Indra Anderson's Blog

It’s a choice. I’m working my core.

Our Japp is a ball of energy – now and then. He likes to go outside. But only on a leash, only for 20 minutes. Most of the time he lays in the grass and looks a bugs and lizards, bunnies and squirrels. But every now and then, he has a moment of madness as he sharpens his claws on the base of the tree. His ears go back. His tail switches about. And then, he flies up a tree trunk. He usually stops about 6 feet up, at the first branching. Usually. Most of the time. Sometimes, however,  a squirrel high in the canopy will mock him. At that point, he shoots up 20’ or more, way beyond my ability to catch the flying red 6’ lead. 

I always worry he’ll do himself an injury, if the lead catches on something when he leaps, or falls, from the tree. But, there it is. I imagine his view from the top is thrilling. Looking down on the earth from high above, he feels like a king. Or perhaps his thoughts become more philosophical. I really don’t know. He doesn’t share them with the likes of me. What I do know is that lost in all the heady sense of superiority, power, or what not, which comes from looking down on the mere earthbound, he always finds himself stuck quite high up and can never quite remember how to get down. 

Cats are famous for this, as are firemen and rock climbers for rescuing cats of such fame (possibly infamy). Nevertheless, this is what it’s like to be a cat. And what it’s like to be a cat owner. More than once, I’ve had to get the 8’ ladder out and climb up it as high as I could, to guide Japp back to the right branches, the ones that lead a mortal kitty back to earth. I sometimes pause in my coaxing duties to look at the view, but I don’t forget why I’m up there. 

Hahahah, you poor people waaaay down there.

Being a reasonable sort, I always like to let Japp jump(ish) down the last bit of the tree, from the first Y, so he feels confident in himself. He always pauses once on the ground and looks slightly vexed and up at the tree, as if it intentionally lured him up, then he trots away with his tail in the air. In a “done with you.” sort of way. I suspect (at least partially) he doesn’t want to see me or the ladder and admit I helped him in any way.

I was thinking of this last night, when we had some of the SO’s friends over to dinner. The SO knows them through their IT company. They run IT for smaller firms, 50 people or less, that don’t have onsite IT departments or people. During the course of the meal, “Jen-i” and “Paul” told us about recent encounter with a potential new client. They were excited at first, because it was a much bigger company than they usually deal with and they saw this as maybe a breakthrough moment for their firm, which is only about 5 years old. And then they had their first meeting with a few of the C-suite folks. It went as follows. 

Jen’i and Paul laid out their company’s capabilities and services, what they had done for other companies, etc, etc. Heads nodded. Jen’i asked if there were any specific issues the company was having. These were discussed. All pretty normal, per Paul. Jen’i asked if there were any specific pain points, or projects the current internal IT team were unable to handle or handle in a timely manner. The CEO (a person over 60 and not at all tech savvy), then began to tell them about a very specific issue. (Oh, boy.)

I’m just getting a bit of sun. I’ll be down in a minute. Stop bothering me.

Internal IT, in the course of its mandate to find and fix vulnerabilities, did a normal IT thing. They ran a strictly private web search on one of the HR people, to demonstrate the sort of public information that was out there on the web and represented vulnerabilities. IT then took the report to the HR person (subject of the search, under age 40) and showed it to that person. The HR person thought that was interesting and wanted to show it to the C-suite, but they wanted IT to do a search for each C-suite member, so each person could see the vulnerability. 

That there is this vast amount out there is something everyone under 40 understands. Information like this can be removed by removal services and most people with a passing familiarity of the internet understand this as well.  But when you deal with people who are older or without much understanding of the internet …. Well, there you are. HR presented the reports and people in C-suite completely melted down. They blamed the IT for exposing them. Um….no, IT actually was showing them they were exposed and giving them the opportunity to fix that. 

So for Jen’i and Paul, as a result of the company’s internal IT people doing their job correctly, the company higher ups was looking for new IT help. The company wanted to destroy it’s own functioning IT department – as if that would cure their vulnerability issues. Um….yeah. Sure. So, Paul and Jen’i found themselves dealing with a cat up a tree scenario.  Because they are wonderful people, they told the company that of course they could help, but went on to explain that the check the internal IT dept did was routine and one they would have recommended as well. They tried to talk the cat(s) down. 

I’m trying to see if you really, really care.

They aren’t sure how it will all work out. But, at this point, they also aren’t sure they want to work with a company where the leadership is soooo uninformed about tech and so reactionary about normal IT things. A normal IT precaution, run internally by a responsible IT person, should not provoke the destruction of the entire internal IT team. Paul said he would do some discrete enquiries into how many IT teams/people the company has used over the years. Just so he could understand what was going on. If you can see you’re dealing with a cat that will often run up a tree, maybe that’s not the cat for you.

This started a long conversation about different times we each had overreacted to someone who was just trying to help us, but we totally didn’t get it. And also about times when people had overreacted to us trying to help them. Sometimes you need to go up in a cherry picker with heavy gear on and grab an angry cat. Sometimes you can talk it down. Sometimes you’re the angry cat. Sometimes, you just need a bit of helpful coaxing. I thought about all this again much later, reading the newspaper. The US has lots of cats stuck in lots of trees right now. War in Iran? Presidential cat in a tree. Classic angry cat, always running up a tree, always demanding to be rescued.  

Republicans talking about “red scares”? Party cat in a tree. Given the GOP are the Red party and are trying to eliminate democracy and create a one party country, you’d think they’d avoid howling from the treetop about that. So, if there is a red menace in the US, it would be the GOP.   Then we have Ancient Regime Democrats declaring Dems are “Capitalists not Socialists.” Party cat in a tree. To sum up that statement in a question, do you want government to work for “captial” which isn’t human and only some citizens have, or for all of society, which is humans and which all voters are? You can be pro-social which leads to prosperity for all or pro-capital which leads to prosperity for a few. You can’t be pro both. It’s like Christian Nationalist. Nope. Doesn’t exist.

Thanks, but I don’t need a ladder.

So, lots of cats, in lots of trees right now. Probably the worst case scenarios are where people intentionally put their cats in trees and then declare emergencies and demand other people rescue their cat at great cost to those others, but not themselves. Honestly, those people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near cats in the first place. That’s an animal cruelty situation. But those are pretty rare. Most of us are just average folk doing our best each day in difficult circumstances. Sometimes we are the cat rescuer, sometimes we’re the cat, sometimes we’re just the tree witnessing all the silliness and trying to make sense of it.

I’d encourage you this week to look around and see if you can spot the cat in the tree in your own life. Is there some area in which you need to talk yourself down? Maybe you need a friend with a ladder (or a cup of tea) to get your feet on the ground again? Maybe you need to do the talking or bring the ladder? Any tree you get up, you can get down again. The cat is not the problem. It’s just a cat. Maybe there are people trying to help you and instead of accepting that help, your howling your head off and running higher up the tree? If you’re way way way up in the tree, take a mintue to look around, and calm down. At least you’re not lost. You know exactly where you are. Right in your own backyard. Nothing’s really change but the perspective. It’ll all be okay.

Well, Japp is here beside me now, demanding to go out. I’m going to be a good cat steward and give him indoor playtime instead. I’m sure there will be some furniture climbing, and possibly some runner rugs slipping around, but at least I won’t need heavy gloves and a 20’ aluminum ladder.

Inner city optional tree-like object. That’s right, no TV till you pet me.

Spoiler Alert: if you have never read the Lord of The Rings books or watched the trilogy movies, this contains spoilers. Also, where have you been the last few decades?

Find and ring and pick it up, and all the day you’ll …. No. That’s not right.

Back in September, I decided to reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read it once a long time ago as kid, before the Peter Jackson movies, and then again some years after the final movie.  So, it’s been a while.  I decided this time, I’d listen to the books because Tolkien was a linguist and, for linguists, how it sounds is important too.  Also, as a sort of riff on medieval tales in general, it’s meant to be heard. There are songs in the story. They are meant to be sung. Back in the Middle Ages, maybe not many people might be able to read, but almost everyone could hear.  

Then it came to choosing between Andy Serkis’s reading of the books and Rob Inglis’s.  I went with Rob, the traditional pick. The only problem was, my hold place in line was 158th for 1 of 30 copies available at my public library. And so, I waited, and waited and waited.  In late March, LOTR became available, and I started listening. In hearing the book, rather than reading it, I realised there was a lot of things I had not picked up on before. Ah, the benefits of mixed modalities! 

As I started LOTR, I put a hold on the Two Towers, the second book in the series, thinking I might have a long wait. There were only 12 holds but only the 2 copies available. Apparently, fandom falls off a cliff after book 1. I was able to get Two Towers  just a week after I finished LOTF. So, that was my April book. What struck me about TT, that I never realised before, was that Frodo was actually responsible for Golum’s death because Frodo actively used the ring’s power to make Golum swear a terrible oath. I found myself wondering how Frodo felt about that, after it was all over and he was back in the Shire. Yes, I think about things like this. Long after wars are over, people revisit their actions in the privacy of their thoughts. 

Not entirely sure what’s being smoked here is “Old Toby.” They look pretty happy.

I also found myself thinking a lot about what’s missing from the books. That is to say, while Frodo writes a contract to sell Bag End in LOTR, we don’t hear about lawyers, or judges. And while we get an inkling of business enterprises in TT, from a discussion of tobacco farming and sales and somewhat shady doings of the Sackville-Baggins’s and the men of Bree, we hear nothing about businesses per se. We know some people have jobs. Samwise is a gardner. Some people are farmers. Gandalf apparently sells fireworks? But we don’t really hear about people having jobs. As close as we come to any sort of work, is hearing about Elves weaving or the metallurgy of Dwarves. It doesn’t seem to matter to the author.

Another very striking thing is that despite all the different cultures and types of beings that inhabit Middle Earth, not one of these groups has a religion or deities of any kind. Every action in the books is down to personal and or  group agency. There are no miracles, very little magic (science?), and only fleeting moments of metaphysics. I’m not a LOTR expert. I don’t know all of the lore written by Tolkien about Middle Earth. I’m just going by the 3 books, so I may be mistaken. But it’s fair to consider Middle Earth to be a place that is truly “godless” but largely filled with basic goodness.

