Millions Spent To Convince Idiots

This cartoon pretty much sums it up!

I am getting a lot of e-mails lately asking me to contribute to political campaigns.  The messages are always alarming and always the same.  My opponent is outspending me 2:1 and using attack ads agsinst me! Contribute now!  Undecided voters could turn the election!

This got me to thinking.  Who are these undecided morons, anyway?  I know that many people are swayed by foreign influences, and you can tell easily when they say stupid things (and Russian talking points) like, "both parties are the same, so why bother voting?" or "I'm voting for Jill Stein (or not voting at all!) to send a message to the powers that be!" (Guess what?  Message never received!).   These are folks who either crave attention by claiming to be "undecided" or who are so immature as to think that the candidate they should support should always mirror their own ideas 100%.  As I noted before, that candidate never exists, unless you are running for office yourself.

So millions of dollars are spent on "attack ads" to convince these morons to vote.  Trump is running one, claiming that Harris, supported (whatever that means) a group that pushed for parole of a child-killer.  It is Willie Horton all over again - broad accusations and little in the way of facts.  It is an emotional punch to the gut, getting you to bypass the thinking brain.  Apparently, "crime" tested well with audiences, so they went with that.  And a public prosecutor with decades of actual work experience must have some incident where a killer went free or a trial went South, right?  It is only a matter of probability.

But the best they could do was say she supported a group that called for the release of someone, but they don't go into too much detail.  But like so many other ads, such as the one claiming Harris was "border czar" (a position she did not hold because it did not exist) it is full of hooey.  Republicans are now "mask off" with their lying.  JD Vance has admitted the whole "eating cats and dogs" thing was a hoax - a lie - designed to dominate the 24-hour news cycle.  And the news biz obliged, telling the lie and mutely reporting the retraction.

This is the nonsense that persuades the "undecided voter" and the only thing that changes their mind is millions more spent on counter-attack ads.  Sadly, in the past, Democrats would say they were "above the fray" and "when they go low, we go high" and had their ass handed to them on a platter.

Sadly, I am not sure there is another way.  Our forefathers only wanted land-owners to vote.  The idea was, if you were smart enough to own land, you were not a total moron.  However, even back then, the moron vote could be persuaded.  When we lived in Alexandria, we were living in the shadow of General Washington - his plantation a short walk or bike ride from my home.  Records of the era show the campaign expenses of Washington as he ran for the house of Burgesses or whatever.   50 casks of rum, 20 of whisky, 100 of beer, 75 of mead.  Get the voters drunk, and they will vote for you.

I guess politics hasn't changed much, has it?

Ants

Ants communicate with one another with pheromones.  Bees use dances to tell other bees where nectar is.  How do humans coordinate their efforts and why has it gone off the rails?

I stepped on a red ant mound the other day, camping.  If you have ever been bitten by red ants, you know how painful it can be. The little buggers bite you and leave these swollen marks that itch like crazy and pop like zits a day later.  The scars can take weeks to heal.

Interesting how they work, though, ants. An ant colony has no place for libertarians or sovereign citizens.  Rugged independence doesn't exist for ants, and indeed, even for humans, unless you want to revert to a cave-man level of existence.  Even then, I suspect, you'd have to rely on the cooperation of other cave-men to survive.

We are not much different from ants or bees.  We live in colonies or hives and work cooperatively to advance the interests of the group.  Without such cooperation, we would have died out long ago.  And despite this modern-day yearning for "simpler times" it is apparent that even back in those days, we relied on an intricate network of people and institutions in order to survive.  The farmer may raise food, but without a market to sell it in, or a transportation network to deliver it, he has no way to raise money to buy a new plow.  We are all cogs on a great machine, interacting with each other, whether we like it or not.  We can't "go back" because even back then, we were interdependent on each other.  We were ants and still are ants.

Of course, we don't communicate with pheromones, do we?  Or do we?  Because it is said that people do detect the pheromones of others and respond to them.  You can smell fear, some say, metaphorically, but perhaps it is literally true.  We may communicate via scent in scenarios other than mating.

