Lowballing the Averages

I should have taken a picture, but I suck at that. On a recent visit to Rochester, MN for my wife’s check-up at the Mayo Clinic there, I saw a Trump supporter sign with “this is our 1776” statement somewhere in the general Trumpanzee gibberish. All the way home, I thought about that sign and the goober who paid for it. The 1776 conservatives were also known as “Tories, Royalists, Loyalists, or King's Men”: aka supporters of King George. Next up were the 1863 conservatives who revolted against the US government and national law and started the Civil War with an attack on Fort Sumpter and seceding from the Union. Realistically, those “conservatives” were clearly traitors. The late-1930’s US conservatives were generally positively inclined toward Adolph Hitler and even the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bombing of London didn’t convince them otherwise. One of the classic 20^th Century Republican conservatives, Senator Joe McCarthy, spent his first term in the Senate freeing convicted Nazi war criminals. In the 70s, conservatives lined up, first, behind Goldwater who wanted to start WWIII to see who had the most atomic weapons and, second, behind the record-setting criminal-producing Nixon administration. Reagan, the conservatives’ patron saint jabbered about economic responsibly while he created the US’s international debt flushing billions down his Star Wars toilet and generally spending money like it was falling from trees.

I have to admit I was surprised to see so many Trump signs in Rochester. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been. Rochester is where Minnesota Republican Party Chair Jennifer Carnahan is from and she’s the humorless nutjob who said, “We are jumping through the roof with excitement to welcome our great and fearless leader, President Donald J. Trump, back to Minnesota next week.” How someone from Minnesota would miss the connection between that statement and the Russian spies, Boris and Natasha, from Rocky and Bullwinkle blows me away.

What I have decided, based on long and careful observation and a growing cynicism—that the last 4 years have fed and over-fed—is that as smart as people are in a given area there has to be an equally stupid pool to keep the average . . . well, average. Rochester, MN residents possess an exceptional number of college degrees and Masters and higher degrees compared to the state, but Rochester has slightly more high school dropouts than the state average, too. The city has some of the nation’s most brilliant doctors, scientists, engineers, and managers and some of the freakin’ dumbest faux-conservatives on the planet to offset the city’s brilliance.

You could make an argument for avoiding ultra-educated cities because you’ll also be surrounded by hyper-idiots who leech off of the productive members of their society and whose purpose appears to be only to drive the average IQ to the national mean. That won’t work, though. The half-wits who call themselves “conservatives” are everywhere. You, literally, can’t find a place in this country that isn’t infested with the conspiracy sheep, racists, entitled and uneducated underachievers, and general purpose fools. We’ve been breeding them for centuries.

Conservatives, You Have Convinced Me

You have convinced me. There have been so few Republicans since Teddy Roosevelt who have advanced the cause of democracy that I could count them on the fingers of one hand. So, when you say “better Russian than democrat,” the lower case “d” is not a typo. You have convinced me that this is exactly who you are: people who do not believe in the democratic form of government or in justice, fairness, equality, or basic decency. You have convinced me that you do not believe that individuals are as important as hyper-rich people or corporations. You have convinced me that you will do anything to turn the United States into an authoritarian state; a nightmare for most and a fascist’s wet dream. I believe you when you quote James Madison’s claim that democracy is “the tyranny of the majority”; a statement meant to justify the defense of slavery that was built in to the US Constitution. You have convinced me that you believe your false flag: that preventing a single illegal vote is worth obstructing thousands, even millions, of your fellow citizens from exercising their most precious and important civic responsibility: the right to vote.

You have convinced me that you believe “blue (and white) lives matter” more than any other life. Nothing is more important, to you than a police officer’s life and lifestyle, regardless of how many citizens have to suffer to protect that officer’s comfort and security. “Protect and serve” was never meant for all. The police department is who you expect to “protect” your entitlement as a white person, as a real American. When a cop, or even a random white person “standing their ground,” shoots an unarmed person of color, it is always justified. You’ve convinced me that is what you believe.

You’ve convinced me that you believe your right to play with guns is much more precious than the lives of children, let alone the rest of society. That attitude has spread into a portion of the public who now believe their right to possess or do something always overrides anyone else’s health, safety, or peace of mind. The prior adage/understanding was that your liberties ended at another person’s nose. However, now your pursuit of happiness is grossly more important than anyone else’s.

With your indefensible commitment to Donald Trump, you have convinced me that you imagine your religion to be the “one true religion” and anyone not believing exactly the same vision as you is a heretic. The idea of “freedom of (or from) religion” is, in your mind, un-American. You would love for the Dark Ages to return so that you can torture anyone who disagrees with you as a witch, an infidel, or a terrorist. The fact that a man who has happily admitted to committing every one of the seven deadly sins is now your “holy warrior” has cemented what your religion represents: the constant pursuit of money over all other values.

You have convinced me that you believe any news source not telling the story you’ve decided is true, regardless of evidence, is “fake news” and no evidence will ever convince you otherwise. In fact, I am convinced that you do not believe any evidence that conflicts with your beliefs. Truth is a casualty of your beliefs. Facts are an archaic construct that is incompatible with your belief system.

You’ve convinced me that you believe “education” should only tell the stories you’ve decided are true, the stories that make you comfortable with your country’s history and your race and your family history’s part in it. I am convinced that you imagine the world can go back to where some people were called “master” and that you deserve to be one of them.

You obviously believe a man who calls himself “the greatest President in history” is actually that, as if bragging makes it true. You have convinced me that your definition of “great” is in no way similar to mine. You’ve convinced me that every movie I’ve ever watched that had “bad guys” also had people in that same audience cheering for the people I thought were wearing the “black hats.”

You have convinced me that you believe all those things. You have convinced me that the United States of America you desire is a different place than the one I once hoped we were trying to build. You have even convinced me that there isn’t much point in hoping that you might understand the idea “my country, let me right the wrongs.” Patriotism and jingoism are not the same thing. There is little to no self-sacrifice or service involved in your version of patriotism.

You have convinced me that you are willing to go to war with your neighbors and anyone in the country who doesn’t believe these things. I do not believe that you understand the consequences of your actions and beliefs. I am beginning to believe that there is no way back to “normal” in the remains of this country because the distance between your “values” and mine are so vast that we might as well be two different species, let alone citizens of the same country. You have even convinced me that humans are incapable of surviving good times together, let alone the harsh and difficult times that we will experience because of the climate we are altering with our selfish and careless use of fossil fuels. You have convinced me that we have degenerated below the kind of Americans who worked and fought together to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and who worked even harder to recreate a post-Great Depression  economy and federal government that had the hope of allowing “the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans. The best we have ever imagined, and never realized, was that bare hope and you have convinced me the light of that hope has been extinguished.

