Trump – Can He Lose?

Oct 11, 2020 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Global Warming, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Racism, Science Values, USPol, Values

Trump – Can He Lose?

Snake Oil & Fury

 

T here’s no argument amongst Trump’s enemies, his grovelling enablers, and even among millions of his supporters, that Trump is a professional liar, and that“liar”  defines almost the entirety of Trump’s persona. It is not possible to listen to Trump speak or tweet and not be more or less certain that what he says is not the truth. Because he said it. Unless you are the dregs of the Trump base and need to believe him. Others of his base will be well aware of the lies but they are vested in their fantasy outcome. We see this in the desperate illogic of their rebuttals of Trumps dishonesty and incompetence, on twitter and elsewhere.

Trump lies for preference. He will not tell the truth if he can manufacture a useful falsehood. He doesn’t control the truth but he does have control of the lies he tells which he can disown and deny at will. He is also a professional gaslighter and lying, and the confusion of whether he is lying or telling the truth is central to his technique.  

This is not unique to Trump. And, strangely enough, he isn’t very good at it. The Jesuits were — and are — masters of the noble lie. 

 Jesuitical casuistry can be described as “destroying by distinctions and exceptions, all morality, and effacing the essential difference between right and wrong”. 

The story goes that in the Middle Ages catholic priests were barred from entering England.
So when Jesuit priests arrived from the Continent and were asked “Are you a priest,” they would reply, “No.”
Of course to tell a lie was a sin. But they had an excellent work-around, the casuistic argument called “Mental Reservation”, or “mental equivocation”, the lie of necessity.
So when they said they were not a priest, they were thinking, “the questioner might have a particular priest in mind, but I am not that particular priest, so I am not “a” priest he is thinking of.”
Or he might think, “I am not a priest of Zeus,” so when he says “No,” he is, with mental reservation, telling a kind of convenient truth.
But when an argument comes down to the definition of the word “a”  then it’s really just blatant dishonesty.

This casuistry has of course migrated from the church throughout the upper echelons of power and is now the benchmark and basic tool in law, corporations, government bureaucracies, politics at every level (note that habitual liar Tony Abbott was trained by Jesuits) and of course in advertising and public relations.

Basically we’re being lied to for most of every day by everyone who has any sort of use for us and access to us.

And we know it. And we don’t really trust anyone who’s trying to ‘sell’ us something of any kind.

At least most of us don’t really trust them. But some do, and they’re the people who have always fallen for the flimflammers, the con-artists, the snake-oil salesmen, swindlers, grifters – in other words, people like Trump, whose  shills are his children, his donors and almost every Congressional Republican.

That people with brains really can’t see, at least after the first time or second time, how they’re being fooled is, as Fanny D. Bergen wrote in 1888, incredible.

” I t seems almost incredible, whatever their origin, that remedies of so offensive a character as many of those above given can still retain a place . . . but there seems to be in the uneducated human mind a sort of reverence for or faith in that which is in itself disagreeable or repulsive. This idea apparently rules instead of rational judgment

You can certainly say that Trump meets the requirements for both ‘disagreeable’ and ‘repulsive’.

The original Snake Oil salesman was Clark Stanley. He was in his way a showman. Among his tricks was a grotesque and highly dramatic performance. With real, live rattlesnakes.

” C lark Stanley reached into a sack, plucked out a snake, slit it open and plunged it into boiling water. When the fat rose to the top, he skimmed it off and used it on the spot to create ‘Stanley’s Snake Oil,’ a liniment that was immediately snapped up by the throng that had gathered to watch the spectacle. Little wonder. After all, Stanley had proclaimed that the liniment would cure rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lumbago, sore throat, frostbite and even toothache.
Dr. Joe Schwarcz in: Science, Sense & Nonsense

You can see – and unhappily smell – the surely not coincidental similarities in structure and style. So, again, a fairly clear progenitor and influencer for Trump.  

As recently as 24 years ago, Congressman Martin R. Hoke said in a speech: 

“M r. Speaker, there is an old trick to hawking snake oil. First raise the fear. Then sell to it. That is exactly what [they] are trying to do with their latest advertising campaign of fear and blatant disinformation.

 This also matches Trump but, as you know only too well, it is now standard throughout politics and has been at least since Joseph Goebbels.  

Trump is a con-man. There was a saying amongst con men: “There’s a mark born every minute”. Suckers are everywhere and Trump has learnt – probably to his surprise – that the suckers he cons amount to almost 50% of Americans. 

Trump is a professional liar and has been since he was bounced off his father’s knee, since the first time his father promised to catch him but lied and let him crash to the floor.

He learnt to trust no-one.

He learnt that love was a hoax (and that he could use that against others and to control others).

And he learnt to steal from anyone anything that he wanted. 

He practised his frauds and polished his scamming skills on his own family. 

Trump is clearly psychologically impaired and emotionally dead, except towards himself.

All of this is obvious. 

