Is growing autocracy a world threat?

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Suddenly many of mariner’s sources have written articles about the growing number of autocracies around the world. Autocracy and democracy do not get along well and Putin’s immoral assault on democratic Ukraine is an example of the difference in national behavior between the two political ideologies.

Matching headlines with Putin is the growing autocratic momentum in the United States. Add two or three new dictators elected in other nations in the last few months and journalists see a trend. Will the United States be able to vaccinate itself against autocracy? Will the world’s democracies be willing to engage in physical war to stem the trend? No less than The Atlantic in May’s issue has published a major article by May Applebaum about this concern:

“There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us.

They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.”[1]

Chicken Little already sits in a corner of the henhouse trembling as the November election approaches. Will the electorate use its votes to put a stop to totalitarian legislation? Amos is revisiting his will. Guru, on the other hand, feels that global warming will dominate the world’s economies to the point that there will not be time or money to fight political ideologies.

Mariner just watches 70s game shows wearing his college football helmet.

Ancient Mariner

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/autocracy-could-destroy-democracy-russia-ukraine/629363/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-weekly-newsletter&utm_content=20220403&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=This%20Week%20on%20TheAtlanticcom

Ranked Voting – 2

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Mariner apologizes for not making clear the manner by which a candidate wins an election in ranked voting. A straightforward demonstration follows.

To keep matters simple, an even 1,000 citizens cast their vote. That means for a candidate to win, they must garner at least 501 votes. In yesterday’s post, a ballot is shown with the ranking one voter selected.

Once all the ballots have been received, the election officials total the votes first by those with a ‘1’ ranking to see if anyone obtained at least 501 votes. It is conceivable that one candidate is so popular that they garnered enough ‘1’ votes to reach the minimum of 501 but if not, for each candidate, the officials add in all the ‘2’ votes – again to see if any candidate, with a combination of 1st and 2nd – obtained 501 or more votes. Typically, 1st and 2nd votes would total at least 501 votes. In close votes it may be necessary to add in all the ranks to achieve a majority. Below is the final score for each candidate as they were ranked in each voter’s ballot.

Typically, there are the two dominant parties who accumulate the largest number of votes so it is likely that by combining the first two ranks, some candidate likely will have won. Note, however, that the candidate who won in this example could only have done so by adding together three ranked votes – ‘1’ plus ‘2’ plus ’3’.

That’s how it works but the beauty is in the power of broader representation. The Green party candidate received 200 votes, nothing to sneeze at in local politics. Further, Jack Spratt knows he must depend on Green party values to stay elected. In this respect, mariner believes policy influence is spread out from Washington, D.C.

Ancient Mariner

 

Ranked Voting

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In 2008 mariner and his wife attended the Iowa democratic caucus (primary) to vote for Martin O’Malley. We were not allowed to cast our votes. We were the only two present who wanted to vote for this candidate. We had to switch to two more popular candidates to assure a majority for the winning candidate. Of course we did not.

As the reader may know, mariner is skeptical that the concept of ‘one person, one vote’ exists. As 63 percent of the American public attests today, there is little confidence in the two-party system.

The most common complaints:

  • Both parties are owned by big money, billionaires, the oil industry, etc.
  • Both parties have destroyed valid party representation through severe gerrymandering.
  • Both parties control party affiliation through big budget domination; third parties and local favorites don’t have a chance.
  • Voters feel they must vote against what they fear rather than what they would prefer – even if a preferred third party is on the ballot.
  • While more Americans voted in 2020 than in any other presidential election in 120 years, 33 percent, 1 in 3 voters, did not.

Every once in a while mariner rummages through obscure magazines and online sources looking for alternatives to the two party system. Lately, a new phenomenon has popped up: 50 jurisdictions in the United States have switched to ranked voting. Ranked voting means the voter can rank several candidates according to preference. A voter can cast a vote for a preferred party first then rank a second vote for another party and can rank every candidate on the ballot. This distributes the final count to the candidate with the most votes by rank rather than a simple majority. Even if a candidate comes in second or third, they may have enough votes to be influential in government politics..

