Killing Them Loudly with Pleasure (and approval)

 How do you move from one of the world’s most hated, or disregarded, nations to one of the most popular? 

Turns out, the answer to that question is simple.  You just indiscriminately blow up as many billionaires’ luxury yachts: ideally, including the billionaires, their friends and family, and business associates as possible.  Religion, economics, political identities, race, nationality, and the rest of the usual culprits of polarization all vanish into mutual agreement when it comes to offing billionaires and blowing up their stuff.  Everyone, but the billionaires, hates billionaires and loves to see them destroyed.  Just ask movie producers since . . . forever about the popularity of snuffing rich people.  If you started listing the movies and books that were popular because their basic storyline was about killing rich people you’d have a book, even without describing the stories or the people.

The world’s clueless billionaires have gone overboard in squandering hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars on extravagant luxury ships of all sorts.  The only thing these boats have in common is their arrogant overindulgence.  Malaysian “businessman” (aka “mobster”)  Robert Kuok’s “History Supreme” is unrivaled with a $4.8 billion price tag and the ship is more insane extravagance than any palace in human history.  Russian oligarchs, like Roman Abramovich, and his $1.5 billion “Eclipse” set the standard for over-priced privacy and tasteless opulence.  Any list should include Nepo-baby and Amazon’s lucky founder Jeff Bezos’ half-billion-dollar, 127 meter-long, luxury yacht, “Koru” might be the most blatantly arrogant American demonstration of excess wealth and social irresponsibility.  But in 2026, there were hundreds of similar examples of the filthy rich wallowing in floating excess and greed while more than a billion people on the planet lived in extreme poverty, many living on less than a dollar-a-day.  To a certain group of the unwashed masses, these billionaires were idolized, but to the majority of the world’s population they were the most hated people on the planet.

The fall of the American Empire, was headed by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the worst-of-the-worst of so-called “conservatives” from the politically far right, who had been supported by America’s enemies since Ronald Reagan’s mindless regime created a power vacuum in the world.  After Trump fired every national security and national criminal justice expert from the CIA, FBI, and the NSA, he trashed the upper ranks of the US military.  In the end, the world’s most powerful military was brought down to its lowest common denominator, while club-footed fools and wannabe-tough-boy amateurs like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe caused an exodus of talent and experience from every area of American law enforcement, national defense, and national security.  A two trillion dollar US military budget was wasted on the remaining men and women who were led by fools and Russian useful-idiot assets.

The moment was ripe for a new world disorder and as Greek physicist-philosopher Parmenides argued 2,500 years ago, nature acts quickly to fill a vacuum.  In this case, a huge power vacuum existed as Russia squandered its attention and economy on Ukraine and the border states that Putin believed were the property of the Soviet Union he desperately wanted to reconstruct.  The United States struggled with delusional “enemies within" and had torn the “United” part into the historic collection of nation-states that the country had often threatened to become.  Russia has never been useful as an international law-and-order enforcer, but the United States struggled with determining which nation-states would “own and control” the military apparatus stationed inside their borders and docked in their harbors.  That left the open seas to become the Wild West (and East) when it came to piracy and simple sabotage and revenge killing. 

First, the surface pirates in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans really upped their game, targeting oil tankers by blowing them up and forcing the shipping companies to pay protection money to dozens of off-shore accounts.  The Singapore and Malacca Straits became so overrun with a variety of well-financed and armed pirates that even China considered putting its own navy into the battle for the open seas.  However, China’s precarious economic situation, hampered by national and internal debt, and Xi Jinping’s problems with his trade partners, who often sided with the pirates, limited China’s response. 

However, the opening shots of the international class war were fired in late May, when more than 300 super yachts were found on full display for the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix.  The two events were physically located barely 30 miles apart, with the film festival ending as the Grand Prix began and some parts of the race visible from where the ships had been anchored for the film festival. 

Well-coordinated renegade submarines crews from Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, Türkiye, Greece, Egypt, and Algeria teamed up to field more than 60 submarines armed with 2,000 torpedoes and several hundred tactical missiles. The French and Monaco Navies usually provided security for these events, along with support from other EU nations, but right-wing challenges to the French, German, Spanish, and British democratic governments provided a substantial multinational distraction for everyone involved.  Tourism revenues were drastically down everywhere in the world as was taxpayer support for the entertainments of the ostentatiously rich.  So, while there was lip service paid to the security of these two high profile events, the actual investment was cursory and no attention was paid to action below the surface of the ocean of the Mediterranean coastline. 

On Friday, when Cannes was wrapping up and the Grand Prix main event was staging, the submarine coalition opened fire on the mega yachts, sinking more than 200 of them in the first few minutes of the attack, including all of the largest ships.  Because Abramovich’s “Eclipse” was equipped with a missile defense system and other military-grade paraphernalia, his ship was targeted by both air and underwater weapons from three different subs, including two Russian subs that launched their missiles from the Bay of Biscay, a few hundred miles west of Bordeaux.  The collateral damage from that one objective practically emptied the area around Golfe Juan of any floating vessels: commercial, recreational, or military.  Port Hercule was another prime target and since Friday was when the rich and powerful were the overwhelming majority of the race’s audience, the race itself received a substantial number of tactical missiles and the body count was almost 20,000 high-rollers and their hangers-on.  The attack was an overwhelming success with every single mega-yacht sunk, hundreds of billionaires and thousands of their families and “friends” wiped from the face of the earth.  Faster than any possible military response during the best of times, the attackers scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, through Gibraltar, or back to their home areas in the Mediterranean Sea near Türkiye, Greece, and the Black Sea. 

