Let’s start this discussion by briefly considering our educational system.

In the 19th century, Prussia introduced the world to a new education system. It was thought to be better than the old education system which had been somewhat optional, less structured and less performance based. Prussia wanted an education system to regiment good workers, good citizens, and a stronger more skilled society ready for the industrialization of Prussia and the wider world.

Today’s neoliberal education system retains performance testing, and mandatory attendance but also uses computers to evaluate and measure performance in new ways. Learning plasticity is a well known feature of young minds. Children have an appetite to learn what they are interested in and their interests can be expanded by exposing them to new information and engaging them in problem solving. They also are in need of personalized guidance to help them to reach their innate potentials.

What worries me about today’s education system is the goal of neoliberal educators to redesign children into whatever someone imagines that society needs. The idea that children are a blank slate ready to be formed into anything is a persistent one that comes from the past.

This notion comes from John Locke’s tabula rasa. It contradicts the idea of innatism, where people are thought have inborn knowledge that comes without training. Genetics studies of identical twins shows that even when they are brought up in different environments, identical twins share a lot of similarity as adults. They share so many traits that it must be true that our genes strongly effect our aptitudes and choices.

After the panic that was generated from 2019-2023 over C-19, when children were required to wear masks and many stayed home for an extended period, children have shown increased stress and mental illness.

Children have also recently been exposed to radical philosophies about human sexuality and the political push to change the sex of children to be different from their biology. Children have also been required to be obedient to mask wearing and other radical indoctrinations.

Even many universities have a mission these days to indoctrinate instead of educate. Debate was once an accepted part of the learning dialogue, so I’m sorry to see indocrination taking the place of open discussions.

Children are becoming suspicious of adults. They aren’t friendly towards people they pass on the street. They look worried. I’m worried that they are being harmed by troublesome political ideologies that go against what is most human about us: our curiosity, our search for fun, the investigation of life for something new to learn about, the ability to change our mind as we learn more or meet someone who sees the world differently.

I hope that all teachers and parents and superintendents will remember that each child is unique and special and each has a chance to make choices that can allow them to achieve what some others may not be able to do. Please don’t try to reshape people for an imaginary world where reality is optional. Reality is still as real as it ever was.

Let children grow up to be whatever they are meant to become because of who they are born to be. Open up their opportunities to learn, but let them find their own way. Don’t try to force them into becoming something or someone that they aren’t innately suited to be.

When I consider the Tennessee shooting that happened recently involving a 28 year old trans-person, I imagine that tragedy and violence broke out because the shooter was medicated outside the envelope of what nature intended. In previous shootings, the prevalence of phycho-active drugs was a recurrent feature. In this case, how many drugs were involved that made this shooter an unstable and violent person?

If you are an adult Trans person I think you can try to be whatever you want to try to be. But leave sexually immature children alone. Treatments on children to alter sexuality should stop immediately. Some states have already drafted laws to make trans treatments of children illegal. Because trans treatments are harmful. Indoctrinating children to believe that they can change their sex is a lie. Changing a person’s sex isn’t possible and creates suffering.

I know that some doctors have been making money on trans-treatments even though some people who undergo trans treatment eventually experience regrets about doing that. Even when parents and their children choose childhood trans treatment, I don’t think they should be able get it. Childhood is a time of self-discovery. Children can be vulnerable when they explore. Irreversible gender damage during childhood should be avoided and made illegal.

I also think that trans athletes that are born male don’t belong in women’s sports where they have a biological advantage. Many others see these trans participants as cheaters that win a prize they don’t deserve.

The trans movement seems to be disruptive for the purpose of creating chaos. In my whole life, I’ve only met two trans persons.

The whole trans movement seems to fulfill the purpose of creating a distraction to hide crimes being committed by a criminal elite. These elite operatives aren’t being prosecuted for a variety of crimes including: bank fraud (SVB, FTX), probable money laundering in the Ukraine, illegal arrests and failure to adjudicate arrestees from Jan 6th, illegal prosecution against Donald Trump, treason, and widespread corruption. This breakdown in the rule of law bodes ill for our nation.

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My husband was recently appalled when he read an article where a woman citing crime statistics in an argument for improving policing to prevent crime was ignored based on the idea that a numbers based argument would be a racist argument.

