Mediocrity versus Exceptionalism

Per a graphic published by the World Economic Forum, 18% of U.S. households earn less than $25,000 a year, 18% earn more than $150,000 a year, and the rest fall in between.

This is as reported about a year ago. A couple of years earlier, Pew Research put it a different way: 19% of U.S. adults are “upper income,” 52% are “middle income” and 29% are “lower income.”

For some reason, IQ is plotted on a “bell curve.” I assume this is based on measurements, but it may not be. Per one rendition of this curve, 68% of people score between 85 and 115, with 16% higher and 16% lower. If you take IQs from 90 to 110, you get closer to 50% of the population.

Real skill or survival ability is difficult to measure. IQ is a theoretical measure, and income is a material measure, and they don’t necessarily correlate, though some studies indicate that in the aggregate IQ and “well-being” correlate rather well. In individuals, maybe not so much.

My point in reviewing the above numbers is that the majority of people, by many measures, are “in the middle.” They are better off than the worst of us, but nowhere near where they wish they were. Thus, in a democracy where the majority rules, you would expect “mediocrity” to also rule. This is not, however, what a company, a country or any group of people need to survive well. They need to be exceptional to survive well, or at least choose leaders who are exceptional. But how can you expect “average” people to pick “exceptional” leaders?

This is a very old problem that was raised by people like Plato, long before they had the Bureau of the Census, Pew Research, or other groups working to compile hard data on these questions.

Sam Bankman-Fried, per most measures, was an exceptional person. So were his parents, both professors and Stanford University. Yet he allowed his company to go bankrupt by, reportedly, making very stupid ethical and financial decisions regarding how to use his investors’ money. Was SBF really an exceptional criminal? Or maybe really just a bit of a dullard, like most of us?

I was lying down contemplating how I would be judged by my peers, members of my church. While I have been with them since 1982 and have done some very good work, by other measures I barely have made it out of the starting gate. My position on “The Bridge” is much lower than others with my longevity, and so is my economic status. I have not shown that much ambition, not that much willingness to be exceptional, even though some measurements would suggest that I would be capable of it.

Though I consider myself to be quite exceptional in my own way, by many social measures I am not. Everyone has a right to consider themselves special. But society favors whose who play by its norms, and I did not. I was interested in “average” people. How did they live? How did they think? What might be their fate?

My teacher (L. Ron Hubbard) tried his best to impress on his students that you do your best by helping others to do their best. He did not recognize any ultimate ceiling to what people could accomplish. But he did recognize that they would require leaders to show them the way.

Mediocrity in the name of equality?

It has become fashionable on the Left, for a long time now, to resent the income and power positions of the “elite” classes. All the personal income made in one year in the U.S., in recent years, has been roughly 18 trillion dollars. If that was spread evenly across a population of 300 million, that would equal $60,000 per person. The “median household income” in recent years was $75,000. Would life be better for everyone if these figures applied to everyone? Or would we all just drive Teslas to work and watch TV all weekend?

If a brilliant man or woman were not provided with the resources to manifest their brilliance in real-world creations, would life today be as “good” as it is for most of us? Would Amazon exist even if Bezos has not been allowed to keep most of his earnings? Would the internet exist, or smart phones, or men on the moon?

I have read the work of many people (like Hubbard, Edward Bellamy, and Henry George) who thought personal wealth could be decoupled from personal excellence, and a society could still achieve greatness and longevity. They thought that the exceptional among us would be willing to “compete” for non-monetary rewards that would motivate them just as much as our current system does. They uniformly also believed that such a society could not exist unless a spiritual awakening occurred that would bring it into being. That is also my fond hope.

Political Statement

I have been enduring a barrage of news coverage from the mainstream media, mostly PBS. And I felt the need to explain why I think this coverage is so unsatisfactory.

The Media

I grew up exposed to a lot of media and a lot of news coverage on TV and radio. When I was young, I thought journalists were doing the best they could to keep their reporting accurate and unbiased. Though of course they seemed to concentrate on war, crime, and controversy, what else was newsworthy?

Then I learned what had been going on with the media from the point of view of my church. Certain media organizations had been attacking the church with stories that were not honest or accurate. They were obviously biased, but relied on the perceived strangeness of our group to convince readers that the criticisms must be justified.

Later on, these attacks were investigated to learn their true sources. It was found that these stories were ordered published by the owners of the respective media outlets, who were operating under the influence of medical interests who saw our church as their enemy. This information introduced me to the idea that there are non-governmental (I call them “corporate”) control groups out there who are perfectly willing to use the media to deliver their propaganda messages to the population, just as political groups do.

Thus, “freedom of the press” does not end with freedom from government control. When a media outlet is government-owned or controlled, it is obviously going to function as a propaganda outlet for the government. But when a media outlet is corporate-owned, all that means is that it can function as a propaganda outlet for the corporation.

It is often assumed that the only major corporate interest is profit. But with the advent of corporate-sponsored non-profit “foundations,” it became obvious that something else was going on. For-profit corporations operate to influence the messages delivered by for-profit media outlets, and non-profit groups operate to influence the messages delivered by not-for-profit media outlets. I must comment that PBS changed a lot from its early years when it was largely listener-supported to the present time when it seems to be largely corporate-supported.

Corporate

Corporations finance the production of news and entertainment programs, and also operate to influence the work of academics and intellectuals through their funding of universities and research institutions. They also support non-profit advocacy groups, activist groups and political parties.

The corporate world is vastly under-reported in the media, compared to the political world and partisan politics. If you want to learn more about corporate influence on this planet, you have to look at sources who are often accused in the corporate media of being “conspiracy theorists.” There are many books written on this subject, and much discussion of them online.

These days, the concept of “corporate capture” of government agencies is widely discussed. But from my experience, corporate media largely avoids reporting the mistakes and shortcomings of the corporate world. Traditionally, Republicans (or Conservatives in other countries) were pro-business and thus tended to defend the corporate world. But that is changing. Though the Left is openly anti-corporate, the Democrats are difficult to pin down on this matter, as liberals support many activities (such as the modern medical industry) that are also supported by corporations. My impression is that liberals got snookered (fooled while they weren’t paying attention), though that could be overly charitable. Corporations do NOT have a liberal history, so this alliance with liberals never made sense to me. Some prominent Republicans have been significantly attacked by the corporate media, so now many Republicans and Conservatives are re-evaluating their traditional support for “free enterprise.”

Crime

I see crime as the single most important human problem. Unless a society can control the criminals in its midst, it is doomed to continual violence (as parts of Haiti are experiencing now) and gross inequalities, as crime is often involved in the amassing of great fortunes.

For me, Dianetics (1950) was the first book to address the subject of crime with the attention it deserves. Hubbard described crime – I think quite properly – as a form of mental illness. Hubbard continued to run into the problem of crime and psychosis in his work, and by the 1960s had developed a much more thorough approach to the subject.

Hubbard’s term for what others call the psychopath is “Suppressive Person.” Though I prefer Hubbard’s approach to the whole subject, almost no one outside of Scientology is familiar with it, so in the interest of communicating across this information barrier, I stick with the term “psychopath” or occasionally “professional criminal” or “compulsive liar.”

A psychologist named Robert Hare is known for his research into the psychopathic personality. He co-authored Snakes in Suits in 2006 which (I hope) opened the eyes of some intellectuals to the problems being created by some individuals in the corporate world. Of course, these people operate in all social strata and cause untold human suffering and violence wherever they are active.

The psychopath is the great “secret” of our crime problem. They perpetrate major crimes to create environments where lesser crimes (the ones that get the most police attention) can become common. They create gang wars, tribal wars, civil wars, and world wars. The mechanism they use is covered in Hubbard’s Third Party Law. The first step any peace keeping body should take in the face of war is a Third Party Investigation. This information has been available since the 1960s and still is not widely known. This shows you the power of the psychopath, especially when organized, to prevent the general public from learning information that could be useful. The data in Dianetics is still not well-known, and that was published over 70 years ago. Many have benefited from that information, due mainly to the efforts of my church. Corporate players wish to keep this information hidden, and not because it is useless or harmful, as some of them might argue.

Examples

Reincarnation. This reality of life has been taught since the time of the Vedas. Secular science found no evidence for it, until Hubbard came along. Later, a chair devoted to the study of “parapsychology” was established by inventor Chester Carlson in 1968. That chair was filled by Ian Stevenson, who is famous for his work researching the reincarnation stories of children. He built a scientific case for the reality of reincarnation that can never be denied. Other researchers using other methods have verified that this phenomenon is quite real. Corporate media still considers it “pseudoscience.”

ETs. Extraterrestrials have been a part of human stories at least since the time of the Vedas. Hubbard’s research into past lives, along with the work of MANY others, has made it clear that ETs exist. The corporate media relies totally on the unbelievability of these stories. Meanwhile, per Pew Research, 60% of Americans believe intelligent life exists on other planets.

In this context, the people of the corporate media seem hopelessly naive and confused by “why don’t more people believe the news?” Why don’t they believe us that Russia is the bad guy? That Trump is the bad guy? That COVID is the bad guy? That those misinformation doctors are the bad guys? The answer is that they have lied too much. Here are some more examples:

Building Seven. On 9/11 “Building Seven” free-fell into its footprint a while after the towers went down. This was obviously a controlled demolition. This is one reason the rest of the “official” 9/11 story is no longer believed by many people. Farsight Institute (Courtney Brown) has already found it to be an inside job. How many more incidents that “everybody knows” happened a certain way are actually cover-ups?

