Post Mortem: Pointless Practicing

Like all of the "Post-Mortem" essays, this one was intended to be auto-published after my death. I've intentionally let one of two slip past that target, but as long as I can reset the publication dates on these things I'll keep pushing them back until I can't.  Damn it, I'm still alive in 2025, so it goes back yet one more year.  

Well shit, I'm still putting up with this nonsense in 2026?  Screw it.  I'll let this one go. 

August 2, 2017 

Modern, at least American, medicine and doctors are a curious mix of uselessness and hope. The things that doctors and medicine are useless at are the important things and the things they cling to a claim of value for are hopeless. Crippling arthritis that inhibits your ability to use your hands for everyday necessities? Forget it, medicine is useless. Don’t even bother asking for help because none exists. Cancer of a vital organ or even several organs? Well, maybe, if you are willing to subject yourself to surgeries, radiation, and toxic chemicals and almost certain poverty and debt regardless of your insurance situation.

Forty years ago, I ripped out the fingernail of my left hand’s middle finger and that fingernail never grew back in any useful form. A couple of years ago, while helping my wife move a plant from a friend’s home to ours. Turns out, that plant (Snow on the Mountain) is a toxic relative of poison ivy. My wife experienced a nasty rash on her face that cortisone shot quickly stopped then cured. I am allergic to cortisone, so I tried to treat the growing, painful rash on my hands with a variety of ineffectual over-the-counter medicines, natural treatments, and a lot of whining. I went to the doctor, but was told that I was pretty much on my own since their only solution, cortisone, was not an option. The end result was that my already mostly frail and undependable fingernails began to develop a fungus that turned them into even larger handicaps. As you might suspect, there are no practical cures in modern medicine for nail fungus and I’ve been left to deal with that on my own.

And tinnitus. My constant companion for at least 20 years. Medical “science” has found absolutely nothing to combat tinnitus, but there are no shortage of non-functional tactics upon which you can pay big money for even bigger disappointments. For a long time, it was a slight background noise only in my left ear. It was enough of an irritant that when I spent time in an anechoic chamber in St. Paul several years ago I mostly thought about the first time I was in such a chamber and how, after accommodating myself to my own rushing blood and cardiac sounds, I became irritated at the asynch heart beats of the three other people in that chamber with me. No such problem 40 years later. Thanks to that constant tone, I probably couldn’t have heard someone else’s heart if it were in my hand, held next to my ear. Then, a few years ago, an inattentive evening spent in a Red Wing club and I was left with much louder and more irritating tinnitus, now in both ears. No thanks to what passes for “modern medicine,” there is nothing to be done about it.

Likewise, when my hands began to wither and twist into uselessness from arthritis a few years ago, other than pain medications, modern medicine takes an “oh well, that’s too bad” approach to my problem. I’ve had an orthopedic surgeon take x-rays and shake his head in sympathy and my regular doctor tell me “it’s just part of aging.” No comfort or relief from either of those “diagnosis,” but there is a reaffirmation that medicine is helpless to deal with problems that can be easily measured like rotting nails or disabled hands.

This week, my aging symptom is a return of my double-vision problems that first occurred last year about this time. At that time, my diagnosis was that the muscles that coordinate my eyes into a coherent single image were simply wearing out from age and over-use: my left eye has always been grossly near-sighted which exercises those muscles unusually. My diplopia was treated, at that time, by adding prisms to my glasses prescription. That worked pretty well until this last week. At least for the short term, I’m wearing an eye patch over the eye that is mostly useless for the task at hand: the right eye when I’m reading and the left eye when I’m driving. That was a “fix” that cost me $7 on Amazon.com. I’m sure Mayo Clinic’s solution will be more expensive and, possibly, less effective. I am learning how to close one eye without tensing up the muscles of that eye and causing ever more headaches than I usually experience. The end result is, so far, a diagnosis of "ocular myasthenia gravis." Still, no real solution for the double-vision but a very expensive prescription medicine.

So, as a result of my last year’s (2018) physical, my doctor noticed that my Prostate-specific antigen ( or PSA) level was around five. Supposedly, anything over four is a concern; a warning factor for cancer. I’m seventy-one now, so “concern” is a relative term. Pretty much everything about my body is turning into a warning factor of some sort. I hurt everywhere. My physical limitations abound. I am seventy-one, pretty close to, or slightly past, the terminal age for someone of my economic class and genetics.

I watched my father degenerate from an active person who regularly played tennis and golf well into his late-60s into a couch potato who was so physically limited that his only “activity” was to sit a few inches from a big screen television and try to pick out the action from various sportscasts. He hated his last two decades of life and only his fear of death—an odd characteristic for someone so religious—kept him alive for at least a decade of suffering. My father went through several surgeries for cancer, a couple for what turned out to be a misdiagnosed thyroid problem, and at least two for various cardiac problems. Not one of those surgeries or procedures extended his quality of life and I doubt that any of them did much for his longevity.

