Corporate Raptors

Mammals generally fall into three categories. Herbivores eat relatively specialized plant diets.. Carnivores eat only meat, which they either find or kill. Omnivores like us can get along on just about anything. Lifestyles vary. In a working ecology, a lot of herbivores, like deer, support a few carnivores, like wolves. The predators keep down the damage caused by overpopulation, while also removing the sick and the old. A useful function. On the other hand, too many wolves can make some of them starve. Omnivores generally stay out of the way, unless forced into food or fight situations.

The corporate ecology is not so different. A lot of companies graze on the economy producing value. A few omnivores collect groups of them into larger entities. And the wolf pack takes over stocks, privatized for “increased profit” and usually destroys its prey after gorging. Ah, “creative destruction”.

Obviously, too many wolves will eliminate too many deer, sometimes eliminating both species and certainly ruining life for individual animals of either type.

Right now, it seems there are way too many corporate wolves, tearing apart our civilization. “Iinvestors” who seek only quick returns, buy gentle useful things like hospitals, daycare facilities, farms, and schools to suck them dry in hopes of never having to work another day in their lives. Everyone suffers sooner or later.

Jurassic raptors have nothing on SPACS and stock swap kings. The government electric fences are down, and the park is wide open for carnage.

Holy Writ

Fundamentally, I believe most people are just like me – pretty smart and dumb at the same time. In general, I think small groups of people construct sane outlooks most of the time. There are exceptions. A few people are brilliant in certain areas, a few groups turn into insane cults.

I do not accept that gods directly write anything. All words are formed by other humans. And so I have a skeptical opinion of anything taken as “holy writ”, immutable and perfect from the moment marks are made on a surface.

No need to get directly into religion. What I most detest at the present moment is the “conservative originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution as not only inviolate and perfect, but also the result of a brilliant gathering of minds whose choices can never be questioned nor seriously modified.

The problems go beyond the obvious – that some of it may be wrong or have become irrelevant. Anything stiffly frozen is in some ways fragile, and in others just an obstacle to be destroyed. And there is a nearly nonsensical position taken by some specialists that they alone can determine what the folks who wrote it were “really” thinking and what they “really” meant.

It is simple madness, usually twisted to make words seem to say or mean exactly what interpreters and their cronies have decided. Sad times for our country.

Risky “Makers”

The smug justifying fable of the wealthy these days is that they “make” things, while the peons just take them away in order to exist. The poor are thus all morally thieves, and the virtuous rich sweat and labor to keep civilization staggering along.

In our capitalistic system, of course, most of the hyper affluent don’t know the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. They take risks (in other words, gamble) mostly with other people’s money on things that might turn a profit. Only a few of these “investments” work out, and of those that do a lot are straightforward manipulation of financial assets with no “making” involved .

I admire free enterprise. These are generally small time entrepreneurs who risk their own time and money to truly make something or provide a necessary service. They rarely climb into the ranks of the hyper-affluent, but they often do well enough and truly provide the frameworks of civilization. To keep them striving, the myth of makers is endlessly proclaimed .

I do not mind the billionaire class, whose equivalent has always been with us. I do prefer the old desire of this class to be “patrons” doing public works to show off. Our current set of selfish “makers” tend to think they should use their assets as “takers” to buy islands and other fantasies that are hidden and private, hence of no use to anyone. “Grabbers” might be a better term .

The current real dream of grabbers is to become immortal and omnipotent rulers of space and time. Individual private “glory” with no connection nor responsibility to anyone else .

Spoiled, dangerous, and increasingly in control .

Missing Middle

Since the rise of agricultural civilization, wealth has always been unequal. A small rich elite floated over the “masses”. Admittedly, in both groups, there were variations, sometimes major. But to speak of the rulers and the ruled pretty much said it all .

For a while during the turmoil of world exploration and industrial revolution, there came to be a myth of a “middle class”, neither rich nor poor, in control of their lives but not lording it over everyone. American economists continue to focus on this fairy tale which is no longer even partially true .

In the scientific, automated, predatory modern economy there is truly only a normal curve of wealth distribution. Sure, there is still a middle, but it is not defined by the endpoints. Most people in first world economies are affluent beyond the dreams of their ancestors. Even if “poor” they have food, shelter, clothing, dignity, and hope. Even if “rich” they fear they may lose a gamble once too often and drop out of the top percentile .

More importantly, from the economists’ viewpoint, it is impossible to define what “middle class” means. The marker once taken for granted – the suburban nuclear family with one man the breadwinner – no longer exists as a reliable guidepost .

The point is that we should abandon any desire to fortify a non-existent “middle class”. We need to concentrate on basic minimum living standards for all, and how to pay for them. “Work”, for example, may or may not be involved. We need fresh new viewpoints, and strategies as old certainties mutate or vanish .

Old Minds

I’ve become increasingly distressed by the advanced age of our leadership. With modern medicine, people who should have been dead live a very long time. As someone almost 80, with many friends and relatives in the same bracket, I can’t help but notice changes in our mental processes . Often rapid and unexpected and worrisome.

Cultural judgment tries to be kind, on a scale of normality. An elder can be “sharp as a tack”, senile, ” busy as a bee”, “sitting all day doing nothing”. But all these judgments by younger folks really miss the point .

The aged have accumulating ongoing problems. Some are physical constraints, aches, ailments requiring treatment. Some are mental degradation with forgetfulness, sleeplessness, and brittle angry reactions to change. Some is simple sensory softness .

But all of that misses the point. After all, much younger people may have many of the same issues and be just dandy .

No, what worries me about leaders – because I see it in myself and others – is lack of sensible reaction. Because of underlying physical conditions, advanced seniors live angrily or passively in the moment. They take each minor conflict as a major slight, they overreact on grudges, they impulsively just do things to get them over with. Their long-term memory is often excellent, but their intermediate memory is gone or irrelevant to their decisions. We lack fundamental common sense. We always believe the last person or thing we heard .

Okay for me. Not so great for leading a nuclear nation .

Socialists

The conventional political world is terrified that “socialists” have won some recent American elections. It might be useful to understand that these economic and political labels belong to a bygone ignorant age.

Before 1850, when most of these terms came into vogue, the conceptual environment of the modern world was just beginning. Chemistry, physics, biology, geology, psychology, electricity, all were in chaotic transition from classical imagining to modern theory and experimentation .

Labels are useful. An eye is not a hand. Stopping at labels is, however, medieval. The eye is functionally and inherently different than the hand, but related in infinitely complicated ways. A politician who stops at a label like “socialism” without going into complications is a lot like a physician who claims he doesn’t believe in all those newfangled ideas about cells, germs, hormones, evolution, and genetics .

We need to understand the uselessness of political name-calling, where puerile unique identification is the be-all and end-all of knowledge. “Socialism” means almost nothing, beyond a system that believes that wider wealth distribution is important to civilization. Details are not provided – but the details are what’s important .

In culture and politics, in civilization and human society in general, we are still at the stage of medieval physicians. We recognize problems but are clueless as to how, why, and what to do .

If we survive the current crises, our descendants will doubtless look back on our ignorance with the same stunned amusement as we do those Venetian doctors warding off plague with beaked masks .

For all I know, computer technology may actually prove helpful in our awakening .

Goonies

Police in the United States have generally been respected, at least in the last 50 years or so, even if regarded a little cynically. For the most part they are neighbors with a tough and stressful job, long stretches of boredom marked by moments of unpredictable terror. Most of us can sympathize with their occasional overreactions, rudeness, and even civil transgressions. Understandable .

ICE broke all the rules .

Nazi Stormtroopers are imagined as lean, mean, hard, cold, nasty, and effective. The image of ICE is more that of a gang of mumbling rumbling Michelin men, always moving in fat, deeply swaddled herds. Angry for the sake of being angry .

At some point in the past ICE agents were due appropriate sympathy as trained professionals, going into difficult areas to find “the worst of the worst” violent criminal alien gangs. A necessary job to mop up what local government could not handle .

But now? Local law seems adequate to handle and turn over the worst of the worst. The goon gang seems to be ignorant, obese, overenthusiastic thugs egging each other on to violently seize inoffensive women and children. Only to fill quotas. And an awful lot of the new masked faces in a bloated force simply resemble poorly trained, bitter unemployables, grateful to act badly while unidentifiable .

Goonies. And not in a funny movie .

Mentally Obese

I’ll use the ancient politically incorrect connotation of obese to mean someone who is excessively fat from enjoying eating way too much with no regard to health consequences. That may damage an individual, but what I will call a “mentally obese” person may endanger a society .

In a consumer driven culture, most of us are “mentally fat”. We acquire too much and may desire even more. But we have limits to our greed, some self-imposed, some forced on us. Many folks honestly believe that what they do not own cannot be enjoyed. They must possess a thing before they dare appreciate it.

The worst mentally obese people are not simple consumers, but titans of industry. They must have more and more and more regardless of consequence. They think they are “lean and mean” but they are a social tub of lard, wallowing about in plans, risks, and ambitions .

They remind me of Marx’s observation that the end of classic capitalism would result in a few gargantuan monopolies owned and controlled by one survivor each. These days, it is not hard to imagine such a scenario where the CEO has no employees at all – only AI agents. And, for that matter, no CEO .

Perhaps, Marxist dystopia is only a temporary stage. With current IPOs, our mentally obese masters of the universe are well on their way to the ultimate end.

Entitled

Political speech is usually more concerned with connotation than definition. Consider the current polemics about “rights: which are viewed as free, and “entitlements” which cost money. What these words actually mean is best described in the lovely legalistic phrase “normal and customary” .

There are no absolutes. The rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are contradicted by graveyards, prisons, and slums. Entitlements such as pensions are viewed as earned rewards, but tend to include expected safety nets for food clothing shelter and medicine.

The rich, of course, always think that whatever they have is a form of right – granted by God, superiority, hard work. The poor assume society owes them other rights such as education. Everyone considers security and property protection on the fuzzy borderline .

This is where the war of connotation spills into redistribution of wealth. If everyone is entitled to health care, are we infringing on the rights of the well-off by taking away some of their assets? There is no easy answer, although the way politicians twist meanings may make it seem so .

Utopians have always claimed that the problem is simply scarcity. In a world of abundance the difference between what costs money and what does not will vanish .

Perhaps .

I’m not holding my breath .

Babies and Puppies

Advertisers know that big eyes sell. Slap a picture of a baby or a puppy on a product and more people will buy it. Most of us can scarcely resist those cute expressions, and we get a rush of endorphins just looking at them .

Nature probably evolved this in certain mammalian species (especially primates) which have young who require extended care. Humans then tended to breed dogs whose puppies were more appealing. In both cases, the cutest survived.

Social causes have now become deeply entangled with standard advertising. In particular, anti-abortion groups always picture helpless human infants as those being “murdered”. In truth of course most modern abortion involves discarding a lump of mostly formless tissue .

Ah, but the potential… Unsurprisingly anti-abortion never mentions surly teenagers nor terrifying criminals who may result from the rescue.

After babies grow up to be surly teenagers, hardened criminals, nasty insane terrorists, or just people we dislike, we have little trouble handling them roughly. “Pro-life” can be code for a social movement to preserve the “right people”.

Of course the crusaders are sincere. After all, they’ve seen the cuddly pictures on the propaganda media.