Wrong, Again

  

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

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

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

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

My Vietnam War Memories

Yesterday was, as the US Army’s website reminds us, another dubious memorial day, “The Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017 was signed into law by President Trump, designating every March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day.” President Bonespurs cynically pronounced a day of memorial for people he called “suckers” and “losers” A friend reminded me, via Facebook, that Friday was when we should all honor the sacrifice that was made for our freedom in that war. The ruling class, like Trump, believes we should celebrate the money they made from profiting on wars and the distraction those wars provided from the damage that they were doing to our nation and the world. From 1955-75, that twenty-year war caused 1.1 million Vietnamese war dead and Vietnamese civilian deaths was in excess of 2.0 million. There is no way to describe the Vietnam War as anything but an empirical invasion of a foreign nation with no national interests justification. The same goes for practically every war the US has entered into since the Revolutionary War, al 107 of them. The US South would argue that even our own Civil War was an empirical invasion. If there is a human history after the USA collapses under the usual internal battles that have destroyed every empire in history, I imagine our national sport will be recorded as “war, with football, baseball, jazz, and Hollywood as recreational distractions.”

“Praise the Lord, this is the Vest residence,” was how Don answered the phone in 1974, the last time I saw him. My little family was passing through Salina, on our way back to Nebraska from visiting my family in Dodge City for some warm-weather holiday, and I took a slightly longer route home to see my old friend,. Don had experienced some rough years since the last time I’d seen him. In early 1970, Don had been one of the most rock-steady drummers I’d ever had the pleasure of playing with. We met while still in high school, he was clinging to the tattered remains of a K.U. college basketball scholarship that was rescinded when his knee wouldn’t recover from a late season high school game injury. I never saw Don play basketball, but he was such a “natural” athlete I have no problem imaging him playing at a level far beyond average.

When we met, I was in the last semester of my dismal high school senior year. Don had been a standout star basketball player at Dodge’s Sacred Heart Cathedral Catholic School, but a knee injury had taken him out of the lineup and blown up his future. In 1965, Vietnam was growing into the threat it would become for all of my generation’s male victims and we were thrashing around a bit trying to figure out where that war would intersect our lives. For some of us, especially the non-white “us,” it was obvious there would be no escape from becoming cannon fodder. The draft loomed large at our 18th birthdays, like a huge black wall blocking every possible escape. Looking back now, I realize that my friends and I played music the way we did as a scream of desperation and protest. For most of us, our WWII fathers did their best to make military “service” seem like an honorable obligation. I know mine did.

From early spring in 1965 until just before I left Kansas for Dallas, Texas in 1968, I lived in a tiny trailer on the south side (“the poor side of the tracks”) of Dodge, with a band on the road or a shared trailer in Hays, Kansas, or in a lean-to on the Arkansas (pronounced are-can-sus in Kansas) River west of town a few miles. One of my fondest memories of Don was while I was on the river, he’d hiked out to spend an afternoon with me hunting. We both had single-shot .22’s, but his was much more of a gun than mine; because he was using it. There wasn’t much to shoot at that day. Usually, I lived on jack rabbits, pheasant, and eggs from the egg distributor who also ran the trailer court where I sometimes lived. We hiked along the river, heading west toward Cimarron, probably talking about whatever gig we’d recently had or one in the future. Don pointed west and said, “See that Blue Jay in the tree?” And I said, “What tree?” (There weren’t and aren’t a lot of trees in Kansas.) He aimed at something and shot. We hiked for a good while and, finally, came to a tree and there was a dead Blue Jay on the ground.

In 1967, I’d bombed out of my Navy physical because of asthma (that I didn’t know I had until the Navy doc flunked me), moved to Dallas for a Trump-style fraudulent “computer tech school,” met the love of my life and was at the tail-end of a brief stint as a folk singer and struggling to survive as sole-support for the two of us. Don and Ed, two ex-bandmates from Kansas, drove to Dallas to hang with me and Ms. Day before heading out to Army basic training. Those two, and Ms. Day, were my best, dearest friends and it felt like we were saying “goodbye” way too early in all of our lives. Ed would go on to specialize in the Army’s pitiful electronics technician program and spent his military time in Germany. Don would become an Army sniper in Vietnam.

My attitude toward the war shifted during the months that I was waiting to be inducted and the day I flunked my physical, thanks to the Hutchinson New’s syndication of David Halberstam’s New York Time’s Vietnam reporting. Aoso, thanks to my new Dallas hippie friends, I’d also read Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era and his second piece of “fiction, One Very Hot Day and my opinion of that war and my country’s values were shifted left for life. Don had to leave first and Ms. Day remembers the two of us playing basketball at an outdoor court somewhere before he headed off to basic training. Ed and I played at the Rubaiyat.with a jug band assortment of freaks and players before he also left for basic.

I tried to stay in touch with both of them from my “safe” life in Texas, but Ed was quickly offended by my anti-war attitude and cut off communications emphatically not long after he landed in Germany for the duration of his “service.” Don and I wrote often and I wish I’d saved his letters, but almost nothing from my pre-1983 life survived the move from Nebraska to California. Don went from being, like me, a Kansas yokel to a deadly assassin to the most courageous war protester I will ever know. After several “missions” of dubious morality he, somehow, managed a transfer from Vietnam to Germany in the laughable Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Don’s description of the several-floors-underground, ex-Nazi SS basement secret quarters, CID offices was surrealistic, at best, and indicative of the US military’s decent into decadence, at worst. By then, Don was convinced the entire US military and government needed a criminal investigation. My memory of 50-year-old events is sketchy, but I hope I always remember some of Don’s description of his deciding to take a blanket to an Army warehouse, in the dead of a German winter, strip off his uniform, and refuse to leave or obey orders until he was given his release from the Army.

