Hitting Critical Mass

When I was young (from about 12 to 30), most of my reading was science fiction for two reasons: 1) SF was heavily frowned on by 1950s and 60s western Kansas local book censors, parents, and other guardians of intelligence and too-much-knowledge and 2) the best of SF made more sense than the conservative version of magical Christianity surrounding me. One story, above all of the others, that has stuck with me for more than 60 years is The Marching Morons, by CM Kornbluth, published in the 1951 April edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine which you can read for free as a reasonably well reprinted eBook here. By today’s standards, it is a fairly politically incorrect story, but the basic concept is still accurate, as explained by one of the few intelligent people left in this dysfunctional future to a recently-cryonics-revived, childless, 20th Century real estate agent/con man:

"Very well. Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children.

"What of it?

This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damn-fool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!"

"As far as I can see," said Barlow, "you're running down the best features of time. Are you crazy?"

"The rockets aren't rockets. They're turbo-jets—good turbo-jets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilometer is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they're going two hundred and fifty. The cities are ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who'd be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside.

"We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

Today’s post-2024-election political and social climate seems to be making Kornbluth seem like a farsighted genius. Other than the obvious 1950’s racial nonsense (“the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers” who he probably intends to mean non-white people), for the most part Kornbluth is talking about rural goobers. Rural parents tend to have more children, although some “analysists” like to call this a liberal vs conservative tendency. That, of course, avoids the blatant worldwide education level variances between urban and rural citizens where, for example, “15-year-olds studying in urban schools in 37 countries outperformed rural students by roughly the equivalent of one full year of schooling.” In the US Midwest, what passes for K-12 “education” is filtered through the racial and superstitious biases of parents and other uneducated small town power brokers. In the US Southeast, if something has to be explained with words that contain more than two syllables it’s considered to be too dangerous for young children to learn.

The fact that a low-brow,convicted felon/rapist, fraudster character like Donald Trump is a viable candidate for anything other than an asylum or prison is right out of The Marching Morons. In the 2024 US Presidential election, 76,917,041 marching moronic cult members (50% of the votes cast) voted for a convicted felon (34 felony convictions), who had been successfully sued for rape, who not only illegally retained top secret documents after he lost the 2020 election but carelessly passed many of those documents to the nation’s enemies, and has a lifelong history of criminal business practices and business incompetence. That should be impossible to believe, but in 2024 it is the state of the nation’s intellectual decay. In 2024, half of the nation’s voters are ethically, morally, intellectually, and politically corrupt and incompetent. Thanks to consistently stupid rural voters and the usual assortment of mentally lazy and racist urban voters, Trump and his merry band of fascists are in control of the United States of America. I think we’ve hit critical mass of stupid. It’s all downhill from here.

Across the nation, stupid people are taking control of local education systems, taking control of local education systems, dumbing-down everything from science, civics, history, and even language programs. Stupid people are getting themselves elected to local and state government offices, partly because stupid voters are making public service a miserable experience, not worth the sacrifice for anyone who is qualified to do those jobs or motivated to do those jobs well. The whole nation is sliding into becoming a shithole state like Florida.

The fact that rural military veterans have gone for the Russian-owned Trump disaster that shouldn’t be a surprise either. Only about 3% of enlisted military personnel become college graduates and officers. Almost none of the officer candidates from the past 50 years have come from rural areas. Even with all of the education and advancement opportunities, the overwhelming majority of enlisted military members only “reach the rank of E-4 (Specialist or Corporal depending on the branch) before leaving the military.” That is in spite of the fact that “almost all officers (99%) have at least a bachelor's degree, and 42% have advanced degrees” while “only about 17.2% of enlisted military personnel have an associate's degree or higher.”

It’s safe to say that after rural kids have managed to crawl out of the stagnant life they left, get a college degree, become an officer and experience that life, damn few of them are going back to the farm or small town America. After leaving any branch of the military, officers tend to live in or near urban areas where they can take advantage of their experience and education economically and socially. Which leaves most of the grunts to resentfully crawl back to rural America and the menial labor life they left; bringing their PTSD, entitled and uneducated dissatisfaction, their tendency toward violence, their meth, alcohol, and synthetic heroin addictions, and their racial prejudices with them.