I cannot say I appreciate the education you have provided in these last four years. My friends often remind me that I am no optimist and I always counter that with “a ‘pessimist’ is what optimists call a realist.” I think the last 40 years in this country have proved that being a pessimist is the most accurate path to take in the declining years of the United States of America.

It’s Not A Team Sport

A bunch of years ago, I was waiting for a friend in a White Bear bar when some drunk sidled over to me and asked, “What about them Vikings today? We really whipped up on the Bears didn’t we?”

I sort of grunted, which he took for agreement and he went back to staring into his beer bottle and I found a table, a safer, less idiotic place to wait for my friend. The “conversation” pretty much baffled me, though. Who was the “we?” No chance that sot had anything to do with winning a pro football game.

Politics have become as inane as pro football fans. People actually cheer for Donald Trump, as if he is performing some kind of sporting act in his jibbering reality show tactics. They even shout “Go team Trump!” and call him their “fearless leader.” It’s a freak show out there. Frank Zappa predicted all of this in 1973 with “I’m the Slime.”

I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold.

H.L. Menken wasn’t off an inch, except in claiming this was a flaw in “democracy,” something the United States constitution was designed to prevent at all costs: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” I guess it must be true that Trump represents the shriveled “inner soul” of his fans and cohorts, but it wasn’t democracy that put Trump into office, it was the flawed republic concept and the Devil’s contract also known as the Electoral College. A democracy requires a faithful execution of “one citizen, one vote” and our system fails that test and has at least three times in the nation’s history.

A lot of people have been amazed at how impossible it has been to penetrate the tiny, locked-down minds of Trump’s cult members with the usual tools: logic, facts, and rational argument. Try convincing a Packers or Steelers fan that their team “ain’t the greatest” and you’ll find yourself in exactly the same kind of argument as with a Trump fanatic. They have been convinced that their investment in Trump somehow will dribble over on to themselves when he “wins.” Just like the drunk with whom I opened up this essay, he and they imagine themselves on the same plane as the multi-millionaire football players and their wanna-be-billionaire politician/reality show character. Like the football players, Trump doesn’t want anything from these people but their money and like the football players, Trump isn’t going to give them anything back for their fanaticism. Once he’s elected, they can live or die and it is no sweat off of his balls; there are millions more where they came from. Suckers are a dime a dozen in these dis-United States.

But American politics isn’t a game. Democrats and Republicans not opposing teams in a pointless physical contest in which the outcome has no real consequence. If every football player and game in history vanished from existence, the world would be the same place it is today, except slightly improved. If every professional team in every country on the planet disbanded and the players had to find real jobs, no harm no foul. Doesn’t matter. If Donald Trump and the Republican Party are allowed to keep driving the United States toward a oligarchy with a dictator at the monster’s head, everyone in this country and, very likely, every person on the planet will be worse off. If you say, “I’d rather watch soccer that to have to cheer for the Packers,” who cares? Watch soccer or don’t. When you say, “I’d rather be Russian than a democrat” (the lower case “d” is an accurate quote), you are saying you’d rather be a traitor than to reconsider your team affiliation. One of these situations is of no consequence. The other is deadly important. 

No rational person ever "wins" an election. Serving the American public is  the most thankless task a human can take on. Being elected to public office, for a decent law-abiding citizen, is an obligation, a call to serve, but it is not a victory of any sort. In the case of the US Presidency, the only person that job has not rapidly aged has been Donny J. Trump. The man is oblivious to responsibility and serving is what every other person in the country is supposed to be doing for him. Barak Obama went from being a young man to a very old looking, very tired old man in 8 years. The job even took a toll on G.W.  Bush; but not Dick Cheney. I'm not even sure you could blame the pressure of the presidency on Reagan's decomposition. The trip from vapid to senile is a short one. But for anyone who is not in it to pack their pockets and wreak the nation like a Trump business scam, the job of president is a miserable assignment for which we will likely see fewer and fewer decent people apply. Left or right, the public won't be pleased unless everything you do turns out perfectly. Even then, they'll find something to complain about. Instead of celebrating when an election concludes, we ought to be sending the "winner" our condolences.

Post Mortem: Winding Down the Watch

I’m writing this at 4AM, July 15 of 2015. I’m 67 and bored with my life and myself. Nothing new there, but it has all gone on way too long and last night was a typical night in a life full of typical sleepless nights. If I live long enough to see this blog entry published, I’ll be 70. 70 years and I’m tired as hell.

For years, I thought my step-grandfather died in his 60s but this morning I discovered my step-uncle, Barry, had logged Sarge’s life stats in a genealogy website and that Sarge died when he was 72. Not a short life, by any practical standard. Too long for me. Sarge didn’t “fight” his end particularly hard and I wonder if we had other things in common. He died from emphysema and complicating factors and smoked his whole life, right up to his last year on oxygen. To me, that feels like a serious attempt to intentionally wind down his life’s watch. Likewise, I decided to do the same thing a decade ago. So far, it’s not working all that well for me.

Two and a half years ago, I screwed up the end-of-life plan and I’ve regretted it ever since. I had a minor heart attack, correctly diagnosed it, and allowed myself to be poorly transported to a hospital emergency room. What followed were 3 of the most expensive, least productive, most miserable days of  my life. In the end, I fought off physician-attempts to do significant surgery, absolutely refused any consideration of medical devices, and ended up with a 3mm stent on my right coronary artery. Usually, implantation of any foreign device in your body requires lifetime anti-rejection, antibiotic, and anti-inflammatory medications. My doctors prescribed two incompatible blood pressure medications, while I had not shown any signs of high blood pressure, a clinically ineffective anti-inflammatory, and a cholesterol medication. All of which listed “possible severe depression” as a side effect.

Mostly what that experience proved was that doctors and hospitals could not care less about patient health or safety. Their one and only concern is emptying their “customers’” (not patients) pockets as efficiently as possible. At this point, I’m pretty much doing the Christian Science thing without the Christian bullshit. I no longer have a doctor. I don’t bother with a physical exam schedule and haven’t for three years. I’ve tossed my cardiac meds and use the internet to self-diagnose and treat any physical problems I have. The sooner this watch runs out, the better. I have no desire to see how the next decade plays out. The last seventy years have been, on average, more painful than interesting and there is almost no chance it will improve from here out. I did live long enough to experience an intelligent President, but even that was fouled by the most corrupt, lazy, insentient Congress in history. So fuck it. It's your ball now. 

