Category Archives: A Plan for America

Sanctions at the Sanctuary

Created April 1, 2021

(This is Part Two of our story Part one)

At Esalen Sanctuary, the sky was turning purple although the sun was not quite to the ocean.

Joe had just lobbed his bombshell proposing an ongoing triangular conversation working together toward permanent relief of friction. All three were now using the jets on their backs and allowing their minds to roam. Strangely, all of them were picturing their own citizens living in a happy world. Vlad and Jinping were mentally commenting cynically to themselves but allowing the positive images to flow.

Joe broke the silence. He was the one who came with a playbook so he kept the conversation going. The two guests were in listening mode, not wanting to give aid and comfort to the enemy but to conduct a thorough reconnaissance.

“Please don’t think of me as an enemy,” Joe said. “Despite the harsh words I used, you know I highly respect you both, and especially your intelligence. We are in this together. In a lifeboat. And we three are responsible for the lives of billions of people – everybody on Earth. If we choose to see through the lens of ‘enemy’, the world is headed for terminal disaster, it would just be a matter of time. We have to see through the lens of ‘fellow human beings, trying our best to do what is right.’”

“Ah, but what is right?” Jinping interjected.

“We’re all trying to make life better for our people,” Joe said, “just going about it differently. Three people as smart as us better be able to figure it out or we all lose the game.” Joe realized he hadn’t answered the question. “What’s right for you might not be what’s right for me, so we figure out a workaround that all sides can live with without having to hold our noses.”

“I sometimes tire of broad generalities,” Vlad said somewhat apologetically and the other two weren’t sure he was being ironic, “Can you give a specific example of what you’re proposing?”

“Sure,” Joe said, his face telling the other two that Joe was going to be loaded for bear with examples. This would be interesting and perhaps advantageous to Vlad and Jinping.

“Sanctions are not the right mechanism,” he went on, receiving instant nods of agreement. “They are distasteful, add to the friction instead of relieving it, harm the world economy and create a death spiral for trade, and when used to try to coerce a nation to show more apparent concern for human rights, so far they have failed 100%.” The other two nodded more emphatically.

“They also give us an unfair advantage,” Joe added.

The two were baffled that an adversary would reveal a non-obvious advantage – giving away the element of surprise – and what was he talking about anyway?

“Not clear to me what you mean,” Vlad responded, and Jinping shook his head.

“Your people want our brands more than our people want your brands,” Joe said, looking at Jinping. “It’s been the marketing – now we are all equals in that – but we had a long lead time.”

“So please spell out how you see that working to your advantage,” Jinping requested.

“It spirals downward unless we switch to other methods. First the American people decide to boycott Chinese products, then China does the same to us. Our people are not much troubled, pay some higher prices, start to rebuild manufacturing on shore. China’s people do without, but many traffic black market American goods, causing internal strife and criminalizing large numbers of otherwise law-abiding people – especially the young.” Joe later realized he should have stopped there but the words which sprang into his mind were new to him so he spoke them aloud, as if musing to himself: “American media have shaped a world youth culture which is now evolving to be a true intermixed world culture – they are leading us to be one family…”

Vlad thought he’d gone off the rails, and Jinping interrupted with a bit of momentary anger: “Yes but you and your media are raising unrealistic expectations we’re never going to fulfil!”

“We are clearly more optimistic than you are,” Joe admitted. “We strive to be idealistic realists. Like both of your cultures, we come up with lots of new ideas all the time, and this fact encourages us to be optimistic. Challenges make us use our creativity at peak levels. Especially if we three achieve global cooperativeness in this creative process, there’s reason to put away the pessimism. Optimism – pessimism – the world is what we make it. Especially we three – we’ve wound up with the power to end the world or to remake it so that it does work, everywhere, to everyone’s benefit – together, we’re smart enough to accomplish that.””

“No,” Vlad disagreed, “there are billions of people out there who put the lie to any optimistic theory. The dregs of the Earth, billions of them, people that we three would never spend one minute with. In Russia and China, we keep these people in line and try our best to bring them up from their animal level of thinking. In democracies those people have the same vote that you have Joe. You have teams of the best people on the planet advising you, but a bowery bum has the same weight as you do in the voting.”

“Your idea of democracy is what we call ‘naïve democracy’,” Jinping jumped in. “To anyone with common sense, to anyone who has studied history as reported by all sides, it’s insane to try to do democracy the way the West has been trying to do it. We consider our type of democracy superior because it works efficiently. We call ours ‘realistic democracy’. When you try to lecture us about human rights and so on, we are insulted because we believe we have bypassed you in political science.”

