You Are Right, I Hate Trump Voters and Everything They (and He) Stand For

I bet you don’t hear this a lot outside of your rural or suburban Fox/NewsMax echo chamber, but you are right. I absolutely despise people like you. My father, an east Kansas farm boy with an accounting degree from a small east Kansas teacher’s college, was commissioned as a Navy lieutenant in 1943. He and five other young men sailed an LST from Virginia Beach to North Africa, then to Italy, and, finally to Normandy, France. He was about as poorly-suited to command a ship as any person alive in 1943. He’d never been in a canoe or more than knee-deep water before stepping foot on to his first LST. I don’t believe he could swim.

He was a shy, introverted, pacifist, Christian man who spent the last 60 years of his life coming to some kind of grips with the horrors he saw fighting people just like you: incompetent, under-achieving, racist, angry, entitled, hateful, small men with poor self-esteem and a love of power and violence. When the US military was mopping up the remains of the German army in North Africa, he and other Americans discovered US-made Bendix (an Indiana company partially owned by General Motors) electrical controls in German vehicles. In Italy, he participated in a landing where he witnessed the results of a fascist controlled country. At Normandy, he watched most of the 200 Marines ,who had crossed the Atlantic with him in that small ship, cut down by German machine gun fire when the bow ramp dropped. He developed a life-long dislike for his own country-of-origin, England, when British LST captains dropped their bow ramps, stopping several hundred yards short of the landing target and forcing US soldiers out and into deep water to drown or be helplessly shot down. So, he and other US LST pilots and sailors humped the que and his crew made two more trips back to the Normandy beaches, to prevent British officers from uselessly and cowardly sacrificing American soldiers. (I’m sure you empathize with the British officers, can’t you? Why should they risk their lives for Jews, liberals, gays, people of color, and other “weak” people who aren’t like you? Hitler and his fellow fascists hated exactly the same people as you.)

After those experiences, his tour of duty was over and he was supposed to ship back home, but every ship he was assigned to was redirected to the Pacific war front. There is a famous picture of the U.S. Petrof Bay narrowly missed by a Japanese Kamikaze pilot. In the background, there are a half-dozen members of an aircraft gun crew looking on helplessly as a Mitsubishi light bomber splashed into the ocean a few yards from their guns. My father is somewhere in that picture. Dad used to, humorously, point out his spot in that crew and point out where he was hiding when the plane missed his ship in a Navy coffee table book that ended up on a bookshelf in my bedroom when I was an adolescent.

He was messed up for the rest of his life from that experience. Always a shy and introverted man, he struggled against his inclination to crawl out of sight and became a high school math teacher and coach. My mother was responsible for a good bit of his drive and success, but she died when she was 34 from cancer and he barely managed not running away and starting over after remarrying and overwhelming himself with three more children and a hysterical, prescription drug addicted second wife.

When he was in his 70s, I’d drive from Denver and, later, Minnesota to west Kansas and chauffeur him to the NCAA Junior College basketball championship tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas every March. His eyesight had failed and he lost his driver’s license due to multiple accidents. We made that trip for about a dozen years before other infirmities made travel impossible for him. Those trips where when he opened up to me about his WWII experiences and the damage those experiences had done. PTSD wasn’t a thing in 1945, when he came back to Kansas to finish his education, start a family, and find his first teaching job.

Mostly, he was an absent father spending the hours from his last class until the rest of us were in bed sleeping “grading papers” by himself. At 9-years-old, I learned how to heat cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli or spaghetti and meatballs, clean the kitchen and dishes after my younger brother and I ate, run the clothes washer and dryer or hang them out to dry in the warm months and fold clothes (badly), vacuum and pick up after the two of us, and be a latch-key kid until he remarried and our lives really went to shit with two, then three, more kids in the house and an angry, hysterical step-mother to try and avoid as much as possible. On one of those basketball trips, Dad told me that he’d often sit in his car in the garage, listening to the screaming and turmoil in the house and imagine what it would be like to “just drive away.” But he didn’t and, instead, I left home between my junior and senior year of high school and lived in a 1-bedroom trailer with a friend and paid my bills with income from our band, odd jobs, and getting by on eggs and chicken our landlord sold wholesale.

There are only two moments that I can remember where Dad actually demonstrated some of what must have kept him going on that LST. Once he stood up to a trio of high school bullies (loosely defined as “high school” because at least two of them have failed so often they were nearly 20) and once when he opposed the teacher’s union. Otherwise that large, fairly fit but overweight, athletic man was as timid and reclusive as anyone I have ever known, if I can claim to have known him at all. From those conversations we had while traveling, I learned how broken WWII had made him. From reading authors like Studs Terkel, William Shirer, William Manchester, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Drury, Tom Clavin, and several others, I know a little more about those experiences and the men who fought to prevent fascism from sprouting its evil wings in the world and, especially, in the United States where people like you desperately wanted to imitate their hero, Adolph Hitler.

And, now, we stand exactly where my father and unwilling soldiers just like him stood in 1941, but we’re on the losing side. Post-WW2 right wing bureaucrat, George Kennan, wrote in 1948, "We have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Since Truman, the Republican Party has been devolving into a group of rich men (laughably self-defined as “businessmen”) who have worked to further the goal of preventing “the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Trump voters have finally given them everything they want and, like Hitler’s sponsors, those rich and powerful (mostly) men are now going to do everything they can to destroy the faint echoes of American democracy and put the 99% into servitude and poverty. They have been working toward that goal since long before the Civil War and, in fact, that goal is exactly what the Civil War was fought over.

I don’t use the word “hate” often or casually. I dislike all sorts of people and things, but I reserve “hate” for those that I truly despise. The weak Americans who are terrified of “wokeness,” whose own sexuality is seriously challenged by gays, lesbians, and, especially, transgender citizens, who pretend to be Christians or Muslims while behaving like amoral predators, and the lazy, entitled white men and women who want a “strongman leader” to justify their own failures are despicable and deplorable and, yes, I hate them. It takes that kind of motivation for most of us to get out of our comfortable lives and make the sacrifices necessary to go to battle with evil. Evil is already filled with hate and ready to make victims of everyone outside of the cult. I am not willing to be a victim without a fight.

“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.

They Are Still Deplorable and Worse

 In September of 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Hillary Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

"The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. 

"But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

 Fox and the other voter-programming media sources turned that into "She called you deplorables." And their viewers' rarely-used brains went "click" and the programming was complete. Now, whenever someone brings up some awful thing Trump or some other Russian/Republican says, the Marching Morons chant, "But 'deplorables!." 

