Who Gets Replaced by A Robot

In manufacturing [Remember when we used to do that?] there is an old rule that says, “We automate the jobs that are mostly occupied by the biggest pain-in-the-ass employees.” In several of the companies where I worked in the 70s through the late 90s, the first people to be replaced by a computer or robot were technicians. For a time, moderately trained technicians were the “special children” on the manufacturing floor. They weren’t skilled enough to be engineers or even middle-management, but they were too skilled to easily be replaced by other company employees or easily recruited from the recently tech school-educated employment pool.

So, as soon as possible manufacturing engineers started searching for ways to put some kind of computer test equipment into the assembly processes to reduce the number of technicians needed. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a management decision. Few improvements in any process are driven by upper management; they are too busy stuffing their pockets with the company profits to bother with doing actual work. Actual decisions always get made by the people stuck being responsible for the work and that is almost always engineers and manufacturing technicians.

Thinking about that kind of problems in society, it is easy who and what engineers would automate in the rest of the country: police, prison guards, politicians and many bureaucrats, firefighters, tax collection, the justice system, bus and truck drivers, and restaurant workers. And, pretty much, in that order.

Police, obviously, are a societal pain-in-the-ass, a huge civic liability, more often than not more corrupt than the “criminals” they supposedly protect us from, and massively expensive. Police department costs range from as much as 64% of a city’s budget (Billings, MT, $247 per resident) to as “little” as 8% (New York, City, $624 per resident). Ridding taxpayers of out-of-control police department spending and erratic and violent policing would go a long ways toward making cities more livable, safer, less racist, less expensive, and sustainable. From a manufacturing engineering standpoint, a huge portion of what police do on a daily basis would clearly be easy and cheap to automate. At least 90% of what a traffic cop does could be done better with strategically placed sensors (cameras and microphones). Most traffic violations could be recorded, vehicles identified, and citations sent through computerized systems: no cop necessary unless an arrest for non-compliance is required. One of the most common vehicle violations that goes un-cited today is noise violations and practically every state’s current vehicle noise violations could be monitored and cited automatically with “fix-it tickets” and the revenue from those violations, alone, might pay for the system. For more aggressive traffic violations, the combination of those cameras and microphones and driver alerts could utilize the remaining human police and computerized dispatch systems to be used more effectively. The relatively few complicated police activities, typically assigned to “detectives,” would likely remain human-powered for a long time, but as the number of crimes solved by those humans continues to decline there will be plenty of incentive's for automated solutions to those underperforming employees.

Likewise, it’s pretty obvious that automation and robots could do at least as good a job as prison guards and their mismanagement for a tiny fraction of the cost. For example, California’s prison guard union is so grossly over-powerful that the annual cost of keeping a typical prisoner “guarded” is well over $100,000 per year. Even as the state’s prison population declines, the costs are rising rapidly as are the salaries and benefits of their underworked, unskilled union members. Since the guard’s union has a stranglehold on the state politicians (Democrat and Republican) the solution is clearly one place where California’s referendum system should be able to sold a problem that the politicians won’t dare touch.

The rest of my list (see above) will be more and less complicated to automate with some of the easiest going earlier simply because there will be fewer political obstacles to overcome (like truck and bus drivers who most everyone will be happy to see gone from the highways). So, now my “predictions” are in print and probably a while after I’m dead someone might find them and have a great time ridiculing how wrong I was. Have fun, whoever you are.

The "J" Stands for "Genius"

From the mouths of morons comes the confirmation they were hoping to avoid. "The 'J' stands for 'genius.'" I admit that I do love this on multiple levels. The Trump rioters are throwbacks to the days when the majority of men were cannon fodder to be tossed into the front lines of every battle to die in numbers as large as possible to maintain population control, to efficiently burn off the excess male population, and to toss mostly-useless bodies between opponents and the royals and officers at the back of the battle lines.

Contrary to their desperate self-delusions, they are "stupid" and they have almost no place in a functioning 21st Century society. At an exponentially diminishing rate, society no longer needs ditch diggers, manual labor to lug bags of cement to the tops of buildings, or even slaves to sacrifice building pyramids and shrines to the rich-and-powerful who these goobers live to serve. At some point, useless and excess humans will have to either find a purpose or filter themselves out of the gene pool. Not only does industry no longer need unskilled and uneducated bodies for assembly line work or minimally skilled labor for construction, or farm labor that pays a living wage, but the planet needs to be rid of as many of this dead weight as possible to minimize the destruction of a human-supporting environment. (I'm not talking about "saving the planet." The planet will be fine without us, in as little as a few 100,000 years, but humans will not be on it then. Neither will most of the animal life we currently cohabitate with.)

The January 6, 2021 Trump rioters were a pack of mommas' boys, unemployed derelicts,  Trump's beloved "uneducated," a few trustfund brats and government employees, and, worst of all, off-duty cops demonstrating the kind of "law" they've been administering against citizens, but this time against other police officers.

Regardless of their education, employment, economic or social class, the one thing we can say about all of them is that they are stupid. They are also seditious criminals who deserve the most severe punishment possible for their crimes.

The United States Is A Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi Scheme: a usually-illegal operation in which participants pay to join and profit mainly from payments made by subsequent participants. 

Humans have evolved to believe in one fallacy over all of the others: “If it seems too good to be true, it must be the truest thing of all.” As a species, once we humans have achieved some level of comfort we appear to become convinced that we have done something to deserve that comfort for the rest of our lives. That’s not just a problem in the USA, but everywhere there are people with “1st world problems.” Here in the USA we have taken that quality to extremes. 

Republicans harp at “entitlements” without bothering to look up the word to see what it actually means. They, of course, object to the working class entitlements like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare, and anything that isn’t an immediate transfer of funds into the paws of our 1% and, even, the Russian 1%. They do not object to the corporate welfare and idle rich entitlements. Obviously, if you are rich you deserve to be so. God said so; Jesus, not so much. I, however, object to all entitlements that are unfunded. 

Take Social Security, for example. Washington D.C.’s Urban Institute, a non-partisan research institute found that “a two-earner couple receiving an average wage — $44,600 per spouse in 2012 dollars — and turning 65 in 2010 would have paid $722,000 into Social Security and Medicare and can be expected to take out $966,000 in benefits. So, this couple will be paid about one-third more in benefits than they paid in taxes.” That’s not an “unrealistic return on investment” over a half-century of work and interest accruement. 

My parents’ generation, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” really kicked Social Security in the teeth by voting themselves solvent after a lifetime of insane military spending and general economic foolishness. The Urban Institute found, “If a similar couple had retired in 1980, they would have gotten back almost three times what they put in. And if they had retired in 1960, they would have gotten back more than eight times what they paid in. The bigger discrepancies common decades ago can be traced in part to the fact that some of these individuals’ working lives came before Social Security taxes were collected beginning in 1937.” The reason we’re expecting Social Security to become insolvent any minute now is because the Greatest and Silent Generations paid themselves overtime salaries on part-time work. Of course, the other reason is that Republican Presidents since Nixon have raided the so-called Social Security “lock box” for every military boondoggle imaginable and if they couldn’t outright steal that money, they simply spent money that didn’t exist and attached the bills to the Social Security IOUs. Trump is doing that with his wall boondoggle. Best case, “Come 2034, so say the system’s trustees in their 2015 report, the trust fund will be exhausted and, absent a law change, they will be able to disburse only 75% of promised benefits.” Worst case, the whole US economic house of cards will collapse on itself and Social Security insolvency will be the least of our concerns. It has happened, often, in the country’s speckled history and is more likely to happen again than not. 

