Luna Bliss

Serious gratitude: My coffee in the morning, which I was sipping when I first saw your statement.

Well Paul, given this Tuesday revelation, I have to say I'm grateful for the fact I don't live in your house! 😉

It's difficult not to feel a pull toward power and safety in a group. I've seen the 'mean girls' and it's usually not just fun and games....they are serious with their adolescent power games though they do appear silly from the outside... I'd call her a Baby Bee Autocrat...lol. Within this dynamic displayed by the silly girls (or mean girls if u prefer) you can see how immature people develop social power within groups. It's typical that a leader (baby bee autocrat) amasses a following via trashing others who won't worship her as the leader. Those who follow Baby Bee identify with the strong leader, and feel a sense of satisfaction resting safely within the orderly, and imagined 'right' or "good" side in the battles Baby Bee creates. The follower bees feel they are strong through vicarious identification with their strongwoman leader controlling who the enemy is -- who can or can't be a part of their group. Basically, the group's power, their reason for being, is to reject others so they can feel a strong sense of acceptance and inclusion via group bonding -- facilitated through identification with the strongman(woman). All played out at one of our own little SL hubs no less I hate to bring him up, but this reminds me of the big boy version.... Mango Mussolini and his Minions.

Some mornings when I wake up I sing a song to my herd of kitties. I sing, with a tune I made up, "it's a brand new day, it's a brand new kitty day". They really get off on it and become alert and look happy. My grandson heard me sing this to the kitties, and one day he ran up to me early in the morning saying "Grandma, it's the day!" Yes, it's the day...it's the day! People, understand!

Certain little guy, apple of my eye Photos newly sent, showing where he went.

I've never seen noise comparisons between liquid-cooled vs not....could be on average liquid-cooled is more noisy so good to check this out. But my desktop and laptop (Eluktronics brand), both liquid-cooled, are not noisy at all. I even use VR with my laptop -- I do have the laptop sitting on a separate fan base to help cool it.

Heheh, maybe it'd be helpful if we met on SL? I go could log in and offer you a TP. She'd just think it was me. We'd probably have to all go on voice...

Isn't it funny how some people think we're the same person?

Maybe it's mostly a language thing. He's from Pakistan but grew up mainly in the UK...

What are you even talking about? What other place? What alt? I think you have me confused with someone else. Well hello, whoever you are today. We have lots of people like you running around the forum these days it seems..

Don't get carried away now...first we have to establish....are you voting???? j/k

It was meant humorously. As for the rest, I have no clue what you are talking about. Oh C'mon...you've never said anything nice about me or to me. And you said that in that other place...with that other alt..

Yes! lol And preface each one with "We only care about you this month"....that will get people going...

LL has probably cancelled all future blog posts till after the election and Covid leaves our lives..

That's nasty, Silent. You're the one who said you wanted to slap my teeth threw my jaw.

Then let your grandson speak. It's his place, not yours. Well he does throw his toddler Ipad at people...will that work?

i find the article you mentioned all a bit gushy the author says things like as kiwis (new zealanders) downplay their achievements. Which is true. Culturally as a nation we tend toward modesty, humility and quiet achievement then the author goes on to compare our Prime Minister to other world leaders and our people to other peoples in the world is is discomfiting when writers from elsewhere do this. Is not a competition of my leader is better than your leader - your people are better than my people. While authors/writers continue to do this kind of comparative competitioning then not only is it discomfiting it is also destructive. It does nothing to advance a civilised society by pointing out the flaws in other people and on top of this saying stuff like: This person is better than you what Jacinda Ardern has shown is firm and decisive leadership for sure, but her biggest strength is that she has done so as a woman, and not as a woman presenting with a masculine persona as is sometimes the case elsewhere in the world. This is not unique to Ms Ardern in the kiwi/nz context. New Zealand has a history of women leaders who refuse to give up their female persona to gain leadership power. At one time the top 4 positions of national power were all filled by women simultaneously. Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, Chief Justice and Governor-General. Something that as a nation didn't enter our minds as anything special or unusual and I think that this is a good place for our minds to be in. As Jacinda says lets try to think about things positively as best we can That's why I tagged you...I hoped you'd give some feedback as a person who actually lives there. That author does worship NZ a bit -- he's always referencing it. Now there's a story about NZ on a major news channel! You guys are really getting the press lately... * But, thinking further, it seems Umair is always pointing out just how deficient we are in the US with lack of affordable health care, education, and more...and so that's why he cites a country that does this well....the "commonweal" thing I think you called it awhile back.. * So, not so much a competition on who is better ....his aim has been to show the US that they are missing what other 1st world countries have. If you can believe it, many in the US have no clue how far behind we are in terms of public good benefits, or if they are aware they say they don't want "socialism". You framed these pubic goods as "charity" and not "socialism", and that's what we need to educate people on here. Still so patriarchal here though...misogynistic...and many say even now we're not ready for a female President. I'm hoping Kamala will go from VP to Pres and be the first!

