Author: fastcaranalysis

Legacies lost.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

So much fast change is happening right now that it makes me wonder if we are losing more than we are gaining. Let me expand on this idea a little.

I recently watched an episode of Legacy List, a PBS program that delves into American history through family objects. I’ve only watched this program a few times but it seems to me that the usual unfolding of each episode involves the death of a family elder and the subsequent sorting of their belongings in a way that strives to honor that person’s life and contributions to the family’s stories and happenings.

I am a person that values old objects. I like to imagine the effort that went into making or buying the object. And I like to imagine the life that went with the object: the technologies, the habits, the goals, the dreams and hopes of the people that acquired the object. Many ways of knowing and doing are lost in the past everyday. Farming ways have mostly been lost, for example. Most people don’t know how to grow food or drain land so that it keeps its topsoil after a hard rain, or deliver a calf that is being born, or even ride a horse or use one to move a fallen tree. Farming know-how was once essential and common knowledge.

On Legacy List, the family descendants are often coping with feelings of grief and being overwhelmed by the objects of their ancestors. They have to get rid of a lot of objects and they want help finding their family’s stories as expressed by what is left behind when their family member dies. This is a search for meaning. The poignant search for meaning at a time of grieving shows us that the pace of change is so fast that objects fall out of use regularly.

Sometimes objects don’t make sense anymore at all. It may well be that public policies that affect the economy have undermined the ability of families to pass family wealth on because the context that objects once had have been radically altered by social and technical evolution. In earlier times, people preserved the past more. The pace of change was slower. They inherited objects that still had a use in the present and future.

A related idea from a different perspective is the idea that people’s brains are being reshaped by how we now consume information into a lesser caliber of mental concentration. In a book I’m reading called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, I’m reading that the way that people take in their information nowadays can reduce our ability to think up new ideas. There are so many interruptions on the way to imbibing new information that it is stored in our minds with less coherency. I wonder if a scattering of our ability to concentrate might harm our ability to plan and assemble new objects that could shape a new future that we will value.

Will people of the future want to imagine and shape their own lives creatively or will they rely on computer technologies to do it for them? Will our partnership with computers inhibit us from working together? Will the legacy of each person’s life be treasured in the same way that the families of Legacy List treasure their own family objects and stories?

I keep hearing that a whole lot of kids graduating from our public schools lack skills to do arithmetic or read for comprehension. I worry that their use of computers has damaged their ability to internalize knowledge that they can carry with them wherever they go and use for their own purposes and plans. How will people who have impaired learning skills become independent and creative adults?

A similar idea about relevancy is the way that some old books in my library are becoming less true especially the ones that talk about social values and social goals. I have a library filled with books that are now from an obviously different era with different ways of thinking and doing things. I regret that those ways of thinking and doing are dying so fast. And those ways of thinking and doing seem to have no defense against the modern onslaught of fast changes.

This fast change may be wasteful.

It may be unwise.

Where will these fast changes lead us in terms of human acheivements and the realization of our dreams for making our lives good?

What do you value in your own life and how will you preserve it so that it can retain some value for the next generation? How can you keep your brain engaged so that you can think creatively and deeply as much as the human legacy shows that we have done in the past?

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Philosophy can help us.

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People I met at the university made fun of those who wanted to study philosophy. It seemed that philosophy had no possible place in the modern industrial and later, the post-industrial world. No corporate behemoth wanted to hire a philosopher to run the company or to do any company jobs. People said that philosophy was dead and no one even cared.

And then soon after, religion was likewise dead. And then an appreciation of beauty in art and architechture was also dead. And now in politics it appears that representational government is perhaps less likely with artifice in voting instead of trustworthy voting with fidelity. And still the SAVE Act hasn’t passed even though 80% of voters think it is a good idea.

Perhaps it’s time to return to philosophy.

Greek philosophy had five branches: Epistemology (the study that answers the question, “What do we know and how do we know it?”), Metaphysics (“What is being and what does it mean to be alive and experienced in this world?), Logic (“What method of reason is the correct one to prove the rightness of understanding?), Ethics (“What is a good life and how does one live a good life?”), and finally, Aesthetics (What is beautiful and how do we recognize beauty?”).

