Heinlein Was Wrong!

"An armed society is a polite society" - or is it?

In Heinlein's many Sci-Fi books he advances a lot of ideas that Libertarians seem to like - including a deep distrust of authority figures and a perverse desire to kill the police. Time was, we called that mental illness.

The characters in his books are always well-armed with various knives, swords, guns, blasters, rifles, and other nasty little things designed exclusively to kill human beings. His novels are rather bloodthirsty, as the "bad guys" usually get mowed down, one way or another.  In some of his lesser and later works, he depicts a future world where "Proctors" (the Police) are the enforcement arm of a strong despised government. In more than one scene, he depicts a stand-off with the Police, ending in a fire-fight where many of the cops are murdered and the "compound" the heroes live in is set alight or blown up - while they escape through secret tunnels.  It sounds an awful lot like the paranoid survivalists we have today.  I think Heinlein was losing his mind toward the end, there.

One of Heinlein's mantras was "An armed society is a polite society" and the characters, particularly Lazarus Long, say they "feel naked" without some sort of sidearm.  The theory is - and it is a theory only - that if everyone has a gun, prominently displayed on their belt, then no one would be impolite. No one would steal your stuff, because if they did, well, you'd shoot them.  So that puts an end to theft!  And if someone brushes up against you in a bar, you'd tip your hat and say "pardon me!" so they didn't gun you down.  Women would not have to worry about being raped, as they could dispatch the rapist with a quick shot of their trusty sidearm.

But of course, reality is something different, and it seems that today we are trying out a grand experiment of Heinlein's theory and finding it has a few holes in it.  Like the days of the wild West, when everyone was armed, there were instances where people would get into disputes, usually fueled by alcohol, and gun each other down.  Places like Dodge City with its Boot Hill became famous for gun fights in the streets.  Ranchers and farmers would shoot it out in the range wars, as they fought over who got to use the land.  It wasn't pretty, to be sure.

That's the problem with Heinlein's theory - people are irrational.  You brush into someone in the bar and say "excuse me" and it devolves into the Cantina Scene from Star Wars - you have to hope Obi-Wan is there with his light saber to bail your ass out.  Not everyone is rational and polite, and some folks go looking for trouble.

And speaking of Obi-Wan, the person who has the fastest draw, the most powerful weapon, or who is associated with the most powerful gang, ends up winning these fights.  You back into someone's car at Walmart and a gang of armed thugs pours out of the car you hit.  How is your being armed going to make this work out?  The resulting carnage would be horrific and in fact, it already is, as people in this country are increasingly settling petty disputes with firearms.  Don't like the loud music some kids are playing? Shoot them dead.  It's been done - and it ruins the lives of the shooter as well as kills the victim.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about police shootings of suspects in this country.  Our European neighbors don't understand it - why would you pull out your service weapon during a traffic stop?  Why would a traffic cop even be armed? In American cop shows, the "perp" is often shot by the cops, sometimes in the back as he flees, at least in the old shows from the 1960's.  In British crime dramas, the cops tap the suspect on the shoulder and say, "Come on now, it's down to the nick with you!" and the criminals sighs and says, "You got me, copper, I did it!" and off to British Luxury Jail for him - for at least three months!

One reason cops in America are so quick to draw weapons is that so many people are armed these days and so many of them seem eager to use their guns, against their enemies, their friends, their family members, and yes, the police. I recounted before how our (former) massage therapist was arming himself with an arsenal of weapons on the premise that, if stopped by the Police he would fire first. And you wonder why the cops are so quick to shoot!  I tried to explain to him that killing a cop is not a good way to get out of a speeding ticket, but he would have none of it.  It is like a mental illness taking hold in America.

Now get this straight - I am not anti-gun.  But there are a host of people who shouldn't have weapons of any sort and a whole host who should not be allowed to buy firearms.  Mentally ill people, convicted felons, illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth.  Yet, every time we try to improve our background check system (which the NRA has successfully lobbied to keep as paper files and not computer records) the gun nuts push back.  They fear some sort of national "list" of gun owners, that will be used in this paranoid Heinlein fantasy when Hillary Clinton knocks on your door and "comes for your guns!"

Like I said - mental illness.  I am not talking about responsible gun owners.  I am talking about people who have thousands or tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition as well as a host of firearms bought willy-nilly.  These are the guys who put their guns on the bed (hello Freud?) and post a photo of them on Facebook or whatever.  These are people who are obsessed with guns and obsessed with politics. These are people who are not nice to be around - and if they are not mentally ill when they start out, they quickly work their way down that path.

These are the folks that Heinlein failed to take into account with his "armed society is a polite society" gambit, because these are not polite people. Well, actually, they resemble the protagonists in many of Heinlein's later novels.