The chances that I would submit myself to any sort of elective surgery, exploratory or remedial, are tiny-to-nonexistent. Broken bones and open wounds aside, I consider almost all surgery to be “elective.” I have zero faith in an industry that can’t fix small, obvious, important patient problems but claims to have miracle cures for the big stuff; cancer and cardiovascular diseases. This is, after all, a medical industry that regularly creates complicated drug addictions by prescribing medications to offset the effects of medications. It’s almost impossible to find an addictive compound that at one time the medical industry and the people who will only “practice medicine” for their entire careers didn’t claim was not addictive: from barbiturates to stimulants to synthetic heroin to depression and anxiety medications. If you can trust the opinions of a group that is so wary of its own expertise that life-long professionals only claim to “practice medicine,” good luck with that. I have been up-close and personal with some of the richest and most incompetent physicians the country has to offer and I wouldn’t trust most of them with a sharpened pencil.

Living Behind A Mask

I was going to title this “What’s it like being an atheist in the hyper-superstitious US Midwest?” but that was too long and the title I chose answers that question in a nutshell. For the majority of my 76 years, I’ve had to waste far too much time idling away the minutes after some arrogant nutjob mutters “Let’s pray.” One of my fondest memories of living in southern California for almost 10 years was that never happened one single time. Midwestern faux-Christians might squall about the “godless heathens on the left coast,” but I’d just call that good manners. I found no shortage of religious people in southern California, but for the most part they were not particularly fragile types who required me to pretend along with them to maintain their faith.

If you are a superstitious Christian tribalist/primate-trooper, you might imagine that Californians are harboring “deep feelings of fear and guilt from a sinful life and turning [their] back on God,” but you’d be as nutty as usual. It’s impossible to “turn your back” on an omniscient imaginary friend, for one thing; if he’s everywhere that would be physically impossible. But, mostly, the Californians I knew were incredibly hard-working, talented, and driven people who were trying to live their lives as best they could.

Before the Reagan Revolution did its permanent damage to the California education system, the highest percentage of adults I’ve ever known were taking night classes at the community colleges and the many University of California facilities, working one or many side hustles, trying to improve their neighborhoods and communities, and enjoying the best weather and recreational opportunities in the country. The mega-churches were still stuffed with Midwestern robo-people, but it wasn’t hard to find people who had useful things to do. Outside of a few marginally civilized cities, the Midwest is nothing like that. And I lived in Orange County, the L.A. area’s most conservative nuthouse! The more rational parts of the state are even less infected with delusional Christian cults.

What it’s mostly like living in the Midwest, especially in the burbs or rural areas is lonely. It’s also scary because the one thing the followers of “the prince of peace” are best known for is intolerance and violence. Humans, like most other primates, are a herd animal. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and monkeys live in “troops.” Although orangutans are mostly solitary animals, just watching freeway traffic will make it pretty obvious that humans are inclined to pile up in tightly packed herds, even when we are going nowhere. Put generously, we’re a “social animal,” more honestly we’re a herd animal easily spooked into following the lead steer over a cliff.

All religion is about producing conformity, but Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions and cults are about forcible conformity. So it is entertaining, at best, and incredibly disappointing, more accurately, to hear someone whining about atheists asking some sect of the Christian cult to behave at least marginally-legally and morally. The US version of Christianity has been as ruthless, ethnocentric, racist, and self-centered as any cult in the history of humanity. That is not to imply that Christians have behaved particularly well since the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned the first edition of the Christian Bible and invented Christianity in 330 CE.

The fact that the majority purporting to be Christian (representing 68% of the US population) could be terrorized by the miniscule 4% of the population representing atheists should be hilarious, but it is mostly disturbing. Christianity is a religion based on conformity of thought and speech, not necessarily actions. From simple observation, it is clear that those Christians are so shaky in their faith that they require universal conformity to cling to their fragile beliefs. As one academic author explained, “The Church so fiercely opposed heretics, i.e. those who did not conform to the articles of faith that they espoused, because they believed that their existence threatened society and would undermine the Church.”

So, those of us who aren’t terrified by our mortality and gave up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairies and angels, demons and fire-breathing dragons, and other imaginary terrors are forced to try to be invisible in this fading empire of superstition, kleptocracy and capitalist feudalism. I have lived in western Kansas, north Texas, rural and urban Nebraska, urban California, suburban Colorado, urban and rural Minnesota and the only place I felt I was safe without my constant mask of anonymity was California. If I could have afforded to stay there, I would still be there. Nobody moves to places like everywhere-else-I-have-lived because they want to be there. If we all had the necessary skills, motivation, and drive to be in California, we’d be there. We pick lessor places because they are easier, the competition is less fierce, the standards of performance are practically non-existent in rural areas. That makes the place where I currently live less demanding, but far more lonely.

Another Valuable (expensive) Lesson

In late 60s, Ms Day and I lived in Dallas, Texas. We were poor, but didn’t know it and we mostly got by surprisingly well considering that we were totally on our own as kids (me, 19 & she, 17) in a big city. We’d financially “graduated” into being car owners in 1968—a nondescript German import brand that no longer exists—that looked a lot like a tiny hearse. .As usual, Ms Day decorated it to look like a vehicle the Munsters or Adams family might own. While I was driving to a meter reading route (I worked for the Dallas Water Department) I was t-boned at an intersection by a lady driving a new model Cadillac. Our car and a lot of my savings were totaled as a result. The German hearse was unrepairable and our friend/mechanic had a great deal for me; a barely used 1959 MGA that an Air Farce guy had been keeping in storage for several years and was looking to unload for $500. What I knew about cars, auto mechanics, and car maintenance could have been extensively documented on a single side of a page with double-spaced, large type print.