I made a little time to study philosophy. I studied Logic and I have read books about philosophy. I value applying philosophical questions toward living an examined life. Life is so short and I think philosophy can help a person to walk a path toward a happy life.

Some people think that whatever makes a person happy or satisfied in the short term is the best road to happiness. Short-term time tables seem to have taken over all of our lives these days. But many people who live for a longer time into old age can experience a complete change in their thinking about what makes life good and what makes them happy. I think that philosophy can help a person to wander onto a good path and I also think that not every path, even ones that create short-term happiness is a good path in the long term. I think it’s good to prevent regrets later or at the end of life.

Philosophy can help you to discriminate between what will help you and help society and what will harm you and society. Here we are.

Finally spring has arrived. The birds are back. Warmer temperatures call us to enjoy being outside more. But remember that philosophy can go with you anywhere. Think of all the questions it can help you answer. You don’t have to be victimized by the anything goes approach to living. You can use your agency to choose well and philosophy can be a helpful guide. Having a pocket full of questions may give you a better chance at happiness.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com. It can help you to understand how we got to our political here and now and also how economics and politics dance together to organize how you experience opportunity in your life.

To read an article about philosophy branches try this one: https://www.thecollector.com/what-are-the-branches-of-philosophy/. I did.

Bombs falling in the Middle East today.

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Bombs are falling across the Middle East. I am concerned about this. What we continue to have in the United States is non-representative government where the voting box has been ignored and powerful people are in pursuit of their interests independently of voters.

That’s why the passage of the SAVE Act, which supposedly restores the fidelity of voting in the United States, is sorely needed.

In the meantime, America and the rest of the world watches breathlessly as bombs are falling in various portions of the Middle East today. I can only hope that our leaders are trying to end violence as quickly as possible with less death and destruction rather than with more of that. I hope that today’s violence will prevent future worse violence. People on the ground in the Middle East, however, care more about what is happening to them today than they care about what good may come out of this in the far away future. If it ever does.

Of additional concern to me this week is a report I heard about how UBI is coming to the U.S. Earlier this week as I did a morning workout routine and tuned into AM radio, there was a broadcast predicting UBI as an economic soulution to the lukewarm job market, where people are facing further erosion of job opportunities as AI moves into position and displaces some people’s economic niche as word-smiths in law and other boilerplate language construction efforts.

Years ago reports were drawn up by independent experts that went into business in order to serve their clients. Their job was to learn about their specialty and to describe investigation outcomes in fields like law, engineering, architecture, and medicine. After the computer age got going, the word processor desk top computer made short work of cutting and pasting ordinary descriptions with a few edits to customize findings. Now AI is expected to go through the motions of reporting that experts once did with similar word constructions.

The way that I heard it explained is that you won’t have to hire an expensive architect but instead you can get an AI program to give you the same basic language constructions that an architect would have if you want to revise your house’s floorplan or add a house addition or remodel your kitchen. In theory, this would save you a lot of money.

A lot of information about similar projects is on file somewhere and an AI can access it and viola, you don’t need to hire an expert. Or maybe, just to be on the safe side, a final rundown by an engineer might be wise to make sure it won’t catch on fire. Because the AI doesn’t care and doesn’t know. It’s just providing you with a word construction of what was known before by experts that once did this kind of work. And they will be unemployed. Oh well!

I personally don’t believe that AI will be so successful as that especially since people with judgement are required somewhere in the reporting process to care about what is really being built or reported. Information has consequences.

Also UBI (as a stopgap in the face of AI job displacements) can’t contribute to the economy because it is not productive in a virtuous way. Adam Smith, the writer of The Wealth of Nations was wise to recognize that government workers act in the political sphere and not in the economic sphere. Paying their salary pulls money from the economy and puts it into politics. Similarly, paying everyone UBI gets rid of an incentive for people to work to produce or do anything in the economy. UBI stimulates the political and not the economic sphere.

In order to prevent theft of expertise, protections within industries against stealing expert boilerplate reporting might be wise at this point. Otherwise, all kitchen remodels may be similarly bad. Or medical reports may leave out a few important details. Or your less expensive will may overlook some important property that should be addressed with regard to your estate.

Also, there’s the problem of providing enough energy to fuel the AI revolution which uses cloud storage, as everyone else worries about their next meal and how to afford to heat their house.

