#100 Falling Top Down (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

If everything is top down, we're screwed.  Our last half-dozen Presidents, from Ford to Bush II, have been, mostly, screw-offs.  Carter and Clinton were, often, relatively hard working (especially compared to the vacationing Ford, the comatose Reagan, and the AWOL Bushes), but their work ethic was often misdirected and unproductive.  Clinton, especially, found too much time to cater to his lower instincts and lost momentum, credibility, and direction from the resulting scandals.  Carter was simply too easily distracted by unimportant crap and pointless detail.  When you think about it, these "leadership" characteristics are pretty constant themes in most US businesses.

If management isn't missing, altogether, from the functions of the business, they have their tiny little heads crammed into details that don't matter, can't be positively affected by someone who isn't dealing with the problem on a day-to-day basis, and can only be made worse by the addition of a non-functional manager's participation.  Usually, management chooses to be missing.  Surrounding themselves with other managers, philosophizing about the "purpose of the business," and arranging the perks and benefits available to the ruling class seems to be the only reason most "managers" exist. 

Relate that to our national leaders' performance in the last generation of Presidents and their lackeys.   Ford performed his one and only intended function, pardoning Nixon, and returned to his old Speaker of the House habits; schmoozing with corporate executives and playing golf at every exclusive golf club on either coast.  His three years in office were a waste of time, but they set us up for the future of, especially, Republican Presidents. 

Carter worked his ass off: selecting office equipment, interviewing practically every menial White House potential hire, worrying about the color of new carpets, and rewriting hundreds of pointless government procedures.  As far as the critical functions of the Presidency, Carter forgot what he'd been elected to do.  He forgot the progressive campaign promises he made, and fully intended to keep, in his control-freak over-management of the daily, unimportant functions of his office.  The man couldn't delegate the selection of office supplies, let alone important policy research.  Four years wasn't nearly long enough for Carter to accomplish what he'd intended to do.  Forty years wouldn't have been enough either. 

Clinton was a productive executive.  He worked hard, he kept his eye on his objectives, selected competent advisors and administrators, and got a good bit of the job done; right up until his dick got hard and his brain went soft.  Even with full knowledge that he would be a target for the right wing for any indiscretion or mistake, Clinton stumbled in where almost any rational adult would have reconsidered and regrouped.  Way back in one of my 1998 Rat Rants I wrote, "Is the job of President of the United States so boring that Clinton needs this kind of distraction?"  I still don't know the answer to this question, but it appears that Americans tend to elect folks who aren't particularly interested in doing the job. 

I realize that in some ways it's irrational to look at the President of the United States as a role model for corporate execs.  The President gets paid less than the average CEO of a mid-sized corporation, for one.  But power-wise, nobody has it over the Pres.  Execs can fire people, but the President can pardon them.  If forgiving is more difficult than punishing, you can't top being able to provide a passel of "get out of jail free" cards to anyone you feel good about.  The Republicrats made a big deal out of Clinton's pardons at the end of his administration.  They seemed to have forgotten Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush's pardons of an incredibly large group of administration and corporate criminals.  One of those criminals is currently the Vice President, which puts a different spin on the "vice" in that title.  Or maybe that's what the Constitutional Congress meant when they created the job?

At any rate, if morals, work ethic, and performance standards are shipped top-down from the President to corporate execs, it's no wonder that so few corporate execs are productive.  If they're taking their lead from the nation's top exec, it's a wonder they ever leave the golf course.  Bush II is mostly showing how few days the President can be in the office and still get away with the illusion that he's actually doing some part of the job he was elected to do.  If there is a more unskilled, lazier, less productive exec in the country (and we know there is because this country's "leadership" never fails to hit new lows) you'd think the man would have a full-time nurse to keep his heart beating.  "Management by walking around" has been replaced by absentee ownership. 

As I said in the first sentence of this rant, we're screwed.  The only thing that's holding our economy and political system together is momentum.  And that's being scrubbed off fast.  It's hard to kill a working business, but creative execs have discovered ways to kill almost every type of business of almost every size.  The 4-year period of Bush II brought record bankruptcies of small to huge businesses in the US.  Just about every spot in the economy has been dismal and it's not just middle-class jobs that are vanishing.  The places where the jobs were vanished, too. 

At least with Bush II we knew what we were getting into.  The guy was a failure at everything he'd ever tried; from cheerleading at Harvard to flying flowers for the Texas Air National Guard to massacring the Texas K-12 education system.  His one business "success," managing a baseball team, was a total prop-job.  To mask his incompetence, he was "given" the cash for his share of the team purchase, he was given a job where his sole task was to remain immobile so that he couldn't screw up, and he was prevented from participating in the sale of the team for the same reason.  He still managed to pose for some incredibly stupid photo ops, looking confused, bored, and foolish sitting behind the dugout in complete isolation. 

While the ship is sinking, the corporate rats are trying to eat the band's instruments.  Execs are giving themselves larger and larger golden parachutes as rewards for their total failures as leaders.  Executive boards, who are supposed to protect stockholders from this sort of shenanigan, are crammed with other companies' failed executives.  The rats are guarding the cheese and the result is there's no cheese left.  I guess the "upside" will be when the economy's momentum comes to a grinding halt and we suffer a massive depression.  When home values start falling, interest rates jump, and the economy grinds to a stop (as it did in 1929), the country's complete lack of leadership might get some attention.  But I'm not holding my breath.

3rd World Identifiers

Back in the 80’s, I spent as much time as possible in Baja, Mexico. The only thing about Baja that I didn’t like was traveling the Tijuana gauntlet, where every parked car might hide a “traffic sign” serving as an ATM for one of the city’s cops.

John Oliver recently described the tactic that many American cities are using to tax their citizens and other victims in a segment called “Municipal Violations.” This story, and reality, is evidence that the United States has become a 3rd world collection of urban and state dictatorships “using fines to fund government.”

Tijuana cops had an excuse. They didn’t get paid to be cops. In fact, like bell boys in upscale New York hotels, they had to pay their sergeants for their jobs. The only income they were allowed to “earn” came from trapping white Americans on their way through the town to Ensenada or hunting for a “theater” that features 13 year old girls getting it on with donkeys. One difference between Tijuana cops and American cops is that the American cops are grossly overpaid, underworked, and largely useless. The Tijuana cops were actually pretty good when it came time for them to do their job of protecting the public.   Another difference is that the Tijuana cops understood they were shaking down the public to feed their families. American cops present a fake image of enforcing the law while they pad their pockets with stolen loot, inflated pensions, and a slacker’s work day that would embarrass one of the Bush or Koch kids.

#102 A Most Irrational Animal (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Humans are exceptional strange animals.  We are the only animal capable of imagining that we are so special that we're going to a life after death.  And we're the only animal that is terrified of death. 

I know, you've watched the Discovery Channel and you've seen terrified prey fleeing predators, so you think all animals are afraid of death.  That might be an interesting theory if those same animals didn't give in so quickly once they're captured.  When a deer gets snagged by a lion, the deer usually quits fighting and waits for the end to come.  I've interpreted that not as a fear of death but of pain.  Once the pain is in process, the animal wants death to end the misery as quickly as possible.  Humans, on the other hand, seem to be considerably less afraid of pain than of death.  We'll submit ourselves to all kinds of pain to stave off even a few seconds of life before death.

The exceptions to this rule of humanity are martyrs.  Martyrs are either confident that their faith is correct and that they've been "on the side of God," or that their cause is right and they are willing to sacrifice their lives to improve the lot of those that live after their deaths.  The majority of humans may pretend to some kind of faith in a life after death, a benevolent god, or the cause of king and country, but they know better.  Deep inside, they know once they are dead, they're dead. 

With industrial age medicine, we have provided ourselves a way to prolong life and pain in exchange for putting off death.  Since the first medicine men appeared, humans have tried to hang on to a few more moments of life even if those moments are full of pain and suffering and incapacity.  We're not doing this to prevent our loved ones from suffering.  Our suffering and disability makes life much harder for them.  We're not hanging on to life so that we can take advantage of the opportunity to rectify the wrongs we've done when we were young and vital.  Most folks simply return to their old life without even thanking the doctors and nurses who gave them the additional time.  This is a purely selfish and faithless act and, as such, it's interesting.

