The Death Cult that Wants to Kill Us All

There was a phase in the early period of Christianity where the clear objective was to die and go to Never-never Land as fast as possible. One of the first Christian sects, the Donatists, inspired a nutty group of fanatics called the Circumcellions who would initiate spontaneous acts of violence on strangers in the hopes of getting their asses killed and obtaining martyrdom status (sound familiar?). As one author put it, “The logic of Christianity leads to the disturbing conclusion that if heaven is better than this life, then death is a good and desirable outcome.” The nutjob Federalist Society even published an article titled “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing” where the author wrote, “For one thing, Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter.” Joy Pullman goes on to pile one nutty superstitious claim on top of many others, but the main point is “For another thing, for Christians, death is good.” Add taking as many non-believers and believers with you as possible to this philosphy is “the Christian thing to do.”

The early leaders of the Catholic Church saw that this interpretation of the Bible would lead to an quick disappearance of their source of resources and followers. In the fifth century, Augustine wrote The City of God, which was Christianity’s first condemnation of suicide. In an effort to get some kind of renumeration even from the dead, as described in Wikipedia, “In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas denounced suicide as an act against God and as a sin for which one could not repent. Civil and criminal laws were enacted to discourage suicide, and as well as degrading the body rather than permitting a normal burial, the property and possessions of both the person who died by suicide and of their family were confiscated.” [And today’s faux-conservatives bitch about inheritance taxes?]

Today’s breed of radical Christian “Crack Suicide Squads” are only slightly more subtle. They have no interest in caring for other humans, but they’ve snagged themselves on the crazy idea that their only path to heaven is to commit to having as many humans born as possible. Obviously, once a baby is born, they have no obligation to it in any way because . . . that would cost the idle rich who profit from superstition and foolishness some of their unearned money and . . . money.

As the author of one analysis of the Christian suicide cult wrote, “In fact, belief in heaven makes this life actively undesirable. The longer we live, the more chances we have to encounter temptation, fall into sin, and lose our salvation—the worst catastrophe imaginable. If heaven is the goal, then the younger we die, the better.This idea is taken to an extreme by Christian apologists who say that fetuses which die before birth go straight to heaven, bypassing human existence entirely. In this belief system, that’s the best possible outcome. The second best outcome is children who die before the age of accountability. They may suffer, but they never have a chance to lose their salvation.”

Knowing that is their belief certainly diminishes any hope one might have that Christians actually care about anyone but their own imaginary souls and their place at the right hand of an all-powerful vengeful Jehovah who will smite their enemies and grade school bullies and high school cool kids with plagues and lightening bolts. Actually, that sounds kinda Marvel Comics cool.

Now we have a buttload of Christian suicide culters in charge of at least one branch of the federal government, the grossly mis-named House of Representatives:

• Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who in his earlier employment was a lawyer for the wall-to-wall Christian crazies Alliance Defense Fund, a group of radical nutbags who have dedicated themselves to imagining that not being able to discriminate against LGBTQ rights will send the country to Hell. In an earlier moment in his career of failures and corruption, Johnson was the founding dean of the private Louisiana College Southern Baptist law school, established in 2010, where Johnson claimed would “acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundation of the legal system.” Gullible sponsors flushed $5 million into Johnson’s mythical university, but it never opened its doors. Johnson slithered away after two years as an idle, but well-paid, dean.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene whose insanity, treason, insurrection, and stupidity  needs no further introduction.
• Matt Gaetz, yet another whack job who would be happier as a private rural girls’ school Principal in an uneducated conservative southern state.
• House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan who should have stuck with overseeing pervert Ohio coaches and team doctors.
• Rep. Bob Good (R-VA): “We should not fear a government shutdown. Most of what we do up here is bad anyway. Most of what we do up here hurts the American people, when we do stuff to the American people while promising to do things for the American people. Essential operations continue. 85% continues. Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shutdown temporarily.”
• Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) “I love Andy Biggs. I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him,” Krysten Sinema
• Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) a classical fact-free-zone of Republican insanity.
• Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) is one of two Representatives from a state that doesn’t have a large enough population to warrant any representation, Rosendale is a special case for reforming the structure of the US Constitution. “Rosendale touts his background as a real estate investor from Maryland who pretends he’s a rancher out on the range from almost all the way across the country, but all public records show, though, that Rosendale is a ‘rancher’ by way of just renting real estate out to others who actually do the ranching on that land.” In other words, Rosendale is just another Eastern millionaire taking advantage of gullible Montana rubes.
• Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) is just like his Montana welfare state cohort, Rosendale, in his disrespect for the fools who vote for him. After running away from his Trump cabinet position in the wake of a collection of ethics violations, Zinke pretended to be an outsider looking out for his fellow Montana rubes in his House campaign. Wearing his ponyboy cowboy hat, he claims that “Despite the deep state's attempts to repeatedly stop me I stand before you as a duly elected member of the congress and tell you that a deep state exists… They want to wipe out the American cowboy.” Little fella, the cowboy barely existed for 20 years after the Civil War and that job is long gone and couldn’t even pretend to exist today without buttloads of federal farm assistance.
• There are at least a half-dozen more Republican nutjobs in the House and as many equally suicidal characters in the Senate, but their names are hardly worth mentioning and their stories are too miserably despicable to research.

As another Christian critic wrote, “For the religious right, every war is a sign of the return of Jesus Christ, and the chance they’ll get to say, “I told you so. I was right. I was right all along.” Even if they have to burn down the world to prove it.” Sadly, “even” is the wrong word to chose in regard to the American Christian Taliban. They desperately want to take the whole world with them to prove they are right, but what they will prove to nobody (when no one is here to see it) is that we all get one life to live and that’s it.

AI and LI, or HI? That Is the Question

This month’s (September 2023) Wired Magazine is sub-titled “Dear AI Overlord’s, Don’t Fuck This Up.” Obviously, the bulk of the magazine is devoted to opinions of how bad or good Artificial Intelligence is going to be for near and long-term humanity. Mostly, as usual, the Wired opinions are from liberal arts majors who have no idea what they are talking about as far as AI’s technology.

In the month’s “Dear Cloud Support” essay, the opening question is “’I failed two captcha tests this week. Am I still human Bot or not?’” The second I read that statement I realized the question missed the real problem. It is not a yes-no problem, it is a 1-out-of-three problem, at the least. It isn’t just AIBots who are the threat, it is equally or more stupid humans (Low Intelligence) and badly designed AI systems that are the threat. The battle for survival is between the LI&AIBots vs High Intelligence (HI). In the short term, the stupid people will cause the most harm. Long term? Who knows?