My husband worries that if society ignores numbers and rational arguments based on observations, then the only thing left would be an irrational and absurd approach based on a policy mandate rather than what reality on the ground would suggest as a sensible approach. This implies a fixed approach that is harder to modify if/when it fails.

There seems to be some absurdity happening today. Certainly Covid mandates were like that: absurd, enforced well after they were proved unhelpful; hard to stop.

The difference between the word rationalization and the word rational is instructive. According to my Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, under a definition for

rationalize,

“5. Psychol. to devise superficially rational, or plausible explanations or excuses for (one’s acts, beliefs, desires,etc.) usually without being aware that these are not the real motives.”

and also a definition for

rational,

“rational implies the ability to reason logically as by drawing conclusions from inferences, and often connotes the absence of emotionalism [man is a rational creature]; reasonable is a less technical term and suggests the use of practical reason in making decisions, choices, etc., [a reasonable solution to a problem]; sensible, also a nontechnical term, implies the use of common sense or sound judgement [you made a sensible decision]”.

In the case of social breakdown that causes an increase in criminality, real problems are hard to address. Resources to address social problems can be hard to come by when there’s stress on the economy. Social divisions can be caused by a claim that racism is causing unfairness in the criminal justice system and this can distract everyone from blaming the criminal justice system itself. It also diverts attention from corruption, from inefficiency, from failures in performance, from manpower shortages and from social breakdown due to economic failures. A rationalization that stops police from reducing criminality may feel like a reprieve to some groups.

When people want what is in short supply, sometimes they want to rationalize why or how they must have something that can’t be obtained by everyone by a rational means. If a person can’t obtain what they want, maybe they can either steal it or force a shortage onto someone else who isn’t them by using a rationalization. But a rationalization won’t achieve what isn’t possible to do. Instead it will offer a lie or an excuse to comfort a frustrated wish. That isn’t the same as solving the problem of having a shortage. If someone else goes without something that they want during a shortage, there’s still a shortage.

Michel Foucault was a French political philosopher ( 1920-1984) (https://literariness.org/2017/03/28/key-theories-of-michel-foucault/). He liked to study and theorize. Instead of studying continuities in history he liked the discontinuities. He asked what caused society to break down during political upheavals, what characterizations led to people being incarcerated, or what kinds of thinking led to the inhumane treatment of people. I think that his writings have been exagerrated today in a way that is causing some people to embrace irrationality as a way to get around a more rational approach. Some people want to use Foucault to reframe descriptions of what is happening in our society in a way that benefits an irrational viewpoint. This irrational approach can feel like an escape to some from trouble that can’t be avoided.

Some of us don’t want to face the notion that the economy is shrinking and a lot of economic suffering is happening for rational reasons. Instead some people want to complain about unfairness due to racism. There’s a wish to escape from a factual physical or economic shortage into an opinion that everything can be explained because of racism or rational approaches can be ignored because using those methods is a racist approach. A state of mind can seem easier to change than a real shortage of economic prosperity that is difficult to remedy.

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Economic harms are happening everywhere as a consequence of bad monetary policies involving financializaiton and monetary system abuse including overspending and too much debt at a time when energy costs are inescapably increasing because our petroleum resources are harder to extract and refine and that increases costs which are communicated to every part of our economy. What can we do about that? ESG certainly won’t solve such a problem as this.

Michel Foucault liked to look in the nooks and crannies of society where suffering was happening to marginalized groups. He examined rationalizations that people had for cruelty or for excluding some people from the rest of society. He liked to look at power dynamics and especially at those least powerful groups and ask questions about that state of affairs. He was looking at the human condition and the human mind and trying to understand society’s justifications for actions that hurt or marginalized others.

Even though Foucault liked to stretch his arguments, he never suggested that arithmetic is irrelevant. He didn’t say that we should ignore rational reasons for doing what we do. He just wanted us to be more suspicious about people’s motivations. He wanted us to realize that people have reasons for what they do and some of those reasons might not really be good enough. But he never said that geometry, algebra, statistics, and various rational ways of looking for information to better guide our approaches in a rational way is without merit. Foucault didn’t want people to abandon a sensible approach to solving society’s problems. He wanted us to ask ourselves and others hard questions about what our real motivations are.

