COVID enabled authoritarians to expand their power:

An appeals court sided with the governor and found the emergency act gave him vast authority—including the “police power” to create new law. The California Supreme Court let the appeals court decision stand, meaning that in any declared emergency the governor can do whatever he deems appropriate without serious checks or balances.

Last month, Newsom mercifully lifted the vast majority of edicts and orders—but the precedent has been set for future emergencies. There are no real limits on executive power.

There really needs to be consequences for these expansions of government powers. I’m just not sure what the solution is. When the elections can’t be trusted, the “news” is cheering the authoritarians, and individuals who speak out are canceled, what are people to do when they find the restrictions intolerable?

On a recent trip to Idaho I finished listening to How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter.

Although her observations and interpretation of current events in the U.S. differ significantly from mine her broader perspective of civil wars world wide and the causes resonated as quite plausible to me. I highly recommended reading it and skipping or pushing through the parts where you know she is oblivious to reality. For example, in her mind January 6th 2021 was an attempted coup. The attempted kidnapping of Gov. Whitmer of Michigan was something similar rather than an FBI entrapment operation.* And President Trump and the Republican party was/is authoritarian while Democrats are pro-freedom..

There are times when I just had to pause and try to recover from some of the crazy stuff she would say. Things like (paraphrasing) “California has a minority majority”. What? In a literal reading that is completely nonsensical. Or, (still paraphrasing) as she talks about the need for government to becoming less authoritarian, “Social media must be regulated and not allow extremists a safe haven.”

I finally managed to reconcile the schizophrenia by deciding she was too close an observer to the situation in the U.S. With this I could move on to accept her study of other countries as more objective and could be used as evidence for the claimed principles of civil war detection and prevention.

The following are my takeaways:

• Governments exist on a scale of –10 (fully autocratic) to +10 (full democracies).
• Countries at either end of the scale are stable and not subject to civil war.
• Countries in the middle, anocracies, are at risk of civil war.
• The US. is at it’s lowest point, +5, since the early 1800 (this doesn’t seem to account for the great unpleasantness of 1861 to 1865) after being a +10 for decades.
• A political divide along racial and/or religious lines is a critical component of civil wars.
• Long time abuse and lack of political influence of one group combined with losing hope for an end to their abuse is one of two possible triggers for violence.
• Or a loss of power and/or status/prestige by a group is the second possible trigger for the use of violence.
• Social media has played a huge role in the initiation of civil wars world wide. The rise of social media is highly correlated with the exponential increase in violent conflicts.

These principals were explained and supported by examples from conflicts all over the world.

* The trial may reveal things that change my mind on this.

This was in the package with a recent purchase I made:

One might be inclined to give someone a pass on this if it were a label on something like a household cleaner with a pleasant smell. Or maybe even your gun oil. But I don’t think you would arrive at the actual produce even with a game of twenty questions.

It is a cell phone holster:

How many trees will be cut down, how much electricity will be used in the creation of those paper inserts, how much landfill space will be used, to save zero people from consuming the cell phone holster and causing a birth defect or have other reproductive harm? Anyone stupid enough to eat that piece of plastic is going to be too stupid to read and remember what the warning was about.

Of course it is California. It is not about saving lives. It is about exerting control and demoralizing the populace.

When I read stuff like this it is like I’m reading something written by an eight grader:

It’s Time for a Guaranteed Basic Income in Washington State

With basic incomes, more people are able to afford food and housing, pay off debt, get full-time jobs, save for emergencies, and get the physical and mental health support they need. Cash payments dramatically improve the lives of our neighbors and communities. That’s a source of hope. Unfortunately, the very need for GBI also reveals just how many of us are close to losing everything; even people working multiple jobs that offer little security for workers.

There is no hint of appreciation for the glaring problems of costs, fraud, and demotivation. I was reminded of what I posted about The Communist Manifesto:

Assumptions critical to the reasoning which followed were unsupported and, at least to my present day perspective, either blatantly wrong or highly suspect. Even conceding the authors their assumptions without contest the conclusions reached with such confidence were as unstable as any house of cards.

And yet, these people, with such simplistic thinking, are making progress.