Because Jesus?

A neighbor, a reasonably well-educated (even if it didn’t take) federal-government-employed (VA Department) woman, recently explained her Trump vote by telling me, “I believe in Jesus.” The sad fact is that I haven’t given “Christians” much credibility since I was nine or ten because they seem to suffer the delusion that they can do any damn thing they want and still slither into the Big Rock Candy Mountain by claiming “I believe in Jesus.”

While I don’t believe in Jesus or any other supernatural being, I’ve read a fair bit of the Bible. That means I’ve been astonished and irritated by the Old Testament’s endorsement violence, corruption, sexism, racism, and general insanity and confused by the wildly conflicting messages of the New Testament and the mythical Jesus character. You can definitely justify Donald John Trump with both books, but it’s harder to stand behind both Trump and Jesus.

Trump’s arrogance and self-promotion and selfishness are a tough sell if Christianity is your stand. ". . . whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Trump, on the other hand, believes that we’re all here to serve his whims. As Donald said, "I've regretted not serving in many ways. So many of the greatest people I know have served." Mostly, I suspect he things “greatness” comes from serving Donald Trump. Even when Don’s rich friends need a little assistance, it’s beyond his capacity.

This isn’t a new position for Donald, it is his lifestyle.

The mythical Jesus said, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." Donald squeals like a stuck pig when someone does to him as he does to others, but he has no problem sticking it to everyone from his business associates to his family and “friends.”

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted." You’d have to be Billy Graham-level delusional not to recognize the fact that Trump’s only form of communication is exalting himself. That is the core characteristic of a narcissist; Donald’s primary personality trait.

"If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." I don’t really need to explain this to you, do I? If you are one of the millions of evangelicals who hope that wishing, hoping, praying, and braying will make them rich, I suppose this whole concept just flew over your head. Jesus supposedly tried to make it even more clear when he said, "And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Evangelicals stretch credulity all the way to “you really don’t believe any of this shit, do you?” when they argue that the eye of a needle is the mythical entrance into the city of Jerusalem. But like Trump, religion is all about money for them.

As for Trump’s historic bullying and name-calling, Jesus had something to say about that, “You have heard that it was said to an older generation, ‘Do not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders will be subjected to judgment.’ But I say to you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subjected to judgment. And whoever insults a brother will be brought before the council, and whoever says ‘Fool’ will be sent to fiery hell” Of course, Christians have been insulting their neighbors for centuries, so this bit of advice is clearly not important. Even though Jesus said it?

All those photo-ops Trump takes with evangelicals pushes Jesus’ advice a ways, too. “Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray while standing in synagogues and on street corners so that people can see them. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you” The pre-Republican Trump once told Howard Stern, “I’m a smart guy. I’m an atheist,” but now, Donny is all about getting the blessing of the temple’s money collectors. I think we have found a perfect definition of “hypocrites.”

It seems to me that hiding behind Jesus isn’t much of a defense for voting for Trump. The only honest answer is just to admit you are a racist, regressive, entitled white person who hopes that Trump can stop time. It won’t work, but at least you’d be honest . . . for a change.

Measuring Progress

These sad and sorry days, it’s hard to remember how far some areas of civilization have come. It’s also easy to see how far we have to go, of course.

At the recommendation of a very smart and well-travelled man, I recently read Roads to Ruin: the Shocking History of Social Reform a 1966 book by E.S. Turner about the long, slow path to correcting some incredibly obvious abuses and vicious behavior; mostly be the British 1%’ers of their time. Of course, American history is well-decorated with similar atrocities, but . . . damn! the Brits were oblivious to some incredibly awful behavior. Some of the more shocking chapter titles (and subjects) are “Spring Guns Set Here,” “Little Boys for Small Flues,” “A Treatment for Treason,” “Plimsol Rules the Waves,” and “A Flourish of Strumpets.” The associated subjects were:

• “Spring Guns” are traps set by the elite landowners to kill or maim anyone who might wander onto their property. Everything from trip-wired guns to pits lined with sharp stakes which often as not “caught” employees, neighboring farmers and their pets, and people out enjoying a breath of fresh air.
• Those “Little Boys” were as young as 4 to 6 and they were used as chimney sweeps and their short miserable lives were some of the worst examples of human slavery in our miserable history. Often by 10, they were used up and discarded with less thought than a farmer might get rid of an injured plow horse.
• The “treatment for treason” was pretty much the process William Wallace enjoyed in Braveheart: “. . . that the offender be dragged to the gallows; that he be hanged by the neck and then cut down alive; that his entrails be taken out and burned while he is yet alive; that his head be cut off; that his body be divided into four parts and that his head and quarters be at the King’s disposal.” I imagine Trump would be drooling at the opportunity to swap this punishment for “lock her up.”
• Plimsol was a British legislator who thought that sailors and officers deserved some assurance that the assholes who owned the ships they sailed cared, at least a little, if those ships were sea-worthy and likely to arrive at their destinations. A side issue in this chapter was about the fact that British sailors were more slaves than employees. They could be jailed for refusing to sail on a decrepit, unsafe ship. Worse, they could be marhed on to that ship and forced to sea where there almost always drowned.
• Obviously, “Strumpets” were hookers of the day; from call girls to street walkers.

One of the many interesting insights Roads to Ruin provides is that the way to the public’s heart is not through logical, ethical discussion, but through some sort of bullshit and insignificant (in context to the injustices) “morals” approach. In the Preface, Turner writes, “Notoriously, in the Victorian Age, a reformer stood a better chance of success if he could present his reform in such a way as to show that the victims of injustice were in moral danger: and even today this is by no means the weakest card to play. What shocked the middle classes who read the reports on conditions in the mines, a little more than a century ago, was not so much the system under which children crawled on all fours dragging sleds behind them, or in which me ruptured themselves lifting loads on to their daughters’ backs; it was the revelation that lightly clad young women working in proximity to naked men at the coalface made no strenuous efforts to save their honour when molested, which was fairly often.”