Meanwhile, what about the economy? Destroying middle class expert jobs leaves a lot less virtuous money circulating in the economy. Fewer connections between people would not be a good outcome of an AI industry. Why can’t AI just be a tool for experts to use rather that trying to replace them entirely with it?

The political sphere and the economic sphere are both complex adaptive systems. They will respond to large changes eventually with sudden adjustments that are unpredictable and uncontrollable. Having voting with fidelity allows feedback into the political sphere and we need that feedback to prevent sudden political change from happening. Similarly, markets allow feedback into the economic sphere where connections between people in making exchanges are important. Getting rid of markets is unwise. To learn more about how the economy and politic work together to create the world around you buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

You’ve got to create your own bargains in 2026.

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Do you think that fun matters in life? I think that humans have always enjoyed making life fun. They invent games. They solve problems. They make objects of beauty and interest to enjoy.

A marketplace that supplies solutions to problems, that supplies beautiful objects and fun entertainments can find customers as long as it provides what people want, need and can afford. One of the problems with monetarism is that the over emphasis on making money doesn’t keep affordability in the mix and sometimes monetarists want to provide what people don’t want or need. They keep insisting that you should buy into technology that might not serve you. For example, smart phones are thought by Jaron Lanier to be behavioral modification tools that can also be used to track a person’s location. Healthcare that doesn’t make you healthy is not a useful product, for instance the covid vaccine that didn’t work to prevent covid and appears to be causing health problems in some people. Insurance that doesn’t really pay for dire illnesses undermines the purpose of having insurance.

The U.S. economic marketplace is offering less desireable products and less fun overall. High inflation reduces disposable income to buy extras that can make life fun. Bargains are certainly gone.

In times like these, you just have to bring in your imagination and make your own fun. Try starting with a delicious meal. What do you want to cook that will taste good and that you can share with your friends or family? Yesterday, I made a pizza. It took about an hour of my time to do. It had (precooked) Italian hot sausage, sweet peppers, onions, garlic, tomato sauce and mozarella cheese on homemade yeast crust. I prebaked the crust for nine minutes at 450 F to make it crispier and then added the other ingredients for a 15 minute bake at 350 F. It was delicious and added a little fun to the menu. We also had a green salad with sliced tomato, lemon and olive oil. I didn’t buy something already made by someone else. I made my pizza dinner my way to suit my tastes specifically with 50% whole wheat pastry flour for a healthier crust. I got more of what I wanted and paid less for it.

I can’t imagine making enough money from creating and selling original art to meet today’s financial obligations of high taxes, high insurance and inflation in all necessities. But I can make original art to please myself and my family. Every year we send out handmade ornaments to our close family and friends. No one else has anything like what we send because it is original. I have heard stories that people who receive these invented objects sometimes keep them around long after Christmas. Something about them makes people feel happy. I like to make them and send them out. They don’t come from a store.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

In this financialized neoliberal economy, production has been damaged by profitmaking and financialization. Money has been leveraged to make more money. And money is being misused. It’s being overprinted and oversupplied. Groups have been gaining access to unearned monies from NGO’s. The whole economy suffers from a lack of affordability and variety and a lower quality and inconsistent supply.

Monopoly pricing after investors bought large quantities of real estate has raised the cost of housing to unaffordable levels. Even though President Trump has made a public statement lamenting that corporate real estate investment is bad for Americans who want to buy a house to live in, real estate is still owned by investors and it still costs too much.

Education serves profit-making motives or political motives instead of helping people learn useful reasoning skills and useful information that they can use in a productive life. Recently, I heard Elon Musk commenting favorably about workers in China working long hours but he never mentioned how acelerationist policies and buyouts have undermined the American worker. He sounded like he was saying Chinese work harder than Americans. There are a lot of requirements laid on American workers to get jobs that they can’t keep when buyouts happen or market churn destroys an industry. No one has an infinite amount of time or money to get yet another career off the ground. Many can’t get an adequate return anymore for an investment in education. That is more widely recognized all the time, now.

When products don’t actually serve people’s needs or instead serve an external political objective, people turn away. They are thrown onto relying upon their own ingenuity. They begin creating their own bargains, their own products, their own opportunities that make sense to them.