There are a couple of articles that delude to the idea that engineers and computer programmers aren’t up to the job of keeping AI reasonably moral. They, clearly a pack of liberal arts dweebs, imagine that, finally, the world will need the kinds of “skills” that a liberal arts degree supposedly promotes. No evidence of that appears to exist in the modern world and lots of contradicting data would argue to the contrary. For example, Steve Jobs, a liberal arts scumbag who learned from his philosophy classes which kinds of decisions are moral and which are not. So, he focused his life on always picking the amoral “what will profit Steve the most” options. There is no shortage of executives, politicians, and entertainers who disprove the idea that anything about a liberal arts education creates any sort of “better” citizen.

Not that a STEM education produces any sort of predictable outcome, either. The amoral academic environment is probably the culprit. Between the cut-throat publish-or-perish competition, the corporate shills who crank out drugs, processes, and products for companies at the expense of the taxpayers who support marginal “education” facilities, and the low bar academia sets for educator standards and skills it doesn’t matter much what a kid majors in, exposure to this environment is probably doing to do at least as much damage as it provides useful education.

As Law 2 in the “Five Laws of Stupidity” clearly explains, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” And that includes education credentials or professional standing and accomplishment. Law 1 states “Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation” and Law 4 explains “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.” At the least, 50% of every population is “below average” and that is assuming the distribution is “normal,” not heavily skewed-right with a really long tail as I suspect. The existence, abundance, and persistence of the Trump Cult is serious evidence that, at least in the USA, some serious down-breeding is causing our average IQ to drop dramatically. So, assuming that “average IQ of 100” might be optimistic.

If I had to put my fate in the hands of an AI system that was Open Sourced and monitored by the smartest people in the world or the random-number-generator that is, optimistically, what the Low Intelligence crowd represents at best, I’ll take AIBots and HI over anything the LI crowd can produce.

Would You Rather I Think You Are Wrong, a Fool, or a Liar?

A couple of years ago, I was traveling in a car with some friends (remember when we did that?) listening to the driver tell us about his alien encounters, paranormal abilities, and his paranoid delusions that Big Pharma possessed cures for practically every major disease from the cold to cancer but were suppressing them for fun and profit. Normally, I zone out when this kind of noise is going on, but that was tough to do on this trip. I tried though, trust me, I tried.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked, “Which is less insulting, being called wrong, a liar, or a fool?” I seriously wanted to know because I do not know the answer, even for myself, at least I don’t know the absolute answer. Liars are often out for some kind of gain, but this wasn’t that kind of situation, and fools can be educated if they want to be. Just being wrong is the human condition. So it seems to me that "wrong" or “fool” would be the better option, but admitting to either is tough on the ego. Especially when you are convinced you are extremely intelligent. I am not cursed with that delusion, at least. So, for me it’s "wrong" or “fool” over “liar.” I might have said “bullshitter” rather than “liar,” but the difference is academic. You could substitute “uninformed,” “misinformed,” “delusional,” or “easily misled” for “fool,” too. Likewise, there are lots of substitutes for "wrong" that apply, but they are no less irritating. Again, the difference is semantic rather than quantitative.

Not surprisingly, my friend did not like the question and I’m still hung out to dry as to which is the worst of the options. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a serious question, or as serious as I’m capable of being. Remember, I mostly think humans are the dumbest least sustainable animal in existence.

One of the funny aspects of this conversation/confrontation is that I’d talked this friend into reading Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark a while back and he loved it. He read statements like “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.” And my friend agreed with Sagan and saw no contradiction between Sagan’s ridicule of alien invasions, magical hidden-away “cures” and technologies suppressed by an all-powerful government or corporations and his own claims to unrepeatable and unvalidated paranormal abilities and anything Sagan said to the contrary.

Another friend is absolutely unconvinced that motorcycle helmets contribute anything useful to motorcyclist safety. This is in spite of the most recent “experiment” in Florida in 2000, when the state exempted riders from required helmets. “The interrupted time series analysis (1/1994 to 12/2001) estimates a 48.6% increase in motorcycle occupant deaths the year after the law change.” Other states contributed to increasing motorcycle deaths in the same general period when Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana weakened their helmet laws. He made some pretty extravagant claims about his lifetime riding mileage, which (probably irrationally) I had to doubt because of his anti-helmet stance. Riding a motorcycle for long hours without a helmet is just not something I’ve ever witnessed in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. The helmet-less biker crowd are usually pushing their extreme limits doing a 100 miles between long bar stops, which usually results in staggering homeward, a crash, an arrest, and/or calling a friend with a pickup or trailer for a ride home. I get that, too, since you really take a sonic and physical beating on a motorcycle without some kind of head protection and a windshield isn’t even close to useful for that purpose.

Like many from my generation, math isn’t this man’s strong point. We hear words like “million” and “billion” and “trillion” tossed around by the media so much that they become familiar-seeming concepts. However, familiarity breeds not just contempt but incomprehension when it comes to numbers; specially at the really large and really small extremes. Likewise, another acquaintance is constantly barraging me with left-wing economic silliness. He admitted that his consumer math skills are so poor that he couldn’t balance a checkbook or a family budget if his life depended on it. (His wife is stuck with that responsibility.) However, with that disability firmly in hand he is convinced he is an expert on the US Fed and the World Bank’s function and the economic solutions to the world’s many complicated dysfunctions. He is really tired of my laughing while he jabbers away about pure nonsense. Again, and likewise, a Libertarian acquaintance has equally nonsensical “solutions” to problems that are so far beyond his economic, mathematical, social-system grasp that they are pure comedy and he also stopped talking to me in person because I can’t stop laughing when he kicks the mini-Koch propaganda in gear and I blurt out, “You know, your heroes were first in line for government handouts when their real estate ‘investments’ and other gambling debts blew up in 2008, right?” People in glass houses, even glass mansions, you know?

So, my question stands and I’d love to hear a response (in the comments, not in a direct email) from anyone who stumbles on this blog. Is it better to be thought simply wrong, a fool, or a liar? What does it mean about someone who picks one over the other? And why do you think one is better than the other?

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.

Book Review: Bullshit Jobs in A Bullshit World

I recently suffered my way through a terrible book, recommended by a retired professor friend who (apparently) hustles any book written by a fellow anthropologist: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber. Graeber setup a definition of “bullshit job” that excluded his own job, "anthropologist and anarchist activist" and any other job where the occupant does not think what he/she is doing is pointless. So, being clueless and selfish at pretty much any occupation makes that job some variant of worthwhile, according to Graeber. 

