The Same Thing....

Poverty Stories are not just for rural rednecks!

I mentioned before, twice, about poverty stories.  These are stories that are designed to make unempowered (read: poor) people feel smart and clever about themselves, as being "in the know" about secret things going on, or whatever. Sadly, like with conspiracy theories, they tend to enslave the people who tell these stories, locking them into a lifetime of cherishing ignorance over intelligence, fancies over facts.

I was talking with some friends and they were having a good chuckle over this "horse dewormer" thing, which I am not sure is as big a thing as people make it out to be.  The Internet says everyone was eating Tide Pods, but in reality, few were - there were just a few loudmouths who put up fake videos, and a few idiots who took it seriously.

But the dewormer thing, along with other quack cures, are not funny anymore - people are dying from these things.  And yes, I was taken in by the "malaria drug" thing - some doctors were even claiming this worked - although later testing determined it didn't do much.  But that's the key - testing and science, not just believing in something that someone says will work.  Similarly, you can't dismiss something until it has been tested and proven to work.  With the malaria drug, there was at least some testing, but this horse dewormer thing seems to be coming out of left right field.

After chuckling about the horse dewormer story, my friends asked me, in all earnestness, if this 100 mpg carburetor really existed, and whether the Patent Office would "suppress" technologies that "threatened the order of society" and in particular, the power of the oil companies.  I had to explain, patiently, why this was not the case. The "100 mpg carburetor" patent, and most perpetual-motion patents, have in fact issued.  That doesn't mean the "technology" works.  You can't "suppress" technology that is published in Patents and books available for anyone to read!.  I also tried to explain why carburetors basically suck (no pun intended) and why they could never yield 100 mpg even in a tiny car.  But that was met with glazed eyes and "Yadda, Yadda, whatever!"

It is a lot easier and more fun to believe poverty stories!

What struck me about this conversation was that at one minute, they were ridiculing the beliefs of their own neighbors, who bought into this horse dewormer thing, because those folks were right-wing.  But a story that casts the government and Exxon-Mobil as the bad guys, hey, that's plausible, right?  We believe what we want to believe.

We want to believe that "we can afford it!" and "I'm not that fat!" and "this hat looks good on me!" because these are convenient things to believe.  Convenient to us, or so we think.  When we spend our last dime, however, we cry out at Wall Street or the 1%'ers as "taking our money away" when in fact we gave it to them.  When we end up in the hospital due to obesity-related illnesses, we cry out against the medical industry, or perhaps the fast-food one.  It can't be our fault.  And hey, that hat looks sharp!

The secret to getting ahead in life, I think, is to eschew things that sound too convenient to us, or at the very least, examine them critically and distrust them.  Lately, the political drumbeat has been to blame Joe Biden for the Afghanistan war and how it ended, when in fact, it probably couldn't have ended any other way - and the very same Republicans who started that war twenty years ago, have been calling for its end for a decade now.

Wars like that - as we learned from Vietnam, or were supposed to - are hard to win.  The civilian you are sent there to protect, puts on black pajamas at night and becomes an insurgent.  They both look alike and you don't have an easily identifiable enemy with a colorful uniform that you can confront on a traditional "battlefield."  You either have to bomb civilians to smithereens, or go home - or get caught in an endless insurgency, as the Russians did before us, and as we did.  And the bombing thing, well, now you're the bad guy, so that's not even on the table.  And no, neither is nuking them - or anybody - as that leads to World War III.  When the nukes drop on Boston, or New York, or LA, you realize too late that strategy doesn't work.

Even this drone thing, which Obama embraced and seemed "safe" can have blow-back.  What do we do when drones are flying over our cities, bombing us?  It wouldn't be hard to do - a 9/11 attack without airliners.  All you'd need is rusty old freighter to launch them from, offshore, fly them under the radar, and then drop them on a target - any target - to create chaos.  And they needn't cost millions apiece - simple and primitive technology could get the job done.  And you know, most of the guys I went to EE school with, were from the Middle East and have nothing to do with their time.  Just a thought.  Don't act shocked if when it happens.

