Category: Environmental Matters

Evil Geniuses

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The Book of the Week is “Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, A Recent History” by Kurt Andersen, published in 2020. In this large, redundant volume, the author described how wealth inequality in the United States has been increasing at an alarming rate in the last forty years, as evil geniuses– economic royalists and self-made empire-builders (who take advantage of existing resources and infrastructure)– have rigged the system to compound their spoils and re-distribute it among themselves in a self-serving cycle.

Lots of research has shown that financial inequality in society actually hinders economic growth in developed nations. In connection therewith, in 2014, the OECD conducted a United States study that showed a 20% slowdown in economic growth since the 1980’s.

The author argued that the year 1980 was the turning point at which America’s hegemony started to decline. Both the Republic and Democratic parties’ elitists (other evil geniuses in addition to the above-mentioned) actually hurt America’s ability to remain economically dominant in the world. They brainwashed a significant number of ordinary Americans into:

  • believing that government is the enemy;
  • agreeing to tax cuts for the rich (also called “trickle down” economics);
  • favoring excessive deregulation; and
  • bashing unions

because such actions would make everyone wealthy!

The author cited ample evidence that the above actions do NOT make everyone wealthy.

The author contended that conservative Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s wrong-headed economic agenda (described above).

Politics cannot be divorced from economics. This is a simple idea that has been hardly ever EXPLICITLY SAID in historical, political and economic literature read by ordinary Americans, through centuries. The author calls this the “political economy” and former president Bill Clinton had the line, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Politics involves the making, monitoring, changing, and enforcing of society’s laws. The evil geniuses in the legal field who helped perpetrate the insidious brainwashing of the American masses, actually conveyed the following attitude in writing and speaking:

“So if you happen to think it’s a good idea for judicial decisions to also consider fairness or moral justice, or other values or versions of social happiness that can’t be reduced to simple metrics of efficiency,

Law and Economics [a body of legal theory from Robert Bork and his fellow Chicago School libertarians] says you’re a fool.”

That is how the 1980’s saw the American legal system start to focus on efficiency– favoring profiteers. The author argued that old men who are resistant to change are the conspirators of the current state of affairs. Well, SOMEone’s got to be oppressed.

Another indication that Americans’ attitude was becoming even more inclined toward rule-breaking greed and showing off wealth, could be heard in a 1980’s SUV TV commercial, which featured a visual of a white, 40ish male driving. The voice-over says, “It doesn’t just say you’ve arrived; it says you got there any way you darn well pleased.”

The author cited evidence that taxing the rich would be the largest factor in more evenly distributing wealth. The first Trump administration passed a tax cut for the rich that gave rise to the “…largest percentage reduction in tax revenues of any developed country on earth.” This was BEFORE COVID. And “…the federal debt increased by $1.5 trillion more than it had in Obama’s final three years.”

Nonetheless, the most hurtful president ever was George W. Bush, whose unconscionable greed and unmitigated hubris led to the crashing of the American economy and the commencement of two wars that enriched him and his cronies.

LBJ and Nixon were two other war-criminal presidents. Their war policies, too, wasted an excessive amount of taxpayer dollars on needless deaths and ruined lives. At the same time, they tried not to foul their own nest. They attempted to maintain this country’s economic dominance in the world, and salve their own consciences by funding domestic social programs. LBJ did some profiteering, but not nearly as much as Trump.

Trump is an angry, vengeful old president who, at the end of his career, is hurting not only his own political party, but also ordinary Americans. His excessive financial criminality has incalculably hurt society as a whole.

In 2018, Trump said NAFTA was the “worst trade deal ever made.” But in 2025, after all his bluster, the trade deals he’s going to make with Mexico and Canada, are going to be largely similar to NAFTA’s, all over again! And through his spokespeople who draft the words spoken by his deepfake image, he will take full credit for “great, great trade deals.”

