Guide to Saving Freedom and Democracy

The second election of Donald Trump should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that liberal democracy is now in decline.  No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, if you value your personal freedoms and want societies where pluralism is welcome, this should be a wake-up call.

Trump and other authoritarian politicians around the globe are not aberrations.  Nor are they in themselves the problems.  They are symptoms of economic and cultural precarity. Economic insecurity, created by a globalization that left nations unable to protect their citizens, coupled with unprecedented population migration and culture wars have left masses of people feeling discombobulated and adrift.  The result has been an epidemic of nihilism, addiction, and despair. This has created a vacuum where authoritarians can attract a following with simplistic messaging that taps into the anger.

If we're to  prevent further decline into world authoritarian governance, we need to be honest with our selves about the role we all have played in producing the problems.  Neoconservative economics has been "successful" in producing growth but it's been a growth where most of the people haven't shared the benefits.  Excessive "wokeism" has left many feeling they don't matter.  There's been a sense that while the entire working class feels like they've been left behind, liberals and progressives are focusing only on particular demographics.

 With that background, here are my humble suggestions for defending and advancing the cause of democracy.

1. Take a timeout.  If you're angry and afraid, it's not a good time to engage.  Find a way to be in nature and get some perspective.
2. Find support.  It's easy to feel helpless if you feel isolated.  Develop a network of people who sympathize with your views. Make a pact to stay involved and, above all, VOTE.
   
3. Stop defending the status quo and the politicians who brought us here.  The economy might look good according to the GDP growth but if people can't afford their rent or have to work three jobs, it isn't good for them.  A social media post complaining about how you think Hillary was treated unfairly might get you lots of likes from your fellow Democrats but it's a pointless feel-good exercise.
4. Stop demonizing opposing voters, no matter how angry you may get or how self-defeating they may seem. We need to win them back.
   
5. Develop a positive vision that recognizes the legitimate concerns that people face and plan for how to address them.  
6. End identity politics.  Stop slicing voters up into demographics.  Develop policies and messages with broad appeal.
7. Focus the attacks on the authoritarians.  To confuse and demoralize their opposition, they create a barrage of controversies that either energize or are irrelevant to their supporters. Center on simple issues of broad appeal.  Most authoritarians are corrupt and incompetent; and present easy targets.  
8. Make institutions relevant to voters.  This isn't easy but if authoritarians can delegitimize and corrupt institutions, they can get public support to eliminate them.  People need to be reminded why the institutions were created in the first place.

 Assuming that we're successful,  how do we prevent authoritarians from rising again?  A few thoughts.

1. Get money and corporations out of politics.
2. Develop political systems which support a number of voices but not a cacophony.  Two parties is too few but twelve is too many.
3. Address disinformation and foreign interference.  We need to understand that truth is a public good and it has to be defended.
4. Enormous wealth and income disparities are politically destabilizing, particularly when economic mobility is limited.  Meritocracy is a laudable goal but it can only exist when people have equitable access to education and healthcare.
   

 

 

What's Wrong With the World?

 I'm writing in the wake of having watched Americans select an erratic convicted felon who's displayed traits of narcissism, racism, misogyny and authoritarianism as their head of state and commander in chief.  This isn't hyperbole and these are not trivial shortcomings.  He's promised to politicize the public service, enact high tariffs and conduct mass deportations, moves which economists assure us will do enormous damage to the US and world economies.  However, he's so unpredictable that nobody knows to what extent he'll actually go through with it and and many of his voters revel in the fear and worry this uncertainty instills in the broader population.  Even if he scales back on tariffs and deportations, there are other, potentially much more damaging actions he will almost certainly take like:

1. Sabotaging climate measures to address and mitigate climate change
2. Undermine world efforts to shore up democracy and stand up to authoritarianism
3. Further divide the US and the world along racial, gender and ideological lines
   

It hurts.  It hurts to know there are millions of people out there who for whatever reason would support this type of degeneracy.  It hurts to know this will harm my children's futures.  It hurts that this shakes my faith in democracy and lowers my opinions of the people with whom I share this planet.  What makes it even worse is in all of the online chatter I've read (and there's been a lot), I've yet to see a credible, comprehensive attempt at even understanding this mess, let alone fixing it.

One of the traits I've inherited from my father is my urge to fix things. When something I own breaks, my first tendency is to take it apart, understand how it works and see if I can fix it. Even when I can't (which is often), it helps me understand how things work so I'm positioned to get a better version of it next time.

So, I sit here and wonder.  What is causing our democratic institutions to fail?  Why are governments (which are supposed to be representing the will of the people) failing to make changes that make people happier? What causes people to turn to ridiculous billionaire saviours?

 Certainly, misinformation and disinformation are a significant part of the problem. Pollsters reported that Trump voters believed that economic benchmarks were much worse than they actually were.  Elon Musk bought Twitter (and renamed it X so I refer to it as Xitter) and weaponized it.  He's reportedly amplified his own voice and other commentators on the far right. Even before this, though, a swamp of right wing news sites, bloggers and other commentators have created an entirely separate reality for right wing viewers.  According to researchers, this is a direct threat to democracy.

Working class citizens felt they were being left behind.  It didn't help that Democrats spent billions forgiving student loans while the majority of Americans don't attend college. Trump voters reported that rent and groceries kept going up while billionaires got ever richer.  The Democrats attracted a majority of voters that made over $100,000 per year - which is a small minority of Americans.

In news reports, Trump voters claim that the Democrats heavy reliance on identity politics has turned them off.  Republicans were successful in branding the Democrats as the party of the elite and the out of touch.  While, Democrats have positioned themselves as champions of racial minorities, Republican support among many minorities (particularly Latinos and native Americans) has ballooned.

 There are no shortage of other theories.  On social media, every center and left account is shoehorning this loss into their favourite world view.  Socialists are blaming this on excessive capitalism.  Supporters of Palestine claim that it's because Democrats supported genocide in Gaza.  Feminists blame misogyny. Others blame racism.  Harris backers blame Biden for hanging on too long.  Biden loyalists blame Democrats for abandoning Biden.  I could go on.

No doubt there is truth in some or all of these claims.  However, it doesn't help to point at a dozen different problems without identifying the key ones.  And it doesn't explain why Americans would be seduced by an explicitly anti-democratic con man backed by billionaires into voting against their interests. 