Here is the “grandiosity” section of the Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism (DIN): 

  • The person exaggerates talents, capacity, and achievements in an unrealistic way.
  • The person believes their invulnerability or do not recognize their limitations.
  • The person has grandiose fantasies.
  • The person believes that they do not need other people.
  • The person overexamines and downgrades other people, projects, statements, or dreams in an unrealistic manner.
  • The person regards themselves as unique or special when compared to other people.
  • The person regards themselves as generally superior to other people.
  • The person behaves self-centeredly and/or self-referentially.
  • The person behaves in a boastful or pretentious way.

This fits like a glove at every single point. It’s just one of several diagnoses that Trump fits.

 

So Can Trump Win?

 

Can he win the popular vote? Or the Electoral College vote, as he did last time?

Biden seems to be going well but, as so many of us are thinking, we thought Clinton had it in the bag four years ago too. Is there going to be another disastrous surprise?

Comparing the polling for 2016 and 2020, it’s clear there’s no room for complacency. Clinton was consistently ahead of Trump and had the two major states, Pennsylvania and Florida, in her grasp, as Biden does now. But . . .  below are the comparative projections for 2016 and 2020 produced by fivethirtyeight.com

Clinton’s road was bumpy and volatile while Biden’s has been more or less straight and stable.    

Biden’s chance of winning (81%) is 10% higher than Clinton’s was (71%). 

Biden is ahead in the same two important swing states – Florida and Pennsylvania – that Clinton was forecast to win but lost. So this might be cause for concern. However, Biden is one or two percent ahead of Clinton’s polling in Pennsylvania that Trump won by less than 1%. In Florida Clinton was ahead by about 2% while Biden is 4.3% ahead. Trump won Florida by 1.2%. So it’s Biden’s to lose.     

The simulations for Biden are slightly better than Clinton’s were but there’s not a lot in it.  

 

Unfortunately . . .

there is another predictive model, Helmut Norpoth’s Primary Model. This is based on the Primary races in the Spring. Only twice has it been wrong and then it was very close. What it measures basically is the winning margin in the primaries of the party’s winning candidate. This reflects the enthusiasm of people to get out and vote. That’s fair enough because the outcome is not based on polling around who people would prefer to win but how many people actually vote for their candidate.

In the case of this election the Primary Model, published on 2 March, 2020 predicted that the probability of Trump winning was 91%.

That’s frankly upsetting and the only antidote is for Democrats to get out and vote in huge numbers, larger than what’s predicted in the primaries.

  

Three things about this Primary Model prediction:

1.  If the Norpoth Primary Model is valid and conclusive then there would be no need to bother about an actual election. They could go directly from the primaries to the inauguration. It would save billions of dollars. Also what it suggests is that universal suffrage is pointless and that most voters are powerless except for the ones who vote in the primaries.

2.  When the Norpoth prediction was published only four of the 57 primaries had been completed:  Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Biden only won two, but he eventually won 47 overall, ultimately by very strong margins;

3.  This election year is, as people keep saying, “unprecedented”. The Primary Model’s prediction was published on 2 March when the pandemic that has so shaken and globally embarrassed the United States was hardly getting started and the people were being promised that everything was under control and it would quickly, magically disappear.

On 2 March there were just 16 cases and only 3 deaths. Today (10/10/20) there has been a world-beating total of 7,945,505 cases and 219,282 deaths. And rising.

On 2 March the unemployment rate was under 4%; within days it had spiked to over 14% and it remains at about 8%. Many millions are out of work. In mid-September, 8.3 million reported being behind on rent and 3.8 million reported that they were likely to be evicted.

Breonna Taylor was shot six times by the police on 13 March. George Floyd was killed by police on 25 May and the Black Lives Matter movement activated millions of protesters in the US and around the world.

Groups of influential, life-long, baked-on, career Republicans, such as the Lincoln Project and MeidasTouch, infuriated and disgusted by Trump’s dishonesty, his mismanagement of the pandemic (and everything else), and his increasingly corrupt enablers, have turned their considerable and frankly ruthless political skills and experience against him in the Presidential campaign.

The political landscape, and the political issues, were utterly disrupted after the Norpoth prediction was released. So it seems unlikely that data on the number of people who were voting for a candidate—or, importantly, who didn’t bother to vote—in the primaries before 2 March would have been able to give a realistic indication of voting intentions and political engagement eight months later. Americans are now voting in a very different world and there is much , much more at stake.

Again, there is no room whatever for complacency.

If Norpoth is right we should be preparing for an influx of Americans to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Europe (including, for the moment, if we can, Britain).

As Trump would say, “We’ll see how it turns out.”

 

The October Surprise

Trump gave us an early October Surprise which tanked in the worst way, by dropping three percentage points . Still, he wasn’t letting the facts (such as he was being treated for CoVid19) stand in the way of a performance opportunity, and so he decided to pretend to be the President and stage a motorcade, waving to his adoring minions – who are few in the District of Columbia which is the bluest place in the USA. The fact this was potentially a death drive for those also in the car with him is of no consequence to someone who believes it’s the least they can do to sacrifice their lives for someone so much more important than them. Or frankly anyone.

There was also an earlier alleged attempted September Surprise. Trump was almost certainly infected with the coronavirus when he debated Joe Biden on 29 September, and knew he was infected. So the surprise may have been his attempted assassination by virus of his adversary. What’s the evidence? His campaign and the White House both refuse to confirm or deny his coronavirus status on that day or earlier. His doctors lie. They also refuse to confirm or deny.

