Living in A One-Sided World

The people who make the rules, the rich and powerful, are beginning to experience the world as the rest of us have to live it and they aren’t happy about it. And let’s face, it’s a pretty miserable world. The rules that most of us are forced to live by, out of necessity, are only suggestions for the rich and powerful. If you didn’t get that out of the 4 years of being mismanaged, ignored, abused, and ripped-off by the Trump 3rd Tier Elites, you will never get it. But a lot of people got it. And now that we are in our 3rd year of a pandemic that has cost this country at least 1,010,599 lives (as of June 25, 2022) and at least 6,300,000 worldwide, some people are discovering that they can use the same rules that have always applied to the idle rich and abusively powerful.

For example, if you are a skilled healthcare worker, like a registered nurse, you are in big demand today. Typically, an RN makes about $29/hour as a hospital employee. Hospital employees are historically abused and misused by their grossly overpaid and under-skilled and cynically misnamed “administration” executives. During the early days of Covid, that abuse went ballistic as hospitals’ staff were decimated by the killer virus and administrators did as little as possible to protect their employees from the disease and hostile, delusional patients. People died, people quit, and as of this writing about 20% of US healthcare workers have left the workforce and 47% of those remaining in that workforce plan to leave their “current role” or the occupation entirely in the next 3 years. One of the ways to leave the role as a hospital employee, for nurses, is to become a “travel nurse.” This article, “Why Do Travel Nurses Get Paid More | Travel Nursing,” does a nice job of explaining why a freelance nurse gets better pay, has more job opportunities and control, and is less stressed than a clinic or hospital employee. The bottom line, though, is more money and less hassle. If a hospital administrator is a pain in the ass, leave and work somewhere else in a heartbeat. Want more money? Travel nurses can make more than twice the salary of a permanent employee. Don’t like the work assignments, don’t do them and the employer’s leverage is practically zilch. Most likely, they won’t fire you because they are already way short on people to do the actual work and everyone knows the administrators don’t do anything resembling work. No patient ever picked a clinic because of the administrators.

Some friends who are retired nurse were recently marveling at the fact that people would apply for a job with Mayo Clinic, be offered the job, and not show up. The assumption was “people don’t want to work anymore,” but the fact is that in that business the odds are good that the applicant received several offers and just took a different one. Employers have been in that position for decades and when they pick an employee for a job most employers don’t bother telling the other candidates that they didn’t get the job and they sure don’t bother to tell them why they didn’t get the job. But for the last 100 years, employers have expected prospective employees to be massively more considerate than employers. No longer that world, is it?

Doctors are in a completely different and much better situation, thanks to mismanagement and Covid and the two combined. For example, pathologists are in hyper-short supply: Industry Voices—The shortage of invisible doctors | Fierce Healthcare. Where there were typically about 100 annual open positions in the country for pathologists there are well over 1,000 today and there are expected to be almost 6,000 open positions by the end of the decade. We can thank scumbags like Ronald Reagan for the current situation, since he made “work” a dirty word and single-handedly flipped a tax system that penalized idle “unearned income” into the spectacularly profitable but culturally worthless “financial services” investment income scam that has destroyed our manufacturing sector, diverted talent from all sorts of necessary functions (like medicine) to money shuffling, and set the country’s education system back at least 50 unrecoverable years. Doctors are retiring, many far earlier than they had originally planned or expected, and doctors are leaving the healthcare system. Even the moderately representative and grossly conservative AMA admits that one in three doctors are planning on cutting back their hours and commitment or leaving their practice entirely in the next three years. Doctors can pretty much go where they want to go, from research positions in the medical device or drug industries to teaching or administration jobs in completely different fields. You might think you are special with your cute little MBA party animal degree, but with an MD behind your name you are special.