We need social scientists to get back to evidence-based truth finding and help us figure out what's gone wrong.  Post-modernist thinking has produced a line of thinking where truth can't be ascertained and so it provides foundation from which to set a direction. 

We need real answers, supported by solid data and transparent analysis; compiled by people who aren't ideologically captured.

How the west created Putin

 As I write this, a horrific war of aggression is being conducted by the Russian armed forces against the country of Ukraine.  Russia is a much larger country with a much larger army and much more military equipment. Despite some aid from western countries (mainly the US), Ukraine has lost considerable territory in the south and in the Donbas. International and Ukrainian officials are documenting multiple war crimes including targeting of civilian infrastructure, murder of civilians, rape and illegal rendition of residents to Russia.

Although there is widespread condemnation from many countries, there are also many who criticize the west (again mainly the US) for the conflict.  From what I've seen, these criticisms take two main  positions:

• The countries adjacent to Russia should remain "neutral" and provide a "security buffer" so that Russia won't feel threatened by NATO and so that Russia can have a "sphere of influence".  This is the position of "political realists".
  
• The US is using the Ukraine to conduct a "proxy war" to extend its hegemony and create a unipolar world.   

The former is more philosophy than analysis.  It argues that all great powers dominate the countries around this (and therefore we should anticipate Russia will as well).  This might be true but it's hardly a justification.  It essentially argues that since the US commits crimes of aggression, Russia can also.  So, I discard this argument as fundamentally immoral.

The latter is ridiculous.  While the argument can be made that the war has become a proxy war to a limited extent and certainly it would be western policy to have Ukraine aligned with the EU rather than Russia, the notion that the US wanted Russia to invade Ukraine makes no sense.  Consider:

• Immediately prior the the invasion, Biden publicly announced it was about to happen.  Why would he do that if the US wanted a war?
• The vast majority of military analysts expected Ukraine to collapse in under a week
• The US failed to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons, aircraft or navy assets needed to successfully sustain a war with Russia in the years between 2014 and 2022.  Even after the invasion, military aid in the first three months is insufficient to stop the forward advance, let alone allow Ukraine to strike back.
• The sanctions being imposed are hurting the west as well as Russia and are causing Biden political problems at home.  There will almost certainly be a recession which will hurt the Democrats in the midterms.

Neither of these claims make any sense, yet I still fault the west for this war and the other things that Putin has done.  The reason is that the west in general, and the US in particular, are responsible for the rise of Putin.  This is no small problem because Putin is a textbook fascist dictator.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the great giveaway of state assets had already begun.  Senior government officials had been allowed to transfer government assets to themselves and their families.   Things only went downhill when the west showed up to help.  The New York Stock Exchange sent lawyers and academics.  Then Harvard sent its best and brightest who promptly tried to profit from the situation. Of course, it wasn't long before the IMF showed up.  Naturally, everyone had the same cure: capitalism as soon as possible.  With the Russian state officials and other insiders eager to cash in on state assets, nobody was looking out for the interests of ordinary Russians.  

The effects of the "structural adjustments" and uncontrolled privatizations were predictable.  Corruption reigned supreme.  The value of the ruble plummeted and inflation spiraled out of control.  Ordinary people were wiped out as their savings and pensions were almost worthless.  Organized crime arose and suddenly there were execution style killings on the streets of Moscow.  This type of societal chaos is the perfect breeding ground for the rise of an authoritarian leader.  Then came the 1996 Russian election.  Worried that his friend Yeltsin might lose to socialists, Bill Clinton shamelessly meddled in the election.

Less than four years later, Yeltsin resigned and passed the presidency along to a former KGB operative who he knew would ensure that Yeltsin and his buddies would never be held accountable for their corruption. Vladimir Putin took over at a time when oil prices started to skyrocket. Although the Russian economy had been hollowed out by the economic reforms, the petro-rubles provided plenty of room for Putin to get credit for bringing prosperity and stability to Russia.  And anytime he felt his popularity slipping, he just picked another fight with one of his neighbors.

Since then, the west has been complicit in Russian corruption and criminality.  Over the past two decades, hundreds of billions of dollars have been laundered into western banks, real estate, stocks and other assets.  Oligarchs have bought their way into western institutions, charities and political scenes.  Donald Trump is alleged to have benefited from Russian organized crime buying his properties.  Russian oil money has undermined the integrity of many, many western institutions.  The result has been a tendency to look the other way when it comes to Kremlin war crimes and human rights abuses.  

Between the initial 90s rush to convert Russia to capitalism and the apathy to his crimes in the intervening years, the west aided and abetted the creation of a monster.  Now we, as 21st century Dr Frankensteins, look upon our progeny with horror and contemplate how to deal with it.

I Don't Know

 It feels like my existence consists of balancing alone on a narrow ridge.  On one side of me is a valley populated by people who uncritically accept mainstream views and conventional wisdom.  Even to ask certain questions is enough to get you branded as a conspiracy theorist.  On the opposite side are the actual conspiracy theorists who claim to be skeptical but are actually much more open to believing narratives that are wildly implausible than those are are simple and logical.  Pharmaceutical companies aren't just big heartless corporations, they (along with the WHO, Bill Gates and the "global elite) are part of a global conspiracy to depopulate the planet.  I don't want to join either camp.  It's tempting to join the mainstream camp and just push aside all of the nagging doubts.  And I know from past experience, the conspiracy camp can be intoxicating and addictive; believing that you're on the cusp of discovering the truth behind some great secret.  I don't dare fall asleep for fear I will fall to one side or the other and not be able to get back to where I am.

The ridge is obviously a metaphor but the divide is very real.  I know people in both camps.  I think both have something to contribute.  However, the two sides have stopped talking to each other and now just lob mortars over the ridge.  The mainstream camp people think they can just marginalize and ignore the conspiracy side.  For their part, the conspiracy people think that they have a monopoly on hidden truths and eventually everyone else will join them. I see both sides and I get frustrated with both.

They have more in common than they think.  They both seem to have a need to know.  For the mainstream camp, this means accepting what they are told by authority figures and not asking too many questions.  They're begging to be lied to and used.  For the conspiracy camp, it means rejecting anything "mainstream" and listening to various narratives without real regard for source or logic.  They are also begging to be lied to and used, but by different people.

The problem is that governments do lie to us - a lot.  And we don't always find out until much later and in some cases probably never. Science does get things wrong - a lot.  What's accepted today is overturned tomorrow, usually without any public reckoning of the harm done or even what went wrong.