The MGA was a very attractive sports car with some of the most ludicrous attempts at engineering in human history. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been saddled with a worse car for that time and place. The picture, at left, is pretty much exactly the POS British crap that I owned, color and all: 4 cylinder, 1489 cc, 108 BHP (79.488 KW) @ 6700 RPM, cast iron block with an aluminum head, dual SU carb, twin Lucas distributor, 4-on-the-floor manual transmission, rear wheel drive, two-seater convertible, wire wheels and all. That summer, Dallas was hitting some record high temperatures and the postage stamp MG radiator wasn’t even close to up to the job; resulting in multiple blown head gaskets. (A good reason why that generic MGA picture is next to a pond.) Couple that with the twin carbs and distributors that needed moment-by-moment adjustment or they’d slip out of tune and set the freakin’ wooden floorboards and air filters on fire, and you have a formula for sudden bankruptcy and lots of stranded moments in weird Dallas neighborhoods (the only kind of Dallas neighborhood).

By the time I gave up on the MGA, my hard-won savings went from more than $3,000 (Almost $28,000 in today’s money.) to the $500 I received from the sucker who bought the car from me. When he drove the MGA off, it was bellowing smoke from yet another blown head gasket and back-firing because it was, again, out of time. I was happy to see the damn thing disappear from my life and amazed that someone who owned a beautiful white 1960’s Ford Falcon convertible would want a British anything.

The inspiration for this essay was an accidental run-in with a 1960 MGA and its owner at the Red Wing River City Days this past weekend. The bleached white beauty at right is the exact car. I was bicycling past the car show when I saw it and I had to take a look for old times’ sake. The owner was nearby, providing some comic relief. I had all sorts of flashbacks looking at that money-sink of a wannabe-vehicle.

Ms. Day’s “favorite” memory was when I foolishly signed us up for a rally that ran some distance in the north Texas countryside past Plano, west to Grapevine, and into Ft. Worth before sending us back to Dallas for the finish line; not that we got anywhere near finishing. Somewhere near Lewisville Lake our MGA started backfiring, setting the floorboards on fire and sending flames into the passenger compartment. We spent the rest of the rally driving slowly towards home, watching the ditches and fields on the way for any sign of water and the typical Texas litter that would include bottles and cans to hold water to use in putting out our flaming vehicle. One of my “favorite” MGA memories was as we were returning home from our wedding ceremony in the MGA, some damn thing happened in the transmission causing enough pressure to pop the rubber transmission fill stopper and shoot hot transmission lube into the vicinity of the glovebox where it dribbled down on Ms. Day’s bare legs and her wedding dress.The only good part of that memory is knowing that she was still this happy to be married to me after all of that.

So, while I looked at the MGA in the car show, I listened to the owner talk about the “joys” of owning this kind of vintage POS. He described the fixes he’d made to the car’s many engineering faults, the money and time invested, and the joys of driving the damn thing. I looked at the odometer and he’d managed to rack up a grand total of 5,200 miles in 64 years (he was the original owner, too), or about 80 miles per year. That isn’t even a decent stat for a pair of boots.

The MGA was a life lesson for me, though. Since that car, I have never once felt a moment of envy toward any sports car owner. If they don’t look like total assholes, sympathy at best, but envy never. Sports cars are uncomfortable, unreliable, impractical, and irrationally expensive. As David McRaney said in the “Spotlight Effect” chapter of You Are Not So Smart, “The spotlight effect leads you to believe everyone notices when you drive around town in a new, expensive car. They don’t. After all, the last time you saw an awesome car, do you remember who was driving it? Do you even remember the last time you saw an awesome car?”

The Living “Lost Cause”

I just finished reading Michael Harriot’s generally painful, but brutally honest, Black AF History · The Un-Whitewashed Story of America and I’ve been struggling my way through Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past for the past several weeks. Princeton’s History Department website summarizes Myth America with “Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past.” There weren’t a lot of surprises in Myth America, at least for me, but there were 20 chapters of constant disappointment. Black AF History was a different collection of stories, filled with many names and incidents that had not been part of my history education. Harriot is as tough on white people as white people have been on people of color and that is a tough pill to take, as a white person. The chapter I am currently wading through in Myth America is “Confederate Monuments” by Karen Cox. And my point in this essay/rant came from that chapter, plus the combined background from Black AF History.

The fascination and perverse pleasure some Americans get from Israel’s racism and apartheid and, not many years earlier, South Africa’s similar internal terrorism is almost identical to the things white southerners were saying to themselves after the brief period of Reconstruction. For example, at the unveiling of an Augusta Confederate monument in 1878, Charles Colcock Jones Jr, ex Confederate lieutenant colonel, reassured white southerners that they  “have no apologies to offer, no excuses to render, no regrets to utter, save that we failed in our high endeavor. . . We were overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions . . . [and] nothing has been absolutely determined except the question of comparative strength.” He continued by ranting about the need to program white children to “be taught to emulate the example of their Confederate ancestors.” The point here is that that damned “Lost Cause” is being emulated in Israel in exactly the way white southerners and other racists would behave if they weren’t “overborne by superior numbers” today.