These were not the best of times.  Pete Hegseth was in his usual rage-filled hysteria and issued dozens of conflicting orders to the Navy and the NSA.  The US Navy, having been removed from the Atlantic and NATO support earlier that year, had no ships capable of a response within days.  The NSA, usually able to employ spy satellites on a moment’s notice had been crippled by Hegseth’s brain-draining purges and political in-fighting among the Trump sycophants left in charge of national security.  In the best of times, the NSA and CIA could have, at least, tracked some of the subs when they surfaced, but that would have required the kind of department discipline that had been removed during Musk’s DOGE mass firings, Trump’s loyalty purges, and Hegseth’s “reorganization” of national defense “leadership.”  Russia, of course, was totally focused on national survival because Ukraine had received a substantial weapons upgrade from the sans-USA NATO and had launched ground and air attacks on Moscow and the Russian military infrastructure. 

The coalition of anti-oligarchy submarine commanders were, for the most part, not even missed from their official duties.  The Russian commanders, for example, had been stationed between Ireland and Portugal and they were able to return to their assigned territory unnoticed.  They would, later, use up some of their remaining ammunition on unimportant Ukraine targets to reconcile their inventory when they returned to Russia.  The unrest in the Russian military was so universal and overt that all real controls had been abandoned almost a decade earlier.  Russian officers had been handing over their equipment in exchange for a ticket out of Ukraine and the war for years.  A returning ship would be treated like national heroes without examination.  One of the many hallmarks of a kleptocracy is poor, or non-existent, inventory management. 

The outcome of the Attack on the Oligarchy was a celebration almost everywhere but in the bunkers of the once rich-and-powerful.  A virtual armada of mega-yachts had been destroyed.  The founders and their families of hundreds of predatory trusts and vulture capitalist funds were dead and/or missing.  The world financial system took a huge hit for several days, then bounced back as if nothing significant had happened. 

While none of the submarine commanders had been outed for their participation, becoming a member of a submarine crew, officer or enlisted personnel, became the goal of millions of young people around the world.  Speculation about where the attack submarines originated morphed into rebellion myths that turned into actual rebellions in several of the countries where the submarine fleet originated and the prevailing regime was most objectionable and vulnerable. India and Pakistan found common ground in their hatred of their respective oligarchs and they both blew up their hierarchical cultural and economic structure and experienced a blossoming of an educated middle class that transformed their countries into the world’s leading manufacturing economies.

The remaining billionaires learned, some the hard way, that “with great wealth comes great responsibility."  The concept of noblesse oblige had vanished from the minds of the tech bros, vulture capitalists, and the nepo-babies who had inherited the world’s wealth.  Suddenly, there were vacancies in the mansions of the filthy rich, all over the world.  The richest of the rich were all dead and their fortunes were being picked apart by heirs, governments, and anyone who could make a claim on the remains.  Many of the wealthy class had abdicated their assets and power and had fled to “Doomsday bunkers,” where they not only feared being discovered and outed by neighbors and the press, but their own security people who had no reason to service loyalty.  The only way to survive and come out of hiding was by being useful to society.  Of course, most had no idea how to be useful or even decent.  The few who did, found that, by disposing and donating the bulk of their wealth and making life more equitable, they could still live exceptionally well without worrying about being hated, hunted, and in constant mortal danger.

In the oceans, the remaining mega-yachts were being hunted into extinction.  Turning the US military over the worst and dullest decentralized and democratized military control.  Not wanting to miss out on the fun, the scattered remains of the US Navy became an actual branch of national defense, usually to local nation-state interests.  In the Southeast, the military forces remained in service to their traditional ruling elite.  However, the available technology was limited to mostly post-Korean War era.  In the Northeast and Pacific West, state-of-the-art military equipment and industrial capacity flourished.  The Midwest and Far West states coalesced into semi-organized agrarian areas dependent on the coast nation-states for access to technology and export markets.  The old Century of the United States of America was history, but the new North American structure made more sense, economically and culturally. 

So, in his usual way, Trump did “Make America Great Again.”  “America” now included Central and South America and Canada, while the bulk of Trump’s supporters were forever mired in dependence and mediocrity, America flourished.  However, they still had their bitterness to wallow in and “their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  Now, that frustration was bound by nation-state borders and they didn’t have to worry about immigrants wanting to cross into their territory.  Nobody, including MAGA wanted to live in the MAGA-controlled nation-states.  The walls they had built to keep immigrants out became barriers to contain the people stuck inside those boundaries of mediocrity. 