 It’s just weird because Medieval literature of the West is always mentioning religion. For example, the counting of how long something was baked in an oven was measured by the number of rosaries one could recite in that period. You want that crust crunchy? That’s going to be 20 rather than 15 rosaries. And language is full of words related to religion, which linguists (and everyday people) of Tolkien’s period would be aware of.  I said to the IT guy this week, “My computer gave up the ghost. Can you come and fix or replace it?” Of course, the IT guy said “what does that mean – give up the ghost?” So, the power of the Numenoreans is clearly fading.

Wait, which one is the Ent, again?

While I was thinking about all this, I requested the last book, Return of the King, of which there was only 1 copy available, and only 1 person reading it, and only my 1 request. How sad, I thought, that so few people reached the end of the tale! But I did understand.  People watch the movie and then get the books only to realise, nope, not really the same thing.  LOTR is the book you read on many a long winter night by the fireside. I didn’t have much time to lament the fact I was one of the few. On the way home from work, at the Entish of May, as I was heading to the airport to go and see my folks for the Memorial Day holiday, a man stopped short in front of me on the freeway (because he went over a hill and suddenly, unexpectedly, saw a line of car dead stopped before him).

I stopped short, and short of hitting his car by about 5 ft. The lady behind me however, in the SUV, going 60? Not so much. She hit me and pushed me into the car ahead of me.  There was a minor bend to my front fender, and crumpling of his rear plate. Whereas the trunk of my car now is bent to resemble the Misty Mountains’ Caradhras. The frame was bent, so much so the doors did not align any longer. The metal of the well wells were pushed into the tires.  It was totalled. A Halligan tool was required to get my things out of the trunk.  The SO does love a reason to buy a new tool.

I was hurt, but not so much so that I had to go to hospital. The same could not be said for a friend at work, who on the same day, at the same time, also leaving for a trip, but going the other direction on the same road, was also rear ended and totalled. She is still not back to work. Needless to say, my holiday weekend got cancelled. But, I was alive and, thanks to prescription anti-infammatories, I was able to return to work (and start treatment) as expected the following week. As I’m writing this, I’m wearing a spica thumb/wrist brace. That’s my current typo excuse.

3 bedrooms, 1 bath, and a spacious kitchen, but subject to unannounced Dwarf and Wizard visitations.

I requested the hold on the Return of the King but since that wasn’t an immediate go, the SO bought me David Sedaris’s latest book is The Land and Its People, which is brilliant and just the perfect read for a person post car wreck. They don’t make Hallmark cards for car crashes unfortunately. The SO looked. Which is strange as there are way more car wrecks – 6 Million per year – than marriages of which there are only about  2.4 Million. Anyway, I highly recommend it ( the book, not the car crash). 

I did get my grubby little mitts on the last book, finally, on June 1st.  I’m in Book V right now. This is the part where the forces of Sauron attempt to take the city of Minas Tirith in Gondor, thinking (mistakenly) that Sauron’s “one” ring of power is there. I had not really taken in the scope of what was happening in this section before. That is to say, all the different groups in the battle on the fields of Pelennor, before the White City. Something else I had not considered before was that, ultimately, it is not a man, but a woman and a hobbit who defeat the Witch King of Angmar, and that, while all these groups are out in battle trying to save Middle Earth, where is the Steward of Gondor (the old white man)?  He’s in the halls of the dead trying to burn himself (and his son, Faramir) alive because he thinks all hope is lost (at least that’s what Pippin thinks). I have issues with this attitude.

I don’t mind that Denethor has given up hope (more on that in a second). I mind that Denethor doesn’t think he should die in battle leading Gondor’s men, making a last glorious stand, doing what a great leader would do, even though he has lost all hope. Although a lot is made of the hopelessness initially, ultimately, once the story is unpicked by Gandalf,  it comes down to the fact Denethor is actually selfish. He doesn’t want Gondor to win because he thinks it will negatively impact him personally. So for that? To prevent that? All Gondor should fall? Wow.

Eowyn’s got the right attitude.

But let’s backtrack. We are told he has lost all hope. Why? Because he’s spent an inordinate amount of time all alone,  looking in the palantir, trying to discern things. Unfortunately, the palantir was controlled by Sauron, who only allowed the stone to show Denethor things that would dishearten him. And, FYI, nobody was supposed to be looking in the stone after everyone knew Sauron had one. So, first mistake?  Denethor glued himself to a screen he considered a source of truth, but wasn’t. Isolated with his tricksie screen, he doesn’t realise he is being manipulated by Sauron, that he is being caused to fall into despair, so that Sauron can more easily take Gondor.  People should really treat Denethor’s story as a cautionary tale. 

When Gandalf arrives to try and save Denethor or at least Faramir his son (who is unconscious), he finds soldiers fighting with each other – instead of the actual enemy at the gates! – such is the division Denethor has created by his selfish stupidity. Denethor refuses all help. Gandalf asks Denethor what it is he really wants, and Denethor, tellingly, replies “I want to go back to the old days, when the stewards ruled Gondor in peace. I don’t want to give up my position to an upstart” (the real king, Aragorn).  And there we have it. Denethor is depressed because he thinks Gondor will fall. But, he’s also not wanting Gondor to go on because his position would be lower with the arrival of the true King.

A man addicted to a lying palantir wants to “go back to the good old days.” He wants to keep the powers that belong to others only to himself. When the moment comes be heroic and unified, he divides the people and he thinks only of himself. He’d rather die – and let his people die – than do the right thing. Sound familiar? In the end, only Faramir is rescued by Gandalf and Pippin; Denethor self-immolates. Denethor had put himself in such a state that there was no saving him. His freewill choice was death. And that brings me back to the lack of a deity of any kind in these books. 

Maybe what I really need to get out of this depression is a new haircut?

This is a world where beings make choices and there are intended and unintended consequences but they take responsibility (for the most part) for their actions. Each being is seen as capable of leading their own life, without deity involvement. I wonder if people who read these books think about this much. Given the amount of “religious” wars, that are actually wars of people who want power for themselves alone,  going on in the world today, you’d hope readers would think about it. Hiding your war behind your supposed “god” who supposedly ordered it or ordained it, is just silly.

To some extent, Denethor’s fate is what happens when people forget their place in the world. By this I mean, he isolated himself to spend time looking into the palantir.  He lost touch with his people, with the sum of Gondor’s history, of which he was a part. He lost touch with the actual past (and replaced it with a sentimentalized good old days) of his world, and though he had a living son, he was choosing to kill him rather than fighting for his life, for staying connected to a future world, a future Gondor, one which  he would not control (if a rightful king returned) as he and his family once had. Denethor chose to become isolated, made himself prey to manipulation, and that resulted in personal despair, which he took out on the public by giving up on Gondor. 

Denethor is probably not a character people think much about, but he’s like a lot of people these days: isolated from reality, manipulated by others, depressed about the future, fearful of loss of power that never belonged to them, divisive, angry. My response to that is “Please, look away from the palantir. It’s lying to you. Come back to reality.” Their answer is usually, “No” Apparently it’s a hill they want to die on, like Denethor, and if you can’t stop them, you just have to save who you can and let them destroy themselves.

The best actor you’ll never see in the LOTR movies.

 In ancient Rome, when the government was made up of oligarchs, those men understood there was a trade off happening.  Citizens gave up all rights and powers, but they received free bread and circuses. I’m mentioning this, because in many ways, American society (a large portion of it at least) is caught up in Denethor’s mindset. Circuses only work on groups made of people who isolate themselves, become addicted to the false information people who want them to fall feed them, and get depressed as they fall into an existential vacuum, feeling everything is meaningless, that they don’t matter, that what they do doesn’t matter. Those parts of society end up self-immolating, as a choice. It’s preferred to returning to reality, to community, to being a part of history. 

Tomorrow, a once fine country, will be celebrating its “250-year history liberal democracy” with a circus paid for by the oligarchs. On the semi-torn down White House’s lawn, fake wrestlers will via in fake wrestling matches to be viewed by fake spectators (selected audience members from the military required to be of a certain height and weight– and probably gender and race) – proxies for “the people.” This is just one of a number of circuses being provided. The video of bombs illegally executing foreign fishermen as “drug dealers”, the showy murderous ICE attacks on citizens and immigrants, the needless Israeli forever expansionist war in Iran are all just part of the constant stream of “made for tv” circuses. 

Most people have noticed the constant profiteering, nepotism, graft, double dealing for self enrichment. Most people notice the inflation due to tariffs and wars, the collapse of democracy, the general corruption of the executive, congress, and the courts. It does seem fair to say that this is largely because America’s oligarchy is more incompetent than any that  Juvenal lived through.  American oligarchs don’t provide free bread, don’t care if people can afford bread, don’t even care if Americans eat. The American oligarchy only provides circuses, which I think American news organizations forget. 

Shadowfax. The only fax I can accept.

America does not have a government right now. It has a tv show, where appointees (who look the part, eg, the current Dept of Defense head) and other incompetent loyal sycophants are rewarded with taxpayer money so long as they keep the show going, keep ratings up, and protect and enrich their “stars” of the show. There isn’t an actual national government with actual policies, only government at the state, county or city levels. But this situation is why individual citizens matter. Democratic government is by and for the people. It can keep happening at the local level.

When individuals break free of their self-inflicted isolation, addiction, and hopelessness, they realise they matter, and that they can fill their own lives with individual meaning, when they can exercise independent thought, listen to their own individual conscience, and walk out their own chosen purpose. When people do that, things change. When enough people do this, society changes. One of the hallmarks of Americans has always been that we choose our own meaning, that’s what the individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are based on.  We need those things, to create a life of meaning. It was assumed we could direct ourselves toward what was meaningful to us individually (with or without a deity). 

It’s the Constitutional goal of our society to guarantee a government that knows this to be the meaning of American society and fosters it. Our society has always aimed to be a petri dish. A free place where we can experiment, discover and be who we are, a place where I can peacefully live out my values while you,  my neighbor, can do the same. We were always a community of people who saw the value in freedom, rule of law and liberal democracy. If the government takes as its goal to support societal freedom at home and protect it so people can live out their own individual meanings, as the founders intended, that would indeed be a good government.

Find meaning everywhere, it’s there.

If you are looking for an appropriate Flag Day entertainment to watch tomorrow, I recommend watching all 3 of the LOTR series by Peter Jackson. It’s full of the values our flag was meant to stand for and for which average Americans thought they were fighting the Revolution. And Andy Serkis is amazing as Gollum (and other characters)!