That’s what making your own fun is all about.

On the brink of 2026.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Recent stories have been coming out just this week about fake daycares owned by Somali immigrants that are taking in grants and not caring for any children. Grift and graft collection and dispersement to certain political groups are their sole known purpose. As I sit here writing to you today, I am thinking of hearing a pundit claim that Americans are unfairly paying for grift and graft with taxpayer dollars. I have to scratch my head at that taxpayer payment claim.

I suppose that taxes have been high in Minnesota. Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, has been recently called before Congress to answer for some of this impropriety. I’m guessing that there isn’t any real taxpayer payment that can be shown at all to cover the daycare funding. Referring to the taxpayers being duped into payment is merely an allusion that has roots in a more prosperous past when the government kept a more balanced budget and accounted for its spending with more honesty. It is far from today’s reality where we see out of control spending, direct thefts from the treasury, and a lack of prosecution for same.

The United States is carrying a huge amount of debt. An end of our once observed prosperity and the death of our nation’s powerbase because of too much debt may be the goal of this ever expanding promise to pay later. Greedy insiders or external enemies may be behind it. It may be just the way that money circulates without proper oversight.

If I were illustrating a picture of the the riches in the treasury, I wouldn’t be able to claim riches are present in the form of gold. In fact it’s quite a trick to keep up an appearance of solvency when the only thing we do is pretend that eventually we can pay when we haven’t been paying off the debt for a long while now.

News reports that lamented the recent shutdown of government made it seem that we are paying. They say that certain bills can’t be paid when the government is shut down. But really, with 38.5 trillion dollars in debt, there’s a lot not being paid. Is our nation solvent at all? I have heard other news stories in the past that claim that the bills of the U.S. are being paid because they have been expenditures for things in the budget. The news story ignored the deficit. Isn’t it true that anything spent after the government is in deficit is not being paid for except with a promise to pay later?

As we continue overspending as a nation, inflation’s threat grows more serious. Certainly many of us can remember less inflation in the past. Sometimes it seems that there’s a free-for-all attitude among certain political groups that have gotten USAID money or some other grant money. Getting money outside of ordinary economic channels seems commonplace among certain political recipients. Real economic production isn’t necessary when political strings can be pulled to supply whatever funds are needed by certain annointed individuals or groups. How special that would make them feel.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

More dysfunction with regard to spending by the US government includes many examples. It would be too tedious to elaborate. Suffice it to say the US federal government no longer reports its spending to Americans. And Congress refuses to balance or plan a budget. I can’t imagine good faith in government without a budget, and without a clear accounting. This is only one of many problems facing our nation.

Entry level jobs won’t accept you unless you have experience? How weird is that!

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Finding a job in the U.S. has been hampered by a series of roadblocks. For years job ads asked for everything and anything that could be imagined whether a person could really do it or not. After the Great Recession, to save money, companies were sometimes merging job roles to give to a single person what three people did in the past. Later, during the covid era, there was a requirement for people to take an experimental shot of mRNA. We all saw cancel culture and race-based hiring during the Biden Era. Now we have another roadblock: the scarcity of genuine entry level jobs. Modern entry level jobs often require degrees and years of experience.

In previous times, an entry level job had a lower salary but also came with some training. A friendly face would help the new guy learn the job so that they could make a contribution as soon as they learned how to do what was needed. In the past, sometimes a person would tire of one job and in order to get a change of profession, they would learn how to do another different job. Or maybe their old job wasn’t needed anymore so they learned a new set of skills to propel them into a new career. General skills were a useful base that could be expanded into some new profession with a little retraining. You could find work in a new job where you would be retrained. You didn’t have to go back to the university and start over.

That friendly face of a helpful trainer is conspicuously absent today. If you search entry level jobs, most of the jobs that come up require years of experience doing the advertised job’s work. That makes it seem that there aren’t really any entry level jobs. New guys aren’t going to be trained and if you need training, you’re not welcome to apply. If you do apply, and you don’t have previous expert experience, you will not be considered.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

People aren’t welcome to learn on the job and trainers won’t materialize to train the new guy and that means that you may not be able learn a new profession from another person at all. Going back to school is not economically affordable right now for a lot of people because of tuition inflation. Or if you are older, your return on investment for retraining may be doubtful which might suggest that re-education as a training option is ill advised. Should you remain stuck wherever you are because no one will retrain you? If your job goes away, do you have to find another similar job and what if you can’t find one? Even when you have some professional experience elsewhere and a good education, you aren’t welcome to change careers because there’s no budget to retrain you. And there’s no intention to train you.

