3/12/2024

“Democrats have done nothing for . . . “

A friend recently claimed that “Democrats have done nothing for young people” and I began to question that person’s math skills. “Nothing” means zero, nada, no benefit whatsoever. It pains me to know that someone who should know better is as clueless about the meaning of zero as 3rd Century Mesopotamians. The Biden White House has published a web page explaining all of the things they have done for young people: “Fact Sheet: President Biden and Vice President Harris Are Delivering For Young Americans.” The list is impressive, but the media (right and left) also appears to be unable to decipher numbers. I’m not going to repeat that data and I’m going to take the wild chance that my readers are curious enough to follow the damn link, but “$117 billion in targeted relief for 3.4 million student loan borrowers, including borrowers with total and permanent disabilities, those cheated by their colleges, those in public service, and more” is a LOT more than “nothing.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of nonsense. A union welder acquaintance recent claimed “Democrats have done nothing for working people.” To be clear, this man was solely concerned that pipelines wouldn’t be built and he wouldn’t be raking in the usual “$36 and $52 an hour” building those infamous pollution systems. However, there are plenty of jobs for welders in infrastructure work and that doesn’t require decimating the nation’s fresh water supplies or contributing to the inhospitality of the planet to current lifeforms. Biden’s “Build Back Framework” could “add an average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.

Photos show bodies piled up and stored in vacant rooms at Detroit hospital  | CNNIf not mismanaging the pandemic so badly that US cities were stacking up bodies in refrigerated trailers isn’t doing something for young and old, skilled and unskilled labor, and all of the rest of us, we’re in a pretty weird state of decline. This kind of faulty and deceptive hyperbola is not adding value to the national dialog. If supposedly educated people are unclear on what “nothing means,” we’re in big trouble; and, of course, we’re in big trouble. 

Lastly, but most importantly, the current Democratic Party offers something no other entity in the country can provide: a slight chance that the "great experiment" that the United States of America represents might, somehow, become a democracy.  There are no Republicans in office in the federal government who represent any of the ideals of democracy. From the despicable oligarchs hiding in the Federalist Society to the obvious spokesperson for Republicans, Donald Trump, and the deplorable rabble of voters and seditionists, Republicans are the worst of this nation's terrible worst and they represent the nation's decent into fascism and chaos. I challenge you to name a single Republican currently in office who is not in favor of demolishing the democratic structure of this country. There are no counterparts in the Republican Party for Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, and at least 15 other progressive and liberal Senators who are fighting for all of us, apparently, without much appreciation. In the US House of Representatives, there are a few dozen progressive and liberal Democratic members, apparently, going equally unappreciated. Again, there are no Republican comparables with any sort of claim to democratic values. The choice has not been this clear since the 1860s, you are either working to elect the most democratic Democrats or you are voting fascist. If that isn't "something," fuck you. 

2/12/2024

How It Happens

When I was a younger man and my father was the age I am now, I wondered how he could be so isolated after the life he’d had. He’d been a high school teacher in the same small town for more than 40 years, a coach (basketball, football, and tennis), had been an active member of the same church for that long, played golf and tennis better than most, and had a fairly active social life up until he retired. Like me, he was introverted and lived a lot of his life inside his head, but unlike me he had his church and friends he’d worked with for more than half of his life and lived in a town full of ex-students.

Like me, he’d retired under less-than-pleasant circumstances. He’d managed to finagle a fair number of math classes without having a math degree, which in the 90’s was a tough hike. Back then, the Kansas education system was still pretending to hold itself to something resembling standards. With new, younger school administration, he no longer had the clout of having “friends in high places” to protect his classes from younger teachers with better credentials. By the time he retired, his class load had been reduced to accounting and “business math” (stupid kid math) courses and he was fairly disgusted with both the assignments and the students. So, he retired before he was fired and there weren’t many of the people he’d worked with left in the school at that time.

My situation was slightly better for me, but about the same for the places where I worked. The only part of my three side-hustles that still had customers and paid consistently well was the “audio forensics” business I’d slid into a decade earlier, but working for lawyers means constantly having to fight to get paid. Like Trump’s fans brag about their Messiah, “You don’t get rich paying bills.” My two teaching gigs were steadily becoming less ethically sustainable: the music college had abandoned its vocational mission for bigger money with less work in academia and the “motorcycle safety” business steadily became more focused on “putting butts on seats” than safety. Both businesses were heading toward obsolescence and fighting it the dumbest way possible. Like my father, I could afford to retire and my personal mission was becoming harder to identify in both of those places.

Like my father, during my working life I had been pretty well ensconced in several “communities,” from education to motorcyclists to music and music technology to audiophiles to professional and amateur acoustics. I knew a lot of people who did a lot of different things. I had one big party to celebrate my 65th birthday (July 2013) and my retirement (I will always be sorry that I was so busy cooking for that party that I didn’t take a single picture of the people who came to wish me well.) and began my fade into black. I didn’t give up the motorcycle stuff until 2018, but I’d dramatically cut-back my course load to no more than a half-dozen classes a summer by 2017. Like my last couple of years at McNally Smith College of Music, I had become pretty vocal in my disappointment at the program’s lack of an honest mission and, I suspect, everyone was glad to see me go. I wasn’t unhappy to be leaving, either.