That some would use Foucault’s analysis of motivations to ignore economic shortages or social breakdown doesn’t fix the problems of economic shortage nor of increasing criminality during economic decline. It distracts us from solving problems that need solutions.

I have been a Toastmaster speech writer and presenter. I attended my first Toastmaster’s meeting with a Russian immigrant friend who wanted to go there in order to improve her English. She invited me to give her some courage and some encouragement. After her first meeting, she decided that speaking English to give speeches was too frustrating so she only went to one Toastmaster’s meeting. I found speaking in public to be harder than I expected it to be, so I ended up staying for a few years until I improved after practicing writing and giving speeches.

I once wrote a speech at Toastmasters about the Information Age. In that speech I talked about how people get psyched out by the sheer amount of information that comes across to all of us every minute of every day. For example, just do a query on the photo of the day. Many examples/choices will come up on the menu. If you only look at one of them, say the site from National Geographic, you will find wonderful images that go back pretty far in time. Even after being charmed by the images, their sheer number over time might feel overwhelming. Like there’s no way that you could appreciate all of them. But you don’t really have to take them all in to appreciate them, do you?

It’s so easy to feel that there’s no way to see it or understand it all. If you wanted a drink of water, you wouldn’t go stand under Niagara Falls and let that water pound onto you. Similarly no one can cope with all the photos and text available on the internet. So what is the solution to all that information? How can you cope with it to turn it in your favor instead of letting it pound you down?

To answer that, I want you to imagine that you have inherited a house with a room full of canned goods. They all are stamped with a date and they are all in date but none of them have their colorful labels to tell you what is in the can. What could you do to find out what is in each can? You would have to use a can opener. You would open one mysterious can every night at dinner to find out what is in the can. Then you would have to think of how to present it with the meal.

What I want to tell you is that instead of having a can opener to handle each part of the flood of information during the Information Age you have something better. Your ability to ask a question can be your can opener. If God is omniscient and God knows all information, it is also true that a human being can’t know everything. What helps us to cope with all the information that exists in the world is that we can narrow our search by asking a specific question. That question can open whichever mystery-can is the most useful at that moment. And the right questions can keep out the worst offenses of too much information that can create anxiety.

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After experiencing the information stressors that we’ve all experienced over that last several years, I have to say that it seems that information chaos has been worrisome. Every effort in mainstream media seems to have been made to increase information overload without helping people to ask the right questions that will help all of us to reduce the flood of information and the stresses that it brings.

When asking questions, it helps to ask pertininent questions that will help to resolve whatever worry brought you to that moment. When I was worried about whether the new m-RNA shots were safe, for example, one question that I asked was “What is the persistence of m-RNA in the body’s natural systems?”

The answer that I got is that m-RNA has a short timespan of persistence in the body. But when I read about researcher’s goals for the m-RNA jabs, I read that they tried to develop ways to prolong the persistence of their experimental messenger RNA. I decided that the jabs might not be safe if they could prolong the persistence of the m-RNA beyond the natural persistence that allows the body to maintain homeostasis (or the balancing act of proteins in the right concentration at the right time). That was a useful question in a sea of confusing information.

We do this selective questioning all the time whenever we try to decide for example, where to go on vacation (like when we ask what kind of vacation, in what climate, doing what activity). When I look at all the dystopic cultural press coverage I can hear on the radio or on TV, do you ever wonder if the people writing that copy are asking the right questions? It sounds like they are asking how to create scary confusion rather than social harmony through useful information.

Instead of asking scary questions, here are the questions that I wish broadcasting infotainers would ask:

How can we be more happy in our society?

How can more of us experience a more abundant lifestyle?

How can we shape future events for a better future than what we see now?

Where has our political and economic system taken a wrong turn and how do we get back onto the right track?

What guidelines worked in the historical past to curb people’s worst impulses and bring forward the best in all of us?

I have one last point to make.

I have heard that when the internet came along, people who read commentary formed a lot of negative views about other people. So much of commentary was negative that it reframed humanity as a darkness…a darkness of violence and greed and anger and lust and whatever other negative traits surfaced online.