And those thousands of open positions with a fraction of the necessary and critical applicants are just the tip of the “Great Resignation” iceberg. One of the longest lasting aftereffects of the Black Plague was an idea that is still growing; the rich and powerful are not as important as they imagine themselves to be. Like today’s Bezos, Musk, and the rest of that dependent, unskilled, over-valued ilk, the idle rich of the 12th Century might have been able to isolate themselves from the plague, but they couldn’t support themselves with their meager talents and when serfs realized that the penalties for walking away from the manor and the 3rd tier royalty were unenforceable, they walked. They kept walking until they created what we now consider “the middle class.” Royals have been trying to beat back that movement for at least 1,000 years, but the more education and talent is required to support a society the more people there are who can do the simple math that illustrates the inconsequential quality of idle elites. One of the key purposes of religion is to convince workers that God has chosen the idle rich for their special qualities and to question that is to question God. If you ever wanted to know why atheists' like Trump, the Kochs, Musk, and the rest toss money and acknowledgement at evangelical preachers, this is why. The priests have the same marching orders they’ve always had, “Baffle ‘em with bullshit, keep ‘em in line, don’t let them think for themselves or you’ll have to get a real job.”

As the author of “How the Black Death made life better” wrote, “With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been ‘essential’ over the past 16 months.” As every competent employee in the world knows, if every CEO, CFO, COO, or any other C-word executive on the planet died tomorrow, the day after tomorrow would be no different than any day that came before it except that companies would be more profitable, more efficient, more flexible, and the stockholders would be richer. With Trump, we discovered that an incompetent and corrupt President is much worse than no President at all. And for 8 years of the worst recession in 75 years, the Republican Congress demonstrated that most of the design of the US government is so flawed that congresscritters can say out loud that their whole goal is to prevent the President from restoring the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure, and preparing the country for the future without any penalty.

For the moment, many employees are in the driver’s seat. Because humans are gullible and easily distracted, most likely this won’t last long. So, enjoy it while you can.

Who Is Sustainable?

As I’m writing this I am doing one of the least sustainable activities human beings have ever invented: a vacation cruise to the Caribbean in late January. I’m on a floating city with about 3,000 other old farts, burning tons of oil resources every few hours, consuming more food than many cities ten or one hundred times the population of this boat, creating nothing of use for anyone else on the planet, and we’re all pretending that we “deserve” this luxury because we managed to be lucky enough to be some of the world’s most wealthy people. We just left two islands, Aruba and Cascaras that are barely more sustainable than this boat. One of those two islands produces nothing but tourist attractions and the other is equally dependent on tourism plus water resources for a brand of booze that is incredibly water-intensive on a desert island that tears through energy and water as if the world were endless.

I live in a small Minnesota town, Red Wing that is barely more sustainable than those islands and this boat. Like all of the previously mentioned places, Red Wing’s residents are mostly oblivious to their dependence and like most of rural America they are even arrogantly clueless about how dependent they are on the rest of the country and world for their lifestyle. “We grow our own food, unlike the people in the cities,” they often argue. Growing corn and soybeans is not “growing your own food.” Corn and soybeans are food for animals and a particularly inefficient energy boondoggle. Just like the rest of the country, if the shit hit the fan and our system of interdependent reliance collapsed, most of rural America would fail in quick and spectacular fashion.

Oddly, the most sustainable community I have visited in recent years has been Detroit. Through corruption, incompetence, indifference, and lethargy, Detroit’s infrastructure and community completely collapsed in the wake of NAFTA, the Bush Recession, and the socio-economic upheavals of the last 25 years that is causing the auto industry to either reform or die (the outcomes, the winners and losers are yet to be determined). After neighborhoods collapsed and were abandoned, ransacked, and, eventually, knocked down and hauled away, urban farms sprouted up everywhere and became far more efficient, independent food sources than anything rural America has seen since the 1800’s. There are neighborhoods in Detroit that not only are capable of feeding themselves, but they produce enough food to export to the rich folks for a premium and profit.