This simple modification greatly reduces the advantages of gerrymandering. Further, third parties have a chance to gather votes as a first choice because the voter feels that the voter’s second, more dominant party still gets a vote.

Today’s citizenry is aware that elected candidates are part of a national plutocracy. Or, they could vote for the far right crazies if they are of that ilk. Otherwise, not even an independent billionaire (Tom Steyer) can campaign successfully against the Koch Brothers and Elon Musk.

Reflecting back on Congressman Ro Khanna’s book about dignity in government, ranked voting isn’t exactly his perspective but mariner believes that allowing multiple parties to inject special voter interests is a way to increase participation beyond Washington D.C.

None of the fifty districts includes multiple subordinate districts but if enough state legislators promote ranked voting, it may become popular enough to generate some legitimacy to what frequently is called ‘one person, one vote’.

Ancient Mariner

Church versus State –

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– in Afghanistan. The Muslim practices relating to women are severely punishing; not only physically but emotionally and with life-long debilitation. In Afghanistan the church side dominates the state side without question. Note the following excerpts from the Associated Press:

“Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers unexpectedly decided against reopening schools Wednesday to girls above the sixth grade, reneging on a promise and opting to appease their hard-line base at the expense of further alienating the international community. The international community has urged Taliban leaders to reopen schools and give women their right to public space.”

Islam dominates every aspect of daily life. Very frequently government legislators and judges are imams (priests) as well. When the United States wrote the original Constitution, it declared that religion was free to practice as it desired and the state had the same mandate. Fortunately, the Reformation had begun beforehand or the U.S. may have found itself in a situation similar to Afghanistan. The reader may recall the bitter confrontations between early ‘denominations’. The Christian religion absolutely is totalitarian and can muscle in on the State’s authority with little difficulty. This occurs consistently in the United States because ‘freedom of religion’ was free to run without a leash.

The clash between the freedom guaranteed to the people via the vote and the mandates of religious practice are in constant battle, to wit: abortion, gay rights, segregation, state practices like marriage, zoning, tax shelters and advocating conservative causes like Trumpism and immigration – the last two clearly matters of state.

Given the totalitarian conflict between church and state, money grubbing between capitalism and socialism, national demolition between Trump and the electorate, existence of privacy between big data and the individual citizen and the imminent flooding of Tiger Woods’ 41 million dollar home in Florida, We the People are in good shape. Indeed good shape – would you rather live in Afghanistan? Or, sigh, Denmark?

Ancient Mariner

 

Jobs

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A company called RoboBurger is out with a machine that will make you a burger with custom toppings in six minutes for $6.99, Jennifer A. Kingson reports in What’s Next.

In the food courts of the future, you could avoid human interaction by ordering from a hamburger vending machine, a pizza vending machine and, of course, cupcake vending machines.

The first RoboBurger machine was just installed in the Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Besides mariner’s lamentations about the future regarding the loss of human contact and abuse to the social herding instinct referenced in the last post, he wonders what will happen to all the low income fast food workers as these boxes spread. The employees don’t have any assets to speak of – where is the next underpaid job market?

Artificial intelligence expert and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee predicted that 40 percent of the world’s jobs will be replaced by robots in the next 15 to 25 years. That means two out of every five working class people will be out of work at a time when there are no other jobs to be had.

The type of job that is in imminent danger is warehousing people filling orders for online sites like Amazon.  Also at great risk are taxi drivers, uber drivers, and other ride-share drivers. Autonomous self-driving cars will use AI technology to drive and apps to identify who needs to be picked up and dropped off. Payment will be made with a credit-card swipe.

UK’s Institute of the Motor Industry states, ‘As many as 97 percent of active auto mechanics aren’t qualified to work on electric cars and won’t get their hands dirty in the future – robots can handle it.’

Assembly line workers will disappear and, interestingly, so will air traffic controllers.

Close to mariner’s home, librarians will disappear as the tracking system becomes fully automated and virtually all reading will be online or in digitized form.