Nice in the day light, maybe.

Recently I went to dinner with some friends I had not seen in a long time. They moved to another part of the country about 5 years ago and although they have family out my way, they don’t come out my way too frequently, usually only for emergencies such as a small child with cancer undergoing a risky surgery or a family member that requires help packing up a house and moving. This time they were here because 2 daughters were leaving their husbands and needed help packing up. One daughter discovered her husband of many years, with whom she had school age children,  had fallen in love with her favorite cousin’s wife. The cousin & his wife had only been married a year. The husband and the bride only met at the wedding. So, lots of pain there.

The other daughter had only been married a few years, but found her husband (a respected doctor) increasingly jealous and possessive, prone to erratic behavior and fits of rage, and insistent that she pay for her own life needs, even though he demanded she not work. Um, what? So pretty much going crackers there. She feared he’d escalate to violence soon and decided to leave before that could happen. She did it while he was away at a medical conference in another country. There were no children and so I expect the split will be … not amicable but doable. Of course I knew nothing of all this before our dinner, which is why one goes to dinners.

After dinner we sat out on a deck and talked about more tractable issues. Like the state of the world. And then I drove home. But on the drive home I realised something. The drive to the restaurant (one I had not been to before) in another town involved a 2-lane road through a remote area that had some tricky bits (where people had died) and along the sea. It was a beautiful road. The sun was out. It took about 45 minutes to reach the town. On the way home, it was well and truly dark. But the drive only took me about 30 minutes.  There was no difference in traffic. What was different was the darkness.  

If you see a Yeti, don’t tell me. Eyes on the road. Eyes on the road. 

Because I couldn’t see all the surrounding, possibly dangerous, bits of road, my focus was entirely on driving, and I was able to navigate more efficiently. I remembered an article I read on how the brain, to focus, dims other areas of activity. The brain is a bit like a theatre stage. It switches to spotlight mode when it focuses. It doesn’t amp up to focus, it dims down. The drive was like that. On the way home, the road was in spotlight mode, the dangers of the road were dimmed. They were still there, and just as dangerous, but perhaps, the darkness had put them into their proper perspective. 

In the light, the dangers seemed magnified and perhaps I felt less confident about driving. But once the focus was only the visible road within the light of the headlamps, I returned to being the masterful rally driver I had always been. Although the SO might argue with that description of my skills, I reject his assessment as he is more a flat track driver and wouldn’t know a hairpin from a kink. 

I found myself thinking about this road trip again the other night, after (honestly, a bit during) a friend’s seder (4 fun-filled hours!). My mind kept returning to Moses, even though his name was not unmentioned, and to the Israelites camped at the Reed Sea, even though that’s not part of the seder story. Moses tells the Israelites “the Lord will fight for you” against the Egyptian army that has arrived to re-enslave them. Awkwardly, God says “nope.” Then instructs Moses to lift his rod, and split the sea while God in a great cloud that was impenetrable and dark to the Egyptians but gave light to the Israelites on the opposite side acted as their rearguard.

Really, kids will be kids. Keep walking.

That God did not fight the Egyptians, seems at first an unlikely response after so many miraculous plagues.  It was not a case of couldn’t, but wouldn’t. Moses then raises his staff and the sea parts. I looked it up. The Reed Sea is about 1200 to 2000 ft deep depending on where you are (and yes there are shallower places, but just work with me here!) . Imagine you are standing on the shoreline, looking at the road that leads down into the bottom of the sea, unable to see the shore on the other side (the narrowest point of the sea is 16 miles). Perhaps the moon is rising in the east, and aligns with your path before you (or the light of God’s cloud may illuminate the path from behind you). What might you see in that moment? A glowing, shimmering path. Perhaps the moonlight and the cloud’s light are bouncing off the waters, stacked high as a 12-story skyscrapers, from either side.

People who don’t know this story well tend to think Moses led the people across. Nope. He was holding up the staff. He was on the shore till the end. God says “Tell the Children of Israel to go forward.” Moses doesn’t lead them. They have to go on their own. They have to choose to make the crossing. If they want to be truly free, they have to take that first step. Alone. God is not before the. Moses is not before them. It is just a road, through the sea. A road no one had ever seen before. A road no one had ever travelled before. It’s up to individuals to make that choice. It’s up to you on the shore, to choose to walk to freedom and life or stay behind and be enslaved or killed by the Egyptians.

Who will be the first? At last, a man steps forward. In Jewish tradition his name is Nachshon ben Aminadav. HIs name turns up a few chapters later as the leader of the tribe of Judah, whose symbol is the courageous lion. His name comes from a root that implies wisdom and skill, an ability to see the future (or maybe just know how the winds blow). He is the one who decides first that he wants to be free, he wants to live, and he steps onto the sandy shimmering path and starts walking down, down, down into the abyss of the sea. Once he goes, other people begin to make the same decision, and press forward, with friends and family, flocks and herds.

Uh, you mean, this path?

The road to freedom, to life, can take you through some strange places. And the road isn’t necessarily easy, if you’ve walked in sand you know what that’s like. You may have to walk in the dark by the light of the moon. Your path may seem hemmed in between towering walls of certain death should the walls let go. Your path may have no possible way to move back, or sideways, and so the only way is forward, in faith, if you want to live. Really, truly, freely, fully live.

This made me think also of the story of Jesus in the tomb. (Warning: there will be some technically unavoidable mental images of Jesus you wish to un-mentally see, due to the way this story was manufactured by God.) In the story, we hear that women come to the tomb early in the morning, Sunday, but Jesus is not there. Logically, he’d left, in the wee hours. In the night. Sometime after Shabbat finished on Saturday night at sunset. I mean, who wouldn’t want the 3 days to be as short as possible. So, a few hours on Friday, 24 hours on Saturday, and a few hours into Sunday and Bob’s your uncle. The days are technically 3, but the hours are more 30-ish maybe?

So, in the night, the rock is rolled away by an angel. And Jesus sees the light of the moon, the dew on the grass shimmering. He doesn’t stay in the cave, in the place of death. He gets up. He doesn’t take his grave clothes with him – they are left folded on the slab. So apparently he leaves naked (but that’s for another discussion), with nothing, and walks out into life. But that’s the point, he exits that dark confined place of death and leaves its trappings behind. He chooses to walk out into life. Not out into an airy fairy heaven life. He’s not translated into heaven. An actual boulder has to be moved, but someone else (an angel). He steps out in the actual world. Into the night and moonlight, barefoot in the dewy grass. 

Life is waiting, start walking. 

In John 10, Jesus describes the qualities of a good shepherd. He knows his sheep by name, he leads them, he brings  them to good pastures, he lays down his life for his sheep. He contrasts this shepherd with a hired hand, who abandons them and the thief who comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  But what’s it really all about, all this sheepish talk?  He says, he as the good shepherd has come “that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Like the Exodus story, the Good Shepherd story is about people choosing life, real life, living a full life, here and now. This is Christian originalism. It’s in the Bible, in the Gospels. It’s what Jesus actually said. 

But critical to Jesus’s story, as in the Exodus story, it’s up to you. You have to choose to walk out into freedom, into the fullness of life in the present (not the hereafter). You can stay in the place of death, the tomb, I guess it’s safe, like a bunker, but that’s not life, you won’t be with others or with God, but you can make that choice. You can follow a hired hand, who will never know your name and abandon you at the first sign of trouble. You can even choose to stand there and let the thief rob, kill or destroy you. Ore, you can go a bit Nachshon and get your shoes dusty or a bit Jesus and get your feet wet (I’m not advocating public nudity). You can choose to walk out into the darkness, under the moon and stars, and chart a course forward, into life, into the fullness of life.

And this I think is the crux of both the Exodus story and the Easter story. God is a god of life, fullness of life. But we have to choose life. We have to be willing to start walking – into the weird, wild, unknown, the “great wide open” – without knowing the end of our story, without knowing very much at all, except that we are walking away from death and slavery, into life, into the fullness of life that God wants for all of us. And I know, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. But there was a lot going on in Jesus’s day, and in Moses’s day. There’s never a time there isn’t a lot going on in the world. Fear not. Don’t be afraid of the darkness. Use the light you have to find life’s path. Follow the path to fullness of life, here, now. You can do it!

Nowruz niceties.

This week was quiet at work, partly because it was the last week of Ramadan, partly because of the Israel – US  (IsUS? Usrael?)  war with Iran, partly because many of my coworkers are Muslim, some of them of Iranian descent, partly because people took off for Eid al-Fitr and Nowruz. I actually have fond memories of Nowruz. There was a big Persian diaspora community in my Gran’s growing up, and we would usually visit her at Easter. They would always throw a big, big party (open to the whole community) at a local park for Norwuz. We would always go. My Gran was very much on the “If we’re invited, we should go.” always support your local community side of the scales. 

I try to keep that spirit alive. At work I’m the person who just opens the door on difficult topics. I ask my diaspora Iranian coworker, who has been in the country for decades, how his wife’s family, who live in Tehran are doing. (They’ve moved to the North, again. They did the same thing last time Israel attacked their city.). I put signs up on my cubicle, wishing people a good fast or a happy Eid. I want people to see that I see them, and support them as people. I’m not afraid to ask “how are you?” and hear a real answer. I tell people, “I’m praying for your family.” because I am. Just like I pray for all the other families in all the other countries involved. 

A friend called me this week. A former coworker, a native Californian, a “voted twice for the Republican currently in the Oval Office, didn’t get a covid vaccine but swears he is not against vaccines,” child of an alcoholic (like the POTUS). He’s a catholic too, and as such, I get him. At work I was the only one who would ever share an office with him. Other people found him “too abrasive.” That’s putting it mildly. He’s often very sarcastic. He’s lost jobs over it. It’s to the point that people literally can’t tell when he’s making a joke (which can be mistaken for rudeness or even racism) or stating something he believes (which can be mistaken for rudeness or even racism). He says he’s trying to change, I’m not sure he knows how to do that. I hold out hope he can someday let go of his defense mechanism, which is what I believe the sarcasm to be in aid of, but only time will tell.

Thank you for your service to America, Bob. 

