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

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

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

This is the crowd that, exemplified by Elon Musk, think that philanthropy, empathy, and community are obsolete concepts. If you want to put a circle around the people who have caused the United States to become a lawless trash can of fools and degenerates, this is the group you put your focus on.

A few days ago, I was talking with a friend and we were trying to determine when our police departments quit cracking down on illegal exhaust systems. Where he and I live, the noise level is often bad enough to make us decide to pack up and move to someplace quieter. When I was a kid, 60 years ago, every young man who owned a motorized vehicle, from scooters to cars, worried about the smallest pin-holes in their exhaust systems. Any sort of unmuffled sound would get them stopped, ticketed, and it might even result in the vehicle being confiscated; if it was the second or third time they’ve been stopped for that offense. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most states performed emissions testing, which included visual inspection of vehicles’ intake and exhaust systems for illegal modifications. When that ended, so did anything resembling law enforcement of vehicle noise laws. Today, it’s impossible to tell the difference between a modified, aftermarket exhaust system and a straight pipe on a huge number of vehicles of all sorts, including vehicles that are absolutely illegal on public streets, regardless of exhaust system condition. Since I still read about cops making house calls when neighbors make a disturbing the peace complaint, I know the country hasn’t gone stone deaf. We have just gone stone lawless. When, and why, did that happen?

The answer to almost every question in these United States can be found by following the money. And there is certainly lots of money to be found in the illegal exhaust business. But that doesn’t explain why people want that kind of lawlessness, and they seem to want it in large quantities. First the Nixon Administration (with a major impeachment threat setback) and, then, the Reagan Administration demonstrated that the nation’s laws do not apply to the rich and powerful. I will always believe that everything in human culture is driven top-down and that doubly applies for criminal behavior. When the average Joe Douchebag saw that the people who run the federal government were unimpeded by any sort of ethics limitations and were filling their pockets with anything they could steal, he decided those same rules applied to him.

For more than 60 years, I thought the American Constitution was the closest thing to a sacred document, at least related to governments, that humans had ever created. Then, I read it cover-to-cover several times in 2013 and 14, when I was trapped in a New Mexico Campground with a broken Volkswagen camper. Even not considering all the lines drawn through slavery protections, it’s not a very organized or impressive document. The Declaration of Independence, the thing we are supposedly celebrating today, is even more flawed. Ignoring the fact that the document only acknowledges that “all (white) men” are “endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” a good bit of this celebrated document embedded vicious racism in the origins of the country. The declaration’s final complaint being that the king refused to protect the European invaders from “. . . the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The North American European invasion history that followed that document is best described as the largest, most ruthless, and blatantly racist genocidal campaign in human history. Add that to the lined-out provisions in the Constitution protecting and furthering slavery and we should probably be having a moment of silence rather than a raucous, drunken, fireworks-detonating celebration of 250 years of mortification and greed.

That isn’t, of course, who we are today. Instead, we are a nation divided and on the edge of another civil war. Our federal government has been dumbed-down to accurately reflect the lowest-common-denominator in our culture. After 250 years of trying to find the least-fit person to hold the office of Presidency, it’s hard to imagine moving that bar any lower. Donny Trump’s rampant corruption, narcissism, mental deficiencies, and vile amoral behavior is a sad and scary reflection on who so many of our countrymen and women are today. I don’t know about you, but I’m not celebrating this moment today. I’m going to spend this day and evening at home with Ms. Day and my thoughts and hope that next year is better. Or, at least, not worse.

The hands-down worst neighbors I have ever experienced or heard about were all in the Midwest. Awful fucking people who were ripe for the picking by a 34-time convicted felon. He was just their kind of boy: a rapist, a con man, an ignorant, uneducated rich kid who had never done a useful thing in his life, a narcissist, and an unrepentant, compulsive liar. Trump may have been a New York guy, but he was made for the Midwest. He is exactly what his voters want to grow up to be.

Spend 15 minutes in any small town, Midwestern bar and you’ll find yourself surrounded by people exactly like him. My career as in electronics technician began when I worked for a couple of agricultural equipment manufacturers, servicing electronic equipment all over the Midwest: From Iowa to Colorado and North Dakota to Texas and Louisiana. With few exceptions, when I needed to find an equipment owner to make a decision or to pay a bill, I always looked for them in the local bars. I am exactly the wrong person to talk to, if you want to brag about how hard working farmers are. That was not my experience in 10 years of dealing with those people. But earth salters? I know about those guys.

In the Old Testament, God (back when he regularly showed his magical face to the dumbest animal on the planet) declared that when the Israelites defeated their enemies, they would scatter salt over the land as a sign of their victory (Judges 9:45): “All that day Abimelek pressed his attack against the city until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it.” I guess he was practicing for the Eurotrash invasion of the middle of the North American continent? The religious right must see Trump as the second-coming of Abimelek (a Philistine king of Gerar and a ruthless, self-proclaimed king of Israel). Christians celebrate and worship the weirdest shit.

The first rational explanation of who the people I have lived among for more than 65 years was in Blazing saddles, when The Waco Kid explained to Sheriff Bart, “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.”

Nevertheless, I spent the first 25 years of my life imagining that there was something special about the “Midwestern work ethic.” I heard about that fabled quality from practically everyone in my life and television and movies regularly reinforced that delusion. I was well into my twenties when a series of accidents and a rescue in the Grand Canyon blew up all of those stereotypes. I fairly accurately described this story, 50 years later, in a blog post titled “The Emergency,” when I was selflessly rescued from being either trapped on the last few miles of the hike out of the Grand Canyon by a pair of hikers from the right and left coast (California and New York). That incident and others led to my moving my family to southern California in 1983 where I discovered how really fucking awful the Midwest really is. (I also discovered that I don’t have what it takes to keep up with Californians, economically or in many other ways. Midwesterners look like statues compared to the California work ethic.) The key attraction to California is that, whoever you are, you can be your best-self there without fear or worry. Conformity, a Midwestern requirement, isn’t a thing in the California beach communities.

Back in the Midwest, in a Minnesota small town, I have been recently reminded of how awful this place can be. Our current neighbors-from-hell are a pack of Wisconsin trailer trash who squatted in a condemned house that any self-respecting city would have torn down a decade ago. My current hometown, however, is desperate for any sort of property taxpayer to support the local overpaid, deadbeat city bureaucrats and to keep taxes low for the old money, ruling elite. It has been a while since I’ve suffered really awful neighbors and it has been “enlightening.” So much that at nearly 80-years-old, we are seriously considering moving, again. Honestly, the privacy-disrespecting, noisy, difficult, white-trash neighbors are just the fuse that lit the bomb. Their ability to expose and flaunt the lawlessness of this town made us re-examine the place we live and that examination has not been encouraging. There are some wonderful, liberal and progressive, educated, hard-working, decent people here, but that is not typical of the community. The majority is, like most rural areas, the below-average intelligence half of the population and history has repeatedly demonstrated that is a dangerous crowd to be among.

Nixon and Reagan started fastening the coffin shut 40-50 years ago. By expanding the Vietnam War without Congressional approval and weaponizing the dumbest half of the population against the institutions, standards, ethics, and laws of the nation, Nixon began the countdown to empire collapse. Even though Nixon paid a small price for his corruption and fascist moves, his minions (the entire Reagan Administration) exacted a price that really started the nation’s decline. In eight chaotic, noisy, distracted years, Reagan trashed the integrity of the nation’s media, flipped the tax system to penalize talent, work, and usefulness as opposed to inheritance and financial gambling, formalized treason as a political tool, created an unsustainable national debt, and convinced the nation’s Marching Morons to repeatedly vote against their own interests. Trump is the logical end result of the kind of self-serving, short-sighted, downright evil “businessman” politics that fascists have promoted since the Roman Empire. History repeatedly demonstrates that always results in the same conclusion.

As Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, described earlier this year at Davos, the world is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition . . . [and that the] middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” That our once-closest friend and neighbor is now warning the world that the United States is as unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous as the other major world powers (Russia and China) is as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described “uncharacteristically candid both for Davos and a Canadian.” The Carnegie Endowment document said that Carney had “laid out, for all to hear, the catastrophic implications of Washington’s current policies for global order and signaled that at least one erstwhile ally is prepared not only to hedge against an unpredictable and predatory United States, but, if need be, to balance against it.” For the world, this is not a bad thing. The United States has been an irrational force in the world since the turn of the last century when our government became little more than a military tool of corporations. How our country has been perverted into a front for uniformed armed mobsters was eloquently described in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, “It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And in the next 93 years, nothing has changed except for the worse. The best estimates are that the United States has successfully overthrown somewhere between 14 to 26 foreign governments (estimates, because our government’s actions are far from transparent). Despicably, 6 to 10 of those covert, military international interventions were against a democratically elected government. And not a one of those intrusions was, as General Butler said, for the “two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.” It’s time that the rest of the civilized world (the one we’ve abandoned) treats the United States as a threat, not a dependable ally.

As Trump, Musk, and Theil’s minions wandered through the ranks of the federal government, purging “disloyal” (i.e. “competent”) federal employees from every institution from the Department of Education to the CDC to the military, the country has been dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator in one painful, ignorance-filled, destructive year. I doubt that anyone thought the country’s intellectual capacity was that fragile, but here we are. In February of 2025, when Musk’s DOGE idiots were plowing through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, one of the recently purged scientists described the damage done as a national intellectual “extinction event.” That kind of destruction has been perpetrated across the federal government and the only thing Musk and Trump proved is that even total fools can break practically everything. At the other end of that demonstration, they proved that total fools aren’t even capable of painting a shallow concrete pool.