The two biggest money-sinks outside of actual earned, useful, and necessary “entitlements” are our grossly racist and unjust prison system and the military. People are making money out of the slave labor harvested in the prison system, but those people aren’t “the people.” The more than 2 million people in US prisons are generating a profit, but not for the public or government forced to live with the world’s most incarcerated public on the planet. The corporations harvesting slave labor, charging exorbitant prices for “services,” and providing labor to the for-profit and government administered prisons are one of the largest lobbies in a nation of monster lobbies. Just the prison phone services make $1.2 billion per year and they doing such a terrible job that PharmaBro Martin Shkreli is still running his old drug company from prison and Tweeting as if he were an actual human being not doing time for felonies far worse than many people doing far more time than this “white collar criminal.” The collection of corporate-welfare queens in the prison system run from commissary companies racking up $1.6 billion to the $3 billion for-profit bail system to the privately-held for-profit prisons that are not adequately monitored and whose income isn’t even known because they don’t have to disclose that information to the people, taxpayers, who are paying the tab. 

The War on Drugs is another corporate-welfare entitlement that involves local, state, and federal “law enforcement,” the for-profit prison system, a collection of para-military sub-contractors, drug enforcement equipment and weapons providers, and a variety of con artists who make buckets of money convincing the public that prohibition will actually work “this time.” As long as there are billions of dollars to be made selling illegal drugs, someone is going to be getting that money. The solution is to cut the legs out from under that profit motive by legalizing drugs, emphasizing education and providing safe and economical use for the small percentage of addicted users, and whatever is left to be described as “illegal” penalize at the source. 

Finally, the biggest cause of the nation’s insolvency is the vast and uncontrolled war spending. Like the drug business, war materials are a source of easy money with practically no quality requirements or practical purpose. The military-industrial complex has had exactly the kind of ride as the dope peddlers: low cost and outrageous profit margins. Worse, the Pentagon has no interest in making the slightest effort at controlling costs or making sure the public gets something for its money. The country has flushed somewhere between $5T and $15T down the post-9/11 war rabbit hole. The Pentagon, through incompetence, corruption, and laziness “misplaced” more than a few trillion dollars (total amount unknown); somewhere between $3 and $9T. Our current national debt is about $22T and the country hasn’t made a serious attempt at repaying any of that debt since Nixon started cutting taxes in 1971, but we really kicked the debt into overtime during Reagan’s fiscally irresponsible regime. Reagan paid lip service to shoring up the Social Security fund with his 1983 “reform act” (never believe any Republican tax modification is a “reform”), but he followed that up with massive deficit spending and liberal use of federal funds for a variety of money-wasting military projects. 

Obviously, the insane pensions paid out to military lifers—especially the officer classes—are just more of the same sorts of boondoggles taxpayers should not be tolerating. A grade-10 general makes $19,762.50 per month and will receive as much as 100% of that salary after 40 years of “service.” Considering the miserable job the military has done both protecting the country and being responsible with taxpayers’ money, I think they ought to be indentured servants after a few decades of leeching off of the public tit. When we say “thank you for your service” to these characters, we should be rubbing our sore assholes and walking bow-legged at the same time. Likewise, the variety of “injuries” ex-military people use to justify disability claims is amazing. Having taught at a college that actively recruited veterans with “disability college funding,” I’ve seen some pretty comical characters burning taxpayer money while avoiding working for a living. Worse, I’ve heard some of the strangest claims from veterans of my generation and, based on that, I can only hope Trump does succeed in privatizing the VA so that it can quickly bankrupt and be abolished. 

If we—meaning my generation the “Boomers”—don’t help solve these problems, our kids will solve them at our expense. Between the X-Gens and the Millennials, we are finally outvoted, demographically if not practically. In 2019, Millennials will outnumber Boomers. They could elect representatives whose only platform is balancing the budget by any means possible, including putting Social Security on pause until it is solvent. I cannot think of a good argument against that, in fact. My generation has been financially irresponsible . . . forever, since early adulthood. Today, half of the country’s bankruptcies are over-50. “Seniors are going into retirement still carrying debt, including mortgages, credit card debt and student loan debt. They are depleting their savings and retirement accounts just to make ends meet.” 

One of my many complaints about news reporting leading up to the Great Recession was all of babble about “more people than ever own homes,” when what they should have said was “more people than ever are in debt for home purchases”; two distinctly different things. Almost everyone I know in my generation has some to a lot of house debt and one of the most basic rules I know of is “you can’t retire until you own your own home.” “Own” your own home, not live in a property that is owned by a bank. If you not only don’t own your home, but you don’t own your car, recreational vehicles and/or boats, haven’t paid off your credit cards or, even, college debt, you not only are not ready to retire you have also demonstrated an inability to manage money like an adult. Our kids should take that information for what it is and stop listening to Boomers as if they were full-developed, educated adults. As the third generation of Ponzi Scheme suckers Boomers are not totally to blame for the economic mess the country is in, but we are likely to be the ones to take the fall for it. Based on the evidence, we won’t deserve much sympathy.

Incentives Are Everything

A few years ago, I was asked to be part of a “This I Believe” presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Society of River Falls (WI) society. If you know me at all, you know that was a tough subject because I'm not much of a "believer." I found a few things that turned out to be more core to my belief system than I'd suspected and among that small list was "incentives." The study of economics has been pretty much a waste of air until the last few decades. For most of my life I've been in agreement with John Maynard Keynes who supposedly said, “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.” Our current executive branch is consistently demonstrating that fact and the last four decades of American economics ought to be enough to put the last nail in most of capitalist theory. Market-driven capitalism tacks on a giant list of poorly designed incentives which work to damage democracy, decimate the ecology, limit personal liberty for all for a tiny percentage of wealthy and powerful bad actors, and promote illiteracy and ignorance in the general population. The mythical “free market” libertarians and traditional feudalists argue so irrationally for is just not a sustainable or just economic system.

What doesn’t work for business works just as badly for government. In our current irrational and poorly functioning “representative” system, unjustifiably powerful groups like the police, prison system employees, military, and government employees are isolated from their customers—the rest of us—by layers of union protection, political clout, and outright terrorism. When cops murder unarmed citizens, the only defense we have is the civil lawsuit. Convicting a cop of any crime, regardless of the evidence, is nearly impossible but getting a violent crime conviction requires all out magic. With that kind of insulation from responsibility and the soaring cost of police departments and their pension funds, cities are going broke trying to pay off the multitude of police misconduct lawsuits. “Dallas civil-rights lawyer Don Tittle says the increased availability of camera footage and shifting attitudes toward police are affecting cases. ’Up until recently, when it came to civil lawsuits, there were two groups that had a distinct advantage, where you had to knock them out to win. And that was doctors and cops. But with the advent of video, and the changing perception of society, I don’t think police are held in the same regard.’”¹  Suddenly the cost of maintaining abusive police officers is turning into a major city budgeting problem.