Nobody ever said, “If you can make it in Red Wing you can make it anywhere.” One of the problems rural Americans haven’t had to face (yet) is the fact that talent, skills, and intelligence have been evacuating the countryside since the beginning of the Industrial Age. The smart kids leave and the dumb ones stay and reproduce, creating a growing dumbed-down rural population that becomes more dependent every generation. Every economic study I know of demonstrates that urban America economically props up rural America for diminishing returns and vanishing reasons. There will be an obvious outcome, eventually.

One of the lessons I learned from my manufacturing career was that engineers apply the Paretto Effect, sometimes unintentionally, to occupations. We first automate the jobs that are typically filled by assholes, eliminating the assholes and the places were their “participation” jams up production. For example, you might have thought that production line technicians would have been the last place for automation to appear, but it was among the first. Equipment and fixtures to perform final test procedures on assemblies and finished products were some of the first jobs to be automated because the people who gravitated to those jobs over-estimated both their skill levels and their necessity. Likewise, farming is experiencing the beginning of that effect as GPS, satellite weather monitoring, drone and robotic ground conditions observation, and robotic planting and harvesting equipment take over farming and farm jobs. In the very foreseeable future, the only commercial farm jobs will be high-tech equipment repair and “farming” will be managed from even greater distances; most likely from urban offices. At that point, rural dependence on urban support will be unsustainable and we’ll see even more rural communities dry up and blow away than in 1929.

The best possible scenario I can imagine will be that some rural areas will become like those Caribbean islands; tourist destinations that either learn to be incredibly tolerant and friendly or die. I got the feeling that Aruba was like one giant service business depending on positive Yelp reviews for its existence. It is scary-easy to imagine my current hometown, Red Wing, becoming one cruise ship-like entity living or dying by a few thousand tourist reviews.

Men’s Lives Matter?

I’m on a mail list with a few local guys. Mostly, the point of the mail list is about motorcycles, but one of the guys is growing some kind of facial hair for the Movember organization. Supposedly, this organization is looking for the magic bullet to slow up the rate of deaths by male suicides (white men are 70% of the 35,000 suicides in the US) and prostate and testicular cancer. I can only say, “Good luck.”

Humorously, the organization claims to "know what works for men" and somehow they expect to reduce male suicides by 25% in 2030. I prowled the organization's website following all of the "how we're going to win the fight" links to the expected proclamations of doing something and I didn't see any evidence that Movember knows more about what they are doing than do the so-called healthcare and mental health "professionals." In fact, as WebMD reports "One doctor commits suicide in the U.S. every day -- the highest suicide rate of any profession. And the number of doctor suicides -- 28 to 40 per 100,000 -- is more than twice that of the general population . . ." And, as you’d expect, for every female doctor who commits suicide there are seven men offing themselves. "Male anesthesiologists are at highest risk," for some reason. If doctors don’t have access to solutions to depression mental healthcare, how will Movember manage to reach everyone else? They won’t. As for Movember, H.L. Menken once said something like “For every complex problem there is a simple solution . . . that won’t work.” I didn’t see anything on the Movember website that looked like they even had a simple solution to propose.

The problem is not just a US-thing, either. Men and doctors and male doctors kill themselves at a higher-than-average rate all over the world. If there isn’t a solution, at least there ought to be some attempt to find the reasons for suicides. One of the most interesting insights I heard recently, when a European psychologist was responding to an American right wing pundit crowing about how societies with the highest quality of life and general satisfaction are also among the countries with the highest suicide rate; again, particularly high among men. The response was that there seems to be some connection to the fact that, in a generally happy society, people who are depressed feel particularly miserable about not being part of all that joy. The distance between the average person living their lives and someone with mental illness may feel exaggerated in a country where the average person is more-than-typically happy.

