Dear Mrs Hall,

Years ago I went out to grab some coffee with a guy I knew and while we were out we bumped into a friend of his.

His friend was about the most charming women I had ever met. She was an artist, she was/is a sculptor and she had lived the most fascinating life.

She was gracious. She was a vegetarian, however if you served her meat, she'd eat it because she thought if someone went to the trouble to prepare a meal for you, you should have the good grace to eat it. This was particularly salient to me at the time because I took someone to a meal where the host prepared some dessert and this person refused to eat it because it had sugar in it. Not that this person was diabetic or anything, he'd eat chocolate mousse all the time, he just wanted to be rude/ungracious. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I brought this person to this meal.

Anyway, this lovely lady, was/is kind, well-mannered, well travelled, educated, sophisticated, the kind of woman any man should count himself extremely lucky to know - I know I thought I was lucky to meet her. She was the kind of person who'd experienced much in her life and survived to become a brilliantly cut diamond.

As we got to know each other I found out she'd worked as a prostitute.

The person who I met her through, who had asked me several times to sleep with him and was often going to Thailand where he was quite able to afford to rent prostitutes for a week at a time, said to me after he found out she'd worked as a prostitute, "I am so glad she told us that because I was thinking she would have made an excellent girlfriend." (In other words, she wasn't good enough to be his girlfriend.)

I turned around and stared at him. My gut reaction was, "She is too good for you".

No I am not a lesbian, but she was someone I was proud to think of as my friend. Unfortunately I lost touch with her but I think of her often.

Now Mrs Hall, what are your sons going to be like? Will they be good enough for my friend? However, Mrs Hall I do know I would never consider you my friend because your attitude is disgusting.

By now most people have read the story of Antoinette Tuff and how she was kind to a man wielding a gun and saved a school full of kids from being shot.

Reading what Tuff said was touching, she told him about how hard her life had been and I am left wondering if this is what is key to making people kind? People who know how bad life can be who can draw on whatever it is that gave them strength to get them through the tough patches so they can survive and shine their light upon the rest of us when life is tough for us.

Is this one of the fundamental dynamics of our society is to make life so tough that those who cannot cope commit suicide and those who do survive, become bright shining lights to the rest of us?

There is nothing new to kindness being a solution to many of the worlds problems, today I read This is Water. David Foster Wallace is an example of those who don't survive. He suicided because of depression.

I wonder if there is so much depression because people don't feel needed, or lonely? No doubt, because people will suicide if they don't, assuming they are numb enough to the horror of their own death. But if they aren't quite numb enough, they are very likely feeling depressed. How do we make people like like they are needed and useful after their view of relationships has been distorted by television?

Is this why we give women so much shit, so they can be kind mothers? Because we do dump so much shit on women. And perhaps this is why people like the Dalai Lama thinks western women can save the world. Western men rule the world and it is only us western women who can control our men.

There is nothing in the world that infuriates me more than the Dems are the same as GOP rhetoric that abounds mostly from men because they don't think women's issues are important.

And then those women's issues are dismissed as merely abortion.

Democrats not only have protected women's rights regarding abortion and Planned Parenthood, but also against violence, equal pay for equal work and many others.

Next time you want to say that the Democrats are the same as the GOP, realize you are dismissing 50% of the population as completely irrelevant. How arrogant is that? While there are many things about the Democrats that annoy the hell out of me, they do defend women's rights. Not only women's right to control their own future, ie with abortion, they also demand equal pay for women and care about violence against women.

I don't like the hounding of people like Snowden, Manning, Assange, Greenwald, but the outcry regarding four men - yes thats right, only four men, was astounding, compared to the time men fight to defend women's civil liberties that effects 50% of the population. My male friends find rape appalling yet I didn't hear much complaint from them when GOP men were saying nonsense about 'legitimate rape'.

Next time you say Dems are the same as GOP remember you are making an incredibly sexist statement. Next time you say abortion is only a talking point, remember you are talking about destroying not only women's lives but potentially her baby's life too if she chooses to raise it, and again dismissing these poor women's lives as irrelevant.

