Lindsay Clancy mistrial makes good sense.

September 7, 2026September 7, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Lindsay Clancy’s trial recently ended in a hung jury. There was no unanimous verdict. There was a good reason for that.

People who take SSRI drugs for depression are administered a drug that has significant risks for suicidal and homicidal ideation. It’s right on the packaging of the drug. Lindsay Clancy under the advice of doctors was issued 8 different drugs, (at least four antidepressants) which only worsened her symptoms and created in her a desperation to end her own life and the lives of her children.

The elaborate plan that Lindsay Clancy hatched in her mind to kill herself and her children likely came directly from the psychoactive drugs that were administered to her at the time she was admitted for postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a disorder that accompanies childbirth for some women every year.

The alarming result of strangling her children is as heinous a crime as a mass school shooting which coincidentally is a problem linked with the same psychoactive drugs. Please think about that. Remember the elaborate plans that mass shooters have made before they went on their killing sprees.

The idea of a drug coctail causing a person to become psychologically unstable can make us all squirm. We wonder if we ourselves or someone we love could be either a victim of someone who has suicidal or homicidal ideation when taking the drugs , acting out murdurous inner directives, or we wonder if a person we love could become a drug cocktail victim as a person transformed into a mass murderer.

But please admit that there’s enough evidence to show that people are vulnerable to exactly these outcomes. We have seen it so many times now that there should not be blame to people caught up in the horrible outcomes that have become more and more familiar over time.

Continuing to administer these drugs that have known tragic side effects is what you get when you keep them as standards of care without questioning their use.

The outcome experienced by Lindsay Clancy and her whole family seems to indicate that we should be more cautious. Maybe instead of a drug cocktail we could do something simpler. Administering estrogen to the people that are suffering depression after childbirth because of the precipitous drop in estrogen may be a more rational approach. That may be a better alternative that provides help for women who are suffering and it might prevent just this kind of tragic outcome.

But that approach wouldn’t be a huge money-maker. So it is not the standard of care. As long as our medical system is organized to make the most profit rather than provide the most sensible or the most humane or the most effective treatment, we will continue to have an ongoing set of tragedies. Those tragedies can be like Lindsay Clancy’s or like all the deaths from Covid vaccination or like the many implied illnesses from the vaccination schedule or really a whole host of other problems that our society is facing because of a desire to increase medical profitability.

When doctors administer a drug that causes suicidal and homicidal ideation but it is the standard of care it seems that the doctor can’t be blamed.

When mothers go to seek relief from postpartum depression and they end as Lindsay Clancy has with a shattered life and a terrible tragic outcome, it seems that we shouldn’t blame her either.

I suggest that we should blame the drugs. Also the system that puts profits ahead of people.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com. It will show you political reasons why our lives have become what they are today.

Today’s job market doesn’t make sense to workers.

August 31, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Today’s beautiful weather is accompanied by squalls in the job market. I have a few recollections to bring to a discussion about that market and also a few observations. Before I had much of a job history, when I was ready to go to work to work my way through college, I had some things in my favor.

One of them was that entry level work would take any likely candidate. No one wanted you to say that you could already do the job as well as the guy that just left. Managers knew that they would have to train you. That was easy as long as you were willing and able to learn. New people have to reorganize their brains with new categories of tasks to accomplish in a new job. That was a given.

Since I knew someone who worked at a local convenience store company who would recommend me and since this company often tried to employ college kids, I went to talk to the manager of the store where I wanted to work. It was just a half mile from the university and I could rent a room another mile further away. The pay was very low but I didn’t have a huge set of demands to meet at that time. I needed rent money, food money and tuition money. All was cheaper then than they are now. I already had clothes and a bicycle and most household items that I really needed although little furniture. The manager was patient and she trained me well by explaining what I needed to do for her to make the store run safely, cleanly, and efficiently.

It turned out that I was a good employee. I kept the store safe, clean and rang up customer’s orders in a friendly way, keeping the coffee fresh and everything in good order. I didn’t steal merchandise and I didn’t let customers steal anything either.

After a while, I heard that another convenience store chain was hiring and paying a better wage. Instead of a local chain this was a national chain and I thought I would apply. But when I did apply, the manager administered a test. She deliberately made a lot of noise and chaos to try to distract me from doing the test well. She said that I would have to run the register in the presence of just such distractions. That wasn’t true though. If I had been the clerk on duty, I would have not allowed that much noise in the store. So even though I had already worked in a convenience store successfully while I was getting through school, it wasn’t a good fit for me in the other convenience store chain and I didn’t transfer over to that other store.

