by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 10, 2020
Some people seem shocked at Rupert Murdoch severing his media empire ties with Trump. Murdoch is an example of late-stage capitalism dedicated to profit in information media without regard for anything else. Late-stage capitalism is profit with minimal or no cost by any means possible.
Trump is probably the most upset at this point, but he was promoted and mined for the bigger goals of massive profit at someone else’s expense. …
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 15, 2021
Our problems recognize no borders. Refugees, storms, air pollution, climate warming, satellite media, and airborne microplastics ignore our arbitrary borders. We moved away from borders as irrelevant and archaic, but the regressive lurch to older authoritarianism forms has brought them back.
The fixation on borders is a symptom of social psychosis. They are the product of insecurity and weakness, representing either the prevention of change from other people or an attempt to block a threatened population's departure.
Borders are an invention of the modern world with the nation-state's rise and its…
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 12, 2021
Diversity and openness are inherently complex. Our world, planet, biosphere, and human culture are complex and becoming steadily more so. This is the result of evolution as the one universal and fundamental law.
We tend to confuse evolution with success, but that is a human value judgment as the decline and disappearance of things is another kind of success. The only value is change, encompassing both the rise and fall of systems, including species. It is only a matter of perspective.
At a deeper level, increasing complexity and diversity is a…
I needed to think about this a bit. That is probably a factor of too many years watching the rise of complexity concurrent with the rise of fascism as anti-complexity for the lazy. and avaricious.
Patriotism once meant pride in one's national culture but having something to be proud of required too much work. It was easier to demean and oppress others and then claiming that as patriotism. But that is only one level of the problem.
Patriotism is tied to nationalism that has too many structural errors to survive. All patriotism now is fake. Cultural pride, an older form, cannot, it appears, survive with borders because culture is self-defining and comparative and is not exclusionary.
Nationalism and patriotism are not about pride but greed and selfishness. Fake White Patriotism is what results.
We all miss Thunderpuff. Her humor was great but she also inspired you to respond however your could. We need more examples of how to deal with absurdity and horror as humor with a sardonic sense of our own absurdity. The absolute absurdity we live with becomes only horror if we cannot laugh at it and mock its perpetrators.
I think a lot about the old black humor of the Soviet era. It collapsed, finally, when everyone got the joke. We can't even see the joke now, let alone get it. How did that happen?
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 9, 2021
There is a steady ramping up of absurd talking points, endlessly parrotted by the disgraced previous guy's followers. As usual, the previous guy can’t keep his story straight, but the only thing that matters is raking in the loot from the pitiful.
Hopefully, the rapidly descending legal hammer will take back most of the money and deposit the previous guy in prison. We know that is a long shot, but complete bankruptcy and a felony conviction would do wonders for the country. But this is a distraction.
The Biden program's strong…
We are dealing with the baggage of the last century that, instead of fading away, has become malignant and metastasized in the bodies of the oldest nation-states instead of fading away.
Unfortunately, this baggage is people. It's the old story of people being used and abused with no future remaining.
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 3, 2021
Protection of your own racial or ethnic privileges is not a right. Oppressing or removing the rights of others is not a right. Ignoring scientific consensus publicly while promoting objectively verified falsehoods, otherwise known as lies, is not a right and, even in America’s racially-biased judicial and political systems, teeters on the edge of criminality.
I think that all of the above should be clearly defined as criminal acts. We need to get our house in order, and America’s house is in an advanced stage of collapse, although it is our…
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 2, 2021
I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that seems to be my lot. Any effort at understanding our planetary dilemma leaves me thinking we won’t make it. Any group discussion I’m in seems to end up waiting for me to say how bad it will be.
Talk about baggage. Trying to be positive with Pandora’s Box on your back now includes Sisyphus’s rock to the mix. And the hill is getting steeper.
Our problems' complexity is so far beyond the median level of human understanding that even…
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ March 24, 2021
Joe Biden is doing things that no one expected him to do. Despite the disastrous collapse of Western Civilization as the modern planetary model, yes, more on that in a bit, Joe Biden is orchestrating a desperate bid for the survival of the nation-state system.
That is so clearly not what we expected from sleepy Joe that millions of people are struggling to reorient themselves to the new reality. How did it happen, and what does it really mean? The shoddy facade of representative government that is the primary emblem of…
Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .