Daddy Issues

It is going on six years since my dad passed away, and in that time Father's Day has increasingly become a time not only where I have the expected overall feeling of missing him, but thinking very specifically of the things I miss about him. That, along with the ongoing cultural perturbations of what is referred to as toxic masculinity, presents broader questions about what masculinity is, what "makes" a "man" recognized as such, which characteristics and traits are identified with "men" and why.

(I'm not going to get into a digression about gender theory or deconstructing heteronormative tropes, or any of that sort of thing. It doesn't bother me, but it doesn't interest me either. I don't know enough about it, and it's orthogonal to the point anyway. I'm going by the usual definitions of all those words and ideas, but putting some of them in quotes just to get people thinking about the definitions all the same.)

There are two additional recent events (for me personally) that bring such questions into sharp relief for me, and I believe are worth considering for everyone. One was watching the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in which Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) helps a magazine interviewer (Matthew Rhys) deal with the self-destructive relationship with his own father (Chris Cooper).

As a kid of that era, of course I watched Mr. Rogers, and then as a teen watched his style lampooned by comedians like Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams. It's one of those little formative things you forget about, but ultimately take seed and bear fruit in many people, in the form of a rather acidic cynicism about everything and everyone. Only later in life, certainly once you have kids of your own, do you start to see the real value in what Fred Rogers was trying to convey not only to children, but to their parents as well:  Kindness. Sincerity. Compassion. Empathy. Patience. Grace.

In a world where we are all routinely conditioned from an early age to reject those things, in favor of a smug, knowing, cynical outlook, those traits become burdens that identify suckers and weigh them down with reluctance to do the expedient things in life.

If you're in, say, the 45-55 age bracket, there are a couple of interesting tests you can run on yourself and on your Facebook friends, regarding two cultural touchstones that people of that demographic would know -- Mr. Rogers and N.W.A. (yes, the gangsta rap group).

Remember the N.W.A. movie that came out a few years ago, and all those people like Yay, cool, I remember when!, right? Think about the people you knew who reacted positively to the movie, went and saw it, relived that era of their lives, and how those particular people now express themselves about the "blue lives matter" movement, or the co-opted national flag they use. There's a cognitive dissonance, a contradiction in declared values.

You cannot align yourself with a group whose signature song and slogan was "Fuck the police," and then turn your back on the hundreds of videos just in the past month, of irrefutable evidence of thugs and bullies abusing their uniform and the public's trust. Pepper-spraying little kids and taking the prosthetic legs of amputees. Not all heroes wear capes, I guess.

Many of those same people in that age bracket also identify as having enjoyed Mr. Rogers when they were kids, yet again, somehow without internalizing those traits which were his entire reason for doing the show to begin with. If you pointed out that Martin Gugino was basically doing what Fred Rogers would have done if he were still alive -- peacefully resisting, and trying to approach his aggressors in a spirit of kindness and kinship -- they wouldn't believe you. They like the cheesy, memorable sure you could slogans that the comedians parodied. As far as the actual values that he tried to impart, he was just a christian hippie with a sweater, as far as they're concerned.

This juxtaposition of personally-held with culturally-inculcated values is key, and it is perhaps the most stark in people who identify rather vocally and emphatically as "christian," while routinely indulging in personal behavior is at odds with the teachings of Christ, and of course loudly endorsing politicians who behave like rutting pigs at a trough. But of course there are countless examples, large and small, subtle and obvious, everywhere you look.

The second recent event for me was a close elderly relative passing away. Despite the ongoing plague, we managed to have a nice service with good, if strategically spaced, attendance. As you might imagine, I am not one for the cliché of "role models," but this particular relative was certainly someone who was cut from that jib, almost effortlessly -- someone who didn't have to show you how decent he was, because he was decent.

So what comes to mind for most of us when we talk about "masculine" "virtues"? Strength (whether physical or moral fortitude), self-reliance, competence, skill, loyalty, honesty. Usually somewhere between the Stoics and the Boy Scouts.

But really, most of those things (maybe not necessarily physical strength) are just as easily applied to women. If you were raised by a single mother or just have ever known one, you know that they have to have most or all of those traits, and more. So they're not "masculine" traits or values, they're just values then, aren't they?

But that's a difficult conditioning to look past in this culture, and the fact is that there are a lot of men who take advantage of the assumptions of those traits, without even pretending to try to possess or attain them.

It annoys me that my relative -- who was kind, patient, funny, strong, competent, decent, and so much more -- went ahead and did the work required to be those things, right up to the very end and with a genuine spirit of joy in the undertaking, while so many in power, and many of those who follow them, don't feel the need to indulge in such silliness.

Many of your "dark web" types, your Jordan Peterson "conservative thinkamator" thought leaders, bullshit people with the notion that if they just made their bed and developed lifehack routines, the rest takes care of itself. But it doesn't. It takes self-reflection to see that you cannot be in conflict at that deep of a personal level. You can't pretend to be one thing while being its diametric opposite. Some misalignment is natural, but either you are kind and patient and reasonable and treat people well until they give you a reason not to, or you're not and don't.

Not just on Father's Day, but every day, fathers in particular owe it to themselves and their children to really think about the values and goals they are imparting to their kids. I mean, I can be a high-toned, vengeful s.o.b. in here, but the fact is that I have taught my child to be generous and decent and kind and tolerant. And that's really the only measure of parental success worth striving for.

A Floating Speck In an Entropic Void

I think I've told this story before, but it's been a while, and like many things, it bears repeating. You can learn solid life lessons just about anywhere, if you're open and aware to the situation and its relevance to you. A big one found its way to me a quarter-century ago in a Guitar Center, of all places.

In the summer of 1994, I took a road trip down-state to visit my dad for his seventieth birthday. He lived out in the Coachella Valley, being a lifelong "desert rat" as he always put it. I hadn't been to SoCal in several years by then, so I decided to hit one of my favorite places -- the Hollywood Guitar Center on Sunset -- before heading out to the moonscaped canyons past San Berdoo.

I had been playing music for over half of my twenty-seven years at that point, and guitar for nearly ten of those years. I had spent the late '80s learning all the hard-rock heroes of the day -- the usual ones like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, the classic British guys like Page and Beck and Blackmore, Hendrix of course, and the European proto-shredders like Michael Schenker and Ulrich Roth.

By 1988 or so, hair metal had taken over, and it was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of tab books, blasting through the so-called "neo-classical" players, your Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai types. I knew my scales and arpeggios backward and forward, drilling with speed and precision. I still have several binders full of all the violin partitas and sonatas that I used for practice material.

I got to the point where, in the middle of playing Roadhouse Blues on stage, I would flip the guitar behind my head and do double-tempo runs of Bach's Invention #4, or a couple lines of a Kreutzer etude. My playing was not as broad-based as it should have been, but I had a decent mix of "classic" and "modern" rock playing under my belt, with some classical flavor and modality. I felt like I was pretty damned good.

So anyway, there I am in the Sunset GC, farting around with some Sabbath and Pantera riffs with an Jackson guitar and a 2x12 Crate amp on the main floor, not too loud but starting to get into it, when a couple guys come in. The store was about a third the size it is now, and was in the middle of some renovations and add-ons. There was a small mezzanine section off to one side from the main entrance, about eight or ten steps leading up to the deck.

There were a number of toys on the deck, but the main attraction was this Soldano full stack -- two 4x12" cabinets topped with a 200-watt customized head. I don't recall exactly what they were asking for that setup, but it was several grand. I wasn't going anywhere near that fucking thing and making a fool out of myself, but it was impressive to look at.

These two guys headed straight for it, one of them short, like 5'6" or so, but wearing high-heeled rocker boots and pants and a jacket that, in the middle of the grunge era, made him look a bit out of his time, like maybe six years or so behind schedule. Sorta ridiculous in the flannel-shirt epoch, but he carried it with a confidence that made you wonder if he was with Extreme or White Lion or one of those type bands. But I didn't recognize him, and I knew every signed band you could think of at the time.

So the little guy just walks up the steps in his heels, grabs the Charvel guitar propped next to the stack, turns it on without a second thought, and just starts blazing. Ultra-fast, clean, precise, and loud. And musical, without a doubt. A lot of that stuff came off as "switched-on Bach", but this guy had done his homework. You could hear the ten thousand hours -- at least I could, because by then I had put in those hours as well.

The guy just rips for about eight or ten minutes straight without missing a beat or flubbing a note, stops, sets down the guitar, turns off the amp, heads down the steps, walks out the door. Just like that. Doesn't say a word to anyone, barely looks around. His sidekick didn't do much of anything the whole time but stand and watch.

At the time, I figured that someone that talented must be with a band. And I'm sure he was. I bet if I had hit the Whiskey or the Rainbow that night or the next, they probably would have been there, working on their Racer X retreads or whatever. But I never saw this guy in any band, before or since. Probably a student at GIT (Musicians Institute), which was just a few blocks away.

Now, that kind of music really is geared not just toward musicians in general, and not just toward guitar players in particular, but toward a very specific niche of guitarist. It takes a ton of carefully applied work to get those patterns down to high-speed muscle memory. You're running all this stuff with a metronome, logging your speeds, and then working it to the next "level" on the metronome; at lower tempos you might be able to jump up six or eight beats per minute per week or two, but at higher tempos it's more like four to six or even just two to four bpm increments per month.

And just like with athletes, it is very much a "diminishing returns" scenario -- it probably took me as much time to get from 180-200 bpm as it did to get from 100-180 bpm, which was a couple years in each case. It takes real work and dedication. You can't half-ass it. You may even have to tear down and rebuild significant parts of your technique in order to obtain the efficiencies of motion necessary to just move your hands that quickly and precisely. You really have to love the process.

And yet -- there I was, sitting there in that room on that day, with untold thousands of hours of practice and probably eight hundred or so live performances under my belt, learning a very important lesson in about ten minutes, something that any person in any walk of life should know and keep close to their heart at all times:

There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is you're good at, there's someone out there who is better at it than you are, than you'll ever be.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's healthy, even freeing. I mean, music is about being musical, not about playing with perfect calisthenic precision and stamina at impossible speeds. I've seen some of those "speed contests" on YouTube before, and they give me a headache. There's nothing remotely musical about any of it. It's just a mechanical trick and some calisthenic conditioning. So being "better" is obviously and incredibly subjective ideal in any creative area.

I took it as a reminder to focus more on making music that would connect with people, and less on pursuing this unreachable athletic ideal that would only appeal to other guitarists in the first place. But as I began broadening my horizons and cultivating other skills, it was a valuable lesson to keep in my back pocket at all times, to listen and observe other people who could do those things well, and learn from them.

There was another lesson learned as well, but it was a few years later, when I realized that I had no clue who this very talented person was, and probably never would:

Sometimes you can be great at something, phenomenal even, and it doesn't get recognized like it should, because no one ever knows about it.

Maybe you don't have the people skills to go with that technical or creative skill (I have seen this multiple times with creative types; woodshedding is an intensely personal experience, and can make you a bit of a loner). Maybe you just have bad luck. Or maybe you just don't have good luck, which is a different thing.

And that's okay too, when you love the work for itself, because it doesn't really feel like work. You would do it for free, and lo and behold, you are. That may not seem "fair" when you see lazy halfwits derp their way into fortune and fame, but whoever said anything in life was fair?

We reassure ourselves that virtue is its own reward, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But that's not always true; in fact, it's impossible to quantify or even estimate just how often it isn't true. Lots of people practice and hone a skill, turn a buck at it for a while or pursue it as a hobby, and die.

The NFL is a great example for this sort of thing. I frequently think about two of the most talented players during the 1980s, when I was coming of age and really starting to appreciate the game:  Barry Sanders and Dan Marino.

Obviously, Sanders is easily one of the most talented people to ever pick up a football and run with it. He routinely did things only a handful of others could. Do yourself a favor and watch a couple of his classic runs on YouTube, they never get old. Amazing, almost superhuman at times. And yet he never even got close to a championship game.

Marino had more success, getting to the Super Bowl in his sophomore year and losing to the Bill Walsh juggernaut. But that was it for him. He spent the next fifteen years chasing that dragon, finally going down in the 1999 divisional playoffs to the "expansion" Jaguars in a humiliating 62-7 blowout. Never won the big game, nor did Tim Brown or Randy Moss or countless other superbly conditioned athletes who worked impossibly hard with a singular goal in mind.

You might say that at least they made it to the big game, even if they didn't win it, and you'd be right. But that's not what they worked so hard for. I don't personally know any NFL players, much less any who played in the Super Bowl, but I feel pretty confident in speculating that if you were to ask them, every single one of them would tell you that it's not remotely the same. As the prophet Ricky Bobby sagely advised, if you're not first, you're last.

Sometimes hard work is just hard work, and sometimes lazy, stupid, vile individuals get to cut to the front of the line. Not even "born on third base, think they hit a triple," more like shat out on the floor in a stadium bathroom, and insist they hit a grand slam, and insist that everyone around them repeat that as gospel truth. And they never receive justice, or karma, or any of the other narrative tropes we have been conditioned to believe are inevitable stations on the story arc.

Assholes and thieves and killers get away with it all the fucking time. Fact. Justice only occurs when it is the goal of a sequence of deliberate actions by a sufficient number of people with the right ability, skill, communication, and luck. Any one of those elements is not present, it doesn't happen. For every Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there's a Roger Ailes or Les Moonves or Brett Ratner, or many of them. And so on. Life isn't fair, nor has it ever pretended to be.

Depending on one's perspective on life, that can be profoundly depressing, or it can free you from preconceptions and assumptions and  bullshit "obligations" that we saddle ourselves with unnecessarily. If we stop trying to assume whom "everyone else" "thinks" can "win" -- and really question our assumptions about what all those terms even mean -- a different candidate emerges and gains traction. If we each make our personal decisions about what we expect out of our short time on the planet, and not what "everyone else" expects from us, a different path reveals itself. It may be narrower and rockier, but the view is much better.

Hang in there. Don't despair, prepare. Whatever it is, vent, grieve, and then get back at it. Never give up, never give in. It does get better, but only when people stop second-guessing themselves, or waiting around for "someone else" to do "something," and simply start taking action and doing what they know to be right.

The Ten-Percent Solution

Like many Americans, I suffer from the chronic problem of too much abundance -- that is, I could stand to lose a few pounds (not to mention some clutter). From what I see of people my own age or even five to ten years younger, I'm in comparatively good shape. But a few years before I hit that magic five-oh, I could feel the excess baggage taking a toll on my back and knees and joints. And it only gets worse.

The bright spot is that I've been able to stay in a pretty tight window for about ten to twelve years now, neither gaining nor losing more than five pounds. But I've been reading up a bit more here and there, trying to find relatively painless ways to take off that tonnage.

I am not a fan of fad or crash dieting, because you just end up gaining the weight back. It's about identifying the bad habits and routines in your day-to-day, and whittling away at them gradually, rather than trying and failing to dump them all whole hog overnight. One of the better books I've come across sums up its pitch in three simple words: Eat Move Sleep, as in eat less, move more, and sleep better. That's really all there is to it, and while it's simple, it's not easy.

People get distracted by the weird tax-exempt hypocrisies of, say, Catholicism or snake-handling evangelicals, but if 'murka has a state religion, it's the cult of self-help books. There are many pulpits and pastors and approaches, but all of them have the same basic angle:  pull your shit together by identifying your bad habits, lining up some personal and/or professional goals, and start leveraging the latter to eliminate the former. That's really all most of these things boil down to.

People with bad habits know they have them, and want to quit them, but generally just don't know where to begin. All they see is an impossibly tall mountain, and that overwhelms the natural common-sense instinct to just take a first step, then another, and another, and so on. Again, we all know this, and it's all very life-hacky, but it's still true. Inertia is the real killer when it comes to bad habits. It's certainly possible to optimize your approach, but the bottom line is that doing anything is better than doing nothing.

Which brings me to David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, which I recommend if you never want to sleep soundly again. I'm not going to bother to review it point-by-point; suffice to say that it is very well-written and solidly researched, and a relatively quick read. He paints a picture that is grim and unrelenting and, most crucially, is already in motion.

Partners In Crime

The Middle East is unraveling very quickly, and with momentum. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, committed by a Saudi hit squad sent by their thug king, is the latest and so far largest domino to fall. (Never mind, of course, that the Saudis have been mercilessly driving Yemen back into the Stone Age for several years now, aided and abetted by the current and previous US governments.

If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.

Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.

Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.

But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.

Rising Son

Another "fiction" piece, a bit longer than the last. As before, there may be some upcoming edits. Please leave feedback in the comments, good or bad.

The Marshal waited until his private jet had left the Malaysian air space to order his meal. It was not the Ilyushin he was accustomed to flying in, on the rare occasions he did fly, but a Boeing 747 -- albeit an older unit -- that the Chinese had lent him, one that they had used to ferry their own leaders in. It was one of those little things that made the Marshal smile to himself, and quite a few of those little things had occurred over the last twenty-four hours in Singapore.

He appreciated that this Boeing had a small kitchen near the front, and requested his personal chef to prepare him a prime rib, medium rare, with sides of potatoes and vegetables, and a bottle of blended Australian cab. There would be much to discuss with the generals once they arrived back in Pyongyang, but for now, he needed to think to himself, have a nice meal and a drink, perhaps watch a movie. There was a small library of Chinese, American, and European DVDs onboard, and a decent-sized screen. His advisers were seated further back, to give him time to reflect. Much had happened quickly, and things were in motion.

They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab

Feeling like I need a political detox, and I feel like I say that periodically without following through sufficiently. A good night's sleep and we're back on that horse again, tilting at the same old tottering windmills.

The entire country has been doing this to some extent, of course, whether they are amateur scriveners like yours truly, or just bewildered passersby who don't record every stray observation in a futile attempt at catharsis. Poison has collected in our collective veins, and when we have no way of expelling it other than sputtering impotent virtual rage, it builds up in our systems. We build up a tolerance to it, even as it continues to infiltrate and destroy the organs.

So this time I'm not promising a hiatus. It might be forty-eight hours or a month. There are, as always, a few creative projects still loitering in the back of what's left of my mind. I've been reading (mostly non-political) books at a torrid pace, something like thirty since the beginning of the year, fiction and non-fiction. There are some short fiction ideas I may tease out in here, there are some music ideas I might go work on, the local school district is offering free Pro Tools engineering classes for the summer, which might be a fun diversion.

There are a couple of other creative and commercial projects in the hopper, some of which may be shared here. There will be some visual updates to this site, maybe more of a link overhaul as well. And there's always more physical exercise to be had, especially in response to a chronically bad back, which only gets worse with age, I can assure you.

Rogue States

After the seeming rapprochement between North and South Korea the other day, a few thoughts occurred, mostly in the realm of cautious optimism. I'd say LGM's Robert Farley pretty much captures my observations on what's happened so far, and what's likely to happen.

When Kim Jong Un says "denuclearization" and Mike Pompeo or Emperor Snowflake says the same word, there's a very good chance that two different meanings are being conveyed. It seems incredibly unlikely that Kim would surrender weapons that he and his father spent decades developing and building. At best he might agree to a cessation of testing and production, but in exchange for what? Farley is absolutely correct that on the off chance that NK completely disarms, with or without major concessions in return, Snowflake actually would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bu Snowflake is who he is, and at heart he is a loudmouth, a fuckup, a loser who manages to escape accountability. He'll find a way to fuck this up, and it's because he thinks that the outcome of Korea will serve as a warning to the Iranian mullahs. It doesn't occur to him that maybe North Korea -- and South Korea, for that matter -- observe his bad-faith dealing with Iran, the constant overt attempts to derail and abrogate the JCPOA, and assume that we'll deal with them the same way.

Analysts continually try to assess Kim Jong Un and determine whether he's a "rational" or "irrational" actor. A truly rational actor would do exactly what Kim's been doing, and be sure to cover his ass going into this "summit" that's supposed to resolve things. Even before the current escalation in hostilities with NK, as much as it pains me to say, Kim seems to have been a rational actor for most or all of his time at the helm, certainly more so than Snowflake in his tenure so far.

Although NK is as much a cult as a country, the fact is that the Kim regime has to balance dynamic internal tensions as well as fend off potential attacks from the US, as well as the cynical game China and Japan and Russia (who have various practical historic and strategic reasons to want Korea to remain divided) are playing. His reaching out to his counterpart across the DMZ may actually have a small core of sincerity (Kim was educated in Switzerland, and is obviously much more westernized than his father), but the clear strategic goal for him right now is peeling South Korea away from our orbit, maybe driving a wedge with them on continuing sanctions.

The US' strategic goal with Iran seems to be whatever the Saudis and Israelis want. It's pretty clear that the Snowflake administration's short-term goal is to either provoke or contrive Iran into a war, further entrenching US troops in a region where they've been stuck for more than a quarter-century now, with no end in sight.

For someone who claimed to have wondrous prescience and profound insight into the folly of conflicts in that region -- without, of course, being able to articulate any of those observations even on a retroactive basis -- Snowflake sure seems eager to stoke that region's eternal grievances.

At least there's this -- once we've invaded Iran, there should be logistical continuity from Afghanistan to Syria, thus hopefully simplifying supply chains and movement of troops and materiel.

Frogs of War; Or, Alpha Frog

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to European politics in general or French politics in particular, but Emmanuel Macron's snuggling up to the likes of Emperor Snowflake reeks of desperation. Macron can't possibly think that the JCPOA can be renegotiated on the terms he and Snowflake propose, even though it's clear that Snowflake does think that's the case, making some blustery threats if Iran were to resume nuclear weapons development (which they obviously would if we welshed on the agreement).

Listening to this fat, incompetent old man rail like a barstool drunk at the teevee in the tavern, it's hard to imagine what sort of dupe listens to this idiot jabber and hears anything fearful or praiseworthy. Only a complete pussy would actually be scared of him, and only a cult member would actually think he sounds tough. If anything, he seems intent on showing both Iran and North Korea that the US cannot be trusted on these sorts of agreements.

(Nor is it helpful when Snowflake praises a murderous dictator like Kim Jong Un as "very honorable." It's slightly better than the schoolyard taunts of the past, but this is a guy who literally had his own half-brother murdered in public on foreign soil by poisoners, a Putin tactic if ever there was one.)

So Macron's star is falling, and with it his rather grandiose version of himself (which may explain at least some of his rush to embrace Snowflake, even letting Snowflake treat him like a chump at the photo-op). Macron is not wrong about the worrisome rise of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, but the solution is not to push Poland and Hungary back into Russia's sphere of influence. All of Europe is facing this crisis of authoritarianism, due to several factors, but so far Macron has yet to demonstrate that has either the best or only solutions. His "Jupiter" posturing should go over very well with his Ozymandias hero.

Crowd Control

You can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastards in this article, but with the understanding that these are entirely foreseeable consequences of policies (or lack of) in their respective countries. Whether you let people breed like rabbits or restrict them into gender selectivity, the consequences are strangely similar -- an overabundance of men in those countries.

But that's also a symptom of there simply being an ever-increasing overabundance of humans in those countries, and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. You can't swing a poached leopard without finding some do-gooder bullshit about how the planet has infinite carrying capacity if we all consume less.

This might be a decent idea if, you know, the handful of individuals who own most of the stuff did anything with their lives other than hoard and accumulate. But that's not going to happen, and for every person who is conscious of the problem and tries to live modestly, have just one or two kids, recycles, there's another (or five or ten or twenty others) who are solidly conditioned to self-actualize through jonesmanship and shopping for things they don't really want with money they don't really have.

Sure, Earth can probably hold twenty billion ravenous humans, if most of them are willing to tolerate a Slumdog Millionaire existence while a handful of inheritance swells live the good life. Maybe some of the peons can get on with them -- they will, after all, need someone to cook their food, watch their kids, scrub their toilets, service them sexually.