The new window of the internet gave new access to people’s private dark thoughts and some of that darkness came into the public’s view. I don’t think that people’s dark side is present all the time in everyone. It isn’t our only potential. But seeing it come into focus for the first time on the internet made people lose respect for the grand human potential.

So if your opinion of humanity has been negatively influenced by the commentary you read on the internet, please realize that not everyone thinks in the negative way that someone was willing to express as commentary. Many people have happier perspectives that they keep quiet about and that you aren’t hearing. So ask the question:

“What are the good perspectives that you aren’t hearing or seeing?” Also, keep in mind that algorithms are affecting how information is curated on the internet. Those algorithms don’t curate information equally for every person nor does every view get equal play.

Hello All. This posting uses science as part of an analogy that describes today’s politics. It isn’t very technical and if you will read all the way to the end, it may reach out to you and explain where we are in a new way. Hang in there everyone.

I once worked in the field of cytogenetics looking for cancerous cells in bone marrow and describing changes in cancer cell chromosomes. Some of those changes could indicate specific stages of cancer progression and identifying those changes could sometimes help a doctor to tailor a treatment and a prognosis plan. At least that is why we would go to the trouble of describing the changes. We were hoping to help the doctor to help the cancer patient.

One of my collegues observed once that genes exist without an ethical envelope. He said that a gene just wants to express itself. People suffering from cancer hope that their body can fight against the cancer. We have cancer suppressor genes that help prevent cancer unless they are damaged. Our immune system can stop cancers from growing by recognizing them and killing them before they get out of control. We wish that people’s good genes could always stop cancer. However, sometimes a great number of mutations in a cell can make cancer unstoppable. The mutations help the cell grow without restraint. An impairment of the immune system can also allow a cancer cell to grow. Cancer that grows and spreads can be the result. Death comes from cancer because out of control cancer cell growth ruins the living systems that keep a person alive.

I’ve also heard the saying, “Crime that pays is crime that stays.” We use rule of law to discourage the unrestrained growth of crime. Crime can be like a cancer that eats out the heart of society.

Among humans, behavioral genes are not well understood. But most of us realize that restraining humanity’s worst impulses is important for people to live together. The criminal mindset is “I want what you’ve got and I want it now.” We have rule of law to prevent people from harming each other by providing a penalty system that applies equally to everybody. When a criminal gains an advantage by hurting others, they are punished and stoppped.

Deregulation that got going during the Clinton administration has now allowed unrestrained abuses of society in banking, transportation, communication and energy. There are bankers guilty of fraud in the 2008 recession that have never been arrested and prosecuted. They got around prosecution by contributing to the political machinery of Washington D.C.

The Nordstream pipeline was destroyed back in September. The Biden Administration, according to Seymour Hersch, is guilty of having ordered and executed the destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline, a provocation that could cause WWIII. I don’t know if the Biden Administration ordered the destruction. I only know that Biden threatened to destroy the pipeline. Whoever destroyed the pipeline, Nordstream’s demise has raised the price of petroleum products everywhere. Nordstream destruction assaulted the transportation and energy system all in one fell swoop. How do we stop such power to destroy when rule of law restraint is clearly failing? What is noticeable is the lack of credible investigation and the lack of credible follow-through in the courts. The Biden Administration denies its involvement in Nordstream’s destruction.

Assaults on our communication system include the FBI’s Twitter news suppression campaign and Bills now being drafted in certain state governments (my home state of Washington included) that are trying to curtail American First Amendment rights to write or speak otherwise than the published curated narrative which ignores reality in favor of continuing a criminal spree. The Covid narrative apologists don’t want to be prosecuted for fraud, so they want to say every narrative but theirs is a false one. Thousands of ongoing deaths is the result.

Right now some of our worst behavioral genes that code for selfish behavior are running amok. We don’t usually think of our behavioral genes running amok but without rule of law, there’s no ethical envelope to stop crimes from happening. Rule of law is the immune system of society and without it corruption grows like a cancer.

Human beings like to keep whatever advantages that they currently possess. But the advantages that some groups enjoyed under financialization, where they used money to make more money, are coming to an end. Those were superlative advantages, no-chance-to-lose opportunities. Priviledged groups don’t want to lose those advantages. There’s a behavioral gene set for that.

