A Gift to Remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Amazon-free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Get It, but That Won’t Help You

One of the many boring things I told students in my electronics and mechanical repair classes was “If you want to be any good at troubleshooting and repair work, you have to get used to being wrong; a lot.” Of course, like students everywhere and always they thought I was joking. I wasn’t and as a result I expect fewer than 0.1% of those young (and some not-so-young) people spent more than a couple of hobby years earning little-to-no-money in the business I was supposed to be helping them learn. Being wrong is a pain-in-the-ass and it’s the reason that so many shade tree mechanics are awful and destructive and that many commercial products are lemons. The predictable and repeatable result is what happens when the people involved in the repair or design of a product are trapped in the belief that they are “not like everyone else” and won’t make the foolish mistakes that have trapped humans into making bad decisions, dangerous or undependable products, and following that with cover-ups that just make it all worse. Face it, you will fuck up and when you do the best thing you can do is admit it and move on to fixing the mess you made. The longer you take to do that, the worse the mess will be. History is littered with ruined reputations, notorious products that have disappointed or maimed or killed consumers, high flying companies that went down in flames, and governments and nations that took major wrong turns and kept going in the wrong direction until they became examples of how not to govern and notes in history books.

Lots of us have people in our lives who are not really in our lives today because those people joined the Trump Cult and can’t and won’t get out. Many of those people are still so cultified that they believe Trump not only won an election that he lost, for the 2nd time,by millions of votes, but they even wish his lame, failed attempt to destroy the already weak link to democracy our ancient and obsolete republic constitution cobbled together had succeeded. Chaos, in their cult-minds, is better than giving up on the weird dream that Trump is “the fearless leader” he clearly is not. The problem isn’t that they are stupid, although they clearly aren’t as smart as they imagine. The problem is that they have lived lives where it has been easy to avoid admitting they were wrong often enough to be good at it.

In his Atlantic Magazine article, What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of? - The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes, “We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.” The wronger these people become, our once-friends and neighbors and family, the more entrenched they become in their delusion and avoidance. Nichols makes a terrific statement about how to know when you are really wrong in his article, too: “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.”

That links to something I have witnessed and believed about most people who profess to be “Christians” for the last 60-some years. When my mother died at 34, when I was 9, I began questioning the “God’s wisdom and mysterious ways” bullshit. The more questions I asked, the more violent the responses became. My father, who was a relatively peaceful man, did what Christians did for several centuries to Native Americans, he tried to beat the doubt out of me. Or, as Captain Richard Henry Pratt's said in a 1892 speech to the National Conference of Charities and Correction: ‘Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’" We used the same “logic” in our terrorist approach to Vietnam and 30 years later in Iraq. “If you don’t admit that we’re right, we’ll bomb you into the stone age.” When that approach is the only option, you can always assume whoever is making the argument is not only wrong, but they know they are wrong and can’t admit it.

Christians have never dealt well with doubters. Many Christians are so insecure in their slight grip on any part of the New Testament that they have hung, burned at the stake, drowned, starved, torn apart limb-from-limb, castrated, tortured, and banished doubters for at least 2,000 years. Of course the Old Testament pretty much gives “Christians” a clear path to any mutant, deviant, perverted violence that is at hand. The problem is, there weren’t any Christians before Christ, which points out a flaw that will regularly inspire a violent response. Even as a 10-year-old kid, it was obvious to me that “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view.” And so, I adopted a life-long perspective that no one actually believes this shit and their violent reactions to doubt proves it. That goes for Mormons, Muslims, Myanmar’s violent Buddhists, and every other cult that uses violence to silence doubt.

Which brings us all back to where we started. If the problem is that humans are often incapable of admitting they are wrong, often until they are forced over some kind of cliff of no return, what are we in store for in the (hopefully) aftermath of the Trump disaster? While many in the impatient and often childish Left are chanting “lock him up” and living in the delusion that a quick trial and conviction of the head fascist-of-the-moment will put an end to the latest awful period of American (USofA) history, the slow, tedious, detailed, and legal path the Senate’s January 6th committee is taking the right path: detailing the activities of the people involved in the attempt to overthrow our elected government and send the United States of America into a spiraling decent into lawlessness, chaos, and very likely dissolution. In other words, exactly the path Putin and his Russian “friends” have been planning for the United States since the 1950s. Giving those stubborn, intuitive (as opposed to intellectual and reflective) folks the time to stare into mirrors until they slowly build some kind of new story that clears them of responsibility for what they have done and what they want to do is the only path that has a chance in hell of working.

I’m Done with “Progressives”

I am done with “progressives” or radical left, anarchists, and the rest of the purists who insist that they either get everything they desire or they want to blow it all up and test the waters of total social breakdown. My interest in their opinions on everything from politics to economics (especially banking) to engineering (social and otherwise) has gone from minimal to zero in the last three years of Trumpian chaos and insanity. I have heard some of the dumbest, most childish things spew from the mouths of the far left without self-reflection or even the slightest bit of humility. The next some half-wit quotes Chris Hedges to me will the last time i hear anything from that person. I can not, in fact, see a significant difference between the actions and attitudes of the far left from those of the far right. The are both spoiled teenagers in mind and spirit.

From example, take this “analysis” of the current political situation, “All I read is totally gloomy, including the prospect of Sleepy Joe Stuttering Biden, Uncle Tom Obama and the Clinton’s pick for prez…what a loser who has already stated what an ongoing pal he is of Israel, and that he won’t sign a universal health care bill. Welcome to Amerika, a fucking joke of a nation!” The only clue that this was written by someone from the left might be the Israel dog whistle. Of course, it could just be a wingnut who, stereo-typically, mixed up the nation he has decided is the enemy. Any way you read that (sentence, run-on phrase, spewing of venom?), you would have a hard time knowing that it wasn’t a Trump tweet. Any time you have written something that sounds like Trump you should really consider rewriting.