And as we are seeing with the rising middle classes in China and India, they are having fewer children anyway -- but, as one might expect, are consuming more, just like their western counterparts. So even reduced birth rates come at a larger per capita ecological price. But it's still the right direction to head toward. An ongoing, concerted international effort to reduce birth rates and improve health and education in the worst parts of the world is obviously (except for the religious idiots who look at shanty towns and think their celestial friend will magically provide, in which case I encourage them to spend a year in the slums of Sao Paulo or Abidjan) a necessity. We should be dumping money into such efforts, rather than letting anti-condom and anti-abortion fanatics muck it up.

Yes Man

The NY Times' op-ed page is a big bowl of boiled ass these days, but once in a while they cook up an article that breaks out some useful info and details. If half of what's here is true -- and there's no reason not to believe it's 100% accurate -- we are in deep shit.

There's no way to overstate how much the US strategic position in Asia has been abruptly diminished by these fucking morons running the show now. This is much bigger than two fat guys with fucked-up haircuts battling over who has the coolest comb. The world is already headed toward a period of dominance centered around the Indian Ocean. The morons are simply accelerating that trend with alarming quickness.

This is what happens when you start your tenure as [fart] chief executive by gutting your entire foreign service apparatus, through a potent combination of spite, ignorance, mendacity, and negligence. When I've referred to Clownstick as a "barstool drunk," the sort of nasty idiot who thinks he knows everything and provides no evidence at all to back it up, this is Exhibit A. Clownstick has jabbered on and on and fucking on about how much they are shorting us on the security invoice, as if the US military was just a bunch of mall cops hired out to contain the shenanigans in the galleria food court.

It literally does not occur to the dotard that we have logical reasons for carrying more of the burden in NATO and the UN, that the greater outlay buys us far more credibility in calling the shots and providing direction. There are reasons we stay in Germany at greater expense to us, as well as Japan and South Korea. All of those countries would just as soon we packed up and went home, even as they grudgingly recognize that in the end, we do serve as a bulwark against Russian and Chinese hegemony. And the fact is, humanity is just at that point where there is going to be a hegemon regardless, so it might as well be the Americans.

But none of these things have any meaning to someone whose every thought and move and impulse is purely transactional, on a level that a crack-whore kneeling in an alley for her fifteenth blowjob of the day doesn't operate at. All the dotard sees when he looks at a map is how many more venues he can slap that worthless name of his on. He couldn't care less if he steps on the toes of allies he may need for something else in the future, or if he fucks up generations of established international diplomacy norms that have kept billions of people safe, however imperfectly.

These things were already in motion regardless, as we are now nearly four generations removed from the post-WW2 arrangements. Japan in particular has seen a resurgence of right-wing militarism and nationalism; the current generation clearly no longer has any use for the terms of surrender acceded to by their great-grandparents. Germany, like the rest of Western Europe, have already had enough of Mister Man's bullshit, and are trying to figure out a way to deal with the bear without our guns parked in their backyard. They seem to figure that they can trade and finance their way into some sort of arrangement, and given that Russia faces a serious succession crisis whenever the 65-year-old Putin retires or dies, they may be right.

All of it points to the same thing:  the other powers under our longstanding security umbrella have been growing restive, and were in the process of testing the waters anyway. Obama was reflexively conservative (in the old-school sense) about flexing US military power, and his over-reliance on soft power set the stage for the current volatility in the MENA region, and no doubt emboldened China and Japan at the very least to start charting their own courses.

The dotard's approach to North Korea, as detailed in the Times article, will eventually serve as a template of this group's disastrous approach to international diplomacy. It's one thing for him to bluster about ignoring Democrats and liberals on the foreign policy front, but this guy is undermining his own team, and it's a shortchanged team to begin with.

Think about it:  their big diplomatic feint with the Norks was to send his knockoff-handbag-peddling brandbot daughter to the fucking Olympics to stare them down. There is no official presence in the diplomatic corps for this part of the world, no ambassador to South Korea, no Undersecretary of State for the region, a shortage of qualified interpreters and translators in the foreign service.

Considering the various consequences and ramifications, and the singularly inept track record of the moron and his gang of dopes and fools, there's too many ways for them to fuck this up royally -- even if Kim and Clownstick never actually meet -- and only a couple ways to get it right.

хаос

It has become (rightly) an article of faith that Russian troll farms and social media strategies helped the Clownstick campaign close the deal. Part of the rationale is Putin's well-known dislike of Hillary Clinton, part of it is Putin's ability to see that he'd have a much easier time manipulating Clownstick to remove sanctions and do business.

Arguably the most significant and substantial reason for the Russians to get involved in the 2016 campaign is the same as their logic for disseminating influential propaganda throughout Europe to influence their elections. Fomenting chaos works in the Russians' favor, as far as geopolitical strategy goes. In a vast country with a dwindling population, chaos is a force multiplier for them.

So let's pose a hypothetical, in context of the Democrats and liberals currently fulminating against the perfidy of the Clownstick campaign's cozying up to what should have been obvious attempts by a foreign power to influence an American presidential election. Let's say that in keeping with the prime directive of sowing chaos, the Russians decide to influence the midterms in favor of Democratic candidates. No secret meetings, no kompromat, none of that, they just independently decide to put the trolls to work to flip the Senate and or House back to the Dems.

Beware of Russians bearing gifts, is all I'm saying. They are not specifically pro-Clownstick or pro-Republican, except insofar as that party and its current leader are more malleable in terms of temperament and venality. They are pro-chaos, simple as that. Chaos and disruption lead to paralysis, especially in terms of foreign policy. We are already there, and this is just the start.

And in the longer-term areas of foreign policy, we are becoming more screwed by the day. This doddering old moron is dragging this country under, through the sheer force of his utter stupidity. He thinks he's some sort of genius because he supposedly has some verbal handshake with the Chinese to back down their economic support of the North Koreans.

Never mind that China -- and the rest of the world -- doesn't have the same Viagra-fueled boner for NK that Old Man Clownstick does, and that the Chinese are content to continue with checkbook diplomacy to move their "One Belt One Road" great project along.

(George Friedman's strategic analysis, claiming that OBOR is "doomed to failure," is worth checking out, but the fact is that China is ready to take twenty years and hundreds of billions of dollars to make this project happen, and a lot can and will happen in that time.)