 

Tortured Beyond Death

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

The music therapist only knew this patient from visits to entertain his wife when she was in hospice the previous year. The man’s wife died, after suffering terribly from cancer, and her last weeks were in a drugged coma to either alleviate her suffering or, at least, make it seem like she was suffering less to the husband, their family and friends, and the caretakers. The therapist sang Christmas songs for the wife and the man abruptly left the room after providing the therapist with a list of songs he thought his wife might enjoy. She died early that year, right after the New Year, and their house was inconspicuously decorated with memorabilia from their lives, pictures of two kids and three grandkids, and some art on the walls and shelves the therapist knew, from earlier visits, had been created by the wife.

The therapist was a retired school music teacher making extra money entertaining, or distracting, hospice patients. She had been at this job, part-time, for almost a decade. It was often draining work, but she felt like she was still making some kind of useful contribution singing and playing piano for people in their last days of life. The therapist looked like a retired public school music teacher, too. She was short, plain which was made more obvious by her black framed glasses, the fact that she was a little overweight, her short bangs were obviously died a dark auburn, and her voice was Midwestern mousy and a little nasal. If you noticed her in a crowd, you would think “middle-aged grade school music teacher from the Midwest.”

When it happened, the stroke hit him like a ton of bricks. One minute he was emptying out an unused room in his house and the next he was paralyzed in the back of an emergency vehicle, sirens blaring and a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. He had been wearing a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) dog tag for several years and had a very specific DNR order in place with his physician. The EMTs ignored it, hit him with their damn defibrillator paddles, after several attempts they shocked his heart back into rhythm, slapped an oxygen mask on him, and jacked some kind of drug into his chest with a long needle that hurt like hell but hurt a lot more when the stimulant hit his system. Now, a month later nothing worked but his sight, hearing, and bits of his brain. He wasn’t breathing on his own, a respirator did that for him on a regular interval. An EEG saw lots of brain activity, but little-to-none of that resulted in physical movement or apparent awareness to outside observers.

That day the husband had become the music therapist’s patient.  The patient was in his middle-70s, he had a long grey ponytail and a neatly trimmed beard.  His wardrobe appeared to be 80s grunge, or just Midwestern working class, with a closet full of worn-out jeans and plaid flannel shirts. The therapist noticed an electric guitar on the wall in a sun room and assumed it was owned by her current patient. There was no stereo system in the house, no records or CDs in the living room or bedroom, The bedroom clock radio was tuned to NPR. She looked at the man, his home, and that Gibson SG hanging on the wall and was convinced she knew what to play for him.

The therapist set up her electronic keyboard, opened up a music program on her tablet, and selected what she believed would be the perfect setlist for this client. The first chords tentatively rang out and she began to sing, “Michelle, my belle. These are words that go together well. . . “

He couldn’t smell anything but the inside of the damn respirator. For some damn reason, they had him flat on his back so all he could see was the bedroom ceiling. His eyes would focus, but he couldn’t control their movement. If someone closed them, it would take hours for them to autonomically open again. No matter how much he wanted to see what was happening it was not under his control. He could feel his feet and hands, they stung like they’d been severely burned, but he couldn’t move anything. But he heard everything they all said, even when they stepped out of the bedroom to congregate in the living room and talk about his condition and care.

“No, fuck no. Not the goddamn Beatles! Torture me with anything but those simpering British Backstreet Boys and their underdeveloped teenage drivel.” He beamed hate at the music therapist and the song with which she was torturing him, but all that anger was absorbed before it left his head. If you knew him well, you might have been able to decipher the intense hatred he was trying to aim at the source of the music he despised so much. His daughters had been visiting earlier that day, but they had gone back to their homes and families. Everyone who had known him knew how much he hated the Beatles and almost everything that spawned from the 60s and 70s “British Invasion.” No one who had known him was in the house, so there was no rescue forthcoming from any direction.

The dreaded “Michelle” ended and in the blessed silence he heard the therapist humming another Lennon and McCartney dirge. She was obviously cuing up another three minute torture for his listening agony. He scrolled through the possibilities and kept coming back to the obvious follow-up to the first musical abortion, “Yesterday.”  And almost the moment he had tried to square himself up for that misbegotten piece of McCartney’s foul mind, it began; “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. . . “  Followed by the nauseating, sappy timbre of a vibes patch from the keyboard and that clichéd descending chord progression.

No good memories were generated by Beatles’ music. His days as a musician, years ago, was occupied with soul or rock or fusion and the soulless, plodding and predictable Beatles were the antithesis of any of that. He couldn’t plug his ears, but he could try to distract himself by cataloging the Beatles’ songs that he hated: #1 on the hate parade was the dreaded “Let It Be,” #2 “Good Day Sunshine,” #3 “Blackbird,” and the list went on almost including every record the British bubblegum band ever made. The mind is a powerful thing and by the time he’d recalled every hated song the Pimps of Pop had recorded, the therapist was packing up her equipment. He had, somehow, managed to block out the noise with distain and bad memories of mediocre music.

As the therapist was about to exit with her equipment, one of his friends arrived to take a turn by the bedside. He asked, “How is he today?”

She replied, “About the same. That angry look never left his face. I played a few Beatles songs and he seemed to relax a bit.”

The friend grimaced, “I doubt that. He hates that shit.” As he spoke, the man sat a small portable speaker on the table next to his friend’s bedside and tapped on his phone for a moment. “I try to put together a playlist for him once a week and leave the speaker here for the hospice folks. Someone knocked the speaker off of the table last week and I had to buy a new one.”