For all of human history, people have learned from other people how to do a job. A worker hasn’t always kept the same job for a whole lifetime. People could grow by gradually expanding their skillset as they learned how to do new things. And an employment market that refuses to train new people is strange…an anomaly. It seems aggressively anti-labor and anti-human. Why is this happening?

One reason might be because the economy is shrinking instead of growing.

In a growing economy, there is demand for new workers. Every new worker might find a job because new jobs are opening all the time. But in a shrinking economy when a worker leaves, sometimes there’s no demand to re-fill the job space they once occupied. A new worker can’t fill a position that’s permanently closed after someone leaves. A shrinking economy is also less agile and new workers aren’t welcome. If a worker leaves, they are not there to train a replacement and no one else has time in the shrinking workplace to train a new guy. The position will either close or it can be filled with another experienced worker a lot like the guy that just left…not really entry level.

Yet people need to earn a living. High taxes and inflation keep nibling away at people’s resources. Nowadays, it’s heartbreaking to imagine that robots and AI are expected to replace people in the already shrinking job market. And somehow, someone writing policies and planning for the future thinks that that’s a great idea. I don’t think so.

I am hearing that there’s a sudden demand and need for bluecollar workers in practical kinds of jobs. An apprenticeship might be more like the old entry level job. But most whitecollar workers have been told for years that bluecollar work is dirty and low paying and represents a social step down. Why would they see this work as more acceptable now than before? An apprenticeship is an investment that doesn’t require the same indebtedness as a university education but most people aren’t so flexible as wanting to try out a new social position.

And so the world for the worker seems to be fracturing into something that is broken, can’t grow and can’t change. How strange. It feels like another workplace embargo like we saw during the Covid-era. Covid shots aren’t required for employment today, but previous experience is. If you want a job you have to do the same kind of job that you did before or go into bluecollar work.

For some of us, that means that the economy is closed to us. Older workers are expected to keep working until they are at least 67. But older workers probably are reluctant or unable to start over in bluecollar work. There’s also a lot of age discrimination. Some people don’t want to or can’t return to a previous profession because their old kind of work has disappeared.

Will some of us have to find a way to contribute economically without having a boss or by doing some sort of job that hasn’t even existed before? We may be on the cutting edge of reinvention. Because if people aren’t being retrained for new opportunities, they will have to make their own opportunities. Good luck to people who find themselves in that situation.

Since the University System is in all kinds of trouble with politics taking over where open mindedness once was, it may be time to allow people to learn on their own and test into new positions. Training materials might be made widely available at a low cost so that everyone who is willing can learn new things online or by buying a training manual without paying a huge amount. Then by passing an entry exam they could obtain new employment in a new field. The world of work might seem more friendly then because people could do something to determine a better outcome for themselves.

It seems like the emphasis on tech has led to overspecialisation in job ads and high costs for university tuition have made specialization unaffordable for people who want to retrain. Programming robots to replace people is a poor solution to this problem. It’s indicative of an imbalanced economy that is unfriendly to workers. I hope it gets better.

Back to the Future?

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Are we designing a future or destroying a future? Years ago, people planned their future and a lot of structures were in place to facilitate that. Those were the years of interest bearing savings. Pensions were once commonplace. There were better schools and libraries. Jobs once were plentiful and innovation was how companies got ahead. Most people got married, bought a house and a dog and then started having kids and raising them to carry-on into next generations. People hoped to make social contributions that would improve the lives of their kids and even the lives of other people through jobs that produced goods and services used by others. Churches had big congregations and people talked about having a spiritual life. That narrative belongs to the long ago now.