Support for Israel has devolved into a mindless march to global suicide for the faux-Christian right and an equally mindless anti-Israel dog whistle for the left. The fact that Biden is the chosen “back to normal” Democratic candidate is disappointing for everyone and will, likely, be a one-term President followed either by a young Democrat with ideas or another mindless Republican borrow-and-spender. I get that we’re screwed in this election, like so many in my lifetime and the country’s meandering and decadent history. One of the fatal flaws in being a quasi-democracy is that we only get to choose between one of two evils. Most democratic nations have a parliamentary system that forces some sort of coalition between two or more special interest factions: Canada’s Liberal Party, Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party, the Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party of Canada for example. Not us. We are only willing to digest two faux-opposing political parties because we’re not bright enough to cope with more. Most US citizens are too dull-witted to even comprehend Ranked Choice Voting as a way to break out of the two-party morass.

This far-left crowd, is who we should always remember who put G.W. Bush over the top in Florida in 2000 and who elected, by default, elected D.J. Trump in 2016 with their “alternative candidate” votes. They “work” in politics, every four years, for candidates with little-to-no-hope of winning primaries, they throw tantrums about having to vote for the “lessor of two evils” and, instead, waste their vote on no-hope alternative candidates so they can pretend the resulting mess is “not my fault.” We end up listening to both sides whining about not getting what they want for 4 years and fall further behind the world in every important category from education to science and technology to economic stability and equality while the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting dumber.

The Cost of Being Honest

Since I was a kid, probably around nine years old, I have known with absolute certainty that there is no afterlife, there are no gods, and that life is more pain than peace and more sorrow than joy. That dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest that conservatives claim to love so much in economics and social justice is the law of the universe. I know that. Even more to the point, I know that almost every person who pretends to be a true believer of every “faith” invented by human beings knows the same thing. Some of you pretend to believe in your gods because you’re terrified of reality, many pretend to believe because they make money from all of the song and dance that comes with superstition and hoodoo, the rest know that convincing people to tow the line on make-up rituals and superstitions is the cornerstone to creating a servile public that won’t bite back when the elites take their usual over-large “share” of the shrinking pies. The remaining few who actually believe in gods and the Big Rock Candy Mountain are simply crazy. There are, for sure, millions of crazy people, but there are billions of the other sorts.

 Pretending to believe is the easy course to take and the most common path, especially for kids. Getting into that habit early makes faking it easier, even semi-natural, as an adult. One of the things kids learn early is that adults do not like to be called on their bullshit. They dislike it so much that they will abuse, abandon, and disfigure their children in an attempt to squash the natural impulse to ask “why.” Nothing about that response is, of course, convincing, but for most humans ending the questioning is good enough. You don’t have to really believe in the bullshit, you just have to pretend to believe and learn enough of the rituals to avoid attention.

All of that comes with a price tag. The price paid by conservative societies like ours, the Muslim countries, and much of Eastern Europe comes due when any sort of stress gets applied to the social or economic system. Outside challenges to the lies and pretense can cause total meltdown and the end result is often what Arab countries have demonstrated for the past 400 years: total stagnation and cultural decay in the service of maintaining the status quo of the lies and the people who profit from them. 

When “In God We Trust” becomes the national motto, reality has to take a distant back seat in the bus to keep truth quiet.

My father and I got into pissing matches over my resistance to joining the Protestant cult; from when I was an adolescent until right up into the last years of his life. Until recently, I thought he was just trying to make me conform for selfish conservative reasons. I am just now suspecting that  he was trying to teach me how to conform to minimize the difficulties I would experience in a life of being an outsider. Religion, especially cultish and dangerous evangelicals, are a growing portion of “the uneducated” that Trump loves so much. A lot of the western world is losing its religion, especially Germany, the UK, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the rest of the Nordic crowd. I suspect I would be more comfortable there, if I could speak any language other than Midwestern-butchered-English. Too late now.

An upside of Trump is that he has totally discredited any moral claim evangelicals may ever make. It’s pretty obvious that their love affair with a philandering con-artist is 1,000% about the money and 0% about “Christian values;” unless, money is the Christian value. As weird as Americans are about Islam, "While more than nine in 10 Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who is black, a woman, Catholic, Hispanic, or Jewish, significantly normaler percentages would vote for one who is an atheist (54%) or Muslim (58%)." No problem, I suspect most atheists who want to run for office just do what Trump has always done: lie. The rest of us would just as soon not waste our time working for superstitious nitwits. a

Surrounded by Christian Zombies

For several years, I would drive from Denver to Dodge City, pick up my father, and drive the two of us to Hutchinson, KS for the NJCAA Basketball national championship tournament. Kansas, if you aren’t familiar with the place, is one of the many states in the decadent US that ignores the parts of the Constitution it believes are “unnecessary” or intrusive: like the First Amendment. Even though the tournament is held in a public building and all of the schools involved are public institutions, every game is preceded with some nutball in a dress chanting an inane prayer to the assortment of gods—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Evangelist, whatever—masquerading as “Christian.”

From my perspective, it has been entertaining to watch faux-Christians freak out about exposure to “radical Islam.” I’ve been surrounded by nutjob radical Christians who want to destroy the world as quickly as possible so they can find their place in that horrific heavenly choir sooner rather than later. Try to imagine this idiot’s rant, “Christians Need To Stop Being So Naive About Muslim Immigration,” from the point-of-view of an agnostic or atheist. This snowball’s terror is nothing but hilarious, “Can they not observe the differences in today’s world between countries dominated by Islam and Western countries founded on Christian and Enlightenment values? Are they not aware of the widespread problems with migrants assaulting women in Germany, one of the latest victims being the daughter of a European official, who was raped and drowned? Have they not heard about the sharia [sic] law courts Muslim immigrants have created in England and the schools where Muslim children are taught barbaric practices?” Any reading of European and American history would make this hysteria laughable. Every single complaint about Islam that she offers can be laid on the laps of the US and European faux-Christian imperialists; past and present. We are, after all, the nation that justified carpet-bombing highly populated cities in Iraq, a nation whose only crime was possessing lots of oil, as a “crusade.” We’re the nation willing to blow up wedding parties on the off-chance that someone on our “terrorist watch list” might be present.