JFK Assassination. The mainstream still maintains the Oswald did it. It is now an open secret that this is a lie. Again, Farsight has confirmed that this was an inside job.Similar findings have been made concerning many other major violent events.

Roswell. The spaceship crashes in July of 1947 have also been confirmed to be real ET crashes. Many researchers have long maintained that this must be so. Per the corporate media, this is a conspiracy theory.

Theory of Evolution. Hubbard’s work is mostly responsible for convincing me. Evolution, it seems, is a minor contributor to the incredible diversity found on Earth. These life forms were created by an ancient form of genetic engineering possibly part of an ancient corporate system that has long since disappeared from this universe. The corporate world continues to insist that Intelligent Design is the work of religious fanatics.

United we Stand?

So far, Corporate and their various lying subdivisions have held together in their insistence that their truth is more real than reality. Will their narratives survive even though so many of them are obvious lies? They don’t survive in my heart. And apparently, approximately half of the adult population also suspects that it is being hoodwinked. Let’s look at some other areas that Corporate is getting wrong:

Education. It has long been asserted that some group has been intent on infiltrating and destroying American culture in order to cripple us as a potential barrier to their planned world takeover. Researchers have identified this invasive group in various different ways. Some call them psychologists, others call them Neo-Marxists. Are they all psychopaths? Maybe – maybe not. But their work has, by many accounts, caused an increase in crime and a decrease in scholastic achievement in American students. While most conservatives who don’t like what their children are being exposed to in modern public schools advocate simply returning to a more basic curriculum, Scientologists advocate reforms in the educational system that would achieve better results for more students. We both agree that the current trend is destructive.

Racism. Racism is one of many divisive ideologies that was planted by psychopathic personalities. The seemingly endless emphasis on sensitivity training and seminars to handle the problem of criminal ideologies will never get us there. The perpetrators of these ideologies must be located and exposed for the criminals that they are. Then we have techniques that can be used to help victims of these ideologies rethink their beliefs with the falsities removed.

Religion. Though the more modern religions are full of deceptive teachings, the core belief that we are more than mere humans and survive death in some form is persistent because it is true. We should not speak too dismissively of religions or religious people. They are “onto” something true and valuable. Their faith helps them to cope with and navigate the vagaries of life, Their freedom to practice their teachings should not be abridged. Meanwhile, it is estimated that about half of all journalists are non-religious.

Spirituality. The corporate world hates “mysterious” forces that are difficult to locate and control. The spirit is such a force. However, it is also the basis of all life and our door into the world of deeper knowledge. Our aversion for spiritual knowledge renders our society much less able than it otherwise would be. If we cling to the superstition of life as just a mechanism, we will never catch up with the ET societies that surround us.

Science. This of course means that many of our current scientific theories are lacking. Not only is this frustrating for those of us who know better, but it acts as a barrier to our further development as a planet. What propulsion systems are used by the ETs? We should know by now, and a few of us probably do. This might be the clean energy source that we need to become more sustainable. But Corporate has decided to keep this a secret. Why?

Progress. There is a general agreement that human progress is a totally human creation. This has been demonstrated to be a false idea. Computers, for instance, are millions of years old, as are robots. There is some evidence that we were given some of that technology by ETs in the fairly recent past.

Cultural diversity. There is evidence that cultural diversity on Earth is a recently-implanted fictional construct. ETs who did not want us to develop are said to have installed these cultures on Earth with the idea of keeping us in a state of disagreement if not war. Now we get all involved in our cultural traditions without knowing how they actually came about. Knowing something about our past lives would give us a fuller appreciation of how diverse many of our experiences actually are.

Politics. This is mostly a dog and pony show put on for the benefit of Corporate and the detriment of their target audience – us. It is probably safest to regard politics as a form of entertainment. Unfortunately, governments and corporations can take actions that can be widely destructive or widely beneficial. So it would probably be wise to recapture this sphere of human action and force it to be honest and sensible. Currently the political realities on Earth are so different than the political stories we have been told that it is difficult to envisage a world where this problem is corrected. But it does need to be done.

Dominant culture know-how

This is just a short post reflecting some thoughts that occurred to me recently.

I see the Woke and the Right talking past each other in so many ways. Though I am much more sympathetic with the Right, as they stand on more tested ground, the Woke are also so certain of themselves! And I have never seen so much mud slinging between two groups that supposedly differ mostly in political ideology. Obviously, there is more going on here.

Systemic racism

The Right insists this was abolished years ago and no longer exists. The Woke insist that the basic system remains intact, continuing to make it difficult for certain targeted populations to get ahead.

Both aren’t paying very good attention. Although we could accuse the Woke of being mere shills, rabble-rousers only there to stir up trouble, the fact is that many people around the world remain very oppressed. Though the problem exists in the U.S. it is much worse elsewhere. Thus, the pounding on U.S. culture is a bit misplaced and has led to a lot of bad feelings. It would seem that American culture has been one of the more flexible in this regard, and that the “oppressed” have more opportunity here than in almost any other country in the world. Yet suffering does continue to exist here at home.

Capitalism

The Woke are trained to put some of the blame for these problems on Capitalism. The Right are trained to defend Capitalism as the most successful cultural system on this planet.

There is no inherent reason in Capitalist theory why it should leave some groups short-changed and others in charge. Under Capitalism in America, members of oppressed groups have fared better than almost any other place. Neither do I see any evidence that anti-capitalist cultures are working any better.

Capitalism is not the root cause of these problems.

What’s different about members of oppressed groups who are happy in America?

They have learned to play the game offered by the dominant culture.

This is my observation, not necessarily the conclusion of sociologists. It is based on observations of much fewer people than it ought to be based on. The Woke would say that these people have learned to “act White.” The Right would say that these people simply decided that they wanted to be successful.

Because of my connections, I know people of many different ethnic and racial backgrounds who are having a hard time here in America. My observation is that they have not learned to “play the game” as well as those who are happier. Some of them have actual disabilities which inhibit them, while others lack essential resources, or have rejected the dominant culture as one they don’t want to be a part of.

The happy (“successful”) ones speak “standard” English well, are literate and schooled, own land, pay attention to their finances, have developed a set of valuable skills and know how to promote themselves, are aware of the importance of their health and appearance, and have a positive attitude towards life. They have learned to play the game.

Rejecting the dominant game

The Right feels that the dominant game is a very acceptable and learnable game. They assert that these days, anyone can learn to play if they want to, and will be rewarded if they play well. They criticize the Woke as people with a criminal mentality.

If you can’t or won’t play the dominant game, you are rejected by the other players.

This is where things get confusing. Criminality is more or less defined as a refusal to play the dominant game, and the willingness to play another game which could be seen as an “anti game.” Disability, on the other hand, denotes a desire to play but an inability to do so for some reason. In a modern liberal society, we have learned to accommodate the disabled in ways that help them play if they desire to. But it is easy for disability and criminality to be confused. Criminals may, in fact, pretend to be disabled as a survival strategy. They tend to give the truly disabled a bad name when they do this. These lines cross over themselves a bit, and without a better understanding of life than we had when the U.S. was founded and most of our laws were written, this remains a persistent area of confusion.

Conspiracy theories

Those who have chosen to look deeper into these issues first run into the subject of conspiracy. Evidence for it is widely scattered throughout history. This is usually in the form of criminals organizing to protect and further their enterprise in spite of the efforts of governments or honest people to stop them. These are the “criminal gangs” that run drug cartels, smuggle arms and slaves, and so forth.

But what most researchers find when they dig is that criminals also exist in “high places” in society, and seek to control their regions, or indeed the entire planet, for their own selfish ends. This historical research is solid; those conspiracies were – and are – quite real. But what does it mean for a society if the high level criminals begin to get the upper hand? Then you get societies like 1930s Nazi Germany. Or?

Can the criminals take the dominant position but decide to keep this a secret? Research tends to indicate that this is quite possible. Why be overt when you control the major communication lines of society, so can hide the fact of your own existence? This is what some of the more astute conspiracy theories postulate.

Criminals versus honest people

This leads us to a vision of the present (if not also the past) that is a bit more complicated than having one dominant culture (or race) lording over the entire planet. What if there has been an ongoing contest between two or more powerful groups that would like to control our planet, each group with its own ends and its own strategies to achieve those ends?

Some of the more criminal groups could specialize in keeping the general population divided and in turmoil. They would introduce multiple competing religions, cultures, and political ideologies on the planet for the purpose of keeping the population embroiled in conflict, and not for the purpose of making a better world. They could invent these ideologies out of whole cloth or, more likely, hijack a halfway decent idea that some honest person developed and corrupt it so that it was no longer workable, even though it still had some appeal.

Extent of criminal influence

Practices now considered criminal, like slavery, have been seen as normal on Earth in the past. And so we see that the boundaries between crime and virtue can change. Older codes, like the Ten Commandments, are pretty basic, but don’t mention certain human rights that we now see as important. On the other hand, modern lists such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are thought by some to go too far. Yet we can say that all of them share the sentiment that within a community – now seen as encompassing all of Earth – people should treat each other with respect and should not lie, cheat, murder, steal, break up families, or leave one’s parents destitute. In the context of a human society, these basic rules demark the basic boundaries between criminality and honesty.

Thus today, a secret group that wished to enslave the population, or murder large sectors of it, or train its young to be criminals would be seen as a criminal group.