Remember Nadine? She will be the replacement for payroll clerks, human resource staff, customer service representatives, cashiers (don’t get mariner’s wife started), translators and even mortgage brokers.. . . And this is a small list. Mariner is dumbfounded by what the world will be like in 2050. Guru won’t even talk about it. Our best guess for insight may be a fortune teller, certainly not our government’s octogenarian legislators.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Gumption Again

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Ambition: An ardent desire for rank, fame or power; a desire to achieve a particular end.

Gumption: Having a sense of enterprise, initiative; colloquially, common sense.

Virtually all mariner’s friends and most relatives are, graciously said, elders. Mariner has no friends in public school, no friends in college, no friends achieving their life’s ambitions, no close friends who are Zs, millennials or Xs.

Although still pretending to have youthful ambition, all his elected government leaders are in their 70s, 80s and (shudder) 90s. But this post is not about them. It is about all elders in general.

Mariner has selected the word gumption not only to represent its generic definition but to represent a generational definition specific to elders. It is the emerging lack of gumption as one ages that exacerbates the reduction of mental function, physical capacity and usefulness. Failing gumption has four causes: evolution, society, mentality and physicality. Each is discussed below.

EVOLUTION

Recognizing all the medical advances humans have discovered (except the invention just recently of CRISPR), we have lived by the rules of one million years of evolution. Until just 11,000 years ago, homo species lived within their environment, did not have overly expensive medical care, did not have transportation beyond their own feet, and were incapable of abusing economic philosophy. If we look at our recent predecessors like Erectus and Neanderthal, it was unusual to live to be forty. Our bodies are designed to be finished when several body chemicals and cells cease to reproduce.

Longer lifespans, regardless of how beneficial the medical industry is today, are unnatural. We are warned by our bodies that something is amiss when we experience ‘midlife crisis’, menopause and mental shifts involving ambition – starting in our forties!

It is common for folks in their forties to ponder a second, more interesting career (AKA less ambition, more self rewarding). Gumption wants to take a break, too. There should be no guilt at this point; the body simply has said, “Are you still around?”  From this point forward, however, managing gumption becomes critically important.

SOCIETY

Society is a deep psychological phenomenon that evolved as part of the survival kit of herd living. Staying close to the herd reduced the odds of being captured by predators. Society is the herd pattern that evolves during our growing years – the things we learn subconsciously from Mom and Dad, the leaders of the tribe and personal experiences in the context of our daily environment. Interestingly, sociologists and historians have discovered that today a human herd pattern roughly has a sixty-year cycle, about the same as the life span of ambition, including another fifteen years for transition to the next generation.

Similar to the evolution constraint, our societal lifespan has an ending as well, perhaps somewhere between forty and sixty-five. Hmm, doesn’t retirement begin today at sixty-five? (Why are politicians exempted? sorry, political comment).

What this generational phenomenon has to do with gumption is that what we learned from Mom and Dad, our peers and life experiences has become largely irrelevant to the new herd pattern so we do not feel the urgency to ambitiously pursue what to elders seems less important. Unconsciously, we let our gumption slide, too. A simple example for men is not feeling the need to shave and dress neatly every day (adjusted for compulsive personalities). Still, we obey our herd pattern by visiting others in our generation. Sadly, often what is missing is a plan to create a personal ambition commensurate with our interests that will at least force us to act as if we were still the dominant generation. This requires gumption; gumption will delay other aging factors in this list.

MENTALITY

Overall, there isn’t much we can do about degradation of the mind. It, too, is subject to evolution. Elders know intimately about forgetfulness, absentmindedness, struggling with bills and arithmetic, lip-slurring and general memory loss. Still, to one degree or another, having gumption frequently can delay the social ramifications of brain dysfunction.

Gumption to force one’s focus on personal ambition will slow the brain’s demise. An example is a serious desire to sustain a hobby at quality levels, doing all the chores and activity required for that ambition, along with continued engagement with the generational herd will sustain rationality if even a little bit for a few years – or for an extended life cycle. Many elders adopt the well being of other elders as an ambition.

Of course, the older we are, the more inevitable our evolutionary commitment will prevail but having the gumption to stay connected to an ambition makes the path more enjoyable.