POSTSCRIPT: (8/20/2020) I remember when I was a kid, I'd write down my dreams in the middle of the night, thinking "That's a great [song idea, story idea, thought" and the next morning, I'd wake up and read what I'd written and think "what a moron." I'm not willing to go that far with this essay, but it's interesting to read something written for a period that I was sure I would not live to see. 

 Be warned. I wrote a half-dozen of these things, back in that 2016-16 period I wrote a half-dozen "Post Mortem" essays. We'll see what they look like as they arrive. When I wrote them, I really intended them to be "post mortem" and be the only example of me living up to a writing ideal I've always failed, "Write as if everyone you know is dead." Instead of everyone else, I assumed I'd be the dead one, but it's a similar effect.

Avoiding Commodity Status

After reading an article about vanishing rural Kansas, “Rural Kansas Is Dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why," and Kansas farmers’ insistence on sticking with commodity products (GMO wheat and corn) that have strong world competition, high production costs, low return on investment, cause damage to their production capabilities (soil), and can be grown profitably anywhere in the world, I got to thinking about that human tendency to become a commodity out of mental laziness. I have been a critic of tip-based jobs for my whole life. Partially, that is because I grew up in a place and time when tipping was something you did for exceptional service, not just because someone managed to do their job competently. When someone offered to “tip” me for work I had done, I always assumed they were being insulting; as if I am too dumb to know what my work is worth. Kansas has been betting on receiving tips and economic support from successful states and urban areas for 150 years and it is not going well. A recent look at house prices and the flood of homes for sale in almost all parts of western Kansas is almost shocking. Clearly, people are abandoning the state as fast as possible and trying to escape with, at least, a pittance of their home investments.

Today, of course, customers are expected to tip everything from waitstaff to home improvement contractors. The justification for the first group is because "in some states waiters and waitresses only make $2.13 an hour before tips. The majority of these servers also receive no benefits of any kind.” That is a pretty weird justification, since people doing those jobs knew that was the case before they aimed themselves at doing a job that could and likely will be automated with some pretty remedial robotics. Being a waiter is the posterchild for a commodity job: a job that could be filled competently by practically any warm body on the planet; including dogs and monkeys. There are a raft of jobs like that and a lot more that have been obsoleted in the last 100 years. You will never find a tip-based job being classified as “essential.” 

This is nothing new. Low skill workers have been a commodity for all of history. The American West is full of stories about how housing for horses was substantially better than the housing for cowboys, because horses were more expensive and harder to train than cowboys. The men who built the railways were notoriously throwaways. When I was a kid, working at Dodge City’s Boothill Museum, I compulsively read the newspapers stored in the museum’s basement. I will always remember an 1800’s report of a train derailment a few miles outside of Dodge. The report read something like, “A freight train derailed outside of town on Monday. There were no injuries. Six rail cars overturned and two had to be destroyed. Three work mules, a dozen head of cattle, two horses, and four Orientals were killed in the incident.” (I doubt that “Orientals” was capitalized in the original article.) I was 13 when I read that newspaper and the story stuck with me for the rest of my life. The AMC series, “Hell on Wheels,” brought that memory back multiple times through out the series. Pretty much any war movie should remind you of the high personal cost of being little more than a body to throw at the “enemy.” Being a commodity is being at the bottom of the employment barrel. 

I used to tell my music production students, “The only infinite resources in the universe are hydrogen, stupid people, cute girls (and boys), and great guitar players (and singers, etc). If those are the qualities you’re counting on getting through life with, good luck.” Today, corporations are discovering how many people they can do without and many people who imagined they were essential have learned otherwise. Likewise, as Trump continues to destroy the US economy, world influence, and the dollar millions of US citizens are going to learn that “service economy” we’ve been so proud of for the last 40 years is non-essential. In fact, the USA has very likely put itself in a position of being discovered to be non-essential to the world’s economy and stability. 

Scary stuff, for all of us. 

After the 2016 election, I had a variety of numskulls tell me that the reason they voted for Trump was “I’m tired of everybody else doing better than me.” Once the $600 federal Unemployment Cares Act expires, all of those commodity workers are going to be living off of their states’ rapidly depleting Unemployment Insurance fund. Some states are close to bankrupt now. There are 40-some million people on Unemployment now. Over 100,000 US businesses are gone forever. Millions of jobs are not coming back. The people who are going to be most hurt by all of this are the people who thought they were hurting others by voting for Trump. Sympathy for those people, from the people still working and those who thought far enough ahead to have obtained skills and essential occupations, is likely to be non-existent.  

Eventually, commodity workers will be replaced by various forms of automation. That started with manufacturing, which is now at least half-robotic and heading toward 90% in the next 20 years. Mining is one of the industries that people often think of as manual, but that hasn’t been for two decades. Those “coal jobs” Trump jabbered about were never going to be filled by uneducated, unskilled goobers wearing hard hats, but those were the people who were betting on Trump. That’s why he “loves the uneducated”: they are gullible enough to think he cares enough about them to help them. He not only doesn’t, he can’t. The only “help” available to any of us is education, training, and that process is never-ending for an entire working career. People unable to keep up are going to find that “everyone else” is doing better than them on an exponential basis from here out.

Wishing for a “Plandemic”

One of the local wingnuts on a Facebook group keeps calling the coronavirus “a plandemic.” She, of course, is an idiot like everyone clueless enough to call themselves “conservatives” when they are radically right wing and as uneducated and stupid as an empty Starbucks cup; maybe a cup with a mouthful of used Skoal staining the bottom. The last time she babbled some “plandemic” drivel, I asked her if she knew anyone smart enough to bake a cake without using a mix. Then, I went on to tell her that “I actually do know a couple of people who work in gene manipulation and that if they were inclined to design a virus that would do some damage it wouldn’t have a paltry 5% fatality rate. What would be the point? Do you seriously think you or the rest of the Trumpanzees or even Trump and his corrupt band of mobsters are important enough to set off this international disaster?” I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I’m sure when I do the response will be . . . memorable and hilarious.

That got me to thinking about a story I’ve put off finishing for more than 20 years. My story was ab out an FDA/CDC investigator chasing down a GMO that might be causing world reproduction rates to crash. My experiences in the US medical device industry put me on to the idea in the late 90’s and, as usual, I got about 2/3 of the way through the book and got bored with myself.