The majority of educated humans do not actively participate in religious activities.  Churches are finding themselves mostly loaded with low-brow fools who desperately want someone to tell them what to do next.  That's a pretty ideal market for what churches have to sell, but it does limit the intellectual future of those organizations.  Today's religious "expert" is the intellectual equivalent of the ordinary layperson of 200 years ago.  A business or a country would be panicked at this kind of brain-drain, but religions have always catered to a baser audience so they, mostly, don't notice the loss of intellect.  Certain sects are probably discovering that it is easier to find dumb kids to molest, but, otherwise, the majority of their patrons are the same dumb, unquestioning folks they have always been. 

All this beings us back to the point of today's rant; the human fear of death.  It ought to be obvious that anyone who is afraid of death is a person who understands the finality of that event.  A "true believer" would look forward to leaving this existence and moving to the promised land.  The rest of us know that dead is dead and that spirituality is just an exercise in socializing a relatively unsocial animal.  Spirituality has mostly been unsuccessful exercise, based on human history at a macro or micro level.  Simply entering a hospital is an act of unfaithfulness.  Submitting yourself to major surgery is downright atheist. 

I don't have a disagreement with atheists.  All available evidence points to the fact that the universe is not designed to promote life and that there are no gods hidden in the ether to protect us from obsolescence.  I do question the sanity and honesty of folks who act faithlessly and pose among the faithful.  You either know that this is life your one and only shot at existence or you believe you're going to heaven to enjoy 22 virgin white grapes (or salamanders or human females) for eternity.  Having it both ways is an act of disbelief and, you'd think, that would be a major sin in the eyes of most gods.

The Good Old Socialist Days

The three old douchebags I got stuck with earlier this week made me think back to those “good old days” they remember so well as being full of capitalism, freedom, religion, and unrestrained racism. Being older than any of them, I actually remember some of those days. Those days were definitely dominated by the old, but they were not good. The good parts of the 1950’s were all inspired by the rampant socialism left over from the revolt against the 1% my grandparents’ generation had waged after those inbred morons (the 1%, not my grandparents) crashed the stock market in 1929, destroyed the economy in their efforts to save their own wealth, and tried to turn the country into a corporatist/fascist state like their hero nation, Germany. Roosevelt’s legacy was continued by Truman and Eisenhower and until Nixon and his thugs came along it looked like the US might remain prosperous indefinitely. Socialism was at the core of that middle class prosperity.

For instance, in my hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, the city owned the utilities (except for the telephone company), a hospital was co-owned and operated by the city and the Methodist Church, and one of our two radio stations was publicly owned. We had a country club with a  fancy swimming pool and a golf course on the eastern “rich side of town,” but the poor side of town had a great public swimming pool on the edge of Wright Park (a park donated by Bob Wright of Wright and Rath General Store infamy from Dodge City’s rowdy days) and the west side of town had the American Legion’s club with a sand green golf course and another fine swimming pool. The city also maintained a zoo, a miniature golf course, a performance gazebo, and a small carnival area in Wright Park, where families spent a lot of picnic weekends and adults used the park for company and organization parties. The park was, in fact, a show place for the city; all paid for with taxes and maintained by city workers. A lot of the park construction was from the 1930’s and the work was done by Roosevelt’s Conservation Corps. The city also owned a “civic center” where concerts, sporting events, conventions, and other large events took place; all without naming the building after some corrupt corporation. (Today, that same building is named the United Wireless Arena).

Although John Kennedy and Congress lowered the top income tax rate from 90% to 75% in 1961, there weren’t a lot of obviously rich people in town, but there were a lot of very comfortable people. In fact, the most wealthy people were, as usual, old money folks who hid in their mini-mansions on the east side of town near the country club and hung out with other old money people. It was generally recognized as tasteless to flaunt your money and my step-grandparents knew a lot of the rich folks through their flooring business. As a Servicemaster company, and a part-time employee, we did some repair and remodeling work in their homes. Mostly, they spent more money for the same things as real people, although they spent more for similar services and products.

The big difference between then and now is obvious in both the town’s appearance and the economy. Downtown Dodge is dead. Even a promotional photo like the one at left can’t hide the fact that the core of the city is a ghost town. The old hotel, once a showpiece of the city, is a shabby collection of city government offices. All of the old department store buildings are empty or they host a collection of second-hand stores (a sure sign of a dead town). There is a middle class, but it is a very precarious existence with debt, income, and emergency money all on a knife-edge. The slightest adverse breeze could blow it all down, as it did in 2007.

Today, the town’s tax and income base is primarily made up of residential property taxes, sales taxes, and traffic fines. The parks are in shambles, Walmart is the primary retail game in town, the public schools are in the same kind of condition Kansas schools all suffer, and the wingnut press has done a fine job of turning lower income whites against lower income Hispanics and African Americans.

#99 Special Interests and Growth (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Every time an area experiences an economic boom, property taxes rise.  Why is that?  Isn’t it  logical to expect the growth to pay for itself?  If the growth is really a good thing for everyone who lives in an area, you would think that would be reflected in lower taxes, not higher.  The addition of buildings to undeveloped land increases the value of the land and should return higher income to the county and state.  Farm land earns a lower tax rate than developed land.  But it never seems to work this way.  Why?  Maybe it’s because disguised special interests are calling the shots and diverting the costs of growth to people who shouldn’t have to pay it.

In the case of public funds and area growth, special interests abound.  Everyone who gains from an increase in the tax base is a special interest.  The obvious special interests, and rightly so, are developers, contractors, and real estate salespeople.  This group has a lot to gain from conning the public into paying for their investments. They would love to spread the cost of schools, roads, utilities, and other public services over the entire taxpaying population.  If those costs were borne by the people who reap the most benefit, the cost of housing would limit their profit margins and slow growth considerably.  They can always be counted on to contribute funding for a bond issue’s advertising. 

But these easy targets aren’t the only people who gain disproportionately from growth.  The two elements of greed, power and money, can help identify those who will gain from growth and, even, overpopulation.  Government officials can expect open paths to promotion, increased income, and larger “empires” through population growth.  It’s pretty obvious that a mayor of a 10,000 population town is going to make a lot less than Randy ("I can't remember who my date was") Kelly.  Kelly probably has more bodyguards than many towns have employees.  Empires are built on employees.  Salaries are based on the number of people supervised and complexity of the managed facilities.  This may also be where a big part of this exponential cost of growth comes from, too.  Large cities are not as efficient as small cities.  Large cities have more employees per taxpayer, more expense per employee, and some expenses that a small town wouldn’t even consider.  If this is what growth brings, who needs it?

If you expect government officials to present an unbiased opinion of the value of growth to the average citizen, you probably wouldn’t be skeptical of Mike Tyson’s intention toward your daughter.  Growth simply presents too much to gain for people whose income and power is based on taxation and population.  You can’t expect people to resist the temptation to look for only the upside of an issue that will dramatically and positively effect their pocketbooks. 

The rule in solving crime is “follow the money.”  This rule applies to finding the special interests who might commit the crime of destroying a community for the sake of growth.  Using this formula, it is clear that it will be difficult to accept a local newspaper as an unbiased source of information, also.  School system administrators are going to be in line for salary increases relative to the size of the schools they administer, also.  Even the police department may be pro-growth for the same reasons, although the officer on the beat will have to deal with more crime and more corruption, the department administrators will make more money and gain more power. 

When growth is a good thing, the gain is spread around equally and it is in everyone’s interest to promote it.  When growth is a bad thing, the majority of people who are asked to pay for it don’t gain proportionally to their investment; or they lose with no voice in that investment, which is what Amendment I was intended to stop.  When taxes must be raised to subsidize growth, that growth isn’t paying for itself.  The people who are reaping the largest rewards are paying only a small portion of the total investment.  When the growth produces more government jobs, it isn’t really doing the community a favor.  Someone will have to produce something real to pay for those government jobs.  When the major investors in the area don’t live in the area, the lion’s share of the benefits don’t return to the community that has paid for those resources.  Putting profits into national and international corporations’ won’t return a reasonable payback, on a long term basis.  It isn’t selfish to expect a fair return on your tax investment.  If the local government hasn’t done a good job with its funding in the past, nothing about new funding will change the people who spend it.  If you won’t get that return-on-investment, don’t spend the money. 

One way to estimate which side of an issue is not looking out for your best interests is to look at the quality of the flyers you receive.  The better they look, the better that side of the cause is financed, and you know good causes aren’t often well financed.  Money seems to flow downhill, ethically speaking, and grassroots movements don’t get much of it.  The best way to determine where your interests stand is to get involved.  Find out how your money is spent.  Learn to read budgets and force government officials to make those budgets available to taxpayers.  There is no reason why cities and states can’t follow the Clinton administration’s lead in making complete budgets available in electronic format.  That would minimize the cost of publishing these documents and allow the public to assist in analyzing the cost of government.  The more we know, the better we can run our country, cities, and neighborhoods.  If we care, the people who work for us in government will care.  If we don’t, we deserve the government we get.

