Sometimes either-or is all you're left with

There is a tension between science and religion, which is, as we saw last time, more imaginary than real.

As most of you know, I'm not a big fan of religion per sé; that is, how those institutions that declare to represent a particular faith go about their business. By the same token, I've made it clear from time to time that I'm no big fan of science either, whereby I mean "science" in the same sense as "religion": how it is practiced by whomever declares themselves representatives of this non-spiritual form of faith.

Fundamentalism -- the most negative and least useful form of belief -- is not restricted to religions, as we commonly understand the term, rather it applies to any way of thinking that insists on belief in spite of facts and which restricts all methods and means of interpretation to those which they are willing to accept or sanction. We have religious fundamentalists that all of us more or less recognize and agree upon, but we have scientistic fundamentalists as well. Most often they make themselves known as militant atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, or revered figures of science who are taken to speak with authority on issues of which they know nothing and are eminently unqualified to pass judgement upon, like Stephen Hawking. Don't get me wrong: I think that both Dawkins and Hawking (who are merely examples, not personifications in any way) are very bright and intelligent people, but being bright is hardly qualification for anything.

There are a lot of bright people in the world. And I would bet that we all know someone every bit as bright or intelligent as Mr. Dawkins or Mr. Hawking, but for some reason, we don't accredit them with much authority at all, which is how it should be. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, or the Dali Lama, for example, are both exceedingly bright and intelligent individuals. Both of them are capable of communicating deep insights into matters of a spiritual nature. But I don't know anyone who would go to either of them to find out whether reality may be a matter of wave-function collapse or for thoughts on whether there is validity to the multiple-universes hypothesis. And rightfully so. What doesn't make sense to me is why individuals like Dawkins and Hawking are allowed to make extra-subject-matter pronouncements that should be taken seriously while individuals like Sacks and the Dali Lama are not (though oddly enough, they don't, for they recognize limits to their own "authority), boils down to a simple fact: at the moment, there is a dominant belief system, and if you don't subscribe to it, you siply have nothing important to say.

Science-as-we-know-it assumes that matter is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting points; this is the fundamental premise of materialism. Anyone coming from the religious or spiritual side of things assumes that G-d or something spiritual/non-physical is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting point. And, the real issue involved is this: both are assumptions; neither can be proved; there is no way that we can know for sure which assumption is true.

In other words, when it comes right down to it ... literally ... we're left with an either-or situation: you can either believe the route to where we are and where we find ourselves is from matter-to-spirit, or you can believe it is from spirit-to-matter. At the moment, we're not aware of a third possibility (whereby, I, personally, don't believe we'll find a third one either).

At first glance, it may appear not to matter what we believe, but it does. Every action we perform, every statement we make, every decision we make can be traced back to this most fundamental distinction. More importantly, what we think, do or say all has unavoidable consequences for all our futures, and for that reason alone, we should get clear with our own selves, just where we're coming from.

Just what happened 2,000 years ago?

Although it's not generally treated as such, this is one of the biggest and most significant days for Christianity. Today marks the day that one "Jesus of Nazareth" (or whatever it is you decide he should be called) was crucified. OK, we don't know for sure if it was him, in particular, but it this day that we set aside to remember whoever it was that was crucified around this time who, by all indications, changed the course of world history.

I'm not making light of the fact that we don't know historically for sure what happened oh, so long ago. I mean, in the end, what difference does it make? Normally, none, but we have the reality that more than 2,000 years later, the whole world, not just some obscure Jewish sect, arranges its calendars around this particular and specific event. I don't care who you are, you have to wonder about that. And, I don't care who you are, playing it off as nothing does no more for us than claiming that this is the be-all-and-end-all of human existence.

Me? Well, I have a very pragmatic streak: we all celebrate Easter (which was initiated by today, Good Friday) and I really have to ask myself what it means that more than 2,000 years after the alleged event, we're not only remembering it, but we're marking our time in relation to it. For sure: why is it 2016 and not some other year? And more significantly: why is it 2016 and not the-year-in-the-reign-of-so-and-so? Not only is it not insignificant ... it is downright defining of who we think we are as a culture (and, in the meantime, the world). Take a moment and let that sink in -- be you devoutly "Christian" (whatever that means) or an "atheist" (whatever that means as well).

