The tragedy of Jason Arday was, is, and will be covered by the media as a racial issue. It isn’t, but that won’t matter to those who view the world through an exclusively racial lens. More than anything, I think, Arday’s story is about wishful thinking, mental illness, and the propensity of so many to believe reality is mutable and that their wishes have actual heft.

Reality always wins.

In 1994 Kim Jong-Il, then ruler of North Korea, played a round of golf at the newly opened Pyongyang Golf Complex. This is a fact. The golf course exists and Kim played a round there. However, following his round of golf, purportedly his first ever, the North Korean state media reported he shot 38 under par, scoring 5 holes-in-one, and that he had birdied (or better) every hole. No one in the history of golf has ever come close to matching this. Not Jack Nicholas or Tiger Woods, not Sam Snead, or Bobby Jones, or Ben Hogan, not John Daly or Nick Faldo or Greg Norman. No one. According to North Korea, the best round of golf ever played (by far) was played by Kim Jong-Il, pretty much the first time he picked up a golf club, and no one in North Korea has ever publicly doubted the veracity of this achievement. In North Korea, Kim’s record is safe. Outside of North Korea, where people can think and say what they want and reality holds sway? Not so much. Outside of North Korea, where opinions are not imposed and enforced, we’re still able to throw the bullshit flag.

So, bullshit. No one, and especially not a little pot-bellied non-athlete like Kim Jong-Il, has ever shot a 34. No one has ever scored 5 holes-in-one in a single round. It never happened. It is made up. It is a lie.

Kim Jong-Il was free to make such an outrageous claim only because no one dared to point out it was obviously not only not true, but impossible.

Which is why no one but Jason Arday is responsible for his death. Certainly not those who threw the flag.

For those unfamiliar with this story, Jason Arday was appointed and heavily touted as “the youngest black person” to ever become a full professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Cambridge hyped his appointment exactly because of the life story Arday told. The BBC, in the weeks and months following his appointment, made five documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series. The story (according to Arday) goes like this: at the age of three he was diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay, deafness, and dyscalculia; and was non-verbal until the age of eleven. He did not learn to read or write until he was eighteen. Soon after he learned to read and write, he was attacked in the street and developed epilepsy as a result. At twenty-one he jetted off to Rio de Janeiro where he installed water pumps in poor communities. He ran 30 marathons in 35 days. Amazingly, he defended his PhD dissertation at Liverpool John Moores University, though he had to relearn the entire content weeks before because he’d had a brain tumor removed and it damaged his memory.

There are other wild claims. That he was in a coma following an automobile accident and had “locked-in” syndrome. That he’d had a bout of testicular cancer. That he’d run 600 miles in six days.

It never occurred to anyone at the BBC, Cambridge University, John Moores University, or the world media to wonder if maybe some of the story was less than true. The story was just too good to be checked. A charming young black man, the child of immigrants, overcoming incredible hardships imposed by a cruel and unjust world to reach the heights of British society. Run with that. On August 11, Simon and Schuster published Arday’s biography, Great and Unfortunate Things. Of the book, Simon and Schuster says, “In Great and Unfortunate Things, we see how Arday went from being nonverbal as a child and illiterate until he was eighteen to scaling unimaginable heights as an adult. Without romanticizing the struggle, this is a story of determination against seemingly insurmountable odds—and of a family and a small group of believers whose compassion helped him see what is possible.” Simon and Schuster knew the biography was a fraud but published it anyway.

As these things often happen, once he’d been promoted to a position of authority and began making television appearances and doing interviews, becoming famous and talked about, someone not in on the gag began asking questions. The Bullshit Flag was thrown. When Arday was a PE teacher no one cared about the stories he made up. It did not matter. When he was granted a PhD, a book deal, made a professor at Cambridge University and given a platform where he pretended to wisdom he did not possess, it did matter.

And the unraveling began.

Sadly, Arday was unable to shoulder the repercussions of his fantastic story being dismantled and died by suicide on August 14^th.

The response of his family and his supporters to Arday’s death was to blame his critics for bringing such pressure to bear. Arday, his family said, “was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for the more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”

No, that isn’t what happened at all. No one launched a “campaign of sustained abuse” because Arday was young and black. His story collapsed because it was not true and he fell from such a great height because he had lied his way there, enabled by individuals who are paid to know better.

Maybe there was hate. I suppose there might have been racists somewhere who simply could not tolerate a young black man as a Cambridge don, but they are not who exposed Arday and brought his story to an end. Racists didn’t compose his life story, concoct his “scholarship”, or promote him far beyond his abilities. Racists certainly did not take his life. He did that all on his own, because he was unable to tolerate the fall from the heights he’d reached after being enabled and empowered by individuals and institutions who loved the story more than reality. No one, it seems, in the media or at the schools that promoted him, ever thought to read his “scholarship”, which (as it turned out) was little more than copy-and-paste plagiarism. No one in academia or the media ever thought to take out a calendar and calculator to determine if Arday’s biography was even possible. No one in authority ever listened to his lectures and asked, “Does this even make sense?”

The question must be asked: Why wasn’t a critical eye turned toward Arday’s “scholarship” and supposed achievements? Isn’t that, too, racism?

I wonder what Jason Arday’s story would look like were it told truthfully and straight up. I imagine he was a normal kid with the dreams kids have, of being a pro athlete or a celebrity. As things worked out, though, through his own efforts he became a normal, run of the mill guy, a PE teacher. Somewhere along the line, he decided that he wanted more, that he deserved more, and that what he believed himself to be was more important than what he actually was. I could have been autistic and disadvantaged. I could have been non-verbal as a child. I could have been dyslexic and illiterate until I was eighteen and I might have had cancer multiple times. I could have been a world-class snooker player and marathon runner. Surely someone has done these things, and I can imagine what it would be like; isn’t that the same as it actually happening to me? I’m not ordinary. I’m not just another guy. I demand to be special. So, he made it up.

That’s the real story. A person so insecure about who he actually was he was unable to exist within those confines, but also too insecure to actually challenge himself to be what he aspired to be. Maybe he could have run back to back to back marathons, had he trained to do so. Maybe he could have done real scholarship had he applied himself. But he lived in a society that put priority on things he could not control—his skin color and his status as a victim of fate. His best efforts would never equal the attention he got for things he could not control. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t autistic and illiterate until the age of eighteen. It wasn’t his fault he’d never had cancer or been in a coma. The powers that be have no use for a guy just trying to be better, to do better, day to day. They wanted a story. So, he gave them one.

Arday’s sad story will quickly drop away now. No one wants to hear the hard lesson Arday should have learned in his youth:

If you want to be respected, be respectable. Trusted? Be trustworthy. Honored? Be honorable. If it is important to you to be seen as great? Do great things. These attributes can only be faked in the very short run and it doesn’t matter how many people you fool. Your self-esteem means less than nothing. That is a pernicious lie we have all been told. If you make up your character, you will have no character to land upon when you fall.

No one wants to hear this. I certainly didn’t when my teachers and coaches were drilling it into me.

This is probably why teachers and coaches stopped saying it.

Anyway, it is a sad story, a tragedy in the truest sense, complete with the tragic flaw. And we haven’t seen it for the last time.

Peace.

In 1976, at the age of eighteen, on the front porch of 224 South Washington Street with my parents and Bob Brown (who was back in town after completing basic training and was sporting a crisp Army uniform) I celebrated the 200^th Anniversary of the United States of America. At the time, two hundred years seemed a very long time to me. The parade rolled by and when a tank passed, the crew spotted Bob in his uniform and the turret turned to point the main gun directly at him. Flags were everywhere and it felt like everyone in the nation was proud and excited. The Bicentennial was huge.

Fifty years have passed since that day and I can say with certainty that now, having experienced 20% of our nation’s history, 250 years doesn’t seem like a very long time at all. Sure, a lot has happened and the world has changed, things we take as given would seem straight up miracles to the citizens of 1776, but in the grand scheme 250 years is a tiny slice of history. On July 4, 2026 we find ourselves still in the early stages of the American Experiment.

I didn’t coin that phrase. “Experiment” is what the founders called what they were doing at the time. Alexander Hamilton opened the very first Federalist Paper in 1787 by explaining the stakes: it was up to the people of this country, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Until July 4^th, 1776 and throughout history, governmental power had been forced upon people. Every governing body in the history of the Western world had been imposed, inherited, or seized. For the first time, a government would be chosen by the governed. That was some “experiment”.

Sort of a big deal, no? Something worth trying, an effort worthy of celebration and praise. Who wouldn’t be for giving individual liberty a whirl?

The question we face today—maybe every day since 1776—is: How’s that experiment working out?

On any objective scale one would have to admit it has gone well, and well beyond the wildest expectations of the founders. The USA is by far he wealthiest and most powerful nation the planet has ever known. We amount to just 5% of the world’s population, yet as a nation produces about 25% of the world’s GDP. The freedom and imagination of the American people has allowed us to generate an incredible number of inventions and innovations. Look it up. Other nations may manufacture things more cheaply, but the number of American inventions is genuinely staggering. No other nation comes close.

And we are not stingy with this wealth. The citizens of the USA, in individual charitable donations, give about $258 billion to charities each year. (List of countries by charitable donation ) A whopping 1.44% of the GDP. The people of the charitable second place, New Zealand, contribute 0.79% of their GDP, which amounts to about $1.1 billion. It’s not even close.

It is not even debatable. The USA is an exceptional country, unique throughout history. Never, anywhere, have people been allowed to live and speak as freely as we do.

Yet, the words of Hamilton keep coming back to me. He seemed to be suggesting that the important question, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice” would be determined not by the things the people said, or believed, or were given by the government or anyone else, but “by their conduct and example”. The people, Hamilton tells us, will have to, in the end, be worthy of liberty. And it is only by their actions and example that history will determine the efficacy of the great experiment.

It all hinges directly on us.

Lately, I’m not sure we’ve been doing a very good job. I have no doubt that the vast majority of Americans are generous and civil, embrace personal responsibility, and understand how very fortunate we are, but I fear we have become complacent and apathetic and allowed the jaded few, poisoned by envy, to wield far more power and influence than their numbers warrant. We should have no patience at all with avowed anti-Semites, communists, racists, and those who openly despise the nation, yet here we are. Large numbers of people have voted for precisely such individuals.

I’m not concerned, though. My personal belief is that the human spirit causes all of us to crave personal agency and responsibility, so whatever scheme comes up the pike aimed at depriving us of that will be, slowly or quickly, tamped down. The system the founders put in place seems very, very good at insuring this happens.

Granted, sometimes it seems like we are on the brink of a great disaster—the undermining of our fundamental structure by blows against the rule of law, the violation of the sanctity of elections, the assassination of our leaders—but these are the actions of a small (and very confused) minority. The spirit of America is alive and well.

I have driven all over this nation, to every state bar Hawaii, many times. I have hitch-hiked it many times in my youth. I’ve had my van pulled out of a gulch in a Wyoming ghost town by a passerby who was picking mushrooms. Had a tire changed at a Walmart in Arizona and the store refused to let me pay. A mechanic opened his garage for me at 10pm in Kentucky, when he noticed I was parked in the lot and sleeping in the van. There are a whole lot of American flags still flying in this country, all over the place, from coast to coast. It’s a miraculous nation and most of us know this in our very bones.

So, like every other 4^th of July, we are absolutely on the brink of something, and it isn’t disaster. We are, as always, on the brink of something wonderful. As a nation we’ve seen the Emancipation of slaves, the polio vaccine, the Moon landing. We’ve seen the average lifespan increase from about 37 years in 1776 to nearly 80 years today. We’ve seen the invention of air travel and the highway system and (thank God) air conditioning. The nation is just fine, thank you, and the next fifty years will bring more benefits and miracles if we only stay the course.

There are those who will refuse to celebrate the nation’s founding, and that is their right, just as it is our right to ignore them and shout them down. Some will refuse because they despise the President (though I don’t recall Jimmy Carter being much of a factor in 1976, and a lot of people were unhappy with him) and some will refuse because they have some crackpot notion that they are oppressed under a “fascist” system. Some will refuse because they don’t know why there even IS a July 4^th holiday, and that isn’t their fault. You can’t know what you don’t know. Some will refuse because they’ve been taught, and now believe, that the success of the United States is somehow unjust. Some will refuse because they simply dislike the country.

It is not our job to silence these people, or to punish them into right thinking. It is our job to leave them be and to do what we do: By our conduct and example show them and the world that we are worthy of everything freedom has wrought.

That probably frightens some people, but that’s an SEP: Someone Else’s Problem. Not mine. Not yours. Not ours.

Happy 4^th of July.

Peace.

Boethius

Current events simultaneously leave me cold and make my blood boil. The stupid hangs in the air like a thick miasma and humanity continues to roil in silly tribal struggles that reek of dishonesty, fear, and hubris. History is rewritten, and being old enough to remember the original version of the facts, I am left with feelings of disgust. And yet I have high hopes for humanity and a great affection for people. It’s a strange emotional brew.

You may have noticed that the global warming climate change crisis is being reframed, now that AI demands unprecedented amounts of electricity. Suddenly, we aren’t in danger of a “tipping point”, a fixed parts per million of atmospheric CO2 (that we passed years ago thanks to China and India) at which the planet would be irreparably harmed and set our feet on the road to Doomsday. The New York Times would now like you to forget that such claims were ever made. Hockey Stick? What Hockey Stick? Okay, so maybe we oversold the danger, but our motives were pure. Sure. Whatever. I clearly remember being told, though, that if we didn’t completely rejigger our economy immediately, we were all going to die. “Oopsie,” doesn’t strike me as much of a mea culpa.