As a result of his protest, Don received a “general discharge” and returned to Kansas where I ran into him, again, when Ms. Day and I attempted to escape Texas in 1969 for Oregon or Washington, but our ‘63 Ford Ranchero full of meager belongings and a cat and us died in northern Oklahoma and barely delivered us to Dodge City. Don was taking an electronics course at the sad excuse for a local tech school and suggested that I might also want to try that route. I found a job as a welder at a local manufacturer, enrolled in the tech school program, and six months later had to drop out and “get a real job” because Ms. Day was pregnant. During that six months, Don and I formed another band and played regularly as a 3-piece power rock band with another guy who fumbled along as our bass player.

Ms. Day’s pregnancy (and another one two years later) forced my career decisions for the next decade and I’ve written a good bit about those years. I mostly lost touch with Don, Ed, and my past life as a wannabe-rock-star. In late September, 1970, Don was convicted of marijuana possession and “intent to sell” and got a 6 month jail sentence for that ridiculous “crime.” That pretty much put a nail in his future and, according to Ed and other sources, Don had quite a few problems with drugs and the law afterwards.

In 1974, after the “praise the lord” telephone announcement, I spent a few hours with Don and his family in Salina (as I remember it). He was some kind of fundamentalist, unordained by anything other than his belief in his god, self-proclaimed “minister” and I was still the savage atheist I’d be my whole life. He made a living as a carpenter and his home was a beautiful demonstration of those skills. I don’t remember much about that visit, but Don was clearly struggling to find himself and it was the last time I would see him. Three years later, Don would be divorced and living in an even more dilapidated Kansas town. The stories I heard about him from the 80s until the early 2000s had him in and out of legal trouble and dying somewhere between those years.

When I sat down this morning to write this Google surprised me with the fact that Don died in 2021. His obituary indicates that he’d found some kind of peace and regained a good bit of who he was. I can not reconcile this picture of a ZZ Top-looking guy with the tall, blond, athletic boy-and-man I knew, but I love the fact that he, at last, seems happy with his life. I feel like I missed years of opportunity to reconnect with my old friend because I’d believed he died at least 20 years earlier.

“Democrats have done nothing for . . . “

A friend recently claimed that “Democrats have done nothing for young people” and I began to question that person’s math skills. “Nothing” means zero, nada, no benefit whatsoever. It pains me to know that someone who should know better is as clueless about the meaning of zero as 3rd Century Mesopotamians. The Biden White House has published a web page explaining all of the things they have done for young people: “Fact Sheet: President Biden and Vice President Harris Are Delivering For Young Americans.” The list is impressive, but the media (right and left) also appears to be unable to decipher numbers. I’m not going to repeat that data and I’m going to take the wild chance that my readers are curious enough to follow the damn link, but “$117 billion in targeted relief for 3.4 million student loan borrowers, including borrowers with total and permanent disabilities, those cheated by their colleges, those in public service, and more” is a LOT more than “nothing.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of nonsense. A union welder acquaintance recent claimed “Democrats have done nothing for working people.” To be clear, this man was solely concerned that pipelines wouldn’t be built and he wouldn’t be raking in the usual “$36 and $52 an hour” building those infamous pollution systems. However, there are plenty of jobs for welders in infrastructure work and that doesn’t require decimating the nation’s fresh water supplies or contributing to the inhospitality of the planet to current lifeforms. Biden’s “Build Back Framework” could “add an average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.”

If not mismanaging the pandemic so badly that US cities were stacking up bodies in refrigerated trailers isn’t doing something for young and old, skilled and unskilled labor, and all of the rest of us, we’re in a pretty weird state of decline. This kind of faulty and deceptive hyperbola is not adding value to the national dialog. If supposedly educated people are unclear on what “nothing means,” we’re in big trouble; and, of course, we’re in big trouble. 

Lastly, but most importantly, the current Democratic Party offers something no other entity in the country can provide: a slight chance that the "great experiment" that the United States of America represents might, somehow, become a democracy.  There are no Republicans in office in the federal government who represent any of the ideals of democracy. From the despicable oligarchs hiding in the Federalist Society to the obvious spokesperson for Republicans, Donald Trump, and the deplorable rabble of voters and seditionists, Republicans are the worst of this nation's terrible worst and they represent the nation's decent into fascism and chaos. I challenge you to name a single Republican currently in office who is not in favor of demolishing the democratic structure of this country. There are no counterparts in the Republican Party for Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, and at least 15 other progressive and liberal Senators who are fighting for all of us, apparently, without much appreciation. In the US House of Representatives, there are a few dozen progressive and liberal Democratic members, apparently, going equally unappreciated. Again, there are no Republican comparables with any sort of claim to democratic values. The choice has not been this clear since the 1860s, you are either working to elect the most democratic Democrats or you are voting fascist. If that isn't "something," fuck you. 

A Gift to Remember

Back in the early 90s, a work friend and I split a Denver Nuggets’ season pass for the 1992-1995 seasons. The 1993-1994 season was a particular highlight as the team was actually decent for the first time in a lot of years. The Nuggets lineup was deep and included Dikembe Mutombo (center), LaPhonso Ellis (forward), Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (guard, aka Chris Jackson, prior to the season), Rodney Rogers (forward), Reggie Williams (forward), Bryant Stith (guard), Robert, Pack (guard), and Brian Williams (center). I’m sure most of those names are now lost to sports history, but at the time they were up-and-coming young players who set at least one record that year. They were exciting to watch and Denver’s McNichols Auditorium was a fun place to watch a basketball game.