With the city government budgeting systems as they exist, that problem is unsolvable. For example, the Alberquerque, NM police department is the most expensive, lawsuit-wise, department in the country and has been under federal investigation and oversight often in the last few decades, but appears to be completely impossible to rein-in. New York City, between 2010 and 2014, spent $601M dollars settling police misconduct lawsuits. In 2015, New York City paid out $228M for police misconduct lawsuits. In 2017, New York paid $302M for the same kind of crap. That city’s 2018 police department budget is $5.6B or a little more than $101k per employee (~55,000 employees). Small towns aren’t immune to this kind of idiocy, either. "In Sorrento, La., for example, a newly hired cop in 2013 slammed into another car on a highway after going on a high-speed chase to catch a separate driver who was speeding. The driver who was hit sued. It was later revealed that the officer was already one of the town's most zealous issuers of speeding tickets, hundreds of which were later thrown out in court. That incident, combined with other lawsuits against the police department serving the small town of 1,500 people, prompted the city's insurer to drop its coverage. The town disbanded its police department shortly thereafter."²

The fix for this is to change the incentives, not to shield bad cops with even more anti-democratic police state Republican stupidity like the unconstitutional and anti-democratic House bill grossly misnamed the “Protect and Serve Act.” New York City covers the cost of those lawsuits out of the general budget, shifting all of the responsibility from the cops to the taxpayer. That is an example of a mindless system with no feedback loops to reinforce decent behavior or to inhibit misconduct.  The solution is to move the cost of settling these cases to the departments that caused them. If, for example, the NYPD had to pay $302M out of its budget to settle misconduct cases, that would result in roughly 3,000 fewer employees (at that $101k/employee cost). If it is true that the cops involved in misconduct cases are “a few bad apples,” the many good apples (if that turns out to be the case) would start cleaning up the department before their own jobs are on the line.

Like I said, incentives are everything. You just have to design them to serve a better purpose.

¹ https://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-of-police-misconduct-cases-soars-in-big-u-s-cities-1437013834

² http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-police-misconduct-growing-financial-issue.html

Gun Fallacies

About 15 years ago, a friend (David) made the dumbest possible decision to use a gun to defend himself from a pair of stupid young men late one evening after a gig in a small Idaho town. He didn’t manage to kill anyone or even seriously injure them, but he did shoot two unarmed men and, in a panic, ran away and tried to hide the evidence. In every simulated and real scenario I have ever seen, ordinary people demonstrate no good reason to possess a gun during an emergency. People kill their kids, kids kill other kids, cops shoot unarmed victims or innocent bystanders, and people shoot themselves accidentally or on purpose. But the whole "good guy with a gun comes to save the world" bullshit is just that; bullshit. I just finished reading A Massacre in Memphis, The Race Riot thatShook the Nation One Year After the Civil War.  A couple of the scenes in that story reminded me of David’s experience with a gun.

The first incident in A Massacre in Memphis that is a classic example of dumb shits with guns demonstrating how criminally easy it is for a pack of idiots with guns to do everything except what they planned with their little toy pistols. The scene is--after a day of white and black idiots waving sticks, throwing rocks, and shooting guns in the general direction of their oppressors or the people they've decided are the reason nobody wants to hire drunken, lazy Irishmen--a group of black men decided to chase a group of white cops out of their neighborhood. Most of the black citizens in this encounter were recently discharged “Buffalo Soldiers” who were well-trained and experienced soldiers, supposedly competent with weapons and with being under fire. Like most modern cops, the white (mostly Irish) cops were more skilled at close-up brutality than being in a gun fight and they not only couldn’t hit a barn door at ten feet, although the only one who did hit something shot himself. Not an unusual story today. 

“To this point no weapon more dangerous than a stick or rock has been displayed. But now a pistol shot rings out. One of the more distant black men, intending no doubt to scare the police men and speed them along on their retreat, has pulled out a revolver and fired into the air. A few others follow his example. The policemen, thinking they are being shot at, halt on the bride and turn. Three of them reach for their revolvers. Two of them draw, level their weapons at the crowd and open fire. The black me who are shooting into the air immediate lower their guns and fire at the policemen. Within moments, twenty or more black men are firing.

“One of the officers, thirty-two-year-old John Stevens, falls. A shout goes up from the crowd, 'He is shot.' He has in fact been shot, but not by any of the blacks. In his panicky attempts to draw his weapon and return fire, he has pulled the trigger prematurely, putting a bullet into his own leg. It is a bad wound: the bullet goes deep and shatters his right thighbone. All who see him go down assume he has been hit by gunfire from the blacks.

“The fusillade is quickly over. The firing has all been hasty and inaccurate. Dozens of rounds have been discharged, but no black person and no policeman but Stevens has been hit.”

In this episode of "Gun Dummies," the two cops who opened fire and started the shootout at the bridge ran away, leaving their wounded officer and the one sane cop who hadn’t panicked to face the black soldiers on their own. That cop and several of the black protesters helped get Stevens to a doctor and, then, to a hospital. The two panicky cops ran back to the police station, exaggerated what had happened and prettied up the fable of their own participation, and helped start a Memphis riot and race war. More of that kind of gun-owner behavior continues throughout the story, but another favorite moment of mine was when black non-participants in the fight were trying to flee the city and escape the white mob.

“Many of the blacks being shot at are fleeing down Rayburn or across the eastern branch of the bayou. Pendergrast sees one who appears to be lagging behind the rest: the man is running down Rayburn just twenty feet ahead of the (white) mob. Pendergrast can see only his back. He takes aim at him with one pistol and fires. The man pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the street. Pendergrast goes up to him and turns him over on his back. To the grocer’s astonishment he sees that his victim is white. ‘God damn it,’ he exclaims. ‘I am sorry I shot this man. I thought he was a God damn yellow nigger.’

“The man is fireman Henry Dunn, who in his eagerness to wreak vengeance on blacks raced ahead of the rest of the mob. He is alive but unconscious, and obviously cannot live long. Pendergrast’s bullet has entered the back of his head, plowed through his brain, penetrated the skull on the other side, and lodged under the skin of his forehead.

Pendergrast now seeks atonement for his error by claiming a black victim. Leaving Dunn, he goes down to the bayou and spots a short young man in an army uniform who is trying to get away. The man is Lewis Robinson, a former corporal in the 3^rd. He is too far off to get a good shot at but is within shouting distance. Pendergrast calls to him, telling him to come back, that he will not be harmed. Robinson takes Pendergrast at his word. He halts, then begins making his way back toward the grocer. When he is close enough, Pendergrast raises a pistol and fires into his face. The bullet hits Robinson in the jaw. A policeman nearby also fires, hitting Robinson in the side.”

American history is littered with the wreckage of lives, families, and communities destroyed by the fable of the "gun that won the West." The west was "won' and became a semi-livable place when communities decided they'd had enough of the mindless fallacy of "good guys with guns." When law officers began to disarm the usual idiots who are inclined to carry weapons everywhere they go and when communities and states decided to disarm the usual suspects, the country finally began to achieve some sort of stability and security. Like most lessons in history, we seem to have forgotten that lesson and the NRA/Russian propaganda is doing everything it can to prevent a rational discussion about the problems a "well armed" society creates for itself. In fact, we have repeatedly disproved Bob Heinlein's drunken claim that "a well armed society is a polite society." It was dumb when he said it and it's even dumber to keep thinking it. 

What’s Truly Evil?

Immediately after I posted a link to “A Simple Solution to America’s Cop Problem,” an acquaintance wrote, “Wow, that's the most evil thing I've ever heard you propose.” First, I’d like to know what other “evil things” I’ve proposed. Second, I’d challenge the idea that this is evil in any way.

