Aren't the 1% ad hoc suzerains

 An empire usually has foreign colonies historically speaking and the United States has none. Except for a brief 20 year period when the United States had the Philippines as a colony as a result of the Spanish-American war, before it gave that nation independence. The U.S.A. never did have colonies nor an emperor or imperial government. The original 13 colonies were of course part of the British Empire before the revolution. Today the U.S.A. has a few territories populated by citizens of the U.S.A. in addition to 50 states that became part of the union voluntarily at some point. Puerto Rico is an example; they could petition Congress to become a state yet appear satisfied to be a territory.

There is a plain difference concerning empires and nations historically easy to discern. Britain and Rome had empires as did the Soviet Union in some respects with Warsaw Pact nations taken during the war against the Nazis, yet that definition is debatable. The trouble with morphing historical terms is that they become meaningless in respect to their original sense and one may conflate completely different forms within one form mistakenly. It is as if contemporary history analyst recognize only several ancient forms of government and try to fit new forms into old categories lacking the will to create a new definition for themselves.

Some people like to call the United States an empire because it has a lot of wealth and foreign troops stationed abroad to bring or keep the peace, and one might regard the 1% as an aristocracy, yet technically the United States isn’t an empire so much as a corporatist entity with plutocratic suzerainty that evolved from a national democracy. In this paradigm I would say the 1% act toward the 99% in their own country as suzerains.

Environment and Recession

 The world environment is in long-term decline from over-use and abuse. If an economy was ecologically sustainable and well designed to let people work without harming the ecosphere recession would not be a factor in regard to the environment. With the present economic structure that plunders the ecosphere, displaces and edges it toward extirpation the ecosphere declines during recession and expansion.

During recession or depression poverty may move people toward exploiting anything of value from Saguaro cactus to desert turtles and bear livers to earn something. Enforcement of endangered species laws may stop as funding decreases. etc.

During the Covid 19 recession the San Francisco peninsula did not bounce back with an old growth Redwood or Sequoia forest appearing to bump out the buildings and asphalt.

Tracking Amazon Deforestation from Above

How would an agrarian nation do today

 One has a few variable parameters such as ‘country’, ‘agrarian’ and ‘survive’ that would allow a hypothetical construction of numerous models including futuristic ones with hyper-modern agriculture- perhaps indoors. One might have an altered demographic or political constituency that would influence the standard of living.

If a modern nation was exceptionally productive it might dominate global food sales and create a surfeit of very cheap commodities for human consumption that would keep its people alive- surviving and thriving. It is difficult to say. Traditional agrarian cultures certainly have a hard time of things these days though for it implies a lack of advance, education and the ability to afford defense weapons that are quite costly.

Concerning the Return of Normalcy

 Millions of Americans not wearing somewhat ineffective masks and Covid 19 reduced to near non-existence would be elements of normality. I suppose there are already millions of Americans not wearing masks who have ignored the admonition to mask up and that too is normal.

One of the Kardashians has filed for divorce from the singer Kanye West and the nation may never return to normal after that. I saw a headline about it and maybe will discover who those people are some day and learn why they are so important. It can never be reasonable said that divorce is normal.

Mr. West apparently said something to the effect that after 400 years of slavery that condition had become normal or not-resisted well enough and that was a non-liberal sounding sort of thing to say unacceptable to Californians or others waiting for 100 million dollars in the Covid 19 relief bill to pay for something concerning the Bay Area Rapid Transit system also known as Black Bart. In my opinion any sort of mass transit system that runs of electricity is probably worth investing in especially if it has Covid 19 detectors and auto sampling needles that extract blood from each passengers entering a ‘train’ for rapid D.N.A. sequencing to determine if they have enough Neanderthal genes to be considered Republicans.

If the Los Angeles Lakers do not win another N.B.A. title the nation will have small chance of being considered normal. The Lakers need win dathe next three years for even a semblance of normality to emerge from the chthonic pathos of the Covid 19 era.

I think Democrats tend to feel normality is godless atheism running to transformation of Star Fleet headquarters in S..F. to evolve a Judy Garland world that might freely be renamed Fruity Rapid Interplanetary transit to paradise on the planet Bezos formerly known as Mars with all of the wealth in 1% of the people who are politicians and CEOS and lawyers with liberty and justice for-themselves.

In a renormalized U.S.A. the rich will keep getting richer in spite of the pandemic being over and Americans will climb over themselves to blow smoke up the bare backsides of the rich agitating for low tax rates and labeling any suggestion to the contrary as socialism. Socialists will believe they aren’t merging with corporatism and Obamacare will be believed in error once again to be a practical system that covers the poorest citizens comprehensively even if they need be homeless and move seasonally to moderate temperatures.