I'm sorry: any way you take it, something happened. It might have been meaningful or it might have been a delusion, but something happened, and it doesn't really matter if that "something" was institutionalized "at the time" or some time later. Whatever it was, it changed the way we perceive and understand the world we encounter.

Even though I'm not necessarily so, I have to take the direct route this time: we don't know. I've got a lot of fundamentalistically inclined friends, and they have a lot of emotion and lot of themselves invested in believing that what happened then is a particular fact. I have a lot of other friends who are just as adamant about the fact that nothing -- and I mean absolutely nothing -- happened. The former have the burden of proof; the latter have the burden of explanation. Neither of them come close to shouldering their burdens.

So, here's my own, personal, take on the matter:

It doesn't matter. Neither of these extreme positions explains or accounts for anything.

I'm not saying that nothing happened. It is as plain as the nose on any of our faces that something did in fact happen, something so significant that we decided to change how we count the years. Oh sure, you can maintain that after the fact the dominant group imposed its way of counting on the masses, but that dominant group has changed identities as often as most people change their underwear and we're still counting in the "new" way. If I'm wrong, let me know. You may be able to rationalize or explain away the "event", but you're going to have trouble explaining away the consequences.

What I love most about today is that neither the die-hard believers nor the die-hard disbelivers can offer up reasonable evidence to support their case. In these days of scientific understanding, neither the totally-for nor the totally-against can make any kind of convincing argument to "prove" their position. I love that. We just don't know, and we have to live with it.

The big day is here

OK, I'll admit it: I'm absoluetly gob-smacked that today is just another holiday. It's Good Friday, fer Chrissake (with a tip o' the hat to Salinger), and while we're all happy that we have the day off (that is, for those who work for companies that recognize today as a holiday: some do, some don't, some only half-way), most people I know have no idea why we should care (be aware of the fact) at all.

OK, I have to insert a personal comment here: in the US (my other "home"), Good Friday really wasn't a holiday. I never got the day off; here in Germany, it has the status of an almost-official holiday, and most people get the day off with pay). This fact, in and of itself, is worth reflecting upon. In a country that prides itself of its "Christian values", the day is, at best, a half-day-not-having-to-work-day, while the world's export leader still has it enshrined as a full-fledged day-off-work-with-pay day, go figure.

But this brings us directly to the point:

A culture's values are reflected in it so-called holidays; that is, those days on which its commercial interests are willing to spend money even though they get nothing in return.

Let's face it: a truly modern-capitalistic organization can't be in favor of any holidays; that is, working days with pay. How could they be? Profits are generated through work, not through non-work or the absence of work or not working, or whatever. Holidays; that is, days without work, are unjustifiable. How is it possible, why should one pay wages for a day in which nothing constructive is done? Oh, I understand the logic, but at the same time I have to ask whether the logic is reasonable in the first place.

This is no pseudo-issue. It's real. Money may "work" 24/7. Profits may be generated 24/7. But, human beings don't function 24/7. I don't know about you, but every once in a while, I need to sleep.

And so, here we are with this "pseudo-holiday" that "business" would like to eliminate, but which, people be damned, it just can't do. And why? Well, it turns out that the answer lies neither in the holiday itself nor in the weakening cultural framework that imposes it.

For all the materialistic, money-talks-nobody-walks mentality that we like to propagate, the truth of the matter is that we have to accommodate and deal with people anyhow. For all the blustering about growth and ROI and stability in the future, we're all still dependent upon the fragile, unknowing, fallible human beings who do our bidding, to the best of their ability.

We've set up a system in which it appears that the "knowers" know what they are doing, but this is increasingly showing itself to be a facade. We like to think that this is how things have always been, but we're increasingly coming to realize that this is just the way we've made things for now. We want to believe that those who say they know actually know, but we're seeing day in and day out that the "experts" sleight-of-hand can't possibly be the way forward.

According to the "'myth' of the day", someone called power's bluff. Why is it that we still think that power has the winning hand?

RE: Brussels. It happened again, and we're still surprised

My heart aches every time innocent people are ripped out of life because evildoers do what they do. I weep for every family who suffers because someone, some group, some ideology thinks they can get what they want by harming others. How perverse can you get.

But, perverse is also thinking that we -- you and me -- are guiltless. We're not, no matter how much we want to be. Why? Because we allow those who have every interest at heart but our own to decide what is right and what is wrong.