The Marching Morons was about the outcome of hundreds of years of down-breeding and the resulting collapse of society as more and more people are unable to comprehend how anything in the culture works and fewer and fewer people are stuck with those critical tasks. Sooner or later, there will be a backlash from the people who can “pull the pin” most effectively.

In 2020, when I was surrounded by dumbasses who believed both that Covid 19 didn’t exist and that it was engineered by China, I often asked, “You don’t know any engineers, do you?”

After listening to the moronic drool that passed for their answer, I elaborated, “When engineers design a pandemic it won’t kill a pitiful 3%. Nature does that kind of sloppy work. Engineered diseases will not only kill 97% they will target their victims to specific genetic characteristics.” For example, there are several known genetic markers for a variety of undesirable human characteristics. A well-designed pandemic virus would aim right at that group, which would solve 99% of the world’s current problems (which are all human creations).

Jokers on the Left, Clowns on the Right

For a short time in the late 60s I was heading toward being politically radically left. I’d participated in several anti-Vietnam War rallies and marches and was a member of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization (although I was not an SMU student). I’m not ashamed of any of that and, as far as it went, I was on the right side of history and morality. The downtown marches were usually ended by the marchers being beaten by cops and rednecks. After one of those episodes, I was sitting in the downtown El Centro College student cafeteria, watching the detritus and fallout from the chaos outside. I’d been hit a few times, mostly by thrown beer bottles and cans, and glancing blows from enraged and terrified cops’ nightsticks, but I was young and indestructible and, mostly, unharmed if disappointed. Up to late-1968, I’d been under the delusion that my fellow US citizens were decent people who were just misled by bad information. The violent and irrational opposition to Vietnam War protests were eye-opening and I would never be that optimistic again.

As I was watching the chaos, another young man I knew from the SDS meetings sat down beside me and pointed to an armed and armored cop on the sidewalk a few feet from our vantage point and said, “I can’t wait till we’re in charge and they have to be afraid of us.” In that moment, I realized that the difference between the far left and the far right was insignificant. 50 years late, when I expressed that view to a good friend, his response was, “The left isn’t usually as violent or destructive, don’t you think?” We ended our discussion there, but I think it’s just a matter of degree rather than a real difference. Right or left, if you go far enough in either direction you end up circling back to the same practical point: jokers on the left and clowns on the right, both meeting at the same point of stupidity.

In the last 40 years, I’ve been disappointed by folks I once thought were on the side of the Martin Luther King’s hope, quoted often by President Barak Obama, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." After 2016, I have given up entirely on what I would define as the “far left,” which is not at all the people Trump and the fascist far-right would label “far left.” They do not, in any way, understand the concept of baby steps, which is how all change happens. They want it now and on their terms, just like their fellow-nutjobs on the far right.

Irrationality and magical thinking comes at us from the far, nutty ends of both sides. Damage-wise, I don’t see enough difference between the two to make it worth my time to parse out the left-right advantages. They both work hard to sow discord, disbelief, and distrust in our democratic institutions (media, education, government, and community) and neither offer anything constructive to take their places. Thanks to both, we are now at a point in the decay of the American Empire where we are on the cusp of destabilizing the entire human world for the interest of argument. I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. In fact, the more I learn about the plans of the 2025 Trump Administration, the more I expect the future to be bleak.

You Are Right, I Hate Trump Voters and Everything They (and He) Stand For

I bet you don’t hear this a lot outside of your rural or suburban Fox/NewsMax echo chamber, but you are right. I absolutely despise people like you. My father, an east Kansas farm boy with an accounting degree from a small east Kansas teacher’s college, was commissioned as a Navy lieutenant in 1943. He and five other young men sailed an LST from Virginia Beach to North Africa, then to Italy, and, finally to Normandy, France. He was about as poorly-suited to command a ship as any person alive in 1943. He’d never been in a canoe or more than knee-deep water before stepping foot on to his first LST. I don’t believe he could swim.

