America is not a republic or a democracy or a democratic republic. It is a lie.

 Hey all, just wanted to make an observation of mine public:

What people think about when they think about America is one thing--a place of dreams where you can buy anything you want freely, where your possessions are protected, where there is stability and opportunity and jobs. A place where you have rights and the law man or the tax man can't just levy a tax and take away your things. 

And then there is what america actually is. 

In America, we have a three class system: at the top of the system is the 1%. Typically the 1% are self-made billionaires, which sounds like the American Dream, right? --Except the real path to reaching the 1% is to find a flaw in the system and exploit it until you make it on top and then close that exploit so that others can't repeat it. Many of the 1% come from wealthy families, its true, they come from the top 20% or even the top 10%, but the top 10% isn't unachievable. A hard-working and smart-investing family can rise from the bottom 5% to the top 10% during their life time and leave their children to carry the banner the rest of the way to the top 1%. So yes, in some ways, the American Dream is real, but before you settle in and feel good about things, lets focus back on the 1%. The top 1% of American society are cheaters. They are exploiters. They are liars and distorters, and they are ruthless. They put on a good show because the wealthiest of the wealthiest, Mark Zuk, Warren Buff, Elon Musk, Bill Gates--they all have a good PR. Many people love them--if not, they wouldn't be able to continue lying and cheating and getting away with things. --THAT is the American Dream. 

The next class is the politician. You're going to think this is the same old same old, so I'll spare you the details: Politicians are pigs and liars. You don't survive in politics by being a good person. If you don't accomplish something big in your first term, people forget about you and then don't vote fore you next go around unless you get lucky and your opponents are worse. Politicians get to stay in office by lying--and in a sick and twisted way they think that their lies are "For the better good" they think they are being ethical and that they're in the right, otherwise, why continue? Why be such a useless piece of shit and waste of space for society and yet continue to fill a role for society that requires you to at least listen to what the public is complaining about? --They all think they are heroes. They think that they're the only one who can push forward some idealized version of the future and they do everything they can to push for that future. It's actually quite pathetic because what we really expect a politician to be is to look after the current interests of the people in their jurisdiction, but the reality is that all politicians are looking out for future peoples who may or may not exist ever. Even when they succeed at bringing their vision for the future, the people they bring it for are too old or dead to really appreciate it. The reason for this is that you don't accomplish anything in politics without a mind for the long form. Everything a politician does is a long con in hopes of bringing a future about. The big problem is that they can't predict how people are going to be in the future and can't provide political wins for their future constituents. It sucks, but we're at least 10 or 20 years behind politically what we are socially on every front. Todays Boomers are starting to get the things they wanted 20 years ago, but now those boomers are leaving the workforce and in need to medical care--too bad they didn't care about taking care of the elderly 20 years ago, if they did, they would have elected people who would look for their retirement and make it a surety. Now, social security is a question, social trends hvae changed and their politicians are batting the wrong way and doomed to be scorned, and medical care is going to continue skyrocketing. 

LAstly, there is the working class. For all intents and purposes, the working class are really plebs. They're the 99%. The people who actually work, the people who do things for society and make sure "shit gets done." The plebs are all working for 1 of 2 things: retirement and death, or to accrue wealth to pass on to their kids and grandkids. The bottom 90% is so concerned about making it into the top 10% and the top 10% are either working to make it into the top 1% or to just make it to retirement. All this hard work that the plebs are doing just to survive causes them to forget that there is more to life than just working. They often just follow trends because they don't have time to think for themselves and develop a personality enough to set trends. Or they're so focused on the "Someday I'll retire..." and they work themselves to the bone to reach retirement only to die before they get to enjoy retirement. 