What just happened in Brussels is a tragedy, no doubt about it. What it preventable? No. Could we have done something about it? No. Can we do anything in the future to prevent such tragedies? No, but we can do a lot to reduce the likelihood that we are victims of terror.

Terror is terror because it comes unexpectedly, violently, without warning, overwhelmingly. It shocks us to our core. Otherwise, it wouldn't be terror, would it?

The media love to tell us how terrible it all is. Politicians are the first to rant and rave and rail against the pain. But, in the end, those who cause it should be the last to condemn it.

A little story, a blast from the past: when I decided to stay in Germany after my tour of duty, the country was firmly in the grip of terrorists; that is, zealots who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted, regardless of what it cost. In those days (the 70s), the hounds of Hell were domestic, home-grown; our own (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction) ... their color was different, to be sure, but their rhetoric and their love of violence was the same as we find today with Daesh. Change the colors, change the words, but you can't change the message, and you can't change the mindlessness. While I was studying at a near-by German university, every week a bomb exploded, a car blew up, sometimes with casualties sometimes not, but with wanton disregard for innocent life. And what did we do? Nothing. Because it was the right thing to do.

People were dying, violence was being wrought, but no one, and I mean no one ... neither the populace at large not the politicians in power ... thought of curtailing rights, instituting massive surrveilance, or creating extra-judicial gray zones to fight against the insanity. All of those are standard fare today. Why? Because we've lost sight of the goal: a free and open society which embraces values that are worth standing up, and even dying for. No, today, we've become cowards and victims of our own making.

It doesn't matter whether terror strikes in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, London, Athens, or anywhere else. Terrorists can only terrorize if we allow ourselves to succumb to fear. When we do, they win. It is that simple. In that moment in which we allow the power that be to curtail our rights, restrict our freedoms, impose their own will, we have lost the struggle for humanity. It is that simple.

It's not about safety or security or surveillance or anything like that at all. Either we have values we believe in and are willing to die for or we can merely choose whom we would like to be our masters and enslavers.

I find it particularly interesting that those who profess to have the strongest faith -- evangelicals and fundamentalists -- who are the first to call for more restrictions, more protection, more repression, more whatever, to save or protect their already petty lives. If you cannot live in the face of death -- the fate of every single living organism on earth -- you haven't really lived and chances are you never will.

So don't make life miserable for the rest of us. We live and we die; everything that lives, eventually dies. Just because your own belief makes small of this fact is no reason to cry for the protection of another because you personally are afraid.

I choose freedom. I choose life. I choose a world that allows me to be me and you to be you. I choose being over fear. I choose going down with my head up rather than cowering with my head down.

You can choose more police, more military, more violence, more killing, more aggression ... that's your choice, but do know that I will fight you every step of the way. I am willing to die knowing that I lived, in freedom, rather than dying never knowing that I lived.

Science and religion share more than you think

Recently, I've been reading a fascinating little book, namely Bernardo Kastrup's Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism, and Culture (iff Books, 2015). I know, some of you have already jumped ships and the rest are looking for any remaining lifeboats, but it's not what you think. Yes, the Enlightenment proclivity for book titles as long as the texts seems to be returning, but Kastrup's "essays" are reworked blogs and interviews for the most part, and are written in an engaging and easy-to-read way; that is, for the rest of us, not the professional philosopher or neuroscientist. Anyone with a little openness and willingness would find them both understandable and thought-provoking.

While reading, one of the essays on the theory of evolution and what Neo-Darwinists have unfortunately done with it, I was struck by an idea. Part of the striking goes back to a post I made not long ago on how so many classic authors are seriously, if not maliciously, misquoted, as the victim this time is not Adam Smith but Charles Darwin. Now there's a really nice guy that got a bum deal.

To almost everyone, Mr. Darwin is known for his evolutionary principle of the "survival of the fittest". As you might have guessed, though, Charles never said, nor wrote that. Truth be told, he adamantly opposed the notion which was actually put forth and promoted by Herbert Spencer, not unsurprisingly an economist (because we saw in that other post what happens apparently when economists read, or something like that). Of course, these days, economists are quick to quote this non-Darwinian "truth". No, Darwin himself promoted the idea of "cooperation" as the most favorable factor in evolutionary survival and benefit. He spent years hoping to find a genetic link to it, of course, without success.

