American Sins, 2012: What Held Up

 Happy Fourth of July, everyone! 

I hope your day is full of good food, better company, and whatever version of rest you've earned this year. 

Fireworks pollution leads to unhealthy air across Southern California - 2024

My piece on Substack for today, The Case for Retiring Fireworks.

Historian John Meecham on current stated claims from the White House toward nationalized elections:

The Constitution, the Framers did this for a reason. They didn't want nationalized elections. They wanted...remember, the key insight of the American founding is that most of what we would want to do as human beings is wrong. Most of it's selfish...that's the insight. The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is because they assume that most of what we would want to do would be wrong. And so elections, moving to the states, that was part of this. I was pleased that the Republican Party is pushing back on that... - Firing Line S10E1

He also said: Patriotism and nationalism. We're in a nationalistic season. Right? Allegiance to your own kind. Patriotism (George Orwel did a great essay on this), patriotism, is allegiance to an idea.

I'll say that again: Nationalism is allegiance to oneself. One's own group. One's own party.

That is not America. Not after the second birthing of America after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Period. We're living in America 2.0 But we're now headed into our 3rd birthing, America 3.0. We're about to revile ourselves against those in power, their ideals, to rebuild once again the nature of our better Angels, as Pres. Lincoln said.

Since it's the holiday, I want to spend today's special post somewhere a little different than usual, not on the news cycle, but on an old post of mine from 2012 called "American Sins." 

I wrote it back when nobody took blogs seriously, myself included, so it's raw and not deeply edited. But going back through it this week, three parts of it held up better than I expected, and on a day about what this country is supposed to be, it felt worth revisiting what I was already trying to say fourteen years ago.

That piece got into Citizens United, the 47%, Romney, taxes, a CenturyLink outage that kept me offline for a day. 

Fourteen years later, those three parts still hold up.

The subsistence argument. 

The piece asked why we talk about tax rates as percentages instead of asking what those percentages actually cost a person. A third of a poor family's income is food and rent. A third of a rich person's income is nothing they'll ever notice. Same number, completely different sacrifice. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, marginal utility of money, effective burden versus nominal rate, but the instinct was right and it's still right.

The loudspeaker line. 

Writing about Citizens United and money as speech, I landed on this:

"If money is free speech to say Donald Trump, then by comparison he is speaking with a loudspeaker and I am speaking with a pillow over my face." WE are speaking with pillows over our faces, now more than ever.

That's the one line from the whole piece that has come back around to bite us in ways never expected.

The infrastructure question. 

I was annoyed that CenturyLink (I have Quantum Fiber now, having dumped Comcast entirely) had left me offline for twelve hours with no explanation, and I asked why our internet doesn't have the same redundancy the actual internet protocol was designed to have, the same way our roads are free so people can go buy things. 

That question turned out to be the net neutrality fight and the municipal broadband fight of the following decade.

The piece ended with a call to action:

"Start being Americans again, start being Heroes." 

Calling to raise the standard of living for every American citizen. Simple as that sounds, it was the same point as the tax argument above it, just stated as a demand instead of an analysis. 

I still believe it.

Fair trade, honestly. Few were watching back then, and that's probably also why the good parts, the loudspeaker line, the subsistence argument, the infrastructure question, never got sanded down either.

I bring this up now for a reason. 

I wasn't trying to be prophetic in 2012, I was just annoyed and paying attention. But look at where those threads led. 

Citizens United didn't stay theoretical. 

That loudspeaker got louder. 

The subsistence gap has gotten wider. 

None of what's happened since was hard to see coming if you were watching in 2012, it just took longer than I expected.

Today is the Fourth. Our Fourth. Not one person's, not one Party's.

I still believe we can do better than this. It looks like it will be soon. 

If two years is soon...28 months.

And that's the whole reason for putting the old post up today.

"It scares me when people aren't brave enough to face their own history." - Lonnie G. Bunch III, Sec. of the Smithsonian Institution

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Author Signing - Port Orchard, Washington, Olympic Peninsula - Halloween - October 31, 2025

Happy Halloween!

Have a fun, safe and sane holiday!

Today, I have an author event in Port Orchard, Washington. This is the next town over from me here in Bremerton. I prepared something to say…but as it turned out, it's going to be just an author signing. Still, I wasn't sure at first, so I prepared something to say just in case I was asked to...

Deity, Dogma, and Misperception in Death of Heaven

2024 New York City Big Book Award Winner for Horror

Cover art by Marvin Hayes

When I wrote *Death of Heaven* in 2012, my intention — other than simply to entertain — was to explore how we as human beings misunderstand reality. This is something that goes back to my university degree in psychology, concentrating in phenomenology.

How, when we encounter something beyond our understanding, we invent stories about it. We build beliefs, and from those beliefs we construct entire systems — religions, moral codes, even ideas of good and evil — all to make sense of what we’ve seen or felt, even when we don’t truly understand it.

To very poorly paraphrase what someone once said:

“Given enough time, humans will turn almost anything into a religion.”

Thus, Longevity + Repetition = Institutionalization, or Religion.

In 1769 Voltaire said:

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

Hanif Abdurraqib (said more recently):

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion.”

Terry Pratchett, in Small Gods more or less said:

“If enough people believe, you can be god of anything,” i.e., belief over time/in numbers begets religion.

Eric Hoffer, American moral and social philosopher best known for his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements published in 1951, is often cited when discussing how long-lived movements harden into institutions:

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Finally, the great Doug Adams of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame:

“I am fascinated by religion. (That’s a completely different thing from believing in it!) … What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it?”

He also said:

“Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever … really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not.’ Why not? Because you’re not!”

For millennia, we humans believed the heavens revolved around us. That misperception wasn’t just an error — it became the organizing myth of civilization. From it grew:

-astronomy and mathematics (as early cultures tried to predict divine “movements” of the stars),

-architecture and art (temples and cathedrals aligned with celestial bodies),

-philosophy and theology (Aristotle, Ptolemy, Aquinas), and

-a moral worldview placing humanity at the center of creation.

Leaving that belief was painful. We murdered people over questioning it.

Every time humanity sheds an old illusion, it feels like dying a little. We fought to keep the Earth at the center of the universe; we silenced people for saying otherwise. But the truth didn’t care. It just waited. And that’s the same struggle my characters face in Death of Heaven — when reality refuses to match belief, but rather than belief fighting back...reality wins. And it’s horrifying.

This book wasn’t about denying religion, it wasn’t an attempt to destroy religion, rather it simply tries to point out just how often we misperceive reality.

That’s what *Death of Heaven* is really about. It’s horror, yes — to be sure, it’s adult horror, but not just in the sense of monsters or the supernatural.

It’s about the horror of realizing how fragile our understanding of existence might be... while reality is attacking us and allowing us no time to assimilate the new paradigm of reality.

The story follows people who experience things far beyond what they or anyone, can comprehend, and rather than accept the unknown, they interpret it through the only framework they have through their lived experiences: belief.

They assign meaning. They have to. And so they create gods out of confusion and terror, as humans have always done.

To me, that’s what’s fascinating — and frightening. We think of dogma as something ancient or religious, but it’s actually a very human reflex. We do it constantly, even today: we fill in the blanks when reality doesn’t make sense.

Both to our benefit and detriment.

The universe, in its enormity, doesn’t explain itself — and that silence is intolerable to us. We are pattern recognizers and so we assign the most obvious pattern to what we do not understand.

So we name it. We worship it. We fear it. We give it purpose, even when that purpose may never have existed.

In *Death of Heaven*, that instinct to explain — to create meaning — becomes both the source of our strength and the root of our tragedy. Because if our gods and our certainties are born from misunderstanding, then what happens when the truth finally arrives and refuses to fit those stories? What happens when heaven dies — not in the sky, but inside us, in the collapse of our own convictions?

So while I wrote it as a piece of speculative horror, it’s really an exploration of perception. Of how much of our reality is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves to survive. And maybe, just maybe, what we call divinity — or evil — isn’t divine or evil at all, but simply the way the universe looks when we see it through human eyes.

But what might happen in the sequel to the book? Once the entire world cannot deny that reality is not what we believed? Many will continue on. Some will not be able to and perhaps mass suicides will ensue. But many will not be able to deny what they had just lived through and will have to reinvent their perceived universe.

That’s the world I wanted to explore — not to deny belief, but to question how belief begins.

How much of what we hold sacred comes from something real, and how much from our own inability to accept what’s truly unknown? For me, that’s where both the horror and the wonder live — in that fragile space between what we think we know and what reality might actually be.

