musing on anger versus meditating on enlightenment. The fact that their favorite platform is now a proven liar is irrelevant: they haven't been told yet, so it's Troglodyte Nirvana. When you seize power, you must keep the Trogs angry even if you control all levels of government. You must keep the opposition - the "Democrat Party" (emphasis on "rat"), turning the adjective into a noun, using poor grammar as pejorative - on the defensive. It also helps that when you're in power, you're particularly bad at governing. "Government is the problem": solutions are hard to come by, especially when it calls for concession and compromise, meaning giving a little to get a little and trying again later. "Owning the libs" and trending on Twitter is more fun than thinking. The goal is to wear us down, to make us give up on pursuing common interests, and to become complacent. The opposite of activism is apathy, and the vacuum abhorred by nature is filled with the first wad of filth to walk through.

Eventually, an echo chamber disciple descends from his bizarro Olympus, personified on a grifting, golden escalator, the embodiment or incarnation of Archie Bunker with a wallet.

In Timothy Snyder's book, "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America," his erudite analysis of Vladimir Putin gets into the man's history, fears, and motivations. Ukraine's "existing" is a threat to his power. Before the bombing, it was modern. It had functional nuclear power plants (with the noted exception of Chornobyl). Ukraine was the antithesis of Russia's thesis of leadership by the reincarnation of Lenin and Stalin. It's why the Russians have to interfere with democratic elections. If you're trying to hold onto power until your last breath, it's a good idea to sabotage democratic elections across the globe. When his people demand elections, demand representation, demand better for themselves, Putin can point to the "failures" of democratic systems, leaving out the part in his Orwellian Pravda news services that he is orchestrating the chaos he allows his 11-time zone subjects - they are not "citizens" - to see. People spontaneously falling out of windows, getting shot or poisoned, and being imprisoned for multiple years in gulags also bolsters his dark reign. The Russian people see where the wealth is: in Putin's palaces and with his oligarchs. "Why don't they protest in the streets?" Russians have no First Amendment Rights, and there, the Second Amendment is only for Putin's hired thugs. Where republicans in America are a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party, the Kremlin is a kleptocracy masquerading as a state.

People under such conditions, according to dystopian fiction author, Margaret Atwood, either become activists (which puts their lives in danger), collaborators, or complacent, keeping their heads down because they feel they have no power to change their conditions.

"In this present crisis, [the] government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Ronald W. Reagan, 40th President of the United States' inaugural address.

Putin can point to the "failures" of democratic systems, leaving out the part in his Orwellian Pravda news services that he is orchestrating the chaos he allows his 11-time zone subjects - they are not "citizens" - to see.

Dominion voting systems are suing Fox Propaganda for $1.6 billion, and SmartMatics is suing for $2.7 billion. No one who watches American Pravda is the wiser because "truth is bad for business."

And voila! You have a utopia for fascists and a dystopia for their subjects, who are either collaborators or exhausted. You have to enamor them to fascism, by comparison.

"For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." Ephesians 6:12

"The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor." Voltaire

Republicans and Putin are trying to defeat democracy by exhausting citizens and subjects. We can regulate women's bodily autonomy, but not climate change or Wall Street. We can pull books from shelves, but not qualified immunity from bad police officers. We can threaten drag shows (a voluntary activity) but not make schools safe: a collapsible, laughable fold-out gun shelter in Alabama must have cost the district a small fortune that could have been remedied with background checks and red flag laws. “Woke” is their new n-word without saying the n-word for everything in modernity they do not like. Everything is, as Carl Sagan said in 1996, a “celebration of ignorance.”

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

Ann Duryan and Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.”

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. Voltaire

Credit: Jose Luis Pelaez/Getty Images

Topics: Civilization, COVID-19, Democracy, Economics, Education, Existentialism

Working four days instead of five—with the same pay—leads to improved well-being among employees without damaging the company’s productivity. That’s the recently reported result of a four-day workweek test that ran for six months, from June to December 2022 and involved a total of 61 U.K. companies with a combined workforce of about 2,900 employees.

During the COVID pandemic, many workers experienced increased stress and even burnout, a state of exhaustion that can make it difficult to meet work goals. “It’s a very huge issue,” says independent organizational psychologist and consultant Michael Leiter, who was not involved in the new report. “You see it, particularly in health care, where I do much of my work. It’s making it much more difficult to hold on to talented people.” He explains that stress in the workplace makes it difficult for companies in health care and many other fields to recruit new hires and keep existing employees. But greater awareness of burnout and related issues can have a positive effect, Leiter adds. “People are demanding more changes in how the work is organized,” he says.

That demand is what led the independent research organization Autonomy, in conjunction with the advocacy groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day Week Campaign and researchers at the University of Cambridge, Boston College, and other institutions, to publish a report on what happens when companies reduce the number of days in a workweek. According to surveys of participants, 71 percent of respondents reported lower levels of burnout, and 39 percent reported being less stressed than when they began the test. Companies experienced 65 percent fewer sick and personal days. And the number of resignations dropped by more than half compared with an earlier six-month period. Despite employees logging fewer work hours, companies’ revenues barely changed during the test period. In fact, they actually increased slightly, by 1.4 percent on average.

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity, Jan Dönges, Sophie Bushwick, Scientific American

Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Democracy, Existentialism, Octavia Butler, Star Trek

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely been held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.

A time of unprecedented danger: It is 90 seconds to midnight. Editor, John Mecklin, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The above is a publication from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, trying to warn us away from the precipice since mankind opened the proverbial nuclear Pandora's box.

It's easy to assume that Earth's history in Star Trek is the same as the real world before Vulcans made First Contact with humanity in 2063, but there are numerous unique divergences. Star Trek: The Original Series established that a devastating global conflict called the Eugenics Wars gripped the Earth in the 1990s, which was followed by World War III in the 21st century. TOS and Star Trek: Enterprise episodes touched upon aspects of World War III, which led to 600 million deaths and the capitals of every major country on Earth destroyed. Star Trek: First Contact showed the aftermath of World War III as the human race was still picking up the pieces a decade after the war ended. Further, the Star Trek: Discovery season 2 episode "New Eden" revealed that the Red Angel (Sonja Sohn) transported a group of World War III survivors to a planet in the Beta Quadrant.

After Captain Pike realized that Kiley 279 reverse-engineered Starfleet's warp technology to build a warp bomb to use against each other in their civil war, he broke General Order One and used Earth's World War III history as a cautionary parable in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' premiere. In perhaps the most significant download of information about past wars in Star Trek, Pike revealed that the United States of America actually had a second Civil War at some point in the late 20th century, which erupted over freedoms and rights. The second Civil War was soon followed by the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s when genetic engineering created Augments who became global warlords, chief among them Khan Noonien-Singh (Ricardo Montalbán). After the Augments were defeated, there was a period of peace, as seen in Star Trek: Picard season 2, before World War III erupted in 2026 and lasted for thirty years.

Pike further revealed that World War III was a nuclear holocaust that resulted in the death of 30% of the Earth's population. In addition, 600 million lifeforms were lost on the planet, which consists of untold flora and fauna. In order to preserve nature that would be lost on a planet irradiated by nuclear weapons, scientists launched seedpods into space that eventually grew in orbit. Amazingly, when the human race became a spacefaring society, Starfleet built Starbase One around the seed pods, which explains the domed forests surrounding the space station. Thankfully, Pike's Earth history lesson had the desired effect on Kiley 279's leadership and population. The Enterprise's Captain brokered peace on Kiley 279 so that they didn't repeat the Terran homeworld's tragic mistakes.

Strange New Worlds Solves Star Trek’s World War III Mystery. John Orquiola, Screen Rant

The above is fiction. 30% of the Earth's population is 2.4 billion souls wiped out, in addition to the disease, death, and wholesale dystopia that would be the planet post-civilization.