While watching Christians freak out when they see Muslim women in burkas or bearded Muslim men in a coffee shop is entertaining, it’s also familiar. I get exactly the same creeping feeling around any superstitious group, especially when I’m surrounded by creepy superstitious people. All religions are cults and all religious people are irrationally superstitious, dangerous, and unpredictable. Once a person convinces themself that a god has chosen them for some damned purpose, anything can happen; usually anything awful. Most of my family is religious and superstitious; as is most of the country. “The survey found 42 percent of adults say they believe in ghosts, 36 percent say they believe in creationism, 36 percent say they believe in UFOs, 29 percent say they believe in astrology, 26 percent say they believe in witches and 24 percent say they believe in reincarnation, or that they were once another person.” We’re a nation of idiots.

For 60 years, all but my first 9, I’ve tolerated insane gibberish from almost everyone I knew. Finally, I’ve decided life is too short and painful to put up with more of this horseshit. If these people were parasite-infected zombies, supposedly it would be reasonable to protect one’s self from contamination. Since they are religious zombies, my only option is to do my best to avoid them.

Women Elected Trump and I’m Out

A few years ago, my oldest daughter complimented me by telling one of her friends that I was the most committed feminist she knew. I have two daughters of whom I am incredibly proud. One of my daughters things I inhibited her feminity by not encouraging her “girlyness” and the other is not particularly worried about how other people judge her. My goal was to provide my kids with the opportunity to become whoever they are; regardless of who I would like them to be. They are humans first, women second, and my daughters somewhere way down the line. What I think of what they do with their lives should only be my problem.

As a peripheral aspect of being the father of two brilliant women, I have been a regular contributor to lots of women’s rights organizations: from Planned Parenthood to the League of Women Voters to the National Organization for Women and practically every semi-related liberal group that asked me for money. The last 35 years have been tough on that commitment. Women elected Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton, and now Trump. Women are the majority of the voting public and NOBODY wins a political office in the United States of America unless they convince a significant number of women to vote for them. 53% of white American women voted for Donald Trump in 2016, including one of my daughters. At 70 years of age I’ve decided it’s time for women to stand on their own two feet and own the mess they have created. I am, officially, out.

I’ve flagged all of the phone numbers of women’s organizations who have called for donations in the past and I’ll keep flagging them until they give up on me. Call it “selfish” or whatever derogatory term you can apply to my position, but I’m going to wait for women to figure out who the hell is on their side and who wants to put them back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, before I worry about their problems again. Trump, Pence, Ryan, Turtleman, and the rest of the Republican Party have fooled a substantial majority of women to take careful aim at their own feet and blow off all their toes. Who am I to stand in their way? I might get hit by a ricochet.

For most of my life, I’ve observed that often women are women’s worst enemies. The Phyllis Schlafy’s of the world are always trying to squash other women into high heeled subservience and I don’t see nearly enough women fighting back. So how is it my job to stand with the few women who give a damn about other women? I am a fuckin’ hermit and if I could get through a year or two without seeing another human I’d have spent the best year or two of my life. So, I’m out and you’re in the batter’s box. Don’t bother calling me to ask if I’ve had enough of this bullshit because you’ll know I back because you’ll be in control and the old, superstitious white men will be hiding in a closet; where they belong.

Marching for Dimes

Remember the March of Dimes? When I was a kid, practically every cash register had a little plastic box with a picture of some poor kid in leg braces or lying in a hospital bed or some other pitiful, helpless situation with Jerry Lewis somewhere in the picture with his hand out. My wife absolutely hates the idea of the March of Dimes, which was mostly an organization staffed by millionaires’ trophy wives guilting working people out of their spare change. As my wife says, “If the millionaire class stopped hoarding their fortunes and spent a little of it on medical research or eliminating poverty or improving public education, poor people wouldn’t have to chip in their ten cents to keep the trophy wives occupied.”

Likewise, the Democratic Party is running its own March of Dimes these days. While the billionaire class buries the Republicans in dark money, Democrats are reduced to asking working people for spare change. They aren’t even good at that, so most of the regional and state Democratic candidates are reduced to buying email lists to beg for money all across the country. There is no Democratic National Committee as far as any sort of national organization is concerned. The DNC’s sole purpose in 2016 was to elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States, all other campaigns be damned. As a result of hustling one of the two most disliked candidates in US history and taking a much undeserved vacation during the entire Obama presidency, the party lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures, governor's mansions and Congress between the 2012 and 2016 elections. The party, which had geared itself up to do exactly what it did in 2016 for 2008 when voters overwhelmingly rejected Clinton for Barak Obama, sat on its ass and did nothing to help local, state, and national candidates for 8 years. Now, there is no national Democratic Party organization and the US is close to becoming a single-party nation. There are plenty of role models to follow at the state level, all of those states are red and all of them are economically, educationally, and culturally disadvantaged. There is no example in the country of a state that has done better under Republican rule, but those Koch brothers’ servants don’t care. Their brains are washed clean.

This spring, Democrats had practically nothing to do with the money they stashed during the 2016 debacle and at three House seats were up for grabs: Kansas, Georgia, and Montana. The DNC did what it does best, ignored those campaigns until the March of Democratic Dimes managed to point out the weakness of the Republican opponents in those races. Still, the DNC didn’t raise a finger to help the last vestiges of Democratic progressive candidates fight millions of Koch dollars. I suppose the DNC is hanging on to its cash in case Hillary or another Clinton wants to run in 2020?

#192 Comparing the Candidates

Watching the recent speeches, I realized something amazing about the Republican candidate: John McSame is Eric Cartman, sort of grown up. Listen to his ranting, his strange nasal grunt used to punctuate his "important" moments. If we could just get him to sing "In the Ghetto," I think it would be obvious that John McCain and South Park's Eric Cartman are the same guy.

I wish I had written this brilliant analysis, but I didn't. However, it is so perfect that I wanted to do my bit to distribute it further. The comparisons between the two sets of Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are clear and obvious. One set is completely unsuited and unprepared for any office more critical than small town American (preferably small town Alaska or Arizona where nothing of importance ever happens and nothing of value is created). The other set is prepared, educated, intelligent, and capable. If you are still inclined to vote for the unprepared pair, racism is clearly your motivation. In fact, you are simply casting your vote for two pink boobs.