There are, of course, other problems with the theory.  When you have such a plethora of guns - as we do today - you end up with weapons being lost or stolen.  One of the perpetrators in the Aubrey trial was upset that someone stole a pistol that he left on the seat of his pickup truck, unlocked, parked in the street, overnight. This is not a responsible gun owner - and the guy was a former cop!  Some teenager or kid could have swiped it and taken it out in a field to "try it out" and blown their brains out.  People who aren't used to the kick-back from a pistol can really hurt or kill themselves.

The other problem is, well, domestic violence.  The bulk of gun-related violence in this country is the result of family squabbles gone bad. People get upset with each other and one of them grabs a gun and suddenly everyone's life is turned upside down - and one or more are ended.  It happens every day with regularity.  Again, proper training is a key, but also proper mindset and temperament.  It was one reason why in the old days, it was hard to get a concealed-carry permit.  You had to show a need for it, as well as the maturity required.  

A friend of mine in New York had to jump through hoops to get a concealed-carry permit,back in the day.  He needed one, as he carried large sums of money for work, as well as negotiable bonds and precious metals.  He needed affidavits from the Sheriff and Chief of Police as well as references from several upstanding members of the community.  They weren't going to hand out permits to drug users, drunks, or ne'er-do-wells.  He got his permit, too.  I never saw his gun, either, which is the way it should be.  Guns are not for displaying, playing with, or looking at.  You draw, aim, shoot, or put the damn thing away.  It isn't a toy.

A new generation of gun owners think differently - guns are toys to them,and rather than go to a shooting range and shoot at boring old paper targets, they go to modern "ranges" where they blow holes in old cars and appliances, or shoot through a water melon, pretending it is someone's head that is exploding.  Some fun!  And of course there is tannerite - you put that in something, shoot at it and watch it blow up!  Yee-Haw!  It is like a child at a 6-year-old's birthday party.  There is very little discipline in these things.

Heinlein's theory would work, provided that people were mature and rational.  It is like the "Invisible Hand" theory of the marketplace.  It would work, if people were rational.  And some are, but most aren't.  They invest in tulip bulbs, the South Sea Company, or today, Gamestop or "Non-Fungible Tokens" (the latest gag to trip up the plebes).  This is the infantile mentality that screws up financial markets and allows a very few at the top to make even more money.  They don't take it from you, they get you to willingly give it to them!

Thus, "free market economy" fails for the same reason "Polite Society" fails - there are too many stupid people out there who just don't behave rationally.  We've tried to educate people - hence our public school system.  The idea being, once people learned history and such, they would realize that easy answers to complex problems were usually the wrong answers - and the bait used by con-men to accumulate wealth and power.  Sadly, it seems we have gutted our educational system - half the country wants to turn it into Vo-tech schools, the other half wants to turn it into an indoctrination system to far-out thinking.

In the name of "freedom" and a free economy, we have stripped ourselves of regulations - regulations that were designed to prevent economic collapse, as well as keep firearms out of the hands of incompetent and irrational people.

Heinlein's theory was bunk - and the grand experiment in "An armed society is a polite society" that is the United States today, has proven why.  .An armed society is a violent society - and an unstable one, as well!

Whatever Happened to the Metaverse?

It's been at least a week since Zuckerstein announced the Metaverse, but nothing has happened yet!

It is a play from the playbook that is as old as the hills.  When the press starts to come after you, change the subject, quickly.  Trump was master at this - if some bombshell revelation was about to come out, all he had to do was send out a toxic tweet and people would forget about the grifting for the time being.  Even something as stupid as Covfefe! would work.

So, in response to a lot of pointed criticism and inquiry about Facebook - everything from how it is used to manipulate people, create divisive politics, and recruit terrorists, to its financial arrangements and tax liabilities - Zuckerberg changes the narrative by announcing a renaming of the company and a "new product" which has been around since the 1990's.

The renaming thing was already tried by Google. No one is calling it Alphabet.  Sorry! This "renaming" gig is as old as the hills - shitty airlines use it after a major crash.   No one is fooled by that, either.

The deal is, this "Metaverse" thing is just another pitch for Virtual Reality, which has been around for a long, long time, either as an experimental prototype, a visonary dream, or as an actual product that no one really bought.  Maybe now it will take off, but I am not so sure.   The fact that Zuckerberg is pitching it is probably enough to turn off a host of people.  I am sure gamers will love it - provided they go out and buy new, more powerful computers or consoles and upgrade their Internet service to fiber optic, but for the rest of us, the idea of spending more time on the Internet sounds like a shitty bargain.