Sadly, I’ve had plenty of experience with this kind of foolishness at a much lower level. Unskilled, lucky fools who stumble their way to the top of the corporate ladder rarely know how little they contribute to the organizations they mismanage. In their ignorance and arrogance, they plod through functioning organizations like hippos in a china shop, breaking stuff and spreading shit everywhere in the process. Today, we’re experiencing that phenomena on a national level and the right reaction from the world is to gain as much distance—socially, economically, politically, and militarily—as possible from this train wreck of a nation. The long term goal of the world should be to do whatever is necessary to disarm the United States before Trump or some other idiot starts pressing red buttons.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department has created an international perception of being little more than a unidentifiable, random-uniformed, masked, over-armed, brutal, lawless, gang of Trump’s thugs who enjoy beating up, arresting, or murdering anyone who gets in their way. Their role in “law enforcement” is about as clear as their 1941 SS and Brown-Shirt German counterparts demonstrated at the beginning of the German fascist catastrophe. The only “friends” these goons have are the other worst-of-the-worst uneducated, unintelligent, unemployable white people who will happily and proudly guzzle whatever Kool-Aid Trump pours for them and Russia’s Republican useful idiots, squatting in Congress, doing whatever treasonous, criminal acts Putin and Netanyahu tell them to do. That’s not a sustainable marketing plan.

There are targets that Trump’s goon squad could be aimed at that would thoroughly distract the public’s attention from the awful, un-Constitutional things they are doing. For example, the old FBI (back when they were, marginally, involved in law enforcement) estimated that there are about 44,000 gang members spread across 300-3,000 Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) littered across the United States. The nation’s impotent and timid “law enforcement agencies” have quietly labeled the largest of these groups “organized crime syndicates.” All of these characters are easily identified by the pointless, peace-disturbing noise they make and the “rolling bowling pin” crowds of unskilled “Biker Santas” plodding down highways, jamming up traffic, and crashing randomly. What if ICE pretended to be actual “law enforcement,” just some of the time, and targeted these useless sacks of fat-marbled meat for PR purposes?

Shooting VA hospital nurses and harmless moms in their cars creates a bad image for ICE, but blasting the shit out of a couple dozen biker assholes could turn that around instantly. Assuming the ICE goons clean up their mess, afterwards, of course. Imagine Trump’s weird banty rooster, Bovino, posing over a pile of dead bikers with a bulldozer shoveling the bikes into a ditch behind him. The ICE goons could wear cowboy hats, military helmets, or even full-on clown suits and they’d still get near universal approval for their performance. Bovino would be up for a Presidential medal of something-or-other instead of hanging out with a bunch of washed up fascists at a cartoonish “remigration” summit in Figueira Foz, Portugal. Tim Waltz might even say something nice about him if ICE had wiped out a Minnesota nest of Outlaws or Hell’s Angels.

It’s probably true that an occasional dentist or lawyer dresses up like Sonny Barger and blubbers through his neighborhood posing as a tough guy biker. After a couple of rounds with ICE hitting the news cycle, shown mowing down a bar full of half-witted biker Santas, the dentists and lawyers will crawl back to their country clubs and go back to posing as rich, single guys in Miatas, BMW M2s, and vintage Corvettes. Their overpriced, underpowered, noise-maker Harley’s will continue doing what they do best, drooling oil on the garage floor.

If ICE mismanagement really wants to change the department’s public perception from a pack of untrained, cowardly, goons with no useful purpose to actual law enforcement, this is the shortest path to that goal. Start gunning down bikers and anyone else with illegal exhaust systems[1] and the department will, overnight, go from being universally hated to being cheered where ever they go. And, let’s face it, nobody will notice if every asshole biker on the planet disappeared tomorrow. It’s not like they have ever contributed anything but fear, noise, stupidity, drugs and violence to the nation’s problems.

[1] Every state in the Union has similar laws to Minnesota’s 325E.0951 MOTOR VEHICLE AIR POLLUTION CONTROL SYSTEMS rule, which states:

“(a) A person may not knowingly tamper with, adjust, alter, change, or disconnect any air pollution control system on a motor vehicle or on a motor vehicle engine.

“(b) A person may not manufacture, advertise, offer for sale, sell, use, or install a device that causes any air pollution control system not to be functional as designed.

“(c) A person may not sell or transfer a motor vehicle with knowledge that any air pollution control system is either not in place or is not functional.”

A 2016 novel, The People’s House, by David Pepper, is an exploration of how and why Republicans and Russians could, and probably did, pervert a national election, stacking the House of Representatives with even more Russian shills and turning the old Midwest into a cesspool of fraking environmental damage. The novel’s Russian antagonist’s tactic accomplished this goal by manipulating the electronic voting machines of a former-US company his shell company purchased. We’ve already been here in 2000 and 2024, but the method the book’s investigators used to determine how the electronic voting data could be corrupted is the point in this essay.

The book’s investigators compared the data from mail-in votes (hard copy) to the electronic votes and found that the electronic votes were substantially different in the down-ballot elections. Herr Trump has been making a lot of noise about eliminating mail-in votes. Wonder why? Mail-in votes are hard copy and can be verified, examined, and recounted, while all electronic votes are no more verifiable and honest than Trump and Russian crypto-currency. A lot of Americans assume the 2024 election was stolen by Elon Musk for his Russian buddies and, secondarily, for Trump and the Republicans. Trump is mounting an all-out attack on mail-in voting with over-the-top idiocy, “Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible. Democrats want to use it for cheating.” This was the kind of crap Trump had been spewing, leading up to signing an executive order aimed at restricting mail-in voting and restricting voting access to MAGA culters.

Any idiot would know that we have a lot more to worry about with unmonitored electronic voting and Republicans often get snagged and, sometimes, convicted of illegal voting. As always, with Republicans “every accusation is a confession.”

So far, the “Spring: High” outcomes have been largely positive for Anglo-Americans. As they say in investment warnings, “Past performance is no indication of future performance.” We’ve been lucky to this point, but nothing about our system of half-hearted-democracy and a non-representational republic combination of oligarchy and kleptocracy has given the country any sort of moral or ethical advantage. Our long history of superstition/religion, racism and inequality have done exactly the opposite and it is likely and justified that Anglo-Americans might very well end up at the bottom of the economic and political heap as a result.

So many things about this past dozen years have been labeled “extinction events”: of course climate change is at the top of the list, but the last year’s losses have more specifically been the nation’s ability to contribute to weather prediction, NASA’s capabilities and contributions, medical research, industrial and technological research and development, and national security. One of the many things that the thick-headed crowd don’t understand is how complicated the world has become. With human knowledge doubling every year and the volume of doubling every day or less, falling behind today has huge consequences. The vast difference between the education and capabilities of the average citizen in blue states vs red is stunning. There are claims that some red states are actually driving education reform. But the data is shaky. In fact, having lived in several red states, and currently living in a red part of a blue state, I doubt the validity of their education claims. One of the lessons learned in researching teams is that, in clinical hospital settings (for example), the teams that reported the highest number of “errors” also had the best surgical outcomes. As you might expect if you’ve ever worked in a team, teams mismanaged by the worst leaders were afraid to report errors and, in those hospital situations, that produced higher patient injury and mortality events. But they looked good, on paper, until you examined the paper. Likewise, knowing the political climate of red states, I doubt that anyone down the chain (teachers, for example) are feeling free to be truthful about educational outcomes.

I’m currently reading Andrew Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation and the similarities to this moment are startling. From corporate monopolies to direct financial ties between the 1% hyper-rich elites and government officials (elected and not) to a general atmosphere of moral and ethical corruption, top-to-bottom, to the morally ambiguous public tolerating and participating in the corruption, history is repeating itself. Another way to look at the cyclic curve is the chart below. It shouldn’t make you feel better or worse, it’s just the same data displayed another way.

This is all just a numerical way to remind us that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and the rest of us are condemned to watch the same stupid shit happen again. I suspect that, when Americans were in those three earlier periods of “unraveling” and “crisis,” it was hard to cling to hope for a positive future. It certainly is today. From every direction, the news and the dependability of the news sources is degrading. Not only are the stories awful, but the reporters are even worse.

But, also, the reason we’re in this bad-neighbor issue is because the city of Red Wing is mismanaged by a part-time City Council and a full-time and grotesquely overpaid bureaucracy who don’t do their jobs. The neighbor from hell property was abandoned for more than 15 years and, since it was abandoned with the whole back side of the house roof unfinished and a large shop roof that collapsed, it should have been condemned and destroyed by the city. It wasn’t: because our city inspector is about as energetic as a block of wood and, as long as the absentee owner paid his property taxes, the county was bribed to do nothing. As always, incentives are everything when it comes to humans.

We did some house hunting this past weekend. Two of my target cities are Rochester and Northfield, Minnesota. Yesterday, we spent several hours going from one listing to another, checking out the neighborhoods. We are looking for what is, apparently, an odd property: a small footprint, two bedroom and two baths, reasonably energy efficient house near a quiet downtown area. And pretty much everyone who has a house that fits that criteria ain’t going anywhere.

Up to this point, you would be rational in assuming this is going to be a Rat’s Eye View rant. But you’d be wrong.