PHYSICALITY

Nowhere is the effect of aging more visible than in the physical condition of the body. Contrarily, it is the physical condition that can be altered and improved most by gumption. The most celebrated effort to use gumption for physical improvement is the annual New Year’s Eve resolution. If nothing else, the failure rate demonstrates the hard core commitment gumption requires. One can imagine a primitive era 35 year-old Homo habilis saying, “Must we hike back four miles to our camp? Why can’t we just camp here tonight and go back in the morning.”

Unlike any other enterprise, physical condition requires had-to-start-will-never-end ambition. It is extremely difficult to sustain today because of automobiles, hover boards, delivery services, food sellers and the insidious chair. Simply sitting in a full squat while eating will do wonders for balance.

An evolutionary function we inherited from the African Veldt days is a part of the brain that takes over body functions whenever we are running or walking for a sustained time at a sustained rate. This function controls and appropriately exercises all the circulatory, skeletal and muscular functions as well as lungs and heart. If there were one exercise that elders must do under any circumstance, it is sustained daily walking at an aggressive pace – and squatting or sitting on the floor without using chairs. If you must use chairs, use only your legs and do not let the arms help. How many elders can’t get up off the floor? If you did it many times a day, it would be easy. Damned chairs!

However, the intent of this post was not to promote physical therapy per se but to urge elders to take control of gumption. Make yourself walk back to camp tonight.

Ancient mariner

 

An example of totalitarianism

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In early January, a day before students returned from winter break, Jeremy Glenn, the superintendent of the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas, told a group of librarians he’d summoned to a district meeting room that he needed to speak from his heart.

“I want to talk about our community,” Glenn said, according to a recording of the Jan. 10 meeting obtained and verified by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Glenn explained that Granbury, the largest city in a county where 81% of residents voted for then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, is “very, very conservative.”

He also made it clear that his concerns specifically included books with LGBTQ themes, even if they do not describe sex. Those comments, according to legal experts, raise concerns about possible violations of the First Amendment and federal civil rights laws that protect students from discrimination based on their gender and sexuality.

“And I’m going to take it a step further with you,” he said, according to the recording. “There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

 It is easy to generalize whenever someone uses a word that ends in ‘ism’. Such words are considered too general at best and too nerdy at worst but they represent concrete behaviors experienced by people every day.

The above mandate given by the superintendent of the Granbury Independent School District is a clear example of totalitarianism. In a quick thought, one could say that this is democracy in action and the Superintendent is representing his majority. In a subtle way, however, the rights of the minority have been declared illegal by a person representing the government. One premise for democracy is that democracies do not go to war against each other; people are never a political instrument of convenience or prejudice. Democracy is a live and let live world.

If one abhors homosexual literature, fine. If one relates to homosexual literature, fine – but one should never, in a democracy, exclude the other.

The United States has begun the twenty-first century saturated in totalitarianism – to the point that most legislatures, state and Federal, can’t come to terms with the diversity found in 300 million citizens.

Ancient Mariner

 

Moving Forward 

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Like global warming and other slow but critical phenomena, one of the issues looming steadily larger is providing enough food to feed billions of humans. It has been stated by agronomists, realtors and anthropologists that there is no more open land to purchase for grand scale farming. Conflicting with this is the need to restore much of the biosphere that has been destroyed by human practices. In short, how can humans increase food supply in a world that shrinks for many reasons? In this month’s issue Science Magazine reports a breakthrough that may significantly improve crop value for grains:

“When farmers in ancient times harvested their crops, some saved the seeds produced by the best performing plants and sowed them the following year. Gradually, this selection led to better and better results, such as increasing the size and number of kernels of maize—traits that helped pave the path to modern corn.

Now, a team led by researchers in China has identified a single gene behind this crucial productivity boost in maize and linked it to early improvements in rice harvests as well.

In 2004, maize geneticist and breeder Li Jiangsheng of China Agricultural University (CAU) began to explore the genetics of teosinte, the puny wild ancestor of maize, which early farmers domesticated and bred to create edible corn. One big change: Whereas teosinte has just two rows of kernels, modern maize has more than a dozen. To understand what changed genetically, Li and colleagues spent years creating an experimental intermediate type of maize that has six rows.