Meanwhile, our nation was founded to make the field more equal for everyone. It was supposed to do away with the ultra powerful king, the Absolute Monarch, the Dictator. Europe wasn't so bad anciently, there were many factions and the lack of centralized power made it so that someone on the outskirts could avoid the local lord's prying eye and then they could get away with things. Then monarchy progressed to where it became more stable to centralize the role and ultimately have just one king to rule the country. Then kings made alliances with other kings to protect their domains, and finally people rose up who had ambitions to rule the entire world, and the only way to do that would be to have absolute power within the nation. Thus, the Absolute Monarch was born in France. 

In the US, we started as several fractured states each with their own laws and forms of government. Eventually the states bonded together to support the idea of slavery and keep their economic power, but other states who had a conscious recognized that slave power isn't fair and isn't what the nation was founded on (remember? the idea that everyone is equal and can do whatever they want so long as they aren't hurting anyone--Liberty? Libertarianism? One of the great founding principles?). So they rallied under one leader who fought the civil war to make everyone equal again. The civil war was supposed to re-center the nation, and in many ways it did, but the politicians who pushed for it were doing so for the peoples of before the war. After the war there were more people, different people, freed people who had a different voice and different wants and needs. It took another 50+ years for those people to get hte right politicians in office who would push for their future. And then there was a counter push when those politicans finally made some ground and they restricted people again after 50 more years. And then there was a little bit more freedom and equality....

Some people describe this as the liberal pendulum or the progressive pendulum. Really, it comes down to the fact that American democracy doesn't accomplish anything quickly and by the time it accomplishes what people wanted now, the people who wanted it and had the majority and had the power--Those people--they're gone. And the new majority, the ones that are pissed off about this thing happening that htey don't agree with, then they form a movement that takes another 10-30 years and after that amount of time they get what they want. 

But I'm not the same as I was 10 years ago, or 20, or 30. 

What I want right now, I'm not sure if it will even be relevant in 30 years. 

Things I care about are climate mitigation, and in 30 years its too late. Removing the power that fossil fuels have on our nation would be great in 20 years, but I fear it might be too late. Damage will be done and we can't go back to the environment we had when I was a child. I care about personal liberty--not liberty over all but Personal Liberty. I think what I do with my personal property, my body, my toothbrush, the items in my inventory, should be completely up to me. I think anything that is connected cell-to-cell to my body should be under my jurisdiction, but me in 20 years might change my mind once people start adding circuity to their bodies to enhance their abilities so that they can become super beings and purge the earth of non-super beings. Or genetically modify themselves. --Yeah, I might change my mind in 20 years and say there are limits. That said, I don't know the future and no body does, and even if somebody could accurately see the future, no one now would understand it enough to  care to invest in it for the rest of humanity. Instead, one of the 10% would exploit it so that they could be the 1% and then close it off so that no one else could benefit from it. 

Sorry if this is classist. Sorry if this is doom-and-gloom. 

I just think America has failed. It has failed to give people what they want, which is what they want right now, not later. And when they get it later, it's contrary to what the people of the then-now want. So if you live in the present, you're getting something you don't want that someone else wanted and you'll have to wait to get the thing that you actually want and you may not live to get it. A better form of government or social structure would be one that can give you what you want right now, or one that can predict what you will want in the future and give it to you when that future occurs. 

I almost wonder if it isn't possible to design laws in a way that they are triggered by future predicted events and that we can change those laws up until they happen so that they can be modified to be exactly what we will need.  Like: a law 50 years ago would have been nice "in case" global warming surpassed an average of 1 degree C. Then suddenly fossil fuel is forced to scale down. If it was on the books, the fossil fuel industry would be prepared for it and less people would be investing in it if they saw the temperature rising 0.5C or 0.75C because they'd realize there was a limit to it.

Maybe we could write a law on how we would treat an alien species if one was discovered, and until then, we wouldn't have to do anything other than leave it on the books. 

But I digress. That's a reality I will never live in. People barely have forethought to save money for retirement, why would they have the forethought to prepare for something that might happen? 