The ‘93-‘94 Nuggets (42-40) were the youngest team in the league and the last seed in the Western Conference playoffs and the Seattle Sonics (63-19) were the first. After losing the first two games in Seattle, the Nuggets won both of their home games and went back to Seattle and beat the Sonics 98–94 in overtime. I had tickets for the first two home games. In the second round, they almost did the trick again, taking the Utah Jazz to a 7th game before losing that series.

Early in the next (‘94-‘95 season, Abdul-Rauf began to speak out against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the US positions in North Africa. He had converted to Islam and made a point of not standing for the anthem because he interpreted that act as worshiping idols and he called the US flag “a symbol of oppression.” He took a public opinion beating from both the fans and the local and national press. Denver, contrary to current fascist delusions, is not a particularly liberal or progressive city and sports fans in general are “conservative” in all of the worst ways. Abdul-Rauf went from being a fan favorite to being his sports generation’s version of Colin Kaepernick overnight and, like Kaepernick was eventually suspended from the NBA and spent the rest of his career in European basketball. Born Chris Jackson in Mississippi, Abdul-Rauf had plenty of experience with US repression and oppression from the start. He was also cursed with Tourette’s Syndrome and it could be “entertaining” to be near the court when he was bringing the ball up, spouting random curses and sound effects. Fans once appreciated his ability to work past that handicap, but they quickly turned into vicious grade school bullies when he demonstrated that he had a conscience.

Almost immediately, Brian Williams spoke out in support of his teammate’s convictions and in agreement with the fact that the US’s history in the Middle East is nothing to be proud of. Likewise, Brian quickly became a pariah to the city’s basketball fans and a fair number of his teammates. You might guess from reading this blog that I didn’t disagree with either Brian or Mahmoud and felt compelled to say so in a letter to the Rocky Mountain News’ editor, which was published in that paper’s Letters section.

A couple of days later, I was home, late in the day, and the phone rang. I answered and the deepest voice I have ever heard responded, “Is this Mr. Day? This is Brian Williams. I wanted to thank you for your letter of support.” I, of course, was convinced that some friends were pulling my leg and said so in particularly ungracious terms. Brian was patient, funny, and finally convinced me that he was who he said he was. He was extremely complementary about the things I’d written in my letter, which made me incredibly suspicious that I was still being pranked. We had a fairly long conversation, as much about basketball as politics or music. (Brian’s father, Eugene Williams of the Platters, had sung the national anthem at a game earlier and proved that there was nothing wrong with the McNichols sound system that decent mic technique wouldn’t cure.) As we were wrapping up the call, Brian mentioned that he’d left three floor seats for me at will-call for the next evening’s game.

The only time I have had floor seats for a big-boy’s basketball game was at the NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship in Hutchinson, Kansas. I have no idea what those Nuggets tickets cost, but it was way out of my league. The team was very popular, games sold out regularly, and the seats my friend and I shared were well into the nose-bleed sections. Still suspecting I was being pranked, I called some friends and asked if anyone wanted to go with me. I was probably a reluctant salesman because of my suspicion, but I couldn’t find any takers. I worked a long way down my list of friends and acquaintances without finding any interest. Without much to lose, other than minimal self-respect, I went to the game alone.

As I was standing in the will-call line, a young man with an adolescent daughter were trying to find scalped tickets, since the game was sold out. I collected my 3 tickets and offered two to him. Since I hadn’t paid anything for them, I thought it would be disrespectful to ask for money and I didn’t. I don’t think he had any idea that they were floor tickets until they found their seats. I’d also been given a coupon at the counter and wandered over to the concession are to see what the coupon was for. It was for this jacket and that was not a cheap item.

When I joined my guests on the floor, I wore the jacket through the game. I suspect, thinking that the two people sitting beside me were old friends, Brian made a point of swinging by our seats several times giving the girl high-fives as he passed. His hand was about the same size as her body, so they were very careful high-fives. Until you’ve watched professional play at close range, you have no idea how different their game is than what you’re used to. Those giant, ripped, fast young men would make Viking berserkers cower under their shields and they could run down wild game or beat down predators with their huge, bare hands. Even though he didn’t love basketball, when he played he played with passion, energy, and an astounding level of skill.

We stayed in touch, rarely, through email from that Denver game to my first year in Minnesota, in 1996, until he started playing with the Chicago Bulls when the ‘96 season started. After being a Lakers’ fan while I lived in California and a Nuggets fan from ‘91 to ‘96, the Timberwolves were a letdown and I wandered away from my last vestige of sports fandom. Brian was a critical part of the 1996 Chicago Bulls championship team and he almost enjoyed that season. He always wanted to be doing something he enjoyed as much as he imagined his father enjoyed music, though. He’d changed his name to Bison Dele in 1998 and I saved about a half-dozen of the email conversations we had over the years, but the last one came before the 1999-2000 Pistons were going to be in Minneapolis and I’d offered to meet him downtown for coffee or a beer, my treat. His last email said, “Coffee or beer, sounds good.” And I never heard from him again.

When the season ended, the Pistons offered him tens of millions to stay with the team, but he’d had all of basketball he could stand. I’ve read a lot about the last years of his life, but hadn’t kept up with him until his disappearance and, likely, death hit the news. This, “The Love Song of Bison Dele,” is the best wrap-up of his incredible life that I’ve seen and I’ve come back to read it several times.