Israel is one more historic example of Lord Acton’s 1887 rule, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (1887) and the more depressing corollary attributed to so many authors I have long given up looking for its origin, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.” For the past 76 years, any mirror an Israeli might chose to look into would reflect back an image that even someone as brutal and amoral as Benjamin Netanyahu would try to reject. Try as they might, the image will stick for as long as human history is recorded. Just like the American South and its history of slavery and repression and violence, once you’ve put that flag into the ground, that property is marked for all of human history.

The current crop of MAGA Republicans and the historic supporters of Israel from both parties are either proudly seeing their racist dreams come true in Israel or becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the reflection of their position in the world. When lifetime supporters like Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs of California are being whipped at both ends, it’s obvious that no middle-ground position is safe, “In San Diego, I’ve been protested by people who think that I’m not sufficiently calling for a ceasefire and those who think I’m not doing enough for Israel — some of whom I’ve known my entire life. It’s really turned into two separate camps. The more you try and carve out a middle, the more neither camp really feels like home.” As usual, the people who know the least about the situation are convinced their insights are “fresh” and valuable. Anyone who is convinced they have the answer to this war is deluded, at best, and arrogantly foolish most likely.

Progressive Democrats are under attack for their realistic positions on Israel and that is being used to Republican advantage in the coming election. Liberal Democrat Jamie Raskin was stuck between a rock and hard place having to defend Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s words condemning Israel, “If I can’t stand up for somebody’s right to just express themselves in Congress without being censured, then I have lost my way constitutionally.” Republicans had no such qualms and even less respect for the Constitution and gleefully voted overwhelming to censor Tliab. Everything about Israel and Gaza and most of the Mideast is a lose-lose proposition for anyone in the US; politicians, businesses, and individuals. Normally, when that is the case the best option is to step away and see what develops.

The Upside of Being An Outsider

Scientific American magazine published an article titled, “In Atheists We Distrust.” The article opened with, “Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to.” The gist of the article is that all of those people with imaginary friends “distrust” atheists. Weirdly, this article claims that a research found “People identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions. Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them.” Of course, “no religious affiliation” just describes people who spend Sunday at a bar watching football and praying for some god to help their team beat the snot out of some other team, so that isn’t particularly interesting information.

From my Midwestern perspective, I’ve mostly decided that superstitious people have such a tenuous hold on their “beliefs” that any sort of challenge to the existence of their particular “god in the mirror” is too much to stand. The “individual quality” of the gods those people worship is also suspiciously mirror-like. And, with even minimal knowledge of modern astronomy, physics, and neurology, it takes a shitload of “confidence” (i.e. “ego”) to believe there is anything special in this universe about an individual human. As a lifetime outsider to the whole mystical experience and an introverted observer of human weirdness, I’ve seen this behavior from every “god-fearing:” character in my life; from my father and family to co-workers and acquaintances to public figures. (Especially black collar public figures whose outrage and general intolerant behavior I’ve always written off as financially motivated. After all, if enough people were atheists, nobody would get to pretend to speak for the gods.)   

In the past few decades, I’ve somewhat modified my opinion to something more like, “Nobody believes this shit, based on their behavior.” You can make a pretty rational argument that everyone is statistically atheist because of the currently existing approximately 4,200+ religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, or otherwise supernatural beliefs, few of us believe more than one of the pack. 1/4200^th is 2.380952380952381e-4 or approximately 0.024% away from no faith in the supernatural at all. In all of human history, there have been at least 10,000 religions. A 1/10,000^th belief is close enough to zero for reasonable and practical purposes. Either of those options demonstrate hardly a significant difference between the faithful and atheists. Other than arrogance and tradition, picking a god to believe in is about as random a choice as possible. So, you might as well invent one as take on an existing god. It’s obvious from behavior and conversations away from peers that a substantial number of “the faithful” pretend to be so for social, financial, and other cultish reasons. In those situations, I’ve had a number of ministers admit to me that their own personal faith is considerable less magically-based than the one they project to their parishioners/minions. Back in the Sam Kinison days, it was almost popular for fundamentalist ministers to tryout different career options, admitting they’d been in the religion thing for the money. At least in the US, we’ve regressed a long ways since then and the majority of Americans are back pretending they believe the same shit as everyone else. Cult behavior, in other words.

Again, in my experience and observation, it is fascinating how much even a supposed single god, like the Jewish Jehovah Yahweh, Elohim, the Lord, God, and his/her/its other pseudonyms has at least as many personality traits as believers. And, on a personal basis, those gods more accurately reflect the personality, habits, interests, prejudices, and other traits of the believer than any description on the various holy books. Which is why I call those various deities “the God in the mirror.” It’s pretty obvious that “God created man in his own image” is the reverse of the objective facts. Men and women create their gods in almost exactly their own image; or the image they have of themselves.

For the nearly-70-years I have been an atheist, it seems to me that I have saved a ton of time, money, and energy for useful activities by missing out on the whole magical world thing. I not only don’t have to tithe to some self-proclaimed Speaker-to-God, I don’t have to knock on wood, worry about stepping on sidewalk cracks, carry a rabbit’s foot, wear offensive and uncomfortable jewelry, or worry about what kind of life I’ll have to suffer after death.

