VirtualExile

Tally up how much fossil fuel the US burned in 2019.  Create a quota or permit system, such as "cap and trade", that reduces the total amount of fossil fuels burned each year by 5% each year, for 10 years.

Done.

Add onto this plan anything else you want, have fun adding additional stuff, but you HAVE TO LIMIT THE AMOUNT OF FOSSIL FUELS WE BURN.

And then don't import anything from China, or any other country, until they agree in a binding way to do the same thing, otherwise you're merely exporting your CO2 emissions to other countries.

Sure, the US and EU have actually reduced CO2 emissions over the past 10-15 years, but the world as a whole has increased CO2 emissions because instead of emitting CO2 at home we buy products that emitted CO2 somewhere else.

I'd also ban the export of fossil fuels, because it does no good for the US to burn less of the crap if we're merely exporting it to somebody else.  This is a huge problem with Canada, which is basically a petrostate like Saudi Arabia that pretends to be a liberal democracy that cares about the environment blah blah.  And it is a growing problem for the US, and for Australia -- pretending to care while exporting our fossil fuels to other countries.

You have to leave that crap in the ground.

OK, nobody's gonna vote for this plan, you'd rather vote for Biden's false promises, I know.  That's because you don't really want to fix the problem.  You just want to pretend you are.

After reading an essay on the Internet I wanted to know -- not just who authored it -- but who published it.  And by who published it I mean, who owns the company that runs this website/magazine.  Who is ultimately responsible for my having read this essay -- whose money is renting my brain?

If you've been reading anything published by The Atlantic, it is currently owned by Laurene Powell Jobs via a privately held for-profit LLC that she uses to run a bunch of projects that she claims include "philanthropy", "advocacy", and "impact investing" -- but with zero public disclosure of its budget or finances.

Ms. Jobs is the widow of the infamous Apple co-founder and sometimes CEO Steve Jobs.  Her mostly-inherited net worth is estimated at around $20 billion.

If you go to the website for her LLC, the first thing you see is a full-screen-sized picture of a beautiful black woman's face, but Ms. Jobs is certainly not a black woman.  And nowhere will you find an annual report or any other kind of audited public statement of what this for-profit LLC is up to.  It tells its own story.

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In a country stuffed with $100 trillion in wealth, our United States, we have many famous billionaires who run so-called philanthropic efforts, and some less-famous or non-famous billionaires who do the same.  But these philanthropic efforts seem to never cause these billionaires to become ex-billionaires, or to move the political needle off "gridlock".  Somehow these philanthropists create the illusion of giving their wealth away to help the rest of us, while their piles of wealth grow ever larger, while economic inequality continues to skyrocket, while the Everything Bubble continues to produce unprecedented hypervaluations of every available investment asset class.

One thing these billionaires never seem to advocate is an end to billionaires.

But it is this existence of billionaires that is one of our world's worst problems.  It's all the stuff these piles of capital are doing other than giving themselves away -- the 99+% of the world's net wealth that is not given away each year -- all that capital is busy reproducing itself at the expense of every living thing that does not own it.  If these piles of wealth were shared more equally, let's say solely within the US for starters, we could easily wipe out poverty.  If we were willing to jeopardize the size of these piles of wealth in favor of the global environment, we could start making a significant dent in our CO2 emissions and start rewilding parts of the planet.

As I wrote about yesterday, when projects like fixing the atmosphere and sharing the wealth are purely voluntary, the resulting gaps between our goals and reality remain immense.  Health care disparities of 100x and more around the globe, alongside continuing increases in the proportion of CO2 in the sky, and 1000x the normal rate of species extinction.

And it's because voluntary donations and reductions are always a tiny fraction of our activities.  Last year I gave away several thousand dollars to charity, for example, more than ever before, but it was only a few percent of my take home pay, and definitely less than one percent of my net wealth, especially if you include the present value of my pension in that calculation.  I'm no better than anybody else at changing the world via voluntary sacrifices.  Although I want to get better.

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Sometimes I get pushback from my LJ readers or others telling me not to criticize the baby steps that people are taking toward the goals we seek.  But somebody should say out loud that these baby steps are not nearly enough; even our adult steps are not nearly enough, heh.

But not nearly enough for what?  For any of us to be in control of the outcome on a globally relevant scale.  This global capitalist machine is far far far from submitting to any sort of democratic control.

At the level of my daily life, I accept this, because I can generally accept reality as it is and go on living.  I am not generally an unhappy or depressed person.  But this is what I see --> I see an ongoing global catastrophe driven by a relentless accumulation of capital -- and maybe it has always been thus, and will always be thus, perhaps our species is destined to destroy all other species and then itself -- but I have the capacity to imagine doing something about it, and I'm not.  Instead I'm living my own life and tossing a percent of my wealth at gestures that won't fix the catastrophe.  And those billionaires who also care are trapped in the same mode of tossing a percent of their wealth at gestures that won't fix the catastrophe.