A bill or executive action will be made that will restore to ecospheric health one acre of prime Florida swamp land and guarantee a cleaner atmosphere without so much CO2 in the year 2739. Illegal aliens will be made citizens in order to get the fair $15 minimum wage and older poor Americans won’t be able to find any sort of work to supplement their retirement check that won’t pay for housing.

The U.S. can focus again upon Russian encroachment on historically Russian lands as a threat to Europe and reason why their need be a new, queer military division to combat global warming with automatic, shoulder fired nuclear neutron bullets. The public debt will increase temporarily for a trillion or two a year until 2028 by which time the federal budget will be balanced and the 1% have converted their U.S. dollars to bitcoin- and all of that will happen by the end of 2021 or 2 at the same time as student loan debt is written off and college education becomes free.

Why the Hong Kong Human Rights Act

 The Chinese government apparently has violated agreements made with Britain concerning the transition of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule. Those violations concern the end of freedom for the people of Hong Kong insofar as freedom is found within self-government of Democratic forms of government rather than authoritarian rule and Chinese authorities are ending several basic planks of democracy in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong | Human Rights Watch

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3289

Arresting pro-democracy demonstrators and holding them indefinitely as well as exporting them to distant Chinese jurisdictions for adjudication are a couple of items people regard as human rights violations. That is, government with the consent of the government and trial by a jury of peers, habeas corpus etc. are necessary for a free people to feel free with the best government so many people can use to remain as free as possible.

The Chinese government has a tradition of crushing human rights these days in order to further communist rule that is of course also liberalizing business to a certain extent. The west is partly at fault for building up the Chinese economy with technology transfers and financial investment that swells Chinese military spending and the aggressiveness of Chinese politicians seeking to expand their power peripherally so far as they can. Hong Kong is something of an innocent bystander being run over by growing Chinese economic power and neo-authoritarianism that isn’t looking far enough beyond purely materially and atheistic ideologies to find a greater spiritual foundation of freedom for its people that might be a good influence on decaying western moral norms as well as its own.

Sometimes a government must intervene in a free market

Governments sometimes need to intervene in free markets in order to keep them free from the collusion of super-rich playground bullies and basic hogs of domination that would tilt the field toward themselves. Hogs don’t care about social progress nearly as much as personal power and total control of money (the root of all {or much} evil). Networks of colluding rich people may form planetary plutocracies that are as unchanging and repressive as that of pyramid building cultures of the Old kingdom of ancient Egypt. Anti-monopoly defenses need to be upgraded continuously or all of a nation’s wealth becomes concentrated in 1% of the people. The marketplace of ideas perishes as an establishment of evil wealth makes sure that politics is controlled and massaged to reinforce the domination of the establishment.

Ideas are repressed and political opposition is labeled ‘extremist’. Currencies become encrypted in electronic data bits and bytes interpretable just by the richest traders swimming about like dark-web sharks in dark pools that have never seen the light of day.

Corrupt private interests with vast wealth may corrupt public interests and ossify social structures and influence economic evolution globally to reinforce their concentration of wealth and power rather than the public good. Millions of insider lackeys may work as sycophantic ideologues to help repress intelligent thought in return for biscuits of prosperity. Environmental decay may develop and the migration of billions of cheap labor workers may ensue to help undermine national political resistance to global plutocratic power or increases of minimum wages.

Free markets may benefit from rules changes that reflect the real economic failures of the day such as the degrading world ecosphere exploited by inherited business relationships that consider environmental harm as an externality to the pursuit of private capital increase. Capitalism may need modernizing upgrades to keep it competitive rather than concentrated. Limits on the size of corporate employment or number of corporations any individual can invest in might be developed to promote competition rather than inertia temporal control.

Economic infrastructure may be mal-adapted to the environmental and demographic challenges of a given era. Governments with intelligent leadership (yes perhaps improbable) can set parameters within which free enterprise can compete, and remain out of the business themselves. Governments can intervene to bail out the rich with quantitative easing and dump them the capacity to loan out an in effect mint their own e-dollars strictly in conformity to the marginal reserve rate of 10% and thus get 16 trillion times 9 dollars free without work and thus buy a free market. Since 2008 the U.S. government has helped via the Federal Reserve to let the rich own the free market- and that is an example of the wrong way to manage things. Governments can also do things the right way an set parameters that would encourage environmental sustainability in harmony with a low entropy economic model that supports all citizens to have the most opportunity for intellectual productivity they can attain without financial limits subverting their course of higher education. A surfeit of well-educated people is better than a paucity.

