“What Do You Think Will Happen?

The wrong question at the right time.

I was having lunch with some friends a few days ago and, after discussing the disgusting state of US affairs for a bit, someone asked “What do you think will happen?” As a fair student of history and a chronic pessimist, I tried to avoid answering that question. And I managed that for the whole of lunch, but I couldn’t help thinking about what my answer would be.

Mostly, I see a long period of rapid economic, social, intellectual, and national security decline in store for all of us, and not just the United States. As I’ve written before, the fact that there are 76 million gullible, low-information, low-education, and amoral voters in this country means we’ve hit “critical mass” of stupid. Personally, I think that fact will overwhelm any hope that the “3.5% Rule” will save us. I could be wrong and I hope I am. Describing the exodus of Americans to various countries and continents, Diego Luna (hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live”) recently described the huge increase in US citizens moving to Mexico and other countries with, “Your main export is now yourselves.” He’s only partially right. Our main export is “smart people.”

In light of all that, I think a better question is “What do you think should happen?”

I think a lot of things should happen, fast, if the United States’ citizens want to stay united, and not fall into 3^rd world economic and political status, and rebuild a government something close to democratic. The two-party system has to die and the only clear path to that is Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Republicans hate RCV for all of the worst reasons. RCV removes many of the financial incentives behind our flawed and non-representational elections. RCV gives alternative party candidates (and voters) a reason to take a place at the political table, instead of just being an occasional election spoiler for one of the two sides (which makes them ripe for outside interest interference). RCV is non-negotiable. We either overhaul our constrained and privately-owned election system or we continue our fall into kleptocracy and oligarchy.

In every state in the country, rural areas are very dependent on urban areas for every aspect of their comfort and, even, survival: from road construction and infrastructure to much of the taxpayer financing of small towns. In spite of that, rural areas and states are grossly over-represented in state and national governments. Cities need to break that pre-Civil War chain. Detroit has nicely demonstrated that, if urban areas are left alone to create their own food supply, rural area contributions (and necessity) are superfluous. Most west coast cities could be even more food-independent and rural areas don't have much more than commodities and meager amounts edible food to contribute. Corporate farming has depended on federal handouts to be profitable for . . . ever. The Western states (the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and the eastern edges of California, Oregon, and Washington) are totally dependent on government handouts and corporate environmental pillaging, all financed by urban taxes.

Commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and alfalfa are animal feed and removing the welfare checks for beef, pork, and fowl would make cultivated meat competitive instantly and, likely, decimate rural economies. There goes what leverage rural areas have, outside of politics. If rural economies want to survive, they will have to learn to express a bit of gratitude to the cities for their economic existence.

Those are all things that should happen. What I suspect will happen is the fragmenting of the old USA into several smaller, less powerful, less economically significant, less important countries.

Trump is far too lazy and arrogant to respond to a secession, especially by a state or city that clearly hates his useless ass (I’m talking about you, New York.). So, that’s not an unlikely possibility. Trump’s administration is fully stocked with inexperienced, corrupt, lazy sycophants who couldn't put down a dinner-time rebellion from their own children (Especially Musk, since he has 14 of them and they all hate him as soon as they are old enough to know what a deadbeat he is.). Trump’s minions are fairly good at posing for stunts and photo-ops, but civil war? I doubt it.

When this four-year term shakes out, the USA will barely be a 3rd world nation in every respect and there will be sufficient motivation for the blue states to split off and the dependent, low-tech red states will be helpless and economically failing. Skilled citizens (doctors and healthcare workers, scientists and engineers, educators, etc) in every state are almost all democrats (small "d") and if the MAGA crowd were wiped out by a plague, no one would miss them, or even notice they are gone, and the nation's IQ would rise sharply. Skilled labor immigration to the blue state countries from red states would further decimate the MAGA nations. Those states will be wishing that the blue nations still had a version of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), because they’ll need it. It won’t be there to save them, though.