Yesterday, October 31, 2020, Texas Republicans demonstrated just how deplorable they are. A gang of the Trump cult surrounded the Biden/Harris bus on the way to a rally and blocked the bus, preventing the rally while some other Trump brownshirts blocked traffic in New Jersy and New York. Of course TweetyPres's response was “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!” Can we try to remember that ANTIFA is a fabricated wingnut dog whistle for "anti-fascists?" It is not an acronym for anything, numbnuts. 

So, these degenerate deadbeats have not just lost faith in democracy and are demanding that we end elections and move straight to the fascist state they appear to imagine will deliver them the prosperity they believe they deserve. That worked out well for their hero Hitler and his gangsters, didn't it? The tattered remains of the United States of America are being ridiculed around the world and we're barrelling toward a half-million dead Americans, carelessly murdered by Covid-19 and an incompetent federal government misled by a President who could not care less who dies as long as he can escape responsibility for the disasters he has created; including criminal charges and likely prison.

These fascist fanboys and groupies are the intellectual and cultural equivalent of those idiot teenagers who screamed their empty brains out at the sight or thought of the Beatles. This is not a political movement with goals, ideals, and an intellectual foundation. This is a cult of stupid that appears to be infecting almost half of the country and most of the degenerating Boomer geezers. Ms. Clinton was right. These people are deplorable and un-American at the highest level. Any Republican who doesn't denounce these farm animals as the "horrible people" they are is in the boat with Trump and his culters. 

Trump, of course, is not going to bring back American industry. That ship sailed with Reagan and his "tax reforms" that allowed the hyper-rich to get rich from "unearned income" and inheritance instead of investments in manufacturing equipment and facilities. Trump is just one of the many decadent outcomes of the Reagan Revolution that moved the US from being a manufacturing nation to a banking and service economy. You don't create world class products by gold plating a toilet and calling it a "throne." A doofus who managed to go bankrupt mismanaging a casino has no hope in the world of "bringing back good jobs" for an uneducated, unskilled labor force. That ship sailed in the 80s and we'll be playing catch-up from the middle of the pack from here out. 

A day before the 2020 election, some Grand Rapids, MI Trumpers demonstrated a new low in deplorable behavior by defiling headstones in a Jewish cemetery. "The [Michigan Democratic Jewish] caucus said the vandalism occurred at Ahavas Israel Cemetery, and photos show the words 'TRUMP' and 'MAGA' painted onto the graves. These statements were painted on the night before the election, the same day President Donald Trump is holding a rally in Grand Rapids."

I guess this is another demonstration of who these people really are. If your idea of a good job would be wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon to terrorize your neighbors into submission, Trump is probably your man. If you dream of wearing a swastika on your shoulder and hunting down "brown people" to feed into der Führer's gas chambers and mass graves, Donny can probably manage that. Don't fool yourself, though. Even if you manage to end life on this earth, for a while, it won't elevate you to anything beyond deplorable.

Your Russian Representatives

How do you know if your politician is a Russian plant? Easy, he or she is a Republican. How do you know if your personal issue lobbying organization is a Russian front? Easy, is it the NRA? If it is, you are giving money to an organization that already has plenty of cash, mostly rubles.

Human Evolution?

When I was a kid, I read a LOT of science fiction. Since most decent literature was banned from my hometown library and the schools, the only thoughtful input I had was “Analog Science Fact and Fiction,” “Worlds of Tomorrow,” “Super Science Fiction,” “New Worlds,” and a few other magazines that led me to science fiction authors like Azimov, Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Lem, and a collection of people who expanded my mind and universe. One story, among hundreds I barely remember today, that stuck with me like a bible or a philosophical text is Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”: probably the most accurately predictive piece of speculative fiction along with 1984. I’ve written about this brilliant novella and the derivative-but-stupid movie before, “Who Cares about Idiocracy,” and I’ve referred to The Marching Morons more often than I’ve probably written about Barak Obama or even the living evidence that we are in the twilight of humanity’s idiotic existence, Donald Jerkoff Drumpf.

The difference between Marching Morons and Idiocracy is as dramatic as the genetic space between Obama and Trump. The Marching Morons is funny, accurate, and brilliantly predictive. Idiocracy is . . . idiotic. The problem isn’t that intelligent human beings are not breeding and are vanishing; the problem is that idiots are breeding like well-fed rats and rapidly outnumbering the brilliant but slower-growing and much smaller species. Because of that, the species is rapidly splitting into mental haves and have-nots. For the moment, the rarer, smarter, more productive minority are supporting the growning horde of nitwits, but that never lasts.

The information humans have accumulated is now doubling every 12 months and that pace is constantly accelorating, but the majority of homosapients are not participating in that information revolution in any way. In fact, it’s likely that they might be getting dumber at an amazing rate. Not only is the dumbing-down happening in primative cultures like the Mideast, Russia and eastern Europe, the jungles of South America and Africa, the slums of Indonesia and India/Pakistan, and the undeveloped portions of the world, but in first world industrialized countries like Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Asia and declining empires like the USA and Great Britian. It’s not just that these humans are not keeping up with change, they are slowly regressing as stupid people breed and interbreed with stupid people. There is evolution on one hand and de-evolution in mass on the other.

At some point in homosapien’s past, the species must have peaked. There was likely a point where the majority of humanity was pretty much at the same mental level and where change and technology began to seperate the average from the superior. At that point, what author Yuval Noah Harari calls “homo deus” began to seperate from the herd. Sometime around the beginning of the industrial revolution, the acceloration of knowledge kicked into gear and WWII really amped it up several notches. The Cold War and space race kept the pressure on and pressure and diminishing resources are what force evolution.

The graph in the previous paragraph illustrates the shape of knowledge growth over the last 120 years, but what might really point out to you why this is generating so much stress is a graph of just the last 20 years (at left). An interesting feature of exponential curves is that when you drill down into any point of the curve, the rise is still startlingly exponential but you can see either the important moments where dramatic change occurred and/or the technology leaps that allowed/forced those changes. This list of milestones tacked on to the technical capabilities of our combined world cultures ought to be intimidating. If it isn’t, you don’t understand what happened.

While the cream of our species is analyzing the make-up and state of the universe, the folks swirling the evolutionary toilet bowl are still clinging to the delusion that the earth is flat and god-given resources are infinite. If you keep in mind the incredible accomplishments of a grossly under-funded NASA in the last 20 years and paste that next to the fact that “homo uno” (or is that “homo oh no!”) is still debating among itself whether NASA managed to get a man on the moon almost 50 years ago, it should be obvious that cream is being seperated from the genetic milk by something resembling a nuclear materials centrifuge.