My variation on that idea is that the novel coronavirus was engineered, but it was not engineered to be a killer but as a reproductive system attack. The large number of people under-40 who get this virus are asymptomatic, which is what gave me the idea. If a virus was engineered to be asymptomatic but to sterilize as many people as possible, COVID-19 might be pretty similar to how that would work out. However, without significant testing it might not have been apparent to the designers that it would kill so many seniors and other people with “underlying conditions.” There wouldn’t be a real opportunity to do such a test, in fact. The entire design might have been laboratory-based and until the first half-million or so were infected, it’s possible that the designers could have thought this could have been under-the-WHO radar until it was wide-spread.

I am not sure who the protagonist(s) or the antagonist(s) would be in this story. I have found that my interest in writing long fiction is zilch. I guess I don’t have the attention span or tolerance for what remains of the publishing industry or even the miniscule reading public. It seems like the kind of thing Robin Cook used to do, but there is no market for “selling ideas” in fiction. The work is what is worth the money, not the basic ideas.

The Rat's Rules: #3 Never Become Expert at Something You Hate

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #3: I can’t believe I’m finally just now getting around to writing up this “rule”: “Never become expert at something you hate, they’ll make you do it for the rest of your life.” This is something I’ve said for at least 40 years. It’s also something I failed to observe for the overwhelming majority of my life. And it’s not an original idea.

The make-or-break moment, for me, came when I was working for one of the least ethical companies on the planet (outside of the military or military/industrial complex) in 2001 and I was depressed to the point that I could no longer read . . . anything. I had become “expert” at organizing and manipulating data (product failure data, in this case) so that product problems could be identified and fixed. Nothing about this “expertise” appealed to me, but it was specially unappealing in a company that had absolutely no interest in improving product reliability. While I have spent a lot of my life at a keyboard, including writing database code, I don’t have the right kind of obsessions to be good at it; or, more importantly, to like doing it.

That job put me in 4 to 5 hour-long meetings a day and most of what went on in those meetings was political posturing and career positioning. I do not believe meetings of any sort are productive. . . politics in business is just bad management. But the job paid more than $100k/year and that was more money than I ever imagined I would see in any life. I hated the company, I hated the job, I hated myself for working at the company and doing the job. My grandson was the inspiration that tripped my quitting-trigger. I realized that my kids had grown up watching me be a lousy work role mode and, now, my grandson would too. With him for inspiration and several friends for support, I left the big money for the scary world of self-employment and temporary contract work. Worst case, I figured I would burn through my retirement savings in 5 years and have to look for “a real job.” Thirteen years later, I retired without having touched my savings and having added substantially to our retirement security. Best of all, I did not hate any part of the last 17 years of my working life. Sure there were bad days, but there were always great moments and good weeks and memories that I treasure to this day.

A lesson that only came to me in retrospect was that when I was doing work that i liked and, even, loved I didn’t need anyone to “make me do it.” Now, to clean up this Rat Rule, I want to be clear on the fact that nobody but me ever made me do the jobs I didn’t love. I chose to take that route for a variety of ill-conceived reasons. I always had a choice to take jobs that were less secure, didn’t pay as well, required more training and preparation, and/or would have taken more effort on my part to obtain. Always. Nobody every put a gun to my head and said, “Do this shitty job or else.” I always weighed my options and went for security, more money, and something that was familiar (something close to what I was already good at). Always, until 2001.

In 2001, several things ganged up on me to help me break that habit. One, my high paying job was so demoralizing and counter to everything I felt was precious to me that it broke me; literally. Not being able to read was simply one symptom of the major depression that job forced me into. Two, my kids were grown and on their own and no one really needed me to stuff my nose into the grindstone for their survival. We went through some rough economic times between 1968 and 2000 and I often felt that if I slipped off of that treadmill we’d be living under a bridge in a heartbeat. Three, I had the surprisingly good luck to have a friend in high places, Michael McKern the director of Musictech College, who offered me a temporary job helping to build the studios in the school’s new St. Paul location. That took a lot of the risk out of quitting my old job. It wasn’t anything near a replacement for the money I gave up, but it was enough money to keep me going for the interim and it gave me a new mission to focus on.

For me, maybe the mission was the thing that turned “work” into something less onerous. For a decade, I really felt like I was doing something that often contributed to making my student’s lives better and, as a result, the world a better place. The problem with most work is that most of us can’t connect the work to our life’s mission; whatever that may be. Having a mission is probably the most underrated quality of a modern life. Just going to work for the check is demeaning and boring and tends to make humans into machines; not very good machines, either. Machines are predictable, reliable, and unemotional. Humans are none of those things and when they are in a creative, inspiring, motivating environment humans kick machines butts every time.

Looking back at a 55 year work career, I am not one of those people for whom work is a means in itself. I need for my work, the thing that I will spend most of my life doing and most of my time attending to, to be something I believe is worthwhile and useful. Like the mistake I made so many years in pretending that I was made to do unsatisfying work because I was good at it, I have also made the mistake of believing that most people do not need a mission in life. I do believe that the overwhelming majority of people in my culture do not have a work mission and do not know that they need one. In this case, ignorance is fatal to your spirit, soul, consciousness or whatever you call that thing that decides if life is worth living or not. It is also true that the mission some people decide upon can be harmful to the world and their community: racial supremacy, wealth and power at the expense of anyone who gets in the way, experimental technology that risks the environment or life, and the rest of that list. Still, when you look at the people who have taken on harmful missions, you can’t help but be a little impressed with their effectiveness.

Missions are powerful and apathy isn’t. If you want to have a career and a life that you don’t hate, you will have to figure out what your mission is, then you will have to stay on it regardless of how easy doing something else seems. Greg McKeown, in his book Essentialism, said this more rationally than me, "If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. "

Labeling Ourselves

Now that the US has decided to speed up the country's decline into a failed empire and 3rd world banana dictatorship, pretty much everything that once resembled civil society is vanishing. Which means the loud pipe morons are proudly demonstrating their assholiness with every opportunity. Apparently, our degeneration has given every spoiled white boy license to act like an asshole; from eBikers to bikers to neo-Nazis (alt-right, to the genteel) to your neighbors and their yard tools.Bicyclists are engaging in hit-and-run road warrior crap. In our fading empire, every nitwit with $200 to blow can buy an assault weapon and another $100 turns it into a machine gun with enough bullets to take out a theater full of victims. We have elected officials who set levels of stupidity and assholiness that astound the rest of the world. Not us, though. We haven't had anything near enough stupidity.

