Whenever America has been at its greatest America was freer. Whenever America is at its weakest it was keeping more and more people under control. During the cold war, we didn't have a patriot act, for example.

Controlling others whether it is their time, body, future, using those people as cash cows, aka enslaving people (and the modern day equivalent is by using debt or their bodies (sex)). Either way, historically or modern day slavery is all about using the slave as a resource and thus to make money from them.

Freedom seems very much to be the provenance of allowing people to be people, accepting people for themselves and allowing them to follow their own beliefs, dreams or agenda. By all means punish people when they mess up, but not before.

The people who aspired to be the US country’s leaders were honorable people who had the best interests of the people who voted for them at heart. Who would never do anything to shame the office that they sought to hold.
Allowing the separation of church and state and treating all people as equals, where all people are of equal value and their time being of equal value to themselves and to those who would employ them for their skills and their time.

All people must have a right to self determination, and be allowed to determine their own destiny within the limits of their ability.

The key to all of this was excellent education so people could be best informed, knowing how to sort junk information from the rest of the information people are/were bombarded with.

Government must follow the dictates of scientific method rather than individuals beliefs. Because people just don’t know everything yet thus imposing beliefs on another is just another form of slavery and ultimately ignorance.

America has been down dark roads before and recovered, and no doubt it will continue to do so. And if not a new dominate force will come to power as in the past, and will do something else, more freeing to it’s people.

Freedom for the people is the best way to ensure the longevity of a regime. We’ve seen this with the British empire and now the US but I rather suspect that this current trend in conservatism will end up destroying itself as it always does but who knows.

So by now you probably are aware Harris lost the presidency, and the very next day the Facebook memes came out that this what it’s like to be a black woman in America, you lose your job to a completely incompetent white guy. This annoyed me because this is what happened to Hillary Clinton too. My reply to the thread was: this is what it’s like to be a woman (in most of the world).

But curiously enough it was my husband who found the most interesting article on why Harris lost. Google reported that people searched on ‘did Biden drop out?’ on the day of the election.

My husband thought: why would you just go vote for whoever... without studying who or what you are voting for.

This headline called these people who googled whether Biden dropped out, boneheaded.

But I call it the ultimate privilege. If you have kids, work several jobs to keep food on the table, prepare food, clean, pay rent, keep other bills paid, shop the best deals, you don’t have time to be studying politics. And perhaps studying for some kind of evening class... If you were planning to vote the best you might hope for is to remember to vote for Joe Biden...

Can you also spot another reason for banning abortion?

In much of the world women are paid to have children, in the US it is just demanded of them and women must lay down their lives. We need to commemorate women who have lost their lives because fetuses are deemed more important than their mother’s lives. I know women never get paid to have children in the US and therefore it is considered valueless work nevertheless we commemorate the men who lose their lives in war, why shouldn’t we commemorate women who lose their lives to fetuses, or access to healthcare because republicans don’t want you to get healthcare?

The ultimate privilege is time. It is with our time we can figure out what is going on in the bigger world to thus inform our choice of activism. Without spare time there can be no activism. And the ultimate way to keeping those with less power than you from gaining power is to monopolize more and more of their time. Money may be time but time is all we truly have in the end.

I was wondering how people define being ‘cool’. And people responded with things like: it’s confidence. Perhaps ‘cool’ may even be considered ‘charisma’.

Then how do you tell people who think they are cool but really aren’t. Like ‘being cool’ was something objective but of course it is not. Indeed ‘cool’ can only ever be subjective.

What I might consider to be cool may or may not be what you consider to be cool. Depending on what you consider cool, if you thought I was cool and then if I say something you consider uncool it may flip your opinion of my level of ‘coolness’.

Now I feel like I am describing ’narcissistic personality disorder’. Because if you are in favor then you are definitely ‘cool’. And if you fall out of favor then you may fall completely out and are definitely ‘uncool’. Because they are ‘believing they should associate only with those they see as worthy.’