This blarney about the fittest (meaning in most instances the so-called strongest) surviving is a one of those ideas that appear intuitively obvious and brilliant, until you think about them. The strongest is the one that has to constantly prove his strength, so he's the one that fights the most and has, as a matter of simple consequence, the greatest chance of gettting killed. While all the tough guys were out and about getting their genes eliminated from the gene pool, the more reflective (and I'll readily admit, cowardly), but certainly more cooperative types were adapting our plans to get through this life and our genes into succeeding generations. And what the overwhelming evidence that we have for the notion of evolution is that we cooperative types were simply more successful, as is the case in every other species on earth.

Put another way, those who are willing to share -- quite simply, adjust their behavior positively toward others -- be it food, shelter, knowledge, comfort, and love, live longer in this life and through the lives of their offspring.

Similarly, Stan Tenen at the Meru Foundation has pointed out that not only is the so-called Golden Rule the most widely spread principle common to all the world's religions, he reminds us that the science writer Michael Shermer has argued that the Golden Rule "does not rest on any underlying religious belief, but rather is simply the most logical and reasonable way for a human to behave". That is, doing to others as you'd like them to do unto you is, well, the essence of sharing, isn't it?

Those who think the world is too huge and complex for us to understand are simply avoiding the obvious. In the end, at bottom, life is really rather simple. For as complex as evolution may seem to be, it works best for those who share. For as much as we like to insist on how different the different religions are, they share the most fundamental tenent in common. And for those who think that science and religion are incompatible, well, apparently you never really stopped to look at or think about either.

Quite often, life is only as tough as we make it.

We have to get over the hill before the holiday

Easter's coming (and I'm going to talk more about that next time). Easter's also a big deal -- I don't care if you're Christian (professing or avoiding) or not. In our oh-so modern, secular, ununderstanding, misunderstanding, materialist, person-centered realities, it's difficult to make anyone aware of anything more than themselves.

Now, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you/your ego/your view of yourself aren't the center of the universe; your city/region/country is not the center of the universe; your social/political/moral views are not the center of the universe. I know you like to think that they are, but they're not.

There was a time (and I'll be the first to admit that I miss it) when "meaning" meant something. We could (and were encouraged to) find "meaning in our lives", "meaning in the things we read", "meaning in our jobs", well, meaning in just about everything. Most of us don't have that anymore. Science, for example, has shown/told/proved to us that "meaning" is mere illusion: the world as we know it and encounter it is the product of a random series of random mutations of genes that has brought us to where we are and we have no idea where anything is going. In reaction to this, some have sought refuge in religion, each of which have thick books written a long time ago that tell exactly where we came from, why we're here, and in most cases, why we're suffering now and will continue to suffer throughout all of eternity. Yeah, I always found comfort in religion too.

It's time for a confession: I love science and have for as long as I can remember. The science I loved, though, the one that was searching for truth, that was willing to adapt based on the evidence, that was putting forth hypothesis to be falsified, and more, no longer exists. I don't recognize science anymore. Another confession: I love religion and have for as long as I can remember. The religion I loved, though, the one that had a view of truth, that was willing to measure itself against others, that was willing to proclaim that its approach to life could make life better for all, and more, no longer exists. I don't recognize religion anymore. The same is true for many of the big-ticket subjects we have to deal with: politics, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology ... the list goes on. At one time, all of them seemed open to what was new, what was to come. Now, they all pride themselves on their exclusivity. How sad, how sad.

And so, I find myself in something of a "meaningless" world. As Buffalo Springfield sang, "Nobody's right, when everybody's wrong." Unfortunately, inspite of everything, I am still looking for meaning because I personally believe that without meaning, life is, well meaningless. But, I hasten to add, I'm willing to talk about it.

A notion close to "meaning" is "sense" and I'm one of those hopeless idealists who would like some "sense" in his life, even if there's on meaning. It may be that we can't have it all, but it would be comforting to think that we could at least have something, anything, no matter how meagre it is. Our modern world doesn't want that.

Oh, I understand when people flee into pre-packaged solutions (or promises of solutions): believe science because they know; accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour and you'll go to Heaven; get more guns because Obama is curtailing the Second Amendment; the one who dies with the most toys wins; I'm rich because I work hard and you're poor because you're lazy; or many, many more. Yes, I can understand that people do that, but I'm having difficulty understanding how, in a world of universal (so-called) education, we can still fall for the same old snake-oil cons that we fell for before. Maybe, just maybe, we haven't been educated at all.

