Morning/Mourning Styles

 

Ms. Day and I have been together for almost 59 years.  You’d think some of our personal “styles” would have merged or, at least, compensated, after a lifetime together, but you’d be largely wrong.  I don’t buy much art, since my house has been “decorated” by a compulsive and impulsive artist so that nearly every open spot on the floor or walls displays something.  When I saw this ceramic tile at one of our favorite Wisconsin galleries, I had high (and foolish) hopes that it might be more than a hint, “a fun thing to do in the morning before I have my coffee is not talk to me.”  Syntax aside, that seems like a simple request.   

I wake up fully introverted.  In a perfect world, I’d wake up in an unheated, un-electrified cabin at least 100’ from the main house.  On cold mornings, I’d get out of bed about 9AM, toss some kindling and a couple of logs into a woodstove, put a coffee pot on the stove, and go back to bed until the room warms up to about 60^oF.  Once the coffee is percolating, I’d get dressed, make the bed, choke down my pile of pills with a cold glass of water, assemble a bowl of cereal with fruit, pour a cup of coffee, and sit near a window to write and eat breakfast.  Sometime around 11AM, I’d leave the cabin and wander down to the house to start the rest of the day.  Until I walked into the house, I wouldn’t have had a word of conversation with anyone. 

In the morning, Ms. Day practically hits the floor talking.  She wants to talk about her dreams, the last half-dozen things she watched on YouTube before going to bed the previous evening, and the living room television set starts blasting streamed cartoons, nonsense “documentaries” (usually about aliens or bullshit archeology), or last night’s talk show monologues.  “Cacophony” best describes my usual morning soundtrack.  I have a decent set of over-the-ear, noise-cancelling headphones that I’m usually wearing by 8:30AM.  The phones take the television noise down about 30dB and, if I add some light ambient noise or music, it’s almost like I’m not living in a trashcan manufacturing factory.  Even those large, black headphones are insufficient clues to Ms. Day that I’m trying to ease into the day. 

Likewise, when it comes to emotional loss we have very different styles.  Both of our mothers died, when we were young, in slow misery due to cancer.  Ms. Day was 15 and I was 9.  Without the strong guidance of her mother, Ms. Day was a lost child and her father was less-than-useless as the “adult in the room.”  She was sent to live with hostile, rich relatives in New York while her father tried to drink his way to the next phase of his life.  When my mother died, I was an angry boy who was forced to pretend to be grown up enough to manage myself and my little brother, while our father hid in his high school classroom “grading papers” until long after we’d fed ourselves, cleaned up, and put ourselves to bed.  He tried shuffling us off to church and religion, which only confirmed (to me) that gods don’t exist and any belief in magic is a despicable and cowardly dependence.  If you want to quickly terminate a conversation with me, all you have to do is toss in a couple of references to gods and magic and I’m “outta there.” 

The past half-dozen years have been too often punctuated with loss.  Too early in our first post-retirement trip, our eight-year-old cat, Spike, ran off from our Lake Texoma campground in late 2013.  He was as close a friend as I’ve ever had in the animal world. Ms. Day immediately began to refill our home with animal life and her first adoption experiment was a freakin’ disaster.  But she stuck with an unpredictable, sometimes-violent, always destructive black male cat until his 2^nd hyper-expensive urinary tract infection when she finally “surrendered” him for adoption to a local vet (for a $120 fee).  He’d tortured our dog, Gypsy, almost as much as Ms. Day.  Gypsy was glad to see him disappear from the household.  In the spring of 2022, our 15-year-old canine partner, Gypsy, died of old-age complications. 

Soon afterwards, Ms. Day adopted a beautiful little shelter cat she named “Diva.”  Diva quickly got close to both of us.  I can’t lie that Diva took some of the sting out of losing Gypsy, but Diva was a fragile little girl and she barely lived with us for a year before some awful, slow disease killed her in the fall of 2023.  Her death broke our hearts, again.  Ms. Day has a, probably healthy and realistic, philosophy that these beautiful animals who live with us are like “flowers” with short, precious lives.  She can move on, fairly quickly from that kind of loss with that viewpoint philosophy.  I can’t. 

Within a few months, Ms. Day adopted a huge black cat we called “Luci” (short for Lucifer, named after a cartoon character not the demon, although the cartoon character is a cat-like demon) .  Luci was insufficiently “friendly” for Ms. Day and, after too short a time for that poor guy to acclimate himself, she adopted a 2^nd cat (I, by the way, had no input in any of those decisions.) who promptly made Luci feel even more out-of-place.  Luci, like me, was an introvert who couldn’t have been quieter or less demanding.  He and I bonded, eventually, and then he died (after a series of urinary tract infections and blockages).  Ms. Day had her cat and I was left to deal with Luci’s last days and, as always, burying him.  A year later, I was still missing Luci and hurting from his loss. 

I’m almost 80 and, having seen how long, and unhappily, some older pets languish in the local shelter, I’m not convinced we’re doing them a favor, bringing an animal into a home that is not likely to survive their “short, precious lives.”  Regardless of all that, Ms. Day insisted on adopting a 2^nd cat who she named “Felix.”  Felix and I did not start off well at all, mostly because I was unwilling to let go of Luci’s memory, even after a year.  I found things wrong with him that were all me.  He was, and is, fine. 

Ms. Day is also right in her “moving on” attitude.  Dwelling in the past, in “what ifs,” in sadness and bereavement just results in prolonging the pain.  The healthy way to get through pain and loss is to move on as quickly as possible.  That doesn’t mean forgetting, it just means finding something or someone to fill the vacuum left by loss.  Easy to say, but harder to do for some of us. 

