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This Month's Scripture Verse:

1 But false prophets also appeared among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many will follow their indecent behavior, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep..
II Peter 2:1-3

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Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Views From The Outside For September 29, 2026

 Views From The Outside

The purpose of this page is to list news stories and reports from mostly Western sources outside of the U.S. You can use Google Translate to translate articles that are printed in another language. 

So far, news sources include:

International

From Canada

From England

From France

From Germany

From Russian Source 

From Spain

From Switzerland

From Ukraine


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Friday, September 25, 2026

Two Anniversaries In One Month

 Five and ten year anniversaries are treated as being more special than other anniversaries. And that is what we have this year during the month of September. On September 11th, we had the silver anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While on September 17th, we had the 15th anniversary of OWS (Occupy Wall Street). What I would like to cover is one of the most important lessons that we can reflect on from each anniversary. 

While many of my fellow activists would like to say that the most important lesson we can learn from our 9/11 is what some Palestinians posted. They try to remind us that our 9/11 is their 24/7. And there is a lot of truth in that when we look at what Gaza has become and how Palestinians in the West Bank are constantly attacked. But that isn't the lesson I am thinking of.

Neither is President George W. Bush's take on the 9/11 attacks. His  interpretation that the 9/11 attacks were an assault on our freedoms was wrong. His explanation was a self-aggrandizing interpretation as it showed a blindness to how U.S. policies can cause blowback. Bush wanted us to believe that people martyred themselves in the attacks because we can choose between cheering for the Red Sox or the evil empire--that is we were attacked because of our freedoms. 

Rather, one of the most important lesson that we could have learned from 9/11 is that our advancing technology can make us as vulerable as it makes us powerful. That our technology can either be turned against us or can be replicated a little later as we embrace a new technology.

And because our technology can make us more vulnerable, there is an understandable reason for increased government surveillance. That such an increase in surveillance though wrong could be understandable since it is there to protect us. But as with technology, the surveillance that can be used to protect us can become a threat if it were to fall into the wrong hands, such as the hands of the current President.

This lesson about technology should make us think long and hard about advancing AI technology. It can be used to both serve us as well as to harm us. And to mitigate the latter, government regulations and self-restraint by the industry is much needed. We should note that self-restraint is not one of the fortes of our current President. And because of that trait, our midterm elections become even more important than usual since our current President sees that lack of self-restraint and raises a seemingly insatiable hunger for power and recognition.

This lesson about technology is a lesson in tradeoffs. That is that with each decision we make, there are both costs and benefits. Those who would deny such a truth are usually salesmen and/or politicians. Those who wish to pursuade us to thoughtlessly embrace AI without regulations are doing so because they have something to gain from us while wanting us to ignore what we have to lose to others.

What can we learn from OWS? Some would say nothing because they believe that OWS's short-term existence proves that it has nothing to teach. Such people forget that the Old Testament prophets often experienced harsh rejection by those in authority and the people. And those prophets were not failures with nothing to teach.

OWS gave us a chance to change course. In particular, the decision making process of OWS provides its greatest lesson to us. That process consisted of decision by consensus where one firm objection could table a proposal. The purpose, or perhaps even the goal, of such a practice was not just to prevent a tyranny of the majority, it was to foster respect for all participants and views. 

Certainly the tactic used by OWS to promote such respect is not feasible in a heterogeneous population like that of our nation's. But the goal is a worthwhile one to aim for. And having such a goal would give our nation a better chance at living as the United States.

As it stands now, the polarization in our nation is based on a certain belief by those groups that wish to elevate themselves above others. Those groups market themselves as having everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them--to borrow a MLK phraseology. When any group believes that it has everything to teach others, it naturally feels entitled to sieze power in order to force its control over others. After all, when anyone has everything to teach and nothing to learn from others, whatever is said by others can only corrupt what is taught and practiced by the one who has everything to teach. And for those of us who are Christians, we need to note something else here. That those who believe that they have everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them are displaying arrogance. And arrogance is never smiled on by God in the Scriptures.

And so our nation (a.k.a., 'we the people') should make it our goal to include multiple perspectives and isms in whatever legislation is proposed, passed, and signed into law. We need to demand that of our politicians. And we should only elect politicians who are willing to listen to and incorporate the ideas of others into their own proposals.

