There is no real purpose in developing the variables that created the need for meaning. Think of everything a human may have encountered in a natural world and you have the drama of chance and success followed by bad luck and death, all observed by fellow humans. The questions of why did my child die, why did the lightning strike the village, why are men following that idiot who is a head taller than them were just a beginning. Faced with these inexorable questions human came up with reasons and the meanings that cemented the reasons.

The creation of gods had to have come early in the communities of humans. When you look at societies that were tied to the natural environment, most of the gods were also tied to nature. Some of these gods and the dogmas tied to them lasted for thousands of years with some variations in how belief was realized. As civilization rose and fell so their gods disappeared except in the form of statuary, votives and other human made devices of worship. It has created a rich archeological trove of items that continue to be discovered and deciphered. In addition to religion, humans began to develop meanings to life that were closer to human intelligence and consciousness. With and in addition to philosophy, accurate mathematics and scientific theories began to be voiced and written down. This occurred in Greece and, later, in Rome as well as China. Religion, philosophy and science existed side by side in many areas of the world for at least three millennium.

As science became modernized it took on the empiricism it has today. Theories were developed and either proven or disproven. Humans delved deeper into the mechanics of life and time. Amongst educated people the possibility came of a world that was completely explainable. This ran counter to the mysteries that were part of religious dogma.

Philosophy changed with the modern times but still tried to find meaning in human existence. Philosophy tried to incorporate scientific aspects into its processes. This has failed because philosophy is not a science. It, like religion, is a belief system based on certain tenets. These tenets are not mystical, or supernatural, but more akin to psychology than anything else. Philosophy still seems incomplete because it is still chasing meaning in the human life beyond what we are, animals.

As science has moved and explained far more of the mechanics of life, showed evidence of evolution and mapped the human genome, religion has struggled to keep up and adjust the dogma to suit reality. Some religious dogmas rail against the evidence of evolution of the human species saying that it is unproven theory as anthropologists find more of the fossil records that illustrate evolution. The capacity to track the evolution of viruses has also blown the religious preoccupation with theory versus fact. As religions struggle with science the relevancy it has begins to ebb. It has been a slow process with plenty of resistance by the varied religious groups. As the world embraces scientific knowledge and use in everyday life and war, the importance of religion fades away. It has not been an immediate ending and many would say it has not ended at all as they cling to a certain inspired ignorance in the face of reality.

In the face of science, religious dogma often appears, strangely, like bad magic, a system reliant on supernatural occurrences that are impossible to explain scientifically or even rationally. Many of the dogmas are based on events that happened over a thousand years ago. There have been no dramatic events to prove that the supernatural exists in our modern world. Dramatic events are often random occurrences that tend toward the tragic. Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanoes exploding and other natural disasters are scientific events tracked and recorded now. Earthquakes stand out as problematic in the capacity to predict the when, where and how big, but science is working on it. Human caused disasters also appear random and often are caused by humans ignoring science or being incompetent in the construction of a significant project, like a dam or a bridge.

As we work to ferret out the mechanics of the natural world as well as our scientific world, the concept of supernatural origins fades away except for those humans unwilling or unable to see the reality of science. These same people will attack science and claim that it is opinion and theory, not something based upon facts. Science moves from theory to fact in a linear fashion with many theories coming out of the progression from actual proven theories. The is now a campaign to discredit science on any number of fronts. The attacks on the science of climate change are one, evolution is another, even the scientific process is attacked. I feel the religious community feels threatened by the commonality of scientific fact. Some religions have moved toward science others still believe that the Ark existed and Noah was the captain.

The human brain is a powerful organ capable of an amazing number of operations simultaneously. The transcendent quality humans can feel at times is not always tied to some religious faith, but can be gained by the view from the top of a hill or the bottom of a waterfall. All of this is why the struggle for religious relevancy is becoming dire for some and easy for others. All mysteries are solvable if the information exists and has not been destroyed.