He was a shy, introverted, pacifist, Christian man who spent the last 60 years of his life coming to some kind of grips with the horrors he saw fighting people just like you: incompetent, under-achieving, racist, angry, entitled, hateful, small men with poor self-esteem and a love of power and violence. When the US military was mopping up the remains of the German army in North Africa, he and other Americans discovered US-made Bendix (an Indiana company partially owned by General Motors) electrical controls in German vehicles. In Italy, he participated in a landing where he witnessed the results of a fascist controlled country. At Normandy, he watched most of the 200 Marines ,who had crossed the Atlantic with him in that small ship, cut down by German machine gun fire when the bow ramp dropped. He developed a life-long dislike for his own country-of-origin, England, when British LST captains dropped their bow ramps, stopping several hundred yards short of the landing target and forcing US soldiers out and into deep water to drown or be helplessly shot down. So, he and other US LST pilots and sailors humped the que and his crew made two more trips back to the Normandy beaches, to prevent British officers from uselessly and cowardly sacrificing American soldiers. (I’m sure you empathize with the British officers, can’t you? Why should they risk their lives for Jews, liberals, gays, people of color, and other “weak” people who aren’t like you? Hitler and his fellow fascists hated exactly the same people as you.)

After those experiences, his tour of duty was over and he was supposed to ship back home, but every ship he was assigned to was redirected to the Pacific war front. There is a famous picture of the U.S. Petrof Bay narrowly missed by a Japanese Kamikaze pilot. In the background, there are a half-dozen members of an aircraft gun crew looking on helplessly as a Mitsubishi light bomber splashed into the ocean a few yards from their guns. My father is somewhere in that picture. Dad used to, humorously, point out his spot in that crew and point out where he was hiding when the plane missed his ship in a Navy coffee table book that ended up on a bookshelf in my bedroom when I was an adolescent.

He was messed up for the rest of his life from that experience. Always a shy and introverted man, he struggled against his inclination to crawl out of sight and became a high school math teacher and coach. My mother was responsible for a good bit of his drive and success, but she died when she was 34 from cancer and he barely managed not running away and starting over after remarrying and overwhelming himself with three more children and a hysterical, prescription drug addicted second wife.

When he was in his 70s, I’d drive from Denver and, later, Minnesota to west Kansas and chauffeur him to the NCAA Junior College basketball championship tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas every March. His eyesight had failed and he lost his driver’s license due to multiple accidents. We made that trip for about a dozen years before other infirmities made travel impossible for him. Those trips where when he opened up to me about his WWII experiences and the damage those experiences had done. PTSD wasn’t a thing in 1945, when he came back to Kansas to finish his education, start a family, and find his first teaching job.

Mostly, he was an absent father spending the hours from his last class until the rest of us were in bed sleeping “grading papers” by himself. At 9-years-old, I learned how to heat cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli or spaghetti and meatballs, clean the kitchen and dishes after my younger brother and I ate, run the clothes washer and dryer or hang them out to dry in the warm months and fold clothes (badly), vacuum and pick up after the two of us, and be a latch-key kid until he remarried and our lives really went to shit with two, then three, more kids in the house and an angry, hysterical step-mother to try and avoid as much as possible. On one of those basketball trips, Dad told me that he’d often sit in his car in the garage, listening to the screaming and turmoil in the house and imagine what it would be like to “just drive away.” But he didn’t and, instead, I left home between my junior and senior year of high school and lived in a 1-bedroom trailer with a friend and paid my bills with income from our band, odd jobs, and getting by on eggs and chicken our landlord sold wholesale.

There are only two moments that I can remember where Dad actually demonstrated some of what must have kept him going on that LST. Once he stood up to a trio of high school bullies (loosely defined as “high school” because at least two of them have failed so often they were nearly 20) and once when he opposed the teacher’s union. Otherwise that large, fairly fit but overweight, athletic man was as timid and reclusive as anyone I have ever known, if I can claim to have known him at all. From those conversations we had while traveling, I learned how broken WWII had made him. From reading authors like Studs Terkel, William Shirer, William Manchester, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Drury, Tom Clavin, and several others, I know a little more about those experiences and the men who fought to prevent fascism from sprouting its evil wings in the world and, especially, in the United States where people like you desperately wanted to imitate their hero, Adolph Hitler.

And, now, we stand exactly where my father and unwilling soldiers just like him stood in 1941, but we’re on the losing side. Post-WW2 right wing bureaucrat, George Kennan, wrote in 1948, "We have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Since Truman, the Republican Party has been devolving into a group of rich men (laughably self-defined as “businessmen”) who have worked to further the goal of preventing “the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Trump voters have finally given them everything they want and, like Hitler’s sponsors, those rich and powerful (mostly) men are now going to do everything they can to destroy the faint echoes of American democracy and put the 99% into servitude and poverty. They have been working toward that goal since long before the Civil War and, in fact, that goal is exactly what the Civil War was fought over.