Since then, a wartime economy formed. Taxes went up. Easy money came along and the derivatives markets unbalanced real estate. Most people can’t afford a home now. Family formation is flagging. Savings accounts don’t provide much interest. With inflation, a low interest or no interest saving account can’t grow a nest egg for the future. The future seems empty of promise. We hear that the disruptors in IT are winners leaving the rest of us to scramble for a future that we can’t quite reach or understand.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Bill Gates once said that people who don’t learn computer moderated tasks will be frustrated and shut out of the modern economy. What I noticed at the time that he said that was that investment in computers was costly and reduced the profit margin. Yet everyday all the time people kept saying that the future relied upon computer moderated success. Now IT has combined with government to be funded by tax money…no profit making required. And computers, which we all buy now to use at home and at work seem to loom over us all. Will AI soon run or ruin the world?

Before all this government funded computer tech took us into a new trajectory that was less human centered, science was really doing science. Scientists weren’t promoting ideas that got them grants and ignoring obvious and truthful information that would exclude them from grants. Science was exploring the natural world and learning about it. Universities were full of people asking questions and getting answers that had the beautiful shimmer of truth or as near to the truth as we could understand and propose. New ideas were welcome and happening. Investigating the natural world often led to improvements and new ideas. There weren’t influencers trying to make people’s minds up for them. Influencers weren’t dominators changing people’s minds in order to shape someone’s fortune by creating a fantasy centered marketplace.

I was reading somewhere yesterday that the workforce is aging and old people will just have to keep working longer. This is a fantasy narrative. Old people can’t replace younger workforce displaced by policy decisions that have made universities more expensive and less powerful at really educating people to live in the real world. As we move into Halloween, the really scary thing is how fantasy-based AI narratives are becoming and how hopeless they are at providing actionable news that helps people make good choices.

As we all face a fantasy narrative world that dupes people into hopelessness, remember that humans without computers have built most of the useful human world we see around us. And the natural world doesn’t need us to believe in it for it to continue being a miraculous network of life and wonder filled beauty. If you can’t find a way to contribute to an economy that is in trouble right now, remember that you are a valuable part of the natural world. The fake computer-moderated economy can waste energy and raise your energy bill price but it can’t even understand the natural world that you are a part of. Keep making things and doing things and thinking your own thoughts. Find your way by connecting with the real world.

At some point we will realize what we are losing and then as a society we will begin choosing what could be a better world. That would be a world that empowers us all to do something good with our efforts, our ideas and life energy. A new future can embrace more of what’s real and leave all the fakery behind.

It’s ok for Christians to pray for their enemy.

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I’ve been here on Earth since 1964. My interest in politics happened before I entered elementary school. Vietnam War images on the nightly news form some of my earliest memories and they made me worry. I didn’t like warfare violence. I noticed that it hurt people in Vietnam and that it hurt our soldiers. I wondered how to stop the war. I felt sympathy for both sides in that war.

I didn’t really believe the rationalizations about the Vietnam War. Later I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin conflict was faked and that’s what got us into that war. Faked justifications for war actions have happened again since the Gulf of Tonkin. I was glad when the Vietnam War ended. The aftermath of the war continued unfortuneately with damaged soldiers returning home and damaged Vietnamese people trying to rebuild their lives in the U.S. or trying to continue and rebuild in Vietnam.

Other wars happened in other places and they carried on with new violence. In some ways it’s like the Roman or Greek God of War visited many nations after Vietnam. War fever seems important at first and then purposeless later.

Violence is hard to stop. By the time that people are engaging in violence, they are usually committed to doing it. Most people don’t like violence but after becoming adapted to doing violence it can be hard for them to stop. Motivating a return to peace happens when a person is free to find something better to do with their life energy. Having something else to do is important.

A few days ago, Charlie Kirk was gunned down when he was addressing an assembly of interested people who wanted to hear what he had to say. That was about 12 years after Mr. Kirk started going to college campuses and talking to students. He would set up a card table and talk with anyone who came along. He said he was trying to recruit young conservative students. He defined Conservatism as an effort to protect social goods and pass those social goods on to the next generation. He thought that having a home and a family are social goods that are objectively good according to Aristotelian philosophy. He used early Founding documents from the colonies (later states) and Biblical texts to undergird many of his political arguments. Even though he didn’t get a university degree, Mr. Kirk studied primary source materials for his arguments. In an era of heavy-duty 24-hour propaganda, using primary source material instead of quoting second-hand opinions allowed Mr. Kirk to get to the heart of issues better than almost anyone else. Charlie Kirk is the only modern person I have heard outside of a church say that Biblical texts are important and valuable both philosophically and politically. He was talking and listening to strangers like no one bothers to do anymore.