I will remember Brian with his statement, “I always figured there were two ways to go. You can die from living, or you can die from just dying.” I still wear the jacket he gave me when the weather is right and I keep it stored in a cedar closet when it isn’t. Not long ago, I was grocery shopping wearing the jacket and an older man in a wheelchair and what appeared to be his son called me “Old School” and complemented me on my 30-year-old jacket. It reminded me that I have meant to tell this story for years and probably better do it soon or never. Ms. Day wanted a picture of me standing next to a guitar sculpture and that gave me one more reason to tell the story.

Going Amazon-free

About eight months ago, I received a notice from the Amazon cop-bot that, somehow, I’d “repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines” (“repeatedly” means twice in Amazon-bot-speak) and “You received an initial warning and because of your repeated violation of our Community Guidelines we've removed your ability to participate in Community features” (the “initial warning” was a bot-email with no reference to what the warning referred to). However, when I send emails to a variety of Amazon’s automated “customer service” locations including one to a Jeff Bezo’s email I found from searching other confused and pissed-off banned Amazon customers, I got a snarky note from “Ayesha of Amazon.com's Communities Escalation Team” finally telling me where I’d violated their weird, poorly-explained, and inconsistent “guidelines.” Here are the condemned reviews, so you can be the judge.

#1 Storm Watch: Joe Pickett, Book 23
Review Title: Deep State goober nonsense
Text: Probably the worst edited novel from a major publisher in years. If it weren't a library book, I'd have probably red-lined at least 50 pages out of the book in an editing fit.
Box has, apparently, joined a majority of westerners in the belief that letting oil and mining companies rape and pillage the mountains at will has no consequences. And, even more cluelessly, imagines that selling those resources does not require the cooperation and financial assistance of the taxpaying states. I couldn't read this silly fantasy novel without remember the first time I drove through Montana in the 60s and was stunned at the filthy, mining-tailing contaminated rivers and streams and the pollution billowing uncontrolled from processing plants in practically every small town I passed through. It actually made Kansas, my home state, look responsible.
Pickett is still, mostly, a sympathetic "hero," but almost every other person in the novel approaches the cowardice and foolishness of the Proud Boys. Even after Trump, these goofy, entitled goobers imagine that anyone with a college education working for the government is "Deep State" and out to repress white "working men," the same men you always see leaning on shovels at construction sites.

#2 Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption
Review Title: Paranoid and laughable
Text: If this were written by Andy Borowitz it would have been spectacularly funny. I had to re-calibrate often while I read "Breaking the News" to remind myself this nutjob is serious. Which kind of makes it even funnier.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that some wingnut objected to my disrespecting the Faux News worldview and hit the “Report” button at the bottom of my reviews. Since Amazon doesn’t post reviews immediately, under the false claim that they check reviews for those mythical “community standards” before putting a review online, it’s tough to know what happened, but both reviews were up for several months before causing my entire 15 year history of reviews to be discarded.

I have, honestly, hated almost everything about Amazon since Bezos and his gang of lawyers steamrolled the original Amazon books in Minneapolis in 2008. I have been buying stuff from Amazon since 2008 to the tune of well over $9,000 up until early this year. I figured if they don’t like my business, I shouldn’t give it to them. So, after getting the first notice, I started looking for alternatives to the demon Amazon. Turns out, laziness is primarily what fueled my buying decisions because Amazon is a long ways from either a primary or a quality supplier. For years, local and national retailers have complained that Amazon shoppers browse their inventory and order the products from Amazon. The reverse is also possible and downright handy. Assuming you know how misleadingly-weighted Amazon’s rating system is you can learn almost as much from a product’s Amazon page as you can from seeing the thing in person. If you’re really devious, you could even order the thing from Amazon, play with it, return it, and buy it again from a decent vendor. Just as Amazon makes it clear to you that it does not owe you a microsecond of loyalty, you don’t owe Amazon anything either.

Currently, the only “business” I do with Amazon is via my Kindle and my local library. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since January and the credit card information Amazon has for me expired in March. I’m currently doing the research to see how I can get away from even that bit of business.

This past few months, I researched, priced, and ordered several products that are listed on Amazon.com. I just didn’t buy them from Amazon. I bought some expensive bicycle handlebars from the manufacturer in Idaho, some bike repair parts and a flat kit from my local bicycle shop, and some bike accessories for my new electric mountain bike on eBay. I looked them all up, initially, with Amazon’s search engine, then tracked down the actual vendors and bought from them unless I could source the stuff locally. As for the cheap Chinese-made stuff, the best sources I know of are Temu.com and AliExpress.com and, of course, eBay. I bought a pair of 3-bearing, all metal mountain bike pedals for $23 shipped, after finding the company and product description on Amazon for $88-140. 

Here are some of the resources I’ve found to substitute for my default Amazon buying habit:

• eBay.com, of course, is and always has been a go-to location for all things. Like several other online vendors listed below, the “convenience” of Amazon (plus my dislike of Paypal, plus Musk and his fascist cofounding buddy Theil) had put eBay on the backburner of my online shopping options. After dumping Amazon, I was “forced” to look to eBay for some odd car bits that my local auto parts house couldn’t supply. I found them on eBay and they arrived in two days. Since I last dealt with eBay vendors, at least a decade ago, they have really upped their shipping and customer service game.
• Newegg.com I’ve been buying electronics from Newegg for years, far longer than Amazon, and Newegg’s electronic selection, quality, buyers’ review usefulness, and customer service blows Amazon out of the water.
• Nashbar.com Another online vendor that I’ve dealt with almost since the beginning of the WWW. My accounting history records a set of mountain bike wheels purchased from Nashbar in 1999. Again, great service, terrific products, incredible sales (hence those sealed bearing wheels in 1999), and knowledgeable customer service.
• PetSmart is the hands-down best online place to go for all things pet-related. I’d forgotten how customer-friendly this company was until my Amazon spat. As I was cancelling some of my Amazon subscriptions, I discovered a couple of them were with Petsmart. I easily moved those subscriptions to Petsmart’s website and saved a little money as a result. When our amazing little cat, Diva, died unexpectedly this fall, Petsmart refunded my money for a shipment in process and sent a beautiful sympathy letter. Not only was that beyond comprehension from Amazon, it was more than our local vet offered.
• Temu.com Is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace that is the number one shopping megastore worldwide, regularly whipping Amazon’s butt in price, selection, and quality (at least with Chinese-made products, which is 70% of Amazon’s selection). I’ve tried some of Temu’s dirt-cheap ($3 for 512GB) MicroSD cards and while they are often defective, Temu gives me instant credit for those defective cards without requiring a return. Otherwise, I’ve bought electronics, bicycle parts and accessories, motorcycle accessories, gifts for my wife and family, shoes and clothing, tools, and assorted weird stuff. Shipping is kinda slow, usually a week to two, but Temu provides tracking information and, unlike Amazon or AliExpress, that information is accurate.
• AliExpress is another Chinese-owned outlet, owned by AliBaba, that under-sells Amazon by a good bit and, usually, with better quality. Delivery is even longer and a lot less reliable than Temu and often untrackable. However, after getting two used induction-compatible high end frying pans from Amazon (returned at Amazon’s expense), I bought the exact same pans from AliBaba and they came new, for 1/4 of Amazon’s price, and included “gifts” from the vendor (a smaller pan and some non-stick friendly utensils). As best I can tell, AliExpress has little-to-no customer protection for lost shipping and you are absolutely gambling buying expensive stuff from AliExpress. I ordered a $120 microphone from AliExpress that never arrived and AliExpress kept insisting that I provide “shipping information” to claim a refund. Since I did not receive any shipping information, tracking links, or any evidence the package had ever been shipped, I was out of luck.
• Walmart.com and Target.com have really stepped up their online games. Plus, I can get stuff delivered to my local store for free and pickup along with groceries. I started using Walmart’s store pickup service early in the COVID pandemic and have used it often since. Now that COVID is making a comeback, I’ll be back in the parking lot waiting for a Walmart associate to load my groceries into the back of the Honda. Our local Target just increased the size of their grocery department and is building a parking area for pickup only. I am looking forward to trying it out.
• My local library, especially for book reviews. The same reviews that got me banned from Amazon are still standing on the Hennepin County Library webpage. When I retired, I sold several bookshelves full of books as part of my downsizing routine and I bought an Amazon Kindle where I restored some of my old book collection. I also found a ton of ePUBs of my older stuff, which lives on my computers and Android tablets. I am about to replace the Kindle, though, since everything my library has in eBook and Audiobook format is also available via Libby (Adobe) plus a few that aren’t on Kindle. And I can access the library’s whole catalog via Libby. Supposedly, Epubor Ultimate is capable of converting Kindle books from the Amazon format to ePUBs which eliminates any reason why I can’t move from Kindle to Kobo, where I could directly check out books from my libraries. I haven’t bought a Kobo, yet, but I am shopping for one everywhere but Amazon.com.
• Speaking of local, when I first dropped out of Amazon, I began to look, first, for local sources for the stuff I buy. For example, my local bike shop is grossly high priced for some stuff, but for many things they are as reasonable as online retail and you can’t beat the delivery time. That goes for hardware, office supplies, groceries, music equipment and repairs, and at least 75% of the stuff for which might have once defaulted to Amazon.

After 3/4 of a year of avoiding Amazon, I literally have no regrets or reason to return to that evil monopoly. I am solidly disgusted with our bought-and-paid-for-congresscritters for not only allowing Amazon to abuse the USPS but for giving them piles of taxpayer money for services the federal government should be managing itself. I do like using Amazon’s website like the old Sears’ catalog, pawing through the options for a purchase, reading the 1, 2, and 3-star reviews (the 4 and 5 stars are rarely honest buyers), noting the sellers so I can go to their websites for better prices and service, and, for now, checking out my library books.

“You need to have an open mind!”

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans–The Cult of the Unremarkable Boys

In an excellent Atlantic Magazine article titled “The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men," lays out a pretty good description of the kind of sour-grapes losers who have been overpopulating the planet and coalesced around the Republican Party since Goldwater was electorally slaughtered by L.B.J. The Karl Roves, Fox Views talking-heads, Dick Cheneys, Rush Limbaughs, Jerry Falwells, Jack Kemps, and Oliver Norths grew up to become the spoiled boys’ elder-faux-statesmen. Those angry old men spawned the current crop of non-achieving boys who chant “you won’t replace us” at least 25 years after their ilk was replaced by everything from educated working women and immigrants to robots to ditch-digging and farm equipment. There has never been much of a need for excess quantities of Y-chromosomes but the over-populated, high-technological world of today has less need of cannon fodder than ever before in human history. And cannon fodder is all this kind of male (and some females and female impersonators, Marjorie Taylor Greene for example) are capable of being at the "best." Anyone dumb enough to think a mask is supposed to be worn like a gag is clearly on the far left side of the IQ distribution curve.

If these uneducated, unskilled goobers aren’t being mindlessly thrown at an opposing hoard of equally useless characters they are causing destruction, instability, and pointless violence against people who do have a purpose. Of course, they don’t need and shouldn’t have anything more dangerous than sharp weapons and a flag to wave as they mow each other down. This pack of mommas’-basement-dwelling goobers are littering up the landscape and causing infinitely more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

Sadly for the country and, likely, the world, these spoiled children found their leader in an equally childish Toddler-in-Chief Trump and he has become the role model for losers, whiners, failures, and angry children everywhere. It’s hard to see a way back from this over-population derivative without some serious assistance from nature or an engineered pandemic and the goober-resistance to medical and scientific advice. Their infestation is beyond politics and rational behavior is just wishful thinking.