When the CEO Dies

One of the least-discussed and barely-admitted aftereffects of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder is something that should make every over-paid, under-worked, totally unnecessary corporate executive nervous:  more than 30 states have passed bills limiting insurance carriers’ ability to reject necessary medical treatment with “prior authorization” abuses and more such bills are pending this year.  Thompson was the overpaid ($10,221,898 for 2023), grossly unnecessary UnitedHealthcare CEO when he was shot to death on the streets of New York, allegedly, by an assassin who’d written “deny, defend, depose” on the shells of the ammunition used in the shooting in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on December 4, 2024. 

Let’s reflect on that unanticipated outcome for a moment.  The so-called “healthcare insurance industry” reported over $71.3 billion in profits in 2024, while increasing premiums, begging for more government-funded revenue, particularly from Medicare and Medicaid.  Corporate executive salaries have ballooned to levels that can’t be explained by any rational means (see below).  And that includes Thompsons’s UnitedHealthcare replacement, Andrew Witty, who leads the pack of deadbeat, useless CEOs scalping the public with the assistance of the Republican Party’s usual corporate welfare suspects. 

Obviously, getting shot at isn’t reforming the industry from within, even a little bit, as UnitedHealthcare’s 2025 Revenues increased to $447.6 Billion, growing at 12% over the year, and investor earnings of $13.23/share.  But if taking out one overpaid and useless insurance company CEO caused more than 30 states to make feeble attempts at reining in the nation’s most corrupt insurance industry, imagine what actual threat of real reform would do for the American healthcare system. 

In fact, if the American public discovered it had hind legs to rise up on, a whole world of problems could be solved quickly, French Revolution style.  Pick a problem and pick a CEO or “investor” who is that problem’s most obvious representative and you have your target?  Corporate and special interests’ election interference and the biggest benefactors of the Extreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision?  Obviously, Elon Musk and/or Peter Theil.  Corporate environmental and climate change damage?  Darren W. Woods (CEO of ExxonMobil) or Meg O'Neill (CEO of BP).  Benefactor of the media’s trust conglomerates and the decimation of reliable US national media? David Ellison (CEO of Paramount Skydance) or Lachlan Murdoch (Fox Corporation CEO).  Predatory low income housing vultures?  Warren Buffett (Clayton Homes, the largest manufacturer and lender of manufactured homes in the United States) and/or Sam Zell  (Equity Lifestyle Properties, ELS)  the largest owner of trailer courts in the United States,

Before it happened, few in 1790 France ever imagined seeing the “worst of the worst,” the French aristocracy, waiting for their turn at the guillotine.  But it happened.  Our ruling class loudly cries about the public dislike of executives with the usual “this is un-American” whine, but is it?  The only people describing Brian Thompson’s death as “tragic” are corporate executives and their useless, babbling corporate media and academia shills.  It is hard to find a working-class person who doesn’t just shrug and say “So what?” when it comes to a blip in the revolving doors of the executive class.  It’s obvious it doesn’t matter which suit occupies those corner offices, the show goes on regardless of who is earning a minimum of 300 times their typical worker. 

And, business-wise, it’s pretty obvious that the ruling class has almost no contribution to make to progress, the economy the 99% relies on, science and technology, and, especially, democracy and national security.  If you can think of anything that critically requires the “guidance” of billionaires like Musk, Peter Theil, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, the Waltons, Jensen Huang, Warren Buffett, or any billionaire in this or any other country, you probably don’t know much about that particular technical or economic activity.  In the past 20 years, so-called “founders” and (usually) self-proclaimed “brilliant leaders” like Steve Jobs (Apple, 2011), Paul Allen (2018, Microsoft), Ingvar Kamprad (2018, IKEA), Jack Welch (2020, GE), Sumner Redstone (2020, Viacom/CBS) Sheldon Adelson (2021, Los Vegas Sands Corp), Sergio Marchionne (2018, Fiat Chrysler), Giorgio Armani (2025, Armani Group), Frederick W. Smith (2025, FedEx), Charles T. Munger (2023, Berkshire Hathaway) and a raft of other overpaid, self-promoted, largely useless executives, “founders,” and investors have died and, mostly, the fallout has been . . . crickets. 

After all the noise about Jobs’ brilliant “leadership,” Apple has done quite a bit better under Tim Cook and, when Cook is dead and gone, likely the next corner office resident will do just as well or better.  GE continued it’s de-evolution into a national embarrassment, the decline of which was started under the “leadership” of Jack Welch, until what was once America’s most powerful and profitable company became a footnote in business history.  The last GE CEO, H. Lawrence "Larry" Culp Jr., was paid $87.6 million to disassemble that once-great company.  The “richest person in the world,” Elon Musk, contributed nothing but political connection and bad press to Tesla until the company finally came out with a vehicle solidly representing Elon’s input: the Cybertruck.  Elon’s 6,500lb+ “pickup” has significant build quality/fitment issues (rattles, panel gaps, water leaks), non-existent impact protection, rusting “stainless steel” construction, dangerous motorized bed and front-trunk lids, limited cargo space (67 cubic feet), and doubtful towing capacity (the hitch is mounted to a cast aluminum frame which is known to fail well under the 11,000 pound rating).  None of Elon’s companies are better because of his involvement and some, SpaceX for example, are considerably worse off from his mismanagement interference. 

