Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele)
Driftless Area South Central Wisconsin, Dane County USA
2016-07-20 406aaa
"Big Oil has engaged in a long-running climate disinformation campaign while raking in record profits"
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“Michael Deterding
Good Governance Paradigm
Design of the “Good Governance Paradigm” chart was prompted by a question about the "US Oligarchy: Command and Control” chart, posed by Gregg Schwinn, paraphrase: What would the Oligarch replacement chart look like? referring to:
The Oligarch’s political model as implemented in the US Constitution, was not created in a vacuum from the economic model. The US Constitution political model reinforces the economic model, it exists because of the slavers' economic model. Slavers orchestrated the overthrow of King George III, taking what belonged to the King, replacing the King with themselves. Slavers designed the US government as a replacement oligarchy, preserving self enrichment through the slaver's plantation agricultural model; itself an 18th C. form of 15th C. feudalism. Slavery was the most predatory capitalist system ever devised, preserved by Madison's slaver cohort for 93 years after slavery was abolished in England and Wales in 1772.
The Best Democracy “Good Governance Paradigm” mimics the slavers' process, taking what currently belongs to Oligarchs, that is, the US government, replacing Oligarch control with Commoners’ control, by changing the electoral system.
Taking guidance from US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941), "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both”, I opted for democracy on steroids, the Best Democracy “Good Governance Paradigm”. It reverses many of the features that concentrate power in Oligarchs' hands, that exclude Commoners from decision making, and disperses power to everyone.
In the same way the slavers' political model was meant to preserve their economic model, slavery, the Best Democracy “Good Governance Paradigm” is meant to produce a more egalitarian economic model benefitting Commoners. The Good Governance Paradigm flips the Oligarchs' model on its head, inverting key elements from Oligarch control to Commoner control.
Determining the political changes was easy, mostly worked out previously.
From the Best democracy Remedies page:
The cure to concentrated, corrupt, unaccountable power is dispersed, transparent, accountable power.
The cure to exclusion from decision making is to include everyone.
The cure to distorted representation is fair, accurate representation.
The cure to predetermined elections are competitive elections in every district.
The cures to distortions in vote counting are to identify all distortions, remove them, count all votes in outcomes and retain voter intent throughout the vote counting process.
A combination of Direct Democracy: Ballot Initiatives at every level of government, including federal; Good Governance Boards and; Hybrid Proportional Representation accomplishes these goals.
The economic inversion was more difficult. The design goal is to reverse the flow of money from Oligarchs to Commoners. That can be done through the legislative process with tax policy and corporate ownership regulations. Oligarchs accumulate wealth through inherited generational wealth, corporate income, investment income, manipulation of taxed income, and other means of tax avoidance. In the 1950’s Oligarchs were taxed up to 90%. They and the country prospered. A combination of a modest, not so egregious it kills the Oligarch’s wealth, graduated Net Worth Tax" on the wealthiest 5% of the population, and higher income taxes on corporations and Oligarchs, will help balance the budget and retire some of the country’s debt. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet's lifestyles won't change at all. Elon can still die on Mars if he wants.
Oligarchs will argue any increase in taxes will kill the Golden Goose, that propels the US economy, that we need concentrated wealth, trickle down is rain, not pee.”
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Duen Hsi Yen NearTermHumanExtinction:
“This is serious…”
“Imminent Mass Extinction
Transcribed Chris Hedges’ video (with minor edits)
“Perhaps the most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Hermann Melville's “Moby Dick.” Melville, in his novel, makes our murderous obsessions, blinding hubris, violent impulses, moral cowardice and lust for self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a doomed whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle, what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoevsky to Czarist Russia.
In Moby Dick, our country is given shape in the form of a ship, the Pequot, named after the Pequot Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's 30-man crew (there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel) is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which in a previous encounter maimed the ship's Captain Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs.
The maniacal quest, much like that of a civilization dependent on fossil fuel and the profits of global speculators, assures the Pequot’s destruction. And those on the ship on some level, know they are doomed, just as many of us know that our civilization and our ecosystem cannot stand the continued assault by corporate capitalism. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions, even from himself Ishmael says in Moby Dick. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think nothing.
How much longer can a financial system that depends on the Federal Reserve to purchase 85 billion dollars in US Treasury bonds (much of it worthless subprime mortgages) each month, survive. How much more money (we are now at 15 to 20 trillion dollars) can be looted from the US Treasury by big banks and Wall Street before the financial system again implodes. How much longer can wages be driven down and suppressed, and I speak of course on a day when 47 million Americans have seen 5% cuts in their food stamps. While interest rates, which (can sort of xxx?) 30% of us with debt peonage.
The ecosystem is at the same time swiftly disintegrating. Scientists from the International Program on the State of the Ocean, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The excess co2 and heat from the atmosphere is rapidly warming and acidifying the oceans. This is compounded, the report noted, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change. The scientists in this report called these effects a deadly trio that when combined are creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet's history. And this is their language, not mine.
The scientists wrote that each of the Earth's five known mass extinctions were preceded by at least one of these deadly trios: acidification, warming and deoxygenation. They warned that the next mass extinction of sea life is already underway, the first such mass extinction in 55 million years.
The University of Hawaii also released a new report saying that the effects of climate change are now inevitable. They cannot be stopped. At best, the rate of devastation can be slowed. The report predicted that over the next 50 years temperature levels will rise, at such a rate that human life in many parts of the planet will become unsustainable. Millions upon millions of people will flee as refugees. Millions of species will face extinction. Coastal cities, such as New York and even inland cities such as London will become unlivable. Microbes seem set to inherit the Earth.
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, do not change course. We do not trust our eyes or our intelligence. We trust in the myth of human progress, the absurd belief that human technology and ingenuity will save us. That somehow, although no one spells out how, we will all be able to adapt. This myth is abetted by the corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking. Those who speak truth are marginalized and ignored, dismissed as pessimists in a culture that prides itself on a child-like optimism at the expense of reality. We have a mania for hope which our corporate masters lavishly provide across the political and cultural spectrum to keep us passive.
Frederick Nietzsche, in “Beyond Good and Evil,”wrote that only a few people have the fortitude to look into what he calls the “molten pit of human reality.” A handful of artists and philosophers for Nietzsche, are consumed by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth, a desire for meaning and this sends them down into the bowels of the pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and the heat drive them back.
This understanding Nietzsche wrote comes at a high cost. Those singed by the fire become burnt children, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. Dying civilizations make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture, on their burnt children. The masters of the corporate state do not want us to peer into the pit or heed the cries of those who have seen what awaits us. The corporate state rather feeds the thirst for illusion, happiness and hope. It peddles the fantasy of endless material progress. It insists (and this is the argument of globalization) that our voyage is unalterable and decreed by natural law. It is part of the march of human progress and those who challenge this myth are heretics.
Clive Hamilton, in his book “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change,”describes a kind of dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of false hopes he says requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable, the second because it means that those we love including our children will face insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to collapse is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth intellectually and emotionally and yet rise up to resist the corporate forces that are destroying us.”
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“Rent Is Too Damned High: US Tenants Mobilize to Demand Rent Controls”
“Tenants nationwide are organizing to win affordable housing, limit rental fees and protect their homes and communities.”
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“Brandolini’s Law:
Brandolini’s law, also know as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that need to produce it.”
[Also, the market penetration of an initial piece of news is much greater than any subsequent modification or addition to it]
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“Research by the University of Leeds shows that 400,000 tons of CO2 will be admitted into the atmosphere as a result of transport for Black Friday in the UK this year alone.
A 2021 report by UK price comparison website Money.co.uk supports these findings. Deliveries from Black Friday sales were estimated to release over 429,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That's the equivalent of 435 return flights from London to New York. Or around 0.12% of the UK's total annual emissions for a comparable year. #blackfriday2022”
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