It's definitely virtue signalling, which has become a fancy way of saying hypocrisy.  Benefiting personally from the catastrophe while tossing pennies into the beggar's bowl.

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For more than a couple decades I've forgiven myself because I've worked for non-profits or government agencies instead of working directly for capitalism; I've thought -- I give via my job, and I'm not in control of what they pay me to do it.  I could have, instead, gone to work for the private sector for 2x+ what I make now.  So I'm already giving up at least half of the income and wealth I'd otherwise have, and my job serves the community.  Paid to do good!

But solving our biggest problems requires collective action that we aren't currently taking, not individual sacrifice or even community service, how do I get that ball rolling?  The snowball of collective action?

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"Advocacy" -- that's certainly part of it, yes, Ms. Jobs.  But it's not enough.  A bunch of us agreeing with each other in our conversations and social media posts does not, by itself, accomplish anything at all.

I recall how one person who stopped reading or following me years ago called me an "armchair" politician as her reason for doing so.  I'd take that more personally if I didn't have a day job in public service, one that statutorily requires that I not run for office, and limits how I can advocate for partisan positions.

But, still.

Advocacy is not enough.  Having a job in public service is not enough.  What is enough?

Again, when solving a problem requires collective action, not individual sacrifice, how do you get that snowball rolling?

You can set a good example.  You can join one or more organizations that are trying to coordinate collective action, or trying to build social support for collective action.

Ironically, from the point of view of this post, the for-profit LLC owned by Ms. Jobs calls itself a "Collective".  Of course it isn't, but perhaps she is trying to get us to that point in her own way.

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Mass movements -- who controls these things?  Could you have mass movements before you had mass media?  Before the printing press, for example.  Instances of popular sovereignty were mighty rare before the printing press came along, and even so were limited to property-owning (and often slave-owning) males.  But then in Europe the printing press created massive problems for the ruling elite who had perfected a marriage between absolute monarchy and obligatory Catholicism.

As unofficial authors began sharing their essays about Christianity and politics, the ruling elite had to come up with a new formula -- Nationalism.  You get the people to identify with their nation, to feel patriotism, to view other nations as The Enemy, and then implement an obligatory state-controlled church.  Where this hasn't been enough, the ruling elite also needed to dangle a form of democracy in front of people's eyes, to get them to identify more closely with their nation -- because You the People Chose Your Leaders Yourself (wink).

Not really, of course.  The ruling elite would produce a short list of candidates to choose from and use their ownership of the mass media to control what The People see and hear about these candidates.  There might be a genuine contest for leadership, but within well-circumscribed limits.

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To create a mass movement, in support of collective action, do you need to control the mass media?  If so, is it up to those who control the mass media to get us there?  The Bezos, the Murdoch, the Jobs -- the billionaires who control the media?

In a country with a "free" press, there's still a genuine competition between the mass media empires, a competition for eyeballs, and I think this is ultimately -- in the Age of the Internet -- what has brought us to our current gridlock and inability to solve any of our problems.  As I've written before, the Internet allows mass media to compete for your eyeballs by giving you more exactly whatever it is you WANT to see or hear.  What you -- you -- individual you -- want to see or hear.  Completely divorced from reality if that's what you want.

So there is no possible collective in this Age of the Internet!  Only what you want to see.  And therefore, no possible collective action.  Mass media has been completely deconstructed by individual choice, and so has mass action.  What passes for mass media now is a set of computer algorithms that are able to finely parse the available content such that you can see exactly what you want.

To the extent we still get mass protest popping up around the world, it is ephemeral, without any goals, without any true collective action.  The world wanted justice for what's his name, after seeing that awful video, OK, they got it, but NOTHING ELSE CHANGED with respect to police violence in the US.  Ephemeral, without any goals, without any collective action.  There is no organized leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, no single dues-paying democratically organized group that is applying systematic pressure to US governments to enact a clear program of remedies.  Justice for George Floyd, but three more people will be killed by police tomorrow.  And the next day.

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This is a long and rambling take on what I feel to be our collective powerlessness to effect global change during this Age of the Internet.  But I'm not sure we ever had that power before?  During the 20th Century the world was pretty well divided between the socialists and the capitalists for a while, but then the capitalists won.  Arguably, it was only the highly destructive world wars between the various capitalist empires that gave socialists an opening to exploit.  But eventually the largest and strongest socialist empires gave up and willingly embraced capitalism for themselves.  China as Exhibit A.  The last truly communist countries are like isolated historical anomalies, the Lands Time Forgot.

So I find myself echoing a book I bought but never finished (of course) -- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?  That's what I've been struggling with in this LJ lately.  What does a person like me do to get the snowball rolling?  I look at my life thus far and conclude I haven't done enough, but I'm not sure what "enough" would entail.

Giving more to charity/advocacy, sure, working on that.  Downsizing my own footprint/lifestyle, sure, working on that.  Possibly choosing a different career, sure working on that.  Moving to a battleground state or even a different country, sure, working on that.  By the end of this decade the outlines of my life could be quite different from what we all see now.  But I doubt it will be enough.  I think this is one of those games you continue to play even though you're probably going to lose, because you want to be a good sport and not quit early.  Bug as Che, heh.  Another book I haven't finished, that biography of Che.

More than 4 billion people live on less than $5 per day.  That's most of the human population.

For a moment I had the most right-wing of thoughts, "How can they be both poor and still alive?"

Then, "What even is poverty?"

Of course the definition of poverty is relative and arbitrary.  The official US formula for the poverty line hasn't been updated since the 1960s, which is a pet peeve of mine that I bring up occasionally in my LJ.  The Obama administration was experimenting with an updated measure, but Trump didn't care.  So, my official stance is that we don't even know how many people live in poverty in the US.

Nearly 10 million households in the US are behind on their rent payments, I'd count that as poverty.  43 million people receive food stamps in the US, I'd count that as poverty.

I've never been dependent on federal aid for my breakfast, have never missed a rent or mortgage payment.  Personally, I don't know what poverty is.  I was a little short on money during college at one point, so my roommate lent me some cash for food, but he assumed I'd pay him back eventually, because my family was upper-middle class.  I think my brother lent me some cash at one point also during my 20s, but I paid him back with interest.  It's been a long time since I needed that kind of help.  Nowadays I keep a cash cushion, one that was large enough to absorb our basement upgrade, and I've already rebuilt it, so I'm starting to spend more again.

Humans don't automatically take care of each other, this is clear.  If I were King of the World I would enact a worldwide universal basic income at 50% of per capita global GDP -- this would be about $5,000 per person.  Anybody whose family/household income was below $5,000/person would receive a monthly support payment to bring them up to that level.  No matter where they lived.  For some countries, this would boost their total spending power by 10x.

The policies I would advocate are so far from the median political attitude that I cannot even vote for them.  I bet nobody running for Governor in Maryland next year will advocate a state-wide UBI of $5,000/person.  Perhaps after I retire, when the Hatch Act no longer limits my political activity, I will run for office on my Impossible Dreams platform.  That should be the name of my new political party!  Impossible Dreams!

When I saw that President Biden had placed Vice President Harris in charge of the "crisis" at the southern border, I imagined her therapist encouraging her to "practice saying 'no'". The VP doesn't work for the President, the Vice Presidency is a separately nominated Constitutional position, separately chosen by the Electoral College, and the incumbent does not serve at the pleasure of the President. The VP can only be removed from office via impeachment and conviction by Congress.

So Harris could say "no" to Biden, "No, I'm not going to fix your fucking southern border 'crisis' for you, fix it yourself."

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There's little condemnation on the Left of Biden's response to the increasing numbers of people seeking asylum in the US or crossing the US border away from US checkpoints. Biden himself told wanna-be immigrants on national television, "I can say quite clearly: Don't come over…Don’t leave your town or city or community," while his DHS Secretary is publicly gearing up to make more border apprehensions than we have "in decades". If this were still the Trump administration, the Left would be hopping mad at how the President is treating these people -- "No Human is Illegal" right? That's what the Left said under Trump.  That's what the yard signs in my neighborhood say.

"No children in cages," we all said!

But under Biden the slogan is "stay home", and the media are not allowed to visit the detention facilities where immigrant children are detained.

People choosing to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum in the US is called: a "crisis" at the southern border.  Biden tries to stop them, just like Trump did, but partisanship in the US means the Left sits by quietly as Biden prepares to apprehend more migrants than any of his predecessors.

VP Harris, just say "No"!

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I think at one point I wrote in here that the US, despite its great wealth, cannot take in every person on the planet.  Not all 7 billion who aren't here already.  But that was before I adopted Green Communism.  Now I'd say, yes, that's exactly what we should do, we should share our wealth with everybody, open our borders to everybody.  But we don't have to wait for them to come here, we can share our wealth with everybody regardless of where they live.

I'm certain that even in a nation like ours where a majority claim to be Christians, that sharing our wealth with everybody would be unpopular.  The American claim to Christianity has always been a pile of crap, more concerned with regulating sexual & reproductive behaviors than sharing the wealth.  Catholic Bishops in the US have recently been arguing over whether the COVID vaccines are immoral because they were developed in part using technology derived from stem cells taken decades ago from aborted fetuses -- these are not a group of men (still all men) who put saving lives ahead of regulating them.

But this is what I advocate as a Green Communist: I advocate dissolving national borders and treating every human the same.  Personally, I've been increasing my charitable contributions to put more of my money where my beliefs are, but I hope when I retire from my current job in 2027 to practice a lifestyle even more in keeping with my ideals.  Maybe as a pro bono immigration attorney representing asylum seekers.  I dunno, we'll see where I end up when I don't have house & pets & job keeping me here.

If I were in charge of increasing the number of Democratic Senators, I wouldn't advocate for Open Borders and reducing the US standard of living by 80% to share our wealth broadly.  But sometimes I advocate for my beliefs instead of pushing a party line.  Perhaps I should do more of the former and less of the latter.

Last year fewer than 2% of the cars sold in the US were electric.  There's been a lot of talk on the Left about switching over to electric cars, a lot of hype in the stock market about Tesla, and several strategic announcements by other car companies that by a certain future date (usually > 10 years from now) they'll fully switch over to electric cars.

Yet this reminds me of non-alcoholic beer, which has a similarly tiny market share, although without any of the hype.

And low-fat potato chips, holding another similarly tiny market share.

When are people actually going to buy electric cars?  If you've bought one, great, but you're still < 2%.

There are some practical problems with electric cars, compared to gasoline cars.  They are generally more expensive and manufactured with top-of-the-line options packages -- aimed at the upper end of the market.  They have limited range of a couple hundred miles (assuming you don't run the onboard HVAC, heating and cooling reduce range substantially).  Charging stations are definitely not as ubiquitous as gasoline stations.  And over time car batteries become less efficient, just like the batteries in your laptop computers, requiring an expensive replacement.

GM can say now it will go all-electric by 2035, but if its customers don't follow them, they'll definitely renege on that promise.  You can't abandon 98% of your customers if you want to avoid bankruptcy.

I know I can sound uncompromising here in my LJ when I write about politics, especially where politics, poverty, and the environment intersect -- my Green Communism and/or my Zero Population positions.

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With respect to the environment, looking just at the most prominent environmental issue of the day -- global warming -- the underlying reason or motivation for my position is that to stop global warming, to actually stop it, we'd have to cut global emissions by over 90%, perhaps by over 95%.  The scale of our global emissions is so massive, it's perhaps a dozen or two dozen or even three dozen times what our atmosphere's "drain" can handle.  The sustainable amount of greenhouse gas emissions is practically zero, from the perspective of our current emissions volume.

So if your "solution" is a product that only cuts net emissions by 1/3 -- which sounds like a lot to most people -- it's not really a solution.  Especially if you consider that people could end up buying even more copies of this new improved product than they bought of the old product, as exponential global economic & population growth continues in the decades ahead.  If you cut emissions by 1/3 per unit, but 30 years from now are selling 50% more units, then you haven't cut emissions at all!

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Right now, over the course of the entire lifecycle of an electric car in the US, accounting for manufacturing, maintenance, batteries, electricity generation, etc., driving an electric car reduces emissions by 1/3 compared to driving a gasoline car.

If you're like me and you barely drive at all, there's no difference in emissions, which is why I bought a gasoline car as my final lifetime car four years ago.  Looking at how little I drive compared to the average -- I've driven 18,000 miles in 50 months -- an electric car would've cost more while affording me no net reduction in emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.

But let's say you drive the average 15,000 miles per year in the US.  Yes, buying an electric car will save you 1/3 of the emissions had you bought a gasoline car.

1/3 is not a solution when we need to cut emissions by maybe 95%.  You're still dumping new emissions into the atmosphere that will continue warming the planet for the next 1,000 years.

Many of you will say -- a 1/3 reduction is better than nothing.  Others will look at the scale of the problem and give up entirely and drive a huge gas SUV everywhere they go.  Others will wave the magic wand of science fiction and say we'll have better options in the future, so let's just go ahead and do the best we can right now, which is to cut emissions only by 1/3.

But what we really need to do is stop driving individual cars entirely.  I've made a plan in my own life to do this.  This is my last car, and sometime between now and retirement in 2027 I'm going to move out of this house and engineer a car-free lifestyle.  Anybody's Green New Deal should be doing the same -- moving us toward a future without individually-owned cars.  A future where we live near where we work and shop and recreate, able to walk, bike, or bus in between.

"Solutions" like electric cars imagine that we can continue living the same kind of lifestyle we live today, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by some fraction that isn't enough to solve the problem.  All the while, population growth and economic growth mean we're emitting more next year than last.  We're not actually solving the problem!

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What we need are enforceable global caps on emissions, that ratchet down year after year until we get down to a sustainable level.  But this isn't what the Paris Agreement does.  And it's not what any of your personal promises to cut emissions do.  Apple can promise to go Net Zero by 2050, but that's worthless without an enforceable global cap on emissions.  It isn't enough to be personally responsible, or organizationally responsible, or even nationally responsible.  We need an enforceable global cap on emissions.  If we achieve that, then I don't care what kind of car you drive or even if you drive a car at all -- because overall as a species we'll be cutting emissions year after year.  That's the solution we need.

Biden calls for a net-zero emissions US by 2050.  That's great!  But we need an enforceable agreement that covers the entire planet, or we aren't actually fixing the problem.  Emissions in Latvia will warm the planet the same as emissions in Oklahoma.  And Biden is unlikely to get even a US/2050 plan passed by the Senate.

I'll still follow my own personal plan to net-zero my own emissions by 2050.  But it won't work until it applies to everybody.

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And that's just one of the more prominent environmental problems we face.

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Meanwhile, there's the desperate poverty that hundreds of millions of humans face, compared to the skyrocketing wealth of a handful of elite capitalists, with a global middle class sitting in between -- many of us in this middle class enjoying 100x the income of the world's poorest, because our education, skills, geographic location, and purchasing power serve the purposes of the elite capitalists.

In the US on the Left we obsess about our relative inequalities between the races and sexes, and fight for a $15 minimum wage, while hundreds of millions of people in other countries live on less than $2/day, with dangerously polluted air & water, amidst proxy wars over resources, proxy wars paid for by oligarchs, multinational corporations, and our wealthier governments.

It's difficult to find anybody on the Left in the US who writes anything at all about the plight of the poor living in the Central African Republic, for example.  "Foreign policy" on the Left is mainly about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.  If you're really into foreign policy on the Left you also talk about ending human trafficking -- the export of unwilling women from poor countries to rich countries where they can be exploited for economic or sexual purposes -- modern slavery.  But nobody is talking about a large-scale redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries with the goal of significantly reducing international inequality.  At best, people talk about how to "develop" poor countries as though there is something wrong with those poor countries instead of something wrong with our global capitalist system of exploitation in which the middle classes of the wealthy countries consume mountains of products made by people who earn far less than they do.

I don't feel that I'm uncompromising, I feel that I'm looking at the problems we face and trying to come up with actual solutions to these problems.  Even if the solutions are only in my head, and skimmed over by the five people who read my LJ.

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At the same time, I do see the real limits of politics in the US, that the best we can do is a bare Democratic majority in the Senate, where Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the swing vote.  [It's why I seriously advocate for Democrats to physically move to other states.]

But I've always felt I can both imagine what would actually fix the world's problems, while also nudging us to become a tiny bit better than we would otherwise be.  It's important to keep both modes in mind.  The ultimate goal, and what we can do right now.

So if in your life you think you need a car -- do the math and see which kind of car will help you to limit your emissions.  If in your political situation you would do best by voting for a centrist Democrat, thereby kicking out a conservative Republican, then do that.  But in your conversations with people about the world and our politics, are you talking with them about what we really need to do to solve our problems, or are you pretending that your compromises are actually your solutions?

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I've got my own 30-year plan to do both -- go net zero on emissions, and share down my income until I'm living with the same resources as the median human.  I may not even live for 30 years, but I've got a plan and I'm moving in that direction.  And it's what I advocate for the entire planet, knowing full well it won't happen.  Carbon fuels are too valuable for our political systems to ban them entirely.  And rich people will never allow global socialism to happen, especially not in practice, although some countries may adopt the names and symbols of socialism as various elites continue their eternal scramble for power and wealth.

It's not that I'm uncompromising, because I compromise all the time in my life.  It's that I'm setting out my goals here in my LJ based on a combination of reality and empathy.  The reality of our destructive exponential population & economic growth, and empathy toward those who are not benefitting from the output of this destructive system.

T left very early this morning, earlier than I expected.  I still needed to work a half day, so that's what I did.  Stopped working at 2pm, started warming up for toys 2:45pm.  Nothing on the Bug Calendar until Sunday afternoon!  Yay!

For some reason T left his new laptop behind, which has an account for me from when my laptop was "sleeping", so I'm using that to type this while my other laptops are busy showing porn :o)

I created an account at a poetry site, and posted two of my favorite poems there, along with the one I wrote this morning.  I already have two followers!  I've had multiple people who are close to me in real life ask me to write more poetry, but I feel like it's not something I can produce on demand, but maybe that's just a confidence thing, maybe if I worked at it instead of occasionally pissing it out on the page after a long period of pent up poetry piss ...

I once described poetry as prose with most of the words deleted, but there's more to it than that, and so many different ways of doing poetry.  But working on poetry more may lead me into writing lyrics and then putting together music with vocals ... so, more angles on this very slow project that is nevertheless moving forward -- my concept album.  I know the title of the album, the names of the songs, it's top-down in this way, but also bottom-up in that I'm going to grow my songs into the concepts instead of growing the concepts into the songs.  Can I apply the role-play method I use to write stories to writing music?  How would that work?

27 days since orgasm, feels like longer?  Tomorrow I may draw another card, and I probably will.  If I'm still awake at midnight I may draw it then.  I can't expect anything to come of this draw, my expected date of next orgasm is in February now?  I haven't been horny much lately because of my overall life confidence issues since my annual review last Friday, but my mood has been improving.  I've done some good work this week, although my Boss can't see it, so much of what I do is stuff he'll never know about.  I did some top-level negotiating with representatives of a major multinational corporate acquisition valued at tens of billions of US dollars this morning.  Not to "brag" but to build up my self-confidence, that I have wonderful attorneys working for me, who can brief me up in 30 minutes, and then I can go toe-to-toe with major multinational corporations.

Sometimes T says I should go work for those multinational corporations and increase my salary by several times.  But instead I daydream about becoming a union organizer on my way to becoming a neo-gatherer heh.

I wouldn't have any money problems if I weren't in a nesting relationship with T -- I didn't have money problems before I bought this house with him.  I don't need more money, I need the streams of money that I do have to be predictable, which has always been the issue with T -- eventually I get the cash, but the timing can drive me nuts, because our personalities are different along the money dimension.  And I need to stop living in this money pit of a house, which, yeah, by retirement time the plan is to have a much less expensive dwelling.

Part of me wants to move back to Racine, the city I was born in, after retirement.  It's one of the most affordable places to live in the US.  Because there's no reason for college graduates to live there, heh.  I think about living there for a year to write a book and create an album and volunteer with some sort of political cause.  Heh, we'll see.  For now, I'm just trying to not go crazy while waiting for this Quarantine to end.

I was reading about the international student/alumni/faculty movement to get university endowments to divest from fossil fuel corporations.

It's one of those social movements on the Left that I find problematic.  Not because I think investing in fossil fuels is a thing we should do.  I would ban fossil fuels if I were Dictator Bug.  But because it is one of those reform movements that seems ignorant of its own privileges and focused on such a tiny fragment of a possible solution.

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Harvard University, with an endowment of $42 billion, is effectively a hedge fund that runs an elite university on the side.  With an endowment of that size, it could easily provide free tuition for each undergraduate student while still making a net profit on the leftover dividends.  Instead, it charges $50,000/year tuition.

Attending college is still a privilege in the US, not afforded to everybody.  Even if you can get in, can your family afford it?  There's no guarantee of affordability, despite the complex web of need-based and merit-based financial aid combined with massive amounts of student loans -- instead of free tuition, we have you run through this financial chomper and leave you a debt slave for the rest of your life.  (At least, a debt slave who typically makes a higher take-home salary than the poor folks who didn't make it through the chomper.)

Once you're on the inside of this elite credentialing system, which sorts of activism will not produce eyerolls when viewed alongside the privilege you've been granted?

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Should universities hoard capital and invest it like hedge funds to maximize their returns?  Should universities resist the unionization of campus staff and graduate students?  Should universities accept research grants from the Department of Defense or the National Security Agency?  Should universities accept research grants from corporations that result in intellectual property that is not shared freely with the world?  Should universities publish research in for-profit journals that exclude readers from accessing their knowledge?

The word "university" would seem to mean a place that cherishes the universal.  Free and open education for everybody who wants one, and research results shared with everybody, not an elite castle that wields hoarded capital and private knowledge to continue enriching itself and the few it chooses to admit.

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But, rather than fixing any of these things, let's focus on the small portion of this hoarded capital that is invested in fossil fuel companies.  That's what's wrong, that our university is profiting from global warming.  Yes, that should stop.  Absolutely.

BTW, Harvard announced earlier this year it will not divest from fossil fuel companies.

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With $42 billion, Harvard could set up a free and open online university for everybody on the planet, through which anybody could take online classes from Harvard lecturers, leading to anybody who's willing to do the work securing a Harvard degree.

Harvard could revolutionize the spread of information around the world, with new approaches and new technologies.  But, no, that would devalue the elite Harvard undergraduate degree, which is awarded to only 1,700 individuals per year.

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I'm always caught between "the art of the possible", and wanting to actually fix things.  In the case of the Harvard divestment movement, it isn't even possible LOL, the administration said, "fuck you."  So rather than calling for divestment from fossil fuels, why not go big?  Divest from everything, and use that $42 billion to leverage Harvard into a new, global, Age of Universal Free and Open Higher Education.

I reject that ridiculous bastion of hoarded capital, knowledge, and prestige for what it is.  Fuck Harvard.

I feel I've turned into one of the Reds from the Mars Trilogy.  The Reds in Robinson's telling were a subset of the human settlers on Mars who opposed terraforming the planet.  Except in my case, we've already "terraformed" Earth.  It's way too late.  "Terraforming" is a misnomer, a misdirection, a euphemism.  We've sapienized Earth.

I feel I've hurtled well beyond both communism and green politics to a kind of radical primitivism.  Well, you don't need either of these more modern political philosophies if you go back in time far enough ;-)

But I was already way more Green Socialist than the duly nominated "Green/Socialist" who I voted for last month, who received 0.5% of the vote -- 15,799 votes -- here in Maryland.

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I'm grappling with what it means to be a living human, and whether it is possible to apply a system of ethics to being human that is not fundamentally hypocritical.

Why even care about ethics?

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Many other animal species are territorial and construct homes for themselves, their young, or their pack/hive/colony.  Some even use tools.  What makes humans different is the fundamental scale of our operations; how we've gone way beyond simple territorialism; we've completely sapienized the planet, our level of species dominance is off the charts and yet still growing.  As a single species we've caused an ongoing and worsening mass extinction, and we're changing the global climate.

Possibly the only comparable event in Earth history is the Oxygen Catastrophe, when the rise of photosynthetic bacteria introduced enough oxygen to the atmosphere to cause the first Ice Age, although that took 100 million years to unfurl, we humans have operated much more quickly.

What we call "technology" is this immense and exponentially growing power of humanity to obliterate everything else in service of our own survival, reproduction, and pleasure.

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In what I wrote yesterday, I was contemplating that humans would effectively abandon our humanity and become something more like chimpanzees (of which there are only 200,000 today), or long-tailed macaques (the second-most successful modern primates after humans, there's about 2 million of them).

I mean, if it weren't for our obliterating technological dominance, there'd only be a few million of us, living in small groups, hunting and gathering food and other objects from the surrounding forest, savanna, or grassland.  Nobody worries about the macaques destroying the planet or running out of global resources.  Nobody would've worried about humans doing these things either, 15,000 years ago.

But then we began domesticating animals and enclosing wild lands for agriculture.  We also began mining the earth for fuel and minerals.  These cultural practices allowed our population to begin its unsustainable expansion.  Slowly at first, until the combination of the industrial revolution, public water utilities, and effective medical treatments -- which together allowed human population to explode.  If it weren't for the development of effective mass market birth control during the mid-20th Century, our population would be expanding even faster right now.

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It is easy to mistake our exponentially-growing technological dominance as a kind of stability, a kind of sustainability.  For thousands of years global human population has continually expanded, except for a short period during the Black Death in the mid-14th Century.

Although environmentalists have been warning of resource depletion and overpopulation for decades, continued growth in technological dominance has made these warnings appear in retrospect like a form of mental illness.  Some warned of Peak Oil, which did in fact occur more or less on schedule, hobbling the US during the 1970s with "stagflation", then hobbling the global economy during the early 21st Century -- but along came new technologies like fracking, and now the US is producing more oil than ever before!  Some warned of an inability to feed our expanding numbers back during the 1960s, but then came synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, along with mechanical irrigation.  Today, human starvation is a political problem, not a technology problem.

These new technologies will also eventually run out of resources, but what we've learned so far over the recent centuries is that each worn-out technology can be replaced by an even more powerful new technology.  Human ingenuity!  Endless growth in economic productivity!

So we now take economic growth for granted.  In the US, we regularly toss out Presidents who preside over economic recessions -- Trump, Papa Bush, Carter, Ford, Nixon -- we expect at least 2.5% growth each year, damn it, with ever-rising profits and wages.  And maybe we can continue growing at this pace for a few more centuries until the physics of heat transfer brings our planet's surface to the boiling point and all our liquid water evaporates into space.

The problem with unsustainability is that it can continue for a long time.

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So what does this mean for ethics, for politics, for how we should live our 8 billion lives today?

There is a widespread fantasy that more technology can save us from our technological dominance.  The leading such fantasy today is "renewable resources".  Tesla is the most overvalued stock in the US today because it is the most fashionable corporate marketeer of this fantasy -- ubiquitous electric cars running on ubiquitous solar power via more powerful battery technologies.

The Green New Deal is based on this fantasy, that an emergency transformation into a 100% renewable resource economy can provide us with even more stuff than we have today, while at the same time reducing our destructive dominance of the planet's ecology.

The idea is that we can turn our history with technology upside down, using it to reduce our ecological "footprint" despite technology being the original reason for our suffocating footprint -- humanity's boot upon Gaia's neck.

It's like hearing an alcoholic say that if he increases his alcohol consumption all the drama will magically go away.

The solution isn't producing hundreds of millions of electric cars with a new power transmission infrastructure, it's giving up cars.