Vlad quoted H. L. Mencken, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“Whoa – hold up guys,” Joe held up his hand and smiled at them, “We have a different theory about the folks that Mencken called ‘plain people’. It’s a two-part theory. Part One is that we train them to be people we would be happy to spend a few minutes with, people who can support themselves and contribute to society. We’re calling this “individualized education” because Part Two of the idea is to find out what life’s work each person would love to do, and make it possible through training and information.”

The two guests looked at each other. Again, Joe had given them information he would have been smarter to withhold and use for American interest first before giving it away to competitors, who because of the efficiency of their governments, could put ideas to work faster.

Joe smiled at them as if reading their minds. He had been coached what to expect. “I look forward to seeing your experiments and learning from them. The more we test and learn everywhere – given the glass houses we all live in – the faster we all grow up.”

“One thing is not the other,” Vlad objected. “Yes, I like your plan to pull these people up, it will take generations but it’s worth doing. But that doesn’t prove anything about the workability of naïve unrealistic democracy. You can’t say that it’s working. Look at what your democracy did electing Trump! Or, look at this one: Aaron Burr right after killing Hamilton – one man indicted for murder of a Founding Father – convinces the Senate to remove the ‘previous question’ rule, and that creates the filibuster. Now the 31% of least adaptable people in your country, the ones most afraid of the future, have 60% of the power. You can’t get new legislation passed no matter how good your ideas may be. You’ve put a brake on your own efficiency for over two centuries! What do you call a system that does that if not naïve and unrealistic?”

“Fair enough,” Joe agreed, “Neither political parties nor filibusters are in the U.S. Constitution. Maybe one day we’ll get to test how efficiently we can govern the U.S. based on the Constitution. That’s one of my goals. I think you’ll see that it isn’t inefficient when the Senate gets its ability back to move on from futile conversation loops.”

The full moon rose over the Pacific across the sky from the dwindling sunset.

“Like let’s get out of this loop about democracy and go back to where we were going – alternative method to sanctions,” Joe said seriously but with a friendly smile. “We’ll have lots of time for philosophy if we keep up this meeting via Zoom every week.” They looked at him expectantly.

“There is no way of stopping people around the world from saying whatever they like,” Joe went on. “If there is expression of disgust over certain events that happen in any of our countries, in order to rechannel outrage away from sanctions and things that work against us all, the most wu wei solution is to remove the cause of the outrage.” Jinping’s expression darkened slightly.

Wu wei is the core tenet of Lao Tzu’s philosophy and of Taoism. It means going with the flow of the Universe’s action (Tao). It also means effortless action as in Flow state. May The Force Be With You. Jinping agrees with the wisdom of wu wei but was slightly miffed at a non-Chinese co-opting it. His face relaxed again.

“You are saying we should simply stop doing the things you criticize us for, although we’ve repeatedly warned you that we are offended by such meddlings,” Jinping said levelly. “Is this creativity, to simply repeat demands?”

“No, the creative part is next. First of all, let’s say the issue is something that you’ve been denying – fake news. One way you could choose to handle that is to invite the Red Cross, or a UN commission, to inspect the situation on the ground and verify that you’ve been telling the truth.”

“Not a bad idea,” Jinping said, “I’ll consider it.” He wondered if Biden knew that Chiang Kai-Shek had snookered the world for years by inviting the press into sanitized areas. However, Jinping was not thinking of doing that.

“I can’t see that this particular piece of creativity is going to make a big difference, Joe,” Vlad said honestly.

Joe nodded agreement. “Just one piece of the puzzle,” Joe said. “Here’s the big idea: Most Favored Nation treatment in all trade deals between the U.S. and your countries if you show the world that you sincerely are respectful of human rights. That you are taking steps to show compassion for all of your people and neighbors.”

The two other men were holding their bodies and expressions very still.

“How would that work?” Vlad asked neutrally.

“I’d prefer that it be based on something objective, so that it’s not a judgment call,” Joe said. “A Pew global poll every month or more frequently that tracks world perception of whether a given country is sincerely doing what it can to move at realistic and compassionate speed toward respecting human rights. As long as more than half the world believes in you, the MFN lasts, as soon as more than half the world condemns you, the MFN is abated until the poll results change for the better. or something like that.”