The evolutionary drivers are progress, resources, curiosity, survival, money, and power; the usual suspects. I have always believed that as resources diminish, evolution speeds up. We are at a point on this planet where our resources are being chewed up infinitely faster than they are being created and renewed. Americans deluded themselves into believing that Peak Oil was a farce during the Bush years and accelorated that resource’s depletion to the point where nutty extraction activities like hydraulic fracking seemed like a good idea. That temporarily drove US oil prices down at the expense of billions of gallons of unpolluted underground and above ground water resources. Humans survived for thousands of years without oil, but without water we’re finished in a few weeks.

As best I can tell, no generation has seriously worried about the survival or welfare of the following generations. As much as humans jabber about homosapien’s capacity for planning for the future, that anticipated “future” appears to be about a year away, at the most, for most of our species. For most of our existence, that was probably enough planning since practically any sort of disaster was likely to wipe out everyone we know. Noah’s flood is a terrific example of a local event blown up into an imaginary extinction of everyone on the planet and a reboot of all other animal species. Anyone with the slightest grip on reality would interpret that biblical story as the kind of thing primative people would imagine if they had never travelled further than the next hill past their valley. A small percentage of humans know, today, how far away the next mountain range is and, more importantly, how far away the next livable planet is likely to be. They aren’t going to wait for the rest of us to struggle our way into getting a grip on the last century’s technology. Sooner or later, they will move on leaving “homo uno” behind to pick over the scraps and fight among ourselves until the dreary end.

Is There Only One Reason the NFL Is Losing Fans?

Lots of people, including fans, are wondering what is going on with the NFL’s lost fan base. According to the folks who care about this stuff, the NFL’s television ratings are down 7.5% for the beginning of this season. So far, there hasn’t been a change in the bottom line for the NFL’s primary financial source, overall advertising revenue, but it seems unlikely that will last. Papa John's founder and CEO and head-douchebag John Schnatter claims that the NFL players’ protests are keeping people away from the crap Papa John’s scrapes onto a pizza pan, while Greg Creed, Pizza Hut’s CEO said, "We're not seeing impact on any of that on our business." I can’t help think lots of failing mismanagers will start to blame their companies’ poor performance NFL players, since nobody wants to blame overpaid, under-talented and generally incompetent CEOs for much of anything. We elect Presidents, governors, and fill Congress with that kind of resume.

So, politics, as usual, gets the blame; although most of the people citing politics as their reason for giving up pro football aren’t bright enough to realize that the whole issue of the national anthem at the beginning of pro games was a political statement. Before 2009, nobody knew what NFL players thought about anything political because they stayed in their locker rooms until after the anthem was played. The Department of Defense spent $6.8 million between 2012 and 2015 on "paid patriotism," to try to pump up recruitment at all sorts of professional sports events. American flag displays, military honors events, reenlistment ceremonies, and a long list of military promotions became part of the NFL’s income stream. The players getting sucked into the opening ceremony was a political statement intended to inspire young people to imitate their heroes in uniforms. Some of the players involved in today’s protests are old enough to have been on the field when their voices wouldn’t have been heard about any political issue. So, one kind of pro-war and military/industrial complex politics is acceptable, but bringing attention to the discrepancy between how police handle people of color vs. white people is unacceptable? I guess you could say that protesting during the military’s taxpayer-funded recruiting pitch is protesting the military, but if that’s your argument we’ve got a lot bigger problems than most of us hoped.

I’m not convinced that the player protests are the NFL’s biggest economic problem. Pro and collegiate sports are all seeing a drop in interest, but football has probably come close to running out its string. Younger people are, on average, less interested in spectator sports. The grandstands at many stadiums resemble Fox News’ base: 50-and-over. At this rate, the decline in the NFL’s fortunes may depend on the league finding other countries to sell their product. Outside of the US, “football” means something completely different.

It’s pretty obvious from the latest medical evidence that any parent willing to subject a kid to the hazards of football is a long ways from a responsible parent. It’s not just pro players who have discovered football is a dangerous sport, college players are almost as badly damaged by the sport. It should be obvious that high school and Pop Warner football is just as risky, or more, because the “care’ provided by football coaches doesn’t become more cautious as you work your way down the sport’s ladder. This issue cuts the sport (and others) two ways: a declining pool of players willing to risk their lives for money and spectators becoming unwilling to be a part of a gladiator spectacle where they might witness one of their favorite players receive a fatal injury on the field.

Finally, there is the other side of the fans’ perspective on the protests. The NFL walks both sides of the road; supporting the players and berating them. Those of us who agree with the purpose and intent of the players’ protest are quickly losing interest in a sport owned by men and women who are more inclined to support Donald Trump and his band of angry racists. I have never been someone the NFL could count on for income from any direction, but I did watch a half-dozen or so games on television (at my local sports bar), including the Super Bowl, for a lot of years. Last year, I didn’t see a game including the Super Bowl. So far this year, I’ve sort of kept track of Colin Kaepernick’s employment status and as long as he can’t find a team with the moral courage to hire a man who is willing to sacrifice his fame and fortune for a cause, I don’t need the NFL.

Who Are the Good Guys?

For most of my life, I’ve thought I could tell who the good guys were in novels, movies, and history. Based on that assumption, I thought that most of us were cheering for the same folks at the end of the movie. After the 2016 elections, I’m not so sure.
I thought I’d post a few pairs of pictures just to calibrate myself with your ethical standards. Take, for example this pair of mythical characters. Who do you like here: the poor kid from Kansas who works for a liberal newspaper and wastes his time saving ordinary people from catastrophe and rich criminals or the rich guy to takes what he wants and could care less about who he hurts?


Being a rock and roll sort of guy, I thought this comparison is pretty obvious, but apparently I’m wrong. So who do you like: the artist who donates lots of his time to charity and who is actually a musician or the NRA spokesthing who crapped his pants to get out of fighting in Vietnam and who has threatened to murder the current President of the United States?

This ought to be a telling comparison. (The first guy is Jimmy Stewart, in case you’re confused and too young to remember Xmas movies.) The characters are Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and Gordon Gekko, a Reagan era idol famous for his unrestrained greed and a 1980’s tag line, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." I don’t know how conservatives even blink with this choice. They have to love everything about Gekko, especially his job-killing corporate raider tactics.

This one should be another no-brainer for the pseudo-conservative crowd: a misfit loner, although a decorated and PTSD afflicted WWII vet, who actually destroyed parking meters or a for-profit prison warden. The warden delivers the line that appears to define the 21st Century, "What we've got here is failure to communicate." I don’t know how conservatives can not love a man who enforces the law without compassion, any sense of justice, or the slightest trace of decency.