The human brain has an estimated 100 billion neurons within it. The functions vary based on an unknown requirement we have yet to define. Each neuron is connected to ten thousand other neurons. There are more than the 100 billion neurons in the cells that support the neuron like synapses and dendrites and even more cells with function yet to be defined. The brain can be defined as a web of connections that manifest the traits of every human being in a unique arrangement. Every aspect of behavior that is part of a person’s identity at birth is based on this brain with its intricate web of identity. If you are a parent of more than one child, you will have experienced the remarkable realization of how different, and similar your children are. The human will fight for their unique identity from birth.

The unique identity extends to all aspects of human existence. The basic attributes of height, hair color, eye color, skin tone and all the external evidence of uniqueness are there to see. What is not seen is the varied aspects of visual processing, gender identification, sexuality and preference, processing anger and aggression and a great deal more. Beyond the previous examples are the traits that are compounded by the environment a child is raised in. All of the nurturing or lack of it contributes to the manifestation of the genetic identity of the individual human. How does this intrinsic identity bond with the greater human community? As we observe our world, we discover that, in our modern times, this unique identity has great problems conforming to society or what we should call the collective.

In the distant past, the unique human identity was able to conform to the small collective they were part of. The extended family that most human societies were comprised of made it much easier for the individual to fit in and survive. It is appropriate to call these groups collectives. The groups were comprised of an extended family of several generations that provided a safe genetic construction. As they grew and wandered, for humans were always wandering, they would run into another collective. These encounters varied in the amount of conflict involved. Some had no conflict, with mutual trading or exchange of technology around tools for rendering food, art or weapons. Others had mortal conflict with the negation of one collective with some individuals being absorbed into the victorious collective. There was not one overriding element to this interaction. More than likely it depended on the prevalence of female input into the philosophy of the collective. Over many millennia there are examples of both types of collectives.

These collectives were responsible for the plethora of language dialects. As language commonalities existed, so did the uniqueness of a dialect. In pre-Columbian America, both North and South, the languages were broken into many dialects, some areas had multiple dialects within miles of each other. These differences satisfied the individual identities of the humans involved. It kept the identity of the collective contained and manageable. It allowed the humans within to have a sense of origin, and, often, a mythos contained with it. Sub-Saharan Africa also had many unique languages and myths regarding origins of the different peoples. Natural barriers contributed to the breakout of collective groups and their uniqueness. There are 2,000 to 3,000 unique languages spoken in Africa. The Middle East has a number of languages with many dialects of some. Arabic is broken into many dialects. Even the prevalence of Islam has not caused a cessation in the use of dialects. The rest of Asia has a great many languages; India alone has 1,600 languages belonging to different proto-language origins. Indonesia has around 700 languages while New Guinea has 840 different languages in its 178,000 square miles.

The concept of the individual belonging to a collective makes language one of the elements that cause this linkage. The smaller the collective, the more a human can feel their uniqueness. Psychology has backed this up. Small groups are known to be more accepting of the ways a human may present themselves and identify. These groups were often forced into larger societies in all different areas of the world prior to colonization. In North and South America different cultural groups came to dominate specific areas controlling large numbers of people with common language, cultural mores and religion. The Maya, Aztecs. Pre-inca, Inca, Zoltecs, Cahokia and other groups created larger cultures with less individual recognition except for the elite including priests.

There is an argument that these higher-level cultures destroyed the intimate collective through war and opportunism. While this was occurring in the Western hemisphere, Europe and Asia had already corralled their subjects, as the elite called the peasants, into an identity that was not consistent with their individualism. They were forced to learn new languages, though many kept their dialects for daily life. Humans fought against belonging to larger societies and would stay in their village and not venture too far afield. Even in more homogenous societies colloquial speech was the norm for the small rural villages. By citing linguistics, I am comparing the capacity of the individual to maintain identity within their group. The larger the group then there is more difficulty in expressing oneself in presentation.

