Random Thoughts - February 2025

Ted Reads Random Thoughts - February 2025

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Four months into this regime, my friend quipped, “It’s too bad that politics isn’t fool proof.”  Good one!!!

Turns out I was wrong, again. DT doesn’t lie about EVERYTHING. He does keep some promises, with a LOT of help from his cohorts, friends, minions, collaborators, co-conspirators and disciples. It’s important for me to remember he is not the author and certainly not the finisher of most of these promises, he’s just following orders written by the unelected 2025 cabal.

I was reminded that a fire I helped set, may very well blow back on me. It seems there are a few victims already of a political fire they helped set. I’m talking about a couple of midwestern, Trump country farmers at this point in particular. The ones whose crops went to help feed the poorest of the poor human beings. They confessed to me that they hadn’t realized it might be themselves who were going to end up getting burned. They won’t be the last.

I have been asking mental health professionals who support the current regime, knowing what they know about its leader, his moral character, behaviors, and his appointees, in terms of sexual abuse, when their training has taught them about how such abuse destroys people’s and family’s lives for generations. How can they sit in a room with a victim knowing that they support a person who has been convicted of such things?

As I have mentioned, I am a student of and thus prisoner of history. The “Do you know anyone who…?” tool is one that was used to great effect by Germany ninety years ago. It’s alive and operating right here, right now. Don’t be shocked when it comes to you.

None of this is new. It’s all human nature. Guardrails and check points, when removed brings out the worst of us humans. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Read Sapiens and Homo Deus for details.

I tend to ask other people what they think about stuff. Regarding the current political climate, a common answer is that they trust that god will take care of it.  Makes me wonder whether god did or didn’t “take care of it” ninety years ago. If so, it seems to me that god may have been eight million people late. But what do I know about life and death at the god level. What I do know is when I hear people justifying the ugly stuff that is happening to people by wrapping it in the ‘god’s will’ cloak, it feels gross. Please own it, leave god out of it.

I’ve been reading about the Artificial Intelligence world. Conversations with those in leadership positions (of huge companies) have suggested that in a few short years 85-90% of their employees will not have jobs. AI, they suggest, can do in an hour or two, what it used to take a team of seven people up to a week to do. It got me to wondering if some of us humans will be kept as pets. Continuing to be put in beauty shows, competitions, taught to do tricks to entertain, act as co-therapists (as horses, dogs, and pigs are now) kept as emotional support animals, etc., as we humans now do with our domesticated animals. Perhaps we will go extinct because we no longer serve a purpose because a machine can do it better. It has happened to other species, some related to us. Read Nexus 

One of the privileges I enjoy is traveling. On a recent trip that included several little towns of less than 1,000, what I noticed was that it seemed the more uphill the homes were, the more upscale.

One of the things I believe about human beings is that we must make up a story about

what “IT” is all about. Most times someone else’s story. Someone else’s religion or political beliefs. Few of us actually create our own: indoctrination is the tool used by those who are charged with humanizing us, so we are programmed before we can resist it.  That story must be big and adaptable enough to include my human experience. My story has to evolve, or I go crazy, perhaps killing myself and maybe you on my way out. When the story I “make up” doesn’t match my experience I am in an existential crisis.

I tend then to resist other people’s stories that are different than mine. Dismissing them is a whole lot easier than being distressed by them. Hate science that doesn’t support my ‘story’?

The crucial point for me to remember is that what I “believe” is just a story I make up, not necessarily the truth (whatever that is).

Read Denial of Death.

This also helps me keep from pulling out what’s left of my hair when I hear the stories that some people make up to justify their behaviors.  Especially their stories that justify hurting other human beings. I know that what I am witnessing is nothing but a story they are making up and that if they didn’t have one, they would go crazy, maybe kill themselves and me on the way out. It is far easier to buy a car than build one. Maybe the best I can do is customize it.

I read and liked a book I read decades ago, I Heard the Owl Call My Name.  In the book the owl in question was death calling. The indigenous folks I know, believe that there is a message in that kind of ‘calling.’ Today I was on a little hike and a crow was looking and began “cawing” at me from fifty feet away. He didn’t stop, even as I walked towards him, stopped, and looked up at him. If anything, he cawed louder, faster, and longer. Over and over and over. I wonder what it means when the CROW calls my name?

I was sitting beside a lake in the Black Hills of South Dakota and noticed how the pine trees that lined the shore were casting their huge, magnified, blurry reflections on the water. I realized that if I didn’t see the trees and only the reflections of them, I could very well believe that the reflection was the real thing. I think so.  I wonder how much of that I do without knowing it? “As viewed, shall appear” the quantum physicists suggest. Read The Quantum Revelation.

I was talking with a friend who has experienced discrimination throughout his lifetime. “Daily,” he said, when I asked how often it happened. I asked him how we, the dominant culture, kept him and others who suffer the same normality from revolting.

He quipped, “You keep us ignorant, tired, sedated, arguing amongst ourselves, and scared.  Especially scared.”  As he was sharing his list, I thought of the quality of schools available to them, the below minimum wages offered, the need for multiple jobs, the drugs, the crab-barrel horizontal violence effect, the crime-infested, under-policed world he walked around and lived in every day, as a community organizer and pastor. 

It reminded me of reading about the militia (so duly protected in the Constitution of the United Sates) in America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Groups of whites would conduct periodic raids on plantations and other places where slaves were kept and education was prohibited, to make sure that there was no uprising. We’re still at it. Latest example, shut down the Education Department.

It’s beautiful and special to be in a place where our gentle fluffy snow falls onto the tree thickening every branch by a good six inches in the still wintry morning. I have to tell you though that it is even more special and beautiful to be sitting on a back porch, watching the oranges drop from the tree in Hawaii.