In the US, mental “healthcare” is pretty much getting a drug prescription for anxiety, depression, or “tiredness” from your doctor. All of the available health insurance plans pay more for pills than for therapy; if they pay for therapy at all. For starters, there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals in the US. The reason is that insurance companies don’t cover that kind of “healthcare.” For example, in my home area, Goodhue County, Minnesota, there is one psychiatrist for every 15,000 residents. Since estimates of the country’s mental health assume about 7% of US citizens have suffered depression at some time and 3-4% suffer long term depression and another 18% suffer from some form of anxiety, that leaves a lot of people out in the cold; even if they were inclined to put themselves on a decades-long waiting list to see a mental health professional. So, the answer is “take a pill” and call me in a year or two if you aren’t feeling better about yourself; if you are still alive.”

Men and boys are in heavy denial, insisting that the problem with us isn't from the outside. Wrong. It's us and our cultural training. There is a video on YouTube from a trans-guy who commented on how he hadn't realized how inhumane male culture is until he became one. There wasn’t much information in his speech, but the comments were informative. There was a crowd of guys pretending “inhumane” means “inhuman” and lots of nitwits imagining that being a macho bully has a place in normal, rational society. My takeaway from the comments was that the people who comment on YouTube videos are not very insightful.  

40 years ago, a friend and I were swimming out to scuba dive on San Clemente reef on a stormy day with 8' waves and 2' visibility and he wondered what we'd be doing with our lives; since we'd clearly outlived our design parameters. His thought was that guys like us were evolved to die with an axe in our skulls or a sword in our guts at about 22. At that moment, we were both in our early 30’s. Since we’d failed in our evolutionary purpose, his question was “What the hell are we supposed to do with the 30-50 years evolution has unprepared us for?” Obviously suicide is the answer about 30,000 US men pick. It is pretty obvious that there is an oversupply of men on the planet and war just isn't doing the job it used to do with rectifying that imbalance. The overwhelming majority of terrrorists and suicide bombers are men and they are just following nature’s coding to try to take themselves out of the gene pool.

Society provides plenty of cues, too. There wouldn't be OSHA labor laws if those rules were only intended to protect men from work injury and death. The whole concept began when women ended up in factories during WWII. As part of researching noise-induced hearing damage for material in one of my Acoustics classes, I found more information about how quickly work noise rule enforcement vanished once women were back out of the munitions factories. The whining from companies about OSHA's rarely-enforced or obeyed hearing protection rules is pretty hilarious when you learn that those guidelines came from 1944 and they are so obsolete (useless when it comes to protecting your hearing for a lifetime) that the rest of the industrialized world (outside of China) has a whole different set of standards and objectives. Again, if the point is in protecting men, it’s pointless to worry about it.

Likewise, a big reason men die from prostate cancer is men don't see doctors nearly as often as women. When we do we just want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I know I do. Many men (and women ) live those lives of "quiet desperation" and just want to get it over with as soon as possible.

As for men and mental health, forget about it. This country decided long ago that the wealth of a few is far more important than the health and quality of life of the many. It's one of the many awful things we adopted from the UK. I don't see that ever changing. It was something Alexis de Tocqueville commented on in "Democracy in America" in 1835. The rich will have all the healthcare they can choke down and everyone else will be victims of our "wealth extraction" healthcare practical joke. All of that adds up to the obvious fact that we don’t care about any of this, as a nation. The only time mental health gets into the national conversation is after some idiot has shot up a school, church, restaurant, or some other public place. Then, it's just to distract us from wondering why gun manufacturers are so well-insulated from product liability. And we are one really easily distracted public. The NRA and their gangster-owned politicians and pundits quickly go into a “don’t regulate guns, regulate crazy people” song-and-dance that is increasingly ineffective at distracting the majority of Americans. So far, it’s working well enough, though. It will always be true that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”

A Disorganized Party or Country?