 

The Base
and the unwillingness to understand

The greatest failure of the Clinton campaign and possibly the most crucial lesson unlearnt by the Biden campaign is why Trump succeeded against all odds in the 2016 election.

Everyone knows Trump is a con-man and a pathological liar, a sexual predator, a racist and intellectually stupid (but natively and intuitively brilliant at gaslighting people, as sociopaths are).

But Trump got how badly the people were hurting in blue collar, economically declining areas; how uncomfortable, or even afraid, they were of societal changes and cultural forces that were threatening the world they knew and understood and the values that mattered to them. He used this to generate his base by promising what he wouldn’t and couldn’t deliver (because he deeply lacks the intellect required).

His base believed him because they needed to. It was their only hope. They still do and they think it still is.

The last thing a Presidential candidate should call people who are hurting, who are afraid, who are confused, who are afraid of losing what dignity they have left, the last thing is to call them “deplorables”. When Clinton did that she showed lack of compassion, lack of understanding, lack of interest in those people and it was a massive own goal, the results of which still haunt the Democrats.

The one thing Biden should have done, has not specifically done, and which, if he doesn’t do it could lose him the election, is to directly address those people who are hurting and say he gets it, gets their anger, pain and upset, and tell them how he is going to help them.

The Gentility
& the Lincoln Project

The problem with the Democrats is that they are so polite. You wouldn’t be rude, not even to an enemy.

A senior MI6 bureaucrat explained to a journalist that he was always polite to representatives of hostile nations. “Yes, but when they’ve done something really bad, how do you show them you’re angry?” “We don’t offer them a cup of tea.”

Or as Veronica Roth wrote: “Politeness is deception in pretty packaging.” Although it has been designed to enable social intercourse without violence, it actually isn’t nice at all. It’s intentional inauthenticity. And it has a more than a tinge of superiority and entitlement. The violence is hidden but still there.

The Democrats need to hide less behind social sophistication and start speaking more authentically.

That is what the Lincoln Project and MeidasTouch do, because they’re not Democrats but Republicans. They know how toxic Trump is and how to talk to Republicans and swing voters. They are ruthless and that’s a lesson the Democrats could learn from, because the stakes are so high.

Losing politely is not an option.

 

The Anger

Sir Roger is furious with Trump, not for the reasons you might imagine but because when Trump (reportedly) contracted COVID-19 Sir Roger in his darkest heart for a moment hoped Trump would die and save the US from any more of his horrors. This is not the sort of person Sir Roger believes himself to be or ever wants to be and Sir Roger is angry that Trump moved him to this feeling if only for a nanosecond. Sir Roger now feels that justice would be better served if Trump survived the virus, lost the election, and was subsequently indicted and found guilty of all of the corruption that he has progressed, during his term in office and before. And so he would pay for the damage he has done to the US and its people. But Sir Roger stops well short of politely wishing him well (like a Democrat).

  

The Shame & the Laughing Stock

Donald Trump for four years has shamed his country. Americans are aware, surely, of how poorly he has ‘led’ the country, how he has failed it, how it has fallen in the estimation of people from almost every other country except, of course those other countries who find Trump a Useful Idiot; countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. People in the rest of the world feel genuinely sorry for Americans who have to suffer the political and cultural fiasco that Trump has visited on them.

At the same time they are laughing their heads off at the incompetence and obvious con artistry of Trump and at the people who are stupid enough to believe he is their saviour and that he has been doing a valuable job.

 

The Reality Mafia Show

One of the most interesting things about the criminal ‘Presidency’ has been, despite all the lies and obfuscations, the fact that the interminable, torrential, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling lies have provided an extraordinary, absolutely transparent view, through the White House Reality Show of how the Mafia operates. Starring The Don, a bankruptcy-prone con-man. It’s thrill-a-minute, complete with shadowy international accomplices, thugs, threats, bribes, blackmail, corrupt officials, and mass-murder. And all there, laid luminously bare.

 

How is any of this about Australian Values?

 

Global stability

Compassion

Decency

Climate Change/ Global Warming

The future of the planet and life on Earth including the lives of our children and their children and theirs etc. etc. etc.

Freedom

Democracy.

And the more time Trump has, the more permission he gives to others like the Australian Right to become more and more authoritarian.

And so much more.

Never forget what Trump’s main advisor in the 2016 campaign, Steve Bannon, said:

“I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment. . . Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

 

If only there were a god to rid us of this turbulent prick, Trump.

 

The Real Showman 

” But however mysterious is nature, however ignorant the doctor, however imperfect the present state of physical science, the patronage and the success of quacks and quackeries are infinitely more wonderful than those of honest and laborious men of science and their careful experiments.

Phineas Taylor (PT) Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (1865)

 

 

Jefferson Says – Reboot

Sep 28, 2020 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, OzPol Values, USPol, Values

Jefferson Says – Reboot

President Kennedy told a gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House,

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

This post was first published ten years ago. Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, was writing 200 or more years ago. His words were wise and prophetic. Especially today, particularly at this time when tyranny seems more than ever before to be threatening the democracy of the United States.