The Right believes that the Left is being supported by such a group. And the Left believes that the Right is being supported by such a group. Almost all of traditional media currently supports the Left. While this would seem to normalize the Left, the Right argues that this is an abnormal condition, and that we used to hear a wider diversity of voices from our media outlets.

Neither the Woke nor the Right openly admit that they want to enslave the planet. So where do all the authoritarian measures currently being adopted come from? They are correctly seen as criminal, in the modern sense of the word; a measure doesn’t have to be “against the law” to be criminal! It only has to show extreme disrespect for the rights of other human beings. So currently the Right is on the side of more respect for human rights, while the Woke are less so. This leaves me – and many others – to assume that there are real criminals supporting the Woke and telling them what to say. In another era they were white supremacists. And in another era they were Communists. The “bad guys” are known not for the details of their ideologies, but for the results of their actions.

The need to reject criminal actions

If a criminal culture becomes the dominant culture on Earth, Mankind will perish. At the least, free men and women will lose their freedoms. Criminals have been a part of the dominant cultures on Earth forever, and this situation will likely continue. You can’t limit the criminality to Capitalists, or Marxists or any other ideology. What we need to reject if we want to survive is criminal ideas and actions, not ideologies. And if you think the concept of survival itself is “too White,” then you are definitely under the influence of criminal thinking!

We are here because we value freedom. Some of us are here because we wanted to be “free” to be criminals. This is the great challenge of valuing freedom! The “great” societies of the galaxy chose slavery, and sent us all here, under spiritual lock and key, for fear that our love of freedom would destroy their delicately-built worlds. It is upon us now to learn how to control criminality without destroying freedom and so build societies that are both robust and free. It can be done. If we don’t do it we will rot here, both bodily and spiritually.

With these new societies will come new dominant cultures. If we do not create games to play for those cultures that are relatively easy to learn and difficult to interfere with, then our new societies will fall as our American culture is crumbling today. We still have time. Our culture is still strong. You can still play the game of the dominant culture without compromising your basic human values. But there is not much time left. If we do not successfully reject the latest rounds of attacks on our most basic freedoms, we may not get another realistic chance to do that on this planet.

Children’s Entertainment

During the Thanksgiving weekend I had the opportunity to spend some time around the 9 year old daughter of my Bay Area friend (girlfriend).

During this time the girl watched (or half-watched) several shows on TV and we also went out to a movie (Encanto). She also played a video game on her mom’s computer.

The entertainment choices available to internet-connected youth today are probably more than ten times more numerous than the TV-based programming that I grew up with.

Thus, one way I entertained myself was to draw pictures. Below is a picture I made for a 2nd grade class assignment for an illustrated story “What Is Important About Me.” I have manipulated this image to make it more interesting to look at.

In my opinion, though the variety of shows has exploded, the quality of this material has not. During my lifetime, society has been transforming into a “techno-space” society where obedience is so valued that those who run the show in the background wish to actively discourage childhood exposure that would encourage too much creative thinking or intellectual curiosity. On Earth, though, this material must be presented in the context of a freedom-loving and diverse population (not so true on many other planets) which requires a certain amount of artful deception (when well done) or when more poorly done (often the case) results in material that is simply maudlin, trite or confusing.

The techno-space context is full of magical technologies and overwhelmed people. This results in a bunch of superheroes who have a hard time of it, autism spectrum disorder, and similar conundrums. Without the spiritual component available to help us understand our situation, the overall reaction of most people is that we are in an impossible predicament where there is no hope that we could ever best the “super smart” technologists that control the tools that we use to produce, travel and communicate.

The Powers That Be don’t want us to learn about the spiritual component. They fear a loss of control in the face of beings who are spiritually free, A few of them, perhaps, can even remember encounters with such beings and what had be done to put them down. It wasn’t pretty.

So as the magical nature of life bubbles up through our “new” technologies, and beings begin to remember who they used to be before they were forced to come here, our rulers feel justified in putting in place a narrative that they hope will divert us, amuse us, and confuse us, or otherwise suppress our desire to regain our freedom and our actual abilities.

The first set of shows this little girl wanted to watch was Maya And The Three. Then we saw the fully animated Pixar (Disney) movie Encanto. Later she was watching the cartoon series Phineas and Ferb (also Disney), and then played a video game against the computer featuring “Gumball.”

Maya and the Three

This is a brand new TV mini-series streaming on Netflix and produced in Mexico by Jorge R. Gutiérrez. They produced it with open-source animation software called Blender. The story is sloppily based on the culture of Mesoamerica, has a slew of magical elements and “peoples” similar to Lord of the Rings, and is comedic. The heroine of the story is 15 years old. The characters speak English. It is full of challenges and fighting (at least the episodes I saw). And what does it teach? That indigenous American culture is rich, colorful and … funny? The current trend is to simply put indigenous cultures into our entertainment to “celebrate” them. There is no attempt (at least not at this level) to dig in to what these people believed or how they lived. Any address to spiritual elements is extremely superficial. And the big problem of history, which is to say how their culture was overwhelmed by invaders and other forces (perhaps including climate changes) is not really addressed in materials like this. All we are doing is celebrating the spirit, sounds and colors of the culture, not its more troubling aspects.

Encanto

This deeply animated film features people involved in the culture of Spanish South America (Colombia to be exact). It features many strong female personalities who clash and attempt to resolve their conflicts which center around the “magic spell” that has protected their family for at least three generations. The characters are ethnically diverse, for the most part lighthearted, but burdened by the thought that their “magic” could come to an end at any time.

It is not clear to me that the little girl with us understood the concepts underlying this story, nor all the plot twists. She told me that she identified with the heroine, and we decided that the character that matched her mom the best was the one who had received the gift of extraordinary physical strength. The “gifts” received by most of the family members, and their reactions to the various abilities they gained, were in some way the centerpiece of the plot. Yet the source and full meaning of their gifts remained vague and unexplored. Though there were elements obviously pointing to Catholic tradition, there was also an indigenous factor. Perhaps in the interest of remaining strictly secular, the film addressed neither of these issues very deeply. It became, in the end, a sort of instructional fable dealing with the interpersonal dynamics of a family that considers itself “gifted.”

Phineas and Ferb

This is also a Disney-sponsored cartoon series. It ran from 2007 to 2015. I consider this series highly ridiculous to the point of near worthlessness. The young lady watching it, however, seemed quite happy with it. Each episode features a new “summer project” by the two boys, who are step-brothers and nerds. There are a lot of obtuse references in the script to science fiction and conspiracy theory subjects. The main subplot involves their sister Candace who is continuously appalled by how many rules the two boys are always breaking, and how they never seem to get caught by the many adults in the stories. Another subplot includes the boys’ “pet platypus” Perry who secretly works as a spy trying to keep a mad scientist from doing something really horrifying. Perry always succeeds somehow, and usually in a way that completely covers the mischief being caused by the boys. There is also a brownie (or bluebird?) girl scout troop involved, which always demonstrates impeccable organization and effectiveness. All the characters are so ridiculous that they barely seem human. The basic story line of every episode is totally predictable, and my main impression of the whole thing is that it is one entire goof-off session, and that the writers see real life that way, too. A valuable lesson for our youth!

Gumball video game

This is apparently a feature of Cartoon Network, which offers video games based on many of its series, in this case The Amazing World of Gumball. The main characters are animated animals that live somewhere in suburbia. The other characters that Gumball fights against are also in the cartoon series.

The game my young companion played (she claimed for the first time) follows a classic “fight” style where the (usually) two fighters take turns deciding how to respond to the previous attack. In this case, the program ran one of the fighters. As the two fight, they both “lose energy” until one goes to zero, or “dies.” In these children’s games, the fighting is quite stylized, though obviously involves weapons and violence which ends in the death of one of the fighters. The entire point of play seems to be to stay in the game by winning most of the fights. In the game I watched, the fight environment (background) was totally irrelevant, as were the exact personalities or identities of the various fighters. Strategy and skill were only minimally required. It was basically a do-nothing, bored way to do something more interesting than nothing at all.

What does it all mean?

I made no attempt here to treat this subject thoroughly. This all is based on sharing just one weekend with a little girl and her mom. I did not sample a full range of programming so my response is not based on very complete information.

But I do sense a certain “glee of insanity” among entertainment writers and performers. In other words, they act funny or happy, but the humor and content is often dark if not actually deviant, like the news (also a form of entertainment). Magical and supernatural phenomena, though very real, are treated with awe and confusion. This is a product of ignorance in the face of an increasing amount of evidence that these things are real, coupled with the influence of criminals who fear these phenomena.

Adults decide what content to show their children, so this is more about them than it is about their kids. It could be said that all this is just a reflection of the times we live in, but it is more than that. I am living in those times, too, yet the content I write is very different that most of what I have seen so far. The difference, I suspect, is that I take ET and magic seriously, and give children credit for being more sophisticated than most adults seem to. I am no longer trapped in the 19th century concept of “evolution” but instead have embraced and extended my understanding of a different 19th century trend; spirituality. It is my belief that Evolution and all that came with it was popularized in an attempt to stamp out spirituality as a competing approach to life. Evolution, with its Materialism, temporarily won out, but Spirituality never died. And it lives on, though quite distorted, in modern entertainment, including what we give our children to watch. I hope those distortions will soon be resolved.