This weekend, I helped campaign for a local Democrat running for the US House against one of the most corrupt, decadent, incompetent, and dishonest Republicans in the House; and that is saying something in this current pack of do-nothing right Republicans. Standing among the crowd of campaigners waiting for a parade to start, I had a variety of conversations with traditional and less traditional Democrats and was constantly reminded of Will Roger’s quote, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." Like Rogers, in some ways I am proud of that position. Democrats don’t tend to fall in line as do their docile Republican counterparts. Democrats argue because they think, they have independent opinions, they sometimes realize the complexity of the problems the nation and their community face and the fact that some problems have many possible solutions. Those are good things.

The down side of Democratic disorder is that an awful lot of people who drift into the Democratic Party have simply wandered to that place driven by their dislike of the monotheistic Republican doctrine of worshiping the rich and powerful. Their grip on the actual issues is so base and simplistic that they might as well be Republicans. The complexity of real solutions just frustrates them and they degenerate into bickering factions easily defeated by the conservative Marching Morons.

For instance, there was a pair of conflicting groups at this rally: labor and environment. Two of the new Democratic members were from the steel workers union and they argued that the party needs to focus more on labor if it wants to win, especially in the rural north where people are backwards, uneducated, and completely dependent on outside investment for any sort of occupational or economic activity. So their big issues are the major polluting and high carbon construction projects like the Enbridge Energy Line 3 oil pipeline and the PolyMet copper mines near the Boundary Waters. It should be obvious that these are both corporate welfare projects with minimal long term employment opportunities for Minnesota and it should be even more obvious that they are both projects with the potential for massive negative environmental impact. It should be, but it isn’t to the labor faction and pressing that issue is likely to drive them back to the Republican hoards. Hearing that “we have plenty of environmental protections in place to protect the environment” from a union guy who clearly could care less about the environment, as long as he got a union wage for his part in destroying it, was pretty depressing. I know someone who was in the EPA during the short period it was allowed to actually protect the environment and I suspect the two union guys at the rally would do everything possible to avoid hearing how limited and powerless the EPA has become, even before Trump castrated it with an oil company promoter.

Rogers also said, "You've got to be optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one." For sure you have to have a well-developed sense of humor, at least. With Trump and a perfectly corrupt Congress full of bought-and-paid-for Republicans and not a few equally completely owned Democrats, you’d think this would be the traditional mid-term election where the party in power loses its grip. I wouldn’t count on it. Democrats and “progressives” have shown an ability and willingness to snatch defeat from the claws of victory in all situations. Part of that comes from the “purity test” mentality and part comes from true fact that all issues are infinitely complex and hard to grasp and a bigger part comes from the fact that America is no longer anything resembling a collection of United States. Humans, as a species, have never shown much will toward creating a better future for our offspring but modern Americans clearly would eat their own children if it came to that or missing a meal. I think we should get ready to accept the possibility that this mid-term election might signal the end of this collapsing empire.

The Face of Racism

Pick any one of these guys, they all appear to be the same privileged, spoiled, hate filled racist assholes. Have you wondered who they are, where did they come from, and how they ended up being such despicable semi-human beings? Some of these faces have become well-known, at least in their hometowns, thanks to the internet. The rest of us are left wondering if these people are our neighbors and that is the question we should be asking. Charlottesville, Virginia, to many of us, is the kind of place where we’d expect racism, fascism, and ignorance. It’s the South, isn’t it? To people who know the place, it’s more subtle than that.

For example, the Trump-spawn asshole front-and-center of this now-famous picture is a University of Nevada scumbag named Peter Cvjetanovic, who is now whining “I’m not a racist,” in spite of overwhelming evidence. Even when this guy speaks in self-defense and with some preparation time, he comes off no differently than his now-famous picture, “As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.” I assume he means his white privilege is the “what we have” he wants to preserve. Equally unsurprising, the University of Nevada is sticking by their Nazi student and employee. University of Nevada, Reno President Marc Johnson said, “There have been numerous inquiries about Peter Cvjetanovic, a student at our University who participated in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Based on discussion and investigation with law enforcement, our attorneys and our Office of Student Conduct, there is no constitutional or legal reason to expel him from our University or to terminate his employment.” Moral values are, clearly, not part of the student code of conduct in Nevada, since that would typically give the university plenty of leeway for firing a neo-Nazi if they cared about that sort of thing.

