The Donald faces The Brat.

Barack Obama is now reluctantly endorsing Kamala, and the left leaning elements of the press are firmly engaged in supporting her.  They still have to manage the convention, but I assume that, contentious or not, they will confirm her nomination as the Democratic candidate for president.  I assume that she will select one or another governor to be her Vice President.  The left leaning press is excited about her candidacy and the right leaning press is dismissive of it.  The polls indicate that the electorate is sufficiently split that she has an excellent chance of being elected.  (The emerging "brat" strategy is politically brilliant and is obviously attractive to a significant percentage of younger voters.)

As I watch all of this unfold, I am struck by the shallowness of the American voting public.  The two leading candidates are massively flawed to be sure, but the idea that we, you and I, are putting inadequate thinkers forward to lead us is my principal concern.  Trump's MAGA philosophy is just as inadequate as is Harris's naive brand of socialist wishful thinking.  Given the state of the world today, Trump is the lesser immediate danger, but the principal problem is that Harris's obvious limitations are blighting the need to embrace more concern for our fellow human.  If we are to prolong the human experiment, we need to have much more concern for people - inside our non-existent borders and outside - even if they do not see the world the same way that we do.  That is not a moral judgement.  It is the only practical alternative to nuclear obliteration.

I do not underestimate the difficulty in doing what needs to be done and fully understand that it may be beyond our abilities, but that does not change the situation and pretending that it does is foolhardy. 

Joining in other people's ignorance is obviously much easier.

 I see the current demonstrations in this country against Israel to be acceptable in principal, but disgusting in the form that they are taking.  I do not see Americans demonstrating against a government policy, I see foreigners and mindless American sympathizers vandalizing property and endangering American lives.  Were I in a position of authority, I would take much stronger action against any and all property damage, while simultaneously engaging in discussion of the issues stimulating the unrest.  Foreign students that are engaged in illegal activity would be expelled from their schools and from the country.

The issues underlying the struggle between Hamas and Israel are very real and far more complex than the vast majority of Americans understand and they have been intensified by millennia of killing.  Resolution of those issues will require superhuman efforts that may not be attainable, but very clearly will not take place through more killing.  It is right that Americans show an interest in the plight of people living outside of our imaginary borders, but it is not intelligent for Americans to resort to violence against one another because none of us have a viable solution to the underlying problems facing any group of foreigners.

It would be much better if we focused much harder on resolving our own differences.  A united America would be in a position to provide one heck of a lot more help to all peoples living on this increasingly overcrowded chunk of rock spinning in space, but then joining in other people's ignorance is obviously much easier.

It was bad enough when the choice was between Trump and Biden.

 It was bad enough when the choice was between Trump and Biden.  I thought that we had reached the nadir of our political life, but alas, I was wrong.  Half of us are now in the hilarious, embarrassing, ridiculous process of championing a person that was yesterday, repeat yesterday, a near universal laughing stock because half of us fear, hate, loath the orange-haired alternative.  I am disturbed by the choice that is emerging, but even more disturbed by the absence of a moral rudder in American society today.  We are fixated on the age of the fetus, our political allegiances, the price of gasoline and our precious feelings when outright war is ravaging humanity in far too many places in this shrinking world.  

War is a bad thing.  It is not a movie.  It wastes resources, kills and maims innocent people, destroys the infrastructure of civilization, and makes cooperation between people impossible.  Cowards attempt to avoid it with appeasement.  Blowhards relish it as a way to dominate others.  Virtually no one, today, attempts to find middle ground that all can accept and even fewer are willing to spend the resources necessary to ensure the military dominance that is the only proven way to eliminate war as an acceptable alternative to cooperation.  Right now, we are in the process of criticizing the Israelis for their persecution of the war against Hamas.  We claim it is killing too many civilians.  I note here, that, not all that long ago, we aggresively fire bombed German and Japanese cities in an admitted effort to encourage the citizenry to accept surrender.

Why?  Americans are good people.  A lot of them have read a lot of books.  Why are we such a stupid people?  I continue to believe that it is because we have constructed an imaginary world that, amazingly, we actually think that we live in.  If I am correct, the prospect is for us to continue to implode as the world deteriorates around us.  As specific disasters take center stage, we will attempt to ineffectually deal with them until one or the other "new" disaster emerges as being more immediate.  It can be argued that the world has always been such, but I suggest that there is an extremely important difference - nuclear weapons.  How do imperfect governments, once engaged in a shooting war, disengage before the use of nuclear weapons, and once those weapons are used, how does the other government avoid using them in retaliation?

Lest you think that nuclear weapons are too horrible to be used, please remember that the only country in human history to actually do so was us.  A people that thinks that Biden, Trump, Harris is acceptable national leadership is perfectly capable of believing that our nuclear weapon is better than "their" nuclear weapon.  

Wake up folks!  Please.

 President Biden has dropped out of the race.  What is going to happen now?  I have not got the faintest idea, but here is what I think some of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are trying to do.

Put Kamala up for failure as a candidate sooner rather than later and replace her with someone who has a better chance of beating The Donald, the challenge being to make the switch in time to organize a real electoral effort.  The question being "WHO?"  

My guess continues to be Michele Obama, with the understanding being that Barack would be just off stage right.

I'm not claiming that I have any specific information suggesting this.  It is based entirely on guesswork and there is absolutely no reason to believe that it would be easy to do, even if my hunch were to be correct.  I should also add that I would not see the development as being a good one for the country.  I remain a severe critic of the Obama years, not because Obama is a bad man, but rather because his policies are not good for the nation.

Why I stopped writing.

