What Oh What Is To Become Of The Left

Especially now that mainstream Democrats still seem bent on some form of the old "We Can Fix Capitalism", orthodoxy that Bill Clinton had some success with, for a time, with the Third Way; which now doesn't seem nearly the good idea it once was.

Perhaps they'll come up with a new version of a third way; push for trade still, but be sure to tax those sherkers of taxation we now know so well. And they may well get some new taxes, but seriously, just how much will their own corporate backing allow them to do? Enough to look good certainly for one budget cycle at least, but to actually accomplish the large scale reforms that would tackle the full institutionalization of the "inequality of outcomes" that has put so many people in a position of "just barely getting by," "paycheck to paycheck?" Anything is possible, but that would be a pretty tall order for them even if there weren't other, countervailing forces, at work here.

And then you also have to wonder about "Big Money" in general's ability to just pull as much of their investment money, out of as many investment markets, as they can here, and even take an earnings hit in the process, just to create the possibility of brutalizing the economy from within, so to speak, so as to punish, and then set the Liberals up for the fall that would allow a Paul Ryan, or someone of similar ilk (a scenario I first heard proposed by Joe Scarborough on one of his recent broadcast segments), to come back and punch down the authoritarian final solution the monied few have always dreamed of.

And if that seems far fetched just consider. Occurring along side of these possible machinations will be the ever pervasive, "fire for effect," pounding that a planet that is fed up with us will deliver; both because we've poisoned it, and because there are just too many of us; and we're always making more. So it's not going to take much from the monied right, either from their puppets in public office, or from their own possible actions, to punish everybody on the left with specific, almost weaponized, economic decisions, to make the dire results, of the whole mess combined, a really bad economic event. Like another "Great XXX" where "XXX" is the new euphemism for depression they come up with, kind of event.

And in all of this it may well be the new active Progressives, that have now come into being after listening to Bernie, when he lets himself talk a real Socialist line for equitable social policy, that will suffer the most because they are really going to be left out in the literal, and figurative, cold; which is, of course, pretty much where the money elites of the Right would want them to be.

Not so obvious, though, is what will also happen to not only true Libertarians, who cannot possibly hope to think that any overly authoritarian social system is going to respect the right of the individual, unless, certainly, they are filthy rich; but in addition to the Libertarians, the fiscally conservative Republicans of the Right who also understand the need for basic human rights. Where will they go with the demise of the old Republican party. Will they make common cause with the old Liberal Democrats? It's certainly possible. They would have to call it something new to make it viable at all. And certainly hammering out what would have to be their shared platform wouldn't be particularly easy either.

My bias, and I suppose my naivete as well, make me want to believe that all of these left outs (the Progressives, the Libertarians, and the part of Republicanism that still has a soul), which is what they will become; if these "left outs" don't do something bold on their own; as in that they will have to realize that a Libertarian Socialist, new party for the left, and right both, is in all likelihood, their best bet to achieve anything that resembles a better way to keep America Federated as a cooperating union (as well as solve some huge survival problems). A "Grand Compromise" party that will balance practicality, and the rights of the individual, with empathy and the needs of the many, And I can only say that we will all be in big trouble if these "Left Outs" don't share my vision, or optimism for it. We will all be in very big trouble indeed.

California’s housing crunch has turned liberals against one another

See Also:
[Post Note: The following link here is to serve to remind you just how much Mother Nature can do that "pounding" I mentioned previously, in the sense of "fire for effect:" J.V.] 

Nor’easter set to slam East Coast with severe winds, rain and flooding

[Post Note: Progressives should also never forget where it is that they come from, and that coming to full terms with how there is now a very real "inequality of outcomes," that is being institutionalized into the current, toxic, and destructive, economic operating system. And that this is something that any "Grand Compromise" must address. I think that redefining work will go a very long way in doing just that.J.V.]

'THE BROAD CRIMINALIZATION OF POVERTY'

How Lenders Are Turning Low-Level Courts Into Dickensian 'Debt Collection Mills'

9 diggs theintercept.com Law

A new ACLU report on modern-day debt imprisonment finds that courts issue tens of thousands of arrest warrants yearly for debtors owing as little as $30.

[Post Note: The following link here is most illuminating for a couple of things related to what the Left should still keep in mind, but also of what the Left should not get too carried away with. And all of that, certainly, wrapped around the notion of money.

What this article really shows us is, on the one hand, a big part of the illusory nature of money now that it has been absorbed into the realm of electronic, and photonic, circuits; but that it also indicates how useful that very thing could be when we will need to work a translation from one social, economic system, to the better alternative.

Remember that it is this kind of thinking that prompted many of their proponents to issue the platinum coin idea; the coin we could just declare is worth, say, a trillion dollars. And then presto changeo, we have a trillion dollars to spend. 

In my suggestion to do a transition government, where the point was to translate from what we have now to the alternative I have laid out, I have indicated that we could issue a blockbuster bond; something to make that trillion dollar coin look pathetic indeed. 

This would be a bond for us, issued by us, to buy all of the productive capability, as well as the physical property (save everybody's existing home, and their other, personal property) of the entire United States. We would then use that bond to pay off not only all other external debt, but buyout all of the holders of all this productive property; or at least all of them who decided that their monetized holdings mean more to them than their continued participation in being citizens of this nation; citizens who are still willing to remain and participate in running their respective communities; because it would be that participation that would give them the right to be a part of the now collectivized ownership of the entire complex mess.

The really interesting thing about doing this, as opposed to doing the coin idea, is that it layers in, the at least the conceivable notion, that the bond would have a mechanism for which that new debt would be serviced. And it would do that by the action of then paying everybody: As in not only a living wage (as an add on to whatever wage they were already receiving in whatever job they might already have), but also by providing universal health care, and guaranteed education. That payment, from the now ultimate single payer source, would be our payment to ourselves, from ourselves, to service the debt, with the ongoing economy of, controlled profit, prices, and managed supply; a reforming thing, then, being the engine of credibility to allow the rest of the world to have assurance that there was still credible meaning to the idea of us as a capably productive entity; one that they could see was working to maintain the idea that we represent a store of value. One that we could literally take to a new bank, or exchange entity, for new loans.

In my opinion, this would be quite workable. And I think others will come to see that. As such, if one were one of these new "thinkers about money" one might also be tempted to believe that this approach could be the way to save Capitalism, but I would hasten to caution them that this would not be so. All this sort of thing can do is buy us some time. Buy us the time to work out how we do all of the things we will need to do to figure out what it means to not only redefine work the way it should be redefined (because work must be redefined), but also how we go about it. And I say this not only because the electrification of Capitalism has rendered it truly a non option, but also because a totally managed economy cannot survive indefinitely in a hypercompetitive, economic world. The world where anything can be made anywhere, and the new scales of transportation make distance a manageable variable, no matter how big it might be. Even if all of the other impossible issues facing Capitalism were removed, that inability to compete within this new hyper competition world would doom it in the long run. J.V.]

The Radical Left-Wing Theory That the Government Has Unlimited Money



[Post Note: Just in case you needed a reminder of how fast this fast talker can change facades just as quickly. J.V.]

Trump stuns GOP lawmakers by embracing gun control

What Is One To Make Of This Relationship?

GDP has gone up, but power consumption is actually flattened out. What gives?

First of all, certainly, is the fact that we make so little of what need, and consume, every day, here anymore; thinking somewhere in the echelons of power, that specialized services will keep us not only competitive, but fat and happy as well. So a lot of people do service work in a lot of sectors, and a few of us still make tangible things, and a specialized few make various forms of very technical things. And, as it actually happens, though we may well, in the majority be unhealthy weight wise, we are not actually all that happy in any of what we really need as humans; otherwise populism wouldn't have gone off its rocker there for a while; getting mesmerized by one fast talker, and facade fast change artist.

Then there is the fact that, eight years after the start of the great recession, we are only now starting see real increases in real wages. So there is probably another disconnect going on with the GDP, which is that, even though a lot of money is being made, by various, over large entities, the purchasing consumer still has limited purchasing power; and even there a great deal of it has been put into increasing debt. So right away you might have a good probability that fewer people can buy power consuming toys, or necessities.

Then as well is the fact that we have made significant progress in making what does consume power consume less. And that is certainly a big plus. A hopeful plus as well as it also does go a long way to show that we can demand things when we work together to do so. If, of course, we can keep a focus on doing so, which isn't easy when so many are right at the edge of just getting by day to day; paycheck to paycheck.

That this is also causing power utilities problems is also understandable; for both public and commercial power entities; something for which I have had a real taste of because I worked for nearly five years with Seattle City Light as, at first a hardware tech for desktops, and then later as a software developer.

This is especially not a good time for this because utilities are also facing a good deal more existential challenge because of all of our newfound geophysical turbulence; whether from more extreme weather, or from the techtonics that have both wires, and pipes, stretching across physical fault lines, as well as social fault lines. It may well come to be that we can maintain roads and highways, or high tension transmission lines, but not both. Any more than we can allow for overly centralized power production now because that is simply not fault tolerant enough for the natation as a community of communities (having situations where one node in a system brings down an entire region, instead of a single community where a possible destructive event might have occurred.

We want to be as efficient as we can be with energy because the effort it takes to bring it to us takes away from effort we might better need elsewhere. Having said that, however, doesn't preclude the need to also be ready to ramp up output of production very quickly when that becomes a necessity. So how is one to balance a bunch of new realities for how we do energy?

And for this I will come back to what should now be a familiar theme: we must start by changing the dynamic that makes everything else already so difficult. And that is the dynamic that necessitates seeing everything in terms of what, and how markets put value into effect; as well to say that it has to be "cost" that is the other arbiter of what can, and can't be done; and that both of these then come to determine what "flexibility" will ever be able to be in the first place; which past history, in this absolutely necessary sector of endeavor, has shown to be very problematic at best.

After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat. Utilities are freaking out.

What We Have Going On Here Shouldn't Surprize Anyone

I have posted on this before.

If you understand the whole process of transfer, and that, with more heat input, you have more transfer ability (assuming the possibility for differential is still there), and thus bigger circulation driven events precisely because there is more there, in either the atmosphere, or the oceans, to cause greater volumes of circulation. Thus we get bigger rain, or drought events, bigger wind, or no wind events, or bigger temperature variation events. As this happens, for instance, you get situations like we have been having in the Pacific Northwest the last week or two where, even though it's almost March, we have had fairly large amounts of snow on the ground; which is, of course, quite unusual for us.

And this does all make sense when you realize that, with more, and bigger, translations of differentials (because, remember, it's all about evaporation and condensation, convection, pressure change, absorption, and radiation etc) , what you are, in effect doing, is taking bigger bites of cold out of our heat sinks at the poles, in order to keep these big translation events going. And those bites, year after year, aren't being made back up with enough recreation ice to keep the cold store going.

It is really that simple and why this realization hasn't woke up more folks all around the scientific, political, and popular worlds of interactive discourse is truly an amazement to me. Because, as I have said, alarm bells of the most prodigious kind should be going off now, grabbing everybody's attention.

We must mobilize as a species and we must do it very quickly. And the only people who can lead this properly is us. Wake the Hell up. Out existence is at stake.

See Also:
[Post Note: This response to "Big Tech" shouldn't surprize us either. How can it when so many of the titans still in the game were, or still are now, like our poor Philanthropist, in this original post, article link, used to be; because they have seen the enormity of the return one can get for delivering ever more commercialized, commoditization, of all life, without having to take on much immediate responsibility for, if a few, unforeseen, or seen, collateral damage effects are a part of the process. Something that can, sometimes, unfortunately, leave you with a few regrets, and perhaps as well, the need to see if you might be able to buy, at least a little bit, of your soul back; the effort for which we must applaud because doing something is better than doing nothing; at least up to a certain point. And there can be no doubt that the above Philanthropist has done some good. We should all hope he continues trying the repurchase effort, however pointless it may, or may not, seem in any, ultimate sense of morality. The bottom line for the rest of them, however, that we must never lose sight of, is that their desire for monolithic control of vast aspects of what makes life possible in the first place, cannot be any longer tolerated; any more than any such egregious imbalance can be tolerated if we want to survive as species. The planet is making that clear to us now. Our current social chaos is making that clear to us now. And our current state of affairs with the other nations of the world is making that clear to us as well. J.V.]

Silicon Valley faces make or break moment amid big tech backlash

[Post Note: This engineering project would be a tremendous achievement, as well as an excellent example of what China is capable of doing now technologically. You still have to ask the question, though, of why going faster, through much hotter air, is really the best allocation of critical capability, when you face a dying planet. It is also, however, why we need to partner with the Chinese, as well as with the Europeans; all of the Pacific Rim, of Africa, of the Middle East, and every other part not mentioned, to tackle the two biggest problems we face: Climate change, and world population. And to try and take on the bridge building we are going to need to take on to create these partnerships is going to demand a completely new operating dynamic for the world. An operating dynamic that would actually give cooperation, as opposed to lists of dangerous competitions that we are all involved in, a chance to thrive.

Think about it. And I mean really think about it. Learn whatever new things you need to learn to see why this may be our only chance to make saving the planet possible. J.V.]

UNFORTUNATELY IT LOOKS LIKE THIS

China's Hypersonic Aircraft Would Fly From Beijing To New York In Two Hours

16 diggs Popular Science Aviation

The double-wing plane just aced wind tunnel tests at speeds of nearly 5,600 miles per hour.

More Examples Of Why The Current Economic Dynamic Makes No Sense At All

Debtors Prisons? Turning athletes into temporary slaves? Advertising ourselves into serious addictions? And having what gets posted on the web control not only economic life, but everything else about our social and political makeup? Seriously?

Does any of this make sense to you? Because it sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me. And even more nonsensical is the fact that so few seem to want to acknowledge what I am talking about here.

How a $90 Vet Bill Can Ruin Someone's Life

The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because The 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Labor

How Misleading Marketing Got America Addicted To Opioids

In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3 Billion Of Snap's Market Value

See Also:

CAPITALISM IS A SCAM

Let Them Eat Experience

12 diggs Jacobin Politics

Until last month, almost all unpaid internships were technically illegal. Now it's open season for employers who want free labor.

'I'M A WORKING WOMAN AGAIN'

This Is What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like

11 diggs The Atlantic Money

Many seniors are stuck with lives of never-ending work — a fate that could befall millions in the coming decades.

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S THEM
All The Tricks Smartphones Are Using To Keep You Addicted

11 diggs Design

To keep users hooked, many smartphones and apps take a page from machine gambling.

THE SHADOW LEGISLATOR
The NRA Lobbyist Behind Florida's Pro-Gun Policies

10 diggs The New Yorker Long Reads

Marion Hammer's unique influence over legislators has produced laws that dramatically alter long-held American norms.

I think That We're Going To Have To Consider That Discussion Transactions

That serve to change, in each small transactional way, the current state of a discussion thread; that these would be the far better use for blockchain linkages to keep track of both originator authenticity, as well as the matter of the discussion site itself being authentic to what the site claims it to be; and then to make sure that if a new thread element is accepted, multiple check sites have agreed to all of the authenticity of both public, and private keys.

This would obviously, then, change a great deal concerning how any kind of important social interaction forum would go about putting new comments into play. And it would present a pretty big increase in necessary secure traffic across the web generally. Something, obviously, that a for profit object model would be loath to consider even if it didn't involve new process demands to what used to be just pass along the input, and see to it that the interface thinks a human has clicked "Accept," or "Publish," or whatever interface catchphrase is required.

But, and I know this will sound trite to a good number of you, but social discourse is way more important than either imaginary money, whatever bits they might arranged by, or the real gold that some bits might still represent, in a very crude, and outmoded way; just to translate one specialized skill set commodity, into the output of another.

This and very heavily protected, community subnets, that provide only read only access to outsiders, and better designed biometric authentication for community users to go deeper for full read/write access; though I have to confess to tell you I don't know how we'd handle all of the details of how we'd be able to make this work throughout its full complexity.

We will have to do something though. That much we can be sure of. The next question, however, is how we can ever expect that the full range of things that ought to be done, will ever be done, as long we stick to this outmoded, old cost based, way of doing business as usual. Because you can be sure as hell that a little piece meal work here, or a little piece meal work there, is absolutely not going to cut it in the long run.

Artificial intelligence could supercharge hacking and election meddling, study warns

The Race To Colonize Mars Is About More Than Just Male Entitlement

Though that is certainly an important component to it.

It is, rather, in my mind about how so many men, and women too, though probably not to nearly the same degree, do not understand the need for balance in all things in our approach to life, and the things that ought to be important in life; hence not only the horrible mess we've made of this planet, as an unbelievably beautiful, and complex, interdependent biom of so many amazing, living systems; but also the unbelievable mess we've made of how we live as social beings. Of all of the deprivation, and suffering that we've allowed to become institutionalized simply because the economics of scarcity fits so well into personal aggrandizement, and the ego expression of power.

A good part of this happens because we have not figured out yet not only the full what, as well as the why, of something that I have always felt is implicit schizofrenia in the fact that men are both partly women, and partly something else. And then, to make things even worse, we are not socialized at all appropriately to even understand this duality, let alone deal with it. Just as we are not, as a species, yet fully cognizant of just how complex gender identity, and gender preference is, and from that how we go about properly socializing the good connections between what can be loving, nurturing, as well as practical choice making, parenting combinations.

The fact of the matter is, in my opinion, that gender preference, and identity are just rolls of immense, cosmic dice, and that there are no arbitrary, it has to be this combination, and this alone, that must be followed. And you can say this because the nominal, parental norms we've been used to dealing with are just so much BS; as in the so called "provider" must be male, and the so called "nurturer" must be female, and that both these are the only way to raise children; when, in truth, whoever are the parents, all must be capable, at any given moment, to be either the provider, or the nurturer. And that each should be able to take not only great pride in being able to do both, but great satisfaction as well.

The bottom line in this, for me as a man, who understands a great deal more of what my woman side is, and what if offers in both upsides and downsides, is that there are so many ways to have, and express, strength. And that the most obvious one; the one that underlies "might makes right," is in fact, the least important. And that is why my life has been one great, very difficult struggle, to first come to this better understanding, and then to try to articulate that understanding. This is why, from the very beginning, though I did not understand it at the time, I have been engaged in trying to bring that understanding into the larger arena of political and economic discourse; having the effort evolve along the way, even a I have evolved in coming to this better understanding. And that is why I blog now. And that is why I am a revolutionary seeking great change in how we conduct human affairs.

With misguided, though very creative, overly commercialized men like Mr. Musk, we risk just repeating endlessly all of the old mistakes that are implicit in continuing to follow the economics of scarcity, and that the needs of the few should outweigh the needs of the many. Allowing them, perhaps, to build the ultimate of gated communities, from which, with newfound synthetic ware control, they might rule indefinitely via the means of the self indulgent expression of "might makes right" (just watch Netflix's "Altered Carbon" to see how depressing such a thing could become), though the precarious nature of our planet's continued survival at all makes even that fear problematic. Unless, of course, we are all willing to become a good deal more "revolutionary," now that both "Father Fortress" and "Mother Earth" seem ready to accept that they must cooperate, somehow, with each other, in order for balance of any kind to come about; and express itself as living the ongoing tension of negotiating what that always changing balance should be, moment to moment.

This is the challenge that lies ahead of us. Will we even acknowledge it? And then will we have all of the heart, perseverance, faith, and strength in a bunch of other qualities to do it?

I steadfastly remain hopeful.

See Also:

WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY

Roads To Nowhere: How Infrastructure Built On American Inequality

16 diggs theguardian.com Cities

From highways carved through thriving "ghettoes" to walls segregating black and white areas, US city development has a long and divisive history

Debtors’ prison: ACLU report details ‘criminalization of private debt’

And How It Will Likely Get Them Even More Down The Road Of Being Compromised,

 And corrupted by another variation of Big Money. At some point, then, you'll have to wonder when "Republican Light" becomes something else entirely; especially if the Republican Party completely implodes, and explodes, all about its current manifestation.

If ever there were a time when we needed a viable, solidly founded on a new, better set of principles, political party, now is it. And of course my bias has the new Libertarian Socialist party that I have been trying to describe, as that alternative.

How Democrats use dark money — and win elections

Here It Is In Another Nutshell

We must all be involved now with creating the next, required, more complicated, ismuth, so that this next mass migration can begin again. You know. Pretty much as has happened to homo erectus, and beyond, for many thousands of years now, when big change came about. We packed up and went looking for better digs.