If it happens, Putin will have accomplished far more than he'd hoped for in promoting, funding, and infesting the Republican Party and propping up Trump’s fake businesses for the past 40+ years. A divided USA is already a shadow of its former self and when (or if) it falls apart, Russia will be competing with China for the remaining world super power position. The former USA states split into 3-6 smaller nations will only be formidable, in any part, if California is able to hang on to its current economic status (the world’s 4^th largest economy) and creates some kind of unity with the rest of the Left Coast. Between chronic economic dependence, low education levels, historic reverence for servitude, and the effects of climate change, the Southeast and much of the Midwest will suffer continual decline and a brain drain of anything resembling talent to the blue states.

And that is what I think will happen. I don’t want it to happen, but I don’t see any other scenario that is more likely.

One Way Streets

 As much as I have disparaged religion, especially Christianity as it is “practiced” in the USA, I understand the motivation; at least some of them.  At almost-80, more of my lifetime friends are dead than alive.  I think about them, a lot, when one of them dies, but after a few years my memories coalesce into a picture so dim and two-dimensional that they become little more than stories that I either told or heard.  That can be a scary thing, if you are convinced that the universe can’t get along without your “contribution.”  Any rational look at the known universe makes it perfectly clear that the universe has no idea that there is life on this planet.  As Douglas Adams explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.  I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” 

The speed of light, alone, is incomprehensible to 99.999…% of us, at 300,000km/second.  So incomprehensible, that science fiction and space invader (UFO) fanatics invented worm holes to get around the fact that the nearest barely-possibly inhabitable exoplanets to Earth are “Proxima Centauri b,” about 4.2 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus or, more likely, Gliese 667Cc at 22 light-years from Earth.  Theoretically, faster-than-light (FTL) travel is impossible, thanks to the speed limit set by E=mc².  Humans are so desperate to believe that we have a shot at immortality and importance to something larger than our little spot of life amidst the vast empty vacuum of space that even marginally rational, non-religious people skip over impossible hurdles to fanaticize and romanticize our importance. That’s how desperate we are to “matter.”  

In common-use numbers, a light year is so incomprehensible that it is practical to use scientific notation to describe that distance, 5.879x10¹² miles (about 6 trillion miles) or 9,461,333,376,000km. NASA's Parker Solar Probe manages 430,000 mph (692,018 km/h), at its nearest approach to the Sun, which is “approximately 0.064% the speed of light.  430,000 mph is pretty inconceivable, but not even in the vicinity of the speeds necessary for practical travel to another habitable planet.

Clearly, most Americans can’t even get a grip on much smaller numbers, like a billion or, even a few million.  A substantial portion of the uneducated, barely-employed American public barely bats an eye at the incredible wealth of the richest Americans.  Not because they have any idea of how twisted our rigged economic system is, but because they are mathematically clueless.  Let’s take the world’s richest, most-perverted man as an example.  According to the latest estimate, Elon Musk is worth $369 billion.  The entitled, son of a South African gem mine owner is 53 years old and he started his adult working life when he was 23 years old, as an illegal immigrant on a student visa without a work permit.  He has been “working” for 30 years and, with tongue in cheek, I’ll pretend he worked at least 40 hours a week without vacations (choke, gag) for those 30 years.  That means he has spent 62,400 hours with his weird plastic surgeon sculpted nose somewhere in the vicinity of a grindstone.  Making all those assumptions means he has collected $5,913,461.54 per hour for 30 years.  As of March, 2024, the Social Security Administration found that the “(over 50 years from age 20 to 69)  . . . overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women” in the United States.  Musk has managed to game the system so that he has collected 3-4X the average American’s lifetime income every hour of his working life.  And that, for some reason, inspires envy, not outrage, because most Americans operate at barely a 3^rd grade intellectual level, which is exactly the education and intellect that the major news networks shoot for. 

Other than very limited travel outside of North America, I have no idea how aware the rest of the world’s inhabitants are compared to the US.  I admit that, other than Alberta, I have been impressed with Canadian citizens and haven’t found them to be as dimwitted, violent, and uninformed as my Midwestern rural neighbors. If the rest of humanity is as gullible as the US, humans are doomed to extinction and we’ll probably take this solitary green and blue globe with us.  And that is probably the closest to we’ll be to being significant in the universe: we wiped out life on one of the few planets where it existed. 

 

Wingnut Blindness or Illiteracy?