 

We the People

 

Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States, a man of the Enlightenment, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most influential Founding Fathers, who envisioned America as the force behind a great “Empire of Liberty”.

Sir Roger knows that his loyal readers are impatient to hear what the great Jefferson, Father of the American experiment and of whom all Americans are so rightly proud [except Glenn Beck] would have said about the Wikileaks matter.

Here is what he did say:

“ Information is the currency of democracy.

[ … ]

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves.

[ … ]

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

[ … ]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

[ … ]

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Just so.

Sir Roger also notes that the Constitution of the United States begins with the words:

“We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America”.

Not 'we the politicians', or 'we the Executive Branch', or 'we the diplomats', or 'we the oil companies', or 'we the bureaucrats', or 'we the bankers', or even 'we the military'.

“We the People…ordain”.

Nothing could make clearer the source of all authority in the United States — as it is in every other democracy in the world —  and any authority arrogated otherwise is illegitimate.

 

Big Bang Time Free Willy

Sep 24, 2020 | Australian Values, Education, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Big Bang Time Free Willy

Watch Time Disappear

 

When Sir Roger was a young man (yes), his university offered a soft course for the scientifically inquisitive but mathematically challenged called The History and Philosophy of Science.

Naturally this was universally and derogatorily referred to as “HissPiss”.

Sir Roger, therefore, as a Big Man On Campus, did not participate in this program but listened to his friends who did and has been fascinated by the discipline ever since.

And so he regularly shouts at the screen or the radio when philosophers tell him that there is no such thing as Free Will. Not because they are wrong but because their science is wrong.

They argue that everything in and about the Universe is predestined and that therefore nothing we think or do can change that. So much about this is wrong. Scientifically.

Their understanding of the universe is Newtonian with a scattering of late 19th century particle physics. Such as, for example that electrons are solid objects. Tiny, but solid. And that as solid objects they must behave as solid objects do. Those philosophers do please need to catch up.

Fundamental particles are not just objects. They’re energy which can manifest as either waves or particles but only when “collapsed” by an ‘observer’. Fundamental particles are not anywhere in particular (until observed) otherwise they are probabilities.

Until they are observed their range of probability is ‘anywhere in the universe’ regardless of the speed of light. 

Also, it is not possible to know simultaneously both the position and momentum of the particle.

All of this is about the uncertainty principle.

So how could you predict, say from today, how the universe was going to evolve? You would have to know where every fundamental particle in the entire universe was and where it was going and you would have to know that for all particles at the same precise instant. Which is not possible. And even if it was possible to gather, store and then compute the entire universe, you would need a computer that was many times the size of the actual universe itself.

And not only that but

  1. if your computer could assemble all of the data of the universe (impossible as that is) at a specific time, it would have to organise those data and then run them, and by the time that was done your computer would be seriously lagging behind what was actually happening
  2.  your computer cannot possibly catch up. It can’t run faster than the universe itself because the universe is running as fast as it’s possible to go
  3.  if you wanted to use a different universe with a significantly faster speed of light to help your computer catch up with this universe, you would have to take that universe into account since it’s now interacting with this one, which makes it even more difficult
  4. and in any case time is relative and is not the same in any two places.  

And we haven’t even talked about field energy and quantum vacuums where stuff materialises out of literally nothing. Or black holes which hide and effectively destroy information which it’s impossible to retrieve, which will screw up your total data collection exercise a bit.

So what’s left of this predetermination theory?

If they were right that everything that ever happens in the universe is inevitable and necessarily taking into account every single item in the universe:

  • down to the very tiniest size possible—the Plank Length: 1.616255(18)×10−35 metres
  • and the shortest possible time—Plank Time: 5.391247(60)×10−44 seconds
  • and without taking into account the question of whether fundamental constants, such as the speed of light, or the gravitational constant, might change over time, or vary across the universe,
  • and not taking into account, at all, Heisenberg‘s uncertainty principle which “implies that it is in general not possible to predict the value of a quantity with arbitrary certainty, even if all initial conditions are specified”
  • or considering that there are an estimated 10 80 electrons in the observable universe to be included in the data sweep

 then the entire actual presumably-infinite (and therefore obviously impossible to calculate) future of the universe must be encapsulated in Moment Zero of the Big Bang.

And if that is the case it has already happened at the beginning.

And if that’s the case there is no need for Time at all.

And if there is no time then there is no Space-Time.

And if that’s the case there is therefore no Universe.

But there is a Universe. 

QED

So . . . 

The Universe is probabilistic but not predictable because the uncertainties multiply exponentially.

Therefore nothing is predetermined except . . .

. . . except that an event is determined only and precisely at the exact Plank moment that it occurs and no earlier. 

You might want to say that an event was inevitable, but its inevitability is only manifested precisely at the exact moment after it occurred and no earlier. 

None of this is an argument for Free Will. Or to free Willy. It is only a rebuttal of the HissPiss argument.  