He saw the gradually dawning realization on their faces of just how serious he was.

“Yes. It’s time to change the game entirely,” he said with a grin, rubbing his palms together vigorously as if he had just spat in them. The meme of getting down to work with eagerness.

The sun had gone down and the colors were draining out of the sky, but their three faces shone with a new inner light.

To be continued.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Could World Safety Be One Conversation Away?

Created March 23, 2021

The press and late-night TV comics had a field day when the Esalen Summit was announced by the White House. Backstory: Joe, Kamala and Chuck had a running joke about the subject and then one day, started to take it seriously.

It turned out that Vlad and Jinping liked the idea. Just the three of them, Joe and his counterparts, without aides, in the hot tubs overlooking the Pacific. No press. No guards visible. Just three men having a good time and talking shop or whatever they felt like. Aimed at visioneering the future together, if it should turn out that way. Otherwise, just a fun thing.

Naturally when they got there each of them took the full most deluxe spa treatment. Vlad did that every night at home anyway. They steamed, saunaed, swam, meditated, yogaed, got massaged, and then met in the hot tubs on the deck just before sunset. Nature was making its contribution in the sky as the pelicans began their evening hunt. A dolphin breached. The three men happily watched it.

Joe asked Vlad, “He wasn’t one of yours, was he?” and the three men chuckled. All three countries had enlisted dolphins into their military and paramilitaries.

The other two men were very relaxed and had no agenda so Joe got to say something else.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if it could always be like this?”

Both men are urbane and smiled good-naturedly, while shaking their heads to indicate it can never work. Joe poured for them. An excellent Russian vodka bottle in ice. All three had agreed in advance to start with vodka. A few steps further away was a bottle of Moutai chilling, and Jack Daniels setups sat in a corner. Joe poured himself a water.

“You remember that Bogart movie where Sidney Greenstreet says he would never trust a man who doesn’t drink?” Jinping asked mischievously.

“Maltese Falcon,” Vlad supplied.

“That was right before they slip him a mickey and then kick him in the head,” Joe recalled. They all laughed. Their respective guard squads had tested all the foods, beverages, the air, and everything else. The amount of air traffic high above was constantly audible.

“See, that’s why it can’t be like this, nice, all the time,” Jinping philosophized. “We know for a fact we can’t trust each other, none of us can afford to be trustworthy, I can’t see the present situation ever ending.”

“How can we be nice all the time while calling each other soul-less killers?” Vlad asked levelly.

“And thugs?” Jinping added with a smile.

Joe had been told to expect those questions. “Look, you guys are pros, you know how the game is played. You had to expect some kind of hard talk from me after you wiped the floor with the Donald and slipped all kinds of unthinkable things past him. The last time anyone got away with daring the US so blatantly was the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

The two Eurasian friends looked at each other and tacitly gave Joe the point.

“So,” Joe went on, “I apologize and will do so publicly when we announce something positive together after this is over. But let’s get back to the future, one in which we talk things over just the three of us, and try to settle everything amicably in advance. Have you wargamed it?” Joe asked both of them. “I mean peacegamed it. Scenarios…” They both nodded ponderously. This promised to be a boring conversation for them. However, as professionals they both enjoyed looking for the advantages they could gain from something he might say.

“We have too,” Joe confided, “it comes down to four things: whether we each feel we have elbow room, how much our behavior at home offends one of us, what to do about everybody else besides our three countries, not making aggressive moves against each other, and a load of details our people can work out.”

“Like the trade deals,” Jinping complained mildly, “just one of the little details?”

“And like what we base world currency on,” Vlad added studiously.

“Say it comes down to a trillion things, still, those top four are the ones to solve, the rest is like a zipper,” Joe pitched them. Both men sat back and pretended to be getting their backs done by the jets. Meanwhile their minds went into overdrive envisioning how they could turn this to their own advantage. Soon all three men were smiling, concocting their own visions of what might be achievable from the springboard of this summit.

Interestingly, all three gave some time to thinking about their people as well as about themselves.

To Be Continued…

Best to all,

Bill

My 2019 Scifi Novel Coming True in the South China Sea?

Created February 7, 2021

Let’s hope not. PANDEMONIUM: LIVE TO ALL DEVICES depicts one of the downside scenarios. It’s our job to steer into one of the upside scenarios.

My career-long friend Norm Hecht just sent me this news story about China creating new laws making it legal for her to fire on foreign vessels in waters where ownership is disputed. And then sending Chinese Coast Guard ships close to what Japan considers a couple of its islands, earlier today February 6, 2021.