So, we can talk about that. You don’t need to have read the book — I’m more interested in people’s thoughts.

What do *you* think heaven is — or perhaps more appropriately...what happens when we realize it isn’t what we thought, and never was?

So there it is…Have a great and safe Halloween!

One more comment...

Happy Halloween, Creatures of the Night! 🩸

The veil’s thin, the moon’s high, and somewhere a chainsaw just revved for its final time.

Tonight isn’t about candy...It’s about carnage, creativity, and the macabre stories that keep our hearts pounding long after the lights go out.

Not just the terror of anticipation, or the horror of the moment—
but the lingering echo of tales gone dark and disturbing.

The kind that crawl back into your mind when the night’s gone quiet.

The kind that makes you check the lock… twice. 🔪

Whether you’re covered in fake blood or hiding behind your screen watching your favorite final fight back, remember: horror isn’t just a genre but a lifestyle. When you hear that click in the distant dark while reading, while watching...it's not real, remember, it's not real... just keep reading, just keep watching.

Stay twisted, my friends, stay safe...but if you hear that knock after midnight…

Well... maybe just don’t answer. 👀

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

🪷 The Four Wise Monkeys: How a Buddhist Lesson Became a Global Symbol

For most people today, the three monkeys — one covering its eyes, one its ears, one its mouth — are a quaint little meme, an emoji, or a tourist carving. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Simple, almost trite.

But behind that familiar pose lies an ancient Buddhist principle that once defined the boundaries of moral discipline, spiritual clarity, and even political wisdom.
And originally, there weren’t just three monkeys — there was a fourth.

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🕉️ Where It All Began

In early Buddhist teaching, long before the carving at Nikkō, monks were taught to guard their senses — eyes, ears, tongue, and body — as gateways to the mind. One of the oldest written versions of this concept appears in Sanskrit:

“Na pāpakaṃ paśyet, na pāpakaṃ śṛṇuyāt, na pāpakaṃ bhāṣeta.”
Do not see what is evil, do not hear what is evil, do not speak what is evil.

These weren’t rules about ignorance. They were about awareness.
To “see no evil” meant not to invite darkness into your thoughts.
To “hear no evil” meant to avoid gossip and corrupt speech.
And to “speak no evil” meant mastering one’s own tongue — because in Buddhism, words themselves are actions, capable of wounding or healing.

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🇨🇳 The Confucian Thread

As Buddhism spread through China, its moral focus interlaced with Confucian philosophy. In The Analects, Confucius advises:

“非礼勿视，非礼勿听，非礼勿言。”
Do not look at what is improper. Do not listen to what is improper. Do not speak what is improper.

This fusion of Buddhist self-discipline and Confucian decorum created a moral framework emphasizing restraint, balance, and inner harmony — a triad later visualized in Japan through a clever pun.

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🇯🇵 From Words to Monkeys

When these teachings reached Japan in the 8th century through the Tendai school of Buddhism, the phrase was translated using the verb ending -zaru — meaning “not to do.”

But zaru sounds identical to saru, the Japanese word for monkey.
So, as Japanese artisans often did, they transformed a linguistic accident into art.

Thus were born:

• Mizaru – “see not” 🙈

• Kikazaru – “hear not” 🙉

• Iwazaru – “speak not” 🙊

The three monkeys first appeared carved into the stable of Nikkō Tōshō-gū Shrine in the early 1600s. They were not jokes, nor mere decorations — but a moral parable carved in cedar.

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🙈 The Forgotten Fourth: Shizaru

Later, a fourth monkey appeared: Shizaru, “do not do.”
Sometimes shown with arms crossed or hands covering its body, this figure completed the ethical circle — Right Action.
It symbolized restraint in behavior, in contrast to the first three, which dealt with perception, hearing, and speech.

Together they mapped perfectly to the Buddhist Threefold Purity:

1. Pure in body

2. Pure in speech

3. Pure in mind

…and by adding Shizaru, they included purity in action as well.

Monkey	Meaning	Domain
Mizaru	See no evil	Perception
Kikazaru	Hear no evil	Attention
Iwazaru	Speak no evil	Speech
Shizaru	Do no evil	Action

This was not superstition; it was practical psychology long before the word existed — a system for protecting the mind by filtering what it absorbs and what it releases.