 

In the 2008 Presidential Election, what if the candidates resumes were reversed?

• What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
• What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
• What if Barack Obama finished 894 out of 899 graduates from the Navy Academy in 1958?
• What if Barack Obama had been a prisoner in Vietnam for five years and suffered from Delayed Stress Syndrome?
• What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
• What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
• What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
• What if Barack Obama had failed at an attempted suicide?
• What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
• What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
• What if Obama had punched a woman in the face in the halls of Congress?
• What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
• What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
• What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?
• What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
• What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem? Or if he used high levels of profanity in his private and public conversations.
• What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?
• What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
• You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:

• Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
• Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude, Editor and President of Harvard Law Review
• Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years.

Michelle Obama:

• Princeton University - BA in Sociology, Cum Laude
• Harvard Law School, Juris Doctor (J.D.)

Joseph Biden:

• University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
• Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain:

• United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Cindy McCain:

• BA in Education - University of Southern California
• MA in Special Education - University of Southern California

Sarah Palin:

• Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
• North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
• University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
• Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
• University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Todd Palin:

• High School Graduate

Some try to sweep the issue under the rug but this is about racism. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

 

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land, the second highest office and the spouses who wield influence over them, as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

 

¹Sheldon Aubut http://www.sheldonaubut.com

November 2008

#165 What do We Deserve?

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

"We get the government we deserve." I think that may be one of the least obvious, most true statements about government of any type, any size, and at any time in history. The best periods of government in American history all occurred during brief times when the public was so disappointed by the performance of the usual suspects that they rose from their lethargy and took back power for those who should never be allowed to possess it. In geopolitical time, those high points barely warrant a blink of an eye compared to the eons of droning, corrupt, self-serving governments that have cursed humanity since the first caveman decided to tell other cavemen who was boss.

Looking at politics under the lens of "what does the public deserve" does, maybe, a disservice to places like Mexico and most of South and Central America, most of Africa, the Arab nations, most of Asia and East Europe. At the core, obviously, many parents in those countries raised or failed to raise the little rat bastards who torture, destroy, and terrorize those countries. If their offspring turn out to be the knife that kills the parent, it's tough to generate a lot of sympathy for the "victim." You grew it, you own it.

Tough love, I know, but it comes back to haunt us. Much of the world's misery is generated by American robber baron corporations that use US military power and the threat of that power to manipulate foreign governments, smaller nations' natural resources, and the world's monetary system. We grew it, now we own it. Those corporations have grown beyond the boundaries of the United States and show no more loyalty to our flag than they do the flags of the countries they've invaded in the past. Should that really be surprising to anyone? In 1968, Chicago discovered that cops on the take don't take orders. Throughout the 1960s until today, we should have learned that a CIA/FBI on the take is equally insensitive to management. Now, we're beginning to see that corporations that manipulate, to their financial and power advantage, all of the worst aspects of our culture are insensitive to the culture that they supposedly serve. Well, duh. You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Which brings us to our present dilemma. Our government, from local to federal is a contaminated, corrupt mess. The bits that aren't owned and operated by international corporations are owned and operated by local gangsters. Even the smallest cities are poorly managed by special interests that don't care one whit about the safety, security, financial stability, or future of the communities they pretend to serve. And we, apparently, love them for it.

My hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, once hired a City Manager from some damned place because he had magical business credentials and could, supposedly, bring new business to that dying community. Within a couple of years, he attracted a collection of packing plants and associated service vendors for that industry, which drew a few thousand illegal laborers to the town, driving wages into the dust, ruining neighborhoods, and decimating the town's already weak education system. After the City Manager's "work was done," he promptly left town with yet another credit to his resume. The town has yet to, and probably will never, recover.

My current home, Little Canada, Minnesota, presents less opportunity for industry, being a fully-developed bedroom suburb of St. Paul. That hasn't slowed up the march of political opportunism, though. Like most eastern cities, we have a supremely expensive, astoundingly unproductive city government. With too many employees doing too little work, all hired or appointed by a crony-system that is old, well-entrenched, and regularly re-elected by local voters. For some reason, the majority of voters like the current system, even though they don't know anything about how it operates. We're a mirror of national politics, which does nothing to explain either local or national politics.

In a fit of irrational community loyalty, my wife ran for City Council in the last election. She campaigned by going door-to-door, talking to our neighbors, engaging in the local televised debate, and taking every opportunity to talk about how our little city's quality of life could be improved. She campaigned on city efficiency, managing the city's resources and development, opening the city's financial decisions to public examination, protecting our small group of lakes and waterways, She placed campaign signs on our neighbors' lawns, with local businesses, and handed out fliers until she felt she'd contacted everyone who might care about the community and vote that concern.

Her opponents controlled the debate, placed their campaign signs, illegally, on public property, in front of a few bars and liquor stores and their own homes, took the local vote for granted and, correctly, assumed that the voters would be as uninvolved, uninformed, and dysfunctional as they had been in the past. One of the incumbents had been seriously ill with disabling cancer and died soon after the election, before taking office. Our little city's experiment in democracy ran aground almost immediately, as the existing office holders disingenuously praised the deceased council member's dedication to the city's welfare (something I never witnessed in dozens of council meetings I observed over the years). While waving that distracting flag with one hand, they worked quickly to subvert democratic principle so they could appoint another of their cronies to the council. Public comment was discounted, logic and fairness ignored, and it appears that we'll continue down the corrupt path our city has trod in the past, because that's what conservatives do.

The problem is normal people don't want to associate with the kind of people who work in government, run for , political office, or own the people who squat in those jobs. One trip to a city council meeting is enough to keep the typical citizen from venturing into that boring, degenerate environment for years. A short conversation with a city manager, a council member, state legislator, or governor will drive most of us into an hour-long hand washing frenzy. Government and business share this quality, the closer you get to the top, the scummier your associations become. At some point, freedom and liberty have to be defended by those who expect the rewards of those precious qualities. If we don't take back our governments from the scumbags who will use it against us, we'll deserve the government we get.