We often talk about politics. He said something I found quite interesting: “I don’t have a party anymore. Republicans are the party of the rich. Democrats are the party of the poor. But who represents me? Where’s the party of the middle class?” He’s an affordability rather than a democracy voter. He owns his own home, which he worked hard to acquire.  He’s got a temporary job (that will last a couple more months) that pays $18 an hour. That doesn’t go far in California where gas is $5.50 a gallon, electricity and gas rates have tripled due to AI and now the illegal, unnecessary war. And this is on top of illegal tariffs that have picked everyone’s pocket (except the POTUS and his cronies). 

He feels abandoned by the GOP. There is no other party that inspires him to hope his concerns are cared about. I think he’ll probably sit the midterm elections out. He doesn’t see that his entire life he (and his family) has benefited from Democratic policy. Affordable healthcare, UI, an affordable education at a state university . . . Nope, he sees none of that. I changed the subject to the GOP’s “just for fun” war. After I expressed my informed opinions, he responded “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion.” I really didn’t know what to say. His fellow American citizens are dying and taxpayers (like himself) are footing the bill for this debacle, and he, a voting US citizen with a college education, can’t be bothered to educate himself about the topic? I know there are low information voters, but no information voters?

I don’t know if GOP voters like this, opting to sit the elections out, will become a trend. I’m not a big believer in sitting it out. Citizens have to make the best choice they can. Not every candidate will fully align with your policy goals, but that’s just life in a human society. Sometimes there are no good choices to make, so you have to make the least bad one. On the other hand, you definitely don’t want to make a choice that’s truly bad and will make things worse. I’ve seen rich men give their 18 year old sons very expensive fast cars, and seen those sons die or go to jail for killing people (for running people over, or driving drunk and causing an accident that killed their friends who were passengers or other drivers). You shouldn’t make a choice that will turn you (people you love, your country) into a worse version of yourself. Those fathers could have made a better choice.

Brother, can you spare a different dime?

This new dime the US Mint is preparing to strike was definitely the result of choices leading to a ”worst version.” Freedom is supposed to be beautiful and peaceful, not disheveled and scowling. Note the Phrygian cap? It’s made of the stars and stripes. It’s problematic as legally our flag is not allowed to be made into clothing. But emblematic of the lack of care the creator put into its design. I like that it’s stamped  “cac”k, that seems on point. On the flip side, it’s hard to miss the sarcasm of the slogan liberty over tyranny, even as the administration works to establish tyranny over liberty. Then, there’s the poorly executed eagle looking at its empty right talon – where there should be an olive branch of peace. But the GOP wanted that removed. So, now instead of looking to peace, it looks into a fist full of nothing. Very fitting really. An apt visual expression of what Americans are left with courtesy of the current administration. Nothing.

But back to least bad options. Last night, I heard this on the PBS NewsHour

Right now, he [POTUS] can say, in the region’s language is mowing the grass, that Iran tries to build up terror capability, terror capability, and every once in a while you have to mow the grass, which — to reduce their terror capability. And this would be the mother of all mowing the grasses. But he could say, we have — basically, the key thing is we have reduced their ability to be a regional power. And we may have eliminated their ability to be a regional power. And that would be a total win for the region. They’ve decapitated the regime. They’ve gotten rid of a lot of the Hamas and Hezbollah. They’ve taken out a lot of the weapons capabilities. Most importantly, they’ve taken out the factories where they make the weapons. So that takes a long time to build all that stuff back. And so that would be somewhat of a win. It would not be a total win. It would be a very ugly win […] But it might be — of all the bad options in front of us, that might be a decent one.

I’d say first in response that, “in the region’s language” is a lie. Only Israelis use this dehumanizing phrase. Second, if your leader decides to engage your nation in this “lawn mowing” behavior, then this is what that leader (and the people who voted for him/her) has chosen to do to avoid making a just peace. Frankly, I can’t see Americans wanting to spend tax dollars and American lives on periodically destroying Iran because …. Third, there’s no rational reason for America to want to destroy Iran. We were willing to make an agreement. There was a deal to be had. But Israel blew it up, quite literally. Iran was not the problem. Apparently Israel’s leaders saw their opportunity to dominate the region slipping away and decided to act in their own best interests. That’s fine for them. I understand. But for Americans, that makes Israel the problem, not Iran. There’s no win here left here for the US. There’s definitely no “decent” options. Decency went out the window when Iran was attacked and the US rubber stamped it instead of objecting.

Will and Ariel Durant.

The best bad option here for America is to walk away, let Europeans go to the negotiation table with Iran, and drop Israel out of this particular diplomatic picture completely. The Israeli government doesn’t share America’s interests. Having proved itself willing to sabotage America’s security interests (and the world’s) to prevent a deal, it makes no sense to continue supporting Israel’s war of choice on Iran (and the rest of its neighbors and its internal non-Jewish population in occupied areas) or to include Israel in any negotiations with Iran in the future. I think what I would most like to know now is who betrayed the US? Who told the Israelis what was going on in the US – Iran negotiations? No Israeli representatives were there that I know of, so how did the Israeli government come to know that the US and Iran were close to a deal, close enough that Israel’s leaders panicked and ordered the bombing of Iran to try to prevent it? That’s a question the administration should be asking. Although the answer could well be the US president, himself.

This week the Israeli PM decided to invoke the name of one of my favorite historians, Will Durant, and “quoted”  his book The Lessons of History. The PM suggested that Durant wrote: “History proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan,” he said. “Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Unfortunately, the Israeli PM was lying, again, as he often does. And that’s fine. It’s probably why he and the POTUS have such a good relationship, each one lies as badly as the other. 

For anyone that cares about facts though, WIll Durant’s The Lessons of History states: ”If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichaean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee. Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”

So, the truth of Durant’s text is Will believed the “universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Kahn.” But if you believe in God, you believe that God does have a prejudice.  And you can believe in that God as a Christian or a Jew or person of any other faith with a god(s). People are also free to choose there is no God. That’s called Freedom of Religion in the US. Clearly the Israeli PM either doesn’t believe in God or doesn’t believe in a God that has anything to do with human affairs. Again, that’s fine for him to make that belief choice. That’s just not my belief. And that’s not most Americans’ belief.

This is what being more ruthless (having no pity or compassion for others) and lacking in moderation looks like in reality. 

I don’t think the PM meant to offend any Christians by what he said (fans of Durant, truth, and proper scholarly attribution are another story) but it tells you a lot about his mindset. He believes one needs to be stronger, more ruthless, more powerful, more aggressive, and lacking in any moderation, to defeat “evil.” I believe history has shown that if one chooses that road, one will become the evil one seeks to defeat. In Nov 2024, a year after Oct 7th and into the war on Gaza, a group of young male Israeli football fans arrived the Netherlands for a soccer game. Instead of being good foreign guests, they harassed Dutch citizens and destroyed their property. For which they were beaten by Dutch citizens. When the Israeli group returned home, they went through the airport happily singing at the top of their lungs. A friend of mine sent me video of them. They were singing: “why are there no children in school in Gaza? Because we killed them all.” They had become the evil they sought to destroy and were so far detached from Jewish values as to be openly proud of it.

Europeans understand the danger of adopting evil methods in fighting a war on “evil.” It’s why NATO members aren’t letting themselves be dragged into yet another pointless Republican forever war. And it is just that. Another Republican President, totally out of touch with reality, totally ignoring his own intelligence services, declaring yet another illegitimate Republican crusade on yet another non-white, non-Christian, oil rich country, for yet again the benefit of lining his and his associates pockets while trying to gin up support for his bad choices and feckless party. All the while, average Americans take the decades-long hit. American soldiers come home in bodybags for decades. American money gets burned up in providing material support or reconstruction efforts (for decades). Respect for America goes down the drain (for decades). And no amount of childish memes on Truth (FYI Pravda means truth) Social are going to change any of that or erase the Epstein Fury at home.

I do think Jewish Americans are in a particularly rough spot right now. There has always been a split about Israel and it’s only grown wider in the last few years (in the Jewish community and in the US in general). But the split was always there, and was always growing wider because Americans are American and Israelis are Israelis. It’s two different countries, with different cultures, languages, and histories. Israel is a child of the Jewish diaspora, not the mother of it. That child was always going to grow up and lead its own life. It’s simply the evolutionary nature of life and nations. Remaining in a codependent relationship isn’t healthy. It leads to bad outcomes for both parent and child. So, the split was always going to happen at some point. The child is going to make independent decisions that will have independent consequences from which it will have to suffer. It makes parents sad to see it, but as a parent, you know that’s the free will choice your child gets to make. It’s a painful process all loving parents of adult children have to go through.

Your child is still your child. But they have their own life to live.

And, there’s the Republicans making everything worse by pushing onto the DOE a definition of antisemitism that even Israel doesn’t use to try to attack and control what they consider liberal schools and end US Constitutional free speech and free thought. So we have a political party, run by a demagogue, with a large body of non-military armed men roaming the streets and killing citizens with impunity, using Jews as an excuse to turn a free democratic country into a fascist state. Hmm, where have I heard of this scenario before in history? None of this behavior by Israel’s govt or the GOP-lead US government makes being a Jewish American any easier or safer. However, I’m not convinced that either government sees this as a negative, which I find appalling beyond words but seems to fit the facts in evidence.

Then of course, we have lots of Americans who don’t seem to understand that Jewish Americans are Americans not Israelis. Much the same way lots of Americans don’t understand that Muslim Americans are Americans not (insert any Muslim country here). So there’s a lot of anger toward the Israeli government that’s been misdirected toward Jewish Americans in the form of antisemitic acts rather than legitimate protest at, say, an Israeli embassy or Republican congressman’s office. Temple Israel is a Reform synagogue. It’s not an outpost of the Israeli government. But the American attacker chose that American house of worship and its school on which to vent his personal anger about something that happened in Lebanon as a result of Israeli actions. An American chose to victimize a group of fellow Americans who, like himself, had no power whatsoever over the foreign government who assassinated his family member in yet another foreign country. It’s tragic from every angle and speaks to the work that needs to be done in society.

