Vote Trump

<blockquote class=”twitter-video” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Stop hating on Trump &amp; wake up. <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpIsWithYou?src=hash”>#TrumpIsWithYou</a><a href=”https://t.co/dBcR7Kx6kJ”>https://t.co/dBcR7Kx6kJ</a></p>&mdash; Charter (@hoodsonco) <a href=”https://twitter.com/hoodsonco/status/756217682664448000″>July 21, 2016</a></blockquote> //platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsV

Either Trump or Sanders Will Win the Presidency

 

For decades, Americans have grown increasingly frustrated by what seems either as incompetence or as ideological stubbornness by both Presidents and Congress. After years of being ignored about lost jobs and lower pay, voter anger has peaked.  Americans have finally risen up to elect either Trump or Sanders as President.

We see both men as incorruptible supporters of the 99%.   Both have stood against international trade deals to bring back good paying jobs to America. Both have touted severe prescriptions to help America. Trump supports reversing illegal immigration to open more jobs for Americans.   He’s offered a deep tax cut for billionaires to avoid a political war within the GOP, although to no avail.  Sanders instead has declared a political revolution, vowing to fix America’s corrupt voting process, and to institute major transfers of wealth from America’s billionaires to the underclasses.

Shocked by America’s uprising, establishment politicians of both the Republican and Democrat parties have declared all out war to defeat Trump and Sanders. Party leaders have touted multiple reasons why they want to destroy them. But to be clear, the unspoken, REAL reason for such a blatant power grab is that America’s billionaires want their politicians to keep international trade deals in place, and to not give an inch of political power back to the middle class.

America’s billionaires profited trillions of dollars from military expansion that eased the transfer of America’s factories to other countries, and from trade deals that allowed bringing cheap goods back into the United States, both displacing American workers. Even if they may have their own candidate preferences, America’s billionaires will support any politician that continues to support their “free trade” money system.  Some GOP leaders have even blatantly stated that they will support Clinton over Trump, exposing billionaire objectives.

GOP and Democrat politicians will continue supporting their billionaire campaign contributors in order to maintain their jobs, parties, power and wealth.  They, therefore, will do everything they must to defeat Trump and Sanders.

1. If that means spending hundreds of millions of dollars in ads to destroy Trump and Sanders, so be it.
2. If it means trashing up-and-coming establishment star candidates like Rubio to try to stamp out Trump, then trash Rubio they must.
3. If it means manipulating delegate rules to oust Trump through a contested, rigged election, and stacking Hillary’s campaign with unelected super delegates to ensure Sanders is defeated, exposes both parties as anti-democratic, then the parties must unfortunately suffer collateral damage.
4. If it means organizing paid demonstrators to disrupt rallies and to create fear of what a chaotic, middle class revolution might do to our economy, then organizing extremists must be done.
5. If it means even mobilizing party members to vote for the other party’s Presidential candidate, then the party establishment will hold their noses and mobilize their establishment members, if they can.
6. And God forbid, if it means, as some have suggested, threatening physical harm to candidates or their families if all else fails, some might be so desperate to contemplate such a despicable solution.

2016 has been a naked display of anti-democratic thuggery by party establishments to stop voter insurrection.  But Trump and Sanders are fighting back, David against Goliath.  Trump is beating the drums of democracy against his own GOP as he continues to win a plurality of delegates.  Bernie Sanders is accusing Hillary of being paid off by her billionaires, and continues his winning streak in the traditional Democrat states, proving him to be the clear, best choice for his party.  As both parties and insurgents push forward, this revolution may not end without violent political upheaval.

Most Americans know that either Trump or Sanders must be elected to stop decades of billionaire abusive profiteering and trampling of the middle class.  So a coming voter backlash is building to a fever pitch.  I personally believe Trump’s policies are best to move America forward.  But if either he or Bernie is defeated for their party’s nomination, they must still go forward as independents to represent the will of the American people. Then, America will make its last stand as the House of Representatives, a body meant to represent the people, votes in the new President.  The Constitution will hold firm.

 

Man Must Adapt to the Law of Selfish Demise to Thrive

 

In the beginning, the world was created.  Whether we believe it was created by an infinite cosmos or by God affects our belief about why man became, but it does not change much my story about what has become of man. Without examining its deeper impact on our relationship with God, let’s briefly examine our place in nature.