I never had a chance to talk to him and I wish I had. I heard about Mr. Kirk (who was about 30 years younger than me) when he first started going to universities to talk with people. I admired his bravery and openness. I just never had a chance to talk to him.

I know that people want to politicize his murder. Don’t do that. Charlie was reaching out to a generation of people in the US that has been under growing economic pressure. Generation Z, born from 1997-2012, was his biggest fangroup. I think that this generation has struggled the most as compared to earlier generations, from both economic poverty and from a poverty of people ready to talk and listen to them. Talking and listening is a great way to embrace confused and economically struggling people. It helps prevent violence.

I think shooting a speaker in an auditorium, shooting Charlie Kirk, is a crime, is an act of cowardice, an act of desperation, and a futile action that has wasted Mr. Kirk’s grand generosity as a communicator. I think to myself that after killing this good man, the shooter will now be confronted with Mr. Kirk’s philosophies and Mr. Kirk’s life’s legacy on a daily basis. This is probably the opposite of what the shooter intended. By murdering Mr. Kirk, the shooter has inextricably tied his own fate to that of someone he wanted to silence forever. I didn’t hear about Charlie Kirk recently until his death. Lots of Kirk video has been released. I have watched all of the footage that I can find.

When I consider the possibility of why the shooter chose violence, I can’t help but wonder if voting frauds in the US have caused this unexpected side effect. A side effect of desperate violence. A desire to act out as a form of terror communication. I also wonder if economic struggle and uncertainty have led some people to wander into violent activism as a way to escape other kinds of uncertainty.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

In any case, I hope that this moment in history will help us to appreciate Charlie Kirk’s grandly generous communication gesture. I can’t imagine that he was correct in everything he said or believed anymore than anyone else is. Emotions of many kinds accompany this loss of a valuable person who was making a difference in our nation’s politics. Praying for us all would be an appropriate Christian gesture. Even among other faiths, such a generous spirit deserves admiration.

Also, remember Charlie Kirk’s family in your prayers and include them in the soft center of your heart.

Neoliberal economy performs poorly.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

The idea of government picking winners and losers (under accelerationist policy) isn’t a good way to run an economy. Because when the government picks losers there are fewer winners. Also, no one is wise enough to decide who should lose. In a market economy, the market decides winners and losers based on profits and losses. When the government tries to replace the market, based on what consumers want, need and can afford, with government influence exchanges, you end up with all kinds of wasted potential. Because influence testing isn’t as good as market mechanisms. When you get carried away with picking losers and then add cancel culture for political reasons, you start eliminating whole swaths of potential economic contributors.

How did accelerationist policy come about? It has been through buying influence in government. People with more money buy influence. When influence is for sale in our government, it increases the number of factions that vie for power. In the neoliberal era, big money access has spawned some big winners that are always buying influence for a surer win, but it has led to a lot more losers than we would have had.

When you go looking for a job right now, there are a lot of websites that advertise phony positions which aren’t really available. Also, the jobs are advertised from the perspective of employers not employees. In fact from the employees’ perspective phoney job ads are really terrible and they persist because it makes employers look more prosperous than they really are. That’s very discouraging to job seekers and it makes online job ads into unattractive time wasters. I keep hearing that there are a lot of jobs that need to be filled and also that American job seekers are discouraged more now than ever. As AI screens out applicants, people who don’t get a call-back begin to wonder how they would ever know what to do to get hired.

Neoliberals like making everything into a profit-center. They want globalization and financialization. They want organizations to be dominant over individuals. They want unrestricted global capital flows and they like warfare. They like economism where everything has an economic motivator. They like big monopolies and big government and smaller-always-less-important individuals and families. They hate religious motivations and ethical behaviors. They don’t like restrictions on big power.

To make our society better, I think it helps to see neoliberalism’s shortcomings. We need strong families because the family is a great place to nurture children and grow them into society’s doers. We need ethics in society and the family is a great place to teach the difference between right and wrong. We need to be motivated by our caring hearts and our connections to each other. We need rule of law to apply equally to all: even the most powerful. Neoliberals don’t support what we need and in fact work to undermine it.