By mapping genetic markers, Li and an even larger team identified a single gene that influences the number of rows of kernels in this lab-grown corn. They called the gene KRN2, for kernel row number.”

What is new that just one gene can be manipulated to increase rows of kernels. It is highly likely that all grasses, e.g., wheat, can be made to grow larger amounts of grain. Imagine the global increase in productivity if each ear of corn, each rice and wheat caryopse increased its yield by twenty percent! Good news!

 

The New Economics

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Changing culture of world economics. What began in 2017 as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade/cultural liaison between eleven nations, has become the new standard for international trade in the future (street name: supply chains). Yesterday the New York Times wrote “There may well be a fracturing of the world into economic blocs, as countries and companies gravitate to ideological corners with distinct markets and pools of labor.”

The difference in the 21st century is the binding power of the Internet. A good example is the impact on Russia as the entire European Union, currently dependent on Russia for 80% of its oil and gas, has signed an agreement to depend on sources other than Russia. This could not be done so quickly without the tools of social media, the ‘Cloud’ and satellite integration.

Further, culture plays a larger role than it did in the last century: democracies are uniting around other democracies; similarly, autocracies are uniting as well (e.g., China’s Belt and Road Initiative). One of the unresolved issues in future economics is the impact of global warming – today more than half of all nations have failing economies that cannot carry the impact of climate change. Somewhere in the shadows the rich nations will have to make economic shifts in priorities, e.g., in current tax imbalances, discounted trade agreements and larger support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Guru suggests this conflagration of shifts will make three nations the owners of all meaningful supply chains: United States, China and India.

Referencing again the New York Times quote, their term ‘fracturing’ suggests many troubling but small nations may be at the center of high energy confrontation. For example, Cuba, Taiwan, Mexico, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Myanmar, etc. Other medium-sized nations like Hungary, Greece and Brazil will use politics to gain favorable economic relationships between supply chains.

Ancient Mariner

Pop Psych Again

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Readers know mariner enjoys pop psychology’s simplistic but somehow relevant descriptions of various personalities. He has developed another shortcut description for the mind’s many hardwired behaviors.

There are two types of problem solving patterns: one is called analog and the other is called algorithm. An analog is a formula that finds final value based on other values that may be introduced during the process. A simple example is a need to know what the weather is like before one can decide what to do. Another example is when computers learn from repeated processes; each time the analog is run, new information identifies relevant facts and discards irrelevant values. Eventually, a finite value is determined.

A person who problem-solves with an analog is a person who doesn’t know the final solution so they begin filling in values in an effort to know what the solution might be – an unknown at the beginning. The human pattern is a person searching for some fact like what shirt to buy, what carpet to select, what destination for a vacation, browsing in a library looking for something to read or any situation where the final value is unknown. This is a repetitive process and is prone to indecision.

A person who knows what the solution is upfront will execute an algorithm to accomplish the desired, already known conclusion. This person has one solution in mind and does not consider variations. Simply, the person constructs a formula of activity that leads to the predefined answer. The algorithm process is prone to failure if the final solution in fact does not exist. For example, how many times has one gone to the pizza shop for a cheese pizza only to discover the pizza shop is closed?

To humanize this a bit, generally, male shoppers will know exactly what they want, walk into a store, find the item, pay for it and leave. Generally, women will walk into a store looking for variables that may reveal what the item should be. Mariner dislikes depending on sex as a constant but his experience has shown the tendencies to be sexually oriented.

Mariner’s wife uses a term, ‘male pattern blindness’. Basically, it means if the product is not where mariner thought it should be, or its size is unexpected, or its display has been changed, mariner will not find it. Sadly, this is true. Mariner leaves home with a distinct image of the solution and if it isn’t there, the algorithm fails.

On the other hand, mariner’s wife has been searching for new carpeting. She is still searching . . .

When mariner’s wife read the draft of this post, she suggested the analog/algorithm was not new; it is a behavior difference that goes back to the days of hunter/gatherer.

Ancient Mariner