The therapist wasn’t very familiar with jazz, but she recognized “A NIght in Tunisia” when she heard it, although the song was being played on acoustic guitar the introduction was unmistakable.

“Next time, you might try some or some Miles, Brubeck, Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, or Marvin Gaye, Dr. John, Steely Dan, or even Alicia Keys or Dave Mathews or John Mayer. Anything but 60s Brit crap. You might get a smile out of him, if there’s still one in there.”

She was surprised and a little angry at being told how to do her job. Then she noticed that her patient was, in fact, smiling, his previously angry face was relaxed, and his eyes were closed.

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 1 of 2)

“Yup, it’s true. The virus was ‘engineered.’ In an unscientific, mostly-illiterate way, you whackadoodles were right all along.” In about a dozen words, the microbiologist, who Tucker Carlson had been interviewing for the past half-hour, confirmed practically every unhinged Covid myth the Moscow Mouthpiece had made during the past four years.

All of the ridicule Tucker had received from liberals for his anti-vax position throughout the years of the pandemic was momentarily shut down. Tucker had asked, "How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccines?" And the experts replied with numbers and facts that had no effect on Friar Tuck’s position. Tucker had literally shrieked, "EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY WANTS YOU TO GET YOUR VACCINE" and hinted at the undisclosed deaths caused by and the ineffectiveness of vaccines. And he was right that the “authorities” he ranted against were scientists and healthcare professionals who absolutely recommended that everyone be vaccinated.

The CDC responded with "Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history," which just inflamed Tucker’s agitation further arguing that the CDC, MSNBC, NPR/PBS, and CNN, the ex-employer from whom he was “involuntarily terminated” and Fox’s arch-media-enemy, cannot be trusted. Even some of Tucker’s co-workers at Fox betrayed him. Jonah Goldberg ridiculed Tucker’s logic with, "FACT: Every single person who ever died blinked before they died. The vast majority — like 99% — blinked mere seconds before death. And yet, no one talks about this silent killer." Carlson’s hero, Donald Trump, was almost his only ally in his crusade against science and vaccinations, but when Trump “lost” the 2020 elections poor Tucker was out on a limb with only a few million (73 million in the USA, to be precise) marginally-literate supporters.

But now, Tucker’s wildest paranoid dreams were being confirmed by an epidemiologist loosely connected to the World Health Organization, Dr. Simon Turenne. Turenne had agreed to go on air, live, with Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson on the Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show after nearly three years of a world pandemic that had, supposedly, taken at least 20 million lives, world-wide and almost 2 million in the United States alone. Dr. Turenne was a thin, well-dressed, angular man of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed unusually comfortable in the company of a man who clearly, loudly, and often spoke of his disdain for anyone involved in science or the reality-based world. In fact, the Fox News crew had been generally hostile to the scientist from the moment of his arrival and he hardly seemed to notice, let alone be offended or nervous. When Tucker asked questions in his usual snide, smirking style the doctor smiled back at him and calmly answered each question as if the arguments were being presented by a rational, intelligent person. That act of acknowledgment seemed to push Carlson further over the edge of the cliff from which he had long since jumped; his wrath was no longer even slightly contained.

“’Yup!’ That is what you have to say for creating a disease that killed millions and has cost nations countless coin and stability?”

With that infuriating smile still plaster to his face, Dr. Turenne replied, “’Yes’ seemed a little formal, considering present company and your audience, but if ‘yes’ makes you feel better the answer is the same. The original SARS-CoV-2 and almost all of the variants that followed were man-designed or human-evolved. Actually men and women did the “designing,” since it was a cross-national and unisex effort.” That smile, again, this time a little wider bordering on outright happiness.

Tucker looked as if he’d been slapped or had seen an actual naked woman. Years of pretending to be outraged at his own conspiracy inventions had left him unprepared to be honestly outraged. You could see the steam building as he sputtered his way toward a response. But before he got there, Turenne continued, “It was an experiment. There was a lot of argument among the design community as to how a response, especially among First World countries, would play out. We were, honestly, impressed with how the USA reacted with both a collection of well-reasoned precautions and effective vaccines far sooner than we imagined. Scientists not in our loop created an assortment of vaccines and testing processes that will set the standard for however long the species continues to survive. Which, by the way, is estimated to not be much more than one hundred more years, at best, with the current climate degradation well underway.”

Tucker’s small narrow mouth and vanishing lips quivered and those strange looking puppy ears seemed to stick out even further than usual as they turned beet red. His cheeks inflated and deflated as he drew in the necessary air for a typical screaming response. “What the hell were you people thinking!” Tucker finally managed to shriek in his shrill, barely-understandable imitation of an upper-class, educated white man with little tolerance for opinions that do not mirror his own. “You intentionally murdered two million Americans [Obviously an accidental slip of the tongue, since up to this point Carlson had insisted that only a few thousand US citizens had died from the Trump Plague.] as an EXPERIMENT?” His pitch had raised nearly an octave above normal by the last word. “What kind of monsters are you?”