I don’t use the word “hate” often or casually. I dislike all sorts of people and things, but I reserve “hate” for those that I truly despise. The weak Americans who are terrified of “wokeness,” whose own sexuality is seriously challenged by gays, lesbians, and, especially, transgender citizens, who pretend to be Christians or Muslims while behaving like amoral predators, and the lazy, entitled white men and women who want a “strongman leader” to justify their own failures are despicable and deplorable and, yes, I hate them. It takes that kind of motivation for most of us to get out of our comfortable lives and make the sacrifices necessary to go to battle with evil. Evil is already filled with hate and ready to make victims of everyone outside of the cult. I am not willing to be a victim without a fight.

When You Can Fool Enough of the People All of the Time

Wednesday, a writer I usually enjoy, Jeff Tiedrich spontaneously labeled what remains of the United States as"Dumbfuckistan" and provided a new continental map; much to the outrage of many of his readers who could claim their state barely voted for Kamala Harris although many-or-most-most of the congressional elections went for the stupid candidates. Tiedrich’s new national identify label came from a 2016 book titled, Welcome to Dumbfuckistan: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America. And that is definitely who we are today and, most likely who we will be for decades to come.

Sadly, Jeff’s map is more accurate than the AP’s presidential results indicate because in the other state results from California to Colorado and New Mexico to Minnesota the congressional results masked the inner stupidity of the rural and suburban areas (i.e., Minnesota’s Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fishbach, and Pete Stauber, Colorado’s Jeff Hurd, Lauren Bobert, and Jeff Crank, and Virginia’s Rob Wittman, Jen Kiggan, John McGuire, Ben Cline, and Morgan Griffith, all 2016 election deniers and MAGA Republicans). The re-elected incumbents were some of the most incompetent and laziest of the most incompetent and lazy congress in our pitiful national history. (If you do a search on “laziest congress in history” you’ll get a collection of MAGA editorials titled “Is this the least productive congress ever? Yes, but it’s not just because they’re lazy” you’ll get three Google pages of articles listing several lame excuses that would get any normal person fired for incompetence.)

I've seen this coming since the 1960s. A country stupid enough to elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, G. W. Bush, and Trump, twice each, it's pretty damn dumb. But Trump is somewhat worse than all of them and he doesn't make any pretense at being decent, competent, or in any way interested in preserving that infamous "American way of life." And more than half of the voters loved all of that and fell for it like starved fish in a stock tank. And this is after the few reputable people from the first Trump administration had the courage to warn their own voters that Trump is a fascist, is incompetent, and a generally vile human being, Trump’s 34 felony convictions, and the fact that when presented with Trump and Harris’ polices, the before the election, “voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.”  “Stupid is as stupid does.” As Heather Cox-Richardson pointed out, “An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: ‘We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.’” In other words, a buttload of stupid, lazy people.

Abraham Lincoln may or may not have said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." What he left out is that you only have to fool enough of the people all of the time to do whatever damage you have in mind. The necessary ingredient for that magic formula to be true is stupidity. I am not using the word “stupid” carelessly. For a lot of years, my definition of that word has been the one detailed by Professor Carlo Cipolla in an essay titled “The Basic Laws of Stupidity”: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” That definition perfectly describes the tribe of culters known as “MAGA Republicans.”

And the 2024 national election was a point where stupid people in the former United States of America hit critical mass of stupid people. If that XY graph is too complicated for you, here is a simplified, cartoon explanation that might meet your intellectual requirements. The stupid category is on the lower left quadrant where an angry nitwit intentionally crashes into a ladder where a worker is laying bricks, causing a brick to fall on the stupid fucker’s rage-fueled, but otherwise non-functional head. If that is too complicated for you, you are beyond help. And if you voted for Trump and the MAGA crowd, you are definitely stupid. Most of the actual MAGA politicians, with a few exceptions, are in the lower right quadrant: pirates: where they are somewhat-to-very-intelligent, but intend to do harm to the rest of us. That group rarely does much damage to the “harmless” crowd because they are not infected with entitlement and greed and are always opposed by the “intelligent” minority. But in fascist environment, the intelligent opposition is the first to go against the wall and that has been true since the first largely-stupid  tribe selected a pirate leader throughout history.