The people coming of age and now putting their hands to the levers of power in government and industry are unfamiliar with a world without solar farms and windmills, a world without the silly ritual of “recycling”, and having been raised in a culture that accepted CO2 as poison are unlikely to turn their backs on that catechism. It is entrenched nonsense now, like collective guilt and collective wealth.

This trick has been played across the board it seems. Racism is cool again and it is widely accepted that white people invented slavery and kidnapped people of color for millennia, until the practice was ended by Desmond Tutu or MLK or Pancho Villa (or, laughably, the Democrats) at some point in the past, and that’s close enough for education. It’s a total inversion of history, but oh well. History is hard, and we only need enough of it to serve our purposes today. Hell, if we need to actually know something we always have Chat GPT in our pocket.

I suppose this is why old men have forever been portrayed as grumpy. We remember, and are the first to piss in the new and faddish ideological punch bowl, which in actuality isn’t new at all. It’s always the same old grab for money and power by individuals who think they have created something new. It’s the same old racket, repackaged. Again and again and again. And, always, people fall for it. This has been true throughout history.

It makes getting old difficult, and it is already pretty hard. My peers and I are living it now. (Pro tip for the young: take good care of your teeth. The upkeep later is very expensive). I’m okay with my gradual and inevitable fading into the gray mist. It’s mostly the fakery I see all around me that rankles.

At the age of 78 and during his final tour in 2013, Leonard Cohen said that men go through five distinct stages where women are concerned. First, they are “Irresistible”. Then the stages go: “Resistible”, “Invisible”, “Repulsive”, and eventually, if one lives long enough, “Cute”. Cohen did not specify in which stage he found himself. Very few escape the progression and generally speaking, those who try to usually appear more pitiable and ridiculous than irresistible.

My 68^th birthday looms. Sure, age is just a number, and frankly, I never expected to get here; but I have the distinct feeling that I am moving through the tail end of the Invisible stage and approaching the Repulsive. I’m long accustomed to being invisible, but now parts don’t bounce back as quickly. Skin has lost elasticity and gravity exerts its despotic force. Feet sometimes hurt at the end of the day. Hair is gone where I liked it and appearing in places I don’t. I no longer leap up or down from or to anything higher than two feet or so. I lift things carefully. I forget little things and find the fine print difficult to read. I’ll run (probably) but only if something is chasing me. Yep, I’ve gone and gotten old. Surprisingly (to me anyway) I find that this development does not bother me any more than the stupid rewrite of history and I consider this lack of concern a positive thing. Of course I miss beautiful women finding me beautiful, but that ship sailed many years ago, long before I became invisible.

Being a human, though, I was saddled at birth, like everyone, with an Ego. The only experience we know is our own, and in my youth, as life played out like a movie before me, I assumed, naturally, that the movie was about me. Uncertain as to how I should run my movie, I looked around for role models, people with stuff and status to pattern my life after. We humans are social creatures, hardwired to seek acceptance wherever we happen to find ourselves. So I watched those I assumed to be well accepted and tried to emulate their behaviors. It was a shock when, as a young man, I discovered that they hadn’t figured it all out either.

It took a whole lot of years to discover that what I thought I knew, what I thought other people knew, and what I thought I knew about other people was often wrong and completely meaningless. I woke up one morning and just knew, like a bolt from the sky, that I was just making a whole lot of life up as it went along. Suddenly I understood that I didn’t know very much at all. What a liberation.

Today I am certain that I do know two things: One, the movie is decidedly not about me, and two, no one but me knows how to be the best version of me. From this I can deduce that the movie is not about any other person, either, and that I don’t know what the best version of anyone else even looks like.

Man, did that ever take the heat off. Suddenly, when someone informed me that I wasn’t wealthy enough, educated enough, listening to the right music, associating with the proper people, or praying to the proper God in the proper manner to ever be truly happy, I was free to ignore them completely and be happy anyway. I could suddenly see people, even politicians and celebrities, as just people. I could look at someone like Obama, or Trump, or the Pope, or the Dali Lama and understand immediately that they were not perfect and had no ultimate answers for me. I saw people, flawed as we all are, trying this and that, sometimes successfully, sometimes disastrously, making their way with the time that they have.

This, I suspect, is the curse of youth. That feeling that somewhere, someone else has figured it out and is living the perfect life—driving the right car, living in the right house, having the right job and raising the perfect children, holding the correct opinions—and if we only reach a little further, try a bit harder, we will pop through some invisible barrier and join them. It’s a lie, but a lie we are encouraged to embrace. Here’s what I have discovered. There is nothing to figure out. There is no puzzle to be solved. The best life, for me, requires only a few things—the basics (food, shelter, etc.) and then to be where I am and do my best to do the right and honorable thing in the moment where I find myself. This is only my perfect life. Someone else’s perfect life may involve a beach house, seven children, a career and the respect of their peers. Honors. A place in the history books. A platinum record. A pilot’s license. A world record. To leave their mark on the world. I have no idea. I can only try to be the best version of me, and that has become goofy simple.

To me, being a bear of little brain, this was an astonishing revelation, but it is old news. Marcus Aurelius wrote of it, and Zeno of Citium, and Seneca. It is old knowledge. Seneca wrote, some two thousand years ago: “All men wish to live happily, but when it comes to discovering what makes life happy, they grope in the dark, and it is not easy to attain happiness. For if we mistake the road, the more eagerly we press forward, the farther we are from our goal; since if the path leads in the opposite direction, our very speed increases the distance.”

I guess I just got lucky, groping in the dark and running headlong down the wrong roads. I didn’t die, which was no sure thing given some of the choices that I made, and I found my way to happiness. Happiness isn’t the right word, though. Seneca wrote of “de vita beata”, Latin for “the happy life”, which is a far different thing than what I believed “happy” to be. Like most people, I thought of happiness as an event—getting married, having a child, buying a house, landing a job, a party, a day at the beach—and for some years I drove myself crazy chasing what I thought happy was. Happiness is just a way of being, for me, now. It involves acceptance and a load of gratitude. Happiness, now, is like Lyle Lovett’s old porch:

“And this old porch is just a long time
Of waiting and forgetting
And remembering the coming back
And not crying about the leaving”

It isn’t contingent upon this or that, winning or losing, places or what other people choose and do.

It’s private and peaceful.

A man named Boethius wrote a book in 526 AD while sitting in prison and waiting for his execution. He had been falsely accused of treason and was to be, and eventually was, brutally executed. The book is titled The Consolation of Philosophy. It is written as a dialogue between the writer and Philosophy, personified as a woman. It is a deep book, but surprising (to me anyway) completely without anger, bitterness, or resentment. Instead, it seems to be about what fortune, the randomness of luck and events, can and cannot take from you. What do you have, who are you, Boethius wonders, when everything external has been stripped away?

It was a powerfully influential book, too. A favorite of Dante, Chaucer, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Aquinas. In fact it was the most widely read book, other than The Bible, for about one thousand years. That’s a whole lot of conversations over dinners about the ideas the book conveys. And it was about centering your identity, your happiness and peace, in something that the world cannot reach.

That is an important truth culture has lost sight of, but it’s sort of what I aim for and where I live now. I guess that makes me very, very old fashioned.

So 68 is just a number. I’m very lucky to have made it and to be alive where and when I am, with veritable miracles all around me, everything from dental implants, streaming music, and zero torque putters to the miracles that have always been—nature and all it contains. What a ride!

Anyway, I wish you all to be the best version of yourselves, whatever that might be. Don’t sweat the rest.

Peace.

I was very young the first time I saw The Harlem Globetrotters defeat The Washington Generals. The Globetrotters were tricksters, impulsive and skilled, while the Generals tried to play straight, traditional basketball. It was theater, and it was funny, but it wasn’t a serious basketball game. Even as a child I could see this.

From Wiki: “The Generals exist primarily as a part of the Harlem Globetrotters’ act, effectively being stooges for the Globetrotters. While the Globetrotters play tricks and perform spectacular displays of skill for the crowd, the Generals attempt to play a “normal” game of basketball. The Generals’ games involve playing genuine basketball at times, but also not interfering in the Globetrotters’ tricks. Almost every game has ended in a resounding win for the Globetrotters.”

Basically, The Generals exist because of and for The Globetrotters. The Globetrotters had to play someone, after all. It all just works better if the Generals are in on the gag and know when to bear down and when to let up,

Now it looks like The Southern Poverty Law Center (the SPLC) copied the Globetrotters business model. Begun in 1971 by Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr as a resource for poor blacks and to hold the KKK legally responsible for attacks on the black community, mission creep started even as the KKK became irrelevant. Today, according to their website, the SPLC now exists to serve as a “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.” It is not Southern, does not concern itself with poverty, and has little to do with the law. It is something else, a something that is all too common today. A 501c nonprofit that is mostly about moving money.

The fundamental problem is: “white supremacy” isn’t really much of a thing. I have never met a white supremacist. In fact, most people outside of prison don’t think of themselves in racial terms at all. In my experience, ask most Americans who they are and they will identify as a descendant of the nation from which their ancestors came. “I’m Italian” or “Irish” or “Chinese” or “Korean” or “Nigerian” or “Brazilian” or “Indian”. I’ve quite literally never heard a single person identify as “white”. I’ve heard people identify as a “hillbilly”, as “a 1%er” (outlaw biker), even as a “Deadhead”...but never as “white” (though, one has to admit, identifying as a Deadhead comes close). Speaking strictly for myself, I have always assumed there is something decidedly wrong with a person who claims superiority for something they have nothing to do with, be it where they were born, a last name, or a family fortune. The SPLC set themselves up as the champions fighting “white supremacy” and now has an endowment of about $1 billion. Must be kicking the snot out of racism with that sort of scratch.

If the SPLC was to continue to thrive, as the KKK fell into obscurity and became a group so fringe a “rally” might be four guys and a flag, it needed an opposing team. They needed their own Washington Generals. According to recent indictments filed, SPLC gave a minimum of $3 million to eight people, at least three who were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, the Nationalist Socialist Party of America Nazis, and the American Front. Strange thing for a 501c charity posing as a bulwark against racism to do, no? But it sure looks like that $43 million investment paid off. The endowment has grown from $500 million in 2017 to nearly $1 billion, with 96% of donations coming from anonymous donors.

The CEO of SPLC earns a cool half million a year.

I’m sure everything is on the up and up.

The thing about the SPLC that bugs me most, though, is not that they are grifters. Cons are run day in and day out. What bothers me is that their con depends entirely upon convincing the masses that everything is awful. And what’s worse, they are just one of many such cons being run--all selling the idea that the US is a terrible place, a hotbed of racism and greed, poisoning the planet and preventing humanity from achieving a perfect world.

They all remind me of Robert Preston in “The Music Man”. Hmmm...nice, peaceful town, River City. What can I possibly use to frighten them into a moral panic? Pool! Kids are playing pool!

In River City it was the game of pocket billiards causing juvenile delinquency. Today it is racism, climate change, inequality of every stripe, the greedy rich, the dying environment; but it is never somewhere else. Never in China, or Africa, or South America. No, it has to be here, in the most free and prosperous nation to ever have existed, because here is where there is money, Big money, to be made. Try selling racial equity in Asia, see how much money you collect.

To keep the money flowing, the lies get bigger and the connections more broadly drawn. Be it Trayvon as a little kid just out to get some Skittles, polar bears “stranded” on ice floes, weather events “proof positive” of climate change, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, the hysteria has to keep ratcheting upward to keep those dollars coming in. Reality doesn’t matter. The money matters.

We all allow it to continue by pretending the stories they tell have actual heft.

Some years ago I was working with a young man who was about 28 years old at the time. He was very proud of his new laptop computer.

“It’s a beauty,” he told me. “A real gaming machine.”

“Nice,” I said. “What did that run you?”

“Nothing! That’s the great thing. It didn’t cost me anything. UPS just left it at my door!”

I was a little surprised. “Was it a gift? Was it addressed to you?”

“No,” he said. “It was an address similar to mine. I don’t know the guy. I didn’t recognize the name.”

“Ah,” I said. “Then it isn’t yours. It’s his.”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t steal it. UPS left it at my door. If anything, UPS stole it.”

“Sounds like an honest mistake by the driver to me.”

“But not my mistake. I didn’t steal it.”

“But you’re keeping it?”

“Sure I am. It’s not my fault.”

I never trusted the guy after that. His compass was seriously out of whack.

Today, somewhere, he’s approaching 50 and I imagine he is precisely the sort of guy who’d jump into a job at a non-profit charity with both feet. He’d drive a nice car, live in a nice house, and live very well all the while convinced that he deserved it. That he’d earned it. He’d tell himself comforting stories about how he was doing his part to make a better world and would sleep soundly every night.

And he would fight tooth and nail (like everyone else in the business) to prevent anyone from ever considering the flow chart of the damage the narratives do as they trickle through society.

We have a lot of those folks, and they are selling an image of the USA that is simply not true.

The unvarnished truth is we here in the United States are incredibly fortunate. An entire nation of people who have advantages humanity has never before known. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Personally, I ignore the hysteria. It bores me. But it would greatly please me if people would stop supporting the negativity con, from all directions. When I feel charitable, I pick up the tab for the group at breakfast or the car behind me in the drive through or leave a tip that is ten dollars too big or arrive early and pay for a round of golf. I’ll make a donation to an animal shelter or a wildlife rehabilitator. I’m sure there are exceptions--St. Jude’s, maybe--but when the average annual salary for Chief Executive Officer of a Non-Profit Organization in the US is $795,064, equivalent to $382 per hour, $15,290 weekly, or $66,255 monthly... well, I can’t help wondering if charity is really the primary mission.