The two most important factors in an executive’s tenure are luck and who is doing the bulk of the work and making the most critical decisions behind that “leadership” (also determined, mostly, by luck).  The Ivy League MBA mills have been cranking out thousands of over-educated fools and arrogant narcissists using the Harvard “push blame down and pull credit up” mantra for at least 100 years, but those “skills” don’t make or break any business.  I have documented, in past essays, my own CEO experiences and none of them have been inspiring in any way (other than the usual “how NOT to do it” examples).  I’ve never been in a meeting where a CEO contributed anything even a little bit useful or enlightening, let alone actual leadership.  And I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with CEOs from seven very different industries from small companies to Fortune 100 catastrophes. 

A smart, democratic public would realize the obvious, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” [Louis Brandeis (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)] 

After WWII and the Great Depression, the country’s leadership and the majority of voters realized that the first task was to pay off the war debt and catch up on all of the infrastructure maintenance and modernization that had been put off by the war effort.  The post-WWII highest tax rate was in the mid-90% territory.  What used to be called “unearned income” (investment and dividend income) was taxed at the highest rate, since it is obviously unproductive income.  Today, all of that is reversed and the chart below plainly demonstrates the result (and this picture is a lot worse as a result of the first year of Trump’s second term). 

Even someone as math-disabled as Republican voters can see the relationship between tax rates and national debt and it’s also pretty obvious where this national insolvency problem began: Ronald Reagan’s “economic miracle.”  In 1981, there were 13 billionaires in the United States and our national debt was $994.8 billion.  By 1989, the country suffered 99 billionaires (an increase of 761%) and a national debt of $2.86 trillion, while the middle class paid the bill for this gross acceleration in the nation’s idle rich.  Today, there are over 1,100 estimated billionaires in the US and the country is drowning in debt as a result. 

Performance is NEVER linked to an executive’s salary and there is no known positive relationship between a nation’s income gap and any useful measure of a nation’s quality of life, security, productivity, or even lifespan.  Self-regulation is not a real thing.  Rich people, companies, corporations, and even communities consistently prove themselves to be incapable of reining in their worst inclinations.  It always takes an outside force to reform anything.  Brian Thompson’s execution was certainly a demonstration of how quickly reform can happen when outside forces exert themselves on a corrupt industry. 

Recently, Musk whined that $900B wasn’t making him happy.  Author George Ouzounian replied, “Do you think it has to do with the fact that all you do is put out hatred and negativity into the world and it reflects back to you constantly?”  Several other people suggested that Musk’s legendary selfishness, greed, entitlement, corruption, and disdain toward “philanthropic activity” was key to his unhappiness.  It’s highly unlikely that logic or morality would have any influence on how someone as corruptible as Elon Musk lives his life, but a better view of the guillotine might.\

 

Spring in America and Minnesota

There are signs of spring coming in Minnesota and it is almost mid-March. We just passed through the usual Minnesota late-winter “blizzard” and while it was advertised as a “major event,” it wasn’t that much of a storm.  This isn't a Happy Spring though. About the only thing I have to look forward to is spring cleaning.  Trump and the American Fascist Party have launched an illegal war, sent armed, violent, lawless, and undisciplined ICE goons into American cities (particularly Minneapolis), murdered and kidnapped American citizens and legal immigrants, and the economy and the entire US economic system is on the verge of toppling into chaos. 

Usually, the sound of early spring in Minnesota is full of birdsong. Not this year. Thanks to bird flu, a federal Administration that too stupid, gullible, and superstitious to comprehend any area of science, and our rapidly changing and highly unpredictable climate, birds are dying in droves. Last year, we saw volunteers along the Mississippi carefully picking up dead birds and disposing of them: geese, ducks, cranes, swans, and songbirds. We are living in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And while we didn't cause this die off with poisons like DDT, we caused it with the poison of carbon dioxide and we probably helped it along with the GMO herbicides and insecticide toxins.  This year, the skies are empty of migrating birds and bird watchers across the country are wondering “Where did all the birds go?” 

As usual, Americans are distracting themselves with the trivia of the MAGA/Trump insanity, our ruling class-manufactured cultural divide, and the continual dumbing down of an already foolish, gullible, and suicidal American public. I wouldn't feel nearly as bad about this if I didn't think we were taking the rest of the world down with us. The loss of 300 million Americans would barely be noticed in a world population of 8 billion, less than 4% of the world population, if it was noticed at all. Everything about the current moment reads like the explanation of how America fell in The Handmaid's Tale.  That’s because it is exactly the same.  Religion and other superstitions, oligarchy corruption, an uneducated and uneducable population, and an economic world that is quickly moving past and away from the American Century have put the United States in exactly the “right” place for a violent overthrow by the ruling class.  If/when that happens, our current kleptocracy will establish itself as the “owners” of everything and everyone below them.  This is the world those same people sent Southern working class fools out to fight for in 1863 and they’ve been trying to destroy our poorly-created shambles of a democracy every since slavery was abolished. 

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend (Charles Yancy), “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”  The MAGA crowd, proud examples of the end result of centuries of Dunning-Kruger breeding, happily creates its own facts, ignores expertise and science, and lives on feelings rather than rational thought and analysis.  As of November 2024, it is well-documented that at least 77,303,568 stupid, lawless, felon-loving, misogynist, racist fools live and vote in the United States.  That is a stunning statistic and one that goes a long way in explaining how and why the United States is no longer a leading first world nation.  

