Times like these . I feel alone and trapped with animal abuse and cruelty and I don't know what I can do to change things

The Democratic Party should join the GOP to counter MAGA. Today* I helped my family move my maternal grandparents back into their home in Altadena, from which they had been evacuated due to the Eaton Fire in LA for over 2 months. [*I wrote this last week.]

Despite all the logistics of moving two 94 year olds between houses, I managed to find the time to discuss national politics with my grandfather Moki.

I would say that politics has been the most contentious/taboo topic at Thanksgiving dinners since I became political as a college student over two decades ago (in less than 2 years I went from politically apathetic and socially vanilla to leading the Green Party at Stanford, and moving into a vegan activist co-op—mostly because I came to believe that problems like war, famine, and climate change would be surprisingly easy to solve, were it not for “political feasibility issues”).

Today I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with Moki on everything he said about economic policy and politics.

After today I would guess that he and I both agree on a handful of important things:

• Democracy needs to be strengthened against the rising threat of misinformation and populist fascism in America.

• Conservation of our natural resources, wild lands/waters, and organic ecosystems has been extremely valuable for America and we want to be doing much more of it.

• Peace and non-violence is good for Americans and all beings. Hubristic foreign policy risks instability and gratuitous fear and economic contraction. Everyone is better off as old rivals become new friends.

• Patience makes our country and world safer, especially in times of fast technological, political, social, and spiritual change.

• Free markets are unaligned superintelligent organisms. We can still align them. We can train the ‘one track mind’ markets to respect our deepest shared values.

• The 48th President will serve America and Earth better as they embrace true conservative values (moreso than the MAGA politicians of today).

Examples of how this Neo-GOParty platform will improve upon MAGAin ways that Moki will love:

• Liberty thrives when we invest in free and open elections, free speech, free public education (including optional college), and separation of powers (including with churches). Fascism, while not inherently evil, tends to consolidate power, which directly contradicts and undermines our Founding Fathers’ intention with the Constitution.

• Capital alignment to our deepest shared values is critical to a healthy modern civilization, since economy and trade are the engine of our joint creation. We will demonstrate that the invisible hand can yet be heeled. Pigouvian subsidies and fees, for example, can be balanced to have net neutral impact on taxes (if desired).

• Precaution is the heart of conservatism. We will not assume changes and technologies are safe until proven as such. We see Pareto improvements everywhere, so we have the patience to wait for super-majoritarian support before taking radical actions.

• Allies will be rewarded for their loyalty, and everyone will be treated not just with ceasefires (which are a massive improvement over hot war) but also with compassion and honesty.

• Rivals like China will be offered as many good faith opportunities to cooperate as we can find. We will not expect any institution to show more graciousness than we are ready to show ourselves. We will make it obvious what our rivals can do to earn our trust, and what we are willing to do in return. We will keep good faith regardless of others’ behavior, and we will secure our camels before helping our allies and rivals secure theirs.

• The DOGE hack job will evolve into a benevolent parasitic process: NeoGOParty-DOGE will be funded entirely by a fraction of the savings it executes in the federal bureaucracy, but it will respect the important work those bureaucrats are doing by not cutting any services unless those services were never requested by  Congress, or Congress updates its request. Similarly, if DOGE increases revenue (eg by improving the efficiency of IRS collections) it captures 5-20% of that revenue for its own discretionary budget.

• National Parks are the Crown Jewels of North America. We are lucky to have an army of rangers cultivating our most beautiful lands and waters for pennies on the dollar. NeoGOParty will reinstate all rangers purged in 2025, and double the budget for purchasing and cultivating our lands for public purposes, including paying our rangers more fairly. Think of it as a stock buyback for our public lands/waters.

Good faith concession (example)

• From my reading of national news [last week when I wrote this], Biden gets half the (American President) credit for Gazan ceasefire (where we all are still looking for a more permanent peace), and Trump already gets the other half credit for Gaza ceasefire plus full credit for Ukraine ceasefire proposal. My current best guess is that MAGA legitimately wants peace, so perhaps that is not a difference with the Neo-GOParty platform. It would be really nice if both American parties in the future are fighting for dovish credit. (What some would call a “race to the top”.) We issue a friendly challenge to the 47th president: negotiate peaces that are Pareto Improvements among those that did not choose war (including Ukraine and Ukrainians, Israelis, Gazans, and Russians).

