Racism, Police Violence and Terrorism Have the Same Source!

Terrorism? Racism? Police violence?

There is one root source for these problems  … and Bernie had it right!

The singular problem that drives these three social issues is greed. It is the idea that a person gets, ( and we all do ) that we as individuals are better or more important than other people. It’s actually very natural, driven by the self-preservation instinct.

But it works against us as a species, now that we have guns and WMD’s and it is just a matter of time before it is our undoing. Every day, we face a small probability that the end of our species will begin that day. It’s like a lottery for doomsday being issued every morning. How dumb are we?

Racism is the USA? Well, how did human beings from Africa get put on boats and sold into slavery, if not for personal greed? This country’s financial advantage was largely built on the backs of slave labor up until 1865. That greed from hundreds of years ago, ( Slavery is a thousands of years old tradition that began in Africa.)  created the raciscm we see today towards dark-skinned people in the USA. These attitudes are passed down
from generation to generation, just as language is.

Islamic terrorism? Well, that goes back to two sources. The USA has to take ownership of its greed for oil located in non USA places. This greed led to our presence in the Middle East, which led to their rational distrust and hatred of Americans. Ask yourself how you would feel, if Iran had a military base in Kansas or they were mining in Utah?   Couple that with the fact that the powers that be in most Middle East countries  have aligned with their billionaires (  just as they do here ), to deprive their constituency of the basics essentials of a good life.  Desperate people are easily swayed towards hatred. The economics of the military ( here and everywhere) wants its constituency desparate, so its easy to get recruits cheap.

So you can see – rasicm and terrorism have one root – economic disparity. I think that being a billionaire, in a world that has needy citizens, is by its nature – obscene. A person, and his extended family, simple never needs that much money – and they know that.

The cost to society for not taxing billionaires very heavily, is all the desperation we see in the general public arena. And that perpetuates racism, fear of the other and terrorism. Dont you think that the Iraqi view American soldiers as terrorists, with hundreds of thousands of their friends and family members left dead?

And billionaires do NOT, per se, create jobs. That is another big myth these days. Demand for goods and services creates jobs. Sometimes, entrepreneurs ( billionaires or not ) actually create new products and that creates jobs, but also displaces jobs.  Today, we are trending towards machines doing the work that humans used to do. Think self-driving cars and how that technology will impact truckers and taxi drivers. So the idea that billionaires are heroes or somehow good for us, is also way out of line. They create and perpetuatre that myth, so that we dont wake up one day and realize we are all suffering owing to the greed of a few.

So what is the solution to all of this? Our USA has been robbed by greed, because our country was founded on greed. Greed was and still is deemed good here. The Wild West, right?  We have billionaires who pay less taxes %-wise that its citizens do.

The solution is to take back the funds that have been robbed from our communal treasury and make sure that tax rates for those who have the essential of life
are HIGHER not lower, that those that don’t. A combination of a retro tax and a progressive tax rate will solve racism and crime here in the USA.

Bernie had it right! And so does Elizabeth Warren. Certainly not Trump and maybe not Clinton. We will see on her. She might have matured. Its hard to tell because when running for president, you have to guard your words and plans so carefully. Well, not Trump ..  and that’s why he probably can’t really win. I went to school with Donald – Wharton in 1969. I know this guy as a kid. He is the same empathy-dumb bully now, as he was then. He has not matured and that I am sure of.

So its all about ending or lowering the economic gaps that are widening all over thw world right now. This has to happen in the Islamic countries for that terrorism to stop. All we can do is set that example here is the USA , and be patient.

The world is watching. Our doomsday clock is not dismantled. Billionaires have to be essentially outlawed. They have to be taxed so highly that its much harder to accumulate funds beyond say 100-200 million. The 80% tax rates of the 1950’s for the super-rich was smart.  They made it so that our society had funds for infrastructure and better schools.

Listen. I am a captialist. I created the world’s first e-commerce site with a shopping cart in 1996. My family and I eat well, and live good. We have what we need. But we can’t afford a jet plane or a house in Switzerland. And we don’t want that.

All I am saying is that until the least of us has enough to get by, its not right or even smart for any folks to be billionaires. After all have the basics of life, then sure – its fine. That is the idea behind single payer healthcare.  It’s smart. Societies that provide healthcare for all have less need for police force. That’s a fact. It’s a win/win.

There will always be economic differences between people. But, if we want racism and terrorism to slowly disappear – we have to put the real criminals, the untaxed or the lowly taxed and hiding funds overseas super-rich (and the Donald is among the worst of them ) in jail – and/or take back what they have robbed.

Yes, the robbery of the super-rich may currently be legal. But they have bought the politicians. That is illegal and that has to stop too. In the USA, we need politicians who are driven to fix these issues and are not motivated by personal advance.