For me, the answer to the impasse lies in three little words - "I don't know".

Was the JFK assassination the result of a larger plot?  I don't know.  Why did the twin towers collapse on 9/11? I don't know.  Was COVID made in a lab?  I don't know.  Is there some conspiracy amongst billionaires to de-populate the planet?  I don't know.

Those three words aren't much of a conversation starter but at least they don't end it.  People with mainstream views could be more open to skepticism and be more flexible in their view of the world.  The old left-right paradigm of politics is collapsing and in its place is emerging a divide between people who want incremental change and those who are looking for radical solutions.  For their part, people who distrust everything and want a revolution should be careful what they wish for.  However bad you might think things are, they can get worse.  

I have one last comment to make on the divide.  The resulting distrust and polarization is making progress difficult and paralyzing governments across the industrialized west.  If we think of who stands to benefit from that polarization, we could come up with a list.  Authoritarian regimes (principally China and Russia), the billionaire class, organized crime. Is that a conspiracy theory?  Yes.  Does it have any truth?

I don't know.

Do White People Suck?

 In the wake of the recent discovery of unmarked graveyards at residential schools in British Columbia (at least 219 bodies) and Saskatchewan (at least 751 bodies), I've seen an outpouring of outage from some of the Twitter accounts I've been following.  One said simply "White people suck!  Don't @ me".

At first, I dismissed it as just one more emotive expression that didn't mean anything; but then I began to wonder.  Do white people suck?  Or is it just that people in general suck and white people just happen to collectively hold systemic power in much of the world?

This isn't a meaningless question.  Maybe white people really do suck.  Maybe there is some genetic predisposition to power-seeking behavior or perhaps western culture is predicated on conquest instead of peaceful coexistence and this leads to endless subjugation.  If that's the case then all of us, especially white people, owe it to the world to identify and eliminate this tendency.  

On the other hand, maybe the tendency to distrust and discriminate against those who you perceive to be not like you is a near-universal evolutionary response to our tribal roots.  In the pre-civilization era, it would have been a survival advantage to trust members of your own tribe and distrust others.  Is it possible that all forms of discrimination whether it be based on race, religion, culture or other indication of group allegiance is predicated on a primitive 'friend-or-foe' identification mechanism?  

 Still, the question remains:are white people generally more racist than non-whites?  Well, not according to the (admittedly limited) research I did.  Researchers conducted a survey asking people if they would be comfortable having neighbors of a different race and found that the most tolerant countries (surprisingly for many of us who live in them) are in North and South America, Australia and western Europe.  Conversely the worst were in Asia, Africa and Middle East.   

Anyone who's read this far might be tempted to dismiss all of this as rationalization and ask "Why does any of this matter?  Shouldn't we be against all racism?"

 Here's why I think it matters. If it's true that racism and other forms of group discrimination are evolutionary tendencies inherent in all of us, then many of the solutions proposed by liberals and leftists are wholly unlikely to rectify the issues and in fact are more likely to make them worse. The rise of identity politics and the propensity to see events through filters of race, gender, sexual preference or other identity dimension may actually be triggering to the unconscious forces within us that are predetermined to perceive other groups negatively.  Similarly, reparations for historical wrongs, affirmative action, and subsidies targeted at marginalized groups could cause resentment and further the tendency towards discrimination.

If we really want to build a world where everyone is perceived on a equal basis, it seems to me that the way we do that is to stop accentuating differences that are often based on superficial qualities (eg skin tone) and build societies based on shared goals, shared values and mutual respect.

And for the white people proclaiming "White people suck", no doubt you mean well; but you're more likely part of the problem than part of the solution.

Russia, Putin and the 2020 Election

 As the 2020 US election draws near, one of the oddest and most dysfunctional debates I'm witnessing is in regards to Russia and its alleged election interference.

Liberals and centrists insist that not only did Russia interfere with the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, the campaign and possibly Trump himself colluded with them.  They see the interference as an attack by a foreign power.  

Leftists, on the other hand, refer dismissively to "Russiagate" as just furtherance of US imperialism and a ready-made excuse for how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.  They see the lack of a conclusive finding in the Mueller report as proof that the affair was overblown.  Many (rightly) point to the the history of US interference in other country's elections (including Russia) as proof that this is all hypocritical posturing. 

I find the whole debate odd from a plethora of perspectives:

1. Both sides refer to "Russia" as if the Russian people have some role in this.  Russia stopped functioning as a democracy years ago so any actions like election interference would be solely the responsibility of the oligarchy and the intelligence agencies
   
2. As soon as intelligence agencies get involved, it's hard to know the truth about anything.  Supporting information gets locked behind the wall of "classified information".  So, while it's certainly plausible that Putin interfered in the election, it's hard to be sure.
3. Putin is the very last person that leftists should defend.  He's a crony capitalist who robbed his country blind and has somehow become one of the richest men in the world while on a politician's salary.  Labor rights in Russia have declined under his rule.
4. Under the Clinton administration, the US interfered in a Russian election on behalf of Boris Yeltsin while Putin backed one of Yeltsin's opponents.  Yeltsin then handed power to Putin who's wielded it ever since. So, if Putin is now interfering with US elections, you could call it karma.  Or blowback. Liberals and centrists never seem to acknowledge this.
5. Through all of this neither side makes much mention of the fact that the integrity of the entire election rests on voting machines with multiple vulnerabilities.  According to attorney and election advocate Jennifer Cohn, 80% of the country's voting machines are supplied by two private companies, meaning who owns them isn't public knowledge.  Further, Cohn has reported that in some battleground states (Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin), these voting machines are connected, via cellular modems, to the internet.  She says they could be hacked.  Maybe by a state actor.

So, here's what I make of this whole messy debate:

Leftists would be well advised to check their sneering when it comes to interference from Putin's Russia.  He's ex KGB, has a reason to hold a grudge and it doesn't take an enormous amount of money to mount a cyber war.  His interference in democratic elections in many countries has been widely documented.

Before liberals point the finger at Russia or anyone else, they should look at the actions of their own government.   The US has a long and unsavory record of interfering in elections around the world going back decades.

Both sides should worry less about Russia and focus on their own voting machines.  They've already been implicated in potentially being the deciding factors in each of the past 3 Republican victories.  When I read Jennifer Cohn's research, I find it crazy that more action isn't being taken.  Where is the Democratic Party on this issue??

