Don’t listen to people who expect the past to return

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 1, 2020

Just to put things on a positive note, Homo sapiens is not likely to die out in the next hundred years. We are not likely to become even endangered despite the disasters that we have brought to our planet. Our species is resilient enough to come back even if only a few breeding pairs remain as we have in the past.

The closest we came to a wipeout was about 70,000 years ago with Toba's explosion on Sumatra. Some estimates estimate that the human population went as low as a few hundred or less, which is definitely endangered. …

Understanding why we can’t get a handle on things and some people seem really dense

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 30, 2020

Living in a shattered world makes it very hard to see our future. As pattern detectors, we have evolved by continuously making sense of our environment by matching its patterns to our memories. Sentience, at least on this planet, is pattern matching to determine threats or opportunities.

With destructive domination on this planet, we have proven the power of pattern matching. After several decades of false Artificial Intelligence starts, we have given up on various analytical logic forms and discovered that Machine Learning actually works.

Much of the problem was our own failure to see the simplistic nature of our intelligence. We were looking in the wrong places. It is not the complex processing power of our minds that have handed us the world but basic pattern matching at all levels of our experience. …

The Destruction continues. How Much More Evil Can We Take?

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 29, 2020

The large and lingering question is how much damage has Trump caused and how much more will he cause before he is forced from the White House?

There is a constant din of discussion on the second question, but it never seems to approach an estimate, let alone an answer. We are left with the threat of an immense indeterminate mass of evil added to four years of continuous disaster. The indirectly stated conclusion is that there is nothing to be done, and it will be whatever it will be.

Our only relief is that the election with Biden’s conclusive win was a transitioning to the Trump Party horror show's final act. Unfortunately, that suggests everything up to now was an anticlimax with the climax yet to come. It is hard to imagine what that climax might be in the midst of an out of control pandemic, growing hunger, economic devastation, and the discovery of widespread social insanity in some 20% of our voting population. …

We are abandoning failed assumptions and failed political systems

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 29, 2020

The American tragedy, as a segment of the planetary crisis, will not end in recovery. We need to abandon all hope of restoration. Whether these are beds we have made and must sleep in or sandwiches, we have made and must eat, pick your preferred metaphor, and get on with it.

People have been saying this for some time. As always, with significant change, the realization is slow to dawn and needs endless repetition to trigger awareness. As anyone who has worked in marketing knows, the first three times you tell people something, they will remember nothing. …

There is no simple solution to hyperobjects

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 28, 2020

How do we climb up out of the pit that may well be our grave? This not just a local hole in the ground, although in many places it is that also, but a planet-sized gravity well?

In our 21st century world, even a metaphorical pit threatening to be a grave is complicated. Explaining it requires significantly more intellectual effort than most people are willing to invest. Still, we really don’t have any other options but to work because no one else will help us.

A key understanding is that this giant well we have fallen into is chaotic in nature. I’ve come to see this as fractalized. …

Hoping for sanity in a year of fear and anxiety

by Mike Meyer ~Honolulu ~ November 25, 2020

Let’s hope it is a quiet Thanksgiving. There should be nothing but virtual gatherings, and next Thanksgiving might be much better. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the Trumpist’s commitment to death. Given the nature of feudal cults, I suspect they would be demanding sickness and death even if Trump won and reveling in both.

But on a personal note, I really don’t want this pandemic to end if nothing has been learned. While my family has been lucky and privileged with the right kind of jobs for online transition and adequate education to know what is real, everyone is tired of staying at home. This is particularly true of the grandkids who are missing a major part of their lives with minimal social interaction. …

The narrow path to the future for Biden and Harris

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 25, 2020

We need to make sure Joe Biden does not waste time on an endless quest to make sense of and compromise with the remains of the Trump Party. This is being identified as a critical component of success for the new Biden Harris administration.

Perhaps success is the wrong word, and we should be honest by identifying it as avoidance of a very likely failure. This was Obama’s great downfall, having squandered any hope of achieving anything beyond the laborious and crippled Obamacare that consumed all resources that were left. …

And the picture on the puzzle box is missing

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 23, 2020

Our societies are fracturing. The US is no longer a nation united in anything but anxiety and disgust politically and divided into those struggling to stay healthy in a pandemic and those who are refusing to do that. That is only two lines of fracture. There are widening lines that include blatant racism, xenophobia, and sexist bigotry.

We see the signs of support for slavery and religious justification for gender exploitation with conscious advocacy for human suffering by denying women their inherent rights to control their own bodies. …