Plutocrats and Cryptocurrency working against Democracy?

 The U.S.A. might consider installing democracy in the United States before going off half-cocked considering foreign subversion. In a sense the American experiment in democracy has ended with corporatism and people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and other plutocrats being the victors.

People can still believe the U.S.A. is a democracy with social media and broadcast networks owned by the rich that brainwash the public about whatever they want declaring undesirable content that opposes their wealth and new world order ‘extremist’. When blockchain cryptocurrency will replace the dollar so rich people can have encrypted financial trades electronically in dark pools globally hidden from local governments and their tax bases and the rich live on Mars or some other above it all places some folks might still be attacking Russian efforts to develop capitalism themselves or Chinese efforts to join global plutocrats half-way in capitalism.

With the recent Covid 19 death total reaching nearly a half-million in the United States the Biden administration is seeking to replace those older, expensive dead people with cheaper live Mexican workers on a pathway to citizenship. The U.S. capitol with its tall barbed wire fence is better defended from U.S. citizens than the U.S./Meschica border is from illegal non-citizens. Democracy at work; Nahuatal will become the primary language taught in schools.

What people want for evidence of God

 People are sometimes confused about reality and language in regard to naming points of cosmology, metaphysics, theology and so forth; they have expectations about God and how He should be and expect categories of ‘evidence (things evident) to appear to them. Generally they have no training in formal logic nor in epistemology and would like a McGod’s to be on the corner with golden arches to offer bite-sized and tasty evidence to them for a reasonable price. With such great expectations they are disappointed to find that franchise missing.

It is as if a waiter is absent from the table in a French cafe’ described by Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Some even believe the waiter needs to be God serving them up information, or that the waiter should have proof that he is God-like if he is Christian having developed a Christ-like character through faith.

There are some troubles with the paradigm of faith and pre-destination that make it difficult for those without any evident relationship in or faith concerning God to see any evident artifact of God as if he left dinosaur fossils about the landscape if they just dig a little deeper. One cannot see the origin of the Higgs field so one has no certainty regarding its extent or if it was created or not by God even indirectly. It is as if every bit of the cosmos that exists even theoretically has just a middle and no beginning or end that is evident…nothing more than faith that it isn’t just a hologram or a deception by a wise-guy super-physicist playing with the sentient beings inhabiting a Universe he whipped up.

A thickening plot like a thickening of massless particles encountering the Higgs field to slow down and become mass so a contingent field of mass locked in a steady condition of particles can exist phenomenally brings us to the problem of finding evidence for and evidence against a creator of the entire uncertain phenomenal field and one-dimensional points that maybe were an uneven or fluctuating dimension of a vacuum between -1 and +1 with absolute zero energy lacking energy to stay balanced.

It is as if the plot of infinite series of quantum points fluctuating between all possible locations in an infinite number of theoretical dimensions was just a figment of the imagination of a lizard sunning itself on a rock rather than God who could set values to agitation and quantum jitters thinking about it. Some people just demand answers they cannot get reading the Bible and natural history and considering how an eternal God might have described some of his work to rather primitive people that believe they are terribly smart at any given time since they climbed down from the trees, or at least their ancestors did.

A plot with evidence for vs evidence against requires a start- an argument maybe stimulated by Darwin’s Origin of Species set with proximal causes and pieces of proofs concerning model universe and the philosophy of logic showing that the beginning and end of time are just arbitrary places to start in the temporal middle of nowhere theoretically speaking, with the relativity of space-time in the combined Higgs field phenomenality of sub-luminal quarks and forces of gravity and massless particles set above and apart from mass being apparent primary- secondary effects of an unknown primary sponsor or agent of the Higgs sub-light show.

If the Bible is a process of understanding and correlating knowledge, those without evidence lack the content wherein with faith they might discover evidence or at least understanding meaning in a deeper sense. It does save time though to make summary though error prone judgments about things. It may be that those that were pre-determined to salvation encounter evidence and those that weren’t, don’t. It might be necessary to think on such things for a while to develop an informed opinion, yet McDonald’s calls.

Thickened Higgs field interactive content, stellar synthesis, melted and cooled magma- some expect to find evidence of God in such structures like clever little message written with advanced theoretical physics tools on the spin-states of sub-atomic particles, or maybe on clay tablets from an alien civilization that encounter God with faster-than-light starships that made it through to an alternate universe. I think that if one considers the Bible deeply one can not only form a good opinion on eschatology so they know the difference between pre-millennialism, post-millennialism and amillennialism, they can form better ideas about the creation in the scriptural paradigm in regard to all times and periods of human knowledge so people of each era might understand it, and that God created the Universe. Whatever mankind finds that is true about cosmology, it is not in contradiction with the information imparted in Genesis. Natural history is not in conflict with scripture, it confirms it paradigmatically. God has not set any sort of deceits between the natural history of the Universe and the content of Genesis. The problem is in human understanding of either.