A little more surprising is the story of Cole White, who lost his job at Top Dog, a Berkeley, California “libertarian hot dog restaurant.” Top Dog, a downtown Berkeley restaurant, posted a sign on its door saying, “Effective Saturday 12th August, Cole White no longer works at Top Dog. The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog. We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone.” Supposedly, White “voluntarily resigned” his weenie job with his weenie employer who went the extra mile to let the world know they did not fire their neo-Nazi employee. The last thing libertarians want is for anyone to think they have ethics. Just ask Paul Ryan how Ayn Rand would feel about that. I have to wonder what kind of idiot would buy a hot dog from someone who doesn’t believe the state has the right to ensure the safety of food?

Mostly, the faces from Charlottesville are unsurprising. They are the the bad guy in every Karate Kid movie. They are the spoiled, upper-middle class kids whose parents foot every bill and enable every moment of their miserable, useless lives. Unfortunately, I think calling out every neo-Nazi, every homicidal militia Klan’er, every future abusive middle-manager or cop in that crowd is going to be a thankless task. The country has been breeding for this class of creep for 250 years.

By the way, both of you know you are going to be bald by 40, right? Enjoy that pre-skinhead look while you can.

From the Mouths of the Next Generation

The survivors of the Parkland High School shooting are being threatened for their gun violence protests by the NRA’s supporters. That shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise. The NRA is a terrorist organization that supports fascist “militias,” has members of its board of directors who threaten to assassinate the President, and actively works to destabilize the country and our democracy. At the core, the NRA is just being consistent to its mission to sell guns to every nutcase who wants one. There is nothing about being an NRA member or a gun owner that indicates a citizen might be loyal to the country or the constitution or even a reasonably decent neighbor. The opposite mostly appears to be the case. The organization is primarily supported by massive “contributions” from gun nuts and their shills from the weapons industry.

The fact that the current drive to shut down the country’s murder industry has come from kids seems to be upsetting some people. They are surprised when teenagers have opinions and that those opinions are not being ignored by the public. There is a long history of young people, students opposing fascism and paying the ultimate price for that fight throughout human history. In the United States, four college students were shot down in cold blood by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970 at Kent State protesting the illegal and grossly immoral war in Vietnam. Sophie Scholl was one of several students, including her brother Hans, who were executed for protesting the Nazi war machine and atrocities. Of course, none of those sacrifices did much toward ending the wars they opposed. The Vietnam invasion went on for another three years after the Kent State students were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians were murdered for a “cause” Americans can still not define. Nazi Germany rampaged on with its vicious genocide and war against humanity until the Allies and Russia crushed that nation into submission. Small comfort to Scholl, but in 2003 a German magazine for women voted Scholl "the greatest woman of the twentieth century." If the NRA’s American Nazis act on their threats and kill some of the Florida high school student protestors, it will just be one more sacrifice of the young for the privledge of the old and evil.

The whole scene reminds me of a moment during one of the Faculty Meetings I suffered about a decade ago. The presenter, Stuart Anderson, was talking about “revealing revolutionary learning opportunities” in the classroom and described a scenario where “a young person creates a new form of music that revolutionizes where we go from here.” Immediately, one of the music department instructors raised his hand and said, “I’d be afraid of any new music that came from a young person” (or something close to that). Of course, all new music comes from young people. Often, really young people. I can’t remember any substantial pop culture invention that came from artists over 30. Not one. I do, however, remember lots of those inventions in my lifetime that terrified people over 30. Lucky for us, the future always belongs to the young and if they are committed, dedicated, and fearless maybe they will create a future that doesn’t include a bi-monthly school shooting.

