So much has happened since we last spoke. If you’ve kept an eye on recent events, perhaps you’ve seen that there are some pretty large shifts going on at large, and in our ruling class in particular.
So Donald Trump is going to be President again. After the shame of January 6, and all the evidence that it was indeed a planned event (which was immediately clear if you watched on that day), I’m amazed that we have found ourselves here again. Slowly it’s occurring to me that the general populace is one that I’m struggling to understand. And yes, this is definitely a political post. I hate to do it, but I’m too patriotic to just keep my silence while our democracy dies. And not just dies, but dies in a really stupid and tacky way. Hollywood had led me to believe that at least evil empires have good style.
At any rate, that catches us up. So I will now move on to one of the main points of this post, which is the behavior of our oligarchs…I mean, tech billionaires…since Donald Trump won the election. If you look at the donations for this inauguration, many of them are not only made by tech companies (notably those who are most likely attempting to curry favor to win the great AI battle that is being waged), but also by the richest individuals themselves. The people who have been siphoning off the money of the middle class and reveling in the huge wealth disparity that has only grown enormously since the pandemic, are now revealing their true selves. No longer content to manipulate our lives from behind the scenes, they are now openly moving to the right wing and showing their willingness to bribe and bully. It’s like the robber barons of the 19th century, only much more tedious, poorly dressed, and without leaving us at least beautiful libraries. I’m amazed at the boldness of it all, particularly the salvo being led by Elon Musk himself. I only hope that the power dynamic of the two largest narcissists on the planet quickly spins to its inevitable centripetal blast, but in the mean time we are stuck with what must be the most tedious boors in our country’s history, running amok over ever aspect of American life.
This is a literal photo taken yesterday, January 7, 2025. It looks apocalyptic. I remember growing up being told that extreme weather and wildfires would increase. Well, here we are. Can we stop pretending yet?
Clearly we need campaign funding reform, but with a Congress that openly embraces corruption now and has no desire to limit its own gleeful dance on the graves of American values, I am not holding my breath. With the 250 million+ that Elon donated to help Trump win, he insured himself his place as First Oligarch. All we are missing to complete this charade is gold embroidered military suits with DOGE medals dangling from the lapels.
I’ve been amazed to see the crumbling of morality for so many Christians in this country, who openly embraced the least Christ-like character that could be envisioned as their moral leader. The fact that so many embraced him as a clear mascot amazes me. Honestly, if you were to lay his traits out and compare it to biblical passages, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard many Christians accusing him of being the antichrist; he sure seems to embody a lot more of those traits than any of the other people I’ve seen haphazardly slapped with the label.
So now we have at least four more years of this. With so many people claiming to have voted the clown car into office due to economic reasons, I can only hope that their eyes are opened when the terrible economic policies put forward (such as tariffs, which historically lead to depressions) hit them in the only place they seem to feel these days. By which I mean their pocket books. But it’s such a cult, that I really just don’t know anymore.
We are at a precipice for AI development and its very much needed safeguards. With the party that probably wants to ban seatbelts next now owning all aspects of government, it’s safe to say that this won’t happen. There are already huge effects from AI running rampant (on a side note, if you want to both laugh and cry at the current AI bots that Facebook is making to manipulate its users and ad engagements, please read this fascinating article). I know that there are many who think that the fear of AI is well overblown, and there is truth to that. But there is also truth to the fact that historically, humans are awful at preemptively solving problems, and instead often do too little, too late (each year is now warmer than the year before for this reason). What’s been terrifying about the generative AI explosion of the last year or two has been that not only does it threaten jobs, but it threatens the jobs of the educated and trained workers: writers, artists, software developers. Of course there is the argument that these tools can be used to enhance the jobs of those workers, and that’s certainly true. But it’s MORE true that they are being used to replaced the workers who have college degrees (and likely matching undischargeable student loan debt that enabled them to have those careers. If androids dream of stealing your job, can you declare bankruptcy for those loans yet?). In 2016 I called for the need for new legislation to start planning for Universal Basic Income, since tech would end up displacing humans in jobs (you can read that post here if you like), and we have done nothing. I still believe we should tax companies that use AI instead of humans to help fund UBI, but again, no movement. I also believe that we should cap personal wealth at 2 billion and have further profits from those individuals go back to the society that they whipped the backs of to take all that capital….but with a country full of personally disadvantaged millionaires who have no empathy for other people (meanwhile, they don’t realize they themselves are the people they refuse to help), our society is going to continue to funnel all of our money to the top until the ultimate goal of the robber barons is reached: 4 people will stand on a miles high pile of money and corpses, gasping the last bits of oxygen left from the dregs of a dying and burning planet, toasting that they finally achieved it all.
Do I sound bitter, angry, and sad? You bet I do. Idiocy is winning, the world is burning, meanness is overtaking kindness, and we could solve nearly every problem humanity faces with technology we have now. Instead, we are regressing at a breakneck pace, and I think that’s why you see madness everywhere you look. On some level, I think nearly every human is aware that this is not the way our world should be right now. I think that’s why they are sticking their heads in the sand, depressed and unhealthy, and looking for a new avatar of “the Other” to blame. Some days that’s women (I’ll never get over the fact that our rights are being taken away as we speak), some days it’s other races. Some days it’s immigrants. The people who view the 1950s as the perfect bastion of society are blaming “wokeness” for taking away the standards that the boomers had and then robbed the future generations of; they don’t even realize that it was the policies that they embraced that took away unions and devalued the middle class. THOSE were why life was so good for the average person, and THOSE are what they see as another impediment. Reagan slashed and burned the social net we had been building, and the remains have been getting hit with machetes ever since. It’s maddening. So now we took away pensions and the boomers are retiring with underfunded 401ks, and whatever is left is going to our bloated and rotten medical system to continue to ensure those masked thieves are able to post record profits. Convincing the American people that our healthcare system is a “free market” is the greatest trick the devil has wrought. How can you freely negotiate if your life and pain are on the line?
In a world of 8 billion+ people, there is no such thing as a “rugged individualist”. Like it or not, we depend on thousands of people to live every day. To order more poorly made trash for our houses to fill our empty souls from Amazon takes roads and underpaid drivers and modern day slaves who aren’t allowed to use the bathroom without chastisement; and now that’s not bad enough, so people are further eroding it all by ordering from Temu. Just put a workshop in your backyard and be honest about it. The infrastructure that we hate to pay for, like clean water and utilities, takes thousands of people. We need to take care of one another, and lying to ourselves about how much an individual can achieve in a world of entrenched systems that just make it easier and easier to crush regular people needs to stop. We live in a surveillance state, and the only thing Brave New World and 1984 got wrong was they underestimated how much how much we would give away. If we had a Congress that worked and wasn’t run by corrupt Octogenerians (LITERALLY living in memory care now for some of them), they would step in and limit how much companies are willing to hoard our personal lives and date like Smaug writ large. But we don’t move the ball forward these days, only back.
We need so much change. Having an entrenched noble class in Congress (you don’t think they are? Well they have dynasties. They all come out rich. And they never leave their positions. It’s like Weekend at Bernie’s in those halls practically) is killing our country, and having a media diet of biased lies and editorial-as-fact has put blinders on so many people. It’s hard to face a world that is so dark, so many people flock to the venue that tells them it’s scary because of the Other and that they truly are supposed to be the chosen ones. I get it, it IS terrible to see what’s happening.
So, here’s what could help:
Term limits. I know they won’t do it, but we need it.
Bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and make it 2.0 Reagan eliminated it in the name of deregulation; the Fairness Doctrine made it so that if an opinion was shared, then the other side needed equal time. We need that again, and we need to also make it so that opinion is clearly labeled, and we need to limit 24 hour news stations on how much they can report that isn’t just facts. If they can’t fill that time, they can just make documentaries. A diet of hot air is good for no one. We also need to make it so that if an opinion is online and has reach, like YouTube videos or podcasts, these same rules apply. Stovepiping of information is insidious.
Tax companies who replace real workers with AI to pay for UBI. Start a UBI program. Our country is moving towards either making us all automatons or destitute; this would give us the chance to give people the chance to get on their feet, and hopefully we would get meaningful art again out of it all.
Campaign finance reform. Companies should not be able to bribe presidential candidates. Or any other politician.
No higher office held after age 65 due to cognitive decline. If you can’t fly a passenger jet for that reason, you shouldn’t be able to run the country. Trump is losing his mind, likely due to the angry strain of dementia that runs in his family. Biden is having problems too. Both of those are situations we shouldn’t have had to deal with. Not only that, but I don’t think people should be able to make rules for a world they won’t live to see live with the consequences.
Remove the restrictions from No Child Left Behind that are now making it so that our kids can’t even read anymore. Allow teachers to teach without penalizing them with paperwork.
Give us a true medical system. Expand our healthcare act. I find it ironic that so many people I know who have Tricare oppose the very type of system they are using. The other 34 advanced countries have worked out, and seeing GoFundMes for childhood cancer is a national embarrassment.
Make privacy legislation so that data brokers are no longer giving our lives away to line their pockets. Once personal data is out there, it never comes back.
Put caps on how much the highest paid earner at a company can make, compared to the lowest. Income disparity is a farce now. If someone at the top makes money and wants more, great. They just have to boost the salaries of everyone else who is holding that ladder up behind them. Pulling up the ladder behind them needs to stop.
Actually pursue racketeering charges. Data shows us that so much of the inflation we are seeing is due to corporate greed, with the same companies wringing their hands to customers about prices simultaneously crowing about record profits to shareholders.
National time limit caps on access to social media. At this point, it’s wrecked our society. It can still be fixed, but we need to cut the rot out. There’s a reason that China engineered TikTok with more insidious rules for Americans than for the version it uses domestically, and it’s working. Social media divides us, wastes time, stifles innovation, and ruins our critical thinking and attention span.
What else can we do? Well, plant an oak tree in your yard. Insects and birds are going extinct at an incredibly depressing rate, and oak trees sustain hundreds of other species. Plus, they are strong, they grow well, and we need more shade in this world that is getting hotter. Then go read a freaking book.