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🌏 From Parable to Pop Culture

When Western travelers saw the carvings centuries later, they took the image literally — “see no evil” as “ignore what’s wrong.”
And so a symbol of moral awareness became, in translation, one of moral blindness.

In time, the three monkeys came to represent either:

• Naïve avoidance (“don’t see what you don’t like”), or

• Stoic wisdom (“guard your mind from corruption”).

The meaning depended entirely on who was holding the lens.

Even Gandhi later adopted the image — returning it to its original moral form — as a guide to truth and non-violence.
Today, the monkeys survive everywhere from carved wood to emojis, reminders of a spiritual idea reduced but never destroyed.

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🧘‍♀️ What They Still Teach

At their heart, the monkeys are not hiding from the world.
They are disciplining perception — choosing which energies to let in, and which to send out.

Their message fits modern life more than ever:
In an age of endless screens, outrage, and noise, to “see no evil” might simply mean turning off the feed that poisons your peace.

Keep your senses clean, your speech kind, your actions measured —
and your mind will follow toward liberation.

That’s the wisdom carved in wood four centuries ago,
and still quietly waiting to be seen.

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Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Trump and the Spirit of Antichrist

Every era, it seems, summons its own Antichrist. Ours has our own, Donald Trump.

Image above from: The Conversation Australia + NZ May 9 · In casting himself as supreme leader and pope, Donald Trump inadvertently invoked the Christian understanding of the Antichrist.

Not always the horned figure of Revelation, nor the apocalyptic destroyer feared by televangelists, but something quieter — the spirit of Antichrist that Scripture says has already entered the world. The apostle John warned that there would be “many antichrists,” each one a distortion of Christ’s message disguised as a savior or a patriot.

The cleverest of them doesn’t curse Christ — he claims Him.
He invokes faith, family, and freedom while inverting their meaning.
He holds up the Bible as a totem while breaking its core tenets in deed.

That is how an Antichrist works — not through open rebellion but through counterfeit devotion.

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The Clever Antichrist

When Jesus warned of “false prophets” who come “in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15), He wasn’t describing atheists or pagans. He was warning about the charismatic deceiver who cloaks his hunger for power in righteousness.

The Antichristos is not merely against Christ — the Greek prefix “anti” also means in place of.
Thus the Antichrist is the substitute Christ, the counterfeit who stands where holiness should stand, commanding allegiance not to God but to himself.

And in our time, that archetype has found a disturbingly clear expression.

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Trump’s Faith in Himself

Donald Trump’s rise to power and his relationship with religion is unlike any in modern American history. He speaks of divine favor, waves a Bible for cameras, calls himself “the chosen one,” and inspires followers to believe his survival and success are proof of God’s will.

Yet his words and deeds consistently betray the very Gospel he invokes.
He mocks the meek, scorns the poor, celebrates cruelty, and prizes vengeance.
He lies reflexively, often to the cheers of those who claim to follow the Truth incarnate.
And he wraps these contradictions in the banner of Christianity itself.

This inversion — calling evil good and good evil, invoking faith to justify sin — is precisely the pattern described in Scripture for the Antichrist spirit: deception under divine pretense.

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The Scriptural Parallels

Below is a concise comparison between traditional Biblical descriptions of the Antichrist and Trump’s observed behaviors and rhetoric as cited by historians, journalists, and theologians.