One can get beyond Pascal’s wager or James’ pragmatic reasons for belief and know that anything that exists does have at least half a chance of being created by someone.

I wrote an ebook that is free to download that has some of my efforts to clarify the topic. It was put together some years ago, before the Higgs field knowledge became familiar, and there are always new things to learn about Biblical, archaeological and natural history that should go into another edition.

God, Cosmology and Nothingness-( Lulu)

The cabin was silent (poem)

 

The cabin was silent
like the world below sparse trees
striving for growth
something future

  Day escaped from shadows
captured night like a fugitive from never
being anything more than illusion
ocean sloshed prime reality

  Olding human being
looking about at chains of mortality
so everything changes the neighborhood
with noise of creative destruction

  Flesh multiplying itself in forms
mathematically structured processes
flowing complex answers
without question

Ever disappears into possibility
objectivity may then regard circumstance
chords of being
silenting away.

Karl Marx; philosopher or sociologist?

 Marx studied philosophy- especially Hegelianism like so many others in his era (as well as law) before setting out on his life’s work. Primarily Marx contributed to sociological analysis at which he was quite good, and not so much so at metaphysics or designing an ideal economic system.

German idealism of the 19th century had influences from Hegel and romantics that discounted ordinary social structures and instead felt themselves a little above the worldview and rote, somnolent lives of the masses of society. Nietzsche was one of those, yet so were so many others, and they were influenced by Darwinism, prominent atheists (i.e. Feurbach) and anarchists (i.e. Kropotkin). Marx was a Jewish intellectual and Jews of 19th century Europe had been victimized by pogroms and so forth going all the way back to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 a.d. when a million were killed and the remainder scattered in exile (diaspora), hence Jews sough a Jewish homeland- so even in Europe, and were revolutionary catalysts in Germany, Russia and elsewhere. Some of the Jewish intellectuals of the day were atheists- like Marx, who had no regard for the Christian religion of the nations in which they had sometimes been unwelcome. Marx had many influences that drove him toward adapting atheism, Hegelianist dialectics and Zionism into a fusion that definitely met the criterion of social philosophy. Marx formalized the first modern state theory of communist economics.

Adam Smith had published the Wealth of Nations (Capitalism) about 1775 so Marx’s Das Kapital was something of an ungrade to that economic tour de force as well as a revision. Marx’s great sociological ability was found in his analysis of the British economic and social structure of the time that described the plight and problems of the poor pushed off rural farm jobs and into cities where they were exploited and labored long hours in factories. He was correct in finding some of the downsides to capitalism that were far less than ideal from the viewpoint of workers not profiting from the system. Generally he was pretty far off at inventing a practical economic alternative to capitalism- it was early in the development of sociology and economics and Marx had to rely on his own ideas in those fields for modern and futurist synthesis and that wasn’t sufficient to create a practical theory of ideal economics for his era or any other.

Karl Marx discounted Hegel’s spiritual dialectic and transformed it entirely in to materialistic economic evolution with clash and counter-clash or thesis-antithesis (as he wrote). As an atheist metaphysics with spirit were rubbish to Karl Marx, so he killed the Hegelian spirit and like Frankenstein made a monster from the corpse that walked the Earth during the 20th century primarily.

Free enterprise is the kernel that brings life to economic progress- not top-down bureaucratic management. Corporatism can oppress free enterprise as readily as communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Writing with the Socratic irony that Kierkeguaard found to be an implicit aspect of society in that it does move along unthinking philosophically about what or why social structures are the way they are, a modern economic philosopher might have a reason to experiment with myriad political economic models packaged in a variety of ways in order to fuse progress into the current ecologically devastating state of the world economy that over-concentrates wealth, leaves a large percent of poverty at the base and does not support the maximum intellectual development of all of mankind to the real limit of their abilities.

Maybe the bottom 25% of society could have socialism and the upper 75% capitalism; with the rich obligated to provide free education through graduate school, enough money for free health care, dental and living they would be motivated to employ and promote the poor out of poverty to reduce their tax payments. Perhaps capitalism should have limited corporate size in order to promote competition and business should have tax incentives for being less entropy causing to promote ecological sustainability. There should be an infinite number of economic packages in limitless forms to model that would be improvements on the present system.