His threats are causing a panic that certain sectors of the American economy will crash. Even the threat of a soft economy will deter some illegal immigrants from coming to this country. Given financial cycles, it is likely that some people will be hurting financially in the next few years. Trump is using a scorched earth strategy on his way out of office in order to be able to brag that HE reduced the number of illegal immigrants who are coming here. He will brainwash his base into believing that the economic downturn was all Biden’s fault!

Anyway, the author also commented that the internet changed American culture in accelerating the automation of the exchange of information, obsolescing a humungous number of jobs. Machine-learning is also making the job situation even worse. It could be said that the internet is the “new television” for the Millennial and Z Generations. However, there are major differences in the ways television changed American culture, and the ways the internet has changed it.

Television was a passive entertainment / infotainment / education source that, for most Americans, was consumed at home only, in one’s leisure time; perhaps on average, most students and workers (there were many more of those then than now) watched three to four hours a day, at no extra charge (except for electricity)– for the lifespan of the set. Then came recording of shows, but also cable TV– whose costs are many times higher for shows and sports games that used to be free.

The internet is an interactive source, and can be accessed globally, 24/7. So the younger generations are wasting so, so, so much more time obsessing over politics, than did the older generations. People have been bamboozled into paying big bucks to purchase electronic toys on which to subscribe to the internet, for which they have to pay even more!

So the amounts of time and money most Americans are spending on the internet are infinitely higher than that of television (and movies, and reading books, magazines, and newspapers). The early years of the internet (up to the single-digit 2000’s) brought emotional comfort to Americans. They flocked to websites that featured relatable, entertaining user-contributions with few or no ads that interrupted their viewing pleasure.

Once the entrepreneurial dot-commers mastered monetization and propagandizing, users became victims of their mind-control techniques. Arguably, the cultural transition from television to the internet has been economically and psychologically regressive for most Americans.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the depressing developments in politics, economics and culture that will eventually lead to the collapse of American civilization.

A Wild Idea

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The Book of the Week is “A Wild Idea” by Jonathan Franklin, published in 2021. This sloppily edited volume told a suspenseful, inspiring story of a man famous for doing the impossible– saving huge swaths of ecosystems in southern regions of Chile and Argentina in the single-digit 2000’s.

Born in 1943, Doug Tompkins spent his childhood in New York City and upstate New York. A social misfit, he dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, he acquired marketable skills in tree-felling and other manual labors, and retailing, enabling him to fund his wilderness adventures. His entreprenurial bent led him to start two clothing companies that prospered.

Tompkins wasn’t some hypocritical environmental philanthropist who claimed to want to save the earth, while: generating excessive pollution with his gas-guzzling vehicles and corporate and private jets, zipping around to his various mansions, and yachting with celebrities.

Tompkins truly, deeply cared about contamination of the world’s food supply, in addition to securing nature preserves in the form of national parks. His goals were to re-balance the proportions of life forms on earth through re-populating those areas with endangered species, and to let people enjoy nature! This, in regions of South America that had yet to be destroyed by humans, only because the terrain was so inhospitable to human habitation. He lived there; off the grid, when he wasn’t on some challenging outdoors-adventure with his buddies somewhere in the world.

Read the book to learn much more about a few episodes of Tompkins’ more extreme adventures, his businesses, the changes he wrought, and how he was changed by his experiences and relationships.

A World of Ideas

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The Book of the Week is “A World of Ideas, Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future” by Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, published in 1989. This compilation of interviews was done at the end of the Reagan Era–prior to the historical revisionism and 20 / 20 hindsight of the Clinton Era and thereafter.

David Gergen was one of the few political workers who has explicitly stated that the job elected officers should be doing is governing. This means serving one’s constituents in public service– rather than wooing voters with fantastic promises that will likely be broken– effecting wily public relations that includes propagandizing and standing on ceremony, also called populism.

Forrest McDonald, one of Bill Moyers’ interviewees, commented that America’s one president fills the roles of both government officer and populist, while England has two separate people doing those jobs, respectively: the prime minister, and the king or queen. A recent American president whose populism instilled fond memories in the minds of Americans that made them forget his wrongheaded governing, was Ronald Reagan. Around the time of the interview, the Iran-Contra hearings were all the rage, yet Reagan’s charisma was on display, as much as his amnesia.