It's a crazy time in world politics and particularly so in the US.  Hype and rhetoric win out over nuance and detail.  Under those conditions, it's hard for an intricate issue like this one to get due consideration.

I hope democracy wins in November.

Planetary Health Index - a better way to measure progress

 "You get what you measure".  This old business aphorism is an essential truism.  Whether your goal is personal, organizational or national, that which you measure regularly will get your focus.  

Too often, we measure the wrong things.   People measure their weight, which is a poor indicator of health. Corporations are often focused on the quarterly results, which could be detrimental to the overall health of the company. 

 As societies, we obsess over gross domestic product (GDP), which is a largely arbitrary figure, consisting of the total goods and services produced in a country during a given time period.  When the media talks about the economy, they're talking about GDP.  If the economy is doing "well", GDP is growing.  If a country is in recession, GDP is shrinking.  Since the economy is a matter covered by general mainstream media and obsessed over by business media, it's foremost in everyone's mind.  It also means that if a government is judged to have managed the economy poorly, the chances of being elected are minimal.  A large GDP also provides a country with more geopolitical clout.  So, governments obsess over the GDP, elevating its importance over almost everything else.

What's wrong with that?  After all, GDP is a measure of how well off we are, right?  Well, it's not a very good one.  GDP is an aggregate measure, meaning that if some people are extremely wealthy, it says little about the experience of most people.  It counts bad things as well as good so if there's a plane crash and a lot of money is spent on cleanup, lawsuits and funerals, that's part of the GDP.  It only counts what you pay for.  If you pay for someone to cut your lawn, fix your car, look after your kids or paint your house, you're "helping" the economy by increasing the GDP.  Most worrying, though, is that GDP says nothing about the degradation of our planet, the ultimate resource on which we all rely for life itself.  When you remove plant life that was producing oxygen, when you kill microorganisms that are the basis of life, when you pollute the air and water, when you degrade the soil, when you destroy biodiversity that sustains the web of life, it takes a long time for that to be noticed in the form of GDP.  And by time it does, it's too late.  It's not exaggeration to say that our single minded pursuit of GDP is jeopardizing the ability of the planet to sustain life.

We need a new measure, one that reflects the ability of the planet to sustain life.  It needs to be an aggregate measure, including biodiversity, climate stability, air pollution, water pollution soil health and ocean health.  We could call it the planetary health index.  It needs to be top of mind for everyone, everywhere.  Free browsers should come with bookmarks to it.  News aggregators like Google need to include links to it.  Social media sites need to promote it.  Public broadcasters should host shows about it.

This needs to trump the GDP as the top priority of governments.

Some Unsolicited Advice to Democrats from an Outside Observer

At this point, there is a very good chance that in 9 months, we will be "celebrating" Trump 2.0.  That's a sobering thought for people who believe in climate science.  Or any science.  Or intelligent discourse. Or honesty.  Or justice of any sort. Or democracy.

Do you think that's an exaggeration? According to Sarah Kendzior, expert on the authoritarian states that emerged after the dissolution of he USSR, Trump has been following a well-documented pattern of undermining democracy since he was elected.  In fact, the situation with the Trump family is eerily similar to that of Uzbekistan.

Still, Trump is historically unpopular.  Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that polls say that almost any Democratic candidate would be 8-10 points ahead of him in an election? Maybe.  The problem is the increasingly vitriolic infighting that is going on between supporters of various Democratic candidates - particular between Bernie supporters and people I will refer to as Bernie-phobics (including those who say they will bring a barf bag to the ballot box if they have to vote for him).

If I were a Trump strategist, an obvious strategy presents itself.  When you need to re-elect a divisive, unpopular leader, you need to aggressively deploy voter suppression techniques.  Release damaging information (true or not) and make it appear that the candidates are cheating or employing unethical tactics to win.  For Republicans, the path to victory is to get Democrats engaged in a bitter battle to the point where the loser's supporters stay home on election day.

If I could address Democratic supporters, I'd say this.  First of all, stay clear of conspiracy theories.  If you are spreading rumours about other candidates that even your own candidate doesn't repeat,  you're not helping.  If you're announcing that you will never vote for candidate x, you're not helping.

For the Obama/Clinton/Biden crowd who seem to be desperate for any centrist alternative to Bernie Sanders, I have to ask: what's so bad about universal healthcare and free post-secondary education?  It seems to work pretty well for the Finns. If you're convinced that Bernie can't win, I invite you to read this insightful analysis that claims the opposite.  If you think Sanders is a radical, here's what French economist Thomas Piketty had to say on the matter:

 I think, first, that [Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders are not radicals," said Piketty in response to one interviewer's question. "They are moderate social democrats by European standards....

Like many other economists, Piketty insists that, as happened in Sweden, sharing wealth more broadly will make the U.S. economy stronger, not weaker, and richer overall.

And for those of you who consider Michael Bloomberg some sort of saviour who can stand up to Trump, I invite you to look at his own, very troubling past, particularly when it comes to racial issues.  No, he's not Trump but he's not great either.

For Bernie supporters, I would say this.  Yes, this is a historic chance to finally get a progressive in the White House and it will be a bitter blow if it doesn't happen.  Still, there is no basis for the claim that Biden, Klobuchar, or even Bloomberg is "worse than Trump".  Publicly declaring "Bernie or bust" is divisive and will encourage centrists to stay home or worse, defect to Trump.  Your best play is to support Bernie but stay positive.

To everyone, I would say support your candidate.  Keep it clean and remember that the ultimate goal in November is to have  president whose name doesn't rhyme with "dump". 

Good luck to the US and to the world.

Why the Democratic Party Demonizes Third Party Candidates

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the shitstorm started by Hillary Clinton when she spoke on David Plouffe's podcast Campaign HQ.

I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.

If you're just visiting this planet, you may not be aware that the "somebody" that Hillary references is none other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently running in the Democratic primaries to be the presidential nominee.

There are so many levels of weirdness attached to this, I need to prune some of them to narrow the focus. Forget, for the moment, that Hillary, whose supporters have been rightly claiming for years has been the subject of unfair accusations, is now leveling unsupported accusations at a fellow Democrat.  Forget that she is a senior member of the Democratic Party wading into a primary to shoot at one of the candidates. Forget that Gabbard's campaign was dying and Hillary's foray into this mess has shone a new spotlight on it.  Forget even that by stirring up controversy, Hillary is doing the Russians a huge favor because they ostensibly are trying to sow division in the US.

