Death Stoppers

The team deployed throughout the world 

Its goal was crystal clear 

To stop the death that threatened all 

Without a shred of fear. 

Its members started with the worst

The ones who didn't share 

Who raped the land for fun and gain 

And cared not what was fair. 

They called them out for what they were

Made their acts a source of shame

No one took their money 

For fear they'd share the blame. 

Next the team set out to change 

How much it cost to live 

By growing more of Nature 

So freely it could give. 

The land provided basics 

Renewable each year 

While factories made less and less 

Of unnecessary gear. 

People learned to value life 

In all its varied kinds 

The team showed how we're all the same

Part of a web that binds. 

Though some remained who wanted more 

The earth chose what they had 

Slowly wounds began to heal 

As good replaced the bad. 

Disaster was averted 

Death slowed to a crawl 

Love and health became the rule 

The team became us all.

Poem by Bradley Jarvis, featured in the book "Death Stoppers Anthology." 

A Clear Choice

 

I hate bullies. I hate liars. I hate bullies who are liars. That, unfortunately, is what we have as one of the two top presidential candidates in the United States election this year. It is unfortunate that there are people who support somebody like that. It is also fortunate because it's really easy to spot somebody you don't like and to vote for the alternative. That's certainly what I'm going to do. I have issues with the plans of the candidate that I support, Kamala Harris, but they are tiny in comparison to the issues I have with the cruel, dangerous plans of the lying bully I could never support, Donald Trump.

My hate comes from the threat of assault on what I value, which is people. I value people's lives. I value their well-being. I feel most guilty when I cause harm to another person. I feel most joy when I feel like I made somebody's life better. Bullying liars thrive on harming others, using them to pleasure themselves and then throw away when they’re done, which is my personal definition of pure evil.

We’re lucky to have a clear choice, between that and an honest caretaker. I think we need an honest caretaker as we face our many challenges in the present and in the future. It's important to have a tough one; someone who can stand up to threats. And I firmly believe in fighting when somebody's life is at stake, to defeat the threat of damage by someone like a lying bully. I expect that most people's lives will be better to the extent that they can be under Harris, and they will be worse to the extent that they can be under Trump. It's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, that's not the case with many of the voters that support him; but I can't control them. I don't believe that I can change their minds because they are under his control. I choose not to control; because to do so would be to become that which I hate.

As we face choices of who to lead us and who's going to have the power to lead people, the way that we make those choices can be influenced for what we consider to be the better. In my case, “better” is based on a bias toward people and their welfare; toward ecosystems and their health; and toward life in general, which is interdependent and requires something from each of its members in order to be able to sustain the environment that we all live in.

In this election, those considerations are a major factor because in the case of the lying bully, there is a desire to remove regulation, remove the constraints on harmful behaviors and enhance the ability of people like him to thrive in pursuit of what they alone want, without consideration for their effects on other lives. The selfishness of Trump and others like him turns the resources needed to maintain basic survival into waste that cannot be consumed and fouls the resources that are left so that people and other species cannot live healthy lives. Worse, these lying bullies force others to do the same.

On the other hand, it appears that Harris’s heart is in the right place. She definitely has the qualifications to effectively serve people by managing the people’s agency, government, one of whose purposes is to do for people what they can’t do themselves in order to live and thrive. She also has the ability to learn and adapt based on intelligent assessment of reality, which will be critical to extending our collective lifetime in the face of global crises largely caused by the lifestyle she has sworn to defend.

Update

[The following is an edited transcript of a video posted to my Patreon site.]

I've been away from the research side for quite a while, focusing on work and some normal stuff for a change. 

But I have been keeping up on what's been going on in the world. If you've been tracking my Twitter (now X) feed, you can see a lot of the stories that I've been most interested in. Of course, they have to do with the ultimate end state of everything, which is death of humanity. 

Key to those things are the collapse of Earth's ecosystems and the emergence of invasive species contributing to our extinction, such as viruses. 

And then, of course, there is the pollution issue, which is directly affecting us like it's affecting other creatures on the planet. We have injected some pretty nasty man-made chemicals into our system along with basically everything else in the world, and we're starting to pay the price.

I have also been tracking one of my earliest interests: astronomy. You've probably seen the news about the solar storms that we've been having. Those are pretty interesting. They also have a component in the disaster realm, of course the possibility of the equivalent of shutdown of power grids and other things, with effects like the electromagnetic pulse which I explored in my first novel Lights Out. It does make for some very pretty aurora. I didn't get a chance to see any, but I have a friend who did. and a lot of other people around the world did. So, that's all the consequence of our sun’s being in its most active period of its 11-year cycle.

And then there's the social upheaval, the potential of having an authoritarian fascistic state resulting from developments here in the U.S. and around the world that very likely could exacerbate all of our other problems as many of the adherents are in serious denial about what's going on in the world and in particular about the vulnerability that all humans have. 

None of us has a degree of superiority that is of any significance over each other or other species especially when it comes to our combined survival. We as a species have essentially taken the role of the ultimate invasive species, using abusing, destroying everything in our path that doesn't serve our very narrow purposes which unfortunately doesn't serve the purpose of survival for most of the life on the planet.

I have been keeping up on that, viewing it through the lens of my research, since my research really is just a set of hypotheses that helps to guide discovery: questions about how things work, what's likely to happen, and testing, testing, testing. Don't take anything for granted, trust yourself no more than you trust anything or anyone else. Basically, trying to stay honest. 

I am continuing to follow those hypotheses and the kinds of things that they predict, just to see what happens and then prepare basically a comparison between the worlds that it projects and the one that we're living in.

So yeah, all that stuff is going on, mostly in my head. I have done some writing and I suppose I could say I've been mainly in the test phase. 

Also, the recuperation phase, because currently dealing with all that negativity is stressful. It kind of reached a level where it was intolerable, so I had to take a little bit of now time and just focus on what for me is normal stuff: trying to find another house to move into that is smaller and more efficiently meets my family's needs and essentially jettisoning the waste that I've been carrying around for probably at least 20 years. So that's fun.

Getting back to viruses, there's COVID, and COVID is about to make a major resurgence as a new variant that is essentially immune to our medicinal approaches to fighting the disease is very soon, if it's not already, going to be like a whole new pandemic. And there's bird flu, which I've also been tracking. Thanks to the anti-vaxxers the basic science deniers among us, diseases that we had under control as a species are now making a comeback, like measles. 

So, I've also been dealing with the huge amount of just disappointment in the judgment of many people in the world around me. Part of me wants to attribute it to the variables that are affecting other species. I'm sure that there's a lot of that; but there are cultural deficiencies. We've avoided holding people accountable for meeting common values like, primarily, long term survival, at least from my point of view being the ultimate one. 

It's not just this generation, but generations past. We're just reaching a point where ignoring those limitations is no longer an option. We have gotten to the point where there's nowhere left to plunder without destroying ourselves; and we've probably surpassed that point by now, so I'm going to continue trying to learn from all of this. 

For now, I think my focus is going to be on the application and exposition of values. As I've been saying in some of my personal videos, the world is dying and I'm doing this stuff, and hoping to be able to turn that stuff into something that's going to ultimately slow things down at least to the extent that I can, as opposed to just living my normal life and continuing to accelerate the damage.