I tried to make this one obvious by picking a picture of who I thought was the relative “good guy” with his gun in hand. However, this should be a tough one for conservatives: one guy is a paid assassin with a touch of morals and the other is a crooked sheriff who believes he’s the ruler of “my town” and does anything he feels like doing, including torture, behind the protection of the law.

This last one is the most confusing for me. One is a consistently ethical man with a beautiful family and who has given the country the most honorable government in my lifetime and the other is the living embodiment of Richy Rich and everything you’d think working class people would hate about the ruling elite.

But the election of 2016 proved that I have been viewing life, moves, and everything completely differently from 50-some-percent of the people in this country. It turns out that every movie I’ve ever watched has been interpreted differently by at least half of the theater audience. I should have known, since I attended the first showing of This Is Spinal Tap and discovered that most of the audience thought the film was an actual documentary and not a comedy at all. I didn’t bother trying to confuse you with these picture-pairs. I put the people I thought were the good guys on the left and the bad guys on the right, but I’m suspecting a lot of you thought I’d mixed it up a bit. You can not imagine how incredibly sad that makes me.

Making the Vote Count

Ever since the inbred crowd started voting in mass and gave us Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, McCain, Romney, and Bush II, I’ve argued that passing the US Citizenship Test ought to be a prerequisite for voting. Face it, if you are too stupid and uninformed to pass a test designed for people who have barely dried off their feet after getting off of the boat or crossing one of our boarder rivers or lakes, you shouldn’t be making decisions about who is running the country, your state or hometown. There are lots of on-line examples of the US Citizenship Test, try and see if you belong in a voting booth.

After Trump’s election, I’ve doubled-down on this idea. I absolutely believe a few sample questions from the Citizenship Test should be administered (automatically with randomly selected questions) before anyone casts a vote. However, after Trump I have decided that simply failing the test isn’t embarrassment enough for those morons who don’t bother to know how the country works but who think their opinions matter. Like nit-picking hanging-chads and racially–coded “purged registration lists,” I think we should do something with the idiot vote. Rather than helplessly wringing our hands after one more fraudulent Red State election count, let’s get some entertainment out of our rapidly growing idiot population.

Since the reddest states are all going to computerized voting machines my voting test system could be tacked on with almost no extra costs (Sorry Diebold and the rest of the Republican vote repressors. You’ll have to game the election system some other way.) I definitely want everyone to vote, so we’re not going to toss out anyone’s vote until we’ve had fun with it. We’re just not going to count the idiot votes for making any important decisions.

However, after the informed voters have made their selection and candidates have been chosen we’re going to do something with the idiot vote.

For every office in every election, every city, county, state, and federal final tally will include who the morons voted for. That will give us two important post-election things to consider: 1) We’ll all get to laugh at the nitwits in our midst and their pitiful attempts to participate in an informed election and 2) the so-called knowledgeable voters who made similar choices to the idiots will have an opportunity for self-reflection and, hopefully, take that moment to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Trump’s Election Upside

Buying local is expensive and a hassle. Most conservatives don’t bother with spending their welfare and social security money on local produce or on local products or services. Without progressives, liberals, and moderates there wouldn’t be any local businesses outside of second hand stores.

In 2016, 1,322,891 Minnesotans voted for Trump and 55% of Goodhue County residents voted for everything Minnesota Nice was supposed to oppose. There were worse places in the state, some voting as high as 74% for Trump (Morrison County, where 32,000 barely-educated, 97%-white, timid Fox News-misinformed souls live in rural isolation) and many of the non-urban counties citizens voted Trump in 60% or greater numbers. Morrison County is typical of those outstate Minnesota ungrateful wretches, where unemployment fell from 12% in 2009 to about 4% in 2016. “Thanks, Obama,” said no one while they voted for a guy who relished their displacement and economic destruction in 2009.

So, when I go to buy groceries, household products, building materials, appliances, furniture, services, or anything locally, I have to think, “I have a 60%-or-better chance of subsidizing a Trump nutjob with my money.” Obviously, if I buy from Target or Wal-Mart there is a 100% chance that I’m handing my money to a corporate fascist but I’m spending considerably less money (For example, $0.89 for eggs vs. $4+ for locally grown eggs). The premium I am paying might be for the expectation that I’m buying chemical-free produce, but I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter to be half-honest as an organic food supplier. I wouldn’t trust a Trump supporter not to be a slave owner, for that matter.

This puts local suppliers in a tough position. They advertise they are not Republicans or Trumpeters and alienate 60% of their neighbors but self-identify with 90% of their customers? They don’t advertise their political positions and people like me assume they are part of the 60% and we pass on gambling that they might be sentient humans? Not my problem. My job is to avoid the Trumpeters as much as possible and that means I either go with known quantities or avoid local producers because they are expensive.

#196 Games Wall Street Plays

My favorite quotes of the month are all about how "the best and the brightest" are being put upon by terrible ideas like limits on CEO salary and talk about cranking up the upper bracket income tax rate. It's actually possible that this country has directed its best and brightest into do-nothing mobster occupations like tax accounting, finance, MBA-style management, marketing, law, and similar unproductive manipulative skills. Many so-called "top schools" have refocused their output into accounting, law, and MBA programs, moving out of the much more capital intensive science and engineering disciplines.

Obviously, under a constant barrage of Republican and faux-Republican (Clinton's "Eisenhower Republican" administration) for nearly 30 years, the federal government's talent level has fallen to 1929 levels. Reagan and the Bushies stuffed the legal system with hundreds, if not thousands, of untalented neocon fruitcakes and it will take decades, if we cared to do the work, to purge that collection of morons from the judicial system. Dedicated talent fled civil service after Reagan made it clear that talent was the last thing he wanted in government. Bush actually actively chased talented civil servants down and tossed it out for 8 years.

If the United States wants to make a comeback, we are going to have to reverse all of this foolishness. The federal government is, once again, going to have to find a way to staff itself with scientific, industrial, economic, diplomatic, legislative, and white collar criminal investigative talent. Our universities and K-12 education system is going to have to relearn how to educated itself, then its students, in disciplines that are based in science and technology, not tax-evading money laundering games.

As anyone who follows history knows, Reagan's "miracle of the markets" is based on the squalor of criminal behavior. Markets, when allowed to run wild, are nothing more than a collection of gangsters in suits wallowing in greed, corruption, and collusion. Game theory has long proven that the basic capitalist theory was a misreading of human nature. Libertarian theory is so far from reality that it appears to be as reality-based as Creationism. Humans are both greedy and lazy. The greediest and laziest are often best suited to take advantage of a system that is not based on laws that regulate those tendencies. Executives are not the cream of any crop and haven't been since the first generation of any industry. Once the founders are gone, the politicians move in and sharks begin to feed on the business culture, turning it from productive to vicious.