I see similar kinds of problems in today’s job market as I did in the past when I was trying to apply to a store that deliberately undermined its candidates with loud distractions. Don’t today’s potenial employers deliberately undermine their candidates?

They have an online application process that completely lacks human empathy or connection or even any encouragement. Many people never hear from the jobs they apply to and that makes it seem to me that applying online is a negative reinforcement to teach applicants that getting a job is a hopeless task. Some people have put in hundreds of applications without any success at landing an interview. Also applicants never find out why they aren’t suitable according to hiring criteria that is secret. And they don’t know what to do to get an in person interview much less a job.

I get no sense of a friendly welcoming job market these days. No one wants to train a new employee or even have a conversation with a job applicant. The social aspects of belonging to a workplace community seem to be lacking. There isn’t any esprit de corps. The sense of belonging to the wider community where the workplace resides is also missing. Potential employers seem afraid to interact with the public. That’s pretty strange compared to the past.

I think that using AI to screen applicants leaves so much to be desired that I don’t think it’s working well. I had hoped that new technologies that claim to know everything about everyone would be better at helping people into jobs where they would be an excellent contributer. But it’s the opposite. AI blocks good people from finding meaningful work. Universities aren’t doing their job either to successfully train people into the modern workforce and many people can’t find their way into a good job.

Another point I’d like to make is that AI can’t know whether the applicant is a person of good intentions. A personal interview would make finding that out possible but credentials aren’t enough to show that aspect of a candidate. It is people of good intention that makes the workplace a good place to be. Don’t you think that potential employers should try harder to find that quality in its job screening process? Doesn’t the employer also have a responsiblity to post true job openings and not fake ones in order to minimize the frustration of applicants? Afterall, a lot of job postings today are fake and that’s a bad first encounter with a potential employer.

The huge society that we live in is full of wonderful people who would like to work and contribute to their community’s success. They would like to belong to an effort that is larger than themselves. A workplace can be a wonderful opportunity to do that. These new screening technologies are screening out the bad with the good and standing in the way of better hiring practices. We can do better.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com. It will show you how political economy defines different political ideologies. It will show you how the political sphere connects with the economic sphere through political policies and economic policies that affect your everyday life. It will show you more about how you got to your here and now through popular but ever changing ideas that have shaped American life.

Appalling failure to address harms in the covid aftermath confrontation of Fauci.

July 31, 2026July 31, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

I listened to several radio broadcasts about Senator Rand Paul’s Congressional hearings where Anthony Fauci was supposed to answer some questions about the role he played in misleading the public and harming our interests during the covid debacle. He refused to answer. I was interested to hear almost the same exact commentary about that on the radio. No one argued that these events are unacceptable. Instead we were told that we have to accept exactly this kind of behavior.

Many excuses were given as to why Anthony Fauci would never be held responsible for the various harms that he caused. This made the radio broadcasts sound canned and planned much like covid messaging that happened in the thick of things.

Let me list some harms that Fauci caused: first, he was behind the research that led to covid-19 getting into everyone’s daily life; second he was part of a group that profited from introducing new and ineffective drugs and also he denied the effectiveness of other more useful and less harmful and inexpensive drugs to combat covid-19; third, he was a prominent figure who gained the public’s trust but who tried to keep restrictions against Americans going far longer than they were needed causing unnecessary economic and social harms; fourth he directly profited from marketing efforts on behalf of experimental therapies that were actually harmful; fifth, he encouraged penalizing and banishing from medicine previously valued doctors and nurses who wanted to do medicine differently than Fauci advised and this has led to severe staffing shortages across the U.S. and the loss of value that those medical practicioners gave us all. Our society is poorer because of the covid experience.

What’s alarming about people telling me that this man will not be prosecuted for harms is that prosecution denial is part of a new social trend that is appalling in its social repercussions. The early classical liberal nation recognized that harms require redress and compensation. Corporations that caused social harms were once required to justly compensate victims and also they sometimes would lose their license to operate and they would cease to cause future harms by no longer existing to cause them. Denying that harms were caused and that people deserve redress and compensation now is part of a neoliberal trend that deliberately pushes social harms onto the weaker and less powerful. This is wrong. It multiplies harms and protects them as just another transaction and also one that will never get redressed or compensated.