In fact, we’re likely on our way to becoming several smaller, less-powerful, less internationally influential, and much poorer nations.  With luck, there will be a couple of spots on the coasts remaining democratic and functional, while the inner red state core of the US, which is already very dependent on the blue states’ financial support, becoming North America’s Bangladesh.  If/when that happens, Putin will have accomplished Khrushchev’s 1956 warning, that whether the West liked it or not, "history is on our side. We will bury you!"  The unintended MAGA outcome will be that communism (through Russia and China becoming the world’s super powers) will outlast and naturally replace capitalism.  The Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains the second-largest political party in Russia, after United Russia (Putin’s party, even though he is listed as “independent”).  Putin may not be loyal to the Communist Party, but he has ambitions to return to the Soviet Union’s old super power status and the MAGA crowd and the pitiful remains of the Republican Party are solidly in Putin’s pocket. 

So, spring this year isn’t coming with the usual hope and optimism after a long, cold winter.  In fact, most likely another kind of “winter is coming” right behind the seasonal one. 

 

Why Is Fascism Popular?

 It seems counterintuitive to think a political/economic system that has failed so spectacularly and consistently over at least 1,000 years (totalitarian dictatorships) is making a comeback.  But it is, apparently.  Even Google’s right-wing PC AI Overview says, “Based on analyses from historians, political scientists, and global observers, there is a widely held consensus that far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist movements are on the rise globally. While often described as a ‘new’ or ‘reconfigured’ form of fascism rather than a direct replication of 1930s Europe, these movements are expanding by challenging democratic institutions and exploiting social, economic, and crises.”  Just like 1930s Europe.  When you ask “Why?” the AI answer is predictable, “The rise of these movements is linked to economic anxieties, crises of capitalism, fear of migration, and the ‘great replacement’ theory—a belief in a plot to replace native populations.”  Again, just like 1930s Europe.  And that answer is about as shallow as I’d expect from an “artificial intelligence” created by Tech Bros and other social misfits and Trumpstein perverts.  That is certainly the motivation being bought and sold by Trump, the rePutin-lickin’ Party, the Heritage Foundation, soulless goobers like Turning Point USA, and everyone else who is trying to gather fame, profit, and power from fascism.  But it’s bullshit.

The rise in fascism is directly related to the fact that the dullest are breeding like caged rats.  Take for example, my half-witted, cowardly MAGAot and devoted rePutin-lickin’ US Representative Brad Finstad, who likely couldn’t name more than 3 of his seven offspring at any given time.  Putting it politically correctly, “there has been a documented negative correlation between educational attainment (a proxy for cognitive ability) and fertility.”  Putting it less politically correctly and more scientifically, “researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons – meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society.”  (Could you find a more opaque way to say that stupid people are reproducing?)  As a species, we’re getting dumber and what was once assumed to be a constantly improving species intelligence peaked in the 1970s and has declined ever since.

The most obvious fan of fascism is the group of deadbeat under-achievers who are being “left behind” (aka “replaced”) by practically every aspect of modern life: mostly useless men.  The world is full of them.  In the US, we have our incels, Proud Boys, video-gaming basement dwellers, and the “Trump puppies.”  In Japan, they are called “Hikikomori” (parasite singles) or “Soshoku-danshi” (herbivore men), in China they’re “Tang ping” (lying flat) and “Bai Lan” , in the U.K. it’s  “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), in Italy it’s “Bamboccioni” (big babies), in Spain they are “Ni-ni” (neither studies nor works), South Korea has their “Sampo generation” (giving up on courtship, marriage, and children), and on it goes.  Every first world country and, probably everyone else, has the same problem: too many unintelligent, unmotivated, useless males.  There are lots of equally useless women, too, but unless they are Putin-lickin Trumpers (in the US, anyway) they aren’t nearly as violent or dangerous. 

I suspect excess males has always been a problem for humanity, maybe all mammals.  In 2016, researchers published their findings of a large battlefield in the Tollense Valley, in northern Germany.  This discovery uncovered the remains of a massive Bronze Age battle, occurring around 1250 BCE. The remains of thousands of warriors and their weapons were uncovered indicating a brutal war that was, possibly, conducted with warriors from hundreds of miles away from the battlefield.  The world human population in 1250 BCE was about 50 million and European population was probably around 2 million, so tossing away tens of thousands of relatively fit young males at that time was an obvious statement of excess.  In 1920, the world population was about 1.8 to 1.9 billion people and WWI killed off 9 to 11 million soldiers (out of 60 million, mostly men, mobilized) and 15 to 20 million total human beings trimmed from the population.  WWII was even more effective at excess male trimming, killing off 21 to 25 million military personnel (overwhelmingly male) plus 38 to 55 million civilian deaths out of a world population of 2.3 to 2.4 billion people.  Humans haven’t quit murdering each other for fun and profit, generally accepted mortality numbers (due to a variety of statistical issues) indicates that between 1945 to 2000, about 231 million people died in various conflicts. Mostly, thanks to religion and politics, since 1989 over 3.9 million people have died in local wars.  That, clearly, isn’t enough because world population is projected to reach 8.3 billion by the middle of this year (2026), with 50.26% of the global population (4.17 billion) male. 

Historically and theoretically, there is (supposedly) a genetic advantage to a 1:1 male-to-female population distribution.  That may be true with natural animals, but humans stopped being natural at least 200 years ago.  A UN study, in 2025, advised women to “be cautious in their attitude towards men,” because out of 4.14 billion men:

• -       About 1.2 billion are already married
• -       94% of the world’s 11 million prison population are male
• -       1 in 8, or a half-billion, males suffer from mental health problems
• -       Another half billion are disabled from injuries and and various illnesses.

