2025

 “Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, have their actions as their refuge.”

Majjima Nikaya, 

Buddhist teaching

There is nothing about this election I understand, except its very dire consequences.  

I guess I'm not alone in this.  Half the country seems to be having a nervous breakdown today.

For me, I realize that this hasn't been the world I've known for some time, but now it is a truly alien country.

America is in disgrace today.  Our system has failed, beginning with the judiciary, that sent hundreds to jail for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but failed to bring its leader to justice.  The result is we have a man who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, who is guilty of 34 felonies and charged with what amounts  to multiple treasonous acts, handed fateful power again.  Now everyone is endangered (except perhaps a few billionaires), including the selfish saps who voted for Chaos.

2025 was always shaping up to be a fateful year.  For the international effort to address the climate crisis through the Paris Agreements, 2025 is a benchmark year. Several targets for that year are almost certainly going to be missed.  Needless to say, the new US government will officially not care. Meanwhile the emission of the main greenhouse gases reached record levels in 2023, after one of the highest one year increases from 2022 despite international commitments to lower emissions.

In all the campaign fuss, a few relevant news items were obscured, such as the latest UN climate conference which called for "no more hot air" instead of action, and a "quantum leap in ambition" if the goals of limiting greenhouse gases sufficiently is to be attained.

 And the story that half a million people around the world were killed since 2004 in natural disasters made worse by climate distortion--more deaths than caused by wars, terrorism and malnutrition combined.  The predicted expansion of formerly tropical diseases has also begun, with outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue in new regions.

Now of course we've elected to have multiple other very dangerous crises and soon.  Perhaps even before the US commits economic suicide with global consequences, we've learned that Russia is enlisting North Korean troops to fight Ukraine, coupled with the kowtowing to Putin by Musk and of course Chaos himself, threatening Ukraine's existence, the western alliance and eventually the sovereignty of the United States.

I could go on but who's listening? I haven't slept since Monday night.  Every time I started to fall asleep, another terrible consequence would attack me.

 On November 6 the sun came up on the beginning of a very different world, for everyone.  And really really really, not in a good way.