A nation that was so happy with bankrupting its citizens for medical debt that half of the 2016 voters elected someone who promised to return the country to the debtors’ indentured servitude we “enjoyed” before the ACA pretty much has a lock on evil. “More than a quarter of Americans say that someone in their household is struggling to pay medical debt” and that statement is from February 2017. Medical debt is the #1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA. And many Americans are happy with that statistic and the situation, apparently. I’d call that “evil.” In 2014, 40% of Americans were in debt for illness expenses. While the number of actual medical expense caused bankruptcies is often debated, for instance in Snopes.com, we all know it’s high and unreasonably, irrationally high. But the American Way is to never allow public interest to interfere with corporate profit, so we effectively don’t care. That is, also, evil. The Republican healthcare plan originally called “RomneyCare”—and renamed by the racist assholes masquerading as libertarians, conservatives, and other forms of fascism as “ObamaCare”—actually succeeded in reducing medical bankruptcies, so they want to get rid of it. Also, evil.

If you are bright enough to understand that the nation is willing to let people with physically identifiable diseases and injuries die and be tortured on their way out with a middle-class wealth extraction system that bubbles-up a lifetime of savings and responsible behavior to the idle and destructive 1% investment class it should be perfectly clear to you that any help, sympathy, or compassion for mental health illness is so far past non-existent that it isn’t even imaginary. At best, pseudo-conservatives offer prayers and other superstitious hoodoo as substitutes for actual assistance after a chronically depressed person either breaks down and falls into the black hole of our incompetent and ruthless mental health system or locates the final exit. Cancer patients are expected to continue work through their chemo and radiation therapy to pay for their insurance and mental health patients are expected to rise above their failing brain chemistry and heal themselves. “Work or go broke and die” is the national healthcare motto. That is also evil.

The fact is, this country’s “mental healthcare” is an oxymoron, at best. You can peel back all of the suicide prevention advertising bullshit to find absolutely nothing behind those billboards. The fact is that mental health problems are not only ignored but criminalized in the US. We not only don’t care about people suffering with depression, neurosis, and psychosis, we want to make a profit from their misery. “Cure,” my ass. For most mental health patients there isn’t even a lick of hope for relief. Even the industry admits most-or-all of the prescribed medications and therapies are unproven to be in any way effective.

The other side of my proposal, which was written as a cynical science fiction “solution” to a problem I believe this country will never become adult enough to admit, was to “assist” cops in finding appropriate victims. Many US cities have turned their police departments into armed tax collectors, disguised as something else. Ferguson, Missouri, for example, has a police department the Washington Post described as a “plundering collection agency. (Please follow and read this link. If it doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.)” That police department so terrorized the citizens of the city to the point that any sort of police interaction could result in a citizen being hauled off to jail, fined for a variety of insane charges, tossed back on the street even further in debt to the city, fined into unemployment and homelessness, and harassed to the point that even a glance from a cop could result in a totally rational desire to run for safety. Which, of course, gave the cop justification for firing at will because everyone knows a person running for the cops must have committed a crime and probably scared the cop out of his half-wits.

Last year, suicide rates in the US jumped to a 30-year high. On average, about 40,000 Americans commit suicide every year and that number has been fairly constant for decades. That number is also pretty close to the fatality rate of a Vietnam War every year.

Citizens-killed-by-cop numbers are not accurate or complete because state and local departments do not report all police shooting information and some federal agencies, like the Border Patrol, do not provide complete information, but at the least police kill about 1,000 citizens every year. It’s pretty obvious that many cops would like to be free to kill a lot more people. With all of that as background, add to it the fact that millons more Americans have had about all of this life they can stand. If we’re not going to fix any of the country’s healthcare and policing problems, we might as well find a way to blend the two dysfunctions into the best stupid solution we can manage.

And that is exactly what “A Simple Solution to America’s Cop Problem” was all about. Do I think it’s an ideal solution? What? Are you stupid? Of course it isn’t ideal, but I’m just working with the poor material I’ve been handed. Likewise, do I think launching the world’s idiots into space in a marketing campaign like that described in “The Marching Morons” is the solution to the constant down-breeding of the human race that has been practiced in the flyover US states and most of the world’s various theocratic nations for the last 500 or more years? Well, maybe.

A Simple Solution to America’s Cop Problem

What we need to do is to get all of the country’s homicidal cops together with all of the depressed people. The country wants to get rid of heathcare, especially mental healthcare. It costs too much to waste time with people who don’t want to live anyway, right? Better to spend that money on Cadillac medical coverage for politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate executives than to waste it on people who only work for a living and suffer in quiet misery.

Think about the efficiency a few simple changes in police policy could create. For example, some people are currently decorating their vehicles, homes, and person with ineffive “Don’t Shoot” signs. That is simply the wrong message. Statistics claim that about 94% of people don’t want to be shot by a cop; or anyone else. In a country of 300M people, that leaves at least 15M non-random targets for murderous cops. So, instead of decorating equipment and people with unnecessary “Don’t Shoot” paraphrenalia, the people who want to be shot just need to take the initative and properly label themselves. That way, no “innocent” trigger-happy cops will have to worry about being second-guessed by their more ethical, courageous, competent, and intelligent fellow cops or the general public. “He was asking for it. Read the sign!” will be all the shooter/cop has to say to justify emptying a couple of automatic weapons into a kid or anyone else.

Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of scared cops randomly firing off their weapons at every shadow, squirrel, noise, or innocent bystander, but it’s a start. Training cops to focus their attention on suicidal citizens shouldn’t be all that difficult. We just have to pass a couple of laws that prevent rookie cops (pretty much all of them, based on news reports of cop shootings) from stopping anyone for anything unless they are wearing a proper label and/or their vehicle is properly marked. States could sell “Just shoot me now” special license plate graphics, so cops can look up a victim on their computers before stopping and shooting someone. To prevent incorrect post-mortem second-guessing, mental health clinics could offer free “Just shoot me now” tattoos, since they’re not likely to be capable of providing any other kind of assistance. It would mean that everyone will have to more careful about whose car they borrow (or steal), but that’s just one cost of freedom we’ll all have to suck up and remember.

The end result is that cops can more-or-less fire at will and the “more than 15 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent” depressed people will get what they want too.

A side-benefit is that the faux-Christians might argue that abortion really is a violation of the unborns’ suicidal rights, since even little kids will be able to wear “Just shoot me now” clothing; with their parents’ permission, of course (or not?). So, their little souls will be tossed into the Great Soul Soup and God will be satisfied that they had a shot at Eternity and threw it away. The faux-Christians will get to see lots of unwanted kids being born and get to cheer for the killer cops at the same time. Everybody’s happy . . . unless they are depressed, of course.

The important thing is that nobody who wants to live will be getting shot by a “public servant.” Except in cases where the cop in question was hired by someone like Trump’s hero, Joe Arpaio. In special cases like that there will have to be an illiteracy exemption for the innocent cop who couldn’t tell the difference between “don’t shoot” and “shoot me now.”

Meth Grandma?

I learned about a new class of sub-human last night at a party in Truth or Consequences, NM: meth grandmas. Apparently, there are “meth clans” that are managed by the grandmothers. Meth is just a part of life in New Mexico, even the cops agree that “Breaking Bad” wasn’t far from a true story. All of this weird information came out in a discussion of the neighborhoods in the tiny town of TorC. The northeast end of town, a pretty obviously decrepit area but not one I’d suspected was particularly dangerous. I guess it is, at night. Even when the “rich” and “poor” neighborhoods are only a 1/2 mile apart in a 6,000 person town and “rich” barely qualifies as lower middle class and “poor” is as destitute as Americans get, most of the crime is isolated to the tiny poor end of town. Poor-on-poor crime seems to be a feature of the meth world. In fact, the stories I heard last night were mostly about family-on-family-member crimes. Drug abuse and New Mexico appear to go together like Trump and ignorance.