The weirdness I want to focus on is this: why do Democrats get so passionate when it comes to third party candidates?  After all, Jill Stein, who Hillary directly accused of being a "Russian asset", garnered a grand total of just under 470,000 votes in 2016.  Rough math tells me that's just around 1/3 of 1% of the votes cast. It seems hardly enough to make a huge deal over.  Democrats claim that she took enough votes away from Clinton in swing states to cost the election but this is nonsense.

Though Democrats have often pointed to Stein getting 1 percent of the vote in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a reason Clinton lost those longtime Democratic strongholds, exit polls have shown that most of Stein's voters would not have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein had not run.

 The Democratic Party is an institution with lots of money and elections run on data; so I'm sure they know that Stein didn't cost them the election.  So, why are Clinton and others making with the histrionics?  More to the point is this.  If third party candidate really are a threat to the US electoral system, isn't there a way to change the voting system to address the threat?

The answer to the second question is yes and provides insight into the first question.  If third party candidates were a threat to the US electoral system, there is a fairly simple way to address it.  Simply switch from a from a "first-past-the-post" single choice ballot to a ranked ballot where voters can rank their choices.  The inherent assumption in the Democrats complaint is that if the third party candidates (like Jill Stein) weren't there, the voters would still show up and they would vote Democrat.  This isn't actually true but for now, let's assume it is.

You might think that the Democratic Party would jump at the prospect of an "alternative vote" system with ranked ballots where people who really wanted to vote for, say, the Green Party but would choose the Democrat second.  This would allow the Democratic Party to capture the votes of those "spoiler" candidates.  If you think this, you would be wrong.

The last thing that either the Democrats or the Republicans want is a system that encourages more parties.  They have a monopoly on voter choice and they don't want to give it up.  Every election, they use fear mongering to get people who don't really like them to vote for them anyway, just to stop the other party.  It's a dumb, anti-democratic game but it works for them.  So, they don't want it to change.

The Reality Show Presidency

Say what you like about Trump but the fact is that he's transformed government.  No longer is it a dry, boring affair where serious policies are crucial and conflict of interest can ruin you.  Now, you can be as smart, as honest, as empathetic, as telegenic as you like.  If you're not entertaining, you're out.

You can be perplexed and offended by this.  You can point out that millions of lives are deeply affected by what the government does.  You can insist that governing is a serious business and needs to be done by serious people - people with expertise, compassion, experience and vision.  I agree with you but that clearly isn't what people expect anymore.  This is an era of memes, pet videos, bizarre pictures and emoji.  If the government isn't entertaining, people's attention will shift in an instant.  It isn't just young people, either.  Plenty of Xers and boomers now have the attention span of gnats as the digital age drowns us all.

Twenty years ago, Trump would have single digit approval and would have been dumped by his own party.  Twenty years ago, Trump would never have won the nomination.  Twenty years ago, he could have been the Ross Perot of his day, a crank; a joke.  He is a joke but the joke is now on Americans and on the world.  Make no mistake.  What's happening is deadly serious.  Nationalism and its ugly twin racism are engulfing the US.  The myriad of links from Trump and GOP to Russian money are not, as Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard might have you believe, baseless conspiracy theories. Authoritarian regime expert Sarah Kendzior's warnings that Trump and his minions are using well-understood tactics to move America closer to authoritarianism are not completely ridiculous notions.  It's time for people to pay attention.

Unfortunately, most of the people who are paying closest attention seem to come from the old era of boring government.  They aren't learning.  Consider this tweet posted yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald:

1. Messages from@RadioFreeTom,@JRubinBlogger,@WalshFreedom and others are the key to the survival of America. If we have learned anything from the Trump era, it is that we MUST end the personal invective of politics. Politics is about governing, and governing is about policy..

Trump has been running circles around these folks by the last three years by doing the exact opposite of what he proposes.  Does anyone think that the ~120 million Americans that, judging from the polls, still support Trump and have no intention of abandoning him, are going to have their minds changed by that?

So, what to do?

1. Stop chasing Trump's every crazy tweet.  The one yesterday about buying Greenland is a great example.  It's not going to happen so ignore it.  If the press and progressives do this and leave Trump's base to talk about it among themselves, he will look as weak and foolish as he is.
2. Focus on issues that matter to Trump's base like conflict of interest, his Russian connections, lack of wage growth and the way tax cuts have benefited the wealthy.  Use House investigations to dig up dirt.
3. Impeach.  Maybe Nancy Pelosi is a genius who is dragging her feet to make sure impeachment hearings can become an election issue.  Maybe she's timid. Maybe she's compromised. Maybe she's a genius and I just don't understand. But if Trump isn't impeached, this will be a message to future presidents. There will be no consequences for anything you do as long as your base doesn't abandon you.
4. Learn from the last election.  The Democrats need a populist, someone who can draw a crowd and make people care enough to show up and vote.  Someone like Bernie.
5. The Democrats need to firmly address the elephant in the room - the spiraling gap between the poor and the rich.  For decades, they've been promising to help the poor but pursuing policies that make the wealthy wealthier. Universal health care is a good start but it's not enough.  Bernie or or Elizabeth.  Not Joe. 

The game has changed.  If the Democrats and progressives don't change with it, they will always lose.

Socialism? wtf is that?

In the past few years, I have seen a noticeable uptick in anti-capitalist sentiment on social media.  In a remarkable turnaround from the 90s when being called a "liberal" in the US could end your political ambitions, many people are openly labeling themselves as socialists.  I always wonder what they mean by that.

While socialism actually means one of a variety of forms of collective or public ownership of the economy, the word socialist is still widely used by people on the economic right to mean almost any policy they don't like.  Even on the political left, many call social programs like welfare or socialized medicine as socialism.  Nordic countries are often described as socialism when they clearly social democracies with capitalist economies.  Bernie Sanders has, at times, called himself a socialist; something he is definitely not. 

