What to Do, Where to Live?

In 1971, around the time my daughter Holly was born, I was working in Hereford, Texas for a small company mismanaged by a total nitwit as a division of a larger company that was headed for corporate oblivion. However, the upside was that I worked for one of the best supervisors would ever experience, although it was an industry for which I had absolutely no interest at all, and all of that was at the very beginning of what would become my career. One of the people I worked closely with was a WWII-generation machinist born and raised in west Texas, but who had spent a bit of his life sampling other parts of the country; especially during WWII. His name was Carl [forgot his last name] and he was a source of a lot of wisdom at a time when that was a rare commodity in my life. Late in my time in that job, he and I were talking about the difficulty of figuring out life’s big questions: like where do I want to live and what should I be doing to make a living? His simple-sounding advice was “If you want to live a happy life, figure out where you want to live and live there. Figure out what you want to do and do that.”

It might sound easy and it was for Carl. He’d grown up in a small farmhouse between Hereford and Amarillo in the early 20th Century. His brothers and he rode Indian motorcycles between the two towns when there were no roads, paved or otherwise. They fixed what they rode and anything else that needed fixing. Carl told me that when he was a kid there were no flies or many other flying insects in West Texas and they would hang a butchered steer from their windmill and carve off what they needed, leaving the sun to “cure” the open wound till the next time they needed some beef. When the WWII draft came along, Carl was told to apply his mechanical skills to the military-industrial complex and he moved to San Diego to do just that. He built machine and airplane parts for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation and when the war ended, he modified his Ford to be able to run on naphtha, since gas was in short supply and rationed, filled up the tank and put a 55 gallon barrel of the stuff in his trunk, and drove back to Texas. He got married, worked at a few different manufacturing companies in the area, and ended up in the ag industry company where I worked for a few years before he retired. That was what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

For most of us, those two questions are not so simple, but it’s mostly because we overcomplicate our expectations. We’re either looking for the impossibly perfect place or a totally-fulfilling forever job, neither of which is likely to ever occur. A good rule for most everything is “pretty good is good enough.” Perfect, on the other hand, is highly unlikely.

Carl was pretty clear in his instructions, though. The first step is “where.” Finding a great job in a rotten place will never be satisfying. In fact, a mediocre job in a great place (assuming it pays enough to enjoy the place) isn’t a terrible situation. Most of us have some idea about what kind of place we’d like to live. Some of us know exactly where we’d like to live because we’ve spent our lives in that place, our friends and family are there, and we are comfortable with the climate, culture, and opportunities. Some folks are so set on the place that they are willing to sacrifice everything else about their lives to live there. No matter how you picked the place, what to do comes next. If you never settle on a place, I think the odds are good that you’ll never be happy with what you’re doing with your life.

One thing many of us neglect or outright screw-up in our early lives is not taking some kind of career planning seriously early enough. All of the smart people I have ever known came up with career goals fairly early in life, at least by high school, and they let those goals drive their first 4-10 years of adulthood. They usually changed those targets several times over their lives, but when they did they set new goals and aimed for them. Some of us take half of our lives to figure that out, some never figure it out and just wander through their lives wondering “why nothing wonderful ever happens to me?” The only thing that is likely to ever happen to you is life, which will happen whether you make plans or don’t but making the attempt to obtain some kind of control and to maintain self-direction is pretty much the same as driving a car vs letting go of the wheel on a mountain road to see what will happen. You might get lucky, but you probably won’t.

You can catch up, if you don’t get started sensibly, but it’s a lot harder. Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's son, is my overwhelming favorite role model for late starters. He started off his adult life as a hippy commune holdout, after being diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and having been committed to Vancouver mental hospital for a time. After providing on his own cure (for what he later decided was bipolar disorder), he graduated from Harvard Medical School at 32 years old and started his pediatric Internship and Residency. That was a lot of territory to cover after being a non-starter in his prime learning years. Your mileage will most definitely vary from Mark Vonnegut’s. Still, my own experience might demonstrate that if you keep at it you might end up doing work you care about with people you love and respect, even if the business is run by self-destructive, selfish and narcissistic idiots.

The trick, as I see it, is to get started on deciding where you want to live, including the kind of home/apartment/tent/cabin it will be. That might include who you want to live with, but that is not critical. While you’re sorting that out, find some kind of mission for yourself because if you don’t someone will find one for you and you probably won’t like it.

Rigged Against Them?

I watched a little of Dave Chappelle’s SNL opening last night (Yeah, I know it’s “Saturday Night Live,” not “Sunday Streaming.”) and his remarks about his poor (not really), dumb (really), Republican-voting, Trump-loving Ohio rube neighbors struck me as totally clueless. I’ve been hearing whining rural and urban underachievers bitch about the “system” that is “rigged against me” since I was a kid 70 years ago. Out of every group of this pitiful group of losers will come several people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a whine-free life, blowing the hell out of the “rigged against them” argument.

Genetics are what are rigged against them. Like Larry McMurtry said

“He’s [Trump] is very loved. The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an ‘honest liar’. . . That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’ he said. And across the stage was a white woman, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama saying ‘No, it’s not.’” Of course, that is a fairly perverted observation of what happened in that debate and the resulting national argument about electing a con artist and known mobster to national office. “Another con artist,” would be more accurate, since the whole Republican establishment has gone over to the darkest of the dark side.

Chappelle’s political and social analysis is, of course, as goofy as most of Dave’s career of funny over-simplifications. Those “poor white people” in Ohio have seen hundreds of Trump-like “honest liars,” Trump was not only not the first but not even the 1,001^st. They see and hear them every Sunday in their fundamentalist churches and on television where they pour money into the pockets of televangelists in the equally insane and gullible hope that if they can’t make it in this world they’ll make it in the next by following their pennies and dollar bills into heaven. And, of course, Trump was lying (as always) about being a billionaire, but there has never been a shortage of bullshit artist millionaires and Ohio has more than a few of those characters.