Caveat: It doesn't appear that Zephram Cochrane has been born yet. There are no Vulcans to Deus ex Machina [rescue] us from ourselves. We're on our own to survive or become extinct in societal suicide like Octavia Butler's "smooth dinosaurs."

We need the stars… We need purpose! We need the image of Destiny to take root among the stars and give us of ourselves as a purposeful, growing species. We need to become the adult species that Destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars…. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.

"Octavia Butler." AZQuotes.com. Wind and Fly LTD, 2023. 02 March 2023. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/998876

Image Source: U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research, February 11, 2008

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

Excerpt from “Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice,” (August 1, 1994) Claude Anderson, Ed. D., Chapter 2: Power and Black Progress:

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 own 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 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 population percentage declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins. Source: Sample chapter

*****

If current trends continue, the demographic profile of the United States will change dramatically by the middle of this century, according to new population projections developed by the Pew Research Center.¹

The nation's population will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the growth during this period will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their descendants. (Figure 1)

Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves, 47 million will be their children, and 3 million will be their grandchildren.

The Center’s projections indicate that nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be foreign-born in 2050, well above the 2005 level of 12% and surpassing the historical peaks for immigrants as a share of the U.S. population—14.8% in 1890 and 14.7% in 1910. (Figure 2)

By 2050, the nation’s racial and ethnic mix will look different than it does now. Non-Hispanic whites, who made up 67% of the population in 2005, will be 47% in 2050. Hispanics will rise from 14% of the population in 2005 to 29% in 2050. Blacks were 13% of the population in 2005 and will be roughly the same proportion in 2050. Asians, who were 5% of the population in 2005, will be 9% in 2050.

If you do the math: the BIPOC in these statistics adds up to ~51 to 53%, a clear majority.

What is intersectionality?

The concept of intersectionality describes how systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class, and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects. For example, when a Muslim woman wearing the Hijab is being discriminated against, it would be impossible to dissociate her female* from her Muslim identity and to isolate the dimension(s) causing her discrimination.

Source: Center for Intersectional Justice: What is intersectionality?

“Race,” as we have been conditioned to understand it, is a social construct. Yet, every employment application asks me to choose a category that best describes me: I chose Black/African American because that is my culture. I am a human being, a terrestrial inhabitant born on planet Earth. We fill out the Census because it is our “civic duty” and our habit, born of ignorance and not questioning why things are the WAY they are.

So racial capitalism was basically built based on the idea that capitalism itself is not distinct from racism. The way we think of racism is that racism is a by-product of capitalism. That is, capitalism emerges, and racism is a way to divide workers. It’s a way to extract greater value from enslaved people, Indigenous people, etc. But Cedric argued that the grounds of the civilization in which capitalism emerges are already based on racial hierarchy. If you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden, then what you end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also relies on an ideology or racial regime. The racial regime convinces a lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through slavery, through Jim Crow, convince them to support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based on white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty minuscule. Slam poet Saul Williams commenting on the Intercept Podcast: The Rebellion Against Racial Capitalism. Facebook

*****

The Census is crafted from the same crucible. Every ten years, we count the number of citizens, or residents, in the nation. We craft, actually, gerrymander districts based on these demographic numbers. The absurdity is evident not too far from me: my Alma Mater, North Carolina A&T State University, the largest Historically Black College and University in the nation, was split in two to dilute the impact of student voting and participation in the franchise. That was thankfully remedied, and students are voting in record numbers. It is thus important which party controls the White House (I think it should be called the Presidential Mansion) during the ten-year cycle. We’re looking at the next election in 2024. What will be of paramount importance is which party gets to draw congressional districts after the election of 2028.

Fifty years of precedent were repealed in jettisoning Roe vs. Wade: why? Perhaps it is that “for the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total 50% decline. Reasons include women’s empowerment in education and the workforce, lower child mortality, and the increased cost of raising children. Lower fertility rates, coupled with increased life expectancies worldwide, create an aging population, putting pressure on healthcare systems globally.” (World Economic Forum) Comparing national birthrates in 2020:

Source: World Economic Forum: Ageing and Longevity, June 17, 2022

It makes sense, in a macabre, sociopathic, psychopathic “logic.” If your birthrates are falling, you open the floodgates to all births by repealing abortion rights; the health and career aspirations of women be damned. Similarly, for the LGBTQ community, the right to marry "who you love" contradicts the desires of capitalism: replacement workers, which can be done through surrogate parenthood. Still, these are Neanderthal minds crafting our society. The closet was valuable to them because you could, in sham marriages, procreate in public and copulate in secret. Dr. Claude Anderson stated in "Black Labor, White Wealth" that enslaved Africans and their descendants were a "planned numerical minority." "White" is a fungible concept: as numbers declined in America, Czechs, Italians, Jews, and Russians were added to the "white" column and instructed how to address the designated pariah "others." This façade would inevitably crash on the weight of its own hubris.

"Race" is a social and political construct. Suppose you happened to have won the "sperm lottery" and were born in "Leave it to Beaver Villes" with a prepondering lack of Melanin (and lack of empathy for those possessing it). In that case, you're likely comfortable with the status quo as it is; reducing inequality doesn't interest you in the slightest; therefore: you want to "conserve" what you know and are comfortable with it. And if you can't gerrymander, voter suppress, or intimidate "others" into their diminished places, January 6, 2021, showed us conclusively that their last ditch, "in case of democracy, break glass" last move, they will resort to deadly violence to uphold a chimera. 40,000+ video security footage given to the CIA reject at Fox Propaganda ensures the next coup will have a roadmap to once-secret places. The Capitol is the scene of past and future crimes.

Intersectionality is another word for cooperation. We will have to cooperate to address the challenges of climate change, to take the mythology out of it, "it's THOSE people, not US," to solve the problem together. It's not Ron DeSantis-Stan at risk of higher water levels due to climate change: it is an American state, American citizens, and, as illustrated in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina, American climate refugees and, sadly, casualties.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech on April 4, 1967, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." He condemned the Vietnam War, which would result in over 50,000 American casualties, as immoral and unjust. He was assassinated, supposedly by James Earl Ray, on April 4, 1968.

Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, for the rights of Sanitation Workers, carrying signs stating the obvious, "I am a man," that wasn't at the time (and since the public execution of Tyre Nichols feet from where King was assassinated) being respected. It was an extension, or arm of the Poor People's Campaign, an effort to unify the poor in urban cities and Appalachia, in other words: intersectionality.

So, it's not a fear of Black History/CRT, or drag queen story hour (if you don't support it, don't go), Hispanic Heritage Month, Queer History Month, Women's History Month: it's the Venn Diagram that intersects each of these groups under a common foe that is determined to maintain that status quo by closing polling booths, voter purging, voter suppression. Book bans discourage intersectionality through ignorance, such that each can build coalitions to the point they could become the 53% voting majority in a majoritarian nation.

South African Apartheid existed as "white" Afrikaans declined to a numerical minority.

America might try something like this for 47%, and the continuously psychopathic 1% would like to maintain.

There is another formula:

99% = 46% + 53%, which is > 1%.

The old world had castles, kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses, with serfs willing to subjugate themselves to a monied elite because of "divine will," not sociopathy.

The new world has mansions, billionaires, hedge fund managers, and corporations, with a bewildered herd willing to subjugate themselves to a monied elite because the propaganda they pump them says they are "blessed," not kleptomaniacs.

Intersectionality = cooperation = survival. Authoritarian autocracy does not.

Image Credit: Down to the wire (IMAGE), Yale University

Topics: Biotechnology, Civilization, Climate Change, Nanotechnology

Accelerated climate change is a major and acute threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused by atmospheric methane, which is 30 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Microbes are responsible for generating half of this methane. Elevated temperatures are also accelerating microbial growth and thus producing more greenhouse gases than can be used by plants, thus weakening the earth’s ability to function as a carbon sink and further raising the global temperature.

