Led by A Pack of Stupid Hyenas

The United States, in the past year and a half, has demonstrated an incredibly careless attitude towards National Security, the economy, the environment and climate, science, and resource management. When the dumbest people in the country scrape the bottom of every barrel they can find until they find the dumbest candidate available, this kind of stuff happens. I suspect it happened to the Romans, the Greeks, the British, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires, certainly to Nazi Germany, and to every other Empire that rose to great heights and fell into oblivion. Of course, it didn't have to be that way for the United States and it probably didn't have to be for the other great failures in human history. Although it does seem like empires attract idiots and we’re certainly proof of that. 

In many of those examples (probably all), the central flaws in those failed societies were racism and nationalism. According to Webster's, nationalism is "an ideology that elevates one nation or nationality above all others and that places primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations, nationalities, or supranational groups." There is almost no upside to nationalism, but there are plenty of downsides. At least in a low technology ancient society, falling behind the rest of the world isn't much of an issue. When human knowledge doubles ever century or two, it’s not hard to catch up.  In a 21^st Century society, falling behind is an extinction event for the country’s technology, industry, trade,  competiveness, and education system.  And a lack of awareness and acknowledgment of worldwide problems, such as climate change, rapid technological change that threatens established economies (ie AI, for example), economic inequality that threatens World stability, and the always looming possibility of a World War are only problems in a modern society. We, of course, are living in that modern world with all of those threats, but half of the country wants to wish or pray away the hard stuff. Our leading political party, known as the Republican Party in the United States and as the American Fascist Party to the rest of the world, has deluded itself into imagining that ignoring worldwide problems is a practical tactic.

This isn't by accident. The fact is none of these worldwide problems are amenable to a national solution. There is, obviously I hope, absolutely no practical solution that the United States by itself could apply to climate change. None. Not one. This is a problem that was created by industrialized nations carelessly using fossil fuels and ignoring the science and the growing signs that we are pushing the world’s climate towards becoming inhospitable to human life. (Obviously, a whole bunch of other animals are going to die off too.)  Pretending that global warming/climate change is “a hoax” is beyond stupid and is risking the whole world’s safety for the profit of a few. 

During the first Trump Administration, I got into a social media discussion about climate change.  (I know, “stupid, stupid, stupid!”)  The conversation started when a polar vortex had dipped down well into the Rocky Mountain states and a lot of people were claiming that those frigid winter days were proof that climate change, global warming, was “a hoax.”  In a conversation with one of those people, I described the vortex phenomenon as "global warming with local weirdness" as an explanation for why the surface of the whole planet might be warming while local areas could experience temporary lower than normal temperatures. And the response was, "Idaho is local?" (Seriously.)  Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that Idaho makes up less than 0.042% of the surface area of the planet and the fact that this person probably didn't even take into account the weather in the entire state, the comment Illustrated the obliviousness of this group of people.  Yes, Karen, Idaho is a local area, barely significant even in North America. 

I recently read a book about the gigantic geological fault that runs from Alaska into Central California, Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami that Could Devastate North America, by Jerry Thompson. The state of geological science isn't anywhere near good enough to make accurate predictions of when earthquakes may occur, or how severe they will be (but this one could be as large as a 9.0), but the science is certainly good enough to point out where they are likely to occur and how often, in the past, they have happened before. And while I read this book, I'm trying to imagine what the Trump Administration's response would be to an earthquake that caused trillions of dollars of damage, destroyed a half dozen major American cities along with hundreds of smaller towns and villages, killed tens of thousands of Americans, and displaced many more. If you are a certifiable member of the MAGA cult, you probably see Trump doing some stupid, impossible superhuman crap. The rest of us will have a hard time imagining Trump and his “administration” of fools making one intelligent decision in a crisis, let alone the thousands of intelligent decisions that would be required in this kind of crisis. 

Most likely, if this kind of disaster or any other major crisis occurred, the whole Republican Party would point fingers at Democrats and scientists for not preventing them from having to be useful.  Nothing enrages conservatives more than having to do stuff. 