And suffering it would be if the after-life my family and neighbors describe is anything like the real thing their heaven would be. I first got a hint of what that would be like as a little kid in my father’s Dodge City Methodist Church. Those “joyful voices” our minister kept calling for were clearly pitch and rhythmically impaired and the polar opposite of anything that could be described as “:heavenly.” Demonic, maybe. Heavenly, definitely not. Crows make happier and more musical noises as do cats.

When my mother died at 34, the “comfort” my family was given from the church and its members amounted to “God works in mysterious ways.” Clearly, not a satisfying answer for anyone smarter than a brick. I was rapidly falling into the group of “people who reject religion because they find a god either insufficiently loving or insufficiently credible.” When my father and I argued about his church attendance requirement, he responded with “Live in my house, go to my church.” A few weeks later, I’d rented a tiny trailer with a friend and I moved out on my own the summer I turned 16 and lived there until I graduated high school and was “finished” with my first year of college (I dropped out.). When my father and step-mother were old, disabled, and no longer in a financial position to pour money and energy into their church, that church vanished from their lives.

Living in the Midwest for most of my life, I’ve been exposed to every variety of what passes for “Christianity” this country has to offer. A few, like Unitarian Universalists have enough other positives to outweigh the occasional mythical and superstitious fantasies, but most are based on cult-like conformity and fear of the impossible unknown (a vengeful god or his bad-tempered fiery sibling). I do not see any advantage, other than not being “different,” to pretending to believe in this silliness and at my age I care even less than before what people think of me for not playing make-believe religious games.

What Am I Missing Here?

Religion and country music have always baffled me and there are a lot of similarities. Both are mostly full of pointless nonsense and both rely on irritating faux-Southern accents to fake sincerity. Religion, apparently, gives the hopeless hope or some such thing. The idea, apparently, is that while this world sucks the next one will be a reward for getting through this one? That seems to me to be a good and useful excuse to do nothing to improve this world. Country music gives the illiterate cornpones something to relate to that isn’t complicated or creatively demanding. There was a long period of my youth where I believed that if I could figure out why people liked country music I’d have the keys to easy fortune. I probably figured it out, but it wasn’t worth the sacrifices I’d have to make to tolerate my victims.

Christianity and assorted cults and superstitions have infested my part of the country so thoroughly that admitting to being a non-believer may be the worst moral failure one can commit. According to several surveys of US citizens, being an atheist makes a person less reliable, less moral, less intelligent, and more unlikeable than practically every other awful thing a human can be. Based on the regular criminal activities, improprieties, and general despicable-ness of Black Collar criminals,it’s hard to figure where religion gets any sort of claim to morality. It’s enough to make me want to migrate northeast to Maine or Vermont where 69% of the population “never attend church or religious services, or go less than once a year,” which is not the same as being atheists but is as rational as the US gets. The top five rational US states are Maine, Vermont (69%), Oregon (65 %), New Hampshire (64%), and Washington state (63%). The closest thing to a “shithole country” in the US, Mississippi, is the most superstitious state at 18%. I was pretty fond of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington before reading that data. Now, I’m practically packing to escape Minnesota’s embarrassing 29%.

What has always baffled me about the end goal of almost all religions is the desperate hope for a life-after-death. My father was a less-than-convinced Christian his whole life, but when his final days arrived he was desperate and terrified, the exact opposite of what I’d assumed was the goal in being a Christian. If, after a life of trying to conform to the rules of his religion, he had no confidence in where he was going after death, what was the point? The ONLY thing I can see that religion might provide is that kind of comfort and assurance. If it fails at that, the religion and “faith” has failed entirely.

And that is the point of it all that I am missing. I find absolutely nothing about dying and fading into non-existence to be scary. Life is hard, often cruel, more often disappointing, painful, and, at the end, often incredibly sad. After death, all of that is over and done. I believe, as I have for the overwhelming majority of my days, that I am my brain and the electro-chemical impulses that happen in that small space and large assortment of cells. That’s it. Hit me on the head, hard enough and in the right place, and I might become someone else. That being a known and well-established fact should be enough to blast any delusions or misconceptions about the existence of “soul” outside of rhythmic music appreciation. When my brain dies, the person you and I know as “me” is dead and gone from the universe. Yeah, I know you can’t “destroy” energy, but that electro-chemical energy in my head will become something considerably less organized (“Inconceivable! I know.) and most of it will dissipate as heat. I find absolutely nothing about all of that to be afraid of. I’m a little nervous about the possibility that those last few seconds of my brain shutting down might involve a shitload of pain, but that will last no more than a minute if it happens at all. For me, all of that is a comfort not something I worry about.

Compare that to the obvious fear religious people have of not having been good enough, not having converted enough of the rest of us to their sect, and all of the other fear-inducing concepts behind practically every religion humans have devised. If form follows function, as it always wants to be doing, the function of religion is clearly to provide money, power, and status to the shamans and priests. Good for them, but useless to the rest of us. The forms are the rituals, the rules, and the mind-control tactics, but if they don’t provide comfort when it counts, they are worse than useless. Those forms definitely do not seem to restrict or improve behavior. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have never demonstrated any sort of improved behavior and are more often used to justify wars, prejudice, inequity, theft and deception, and hate. So, again, I do not see what I am missing by abstaining from magical thinking.