Back here in Minnesota, I have a neighbor, who I  call "Slo Mow Man," who mows his lawn "conservatively" every 2-3 days. He's a retired California civil servant who moved to Minnesota to spread his retirement money further into the 21st Century. I have never seen anyone drive a riding lawn mower so slowly. He mist have had a low-low gear installed at the local Hardly shop. Likewise, when he uses his wood chipper, he fires up the motor and, apparently, wanders around his several-acre-yard gathering sticks, hiking back to the chipper with one of two twigs in his hands, tosses them in, and goes back to wandering. The wood chipper runs all day and rarely does any actual chipping. All of that pales when the snow flies or the leaves fall. His use of the leaf blower is a source of depressing entertainment, if you are deaf. It's kind of hilarious to watch him blow leaves off of his driveway, into the wind where they blow right back as he creeps down his driveway at a pace that would frustrate snails. You just know this guy pisses into the wind, too. Likewise, after he takes 2 hours to plow the snow from his driveway, he whips out the leaf blower and tries to blow the snow dust from his driveway, turning a 20 minute job into nearly an all-day affair. 

Typical of that crowd of folks, he's convinced the rest of the country is "lazy, entitled, and resentful of white people." Ok, he's probably right about the last point. Hell, even I don't like white people much and I am one. 

After going over this sad, degrading history, I have decided that we need a new national anthem and this is the song I recommend. (20 years ago, it would have been Jame's Brown's "Living in America.". Those days are long gone. Today, you'd have to be desperate at the level of those who are willing to risk Trump's immigrant concentration camps to "eat your heart out" to become an American.) We've become the sort of international laughing stock that the wingnuts used to claim we were during the Obama years; when US perceptions in the Rest of the World was about as good as it has ever been. Today, that perception is dropping out of sight, to the point that our chimp President was laughed at while addressing the United Nations.

This One's Pretty Good Too

Spread these ads everywhere. Don't let anyone forget how incompetent this bastard was and is.

One of the Best Political Ads in History

Ok, Boomer

Or is that “Ok Boomer?” Whatever. We all know it’s the clueless, snarky response of a spoiled brat who imagines that he or she has it “harder than any other generation.”Baby boomers just don't seem to get it. Millennials have it a little harder than they did. Not only with college tuition but let's look at the job market. Most jobs now, you need a college degree for. 61% of Millennials attend college compared to 46% of Baby Boomers. You need a college degree for places to even look at your resume. That wasn't the case when our parents were looking for a career. But now, not only do they want a college degree, they want you to have experience.” That’s typical of the kind of mindless drivel these children spew and they even imagine it is true. 

I’ve been dismissed a few times myself and I don’t waste my time trying to educate these kiddies any longer. I just remind myself that I’m not the jackass whisperer and move on with my life. However, I wonder if there will come a time when these old children discover how wrong they are? The author of the article I quoted above lists a collection of “boomer prices” vs today’s prices and imagines that somehow those numbers account for inflation. Of course, they do not, but math skills and, even, simple accounting skills appear to be something that has been lost in their education. It’s not like the tools aren’t there in K-12 and beyond, it’s that they do not want to waste their precious screen time learning those skills. Strangely, they imagine that my generation magically got that stuff effortlessly. “A dozen eggs for Baby Boomers” did  “cost about $0.84” and today they cost $0.99 to $1.50, for an inflation value of 20% to 50%, while the minimum wage was $1.00/hour in 1960 and today’s minimum wage is $7.25 (federal) to $15.00 (several states) for an inflation rate of 700% to 1500%. Eggs are one example and there are several examples of items (like housing) that have inflated far beyond wages. College, however, is one item that varies by state; from the worst case, California, where college tuition went from free to $138,000 for 4 years of UCLA and $15,000 in 1970 to $28,000 for 4 years at typical state colleges (like the University of Nebraska where I attended). California’s tuition rate is nearly an infinite increase, but most states saw an 85% increase in tuition over 50 years, not even close to wage inflation over the same period (the 1970 minimum wage was $1.60). 

As I’ve marveled before, humans don’t ever seem to learn anything the easy way. Two generations away from the last war fought with draftees, young Americans shrug off reality and history as if it doesn’t pertain to their situation or any situation with which they have chosen to compare themselves. For example the claim, “Most jobs now, you need a college degree for.” Ignoring, the fact that this presumably college educated kiddy doesn’t even know about dangling prepositions, that whole claim is a joke. The kinds of jobs that my generation didn’t need degrees for are often crying for applicants today, but Millennials don’t want anything to do with manual labor. I’ve been told that “we were promised great jobs if we went to college” by nitwits who were told in clear terms by a collection of experienced adults that their degree in music was worth slightly less than the paper upon which it was printed, economically. Not only did they persist in wasting money on that degree, but they doubled-down on the delusion and went for an MFA (which stands for My Fabulous Adolescence). Now, they are surprised that Starbucks asks for a degree for a coffee shop management job because every idiot serving coffee or donuts has a useless liberal arts degree. Why not ask for it? 

Housing inflation is an interesting problem. Housing is expensive in the places young people insist on living; large cities, and the quality of home Millennials insist is their right. My first house, in 1973, cost $8,900 in Central City, Nebraska. The place was a dump, but it was all I could afford. In three years, I replumbed the place, turned an attic space into two bedrooms and a sewing room, built a garage and workshop, and landscaped the place while supporting my wife and two kids on $3.25/hour and regular 80-90 hour weeks. My “vacations” were spent working on the house or working a second job (R&R bands and music equipment repair, usually). We sold that house for $16,000 and moved “up” to Fremont, Nebraska and a larger $20,000 1920’s house. I started the remodeling routine over, but in 1979 I was laid off along with 1,400 people in my company and almost 2,000 others in two other industries in Fremont and I sold that house for $18,000 and slipped the “buyer” $5,000 under the table so they could make the “down payment".” So, not counting my improvements and labor, I lost $7,000 on that house. I didn’t buy another house for almost a decade. 

Chased by the constant regional recessions of the 1980s, we moved to California where my salary was $28,000/year (with the usual 60-90 hour work weeks) and a typical middle class home was $120,000 at 15% interest. Totally unaffordable, by any math I understand; although at least one of my kids thought I was a failure and a fool because I couldn’t figure out the ladder of mortgages, second mortgages, credit cards, and third mortgages her friends’ parents used to pay for their homes. Like today’s young city dwellers, California homes were far beyond my reach in 1984 and that only got worse until I left in 1991. Just like city life, almost everywhere, today. 