Post Mortem: Pointless Practicing

Like all of the "Post-Mortem" essays, this one was intended to be auto-published after my death. I've intentionally let one of two slip past that target, but as long as I can reset the publication dates on these things I'll keep pushing them back until I can't.  Damn it, I'm still alive in 2025, so it goes back yet one more year.  

August 2, 2017 

Modern, at least American, medicine and doctors are a curious mix of uselessness and hope. The things that doctors and medicine are useless at are the important things and the things they cling to a claim of value for are hopeless. Crippling arthritis that inhibits your ability to use your hands for everyday necessities? Forget it, medicine is useless. Don’t even bother asking for help because none exists. Cancer of a vital organ or even several organs? Well, maybe, if you are willing to subject yourself to surgeries, radiation, and toxic chemicals and almost certain poverty and debt regardless of your insurance situation.

Forty years ago, I ripped out the fingernail of my left hand’s middle finger and that fingernail never grew back in any useful form. A couple of years ago, while helping my wife move a plant from a friend’s home to ours. Turns out, that plant (Snow on the Mountain) is a toxic relative of poison ivy. My wife experienced a nasty rash on her face that cortisone shot quickly stopped then cured. I am allergic to cortisone, so I tried to treat the growing, painful rash on my hands with a variety of ineffectual over-the-counter medicines, natural treatments, and a lot of whining. I went to the doctor, but was told that I was pretty much on my own since their only solution, cortisone, was not an option. The end result was that my already mostly frail and undependable fingernails began to develop a fungus that turned them into even larger handicaps. As you might suspect, there are no practical cures in modern medicine for nail fungus and I’ve been left to deal with that on my own.

And tinnitus. My constant companion for at least 20 years. Medical “science” has found absolutely nothing to combat tinnitus, but there are no shortage of non-functional tactics upon which you can pay big money for even bigger disappointments. For a long time, it was a slight background noise only in my left ear. It was enough of an irritant that when I spent time in an anechoic chamber in St. Paul several years ago I mostly thought about the first time I was in such a chamber and how, after accommodating myself to my own rushing blood and cardiac sounds, I became irritated at the asynch heart beats of the three other people in that chamber with me. No such problem 40 years later. Thanks to that constant tone, I probably couldn’t have heard someone else’s heart if it were in my hand, held next to my ear. Then, a few years ago, an inattentive evening spent in a Red Wing club and I was left with much louder and more irritating tinnitus, now in both ears. No thanks to what passes for “modern medicine,” there is nothing to be done about it.

Likewise, when my hands began to wither and twist into uselessness from arthritis a few years ago, other than pain medications, modern medicine takes an “oh well, that’s too bad” approach to my problem. I’ve had an orthopedic surgeon take x-rays and shake his head in sympathy and my regular doctor tell me “it’s just part of aging.” No comfort or relief from either of those “diagnosis,” but there is a reaffirmation that medicine is helpless to deal with problems that can be easily measured like rotting nails or disabled hands.

This week, my aging symptom is a return of my double-vision problems that first occurred last year about this time. At that time, my diagnosis was that the muscles that coordinate my eyes into a coherent single image were simply wearing out from age and over-use: my left eye has always been grossly near-sighted which exercises those muscles unusually. My diplopia was treated, at that time, by adding prisms to my glasses prescription. That worked pretty well until this last week. At least for the short term, I’m wearing an eye patch over the eye that is mostly useless for the task at hand: the right eye when I’m reading and the left eye when I’m driving. That was a “fix” that cost me $7 on Amazon.com. I’m sure Mayo Clinic’s solution will be more expensive and, possibly, less effective. I am learning how to close one eye without tensing up the muscles of that eye and causing ever more headaches than I usually experience. The end result is, so far, a diagnosis of "ocular myasthenia gravis." Still, no real solution for the double-vision but a very expensive prescription medicine.