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Biblical / Theological Trait	Trump Parallel Often Cited	Scriptural Reference
Self-exaltation and blasphemous pride – magnifies himself above all, demands adoration.	Calls himself “the Chosen One,” says “Only I can fix it,” seeks loyalty pledges, enjoys near-worship from followers.	2 Thessalonians 2:3–4 — “He exalts himself above every so-called god… proclaiming himself to be God.”
Deceives through lies and false wonders	Habitual falsehoods; alternate-reality politics accepted as truth by followers (“fake news” inversion).	2 Thess 2:9–11 — “The coming of the lawless one… with every deception of wickedness.”
Lawlessness while claiming righteousness	Frames himself as law-and-order champion while undermining rule of law, seeking immunity from prosecution.	2 Thess 2:7–8 — “The mystery of lawlessness is already at work.”
Mocks humility and mercy	Ridicules the weak, refugees, and opponents; promotes cruelty as strength.	Matthew 5:5–7 — “Blessed are the meek… merciful…” (inverted by conduct)
Uses religion as political tool (“in the temple of God”)	Bible-holding photo-ops, church backdrops, Christian-nationalist rhetoric.	2 Thess 2:4 — “He takes his seat in the temple of God.”
False prophet aura / messianic claims	Surrounded by pastors calling him God’s anointed; followers speak of him in salvific terms.	Matthew 24:24 — “False christs and false prophets will appear and deceive many.”
Pride replacing worship of God	Cult of personality eclipses faith; “Trumpism” replaces Gospel for many.	Exodus 20:3 — “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Creates division and hatred under banner of faith	“Us vs. them” nationalism presented as Christian duty.	Luke 12:53 / John 13:34 — Christ’s call to love turned to strife.
Wounded-then-restored leader revered as invincible	Survives impeachment, criminal trials, assassination attempt — seen as proof of divine favor.	Revelation 13:3 — “One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed.”
Delusion of followers believing lies	Loyalists dismiss all evidence, treat criticism as persecution.	2 Thess 2:11–12 — “God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false.”

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Judgment: Archetype or Reality?

By these measures, Trump matches almost every behavioral and symbolic pattern historically linked to Antichrist figures.
Whether he is the Antichrist of Revelation is unknowable — prophecy resists calendar dates and cable news soundbites.
But it would be disingenuous to ignore how tightly the shape of his power fits the scriptural mold.

He stands as a man who:

• Claims divine sanction while practicing deceit.

• Preaches strength while mocking compassion.

• Elevates himself as savior while dismantling justice.

• Uses religion not to heal, but to divide.

That is not a mere political profile; it’s a spiritual one.

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The Spirit of Antichrist in Our Time

In Christian theology, the “spirit of Antichrist” is any force that replaces love with power, truth with manipulation, and service with domination.
It’s the perversion of faith into an engine of self-worship.
It’s when a nation kneels not before God, but before its own reflection — or its leader’s.

Trump’s genius, and his danger, lie in that inversion.
He made millions believe cruelty is patriotic, vengeance is justice, and that moral decay is strength.
He convinced Christians to bless Caesar while believing they serve Christ.

That, more than prophecy, is the measure of deception.

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The True Test

If the Antichrist’s work is to make people cheer for what Christ condemned, then we are already living in the echo of that revelation.

It doesn’t matter if Trump knows what he represents.
Evil rarely knows itself.
It just smiles, raises a Bible, and says, “Only I can fix it.”

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Postscript: What the Mirror Shows

Whether one views Trump as the prophesied Antichrist or simply an Antichrist-like figure, the real question is what his rise says about us.
Scripture never tells believers to hunt for the Antichrist.
It tells them to watch for themselves — for the ease with which they’ll trade conscience for comfort, or truth for tribe.

If democracy falls not to armies but to applause, it will not be the Antichrist who destroyed it.
It will be those who confused worship with obedience, and faith with idolatry.

Obviously, this is theistic nonsense. 

But the odder issue at large is, his supporters, more than him. How they have deluded themselves, selectively become ignorant of the obvious, and just how easy it was in many ways to accept a career criminal, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, malignant narcissist, and just obvious low life kind of person as some kind of "great man" or Christian idol". It's truly bizarre, and exactly the kind of person who might fit the label of "Antichrist".

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Notes on Books, Brains, and the Strange State of Knowing in America

When Is a Book a “Hit”?

In a country of 340 million people, the raw numbers are misleading. Out of more than a million books released each year, most never sell more than a few hundred copies. For self-published authors, 250 copies lifetime sales is average. Even for traditional publishing, most titles don’t break 1,000–5,000 copies.

So yes, selling 10,000 books is a hit for almost any author outside of the megastar tier. For a small press or indie writer, it’s career-changing. For a Big Five publisher, it’s “respectable,” though not necessarily a bestseller. And if those 10,000 copies sell fast, it can land a book on a list like the New York Times depending on competition that week.

📖 1970s–1980s: A Stronger Midlist

• Publishing was more consolidated, and midlist authors (those who weren’t blockbusters but sold steadily) could expect 20,000–40,000 copies of a hardcover and more in paperback.

• Advances were better, and publishers invested in nurturing careers over time.