Something to keep in mind. Injustice is inconsequential compared to unmarried sex in a coal mine. I try, but humans are such disgustingly vicious animals, it’s hard to me to not hope that planet-killing asterioid gets here pretty damn soon.

What I Don’t Get

A friend has repeatedly told me I need to “blacken up,” since my appreciation for Black Panther is, apparently, insufficient. Of course, he would also say my appreciation for lots of things is equally insufficient; religion, for example. In particularly, the relief or comfort religion provides to this country’s abused and neglected black population. I might imagine that I have plenty of sympathy and solidarity with my black, Hispanic, and other minority friends, but I’d probably be wrong. I’m white, educated, middle class, and live in Middle America where all of my privilege and entitlements are entrenched.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t always been those things. When I escaped my parents’ fundamentalist home, I went from middle class to desperately poor. Poor enough that I lived for part of a summer on the Arkansas River a few miles west of Dodge City in a log lean-to I’d built with my own hands, an axe, and a log saw I “borrowed” from a friend’s father. At the time, I wasn’t broke but I might as well been. My father was the primary owner of my “college savings” and he refused to let me spend it on anything else. To the point that the only way I could do anything with that money was to sign up for what turned out to be just another Texas for-profit “education’ scam. He promptly wrote a check with my money for 3,000 1967 dollars ($22,263.50 in 2018 money) to a “school” that was practically Trumpian it was so bogus. Another $500 of my money ($3,710.58 today) went to a flophouse the school called its “dormitory” and I was on my way from my river hideout to Dallas, Texas and real poverty. In no time, the school collapsed under its own incompetence and most of my school mates joined a class-action lawsuit they eventually won, which resulted in the school going bankrupt and evading responsibility for all but a small percentage of the money it had stolen from its victims. My father, on the other hand, sent the school the last of my savings when they asked for full payment for my “education,” another $4,000 ($29,684.67 in 2018 money). The end result was that I ended up moving to a one-room converted 1900’s garage in a scummy part of Old East Dallas. The place cost me $40/month (about $300 today), which was exactly 1/3 of my monthly income, 1/4 of my gross went to state and federal taxes, the rest went for food and transportation. I ate a lot of chicken, fatty pork, and peanut butter. My wife, Robbye, moved in with me a few months later. From there, I moved from one lousy apartment to another lousier house to more apartments until I saved enough money to get the hell out of Dallas. While we lived in Dallas, I was part of the anti-Vietnam War movement, identified as a “hippy” in a state that truly hated hippies, and was so far into the alternative culture that the majority of my own generation in Dallas would have been happy to see me dead or in jail. The next generation occasionally took actual potshots at me and my friends at every opportunity.

For the next ten years, we lived from paycheck to paycheck while I went to school nights, took engineering correspondence courses, and began a family. I’ve been poor enough that I often took those jobs Bush and Trump say “Americans don’t want.” I didn’t want them, either, but I needed to feed my family and beggars can’t be choosers. I didn’t make it into the middle class until I was just short of 50. I didn’t have squat for retirement savings until a few years later. So, while I may look, today, like a poster boy for my so-called entitled generation, you have no idea who you are talking to if you believe that. To get to here from there, I have had to pretend to be someone I am not for the majority of my adult life.

Back to Black Panther.

What left me cold in the movie was the bowing and scraping over Wakanda’s royalty. The whole idea of a king leaves me cold. Yes, I have little-to-no respect for the UK, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, etc. At the head of each of those countries lies a waste of air. The ease at which Wakanda’s Princess Shuri mastered “science” was one more false premise in the usual nonsensical Marvel world. The “happy folk” littered around the edges of Wakanda’s capitol city tending goats, walking beside their animals, weaving baskets, and other examples of the usual giant economic inequality demonstrated in monarchies didn’t impress me, either. Sorry. Whatever excuse you have for some people wearing rags and going barefoot while the royalty wear super-armored and weaponized suits isn’t going to do much for me; other than piss me off.

I feel the same way about black promoters of religion. Christianity has done NOTHING for black Americans; except take their money in huge quantities. Supposedly, there is “comfort” provided by the promise of a Big Rock Candy Mountain afterlife, but we all know that is just a shell game designed to distract suckers from what’s happening right now. And there are even uglier aspects of black Christianity that don’t have to be faced while the sales pitch is in full demonstration: racism, homophobia, income inequality, and the rest of the crap religion is designed to distract us from addressing and fixing.

You know religion isn’t helping when writers argume it’s a good thing that “Black People Aren't Inherently More Homophobic Than Anyone Else.” I’d be impressed if all minorities bound together to oppose their common enemy, but I’d be a drunken fool to expect anything like that from the deeply flawed human animal.

My Black Panther movie was probably V for Ventetta. The identifying moment for me came with the impossible event that the British military decided not to slaughter the general population as thousands of unarmed and Guy Fawkes masked Londoners march on Parliament. Every bit as impossibly idealistic as anything in Black Panther, I know. So sue me.

Facebook Isn’t Democracy

Let’s face it, Facebook is one of the many fake news sources the Russians exploited to wreak the 2016 election. You have to be a special kind of sucker by now to imagine that Trump voters weren’t played on social media, through the right wing “press,” and among themselves. They were conned. I’ve always said one of the beauties of being a pseudo-conservative is “never having to say you are sorry,” or admit you were wrong, foolish, or corrupt. There is, literally, no risk in getting absolutely everything wrong, as long as you are coming from the right wing.