Under the leadership of our current President, our nation is spiraling downwards and not just toward an authoritarian abyss; we are on the verge of experiencing a social and economic collapse. And for as long as we the people practice tribal politics in what we demand from our elected officials, we increase the speed of that trajectory. And so just perhaps the lessons that we can learn from these two anniversaries can help us to stop and change course.




 

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Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Views From The Outside For September 22, 2026

 Views From The Outside

The purpose of this page is to list news stories and reports from mostly Western sources outside of the U.S. You can use Google Translate to translate articles that are printed in another language. 

So far, news sources include:

International

From Canada

From England

From France

From Germany

From Russian Source 

From Spain

From Switzerland

From Ukraine


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Friday, September 18, 2026

How 2 Of MLK's Statements Can Solve Most Of Our Problems

Our demise as people, either on a small or large scale, will be due to our refusal to share power and wealth with  each other.

Think about that. Our refusal to share power and weath involves the refusal of viewing others being fully human and thus equal to ourselves. And all of that comes from either a sense of entitlement or naked ambition. While the former assumes that we are superior to others in some way, shape or form, the latter seeks to prove ourselves to be superior. Either way, we are refusing to count others as our equals. And so while the former starts with assumptions about ourselves, the latter sees that sense of entitlement as something to be achieved.

Our refusal to share power and wealth becomes our own demise in a number of ways. The first way that it causes our own destruction is that that search for power and wealth eventually causes us to dehumanize ourselves as reflected in how we inhumanely treat others  The second way in which we cause ourselves to fall is seen in destruction we visit on others when competing for power and weath. Certainly war is the largest scale on which that competition occurs. And regarding war, we would be wise to continually point our what the Russell-Einstein Manifesto says; that, because of the present or future avaiability of WMDs, humankind has a choice between survival or war. And so the longer we rely on resolving our differences through war, the more inevitable the use of those WMDs becomes. But even if our competition for being superior to others is on a smaller scale than that, the destruction that such a competition involves reduces the victimizer to being that of a temporary king-of-the-hill and the victim to being counted as untermenschen. Here we should remember that no one is king of the hill forever.

The above state is what all mankind faces today. And the quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. listed below not only strikes at and reveals the heart of those who refuse to share power and wealth, it implies an escape from a doomed future (click here for the source):

Quote #1:

'The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just'

Quote #2: 

'I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered'

We will look at the first quote, we should consider the ramifications if we were to replace the word 'Western' with a fill-in-the-blank. For when we make that substitution, we find that the scope of the claim increases tremendously so that we can experience how that statement can apply not just to any ism or group, but to individuals, even ourselves, as well. 

What that first quote targets is the emotional base for entitlement involving ruling over others: arrogance. Arrogance allows us to look down on others. And in that first quote arrogance promotes the idea that our own ism, group, or self are superior to others. That sense of superiority sees others as having nothing to contribute to ourselves, our groups, and our ideologies. Also, that sense of superiority gives us  permission, if not a mandate,  to rule over others and/or take their resources at their expense.

The striving of our favorite sports teams  promotes the idea that we should strive to be superior to others. Only unlike in sports where superiority only pertains to a game, superiority in life leads us to visit injustices on others as we rule over and/or take what is theirs. Arrogance not only makes us feel significant, it drives us to hurt and exploit others.

What should also be noted in the first quote is the all-or-nothing thinking involved. One side has EVERYTHING to teach while the other side can only learn. This all-or-nothing thinking feeds on one's arrogance that persuades us to feel entitled to do what we want to others. And that kind of thinking serves as the cognitive foundation for authoritarianism.

When King spoke of this feeling and all-or-nothing thinking, he was focusing on his own nation and government. He did so not just because of war in Vietnam, but also because of our past foreign policies that saw the U.S. suppress the aspirations of multitudes of people for either the financial gain of its businesses and corporations, and/or for strategic reasons too. And so the U.S. sometimes used proxy leaders to control how some other nations behaved and where their resources were directed. That was true in Iran (1953) and Guatamala (1954) as well as in Vietnam.

