No one will save us except ourselves
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ July 19, 2021
We are caught between a rock and a hard place. Unfortunately, the soft spots seem to have disappeared for our species. Sadly, also have the options for survival for many other related species on this planet. They are screwed through no fault of their own. At least we have only ourselves to blame, but even that is denied by a significant population segment.
While I’ve talked about this before in various ways, our form of sentience, literally how we deal with reality, does not appear suited to the level of our…
We bought the lesser evil but the result is the same
This is not going to work. I’m feeling used.
We’ve been rushed to sign on the dotted line because the threats are exploding around us, and what else can we do? Our only hope is an old establishment man who means well but who is determined to save the status quo. But that status quo is what is killing us.
Good or bad intentions don’t matter if the people in charge have the same goal and that goal will kill us. A nice person can make you just as dead as an asshole and then it doesn’t matter.
The key…
You neatly summarized the whole mess with cameos given to the usual solutions acknowledging that none of them work. Technology, and managing to keep the lid on the problem groups within the general population is our only hope. Eventually the most difficult and recalcitrant groups die off but only to be replaced by newer difficulties and their recalcitrant groups.
The opportunities for innovation to our problems lie in hybridization by random matching of the best pieces of the least egregious failures from our past. …
Building a new world from the few working pieces we have
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ July 5, 2021
There is no simple path out of this mess, so we will need to explore concurrent changes. However, because our situation is so dire, the initial battle will continue to be converting the population lost to destructive manipulation and motivating the terminally lethargic.
We are our own worst enemies, and this must be faced. Successful prevention of political and cultural collapse from the self-created climate disaster while countering the forces of greed, ignorance, and traditional oppression is a multi-front war. …
Restructuring to produce planetary innovation is the only hope
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ July 1, 2021
The planet’s moderately educated and reasonably thoughtful population knows the mess we are in. Our self-induced climate change, now an escalating and continuous disaster, leads the list. But this is the first of several hyper-objects that, themselves, deserve their own place on this list as we have no idea how to deal with a hyper-object problem.
Entangled in this is our planetary asset maldistribution producing widespread poverty and suffering. In addition, this produces problems from the lack of healthcare, excessively corrupt governments, and pseudo-slavery in universally exploitative economies. …
And we have too many pieces
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ June 24, 2021
America is the new Humpty Dumpty, and they have fallen. We are trying to put the pieces back together again, but even if we succeed, what will we have? All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the original Humpty Dumpty together again, and it doesn’t look as if we will have any more luck.
Perhaps that’s why we are depressed in the midst of an official planetary reopening with student insistence that we are returning to the halcyon days of yesteryear. Yet, somehow things aren’t coming together…
Each time the result is worse
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ June 22, 2021
I’m beginning to notice a bad smell permeating the Spring Fresh scent of the Biden administration. We know that a major aspect of post-modern technology is scented to improve impulse buying and create a positive feeling.
We all love our diffusers. In the disappearing world of superfluous retail, the strength of the distinctive smell in a store is proportionate to the price tag of items and their irrelevance. It is a form of olfactory propaganda.
At least we put in a pleasant frame of mind as we are being ripped off…
Until we admit it’s not repairable, we can’t rebuild
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ June 26, 2021
Why are we pretending the US government is still functional? Biden’s gallant attempt at resuscitation was a long shot, sometimes long shots work but only rarely. Whether admitted or not, everyone knew that Biden’s effort was long on jawboning and short on a commitment to effective change.
Knowing the causes of impending death does little to prevent death if it is impossible to remove those causes. We are hung in the long twilight of imperial collapse. It is difficult to kill a vast social entity. …
The minimal office is more than just a work change
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ June 11, 2021
This summer is, I think, a turning point different from all the turning points we have driven past in the last thirty or forty years. That is the reason for the disturbing tentativeness of things as we emerge from the pandemic.
Things are far better than they were but still not right and not even close to being right. We can’t escape the realization that only the collapse speed has slowed, but there is no change of direction.
While in America and the linked late-stage capitalist countries, the media machines are…
We need to think in different ways to beat misinformation
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ June 3, 2021
The problem with complexity is that an array of diverse things are indirectly interrelated. While this may seem obvious, the important thing and the difficulty are not with the diverse things but with our inability to maintain all the relationships.
This is exacerbated by our tendency to worry about things first and relationships between those things second. I can only assume this is a product of our instinctive linearity in ‘slow’ or analytical thinking.
Our evolution has programmed us for fast thinking, quick pattern matching. At the same time, our current…
Mike Meyer
Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .