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I still think Greens and Socialists are at least thinking about the important problems, their hearts are in the right place, etc.  What tends to be missing is a realization that sacrifice is required.  Instead most Greens/Socialists advocate for limited and magical solutions that never stand in the way of a more fairly shared exponential economic growth.  The answer to too much species dominance is that our species needs to become more submissive to others, not that we become more creative and careful in our dominance.  It's as though today's Greens are arguing for a more creative and humane treatment of slaves rather than ending slavery.

Giving up economic growth, giving up technologies, giving up having children.  Giving up parts of the planet so they can rewild without any human intervention or interaction -- more places like Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island on Earth.

These things will eventually happen anyway, because we will eventually run out of resources and then our civilization will unravel.  It might not happen for centuries yet, as our collective human ingenuity finds ever more destructive ways to continue extracting the planet's remaining resources, but it will happen, we'll eventually crash into the walls of Physics if nothing else, creating waste heat faster than it can dissipate into space.  The only issue is whether we choose to manage this process, whether we choose to minimize the harm we're causing.

But the scope of our future decline is so large ... who would willingly choose it now?  Who would choose to live like a wild primate when they can have air conditioning and Netflix?

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Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligence has always been self-limiting and self-destructive.  When intelligence evolves to be strong enough to understand its own evolution, when intelligence becomes recursive, such an unleashed intelligence will inevitably destroy its habitat via unsustainable hyperdominance.

But even the less-intelligent non-hyperdominant mammalian species regularly go extinct over time.  The average lifespan of a mammalian species is only one million years.  Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years old so far.  We spent 95% of our existence as a rather intelligent variety of hunter-gatherer primate, with a few million of us scattered around the planet.  But then we broke the glass ceiling ... launching ourselves into space.

Maybe resources exist to be used, waiting until a form of live evolves that can make use of them.  It's just a function of how the universe increases entropy over time.  Our function as a hyperintelligent species is to increase entropy as much as possible, and if we can have fun while doing so, why not?

Perhaps what bothers me is the mindlessness of it all.  People acting like limited resources are unlimited.  People acting like they're at a party that will never end.

But this is a metaphor for the single human life.  My own life is a limited resource, and it will eventually run out.  Civilizations, like individuals, have limited lifespans.

Perhaps the ethical lesson in all of this is to act in full knowledge of our limitations and our hyperlimitations.  What I'm not sure about yet, is how I will act differently as this knowledge sinks in.

I'd pulled all of my play money into cash a while back, because my crystal ball was broken -- no idea how all this election stuff would really turn out.  I'd wait until the dust settled and then come up with some new plays.

Well, the bubbly stock market was overjoyed to learn that the US Senate will likely remain in Republican hands, because that means no tax increases during the next two years.  Yay for corporate profits and capital gains!

What else can I say, bubble on, capitalists and employed professionals, enjoy your bubble all you want, continue bidding stock prices to unrealistic new highs.  It's fun when your 401(k) balance goes up and up and you feel more powerful, as though stock prices always go up and up.

The 22% of my retirement portfolio that is invested in stocks is very happy.  The other 78% is a bit annoyed, but will get over it.

I'm more concerned about the rest of humanity, and how a Republican Senate means we'll do nothing to stop climate change, nothing to reduce the cost of higher education, nothing to expand the availability of health care, little to address the current economic emergency.  To some extent, as you celebrate your 401(k) balance, you're dancing on everybody else's graves.  Capitalism is destroying the planet, while it steadily exploits the global poor and working classes to feed an expansion of economic inequality.

I can't really blame people for having a 401(k), I have one also.  The incentives ... like the matching funds, the tax deferral, the ability to fund a comfortable retirement.  But we're part of the systematic irresponsibility of the sixth mass extinction, and much of this celebratory bubble wealth is an abstract mirage.  If we all tried to cash in at the same time, it would vanish.  And all these tax cuts on the rich have fueled the largest bond market bubble in human history.

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I can't help but be captivated by your Biden/Trump battle and it's cliffhanger Electoral College ending, because Trump is so awful, and about 75 million of you voted for him anyway, a massive crowd of asshole-loving bigots -- a crowd so awful it inspired 82 million to vote for his major-party opponent instead.  But I voted for a Green Socialist.  I voted for an entirely different kind of politics.  I voted for the global environment and the international working class.  If my candidate had won, the stock and bond market bubbles would have immediately popped.  And that would have been a good thing.

If the stock market is celebrating the outcome, that means we failed.  We failed to overcome the inertia of an 18th Century Constitution and the 19th Century creation of a dozen nearly empty "states" that each gets two Senators, during the worst pandemic in 100 years and the worst recession in 90 years.  If we couldn't get a Democratic Senate this year, and if a margin of 7 million votes is only barely enough to win the Electoral College now, then I don't know how bad things will have to get before we can break out of this gridlock and solve the problems of our planet and the everyday people who don't have 401(k)s.  We're stuck.