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 1 of 2)

“Yup, it’s true. The virus was ‘engineered.’ In an unscientific, mostly-illiterate way, you whackadoodles were right all along.” In about a dozen words, the microbiologist, who Tucker Carlson had been interviewing for the past half-hour, confirmed practically every unhinged Covid myth the Moscow Mouthpiece had made during the past four years.

All of the ridicule Tucker had received from liberals for his anti-vax position throughout the years of the pandemic was momentarily shut down. Tucker had asked, "How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccines?" And the experts replied with numbers and facts that had no effect on Friar Tuck’s position. Tucker had literally shrieked, "EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY WANTS YOU TO GET YOUR VACCINE" and hinted at the undisclosed deaths caused by and the ineffectiveness of vaccines. And he was right that the “authorities” he ranted against were scientists and healthcare professionals who absolutely recommended that everyone be vaccinated.

The CDC responded with "Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history," which just inflamed Tucker’s agitation further arguing that the CDC, MSNBC, NPR/PBS, and CNN, the ex-employer from whom he was “involuntarily terminated” and Fox’s arch-media-enemy, cannot be trusted. Even some of Tucker’s co-workers at Fox betrayed him. Jonah Goldberg ridiculed Tucker’s logic with, "FACT: Every single person who ever died blinked before they died. The vast majority — like 99% — blinked mere seconds before death. And yet, no one talks about this silent killer." Carlson’s hero, Donald Trump, was almost his only ally in his crusade against science and vaccinations, but when Trump “lost” the 2020 elections poor Tucker was out on a limb with only a few million (73 million in the USA, to be precise) marginally-literate supporters.

But now, Tucker’s wildest paranoid dreams were being confirmed by an epidemiologist loosely connected to the World Health Organization, Dr. Simon Turenne. Turenne had agreed to go on air, live, with Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson on the Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show after nearly three years of a world pandemic that had, supposedly, taken at least 20 million lives, world-wide and almost 2 million in the United States alone. Dr. Turenne was a thin, well-dressed, angular man of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed unusually comfortable in the company of a man who clearly, loudly, and often spoke of his disdain for anyone involved in science or the reality-based world. In fact, the Fox News crew had been generally hostile to the scientist from the moment of his arrival and he hardly seemed to notice, let alone be offended or nervous. When Tucker asked questions in his usual snide, smirking style the doctor smiled back at him and calmly answered each question as if the arguments were being presented by a rational, intelligent person. That act of acknowledgment seemed to push Carlson further over the edge of the cliff from which he had long since jumped; his wrath was no longer even slightly contained.

“’Yup!’ That is what you have to say for creating a disease that killed millions and has cost nations countless coin and stability?”

With that infuriating smile still plaster to his face, Dr. Turenne replied, “’Yes’ seemed a little formal, considering present company and your audience, but if ‘yes’ makes you feel better the answer is the same. The original SARS-CoV-2 and almost all of the variants that followed were man-designed or human-evolved. Actually men and women did the “designing,” since it was a cross-national and unisex effort.” That smile, again, this time a little wider bordering on outright happiness.

Tucker looked as if he’d been slapped or had seen an actual naked woman. Years of pretending to be outraged at his own conspiracy inventions had left him unprepared to be honestly outraged. You could see the steam building as he sputtered his way toward a response. But before he got there, Turenne continued, “It was an experiment. There was a lot of argument among the design community as to how a response, especially among First World countries, would play out. We were, honestly, impressed with how the USA reacted with both a collection of well-reasoned precautions and effective vaccines far sooner than we imagined. Scientists not in our loop created an assortment of vaccines and testing processes that will set the standard for however long the species continues to survive. Which, by the way, is estimated to not be much more than one hundred more years, at best, with the current climate degradation well underway.”

Tucker’s small narrow mouth and vanishing lips quivered and those strange looking puppy ears seemed to stick out even further than usual as they turned beet red. His cheeks inflated and deflated as he drew in the necessary air for a typical screaming response. “What the hell were you people thinking!” Tucker finally managed to shriek in his shrill, barely-understandable imitation of an upper-class, educated white man with little tolerance for opinions that do not mirror his own. “You intentionally murdered two million Americans [Obviously an accidental slip of the tongue, since up to this point Carlson had insisted that only a few thousand US citizens had died from the Trump Plague.] as an EXPERIMENT?” His pitch had raised nearly an octave above normal by the last word. “What kind of monsters are you?”

Despite being practically drenched with spittle from Tucker’s frothing, spluttering outburst, Dr. Turenne remained calm and looked clearly amused by Carlson’s emotional response. “A more rational and responsible question would be ‘Why would you engage in an experiment that had this radical an outcome?’ The answer is that it appears to be the only way to solve many of the problems the planet is facing, with or without humans participating in either the solutions or contributing more to the problems. It was an experiment to test the world governments’ capabilities, the individual countries’ populations, and mostly a test to see what portion of the world population a real pandemic would most affect. As a test, it succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We have collected more data in the last four years regarding all of the issues and political systems and human responses than we expected to obtain if the pandemic had gone on in experimental form for at least another decade.”