There will always be some kind of power struggle.

Originally power came from the belief in God and those who were perceived to be closest to God had the power.

Then came Kings who were anointed by God, or anointed by the people, people believed them to be powerful so they were powerful.

Meanwhile there is always might-makes-right. Those with the biggest, most powerful weapons, most strength were the most powerful.

Furthermore there are the people with the most resources, whether its land, or money that makes them powerful or a set of skills that people desire/require that makes them in demand, such as intelligence.

Our society has developed tools to control those with power. Girls, often the least powerful members of society have one of the greatest assets, sex. So girls were told not to have sex before marriage to preserve her power to score a man to take care of her. In return for taking care of the house and bearing the man's children, she was given access to his money and his strength to defend her and her kids. Of course that control also maintains the status quo.

To counteract the power of kings, we developed democracy. To counteract the power of the clergy, we developed alternative religions. Some people would argue that eventually these choices also ended up maintaining the status quo also.

To counteract physical power, we developed ranged weapons, however we still want boots on the ground so we still have no way around men's upper-body strength as the final last ditch effort to save the tribe (ie when the shit really hits the fan, women and kids were meant to hide inside while the chivalrous men fought to the death to protect us).

The US founding fathers started the revolution because of corporations and set up regulations to keep corporations under control however corporations manipulated their way out of the yoke that the founding fathers put them under.
Now they are pretty much controlling government, like its controlling an army of zombies, making the US go to war for access to oil reserves, orchestrating free trade agreements to destroy regional industries, interfering with allies and other countries to benefit the 1% or corporations. So in the end we are in the same predicament.

The problem is the dynamic that exists between those with power and those with much less of it.

One friend suggests we remove Limited Liability on corporations. I haven't heard any other solutions other than govt absorbing corporations that are too big to fail but then corporations that are too important to the operation of the country should be seen as our services, they should be operating to benefit us, instead of stockholders or probably more relevant, the principals of the corporation. The CxOs have all the power and none of the responsibility. Ever notice when you ring a corporation to complain, you get someone who just works there? Don't swear at them, its not their decision and there is no way you get to swear at the CxO, they're out playing golf.

Over the past 250 years women's power has been increasing in the west. And with it government has been improving. However there are many forces at work. Society was set up to work for men as they work best in hierarchical situations. Some women cope by becoming mini-males and working within the hierarchies. Then there are the reactionary women who have doubled down on slut-shaming.

While our society is in a state of deep flux, power shifting, there is no comparison between the life in the west and other parts of the world. It is clear that women gaining power greatly improves society. However we have a problem that men in the west have started losing responsibility and I think thats because women haven't been making men shoulder blame.

Essentially, there are those with power and those without power. Mechanisms were in place to maintain the status quo and something has to happen to change the ratio of power. Is what giving you power also destroying you?

Men feel threatened by women gaining power because they have the feel there is conservation of 'power', the zero-sum game. Men feel threatened that women gaining power means men are losing power, because the rationale is there is only so much power in society to go around. Perhaps they feel threatened at work with additional competition? If women have more money, men won't be needed as much? I don't know what the reasoning is. But if you look at societies where men have all the power, the society is floating somewhere down in the toilet of humanity. The worse the society is, the least amount of power women have and men have all the power. Usually this means the government has completely disintegrated.

When we are altering power ratios, we have to be careful how it is altered otherwise you have situations like that of the Russian revolution, from the Tzar to Lenin but more ominously, Stalin. When Iran ousted its shah, it got the Ayatollah. Taking out a dictator never leads to a stable society, as we see in Libya, Iraq. Libertarians undermining government in the 1980s with statements like 'government is inefficient' has lead to the crony-capitalism we have now, where both the Democrats are chasing corporate funding for election campaigns and the GOP are pretty much only interested in serving corporations.

While there is much interest complaining about the evils of the management of our society, it is clear that changing the status quo must be done carefully.