What I didn’t expect was to have, what I’d imagined to be friendships, vanish with the work. Most (99%) disappeared overnight, a few took a month or three to wander away, and a handful still bother to communicate with me occasionally. In retrospect, I think Ms. Day and I both underestimated and undervalued what we had in the Cities.Our 130-year-old house and 2 1/2 acre lot had become mostly a chore and the noise of that location seemed to me to be screaming “Get out while you can still hear the noise!” We made a fairly detailed list of priorities for a new home and, for me, noise levels were high on the list. Due to other considerations, including a price range that we could afford in cash, we mostly ended up looking outside of the Cities and settled in Red Wing. I grossly overestimated the tourist attraction of Red Wing and I have been surprised that so few of our friends have ever visited us here. I also over-estimated my willingness to stay involved in local activities, especially the motorcycle and music stuff with which I expected to fill my retirement time. Not that different from my father’s expectations for golf and tennis.

2/01/2024

A Gift to Remember

Back in the early 90s, a work friend and I split a Denver Nuggets’ season pass for the 1992-1995 seasons. The 1993-1994 season was a particular highlight as the team was actually decent for the first time in a lot of years. The Nuggets lineup was deep and included Dikembe Mutombo (center), LaPhonso Ellis (forward), Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (guard, aka Chris Jackson, prior to the season), Rodney Rogers (forward), Reggie Williams (forward), Bryant Stith (guard), Robert, Pack (guard), and Brian Williams (center). I’m sure most of those names are now lost to sports history, but at the time they were up-and-coming young players who set at least one record that year. They were exciting to watch and Denver’s McNichols Auditorium was a fun place to watch a basketball game.

The ‘93-‘94 Nuggets (42-40) were the youngest team in the league and the last seed in the Western Conference playoffs and the Seattle Sonics (63-19) were the first. After losing the first two games in Seattle, the Nuggets won both of their home games and went back to Seattle and beat the Sonics 98–94 in overtime. I had tickets for the first two home games. In the second round, they almost did the trick again, taking the Utah Jazz to a 7th game before losing that series.

Mahmoud Abdul-RaufEarly in the next (‘94-‘95 season, Abdul-Rauf began to speak out against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the US positions in North Africa. He had converted to Islam and made a point of not standing for the anthem because he interpreted that act as worshiping idols and he called the US flag “a symbol of oppression.” He took a public opinion beating from both the fans and the local and national press. Denver, contrary to current fascist delusions, is not a particularly liberal or progressive city and sports fans in general are “conservative” in all of the worst ways. Abdul-Rauf went from being a fan favorite to being his sports generation’s version of Colin Kaepernick overnight and, like Kaepernick was eventually suspended from the NBA and spent the rest of his career in European basketball. Born Chris Jackson in Mississippi, Abdul-Rauf had plenty of experience with US repression and oppression from the start. He was also cursed with Tourette’s Syndrome and it could be “entertaining” to be near the court when he was bringing the ball up, spouting random curses and sound effects. Fans once appreciated his ability to work past that handicap, but they quickly turned into vicious grade school bullies when he demonstrated that he had a conscience.

Almost immediately, Brian Williams spoke out in support of his teammate’s convictions and in agreement with the fact that the US’s history in the Middle East is nothing to be proud of. Likewise, Brian quickly became a pariah to the city’s basketball fans and a fair number of his teammates. You might guess from reading this blog that I didn’t disagree with either Brian or Mahmoud and felt compelled to say so in a letter to the Rocky Mountain News’ editor, which was published in that paper’s Letters section.

A couple of days later, I was home, late in the day, and the phone rang. I answered and the deepest voice I have ever heard responded, “Is this Mr. Day? This is Brian Williams. I wanted to thank you for your letter of support.” I, of course, was convinced that some friends were pulling my leg and said so in particularly ungracious terms. Brian was patient, funny, and finally convinced me that he was who he said he was. He was extremely complementary about the things I’d written in my letter, which made me incredibly suspicious that I was still being pranked. We had a fairly long conversation, as much about basketball as politics or music. (Brian’s father, Eugene Williams of the Platters, had sung the national anthem at a game earlier and proved that there was nothing wrong with the McNichols sound system that decent mic technique wouldn’t cure.) As we were wrapping up the call, Brian mentioned that he’d left three floor seats for me at will-call for the next evening’s game.

The only time I have had floor seats for a big-boy’s basketball game was at the NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship in Hutchinson, Kansas. I have no idea what those Nuggets tickets cost, but it was way out of my league. The team was very popular, games sold out regularly, and the seats my friend and I shared were well into the nose-bleed sections. Still suspecting I was being pranked, I called some friends and asked if anyone wanted to go with me. I was probably a reluctant salesman because of my suspicion, but I couldn’t find any takers. I worked a long way down my list of friends and acquaintances without finding any interest. Without much to lose, other than minimal self-respect, I went to the game alone.

As I was standing in the will-call line, a young man with an adolescent daughter were trying to find scalped tickets, since the game was sold out. I collected my 3 tickets and offered two to him. Since I hadn’t paid anything for them, I thought it would be disrespectful to ask for money and I didn’t. I don’t think he had any idea that they were floor tickets until they found their seats. I’d also been given a coupon at the counter and wandered over to the concession are to see what the coupon was for. It was for this jacket and that was not a cheap item.

When I joined my guests on the floor, I wore the jacket through the game. I suspect, thinking that the two people sitting beside me were old friends, Brian made a point of swinging by our seats several times giving the girl high-fives as he passed. His hand was about the same size as her body, so they were very careful high-fives. Until you’ve watched professional play at close range, you have no idea how different their game is than what you’re used to. Those giant, ripped, fast young men would make Viking berserkers cower under their shields and they could run down wild game or beat down predators with their huge, bare hands. Even though he didn’t love basketball, when he played he played with passion, energy, and an astounding level of skill.