I realized recently that ‘cool’ can be very important to some people and they can be convinced to do awful things to people who they consider not to be sufficiently ‘cool’ enough and rather than just not associating with those deemed unworthy (aka uncool) are even eligible to be bullied, ignored or even murdered? We see this especially amongst teenagers.

It can be devastating to be considered unworthy, uncool, not-one-of-us… When if you are told immigrants are causing all your problems then how do you deal with those immigrants, do you go there and destroy the lives of their lives and the lives of those loved ones?

Do you even consider whether those people are causing the problems you are told they are? Do you whether they are human? There are people of all kinds who are good or bad, but how do you know? Let alone whether they are cool, unworthy, not-one-of-us, doing interesting things that may or may not benefit you directly.

I worry about the economy once we throw away all the people who we’ve decided aren’t our kind of people, who will pick our fruit, who will slaughter our pigs for our bacon, who will kill the chickens for our McNuggets? Who will gather the trash on the side of the road, and who will put out our wild fires?

Will it be you who has decided they are not worthy, uncool, no-one-of-us? I doubt it.

And I normally dislike wikipedia because pretty much anyone can go in there are write whatever they like but before you believe anything Donald Trump says read this entry.

However before you throw out that ‘illegal’ immigrant, why would they be committing crimes? Presumably they want to be here because it’s better than wherever they came from otherwise why be here rather than there? And in America, I find this astonishing I need to inform people of this but you cannot be eligible for any kind of benefit from the government without proving you are eligible, with proof of who you are, proof of citizenship, or at a minimum, a green card holder and even that may not be even enough, as a requirement of eligibility. No illegal immigrants are not living off your tax money.

tI was reading about a woman in France who her husband had been using date rape drugs on her and had her repeatedly raped for decades. And all these French women are protesting. One held up a sign saying ‘not all men, but always a man’, yes, that, it always seems so exhausting to have to agree, after all these years of writing this blog.

And I definitely approve the woman’s decision about the courtroom being open. That is so brave of her because woman have been told for way way too long to carry the shame of their abuse, because we are told we are to blame for what happens to us. But it is not our fault. Men do this to us.

Men have benefited far too long from the ‘hidden in the dark of the night’, ‘behind closed doors’, ‘if no one sees it never happened.’ Because the women it happened to just don’t count, no one will believe them and I’ve written about this before and it’s still true.

But as I read this story kept quiet in the US probably we don’t want to remind men of their shameful behavior in the midst of an election between a competent woman and probably one of the most shameful men to walk the planet (how on earth could this election even be close?) because how many men have done these awful things? It has happened to me and I know many men have given women all kinds of date are drugs to allow men to perform their heinous actions on women.

Anyway as I read this I realize I keep reading the Guardian and while I approve of their editorial stance and their journalism I think I should subscribe but I feel like a cash cow for all the stuff on the internet already. From the subscription to connect my devices to the internet, the equipment I need to access the internet, my subscriptions to the various pay-walled content, and then apple and google try to serve up our free weeks subscription to whatever... so then they too can benefit from my cash cow status.

And they wonder why there is so much poverty in the US? Back in the 80s there was no internet. Technology was nothing more than the size of your TV and its remote control. There was also entertainment systems but you could get by with a cheap transistor radio or you could go all in on a high end music system.

So if you laugh at someone for their poverty, remember most people are only a single pay check from losing their home let alone their lifestyle.

One of my favorite shows on Starz is ‘the white princess’.


I love how they describe it as women waging war for power.

I get this, if you read history from this time you get the impression that women just did not exist, beyond giving birth and who married each of the men. Women appear to be placeholders for real people (aka men) and had no ability to act, pawns in a much larger scheme. There is no doubt these women wielded a lot of soft power. They could whisper into the ears of the men who held the power, they could suggest, hint, and as women I knew used to say: kiss her king across the chess board. The problem with soft power is that it requires the men do as she wants. As we see in ‘the white princess’ the rise and fall of the Queen mothers soft power over those with real power, in this case the king. In the end the king not only has thrown her out of ‘her’ rooms, but out of his life, when he literally throws her out. The King’s wife, aka the Queen (Lizzy), taking all the power his mother once had and then holding all that power herself.

Lizzie does not realize how powerless she is, unlike her mother who does realize, when Lizzy visits her mother. Her mother is surprised by her daughter’s visit and when Lizzie returns ‘home’ is met by the king who tells her she wouldn’t have been able to go visit her mother if he didn’t allow it.

But there were women who held their own power, for instance in the Duchess of Normandy and Isabella I of Castile as portrayed in 'the white princess'. These women appeared to have governed in their own right in this version of history (whether they did in historical reality is another thing entirely).

And while I love that they are presenting us with a tragedy, the true tragedy is based on a modern perspective, that the King’s mother, indirectly, killed ‘the children’. This is only true from a modern perspective. No one at the time would’ve considered a person's age in anyway important.

The other tragedy is: what people will do for power. And how blind people can become based on that lust. They will use whoever they can to grasp what power they can, aka the dowager queen uses her daughter to keep her hand as close as possible to that power, convincing her daughter to keep her pregnancy, marries Henry VII, and becomes queen. This is also unlikely given that any child conceived out of wedlock would not be a legitimate heir to the throne. And given the King’s claims being weak already it seems twice as likely he’d be extremely careful about his eldest son’s claims.

Then there are the justifications people make for their actions “it is God’s will” (Margaret Beaufort and Prince Richard). And how they will use anyone or kill even those they love for power (Margaret Beaufort (Michelle Fairley) kills Jasper Tudor (Vincent Regan)), urging her (dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, Essie Davis) Lizzie to marry Henry VII, and not abort their baby. And indeed the dowager queen’s joy at the plague ravaging England. She didn’t care about the people of England who she eagerly wanted power over. (Compare this with Trump’s lust to win the 2020 election, when Americans were dying from COVID. He did not care if Americans were dying, he just wanted to hang on to the presidency whether it was for the immunity from legal action or to continue using us to bankroll him or both?)

And I get th'e impression that this meant to be contrasted with what people will do for love. Lizzie (Jody Comer) makes it very clear she loves her son and his siblings and then her husband. We get the hate/love transition so common in romances, because how else can we possibly know they truly love each other? (Sic) invented even before Jane Austen and been used ever since in all romances.

Finally the show demonstrates what is good governance, versus the paranoia of losing power. Do you help your subjects as Lizzy does during the plague? Or do you constantly seek to punish people who might seek whatever power you have away from you as the King’s mother does, 'and you must punish her, severely', 'you must come down hard'...

But doing research on this period in history I learned one thing, women in this era did not wear underpants so they were all running or walking around commando! And in case you are wondering...

Well the press got their way and Biden stood down, or was it Trump? Who knows, but those that make a buck out of this will and the people who will suffer most from this are, we the people.

And the thing I worry about is can we even have a real election anymore? Or did all of MAGAs harass the honest vote counters into resigning? Because they did and they don’t mind threatening, attacking, hurting or even killing anyone who thinks differently to whatever they feel passionate about.

And they have people who actually believe the lies they spin, that 2000 election was stolen, abortion apparently justifies them murdering abortion providers, because they have actually murdered people in the past, even Pelosi’s husband wasn’t safe, and while they accuse us of ... while they are already doing it. And they are not opposed to making up whatever nonsense they want: that the left want to turn the kids of conservative parents into lesbians, gays, transgender... whatever? Seriously? We had that discussion in my high school and they didn’t turn any of us into transgender, gays or lesbians or whatever...
There is no doubt we will soon be living in a tyrannical system, and many on the front lines are already there, aka people who count votes.

And who will save us? In WW2, the US, and whatever vestiges of the the British empire still standing stood against the nazis, but now it’s not like Russia or China will save us, they will likely be quite happy with us being kept like mushrooms in the tyranny republicans will bring down upon us, rewriting our history, and killing most of us off. (Drink bleach!)