Never mind that the one person Clownstick is too afraid to criticize with a rage-tweet -- Vladimir Putin -- will just step in and help the Norks out, because he can, because the history of Russia is one of buffer states and proxy wars. Maybe Clownstick really thinks Putin is his friend, or that they can be business partners; he clearly seems to believe that since Putin insists he "didn't meddle," that should be enough for us. (Or maybe he really thinks everyone's that stupid. More likely he just doesn't give a shit either way. Remember, everything about this asshole is an act of defiance. What are you gonna do about it, prole?) Either way, the only role he has for the Russians is as a complicit dupe.

Everyone who thought this dumb old bastard was some sort of genius deal-maker because of his stoopid teevee show should be forced to, I dunno, live in one of his scam housing developments, bear the direct brunt of his serial idiocy. That seems only fair.

This guy "does deals" like old people fuck. His approach to "business" is the old saw about how when you owe the bank a million, you have a problem, but when you owe the bank a billion, the bank has the problem. Similarly, his approach to "making a deal" boils down to lying through his teeth and hoping the other guy is stupider than he is. Winning!

So don't be too surprised if the Russian interference in 2018 and/or 2020 extends to the Democrats -- or more likely, to both parties. The idea is to pit us against each other, heighten the already dangerous levels of polarization. And because you can't have a scam without willing marks, it's going to work, and the imperial death spiral will continue apace.

Into the Void

Something non-political for a change, and infinitely more momentous:  after twenty years of faithful service, the Saturn spacecraft Cassini reached the end of its life-span, and plunged into the planet's surface. It took some unbelievable photos over the years. That's an amazing thing, one that transcends the smallness and venality of our earthly concerns, the amateur Kremlinology and dopey reality-teevee politicking.

Cassini serves as a wondrous reminder of what the human mind can achieve in its quest for real knowledge and our place in the universe.

Axiomatic

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber asks what is turning out to be the defining question of this wondrous new millennium:

What do I think the really important, consequential issues are for humanity for the next hundred years?  Climate change and environmental destruction generally; the threat of some catastrophic, global war and/or the use, somewhere, of weapons of mass destruction. I guess number three would be: inequality and the threat it poses for the stability of societies and political orders, long-term.

I would agree 100% with all of those. I would also note for the record that the primary cause for these issues is generally the same across the board:  overpopulation. We have reached the carrying capacity of our planet, for the lifestyle we wish to lead. If we don't mind living asshole-to-teakettle in urbanized stack flats, invest massively in desalination, irrigate every hectare of arable land with perfect seasonality and soil management, stop raising beef and pork, and eliminate every non-essential species over 100 pounds, then sure, we could probably stuff another few billion in. Why the fuck not?

To answer Holbo's question about whether to be pessimistic or optimistic about the next hundred years, I am extremely pessimistic about the near future (to 2040 or 2050), and very cautiously optimistic about the longer term (2050-2100). I'll sketch out some ideas further down, but the proverbial elevator pitch is one of my all-time favorites, which any regular reader here has seen many times (but like so many things, bears repeating):

People do not change until they realize that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing.

I'd love to lie to you and say I coined that one myself, but it's been such a long time I honestly don't recall where I first encountered it. I'm pretty sure it was at The Oil Drum, but I couldn't tell you which writer; whether they poached it from some organizational theory seminar is anyone's guess. The main thing is that it's true and it applies so well to so many issues going on right now.

Size Matters

Let's talk about music (rock and metal music, anyway), especially the media on which it's produced now. This is a point I've made pretty consistently over the years, more so since things have shifted so drastically to a la carte digital -- the traditional cycle of a 50-60-minute album, usually containing at least 25% "filler" tracks, supported by a tour of 9-12 months in duration, is (or should be) dead and buried. The only reason it persists is because most bands (that is, bands who are not at The Top, whatever that means these days) spend at least some of their touring season at festivals, where the costs are more scalable and the crowds are much larger (even though you're competing against dozens of other bands for their attention).

The paradigm shift of the past decade in particular points (at least to me) in the direction of shorter, tighter "album" sets, supported by shorter tours, peppered with "special" releases of one or two "bonus" tracks in the middle of the season.

Have It Your Way

One of the cornerstone concepts we covered in MBA grad school was customer service. By "cornerstone" I mean that this idea underpinned every facet, every class that made up the program, from supply chain management to finance to drawing up the dreaded weebis. It was very much a central theme by choice rather than absolute necessity, not unlike writing a history of the world from the viewpoint of, say, Sicily, or organizing musical theory around the Lydian mode (or, for that matter, the major scale, instead of some other scale).

Until relatively recently, business clichés such as "the customer is always right" existed alongside sayings such as "you break it, you bought it", and in practice the relationship was one of patronage; i.e., business>consumer. The lack of logistics and technology made the relationship much more of a dependent one, to a degree that would be difficult to explain to a much-derided millennial -- perhaps as difficult as explaining to them why phones used to be rotary-dial, or that television was not always in color, much less in high-definition resolution.

Rock and Roll Over

It's a small but somehow fitting irony that the inventor of the Pet Rock passed away just in time for April Fool's Day. For those folks too young to remember it, the Pet Rock -- and its numerous imitators, perhaps the most noteworthy at that time being the Invisible Dog Leash -- was one of those products that were quintessentially American, that could not have succeeded anywhere else.

Sure, there have been tulip crazes and such like, people paying vastly more for a product than it was objectively worth. But with the Pet Rock, you finally had the apex, the holy grail of marketing. Our usual snarky definition of marketing is "getting people to spend money they don't really have on something they don't really want." (And at Christmas, perhaps for someone they don't really like).

This presaged a new era of marketing, though, the sort of thing that would have made Don Draper break one in his no-press slacks. Here was something that people bought that had no objective worth whatsoever, that was purchased not just ironically but semiotically, a cultural signifier that you were in on the joke. This was something you could literally find in your backyard, thrown in a silly package, something that all observers could see had no intrinsic value, lying inert, much like the recorded catalog of Kanye West. [Ed: Hi-yoooooo!]

