It’s not just relief from the threat of COVID-19
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 21, 2021
Our world is new and strange in many ways. While many people are anxiously awaiting a return to the pre-pandemic world, many others are growing familiar with the pleasures of a new and different world. The experiences are very different and will, I think, only expand the gaps between the broken pieces of human society and the disintegration of American society specifically.
We spend so much time struggling to understand the social malignancy that has destroyed our governments that we miss the new pleasures. We are living in a new world…
or the last action before paralysis
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 21, 2021
The tremendous relief of a silenced, defeated, and exiled Trump is like recovering from a long and debilitating disease. Fast executive action by Biden brings a fresh breeze. That we hope will freshen into a cleaning wind to remove the Trump stench. But will the wind be strong enough?
No one wants to spoil these valuable moments of relief and hope, but the variables are mostly uncontrollable, and the historical precedents are not good. Our economic and political structure is not viable. The social psychosis fostered by the Republican Party in…
CODEX
Why doesn’t anything make sense anymore?
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ October 18, 2020
We have so many problems, but we’ve always had problems big and small. As much as we try to figure things out using our hard-earned problem-solving skills, nothing seems to work. Part of our population has become dangerously irrational, and what they are saying makes no sense. Because they have lost touch with reality and repeat only lies and nonsensical conspiracy fantasies, it is impossible to understand why they do these things. We cannot seem to get a handle on what is happening, let alone why.
That leaves us exhausted, anxious…
When we most need moral strength to save the nation
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 22, 2021
While watching the ramping up of a scientific breakthrough in vaccines that give us a ticket to a different future, old hatreds and the willful ignorance of our reactionary populations are trying to drag us down. Their goal is white supremacy and authoritarian oppression to ensure that they retain control and are not threatened with any change.
That the majority of the American population and the people around the planet find this disgusting and inexplicable shows that this is not a fight against alternative policies but a fight against irrationality and…
Judging anything short of a disaster as success does not work
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 16, 2021
Times have been hard. After a year of pandemic lockdown, the inevitable capitalist economic collapse, mass hardship, hunger for many, and the endless screeching of the Trump nightmare ending in a pitiful but frightening parody of a coup attempt, almost anything is an improvement. For people everywhere and particularly those in exploited countries and failed rich countries, this is our world.
In America, one of the last bastions of national confidence, the polite transition to a new administration, however ugly the electoral battle was mauled and beaten at the whim of…
Everyone is now a student and very demanding
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 12, 2021
This is a story of a failure to evolve. That failure has produced an educational disaster at all levels in America. Isolating and minimizing change produced an environment of failure that has devastated American, and world, education in the face of the COVID pandemic.
Will the consequences of that failure also sabotage the future of education in America? The door to that future is fully digital and online with an open modality. A traditional, closed classroom is no longer the default learning environment. …
The federal political system is powerless; we need other means
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 11, 2021
What can be learned from Trump’s second impeachment has already been discovered. If it wasn’t before, it is clear that the US government is living on borrowed time because of structural failure.
Congress comprises two groups of people, one group who are vaguely concerned about the national decline in overall wellbeing and frightened at the extent of fascist criminality of the second group. That second group denies any decline in wellbeing and is committed to expanding authoritarian power as their only goal.
The second group's denial of any decline in national…
No, it’s not, and yes, it is, but that is not a problem
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 9, 2021
I’m not interested in religion. Like many people, perhaps even most people, religion is not something I care to deal with. Religion was humanity's original one-stop-shop for all those things that had no easy answers.
The original unanswerable questions covered almost everything with a sharp focus on finding our next meal and avoiding being someone else’s next meal. Sitting around the fire in the evening was a good time to wonder where we came from. …
Removing one person from politics will end the insurrection
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 8, 2021
I’m not sure how this will work, but returning to anything like a unified nation does not look possible. The Republican Party's wholehearted effort to turn Trump’s second impeachment into an accolade for neofascist, racist authoritarianism will go down in history as such no matter how much they try to shirk responsibility for it.
We’re being inundated with off the record, high ranking Republican statements that they want Trump gone but can’t figure out how to do it without enraging his cult. As always, with Republican statements, particularly high-ranking ones, there…
Biden’s tactical successes are not our needed strategic change
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 6, 2021
Before saying anything about America, the necessary ritual is the equivalent of a reluctant bow to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for removing Donald Trump from our daily lives. That beautiful absence is restorative and unique in American culture, a culture long dependent on defining beauty as more, sometimes selectively less, but never an empty space.
May that public space, identified as Donald Trump, remain forever empty. But that absence, however wonderful for our mental health, brings nothing to our cascading problems. …
Mike Meyer
Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .
