North Korea is very dangerous, unfinished business.

 I see North Korea as being very dangerous, unfinished business, because of our decision to accept a draw in the Korean War, back in 1953.  The current government in Pyong Yang is a direct successor to the government that controlled that state more than half a century ago and it is a staunch enemy of everything that this country stands for.  I do not here intend to try to refight the Korean War, but I regard our decision to accept a truce as being very unfortunate, even though it probably saved my life.  Today, Pyongyang is cooperating with Moscow in fighting the war in Ukraine, and, as a reward, is receiving assistance in developing its nuclear capability.  A capability that is aimed at this country.

North Korean troops in Ukraine are a serious escalation of that ridiculous conflict, but the most dangerous part of it, in my mind, is the payback that Pyongyang is receiving from Russia because it threatens the American heartland.  The Kim family is dedicated to redressing the division of Korea into two nation states and it is willing to go to war to achieve reunification of the Korean peninsula under Pyongyang’s control.  Americans alive today do not remember how bad the Korean War was, but over two million people died in it and nearly half a million Chinese were among the dead and wounded.  Beijing is very definitely part of the Korean enigma and the problem is metastasizing as Teheran joins the anti-American axis that is emerging.  Here, in this country, the Biden/Harris Administration basically ignores the issue, while Trump seeks to address it by restoring the American military’s waning capability to defend against it.

Given the Hobson choice between Trump and Harris, I obviously choose Trump, but I also believe that this country has to move well beyond the shortsighted Trump doctrine of America First.  I accept that we must maintain a military capability that is superior to any other on earth, but I do not believe that a strong military is, by itself, adequate to defend ourselves from some idiot, like one of the Kim family, deciding to use nuclear weapons.  Mutual deterrence is all fine and good as long as the various potential contenders are rational.  I suggest that there are far too many flash points around the globe that involve unstable leaders with their fingers on buttons that lead directly to nuclear war.  Some of them are even apocalyptic in their thinking and might well see nuclear war as being necessary to cleanse the earth.  Were I in a position to influence policy, I would reestablish military dominance and simultaneously initiate economic policies that expressed more real concern for the standard of living of all humans.

I am jaundiced enough to believe that you and I are too shortsighted to do the necessary, and I see that as being stupid.  My fellow American's refuse to accept that we are stupid, so we will eventually slide into another conflict and this time it might very well involve a nuclear exchange that changes the world under our feet and the air that we breath.  At that point in time, the sign on the bathroom door probably won't seem as important as it does now.

Garbage, politics and nuclear war..

An unknown comic at a Trump campaign event made an unsuccessful attempt at humor that insulted a large group of potential voters.  The president of the United States then used that comment to insult another large group of voters.  Many of these voters will permit this type of rhetoric to influence their votes.  I am critical of the joke as being in poor taste and extremely unfunny, but I do not see its relevance to the war in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, or Burkina Faso, let alone the gang violence that is growing in our cities, or the size of our national debt, or a gazillion other things.  I am more critical of a vote cast because of it, than I am of it.

You and I are living in dangerous times, but the threat that we face has virtually nothing to do with sanitation on a nearby island, or an unsuccessful joke by an unknown, wannabe comic.  I argue that you and I should be more concerned with some of the other problems that are out there.  I also suggest that we should be actively discussing what to do about each of them, rather than spending all of our time trying to prove that none of them are our fault.  We desperately want to believe that we are right about whatever, and we focus all of our energy toward that goal, leaving very little, if any, energy for the real issues that threaten us.

I oversimplify when I call it wishful thinking, but whatever it is, it is going to kill us.  In times past, it inconvenienced previous generations and led to industrialized warfare that killed lots of people.  Today, it will eventually, once again, trigger war, but this time, the conflict will include nuclear weapons and that will change the chemistry of the air that we breathe and the fertility of the dirt under our feet.  Potatoes will be impacted adversely and that will significantly change life as we know it now.  Sanitation will be a problem, not for an island off the east coast of America, but for humanity in general.  The garbage will not just be unhealthy, it will be toxic.

Bitcoin and Nuclear War

 I, quite frankly, do not understand Bitcoin, or anything associated with it, but I wish that I did.  If I were a youngster today, I would make a sincere effort to get my head around it, in as much as it seems to be growing in importance both inside this country and out in the rest of the world as well.   Putin is talking about using the principals underlying Bitcoin in his effort to replace the dominance of the US dollar in international trade and people like Elon Musk are taking it seriously.  All of this, while this country continues to spend more than we are making - no matter which political party dominates the halls of power in Washington DC.  The American people are on a sugar high that is, at some point, going to crash our economy.  Individual politicians milk the situation to get political power over the rest of us, but, today, none of them even begin to address the imbalance between the world’s resources and mouths.  I admittedly do not know, but I suspect that Bitcoin is nothing more than another charade designed to cope with this failure on our part.

As I look out into the world around us, I see entirely too much conflict.  Conflict that adversely impacts the economies of the countries directly involved, but even more importantly, the international economy.  At some point we, you and I, will wake to the relationship of the world’s standard of living to our own lives, but I fear that it will be too late to successfully address the problem.  Very unfortunately,  leaders like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jin Peng, Vladimir Putin, and soon the Ayatollah, all have nuclear weapons and the delivery capability to destroy the ability of the earth to feed the number of people currently clinging to it.  Instead of thinking about all of this as we select our own leadership, we continue to permit our precious feelings to dominate our actions.  Neither political party speaks to the fundamental problem that faces humanity.  Instead, we quarrel mindlessly about the age of the fetus, the price of gasoline, the sign on the bathroom door, and our precious feelings.  Our focus on the relationship of carbon dioxide and climate change is illustrative of the same stupidity.  We have figured out that there is a relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth, but we fail to think about the fundsmental relationship of population size and carbon production.

The problems that face humanity are humungous, but that does not change the need to address them.  Never will “leaders” start thinking about them if the people that gave them the leadership role do not start thinking about them.  People in the aggregate may well be too self-centered to make that intellectual leap.  If my pessimism is warranted, the difference between Harris and Trump is of temporary import.  Harris expedites, while Trump merely delays the next chapter in the devolution of humanity.  I choose to vote for Trump, but I recognize that it will not solve the long term problem facing us.  In order to do that, you and I are going to have to start thinking more deeply than we are now. My pessimistic derives from the fact that I see no evidence that we intend to do that.

One of the principal reasons why I voted for Donald Trump.

 I am not in a position to comment usefully on the current state of the war in Ukraine.  Too far away, too little information.  Having said that, I find news reports about Zelensky’s “Peace Plan” to be interesting.  As I understand it, a precursor to negotiations to end the war would be a good faith agreement between Russia and Ukraine to stop all attacks on their respective energy systems.  His plan also includes early Ukrainian membership in NATO.  I suggest that this reflects his understanding that Ukraine can not, by itself, defeat Russia and is looking for Western Europe and the United States to stop the fighting.  I presume that he is also increasing his tactical effort to get the munitions necessary to significantly increase the pressure on the Russian heartland.  My guess is that all of this is fundamentally encouraging to Putin, in that it implies that his campaign is succeeding, in as much as the Biden Administration and Western Europe are unwilling to provide the level of support necessary to hurt Russia enough to force Putin to agree.

Now, we have United Nations Secretary General Guterres attending Putin’s BRICKS meeting, where he is being accused of ignoring the Russian dictator’s various transgressions.  I am not a fan of Guterres, but I see this criticism as being off the mark.  I suggest that the UN Secretary General, by the definition of his position, has to talk to all nations that are members of the organization.  I argue that talking to each other is better than shooting at each other and I would encourage more substantive talking and less mindless shooting.  The problem being that bad people choose to try to use force whenever they sense weakness and talking instead of shooting is frequently interpreted as weakness.  Putin has spent his entire life correctly calculating the amount of force that he can use before his antagonist resists militarily.  The success of his Crimea adventure led directly to his effort to capture Kiev.  I believe that he might well have succeeded had his army not let him down by running out of gas on the drive to the Ukrainian capital.  Biden’s bungling of the situation has given us the current mess, but Obama’s acceptance of Crimea was the fundamental precursor mistake.

Whatever the reasons, the fighting in Ukraine is not only destroying that country’s infrastructure and killing far too many Russians and Ukrainians, it is also adversely impacting the economy of the world and raising the possibility of a nuclear exchange that very well could eventually (minutes) include us.  While I don’t mind Guterres talking to Putin and Xi at their BRICKS meeting, I also do not have the least reason to expect anything to come of it.  Guterres and the current UN are irrelevant in the real world.  So is Zelensky.  The only way that the argument in Ukraine between Moscow and Kiev is going to be temporarily settled is when Zelensky and Putin sit down (figuratively) at the negotiating table.  The only entity that can force that to happen is Washington DC.  The only national level politician that is arguing for that to happen is Donald Trump.  It is one of the reasons that I voted for him.  Those of my fellow Americans that are trying to elect another figure head president are making a tactical mistake that will ensure that we remain on the present inadequate political trajectory.

PS:  Electing Trump is not an ideal solution to our current political imbroglio.  It is merely the least bad alternative.  We will still have a mountain of work to do, but that is better, by far, than the alternative before us at the present time.  I am pessimistic that we will, in fact, do the work necessary, but I still want to continue to try.

I find social media to be extremely educational.

 I find social media to be extremely educational.  Millions of people sharing their innermost thoughts with the world in an increasingly carefully curated medium.  Each social media channel is dominated by “influencers” that generally reflect one side or the other of the national argument that passes for social discourse.  The level of intelligence embodied in the content on both left and right is abysmal and the degree to which contrarian voices are silenced is astounding.  “Free speech” is but one of the casualties.  Equally important is the dumbing down of America and the growth of mob mentalities.  Not only do we not think issues through, we do not even articulate our own disagreement with our neighbor, preferring instead to copy a meme generated by a lonely soul living in their parent’s basement or a more sophisticated political operative busily supporting one or another cause.

I am increasingly fascinated by the subtle nature and growing effectiveness of the control mechanisms governing social media and the extent to which the public participates in enforcing political bias.  Social media channels rely not only on artificial intelligence, but, to a great extent, also on the public, to identify contrarian views.  Their response is not to argue points of disagreement, but rather to silence opposition voices.  The vast majority of the populace today, ducks their heads and tunes in to the social media channel that best represents their own”thinking.”  Perfectly nice people post obnoxious material that illustrates their own shallowness, and they do it with great glee.  When challenged on this point, they respond with anger and childish rebuttal.  Never are issues intelligently debated in social media channels.  The public reaction is to blame the social media channel, but, in my mind, the real culprits are you and me for engaging in this childish stupidity.

The extent to which this phenomenon is impacting our society never ceases to amaze and discourage me.  I am an ardent photographer and I believe that beauty in nature can be an antidote to social malaise.  I try to share my photography as widely as possible, asking nothing in return.  I am proud to say that my photography is favorably regarded by most, but, very recently, I have been asked to not share it on certain social media channels, because it was not representative of the geographic limits associated with that particular channel.  I confess that my critics did indeed grasp one of my objectives and that was to try to broaden the geographic confines of our thinking.  As I see it “us” and “them” is a very serious fault line in our society.  If people living a few miles apart choose to draw imaginary lines that separate them from each other, how, in the world, can people living on opposite sides of the planet avoid conflict?

I confess that I find all of this very discouraging.  We are constantly bemoaning the evil nature of “them” without understanding that you and I are not only "us", but are also, actually “them.”  I well understand that we can not admit that and conclude that we are hell bent on destroying ourselves without accepting that deep down inside we understand it.  We focus instead on subjects that we can get our inadequate minds around:  the age of the fetus, the price of gasoline, the sign on the bathroom door, our precious feelings, and the boundaries around our community.  The Brat and The Donald are not what is going to destroy us.  We will do that ourselves by walling ourselves off from each other and repeating whatever stupidity, our “leaders” script for us.

BRICKS has unveiled its new payment system.

 I read today in the various make-believe rags that claim to be news organizations that BRICKS has unveiled its new payment system which is designed to replace the dollar in international trading.  The various "news" articles have varying degrees of explanation as to how it is supposed to work, but I confess to be unable to understand it and note that it apparently depends to some extent on principals that are inherent in cryptocurrency, another subject that I find mysterious.  I am much more comfortable with the more traditional form of currency, even as I admit to not understanding much, if anything, connected to “high finance.”  I do understand that poorer countries sought shelter in the stability of the dollar in years past and are today fleeing the dollar because we are unable to maintain its value, but I fail to understand the new form of money that is emerging.

I posit that “high finance” is but one more subject that average citizenry is not going to understand, and I wonder how much of our world can be a mystery to us while we expect democracy to be a viable form of government.  Whether we like it or not, international trade is already a major determinant in the way in which we live our lives and the quality of those lives.  This time around, we are extremely interested in whether Kamala or The Donald will give us a better economic future, but how many of us understand economics well enough to make that judgement intelligently, particularly when the candidates are telling us what they think the majority of us want to hear?  I hold that the average citizen does not even try to understand the issues being oversimplified in the various candidates proclamations, let alone understanding the international implications of any of it.  What will tariffs on Mexican car manufacturers do to political stability in our neighboring country, how will that impact the cross border drug trade, and what will that mean with regard to the battle against crime in the non-existent ghettos that are emerging in our once beautiful cities.

Put eleven people on a raft in the middle of the ocean and lines between authoritarianism and democracy are very easy to comprehend.  Add more people on the same size raft, in the middle of the same size ocean, and you have a much more complicated set of issues.  Now put a computer on the raft and let two people learn how to use it.  I hold that those two people will eventually learn how to use the computer to influence decision-making on the raft.  Cryptocurrency is but one of the incomprehensible computer based concepts that are increasingly shaping our lives and the average citizen in this country is blinking and looking away.  Now look at the type of individual that is allied with these concepts, and I argue that you are beginning to understand the changes that are occurring in our society.  The new elites are a different breed of human than ruled the world in medieval times and the ways in which they interrelate are far more complex.  My guess is that we will eventually destroy ourselves, but, until that happens, we will continue to drift away from the concepts that united us when I was put on the raft.  

My problem is deciding how I want to cope with the situation.  I long ago decided to join the commuter revolution and, in the beginning, tried to become part of it.  At first, I had a modicum of success, but the complexity of that world developed faster than I could keep up, and today I struggle with machines and technology that I do not sufficiently understand.  My personal advantages in the competition that is life are all firmly based in my life experiences, but the challenges that increasingly determine success and failure are rooted in what I see as the imaginary world of the computer.  Life is phasing me out.  In my youth, I paid 25 cents on Saturday afternoon to sit in s dark room and watch John Wayne take the West away from the Indians that lived here, and I paid five cents for my delicious Snickers candy bar.  I "earned" that 30 cents by taking the garbage out after dinner and keeping my clothes picked up in my room.  Today. the kid down the block has his nose in his thousand dollar phone watching beautiful people do impossible things 24 hours a day, while sucking on his drug of choice which originated in some far off place that he has never heard of and cares not about, paying for it with this parent’s credit card.

Life is different, and, whether I like it or not, it is going to get increasingly different, at a faster and faster pace, in large part, at least, because of the computer.  You and I are in a race to keep up, and, in my opinion, we are not doing a very good job of it.  I see The Donald as an effort to put the brakes on, and The Brat as being eager to rush forward into the imaginary digital future.  I am more comfortable with the former, and while I see the fragility of basing our future on Kamala’s vague mishmash of wishful thinking, I also see the reality of the need to accommodate to the computerization of decision-making.  I sincerely hope that we manage to do it before one of us pushes the nuclear button, even though that may be the only realistic way to change the stupid trajectory that we are on.

The role of the United Nations in Gaza.

 The role of the United Nations in Gaza is, understandably, a subject of considerable discussion presently.  There is considerable evidence that members of the various United Nations entities operating in Gaza are sympathetic to Hamas and are actually cooperating in the struggle against Israel.  I do not have any way to confirm or deny these charges, but I find them to be very credible.   I can not imagine an organization that depends on local employees in a situation, such as exists in Gaza today, to be anything other than sympathetic to Hamas.  Any Palestinian that is not would be inviting retribution, if not death, even if they were for some reason, or another, opposed to Hamas.  My guess is that virtually the entire population of Gaza is, in fact, dedicated, heart and soul, to the fight against Israeli “occupation.”  Trying to find a citizen of Gaza that does not know where the local tunnel exits are would be a fool’s errand and a healthy percentage of the citizenry almost certainly helped construct the Hamas labyrinth beneath the city and today participates in hiding entrances and exits.  Harboring a local command center or arms depot in your second bedroom is almost certainly a matter of considerable prestige in the local society.  What has to be understood is that the people living in Gaza do not like Israel.  Whether they should or not is immaterial to the real-politic situation on the ground and we should not be confused about the matter, just as we should not be surprised that their sons and daughters that have come to this country for schooling feel the exact same way.

I repeat what I have said in earlier articles, I support Israel, but I am not blind to the challenges facing the Arab population concentrated in Gaza, and I do not believe that a solution can be found to the “Palestinian Problem” that does not provide a significantly better life for the Arab populace.  This does not mean that I condone the inhumane stupidity represented by the events of October 7.  Quite the contrary, I see that stupidity as being part of a larger problem and that is Shia Islam’s internecine war with Sunni Islam.  Specifically, Teheran was concerned that Jerusalem and Riyadh were about to significantly improve their relationship to the detriment of Shia interests in the region.  The killing in Gaza is, in fact, a side show in a much, much more important struggle that is poorly understood in this country.  I don’t pretend to understand it either, but I see it clearly and firmly believe that it transitions into the various manifestations of Radical Islam that are largely being ignored by the entire Western world including you and me.  The Gaza microcosm should be seen as a precursor to a much more difficult battle between the Western world and Radical Islam as represented today by the likes of Al Qaida and ISIS.  

I do not claim to be smart enough to suggest the best way forward, but I do not believe that our current approach to Radical Islam is sufficient, and I see Jerusalem’s current effort against Hamas and Hezbollah as being nothing more than a significantly ratcheted up version of our own “Over-the_Horizon” assassination of individual leaders that we don’t like.  There is no question but that sometimes it is necessary to kill an enemy, but anybody that believes that, by itself, it leads to anything other than retribution has not read very much real history, preferring instead fiction dressed in the current set of patriotic colors.  All of this is. as it always has been, but there is a significant difference that we are blithely ignoring - the invention of satellite guided ballistic missiles tipped with multiple, independently guided nuclear war heads.  That conflict, when it comes, is going to make a profound change in the way we humans live.  It will be even more important than all of the things we are quibbling about today - gas prices, the age of the fetus, the sign on the bathroom door, and our precious feelings.