Bernie had all this right. Economic justice fuels racism, police brutatlity and terrorism. 

Let’s continue his revolution – regardless of who wins the presidency. The president alone is not going to fix this. We have to.

Please – for our kids sake – for our legacy.

What is the etymology of “deplorable”?

DEPLORABLE seems to be the word of the week. It is classically defined as: deserving strong condemnation. But what are its roots?

Clearly you have three parts to this word: DE, PLOR, and ABLE. Let’s start with the PLOR.

What you see there can be broken into two parts as well: PL and OR. These are two word parts that are clearly defined in my book. PL is a form of FALL. (P and F are etymological morphs.) You see it in words like PLUNDER, RAPPEL, IMPALE, and PLOW. ( A plow does go down under the earth). The Spanish word PALOS, as in Palos Verdes, means FALLS. The “L” in these words represents a negativity. ( L is an up or down phoneme, owing to the fact the the tongue moves UP to say EL.)

And the OR in PLOR is just our oldest word for LIGHT, as in AURA, TORCH and MORNING, but it also exists in WORD and ORAL.  The ancients believed that light and words were similar forces. ( They both are waves, they had it right enough. ) PLORARE is a Latin word meaning “to weep or cry”, and you can feel the “fallen words” in that word.

ABLE is a “father’s work” word. ( More OR’s, they are everywhere.) ABBA is the desert word for father, and it is associated with work. The Spanish word for work, TRABAJAR also has that father reference in it. So something or someone that is ABLE, is essentially “workable”.

DEPLORABLE breaks down as ” it is workable to say bad words about whatever is deplorable.”

Do many of Trump supporters deserve to have bad words said about them? Without putting in a percentage, I think most people would agree to a yes. An undetermined percentage of Trump supporters have certainly been deplorable. One could also say, that Trump himself is deplorable. And Trump has described many portions of the US population as being deplorable, among them, Muslims and Mexicans.

In fact, one could also say this entire presidential race has been on many levels, deplorable. Deplorable may even be the word of the year! Keep it up guys.

 

 

 

The Secret Meaning of SCHOOL

It’s early September, back to school time all around the world. Today at 3PM, I saw a high school let out, the traffic signal workers all focused and busy. Maybe 3000 kids ( this is LA ) all leaving at one ringing moment. And yet, this visual that paraded in front of my eyes as I was stopped at a light, is exactly what the word SCHOOL was built upon. Not the learning thing! Listen up, class. 🙂

In the front of SCHOOL, the S represents motion, because of the ongoing, continuing sound of SSSSS. You find that confirmed in a host of S-words like SHOO, SWIM, SHAKE, SEND, SWIVEL, SURGE, SHIP and many more.

That then leaves you with the suffix, CHOOL. Let’s examine SCHOOL’S cousin word SCHOLAR. What is left is CHOL, pronounced more like COL these days. And COL is about exactly what you think it should be about, a COLLECTIVE ( or CLASS ). C-words are almost always about some sort of CLOSURE.

And there you have it! SCHOOL first meant MOVE TOGETHER or MOVE IN A GROUP. It had nothing to do with learning! It referred to the socialization that is learned in a group, or some massive child-sitting program, created so people had the time to work.

The school you go to is more like that school of fish, that you might like to think.

kids move through school in groups

so does a school of fish

Children move together in groups through school like fish move in a school.

And so do two glasses, when they CLINK together in Scandinavia. Skol!

Why Do Earworms Exist?

An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person’s mind after it is no longer playing.

We all know music is easier to remember than plain words. But why? Has there ever been a study that reveals why this is so?

I looked, (google it ) and there was nothing definitive. The jury is out. Consider this.

Almost always, nature  does things for reasons, and it’s nearly always based on survival. Before we had discovered writing, it became advantageous for our species not only to communicate, but also to retain words of wisdom and lessons from the distant past.  So how did they do that without writing? They used music, of course.

Music parses thoughts out in repeating patterns when it is effective as a potential earworm. So the attraction within us was first to the pattern more than the music!

Simply put, life is a force that attempts to imprint a repeating pattern over the chaotic dead world. Within our bodies, the minute forces of life are also repeating processes  – breaths, heartbeats, even down to cellular processes which are also repeating patterns.  At the cellular level, living things are the sum of many repeating patterns.

To resound with chaos, would be to align with the dead world. Life does not exist to do that. Life is a repeating process that flies in the face of chaos. Life is a minute aberration from the nearly infinite chaotic world. So it’s natural that we would resonate with the forces that sustain all living things.

 So it’s just natural to feel connected to music.

Mark Twain wrote a short story about an earworm. It’s actually fascinating. I’d like to see it modernized and made into a sci-fi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Literary_Nightmare