There was one house on my list that ticked every single box and I was really looking forward to seeing it. As we approached the neighborhood, the bicycle trail that ran parallel to the street was almost packed with walkers, joggers, and bicyclists. Bear Creek runs next to the bicycle trail and it looked absolutely kayakable and easily accessible. Despite that “traffic,” the neighborhood is reasonably quiet. My hopes were rising. The house is a four bedroom, three bath, brick home with a small, very manageable yard, and a really nice back deck with a fully fenced backyard. But I barely looked at the house before telling Ms. Day “this ain’t it.”

The house next door was a large, white box building with a highly customized Harley piece of two-wheeled garbage parked right next to the front door. There are a few things on earth that are a bigger red flag than a customized Harley. I instantly knew why the house we were looking at had been on the market for more than 80 days and the price had dropped three times. I knew why the people who were selling that house desperately wanted to leave. I wish them good luck, but the only people they are likely to find interested in that house would be another biker gangbanger. And, usually, that demographic doesn’t have enough money to pay rent let alone fund a house down payment.

And we’re in a similar boat with our home. The people who bought the next-door hell-house instantly cut down a backyard full of trees and, because there is no equipment access to their backyard, decided they were going to use a wood chipper to grind up a small forest. This guy is on full Railroad Pension Disability, supposedly due to long-COVID. In the meantime, the garage right next to our property has a collapsed roof and has been condemned by the city. And in Red Wing, condemning a property means absolutely nothing. They are still storing vehicles in the garage and it is obviously a fire trap. Neither the city or the county cares and won’t until it burns down and causes a major neighborhood disaster or someone wanders into that garage and gets injured. At one time, around 2006-2008, the deceased owner’s nephews cooked meth in the house until . . . something, I don’t know what, shut that business down. Supposedly, the meth chemicals still provide an essence to the house. And, did I mention, there is a POS cruiser parked in the collapsing garage. Of course, there is.

As a member of the Vietnam War generation, the holiday has always had a mixed message. As a dumb, frustrated, rural western Kansas kid who thought his options were played out after a couple of miserable community college semesters, I tried to join the Navy when I was 18, in late 1966. As I’ll describe later, my father was a WWII Navy officer and, sans-the-officer credential, I was sort of following in his footsteps. I didn’t know I had asthma, but the Navy decided I was physically unfit for service and reclassified me to 1Y. Between the spring, when I signed up, and fall, when I was supposed to be inducted, I’d been reading David Halberstam’s New York Times Vietnam reports and he’d convinced me that I didn’t want anything to do with that war. I spent the next 6 years doing what I could to end that fiasco.

Several of my friends didn’t have my luck. Louis Dorsey was the first of several friends who didn’t return from Vietnam. Some that did come back weren’t much better off than those who did. One of the most talented, physically gifted friends I’ve ever had, Don Vest, died at 73 in 2021, but he spent too much of his life trying to find his way back from the horrors of Vietnam. The last time I saw him, probably sometime around 1982, he was not the same guy I’d known in more ways than I can describe.

My father finished his Business BA before he was inducted into the US Navy. As his obituary explained, “Fred entered the U.S. Navy in 1942. He was in Midshipmen’s school at Columbia University in New York and received his commission as Ensign in February of 1943. He was sent to North Africa as a small boat officer. Fred was involved in landings at Licata, Sicily; Salerno, Italy; Anzio, Italy; and Southern France. He served as a Gunnery Officer aboard the carrier CVE 80 Petrof Bay.” All of those landings were perilous, but “Southern France” was Normandy, D-Day and the “small boat” was an LST (Landing Ship, Tank). I had no idea how awful his Navy time was, until he suddenly told me the story of his LST war career sometime around 2005 when he was 86-years-old and I was 57, and we were on our way to a college basketball tournament..

Normandy Invasion, June 1944

Before that day, I didn’t know Americans actually crossed the ocean in those glorified flatboats. I always figured they loaded them on to battleships or something and dropped them into the ocean a mile or two from shore. The invasion ships travelled in a great convoy, under the assumption that there is some sort of “safety in numbers” or the “strategy” was something as simple as “if we send off thousands of those silly ships, at least a few of them will get through.” He and four other sailors and about 50 Marines crossed the Atlantic to North Africa, then to Italy, and finally to Normandy. Dad, being a farmboy from eastern Kansas, didn’t know anything about boats and was never gifted with any mechanical skills, a sense of direction or celestial navigation skills, and he had no idea how to captain a ship. In his telling of the story, the other four sailors carried his mostly-useless ass across the ocean and through the first three landings. It really sounded like they put a seat in the front of the boat and told him to “sit there and stay out of the way.”

None the less, it was a complicated story with a high-seas, mid-crossing engine overhaul and, after the relatively easy crossing to North Africa and that invasion, another LST pilot, of higher rank, “claimed” Dad’s boat and dumped Dad’s crew with a near-wreak of a ship and not enough time to do the work. Dad’s crew apparently knew what they were doing and they managed to hang on to that boat until Normandy. Same boat, same 4-man crew, same 50 Marines. On the first pass into Normandy Beach, when the gate dropped for the Marines to run out into the fight, at least half of the group were killed before they made it off of the gate and the rest didn’t even make it to the beach before they were machine-gunned down.

Dad’s LST escaped the beach and returned to the armada, where they were supposed to get in the back of the queue of LSTs waiting to get more soldiers and equipment into the war. And this is where a lifelong prejudice of my father grew wings and claws. The 2^nd wave of LSTs were piloted by British officers and crews. According to my father, for many of the politically-connected British officers, that was an unearned “reward” for having been in the fight before the USA joined the Allies. Dad told me that the US Navy watched the British-crewed LSTs dump US Marines hundreds of yards from the Normandy beach, at gunpoint, sending them to their deaths by drowning, heavily laden with a combat load of equipment and ammunition. From then on, US-crewed LSTs started jumping the queue, in front of the British crews, risking their lives and trying to save US Marines from drowning pointlessly.

The story got vague at this point. Years ago, I looked up Dad’s LST and Navy career on the Navy’s website, but all of the links I’d attached to the article I wrote back then are dead now. Dad never, once, pretended that he was the “officer in charge” of his boat. He always made it clear that he was little more than a special passenger. His boat, however, made three trips to the Normandy beach. Watch the first few minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” to get a feel for what that was like. It is especially compelling/terrifying in surround sound. As far as I know, Dad hated everything about the United Kingdom for the rest of his life: and BOTH of his parents were British immigrants.

I have always been a bit baffled by his lack of relationships with the four men he served with on that LST. He never did any of the usual veterans’ stuff, other than maintaining a membership at the local American Legion Club, because that is where he played golf. For many summers, he was an accountant for a local manufacturer: Mayrath Manufacturing. For several of those summers, one of the guys who’d been in his LST crew was a Mayrath’s assembly-line welder, but Dad said they never spoke to each other, ever. When we were kids, Dad let my brother and I play with all of his Navy paraphernalia: clothing, medals, and anything else that caught our eye. When I was in my early-twenties, I converted his khaki officer’s jacket to a full-on hippy suit coat, with peace signs and British motorcycle patches and my wife’s artwork. My grandson has that coat now. Dad made a “respect” joke when he saw it “finished,” but he didn’t seem to care.

Far too late in both of our lives, I realized that he had suffered incredible damage in his WWII experiences. Then, a dozen years after he came back to his “real life,” the love of his life, the reason he did everything that he did to stay alive, my mother, died of cancer in 1957 at 36-years-old. I was almost 9-years-old and my brother was 6. Dad came unglued and I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that awful blow. Maybe, none of us did.

25 years earlier, I had been working as an engineer for an Agricultural Equipment Company and, on the side, I was trying to start an audio services and equipment company with a friend. We called that company “Wirebender Audio Systems.” So, my day job was designing, testing and developing, and troubleshooting some fairly weird and complicated electronic control systems for guiding half-mile long center-pivot irrigation systems. And my nearly full-time Friday through Monday morning dream job was running a recording studio, a live sound company, and an audio systems installations business.

There was only one place where those two very different vocations met: the agricultural equipment company often installed large, noisy diesel-powered generator systems close to suburban housing developments or at the edges of small towns. This would be in the late 1970s, when there were still some rules about disturbing the peace, unnecessary noise, and the sort of thing that no longer exists in this rapidly collapsing empire. So, one of the tasks I was given was to design an acoustic enclosure to contain a substantial amount of the noise (~30dB_SPL) those diesel motors generated. Other than the very rudimentary acoustic background that most musicians have a slight grip on and a bit more information I had collected in building our recording studio facilities, I knew very little about acoustics. Lucky for me, every other engineer in the company knew nothing. So, I got the assignment. Those were also the days before most companies employed consultants for every out-of-the-ordinary assignment.

It seems hard to imagine today, but there was a period when large, profitable American companies, relatively willingly, provided education resources for employees. And my employer was no different. To assist me in background for the assignment, the company paid for about 12 hours (three classes) of acoustics-oriented physics courses at the University of Nebraska and several out-of-state industry seminars including four days of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) national meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Today, there are several companies that specialize in prefab acoustic isolation enclosures, although not many are intended for four-season outdoor applications. And absolutely none of them would have fallen into the budget that I was given for the fabrication I had to design. I wish I had at least one picture of one of the finished enclosures, but the designs were proprietary and back in the film days I didn’t take many pictures. At least for me, that experience turned into a lot more than a one-off industrial construction design.