But that’s just me.

Anyway.

Peace.

I apologize for not writing for a while, and by way of explanation all I can offer is, “Sorry. I’ve been reading.” Not much of an excuse, but in fairness I’ve been reading a massive series of fascinating novels by Upton Sinclair.

Most people were introduced to Sinclair much as I was, in school through his harrowing, muck-raking novel, The Jungle, written when he was 26 years old and published in 1905. I was mildly surprised to discover that he lived 90 years and died in 1968, and furthermore that he’d been writing and writing and writing all along and published some ninety-five novels and thousands upon thousands of essays, letters, op-eds, and other assorted odds and ends. He was, as a writer, a 20th century heavyweight. Where did all of that writing go? My suspicion is that he was quietly airbrushed out of our schools and libraries because of his leftist political leanings, but that’s a guess. I suspect one day, maybe soon, he will be “rediscovered” and find his place in the company of other great American novelists who are still celebrated. Popularity walks hand in hand with fads and fashion, it seems.

The books I have been reading are eleven large novels, written by Sinclair between 1940 and 1953, that went out of print and have been largely forgotten, which is a shame. The series is generally called “The Lanny Budd series” [The Lanny Budd Novels (11 book series) Hardcover Edition}. The main character, Lanny Budd, comes of age early in the 20^th century in Europe in the first entry, Worlds End, and is present at pretty much every major event throughout both World Wars: from the crafting of the Treaty of Versailles to the evacuation of Dunkirk, from Hitler’s construction of the Eagle’s Nest to the London Blitz, from the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong to America entering the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor; and he knows (or meets) everyone of importance—FDR, Hitler, William Randolph Hearst, Churchill, Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joseph Stalin, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Stalin, Mao and on and on. Sinclair carefully places Budd at many historical events, and he is meticulous about getting the details right. He studied the documentation, interviewed many major players, and obtained permission when available to use the recollections of those present at these events that were available on tape or in print.

Inserting Budd into so many historic events makes for an improbable story, but Sinclair makes it work and the contrivance allows Sinclair to comment, through the eyes of Lanny Budd, on the theories and thinking of these major players, what they hoped for, what they dreamed; and because of this it gives a fascinating glimpse of the intellectual fads, the various outlets of propaganda on all sides, the moods and concerns of the people of those historic times.

It is equally interesting to watch as Sinclair parses these events and historic figures, because he was an avowed and unapologetic socialist. He ran for Governor of California in 1934 as a Democrat, largely because he believed he’d have no chance running as a member of the Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party of California expelled him for it, destroying itself in the process. In the novels, FDR is characterized as saintly and Lanny Budd is a solid FDR fanboy. I assume Sinclair remained a Democrat.

Budd is sympathetic to the early communists in Russia and China, but he wonders aloud about the regimented and enforced dogma, the coercion and purges and elevation of individuals to dictator status.

As mentioned, the books are out of print and it is expensive to buy seventy-year-old copies, but most have been released as e-books and there is a very good, recorded version of each of the novels at Audible, read by Bronson Pinchot. I’ve mixed and matched—read a few, listened to a few—and I have no complaints. It would make one hell of a miniseries. Were I still 25, I might take a shot at writing the script myself.

Those who have followed me, even for a short time, will know I think socialism and communism are dangerous hooey, and both appeal to the baser instincts of mankind, but I share Sinclair’s empathy and concern for humanity, and reading his impressions of events as they unfolded gave me a much greater understanding of, well, how we have gotten to where we are.

Here are some thoughts.

As individuals, we are all constantly engaged in an effort to figure things out. We begin at birth and never really stop. The progression leads some individuals to “Why are some people poor and others wealthy?”, “Why doesn’t everyone have enough to eat?”, and, eventually to, “Why won’t other people do what I think they should do?” This questioning, as well as reaching for answers and reasons, more than anything else defines the human condition. In the Lanny Budd series, we watch as various theories rise and conflict—theories of governance, of spirituality, of morality—and in each instance conflict arises when someone, an individual or a group, decides what is best for everyone else and attempts to put their theory into practice.

By the time the Lanny Budd series begins, humanity was moving very fast and social and intellectual fads were being treated as tradition. People spoke of cultures and peoples, as we do today, as if they were cut in stone, whereas the reality was and is these are just flashed in the pan. Communism, as a theory described by Marx, was about forty years old. Still a new, shiny thing for the intellectual class.

For some perspective of how short a time forty years actually is, consider Windover.

In 1982, while excavating a road through a small marshy pond in Titusville, Florida, human remains were discovered. The site has become known as the Windover Archaeological Site and some 168 human skeletons have been exhumed there. It is, put simply, and ancient cemetery, some 8,000 to 10,000 years old. Older than the Pyramids. It is known that these were burials because some hundred or more of the bodies are intact, and they were buried with artifacts—cloth, tools, weapons.

Here’s the thing. The cemetery was used, by the same group or tribe, over a period of about 1,300 years! That’s a long time. More importantly, though, it was possible, because of the peat many of the remains were buried in, to sequence the DNA. In fact, many of the brains were partially intact. What was discovered is that for all practical purposes these were modern people, just like us, though they have no genetic connection to any North American tribe.

My point here is that we, humans, have been around for a long, long time. These theories of economics, of governance, of spiritualism, of national and racial identity that drove the world to two world wars and are examined so closely by Sinclair are new things. We pretend they are real and ancient, but they are not. They are new ideas passed around by people who assume they are the at the pinnacle of human thought.

What strikes me most, as I read Sinclair’s interpretation of the history of the first half of the 20^th Century, is that two things were happening simultaneously. One, groups of people decided that because of birthright, race, historical grievance, or simply because they had the ability, they were destined to direct the course of the human race. The Japanese imperialists believed this. The Nazis. The Fascists. The British believed in their empire. The French in their cultural superiority. The Christians and Muslims in their superior mandate from God. The Communists in the soundness of their bright, new theories. All believed that somehow, for some reason, they were set apart from and superior to the rest of humanity and it was their destiny to drive humanity to their imagined utopia. Of course, to realize these visions, a strong hand was required.

And two, most were more than happy to run their experiments, in real time, using humanity as their test subjects. The Nazis believed they were destined to usher humanity into a new age of National Socialism and that every nation that fell under their umbrella would eventually thrive. The Communists believed that once their system was in place and the population properly educated, greed would vanish and everyone would benefit. The Fascists believed that humanity required strong, even brutal leadership to guide them, and that one day they would be happy that their lives and the world were managed by their betters, that everyone would benefit in a world without want or waste. They all believed in their theories and were willing to impose them on the public, for their own good of course, and if some naysayers had to die? Well, you can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs.

Even in the USA, where freedom of thought and speech are protected by the Constitution, the New Deal—a Utopian work-around of the limits placed upon the power of government—was being implemented and run as another experiment, with the American citizenry as the test subjects; and celebrated by well-intentioned individuals (Sinclair among them) who believed in their hearts that experts knew best.

Looking around me, it looks like very little has changed. Theories, old and new, are trotted out and tried in real time on, well, on us. And the proponents of these theories will fight tooth and nail to prop them up. Critical theory, gender theory, conflict theory, modernism, post-modernism, psychoanalysis, Keynesian economics, anthropogenic global warming, Malthusianism, communism, socialism, capitalism, you name it and it has been pulled like a rabbit out of someone’s hat and inflicted upon the general public as the New and Improved Way of Being. Individual liberty and the value of a person as a person is set aside for someone’s vision of a perfect future. Hubris, with weapons.

As humans, I suppose, we scramble for agency and meaning. We want to make a better world, and every time someone is certain they’ve figured it out there are those who embrace the new theory and vilify those who do not. It must be comforting to despise whatever group of people the theory deems as the “enemy”. To the Nazis, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. To the Communists, it was the fascists and the bourgeoisie. The actual fascists seemed to hate everyone who wasn’t a) Italian and b) fascist.

As Sinclair tells it, through dialog with FDR, Churchill, Hitler, and other players the strength of the USA derived from the nation’s respect for freedom. People in the US were free, at least more free than anywhere else, to disagree. Many Americans were scared to death of the Russian revolution and happy to see Hitler go up against them, and some weren’t shy about saying so, at least before the US joined the war.

Anyway, I could go on and on. The books are great. Real food for thought and a glimpse at one man’s understanding of what was happening in the world when all of these theories, instincts, and ambitions collided on the world stage.

Sinclair doesn’t attempt to tie it all up with a bow, either, and say, “See? Socialism is the only possible way forward.” He leaves all of the questions and contradictions and ambiguity in place.

Today, we’ve seen some of the experiments described by Sinclair play out in real time. We’ve seen communism. We’ve seen various incarnations of socialism. We’ve seen freedom. We’ve seen hatred and we’ve seen cooperation. We have data regarding what works and what doesn’t.

I still have no idea what anyone else should do. Personally, I’m a fan of maximum freedom. I don’t care what the world believes, unless it shows up on my doorstep and insists I fall in line.

This year we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence and the founding principle that, if universally accepted, would put all of the Utopian theories to rest:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Who can say where humanity will be in 10,000 or even 1,300 years? My guess: People will still strive for and embrace freedom, and there will be still someone, some group, with a new theory and the willingness to impose it on their neighbors.

In any case, the Lanny Budd novels are terrific—dramatic and touching and certainly thought provoking. Worth the two or three hundred hours it takes to wade through them. If you are so inclined, if you have a daily commute and enjoy audio books, if you can get past reading on a screen and can forgo the prohibitively expensive (for me anyway) out of print, yellowed pages, take the series on.

And that’s where I’ve been.

Peace.

Individual liberty is a relatively new thing in the world. Humanity stumbled about for millions of years, pushing one another around and enslaving each other, before the concept was codified by a bunch of idealistic youngsters a bit less than three hundred years ago. That, in and of itself, is a miracle. People thought about freedom before that, in a theoretical way, but usually such individuals were quickly marginalized, silenced somehow, killed, imprisoned, exiled, and the concept of individual freedom never caught on. In a very real sense, we are still trying to figure freedom out and make it work, and this is hard, because there are always those who see the freedom of others as an obstacle to be overcome. Throughout history the general consensus seems to have been that people were just too primitive and stupid to ever govern themselves. We needed kings and dictators, warlords and nobility, chieftains and slavers. That’s human history.

In the Gettysburg Address, the very short speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 while honoring the dead at that famous battlefield of the Civil War, when our nation was less than one hundred years old, he said, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This is a very big idea. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Not some of the people. Not the lucky people or the powerful people. All of the people. My God, what an order. How can there ever be a government of, by, and for all of the people? Any three people will have a difficult time agreeing on whether to get sushi or take out pizza on any given day. How are 338 million people ever going to agree on how they are governed?

That’s a conundrum all right. I think the long and short of it is that sometimes you just have to suck it up and accept that the majority does not agree with you. To my mind, that’s just part of being a good citizen. This is especially true, I think, when one is certain that they are not only correct, but also hold the moral high ground. Freedom for everyone is hard on the narcissist.

If freedom was easy, everyone would be doing it, everywhere in the world. But it is not easy. Sometimes you don’t get your way and it is important to be okay with that.

I think we, as a nation, understood this at one time. The principle of freedom mattered more than what any of us desired at any moment. I clearly remember people regularly quoting Evelyn Beatrice Hall, when I was young, and saying, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

We don’t hear that very much these days, nor are we often reminded that the goal is and was a government that works for us. I suspect there are those who would prefer we never remember these ideals and who would be happy to see them “perish from the Earth”.

Granted, these ideals set the bar ambitiously high and ask much of us as people, maybe more than we are capable of delivering all of the time. That’s okay, too. Individual freedom does not require that people be perfect; only that they understand their place in the civic life of the nation and respect the liberties of those they share the nation with. Is this even taught to children any longer? I’m genuinely unsure that it is.

Individuals can ignore their personal responsibility and choose a life of crime and disregard for any civic burden. We have laws to deal with that.

But what happens when those doing the governing believe the people being governed are classless boobs and choose to ignore them?

I think we are finding that out. We are seeing, in real time, how well the protections enumerated by the founders hold up under a concerted effort to ignore them.

We are hearing much lately of 80/20 issues—political issues that, when polled, come down with 80% of the people for a given position and 20% against it. There are many of these. Crime and punishment, illegal immigration, energy independence, parental rights, etc. If, as the founders intended, a representative republic actually works, those taking a firm stand on the 20% side will have a short and inglorious political future. Will that happen? Wish I knew.

What brings this into focus for me is the bill currently being batted about in Washington called the SAVE Act. Generally speaking, requiring a valid ID to vote is supported by about 75-80% of the citizenry. The SAVE Act is a little different in that it requires an ID only to register to vote. This is slightly different, and slightly less effective, but: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 63% of Likely U.S. Voters support the SAVE Act, including 47% who Strongly Support the legislation. Thirty-two percent (32%) are opposed to the bill, including 21% who Strongly Oppose the bill.”

That indicates the bill has about two to one support, yet it is having a difficult time getting passed. What, I wonder, is the hold up? Who doesn’t want election integrity? 21% of the population, apparently, but that makes it a losing position. At least, it should.

So, the question is: Why isn’t it losing? Why isn’t the popular bill passing?