I will have to disagree. 
 
One of the things I experienced working in a for-profit college for 13 years was the bullshit academia attitude of “What can I do to keep myself busy and employed without a moment of thought as to whether my class provides any value to students?” Liberal arts academics are desperate to sell their bullshit services because outside of those ivy-covered walls those “services” are pretty much worthless. With a PhD in anthropology/literature/history/music/philosophy/etc. and an ability to pour coffee into a cup and carry a plate you can probably get a wait-staff job, if you aren’t too lazy. Otherwise, what you know and can teach does not have a market value outside of the education system. If you can incorporate those fields of study into a writing career or take your “broad-based education” and turn it into a profitable hobby or convince someone that your liberal arts background makes you a viable candidate for a marketing, sales, or management job, power to you. Seriously. It happens although I don’t know why. . 

In the meantime, I’ve thought a lot about bullshit jobs and, more importantly, important and critical jobs and how our fucked up incentive programs (taxes, education system incompetence and obstacles, paychecks, and general encouragement/discouragement) are as far as getting the right people into the right jobs and getting the rest of the braindead bulk of humanity out of the way. A typical western STEM education, for example, is loaded with bullshit classes taught by bullshit experts; from "anthropologist and anarchist activists" to anthropology/literature/history/music/philosophy/etc. PhDs. There are areas of those fields that are of use to every serious adult, philosophy’s Logic and Critical Thinking, Advanced English Grammar (in the US, at least), and . . . that’s about it based on my own experience. At one time a “liberal education” required several hours of college-level math including calculus, similar hours of real science including calculus, and cross-disciplinary courses in STEM subjects. Today, a liberal arts program is designed for the lowest common denominator with inflated grades for mere participation. With that in mind, forcing a serious student to waste time with these fluff courses is practically theft. 

For a really long time, I’ve believed that management jobs, from corporate to the President of the United States and all important jobs in-between should be drafted positions. Anyone who wants that kind of job is exactly the kind of person who should never be allowed anywhere near it. On the compensation scale, the jobs a society needs the most should pay the most: scientists are probably most mission-critical in today’s world, followed by physicians of all specialties, engineers, computer programmers (especially cybercrime experts) and technicians followed pretty closely by farmers (actual farmers, not corporate farm managers) and a variety of critical jobs from water purification technician to garbage man. The easy, unimportant stuff like middle management, banking executives and hedge fund traders should be taxed into near negative incomes until no one wants to do that job ever again. Most of the rest of the jobs in our culture are likely bullshit jobs. 

A realistic definition of a bullshit job is any job that, if every practitioner of that occupation vanished tonight, would either not be missed by society as a whole or could easily be replaced in a day or two with equally unskilled labor. Doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, skilled construction technicians, food farmers (not corn or soybean corporate welfare queens on tractors), and the like are real jobs. Bankers, hedge fund “managers,” a huge variety of “higher education” academics and administration doofuses, salespeople, burger flippers, wait-staff, telephone sterilizers and the like are bullshit job practitioners. And it doesn’t matter if they know it or not. 

Postscript: In these corona-virus pandemic days, it has become a lot easier to determine which jobs are really bullshit jobs. If you are sitting home now, unemployed and clearly "unnecessary," your job was bullshit. If you are fumbling around at one of the stock exchanges, gambling and guessing a whatever direction the President's latest gibberish is going to take the market, you could not be less critical to any aspect of the economy or national security. Obviously the author of this books self-exemption from the world of bullshit jobs has been proven wrong. Every anthropology prof on the planet is sitting at home hoping for extended paid leave because not a one of them is critical for any aspect of life. 

Parents or Not Parents?

June 3, 2014

It’s summer 2014 and I’m getting Facebook, Twitter, and email bombed with “we’re having a kid” notices from ex-students and friends. I guess I’m supposed to be happy for them, but if that’s what they expect they don’t know me very well. Do they?

I’d offer a general rule of thumb (with the original definition of that rule intact) for prospective parents: If you would have hated to be your own parent (think during ages 13-25) you will be a lousy parent and will raise a terrible kid. Sure, there are a tiny number of exceptions to that rule, but they mostly prove the rule.

Remember, even alligators care for their babies as does about every species on the planet, but humans need care, feeding, nurturing, patience, investment (emotional and financial), training, and protection well into young adulthood. Babies are the easy part and if you have never cared for a baby I recommend you put in some time doing that before you consider reproducing. Of course most people aren’t considering reproducing at the time of conception, anyway. They are just fucking. After they discover what fucking leads to, they pretend they wanted to be a parent all along because they’re too lazy and cowardly to hunt down an abortion clinic. Not long after that, a kid is born and lousy parenting ensues.

Still, it’s all easy and somewhat fun and games until the little brat turns into a teenager. Then it all goes downhill fast. The kid turns into a fair reproduction of the parent at that age. The “parent” loses patience with the mirror reflection of him/herself and the kid continues the cycle with another kid; or ten.

And don’t forget, if you reproduce you have to pretend to care about your kid’s future. You can fake-pretend by joining a religious cult (all religions are cults) that absolves you of responsibility for the environmental, economic, and social disasters you’ve left for your kid to suffer and clean up, but that’s just avoidance. Every generation in front of us did the same damn thing and that’s why much of the ocean’s surface and bottom are covered in plastic and human waste. It’s why we stumble from one war to the next, each one driving society closer to total war and global annihilation. It’s why our species and culture gets dumber and dumber, because smart people do not reproduce (or do in small numbers; ie. less than 2).

Of course, you could actually care about the next generations’ futures and try to do something right for your children and your children’s children. But if that’s the kind of person you are you probably didn’t meet the criteria I started out with in the beginning of this essay.

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.

Mangling the American Dream

I am never more out of sync with my country than when it comes to consumerism. For all of the reasons Republicans say people like me are “un-American,” I hate all of the holiday seasons; especially Xmas. It’s not just the superstition and faux-good-will that smears itself across this smarmy holiday from work (for a rare non-retail few) and common sense, it’s the constant guilt-manipulating whining about “gifts” and expectations. If I could pick any time of the year to be struck down by lightning, it would be anytime between Halloween and Easter. Hell, I’d step between practically anyone and a bullet to get out of that time of the year (Trump and his spawn excluded).