We stayed in touch, rarely, through email from that Denver game to my first year in Minnesota, in 1996, until he started playing with the Chicago Bulls when the ‘96 season started. After being a Lakers’ fan while I lived in California and a Nuggets fan from ‘91 to ‘96, the Timberwolves were a letdown and I wandered away from my last vestige of sports fandom. Brian was a critical part of the 1996 Chicago Bulls championship team and he almost enjoyed that season. He always wanted to be doing something he enjoyed as much as he imagined his father enjoyed music, though. He’d changed his name to Bison Dele in 1998 and I saved about a half-dozen of the email conversations we had over the years, but the last one came before the 1999-2000 Pistons were going to be in Minneapolis and I’d offered to meet him downtown for coffee or a beer, my treat. His last email said, “Coffee or beer, sounds good.” And I never heard from him again.

When the season ended, the Pistons offered him tens of millions to stay with the team, but he’d had all of basketball he could stand. I’ve read a lot about the last years of his life, but hadn’t kept up with him until his disappearance and, likely, death hit the news. This, “The Love Song of Bison Dele,” is the best wrap-up of his incredible life that I’ve seen and I’ve come back to read it several times.

I will remember Brian with his statement, “I always figured there were two ways to go. You can die from living, or you can die from just dying.” I still wear the jacket he gave me when the weather is right and I keep it stored in a cedar closet when it isn’t. Not long ago, I was grocery shopping wearing the jacket and an older man in a wheelchair and what appeared to be his son called me “Old School” and complemented me on my 30-year-old jacket. It reminded me that I have meant to tell this story for years and probably better do it soon or never. Ms. Day wanted a picture of me standing next to a guitar sculpture and that gave me one more reason to tell the story.

12/30/2023

Freedom of Choice? We’re Being Invaded!

I had a couple of sobering experiences yesterdays that reminded me of the complications involved in keeping the human species from killing itself and every other major lifeform on the planet. As usual, if life wasn’t so funny it would be terrifying and depressing.

First, I had a doctor’s appointment to review the analysis of my failing right knee. I particularly like my physician because he has a very international view of medicine, life, and the world around him. As we went thorough my options regarding the beat-to-shit knee, we carried on our usual conversations about the world outside of my old, rotting body. Someone close to me once told me that all of the doctors in the world had conspired to treat Covid as if it were something much worse than the seasonal flu. He complained that he didn’t get “his check” for participating in that grand conspiracy to profit Big Pharma and whoever else supposedly benefitted from the pandemic. From there we had a laugh about the self-important goobers who imagined they were receiving Microsoft tracking chips with their vaccines. Again, no payment for that work to my doctor and I suggested he at least ask for a lifetime subscription for Microsoft Office and not that bullshit 365 crap, but the real thing on a DVD. And that was the funny part of the conversation.

The less funny part, from his perspective, is that when humans are confronted with evidence that their delusions are nothing more than bullshit they double-down on their bullshit. Cognitive dissonance seems to be exclusively a human mental defect, but it is a big one. When I asked if there was a way to get past that, in his experience, his response was, “No, we’re doomed.” I desperately wish I disagreed with him, but I don’t. Since I was a kid. in the 1950s, and first read C.M. Kornbluth’s novelette “The Marching Morons” I have had zero faith in the future of human beings as a species and my own best-case-scenario is that we find a clever way to kill ourselves off without taking every other form of life with us. Any reading of US history that isn’t pure conservative newspeak is full of the dullest, most violent, and the dumbest rolling over anything resembling logic and decency as easily as Trump cons his nitwits into sending him their spare change. “We’re doomed,” for sure. At best the 1% of humanity’s best and brightest will be doomed to babysitting the marching morons until the planet is uninhabitable.

Later that day, I limped to the local YMCA to try and reinstate my swimming routine after a couple of months of avoiding the pool until I knew if it was doing good or harm to my knee. When you are 75, a couple of months of low to moderate exercise does a lot of damage to your physical conditioning. My usual lame 1/4 mile routine too much for me and I was pretty discouraged when I gave up on the swim and headed to the sauna before braving this year’s mild December evening. There was one guy in the sauna and I picked the opposite end of the room to stew in my frustration. Within a few minutes, the sauna was almost full of middle-aged men showing off their flabby naked bodies and I should have passed on the experience. Their conversation was as depressing as my swimming failure and I sunk into a steaming funk as I listened to a pair of nitwits babbling about the “border crisis” and other equally obscure-to-Minnesota subjects they know nothing about.

The big takeaway I got from their conversation was that they are major breeders of stupid. I wasn’t interested enough to keep an accurate track of their family mobs, but I am fairly certain that everyone in the sauna had at least 5 offspring. All of whom were somewhat-to-seriously involved in mindless school sports. For sure, with all of the preening and bragging not one of those obvious-Trumpers had a kid who was competing in the USA Mathematical Olympiad, the Scripps National (or even the city or state) Spelling Bee, the National Speech and Debate Tournament, or any of the 30 national high school academic competitions. (I linked those competitions, just in case you don’t believe there is anything other than sports for your kid to excel in, you fuckin’ idiot shoulda-been-sterilized-at-birth goober.)