So, as a result of my last year’s (2018) physical, my doctor noticed that my Prostate-specific antigen ( or PSA) level was around five. Supposedly, anything over four is a concern; a warning factor for cancer. I’m seventy-one now, so “concern” is a relative term. Pretty much everything about my body is turning into a warning factor of some sort. I hurt everywhere. My physical limitations abound. I am seventy-one, pretty close to, or slightly past, the terminal age for someone of my economic class and genetics.

I watched my father degenerate from an active person who regularly played tennis and golf well into his late-60s into a couch potato who was so physically limited that his only “activity” was to sit a few inches from a big screen television and try to pick out the action from various sportscasts. He hated his last two decades of life and only his fear of death—an odd characteristic for someone so religious—kept him alive for at least a decade of suffering. My father went through several surgeries for cancer, a couple for what turned out to be a misdiagnosed thyroid problem, and at least two for various cardiac problems. Not one of those surgeries or procedures extended his quality of life and I doubt that any of them did much for his longevity.

The chances that I would submit myself to any sort of elective surgery, exploratory or remedial, are tiny-to-nonexistent. Broken bones and open wounds aside, I consider almost all surgery to be “elective.” I have zero faith in an industry that can’t fix small, obvious, important patient problems but claims to have miracle cures for the big stuff; cancer and cardiovascular diseases. This is, after all, a medical industry that regularly creates complicated drug addictions by prescribing medications to offset the effects of medications. It’s almost impossible to find an addictive compound that at one time the medical industry and the people who will only “practice medicine” for their entire careers didn’t claim was not addictive: from barbiturates to stimulants to synthetic heroin to depression and anxiety medications. If you can trust the opinions of a group that is so wary of its own expertise that life-long professionals only claim to “practice medicine,” good luck with that. I have been up-close and personal with some of the richest and most incompetent physicians the country has to offer and I wouldn’t trust most of them with a sharpened pencil.

Breaking Stuff Is Easy, Making and Fixing Is Impossible (for conservatives)

 

American conservatives have a long and well-earned reputation for not knowing how the things that they break worked before they broke them. Now, they have added a lethal weapon to their wildly-wielded ball peen hammer: ignorant, entitled nepo-baby, insanely lucky billionaires who have no clue that they were lucky or that their luck was undeserved. In a few mindless months Musk, with his collection of DOGE boys, set the United States back decades. In fact, any reasonable person would have to suspect that Musk has a political and economic connection to Putin, his DOGE-damage was so complete. One small part of the intellectual decimation Trump and Musk have unleashed upon the United States was well documented in this Substack post: CANADA JUST RAIDED AMERICA'S GREATEST MINDS LIKE A SMILING FUCKING ASSASSIN.  And, as awful as that story is, it’s just the tip of the US Titanic’s iceberg. 

The article describes the evacuation of "sixty-four research chairs, half a billion dollars over eight years, roughly a million a year each, for the kind of people America spent decades and obscene fucking fortunes training." The only disagreement I have with the  article is the wildly hopeful prediction that the United States could make a comeback by restoring trust with only "a decade of adult behaviour.”  Of course he moderates that hopefull prediction with the facts, “nobody with a functioning lab, a mortgage and a career’s worth of unfinished work is betting all three on Washington locating a decade of adult behaviour down the back of the couch. . ."  And that’s just to restore our best and brightests’ trust in their own government and fellow citizens.

"A decade," my ass. As the article mentioned several times, all of this expertise was built by generational careful planning and management. We're talking generations, not "a decade." It is, for me, impossible to imagine the shattered remains of the United States being adult and sane for more than 4 years and even that will be marginal. I realize this article was written by an Australian and Australia hasn't been a major contributor in any of these areas until incredibly recently. So, Maybe, the author just doesn't have a feel for how long rationality has to be sustained to build a functioning, world-class higher education system, an internationally respected scientific community, and anything resembling a national direction and purpose.