I find that much of conventional socialist thought is still modeled after Marxist thought - exploited workers and cooperative ownership of organizations.  I find this curious in 2019 as we move towards a future where a manufacturing facility might consist of a building full of robots.  Although I support unionization of workers who truly are exploited, I also see the limitations of this from three perspectives.  First, unionization raises wages which causes companies to  invest more in labour saving technology, which in turn reduces employment.  This isn't inherently a bad thing, providing we have societies that look after unemployed people (which we currently don't).  Second, technology acts as a multiplier that allows individuals to become wealthy to an extent that wouldn't have been possible in Marx's time.  Finally, I regularly see unions on the wrong side of environmental issues as they support expansion of dirty industries for the benefit of their workers.

I think socialist thought requires an update.

First, instead of focused on workers, it needs to be people-centric.  Over the next few decades, we may find ourselves increasingly in a position where workers aren't needed for production of necessary goods and services. People still need to be free, cared for and provided opportunities to challenge themselves and grow.

Second, the resources of the world need to be equitably distributed to the people of the world.  Also, consumption needs to be capped to within and amount that is sustainable across the planet.  This means that sooner or later, there needs to be some form of democratic world government.  No, not the UN.

Third, there needs to be limits on the amount of wealth inequality allowed.  I don't care how good of a singer you are or how talented at curating cat videos, you are not entitled to enormous wealth because that wealth allows you to consume disproportionate resources.  Inequality is corrosive to social cohesion.

Finally, we need to abandon nationalism in favor of localism.  Nation-states should be weakened, with more control given to local governments, under an overall global administration.

I know this all sounds so utopian but it's all possible.  The key element is for people to wake up and understand that giant corporations and the billionaires that own them are pan-national.  When trade deals are negotiated and pundits claim that this or that country won the negotiations, what isn't mentioned is that the corporations win no matter what.  They operate in both countries and simply adjust their operations to maximize their profits.  While ordinary people are played into acting against their own interests in pursuit of the "national interest", billionaires win either way.   When people understand that their interests are more aligned with people in other countries than the billionaires in their own country, then things become much clearer.

Good luck to us all.

Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

I grew up in a world before the Internet.  There were no social media, no online games, and no email.  Most importantly, in the rural location where I lived, there were few sources of information: TV and radio news, one daily newspaper from Edmonton, one weekly newspaper from Toronto and Time Magazine in the mail monthly.  The local town and school libraries were a joke and so my reference information was a set of encyclopedias.  It was a different world.  While you and your neighbor might disagree on the interpretation of events, for the most part you were in agreement with what events took place and which events were most important.

Fast forward to the1990's and the explosive growth of the Internet.  Suddenly people had free online access to major newspapers around the world.  Chat groups and online discussion forums meant that you could have discussions with people anywhere, anytime.  Wikipedia came online in 2001 and in 6 years became the largest encyclopedia in history, replacing the Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.  Social media is so pervasive is our society, it's easy to forget that it has only been mainstream for about 15 years since MySpace took off.

We're now connected in ways that in my youth would have been considered science fiction.  Although much of the most valuable information has become secured behind firewalls, there are still vast troves of information freely available.  We should be the most knowledgeable people in history.

It's Not All Good
In the 1990's, when the Internet was first coming into its own, I found myself drawn to conspiracy theories and other topics where mainstream knowledge was questioned. It started as harmless fun with topics like Roswell, the existence of UFOs and whether the moon landing was faked.  This morphed into more serious issues like the JFK assassination and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered the Vietnam War.  As it went on, people I knew were starting to be immersed  topics like Internet health cures and whether vaccines cause autism.

Spending time reading about topics in which you have no expertise starts out as interesting but soon becomes bewildering.  How do you fact check something when everyone comes with their own set of facts? Over time, the concept of truth becomes hazier and more malleable; and the research begins to feel like a project that will never lead to a conclusion.

For me, the turning point came after 9-11.  So many improbable events happened on one day, it was hard to absorb.  Predictably, it took almost no time for groups to start accusing the US government of a "false flag" operation.  Although many of the conspiracy theories arising from 911 lack any real evidence, there are many credible people who simply question weaknesses in the official explanation.  Over 3,000 architects, engineers and scientists have signed on to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.  They are questioning the official NIST version of how the 3 buildings fell and demanding a new, independent investigation.  One article I found particularly chilling was this 2009 article in the Open Chemical Physics Journal documenting the analysis of dust collected from points around New York City after 911.  It claims that particles in the dust are consistent with an explosive form of thermite, a material which could be used to bring down buildings.

Hours spent researching 911 left me feeling bewildered and lost. It was impossible to ignore the holes in the official story yet it's awful to contemplate the the potential implications of the official story being wrong or worse, lies.  I gave up and moved on to other things.

The Problems Continue
The Internet continues to be a place of questionable information, fake news, "alternative facts", well-written disinformation and just plain lies.  Two recent examples are the climate change debate and the 2016 US election and subsequent Trump presidency. 

In the case of climate change, it's hard to imagine another branch of scientific research that is subject to so much controversy, resistance and disinformation.  The reasons are fairly clear - people don't like change, especially when it costs them money; and there are huge industries that stand to lose trillions of dollars in revenue by switching away from fossil fuels.  The Internet provides support and ammunition to those who don't want to change.  Meanwhile, scientists have been issuing increasingly urgent pleas for citizens and politicians to take action.  It's only recently, since the effects of climate change are becoming more apparent, that people are starting to take it seriously.

In terms of the election, the Internet was a cesspool of false information and entirely made up news. These articles were widely shared on social media. There is incontrovertible evidence that points to Russian involvement in swinging the election towards Trump. A study conducted in 2018 concluded that fake news may well have cost Clinton the presidency.

So Now What?
The Internet is the greatest revolution in human communication since the invention of written language.  However, like all technology, its power can be misused as easily as it is used.  It can be used to spread information and build knowledge or it can be used to spread disinformation and shut down debate.


Some practical suggestions for dealing with the dangers of false information include:

• Social media giants need to take more accountability for false information that is spread on their sites.  This is starting to happen.
• We need entities that can call out fake news without being attacked by the left or the right.  This need has been variously filled by websites like snopes.com, some journalists and certain academics.  However, so far, none of this has proven capable of effectively calling out or correcting misinformation.
• People need to develop better critical reasoning skills.  In particular, there is a phenomenon called the Kruger-Dunning effect which describes peoples' tendencies to overestimate their knowledge and abilities when it comes to forming conclusions on technical topics.

Navigating Climate Change for Lay People

I'm not a scientist.  My credentials consist of a couple of entry-level university courses, reading of popular science literature such as Scientific American and deep curiosity and concern for the world.  Still, I'm not naturally inclined to believe or do something just because the experts told me so.  I try to balance a healthy skepticism with respect due to scientists who've devoted their careers to inquiry in specialized fields.