My grandson is half Indigenous, so I'll say what I want -- it's just a fact... if prominent people in the US think other countries are Bleepholes (often countries with darker peoples) then I want to bring in the fact that the Indigenous population here wasn't all too happy with the slavers from other countries who came here and stole their land and decimated their population.

You aren't aware of how he called some other countries Bleephole countries? I mean the guy is making other countries hate us, and they laugh at him when he speaks. We gotta get rid of him.

Unfortunately we just don't have a presidential president, and he is causing trouble with our allies all over the world. I pray he doesn't get 4 more years to do damage.

Actually a Harvard study from 09 put the number at 45,000 deaths yearly, but that's a bit dated. Here's newer info from the Annals Of Internal Medicine for the science-minded... https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M17-1403

The Democrats have not nor could they ever solve all our problems as there are many complications even when in control of 2 branches of govt, but they do provide more help for 'the little guy'. In Social Work I've watched the parties switch over the years, and when Repubs come into power the programs for the needy lessen or disappear. For sure they have not done enough to protect the underdogs -- the poor and the working class -- but they did deliver big time when they created Obamacare (ACA - Affordable Care Act) during the Obama-Biden term. They have much more than empty promises, as some assume. Many are upset about the loss of manufacturing jobs in certain areas of the country (or in adjacent states). I agree this hollowing out of the middle-class is an important issue, as those who had decent middle-class jobs were forced into poverty as neo-liberalism increasingly gained ascendance when factories were allowed to close jobs and relocate overseas. Enough of those forced into poverty due to job loss detached from the Democrats who are supposed to support the working class, and they placed their hopes in Trump -- this is likely the primary reason Trump won. Anyway, this hollowing out of the middle-class is an ongoing pattern stretching back 50 years or more, and has increased as neo-liberalism gained traction under both parties. I expected the Democrats, who typically stand for the underdogs, to do something about it. As I said, they haven't done enough, but they've done a lot of good things I shouldn't ignore. They've made progress in providing affordable health insurance for millions of Americans -- this has saved lives as 30,000 people each year in the US die from lack of affordable health insurance. It didn't go far enough in that it didn't cover everyone, but Biden's plan with a public option will not leave out any poor person, while allowing those who prefer their current health insurance plan to keep it. As I've stated before, I'd be dead without the ACA as I surely couldn't have afforded insurance costing $800.00 to $1300.00 monthly and was allowed to pay an amount based on my yearly income. ACA paid for an expensive medication that saved my life. We also shouldn't forget the social gains the Democrats pushed through -- marriage equality for the LGBTQ community, protections for the Trans community, the Violence Against Women Act, continued support for Affirmative Action, and much much more. Truly they are the party that believes in rights for all and not just the wealthy, white, straight male. I just want more from them.