September 2004

Shootin’ for Fun

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of having lunch surrounded by gun fanatics. No matter what these characters have to say for themselves and their “constitutional rights” to own an armory, there is a pretty good chance that most American gun owners are either dangerous neighbors or crazy scared. Maybe both. Jim Jefferies pretty much wraps up all of the rational reasons society should be get worried about gun owners. He blows off the “bullshit arguments and lies” that are the cornerstone and marketing plan of the NRA and its friends. Not one of these guys was man enough to admit that the whole reason they didn’t like gun laws or any attempt to design a sane society their whole defense was “Fuck off, I like guns.” In fact, they were pretty damn defensive about both their sanity and the sanctity of our mostly fucked up Constitution.
There is, though, one good reason a huge number of Americans want to have a gun: Yep, men in particular want to be sure they have a handy exit plan, just in case, as Jim said, “From time to time, we all get sad. One day you’re happy, the next you’re sad.” We don’t buy guns for protection from much of anything except depression. Since we’ve abandoned all hope of having a national health care system, especially mental health, that doesn’t bankrupt anyone who doesn’t have a few million in the trust fund, we gotta have guns.
If a manufacturer had balls enough to design a gun for the current gun owner market, it would be a very purpose-built device. For white people (men, mostly) it would look like the pistol at left. The cylinder is solely for the purposes of playing Russian roulette, since most of us only need one bullet. White people commit 75 suicides for every 15 homicides per million people. Black people are different, thanks to the NRA and our half-hearted police state. 150 black people are murdered by guns for every 27 who take themselves out (I’d imagine mostly middle class black people have the same issues as their white neighbors.). The self-defense statistics are so small they are not worth considering. The people who own guns for self-defense are so rationally-and-mathematically-challenged they should be carefully placed in padded rooms and heavily medicated.

The “in defense of freedom” argument is the most bullshit of all gun nut arguments. Yeah, right, you pussies own guns “in case the government became a bunch of cunts and you all could fight back.” The Revolutionary War was the one and only instance in American history where that actually happened. Sure, there are lots of instances of superstitious nuts going Waco on local police over silly shit like their right to have sex with children or defending their take on when and how the Great Kahuna is going to haul all of his/her children up to the Great Rock Candy Mountain. Careful examination of those situations would reveal that the government might have been less than A-Team’ish in their efforts, but the “bunch of cunts” group has been consistently on the other side of the wall.  In the most recent case, the wad of deranged crackers defending a fellow racist, millionaire cracker’s right to decimate public land for profit and greed, my point was made painfully well. Since 1776, there hasn’t been a single instance of patriots gearing up and heading off to protect fellow citizens who have been deprived of their rights. In fact, in my experience the gun owners have been pretty consistent in their support of the government when it comes to violating voting rights, petitioning for the right to work in safe and fair conditions, protecting the environment, or promoting any “civil rights” that don’t make the 1% richer. If modern white gun owners were tossed back to Revolutionary War times, they would all be Tories.

Nothing Changes, Nothing to See Here

Forty-three years ago, in 1972, Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern selected Thomas Francis Eagleton to be his vice-presidential partner. By August, McGovern had abandoned Eagleton because of his history of depression treatment. Supposedly, a poll found that 77% of prospective Democratic voters said "Eagleton's medical record would not affect their vote." I’d find that hard to believe, but Americans wanted to imagine themselves to be more civilized than they do today. Eagleton returned to the Senate, won two more elections, and retired after a weird blackmailing affair with a niece, a local lawyer, and the Scientology organization. Eagleton was a key player in the Senate's foreign relations, intelligence, defense, education, health care, and environmental legislation. He was an important Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act sponsor. He and Frank Church sponsored the amendment that halted the bombing in Cambodia and effectively ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Still, to most conservative Americans (the majority of Americans), Eagleton was the “crazy McGovern VP.”

The Greek father of medicine, modern or otherwise, Hippocrates described “melancholia” as a disease with both mental and physical aspects. "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time"¹ as the earliest and not yet improved upon description of depression. Freud discovered or pronounced nothing new about depression and not much of value has come about since. So, a couple thousand years of avoidance and denial has led us to where we are today with a minimum of 7% of the US population suffering from a well known, totally misunderstood mental disease that offers largely unsuccessful therapies and the joy of social stigma. The modern approach is to bury the patient in side-effect-laden but ineffective and dangerous drugs (“Why Are More than One in Ten Americans at Risk for Suicide?”). While these drugs are barely or rarely as effective as placebos,  they are a big money-maker for the dope peddlers. In 2013, the dope dealers made $11B on antidepressants alone. No wonder these assholes are spending so much money fighting marijuana legalization. They are just fighting off the competition.

Since 1974 a lot of noise has been made about improvements in mental healthcare but there is no reality behind that noise. The stigma that existed 100 years ago remains, largely, unchanged today. In 2013, 41,149 US citizens committed suicide. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Americans.  And that is with the unmentioned understanding that suicides are dramatically underreported due to . . . yep, the stigma of mental illness. Even the survivors are unable to admit their loved one was ill. As an illustration of that national reality-avoidance, no accurate national suicide attempt statistics are kept. However, in 2013 494,169 people were hospitalized for “self-harm behavior.” There is a sexual component to US suicides, too. Men are 4 times more likely to kill themselves, but women try to kill themselves 3 times as often. You could argue that women are more likely to make a “cry for help,” but you could also argue that men are just more mechanically competent in their attempts. Men are a lot more inclined to use guns for this purpose and firearms account for 51.4% suicide deaths.

The first requirement to fixing a problem is to admit you have a problem. The only admission allowed to mental illness is suicide or at least a fairly serious attempt, which in 1-out-of-12 examples doesn’t do much to fix the problem for the person making that admission. The effectiveness of further attempts is depressingly high. The medical profession ridicules poorly executed attempts as “a cry for help.” If that were true, it’s pretty obvious that crying for help in the direction of American medicine is misguided. You might as well ask a tiger to care for a baby lamb. If US doctors don’t see a dollar sign swirling around your head, they’re not interested.

Outside of the drug profits, all of this self-destruction is socially expensive, too. The estimated US suicide death expense was more than $44 billion in 2010. Even the failures are far from cheap, costing about $2 billion for medical care plus $4.3 billion in lost wages and productivity and other costs. In a so-called capitalist society, you’d think the shear expense of suicide—successful and unsuccessful—would make us do something about all of this self-destruction. Don’t get me wrong. We’re not the worst, most suicidal, country in the world. In fact, we’re #30 behind such wonderful places as Greenland (#1), Lithuania, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Russia, Poland, and South Africa. Also, we’re slightly less self-destructive than Japan, Belgium, Finland, Austria, and France. The top ten suicidal countries have some pretty amazing rates of self-destruction from 83/100,000 down to 20/100,000. From there on, though, the next 50 slowly decline in self-annihilation from 20/100,000 to 10/100,000. The USofA is pretty much in the same territory as Bulgaria, Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic, Cuba, Romania, and the UK. Apparently, political and economy systems are disconnected from suicide rates. Neither capitalism, monarchies, fascism, communism, socialism, dictatorships, democracies, anarchy, order, rich, poor, middle class, rural, urban, suburban, and every other description I can use with which to describe a society seems to produce relatively the same rate of self-hate.

Greenland, for some reason, is a standout with 1-in-4 Greenlanders attempting to kill themselves every year and with the world’s highest rate of self-destruction. Greenland’s streets are decorate with signs advertising suicide prevention hot lines, “The call is free. No one is alone. Don't be alone with your dark thoughts. Call." So far, that tactic has been ineffective. People, especially teenagers call the hot line and discover that they are, in fact, alone. We are all alone in ourselves. I suspect that, once they hear the usual perfunctory “we are all in this together” drivel they are even more inspired to put an end to their misery.

In the last couple of decades, I’ve lost three friends to suicide. For a while, back in the 80’s, it seemed like everyone I knew was contemplating—out loud—suicide and taking a shot at it. Supposedly, suicide is “catching” and I’ll admit that knowing people who have checked out for a variety of non-medical motivations makes considering the option a little easier. Malcolm Gladwell calls that a “contagious idea.” That’s possible, but I doubt nearby suicides are the cause of following events.