In this country, practically throughout the nation’s history, we have celebrated the luckiest 1%, not the smartest. The half-wits who stumbled into wealth through inheritance or good fortune or both end up being the idols of millions and those who work hard, take almost every step of accomplishment our species has managed, and make the rest of us look like the the extinct human species we came from are mostly ignored. As I have said more than once, “I’m not worried about AI, but LI is gonna kill us all.” The fourth of the “The 5 basic laws of human stupidity” is “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals” and the fifth is “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.” They are everywhere and their population is growing exponentially, even as world population growth slows. In fact, for the most part the only humans who are currently breeding are fools,. So, “we are doomed.”

12/29/2023

Freedom of Choice? How to Make A Cult

You can’t get very far into this subject without an argument about what a “cult” is. So I’m going to stuck with Webster’s for a definition, because I usually do.

  1. as in audience: a group of people showing intense devotion to a cause, person, or work (as a film)
  2. as in religion: a body of beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural and the worship of one or more deities

Mrs. Day and I were talking about the odd devotion people we know have toward a variety of pop stars: from the Beatles to Taylor Swift or John Wayne to Keano Reeves. We know old-ass men who worship the Beatles with at least as much fervor as teenage girls texting about Taylor Swift. To be honest, we weren’t just academically interested. Mrs. Day and I really wanted to know “What is that about and how do I get my own cult?” Because if you can attract enough members to your cult, you never have to worry about money. Donald Trump sold 2,024 scraps from a cheesy tarp-sized blue suit he wore for his mugshot for $4,654 a scrap. That is more than $4.7M dollars for a suit J.C. Penney’s would have discounted or put in a seconds bin! So, “how do I get my own cult?” is a serious question. Now the two of us have a goal, a definition of what that goal looks like, and a purpose for reaching that goal.

First, we need that devoted “audience.” If you are really serious about this objective, math is on your side. There are about 320M people in the USA alone and 8.1B in the world, but let’s concentrate on the US and let the ROW cash flow come as it will. If I can get myself or my product (for example: a popular song) in front of a lot of people, say 10% of the bodies in the USA, I will have am uncommitted audience of 3.2M people. If I mostly suck, I might end up with 1% of that group who hear my song and pay attention to the name of the song, they might want to know who the artist is, look up when I might be performing nearby, buy some of that artist’s (my) music, and, if I really get lucky, they “follow” me throughout their lives like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Clapton, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Springfield, and those really obscure British Invasion band fans. Those followers become members of the “cult of me.”

If I’m even a little bit special, 1% of that first group of 10% leaves me with a a fan/cult-base, a “cult group,” of 360,000. And that’s if I suck and/or didn’t get enough exposure to really be a hit. Casinos all over the world are well-stocked with performers who suck, but still collected enough attention to have a modestly lucrative cult following. (I’m talking about you, Teddy “Captain Poopypants” Nugent.) Taylor Swift has at least a 93% saturation rate (256M), supposedly 44% of US adults consider themselves Taylor Swift “fans” (258M over 18) and about 40M more between 10 and 18 (~275M total). Supposedly, 16% of that huge first group consider themselves to be “avid” fans and are almost certain to be the minimum size group for the Swiftie cult. That is a cult with 44M members. She’s the either the first or the second largest church/cult in the USA and she has fans worldwide.

If she was an asshole, I’d be worried. Pop history tells us mostly “what you see is what you get.” Ted Nugent was an asshole as a young man and is still one. Bruce Springsteen was a pretty cool guy as a young man and is a bit cooler today. Willy Nelson was cool out of the womb. Donny Trump was born a turd and just got smellier with age. So, I’m not worried about Swift and the Swifties. She (and her fans) got a pretty serious boost to her cred when Teddy Nugent publicly whined about her. Anything Teddy is afraid of (more likely, jealous of) is good enough for me.

While Swift certainly sets the high and enviable bar for creating a successful cult, she doesn’t make getting up there seem any easier. She is an incredibly hard working artist and performer. I don’t want to be a hard working anything and it it worked for Trump that means there is a pretty easy-to-achieve low bar for creating a cult, too. Donald Trump's personality cult and the erosion of U.S. democracy - The  Washington PostThat’s the one I want to aim at, even without the advantage of being handed somewhere around $800M just for being born into the right, cutthroat family. Of course, if I started out with $800M I wouldn’t be wasting my time messing with goobers like the nitwits who belong to Trump’s cult. I don’t want those imbeciles in my country, let alone anywhere near me. I am even nervous about getting anywhere near their money.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi profile | The Beatles BibleThat is a problem with creating a cult, too. It’s not like cult members are anyone’s idea of the “best and brightest.” From Joseph Smith’s original Mormons to the Beatles and their nitwit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Transcendental Meditation entourage, true believers are kind of gross in a simple-minded, hyper-gullible, sticky-clingy, lay-down-with-dogs-and-get-up-with-fleas way that makes me want to take a shower after looking at them. That is a show-stopping problem for a wannabe cult leader. You have be someone like Trump who can loudly and proudly stand in front of people he despises and tell them what they want to hear. Man, if I’d have thought this out earlier I might have passed on the whole idea. Talk about being surrounded by people you don’t want to be near, this is getting totally out of hand. Still, the idea of collecting a few hundred thousand followers who will happily and stupidly empty their pockets and bank accounts for my benefit is tempting. I’m going to have to think about this more.

I’ll get back to you.