A potential solution to this vicious circle could be another kind of microbes that eats up to 80% of methane flux from ocean sediments that protect the Earth. How microbes serve as both the biggest producers and consumers of methane has remained a mystery because they are very difficult to study in the laboratory. In Nature Microbiology, surprising wire-like properties of a protein highly similar to the protein used by methane-eating microbes are reported by the Yale team led by Yangqi Gu and Nikhil Malvankar of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Microbial Sciences Institute.

The team had previously shown that this protein nanowire shows the highest conductivity known to date,  allowing the generation of the highest electric power by any bacteria. But to date, no one has discovered how bacteria make them and why they show such extremely high conductivity.

An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by bacteria provides clues to combating climate change, Yale University.

Image source: Black Planet dot com

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

Note: I had my bridge removed by a periodontist. That's not as trivial as I thought it would be, recalling me pulling my baby teeth at the age of six. My pain management regimen consisted of 600 mg of Motrin and 500 mg of Tylenol four times a day for two days, plus lots of rest. I guess losing a tooth at six is remarkably different than losing one at sixty. For the sake of public safety, I opted to telework as much as I could that week. I will have posts for Tuesday - Friday next week, taking President's Day off.

*****

Sematech was a consortium of semiconductor industry giants on Ben White Boulevard in Austin, Texas. The taxpayers paid their land expenses through a ten-year tax abatement. Sematech promised Austin jobs. So in the spirit of fairness, Austin obviously wanted Sematech to start paying their taxes, and repaying the homeowners who footed the bill for a decade.

May 9th, 2007

Sematech leaving Austin for Albany

Abstract:

International Sematech will move its headquarters from Austin, Texas, to Albany, N.Y., state officials said May 9.

New York will spend $300 million to provide the buildings and infrastructure required to accommodate the headquarters of Sematech, a consortium of microchip manufacturers and semiconductor research operations, said Alain Kaloyeros, the chief administrative officer of the state University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, located at Albany NanoTech.

The money will go to the University at Albany, which now hosts Sematech's existing research operation. The deal is still being finalized, although Sematech will begin moving some personnel to Albany in July, Kaloyeros said.

Source:

phoenix.bizjournals.com

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=22519

*****

I worked for Applied Materials at the IBM research facility in Fishkill, New York, from 2011 to 2017 and, ironically, with Albany Nanotech/Sematech on many occasions since my company had equipment installed there. I often passed the photo in Fishkill of the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony, taken in 2005 with Governor George Pataki and IBM executives. IBM promised jobs. The company needed ten years of tax abatements to grow, and they promised job nirvana. The ten-year clock was UP in 2015. Fishkill wanted their money. IBM wanted another decade-long tax abatement. There was an obvious impasse. Something had to give.

(Reuters) - IBM Corp IBM.N said it would hive off its loss-making semiconductor unit to contract-chipmaker Globalfoundries Inc to focus on cloud computing and big data analytics.

IBM will pay Globalfoundries $1.5 billion in cash over the next three years to take the chip operations off its hands, the companies said in a statement on Monday.

IBM took a related pre-tax charge of $4.7 billion in its third quarter. It also reported a 4 percent drop in revenue on Monday, hurt by weak sales in its software and services businesses.

IBM’s shares fell 8 percent to $167 in premarket trading.

IBM to pay Globalfoundries $1.5 billion to take chip unit. Abhirup Roy, Reuters, October 20, 2014

If $1.5 billion dollars paid is saving, what in Heaven's name did they OWE Fishkill, NY?

So, color me not exactly nonplussed when I read this article on CNN:

CNN Business — When Microsoft President Brad Smith announced in February 2021 that the tech giant had purchased a 90-acre plot of land in Atlanta’s westside, he laid out a bold vision: The company, he said, would invest in the community and put it “on the path toward becoming one of Microsoft’s largest hubs” in the United States.

The announcement, which was met with enthusiastic coverage in local media, promised the construction of affordable housing, programs to help public school children develop digital skills, support for historically Black colleges and universities, new funding for local nonprofits, and affordable broadband for more people in Atlanta.

“Our biggest question today is not what Atlanta can do to support Microsoft,” Smith wrote. “It’s what Microsoft can do to support Atlanta.”

Two years later, Microsoft announced a series of cost-cutting efforts, including eliminating 10,000 jobs, making changes to its hardware portfolio, and consolidating leases. As part of those moves, Microsoft put the development of its Atlanta campus on pause this month, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

The decision to pause plans feels like a “broken promise” that caught many residents of the predominately Black neighborhood where Microsoft planned to build the campus off-guard, according to Jasmine Hope, a local resident and chair of her neighborhood planning unit.

‘Broken promises.’ Tech industry’s real estate pullback leaves communities reeling. Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business, February 14, 2023

*****

In the book and 2003 documentary, "The Corporation" by Professor Joel Bakan, he looked at the legal fiat during the Robber Baron era using the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which conferred birthright citizenship for formerly enslaved peoples to corporations, hence making them legal "persons."

So, Dr. Bakan asked the question, "what kind of person would this entity be?"

The chilling and provocative answer: the closest person to a corporation would be a psychopath.

The Corporation likewise forces viewers to ponder key philosophical questions about the role of science and entrepreneurship and who should own knowledge and life. Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, introduces the complexities of intellectual property by outlining the history of patenting knowledge and life forms. Here, the film pushes our sensibilities of entrepreneurship and patenting. Patenting is intended to encourage innovation by ensuring that the innovator profits from the discoveries. But indiscriminate patenting can lead to “biopiracy,” –– a recently-coined term for the activities of corporations, universities, and governments that patent the medicinal or therapeutic properties of plants or animals used in traditional and indigenous medicines. The film also discusses the ethics of genetically-modified foods, which dramatically increase food production and change farming practices. For example, “terminator technology” in rice prevents farmers from saving and re-sowing seeds because the seeds have been genetically modified to produce only one crop. Perhaps most disturbing, the film raises the specter of corporations’ owning the entire human genetic code, as well as that of all other species on the planet.

In summary, The Corporation contends that today’s ubiquitous corporations are designed to behave like psychopaths—a provocative premise likely to polarize viewers and invite debate. The film has insights for people on all points of the political spectrum. It is useful for managers who struggle with issues of ethics and corporate social responsibility and for trainers, instructors, and researchers in the fields of strategy, ethics, governance, labor-management relations, and sustainable development.

The Corporation - The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power: Movie Review

About 1.2% of U.S. adult men and 0.3% to 0.7% of U.S. adult women are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. Those numbers rise exponentially in prison, where 15% to 25% of inmates show these characteristics (Burton, B., & Saleh, F. M., Psychiatric Times, Vol. 37, No. 10, 2020). That said, psychopathy spans socioeconomic status, race, gender, and culture, and those who score high on psychopathy scales range from high-functioning executives to prison inmates to people whose psychopathic symptoms may reflect difficult life circumstances more than anything else.

One effort to coordinate thinking in the field is Patrick’s “triarchic model,” which posits three separable trait constructs underlying psychopathic symptoms: “disinhibition,” which includes tendencies toward impulsiveness, irresponsibility, difficulty regulating one’s emotions and behavior, and mistrust of others; “meanness,” which involves deficits in empathy, contempt toward and inability to bond with others, and predatory exploitativeness; and “boldness,” which includes dominance, social assurance, emotional resilience, and adventurousness. Each of these traits has unique developmental features and neurobiological correlates. Patrick developed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure to assess these trait constructs (Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2009; Journal of Personality, Vol. 83, No. 6, 2015).