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.”

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.

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.”

Characters 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. If 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.

Arrogance 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.

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.

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.

“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.

American Lawlessness

I can't run no more,
With that lawless crowd.
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud.
They're going to hear from me. Leonard Cohen – Anthem

But they likely won’t hear from enough of us, will they? Usually, in American history, the “thunderclouds” that get summoned are in service of the 1%, the planet killers, the real “baby killers” who do their work in quantity not quality, and outright criminals who belong either behind bars or standing in front of a firing squad convicted of treason. But the United States are no longer united and at least half of the voting public (those allowed to vote) are “that lawless crowd.”

You see their distain for law and order, peace and quiet, the public spaces, and decency practically everywhere you go. You hear them flaunt laws and polite behavior all night long in practically every town in the nation. They do it for both fun and profit and they do it knowing the police are, mostly, on their side. The country is rapidly becoming half-“that lawless crowd.” And they are clearly proud of their ability to repeatedly commit crimes against the “public good” and national security without consequences. How will this play out on both the world stage and locally? Probably, badly.

I’m going to work from the bottom up in describing the symptoms of an empire in rapid decline. At the dead bottom—where local, state, and federal laws are broken and flaunted on a moment-by-moment basis—are vehicle noise laws. Here is one of many places where you can see that rural areas are in a state of far more deterioration than their urban cousins. On mild spring-thru-fall days, you can hear the sounds of blatantly illegal vehicle exhaust systems coming from every direction. While it is clearly and obviously illegal to alter any EPA/DOT-approved vehicle’s intake and exhaust system, local and state cops ignore those criminals because of . . . money. Irrationally powerful special interest groups like the IAPO (International Association of Professional Bar Owners) spent buttloads of cash putting up obstacles to prevent the weak attempts of “law enforcement” from patrolling the obvious sources of a substantial number of vehicle deaths and serious injuries: bar “closing time.” That same pack of gangsters and the amazingly powerful (and totally lame) MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) put up all sorts of political noise when the noise their customers make destroys the peace and quiet and citizens begin to demand actual law enforcement (instead of minority harassment.).  And cops?  They are both terrified of biker gangs reprisals and too often the gang members. The same goes for the characters with illegal exhaust systems on their pickups, Honda Civics, and other assorted law-breaking vehicles.

That’s one of many examples of lawlessness at the lowest levels of society. At the national level, we had a violent insurrection that attempted to cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to install a egotistic, foolish reality show actor and his 3^rd-tier élite handlers as a permanent dictatorship. Everything works top-down and our culture is infested with lawless 1%ers who imagine themselves to be above the law and, worse, the law itself. When those at the top of society or business consider themselves to be ungoverned by law and order, that attitude showers across the nation with all of the worst people imagining themselves to be “special.” No only are they not special, but they are capable of destroying anything that is special within their reach.

What to Do, Where to Live?

In 1971, around the time my daughter Holly was born, I was working in Hereford, Texas for a small company mismanaged by a total nitwit as a division of a larger company that was headed for corporate oblivion. However, the upside was that I worked for one of the best supervisors would ever experience, although it was an industry for which I had absolutely no interest at all, and all of that was at the very beginning of what would become my career. One of the people I worked closely with was a WWII-generation machinist born and raised in west Texas, but who had spent a bit of his life sampling other parts of the country; especially during WWII. His name was Carl [forgot his last name] and he was a source of a lot of wisdom at a time when that was a rare commodity in my life. Late in my time in that job, he and I were talking about the difficulty of figuring out life’s big questions: like where do I want to live and what should I be doing to make a living? His simple-sounding advice was “If you want to live a happy life, figure out where you want to live and live there. Figure out what you want to do and do that.”

It might sound easy and it was for Carl. He’d grown up in a small farmhouse between Hereford and Amarillo in the early 20th Century. His brothers and he rode Indian motorcycles between the two towns when there were no roads, paved or otherwise. They fixed what they rode and anything else that needed fixing. Carl told me that when he was a kid there were no flies or many other flying insects in West Texas and they would hang a butchered steer from their windmill and carve off what they needed, leaving the sun to “cure” the open wound till the next time they needed some beef. When the WWII draft came along, Carl was told to apply his mechanical skills to the military-industrial complex and he moved to San Diego to do just that. He built machine and airplane parts for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation and when the war ended, he modified his Ford to be able to run on naphtha, since gas was in short supply and rationed, filled up the tank and put a 55 gallon barrel of the stuff in his trunk, and drove back to Texas. He got married, worked at a few different manufacturing companies in the area, and ended up in the ag industry company where I worked for a few years before he retired. That was what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

For most of us, those two questions are not so simple, but it’s mostly because we overcomplicate our expectations. We’re either looking for the impossibly perfect place or a totally-fulfilling forever job, neither of which is likely to ever occur. A good rule for most everything is “pretty good is good enough.” Perfect, on the other hand, is highly unlikely.