Here’s an excerpt from my fictional story, intended to anticipate some of what is really bound to happen, based on how the chips are stacked:

When the Chinese president awoke the next day, he announced to the world, on television and handhelds, the exact GPS coordinates of the South China Sea as defined by China, “which has always been the property of China, and for too long we have been taken advantage of.” He told the world that non‐Chinese ships would need to go around this piece of sea or be boarded and inspected, on threat of lethal force. “If a war erupts in that location, China will limit itself to these GPS coordinates and not escalate the fighting to outside that war zone.”

* * *

President Snike did not hesitate to send a pweet deriding that announcement. “If China wants a rumble in their neighborhood, we’re up for it,” he wrote. Separately he ordered two more carrier groups to move toward the area. In the fleet with the George Washington steaming into the South China Sea, all were at battle stations.

The Marxist superpowers from 1945 onward made it a practice to test the resolve of each new US president by seeing what they could get away with. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the test the world remembers best.

Unlike my fictional US president Norfal Snike, our real President Joe Biden will undoubtedly take a firm stand without raising the temperature.

As I’ve written before, the best diplomacy nowadays would be to spell out the scenario options and agree on the ones closest to win/win that we can get.

We’re all in this together, and we all have to unite against the forces that threaten us all equally, pandemics, environment, hatred, greed, unemployment, inequality, injustice, debt…

And as we learn to work together to overcome the common threats, we can join together to take advantage of the common opportunities, including a better life for all, technology, space travel, human potential, and the scientific quest for true enlightenment – knowing everything there is to know about reality. Including materialist science, but not limited by its assumptions, e.g. that consciousness could not exist without matter.

But first, much closer at hand, we have to put away the old ways, substituting better ways to do international diplomacy and everything else.

We really don’t have much choice.

We can do it.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

How Can We Hold the Feeling of Unity?

Created February 1st, 2021

I had cautioned that habits are going to be hard to break when I began to write about all of us getting a fresh start. We’ve all now seen a lot of backsliding to the partisan bickering here at home, and one evidently cannot lay aside cold war feelings overnight in making a new beginning with other nations we’ve chastised in the past.

We really do need the luxury of rethinking everything from a clean sheet of paper. Band-aids on the past ways of doing things are not going to save the human race from itself. Far better ways have always been available and the nature of them is no secret needing extensive research. “Live and Let Live” covers a lot of it.

My friend who is slightly to right of center and who sees me fairly accurately as slightly left of center, and I, quickly resolved our political differences by recognizing the validity of both viewpoints and helping each other to gather facts and create hypotheses about what might be tested going forward. But then after our shared optimism about unity after the Inauguration, the articles I find interesting now because of glimmers of promising new ideas, I hesitate to send to him because they often contain jabs at the past or even present actions of Republicans.

Sure, it’s easy to see why after four years of sucking it up, Democrats might naturally feel the need to vent now that they can. But it can undo all the good that was done by the noble unity intention set down by President Biden at the outset. We have to give unity a chance, which means laying off pot-shots. That goes both ways. Reopen our minds to kindness and respect. It’s possible we all have a lot of good to bring to the new unity party – meaning all of us. Let’s think of it as a meta-party. The United States of America.

George Washington was right to warn us not to allow political parties but they are part of us now and let’s simply try to improve the way we use them rather than try to disband them. We don’t have a lot of time to go off on long term high risk windmill tilting right now. Mutations in Covid could make our war against Covid a longer term affair than any of us are prepared to even think about right now. That plus the environment, international tensions, thermonuclear biological chemical and psychological warfare weapons “improvements”, racism and other ancient vendettas, world debt, robotics replacing jobs, are a nitroglycerine puzzle that needs kid gloves rather than mailed fists.

Our objective as human beings has to be to twist that Rubic’s Cube so that all those threat vectors fade away and what is left is an equilibrium in which everyone is having a good time, and feels okay about the rest of the people in the world. Where we can all be world travelers and bring out our own individuality via positive creative outlets that delight others as well as ourself.

The only radical thing we need right now is love thy neighbor and the Golden Rule. Otherwise, small dial setting changes would be far less risky than wild card moves from far left or far right fields.