The idea (or the dystopian idea) of a world where people live trapped indoors, communicating electronically and never actually meeting one another, is not new - not even fairly recent.  It was described in the science fiction short story, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.  Yes, that E.M. Forster.  Over a century ago, he predicted how we would live today - isolated from one another, rarely venturing outside, and communicating only through electronic links - and utterly dependent on a technology that 99% of the population couldn't and wouldn't understand.

The idea remained science fiction for decades, but nevertheless, the concept of a virtual world was one that was known in industry and in particular, in Silicon Valley.  I recall chatting with clients back in the 1990's as they regaled me with tales of a future world of Virtual Reality - where you could choose an "avatar" to represent you in an online 3-D world.   Some early attempts, such as "Second Life" fell flat because the graphics were too primitive and the data bandwidth needed to really make it work wasn't there.  The real reason Second Life failed, though, was that at the time, fewer people  were on the Internet, and fewer still had the hardware, the bandwidth, or the inclination to try it.  I recall at the time trying it out with my 486 computer with a DSL connection and it was, to say the least, clunky.

Movies, such as The Matrix riffed on this theme of a virtual world where we could live - and the harsh reality we would be escaping.  In 2011, a book titled "Ready Player One" expanded on the Virtual Reality concept and became something of a Bible for Silicon Valley mavens.  According to folklore, it was handed out to new hires at Facebook as some sort of road map to Armageddon.

Such is the nature of invention - ideas exist in the public mind long before they are implemented as physical manifestations.  "Long felt need" we called it in the Patent Business - as a means of overcoming "obviousness" rejections.  The electric light was needed simply because whale oil (and later kerosene) was expensive, didn't work very well, and set fire to your house.  The automobile was envisioned long before it was created - and the mounds of horse manure and dead rotting horses in the street pushed the technology along - it was a long-felt need.

And so with Virtual Reality - which is all "Metaverse" is, with new window-dressing.  I guess Zuckerberg has re-named it so he can claim to have invented it - and the plebes, knowing nothing about technology or even their own recent history, will go along with this.  The fanboys will all oooh and aaaah over this new "invention" by America's number one whiz-kid.  Just as Musk "invented" the electric car, and Bezos "created" online retailing, the narrative will be that Zuckerberg invented social media and now is following it up with another hit.

Of course, the reality is - virtual or otherwise - that Zuckerberg bought the "Oculus Rift" company several years ago - with vague promises of making VR a big deal.  But so far, not much has come of it - not even many households have VR sets.  But then again, until the Model-T was developed, not many people had cars, did they?  The Oculus Rift headset is no longer sold, of course, and was not a commercial success. Perhaps the new "Meta" headset will replace it shortly.

But will Zuckerberg succeed where others have failed?  Does he have a "secret sauce" to make VR work this time?  Or is it just an idea whose time has come?  Facebook succeeded where Second Life and MySpace failed, simply because it came about at a time when the vast majority of Americans (or indeed citizens, worldwide) were now online.   AOL had faded from view, and the average schmuck on the street or your grandmother wasn't about to navigate URLs and domain addresses to find something interesting to look at.  Suddenly, at the right place at the right time, this one platform appears that appeals to the paranoid narcissist in us all.  Zuckerberg's only genius - if even that - was being in the right place at the right time, or seeing that conditions were coalescing to make such a platform take off.

But is it the right place, right time, for Virtual Reality?  Maybe, maybe not.  Some of the technical hurdles of VR have still to be ironed out.  Without superfast processors and rendering engines - as well as staggeringly fast connections speeds, there is a slight delay between movement and rendering on the VR goggles, which can lead many people to experience vertigo.  Seems like a trivial thing, until the guy who just dropped several grand on a "VR" setup starts power-vomiting in his living room.

One problem I see to implementation of the "Metaverse" is the increasing skepticism of anything Facebook is doing.  People are starting to see the downside to social media and while it is a small movement at the present time, many are disconnecting from the social media universe - just as many started "cord cutting" from the expense and toxicity of cable TV.  Of course, my friends who are still on Facebook posit that it is "the other guy" who is being radicalized or snookered or influenced, but not them.  So maybe denial will keep Facebook afloat.

Certainly, the smart phone has illustrated the extent to which we all are willing to stay connected electronically 24/7.  Zuckerberg is an electronic drug dealer - delivering smaller and smaller doses of dopamine for each hour you spend online.  Maybe Metaverse will sound appealing to folks who are tired of reading Grandma's cookie recipes or Granddad's rants about "Lib'ruls".   But like anything else, that initial rush will wear off pretty quickly and people will have to go back to the well again and again for smaller and smaller dopamine hits.