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📖 1990s: Chain Stores and Mass-Market Paperbacks

• Big-box booksellers (Borders, Barnes & Noble) and huge print runs meant that even “average” titles sold decently.

• A midlist paperback could still push 10,000–50,000 copies fairly reliably.

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📖 2000s: Amazon & Online Disruption

• Online sales and later eBooks broke the traditional distribution model.

• Print runs shrank. Shelf space in physical stores became harder to get unless you were already a star.

• Midlist sales started collapsing — 5,000 copies was becoming the new “solid” number.

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📖 2010s: Self-Publishing Boom

• With Kindle Direct Publishing and other platforms, millions of new titles flooded the market.

• The average sales curve fell sharply: most books (self-pub or traditional) now sell under 1,000 copies lifetime.

• “Success” was quietly redefined: selling 5,000 copies was considered strong, and 10,000 made you exceptional in most niches.

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📖 2020s: Current Landscape

• The flood of new titles has only grown — Bowker reported over 4 million ISBNs were registered in 2022.

• Discoverability is the key issue; competition is massive.

• Today, even big publishers often count 10,000 sales as a solid win for a debut or midlist book. For indies, 1,000+ is rare and celebrated.

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✅ The drop happened gradually between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, as chain stores collapsed, Amazon rewired the market, and self-publishing massively expanded the pool of available titles. What once looked modest now counts as a genuine success because the denominator (number of books competing) exploded while attention spans and shelf space shrank.

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Anti-Intellectual Intellectualism

There’s a cultural mindset worth naming: anti-intellectual intellectualism. It shows up in people who are educated enough to argue against education, convinced that skimming daily news headlines makes them better informed than specialists, while resisting the humility deeper study requires.

This is not a lack of intelligence but a rejection of expertise. Credentials are reframed as corruption. Headlines become “evidence.” Skimming stands in for mastery. It’s a way of having just enough education to scorn the very idea of education.

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How Many Americans Fit This?

The numbers tell a story.

• Gallup (2023): only 36% of Americans had confidence in higher education, down from 57% in 2015.

• Pew: roughly a third of Americans say colleges have a negative effect on the country.

That distrust isn’t limited to the uneducated. A chunk of the college-educated also dismiss higher ed as elitist or ideological, yet present themselves as more insightful than the “ivory tower.”

By rough estimate, about 10–15% of Americans could be described as fitting the “anti-intellectual intellectual” mold. That’s tens of millions of people. A minority, but a noisy and influential one.

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The Skim-and-Shout Era

Pew Research has found that many Americans admit they consume news only casually or by skimming, yet describe themselves as “well informed.” Social media rewards confidence over depth, and that turns fragments and memes into strong, immovable positions.

The performance of knowledge replaces knowledge itself.

This actually also gets into the workforce as well as too much available information. When you're working 80 hours a week, or 60, or 40, you have a family, possibly, it's a lot to deal with. We need downtime to process and when we don't get that, we have to do the only thing available to most of us...dumb down.

We are at the point we've been expecting for decades, a need to slow not pick up speed. To work less per week (and per day) not more. Not 6 days a week, not 10 hour days, but 4 day weeks. We NEED at least 3 day weekends. We need at least no more than 6 hour days of work.

We’ve reached the point many of us anticipated decades ago—the moment to slow down, not speed up. The future of work shouldn’t be six-day weeks or ten-hour shifts. It should mean four-day weeks, six-hour days at most, and at least three-day weekends. That’s what we need now. Consider cutting hours by half—it would double the number of jobs available while giving people back their lives.

Even back in the 1970s it was clear this day was coming: automation promised to take on the workload, robots were meant to handle the repetitive jobs, and AI would eventually free us even further—for the higher experiences of being human.

So why haven’t we arrived there? Who’s holding us back from this better life? Toxic capitalism. Corporations clinging to outdated measures of productivity. A culture that confuses exhaustion with virtue. AI and robotics already make a shorter workweek not just possible, but practical—if those in power would open their eyes. The tools to liberate us are already here, yet the will to use them for human benefit has been stolen by leaders who serve shareholders over people. What’s missing isn’t capability—it’s courage.

But enough about that...for now.

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A Long American Tradition

Suspicion of higher education isn’t new. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life traced how hostility to “book learning” has been a recurring theme in U.S. culture. From religious populism to political movements, there’s always been an undercurrent that treats expertise as a threat rather than a resource.