For years, financialization made it easy for insiders in government, banking and industry to make enormous quantities of capital. They borrowed money, bet it in a stock market and externalized their losses with the Greenspan Put. These insiders also made other risky investments using capital that they borrowed with no or low interest loans. They would just refinance their loan with more low interest loans. No one who benefited wants the financialization game to stop. Wealthy advantaged insiders have raided the value of American companies, used monopoly pricing to bid up the price of housing, healthcare, education, transportation, etc. Powerful insiders that have damaged our economy want to destroy our current money system and substitute a slavery CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) system in its place so that they can keep going, never losing the advantages they’ve enjoyed over decades of time.

The problem with financialization is that it leads to massive malinvestments leading to losses. Externalizing the losses to the public doesn’t undo economic damage. Less wealth and less prosperity and less economic stability can lead to tragic results for most people. The criminal mindset doesn’t care. That’s where we are and financialization won’t continue because it can’t continue. Building a CBDC as an alternative to financialization will provide advantages to insiders that are even worse for most of us than those that have damaged the larger economy during financialization. Our vulnerabilities will increase under CBDC to the point of extinguishing freedoms that Americans have enjoyed over the whole span of our American history since and before we became a nation. Our freedom to own property, to own a business, to own our own body, to protect our family and our assets are endangered by an CBDC system. The American life as protected under the Constitution is now endangered. Ordinary freedoms under the Bill of Rights are endangered. Abundant evidence exists to show that a powerful group of insiders want to foist CBDC onto all of us no matter how many harms it brings to most of us.

We had finance laws in place that were once enforced to protect Americans from this kind of predatory behavior. With so many insiders operating outside the rule of law, Americans and other people across the world have become vulnerable to out-of-control, worst behavioral genes. We have to restore rule of law in order to restrain these worst human impulses.

Recently there’s been talk about expanding the biosecurity state. I detest this plan. Enabling a biosecurity state is just another attempt by advantaged insiders to continue and expand lawlessness, harms to others and mass murders. It’s humanity’s worst behavioral genes running amok. We can see it. We have to find a way to stop it.

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Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, said “Just keep swimming,” during Finding Nemo. It’s pretty good advice for the times that we are living through right now. I remember the drama of the 1960’s and 1970’s and I really didn’t know enough in elementary school to understand or evaluate the talking points having to do with counter culture and the Vietnam War. So I just went to school and tried to keep learning what I could. I planned to have a life where I could make valuable contributions and try out my best good choices. Like everyone else, I tried my best and had to wait and see for myself what would happen. I eventually learned more about history. It has seemed to me that American life went through a radical change after the Second World War. WWII is directly linked to our troubles today.

Why would I say that? I say that because WWII ended with nuclear weaponry which provided an argument that said the United States couldn’t be safe inside its own borders because nuclear bombs could obliterate us at any time. The kind of defense that planners imagined after WWII involved secret actions and secret budgets that have now led to crimes that are indefensible if you believe that the DoD is responsible for covid vaccine deployment across the world. I’ve read stories about that on Kustler.com and Solari.com. I’ve been reading that the Department of Defense injected people with a bioweapon and used the NIH and CDC to sell it by lying about safety and efficacy. How crazy is that?

And you know what? I don’t know if it’s even true that digital communications have led to a realignment of strategic forces against everyday people. Even if it has, I think that we should all just keep swimming.

No matter what narratives that you are listening to or watching on-line, you can set it all aside and just keep swimming. There’s no way to know yet how these events will play out or what is exactly true. People are usually confused about current events because of the many different stories that circulate, the many different parties that care and want to win through in spite of others or with others and because we are always discracted by our own concerns. Every part of the action is still in play and there’s no way to know what will happen in the end. Say prayers and hope for better times.

Even if these narratives and stories make you feel that powerful forces are plotting against you, open your lungs, breathe the fresh air and just keep swimming. Get out of the pool (which Dory could never do) and continue building your world in the ordinary ways that people do that. Put in a garden and grow some vegetables. If you don’t have room for a garden get some pots and plant some tomatoes. Plant some fruit trees. The smallest dwarf fruit trees can grow in a pot. Learn to sew. Repair your worn clothing; sew a button back on, darn your socks or long underwear. Practice some carpentry. Build those shelves, refinish your old hutch. Research and find out what you need to do to stay healthy. Even vaccine injured people can do something to improve their health. Write in a journal how this time feels to others and write down how you feel. Get dressed, clean up, create some good times, do some work. Go to work. Read a joke so you can tell it to someone else. Laugh a little. Cook delicious whole foods with good ingredients. Bake cookies. Exercise. Plan to make your life a little better everyday. Keep going on with life whether it’s raising your kids or helping your neighbor.