The fact that the sacrifice needed for any hope of a cure for depression is to suffer the slings and arrows of exposure, stigma, ridicule, followed by even more isolation looks more suspiciously causal to me. Asking for help when the brain doing the asking is the source of the disease is not much different than requiring a cancer victim to administer his own radiation therapy. That is, of course, unacceptable. Because if we admit we need help, we’re weak. If we can’t fix ourselves, all by ourselves, we’re just like that “crazy McGovern VP.” Americans can forgive drunks, drug addicts, cowards, liars, criminals, draft evaders, traitors, National Guard A.O.W.L. rich kids on a bender, complete idiots, greedy bastards, adulterers, and every sort of low life. But our society is incapable of forgiving people for mental illness. In fact, we’re going backwards. The general distain for a “mental illness defense” is evidence that our societal tolerance and compassion for the mentally ill is going backward. Texas and Florida appear to revel in executing the mentally ill and a few other states are showing signs of jealousy.

I don’t think any of this bodes well for any honest attempt at attempting to contain our suicide epidemic. And, if we were capable of honesty, it’s pretty obvious that any physical disease, product, or activity that caused this kind of death, destruction, and expense would be front page news and Fox Views and the other panic generators would be freaking out.

¹ Hippocrates, Aphorisms, Section 6.23

#98 Redneck Conservatives

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

[This is another old rant, pre-Rat, in fact.  The original piece was published in the Orange County Register, in 1986.  I discovered it in a fit of hard disk sterilization and it seemed appropriate to this year just as it did during the Reagan years in SoCal.]

The onslaught of "redneck" conservatism is prompting me to write this.  A combination of the micro-minded (I apologize for the Communist metric term.) state representatives Dornan, Ferguson, and their supporters, the comments of the Contra Costa County District Attorney (DeBeer, L.A. Times, 6/22/86), the insidious attack on free speech that the Meese commission's blackmail represents, and our pitifully confused president's defense of his awful court selections have overwhelmed me.  I am under personal pressure to defend the "real" standards that America represents.  Standards that were expressed and well documented by the "real" Founding Fathers; not Reagan's contra imitations.

First, I want to establish two definitions. 

The Right often applies the descriptive terms "Bolshevik", "commy", "red", "pinko", and (when they are feeling sociable) "socialist" to any opinion and opinion-holder on the liberal side of George Patton.  When this scale of analogy is applied to themselves (as in "Nazi", "fascist", etc.) the right wing acts like they have been horribly wounded.  Tough.  If you can't take it, don't dish it out.  On an unnecessarily civilized scale you good ole boys are practicing vicious forms of argumentum ad hominem (personal slander) and ignorantiam (ignorance).  If you can't be restrained to argument by the logical rules of debate, don't expect your opponents to be so shackled. 

The second defiled word that I want to reclaim is "conservative".  The present political definition of "conservative" is a fundamentalist, anti-human rights, supporter of the loudest, most macho posturing demagogue (unless the "conservative" is that demagogue, then he simply supports himself).  Webster's has a more satisfying definition; "a cautious or discreet person...tending to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions...marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners."  I believe that definition applies to many of the people that the right opposes and few of the politicians they support.  Especially the last section; "elegance, style, or manners" are in short supply from the far right.  Take a look at the Times picture of Dornan and Ferguson (Hayden, L.A. Times, 6/24/86) for examples. 

I think any intelligent reader of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Whitman, or Thoreau would be forced to link Tom Hayden's positions closer to a true "American" stance than the rantings of Bobby Dornan or the posturing of Guilt Ferguson.  The difference between the quality of Dornan's "a liar . . . a coward . . . and a traitor" (or Dornan's ranting at a closed door, "I am a member of Congress!") and Hayden's "My country, let me right the wrongs" should shed some light on the subject.  These two "conservative" politicians remind me of another phony patriot's heroism.  Anybody ask where "Rambo" was during the Vietnam period?  He wasn't hiding behind twenty layers of officers and enlisted men, but he was safely in a foreign country exposing his chest at a girl's school.  It doesn't take courage to assume a right-wing stance. 

This country is full of simple people, who will follow the man who tells them they are "number one".  They will follow him off the tallest cliff top.  Hitler didn't go against the popular grain.  Dornan and Ferguson know where the prevailing winds blow.  They know the cost of fighting the crowd (They may not have a motive, though.).  History contains a long list of men without morals and/or wisdom who followed the chanting of the masses.  It does not present them well.

I can't give a retired general much credit for patriotism.  Possibly radical protectionism, but not patriotism.  Scores of these profiteers parade their self-claimed heroism after short twenty-year careers of poor quality middle-management while having their every whim catered to by enlisted boys.  Then, using the guise of "sacrificing servant", they double-dip into the public coffers with civil service careers or political ambitions; paid for by the companies whose over-run, pitifully-designed products their mis-managing allowed into the cynical military industrial simplex.

Military men are military men.  They aren't about ideology and it doesn't matter which side they are on.  For them, the struggle between right and wrong is reduced to tactics and firepower.  If our imagined invaders leave anybody in place, it will be the middle-to-upper military management.  It would not be cost-effective to replace them, since they won't need re-training or expensive additional linguistic education.  If they are left in place (or slightly re-sorted) they will carry on as before with a few new phrases to shout at their fool soldiers.

During a recent conversation about the real or imagined threat presented by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, I began contemplating what changes would occur from such an invasion.  The most radical right-winger's scenario goes along these lines: The far-right often uses examples of what sets us apart and above the "communists".  Freedom of speech and press is often example numero ono.  I've noticed that "conservative" politicians seem to be in the forefront of censorship's fan club.  I suspect that they are merely honestly interested in their own comments and would be strongly in favor of shutting the rest of us up.  Freedom of religion is close to every rightist's heart.  Especially those fundamentalist types who offer the rest of us the freedom to join their religion or find somewhere else to live.  And we can take our radical, pornographic, or un-nationalistic free press with us!  Their interpretation of these freedoms seems to closely resemble the freedom another Mr. Christian offered Captain Bligh. 

I could be missing something, but this all seems suspicious.  It has been often noted that government officials are most interested in limiting access to documents that chronicle their foul-ups and criminal actions.  I suspect that the government officials in the Kremlin who are responsible for the notorious communist press repression are the same kind of people that are interested in that sort of authority in our own government.  In fact, I suspect that, if the Russians could have non-violently overthrown our political system, they would employ the same people just to simplify the language difficulties that a new government would face.  Walt Kelly and Pogo might be even righter (no pun) than ever with "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."

From sometime in 1986

#97 Management Perks and Necessity (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

From the working class employee’s perspective, "upper management" is the portion of the company that has no purpose.  The higher-ups attend every party-time trade show, personal improvement seminar, and marginally work-qualified travel junket the company can afford.  They often attend events the company can’t afford.  In many organizations, a "need/not needed" formula can be applied to the company’s positions: “the people who are required to do work are necessary, the people who are are not are expendable.”  Using this formula, you may find that most of your company’s executive branch is expendable. 

For example, assembly personnel are logically required to be at their work stations on time, every day, for the whole day.  They have to be in place because they are part of a  process that allows for no surplus staffing.  Many executive positions are allowed total freedom of  arrival and departure.  They don’t have to be in place because the company will function just as well without them.  Their absence is often an improvement in the workplace.  Using my formula, these executives are expendable and the assembly personnel are not. 

I’m not interested in why business works this way, it just does and every company generates its own reasons for executive existence.  “They were there first,” is as good an explanation as you are likely to get.  What I am interested in is the few managers who actually want to make a contribution and don’t know what that contribution should be.  So, if you believe you “deserve” your big office, your tiny work load, and your out-of-proportion salary, find something else to read.  The rest of this article is going to continue to insult you and question your value to your company, the economy, and world ecology.  If you want to make an important contribution to your company and employees as a member of what Peter Drucker calls “the management class,” please read on and I hope to repay your effort.  You are a rare bird who needs help to avoid extinction. 

A simple perspective every manager should take is, “What services do I manager provide to the people who work for me?  Do those services justify my existence to them and to my own managers or customers?  How do I add value to those services so I can continue to justify my existence and increase my value in the future?”  The answers to those questions will return an answer to the next question, “What am I worth to my customers?”  You can replace “customers,” with employees, supervisors, other departments, and the end users of your product or service.  In most companies, the customer is the enemy; no matter where he comes from.  In a well run company, customers come from every direction. 