Look at this @Mollymews If you want to know what the changing nature of global leadership in the 21st century looks like, it resembles this: New Zealand’s deputy prime minister telling a jeering, Covid-denying, Trumpist heckler to “sit down…sunshine” And yesterday, something remarkable happened: Jacinda Ardern was re-elected in a landslide. That might not sound like a big deal, so let me put in context. The big three Anglo societies — Australia, Britain, and America — have all fallen prey to strongman politics. America has become the world’s laughingstock, led by the Idiot-in-Chief, Donald Trump. Britain isn’t too far behind, with clownish Boris Johnson treating the future more like a satire than an exercise in governance. And then there’s Australia — whose PM is a climate change denier, even as his continent is being struck by megafires. The Anglo societies are leaders — in the wrong direction. They are pioneers of social collapse. America has the world’s highest Covid death toll — while Britain has its highest per capita deaths. The only two societies in the world — outside hardcore failed states, like North Korea — where incomes, happiness, trust, and life expectancies are all falling, in a kind of grim trifecta of implosion? America and Britain. America has no Covid strategy whatsoever, and so the current death toll of about 215,000 plus is simply skyrocketing upwards, at the jaw-dropping rate of about 1000 per day. Britain, on the other hand, now faces the “double cliff edge,” as former PM Gordon Brown has correctly put it, of a hard Brexit — breaking up with its largest trading partners, having no real way to obtain even basics like food, medicine, water, and energy — during a literal global pandemic. The mismanagement of Anglo societies is on an epic, surreal scale. They once used to be the envy of the world. No longer. Now they are the laughingstock of the world. The envy of the world now is a new set of leaders, emerging, in unlikely and improbable places. And chief among them is tiny New Zealand. Little New Zealand, it turns out might just be the new leader of the free world. Now, Kiwis don’t like it when I say that. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Take the example of Covid, which serves as a metaphor for what it takes to have a successful society in the 21st century. While completely mismanaged nations like America are simply letting it spiral out of control, even Europe has found it hard to cope with. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Covid was actually defeated — twice. How did that come to be? Ardern took swift, decisive action. She pioneered what is now a global template of best practices, at least in part — locking down, testing, tracing, quarantining. At the time, there were concerns about the economic impact of all that. But the trade-off between health and the economy is largely false, as the dire experience of America and Britain shows: the longer the pandemic rips through a society, the longer and harder the economic chaos is, too. New Zealand’s leadership on Covid teaches a critical lesson of the 21st century. We now face genuinely existential threats. To democracy, to freedom, to civilisation itself. The best way to deal with these threats is swiftly and decisively. If they are allowed to fester, they soon spiral out of control. Take the example of Ardern herself. She is a woman in an age of strongmen, who gleefully bestride the world, wrecking society after society. Trump in America, Johnson in Britain, Modi in India, Duterte, Putin — the list is so long as to be almost endless. The strongmen are fascists and capitalists. They are playing out — hell-bent on playing out — in a grim repeat the story of the 1930s. Capitalism run amok implodes into fascism, as nations plunge into inequality, poverty, despair, and distrust. Their social bonds come undone as middle and working classes find themselves impoverished. When life is a bitter, brutal struggle for survival, friendship and cooperation quickly becomes luxuries. Such imploded classes — like America’s former middle class — become easy meat for demagogues, who misdirect their rage and fury at those even more powerless than them, who are usually already hated minorities. That is the story, in a nutshell, of how America and Britain both imploded. Britain will not survive Brexit, and it’s dubious that America will survive the fallout from Trumpism, even if Trump goes. These societies are now on trajectories of long run and very real collapse — fragmentation, disintegration, and implosion, in every way: economic, social, cultural, political. Now see how Ardern — and Kiwis themselves — resisted all that. What an achievement it really is for a nation to come together and stand for democracy, civilization, equality, goodness, and truth, in an age of collapse and chaos. Ardern is a social democrat — one of the few, who’s successfully led her nation to resist the implosive tide of fascist-capitalist strongman politics. As a result, New Zealand has begun to prosper in remarkable ways. Its success on Covid is only a reflection of those deeper forms of prosperity. It wasn’t just Ardern that led New Zealand to global leadership — but also Kiwis themselves. Check out this example of the deputy PM putting an American heckler firmly in his place. “Sorry, sunshine, wrong place.” Translation: we don’t tolerate uneducated people lecturing us here. Bang. That is how you deal with extremists. That sentiment is popular across New Zealand. That feeling remains — of civilisation, gentleness, goodness, truth. And there is nothing more important than all