Sustainable Development vs. Artificial Armageddon

In 1998, after observing activities of the Christian Right in California where I was living and working, I predicted what was going to happen. And it did. I knew what they were up to, and I described them as Nazis of America. I knew that they were going to seriously undermine, the country, and they did just that. And now it is time to pick up the pieces.

To be fair, the ideologies of the 1990s that they have replaced were full of hideous error. Political correctness made it impossible for people to say what they thought, resulting in massive hypocrisy and strangulation. The idea that everything is about self-esteem created an inverted value system in which those who have lowest standards for themselves and thus find self-esteem most easy to come by dominated those who have higher standards and thus find it less easy to think as well of themselves. The brain-dead concept of adequacy dating from Alfred Adler, and the perversion of the concept of winners and losers from Eric Berne, turned people into enemies of one another, kept people from doing good to others, and allowed entities to play divide-and-conquer and to ensnare both those who thought themselves winners and those who were seen as losers. The war waged by worst elements among feminists against beauty, love, tenderness, warmth and goodness made the climate so toxic and horrible that people flocked to any ideology that might protect them from it, including ideologies that were completely destructive. The DSM-II psychology with its erroneous concept of what is health - and consequently erroneous concept of what is sickness - aimed to - and, where implemented, did - rob America of its sources of creative thinking, ingenuity, risk-taking, passion and greatness, reducing the productivity of its science, impoverishing people’s minds and relationships, and keeping true innovation from taking place. And the New Age idea that everyone makes their own reality – that no one can either help or injure another – that everyone is in control of everything that others do to them – and that someone to whom bad things have been done caused them and will be bad for everyone else - stopped people from doing good, denied assistance where it was needed, kept people strangulated in bad situations, and supported corruption, cruelty, crookedness, callousness and conmanship all around.

What followed however was not an improvement but degradation. What followed was a totalitarian misogynistic apocalyptic cult that warred, with predictably disastrous results, against human rights, liberty, peace, prosperity, science, reason, women's rights, and democracy itself. What followed was the darkest hour in American history since Second World War, with none of its glory. What followed was a Giant Leap Backwards to 19th century and an undoing of the accomplishments of civilization that took place since then.

There was - and is - another totalitarian misogynistic cult attempting to war with this one and with the rest of the world. And to both of the preceding, it is time to say: You do not have the right values to lead. If you believe that it is OK to conceive - and work toward - a world that ends before your children or grandchildren have reached maturity, and where the bulk of the people wind up in hell, then you do not have the right moral values to lead the great countries of the world. Having gone into one of these cults - and having had close personal relations with people from the other - I have come out having made a moral decision. And the decision is this: I would rather burn in Hell than conceptualize and work toward such a future, or be a part of any entity - secular or religious - that does.

And I hope that more people of goodwill and intellect - and ones of either of the preceding - make the same choice.

It becomes incumbent to move away from both errors - those committed in 1990s and those committed in this decade - and work toward a sustainable, peaceful, beautiful, long-term future. To use high-technology, high-intelligence, high-job-creation abundant clean energy solutions to provide for the world of civilization that man has created while impinging minimally on world of nature that man has not. To fully fund nanotechnology, stem-cell research, and genetic cures for cancer and congenital disease. To create synthetic life-forms to eat the plastics and clean out the landfills - to replant rainforests - to support both public and private space travel, resulting in colonization of Mars and Moon and eventually long-distance space travel. It is time to develop and put to work human brilliance, passion and inspiration and create a long-term beautiful sustainable future for humanity.

It is time to create true family values - values that allow in relationships for men and women to have meaningful roles suitable for who they are; that teach men to respect their wives, and teach all parties to have the attitude, respect and goodwill to negotiate among themselves and work together to better future for both their daughters and their sons. To create beautiful, loving relations between men and women, where women are respected as being women and do not have to act like bad men in order to gain equality or respect. To teach men how to treat their wives nobly and to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law domestic violence and child abuse.

It is time to create better social values - values that celebrate and make room for the fulfilment of beauty, intellect, caring, insight, and benevolence, both in women and in men. It is time to create better psychology - psychology that affirms, accepts, and allows to manifest and constructively implement, human genius, insight, brilliance, greatness, ingenuity and love. And it is time to create better moral values - values that accept life, celebrate life, and reward what adds to it and leads to its richness and continuity.

It is time to create covenants that respect all these things and tap into their endless resources in humanity to avail of their riches and employ them for benefit of the present and ages to come. It is time to sustain such covenants by values and ways affirming and hospitable of the above. It is time to move away from oppressive, destructive, malicious mentalities - secular or religious - and replace them with mindsets affirming of life, in its natural and man-created aspects, allowing a replenishment of nature, continuous prosperity and accomplishment of the civilization, and affirmation and constructive fruition of both natural and creating aspects of human being.