However, while I lived in California and didn’t have a chance in hell of owning a home there, I bought a nice, normal, very old house in a normal town in Nebraska for $5,000 cash. Over five years in California, I took occasional “vacations” to Nebraska to fix up that house until I had it in good enough shape that I could rent it. As a landlord, I made a little money, took decent tax write-offs, invested money in the property, and a decade later sold it for $15,000. Not a terrific profit, but not bad either. I have always believed in the adage that “you never want to buy the nicest house in the neighborhood.” Usually, I’ve bought the worst house in the block or neighborhood or, even, town, fixed it up, and sold it for more than I paid for it. It’s hard to describe what I’ve done in houses as “profitable,” but at least I didn’t lose a lot and had a place for my family to live. 

That isn’t something a lot of today’s young people are willing to consider suffering with. They imagine that not only should they get to live like their parents do after decades of work (without the decades of work), but they should get to live in the city of their dreams in the house of their dreams with the stuff of their dreams. 

Good luck with that. 

I recently read a book about war, from an American perspective, that described “warriors” from each succeeding generation who imagine themselves tougher than the previous generation but who fought less risky, less demanding battles, for shorter durations each generation. For example, Civil War veterans were tougher than WWI vets who were tougher than WWII vets who were harder tested than Korea or Vietnam vets and so on. I suspect that is, on average, true. Today’s military that depends on drones to take the big risks probably feels really battle hardened, but has a terrible time with third world fighters who are throwbacks to American soldiers of at least 70 years ago. 

Likewise, today’s kids act as if they are being tortured and mistreated when they are asked to perform ordinary work tasks. They have self-directed themselves into the college path to avoid growing up or having to learn manual labor skills. It turns out that electricians, welders, mechanics, technicians, and plumbers are worth a LOT more than musicians, graphic artists, anthropologists, historians, librarians, clerks, help desk phone operators, and the rest of easy liberal arts “skills.” That was true in 1960-70 and it will be true in 2050. That 54% of Boomers who didn’t attend college often found dirty jobs doing hard manual labor in dangerous conditions for long hours and they supported their families. 

When I tell kids that they wouldn’t believe the kind of crap I did to support my family, they say, “Ok, Boomer.” Then, they expect me to feel sorry for their foolish economic decisions and general low energy and motivation. I don’t. I am not the jackass whisperer. I’m 71 and I have, possibly, infinitely more days behind me than in front and fixing the future is not my job. If it was, I’d quit.

Book Review: Bullshit Jobs in A Bullshit World

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Mortem: I Just Wanted a “Family Day”

Monday 2/26/2018

My wife, Robbye, and I are having one of those classic “quiet days” after her day-long plan to drag me into the Cities for a day of being ignored by the kids, buying stuff, and waiting around for her visit to end stalled when she learned I had no interest in going. She tried the guilt trip, the anger trip, and the "I’m not talking to you” trip and we’re still in the last phase. She decided, yesterday, that she wanted to go into the Cities for a political meeting. Later, she decided she wanted to visit our daughter and her family before the meeting. Sometime after that, she started saying “we” when she described her plans and, this morning, I had to remind her that I had other plans for the day and had no interest in the 100 mile trip just so I could sit around being tolerated until she got back from the meeting. 

I’m just not into all of the family hassle any more. I’ve been everyone’s daddy for 60-some years and it hasn’t been particularly rewarding. I was a pretty terrible parent and only slightly worse as a grandparent. I tried, but I don’t have the necessary skills. I disappoint people on a constant basis, mostly because I do not understand them . . . ever. I don’t know what people want from me and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of most relationships. 

About the only line I’ve managed to draw in my life has been on funerals. Even that one gets crossed far too often. Once someone is dead, I’m convinced they no longer need anything from me and I would rather not attend funerals as a rule. I went to my step-mother and father’s funerals and those events were as baffling as being hit on the head from behind by a stranger. I don’t know why I was there or if anyone cared that I was. If my goal in life is to bring comfort to others, I’d just as soon they kill me and eat me for that purpose. 

Robbye and I are at the point in life where we are considering what we’d do if we were suddenly alone. She likes to think she’d do something independent, for the first time in her life. She imagines herself driving places towing a camper, a dog, a cat, and a house full of stuff. Or she might put all of the crap in a storage bin, where it will rot and be infested with mice, rats, and insects. The exploring part is the dream, though. I suspect she will muddle along in our Red Wing house for a year or so, get tangled up in some sort of home repair scam and lose a bucket of money, panic, and sell the house, camper, furniture, and the rest of our stuff for a huge loss and move into an assisted living facility. I like to think that I’d observe a reasonable period of mourning and hit the road. I’d probably sell the house to be sure I have nothing to come back to and simply disappear from my past life. 

The obvious directions are west or south: west coast or South America, that is. The past three years in Red Wing have made it pretty obvious that the “home” we thought we’d discovered and built is a myth. We’re about as established here as we were when we moved from Colorado to a rental house in Roseville in 1996. The “communities” that we imagined we were part of are all illusions. People say you aren’t a Minnesota resident until you are at least 3rd generation and, apparently, that is true. Likewise, once your kids no longer depend on you for support and sustainence, your relevance to their lives vanishes. That’s normal, if unexpected, and healthy for them. Sticking around to see if they might still need you is, however, insane. 

So, my wife’s dream of a “family day” is something she and we are going to have to get used to not having from here out. The kids don’t need us, probably don’t like us much, and get bored quickly when we are around. We always feel like we’re imposing when we visit them, their busy lives go on hold while they put up with us, and that’s about as satisfying as a pizza that has everything you don’t like sprinkled on top of the things you can just tolerate.

The “Havin’ Stuff” Handicap

The first kid I ever knew who “had stuff” was a guy I’ll call “Andy” (because that was his name) who had a lot of stuff, probably from the day he was born until he died. (I am assuming he is dead. Unless there was an outright miracle, he almost certainly is.) Andy’s father owned the local rural telephone company and, by the standards of the day and place, Andy’s family was rich. Even better, Andy was an only child. Our neighborhood was mostly 1950’s middle class white, but it was the “new” end of town and there was some diversity in the houses that were being built and Andy’s family lived in one of the more upscale homes in the area.

