Las Vegas getaway!

Wednesday, 4/16/25: Friday morning my wife and I will head out of Los Angeles on Highway 15 for a 4 hour drive northeast through the Mojave Desert (forecast: calm and mild) en route to Las Vegas.

When we arrive we will walk around the streets and through casinos to watch people gamble, some casting their hopes towards a mystical power, praying that it sends them money, refusing to accept that all power is in the house, and the mysticism is math.

We'll see a show at the Sphere on Saturday.

These things will be interesting until they appear empty through commercial promotion without perceptual depth. The Sphere will bring an hour of distraction, but what will it be other than glorified flashing lights? Will it change our immediate lives? Will gambling bring anything beyond clanging bells and empty pockets?

The "news" too, which may distract us on the desert trek, tends to lose its power through mindless media treatment. News cycles usually feature at least one striking event, striking in the sense that they impact large numbers of people, like the replacing of a world order with uncertainty, or a president switching sides in the middle of a war, but even impactful stories outlive their shelf life if the reporting is repetitive and shallow. For instance the story of Trump's tariffs, impactful as the tariffs are, becomes boring as presented by media, because Trump's terms are the basis of the reporting, with endless discussion of economic theories the tariffs are allegedly based on, while in fact economic theory is not the compelling motivation behind the tariffs. The motivation is to sow chaos and war as cover for establishment of new monopolies in coming AI/bio-engineered societies. Such superficial reporting gives stories an abbreviated shelf life no matter how impactful they are (unless you're part of the story and it becomes real beyond the media, as happened to us when the Palisades fire burned down our daughter's house). Ukraine vs Russia? What's the shelf life of this story if we hear only grand terms like "freedom" and "democracy" to describe its motivations, avoiding the actual motivational question: Who gets the mineral rights in Ukraine? This is treated as a side issue, when it is actually the only issue, at least for America's evolving corporatocracy. I find myself pondering my grandfather, who fled Ukraine at the age of 10 after his father was killed in a pogrom. Should that be somewhere in the story to freshen it up?

Anyway, Vegas here we come!

Note: The next post on this trip, and in fact all of my future posts, will appear on my alter-ego's site, Harry the Human at http://harrythehuman.harrythehumanpoliticalthoughtsfrombeyondthepale.com/.

Living the myth

From Rick Riordan's young person novel, Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief, which I heard today on a book-on-tape while observing a Los Angeles Unified 6th grade class, I learned that if one of your parents is a Greek god, you might have ADHD (because gods have so much to think about) and dyslexia (because the gods think in ancient Greek). This is the case with 12 year old Percy, whose mom, Sally, a mortal though she can "see through the mist," perceived Poseidon on the beach and one thing led to another.

The book's storyline has a remarkable resemblance to humankind's current, real storyline. In the chapter I heard, Percy, on an urgent diplomatic mission to avert a war of the gods, makes his way into the underworld to talk to Hades, the god of death. Due to his ADHD, Percy has multiple ideas about how to approach Hades, but Hades screams at Percy, accusing him of trying to start a war between the gods by hiding the Master Bolt, the gods' strongest weapon (producing lightening strikes as powerful as nuclear bombs), in his bag. Percy denies it but when pressed to open the bag, to his shock, there is the Master Bolt. Hades takes it but continues to be outraged because he still won't have enough power to wage war unless he has another weapon of the gods, the Helmet of Darkness, which makes the person wearing it invisible and creates fear in anyone nearby. Percy realizes that Aries, the god of war, must have slipped the Master Bolt into the bag as part of his plot to start a war of the gods. The teacher asked students why Aries wants to do that, and most answered, "Because he's the god of war." Apparently that's all it takes.

Something to think about

The negative reaction to President Trump's public humiliation of Ukraine's President Zelensky in the White House last month is intense and widespread. Though Trumpers claim to understand what the president was trying to achieve- something to do with U.S. pride or saving money- many feel he's more like a crazed person breaking out of an asylum with a sledgehammer, then bashing everything he sees, whether a federal agency or established foreign policy.

But the crazed person view, convincing though it is, does not tell the whole story. It does not explain what Trump is doing in the practical world. For a clue to what he's aiming for from the Russia/Ukraine war, look to Trump's main advisor and financial supporter, Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, who complains that the price of lithium (in plentiful supply in numerous locations in Ukraine), which he needs for Tesla batteries, "...has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into mining and refining directly." In the same week, Trump, with Musk at his side, lined up Tesla models in front of the White House and used the presidency to do a car commercial. Translating this sensitivity to corporate need into foreign policy, Trump switched sides in the Russia/Ukraine war, now favoring Russia, in an attempt to maneuver Ukraine's mineral deposits into Russian hands because, as he explained, "...it may be easier to deal with Russia." [Update, 3/30/25: Trump appears to have switched sides again, this time in favor of Ukraine, and is "very angry" at Putin, but it's a show. Russia will end up with significant mineral deposits in contested border areas.][Update, 4/30/25: A deal was signed today between the U.S. and Ukraine giving the U.S. access to rare earth deposits in central Ukraine, with the Ukrainian 50% share paid for by future U.S. military protection of those areas only, terms that were resisted by Ukrainian leaders, many of whom find them "unjust." Not affected by this deal are the up to 53% of Ukraine's rare earth deposits in border areas contested by Russia. Projection: Future U.S. deals for these border deposits will be with Russia, in effect ceding them the territory, in terms that Russia will not find "unjust."] In essence, the president is replacing rule by traditional government, which is accountable to some extent to voters and usually explains itself in terms of "right" and "wrong," with rule by corporations, accountable only to their boards and explaining themselves in terms of "profitable" or "unprofitable."