So, the topic of climate change has produced a serious quandary for me.  It covers such a huge area of topics that I found it almost impossible for me a as a lay person to completely understand.  Although the bulk of the scientific community has largely rallied behind the science, there is an active community of detractors anchored by a small number of contrarian scientists.  How many are genuine and how many are part of a funded proponents of the fossil fuel industry is a matter of speculation and debate.

The broad strokes of climate change science are simple enough.  The earth's climate is produced by an interaction of heat with the atmosphere, water, and land.  There is a balance between the energy received from the sun's rays and energy radiated off into space. An important part of that balance is the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2).  Greenhouse gases absorb a portion of the spectrum of the sun's rays that would otherwise be radiated out into space and radiate the energy back to the earth in the form of infrared radiation.  Without the greenhouse effect, the earth would be too cold to support life as we know it. 

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, human activity has significantly increased the amounts of 2 greenhouse gases in particular - CO2, which is produced by burning oil, coal and other fuels; and CH4, which is the main component of natural gas. Here's where the complexity comes in.  Although the effect on an annual basis of the additional CO2 and CH4 is slight, it's cumulative over time.  Scientists say that models and experience show that the increased energy over decades and centuries produces significant rises in temperature, affecting the  the biosphere and causing disruption to the conditions that support life which has adapted itself to specific circumstances.  Detractors argue a multitude of contradicting points of view including

1. The world isn't actually warming - perceived warming is due to measurement errors
2. The world is warming but it's not due to human activity
3. The warming exists but it's actually a net benefit
4. The warming exists but it's cheaper to live with it than avoid it

To make it even more complicated, there are numerous types of feedback, both positive and negative, that will affect the ultimate impact that the increased greenhouse gases have.  There are factors like the loss of the albedo effect (cooling due to reflection of energy from pale surfaces like ice) when ice melts, the increase in plant growth due to increased CO2 and the increase in methane when the permafrost melts, and the potential for massive loss of rain forest due to temperature change.

Unless you're a scientist with a significant amount of time invested in this, the chances of you drawing an informed opinion from the details are remote.  So, how do you move forward?  How do you make a decision when the evidence is so complicated, you aren't qualified to evaluate it?

 I've taken a 3-pronged approach to evaluating the problem of whether we should be actively reducing our GHG output:

1. Which side has the most credibility?
2. Which side presents arguments that are most consistent with observed results?
3. What are the relative risks and rewards of of each side?

Credibility
On one side of the debate you have the vast majority of the world's scientific community (no major scientific body disputes the science of climate change), most of the world's governments, and environmental groups.  On the other, you have a small number of contrarian scientists, the fossil fuel industry, right wing politicians and think tanks.  Each side has accused the other of distorting the issue to protect their respective financial interests.  There are persistent claims of industry-funded "astroturf" groups on one side and environmentalists being funded by liberal billionaires on the other.  To me it's difficult to equate the two.  The financial interest of the fossil fuel industry is clearly massively greater than that of climate scientists vying for grants.  If there were something improper about the way climate scientists arrived at their conclusions, the fossil fuel industry with its almost unlimited funds would surely have uncovered it.

Some claim that because the community of climate scientists is relatively small and they peer-review each other's work that group think and confirmation bias have tainted the results.  This is possible - it wouldn't be the first time that the scientific community have gone off in a false direction and shouted down contrarian views.

In my view, the scientific community has significantly greater credibility than the the fossil fuel industry and the few contrarian scientists.  The scientific community is fairly conservative and shies away from the most extreme (and speculative) scenarios that could come from climate change.  Whatever the financial rewards for scientists who publish on the risks of climate change, they pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars of revenue at stake for the fossil fuel industry if carbon intensive industries are curtailed.

Observed Results
To me, this isn't even close.  This chart clearly shows an upward trend in temperature.  All of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1997.  1998 was an unusually hot year due to a a particularly strong el nino and it took several years afterwards for the warming to catch up.  There are still people who are falsely claiming that "warming stopped after 1998".  Other visible signs of warming include the loss of ice in the arctic, glacier loss and the accelerated melt in Greenland and parts of Antarctica.

Some will claim that the warming is due to some other reason besides GHGs (eg sunspots).  They've yet to provide convincing evidence to back that up.

Risk Analysis
It's impossible to be 100% certain of what will happen in the future.  Risk analysis is the practice of considering and adjusting for the effects of uncertainty on outcomes.  There are unlimited possibilities but for the purpose of this exercise, I'll consider 4 scenarios:

1. Climate science has correctly or conservatively determined the causes and effects of climate change; and we continue to increase GHGs
2. Climate science has correctly or conservatively determined the causes and effects of climate change; and we cut GHG's, trending to zero over 25 years.
3. Climate science is wrong about the causes of climate change or has dramatically overestimated the effects; and we continue to increase GHGs
4. Climate science is wrong about the causes of climate change or has dramatically overestimated the effects; and we cut GHGs, trending to zero over 25 years.

Scenario 1 is the disaster envisioned by many climate scientists and environmentalists.  The only benefit I can see is a delay in transition costs to cleaner energy.  The downsides are potentially vast: drought, mass starvation, mass human migration, ocean acidification, greater regions of hurricanes, areas of the world abandoned due to extreme heat and sea level rise. At the same time, fossil fuels will gradually grow scarcer and more expensive. If human migration, food shortages, and water scarcity become extreme, conflict and wars and virtually certain to follow.  Some areas in Canada, Russia and other northern countries may have somewhat enlarged agricultural zones but they will be more than offset by losses in other areas.  Many people seem to focus on extreme weather when contemplating the effects of climate change but I see that as just the tip of the iceberg.

Scenario 2 is scenario 1 but with greater costs due to transitioning energy and much less severe impacts. There are side effects to electrifying the energy system - cleaner air, water and soil.   A few years ago, it was common for people to claim that switching to renewable energy was akin to reverting to the stone age.  Now, however, solar and wind energy are the cheapest forms of new energy and electric vehicles are the fast growing sector of the auto market. Mark Jacobson, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, has developed scenarios that show 100% renewable energy is not only feasible, but cheaper than continuing to develop fossil fuels.