A broader view of psychopathy. Tori DeAngelis, the American Psychological Association

Wafer fabs are complex places in need of specific technical STEM backgrounds. Local colleges and universities can tailor curriculums so that their graduates "fit the mold" of what XYZ employer is looking for. There are often collaborative research efforts between academia and industry that are encouraged and pursued.

Not all of the jobs are technical. If you have a cafeteria on-site, you need to staff it. Janitorial services are needed for the offices and bathrooms. You need painters, masonry workers, plumbers, and electricians.

All, from the cook to the engineer, are subject to layoffs at the whims of management and shareholders who never met them or care how such a move impacts their families. It is a string of broken promises and shattered dreams.

It's a tax dodge. It's grifting. It's Silicon gaslighting.

So, let me get this straight:

The tobacco industry paid lobbyists to promote the false narrative that smoking wasn’t as bad for your health as the Surgeon General reported. Mike Pence (not a smoker) endorsed in an OpEd that resurfaced after helming the disastrous response to the Coronavirus pandemic (and he wants to run for president, presumably getting the votes from the same people who wanted to kill him on January 6, 2021). Smokers like my father were gaslighted, and paid for this lie with their lungs and lives.

The fossil fuels industry paid those same lobbyists to do their magic, promoting the false narrative that climate change wasn’t as dire as they were already aware of in the late 1970s. Instead of information we could have acted on, we were gaslighted.

A lot of American oligarchs: Bezos (Washington Post), Bloomberg (Bloomberg News), Murdoch (Wall Street Journal, Fox Propaganda), Musk (Twitter), Trump (Twitter knockoff, the Orwellian “Truth Social”), and Zuckerberg (Facebook) are heavily involved in controlling the narrative of what we believe and know as reality. The previous “off the dome” isn’t even an exhaustive list. AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, and Viacom are the six corporations that own 90% of all the media that we consume: radio, television, print, and the Internet. Thirty-eight years ago, it was fifty. We believe what we're fed: "corporate citizens" is a term the corporations lob at us through various forms of media. We believe also from the media that billionaires/oligarchs are "blessed," "geniuses," "highly favored," not tax dodging criminals because that's what their media tell us to believe.

If corporations "are people," are the organizations clinically psychopaths?

Are their minions in lobbying firms and congress merely servile sociopaths?

But this isn’t gaslighting?

Note: The origin of my harshness was this, ON the day we laid Tyre Nichols to rest, I was commenting on a police report of a double amputee being shot to death by the police. Trolls have to troll. After my rebuttal, I heard nothing else.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Star Trek

A common trope in science fiction is a misunderstanding, intentional, or unintentional, of evolution. Over time we get smarter, more peaceful, better, or something like that.

The definition of evolution given at the outset of this entry is very general; there are more specific ones in the literature, some of which do not fit this general characterization. Here is a sampling.

Although the work of Charles Darwin (see the entry on Darwinism) is usually the starting point for contemporary understandings of evolution, interestingly, he does not use the term in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, referring instead to "descent with modification.” In the early-mid 20th century, the "modern synthesis" gave birth to population genetics, which provided a mathematization of Darwinian evolutionary theory in light of Mendelian genetics (see also the entry on ecological genetics). This yielded a prevalent—probably the most prevalent—understanding of evolution as "any change in the frequency of alleles within a population from one generation to the next." Note, however, that this definition refers to evolution only in a micro-evolutionary context and thus doesn't reference the emergence of new species (and their new characteristics), although it is intended to underlie those macroevolutionary changes (see the entry on philosophy of macroevolution).

In a popular textbook, Douglas Futuyma gives a more expansive definition:

[biological evolution] is a change in the properties of groups of organisms over the course of generations…it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population to the alterations that led from the earliest organism to dinosaurs, bees, oaks, and humans. (2005: 2)

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution/

For one hour of fictional products, it has to be shortened: over time, things get better.

Over time we will reach nirvana. Over time science will solve the mysteries that vex us. Over time we will learn to "live together as brothers and sisters" or perish as fools, per Dr. King. Both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gene Roddenberry were optimistic evolutionists. They could see a future where we conquered our prejudices along with the stars. We worked together across skin tones as one humanity, in peace (at least on Earth), expanding our survivability on other worlds. Particularly for King, Nichele Nichols represented our people would survive into the future, a detail sci-fi writers like H.G. Wells (an enthusiastic eugenicist) conveniently forgot, and H.P. Lovecraft was openly racist and hostile, a reality that still plagues both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It is why African American speculative fiction writers like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin is important in an era of projection, obfuscation, and, ironically, "cancel culture." Afrofuturism came from the same well as women's fiction, queer fiction, and studies centered on each genre: to be seen. Florida might as well call February Blank History Month. Frederick Douglass, a Republican, orator, and abolitionist can't be mentioned in "DeSantis-Stan."

Things, over time, don't necessarily get better.

Are we living in [the] age of stupid? The era of the idiot? The answer, of course, is yes, with examples of monstrous moronicism everywhere – from climate deniers to the "plandemic" crowd who believe Covid-19 was cooked up in Bill Gates' basement. On the other hand, human beings have always been incredible creatures. A better question is whether we are, as a species, becoming dumber. If this is already the era of the idiot, what comes next?

An "Idiocracy," according to filmmaker Mike Judge. The Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, and Silicon Valley creator's dystopian 2006 comedy (which he directed and co-wrote with Etan Cohen) arrived with its own terminology to help us prepare for the upcoming reality T.V. special that we may call The Collapse of Reality Itself.

Idiocracy: a disturbingly prophetic look at the future of America – and our era of stupidity, Mike Judge, The Guardian

To get to the "get better" part, fictional Earth and Vulcan two millennia before, had to go through, and survive their global nuclear conflicts (not an easy trick - so far, we have no models). The Vulcans discovered "o'thea": a philosophy of logic/reality-truth after massive savagery and infighting. Earthlings, after MAGA, went through a few things that aren't for the squeamish.

Leon Festnger studied an apocalyptic UFO cult in the 1950s – a precursor to the Heaven’s Gate Cult of the 1990s. They were sure the world would end and had a date. The faithful sold all their worldly goods and waited for the apocalypse, and waited, and waited. Some of the former faithful felt discouraged and left. Others felt their “vibrations” had saved the Earth from destruction. Simple Psychology defines it thus: “Cognitive dissonance (CD) refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. CD produces a feeling of discomfort, leading to an alteration in attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc. “For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition). “Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).”

"Party of Apocalypse" - Reginald L. Goodwin

Jordan Klepper turns the crazy into a shtick on the Daily Show. Crashing Trump's first campaign rally in South Carolina, he ran into a fanbase that has not only still stayed faithful to their cult leader, but they also do not accept Joe Biden as the current president. In their minds, Trump is still president, and they probably wouldn't mind if he suspended The Constitution, elections, and REMAINED president, plugging in his children and grandchildren. This rule by royalty is what Europeans left Europe for. Jordan himself is worried.

We used to have two Americas based on a social construct of race. We now have two Americas based on logic, and illogic, reality and nonreality, fact, and fiction. The purveyor of 73% of election misinformation on the planet was suspended from social media after a filmed, live insurrection on January 6, 2021, that he encouraged, where people died, excrement spread at the Capitol. But, those were "crisis actors," Black Lives Matter, or Antifa (again, which means anti-fascist, and I can't imagine anyone but a fascist having a problem with that). He has now been re-platformed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Misinformation is their business model, and the bottom line is far more important than citizenship and a federal republic. The College Board, in a move of abject cowardice, dumbed down the African American AP curriculum, piloted at 60 high schools, and released stripped down nationwide because it hurt the feelings of the High Potentate of DeSantis-Stan!

This is probably what a "Collapse of Reality Itself" looks like.

And it didn't take 500 years, rabid procreation, or a nuclear holocaust to get there.