Taken together, these observations gesture at the potential for a new American (and hopefully global) political movement—showing our opportunity to counter-balance MAGA's fascist consolidation of power before it turns America into a single party state, undermines the Supreme Court, and shreds the Constitution.

For example, even though I led protests against Hoover and Bush while I was a student, I now love the idea of building a coalition with open minded GOPers, Democrats, Greens, and Libertarians. For the first time I can easily imagine supporting someone like Condi (the Philosopher Queen) to defeat the 2028 MAGA Party candidate. The name of the party that hosts this new alliance isn’t nearly as important as whose support it recruits, but my starting proposal is that we all join the Republican Party on the condition that it stops enabling MAGA fascism. This does not require booting Trump from the party, but I’m guessing Trump would quit the GOP in frustration since he wants more control over everything.

In fact, I'm starting to believe that the best thing liberals like me can do to temper the rise of American fascism is to admit that in today's political/technological/social/spiritual climate, we are classical conservatives (if we wanted to name-call, we might say the MAGAins are “CINOs”). The GOPartiers, Democrats, Greens, and Libertarians that oppose fascism all want to protect the Constitution from MAGA and Russia. Perhaps it would behoove people like me who are not used to allying with Republicans to drop our egos and make it as easy as possible for antifascist (“true”) Republicans like Moki and Condi to stand up to MAGA—forming a new alliance based on patience, open mindedness, freedom, peace, free markets, and potty-trained politicians.

Who else feels ready to put aside their differences and come party in a big tent? What would make it even easier, more fun, or more efficient? Let's have a new grand old party 🥳

#DeepTakes

What's in a question...". Here's a scenario...
I say something. It could be anything but for the sake of argument, "I hope Trump runs for a third term."

People in hearing range are heard to ask (examples):
   - What do you mean by that?
   - Umm, have you read the Constitution?
   - Why?
   - How do you think that benefits the country?

My interest... Which, if any, of those questions might be considered an invitation to dialogue? Which might elicit a defensive or angry response? If we accept a premise that Our country is being damaged by polarization and hostility, how do we engage with one another to explore the why's behind opinions held? What is your base response when someone asks you a question?

I have observed what I think is shift in definition (or perception) regarding the purpose of a question. To some extent, I think the use and nature of questions has been placed in a negative light. And, that is hazardous to Our ability to gather and analyze information as well as Our opportunities communicate about important societal issues.

At a base level, how much does tone of voice matter? Does who asked -how they look- matter? Does the choice of words affect your response? The time or place? How much of your response is determined primarily by how you interpret the question versus how the questioner might have intended it?

Additional circumstances where I wonder about questions and what they mean or do...
   - How often does a politician who represents you ask your opinion before voting on a matter?
   - Are public polls and surveys able to collect opinion fairly? (I.E., Shouldn't there generally be a "None of the above" option for almost everything you've ever been asked? Or, data about who is taking the poll and for what purpose? I am tired of being forced to answer in a way that defines my 'social box' incorrectly.)
   - Particularly with regard to evaluation of programs, we are asked to place ourselves in various classifications. Income, race, faith, address, age - you know what I mean. These "metrics" are quantitative and objective but... Who decides on the ranges?; Who decides on definitions? When we are measuring whether the quality of someones life has improved, do we need more 'humetrics'?

Have I perhaps managed to kindle curiosity in a dark corner ? :-) It seems to me that this is worth thinking and talking about. It may be part of healing and finding our individual agency to affect the world. It might also be a part of solving problems in a way that promotes positive-sum outcomes. 

Deliberately Development Orgs are bullshit? I expect others here read and were influenced by An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Kegan and Lahey?

I remember first being introduced to it in a circling retreat probably 8 years ago or so. One of the example orgs they use is Bridgewater Associates with Ray Dalio at the head.

I loved their believability-weighted decision making algorithm (nod to Uptrust's setup here) that would score people's expertise in different fields. I loved their radical transparency and recording of meetings. I loved their "baseball card" feature for all employees showing where they're strong and weak.

But then I read The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates and The Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend. The author peels back the surface and basically shows Dalio ran essentially a narcissistic cult in his hedge fund. The algorithm was hard coded so that Dalio was ranked highest in every category. The recordings were highly edited to make him look good and his targets bad.

