Canada, our neighbor to the north and my place of birth, is a country that is almost our twin, we have the same background, the same type of demographics, the same type of history and a similar type of government. On my recent vacation I interacted with my large extended family and met some new faces. What follows are my reflections, I do not suggest that ALL Canadians feel this way. Despite what many Americans believe, Canadians aren’t really very fond of Americans, we are viewed more like an over bearing older brother. Canadians tolerate us but also whisper behind our back. My recent visit confirmed that impression, in fact, I think Canadian disdain for America has grown.  Canadian women especially have a more negative view of Trump's America with just 38 percent holding a favorable view of America, down 32 percentage points from 2012.  In case you haven’t figured it out, this increase in lack of respect comes from our president. NEVER in all my interactions with my Canadian family and friends was I ever asked about politics, never before was I asked who I voted for or how I felt about the current political climate in the US the way I was in my recent visit. When re-engaging with my relatives the question of who I voted for came up, cautiously, “So, how do you feel about your president?” I responded quickly with, “I hate him and didn’t vote for him.” The sense of relief on their part after my answer was palpable. We didn’t discuss Reagan, Bushs’ or Clinton in the past.

After years of living in the US as a LEGAL Alien I decided to become an American citizen about 10 years ago because I realized that my life was here, in the US, particularly in California. The likelihood of moving back had become less and less realistic. When I decided to become a citizen I embraced it fully and became active in my community, if I was going to live here, I thought, I should involve myself. It’s no secret that I loathe our current president, however, hating our president does NOT mean I don’t love this country. In fact I despise our president BECAUSE I love this country. I think we have achieved great things and been a part of abundant affirmative progress. Sadly, #45 is walking us backward and I am not ok with the changes that are in the works due to the current administration. Right now, from what I saw in Canada, Canada is moving ahead of us, the US. I am happy for my family and friends in Canada but miserable about the direction #45 is taking us.

Here is what I saw and I accept that it was not a scientific process with strict academic guidelines- the following are observations. I saw that my cousins’ children have better jobs and better pay than my children (who all have degrees). They aren’t burdened with huge student debt. They aren’t worried about health care. They are confident enough in their jobs to make future plans. My kids have already experienced plant shut downs, layoffs, lack of job opportunities and advancement in the less than 10 years they have been in the work force. We could afford access to universities for all of our children. College isn’t a luxury. It really isn’t even a choice. If we want to stay competitive in the world then we need educated workers. Despite what so many old white men complain about, (yes, grumpy old geezers exist in Canada too, several of them are my uncles) the reality is that the good old days when they entered the workforce with nothing but a high school diploma (or less) and worked themselves into high paying jobs that enabled them a comfortable middle class lifestyle for their families are gone. And it won’t be coming back. The ratio of tuition to wages has not kept pace, tuition has skyrocketed and we all know what wages have done. We can’t possibly offer affordable higher education to our children?  There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/new-yorks-free-tuition-law-redefines-idea-universal-college-access/

https://berniesanders.com/issues/its-time-to-make-college-tuition-free-and-debt-free/

http://www.nea.org/home/62740.htm

Canadians scratch their heads in wonder that we are still fighting for affordable access to health care for all. They simply do not understand. Do they think their system is perfect? No, they don’t, however, they wouldn’t give it up for ours. Last year my mother had heart surgery and her co-pay was about $10,000. My cousin’s husband also had heart surgery recently- they paid no out of pocket expense because they pay for their health care in affordable premiums. Another cousin of mine takes methotrexate, I have a US friend who takes it also- the same drug, same manufacturer. The price in Canada? $82 for 3 month supply. In the US?  $236. As my cousin says, “I am willing to pay for your child’s broken leg today because I may need you to pay for my family’s health problem tomorrow.” That’s what insurance does, we pay premiums in the event of an emergency- so that we are prepared. They do complain about wait times, especially in the rural communities I visited. It isn’t perfect but they at least know that in an emergency they are covered. We can afford health care for all. And before you ask how, here are links that offer financial solutions to that question. What is preventing us from being the fair country we espouse to be is greed, plain and simple greed.