One of the first things we need to establish is that Democrats do not want any more socialism than the way the government has been taking care of non-rich people during the economic contraction, except that job can be done better so all who need, receive, without making non-needy people into needy ones. Nobody really wants true communism any more, not even the communists. They have adopted capitalism bigtime and although we have not “converted them” to what we call “democracy” we have converted them to our real way of life which is capitalism. Now that they rival us in capitalist skills we’re not so sure we’re happy to have converted them. Be careful of what you wish for.

We do have the best democracy the world has ever seen. It’s got some loopholes that can be exploited by people who fundamentally misunderstand what democracy means, and we shall be making laws that close those and other loopholes in our Noble Experiment, the one nation whose very meaning is to risk everything to prove that utopia is achievable by human beings on Earth. That’s us. Naturally a nation that is an experiment, is a nation of change agents, and therefore is going to serve up some individuals who are lunatic fringe. We have to do a better job of helping those folks back on the path sooner in their divergence from reality.

Changing hats now to my persona as a marketing consultant. What would I advise the Republican party now if I ran its advertising agency? December Gallup data show 25% Republican, 31% Democrat, 44% Independent is the way Americans think of themselves lately – but the Republicans have been concerned about being the minority party for some time now. They calculate a bad future for the party unless they stand behind Trump no matter what – because of those 70 million voters who voted for him in November.

But that would be a defensive strategy. Defensive strategies have rarely worked in advertising. The Republican party stands to gain – and to give – the most by harking back to the achievements and ideals of past Republican presidents, and to uplift its party back to that level. To do its job to conserve the valid improvements of the past, to minimize waste, to minimize risk, to do the things a conservative party is expected to do – its objective function.

The Republican party should speak to its devoted followers of Trump and clarify for them what happened. The man made some good moves and some bad ones. “We Republicans all liked him because he seemed like an average Joe like us, not boring like so many other choices, and with balls to stand up for us. But he lied to us. He equated Democrats with Communists – an awful lie that infected millions of us and has nearly wrecked our country. He did not really stand up for us, he just made a convincing act of it. He incited us to dividing and thus weakening the nation and leaving ourselves prey to cyberspying and psychological warfare in the social media, which he himself got so caught up in he was an unintended puppet of other nations. This has to be taken as an important lesson not to get carried away like a cult into loyalty to one person, what we need is loyalty to the whole country, and to consider the rest of the world to be vital partners in conquering Covid and the rest of the problems we’ve created for ourselves by this incessant aggression toward one another.” Or words to that effect.

We’ve fallen into the trap of threatening the stick all the time with very little show of the carrot, in our dealings internally and internationally. We tell other nations what we want them to stop doing. It would be more likely to succeed if we painted attractive pictures of what we DO want them to do – which is to succeed like us, and play nice like we used to and must go back to immediately, or none of this will work. Then we can go back to traveling to see the world and be in it and enjoy the growing we experience by inputs from people very different from ourselves but on the inside identical.

This tilt toward rage was fanned by the partisan news channels and by Trump and his devoted followers. And it found fertile ground in an American minority happy to go brawling into the streets causing harm to others and undermining America at its roots and around the world. The Republican party should most definitely address this part of its base, explaining that such behavior will no longer be tolerated, there will be new laws continuing to allow free speech, but with swift justice against threatening or hurting other people or property based on ideologies fundamentally at conflict with America’s ideals for itself. New ethics laws that apply also to civil servants at all levels which prohibit seditious and/or hate speech. And which regulate social media such that free speech which is oriented to hate is removed as quickly as possible.

If there are some who would rather leave the country than stay in the USA when these laws are instituted, that is their right. The majority will determine where the lines are drawn to preserve free speech but end bullying, intimidation, and domestic terrorism. Most Americans wish to not have to live in fear. For a small minority who embrace fear and get off on it, if they choose to leave, most Americans will not mind them being further away.

The Republican party in the last Century and a half has never had to resort to such demeaning ways to gather its members as we saw in the past four years. It has always had its share of geniuses and visionaries able to see and embrace better ways for the future. That is what it should focus on. Making the country better and stronger, making life here safer and more pleasant than ever before.

That’s what we should all focus on, almost half of us are not even in a party. Let’s dial down the importance of which party we are in and dial up the importance of making all of our working and non-working lives more like a party.

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium

Liable to walk upon the scene

—Johnny Mercer,

Accentuate the Positive

 

We can do it.

One takeaway for recommended explicit action/non-action based on MIND MAGIC:

Don’t speak unnecessary negative thoughts. “Don’t Bring Them Down”.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.