McDonald correctly prophesied that more Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals would break in future decades, due to the conflicts the president faced in executing laws while worrying about protecting his reputation. Hardly any political issues have changed at least since the late 1980’s when McDonald rightly declared, “We’re living beyond our means. Congress is for sale to the highest bidder from one election to the next, the Pentagon belongs to the fixers, the President’s out to lunch, and the media are drowning us in violence, nonsense, and trivia.”

In his interview, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the United States government is comprised of two parties (Republican and Democrat) whose main policies are based on business and economics; in other words, donor-determined. All other major, developed countries of the world have a Labor Party– comprised of politicians who lobby on behalf of the poor or working class. It appeared that Chomsky was making a value judgment that the United States was wrong for allowing money to elect its public servants.

There are pros and cons to this, which are too numerous and controversial to discuss here. Suffice to say, the American government’s leadership-and-management culture is a completely different animal from that on other continents. It allows its people the freedom to practice capitalism on a much more extensive scale. Its foreign policy, shaped by globalization of course, has played a major role.

Speaking of foreign policy, Sissela Bok wished that the United States would behave in a more humanitarian manner in international conflicts. She wanted to see more Americans value all humans equally– “… so that it becomes just as awful for us to take an innocent life in some other country as it is in our own.”

Read the book to learn the opinions of mostly university professors, on American political, economics, cultural, and social issues from the 1980’s; that show the areas in which the country has regressed or progressed.

ENDNOTE: Since the book’s writing, arguably, the U.S. is slowly but slowly, progressing in terms of maintaining a democracy, more or less. One bit of evidence of this, is that the country suffered roughly ten years in a row during which a wartime president behaved like a dictator– under LBJ and then Nixon. The next occasion of that, which was seven years in a row, occurred under George W. Bush. It took four years in a row and one day (Jan. 6) for the U.S. to get tired of the next president who behaved like a dictator (Trump), and there wasn’t a war on.

Crisis-generation has always been a cliched way for leaders to keep their power, but hyper-awareness and politicization of crises has been generated in recent decades, due to the speed and reach of modern, global communications. In this way, the traumas of recent natural disasters, financial crashes, wars and celebrity anguish stay fresh in the minds of every culturally-labeled American generation, from Depression-Era babies to Generation Z.

The institutional memory of the older generation especially, allows them to detect and minimize the impact of crises sooner than otherwise. For instance, the Baby Boomers personally experienced— how LBJ and Nixon stubbornly refused to withdraw American troops from Vietnam– a war that involved unspeakable horrors in the region, causing adverse decades-long consequences there and in this country. The Boomers saw that Trump’s megalomania, secrecy and vengeance are akin to those exhibited by LBJ and Nixon. However, Trump refuses to ever give in; whereas, Nixon was shamed into resigning.

Leaders who have harnessed ways to brainwash the masses into believing they are saviors, are the ones who keep their power, at least until their enemies out their crimes in court.

There are many more indicators that our nation won’t devolve into anarchy anytime soon, that are beyond the scope of this post.

On Shaky Ground

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The Book of the Week is “On Shaky Ground, An Invitation to Disaster” by John J. Nance, published in 1988. Prediction of earthquakes is an age-old issue that can be improved, if enough money and political support is thrown at it, in connection with studying the geologic, tectonic, volcanic and geophysical problems that crop up along fault lines.

Even in 1960 when a major earthquake hit Chile, there was disagreement among scientists over the behavior of underground structures. The opposing theories consisted of “steep vertical fault” and “shallow, sub-horizontal dip-slip fault.”

To that time, ivory-tower “experts” at Caltech relied on only seismograph data for ideas. In the coming decades, graduate students looked elsewhere to disprove the old theories. One young scientist personally, physically surveyed a large swath of the topography of the Alaskan countryside. His data disproved the steep vertical fault theory. Another graduate student became a pioneer in paleoseismology, which identify the substances piled up underground in an earthquake zone, showing how they changed and moved over the course of millennia.