 

In the beginnings of primeval life on Earth, organisms learned to destroy other living creatures to survive.  Yet, they also learned that survival required living in harmony with other species, including those they destroyed.  Into this environment of destruction and harmony, man came to be on our planet.  We were born with the same drive to survive as all other creatures. 

 

Because of Earth’s unique orbit around our sun and the positioning of our tiny planet among the stars, whether perfectly hung here in space by God or not, Earth’s nature impacts man’s survival.  One natural law affecting man’s survival is selfish demise.

 

Early forms of life on Earth that selfishly took more than their share of Earth’s resources died out.  Those creatures that adapted to a balance between destruction and harmony lived on and mutated into today’s community of living things.  Take man’s nemeses, infectious diseases, for instance.  Those virulent, early organisms that quickly killed their human hosts died out along with their humans, not having a chance to mutate.  Viruses and bacteria that let man chronically adapt to disease, however, have lived on in the world for millennia.

 

So our earthly community of organisms has been kept in balance by rules of the universe, Godly or not. Destruction has been tolerated to let species survive.  The law of selfish demise has let one species in particular, mankind, benefit even as others are completely destroyed.  Scientists estimate that between one and twenty species become extinct every day.

 

Yet, while we believe that we are benefiting, this law of selfish demise also applies to man.  If man acts too selfishly, like all other forms of extinct life, Earth will become uninhabitable for our species.  As it has been for the millions of extinct life forms that once inhabited Earth, the planet will live on, perhaps with higher temperatures or lower oxygen, perhaps with an overgrowth of pathogens that would otherwise be plagues to man, but live on it will.

 

Mankind believes that we are the greatest beneficiary of Earth’s position amongst the stars.  We, above all other creatures, have been given the capacity to bend Earth’s resources to our desires. But if thousands of creatures become extinct each year, perhaps the lesson for man is that we must not exceed the law of selfish demise if we are to survive.

 

We have subdued most of the living things that would eat our flesh. Thus far, we still have most of the polar ice that keeps Earth temperate.  We still keep many microorganisms in check that continue to mutate to challenge our superiority.  Perhaps our greatest immediate threat to mankind remains ourselves.  We are a unique species in that we remain intent on killing our own.

 

If the law of selfish demise also applies to man, then our survival requires that we maintain a balance between killing other humans and living in harmony with them. We continue to improve our material lot by destroying other men, even if this destruction ultimately harms mankind. In North America, our Native American reservations and inner cities are remnants of this selfish imbalance.

 

If we can destroy so many of our own species for our selfish advancement and look on as thousands of other species disappear from the Earth, is it conceivable that we might be closer to the tipping point than we think?  It might be time for us to lean more toward harmony and less toward destruction of other men.  Perhaps, we might even have to lean more toward harmony and care more for other species that do not so clearly meet our needs for survival. 

 

At some point, the Earth might even require man to review our current beliefs about how to live in harmony on our planet. There are deeper meanings to the patterns of evolvement and extinction taking shape.  We need to evolve our understanding more quickly than the species that are disappearing from their harmonious enjoyment of planet Earth.

If Investment was ridiculous in War Torn Iraq, It Will Be Impossible in Detroit without Curbing Crime

We hear of suicide bombings and other murderous violence in the news about Iraq, a country under siege since the U.S. Military pulled out last year. In the year that has passed, officials in Iraq have estimated that approximately 7 people died each and every day in the country gripped in terror. Iraq is country with a population close to 33 million people. Its murder ater for 2012 was 7.7 per 100,000.

Detroit wrings its hands over the rising number of murders in a city whose population keeps falling. With a declining population of 706,585, Detroit had 411 murders in 2012, up from 344 in 2011 and 308 in 2010. Detroit’s murder rate for 2012 was 58.2 per 100,000, 7.5 times that of war torn Iraq.

Before, U.S. contractors began pulling out of Iraq, the U.S. government asked a consortium of three companies including mine to put in place a nationwide EMS system in Iraq to support the contractors when the military pulled out. In the midst of developing our venture, the team in Iraq was taken out when a missile took down the helicopter carrying 11 men. The military then deemed Iraq too hot for civilians like ourselves to go in and build resources to support Iraq’s turn around. That tragedy emphasized how important safety is to re-establishing an economy.