December 2006

#111 The Liberals in Congress (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

To explain the many stupid things done in Washington, Bush often blames "the liberals in Congress."  The four-legged fools who think that Bush could identify a problem if it was pecking a hole in the top of his head repeat the chant "the liberals in Congress" as if it was actual information.  You could count the liberals in Congress on the fingers of one hand.  If there are that many.  Many real liberals thought the one and only liberal left in Congress, Paul Wellstone, died in 2002.  If John Kerry and John Edwards are examples of what passes for a congressional liberal today, then this country has a severe liberal leadership deficit. 

For the last two decades, counting the number of liberals in Washington has been a grossly overrated activity.  Democrats are not necessarily liberal, regardless of the ignorant and boneheaded claims of the Bushies.  Those fools think anyone who isn't to the right of Adolph Hitler is a liberal.  Their definition of "conservative" is so simplistic that it resembles a meaningless chant, "pro-life good, pro-choice bad."  On every issue of government action, the neo-cons are radically socialist. 

Remember, Nazi Germany was called The Socialist Republic of Germany.  The definition of socialism is "a social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community."  We have allowed our government to redistribute national wealth to less than 1% of the population and we have allowed a tiny number of international corporations to absorb the majority of the nation's economic activity.  In our case, the production and distribution is exclusively within the means, and under the control, of a socialist elite, just like the old Soviet Union.  Just like the Soviet Union's nomenclature, that elite is uninterested in the welfare of the nation, its security, or the future of its citizens.  If things get bad enough, they'll move to a country they have yet to wreak.  They are no more the loyal citizens of the United States than were the mobsters who destroyed the Soviet Union.  Who knows, when it gets bad enough here maybe our mobsters will move to Russia?

The Bushies would like you to believe that anyone elected as a Democrat is a liberal, for the sake of their simplified, inaccurate political propaganda.  The reality is that very few southern or western Democrats hold a single liberal political view.  Outside of Teddy Kennedy, it's hard to find a northern Democrat who could be seriously defined as "liberal."  Leiberman, Gore's running mate in 2000, is more consistently conservative than anyone in the Bush Administration.  Those of you with a few functioning memory cells might remember that Gore was a good deal less than liberal, to the point that Frank Zappa suffered a trip to Washington to argue that Gore's attempt to censor music lyrics violated the First Amendment.  Gore's wife, Tipper, is as radically socially conservative as any Republican. 

Since the definition of conservative is someone who is limited to "traditional views and values" and tends "to oppose change," it's hard to imagine anyone who isn't conservative getting elected in the current US climate.  The current voting generation of Americans is timid, unimaginative, politically ignorant, and under serious economic pressure.  That is not a formula for electing people who are "not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded."  That is the definition of "liberal."  If you can find fault in any of those characteristics, you will be happy to be called a conservative.  Most intelligent humans, especially Americans, would be happy to aspire to be liberal, knowing that it is nearly impossible for a human to consistently hold to those values.

Today's problems were created by conservatives of both parties.  In fact, various flavors of conservatives are all that either party is capable of producing.  Conservatives sponsored by labor unions, conservatives sponsored by corporate executives, conservatives sponsored by government employees or government agencies, or, worst of all, conservatives sponsored by religious organizations.  Anyone with a lick of sense would be desperate to see a liberal find a position of power in this stagnate society.  Unless we all have to suffer years of another Great Depression, I don't see it happening.  We are not experiencing desperate times and without desperation humans never resort to creativity. 

#79 Dangerous Illusions (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

If we ever needed to be comforted that "things are going to be ok," it's probably now. The nation's cities are overpopulated, over-crowded, under-managed, and more dangerous than they've been since the turn of the last century.  People are afraid that they're going to be raped, robbed, murdered, and/or squashed by falling 747s piloted by Islamic terrorists.  We are turning timid as quickly as our social environment is growing aggressive.  The solution is . . . television. 

In 2001, the National Crime Information Center reported 840,279 missing persons (of which 85-90% are children) and the fraction of those returned is so unpredictable that I was unable to find a meaningful statistic regarding the nation's unsolved missing persons resolution rate.  The fact that the missing persons statistics are not delineated into categories makes it difficult to isolate kidnappings that were investigated from the other categories of missing persons. Regardless, with those huge numbers of missing persons, in 1985, the NCIC entered only 14,816 cases in its involuntary missing files and the FBI only chose to investigate 867 cases, some of those were adult victims.  Out of that tiny fraction of the nation's missing persons, an even more discouraging number were "found," most commonly dead. 

This ought to be especially discouraging because it's obvious that the Feebs are cherry picking the cases to select ones that they expect to solve and they're still not getting the job done.   An imaginary 63% of U.S. committed murders resulted in prosecution in 2000 (down from 79% in 1976).  I'll explain in a few sentences, why I classify that statistic as "imaginary."  While crime goes unsolved and we become more isolated in our homes and communities, television's CSI Miami and Vegas are wrapping up every vagrant's death as neatly as Xmas packages.  

Missing, the television myth that glorifies the FBI's never-before-sighted exercise of human compassion, actually cares if taxpayers miss an appointment.  The ultimate television hoax, X Files, portrayed an FBI agency that went out of its way to read case files.  I admit that I'm a little jaded about television's fairy tales. 

Twenty years ago, my stockbroker was an ex-Atlanta detective.  He'd quit and restarted his career when he found himself unable to carry on normal conversations with friends or family.  He was beginning to view everyone as scum floating at the top of the pond.  When he decided to leave the policing business, standard operating procedures were changing in the nation's cop squads that made him feel his occupation was even more pointless.

In the early 80s, urban police departments began to imitate the FBI's long held habit of "ganging" crimes on to the sheet of whatever high profile "most wanted" criminal they'd recently stumbled upon.   What this means is if Mulder and Scully tripped over a serial murderer and someone handed them enough evidence to securely lock that person up for life, what's the harm in sticking a few dozen unrelated homicides on that bad guy to clean up the paperwork?  After all, how often are our sluggish government bureaucrats likely to trip over another Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or even someone as dangerous as Married with Children's Al Bundy?   You gotta do what you wanta do and they do. 