One morning a few weeks ago, I was making potato pancakes for our breakfast and decided to drag out my rarely-used food processor to shred the potatoes and onions. As I was assembling the pieces of this vintage machine into something that would turn potatoes into bits of vegetable confetti, I was reminded of where this kitchen implement came from. Sometime around 2005, I decided I wanted to make one more attempt at adding a lot of vegetables to my diet and I figured buying a food processor to make that job a little less irritating might be motivational. As usual, I didn’t want to pay much for this speculative diet-motivational tool. So, I went on Craig’s List, created a “search alert” and let CL do what it does best. A couple of days later, I got a hit on a processor in my price range in the Payne-Phalen area of St. Paul. I called the seller and set up a time for me to check out the appliance a few hours before I needed to be in St. Paul for a recording session later that evening.

The sellers turned out to be a fairly recent-immigrant Asian couple who were doing the American Dream thing: buying all new everything as fast as they could toss their credit cards at anyone with stuff to sell. They had a new Honda Accord in the driveway, a living room full of nice leather-bound furniture and a television bigger than my living room wall, and a recently redecorated kitchen with lots of brand new appliances. I suspect the processor they were selling me was a hand-me-down. When they greated me at the door, they checked out my classy 1998 Ford Escort station wagon and my usual high-style outfit: a tee-shirt and jeans and sandals and a Denver Nuggets jacket. I don’t think I impressed them at all. We talked a bit while I tested the food processor and stuffed it and its parts back into the original packing box they had provided. They wanted to show me their new Cuisinart food processor, but I needed to keep moving so that I wouldn’t be late for my gig.

That morning, I considered the fact that I have never been much of a fan or even a participant in the American Dream; as commonly accepted by most Americans. I have owned exactly one new car—a  1973 Mazda RX3 station wagon—in my life and would just as soon never get financially beat up that badly again. I bought two new motorcycles, both early in 1974, and got my financial ass handed to me on those vehicles. Since then, I’ve owned a collection of beaters and utilitarian used vehicles and have driven a few of them into the ground. I’ve been accused of being willing to buy used food if I could figure out how to safely digest it. During my working career, I allocated so few minutes to meals that I probably wouldn’t have tasted the difference most of the time.

I don’t care about keeping up with the Jones’s, I just don’t want to get screwed. For most large purchases, being the first buyer is accepting the fact that you will likely be the one who takes the biggest financial hit for getting it when it is new. New cars lose 25-50% of their purchase value the day they roll off of the lot. Most motorcycles are no different. I bought a relatively new construction home in Parker, Colorado: I paid $71,000 for it in 1992, the original owners paid $110,000 for the house in 1984. (Thank you, Mr. Reagan.) I bought a like-new carbon fiber guitar a couple of years ago for $750. The original owner paid $1100 for it and a friend bought a lower cost version of the same instrument at the same time I found my used one; he paid $1300 plus tax. I bought a collection of power tools from a local retired guy for $100. On the way out his door with my new tools all loaded in the pickup, he mentioned that he’d paid about $2000 for those same tools when they were new. I bought a like-new $1400 digital oscilloscope a few weeks ago for $200 and the original owner threw in a couple hundred dollars worth of test probes to seal the deal. All of this equipment was barely used when I bought them. And on and on I could go. You too, I hope.

The real American dream used to be to hand off a world and a country that was better than the one we inherited. Americans used to take pride in trying to give their children a leg-up into the world they would possess when their parents were either old and feeble or gone. Today, many Americans appear to be proud of doing exactly the opposite. The two generations currently in power, Boomers and X-gens, seem to be doing everything they can to use up all of the world’s natural resources before their children realize how greedy they are being. We’re cobbling together dysfunctional national and state governments, solely purposed to make the rich richer and everybody else poor and enslaved. At least half of us are pretending that humans are not primarily responsible for the rapid climate change the world is displaying.

Americans and Arabs are doubling-down on their death-cult superstitions, pretending that prayers and wishes and a collection of gods so confusing that even the Greeks would be confused by who-is-who-in-the-sky. In the US, we’ve decided social and economic justice, education, democracy, and national security all take a backseat to making the rich richer and more powerful. That is NOT the American Dream. If anything, it is the Russian ogliarchy’s dream and they seem to be driving the car at the moment. I’d call that an American Nightmare.

Free At Last

Listening to comedian Rory Scovel on the January 20th Live from Here show, I realized that he’s right: the freakin’ world is gonna end with Trump in charge . . . and that is, weirdly, a good thing. During the show, John Prine even did a song with a lyric that emphasized that thought. They’re both right, we’re free, we’re finally free. Nothing matters any more. Everyone is going to die at pretty much the same time.

The religious right made it clear to anyone who knows anything about traditional Christian theology that the only remaining Christian “value” is the Supreme Court interpretation of the first amendment that exempts “churches” from corporate or personal income tax. That’s it, for them. End of moral discussion. Nothing else matters. Yeah, they babble about “right to life” in their 13th century hustle to get women back into the kitchen and delivery rooms, but that yak has been going on since the first European immigrant wet-backed into “New England.” The right to an abortion is one of the first marketing ploys the "New World” promoters used to con women into risking the wilderness. Face it, Republicans don’t care about any lives but their own and the Koch brothers’.

For decades those two groups, Republicans and faux-Christian evangelicals, have held the high ground in the cultural war’s labeling and marketing game; with phrases like “family values,” “Christian values,” “American (‘merican) Values,” “traditional values,” and so on. Now, thanks to Donald John Trump, those days are long over for several reasons. The first would be that the evangelicals and the uneducated and the self-appointed moral guardians of “conservative values” elected Donald John Trump; a vulgar, hedonistic adulterer, a sexual and economic predator, self-aggrandizing narcissist, a child-molesting, serial bankruptcy con artist, and all around near-perfect anti-Christ. If they can vote for him, nothing they’ve ever said about morality has meant squat.

Guys like me, who used to think it was polite to save “special” words for the garage and basement, have been cut loose. George Carlin would be amazed. All seven of his “words you can’t say on television” are now on television almost every night. Just from the language Donny John has let loose on the public, all bets are off. “Fucking,” “motherfucking,” “fuck,” “shit,” “shithole,” “shithouse,” “pussy,” “son of a bitch,” “bullshit,” and pretty much any other collection of words that used to be considered obscene and unfit for public use are now spouting from the President’s tiny pursed mouth. Boorish and bigoted behavior is now the model we’re showing to the world from the White House, But if you think Trump’s language is mean and obscene, you ought to hear what his minions are saying.