Now, we are stuck with a generation or two of our best and brightest who are unsuited for any productive work. The American X, Y, and Z Generations are rarely engineers, scientists, doctors, technicians, or even schooled in any reality-based discipline.

Obviously, the cure is in our tax system. It should be clear that a tax system is designed to encourage or discourage activity. We tax the stuff we don't want to happen and we don't tax the stuff we want to encourage. Currently, our tax system is designed by exactly the people our culture ought to be discouraging. There is no upside to inherited wealth, which is the reason for inheritance taxes. G.W. Bush is the posterboy for why wealth and power should not be inherited. There is no advantage provided to businesses or the culture for excessive executive salaries, it's not like these morons could go somewhere else and make money. We should stop providing corporate tax breaks for executive income expenses. We need alternative energy research and development. We need a working education system. We need manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology. We don't need more lawyers, tax accountants, or MBAs. The fix is to tax the things we don't want to death and to reward the activities we desperately need.

Leadership is top-down. When the top of our corporate structure is incompetent, uneducated, and corrupt, you can expect the economic levels below them to follow. For the last 30 years, from the President to CEOs, our "leadership" has been drawn from the worst of the worst. We have to fix that.

February 2009

#142 Fools are Us (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Or, in regards to the subject that I am developing here, did our national business model create our national foreign policy or did the foreign policy come first?  My bet is on the business model.  I suspect that our cut-throat, amoral corporations and the execs that squirm within created the mess that the rest of the world sees as the United States. 

As a nation, our "leaders" have often acted as if the rest of the world, especially the third world, is populated by complete idiots.  Our current government is particularly arrogant in its expectations of the rest of the world, but they are just the logical extension of a long history of overconfident, under-skilled  politicians and bureaucrats.  Ever since the United States began to formulate a foreign policy, that policy has been directed by the assumption that everyone else is an idiot and we are so clever that they won't see through the thin veneer disguising our national purposes.  The fact that our politicians and their henchmen are as transparent as fine crystal has never occurred to arrogant American lunkheads from John Adams to G.W. Bush.  They simply see their malevolence as being so complicated and intricate that no one outside of their inner circle could possibly sense their motives. 

We haven't had a sophisticated Executive, Congressional, or Judicial branch since the early 1960s.  And the intelligent leaders didn't amount to more than a hand full of fingers before that.  Cats can predict the motives of the overwhelming majority of human politicians.  A pigmy child extracted from the depths of the most remote area of Africa could, in seconds, size up any of our federal or state bureaucrats and anticipate their actions.  Our national motives are as simple and impure as those of any villain ever dreamed up by Marvel Comics, "'We want your natural resources, all of them, and we will pay bottom dollar to get them.  We'd prefer to wreak your culture and crush your dreams in the process."  Even if the rest of the world was completely populated by morons, that message wouldn't be subtle enough to fool anyone who doesn't drool a in Texas accent.

Our management class is a carbon copy of our government class.  These "elites" stumble through company meetings, delivering foolish platitudes and grade school ultimatums, assuming that no one foolish enough to be employed by a company so disorganized as to hire them for management could detect deception if it were printed in a frame surrounded by flashing "lies, all lies" signs.  If anyone in the room is stupid enough to accept anything they say as worthwhile, that person is clearly management material.  They lie and cheat and stab each other, and the rest of their countrymen, in the back over power and wealth.  The difference between our executive class and Mafia dons is so minimal that the two swap positions without skipping a beat.  All the while, they assume the rest of us are too stupid to do anything about their crass manipulation and gross corruption.

In a way, they are right.  We take far too much abuse from the 1% who own 90% of our country.  Third world terrorists are quicker on the uptake than US voters.  The average man living on the streets of Calcutta knows more about what goes on in Washington D.C. than does the typical American voter.  It's incredibly embarrassing to admit that my own country appears to be the world's most universally hated and feared villain, but it's better to acknowledge that and fight against the inbred self-proclaimed royalty that owns the United States than it is to pretend crimes are not being committed in our name.  You can't fix anything until you recognize it needs fixing.  A startling majority of Americans seem to be too stupid to know when they ought to be asking for a little lubrication with their shafting. 

It's not like the execs are stunningly clever.  These are not people who are bright enough to learn from history, books, mathematical simulations, or remedial tutoring of the sort provided to the ruling class through their Ivy League institutions of slower learning.  They do not realize that eliminating freedoms, driving the middle class into poverty and servitude, terrorizing the third world, and acting as the planet's corrupt Chicago Police force is a sure formula for mass riot and individual violence.  When people do not have political outlets for their grievances, they are forced to resort to physical outlets.   You can bottle beer, but you can't hold your thumb over progress.  The human race is progressing, regardless of the efforts of the current administration, the U.S. military, or mismanaged multinational corporations. 

From the mismanaged side of the equation, the perception is anything but confused.  Most employees think management is overflowing with idiots.  Decisions are handed down without even the slightest clue as to the cause, effect, or purpose.  Every word uttered by mismanagement seems to be designed to demotivate, irritate, confuse, disorganize, or incite riot among the employees and alienate customers.  As I have written before, in every company I've ever worked, if the top management were to contract a disease that caused them to vanish, instantly, in their offices, it would be weeks, months, or years before anyone noticed they were missing.  Universally, the thing that would instigate a search for the missing execs would be a sudden increase in profitability, efficiency, and morale improvement beginning the moment the dead weight vanished. 

Abusing and destabilizing the countries from whom we depend upon for natural resources has been a terrible, vicious, failed experiment.  New York on September 11, 2001 suffered for all of our sins in that regard.  Allowing ourselves to be similarly abused at work and in our communities has resulted in the depersonalized, culture-of-one society that appears to be so susceptible to degenerative "life style marketing." 

Many of us have resorted to looking for a pill that will counteract our national low self-esteem and non-existent sense of community and purpose.  Pills won't help.  Treating the symptoms only works when you treat the right symptoms.  The cure is revolution in the voting booth.  We'll find a cure when the majority of citizens are taking part in the political system with an educated, motivated, outraged purpose.  Until we are "mad as hell and we won't take it any more," we're going to be stuck in crappy jobs, mismanaged by inbred idiots.  Until we want to honestly respected as "the leader of the free world," we'll be ordered about by fourth generation political hacks who only serve international corporate masters and have no interest in the fate and future of this country.  We either stand up and act like citizens of a free country or fall down and serve as floor mats for the ruling class.  There is no middle ground.