But low brows like Chappelle’s neighbors (who “love” him because of his money and tolerate his color) and Dave himself conveniently neglect to mention the reason Republicans hate Hillary Clinton with a passion. She tried and failed (thanks to the people she was trying to help) to start a first step at a national health care system in 1993. She tried to start unravelling the worst part of our rigged system, 60% of US personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and a fairly conservative estimate means at least 650,000 medical bankruptcies occur every year which would mean about 18,000,000 personal bankruptcies are due to the Republican effort to squash national healthcare. Currently about 1 out of 6 Americans are carrying significant medical debt.

And they voted for that fucked-up system, repeatedly. You don’t get to bitch about a rigged system when you keep voting for the riggers. Worse, your whining rings false when you fall in love with a con artist who has failed at every business he’s started, even with an $800B head-start in life, left a long trail of ripped off customers, vendors, and business partners (including almost every major bank in the western world), and had an obvious conflict of interest with his Russian “business partners’ and the job of US President. That’s who you think is “telling the truth?”

The problem with Trump’s whining lovers isn’t that the system is rigged against them. The problem is that they are too dumb to know what “rigged” means. Start with this definition from Webster’s, “manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means." Trump’s fans manipulate themselves and purposely choose the people who obviously lie to them without restraint. When you are in the driver’s seat and you choose to drive off of a cliff, you are not being manipulated or controlled by anything but your own foolishness.

Men’s Lives Matter?

I’m on a mail list with a few local guys. Mostly, the point of the mail list is about motorcycles, but one of the guys is growing some kind of facial hair for the Movember organization. Supposedly, this organization is looking for the magic bullet to slow up the rate of deaths by male suicides (white men are 70% of the 35,000 suicides in the US) and prostate and testicular cancer. I can only say, “Good luck.”

Humorously, the organization claims to "know what works for men" and somehow they expect to reduce male suicides by 25% in 2030. I prowled the organization's website following all of the "how we're going to win the fight" links to the expected proclamations of doing something and I didn't see any evidence that Movember knows more about what they are doing than do the so-called healthcare and mental health "professionals." In fact, as WebMD reports "One doctor commits suicide in the U.S. every day -- the highest suicide rate of any profession. And the number of doctor suicides -- 28 to 40 per 100,000 -- is more than twice that of the general population . . ." And, as you’d expect, for every female doctor who commits suicide there are seven men offing themselves. "Male anesthesiologists are at highest risk," for some reason. If doctors don’t have access to solutions to depression mental healthcare, how will Movember manage to reach everyone else? They won’t. As for Movember, H.L. Menken once said something like “For every complex problem there is a simple solution . . . that won’t work.” I didn’t see anything on the Movember website that looked like they even had a simple solution to propose.

The problem is not just a US-thing, either. Men and doctors and male doctors kill themselves at a higher-than-average rate all over the world. If there isn’t a solution, at least there ought to be some attempt to find the reasons for suicides. One of the most interesting insights I heard recently, when a European psychologist was responding to an American right wing pundit crowing about how societies with the highest quality of life and general satisfaction are also among the countries with the highest suicide rate; again, particularly high among men. The response was that there seems to be some connection to the fact that, in a generally happy society, people who are depressed feel particularly miserable about not being part of all that joy. The distance between the average person living their lives and someone with mental illness may feel exaggerated in a country where the average person is more-than-typically happy.

In the US, mental “healthcare” is pretty much getting a drug prescription for anxiety, depression, or “tiredness” from your doctor. All of the available health insurance plans pay more for pills than for therapy; if they pay for therapy at all. For starters, there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals in the US. The reason is that insurance companies don’t cover that kind of “healthcare.” For example, in my home area, Goodhue County, Minnesota, there is one psychiatrist for every 15,000 residents. Since estimates of the country’s mental health assume about 7% of US citizens have suffered depression at some time and 3-4% suffer long term depression and another 18% suffer from some form of anxiety, that leaves a lot of people out in the cold; even if they were inclined to put themselves on a decades-long waiting list to see a mental health professional. So, the answer is “take a pill” and call me in a year or two if you aren’t feeling better about yourself; if you are still alive.”

Men and boys are in heavy denial, insisting that the problem with us isn't from the outside. Wrong. It's us and our cultural training. There is a video on YouTube from a trans-guy who commented on how he hadn't realized how inhumane male culture is until he became one. There wasn’t much information in his speech, but the comments were informative. There was a crowd of guys pretending “inhumane” means “inhuman” and lots of nitwits imagining that being a macho bully has a place in normal, rational society. My takeaway from the comments was that the people who comment on YouTube videos are not very insightful.  

40 years ago, a friend and I were swimming out to scuba dive on San Clemente reef on a stormy day with 8' waves and 2' visibility and he wondered what we'd be doing with our lives; since we'd clearly outlived our design parameters. His thought was that guys like us were evolved to die with an axe in our skulls or a sword in our guts at about 22. At that moment, we were both in our early 30’s. Since we’d failed in our evolutionary purpose, his question was “What the hell are we supposed to do with the 30-50 years evolution has unprepared us for?” Obviously suicide is the answer about 30,000 US men pick. It is pretty obvious that there is an oversupply of men on the planet and war just isn't doing the job it used to do with rectifying that imbalance. The overwhelming majority of terrrorists and suicide bombers are men and they are just following nature’s coding to try to take themselves out of the gene pool.

Society provides plenty of cues, too. There wouldn't be OSHA labor laws if those rules were only intended to protect men from work injury and death. The whole concept began when women ended up in factories during WWII. As part of researching noise-induced hearing damage for material in one of my Acoustics classes, I found more information about how quickly work noise rule enforcement vanished once women were back out of the munitions factories. The whining from companies about OSHA's rarely-enforced or obeyed hearing protection rules is pretty hilarious when you learn that those guidelines came from 1944 and they are so obsolete (useless when it comes to protecting your hearing for a lifetime) that the rest of the industrialized world (outside of China) has a whole different set of standards and objectives. Again, if the point is in protecting men, it’s pointless to worry about it.