The world existed in low population groups for over 100,000 years. Larger groups did not occur until perhaps 5000 years ago. This suggests that humans evolved in smaller intimate surroundings where the level of acceptance was high and casual. Religious beliefs existed, but from anthropological study, these religions were linked to the natural world. Even when cities started to exist throughout the world, many humans did not live in them. They maintained their lives in small communities. They may have traded with the city sized communities, but they did not live within that cultural element. The small communities of the past allowed for a sense of individualism based on size. The world of today has no idea that the impacts of the density of population are doing to the average person.

Evolutionary Psychology did not really become relevant until the 1990s. Prior to that and other elements, psychology was the domain of behaviorists following in the footsteps of B.F. Skinner. Both psychologists and philosophers had entrenched themselves in behaviorist theories for they remained accepted but mostly unproven theories. The aspect of behaviorism that engenders validity is that, in the absence of anything else, it makes logical sense. Monkeys and apes imitate us when encountered, of course they are probably terrified. So why not little children follow in those same footsteps. It took the psychology world by storm and resulted in decades of erroneous counseling methods. The elements of cognitive behaviors based on something other than observed or learned actions was impossible to put forward based upon the conditioning of the modern psychologist. In the end it compromised the whole psychological practice.

The “Nature vs Nurture” debate began long ago but came to a head around the same time that evolutionary psychology came online. Studies on twins separated at birth was a controversial study that found distinct commonalities in such twins despite never being together as children. Because of the purist aspect of the psychological community when it came to behaviorism, it was a long road before the opinion that both genetic and environmental aspects shape a human. This opened a door into modern idea that we may be fundamentally unique in all the aspects that make us human.

The various theories that made their way to applied treatment of humans were mostly non-consequential or harmful, depending on the treatment suggested or imposed in some cases. There is still not a consistent approach beyond cognitive therapy, which, at least, approaches the person as an individual. The advent of psychoactive pharmaceutical approaches has created a confusing streamlined effect on the modern psychological ailments. The question of effectiveness continues to be debatable by the subjects of these medicines and some of the people actually prescribing them. A lot of this comes from the cost of cognitive therapy, that one on one approach that can lead to better outcomes is hard for the companies that provide the reimbursement for the treatment to afford and make a profit. This leads to the societal willingness to address what the problem is. Evolutionary Psychology has not really delved into the brain as a complex repository of identity and presentation. They are still perplexed as to why a man, in the face of societal exclusion, wants to be a woman, or the opposite. They are still trying do get a handle on why a wide variety of men prefer men over women although they present as normally male or effeminate. There are so many external political pressures on getting to a definitive reality on this question, even in countries that accept such presentation and characteristics without judgment. Those accepting countries are leaving things undetermined for fear of being prejudicial in their studies.

The 20th Century was a fertile ground for addressing the human as individual but as we have moved into the 21st Century there are still no satisfying answers. The current societal matrix does not allow for much of the individual even with the internet and social media which allows a person to create their own persona online. There are companies and people who would claim that this is the process to let the individual reign supreme, yet it is not a flesh and blood experience and is fraught with people pretending to be something they are not or even close to. The technology of the 21st Century is not taking us back to that small community of humans that knew one another quirks and all. It can’t because a person’s avatar claims a certain identity. If you can’t tap a person on the shoulder and say, “hello”, how much of a relationship do you really have? There are people who have grown amazing close to people they have met virtually. There are also many people who have been scammed by the same virtual people.

Have we moved too far beyond our original acceptance of who we are as an individual because there is no space for such a personal concept. Economics presses down on us for expectations regarding careers, income, the material goods we acquire to show status, the educational attainment of our children while many other parts of the world have none of those worries, and people, as individuals have the worries of navigating the challenges of hunger, shelter, disease, violence, cultural misogyny, bombs and bullets. Modern society has been distracted from trying to find the answer to what makes us feel whole. We don’t even know if it is a mortal need for us humans to be ourselves.

Christianity would like humans to believe that the creation of Jesus as the son of god was the ultimate creation in human history. Slightly later in human history, Islam claimed that it was the faith to supersede all faiths, often at the tip of a scimitar. Prior to these two Abrahamic religions other attestations to gods or other spiritual elements brought forth a dogma dominating thought. Humans have been creating gods because it is a convenient explanation for the complexity of our existence and the conceit that goes into those explanations.