In the usual organization, the only real customer inside of the organization is the CEO, owner, or Big Cheese.  If Cheese has lost that critical bit of perspective, the company will exist soley to provide for his gratification and only the foolish dedication of a middle manager or two will drag out the company's painful death.  If Cheese has at least some grasp on reality, he or she will give some direction to the people who do the work and that will contribute enough to the company direction to prevent bankruptcy.  If your name is Cheese and your style falls in these two categories, either you go away or your company will; it’s only a matter of time.  If Cheese is one of those rare birds who recognizes and promotes the company’s real customers, the problem becomes a matter of pursuing excellence with some real hope of achieving it. 

How do you know if your company is mismanaged?  If you are the mismanager, you probably don't have any way to know, because your employees won't be honest with you and you aren't likely to be honest with yourself.  But positive answers to the following questions are a good sign that your company is troubled:

• Is there more than one corporate vice-president? (If the country only needs one, and no one knows what he does, why do companies need more?) 

• Are the executives more inclined to play golf/tennis/etc. than to do work? 

• Does the company tend to have "jeans days" when the execs are on business trips? 

• Do people act cautious when you're around?

• Get resources, protect from other managers and customers, play politics?

• Do unsigned memos about “dysfunctional companies” appear on your desk? 

The most important thing to remember about managing is "power corrupts."  If you know that your position is corrupting you and you attempt to limit that effect, you have a shot at doing something positive in your position.  If you pretend that it can't happen to you and ignore your power abuses, you will drift into uselessness; eventually becoming a person the company can do without.   

September 2004

#96 Hairy Jealousy (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The older I get the more I notice idiotic little things popping up in my psyche.  Thirty years ago, I watched “suits” march off to work and marveled at how robot-like they seemed.  While I was not exactly a freak, I was confident in my safe distance from the average working man.  I had hair over my shoulders.  I wore sandals to work.  I played guitar and wrote stories and read science fiction.  I was cool.  Thirty years later, I was a minor league suit.  Monday through Friday, I wore a tie and shoes that are less comfortable and more socially acceptable. 

More than the tie and dumb shoes, I think a sign of my sellout is that I sometimes caught myself thinking another man’s long hair is “unprofessional.”  You know the guys I’m talking about.  The lawyer with a ponytail.  The computer programmer doing a Jim Morrison imitation.  The dreadlocked engineer.  It only passes through my mind for a moment before I snuffed it out, but it irritated me that it was there, ever. 

I admit that a lot of  the origin for the thought comes from my work environment.  I’m was an engineer in a medical devices company.  There is probably no more stodgy, uncreative, mindlessly, conservative business in the world than those companies producing products for doctors.  No one with half a talent world ever work for an established medical devices or drug company, because those places are so stifling that ideas slip out of their hands like a bar of buttered, wet soap.  In a medical products company, “unprofessional” means anything from not being properly dressed to discussing screwed-up  products out loud.  You can stumble into more “career limiting mistakes” in that business than you can on a battlefield.  People are judged by microscopic social errors and inane business traditions and surviving every workday is a painful test.  So we get really critical of diddly, unimportant things.

But that isn’t what the hair thing is about.  Long hair is a completely different “professionalism” issue.  Being successful and letting your hair grow flaunts male modesty.  It’s a way of saying, loudly, “I don’t give a damn what you think. I don ‘t have to kiss anyone’s ass.  I’m talented enough, or rich enough, that don’t need this job.” 

Men don’t mind brilliant or rich men who conform, like the rest of us, to robot-ness.  But it really annoys us to have our own menial, gutless, slave status thrown back in our faces.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Arnold Swartzenegger, and the majority of rich, famous guys respect this ritual.  They wear uncomfortable, geeky looking clothes.  They cut their hair so short that their ears protrude from their heads like microwave antenna.  While we might resent their wealth, we never have to resent their freedom.  For some of these guys, the richer they get the more enslaved they look. 

That’s comforting, from a sick, pack animal kind of logic.  That’s the way it should be, as far as the herd is concerned.  Don’t show off your wealth and your freedom, pick one and keep the other hidden from our view.  We can deal with a long haired dude flipping burgers or pushing a broom.  A pony tail and a Mercedes is too much of a blow to our pride.  Success and freedom are so far out of the reach of the average working stiff.  We don’t want to think about what we’ve given up to be useful corporate fodder.  So keep your hair under your hat if you don’t want to be called “unprofessional.”  Like you’d care.

September 2004

Boomers Are?

Last night sucked. I’m taking a woodworking class in Winona and the “class” has turned out to be a woodshop free-for-all. Nothing wrong with that, although I’d have appreciated a little more instruction and structure. Most of the “students” are 50+ year-olds who have taken the “class” a dozen times for the access to the tools and are building a variety of furniture bits for their homes. Considering how far I’m driving for this class, I’m not learning nearly as much as I’d hoped. I suppose that’s how education is supposed to work.

The class starts at 5PM and ends at 9PM with a break at 7-7:30. Last night during the break I had to listen to a trio of crackers (including the instructor) jabber about how much they hoped someone would assassinate President Obama and the current Pope. Obviously Faux News drones, but not the kind of people I’m used to being around.

And that’s for a reason. My tolerance for stupid has vanished in the last decade. I don’t do well with superstition/religion, racism, cowards, chicken hawks, or ignorant crackers who think the United States is a territory of the Israeli nation. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin debating with them. Their knowledge base is so limited, perverse, and arrogant that they barely seem human to me. A couple of short conversations with those people and I start thinking about my dream retirement home in the side of a Montana mountain. It’s not all that comfy, but I never have to worry about visitors and the ones who make it past the “trespassers will be shot sign” discover that I’m not kidding. When I move into that abandoned mine shaft and set up house, do not come visiting.

To be fair, these three old white guys are somewhat likeable if you can keep their minds focused on work. They are moderately helpful, reasonable skilled carpenters. One of them is a retired 62-year-old rich farmer, who is mostly trying to prove how hip he is by playing with the school’s state-sponsored tools while complaining about having to pay taxes for stuff. He’s a southern boy who considers himself to be hip because he likes black blues musicians but hates President Obama and black people in general. He’s convinced he’s going to “heaven” because he’s reborn and really gets testy when I mention the camel through the eye of a needle thing. He contributes $22/month to some crippled vets thing and a larger pile to his politically-based church and that’s his guarantee to an eternal life at the right hand of one god or another.

The instructor is just a simple, small-town, working-class racist. He thinks he’s hiding his racism behind a political ideology, but his take on the US Constitution is so demented that he couldn’t out-debate a smart ten-year-old in a fairly managed civics discussion. He’s pissed off about Obamacare/Romneycare because he thinks his state-provided health insurance has been degraded by the ACA. Like many of the folks who are on the public dole pretending to be “public servants,” he’s against all parts of the government except the ones that provide him with a middle class life.

The third leg of this unstable stool is a religious nutbag who is convinced the Apocalypse is coming “because gays.” Yeah, that sentence doesn’t make sense, but either does this doofus. Like too many Boomer males, this idiot is pissed off that the world doesn’t have to bow to his perverse version of Christianity and that people can’t be made to behave in a manner that doesn’t make him uncomfortable. Just like my decision to assume that everyone who “doesn’t like Obama” is a racist, I’ve decided that everyone who freaks out about gays is in the closet. Everyone.

A good bit of the breaktime conversation was about how much better off the world would be if someone assassinated President Obama and the Pope. Then, they got into a heated, ignorant discussion about how far off base Pope Francis is getting and my comment that “he’s awfully Christian, isn’t he?” went right over/under their heads. The crazy third leg went off on gays and lesbians and the Apocalypse and the loony rich guys started babbling about being reborn as the only path to heaven, regardless of his wealth, greed, and general uselessness to humanity and nature. The instructor just muttered about how much he hated Obama and barely kept “niggar” out of his ranting. (Fuck you and your “n-word” bullshit. We all know what you assholes want to be saying and don’t because you think it proves you are civilized.)

The interesting part of the crazy guy dialog was when the rich asshole started ranting about how Obama wasn’t taking the ISIS “threat” seriously and the religious nut joined in with insane talk about nuking ISIS. The rich guy pretended to be questioning modern patriotism and asked if any of us thought US citizens would “pitch in” against a common enemy, like we did in WWII. I’d checked out, by then, but I should have said, “Nope. No way the 1% would allow a 90% top tax rate to pay for a war. Rich people mostly take from society. They get pissed off when they are asked to contribute more than voluntary tips to the servant class.”