And, now, here we are, Dumbfuckistan led by a pack of MAGA pirates diving stupidly into fascism with empty heads held high and happily dismantling 250 years of bursts of random steps forward and lots of stupid steps backward. We have reached the critical mass of more than enough people who can be fooled all of the time, a corporate controlled national media more effective at delivering misinformation and propaganda than anything Moscow or Beijing ever dreamed of producing (because the citizens of Dumbfuckistan willingly pay for their misinformation), and all the elected branches of the federal government controlled by the tools (and fools) of fascism. I don’t see any way out of this mess without violence, luck, and outside assistance and none of that is visible anywhere on the horizon. So, as Jeff so accurately wrote, “Welcome to the United States of Dumbfuckistan.”

Known by the Company You Keep

You voted for a known con man awaiting sentencing for 34 felonies. You knowingly ignored the fact that those convictions were decided by 12 citizens who risked their lives to ensure that no American is above the rule of law. You have no integrity, no decency, and no values that can make up for your flaws. You voted for a man who was convicted for raping a woman, again ignoring the courage of a jury of whom half were selected by Trump’s lawyers. That is a clear statement of who you are, man or woman, and how little you care for a woman’s safety and her right to exist as an equal. Russia, especially Vladimir Putin, obviously exerts significant influence with Trump and every investigation by both the House, Senate, FBI, and CIA confirmed that. But you have no interest in US national security, do you? That certainly defines who you are in many ways. Trump is a known conman and incompetent “business man,” but his flaws and failures are just yours inflated to an international level, aren’t they? Robert Reich has cataloged “The 101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency,” saving me the trouble of making a similar list. None of that is hard to find or verify, but you don’t care do you?

When I was a kid, when the sun was tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet, a common parental warning was “You are known by your friends” or ““You are known by the company you keep.” Supposedly the origin of that saying came from Don Quixote, “Here, quoth Sancho, the proverb hits right, Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are. If your worship keeps company with those who fast and watch, what wonder is it that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with them?” You are known by the politics you follow, too. For the last dozen years Trumpers have been given slack with a collection of lazy, unobservant excuses: they don’t know better, “they are hurting,” the education system failed them, liberal elites don’t pay attention to their problems, and the list is inexhaustible. And it’s bullshit. I’ve lived among the people who voted for Trump for all of my 76 years and they are, as Hillary said, deplorable. They are lazy, uneducated by choice, emotional and anti-intellectual, timid and terrified, selfish, greedy, violent, and will be just as happy marching in uniforms toward any target they are aimed at as they are sitting in their living rooms cowering from the blue glow of their televisions. You can always identify them by their deep-set scowls and angry fear.

Another author did a fine job of pointing out the error in imagining there is some kind of thin shell of evil over mostly-decent Trump voters, “If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.”

Back in 2012, another Republican Trump-enabler, Rick Santorum, admitted, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Santorum was talking about intelligent, decent people in the media, but he was also right in the broader category of who fascists will never have on their side. Smart people rarely tend to also be treasonous, self-serving, uneducated, and gullible. Don’t get distracted by professions or degrees, as the 2nd of the Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity clearly warns us, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” For example, 2022 Minnesota Republican Governor Candidate Scott M. Jensen is a Chaska, MN family physician. A “doctor,” right? But a really bad doctor whose own patients and other Minnesota physicians warned Minnesota voters that Jensen was a nutjob. Not only was Jensen an anti-vax nutjob, but he also over-prescribed opioids to his patients while pretending to be outraged at other physicians’ use of their “prescription pads.” Doctor, yes, “smart person,” not so much.

In my Rat’s Eye View blog, I have pointed out the many flaws in considering a collection of so-called professionals “smart” since 2007 and much of that early material came from my initial attempt to create a business management consulting website in 1999. From engineers in every profession to medical doctors to every sort of executive (government or business) to scientists and the arts, stupid people abound.