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The neoliberal economy creates too many losers. It’s a wreck. Taxes keep going up but economic activity is down. We have numerous unfilled jobs. We have failing universities where credentials serve money interests instead of the public good. Prosperity overall is waning as the rate of economic exchanges slows and fraud increases. Investors owning real estate has led to monopoly price influence raising the prices of houses. Bigger hospitals and medicare and medicaid have led to price increases in healthcare. Government and corporate grants in our universities have led to research conclusions that are up for sale from climate change to covid drugs. Crime on our streets has grown as homeless and unemployable people become renegades and people in city government try to make political dividends out of desperation.

In a better economy, economics doesn’t overshadow our lives in the way the neoliberals are trying to do. Our healthcare has been taken over by greedy profiteers who want people to be sick. Our neoliberal money making goals don’t allow doctors to cure disease anymore the way that they should. Everyone needs a place to live that’s affordable and investors in our real estate markets keep raising prices beyond what any one person or family can afford. We need affordable food but inflation in food is making it too expensive for many to eat properly.

The neoliberal economy is a disaster that will continue to fail as long as capital is emphasized over wealth, rule of law spares the powerful and influence money is more important than markets. Neoliberalism is power for power’s sake. Unlimited partnerships between government and corporations leads to failure.

Prosecute but stop the rhetorical disection.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

This week there’s lots of buzz online about people who fabricated intelligence to prove that Mr. Trump was a Russian asset in order to damage his political opportunities. This hoax can be lumped into the category of unprosecuted happenings from the last decade or longer. Many Americans are waiting to see if prosecutions will happen this time in this one category. We’re pretty tired of rehashed old news without judicious outcomes.

I have become convinced over many years now that our politics are not above board. Whatever a politician says and whatever the news coverage is about politics, it’s all false. There’s no humor and no interest left in politics because there’s no honesty. Humor makes fun of honest appraisals and interest can’t be generated without honest assessments. Without honesty, the stakes and the facts are fake and there’s no reason to listen to any of it anymore.

I would like to refocus on something entirely different. I would like all my and likewise all of our collective energy to go into making good things happen for me and likewise for all of us in the United States. Because it’s been a while since that was part of our experience.

For years, government statistics continually lie about the number of unemployed people by ignoring the longterm unemployed. Government statistics in 2015 had rosy assessments about future jobs that never came about but little acknowledgement about that failure. When less than 27% of degree holders can find a job related to their training, investing in a university education has become a waste of money and time.

If the Secret Government Agencies, like the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security etc. have all grown out of bounds, if they are doing things that are illegal and therefore criminal, then is anything that they are trying to do worth doing at all? Probably not. Can anyone measure power by the amount of damage that can be inflicted on the other side of whatever group so consistently that there’s no room for real prosperity building?

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com.

Isn’t government power supposed to be on the side of prosperity instead of destruction? Because it hasn’t been for a long time now. It looks like our government is full of bad guys doing stupid bad things.

I’m glad that some of the election shenanigans will be addressed. However, I will only pay attention very briefly when the people perpetrating various forms of deception and treason are in jail. Then I will merrily ignore those jailbirds completely while I try to rebuild my life by making good things happen that these political people have been doing their best to prevent me from doing.

When the government wastes our resources doing bad things instead of good things, good things don’t get done because they are crowded out by all that nonsense. Please no more political news stories on broadcast media. Just set up a website that describes charges leveled, fines levied and jail terms meted out for guilty verdicts.

Instead of talking about politics, let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about jobs. There’s been a labor blockade here in the U.S. for decades. It’s time for that to end. Internet job ads are supposedly 85% fake. Maybe that should be illegal. Hire everyone and train them. Hire old people who have a rich life experience but who can’t collect pensions until they are 67 years old. Hire young people who need experience and training. Hire people to do what needs doing. Pay them.

Stop using social media to make people crazy and disagreeable. Social media has been providing different information to different groups in order to foment discord and increase site traffic. That should be illegal. Stop that. I’m all for the first amendment but it’s not ok to constantly try to set the world on fire.

Let’s move on towards a new prosperity. Don’t make people take sides anymore. Help people work together for a better America.