But personal communication within sight distance, hearing distance, or indeed, smelling distance, is one thing, but no way to coordinate a modern human society.  We need ways to communicate over distances - via writing at first, then the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and today, the Internet.

But what to communicate?  Back in the early days of modern communications, there was an unstated agreement on what "society" thought was right and proper.  People were expected to behave in certain ways, even if no one was looking.  The disapprobation of society was often a stronger cudgel than our laws and legal system.  Some things just weren't done!

As our communications technology advanced, personal communication became more impersonal.  Social mores or normative cues became more relaxed and people, able to communicate with others outside of their home town, were exposed to new and disturbing (to some folks) ideas.

However, well into the television era, there was still a sense of society in our society.  Television stations were limited in number and regulated by the government - or social pressures.  You could not say "the seven dirty words" on the air.  News divisions were loss-leaders and run by professionals with a sense of duty to society.  Equal time provisions helped ensure that radical ideas were not presented, at least without counterpoint.

But all that seems to have gone by the wayside with the Internet.  News divisions of networks are now part of the "entertainment" division and radical ideas are promoted with the unspoken idea that they are merely entertaining viewers and are not to be taken seriously.  Sadly, most viewers fail to understand this concept.

On the Internet at large, however, radical ideas are held forth with the same seriousness as rational ideas.  In the year 2024 we are having serious discussions as to whether the world is flat, vaccines are bad for you, the moon landing was faked, or Russia isn't the enemy.  In a marketplace of ideas, where every idea has equal value, no idea has any value.

You could kill off an ant colony by messing with their pheromones.  Poison the colony with a pheromone that makes them slack off or spend all day walking in circles, and eventually the colony would die.  Somehow suppress the bees' wiggle dances - or better yet, get their message so garbled as to be nonsensical - and the hive dies from starvation.

I wonder, sometimes, whether that is what is happening to us - and whether this has happened before.  I noted before that with each advance in communication (the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, etc.) came not only great improvements in our society, but increased chaos. The rise of fascism and dictators in the 1930s was accompanied by the popularization of broad-cast radio, which dictators used to deceive the masses.

Today, we are seeing the same thing - politicians admitting they are making up lies and fantastic stories ("They're eating the dogs!") and then saying, "what are you going to do about it, fact-check me?"  And even when fact-checked and even when the liars admit they are lies, people still believe the lie.  It defies logic.

If history is any guide, this can only go on for so long before reality rushes back in like the tide.  Eventually, the disconnect between what is said in the media and what people personally experience becomes so vast that people turn away from the liars and new social norms are established.

After World War II, it wasn't funny to be a Nazi anymore.  In Germany, such things were flatly outlawed.  In other countries, you would face the scorn of society at large if you marched around with a Nazi armband, giving Hitler salutes.  That lasted about 20 years until the ACLU decided that "free expression" should trump common sense, and that paved the way for the new generation of Nazis we see today.  And certain demographics on the right welcome these new fascists to the fold.

The problem is, in the time it took our society to realize there was a problem and take action to solve it, a decade or more had gone by and millions of people had been killed and trillions of dollars of materials destroyed

This is a long way from stepping on an anthill, I know.  But you wonder, does mankind really have to go through this nonsense every few decades, or is there another way? Because this time around, well, the destruction could be fatal to our society, or indeed all life on earth.

The flat earth, of course.

No Tax On Tips? Stupid Ideas For Stupid People

This Garthtoons comic illustrates the folly of "no taxes on tips"

Republicans are getting desperate.  The threat of "socialism" and "communism" as well as the Willie Horton-like ads they are playing, don't seem to be working as well as they thought they would.  So why not just buy votes?  Trump is literally doing this now, handing out cash (not much of it) to prospective voters.  But that gets messy and expensive - and probably is illegal as well.

So why not just make empty promises for pie-in-the-sky ideas that will never happen?  Costs nothing and changes the whole narrative.  Plus, it garners votes from people in service industries - right?

Well, maybe.  As the above cartoon notes, if tips are untaxed (at the Federal level, at least) it would motivate many people to restructure their incomes as "tips."   You want a new roof?  It's $100 for the whole thing, but there is a mandatory gratuity of $20,000 of course.