It is also a rebuttal of the dreadful, hateful, ignorant, particularly – but not exclusively – Calvinist doctrine of ‘predestination’ which has royally screwed and crippled (not only) western culture for 500 years. That psychotic, murderous bastard has a lot to answer for. He is probably undergoing eternal therapy with his therapist, Dr Lucifer. Hope so. 

Briefly, then, despite what Darth Vader said, Luke Skywalker did not have, and you do not have, any “destiny” apart from the one you choose, and cause, for yourself.  

 

And we haven’t even discussed Consciousness.

Another day.  

 

The Real Anarchist

Sep 10, 2020 | Arts, Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, Racism, USPol, Values

The Real Anarchist

“I’m a Leninist” *

 

Trump has branded democrats and protestors as terrorists and also as anarchists. And because he likes the wacko Q narrative  – or likes to use it to manipulate his stupid base –  he sees the dark agents of doom in every corner.

But anarchists? The perfect patsy, a “useful, biddable idiot”, a deeply ignorant, psychopathic, personality-disordered, narcissistic buffoon he was scraped up, groomed and dragged into his “presidency” by a self-described . . . wait for it . . . anarchist.

That real anarchist is the unutterably awful, extreme-right, woman-hating, anti-democratic, supposedly communist-loving, power-mad, fake-news propagandist, pus-brained Steve Bannon.

What is this if not hot-lead anarchism:

“I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

And he’s willing to destroy not only the establishment but the people.

“Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

Good grief! Cheney? Cheney taught Satan everything he knows, and is so deep in the Establishment you’d have to pry him out of the magma chamber where he and his heart machine ‘live’.

As you know, Bannon was arrested and charged on 20 August with mail fraud allegedly involving the misuse of multi-million-dollar funds — donated to build the notorious “Wall” — for personal expenses. So much for destroying the Establishment.

Why should we care?

Because the US is important to global stability. Yes it could do with some political cleansing.

For any other actually democratic country the supposed “leftist/socialist” party, the Democrats, would be considered hard right. The conservatives are beyond alt-right, being absent any sense, or understanding of ethics and bereft of any ‘moral compass’ and are more or less irreparably the party of robber barons and their weak thoroughly bribed and compromised political tools.

But the people of America are for the most part fine people, generous people, fun-loving people, wildly creative people, enthusiastic energetic people, incredibly clever people.

They don’t deserve this.

Nor do we.

 

If Trump gets another go the whole world will be left in turmoil.

 

*  Sir Roger, by contrast, is a Lennonist

Coronavirus? Pandemic?

Aug 31, 2020 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Global Warming, Lifestyle & Life, Love, New Normal, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Coronavirus? Pandemic?

What the Actual Fuck?

Has this been the worst ever social and economic disaster in our lifetimes? Or has it been the squealing brakes we needed, to curb our pre-pandemic headlong, tunnel-vision rush towards . . . well, where? . . . We were too busy to think about that.

And is it unprecedented? Or is it just one of the smaller, if not insignificant, health crises in roughly 300,000 years of the human story?

The answer is Yes. Or no. Or all of the above.

For some it hasn’t been so drastic; it’s even been interesting, a wake-up call, an eye-opening surprise, intimations of a new world waiting for us.

For others—millions, billions of people—this has been dreadful. Shocking. Crushing. Life was already tough enough and suddenly the little that they had has been locked down, or ripped away, or they are forced to endanger their own lives and others just to survive. And many have seen their businesses, their jobs, their weddings, and funerals, without warning, abruptly disappear into a ruthless black hole.

For some ‘luckier’ ones it has just been a horror show of seemingly interminable boredom doing the same bloody things, or nothing, day after day after blursday.

While some have clung to crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, binged on Netflix and blown the dust off childhood board games, many others have discovered TikTok or embraced Instagram and explored their latent talents and skills, joined online courses, or worked on projects they never had time for before. But even this can drain enthusiasm if what we also need is the stimulation of other humans physically close to us. 

People who already work from home, and are more used to it, might have escaped the worst of the trauma.

For introverts and people who enjoy their own company there is the added benefit that avoiding going out in public becomes a good deed.

 

What next?

What has roared up to surprise us is an incredible global treasure-trove and display of creativity and ingenuity that hadn’t displayed itself quite so publicly or broadly before. A lot of people are suddenly engrossed in something they love doing that has become more than a frivolous hobby.

We have discovered new ways of doing things and embraced new rules for living. There has been an extra flourishing of kindness and caring.

Many of us are longing for the time when this uncertainty is all over and everything returns to ‘normal’ – what the politicians are falling over each other to call “the other side of this” as if we’re going through a tunnel that doubles back on itself and we’ll pop out the other end into an unchanged world.

But it won’t work like that. We are already creating a new world with novel expectations. Many of us are praying that we never go back to that pre-2020 ‘normal’ because returning to those days would be to endorse the negatives and stress of that time, abandoning so much of value we are freshly learning. It would be like resigning to the hopelessness, like embracing our abuser.

What before we had considered ‘normal’ isn’t normal in the history of humanity, not in the history of science or technology, not even in the stagnant history of politics. What we called ‘normal’ before this time wasn’t ‘normal’ as recently as 20 or so years ago.

The world of 2020 is not at all the same as the world of 2000, and it is starkly different from the world of 1980. Millennials were born in the dark ages; many before the internet and smart phones which rule our lives today.