One of the half-dozen routes I went for earning a living after leaving medical devices, was acoustic consulting. The Twin Cities was a dumb place for a 53-year-old to start that kind of career, since there were a plethora of actual acoustic experts there at that time. But, I found a niche and several of those local experts turned out to be incredibly helpful, generous, and a few became good friends. My membership in ASA and some of the connections I made there didn’t hurt, either.

One of those lucky friendships, David Berg from Orfield labs, recommended me to Bob Feldman, the owner of Red House Records. Bob was trying to help the Cedar Cultural Center with acoustic problems in their performance hall. I have been retired since mid-2013 and I haven’t done much of anything that wasn’t purely recreational since retirement. Today it’s hard, even for me, to remember how incredibly hectic and chaotic a good bit of my life was back then. That is as close as I can come to an excuse for not knowing why the project with Bob and the Cedar fell off of my radar.

Bob’s big focus was to make some quick improvements to the facility before Tony Rice and his group—The Tony Rice Unit with Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, and Todd Phillips—performed and recorded at the Cedar sometime between late 2001 and 2004. (Sorry, I can’t nail it down any tighter than that, date-wise.) There wasn’t much we could do in a short time that would even be musically noticeable, let alone an actual improvement. There was a lot less we could do with the almost non-existent budget the Cedar had for acoustic treatments. So, that project fell into the background noise of my life.

I had the really special opportunity to work with Bob on two Red House artists’ concerts and the Tony Rice show and I did some work on one song for a Red House compilation record. It never felt like work with Bob. He loved the music, the venue, the audiences, and the artists and that feeling was infectious. I either didn’t know or had forgotten that Bob died in early 2006. He was only 56 and two years younger than me. When this story started to form in my mind, I fully expected to see that Bob was retired or still going strong. So, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t and that Red House Records was no longer a Minnesota label, as of 2017. 2017 was obviously a bad year for many things.

The fact is, it would be difficult for any rational society to create a more fucked-up mess of a government than did our “founding fathers.” Those self-infatuated, 3^rd tier, elite boys were more concerned with protecting the institution of slavery, which was rapidly falling out of favor in the rest of the world, and the idle-rich lifestyle of slaveowners than creating a democratic government that would flourish and last. As a result, the US has been plagued with corrupt corporations and vile, spoiled nepo-baby “businessmen” for the country’s entire lifetime. Trump and the refuse who populate his mis-named “administration” are just the latest in a long line of ruling class idiots.

The obvious thing about these two Texas maps is that Republicans are convinced that their voters are so stupid and cultish that their votes can be taken for granted, no matter how badly Republican foolishness and corruption treats them. Inflation, national bankruptcy, wall-to-wall corruption, desecration of national monuments, war, even world war with a universal draft and without a single rational, competent, responsible ally from our nation’s 250-year history haven’t made a dent in their loyal infatuation.

The Republican Motto is clearly H.L. Menken’s “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people,” commonly shortened to “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.” The other obvious thing about these maps is that the state’s stupid, self-destructive people are concentrated (to abuse that word) in the vast, unpopulated, uneducated, unemployed and poor rural hinterlands of Texas.

That same analysis holds true for Florida. Florida Republicans had already isolated the few educated, intelligent, and decent voters from the bulk of the awful people who call themselves Republicans. But their latest gerrymandering is blatantly assuming everyone who ever voted Republican is a total fucking moron and, again, couldn’t be knocked out of the cult with a sledgehammer.

The old political saying is “liberals fall in love and conservatives fall in line.” Today, with what passes for “conservatives” totally infatuated with the MAGA cult and Donald Trump’s mobster administration, “love” and “falling in line” have merged into the dumbest political movement in American history; and we’ve had some really dumb moments in our awful 250-year history. If there is any hope, any comeback from this pitiful moment in time, it is likely going to be from another plague. This time there won’t be any medical backup from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, which was instrumental in developing vaccines and getting the country ready to distribute that technology when Trump’s Ship of Fools left the government in 2021. This time, Democrats won’t be back in power in time to stop the plague from running its course. Trump has practically dismantled the NIH and anything resembling the federal government’s ability to respond to any national health crisis. Hegseth has dumbed-down the military to Fox News “standards” and the country is ripe for another pandemic; natural or man-made. In fact, our nation is less secure in every way than any time in modern history. And that may be the nation’s only hope for restoration, after a hundred million or more die on the pedestal of stupidity.

So, for what they’re worth, keep your vaccination record up-to-date, stock up on N95 masks and hand sanitizer, and keep your cupboard stocked with at least a few weeks’ worth of up-to-date canned and dry goods staples. One way or another, we’re going to be in for a lot of wild times and they aren’t likely to be much fun.

Using that logic, before I made it to my first birthday I was zero-years-old. I guess if you are really pro-abortion that makes sense. You’d have a whole year, plus the initial nine months, to decide to keep or abort the kid. “Hey, he was zero-years-old when I tossed him in a sack and threw him off of a bridge. Not even alive yet.”

I’m a sort-of-math-teacher’s kid (my father never managed to get a Masters in Mathematics) and that kind of rounding error irritates me. I will admit that even after living with a woman who really loves holidays for almost 59 years, especially birthdays, that I’m not a big fan. My childhood family, as it were, didn’t make much of birthdays. We didn’t do birthday parties and birthday “gifts” were usually socks and underwear with, maybe, one toy, until I was 10 and had a paper route that gave me the cash to buy my own toys. I don’t remember feeling particularly deprived, so that was probably the usual birthday acknowledgement for the neighborhood. There was one “rich kid” who lived a couple of blocks away who got birthday and Xmas presents that the rest of us could barely imagine. The rest of the Spanky and Our Gang bunch of us watched his alley for throwaways for weeks after his birthday. My first motorized “vehicle” came into my life that way, a gocart with a fried motor. I never did get the motor working, but I entertained myself just pushing the cart up a steep hill and riding it back down over ramps and around obstacles in the road.

I know our daughters were often confused by the giant difference in their parents’ appreciation of birthdays. I tried to keep up with Ms. Day, but I was just fakin’ it. I really didn’t know what the big deal was until our younger daughter’s 13^th birthday. She and Ms. Day had planned a big day at Disneyland, something we didn’t do often, even though we lived about 30 minutes from the park. It was a weekend and in the 80s banks didn’t stay open on Saturday or Sunday. I’d had my usual grossly over-extended California work week and hadn’t thought much about the weekend until Saturday morning. We all packed up and headed east for the park, with an ATM stop on the way. Even though Bank of America was well-known to be customer-hostile in those days (like today), that was my bank and, when the ATM swallowed my debit card without giving me a dollar (or, even, a receipt) for the effort, it wasn’t really a surprise.

In an instant, the day was ruined. I didn’t have enough cash on me to buy us all a McDonald’s breakfast, let alone the $200+ that a day at Disneyland would cost. Three girls were waiting for me in the car, full of anticipation, and I was about to let them down, again. To cut myself a little slack, I was always running on empty in California. Those were days of the Reagan “Economic Miracle,” double-digit inflation, the economy was barely squeaking along at 2.3% growth, unemployment was low in California but astronomically high everywhere else, our household expenses were dangerously close to my income, and I always felt like I was one paycheck away from failing us all and moving into a cardboard box under a bridge. I was managing a small manufacturing company, going to college at night, and, usually, hustling a couple of one-man businesses most weekends. I had no emotional or physical reserves to spare for, even, a stupid, unavoidable failure like a defective ATM transaction.

I drove us back home, probably in silence. Ms. Day and the girls probably didn’t understand what had happened. I’m sure it was obvious that I was disappointed and angry, but it probably wasn’t obvious that I was angry at myself for letting this happen. This was exactly the kind of thing that scared me about being a parent, from the moment Ms. Day told me she was pregnant, and often kept me from enjoying the experience. My jobs, my life, had been about anticipating and averting failure and disaster, but focusing on the possible break-points had become my default attitude. Even when things went well, I quickly moved past success to anticipating the next crash. And, in that moment, a disaster I hadn’t anticipated had caught me without a Plan B (or my usual C through Z) and I crashed and burned.

It shouldn’t have been something that caused me to stop functioning, but it did. I ended up sitting in the bathroom, on the floor of the shower, decimated. I don’t know how long I sat there, but the birthday girl, Genya, came into the bathroom and sat on the floor beside me. “Dad, aren’t you glad I was born?” In that moment, I finally understood why we celebrate birthdays. Before that, I had been faking it, just pretending to know what our family celebrations were about. In spite of all of the weight that I felt as the sole support for my family, my love for her was overwhelming. I collected myself and kickstarted the day, again. Fortunately, Disneyland stays open till 11PM, so we still had some time. I don’t remember what I did to find the money for our little birthday party, but I did. I probably sold something or called in a favor from one of my customers or just collected an overdue bill. Whatever, we spent the day at Disneyland and I spent the day being glad that Genya was my daughter and that she loved me in spite of all of my failures and ignorance.

I have had a different feeling about birthdays since then. I will still round off my age to the higher number after about mid-January, I often round 78 to 80. But I know why people care about birthdays. I don’t care how you count the years. It’s a personal thing and, if you think clinging to the last birthday number till the actual day you were born keeps you young, go for it. I am glad you were born, though, and I’m unlikely to ever forget that.

The United States has been breeding for stupid from the start, beginning with the failed English Jamestown “settlement,” which was mostly stocked with the 2^nd and 3^rd sons of British aristocracy who weren’t going to inherit much from their parents and were obviously useless, spoiled excess males. As should have been expected, once the working-class sailors and soldiers who delivered the deadbeats to Jamestown left, the 3^rd tier British elites starved to death waiting for someone to feed and house them. England followed that debacle by exporting the unruly mobs from Scotland, Ireland, and the unemployable chumps from England’s urban underclasses.