I drove my 60 miles back home last night thinking, “this is a waste of my time.” I hauled the bits of my project back with me, thinking I’ll finish it up on my own equipment. I’m still waffling on deciding if I’ve had enough of this or if there is more I could learn for my money. One thing is for sure, there are way too many people like this from my generation and if people under 40 don’t vote like no American generation their ages have ever voted, they and we are all fucked.

#95 Going Postal, a Rational Response (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

If you talk at any length to those of us who works for a large company, you’ll eventually hear some comment about “going postal.”  When you dig a little ways into why they might use this language, you’ll find that they may not be kidding.  Even more to the point, it probably makes sense to consider that line of thinking.

The U.S. Post Office, for instance, is not much different from the worst-case major corporation.  The working class is stressed, strained, and maligned by a management class that is unskilled, unsympathetic, and rarely available or useful. Post Office employees often complain about working under conditions where they are treated as not much more than a part of the machinery.  Management considers their employees' lives to be of no more importance than the junk mail they sort and deliver.  People are hired and fired and reassigned for the strangest, most irrational reasons imaginable.  People are put into situations where they snap.  When they do, they sometimes come to work heavily armed.  They “go postal.”

Using the classic Western model for heroism, the lone gunman who finds protection from injustice by blasting his way through the bad guys, going postal may not be an irrational response.  We are surrounded by a barrage of major powers that don’t care about justice.  The workplace is just the first in a long line of conflicts where we are helpless to put things right.  From the IRS to the welfare system to chain stores where we return defective products to minimum wage workers who could care less if we “have a nice day,” we are powerless to find a fair deal.  If Bruce, Arnold, Sylvester, and the other muscle guys can shoot their way out of impossible situations, why can’t the rest of us? 

Let’s face it, there is nobody out there protecting the ordinary citizen. The people who are supposed to be protecting us are just in it for the power and money.  We’re like Joseph Heller’s man in the street crying “Help, police!” hoping someone will step up to save us from the police, lawyers, employers, government, and our violent neighbors.  But we’re alone against those hazards.  No can or will help us fight those battles.

The Dilbert^© cartoon constantly illustrates what life in corporate America is like.  A mindless herd of marching management morons make decisions that destroy the companies we depend on.  MBA pinheads who know more buzzwords than an Air Force general, but who don’t meet that same low common sense standard, decide what we do and when we do it for the majority of our waking hours. 

That’s no small portion of life, either.  Someone estimated that, out of a 30 year working career, most of us get 1 1/2 years away from the job before retirement.  You work until you're mentally dead, you retire, you die.  What a life!  If anything puts the phrase “wage slave” into context, that ought to do it. 

If we screw up and step over one of the thousands of boundaries that define the margins between legal and illegal, the penalties often make the Spanish Inquisition look like the good old days.  We are under threat of imprisonment or poverty for more causes than Sam Clements ever imagined back in the 1800’s when he analyzed the English penal system and found a few hundred capital crimes.  We have crime in the streets, in business, and in government.  We have redefined capital crimes in the twentieth century.  Unless you are a case-hardened criminal, going jail isn’t just “paying your debt to society.”  In the U.S., when you go to jail you might as well be dead.  You can get hung, gassed, or injected through a direct sentence.  You can get any of those things, indirectly, as part of a minimal sentence in our over-crowded prison system.

With the exception of Tim Allen and one other guy whose name escapes me, jail time is pretty much the end of any hope for a normal life in this country.  Rehabilitation is a concept that only applies to white collar prisons.  The rest of us are tossed to the wolves.  So the only honorable way out, when backed into a wall, may be going postal on the folks who built the wall, put you against it, and laugh at your predicament when they escort you to the door.

September 2004

#94 Exit Interviews, Why Bother? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

It seems like every company is doing exit interviews these days.  Supposedly, the reason is to learn why employees are leaving, to slow the turnover.  Exit interviews are about as likely to accomplish that task as Congress is to reform campaign finance.  The problem is that the people gathering the information don’t know what to do with it and the people who need the information don’t want it.

The simple fact is that ex-employees are not going to burn bridges in today’s competitive job market.  Even if the exiting employee doesn’t expect to ever return to the company, he still may want a good reference.  Telling the straight truth about ex-bosses, past projects and products isn’t going to make friends and it isn’t going to accomplish anything.  Most likely, it won’t do anything at all.

Most company’s Human Resources departments are so insular and isolated from every other department in the company, that the results of exit interviews die in the employee’s personnel folder.  HR departments are the most resented, bureaucratic, unresponsive area of many companies.  Middle managers avoid contact with their HR representatives at all costs.  Upper management has organized its HR departments to confound communication, not enhance it.  HR managers are extremely successful at this assignment.  With all these obstacles, is it any wonder that exit interviews are regarded as nothing more than a mindless hurdle on the way to the last paycheck? 

The first HR department, at Ford Motor Company, was managed by a processional goon, Harry Bennett.   The original purpose seemed to be to find the optimum methods to abuse employees.  Today, they are a lot more subtle than their predecessors, but the function is not significantly different. 

August 2004

#93 WHAT THE HELL GOOD IS PUTTIN' ALL THE JUNK IN SPACE? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

[This is a fantasy short-story I wrote some time ago, during the end of the Reagan years.  I decided to dump it into the Rat Rants because I didn't know what else to do with it.]

The Russians and the Americans decide, in a fit of teamwork, to "utilize the resources of our two great nations" and split the cost of a manned space station and giant radio telescope.  The Star Wars program is scrapped as part of the deal.  Since the government never gives up funds it has managed to tax out of the public, the funds are spent on the space station.  The space station gets finished and the two nations have more tax money to spend.  They spend it on a space manufacturing facility.  The two nations' research and development industries have been working a lot on space and a little on consumer/industrial products.  They are working smarter and at an elevated technical base after closing their mil-industrial facilities and moving the really valuable engineers to more productive tasks.

The Russians and the Americans are once again the world leaders in technology.  They move all polluting manufacturing tasks off-planet.

The Japanese want part of the economic pie.  The Americans and Russians are wealthy enough to buy great toys and the Japanese want to build great toys.  The Japanese are not afraid of the Russians and not controlled by American regulations.  The Japanese begin SALT XIII negotiations with the Chinese and Koreans.  With Japan in the lead (barely), the Eastern block begins work on a space bridge, with facilities in the center of the span for zero gravity manufacturing.  The bridge is complete in 6 years.  The bridge is profitable in 10.  The Eastern block makes great toys for the Americans and Russians. 

The American consumer market is very wealthy and can afford to share the wealth.  The Russian consumer market is about as profitable as the American market was during the 1960's.  Many developing countries test the new Russian market for consumer products.  The Russians and Americans have perfected space habitats and are considering terraforming experiments on a twin planet in Alpha Centauri.

The West Germans and East Germans get united because the Russians have their eyes on the sky and don't pay attention to terrestrial boarder shifts.  The Germans collaborate with the Swiss to "keep technology in the hands of artisans who are concerned with workmanship."  They make tremendous gains in superconductor and particle force theory and develop a superconductor-based generator that powers a drive that harnesses the anti-mass characteristics of the atom.  They are commercially competing with the Eastern block for the 50 year East/West reunion. 

The Eastern block has made ownership of space habitats a cost-effective, consumer product.  Thousands of families move into the asteroid belt to work and live in the non-national manufacturing facilities. 

The "Keep Terra Clean" movement restores natural balance to the earth's environment and life forms.  Thousands of acres of rain forest are re-planted.  The atmosphere of the earth becomes controlled and the ozone is re-designed to be 100.000000001% efficient.  The oxygen generated by the system is sold to the space colonies.   The rare gases, metals, minerals, and chemical combinations are sparingly parceled out to the colonies.  This trade finances a cottage industry based, high-technology, back to nature life-style economy throughout the earth.

The Americans and Russians are somewhere out there.

You want to know why all the space junk is floating around the planet?  That's why we did it!

#92 Voting Ourselves Rich (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Our democracy is on a cusp.  The last statistics I read, several years ago, predicted that by 2000 more than 30% of the working public would be employed by government offices.  I believe we've whipped past that percentage, like it was a parked car, and are heading off toward 50% in the next few years.  Our "conservative" spend-and-spend (as opposed to liberal tax-and-spend) politicians mis-leaders are building a government that will be more total than anything communist Russia ever conceived.  From local to federal government offices to all areas of education to military service to the myriad of government contractors who serve the whims of bureaucrats, we have created a monster of government in this country.  After government underwent a few years of shrinkage during Clinton's administration, that odd Bush brand of Republican socialism has brought back big, arrogant government with a vengeance.  We're going to see a lot more of Big Brother before we ever again see less of that evil monster.