Iraq’s terrorized economy is 7.5 times safer than Detroit’s. Detroit is offering enormous incentives for businesses and real estate developers to come in and help rebuild the city. Yet, in a city where people are fleeing as refugees, the prospect for investment is poor. Yet, Detroit’s empty skyscraper was just sold for $5 a square foot where buildings in comparable cities would go for $200. This example signals the level of discounting that must be done to attract investment with such a dangerous state of crime that exists in Detroit.

No matter the solution, lessons learned from the U.S. military might be what is required to stabilize Detroit’s crime for investors to bring businesses back. Yet drastically increased policing in a city that has a history of police brutality and that cannot afford the size of policing efforts it now has would be difficult. Nonetheless, it will be an imperative component of any real solution set.

King Cotton, Weevil Plague, and Exodus North

Bolls of cotton paid the passage of a half a million slaves to America.

As cotton depleted the soil of the original colonies, the President of the United States himself bowed to the cotton king when he signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to make way for new plantations in Alabama.

White cotton made southern states from Alabama to Louisiana, some of the wealthiest in the nation, and sent common men, most who never owned a slave, to bleed red in the Civil war.

The British traded armaments for Cotton, keeping mills spinning in England but extending the war and causing thousands more to die in battle.

After the war, captains of industry, North and South, businessmen, political leaders, and bankers pledged allegiance to king cotton. In unison, they turned their backs on Reconstruction in 1876 and restored their power.

In 1892, the Boll Weevil crossed into Texas and by 1920, it had travelled to Georgia, destroying 50% of cotton production across the South. In 1903, testifying before Congress, the USDA chief called the insect a wave of evil. What the cities of North could not accomplish in drawing blacks into the WWI industry, the boll weevil achieved, for share-cropping became a losing proposition with the loss of crop yield.

King Cotton took on the aura of Pharaoh. The book of Exodus tells how God sent successive plagues of lice, flies, and locusts to free the Israelites from slave bondage to the Egyptians. The weevil’s effect in the early 20th century was as a plague that economically emancipated African Americans from the bondage of cotton and sent them on their exodus North.

What happened to the once prosperous king cotton of the Deep South that had once driven America’s economy? With the loss of share-croppers, cotton yield, and the subsequent drop in land prices of 40% due to less productive crops, Mississippi went from being one of the richest states to being the poorest in the union. Most of the Deep South followed and did not recover for another 70 years.

Before the Weevil, Georgia produced 2.8 million bales of cotton. By 1923, production was down to 600,000 bales. By 1983, the output was 112,000 bales. Simultaneous to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, new eradication programs were devised and tested at Mississippi State University. Once established by the 1980s, cotton came back. By 1995, 2 million bales were harvested, re-establishing Cotton’s domain.

Plantation owners had created their own reality. Having invested the majority of their wealth in slaves, they lost their equity in the future. Clinging desperately to the caste system they had devised, they lost their work force through the plague of the Boll Weevil. The South held staunch views through the late 20th century and is now recovering both socially and economically.

Descendants of plantation owners, modern cotton farm industrialists, receive 2 to 3 billion dollars in subsidies from the Federal government annually. 85% of subsidy dollars go to the largest 7% of cotton farms. In order to keep giving large plantations subsidies, The U.S. taxpayer now pays Brazil $150 million annually in WTO compensation.

At the end of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he stated:

” I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriots’s grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’

He knew the grave situation confronting him and that each of us has the ability to seek out from our own divided nature the better path. This is the path that I envision when I write of “America’s Thriving Path Forward”, in which our better natures seek out solutions that affect all positively.

At the Civil War’s end, a choice could have been made to let the wounds breathe while healing them. Sharecropping could have been one of the solutions, given equitable sharing of profit. Freedom of movement by African Americans in the South could have allowed them to seek the highest value of their labor, thereby giving both their families and the South more value that would multiply with each generation. With such a start, the indignities suffered could have begun their healing in 1865.

Instead, the scarcity principle practiced in capitalism was exercised through terror to eke out maximum profit for plantation owners from ex slaves at the expense of continuing this overt caste system that pitted men’s lesser natures against each other.

In the end, all in the South suffered the choice of this lesser path, and all in our nation suffered for not insisting that we heal the injustice of slavery as quickly as possible. This was the legacy that carried forward into our inner cities and that has affected them to this day.

Roger Ebert Noted America’s Prejudice at the Epoch of the Great Migration

The nation noted the passing of Roger Ebert yesterday. Ebert, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reviews, was known as the most influential movie critic of his time. Before I turned to “Rotten Tomatoes” as a guide on how to spend my movie dollars, for years I relied on the thumbs up of Siskel and Ebert.