Economics and Capitalism II

 I can sense and understand that our method of Economics and Capitalism is a problem, but I'm really struggling to wrap my head around a solution...

It seems like a pretty important thing in life, and possibly something that people wouldn't expect just one person to find a solution for, but I think many great writers and thinkers have, individually, come up with solutions for these great pressing problems of our time.

So I'm sitting here at the "why" stage--I know why it's not working, I also know THAT it's not working. But now I need to move into the stage of where do we go from here?

It's really hard to articulate this, but I'm really noticing in every conversation people have that is economics related or capitalism related just how bad those things are. Our understandings of economics is so ingrained into people that they don't realize there could be alternatives. Take for instance when people assign value to something: their first instinct is to say that the value is based on what someone will pay for it. That supply and demand is the main generator of value then. --That's not accurate, and that would put Marx's theory in some strange water because then the controlers of the means of production are those people who can create demand. It puts power in society into the hands of PR firms, Marketeers, and Sales people, which are an end product of value not a begining product. Those people sell created value, they don't create value to sell!

And capitalism. We often associate capitalism with corporate capitalism, or the public's ownership of public companies. But we have seen where that line of argument leads: corporations are treated like people rather than entities controlled by people. People use their ownership in companies as leverage for other things, even leveraging the assumed value of the corporation (although it is unrealized) to generate value. They offer up their shares are collateral to private investors who lend them money and in effect create value out of nothing. This is economic capitalism at its finest, but that doesn't mean there is actual value there. There is no real value to those deals yet people believe into them and it causes the economic engine to turn--generating increased value from nothingness! How can this be sustainable? How can this be equitable? It's no wonder there are so many huckers in the world today--so many people pitching lies to accumulate wealth--because that is in effect tapping into a limitless source of economic power: the belief of a lie that says there is value in something when there isn't! 

What's more, when we take a step back, no one has really put much thought into whether running this economic engine for the long-haul is actually beneficial to people? Is it? Is it beneficial to everyone or just a select few, because it seems to me like it is another form of propaganda, no different from religion. Economics is the new religion. Religion was the old method for controlling the masses and even, eventually, for controlling kings. The new method is economics. Kings rise and fall based on that "Economic engine," and not all kings hold geographic holdings in the same way that they did back 500 years ago. Some kings own corporations. 

What a lie this world is. What an illusion! What a waste. We humans are such a wasted species. We rely on fiction, we build our whole world on fiction, we are fiction. Is it really a human trait to look at the truth and turn away from it only to embrace a fiction that is more digestible? 

Economic Capitalism The problem of All of Us

The Climate Crisis may kill us all, and because we have already reached the tipping point--even though people don't want to admit it--humanity will be facing many changes and what society looked like 10 years ago is not what it will look like 50 years from now. It has already changed in many ways, too many ways. 

I suppose the rest of my thought pieces on this site are going to reflect the fact that we have a finite amount of years on this planet. Humanity used to change at a steady pace, but the rate of change has been exponentially growing and we are now approaching an infinite rate of change. What that means is chaos, anarchy. When we hit that point, everything is up in the air and whether we escape from it or not is dependent on whether humans are inherently good, or inherently bad; but the fact that we reached that point in the first place says that we are inherently bad. And by bad I mean, predominantly those negative traits that people think of.

Which leads me to the topic I wanted to write about:

Our current method of economics is fatally flawed and is directly tied into the flawed side of capitalism. The flawed side of capitalism is the side that over-exploits, seeks profit above all else, emphasizes and rewards greedy behavior, and leads to only a select few bubbling to the surface. 

This is flawed because it presumes that there is such a thing as "best of the best" in regards to human beings, yet anyone who studies humanity will tell you that humans greatest trait is that their weaknesses are actually strengths when pooled as a collective. The flawed capitalism concepts have been pushed throughout history, arrogantly, for centuries under different names like imperialism, or colonialism, serfdom, tributaries, and despotism. Capitalism is being wielded by greedy individuals to amass power, and unfortunately, Capitalism has done a much better job of it that its predecessors. 