11/04/2023

The Death Cult that Wants to Kill Us All

There was a phase in the early period of Christianity where the clear objective was to die and go to Never-never Land as fast as possible. One of the first Christian sects, the Donatists, inspired a nutty group of fanatics called the Circumcellions who would initiate spontaneous acts of violence on strangers in the hopes of getting their asses killed and obtaining martyrdom status (sound familiar?). As one author put it, “The logic of Christianity leads to the disturbing conclusion that if heaven is better than this life, then death is a good and desirable outcome.” The nutjob Federalist Society even published an article titled “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing” where the author wrote, “For one thing, Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter.” Joy Pullman goes on to pile one nutty superstitious claim on top of many others, but the main point is “For another thing, for Christians, death is good.” Add taking as many non-believers and believers with you as possible to this philosphy is “the Christian thing to do.”

The early leaders of the Catholic Church saw that this interpretation of the Bible would lead to an quick disappearance of their source of resources and followers. In the fifth century, Augustine wrote The City of God, which was Christianity’s first condemnation of suicide. In an effort to get some kind of renumeration even from the dead, as described in Wikipedia, “In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas denounced suicide as an act against God and as a sin for which one could not repent. Civil and criminal laws were enacted to discourage suicide, and as well as degrading the body rather than permitting a normal burial, the property and possessions of both the person who died by suicide and of their family were confiscated.” [And today’s faux-conservatives bitch about inheritance taxes?]

Today’s breed of radical Christian “Crack Suicide Squads” are only slightly more subtle. They have no interest in caring for other humans, but they’ve snagged themselves on the crazy idea that their only path to heaven is to commit to having as many humans born as possible. Obviously, once a baby is born, they have no obligation to it in any way because . . . that would cost the idle rich who profit from superstition and foolishness some of their unearned money and . . . money.

As the author of one analysis of the Christian suicide cult wrote, “In fact, belief in heaven makes this life actively undesirable. The longer we live, the more chances we have to encounter temptation, fall into sin, and lose our salvation—the worst catastrophe imaginable. If heaven is the goal, then the younger we die, the better.This idea is taken to an extreme by Christian apologists who say that fetuses which die before birth go straight to heaven, bypassing human existence entirely. In this belief system, that’s the best possible outcome. The second best outcome is children who die before the age of accountability. They may suffer, but they never have a chance to lose their salvation.”

Knowing that is their belief certainly diminishes any hope one might have that Christians actually care about anyone but their own imaginary souls and their place at the right hand of an all-powerful vengeful Jehovah who will smite their enemies and grade school bullies and high school cool kids with plagues and lightening bolts. Actually, that sounds kinda Marvel Comics cool.

Now we have a buttload of Christian suicide culters in charge of at least one branch of the federal government, the grossly mis-named House of Representatives:

  • Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who in his earlier employment was a lawyer for the wall-to-wall Christian crazies Alliance Defense Fund, a group of radical nutbags who have dedicated themselves to imagining that not being able to discriminate against LGBTQ rights will send the country to Hell. In an earlier moment in his career of failures and corruption, Johnson was the founding dean of the private Louisiana College Southern Baptist law school, established in 2010, where Johnson claimed would “acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundation of the legal system.” Gullible sponsors flushed $5 million into Johnson’s mythical university, but it never opened its doors. Johnson slithered away after two years as an idle, but well-paid, dean.
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene whose insanity, treason, insurrection, and stupidity  needs no further introduction.
  • Matt Gaetz, yet another whack job who would be happier as a private rural girls’ school Principal in an uneducated conservative southern state.
  • House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan who should have stuck with overseeing pervert Ohio coaches and team doctors.
  • Rep. Bob Good (R-VA): “We should not fear a government shutdown. Most of what we do up here is bad anyway. Most of what we do up here hurts the American people, when we do stuff to the American people while promising to do things for the American people. Essential operations continue. 85% continues. Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shutdown temporarily.”
  • Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) “I love Andy Biggs. I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him,” Krysten Sinema
  • Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) a classical fact-free-zone of Republican insanity.
  • Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) is one of two Representatives from a state that doesn’t have a large enough population to warrant any representation, Rosendale is a special case for reforming the structure of the US Constitution. “Rosendale touts his background as a real estate investor from Maryland who pretends he’s a rancher out on the range from almost all the way across the country, but all public records show, though, that Rosendale is a ‘rancher’ by way of just renting real estate out to others who actually do the ranching on that land.” In other words, Rosendale is just another Eastern millionaire taking advantage of gullible Montana rubes.
  • Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) is just like his Montana welfare state cohort, Rosendale, in his disrespect for the fools who vote for him. After running away from his Trump cabinet position in the wake of a collection of ethics violations, Zinke pretended to be an outsider looking out for his fellow Montana rubes in his House campaign. Wearing his ponyboy cowboy hat, he claims that “Despite the deep state's attempts to repeatedly stop me I stand before you as a duly elected member of the congress and tell you that a deep state exists… They want to wipe out the American cowboy.” Little fella, the cowboy barely existed for 20 years after the Civil War and that job is long gone and couldn’t even pretend to exist today without buttloads of federal farm assistance.
  • There are at least a half-dozen more Republican nutjobs in the House and as many equally suicidal characters in the Senate, but their names are hardly worth mentioning and their stories are too miserably despicable to research.

As another Christian critic wrote, “For the religious right, every war is a sign of the return of Jesus Christ, and the chance they’ll get to say, “I told you so. I was right. I was right all along.” Even if they have to burn down the world to prove it.” Sadly, “even” is the wrong word to chose in regard to the American Christian Taliban. They desperately want to take the whole world with them to prove they are right, but what they will prove to nobody (when no one is here to see it) is that we all get one life to live and that’s it.

10/13/2023

Or This Guy (these guys?)