The last time I cancelled my Facebook account was in early 2012 when Eduardo Saverin, one of Facebook’s four founders, renounced his American citizenship to avoid taxes. (He claimed it was for other reasons, but he managed to save himself income taxes on at least $3.5B in 2012.)  I realized my use of Facebook was tying into the company’s privacy invasion policies and I was beginning to see way too many advertisments linked between my Google searches and Amazon purchases and Facebook. I cancelled my Facebook account and didn’t look back for about two years. There is no reason why I would ever want to help make someone like Saverin rich(er).

Three things happened that brought me back: 1) I retired and Facebook seemed like a good way to stay in touch with my MSCM students and work friends and 2) we moved to Red Wing and the chances that I’d be seeing many of those friends in person was slim-to-far-less-than-I-expected and 3) moving to Red Wing allowed me to sever my business with Comcast and the 1990’s quality service we recevied from that awful company, but my free websites died with that move. My only reason for rejoining Facebook was to promote my three blogs/websites: wirebenderaudio.blogspot.com/, theratseyeblog.blogspot.com/,  and geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/. I hadn’t intended to get tangled up in politics, hyping my home and musical woodworking projects, and reading everyone else’s stuff. But I did.

My routine began to be predictable: up in the morning, cobble some breakfast, read the on-line news, read the local paper, check my email, check Facebook, and, eventually, try to do some writing before Elvy got up and started her day. That isn’t the routine I want. I’m 70 and I don’t have many more years to do something productive with my time. My ideal routine would be: get up, fire up some coffee, take a shower, do a 30 minute yoga routine, eat breakfast while I look at the news, write for an hour or so, then do the low value stuff. That’s the routine I want and there isn’t anything about Facebook that adds value to my day.

I would absolutely like to stay in contact with all of the people I connected to on Facebook. I read my email at least twice in a normal day. Better yet, drop in and spend a day drinking my beer and whiskey. My FB policy was “never ‘friend’ anyone you don’t think of as a friend.” I’m leaving Facebook because I am disgusted at this company’s participation in the wreaking of our fragile and barely-breathing democracy. And because I’d rather live in the real world than the virtual one.

From the Mouths of the Next Generation

The survivors of the Parkland High School shooting are being threatened for their gun violence protests by the NRA’s supporters. That shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise. The NRA is a terrorist organization that supports fascist “militias,” has members of its board of directors who threaten to assassinate the President, and actively works to destabilize the country and our democracy. At the core, the NRA is just being consistent to its mission to sell guns to every nutcase who wants one. There is nothing about being an NRA member or a gun owner that indicates a citizen might be loyal to the country or the constitution or even a reasonably decent neighbor. The opposite mostly appears to be the case. The organization is primarily supported by massive “contributions” from gun nuts and their shills from the weapons industry.

The fact that the current drive to shut down the country’s murder industry has come from kids seems to be upsetting some people. They are surprised when teenagers have opinions and that those opinions are not being ignored by the public. There is a long history of young people, students opposing fascism and paying the ultimate price for that fight throughout human history. In the United States, four college students were shot down in cold blood by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970 at Kent State protesting the illegal and grossly immoral war in Vietnam. Sophie Scholl was one of several students, including her brother Hans, who were executed for protesting the Nazi war machine and atrocities. Of course, none of those sacrifices did much toward ending the wars they opposed. The Vietnam invasion went on for another three years after the Kent State students were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians were murdered for a “cause” Americans can still not define. Nazi Germany rampaged on with its vicious genocide and war against humanity until the Allies and Russia crushed that nation into submission. Small comfort to Scholl, but in 2003 a German magazine for women voted Scholl "the greatest woman of the twentieth century." If the NRA’s American Nazis act on their threats and kill some of the Florida high school student protestors, it will just be one more sacrifice of the young for the privledge of the old and evil.

The whole scene reminds me of a moment during one of the Faculty Meetings I suffered about a decade ago. The presenter, Stuart Anderson, was talking about “revealing revolutionary learning opportunities” in the classroom and described a scenario where “a young person creates a new form of music that revolutionizes where we go from here.” Immediately, one of the music department instructors raised his hand and said, “I’d be afraid of any new music that came from a young person” (or something close to that). Of course, all new music comes from young people. Often, really young people. I can’t remember any substantial pop culture invention that came from artists over 30. Not one. I do, however, remember lots of those inventions in my lifetime that terrified people over 30. Lucky for us, the future always belongs to the young and if they are committed, dedicated, and fearless maybe they will create a future that doesn’t include a bi-monthly school shooting.

Grandma Is An Idiot

Most of the Trump supporters and voters were old white people. More than  a few of them are totally dependent on federal support for their income. But they hate “government” because Fox News and Breitbart and a gaggle of hate radio dimbulbs have told them government is their problem. If only government would get out of the way, those multi-national corporations would be creating high paid jobs by the barrell-full. Right. The government is keeping Santa Claus from cramming the living room with presents every December, too.

I don’t think anyone has ever accused old white people of being any sort of brain trust, but these days their gullibility and incompetence is setting new standards in stupidity. The nitwit CNN interviewed in this program about Americans who worked for the Russian troll machine was pretty typical. The program was kind enough to call her and the other Russian surrogates “unwitting,” but that is a kind way to say “wittless.” (About 4 minutes into this video, you can listen to this idiot chitter like a poorly trained monkey.) The people at the Trump rallies were so over-the-top emotional that their already damaged brains were totally switched off. Since the 70’s, they’d been trained to automatically respond to Republican dog whistles and when Trump fired up an orchestra of whistlers they were sitting, begging, barking, rolling over, and lying down on command. When the Russian trolls discovered how easy it was to manipulate these dumbasses, they must have imagined themselves to be the rulers of the world.