And that’s just a wild hope to rebuild internal trust and competence.  Eight years of Obama’s rational administration and the resulting guarded international hope that the US was turning a corner was practically blasted from international memory with Trumps insane self-promotion, boorish behavior, and consistent incompetence.  Four years of Biden trying to hold the country together with Republican Congresscritters doing everything possible to continue the national decay and disgrace did little-to-nothing to restore any hope that the US might be salvaged.  The 2024 election followed by 20 months of MAGA/Trumpian insanity undid it all and, without dramatic restructuring (like the platform presented by the Democratic Socialists of America), the country is doomed to slide into fascism fatally spiked by a fools’ oligarchy.  Canadians are even blowing off visiting their relatives in the US.  Whether this decline will be followed by another American democratic revival is anyone’s guess. 

I’m just short of 80-years-old and I have zero hope that the country will rise out of this sewer in my lifetime.  The shards of respectability and trust the US had, pre-Trump, was almost all bult during and immediately after WWII, with brief and mild recoveries during Democratic administrations.  Like Trump, Woodrow Wilson abused and ignored the Constitution so blatantly, dragging the US into WWI, that what small bits of goodwill American soldiers created in that “Great War” conservative American politicians decimated between 1919 and 1941.  Every Republican President since Eisenhour and done significant damage to the country’s credibility and trust, the working middle class, national unity, and the economy. 

Today, that same lack of understanding applies to a near majority of American citizens if not a solid majority. There's plenty of blame to go around, but I think the core problem is that the original European Invaders of North America brought with them severely flawed genetics and then doubled-down on those defects to produce a voting public that is impossible to educate, mired in 15th century religion and superstition, and irrationally proud of sun-intolerant skin color. Those core defects have also resulted in creating a country that attracts people of all races and creeds with the same flaws.

 

If We Eat the Rich, Who Will That Inconvenience?

Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

 

 

Elmo Musk is back out there challenging the average numbskull to imagine what the world would be like without billionaires.  This is the funniest part of the whole AI panic: the idea that when AI becomes prevalent, the average worker, skilled-laborer, healthcare workers, and everyone who keeps the wheels turning will be out of work and the hedgefund goobers will be at the top of the stack. 

Elmo hasn’t made a useful decision in his whole pedophile, nepobaby life and he’s the poster boy for the useless rich kid.  He thinks his money and intellectual “contributions” are what make his “businesses” work, but the actual business relies on the people who know how to code, design and build cars and rockets, can do the accounting and pay the bills, and sell the crap his companies build.  Every AI program in existence today would do Elmo’s “job” better than him in a heartbeat.  AI could easily be programmed to behave like an entitled, racist, selfish asshole, so it could replace Elmo in every aspect of what passes for his “life.”  Likewise, the hedgefund banksters don’t “contribute” anything useful to the businesses they gobble-up, sell off the functioning divisions and assets, and overpay themselves (as “consultants”) and the deadbeat mismanagement they bribe into allowing the barbarians into the corporate castle.  Like Musk and the rest of the billionaires, they are leaches draining the life from the businesses they contaminate and the nation they are destroying. 

Americans heard this “you can’t survive without us” nonsense from “businessmen” who created government-funded monopolies back in the 1890s.  Luckily, after repeated economic crashes, depredations from the overbearing overlords of wealth that caused entire states’ economies and populations to collapse, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. became the 26th president of the United States and put a temporary end to the American Oligarchy.  It wasn’t the intention of either the always-flawed Republican Party or the Marching Moron American public to either elect Roosevelt or to stand on their rarely-used hind feet, it was pure and simple luck.  It was a well-placed bullet that took out the Republican establishment’s President, William McKinley, and dropped the right man into the right job at the right time for one of the few, brief, good moments in American history.  The inflation-adjusted “billionaires” of the day (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Hetty Green, Jay Cooke, James Hill, and a few lesser-known figures of American “royalty”) were just as convinced as Musk that the country couldn’t survive without them.  And they were also wrong.  

Labor, invention, science, and the necessities of life, culture, economies, and progress do not need the “influence” of gross wealth, they struggle to survive in the presence of them.  In spite of the “conservative” interference from stagnate, paralyzed capital held closely and selfishly by the entitled rich, actual progress can barely keep its head above the sewage.  Whether that wealth was inherited (Musk, Gates, Theil, Bezos, etc) and, occasionally, expanded on through luck and/or skill or initiated through hard work, luck, and innovation, once it is captured and hoarded by the rich and powerful it becomes a roadblock for everyone else. 