I knew Andy was “rich” because he always had stuff that nobody else in the neighborhood might ever get to see if he didn’t have it. To the point that, for a few days after the Xmas holidays the other kids in the neighborhood would sneak a hike through Andy’s alley to check out what his parents had made him throw out to make room for the toy store they’d emptied under the tree that December. To you that might sound like some serious low-life scavenging, but to us it was just good sense. For example, one winter I salvaged a non-functional go-cart from Andy’s Xmas trash. For a while, I managed to hide that cart in the weeds of an empty lot across the street and I’d drag that thing up the neighborhood hill and coast down it, over and over, until I could barely stand. I don’t remember what became of it, but I suspect my father found it and made me take the cart back where it would have either been picked up by the garbage collectors or snagged by another kid who might have made it run again. At that time, my father so effectively squashed my budding interest in all things mechanical that fixing the motor wasn’t even a consideration for me.

Andy was two or three years older than me and when he was in high school he not only had a car, but it was a British sports car (MG, Triumph, Austin-Healey, etc.) and it was brand new. He treated that car as carefully as he had the go-cart. One of the last times I hung out with Andy, he drove the car on to the practice football field, burned a few donuts in an end-zone, and tried to sneak off through a path that led from the field, past the tennis courts, along a very steep ledge that, eventually, led to the maintenance building’s parking lot. The path along the tennis courts turned out to be seriously compromised by a previously undiscovered drainage path under the courts. Andy discovered the erosion by dropping his car’s front end several feet into the collapsed path. We abandoned ship and ran for it. Andy called his dad. I did everything but calling my father and put as much distance between me and Andy as possible. Being a rich kid, there were no apparent repercussions from the public property destruction, but his father took away the sports car . . . and replaced it with a sedan or something that might be harder for Andy to squeeze on to the football field.

A decade later, visiting my parents for some holiday, I ran into Andy at the local bowling alley. He was still a rich kid, still crashing cars his father bought for him, and still “trying to find myself.” A few years later, Andy piled one of those cars into an immobile object and discovered that he was a stoppable force. At least his friends and relatives discovered that Andy was stopped, because he spent the rest of his life in a coma.

Andy is a relatively extreme example of someone who suffered the “havin’ stuff handicap,” but I have known a lot of kids who grew up with plenty and ended up with not much of a life. These days, I think I’m seeing a lot more kids who are being handicapped with stuff than those who are expected to figure some stuff out for themselves. I admit that I’m old and, maybe, I’m even wrong. However, the expectation that a 10-year-old “needs” an iPhone and unlimited phone and browser and texting time seems excessive to me. The fact that so many parents “gift” their teens with a car that is more expensive than anything I’d consider buying for myself seems irresponsible. Kids have always bawled “I wanna [something or other]” and parents have always either been able to afford to buy off the squalling brat or knock the snot out of it until it shuts up and waddles back to the assembly line to keep cranking out widgets of crawls back into the chimney and finishes the job. Today, parents seem to be inclined toward always buying off the noise-maker and I’m not convinced that is the right approach based on 60-some-years of observing outcomes.

My spouse often says “discipline is a kindness” and she is not talking about corporal punishment or standing a kid in a corner without supper. She means that instilling some sort of self-discipline in a kid is the same kind of parenting task as teaching reading and writing and other life-skills. In our small, mostly-middle class, white and privileged village, I have seen an astonishing number of kids (people under 50) who went out into the world, post-high school, failed miserably and returned to their parents’ basements to live out the rest of their days. All of these kids grew up expecting their parents to provide them with anything their shriveled little hearts desired: cars, cell phones, computers, musical instruments (yeah, I'm jealous), exotic vacation trips, private lessons and tutors, and everything that caught their attention on television or YouTube. Those expectations were relatively easy to meet when the kid was 0-18. Post-high school and college failure, those quasi-adult expectations were economically impossible for the parents to provide as they aged and their incomes declined and the kids had to settle for pretending to be music “producers,” video game “influencers,” authors without a book or publication in sight, or just underachievers waiting either for inspiration or to be recognized for their unrecognized genius. Odds are good-to-infinite that they will be disappointed for the rest of their lives and once you fall that far behind your contemporaries you are unlikely to ever catch up.

And who are they consistently falling behind? The kids who didn’t get immediate gratification from “I wanna” and had to make do with what they could make, find, or earn from their own efforts are more often than not the ones actually changing the world, starting businesses and industries, creating video games and applications and selling them to Apple or Microsoft for a few billion $, kids who are actually working musicians or artists or writers and making a living from it, and, probably, screwing up their own kids by responding to “I wanna” with stuff.

Picking and Choosing Your Science

The climate change deniers fascinate me. We know these are not people who deny science consistently, right? They pick and choose which science at which moment they will believe or disbelieve. Christian Scientists (and a tiny minority of other superstitious cults) are the only superstitious people who are even a little bit consistent. They refuse medical intervention for all health care issues, relying on prayer and luck. As a result, they die younger than the general population. Still, you have to give them some credit for actually living their beliefs and the species should thank them for their non-contributions to the gene pool as a result.

In general, though, most superstitious people hedge their bets. They might pray and even insult their healthcare practitioners by thanking gods and magic when modern medicine heals their ailments, but they accept every therapy offered without even reasonable questions. Clearly, they are terrified of death and know that prayer is just a habit; not something to be counted on. “God helps those who help themselves” they will chant, but when it comes to climate change, overpopulation, toxic air and water, mass killers in grade schools, dwindling natural resources, or even failing political and social systems, that’s when they resort to useless chants and prayers and nothing more. If that doesn’t seem inconsistent to you, you are the problem.

My favorite deluded superstitious nonsense is the dichotomy of those who rely on the daily and weekly weather report while pretending that climate scientists don’t know what they are talking about. Climate scientists are the adults among the hierarchy of people who predict weather. All of the mathematical models created to predict local and world weather (including hurricanes and winter storms) came from climate scientists. Meteorologists are the teenagers in this scientific family, simply interpreting the information provided by climate scientists for the average mindless civilian and narrowing down large scale weather observations to local predictions. The television talking heads are the family babies, unschooled or barely-educated kiddies who are too ignorant to even take the dumbed-down meteorologists’ interpretations and get that right. Worse, some of those idiots take it on themselves to make their own idiot best guesses; assuming (correctly) that anyone stupid enough to listen to their ignorant predictions will also be too damn dumb to keep track of how often they are wrong.

NOAA’s seven-day forecasts “accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time.” There is a cost to US disbelief in science and scientists. One cost is that as climate change (caused by human pollution, idiot) changes the large-scale weather actors the weather is becoming less predictable; based on past performance. The EU, Japan, China, and other nations have been investing resources on improving weather prediction models. The US has been concentrating on making the Koch’s happy by reducing federal spending on any activity that doesn’t make money for those corporate welfare halfwits; i.e. military waste. There is a half-funded “plan” to improve the US models, but it mostly depends on piggy-backing with other national algorithms to moderate errors in the obsolete US system.