The previous essay, “ID’ing A Trumper” needed this additional character stereotype. The headline below his picture was:

Princeton, MN (KROC-AM News) - Five Minnesota law officers are recovering today from gunshot wounds suffered in an apparent exchange of gunfire with a 64-year-old man at a rural residence in central Minnesota this morning.

You know this doofus is a Trumper.

64 Year Old Suspect Surrender After 5 Minnesota Law Officers Shot 

Or all of these guys: 

Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022 | ADL 

Mass Shooters' Most Common Trait—Their Gender—Gets Little Press Attention -  FAIR 

US Counter-Terrorism and Right-Wing Fundamentalism 

Assessing the right-wing terror threat in the United States a year after  the January 6 insurrection | Brookings

10/12/2023

ID’ing A Trumper

After 7 years of this nonsense, Trumpers have become a “group” of their own. Like Republicans, they are a minority but also like Republicans they are grossly and powerfully overrepresented in society. As Wikipedia notes, “The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Jacob Zuma, Shinzo Abe, Javier Milei, and Yoon Suk-yeol.” So, Trump’s brand of racist fascism has spread (or was already there and Trump allowed them to crawl out of their rat holes) to assholes around the world. Trumpism has become sort of a culture with some pretty obvious trademarks. As one source explained, “MAGA idealism which includes white supremacy, xenophobia, control over women’s bodies, capitalistic values and a lack of morality.”

Trump superfans dream of a run again, and of JFK Jr. on the ticket -  POLITICOCharacters like this guy don’t need the hat or the disrespectful shirt to be identified. You know by the expression on his face and the rest of his body language that he is uneducated, entitled, racist, ignorant, and proud of all of that. Likewise, this bunch of shouting, inbred, arrogant fools are easily identified as Trumpers. Opinion | How Never Trumpers Fell in Line - The New York TimesIf they weren’t Trumpers they’d be Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell’s Angels or Outlaw biker gangbangers, Blood & Honour America Division neofascists, Aryan Nation skinheads, Jewish Defense League terrorists, and nothing keeps these characters from belonging to all of the above clans of nutjobs and the many more “organizations” where white people join in mutual hatred of anyone who isn’t “like us.” The fact that there are so many young Trumpers proves that Kornbluth was on the money with “The Marching Morons” and the saying “stupidity kills, just not fast enough” is sadly true.

However, my inspiration for this essay came at my local YMCA. An old white guy (surprise!) is often wrapping up whatever routine he has when I arrive at the gym. He shaves at the Y and while there is nothing special about his face it takes him about 10 minutes to get the job done. All the while, he has the water running full force as he scrapes the dead skin and scraggly hair from his face. That kind of arrogant, entitled, wasteful, anti-environmental attitude just screams “Trumper!” and it got me thinking about the other identifying behaviors of Trumpers.

Deadline Detroit | Lapointe: Trump's Selfish Mask Resisters in Michigan  Reflect an Abnormal ElectionArrogance and entitlement are the primary hallmarks. Mostly, we’re talking about middle-aged to old white people, sadly not just men. Even more sadly, not just old men. When you see some one blasting down the freeway at 20+mph over the speed limit, weaving between cars like a video game, you likely automatically think “asshole” and “Trumper.” When someone tries to push their grocery cart in front of a long line of socially distanced shoppers, you know this is another Trumper. When someone is yelling at a cashier for some imagined slight or, back in the masking days of COVID, for asking the customer to either back off or wear the required mask, we think “Trumper.” An illegally loud vehicle--motorcycle, pickup, car, or semi--90% certainly a Trumper. Obviously, swastika or Confederate flag tats and patches and hats are Trumper ID marks. When someone takes an assault rifle into a business, school, church, or concert crowd and kills the usual mass murder quantity of innocent people, you think “Trumper.” When someone is commenting on science, technology, medicine, religion (especially Christianity), or economics and it is beyond obvious that they know nothing about that subject, you should probably think “Trumper” and 99% of the time you’ll be right.

You can always find an exception and, especially in this case, “the exception proves the rule.” You will be wrong in assuming any form of assholery to be Trumpism so rarely it will be of no consequence. That is one hell of a hallmark for a political/social movement: always wrong, never learns from mistakes, and so deep into the wingnut echo chamber that no new information ever seeps in.

10/10/2023

AI and LI, or HI? That Is the Question

This month’s (September 2023) Wired Magazine is sub-titled “Dear AI Overlord’s, Don’t Fuck This Up.” Obviously, the bulk of the magazine is devoted to opinions of how bad or good Artificial Intelligence is going to be for near and long-term humanity. Mostly, as usual, the Wired opinions are from liberal arts majors who have no idea what they are talking about as far as AI’s technology.

In the month’s “Dear Cloud Support” essay, the opening question is “’I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human Bot or not?’” The second I read that statement I realized the question missed the real problem. It is not a yes-no problem, it is a 1-out-of-three problem, at the least. It isn’t just AIBots who are the threat, it is equally or more stupid humans (Low Intelligence) and badly designed AI systems that are the threat. The battle for survival is between the LI&AIBots vs High Intelligence (HI). In the short term, the stupid people will cause the most harm. Long term? Who knows?

There are a couple of articles that delude to the idea that engineers and computer programmers aren’t up to the job of keeping AI reasonably moral. They, clearly a pack of liberal arts dweebs, imagine that, finally, the world will need the kinds of “skills” that a liberal arts degree supposedly promotes. No evidence of that appears to exist in the modern world and lots of contradicting data would argue to the contrary. For example, Steve Jobs, a liberal arts scumbag who learned from his philosophy classes which kinds of decisions are moral and which are not. So, he focused his life on always picking the amoral “what will profit Steve the most” options. There is no shortage of executives, politicians, and entertainers who disprove the idea that anything about a liberal arts education creates any sort of “better” citizen.