In a way, this is like the Kansas experiment with exempting Subchapter-S corporations from taxation.  Subchapter-S corporations are not taxed, but the income "passes through" to the shareholders/owners who then would ordinarily pay income tax on that money.  Kansas decided to exempt even that tax and guess what happened?  Yup - there was a land-rush by everyone in the State to incorporate as a Subchapter-S corporation.  Tax revenue plummeted and the State nearly went bankrupt.

Crazy tax ideas never work out well. Sure, everyone would like to not have to pay taxes.  They also would like not to pay utilities or car insurance.  Everyone wants a free pony and free ponies don't exist.  When someone offers you a free pony, odds are, they are trying to screw you out of your very last cent.  In the case of Kansas, it caused financial hardship for the rest of the State and will cost taxpayers for years to dig themselves out of the hole Republicans dug.  Of course, the GOP will blame Democrats for the problem - that is the way these things work.

Ditto for "no tax on tips."   Even if Trump gets elected, you can bet that tax breaks for billionaires will be at the top of his list.  "No tax on tips" will get stalled conveniently in committee and Democrats will be blamed for not enacting this silly idea.

Silly? Yes. Because not only is it unworkable, it is unfair.  The server at McDonald's gets no tips whatsoever, but is taxed on their wage income.  The server at Applebee's gets tip income and doesn't have to pay taxes.  The server at Chez Louis fancy restaurant, makes $50 to $100 a table (or far, far more) and pays little or no tax - while taking home a pile.  He pays less tax than the first two, combined.  Once again, a tax cut advertised as helping "the little guy" ends up helping him not at all, while the wealthier people reap the main benefit.

And make no mistake about it, waiters at high-end restaurants can really rake it in!  Hey, it is only fair, as a coke habit is expensive and not deductible as a business expense (Trump is looking into that, though!).

It also makes no sense to single out one group of workers for tax exemption (tipped service workers) while ignoring others.  It is as unfair as eliminating taxes on people who can structure their business as a Subchapter-S corporation.  Why give tax breaks to arbitrary groups of people?  It makes no sense at all.

Well, unless you run a restaurant.  Because tipped service workers are often paid a sub-minimum wage as they are expected to earn tip income.  And you can bet that restaurant owners will petition to lower that sub-minimum wage even further, using the argument that since tips are tax-exempt, well, servers are effectively making more!  I could envision a scenario where service workers are paid no wage and forced to survive only on tips.   But hey, it's tax-free!

When you get right down to it, the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick - to make working people think that Trump is on their side, and not on that of the Billionaire investment-class.  But make no mistake about it, it is just a gimmick, an empty promise, that Trump, nor any other Republican, has any intent of fulfilling.

Starving the treasury of tax money doesn't result in small government, but rather just higher deficits - which in turn, fuels inflation, taxing us all, but taxing mostly the working class.  The inflation of 2021-22 was due mostly to the deficit spending and the resulting dramatic increase in the national debt that we saw during the Trump era.  Sadly, unlike Trump, the Federal government cannot simply avoid paying its debts or try to "cram down" its lenders.

There is also the question of Social Security and Medicare taxes - the so-called "payroll taxes" that Republicans (and even some Democrats, thank you very much, Obama!) like to cut occasionally to get our votes. Problem is, by cutting these taxes, it under-funds these programs, which are set to go negative in a few short years.  And the longer we wait to fix that problem, the more painful it gets.

So, if we cut the "payroll tax" on tips, we add to the problem.  And in addition to under-funding Social Security (which to the GOP is a feature, not a bug - they want to smother that program until it is dead!) it may mean that some tipped workers receive less in retirement as a result, as the amount you get in benefits is based in part on your earnings over your lifetime.   Unless you have 40 Quarters of income, you will receive nothing at all.

Old people dying in the streets like old Calcutta.  What's not to like?  I mean, yea, lets turn America into a third world country so Billionaires can go for space walks.  That's only fair - they earned it!  And they paid their fair share of taxes, too!

The sarcasm light is lit.