• Son-in-law fails to score the week’s dope supply and grandma stabs him in the gut with a screwdriver
• Grandkid gets into grandma’s stash and OD’s while playing with the crystals, grandma tosses the kid into the backyard as a punishment
• Baby OD’s after grandma uses the kid’s diapers as a meth processing filter and puts them back on the kid without even washing them

And so it goes.

Some of the folks at the party were sympathetic and some weren’t. All of them were part of the tiny crowd of Democrats in a mixed mostly-conservative state in a solidly red county (58% voted for Trump, which is consistent with the state’s overall results: the poorest, least educated counties were consistently Republican and the few educated, relatively wealthy, and more populated counties were strongly Democratic.) with some twists (2 Democratic US Representatives vs. 1 Republican and a new Democratic majority in the state House and Senate.).

The diversity of opinion and perspective reminded me of Will Roger’s political statement, “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Sometimes I think Democrats think too much. To overwhelm the emotional and irrational Republican fascist movement in the US, it will probably take the same kind of mindless fire Republicans exhibit. Fighting fire with fire just creates more fire, so I have to wonder if it’s worth the sacrifice?

 

#161 Terrorists and Biker Gangs (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Biker gangs have been with us since the beginning of history. This was first pointed out to me by my wife when I described the "Comancheros" who used to terrorize the American plains before and after the Civil War, before "civilization" replaced random acts of terror with organized terror (aka "government"). In this context, Viking marauders were boat-gangsters. The Mongol hordes were really big horse-riding gangs. Roaming packs of male chimpanzees are horseless, bike-less proto-gangsters. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were nations of biker-gangsters, finally, wearing helmets and uniforms. It's about time a biker gang thought about safety and strapped on helmets.

The basic concept of gangs could be taken from the Three Musketeers, "One for all, all for one."  Of course, when the going gets really tough and individual qualities are required, the members add "and everyone for himself" until the smoke clears. Without loud and clear orders to follow and simple rules to remember, biker gangsters revert to the most human primitive values. 

Years ago, I stumbled into a discussion with a guy who'd spent most of his life in biker gangs.  He talked about "honor" and "loyalty" as if those character traits didn't exist outside of gangs.  I had to comment on the fact that I had a hard time rectifying the habit biker gangs have of ganging up on an outsider who presented some minor challenge to one of their members with the quality of "honor." 

His reply was that disrespecting one member of the gang was disrespect to all.  Any challenge to a single member was a challenge to the whole group, even when the challenge was issued completely out of context to the group.  Honestly, I though that was the nuttiest answer possible.  I am incapable of seeing a gang beating as anything other than group cowardice and incredibly despicable.  But I'm never going to be recruited to be a gang member, partially because I don't think like gang members.  I'm all for "all for one and one for all," but at some point individuals have to accept the responsibility of their own actions.  Gang members are not individuals. They surrender their individuality when they merge their weak personalities into the slightly stronger group-mind.

How does a 12-on-1 gang beating fit into the concept of "honor?" The logical extension of this response is the old 10-for-1 reprisal rule that the Nazi's applied to resistance movements.  Today, the USA and Israel have extended that logic to several thousand for one in Iraq and Lebanon. To me, it still violates my Kansas cowboy sense of justice and fairness and I don't get it. Let's face it, when most of us saw L.A.'s cops beating the crap out of Rodney King we thought "somebody ought to help that guy," no matter what King did to get into that predicament.  At least, I hope most of us thought that. 

Paul William Roberts describes an American Special Forces soldier in A War Against Truth, "He was as alien as the yogis I'd seen up in isolated Himalayan caves - people who have had no interaction with other humans for years, who have forgotten how.  The soldier was both shy and lethal.  He had lost most human qualities. If he married, it would not last: she'd realize eventually that he had no feelings towards her - that he had no feelings at all. The 'company' would never let him go, either.  It might make his leash quite long, but it would always want to know what he was doing, because it had trained him and knew what he was capable of doing. If he turned to crime, no police force on earth would be any match for him. This was The Terminator for real." This is a pretty accurate description of the prototypical biker gang member; with the exception of the Special Forces' exceptional training. Some bikers are ex-Special Forces and the like, however, and we can thank our military for loosing them on the public.

One of the prime faults in biker gang logic is the misinterpretation of fear as respect. Nobody respects bikers, but most everyone from cops to man-on-the-street citizens fear them. Any group inspiring fear creates an equal amount of hate.  Hate and fear create a need for security.  The need for security creates an opposite reaction to the source of the fear and hate.  And arms races are born of thus.

Internationally, we're seeing these qualities displayed by at least two nations: Israel and the United States.  Both nations have decided that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them because . . . those rules are inconvenient. Both nations react to specific acts of violence with random, extended violence disproportionate to the initial event and without any concern for striking the actual perpetrators.  Like drunken biker gangs, Israel and the US blast everything in the general direction of their enemies, creating larger and more sophisticated enemies.  They intentionally pick on small, unarmed or barely armed nations and attempt to "shock and awe" them into submission.  They are careless about the "collateral damage" they cause to both those they attack and the nation (gang) they "represent." 

This is not just Little George's gang, Clinton's gang, Old George's Gang, and Reagan's gang (who have mostly moved on to Little George's gang) all felt the same way.  Remember Madeleine Albright's response to the possibility of 300,000 children dying to effect "regime change in Iraq?" "I think it is worth the price."  That's what she said.  Billy Clinton's Secretary of State was willing to sacrifice 300,000 children to replace Saddam with an unknown (but more compliant) political system. So, we did. 

Things have changed in Iraq, mostly much for the worse.  A few hundred thousand Iraqis have been sacrificed since 1991. We patrol, but don't control, the oil wells that were the real reason for this sacrifice. And we've created an image for ourselves that is equal to the shining aura of the Hell's Angels. We've become a nation of crack-importing, meth-manufacturing, gang-banging bikers who instill fear in every sane nation in the world. 

Any national leader who cares about his country's security is either cranking up the national defense mechanisms, building weapons of self-defense and mass destruction, or is sucking up to Little George in hopes that obedience is all he and his loons want.  In the case of Great Britain, that's probably all that is necessary.  They have used up their natural resources, so there is nothing worth stealing on that pitiful island. The rest of North Africa, however, is scared to death.  South America is bracing for another round of assassinations and invasions. George Pataki, New York's nutty governor and the potential 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, ramped up the hyperbola about to be concentrated against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez in his National Press speech, "Energy Freedom: Putting an End to Foreign Oil's Dangerous Grip on America's Future." "Energy freedom" was a side-issue in Pataki's speech, mostly he used the forum to rant against the elected leader of a country that has failed to allow American corporations unrestricted access to that country's national resources. 

Shame on them. Everybody grab a weapon.  We're gonna go beat the crap out of those disrespectful civilians.

August 2006

#79 Dangerous Illusions (2003)

All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day

If we ever needed to be comforted that "things are going to be ok," it's probably now. The nation's cities are overpopulated, over-crowded, under-managed, and more dangerous than they've been since the turn of the last century.  People are afraid that they're going to be raped, robbed, murdered, and/or squashed by falling 747s piloted by Islamic terrorists.  We are turning timid as quickly as our social environment is growing aggressive.  The solution is . . . television. 

In 2001, the National Crime Information Center reported 840,279 missing persons (of which 85-90% are children) and the fraction of those returned is so unpredictable that I was unable to find a meaningful statistic regarding the nation's unsolved missing persons resolution rate.  The fact that the missing persons statistics are not delineated into categories makes it difficult to isolate kidnappings that were investigated from the other categories of missing persons. Regardless, with those huge numbers of missing persons, in 1985, the NCIC entered only 14,816 cases in its involuntary missing files and the FBI only chose to investigate 867 cases, some of those were adult victims.  Out of that tiny fraction of the nation's missing persons, an even more discouraging number were "found," most commonly dead. 

