Dot Connection

The Super Rich Know We’re Doomed, because 90% of them (I guess) cannot or will not use their power to change the trajectory that we, as a global civilization, are on.

Following is an amalgam of some recent themes I’ve written and copied & pasted about.

In “Full Circle? The Writing is on the Wall” on outofunitedstates.com I reflect on my personal journey, moving to Japan in the 1980s due to an interest in Buddhist teachings and residing in India's Himalayan foothills since 2008, suggesting an alternative to living under extreme ideological shifts in the U.S.

Trump uses the classic techniques honed by totalitarian leaders in the mid-20c, analyzed & explained by writers like George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and TW Adorno. He has been enabled by major media like NYT which sane wash his blather, circulate his lies and fail systematically to furnish corrections.

Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day. The inconsistencies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to believe about the president’s intentions.

Mr. Trump has long dealt in distortions and lies, including in his first term. But as he executes a much more aggressive agenda at home and abroad, his contradictions have become more brazen and more pronounced.... “The point isn’t to have a contradiction, the point is to have cover.”

"The reality of our modern information world is that you can pick & choose what you want to believe. He instinctively knows that.” Within hours of taking office, Mr. Trump pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted Capitol Police officers, a move that clashed with his professed support for law enforcement...

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Details of Trump executive order that resembles Hitler’s Enabling Act of the 1930s:

❧ All federal agencies, including independent regulatory commissions, are now subject to direct White House control.

❧ Regulations cannot be issued without presidential approval.

❧ The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can now withhold funding from independent agencies if they don’t align with White House priorities.

❧ All federal employees must follow the President’s and Attorney General’s interpretation of the law, eliminating legal independence.

❧ A White House Liaison is to be installed in every independent regulatory agency to enforce direct presidential control.

This is the biggest executive power grab in U.S. history.

This formally ends the concept of an “independent” regulatory agency, dismantling one of the last barriers to absolute executive power.

This order effectively erases the last major restraints on executive power.

Trump wants to annex Canada because the dramatic acceleration of climate change has caused extreme concern in the U.S. alphabet agencies about water access and habitable living land.

“Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement…Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves a high degree of uncertainty, but the direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S096262980700087X*

Who can’t connect the dots at this point?

Are you worried about what’s going on? Would you want to move to a place that has all the tech you need to be a digital nomad? where over half the food is locally grown by small farmers, and eggs cost 80 cents a dozen? where the air is clean year-round? where no one has a gun, and violent crime is practically non-existent? where Tibetan and Ayurvedic doctors heal conditions that Western medicine cannot?

Then get your 5- or 10-year tourist e-visa (at indianvisaonline.gov.in only!) and book your ticket to Dharamsala (Kangra Airport) via New Delhi, India. Try to arrive in New Delhi by 5-9am local time, so that you can catch one of the four daily flights to Kangra, the last of which departs at 11am. The 11-hour overnight bus from Delhi’s Majnu-ka-tilla to Dharamsala costs $10-20, and can be booked on the spot, but the whole process of getting from the airport to Majnu-ka-tilla to Dharamsala can be an ordeal for newbies.

The cost of living in India is far less than most places where the living is easy. Yesterday, I got a haircut for Rs.80 (US$1). Eggs cost about US$0.80 per dozen. I’ve rented rooms for as low as US$63 per month (for two rooms, with a tiny kitchen and bath/toilet).

Climate change will negatively affect every region of the world.

At least in India, no one carries guns, the concept of ahimsa (non-violence) is almost universally shared, and it is a relatively high-trust society (where I live, anyway), where it takes minutes to hitch a lift on a scooter or motorcycle the 10-20km into or out of lower or upper Dharamsala.

Home to a relatively high concentration of people from around the world who follow the teachings of the Buddha, where monasteries full of monks fill the atmosphere with mantra designed to maintain harmony, and where the locals also believe in live-and-let-live, the Himalayan foothills around Dharamsala have strong mojo, on paper and in vibes.

I just visited a friend who used to live in upper Dharamsala, but recently moved to [undisclosed location] on the northern edge of the Kangra Valley, in the state of Himachal Pradesh. He now owns not only a house, but several stepped fields around it, and has friendly neighbors who also own fields. There are beekeepers nearby, so we could have our breakfast eggs on multi-grain bread with butter and honey, all of which were locally sourced, like within one kilometer.

Lots of people have chickens, goats and/or a cow or two. Since moving here in 2008, I’ve always had the impression that, if something were to cause a global breakdown of trade; if an electromagnetic pulse were to short-circuit all electronic equipment; even if oil & gas were to become too expensive, or otherwise impossible to obtain; the millions of small and marginal farmers in Himachal would continue producing food, almost as if nothing had changed.