Some of the best US-born climatologists are working and living outside of the US, thanks to the unscientific climate in their home country. Genetic engineers and scientists left the US for more civilized environments in the early 2000’s, alternative energy research and production moved out of the US during the hyper-pro-oil. Bush/Cheney years, and manufacturing mostly abandoned the US during the Reagan years. The pride that Trump’s “uneducated” take in their overall ignorance is a long-standing US tradition, but it cost us the headstart in space exploration in the 1950’s, the automotive industry in the 1970’s, the computer industry in the 1980’s, and today it is costing us the remains of our democracy as pseudo-conservatives are so easily bamboozled by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian trolls.

So, at the least, I recommend that superstitious folks be forced to live their professed faith. Do the world a favor and avoid scientific medical treatment, go back to riding horses since modern transportation technology uses far too much science for your tastes, stay off of the internet and cell phones, take your best guess at the weather and keep disbelieving climate scientists in all respects, and, by all means, pray that you and your children are not gunned down by other science-denying wingnuts.

The Bottom of the Water Slide

My sister, a devout traditional Christian, often asks me how I can face death believing it is the end of the road. The question baffles me. My father, for instance, who was also a fairly traditional Christian was terrified of death; especially at the end. So, obviously, faith isn’t enough of a comfort for some. Lack of faith in an afterlife, so far, has been incredibly comforting for me.

The image of life that comes to mind is the trip up and down a really large waterslide. The early stages of life, for many of us, are a long slog up a bunch of stairs to “the top,” which might not be much altitude in the end but the climb is pretty much the same for most of us. 

Growing up, education, career, family, friends, economic ups and downs, and the rest of life are all part of that climb up to the top. Mostly, it’s a slog for everyone but the very rich or very lucky. We all end up at the top, though. 

You could look at retirement being the time you spend on the platform waiting for your turn down the slide. Or maybe the years after the kids have (hopefully) moved away and into their own lives and you get to enjoy the remaining calm, productive years of your life. Some people get a couple of decades on the platform, some a few minutes, some get tossed headfirst from the top of the ladder to the slide. For many of us, the platform is particularly uncomfortable because of our fear of heights, discomfort from the long climb, 

The ride down the slide represents the moments at the end of life; often a few seconds to a minute or two as we slip from life to death. There is some research that indicates that there might be intense pain, fear, and/or hallucinations in those moments and that portions of the brain may live for as long as 10 minutes after “death.” Regardless of how much brain activity there is or how long it lasts, it will always be a tiny fraction of the lifetime we’ve lived and, as such, it’s a fast slide down into death and oblivion. 

And then the ride is over.

I do not see any of that as either scary or undesirable. Honestly, I feel like I’ve experienced more of life than I needed to see; especially life with other humans. The level of stupid that appears to be state-of-the-species is mostly depressing. This country has long worshipped corruption, greed, injustice, and outright evil and I’ve seen enough of that. The fact that there is no afterlife, no more requirement to put up with idiots and criminals, is damn comforting. In fact, it might be the best thing about being old and having more years behind than in front of me. If I had the slightest bit of doubt that there might be more of this bullshit after death, I would be far more afraid of death than I am in knowing that religion and superstition are man-made bits of bullshit designed more to control the masses than to comfort them.

Is It Socialism or Is It the Russians?

Trump and other small minds often like to point to Russia and China as examples of countries that “tried” communism and socialism and proved it to be an impossibly corruptible system. Russia, for example, has “tried” several forms of government; from kings to capitalism. Regardless of the political system Russia has tried, the end result has been a total clusterfuck. If you were being generous, you might pretend that Russia has a difficult climate which makes creating an organized society complicated to impossible. That would require ignoring all of the countries with similar or more harsh climates who have fashioned just, economically sound societies with a high quality of life. The only rational way to look at Russia’s failure to create anything resembling a decent quality of life is to acknowledge that Russians are, on average, dumb as bricks. 

Their current experiment with capitalism is a case-in-point. Without even a brief nod to economic equality and an attempt to approximate a middle class, Russia’s oligarchs quickly moved from being corrupt and rich government officials to being corrupt and rich “capitalists.” The Russian public and what passes for a working class accepted it and even applauded it. Russia’s huge military class can be told to march into a burning pit, dragging their spouses and children with them, without complaint. The Russian people, overwhelmingly, are the most gullible, passive, and corruptible collection of semi-humans on the planet. That is true to the point that if you are a white supremist and you have a spot of Russian blood in your veins, you are a walking, talking joke. 

Even fairly useful pieces of data like the unemployment rate are messed up in Russia. While the advertised unemployment rate is currently 4.9%, the facts are that Russian companies generally don’t fire employees, they just pay them less during down times. A LOT less. The alternatives are unemployment compensation of $24 to $124 a month, which is small but so is the Russian minimum wage of $175/month. As the Russian labor spokesman says, "The official unemployment benefits are mostly symbolic. . ." Russians generally don’t bother to register for benefits that barely exist, so their unemployment statistics are barely meaningful.
Russians are good at breaking things, though. While there is no evidence that Russian programmers could write a successful computer program regardless of how lucrative that could be, they are fairly competent hackers and computer thieves. Of course, their success is assisted by Putin’s little handmaiden, Trump, and the drain-swamping collection of idiots, racists, and traitors Trump and the Trumpanzees who do pretty much anything the Russian and US oligarchs tell them to do. Trump has opened up the US for Russian interference so blatantly that so-called “conservatives” weren’t even upset when the FBI’s cybersecurity brain-trust resigned rather than go along with Trump’s collusion. So far, it appears to be impossible for Trump and gang to do anything that will put off his loyal fans. He wasn’t joking or exaggerating when he said he could kill someone and those idiots would stick with him. 

All that said, nothing about the failure of socialism and/or communism in Russia reflects badly on either economic system. Russians can’t do anything well, let alone manage a social system that relies on competence, social justice, economic equality, and democratic principles to offset the natural human tendencies toward entropy and corruption. If you want to honestly look at functional socialist nations, you need to be making comparisons with Finland, Iceland, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. Picking the dumbest, most corrupt and mismanaged failed states to compare against ourselves might be gratifying, but that is not information if you are looking for actual data about which economic system supports and provides the best quality of life, democratic values, social and economic equality, and is most sustainable.