The lesson younger people should be taking from the 2016 election is that you can’t listen to much of anything old people say. People get old, they get stupid, they become timid/conservative, and they fear change the most of all. The problem is, change is going to happen regardless of how afraid of it you may be. The more you resist it, the more unprepared you are going to be. But it’s still going to happen.

Why We’re Nervous

Someone recently posted a like to a Politico.com article about our Wisconsin neighbors across the river, “The Wall That Trump Actually Built.” What followed was a lot of the usual mindless right wing drivel about liberal snowflakes and “why can’t we all get along with our fascist neighbors” sort of silly shit. Apparently, the wingnuts are confused about why “liberals” (Rove-code for “smart people”) are nervous about what Trump and the Trumpanzees say about the state of our nation.

I get why they are confused. These are the same people who were pissed off that a black man, who they desperately wanted to pretend wasn’t even a US citizen, bailed out the nation from the likely economic implosion that their favorite collections of privileged white nitwits had created. Here’s what we’re concerned about, in case you redneck fruitcakes ever come to your senses:

White people in this country have a special history of violent, decadent, racist, greedy, and amoral behavior and you have elected a man who epitomizes all of those negative characteristics. Don’t believe that? Read a history book; start with The Making of Donald Trump. From the first moments European rejects showed up on the shores of the New World, their behavior has been consistently mean and vicious. Euro-Americans institutionalized slavery to the point of documenting it in the freakin’ constitution. Remember the 3/5ths of a human bullshit? Remember a war fought to protect the assholes who profited from the sale of human beings? Of course you don’t, you don’t read and get your delusional information from actual “fake news.”

Another piece of this puzzle is that we’re confused about how you’ve managed to convince youself that electing a Russian ogliarch is an act of patriotism. All the evidence is out there for you to see, but you’d have to pull your eyes away from Fox and Friends and Breitbart and the other wingnut media to learn what the rest of us have known about Trump and the scumbags he’s drug into the swamp he’s creating. You don’t care, now. You are all wrapped up in the delusion behind your MAGA/swastika hats and the wild hope that Trump can turn back the clock and restore American dominance and world power, high paid-low skill jobs that are lost forever, and that kind of “respect” white people used to command from their slaves, servants, and peons. You’re so caught up in the con artist’s promises of lost power and glory you can’t even talk yourselves into looking at Trump’s past history of failed enterprise, broken promises, and even the constant lies in the face of not only facts but recent recordings of his own statements. If you can fool yourselves that easily and completely, the rest of us are seriously doubting your sanity and we’ve never had much faith in your intelligence.

Finally, you appear to be willing to let this country not only degenerate into a third world dictatorship, but you’re willing to condemn our children to life on a dying planet and you’re even willing to risk their safety and economic future for a few years of pretending you and your shallow “values” matter. You wonder why we are putting distance between you and your ilk and our families. We don’t trust you not to take the first Gestapo job Trump offers. We wouldn’t be surprised if you are itching to fire up the gas chambers and build your own personal concentration camps. We’re backing off in case we need the time and space to protect ourselves and our families from your radical, deluded, fascist inclinations. And protect ourselves and our families we will.

Gun Fallacies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free At Last

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that awesome? Seriously.

I’m not kidding.

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

How is that not liberating?

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

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

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

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

Hobbies and Vocations

Possibly the title of this should be “Hobbies vs. Vocations,” but the point is some things qualify as pastime activities and some things are actual work with an intended function. Some things are necessary and some are not. Some pursuits are moderately intellectual, but if they didn’t exist, which they don’t in hard times, we’ll all get along just fine. Some jobs are just recreational and totally unnecessary, under all conditions. Some people do work so critical that if they stopped the rest of us would die in a few days, weeks, or months. The more entertainment-oriented we become, the less able we are, as a society, to tell the difference. In the US, approximately half of the population is “employed.” Considerably fewer than that are doing actual, useful work.

In a dysfunctional, disconnected-from-reality society full of luxuries and trivial pursuits, often only a few people are engaged in doing actual necessary work. For example, in the United States less than 2% of the population is engaged in agriculture, but 100% of us eat. In 2014, 0.3% of the US population was actively licensed physicians. [As an aside, you probably don’t know that 25% of US physicians are born outside of this country. If you live in a rural area, your dependence on foreign-born physicians rises to above 50%. Choke on that immigration data, farmboy. Literally, choke on it and see who comes to rescue you, if you are lucky enough to live near a physician.] In 2014, 0.76% of the US population was employed as nurses and non-physician qualified healthcare workers. 2.4% of Americans are teachers, from K-12 through higher education. Counting all engineering disciplines, from agricultural to nuclear to manufacturing engineering, 0.7% of us are engineers. 0.2% of the population are practicing electricians (and about 50% of them will be retiring in the next decade) and another 0.2% are plumbers, pipefitters, pipe layers, and steamfitters. All of these occupations, and a few more, are mission-critical to life in civilization.

On the other side of the usefulness ledger, in 2014, 3% of Americans were employed as some sort “financial advisor” or analyst or banking. 2% of us are employed in entertainment industries, from music to theater to gambling to providing specific services to those industries. 0.2% of the uselessly “employed” are “religious workers,” clergy, and other superstition promoters. The list of incredibly pointless activities is practically infinitely long. Worse, our tax system appears to be constantly undergoing modifications to encourage less and less useful output from the population. Likewise, the education system is packed with incredibly stupid hobby activities; some even degrade the whole academic process by awarding PhD's in truly ludicrous non-disciplines.