I am a father and will attest that babies are not born religious. They begin to think, more than likely, in utero. Their thinking greatly expands once born. This thinking can be nurtured or limited based on a family’s worldview. In some cases, female children are provided a limited worldview, while male children are provided a full portrayal of the culture’s worldview. This practice is not unique to the current world, but has existed for millennia. No entity has truly defined why. That is a curious state of affairs. With some cultures it is understandable due to religious dogmas that dictate behavior. But the same can be said about cultures that propose equality based upon gender.

Females, for the most part, are not content with being relegated to the lest enlightened of the human species. In almost all cultures they do the majority of the child rearing, the planning of a household, the accounting of the household, and the health and well being of the children, themselves and even their male partners. It is akin to drudgery, yet society often says that it is what women were purposely born into.

In concepts of accepted thought on a wide range of subjects, women have been extremely marginalized throughout history, including modern history to the status of the present. It takes an extremely strong cogent woman to breakthrough the patriarchy with a clear vision not compromised by the men controlling her rise. It can only be described as repulsive. When you look society over the last 500 years you will see the voices of women censored repeatedly when they are correct. The hubris of men has kept society back in more ways that one. They compete against their fellows regarding what is truth, sometimes holding on to ideas that block further thought, and they prevent women from even having a voice in all of the realities we should know.

There is an ebb and flow to the acceptance of thought. Different male dominated entities try to censor thought or parse it down to a meaning they can abide by. This is not a new experience for humanity as a whole. It is experience in totalitarian regimes as well as purported democratic ones. Governments in power, especially those threatened, will try to limit the expression of thought for fear that it might allow people to think and posit conditions out for themselves.

If an average female with children in the United States is told over and over that groceries are more affordable when they are not, she will know that the person saying this is lying, just like her husband did in saying he only had one beer with the boys. The problem lies in the fact that the husband’s two beers do less harm to the household than a president’s lie of affordable groceries that cost more then they did the week before.

There is a conflict between religious thought and the reality humans face in spite of the faith, hope and charity characterized by dogma. One wants you to surrender to the dogma and hope for salvation. The other demands that you survive a challenging world. The challenging world exists every day, while the hope of salvation awaits a person’s death. Humans have spent countless lives and hours contemplating their existence under systems of belief, whether it is religious dogma or societal dogma, like Stalinism. The one distinct commonality is that both are contrived by men and their conceit.

If the world was free of believing in gods, humans would travel in many different directions in seeking out something to placate their doubt. Some would create new religions with a new god that would explain the unanswered questions of their existence. Many others would look at the world they live in and think. Those thoughts may align with a deity or may align with direct reality. It is hard to maintain a dogma when you use Boolean logic to posit things out. Descartes tried but his “if, else, then” fell flat in the face of later logic problems.

Now, almost every computer program uses Boolean logic as its base or expands upon it with recursive logic beyond what George Boole intended. We live in times where ancient beliefs conflict with modern realities. Our thoughts are conflicted by superstitions concocted five generations before our parents were born.

Human thought has always been based on the interaction of reality with the individual. On occasion a human will jump the curve and come to a realization that shocks their fellow humans. If they survive this revelation, many don’t, they contribute a furthering to our species’ understanding of the world we live in. Too often they are marginalized because they don’t belong to the right club, fraternity, college, religion, party, or socioeconomic status. Or they are female.

An objective person, a truly objective person, sitting in a busy city plaza drinking an iced latte can see the way people behave; their mannerisms, irritations, posture, the direction of their gaze and many other traits of the human animal. This viewer, with the right training, could attach most of the human behaviors to animal behaviors. This is, again, because we are animals. When law enforcement looks at the death of a wife or step-child, they focus on the male in the household. This is because of statistics that show a preponderance of the male in the household being responsible. In the world of primates, the only thing that prevents males from killing the young is the male that is the father of the young in species that mate for life, or the level of promiscuity that makes it difficult to establish paternity without a doubt. In the former species, when a male father dies, the other males will kill the mother’s young so she will go into estrus and mate with one of them. We detach ourselves from the statistics when confronted by the animal side of primates. It is because the majority of humans do not want to believe they are animals.