The uneducated MAGA crowd, who keep babbling about a time when “America was great,” are likely talking about the post-WWII era when the top income tax bracket was more than 90%.  That was when the United States, representing a few ideals that the rest of the world wanted to emulate, was at its most productive, creative, and optimistic.  Of course, the part of the 1950s that MAGA wants to return to is the Jim Crow racist bullshit because, even 1950s technology and education levels is beyond the capacity of Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” 

Obviously (I hope), the best way to “eat the rich” is to tax those useless deadbeat hoarders into insignificance and put all of that idle capital back to work rebuilding the country they tried to destroy.  When America was great, in 1950, the top federal estate tax rate was 77%, applied to net estate values that exceeded $10 million, working down to as little as 3% for smaller estates with a $60,000 estate tax threshold.  The purpose of inheritance taxes was to prevent an idle aristocracy from becoming powerful. Reagan convinced the Marching Morons that estate taxes were “death taxes” with a math-free argument that only made sense if you were either on the receiving end of the estate or too stupid to know how taxation worked (every MAGAot who ever lived).  It’s hard to imagine today, but those taxes were intended to pay off the World War II national debt (to itself and US citizens, not foreign investors) and to rebuild and catch-up on the time, prosperity, and progress lost during that war.  Since Nixon, US voters have been convinced that passing responsibility on to future generations is not only a right and privilege, but some kind of magical get-out-of-responsibility-free card in perpetuity. Without exaggeration, that is how fuckin’ stupid American voters are today.  

 Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

Wrong, Again

  

About 20 years ago, a good friend speculated that “We’ll be the last generation to enjoy global warming.”  As I’m sure you’d assume, we’re both Boomers and were expecting a sooner-than-later use-by-date, too.  The fact is that, regardless of Republican and Religious Right denials, the climate is changing at a record only beaten by giant asteroid planet-killing extinction event.  Of course, with Trump and Musk’s decimation of NASA and their Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the SpaceX and Starlink clutter, we could be in for a planet killer strike, too, and won’t know it until we see the billionaires heading for their rabbit holes.  This summer, if it is an example of what we’re heading into, has not been enjoyable.  It has been hot, dry, and even our semi-rural Minnesota city’s air has been as polluted by smoke and factory emissions as the worst I ever experienced in L.A. in Reagan’s environment-denying-and-defiling 80s. 

Seeing these kinds of environmental changes in my own lifetime is (and should be) startling.  For example, in the late-1970, I was working for an agricultural equipment company that maintained test plots in northern-central Florida.  Having grown up and suffered the “real Midwest” for all of my life, at that point, the only running water I’d ever seen that had any visibility at all came out of a tap and, even that, was cloudy.  One weekend off, one of the welders I worked with and I decided to canoe the Ichetucknee River, which was at that time the source of the most pure water in the country.  It was, in fact, like canoeing in a really large bathtub or aquarium.  We were surrounded by tropical plants and animals (especially the occasional alligator and snapping turtle and, often, several water moccasins) and, when our boat drifted over a spring outlet we could see scuba divers 30-40 feet down as clear as you can imagine.  That was my first experience with a canoe and it became one of my favorite, regular activities for the next 50 years.  However, in those same 50 years, Florida’s clear water springs and creeks have been decimated by agricultural pollution and over-development.  Florida is not and has never been a place anyone sensible would call “environmentally responsible,” but with 1,000 new residents every day the place is in need of a new, much larger handbasket in which to travel to hell.  You have to wonder if the dinosaurs were this irresponsible and that is what attracted the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Gulf of Epstein 66 million years ago and put an end to their overpopulation? 