An acquaintance unintentionally inspired me to consider how much of academia is aimed at hobby activities when he asked, “You don’t think someone with a PhD in (sociocultural) anthropology, who lived with a primitive tribe of humans for a year, and who spent most of his life studying and thinking about that subject is important?” My immediate and considered answer would have to be, “No, I’d need more evidence than that.” Archaeology or biological anthropology, probably-to-yes, but socio-cultural, almost certainly no. In my experience, which is much greater than I’d like but not massive, I have yet to take a class from or talk to a cultural anthropologist who can listen to anyone long enough to learn something from them. They are almost universally talkers, not listeners. And when they talk, they talk until you go zombie. Likewise, another acquaintance with a PhD in Ministry was explaining how excited he was to be teaching a class in “Dream Work” at a local community college. My stomach turned at the thought of young people wasting their money and future on a class that barely qualifies as a novelty subject, even if there is a whole nutjob institution called the Institute for Dream Studies and a whole wacky world of chin-dribble pretending to be science or philosophy attached to that insanity.

It is certainly unsurprising that most humans would rather be doing fun, easy stuff than work. I’m totally onboard with that. However, when we lose track of what’s important and necessary and what isn’t, we’re solidly on the path to decadence. At least a decade ago, I heard a talk on one of the NPR early afternoon programs from a Stanford University engineering dean about his experience with academic politics. If I could remember who that was I could find the damn talk and link it to this essay, but I have failed, totally, in recovering that memory or any reference to its existence in the NPR library. However, the basic gist was that this academic manager came to the office with the deluded, but inspired goal of cross-breeding liberal arts into engineering and science disciplines. What he discovered, instead, was that most of the engineering and science professors were well-versed in the arts and often professional or near-professional performers or artists in their spare time. The reverse was completely untrue: the liberal arts instructors were practically stone-boilers, technically. Their grip on all aspects of science, mathematics, and technology was worse than the average high school graduate. So, he set out to change that and discovered that he had taken on an impossible task; politically and academically. Not only were the “humanities” academics uninterested in joining the 20th century, they were quick to unite in opposition to learning anything that might make them less irrelevant.

Whoever this dean was, it didn’t take him long to bail from the whole project and academic management in general. The odds were overwhelmingly against him. And they still are, “Some 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford’s main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities — but only 15 percent of the students.” What that means is that every committee, every budget meeting, every power struggle is overpopulated with humanities instructors who have nothing else to do but “contribute” their positions to management, who are also highly likely to be from the Liberal Arts academic community. What else do they have to do? It’s not like anyone is beating at their doors to fund their “research” or other half-baked opinion pieces. Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid isn’t even a little shy about the goal of the school, “We have 11 humanities departments that are quite extraordinary, and we want to provide for that faculty.” Screw providing value to students, the point is to keep the faculty housed and fed. It should be obvious that when an incredibly expensive and dubious proposition like humanities education becomes primarily an effort “to provide for that faculty” who desperately want to cling to their declining position in society, the education system has a busted spoke or ten.

Face it, if they weren’t cutting off chunks of money most likely intended for science and engineering projects, they’d all be working at Starbucks or McDonald's. Literally, that is a fact. For this kind of field, to stay moderately relevant academics have to “publish or perish” in the staid, barely-critical world of academic publications: mostly subsidized by academic institutions and their publication outlets. If it weren’t for the financial umbrella provided by academic institutions, the humanities folks would have to really learn how to write and compete in the overall non-fiction area that is largely populated by hobbyists who are successful professional writers. From the shelter of academia, these hobbyists can act superior and disdainful of professional writers who can actually sell books about the subjects the academics can only peddle with the carrot of a degree attached; even if that degree is economically pointless outside of being a door into academia. Garrison Keillor once ridiculed MFA degrees as being a study of “My Fabulous Adolescence.” I wouldn’t be particularly surprised or offended to hear most graduate humanities studies collected under that childhood-extension umbrella. The arts apply, too. After all, “if you can talk, you can sing” and “paying other people to get your kicks for you” is the sort of thing expected from decadent societies.

One hilarious aspect of the shrinking humanities is in their desperation to appear relevant the courses are becoming more comedic while they try to appeal to popular culture addicts and trivia. For example, “‘Teaching Classics in the Digital Age,’ [where] graduate students use Rap Genius, a popular website for annotating lyrics from rappers like Jay-Z and Eminem. . . " One of the most repeated arguments for Liberal Arts and Humanities is “our job is to help students learn to question.” One of those questions should be, “Is this a serious subject worth spending a few thousand dollars on or is it a hobby topic that I can adequately research on my own time for free with a library card?” As humanity departments dumb-down the value and difficulty of a Liberal Arts education, in a desperate attempt to cling to a paying gig, that question becomes easier to answer. A solution would be to cost-justify portions of the education system, but that often has unintended consequences. California, for example, tried to encourage STEM-qualified K-12, particularly high school, instructors back in the late 80’s by requiring public schools to pay more for STEM graduate instructors than Liberal Arts instructors. No money was allocated to schools for this requirement, so the end result was that more expensive STEM instructors were laid-off and replaced with marginally-qualified teachers who met the minimum standard for math and science course instruction but who were not math or science grads. Mandates require tight regulation or you may not get what you hoped to get as a result.

As Harvard University professor of government Harvey Mansfield said, “Science students do well in non-science courses, but non-science students have difficulty in science courses. Slaves of exactness find it easier to adjust to the inexact, though they may be disdainful of it, than those who think in the realm of the inexact when confronted with the exact.” That is a really complicated way to state the obvious: students who have spent their lives being disciplined and working in a system that has standards and expectations have no problem kicking back and goofing off if that is all that is required.

The Rat's Rules #2: When You Know It Is Over

Way back in 2008, I wrote a Geezer with a Grudge rant titled, "A Technological Dead End?" I always intended this essay to be turned into a Rat's Rules for this blog, but because I wrote it once it never made it to the Rat's Eye View. Today, I have fixed that. This is Rat's Rule #2: as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.