A vertical shock tube at Los Alamos National Laboratory is used for turbulence studies. Sulfur hexafluoride is injected at the top of the 5.3-meter tube and allowed to mix with air. The waste is ejected into the environment through the blue hose at the tube tower’s lower left; in the fiscal year 2021, such emissions made up some 16% of the lab’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The inset shows a snapshot of the mixing after a shock has crossed the gas interface; the darker gas is SF₆, and the lighter is air. The intensities yield density values.

Topics: Civilization, Climate Change, Global Warming, Research

Reducing air travel, improving energy efficiency in infrastructure, and installing solar panels are among the obvious actions that individual researchers and their institutions can implement to reduce their carbon footprint. But they can take many other small and large steps, too, from reducing the use of single-use plastics and other consumables and turning off unused instruments to exploiting waste heat and siting computing facilities powered by renewable energy. On a systemic level, measures can encourage behaviors to reduce carbon emissions; for example, valuing in-person invited job talks and remote ones equally could lead to less air travel by scientists.

So far, the steps that scientists are taking to reduce their carbon footprint are largely grassroots, notes Hannah Johnson, a technician in the imaging group at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in Utrecht and a member of Green Labs Netherlands, a volunteer organization that promotes sustainable science practices. The same goes for the time and effort they put in for the cause. One of the challenges, she says, is to get top-down support from institutions, funding agencies, and other national and international scientific bodies.

At some point, governments are likely to make laws that support climate sustainability, says Astrid Eichhorn, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark whose research is in quantum gravity and who is active on the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities committee for climate sustainability. “We are in a situation to be proactive and change in ways that do not compromise the quality of our research or our collaborations,” she says. “We should take that opportunity now and not wait for external regulations.”

Suppose humanity manages to limit emissions worldwide to 300 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e). In that case, there is an 83% chance of not exceeding the 1.5 °C temperature rise above preindustrial levels set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report. That emissions cap translates to a budget of 1.2 tons of CO₂e per person annually through 2050. Estimates for the average emissions by researchers across scientific fields are much higher and range widely in part because of differing and incomplete accounting approaches, says Eichhorn. She cites values from 7 to 18 tons a year for European scientists.

Scientists take steps in the lab toward climate sustainability, Toni Feder, Physics Today.

Credit: michaelmjc/Getty Images (chalkboard); Scientific American (words and design)

Topics: Biofuels, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism

Climate change is already disrupting the lives of billions of people. What was once considered a problem for the future is raging all around us right now. This reality has helped convince a majority of the public that we must act to limit suffering. In an August 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans said they had experienced at least one heat wave, flood, drought, or wildfire in the past year. Among those people, more than 80 percent said climate change had contributed. In another 2022 poll, 77 percent of Americans who said they had been affected by extreme weather in the past five years saw climate change as a major crisis.

Yet the response is not meeting the urgency of the crisis. A transition to clean energy is underway, but it is happening too slowly to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The U.S. government finally took long-delayed action by passing the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, much more progress is needed, and entrenched politics hamper it. The partisan divide largely stems from conservatives’ perception that climate change solutions will involve big government controlling people’s choices and imposing sacrifices. Research shows that Republicans’ skepticism about climate change is largely attributable to a conflict between ideological values and often-discussed solutions, particularly government regulations. A 2019 study on Climatic Change found that political and ideological polarization on climate change is particularly acute in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

One thing we can all do to ease this gridlock is to alter the language and messages we use about climate change. The words we use and the stories we tell matter. Transforming the way we talk about climate change can engage people and build the political will needed to implement policies strong enough to confront the crisis with the urgency required.

To inspire people, we need to tell a story not of sacrifice and deprivation but of opportunity and improvement in our lives, health, and well-being—a story of humans flourishing in a post-fossil-fuel age.

The Right Words Are Crucial to Solving Climate Change, Susan Joy Hassol, Scientific American

New liberal ad ties presumptive future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to ‘red scare’ icon Joseph McCarthy, Peter Weber, The Week

Topics: Civics, Civilization, Democracy, Economics, Existentialism, Fascism

Debt Ceiling and Dystopia

The debt limit does not authorize new spending commitments. It simply allows the government to finance existing legal obligations that Congresses and presidents of both parties have made in the past.

Failing to increase the debt limit would have catastrophic economic consequences. It would cause the government to default on its legal obligations – an unprecedented event in American history. That would precipitate another financial crisis and threaten the jobs and savings of everyday Americans – putting the United States right back in a deep economic hole just as the country is recovering from the recent recession.

Congress has always acted when called upon to raise the debt limit. Since 1960, Congress has acted 78 separate times to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. Congressional leaders in both parties have recognized that this is necessary.

Source: Treasury.gov

The Old McCarthyism

Elected to the Senate in 1946, Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) did not draw major national attention until 1950. On February 9th of that year, he delivered a Lincoln Day address in Wheeling, West Virginia, blaming failures in American foreign policy on Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. The Wisconsin Republican claimed to have a list of known Communists still working in the Department of State. A special subcommittee investigated McCarthy’s charges and rejected them as “a fraud and a hoax.” Still, the outbreak of the Korean War and the highly publicized conviction of Alger Hiss lent credibility to the charges. When McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, he launched a series of investigations into alleged subversion and espionage. In 1954 a confrontation with the army led to the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings, which tarnished McCarthy’s public image, undermined his charges, and prompted his censure by the U.S. Senate.

Source: Senate.gov

The New McCarthyism, or the New Testament of the Soulless

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

This is an excellent definition of the “Big lie,” however, there seems to be no evidence that it was used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, though it is often attributed to him.

The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library/Joseph Goebbels: The Big Lie

"Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their [own] citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind." Plato, The Republic

We tell ourselves lies: E Pluribus Unum - out of many, one, or the "melting pot," Emma Lazarus's poem at the Statue of Liberty, whitewashing the kidnapping of Africans, the indentured servitude of poor whites and Native Americans, the disdain our immigration laws treated immigrants from the Chinese Exclusion Act, Catholics, Italians, Czecholovacians, Russians, to the recently attempted Muslim Ban.

One lie a sizable number of citizens are telling themselves: a demographic shift either isn't happening or can be mitigated by either denying electoral losses or keeping certain people from voting.

America Looks Different

The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.

America is changing demographically, and unless Republicans can grow our appeal the way GOP governors have done, the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.

In 1980, exit polls tell us that the electorate was 88 percent white. In 2012, it was 72 percent white. Hispanics made up 7 percent of the electorate in 2000, 8 percent in 2004, 9 percent in 2008, and 10 percent in 2012. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country, while Hispanics will grow to 29 percent and Asians to 9 percent.

If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we must engage them and show our sincerity.

Source: The Growth and Opportunity Project (the so-called autopsy), page 7, paragraph 2

A functional party would look at this and disseminate it. They might hire consultants to form focus groups. The message would be broadcast from radio stations, television, and the Internet: Republicans want to be a "big tent" party. We (republicans) want to expand to minorities, women, and youth. A function party acting on these practical, fact-based conclusions would look completely different than the fiasco we are currently witnessing. They have shown since this report to be racing in the opposite direction, heading over the proverbial lemming cliff. Maybe they tried, but most of their electorate wasn't receptive to "others" being under their red tent.

Rural Americans reliably votes republican and guaranteed the re-elections of Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, miniatures of Trump showing after higher infection rates and deaths from Covid, gun massacres, faux crusades against asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants - usually coming for construction jobs at American companies paying them cash under the table, and wars against Critical Race Theory (i.e., accurately taught American history), Nazi book bans, and assaulting the beach of Drag Queen story hour with AR15s - all it takes to win elections is the scare and make angry the right number of white people.