As Bill Murry proudly(?) said in “Stripes,” “We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts! . . . But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.” Yep, you can kick ‘em, beat ‘em with a stick, starve ‘em half-to-death, but a mutt will just keep coming back for more because they aren’t smart enough to know that they have the option to run away, or stay and fight, for a better situation.

Outside of the US, lots of people are wondering how Americans could have elected someone as stupid, petty, and destructive as Trump and his cronies to the Presidency. Inside the US, it’s pretty obvious: the country is full of idiots, gullible cultish fools, and illiterate know-nothings who make proving the Dunning-Kruger Effect their life’s “work.” It’s not, as many desperately want to believe, that our “education system has failed.” The problem is that a significant percentage of the gene pool in the US has been pissed in by goobers who shouldn’t have made it past the embryo stage, let alone “grown up” to be mental dead weights dragging the world into the Sixth Extinction and reproducing like Viagra-stoned rats.

Every time you hear a vehicle with an illegally loud exhaust, you’re listening to the sound of a moron passing, spewing unspent fuel and burned oil from poor maintenance and shade-tree “engineering.” Every tattered and faded “Trump/Vance” sign you see on a run-down, unkempt yard marks the home of an idiot. Every “Remember Charlie Kirk” flag marks the home of failing K-12 grades and chronic economic dependence.

A lot of the country (and world) has been deluded into thinking that Minnesotans are all like the Twin Cities “bleeding heart liberals” who put their lives and freedom on the line to protect their neighbors. A quick glance at the responses to Amy Klobuchar’s Facebook page would destroy that hope. Just look at the stupid nonsense, mostly coming from rural Minnesota’s dumbest voters and you’d be hard-pressed to imagine this state is any smarter than Alabama’s inbred, low-brow honkies.

I lived in a St. Paul suburb for 19 years before retiring and moving to a southeastern Minnesota small town (foolishly for the “quiet” and “slower pace”). Outside of Harley Davidson “season” (6-9 months out of the year), we mostly got the quiet. “Slower pace” mostly means way too many morons per square mile: “slow” as in mentally slow. In 2016, 85% of Ramsey County (our old Cities’ district) voted for Clinton while 57% of Goodhue County (where we are now) voted for Trump. We had only been here for two years at that point and Ms. Day was ready to pack up and run back to the Cities immediately. We probably should have done that while we could afford the move. Not surprisingly, house values in Goodhue County have been stagnate since about 2016, but Twin Cities housing prices have increased 168% since 2016, pretty much pricing us out of the market. (We sold our Cities home, in 2015, for $254,000 and it’s currently valued at $450,000!) In 2016, many of Goodhue’s available housing inventory were foreclosures and we’re beginning to see that trend again in 2026. So, getting out of here is going to cost us some retirement security.

Early in our experience in rural Minnesota, I took a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN. Same school system as the course I wanted to take, about 70 miles south on Highway 61, but easier to enroll for a class that year. The end result was massive cultural shock. I have lived in some pretty regressive places, but I haven’t lived anywhere worse than the people I met in that class. Primitive, racist, unintelligent, uneducated, superstitious, entitled, dependent, and unpredictably violent are just a few of the words that come to mind in describing the mostly-old-white-men in that evening class.

The word that always comes to mind when I realize how outnumbered we are in so many areas of this country is “disappointing.” 63 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, this is not where I’d hoped we’d be in these rarely-United States. It is probably hard to remember, but a lot of that “Sixties’ hippy nonsense” was about hope and optimism. Yes, we were protesting a genocidal war and a blatantly and violently racist “Establishment,” but we somehow imagined building a better world for the future. While that was going on, “the worst of the worst” (The Heritage Foundation, for example) were working toward a very different world. And we are living in it now: a superstition-filled, racist, martial, patriarchal, oligarchical, “Christian Nation” that denies reality, science, justice, and democracy at every opportunity. And all that has been possible thanks to the dumbest Americans since those fools who fought and died for the Confederacy.

I wake up fully introverted. In a perfect world, I’d wake up in an unheated, un-electrified cabin at least 100’ from the main house. On cold mornings, I’d get out of bed about 9AM, toss some kindling and a couple of logs into a woodstove, put a coffee pot on the stove, and go back to bed until the room warms up to about 60^oF. Once the coffee is percolating, I’d get dressed, make the bed, choke down my pile of pills with a cold glass of water, assemble a bowl of cereal with fruit, pour a cup of coffee, and sit near a window to write and eat breakfast. Sometime around 11AM, I’d leave the cabin and wander down to the house to start the rest of the day. Until I walked into the house, I wouldn’t have had a word of conversation with anyone.

In the morning, Ms. Day practically hits the floor talking. She wants to talk about her dreams, the last half-dozen things she watched on YouTube before going to bed the previous evening, and the living room television set starts blasting streamed cartoons, nonsense “documentaries” (usually about aliens or bullshit archeology), or last night’s talk show monologues. “Cacophony” best describes my usual morning soundtrack. I have a decent set of over-the-ear, noise-cancelling headphones that I’m usually wearing by 8:30AM. The phones take the television noise down about 30dB and, if I add some light ambient noise or music, it’s almost like I’m not living in a trashcan manufacturing factory. Even those large, black headphones are insufficient clues to Ms. Day that I’m trying to ease into the day.

Likewise, when it comes to emotional loss we have very different styles. Both of our mothers died, when we were young, in slow misery due to cancer. Ms. Day was 15 and I was 9. Without the strong guidance of her mother, Ms. Day was a lost child and her father was less-than-useless as the “adult in the room.” She was sent to live with hostile, rich relatives in New York while her father tried to drink his way to the next phase of his life. When my mother died, I was an angry boy who was forced to pretend to be grown up enough to manage myself and my little brother, while our father hid in his high school classroom “grading papers” until long after we’d fed ourselves, cleaned up, and put ourselves to bed. He tried shuffling us off to church and religion, which only confirmed (to me) that gods don’t exist and any belief in magic is a despicable and cowardly dependence. If you want to quickly terminate a conversation with me, all you have to do is toss in a couple of references to gods and magic and I’m “outta there.”

The past half-dozen years have been too often punctuated with loss. Too early in our first post-retirement trip, our eight-year-old cat, Spike, ran off from our Lake Texoma campground in late 2013. He was as close a friend as I’ve ever had in the animal world. Ms. Day immediately began to refill our home with animal life and her first adoption experiment was a freakin’ disaster. But she stuck with an unpredictable, sometimes-violent, always destructive black male cat until his 2^nd hyper-expensive urinary tract infection when she finally “surrendered” him for adoption to a local vet (for a $120 fee). He’d tortured our dog, Gypsy, almost as much as Ms. Day. Gypsy was glad to see him disappear from the household. In the spring of 2022, our 15-year-old canine partner, Gypsy, died of old-age complications.

Soon afterwards, Ms. Day adopted a beautiful little shelter cat she named “Diva.” Diva quickly got close to both of us. I can’t lie that Diva took some of the sting out of losing Gypsy, but Diva was a fragile little girl and she barely lived with us for a year before some awful, slow disease killed her in the fall of 2023. Her death broke our hearts, again. Ms. Day has a, probably healthy and realistic, philosophy that these beautiful animals who live with us are like “flowers” with short, precious lives. She can move on, fairly quickly from that kind of loss with that viewpoint philosophy. I can’t.

Within a few months, Ms. Day adopted a huge black cat we called “Luci” (short for Lucifer, named after a cartoon character not the demon, although the cartoon character is a cat-like demon) . Luci was insufficiently “friendly” for Ms. Day and, after too short a time for that poor guy to acclimate himself, she adopted a 2^nd cat (I, by the way, had no input in any of those decisions.) who promptly made Luci feel even more out-of-place. Luci, like me, was an introvert who couldn’t have been quieter or less demanding. He and I bonded, eventually, and then he died (after a series of urinary tract infections and blockages). Ms. Day had her cat and I was left to deal with Luci’s last days and, as always, burying him. A year later, I was still missing Luci and hurting from his loss.

I’m almost 80 and, having seen how long, and unhappily, some older pets languish in the local shelter, I’m not convinced we’re doing them a favor, bringing an animal into a home that is not likely to survive their “short, precious lives.” Regardless of all that, Ms. Day insisted on adopting a 2^nd cat who she named “Felix.” Felix and I did not start off well at all, mostly because I was unwilling to let go of Luci’s memory, even after a year. I found things wrong with him that were all me. He was, and is, fine.

Ms. Day is also right in her “moving on” attitude. Dwelling in the past, in “what ifs,” in sadness and bereavement just results in prolonging the pain. The healthy way to get through pain and loss is to move on as quickly as possible. That doesn’t mean forgetting, it just means finding something or someone to fill the vacuum left by loss. Easy to say, but harder to do for some of us.

Since this is the United States, where we can’t even manage to keep high-capacity, military-grade automatic weapons out of the hands of kids, morons, and lunatics, I can only wish California “good luck.” The law’s intention is not just rational, but worthwhile, “Faster and more powerful electric motorcycles are being marketed as e-bikes, which is dangerous to children and adults,” Blakespear said. “SB 1167 makes clear to consumers whether they are buying an e-bike, which has defined limits for power and speed, or something else.” The problem is that the same people who happily elected a convicted felon to the Presidency are the ones buying electric motorcycles and whining “but it has pedals” when the fact is that they are incompetent riders, aggressive traffic hazards, and low-level criminals.