The point is, conservatives are piling-on, using this as an excuse to bash Biden, just as Democrats would have done, if Trump was still in office and the same thing happened.  Politics today is just a collection of poverty stories with a political angle.  The parties and their partisans create this drumbeat of negativity that the plebes buy into.  Trying to explain the intricacies of farm subsidies to the average American is nearly impossible.  You get the same "Yadda, Yadda, whatever!" response to such factual instruction.  But you tell them that Trump has orange skin or Biden can't hold an ice cream cone (wtf?  Did I miss that?) and they lap it up!  "Look at [opposing politician] they're a doo-doo head!"

And yea, even I get caught up in this nonsense, maybe particularly I.  Ms. AOC is certainly some low-hanging fruit, in that regard.  It is just too much fun not to have fun with her.  But her fascination with garbage disposals is secondary - tertiary - to her political positions on real issues, and what she has accomplished (nothing) while in Congress.  That's what is important.  We tend to concentrate on the window-dressing and fluff and cotton candy, because hey, that's more fun.

Is there a real danger to these sort of poverty stories?  Well, hell yea.  Ask the guy in Idaho who took horse medicine instead of the vaccine, who is now in intensive care.  Well, you can't ask him, as he is in an induced coma and probably won't ever come out of it. More tragic are the stories about young pregnant women in that State, who are being intubated and sedated in a valiant effort to limit organ damage as much as possible. No word on the fate of the 7-month old fetus.  Pretty odd that the same people who want to outlaw abortion will let their baby die just to "own the libs."

One wonders how even survivors of CoVid will do in the next few years.  With major organ damage, will any live as long as their forebears?   I suspect that many who had the virus (and never knew it) may have this hidden damage.  We may see, ten years from now, people dying off from various CoVid-related organ damage, as they get older and more infirm.  Just a thought.  Pleasant thought!  Not very convenient to think, though.

But beyond immediate life-and-death scenarios, these sort of stories create a drumbeat of unrest.  The folks who asked me about the 100 mpg carburetor believe that the oil companies are "evil" but at the same time, have a yard full of internal combustion engine products - from lawn mowers to weed whackers, to generators, ATVs, tractors, cars, trucks, boats, etc.  Global warming?  Has to be someone else's fault.  And that is a convenient thing to believe.

People are willing to believe anything, though.  Another friend decided to buy one of these re-worked diesel VW's.  It was a car that VW bought back from the original owner after dieselgate, and retrofitted with the correct software and "exhaust fluid" injection system that it was supposed to have in the first place.  Of course, this meant it didn't get as good mileage as it did before - when VW spoofed the software to lie to the government.

I am not a big fan of VW, even before that incident.  They've made some good cars, but the history of the company, starting in the Nazi era, and the manufacture of what was the world's most unsafe car made in any quantity, sort of turns me off.  Their extended drive-train warranty was the result of the quality fiascoes of the second generation Golf, assembled in Pennsylvania, not the result of "precision German engineering."  VW has a checkered history, and their pursuit of market share over profitability is just part of the problem.  Volkswagen lied to us - told a whopper of a lie - and you know how I feel about liars.

So he bought the car, because he likes diesels, even though diesel fuel can cost as much as a buck more a gallon than gas, and even though many gasoline cars are getting diesel-like mileage these days. The price was attractive (not free, but attractive) and they promised a 100,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty on anything that could go wrong.  So, hey, what could go wrong?  I mean, they wouldn't lie about that, right?

Well, the check engine light goes on, and he takes it to the dealer and they claim the warranty is now voided because he used an unapproved air filter in the car.   Didn't see that coming, eh?   I mean, a company that deceived worldwide governments and all of their customers wouldn't lie again, would they?  Nah.

Well, hopefully he'll get it straightened out.  The Magnum-Moss warranty act would seem to negate the dealer's claim that the warranty was void - they would have to show a nexus between the "unapproved" filter and the failure.  We'll just have to wait-and-see.  What a pain-in-the-ass, though.  He thought he was getting a deal, and he ended up getting a hassle.

But then again, I guess it was convenient to believe it was a bargain at the time.  And convenient things are often inconvenient.