Personally, I’m a big fan of freedom of all stripes—word, thought, and deed—but it seems to me that that freedom vanishes when anyone tips the scale because they believe they know better. Individual liberty hinges upon everyone owning a pair of big pants and the willingness to put them on and lose sometimes.

A government governing against the will of the people is not a constitutional republic, but something else, and a something that then depends only upon the will of whomever holds the reins of power. Is that a road we should be going down? Doesn’t that road lead to exactly what has been the case since the beginning of time, whatever it is called?

This seems like a silly risk to be taking for very little return. Everything is always an existential crisis. When Obama was President, people screamed that the American experiment was over, and now the same is being claimed because Trump is in office. That was and is simply not true, but the government ignoring the majority and doing what it wants is an actual danger. That effectively ends any trust in a representational leadership.

In a representative republic it is our duty to elect individuals who represent us, and if they do not, to rectify the situation at the next election. Sometimes we lose and people are elected who represent a different point of view. That’s fine. It’s pretty simple. But when people elect leaders who refuse to represent them, who seem to represent another agenda that is obscure and runs counter to what the voters want, and yet seem to be permanent fixtures immune to the election process, well, then things start to break down. It begins to feel like we may no longer have a representative government and we wonder, “If they don’t represent the people who voted for them...who do they represent?”

It feels like we’re approaching this point and it is sad to watch.

Anyway.

Peace.

Can it be permitted for one segment of society to simply decide to oppose enforcement of federal laws?

Can such a society survive at all if they succeed, or is it destined to descend into anarchy as each disparate segment, with their own personal hobby horse, demands federal authorities also leave them alone? Do we actually respect the Rule of Law, or is that just a bullshit talking point trotted out when someone we really dislike finds himself in the cross hairs of prosecution?

To permit activists to effectively nullify federal law for any reason will lead, eventually, to chaos. This seems axiomatic. Open that door and any group is free to erect barricades for any cause. Today it is pro-immigrants and anti-Trump. Tomorrow it could be pro-life and anti-Democrat. It could be Christians demanding the supremacy of biblical law or Muslims clamoring for Sharia. It could be some small group daring the Feds to take their guns. Laws matter.

In this instance, it actually IS the principle that matters. The federal authorities cannot just walk away and take a loss. That can’t happen if the rule of law is to survive (trust me, protesters, you will miss the rule of law if it vanishes) so it won’t happen. The federal authorities can not lose. Not because of Trump, but because there are genuine laws in play and in the end, no one can be allowed to nullify the laws that were written and passed democratically. As Joe Biden famously pointed out, the federal government has fighter jets. The federal government will not lose this.

On the other hand, the government can’t just ride roughshod over those citizens (however misguided) who are trying to nullify the law. You can’t beat them or run them down. You certainly can’t shoot them. That way lies madness of a different sort. That causes the great mass of the citizenry, who believe immigration laws should be enforced, to see enforcement as the problem, which only compounds the madness. This is how actual revolutions are born.

So that is the conundrum, the actual problem on the table.

Of course, we see all of the usual idiocy—AI generated images purporting to tell the “truth”, scathing fictional diatribes painting one side or the other as bloodthirsty savages, completely ignorant blathering about morality and justice and obligations. Social media is chock full of this fuckery. None of it helps solve the problem and usually just tightens the knot and makes it more intractable. ICE agents are “untrained” thugs. Petti was a cross dressing nutjob. All of that.

I see no easy answers. If I had easy answers, I’d be in an office somewhere making policy decisions.

That said, the wise course now, in my opinion, is to just let things cool off. If the activists in Minneapolis really, really want that gang banger or rapist to live among them? Let them have a win, if it is a win. Today, pretty much every activist and professional protester within 2000 miles of Minneapolis is gearing up for another Summer of Love, and incidents like those we’ve seen will only encourage them. It’s okay for ICE agents to take a giant step back when confronted by a shrieking crowd intent on provocation. They want to keep that criminal in their neighborhood? Shrug, make it clear to everyone exactly who you were after and why, and let them keep the criminal until he or she can be apprehended. No problem.

Illegal immigration has pretty much stopped at the border and if Minneapolis is intent upon keeping their dangerous criminals, there are other, more effective ways to enforce the law. Forensic accountants may prove to be more effective than boots on the ground. There are many, many laws to be enforced that go deeper and further than putting one fugitive child abuser away. Purge the voter rolls. Stop international wire transfers. Seize all cash over $10K passing through TSA. Prevent illegal immigrants from receiving any federal benefits. Enforce the employment laws and fine employers for hiring illegals. If Minneapolis wants to support a population of illegals, let them. We’ll soon find out how charitable they are with their own money and resources. Eventually, the citizens who will have to live with their choices will rethink them.

Much of what we are hearing now is just propaganda, from the activists, the media, and ICE. It doesn’t feel, to me, like immigration is even the actual issue. It feels like the point of all of this is just an attempt to put a thumb in Trump’s eye, get his choice for head of Homeland Security removed, maybe get another court to declare that Trump is a poopy head. None of this matters much. Trump is going to be President for another three years.

No need for unforced errors, though. Back off a bit and give the organized resistance nothing to do, and they will stew until they either escalate, or someone gets the brilliant idea of making illegal immigration a national issue. At which point they will quickly discover that a majority of voters voted for Trump and are solidly behind the removal of all criminal aliens. There is no need to allow the waters to be further muddied. Have ICE take a step back and allow things to play out.

Because these are not “protests”, though that is what they are being called. A protest is a group of peaceful people making their voices heard. This is not that. This is people putting themselves on the line to actually, physically oppose the enforcement of federal law. As a wise friend of mine once said, “You don’t have to attend every fight that you’re invited to.” This may be the hill the activists are willing to fight for, but ICE needn’t. Let them have this hill.

They’ll hate it when it’s theirs.

Anyway.

Peace.

Fraud.

What does it mean, exactly? In the simplest terms, we all understand that it is a deceit, presenting something as something that it is not for personal gain. A forgery. A con. An insurance claim for damages that did not happen. A person presenting as a doctor who never earned the degree. The wooden nickle. Fraud. We get it. We know it when we see it.

But what happens when the numbers become so large, the people involved so numerous, whole economies hang in the balance? Does “fraud” begin to describe it? It begins to look more like an industry.

I don’t think this is an exaggeration. The latest reporting I’ve seen claims $700 million in currency was flagged by TSA in personal luggage leaving Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and heading to Somalia. That’s only what TSA flagged. It’s anyone’s guess how much went undetected.

Where did this money come from? Did Somali immigrants work their asses off and save every penny in order to send it overseas? There are about 61,500 Somalis living in Minnesota. If each individual--each man, woman, and child contributed $11,350 they could amass $700 million. I suppose such a thing is possible. Seems unlikely, though.

Some years ago, I flew from Boston to Florida carrying $15,000 in cash to purchase a vehicle, and I was very nervous about it. Such sums of money are regularly confiscated from travelers by the authorities, and it can be difficult (or impossible) to get it back. Pretty much any bill in anyone’s pocket at any time will test positive for trace amounts of narcotics, and this has been enough to justify the confiscation of cash in the past. Civil asset forfeiture is a real thing. How could TSA just shrug as $700 million passed through their checkpoints? Seems like a question that needs to be asked.

That’s one community of immigrants, in one city. We have a lot more cities, a lot more immigrant communities, and a whole lot more programs that do nothing more than distribute money.

The USA has an enormous economy. We live well here and we create wealth. In fact, we are the biggest fish in the pond by a large margin. The GDP of the US is about $30 trillion. The closest competitor is China, with a GDP of roughly $19 trillion. In fact, the USA generates about a quarter of all of the wealth in the world. An economy that large, like an enormous whale swimming the oceans, is going to attract some remoras. Willy Sutton was famously asked why he robbed banks. “Because that is where the money is,” he answered. The USA has trillions floating around, much of it unaccounted for. It only makes sense that a portion of that will be stolen. It is expected. It is, after all, where the money is.

What makes no sense at all, though, is the government aiding this theft, which seems to be what has been happening. It is one thing to deposit your money into a bank understanding the risk and knowing that the bank will do everything possible to keep your money secure, only to have it grabbed by the Suttons of the world. It is another entirely to discover there are government (your government and mine) programs and agencies who’s only purpose is seemingly to siphon money.

USAID, which recently shuttered their doors, was one such agency. In some instances USAID actually delivered aid (food, clothing, and equipment) to impoverished parts of the world, but for the most part it just moved money, lots and lots of money, from the government to nongovernmental organizations, who then moved the money to where it could no longer be found while taking a sizable cut for themselves. The list of NGOs, their purported purpose, and the amounts they were given is genuinely staggering. In 2024, USAID spent $21.7 billion. Apparently, no one was even watching, because when DOGE began looking at the books, USAID permanently closed. There may have been aspects worth saving, but none that couldn’t be shifted to other, more transparent, agencies. My suspicion is that the fraud committed under the USAID umbrella constitutes the single largest larceny in the history of humanity. Some, maybe much, good was done, but whatever good was done was surrounded by waste and theft.

What is really shocking is that this theft was not orchestrated by a master criminal. It was done by some pretty simple people, many who believed (and still believe) they were agents of good, who were paid well for feeling smug and not examining anything very carefully.

This didn’t end with USAID.

US law requires that any amount of money over $10,000 entering or leaving the country be declared at customs. This begs the question: How did $700 million find its way out without any alarms being tripped? It’s a big number and a lot of currency, nearly equal the amount the US has pledged to Somalia in foreign aid; even in $100s it amounts to seven actual pallets of cash. Did each of the 61,500 Somalis in Minneapolis file the customs documents for $11,350? I’m thinking, no. This can’t be an oversight. Someone, likely many people, knew it was outbound and wanted it to go.

Who? Why? And this is just one airport, in one city. We have a lot of airports and a lot of cities. Is no one keeping an actual record?

I’m a simple man. If I have a couple of hundred dollars left after I’ve paid my bills, I figure I’m doing okay. I don’t deal in suitcases full of $100 bills. But someone does and to me, simple as I am, it sure seems like it’s a major enterprise with a large number of people involved.

It’s as if someone, somewhere, has decided we, the American people, are a natural resource to be harvested regularly, like lumber, or wool, or soybeans, for the benefit of the world. We call it “fraud” because we really don’t have a word for it. It is too big. It is institutional.

When something this big is threatened, one can expect a response. There are many people invested in the status quo, and they are going to make every effort to prevent anyone from looking too closely. I look at the unrest in Minneapolis today and I can’t help but wonder how this is being financed. These protests aren’t about the arrest of a gang member or child rapist.

It’s about the money. As the 1916 Abe Martin cartoon said, and is often quoted, “When a feller says: ‘It ain’t the money, but the principle of the thing,’ it’s the money.”

Let’s turn off the tap and watch to see where the most squawking originates.

This is what I think I see. If you believe I’m mistaken, please explain how.

Anyway.

Peace.

I’m confused. Admittedly, this is not a one-time thing, but I suspect my confusion today is not mine alone and more a rivulet trickling down from a larger, more widespread confusion that seems to have settled like a fog on the nation. Allow me to explain.

Not so very long ago, when charges were being brought against Trump for all manner of crimes, we were repeatedly told that no one is above the law. We are a nation of laws, we were reminded again and again, and laws had to be respected and obeyed, no matter how high or low the individual involved and no matter how large or small the purported crime. I’m certain I didn’t imagine this. The broadcasts were full of politicians and talking heads saying the same thing: We are a nation of laws and no one is above the law.

Today, many people—many of the same people—are telling us that some laws not only do not matter but need to be ignored. I’m not imagining this, either.

The laws regarding immigration are actual, honest-to-God laws, written by Congress, passed as bills, and signed into law by Presidents of the past. They are the law (as many were recently wont to say) of the land. It’s pretty clear, too. Nothing ambiguous about it. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act into law, and it was very clear about the expedited removal of aliens convicted of felonies and misdemeanors that are considered aggravated felonies. ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was formed in 2003 after the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, another law that was enacted after debate and voting, upon being signed by President Bush. One can argue the wisdom of the Homeland Security Act, but it is the law, and the federal government, including ICE, has a mandate and duty to uphold the law. Including the removal of individuals in the country illegally.

That’s the way it actually is. This is where we actually stand.

If I understand the arguments being made by the protesters (and granted, I may not.) ICE is a “rogue” agency, akin to the Gestapo, not enforcing the law, but “terrorizing” entire communities. Is that about right? Feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken, because I’m making this assumption based entirely upon my observations of the protests and speeches of the politicians.

Here’s the thing. ICE is enforcing the law. No question about that.

So, it seems, to me, that a segment of our society is now arguing, precisely, that some people actually should be above the law. Either the law should be ignored completely or applied only when and where some unnamed individuals believe it should be applied. Is this actually the case? Do people actually believe this? Do you? Can anyone explain it to me?

This is very confusing. If laws are fluid, and should be applied only when we all agree they should, of what use are they? Wouldn’t criminals rather the laws against whatever crimes they commit be ignored? If I’m wrong about this, and the point of these protests is not that some people should be immune from law, what are the protests actually about?

The way I see it is there is one other possibility.

Many people really, really dislike President Trump, to the point where just the words “President Trump” rankle and cause their blood to boil. If Trump is for it, they have to be against it, whatever “it” happens to be. If a case can be made, a narrative framed, in which Trump is a tyrant for actually adhering to his oath of office and enforcing the law, maybe his critics can find a toehold in the mid-term elections. That seems to be the only other explanation.