September 2005

#114 No News is the Usual News (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Back when he was funny, before he became a paid Republican shill, Dennis Miller commented that the news was nothing more than a litany of catastrophes, natural disasters, and crime events. He called the news the "thank God that shit didn't happen to me" show.  Mostly, he's right.  The news tells us nothing useful about the state of the nation or the world.  We don't learn what's going on in our communities or home states.  After an hour of network news, we won't have learned anything new about the world or the economy or science.  We'll have been entertained by crimes that are solved or unsolved, big winds that have blown down other people's homes, and a car crash or two.  Today's news programs are more like reality TV than information sources.  Because of that, fewer and fewer Americans are turning to television or newspapers for information.

In a last minute bum's rush, the media is pretending to have suddenly realized there is stuff to report about the Presidential race this year.  Don't let that fool you into believing that the news is becoming more relevant.  It's just a marketing tactic. 

Bush has been given a free ride for four years, plus.  Long before he ran his first race for public office, Bush was a drunk and a doper with a criminal record.  He was a spoiled rich kid draft dodger who went AWOL from a safe and pointless rich kids' National Guard job.  He failed at every job he'd had and, because of his stupidity and incompetence, Republican power brokers picked him for their puppet candidate for Texas governor and, later, President.  His one and only claim to competence came when he was given a token position for a baseball team whose new stadium was built on seized private land and paid for with public financing.  This is a dedicated capitalist?  Sounds more like a corporate commie, to me.

Bush's handlers ran vicious, amoral, lying campaigns for every office he won and the media let them get away with it.  Why?  Because the media expected corporate and ruling class tax breaks from a Bush Administration.  And they got what they expected and a whole lot more.  Bush has handed over the environment, ownership of public airwaves, national natural resources, and the federal reserves to his corporate criminal buddies. 

All of this went on without a whisper from the national media, who are the same folks who received many of the benefits of Bush's corrupt administration.  These people are so counterfeit that they have absolutely no difficulty taking advantage of the awful catastrophe of September 2001 for their own financial gain.  As long as they were raking in bushels of cash from the ineptitude and corruption of the Bush Administration, they were happy to avoid doing the job they pretended to be doing. 

Suddenly, the golden goose appears to be dying.  Publishers are amazed to find that they had been losing money for the last several years because the only way they can attract readers is to offer their newspapers at a loss.  Because so few of their subscribers actually read anything more than the sports page, advertisers found the effectiveness of their ads had declined to near-uselessness.  Television networks are experiencing the same problems.  Their "hard hitting" bobble-head reporters and their grinning talking head anchors weren't attracting viewers.  For the first time in modern history, the major media had become the minor source of information for the majority of citizens. 

Young people and literate older folks get their news from a variety of internet sources and public television and radio. The illiterate youth and old folks get what little they know from Oprah and Letterman and the Late Show.  The really stupid get their misinformation from talk radio or, worse, Fox News.  Hardly anyone looking for information reads their local papers or watches network news.  This has left a major corporate force looking at vanishing income and influence. 

Their cure for this loss of credibility is to pretend that they have relevance in the final moments of the 2004 election.  Suddenly, the major media is lightly reporting on a few of the many defects in Bush's "character" and an equally small number of the administration's failures of competence.  They've waited long enough that they won't have a significant effect on the election, but they've done just enough actual news reporting to have created a little spin for themselves.  They have enough fingers in other pies that they don't want to mess up the good thing Bush has provided them, but they need to hang on to their core, media business.  Hoping to eat their cake and eat it too, the media is trying to walk a fine line between actually reporting the facts and only reporting enough of the bad stuff that they can pretend to be "fair and impartial" without pissing off the Bushies or throwing the election to Kerry. 

Will it work?  For the short term, probably.  For the long term, not a chance. 

The characters fronting the media have earned a national reputation slightly below used car salesmen and politicians.  Nobody with half a brain believes anything they hear on the tube and damn few people take the time to read "news" that isn't sports related.  We might be entertained by their minimal attempt to shed some light on Iraq, the President's lies, or some other insignificant bit of actual news, but I can't imagine how the media can ever win back the trust of the American public.  Now that it's obvious to even the dumbest of Joe Public that the media doesn't make an effort to be "fair and impartial," we're all looking for media sources that reflect our own take on the world.  Big media can't provide something for everyone because there isn't anything that we all want. 

The country has been split into dozens of special citizen interests and we are never again going to be able to say, "united we stand."  We stand as individuals in a Babylon of a country with only our friends and neighbors (at best) to share a small speck of culture. We can thank corporate media for their part in disintegrating America into such an insignificant and disorganized mess.  We are thanking them by ignoring their newscasts and by hanging up on their telephone solicitors.

#103 They've Always Relied on the Votes of Fools (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Tennessee William's Stella always relied on "the kindness of strangers."  Republicans have always relied on the incredibly short memories, small attention spans, and the general foolishness of middle class voters.  So far, it's been a good strategy.  With the Bushies attack on the public education system, the increase in adult illiteracy, and the near complete lack of investigative journalism in major media, the future must look bright to Republican strategists.  There will be no shortage of stupid, uneducated people.

Remember six years ago, when the House and Bill Clinton were arguing about the definition of "sex?"  Leno and Letterman had a field day with almost-funny jokes on that subject.  Today, the Bushies and the world community are debating the definition of "torture" and the right wing comedians are missing in action.  So is the American press, Congress, and the American public.  That situation pretty well sums up Republican morals; sex among consenting adults is bad, institutional torture of randomly selected Arabs is good. And it works for them, because they're getting away with it and the odds are pretty good that Bush and CRAP will be re-elected in November and they'll get away with even more.  Get it?  They're relying on good old American stupidity.  Make a big deal out of nothing, ignore the really big stuff, and hope nobody is bright enough to see the contradiction.

You have to wonder what sort of moral behavior you would have seen from GWB before he was "reborn."  If he's this evil under the guidance of his god, how awful did he behave when he was on his own?  I guess, if you're an Alfred E. Newman look-alike, you have buckets of inherited cash, and your oily smirk convinces the average moron that you're a "nice guy," you can get away with treason, murder, theft, and any number of national and international crimes.  Now that's an inheritance!

The Republicans ran on a platform of conservative economic magic and they promptly put the country into a tailspin of debit spending, unemployment, and social manipulation.  In a few years, they'll be blaming all of their misdeeds on Clinton and the Democrats and the sheep who wear Republican buttons and plaster bumper stickers on their rusting pickups will be parroting that line in bars around the country.  Like Nixon said, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes fact.  That only works if you are lying to fools, but there is no shortage of that commodity. In fact, they reproduce like rabbits and their children are usually dumber than the originals.