OK, that's a long way from horse dewormer.  But I think what I came to realize was that we are all subject to weak thinking and externalizing.  We all want to believe things that are convenient to us, and it is very hard - very hard - to fight this tendency in our nature.  The folks who get ahead in life probably spend less time thinking convenient things, and if they start thinking convenient things, they can take success and turn it into failure.  Consider the MyPillow guy.

I guess you can excuse the great unwashed masses for believing in poverty stories, but what's our excuse?

Stop Thinking Like A Student!

Being a student is just a transitory phase in your life.  Don't view it as life!

I spent 14 years in college - night school mostly - so I have a vast experience at being a student.  But one thing I noticed is that a lot of my fellow students looked at high school or college as being "life" and not just some four-year transition into life.  Perhaps it was because I was working full-time and had a life - owned a car that I paid for, and a house and a mortgage.  I already had a life, being a student was something that I did to qualify me for a better life.

What got me thinking about this was a cartoon I saw about grades and testing.  That and the presence of things like "Rate my Professor" which has reviews from students about their professors and grading policies.   When you read this stuff, you would think that the grade someone got on a test in some course was the end-all and be-all to life and not just some incidental thing that will be long-forgotten in short order.

(It is funny, but my own brother is on "Rate my Professor" and some of his students complained about how he graded on an unusual "Bell Curve" - pun intended).

Life is not school and school is not life.  Sadly, many young people fail to make this distinction.  Yes, it is important to study something of merit and to get good grades and graduate - this shows you have some knowledge and intelligence and can accomplish things.  But it isn't the work you'll do. It isn't the life you will live.  Academia and real life are two different things.  Academia has a use, but is not an end in and of itself.

Well, unless you are a college professor.  And few become that.  And the few that do, well, "Those who can't do, teach" as they say.  Many professors I have known are people who basically never left college as they craved the insular lifestyle of the institution.

This is not to say school is worthless or just a means of parking young people to keep them out of the job market for a few years.  Well, maybe a little, for some.  I am not saying that college is a trade school, where you learn skills, because you don't really learn skills even in a trade school, but rather by doing things.  I took a typing class in high school and learned to type.  45 years of typing every day is what made me a typist, though.  The class was good, the instructor great, but you can't learn everything in class.  It is like piano lessons - as I learned the hard way as a teen, you can't learn the piano from lessons, you have to practice, day-in and day-out to get good at it.  And you have to keep doing it, too.

So school is important, yes, as it can set you on a path in life - or teach you what paths you don't want in life.  But it is not the end-all and be-all of living.  And it is not the only thing you need to learn a skill, a trade, or a profession.  I saw this all the time when I had my practice.  Young graduates would write or call me, looking for a job - convinced that since they graduated from law school and took a few courses in Patent Law, they could instantly start writing Patent Applications with little or no instruction or practice.   What they learned, the hard way, was that every firm out there wanted "2-5 years of experience" in the field, no more, no less.

Sadly, I think a lot of people put too much faith in education, particularly college.  You read all the time about young people with massive student loan debts, who cannot understand why, with no real experience whatsoever, they are not being offered huge salaried jobs in their chosen field of endeavor.  Many cannot bother to figure out if there is even a demand in that field, much as many of my siblings failed to do.

A degree in "Communications" for example, isn't going to make you the next Bryant Gumble.  Experience in broadcasting, a handsome look and straightened and whitened teeth might - along with decades of experience, starting at local stations and (hopefully) working your way up.  But even then, it is likely you'll peak as weatherman at some local podunk station.  And even that would be a major accomplishment - one school (Newhouse) graduates more people every year than there are jobs in the industry.

So yea, we should all give these kids six-figure salaries because their high school guidance counselor promised them that, and as we all know, promises made by high school guidance counselors are written in stone.  They know what they're talking about - after all, they have achieved the pinnacle of success in their own lives.  OK, that was too sarcastic.

I think the point is, school is not an end in and of itself.  And sadly, most students don't use the opportunity to find out what they want to do in life, but instead think the study is the goal and the grade is the end-point.

