Bernice King's Advice, Interpreted

There is a list of wise advice for dealing with Trump and his administration being passed around and attributed to Bernice King, one of the daughters of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. 

It seems like useful advice, if you interpret it to all sides of the current political differences.

Here is my interpretation:

---

(1) Quit talking about people. Talk about principles.

(2) Remember that conspiracies happen. Then they self-destruct. They are not on your side, whatever your side is.

(3) Arguing does not convince people to join your side. All it does is give the conspiracies power. Seek understanding instead.

(4) Focus on principles first. Personality is a decoy. Policy is for people who can implement policy, and if individual people don't implement policy it doesn't get implemented. Implement your policies and don't wait for the government.

(5) Keep your messages positive. Anger, fear, and darkness give the conspiracies power.

(6) You are not helpless. If you are hopeless, find something worth hoping for.

(7) The arts, artisanry, micro-industry, philosophy, education, and even religion are among the essential small-scale activities that ideologues and conspirators want to throw under the bus. Support those who do the small-scale essentials. Participate, because that's the best support. Shun ideologies that erase the individual search for meaning.

(8) News is news, and is often not news. Check your sources, and don't panic.

(9) Take care of yourself. Listen to your own deepest heart, your own deepest conscience. If you believe in a real God, that's where only the real God can talk to you.

(10) Resist evil, wherever it comes from. Peaceful resistance almost always works better than violent resistance, and violence always puts you at a disadvantage. Start as peaceful as you can, and keep it as peaceful as you can.

 

---

 

[Facebook turned the bullet for number (8) into a shocked smiley, and I wanted to leave it like that because we should always be ready to be shocked at how brazenly fake our news sources can be. But it registers as a graphic and would become the lead graphic for this post, so I took it out. (8-|) ]

Checking the provenance, here's a URL to her post update, back in early 2017, on FB:   https://www.facebook.com/OfficialBerniceKing/posts/10158320528270571

The account looks legitimate and I found it via an old Twitter (now X) post that appears to be hers, so I'm pretty sure it is legitimately hers. Her mode of expression indicates she may not want it to be considered original with her, but I would express my gratitude to her for posting it. 

Thank you, Ms. King.

 

Neuro-Typical? Normal?

We should understand that no one is neuro-typical. Neuro-typical is a statistical artifact. 

So is normalcy.

Claiming that, because you are "normal", everyone must conform exactly to your ideas of how things should be, of how people communicate, of how people behave, is a symptom of a gross divergence. 

No mortal should claim to be God, at any rate.

It should be enough to have people around you who will meet you half-way. The vast majority of people in the world don't even have that, and we've still managed to more than survive. 

It's true that, in times of peace, somehow we all get along. 

But it's because of all the people that are struggling and somehow sort-of meeting the demands of those who most loudly proclaim that they themselves should be the norm, their behavior and language should be the standard.

Each generation has to learn it all over again -- how to meet people half-way. 

Let people be.

 

Dual Citizenship?

Citizenship is a problem I've been wrestling with for a while, now everyone is talking about it.

Dual citizenship is a can of worms. It entangles people in the laws of two countries with necessarily incompatible legal foundations.

The USA recognizes, or rather, refrains from refusing to recognize, dual citizenship.

Japan does not recognize dual citizenship, technically.

If I were to try to obtain Japanese citizenship, by technical requirement of Japanese law, I would have to formally give up my US citizenship (which is an expensive process). And the USA would not necessarily recognize my having done so.

But I have lived more than half my life in Japan at this point, and I have no reason not to expect to die here.

When trying to work through dilemmas, I like to work out ideals and then map them to reality. Or try to.

Ideally, we should not need dual-citizenship. What we call permanent residence should count as citizenship. That we could tell whose laws we have a greater obligation to.

But that ideal requires things to be different from the way they are in this world.

In specific, there would be birth citizenship. There are fine points to untangle in that, but we can't untangle them until we deal with some other problems, so we won't try just yet.

Then, if you had lived long enough to become what we call a permanent resident in our current laws, we should be, rather, citizens, so that we could participate properly in voting and taxation and other duties which devolve on people who live in primarily in one place.

The birth citizenship would not be erased, it would be placed in abeyance, and would be recoverable.

People who spend half their time in one country and half in another would claim one country of citizenship and would be a, perhaps long-term, resident of the other. 

Taxes would be split up by where they are incurred.

Social security as a national retirement insurance scheme would have to be privatized, so that the person who moves could take it with him /her.

Now that would require cooperation between the countries involved, but I think it would provide a better framework for preventing countries' laws from becoming entangled with each other. 

And that's all the time I have for theorizing I have right now.

Is $2000 in Tax Forced Insurance Cheaper than $8000 in Insurance?

From a post a friend shared on Facebook:

All it takes to get Universal Healthcare,
is convincing Americans that paying
$2000 in taxes is better than paying
$8000 in Health Insurance.

It literally boils down to enough
Americans understanding that the
number 2 is smaller than the number 8.

Every other country has
already figured this out.

Me: 

If a used car salesman brings me this kind of talk, I'm not looking for the fine print.

I'm looking for the exit.

Also me: 

This is how insurance companies have succeeded in forcing indefensible intrusion into ordinary citizens' daily lives, essentially doing an end-run around Constitutional law. 