Carl was pretty clear in his instructions, though. The first step is “where.” Finding a great job in a rotten place will never be satisfying. In fact, a mediocre job in a great place (assuming it pays enough to enjoy the place) isn’t a terrible situation. Most of us have some idea about what kind of place we’d like to live. Some of us know exactly where we’d like to live because we’ve spent our lives in that place, our friends and family are there, and we are comfortable with the climate, culture, and opportunities. Some folks are so set on the place that they are willing to sacrifice everything else about their lives to live there. No matter how you picked the place, what to do comes next. If you never settle on a place, I think the odds are good that you’ll never be happy with what you’re doing with your life.

One thing many of us neglect or outright screw-up in our early lives is not taking some kind of career planning seriously early enough. All of the smart people I have ever known came up with career goals fairly early in life, at least by high school, and they let those goals drive their first 4-10 years of adulthood. They usually changed those targets several times over their lives, but when they did they set new goals and aimed for them. Some of us take half of our lives to figure that out, some never figure it out and just wander through their lives wondering “why nothing wonderful ever happens to me?” The only thing that is likely to ever happen to you is life, which will happen whether you make plans or don’t but making the attempt to obtain some kind of control and to maintain self-direction is pretty much the same as driving a car vs letting go of the wheel on a mountain road to see what will happen. You might get lucky, but you probably won’t.

You can catch up, if you don’t get started sensibly, but it’s a lot harder. Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's son, is my overwhelming favorite role model for late starters. He started off his adult life as a hippy commune holdout, after being diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and having been committed to Vancouver mental hospital for a time. After providing on his own cure (for what he later decided was bipolar disorder), he graduated from Harvard Medical School at 32 years old and started his pediatric Internship and Residency. That was a lot of territory to cover after being a non-starter in his prime learning years. Your mileage will most definitely vary from Mark Vonnegut’s. Still, my own experience might demonstrate that if you keep at it you might end up doing work you care about with people you love and respect, even if the business is run by self-destructive, selfish and narcissistic idiots.

The trick, as I see it, is to get started on deciding where you want to live, including the kind of home/apartment/tent/cabin it will be. That might include who you want to live with, but that is not critical. While you’re sorting that out, find some kind of mission for yourself because if you don’t someone will find one for you and you probably won’t like it.

It’s Not My Problem/Business

A friend on Facebook recently asked about the relevance of Yelp (and other user-style volunteer) reviews. He said, “To me the content feels like collated, anonymous hearsay.” Of course, the alternative would be the paid professional/political-announcement style reviews we should all be taking with a block of salt in magazines, blogs, television, the internet, and newspapers. Having read and written product and performance reviews since I was 13, when I submitted a whiny little-kid letter to Downbeat Magazine that the editor mistook for a “review” and published it as such, I usually apply more weight to end-user reviews than to “professional” opinions, unless there is technical content involved.

Opinions are, as everyone knows, like assholes. On a weirdly-weighted site like Amazon, I look at the negative reviews first to get the “bad news” over with, then the middle-weighted reviews for the whole picture, and, rarely, scan the paid 5-star reviews to see what the company line might be. I still get misled occasionally, but not as often as I would if I just looked at the overall star-count or read the pointless 5-star reviews.

Lots of people and businesses don’t like the end-user review system, from academics to small business and services to giant monopolies like Amazon. That, of course, doesn’t mean that these reviews are wrong or even particularly effective in affecting business behavioral change. The thinner the skin and the more aggrieved the business response, most likely, the more accurate a negative review probably is.

For example, an acquaintance of my friend wrote, "As a restaurant/bar owner I believe there really isn't a reason for these type of sites. If you are a decent, strong human being, if there is a problem you will always speak in person, in private, to the manager or owner, because you care about the business and you care about its employees that need jobs and you want to see the business do well. If everything is great you can always give a good review on your own social media platforms. . .”

This reminds me of a similar experience I had in a vocational class a few years ago and I wrote about that in “How Quality Feedback Really Works” and I kept beating that horse with "Quality in the Disposable World." I summarized my take on customer feedback, “Small quantity (boutique) production and service businesses don’t have access to actual numbers and formal inspection procedures and if they rely on customer complaints for feedback they are committing business suicide. In fact, the only way a small business can get any kind of information about customer satisfaction is to hunt for it. When someone cares enough about the product or its performance to complain, a conscious customer service tech should take that complaint seriously and to heart. The 1% of your customer base who care enough about your product or their expectations to complain are rare and valuable. If you choose to ignore them, don’t complain when your customer base makes its buying decisions solely on price and delivery. You have informed them through your actions that you don’t give a shit about their expectations and the result is that they won’t care about you or your company’s survival.” But that requires the owner of the business to actually care about something other than convenience and income and that is rare as hens’ retirement plans.

After working for a half-dozen small companies during the first 20 years of my career, I decided to actively pursue Intel CEO Andy Grove’s advice, "Each individual must build the kind of career strength that makes him or her marketable. No matter where you work, you are not an employee. You are in a business with one employer - yourself, in competition with millions of similar businesses worldwide. . . Nobody owes you a career - you own it as a sole proprietor. And the key to survival is to learn to add more value everyday.“ An addition I tacked to that advice was a tactic I ended up needing to pay attention to way too often, “I have no reason to care more about this business that the people who have the most to gain from its survival.” I augmented that rule with “I am not going to make another nitwit into a millionaire.” (In those first 20 years, I rescued three circling-the-toilet companies from their owners’ worst instincts and two of them were sold for a substantial profit soon after I left and one went back to old habits and soon vanished from corporate history.