This has not always been so. Humans in the distant past realized this because they had to hunt and act like the intelligent animal we are. They tracked seasons and migrations and knew all aspects of the earth. They slaughtered animals for their meat and on occasion they slaughtered and ate humans. We know this because of the fossil records that have been found. Science has compiled an amazing store of evidence of our movements as animals in packs with shared genetic backgrounds.

The motivations for our denial of the animal that is us extend back thousands of years as well with the development of civilizations, religions and philosophies. These creations distanced our species from our animal existence. Hunting was still done, but a lot of the protein we ate was raised domestically. There are many people today who would decry such an idea that civilization was not a true human activity and more of a human conceit that arose out of philosophy and religious dogma. These thousands of years that we have lived as if the earth is an infinite source of the things required to build civilizations. The science that defines us has moved into defining both our early existence as an animal and our new existence as the despoilers of earth.

The challenges the truth faces when confronted by humans is alarming for that objective observer referenced in the first paragraph. Most governments are blind and move on with the industrialization that spews carbon into the atmosphere and waste into the earth’s rivers and oceans. We do not view beautiful mountains and lakes as scenes of nature, but as minerals to be exploited. We press for increased population to fuel economic booms without the thought of what it will take to feed these people. We despoil our farming land with fertilizers that eventually leave many of them fallow. We cut down the forests that provide oxygen and remove carbon dioxide with thoughts of profits. The degradations caused by our conceits is endless and the few voices raising alarm are ignored or shouted down. Our new god, Economics, runs the world and requires yearly growth as if a plant. In reality, it is our cancer moving through us until society reaches a state of Cachexia. Then we will bemoan our fate and wonder what we can do to stop the cancer from killing us.

Why don’t we think about the cancer of consumption now before Cachexia occurs. Why don’t we control our conceits and realize we are a species that needs to be integrated with the earth. No amount of philosophy or dogma will allow us a way through this. It will take simple rational acceptance of our place as an animal that, at its highest pinnacle of achievement, is on the brink of a collapse that could lead to our extinction.

In Roberts’ America the individual achieves and overcomes adversity to become the American citizen they were meant to be even if that is a menial laborer without job protections. If the adversity is too great because of discrimination and prejudice, the individual just didn’t try hard enough. If the individual’s voice and vote cannot really count due to prejudice and discrimination, they did not try hard enough in a polite American way. Roberts only identifies the citizen and has the attitude similar to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regarding illness and herd immunity. Do nothing to help and the equilibrium of justice will rise all boats. I believe this belief makes John Roberts one of the most insidious racists we have in a position of influence since Justice Taney who wrote the Dred Scot decision. People would say that Donald J. Trump rivals him and has more influence. Trump is an overt racist. It is immediate with him, calling people of color “low IQ”. Roberts isn’t doing that. His is hiding behind his view of the law.

Pretending that racial gerrymandering is really political gerrymandering is a vile thing. Allowing the disenfranchisement of groups of Americans because they should all be considered the same ignores the obvious discrimination going on in the Southern States of the US. John Roberts is not an unintelligent man. I do not know the process of rationalization he uses for his opinions, but those opinions are caustic fluids thrown on the wounds of the disenfranchised. The danger of his opinions creates a severe uneasiness amongst people believing in equality and empathy. Will this opinion hold over time extending the level of white supremacy he pretends not to service. He says the Supreme Court of the United States is not political. By doing so he is admitting that this court is a biased racial entity. White.

Most of the Islamic nations involve religion in their governance. A few keep the religion at an arm’s distance at their peril. The rest embrace the dogma completely. Being contrary in these societies is living on the edge of imprisonment or death. There is no let up. The dogma of the Quran does not trickle down to the jailors in these nations. Torture and death are common realities. It is like Spain in the 15th Century with Father Torquemada running the show. There is an amazing lack of modern sensibilities. Enough of a lack to question if humans have progressed at all. There are still religious pogroms in India between Hindus and the other religious ethnicities. Pakistan and India have a continued animus based upon religion.