So, if the federal cops claim that they have a 63% resolution rate on murder, I figure they're probably batting somewhere below .200.  The difference between imaginary crime fighting and reality are on television almost every evening.  I drive by the real guys most every morning on the way to work and, if that group of civil servants could chase down a donut, it would only be after a waitress has corralled it on a plate for them.  After they satiate their compulsion to "protect and serve" themselves, they are too fat to actually chase criminals. 

A guy I worked with a decade ago, is more the kind of person I'd expect would excel with the FBI.  He was a failed medical student, turned MBA-adorned middle executive in charge of covering up our employer's antics with a collection of unreliable and hazardous medical products.  He was being actively recruited by the FBI because he was, obviously, their kind of guy.  His motivation for attending to the task of joining the FBI was "they have a great pension plan" and "I can retire when I'm fifty and consult for the companies I've investigated."  It's good to have high moral standards and lofty goals when you're heading off to protect the public. 

 The now famous Elizabeth Smart story ought to tell us everything we need to know about crime fighting's capacities.  A girl obviously kidnapped and held, practically in plain sight, a few blocks from her home by a vagrant her parents had hired to do grunt work only a few days before the kidnapping.  If the FBI and local cops could solve any crime quickly, this should have been the one.   As happens far too rarely, a half-year after the kidnapping, a citizen recognized the kidnapper based on an artist's sketch of the suspect and called it in to the cops who managed to drag themselves away from donuts long enough to rescue the girl.   The FBI and all their mythical resources were useless and it was only the competent work of a beat cop that saved Ms. Smart from spending another year as a hostage in her own neighborhood.  Remember that her kidnapper was a transient who'd done maintenance work for the Smart family only a few weeks before the kidnapping. 

Can you say "obvious suspect?" 

Maybe this heartwarming story makes you feel comfortable about your "police protection," but I'm not that simpleminded.  John Walsh and his television program have made it clear to anyone capable of rational thought that the only way to rescue our loved ones from the worst people on earth is to drop our lives, sell everything we own, hire private investigators and spend all of our waking hours in pursuit of these criminals.  The police, the FBI, and all of the King's men are useless.  They're too worried about parking violations, speeding ticket quotas, pension plans, and outsourcing donuts to be distracted by our problems. 

 But not on television. 

The worst (most corrupt, least courageous, most self-serving) police force in the nation, New York's tubby-blue constantly-shifting line, are practically competent on television.  One of the most notoriously gangland related cities in the world, Las Vegas, has CSI uncovering killer DNA on every carpet fabric in Nevada.  The FBI finds missing vagrants, children, lawyers, and other otherwise ignored citizens in hours, often before the victims miss a single dose of some equally mythical life saving medication.  Pretty soon, I expect we'll see a series on how loving and helpful LA cops are to minority citizens.  Why not?  It wouldn't be less believable than picturing FBI agents in motion.  How about a show illustrating the SEC's relentless pursuit of corporate criminals?  That would be as believable as Spiderman, but no less so than Missing or "NYPD Blue.

December 2003

#77 Conservative Morality

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

In case you haven't figured it out on your own, the title of this rant is intended to be ironic.  Conservatives have about as firm a grasp on morality as Gee-Whiz Bush has on the state of the economy.  The two claims to moral fame held by the religious right are non-reproductive sex (they're again' it) and forced Christianity (they're for it).

On all other issues, conservatives could care less about the poor, the underprivileged, the abused, downtrodden, good manners, or common decency.  The new and old Right are for the power and wealth of those who already hold power and wealth, for keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor.  They are so inclined to bear arms against their fellow citizens that they form organizations to prevent any semblance of rational legislation controlling personal weaponry.  They gloat over the fact that Amerika has stockpiled more of its citizens in prisons than most of the other industrialized nations put together.  They hate freedom of the press, civil rights, habeas corpus, women's rights, taxation of the rich, and cereal with raisins.  They're all about dismantling the education system and replacing it with menial labor vocational training for everyone who wasn't born leaching from a trust fund.  In fact, there isn't a single positive human value that the Right would fight to protect.  If it ain't about greed or power, it's not an issue for these very un-conservative conservatives.

For that matter, the two moral issues they cling to are not about morality, but about greed and power.  Any group that claims to be pro-life but is so much in love with capital punishment is, obviously, conflicted.  As far as I can see, the conservative dislike for abortion is that the private medical procedure removes the possibility of a later-in-life public execution.  I have never seen a single incident that would make me believe conservatives are concerned with preserving precious life.  From where I sit, that appears to be a power issue, not a morality position. 

The conservative passion for government control of bedroom activities is a combination of repressed sexual anxiety or a desire to control every non-economic human activity.  You can't tell the communists from the conservatives without a conservative media to pin a label on who’s who. 

Either the conservative gods are astoundingly stupid, or they're thoroughly disbelieved by their let's-pretend-worshipers.  Conservatives hunt through whatever sheepherder tales they claim were written by the hand of whatever god for any excuse to kill, steal from, or rape and pillage their enemies of the moment.  I'm not just talking about our local nutball Christian "conservatives," I mean every conservative on the planet; Christian, Muslim, Moonie, Mormon, Marxist, or whatever timid person's flavor-of-the-century we're suffering at the moment.  If these people aren't killing someone or planning to kill someone, they are unhappy as hell. 

Two unbelievably vicious examples of Right immorality demonstrated their wrongness recently, during Minnesota's 2002 Senate campaign.  First, the Republicrat candidate waged a smear campaign against the only populist politician left in Washington, Paul Wellstone.  When Wellstone's plane went down a few weeks before the election, the Demoplicans stuffed the vacancy with Walter Mondale.  In a panic, Republicrats worried about losing the election out of sympathy for Minnesota's great loss.  Conservative whackos stormed the Fitzgerald Theater where a debate was the be held between Mondale and Abnormal Coleman.  Outside the theater, they paraded with signs that read "War Means Jobs." 