But even if they are a small minority of humans, there are 8 billion of us littering the planet and some of those humans are very smart. So smart, in fact, that I have often suspected our species is about to snap off another evolutionary branch. Those people have now witnessed inconvertible evidence that Trump voters are deplorable, unredeemable, dangerous fascists. Those very smart, very talented people are out there running every complicated aspect of modern life. They are the physicians, scientists, engineers, and public servants who once thought they were working for some “greater good” who now know the greater good would be to let nature take its course more often than not.

The deplorables will be unable to contain their glee at this most recent victory. They will self-identify without fear, loudly and proudly. When they need the services of the intelligent minority, I hope they see increasingly overwhelming obstacles. One million medical professionals left the field during the Trump covid massacre, either through death, retirement, or career change. There are few replacements in the supply chain and, regardless of Trumps delusions, far fewer foreign physicians from his designated “nice countries” will be interested in immigrating to fascist America. “Smart” doctors will gravitate to decent communities and rural America will continue to be abandoned. Trump will accelerate that by demeaning the sacrifice necessary to become a medical professional and directing even more resources to “unearned income” such as his tax breaks for the rich and vulture capitalism. More and more clinics are facing doctors nearing retirement and insisting on “no new patients” while new doctors quickly reaching patient capacity and being unwilling to accept a work load that demeans their profession and endangers the patients they have. It turns out that no matter how much you pay an equity capital anointed hospital executive, nitwits who majored in “business management” don’t know anything about healthcare and are nothing more than a grossly overweight albatross dangling from the neck of doctors and nurses. Medical professionals have less trouble immigrating to “nice countries” than any other group.

When Trump and his nepo-imbeciles are done privatizing NOAA, US climate scientists will largely be out of the business of formulating climate models so that a few of Trump’s corporate buddies can use the fragile remains of that agency to sell weather predictions to other corporate interests. You can safely assume that climate-impacted areas will continue to see insurance companies divest from home owner insurance and other government-regulated obligations, while Wall Street gamblers use that same data to short those same areas based on insider weather information. We saw a surprising number of US “smart people” move across the border to Canada in the first Trump regime. Vancouver is a hotbed or US techie immigrants and Toronto is the “New New York” for tech immigrants from all over the world.

So, revel in the fact that you “broke the system” for as long as that euphoria lasts. The problem with breaking something as complicated and intertwined as the very fragile United States of America is that you will never see anything like the country you broke again. A surprising portion of every state in the nation wants their state to leave the union. Trump’s election may mollify the non-productive, dependent red states, but if they leave the country won’t be nearly as effected as if the blue states jumped ship. Most of us wouldn’t miss Alabama-Mississippi-Arkansas-Louisiana-etc if those sad pieces of real estate disappeared into the earth’s core. Economically, they are all nothing more than a burden. Be careful what you wish for. There is no coming back from this sad victory. You have made it clear who you are, both by your actions and the company you keep. You will never again have the “fellow Americans” trust of the people you desperately depend upon. Once that bond is broken, it can’t be repaired and you are totally unprepared for the consequences. And there will be consequences.

They Aren’t New

In 1967, I’d about played out my rock & roll pipedreams and my father and step-mother had confiscated my coerced “college savings” (US Savings Bonds compulsorily taken from my paper route earnings as an 11-through-13-year-old plus a couple years of summer farmhand work) and written a $5,000 check (about $47,000 in 2024 money) to a fly-by-night for-profit (is there any other kind?) Texas “computer school.” I was deposited, with $100 cash to tide me over until my first after-school job’s paycheck, in a Dallas flophouse that the school pretended was a “dorm.” I was barely 19 years old. Lucky for me, there were several other Kansas students/victims in the “dorm.” After a few nights of cowering inside our rooms with furniture stacked against the doors to keep the roving drunks out, we found a house to rent together.

That turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement because the oldest-and-wisest of us (a very low bar to exceed) decided to to back home to Lawrence, Kansas and finish his accounting degree at the University of Kansas. Soon afterwards, the next-sophisticated of our remaining quartet of Kansas bachelors decided to move to rented room in a house across town. Not wanting to be stuck paying rent for the guy who had broke up the study-band, I followed the twins and rented a single-car garage apartment behind the house they were renting. Calling that room “an apartment” is a huge compliment. It was nothing more than a tiny room with a camper-style “bathroom” and a single-burner stovetop, sink, and micro-refrigerator kitchen. It cost $10/week, which was all I could afford with $10 going to rent, $10 going to school tuition, $10 for food and transportation, and the rest to taxes and other uncontrollable expenses on a $50/week income. So, when I got the occasional invitation to a free meal, I always took it.