Likewise, a big reason men die from prostate cancer is men don't see doctors nearly as often as women. When we do we just want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I know I do. Many men (and women ) live those lives of "quiet desperation" and just want to get it over with as soon as possible.

As for men and mental health, forget about it. This country decided long ago that the wealth of a few is far more important than the health and quality of life of the many. It's one of the many awful things we adopted from the UK. I don't see that ever changing. It was something Alexis de Tocqueville commented on in "Democracy in America" in 1835. The rich will have all the healthcare they can choke down and everyone else will be victims of our "wealth extraction" healthcare practical joke. All of that adds up to the obvious fact that we don’t care about any of this, as a nation. The only time mental health gets into the national conversation is after some idiot has shot up a school, church, restaurant, or some other public place. Then, it's just to distract us from wondering why gun manufacturers are so well-insulated from product liability. And we are one really easily distracted public. The NRA and their gangster-owned politicians and pundits quickly go into a “don’t regulate guns, regulate crazy people” song-and-dance that is increasingly ineffective at distracting the majority of Americans. So far, it’s working well enough, though. It will always be true that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”

Who’s the Asshole?

The “No Assholes Rule” is a pretty good goal post for a sustainable organization or any sort. There are all kinds of ways to define assholes, but the problem is too often who is doing the defining. If, as is often the case, an asshole is a founding douchebag lucked into the right combination of people to run the business before he decided to wear the CEO hat, it will be tough to enforce (or create) anything resembling a structure that could support “no assholes.” In fact, I don’t see how it can possibly work.

I have, unfortunately, worked in the more typical American “trashcan full of assholes at the top” corporate structure far more often than anything resembling the ideal. A motto I’ve observed to be true is “two things float: cream and shit.” In the sewage pool that is most American corporations, cream is by far not the lightest material in the mix. I’d go so far as to say if you try to keep cream in that stew of garbage it will disolve into the rest of the digested material before if ever has a chance to get to the top of the pool. In fact, real cream seems to be pretty good at avoiding those containers altogether.

The basic terms of the No Assholes Rule is “don’t work with (or associate with) assholes.” A good business rule is “never do business with anyone you don’t like,” which would have saved a whole lot of people from losing their jobs, fortunes, and businesses doing business with Donal Trump. In fact, if you haven’t figured that out by your second or third job, you’re probably an asshole.

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

Is There Only One Reason the NFL Is Losing Fans?

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Useless Answers

My sister sent me a Facebook post with this video and a question, “This is very interesting, Would like to have feed back from you. I hope that we can agree to disagree on this subject. I would just like to know your beliefs. Calm cool and collected conversation.”

My first response was pretty poor, “Poorly explained options, DNA did not 'happen by accident,' it happened after billions of years of failed and partial failure natural selection experiments. So, this protagonist has a well-scripted set of misleading questions and jumps unprepared people with his propaganda routine. No surprise that their answers get him the answer he expects and most likely edited to refine. A more detailed explanation of Dawkins' position is found in The God Delusion, but this video isn't about obtaining rational opposition it's just an effort to demonstrate a cheesy debate tactic. It would be interested to see the entire input to this video, because it's obvious the editing was intended to direct the conversation in a very limited way.

“Since the whole God argument is so childish, most atheists don't put enough thought into religions' propositions to be good anti-superstition debaters. Logically, that would be wasted time. Dawkins has done so because the Big Three religions have become 'death cults' bent on destroying life on this planet to create a test for their various Armageddon stories. It's an admirable goal, but hyper-unpleasant because you have to listen to so much silliness. The whole 'something from nothing' argument is not satisfied simply by shamans' inventing a god and placing him/her/it in charge of creating something. That's just human arrogance to imagine that we can go "poof" and invent the answer to a scientific question with 1500 year old sheepherders' tales.

“We're currently involved in a pretty scary natural selection experiment, as a species. Just in the last 25 years, 75% of flying insects have vanished from the planet. That will have all sorts of effects on every species up the food chain, including humans. It's pretty obvious from the fossil record and even human records that lots of natural selection experiments have failed or been modified. That DNA is either lost or combined with surviving lifeforms. Did the gods screw up with those animals? If they can screw up something as simple as a butterfly, how did they manage to create an infinite universe?

“If humans are going to survive, we're going to have grow past superstition. If we don't, we certainly don't deserve any claim for love for our children and their children. Being the cause of the 6th Extinction in the name of religion is nothing to brag about.”

The question and the smarmy “interviews” stuck with me throughout the day. Mostly, I worked my ass off all day and a long history of going through these questions slowly came back to me. Thirty years ago, a philosophy instructor loaned me a book, Abusing Science, The Case Against Creationism, by Philip Kitcher (a UofM professor) that attempted to answer all of the questions posed in this video. It’s a terrific book and, oddly, still in print. The problem with asking about evolution and DNA, the origin of the universe, and the building blocks of life from a religious perspective is that the questioner already believes he has the answer, “God works in mysterious ways. We can’t know the mind of the maker. And so on.” The answers from a scientific perspective are all hyper complicated, requiring an education in astrophysics, biology, genetics, geology, and other disciplines. Abusing Science goes to those places and experts and obtains those answers, but most of us (probably all of us) are already involved in complicated and specialized lives and we’d have to spend a few days preparing an answer to these poorly framed and leading questions. Dawkins has presented several of these rebuttals, in case someone actually cares enough to hear them. Here is one, for example:


In 1957, my mother died of hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). In 1957, medicine had no answer, no solutions, no options for someone even suffering from stage one hepatocellular carcinoma. Religion still offered the brilliant and perfectly useless, “God works in mysterious ways. We can’t know the mind of the maker. And so on.” Today, "people with early-stage liver cancers who have a liver transplant, the 5-year survival rate is in the range of 60% to 70%.” Religion is still stuck with “God works in mysterious ways. We can’t know the mind of the maker. And so on.” If religion was a valid area of thought, it would have evolved something useful, like medicine has done, by now. In fact, since Christianity has been around for about 1500 years and has accomplished exactly nothing of use to any human, other than becoming a highly refined money-making scheme for churches, televangelists, and assorted con men, generating wars and warriors for practically any political excuse, and a huge variety of inequalities and injustices.
That’s where religion draws its strength, though. Uneducated people who desperately hope for a magic solution to the problems of existence, survival, power and money are not attracted to the complexity of the real world. “God works in mysterious ways,” is a good answer for them because real answers require a serious effort to comprehend. People, as a species, are fairly lazy. Easy, useless answers are more acceptable to most people than reality.

