Thanksgiving 2020 is quickly gaining on us

Greetings

Hi there, I hope you’ve been having a good week. We’ve moved past the election and now we’re headed into the holidays. The temperature around the country is dropping. Leaves are falling from trees. Some place may be seeing snow already. Here in the Portland suburbs it’s quiet and the leaves which turned beautiful shades of gold and red are now falling to the ground. I went out for a walk earlier and people are piling the leaves up in the street for the city to come by and sweep them up.

Interesting Read

This weekend I read the Atlantic article The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse by Graeme Wood. I found this article to be extremely interesting. In the article University of Connecticut professor Peter Turchin discusses his progression from entomologist to ecologist to historical data scientist.

Turchin states that he learned all that he could learn about pine beetles. Then he started searching for new areas to work on in the academic world. The thing that he does which some shy away from is applying math in his research. Math is something that a number of academics don’t really like to engage or feel that you can’t apply math to something like humanities.

His prediction models take into account the prior 10,000 years. That’s approximately 200 lifetimes. I don’t know about you but that’s a long time. Now in term of data sets some would say that it’s not significant. That’s all we have though so seems like a good starting point. We’ve seen a number of societies rise and fall.

One of the pieces he discusses is how war is part of the change in societies. The strong prevail over weak. That doesn’t come to a surprise to anyone until you start to bring that into the modern day. In today’s world I’m sure we could apply this to several different areas on the globe.

The other thing he discusses is what he refers to as the elites. The elites are the ruling class and control much of what is going on in their society. he talks in the article about how we currently have to many elites. When we talk about elites people normally think of people with a lot of money. However there are also academic elites also.

The problem is that once you have to many elites you start to have fighting amongst the elites for power. He equates it to the children of Kings. The oldest child (mostly male) is the next in line to take over the country. If there’s multiple children those other children don’t have a purpose but yet they are elites. This is when you start to see infighting between the children.

Apply that to today’s world you have the children of old money, self-made people with money, and the children of new money. Beyond that, you have the people who have attended ‘prestigious’ universities. All these people start to feel that they are entitled to ‘lead’ our country at local, state, and national levels. They also see themselves as more qualified to lead companies and make more money than others.

I’d liken it to crabs in a bucket. They’re all scrambling to get to the top. King of the hill if you will. We have too many elites and so they are starting to fight with each other to move up the ladder further. Our current president would be a good example of this example. He comes from questionable money and makes questionable money and relationships. This is all in an effort to get the acknowledgment of others who move in more elite or old money circles.

In the article, Turchin projects a decade or more of civil unrest because of the environment with too many elites and the general population that’s not equally improving their quality of living. We’re currently in the middle of the period of unrest that he’s projected. A little scary if you ask me about what we’re currently seeing in our country and world.

Give it a read and see what you think. If you’re not working with or around data sets it may be a little dry and confusing. However I believe you can make projections given the prior 10,000 year data set.

Podcast

While going about my week one of the podcast that’s in the background that I get to from time to time is Trump Inc, a joint venture between WNYC and Propublica. The podcast started post Trump getting elected as our 45 president and they were looking into his business.

Some of the stories are pretty from the past 3 years are a jarring. Not something that you would like to think your president would have done or do. Of course Trump didn’t remove himself from his business. There’s many examples where there’s questionable business practices going on in his properties. Domestic individuals who are staying at properties as a way to grease the wheels and get access to the president. We also see International people doing this as well. These people are staying in his properties in order to gain favor with the president. All these are very transactional efforts to gain favor and access to our president.

The episode that I listed to Saturday was regarding Rick Perry and his questionable efforts to sell Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to the Ukrainians. I tied this back to the article I read yesterday about the elites. This guys starts as the Governor of Texas. Then he’s appointed to be the head of the EPA.

While he’s in this role he starts trying to cut a deal with the Ukrainian government. A deal to sell them LNG. Problem is he’s going to benefit from this sale. This isn’t clear on the surface even though people are questioning how this deal is starting to play out. The Ukrainian government officials who are used to seeing corruption even see this as sketchy or questionable.

To tie this back to the elites discussed in the earlier article you can see how someone thinks they can make money off the hard work of others. A questionable backroom deal that wasn’t even that ‘slick’. Several people involved had raised eyebrows about the development of this deal.

Give it a listen. I find this podcast to be extremely interesting. It’s an ‘open investigation’ into the Trump family and business. The family gets involved because of the way they’ve set up their business and charades. The families relationship with questionable business people are a little alarming seeing that they are now running our country. There was even an episode with the gentleman who did Donald Trump’s taxes. That’s something that’s recently come into question due to some reporting.

Wrap up

I’ll start to wrap this up and wish you all a good week. In many parts of our country COVID-19 cases are surging. I know we’ve been having a surge where I live. Wear a mask, socially distance, wear gloves and wash your hands. Safety actions are important to keep everyone healthy.

Check out my last article if you like what you’re reading. Election season is about to come to an end

Have a great week!