[To be continued]

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Spreading the Word, Testing the Waters (Part 2 of 2)

[Continued from Part 1]

You could almost hear and see the steam escaping from somewhere under Tucker’s carefully sculpted toupee. A burst of unintelligible noise escaped that, eventually, turned into a series of insults, raving astonishment, and disconnected partially formed statements and questions. Dr. Turenne waited patiently; removing a handkerchief from his jacket with which to remove Tucker’s expelled saliva from his face and clothing. After the fake-newsman/entertainer’s expletives and hysterics wound down to sputtering and nonsense syllables, Dr. Turenne interrupted with, “Sorry. I couldn’t identify anything that I could respond to in all of that, so I’ll continue explaining the experiment’s results.

“What we learned was that in most undeveloped countries, if a vaccine was available the overwhelming majority of residents in those areas would take it immediately. In countries that most citizens in the United States might identify as ‘socialist,’ those citizens mostly trusted their governments to do a reasonable job of testing and distributing vaccines and information. Both of the first two types of societies, under-developed and ‘socialist,’ were able to vaccinate nearly 100% of their populations as soon as vaccines were available. And we worked quite hard to ensure that vaccines were made available as quickly as possible, including ignoring patent rights and corporate profits whenever possible. In the West, certain groups were also likely to obtain vaccinations immediately and those groups quickly learned the necessary skills to prevent infection.

“Other groups, your audience for example, tended to gravitate toward the worst possible information sources, like yourself, and remain unvaccinated and generally averse to taking any other precautions even four years into this experiment. First world countries in the west have done a particularly good job of segregating intellectual haves from have-nots; geographically and socio-politically. That reaction was particularly helpful for the purposes of our experiment.”

Tucker’s mouth, now wide open, failed to respond. Dr. Turenne  continued, “The kinds of people who will not make the slightest effort to protect their families and communities are also the people who will be unwilling to change their behavior regarding global warming, racial and economic inequality, ending nuclear armament and wars in general, and any number of issues that will result in the extinction of the human race and serious damage to almost all life on this planet. Their self-image and imagined self-importance is the only value they worship and that has turned out to be a spectacular advantage in ‘culling the herd.’” Turenne punctuated the end of that statement with finger quotes.

Finally, Tucker found his now hoarse and somewhat squeaky voice, “Culling the herd? What the fuck are you talking about?” At this point, Tucker was somewhere between outraged and terrified. His beady little eyes had narrowed to pinpoints and his lips had vanished entirely. There was no sign of his characteristic smirk.

Turenne’s smile returned in full force, “Thanks to influencers like you, our experiment has ended early and the conclusions are irrefutable. Our trial virus was a total and absolutely unpredictable success. I am here, primarily, to thank you and your misinformation colleagues for making it happen so quickly and moderately painlessly. Initially, there were more healthcare workers infected and even killed than we would have hoped, but for the most part they learned how to protect themselves. After the initial months if the pandemic, the few healthcare providers and first responders who were fatally infected were among your disciples. Of course, more than one million physicians and nurses left the US healthcare system in the first two years of the pandemic.

“However, the experiment is over, the data has been collected and analyzed, and the resulting actions have been taken.” Dr. Turenne’s smile dissolved into a more serious expression.

“What actions?” Tucker not only looked confused, he looked nervous and his question was barely audible.

“The last variant has been introduced and within a few hours of this broadcast, the world will begin the nasty job of cleaning up the real outcome of pandemic’s final form and getting on with the important work at hand. Depending on your perspective, and I suspect you will be around to have one since it is clear from your dissembling on the subject that you might be fully vaccinated, although I won’t be surprised if you haven’t kept up your booster regimen. If so, that will be unfortunate for you but no loss for humanity.” And the smile returned.

At the end of Dr. Turenne’s response, Tucker began to look terrified. A long pause ensued as Tucker tried to formulate a response under what had become a flood of information and an overload of doubt and suspicion. Finally, his rasping and hesitant voice returned to him and he asked, “What are you talking about? I thought the pandemic was over. Even Biden said . . . “

Now, Dr. Turenne laughed out loud. “Now, that has been your mistake from the beginning. You keep pointing your fingers at US ‘bleeding heart liberals’ and Democrats, but this ‘engineered pandemic,’ as you so cleverly deduced, is not a product of the US government; and certainly not the Chinese government or any government. This is an experiment and a world population solution that was engineered by a collection of concerned scientists and physicians across the world. The initial Covid variant and the evolutionary variants that followed were just a biological and data-collection trial balloon. Everything from the distribution and spread of the virus to the misinformation response to vaccines and preventative measures have been collected, assessed, and evaluated. Once the data and tactics were correlated, the testing phase of the experiment was complete and we are confident that the finished design will be at least 99% effective. The only undetermined variant is how quickly and efficiently the clean-up will be managed.”

Tucker’s usual quick, inaccurate, and snide response failed him and he squeaked out, “Clean-up?”

“Of course, here in the United States we anticipate approximately 140 million deaths in the next 24 hours. That will create approximate 10.4 million metric tonnes of human waste that will have to be disposed of quickly. Countries like Russia, England, Ireland, and Australia will have relatively similar clean-up problems to contend with, since those countries have comparable ‘conservative’ unvaccinated populations. ‘Vaccinated,’ by the way means having the initial vaccination and all boosters as of at least 30 days ago when vaccinations had been available across the world for at least 120 days. If you have the usual Covid early symptoms, you might want to get your affairs in order quickly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say, ‘Good night and good luck.’”

While Turenne beamed that irritating smile at the camera, Tucker coughed and began to look frantically around him at the Fox News familiar faces all breaking out in a sweat, many heading for the exits. 

[The End, Literally?]