A friend tried to justify some part of that position by saying, “That ecological disaster you referred to was caused by science.” No, it wasn’t. If we were a scientific species or even marginally led by scientific leaders, we’d have dramatically dropped the world’s population 50 years ago and the cliff we’re heading toward would be far more manageable. Religion and its bizarre interpretations of sheepherders’ gibberish squalls like a stuck pig when any attempt to slow down the world’s population gets any traction. Religion is the core to practically unsolvable problem in the world and will continue to be until something either ends humanity or superstition. I’d bet on superstition outlasting our species. It is core to our flaws. As Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Hoping for the end of life because some halfwit convinced you that you'll be in paradise after life is the ultimate absurd atrocity.

Always Visitors, Rarely Visited

When my wife and I were young, we lived in a variety of hell-holes from Dallas and Hereford, Texas to mid-sized and small towns in Nebraska. When none of our family or friends visited us in those places, it was no surprise. We didn’t want to be there, so why should anyone else want to visit? However, when we moved to Omaha in the early 1980’s that should have changed. But it didn’t.

Omaha had more recreational resources than any of the places we’d lived previously and dramatically more than where our friends and family lived. Still, we did the visiting and no one came to visit us . . . ever. We moved to southern California and had three visitors in ten years. Part of the SoCal problem was that our $1600/month apartment was tiny and we had no room for anyone other than us. We moved to Colorado and my brother visited a few times and our daughter, once, but we were pretty much left on our own there, too. As always, we travelled to visit my family. Next, we moved to Minnesota which is a world more interesting than Kansas, Missouri, or Texas, but we’ve pretty much been left alone here, too. Even our daughter’s family, who live less than 10 miles from us, rarely make the trip to our place. Instead, as always, if we want to see the kids and grandkids we travel to see them. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it means my wife and I are hermits. Maybe not by intention, but certainly by lifestyle.

When my parents were alive, we'd make the miserable pilgrimage to western Kansas, often fighting out way through blizzards during the holidays. After we'd been "home" for an hour or two, my parents would settle back into their normal life, as if the effort we'd made to visit were inconsequential and expected. After a few years of that, my wife decided to quit travelling to Kansas. I should have wised up sooner, but I didn't. I guess I wanted my kids to know where I'd come from and had wild hopes that my parents would want to get to know my children. We were always from different planets and that was never going to be likely, though. We're not much for visiting these days. Travel, yes, but travelling to see family or friends, not so much. And, as always, no one travels to see us. Even as old fucks, we're expected to go to them, whoever "they" are.

So, in the fall of 2014 Robbye and I are moving to Red Wing, Minnesota, where we know no one and would be starting life over at 66 and 64. It could be intimidating, but it is only a little because we’re not giving up much. We’ll be leaving the city, but that’s no real sacrifice. I’ve had all of the urban noise and traffic I need for a lifetime. We’ll be moving about 40 miles further away from the kids, but since we see them once or twice a month that’s no big obstacle. Their visits to us are so infrequent that we won’t notice any change in that area. The grandkids won’t be staying overnight or on weekends during school months, but they don’t do that much now, anyway. Most of the good friends we once had in the Cities have left or drifted away. It's not unusual for us to go for a month without seeing anyone but strangers in stores. With that in mind, we might as well be where the cost of living is lower, somewhere quiet, less pointlessly busy.

I am curious as to why we’ve always been visitors and rarely visited. Maybe we’re not good hosts? Maybe our home is not comfortable. When I worked at the school, we had a fair number of parties during the summer and, sometimes, people came. Often, they did not. More often than not, I’d have enough food prepared for the party that we’d be eating on the leftovers for a week afterwards. I never thought much about it at the time, but in retrospect it seems to be part of the story of our lives.
I’m writing all of this, of course, in the fall of 2014 and I expect to be long dead when Google “publishes” this addition to my blog. Of course, I might live longer than two more years but it seems unlikely at this moment. Google might not be messing with Blogger in 2016, so maybe no one will ever read it. Maybe people will be so involved in basic survival in 2016 due to climate change, revolution, or societal collapse that even if Google still pukes out scheduled blog entries it will be unnoticed. No problem there. I’m used to it by now.

What’s Inside the Sausage?

For some perverted reason, I decided to put myself on the ballot for one of Red Wing, Minnesota’s city council seats this fall. Part of that citizen-penance has been to attend city council meetings, especially this fall’s budget planning sessions. There I was reminded, again, that humans are incapable of learning from past experience. If you have ever been part of a corporate budget planning session, especially for a manufacturing company, you wouldn’t be able to recognize the civil service version. Instead of presenting a best-case/normal-case/worst-case revenue budget figure, so the city’s representatives can decide what gets done and what doesn’t, the city’s “finance officer” presents the happiest scenerio possible without any presented data to support his optimism. As usual, the more I learn about how my municipal sausage has been made, the less likely I am to want to eat sausage.

A new-to-me  term titled “tax capacity” was introduced along with a really depressing chart that described how city property taxes could be increased over the next decade. “Tax capacity” is the city finance officer’s best guess as to how much the city can raise tax rates before “something bad” happens. That undefined bad thing would be when the city raises taxes and the cost of services so high that even the current retirement community in the city and the small-to-large businesses are motivated to leave.