Yeah, “low level-criminals.”

Like exhaust noise and pollution, most every state has laws defining bicycles, mopeds, and motorcycles. The definitions are based on horsepower and max speed under power and they are defined at the national level by DOT. E-bikes, for example:

“Electric-assisted bicycle” means a bicycle with two or three wheels that:

• has a saddle and fully operable pedals for human propulsion;

• meets the requirements for bicycles under Code of Federal Regulations, title 16, part 1512, or successor requirements;

• is equipped with an electric motor that has a power output of not more than 750 watts; and

• meets the requirements of a class 1, class 2, or class 3 electric-assisted bicycle.

• In Minnesota, a moped (motorized bicycle) is defined as having:

• · Pedals or a seat,

• · 50cc, engine max 30 mph.

• Requirements: Must be registered ($6 annually). Operators need a driver’s license or a Moped Permit.

• Operation: Cannot operate on sidewalks or interstates.

And motorcycles:

• Seat/saddle,

• 2 or 3 wheels, >50cc. Includes motor scooters (e.g., Vespa).

• Requirements: Valid driver’s license with a 2-wheeled endorsement. Must be registered, titled, and insured.

• Operation: Must use lanes, not sidewalks. Passengers allowed only if designed for them.

See how easy that would be to regulate? Probably not. If vehicle noise is beyond the capabilities of “law enforcement,” everything else is Crazyville. Minnesota’s 325E.0951 Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Systems rule provides police with clear guidance, even defining “motor vehicles,” “people,” and the parts of a vehicle’s “air pollution control systems” for the totally clueless characters in uniform:

• Motor vehicle. “Motor vehicle” means any self-propelled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine and designed for use on the public highways, such as automobiles, trucks, and buses.

• Person. “Person” means an individual, firm, partnership, incorporated and unincorporated association, or any other legal or commercial entity.

• Air pollution control system. “Air pollution control system” means any device or element of design installed on or in a motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine in order to comply with pollutant emission restrictions established for the motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine by federal statute or regulation.

Minnesota’s law is clear about “prohibited acts” and the penalties, too:

• A person may not knowingly tamper with, adjust, alter, change, or disconnect any air pollution control system on a motor vehicle or on a motor vehicle engine.

• A person may not manufacture, advertise, offer for sale, sell, use, or install a device that causes any air pollution control system not to be functional as designed.

• A person may not sell or transfer a motor vehicle with knowledge that any air pollution control system is either not in place or is not functional.

• Subd. 4.Penalty: A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Spend a few moments on any major traffic route in the state and you won’t have a moment of trouble identifying misdemeanor criminals, but local and state cops are totally incapable of this simple task. If there were ever a job that could be immediately performed better than humans, it would be “traffic cop.” Put a decibel meter, a CO-sniffer, and a photon-cannon on a robot and advertise the “new rules” on YouTube (where all of the idiots get their “information”): “If your vehicle is stopped for noise or emissions violations, you will be given five minutes to remove your possessions from the vehicle before it is vaporized.”

Likewise, if a Robocop sees a “bicyclist” cruising along at 21+mph on level ground without pedaling, the bike is obviously a moped (under 30mph) or a motorcycle and becomes the property of the city or state to sell at auction, or to crush for the recycling value. Or provides roadside entertainment with the photon-cannon.

Obviously, in every respect, e-bikes are the least of our problems today. Our Constitution is so poorly conceived and written that it doesn’t prevent convicted felons from becoming President, although that same person probably couldn’t get a job at McDonalds flipping burgers. That wad of slavery-protecting tissue paper doesn’t prevent Supreme Court judges from taking bribes or even require the Chief Justice to recuse himself for having direct financial interest in a case. Thanks to the deadly blow to democracy from the Citizens United stupidity, every Russian oligarch, tech bro billionaire, and foreign interest can buy any political office needed to rape and pillage the nation’s credit and national security.

The inability to competently regulate something as simple as electric bicycles vs. motorcycles is just a symptom of a nation that has spiraled into lawlessness and chaos. At least from where I sit, it’s hard to see a path to anything resembling an organized, rational, law-abiding society. Canada is looking better every day: and I hate winter.

I am not a television person. If it were my house (I just pay the bills, bought the house, and maintain everything but the flower gardens.), I wouldn’t have a video system, other than my computers. I’d probably still have a Roku unit for streaming background music (NOT Spotify) in the living room, but the screen would be set to drop into screensaver mode after a few minutes and, other than PBS, I wouldn’t subscribe to any video channels. Since my receiver has a USB port, I might just try to “stream” my huge CD collection, ripped to MP3, and blow off the video monitor and Roku entirely. YouTube, in particular, is only useful, rarely, for finding out how to get into weird electronic devices to replace batteries, weird vehicle maintenance tips, and other repair tasks. Even then, I have to sort through a half-dozen or more how-to videos to find one that is actually useful.

Before I retired in 2013, I was actually fairly knowledgeable in several technical areas and, when I was a college instructor, students would often refer to YouTube nonsense in class and, even, in test questions. Consistently, those “sources” would be bullshit. Failing grades was usually the result of using that “resource” for college work. When curiosity drove me to investigate what was on YouTube regarding one of my areas of interest, I would consistently be disappointed at the inaccuracies and outright foolishness of the “information” found in that internet sewer.

Yesterday, not by choice, but as a necessary result of a property boundary discussion with a neighbor, I was subjected to an ear-full of YouTube, 4Chan, X, Facebook, and Qanon-sense and I remembered more of the reasons that I’d be perfectly happy to see Google and YouTube be stabbed to death by Iranian hackers. Did you know that Bill Clinton and Osama bin Laden were business partners and that there was an article in Time Magazine about that partnership that has been “disappeared” from the internet? Me either, because it’s bullshit. Did you know that there were ancient civilizations that “everyone knows about” who had watches, cell phones, and nuclear power more than tens of thousands of years ago? Yeah, me neither. This is, however, stuff that all of the academic and media experts know and suppress to keep the rest of us ignorant. Sometime during the last bit of “information,” my politeness and attention span was exceeded and I started planning the work I’d have to do to revise our backyard to the “new” property boundaries (We “lost” about 10-20’ of our yard. It was never ours, but you sure couldn’t tell from the previous landscaping and yard use.)

These folks are reasonably nice people, but obviously the kind of people the rest of us had to tolerate tossing spitballs, making noise, and generally ignoring K-12 class material until they quit or were kicked out of school. “Back in the day,” they’d have shuffled off to remote trailer courts where they could inbreed more dummies to jam up public schools, but at least we wouldn’t have to see their bar-talk on social media. Now, thanks to YouTube, Facebook, and the rest of the braindead internet, they have become experts in their own minds: Dunning-Kruger experts with a platform. People who know so little that they have convinced themselves they know everything. I, completely fairly, blame most of their confidence on YouTube.

YouTube intentionally created this fools’ paradise. “Last Wednesday [March 25, 2026], the jury delivered their verdict in a landmark trial. A now 20-year-old woman (K.G.M.) sued Meta (including Instagram), TikTok, Snap, and YouTube,[1] claiming that she became addicted to the products as a child, and developed mental health problems as a result.” The analysis of this court decision is messy, at best, but to my point, selling crap is more important to all of those “social media” providers than providing honest, true information. At best, YouTube is a firehose of nonsense with “drips and drabs” of useful information accidentally and rarely inserted into the stream.

It would be great if we could assume this court loss would result in meaningful change, but it won’t. The billionaire class has totally sold “The Marching Morons” on their own genius and, because no one was there to tell them they are wrong, they bought it like a fish on a worm without a thought of the hook. Our court system is as bought-and-paid-for as is the rest of federal and state government. One entire political party is owned property.

All of the areas of society that desperately need studied expertise are being overwhelmed with YouTube-quality “experts” who have never cracked an adult book about any subject. Fox News gibbering idiots expound on the non-existence of climate change. Russia’s useful idiots are as popular in Russia as the US. And Republicans tell the rest of us that is “patriotism.” Every complicated issue from AI proliferation to protecting democracy to economics to national security to science and industry is being explained by people who know nothing about any of those subjects, while actual experts are sidelined and ignored.

As of January 2025, actual experts began to be purged from every area of our federal government. NASA scientists said the Trump Administration was the equivalent of a “knowledge extinction event” and the current hoopla about NASA making a “loop around the moon” in 2026 ignores the fact that this is a repeat of a 50-year-old “accomplishment.” Between 1969 and 1972, 12 NASA astronauts walked on the moon and no other nation has equaled that accomplishment although the Soviet Union (1966), China (2013), India (2023), and Japan (2024) have done what NASA is doing today. Of course, YouTube experts have argued that the US never made it to the moon 50 years ago. At their core, this bunch of fools is arguing “If I can’t do it, no one can.” More accurately, if they can do it, no one else would bother with something that simple.

[1] Note: Snap and TikTok both settled prior to the start of this trial.

One of the least-discussed and barely-admitted aftereffects of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder is something that should make every over-paid, under-worked, totally unnecessary corporate executive nervous: more than 30 states have passed bills limiting insurance carriers’ ability to reject necessary medical treatment with “prior authorization” abuses and more such bills are pending this year. Thompson was the overpaid ($10,221,898 for 2023), grossly unnecessary UnitedHealthcare CEO when he was shot to death on the streets of New York, allegedly, by an assassin who’d written “deny, defend, depose” on the shells of the ammunition used in the shooting in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on December 4, 2024.