Everything is always changing in the subtle blink of a historical eye. It morphs subliminally as we watch but don’t notice. And it sneaks up on us so surreptitiously that it feels as if things have always been this way.

Except . . .

. . . except that this very recent jolt sits on top of centuries where the central pillar of human society hasn’t essentially changed – like an Easter Island statue, set in stone that goes literally deep underground.

This central pillar of modern society, in effectively all cultures, and all politics, is the gaslighting coercion and commodification of humans by the wealthy and powerful in relentless pursuit and protection of power and wealth.

While everything else is always changing, the underpinning fundamental principles of political philosophy change glacially. Most politicians and their parties almost anywhere in the world still wade up to their armpits through the foul morass of opportunist cronyism; still harvest the noxious sludge of the distant past; still, head down, trying to navigate, with stained, fading, tattered and obsolete maps, the quagmire of ancient myths of crumbled worlds millennia ago; still shadowing the spectral call of long-dead heroes, buried in dark ages, or in the more recent beige years of hopelessness and resignation imposed upon us for a quarter century by Ming the Grim; still desperate to claw up and restore a long-vanished, and fictitious, world of fairytale childhoods; still hawking concepts that decomposed centuries before they were born.

While the horse and buggy politics of early Australia – forever ago it seems – were often steeped in inequality, prejudice and discrimination, at least some few of those early federalists were people who had achieved something in their own right before they became members of Parliament, people of principle who had a sense of service, social conscience, ethics and fairness and worked for the good of the country. They fought for the People, for a basic wage, fair working hours, a national broadcaster, and an equitable health service. And if they were found breaking the rules they resigned.

It has not lately been like this. As you know.

What Parliament really looks like on a normal day. Where are all the dedicated people (paid by Australians to do a job) who really care and are working hard for the welfare of the Australian people?

‘Normal’ in the 21st century has been the seats of Parliament, on both sides, filled (when they are filled) with the polished arses of chancers, grifters, opportunists and carpetbaggers; arrogant, self-impressed, self-congratulatory, amoral branch-stacking careerist apparatchiks without principles, conscience, or ethics; with limited experience, no understanding of the complexity of the real world, empty of any sense of service (or what ‘service’ even means), oozing with greed for power and money, uninterested in the good of the country and its people, willing to lie and cheat in order merely to “win” and enrich their mates. And amongst them are more than the country’s share of racists, fruitcakes, conspiracists, conspirators and clowns.

As American Professor Heather Cox Richardson puts it:

 [Politicians] create their own reality for the end that they will be able to continue to stay in power, come hell or high water [and] will do anything it takes — anything it takes — to make sure that this [US] government continues to be responsible only to a very, very small elite in society.”

  

So winning at some dick-measuring game, the game of “staying in power” for the sake only of staying in power—without regard to the actual issues and potentially destructive outcomes of the game, or of the effects on the country, its people, or their future—this is what politicians all around the world think and have long thought is ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’. Of course it is despicable and we all despise them for it.

 

 

‘Normal’ before 2020 was good in many ways but it was never a perfect time, was never good enough and often it was contemptible. Our greatest challenge—Global Warming, far greater than this pandemic—has not been seriously addressed, at least not by our global “leaders”. Inequality, prejudice and discrimination have not dissolved. Political cruelty is rife. Those who struggle are scorned as weak. Unemployment is cast as a moral  issue, portraying the almost universally unwillingly unemployed as bludgers, when the fact is it is an economic issue linked to inflation and party politics.

  

“ The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us.
But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”
― Heinrich Himmler

If we settle again for the political and economic slop and mush we know it has been, all our suffering and our admirable communal discipline and sacrifice through 2020 will have been for nothing.

 If we ignore the gift of this pandemic, if we fail to take personal ownership of our society, and the quality of our lives, that will be a choice we have collectively made and we will each own the responsibility for it.

 Too much about the CoVid world has changed for us to want to reboot the past; but a ‘new normal’ will not be an improvement unless we keep reminding ourselves of what we have been taught here and the visions of the future we are all already imagining.

We have had the opportunity to take a stark, honest look at the way we have actually been living. In the gift of this frozen moment we have seen through the deception of the cultural illusions and delusions we’ve been wrapped in for so long. Our suspended lives are an opportunity to choose who and how we really want to be, and what is truly possible in life.

The power ‘elite’ will try to convince us to return to a past they already royally buggered up (in the case of many priests, literally) . We know we can’t trust them. In a private wine-glazed moment they would admit that lying to us is in the core of their craft. We can’t live into a new future by relying on them, or anything they say, when everything they think they ‘know’, or want us to believe, was dredged up from the fossilised past. 

 

Imagining the future

 

Human society has always been organic, even (or perhaps especially) when faced with the horrors of despotism. It is always the mass of the people who take on the big challenges and decide the big corrections. And it is always when the people are tired and shrink in fear that the great possibilities are stolen from us.

We have already imagined so many ways a new normal might look and feel and how it might work. It is this envisioned, projected future, our combined belief that it is possible, our expectation of it, that will generate the new future, with a firm intention that it is beautiful, free and healthy.