We're not over the hill yet, but we're getting there. We've a holiday coming and I think we should stop and enjoy it. We hardly ever take the time. But, we should always take the time.

Gotta shift gears, we're heading uphill

Sometimes I think the world is simply going insane. I know a lot of you agree with me. You can't open your Facebook page, read your daily newspaper (on or offline), watch the news, or simply turn on your TV without being overwhelmed with more insanity than the normal person deserves: war, plagues, famine, aggression, crime, immorality, corruption ... it's the order of the day. Yes, these topics have been attracting our attention for as long as we, as humans, have been around, but I know a lot of think that there all getting worse, not better.

We do have major issues confronting us, no doubt about it: global warming (it's a fact, learn to live with it), wealth inequality (it's not getting better), worldwide migration (both due to climate change and unwarranted military aggression), debt, food insecurity, water insecurity, natural-resource depletion ... all of these things are very, very real, and whether we like it or not, they affect all of us. We may not agree on the definitions or delimitations of these issues, and we may have differing views on who is allow and justified in doing what on the world stage, but the least that we can expect at the beginning of the 21st century is that we should be able to talk, discuss, and debate about them. But we can't.

In my (OK, perhaps not-so-humble) opinion, that is the biggest, most threatening problem facing humankind: our unwillingness (in too many) cases and our inability (generally) to interact with one another to resolve it.

In a world in which everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, how can we decide which opinions are worthy of further consideration and debate, and which ones are nothing more than what they are on the surface: opinions (the replacement, not the result of thought)? You can shrug this off as mere playing with words and clever turns of phrase, but the real issues around which these words are dancing is as real and as threatening and as potentially devastaing as any we have faced as a species thus far. What I am seeing -- and what particularly disturbs me -- is a decreasing willingness and abililty to talk (in the most fundamental and essential sense of the word) with others. In a word, this bothers me tremendously.

There was a time, not long ago, when we could discuss and debate. The reasons we can't anymore are legion. I don't care at all who is at fault. For me, I would much rather fix the problem than fix the blame, but that's one of the reasons so many people think I'm odd. That's not how things are normally done.

OK, I'm one of those hopeless, hapless dreamers who thinks that there are such things as right-and-wrong, true-and-false, correct-and-incorrect, but I am also one of those nerds who thinks we can establish rules and standards, criteria, against which we can judge our claims. These might be pragmatic (what works) or ideal (abstractions of some kind) ... I don't care. Some things are more physical than others and the measures that we might agree on to determine the goodness, badness, validity or inapplicability of any standard should be able to be discursively determined (that is, we should be able to talk about and agree on what we mean).

In other words, we could talk, discuss and debate, if we wanted to. This isn't going to happen politically at the moment, though there are certainly politicians who could. It isn't going to happen religiously, though there are people of faith who would be more than welcome in the discussion. It isn't going to happen nationally, for the issues that most need to be resolved apply to everyone, not just one nation or group of nations, and the issues transcend "interests", regardless of how they are nationally or politically defined.

What I'm saying, in simplest terms, is that we are in dire need of a new dialogue: one that doesn't care in the least who you are, but is completely concerned with what you have to say; one that is impervious to where you come from, but is in tune with how you apperceive the world around you; one that doesn't care in the least what your interests are if they are not in tune with everyone's interest.

I am not talking about some utopian ideal, quite the contrary. I'm talking about every serious discussion between any two human beings on this planet. For me, this is the absolute baseline. If you're not willing to engage, if you're not open to otherness, if you're not serious about what might be good, right or wholesome for anyone other than yourself or those close to you, you're never going to be part of the solution, you'll always be part of the problem.

I still owe you an answer

It would seem I got so wrapped up in the analysis of the question that I never got around to giving you an answer: should I be glad about all that political bad news or not?