Despite being practically drenched with spittle from Tucker’s frothing, spluttering outburst, Dr. Turenne remained calm and looked clearly amused by Carlson’s emotional response. “A more rational and responsible question would be ‘Why would you engage in an experiment that had this radical an outcome?’ The answer is that it appears to be the only way to solve many of the problems the planet is facing, with or without humans participating in either the solutions or contributing more to the problems. It was an experiment to test the world governments’ capabilities, the individual countries’ populations, and mostly a test to see what portion of the world population a real pandemic would most affect. As a test, it succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We have collected more data in the last four years regarding all of the issues and political systems and human responses than we expected to obtain if the pandemic had gone on in experimental form for at least another decade.”

[To be continued]

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

[Continued from Part 1]

You could almost hear and see the steam escaping from somewhere under Tucker’s carefully sculpted toupee. A burst of unintelligible noise escaped that, eventually, turned into a series of insults, raving astonishment, and disconnected partially formed statements and questions. Dr. Turenne waited patiently; removing a handkerchief from his jacket with which to remove Tucker’s expelled saliva from his face and clothing. After the fake-newsman/entertainer’s expletives and hysterics wound down to sputtering and nonsense syllables, Dr. Turenne interrupted with, “Sorry. I couldn’t identify anything that I could respond to in all of that, so I’ll continue explaining the experiment’s results.

“What we learned was that in most undeveloped countries, if a vaccine was available the overwhelming majority of residents in those areas would take it immediately. In countries that most citizens in the United States might identify as ‘socialist,’ those citizens mostly trusted their governments to do a reasonable job of testing and distributing vaccines and information. Both of the first two types of societies, under-developed and ‘socialist,’ were able to vaccinate nearly 100% of their populations as soon as vaccines were available. And we worked quite hard to ensure that vaccines were made available as quickly as possible, including ignoring patent rights and corporate profits whenever possible. In the West, certain groups were also likely to obtain vaccinations immediately and those groups quickly learned the necessary skills to prevent infection.

“Other groups, your audience for example, tended to gravitate toward the worst possible information sources, like yourself, and remain unvaccinated and generally averse to taking any other precautions even four years into this experiment. First world countries in the west have done a particularly good job of segregating intellectual haves from have-nots; geographically and socio-politically. That reaction was particularly helpful for the purposes of our experiment.”

Tucker’s mouth, now wide open, failed to respond. Dr. Turenne  continued, “The kinds of people who will not make the slightest effort to protect their families and communities are also the people who will be unwilling to change their behavior regarding global warming, racial and economic inequality, ending nuclear armament and wars in general, and any number of issues that will result in the extinction of the human race and serious damage to almost all life on this planet. Their self-image and imagined self-importance is the only value they worship and that has turned out to be a spectacular advantage in ‘culling the herd.’” Turenne punctuated the end of that statement with finger quotes.

Finally, Tucker found his now hoarse and somewhat squeaky voice, “Culling the herd? What the fuck are you talking about?” At this point, Tucker was somewhere between outraged and terrified. His beady little eyes had narrowed to pinpoints and his lips had vanished entirely. There was no sign of his characteristic smirk.

Turenne’s smile returned in full force, “Thanks to influencers like you, our experiment has ended early and the conclusions are irrefutable. Our trial virus was a total and absolutely unpredictable success. I am here, primarily, to thank you and your misinformation colleagues for making it happen so quickly and moderately painlessly. Initially, there were more healthcare workers infected and even killed than we would have hoped, but for the most part they learned how to protect themselves. After the initial months if the pandemic, the few healthcare providers and first responders who were fatally infected were among your disciples. Of course, more than one million physicians and nurses left the US healthcare system in the first two years of the pandemic.

“However, the experiment is over, the data has been collected and analyzed, and the resulting actions have been taken.” Dr. Turenne’s smile dissolved into a more serious expression.

“What actions?” Tucker not only looked confused, he looked nervous and his question was barely audible.

“The last variant has been introduced and within a few hours of this broadcast, the world will begin the nasty job of cleaning up the real outcome of pandemic’s final form and getting on with the important work at hand. Depending on your perspective, and I suspect you will be around to have one since it is clear from your dissembling on the subject that you might be fully vaccinated, although I won’t be surprised if you haven’t kept up your booster regimen. If so, that will be unfortunate for you but no loss for humanity.” And the smile returned.

At the end of Dr. Turenne’s response, Tucker began to look terrified. A long pause ensued as Tucker tried to formulate a response under what had become a flood of information and an overload of doubt and suspicion. Finally, his rasping and hesitant voice returned to him and he asked, “What are you talking about? I thought the pandemic was over. Even Biden said . . . “

Now, Dr. Turenne laughed out loud. “Now, that has been your mistake from the beginning. You keep pointing your fingers at US ‘bleeding heart liberals’ and Democrats, but this ‘engineered pandemic,’ as you so cleverly deduced, is not a product of the US government; and certainly not the Chinese government or any government. This is an experiment and a world population solution that was engineered by a collection of concerned scientists and physicians across the world. The initial Covid variant and the evolutionary variants that followed were just a biological and data-collection trial balloon. Everything from the distribution and spread of the virus to the misinformation response to vaccines and preventative measures have been collected, assessed, and evaluated. Once the data and tactics were correlated, the testing phase of the experiment was complete and we are confident that the finished design will be at least 99% effective. The only undetermined variant is how quickly and efficiently the clean-up will be managed.”