Leaving about 2 billion men available for marriage and in that group:

• -       56% are unemployed
• -       4% of them are gay
• -       1% are Catholic priests.
• -       10% are parents or close relatives
• -       30% over 65 years old.

The 56% “unemployed” are the obvious “excess male population who would normally be chewed up and spit out of the gene pool in combat.  The fact that many obviously-excess males are really into violent video games and, when they cosplay as actual warriors, they suck at it, Proud Boys or ICE-gangser-style, proves the “excess” point.  These guys, however, are strongly drawn to a fascist, male-centric culture that does not focus on intelligence, skill and education, or even utility.  Ideally, they think the perfect society would be a nation of Donny Trump clones where stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance are rewarded lavishly. 

 

I don’t know if there has ever been a better example of useless, excess males demonstrating their total lack of value than Alex Pretti’s execution in the streets of Minneapolis.  Eight cowardly, masked, heavily armed, randomly-uniformed, gangsters rampaging through the city’s streets, terrorizing and brutalizing everyone in sight, and, finally, converging on an obviously decent citizen, beating him mercilessly, and executing him with 9 close range shots to the head and body.  These faux-law enforcement cosplayers reenacted every biker gangbanger stereotype Hollywood ever portrayed and rePutin-lickin’ Trumpers somehow saw “law enforcement officers putting their lives at risk protecting the public[1]” from that same picture. 

The argument for the continued existence of drone-quality men used to be that “we need people for all kinds of jobs, and intelligence is not everything.”   It is absolutely true that “kindness, patience, sensitivity, and trustworthiness are important — things that are not necessarily linked to intelligence,” but just being dumb, unskilled, manual labor is less useful every year.  It won’t be long before it’s totally worthless as automation and robots take over the stupid stuff and it’s pretty obvious that excess males have already been “replaced” by useful people, technology, and automation.  A world overstocked with 2+ billion excess men is going to be a very dangerous, precarious place unless something can be done with (or to) that population. 

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[1] An exact quote from at least three Minnesota US Representatives the day of Pretti’s murder.

The Putin-lickin’s Miscalculation

 Ms. Day is a big fan of watching YouTube documentaries, anthropology specials, silly alien invasion paranoia {“Alientologists?” Give me a break.), and, lately, a lot of WWII era documentaries.  She isn’t a big reader and grew up with the typical Boomer filtered-into-nonsense K-12 mis-education, which left her knowing a lot less about Germany’s descent into fascism, and who and how WWII was won, than she’d imagined.  Until recently. She didn’t even know that Russia had taken massive losses in doing their huge part in driving the Germans back into Germany and in the resulting defeat of the Third Reich.  She isn’t a fool and she isn’t in any way uneducated, but she was definitely indoctrinated, largely thanks to growing up as the daughter of an Air Force lifer and getting a lot of her education in cities that depended on the military for a lot, even most, of their economy.  Watching the quick fall from the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s Nazi Party takeover on YouTube, she was struck by how different the early days of Germany’s democratic collapse has been than our first days (we’re still a long way from “safe” from Trump and the Putin-lickin fascists). 

When Trump “won” the 2024 election, I decided I needed to reread William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I’d hoped that the many protests across the country, especially in Washington D.C. when Trump brought the National Guard into the nation’s capital to, supposedly, suppress a "crime emergency" in the city.  At first, I was hopeful that the large outpouring of non-violent protestors in the city was above and beyond what had happened in Germany.  Re-reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich set me straight. “On Sunday, January 29 [1933], a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lutsgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor.”  Damn!  The 1933 Germans more than equaled our initial opposition to the death of their democracy.  And look how little good that did them. 

It’s true that Trump, Putin, and the red state Putin-lickin’ gang overestimated how willing the National Guard would be to gunning down and kidnapping American citizens.  So, they re-tooled and, in July, the Trump/Musk Plan (aka “One Big Beautiful Bill”) provided Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with more than $75 billion in new funding over four years, added to their $10 billion annual budget. The damn bill added $45 billion for concentration camp expansion and $30 billion to add personnel to what would become Trump’s personal, lawless military force which is an exact replica of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS).  Trump tested his shiny new, untrained, un-vetted, hyper-violent and totally lawless Gestapo in Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, and in full force in Minneapolis.  And that is where I think the Putin-lickin’s made their big mistake. 

Especially in Minneapolis, where even the local, but rural, Putin-lickers under-estimated the state’s only large city’s resilience, commitment to community, civic energy, and patriotism.  Gross Putin-lickers like Rep Tom Emmer, Rep Brad Finstad, Rep Pete Stauber, and local Putin-lickers Mike Lindell, Nick Shirley, Scott Jensen, and many others clearly imagined that Minneapolis would be as self-serving, racist, uneducated and unintelligent, and MAGA-cult brainwashed as their rural Minnesota constituents.  They were wrong.  Really wrong!

If Trump had been intelligent enough to put his petty vengeance aside and gone for a big win, he’d have picked a red state city to invade.  Under any pretense he chose, he likely would have been successful in starting his Fourth Reich bullshit.  For instance, Miami.  I could be wrong, but I suspect the overwhelming MAGA “character” of that decadent, fraud-filled, criminal illegal immigrant overstocked, Putin-lickin’ dominated state would have put up insignificant opposition to any sort of ICE abuses.  As long as the majority, white people, were left un-harassed, ICE could have storm-trouped their way through that state from the Florida Panhandle to the Keys and, mostly, received cheers from the local politicians and the few citizens who are allowed to vote in that corrupt, antebellum state.  Other likely low-resistance, Schutzstaffel-invasion cities could have been in Texas: Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and any city in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, or Arizona. 