For me, the answer to Israel and Iran’s problem is not to be found in US bombs or troops but in Iran and Israel seeing each other as they are, and in their leaders not using each other as an excuse for to cling to power. In truth, an Iran-Israel regional partnership makes way more sense than a Russian-Iran partnership or a US-Israel partnership and I think the US and Russia both know this and are a bit worried about this. Iran-Israel is a power couple that could really disrupt the world order. Since the US is destroying the current world order anyway, the Israelis and the Iranians should really think carefully about jumping their current ships. Iran and Israel are just proxies. Why they would prefer to be allies to and proxies of white Christian Western powers when neither of them are white Christian Western nations and both could be nuclear-armed allies of each other makes no sense to me. But that’s the choice their leaders are making – at least for now.

I’m not sure what will happen in the next 48 hrs. President TACO is called that for a reason. I’m sure GOP members will make lots of money off the prediction markets. Making hay while the sun shines as their upcoming midterms are looking bleak. Iran has no reason to do anything but continue to attack, since it continues to be attacked. It has an army of loyalist with programmed in martyr complexes so that could get really ugly fast. Israel’s PM told his citizens he’s fighting for their country’s future, but in reality he is desperate for a “win” to display if he was to have any chance of hanging on to power in the upcoming elections. I hope it doesn’t all end badly, but for thousands in the region and around the globe it already has. All I can do is pray. Speaking of which….

For anyone that cares, Will Durant was born a Catholic. He started out wanting to be a priest, then wandered off into agnostic views. He married Chaya Ariel Kaufman, a Jewish Russian/Ukrainian immigrant girl, in 1913 – she was 15, he was 28. They were different times, it was legal. But he did have to resign his post as she was a student in the school where he taught. It was frowned upon in that sense. By all accounts it was a good marriage. They wrote a lot of books together, and both their names went on the jacket even though he was the only one with a college degree. I read their 11 volume Story of Civilization set as a child. It made me realize history was way stranger and more interesting than fiction. The pair won a Pulitzer Prize for their work. I would call the Durants prolific authors. After Ariel died, less than two weeks later, Will died. They were survived by a daughter and a son (the nephew of Ariel, who they adopted and raised).

In case you wondered, Will Durant actually returned to faith and died a Catholic, having taken the Last Rites before his passing. So in the end Jesus was there, Genghis Khan was not. I’m not sure what the Durants would have made of the world today. But I suggest you make of it what you can and remember the Beatitudes: Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the Sons of God. These words of Jesus are still true and still remembered to this day. Why? Because even if the universe does not have a prejudice, the God of the universe most assuredly does.

I’m on me time.

This week British Columbia decided to move to permanent daylight savings time. Which now puts me in a different timezone than friends and family who live in the same longitudinal plane, just not at the same latitude.  I decided that didn’t work for me, so I’m staying on permanent standard time.  My workplace is okay with that. I keep two clocks at my desk. The SO is fine with that. There are now 2 clocks in the kitchen. Let’s face it, mammals evolved for millions of years to live in the real world, not the floating world we humans have created that’s tethered to nothing real, not even our own bodies.

It’s good to keep grounded in the real world. To putter in the garden, or amongst one’s potted plants or bonsai. To look at the stars and moon. To walk barefoot in the grass. To eat an apple, just the way it comes from the tree. To knit something. Or draw something. Or play with your pets, who live in the real world all the time. I like birding. In the UK they have a podcast/videos called Get Birding and each season they have a celebrity guest, who likes birding, come on. This season it’s Sean Bean. He’s hysterically funny, kind and thoughtful, in real life, which you may not know from his screen parts. But again, real life, way better than the floating world.

This week, in the floating world that is my office, someone told me they thought I always looked so stylish and had such presence. I said “really?”  I literally wear second hand clothing, and at home, more like third-hand. I never buy anything not on sale. I think it was a case of she only knows me in that “work” role. And because I don’t say very much, people think I’m wise. I’m not wise. I then met another person, who couldn’t remember that I, and not my boss, was in a meeting last month. So maybe not a memorable style or presence? Everything is apparently observer dependent at work.

And if there are two observers?

In other work news, there were rumblings about — God help me – going back to the software that we tried and then gave up on and gave me grief for months. When I was asked how I felt about that, I said cheerfully, “I’m pro whatever the company decides. If that’s the direction we’re going, I’ll get in the boat and row.” A job’s a job, what did they think I would say? “No, no 1000 times no!” I was also asked what I wanted out of my job. I was confused. I want a paycheck so I can live my life, pay my bills, do the things I like with family and friends. Apparently that was considered an odd answer. 

Didn’t I want to advance? Advance to where? I’m happy here, now. It  was a very floating world conversation. Then it got weirder. Didn’t I want more money? Did I know the person on the reception desk makes 25% more. First, why would you tell me that? Second, I know God will make sure I get what I need (and God help you if you cheat me). Third, they’re paying extra for a pretty girl, which I find financially stupid as well as creepy, but that’s an issue for the C-suite to sort out with the HR head not me. 

The conversation died there, but in thinking about it later, I wondered if my boss wanted me to take the front desk spot, because there was another (more ambitious) person they wanted to bring into my spot. At this point, I took it as a compliment that I considered attractive enough to do the “pretty girl” job and moved on. Take the wins where you find them.

I’m still working on vol. 1 of Murdels. It’s been helpful. Logic is all about seeing what’s not there, that’s there. So for instance, if I tell you the poison pen is on the desk in the library and the person with a motive to kill for an inheritance was playing billiards in the billiards room, you can deduce from there that person wasn’t near the murder weapon. I’m still doing the relatively easy ones in the high 60s (out of 100 degrees of difficulty). Sometimes they take 30 min, sometimes 3 days. I’m not always able to follow Det. Logico’s logic. But that’s true of many things these days. I think logic has largely gone out the window, along with literacy and rational thought, in many places, but particularly in America. Take this FBI (or is FIB) alert released at the end of Feb for example:

Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” the alert read, according to ABC News, who viewed the alert. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”

First of all, I don’t think the person who released the alert is qualified to be in the FBI if he or she can’t spell the name of the country they live in. Second, it’s the United States, with an s, not the United State.  Although that Freudian slip does tell me something. Third, it’s certainly not the United State Homeland.  Homeland is not part of the nation’s name. The only people who use words like this are Nazis (Fatherland) and Russian autocrats (Motherland). Americans live in America, the United States of America. It tells you what the head of the FBI must be like if this is the chief of communications putting out an alert that is so badly written. 

At this point, life’s too short.  I turn off any program/podcast if anyone says the word homeland (dept of war, warfighters, gulf of america) or other nationalist bon mots. It’s this level of idiocy at every level of the United States’ government that makes me sure Iran will win the war they didn’t start. For those unaware, the people who live in Iran, formerly Persia, formerly Elam formerly …. You get the idea. The US is 250 years old. The folks in present-day Iran have been on their land for thousands of years. They aren’t going anywhere. And, they are extremely intelligent people who carefully think things through.

If the majority of the Iranian people wanted to rise up and change governments, they’d do it. But the majority of Iran’s people don’t want this. Someday they might, but today is not that day. There’s no rebel army with millions of Iranians fighting for regime change. So bombing Iran and telling people to rise up is absurd. Doubly absurd when the GOP is shooting peaceful protesters in the street at home. Protesters in Iran? Don’t shoot them. That’s a red-ish line for the administration. Shooting US citizens peacefully protesting? That’s fine. Iran’s government is a violent  militaristic authoritarian suppressing protest by throwing thousands of people in jail and forcing their idea of religious behavior on people. And so they should be destroyed. 

Um, hello? GOP pot calling Iranian kettle black. This is the very type of regime the GOP is desperately trying to set up in the US. Concentration camps to hold a half million people? Voter suppression? Violent ICE, DHS, etc out of control killing people in the street. Courts co-opted or lawful orders being completely ignored so the rule of law and the Constitution are being overthrown by a single man guided by his “genius brain and own morality.” Trying to force the Christian religion on everyone everywhere in the US. Controlling women’s bodily freedom. Controlling voting. Sorry GOP, you’re a Kettle too. So if you want to stop what’s wrong with Iran, maybe start by not trying to turn the United States into Iran.

I think this current (illegal) war with Iran (along with all the other illegal uses of the US military) probably started as a diversionary maneuver. In this case, an attempt to move people on from the Epstein case and the notion of the GOP, POTUS, and DOJ as pedophiles or pedophile protectors. But the public was not, and still isn’t, diverted. No one with any experience of government could have thought, logically or rationally, this war was a good idea. Especially if they were around during the Arab Spring and saw how that played out. People in the Middle East shouldn’t have the kind of government they want, but the thing is, when they rise up and create it, Western European nations immediately back a right-wing dictator to destroy it. 

There’s apparently no room in the minds of Western European Christians for a model of democracy that’s organically Middle Eastern Muslim (and perhaps not capitalist). But history has repeatedly show, when WECs attempt to force change on MEMs (say, eg, Afghanistan) even after 20 years, the majority of people who live there don’t want to fight to keep that WEC change. And if they aren’t willing to do that, what was the point of the exercise? You can’t change people who don’t want to change. And if you go onto someone else’s land, into someone else’s culture, and try to impose your culture (and values), you are not going to do anything but waste your time. Unless you plan to stay a couple hundred years, or longer.

I suspect leaders in the GOP (and their associates) are actively insider trading off the up-down war and market for oil. I mean, if you’ve called soldiers who die for their country “losers” and have so little respect for their sacrifice that you couldn’t even be bothered to wear a real hat and not only don’t remove your ballcap, you wear your branded merchandise and a white hat – because you have some lame idea that you’re the good guy in the white hat, when in reality, you’re the black hat that sent them to a needless death for your own profit – you’re only in it to line your own pockets. 

So many problems with this. The hat, the horse, the man and the gun handle –  all white. 

Of course,  if the US weren’t dependent on oil because the government had been actively addressing climate change (which apparently doesn’t exist for the GOP, much like air and water pollution toxins) the price of oil in a crisis wouldn’t matter as much. But black hats do what black hats do. So the black hat war is now devolving, as such wars often do when people have no objectives except self-interest and profiteering. The reasons offered for the war keep changing because it’s all about using the war to make the POTUS look good and line the POTUS’s pockets. There are no actual typical war objectives. Zero.

People missed this, largely because so much is going on, but this situation of destroyed oil facilities means “oh dear, now places like India are short of oil and need oil. Whatever shall we do? Wherever shall we go? Oh! I know! Let’s lift sanctions so Russia can sell their oil to India (and use their money to make war on Ukraine).”  So in addition, now the war has become an excuse for harming Ukraine and helping the enemy thereof. It’s just more of the usual – the POTUS and the GOP looking for ways to help Russia come in from the cold. People don’t question whether this is an administration goal anymore. GOP actions make clear it is. 