The current administration in the United States and some of the State governments have been pushing for more institutional religion in government. Many members of the administration desire the United States to be a theocracy. Specifically, a Christian theocracy, was what is wanted. The phrase, “Under God,” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 to differentiate the United States from Soviet Russia which was considered a godless nation. The complexity of American thought could not comprehend that an extreme belief in an ideology was what governed the Soviet Union.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson worked to clarify that governance was free from religion as part of the institution of government. They had an awareness of the power of religious dogma in skewing a government’s approach to its citizens. I believe it was deeper than that.

The concepts of religious dogma accept as a certainty, things that cannot be proven without a faith in supernatural elements. Throughout history many religions espouse beliefs in things outside of human reasoning and rational experience. Visions, hearing the voice of God or Jesus, and revelations have been part of Christian experience over many centuries. Most of the founding fathers, looking at how to govern a diverse group of citizens, believed that government should be reasoned and rational without arguments about someone’s spiritual revelations entering into the rule of law.

The colonies had already had the experience of the allegations of witchcraft in Salem in the colony of Massachusetts with 200 accusations, 30 convictions, 19 people hanged to death and one person pressed to death. This occurred between 1692 and 1693, and was less than one hundred years before the American Revolution. It must have remained a perceived blemish in the American concept of justice and an example of religious fervor run amok. The capacity for religious persecution was also experienced in the colonies with the Puritan’s hanging of Quakers for their proselytizing in Massachusetts in 1660. Some of the founding fathers of the American nation came from the very area of these events and may have felt the need to prevent such extremes in the future.

The willingness of current American politicians to put religious dogma into 21st Century law needs to be called out and examined. There has been a great deal of selective historical revision regarding the origins of the separation of church and state. The imposition of Christian dogma into government has become common practice in certain states and in local city and county governments. This has led to constitutional lawsuits that are headed towards the Supreme Court. The current Court has shown a capacity to extend a level of credibility to the religious side of these suits. A number of verdicts are pending that could swing America back into a time when religious thought, belief and revelation become consistent with evidence in the rule of law.

In America, the concept of collective action or collective behavior is very strong. It doesn’t matter where you live in the country, there is a general sense of both collective action and behavior. The most obvious example is driving. Most States in America have common Vehicle Codes with the exception of speed limits. Those vary on population density. The least dense the higher the speed limits allowed. Some States have a libertarian sense of speed limits because of the open road’s aspect of their environment. In the cities, it becomes a crucial element for safety that people have the collective behavior of safe driving. Although there are a few bad drivers that can cause chaos, the majority of our citizens abide by this collective understanding that was established at least one hundred years ago.

This is just one of the examples of the expectation of the populace regarding societal behavior. There are many more. One is taking advantage of a position of power. This type of action is generally looked down upon by the average American, mainly because most of us are rarely in such a position. During the history of American government, both local and nationally, people, mainly men, have benefitted directly from their position, whether appointed or elected, to generate either income from information of impending government action or income from withholding information. These actions have become commonplace in today’s administration.

The reason I began with driving is that it is the most visible collective action citizens take on almost a daily basis. We drive to a four way stop and figure out who goes first. We allow other drivers to merge in front of us without angry shouts and offensive gestures. What if this collective action ceased to exist and driving in America became a challenge to survive, a contest of wills. It would lead to an economic breakdown because people would stay home. People who drive for DoorDash would hesitate to go to work. Life would truly become immediately chaotic.

This is what Trump’s current vision for America is doing to the country’s citizens. It creating cracks in the norms of collective action, all the elements, large and small, that make up our daily acts as citizens of this nation. This administration has made daily racist actions the norm without even the semblance that it is counter to what was considered normative in the past. The administration has also made sexism normative in its employment decisions as well a programmatic cuts and funding. The administration is breaking down the language used for government through biting slogans and demonizing prior actions that worked to lift all Americans. This administration cannot say, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, because DEI makes it seem like an anonymous evil concept. They use the word, “Woke”, without even the capacity to realize what it means. They externalize the word fraud, while many of them devote themselves to the creation of the Kleptocracy.