And exciting.

We’ve been given the opportunity to learn to recognise, in the cold, calm, quiet light of this suddenly suspended time, the levers and pulleys of the flimsy fantasy machine of the systems we have permitted to command the quality, the colours, the contents, the contours, and the meanings of our lives.

Now is an opportunity to learn to deeply appreciate life itself, the actual miracle of being alive, the right to enjoy it fully, in an impossibly unlikely and (as far as we are yet aware) otherwise lifeless universe. It is an opportunity to appreciate being; not just having; not just doing; and not just going somewhere.

Until now, in our urgent rush toward the void, we haven’t really had time to grasp that we’re not actually going anywhere anyway. Full of stress, anxiety and fear, we’ve been sprinting towards . . . what though? . . . winning at life?

There’s no payoff at the end, no trophy, no pat on our deathbed head. We don’t get a certificate for making it to the end (unless we score a telegram from the queen).

If we’re always in a hurry to get to the end we rush past all the amazing things that truly enrich life because we’re too busy to notice them and don’t have time for them on the way to nowhere.

 

“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention?

A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.”
~  Eckhart Tolle 

What will be left?  Yes, in that brief dash will be the fear, all the hatred and all the good we failed to do. But also in that simple hyphen will be all the good we did do, the love we gave, our positive influence, the lessons we learnt and taught, how we lifted others up, the difference we made in the world, how we helped to protect the world, improve the world, create new ideas for the world.
The money we made and the stuff we owned will not be engraved in stone.

What will be left of value in the living world?  Our kindness, our wisdom, the love we shared and received, the joy we gave to others and the joy we found for ourselves. These things will continue on, in the eternal present.

 

We don’t win at life; we win IN life.

 

 

The whole of life is in

each moment of life itself

What if we were to spend our infinitely precious time, here and now, appreciating the juicy, exciting, amazing, exuberant, cornucopia of the present.

What if we play in it, experience it, embrace it, grasp and suck and swallow it, in the present. And what if we do all that with feral enthusiasm? Or in meditative stillness? Luxuriously bathe in it?

Right now.

Yes we can sit with our back to this moment nostalgically yearning for the past, but the past is just a sketchy memory we experience in the Present. We can enjoy good memories and be grateful for them.

In the Present.

We can understand that whatever our bad memories, they are not real, they’re just imperfect recollections.

In the Present.

We can thank them for the learning and smooth their pillow. They have no real claws. They can’t hurt us in the present without our permission.

 

Yes we can scream forward with our head in the future trying to reach it before it arrives.

Or we can savour the joy and the miracle of right now.

Because the future, inexorably and without our help, will come in its own time. In the present we can enjoy the possibilities of the future. And when it arrives we can appreciate its reality.

We’ll recognise the future when it comes.

It will be called “The Present”. 

“It is our suffering that brings us together.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed 

Many things have emerged during this lockdown, some of them upsetting; but also good has emerged because of our shared experience.

There has been an increase in generosity, a stronger sense of local and global community. Complete strangers wave to each other, chat to each other, form more intimate relationships. We see it in people from all over the world joining together in creative activities. Remotely making music, performing plays.

Even dressing up to put out the bins has created an international community of over a million people. Community is the core to being human. We are social animals. We need each other. We are incomplete without others. That’s hard-wired. We need connection whether we’re introverts or extroverts.

We need that real, warm sense of personal connection and belonging to a community.

Homework’ Takes On A New Meaning

In 2020 we’ve discovered — or rediscovered from the cottage industries of the pre-Industrial era — that employees can work perfectly well from home and be productive and collaborative without being micro-managed.

One of Sir Roger’s acquaintances reckons the data show an increase in productivity of 25% among those working from home. We can continue to do this. And it’s scalable.

This has benefits for both workers and companies.

Workers have found that they can put in the same or more hours from home but don’t need to spend hours and money travelling to and from work. And that means they have more time at home spending more time with family and more time doing the personal things they never seemed to have time for before.

In many cases companies won’t need enormous elaborate premises with expensive leases to accommodate the workforce that they have. They won’t need to be in the centre of the city, Costs can go down and salaries can go up without a loss of profit.

 

We spend most of our lives first being trained to be compliant and docile and then bringing those gifts to a job which is, for most of us, not wholly satisfying; not the job we chose but the one we could get; not really who we are; learning to pretend to be the person we are expected to be; all for rewards which are never quite enough.

Just in order to survive.

For what?

 

For that awful realisation, as we get older, that we wasted most of our lives wrapped in a blanket to protect ourselves from dangers that never happened.

How do you know that your job is not everything you could wish for and you are wasting your precious time?

  • Do you look forward to Friday?
  • Do you call Wednesday “hump day”? 
  • How quickly would you leave your job if you won the lottery?
  • Would you stay in your job (and put up with the boss) if you didn’t need the money?
  • What would you do if you didn’t need your job?

What are we thinking?  

Despite our unremarkable, humble neighbourhood, we are extraordinary.