Ebert claimed that movies provide a snapshot of the soul of a nation in the era they are filmed. One movie that he and Siskel gave two thumbs up was a 1915 silent film called “The Birth of a Nation”. Ebert said: “The Birth of a Nation” is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.” Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 100% positive rating.

What did this box office hit movie, produced by a Southerner, and allegedly endorsed by Woodrow Wilson before he reversed his words after condemnation by the NAACP, say about the views of America?

* Black militia ransacked white homes, disregarding white America

* Black men lusted after and raped white women

* White southerners suffered the humiliation of having to salute to blacks

* The Klan was a needed defense against such injustice

* The former enemies of North and South united again in their Aryan birthright.

* After rising to thwart the injustice committed on whites by blacks, the Klan intimidated them into not voting, thereby reinstalling the rightful white political leadership

Of the film, Ebert remarked:

“It is a stark history lesson to realize that this film, for many years the most popular ever made, expressed widely-held and generally acceptable white views. The producer’s paternalistic reply to accusations that he was anti-Negro: “To say that is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives.”

And:

“[The producer] and “The Birth of a Nation” were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all. That is worth knowing. Blacks already knew that, had known it for a long time, witnessed it painfully again every day, but “The Birth of a Nation” demonstrated it in clear view, and the importance of the film includes the clarity of its demonstration. That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values. “

Ebert commented on what was the accepted culture of 1915 in the year before the great migration of African Americans northward to the cities. 1915 was 50 years after the Civil War. In cities where the majority of citizens were either too young to have experienced its horrors, (Viet Nam War ended 40 years ago) or immigrants whose histories were not shaped by our past, nonetheless, the pervasive culture that permeated our cities at the start of the “African American Invasion” still reflected the Reconstruction years. The ensuing conflicts of the migration would set the stage for our inner city collapses to come.

America’s First Warriors Against Terror Cry Out For Justice

Throughout history, societies that have optimized order through organization of men, equipment, energy, resources, and technologies, have dominated commerce. Control of men, of the land they tilled, of armies, or slaves was the dominating motive force of wealth creation prior to the industrial era, when energy began to supplant man as the motive force of progress.

Prior to the Civil War, Slaves were the economic engine for America, and the driver of its economy. While the North had much of the industry of America, the South had cotton and four million slaves. Cotton made the Southern United States one of the four most prosperous economies in the world and northern industry, which was internationally uncompetitive, depended on trade with southern states.

To enforce trade, Northern Congressmen pushed tariffs through a Congress dominated by the North, since the North had two thirds of the population. Tariffs allowed the North to skim slave-derived cotton profits through interstate trade. The North depended on southern purchases and attempted to prevent war that would hurt both economies severely. Yet when the South seceded for reasons of tariffs and slavery, destruction of the South’s economy was inevitable.

The minimal physical infrastructure that existed in the South was devastated by the war. And human capital…40 percent of white males of war age were wounded or killed. The bonds held by wealthy southern landowners that had funded the war were now worthless. Congress increased tariffs even more punitively after the war, imposing reparation costs on the South. And the vast wealth of the South, its slaves, was emancipated without compensation to owners.

The Southern Elite had pinned their economic future on the plantation system. Southern farmland was poor soil for growing staple crops that thrived in the North and Midwest, and cotton was highly labor dependent. The success of the plantation strategy therefore relied on a grotesque caste system, which instilled in slaves that they were incapable of anything but their deprived existence. Now that the North had torn apart this caste paradigm, the Southern elites believed their very survival depended on once again entrapping their labor. They chose terror as their weapon.

The ensuing black codes were an oppressive start. Plantation Owners passed vagrancy laws to imprison former slaves who did not sign annual share cropping contracts. And freedmen that tried to leave the South could be pulled off the train and imprisoned for similar reasons. Anyone caught coming to the South to recruit Freedmen could be imprisoned unless, as an example, they purchased $25,000 recruitment licenses. More monstrously oppressive were the 4,500 lynchings that took place all over the South to send freedmen the signal that they were no longer free.

What had been 4,000 of the wealthiest men in the United States now dragged four million souls through constant terror and degradation to save what was left of their fortunes. And while the northern administrators initially fought back, Northern Congressmen ultimately decided that continued bondage was in the best interests of their constituents, ending Reconstruction.