All Rights Reserved © 2008 (revised 2012) Thomas W. Day

 

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #2: I have a theory, born from personal experience and lightweight observation of history.  My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.  Then it dies.  When a new technology is just finding its legs, the technology being replaced makes a wonderful collection of giant leaps; which will fail to stave off obsolescence, even for a moment.  But examining those last moments of declining technological health can be really enlightening.  

I'm not saying this as someone who has been on the leading edge of a technology shift.  In fact, as a mid-tech transient I've been trailing edge for most of my life.  In the mid-1980's, professional analog audio recording gear began to be displaced by digital recording systems.  The last generation of analog recorders were a huge improvement over anything previous technology.  But it was too late: the convenience, cost advantage, signal-to-noise improvement, and trendy-ness of digital wiped out those last moments of glory and hardly anyone even noticed that most of the problems usually associated with recording on analog tape had been minimized.  Today, professional analog recording systems are practically relics and even the simplest personal computer has more editing and playback horsepower than a multi-million-dollar studio from twenty years ago. In my lifetime, I've seen (or am seeing) electronic tubes, analog computers, magnetic data storage, photographic film, visual artist's tools, payphones, cathode ray tubes, analog television, vinyl records and turntables, carburetors, and dual-shock motorcycle suspensions quickly peak and begin the rapid transition from regular use to museums' shelves [2] . 

I was first turned on to this realization when I was a very young man.  When my kids were toddlers, one of our favorite weekend trips was to Minden, Nebraska to visit the Harold Warp Pioneer Village Museum.  The place is stuffed with all kinds of historic tools and toys, from Pony Express relics to railroad history to farm equipment to early internal combustion vehicles. The thing that tripped my trigger was getting a close look at horse-drawn carriages, especially the high-end, luxury models from the turn of the last century.  Just as the first internal combustion vehicles were making horse-drawn transportation obsolete, the last carriages were becoming efficient, comfortable, and sophisticated.  I studied suspension systems that we wouldn't see on cars until fifty years later.  Some of these vehicles had heating systems, evaporation interior cooling, clever convertible tops, interior and exterior lighting, safety equipment, and finish work that made the next half-century of car design look primitive.  Unfortunately, they also had horses providing the horsepower. 

The other sign of impending obsolescence is nostalgia.  This country is currently being decorated with monuments to the Golden Days of Oil.  To anyone with a sense of history, that ought to be a big, red, flashing sign that something is on the downhill slide.  Folks are paying idiotic prices for Gulf, Esso, Kerr-McGee, and Standard Oil memorabilia.  Oil Century Museums are popping up everywhere from California to Tex-ahoma to Florida to New Jersey.  Ohio is home to the "Society for Commercial Archaeology."  And, of course, we have wads of motorcycle museums littering the country side.  On my last long Midwestern bike trip, I counted ads for half-dozen Harley/Indian museums before they began to fade into the fast food, antique store, and hotel signs. The last couple of decades witnessed a giant blast of the past as Boomers tried to revive their youth with muscle cars and 1950s-styled big twins.  That fad won't last much longer, because Boomers are soon going to be looking for their next hipster thing in prosthetic hips (like mine) and electric wheelchairs. 

Watching what's going on in our culture makes me suspect that we're about to see our beloved internal combustion engine technology vanish.  I don't know if you've noticed, but internal combustion engines have become trailing-edge technology, almost overnight.  There are alternative transportation systems on our highways and all over the rest of the world.  At the same time the technology designed into internal combustion-powered cars and, especially, motorcycles has become absolutely incredible.  The performance, reliability, and even the sound of modern motorcycles has been tweaked to the nth degree.  The only thing that's been stubbornly ignored is energy efficiency and that's probably the only characteristic that really matters in the twenty-first century.

In (2007) end-of-year issue, the relatively conservative Motorcycle Consumer News published their "Performance Index" for the current generation of motorcycles. In a summary, they listed the following most important performance categories: ten best 1/4 mile times, ten best rear-wheel HP, ten best power-to-weight rations, ten best top speeds, ten best rear-wheel torque, and ten best 60-0 stops. All but one of those measurements are, essentially, the same sort of 1950's information; power.

Most likely, the only modern statistic included in the data provided would be "average fuel mileage." By this standard, the 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 650R was the winner at 65.3mpg (the 2007 version was 10mpg less fuel efficient), followed by the Ninja 500 (64mpg), and Honda's Rebel 250 (62.6mpg). The Victory 8-Ball at 29.8mpg was the fuel guzzling loser. My daughter's 1991 Geo got better mileage than more than half of the motorcycles MCN rated. From occasional long ride experiences with folks on liter sportbikes, my own calculations estimate that MCN was optimistic about the efficiency of most of the bikes they rated. I wouldn't be surprised at less than 20mpg performance from many of those street legal race bikes. (The new Honda NC700X has upped the game a bit, but I think it's too little, too late.)

While those performance-based qualities are being fine-tuned, the world's oil consumption has rapidly passed world oil production.  Sometime in the last five years, oil demand whipped around oil production capacity and the world's economies will either shift away from burning petroleum or suffer the consequences.  Some experts claim that 2005 was the whipping point; the last year of "cheap oil" and that we're on the downhill slide where production will get further from meeting demand every year.[1]  In 1999, the uber-conservative, alternative-technology-spurning oilman Dick Cheney was one of those "experts" warning that the age of oil is about done.  Cheney told other oil execs, back then, that the reason oil companies weren't building new refining plants was that investment would be putting good money after bad.  We have more than enough oil processing equipment, we don't have much oil left to process.  Some folks estimate that in as little as two or three years, it may cost $100 to fill a compact car's tank.  Filling a bike's tank will be pretty close to half that and it's going to be more expensive every year afterwards.