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Happy New Year. It’s almost the turn of the year today. What can we say about this moment?

As we have gone through 2022, dire medical consequences of the covid vax have been unfolding. Most people know someone who took the injection who has become ill or died. It’s with a heavy heart or maybe a sense of fear that we look on these terrible outcomes. Broadcasting media continues public service messaging that everyone should keep getting boosters and this shows terrible and deadly corruption in our nation because medical studies have abundantly shown that the covid vax has an adverse outcome rather than offering any kind of benefit. Corruption runs rampant in government and it’s hard to know what to do about a large system failure. Many people have been incentivized into criminal acts.

No matter what happens as we move into 2023, remember to have compassion for your neighbors, friends and family. Look on adversity and track its cause. Consider how politics can work towards harm or benefit. Imagine how to restructure government to offer the least harm. Remember that other people have tried to discover how to assemble a less harmful government as a goal. Many of them have left a written history of our human struggle to unite without causing tragedies. And of course, history can guide us.

In 2015, I wrote a book called Political Catsup with Economy Fries. I was hoping with that book to warn and to join Americans together in a better understanding of our history and our political and economic successes and failures. In reading recently about ancient Celtic traditions, I read that Celts (before Rome invaded their society) would welcome a new baby by saying “thank you for coming to this difficult life and joining us in the struggle.” Lets all join together in the struggles of 2023.

I heard that Thomas Sowell, the famous and reliable author of Basic Economics, once said that only a liar can satisfy people when they prefer magical thinking to an honest assessment because what they want isn’t possible. If you’ve been gullible and listened to liars in the past, it’s time to stop doing that. Don’t be persuaded by fancy promises that aren’t achievable.

No matter what we think is already baked into the 2023 pie, there will be some surprises. Keep your good humor intact as you face whatever happens and remember that loving is one of the most powerful human traits. We can all keep learning as we go forward. We will all need our brains, our hearts, our souls and our courage to do good in 2023.

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Our days are now loudly filled with media coverage of unimportant arguments about things that don’t matter to most Americans. For example, non-issues: these are the ones where Americans split 50% on both sides and for which an agreement can’t be achieved except to respect people’s differences. Non-issues like abortion have reorganized rhetoric in both the Democrat and Republican parties, and generated a lot of discord but not any kind of detente. There are also pet issues, those like pronoun usage in the support of a small population of loud voices. Also there are fantasy issues, issues that are made up out of fictions based on sciency arguments that aren’t factual, like claims that humans have caused global temperature warming based on CO2 in the atmosphere, now renamed climate change after the temperature failed to increase.

These topics get constant play in media. People in media and politics like these issues because they are kinds of unsolvable problems. Since they are unsolvable, small interest group based or fantasy based, media pundits and politicians don’t have to do anything except constantly regurgitate these issues as a useful waste of time to distract from the issues of who gets what and who isn’t getting anything of political advantage. It gives them something to talk about even though Americans mostly don’t care about that stuff. So much media passion-for-nothing is what these issues amount to. With carnival-like enthusiasm, with shrill fake-concern, our media goes back and forth reheating and re-serving these same left-over topic-arguments again and again. This is part of why media in America is losing money and audience numbers.

Americans instead want to know how to get ahead economically and politically. They want to know how to make a living based on their own real competencies while they are confronted instead with a bewildering job climate full of churn which has suddenly started prying into people’s private lives and personal opinions. They want to know how to create more wealth and generate more security for themselves as they age or as their children grow up. They want to know how to restore confidence in voting during American elections and how to get rid of vote mis-counting by fake balloting and illegal electronic vote-transferring. They want to know how to restore the rule of law. They want better prices for real estate that match what people can afford to pay. They want inflation and money overprinting to end with a sounder monetary policy approach. They want an end of clown-world and chaos-politics.