Truth be told, I don't know. When looked at in a short-term context, the answer is probably "no". We've had protest votes before (for example, the Ross Perots and Ralph Naders, the Pirate Party, and more, come and go) and I'm sure we'll have more in the future (assuming, of course, that nothing is really going to change, and I'm pretty sure that most people I know won't be trying to change anything). What is more, there's always some movement left and right in modern politics (but that's because we're stuck in the 18th century politically and some places are so close to the edge (and I'm thinking about my home country here) they're going to go over the edge of the abyss before they step back from it), so nothing's really all that different. Mid-term? I doubt it. I find it amazing how people who will tell you every day that time is running out (for whatever reasons) have no trouble waiting through another election cycle to see if something does change (which it doesn't, and hasn't for the last 10 cycles they've been waiting through, but you never know, do you?) And when looked at strategically; that is, in a long-term context, well, anyone with the sense God gave a dog should see that we're not only digging our own graves, we're building and finishing the coffin and headstone, and are organizing the funeral as well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not Chicken Little: the sky's not falling, at least not now, but our inaction will ensure that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. As they say, it's always darkest right before the dawn.

And I think that's my problem. For all my gun-totin', militia-leaning, gun-owning, true-'Murrican friends: don't worry about it; you'll be dead before you live your dream of whatever it is you're dreaming. For all my, you-gotta-work-within-the-system friends: don't worry about it; before the system lets you change anything and when the "system" finally goes away, you'll be lost because that's all you know. For all my there's-nothing-us-little-people-can-do-about-any-of-this friends, don't worry: you won't have any input to make in the chaos that will most likely ensue and since you've shown you've got no imagination, your silence will be welcome when people are trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces and move on. You see, most people I know either think they're tough, don't understand the situation, or don't trust themselves in the first place. And that means that when things really do get tough, the tough-thinkers will be dead and everybody else will be more or less lost. Yep, that's my problem.

Things cannot continue as they are going now. Almost everybody's dissatisfied but hardly anyone I know has the desire, the willpower, the energy or the desire to start thinking about possible solutions. Things are certainly going to get worse before they get better, but there is every indication "out there" that better is possible.

The not-so-old American saying, "You can't fix stupid" is taking on new meaning. It's accurate in and of itself, and for that very reason, all those things we think are just given -- our economic system, capitalism in its current form; our political systems; our religions; our nationalities -- are what are going to break, and everyone who is holding on to any, or all, of these, is going to get hurt, when we find out how unsustainable all of them are.

So, am I happy about all this bad news? No, for the simple reason that too many people are going to get hurt. It doesn't have to be that way, but that seems to be the way we want it. You get what you pay for, and not enough people are investing the time and energy that is necessary to avert the obvious disasters that are facing us.

More bad news ... should I be glad?

This past Sunday, community-level elections (towns/cities and counties) were held here in Hessen. The results are in and they are, in a word, disturbing, but certainly not unexpected: there was a noticeable and unsettling shift to the populist right.

(For my American friends who live over on the right as a matter of course and who only have two party-candidates to choose from, these things don't make much sense. I understand that. In Germany, the general rule is proportional representation and any party accumulated 5% or more of the vote gets seats in the representative body. More often than not, no single party achieves an absolute majority (50+%) and so whoever wants to run the show needs to form a coalition with one or more of the other groups who had seats mandated by the election. The upside is that most often, extreme positions are tempered by necessary compromise; the downside is that if the coalition partners are close enough in program and ideology, you get things shoved down your throat anyway. Let's face it: democratic approaches are all problematic, but they're more problematic the fewer choices you have.)

All the established "people's parties" (that is, those that allegedly appeal to the broadest segments of the population), the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens (G) all took noticeable hits in their votes and seats. There was, once again, a lot of protest voting going, with voters seeking alternatives to the status quo. Though the Linke (the Leftists) showed moderate increases (even if they didn't manage to get over the 5% hurdle), the majority of "protestors" jumped to the right: moderately toward the Liberal Democrats (FDP), who managed to get back into the city and county councils where they had been voted out five years ago), moderately to the Free Voter Associations (a loose association of independents), but drastically to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-populist party that comes of short of having to wear brown shirts wherever they go. It would seem, the scare tactics sown by the governmental and mainstream media (though the AfD calls the mainstream press the "liar press") have yielded fruit. In (too) many places, they garnered 10-15% of the seats.

The naivists among you will be grumbling that if that's the will of the people it needs to be respected, but as is so often the case, what the people want and what political parties want are very different things. Granted, I've not been everywhere and I've not experienced every possible democratic system going, but I've experienced three personally and I've got to hear a lot about a good number of other systems from people who are trying to come to terms with their own back home. What all of them have in common is this: the party comes first, the members come second, and everyone else doesn't matter at all; thank you for your votes, even if you were protesting, but you don't count in the end.