Let’s reflect on that unanticipated outcome for a moment. The so-called “healthcare insurance industry” reported over $71.3 billion in profits in 2024, while increasing premiums, begging for more government-funded revenue, particularly from Medicare and Medicaid. Corporate executive salaries have ballooned to levels that can’t be explained by any rational means (see below). And that includes Thompsons’s UnitedHealthcare replacement, Andrew Witty, who leads the pack of deadbeat, useless CEOs scalping the public with the assistance of the Republican Party’s usual corporate welfare suspects.

Obviously, getting shot at isn’t reforming the industry from within, even a little bit, as UnitedHealthcare’s 2025 Revenues increased to $447.6 Billion, growing at 12% over the year, and investor earnings of $13.23/share. But if taking out one overpaid and useless insurance company CEO caused more than 30 states to make feeble attempts at reining in the nation’s most corrupt insurance industry, imagine what actual threat of real reform would do for the American healthcare system.

In fact, if the American public discovered it had hind legs to rise up on, a whole world of problems could be solved quickly, French Revolution style. Pick a problem and pick a CEO or “investor” who is that problem’s most obvious representative and you have your target? Corporate and special interests’ election interference and the biggest benefactors of the Extreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision? Obviously, Elon Musk and/or Peter Theil. Corporate environmental and climate change damage? Darren W. Woods (CEO of ExxonMobil) or Meg O’Neill (CEO of BP). Benefactor of the media’s trust conglomerates and the decimation of reliable US national media? David Ellison (CEO of Paramount Skydance) or Lachlan Murdoch (Fox Corporation CEO). Predatory low income housing vultures? Warren Buffett (Clayton Homes, the largest manufacturer and lender of manufactured homes in the United States) and/or Sam Zell (Equity Lifestyle Properties, ELS) the largest owner of trailer courts in the United States,

Before it happened, few in 1790 France ever imagined seeing the “worst of the worst,” the French aristocracy, waiting for their turn at the guillotine. But it happened. Our ruling class loudly cries about the public dislike of executives with the usual “this is un-American” whine, but is it? The only people describing Brian Thompson’s death as “tragic” are corporate executives and their useless, babbling corporate media and academia shills. It is hard to find a working-class person who doesn’t just shrug and say “So what?” when it comes to a blip in the revolving doors of the executive class. It’s obvious it doesn’t matter which suit occupies those corner offices, the show goes on regardless of who is earning a minimum of 300 times their typical worker.

And, business-wise, it’s pretty obvious that the ruling class has almost no contribution to make to progress, the economy the 99% relies on, science and technology, and, especially, democracy and national security. If you can think of anything that critically requires the “guidance” of billionaires like Musk, Peter Theil, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, the Waltons, Jensen Huang, Warren Buffett, or any billionaire in this or any other country, you probably don’t know much about that particular technical or economic activity. In the past 20 years, so-called “founders” and (usually) self-proclaimed “brilliant leaders” like Steve Jobs (Apple, 2011), Paul Allen (2018, Microsoft), Ingvar Kamprad (2018, IKEA), Jack Welch (2020, GE), Sumner Redstone (2020, Viacom/CBS) Sheldon Adelson (2021, Los Vegas Sands Corp), Sergio Marchionne (2018, Fiat Chrysler), Giorgio Armani (2025, Armani Group), Frederick W. Smith (2025, FedEx), Charles T. Munger (2023, Berkshire Hathaway) and a raft of other overpaid, self-promoted, largely useless executives, “founders,” and investors have died and, mostly, the fallout has been . . . crickets.

After all the noise about Jobs’ brilliant “leadership,” Apple has done quite a bit better under Tim Cook and, when Cook is dead and gone, likely the next corner office resident will do just as well or better. GE continued it’s de-evolution into a national embarrassment, the decline of which was started under the “leadership” of Jack Welch, until what was once America’s most powerful and profitable company became a footnote in business history. The last GE CEO, H. Lawrence “Larry” Culp Jr., was paid $87.6 million to disassemble that once-great company. The “richest person in the world,” Elon Musk, contributed nothing but political connection and bad press to Tesla until the company finally came out with a vehicle solidly representing Elon’s input: the Cybertruck. Elon’s 6,500lb+ “pickup” has significant build quality/fitment issues (rattles, panel gaps, water leaks), non-existent impact protection, rusting “stainless steel” construction, dangerous motorized bed and front-trunk lids, limited cargo space (67 cubic feet), and doubtful towing capacity (the hitch is mounted to a cast aluminum frame which is known to fail well under the 11,000 pound rating). None of Elon’s companies are better because of his involvement and some, SpaceX for example, are considerably worse off from his mismanagement interference.

The two most important factors in an executive’s tenure are luck and who is doing the bulk of the work and making the most critical decisions behind that “leadership” (also determined, mostly, by luck). The Ivy League MBA mills have been cranking out thousands of over-educated fools and arrogant narcissists using the Harvard “push blame down and pull credit up” mantra for at least 100 years, but those “skills” don’t make or break any business. I have documented, in past essays, my own CEO experiences and none of them have been inspiring in any way (other than the usual “how NOT to do it” examples). I’ve never been in a meeting where a CEO contributed anything even a little bit useful or enlightening, let alone actual leadership. And I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with CEOs from seven very different industries from small companies to Fortune 100 catastrophes.

A smart, democratic public would realize the obvious, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” [Louis Brandeis (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)]

After WWII and the Great Depression, the country’s leadership and the majority of voters realized that the first task was to pay off the war debt and catch up on all of the infrastructure maintenance and modernization that had been put off by the war effort. The post-WWII highest tax rate was in the mid-90% territory. What used to be called “unearned income” (investment and dividend income) was taxed at the highest rate, since it is obviously unproductive income. Today, all of that is reversed and the chart below plainly demonstrates the result (and this picture is a lot worse as a result of the first year of Trump’s second term).

Even someone as math-disabled as Republican voters can see the relationship between tax rates and national debt and it’s also pretty obvious where this national insolvency problem began: Ronald Reagan’s “economic miracle.” In 1981, there were 13 billionaires in the United States and our national debt was $994.8 billion. By 1989, the country suffered 99 billionaires (an increase of 761%) and a national debt of $2.86 trillion, while the middle class paid the bill for this gross acceleration in the nation’s idle rich. Today, there are over 1,100 estimated billionaires in the US and the country is drowning in debt as a result.

Performance is NEVER linked to an executive’s salary and there is no known positive relationship between a nation’s income gap and any useful measure of a nation’s quality of life, security, productivity, or even lifespan. Self-regulation is not a real thing. Rich people, companies, corporations, and even communities consistently prove themselves to be incapable of reining in their worst inclinations. It always takes an outside force to reform anything. Brian Thompson’s execution was certainly a demonstration of how quickly reform can happen when outside forces exert themselves on a corrupt industry.

Recently, Musk whined that $900B wasn’t making him happy. Author George Ouzounian replied, “Do you think it has to do with the fact that all you do is put out hatred and negativity into the world and it reflects back to you constantly?” Several other people suggested that Musk’s legendary selfishness, greed, entitlement, corruption, and disdain toward “philanthropic activity” was key to his unhappiness. It’s highly unlikely that logic or morality would have any influence on how someone as corruptible as Elon Musk lives his life, but a better view of the guillotine might

.

Usually, the sound of early spring in Minnesota is full of birdsong. Not this year. Thanks to bird flu, a federal Administration that too stupid, gullible, and superstitious to comprehend any area of science, and our rapidly changing and highly unpredictable climate, birds are dying in droves. Last year, we saw volunteers along the Mississippi carefully picking up dead birds and disposing of them: geese, ducks, cranes, swans, and songbirds. We are living in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And while we didn’t cause this die off with poisons like DDT, we caused it with the poison of carbon dioxide and we probably helped it along with the GMO herbicides and insecticide toxins. This year, the skies are empty of migrating birds and bird watchers across the country are wondering “Where did all the birds go?”

As usual, Americans are distracting themselves with the trivia of the MAGA/Trump insanity, our ruling class-manufactured cultural divide, and the continual dumbing down of an already foolish, gullible, and suicidal American public. I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad about this if I didn’t think we were taking the rest of the world down with us. The loss of 300 million Americans would barely be noticed in a world population of 8 billion, less than 4% of the world population, if it was noticed at all. Everything about the current moment reads like the explanation of how America fell in The Handmaid’s Tale. That’s because it is exactly the same. Religion and other superstitions, oligarchy corruption, an uneducated and uneducable population, and an economic world that is quickly moving past and away from the American Century have put the United States in exactly the “right” place for a violent overthrow by the ruling class. If/when that happens, our current kleptocracy will establish itself as the “owners” of everything and everyone below them. This is the world those same people sent Southern working class fools out to fight for in 1863 and they’ve been trying to destroy our poorly-created shambles of a democracy every since slavery was abolished.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend (Charles Yancy), “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The MAGA crowd, proud examples of the end result of centuries of Dunning-Kruger breeding, happily creates its own facts, ignores expertise and science, and lives on feelings rather than rational thought and analysis. As of November 2024, it is well-documented that at least 77,303,568 stupid, lawless, felon-loving, misogynist, racist fools live and vote in the United States. That is a stunning statistic and one that goes a long way in explaining how and why the United States is no longer a leading first world nation.