http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/368536-here-is-an-american-solution-to-universal-health-care

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-medicare-extra-20180227-story.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/15/universal-healthcare-us-possible-bernie-sanders-kamala-harris

I saw that in race relations, they seem ahead of us, not far ahead, but they have made more progress. I saw no hate groups being discussed on their news, no race riots going on. I even watched an advertisement for cosmetic products at a local drugstore on TV that included a variety of people; white, indigenous, Muslim, senior, male and EVEN transgender! Imagine if a store put a commercial on TV that included transgender in the south. We tell businesses that they can refuse gay people service. In California I have been seeing ads including gay couples on TV but they are few and far between. I noticed a stark contrast in the journalists on television news- very few Barbie and Ken cookie cutter reporters, reporters reflected more accurately the general population, with different ethnicities, ages, and sizes, most of the female reporters had healthy body proportions and wore clothing that was not as revealing as what the women on FAUX news wear. Sadly, Canada has the same problem with Indigenous people as we do in the US.

Climate Change was not a debated topic, it was a given that the fires and floods going in British Columbia and Ontario (just as we have been having fires and floods raging in the US) stem from Climate Change. The discussions were more about solutions and worries. I was in some farming communities, one community with a paper mill and one with a mine as well as small cities. The people in the community didn’t mock Climate Change concerns. It wasn’t questioned.

As the scientific evidence for global warming continues to mount, the Canadian public is increasingly coming to accept this reality and take the issue seriously. A majority is clearly concerned about climate change, and about the potential consequences in terms of weather events, environmental impacts and in particular about what it may mean for future generations.  

Lastly, and sadly, I was there for the shooting in Toronto  and in New Brunswick . Here again the discussion in public and on the media was different. I did not hear one single utterance of ‘thoughts and prayers’. A former police chief was asked about his ideas and he discussed ‘better police staffing, stronger laws, better checks and balances’. Many, many folks made the comment, “we don’t want to be like the US, we want to find a solution to this”. The general Canadian reaction was; “We need to find a solution.”, not ‘there’s nothing that can be done’ as our politicians say here.

No, I do not want to move back to Canada, nor am I sorry I renounced my Canadian citizenship to become an American. I can still love my country AND be concerned. I can still be patriotic AND recognize that we are falling behind. I don’t want to live anywhere other than my home, I want to work on improving my home for the future, for my children and grandchildren. I am not working for myself, I don’t want my kids to have what I had- I want a BETTER future for my family. Right now, they have less than I did and the actions of the current administration are exacerbating the problems that need fixing, equality issues of gender and economics, environmental issues and social issues. Sometimes we have to leave a problem to see the situation from a new perspective, sometimes we have to listen to the critiques of others to understand where we are failing. The view from above was not pleasant, I was not surprised but I was a bit ashamed. We are being laughed at and criticized by our neighbors, it’s not a good feeling, however, we can change that, each one of us, in our little way. And yes, voting is one way that we can all make a change. My children are here, my home is here, heart is here and I want to be proud again.

Seems like some at NASA are seeking the "Christian God who founded America" within dark matter and energy

Lately I've been following the international effort to find evidence for dark matter which, together with dark energy, makes up almost 95% of the universe, according to accepted theory to date. Most of that research is occurring in detectors kilometers deep in the Earth's crust.

And then I came across this curious conversation at Research Gate among ~scientists~ about consciousness. Is it emergent from out of the brain's propagation of neural signals, as most neuroscientists suggest from the evidence? Or is there a fundamental consciousness interacting since the beginning of time from that 95% dark matter and energy part of the universe that's entirely "invisible" to the electromagnetic spectrum?