War means jobs.  Now there's a strong moral position for you.  They were worried that Mondale might not let Gee Wiz carry on his war-plans-slash-economic-recovery-strategy and that resistance to rational thought might cost them precious military industrial jobs.  I'd never been more disgusted by my fellow Americans. 

But conservatives keep trying to set new records for immorality.  In New York, there is a 30 year old Republicrat governors' law, called the Rockefeller Law, which puts "drug offenders" in prison, regardless of previous history, mitigating circumstances, or breakfast cereal preferences.  Recently, there has been some questioning of the fairness or rationality of a law that tosses people in jail for crimes against themselves.  Some famous rappers are putting themselves in between the law and common sense.  They're asking why people should be jailed for life, or the majority of a life, for drug possession, especially possession of amounts small enough to barely qualify for personal use.

And the conservatives are upset.  Not because they believe the punishment fits the crime, but because they are concerned that precious right-wing jobs will be lost in the prison system.  Who cares if people are unfairly stripped of their lives, families, and freedom?  Let's face it, it's obvious that prison guards are old-fashioned conservatives and it's hard to find high paying jobs for that sort of upstanding citizen.  Mostly, because the kind of person who would take a job as a prison guard is uneducated, unskilled, and otherwise unemployable.  So what's a person's life compared to keeping conservative dumbshits employed? 

Morality, who needs it when you can pretend to have the power to define it and the rest of the country is too terrified of you to correct your grammar?  If we truly wanted to wage a war on terrorists, conservatives would be in deep shit.  The terrorists of the world are all conservatives stumbling along behind one deeply flawed superstitious fantasy or another.  A war on real terrorism would be one that could be easily conducted at home and it's a war that should be won at all costs.  The future of our Constitution and world democracy depends on rooting out conservatives and putting them where they can do no harm.  Based on past performance, I’d argue that  public sanitation is about as critical an activity as conservatives are capable of serving, and they should be prevented from holding management positions in that industry.

September 2003

#72 Turning a Page (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

In the summer of 2001, my excuse for randomly producing Rat Rants went cold.  At the end of August, I quit my Fortune 1000 job and wandered into the world of unemployment and, hopefully, self-employment.  A year later, self-employment is a reality, although an intermittently paying reality, and my exposure to management is minimal.  Hence, my inspiration for Rants has been stunted.

At the moment, I'm actually relishing being out of the Rat race.  Of course, at 54, it's possible I may be further out of the race and so far off of the road that I've become irrelevant.  In some ways, it was the fear of obsolescence that drove me to the decision to leave my cube life.  In my 54 long and disillusioned years on this planet, I've found that confronting fear is not enough.  I usually have to dive into the pit with whatever I'm afraid of and see how sharp its teeth really are.  And so I am in the pit with uncertain income and it's a lot less scary than I'd imagined.  But it pays about as well as I'd expected.

Last night, I had a dream that actually stuck with me through my morning coffee.  I'm likely to misinterpret it in this Rant, but it's my dream and my column, so you'll have to suffer with your Jungian or Freudian disagreement.  I dreamed that I was in the military, but still working for a manager from my last job who I actually liked and respected (imagine that!). 

The two of us were all trudging up a staircase, not knowing where we were going or what we'd be doing at the top, when he reminded me that "it is inappropriate for an enlisted man, to be walking ahead of an officer."

I asked him, "If we were walking on to a battlefield, would you still want to be in front?"  He replied, "That is an inappropriate question."  This guy actually uses that kind of language in normal conversation, which is why I remembered the dream so clearly.

Believe it or not, that must have been my version of a nightmare because I woke up at that point.  I, clearly, lead a sheltered life.  After realizing that I wasn't going to fall back to sleep, I was stuck trying to figure out what the damn dream meant, or what it meant to me.  My personal irritation with the dream's concept was that his officer's "credential," not his skill, courage, or knowledge, was what gave him a position at the head of the staircase.  And, of course, I was pissed because I knew he'd be climbing the stairs too slowly.  I don't usually follow people up stairs, because I take them two at a time.  I get bored easily.

After exercising his leadership, away he went, in front of me and just as cluelessly as I'd been when I was in front.  In the dream, there were only two of us in this military column, which simplifies the symbolism.  Even my subconscious knows that I need simple and direct instruction.

Much of my Rat Ranting MBA-directed ire is based on the kind of academic aristocracy that I'd experienced from my last two employers.  Many of our large and stodgy employers have taken the position that college degrees are evidence of competence, not inheritance and lack of necessity or stunted adolescent inspiration.  Now that the bloom has fallen off of the last ten years of economic "irrational exuberance," I wonder if this mistaken belief will be revisited.  If we want to jump-start the economy, again, the way it was cranked up in the early 1990s, talent will have to be more important than pedigree. 

A visit to any major state or private university will make it obvious, even to HR drudges, that the majority of the kids in school past age eighteen are rich, idle, privileged and clueless.  With an average cost of $50,000 per year, it's pretty obvious that average folks aren't sending their kids to college, unless there's a scholarship involved. 

At the University of Minnesota, school officials are campaigning local apartment complexes to encourage them to cater to college students.  Because there are more kids in school than the college can provide for?  Nope.  Because the kids whose parents can afford university life have grown up with their own bedrooms (and telephones, entertainment systems, Jacuzzis, and Porches) and they're not willing to share a dorm room at this self-important point in their lives.  So, working-class folks are being forced out of their hard-to-find apartments to accommodate housing for multinational children of the ruling class. 

It's happening all over the country.  An invasion of snobby apartment snatchers.

I've said this before and will most likely repeat myself at a later date, anyone can do well in college if college is the only thing that person has to do.  Between the dumbing-down of the education system and the high-tech availability of everything from test questions to Masters thesis, it's not that hard to survive four through eight years in our university system.  If you have money and time. 

All of this tells us that the real justification for using a college education as selection criteria is to keep the good jobs in the hands of the rich and privileged.  In really good times, we can probably survive that kind of foolishness.  In bad times, ability and aptitude ought to become more important than breeding.  Bad times might be on the way and it remains to be seen that business is agile enough to rearrange its poor habits and irrational priorities.