The problem with optimistic budget plans is that optimism is not often justified. In the case of Red Wing there are many looming financial difficulties and, by leaving them completely undefined and unanticipated, the city is setting itself up for failure. Here are just a few of the likely bumps in the road in Red Wing’s future:

• The country elects another borrow-and-spend Republican President and, this time, the House and Senate are also Republican. After a brief bubble in a variety of recently “unregulated” sectors, the economy crashes into a real depression when all of those previously-regulated gangsters and con men crash the house. Housing values fall, businesses fail, tourism vanishes, people move away looking for the few jobs that exist in the rest of the country, and the tax base collapses for loss of population and local income.
• The Prarie Island Nuclear Power Plant is either decommissioned (as planned) and 6-10% of the city’s revenue vanishes overnight. The city is not only left with a huge hole in the budget, but clean-up costs at the nuclear power plant fall on the city and county as Xcel “bankrupts” out on the obligation, as they have repreated across the country. Thanks to the revenue from this facility, Red Wing has over-built its school system, police and fire departments, city management, and services. The cost of maintaining these facilities and personnel without Xcel’s tax revenue could push local taxes high enough to cause rapid population loss.
• Prarie Island has a Three Mile Island-level event, which not only forces the plant closed “unexpectedly,” but causes the city, county, and state to spend massive amounts of borrowed money to hang on to something resembling a community. Since there has been no planning for this event, the city moves quickly from prosperous to bankrupt when the bonds/debt comes due.
• The obviously aging Red Wing demographic takes a jump in years and tax revenues fall when one or two major manufacturers decides to leave the area. What little attraction there was to the city for young families vanishes and they evacuate Red Wing for the Cities.
• The same “aging Red Wing demographic ” continues to increase in years, allowing more Minnesota residents to take advantage of property tax allowances and the aging Minnesota demographic votes itself a better deal on property taxation in general. That shifts the municipal tax burden to younger families and to a lesser extent on local business. Of course, that provides incentive for the younger citizens to leave the area.

These are just the top of my list. I could add at least three or four more bad news scenarios and I’m sure you can think of a couple I would miss. Even without a significant catestrophic event it is likely that the overall US economy will continue the generally downward path it has been on since the late-60’s and all those bills we put off for a more prosperous future generation will come due on our children and their children. The time to solve those problems is now, while there is still some money available to work with.

When a competent business (a rare organization today) makes an annual budget, one part of the planning is examining all of the good and bad things that could effect that plan. During the Red Wing budget process I heard far too much about how much additional tax capacity the city would absolutely have for the future. I’m not picking on Red Wing here, either. I suspect that my little town is no different than 99.999…% of the country, including counties, states, and the feds. Civil servants are not the right people to be in charge of the budget process. Either citizens, both elected and not, tell their government how to manage the community or the process is out of control. As I’ve said at least a couple hundred times this summer, there is no such thing as a successful non-participatory democracy. The only way to actually find a fix for the looming problems of Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, and the United States is for citizens to be actually involved instead of pretending to be patriots on-line and in preaching-to-the-choir bar conversations with like minded friends. It’s dirty work and no one wants to do it, but you always get exactly the government you deserve.

Red Wing and Goodhue County’s golden goose, the nuclear power plant, Prarie Island’s operating license expires in 2033-2034 and Xcel Energy has and will continue to explore shutting the plant down early. Fusion nuclear plants are expensive to maintain and alternative energy is becoming cheaper, more reliable, We are likely near the tipping point for a variety of technologies that will make nuclear even more unprofitable and undesireable. In not more than a dozen years, Red Wing and Goodhue County will lose a huge source of municipal income. There appears to be no local concern or plan to address that drastic change.

The questions that should be asked today, while there is some time left to work toward solutions are: How much of the city’s future debt is covered with savings? Is the city pension fund (or funds) fully covered? Does any new city hire automatically trigger increased savings in the pension funds? Are new hires and capital expenditures justified with the anticipated future population and demographics?

For example, in 1995 the city built a new high school complex that includes “a full size greenhouse and one of its kind Minnesota Department of Natural Resources-licensed Aquaculture Facility play host to plant science and agricultural courses. The Hovda Auditorium seats 732 people and supports concerts and community events. The Black Box Theatre allows seating for 250 and hosts smaller productions. . . The sports complex includes a football stadium, eight tennis courts, three baseball fields, four softball fields, soccer fields, a nine-lane all-weather running track and field event areas. The district also owns both of the city's indoor ice arenas: Prairie Island Arena and Bergwall Arena.” This is a facility that educates about 1200 students. As you can see by the age demographics chart at left, Red Wing’s population is pretty much the same as the rest of Minnesota. However, if you compare that to Minneapolis’ demographics the picture is more than a little scary. Red Wing’s population “hump” is solidly in the 25-64 territory with an obvious hole in the 18-24 age group. Adults in the 18-44 age groups are highly mobile and will evacuate quickly, especially if they are skilled, if the local economy tanks, if local taxes makes the city unlivable, or if the quality of life declines. An empire as substantial as the Red Wing High School could quickly become a major economic drag on the city with even a 10% drop in high school age students. With current trends, it’s not hard to image a much small school age population in the next decade. Those 1990’s high expectations for Red Wing’s growth were likely driven by delusions of grandeur that have not been realized by the city.

At the budget meeting I heard several recommendations from city bureaucrats that the council approve hiring consultants to do work I would have expected the city employees to be doing. That reminded me of some of my consulting jobs where management wanted close evaluation of low paid employee activity when that same examination of management and executive effectiveness would have produced far greater returns. So, with that in mind I’d like to know who evaluates the effectiveness of city employees? With all of that consultant money being spent on things that should be at least partially researched and evaluated by the existing city employment, why not hire a management consultant every few years to evaluate the efficiency of the city’s employees including all levels of city management? In fact, that should be in the city’s charter that such an evaluation is the first thing an incoming City Council undertakes.