During his 1^st term, Trump wanted to curtail illegal immigration and build a wall on the southern border, so some people had to hate the idea. They hated the idea so much, in fact, that one of the first things President Biden did was undo all of the enforcement of immigration law that Trump had begun. If Trump wanted to limit and stop illegal immigration, the thinking went, then illegal immigration is what we want. Biden opened the border and roughly 25 million un-vetted foreign nationals came in.

This is undisputed fact. And, though we were often assured that no public money would be spent supporting these migrants, and that they would never be permitted to vote in our elections, and that they would contribute and not be a burden of any kind...well, we all know how that worked out. We’ve all seen the mixed result. Most are just fine (though apparently not fit to remain in, oh, Martha’s Vineyard). Some are very, very bad (gang members, human traffickers, drug dealers, career criminals, sex offenders, fraudsters, etc.).

In 2024, 75 million people voted for Kamala Harris. Let’s be generous and assume that each and every one of these people despise Trump and believes open borders are a great idea. Or, even if they don’t believe open borders are a good idea, are willing to pretend they do if it can help in the resistance of all things Trump. 75 million is a lot of people.

But 77 million voted for Trump, who ran on (among other things) putting a stop to illegal immigration and jettisoning the criminal aliens among us exactly as the law requires. He won the election.

152 million voters have spoken. The side that won happens to be the side that wants existing law to be enforced.

It seems to me there are only two ways forward for those who dislike the law: Vote for representatives who will change the law to something you like, or wait for the next presidential election and try to elect someone who, like Biden, will simply refuse to enforce the law. That’s it. I don’t think pussy hats will get the job done.

But understand this: The majority of the country disagrees with you. The majority voted for this and celebrate the law being enforced. You can hate that. You can believe in your heart of hearts that the law is evil and wrong and your fellow citizens Nazis, but you can not bully the majority of the citizenry into seeing things as you do. That is just not how things work. Pouting is not policy, and impeding law enforcement is a crime.

I suppose the real question is: What other federal laws should be ignored, or federal agencies be prevented from enforcing? Tax laws? Civil rights laws? Environmental protection? Fair housing? When you climb onto this crazy train, where the angriest people get to veto federal law ad hoc, where do you suppose the train stops?

Can you imagine a world in which the angriest people disagree with you and imagine they can bully the government to do what they want done? What then?

Do you imagine the train stops on a dime, precisely where you hope it does? Why would you think this?

I wish you luck with that.

I don’t make this point for ICE or against ICE. I’m not trying to be provocative. It’s a serious inquiry. If one can bully their way past federal law, what happens when the bullies come for you?

Peace.

It happens like clockwork and it makes me ache.

A tragedy occurs and immediately, before the blood has dried or the body grown cold, before any of the facts are known or any manner of investigation begun, it is seized upon by the political demagogues who all pretend to psychic powers. And their people fall in line.

Within the hour after the death of Renee Nicole Good, who (as we all now know) was fatally shot by an ICE agent, we were being told what was in the agent’s mind, what was in hers, what each was thinking and trying to do. Yeah, life is way, way more complicated than that. On the left, we were immediately told that ICE is a group of violent thugs terrorizing a city who murdered an innocent in cold blood. On the right, we were told this is a clear case of domestic terrorism and the clear result of people being encouraged to violently oppose the enforcement of federal law. Neither is likely the case. It would take an effort for me to have less respect for the demagogues and the media. I’d have to work at it.

On the other hand, this is what I know to a certainty. There are federal immigration laws on the books. These laws were written by Democrats and Republicans over a span of many decades. Ted Kennedy himself had a major part in shaping the laws ICE is now called upon to enforce. See: Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) - Immigration History This law (and note, it is LAW) set the tone of immigration policy to this day.

And, contrary to what many believe, we remain a nation of law. Federal law is not a buffet at which a city or a state can pick and choose. Imagine a city declaring itself a “sanctuary” from the Americans With Disabilities Act, from federal minimum wage and labor laws, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964! Why, the federal government might send troops, as was done in Little Rock [Showdown in Little Rock [ushistory.org]].

There is nothing new under the sun. So it is patently absurd to demand federal law not apply to your city or state. That isn’t how it works. If it did, we might still have segregated water fountains in some places. You might be asked to pay a poll tax, or pass a literacy test in order to vote. You might have no recourse, in some cities, should a landlord refuse to rent to you because of the color of your skin or your sexual orientation. Where in God’s name did people get the idea that laws they do not like are optional?

One can dislike a law, oppose a law, even protest a law. Those are rights enshrined in our founding documents. What you can not do, ever, is impede (or attack) an officer of the law who is engaged in his or her lawful duties. The laws are there for us. Our elected representatives passed them and we pay law enforcement officers to enforce them. If you dislike a law, call your representative. Tell your friends and neighbors why you dislike it and how you want it changed. Run for office yourself. If that process is too slow for your taste? Why, you’re living in the wrong fucking country.

Running every bit of news through a filter that depends only upon how it reflects on Democrats or Republicans is a fool’s game. It has ruined, quite literally demolished, the institution we called “Journalism”. Journalism barely exists any longer and those who still make an honest attempt spend their days like shuttlecocks batted back and forth between the left and the right. One day Matt Taibbi is a moonbat peddling unicorn farts and the next he’s a jackbooted Nazi, depending only upon who whatever he is reporting puts in a negative light. It is maddening. He is not a moonbat. He is not a Nazi. He is just a guy trying to get a story correct. Which, once upon a time not so very long ago, was the entire point of journalism.

Look, I get it. We’ve just spent about two decades marinating in post-modern relativism, where everyone gets to whine about their personal “lived” truth. But whatever truth that is, it isn’t THE truth. Everyone isn’t going to suddenly fall in line. You don’t get to cosplay revolutionary and then go home, put up your feet, and watch Netflix until the next urge to be meaningful strikes. Whatever your lived truth, actions have consequences in the real world.

We can parse the videos and play Monday morning QB until Jesus comes back, and it isn’t going to change a thing. Renee Good is dead. Did the officer act lawfully? Don’t know. Was she trying to kill him? Don’t know. Was ICE there legally? 100%. Was she trying, at the very least, to impede them from doing their duty? Seems she was. Did she deserve to die for impeding the officers? Of course not. No one is claiming that she did. That isn’t even the issue.

The issue, and the only issue that will matter, is: Did the man who pulled the trigger believe that his life, or the lives of his fellow officers, were in danger? That’s it. I don’t know what will happen, or even what should happen, because I am not a psychic. Anyone who today is pretending to be is a bald-faced liar.

An investigation will continue and politics should have nothing to do with it.

If this is difficult to grasp, I suggest a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that this did not happen in Minneapolis, but Washington DC. She was a Jan 6^th protester, and the police she was impeding members of the Capital Police on duty and engaged in protecting the Capital.

If you would feel differently (and c’mon, be honest, many people would), then that’s the problem we face. Were you ready to march for Ashli Babbit? Why not?

Anyway. That’s my rant. We all need to be better.

Peace.

I’ve recently noticed a trend in regular conversation. People seem to be talking about the decline of quality in pretty much everything. Food preparation, music, art, automobiles, customer service in every field, health care, tradespeople (plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc.); it seems that no matter what is being discussed there is a general feeling that quality is on the wane. Granted, we all have the tendency to complain, to accentuate the negative (to completely massacre the words of Johnny Mercer), but underneath this might there not be a grain of truth? Is quality actually slipping?

It is. What gives?

Yesterday I was reading a piece about how difficult it was to be in a Frank Zappa band. Zappa was famous for (among other things) the quality of the musicians he hired—Jean-Luc Ponty, Steve Vai, Michael Brecker, literally hundreds of big-name musicians—and the precision he expected. He didn’t ask musicians to join the band in the traditional sense, where everyone collaborated and contributed. He was more of the big band and orchestral tradition, and he auditioned musicians who could read music and play their very difficult parts precisely as they were written. A musician, in a Zappa band, was not expected to be a creative rebel. A musician in a Zappa band was expected to be an accomplished technician. He would unceremoniously fire anyone who improvised or tried to change the composition in any way. From the outside (and probably from the inside) this might seem soul crushing when one considers each of these musicians was a virtuoso, but pretty much to a person they agree that the experience made them better musicians.

I thought about this for some time. I grew up with Rock and Roll, and then jazz, where individuals were rewarded for putting their personal stamp on everything they did. I can hear a Carlos Santana lick and know immediately that it is Santana. I don’t think Carlos, as accomplished as he is, would have done well in any of the Zappa bands.

As I thought more about this, I considered my own experience as an employee and as an employer. Imagine a person, I thought, who is absolutely nuts for coffee. She has spent a lifetime experimenting with techniques and formula for brewing what she believes to be the perfect cup of joe. The water must be this temperature. The beans must be of this varietal and roasted to precisely this color, ground to a specific texture, brewed in a specific manner and served in a certain mug that has been preheated to an exact temperature. Indeed, she has found the way to make an amazing cup of coffee and is aware of nuances that will be lost on most of us—the texture on the tongue, the fruity notes in the nose, how long the beverage will remain perfectly palatable in the vessel—but pretty much anyone who tries her creation will experience quality, whether it is understood in its entirety or not.

Now imagine she wants to bring this creation to the public, to monetize her efforts and make it a business. What sort of hurdles would stand between her and success?

First and foremost, of course, is cost. If people choose to pay less for less (think air travel) the market has spoken and it is what it is. I can’t pay a bus fare for a flight and expect it to be superior to a bus trip just because it is way, way faster than a bus. So, I suck it up, understand that flying anywhere is going to be a crowded and uncomfortable. It is not what flying was in, oh, 1970, when flying was a luxury and everyone dressed and behaved accordingly. If I’m paying $125 for a 1,200-mile flight (which is not unusual) I am paying a little more than ten cents a mile to make a trip it would take 20 hours to drive. It is what it is. A bus in the sky. And a great value, even though the experience sucks. Coffee is no different. If our shop owner only serves coffee in ceramic mugs and sources a particular bean, she may need to charge $4 a cup or more. Many people, maybe most, will choose to drink the coffee they prepare in their Keurig out of a travel mug. It is coffee, they will decide, and it is good enough. It’s a hard reality. Zappa did okay for himself, but Rihanna is a billionaire. A Rolex and a Casio both keep time.

But what if, for the sake of the analogy, we assume her cup of coffee comes in at a profitable price the majority of coffee drinkers are willing to pay? People are willing to line up to experience her coffee. What’s her next hurdle?

That hurdle is: Who can she hire? Who (much like Zappa) can she find who is passionate about coffee, who is willing to become a virtuoso of coffee making, yet also willing to follow her formula precisely? Wouldn’t anyone so passionate about coffee have a vision of their own? This is an important point. Everyone’s vision does not count.

What a hard lesson that is to learn! Sometimes, in service to quality, what the individual thinks about the task is unimportant. You just shut up and do the task, as the task requires, to the very best of your ability. Your genius is unimportant, your vision of how it should be done, your flair, your individualism, your panache. Just shut up and do the job.

I don’t think we teach this much anymore. We train people to be navel gazers, to think of everything in terms of what it means to them. If the focus of the line cook in any restaurant is primarily upon how they feel at any given moment, the focus is not upon excellence in their execution. Even if the focus is on excellence, it might be upon their individual vision of what excellence means, not the vision of the executive chef or the restaurateur.

If everyone is equal, the barista thinks, then my vision of the perfect cup of coffee is as valid as hers.

Except it isn’t, and this is where things break down.

The hard part of considering this is examining my own part in the decline. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I think of the many jobs I’ve had, and I was terrible at simply following instructions. Again and again, I reinvented the wheel, never content to serve an other’s vision of what something should be. The sad truth is that I would have done the same on a Ford assembly line. “What do these guys know that I do not?” I would have told myself. “I can do this easier, faster, better...this instead of that.”

So I’ve helped create this. In service to egalitarianism, we’ve put quality aside.

I think about this when I’m checking the drain plug after an oil change, because I can’t be certain the person who replaced the plug wasn’t watching a Tik Tok video on their phone at the time, when a simple breakfast order is wrong, when a cashier has a difficult time making change, when a product fails to perform. I had a hand in this, I think.

And conversely, I really admire quality when it appears. There are areas in my life where I simply do not compromise (socks, garbage bags, wrist watches, toilet paper) and I usually get more because I pay more, but I notice quality when it appears anywhere. Quality is difficult to achieve and in any complicated product or service, a whole lot of individuals had to put their ego aside and focus on the job at hand. Never an easy thing to do. I appreciate it when it is done well.

As I age I find myself thinking less and less about what I want. It was a stupid way of approaching anything—a job, a relationship, the weather, any endeavor. I find that instead I’m focused more and more upon what I can do, and what I can do is a very limited set. I can have patience and manners. I can be kind. I can see people and their struggles. And I can focus on the task at hand, whatever the task might be. But I had to learn to do this the hard way. It took a lot of falling down. Maybe it is that way for everyone.

Maybe we should be teaching this, though, instead of the supremacy of self-esteem. Sometimes, usually, it is fine, it is perfect, to be in the third row of the orchestra and playing exact notes on your triangle, exactly as they are written. Maybe that is where true self esteem resides.

Anyway, something to consider.

Peace.

Getting old is interesting. It is complicated and sometimes a little uncomfortable to consider, but this doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth talking about. All too often, it seems, we all talk around the edges of important things. Time passing is sort of important, and though getting older isn’t the cat’s cajones, it beats the alternative. Being older (or even old) and happiness are not mutually exclusive. The people who were the age I am today (67) when I was twenty had been born in 1911. They’d come up in a different time, children of the Great Depression, before the advent of television, air travel, or the highway system. They were not prone to speaking of their feelings. In retrospect, at twenty we must have appeared genuinely alien to them. It’s no surprise that none of the older people I knew then spoke openly about aging.