Now whereas the first quote dealt with controlling others, the second quote addresses our priorities as a nation and as individuals. It isn't that gadgets, profit margins, and property rights are not important. It is that people should be considered more important than those three items. The more that gadgets, profit margins, and property rights have precedence over the welfare of people, the more transactional both our nation's policies and our own affairs become. King's complaint about how investors would invest in other nations only to squeeze out all of the profits that they could was evidence of a thing-oriented society. To that, we could add the triplets of racism, materialism (which was replaced  by 'economic exploitation' in other messages), and militarism could never be eliminated. And we should note that King saw those 3 traits as being unseparable.

Just think that if we lived in a person-oriented society. the maximization of profits would not be the prevailing code followed by most of our publicly owned businesses and industries. And without that maximization of profits ethic, those in the business and financial communities generally exercise a significant amount of self-restraint resulting in smaller differences in the income and wealth disparities both between the classes and the races. We would also move closer to a more environmentally friendly and sustainable future.

That our society is becoming an even more thing-oriented society than before possibly shows one of the biggest failure of our education system especially in the secondary education and high education systems. There we are often taught how to tweak a thing-oriented financial practice or economic system that encourages us to maximize profits. The maximization of profits is a cannibalizing ethic meaning that in order to pursue the highest profits for oneself, one deliberately ignores all other principles and ethics to operate. In addition, such an ethic reduces those who could initially be counted as stakeholders to shareholders. The maximization of profits ethic tells us to ignore how others fare in the system regardless of their plight. And so we are taught to prioritize what is not human over people. We are taught that the only moral principle we are required to follow is that of serving oneself. If we wish to be kind or compassionate, that is an individual choice that many will applaud as long as they are not compelled to join.

The problem is not that we try to tweak a financial practice or economic system, the problem is that we do not include, in many of our economic institutions, how to objectively look at our economy from outside the system. And thus we uncritically continue with the maxmization of profits without realizing that our focus on such an approach encourages us to be selfish and to pursue extreme individualism in an interdependent economic system and world. As a result, those of us who are at least financially comfortable will often look down on those who are in the lower economic classes with disdain and as obstacles to one's own continual pursuit of their own personal profits. Is it any wonder that we have many elected officials who are so vulnerable to the influence of money? And is it any wonder why we have chosen the wrong people to represent or lead us?

In too many instances, our educational institutions have failed us in providing us, and those who are work in the business world, a full education on our economic system. But it is not just those in the business world who have been educationally shortchanged, it also includes almost all of the rest of us.






 

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Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Views From The Outside For September 15, 2026

 Views From The Outside

The purpose of this page is to list news stories and reports from mostly Western sources outside of the U.S. You can use Google Translate to translate articles that are printed in another language. 

So far, news sources include:

International

From Canada

From England

From France

From Germany

From Russian Source 

From Spain

From Switzerland

From Ukraine


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Friday, September 11, 2026

RL: American Voters Are Easy

 The title of this article was inspired by the Earth Girls Are Easy movie title with 'RL' standing for Real Life.

Of course, saying that any girl is easy in today's venacular means that it does not take much time or effort to gain sexual favors from them. And so when one says that American voters are easy, what is being said is that their voting favors are easy to win.

There are a variety of reasons why American voters are easy. One reason is that we have, for as long as I have been alive which goes back to the Eisenhower Presidency and that preceded the 9/11 attacks,  a lazy, bipolar Democracy. BTW, I actually had to confirm the timing of Eisenhower's Presidency to a high school kid when we were discussing history.

By lazy, I mean that we take relatively little to no both time and effort in deciding for whom to vote. For too many of us, our party affiliation determines how we vote. For too many of the rest of Americans, political commercials settle our decisions.

I use the word 'bipolar' because of our two-party system that consists of the Repubican and Democratic parties. Both of those parties hate third party competition from their respective share of voters from the conservative-liberal divide in our nation. Each of those parties has worked to suppress the exposure of names of third party candidates on the election ballots. And so for almost 100% of the time, the behaviors of the major political parties  during the elections fixes the election. In addition, either party loyaty or fear/hatred of the opposing party keeps us voting for either Democrat or Republican candidates. In addition, the viability of a third candidate also keeps us corralled into the Republican or Democratic herd.