Since PR and marketing are the rackets that really run the industrialized world, far larger than the usual finance / health care / higher ed beasts combined (indeed, by definition, all rackets depend on PR and marketing in order to get people to accept the ripoff and ask for more), it makes sense that the scumbags who run the political circus would sit up on their hind legs and take notice.

As Mad Men finishes up its run, it has noted repeatedly that that era was where PR weasels finally crystallized their understanding that people buy the sizzle at least as much as the steak. An even more important realization was that many people are more than willing to buy just the sizzle (fo shizzle), and not even worry about the steak.

If you're old enough to recall the Pet Rock, then you probably also recall a time when Ronald Reagan was not taken seriously as a viable presidential candidate. Then in the mid-'90s, a dimwit fuck-up son of another preznit name o' Gee Dub Bush (aka Fredo Arbusto) first beat a popular governor in Texas, and then clawed and cheated his way into the White House. But the bar had been lowered.

Several years later, Sarah Palin, and now Ted Cruz. Not to mention the countless jabbering assholes and buffoons that litter the Senate and especially the House, brazen dickheads like Louie Gohmert and Scott DesJarlais, whom you wouldn't have allowed to clean your gutters twenty or thirty years ago.

In "inventing" a fun, silly way to make a few ducats for himself and his (I shit you not) investors, Gary Dahl inadvertently also demonstrated that the bar can always get lower in this country, even in more important areas of life, with the proper marketing.

Irresistible Force, Immovable Object

While worldwide overpopulation is an obvious concern as this century progresses, this article only captures part of the most likely effects and viable solutions. Even more than supplying various free methods of birth control in Third World countries, it's been demonstrated over and over again, virtually everywhere it's been observed, that educating and empowering women are by far the most important factors to reducing birth rates.

A corollary to that rule -- one that sounds good but turns out to be tremendously inconvenient in the medium to long run -- is that upward mobility for women and families will lock that lower birth rate into place. The thing is, most scientists agree that the majority of observable climate change issues are caused by the resource consumption rates of industrialized nations, and the two massive countries -- China and India, obviously -- who make our stuff for us.

The countries with the highest birth rates are the least developed, the least industrialized, and (most importantly) consume the fewest resources per capita. China and India contribute through the pollution generated by their massive manufacturing capacity, but the other end of that Faustian bargain was that these two gigantic countries would have a rising consumer class. In fact, even a 100% successful, completely benign project to lower the birth rates and improve quality of life in sub-Saharan Africa would simply result in even more people wanting to consume resources at the same rate as the US and Europe. And our level of consumption is simply not scalable on this planet.

Humans are really great at two things, both of which are in play here. The first thing, of course, is adaptability -- we don't have fur or fangs or claws, but we have opposable thumbs and the ability to reason and build. Those enable us to live in just about any climate -- and in just about any condition. Life in a Soweto shantytown, a Rocinha favela, or an unfinished skyscraper would be unthinkable and unacceptable to all but the very poorest American or European. We have each adapted, in seemingly different directions, but as the American suburbanites who got shoved out of their homes and into tent cities found out the hard way, people can find a way to adapt to just about any situation, pushed hard enough.

The second thing, more problematic, is providential thinking, the ongoing assumption that something will come along, because something always has. In the more mystical past, steeped in religion and unquestioned belief, priests of various cultures communed with their versions of god and assured that he/she/it would provide. These days, our modern priests -- futurists and technocrats -- place their faith in technology to solve everything, so that we can continue to consume blindly.

Various conclaves of power-brokers and shot-callers at Davos or the Bohemian Grove filter their talking points down to TED talks and corporate media, and eventually to the masses, who want nothing more than to be placated by what they need to hear. We'll get you cheap gas by fracking in someone else's backyard, poisoning someone else's aquifer, so you can drive your Excursion to the post office, alone. We'll truck your NAFTA berries 1500 miles to you in the middle of winter, so you don't have to think about eating seasonally or locally. We'll build enormous tunnels to move millions of acre-feet of water 500 miles away, so you can wash your cars and play golf.

Two other major factors are rapidly kicking in to affect all of these environmental issues:  longevity and productivity. Crazy, right? Those should be good things, and intrinsically they are. But when you have finite resources, they become problems. We can automate many processes and jobs, with no doubt many more to come. So what do we propose all these humans who are coming, with or without dedicated efforts at population control, going to do? How do they stay busy and productive during their prolonged lives? How many people will still be needed to work and produce, and for how long, to help maintain the systems that prolong those lives?

More importantly, as our Great Society continues its run toward economic stratification, who will those people be? As we return to a feudal system, albeit a technologically empowered, corporatized one, we can easily see how a permanent underclass gets utilized to do all the heavy lifting, and an upwardly ambitious supervisor class oversees them, chasing a non-existent carrot, all for the benefit of a much smaller leisure class. Same as it ever was, just with more toys and distractions, more extreme weather, and less wildlife.

Curbing population growth is still a worthy goal, don't get me wrong. But too many people, with their adaptability and providential thinking, would take any gains gleaned by such efforts as a license to consume and waste more, because they can, because the powers-that-be know just how to placate them.

Bot World

I'm glad to see the estimable John Robb back on regularly at Global Guerrillas, as he frequently has that futuristic take on things. Case in point:  the steadily increasing presence of bots in the routine tasks that affect our lives and perceptions of the world. Most of us are probably aware to at least some extent of the proliferation of automated algorithms in financial trading, or article "spinners" used by internet marketers.

But it's becoming more and more prevalent; the notion that a bot could be used to spin a million Wikipedia articles is staggering. The idea that the same tech could be used to generate more conventional content -- books, magazines, movie scripts -- is annoying. That bots are doing most Wall Street trading should be a cause of concern. The possibility that bots may, sooner rather than later, be driving us around -- and that there may be insurance ramifications that necessitate having them drive us around -- should be alarming.

Even setting aside the sci-fi Skynet scenario of AI taking over, or the already problematic issue of near-constant government surveillance, think of how many jobs are lost just in the four proposed uses for bots (and of course there are and will be many more uses). In a groaning, increasingly overcrowded planet, with resource scarcity issues looming on all fronts, with any and every function automated, what exactly are all those unemployed people supposed to do?