“All the world’s a stage” still holds true, and I personally have always had a preference for live entertainment. I studied Shakespearean theater for a junior high project once:

Old Issues – New Issues

The Process

I go lie down in bed. If there’s something on my mind that’s a little deeper, it will tend to bubble up. I’ll get emotional about it.

I might be able to tell that it is really meaningful.

If it seems really meaningful I’ll get up and write about it or do something about it.

This has happened two or three times already this evening.

This isn’t normal. It’s my current process for handling an extra heavy emotional load.

If this in TMI for you, you are welcome to just skip it.

Old Issues

Tonight I recognized some old issues that I was sort of pushing off on my friend but that – surprise! – I had never really handled myself.

Decide what you want to do!

A situation comes up. It was probably an unexpected situation. And now you’ve got to decide what to do about it. And maybe you work it out all by yourself or maybe you talk to someone close (or not so close?) about it. And the result is supposed to be that you decide what to do. If you don’t decide someone else will decide for you, right? Wouldn’t you rather stay in control of your life and make your own decisions?

And this process is supposed to result in a goal and a plan of action. I’ve done this lots of times for more minor actions. Like moving back to California (twice). Like finding a job. Like getting products at work.

But to decide this for all aspects of your life over a short space of time? That’s more of a challenge.

Aren’t you supposed to help me with this?

When you are young and still trying to cope with your current life and all the changes that have happened since the last time you were a kid (particularly because you probably can’t even remember the last time) you kind of expect that maybe an adult (like your parent?) would sit down with you and help you to sort stuff out.

How many of you out there have gone through such a process with a parent? Or maybe a teacher or a mentor or even a counselor? I’d like to hear from you all about your experiences!

I’m fond of saying that my parents weren’t exactly there for me, but they aren’t here to defend themselves now, so suffice it to say that I never really did this with either my dad or my mom while I was growing up with them, but a little more with my mom after I left home.

When you are older, who replaces your parents when you need to get an exterior look at something that is making you feel very weak and little? The most obvious answer is your spouse. But these days, approximately half of all U.S. adults live as singles. Who do those people turn to when they need to get some perspective on their lives?

Why won’t you let me help you?

A friend of mine who I should probably consider a dear friend even though we don’t know each other that well was willing to help me with this recently. She’s my age, but more learned and more emotionally mature. She came up with the observation that this all centers around the subject of help. She suggested that I review some materials on the subject, which I fortunately have copies of. I have been reviewing those materials.

Help is a very interesting subject! It’s a very emotional subject because it is very very basic in this world. When the worms reproduce in the soil underneath a lawn, then a robin comes along one day and spots one and pulls it out and eats it, was that not a case of the worm helping the robin? Might it even be true that in some way the robin helped the worm by allowing it to fulfill its purpose of being food for higher life forms? The argument could be made. So help isn’t necessarily all sweetness and light, is it?

Way back when we were all bodyless spiritual beings – I’m talking way way back – we really didn’t need that much help from each other. But, we wanted to play together (the analogy with children at play only stretches so far). One being might make some creation and throw it in the direction of another being to see how they would react. Now, if the second being just ignored the “pass” (seeing a sexual connection here? That’s OK…) the first being would not consider that helpful. He might get pissed off at the second being and try to entrap him with flaming plasma or something (I just made that up). On the other hand, if the second being responded by sending a creation of his back in the direction of the first being, that might be considered helpful. They might even get together and have a relationship!

Other responses might also be considered helpful. The second being could blow up the first being’s creation. Or he could change its color and throw it back. You can see how eventually some sort of game could develop with “rules” about responses that were helpful versus ones that weren’t. It would all be totally subjective, but it would be a game. They are a couple of immortal spiritual beings! They don’t really need any “help.”

Fast forward billions of years, closer to present time. We’ve all become involved with biology. The rules of the “game” (if you can still call it that) are a little more obvious. And the actions involved are a little more…graphic, I guess you could say. Feeding someone is considered helpful. So a farmer helps others by feeding them. And they help him by buying the food instead of stealing it, so he can afford to replant each year and also feed his own family. A mother feeds her baby my nursing him and so on. Pretty obvious.

But the problem of failed help can come up. The farmer’s crop fails. The mother’s milk dries up. Oh no! Everyone has their stable data upset! How will they react? The situation suddenly becomes new and confusing. The baby could cry. The little boy, hungry, could get angry at not being fed and run away from home. The people who depended on the farmer could riot and burn down the farmer’s house. Failed help, then, can result in the person who expected that he could help finding himself resenting those he hoped to help. He failed to help so now he hates the objects of his help? Sounds nutty, but that’s life for you.

And so, all sorts of strange attitudes towards help can pop up and cripple individuals and their groups. A person can reject help even though he obviously needs some. A person could refuse to help another even though he could obviously provide some. Oh my goodness what a sad situation!

My family and my relationships…

And so it was that, though I expected help from my parents, it seldom arrived. They provided the most basic help: food, clothing, shelter, health care. That might be good enough for a farm animal, but that’s not quite going to cut it for a human boy trying to grow up into a man. There were obvious attempts to provide educational opportunities and fun family activities. The help landscape was not a desert, but more like a savanna when I had hoped for a forest.

And so I learned to not ask for help, and to figure out my issues by myself. This could be considered laudable in some respects, but it is missing at least one important ingredient: Without a second terminal in the picture, it becomes extremely difficult to have enough space to be truly sane and inventive. Solutions created in a space that’s too small and cramped will result in solutions that, frankly, are a bit half-assed. This, unfortunately, characterized many of my solutions to many of the situations I ran into growing up. The first big one being the loss of my friends, including my dear girlfriend Linda, when my family moved from California to Michigan.

What am I supposed to do?

When I was nine and living in the Bay Area, my answer would have been: Grow up, go to college, marry Linda, raise a family and live a “normal” life.

By the time I was about 15 the plan looked more like this: Don’t grow up – be an irresponsible playboy for the rest of my life, don’t go to college, follow my passions instead of putting common sense first and live an “abnormal” life.

By the time I was 25, I had finally found someone (Suzy, a child psychologist) who was willing to be a second terminal for me so I could straighten some of this shit out. With her help, I learned to:

1. Dress like an adult.
2. Find enjoyable play activities with other adults.
3. Have adult girlfriends.

However, we never worked out college, my passions, or my determination to swim against the prevailing current. Perhaps this was just as well. I ended up learning a lot from “growing up” but I also learned a lot from “being different.”

However, there was a crucial skill and awareness I did not acquire: How to provide myself with one or more stable terminals who I could work with to create my future. This was especially critical because I no longer envisioned a mainstream future for myself. Some would argue this was a mistake. It meant that people, particularly women, who could fill this need would be few and far between. And that my friends, is an understatement in describing what I experienced!

But wait – so, what is it that I’m really supposed to do?

In a nutshell, I walked into adult life with a fragmented and incomplete vision of my own future, largely manufactured by myself without any direct consultation with another person.

Would I eventually work in the arts, as I had envisioned when I was 15? Would I create a space for children to learn in a more hands-on, trial-and-error (sometimes known as “heuristic”) fashion, the way I had learned so many things? Could I create an organization that would promote group dancing as an ideal way to attain physical (and mental) health? Could I come up to the level where I would be able to train and organize musicians, technicians, and other personnel to put on dance-exercise events and create some sort of enterprise that could be economically viable?

The above was one version of what I hoped to be doing for the rest of my life. It didn’t exactly turn out that way, but that’s not the point of this article.

Can I help her master a situation that I would have been unable to master when I was her age?

I find myself associated with a woman who is about as old as I was then. Her situation is in some ways much more complex and brutal than anything I ever experienced. It, in fact, comes very close to being overwhelming for both of us. It is a situation the likes of which I never imagined getting this close to in my lifetime. This kind of thing never happened to “nice college-educated people.” Yet it is happening to her, and similar things are happening to many other women (and men) in her age group.

An aside: I should have seen it coming.

I should have expected the Big Bad Asses to pull a bait-and-switch scheme on the entire planet to sell it on slavery. I should have expected them to come up with something really scary like a “new” virus (that really isn’t much worse than all the “old” ones we’ve already been through). The evolution was choreographed quite masterfully. And we are at a point – right now – where they seem to be on the verge of success.

I should have expected this.

I knew there were a bunch of guys out there who wanted to enslave the planet and needed to cripple the United States – the planet’s biggest defender of basic human freedoms – to do it. I knew these guys had total control of the mainstream media outlets, so could orchestrate a multi-faceted propaganda campaign that would leave few stones unturned. I knew they had the doctors in their pockets. I didn’t know the new Tech companies would be so compliant, but should have guessed. And so it happened!

Duh.

Meanwhile, young adults – boys in particular – were being crippled by chemicals in their water, their food, their vaccines, and in drugs they were forced to take for their “mental illnesses.” On top of this a criminal philosophy which used to be known as Marxism, but it now known as Critical Theory, was sweeping through the humanities and being pushed in schools, businesses and the media. Its basic goal was to convince an entire generation that a criminal takeover was the only way to solve the persistent problems that we continued to create for ourselves – particularly in the “free” countries.

And so freedom itself came to have a bad name. Many of the younger generation don’t see any value in freedom. They are sold on the idea that freedom just results in crime. That it’s not something that is vital to our spiritual or mental health. And so a whole generation (almost) is fine with wearing masks that don’t work, participating in lockdowns that don’t work, and losing their jobs so they can’t work, just because the “experts” and the media insist that something really awful will happen if they don’t “follow the guidelines.” The only thing “awful” that would happen if we were much less compliant is that they would lose their power over us! Yet few see the pure evil in their actions and exhortations.