As a writer, I try to find the things that we have in common, despite every life and every perception being unique. Though the events we see and experience, alone or together, are memorialized through our individual perception, each experience as singular as snowflakes, we still have much more in common than we don’t. Imagine we were sitting beside one another and watching a football game. We would see the same game, but your attention may have been on a play at the line while mine was watching the pattern being run by a wide receiver; your eye may have been caught by a colorful sign, my view obscured by an unruly hat. No two experiences are the same. This is what life is like, yet we share commonalities that come at different times and to varying degrees: doubt, concern, uncertainty, rage, fear, love, loss, happiness, despair, laughter. These are the things I try to capture when I write. Admittedly, it’s a silly enterprise.

This morning I woke up laughing to myself, because I remembered, as clearly as if it had been yesterday, waking with a girlfriend in about 1983. We were sleeping on a futon on the floor (futons were a thing in 1983) and the sun was streaming in through blue batik curtains. It was an old apartment, with rough white walls and moldings of dark natural wood, and high up on the wall across the room and near the ceiling, a huge nail was obvious. It was bigger than a nail. More like a spike. In those days it was not unusual to find artifacts from the early days of electricity in apartments, old doorbells, pipes that had once carried natural gas, random insulators, that sort of thing, so it’s possible this spike once had a purpose, but on that morning it was just a black nub jutting out of the wall.

“It looks like a caterpillar,” I said, “that nail in the wall.”

She followed my gaze and saw what I was looking at. “It does,” she said, “and it’s a judgmental caterpillar, too.” Then she said, in a very good cartoon caterpillar voice, “Whatcha gonna do? Sleep all day? Huh? You gonna sleep all day?”

We laughed and laughed. It was a very good morning. We got up and made coffee in a stove top espresso maker.

Not long after that morning her life went somewhere and mine went somewhere else and I haven’t seen her in more than forty years, and I haven’t thought about that morning or that nail until today. Isn’t that odd? There are just two people on Earth who share that memory. One, if she has forgotten it. Where does that morning reside when I am thinking of other things? Why is it real when I think of it today? For awhile, for just a few moments as I was coming awake, I was there, looking at that nail and feeling the crisp sheets against my naked back. Time is a funny thing.

Looking back on my own years, it is a series of moments that connect like pop together toy pearls, some fantastic, some heartbreaking, each unique and all of them magical.

Did I realize how magical that morning was while I was living it? Probably not. I was probably thinking of other things, maybe wishing I was somewhere else. What a crying shame that is. This is one of the things I wish an older person had told me way back when: “Relish where you are and what you are doing. Pay attention. You are building a gallery of moments, and there will be beautiful exhibits you’ll want to revisit again and again, and corners so terrifying or painful you will try to avoid them. Try to make good choices. Try to minimize those dark places. Respect where you are. You’ll be visiting your personal gallery sooner than you think.”

Everyone has their own gallery and no two are alike. This, for me anyway, is what makes death so unspeakably sad. Another unique gallery shuts its doors and shutters the windows. Maybe all those memories travel to somewhere, or maybe time isn’t actually linear and each moment is always happening, rippling out like the disturbed pattern on the surface of a pond, forever. I don’t know. That knowledge is far above my pay grade. What I can say is that a well-lived life will have some disappointment and regret, but that doesn’t have to be the theme.

I just came from the funeral of a great friend. He was many things. A hairy, tattooed veteran of Vietnam who had actually been there, lugging an M60 through the jungles as a 19 year old Marine. He came back damaged and changed, and in many ways his Vietnam experience defined him. He was tough and crude. As an outlaw biker after the war he’d lost an eye in a bar fight. Public speaking was a challenge, because he had a difficult time getting through more than a sentence or two without an F-bomb. He was a guy who did prison time he deserved to do many years ago, but who also deserved a fucking parade that he never received.

We had a recurring gag.

I’d say, looking at his glass eye, “Are you winking at me?” and he’d say, “You better fucking hope I’m not.”

Somewhere along the line, some forty plus years ago, he got sober and changed the path he was on. Since then, he’d become a happy warrior. He loved his family, his dogs, his friends and his life. He helped more people that anyone will ever know. Two weeks ago, he was clearing leaves off of a lawn and we made plans to redo the kitchen in his small house. On my desk is a cap that commemorates the 250^th anniversary of the US Marines that I intended to give him the next time I saw him.

Last week he went into the hospital with a stomach complaint. We sent a few texts back and forth, mostly about his dog, and planned to get together when he got home. Then the texts stopped.

They found some tumors in his stomach, and then they found cancer everywhere—liver, pancreas, stomach, spleen—and that was that. Two days later he was gone.

His gallery has shut its doors.

I mention this because he is a perfect example of how life works. I know some things about him, but his experience was his own. The memories he cherished, the memories he avoided, the places and things he had seen, that was all his and his alone. We have friends in common and their experience of him is different from mine. I won’t forget him. I don’t suppose they will, either.

But I learned an important lesson from him in the time we spent together, about how to find peace and live a happy life; and it is another thing I really wish I’d understood in my youth: Chasing happiness does not work. It is not a thing that can be forced. You do the next right thing and allow happiness to come to you on its own terms, like a nervous animal you want to befriend. If I walk out of the door in the morning seeking to be happy, in search of something I believe I need to be happy, I’ve set myself up for failure and disappointment. Ignoring the process and trying to leap immediately to the result never works. If instead I focus on being of service, of making the day a little bit better, just slightly easier for those I run across in my day to day, on doing the next right thing, happiness and peace of mind are the result. This is counter-intuitive, but absolutely true. I had to see this in action before it made sense to me.

Finding happiness and joy is not an onerous task, I eventually learned, but there are no shortcuts, either. For many years I was chasing, and because I was chasing the appreciation for happiness and joy eluded me. It wasn’t until I stopped chasing, stopped being frantic, that peace of mind approached, like a nervous stray, licked my hand and curled up in my lap.

I don’t know that I learned this directly from my friend, but he was certainly a large part of me putting the pieces together. Watching him I saw that happiness is a habit and not at all contingent upon what one has or what is happening. I read the news on any given day and thank God that I am not crazy and chasing my tail as so many seem to be, trying to beat the world into what I imagine it should be and chasing happiness like a big game hunter.

I’m going to miss the man. It was always a joy to see him. But being sad is no reason to be unhappy.

Peace.

I don’t know what this means or what comes of it, but it is slightly scary, in the way not knowing is scary, like there is a storm brewing out over the ocean that may swing this way or that. I can hope that my favorite things are missed, but I can’t deny that the storm will make landfall. AI has arrived, and it is beautiful and terrifying.

Listen to this. It is an AI generated song, an AI creation. AI was tasked with recreating an Eminem rap classic as a 50s jazz ballad:

Pretty incredible, no? The singers are AI generated. The instruments. The arrangement. The tone, the style. The program has access to everything—every vocalist ever recorded, every instrument, every artist; what critics and the public found interesting and great; every music theory, textbook, and lecture ever given; every artist who ever wrote or spoke of their philosophy—and then given the task of interpreting a song in a particular style. Voila. Sans human input.

It’s quickly becoming a thing. Ever wonder what “Nothing Compares to U” would sound like if interpreted by a 50s blues singer? Here you go.

Pretty tasty, right? What a voice. What an interpretation. In the past one might rightly think, “Who the hell is that?” The answer today is nobody. Or everybody. Every singer ever recorded. It is the voice of no person who ever lived, because it is not a person.

This is bigger than any of us suspect. Soon, far sooner than most would believe, AI will be able to write novels and screenplays, make movies and television shows out of whole cloth with actors created from a database of every performance ever filmed, directed by every director who ever worked, with cinematography by everyone who has ever shot a film, and without human touch or vision.

The worry used to be about identity protection. It wouldn’t be fair, for example, to cast an “On the Waterfront” era Brando in a new film, but AI doesn’t need to. It can take what was deemed best of Brando and merge it with a touch of Gary Oldman, a soupcon of Alex Guinness and give it a composite body and voice that is no one real. We won’t need to contemplate the morality of co opting Judy Garland to sell hamburgers. AI will just create someone new who sings as well as Judy, but who also dances like Ginger Rogers and is wrapped in a body like that of Raquel Welch. This is coming. Soon.

A program could be tasked with learning everything that there is to know about Da Vinci and his technique (or Rembrandt, or Picasso, or Matisse) and then directed to paint Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” as Da Vinci would have. Or something completely new. A new masterpiece.

Now apply this to everything. Not only artistic endeavors, but everything: medicine, architecture, dentistry, industrial design, agriculture, cuisine, urban planning, engineering. No aspect of human endeavor will be untouched. It is a revolution that is bigger than the telephone. Bigger than television. Bigger than the internet. And it has just arrived.

It’s about to get pretty wild.

And not just on the intellectual front. The power needed to run the huge server centers AI requires is immense and growing exponentially. I expect to hear very little talk of climate change or the dangers of nuclear power in the very near future, because AI will require power and AI will also control the news we receive. According to a story in Scientific America from two years ago: “A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.”

And that’s from two years ago. The estimates are far larger now.

Let that sink in. Whatever one thinks about the dangers of carbon today? It is moot. Carbon will not be a concern by summer of 2026. That ship has already sailed. Net Zero just went up the chimney, so to speak. AI needs a lot of power, and it will get it. It won’t come from windmills. The concern now is power, pure and simple, and how to generate lots of it. That will be the trending narrative. Climate change hysteria is kaput.

This is all happening right now, as I type this. No prognostication required.

Now, I’m an old fart. I grew up with a rotary phone attached by a cord and music on vinyl. I was in my mid 20s when I bought my first rack system that played compact disks and cassettes. And my first PC soon after that. The first PC I owned was booted from a 3 ½” 1.4 MB floppy disk. So, I have no idea where this is going, but that it is going to go somewhere in indisputable. Will I recognize society in two years? I have no idea.

There will still be fish in the streams, though, and birds waiting on me to fill the feeders. Still be possums and raccoons looking for a treat in the compost pile. The sun will come up and set in the evening. Physical books will be around for as long as I am. The waves will still be lapping on the beach, depositing shells for old folk like me to peck at like the birds in my yard.

I’ll keep writing, looking for words and hitting the keyboard with a couple of fingers.

I’m surprisingly okay with all of this. I only need the world to make sense for another twenty years or so (if I’m very lucky) and then it’s what I like to call an SEP. Somebody Else’s Problem.

I don’t think anyone can go far wrong investing in NVIDIA today, though.

Good luck everyone. Keep your chins up!

Peace.

I seem to digest current events as a sort of coarse stew consisting of things I imagine, things I clearly remember, and things that are actually happening. This may well be true of everyone, but for me, at my age, news seems to arrive in chunks stippled with memories, with seemingly unrelated stories bound together by themes. The recent government shutdown is a case in point, because it calls up all manner of memories. I clearly remember prominent Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, calling the Republicans (when they were the minority) “terrorists” and “hostage takers” when they refused to immediately sign on to a continuing resolution. But that’s a story for another day.

I was mildly surprised when the Democrats refused, for forty-odd days, to pass a continuing resolution, something that had happened more than a dozen times during Biden’s tenure as POTUS. Putting aside the wisdom of continuing resolutions as a whole (which feels, to me, like saying “We can’t live without the rib eye! Pay the bills with the credit cards!”) it has become common to pass a “clean” CR to keep government open for business while the actual budget debate is occurring. This time, the Democrats simply refused. Well, they didn’t refuse outright, but presented a list of demands so onerous to Republicans it would be like Republicans, under a Democrat majority, refusing to open the government unless abortion was made illegal and every homeowner got a government supplied gun. No way would (or could) the opposition agree.

This all blends together though, in the aforementioned stew.

About the same time the headlines were full of the “Shutdown”, ANTIFA staged a counter protest (hell, let’s call it what it was, an attack) at a TPUSA event at Berkeley. TPUSA, you may recall, is the organization started by Charlie Kirk and currently led by his widow. The protest became violent, which one might fairly argue was always the point. The goal of the counter protesters seemed, to me anyway, to be to become so disruptive and destructive any future TPUSA events would be untenable, too expensive to host and provide security for.

At about the same time these stories were breaking, I read a few reviews of a new book, “Life is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches”, by the hosts of a popular progressive podcast called “I’ve Had It”. The two writers and hosts, Angie Sullivan and Jennifer Welch, detail Angie’s gradual transition from right-wing wrongthink to Jennifer’s left/atheistic understanding of the world. We aren’t talking high-minded theology here. Angie’s epiphany?

Trump. That damnable Trump! Look at the things he’s makes us do! How can anyone believe in a loving God when there isn’t free WiFi? Not particularly deep thinking.

Jennifer says at much when she describes her allies:

Trump. And the people who elected him. Look what he’s made us do! Let us bond over the things we cannot stand!

Rage is the common thread, of course. The broth that holds this stew of stories together, and it is a madness. The Senate Democrats banked on the hatred of Trump to shift public opinion and absolve them of responsibility for the shutdown. It’s a cynical political ploy, but effective. ANTIFA attacked TPUSA because they hate what they say and stand for and want them to stop. Jennifer and Angie celebrate their escape from the conformity of civility and bond with others in their loathing off all things Christian, Trump, or remotely of the “right”.