Universities, on the other hand, react as slowly as glacier ice.  Their budgets get bigger while their service to the culture shrivels into approaching zero.  In a frenzy of public spending, they collect sports coliseums, performance amphitheaters, art galleries, and other monuments to uselessness.  Their administrators throw tantrums when state governments consider withholding funds for these arrogant extravagances. 

The only way to reign in these folks is to ignore their existence.  Since most Americans can't even afford to send their kids to a college sports event, let alone to college, at least half of that job is already accomplished.  Outside of television athletics, the majority of us only think about universities when we're bitching about management and the people who spawned that ilk.  Hopefully, "out of mind" will soon turn into "out of funding."  Not long after that, universities will pare down to necessary survival functions and, possibly, return to providing education and useful research. 

Right.  I'm living in a dream world where everyone breakfasts on lobster and Johnny Walker Blue.  Dream on drunken Rat.

Contrary to popular fantasy, Americans love royalty.  We appear to crave a return to King George's reign.  I once read that less than 1% of the population participated in the Revolutionary War.  I suspect that it's probably safe to say that the other 99% were perfectly happy with serving an aristocracy.  Some things never change.  Our soap opera crowd practically slashed their arms and tore hunks of hair in mourning after the death of spoiled Princess Diana.  A good portion of the voting public flushed their vote toward George II because there was a George I and good money and breeding ought to follow bad.  Or some weird logic that escapes me.  We still turn out good crowds to bow before popes, kings, and rock stars.  And so on.

Nuts.  After 200 years, the American Revolution may have come to an end.  We're a royalty-loving, aristocracy-sustaining, ruling class mismanaged socialism for the rich and while that might be a luxury we can afford when we're rolling in success, it's not something we can afford now that the rats have invaded the corn crib. 

April, 2003

#36 Campaign 2000

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

As I write this, on March 7 just after Doomsday Tuesday, it appears that we're in for another Tweedly Dee vs. Tweedly Dum presidential election. I'd be willing to write Bill Bradley or John McCain's tossing-in-the-towel speeches for them.

It would go something like this:

"You gutless wimps. You call yourselves Americans, but you have absolutely nothing in common with real Americans, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or, even, John Kennedy. You're afraid of your own shadows. You're afraid of anything that isn't spoon fed to you by the grumpy old men who hold the power in this nation. Even American kids are freakin' wimps. All it would take to invade this puke of a country would be for someone to yell "boo" really loud and a third of you would dive under your beds for protection. The other sixty-some-percent could care less what the hell happens as long as your favorite television shows don't get cancelled.

"It's one thing that those pitiful old men want to hang on to the power they've had for so long. That's understandable, if a good bit disgusting. It's totally another that the average, working stiff is happy to give those inbred losers control over a nation that could be democratic, if it wanted to be.

"So, now you get to choose between Gore and Bush. Gore, a political hack who is the son of a political hack. A politician who lost the credibility war with Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush, the son of a pitifully lame ex-president, a spoiled rich kid of a politician who's owned by so many special interests that his butt is tattooed like one of those Beef Council diagrams of a fattened steer.

"The upside is, it doesn't matter who wins. They're one and the same. Or maybe that was what you wimps wanted, all along."

If I could choreograph this speech, I'd have my guy give the nation (especially the media) a single digit salute and call it a night.

There's so much going on in a major election that I don't understand. For instance, I'll never understand how the Republican Establishment gets a single vote from people who work for a living. I know, Republicans claim to be "pro-business," but they're really just pro-rich people. The closest the Republican Party ever comes to associating itself with the function of business is when executives give away their stock holder's money to promote special tax breaks for executives.

The list of "business interests" that Republicans have hustled on the rest of us is pretty amazing: the military/industrial complex, the savings and loan deregulation disaster, the sixty zillion tax loopholes that encourage international corporations to save money by moving jobs out of this country, a gigantic income tax break for the top tax bracket. And so on.

Sure, they throw the "pro-life" bone to the religious right, but they don't really mean it. After all, if the poor couldn't get abortions the welfare rolls would be increasing faster than they are now and that would, eventually, force the rich to pay higher taxes to support those not-being-born-and-not-wanted-by-anybody kids. Trust me, that's not gonna happen. Rich folks look out for their own interests like scorpions hunting for a warm boot on a cold night.

None of that lets the Democrats off of the hook, either. Different money interests for different folks. Without the support of the 80 million members of government employee unions, Gore wouldn't get noticed at a high school dance (until he started waving money). This crowd of union bozos have discovered that it is possible to vote yourself rich. They are the only thing separating Gore from Bush. Gore wants to keep spending tax money to support the unemployable in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed and Bush is willing to trash the country's economy by letting the ruling class make one last dash to the feeding trough. Both candidates represent the ruling class interests from around the world. Gore just gets some of his money from the government employed ruling class while Bush gets a much bigger chunk from the sort of con artist who really appreciates getting to take a poke at the national treasury.

Like the usual 70% who will stay away from this election, it just doesn't matter to me which of these morons wins in November. Kill me slow or kill me quick, I'm still dead.

It will never happen, because of the gutless character of what passes for today's "Americans," but now is the time for the NOTA movement. None of the above. Here's my version of this ballot entry:

The parties can submit their usual human refuse, for the election. But as part of getting to take a roll with these dice, they put up a bond, equal to the campaign funds, for that candidate. No soggy money. No non-candidate advertisements allowed. You're either part of a campaign or you're a spectator. If the voters "elect" NOTA for a particular office, the bond money goes to fund a second election.

None of the clowns from the first campaign can run again. The second campaign works just like the first one. Another bond gets funded for the next batch of mindless morons. And so it would go.

That's actually my second option. My first choice would be, if NOTA wins, NOTA serves. The office goes vacant for the term of the position. At the end of the term, if it is not obvious that we need someone to do that job, the office is abandoned. I figure in twenty years, there wouldn't be an elected government office in the nation.

March 2000