The New McCarthyism is based on Goebbels's "Big Lie," the current one given by a septuagenarian that could not accept another septuagenarian who beat him in the 2020 election. So narcissistic and pathological was the loser he fomented a coup in the 21st Century, 20 years after 9-11. Osama Bin Laden is gone, a casualty of Seal Team Six, but his chief aim of destabilizing the west of showing the "Great Satan" to be a paper tiger. To show that the ideals we espoused overseas couldn't even be maintained at home. The Civil Rights Movement, the killing of African Americans: all of this has been televised and broadcast. Osama and Vladimir Putin only pushed on an open sore and poured in salt. The culmination of Osama and Vladimir's wildest dreams was the election of a mop-headed, fake billionaire that has lost more money than he's ever earned. The book I believe he read from cover to cover and emulated in his rallies was "My New Order," a collection of speeches by Adolf Hitler. It is in its original form, 1,008 pages long. At one time, he had an attention span beyond that of a gnat. He seems to have committed it to memory. The only person who would know for sure, Ivana, is buried surreptitiously on his golf course in New Jersey.

Concealed carry devolved to open carry, in many states requiring no registration or training, studies showing the threats to African Americans getting shot elevated by such conditions. The goal of the New McCarthyism is the same as old-time American Klan-robed fascism: it frightens African Americans first, then the general public. Where does anyone feel safe now when schools, malls, and places of worship have become killing fields? The government dysfunction we’ve seen since the Speaker vote debacle and the threat not to raise the debt ceiling (25% of which was accrued during the previous administration) is by design. It is to “wear out” the electorate; it is the proverbial “pox on both houses,” and the convenient discovery of classified documents with former Vice Presidents Biden and Pence is both sides-ism on steroids and textbook gaslighting. It is to give us no reason to believe voting will change anything. It is voter suppression by gaslighting because the Growth and Opportunity Project would take too much work. and change. They are not a serious governing party: they are the comments section on Facebook reading "Green Eggs and Ham."

The Republic is a repudiation of the rights of kings to rule over a country, the lives of peasants, and hoard wealth for themselves. The new world kings/billionaires/oligarchs are trying to reestablish that through means of fear, violence, and terror.

Kevin McCarthy will cement his legacy as this nation's weakest (and likely, short-lived) Speaker of the House. He's given away his power and threatened the default of the full faith and credit of the United States. This would defund the Ukraine war on Ukraine's and Russia's sides. It would raise U.S. unemployment from record lows to third-world levels. It would pitch the world over that same lemming's cliff into the Greatest Depression, possibly the last. It would guarantee an electoral loss for the Grand Old Party that rejected the price of growth and opportunity: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Image Source: MedPage Today

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Civilization, COVID-19, DNA, Epidemiology

Currently authorized bivalent COVID-19 boosters demonstrated similar protection against symptomatic illness from the XBB/XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariants as from BA.5-related subvariants, according to a CDC study.

From December 2022 to January 2023, the bivalent boosters' vaccine effectiveness (VE) against symptomatic infection was a similar 48% versus XBB/XBB.1.5-related strains and 52% versus BA.5-related sublineages, reported Ruth Link-Gelles, Ph.D., of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and colleagues in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

Meanwhile, Pfizer's updated booster demonstrated superior neutralizing antibody activity compared with the company's original product against all the latest Omicron subvariants, including XBB.1, according to Kena Swanson, Ph.D., of Pfizer Vaccine Research and Development in Pearl River, New York and colleagues, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine. Their findings contradict earlier research from other labs that found no significant difference in neutralizing activity with the bivalent over the monovalent vaccine.

According to the latest estimates from the CDC, XBB.1.5 is responsible for 49.1% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S., while XBB is responsible for another 3.3%.

CDC: Bivalent COVID Vaccines Stop Illness From XBB.1.5

— And Pfizer lab data show better neutralization against the latest variants with the bivalent shot, Ingrid Hein, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

The Last Kingdom recap: season one, episode three: succession in Wessex, Sarah Hughes, The Guardian

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

The modern martial arts belt ranking system first started emerging in 1907 when the creator of Judo, Jigoro Kano, introduced the iconic Judo uniform and belt. Before that, his students practiced traditional Japanese kimonos. However, back then, there existed only two belt colors: white and black. White belts were those in the process of learning the fundamentals, while black belts were students who mastered the basics, knew how to use them functionally, and were ready to pursue Judo on a more serious and advanced level. The white coloring represented purity, avoidance of ego, and simplicity, while the black symbolized a fuller repertoire of knowledge.

A popular belief within the martial arts community is that every student started off with a white belt, then gradually, it darkened in color from all the blood, sweat, and tears of training. However, there exists no real historical evidence of this practice, and it is generally regarded to be little more than a myth. Source: https://stouttrainpitt.com/

Hierarchy (noun): a system in which people or things are arranged according to their importance. Cambridge Dictionary

Every nation has an arrangement of those who are deemed "important." In the United Kingdom, since Charles ascended after the death of his mother, Elizabeth, they are apparently the beneficiaries of the Norman invasion in 1066, which deposed someone named Harald Godwinson and the House of Wessex. After several centuries of colonization, plunder, and slavery, the "Commonwealth" was born, and the fairytale of Camelot was used to justify plunder. One hierarchy is justified with belt colors, the other with propaganda.

In November 2022, we reached eight billion with something of a shrug. We were 4.4 billion my senior year in high school, 1979 - 1980.

The average human takes up an area of approximately one square meter.

The volume of Earth is about 1,000 billion cubic kilometers, per the World Bank.

4,400,000,000,000/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 4.4E-12

8,000,000,000,000/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 8.0E-12

Relax. These surface-to-volume ratios only work on the nanoscale. For example, if we were a metal, say gold, the spectrographic analysis would show that due to the S/V ratio being different, the color of a macroscopic (seen) bar of gold would be different on the nanoscale (in many cases, blue or other colors) because the S/Vs are different.

It is a gross and stark illustration that as we exponentially increase in population, we're exponentially decreasing the ability to feed our population. The fraction's denominator did not change, but you can bet feeding the first humans in Africa was a lot simpler math than eight billion. The first thing learned in kindergartens for the 99% is to share. One presumes the first thing learned in nurseries for plutocrats is how to hoard.

Therefore, the castes of royalty, race, and inequality justify hoarding resources in a siphon-up operation (the antonym of "trickledown"). Billionaires, like kings, influence through propaganda the justification of resource theft. To ensure the running of this machine, you need some willing advocates (e.g., Kyrsten Sinema, Boris Johnson, Joe Manchin, Rishi Sunak) in world governments such that the obscenely wealthy will pay little or nothing in taxes in their respective countries. Camouflage the theft with drivel like "free markets" or "God's will." Having a compliant court system to define "money as free speech" helps magnify your megaphone and hides where and from what country your campaign donations are coming [from]. Social media, with the protection of Section 230, can proverbially "shout fire in crowded theaters" without consequences, except the empty "we'll do better" promises. They pay for Members of Parliament, Senators, House Members, and presidents to enact their agendas, despite their nation's constitutions. Democracy is, thus, anathema to avarice.

We have a global hierarchal social construct. Instead of the distribution of resources that ensures the health, safety, and welfare of the human tribe, a justification is given to those more "worthy" of the resources: bloodlines, divine right, "good genes" (eugenics), going to the "right" schools, being born on the "right" side of the tracks, "talented tenths"; secret fraternal orders, and open orgies of oligarch opulence like Davos. It is the justification of high crimes and misdemeanors committed in plain sight. It is the framework of how we justify the "haves" and the "have-nots." It is a form of societal cognitive dissonance. It has justified the grand theft of natural resources, political power, and, thus, wealth over millennia. It has no analog in nature and does not guarantee species survival.

The dinosaurs did not perish from arrogance. They [simply] had no science to tell them that the meteor was coming.

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

Note: Sourced from https://physics4thecool.blogspot.com/2011/10/honoring-trekkie.html, my previous blog posting site.