Like other fads that have come and gone, this too shall pass, and I suspect a whole lot of people who are currently reveling in their hatred will choose to pretend that it never happened when that day comes.

No one who reaches the age of retirement gets here with no regrets at all. God knows, at a certain age we all play our memories over and wonder what might have been different had this happened, not that; had I done or said this instead of that. Had I only not believed that or felt like this. At twenty-five or thirty it is easy to conflate hatred with caring, self-serving anger with compassion, desire with need, rage with righteousness. Pumped with hormones and free-floating anxieties it is a simple thing to assume we are fighting on the side of the angels, that we know so much more than we actually do, and there is plenty of time ahead to sort it out in any case. But when one is out on the back nine and the roof of the clubhouse is coming into view, a balancing of the books begins. The importance of one’s ego is diminished, and it peels away no matter how tightly one clings. A reckoning comes.

Only the truly addled never face this reckoning—be it the unrepentant Weatherman or the hateful old racist—those who choose the soft cocoon of delusions to an examined life. Sometimes it is a failure of imagination and sometimes a failure of courage, but such people are to be pitied, not envied. They are incapable of honest introspection and have nothing that I want.

The hard truth is that hatred, all hatred, is self-lacerating. It is the snake eating its own tail. Those investing in their hatred today—of Trump or anyone else—are carving the souls they will carry in the future like the chains carried by Marley’s ghost; because, in the end, hatred and rage are just narcissism writ large. I watch the people, so consumed by rage and so certain they are moral, so intent on punishing the universe and the people in it until it behaves as they believe it should, and I marvel. What will they do when faced with genuine adversity?

Personally, most of the deepest regrets I carry are rooted in selfishness and self-importance. The kicker is that I can only see this because I see it in myself. Had I never been so full of myself that I thought it my place to punish, manipulate, and bully those who did not act and behave as I believed they should, I wouldn’t be capable of seeing it in others. Now, I see it all around me and have no inclination to try to fix it, no impulse to correct the haters and punish them for their behavior. They aren’t the first people to ever lose their minds to a fashionable trend, and they won’t be the last.

Assuming you have control of your neighbors and people around the world, that you are capable of policing their beliefs, that you control world hunger and wars and who gets what, that you have your hand on a global thermostat and can alter the climate—well, that comes with a lot of imagined responsibility and anxiety. No surprise that people so wrapped up in these massive, imaginary concerns have little left to control themselves.

I notice, but I can’t fix them. The best I can do is police my own out-sized ego and maybe warn people that they may well be doing themselves more harm than the targets of their rage. That’s the best I’ve got.

Peace.

I wish NYC the best of luck. I don’t see how Mayor Mamdani is going to improve the lot of the people of NYC, but I don’t live there. Maybe, in their collective wisdom, they see something that I don’t. Time will tell.

Still, though. I had little interest in listening to the news yesterday. Generally, I listen to books when I’m driving. Coincidentally, I’d just finished listening to Billy Summers by Steven King, read by Paul Sparks, Tuesday evening as I pulled into the driveway. When I climbed into the car on Wednesday morning, I didn’t have time to scroll through the Audible listings looking for another book and I had zero interest in the radio, so I put Pandora on shuffle and just started driving.

I was a surprised to find that the music made me happy. Here I should explain that my Pandora channels are a little bit eclectic and that I have selected artists who I enjoy very much but am unlikely to hear on any commercial radio station, ever. Last time I sat down to write a Substack piece I mentioned Shirley Horn, and people seemed to enjoy being introduced to her music. I thought maybe you’d like to see (and hear) the six songs that brightened my day yesterday.

To that end, I’ll name the artist and write the little I know about them and then post the song that played that made my day, in the order that they came up.

Michael Franks. Franks is 81 years old now. He’s a singer/songwriter who has sort of flown under the radar, with one semi-hit, “Popsicle Toes” that got some soft rock airtime in the early 80s. He’s played with all sorts of people, and has written songs that have been covered by Ringo Starr, Lyle Lovett, Patti Labelle, Diana Krall and many others. This is one of my favorites:

Johnny Hartman. He is hands down my favorite vocalist of all time. You’ll understand why. This is the title track from an amazing album recorded in 1964 with an all time lineup. Illinois Jacquet on sax. Kenny Burrell on guitar. Elvin Jones on drums. Hank Jones on piano. To the best of my knowledge, Hartman is the only vocalist Coltrane ever made a record with, called “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”. If you’re interested, I’d start there. Both albums are fantastic.

Bob Dylan from “Blood on the Tracks”. Nothing more need be said.

Cake. I don’t know much about Cake. I was swept away the first time I heard them, though. It’s edgy, like early Violent Femmes, but man...that bass line!

Stanley Turrentine. Turrentine was a master of what became known as soul jazz, or cool jazz. In the early 60s he was married to Shirley Scott, just a monster on the Hammond B3. If my life could have a soundtrack, I’d have been happy were it them. This is from the Album of the same name: “Let it Go”

David Frishberg. I saw Frishberg a few times back in the 80s, in small clubs in and around Boston. Though he was from Minnesota, he moved to New York in the 50s. He relocated to LA to work as a studio musician in the early 70s, but whenever I hear him I think of New York. And, for some reason, Muppets.

Well...that was the six tunes that started my day. I left Pandora on (and will until I select another novel) but these are indicative of how it plays. I hope they brighten your day as much as they did mine.

I’ll write something of substance soon. Promise.

Peace.

I suppose people from other parts of the country have the same feelings about the places they know. Maybe people in the deserts notice subtle changes in the mesquite and those in the Rockies see changes in the aspens, but it seems to me New England makes a show of wrapping up another year. In the cities it is obvious, but in the countryside, autumn clubs you with colors and scents that seem to flow into the days from years past. Casual conversations turn to practical (though mundane) matters as they have for generations. “We’ll be turning on the heat soon,” someone will say, exactly as if it is 1825 and they had best top off the stacks of cord wood, though in reality it will entail nothing more than turning the thermostat up from 50 degrees to 69.

It is difficult to not become nostalgic, though, or to find my feet mired in The Analogy. With the first chill evenings, I find myself remembering things both large and small—my father carefully washing and replacing the storm windows that had been stored in the basement for five months, the smell of wet wool, walking to school in 1969, desperately trying to make summer last another day and doomed to fail. I remember the feel of a football helmet. I haven’t worn a football helmet in fifty years.

The despotic analogy is so obvious it has become cliché. As the year winds down we oldsters become acutely aware that we are in the autumn of our lives. This is easier to ignore in Spring, when flowers are bursting through the patches of rotten snow and buds appear on the trees, but falling leaves speak to those of a certain age. I notice a new ache that is destined to become chronic. I reach for a name from the past and find the spot where I’d stored that memory empty. It is an unsettling feeling, and a transition that comes to everyone. Everyone seems to deal with this differently, but everyone deals with it, well or poorly. That damned analogy is unavoidable. It feels like watching the past becoming vanishingly small through the rear window of an old station wagon, as the wagon I am in is driving off...toward somewhere else.

Sometimes, when The Analogy has a good solid grip on me, it feels as if I am huddled with older versions of myself, under a lamp and around stacks of loose paper and artifacts, feverishly comparing notes. We’re trying—all of the versions of me at once—to figure something out. Did we make the correct choices? Could the ride have been better? More entertaining? Less painful? Could other choices have made it last longer? Is it possible to turn this around, get a do-over, postpone the inevitable?

This is silly, of course.

I’m reminded of a night in 2003, maybe 2004, when five of us were incredibly fortunate, and upon entering the small jazz club that was the old Scullers found ourselves seated directly at the piano of Shirley Horn. Not at the keys, of course, but just to the side, and close enough that were any of us totally bereft of manners, we could have placed our drinks directly on the piano lid.

It is important to understand that Shirley Horn was a national treasure. Finding ourselves seated where we were was akin to discovering you’ve been seated onstage beside Miles Davis.

Toward the end of her last set she announced that her health was failing and that this would be her last tour, and it was conversational, like a she was speaking over a dinner table. As she spoke, she met our eyes across the piano top. She indicated that she would not be playing Boston again, ever, and I had the impression that she knew she was dying. I wasn’t alone in feeling this. It felt exactly like she had gathered us all together in order to say good-bye in the best way she knew.

And then she played this: “Here’s to Life”

What is the appropriate response to this? Polite applause, like a golf clap? A standing ovation? Should one just crush the table and set the tablecloth on fire? My friend, Eduardo, was sitting beside me and he had tears streaming down his face. The last notes were followed by a sort of stunned silence, and then we clapped as best we could. When the applause faded, the room was entirely quiet and still.

I do not remember if she played anything after this. Frankly, I was sort of stunned.

The way Scullers was set up (there’s a new and improved Scullers now) there were two ways to get to the lobby, and the artists would usually use the back exit and set up a merchandise table where patrons could buy autographed CDs when they exited through the front. When we came out, she was sitting right there at a card table. She seemed to know some of the people, and others just stopped to say hello. Mary and I stopped to buy a couple of CDs.

“Thank you,” I said to her, and I meant it. “Thank you for everything.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t plan on checking out anytime soon. I met with my urologist last week, though, and he asked, “So, say you live for another twenty years. Would you be happy with all of your plumbing working pretty much as it does now?”

I said, “Absolutely.” Which is true, because everything seems to function as well as it ever has, outside of the occasional middle of the night bathroom trip. What struck me, though, was him picking twenty years as the outside possibility. I’m young enough to remember when twenty years seemed like a very, very long time; but I’m old enough to have t-shirts that old and to know that twenty years is not a long time at all. And I suddenly understood that if I am fortunate enough to get another twenty years, I’ll be 87 years old.

Yikes.

I don’t feel there is anything particularly morbid about this. As I’ve said, everyone deals with this in their own way. Between the ages of 18 and 20 I hitch-hiked across the country, coast to coast, six times and alone more than half of the time. I hitch-hiked into Canda and Mexico, and from Maine to Florida. Brian McNamara and I once hitched, all the way to the west coast, with a sign that read: “Killers”. I never worried.

I don’t worry now.

Twenty years is not a very long time at all, though.

I’d best get busy. Still a whole lot things I’d like to do.

And, as Shirely sang in that club some twenty-plus years ago, “I have learned that all you give is all you get, so give it all you’ve got.”

Peace.

Tantrums are easy. You open the floodgates and allow emotions to carry you away to that place in yourself where only you exist, and your feelings about X (whatever X happens to be—a lost binky, an unfair bedtime, a person disagreeing with you) are all that matter. We all know this place. We’ve all been there. It’s simple and comforting, like a shot of adrenaline while wearing well-worn pajamas, curled up under a favorite blanket. This is why little children are famous for them. Oh, we all know this feeling. We know this feeling like we know our own hands.

The feeling is a lie. It might feel good and seem harmless, but like a fourth martini, the effects can be dicey. The repercussions of a tantrum might last an entire lifetime. This is particularly true once one reaches adulthood. A tantrum from a two-year-old is easily curbed. A tantrum from an adult, much less so. As an adult, a tantrum causes us to say and do things we can not reel back. The hurts and the scars, in adulthood, are real.

Yet, for some reason we seem to have become addicted to throwing tantrums. In arguments, in debates, in conversation. We throw them in the office, at the supermarket, online, on the highway, in the classroom. It seems to me that in the past we expected this from a certain type, the emotionally retarded criminal archetype, the sort who might become enraged when a robber victim refused to immediately hand over their wallet, maybe from someone very drunk, but the tantrum appears to have been mainstreamed. My suspicion is that this dovetails precisely with the adoption of two crazy ideas: that emotional turmoil has heft and is just as valid as logic and fact in any given debate, and that words (particularly words that do not support the emotional turmoil being expressed) are violence. How crazy is that? Yet here we are.

In my childhood (which was, granted, a very long time ago) throwing a tantrum was a risky proposition. The adults who had grown up during the Great Depression and WWII took a dim view of tantrums, and losing control in their presence rarely achieved the desired result. A child who threw tantrums in public was a sign of poor parenting, so tantrums were usually a private affair, reserved to the home. I don’t recall a single tantrum thrown at school, by anyone, being a success by any meaningful measure. Tantrums happened, but they never worked and were never rewarded. By the age of five or six, most of us had given it up and shelved the ploy as untenable.

Something changed.

In a very real way, we have excused and even rewarded tantrums, and we’ve been doing it for years. It is difficult to pin down precisely when this began. My guess? About the time people began arguing online. Unaccustomed to debate, when we began arguing anonymously online we assumed that a debate would have a winner and a loser. That turned out to be a misconception. No one ever wins a debate in social media, and no one ever loses. Persuasion of third parties quickly became the point.

In his thesis on Rhetoric, Aristotle proposed three appeals that effectively persuade an audience: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

Ethos is the credibility and stature of the speaker. In today’s world, this might entail claims of being an “expert”, academic credentials, social status, political office, or public reputation. A medical doctor debating matters of health comes to the debate with a cache that a janitor does not possess. A billionaire, speaking of matters economic, has an authority someone living out of their car does not. This does not mean that the “expert” is correct, of course, but it does mean the credentialed speaker has a better chance of being persuasive.

Logos is logic and reason. Facts. Syllogisms. This is the only way to construct an argument that holds up under close scrutiny. Logic is the only path to validity. Most people presented with a debate don’t care much about logic or reason.

And then there is Pathos, the appeal to emotion.