Very few people now are educated about what criminality is and what sociopathy is. A lot of people think these behaviors are just normal and that we have to live with them. If someone gets too scary, we can always send them to a psych hospital where they will be forcibly drugged and made compliant – or else. Actually, psych wards and prisons are used to identify persons who might be useful to the Big Bad Asses as terrorists, and such persons will often be released as “cured” so that they may perform this function. To keep the threat looking real, this is an important part of the plan.

Back to my friend.

This woman seems very intent on sorting out her own life. Perhaps she will find someone to help her. But as she is trained in the helping professions to assist others in situations similar to her own, perhaps she feels that she herself is the most qualified!

Yet she complains of feeling “introverted and exhausted.” Too little space! She needs another terminal to help her open up her space. Not to think for her! Just to help her find the room she needs to really think for herself.

When I was her age and in a similar but much less extreme situation, I failed to understand the true benefits that another terminal could have provided, and did not expect much from the one I did find, nor continue to look for a better replacement. And so I failed myself in many ways.

And now I offer myself to her as one who can truly help? Perhaps she has been wise to reject the offer. This is my great dilemma. Am I helping her enough, or failing her? It is indeed a great dilemma for me now.

You think I am making this all up?

This is not the time or place to sort out political theories. A girl is in trouble. Can I help her through it or can’t I? Either way, I will lose her – like successful parents lose their children – to the world of adult life. But perhaps if I continue to care about her, and am honest and real about it, and actually manage to provide her with information that will help her make better decisions, she won’t end up like I did, and will keep me a bit in her life.

Who wants to be 66, alone, and constantly emotionally needy? It is a form of torture I dearly wish now I could have avoided. Though my breadth of understanding of life somewhat makes up for the isolation, it seems now that I could have done so much better, been so much more effective.

If I had just had someone there to help me when I needed it the most.

If I had just been more willing to ask for and accept help from others.

If I had just been able to recognize when someone else needed help but didn’t know how to ask for it, and then helped them.

Well, I still have a little more time this life to get it right.

And yes, I guess I am making all this up.

It’s my life; what other choice do I have but to create it myself?

Democracy and Minorities

Simplistically, democracy means “majority rule,” right? So, what happens to the minorities in a Democracy?

I chose as my featured image a picture of a family. Though this isn’t totally analogous to a group like a nation, we may suppose that larger groups tend to use the same patterns that are successful in smaller groups.

Hence, we start with the family, the most basic small group. We might say, especially these days, that the father and mother rule together, in a sort of cooperative arrangement where some tasks are handled more by Dad, and others handled more by Mom. Considering that children need care and supervision as they grow, we can see how this arrangement would be helpful even if there were no biological connection between the parents and the kids.

I should note the obvious just to make sure we don’t miss it: The kids are in the majority. The adults are the minority, but it is just assumed they are the best choice for managers in the family. These days I might get some arguments about this, but probably not too many.

Larger groups

I didn’t want to just strew this post with photos, but I do like to show what I’m talking about. So, here is a small-ish corporate group that works in Manhattan, as photographed by professional photographer Mark McQueen:

You can’t really tell from this photo how this group is structured. But if it is like most companies, it is divided into roughly-family-sized working groups, each handling a specific set of tasks, coordinated by an executive group, with one “chief” executive who is responsible for making the ultimate decisions, when it comes down to that. Ideally, each group leader knows their job well enough so that the top person’s main job is just to keep informed and keep things coordinated, not to micro-manage.

And that is the basic workable pattern on which all organized groups are based. Even disorganized groups will tend to look for a leader, if it seems that leadership is called for.

“Majority rule” isn’t the fashion in this pattern, either. So, where does it come from?

Policy and the consent of the governed

There are some people missing from the above photo: The policy makers. In the business world, this is usually left up to the Board of Directors. In a democracy this becomes the Legislature or Parliament. And “policy” becomes “law.”

What were the problems that this arrangement was trying to overcome?

It should be noted at this point that the “conventional” model for corporate management is not the only model in use. The Spanish (Basque) Mondragon Corporation functions as a federation of worker cooperatives, though it appears outwardly as any other large corporate entity.

More generally, it has been long acknowledged among managers that things go better when “workers” (or whoever is being managed) are included in any major decisions, particularly regarding any major change of direction. Good mangers at least “feel out” their people, if not observing some more formal (policy-based) process when hit with any major changes or shifts. I wish my own parents had done this more often.

The idea is to gain the “consent of the governed,” which concept is included in our Declaration: “… governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” The Founders stated this concept in lofty terms, informed as they were by centuries of political philosophizing. But it’s basically just good sense. Isn’t it? Seems that way to me.

Rulers will always be a minority

Here’s another family photo. The Elders stand above, the younger ones below. If every single child and grandchild and great-grandchild had been present, it would be even more obvious that the Elders are in the minority. Yet, in life, in business, and in politics, we normally allow them to rule.

Let’s go back to the basic family pattern. You don’t need a lot of people at the top. In a pinch you could get by with just one. Two tends to work better. For a larger group, an executive council of four is a good number.

And any well-run group that intends to survive, or even expand, usually expresses in basic policy (in the U.S. that’s the Constitution) that leaders and managers need to maintain good communication with their people and seek to gain wide agreement for policies and activities that will affect their people. And so we have Democracy as a formal method for providing periodic “consent of the governed” to those doing the governing (the “ruling class”). Done well, this tends to legitimize policy decisions and make implementation go smoother. Done poorly, it can create more problems than it’s worth. And these days, it is often done quite poorly.

What about real political minorities?

Any group, especially where it’s rulers have a policy of ignoring their wishes or their humanity, can have difficulty getting a fair shake from mangers and policy-makers. The common result is violent protest, particularly as the injustice of the situation becomes more and more obvious.

That this is a dangerous path should be apparent, but that it will certainly not be productive is not. We celebrate our own violent revolt following the 1776 Declaration as a pivotal moment in world history. But all-out war does tend to open up Pandora’s boxes of “unintended consequences.” It, for one thing, tends to indicate to a people that further violence may result in further gains. This is seldom true.

If we had negotiated peaceful treaties with indigenous Americans, and honored them, life for them could have been much different. If we had negotiated the abolition of slavery before our war with Britain, things could have turned out much different. From that point of view, we forced those minorities in the direction of violent action. The indigenous people rose to the occasion, and got badly beaten down. The slaves, then ex-slaves, controlled their desire for violence and won an enduring place in American culture.

However, the classic case of a “political minority” is the case of an immigrant population, more-or-less forced out of their homeland, to arrive on some foreign shore speaking a different language and bringing a different culture with them. The American colonists once occupied this position, but with the backing of a heavily-armed imperial government, they overwhelmed the majority inhabitants and set themselves up as the new rulers. In current times, we don’t consider this a probable scenario, except possibly if the invasion came from outer space.

We do see various modern examples of this, including the migration from the rural South to the urban North, as well as various other significant migrations to the New World via both the Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as recent movements of people out of the Middle East and into Europe.

Thomas Sowell has taken an economist’s view of some of these populations. And though I am not entirely familiar with his work, I have seen him speak. The way this usually works, when it works, seems to be when the group begins in their new environment as a relatively powerless, but culturally cohesive, community. In other words, they remain “segregated.” Then as they grow stronger in their environment, their younger members, nurtured by the safe space provided by the community, begin to reach out towards the majority culture and economy. As some of them make it, they bring more with them. And they eventually become a part of the larger culture, at least in some important ways, and then gain their share of clout.

Sowell noted that this is where black communities were headed in the time of Jim Crow and redlining. But then a white-supported policy shift, touted as a “war on poverty,” began breaking up the safe spaces where young blacks could get a start. Welfare rules favored single mothers, and so the basic family pattern in those communities was directly attacked by the mostly-white ruling class of those times. And the advances that blacks had made, even with Jim Crow breathing down their necks, was eroded by a program that was supposed to help them, but was not really their program.

The real political minority is the ruling class

The ruling class has only two ways to remain in control: Management skill, or coercion.

The Vancouver B.C. 72nd Seaforth Highlanders in ceremonial garb, 1928.

And coercion does not result in “good control” but only an appearance of control, based on fear. So the ruling class really has only one way to maintain good control: Management skill. And this, unfortunately, it lacks in sufficient quantity. And in this lack, it has resorted, too often, to various coercive tactics. While most see this failing as some sort of “natural” process of decay, I don’t. I think managers have been pushed in this direction, but in ways that have been very difficult to trace to their sources.

There are certain fundamental rules of good management that are being violated today, and have been for some time. Most of them go unnoticed and uninspected.

One important law of management is that any person will tend to feel intimidated when put in an asymmetrical power situation. An intimidated person will remain weak and less productive in his work and his life. A classic example of this is Federal Income Tax, and all similar federal programs that force the individual to deal directly with the central government. Ideally, the individual would have all his legal dealings with his local government, and would feel he had a voice and could defend a position in that group.

This is one of the greatest arguments against “socialist” systems of all kinds, as well as any form of autocracy. It is almost never listened to.

Another basic law is that data at all levels should be true and accurate. If I were running any “justice system” I would make this the first and most important role of all its agents and officers. Today, not even journalism is willing (or able?) to find the truth and report it. That has to change!