Minneapolis wasn’t totally a foolish choice for Trump’s ICE invasion.  The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department has always been a sympathetic holdout for any sort of bureaucratic “law enforcement” criminal behavior.  Several of the surrounding suburban sheriff departments---Anoka, Scott, Carver, and Wright Counties for example—aren’t particularly “enlightened” either.  The Minneapolis Police Department has a far less-than-stellar racial reputation.  And, let’s face it, any cop, police department, or police union that is overtly in favor of a Presidential candidate who is a convicted felon is a long, long ways from trustworthy.  It just turned out that the people in the city and the Democratic state government officials are far better than their “law enforcement” disorganizations.  Anyone who has spent any serious time in Minneapolis might have guessed that, but Trump and the Putin-lickin’ Party didn’t.  [TD1] 

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 [TD1]

How Idea “Compounded Interest” Works

 

 Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

In the late 90s, I created three Google Blogger blogs: The Rat’s Eye View, Wirebender Audio Rants, and Geezer with a Grudge.  The Rat’s Eye view was, originally, going to be a repository for a collection of articles I had written in my position as a freelance manufacturing/management consultant with Productivity, Inc. (A long dead manufacturing consulting company out of Temecula, CA.)  That gig didn’t last long, mostly because I was disgusted by the executives I worked with as a consultant and moved on to other money-making ventures.  But I kept writing in The Rat’s Eye, even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention.  About the same time, I had become a regular contributor to a regional motorcycle magazine, The Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and my column was called “Geezer with A Grudge.”  I almost always wrote more articles than the magazine could use and I started storing my “extras” in the Geezer blog.  A few years later, I started working, part time, at a music college, first as a technical support consultant and, later, as an instructor.  I also had three music-related one-man businesses that I called “Wirebender Audio Services.”  So, to promote those businesses, I started Wirebender Audio Rants.

I haven’t written much about motorcycles since I had to quit riding, last year, for reasons of old age.  So, I haven’t paid much attention to that blog’s statistics.  Today, I discovered that sometime ago the Geezer blog past 2 million views (2,028,204, as of today, in fact) and is averaging about 6500 views per month!  So, I checked the other blogs and found that The Rat’s Eye View, my least likely candidate for readers had 393,543 views and for the past year has been averaging 3500 views per month and Wirebender Audio Rants and averaged 9100 views per month and a total of 332,501 views for the blog’s lifetime. 

For a while, Google’s Ad Sense actually paid money for advertising links in the blog and the Geezer blog made me an average of $100/month for the advertising hits.  A few years ago, Google decided to keep all but a few pennies of the advertising revenue to themselves and I deleted Ad Sense from all of my blogs.  That was several (about 10) years ago and, since then I just write for the excuse H.L. Menken gave, “for the same reason cows give milk.” 

The point I lamely tried to make with this essay’s title was that many things that we do, creatively and without much hope of notice, can pay some fun dividends if you last long enough.  Way back in late 2020, I was still writing fairly regular Geezer columns and paying attention to the numbers.  I was pretty impressed with myself when that blog made it to 1,000,000 hits.  I know that’s pretty lame in a world where a Tik Tok or drunks-in-a-bar YouTube “influencer” can, apparently, easily gather 1,000,000 followers.  My most “popular” blog, the Geezer, has a grand total of 90 followers and The Rat’s Eye has 2 and Wirebender has 14.  I’d be embarrassed by those lame numbers, except that . . . I’m not. 

My comparatively new Substack page, “T.W. Day Stories and Rants on Random Subjects,” has 24 “subscribers” (all free) and that page has had about 6,400 hits since it started in December of 2023.  It has ben a slow, somewhat exponential, reader growth and I’ve made-little-to-no effort at promoting my page.  My “biggest” month had a little over 900 hits.  Every source I know of claims that reading isn’t something that many people bother with today.  My wife, more typically, gets practically all of her knowledge from YouTube, which is a sure way to drive me from any room or gathering.  I really don’t want to think about how many people use Tik Tok for that purpose.  I never expected to be read as much as I’ve been on any of my Blogger blogs and I’m delighted with the slow progress of my Substack page.  I’m incredibly grateful to everyone, even the critics, who has take the time, exercised the patience, and kept a rare skill alive by reading my essays. 

Gratefully,

T.W. Day

Lies, Damned Lies, and, Worst of All, Republican Lies

 If you watch these two videos of ICE murders and you come away with anything other than the absolute knowledge that you’ve witnessed a pair of murders by overly-armed, vicious gangsters, you have mental problems.

Unsurprisingly, chronic liar and misinformation source, Pedo President Trump immediately spouted nonsense on Truth Social, where he claimed Rene Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”  On the same day as the murder, Department of Homeland Security Secretary and the world’s ugliest, angriest garden gnome, Kristi Noem, claimed, “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism,” because, supposedly, the as yet unidentified ICE goon “fired defensive shots” because he was “fearing for his life.”  Confused couch fucker Vice President JD Vance said, “She was trying to ram this guy with his — with her car.”  Vance later added, “I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making.” 

Minnesota US Representative Tom Emmer said, “Our brave ICE agents put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities from dangerous criminals . . .May God bless and protect them in their efforts.  Shame on the elected officials who endanger these agents by spewing lies and hateful rhetoric.”