The only words Donald John Trump seems to think we all need to avoid are “vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based.” Who knew what “obscenity would be in 2018? George Orwell would be writing a whole new 1984 if he’d lived to see Trump’s America.

But the real gate-buster is the fact that, not only are we all likely to die while Donny John is President, but that we are all going to die at very nearly the exact same time! Think about how liberating that knowledge is. One of the disgusting values most liberals hold dear is “What kind of world are we leaving for our children and grand-children?” Republicans, pseudo-conservatives, and fundamentalists of all stripes and denominations never worry about the future: they either don’t care or they and their death cults sincerely hope that we’ll all die soon. Well, we’re leaving those kids absolutely nothing, which means we don’t have to worry about their struggle and suffering from the mess we’re going to leave them. We won’t be there to slut-shame and they won’t be there to do the slut-shaming. We’ll all be dead!

Isn’t that awesome? Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

We’ll all be dead, every one of us within a few seconds of every other: barely time for the last ones left on the planet to say, “Oh, shit!” And we’ll all be dead and gone and, afterwards, there might not be much left of the whole planet’s ability to support life.  At the literal least, when Donny John is done, it will be at least 100-200 million years before the alligators, crocodiles, rats, cockroaches, bottom-of-the-ocean amphipods and echinoderms and foraminiferans, and/or houseflies evolve into something capable of being pissed off at us for blowing up the world. 

How is that not liberating?

We might as well legalize practically everything that isn’t directly and intentionally murderous: only because we don’t want to short anyone out of their 1-3 years max life-expectancy. Drugs, all of them, all of the recreational ones, anyway, get legalized. Screw waiting for lazy, incompetent Republican congresscritters to get around to shutting the door on the DEA. This is a states’ rights issue. Just legalize anything that can get us high and make federal law enforcement stay in Washington, D.C. (where weed is already legal). We’re good with the totally bonkers right-to-lifers; everyone dumb enough to get pregnant gets to be a mom just in time for both mom and the kid(s) to be blown to bits! What’s the worst thing that can happen to new moms? 1-2 years max and your troubles are over. Of course, drug manufacturers get to sell their latest male and female sterilization and birth control drugs without any sort of FDA approval process. Over-the-counter, for crap’s sake. Who wants to be pregnant or a new dad if the odds are lousy that the kid will even live long enough to be born?

Nothing you can say, nothing you can do (excepting the murderous boundary), no words are obscene, no sexual behavior, and no financial crime matters. Because we’re all going to be dead in the same moment. And it’s going to be soon!

Obviously, if someone doesn’t want to wait for Trump to poke his “really big red button” with his tiny little fingers, they should have all the resources necessary to take an early exit. Pfizer and the companies that make sodium thiopental should get to be as rich as they can be in the 1-3 years they have to sell death-row drugs to the general public. When someone does manage to off themselves, relatively painlessly, we’ll be done with dreary, teary funeral ceremonies. We should celebrate that kind of skill and research. Most likely, we’re all going to fry in a blast of several-thousand degree evaporated atmosphere and radiation. Who knows? Trump’s apocalypse might be incredibly painful and the successful suicide will seem like the smart choice. We should all be jealous, rather than selfishly-sad. Every death will be cause for one of those drunken Irish wakes where at least another half-dozen mourners get killed on the way home from the party. Life will be like non-stop frat parties, which we’d think was irresponsible and shortsighted if we thought there was going to be any sort of future to worry about.

So, I say it’s time to celebrate the Age of Trump. We’re all going to be guilt-free and that’s no easy thing these days. In fact, if Trump doesn’t kill us all, the smart move will be to follow Trump with President Rock or Nugent. On their first day in office, either one of those two drunken nitwits would stumble into the Oval Office and fall on Trump’s “big red button.” Otherwise, our kids and grand-kids are really going to hate us for the mess we’ve left them and we’ll probably live long enough to hear about it.

Proving My Point, Again!

I have never believed that semi-pro sports, Division I-XX inter-collegiate anything, belongs in public universities. For-profit, private Schools for Spoiled Children can do whatever they like, but taxpayer money should not be wasted on jocks and stadiums. The recent University of Minnesota scandal proves my point for the n-qillionth time. Ten UofM football players gang raped or banged a co-ed who was either drunk or stupid or both and that obviously violated the university’s bare-minimum “school conduct standards.” The rest of the team went on strike, threatening to stay away from the bowl game that would almost provide the UofM with enough money to justify paying the ridiculous salaries to the coaches and athletic director. This is what passes for taking a moral stand in sports, “Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world!” said GoldenGopherHFC on Twitter. In the new world of Trumpdumb, this is as good as “a better world” gets.

“According to police records, a woman told officers she was drunk when she was sexually assaulted in running back Carlton Djam’s apartment by several men on Sept. 3, including some of the suspended players. She said her sexual contact with two men may have been consensual, but her contact with four of them was not. Several players told police it was consensual, and an investigator who watched a video Djam took of the incident wrote that ‘she does not appear to be upset by the sexual activity and does not indicate that she wants it to stop … and the sexual contact appears entirely consensual.’” Explain to me how any of that resembles higher education. Please!

The players are concerned for their fellow teammates/gangbangers, the quarterback Mitch Leidner said, “All these kids’ reputations are destroyed. Their names are destroyed. It’s extremely difficult to get back and it’s very unfair for them and that’s why we’re sticking together through this thing.” First, none of these men qualify as “kids.” They are overgrown, privileged young men in a culture that celebrates brawn over brain and violence over decency. If they weren’t playing football, they’d be in the military. They are not kids, children, or boys. They knew what they were doing and one of the nitwits even filmed the gangbang to give himself something to beat off to after the head injuries and age remove whatever attraction he has to women.

So, good for them. Stay on strike guys. “Three senior leaders stood in front of the group and delivered a defiant rebuke of the university’s decision, saying they would not participate in any football activities until the school president and athletic director apologized and revoked the suspensions. If that meant they don’t play in the upcoming Holiday Bowl against Washington State, they appeared poised to stand firm.” Blow both your college and your professional career making a statement that replicates the incoming federal government’s moral values and that of the 62.2 million Trump chumps who did what their Russian brainwashers (didn’t take much washing, either) told them to do and are standing proud as the nation’s security and economy is about to be wreaked by their votes.

Now that I’ve thought this all the way through, maybe sports are the only thing public universities should concern themselves with. These athletics-only college employees are absolutely representing the true moral values of 47% of the voters in the 2016 election. I guess this is the country we are going to be for at least the next four years.