In scenario 3, global warming either mysteriously abates or it turns out to have more positives than negatives.  It's very unlikely that a warming planet will have a net positive impact to the biosphere in the short term because plants and animals have spent thousands of years adapting to the climate they are in.  A drastic change over a short time frame is normally associated with extinction events.  Although, this scenario avoids the transition cost to cleaner energy, there are still downsides: continued increases in pollution, scarcity & cost of fossil fuels.

Scenario 4 is what fossil fuel companies and climate change deniers fear the most - we'll transition away from fossil fuels and it will be all for nothing.  Will it really, though?  The development and usage of fossil fuels is one of the most environmentally destructive things that people do.  Also, fossil fuels themselves are very unevenly distributed and this distribution has resulted in significant geopolitical strife over the past 100 years.  Even if it costs more in the short term, switching to renewable energy has environmental and geopolitical benefits that can't be measured in dollars.

In summary, I would say that from a risk/reward standpoint, reducing GHG's has greater potential rewards (a cleaner, lower conflict planet) and lesser potential downsides (transition costs vs the potential of societal collapse) than continuing to do what we have been doing.  The risk of continuing to increase GHG emissions is reckless.

Summary
The topic of climate change is incredibly complex, particularly for someone who's not a scientist.  Still, it's possible to logically analyze the options without detailed technical knowledge of the intricacies involved.

To me, it's an easy choice.  When I consider the subject from a standpoint of which side has credibility, which outcome is most aligned to observed results and when I look at potential scenarios, it's clear that the best path is to accelerate the transition to cleaner technologies, eliminate fossil fuels and end the risk practice of using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for GHGs.

But you use oil too!

Regularly, I find myself on Twitter or online fora debating with people who, for a variety of reasons, are deeply protective of the oil industry, particularly that of the Alberta tar sands.  Almost invariably, they will start to attack my lifestyle, claiming that I use oil to drive my car or heat my house.  When I point out that I drive very little and cycle to work, they tell me my cycling clothing and helmet are made of oil.  One even called out the use of oil in my bicycle tires.

So, I'm here to come clean.  I do use oil.  Although I drive little (~5,000 kilometers annually for a family of 3), my minivan burns gas.  Although my house is heated with hydroelectricity, the water heater is natural gas; because that's what was there when we bought the house. There is certainly oil in the synthetic materials used in my bicycle clothing and my shoes.  Although I make an effort to buy locally, lots of things I use have been brought to my home by oil burning ships, trucks and trains. I've become aware they add plastics to t-shirts.  I understand that some corporate sociopath decided to add microplastics to the liquid soap we use but it has since mercifully been banned.  So, that's it.  A full confession.  I must be a raving hypocrite, right? 

Well, not exactly.  I try to live my life in a way that minimizes my usage of oil because I understand that scientists say that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change; and climate change will threaten civilization itself.  So, I choose to cycle when I'd rather drive.  And I take vacations close to home when airfare is so cheap it can literally be cheaper to fly across the planet. My next car will be smaller, possibly electric if I can afford it.  And when my water heater dies, it will be replaced by an electric model, perhaps tankless.  I would love to have solar panels, if I could afford them.  And a heat pump.

However, any amount of personal choice and sacrifice is insignificant in a world of rampant oil use.  That's why the most important choice I make has nothing to do with my lifestyle.  I vote for the Green Party, the only Canadian political party that would make any meaningful moves to correct climate change.  I  support carbon taxes and higher individual taxes, if that's what it takes to save the planet.   I even advocate online, debating with people who seem to be afraid of a world without oil. 

Transition will be difficult but it can be done if the right changes are made and everyone participates.  And it won't cost near as much as opponents fear.  It isn't necessary to eliminate all oil but it is necessary to stop burning hydrocarbons for fuel.

Is Utopia Possible?

Recently, a Twitter acquaintance posted a link to a blog post with a rather nihilistic take on responses to climate change.  It essentially claimed that solutions from capitalists, socialists, communists, liberals, individualists, radicals, and Malthusians were all useless; implying we have to throw away all preexisting ideologies and start from scratch.

For such a pessimistic view on the world, the reference to Malthus was particularly ironic.  Of course, Thomas Malthus was the British economist who, in the period 1798-1830, proposed that expanding populations would quickly exhaust food supply.  Malthus wasn't wrong, exactly, he just couldn't predict technological changes that would increase food supply or reduced population growth as the middle class emerged and children stopped being economic assets.  No one can predict the future and the lesson we should take from Malthus is that no matter how bad things look now, they can turn around.  There is nothing to be gained from panicking in a fit of apocalyptic despair.

All of the different world views in the first paragraph have strengths as well as weaknesses.  It would be much more practical to accentuate the positive than to throw away everything.

Capitalism certainly has many sins to answer for but you can't deny the efficacy of small groups of independent entrepreneurs when it comes to generating ideas and launching concepts.

Socialism provides economic justice and ensures that all receive an opportunity to develop and grow as people wish.

Liberals bring a pragmatism and a passion for social justice.

Individuals can't change the world by themselves but nor will global solutions work unless individuals participate and make the necessary sacrifices.

Radicals are needed for their fresh thinking and fearlessness when it comes to challenging established norms.

As for Malthusians, Malthus was right.  Population can't grow forever.  The good news is that history shows most people choose to have smaller families; assuming children aren't economic assets and they have access to birth control.

Humans have evolved to the point where we are our own enemy.  Most of the pressing problems we face, from climate change to wars, were created by us.  As Einstein once said, "the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them". If we are going to survive as a species (at least while we have only one planet), we're going to need to change the relationships with our world and with each other.

We need to stop viewing the planet as simply a resource, vast and relatively impervious to our actions.  We need to instead view it as a fragile web of interconnected systems.  There needs to be a system of global caps on the resources we consume, the emissions we give off and the damage we inflict.  An evidence-based scientific consensus should be developed and enforced.  Increases in average standard of living are only provided through technological advances that reduce the impact of goods and activities.  And the population needs to be stabilized.  GDP becomes a quaint, obsolete concept.

At the same time, we have to stop seeing each other as enemies, competitors, and rivals.  Instead, we are fellow travelers with a shared interest in peaceful coexistence.  Resources are shared equitably among the world's people and the products of research are freely available to all.  Quality healthcare and education are freely available to all.

How do we get there?  Honestly, I don't know.  I only know that we must find a way.  Or today's Malthus might be proven right.