I doubt there will be any freedom left but eventually the economy will get better for more of us and freedom will come again, but perhaps not for a very long time. Not until Fox News and the right wing machinery that props up the conservatives has been destroyed.

Because this article indicates how close they think they are from being unassailable. This is indeed truly worrying. Because it means they have destroyed our democracy. And this is indeed extremely worrying for everyone.
Although republicans are passing off Trumps comments as nonsense, as per normal.

But why in the goddess’ name would you vote for someone who other members of his party consider ‘nonsense’?
This must be the aim of the 2025 project.
And we know the country is moving to the middle, if not left, with the increase in people coming from the south, Mexico and other countries, younger Americans are tending left as well. And all this tends to be bad for the future of republicans, so with all these existential threats to the viability of the Republican Party.

Also republicans have been able to demonstrate that they can follow through with plans to steer to their agenda, as we see explicitly with the reversal of roe v wade and moving the country to the right or at least moving the direction to the right. The right have a habit of moving through people nevertheless they still manage to adhere to their agenda.

Yellow headlines seem to be a fact of life.

One such headline, hidden behind as paywall: suddenly there aren’t enough babies. The whole world has declining birthrates.

And we may have already hit the point of population stability and in decline. I think this is probably a good thing. There are too many humans already and our biosphere just isn’t coping with all of us. But we all know economics far outweighs our environment and what is good for one is utterly dreadful for the other, oh the wisdom of idiots, if only our environment was an important resource we could turn into money... as opposed to just vital for sustaining us. But once again the conservative right can’t think much beyond what suits them and think women should just pop out babies for the sake of economic stability and hence they ban abortion. Similarly who cares about wetlands when they can be drained and turned into farmland, cha-ching.

I know you’ve heard it before but if they were genuinely serious about pro-life, they’d help these poor women who now must care for a baby they never wanted. I know these pro-life types like to think they are doing a good thing by giving all these fetuses a life but what kind of life will they be getting? The road to hell is always paved with good intentions.

But as I’ve said before abortion has always been about building armies. And a good soldier was born merely to die because putting him back together after war would cost the male taxpayer way too much of his hard earned money. Some of their reasoning is so naive they think that women will automatically love this nuisance just because they gave birth to it? Perhaps some women will fall in love with their babies but there are no guarantees.

I remember a discussion had with a woman about drinking alcohol while pregnant, many women won’t drink alcohol when pregnant for the sake of her fetus, but that is a choice many women voluntarily make, the woman I was talking to just assumed women must do this, and I said it was the woman’s choice. There are many pitfalls women chose not to engage in because she is pregnant but it is her body and her passenger is just an experiment in DNA.

How many baby boys will be hurt by women forced to give birth to them? We can still send them off to war... I am sure the urgency to ban abortion is because the US struggled with 2 wars under Bush.

We also know the conservatives say they value life but their actions never really seem to demonstrate what that means, especially since actions speak louder. I think conservatives want the right to kill at will including anyone they dislike for whatever reason. Why else would you want women to die, not pay women to have the children they so desperately want them to have. Or the healthcare needed, or for food, or even child care, education...

With men refusing to wear masks in the height of covid, stand your ground laws and abortion, I think they want to kill us. Killing people who drive into our drive-ways, shooting sprees of random strangers to people who may not be strangers. Whipping these people into a killing frenzy needs to stop.

I have often said reality is by consensus, and people have replied, no it’s not.

I wonder how people explain the reality of Americans who want trump as president. Of course if you don’t it means these other are out of touch with reality.

In my previous blog entry I wrote about descriptions of reality as being very subjective and therefore if we describe reality with adjectives then those adjectives are really important. For instance Trump holds a rally, how the rally is described is full of subjectivity. I can see how those attendees might describe the rally differently than other people, and while most often our view of reality is colored in for us with statements like ‘they are out to get us’ and
‘the election was stolen’... why try to determine an independent view of reality when it involves a lot less thinking to accept someone else’s view of reality? Each time a world view is accepted, it becomes a stronger reality for those who believe it, and thus it becomes a consensus for those who ’share’ or ‘adopt’ a version of reality.