As the “ruling class” extends into the business world, I don’t think large businesses should be seen as very different from large governments. I think there are “bad apples” hiding out in the world of multinational corporations that have been continuously seeking to have them treated in law as “legal persons.” I believe that beyond a certain size and scope they must lose that privilege. Those groups have a long and sad history of trampling countless lives in their pursuit of profit. It is long past time to end that. Groups with that much power should be under some sort of democratic control, and be held to certain basic legal standards. We can’t have real democracy where we allow corporate tyranny. It has almost destroyed our Republic.

Let us return to the pattern of the family. It isn’t perfect, but it is the most workable, most durable pattern that we have.

Vacant Urban Land

Every time I go down the stairs to get the mail, I have to look out on this scene across the street.

This used to be the location of the “Clunie Hotel.” I believe it was burned down about ten years ago. This lot appears to have been vacant for quite some time.

This scene keeps hitting me in the face as “wrong.” So I wanted to write about it.

Other unused land

There are several pieces of land close to city center that have been marked for redevelopment but so far stand empty and unused.

One such area in Sacramento is the “railyards” area just to the north of downtown. It was established around the time of the Civil War as a major maintenance depot for local and transcontinental trains. A plan to make this area into a living part of the city has been on the table for years.

If you get up on that overpass (which goes over the existing rail line) and look to the north and east, you see how large this area is.

As was obvious from the previous photo, the city has already put in a road grid with street lights and storm drains. Nothing else has really happened, though, since that time.

Vacant land in the “old days”

In the mid-1800s, as California opened up to immigration from the Midwest and East, people who could afford to would go in and buy large quantities of land and then sit on it until the people came, and sell it to them at a big profit. This has been called “land speculation.” This made a few folks very rich and started a popular trend of “investing in land.”

Well, back then there was a lot of open land and most U.S. cities were still quite small. The money was thought to be in agriculture until industry started to build up in cities.

In the late 1800’s land speculation was a big problem in cities, too. It kept urban land out of production and forced workers to seek cheaper lots further away from where they worked. A thinker of that time, Henry George, proposed that communities should force more urban land into productive use by taxing only the value of the land, rather than land plus improvements. He argued that communities owned their land and gave it value by their very presence, and that land “owners” really only owned the improvements they added to the land to make it productive. A “land tax” would provide incentive to someone holding title to land to make it and keep it productive.

Various modifications to this scheme were tried in a few places, sometimes with good results. But most areas stuck with the traditional way of valuing land, which meant that the owner was basically penalized for improving the land to make it more productive. There was pressure from land owners to keep property taxes low, and cities started relying more on other forms of tax, like sales tax. Investing in land continued to be a “thing to do.”

Vacant land now

Today there is still a problem with unused/undeveloped land in or near cities. The problem these days tends to be that the original owner cannot afford to continue to use the land. They have experienced some economic setback that prevents them from repairing or replacing structures, keeping up mortgage payments, or even paying property taxes. When taxes go into arrears, the county or city government usually gains control of that land. If one defaults on mortgages, the lender will foreclose. But most lenders are not prepared to be land owners and will try to get the land resold as soon as possible. There is still room for land price speculation in these scenarios.

The most common solutions I have found for getting land into use are to either tax it more heavily until it goes into use, or get it into the local “land bank” where it can then be sold cheaply to someone who promises to actually use it for something productive.

Per reports I have read, penalizing vacant land owners does not seem to work that well. They just find sham ways to get the land to appear on paper like it is in use. I suppose such people are speculators, or they would just sell the land and rid themselves of the problem.

Land Values and Property Tax

Most land is assessed for tax purposes by an “Assessor” who follows certain guidelines of good practice, along with whatever the law in his state dictates. It is usually assessed at some percentage of what he thinks it would sell for if put on the market for sale. He compares the land to similar land that has recently been sold to estimate this value.

This is a problem for most municipalities when there is an economic downturn, because the sale price of unused land tends to decrease, and so their tax revenues. If they don’t have a land bank system set up, they can’t do that much when an owner defaults on his taxes except to hope that a new owner will come along who can afford to pay the taxes.

City (urban) planning

The problem of how communities could get more control over their land and how it is used has been a big issue for quite some time. Most communities do not want to challenge the “free market” aspect of land ownership and use, yet have made various attempts through “zoning” and other urban planning strategies to increase their control. Sometimes this process just results in stalemates, because existing residents will pile up against some new idea for using land in their area in fear that it will result in reduced property values (their “investment”).

There is also a push for more open space among some sectors of the urban population. This usually means turning a lot into a park, which the community will then have to maintain at its own expense.

However, none of these dynamics are very evident in downtown Sacramento. The residents here are mostly not land owners and not organized. The land owners are mostly governments, developers, and some big corporations. They normally have buildings on their land (which may include nice park-like areas) which are there for commercial (or governmental) purposes. If a major player wants to build a skyscraper next to my apartment building, they’d probably get their way, though the parcel is currently part of a “special planning district.” Special districts offer incentives to developers to provide certain types of business and residential spaces in their areas. The city planners want K Street to be a “multi-use” type of street, which means more people and less cars. The overall idea is to reduce the costs of commuting by allowing more people to live near where they work and/or near public transit (although public transit isn’t currently less costly than cars, just more compact).

How all this has impacted the plans for the vacant lot next to my building is hard to say. I don’t know how to find out what the current owner is planning to do with the property. And then there is the issue of the economy….

Criminals create poor economic conditions

If a criminal element or operation is bleeding the economy generally, everyone suffers and regular expenses, like taxes, mortgages, and construction loans, become more difficult for everyone to afford.

Criminals find their way into communities by various means. Some (like psychiatrists) pose as “experts” who know how to handle some sort of problem plaguing the community. This can also be done on a “protection racket” basis. In this operation, the criminals create a problem in the community, then offer themselves as the solution to that problem. This has happened in some places in Central and South America where criminals now “run” whole neighborhoods or towns, because they caused so much trouble for the existing honest managers that they gave up and left.

Crime is no minor concern in today’s world, and there are lots of pressures in the direction of increasing use of criminal methods instead of honest methods in handling situations in life. Such is our current condition in this “COVID Crisis” per my best estimates.

It should be noted that the Nazis started in Germany as a more-or-less popular political party and ran the government there for many years. This is even though they openly supported Eugenics and other racist ideas. Eugenics was also widely supported in the United States (and many other places) back then.

Any concentration of power is attractive to criminal elements because if they can gain some control of it, it gives them more “freedom” to commit more crime. This should serve as a warning to anyone who seeks to concentrate or centralize power and authority to “solve” local or world problems. It won’t work if criminals take over, so you need an active and working protection against their incursions. We already have the IRS in the U.S. It has only been kept somewhat in line by good sense and constant oversight. It has had many criminal episodes, and is based on a basically criminal idea.

Remedies

If the lot across from my building is vacant because of unfavorable economic pressures, then Sacramento is still dealing with a criminal scene somewhere in its midst. I’ve spotted psychiatry as one for sure. It is strong here for some reason, but just as ineffective as always, and so should really be fired from its current position controlling “mental health” in the city. For now we can use psychologists who are a little more ethical.

Major drug trafficking lanes run through the city, so there is some criminal attention on letting their traffic pass through on the freeways. They probably also traffic people (slaves) on the same routes. There are probably a variety of other unseen forces at work, as this is, after all, the capital city of one of the largest states on the planet.

Remedies in terms of law, policy, and “community development” are often discussed on the internet. Getting the bleeding to stop by kicking out the criminal elements in a community or society in general is less commonly mentioned, but I think is obviously a more key action to take. Not only will criminal activity ruin a community financially, it will ruin it spiritually, too. And then reviving it will become that much more difficult, because somewhere along the line it started to decide that it was easier to give up and die.

This is, in essence, what had been happening to various communities – including the global community – over the years as the pressure from criminal interests and activities has increased. They are, individual by individual, beginning to give up.

This is an old pattern. It has caved in – if not entirely erased – many civilizations on this planet (to say nothing of other planets). We now have technology to remedy this problem, but it goes up against an attitude of defeatism that actually runs quite deep.

However, if we don’t take the needed steps to revive ourselves, we could all end up living like this guy:

And the whole city will look not much different than these vacant areas he looks down upon. If buildings remain, they will be unusable – no electricity or water – and probably guarded by armed gangs as superior shelter. This is what we get if we give up!

The Emotion of Hate

The essay below is almost verbatim from a copy I kept. It was probably written in 1968. I presented it with a collage of news photos from magazines – probably ones we had at  home. The collage of photos is lost, but as they were news photos, similar ones still exist on the internet. My copy has notes from my teacher (not sure who she was) which are not included here. It is being published here for the first time to give my readers some idea of where my thinking was back then, and how long I have had these issues on my mind. The first photo is from the Birmingham student protests of May 1963. The second photo is from the Columbia University (New York) student protests of April 1968.

With these pictures I have tried to illustrate, among other things, the emotion of hate. This emotion, as all emotions, belongs exclusively to man. It occurs under many circumstances and may be accompanied by fear. I used a dictionary to help me find what fear was. One of the basic things that fear is is “ an agitated feeling aroused by an awareness of actual or threatened danger…an uneasy feeling that something may happen contrary to one’s desires.” I would like to try to elaborate on this, so as to be able to understand it better.

