GOP Gas Lighting

The GOP’s gas lighting ability has been on display since Pat Buchanan paid those “hippies” to spit on our returning Vietnam Vets. Most marketing handbooks say that to make a sale, you first have to make a problem to be solved by you.  In the annuity industry, we used ‘fire sales’.  Tell the salespeople that interest rates would go down on a set date and watch the money flow in prior to that date.  Trump used the same process with his wall.  What a great way to get as many people to the border as possible before the wall was built!  To be a “law and order” President he must have riots, and what better way than to send in ‘brown shirts’ to those places most opposed to them.  Open your eyes America.

Pandemic of Stupidity

It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that the real pandemic we are fighting is one of stupidity.  Fear and anger have dominated our politics for so long that reason has disappeared.   We have many pundits claiming it’s safe to open our economy up without any facts to back it up.  Until we have tested virtually everyone, every two weeks or so, we won’t know where we are at with covid 19.  There are two types of people we have to deal with:  one dreams improvements and builds from them, the other destroys what others have built and likes to tear others dreams to shreds.  Real leaders take the blame for mistakes and fixes them, tells the truth, listens to all sides, and gives credit to subordinates for the good things happening.   If we listened to our intellect instead of our fears we might be able to determine the real role of government and forget about the words socialism and capitalism that mean something different to everyone you talk to.

Time to try "Bubble Up"economics

Now that the US has approximately half of its population without jobs, (children, students, retirees, disabled and unemployed) it might be time to change our economy’s focus from jobs to incomes.  The focus on jobs gives discretion for spending two trillion of our aid tax dollars to business owners and executives under the “trickle down” theory.  By spending only one trillion dollars we could eliminate hunger by giving each resident with a Social Security number a debit card for $300 a month.  It could be spent only on food produced in the United States, and on one day each month it would be brought back to the $300 amount.  If it wasn’t spent it couldn’t be accumulated.  This would eliminate hunger, free up rent and mortgage money, benefit our farmers, and bubble up to our business owners.

Eleven Myths Promulgated by Our Fear Mongers

Our leaders: political, religious, media, and business, have found that the fear of loss is a much greater motivator than the hope of gain.  Trying to motivate a comfortable person is difficult without inducing fear in them.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to a loss of reasoning power, hence our current lack of logic and common sense.   Anger also leads to hate, and we see plenty of that around us.   Because so much power and money is involved, it’s useful to recognize many myths that are promulgated by those that benefit from fear.

1.   1     “Communism, Capitalism and Socialism” are 19^th century ideas that have been shown to be total failures.  All advanced countries in the world today combine the features of capitalism to provide incentives to those who are motivated and socialism for those who are unable to fully take advantage of capitalism. The mere mention of the ISMS causes hostility to fly.  We should really be talking about what risks do we cover as a society and which risks do we cover privately.

2.      2 “Stealing Christmas” the stories about people being forced to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” are just plain stupid.  With each major religion having a holiday during this season, the Christian thing to do is to help others celebrate.  Besides the only first hand story I have heard about this was a Jewish delicatessen owner with a Jewish clientele.  It sounds like a Russian thing to me.

3.      3 “Bring prayer back into our schools.”  Not being able to pray in school is absurd.  Anyone can pray anytime they want in this country.  There is certainly an abundance of prayers during finals.    What is wanted is to be able to force others to pray as you do.  If this passes, I wonder how prayers to Allah will be handled.  Maybe another Russian thing.

4.    4   “They’re going to take my guns away.”  What no one seems to say is: How?  I’ve had 5 guns in my life and no government entity had any knowledge of any of them.  Are we going to send people door to door? (Who would be that crazy?)  We would need search warrants for every house.

5. 5      The “Right to Life” group is intent on sending doctors and women to jail in order to stop abortion.  The truth is they will never be able to stop it.  It can be slowed down with education and contraceptives, (and has been), but these aren’t in this groups’ vocabulary.  The effort to turn fetuses into babies prior to birth is a religious belief that the soul has entered the body prior to birth.  Why these haters of abortion don’t accept the “Lords” eventual judgment and have to make their own about other people is beyond me.  Nobody is forced to have an abortion.

6.    6   “If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist” comes out of our ‘C’ suites in business and is moving into politics.  It promotes money while denying love, happiness, sadness, faith and security among others.

7.    7   “The Holy Scriptures teach you what to believe”.  If you’ve ever read them cover to cover, it’s pretty obvious that the main concern is how to behave.  If you behave according to the Scriptures, you will know what’s important to believe.  Almost any belief can be found in the Scriptures if you look long enough.

8.    8   “My opponent believes, (or does). . .”  We can be almost certain that this is the beginning of a lie or a gross exaggeration.   We must start listening to what the opposition says about itself in order to understand it.  We also have to concern ourselves with what is or isn’t actually done by whom!

9.       “She/he did something awful years ago” Seems to say that people and times never change.  Many things considered horrible now weren’t years ago and vice versa.  People also change with the times and we should be looking to their recent past to gauge their moral compasses.  It’s important to remember that bad people can do good things, and good people can do bad things on occasion.

10.   Name calling is a sure sign that the argument can’t be won by logic.

11.   Climate change deniers are actually climate change profiteers and we should be calling them that.

Ethical Compass

As someone whose spent years navigating waters, prior to GPS, I thought it might be enlightening to review the similarities between navigating life and navigating travels.  We often refer to moral or ethical compasses.  There are many similarities to using a moral compass and a magnetic one.  Both rely on a definition of Truth.  One defined by the rotation of the earth, the other defined by the Highest Power.  The connection between the Truth and the compass is corrupted by forces called “Variation and Deviation”.   For the traveler, Variation is caused because the magnetic north pole moves constantly and is in a different spot than the True North Pole.  As you travel around the globe, the amount of variation changes due to simple trigonometry.  Moral compasses have this same variation feature: Abortions are repugnant to many while an acceptable form of birth control to many others.     Deviation is the bug bear of navigation.  On a boat it is caused by iron close to the compass.  It’s deviation that allows criminals to live with themselves and rationalize that they are still good people even though they do disgusting things.  The times we live in today remind me of a trip from Knife River  to Two Harbors when I could see we were progressing in a straight line, but my compass was swinging as much as 20 degrees either side of my real course.  The iron on the North Shore was causing the compass to swing in a sort of combination of variation and deviation.  Our leaders have this same ability to “deviate” our compasses.