Gaming, of course, is the king of electronic addictions.  Forget arguments about violent video games causing violence (because killing hundreds of people in "first person shooter" games isn't going to affect your mind at all).  It is the time bandit aspect of gaming that is interesting.  Gamers themselves will regale you with tales of how many hours - or even days - they spend online, playing a realistic first-person-shooter game.  Some will go so far as to wear diapers or pee in a bottle, so as not to "miss" anything, as online games can't be paused.  VR promises the same immediacy.  You can't just stop playing a VR game to go to the bathroom.

So gaming is the next level for Zuckerberg, and yet his platform isn't really set up for gaming, other than idiotic things like "Farmville" which only children play.  Metaverse promises to be the platform on which all future games will be played - or at least that is what they are hoping, I think.

Right now, if you want to play "video games" you have to select a platform - PlayStation, Nintendo, XBox, or whatever, or build a killer gaming PC with all the latest bells and whistles.  Then you select the game you want to play - which may be marketed by one or more platforms, or by an independent company.  It is still the wild-west in gaming, with no one company claiming to "own" the space.

So you see where Zuckerberg is going with this.  If he can "go big, fast" and become the de facto VR gaming platform, he can likely put the other platforms out of business, or at least scoop up a sizable chunk of their revenue, much as he did with Farmville and other games played on Facebook's platform.

As I noted before, gaming might very well be the new social networking.  Gaming has driven the development of the PC.  The intensive processing requirments to render images in real-time has created the need for ever more powerful processors and graphics cards.  A simple laptop like I have (over a decade old) will run most word processing programs and accounting software and surf the net.  That technology has reached its apex.  But if you want to process video or play games, well, you need something even more powerful.

The computer industry may love this, as, in theory, it could force massive numbers of users to buy newer, more powerful equipment.  But then again, they said the same thing about Windows 95 - and the prophesied buying orgy failed to materialize on-time, resulting in a tech recession.  I suspect a similar thing will occur here.  The hard-core gamers and fanboys will be early adapters - the "bleeding edge" people who don't mind and actually relish the pain of having the latest and greatest.  Such folks are machocists.

The rest of us?  Young people like to do the latest trendy thing and maybe they will jump on the bandwagon.  But I can't see Grandma in a VR headset - she'd fall and break her hip!

Some argue that the pandemic might have primed us for this technology - after all, we are "used to" being "locked down" and communicating via Zoom meetings.  On the other hand, many report that such online communication is exhausting and disorienting.  Children's grades at virtual school are plummeting.  As someone who has "worked from home" since the 1990's, I can attest that it is harder to get things done - particularly with online distractions enticing you to blow off work for another hour.

Whether people give up on the real world entirely and retreat into a second, artificial world, remains to be seen.  I suppose the great masses of people jammed into tiny apartments in polluted cities might find the virtual world to be enticing.  But the rest of us, living in the real world, might find it a shallow shadow of reality that is designed more to manipulate us, that we can manipulate it.

And when an animal cannot manipulate its environment, well, learned helplessness sets in.

Or was that your plan all along, Zuckerberg?

No, Hitler Wasn't a Socialist - Nor Was Trump!

While the term "Nazi" stood for "National Socialism" the Nazis had little to do with Socialism other than to hijack the name for their own purposes.

Labels are just that - labels.  In some parts of the world, the "Liberal" party is actually conservative, while "Labor" represents industry.  Republicans back in the 1800's were against slavery and represented Northern industrial concerns, while Democrats were from the South wanted to preserve their "peculiar institution" and later fought for Jim Crow. Over the years, they have largely swapped political positions.

The reality of politicians is (act shocked) that they will do whatever it takes to get elected and stay in power.  If they see a parade outside their door, they get out in front of it.  This is how prohibition came to be, as well as the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920's.  It is how the McCarthy "Red Scare" era came - and went so quickly.  Recall that both Nixon and Kennedy jumped on that bandwagon as it drove past.

People have been trying, in recent years, to rehabilitate Hitler - or, if that fails, to label their political opponents with his name.  Actually, they have been trying this for years. People deny the holocaust happened, or trivialize the extent of it.  Even among its victims, there is tension.  I recounted before how back in the 1980's, they tried to put a small monument - the size of a headstone - with a pink triangle on it - at Auschwitz, to commemorate the gays who were murdered there.  A group of orthodox rabbis protested, saying that Auschwitz should only be a memorial for the innocent victims of the holocaust.  Yea, fuck orthodox rabbis.  Or orthodox anyone for that matter - narrow-mindedness knows no religious boundaries, worldwide.

As part of this rehabilitation, many argue that Hitler was a "man of the people" and a "Socialist."  He helped Germany recover from the great depression and the injustices of the Versailles treaty!  He couldn't help it that the Allies forced him into war!  If you want to believe that, you probably believe that Mussolini made the trains run on time. In reality, Italian trains have never run on time, and Mussolini's "black shirts" were just a collection of petty criminals and grifters who ran the country into the ground.