They Are Not Like the Others

The 2016 Minnesota redneck vote tells a lot of people more than what they needed or wanted to know about the culture in an area. When someone is thinking about starting a business, today the old “location, location, location” rule can have a completely different meaning. A location that has drive-by visibility and access is less important in a society that is driven by convenience (internet access), customer service (tolerance and people skills), loyalty (product lifestyle identification), and originality.

Voting red is a loud and clear indication that a community is neither tolerant, loyal, or creative. Goodhue County, in southeastern Minnesota, has a lot of the qualities that could be incredibly inviting to a 21st Century business. Red Wing, for example, is a transportation hub of sorts, at the intersection of US 61, US63, MN 58, and several well-maintained county roads plus there is an actual functioning Amtrak station. The city is hot-wired with fiber optic internet service almost everywhere in the city limits with IP service up to 1Gbps speeds. There is even public transportation in the city and it is a fairly inclusive service with three routes and regular service from 6AM to 6PM Monday through Friday, and 7AM to 5PM Saturday and Sunday. Housing is reasonably priced and there is no shortage of vacant industrial space. All that is good news. The bad news is that Goodhue County voted strongly for Trump and a Republican House candidate reasonable people assumed should have been unelectable. The Goodhue County Commissioners have tossed up random obstacles to prevent a “zip rail” system to Rochester and high speed rail along the Mississippi River cities. A surprising number of creative people are not drivers or even car owners, choosing to spend their commuting time doing something useful with their time. Easy and quick access to the Cities from the River Cities would be a biog draw to a lot of potential job-creating residents. The City and county officials appear to think Trump or some other con man will be able to return the country and world to the 1950’s, including that period’s social system and hierarchy (income inequality, racial isolation, and white supremacy). While there is a comedic appeal to the “back to the 50’s” drivel, change only goes backwards during catastrophes. Making “America great again,” as in somehow reviving a world where the US is the only major economic playground and white men are the only important players, is not an option.

Creative people are often odd ducks, like Steve Woziniak, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Terry Gilliam, Robert Rodriguez, Amy Pohler, John Stewart, and pretty much any other artist, geek, or inventor you’ve ever heard of. Many (or most) of those people have experienced all of the bullying, intolerance, racism, stupidity, and backwards thinking they’re likely to be willing to put up with by the time their skills become productive. The statement Red Wing and Goodhue County are making with the election and opposition to technological and social change is “we don’t want your kind here.”

Creative people are attracted to other creative people and environments that encourage variety and tolerance. Mostly, that is a selfish preference because they will only thrive and survive in that kind of society. Intolerance, on the other hand, is an unattractive trait that repels creative people and inhibits everyone else. Diversity, that politically-correct concept the alt-right and blue collar middle-aged white men hate most of all, is a creativity driver. Creativity is not a conservative characteristic, either, assuming by “creative” you mean “moderate, careful, restrained, keeping with traditional, opposing change.” It’s pretty obvious that with that list of qualities, conservatives are disinclined to look for new solutions.

Currently, human knowledge is doubling every 12 months and that rate is accelerating. With knowledge comes change and change-drivers are always young, educated, and creative. Any community actively doing things to repel that demographic is doomed. Most of Middle America has been in severe decline for 30 years or more. The smartest kids leave, the dumb ones stay and reproduce more dumb kids with fewer outliers of intelligence every generation. That is not a formula for economic or social success in any vision of the future.

The Real, Really Depressing US Economic Picture

A Teatard recently tried to explain to me why it was important that we have economic royalty in the US. I had him watch this video, but the math completely evaded him. The multiple lines of stacked wealth for the 1% were beyond his comprehension and capacity and he kept trying to explain that the off-the-chart portion of the display meant a wide group of people were the richest 1%. I guess this is consistent with the fact that more than 20% of the US public believe that they are among the wealthiest 1%. We are a nation of morons, for a fact.