Was the victor of the Civil War actually going to accept the outcome of Reconstruction as simply a means to reunite the states and to recommence commerce? Was this going to be the final resolution to the loss of 620,000 American lives? This political compromise of the wealthy powers meant that those soldiers who spilled blood to give an oppressed people the hope of a free American life, would as a ghostly choir now transfix on a distant future silently aggrieved.

Some say that Supreme Court decisions reflect more the slowly changing mores of America than an objective rendering of the Constitution. In 1883, when it ruled protection of ex slaves’ civil rights as unconstitutional, it supported pre-civil war racist views of both the South and North that allowed southern states to re-install oppressive control of ex-slaves.

For the next thirty years, the South and North would suspend racial justice while allowing real terror of lynch mobs to roam free. How would generations of injustice and poverty affect a subculture of righteous anger within the African American community? How would it ultimately impact our inner cities?

America’s Pathology

I have had the opportunity to study only one person in extreme detail that had a sociopathic disorder. The person was actually a highly functioning and dear friend of mine who absolutely had zero empathy for others. After eight years of spending time thoroughly researching this person, I was personally convinced that this type of person exists in reality and must be dealt with from the societal viewpoint.

It is not that sociopaths are necessarily evil, although some are. It is just that they do not see any of their actions as evil, no matter the consequences to others. Their needs transcend all others’. In fact a desire that the normal person might consider trivial, to them can be earth shattering, engulfing the needs of all that come in contact with them.

For a hot cup of coffee, they would not flinch if the person providing it to them had to give their life to prepare the coffee and bring it to them. This sounds extreme, but in the world of the sociopath, it is not. The sound of it is so abhorrent and ridiculous to the normal person that one cannot typically even process its reality. In fact, it took me eight years to believe it to be true, even with all the evidence before me.

Yet these people are real and walk among us. If you have compassion for your fellow man, do not mistakenly believe that all do to your extent, or to any extent at all. If you have a sense of remorse when you do someone else wrong, do not believe for a moment that all possess this character, for they do not. The terror of sociopathy is that these people are highly functioning and tend to concentrate in places of power over the individual for that wields them the authority to act our their pathology without restraint.

Unfortunately, society can be taken in by sociopaths in positions of power. Their rationale, which is so very different from that of normality, becomes the projection of society in early stages of changing environment. We drift in their direction as if it is one that would be chosen by us until it goes beyond our level of comfort. But then it continues past that point for they wield the power. And then we know, something is amiss.

We are then part of a country that tortures, when our country has always held to a higher standard. We are a country that assassinates when we have always been one not to follow that path. We are a country that prepares for civil unrest through domestic drones and laws to kill US citizens on domestic soil without trial.

As our sociopathic leaders take us beyond what we know is ethical, we at first just watch their sociopathy in disbelief. For no rational human being with a sense of right and wrong would go down this path. It took me eight years to understand both intellectually and emotionally, holistically, that very rational, but completely sociopathic human beings will go down this path without flinching and without concern for the welfare of those they are sworn to protect.

Keystone is Absolutely Part of a Systems Solution to Global Warming

Empirical evidence shows that taxation impacts societal decisions. Raising cigarette taxes, for instance, significantly reduces cigarette purchases, especially amongst our youth who have not yet succumbed to their addictions. 

America is now addicted to oil and other carbon energies. However, unlike cigarettes, our true addiction is to energy, independent of whether it is created by release of carbon into the air. Albeit, our energy purchases are influenced most by lowest near term cost, without considering externalities and without considering long term payback on capital. For these two reasons, carbon based fuels continue to be our addiction. 

Could taxation cause our nation to choose alternative fuels such as wind and solar? The answer drawn from empirical tests is yes. However, the idea of carbon tax is not politically viable unless applied within a system solution. System solutions typically do not occur in a political divisive environment for they require compromise of political platforms that are historically based on isolated solutions. 

For instance, the Democratic Party is opposed to the Keystone Pipeline, saying that it endangers a major aquifer, but more importantly because it opens up an entirely new source of carbon that can reign havoc on the planet’s ecosystem. As an isolated solution, the liberals support a worldwide carbon exchange or a carbon tax to make carbon more expensive than alternative fuels. 

The Republican Party, on the other hand, states that global warming is a farce, that the Canadian tar sand oil will come to market whether or not it comes to Texas to be processed, that the pipeline will create and save thousands of jobs, and that the oil will dramatically reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. As an isolated solution, they say build it. 