My new across-the-driveway neighbors were the first people I had ever met from Alabama. They rented the entire downstairs apartment, with a quartet of kids, and were the “apartment managers.” They were also the worst people I had ever met at that point in my life: with Confederate flags, racist posters and KKK memorabilia, and swastikas on their walls. They had invited me to dinner one evening and, when I entered their apartment, I was immediately struck with so much radical-right artwork that I thought it was some kind of sick joke. I must have stood in the backdoor way for several minutes, staring at the horrific, nightmare  interior of that living room.

I was mostly stunned throughout the evening. I am often stunned into incomprehension by the vile behavior I have witnessed from my “fellow” human beings. But that hadn’t happened so blatantly in my previous 19 years. For the next three years, my bar-of-expectation became lower by the experience on a constant and relentlessly disappointing interval. I was exposed to poverty at third world country levels. I was exposed to racism, brutality, corruption, and unexpectedly selfish and vile behavior. Dallas was a real college-of-the-streets experience for me. I thought I had seen some bad shit, worse than most people ever experience, before Dallas, Texas, but life was just getting started with me.

Meeting the two twenty-something people from Alabama was the beginning of what formed my increasingly low opinion of human beings. Up to then, I had never experience overt, hateful, racist people. Probably lots of discrete variations of that theme, but these folks were not even a little bit shy about flauting their hate. Today, November 5, 2025, many Americans (the good ones) are stunned to learn how awful their neighbors and countryfolk (sadly, and certainly not “fellow” countryfolk) really are. This election is a repudiation of every professed “Christian value” I ever heard on my way to atheism. This election voids 248 years of spoken, if not acted upon, traditional liberal values of equality, equal opportunity, decency, fairness, civil responsibility, patriotism, obligation, and gratitude.

As a friend wrote this morning, “Welcome to Ameristan. Manipulated by affirmation---and that’s a wrap on the US as we’ve known it.” We can never go back to anything resembling the country most of us thought we were building. From here out, everything will be different.

Fooled Again?

Today’s big left issue is Biden’s “collaboration” with Israel and Netanyahu’s Gaza-and-beyond expansionist war. Lots of voters, who might be Democratic voters, are abstaining or tossing their votes into the sewer for alternative “candidates” in protest. It struck me that they are likely falling for one of the oldest Republican tricks in the Treason Book.

Republican far-right politicians have been pulling off red-herring voter scams using treason as a tactic since before our involvement in WWII. The Foreign Agents Registration Act that ensnared Paul Manafort was a byproduct of that period. Disinformation was a pretty common weapon in their toolbox, too. The 1940’s America First Committee propaganda organization included several congresscritters, including Representative Hamilton Fish III (R-NY), who used congressional franking privileges to publish and mail disinformation to their constituents. Lucky for the world, they were unsuccessful; back when the US empire was likely at its intellectual peak.

Skip forward to 1968 and Republican candidate Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger and Anna Chennault to Paris to sabotage President Johnson’s desperate attempt to end the Vietnam War. Liberals and middle-of-the-road voters were conned into imagining that Nixon’s “Secret Peace Plan” actually existed. Back then the Soviet Union was afraid of Republicans and they were pressing North Vietnam to participate in the peace talks. Nixon’s tactic worked and he buried the nation in war debt, that is still unpaid, and corrupted the federal government. American democracy took a series of hits from Nixon’s Republican gangsters that set us up for the next treasonous Republican regime; Ronald Reagan.

Now it’s 1980, and President Carter is entangled in the Iranian Hostage Crisis; another marginally significant event that captured more attention than it was worth. There is substantial evidence that William Casey, who would become Reagan’s CIA head, and Joseph Verner Reed, who was Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco, negotiated with the Iranians to hang on to the hostages, 52 US diplomats, until after the election. Later, that turned into the Arms-for-Hostages payoff that established Reagan’s “Teflon President” credentials.