I agree that it's an incomprehensible situation. But the incomprehensible part is that we tolerate it, not that our system has become this perverted.

Why Teaching Sucks

In a recent conversation, my daughter made a comment about how unfair it was that teachers make $40,000 a year and "only have to work 9 months" for it. For the last decade, I've taught at a private college. For about 3 years of that decade, I had the time of my life teaching. For those 3 years, I would have agreed with her, except that I was making about $7,500 a year at the time. I was, also, working 12 months a year at two other businesses that paid the bills. I wasn't teaching for money. I sure wasn't doing it because it was easier than my previous job. I was teaching because it was fun. It was fun because I'd stumbled into a school situation where my boss was a terrific person with honorable motivations and his boss was, possibly, an even better person with amazing management skills. It was fun because I was learning as much as I was teaching, if not more. 

That's not a typical teaching position in the modern United States. It didn't last long where I worked, either. Most schools are mismanaged as badly as the worst corporations. Most teachers find themselves in systems that provide no outlets for their own education. Most teachers are as unsupported in their classrooms as a National Guard foot soldier in Afghanistan. The web is jammed with articles describing the conditions teachers work under: Top 5 Reasons Many Teachers Quit, Why are So Many Teachers Quitting after 5-7 Years?, Valid Reasons Teachers Quit, Why Teachers Quit and Why They Don’t, Why New Teachers Quit, and hundreds of other articles on this subject. 18,000 California teachers quit every year. 6%, nationally, leave the profession every year. 20% quit after 3 years. Nationally, 50% of urban teachers quit in the first 5 years of their career. Most teachers are short-timers. Our national divorce statistics look better than the teaching profession. 

If the pay is so good, the hours are so short, and teaching is one of the last jobs in the country to be "protected" by a union, why is the job so unwanted after a few years of experience? The reason is that teachers are constantly exposed to the nation's dirty laundry. From both ends of the work, teachers experience disrespect, incompetence, and disregard for their work. Students are ill-equipped to be educated. Administrators are mostly failed teachers. Society can't decide if it wants a professional education system or an amateur religious indoctrination. Government involvement swings from indifference to demanding hours of dysfunctional testing and mountains of pointless paperwork. From top-to-bottom, side-to-side, and front-to-back, teachers are surrounded by factors that would demotivate a saint.

What we're often left with is the institutional dumbing-down of the career that has paralyzed small towns and the Midwest. All of the smart kids leave for the city or better jobs as soon as they can escape and all the dumb kids stay home, reproduce, and down-breed even dumber kids. The smart kids who become teachers quickly see how screwed up the profession is and get out. The dumb kids who can't find better jobs stay in teaching, infect new teachers with their incompetence, and wait to be promoted into administration jobs where they can do even more damage.

Top all this foolishness off with the national drive for "efficiency" and you have larger classes, fewer resources in the classroom, more demands on a teacher's after-class time, fewer teachers with special skills (particularly math and science), no time for class planning, mountains of No Child Left Behind paperwork, and more needy children desperately looking for a parent substitute. Getting a day off is easier for soldiers. Having a weekend free of class planning, paper grading, or required-attendance school activities is rare. Getting support from administration is as unlikely as getting an honest answer from Little Dick Cheney. Summers are spent on a 2nd job or advanced degree pursuits or class preparation.

"Efficiency," in the US, means lower taxes for the rich. This efficiency is producing a workforce that is so incompetent that practically every 3rd world nation has better educated labor. Eventually, the rich are going to find themselves surrounded by incompetence and they won't be so rich anymore. The middle class drives everything in this country, in every country, and wreaking the education system that feeds the middle class is cultural suicide.

Any reasonably intelligent person would do anything to escape from this rat's nest of a job. And they do. That leaves the unreasonably unintelligent holding down the fort. Great jobs don't see mass evacuation from the profession. Teaching is not a great job. Try it sometime. Let's see how long you last.