These actions have symbolically created minor to major tremors in the ground beneath our feet. The perversion of language and actions spins heads. The complacency of a significant but shrinking populace shocks the thinking world. With the inclusion of a war taken on without the consultation of our traditional allies, we teeter on the edge of alienation coupled to the marginalization of our influence as a nation. Our nation is left with messy sores that bleed out any respectability we once had. One vain man should not speak for our nation, nor be able to take the kind of actions he has moved on without letting the citizens have a say through congress. His actions against the vote of the nation’s citizens are most alarming. The midterms of 2026 could signal either a return to checks and balances or the beginning of a new civil war with more than half the nation struggling to maintain liberty and justice for all.

The felon who lives down the street on occasion has a unbelievable amount of penitence to do if he is ever going to be considered a good man. Another retired surgeon who relieved pain for many through his surgical skills but lost his license to personal stupidity has a very long journey to the “good man” category not just because of his stupidity and greed.

I read a lot about consciousness and how we acquired it sometime in the deeps of our evolutionary past. With the eyes I have now I look and wonder if men can achieve the same level of consciousness of many women. I am talking about the women not in thrall to men who do not deserve the title of just good men, not better men.

I may be able to outthink my wife on a great deal of subjects, but I cannot come close to her on the command of presence. She is present far more than I can be for any number of physical, laziness or distractions on my part. I may know far more about the history of the human species, but she knows the birthdays of everyone and their phone numbers without consulting her smartphone. That is presence and more.

I write today about men being better. Better than me who might be approaching the level of consciousness that many women are born innate with. How can men make the jump to realize their shortcomings, to realize that just being male may mean that they are neurodivergent and need to work on their societal skills from an early age. We men deal with the distraction that testosterone floods us with, but it is not something we cannot live with peaceably with society and women. Our brains have an amazing capacity to settle and think things through. To weigh the realities and facts around our existence. To parse the realities and come to logical conclusions about our place in a partnership with women in our multiple societies.

We men need to call out the misogynists that call for the domination of women in all societies, with their religious mandates and proclamations making the mothers of their daughters and sons less than they are. We men need to call out the proponents of the manosphere in social media to prevent the damage to young girls and boys. We men need to call out the societal expectations for women’s physicality while giving men a pass. We men need to call out the sexual predators that exist in our public lives and their public lives as they work to minimize their wrong doing.

We men need to accept and support women in leadership positions and call out the awful double standards they face in the jobs they do. We men need to value their leadership and the consciousness they bring to the job that few men can achieve. We men need to do all of this and more. We men need to stop sending our sons to their deaths in war, a unique male construct.

I could write pages more on this. Perhaps I will someday. Men need to step up and begin our approach to a consciousness that does not rival women, but partners with them to save our world from the men that are far less than good and will never be better.

First out the gate is their groveling dishonesty. It is like they are all in a lying contest. It would be comical if it wasn’t our current state of reality. If they were watching my child and he or she disappeared the cabinet member would begin by saying they were just here a minute ago. Then they would say that they probably went to get something to eat. After a few more minutes they would state that my child was never in their care. When another person would chime in that they saw my child with them, they would accuse that person of taking my child, who they had just claimed wasn’t there, and spirited the child off to a third world shit nation. The cabinet member would then smile and walk away oblivious that my child was still missing.

The second reason is what they might do to my child if they didn’t lose them. They would take all the books away and give them the bible to read, although my child might be too young to read. I guess having a weighty book is just as fun as having a picture book. Then they would have to find a paddle because spanking is a requisite in the Christian School they went to. I would come back to my traumatized child and ask what happened. They would explain the paddling while I dialed the police. When the police arrived, they would deny paddling the child and deny that they were ever in charge of the child. At the end they would exclaim that they had no idea how they entered my house.