Yes, it is true that early on in the Nazi era, they built the world's largest hotel as a worker's vacation resort.  And yes, they built cruise ships so the "workers" could take a Volksvacation.  And yes, the Volkswagen car was conceived as a "worker's" car that they would drive on the new Autobahns.  And maybe if Hitler had left it at that, the world would be a different place today.  But the reality was, the worker's hotel was never finished (and indeed, sat partially abandoned until fairly recently) before the war, and the cruise ships never made many cruises before they were taken for war use.  Few Volkswagens were built before the war and fewer workers ever bought any.  And the autobahns were used mostly for moving troops and later on as ad-hoc airfields.

Nazis dabbling in socialism sort of ended there. Worker's unions were nationalized and strikes were basically outlawed.  This was not a party of the workers, but of the industrialists. The Nazi government was a grifter's government, where each party official tried to make off with as much loot as they could - often literally, after they invaded other countries.

I recently read a book which drove home this point about a black marketeer in France who supplied the Kreigsmarine with materials. He became one of the richest people in France before the end of the war, and even though he was Jewish, was protected by the military because he helped them loot the country.  Luxury goods, artwork, champagne, food, whatever - it all got shipped back to Germany, where it was sold to consumers and the profits pocketed by German officials and officers - and France was made to pay for the goods as well!

This guy made a fortune from the Nazis - helping them make even more.

Of course, this was not a sustainable business model - nor a very efficient one.  It was doomed to fail, eventually, as they ran out of stuff to loot. Sure the big German industrial concerns, such as Krupps, were making lots of money supplying war materials, but when the bombs started falling on the factories, those profits went right up in smoke. In the waning days of the war, Hitler declared that everything of value in Germany should be destroyed, as the German people had failed him and didn't deserve anything better but to suffer.

That's not Socialism - not even close.  It was Fascism, plain and simple.  And what is odd is that the very same people who a few years ago were trying to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation as the guy who built autobahns, are now trying to paint the far-left as Nazis.  The "Hitler wasn't so bad" canard didn't fly, apparently, so their new strategy is to say, "Oh yea? well you're more like Hitler than we are!"  It comes down to schoolyard taunting.

Of course, there is a marked difference between a dictator who takes power through brute force and an elected Socialist government that nationalizes health care. One is elected, the other not.  I am not saying I am in favor of "big government" but an elected government is preferable to a military junta or a coup d'État.  What these self-proclaimed patriots are saying, in effect, is that since they don't like the decisions that an elected government might make in the future, we should abolish all elections and appoint Trump for life.  And on January 6th, we came very close to that - closer than many people would think.  Maybe it had all the slapstick comedy of the Beer Hall Putsch or maybe it was closer to the Reichstag fire.   Make no mistake, it isn't hard to figure out who is closer to Nazism on the political spectrum.

The screwy thing about it all was that Hitler proclaimed he was fighting Communism or "Bolshevism" which like "National Socialism" claimed to be all about the workers, but quickly devolved into a dictatorship indistinguishable from that of Hitler's.  In fact, once the war against Germany was over, the West went to war - a cold war - against Russia. Hitler thought that the West would unite with him against the Communists, but the reality was, his interests and tactics were more akin to Stalin's than Roosevelt's.

And no, Stalin wasn't a Socialist - or even a Communist - but a brutal dictator who murdered millions - as was Mao.  None actually served the people they claimed to be trying to help.  They served their own interests first - acquiring power and brutally keeping it.  Communism sucks - mostly because it quickly becomes a dictatorship.

So what is up with this latest effort to reform Hitler - or to make him appear to be a Leftist instead of a Rightist?  Well, it is complicated, and like anything else there is a small nugget of truth to it, obscured by layers of politcal bullshit.  If you can't reform Hitler's reputation, then smear your opponents with it!  It is a neat political play, oddly coming from a party who worships one man in a cult of personality.

As I noted at the start of this piece, political parties are just labels - and labels can change and change rapidly.  Prior to the 2016 election, the term "Fake News" was being used by the Left to discredit such media "outlets" as "Infowars" as well as the use of rumors and conspiracy theories on the Internet.  Trump co-opted this term to mean anything from the mainstream news media or "MSM" which itself became kind of a dirty word among his supporters.  Even today, there is a small but loud minority of people who simply refuse to believe anything they see in the mainstream media, unless it is on Fox News (and even they are on probation!).