I was lucky, in retrospect, to spend 14 years in night school - working part-time and then studying part-time, getting the job first, and the experience, and then getting the credential that allowed me to keep the job.  Maybe it wasn't easy, but it was a lot more fun, I think, and the real education I received was not reflected in my GPA or what diplomas I received, but in what I actually learned.

Just a thought.

Museum Syndrome

Curators can sometimes ruin the thing they want to curate

Rainy day from the remains of tropical storm Ida, so off to the museums.  Museums are a valuable and necessary part of our civilization, but sometimes, I think, curators go off the rails and start viewing the items in their custody as objects to be cataloged and displayed as part of an overall context, rather than appreciated for what they are.

The Farnsworth Museum, for example, has a great collection of works by members of the Wyeth family, as well as other artists.  It was well curated, but for some reason, they can't leave well enough alone, and had to put paintings and sculptures "in context" with some greater theme, this time around, "women of vision."  It was well done, but I guess the curators just get bored at showing the same paintings and sculptures, so they have to mix it up and do a "theme" exhibit to make things interesting.  Well, at least they weren't pandering to the children, as is so often the case.

After a light lunch, we decided to revisit the Owls Head Transportation Museum, which we had seen a decade before.  Maybe we hit it on a bad day, or maybe it was due to CoVid, or maybe the place has gone downhill, but there didn't seem to be as many exhibits as I remember.  Not only that, it seemed they were in the midst of changing exhibit formats.  Again, we have the "theme" thing going on.

One theme was "Fads and Failures" where they exhibited cars and airplanes that were successful and others that were labeled (with a fake stamp font) "Fad" or "Failure."  So the Model T Ford was a success but the Pinto was a "failure" - even though over three million of them were sold, and if you lived in the 1970's, well, you remember seeing them everywhere. Chances are, you had a friend or family member who owned one - or owned one yourself.  And no, they were not more dangerous that other cars of the era - the VW Beetle, the Vega, or anything from Japan.  Pretty much all cars of the 1970's were deathtraps, compared to today.

But, none of that! Let's curate by urban legend! Facts be damned. Another display of a 1955 Thunderbird was even more embarrassing.  A long-winded and poorly written display piece argued that the Thunderbird "saved" the Corvette by forcing GM to up their game, replacing the original V-6 with a V-8 in the 'vette.

No, that wasn't a typo.  They actually said "V-6".  Ugh.  The original Corvette was sort of lame, as it featured the "blue flame" inline six with triple Carter carbs and a two-speed automatic transmission. Does it make a difference that they said "V-6"? Well, probably not to the great unwashed masses.  But the great unwashed masses should not include curators at a car museum.  It is an amateur mistake, and a sure sign that whoever set up that display was not a "car guy" (or gal) and didn't know squat about cars.  I mean, they could have just looked this up on Wikipedia, right?

It reminds me of a guy who ran a gym in Pompano, Florida, who had a Z3.  Unlike our 3.2 his was a 2.3 with an automatic.  OK, a  pretty lamer cruiser, but still a fun car.  For some reason, he decided to put stick-on chrome letters on the trunk lid that said "V-6" which is even more embarrassing as all he had to do was open the hood to see this was not the case.  BMW made its bread-and-butter from its silky-smooth, powerful and largely indestructible inline six engines.  So to put "V-6" on the back of your BMW is sort of advertising that when it come to cars, you haven't a clue.

V-6 engines are a packaging and manufacturing compromise.  They fit the engine bay of cars more easily as they are shorter in length, and with a 90 degree bank angle, could be machined on the same assembly line as their larger V-8 brethren.  The problem is, you get weird harmonic vibrations with a V-6 with a 90 degree architecture.  A 60 degree bank angle (which GM started using in the Citation X-body cars) works much better, although there are ways of damping the vibrations from 90-degree V-6's.

The inline four suffers from similar issues, hence the use of "balance shafts" to dampen the vibrations. But add a cylinder on each end, and voila! it zeros-out most of the vibrations in the engine, except for torsional vibrations, which took the Rolls-Royce people many years and broken crankshafts to figure out. The inline six is a great engine, but people gravitated toward V-8s in the 1960's as we became a wealthier nation, and the V-8 was seen as having more status - even as many had fewer horsepower than their inline-six brethren.