Both arguments have merit but neither seeks a viable, systems solution. Each party seeks the benefits their constituents want but neither seeks solutions to accomplish an optimum path. System solution achieves Pareto optimization but only when both parties acquiesce to what is best both for the nation and for the environment.

Ultimately, science will win out with global warming. Whether global warming is being caused by man or not, man can slow the rate by reducing our carbon footprint. Therefore, the timing our our actions is all that is really in question. Will we react now by transitioning to renewable energy as part of a system solution, or will we react later to the violent nature of a changing environment? The decision rests with whether or not our politicians will accept their fate of compromise or whether they will be forced by crisis to act.

Ultimately, tar sands oil will come to market for oil prices now support it. While a pipeline to the western Canadian coast can be temporarily blocked awaiting a permanent outcome in America, Canadian citizens cannot hold off forever. Yet timing is such that the pipeline will be built in America, even if not until the next Republican president is elected. Obama’s best strategy is to leverage the pipeline for a system solution that provides the ends if not the means of liberal goals.

A system solution recognizes that the Keystone pipeline is part of an optimal solution. Delaying its completion does nothing to prevent carbon emissions and only hurts jobs. The argument about aquifer endangerment is simply a delay tactic of fear. In fact, shale fracking has magnitudes more potential to harm aquifers, yet our country’s economics will be dramatically changed during the next two decades by dramatic increases in shale oil production.

Interestingly, shale proponents are Keystone opponents not due to environmental reasons but due to competition for oil refinery pricing in a flooded market. Keystone delays are more about politics of pricing than about politics of pollution. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Given that tar sands and shale oil are now going to be a reality, what then is the systems solution? Liberals, in isolation, suggest that raising the cost of carbon fuel is the answer. They suggest that higher carbon energy relative to alternative energy will change buying patterns and they are right, but at what cost to the economy? They would answer that economic losses are a small price to pay for the sake of the planet, but can you see how this is not a system solution by that answer?

An international Kyoto exchange solution is not part of a national systems solution for it only changes the location of carbon emissions but not the level. However, a carbon tax can be part of a systems solution, or even a national Kyoto type exchange. Yet in isolation, neither are politically viable for they would raise the cost of American business and would adversely impact GDP and jobs.

As part of a system solution, a national exchange or carbon tax could be part of a system solution if revenue neutral. If a business or individual’s net taxes and net energy costs remained the same when switching to alternative fuel, their addiction to carbon could be broken. Tax collection for both business and individuals could be transitioned from income taxes, as an example, to energy taxes that allowed for no net tax increases. Yet even if neutral taxation were part of a system solution, the overall cost of alternative energy, given our capitalist system, is still be higher.

A technical solution to reduce the cost of alternative energy below that of carbon fuels does not yet exist in our capitalist system and may not until depleting carbon fuels begin to run out, raising their costs relative to alternative energy. This of course is not likely for a half a century given new horizontal drilling technologies. Therefore, the system solution involves changing the way we finance and benefit from alterative fuels.

The capitalist system of benefit evaluation depends on the return on capital invested. Unfortunately for alternative energy, there is an abundance of other investments that pay investors a much higher return than ether wind or solar power. However, the cost of alternative energy, in the absence of capital requirements, is less costly in the long run, even without factoring in externalities such as global warming and deleterious health effects of air pollution. But we do have a capitalist system.

Capital returns signal what society values most. In a capital constrained world, society would rather employ capital to manufacture iphones than to saving the planet. But are we really capital constrained? By law, we have a Federal Reserve, a money cartel that constrains capital. And we do as a nation, pass all money formation through this constraining cartel. Yet, isn’t capital constraint really a fiction?

Individuals and businesses also make their decisions based on return on capital. For instance, an individual is deterred from investing in solar power because the payback is too long. If an individual sells their house, their initial investment in solar power is not reflected in a higher selling price, and therefore the buyer gets the reward from the orignal home owner’s investment, while the original owner doesn’t see the return of investment if they sell. But isn’t this bad choice under current financial paradigms also a fiction of our financial system?

A system solution could be devised to provide unrestrained capital for environmental investments. A means could also be created to make the investment in environmental solutions portable, letting original home investors, as an example, recoup their capital upon home sales. The combination of these two financial changes could make alternative energy part of a viable system..