The Price of Being A Nation of Assholes

One of the few terrific management books of the last 100 years is Robert Sutton’s 2007 The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. In case you are a typical American and don't have the mental capacity to read a book, Sutton offered two tests for identifying assholes:

1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than him/her?

Sound familiar?
To provide guidance to the generally clueless sort who make corporate decisions, Sutton also gave us a dozen identifying asshole behaviors, he called them The Dirty Dozen:

1. Insults
2. Violation of personal space
3. Unsolicited touching
4. Threats
5. Sarcasm
6. Flames
7. Humiliation
8. Shaming
9. Interruption
10. Backbiting
11. Glaring
12. Snubbing

Thanks to the Electoral College and the ultimate American asshole, Alexander Hamilton, we are about to experience a federal government totally staffed by assholes. Outside of the 61,900,651 confirmed assholes who voted for Trump (as of November 8, 2016) any normal person would recognize all 12 of those behaviors as Donald Trump’s prime personality markers.  From my own personal experience in this past election, those characteristics are core pseudo-conservative principles, too.

What does it mean for the future of the country when half of our voters idolize assholes? Keep in mind that, on average, the least educated portion of the country voted overwhelmingly for Trump, demonstrating why Trump and Republicans “love the uneducated.” For one, it means our media will continue to become more mean spirited, less fact-oriented, more focused on profit and less on public service, and society in general and public service will be less inviting to decent, intelligent people. I’m a firm believer in the FACT that incentives are everything. When society rewards politicians’ bad behavior far more consistently than decency, manners, intelligence, and competence, people with those qualities will find other places to commit their time. Eventually (as in January 20, 2017) our federal government will be almost fully-staffed by the worst, most selfish, least capable people in the country. The country is about to experience at least two years governed by all assholes. I don’t think this is going to work out the way these voters expected or hoped.

#165 What do We Deserve?

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

"We get the government we deserve." I think that may be one of the least obvious, most true statements about government of any type, any size, and at any time in history. The best periods of government in American history all occurred during brief times when the public was so disappointed by the performance of the usual suspects that they rose from their lethargy and took back power for those who should never be allowed to possess it. In geopolitical time, those high points barely warrant a blink of an eye compared to the eons of droning, corrupt, self-serving governments that have cursed humanity since the first caveman decided to tell other cavemen who was boss.

Looking at politics under the lens of "what does the public deserve" does, maybe, a disservice to places like Mexico and most of South and Central America, most of Africa, the Arab nations, most of Asia and East Europe. At the core, obviously, many parents in those countries raised or failed to raise the little rat bastards who torture, destroy, and terrorize those countries. If their offspring turn out to be the knife that kills the parent, it's tough to generate a lot of sympathy for the "victim." You grew it, you own it.

Tough love, I know, but it comes back to haunt us. Much of the world's misery is generated by American robber baron corporations that use US military power and the threat of that power to manipulate foreign governments, smaller nations' natural resources, and the world's monetary system. We grew it, now we own it. Those corporations have grown beyond the boundaries of the United States and show no more loyalty to our flag than they do the flags of the countries they've invaded in the past. Should that really be surprising to anyone? In 1968, Chicago discovered that cops on the take don't take orders. Throughout the 1960s until today, we should have learned that a CIA/FBI on the take is equally insensitive to management. Now, we're beginning to see that corporations that manipulate, to their financial and power advantage, all of the worst aspects of our culture are insensitive to the culture that they supposedly serve. Well, duh. You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Which brings us to our present dilemma. Our government, from local to federal is a contaminated, corrupt mess. The bits that aren't owned and operated by international corporations are owned and operated by local gangsters. Even the smallest cities are poorly managed by special interests that don't care one whit about the safety, security, financial stability, or future of the communities they pretend to serve. And we, apparently, love them for it.

My hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, once hired a City Manager from some damned place because he had magical business credentials and could, supposedly, bring new business to that dying community. Within a couple of years, he attracted a collection of packing plants and associated service vendors for that industry, which drew a few thousand illegal laborers to the town, driving wages into the dust, ruining neighborhoods, and decimating the town's already weak education system. After the City Manager's "work was done," he promptly left town with yet another credit to his resume. The town has yet to, and probably will never, recover.

My current home, Little Canada, Minnesota, presents less opportunity for industry, being a fully-developed bedroom suburb of St. Paul. That hasn't slowed up the march of political opportunism, though. Like most eastern cities, we have a supremely expensive, astoundingly unproductive city government. With too many employees doing too little work, all hired or appointed by a crony-system that is old, well-entrenched, and regularly re-elected by local voters. For some reason, the majority of voters like the current system, even though they don't know anything about how it operates. We're a mirror of national politics, which does nothing to explain either local or national politics.

In a fit of irrational community loyalty, my wife ran for City Council in the last election. She campaigned by going door-to-door, talking to our neighbors, engaging in the local televised debate, and taking every opportunity to talk about how our little city's quality of life could be improved. She campaigned on city efficiency, managing the city's resources and development, opening the city's financial decisions to public examination, protecting our small group of lakes and waterways, She placed campaign signs on our neighbors' lawns, with local businesses, and handed out fliers until she felt she'd contacted everyone who might care about the community and vote that concern.

Her opponents controlled the debate, placed their campaign signs, illegally, on public property, in front of a few bars and liquor stores and their own homes, took the local vote for granted and, correctly, assumed that the voters would be as uninvolved, uninformed, and dysfunctional as they had been in the past. One of the incumbents had been seriously ill with disabling cancer and died soon after the election, before taking office. Our little city's experiment in democracy ran aground almost immediately, as the existing office holders disingenuously praised the deceased council member's dedication to the city's welfare (something I never witnessed in dozens of council meetings I observed over the years). While waving that distracting flag with one hand, they worked quickly to subvert democratic principle so they could appoint another of their cronies to the council. Public comment was discounted, logic and fairness ignored, and it appears that we'll continue down the corrupt path our city has trod in the past, because that's what conservatives do.

The problem is normal people don't want to associate with the kind of people who work in government, run for , political office, or own the people who squat in those jobs. One trip to a city council meeting is enough to keep the typical citizen from venturing into that boring, degenerate environment for years. A short conversation with a city manager, a council member, state legislator, or governor will drive most of us into an hour-long hand washing frenzy. Government and business share this quality, the closer you get to the top, the scummier your associations become. At some point, freedom and liberty have to be defended by those who expect the rewards of those precious qualities. If we don't take back our governments from the scumbags who will use it against us, we'll deserve the government we get.