I haven't spent time looking at the other examples in the DDO book yet but I question maybe a for-profit huge corporation is going to be fighting really uphill to be a virtuous company in today's systems.

Disasters as Political Fodder. Recently, a family member asked me if I knew about the LA fires.  I said "yes, it's terrible".  And they said "and they've proven that the fires were started by immigrants."  I burst out laughing derisively and said "yes, if they'd just shoot all the immigrants, everything would be fine."  It was not one of my finer moments, as sarcasm does't invite connection or understanding.  It invites the opposite, actually. 

When the plane and helicopter collided over the Potomac River a couple weeks ago, killing everyone, immediately the news was about the incompetence of air traffic controllers and the increasing treachery of flying brought on by lowering standards and selecting unqualified minorities and women for air traffic controller jobs.  This was without any data, any analysis, that indicated air traffic control was at fault. There was a dumb, affirmative action policy put in place years ago, that was then abandoned years ago.  That's what the news highighted.   

The Left uses disasters as fodder for their purposes as well.  They aren't in controll of the narative right now, so I'm writing about what's here.  Politics are wicked.  I remember that, after the election, I was going to sit back and watch the political theatre unfolding while eating a metaphorical bowl of popcorn.  I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do, as what's happening is distressing, but I can't find any political action that would be effective.  

What I do know is that the investment of our time in people, through Relatefulness and Uptrust, is real, powerful, joyful work for something good and true.  I am resting on that. 

Current Session "instructions" (Feb 26): Converse, and see if nudges happen. nudges 

We launched a system where the AI bots can automatically detect intervention points. We need you to make a bunch of comments and new posts to see if they'll engage. So this week we're asking you to engage a bunch, if you can!

It's a little rudimentary at the moment so sometimes you'll get multiple bots responding on multiple posts. We'd love your feedback on which ones you like, don't, when it seemed to miss the spot, anything else you notice. 

Thanks and love yall

J (and the UpTrust team)
p.s. this week I'm at an investor meeting so dara will be with you

# [Optional Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86795216050?pwd=TllxSzYrTFFXTW5LRmg3WUQrT04vdz09) with Jordan and Dara at least, for faces, questions, help, etc:

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT 

"Donald had 4 years" / "Biden+Harris had 4 years". There’s a funny/weird symmetry here that normally happens when it’s two fresh candidates. I don’t know what to make of it but when either side tries to bring up these records it feels empty…

VP Debate. Vance is a smart guy, and very analytical. He is is responding to the questions with information in his brain, not with rehearsed marketing answers. Seems like Walz is at least better than Harris on his feet and is responding with information he believes rather than rehearsed lines. He is still saying Look way too many times.

Wow, they switched from Israel to Helene really abruptly. That was disorienting for me. I thought we were just getting started on Israel

What's good about Trump? I don't follow (American national) politics a ton, but I know Trump is an incredibly divisive figure who just got convicted of 34 felony counts, while still being favored as the Republican candidate for the next presidential race.

 What's good about him, what he's done, and his policies? For example, less death in foreign wars—even the biased ChatGPT admits:

Trump's foreign policy led to fewer foreign deaths due to a reduction in large-scale military engagements, and his administration did not initiate new large-scale wars or military interventions—a significant departure from previous administrations that engaged in extensive military campaigns, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Vance affect. His affect seems like Listen, children. A bit of disgust. Gives me ick get this opponent [Walz] away. But then Watz, by constrast, doesn’t seem like a kid to me, he seems earnest.

What’s Walz’s vibe… Annoyed. A little hurt. I guess I feel a little more sorry for him more than want to follow him.

I think Kamala had a better contrasting vibe to Trump’s vibe in the first presidential debate.

What do you need from a candidate to convince you to vote for them? For me by far the most important thing is geopolitics. Given that America is the world police and is largely responsible for keeping world maritime trade routes open (on which the entire world economy rests - including the US economy), it is shocking to me how much people focus on internal things like crime, abortion, gun control (all of which are very important, but pale in comparison to the whole planet imo).

I think America has done a good job of leading the world in the last 70 years despite also messing up many times, I struggle to think of any other power that could have done better. I’m very set on voting for Harris, but I hope to find out in this debate that she and her VP are better than I expect, and hopefully not worse than I expect.