This is how the government gets into your bedroom for real.

And, finally, me:

But -- This is also what happens when a free people can't take care of each other, can't take care of their own, without some authority figure telling them who, when, what, how, where, and why.

The Wolves in the White House

The wolves have been in the government chambers, including the White House, since the founding. It's one of the most common threads of history. 

Some 250 years ago on the east coast of what is now the USA, a group of the wolves got together and agreed to a new form of détente. Instead of trying to get rid of the wolves, they accepted that they themselves were wolves to a large sector of the citizenry, and they agreed to a set of rules that did _not_ make the citizenry free. 

There is no way to force people to be free. 

The new rules they set rather support a people that is willing to be free in their freedom by keeping any of the various factions -- the wolves -- from getting an upper hand. 

Partisan politics (DNC, RNC, any other party that might develop long-term viability) is the result of certain factions collaborating to break the rules of détente -- factions within the party. That's why you have extremists along with moderates, and various flavors within the parties.

This is one of the things everyone who wants to be free needs to understand. The very existence of only two controlling parties is because most of the factions have agreed to try to break the détente. They think they will somehow win in the resulting power struggle.

The constant veering back and forth from left to right, liberal to conservative, etc. is a necessary adjustment in keeping any one faction of the wolves from taking control. 

That's why the leaders of the parties don't like a loose cannon, except when they are the ones who haven't been in control. 

That's why I'm really upset with the DNC for pushing RFKjr out of the contest this time. The two ruling parties have gotten too good at colluding with each other, and a win -- or even a serious challenge -- from a third party will force them back into détente. 

Moderates are generally politicians who are willing to keep the détente. Biden was a good moderate until part way through his first term, when he ran out of energy to keep his party hacks -- his support team -- in check, and they took over. 

Harris, as I say, is a loose cannon, too. She's good at hiding it. But if she had been elected, there would have been a lot of surprise and cries of betrayal from within the party that was hoping for another president they could manipulate.

Freedom is not free. 

 

 

(Wovles. LoL: Sorry about the URL, but I'm leaving it that way.) 

Affirming for Real

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.)   

A thought about affirmative action --

If you want people to be productive, you want them to produce things of value. If you want people to produce things of value you have to believe that they can produce things of value.

If you want to believe that people can produce things of value, you must believe that they have value -- intrinsic value.

But if you don't show that belief in your actions, you are essentially refusing to believe the thing you want to believe.

But affirmative action seems to put unqualified people in positions they aren't qualified for.

Wait. I said "not qualified" twice. Let's take one of those away.

But affirmative action puts people in positions they are not qualified for.

You get why I made those changes, don't you?

How do we demonstrate our belief in people without putting them in positions they aren't yet qualified for?

"... aren't _yet_ qualified ..."

It's impossible to get qualified without experience, and it's impossible to get experience without being in a position you aren't qualified for.

So what do we do to reduce the damage unqualified people do while they are getting experience and getting qualified?

How about letting the people who are qualified stick around?

Not so close as to prevent the new guy on the job from learning things the hard way (which is the only way to get experience), but not so far away that when the inevitable troubles ensue they can't help.

This is what seems to me to be missing in our current efforts at affirmative action.

Wealth Caps?

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.) 

I consider myself conservative. 

I consider myself to respect the concept of natural stewardship. I understand how artificial restraints on wages can strangle creativity.

But there comes a point -- or two or three -- where ... 

If you've already amassed enough personal wealth to retire comfortably ten times over, it's time to do so, to move over and let someone fresh join the fight. No, those who have gotten wealthy shouldn't just go on vacation, there are plenty of service projects that have no way of generating monetary value that a person can get involved in, to keep a person competitive, sharp, and alive.  

And, really, service itself should be considered a higher value than money. 

Having enough money to retire a hundred times over gives an individual the sort of personal power that minor nobility have in nobility systems of government, and if the national government is involving itself in taxing personal income, if it fails to set some boundaries on that kind of wealth, it is effectively setting up a modern version of nobility.  

In the US, that should be a Constitutional issue -- and should be held up as evidence that the national income tax itself, amendment notwithstanding, is a breach of the Constitution.  

Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times the amount of money that enables a comfortable retirement, there's a point where the government should have a right to step in and say that that much wealth is on the face of it evidence of business malpractice, and force early retirement. I mean, if the government can force retirement at 65 or 70, under whatever untested assumptions, surely the government can force retirement at, say, 650 MUSD or so, to borrow an arbitrary number.  

[JMR202411200736 note:] 

(I should emphasize that I am speaking strictly in the loose theoretical -- I haven't thought this through to the consequences, and I am confident that, like all other good ideas, there will likely be negative effects and more loopholes for the lawyers and the rich who can afford lawyers.)

[JMR202411200736 note end.] 

I'm sure that finding indirect holdings would become a problem for the regulatory agencies. I could guess that some of the very rich would find tricks like paying people to hold holdings for them -- but even that would require them to dilute the power they can exercise. 

Getting the national government out of the income tax business would definitely help reduce the special interest involvement at national level, and spread them out at the state level enough to dilute their power -- assuming that states would completely take over the individual income tax function.  

I suspect that simply pushing the income tax function down to the state level would pretty much force most national corporations to split up on state lines, and significantly limit monopolies and the insane levels of personal wealth.