One of the main things I would like to study is what one’s desires are. Most people have a conscious, or at least biological, desire to live. One may also desire to conform to sets of values determined by his peer groups. These values may include certain prejudices. Many people want things to stay as they are; they do not desire change. This may be a change in governmental or business institutions, or it could be change in their own lives or values. Another thing people desire is to feel as if they are better than someone else, or have power over someone else. Many people have a desire for wealth.

The desire to live is basic. Within this basic desire we may include the need for food, clothing and shelter. Since these things, in our system, are not free, one must have money to buy them; one must have money to buy life. One must have a paying job.

I must now go back to hate, “an extreme feeling of dislike or animosity,” says the dictionary. But why would this feeling ever occur? Have you ever hated? When you hated, you probably hated a person or group of people. What made you hate them? Maybe they said something about your looks, or actions, or manner. Did what they said affect your pride? Or perhaps they physically threatened you, perhaps they wanted to kill you. Or maybe someone told you to hate them, or described them to you so that they seemed inferior to you.

The basic reason for hating is because someone is threatening your life. Most other reasons for hating are reasons built up over hundreds of years of people living with people. They are reasons that need not exist. Of course these reasons, which are in most cases the desires I spoke of before, are hard to get rid of. But some of them keep others from attaining their basic desire – which is to live. This cannot and should not be tolerated by the victims of hate. They should not have to only half-live because of someone else’s hate for them. And if they hate the people who hate them, their feeling should be condoned and not condemned. This, I believe, is the only justifiable hate.

(Or is it?)

Most of these students, at first, only fear. Fear that they will not feel fully educated when they leave the university they protest. But repelled by police, they now have something to fight, someone threatening their lives, and the fear turns to hate. And once the ball gets rolling, it’s hard to stop it.

The blacks have, for a long time, had a true and justified hate for whites, because the whites hated them, as humans at any rate. If the Negroes had remained slaves, the whites would have been content – they had someone to have power over, to dominate. But of course the Negroes were humans, not slaves, and not content. They hated the white man. And because of this, the whites hated them all the more.

So unless the white desire to dominate over the Negro ends, they will probably go on hating each other forever.

Possibly one way to eliminate hate is through education.

Basically, hate comes when one thinks his life is being threatened.

How do you get rid of the artificial desires and values of modern man? You only have to get rid of them enough to let everyone live a good life. Possibly these desires also come from a fear that one will not live a full life without the things desired. Is it possible that really no one in America feels he’s not living a good life? Maybe everyone should go back and re-examine their basic fear. If they find it to be a justifiable one, as I think it is, perhaps they are over-estimating what it takes to live. Or perhaps someone is helping them to overestimate. Their peer group? The business world?

I must find the root! A common denominator!

The trouble with human relations is that they can never be perfect, for human emotion is part of it. And human emotion will occasionally be able to rule a person’s whole body.

Of course, some emotions seem perfectly wholesome, such as love. Though at second glance there may be complications – or is that only in love as many see it? In the institution of marriage? For some people, marriage might ruin their love. Perhaps people were not meant to love one person for the entirety of life. In fact, it is horrible to think that all the more people a man is allowed in his life to love is one. Everyone should feel love for everyone. Love, as all emotions, was not meant to be hidden or kept by only two people.

And then there is hate… You know, it’s a funny thing: I used to hate a person so much that I threw rocks at him once. But now he’s one of my best friends. Of course it was a childish hate, bred from immaturity and failing to understand the other’s situation. Why, then, does this same childish hate occur in adults? Why do some adults let their emotions and their peer group just rule their lives? It must be because of something they need, something they want out of life, or maybe it is a misunderstanding of life. What could it be?

Perhaps it is fear. Fear that if one breaks one’s dependencies on others one will cease to exist. Fear that if they are not accepted in their group, they will be alone. It is as if they don’t know how to make new friends with new people. It’s as if they couldn’t face a world different than the one they are in.

Institutions often help this happen. Take Christianity. It has been the truth for some people for years that God created the earth and all the creatures on it. These and other beliefs have been thrust into people’s heads along with fear, the fear that if they don’t believe these things, they will go through huge amounts of pain – the most hated thing to man. And when these beliefs are contradicted, the Christian backs into his shell farther, afraid to believe the truth.

Yes truth, all important truth. Not nearly enough people take the truth as seriously as they should.

Shut minds breed fear and hate; these minds must be opened with love and courage. People must live the truth, yet always question it, curiously and openly.

Now another question: Is hate on anyone’s part really necessary?

As I envision the cave man, I see him with a myriad of unknown phenomena surrounding him. These included electrical storms, wild animals, birth, death, and many other wonders of nature. These men learned to hate some of these things – death for one, and things that caused it – and pain, and things that caused that. This included wild animals, weather extremes that started fires or ruined the food supply thus causing hunger and pain, and anything else causing pain or death.

These things – death, pain – were not understood and fantastic stories were built up around their causes. In the meantime, science has solved these questions, basically at any rate, and so anyone with an education can understand why death, pain, birth and other things exist, and why some of them are necessary.

One question has remained unsolved, and this is fate, on a personal basis at any rate. People have always wondered, why did he die then? Why was he the one to be killed, out of all those others? It is harder for people to understand why things like this happen, sudden deaths, with one in a million chances of the one that died dying. Yet people need not even get as flustered as they do, except for the fact that their emotions get in their way, emotions like love, emotions that aren’t essential to life yet certainly do, and will, exist. It seems that for hate to dissolve at this late date, people would have to be able to rule over their emotions. This seems impossible. But at least people could make a conscious effort to eliminate false hate as much as possible, making their hates as basic and justifiable as they can possibly be. The hate of other humans is not justifiable. But it has existed ever since the first cave man wanted someone to blame for something that happened, that he couldn’t explain.

Cruelty to animals seems to be a well-liked pastime among boys my age. They blow frogs up, burn mice live, use toads as slingshot projectiles, feed squirrels whiskey, cut a rat in half, sin a snake live.

Why is this necessary?

Perhaps it is better than taking out one’s hate on other people. But where were these boys exposed to so much hate in the first place? It’s horrible, grotesque, and brutal.

People ask, why are there so many problems in our society? I have been thinking about hate because I thought it was one of the main causes of our problems. Some people use other words to express this prevailing feeling of hate…racism, conflicting interests, unequal rights…but I see hate as the major factor in all of these.

Hate, as I have said before, has to do with man’s desires. It is, however, always hard for me to remember how it has to do with them. Perhaps it is this: One man, a businessman, pursues his desires which are, say, to make money. He thereafter does not bother to shell out the dough to train hard-core unemployed. But this results in the interference with another man’s basic desire to live (by earning money which can buy food, clothing and shelter). This may be seen as conflicting interests, but their interests are much the same. They both want money. If the richer man, though, were to sacrifice some of his to train hard-core unemployed, he would then get a new set of workers. This would probably pay back a bit of what was spent on them, and they would also be able to live a decent life. It all comes down to people having to look at themselves and others and be compassionate enough to bend their backs a bit for others so that they may fulfill the desire shared by all men – the desire to live.

So, we find a condition on the part of upper and middle class people which is often called apathy. They think of themselves as harmless, not taking anything away from underprivileged people. But they aren’t able to lift a foot off the floor to help them, support them, love them. And though they may think the absence of love for their fellow man on their part is not extremely important, by the time this absence of love gets down to the underprivileged people it turns to hate, for they are only half living. And so people must truly love their fellow man in order for hate to cease to exist. It means, at first glance, that the affluent must give some of it up. But in the end, everyone would benefit. In the end, there would be no hate, conflicting interests, racism, unequal rights, just living human beings.

P.S.

The above is probably the major philosophic work that survives from my early teenage years. I was surprised as I transcribed it. It summarizes all the most basic themes – at that level of thought – that I have been dealing with my entire life. I even get some of the basic concepts correct, which surprises me; I don’t recall where I learned them from. This is part of an ongoing project to digitize writings I have saved that I think might be important. But this first is probably the most important piece in my collection.

Traffic and Wild Fruits – Connected?

Sometimes working things out requires physical models. In this case the results were equivocal. The problem was: If you wanted to design a road system that would not require traffic lights to handle intersecting flows, what would it look like? Well, you’d probably have to separate the traffic into two levels (not totally necessary, but more compact) At the intersections you’d have to route the crossing flows around each other.

In another system, all the streets would be one-way, and the direction would alternate every block. To get through a city (or neighborhood) you’d have to “wiggle” back and forth through the grid.

I got these ideas from two videos reporting on new designs for intersections that use fewer road signs and no traffic lights. The videos said these designs were working better (allowing a smoother flow of cars with fewer accidents) than traditional intersections. This seems to result from a combination of spatial and psychological factors.

Urban Design

This is just one small example of what some people are thinking about concerning the broader subject of urban design. Did I mention going to a meeting about a new light rail station in an earlier post? Same basic topic.

Urban Design is linked to Urban Planning, or Land Use Planning. Urban Design is considered the more embracive subject. Planning is more directly involved with political control.

A view of San Francisco’s Vaillancourt Fountain, in a plaza near the old ferry terminal. This is from 1977. The fountain was installed in 1971.

In trying to find out more about what people involved with this subject are thinking and doing, I searched online using several search strings that I thought would be important to the subject. However, it seems most others did not consider most of those topics that important. Which is to say, I didn’t find a lot of helpful material.