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Americans want restored prosperity through better policies based on sound money, the American Constitution and rule of law, and ending undeclared wars and proxy wars. They care about their local communities and their neighbors. They don’t want to argue with them. They just want to join them in getting on with life.

Many Americans avoid network news programs because when viewers start enumerating the lies they tell us it is too irritating. Many find that the social connections they used to have that enabled them to get a job don’t exist anymore. Many find inflation burdensome and think saving for retirement isn’t possible. Many believe that government is better with limitations on government power as it is supposed to be in America. They know that the government isn’t supposed to declare that non-essential workers must stay home as has been done historically during political takeovers. They know that food should not be used as a political and economic weapon. When they look over VAERS data or check published studies they discover that the rna-vax is poisonous and harmful: sort of like throwing sand in the gears. They know the vote is supposed to have fidelity with what Americans choose when they cast their choices during elections.

We all look for and hope for better choices to be made in the future to restore the Republic that once knew prosperity.

Real markets were once a part of everyday life. When we lived in the context of a marketplace, prices were set in mutually beneficial exchanges by what people wanted and could afford. Today, instead we live with monopoly set prices that have destroyed market mechanisms that keep prices where they make sense. It isn’t a better life.

As financialization comes to an end, that is: the technique of making money through financial bets rather than by asset production, low interest loans are ending. That’s important because low interest loans enabled a huge amount of malinvestment and debt that seemed to stimulate economic gambling but that did not stimulate the production and accumulation of real wealth… only large quantities of capital.

What remains in the wake of financialization is a bunch of titanic monopolies and their attendant price distortions toward higher pricing. There’s also terrible corruption in government. This corruption has led to many problems in the justice system, the legislature and the executive branch, all three branches which remain stubbornly determined to subvert the rule of law and the vote in order to remain powerful in the face of the various disasters unfolding around us now.

There’s a lot of talk about higher ends through some high falutin sounding program that will make today’s suffering worthwhile in the distant future, but you should not believe any of it. There have never been beneficial goals for today’s covid 19 emergency or climate change or ESG or whatever to make any kind of real world sense except for them being indicative of a criminal mindset where some want to have everything that belongs to others and be responsible for nothing and no one. Most of what’s unfolding is just a really big heist with a bunch of empty excuses. Large wheels are still in motion. Watch out and don’t get ground down by them if you can help it.

There’s an Indian saying that a person or a lot of people can help an elephant to not fall down until it has finally lost its balance and is falling. In that case just get out of the way. The elephant is now falling.

If you want to learn more about U.S. history, politics and economics, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

To return the discussion now to the tiny house movement, some people have tried to adjust to ridiculously high real estate prices by building according to the tiny house aesthetic. This movement suggests that regular houses cost too much and that ordinary people can get by with significantly less space. Instead of a house that’s 1500 to 2500 square feet, they can begin a new life in 300-700 square feet. It just requires a little sacrifice like less room for hobbies, or a family or pets or other activities. What the tiny house movement suggests to me, however, is that monopoly pricing in real estate has ruined the housing market for most of us. It shows that making ends meet can’t happen while monopolist pricing prevails.

Now we hear that the Federal Reserve must raise interest rates to protect the value of the dollar. Some say that this will cause a recession and that it is meant to reduce inflation by slowing down the economy. Raising interest rates will supposedly shrink down the bubbles in real estate and the stock market which are expected to fall in price as interest rates go up.

Some investors have thought that they can trade their stocks for real estate and then prevent real estate depreciation through corporate house ownership. The idea among investors is that deflation can be prevented and real estate assets can be substituted for financial assets because they have real value in the 3-D world rather than just symbolic value as in the money world. Monopolies in real estate can keep the prices high.

When the stock market falls, investors in this strategy think that they will retain the value of real estate assets they own. But financialization bubbles were blown in most of the economy during the flow of easy money. The high price of assets and capital has now led to demand destruction.

Raising interest rates to protect the dollar can’t slow down the economy where demand destruction has already happened and holding prices at an unreasonably high level will not save the economy from a deflation. Today’s inflation isn’t from an overheating economy. It is from money overprinting and overcirculation and it shows that MMT is a complete failure now as it has been throughout history. Demand destruction will only continue on apace.