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

Living in A One-Sided World

The people who make the rules, the rich and powerful, are beginning to experience the world as the rest of us have to live it and they aren’t happy about it. And let’s face, it’s a pretty miserable world. The rules that most of us are forced to live by, out of necessity, are only suggestions for the rich and powerful. If you didn’t get that out of the 4 years of being mismanaged, ignored, abused, and ripped-off by the Trump 3rd Tier Elites, you will never get it. But a lot of people got it. And now that we are in our 3rd year of a pandemic that has cost this country at least 1,010,599 lives (as of June 25, 2022) and at least 6,300,000 worldwide, some people are discovering that they can use the same rules that have always applied to the idle rich and abusively powerful.

For example, if you are a skilled healthcare worker, like a registered nurse, you are in big demand today. Typically, an RN makes about $29/hour as a hospital employee. Hospital employees are historically abused and misused by their grossly overpaid and under-skilled and cynically misnamed “administration” executives. During the early days of Covid, that abuse went ballistic as hospitals’ staff were decimated by the killer virus and administrators did as little as possible to protect their employees from the disease and hostile, delusional patients. People died, people quit, and as of this writing about 20% of US healthcare workers have left the workforce and 47% of those remaining in that workforce plan to leave their “current role” or the occupation entirely in the next 3 years. One of the ways to leave the role as a hospital employee, for nurses, is to become a “travel nurse.” This article, “Why Do Travel Nurses Get Paid More | Travel Nursing,” does a nice job of explaining why a freelance nurse gets better pay, has more job opportunities and control, and is less stressed than a clinic or hospital employee. The bottom line, though, is more money and less hassle. If a hospital administrator is a pain in the ass, leave and work somewhere else in a heartbeat. Want more money? Travel nurses can make more than twice the salary of a permanent employee. Don’t like the work assignments, don’t do them and the employer’s leverage is practically zilch. Most likely, they won’t fire you because they are already way short on people to do the actual work and everyone knows the administrators don’t do anything resembling work. No patient ever picked a clinic because of the administrators.

Some friends who are retired nurse were recently marveling at the fact that people would apply for a job with Mayo Clinic, be offered the job, and not show up. The assumption was “people don’t want to work anymore,” but the fact is that in that business the odds are good that the applicant received several offers and just took a different one. Employers have been in that position for decades and when they pick an employee for a job most employers don’t bother telling the other candidates that they didn’t get the job and they sure don’t bother to tell them why they didn’t get the job. But for the last 100 years, employers have expected prospective employees to be massively more considerate than employers. No longer that world, is it?

Doctors are in a completely different and much better situation, thanks to mismanagement and Covid and the two combined. For example, pathologists are in hyper-short supply: Industry Voices—The shortage of invisible doctors | Fierce Healthcare. Where there were typically about 100 annual open positions in the country for pathologists there are well over 1,000 today and there are expected to be almost 6,000 open positions by the end of the decade. We can thank scumbags like Ronald Reagan for the current situation, since he made “work” a dirty word and single-handedly flipped a tax system that penalized idle “unearned income” into the spectacularly profitable but culturally worthless “financial services” investment income scam that has destroyed our manufacturing sector, diverted talent from all sorts of necessary functions (like medicine) to money shuffling, and set the country’s education system back at least 50 unrecoverable years. Doctors are retiring, many far earlier than they had originally planned or expected, and doctors are leaving the healthcare system. Even the moderately representative and grossly conservative AMA admits that one in three doctors are planning on cutting back their hours and commitment or leaving their practice entirely in the next three years. Doctors can pretty much go where they want to go, from research positions in the medical device or drug industries to teaching or administration jobs in completely different fields. You might think you are special with your cute little MBA party animal degree, but with an MD behind your name you are special.

And those thousands of open positions with a fraction of the necessary and critical applicants are just the tip of the “Great Resignation” iceberg. One of the longest lasting aftereffects of the Black Plague was an idea that is still growing; the rich and powerful are not as important as they imagine themselves to be. Like today’s Bezos, Musk, and the rest of that dependent, unskilled, over-valued ilk, the idle rich of the 12th Century might have been able to isolate themselves from the plague, but they couldn’t support themselves with their meager talents and when serfs realized that the penalties for walking away from the manor and the 3rd tier royalty were unenforceable, they walked. They kept walking until they created what we now consider “the middle class.” Royals have been trying to beat back that movement for at least 1,000 years, but the more education and talent is required to support a society the more people there are who can do the simple math that illustrates the inconsequential quality of idle elites. One of the key purposes of religion is to convince workers that God has chosen the idle rich for their special qualities and to question that is to question God. If you ever wanted to know why atheists' like Trump, the Kochs, Musk, and the rest toss money and acknowledgement at evangelical preachers, this is why. The priests have the same marching orders they’ve always had, “Baffle ‘em with bullshit, keep ‘em in line, don’t let them think for themselves or you’ll have to get a real job.”

As the author of “How the Black Death made life better” wrote, “With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been ‘essential’ over the past 16 months.” As every competent employee in the world knows, if every CEO, CFO, COO, or any other C-word executive on the planet died tomorrow, the day after tomorrow would be no different than any day that came before it except that companies would be more profitable, more efficient, more flexible, and the stockholders would be richer. With Trump, we discovered that an incompetent and corrupt President is much worse than no President at all. And for 8 years of the worst recession in 75 years, the Republican Congress demonstrated that most of the design of the US government is so flawed that congresscritters can say out loud that their whole goal is to prevent the President from restoring the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure, and preparing the country for the future without any penalty.

For the moment, many employees are in the driver’s seat. Because humans are gullible and easily distracted, most likely this won’t last long. So, enjoy it while you can.