But what about "independent voters"? Here, we should also focus on the laziness of American voters. Certainly, our two-party system makes our voting choices easy to make. And so it makes us lazy voters. Lazy voters are easy voters. And so, again, what about the independent voters? Have they escaped the laziness of other voters?

The answer is a firm 'NO!' They might be a bit less lazy than our counterparts who are too loyal to their respective parties. but they are not off the hook. Why is that the case? For most independent voters, their laziness has to do with the kind of society we have.

There are two factors that drive our society that can cause voters to be lazy. The first factor is that we have a consumer society. And in a consumer society, the tendency is for people to find a large part of their personal significance in what and how much we consume. Our consumerism not only dulls our concerns for higher values, it bestows on us a political Attention Deficit Disorder so that we don't have the patience or interest to weigh through the details of the tradeoffs that each candidate brings to the table. Those previously mentioned higher values incluse human rights, a non-toxic environment, a good education system especially for low income neighborhoods, law enforcement and the justice systems, and an economic system that, tragically,  currently revolves around shareholders. That reductionism eliminates other stakeholders of our economic system from consideration like the environment, respect and adequate compensation for all employees both foreign and domestic, consumers, neighborhoods and even educational institutions. 

Now add to that the role that advertising plays in our purchases. Advertising relies on selling a statu, that possession of a product can bring, or it relies on a single benefits that owning a given product brings. What we will never hear from any political advertisements are the tradeoffs that come with the selection of any candidate. And so our political advertisements mirror our product advertisements in that they rely on, using a Rush Limbaugh phrase, symbolism over substance.

Think of many of the car advertisements we are shown. They often focus both on the looks of a car and the image it projects more than on any other quality. Think of how our food is advertised. Restaurants focus on the taste of the food so that its nutritional provision and its safety in terms of preparation and added contents are overlooked. And what about the advertisements for clothes? Advertisements of focus on the status that wearing such clothes will bring and neglect to inform us about the plight of those who actually make the clothes.

Now think about how our political candidates are advertised in their commercials. Again, it's all about image. When political issues are included, they are greatly reduced to perhaps  one or two positions so that the potential of a given candidate is based on overly simplistic thinking. Candidates must project a strong, patriotic image who will help return America to a place of strength and leadership while reducing taxes and normal costs.  

But what makes our nation strong? Is it military capabilities or dominating others? Also, what is the price of reduced taxes if such reductions require that our national debt continues to spike so that it can cause our economy to collapse?

Like the claims made by the advertisements for the products we buy, the tradeoffs of the suggestions of the advertisements are not in sight. And the same goes for obeying the political campaign advertisements.

BTW, what are tradeoffs? A tradeoff includes the costs and benefits of any choice we make. For example, I am told that while I might enjoy the taste of the food and the speed at which fast food is delivered, there are costs. The fast food might have unnecesary ingredients that improve the appearance and taste of the food while toxically prolonging food storage. And its preparation might be harmful to my health, especially in the long-run. Such food might also not be as nutritious as I have been led to believe. Or so I have been told.

Because we have been consumed with consuming and advertising has been designed to kill our curiosity, we tend to put little effort into discovering the tradeoffs that come with electing the candidates we are favoring. 

Take the 2024 election of Donald Trump as an example. We had already seen, first-hand, how his first administration left the nation in utter chaos. And that state existed before the January 6th attempted coup. But because the Repubs painted such a negative image of Biden and Harris while strongly promoting Trump's abilities and positions, too many of us fell for the Republican claims for Trump hook, line, and sinker. 

For the most part, American voters are easy. And because of that, we have Trump as President and a worsening of the candidates we choose from in our elections. The old line, 'you get what you pay for,' applies here. That is because the quality of our candidates corresponds not with money, but with disruption, patience, research, anxiety, reflecting, and investigating the candidates and the issues before we vote. Though right now, not voting for Trump seems like the best alternative, perhaps some day in the future, neither of our two political parties will be way off the rails like today's Republican Party. And should that time occur, it would serve us well to consider voting for third party candidates as much as we feel comfortable with voting for candidates from our nation's two major political parties.





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