The conversation begins in 2019 (last comment June 19, 2020) with: “Is dark energy fundamental consciousness?” by Karl Sipfle , a Trump-administration appointee to NASA's Gateway Moon-to-Mars space station program. He's also self-published some books on consciousness. In a paper at Research Gate, he synthesizes his projected thinking with: “Dark energy must be fundamental and we have not directly detected it and consciousness must be fundamental and we have not directly detected it. If they are the same, most of the energy of the universe is consciousness.”
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When I searched deeper, I found that Sipfle had been a GOP candidate in 2010 for the Michigan State legislature, as a member of the Michigan Conservatives Network. Based on its stated values, I can only conclude to myself that he, in the sly, is proselytizing the blatant historical lie that a Christian God is the basis for the founding of America, and is apparently trying to bring real scientists onboard, suggesting without stating it that this god is running the show from within all that dark matter/energy. Of course, based on what I’ve read, he would never put it that way among a gathering of scientists.

Here are MCN's stated values:

To Pray has you covered Michigan Conservatives. Our Values Here is our outline for our values. If you feel anything important is missing, please contact us at michiganconservatives at live dot com .

Michigan Conservatives stands for these values.

1.Low taxes

2.Limited but efficient government

3.Life should be protected inside an...d outside the womb.

4.Marriage is between one man and one woman.

5.The nation is founded on a belief in God. People are free to believe anything they want, but they can’t neglect the importance of a belief in God in founding and maintaining this nation.

6.The right to arms.

7.Strongly supporting the military.

8.Strong laws protecting our borders, which allows for legal immigration but punishes for illegal immigration.

9 Belief in full freedom of press, speech and religion.

10. Belief that all are created equal.

Sipfle briefly speaks to FOX News at minute 1:39, in response to Obama’s 2010 State of the Union Address

***
OPINION

To me, the reality that my consciousness, my awareness, is entirely based on the sum total of my brain's neural activity becomes such a fresh breath of air. There are no invisible fundamental forces of influence, good or bad, to affect me. Or anyone else.  It's such a waste of time, resources and effort -- and lives lost -- to constantly be thinking and worried about all those fictions.

There is no god, though its archetypes have been analyzed to either generate a good or horrific moral compass for the cultures that have generated them. But those very archetypes, many of them Abrahamic, have dovetailed with the agendas of history's and breaking news' most brutal and power-greedy predators, recently from ISIS and the orange POTUS.
So be aware of what you sign up for when voting, or to which school and church you might take your kids. Nurture their brains so they can have knowledge of the true world in which they will spend their lives problem-solving our mistakes, and thus be empowered to go where no one has gone before.

Enjoy life! Have fun! Embrace all life on the planet, for their individual evolutionary histories are intrinsic to our own existence and awareness at this very moment as you read this. When my body no longer can keep the brain alive, consciousness ends. Nothing mysterious, good or bad, then occurs. Let the carrot in front of your life be to empower whatever can humanly design with nature a paradise that is real for some future generation. Love and like who you are -- no imaginary being is there to do that for you -- and understand that there are over 7.5 billion others on the planet with that 3 pound organ generating a consciousness quite similar to your own. Nurture a cognitively strong sense of empathy within yourself, and reduce suffering wherever you find it. But never so any harm comes to yourself. Feed your brain, and the body that supports it, as though it is a god. I think it is so befreeing to not be bound by a fictive story filled with really scary shit. The first Navajo (Di'neh) to encounter the Conquistadors (who never conquered the Navajo) were horrified by the notion of these palefaces, on this remarkable new animal, horses, worshiping a hero they’d nailed to a couple pieces of a tree.

Here is a very simple and irrefutable way for anyone to understand how the US, under 45GOP's minuscule but deadly-venomous thumb, is doing with Covid-19 relative to other countries.

For example, the mortality rate in the US per million on Sept. 23, 2020 is just over 600. In Denmark, it is just over 100. Sweden, our beloved Nordic neighbor and which began this pandemic with herd immunization in mind, is at 580.