It is time to use intellect not to divide but to create, and to strive for win-win scenarios. It is not nature or civilization, reason or feeling, love or equality, spirit or body, business or government, doing good or doing well; with true use of mind, it is both in every duality. And by being employed to do the tasks necessary to make possible the preceding, intelligence - now a tool of combining and creating instead of dividing - becomes a path to true peace, to constructive sustainable integration, to life being seen and given path to benefit at all levels. At which point intelligence - which has at all times been the true saving grace of humanity - becomes saving grace once again and a basis for a long and beautiful future.

It is time to look at the inherent logic of the beliefs - secular and religious - and trace them to their logical consummation. And by doing so, to predict their effect on the world. Whether a secular belief that claims that creativity, ingenuity, passion, originality, inventiveness, greatness and love are pathological - or a religious belief that claims that women are root of all evil, that nature and physicality is of the Satan, that the only good in the world comes from the belief and that all else is going to hell - can be traced and easily found out for their results. The first being, stagnation and decline and graying of the world - and the second being, a totalitarian misogynistic abusive world-gobbling apocalyptic cult. And then it becomes possible to create better ways, better values, better traditions, that tap into instead of suppressing the genius and beauty and greatness that lives in humanity, and apply them toward creating a beautiful livable sustainable peaceful world.

At this point the choice is really nothing less. Will humanity bring an Armageddon upon itself before the babies born in this baby boomlet have learned how to read, or will the future extend indefinitely and reach ever greater beauty and ever greater accomplishment. These are momentous times in world history, and it is up to us to decide which world will be bequeathed to our children and theirs and ones after them.

This, is the true moral choice facing this generation. And it is a choice that will resonate - on earth or in any conceivable afterlife - for ages to come.

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Refuting Reaganism

As America wakes up to the ruin that has been forced on it by Reagan-Bush Republicans over the last thirty years, it is time to look at the basic tenets of Reaganism and show them for what they are.

I deal here with Reagan’s economic policies and Reagan’s social policies and show them for their error.

Tenet One of Reagan economics is that the government is a tax-and-spend operation, and that cutting taxes leads to economic growth. That has been solidly refuted by the last two administrations. The high-tax Clinton economy produced 23 million new jobs, soaring family incomes, and the greatest prosperity that America ever had. The low-tax Bush administration - with Republican Congress for six out of its eight years in power - produced collapsing family incomes and no new jobs.

The governments prior to Reagan were regarded as being "tax-and-spend." The Reagan-influenced governments however were something far more irresponsible. The Republican administrations starting with Reagan produced Borrow-And-Spend policies that put America ten trillion dollars in the hole.

This debt is now being passed on to the children and grandchildren of Reagan Republicans. And I ask this of the people behind this: How dare you speak of family values when you are doing this to your own children? How dare you speak of responsibility while you are passing on this crushing burden to those who have not had any part in making this problem or any voice in how it is dealt with? How dare you speak of fighting crime or being American patriots when you have committed this giant criminal misdeed against America?

The Reagan borrow-and-spend economics are not just wrong morally. They are also wrong economically. Government debt takes investment funds out of productive sectors of the economy, making it harder for businesses to start or expand. High levels of bond debt leads to rising interest rates. In both cases, economy falls. It did in the second way under Bush Sr; and it did the first way under Bush Jr.

The borrow-and-spend economics is also wrong in its basic contention. With government, it's not pay or not pay; it's pay now or pay later. For as long as you want roads, military, police, courts, schools, fire engines, jails, garbage pickup, you pay. Or else your children and grandchildren will have to.

Perhaps the people behind Reaganomics are working toward a 10 trillion dollar government debt default. Perhaps they are thinking the world will end before it is due. More likely, they just don’t care what they are doing to their children and to their country. In either case, the attitude is totally unacceptable.

The next tenet of Reaganism: "Get government off people's backs." And yet the most solid Republican constituencies - Texas and Plains States - exist solely by virtue of government. The economic bases for these constituencies are Texas Oil, beef industry, and the military. The third is part of government. The second is heavily subsidized by the government. And the first became and remained what it is by virtue of lobbying the government and deceiving the public.

Oil interests have deceived the nation for decades, claiming that there is no global warming and that nothing man do can affect the environment. They are responsible for the current climatic crisis. Without their conmanship, America and much of the world would have by now converted to high-intelligence, high-technology, high-job abundant clean energy such as the energy of the sun and the electrolysis of ocean water - technology that can provide for all of people's material requirements while minimally impinging on nature. Instead it was - "liberal academics this, liberal media that" - well. Now we know who has been truly brainwashing the public, and who truly has been stealing from the people their most precious commodity – their future.

The beef industry in its present form is likewise parasitical. It takes ten times as much biomass to produce a pound of beef as it does to produce an equivalent amount of grain. Government subsidies to the beef industry that make beef artificially cheap keep the country producing an inefficient, unhealthy, environmentally expensive foodstuff when it could have produced ten times as much healthy food. Food that it could have sold on world markets, reaping huge revenues, and given away in famines, reaping great international goodwill, instead of reaping disease and debt.

The true sources of American prosperity are and have always been the Democratic areas of the country. The greatest source of 1980s and 1990s prosperity - personal computer - was invented by a California hippie named Steven Jobs and put in place by Democratic constituencies in California, Washington State, and the DC area. Another big source of prosperity - Internet - was a government project. Of America's Nobel Prize - winning scientists, 90% came from Democratic states, and of its Ivy League institutions of learning, all except Duke are in solid Democratic states. America's richest states in per capita terms are DC, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York - solidly Democratic. There is a reason for all this, and it has to do with the thinking habits that are required for innovation and for generation of true prosperity.

Innovation in science, technology, and organizational and business practices, depends on free and creative thinking. The authoritarian-minded red states cannot tolerate such a thing and suppress it wherever they find it. The Democrats on the other hand are open to such things and encourage it, nurture it, and bring it to constructive fruition. Which means that Democrats develop habits of mind needed to innovate and create true prosperity, while Republicans feed off of them, demonize and attack them, and the steal the credit. The Democratic thinking is about how to create; the Republican thinking is about how to bludgeon, deceive, steal credit and place blame. Which makes them parasitical economically as much as they are parasitical in other respects.

Another major tenet of Reaganism has been aggressive inattention to the environment. Now we all know exactly where this leads. Even the Republicans are waking up to the reality of what they have done to the world. And that is a belated big Duh for people who were so certain that they knew reality and common sense, and that everyone who thought to the contrary was a fool or a crazy.

The social policies of Reagan have been just as disastrous. Abortion and “family values” are a ruse – a false issue used to distract the public from real social issues of the day. Domestic brutality and abuse of women and children in families is and has always been the true social wrong facing the people. The Reaganists sought to silence these truths – by portraying women as losers or crazy for being in the abusive relationships and portraying them as evil if they left; by abusing the concept of personal responsibility to blame people for wrong that others did to them while exonerating the wrongdoer; and by claiming that America was losing its “moral fiber” as more women left situations of abuse. And in neither case was there anything moral in these policies. The purpose was and remains to perpetuate abusive, brutal, incestuous ways from generation to generation, and portray these horrendous practices as morality or tradition or family values.

The family values and morality that I have shown above that Reaganists have the least of, as they have forced federal debt and environmental catastrophe on their own children and on the children of everyone else.

In making major issues of nonissues, while failing to address true wrongdoing, resources were distracted from where they were needed and engaged them in battles where they could be portrayed as being against morality. This paralyzed the women’s rights and human rights agenda and kept it from being applied where it was most in need. The result has been ongoing incest, abuse and brutality all over America. And that is the true reality of Reagan conservatism – the true reality of the so-called traditional family values. Quite simply, a parent or a partner who truly practices ethics treats the partner and children in such a manner that they do not want to leave him. Whereas a parent or a partner who uses “family-value” theme to keep them from leaving is the one who is unethical in the values and actions he practices toward his family and least merits to lay a claim on the concept.

Further policies – Reagan’s anti-education, anti-academic, anti-intellectual and anti-media propaganda in particular – resulted in the thinning and hollowing out of institutions of science and education, greatly reduced levels of Nobel Prize winning work, denying the media scrutiny to matters that were of most import, and allowing corruption to go on without strong and active media and academia being there to check it. It also resulted in turning of red-state America into a morass of aggressive ignorance and violent stupidity. In Reagan society, intelligence was despised and bullied, abused, demonized, trivialized, or even criminalized and pathologized. This resulted in dumbening of the population, in America overrun by cons and cults, and in degradation in the character of American people. It also resulted in loss of what media and academia exist for – cultivation of knowledge, education of youth, scrutiny of all levels of society, checking of corruption, and address of issues of public concern.

The refusal to include birth control in population control initiatives made sure the gross overpopulation of the world. The support for militant Islam against Communism created the terrorist threat facing the world today. The “war on drugs” led to two parasitical infrastructures: Brutal gangs and cartels to deliver the forbidden goods – with most drug-related violent crime related to its distribution instead of consumption – and expensive police and prison infrastructure to keep imprisoned people who have availed themselves of drugs or were falsely convicted of having done so.

And the concept of personal responsibility was abused to blame people for the wrong that others have done to them - to blame wives for brutality by their husbands, to blame poor children for their heritage, to blame the disenfranchised for despotism and oppression against them, to blame people around the world for actions of despots, to blame "humanity" for global warming and federal debt accumulated by Reaganists – as much as it was abused to discourage people from pursuits such as teaching and science that are not well monetarily compensated but that hold supreme social value. If every person is responsible for themselves and solely for themselves, and success is measured in monetary achievement, then it is against the ethic of the times to do anything for the children, or for the country, or for the planet, or for justice and peace. This Reaganist ethic sowed not only corruption, violence, deception and sociopathy at all levels of America, but also prevented action to redress and prevent the same. This directly led to these great wrongs becoming way of life in America, when there was tons of knowledge and resources that, with better values and leadership, could have been used to correct these wrongs.

As for the nonsense of liberal-media-and-academia-are-brainwashing-you (and the people who claim such things aren't) - who indeed is more worthy of being believed: hundreds of thousands of brilliant, dedicated, hard-working people working on scientific pursuit of knowledge, or Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson style blowhards who claim them all idiots and sinners while they themselves are contributing nothing whatsoever toward that pursuit? In defunding America's scientists and teachers and discrediting its journalists and professors, Reaganists have deceived, debased and dumbened America. And that, along with global warming, federal debt, sickening of America, domestic brutality, world overpopulation, Islamic terrorism, and deterioration in American character, is a crime that Reagan “conservatives” will have to wear for decades to come.

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True family values

For a long time the concept of family values has been completely misconstrued. It was used to mean a return to 1950s-style arrangement and exclusion of all innovation that came after 1950s. As a father, and one dedicated to the well-being of my family and my daughter, I say this: That is not family values.

True family values is about bequeathing to one's children a better world than what existed when one has found it. True family values is about making sure that one's children have a chance. True family values is about providing for the future. And that means, a long-term, sustainable, livable future, and not one that is supposed to end at the time that the baby boomers have died.

True family values is about preserving the planet in all its richness and splendor, and using intelligence and technology to provide for material needs while minimally impinging upon the world's climate, air quality, water quality, and biospheric diversity. It means using high-intelligence, high-technology abundant clean energy solutions to keep the civilization running while preserving what man has not created and does not know how to recreate. It means sustainable agriculture, sustainable industry, sustainable energy, and sustainable technology, using the best of man - his intellect, effort and dedication - to power the world of civilization that man has created while being nonobtrusive to world of nature that man has not.

True family values is about creating institutional transparency, so that one's children do not have to live in a snakepit of corruption, deception and cruelty that takes place when this does not exist. It means ridding institutions of rackets and cons that are used to silence people from telling the truth. It means creating media, court, and political cultures that practice transparency and integrity and are not afraid to confront corruption in whatever form it may take.

True family values is about creating covenants in which one's daughters have a chance at a life worth having, and do not have to worry about abusive partners, corrupt and ensnaring communities, bullying in school and in workplace, and religious, social and institutional abuse. It is about making sure that one's daughters can attain to their potential and not be undermined in it by entities or individuals hateful of women's advancement or of human rights. It means full enforcement of human rights and civil rights and standing up to all things that are hateful to the preceding. And it means protecting meaningfully people's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, even when and especially when this is not popular.

True family values is about putting the future ahead of the present, rather than making the future pay for irresponsible borrow-and-spend policies and planetary destruction of the present with no eye toward posterity. It is about doing what needs to be done, now, in order that there is a livable future for one's children. It is about fiscal sanity and environmental sanity, and about using intelligence to make possible the preceding.

True family values is about imparting to children real education that gives them understanding necessary for good citizenship and for avoiding rackets and cons. It is about making primary education sufficiently strong that the children come out of it with knowledge and with intelligence that allows them to be better citizens as well as better workers. It is about making college education more affordable, so that those who seek to rise to that level can, regardless of income of the family.

True family values is about recognizing and giving the way to fruition of human genius, goodwill, intellect, love and beauty, making it possible for these endless sources of good to flourish and to impart to the world and its inhabitants of the magnificence that they have to give.

True family values is about creating an honest society and ending corruption, whether it be in law or medicine or government or business or small town or society itself. It is about making things clear and making that clarity and integrity the basis of social covenants and interactions, with no room for corruption, oppression, deception or abuse.

It is about creating a livable society for one's children, as well as a livable planet.

And that, is the true family values that are at stake in the world at this time.

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