 A friend asked me why I stopped writing.  It is a question that I think about a lot.  I can easily argue that I need the time to address other, more immediate challenges, but, while true, that is clearly a cop out.  The more probable answer is that I have concluded that today's humans are incapable of rational thought, purposely blind to what is happening all around us, and the ultimate reason that the world is needlessly in such a mess.

Humanity 3.0

We are currently asking who was responsible for the breakdown in security that led to the near death of a prominent politician and the very real death of an innocent bystander? It is an appropriate question, but there are other, even more relevant questions, that remain unasked.  My guess is that we will eventually satisfy our curiosity with the chastisement and/or firing of one or another official and some pontification about how we need to cool down the political rhetoric, but we will not come close to addressing the more fundamental issue, because it is too difficult and frightening for most people to even conceive it's nature.

The Trump assassination attempt is far too rich in peripheral facts to encourage a deeper consideration of the conditions that generated it.  An amateur assassin brings his gun, his rangefinder, and a ladder to a building that the police were inside of, climbs to the roof, where he has a line of sight shot at the president, is seen with his weapon by multiple people in the crowd before he opens fire, cops are told about him before he starts shooting, one of them actually confronts him, and on and on...  The specifics are far too rich for anyone to think about the deeper problems that remain with us.

Lest anyone be confused, I am a supporter of all of the men and women involved in providing security to politicians and other prominent people.  They have a difficult and dangerous job.  In this particular case, it would appear that serious errors were made by people at all levels and I expect that the incident has attracted enough attention that punitive measures will be taken.  I am less optimistic that any thought will be directed at resolving the basic problem.

The fundamentals involved in the Trump shooting are exactly the same as those underlying Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and most if not all of the remaining horrendous stupidities that currently blight lives all over the world.  The only difference is scale.  Too many humans actually think that they can convince/coerce their fellow humans to live according to their set of rules, while simultaneously creating technology, so complex and powerful as to ensure that will never occur.  Back in the day, when weaponry was limited to what an individual could carry to the fight, our "reach" was sufficiently limited that we could pretty much ignore the danger to humanity as a whole.  Today, we have an imperfect, massively overcrowded world full of small minded humans possessing horrible weaponry that will almost certainly eventually destroy humanity as we know it today.  While I am curious as to what humanity 3.0 will look like, I am not at all desirous of experiencing it firsthand. 

We are different from "them" and loyal to "us."

 If you look at the world from the moon, you see too many people competing for too few resources.  If you look at the world from any country, you see the government struggling to maximize that country's share of whatever.  If you look at the world from the kitchen table you see people trying to maximize their family's share of whatever.  If you look at the world from the individual's point of view, you see him or her trying to maximize the quality of their own lives.  Everybody talks a good game, but greed is far too often the principal motivation and "intelligence" is the intellectual cloak that disguises greed as "principal."

Very few individuals anywhere in the world see the whole or anything close to it.  Each of us are the product of the sum of our experiences.  A poor black person living in an urban slum is a different thing than his or her white neighbor living in a wealthy suburb.  An ethnic Russian farmer living in Ukraine is a different thing than his ethnic relative from Siberia that is presently engaged in trying to kill him.  Yet, we all share the same cell structure in every single one of our body parts and we all have the same fundamental needs, desires, and feelings.  The most amazing thing about us is our need to be different from "them" while simultaneously insisting that we are loyal to "us."

I have been on earth longer than you have and I have figured things out, but you won't hear me because I am critical of us.  It has always been so, as long as I can remember.  No one has ever listened to me about anything, unless nobody else wanted the job.  Please don't misunderstand, I am not bitching about life, I am just trying to explain it.  Several times, in my time on earth, I have been asked to do things that nobody else wanted to do.  I had a modicum of success and was rewarded with more authority, but I was never ever listened to when I suggested any actions that were not consistent with the basics as outlined above.  I am sure that others have tried as well and it is obvious that we have all failed miserably.  Greed masked by "intelligence" wins every time.

I ask myself why I am so out of step with my neighbors and conclude that it is because our life experiences have been so radically different.  I have actually tried to feed and care for tens of thousands of people that were uprooted from their homes by my government's actions.  In one such situation they tried to kill me and in another they named their children after me.  Very few of my neighbors have those kinds of experiences in their backgrounds.  Most of my neighbors have never been intellectually outside of their place of birth.  They are good people all, but they have no idea what life is for most of our fellow humans in this world.  Because this situation is not going to change, I conclude that we will continue to destroy ourselves as we are mindlessly doing now.  

It is way too bad because, with all of our flaws, the America that our parents and grandparents created was, hands down, the best society that humans have ever created.  I find it ironic that our good intentions are such a huge part of the failure of our society.  Too many of us feel that we can legislate goodness into our neighbors, failing to understand the limitations of legislation and the inevitability of resistance to it.  My current pessimism stems from the fact that I do not see the needed epiphany on the horizon.  Instead, I see advances in technology making eventual nuclear war more probable and central control of the individual more likely.

People sometimes actually get mad at me for pointing all of this out and ask me what I would do about it.  I explain that I would start by reorienting society away from liberal idealism back toward conservative practicality, but this immediately alienates half of my audience.  I lose the other half when I try to explain that we must, repeat must, help all humans live a better life if we are to continue to live one ourselves.  Back in the day, I was asked to man an outpost in Viet Nam because my bosses knew that they were going to abandon Viet Nam.  It was a backhanded compliment which I saw as duty.  I understand that no one is going to ask me to save humanity from ourselves and, at my age, I have little option but to accept the facts of life, but I confess that it galls me no end and proves to me that humans are a stupid breed of animal.  The irony is that we call all other animals dumb because they are do not possess our brand of stupidity, but ours is the brand that will kill a lot of us and destroy our current societal structure with absolutely no insurance that the next form of society will be any better.