How many profited from covid like Ferengi overlords? How many have escaped consequences for over a million deaths? How many people continue to suffer from side effects from the experimental RNA treatments? How many can’t even tell their story because they are dead now? Anthony Fauci wanted to be in the limelight and he wanted to lead the nation in its response to the covid emergency. He can’t say he was doing his job as though someone else were directing him. He was in charge and a key part of why covid happened at all. Responsibility for harms lies directly on him. Anthony Fauci should have been marched off to jail for contempt of Congress after the first refusal to testify until he was willing to testify and the Congressional hearings should have contiued with other people who were behind the covid caper. There are many who lied and caused terrible economic, social and individual harms and suffering. Fauci isn’t the only bad apple.

The covid response coordinated public exposure to an experimental virus, public exposure to constant propaganda, public exposure to exprimental treatments not designed to help but rather exclusively to make money without helping. The whole kit and kaboodle is one experiment after another coordinating harms against people with little power to stop the parade of damages. And now apparently no power and no government that will guarantee that the people will receive just compensation.

No one who caused the harms wants to be part of a system that holds them responsible and expects retribution. Without compensation and recognition of harms, harms will multiply further and these kinds of events will tend to be more commonplace. As it is many Americans have stopped trusting that anyone in government or medicine are really looking out for anything other than a big fat profit and nevermind the public’s experience of death and economic destruction.

I don’t accept that this is a good social system or that it is proper or moral or that our society should continue carrying on in this way. If you want to learn more about politics in America and how it influences your economic circumstances day to day, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

Time can surprise us with a new perspective.

June 29, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

A History of the World in 100 Objects, a book by Neil MacGregor of the British Museum is opening up my sense of perspective about time and human accomplishment.

Today’s world is full of technology braggadocio, memes galore from influencers aplenty trying to persuade us all to go on a wild ride with them, and hubris in general about how great today’s accomplishments are.

However proud humans are today, this book that shows objects from antiquity can remind us that the human timeline is much longer than what we experience around us today. It’s also longer than the last 100 years, which is what is most often mentioned in brief references to the past that we hear from time to time. Today’s controversies are mostly recent. Today’s trends focus on the present and focus on personal experiences that each of us have.

We tend to focus on human failings in our stories about character development more than we consider humans striving to overcome their darker potentials. Our writing is often today about each person’s individual perspective which would be limited to a single lifetime. But there has been so much human experience beyond that.

Object number 28 in MacGregor’s book is the Basse-Yutz Flagons. Look them up online to get a clear view of them. These mostly bronze flasks are highly decorated with humorous adornments including 3 dogs and a duck. The duck appears to be swimming in the stream of decanted liquid as the flasks pour out their libations. The dogs are looking at the duck and it seems that they would chase it in the very next moment.

What is so amazing besides the beauty of these flasks is also the numerous skills that it took to make them, as well as the array of materials it took to assemble them and most especially their age. They were found in Lorraine, France and date from 450 BC. That’s about the same age as the Parthenon. And they were made by a Celtic people that were eventually conquered by the Romans. They are older than Christianity and older than Islam. Whatever troubles the world is touched by today never touched them in the particular way that current events may lead many of us today to feel worry or even to experience despair.

Since there are 3 dogs on these old flagons, I began to wonder how long our relationships with dogs have lasted. According to Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, by Pat Shipman, humans have been domesticating dogs at least since 36,000 years ago. Amazing. That’s something we can trace that goes back in time much further than the 2,500 years of the Basse-Yutz Flagons.

Today’s perspectives are much influenced by media. But modern media is quite new. Whatever blessings or problems that modern media is causing our society have been over a much shorter timespan than the spans of time that I have just mentioned to you.

Whatever your concerns about politics, or economics, the politics and economics of today reflect only a short portion of the time that we humans have been experiencing life and creating societies. Whatever our perspectives about character development in fiction and fact and especially our tendency right now to concentrate on the darker aspects of the human heart, there have been and are other ways of portraying our human potential. Many stories have been told over the millenia of human life here on earth and some of those stories are hopeful. There’s a lot more to being human than just what we see in today’s media.

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

Opportunity and discovery can still surprise us and change us and redirect our path to something more encouraging or perhaps, more generous in acknowledging the human heart’s capacity to care about others, our ability to use our talents to create interesting objects, and our capacity to embrace the beauty of the natural world.