Tucker’s usual quick, inaccurate, and snide response failed him and he squeaked out, “Clean-up?”

“Of course, here in the United States we anticipate approximately 140 million deaths in the next 24 hours. That will create approximate 10.4 million metric tonnes of human waste that will have to be disposed of quickly. Countries like Russia, England, Ireland, and Australia will have relatively similar clean-up problems to contend with, since those countries have comparable ‘conservative’ unvaccinated populations. ‘Vaccinated,’ by the way means having the initial vaccination and all boosters as of at least 30 days ago when vaccinations had been available across the world for at least 120 days. If you have the usual Covid early symptoms, you might want to get your affairs in order quickly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say, ‘Good night and good luck.’”

While Turenne beamed that irritating smile at the camera, Tucker coughed and began to look frantically around him at the Fox News familiar faces all breaking out in a sweat, many heading for the exits. 

[The End, Literally?]

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 

A Better Story Than A Pretty Good One

As good a movie as “Catch Me If You Can” was, the real story is far, far better. Being a parent is one of those things that our fractured, disloyal, unappreciative, corrupt, and uneducated society either devalues or corrupts out of superstition. The real story of Frank Abagnale's father and his relationship with his father to the moment of his parents’ divorce is amazing. The real story of how Abagnale became the criminal that he was well-punished for being is incredibly funny, sad, and amazing. His recommendations for how you protect yourself from cybercrime are insightful and valuable and I am going to stop using my debit card for ANYTHING once my nitwit credit union figures out how to quit screwing up their website.

What Part of Death is Complicated?

When I was teaching, every semester a few hours to a week or more after the course’s final exam, a few "students" would call or email me messages with a variety of excuses asking when they could "make up " their missed or failed exam. Since the final often accounted for 30-45% of the total grade, sleeping in that day was expensive. For more than half of my life, I’ve been convinced that “a lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” From the beginning of my teaching career, my syllabus clearly stated that final exams would only be administered on the day the exam was scheduled; a date and time clearly identified the day class began. With that as a background, my only response to those messages was, "What part of 'final' do you not understand?"

A concept that we regularly tried to reinforce in our classes was that there are “get fired moments” that can be career-stoppers. In a highly competitive business, like recording music, there is always someone right outside the door waiting to take your job. It really is a business where “there is no try, only do.”

Lately, some of my religious friends and relatives have been prying at my atheism asking, "What do you think happens after death?"

There could be a lot to unpack in that question, but for someone who does not believe in magic of any form the question has a pretty straight-forward answer. Remembering the final exam moments, this question does feel like déjà vu. It is all I can do not to rudely respond with, "What part of death do you not understand?" Because that is the rational answer, obviously. Death is the ultimate final exam.

One response to my hopefully scientific take on life and death was “it’s easier for me to believe in a divine creator than the idea that everything came from a Big Bang that was created from nothing.” Most Americans have a terrible grasp on mathematics and science, so it is pretty easy to understand how the most sophisticated and complicated field in science, astrophysics, is incomprehensible. However, many of the people who cling to religion for their information about how the world works, have almost no clue about even the most basic and well-accepted proven science. While they claim they don’t believe in the science behind astrophysics, they offer no excuses for not understanding most of the technology that is all around them: computers, television and radio, internal combustion, the internet, medicine and biology, and practically any complicated thing that has been invented or discovered in the last 100 years. If it were up to them or their religion, none of those things would exist today or tomorrow. It’s a wonder, to me, why anyone cares about the philosophy, religions, or the opinions of people who have provided so little contribution to progress of any sort.

The disinterest they express in understanding how even life works should be a disqualifying admission in any serious conversation about the complexities of the universe. Why, if you know so little about how life works, would you assume expertise on something as poorly-understood as death? For the most part, science knows a lot about life on earth and even a good bit about how life might exist on other planets with totally different atmospheres. Science knows more than most of us would like to know about the moments after a heart stops beating, too. However, science doesn’t make any claims about life-after-death; that remains in the territory of the con artists often known as “ministers,” “priests,” and the rest of the hucksters selling real estate in another dimension.

In a talk broadcast on MPR, Thomas Friedman recently said, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics. She will do whatever chemistry, biology, and physics tells her to do. She always bats last and she always bats 1.000. You do not mess with Mother Nature.” (I really recommend that you listen to Friedman’s talk on this link) and nothing more or less. Nothing about spirituality has anything to do with “chemistry, biology, and physics.” Religion and the afterlife are just weird ideas made up by sheepherders and primitive people who didn’t have “chemistry, biology, and physics” to use as tools to understand the world we live in. Of course, many American citizens are also without those tools; along with mathematics, economics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, engineering, and every other aspect of advanced, modern human knowledge. Because they are clinging to ancient religions, most of which they have barely studied, and their parents and offspring are handicapped by their devotion to dead religions and imaginary gods.