that. In formal terms, the economist in me would say that New Zealand is a “high trust society.” The truest harbinger of America’s and Britain’s social collapse to come was that levels of trust — in government, in society, in one another — began to fall, decades ago. When people begin to distrust one another, a society cannot cohere. Collective action then becomes impossible. The result is what enmity produces: a politics of hate, a culture of division, a society going backwards, and an economy growing poor. Trust is everything for a society — but especially now, in this age of existential threats. Why? Because a people must be able to cooperate. To defeat the great threats of the 21st century. Individualist approaches and attitudes and cultures no longer work, function. Whether pandemics, climate change, ecological collapse, inequality, or fascist-authoritarianism, no problem of the 21st century can now be defeated in an individualistic way. That is why though America and Britain try, they fail, over and over again — individualism cannot yield the level and intensity of collective action necessary now. Take the example of Covid to make that real. Ardern could have ordered the template that is now global best practice — lock down, test, trace, isolate, and so forth. But it took a population willing to cooperate with it to make it happen. That only was going to be the case in a high trust society. In America, by contrast, Trump’s Army of American Idiots refused to cooperate — and Covid spun out of control, as everyone from Red Staters to governors flatly refused to act collectively, in the name of free-dumb. The same was and is true in Britain, where impending lockdowns produce street parties which become super-spreader events. People in these societies no longer care about one another. I don’t mean that in an abstract way. I mean it in a lethally real one. They no longer care whether others live or die. That is what it means when Americans deny each other healthcare. That is what it means when Brits think a drink at the pub or a street party is more important than stopping the spread of a lethal virus. They have become low trust societies, and while that may sound like some kind of remote abstraction, what it really means is: the average person feels nothing whatsoever about mass death, he has lost the ability to care whether anyone else lives or dies. A society like that has already collapsed — it just doesn’t know it yet. It’s in that way that New Zealand really is different. Maybe Kiwis don’t fully understand the scale of their success, and their new role as global leaders. Or maybe, having re-elected Ardern, they do. Either way, what they have achieved is genuinely remarkable, not to be understated, in that very Kiwi way. It is a profoundly special and meaningful thing for a nation to prosper by cooperating with a leader who is a young woman and a social democrat in an age of collapse driven by the furious rise of global strongman politics. That is why, even if Kiwis don’t really want it to be, New Zealand has now emerged as a new global leader. People joke about fleeing there — but nobody’s really kidding. New Zealand has a rising quality of life, in an age where living standards are either stagnant, as they are across much of Europe, or falling catastrophically, like in America and Britain. It has done so not in the old way — exploitation, abuse, and hatred, of those even more powerless than it — but in the new way, which is through cooperation and investment. There is a lesson there. What was global leadership in the 20th century really about? America’s bizarre, macho intellectual and political class would have said: being able to “project power,” winning the Cold War, winning the “war on terror,” building a gigantic drone-powered killing machine. None of those things stopped America from collapsing. In retrospect, they were follies. They had no lasting positive effect. The idea of the 20th century was that power came from exploitation, cruelty, and violence — but the only result of that was mutually assured destruction not being deterred, as the theory went, but actually happening. America and Russia today are mirror images of each other, failed societies. Leadership in the 21st century is not about using force to defeat some imagined enemy. It is about just the opposite. A society being able to come together, cooperate, invest, to lift its own living standards. Through better education — not by becoming the kind of uneducated louts New Zealand’s deputy PM rightly shamed Americans for being. Through an expansive social contract that gives people freedom to enjoy the basics, to realise themselves, to develop and grow as human beings, not simply to be cogs in a military-industrial machine, or capitalist-profiteering one. The future is no longer about exploitation — it is about cooperation. New Zealanders will point out that their society still has a long way to go. They are correct. Its investment rate needs to rise. Its dependence on a few forms of exports, which are ecologically hyper-sensitive, should be both protected and diversified. Its currency and central banking mechanisms should be made more flexible in order to do it. It should build even stronger public institutions to make that all happen. Mobility needs to continue rising. I could go on, with the typical recommendations economists make. But the truth is that they are both obvious and superficial. A high trust society is capable of handling those challenges, but a low trust one never will. What’s more crucial is to see what New Zealand has done different, and right. It has done