Fighting for solutions to problems that no longer exist

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 7, 2021

One of the largest and most challenging issues in times of revolutionary, paradigmatic change is sorting out the problems from solutions. This issue can be described in several ways, but each shows how things get very complicated when we find ourselves in interesting times.

Large scale changes cause things to be redefined socially and culturally. These definitions can make things that were once bad become good in the new context. Languages change rapidly during these times, reflecting the redefinition of basic concepts and new relationships between things that were once unrelated.

In morals and ethics, things that were once considered acceptable, racism or misogyny, for instance, became completely unacceptable. These become points of conflict as change rolls on and the inevitable reaction of parts of a population who fear change and fight to keep the old ways even if everything else has changed. …

There is nothing to be said now. Action must be taken.

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 6, 2020

What a shock! The neo-nazi supporters of a psychopath attempting to hold onto power follow the orders they are given to overthrow the government. Who could have known that such a thing could happen in the US capital?

The goons fomenting this are, of course, also shocked.

Shocked, I tell you, we had no idea this could happen, is what they will say. The idiot Cruz, a twisted piece of shit, playing a little sedition game for some political gain, wanted everyone who could read to calm down. …

We need to understand how things are changing

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 4, 2021

A strange confluence of events has jarred me into a new awareness of the future we face. We all know that we lurched into unknown territory in 2020, and the door back into the world we knew not only closed but disappeared.

Fittingly the cause of that door disappearing was the actions of the part of our population desperately rebelling at the loss of that past. Unable to use psychopaths and criminals to force us back to the past, they succeeded in erasing even the locked door's outline. …

It’s not the year that is changing, but our stories

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 2, 2021

Our stories have changed. The changes are multifaceted and easy to miss in the normal rush of 21st-century disasters but disorienting and disturbing. They deal with science as magic and people as struggling to survive.

Beginnings are arbitrary, and endings are incomplete. It is as if the endings are lost in beginnings and, usually, too awful to accept. Discovering small successes and avoiding personal disasters have replaced discovery and conquest for the greater good.

The successes may be failures, but we are not sure as we no longer know how to judge such things. Any rules for success may produce only failures, and rules guaranteeing failure may produce something like success. So our stories are overwhelmed with itemized listings of the rules for success even though they no longer work. …

Using old economic measures in 2021 is irrelevant

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 29, 2020

The most confusing aspect of anticipating what will happen in 2021 is the dangerous gap that results from using old measurements to predict a very different world. The measurements still work and are as accurate or inaccurate as they have been for years but are what they measure still important?

Once upon a time, the US stock market was effectively measured by the Dow Industrials. What was good for General Motors was good for America. The measure that mattered was steel, automobile production, and oil. …

The battlefields will proliferate, and people will make decisions

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 28, 2020

While the traditional focus during the last week of the year is to review the previous year, balancing the good, the bad, and the silly, for 2020, even that has failed.

Dave Berry’s Year-End Review, long an enjoyable and humorous summation of the things that happened in the previous year, could find only one positive, and that was the failure of the murder hornets to terrorize North America. For the first time in human memory, mine at least, I was unable to finish reading Berry's review.

The end came for me somewhere around the fourteenth or twentieth line in a very long paragraph attempting to compress all the horror and disgust into a small enough dose to swallow. Pomposity is easy to satirize to release the tension. Decades of Russian humor under Soviet rule can bring at least a chuckle to tragedy. …

Reconstructive surgery is needed and not bandaids

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 26. 2020

We are watching a world disappear and a universe transformed before our eyes. For many of us on this planet, the world we knew so well has been fading away over the last ten months. We thought it was falling into the fog from the pandemic, and the sun would soon burn off the haze. But the sun is lighting a different world that is far stranger than we are prepared to accept.

What was a time of anger and anxiety threatened by insecurity, growing poverty, and oppression for many held at bay by illusion has lost its camouflage. …

Our hope is our children but they may not be what we expect

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 25, 2020

Standing on the shore at sunset in the last days of the year. My chosen time and place to say goodbye.

The winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is past and the traditional holidays originating in Europe are here. Such things evolve and merge over centuries marking the mental calendar of families and societies. It throws us a curve, another obscure reference, when we must leave the planet of our birth.

I still like the feel of winter arriving and the thought of trees and food and family time even if the geographic links are finally broken. My departure time is in an hour but how do you wrap up a lifetime extending back beyond thousand centuries? …