Does it not seem like degeneration to you when the country's leaders move from arguing whether a blow job is "sex" to arguing if stripping, humiliating, beating, physically and psychologically intimidating prisoners is "torture?"  That pack of Washington Republican neo-con wimps would break down and give up every national secret they know if they were deprived of limousine drivers.  But the Bushies and Rush and the other right wing pussies pretend that their untrained, unsupervised, scared-shitless prison guards are just enjoying college "pranks" and their pet sheep voters buy into another Big Lie.  Obviously depending on the stupidity of others is a fairly safe bet. 

One of the two last great Republican Presidents (Teddy Roosevelt was the other), Lincoln, miscalculated when he said "you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  You don't have to fool all of the people, you just have to fool the majority all of the time.  These days, you can do that.

"I Was Right! Damn."

The country is hotter than it has been in recorded history. Temperatures are high and rising, rainfall is dribbling to record lows in much of the nation, crops are failing, and Al Gore is hidden in media-obscurity somewhere saying, "I was right! Suck on it, you wingnut biaches."

I guess there is some justification to be had, knowing that the wingnut mainstream media got it wrong, as usual, but since wingnuts are still in charge of information everywhere, only the literate know about it. The majority of the Marching Morons are just as delusional, incoherent, and fucked up as they have always been. Nothing changes but the names on the mastheads.

In a country where "God is punishing them" is considered a rational argument, God seems to be punishing the Red States aggressively. If he/she is out there, it must be frustrating to see how the religious zombies mistake their own punishment for something done to others that happens to spill over on to the "righteous." The high price of poor design; Intelligent Designer, my ass. You forgot the brain, fool. Next time, create a bill of materials before you start playing in the mud. If God had been Japanese, he'd have had better quality control. Since he is, obviously, European he missed the entire manufacturing revolution and is more of a marketing guy than a manufacturing guy. That explains my crappy knees and hips and the entire Repuglican Party and the weird Romney genetics.

Humans have missed the boat so many times, you'd think we'd be better swimmers. The 2000 presidential election is going to be viewed, for a few years, as one of the most catastrophic events in human history. We allowed five senile assholes to overturn an election and stick us, and the rest of the planet, with a pair of characters who couldn't outsmart an inflatable Bozo the Clown doll and we wasted eight precious, unrecoverable years packing the pockets of the most corrupt people in human history while one hell of a lot more than Rome began to catch fire.

My advice, if you haven't reproduced yet, don't do it. If you have, start apologizing now. Unfortunately, being right means that we're all in for a nasty future.

Who Are the Job Creators?

Wingnuts want us to think the idle rich, corporate executives, military-industrial companies and the rest of the elite corporate welfare crowd are the "job creators." I don't think so. I came up with a game to test who is really economically important in the country and world. It's called "Who Can We Live Without."

First, let's play this game with the right wing crowd. If some blessed biological catastrophe were to happen to the caviar-eating crowd, everyone Romney and Bush have ever known for instance, what effect would that have on the nation's economy? All of the little rich kids who life on Daddy, Granpa, and Great-Great-Great-Granpa's money come down with a case of the mother-of-all diarrhea. The clowns to inhabit the top floors of the nation's corporate headquarters spend their last hours in the executive bathroom, emptying their money makers. The entire investment banking circus vanishes in a bubble of oily excrement. Most of the entertainment industry does what Hollywood usually does, makes shit, but this time no careers rebound from the disaster and we're left with independent artists for out diversions. Everyone who has eaten caviar (or some other rich asshole staple) in the last month is gone in a few weeks. How does that effect the nation's gross national product?

It's not like it's hard to find another CEO, so the loss of the executive class would result in a momentary burst of business productivity, until the usual assholes filtered to the top of the corporate toilet bowl and everything businesslike returned to "normal." Nobody but the people who serve the idle rich would know the rich douchebags were missing and those servants would probably find something useful to do fairly soon. The South's slaves ended up on the Detroit production lines after a few years of assimilation. George and Ann's butlers, maids, and gardeners can probably find productive work in time. Bankers just beg cheap (free today) money from the public and sell it back to us with interest. We can live without them. The difference between major stars and everyone else who plays an instrument, pretends to be someone else, or chases a ball in clown costumes is . . . not much. They will be replaced faster than we can forget their last performance.

If the right wing elite isn't mission critical to the country, who is?

How about scientists and mathematicians? If exposure to calculus and statistics caused aneurysms, how would that effect the economy? First, all of the rich people in the previous paragraph would be broke overnight if someone didn't manage their money, do their taxes, create tricky investment portfolios to maximize profits and minimize effort, and invent the products  and services that keep the 1% in control of 95% of the country's income. Without scientists and mathematicians, the idle rich would starve and have to find work asking if we "want fries with that?" The rest of us would be in trouble, too; especially if the US was the only country to have lost its scientists and mathematicians. We would go from being a shriveling first world economy to a third world disaster zone in a few months. Most of our productive industries would have seen their last new product and many wouldn't be able to continue producing their current products. The only competent federal government agency, the General Accounting Office, would become as stupid as the military and the military would be in capable of targeting anyone but Canada and Mexico and we'd have to drive the bombs to those places. Anyone but a wingnut can see scientists and mathematicians are job creators.

If we drop down the social ladder to the fastest vanishing career in the United States, farming, how does that play out if farmers and their support industries get Mad Cow and Corn disease and spend their last hours clawing at their skulls? The US food reserves are already lower than they have been for decades and fuel costs are likely to drive them lower. Doing stupid things like converting farm land to energy production (ethanol) will push this safety margin even closer to disaster. Even without killing off farmers and the ag industry, we might see the effect of these producers going away in the near future. Disregarding reality, if the food producers of the country vanished, so would most of us. With food reserves in the near-non-existent territory, most Americans would starve in a week. Grocery stores would empty on the first day and we'd eat our way through our personal reserves in a few days, those of us who have any. The streets would be on fire and the rioting would make the Civil War look like a block party. Obviously, farmers are job creators and life sustainers.

You can, hopefully, think of a few other occupations that are actually important to the country; medical providers, fire departments (especially forestry fire fighters), teachers, and the list of underpaid, overworked, unappreciated economy-critical jobs goes on. The ruling elite are not among that group. We can get along without them under any conditions.

Short Memories, Tiny Minds

The poofs at Faux News are upset that the Muppets are waging class war on the 1% and the poor oil billionaires. Obviously, they've missed the last couple hundred years of American life and literature. The basic theme of practically every story in our history is about the battle between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. If you can find a western, even a Ronald Reagan or John Wayne western, that isn't about some powerful rancher, mine owner, crooked sheriff or marshal, or some other rich gangster who has taken over the town, corrupted the characters who usually work as enforcers, cops, or gangbangers for the interests of the ruling powers, and bought the town with money and guns. It has to be the oldest story in the US.