An optimistic person would imagine that the stresses from global warming, a radically changing world economics, economic and social inequality, and international competition would force a “first world country” like the USA to pull itself together and get into the game before it is too late. I have spent too much time in rural America. The thing to learn from being around marginally educated, timid conservative small town citizens and politicians, and racially isolated and deluded white nationalists is that change terrifies them and they imagine they have some control over a naturally occurring, rapidly accelerating, and unstoppable change in every aspect of human life. They hope to pray away the change. If that doesn’t work, they plan on living forever in a magical afterlife where all of the problems are solved by a god.

I’m 70. I don’t expect to see any sort of useful solutions in my lifetime. On some levels, I don’t care. I wish for solutions that will allow my kids and grandkids to live long and good lives, but I won’t be here to know how that works out. Since, as far as I’m concerned, life everywhere will end when I die it’s hard to me to get really concerned about what happens after I’m dead. Believe it or not, I’m not afraid of death at all. I expect it’s possible that the few seconds after my heart stops my brain will go into overdrive and it might even be painful, terrifying, and sad. But 2-20 seconds late, it will all be over and I’ll be dead. That will be the first final exam in my life that I will have failed.

Human Evolution?

When I was a kid, I read a LOT of science fiction. Since most decent literature was banned from my hometown library and the schools, the only thoughtful input I had was “Analog Science Fact and Fiction,” “Worlds of Tomorrow,” “Super Science Fiction,” “New Worlds,” and a few other magazines that led me to science fiction authors like Azimov, Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Lem, and a collection of people who expanded my mind and universe. One story, among hundreds I barely remember today, that stuck with me like a bible or a philosophical text is Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”: probably the most accurately predictive piece of speculative fiction along with 1984. I’ve written about this brilliant novella and the derivative-but-stupid movie before, “Who Cares about Idiocracy,” and I’ve referred to The Marching Morons more often than I’ve probably written about Barak Obama or even the living evidence that we are in the twilight of humanity’s idiotic existence, Donald Jerkoff Drumpf.

The difference between Marching Morons and Idiocracy is as dramatic as the genetic space between Obama and Trump. The Marching Morons is funny, accurate, and brilliantly predictive. Idiocracy is . . . idiotic. The problem isn’t that intelligent human beings are not breeding and are vanishing; the problem is that idiots are breeding like well-fed rats and rapidly outnumbering the brilliant but slower-growing and much smaller species. Because of that, the species is rapidly splitting into mental haves and have-nots. For the moment, the rarer, smarter, more productive minority are supporting the growning horde of nitwits, but that never lasts.

The information humans have accumulated is now doubling every 12 months and that pace is constantly accelorating, but the majority of homosapients are not participating in that information revolution in any way. In fact, it’s likely that they might be getting dumber at an amazing rate. Not only is the dumbing-down happening in primative cultures like the Mideast, Russia and eastern Europe, the jungles of South America and Africa, the slums of Indonesia and India/Pakistan, and the undeveloped portions of the world, but in first world industrialized countries like Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Asia and declining empires like the USA and Great Britian. It’s not just that these humans are not keeping up with change, they are slowly regressing as stupid people breed and interbreed with stupid people. There is evolution on one hand and de-evolution in mass on the other.

At some point in homosapien’s past, the species must have peaked. There was likely a point where the majority of humanity was pretty much at the same mental level and where change and technology began to seperate the average from the superior. At that point, what author Yuval Noah Harari calls “homo deus” began to seperate from the herd. Sometime around the beginning of the industrial revolution, the acceloration of knowledge kicked into gear and WWII really amped it up several notches. The Cold War and space race kept the pressure on and pressure and diminishing resources are what force evolution.

The graph in the previous paragraph illustrates the shape of knowledge growth over the last 120 years, but what might really point out to you why this is generating so much stress is a graph of just the last 20 years (at left). An interesting feature of exponential curves is that when you drill down into any point of the curve, the rise is still startlingly exponential but you can see either the important moments where dramatic change occurred and/or the technology leaps that allowed/forced those changes. This list of milestones tacked on to the technical capabilities of our combined world cultures ought to be intimidating. If it isn’t, you don’t understand what happened.

While the cream of our species is analyzing the make-up and state of the universe, the folks swirling the evolutionary toilet bowl are still clinging to the delusion that the earth is flat and god-given resources are infinite. If you keep in mind the incredible accomplishments of a grossly under-funded NASA in the last 20 years and paste that next to the fact that “homo uno” (or is that “homo oh no!”) is still debating among itself whether NASA managed to get a man on the moon almost 50 years ago, it should be obvious that cream is being seperated from the genetic milk by something resembling a nuclear materials centrifuge.

The evolutionary drivers are progress, resources, curiosity, survival, money, and power; the usual suspects. I have always believed that as resources diminish, evolution speeds up. We are at a point on this planet where our resources are being chewed up infinitely faster than they are being created and renewed. Americans deluded themselves into believing that Peak Oil was a farce during the Bush years and accelorated that resource’s depletion to the point where nutty extraction activities like hydraulic fracking seemed like a good idea. That temporarily drove US oil prices down at the expense of billions of gallons of unpolluted underground and above ground water resources. Humans survived for thousands of years without oil, but without water we’re finished in a few weeks.