Let's get real.  A 250hp, liter bike that burns 15-20 mpg is going to be a pretty worthless piece of history when gas costs four to ten times what it costs today.  Everything we use, do, and consume, will be incredibly more expensive when oil bumps against the predicted 2025 $400 per barrel.  If we humans are lucky and put some planning and a lot of resources into the next few years, we might be converting to hydrogen cell vehicles or some other petroleum-less fuel about the time the old technology becomes impractical.  I like to imagine that motorcycles, with their inherent energy efficiency and other advantages will be part of that change.  I'm sure horse lovers hoped horses would find a place in the modern transportation scheme, back in 1906.  Who knows, maybe horses will make a comeback?

Personally, I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, while the majority of Americans appear to be clueless about the future of our energy-dependent systems.  As an example, the dim-bulbs in St. Paul are widening freeways, planning communities that are further than ever from necessary services and employment, and designing government buildings that depend on energy systems that will be disappearing about the time those facilities are put into service.  My sentiments, inspired by that irresponsible bureaucratic inattention to reality, is considerably less upbeat.  Their behavior is more evidence that we always get the government we deserve, just like every other country in the world. 

While there appears to be a fair amount of thought going into replacing the power plant under the hoods of our cars, for a while it looked like that wouldn't be happening for two-wheeled vehicles.  Zero Motorcycles and Brammo have changed all that.  Zero Motorcycle's new Z-Force^tm power pack is pushing electric motorcycle technology fast into the new Green Age. With a 100 mile range, an 88mph top speed, and 3,000 charge cycles (a 300,000 mile battery life), Zero's bikes are beginning to warrant their price premium. Hayes' diesel-powered bike is another cool thing.  A hydrogen-powered turbo sportbike would be beyond hip.

Knowing that this oil barrel is more than half-empty with a rust hole in the bottom has forced me to suspect that the world I lived in is vanishing.  I'm trying not to sound like a reformed whore, but it's hard for me to pretend to any other pose.  I am from a generation that burned gas for almost nothing but recreational uses.  I can "brag" that I sometimes rode my Kawasaki Bighorn, Rickman 125 ISDT, or even the Harley Sprint to the racetrack, took off the street hardware, raced the bike, and, after reinstalling lights and crap, rode back home.  I guess that's something.  But I also trailered, trucked, and station-wagoned bikes to races, took long mind-altering rides in the country, and practiced racing on all sorts of surfaces.  Today, those leisurely rides through the country side feel a bit like immature, excessive exercises in selfishness; and I'm missing them before I've given up doing them.  I know that every drop of oil that I waste is coming out of my children and grandchildren's heritage and I'm becoming more than a little ashamed of the oil I wasted before I knew better.  The days of getting together with a few dozen friends to explore backroads and hang out in the twisties are fading.  I think sports like motocross, road racing, and all of the fun we have had aimlessly and recreation-ally burning fuel are also coming to a sooner-than-you-think end.  Between declining resources and world-wide pollution and global heating catastrophes, it appears that we have hung on to these carbon-burning handlebars a little too long.

I'm not celebrating this.  I'm not gloating or saying "I told you so" while I write this.  I lived in a gloriously ignorant, greedy, selfish time and it was an incredibly fun period in human history.  I wish I could pass it on to my children and, especially, my grandson.  If we're truly a civilization worth saving, we'll find a way to make a world our kids can enjoy.  If we don't, we deserve any misery we receive. 

---

[1] A depressing, but complete site for all sorts of links to information about the coming energy crisis is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/.
[2] Paul Young added this note to my list of vanishing technologies from my own lifetime: "One of the guys I work with had his 11 year old son come up to him and ask 'Have you ever heard of something called a landline?' Something else to add to your list of disappearing technology. "

The Rat’s Rules: #5 "The first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim."

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #5: Stuff ends. Eventually, everything and everyone dies. Anyone who uses the words “forever,” “in perpetuity,” “to the end of time,” or any phrase or word similar to those in relation to anything human is clueless about time, death, decay, and entropy. Businesses, and in particular corporations, are designed to be easy to kill and for the killers to get away punishment-free.

Businesses often get shutdown to protect the people with the most money and power. The bigger the business, the more protection provided to the perpetrators. The people who did the work, created the products and services, produced the products and services, and who believed in whatever "mission" the business pretended to have get sacrificed. It's the way life in this country has worked for 200+ years, with only a few moments of interruption. Corporations whine that "employees aren't loyal these days." Interpret that to mean, "You people are too smart to buy into my bullshit."

Somewhere out there in the web is a reprint of a great speech Andy Grove (one of Intel’s founders) gave to a collection of business assholes where he explained why employees did not owe those rich and powerful men one ounce of loyalty. His recommendation to employees was to consider their employers as one of many possible customers and to treat their own careers as independent businesses. One absolute rule for the self-employed is to never limit your business to a single customer. Likewise, an employee who commits all of his output to an employer is destined to be disappointed and, probably, unemployment or worse. An employer deserves exactly the same loyalty as that employer gives to employees; nor more and probably slightly less.

In my 50+ years of employment, the majority of my past employers are gone. Now that McNally Smith College of Music has joined those ranks, seven of the twelve employers on my resume have vanished. One, ex-Fortune 100 Guidant is on record as Forbe's #2 "Worst Mergers in History." Another Fortune 500 train-wreak, Telectronics, would have resulted in criminal FDA prosecution if Clinton had been a fraction of the Democrat some mis-remember him being. Two of the small corporations on my resume were absorbed by larger firms; one for a profit and one sold for patents and equipment. The rest just disappeared without a trace. Not a one of those failed companies were well managed, but the mismanagers were all grossly overpaid for their incompetence. Most of them were grossly over-compensated for blowing up the companies they mismanaged. The fortunes created by some of those golden parachutes could have solved Greece’s economic problems.