Not that a STEM education produces any sort of predictable outcome, either. The amoral academic environment is probably the culprit. Between the cut-throat publish-or-perish competition, the corporate shills who crank out drugs, processes, and products for companies at the expense of the taxpayers who support marginal “education” facilities, and the low bar academia sets for educator standards and skills it doesn’t matter much what a kid majors in, exposure to this environment is probably doing to do at least as much damage as it provides useful education.

right skewed

As Law 2 in the “Five Laws of Stupidity” clearly explains, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” And that includes education credentials or professional standing and accomplishment. Law 1 states “Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation” and Law 4 explains “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.” At the least, 50% of every population is “below average” and that is assuming the distribution is “normal,” not heavily skewed-right with a really long tail as I suspect. The existence, abundance, and persistence of the Trump Cult is serious evidence that, at least in the USA, some serious down-breeding is causing our average IQ to drop dramatically. So, assuming that “average IQ of 100” might be optimistic.

If I had to put my fate in the hands of an AI system that was Open Sourced and monitored by the smartest people in the world or the random-number-generator that is, optimistically, what the Low Intelligence crowd represents at best, I’ll take AIBots and HI over anything the LI crowd can produce.

9/13/2023

Going Amazon-free

BAM, Indigo Join Amazon Publishing Ban | Shelf AwarenessAbout eight months ago, I received a notice from the Amazon cop-bot that, somehow, I’d “repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines” (“repeatedly” means twice in Amazon-bot-speak) and “You received an initial warning and because of your repeated violation of our Community Guidelines we've removed your ability to participate in Community features” (the “initial warning” was a bot-email with no reference to what the warning referred to). However, when I send emails to a variety of Amazon’s automated “customer service” locations including one to a Jeff Bezo’s email I found from searching other confused and pissed-off banned Amazon customers, I got a snarky note from “Ayesha of Amazon.com's Communities Escalation Team” finally telling me where I’d violated their weird, poorly-explained, and inconsistent “guidelines.” Here are the condemned reviews, so you can be the judge.

#1 Storm Watch: Joe Pickett, Book 23
Review Title: Deep State goober nonsense
Text: Probably the worst edited novel from a major publisher in years. If it weren't a library book, I'd have probably red-lined at least 50 pages out of the book in an editing fit.
Box has, apparently, joined a majority of westerners in the belief that letting oil and mining companies rape and pillage the mountains at will has no consequences. And, even more cluelessly, imagines that selling those resources does not require the cooperation and financial assistance of the taxpaying states. I couldn't read this silly fantasy novel without remember the first time I drove through Montana in the 60s and was stunned at the filthy, mining-tailing contaminated rivers and streams and the pollution billowing uncontrolled from processing plants in practically every small town I passed through. It actually made Kansas, my home state, look responsible.
Pickett is still, mostly, a sympathetic "hero," but almost every other person in the novel approaches the cowardice and foolishness of the Proud Boys. Even after Trump, these goofy, entitled goobers imagine that anyone with a college education working for the government is "Deep State" and out to repress white "working men," the same men you always see leaning on shovels at construction sites.

#2 Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption
Review Title: Paranoid and laughable
Text: If this were written by Andy Borowitz it would have been spectacularly funny. I had to re-calibrate often while I read "Breaking the News" to remind myself this nutjob is serious. Which kind of makes it even funnier.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that some wingnut objected to my disrespecting the Faux News worldview and hit the “Report” button at the bottom of my reviews. Since Amazon doesn’t post reviews immediately, under the false claim that they check reviews for those mythical “community standards” before putting a review online, it’s tough to know what happened, but both reviews were up for several months before causing my entire 15 year history of reviews to be discarded.

I have, honestly, hated almost everything about Amazon since Bezos and his gang of lawyers steamrolled the original Amazon books in Minneapolis in 2008. I have been buying stuff from Amazon since 2008 to the tune of well over $9,000 up until early this year. I figured if they don’t like my business, I shouldn’t give it to them. So, after getting the first notice, I started looking for alternatives to the demon Amazon. Turns out, laziness is primarily what fueled my buying decisions because Amazon is a long ways from either a primary or a quality supplier. For years, local and national retailers have complained that Amazon shoppers browse their inventory and order the products from Amazon. The reverse is also possible and downright handy. Assuming you know how misleadingly-weighted Amazon’s rating system is you can learn almost as much from a product’s Amazon page as you can from seeing the thing in person. If you’re really devious, you could even order the thing from Amazon, play with it, return it, and buy it again from a decent vendor. Just as Amazon makes it clear to you that it does not owe you a microsecond of loyalty, you don’t owe Amazon anything either.

Currently, the only “business” I do with Amazon is via my Kindle and my local library. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since January and the credit card information Amazon has for me expired in March. I’m currently doing the research to see how I can get away from even that bit of business.

This past few months, I researched, priced, and ordered several products that are listed on Amazon.com. I just didn’t buy them from Amazon. I bought some expensive bicycle handlebars from the manufacturer in Idaho, some bike repair parts and a flat kit from my local bicycle shop, and some bike accessories for my new electric mountain bike on eBay. I looked them all up, initially, with Amazon’s search engine, then tracked down the actual vendors and bought from them unless I could source the stuff locally. As for the cheap Chinese-made stuff, the best sources I know of are Temu.com and AliExpress.com and, of course, eBay. I bought a pair of 3-bearing, all metal mountain bike pedals for $23 shipped, after finding the company and product description on Amazon for $88-140. 