The third reason is that they would take away all the food we had in the house because it was purchased with funds provided by public institutions. My child would not have breakfast available before going to preschool. I would think that at least the preschool would provide breakfast lunch and a snack while I went out to find work so that funds would flow again. When I arrived at the preschool, I would see the sign saying that they could no longer provide these meals due to Trump’s government cutbacks that were part of his Big Beautiful Bill.

As the reasons ran towards infinity, I would realize that the current administration does not care about my children or any children. They care about stifling scandals that the President has been involved in, ripping children from the arms of their mother or father because they do not have their papers with them, making sure their daughters become beautiful traditional wives in a world plagued by climate disruption, actual plagues, and terrorism caused by the unilateral actions of our President, who cannot be trusted with children.

Politics and its factions, although ancient in origin, cover most of the landscape of modern society. Shortly after the creation of the United States of America, Americans moved into parties to bring like-minded individuals together to advocate for a path of governance. It was not a novel concept. It was as old as the notion of power sharing and coopting power. Politics, worldwide, has become an out-of-control juggernaut of hyperbole and faux reactions to everything from pins worn in lapels to food eaten by political candidates. It has moved far beyond who is the best person to lead a nation to who can say the most outrageous statement with a straight face. In some situations, ignorance is embraced as a strange form of godliness for a person running for office.

The atmosphere has become akin to the Roman Coliseum in bygone days of gladiators and spectacles of mortality. Voters seek disruption instead of competent administration. Humanity has come to view politics as entertainment instead of a process of governance and, for the most part worldwide, many nations have complied with an irrational approach to problem solving and the processes needed to actually accomplish the services and actions needed.

There is a dramatic lack of honesty in the politics of the world. Many political parties hide the identity of their sponsors to pretend that they are people based and not tools of an economic elite. They rarely concede the overall impacts of their platforms and the impacts on the citizens of any specific country.

Politics in a country with a parliamentary system of government can be both very representational of the factions within society and extreme examples of populist driven sentiments. In a divided society the construction of a government can become a dangerous process as outliers from the fringes of xenophobic groups can become allies in getting enough votes to establish a government. We have even seen the result of this in the US where extreme elements of one political party hold the majority hostage to push an extreme agenda or forces a stagnant “do nothing” situation where no issues are addressed until they get what they want. This ties back to the sense of politics as tense entertainment with citizens hoping for winners and losers. I have always felt that a system requiring winners and losers rarely is capable of addressing the real issues at hand.

I believe we have come down the wrong road from the concept that created the Greek word, “Politics”. It originally meant governance of people. Perhaps we are impossible to govern, but I think the problem is the people we choose to put into power and who we choose to leave in power. Another issue is the interference by major world powers into the governance of other nations. The US, China, and Russia have become major disruptors of other nations. Western European Nations, the former USSR and the US have spent decades in a state of both colonialism and neo-colonialism without the colonists. They, and in some ways us, have foisted an agenda on these nations that they never asked for. We simply manipulate in many ways, often, nefarious. We arm, fund and advise elements with nations that will allow our corporations to plunder their natural resources and exploit their citizens. This manipulation is just immoral.

Throughout the world, politics have become a system of manipulation of the masses. The forces in control of it use it to bend the systems to their will and agendas. When you wonder who these forces are, they can be whittled down to the World Economic Forum, a group of 1,000 of the world’s largest corporations who meet annually at Davos, a city in Switzerland. They also invite governments, the heads of some NGOs and even religious leaders. It is invitation only.

“McKinsey & Company describes Davos as, “Davos is a modest ski resort near Zürich, Switzerland. But that isn’t why it’s famous. Every January, Davos hosts the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). A highly curated selection of delegates from global business, government, civil society, media, and academia converge on this Swiss town to attend sessions designed to spark fruitful discussions around the most pressing issues of the day — and ultimately drive impact.”

We think, in the US, that our will, the will of the people matter in decisions on our and the world’s fate. Our will is so often sidetracked so that these corporations can remain profitable at the expense of our workforce and the environment.