 This is a review left by a wingnut non-reader (typically unwilling to list his real name) on my local library’s website: 

The book is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  Apparently, cello9flute made it all the way to page 23 before his tiny, “like new, barely used”  brain ran out of storage space.  I’m assuming cello9flute is a guy, but maybe it’s a flute that is half cello?   Nearly ¼ of the book is about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, hardly a right wing authoritarian, but the problem with being wrong at this level is that it is hard to tell the far right from the far left because they always meet when their tactics become identical.  It takes a special kind of snowflake to be insulted by Obama’s statement explaining the bitterness of rural America after years of job loss, declining economic mobility, and marginal education, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."  That is, simply, the truth and is more true today than it was in 2008.  The characters who “would rather be Russian than democrat” are clearly uneducated, anti-American, and “deplorable,” even if they aren’t smart enough to crawl into a basket.  If you are so blinded by cult-loyalty that you compare those words to Trump’s insults, name-calling, and constant lies, reading books past page 23 is likely to be an impossible task. 

The part of that review that stuck in my craw was “you will never raise future generations to support democracy if you teach them in schools that the country was founded on genocide and is irredeemably racist.”  The first part of that statement is obviously a fact, the country “was founded on genocide.” The entire European invasion of the Americas was obviously based on racism and accomplished by genocide.  In the Americas, 20 million indigenous people were murdered by guns, germs, and steel.  That isn’t even debatable, it’s a fuckin’ fact.  Up until the 60’s, every American Hollywood movie about the “settling of the west” celebrated the killing of indigenous people and the pillaging of the continent for profit.  The second part, the “irredeemably racist” claim, is a typical wingnut red herring intended to hide the fact that the author may be incapable of admitting his own racism.

Forty years ago, I was managing a manufacturing company and we were trying to compete in the new six-sigma world of dramatically improved product quality.  As part of our internal systems improvement, my Quality Manager started posting defect charts along the assembly lines.  Initially, practically every station had its own chart.  The charts were maintained by the assemblers and were, mostly, a record of the defects and errors that landed at that station from the previous assemblies.  Some of the defects were from earlier processes and some were from design and manufacturing process issues.  In Manufacturing Engineering, we were trying to identify what to work on by using the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) and those charts were how we sorted our priorities. 

As in most companies (even small ones), the Sales, Marketing, and mismanagement goobers rarely ventured into areas of the company where work was accomplished.  But after a few weeks of posting those charts one of the Sales executives wandered onto the assembly floor with a customer and, immediately, went whining to the CEO’s office.  His argument was that by posting our problems where “anyone could see them” we were damaging “customer confidence” in our products.  Like cello9flute, the sales-goober was convinced that hiding problems was the same as fixing them.  I wasted way too many hours in several pointless meetings explaining to our CEO and Marketing/Sales mismanagement how stupid that argument is and how years of shoveling problems under the rug had created a collection of product problems that only appeared as customer complaints, assembly line work-arounds, and other out-of-sight and out-of-mind expenses.  “You only fix problems that you know about” is the key to any sort of quality control system, but the lethargy of the previous generation of manufacturing mismanagement had led the country to where “quality” meant Japanese products.  In the 1980s, American manufacturing companies were desperately trying to learn the skills that American quality experts had taught Japanese manufacturers in the 50s and 60s.  Step One is “identify, document, and prioritize problems.” 

If we want to be a functioning, sustainable, progressive (as opposed to regressive) nation, we will have to do something about our institutional racism or we’re going to be “irredeemably racist.”  Obviously, people like those who voted for Donald Trump on a blatantly racist platform are likely to be “irredeemably racist” and proud of it.  There is no hiding that fact from anyone, except those who pretend it doesn’t exist.  They are also “deplorable” and tend to delude themselves by clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them . . .”  And they are blatantly anti-democratic to the point that they don’t know the difference between being a “democrat” or “democratic” and “Democrat” or even being a member of the “Democratic Party.” 

This mental disconnect is so complete that when Florida Governor DeSantis’ lawyers were asked to define “woke” in court, DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, proudly spouted that it is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."  He added that DeSantis doesn’t believe such injustices exist.  I have quoted that statement several times and it is mindboggling every time I read it.  That is either a monstrous level of ignorance or “irredeemably racist.”