While no one is suggesting an election was not held, some would prefer one reality over another. And that description of the reality is where the choice of interpretations is made. It is easy to see beyond this consensus if we believe either someone else’s reality or have thought enough about the subjectivity of reality to realize they’re maybe more interpretations.

When presented with a version of reality we must always ask ourselves how would they benefit from this version of reality. For Trump it is pretty obvious. He benefits most from the reality he’d have us believe.

For years I believed whoever the president of the US pretty much uniformly represents the people of the US, but then those photos of Abu graib came to light and I expected the people of the US to rise up in horror of what was being done in their name. To my surprise in the country where I lived at the time no reports were made of outrage within the US of what happened at Abu Graib. I was shocked there was no outrage because those photos were sickening to me in the extreme.

Then Israel started saber rattling at Iran somewhere around then and although the internet was young, YouTube had a video of an Israeli man saying to Iran: we love you. Then the Iranians responded in kind.

It is easy to believe that a country uniformly believes the message presented by their leader, whether it is the US president, or any other country. And for me that included Israel but from this wonderful video, shows it is not.
I think in the case is Israel, Netanyahu benefits despite when his reign ends the damage that may be done to Israel if it doesn’t persist in its militancy, a terrible catch 22? And demonstrates the selfishness of Netanyahu.

Politically the country I was living in at the time those photos from Abu Graib came to light may have benefitted from not showing the outrage Americans exhibited. As we saw when occupy started in the US people all around the planet took to their tents. It makes sense since the country I was living in had followed the US into Iraq. Perhaps they suspected rioting would ensue regarding Abu Graib? Besides I think there had been some fights breaking out between Muslims and white pride types in that country already. Certainly that country’s prime minister lowered the tone of his rhetoric after the fights started breaking out. No doubt because these white pride types were adopting his vision of reality.

All the time we are given versions of reality, based on what someone would have us believe, be careful what you believe.

I’ve been reading about Hannah Arendt. Initially her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was on sale at Amazon, but it’s at the library so I will eventually read it there but then later I was listening to someone tutoring and referred to the banality of evil to a student. I then wondered if reading Eichmann in Jerusalem is a common part of the US high school curriculum. It is not although I think it would be worthy for teenagers to think upon.

I wonder how many people know Arendt coined the term ‘the banality of evil’? I later read on the internet that there was nothing banal about the evil of Eichmann.

While the author of the article understands the point Arendt is making it seems they want to assert there is something like an objective evil, like those trite documentaries on murder crimes on TV as if it’s so easy to dismiss a murderer as something other, no longer worthy to be called human. And thus the only valid way to describe such a person as ‘evil’. In my opinion this is lazy thinking.

Evil, a concept straight from religion being the complete opposite of good, seems like it is never seen as subjective. However eastern religions are better at seeing the subjective nature of opposites. Yin has some yang in it and yang has some yin in it. Can we see black without white/light? Therefore it is necessary to walk the middle path, according to eastern religions because it would seem the more we avoid evil the more evil we invoke?

Subjectivity speaks to the banality of evil, but not just evil. All things have a subjective side to them, even that chair in the corner of the room. You may think it’s ugly, I might think it’s useless, someone else might think it’s priceless. While the description of the chair may be subjective, that it’s a chair and its current location is based on some kind of objective reality. Evil is a description so therefore is subjective.

I get it, I don’t want to see any similarity between me and the person who does something evil. But the reality is we won’t know if we could until we’ve walked that proverbial mile in another's shoes. Is it easy to see beyond the story we tell ourselves of who we are? Because we are all cogs in the machine. While some people say we have no free will, which might be another extremely lazy thought process that allows us to take no responsibility for our actions. But it can be very difficult to say no, I will not do this job. And we all may wish to be the one to say, no I will not, we
never know we will or won’t until we are actually in that position. Especially when we feel threatened which may be possible in a situation like Eichmann might have found himself. Did he see his neighbors shot in the street one morning? [I actually haven’t even read anything about Eichmann so I know nothing about his situation at the time.]