Instead of allowing city employes to speculate on corrosive and unproductive concepts like “tax capacity,” I’d like to see city employees refocused on business concepts like “value added” service to the community, customer service, and data-driven customer satisfaction. Obvious and tested business concepts like “return on investment” with the return being value provided to the taxpayers would be core to a well run city. I have no idea how to get this conversation started and history, unfortunately, shows that Americans want entitlements, wasteful spending, and incompetence reduced; just not the entitlements, wasteful spending, and incompetence that benefits them. Personally, I think catestrophe is the only thing that successfully motivates human beings. We are, by nature, stodgy conservatives afraid of change in any form and Americans are more conservative than most 1st world nations.

#137 Fixing the Future (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

My big bitch about modern politicians is with their total lack of vision and leadership abilities.  In the last forty years we've either had cowards and crooks like the Bush clan and Nixon, fools such as Reagan and Ford, the distracted and egocentric underachieving Johnson and Clinton, or Carter's well-intentioned, but incapable micro-management.  The country and the world need and deserve more. 
Take Bush's current fake emergency, Social Security.  An obvious way to fix the possible disaster that could land on our children's shoulders would be for the about-to-retire generation, the Baby Boomers, to . . . not retire.  We could ask, or force, our government to be responsible with the money we turn over to them and we could build an idyllic future for our children.  We could behave responsibly and make sacrifices so that our children could have a better, more secure future. 

"Sacrifice."  What a nasty word.  However, the only way this world is going to resemble the science fiction future we'd hoped for in the 1950's is if we rearrange the world's priorities; especially the United States' priorities.  We need to take charge of our government, make plans for the future, and build a world that resembles something we'd want to hand over to the next generation. 

In the 1960s, the ruling class created the Vietnam "crisis," the 20-year recession, and manhandled the working classes to create a "growth economy" that only provided economic benefits for the leisure class.  Because it looked like working class kids with good educations might be a lot harder to manipulate, they smashed our economy, disassembled the public education system, and promoted the fantasy that "growth is good and necessary" when all evidence points to the contrary.  Population boomed, middle and working class income shrank, working class quality of life shriveled to a miserable bare existence, and science and technology have barely provided a single useful cultural improvement in 40 years.

Yeah, computers are smaller and cheaper.  That hasn't proved to be a terrific social improvement for anyone but the richest and most educated in society.  Cars are practically the same boring, noisy, polluting, and consumptive vehicle they were 50 years ago.  Planes are barely faster, a little noisier, and barely more efficient than they were in the 1960s.  Trains and public transportation are virtually identical to their 1950s versions.  In the modern world self-proclaimed "leading economy," 2005 looks a hell of a lot like 1960. 

All of this happened, or didn't happen, because society and, especially, our government decided on quantity over quality.  It's time to try a different tact. 

Republican "leaders" are advocating opening the boarders for "skilled labor."  Bush claims that there are lots of "jobs that Americans won't do" out there and that we need to import millions of laborers from the third world to fill those positions.  Welders, roofers, computer programmers, and call center operators are among the "jobs that Americans won't do."  We won't do those jobs for minimum wage, especially a minimum wage that isn't even close to a living wage.  That isn't the same as not being willing to work.  Every necessary job in this country could be filled with a current resident if we made the sacrifice to rebuild education, limit immigration, and forced our ruling class to live by the same rules they apply to the majority. 

All things begin at the top.  Morality is a top-down leadership-drive cultural quality.  So is education, motivation, honor, justice, and every other trait that United States' citizens take pride in possessing.  It has been decades since the country has had moral leadership.  Maybe it's time to begin a new American Revolution and to take back the direction of the country before we hand off a worthless shell of a nation to our children.  We can begin that revolution by making sacrifices in our comfort for the good of our children and grandchildren. 

July 2005

#129 Imagine This (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

This strange . . .  parable(?) was sent to me several months ago by a Kansas family member.  I hung on to it for weeks, considering sending a "reply to all" as a correction to the many logical flaws in this irrational rant, but decided that the Rat is a better place to "publish" my response.  The "letter" is highlighted by lines beginning with ">" and my response is found in the bits without that weird punctuation.

• Imagine this happening to you...
• One Sunday morning during service, a 2,000 member congregation was
• surprised to see two men enter, both covered from head to toe in black
• and carrying submachine guns.  One of the men proclaimed,
• "Anyone willing to take a bullet for Christ remain where you are."
• Immediately, the choir fled...
• the deacons fled...
• and most of the congregation fled....
• out of the 2,000 there only remained around 20.
• The man who had spoken took off his hood...
• He then looked at the preacher and said "Okay Pastor, I got rid of all
• the hypocrites... Now you may begin your service. Have a nice
• day!"
• And the two men turned and walked out.

This foolishness was described as heavy" by the sender.  Heavy was once a hip term that described an idea requiring considerable contemplation for understanding.  This message is considerably below the hip standard.  Usually, my email filters catch this crap and auto-deletes it.  When that fails, I figure it out pretty quickly and delete it, manually.  That day, it just tripped a trigger and I couldn't let it pass without comment.  This whacked-out author asks us to believe in the judgment of the 20 dimwitted, terrified, or petrified folks who were convinced that two jerks with machine guns would represent God.  Why would anyone expect holy inspiration from any one who OWNS an automatic weapon, let alone hauls one to church?  Is there something that conveys sanctity when gun-toting clowns add black masks to their costume?  If that's true, I wonder why we all aren't bowing and scraping when Islamic women parade by in their black tent suits?

• Funny how simple it is for people to trash God ...
• and then wonder why the world is in the condition it is today....

Funny how a powerful majority religion can be so paranoid about its status in a country that it clearly rules with fear and repression.  Even non-believers are afraid to express disagreement in the current climate.  Like Islamic fundamentalists in Iran or Saudi Arabia, neo-con Christians continue to push their agenda on everyone who thinks like or unlike them.  When anyone questions their ethics, honesty, fantasies, or superstitions, they cry "persecution!" and act like "freedom from religion" is the worst crime Jefferson perpetrated against humanity. 