We are entities with minds the size of the universe (literally).
We are the universe. We are the universe conscious of itself—probably for the first time in its 13.7 billion years.
We extraordinary beings, full of thoughts, emotions, imagination, stories, creativity, wonder, are the only beings aware of their mortality and the mortality of the universe itself.
Yet we willingly surrender our too brief and finite lives, our gifts, our dreams, the miracle of our minds.
We surrender to a dispassionate, fabricated system; to an artificial and deeply dysfunctional construct called ‘the economy’; and most of us to a suffocating story of compliance and conformity and the safe, orthodox, mediocre life. Religion has a lot to answer for, for this, because . . .

The immense majority

of human biographies
are a gray transit between

domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner

What can we do?

This pandemic has given us time to become more aware of the environments where we live and the people who live there. It is giving us time to be more aware of, and to think about, what society and community really mean.

It is also an opportunity to see how we have overlooked the breadth, the depth and the vitality of community, and why; and to draw out the forensic UV torch to reveal the blood on the walls; to unveil the fictitious story, to reveal the witchcraft, to expose the illusion, to unmask the conspiracy, and instead to see the reality. To grow into a way of living and of really experiencing and exploring our real lives, with other real lives, freely, richly and autonomously.

It is an opportunity that we can all share.

How exactly it will look and how it will be achieved we can’t know. Not yet.

What we can know is that any outcome hauled out of the grave of the recently passed world will inescapably mean inviting the undead to inhabit, and inhibit, the future.

But if it’s drawn from the future that we are already imagining, that will be something new and better.

In the meantime we can reach out in our lives to others. Value others – and not just humans – as fellow creatures. Make a joyful difference to their lives. Value our own lives fully, for everything they are, be grateful, and find joy in our own lives.

Lynton Crosby Outed

May 26, 2016 | Australian Values, Border Security, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Global Warming, Media Values, OzPol Values, Terrorism, Values

Lynton Crosby Outed

 

. . . as Dutton’s Mews Muse (probably)

 

Sir Roger has it on authority from multiple sources that the “Dead Cat on the Table” ploy, most recently fed to and trotted out by Peter Dutton, is the signature work of one Lynton Crosby. Goebbels was also a master propagandist.

What?

Sir Roger is in no way suggesting that Crosby is comparable to or correlated with the Nazi regime. On the contrary, just as Barnaby did with the boats and the beef, Sir Roger just mentioned two things side by side. How dare you suggest that Barnie was throwing a long-dead and rancid cat on the table, or that Lynton Crosby is just as putrid! How very dare you!

ICYMI, what is a “dead cat”?

According to The Spectator :

“ When,  Crosby says,  you are in a hole or faced with the tricky task of diverting attention away from some unwanted piece of news you should throw a dead cat onto the table. Hey presto! No-one is talking about the bad news; everyone is talking about the dead cat on the table.

Lynton Crosby – sorry, SIR Lynton Crosby (knighted for confusing the British electorate into voting for the wrong set of poncing fools last year) – it is said SIR Lynton Crosby has, as his favourite method of tricking the voting public into voting for the wrong team, the above-mentioned Dead Cat Ploy.

The function of this skullduggery is to cause everyone — including especially the media — to talk about the one thing the party has going for it. The media of course lap it up and blow it up and smear it over everything they own because there are now too few journalists, they are overworked and overwhelmed and they are desperate for an easy story  (“what are they saying on twitter?”). And so it becomes the Big Story of the Day, or the week, it reinforces the one issue that does well in the party’s focus groups and turns the media gaze away from issues where the other side polls better.

It is also used to divert attention (and conversation) away from damaging embarrassments.

And what would they not want people talking about?

Well, almost everything. The budget, last year’s budget, the one before that. Malcolm Mansion’s incompetent mismanagement of the NBN, health, education, pensions, unemployment, the economy, growth, unemployment. The “Innovative Society” needed to be hidden after the NBN raid because that just reinforces that if Malcolm is so incompetent that he can’t make the cheap and nasty version cost heaps less than the expensive shiny one then he’s got no chance of pulling off an innovation of any kind.

Then there’s:

  • superannuation
  • tax cuts (except for the rich)
  • tax increases
  • the climate
  • the environment
  • fracking
  • burning rivers
  • subsidies to polluters
  • orphan industries
  • new coal mines
  • the Great Barrier Reef and coral bleaching

. . . to name just a few.

The list of topics they’d rather we didn’t have a close look at includes just about everything – oh, except the Tony Abbott obsession with keeping the brown-skinned people away from our pristine White Australia.

Lynty-baby certainly has his work cut out.

Anyway, Sir Roger hopes that Sir Crosby will be as effective in this election as he was in the recent Canadian election, where his client collapsed in a landslide.

The problem is that the Dead Cat ploy is not a surprise anymore.

The media are onto it like a shark smelling blood at a dog show and are beginning to cover the campaigner and not the issues. More and more people are talking about the sliminess of the liberal party’s campaign strategy and campaign strategist and despising them for trying to play them for fools, or more importantly, trusting them even less than before if that is possible.

The propagandist is in the spotlight when he’s supposed to be invisible, and the ‘valiant hero of the East’, or at least the Eastern Suburbs, is the one who’s supposed to be bathed in the limelight.