Henry George and Garden Cities

I did run across the subject of Garden Cities. These were first proposed in England by one Ebenezer Howard, who, according to Wikipedia, was inspired by American writers Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward) and Henry George (Progress and Poverty). I have read both of those books!

Really only one (you can count more) garden city was ever constructed in England, named Letchworth. The historically recent push for sustainability in urban design has created renewed interest in the Garden City concept. This resulted in “The Letchworth Declaration” of 2014, put forward by a new Community Interest Company named New Garden Cities Alliance. The declaration upholds the values of Sir Howard, including in particular the idea that the land of the city should be held by the community in trust. This is very similar to Henry George’s vision. It totally changes the traditional rules regarding land ownership, but has a more favorable history in the UK than it does in the US.

Land Ownership

If a community is unable or unwilling to take ownership of its land and charge rent to those wishing to use that land, then a Garden City degrades into a nice-looking suburb, as has happened with most attempts to create such cities in other places, especially the US. This seems to be a fundamental problem in changing the way cities form, particularly in the US, but more conspicuously in most large cities in the developing world. In those cities, the landowners have refused to build any kind of housing for poorer people, and the poor who moved to the cities were forced to build their own “cities” according to their own rules. Thus the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are much more than just “slums” as we would think of them. In the US, the original slums were created when tenements built for immigrants or poorer workers were abandoned by their original communities and rented out to new waves of immigrants, and left to run down until land owners were forced to demolish them or cities were forced to replace them. In Rio the favelas were built by their occupants, and this remains the case to this day. In 2010, over 11 million people lived in favelas in Brazil. This is more than the entire population of New York City.

I thought that land ownership, land owners, and the decisions they make about how to use their urban land would be a major topic related to the subject of urban development, design, and planning. But most writers (after George) avoid the topic. Apparently the debate is considered closed. In the US at least, land owners have the right to decide how to use their land (as long as it is not overtly destructive) and can sell the deed to their land to anyone they want for any price they want.

The above-pictured land has stood vacant very near the downtown of Sacramento for about 20 years. It is currently owned by a local developer who promises to start building on it. However, the year 2017 came and went with no significant work done. Below is the same view from a slightly different perspective.

This tent has one of the nicest views in the entire city (campers are periodically removed from this site, but tend to get bothered less during the colder months). Why does this overpass exist? Because the city built it and another one in 2015 to connect the new development to downtown. And when the development finally gets built, the various community agencies that provide police, fire protection, sewage, water, garbage collection, electricity and gas will obligingly re-tool and expand into the area. But how will they recoup the costs associated with doing this? George said: Charge the owners rent. If the owners of this land had to pay Sacramento-sized rent on all this property, would they continue to leave it vacant? George hoped the answer would be, “No.” But apparently Georgism in the US has been canned for the duration…And the Railyards remain vacant.

Who decides how to use the land?

When you are a homesteader sitting on your 160 acres (the Railyards cover 240 acres) you get to decide where to put the well, the house, the chicken coup, the cow pasture, the corn field or whatever. Seems fair. But what if that land is in a city?

200 acres is enough land to host one or more companies employing thousands of people, the housing, schools, clinics, restaurants and parks for those people, and probably much more. You don’t have one user, you have thousands. And you don’t have one landowner, you have (maybe) hundreds. They all have to develop their land in a way that eventually fits together with everyone else. And they might be able to do it. But it’s a sure thing that various agents for the community (or its government) are going to be looking over their shoulders and trying to influence certain outcomes.

“Modern” urban developments commonly go through years of design, planning, and approvals before the developers get the go-ahead. This isn’t the way it always was. I don’t think it is even known how the ancient cities of Europe, Asia and Africa were built. There was probably a central planner/designer, but this data seems to be lost. We know that many of these cities were rebuilt following wars, fires, floods and similar catastrophes. And not always with as pleasing results as in older times. Certainly, the majority of US cities could easily be described as “ugly.” Or as having a “disorganized” look about them. They certainly have not responded well to various economic/cultural/political changes in the past. When agriculture got mechanized, and more factories got built near urban transport hubs, were the cities ready for the inrush of new workers from the countryside? The stories I read point to the contrary. When old electric trains and trolleys were torn out and replaced with wide streets for cars, then freeways for cars, were the cities ready for that change? It seems not. And when the welfare system started dumping its failed cases into the streets of urban America, I don’t see that going very well, either.

Perhaps it is time to take a different approach to the problems that cities were built to solve.

Did cities “evolve” from rural settlements?

Students of ancient history seem to agree that something happened on Earth that led to the need for cities. Cities began developing in a big way around 3,500 BC. The city of Mohenjo-Daro in India, estimated to have been built about 4,000 years ago, is noted for its “urban planning” including some form of plumbing. It shared its layout pattern with several other sites occupied by that same civilization.

With historical scholarship as it stood in the early 1900s, historians and archeologists of those times had to assume that the humans who built and occupied those ancient cities somehow worked it all out, all by themselves. But with what we know now, there is no excuse for that theory to stand as the only one, or still very dominant one. It is much more likely that something more interesting than that was going on back then.

And in that possibility – probability – lies the key to a new approach. We have already developed part of that new approach: Computer design and simulation techniques. We still need the other part: An understanding and certainty on what we are doing on Earth, firmly supported by our own ability to recall similar situations in the past.

At this point in my own development, I’m not sure where such a certainty will lead us. The intention is that we “get it right” this time, or at least more right. We have an opportunity today that is close to unique in the history of the universe. We are now able to combine human compassion with the willingness to use advanced technologies. In our own written history, we have no obvious prior experience with a situation like this. But in our longer history, we have many such experiences. If we can humanize our technocracy so that self-destructive impulses don’t ruin our future on Earth, then we have a chance to bring something new to the table.

Of Fig trees and Freeways

My fig sample.

This fig came from a tree growing underneath a freeway in Sacramento’s American River Parkway. I’ve never had a chance to look inside an unripe fig before. Perhaps the figs there will be ripe in another month or so. But, what will happen to them?

Here is a lovely row of flowering plum trees near the Queen Anne area of Seattle. How do I know they are plum trees? Because every summer their fruit ripens and falls on the sidewalks, making a big mess. How many people could those plums feed if they were harvested? Same question could be asked about the figs under the freeway in Sacramento. I know the animals there don’t eat them all. Besides, the animals also have wild grapes, blackberries and goodness knows what other treats growing in their park. With a little effort, all these plants could also provide human food. Elderberry flowers are edible, and the fruit also has many uses. The park is full of elderberries.

Elderberry bushes heavy with berries.

People could also be growing plants like this in their suburban gardens. Some do, but they don’t harvest the fruit. At a house just down the street stands a fine lemon tree, still holding its (I am sure now less than edible) fruit from last year!

OK, so maybe it would be more efficient to have urban orchards (like they do in Village Homes in Davis) and hire someone to harvest the fruit and get it into the hands of people who want to eat it. So, let’s do it! All I know is, that if I get a chance, I’ll be enjoying some great figs, wild grapes, blackberries, almonds and goodness knows what else courtesy of my local park.

The point is, a lot of functions that get overlooked or forgotten could be integrated into urban life (at least in a town like Sacramento) if someone just became a little more aware of what is possible. We need people thinking about things like this, and those people should be people like us. We have a chance this time to get it right. Will we blow it?

The Lands

…Some background on a new writing project and WordPress site…here…

Inspirations from odd places

I had recently been exposed to a film story called “Blade Runner 4049.” Though I found the story overly complex, its vision of our future is not that unusual in contemporary fiction. I particularly recall from the movie an area called “San Diego” that had become a huge dump and salvage yard for the Los Angeles metropolis. The piles of junk went on for miles and miles in all directions. It was also pointed out that there were no living trees in the environment. It was noted that at a “rebel” outpost, a dead tree had been kept standing using steel cables.

The Blade Runner story is a “loose adaptation” of a story by writer Philip K. Dick. Philip is considered an important science fiction writer. Born in 1928, he was influenced by the somewhat older sci-fi writers of the pulp days, such as Hubbard and Heinlein, but also the “beat” writers like Jack Kerouac. He died at only 53 under circumstances that remain poorly understood. He was a drug user, that is for sure.

In Dick’s book, the dystopia evident on the West Coast was brought about by war. In the movie this is not mentioned, except for a reference to a “high radiation” area near Las Vegas. In both stories, androids apparently designed for robotic tasks (I don’t believe it) acquire their own sense of humanity and wish to have equal rights with humans and an end to the control programming. Science fiction writers who have gone down this road seem to be of a mind that something like this could happen. They don’t try to understand why. The difference for me is that I now know why. The design and manufacture of human-like androids would be seen as a dangerous and stupid activity by anyone who understood the likely spiritual outcome of it. The androids in the film, called “replicants,” would be even more susceptible to this problem, as they are almost totally biological.

Bicycling downtown through the riverside park, I noticed a large stand of dead trees that has always been there, but seemed unusually gloomy with no spring foliage to offset the grayness. And I thought, “this is the Land of the Dead Trees.” And so I began to formulate the starting point of a story.

I am incapable – even if I wanted to – of writing an ordinary fiction story. I have been exposed to too much actuality that is much stranger than most “fiction” written these days. The trick would be to start with how things are now and somehow show how the situation could be improved.

That leads to Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” which employed a similar technique. But I have no use for his time traveler. I can simply assume a viewpoint of some future time and “look back” to now.

The photo above with two effects added to it: “oil” and “sepia.”