In the early 1960’s, the U.S. government and military were the major employers in the city of Anchorage in Alaska. They were eager to urbanize the place, and construction was booming. They ignored a pesky report issued in 1961 by the U.S. Geological Survey warning that the city’s underground foundation– Bootlegger Cove Clay– would be unstable in the event of an earthquake. Building codes were lax on structural soundness.

Alas, a major earthquake hit the area in March of 1964. The epicenter was under Unakwik inlet in North Prince William Sound, ten miles from Valdez, Anchorage and Seward, Alaska. Many structures collapsed, including but far from limited to: docks, warehouses, a newly opened J.C. Penney store and a Four Seasons apartment building.

The underground clay became liquid, causing the location of oil, army and cannery docks, and railroad yards to shift many feet. Fortunately, there had been regulation of natural gas lines. They had been programmed to shut off in an emergency, and they did, preventing explosions and fires. However, wooden buildings swayed instead of collapsing, but they burned in fires when a Texaco fuel tank exploded.

As fate would have it, the Seismological Society of America happened to be holding its annual meeting in Seattle, on the campus of the University of Washington on that very day. But news of the disaster in those days took hours to reach them. As is well known, communications technology has come a long way since 1987, when there were different radio systems for Los Angeles’ more than one hundred and forty police and fire jurisdictions.

The seismic waves generated vibrations in numerous other places around the world. The quake’s severity was “off the charts” given the existing technology for measuring such activity. Four tsunamic waves spanning twelve thousand square miles of Alaska’s sea floor was felt as far away as Hawaii, and swamped Vancouver Island. Seward’s economy was ruined, as it was based on oil, fishing, import/export, railway transportation, and boating.

Sadly, human beings have short memories; possibly because they’ve become desensitized to cautionary tales. Greed eventually results in business as usual. Political candidates in at-risk communities are loath to spend precious campaign time on safety regulations– their donors benefit financially from disasters. In recent decades, American communities have become wise to the fact that they can always apply for federal aid when they are hit by a disaster (whose loss of life and property damage could have been minimized!).

Anyway, read the book to learn about additional disasters in China, California, Mexico, South Carolina, and much more about the science of earthquakes, and the mentalities of the people in connection therewith.

Peace

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The Book of the Week is “Peace, the biography of a symbol (sic)” by ken kolsbun with michael s. sweeney (sic) published in 2008. This colorful volume described how a symbol has gone viral worldwide. That symbol is an instantaneous message that its bearer is anti-nuclear, anti-war and / or anti-discrimination.

English artist Gerald Holtom invented and mass-produced the “peace sign” (hereinafter abbreviated ps; consisting of a circle bisected by a vertical line, and on the bottom half, an upside-down “v”), to be attached to picket signs for a 1958 anti-nuclear-weapons march in Britain. Thereafter, the ps was used on what became all sorts of memorabilia, repeatedly, internationally in different kinds of protests.

After WWII, the governments of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. brainwashed many of their citizens into thinking that the other nation (the enemy (!)) would use nuclear weapons to make war. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and index), beginning in December 1960, Bradford Lyttle led ps-displaying members of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA)– (pacifists urging American and Soviet nuclear disarmament) in a march from San Francisco to New York City, through Western Europe, that ended in Moscow in October 1961.

In November 1961, the group Women Strike for Peace (WSP; a spinoff of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) was afraid that usage of nuclear weapons at the newly constructed Berlin Wall would trigger more widespread hostilities and globally cause slow, painful deaths due to cancer. So they led about 50,000 ps-bearing females (many of whom had children) to go on strike; alpha males with hubris syndrome were the perpetrators of massively destructive war tools, after all.

In autumn 1963, freedom walkers teamed up with peace walkers to express their displeasure with violations of their civil rights, and nuclear weapons, through marching from Quebec to Cuba. Everyone wore the ps. Folk singer Pete Seeger joined in the activism. He said, “Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells.”

Read the photo-filled book to learn about numerous other people whose messaging helped spur the peace sign’s popularity through countless protests.