"If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am part of a generation that, when we pass, will have the last memories of hearing your voice on the radio, on television, and not be a documentary or a YouTube embed. Small children, that terrible day when we...lost you.

I remember when after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a pickup truck with a confederate flag flying behind it rode past my kindergarten, shouting epithets and gloating at his death (1968).

I saw my first burning cross at the age of fourteen (1976) during my first overnight encampment with JROTC.

This wasn’t that long ago.

Like your support of the idea of us in the future in Star Trek, we tried to embody that hope in every class we tackled, every Calculus, Physics, and Engineering problem we solved: we strove to make you proud of us, despite the fact you were here and then gone so soon.

Happy birthday sir, and THANK YOU!

https://youtu.be/cLOZxOo5Czo

"At the end of Star Trek's first season, Nichelle was thinking seriously of leaving the show, but a chance and moving meeting with Martin Luther King changed her mind. He told her she couldn't give up...she was a vital role model for young black women in America. Needless to say, Nichelle stayed with the show and has appeared in the first six Star Trek movies. She also provided the voice for Lt. Uhura on the Star Trek animated series in 1974-75."

See Star Trek Database: Nichelle Nichols

Research Gate dot net: Epidemiology of Munchausen syndrome by proxy in New Zealand

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

Tina Depuy (from her website: tee-nuh doo-pwee) wrote an analysis of the Republican Party when the House of Representatives was under John "weed head" Bohner in 2013:

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, now referred to as Factious Disorder by Proxy or FDbP, is where a parent or caretaker enjoys the attention of having a sick child. Hence, they exaggerate and sometimes induce their victim’s symptoms. Children are made to be sick; parents are given sympathy for their seeming stoicism. It’s adulation-seeking via child abuse.

In this case, the caretaker is Congress (specifically the Republican-controlled House). The thing they’re enjoying making unwell is, well, us: the country, our economy, postal services, meat inspections, air traffic control, infrastructure, law enforcement, military, credit rating, commerce, and every other part of a country [thought] of around the globe as a superpower.

This disorder can sometimes be traced to an early legit emergency, where the caregiver with FDbP first experiences the rush of admiration they’ll later crave. For the GOP, it’s probably September 11, 2001. It was on that day the then-leader of the Republican party (the same dude the GOP no longer acknowledges exists, they’ll even listen to Mitt Romney speak before uttering his name) finally got to do everything he wanted without question – all with an over (and brief) 80 percent approval rating. He pre-emptively invaded Iraq without paying for it, flattened wages, made the rich richer, and transformed higher education into a profit-driven industry. More importantly, he got Democrats to shut up while he pretended drunken-sailor-spending was compassionate conservatism.

Congress has Munchausen by Proxy, Tina Depuy, March 2, 2013, Post Independent.

The above article and its analysis by analog have aged incredibly well.

Unless you've been living under a rock, we now have the weakest Speaker of the House in the history of the republic who "gave away the store" to MAGA extremists and got his authority weakened. Is George Santos’s real name even George Santos? The only reason the pathological liar is tolerated is that it gives Kev a four-vote thin margin. If he removes him, it triggers a special election in a Blue State in a Democratic-leaning district (that somehow woke up from their drunken stupor and is pissed George is their Representative). If he were to survive the primary, the fictional Klingons have a proverb: "revenge is a dish that is best served cold." That would cut Kev down to three and resorting to public self-immolation. The constituents would send another Democrat to the House, increasing Hakeem Jeffries' numbers and steps toward Speaker in 2024. Under "Kev the Spinless," we can look forward to nothing but show trials, no credible laws proposed that could [possibly] pass the Senate, and going over the debt ceiling cliff in September, if Kev makes it that long.

Newton Gingrich started this mess. His philosophy was playing a zero-sum game, political terrorism, and nihilism. It was always a "Contract ON America," never WITH America, as it ignored a sizeable and growing part of the electorate that demographically, the republicans let themselves get caught flatfooted in the 21st Century, so: voter suppression as a Hail Mary. It was under Gingrich we started seeing the debt ceiling being used as a tool for hostage-taking (the entire government). He somehow (creepily) married his high school Geometry teacher, divorced her for his first mistress, then divorced the second wife (the previously-mentioned first mistress) for his second mistress (and now third wife) Calista WHILE trying to impeach Bill Clinton for the same thing!

Gingrich attempted a soft coup by Constitution: he aimed to impeach Bill Clinton and Al Gore and, by default, become President of the United States. He was both hypocritical and shameless, just like the Republican Party now. Zero-sum became the Tea Party under the first (and only) African American president, then the Orwellian "Freedom Caucus," which led inexorably to MAGA, having the same characteristics and number of letters as "Nazi." After midterm losses, he stepped down as Speaker in the face of full rebellion. Bob Livingston challenged him, then had the same "strayed from his marriage" issues as Gingrich and Clinton. That led to wrestling coach pedophile Dennis "the groomer" Hastert before Nancy Pelosi's first run. After that, John Boehner (ran out by the Tea Party), Paul Ryan (Ibid), and Nancy Pelosi for her last go-around, followed by a slimy, whimpering, limp surfer tan in a suit. Newt posing now as a wisened, sage political philosopher, is gaslighting from a windbag.

Do soft coups then become dry run practice coups like storming the Michigan Capitol under Gretchen Whitmore's first term as governor? Her attempted kidnapping and threats to her administration flukes? I guess Charlottesville, August 11 - 12, 2017, and The Insurrection of January 6, 2021, were all Antifa (antifascists) dressed as conservatives and bringing with them the Grand Pooh-Bah of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos?

"The Republican Party is the party for normal Americans." Newt Gingrich.

Unlike Depuy's analysis, this didn't age well.

Image source: Carter Matt dot com

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

Note: Apologies for the late and last 2022 blog post. My laptop has had its own mind lately.

My "Rotten Tomatoes" review:

"I've been a fan of Octavia Butler since reading my first novel by her, "Mind of My Mind," about a vampiric telepath named Doro: an immortal from Africa that devours your soul, so he can essentially be immortal at the cost of what makes you "you": your mind and soul. Butler makes us, through fiction, look at race, class, gender, and the impact of a hierarchical society whose behaviors reflect our slavery past in America. Notice that no other nation has our domestic violence problems: the Second Amendment was specifically designed for quelling slave rebellions. The fact that the first African American president was elected re-elected, and the response was a vaudevillian reality TV pretend billionaire, Kindred, could not be more timely. We need more from her, NK Jemison, and other speculative BIPOC writers. It's been a long time coming."

My wife and I watched it on Hulu, and like "The Handmaid's Tale," she was immediately hooked. She had never been a fan of science fiction, but I corrected her by saying that Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler are speculative fiction writers:

A type of story or literature that is set in a world that is different from the one we live in or that deals with magical or imagined future events:She tells readers that she writes "speculative fiction," defined as "fiction in which impossible things happen."Her speculative fiction novel is set in the near future. Cambridge Dictionary

I'm a Trekkie, but in Kindred, the protagonist, Dana, time travels (a popular science fiction trope) to the antebellum south, where she meets two of her ancestors: a black woman and her slave owner obsessed with her. Her technology isn't going at superluminal speeds and whipping around the sun: her tech is the terror of thinking she's going to die, which pulls her back to Rufus Weylan, and Alice, his father's slave. Butler doesn't explain the mechanism of how this is done (like, do we really know how warp drive would work?), but the writing by Butler and the 21st Century adaptors of her fiction pulls you into the story. Dana is going back in time to ensure the (in this case) "grandmother paradox" favors her being born.