In fact, we’re likely on our way to becoming several smaller, less-powerful, less internationally influential, and much poorer nations. With luck, there will be a couple of spots on the coasts remaining democratic and functional, while the inner red state core of the US, which is already very dependent on the blue states’ financial support, becoming North America’s Bangladesh. If/when that happens, Putin will have accomplished Khrushchev’s 1956 warning, that whether the West liked it or not, “history is on our side. We will bury you!” The unintended MAGA outcome will be that communism (through Russia and China becoming the world’s super powers) will outlast and naturally replace capitalism. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains the second-largest political party in Russia, after United Russia (Putin’s party, even though he is listed as “independent”). Putin may not be loyal to the Communist Party, but he has ambitions to return to the Soviet Union’s old super power status and the MAGA crowd and the pitiful remains of the Republican Party are solidly in Putin’s pocket.

So, spring this year isn’t coming with the usual hope and optimism after a long, cold winter. In fact, most likely another kind of “winter is coming” right behind the seasonal one.

In 2008, I took a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to New York’s Thousand Islands to Quebec to Nova Scotia and back home, with a pause in Nova Scotia to enjoy some resort time with Ms. Day. Altogether, it was 28 days away from home with most of the nights spent in a tent in campgrounds and spots off of the road where I found campsites private and isolated enough to put up a tent and park the bike. At, roughly, the mid-point in my trip, I blasted more than 1,000 miles from Quebec to Nova Scotia to drop off my gear at a resort I’d booked for the two of us and back to Halifax to the airport to pick up Ms. Day and the wardrobe she’d brought for her 5 days in Canada.

After one of the most harrowing rain storm rides ever, from the Halifax Airport to our Port Dufferin “resort,” Ms. Day and I relaxed, canoeing the bay, taking short sightseeing trips within 100 miles of our incredibly comfortable room, ending with a leisurely ride back to Halifax where we stumbled into the weekend of the annual Halifax Busker Festival and stayed in a nice hotel close to the airport to make Ms. Day’s getaway as painless as possible.

After dropping Ms. Day off, I took a relaxed loop around Cape Breton before I returned to the good ole’ USA. I was a long way from burned out, since I’d taken about 3 days to make the loop from Halifax around Cape Breton Island and back to catch the ferry in Yarmouth. That was some of the nicest camping and sightseeing I’d done in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. I still often go to sleep to the surf recordings I made at the campsites along the north shore of Cape Breton Island. If I’d have been hard at pounding the miles, it should have taken me about 20 hours for that loop (approximately 1,600 km). Because I love ferry rides, I took the ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor, Maine.

At that point in the trip, I’d been on the road for fifteen days, counting the five days relaxing at Dufferin Bay and Halifax, and almost 10,000 miles. I always packed light for motorcycle trips, usually stowing a half-dozen t-shirts, pairs of socks, and riding shorts, one pair of swimming shorts, and no more than one half-decent-looking pair of pants and a shirt. When Ms. Day was loading up her gear for the return flight to Minnesota, she swapped a couple of my t-shirts for clean(er) shirts that she’d packed. Three days later, and I’m down to one clean shirt when I boarded the ferry. I was wearing this one (see above). It’s a piece of Ms. Day’s original artwork. Go ahead and ask, “Do you know how to dress yourself?” The answer is, “maybe?” I have a simple routine for the clothes I wear almost every day: I wear whatever is on top of the drawer. Sometimes that can be embarrassing, but usually I’m oblivious to embarrassment, too.

So, I’m in a long line of vehicles, mostly poorly tuned pickups spewing unburned fuel, and it’s a hot August day. I’d been wearing an Aerostich Darien suit, but I’d turned off the bike and stripped down to my riding shorts and tee-shirt and riding boots. The rest of my gear was insecurely slung across my bike’s seat and tank. I turned the engine off early in the cue and I was pushing the bike toward the check point when one of the Border goobers spotted me and routed me out of the line to an inspection area. I think it was the shirt that pissed him off. He even patted me down, as if I could hide something in skin-tight Aerostich Lycra riding shorts and my wife’s tee-shirt. I think he might have been making a pass at me. He and one other ICE goober marched me into the office and sat me down where everyone passing through the area could get a look at the terrorist in tight pants. And a gang of ICE prepared to “inspect” my motorcycle.

My 2004 Suzuki DL650 V-Strom was pretty well setup for touring in less-than-ideal locations. I had stuff hidden all over the motorcycle and multiple storage locations. My custom Sargent seat had a tube strapped under the seat where I kept my passport, $500 in emergency cash, Traveler’s checks, a couple of credit cards, and copies of my driver’s license and other identification. I had two large GIVI side cases and one large tail case, two home-made tool tubes under the side case frames, and a tank bag with stuff in all of them. I explained which key went to the seat release and which side case contained the keys for the rest of the storage cases. I explained how to unscrew the covers of the tool tubes. For my effort, I got snarled at and told to “sit down and shut up.”

For a guy who made a significant bit of income as a writer, mostly for magazines, I was not much of a photographer until I bought my first decent smart phone a few years ago. The digital camera I’d brought on the trip was locked in the tail case and I didn’t think to ask if I could retrieve it before being sequestered in the office. However, an AI art program did a pretty serviceable job of re-creating the scene on the inspection slab and this AI-generated picture is how I have described the Border Control “inspection” for the past almost-20-years. Five uniformed “officers” wandered around the bike for a LONG TIME without managing to open any of the storage, other than the zippered tank bag. Being the macho boys they were/are, none of them thought to ask me to show them how to get any of my luggage open. They just wandered aimlessly around the bike, just like this picture, until they gave up and handed me my keys and told me “get outta here.”

I had plans to jet out of Maine to New York to see my mother’s younger sister in her care facility, but that was a ten-hour ride and I didn’t get out of Bar Harbor until late afternoon. So, I headed for a campground in New Hampshire and spent the night there. I suppose I should have slept soundly, knowing that the country was well-protected from terrorist motorcyclists wearing marijuana artwork tee-shirts. In fact, I was pretty convinced that it is incredibly easy to bring contraband into the country, just “hide it” in a plastic case with a cheap key lock.

When it comes to music, though, especially popular music the bar is so low that I suspect AI will be quite successful at creating pleasant background noises. Yes, that’s where the bar is set for most of pop music. While I am no longer involved in any part of the professional audio industry, I still get the industry rags: mostly Mix Magazine and Tape Op Magazine with a few other freebies showing up intermittently. If nothing else, those magazines tip me off on what is supposedly new and cool, while they flail helplessly at their primary purpose, selling me new equipment and software. I have too much of both already. For the most part, most of the new music discussed in the industry magazines leaves me sub-zero cold. For that matter, that is true for most old pop music. I’m a firm believer in 1950’s SF author Ted Sturgeon’s rule, “90% of everything is crap” and I still think Ted was an optimist.

For example, this month’s Mix Magazine does a several page, detailed description of the creation of Lily Allen’s new record, “West End Girl.” (If you’re interested, you can read the article by following this link.) According to the article, a lot of creativity and work went into the recording, but it sounds suspiciously repetitious and the production is not unlike, or superior to, work I’ve heard from dozens of regional pop artists done in their home studios. [You can decide for yourself without investment listening to this YouTube link.] The song, “Ruminating,” is a good example and is about the most AI-sounding thing I have ever heard. If it shows up in the soundtrack of “Matrix 101: Doing Everything the Same Way All Over Again” I want it noted that I said it first here.

On the AI end, Producer/YouTube dude Rick Beato, who absolutely hates AI, in a show about an AI artist, Sienna Rose, does a pretty good job of showing how little space there is between an AI “artist” and some human, but very similar and equally derivative, pop artists. That wasn’t his intention, but it was a pretty solid side-effect. The problem with Rick’s argument is that there is a long history of pop music that is soul-less, repetitive, imitative, and boring and much of the worst of that ilk have been hits. Not only is the music blah, but pop music listeners are not in any way discerning.

There are many areas of “art,” industry, science, medicine, law enforcement and legal system administration, transportation, and clerical tasks that AI will very likely do as well or better than human competition. Since the 1980s, when I first heard about autonomous cars, I’ve argued that it wouldn’t take more than a Zilog Z80 processor with 64kb of memory and a 5Meg hard drive to outmaneuver 99% of American drivers.

In general, and on average, humans suck at complex tasks requiring actual multitasking and computers excel at those same kinds of chores. Our “justice” system is plagued with issues as blatant as judges issuing harsher penalties before lunch, than after, to the obvious fact that rich people have a totally different set of legal rules than the rest of us. Doctors are overwhelmed with information and responsibilities and, as their numbers shrink (Thanks to Reagan’s idiot tax changes.) and workload increases and their patient data flow exponentially increases, AI will be moving from providing assistance to making decisions. Electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering decisions and designs are becoming more AI-driven every year. Everyone from self-publishing authors to book publishers are resorting to AI-generated artwork due to speed, flexibility, and necessity. (Watch for my next essay.) Currently AI is used for 5–10% of movie CG generation and that will increase exponentially in the next few years. Pop music just isn’t anywhere near as complicated or, usually, creative an enterprise as any of those tasks.

However, nobody (almost nobody, anyway) is likely to want to pay money to attend an AI concert and we’ve already suffered through disco and we’re not likely to go back there soon. Musicians, live and locally, are not likely to be inconvenienced by AI music and that might not mean much change for 99% of music “artists.”