Politics, by its very nature, is about power, and as Lord Acton made clear: the more you have, the more you want and the worse off you are because of it. I firmly believe that we need ways to organize ourselves to ensure that our needs are met. The level of this organization has to be more than just the single individual or family. We're social creatures, so social organization is necessary. Whether we've got systems that ensure that, well, I only have to look at the latest community-level elections here or the circus they call the American primaries over there to convince me that we don't. We have systems that ensure the system-players' interests and power. That's it.

We've been repeatedly told how far we have advanced and how technologically savvy we are, how smart we are and how many options we have, but for some reason, we can't get past a political system that can't get out of the 17th century. I don't think that speaks very highly for any of us. And so we're all driven to feel -- and then believe -- that there's nothing we can do about any of it, so it would just be best if we would sit back and passively accept our fate. Unfortunately, as it appears that things are developing in America and the poke in the ribs we just got here in Hessen make me think that it's high time we put our thinking caps on. Those in power are looking to keep it; those who are tasting it for the first time are looking to keep it; those who lost a bit of theirs are looking to regain it, and the rest of us ... well, we're just going to be pushed aside unless we stand up for ourselves.

What if ...

• the world made sense;
• we actually cared about one another;
• we understood the stupidity of violence;
• "love thy neighbor" wasn't just something we say;
• money weren't power;
• the love of money weren't the root of all evil;
• respect had to be earned and deference was a result;
• both Newton and Einstein were right, in their own ways;
• we were aware of the actual impact of our own opinions;
• we could empathize;
• truth were relative, but Truth abolute;
• even half of us knew what we were actually saying when we speak;
• a minimum of effort produced a maximum of results;
• we were aware of the consequences of our intentions;
• what we believed made sense to someone we hated;
• our bitterest enemy agreed with us;
• what I thought became a reality for everyone else;
• gaining salvation meant admitting you were wrong;
• wanting to be good was more important than wanting to be right;
• we realized that power is impotent, without the power we give it;
• time didn't really exist;
• the everyday person realized there are worlds beyond the everyday;
• peace prevailed on Earth;
• the contestants in the Battle for Heaven were getting tired of fighting;
• reality consisted solely of possibilities;
• you had absolutely no idea;
• everything you believed to be true turned out to be false;
• nothing is at it appears?

And who has the slightest idea why there are as many questions as there are?

Free trade isn't fair trade, if you're big enough

Instead of a lot of theorizing and legalistic mumbo-jumbo, let me try to make clear what TTIP means in practical terms. Hence, a couple of mini-cases, which is no easy task, since my American friends pretty much have no say in anything any more and the few consumer protections they had are continually legislated into oblivion by a pro-big-business Congress. The real impacts, though, for all the diehard States-rightists will be that they will no longer matter because a small town in Oklahoma won't be able to do anything that might discriminate against a company in Poland.

For example, say Smalltown High School has a deal with a local caterer for providing school lunches. The caterer provides jobs for two-dozen employees and procures all its raw materials from local producers. The time comes to renew the contract. It will have to be put up for public tender and this tender must be open to anyone in the trade-agreement area. A Roumanian entrepreneur has to be able to bid on the job just like the local caterer. The local caterer, however, must now conform to international legislation, the local rules no longer apply. Getting in consultants, not the least of whom are familiar with international law, increases the caterer's overhead and has to increase prices. The Roumanian wins the contract, the caterer has to let most of the staff go, so the Roumanians pick them up are just over half of what they were making before. All the raw materials are sourced from discounters worldwide, prepared in Vietnam and frozen before being sent to Oklahoma for thawing and feeding the kids. The other local suppliers feel the pinch, let staff go, but there are no other jobs around. The kids are still getting lunch, but some of their parents are now unemployed or even unemployable.

Or, Midsize City has plans to develop a new shopping mall just outside of town. The plans are for 500,000 sq. ft. of retail space and A&B, a Swedish clothier has signed a long-term lease for 30,000 sq. ft of space. Complications in the implementation arise and the mall will end up being smaller than originally planned. In negotiating with all the prospective tenants, A&B's square-footage gets reduced to 10,000 sq. ft. Less space, less profit over the 25-year lease, so they sue the city for the expected profits over the duration of the lease. The suit, however, cannot be argued in local or state courts, rather it will be referred to an independent court organized under the terms of the trade agreement. Midsize City loses, but is broke because with money spent on legal fees and compensation, it no longer has any money to complete the mall, and so it now gets sued by everyone involved because they all expected to make money on the deal.