a far, far better job of overcoming old biases and hatreds than America and Britain and Australia. People can grant one another inherent worth and value. The ideas of dignity and freedom and justice are therefore not seen as luxuries, but necessities, with context and sophisticated meaning. Though it is relatively poorer than many of its peers, it has invested more in having an equal and fair society, made up of educated and healthy and secure and happy middle and bottom — not just a society where a tiny percent at the top takes all the gains, and everyone else struggles, leading to the vicious spiral of poverty, despair, ignorance, fascism, and ruin, like in America and Britain. That is what has made all the difference. So I see New Zealand something like the Canada of the East, to Australia’s America. A society which is overcoming the burdens and legacies of the last few centuries — hate, division, brutality, ignorance — and learning to come together, to cooperate, in gentle ways, retaining the paramount values of decency and truth and goodness, investing in itself, in lifting people up, in the equality and quality of their lives, not just in consumerist status seeking for the top 1% or 10%. And like Canada, it is going to go on succeeding, if it is wise enough to champion all those. The rest — economics, finance, industries, and so forth — are effects of the deeper cause of cooperation, trust, decency, the choice to continue to grow and develop as a civilised society. It might seem that that’s an easy choice. Why would anyone choose not to be a civilised society? But that is the norm now — and New Zealand is one a few exceptions. Again, take a hard look at America and Britain and even Australia. They are not making the correct choices. Australia is the best off, but even it is making some big, big mistakes. It has not been nearly as successful in building a cooperative, trusting, gentle, future-facing society as even New Zealand has been. America and Britain have failed abjectly at the task, demonising and scapegoating minorities — whether Mexicans or Europeans — for their own withering economic, social, and cultural outcomes. The choice to be, and to stay, a civilised society is the most difficult one of all. In this chaotic and challenging age, there are always extremists, fanatics, strongmen, fascists, authoritarians, willing to blame every misfortune on some hated minority, on a lack of purity and piety, on not enough hate and brutality and violence directed at the powerless. Not to take real responsibility for today’s challenges, and to say instead, we must invest together, act together, and that is the only way that our society will grow and mature, in the face of existential threats. That, after all, is what existential threats are: they threaten all of us. They can only thus be defeated, too, by enough of us, acting in concert, in unison, cooperatively. Kiwis might not like what I’ve written. Fair enough. Last time I wrote this, I got a fair amount of flak from them. But this isn’t really for them. It’s for a world, who’s watching a new class of global leaders emerge. Nobody much wants to be America or Britain or Russia anymore. The world looks at such societies with a combination of laughter, horror, and glee. Those violent sods who enslaved us and brutalised us — they’re finally getting what they deserve. LOL — how can people be so foolish?! As yesterday’s global leaders go on collapsing, they are being replaced by an improbable new set. Tiny islands of sanity, decency, civilisation, in an age of chaos driven by existential threats. New Zealand is one (literally). Canada is another. In Asia, perhaps Taiwan and Thailand and Vietnam are beginning to join this pack, too. These are nations who are today’s pioneers. They are not following yesterday’s rules anymore, because those rules have not worked — that much is evident in the stunning, swift, humiliating collapse of yesterday’s giants. They are blazing new trails — whether that global template of best practices for Covid, or Ardern’s “well-being budget,” or Canada’s cultural ideas of gentleness and kindness. It’s this set of global leaders who are really going to define and shape the 21st century, whether they know it or not. The collapsing giants are just that — societies on their way to disintegration and implosion. They will not exist as we know them by the century’s end — even by the decade’s end. They will be broken up, fragmented, poor, and riven. But the shocking, abject level of self-destruction we see in America and Britain was a choice, too. As is New Zealand’s choice to back Ardern, to grow and evolve as a social democracy, to rewrite the boundaries of cooperation and investment in the 21st century. The world is learning the hard way the true price of strongman politics — how catastrophic it is. It’s measured in America’s hundreds of thousands dead, in Britain’s destroyed future, in Australia’s megafires. And it is now beginning to look for an alternative. It is seeking something as far away from the stupidity, hate, violence, and folly of the strongmen as is possible — something very much like a little island that can cooperate, nurture, nourish, grow together, not apart, lift up, not punch down, led by a young woman, who is the opposite of a strongman in every conceivable way. Whether it knows it or not, the eyes of the world are on little New Zealand. It’s not easy being in the spotlight. Maybe you never wanted to. And yet when you are a beacon of light in a dark age, you are the spotlight. Umair Haque https://eand.co/the-new-leaders-of-the-21st-century-8512d029552