Face it, girls. It isn't a story unless it's about the rich and powerful against the rest of us. Call it "class warfare" or call it reality. Either way, it's an American story. If we aren't fighting our side of the battle, it's just class slaughter.

Crazy Is As Crazy Does

The Department of Homeland Security linked Jared Lee Loughner to a collection of right wing hate groups that the DHS called "anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government], anti-Semitic.” Sounds like Fox, doesn't it?

The wingnut bin has been trying, predictably and desperately, to separate itself from responsibility. That's the beauty of being conservative; you can be wrong on every issue and still claim you're Right. When you're Right you're always right.

Of course the other side of that position is it's hard to tell crazy from stupid. Rush and the Bimbo Führer are both crazy and stupid, but they aren't foolish. In our idiocracy you can be a moron and still be powerful, corrupt, and completely unhindered by any form of civility or common sense or any interest in the common good. They are anti-democratic, pro-corporate, and sponsored by elite money that has no loyality to any country, let alone the United States.

Limbaugh, Palin, O'Reilly, Beck, and the Faux News cast of fools and lunatics are running from their own words in terror of taking any responsibility for their constant hate agitation and fear mongering. In a just world, Faux News would be held accountable for all sorts of national disasters, not just the most recent tragedy. As the sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik said, “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government—the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

If we were a country ruled by laws, these people would be immediately held responsible for the damage they do. We are not. Obama and the Justice Department are pretending that a "lone gunman" (when have we heard that one before?) is responsible for this assassination attempt and the associated murders. Screaming "fire!" in a dark auditorium is no longer a criminal offense, even when lives are lost. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' father replied, when asked if his daughter had enemies, "The whole tea party." "Enemies," not opponents. Palin and her gang of ignorant "patriots" considered Giffords an enemy because she disagreed with their nutty, perverted mutation of what a society should be.

When taking a political position is sufficient to become a hated enemy, you know crazy has taken over and rational discussion is beyond hope. When a national figure can generate a hit list, publish it nationally, and talk about "reloading" in reference to defeating an opponent, rational dialog is not on the table.When our government stands by and allows this kind of rhetoric to contaminate the tiny minds of fools like Jared Loughner and pretends that those who incited murder are above the law, we are that much closer to becoming the kind of country the Bimbo Führer dreams of.

Look at this map littered with gun-sight bulls-eyes. Tell me you think those are anything but a call to shoot the opponents Palin has listed here. Give it your best shot, but you are only deluding yourself. Of course, if you think Palin is anything but a dangerous fool, you're pretty good at delusion.

Interpreting News

The more media we have, the more sources that appear on the web, the more cable "news" channels we have, the more dense the new digital on-air world becomes, the harder it is to figure out what's going on. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Ever since crazy Ronny Wrinkles abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," the media has steadily gone downhill. Of course, that was the intent behind eliminating the one thing that held the American media accountable so Reagan could have claimed "mission accomplished" if he had been able to put together two such obscure words into a single sentence.

With the advent of all of these news "sources," American citizens are all the way back to those days when being more than 10 miles from the event is the equivalent to being across the ocean from useful information about the event. If you didn't see it, you can't know what happened. Even pictures lie, words are valueless. This is a serious problem for democracy. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." - Thomas Jefferson

Clearly, today we are not to be trusted with our "own government." Our government, our world, belongs to corporations and their representatives in governments all over the world and they don't trust us, themselves, each other, or humanity at large. All my life, I've realized that two things float to the top of the toilet bowl: cream and turds. In the corporate world, cream isn't often produced. Which means that the people who are running the world are the lazy, inbred, retarded children of the people who have been running the world for decades. George W. Bush, for example. (No, by the way, I don't miss him.)

Until a solution like the one the Fairness Doctrine represented is found, the integrity of our democracy, the quality of discourse, the value of our actions, the usefulness of "information" will be minimal. If that seems unimportant to you, you are not alone. Reagan's FCC henchman, Mark Fowler, argued that abolition of the Fairness Doctrine was a First Amendment "matter of principle." The principle was the "right" of corporations and the elite to have their position strongly made over all objections. You have to give Republicans credit for consistency.

Obviously, the authors of the First Amendment would have gone to war to defeat that sort of argument, but Republicans have freely interpreted the Constitution for their own purposes since Teddy Roosevelt fooled the party into being responsible to all citizens for 8 short, incredibly productive and progressive years. Of course, TR had to invent his own party (Bull Moose) to try and hold together the people who were honestly "conservative" and ethical after Taft returned Republicanism to it's rightful, corrupt, inbred roots. The Taft administration was intellectually lazy, administratively incompetent and corrupt, and personally gluttonous (sound familiar?) and set the nation and the world up for the first World War and 1929. The Republican Party has been repeating that formula ever since. The intention and end result is redistributing wealth from the many to the few: socialism and wealth for the elites, capitalism and disaster for the rest of us.

But this kind of discussion is blasted out of the MSM with the irrational "class warfare" argument and as far as Faux News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Murdock and Sun Myung Moon's media conglomerates, and the rest of corporate wingnut America's "news sources" are concerned that is the end of the discussion. Of course, the American Revolution was the ultimate class warfare and our Constitution was supposed to be the platform from which that battle could continue throughout the life of the Union of States. The classes will battle, regardless of the illusions and fantasies of propaganda, and the only real issue is "are both sides equally armed?" Today, the rich and powerful have all the weapons.

Reagan and his cynical and corrupt henchmen and heirs fired a fatal shot to the heart of democracy in 1985 and there has been no sign of democratic life from the corporate media since. Despite the fairyland wingnut whining about "left wing media," the media is overwhelmingly far right. Apparently, any sign of responsibility, integrity, fairness, or curiosity displayed by reporters is taken as evidence of political apocalypse by the wingnuttery. While it is true that the majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is equally true that most corporations are owned and mismanaged by the inbred children of inbred children of robber barons and ancient royalty. Those true "elites" hold the purse strings and money is what makes our world spiral down the toilet.

Without the protection and balance provided by the Fairness Doctrine, fairness is the furthest thing from the mind of corporate America. Without honest, balanced news, corporations like Murdock's and Moon's are free to distort and pervert "information" until it is as credible and useful as the babbling of priests or miracle cure peddlers. Once that task is complete, democracy has a half-life measured in minutes. The cynically misnamed "Patriot Act" was an example of that sudden death as were G.W.'s grotesque overuse of the State Secrets Privilege and Cheney's secret "National Energy Policy Task Force" meetings. From where I stand, it looks like the ride is all downhill from here.