Today, there are few inline six motors left - other than from BMW, that is. The packaging and construction cost of the V-6 won the marketing battle, for the most part.

But I digress.

The museum was gearing up for a vintage motorcycle meet this weekend, so maybe we caught them on a bad day.  So many of the vehicles had no display cards, or if they did, really didn't say too much about the vehicle in question.   Others were just sort of randomly displayed and kind of dirty.  Clara Bow's custom Rolls Royce, for example, really could have used a coat of wax - and a better display layout.  They had nice things, but the attempts to contextualize everything into a "theme" was sort of a turn-off.  At least they didn't try to pander to the children, as we see so often in museums, such as Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.

As I noted in that earlier posting:

The population of our country has nearly doubled since I was born. Yet in most major cities, cultural institutions are failing for lack of interest.  Local symphonies, operas and ballets are closing one by one. Museums struggle to stay in business unless they put in a "Children's Museum" replete with Disney-like special effects and things for the kiddies.  I was very disillusioned when I went to the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry to see one of the few captured U-boats from World War II.  It should have been a somber display of a cultural artifact, but instead was cut open to make it into a Disney-like ride for children (with sound effects and flashing lights) who didn't seem to appreciate it anyway.  It seems we can't enjoy an intellectual level of discourse anymore, everything has to be lowered to the lowest common denominator.  It seems like the marching morons.

I mean, a submarine - a deadly instrument of war - is a serious artifact, that should be displayed with great reverence, for the people who died from its attacks, and the people who died in it.  But instead, they loaded it up with flashing lights and a sound track so the kiddies wouldn't be bored by it all.  It kind of made me sad - curators gone wild, and off-the-leash.

Of course, I am blaming the curators, but the problem is us.  We are not content to just look at an object and appreciate it for what it is, and its history - although the thousands of car shows across America would seem to negate that thought.   We get bored easily, and museums need to get patrons through the door, paying admission, to keep the lights on and - more importantly - keep the paychecks coming for the curators.  So they have to do theme exhibits, theme weekends, and special events, in order to keep it fresh and current and "relevant" and keep interest up.  Otherwise, you end up with a dusty collection of cars or paintings or whatever.  What a tragedy - or the definition of "museum".

But for God's sake, hire someone who knows something about the subject matter at hand.  Saying that the 1953 Corvette had a "V-6" is just freaking embarrassing.  I could excuse such a boner at the Farnsworth Museum (where it would never come up, of course).  But a car museum?  Full of car people?  It is not like it is some obscure piece of trivia, either.

Benevolent Billionaires

We shouldn't count on Billionaires to save us.

I live on Jekyll Island, which was once home to the Millionaire's Club - the Jekyll Island Club.  People like Pulitzer and JP Morgan had homes here, along with various other minor Millionaires, such as some stray Rockefellers, Goodyears, and Cranes (yes, the toilet people).  The Federal Reserve was formed here - giving birth to the most ludicrous of conspiracy theories (aliens or giants are supposedly buried on the island, and apparently all aliens want to do is banking).  The first long-distance coast-to-coast phone call was made from the island.  It was a bunch of rich fucks getting away from the smell and noise of the city - not to mention disease and epidemics.

When the Jekyll Island Club was in session (January through March) one-sixth of the world's wealth was present there.  Not just one-sixth of the wealth of the nation, but the world.

Back then, industrialists and bankers were superstars, and everyone knew their names.  Carnegie (whose island is adjacent to ours) made his money in steel.  Rockefeller in oil, and so on and so forth. We worshiped these Gods from afar, and also resented them.  After all, people were suffering and starving and dying of disease, laborers were working long hours for low pay, and these same superstar Millionaires were sending out goons to break up strikes and unionizer's skulls.