Mickey Mouse is Mickey-Mouse

Who cares about Mickey Mouse?  Do kids today even know who he is or was?

They call it the "House of Mouse" - the Disney empire.  But is that really true?  At least for my generation, Mickey Mouse was like a missing divorced Dad - we never even saw him on weekends.  Yet Disney trots out Mickey as the cartoon character "beloved by children of all ages!" when in fact, Mickey, we hardly knew ye.

Think about it.  Do you remember the plot of a single Mickey Mouse cartoon?  And while you may be able to rattle off the names of five or six characters, such as Donald and Goofy, can you really remember them for anything of consequence?

Much ado has been made about the original Mickey falling out of Copyright.  But really, who cares?  It isn't like he is the big money-making center for the Disney company.  Indeed, it seems hard to fathom what is making money for Disney, as its streaming service seems to be unprofitable and its numerous Star Wars spin-offs are losing the interest of fans.  But Mickey Mouse?  He seems to have gone AWOL, decades ago.

Sure, when I was very, very young, it was during the waning days of the "Mickey Mouse Club" which we watched, because the parents parked us in front of the TeeVee and then went out on the patio to have a cocktail and some peace and quiet for a half-hour.  We kids would rather have watched Soupy Sales, as he was more hip.  Although, to be fair, Annette Funicello had these mysterious orbs concealed in her skin-tight sweater.  We noticed them, and so did Uncle Roy, it seemed.

And yea, they would show one short cartoon during that show, but for the life of me, I can't remember a single one.  Nothing stood out.  Nothing was memorable.

But the next year, it seemed, Saturday mornings exploded with cartoons.  Mickey Mouse was off the air on weekday afternoons, Bozo the clown was in.  But Saturday ruled the cartoon roost, and Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbara ruled Saturday.  Disney was nowhere to be seen - preoccupied, perhaps by the theme park and feature-length cartoon movies like Bambi.   I went to see Bambi, but for the life of me, I can't remember much of it, even Bambi's mother getting shot.  I did remember Fantasia in the late 1960s when it had a reprise for all those acid-tripping hippies.  I think we were the only kids in the theater.

But for me, cartoons meant Bugs Bunny and Scooby-Doo.  And I can recall dozens of characters and plot lines from those shows.  Remember Bugs doing The Barber of Seville?  Genius stuff, really, as unlike Mickey Mouse, it didn't talk down to us. Mel Blanc was a God. Even Hanna-Barbara productions, which were generally lamer, had a seriousness to them.  Shows such as Johnny Quest had an adult feel to them, at least to a 7-year-old.

Mickey Mouse? That dude was gone, man.  Off-the-air.  Yesterday's news.  Nowhere to be seen.  Disney coasted on this idea that kids loved Mickey, while at the same time, limiting his exposure to a mascot character at Disneyland (who, no doubt, scared the crap out of little kids).  The term "Mickey-Mouse" came to be viewed as an insult, describing something that was lame, outdated, kiddie-style, or just poorly put together.   As in, "hey man, that setup is really mickey-mouse!"

And Disney didn't seem to notice, preoccupied with their efforts to turn the sleepy little town of Orlando into the nightmare that it is today.  Never drive on I-4 if you can help it.  Too late, at least for my generation, Disney jumped back into Saturday morning cartoon fare, with things like Duck Tales, which actually introduced new characters, rather than relying too much on old ones.  But where was Mickey?  Of course, at that point, I was too old to care.

And the new generation of Saturday morning fare seemed to talk down to kids. Anything by Sid and Marty Kroft seemed patronizing, as did newer shows like Muppet Babies.  Sadly, even Warner Brothers jumped on that bandwagon with "baby looney tunes."  Cartoons were dead to me by then - I had outgrown them, and they had left me as well.  The nail in the coffin was reliance on Japanese Anime, which started out by doing voice-overs of cheaply made Japanese Cartoons like Speed Racer.   Producers realized you could churn out poorly animated crap and kids would watch it.  Today, adults watch it, and I don't think it is healthy.