Collectivist ideologies destroy whatever they feed on.

May 31, 2026June 5, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a brief historical summary as we approach our Independence Day summertime and 250 year celebration.

The United States started as a limited government that mostly stayed out of the economy from the writing of our Constitution in 1789 until the Civil War in 1861. The Civil War marks the moment that we strayed into collectivist governance where people are taxed in order to provide monies for war and welfare. The period from 1861 until WWII in 1941 was a period of mild socialism that began when the Northern states taxed people to pay for the Civil War. During modern liberalism, the government played a more active role in manipulating economic outcomes. Government money in the form of land grants, for example, gave a hand up to railroads which were the first big industry that began to change how people lived, travelled, and obtained their goods from the economic market. The federal government grew and began to interfere more with regulating people’s lives by passing new laws. After WWII, we entered the neoliberal period with globalization, financialization and wars all around the world to make way for global trade and monetary flows across national borders. This is a form of fascism. That’s why each political side continuously uses the word fascism in a derogatory way to criticise their political competition. Partnerships between governments and corporations are a form of fascism. More power to decide economic outcomes for corporate clients is part of neoliberal fascism. Empire as a goal is part of fascism. That’s where we are now. Problems are easy to find under neoliberalism.

Today’s U.S. has monetary and fiscal policies that harm people by overprinting money and overspending money. The government doesn’t really publish or explain how money is to be spent. Congress hasn’t created a yearly budget plan in a long time. Outsourcing jobs to foreign nations has led to unemployment at home. Inflation makes life less affordable and people have less disposable income and fewer employment opportunities. Financialization instead of production makes the U.S. economy more fragile. Government regulations interfere with everyday life for most people. Mandating covid vaccines in the recent past is only one example of this. Examples of corruption that steals U.S. treasury dollars in health and social programs is being revealed in California, Washington, and Minnesota. There are rumors of widespread corruption and many new examples continue to surface and flash by as another one soon replaces the last one. Corruption undermines legitimate deals in business.

Collectivist ideologies are three: socialism, communism and fascism. None of them are builders but instead, they destroy by falling on the nation where they erupt and devouring all assets and advantages that individuals living in the nation build when collectivists aren’t present. As collectivist ideologies begin to fail, because of the economic destruction that they cause, they often become violent. They don’t have a goal to build or improve. They don’t act responsibly or ethically though they often use rhetoric that sounds like they champion the powerless. Powerlessness among the population grows because collectivist systems steal people’s power by subverting governance systems and the rule of law. Breaches in the rule of law increase people’s sense of frustration, but how do you stop it? Perhaps by gradually recognizing that it’s happening. Solutions to despotism and collectivism abound in history. New agreements can be forged to stop the chaos and destruction that deconstruction is causing.

I would like to talk a little more about limited government and economic scarcity. Although the U.S. was the first Western government to limit governmental power in its Constitution in an enumerated list, the Magna Carta also limited the ruler’s power in specific ways. Even in the distant past there were real world limits to government power because of natural limits on human power. The power of gravity for instance, pulls everyone down to the earth’s surface. That natural law made it obvious to people like Thomas Hobbes that kings had limited power. One of the recent scary myths that I hear from time to time is the idea that modern economies can exist without scarcity. That isn’t true. Economies have scarcity as an inescapable feature: no one can have everything they may want in an unlimited supply. If someone finds a way to steal from others, they may acquire abundance beyond their means to produce for themselves, but having stolen from others impoverishes them.

I studied systems in biology during my education. Biology shows us that living systems organize their natural environment to harvest energy and build opportunities to evolve into the future through procreation. Living systems aren’t passive but rather play an active role in creating coherency. Human culture can sprout and grow under coherent rule of law practices and limited government. Today’s government is constantly thrashing about as it’s internal factions vie for power. Government loses real power as factions strive against each other, breaking out of legal limitations on power at every turn. Reigning in the abuse of power and reinstituting limitations on government power is a way to stop governments from harming the people’s ability to live their lives in the pursuit of happiness.

To learn more, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Legacies lost.

April 30, 2026May 2, 2026 ~ 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.

March 31, 2026April 4, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

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.

February 28, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

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.

January 31, 2026January 31, 2026 ~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

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.

December 31, 2025 ~ 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.