Therefore, a system solution can include building the Keystone pipeline, creating pipeline jobs, ensuring America’s carbon independence, transitioning our tax system to favor alternative energy while keeping the solution tax neutral, creating an unrestrained government capital solution and creating a portable alternative energy investment return for individuals and businesses.

When SCI FI Becomes a Reality, the 2nd Amendment Will Feel Cosy

America has now decided to employ the same drones used to kill terrorists in Yemen above our own skies. Combine this decision with the fact that the Administration is now hiring people who meet psyche profiles that will allow them to more easily kill our own citizens and it makes a good scifi movie.

Every city is now being outfitted with cameras at road intersections for traffic control. Every state security center is being outfitted with facial recognition software and computing power to recognize any individual that passes through these videos. Every cell phone is now by law a listening device for law enforcement to be used without warrant. Every security center can listen to every phone conversation in America and with enough artificial intelligence can create dossiers on every individual in America summarizing their speech. Every cell phone GPS can be matched by location to every suspected crime scene, mob, demonstration or assembly to monitor and assess probabilities of being connected to action against the state. Every security center can add every credit card transaction to dossiers to scan for probabilities of terror or crime. EVery public form of transportation, every banking transaction, even your use of electricity can be monitored and compared to the norm for suspected illegal activity.

Add to this immense detection power, growing exponentially and connecting interagency, interstate, and internationally, a computing and analytical capacity that is breaking through previous paradigms of what is possible faster than our policing laws can be changed to keep up with them and you have an immense, almost inconceivable capability to determine the DNA of our citizenry in real time.

Now take this microscopic surveillance and add it 30,000 drones operated by sociopathic twenty somethings that have sworn to remotely joy stick their contraptions in grid formation and to trigger their kill switches to employ deadly lazers with precise accuracy anywhere in their assigned grid and you have a Orwellian destruction machine awaiting he who would be king.

Now as a law abiding citizen, I am ambivalent of such policing power. The love part of my thinking is that this artificial intelligence strength can be used against that not so mythical future terrorist organization that plots to take down our country through weapons of mass destruction. Such immense policing force could not have been accepted by our government at all levels were it not for the very real possibility and high probability that our government and/or financial structures could be incapacitated by ideological organizations possessing nuclear or other means of destruction within our borders.

As this power that is now flying up the curve of capability begins to pin point and prioritize those individuals amongst the 310 million of us moving within the boundaries of America that might perpetrate these most heinous of crimes, we will all watch in amazement at how much more easily our law enforcement continues to apprehend individuals set on perpetrating terrorist crimes of all levels of sophistication. For that terrorist that might one day attempt to destroy an entire city in a lunch pail, it will give America a fighting chance to find this needle in a haystack and to stop such an atrocity of unspeakable scale before it is triggered.

The mistrusting part of my ambivalence feels this power could be used to enslave our nation through a rising tyrannical government of ideological extremes almost as easily as it could be used to protect us from destruction by a rogue terrorist bent on destroying what they feel is an evil hegemony that enslaves the world. America now debates the use of automatic pea shooter ak-47s that might one day have to fight a 30,000 headed, lazer breathing dragon in the sky bent on destroying every human within the border whose dossier meets predictive probabilities of becoming an enemy of the state.

 

This scifi thriller above would be out on the lunatic fringe if it weren’t so real.  Advocates of gun control say that the whole concept of the 2nd amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But mankind is capable of some pretty way out lunacy.

The trillions of dollars the United States and others have spent on nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire planet many times over is even farther out on the lunatic fringe, yet our societies marched in lockstep out to the fringes as we taught our children to make sense of our lunacy through the exercise of climbing under their school desks. 

The North and Central American holocaust, EuroAmerican slavery, the rise of the Nazis, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Chinese re-education and so many other atrocities, these are all so lunatic as to be deniable to the human condition, if it were not so that they actually occurred. 

Are we on this planet going to be so deluded as to think that in the next 5,000 years of human history, if mankind is lucky enough to figure out how to deny its own extinction, that we will not time and time again repeat of our horrific nature on civilizations yet to rise? 

Yes, the 2nd Amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But when the world is confronted by its next lunatic existence, this one simple protection of the right to bear arms might just seem normal. It might just be that as we meander through the burned out cities in our roving gang of hunters and gatherers, that we look back at that band of elite eighteenth century farmers that gave us the 2nd amendment with a solemn reflection to thank them from the pit of our hearts for the bit of sanity they gave to our now post apocalyptic chaotic world.