This ought to be especially discouraging because it's obvious that the Feebs are cherry picking the cases to select ones that they expect to solve and they're still not getting the job done.   An imaginary 63% of U.S. committed murders resulted in prosecution in 2000 (down from 79% in 1976).  I'll explain in a few sentences, why I classify that statistic as "imaginary."  While crime goes unsolved and we become more isolated in our homes and communities, television's CSI Miami and Vegas are wrapping up every vagrant's death as neatly as Xmas packages.  

Missing, the television myth that glorifies the FBI's never-before-sighted exercise of human compassion, actually cares if taxpayers miss an appointment.  The ultimate television hoax, X Files, portrayed an FBI agency that went out of its way to read case files.  I admit that I'm a little jaded about television's fairy tales. 

Twenty years ago, my stockbroker was an ex-Atlanta detective.  He'd quit and restarted his career when he found himself unable to carry on normal conversations with friends or family.  He was beginning to view everyone as scum floating at the top of the pond.  When he decided to leave the policing business, standard operating procedures were changing in the nation's cop squads that made him feel his occupation was even more pointless.

In the early 80s, urban police departments began to imitate the FBI's long held habit of "ganging" crimes on to the sheet of whatever high profile "most wanted" criminal they'd recently stumbled upon.   What this means is if Mulder and Scully tripped over a serial murderer and someone handed them enough evidence to securely lock that person up for life, what's the harm in sticking a few dozen unrelated homicides on that bad guy to clean up the paperwork?  After all, how often are our sluggish government bureaucrats likely to trip over another Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or even someone as dangerous as Married with Children's Al Bundy?   You gotta do what you wanta do and they do. 

So, if the federal cops claim that they have a 63% resolution rate on murder, I figure they're probably batting somewhere below .200.  The difference between imaginary crime fighting and reality are on television almost every evening.  I drive by the real guys most every morning on the way to work and, if that group of civil servants could chase down a donut, it would only be after a waitress has corralled it on a plate for them.  After they satiate their compulsion to "protect and serve" themselves, they are too fat to actually chase criminals. 

A guy I worked with a decade ago, is more the kind of person I'd expect would excel with the FBI.  He was a failed medical student, turned MBA-adorned middle executive in charge of covering up our employer's antics with a collection of unreliable and hazardous medical products.  He was being actively recruited by the FBI because he was, obviously, their kind of guy.  His motivation for attending to the task of joining the FBI was "they have a great pension plan" and "I can retire when I'm fifty and consult for the companies I've investigated."  It's good to have high moral standards and lofty goals when you're heading off to protect the public. 

 The now famous Elizabeth Smart story ought to tell us everything we need to know about crime fighting's capacities.  A girl obviously kidnapped and held, practically in plain sight, a few blocks from her home by a vagrant her parents had hired to do grunt work only a few days before the kidnapping.  If the FBI and local cops could solve any crime quickly, this should have been the one.   As happens far too rarely, a half-year after the kidnapping, a citizen recognized the kidnapper based on an artist's sketch of the suspect and called it in to the cops who managed to drag themselves away from donuts long enough to rescue the girl.   The FBI and all their mythical resources were useless and it was only the competent work of a beat cop that saved Ms. Smart from spending another year as a hostage in her own neighborhood.  Remember that her kidnapper was a transient who'd done maintenance work for the Smart family only a few weeks before the kidnapping. 

Can you say "obvious suspect?" 

Maybe this heartwarming story makes you feel comfortable about your "police protection," but I'm not that simpleminded.  John Walsh and his television program have made it clear to anyone capable of rational thought that the only way to rescue our loved ones from the worst people on earth is to drop our lives, sell everything we own, hire private investigators and spend all of our waking hours in pursuit of these criminals.  The police, the FBI, and all of the King's men are useless.  They're too worried about parking violations, speeding ticket quotas, pension plans, and outsourcing donuts to be distracted by our problems. 

 But not on television. 

The worst (most corrupt, least courageous, most self-serving) police force in the nation, New York's tubby-blue constantly-shifting line, are practically competent on television.  One of the most notoriously gangland related cities in the world, Las Vegas, has CSI uncovering killer DNA on every carpet fabric in Nevada.  The FBI finds missing vagrants, children, lawyers, and other otherwise ignored citizens in hours, often before the victims miss a single dose of some equally mythical life saving medication.  Pretty soon, I expect we'll see a series on how loving and helpful LA cops are to minority citizens.  Why not?  It wouldn't be less believable than picturing FBI agents in motion.  How about a show illustrating the SEC's relentless pursuit of corporate criminals?  That would be as believable as Spiderman, but no less so than Missing or "NYPD Blue.

December 2003

#48 Easy Solutions, Poor Results (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

In the year-aftermath of the country's many kid-killings, but especially the Loveland, Colorado school massacre, lots of people seem to have identified simple solutions to the problems that cause our kids to hate each other enough to want to kill. A real news reporter and columnist (the kind who don't seem to exist these days), H.L. Menken, said " There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." 

I highlighted the word "wrong" because a big reason  we don't have many real news reporters is that we don't have many real news readers.  So, in case this rant manages to fall into the hands of non-Rat's Eye subscribers (all of whom are brilliant intellects and above average in all respects), I want to be sure that Mr. Menken wasn't misunderstood. 

Popular solutions haven't become any less simple or less wrong since his time, but we have a lot more simply wrong solutions to sort through.  This is based on the honestly simple fact that humans don't seem to be able to figure out who should reproduce and who shouldn't..

For instance, one of the parents of a girl murdered in Colorado told the Colorado state legislature (also known as the "Colorado State Home for the Overpaid and Mentally Deficient") that the lack of organized religion's presence in public schools is the root of the breakdown in the country's morality.  During America's religious primetime, lynching innocent folks was pretty popular in many of the Bible Belt states; and in all of the states below the waist.  I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem like a big moral improvement over anything going on today.  When I was a kid, the country, practically, had universal organized Christian activity in school. All around the country, you couldn't tell public schools from secular schools, unless the teachers were all wearing habits.  Kids were a hazard to other kids back then, too.  Maybe more so than today.

Minnesota's often-goofy governor claimed that more kids need to have guns so that the nuttier kids with guns would be afraid to use their guns. Our oversized, under-thoughtful Governor may be out to lunch.  Or out to referee a WWF match.  Or promoting his latest ghost-written book about his wasted and fantastic youth.  Anyway.

Colorado's problem was that there were too few guns in school?  There was a gun in every pocket, in the U.S.A. of the 1850's, and people got shot for just about any brainless reason you can think of. I suppose, eventually, it could be true that "a well armed nation is a polite nation," but how many reasonably mannered folks would have to die to complete that evolutionary correction? It's an interesting argument that failed the test in a simpler time.  It probably won't improve with more people and more problems in the mix. On the other hand, I guess it's possible that getting the damage done quickly might be just as efficient as letting it go on for another 225 years.

Flipping the legislative coin, a significant number of the country's lawmakers think the authors of the Second Amendment were just kidding around.  There must be 3,700 gun control bills scattered around the House and Senate. And another 7,400 similar bills litter various state government buildings.  Personally, I suspect that anything short of yanking the guns out of the cold, dead hands of every individual in the country won't do anything to improve safety in schools, or post offices. It's just an easy answer to the wrong question.