Corporations buying into real estate doesn’t allow the asset market in real estate to recover a natural price according to the natural path of supply and demand that was followed with non-corporate home owners. Most people have been priced out of most ordinary sized properties. And the tiny house movement seems like a tiny segment of housing that won’t help to support the high price of the larger corporate owned homes that Americans were formerly accustomed to buying. As the tiny house movement is being portrayed on television, I can’t help but wonder if it signals the end of a consumer lifestyle. If home ownership means living with less that may signal less resilience among homeowners generally. Home buying may never lead Americans out of recession if Americans can’t afford to buy a property that allows them to grow more resilient over time.

It seems that there’s a broad misunderstanding these days about networks and what a network can do based on the connections between elements in a network. Today a lot of people seem to want to form control networks instead of open networks. For example, cancel culture is about forming networks to exclude the participation of some potential members and to favor the participation of others. As soon as you do that you create a net instead of a network. That net is meant to trap some and block others. When you do that, you stop the network from growing to become whatever is needed.

In politics, the idea lately has been to promote participation by excluding some so that everyone knows that unless they pretend to believe in certain ideas, they will not be welcome to play any part whatever in what the network can accomplish. That seems like a terrible error that is unwise in the context of what happens in nature.

In nature, networks form spontaneously in an ever changing set of connections that come and go depending on what energy and opportunity there is to connect. Think about the way water behaves as a fluid substance because of weak and ever changing connections called Van der Waals forces. These are weak connections between H+ and OH- or hydrogen and hydroxide. These connections mean that water is wet. Van der Waals connections also mean that water can move into any space and fill it. Water can have surface tension because of weak forces. That’s what makes life on earth possible. Where would we be without water?

Among people, social connections that form spontaneously can also be extremely valuable. Instead of selecting people because of what they believe or don’t believe, or by some other trait, I think that it works better to allow connections to form between people to do something that needs doing. In our economy, an openness toward people who want to contribute is valuable. Too much emphasis today on using networks to control access leads to less participation and less energy and opportunity to do anything.

For example, getting an education that provides a basic set of skills and understanding can allow more people to participate in the economy than over-credentializing education into very narrow specialties. I’m amazed to see that a lot of employers expect people to pay for retraining when their basic skills already should allow a simple transition into another career in our quickly changing times. Today the average span of each job is so short that there’s a lot less return on investment for retraining. Wasting anyone’s ability to contribute, wastes what a more inclusive society can accomplish when more people can work together.

Political Catsup with Economy Fries can help you to understand American history, the connections between politics and the economy and inform you about ideologies that have influenced our history. Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at amazon.com.

Have you ever built a dry stack wall? First of all you need to grade the landscape and use some gravel that is leveled where your blocks are going to go. You have to buy good blocks that have been manufactured to last, that are consistent in shape and size and that are of a shape useful in wall building. In order to get a stable wall made from your blocks, you need tools to help you to achieve the three blessings that every wall needs: plumb, square and level. You need the tools to help you check that you are plumb square and level. If your wall isn’t plumb square and level your wall will look bad and it might fall down.

Likewise, in building a stable society you need good tools too. Society has a politic and economy. In order to get a stable society, you need three things: good laws, stable banking and infrequent warfare. To have good laws a society follows rule of law guidelines. That is, the law should apply to everyone, be easy for people to understand and be published and consistent. Banking must be regulated so that money maintains its value so that it can act as a store of value. Money serves many functions but if it fails to maintain value or if banks become insolvent, money can’t support exchanges in a well functioning economy. Warfare has been necessary over history at times but those times should be infrequent. Warfare is expensive: it uses up lives and money. Constant warfare can lead to disastrous taxation and tyranny.

Lastly, governments are supposed to regulate the politic with just laws that protect private property so that people have an incentive to work. Markets, that is the mutually beneficial exchage of goods and services, can combine the efforts of many people to assemble a good economy. Prosperity happens when gains are protected so that people can build on their gains. Most people gradually improve when they are allowed to work for their own prosperity. When governments interfere with markets, government becomes corrupt, markets fail to prosper and people can’t build on their gains to create a better future.

If you want to learn about history, economy and politics buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.