So labels like "Communist" or "Socialist" or "Democracy" mean little or nothing, as no country in the world has yet to practice real Communism or Socialism or Democracy - which is probably a good thing.  A central committee directing the "workers" who "own the means of production" would be an unmitigated disaster - and was, to the extent it was tried.  Similarly, if everyone was put on the dole, no one would work (as we have seen time and time again, worldwide).  And direct Democracy - where everyone votes on everything?  That fails, as Heinlein noted, when everyone realizes they can vote themselves a raise.  The fiasco of ballet propositions in California (and other States) have illustrated why direct Democracy doesn't work - and why our "founding fathers" never envisioned such a nightmare.

What some argue we need, is a strong-man dictator to "get things done!"  No more pussy-footing around with the bill of rights (other than the 2nd Amendment, of course - and the first, but only applied to Facebook and Twitter!).  We need a guy who will kick ass and take names!  You know, someone like... Hitler.  So you see how silly this all is - they try to paint the Left as Nazis, but what they really want is a dictator of their own.  Maybe both sides - at least the extremists - want that.  A dictator of their own.  And it will be a good thing if neither side gets one.

Yes, it is frustrating that it seems nothing ever gets done or done well.  And the media likes to harp on this -with stories about government waste and inefficiency, or police abuse, or corruption in high places.  Surely there has to be a better way of getting things done!

The reality of our present governmental system is that, while horribly inefficient, noisy, and prone to breakdown, it actually combines the best aspects of all these various forms of government.  We have a social safety net - or nets - in the forms of various government social programs that are not always easy to qualify for (nor should they be) and often have a "work requirement".   We have elections which can roust parties from power, if enough people are disgusted enough, as they were when Nixon left office or in November of 2020 (and again on January 7th of 2021).  But it is also a system which allows a President to push through policies like a strong-man dictator, but with limitations.  And the inertia of the "Deep State" as Trump called it, act as a flywheel to sudden change.  It's not a bad little clockwork, this Constitution the forefathers cobbled together, despite its many alleged flaws.

Some people put this up against the mythical ideal of a "perfect" government, that always does the right things all the time (and what are the right things depends on who you are talking to!).  And of course, our government comes up lacking, as this mythical perfect government used in comparison is a myth.  "If only..." they say, "We could change this one thing!" then the world would be perfect.  And what that "one thing" is again, depends on who you are talking to.  Outlaw abortion.  Legalize marijuana.  Elect Trump-for-life.  Guaranteed annual income.  Forgive student loan debts.  Free College.  Whatever - usually the "just one thing" is something that profits the speaker personally and also has a snowball's chance in hell of being enacted.

So what's the point?  Well, first that labels are meaningless and misdirection.  In the name of a better world, many liberals embraced eugenics back around the turn of the Century. Fascists embraced genocide instead.  Whenever one side gets absolute power, it corrupts absolutely.

And this is what worries me, as our economy seems to be on the verge of.... well, something.  Perhaps just a stag-flation malaise like we had in 1979, or perhaps a full-blown depression as in 1929.  An economy hollowed-out with debt, and an international economy about the same, particularly in China.  Will we succumb to easy answers and hand over our hard-fought system of government to people who, well, are basically blithering idiots?

I hope not.  But we'll just have to wait and see.

We're Being Trolled!

Political extremists are trolling us by taking obscure or often made-up events and then positing they are representative of the other side's views.

I saw the above poster online and what disturbed me was that folks thought it was real - when it was an obvious troll.  I mean, who cares what you call a dog?  It's not like they understand.  Moreover, who prints out such posters and then staples them up all over town?

Well, maybe Alan Wagner.  He's one of those performance artist types. He puts up bizarre and funny posters all over LA just to get a reaction. Supposedly his ex-girlfriend accused him of date-rape, sort of, after they broke up.  And someone doxxed him and sent him death threats and put up posters of their own, accusing him of raping numerous women.  After reading about him, I couldn't tell if this was also some sort of performance art piece - pointing out how quickly the torch-and-pitchfork parade can get started in this great land of ours.  Or maybe just a means of getting famous - that's how its done these days, you get accused of doing something awful.

We are being baited.  We are being trolled.  And like clockwork, people chimed in on how ridiculous this was and how we are being smothered by political correctness and cancel-culture.  Not a single person bothered to ask if it was really real, where it came from, who put it up, or whether the whole thing was just an elaborate prank or joke.

That's the problem with the internet.  So much of it is fake, fake, fake.  We see videos of confrontations or funny things and no one bothers to ask,"Why was someone filming this?  I mean, it starts out with someone folding laundry and then escalates into a fistfight.  Why would someone film someone sorting laundry?"   Similarly, so many "prank" videos are staged and scripted.  Maybe some of them are still funny, but they aren't real.

But real is so 20-minutes-ago.  We live in a new virtual age of "Meta" so you'd better strap on your Oculus Rift and plunge into this new world of fantasy, where - just like your Psych 101 professor predicted, reality is what you perceive it to be, or in the case of the internet, what you want to make it to be.