The problems kids face are far messier than surface changes in law can alter. Kids, of all ages, are a lot smarter than parents, teachers, legislators, and cops allow. Kids see what we do, and put more weight on action than words. What kids are seeing adults do is . . . anything we feel like doing.  From any objective perspective, there are no "standards of behavior" in modern life.  From the President's office to life on the street, rational and moral behavior is something that rarely happens enough for anyone to notice.

Maybe one real difference between now and yesterday is that it's a lot easier for kids to see what's really going on. Cops and politicians have always been, by and large, crooked and self-serving and dangerous. Today, we get to watch that behavior every night on television. If you want to read about it, do an Internet search on "police brutality" or "political corruption," and be ready for a long, depressing evening. While political figures have always been, on average, crooks, in the past it was harder to have that rubbed in our faces. Today, electronic and traditional media bury us in Washington's muck and the slimy activities of our local governments. "Public service" is a phrase that is completely out of fashion.  We don't even bother to label "carpetbaggers," these days.  We just expect it from anyone who's corrupt enough to want to hold a public office.

Try to think of a group that hasn't looked awful, when the public's attention is in that direction: the clergy, medicine, United Way and a hundred other "non-profits" that are little more than corporate empires, the military, the police, and on it goes.  In fact, pretty much any place the media light gets shown, we find a selfish corruption being illuminated.  The easy solution is "censorship."  Repressing the information isn't going to work, or happen. That genie's out of the bottle. What needs to happen is a dramatic change in how we deal with abuse of the public trust. First, there has to be some public trust.

Kids don't have any problem seeing through cultural smoke screens. They, instantly and intuitively, understand what we're saying with our actions.  When we chew up the Earth's resources, thoughtlessly and recklessly, we're practically screaming at them, "We don't care what your lives will be like after we're dead, we want to party now!" While any damn idiot knows that there is an end to the world's resources, lots of damn idiots are in control of wasting those resources at rates that are becoming measurable in "days of life left on earth." A lot of things are going to come to a screeching halt, in not very many years, and, if we don't care about the lives of our children, why should be expect them to care?

Tom Hayden once said, "My country let me right the wrongs." (And what happened to Tom, after Jane left him for the easy life of a billionaire's trophy bimbo?) The list of things that need to be done, so our children will believe they are wanted and that they have a reason to hope for a future, is practically limitless. The time for doing those things may be very limited.  There are no easy answers for any of these questions.  The best we can hope for is that there are answers.

December 2000

#21 There but for the lack of courage . . . (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

Today, right here in St. Paul, Minnesota, the local newspapers spewed ". . .the woman, married to a doctor, with two children, is Kathleen Ann Soliah, FBI officials told WCCO-Radio. Her neighbors know her as Sara Jane Olson . . ." The lady was stalked by the nation's internal spooks and arrested, this week, for kidnapping (Patty Hearst) and bank robbery that she supposedly committed twenty five years ago.

Pretty exciting stuff, and a lot less dangerous than chasing down criminals who carry guns or have political connections. Once the FBI finds the scent of a safe target, they almost never give up, unless the target becomes mildly dangerous. In the historic tradition of their cross-dressing founder, the FBI is patting itself on the back for spending a few million of the taxpayers' dollars searching for Ms. Olson-possibly-Soliah for these last twenty-five years. They even think there's some kind of high moral victory in wrenching this woman from her home, husband, and two children.

In the exciting and well-documented (lots of TV) takedown, they used enough manpower and equipment to disable a well armed militia. Of course, they'd never consider actually taking on a militia because, as they say in the Bureau, "those guys have guns."

Here's my real point, though. Even if Olson-possibly-Soliah had committed the crimes for which she's accused, I wouldn't be happy about her arrest. The fact that this effort has gone on this long irritates too many old wounds and revives evil memories of my country's poorest hours.

The warped lenses of the 90's don't give a decent perspective of the actions of the 60's. Our government was hell-bent on destroying a tiny agrarian country, using the excuse that it was "stopping the communist dominos from falling." What was really happening was a lot of cash was transferred, mostly from middle class taxpayers to the filthy rich (and generally filthy). Low-tech industrial executives, military executives, and a few general purpose criminals (like the CIA creeps who imported tons of high powered drugs into this and other countries to finance their murderous little schemes) promoted this dirty little war for their own fun and profit. While this scheme produced nearly two decades of social instability and recession, it made some miserable examples of our ruling class very, very rich and powerful. Our parents, the adults of the time, had their heads buried so far into the sand that you need to know where to dig to find tail-feathers.

During the war years, a lot of kids actually exercised their consciences and did whatever they thought was necessary to stop the war. Some went to jail, willingly, for their beliefs. When they did, the miserable scum who managed the government's "justice system" intentionally tossed them into cells with the most vicious criminals available, not wanting to pass up any opportunity to commit atrocities. A lot more kids (and a very few adults) staged non-violent protests where they were sometimes mercilessly beaten and, then, jailed by the kind of cops that Los Angeles still employs wherever non-whites happen to live. The 1968 Chicago Police Riots (during the Democratic convention) and the Ohio State Student Massacre were fine examples of our police state employees in action. A lot more of us, probably the majority under twenty-five, took every opportunity to disagree with our elders' version of "patriotism" whenever the Vietnam subject came up. Sometimes even stating opposition provided the nutcases with an excuse to commit violence. During this cultural mayhem, the prevailing pro-government population's primary argument was "love it or leave it." There wasn't a lot of middle-ground in those days.

On the fringes of the polarization, a fair number of kids believed that they could change the system by joining it. A lot of those types were immediately sent to the battlefields where their ethics got them killed or maimed (the fatal shots could have been fired from either side). A smaller group of kids believed that "The System," our society, was so corrupt that it had to be destroyed and rebuilt. Soliah was probably one of those kids. It wasn't hard to make a good argument for that proposition, especially after Chicago and Ohio.

Now, you'd think, twenty-five years after history had told the story of our sordid Vietnam-ish escapade, someone would have learned something ethical from history. It appears to be un-bloody likely. Not in this lifetime. The government is still after vengeance on those who practiced what it preached.

I'm not making excuses for an accused kidnapper/bank robber (although it's damn hard to feel sorry for banks and their investors these days or those days). But a country that slithered into a vicious, amoral war like the one we called the Vietnam War has damn little grounds for posturing righteousness.

To make a current reference, we have dramatically greater justification for participating in our current involvement in Yugoslavia's dirty little war. At least a reasonable number of the surrounding countries and the United Nations are on our side. Even with that, the right wing Republican wackos, currently squatting in the House of Misrepresentation, are chanting the exact same anti-war verses and melodies used by the radical left twenty five years ago. It's "dé·jà vu, all over again." If Kosovo is an immoral, no-win situation, Vietnam was totally unjustifiable.

The right-wingers still pretend that the dirty little war from which a Republican president bailed out (chanting "peace with honor" while we abandoned all pretense of an ordered retreat and ran like confused rabbits) was "a different kind of situation." It was, too. The bad guys were our allies during the last real world war and only became our enemies after the French got their butts kicked in a failed attempt to colonize Vietnam. We actually had to fake an "attack" in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify our military presence in Vietnam.

Whatever. It was as righteous as any excuse generated by morally bankrupt corporations living on government handouts who needed a justification to be able to sell machines of war at a dozen times the going rate to a government that couldn't spell "right" if they knew which hand it was.