Now this is where it gets interesting. New Zealand's mortality rate is 5, FIVE, per million. And it is led by PM Jacinda Ardern, whom Forbes named as among the 100 most powerful women in the world. She immediately responded to the pandemic with the best scientific advice. It is not a perfect pattern, but those countries currently being led by women seem to be doing the best. OK, so New Zealand is a group of islands. But Germany, under Angela Dorothea Merkel and in the thick of things with huge mortality rates in neighboring European countries, is at about the same rate (110/million) as in Denmark, under Mette Frederiksen (who just got married). At her most recent press conference a few days ago, a reporter asked her if she had stuck to her own rules at the wedding. And she laughed, "Of course."

This is continuously updated. All you have to do is move your cursor over any country. Some may not be easily seen, if they're small, so just hover over the area where the country exists.  But before you do that, why not turn on the music just beneath this interactive map

For everyone who is hurting under 45GOP, including from the pandemic as winter approaches, here are four warm women...

One of the advantages of being old is that you can clearly remember a different world when ideals like democracy, fairness, and justice were honored as national values and a source of American pride. In the 1950’s the whole concept of American ideals were not simply overused cliches or a vision of history that blinded us to this nation’s wrongs. Americans were primed to believe this was what we struggled to be. You see, this was the nature of the propaganda that mobilized an unprepared nation to fight the forces of fascism-- we were better, we were the good guys, we believed in justice and liberty for all.

As this image of an ideal America became real in the minds of Americans, it became impossible not to see the dissonance between the real America and that idea. Forces began to coalesce in order to bring  America into line with the ideals America claimed as its foundation. As every action spurs an equal and opposite reaction, people shaken by war, the possibility of nuclear holocaust, the birth of the cold war and the push for “Negro” Civil Rights began to long for the pre-war imaginary America, the one that did not look too closely at the conflict between our ideals and our reality. All this hullabaloo had to be the work of “outside agitators” even worse the Commies, not red-blooded Americans who lived in little white houses in little white towns  where every home contained a kindly black maid. This little white town was evidenced in almost all the films made during and shortly after the war. They depicted an America that never was but was desperately desired by many white Americans. Thus the forces for change and the forces of reaction quietly began to prepare for a war of values, a war between the new and the old, between imaginary and real.

On the Liberal Left, segregation was the issue. People talked about it, they argued about it. They demonstrated. No one noticed they were all standing on the quicksand of over four hundred years of racism. It seemed like a simple problem of fairness. The battle to end segregation shook many people’s idea of  America and began to reveal the ever-present anti-black, anti-immigrant, antisemitic America.

Many Americans were bred on the idea that segregation, America first, white supremacy reflected a comfortable and even righteous order. Both sides shouted, marched, attacked, hurt others, destroyed property, tried to overturn school buses, shot at people, murdered. It was far from pretty but we knew exactly what the fight was about and the Black people, who fought and died on the European and Pacific battlegrounds of WWII, decided they would win this battle whatever the cost.

I know I am oversimplifying but I want to make it clear that the left organized itself around issues.  Another early issue was the fight against nuclear testing and all around the world, people took to the streets. We knew what the issue was. We defended our position using science and logic. Then the young John F. Kennedy won us with his call for a new patriotism, a slowing of the arms race, and racial justice made us want to be part of the world he presented.

The call to make America live up to its own proclaimed standards grew and hit at many groups in society. As the call for justice grew, as the issues grew clearer, the battles became more vicious. But we always knew what we were fighting for or against. We formed organizations that would last until the specific issues were resolved and some even beyond. Of course, there was the ugliest of push backs but I am not examining the history of the time, only how we did politics then. Sometimes it included the government using violence, incarceration and the secret tactics of the FBI and CIA but we fought and we knew what each issue was. And in the center of this agitation was a war that threatened the lives of young American men, a war that many young men believed was not worth dying for.

The media of the time, radio and the new television looked at and for issues. The televised Presidential debates examined issues, of which most Americans were aware and the television journalists asked questions about those issues. There was also a Fairness Doctrine where the FCC demanded that media present programming that informed the public on issues. That’s right. To impartially look at issues. Breathtaking, no? And if one party got representation on the air ALL parties needed to be represented. It was called  equal time and that gift of equal air time included third parties .