Minnesota US Representative Brad Finstad, bravely hiding behind an electronic shield on X, said what happened in Minneapolis “is a somber reminder of the dangers ICE agents face while doing their jobs. These dangers have continued to escalate because of the anti-law enforcement rhetoric and sanctuary policies that so-called ‘leaders’ continue to perpetuate. Praying for the speedy recovery of the ICE officer who was injured this morning. I have the utmost respect for the brave men and women who go to work every day putting their lives on the line, and I stand with our federal agents who are carrying out their sworn duty to serve and protect our communities.” 

Minnesota US Representative Pete Stauber said, “If you want to look at what a failed state looks like, all you have to do is look at the state of Minnesota under the lack of leadership of Tim Walz and our Attorney General Ellison and, of course, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey . . . For the last many, many months, they’ve villainized law enforcement, federal law enforcement.” 

The second ICE murder, Alex Pretti, in Minnesota was even more blatant and vicious, but that didn’t have any effect on the orange-tinted Republican glasses.  Before any evidence or information was available, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin provided a news release claiming “the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted” and that “an agent fired defensive shots . . . This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”  Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller, who can always be counted on for a source of blatant lies, said, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”  Consistently, Gross Garden Gnome said, “Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.  This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” 

Minnesota Senate Republican Leader Mark Johnsons said, “Today’s events are frustrating and tragic, and we are exhausted that Minnesota is once again in the headlines for violence and chaos. This tragedy is the result of escalating tensions led by Governor Walz, who has used inflammatory rhetoric against law enforcement, called this lawful operation an ‘occupation,’ and encouraged Minnesotans to resist rather than comply with law enforcement. His actions have turned this into a propaganda war. In many states, top leaders fully cooperate with ICE and DHS, and people are safer because of it. I’m calling on all levels of government to come to the table and cooperate to keep people safe. Senate Republicans urge immediate discussions to plan a peaceful path forward and restore order; we can’t wait for more headlines.”  

Emmer (R-MN) said, “The governor and local leaders’ rhetoric has empowered criminals and put federal law enforcement’s lives at risk. It’s dangerous and has made the situation in Minneapolis much worse.  Unlike my Democrat colleagues, I’m going to let law enforcement conduct their investigation and not jump to asinine conclusions. We are grateful no Border Patrol officers were harmed.”  What?  By ricocheting bullets fired from their own guns directly into Pretti as he lay on his face on the street?

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed, “An armed man trying to impede a lawful arrest is a recipe for disaster. I expect law enforcement officers to use good judgement. But not to foolishly risk their lives or the lives of others. As to the recent tragic shooting in Minnesota where Border Patrol agents used deadly force against an armed protestor trying to impede a lawful arrest, it is a direct result of the heated rhetoric and over the top reaction toward ICE —who are simply trying to enforce the law in sanctuary cities.  You have every right to protest and you have every right to disagree with President Trump. No one has the right to impede law enforcement officers carrying out their duties. If you go to such events with a loaded gun, bad things can happen. The facts will be fully investigated, but for me having been a defense attorney and prosecutor who’s been around law enforcement officers, you have to understand the extreme pressure that Border Patrol and ICE agents are under in sanctuary cities.”  Funny how that same opinion changed in a few months after the January 6^th 2021 insurrection attempt.

Stauber (R-MN) ignored the murder and spouted Trump’s nonsense propaganda, “When politicians spew hateful rhetoric about law enforcement, like calling them the Gestapo, it incites violence against them. It encourages disruption and interference with law enforcement operations. It can also lead to deadly but entirely avoidable incidents.

“The politicians in Minnesota need to stop with the inflammatory statements against law enforcement. It is only putting people in harm’s way. We need our citizens to respect the rule of law and practice their American rights while complying with law enforcement orders. Only this will keep our communities safe.”

And on and on went the lies and distractions and projections from, Minnesota state Republicans to the White House.  You’d think they had a playbook or something? 

One of the other constant Republican lies is that our elections are frauds and that illegal aliens keep throwing the elections to Democrats.  Louisiana rat fucker, tiny Mikey Johnson, pretty much spelled out the whole Republican argument in 2024, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” And more recently, Tiny Mikey said, “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent . . . Can I prove that? No.”  And we can all guess why, can’t we?

Republicans have wasted taxpayer money on “investigations” into election fraud since they lost the 1995 midterms.  You know why they can’t prove it?  #1, because it’s bullshit and, #2, because they don’t want any serious investigations into voter fraud because, as usual, the only actual fraud going on is being committed by Republicans.  The history of Republican election fraud includes: Texas County Republican Party chair Kelly Kenten Giles, Texas Republican state legislator Austin Smith, Colorado Republican election denier Tina Peters, Indiana Republican Larry Savage, three Republican residents of Florida’s Trump-land retirement horror show, the Villages, Brian Pritchard, first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, Indiana Republican candidate Larry Savage, North Carolina Republican “operative” L. McCrae Dowless Jr, and the list goes on almost endlessly. (I’m not getting paid to read about Republican crooks, but you can continue this “good work” with a simple Google search for “republicans convicted or accused of election fraud.”) 

Modern history has proved, without a doubt, that anything Republicans are accusing everyone else of doing is something they are doing themselves.  Maybe they should be renamed the Projection Party? MSNBC’s MS Now provided us with this bit of comedy relief regarding Republican voter fraud accusations and convictions:

The fact is, all we can count on Republicans to do is lie and do that blatantly.  They don’t even bother with making their lies credible because they know the MAGA cult is beyond gullible and well into totally compliant.  And that is why Republican lies are worse than damned lies.  When a substantial majority of the voting public can be convinced not to believe their “lying eyes,” we’re all doomed. 