The POTUS, I think, wants to be the Putin of the US. An unbounded autocrat, racking up the dollars, answerable to no one, ever, for life. Why else would he be building concentration camps / gulags? Where people are not fed adequately, not given medical care, not given legal representation, beaten, raped and abused, and made to labor for the for-profit company holding them. This is classic concentration camp / gulag stuff. And if he wants 39 camps, each holding 10K people – men women and children – he’s talking about having a permanent right-less underclass of forced labor of almost half a million people. 

Note the inclusion of 8 blocks with 100 beds for the handicapped! Someone went DEI?

And who do you think those people will be, if the populations in the camps have a turn over of every 3 to 6 months? FYI, 3 months is when a person treated this way kind of gives out physically and mentally, so there’s no more work to be got out of them. I invite you to consider the DOJ now wanting to force homeless vets without family into “care.” So the thinking would be, perhaps, homeless people in general next. Probably the designated “poor” would follow. Camps would become a new form of the Victorian workhouse really. And surely “domestic terrorists” ie, people who don’t agree with the “sane” agenda of the current administration would be a class of people subjected to incarceration in these camps. 

To be frank, I think it’s good for Americans if there’s no more legislation passed or signed into law for the remainder of the year, till after people have voted in November and a new legislature has been seated. Given the state of mind of the POTUS, and the state of the GOP in “leadership” in Congress, a do nothing Congress is probably best for now. Because everything they do is way worse. Americans are sicker and poorer, have lost jobs and businesses, watched the educational system, cutting edge science, the rule of law and democracy be decimated, been dragged into wars, witnessed executions of citizens, assassinations of fishermen. It’s truly a banana republic. Yeah, most Americans would rather such “leaders” did no more. 

Do you know about the Turnip Day Session or the 80th Congress? Or who this is?

It’s interesting to compare the US approach to Ukraine’s war with Israel’s war. If Ukraine were treated like Israel, the US would give it all the weapons it needed or wanted, to the point overkill weapons and tell them there were no restrictions on how to use the weapons. Eventually, the US would have sent a couple of Ukrainian American real estate developers with no state craft experience, but were related to the POTUS, to Moscow, and after a few attempts at negotiation, the POTUS would have bombed the Kremlin and killed Putin and then argued for NATO membership for Ukraine. After which the US and Ukraine would have continued bombing Russia, pointlessly, hoping the Russian people would rise up and seize power – but not too much power or democracy, because the POTUS wants to pick the next leader of Russia.

If Israel were treated like Ukraine, the US would have been very stingy about giving Israel the quantity and type of weapons it needed, would tell Israel that it needed to strictly comply with US laws on how those weapons could be used and forced them to come to the Oval office and sycophantically praise the POTUS and agree to give the POTUS a personal share of Israel’s major natural resources that only he would control. Later, the US would send a couple of Ukrainian American real estate developers with no state craft experience, but related to the POTUS, to Tehran, and after multiple years of half-hearted negotiations, the POTUS would still be on the side of the Ayatollah, pressuring Israel to make concessions of 20% percent of their land, and telling them they “don’t have the cards.” and the need to lay down all their weapons to make Iran feel safe.

People in the US see this inequality. They talk about it. Ukraine is a Western European democracy in the West. Israel is a Middle Eastern democracy in the Middle East. Each has some bully neighbors they have to get along with. The differences are that Israel’s leadership doesn’t want peace and it’s very upfront about this. The same leadership has been employing the same strategy for 20 years – don’t make peace, take other people’s land, try to force Palestinians out, get the US to be the military back up and political cover for every violation of law. It’s not working; Oct 7th proved that. So at some point, Israel will have to change directions, politically. 

Pivot with grace and style.

If the Israeli leadership doesn’t want to pivot, that’s a choice they can make, but Americans I know feel Iran is the last straw. They aren’t anti-Israel. They just feel American support has not helped Israel achieve peace, in fact it’s only helped perpetuate the cycle of wars of conquest (not defense). American involvement is making things worse not better, for Israel, for Iran, for the Middle East, for America, for the world. The war with Iran is the perfect example of this. The US mediated a solid deal with Iran under Obama. Trump and Israel blew that up. Biden tried to restore that. Trump and Israel blew it up, literally, because Israel didn’t want peace or a deal. They wanted a neutralized (euphemism for dead) Iran.

Now US citizens are coming home in bodybags for a war no one in the US wanted, that was not authorized by the elected representatives of the US citizens, and is being paid for by US citizens who don’t want war, but basic standards of other Western countries – affordable housing, childcare, health care, education, peace, justice, equality. I literally don’t care who has a nuclear bomb. Israel has one, why not Iran? Is Iran’s leader less crackers than North Korea’s or America’s? Didn’t the GOP always think mutually assured destruction was the way to peace? Okay, not the way I’d have chosen, but it’s a way. Let Iran have a bomb. Then maybe Israel and Iran will finally sit down – together, on their own, without America – and figure out a lasting peace.

I’m not sure what will happen tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow, but I hope for the best and I work toward that end, with faith. The sun will come up, the birds will sing, the real world will be there tomorrow and always. Remember the floating world is just that. It’s a chimera. A fictional monster of chaos and horror that constantly changes to try to keep you in that state of chaos and horror. But any chimera that people create can always be uncreated. We can always respond, rather than react. We don’t have to let any passing thing upset us or unhinge us. To everything there is a season, and when the season passes, everything that was part of it, vanishes and gets reinvented. The bud as the flower, the flower as the fruit. The fruit becomes the pie. The pie becomes …well, you know, what returns to the earth to feed the apple tree through winter and keep it alive. So, never be afraid when things turn to crap. Crap is what causes the world to live, to grow, and to be renewed and flourish in its season.

Slushfunds are not to be confused with Slushies, which are great.

I heard a commentator say the current partial DHS shutdown wasn’t really helpful because the money being held up was for TSA, FEMA, the US Coast Guard, and other non-ICE/BP bodies. But I think that’s incorrect. The DHS was given an ENORMOUS budget most of which is discretionary. DHS can simply move its discretionary billions of dollars around and keep those important agencies of the US govt going and keep paying the people on those jobs. On the other hand, if the party or person running the DHS doesn’t want to do that, well, that’s on the GOP.

If I were the Dems, I’d just keep pointing out that it’s a choice the GOP is making not to pay people to do their jobs, and not to return ICE to a law-abiding dept it previously was under administrations that were even more deportation oriented – like Obama. ICE did a better job deporting people when it didn’t have the GOP in charge and when it didn’t operate as a lawless body. So, it’s clear that what ICE has become under its current leadership is a bloated (on taxpayer dollars) hot mess that can’t actually do its job professionally or legally.

To the “abolish ICE” conversation, I would say this. People have discussed ICE as if it were some hoary agency. ICE was created by the GOP only 23 years ago. The DHS, also GOP created, is a mere 22 yrs old. It’s ok to admit DHS and ICE were a mistake, deconstruct them and use that money to make an Immigration and Border that’s actually Constitutionally compliant, humane and works. If you have a problem with that, I would remind you that USAID – an important functional, efficient and economically run division – was 64 yrs old when the GOP destroyed that. The Dept of Education – an important functional, efficient and economically run division –  was 46 yrs old when the GOP destroyed that. 

American Customs ship with US Customs flag.

If your issue is you didn’t know ICE didn’t always exist, allow me to jog your memory. The US Customs agency existed since 1789. It was only folded into ICE, 23 years ago, when ICE was created.  The US Border Patrol has existed since 1924. But it’s only been killing US Citizens under the current administration. So eliminating ICE would just be returning to what we had before the GOP post 9/11 created DHS and ICE. And I would say the DHS actually needs to be deconstructed as well. It’s not been of service to the American people and it would be better to admit it was a mistake to create it and move on.

9/11 was a turn down a dark road for America. Americans were quite shocked to discover they were hated by some people, even though all the signs were there for decades and it’s hard not to see how American interference always leads to blow back. And the GOP took advantage of that shock to create the DHS as a way to protect Americans, from the blow back of American politicians and corporations bad behavior, to start to build a proto-military state within the US, to replace democracy. The fact that for decades the US has topped legally elected governments to replace them with more pro US or pro US business right wing dictators (or to keep such leaders in power) should have been a warning sign to voters in America, but apparently not.

I really struggle with public commentators like David Brooks, who constantly say “no, that will never happen” and then a few months later say “if you had told me a year ago that would happen I wouldn’t have believed you.” People did tell him. Lots of people. He just didn’t want to believe them. He still continues to believe that America will be ok, that “it’s been through worse and been okay.”  Dahlia Lithwick is another commentator in this vein.  She just kept pretending it will all be ok because of the law (the law the current administration doesn’t care about). Only recently has she seemed to have noticed her reality is not quite right. 

Hmm, she looks a little different than I remember her. No, she’s okay.

To be fair to both these people, whom I like and respect, are fairly representative of the general public in America. They choose to suffer from a failure of imagination. They don’t want to believe things have changed dramatically and will change more dramatically in the future. So they sit like frogs in pots of water trying to find reasons to keep singing “it will be okay” even as the heat is turned up and US citizens are shot in the street. This is a fairly typical problem among Americans, who tend toward cock-eyed optimism and, often, parochialism.

If your country has been carrying out extrajudicial murders of black and brown US citizens for decades, and you do nothing but continue to vote for those who militarize your law enforcement, eventually white US citizens will be the extrajudicial murder victims. It’s how these things work. Maybe not in your town, but in enough towns that you should know about it – if you chose to. It’s not surprising to me that when a white man peacefully carrying a gun while exercising his first amdt right at a protest is killed, that becomes a cause celeb that must not be ignored. The definition of “an American” invokes a white man with a gun. The murder of a white woman? Sorry, not enough to provoke that reaction.

There’s a tendency to see everything that is happening now as shocking and out of the blue (like 9/11), when it’s actually been a trend heading toward you all along (like all events clearly leading up 9/11). We just now notice the trend as a result of it showing up in our own little towns and our own little lives. If there’s one article I think Americans should read to help see the reality we live in now, it’s this one about the use of AI by ICE written by University of Cambridge anthropologist Sophie Goodfriend. I can’t say you’ll enjoy it. But you will at least better understand what’s happened in the past, what’s happening now, and where these trends are headed if Americans continue to sit in the pot and just sing happy thoughts.