Here's what I learned from my first experience, back in 1972, with one of those companies. My tech-mentor, L.A. (Arnold) Stevenson, a high school dropout/genius Air Farce-trained electronics tech who is still the hands-down best educator I have ever met, "The first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim." That lesson taught me that the day to start looking for work was the day I got hired to a new job. That habit really came in handy when I started my own businesses. 

There is an obvious reason for that, too. The people who stick it out to the bloody end either feel they have no other good option or are so limited or incompetent that they don't have a better option. The ones who bail at the first sign of self-destruction are those who know they can find as good or better employment elsewhere. As Andy Grove infamously told us all, "Your career is your business, and you are its CEO." You are also your business' most important customer and everything you do in your career/business should be designed to first serve that obligation. In the last 20 years of my own career, I finally learned that it was time to leave when I stopped improving myself at work. That means when the resources to make yourself more marketable dry up, you should jump ship.

I didn’t stick around for the bloody end of any of the companies I worked for, but I got damn close in my first engineering job. The first time that company crashed, I stayed until I’d been asked to layoff every one of my techs and mechanics; then they laid me off just before Xmas (sound familiar?). Six months later, that company rehired me as a contractor which, eventually, turned into a management job. The next time their market collapsed, I was the first out the door; leaving my employees and friends with a little more job security and a big warning notice that “the end is near.” One of my best friends tried to stick it out to the bloody end and when he was laid off the Reagan economy was in full recession and there were NO tech jobs to be had in Nebraska. He died of a massive heart attack at 35 an unemployed year later. That was also a life lesson for me.

A lesson I learned the hard way from two of my defunct small company employers was “Never invest more of yourself in a business than the owners (or the people who profit the most) are investing.” For the last 15 years of my career, I regularly turned down management positions because I know enough about myself to know that my loyalty to the people who work for me will override my common sense and I will violate this rule. I will try to drag a dead horse over a mountain, even if I see the executives sitting on the damn horse while I try to move it. The simple solution to that problem is to avoid horses/management altogether. I can’t “fix” me, but I can sure as hell put some fences around my options.

Another thing I learned from Arnold was that I never wanted to be an employer. Everyone who has ever worked for me did so as an independent contractor. I don’t need the responsibility, the people who have worked for me didn’t need to be trained to be dependent on me, and I have always been too interested in too many things to want to be tied down to one business model or customer base.

I worked, weekends and nights, as an independent contractor for Arnold and he paid me about 10x what I made on an hourly rate with my day job. He constantly reminded me that he was my sole customer and that was a bad thing. That spurred me into doing a lot of electronic design work which led to my first product “invention” and a royalty check that saved my family a few years later when I was laid-off and near broke. 

Postscript November 2022: One of the big quarter-flipping winners of the past two decades has been Elon Musk. Purely by luck, his first dotcom was one of those 90's train wrecks, Zip2, that was foolishly acquired for a buttload of cash by the late-not-so-great Compaq. From there a sketchy online bank. X.com, which was merged with Musks' fascist buddy, Peter Theil, and turned into  Paypal, which was bought for a hilarious amount of money by eBay, making two of the most dangerous, most idiotic lucky fumblers into billionaires right when Republicans were eliminating the hyper rich from tax burdens/responsibilities. About the time those two were lucking into their fortunes, the people who were tossing money mindlessly into anything with a dotcom tail started damming up the waterfall of stupid cash, leaving the lucky ones who skated under the wire to take advantage of that timid moment in investment. 

Luck and management skill rarely go together and Musk, in late 2022 is demonstrating that fact. Immediately after buying Twitter, little Elon laid off 7500 Twitter employees with the finesse of a rural northern Minnesota lumberjack set loose in a national forest. Now, of course, he's trying to lure some of them back, but the exodus he began with his incompetent mismanagement "style" is resulting in more rats jumping ship; that includes a bunch of Twitter's most critical management people who are getting out while the getting is good. What do you want to bet many of those people will be recruiting ex-Twitter talent to create Twitter's next round of competition? Having voided their contracts, Musk will have a tough time enforcing anything resembling a non-compete.

The Best Society Possible

I’ve been a science fiction reader almost since I started reading, at least nine or ten, starting with comic books and continuing to this day. SF gives us some deluded hope that human society can evolve to something more decent than whatever toilet bowl we’re living in at the moment. It’s a delusion, obviously, but the Trekies can imagine humans might evolve into a society without superstition/religion, war, racism, and sexism, Star Wars nutjobs can keep living the silly fantasy that one fool with a spaceship could defeat the Death Star and the government with some magic powers and an oversized puppy, and a few of us can see what the world our fellow humans are really building will turn into. For me, Soylent Green pretty much hit the nail on the head as a realization of the best and worst I expect of human society and the end times of the Sixth Extinction. I don’t think the United States has a hope in hell of ever creating an assisted suicide system as humaine as the one in Soylent Green.

I know there are people who imagine happier futures than this one, but having grown up in a evangalistic family and mostly spending my life smothered in the superstitious Midwest, I’m not one of them. Using the smokescreen of religion to mask their vicious and greedy personalities, the 70-something-percent of Americans who are the core of America’s decadence would never allow a process or facility as decent and realistic as the suicide center in Soylent Green. We’re a nation that believes people should suffer to the last moment to allow the wealth-extraction system (aka American healthcare) time to completely transfer patients’ assets to the 1%.

The only gross error in the movie’s depiction of an assisted suicide facility is that in 2022 when the envionment is completely overwhelmed by human pollution, the lines in front of a building like that one would make opening day for Star Wars XXXXII look abandoned.

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.