Font of Sorrows

It's fascinating to think that just about every major event that has taken place in the past century can be traced directly back to the actions of a gang of Serbian anarchists against a relatively minor Austrian noble. I've always been a big fan of alternative and speculative history, but when push comes to shove, there's nothing like the real thing.

#thanksobama #gavriloprincip
 

Frustrated Incorporated

What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years, at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane? -- Steve Buscemi, Con Air

As we head into the middle of the second decade of this blessed new century/millennium, there are some clear issues that societies will have to deal or cope with, if they are even to continue, much less progress. Almost all of the major ones -- water, climate change, health care, extended longevity, resource consumption, habitat depletion -- revolve around population (or more accurately, overpopulation).

Add into that mix the notion of work, as defined as the performance of productive duties and tasks, in order to secure an income by which one may survive, and even participate in the greater economy. This is an issue I've been dancing around here and there in recent months, but I reckon I'll spend most of this year teasing out ideas more and more as they occur, as events necessitate.

One such event that just took place was the rejection of UAW unionization among workers at the Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What's peculiar about this, as Ed points out in the link, is that not only is VW pro-union, but the Chattanooga plant is their only one without a union workforce. In other words, this was not the usual instance one sees in American sweatshops, where the threat of moving jobs overseas, in response to unionization, is more explicit than implicit.

No, what happened was an equally usual combination of cheap politics and ingrained cultural assumptions regarding the uselessness and corruption of unions. (As opposed to the mighty corporate bootstrappers of the world, who have never goldbricked or bullshitted their way through anything, no sirree Bob.)

This is what fascinates about this issue more than anything. Although I obviously have written a lot about economic issues over the years here, and I believe that the observations and occasional predictions have been proven correct far more often than not, I have no real specialized knowledge of economics. So I don't know or necessarily believe that Chattanooga is some sort of bellwether for American labor unions, in general or in particular. Obviously unions have massively declined since the '70s, in conjunction with globalizing labor and capital, and all those things are important factors in the concurrent median wage stagnation and the accrual of income and wealth to the very highest economic strata.

So the fascinating part is how willingly -- indeed, eagerly -- the worker bees have embraced the insect overlords who have systematically destroyed their lives and communities for four decades running. Anecdotally, one of my oldest friends, whose parents had union jobs, "shared" some bullshit anti-union graphic the day after the Chattanooga vote, with the smug surety that could only be possessed by someone who didn't think about their own childhood. Given the lack of self-awareness or intellectual consistency we see from the average 'murkin on virtually any issue of note, it's probably safe to say that this idiotic sentiment is the norm, rather than a statistical anomaly. An entire generation of right-wing radio loons has desensitized the proles to even basic reflection and common sense.

It's very difficult to feel any sympathy or pity for people who so consistently vote and rant against their own rational self-interest, time and again, and then are surprised to reap the exact consequences which they sowed. But the thing is, not only do those consequences affect everyone, as the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, but they will continue to hit harder.

Overpopulation in globalized "emerging" markets obviously exerts downward wage pressure across the board (except, of course, for our wondrous job creators -- o bold transnational merchant princes!). This is what we have been seeing the past two generations, and the pace has increased the entire time. At the same time, technology and innovation have served to automate and commodify routine jobs, workflow processes, and entire jobs and production lines. In other words, whether you are building Volkswagens or flipping burgers at Mickey D's, you are only doing so until a robot can be developed to do your job.

So your best options become either to be the person who maintains and repairs the mechanical lines of production, or to spend 4-6 years and $100K or so to get into the manager class and "optimize" those operations. You don't have to be a whiz with numbers to intuitively grok that you only need so many folks to perform either of those functions.

Imagine what things will look like in 10, 20, 30 years, even without increases in, say, extreme climate events and patterns, or water scarcity. More humans to contend with, and by definition, the increased efficiencies in producing and distributing commodities will be disruptive, to say the least, to the normal mechanisms of commerce. You don't have something for x number of people to do, but you need them engaged in the economy at some point, purchasing things that are produced and move through supply chains. Proposals for guaranteed minimum incomes are being discussed, and will out of necessity be implemented on some level at some point, probably sooner rather than later.

How much do you pay this x number of folks to essentially do nothing (or at least nothing that adds direct value to the aggregate economy), and how will that square with (again) consistent downward wage pressure on people who do perform necessary tasks? There is a point of equilibrium for any set of multiply competing dynamics, so there is certainly one here.

In short, what price-point will Joe Average have in this future workscape, where his options are circumscribed by participating in the "higher education" racket, meaning (in the best case scenario) years of indentured servitude paying down his overpriced tuition, versus being someone who can just kick back and collect a stipend that, once the externalities of the "traditional" career path are accounted for, may end up being comparable?

Another recent event that highlighted this coming paradigm shift was the announcement from the Congressional Budget Office that a labor effect of the Affordable Care Act will be a large number of people leaving the conventional workforce, to trade in jobs they hate or are just tired of, but were hanging on to for the necessary health-care benefits, to pursue their entrepreneurial or creative dreams. Of course this is tragic news to the class that has a vested interest in keeping their work staff cowed and compliant, but again, it also begs the question of what those folks will do.

There will always be something to do, don't get me wrong. You can't automate every single thing, can't commodify every single experience. This is something the optimizers didn't really think through, as all these technological blessings and productivity gains began accruing mostly to the top of the food chain. Sure, it's been neat to be able to get those nifty electronic devices from Chinese sweatshops at bargain prices, but there's only so many teevees and iPhones you can buy, and there's only so many line-waiting dunces to buy the same thing with new bezels every year.

We can't all make each other $5 cups of coffee, or self-publish e-books (though FSM knows I've given the latter my best shot). The more entrepreneurial among us will come up with more and better scams and rackets by which to grift the poor and gullible; exploiting the vulnerability of others is, aside from fouling our own nests, probably the most charming of all innately human characteristics.

Of course, once enough people realize that their Tinkerbell economic system is largely smoke and mirrors and imaginary wealth in the first place, subsistence will be the job, and just about everyone will be employed at it.