The rapid changes in the nation created an emotional chaos that made many Americans confused and afraid. Then along came Lee Atwater who saw these fears as a way to manipulate the public not with issues but with emotion, Of course, this began before Atwater. Slander, lies, slogans, false news , scandal were always part of America politics but, in the end, it was the issues that tended to galvanize the voter. Television ushered in the idea that presentation was, perhaps, as important t or even more important than the issues.

Optics is what we call it today. How to make things look in order to create a climate, not  to foster an idea but an emotion, in an attempt to encourage voters to bypass their brains and vote the way you want them to vote,  because you have sounded a whistle. A dog whistle  that silently played into their fears.

 Many criticized  the ad used by Democrats against Republican Barry Goldwater, A little girl is picking the petals off a daisy in a beautiful field of daisies, then poof an atom bomb bursts. It certainly was dramatic and powerful but it still spoke to the issue. “Goldwater’s approach to foreign policy is dangerous and will lead to nuclear war.”

Atwater had a different and very creative idea. Don’t mention the issues, construct a political world where words deceive, where outrage replaces thought. He laid out the method and died quite young but the die was cast. Of course, it began with an idea. Prove Dukakis was weak (a repeated accusation against Democrats). An unfortunate optic with small Dukakis in a large tank was uncovered and passed around. But the most famous of these attacks was the “Willie Horton” television ad. It rolled racism in a ball to frighten vulnerable white people and to tell the South that the Republican Party stood with them. Governor Dukakis, as Governor of Massachusetts, had  administered a felon furlough program where a black man, Willie Horton, used his time to assault, rob and rape. Game on.

Over the years this method has been utilized in various ways but it was in the last election that this way of politics totally usurped the idea that the vote was about real issues that affected real lives. Not one issue was discussed. It was a total game of character assassination.  No one wanted to know what either candidate believed or how they would implement their plans. Trump barked out pleasant reactionary predictions. America would be great again. What did that mean? What, for example, did he plan to do about the environment and how it would be accomplished? Trump spoke only in generalities and was never examined beyond sound bites. I remember Clinton attempting to discuss issues while a lumbering orange presence lurched over her and made sure he claimed every frame. None of the “moderators” politely asked him to sit and/or address the issues.

And now it has only gotten worse. The media drives us from anecdote to speculation all designed to overwhelm us and distract. We speculate on the Mueller investigation, what might or might not happen, and, of course, Roseanne and her sit-com require long discussions of outrage, let’s feast on Kayne West’s joy in Trump, or why didn’t Trump congratulate the man who captured a murderer, and did Trump actually brush lint from Macron’s suit, and on and on.

So we talk about nothing that is fundamental to our lives or the lives of our family and friends, at least not for very long, while the Republican Congress and administration work on passing and implementing their platform. Have you read it? Do you know what issues they are attacking and what it might mean to you and your family? You can hate Trump all you want but it is the Republicans that he is working for. Where does the party stand on pollution? On safe food and drugs? On selling national land? On ending workers safety net? It’s all in the platform and if you can read past the glittering words and noble explanations, it is all there.

The disease of being ticked off is not the property of the “dumb” right. I know many on the left chasing one outrage after another. This is a recipe for defeat. Often when I mention this I get back an angry, “Well, I’m working on real things, besides writing opinions on FB”. However, when I ask what they are working on, I rarely get an answer and the truth of experience is it takes a mammoth effort to turn the ship of state. A famous saying growing out of the civil rights movement was “keep your eyes on the prize?”

Do you know what your prize is? What you want to work for? And you should know, the work is hard, often tiresome, always thankless until you win and that might take decades but focus on one issue at a time, one thrust forward. There is no time for outrage alone, every motion should bring you closer to your goal. Do you know what it is?  Or is our passion mainly  to hear our own voices?