As the rate of societal changes continues to press forward though, Capitalists ought to be quivering right now because social change is inevitable and just as the Rome was built and fell on the backs of the refugees it created though its wars, or how Imperialism crested and then was replaced, so too will capitalism die and be replaced and the people who it served will be forgotten.

Economics is presently a tool of capitalism. Money, currency, fiat, all representations of economics and not something tangible. Economics is founded on a principle that growth means more and loss means less. One flaw to economics-thinking is that it attempts to explain the resources of a finite world as though they are infinite. Infinite growth is impossible. In a natural system, there are a finite number of resources and the value of those resources don't go up when they run out, the value plateaus at a maximum value that I would coin "survival maximum." It is the price that one pays to survive--to live--which cannot be greater than the value of their life. Animals have a survival maximum the same as humans, yet economics undervalues them substantially. Plants, even bacteria have a survival maximum. Just because we can wipe out an organism relatively easy, doesn't mean that it's survival maximum is the same as the cost to wipe out said organism. The value of a wine culture is not the value of a campden tablet used to kill it off before bottling the wine, and yet the same approach is applied in many instances of the economics world. 

Wild animals that are often hunted for sport or sustenance do everything in their power to outwit the hunter, and yet the ecological services that these animals provide far surpass the lead and gunpowder used to kill them. How easy it is to destroy something that took so much to build, and yet, destruction or threat of destruction has been used for eons as a means to devalue resources and snatch them up well under their true economic value. 

Economics can never accurately value a living organism, and because of that inadequacy, it will always lead of false pretenses. Economics, by nature of being a faulty system, is therefore inadequate for most of the tools it has been used for. If anything, the only merit that economics serves is to deceive the unwitting into offload highly valuable tangibles and real property into the hands of master deceivers. 

After the thousands of years that money has been around--the prerequisite to economics--I think now is a good time to start developing a system to replace it. Some people have proposed cryptocurrency, but it is only a further expansion of the flaws of economics because it relies on economics for its very existence--moreso than previous currencies. Instead, we either need to latch our currency onto semi-infinite sources of energy, such as the sun, or do away with currency altogether. And yet, if we manage to harness the power of the sun and create infinite energy, there may no longer be a need for currency.

Sadly, the easiest alternative to currency is worldly power and political structures, and when society hits the chaos stage, those with amassed worldly and political power will attempt to base currency on this resource they believe they have an abundance of. "Favors" will attempt to replace "money,"  and yet that will not suffice because it has never been a stable nor a long-term solution. 

This all sounds like I am suggesting we all switch to a "wild" life, supposedly moving out into the bush to live off the land like our ancestors, but sadly we have never lived a sustainable lifestyle in the wilds. Human evolution has assured us that forming society is one of our greatest attributes as a species because it pools our weaknesses for certain traits and collaborates them with others' strengths. Living in smaller communities out in nature only gives a face-lift to the problem we are all facing--those people who live that lifestyle face the same problem, but they approach it in a different way and believe that they have evaded the "rat-race." Instead of competing with other humans over resources deemed valuable, they are competing against wild animals (who they perceive to be inferior to themselves) or Nature (who they perceive to be superior). At least in modern society, humans recognize that their greatest threats are their fellow humans--nature has been tamed as much as it can be and wild animals no longer pose a threat, but some humans are perceived as inferior and others as superior. The wild man or woman is merely avoiding facing his or her inadequacies and staring down the problem at hand and doing something about it. They are choosing to engage in selfish human behavior by focusing on their own survival and abandoning the global community at a very challenging time and I don't see that as a valid solution. 

We are all facing Nature. Nature hasn't been tamed. It is bigger than all of us and by attempting to tame it we have destroyed it. As Nature dies, it will destroy everything in its grasp, including all humans who so arrogantly thought that they could conquer it.