As best I can tell, no generation has seriously worried about the survival or welfare of the following generations. As much as humans jabber about homosapien’s capacity for planning for the future, that anticipated “future” appears to be about a year away, at the most, for most of our species. For most of our existence, that was probably enough planning since practically any sort of disaster was likely to wipe out everyone we know. Noah’s flood is a terrific example of a local event blown up into an imaginary extinction of everyone on the planet and a reboot of all other animal species. Anyone with the slightest grip on reality would interpret that biblical story as the kind of thing primative people would imagine if they had never travelled further than the next hill past their valley. A small percentage of humans know, today, how far away the next mountain range is and, more importantly, how far away the next livable planet is likely to be. They aren’t going to wait for the rest of us to struggle our way into getting a grip on the last century’s technology. Sooner or later, they will move on leaving “homo uno” behind to pick over the scraps and fight among ourselves until the dreary end.

#136 Gonzo is Dead, Long Live Gonzo (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

"Doctor" Hunter S. Thompson, the King of Gonzo Journalism, died by his own hand this week.  The eulogies and anthems and homilies began the moment Thompson's son discovered the body and reported it to the Aspen City Police.  This rant has been a bitch for me to write.  I've written it, posted it, removed it, rewritten it, and re-posted it at least four times.  I usually don't rethink my thoughts all that often.  The Doctor made me rethink my thoughts often throughout my life. 

One of the best reviews of Hunter Thompson in life was an article written for, of all places, the Wall Street Journal by Tom Wolfe.  Wolfe and Thompson attracted major league attention to their writing through books about the same general crowd; the Hell's Angels and the freaks who ran with Ken Kesey's Cool Aid Acid Tests.  Wolfe went mainstream almost as soon as he recovered from his Acid Test hangover.  Thompson couldn't find a mainstream with a map and a guide and GPS and a well-marked path.  Hunter Thompson was so completely polarized to oppose the mainstream that he was magnetically drawn off the worn trail, away from conventional wisdom and "common sense," and into the middle of tributaries that ordinary men considered too ferocious and uncivilized to be useful. 

Even in death, Thompson went his own way.  At 67, he apparently shot himself with one of his many weapons.  "Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head," was his son's statement to the local press.  The Doctor had a long history with guns, explosives, fast motor vehicles, drugs and alcohol, and life on the edge of a long, deep, dark precipice.  Recent portraits show a man who put a lot of miles into those 67 years.  Some photos illustrate a man who looked nearly twice his actual age.  He was recovering from complications of a fall, including back pain and a broken leg, which would be enough to make a lot of 67-year-old folks cash it in.  His friends and family saw a collection of warning signs that Thompson was depressed and considering a final exit.  Still, part of me wants to believe that Thompson wasn't as selfish and egocentric as his final moments appear.

Part of me wants to be convinced that The Doctor was something better than human.  This is the age of paranoia and I have yet to see a depth that the neo-Nazi-conservatives won't fall.  Maybe I'm seeing the Gestapo under every unhappy event, but I think the Bushies would torture and kill Christ, Santa Claus, Mother Theresa, Ray Charles, and the Easter Bunny to fatten their portfolios and increase their power.  So far, there hasn't been a report of a suicide note, which seems a bit odd for someone so chronically inclined to write about everything that crossed his mind.  If you do a web search on Hunter Thompson, you'll find articles on everything from politics to the XFL to assassinating rabbits that dared to venture into his "compound" to an in-depth analysis of the Bushies and their sycophants; Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.  Thompson was eternally interested in practically everything that happened in his world.  And he wrote about those things constantly.  Why he wouldn't choose to put down a few notes about his final thoughts is, at least, curious.  That's what I'd like to believe.

Whatever the final story of this benchmark in American literature, I'm going to miss him as much as I miss George Harrison, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Bertrand Russell, and the growing hoard of people who have changed my world and left it with increased knowledge and wisdom.  Because of Hunter Thompson, I have a different definition of "evil" and "terrible" than the simple concept my father provided for me.  I don't know who has the true fix on those values and terms, but I know which one works for me and I have my experiences enhanced by Hunter Thompson's words to thank for that.

But, man, the thought that the great Hunter Thompson could blow his brains out so that his son and six-year-old grandson would hear the shot and find him and his residue splattered all over the room is beyond distain.  Thompson tended toward egomania more often than not.  He spent most of his life posing as a little boy waving his arms, yelling "Hey, look at me!" He was one of the few people who could control the center of attraction by claiming that he didn't want to be the center of attraction.  Like many dope-inspired artists, Thompson had delusions of worlds revolving around his center of gravity.  At the end of his life, he gave up wrestling with the devil and became one to the family members who cared the most for him. 

For a man who hoped to be so familiar with courage and honor, he failed to die to his own standards.  I have a lot of respect for those who go down in flames, but you have to drag demons into the fire not the people who love you.  Gonzo may have just been ego and that may be the legacy that Hunter Thompson leaves us when all the weights and measures are balanced.

Killing yourself is a bitch, though.  Anyone can talk about doing it, only the truly desperate can do it.  I doubt that Thompson had any fantasies of "crossing over to a better world," so he was giving up on life.  I suspect, that when life becomes so painful that he could make all of the moves necessary to end his life, he had to seize the moment regardless of how inconvenient the moment was for those around him.  Thompson's life was all about seizing moments of all sorts and his death was probably just another such moment.

June 2005