This worries me a bit.  I hope to hang around this planet another 20-30 years, God willing, and it would be nice if it didn't devolve into World War III or Civil War Part 2 - the war over nothing.   It would be nice.  Then again, I do have enough money to emigrate to Canada.  Canadians, it seems are not immune to American wackiness - they seem to have caught at least a whiff of it as well.  In fact, the madness has spread worldwide, because that's how far the Internet spreads.

So how do we fight this new form of mental illness?  Well, with a good dose of common-sense.  No, not all Republicans are heartless bastards who want to take food from the mouths of the poor and worship Donald Trump as their God.  Not all Democrats are gender-fluid PC-cancel culture Social Justice Warriors who want to teach your third grader that he should be ashamed for being white.

Sure, maybe these outliers exist somewhere - in a mental institution or a homeless shelter, or a proud boys meeting or some ivory tower liberal arts college.  But they don't represent the mainstream of America.  And the antidote for Communism isn't Fascism or vice-versa. Throwing away our perfectly decent government and country over some perceived and made-up slights would be the dumbest thing ever done in the history of mankind.

But the history of mankind is a history of one dumb thing after another.  People crave power and control and will destroy a country just so they can run it for a few years and pocket the profits.  We saw this with the downfall of Rome, and with the rise of Nazism in Germany.  Around the world, the Kleptocracy is the norm, not the exception.  Maybe some people in Afghanistan craved Democratic reforms, but the majority just wished it was they, not someone else, pocketing all that bribe and graft money.

Human nature is an ugly thing and always has been.   But what is really sad is that so many people are riled up over nothing or to be more precise, made-up stuff.  What's worse is that they are willing to sacrifice their own well-being and even their lives for nothing. 

We need to stop believing in convenient things - on a personal level as well as a national one.  It is all-too-easy to demonize the opposition, but it accomplishes little.  Much of what goes on today as "Political Thought" comes down to schoolyard name-calling.

Late-night comedians, for example, thought that it was wildly funny and a searing indictment of Trump that his family name in Europe was "Drumpft" or something along those lines. Was that funny?  Did it mean anything?  Similarly, I see people laughing at Joe Biden for being three years older than Trump.  He slipped on the stairs!  He can't hold an ice cream cone (I don't get that one - did I miss a nationally important event by not subscribing to Cable TV?)

But maybe our biggest weapon is skepticism. No, not the skepticism of vaccines or masks and science in general.  But skepticism of things that sound awfully convenient and also go against the grain and against common sense.

All that being said, maybe it is already too late, and I should be applying to residency up North, before it all goes to shit down here....

Oh, My Aching Back!

I know how you feel, Mum!

I recently threw my back out, lifting an air conditioner.  I mentioned before that as you get older, the body starts to fall apart.  You realize - far too late in life - that everyday activities are slowly eroding various body parts.  And the ability to replenish and renew deteriorates over time.  The Queen, over 90 years old, just threw her back out and couldn't attend some ceremonies.  I understand how she feels!

There are a myriad of back problems that can occur, the least serious is a muscle spasm, which can be brought on by lifting something too heavy or too much of the wrong exercise.  A muscle relaxant, an ice pack, a heating pad and it all might go away - only to come back later, of course. Massage helps.  We've had friends have "wedges" inserted into their spinal discs and in most cases it works out OK.  In the few it doesn't... well, it is better not to have to have surgery than to assume that they can "fix" you once you are broken.

But there are more serious problems with the spine which can cause real pain and discomfort.  Discs compress and nerves are pinched.  It gets pretty ugly.  And surgery is kind of risky, as if the surgeon slips with the knife, you may be paralyzed or dead.

We abuse ourselves when we are younger.  I used to water-ski and that really wears on your spine and knees, among other things. When I see these "stunt" videos online, where some kid jumps off the garage roof on his skateboard and lands on a rock or something, I cringe - not because he is in pain now but because I can foresee the chronic pain he will be in later in life.

It can come down to such simple things as shoes.  We live in houses built on concrete slabs.  When you walk on them in bare feet, you can feel the shock wave go right up your leg and into your spine.  A good shoe with good cushioning support is essential - and we are lucky to live in an era of comfy sneakers with expanded polyurethane soles.  Yet I know so many people - women in particular - who wear tiny slipper-like sparkly "shoes" that are little more than cardboard covered with shiny material.  The soles are non-existent. I lose patience talking to people like that - who complain about back problems while wearing cardboard shoes!

So what does this have to do with finances?  A few things.