The era of the superstar industrialist or investor sort of faded away during the great depression.  Perhaps the wealthy learned that making a show of oneself only made one a target.  Perhaps it was the income tax, which made it a lot harder to accumulate dynastic wealth.  Perhaps it was anti-trust laws which broke up Standard Oil, among others.  Or perhaps it was just the dissipation of wealth that occurs when children inherit a fortune - but not their parents' financial acumen.

For whatever reason, the "corporate man" and the faceless corporation replaced the superstar Millionaire of the turn of the century.   As I noted before, after he war, Mark's father was able to buy an estate in Westchester county for very little and convert it to a nursing home.  When the County told him he would have to install sprinklers in the old wooden firetrap, he sold it out.  Today, it is once again an estate, owned by some investment banker on Wall Street.

My own home town was this way.  Cazenovia, New York, was a vacation retreat for the wealthy from Boston and New York, who build mansions around the lake, in the early 1900's.   Then, World War I and the income tax, and, well, the houses were sold off to locals, who used them to house their large families.  Today, they are once again estates for wealthy people who commute to nearby Syracuse.   Well, at least someone has a good-paying job in Central New York!

And today, we once again have a bevy of famous industrialists, investors, bankers, and robber-barons.  We all know them by name - Gates, Bezos, Musk, et al.  They made their money the hard way - well the same way the robber barons of the late 1800's did.  You go big fast, crush the competition, and scotch any attempts at unionizing, break a few laws and more than a few regulations - and profit.  The only real difference is that today they are Billionaires, not mere Millionaires.  They are a thousand times more wealthy than in the past, at least in terms of numerical values.  Taking inflation into account, they still wield far more power than the barons of years-gone-by.

What is weird is that so many people today worship these Benevolent Billionaires. Elon Musk has a following of groupies online, who follow his every move.  Warren Buffet has his own fan club.   Many liberals are agog over Jeff Bezos, as he publishes the liberal Washington Post - and they can order their new annoying counter-top appliance using Amazon Prime.

But those same said liberals are silent about the working conditions in his warehouse, the blatant union-busting that goes on in his company, and the sharp practice that puts smaller competitors out of business.  No one chides him for the deceitful way his company tries to trick people into signing up for "Prime" by calling it "free shipping" - when you can get free shipping for free, without having to pay a Prime charge.

People adore Elon Musk and his electric cars and rockets, but no one talks about the sleazy things they did at PayPal to go big, fast.  No one talks about how Musk has blatantly manipulated the price of his stock through tweets, or how he hyped Bitcoin - taking a little money away from his very admirers, and putting it in his pocket.  No one talks about how he used his publicly-traded company to buy out a solar company run by his relatives.  He (or more precisely, his companies) have accomplished much (making a lot of money not yet, though) but how he has gone about doing it was, well, a bit odious.

And so on down the line.  Bill Gates seems almost like a charming anachronism at this point - making money selling an obsolete and clunky operating system, which thanks to monopoly practices, has captured over 90% of the market.

But like many of the others, Gates has sort of stepped away from actually running Microsoft, just as Larry Page no longer runs Google.  Musk has been pushed away from the day-to-day operations of Tesla, due to his run-ins with the SEC.   But they certainly make a lot of dough from the stock they still own!

In a way, there is a parallel here to the robber-barons of the turn-of-the-century.  I mentioned that nearby Cumberland Island was settled by the Carnegie's - but not Andrew Carnegie.  He sold out of US Steel, and gave half the money to his idiotic siblings, who built white-elephant mansions on Cumberland Island, many of which are now in ruin.  He donated the rest to charity - setting up "Carnegie Libraries" in towns and cities across the nation - as well as establishing other institutions.  And we all admired him for that, too.

Today, it is the Gates foundation, among others - and I am sure the other robber barons of this century have their own charitable causes as well.

And perhaps a new generation of unionizers and trust-busters will break up these huge companies and scatter their resources somewhat, as we did in the past.  It seems the drumbeat of discontent is rising, and perhaps these robber-barons know this, and are taking their money and leaving the field, just in time.

What got me started on this was a reader writing, citing an article from the New York Times (paywall) which was apparently mimicked here, only they confused the word "prize" with "price".  Elon Musk is offering a $100 Million in "X prizes" to people who come up with ways of eliminating greenhouse gases (plant more trees?  Gimmie da money!).