Of course, "adult cartoons" got a start in my childhood as well.  Shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons got their start as evening television fare during prime-time, not as Saturday morning kiddie shows.  Nevertheless, they were kind of lame, with loud laugh tracks and plot lines and characters recycled from old shows like The Honeymooners.

Today, of course, we have a plethora of "adult" cartoons to watch, with The Simpsons being the oldest one currently running.  Maybe these shows are more hip and sophisticated that The Flintstones and their ilk, but the underlying idea is the same - a family sit-com, presented as animation.

And as for Saturday morning?  I suspect it is now dead, as kids can watch cartoons any time of day or night.  There is even a network for cartoons.   Of course, much of the modern fare eludes me - like music, I guess we focus on what we listened to during our formative years and reject any "modern" replacements.  I was never a Ren and Stimpy fan and not much of a Beavis and Butthead one, although South Park has its moments - and yet, like The Simpsons, seems to be subtle right-wing propaganda sometimes.  Or perhaps not-so-subtle.

But Mickey Mouse?  Haven't seen him around in decades.  Other than his annoying voice and poorly drawn character, I don't remember much about him.  The only thing memorable about him is the use of his name as a slur.

Think about it.  No one ever called something "Bugs Bunny" as a means of deriding it.  No one every said, "That's just Scooby-Doo!"

But Mickey Mouse?  Yea, he was really Mickey-Mouse, and not in a good way.

Changing God's Mind

Praying is trying to change God's mind.  Good luck with that.

We have been travelling with a recently widowed Cuban friend who is making spiritual pilgrimages to his Alma Mater which was a monastery that had a college at one time.  We also visited his old haunts from 50 years ago.  I guess he is processing grief somehow.

Catholics are an interesting bunch.  The faith is very strict - at least on paper - but many I know are anything but devout.   Some are divorced, others haven't attended mass in years (or go on Easter and Christmas and that's it).  Others profess to be agnostics or even atheists - while still proclaiming to be Catholic.  Some of these agnostics are even Nuns, Priests, or Monks.  It is an interesting religion.

One quote my friend told me sort of stuck with me.  A famous Nun noted that, according to the Bible, God is omniscient and sees all and knows all.  He is also infallible as well - he makes no mistakes and has no "do overs" although the Bible seems to have a few of the latter (Noah and the flood, Sending Jesus to fix things, etc.).

The point was, if God has decided something should be so (e.g., little Timmy gets cancer) then praying to God to cure him is asking God to change his mind when he already made it up.  If you think about it, it seems kind of pointless.  For whatever reason, God decided little Timmy had to suffer and die, and here you are asking him for a second chance.  God doesn't change his mind - he is infallible, right?

Of course, atheists would note that the whole argument is hooey and that the law of probability made little Timmy sick, not God, and that medical treatment might save Timmy more that praying would.  But that's just being logical, and religion, like all belief systems, collapses under the scrutiny of logic.

This is not to say that prayer is worthless.  Well, it is when it is used like a letter to Santa Claus, asking for favors or new toys.  I kid you not about the latter - many fundamentalists will pray for a new car, and when they go and buy one with their own money they claim that "Jesus gave us this car!"   I have witnessed that firsthand.

Some fundamentalists would posit that God will change his mind, but only if you pray and are one of his anointed favorites.  This posits that God is a cruel and shallow God, who only does good things for those who fawn over him.  Oddly enough, the most religious people in the world (of all stripes) are the poor.  Clearly prayer isn't working out for them - or maybe God just hates poor people, right?

But prayer, as a means of meditation and contemplation, can be productive. In our visits to various holy shrines, I found them to be very calming and contemplative places which were conducive to introspection and careful reflection.  When one prays, perhaps, one thinks about what they are praying for and realize what best course of action to take as a result.  As a form of meditation, it could indeed work miracles, not by changing God's mind, but by changing yours.

God is not the answer-man, and giving up on real action in life and instead relying on prayer isn't what God wanted.  After all, he did give us self-determination, right? So maybe rather than sitting on our hands and hoping it all works out for the best and have God fix things at the last minute, we should do something, instead.

Just a thought - or a prayer.