One of the less-often-discussed reasons for climate change denial, not just in the uneducated, dumbed-down United States but in other declining and fool-filled civilizations, is that nationalism eliminates any possibility of international action to preserve a climate that humans can live in.  In fact, nationalism has zero answers for all complicated world-wide problems, so the only “logical” approach is to call those problems “a hoax” and ignore them until they are impossible to ignore and way beyond the point of no return.  That kind of “solution” works for bills that we can’t afford to pay, like the national debt or balloon payment home loans, why not for world-wide catastrophes?  Since the Nixon Regime, Americans have grown so used to putting off responsibility to the next generation that it’s just a reflex now.  We haven’t even begun to pay off the Vietnam War debt and Reagan treated the national debt like it was a pile of chips someone had given him to play with at a casino.  Carter, Clinton and, to a lessor extent, Obama made an attempt to convince Americans that either taxes had to increase or spending had to decrease before the debt became unsustainable (which it is far past today), but Reagan’s gift to the 1% of control of the national media kills that discussion before it gets real.  And, like global warming, we’re just going to let that problem creep up on us until someone with a bigger stick calls the debt due.

If we’re lucky, we might be the last generation to enjoy spending the American dollar, too. 

Happy 4th?

 I recently saw that half of Americans don't have any idea what they are celebrating on the 4th of July, “including 61 percent of Gen Z respondents.”  That is certainly consistent with my experience, with rural Americans and, especially, rural young people. On average, the "Proud to be an American" crowd doesn't have even the slightest idea what parts of American History they should be proud of and what parts should be causing deep shame and embarrassment. Worse, at least half of them don't have the capability of feeling shame or an obligation to make things better for anyone but themselves. 

 This is the crowd that, exemplified by Elon Musk, think that philanthropy, empathy, and community are obsolete concepts. If you want to put a circle around the people who have caused the United States to become a lawless trash can of fools and degenerates, this is the group you put your focus on.

 A few days ago, I was talking with a friend and we were trying to determine when our police departments quit cracking down on illegal exhaust systems. Where he and I live, the noise level is often bad enough to make us decide to pack up and move to someplace quieter.  When I was a kid, 60 years ago, every young man who owned a motorized vehicle, from scooters to cars, worried about the smallest pin-holes in their exhaust systems.  Any sort of unmuffled sound would get them stopped, ticketed, and it might even result in the vehicle being confiscated; if it was the second or third time they've been stopped for that offense. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most states performed emissions testing, which included visual inspection of vehicles’ intake and exhaust systems for illegal modifications.  When that ended, so did anything resembling law enforcement of vehicle noise laws. Today, it's impossible to tell the difference between a modified, aftermarket exhaust system and a straight pipe on a huge number of vehicles of all sorts, including vehicles that are absolutely illegal on public streets, regardless of exhaust system condition. Since I still read about cops making house calls when neighbors make a disturbing the peace complaint, I know the country hasn't gone stone deaf. We have just gone stone lawless. When, and why, did that happen?

 The answer to almost every question in these United States can be found by following the money. And there is certainly lots of money to be found in the illegal exhaust business. But that doesn't explain why people want that kind of lawlessness, and they seem to want it in large quantities.  First the Nixon Administration (with a major impeachment threat setback) and, then, the Reagan Administration demonstrated that the nation’s laws do not apply to the rich and powerful.  I will always believe that everything in human culture is driven top-down and that doubly applies for criminal behavior.  When the average Joe Douchebag saw that the people who run the federal government were unimpeded by any sort of ethics limitations and were filling their pockets with anything they could steal, he decided those same rules applied to him. 

 For more than 60 years, I thought the American Constitution was the closest thing to a sacred document, at least related to governments, that humans had ever created.  Then, I read it cover-to-cover several times in 2013 and 14, when I was trapped in a New Mexico Campground with a broken Volkswagen camper. Even not considering all the lines drawn through slavery protections, it's not a very organized or impressive document. The Declaration of Independence, the thing we are supposedly celebrating today, is even more flawed. Ignoring the fact that the document only acknowledges that "all (white) men" are "endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," a good bit of this celebrated document embedded vicious racism in the origins of the country.  The declaration’s final complaint being that the king refused to protect the European invaders from ". . . the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." The North American European invasion history that followed that document is best described as the largest, most ruthless, and blatantly racist genocidal campaign in human history. Add that to the lined-out provisions in the Constitution protecting and furthering slavery and we should probably be having a moment of silence rather than a raucous, drunken, fireworks-detonating celebration of 250 years of mortification and greed.

 That isn’t, of course, who we are today.  Instead, we are a nation divided and on the edge of another civil war.  Our federal government has been dumbed-down to accurately reflect the lowest-common-denominator in our culture.  After 250 years of trying to find the least-fit person to hold the office of Presidency, it’s hard to imagine moving that bar any lower.  Donny Trump’s rampant corruption, narcissism, mental deficiencies, and vile amoral behavior is a sad and scary reflection on who so many of our countrymen and women are today.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not celebrating this moment today.  I’m going to spend this day and evening at home with Ms. Day and my thoughts and hope that next year is better.  Or, at least, not worse. 

There Is No “Coming Back” from This

 With the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the country demonstrated how gullible, violent and vicious, unpredictable, and dangerously stupid the country is at its core.  After Trump and his minions attempted to violently overthrow the 2020 election results and the repercussions for Trump and what passes for Republican leadership proved to be non-existent, national credibility and trust took another huge hit.  The 2022 midterm elections were another demonstration of how awful a near-majority of the country are.  Regardless of the legitimacy of the 2024 national elections, and the outcomes were very likely fraudulent, the fact that 78 million Americans voted for a convicted felon with close ties to Russia and organized crime and put the American Fascist Party in charge of both houses of Congress and the Extreme Court has marked the country as “unstable” to the world.  Those were the latest nails in the national coffin. 

Nixon and Reagan started fastening the coffin shut 40-50 years ago.  By expanding the Vietnam War without Congressional approval and weaponizing the dumbest half of the population against the institutions, standards, ethics, and laws of the nation, Nixon began the countdown to empire collapse.  Even though Nixon paid a small price for his corruption and fascist moves, his minions (the entire Reagan Administration) exacted a price that really started the nation’s decline.  In eight chaotic, noisy, distracted years, Reagan trashed the integrity of the nation’s media, flipped the tax system to penalize talent, work, and usefulness as opposed to inheritance and financial gambling, formalized treason as a political tool, created an unsustainable national debt, and convinced the nation’s Marching Morons to repeatedly vote against their own interests.  Trump is the logical end result of the kind of self-serving, short-sighted, downright evil “businessman” politics that fascists have promoted since the Roman Empire. History repeatedly demonstrates that always results in the same conclusion. 

As Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, described earlier this year at Davos, the world is "in the midst of a rupture, not a transition . . . [and that the] middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.”  That our once-closest friend and neighbor is now warning the world that the United States is as unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous as the other major world powers (Russia and China) is as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described "uncharacteristically candid both for Davos and a Canadian." The Carnegie Endowment document said that Carney had "laid out, for all to hear, the catastrophic implications of Washington's current policies for global order and signaled that at least one erstwhile ally is prepared not only to hedge against an unpredictable and predatory United States, but, if need be, to balance against it.”  For the world, this is not a bad thing.  The United States has been an irrational force in the world since the turn of the last century when our government became little more than a military tool of corporations.  How our country has been perverted into a front for uniformed armed mobsters was eloquently described in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, “It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And in the next 93 years, nothing has changed except for the worse.  The best estimates are that the United States has successfully overthrown somewhere between 14 to 26 foreign governments (estimates, because our government’s actions are far from transparent).  Despicably, 6 to 10 of those covert, military international interventions were against a democratically elected government. And not a one of those intrusions was, as General Butler said, for the “two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.”  It’s time that the rest of the civilized world (the one we’ve abandoned) treats the United States as a threat, not a dependable ally. 

As Trump, Musk, and Theil’s minions wandered through the ranks of the federal government, purging “disloyal” (i.e. “competent”) federal employees from every institution from the Department of Education to the CDC to the military, the country has been dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator in one painful, ignorance-filled, destructive year.  I doubt that anyone thought the country’s intellectual capacity was that fragile, but here we are.  In February of 2025, when Musk’s DOGE idiots were plowing through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, one of the recently purged scientists described the damage done as a national intellectual “extinction event.”  That kind of destruction has been perpetrated across the federal government and the only thing Musk and Trump proved is that even total fools can break practically everything.  At the other end of that demonstration, they proved that total fools aren’t even capable of painting a shallow concrete pool. 

 Sadly, I’ve had plenty of experience with this kind of foolishness at a much lower level.  Unskilled, lucky fools who stumble their way to the top of the corporate ladder rarely know how little they contribute to the organizations they mismanage.  In their ignorance and arrogance, they plod through functioning organizations like hippos in a china shop, breaking stuff and spreading shit everywhere in the process.  Today, we’re experiencing that phenomena on a national level and the right reaction from the world is to gain as much distance—socially, economically, politically, and militarily—as possible from this train wreck of a nation.  The long term goal of the world should be to do whatever is necessary to disarm the United States before Trump or some other idiot starts pressing red buttons. 

Rising and Falling, All Over Again

 US history is a 250-year graph of long and slow degradation, followed by a crisis, followed by some kind of “resolution.”  It is nicely described in the Strauss–Howe generational theory.  I think this is best explained in a chart and this one is pretty complete, if not all that easily interpreted.  The first Anglo-American cycle began in 1493, with the Renaissance reformation and the current cycle began with the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  The anticipated outcome, in the chart below, from “WWIII?” is a list of consequences that Americans will not like but will, likely, be powerless to effect.  The high cost of allowing the “Alt-Right” to take the wheel is very likely going to be the end of the United States Empire, at best, and a large collection of irreversible calamities, at worst. 

So far, the “Spring: High” outcomes have been largely positive for Anglo-Americans.  As they say in investment warnings, “Past performance is no indication of future performance.”  We’ve been lucky to this point, but nothing about our system of half-hearted-democracy and a non-representational republic combination of oligarchy and kleptocracy has given the country any sort of moral or ethical advantage.  Our long history of superstition/religion, racism and inequality have done exactly the opposite and it is likely and justified that Anglo-Americans might very well end up at the bottom of the economic and political heap as a result.

So many things about this past dozen years have been labeled “extinction events”: of course climate change is at the top of the list, but the last year’s losses have more specifically been the nation’s ability to contribute to weather prediction, NASA’s capabilities and contributions, medical research, industrial and technological research and development, and national security.  One of the many things that the thick-headed crowd don’t understand is how complicated the world has become.  With human knowledge doubling every year and the volume of doubling every day or less, falling behind today has huge consequences.  The vast difference between the education and capabilities of the average citizen in blue states vs red is stunning.  There are claims that some red states are actually driving education reform. But the data is shaky.   In fact, having lived in several red states, and currently living in a red part of a blue state, I doubt the validity of their education claims.  One of the lessons learned in researching teams is that, in clinical hospital settings (for example), the teams that reported the highest number of “errors” also had the best surgical outcomes.  As you might expect if you’ve ever worked in a team, teams mismanaged by the worst leaders were afraid to report errors and, in those hospital situations, that produced higher patient injury and mortality events.  But they looked good, on paper, until you examined the paper.  Likewise, knowing the political climate of red states, I doubt that anyone down the chain (teachers, for example) are feeling free to be truthful about educational outcomes. 

I’m currently reading Andrew Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation  and the similarities to this moment are startling.  From corporate monopolies to direct financial ties between the 1% hyper-rich elites and government officials (elected and not) to a general atmosphere of moral and ethical corruption, top-to-bottom, to the morally ambiguous public tolerating and participating in the corruption, history is repeating itself.  Another way to look at the cyclic curve is the chart below.  It shouldn’t make you feel better or worse, it’s just the same data displayed another way. 

This is all just a numerical way to remind us that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and the rest of us are condemned to watch the same stupid shit happen again.  I suspect that, when Americans were in those three earlier periods of “unraveling” and “crisis,” it was hard to cling to hope for a positive future.  It certainly is today.  From every direction, the news and the dependability of the news sources is degrading.  Not only are the stories awful, but the reporters are even worse.