Here are some of the resources I’ve found to substitute for my default Amazon buying habit:

  • eBay.com, of course, is and always has been a go-to location for all things. Like several other online vendors listed below, the “convenience” of Amazon (plus my dislike of Paypal, plus Musk and his fascist cofounding buddy Theil) had put eBay on the backburner of my online shopping options. After dumping Amazon, I was “forced” to look to eBay for some odd car bits that my local auto parts house couldn’t supply. I found them on eBay and they arrived in two days. Since I last dealt with eBay vendors, at least a decade ago, they have really upped their shipping and customer service game.
  • Newegg.com I’ve been buying electronics from Newegg for years, far longer than Amazon, and Newegg’s electronic selection, quality, buyers’ review usefulness, and customer service blows Amazon out of the water.
  • Nashbar.com Another online vendor that I’ve dealt with almost since the beginning of the WWW. My accounting history records a set of mountain bike wheels purchased from Nashbar in 1999. Again, great service, terrific products, incredible sales (hence those sealed bearing wheels in 1999), and knowledgeable customer service.
  • PetSmart is the hands-down best online place to go for all things pet-related. I’d forgotten how customer-friendly this company was until my Amazon spat. As I was cancelling some of my Amazon subscriptions, I discovered a couple of them were with Petsmart. I easily moved those subscriptions to Petsmart’s website and saved a little money as a result. When our amazing little cat, Diva, died unexpectedly this fall, Petsmart refunded my money for a shipment in process and sent a beautiful sympathy letter. Not only was that beyond comprehension from Amazon, it was more than our local vet offered.
  • Temu.com Is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace that is the number one shopping megastore worldwide, regularly whipping Amazon’s butt in price, selection, and quality (at least with Chinese-made products, which is 70% of Amazon’s selection). I’ve tried some of Temu’s dirt-cheap ($3 for 512GB) MicroSD cards and while they are often defective, Temu gives me instant credit for those defective cards without requiring a return. Otherwise, I’ve bought electronics, bicycle parts and accessories, motorcycle accessories, gifts for my wife and family, shoes and clothing, tools, and assorted weird stuff. Shipping is kinda slow, usually a week to two, but Temu provides tracking information and, unlike Amazon or AliExpress, that information is accurate.
  • AliExpress is another Chinese-owned outlet, owned by AliBaba, that under-sells Amazon by a good bit and, usually, with better quality. Delivery is even longer and a lot less reliable than Temu and often untrackable. However, after getting two used induction-compatible high end frying pans from Amazon (returned at Amazon’s expense), I bought the exact same pans from AliBaba and they came new, for 1/4 of Amazon’s price, and included “gifts” from the vendor (a smaller pan and some non-stick friendly utensils). As best I can tell, AliExpress has little-to-no customer protection for lost shipping and you are absolutely gambling buying expensive stuff from AliExpress. I ordered a $120 microphone from AliExpress that never arrived and AliExpress kept insisting that I provide “shipping information” to claim a refund. Since I did not receive any shipping information, tracking links, or any evidence the package had ever been shipped, I was out of luck.
  • Walmart.com and Target.com have really stepped up their online games. Plus, I can get stuff delivered to my local store for free and pickup along with groceries. I started using Walmart’s store pickup service early in the COVID pandemic and have used it often since. Now that COVID is making a comeback, I’ll be back in the parking lot waiting for a Walmart associate to load my groceries into the back of the Honda. Our local Target just increased the size of their grocery department and is building a parking area for pickup only. I am looking forward to trying it out.
  • My local library, especially for book reviews. The same reviews that got me banned from Amazon are still standing on the Hennepin County Library webpage. When I retired, I sold several bookshelves full of books as part of my downsizing routine and I bought an Amazon Kindle where I restored some of my old book collection. I also found a ton of ePUBs of my older stuff, which lives on my computers and Android tablets. I am about to replace the Kindle, though, since everything my library has in eBook and Audiobook format is also available via Libby (Adobe) plus a few that aren’t on Kindle. And I can access the library’s whole catalog via Libby. Supposedly, Epubor Ultimate is capable of converting Kindle books from the Amazon format to ePUBs which eliminates any reason why I can’t move from Kindle to Kobo, where I could directly check out books from my libraries. I haven’t bought a Kobo, yet, but I am shopping for one everywhere but Amazon.com.
  • Speaking of local, when I first dropped out of Amazon, I began to look, first, for local sources for the stuff I buy. For example, my local bike shop is grossly high priced for some stuff, but for many things they are as reasonable as online retail and you can’t beat the delivery time. That goes for hardware, office supplies, groceries, music equipment and repairs, and at least 75% of the stuff for which might have once defaulted to Amazon.

After 3/4 of a year of avoiding Amazon, I literally have no regrets or reason to return to that evil monopoly. I am solidly disgusted with our bought-and-paid-for-congresscritters for not only allowing Amazon to abuse the USPS but for giving them piles of taxpayer money for services the federal government should be managing itself. I do like using Amazon’s website like the old Sears’ catalog, pawing through the options for a purchase, reading the 1, 2, and 3-star reviews (the 4 and 5 stars are rarely honest buyers), noting the sellers so I can go to their websites for better prices and service, and, for now, checking out my library books.

8/27/2023

“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.