Even worse than owning slaves. A psychologist might diagnose this as either paranoia or megalomania.  From my perspective, it seems more like the kind of insecurity that has driven religious despots since the beginning of human communities.  Vicious historic actions like witch hunts, the Inquisition, England's purge of all churches other than the Church of England (not long before the American Revolution attempted to separate politics from such oppression), and Hitler's purge of Jews and other non-white, non-Christian citizens in 1945 are examples of this insecurity in action. I'm unconvinced that a significant number of people in any culture "trash God."  However, it's obvious that all people do not believe in the same gods.  Or the same ideals from a shared God.  If that's trashing God, I guess my last paragraph explains this statement.  If the writer hopes to create a unified human mind, she's living a drug-addled superstitious fantasy.

• Funny how we believe what the newspapers say...but question what the Bible says...

Again, it's not like Christianity is a consistent source of information.  There are almost as many bibles as there are countries.  Counting the versions of the bibles from the variations of religions, there might be as many bibles as there are newspapers.  From about 800AD we've been blessed with the Wyclif Bible, Luther's German New Testament,  William Tyndale, Coverdale's, Matthew's, Taverner's, The Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, Douay-Rheims, King James, William Whiston's Primitive New Testament, John Wesley's New Testament, Griesbach's 2nd Greek New Testament, Griesbach's last Greek New Testament, the Apocryphal New Testament, Young's Literal Translation of the Bible, Tischendorf's 4th Greek New Testament, Tregelles' Greek New Testament, Alford's New Testament for English Readers, Rotherham's English translation of Tregelles' text, Eberhard Nestle's Greek New Testament, the American Standard Version, the First edition of Weymouth's New Testament, and the Twentieth Century New Testament which takes us to the beginning of the last century, when biblical editions really exploded.  From then on, a version of the Bible appeared practically every two years for the next 100 years.  This site lists 100+ versions of the Bible (http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Scriptures/), pick one that makes you happy. 

 The history of this often-edited book is anything but clear and unambiguous.  Which makes it easy to pick and choose what you want from the version that most suits the crime you want to commit.  Depending on the section and the edition it's not difficult to find arguments for "loving your neighbor" or "killing the heretics."  The argument you choose probably says more about you than it says about your faith.  Aside from Christianity, we have the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Torah, the sacred documents of 60-some Indian (not Native Americans, India Indians, you dolt) religions, the Buddhist Bible, and only the gods know how many other religious documents exist. 

There is no shortage of gods to celebrate and everyone seems to think the believers of other gods are heretics.  Personally, I don't have time to sort out who's right.  Living in the here and now is tough enough without inventing and justifying the "next life."  People of faith have used the Bible and other famous religious books to justify slavery, genocide, infanticide, homicide and assassinations, war, theft, greed, selfishness, and every other human fault.  How, exactly, do you know when a person is acting in good faith or in self-interest? 

 Obviously, Christians are not particularly good at making that determination, since they picked a marginally recovered drunk and drug addict who swindled his home city for his share of the $7.5 million dollar debt for a publicly financed baseball stadium.  Choosing a man who executed 250+ people, while claiming to be "pro-life" is equally inconsistent.  Bush's list of un-Christian acts would go on for pages and pages, but he's just one piece of evidence that life is, apparently, more complex than defining the hereafter.  As for the claim that "we believe what the newspapers say," most people rarely believe much that newspapers say.  The press has a credibility rating that is considerably beneath used car salespeople.  Maybe that's because so much of the press is dominated and owned by the same folks who want us all to bow to the same religion?  Rupert Murdoch and Sun Myung Moon own right wing newspapers that are regularly quoted as "unbiased Christian sources."  Right.  If the Klan is unbiased, so are those sources.

• Funny how everyone wants to go to heaven...
• provided they do not have to believe, think, say, or do anything the Bible says.

That word "everyone" is overused by almost everyone.  Some of us, hundreds of millions of Buddhists for example, would be satisfied with not having to return to life.  Believe it or not, everyone has a different concept of what heaven might be.  The male Islamic heaven, with its 27 virgin slaves, sounds hellish to many women, for example.  Everyone would not be interested in the heaven imagined by everyone else.  I, for example, would rather go almost anywhere than be where a chorus of shrieking Midwestern protestants are howling their out-of-key, rhythm-less "praise."  Heaven is not a universal concept and it's absolutely not a universal vision. 

 Having read a good bit of the Christian Bible, I think it's impossible to not "do anything the Bible says."  The Bible can give justification to just about any act, if you look for a specific justification.  Murder ("an eye for an eye"), genocide, incest, it's all there.  The Old Testament, in particular, is specially ruthless and wide open for interpretation.

• Funny how someone can say "I believe in God"...
• but still follow Satan (who, by the way, also "believes" in God).

Having watched the results of the last Presidential election, I am amazed at how true that is.  How Pro-Life Christians can vote for a man who executed more than 250 people and, by his own words, has a clear conscious, is amazing.  But not funny, it's scary.

• Funny how you can send a thousand 'jokes' through e-mail and they
• spread like wildfire... but when you start sending messages regarding
• the Lord, you think twice about sharing. 

Apparently not.  I have received no shortage of this kind of message.  To trap and dispose of internet preachers, cheap Viagra sources, and body organ enlargement systems, I have constructed a half-dozen email filters and, still, most of the junk slithers its way into my mailbox.  I only wish this last erroneous statement were true.  Jokes and porno are much easier to filter than superstitious claptrap.

• Funny how the lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene pass freely through
• cyberspace... but the public discussion of Jesus is suppressed in the
• school and work place.