In social media, maybe everywhere, the appeal to emotion, Pathos, is the tactic that is most persuasive. Maybe this has always been the case. We’ve all seen the movie mob trying to hang the prisoner in the tiny jail. “You’ve got to give him up, sheriff, so we can give him what he has coming to him!” That is Pathos. Rage. Pity. Longing. Emotions. It is no accident that most advertising is an appeal to one’s emotions.

Pathos causes evidence that is ridiculous (if one thinks about it) to be persuasive. Think Polar Bears seemingly trapped on tiny ice floes. Never mind that Polar Bears can swim for three or four days at a clip and up to a hundred miles. Never mind that Polar Bears live on land during the summer when the ice cover recedes. None of that matters. The emotional appeal is what counts. The audience member imagines how he or she would feel trapped like the Frankenstein monster on a tiny ice floe and feels an emotional response that is deeper than thought, even though the bear is not trapped and is in no danger whatsoever.

Online, emotions carry the day. All a meme can do is appeal to emotion. And in the world of persuasion, Pathos is a winning gambit.

Critical theory is nonsense, but it is nonsense that rest entirely on Pathos. According to the theory, humanity is divided up into arbitrary groups—racial, sexual, economic, the alphabet of preferences, countries, states, cities, neighborhoods—and then it is imagined that all of these groups are forever striving against one another, so if an individual succeeds it is at the expense of someone else, and if someone flounders it is the fault of someone else. Any advantage is an unfair advantage. Everyone has an edge over someone else, and everyone is oppressed by someone else still.

The conceit is that no member of one group (and we are all members of many groups, whether we like it or not) can ever fully understand the emotional turmoil of a member of another group. And it is emotional turmoil that matters.

What a stupid idea. But it has been adopted, and it has turned identity into a conversational trump card. Whatever your argument, no matter how logical and valid your syllogism might be, you cannot understand the emotional landscape of [insert group here: blacks, whites, Asians, women, transexuals, gays, lesbians, Muslims, the poor, immigrants, Cowboys fans, etc., etc., etc.].

In this environment, the scope of the grievance, real or imagined, is all that matters. How much Pathos can be mustered? “Your argument (no matter how logical and reasoned) is not valid because you cannot know what it is like to be me” became the neutron bomb of debate. If the argument continues after that, if the opposition continues to debate even after this truthy bon mot is deployed?

It’s time for a tantrum. To exhibit just how passionate one is and how enormous the cost of continuing opposition can be.

Am I wrong about this?

In the end, tantrums are a sort of emotional terrorism. Give me what I want, or I will unleash my ego and all of its terrible irrationality. I will kick and scream, say and do awful things, and it will hurt you to see it.

This actually worked for a while. Whole swathes of society were exempted from any consequence for their behaviors as individuals. Established rules, even laws, were ignored or suspended. Exceptions were made. Facts were ignored. I could catalog dozens and then more dozens of such cases, but you don’t need me to do that. You remember them yourself. Adults, behaving like poorly raised children, with complete impunity.

I always suspected society would one day hit a wall and say, “Enough is enough.”

“No,” society was always bound to say and is saying now, “we can tolerate you, but we are unwilling to pretend that reality bends to your will. Everyone you disagree with is not a Nazi. We are not poised on the razor’s edge of ecologic calamity. The successful are not responsible for the choices you have made. Men can not become women, nor women become men. No one is oppressing you. Go ahead. Throw your tantrum. We do not care.”

What happens then? What does a person who has been raised believing their emotions trump facts, and that a tantrum is a winning argument, do when these are no longer effective?

When a child launches into a tantrum and is ignored, the child grows weary. The screaming stutters and a careful peek is taken to see if anyone is still paying attention. Eventually, the child gives it up as a failed attempt and rejoins whatever else is going on.

But an adult, taking a careful, sly look and finding that no one is watching, or worse, those who are watching are watching with a sort of casual disdain, might not just give up. Such an adult, in the throes of a great tantrum and accustomed to being immune from all consequences, might choose escalation. A child will get off of the floor in aisle 6 and sulkily rejoin the family in the checkout line. An adult might try to burn down the store.

I think this is what we are witnessing unfold. Individuals, raised to believe they are members of an exempt group, above reproach or accountability, coming to grips with a culture that has lost patience with tantrums. In their delusions, they think emotion will carry the day and the universe will bend to their demands. It will never happen. In the end society as a whole and the juggernaut of reality will grind their delusions to dust.

This is an old, old story, and it always plays out the same way.

Peace.

I had a very happy dream, and it was the type of dream I wanted to hold on to upon waking. Sometimes, in the shards of a nightmare I catch myself slamming an imaginary door on the images and feelings. This dream was the opposite of that. I came awake grasping at the remnants and trying to preserve them as memories even as they slipped away. It was like trying to stuff cotton candy into a pillowcase in a heavy rain. Most of the dream was lost. Little bits of the imagery remain, but most of the dream collapsed like some fantastic animal dragged up from the depths, unable to exist in the sunlight of linear time and logical consistency.

It was a jumble though, this I remember, and had to do with a group of people I knew in my early twenties. That was the neighborhood, anyway, but it was all jumbled together like a child’s block castle as imagined by the set designer for “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”.

In the early 80s I shared a house with five others in Brookline, MA. Most of these were either students (or former students) of The Massachusetts College of Art. Across a vacant lot was an apartment building that has long since gone condo, but at the time two other groups of artists lived on the second and third floors. More lived up the street and others just around the corner. We had some fabulous costume parties back in those days, with Aretha playing loud and the playlist rounded out by Patti Smith, The Pretenders, and The Talking Heads. But we were all very serious about Art.

Anyway, that entire neighborhood was stretched and collapsed in the dream, in the midst of one of these parties, with doors opening Escher-like into other rooms in other places, and though I knew some of the people, most were strangers, but of a type. Young artists in the prime of their daring, before obligations and bills dulled their ambitions. I was basically me—67, bald, slight paunch, gray beard and deeply etched laugh lines—way, way outside of the demographic, but no one seemed to notice or care as I wandered among the costumed crowd. There were fantastic costumes (many of the students were actual costumers, back in the day) and some had purchased thrift store suits that had been taken out of circulation in the 50s, poked the lenses out of thick Buddy Holly frames, and tottered around like Jerry Lewis after a comical bicycle crash. There was lots of laughter. I remember wanting to tell each person I spoke to that it was silly to be so serious about the work, that we should all be celebrating life with color and light, but lacking the words.

Anyway, when I woke up I had the strong notion that I suddenly understood something important about the value of art in our lives and of being alive at all, and this was tinged with regret about all of the attention I gave to art that I supposed carried an important “message”, but was angry and grim. I’d been wrong, I remember thinking, to not simply love beauty for being beautiful—or, more precisely, not being capable of just marveling, but rather wanting to see my own fingerprints on the world. I remember a woman, dressed in a silver gown and just surrounded by big, white feathers, smiling brightly and saying to me, just before I began climbing a turret toward another small gathering on an outside patio, “The entire point of being alive is learning how to gracefully say goodbye to everything, even though we are in love with it.”

That was the opening of the day and the feeling followed me around like a puppy. This was interesting because I played golf with a friend I haven’t seen or talked to in about fifty years. We were playing golf, sure, but really we were comparing notes. We’d grown up in the same small town, played on the same teams, and we’d shared teachers and coaches, the same cops and stores and small town events, so we held many of the same values—a sense of fair play, the value of hard work—but we’d made vastly different choices and lived very different lives.

Between great shots and drives that often went out of bounds, we spoke of the people we had in common, who had made it big, who had fallen to accident, or disease, or drugs, or booze, who we still kept in touch with, who we’d lost to motion and time.

In truth though, I was measuring my own life and my own choices, and I suspect he was doing the same.

There is a peace that comes with being our age though. It is too late to start another career or harbor many illusions about changing the world, so we each sat with the pile of money and things and memories we’ve amassed without much comparison or judgment, and maybe wondered about what we might have done differently, but I like my life and he likes his and there is no envy, just a comparison of the lessons we have learned discussed between golf shots—each planned and executed with the very best of intentions—that sometimes went badly awry. Sure, I planned on hitting that 7 wood 196 yards and landing it on the green, but it was slightly off line and took a bad bounce, and sits in a bunker 15 yards left of the pin.

So much of life is like that. On the tail end of the back nine, the score is what the score is.

At about eight in the evening, standing in a parking lot as we were heading to our respective cars, a friend (who I think the world of) told me that Charlie Kirk had been murdered. I was shocked. Charlie Kirk who (so far as I have ever seen) had never threatened or harmed anyone and engaged in open discussions with people who disagreed with him, had been murdered at the pitifully young age of 31. How unspeakably sad.

Mostly though, I was shocked because my good friend seemed completely nonplussed. With a sort of casual shrug he said that something like this was bound to happen, because Kirk brought “hate speech” to college campuses and held open air events.

“Hate speech?” I thought. I left the parking lot fast because there was a white hot rage building inside of me. Hate speech? I haven’t followed Kirk closely, but I’ve watched a few of his debates and he was always patient and respectful, he never called for violence, and he made the case for his point of view cogently, citing history and facts. That qualifies as hate these days? Where is the hatred? Disagreement is not hatred. Refusing to validate what someone else believes is not hatred. Kirk would say, plainly, that men are men and women, women. That might be contrary to what someone else wants to believe, but it isn’t hatred of anyone.

If these are the new rules, I thought, God help us all. If people start assassinating one another for expressing opinions, there will be a whole lot of people on the left spending the remainder of their days cowering and looking over their shoulders. If speech is enough to justify murder, and people on the left are willing to make that stand, this could easily become an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment. I could feel the rage and a need to retaliate building in my own heart, and I don’t hate anyone. If I felt that, might there not be someone, or many someones, on the right—fully armed and ready to go—choosing targets right now?

If the characterization of conservatives painted by the Democrats over the last decade is even remotely true, that this will happen is axiomatic. Prominent liberals will start dropping like flies.

I never believed the things said about conservatives, though. Democrats have been wrong about everything else, so I assume they are wrong about where the actual hatred resides, too. The cure for speech you disagree with is more speech, not violence. This is a core value among conservatives.

But people are people. Patience wears thin. And there are many desperately nutty individuals out there.

My advice. Be careful what you wish for.

Anyway.

Peace.

This has been my July of 2025. I did this. It was hot, physically exhausting, and I came up hard against the limits of what I can do at 67. It’s good to know there are limits. One doesn’t have to respect them, necessarily, but it’s good to know that they’re there.

It started with a conversation about goats. I like goats. I like most animals, even people, but I seem to prefer a higher ratio of the animals I run into than the humans. We walked around the spread of a nearby couple who have goats of their own (and chickens, and dogs) and made some notes. How much space is required? How does one keep hay dry? What does a feeding station entail? What are the requirements for happy goats in the winter? And we decided to get goats.

We settled on three, and my sister adopted them on the day they were born—two males and a female. She named them after characters from Dickens novels: Pip (Great Expectations), Ebeneezer (A Christmas Carol), and Lily (The Old Curiosity Shop). She couldn’t take them on day one for obvious reasons. We had to wait some months.

While the kids were being weaned, Maura (my sister) visited them often. Tim, my brother-in-law, cleared a spot among the trees and sank 4x4 fence posts. I drew up the first (among many) material lists and put in an order for raw lumber. And then I started building.

And it got hot. A heat wave came through and temperatures went into the mid-90s with high humidity. This is where I hit the limits. I found that in that heat, even drinking water pretty much constantly, I was good for an hour or an hour and a half and then I would have to stop, change the t-shirt that was soaked through, and sit in front of a fan for a bit before starting in again. In fits and starts I could do maybe five and half, six hours a day. I like to think I would have kept on keeping on doing such work were I still in my thirties or forties, but I’m not so sure. It wasn’t the physical strain that laid me low. It was the heat. I’ve added “roofer in Florida” to the list of possible careers I will never pursue.

I used mostly local lumber, which is a first for me. I looked around and found a small, local place where they mill lumber, just up the street. Thompson Lumber. I ordered a lift of maybe 50 1x8s of rough cut pine. And then I pretty much winged it. No drawings. No plan to speak of. I built a box that I was certain would hold up a roof full of snow, decided on the slope for the roof, and cut rafters. I left spots for the doors and then figured them out when I got there. Then I repeated the process, sans walls, for the feeding station, and then did it again, with walls, for the hay shed. Somehow, it all came together. I did the roof with the same shingles one might put on a house because I’ve done it before and didn’t want to screw around any longer than necessary. I figure if a shingle roof keeps the rain off of me, the same will keep the rain off of the goats.

We’ve moved them in and they seem to be happy. They’re certainly friendly. It took about three days for them to clear their pen, which is about half the size of a football field, and then another couple of days to devour whatever leaves they could reach from inside the fence; so whenever we go down to see them we lop a low hanging branch or cut some brush and drag it in. This seems to be a highlight of their day. They have the food focus of Labrador Retrievers. Entering with one’s hands in the pockets is an invitation to get muckled, because they assume that the only possible reason a person would put a hand in a pocket would be to produce peanuts or string beans, and where food is concerned, they are not dainty or polite.

So it’s pretty much over. I have to build a door for a stall in the future, in case any of them get sick and have to be isolated, but that will take a few hours and gives me an opportunity to practice my procrastination, though many would claim I’m a damned fine procrastinator already.

But I promised myself that once the project was done and the goats were housed, I’d golf, and fish, and write. Maybe stop procrastinating and visit some people I’ve been planning on seeing.

In any case, I should be writing more.

Unless I find a pig to rescue.

Or a donkey.

Peace.