A slight, but very helpful (to me) variation on that 2nd rule is “I will not be a manager in a dysfunctional business.” My 30-day stint as manufacturing and engineering manager for a trainwreck of a company in Indiana put the nail into that rule that has stuck since. Not volunteering for a “promotion” into middle management freed my energy and time so that, eventually, I was able to put my whole self into three one-man service businesses that I ran between 2000 and 2015 (when I retired the last of those companies) and my paid hobby as a Minnesota State Motorcycle Safety Instructor (from which I retired in 2018).

So, not only do I believe there is some value in end-user goods and services reviews, I think they are a business’ best (and sometimes only) chance to know what your customers really think of you. Ignore them at your own risk. Many have and many have died as a result.

Banned by Amazon’s Robocops

April 10, 2023 This past Friday I received an email from Amazon titled “Unusual Reviewing Behavior.” The message inside was, “We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.  If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com.” If you’re bored enough to follow that “community guidelines” link you’ll discover it is almost as helpful as FEMA under a Republican administration. That description applies to all of the communications I’ve ever seen from Amazon, too. The company is so big that it no longer feels any need to communicate with its customers.

In the past twelve months, I’d received two notices from Amazon’s “bot algorithm” claiming that “You  have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines (available at http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines) or Conditions of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088).” There was no indication of where I had “repeatedly” violated anything and since I used to regularly review music, books, and occasional products I was in the dark. I responded to their “community-help” robot with “If you don’t have a system to help identify what you call a violation for users, how do you expect anyone to self-correct?” And that has been the end of our “communications.” Of course, in the lazy-robo-programmer tradition, there was no way for me to identify what review Amazon’s robot was objecting to, so examining what it was that the bot objected to was impossible. . However, as an obvious “libtard” I suspect the actual objection came when some wingnut “reported” one of my book or movie reviews and inappropriate or some other typical snowflake objection.

For a fact, I know that Amazon’s ‘bot wasn’t activated by an excessive number of positive reviews. I almost never give anything a 5-star review and I almost never think anything, product-person-or-organization rates an “excellent” rating. Likewise, I rarely give 1-star ratings. Again, not many things are outright awful. I do review a fair number of books that I’ve checked out of my local libraries through Kindle. So my “verified buyer” numbers do not correlate to my book reviews. But after the first Amazon threat of banning, I have contained my book and movie reviews to the Minneapolis Public Library system.

Amazon is obviously overwhelmed by the outcome of their AI review “analysis” and banishing pogrom. It seems that there should be a substantial backlash to the company’s actions and I suspect there has been. There has been a sudden rash of complaints about this robocop-crap and you’ll find an almost unlimited number of people wondering what is going on at Amazon on diverse sites from the  amazonforum.com to forums.macrumors.com to quora.com to reddit.com to businessinsider.com to Amazon’s own vendors who complain about informative reviews disappearing.

For me, this forced a self-admission that I have been lazy and this has been a wake-up call. A little on-line searching and I found all sorts of substitutes for Amazon’s dismal service including Rakuten.com, Walmart.com, AliExpress.com, and for a few extra pennies I started going direct to some of the vendors I’d bought from through Amazon in the past, especially my subscription services. This wake-up call comes at a pretty interesting time for me, too. Looking back at my last year of Amazon purchases I discovered that I’ve returned about 1/4 of the semi-major purchases I’ve made with the monolith due to defects, obviously previous use, and gross mislabeling either by Amazon or the vendor. Electronics from Amazon is almost consistently a bad bet.I have had far better results with electronics from NewEgg.com. NewEgg's customer service is terrific and the people who do customer reviews on NewEgg are technically competent.

This is an example of damaged or
used stuff Amazon's Chinese vendors
ship to US customers. I had to cancel
payment through my bank to get
Amazon to refund this purchase.

I’d suspect that a lot of Asian vendors are dumping their junk inventory on Amazon under the safe assumption that Americans who are lazy enough to buy online are also too lazy to complain when their purchases are defective or damaged or even “previously owned.” 25% defects is a terrible batting average and a friend who gave up on Amazon a few years ago swears that the stuff he gets from AliExpress is consistently better quality and far cheaper than any similar products coming from Amazon. It makes sense, since almost everything Amazon sells is made in China and the things that aren’t made in China are available directly from those companies. 

Again, why wouldn’t Chinese companies dump their junk through Amazon and sell their good stuff directly through their own outlets? That is how the long, sad history of vanishing American manufacturing has gone since the 70s and, now, we may be seeing the same thing happen to American retail. If I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I makes no sense to be building a brand for another country or business. Remember Superscope from the 1960s? I didn't think so. 

Living without Amazon is a lot easier than I suspected. I gave up on Prime a couple of years ago because their video selection was pitiful and I almost never got anything in less than 3-4 days, regardless of their 2-day shipping promise. There are all sorts of articles about ditching Prime: "How to Officially Break Up with Amazon" is a terrific primer on how to wean yourself from Amazon's clickbait. Buying from Amazon is bad for your local economy and the company treats its employees like crap, so everything about Amazon is bad karma. Like dumping Twitter and Facebook, the longer I stay away from Amazon the better I feel about that decision. I think this is going to be a beautiful non-relationship.