Terror as a tech: the United States, the John Winthrop self-professed "shining city on a hill," has been at war 93% of the time since 1776. Assaulting the indigenous inhabitants and kidnapping an uncompensated labor force from the African continent: the only way you can keep such a psychopathic system in some semblance of "functionality" is with violence. That terror pulls Dana through the corridors of time from 2016 to the 19th Century, where her interracial relationship with Kevin could not be seen as possible or desirable. Her travels aren't with Industrial Light and Magic special effects and light shows: it is raw, guttural fear, shrieks, and screams audible to her neighbors that remind you of Mrs. Kravitz and her patient husband Abner from the TV series "Bewitched," which I'm sure inspired Butler when she wrote the characters. Dana is repelled by the rigid codes that don't respect her autonomy and compelled by the need to rescue Rufus at several key epochs where he could have perished, and she would thereby cease to exist.

America prides itself on being E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one people. Yet the stratification of our society into classes, types, and colors frame our politics, our discourse, our understanding of history, our rejection of facts, and our nostalgia for a halcyon era where we were "great": sequestered on reservations, enslaved, segregated, closeted, miserable, except for the dominant culture at the top of the Great Seal Pyramid.

Selfish desires are burning like fires.

Among those who hoard the gold

As they continue to keep the people asleep

And the truth from being told

Racism and greed keep people in need

From getting what's rightfully theirs

Cheating, stealing, and double-dealing

As they exploit the people's fears

Now, Dow Jones owns the people's homes

And all the surrounding land

Buying and selling their humble dwelling

In the name of the Master Plan.

E Pluribus Unum, The Last Poets, Genius Lyrics

And this framework keeps us at each other's throats, clawing for scraps on a planet that surpassed 8 billion humans last month. Every structure of violence has within it the kernel of resource allocation: who gets WHAT. When you define yourselves at the top of the pyramid, you must convince the rest of society that this evolved or divine position is correct, "logical," and "rational." Your progeny inherit this "superiority" in perpetuity. Anyone disagreeing with you is met with violence, even unto death.

The Myth of Race, Robert Wald Sussman; The Emperor's New Clothes, The Race Myth, Joseph L. Graves, Jr.; Racism, Not Race, Alan M. Goodman, Joseph L. Graves, Jr., all give credible, anthropological, biological data pointing to that we are all humans sharing the same planet with 8 billion other humans. Even if we could accelerate a rocket to near-light speed, we're parsecs from anything resembling the current planet on which we've evolved. Climate change is a real dilemma we currently face that threatens our survival. Due to laws of physics and causality, time travel and warp speed have yet to materialize. We can face the future by reconciling with our past. The future is rocky and uncertain if we don't.

Despite the gaslighting, we are Kindred.

I invite you to stream the Hulu series, write a review online, and treat one another like we're related: because, ultimately, we are. This will also support getting a Season 2.

"God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth" - Acts 17:26

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

The genesis of grievance

The man who was least deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in history is the beginning of the roots of white fragility. It wasn't that he might have had learning disabilities or wasn't suited for college. He turned his focus outward to "others": immigrants, feminists, the LGBT, and minorities. Once he settled into a syndicated broadcast on AM Talk Radio that proved more lucrative than what his WWII veteran father earned as a fighter pilot, lawyer, and legislator, he founded a cottage industry of handling that fragility by blaming others for personal shortcomings with no sense of hypocrisy in the party he championed labeling itself the "party of personal responsibility and family values."

In 1969 Limbaugh graduated from Cape Girardeau Central High School, where he played football and was a Boys State delegate.^{[15][16][17][18]} At age 16, he worked his first radio job at KGMO, a local radio station. He used the air name Rusty Sharpe having found "Sharpe" in a telephone book.^[12][19] Limbaugh later cited Chicago DJ Larry Lujack as a major influence on him, saying Lujack was "the only person I ever copied."^[20] In deference to his parents' desire to attend college, he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University but dropped out after two semesters. According to his mother, "he flunked everything [...] he just didn't seem interested in anything except radio."[12][21] Biographer Zev Chafets asserts that Limbaugh's life was largely dedicated to gaining his father's respect.^[22] Source: Wikipedia/Rush_Limbaugh

The high priest of gridlock

In the 1994 campaign season, to offer an alternative to Democratic policies and to unite distant wings of the Republican Party, Gingrich and several other Republicans came up with a Contract with America, which laid out ten policies that Republicans promised to bring to a vote on the House floor during the first 100 days of the new Congress if they won the election.^[61] Gingrich and other Republican candidates for the House of Representatives signed the contract. The contract ranged from issues such as welfare reform, term limits, crime, and a balanced budget/tax limitation amendment, to more specialized legislation such as restrictions on American military participation in United Nations missions.^[62]

In the November 1994 midterm elections, Republicans gained 54 seats and took control of the House for the first time since 1954. Long-time House Minority LeaderBob Michel of Illinois had not run for re-election, giving Gingrich, the highest-ranking Republican returning to Congress, the inside track at becoming Speaker. The midterm election that turned congressional power over to Republicans "changed the center of gravity" in the nation's capital.^[63]Time magazine named Gingrich its 1995 "Man of the Year" for his role in the election.^[3] Source: Wikipedia/Newt_Gingrich

The apotheosis of grift

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." President Ronald Reagan's inaugural address.

Despite the propaganda from the "Never-Trumper" folks, Saint Ronnie Reagan wasn't: a saint. Reagan had a racist conversation with Richard Nixon, mocking an African delegation as "monkeys." He was famous for referencing African Americans with the terms "young bucks" and "welfare queens." Ironically, the Nixon administration came after Donald and his father for discriminatory housing practices. TO THIS DAY and with DNA evidence, he still wants the Central Park Exonerated Five rearrested and executed. Trump came down that escalator in his Ivory Tower and talked like a racist white man from Queens, famous for attacking black children in the 1970s. Reagan did his racism with winks and nods, plausible denial for any blacks who supported him: Trump was, and is, who he has always been.

After railing before the election about inflation and gas prices, they immediately, on a DIME, switched to Hunter Biden's laptop, A.K.A. Benghazi 2.0, without a SHRED of shame or cognizance of hypocrisy. They had no political platform in 2020 and none in the midterms. They eeked a majority out of gerrymandered districts and refused to campaign about the fifty-year project of overturning Roe vs. Wade. Because when you have no policies or a framework to govern, trolling is what you do. If Elon kills Twitter, that might be the best thing he’s ever done. It’s dumbed down our public discourse and allowed conspiracy theories to run rampant as “free speech.”

The fact that Trumpism is largely a reincarnation of the German American Bund is beyond dispute. To paraphrase Thom Hartmann's latest article, we are in late-stage Reaganism. Lauren Boebert and Matt "pedo" Gaetz refused to stand or applaud during Voldemyr Zelinski's address to Congress (you know, like normal humans), and "Boe" is on the outs with the former Mrs. Marjorie Taylor "Nazi Barbie, Secret Jewish Space Lasers" Greene. There was no "red wave," but elections were razer close: we almost got Herschel Walker as a Senator from Georgia, and the aforementioned mean girls got reelected. We are FAR from out of the authoritarian woods yet. If January 6, 2021, isn't punished, including Trump and other plotters, it was a dry run practice before the next bloody coup.

We went from a B-Movie actor whose film credits included "Bedtime with Bonzo" to a reality television star that was a carefully-crafted public fiction by Jeff Zucker and NBC. Mark Burnett had to replace his office furniture that had long succumbed to Entropy. We as a nation are at the endpoint of the Lewis Powell memo. Before it, lobbyists were rare to nonexistent. The confluence of government and corporations hasn't always been our "normal." We have to decide IF we're a "nation of laws and not of men" or if the only men that will count in the opposite of a democratic republic are wealthy, white, male, cisgender American oligarchs. “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini; however, it's unlikely he ever said this, but what it outlines is disturbing nonetheless. We give far too much attention and power to narcissists with itchy Twitter fingers and deep pockets to corrupt politicians.

We can have either a functioning Constitutional Republic or we can have the Hunger Games. We cannot have both.