Now, it’s 2024 and President Biden, and Vice-President Harris, are tangled up in Netanyahu’s war on Gaza’s civilians and Netanyahu’s desperate attempt to stay out of jail (like his parallel in the US, Donny Trump). As Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in 2019, “There’s not much daylight between Netanyahu and Republicans, at least Republican elected leaders.” When President Obama was attempting to apply some leverage on Israel in 2015, Netanyahu’s speech to the Republican congress was both an insult to Obama but to the intelligence of the United States citizens. By 2015, US “intelligence” was in such decline that at least half of the country received the insult as a compliment.

There is absolutely nothing about the herd of Republicans, in either the House or the Senate, that should inspire confidence in their honesty, decency, or patriotism. If you don’t think that Netanyahu is talking, regularly, to Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and everyone who will listen in the Trump campaign, you are a gullible fool. These clowns would sell out their own mothers for a reasonable bid. Sadly, what remains of the US investigative “press” has been co-opted by Republican billionaires and it could be a lot longer than it took to uncover the details of Reagan’s treason before we learn about today’s misdirection.

Most Americans, including the so-called “educated” left, don’t know how our government works. They imagine that the President has ultimate power to direct aid, the military, and civil service. Even Donny whined (surprise!) about how little power the President has to wreak things and get his way. If Republicans want to sabotage Biden’s attempts to end the Gaza invasion, they have a more than willing accomplice in Netanyahu. Netanyahu has zero interest in stopping his war because, if he does, he’s in the same kind of corruption legal mess as Trump. It’s a long term bet, like 10 years, but I’d bet $100 that, eventually, we’ll learn Republicans are encouraging Netanyahu to keep up his invasion and illegal war until, at least, after this election.

Fixing the Left Coast’s Taxation Inequality

The Left Coast—California, Oregon, and Washington—are grossly under-represented in the US federal government.  “The coastal counties in the United States are home to almost 40% of the country's population (50M people), even though they make up less than 10% of the land mass.”  Those three states make up a huge portion of the US economy: In 2024, "California is once again the sixth-largest economy in the world.  If you add the GDP’s of Washington and Oregon, California would surpass the United Kingdom to become the fifth-largest economy in the world."  In 2023, California's GDP was nearly $3.9 trillion, making it the fifth largest economy in the world for the seventh year in a row. California's GDP growth rate was 6.1% from the previous year.  Oregon's GDP was $318,884B a slight increase from the previous year, when the state's GDP was $254.71B.  Washington's GDP was $807,864B.

In 2023, the federal government collected $4.44 trillion in total income taxes. The residents of California paid over $234 billion in federal personal income taxes in 2023. That's about 15% of the national total, and nearly 95 times as much as paid by residents of Vermont, for example. Washington paid $44.2B in personal income taxes and Oregon paid

This is just a partial list of the dependent states (only the top 10), but it’s pretty obvious that the majority of freeloaders are Republican states. Even some of the so-called “Blue States,” like New Mexico, are geographically red states, they are mostly rural and the rural, uneducated, and gullible areas are solidly Fox/NewsMax territory. Sadly, that is also true for the Left Coasts’ rural areas in the eastern portions of the states.

But, imagine if those Left Coast states quit paying those billions of federal taxes and invested that money in their own defense systems, infrastructure, economic development, education systems, and world trade. The rest of the US would suddenly be buried in its national debt (currently at more than $34T) with no functional economy with which to repay any part of that mountain of paper. Skilled immigration to California, especially from Red States, would likely blossom into a massive brain-drain from the remainder of the US.

The rising price of real estate would purge even more of the economic losers from the states to the massively dependent and unproductive Mountain West. About 40% of California’s homeless were born in other states (or countries) and the new Left Coast nation would be under no reasonable obligation to support them. As of February of this year, “of Californians feel they'd be happier if their state was no longer part of the United States.” The threat of suffering another episode of Trump is a driver, too: “"If Donald Trump is elected, the number of people who think California should become its own country will undoubtedly go up in California," Michal Strahilevitz, a California business professor, explained. "If Joe Biden is reelected, or really anyone other than Donald Trump, the number is unlikely to go up and may even go down. As in many blue states, most residents of California are terrified of another four years under Donald Trump." Another overthrow of the popular vote by the Electoral College could be the event that really trips this trigger.

It is not inconceivable or impractical. The flame-throwing MAGAots like to imagine they are brave patriots, but when they are asked to support themselves and be responsible for their actions they will be like their “fearless leader” Donny and bankrupt themselves and their futures. We could be in for an ugly, exciting future.