The article(s) in question were arguing whether such prizes were a good idea, or whether having the Patent rights was a better one.  The arguments for both sides are interesting.  Patents aren't a guaranteed payoff. Someone else may file before you, or your patent may be held invalid.

Plus, it can cost hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) to enforce it through litigation. So you have to sell off a big part of the Patent to someone with deep pockets, in order to sue. If you work for a company, odds are, they own the whole Patent to begin with, as part of your employment agreement.

A "prize" (or "price") on the other hand, is a check that clears the bank right away.  How the prize is awarded, by who, and to whom, and what standard is used, might be as uneven as how Patents are awarded and enforced! I think the article noted this as well.

But the main point of the article(s) was that the prize will reward Elon Musk most of all - he gives away what to him is a pittance (and maybe doesn't have to pay if no one wins!) but gets ten times as much back in PR value. That old Elon - what a good guy! Forget about the insider deal with the solar company and whatnot, not to mention stock price manipulation, bitcoin manipulation, and so on and so forth. He steals a little from everyone, but he's a good guy!

It is yet another example of our Benevolent Billionaires doing what is best for all of us. Un-elected power-brokers deciding for us, what is best for us - and of course, what is best for them as well.

A new century and a new sheaf of robber-barons to deal with.  And perhaps, just like the last go-around, new regulations, new laws, and new taxes, will rein in this latest iteration of wealth concentration.

Perhaps.  In the meantime, don't add my name to the list of those who adulate the mega-wealthy.

So Long as It's Other People....

We can ignore human misery, so long as it is happening to other people.

In the news business, there is an old saying that a murder in your town is a headline, but a murder in another town isn't.  Maybe two or three people killed in another town is a headline, or a dozen in another State, or a hundred in another country, and so on.  We care less and less, the more removed the incident is from us.

For example, there was a recent suicide bombing in Kabul.  What a tragedy - 100 people killed, 18 of them Americans.  But if all 100 were Afghans, well, the outrage would be a lot less.   We identify with our own.  It is like the Olympics - the press reports a big story when a US Athlete or team wins, but doesn't say much about Romania winning the gold in synchronized swimming.

It is, perhaps, human nature.  And human nature is not a very pretty thing - it is derived from our animal nature, and that gets pretty ugly.

The new variants of the Corona Virus are once again driving up the death and infection rates.   It is not yet at the peak we saw earlier this year, but it was starting to look like the whole virus thing was gone, and now it is resurgent.  And many, if not most, of those infected, sick, and dying, are people who refused to get vaccinated.

I have two observations on this.  First, when we go to a gay campground, the inoculation rate is 100%.  Most people who lived through the AIDS crises don't think twice about it.  After all, if there was a vaccine for HIV, people would have lined up around the block for it!

The second is that so long as "other people" are getting sick, people can pretend it isn't happening.  In 1985 is was gays and hemophiliacs and drug users.  Not one of us!  And maybe there is some nugget of truth to that.  After all, HIV was a lot harder to get - at least after blood transfusions were screened for the virus.   It wasn't something you could catch from a cough or cold.   But then again, blaming the victim isn't always the answer.

With Corona, the "other people" were the elderly, infirm, and sick - again, not one of us (or so the perception was).

But in recent months, the not one of us have been the un-vaccinated.  And I have heard more than one person express the belief that "those people" have it coming to them anyway.  If the virus kills only right-wing Republicans, then that's OK with them!

If you asked those same people if it was OK that the virus only killed the mentally challenged or the insane, they would react with horror.

But any Qanonsense believer or anti-vaxxer is, essentially that.  So we should have some compassion, instead of schadenfreude.

Well, maybe a little schadenfreude....

The scary thing is, though, people who were vaccinated are also getting this new variant and getting sick and some are dying.  So yes, it could happen to anyone, although statistically, so far, it seems to be the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers who bearing the brunt of this new wave of infection.

So, I guess we need to dust off the old surgical masks and start practicing social distancing - again. 

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...