Excessive government employment is a sign of a failing economy and a fallen culture.  There has been a lot of babble about a "service economy" in the last couple of decades.  Much of that hype is disguising the fact that the overwhelming majority of "service employees" are civil servants.  Civil servants, like most employees of local or national government, primarily serve themselves.  Very few of the concepts of customer service or accountability filter into government offices.  But that's not the worst aspect of mindlessly growing government.  The fatal flaw in our current system is that government employees can vote themselves into becoming the idle moderately-wealthy majority.  In many ways, they already have.

Since a very small minority of working citizens vote, as few as 20% during a non-Presidential election and no more than 40% during Presidential elections, it's possible for the highly organized civil servants to elect their candidates for every office, at every level of government. 

There is no profit or productivity statistic for government employees, but there should be.  A way to put productivity into the national equation is to remove government employees, all of them, from the employment statistics.  Consider every single government employee, elected or otherwise, as unemployed and make it a national cause to put them on the employment roles.  If we can decide on the actual purpose of the government and, then, stick to making government perform those tasks, we could instantly start reducing the size of that monster.  The best way to improve any system is to measure it and the way to measure national productivity is to only consider "working" folks as working folks.  People on the dole, either goofing off on the welfare roles or wasting resources in city, state, or federal buildings, should be on the unemployment roles with no 6 month period where they are removed as "permanently unemployed." 

September 2004

#91 Revolting Developments (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Do yourself a favor and read a book.  Not just any book, but this book; There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, by Jim Hightower.  Jim is one of those characters that corporate/political America would label "a bleeding heart liberal."  Jim calls himself a "progressive."  Anyone who meets this ex-politician, sometimes talk radio host, unashamed Texan would have a hard time labeling him as anything other than an immensely practical American.  Which is pretty much all it takes to be defined as liberal in this corporate right-wing environment. 

If you think corporations should pay for the environmental damage they do to the health and property of others, you're a pinko-commie liberal.  If you think that cutting government costs should include cutting corporate welfare, eliminating tax breaks for the ultra rich, and returning government agencies to their intended tasks of protecting citizens and the country's best interests instead of acting as corporate PR and legal defense hacks, you're a left-wing, socialist liberal.  At the core, the American majority is liberal, but they are so indoctrinated to believe that philosophical stance is a bad thing that they mislabel themselves as conservatives and shoot themselves in the foot on Election Day, year after year.  And the rich get richer, the government becomes less concerned with "by the people, for the people," and we become more like the countries most of our ancestors fled to come here. 

It's easy, natural, and understandable to give up and say, "What can I do?  The voters are idiots, the politicians own the political system, the big corporations own the economy, and my tap water is so polluted that my whites are no longer whiter."  In human history it appears that regular intervals, somebody, somewhere, comes to the realization that the Powers that Be only exist at the will of the working classes.  The ability to manipulate the effort and ingenuity of people who actually accomplish work is all that provides them wealth and power.  More often than not, the someone who comes to this realization is simply driven to become one of those manipulators and that sort of "revolution" is about as revolutionary as repainting an old car.  We have that sort of revolution, every 2 years, in the US.  We call 'em "elections," but they have become something more like paint jobs. 

The 2000 and 2002 national elections were among the shoddiest paint jobs in American history.  If the next few years don't spawn some sort of reaction from the middle, working class I think it's safe to say we've seen the beginning of the end for American dominance in world economic and political affairs.  If we can't run honest, democratic elections, we can't demand the respect of countries that can.  If our corporations become money laundering institutions for international corporate criminals, working people will find other places to invest their money.  If government loses the faith of working people, the value of our currency, our trade, our position in the world will devolve to nothing more substantial than fear of our weapons of mass destruction. 

Without respect, fear is a double-edged sword.  Fear motivates opponents to resolve the emotion.  You can't remain afraid of a school yard bully without either trying to run, hide, or find allies and strike back.  That's true for our country, too.  American citizens are once again considering immigrating to more neutral countries, Canada being the most popular.  Hiding isn't an option, so fear and terrorism are the likely to increase if we continue on the international bully path.  France has been more successful than anyone would have imagined at turning the European Union's attention from the north, Russia, to America.  Islamic fundamentalists are rallying followers to protect themselves from undirected the US's 9/11 retaliation.  If Islamic countries join with the EU against the US, we will have isolated ourselves from a large portion of the world community.

August 2004

#90 Parking in the Red Zone (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day
One of the many signs of a management vacuum is the institution of assigned parking.  Execs, ignorantly and arrogantly, convince themselves that they need their names on a parking spot as a symbol of corporate dominance, sort of like pissing on a tree to mark territory.  It ought to be obvious to anyone with a frontal lobe that any exec who arrives for work so late that he can't find parking is really demonstrating how unimportant he is to the business. 
In fact, I think a smart stock buyer would consider checking out corporate parking lots to see how many assigned parking spaces are unfilled each morning.  The more empty spaces, the more deadwood in high places.  For that matter, the existence of assigned parking out to be one of the statistics a corporation should be forced to publish in its financial statement. 
The managers just about anyone can agree are worth their weight in parking lot paint cans don't need assigned parking.  They beat everyone to work and can park anywhere they want to park in an empty lot.  Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, David Packard, and the ever shrinking collection of execs who know their business and get things done, practically lived in their offices during the period when their presence actually made a positive difference in the function of their company.  Nobody contested their parking rights because nobody else was looking for a parking space when they arrived at work. 
The concept of assigned parking, in reality, punishes the rare inspired employee who is motivated enough to be at work early.  First, it's likely that someone that driven will have an armload of work to carry into the office.  Two, it's de-motivating to trudge in from the hinterlands past all those empty, named spaces knowing that wasted real estate will remain unused until the morning golf game is finished.  Three, assigned parking is rarely assigned based on anything valuable to the business.
Sometimes handing out a named parking space is an act of management cowardice or neglect.  I have worked for three companies that provided spaces to execs' secretaries.  Not because the secretaries were valued employees, not because they had work to carry into the office, but because they were nasty, ill-tempered people whose bosses were too gutless to fire, reprimand, contradict, or refuse when the secretaries asked for perks they had no reason to receive.  [I'm sure you're surprised than an exec might be cowardly.]
By far the most gutless parking assignment I've seen was self-generated by a janitor.  He was able to mark his spot because he had control of the can of paint used to label parking spaces.  Now, I'm waiting for you to top that for non-existent management.
August 2004

Confusing Signs

A recent ATTN.COM article shrieked, “The State of Millennials' Finances Says a Lot about Our Economic Recovery.” The article ticked off the scary signs of a failed economic recovery:

• Low trust, lower savings.
• Higher education means higher costs
• More education, fewer jobs...?
• Underemployed and undereducated?
• Decreased buying power

It’s pretty clear that several of these complaints are contradictory. Lower savings means decreased buying power. Which is it? Higher education or undereducated? After a thousand words of whining about how badly the poor Milennials are being treated by reality, the article admits, “Despite hardships, Millennials remain uniquely optimistic about the future. But at the same time, data shows they are relatively unattached to political organizations. Last month, almost 80% of young voters sat out on the midterm elections.” Finally, this last bit isn’t confusing at all. Two clear characteristics about Millennials are clear: they are lazy and they are entitled.

Before you get your panties in a wad and whine “we’re not all lazy,” I know. Nothing of anything is all anything. However, it’s also true that 90% of everything is shit. The shit the Millennials represent is specially sorry. In my opinion, nobody has ever been braver, more on-target, or more politically creative than the Occupy Wall Street kids. I would put their energy and dedication against any generation’s social protest movement from the 1900’s labor movement to the Vietnam protests to the civil rights movement. Occupy is heroic and very Millennial. The other 99% of that generation can’t be bothered to crawl out of their parent’s basement for breakfast.

In conversations with several realtors regarding selling our 1.4 acre, 1900 square foot home, we have been given the same message repeatedly, “Young buyers are lazy. They do not see the potential in anything that will require them to do work. Fix everything, replace everything that needs replacing, paint everything, and sterilize the place.” When I asked how that would play out with the 1.4 acres of yard that needs at least 3-4 hours of work every week to stay reasonably under control, they all said, “That’s in the fantasy zone. They will imagine themselves able to take care of a park because it fits their delusional fantasies. Just make it look neat and don’t talk about the work required to do that.”