First, it illustrates the fallacy of the "I'll just work until I'm 70!" mentality.  Recently, I thought for a brief moment about maybe working part-time just to amuse myself and make a few dollars. What would happen if my back went out?  I wouldn't be able to work that day - or the next, or the day after. Eventually, they'd get tired of that and let me go. Your body wears out over time, and when you are older, you don't want to be in a situation of being in chronic pain and still having to work.

Second, it is akin to how we spend money. When we are younger, we abuse our bodies and they bounce-back, or so we think.  I screwed up my knee, water-skiing when I was 24.  The pressure, over time, was squeezing the cartilage in my knee joint.  We were out at a rope swing by the lake, and I hyper-extended my knee joint, trying to climb up on the swing platform to swing out over the lake. That did it.  The years of abuse came for a fore and bone ground against bone.  I fell - into a patch of poison ivy on the first day of my week vacation from work.  They put me in a cast and I spent my summer vacation itching with a coathanger.  Fun.

The knee "healed" but it has come back to haunt me again and again. I take glucosamine, but if I live long enough, I can foresee knee replacement surgery as a possibility - a possibility I would rather avoid.  A friend of mine had this done at age 80 and it pretty much killed him.   Yes, they can try to "fix" you in the hospital, and once you are on medicare they will suggest all sorts of treatments, as Uncle Sugar is paying.  But they don't always work out for the best.  Better off to not need them!

We assume, when we are younger, that such things will heal over time and we will be "back to normal" in no time. It kills me when the media reports about some poor bastard who got clocked on the head or some other horrific injury and they follow up with, "But he recovered in the hospital" - as if there are no long-term effects at all. There are. You realize later in life that the doctor can't "fix you up" like repairing a car.   And you realize that much of your illnesses and problems are of your own making.

Similarly, when we are younger, we assume that mistakes we make with money can be remedied down the road.  We'll just earn more, right?  And saving for later in life, we can do that later, right?  Because right now, we need a new tattoo, or piercing, or motorcycle, or a $100 haircut or $5 cup of coffee.  And that's "normal" to do these things, just like jumping off the garage roof - Hey, I saw that on Tik Tok!  I have a friend, my age, who is still working at manual labor and tells me that someday he hopes to start saving for retirement.  He will likely die in the harness.  "Someday" is already too late.

Some folks argue they are victims of circumstance - that their earning power isn't enough to save money.  Well, not enough to save money and buy the toys they want.  I recalled before about a friend of mine (now deceased) who badgered me to "loan" them $5000 to pay off their credit card.  Between stories of financial woe, they would regale me with tales of their successively leased Cadillac and how much money they donated to an evangelical church to pay for a stained-glass window.  People make choices - we all do - and often we choose to "treat" ourselves today at the expense of tomorrow.

You can spend less than you make and accumulate wealth.  That's a good thing.  You can spend every penny you make on "stuff" and enjoy yourself and never save for tomorrow.  That's pretty bad.  You can spend every penny you make and borrow from tomorrow to have even "more" depreciating consumer crap. That's about the worst possible thing you can do.  And the latter is what about 90% of Americans do - I know I did it at one time.  Most do - and then blame others for making them do it!

So what's the answer?  Well, again, there probably isn't one.  Young people are always going to think they are indestructible and that life will go on forever, and they'll "just work until they're 70!" and whatnot.  All lies we tell ourselves and it is hard to break free of that mentality.

Usually, though, around age 25, reality sets in - as the brain fully develops.  People start to realize that this is pretty serious shit and maybe being a big goofy kid isn't such a great strategy for adult life.  You realize that the game of life is one that you should want to win - not by beating others, but by beating your own self-defeating tendencies.

Sadly, today, we offer ruinous loans to kids when they turn 18, promising them good paying jobs if only they get a degree in advanced naval-gazing.  Those kids are fucked - but then again, how stupid do you have to be to believe such lies?  From a high school guidance counselor no less? It is hard to say.  You feel sorry for some of these "kids" but then again, you don't.

Some folks had quite a party for four years in college. I know because I spent 14 years there.  I delivered pizzas to kids five years my junior, who gave me $5 tips paid with student loan money.  And my classmates would regale me tales of their "Spring Break" trips to Florida - trips I never once took in 14 years of night school.  I wasn't broke.  I just didn't think that fancy vacations were in order at that stage in my life.

Maybe it is inevitable that so many will go through life, unhappy and angry - with each event in their lives seemingly to occur at random, with no cause or effect.  Such folks will end up old and poor and not in any amount of comfort.

Myself, I am grateful that I can afford to relax and take it easy and wait for my back to heal - as Liz can do.  Others are less fortunate - going to work in painful agony, re-injuring their back again and again, and taking weeks to heal.  It isn't pretty.  It isn't fun.  It is, in fact, very painful.

It is ironic, but not treating yourself to bling and crap when you are younger is, in fact, the best treat you can give yourself!