The Red State Types Inside Blue States

I just got back from a Minnesota state DFL (Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party) caucus and a few things left me with a bad taste.  It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the same district’s Republican caucus, which is full of braindead Trumpers and worse.  Still, a state Senate candidate, who I generally like, said some dumb stuff about the Twin Cities, mainly claiming that St. Paul is hoarding tax revenue that should be going to rural areas.  I kept quiet because I hadn’t looked at those numbers for a while, but later I refreshed my knowledge of who pays taxes in Minnesota and who gets the benefits. 

The fact is that the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area contributes about two-thirds of the total state tax collections, according to 2021 Minnesota Department of Revenue data. That same area accounts for about 57% of the state's taxpayers, which means Minnesota’s major urban area receives about eighty-six cents in services for every tax dollar paid.  Minneapolis alone generates roughly 3.5 times more in state tax revenue (income, corporate, and sales) than it receives back in state aid.  Minneapolis currently ranks highest among peer cities for the percentage of its own city income derived from property taxes, at approximately 48%.  State taxes for Minneapolis and St. Paul are expected to contribute $7.72 billion in net receipts, paid to the state's General Fund, for the first quarter of FY 2026.  The other successful semi-urban city in Minnesota, Rochester, gets shafted almost as hard as Minneapolis.  Dying cities like Duluth are better off, but that historical out-of-proportion state and federal support is finally declining as the city continues to shrink from its 1960 all-time population high of 107,312 to its current of about 88,000. 

Another way to look at state taxation equity is that the rural areas of the state get $1.30 in state services for every dollar paid in taxes.  That is almost exactly the same kind of unequal returns, on taxes paid, that most blue states suffer and most red states benefit from. In other words, the “failing” parts of the state (aka “Greater Minnesota”) are getting regular welfare checks from the successful cities.  And the part that pisses me off is, like Republican states who consistently receive a positive return, in federal aid, rural Minnesota not only gets more than it deserves but it is angry that it isn’t getting more. 

Practically every aspect of rural Minnesota life is paid for by taxpayers in the Twin Cities: schools, healthcare, roads, clean water, sewer, and all infrastructure, including internet access and, even, telephone service.  And the thanks urban taxpayers get is more whining about the pitiful quality of life in areas of the state that are hostile to education, science, technology, and medicine, while being totally dependent on all of those things, mostly supplied by Minnesota’s state government at the expense of urban taxpayers. 

A few years ago, I spent a week in Detroit taking a class from one of the city’s many fantastic maker groups.  In my spare time, I took a “Beautiful Ruins of Detroit” tour and, at the end of the tour, our guide took us to areas of the city that had been completely razed to the ground and rebuilt as urban agriculture centers.  After seeing the awful damage “globalization” and economic predators like Betsy DeVos’ family had done to the once-great hub of American manufacturing, we toured neighborhood hydroponic and enclosed, passively heated greenhouses and even small fully-enclosed mobile structures for raising chickens and pasture-raised, antibiotic and steroid-free cattle and pigs being raised for local consumption.  At last count, Detroit has about 2,200 urban farms and gardens focused on local sustainability and food sovereignty.

 

The only claim to state and federal rural welfare checks has always been “we grow the food you eat.” Even though that is, largely, untrue, since roughly 55% of fresh fruit, 32% of fresh vegetables, and over 70–85% of seafood of the “food we eat” is imported and California provides more than one-third of all U.S. vegetables and roughly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts.  In fact, California is the source of nearly half of the country’s total produce. 

US taxpayers cough up as much as $20 billion annually to subsidize corn and soybeans, which are mostly export and low-efficiency fuel crops.  For most of us, especially those trying to remain healthy, corn and soybeans are not “food.”  Certainly, the corn grown for animal food, undesirable and unhealthy “food products” (filler), diabetes-inducing corn syrup, and saturated with herbicides and insecticides is not food and most of us want it out of our groceries.  Corn grown for fuel is just an agricultural welfare check. 

On top of that, U.S. taxpayers put out approximately $38 billion annually to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, another export crop since US meat consumption has been dropping for years.  Put that money into "animal-free" (plant-based or cultivated) meat, currently totally unsubsidized, and you’ve put the knife even deeper into the heart of urban dependency on food production.  Rural welfare recipients are so worried about this “attack” on their “way of life” that Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas have passed laws banning cell-cultured meat.  Just imagine what some of those states would look (and smell) like without acres and acres of feedlots, rendering plants, packing plants, and animal waste “fertilizer” stinking up the state.  That’s what those states are trying to protect and the rest of us would like to see disappear. 

Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician babbling about “income distribution.”  99% of livestock in the United States is factory-farmed and U.S. farming is rapidly becoming a corporate venture, with the “family farm” designation becoming more of a farce every year.  The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) defines a family farm as “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, as well as farms with hired managers.”  Under this definition, a multi-million-dollar corporation, managed by cousins who own slightly more than 50% of the corporation, is a "family farm." The term masks the shift toward industrial-scale agriculture, where large-scale family farms (which can be thousands of acres) account for a significant portion of production.  Those corporate “farmers” are who bawls the loudest when their “way of life” is threatened by economic and societal changes and any reduction in their corporate welfare checks. 

Personally, I can’t wait for those people to be cut loose, entirely, by independent, self-reliant cities producing their own food and keeping their resources to themselves until rural goobers admit they need assistance to survive and get cut down to size.  Eventually, the US will have to become an actual representative democracy or it will, and should, be broken into smaller nations with the “haves” becoming democratic and the rest going their own backwards, regressive way.