Back to the present. (I'm easily distracted today.) Olson's neighbors expressed amazement that she was "the perfect soccer mom" all the years they have known her. I'm not amazed, not even a little bit. Today is completely out of context with the mood of the Sixties. Olson was not much different than at least half of her peers, in those days. Her friends were more radical. She made choices that were more unforgivable, by today's (and yesterday's) standards.

Somebody once said, "choose your enemies well, for you will become them." The Sixties radical left missed that point. Worse yet, Pogo's creator wrote "we have met the enemy and he is us." Soliah and her friends became the people they hated. They looked at the weapons our government uses to enforce "order" and preserve the social status of the ruling class and they saw something that wasn't there; an alternative, positive use for violence. It was a mistake that could have been made by a lot more of us in those times.

In context, in those awful days, most of us stood our middle ground out of cowardice. It's not that we didn't burn draft cards, pour blood on military records, or march the streets in protest out of conscience or a belief in the goodness of our country. We didn't go to those places out of cowardice. Lots of us pretended to believe that our government knew something we didn't. We skated by on the mistaken prayer that Uncle Sam knew best. We pretended that "the best and the brightest" directing the activities of the federal government weren't the lazy, brain-dead, arrogant sort of public servants that we ran into every time we had any dealings with the government. Today, a remains of that hope is the nearly universal American belief that all politicians are crooks and all government employees are lazy incompetents. We may never again make the mistake that our government knows what it's doing, even when it does.

The people most responsible for one of the United States' darkest hours made out like bandits. Most of the presidents, and their pet fools, literally got away with genocide, disguised as a "war of containment." Eisenhower, who got the country into the mess, warned the country that the "military-industrial complex" (his term, I believe) would destroy the country if they weren't kept under lock and key. Kennedy, who may have been deciding to get the country out of Vietnam while the getting was possible, paid the price for those who came before and after him. Johnson escaped with nothing more than the reputation of a failed presidency. Nixon received an official pardon and within a few years the goofier members of the U.S. media forgot his screw-ups so completely that they called him a "statesman" in the last years of his life. The various criminals who headed the corporations that profited from the mass murder of rice farmers and peasants were all given golden parachutes and retired to wherever super-rich, amoral monsters hang out.

I knew a lot of young men who went, unwillingly, into the military because they didn't have whatever it took to face down the well armed power of their government. Some of those men, now, suffer sleepless nights reliving the things their government made them do to a people whose major crime was wanting to manage their own destiny. Some of those men pretend what they did was heroic, so they won't have to examine their failure to take the stand they knew was right. Some died. As a nation, we've allowed most of those men to live with their decision as long as they suck it up and keep their doubts to themselves. Even the few who were symbolically prosecuted for wartime atrocities have been, mostly, forgiven.

Vietnam, that vicious enemy of freedom and truth, is now, practically, a most favored nation. The same people who we tried to bomb into molten biological blobs are courting American business investment and cranking out athletic shoes and other junk by the boat load.

It looks like the people who violently protested our national violence are the only people who are unforgiven for their part in that disaster. Maybe it's time to consider closing the door on both sides who made errors in judgment in those dark times.

June 1999

June 1999 note: If you actually managed to read through all of these pages, you clearly need something (like a hobby) to occupy your mind. But thanks for slogging through my work. I truly do appreciate the compliment, however it was intended. This is the end of the original series of Rat's Eye articles. From here until I published the webpage, I simply thought a lot about what I'd expected this column to be and what it turned out to be. I had hoped to produce a written version of Dilbert, in the style of Dave Barry or someone equally clever. I've been told that it more resembled grumpy old man meets technology and doesn't like it much. I can live with that. From here out, the gloves are off and I'm gonna be me. Like my hero, H.L. Menken once wrote, "Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow." It's not like I have a choice. I have to write somewhere, so this is going to be one of the places. Take good care of your self, gentle reader. There aren't nearly enough of you in the world.

Why Do They Hate Us?

"Why do they hate us?" I heard this question a year ago from a young man who had just dropped out of a state university engineering program because it was "too hard" and was pursuing one of the most remedial and disgraceful programs offered by any educational facility: criminal justice (talk about an oxymoron!), police science or law enforcement. Pick a program name, they are all the same and they are all equally simple.

My response was lame, at best. "You're kidding?"

The kid was, of course, excelling at the idiot program because he is of normal intelligence and moderately conscious. If you are unable to pull an "A" in classes like:

• CPS 103 Particular Forms of Crime - Analysis of conventional property crime, criminal markets, criminal organizations, white collar crimes, and corporate crimes. Consensual and non-consensual delinquency, and "victimless" crimes. Factors that can be used to differentiate several dimensions of forms of crimes. (4 credits)
• CPS 105 Deviance and Social Control - Competing theories of deviance, deterrence and control, relations between deviant actors and reacting audiences, and how deviant individuals explain or justify their behavior. 
• CPS 170 Domestic Violence - Comparative approach to power and violence in family systems including detailed and in-depth analysis of the devaluation of family relations. 
• CPS 171 The Criminal Mind - Psychological aspects of criminal behavior, personality of criminals, the psychological processes affecting behavior, and the violence that is often associated with criminal behavior. Dealing with fear and anger, offering and counter-offering, and negotiating in high-risk situations.
• CPS 172 Comparative Police Systems - Selected police systems in the United States compared with a variety of police systems in other countries. 

Honestly, I can't go on. The titles of these classes sound like exactly the kind sociology program titles that would study the anti-social behavior of police officers around the world.

This goofy kid appeared to be completely clueless about why ordinary citizens hate the police. Even in St. Paul, where the local police and country sheriff's deputies went 1968 Chicago-style on local and visiting protesters during the 2008 RNC debacle, it appears that a police candidate can remain ignorant of the history of the occupation he desperately wants to join. He asked me, repeatedly, to cite reasons why so many citizens "hate cops." As you might expect, he had excuses for every abuse and every anti-social police act committed in modern history. As I should have expected from someone so disconnected from human history, he imagined none of this violence applied to his possible future.

It's hard to imagine this level of avoidance, but it's critical if what's left of our society expects to create "order" from the chaos of corporate socialism and pusedo-capitalism. The fact is, fear is not respect. Fear is a close emotional relation to hate and as far from respect as love is to hate. While there are cops who deserve respect for trying to do the right job in a system designed to repress human dignity and freedom, most are exactly the vicious characters pictured in these video links and the photos on this page. For example, any animal capable of intentionally smearing pepper spray in the eyes of environmental or political protesters is unfit for socialization. Any society decadent enough to instruct its stormtroopers to commit such a crime is undeserving of history's charity. Cops have been used to break up legal protests, as strikebreakers, as an armed force dispossessing citizens of their legal property, and as a protection force for corporate criminals and other organized crime figures since the middle of the 1800's.

The fact is, most of us don't hate cops. We do fear them, however. They represent us in our national decay and "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Cops serve the worst of our society and repress the best. Regardless of the deranged fairy tails Hollywood and television create of hard-working, dedicated, clever police protecting society from terrible criminals and solving complicated crimes, many cops are nothing more than lazy, cowardly, tenured, over-armed, arrogant, brownshirt terrorists who repress any attempt of the public to regain control of their nation. (Not just true in the US, but in many corporately controlled nations.) What kind of person wouldn't fear that kind of police force? When some citizens get past fear and hate, and act accordingly, we call that "revolution." Remember that when you finally get your corporate welfare job and are asked to remove your badge and any other form of identification before committing a psychopathic act of brutality. Being ignorant of your own motivations and the history of your chosen occupation is no defense. When you are the fist of repression and the weapon of fear, you will have to get used to being the object of fear and hate.