December 2006

#70 Enough is Enough (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

A few years back, I was traveling in a smoke filled pickup with my brother and one of his friends.  The conversation, somehow, had drifted to the reintroduction of timber wolves on public lands in the northwest.  These two hobby cattlemen were irritated that perfectly good grazing land was being wasted on a wild animal; even worse, a predator.  Obviously, the conversation degenerated into one of the many the ever-popular anti-tree-hugging diatribe.  Winding down, it all ended on a statement that tree-huggers ought to be concerned that cattlemen were going extinct. 

Until that moment, I hadn't realized that cattlemen were a species.  Having known a fair number of real cattlemen in my ag-tech-support past, I'd always thought of them as members of the more common homo sapiens sup-species and as nothing more specific than industrialists in a rectally-emitting smokestack industry.  Once I considered this new knowledge, I began to feel real concern for other, long extinct, occupational species.  Buggy whip weavers, for example.  Stovepipe hat blockers were especially cruelly extinguished, in the prime of their abilities and stylishness. 

Picking on my brother's hobbies is a great pastime, but it's not the real purpose in this rant.  Humans have developed a species-centric perspective that is becoming downright vicious.  All of the religions we've created, including science, are based on the idiotic idea that humans are the end product of evolution.  That species-centric outlook would be good comedy if we weren't so prone to take it to globally destructive extremes.

Here in Minnesota, for instance, the Department of Natural Resources has become concerned because the deer population is approaching one million, "far too many for the habitat to support."  In the Twin Cities, alone, there are nearly four million humans, but the entire state is incapable of supporting one million deer?   In Arizona, the FLM experts have decided that the desert is incapable of supporting more than 40,000 wild horses.  So, they roundup and redistribute the "excess" animals on a regular basis.  Redistribution often means selling the animals to dog and people food processors.  In the 1930s, there were more than two hundred thousand wild horses in Arizona and the desert appeared to support those animals considerably better than it supports the five million people who live there now.  Which animal uses and misuses the most resources, deer, wild horses, wolves, or humans?  Which animal is more likely to exceed the carrying capacity of a given piece of real estate? 

The idea that wild and free animals are encroaching on human habitat has become the usual human perspective on real estate.  Even to urbanites, it ought to be obvious that the animals were here first.  It's humans who are doing the encroaching.  Rapidly approaching five billion on earth, soon the only species that will outnumber us will be house flies and cockroaches.  Without the food we supply to those species, they would be in trouble too. 

Since it's so obvious and easy to determine how many of each wild animal species belong in a given territory, I'd like to ask why that same calculation hasn't been made for humans?  Biologists make precise statements about how many acres per animal are required in a given habitat, based on the animals' nature, diet, and the available resources.  Predators always require a lot more space than herbivores.  Humans, being the ultimate predator, would seem to require the most space but that's a calculation I've never been able to find.

Personally, I've always considered most human abnormalities to be "population diseases."  Many of these behavioral oddities are so "normal" in our current overpopulated world that it has become politically incorrect to describe them as unnatural or aberrations.  Most non-reproductive sexual preferences, for example, are obviously nature's attempt to prevent humans from procreating.  Homosexuality and variations on that theme take a significant portion of the population out of the breeding pool.  Mental illness, especially those illnesses that shorten life expectancy, reduce average longevity and population growth.  And, of course, good 'ole and ever-popular wars and other crimes of violence are effective population reducers.  These are the tactics, and the only tactics, humans use to prevent overpopulation. 

If we were truly a rational animal, we'd be more proactive about managing human population.  War, for example, is a typically human response to population control.  In other words, it's stupid.  War is similar to organized hunting as a population control tactic.  Hunters actively seek out and destroy the most healthy and attractive animals, leaving the sick, weak, and weird looking to reproduce and continue the species.  Wars do the same thing to human populations.  The easiest way to avoid being killed in a foreign war is to have a serious defect, to be 4F.  Fit males get shipped off to be killed and the defective stay home and breed.  Yet another brilliant innovation from the folks who brought you communism, dictatorships, feudalism, monarchies, and international corporations.

Humans have ruled the planet for less than 5,000 years and have been a significant evolutionary force for less than 50,000 years.  In geologic time, we've been here for less than an instant.  In biological time, we've barely been here for much longer.  At our current rate of stupidity, it's hard to imagine we'll be around to meet the next dominant species.  Unless we destroy the planet, we're likely to be leaving it to that unlucky species in the not all that distant future. 

However, an awful lot of humans appear to be determined to take out the planet when we go.  The Reagan Administration was stuffed full of people who could expound on Manifest Destiny and other comedic standards.  Bush I & II rehired many of those same simpletons and they are charging ahead, ignorantly and theocratic-ly, into the overpopulation void.  The race seems to be between finding a way to use up the world's natural resources in a single generation and breeding so effectively that we reach standing-room-only.  As Mark Twain said, "humans descended from the higher animals."  Was he talking about rabbits?

February, 2003

Progress as Consumption

"Why's it got to be built? It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses . . ." And with that Douglas Adams describes all of human intelligence on the subject of "progress" and consumption. Growth and consumption and progress are all linked together in the corporate social model. You have to build, population has to grow, and all of this bulding and growing is somehow linked to the progress of humanity as a species. Nevermind the mountains of trash, the acres of abandoned buildings, or the mass of the population who can't keep up with progress and end up on welfare or homeless or living on the margins of society. That's the price of progress.

In a country where less than 1% of the population owns more of the nation's wealth than the bottom 95%, progress seems to be defined by pushing that statistic further apart. Anytime a politician questions the human and social cost of marginalizing the overwhelming majority of the population that politician will be accused of "social engineering."

Of course, social engineering is what every tax system, economic system, and government does. It is social engineering when you tax one set of activities and don't tax another. There is even more social engineering happening when you reward a set of activities with government handouts (think "oil"). In short, social engineering in a socialist society (like ours) increases taxes to restrict the activities it wants to discourage and reduces or eliminates taxes on the activites it wants to encourage. The dramatic difference between a theoretical capitalist society and a theoretical communist society (two imaginary social systems that have never been and will never be practically applied) is that Adam Smith's magical "invisible hand" or Marx's equally unlikely wisdom of the "worker state" corrects the steering of the social system. A short experience with big business will destroy any faith an intelligent person has in the brilliance of the invisible hand and any experinence in or with government employees will do equal damage to the hope that big government can do anything efficiently or intelligently.