It's supposed to come naturally to us but, obviously, a lot of stuff has happened since we first figured out that we hand hands, and imaginations, creating handles of all variety, that could grasp, and utilize, better understandings, of the things around us; and most especially now that instrumentality itself has become electro relativistic, and profoundly complicated in its own right.

Old economic operating norms just are not going to be up to the problem of taking on this task. And it ought to be as sadly obvious, as it is really depressing, to say it in this simple observation: "There could be little, if any, prospect, for decent profit in such an undertaking;" or, in much simpler terms: "There's no damn money in it."

That we can also say: "And rightly so," should offer only small satisfaction. But we've been on this norm where "value" has become dependant on the same operating system that has absorbed everything else in daily life. Where as well, unfortunately, far too much of what should be a careful, group process; a process of what, and how, too many important things are defined, and kept to the orthodoxy of; all, of course; where that process has been kept within the specific interests of what has become a mutated monster. Which is part and parcel of why we're having such a hard time now negotiating not only what, exactly, is going on right now, but also of what, should be the priorities, and from that the proper operational plans formulated, to deal with "what, exactly, is going on, right now."

The other difficulty here is that the same "Mutated Monster" has, for the most part, decided, over the many, many decades of its existence, that there is also "No Damn Money in it;" as in for taking their responsibility for all of the true life cycle costs, of all of the things it decided it had to do, to create the progress, both materially, and technologically, that it did, indeed, create. Unfortunately as well, that total bill is now due. And the debt collectors here will do more than just take baseball bats to our knees for lack of payment.

Put together, this means we need to get pretty much everybody, pretty much everywhere, involved in growing, and building, and fixing, and maintaining, and imagining, and dreaming up, and daring to risk; in both a manageable, and bearable, way. That, in a nutshell, is what all of my posting has been attempting to describe; slowly over time because I have had to learn how to do this, even as I have tried to keep imagining, that elusive something; that something that just had to be better than what I was forced to grow up in. There just had to be something better. I have always felt it in my bones.

One of the big problems in this is that, as I have never been able to approach it in any kind of a purely linear way, I have never been able to present it in that way either. For me it is a grand, multi dimensional, mosaic, that weaves an intricate tapestry of connections, to inter linked meaning nodes. Something that, even I did not understand fully until only the last few years, and only with better detail in the last year; most especially in August of last year; which was when this whole Cosmolosophy thing became a great deal more profound (at least to me) than I ever expected it to be.

This is why you have to jump into these posts, and bounce around in all of them, for a good while, before you can fully understand the bigger picture I've been trying to create (again, learning, as I go), for what I now understand to be, my entire, unbelievably odd, life. There may be a lot of details here you will not agree with, but I am hoping that, if you do understand the bigger picture, so to speak, you will see that the end result would make negotiating, something we can all live with, as pertains to those details, a good probability. And I can say that because I think there is enough inherent commonality in what I am proposing that the bigger picture will be an agreeable starting point. We just need to get to work, so we can work this out. Is that really so much to ask of you?

There Is A Way To Produce Hydrogen Effort Effectively

The first step, though, is to stop thinking in terms of it being profitable or not. Or that markets need to be involved at all.

With the Yen Tornado Turbine, built with the right design, and put out to sea to take advantage of the better wind available there, and to eliminate the "not in my backyard" problem of building them in already populated areas, we can produce as much liquid hydrogen as the world is going to need for quite a while to come; assuming, though, that we don't let the ice at the poles melt for now and ever more.

If we let that happen we lose the planets ultimate heat sinks. The place where cold is stored permanently so as to provide a constant, quite necessary, condition; the condition that all of the flows that allows thermodynamics to mitigate temperature differentials, to work with. You know, just minor flows of heat transfer that makes the wind blow, that causes evaporation, and condensation, as well as convection currents in general; something our oceans have really come to depend on.

So you see, we not only need to change our outdated economic system to make using hydrogen a lot easier, we need to do it so we can still use wind turbines at all.

THE OTHER KIND OF HYDRO POWER

This Company May Have Solved One Of The Hardest Problems In Clean Energy

12 diggs vox.com Long Reads

Hydrogen turns out to be something of an all-purpose element, a Swiss Army knife for energy. It's also really expensive to isolate — despite its natural abundance (in, you know, water).