Never to vote to fund a pot. Always vote to fund frog protections.

Enough with the fortresses. (Which way to the middle kingdoms?)

A year ago, ICE agents were professionals, between the ages of 21 and 37 or 40 (depending on their role because) as it’s can be a physically demanding job), who had at least 4 months training so they understood the law and its limits, the weapons they were entrusted with, and had some remedial level Spanish. There were 10K of them.

Today, there are 22K.  There is no age limit. So 18 to 80. They have 2 months training, apparently none of it about what the US laws actually are or that they need be obeyed. They are not required to know even basic Spanish. And finally, they are entrusted with deadly weapons. I would also add that they are given 50K signing bonuses and student loan repayment and forgiveness options. 

So the majority of ICE agents today have less than 10 months of experience with ICE. They are deeply unqualified, untrained, unaware of the laws, can’t communicate with the majority of potential immigrants they might encounter, physically unfit for the job and yet are given deadly weapons and thrown on the street to cosplay at being mercenaries. 

Not mercenaries. (But definitely all kinds of wrong on the street.)

I use the word mercenaries in its literal sense. Let me math this out for you.  12K x $50K = 60 million tax dollars. And, let’s throw in another, what $5M for school loan forgiveness? Sadly I also can’t rule out that there may be some “incentive payment” per immigrant arrested, or per postable (with use of Photoshop) photo captured, or even per murdered US blue state citizen who was just exercising his or her 1st Amdt rights.

The reason I’m saying this is because I want people to understand that the ICE agents that existed a year ago still exist, but they are not the majority. And though these agents should have seniority, I do not believe they are in any way in control of these “patriot recruits”  that have been brought into their ranks. Quite the opposite. A loose cannon takes many trained men to contain on a rolling deck. Many loose cannons? Sorry, ICE doesn’t have enough trained able bodies to restrain them. And that I think is as intended (if your wish is to provoke reaction, invoke the insurrection act, and put an end to pesky voting – do remember you were promised “you’ll never have to vote again” and the “coup will be bloodless if the liberals allow it.” this is just the tact to take. Though American blood has now been spilled – so….all bets are off.)

Essentially, the majority of ICE agents are now these unprofessional Sturmabteilung. They’re a handsomely paid, personally loyal, paramilitary organization of the GOP, being disguised within what was once a body of trained knowledgeable professionals working safely, without drama, on behalf of the American people. It pains me to say this is what’s happened to ICE, but it’s the way it is right now.

Memory potions, they can work both ways. (Not approved for medical use.)

Still, I would encourage people to remember that up until Jan 2025, ICE agents were very different. Am I saying they were perfect? Not at all. No group is. But they were working within the structure of US laws, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Judicial Warrants from Courts, and they worked in coordination within their states, counties, and communities, and with compassion toward those people they had to deport. They weren’t kidnapping toddlers and shooting US citizens observing them. And these professional men and women are still among the ranks.

I would also encourage people to read the Biden-era 2023 Use of Force Manual (which I’m sure has been amended by now and does not include things like “de-escalation” or commands “not to shoot a fleeing suspect”). Just to understand what it was – by way of training – what ICE agents used to get before they were allowed onto the street. Not that they always remembered it, but they got it. As opposed to what 2025/6 ICE cohorts get today – if anything. We don’t know. It’s not made public. But I suspect they are just handed a gun, a can of mace, some zip ties, and told to make their quota.

US news organizations tend to focus on the trees, the potent, factual, “on the ground” stories that are happening. And those are worth reading. Foreign press are more often forest focused, asking “what is going here?” and able to see a wider picture because they aren’t checked into US frames of reference. Read a few articles about ICE by foreign press correspondents, like this one, from Matt Pearson of DW, a German news organization, or this one from Lila Hassan of Al-Jazeera, a Qatari news organization. I’m sure you have some time, and hopefully a generator for electricity. They are worthwhile reads. But if you just want to escape to another into a fairy tale right now, for a few hours, I understand.

Happy endings available should choose to enter the woods. (But only after many trials – not all of which occur in courts of law.) 

If a US president is calling Canada the 51st state, and his nominee Ambassador to Iceland is calling that nation the 52nd state, looking at the map above should help you understand why the US owning Greenland is important. The US could essentially aim missiles at Canada from 3 directions and have it surrounded. Iceland would also be easy to pick off, to stop any pesky NATO help.

If you’re asking why do this? It likely has to do with Russia. Russia has the largest land mass of any nation. Canada is a distant 2nd, and the US 3rd. But if the US owned Canada, it would be the largest nation on the globe and have all the more resources to exploit. It’s probably that simple. Insecure people need to control everything around them, need to feel they are the biggest, the best, the most powerful. So if you’re super insecure, and intent on taking Canada, you need to take Greenland first.

For anyone who thinks the Congress will stop this attack on Greenland, I give you Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) telling Wolf Blitzer of CNN  “And just on the weird chance he’s serious about invading Greenland, I want to let him know it will probably be the end of his presidency. Most Republicans know this is immoral and wrong, and we’re going to stand up against it…. I think it would lead to impeachment. Invading an ally…is a high crime and a misdemeanor.”

Note the language I bolded. There’s no guarantee there. If Rep. Bacon believed his own words, why on earth would would he wait till after an attack on Greenland to impeach? Why would the GOP-controlled House wait and allow a NATO ally to be attacked? Why would the GOP-controlled House wait and allow US soldiers to be slaughtered on foreign soil (again) in a war a GOP president started (again)? Yet this is the position of a Congressman who claims he sees this all as “immoral and wrong.”

The only real question here is will the US military follow a clearly illegal order that is – to quote Rep. Bacon – “a high crime and misdemeanor”? Will US servicemen and women attack our peaceful NATO allies? Because a single man “psychologically needs” to own an ally country? Because if he can’t buy it, he has right take it? So, Greenlanders should just sell themselves to the US president or be raped by the US military?

If given, this immoral, wrong, criminal order, I would expect the US military leaders to refuse to execute it. This would probably lead to a coup as this is exactly how military coups happen. The party giving the order would ousted by the military, and … there you are. But I’d honestly expect the same thing if the army was ordered to Minnesota. The GOP-controlled Congress and the leader they enable may be devoid of morality, honor, integrity, or a even a sense of duty, but US service members? Quite the opposite.

Things at work have been …. work related. We lost our CEO. Literally, he died unexpectedly. So, we’ve been in a mourning period, which has turned into a transitional period as well. Read – his 2 siblings, 4 children and 3rd wife are all in a fight over the company. Some of the heirs want to “restructure” (fire anyone as pro the other heirs – the barnburners). Some want to grow the company and keep it going (the sentimentalists). Some want to grow the company and sell it off (the profiteers). Needless to say, employees are left to get on with their jobs so our customers’ lives are not disrupted. We practice a lot of “not taking sides here” diplomacy when asked. Some are either casually looking for exits or hoping it all dies down and goes away. It’s very … Venezuela?

I’m in the extreme minority, the “let’s watch this play out” camp. I like the company. If it sells, maybe I’ll be fired or I may quit because I don’t like the new owners. But for now, I have a job. If it grows, I will benefit from seniority. If it restructures, I may or may not still have a job. But why jump if I’m not pushed? I see the C-Suite issues as just that. C-suite issues. The SO calls this blue sky thinking (meaning I’m making an overly optimistic and sunny forecast, despite the gathering clouds and drizzle). But I’m really just following the historical throughlines to their rational conclusions and I do have access to an umbrella (my rainy day fund) in case. 

C-suite folk come and go in most companies – with regularity. Managers come and go – with less regularity. But the regular hourly employees? Those are the ones who stay and actually run things. We keep the lights on and the cash coming in. The SO deeply knows this, but doesn’t want to hear it (because he’s a C-suite folk and a child in a family-run company). So, I often commend my C-suite thoughts to the ethers rather than his ears, and we are both the better for it.

I do still have people stop by my desk, frequently, and say “America. What’s up with that?” I usually tell them “the US is reliving the Civil War and WWII because it never finished them, because the ideas that started them, originated in America and we’ve never dealt with our issues.” That’s usually Too Much Information, because non-Americans don’t know much about our Civil War (“that was about slavery, right?”) and memories of WWII have faded (“the Nazis killed a lot of Jews, right?”)

Historians everywhere are openly weeping right now, but it’s what happens. Unfortunately forgetting or never knowing doesn’t make the underlying issues don’t go away. That’s why history repeats itself. Like the man who married 4 women, all identical, with the same first name. Psychologically, he was trying to resolve an issue with his first wife – without talking to his first wife – but never realized that. The last one, No. 4, outlived him. He died unresolved. America is a lot like that. Unresolved. I don’t say this to be provocative. It’s just accurate. And I don’t make this comparison lightly. 

You hear the Civil War redux plainly in the stream of anti-blue state commentary by the current administration. Just take a moment right now, and ask yourself (if you’re American), historically, what was a blue state in the US? It was a free Union state, where people were free. As opposed to a grey Confederate state, where most of the people who lived there were not, did not arrive there voluntarily, and were not even considered to be full humans based on the color of their skin. 

All this violence and bother in Minnesota allegedly about alleged fraud (nothing has been proven, a right-wing provocateur social media personality made a claim, that’s all) isn’t really about fraud. It can’t be. The administration has pardoned multiple white people for fraud, including one person multiple times. The person in the oval office has himself committed fraud (on taxes, on bank loans, and even through an eponymous university). Fraud is not a problem to this leader or administration. So if it isn’t about fraud, what’s it really about? In this blue state?

To understand that, consider Venezuela. The US administration, apropos of nothing, began by illegally executing fishermen as “drug dealers.” Next, it illegally declared war on Venezuela by kidnapping its president. Now it is illegally taking their oil and selling it, and the money for the oil (that would normally go to paying the workers who produced the oil) is going into an offshore account in Qatar in the personal name of the president who committed all these illegal acts. Venezuela is now essentially a US plantation for and its people are that white man’s slaves. 

It’s not a colony. The people there aren’t considered US citizens by virtue of US conquest, and entitled to any sort of support or due process. They’re Venezuelan citizens being forced to extract wealth from their own land for the benefit of a single foreign white man in another land. They have a new president but she acts as overseer on behalf of the plantation owner. The overseer is happy to keep her cushy station and knows what will happen if she steps out of line. There is no desire to liberate anyone in Venezuela. Neither the overseer or the plantation owner cares about democracy or the Venezuelans.

Personally, I don’t think anyone willing to sacrifice their Nobel Peace Price medal (and probably all the prize money that goes with it, though that wasn’t stated) to such a man, in order to try to buy the Venezuelan presidency she never won, is worthy of being that nation’s president. Not that worthiness is something that seems to matter in presidents these days. But the upshot here is, she will not be picked to be president because she will not act as overseer. She wants there to be democracy (in some form) and democracy doesn’t fly on a plantation. So she’s out for good, and so is any thought of democracy in Venezuela. But 3 million Venezuelans who had TPS will be sent back to Venezuela because now it’s “safe for them” there, on the plantation.

I think it would be closer to the truth, regarding Minnesota, to say that free black people with political agency existing in America are considered a problem by this administration, and fraud is just their excuse to harm that group of Americans. That the people being targeted are Americans of Somali descent or American residents from Somalia via the refugee program or Muslims is all irrelevant. The administration is targeting black people in this specific case to make an example. But, it’s failing. And make no mistake, it wants to rid the US of all non-white people and put non-white people it can’t ever get rid of (as well as white people they don’t like) “in their place.” Which brings us to the current US administration’s anti-DEI root & branch approach. 

In essence, the anti-DEI policy is stated as there to combat a “woke ideology” (since the word woke comes from black American culture, of course that’s a problem). But this stance is really nothing to do with DEI (which was never legally defined by the administration) or ideology. It’s simply a means of engaging in collective punishment against non-white people, women, and other groups the current administration disfavors and wants to get rid of or “put in their place” (place to be decided by white christian heterosexual men of wealth and power only).  FYI, collective punishment is a Geneva Convention listed war crime. So, you should think of this policy as an act of war, not on wokeness or an idea, but on real groups of US citizens in order to inflict real and deadly harm.

For example, if black Americans have higher maternal mortality rates, it would be reasonable for the government to fund a study on that and try to fix that problem among their citizenry. But anti-DEI policy (illegally created by the president, not the Congress which legally funds the NHI to make such grants) means that this type of study will never happen. The result is black Americans will continue to have higher maternal mortality rates, maybe those rates even get worse. So anti-DEI, in this case, is really pro-murder of pregnant black American women. Which, one has to assume, the current administration is ok with because they’re trying to make the country white. 

No one talks much about eugenics these days, for good reason – it’s all hogwash. But eugenics in a nutshell, is the belief by some people that their race (self defined) is hampered by other races mere existence in the same country (continent or world). So, step one for them is always to demonize and get rid of anyone in the country that’s not their race. Because the nazis lost the war, people fail to understand that they wanted to conquer the world and everywhere they conquered, the politically deemed “non-whites” were to be enslaved and then eliminated. Why? Because they thought white people were superior and should be able to take whatever land or resources they felt they needed, or just wanted. (Sound familiar?)

Emma Darwin

Second, and this idea was central to nazi thought as well, was the strengthening of their white race (also eugenics). This is the notion that they have to remove not just non-white people, but all white people deemed “unfit” among their own citizens who might weaken the race. This would be the sick, handicapped, poor, criminal, non-heterosexuals, mentally ill, the Roma, political dissenters, or any disfavored groups they designated as such, such as Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Think politically motivated stark raving mad Darwinism.  And at this point you may be asking “how is this a throughline to today?” Fair enough. 

Consider the current administration’s NIH. It cancels research into children’s cancer. Why? Because they consider those children to be genetically “defective.” If they can’t overcome their cancer, they should die out – to “improve the race.” Remember the grant money to help drug addicts that got cancelled? Addicts aren’t good for society. If addicts can’t get better on their own, they need to die out. Unless of course you suddenly remember that you promised to help rural communities – ravaged by fentanyl, ie, their kids are addicts – so then you change your mind and restore the grants to get back those votes you’d have lost.

Vaccines? Definitely against those. Children who can’t develop immunity on their own will make the race weaker. But if the NIH can convince parents not to vaccinate their kids, if it can get parents to let their less immunologically strong children die, that’s going to make the race stronger. Education for Special Needs Children? Never. FEMA? I don’t think so. Destroying all of USAID and its work? Of course. Removing aid allows any non-white populations that were being helped to experience a much higher rate of devastating and preventable diseases (like AIDs or polio) and mortality as a result, making them smaller and easier to conquer. Isn’t that the plan working as intended?  

Once you see this is the policy throughline, all the policy decisions become connected and make perfect (if horrible) logical sense. And no one should be surprised by the current administration’s stance. These are open admirers of the nazi beliefs and methods. Just look at what’s happening with Greenland. This is a classic scenario. A state run by a white demagogue demands appeasement, in this case Greenland, not the Sudetenland, but same picture, different frame. Threats of tariffs, economic warfare, and actual warfare are all laid on the table. This is the typical modus operandi. But you can’t appease a person like this. It is a lesson Europeans learned from WWII.

I’d expect once Greenland was acquired, all the Greenlanders would be removed. Allowed to leave for Denmark. Because, you know, they are 90% native indigenous people and not “white.” They’d need to be ethnically cleansed from their lands. Part of me thinks Greenland is desired simply as the fantasy island escape from the coming climate change the GOP knows they’ve created but won’t admit. Greenland as a temporary refuge where they can build a rocket ship to take them to Mars where they can continue to be what they are.  I guess launching themselves into space helps them gain some distance between themselves and the Epstein files?

I don’t think the current US administration knows how strong Greenlanders and the Danes are. Denmark may seem like a small nation, and Greenlanders might seem like easy pickings, but the Danes have a pride of lions on their coat arms for a reason and the Greenlanders’ flag displays the unchanging powers of the sun, sea, and glacial ice. You will not win a battle with the raw elements of the Earth. The Danes stood up to the nazis and said that Danish Jews were Danish citizens. No other nation did that. When things got really bad, the Danes evacuated their Jewish citizens to neutral Sweden, saving almost all Danish Jews and leaving the nazis with a bag of squat. You shouldn’t mess with these people.

Nice in pictures. Best left to the Greenlanders.

 If the US attacks Denmark or Greenland, I’d expect the US to lose badly. One, the military command would be so ridiculously unlawful that any member of the US armed forces that followed it would be guilty of war crimes. Two, NATO nations will align against it because they know their lands will be next. Three, Canada is a NATO nation, and technically closer geographically to Greenland, so that’d be a war on two fronts. Four, Americans would not survive the Greenland winter if Greenlanders did not want them to. Think Napoleon’s army in Russia. Five, . . . there’s just a lot of reasons it’d all go terribly wrong.

Iran on the other hand has nothing to worry about. It’s in the interests of the current US administration for Iran to exist – exactly the way it is, as a Muslim theocracy. The eternal boogie monster for which any amount of defense spending domestically (or overseas to other nations in the neighborhood) is rubber stamped (and then spent as desired). How do we know this? Because the US is willing to bomb Iran only if they judicially execute protestors, but not if Iran just shoots protesting citizens in the streets. There’s no desire for Iranian democracy, or to support Iranian citizens asking for democracy, or even just freedom from a theocratic state. 

And why would the current US administration do otherwise? a) it too wants to establish a theocratic state itself and b) it too is shooting protesting citizens in the streets. Citizens who are just exercising their US democratic Constitutional rights. 

This is Fifth Avenue, in NYC  By A. Balet – Own work, CC BY 3.0,

There’s no legitimate reason for trained law enforcement to shoot anyone in the face.  When one reads about a civilian in a democracy that’s been shot in the head or the face by a government agent, one should be thinking “this is a criminal political act by an illegitimate government that doesn’t have the consent of the people.” You can see this is true. The DOJ, the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security have decided it’s okay to shoot lawful, Liberal American White Female Urban Leader, citizens in the face. Unpack that acronym and you have that list of government disfavored citizen groups.

Like I said, it’s a Civil War – WWII redux, because the core ideas that were involved, the structures created by them, have never been completely dismantled and properly laid to rest in the US. This is largely due, frankly speaking, to people who choose to use their power and money to try and gain more power and money because there’s never enough of either for them. Other people don’t matter to them, democracy doesn’t matter to them, countries, morality, rule of law, ideals, Christ’s teachings, none of it matters to them. They’re like the Buddhist hungry ghosts. You may have seen a few rows of them sitting on a dais during last year’s inauguration or in the capital building giving interviews. 

But, remember that man who said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK.” That man who has never held a gun, who shirked military service, and who called citizens who choose to serve their country and gave their lives for its protection and its democracy “losers” and “suckers”? Well, he might get away with that on 5th Ave NYC, but he can’t get away with that on Fifth Avenue, Minneapolis. And he is losing voters over it. He’ll lose more votes over Greenland because no US parents will encourage their child in uniform to lay down his/her life, attacking our ally Canada, so a president can claim ownership of another ally, Greenland.

As we celebrate that truly great man Martin Luther King, Jr on Monday, I think it’s important to remember that speaking up, showing up, standing up, and voting all work together. If all you can do is vote, please vote. But if you can speak up, speak up as well. Show up for your neighbors, so when you need them, they show up for you. Stand up, even if your congress person is too much of a coward to do it. The sad truth is, any member of the majority at any time could opt out. The 25th amendment is there for a reason. If you show resolve and lead, they might grow a backbone.

Yes, there’s still a chance they might not, that these enacted policies and garbage bin ideas from the past truly represent what they want America to become. But as we all know, C-suite folk are the most prone to being removed from office. And many I think will be removed this year, at the city, state, and national level. These “superior” people have trashed the nation. They literally tore down the white house, the house of the people. They’ve train wrecked the education system. The health care system. The economy. They’ve murdered people at home and abroad. They’ve lined their own pockets at every opportunity.

It’s not blue sky thinking on my part to suppose they will be removed. It’s just the way the weather patterns are unfolding. People can see what’s happening, despite efforts to control the narratives and the media itself. I could be wrong, so I carry my umbrella just in case. But conditions do seem cloudy with a chance of democracy.