So, we keep building bypasses, bigger and more expensive freeways, trinkets and useless gadgets, and (worst of all) adding to human population with the speed and intelligence of termites. The closest thing we have to a philosophy of population is that the population needs to increase because there need to be more young people in order to support the growing population of old people. Of course, this argument means that as the population increases and old people become more demanding and expensive even more babies have to be made to provide support. Obviously, this is an insanely selfish social system, but it's also stupid. When it comes to human reproduction, the smart multiply cautiously and the foolish reproduce like rats in a sinking ship. 

Only radical conservatives are dumb enough to believe that resources are endless. You have to be completely math-deficient to imagine that a finite planet can provide infinite resources. Fortunately for our economic system, there is no shortage of radical conseratives or math-phobes. (They are usually the same characters.) We are well-stocked with people who believe that they can possess "family values" and greedily use up all of the world's energy resources in a single generation. This is the basis of an idiocracy. 

Patriot or Traitor?

When one of the two Facebook billionare scumbags, Eduardo Saverin, announced that he would renounce his American citizenship to save on income and unearned income (investment) taxes when the Facebook IPO made him a multibillionaire, I began to suspect that Facebook wasn't a place for me to spend time. Saverin is Brazilian-born rich kid who, like the current Repuglican candidate for President, considers himself a "world citizen" rather than an American. He was naturalized in 1998 and latched on to Zuckerberg as a "friend" (virtual and financial friends are all Zuckerberg can manage) when the two cloned the Facebook idea from the dozens of on-line social networks that were already in place in 2004. The two Harvard fratbrats unfriended each other as part of their money grubbing to control the monster Facebook became. The usual Faux News zombies heralded Saverin as a "hero" which made me think that their definition of hero has been pretty consistent over the centuries. They loved Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr (an upper-crust ex-Vice President who tried to steal Louisiana for England) Joe McCarthy who betrayed the US government for a stiff drink and a head full of delusions and the Rat Pack of Repuglican Presidents from Tricky Dick to Little George who all considered the Constitution to be "just a goddamn piece of paper."

All of this reminded me of a man I met almost 40 years ago, Louis Dinklage. Mr. Dinklage was introduced to me by my employer as "the man who paid the most personal taxes in the United States." That did not make him the richest man in the US, but by Faux News standards it would make him the biggest sucker. Louis Dinklage was in his 70's when I met him. He was a legend in Nebraska farming and almost everyone I met in that part of Nebraska had a story about how "Old Man Dinklage" had bailed them out, financed their business or farm, or carried them in tough times. In fact, the night I met him I'd been run around the state for 14 hours and was, then, expected to be at a Wisner, Nebraska mill first thing in the morning. I left home expecting to be back by lunch, so my cash was expended and there were no ATM's (on the planet) or open businesses in that town to cash a check. Most small businesses did not take credit cards in the 1970's.

I stopped at the Wisner grain mill, because there was a light on, and found an old man sweeping up the office. I explained my predicament and asked if he knew where I might be able to get a check cashed. He asked me "How much do you need?"

I said, "Twenty bucks would get me through the night, but I'd like to have fifty so I can get something to eat and buy gas tomorrow morning."

He unrolled a wad of cash from his back pocket and said, "I think I can do that. I know who you work for."

I later learned I had met Louis Dinklage.

Mr. Dinklage was a first generation American, the son of German immigrants, who knew that all of his success and wealth came from the community and the country where he lived. He poured back into that community and tried to give as much as he got. He created charitable foundations that still finance his old community. He built the town a city swimming pool in 1982 and they named the park after him and his wife. Thirty years ago, I knew more of his story that I remember today, but I suspect I know what he'd think of a man who hid his cash in foreign banks to avoid paying taxes on his millions of speculative income. I know what I think of a boy who lucked into a fad made possible by the investment of the US government and who would leave the country rather than help support the community that made him rich.

This all further cements my opinion of rich people. I do not care what happens to them, under any circumstances. If they all contract syphilis from too much contact with $1,000 bills I will hope for an antibiotic shortage. If their children are born with two empty heads and dysfunctional organs, I'll cheer for the extinction of their linage. There is, literally, no bad thing that can happen to any rich asshole that will cause a moment of sympathy from me. One of the obvious qualities of being the 0.1% is that no one will miss them when they are gone. They are dead weight.

Sad Times for the GOP

The Gay Old Party is having a tough time with getting its act together. The crazies in the House of Representatives pledged to focus on the economy ("It's still the economy, stupid.") and immediately turned their toilet-tube focus on abortion, union busting, and jabbering about socialism (a form of government that their hero, Reagan, badmouthed and loved at the same time). The crazies at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) wrangled publicly about who was going to sponsor the event; crazy religious freaks or self-destructive pseudo-conservative gays.

 The CPAC event is wrapping up showcasing the micro-intellects the Republicans have to offer for the 2012 presidential campaign: the corporate criminals' best friend and the poster boy for everything-not-family-values, Newt Gingrich; Abramoff's buddy and medical tort reform hypocrite, Rick Santorum; the trust-fund baby with the dead squirrel comb-over; and the Minnesota state bird masquerading as a US Representative. Palin was probably there, too, but I can only digest so much crazy before I lose all faith in my country.

 Eventually, you'd think these loony memes would self-destruct and the species would begin to rebuild. Wouldn't you?

I am often accused of being a pessimist. As soon as my constant downgrading of expectations begins to prove wrong, I promise to accept that label. As long as expecting the worst from my fellow human is a reliable predictor of future behavior, I'm sticking with what works.It's a sound investment strategy, too.

NPR drew some sort of idiotic conclusion from interviewing some "young Republicans" at CPAC. That bunch (NPR and the spoiled brats at CPAC) confirmed my expectations from that crowd. Supposedly, these were "college students," but when asked about their field of study the response was repeatedly "business," "communications," "theology," and other fluffy subjects barely suitable for an adult's afternoon recreational reading. Not a science, engineering, or pre-med student among them. This isn't higher education, its a continuation of the K-12 babysitting service. I know that reflects the "education" distribution in the general college public, but that is nothing to brag about. The dumbing down of the American public began with the watering down of "higher education."

The only upside to all this nuttiness is the entertainment value. Suddenly, Republicrats are as disorganized as Demolicans. The only thing that has allowed me to pretend that Demolicans slightly represent my positions is the lack of lock-step marching from members of that party. While both parties are corrupt, inept, and corporate sponsored, the Demolicans occasionally show signs of independence. Republicrats are wholly-owned subsidiaries of international corporations and, therefore, useless as the tits on my chest. Is it possible that actual citizens of the United States have crept into the GOP?