Unrealistic scenarios? Not at all. In both cases, should things really go sour, I don't doubt for a minute that a major player -- perhaps a major fast-food chain in the first scenario or a real-estate hedgefund in the second one -- jumps in to fill the void. And we all know, in the end, just how well that works out.

For all of you who think that government is worthless anyway, just who are you going to turn to for help? For those of you who think that the local government should at least care about the local citizenry, what support can it offer? For those of you who think that some form of governance is necessary to ensure the safety and security of the community, what does the community even have to say? No, it won't happen right away and it won't happen all at once but sooner or later, everything described here will come to pass and there won't be a thing you can do about it.

Does your health insurance mandate buying generic medications? After TTIP, patents can be held forever, no more generics, except for what's on the market at the time of the ratification. In fact, all intellectual property will always belong to the property holder and we know how well that works out for small companies and individuals now.

It's up to you. You can sit back, do nothing, and take whatever comes whenever it comes your way, but the past weekend made exceedingly clear to me that big business has anything but my interests at heart, and they've got the best allies money can buy.

If you think government is bad, try big business

On the February 26 & 27, there was a conference on the pending free-trade agreement between the USA and the EU, known as TTIP. It was the most interesting two days I've spent in a long time. About 500 people from all over Germany showed up, and there was the odd visitor/speaker from Spain, the UK, the USA, and France there as well. There could have been others, but I didn't run into them.

The EU, or better, the European Commission (EC), is pushing hard to get the negotiations over with this year. In October last year, over a quarter of a million people showed up in Berlin to protest the agreement, and despite strong opposition, a citizen's initiative collected over 3 million signature on a petition to the EC to stop the negotiations. Of course, none of this has stopped anything and the 12th round of negotiations took place in Brussels last week as well. While I am aware that most of my Europeans friends and acquaintances are familiar with this proposed treaty, with the negotiations on the transpacific agreement completed and the clown car and circus of the primaries blaring at full volumne, I'm not sure how many of my American compatriots are, so here's the deal and why you should care.

The last big agreement of this sort was NAFTA, which I'm sure just about everyone has forgotten, but they shouldn't have. Despite all the hype of the government at that time about benefits and economic growth, the impact to the American worker couldn't have been more devastating: more than a million jobs lost, unions busted, wages depressed, and job security thrown out the window along with most regulation and legal restrictions on irresponsible industrial activities nullified.

No, NAFTA didn't cause the financial meltdown in 2008 nor is it solely responsible for global warming, but I can assure you that unlabeled Frankenfood, Nestle's plundering of the Great Lakes while Flint's children are poisoned, and a $15bn lawsuit against the US (which they have little chance of winning ... so pony-up taxpayer) because the people shutdown Keystone XL are the result. But, NAFTA was only a dress rehearsal for the real thing which TTP and TTIP are bringing to us now.

The pro-TTIP propaganda is the same as it was with NAFTA: economic benefits beyond belief for all, which is anything but the case. Truth be told, this is a treaty by big business and for big business and this time they're not going to let little things like national soverignty, the will of the people or elections of any kind get in their way. Why do I think so? Well, how about the fact that

• the negotiations are conducted by non-elected governmental appointees
• all negotiations are conducted in complete secrecy
• elected officials (members of Congress, the EU or EU-member-state parliaments) have no access to the text of the agreement except under certain limited and restrictive conditions
• anyone who does get access to any part of the agreement is forbidden to talk to anybody about anything they read
• the treaty, being a matter of international law, supercedes any national law of any signatory country

just to name a few of the most disturbing.

I'm sure there are many of you who are saying, "So what? The big guys do what they want and we have to see how we manage to get along", but what is most unsettling is the fact that the agreements stack the deck against the little guy, so if you think you have to put up with crap now, just wait. And for my European readers, I'd like to remind you that the handling of the Greek affair was also a bit of prototyping for what is in store for all of us once the agreement is through.

So, it would seem that this post is running over, so even though I don't like to do so generally, I'll have to pick up on this next time as well. Do come back ... it gets better.