Especially if he believed the then Nazi rhetoric that the German army was unstoppable and would not stop until all of the world had fallen under their power. Also plausible. And the consequences of not doing the job seemed unlikely because this was the story of that German society was telling itself at the time. Besides how would the conversation go, no I am not going to send people to their death today? In Nazi Germany I doubt this would’ve been met with “sure, okay”. Could he have resigned? In our society it is possible but getting a good job in the US is difficult enough, besides your kid might need that medicine that is covered by the employers health insurance.

And who was responsible really? The train driver? The people who laid the tracks? Hitler? The guards? The people who didn’t run away, rather than get on the train willingly... (aka victim blaming. Gandhi said the Jews should’ve just suicided or turned themselves in) besides if Eichmann hadn’t done it, it is possible that someone else might have?

I rather wonder how at the trial they got a conviction but how could they not convict him? Either convict them all or none I suppose. But conviction is necessary because we must say, no, never again in spectacular style to underline the message that what they did was completely unacceptable.

But lessons are learned. Make sure you are never get caught, a lesson well learned by American moguls. In her book blood on their hands, the owners of corporations ride high on corporate income while the corporate businesses just
squeak by and employees are forced to live on minimum wages. While this is a book about newspapers, this corporation is hardly unique and has been a business model employed in any number of corporations.

One could see that as an evil too but the cogs aren’t seen as being particularly evil despite how many families or children are hurt in the process.

The evil of denying abortions to women who need them as emergency healthcare, how many (potential) families are destroyed in the process by ignorant politicians voting for stuff they don’t understand or really care to understand. This is an evil too but are they caught up as cogs in a machine?

I used to know that I was such a genius that all my thoughts were so brilliant that every one of them so dazzling that all must be waiting on baited breath for my very next idea...

With my self-assured knowledge of my wisdom, I told a friend when I get out of the swimming pool, my husband and I both need to use the bathroom, each of us for different reasons.

My friend said ‘fascinating’ in an Oscar winning voice performance.

I was lately looking at Steven Pinker book, ‘a sense of style’, and I think Pinker needs such a friend as mine. Or perhaps Pinker is so utterly brilliant he no longer has friends who are of equal intellect to his own and thus he knows he knows better. I started reading the beginning of the ‘sense of style’ where he belabors the need for brevity. Advice I definitely wish he thought to heed when he wrote ‘the better angels’. While I agree with the thesis of ‘the better angels..’, it was long like 7000 x7000page PhD theses.

I hope I am hyperbolizing but I am not sure I am. I get he thought we’d all disagree with him so he wrote it thus to beat us all into submission. And the point of such a thesis is to bore readers to death so they start to skim. Indeed to me he was preaching to the converted: we indeed are a much less violent society.

For me it was the realization that public executions are no longer happen in most of the world. Also we don’t do witch burning anymore. In my opinion our society has gotten less violent because women have been gaining more power, and as women get more power the safer and better society will be. I did not see this in Pinker’s book, what I saw is that he expressed was that it was correlated rather than causative. I believe women’s power is causative.

The proof of this I think is in Afghanistan, before the US invaded they had public executions and it is possible that there was no other country where women had less power, except perhaps some African nations according to wikipedia and amnesty international countries performing public executions in 2012 were Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iran and Kuwait. And it seems the taliban are back at it.

While men might think it’s wonderful having so much power, I think that all that power probably hurts men too.

While this is about how the accumulation of wealth and how this even hurts the rich, it’s not a big leap
to assume that the same is true for power. In some ways i think this is even more obvious because the power men exert is very conformist, so men must conform otherwise be ousted.

As I am sure I’ve said before and I know I am not the first, that society is no better than how the weakest member of society is treated. Gandhi and Maya Angelou have both said similar. And the best possible society will be when each member of society is treated with equal respect and everyone’s time is treated as equally valuable.

Our society is heading in that direction because sooner or later republican men will realize that they are living fossils and women do have value.