In a moment of despair a friend commenting on her kids’ inability to drag themselves out of their parents’ home and begin their own lives, she said, “They want to start off where we ended up.” I’ve seen a lot of that, too. I taught at a technical college for 12 years and the resistance to learning core skills was impressive. How these spoiled, lazy children expected to make a living in an industry (music) that was not only in severe economic decline but that has always been highly competitive completely evaded me. As expected, most of the school’s graduates ended up in completely non-music related businesses doing the sort of tasks they could have been doing without any education at all.

Supposedly “youth unemployment is stuck at 17.7%.” I wish I could say I am surprised or that I believe the economy is at fault for this sad state of affairs. However, the fact is that I wouldn’t hire many of the people I had in my classes for menial labor, let alone the skilled labor they pretended to be training for. The fact that Congress is working hard against the best interests of that group of citizens (and the rest of the 99%) is in large part the fault of this huge non-voting block. The 18-40 managed to drag themselves off of mommy’s couch to elect Obama in 2008 and to a massively lesser extent in 2012, but they failed in their responsibilities in both the 2010 and 2014 elections and have no grounds from which to complain when the Republicans trash their future by overriding Obama’s vetoes in the next two years. This bunch of coddled kiddies want to blame Boomers for their problems, but they’re going to find that when the Boomers are gone their own kids will shift that blame to their own parents who are going to do what they’ve always done; whine and screw off.

#89 Marketing Wizards (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The Internet economy died when marketing gurus decided that website ads were ineffective.  How they made that decision is about as logical as all of the rest of marketing decisions. 

Take, for instance, television advertising.  Nothing costs more than television advertising, except government.  How does a company know its advertising dollar produces income?  The Neilson rating system.  How do the Neilson ratings determine a program is "popular?"  The folks with the Neilson monitors have left their TVs on a program for at least 5 minutes.  Those five minutes don't have to be five minutes of advertising, either.  Just any old five minutes will do.

Pretty scientific, don't you think?

Last year's ABC attempt to buy Letterman to replace their evening news is based on the idea that people will go to bed, leaving their boob tubes on ABC (and Letterman, who certainly bores me to sleep), and wake up to Diane Sawyer or some talking head selling widgets.  If you turn on the tube, head for the bathroom, and leave the box on that channel for five minutes, up go the Neilsons. 

What would you spend for the science behind that kind of advertising clout?  Personally, I'd rather have a website ad. And I'm not convinced that website ads work, either. 

Obviously, ads do something.  Otherwise, George Bush II wouldn't be in office.  He sure wasn't elected based on performance, capability, intelligence, or good looks.  He's proof that most Americans don't know "What me worry?: Alfred E. Newman from "E=MC²" Albert Einstein. 

Marketing gurus seem to think that the 18-35 year old male is especially stupid, vulnerable to advertising, in other words.  I guess it's possible that 18-35 year old males elected Bush. I have to say that's a disturbing thought.  I wouldn't put that whatever group who elected GWB in charge of parking my 35 year old pickup.  That rust-bucket still has some practical value.

August 2004

#88 Making a Case for Intolerance

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

U.S. citizens are probably the most persecuted group of humans in the history of the world.  Every once of us is a member of some kind of minority.  If we're not, we pick a hobby that makes us a minority.  If we're the ruling majority, we make a law that classifies us as a minority and we run with it.  Whatever group we belong to, no matter how small or weird, we expect that group to be honored as a minority and to be respected as if we are making a valuable contribution to the culture.

One of my hobbies is motorcycling.  Less than 0.5% of U.S. citizens own motorcycles.  Probably half of that group owns a Harley that is mostly unridden, either because it's broken or because its owner is investing a small fortune in customizing the bike and it hasn't been completely assembled since the early years of the Vietnam War.  So, an optimistic estimate of motorcyclists on the road, paying license taxes, contributing to air and noise pollution, amount to a measly one in four hundred citizens.  That's a serious minority.

I live a few hundred feet from a freeway.  I know that's not smart, but it's something I've mostly come to terms with.  I can safely say that a disproportionate contribution to my neighborhood's noise pollution comes from motorcycles.  The blast of motorcycle exhaust noise often overwhelms the blat of semis, the boom of rolling ghetto blaster pickups, and the other 399 of 400 vehicles on the road.

You'd think that noise pollution, alone, would make motorcyclists a bit apprehensive about their status in the vehicle culture.  Because of our minority status, we seem to be more arrogant about our social standing, if anything.  We have successfully overturned noise pollution requirements, helmet laws, emission standards, and common sense through political action and a lot of whining. 

That appears to the standard practice for all sorts of minorities.

Christians represent 5% of the religious world, but that doesn't keep one sect of Christians from acting like the Pope is the true ruler of the universe or another sect from believing that their favorite wild-eyed evangelist is God's only direct spokesman.  Christianity isn't alone in this sort of "my universe, love it or leave it" fantasy.  In fact, it's hard to find a dominant religion on this planet that isn't similarly deluded.  Taken individually, every one of these religions and sects of religions are a minority but they have taken their minority status and turned it into a political advantage, in their own minds.  Combining martyrdom, fanaticism, terrorism, and secular nationalism into a frenzy of self-delusion, the world's minorities create pockets of majority status for themselves. 

Like US motorcyclists, this sort of deluded outlook often gets run off of the road by reality.  Combining nationalism with religious minority paranoia is scary stuff, though.  That throws what Mr. Bush calls "weaponsh of mash disrushon" and a higher power's justification to use those weapons into the mix.  We're now operating at the intellectual level of "my god is tougher than your god." 

Another country operated on this level of paranoia in 1936 and their national delusion became a reality a few years later when all of the folks they imagined hating them really did hate them.  Germany followed a nutball, paranoid, I'm-doing-God's-will wacko all the way into World War II, under the justification that they were a picked-on VIP minority.  Crazy people are specially noxious when they collect in large groups and begin sharing their fantasies.  Sane people tend to want to put walls around them, isolate them, and remove their access to weapons and pointy objects.  Or blow them up.  If we don't find a way to police our crazy people, the rest of the world is going to start wondering if they need to do it for us.

August 2004

#125 Merry Xmas (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day
Scrooge has nothing on me.  "Bah, humbug," would be the nicest thing I can say about this phony, greedy, superstitious holiday.  I grew up in a tense, unbalanced Midwestern home where this particular holiday brought out all the worst in our tension and imbalance. 
Giving and getting presents was only a part of the stress.  Like most Americans, we were driven by guilt to spend every nickel we had on things that the receivers would want nearly as much as a case of the clap.  Like many Americans, the "festivities" were wrapped in superstitious semi-Christian ritual designed to make every freakin' moment as guilty and unpleasant as possible. 
In my old age, now that my kids are grown and living happily (I hope) in their own families, I do my best to avoid everything about this nasty commercial ritual.  Of course, the superstitious aspect of Xmas is lost on me.  I'm not Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, so the Jesus, Jehovah, Mohamad, or Superman myths are just a collection of sheep herders' tales amongst a long, long list of sheep herders' tales that have complicated human history and rational thought since the first caveman painted a space ship on a cave wall and claimed that someone had stuck a probe in his butt. 
I can't escape the guilt crap of being a Midwesterner.  I still buy something for everyone I love.  I try to convince myself I go through this ritual for some reason other than the ones that actually motivate me.  It's not true, though.  I'm as guilt driven as I was when I was a child in my father's house.  I'm just fighting harder to reclaim this dreary time of the year from the marketing scumbags who currently own the period between Thanksgiving and Xmas.  I figure that the more people I can convince to do the same, the fewer marketing jobs there will be and the better the rest of us will live.  Or something like that. 
I'm not mortified enough to try and pretend that I like Xmas, though.  I am upfront about how much I hate this stupid holiday.  I'm not talking about dislike, distrust, or distain, either.  I mean I "hate" Xmas and everything it stands for.  Xmas is not about love, sharing, compassion, friendship, family, or faith.  It's about greed, power, control, guilt, and fear.  Scary people trying to sell garbage and superstition to timid people who hate their lives so much that they spend more than they earn to massage their guilty, selfish hearts for long enough to make the scary folks a little richer and more powerful.  Even buying some little thing for the people I love is contributing to the things I dislike the most about my country.  Someone stronger, more patriotic than me would completely ignore the holiday.  A person worthy of the title of "American citizen" would go public in his dislike of this holiday and do everything in his power to break the chain.  I guess I'm public now, maybe I'll have done some damage to the chains in my own life.  You are free to work the links of your own chains.