If by "suppressed" the author means that fellow workers, especially management, are not allowed to forcibly harangue other employees about their "faith," I suppose this is true.  If she means that public schools, paid for by all of our taxes, are not allowed to promote a national religion? Again she's right.  But you're living in a fantasy world if you believe that "public discussion of Jesus" does not happen in schools or at work.  It's practically impossible to escape from cubicle evangelists pushing their special perversion of religion.  But, I guess, if they can't force it on us by power of law and gun, religion is being repressed.  So much for Christians being fed to the lions: Christians are the lions.

• Funny, isn't it? Funny how someone can be so fired up for Christ on
• Sunday... but be an invisible Christian the rest of the week.

Again, look to the White House for a wonderful example of Sunday Christians.  Drop bombs Monday thru Saturday, worship the Lord (and drop bombs) on Sunday.  Steal from the needy, the uneducated, the disabled, and the dying Monday thru Saturday,  and ask forgiveness on Sunday.  Why would ordinary citizens behave differently if the folks at the top get away with murder and still, apparently, float into Heaven?

• Are you laughing?
• Funny how when you go to forward this message...
• You will not send it to many on your address list because you're not
• sure what they believe...

Less funny, you who do send it on won't care what others believe.  They believe that their particular take on their specific offshoot of Catholicism should be universal and all other versions of "the truth" should be suppressed.  They don't worry about offending people with different views because they believe the law should pick our position and force it on us.  Possibly, like Rev. Jimmy Swaggert, they believe god is so dumb and unobservant that He wouldn't even notice their murdering another human, as long as he lied, convincingly, to Him.  With that kind of arrogance, no wonder shipping religious propaganda to everyone they know seems inconsequential.  They might even imagine that they are doing the rest of us a favor.  

• or what they will think of you for sending it to them. *Funny how I
• can be more worried about what other people think of me...... than what God thinks of me.

Strange use of repetitive periods, wonder if there is some underlying Satanic meaning to six periods separating a statement?  This six period thing occurred several times in this message.  Care to interpret? Inspirational messages are universal and they are always welcome.  Religious propaganda is less welcome, regardless of the source or the motivation.  Considering the feelings of friends and relatives is not immoral or heresy.  Forwarding a poorly written, irrationally considered, irritating cant that is as likely, or more likely, to offend as it is to inspire is not a religious act; it is a political act.  It used to be that religion, politics, and sex were off limits for general discussion in polite company.  America is not a polite society, maybe it never was, but we're so divided today that we may be on the verge of a second Civil War.  Like the first Civil War and the Revolutionary War, this will be parent against child, brother against brother, friend against friend, and it will be a waste of time and energy because nothing will change when it's done.

• Are you thinking?
• Will you share this with people you care about?
• Or not?

Normally, no.  I'd just let it go as another of the thousands of attempts to mind-control.  This election and the radical right wing that controlled it has ruined my civility.  The less quiet the radical right is about it's dream for a "New Christian America," a return to the theocracy we escape during the American Revolution, a government similar to that suffered in Iran, today, the less inclined I am to quietly suffer the disrespect intended in this kind of message. 

 January 2005

#88 Making a Case for Intolerance

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

U.S. citizens are probably the most persecuted group of humans in the history of the world.  Every once of us is a member of some kind of minority.  If we're not, we pick a hobby that makes us a minority.  If we're the ruling majority, we make a law that classifies us as a minority and we run with it.  Whatever group we belong to, no matter how small or weird, we expect that group to be honored as a minority and to be respected as if we are making a valuable contribution to the culture.

One of my hobbies is motorcycling.  Less than 0.5% of U.S. citizens own motorcycles.  Probably half of that group owns a Harley that is mostly unridden, either because it's broken or because its owner is investing a small fortune in customizing the bike and it hasn't been completely assembled since the early years of the Vietnam War.  So, an optimistic estimate of motorcyclists on the road, paying license taxes, contributing to air and noise pollution, amount to a measly one in four hundred citizens.  That's a serious minority.

I live a few hundred feet from a freeway.  I know that's not smart, but it's something I've mostly come to terms with.  I can safely say that a disproportionate contribution to my neighborhood's noise pollution comes from motorcycles.  The blast of motorcycle exhaust noise often overwhelms the blat of semis, the boom of rolling ghetto blaster pickups, and the other 399 of 400 vehicles on the road.

You'd think that noise pollution, alone, would make motorcyclists a bit apprehensive about their status in the vehicle culture.  Because of our minority status, we seem to be more arrogant about our social standing, if anything.  We have successfully overturned noise pollution requirements, helmet laws, emission standards, and common sense through political action and a lot of whining. 

That appears to the standard practice for all sorts of minorities.

Christians represent 5% of the religious world, but that doesn't keep one sect of Christians from acting like the Pope is the true ruler of the universe or another sect from believing that their favorite wild-eyed evangelist is God's only direct spokesman.  Christianity isn't alone in this sort of "my universe, love it or leave it" fantasy.  In fact, it's hard to find a dominant religion on this planet that isn't similarly deluded.  Taken individually, every one of these religions and sects of religions are a minority but they have taken their minority status and turned it into a political advantage, in their own minds.  Combining martyrdom, fanaticism, terrorism, and secular nationalism into a frenzy of self-delusion, the world's minorities create pockets of majority status for themselves. 

Like US motorcyclists, this sort of deluded outlook often gets run off of the road by reality.  Combining nationalism with religious minority paranoia is scary stuff, though.  That throws what Mr. Bush calls "weaponsh of mash disrushon" and a higher power's justification to use those weapons into the mix.  We're now operating at the intellectual level of "my god is tougher than your god." 

Another country operated on this level of paranoia in 1936 and their national delusion became a reality a few years later when all of the folks they imagined hating them really did hate them.  Germany followed a nutball, paranoid, I'm-doing-God's-will wacko all the way into World War II, under the justification that they were a picked-on VIP minority.  Crazy people are specially noxious when they collect in large groups and begin sharing their fantasies.  Sane people tend to want to put walls around them, isolate them, and remove their access to weapons and pointy objects.  Or blow them up.  If we don't find a way to police our crazy people, the rest of the world is going to start wondering if they need to do it for us.

August 2004