What’s new today is the speed and scale of amplification. Social media has given anti-intellectual intellectualism a megaphone, letting opinion without study travel further than scholarship with evidence.

Religion and Anti-Intellectualism in America

Religion has always been entwined with American anti-intellectualism, and that’s still true today. For many, faith provides community and meaning, but it can also reinforce suspicion of secular expertise. In the U.S., certain strands of Christianity frame universities as hostile to belief, science as an enemy of scripture, and intellectual inquiry as a distraction from “truth.” 

This doesn’t describe all religious Americans—many scientists, doctors, and educators are devout—but the cultural pull is powerful. It allows congregations to celebrate certainty over questioning, to privilege conviction over evidence, and to treat higher education as dangerous indoctrination rather than a tool for understanding. In this way, religion can act as a cultural amplifier of anti-intellectualism, giving it both moral weight and political force in American life today.

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Depth vs. Skimming

In our media-saturated world of skimmers of reality, information, and knowledge, this isn’t just a global problem...in our country of 340 million, it’s magnified. We risk (risk, as in it's coming or it's already here?) becoming (becoming?) a nation that confuses appearances for truth, speed for wisdom, and noise for understanding.

One of the real losses in America isn’t just declining trust in education or expertise — it’s the way we’ve turned into a nation of skimmers. We scroll headlines, half-listen to podcasts, glance at snippets on social media, and convince ourselves we’ve absorbed the whole story. But knowledge has never worked that way. Understanding requires patience, revisiting sources, and wrestling with uncomfortable detail.

It would be good to stop being a country of skimmers and return to being a country of readers, listeners, and thinkers willing to go in-depth.

Skimming through life may give us speed, but depth is what gives us wisdom. 

Yes, we’re deluged with information and taxed for time, but we have to get beyond the Idiocracy of media saturation. Knowing a little about everything is not the same as knowing deeply. The former is good for appearance — for looking “smart” to others, and delusionally to oneself — but it leaves us shallow. 

Opposing views in a room full of the shallow don’t lead to wisdom — they lead to exactly what we’re seeing all around us today: leadership that has submerged itself not in principle or purpose, or even accurate information, but in whatever offers control over to THEM.

What might serve us better is choosing what matters most, and then going further. Knowing less about everything and more about the important things that truly shape our lives, our communities, and our future could do us all much more good.

Books rarely sell in big numbers, but 10,000 copies still matter. Education produces humility when it works, but when rejected, it fuels confidence without comprehension. America is big enough that even a minority who skim and sneer can shape politics and culture. And the old tension between expertise and populism isn’t going away — it just looks different now, in the age of headlines and hashtags.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Walkabout Thoughts #47

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts…June 2, 2023, Sunday

Weather for the day…NICE! 56 degrees starting out, high 60s by end of walk

Podcast for the day: “Matice Founder Jessica Whited on Harnessing Regenerative Species for Medical Breakthroughs - Ep. 198"

In the podcast they're talking about biological regeneration. If you lose an arm, can you regrow it? Because some creatures can. Apparently a fetus can regenerate without scar tissue up to a certain point and then it stops. Why? I would assume it has something to do with a trade off for something else as to why that stopped working. Salamanders can regenerate, and studies are being done on that particular species by the person in this podcast.

We may have lost the capability for regeneration due to tumor suppression, but that’s just conjecture. But can we stimulate that somehow?

When I graduated from Western Washington University with a degree in psychology, a concentration in phenomenology, one of the main things I recognized about America at the time was in our priorities being out of whack. Considering that today they’re far more out of whack than ever, how do we define that? If I ask anyone, considering humanity and in reality, how do America’s priorities add up?

As I’ve been healing from long Covid over these past three years (I believe I healed from it and it ended at least once or twice already, this last time being the worst iteration of it), and having it this time now over a year, it seems to be healing in a two steps forward one step back pattern. Or in various modulations of a sine wave in coming and going. Couple of months ago it felt like I was over it. And then at raised its ugly head a little bit yet again. One of the things I noticed in my research was how sugar would irritate the vagus nerve, which is part of the issue of problems I’m having, mostly now exhibiting in issues of blood pressure. Which oddly enough, I can typically counter using an antihistamine like Benadryl. I also read something that mentioned how you can get a craving for sugar. Which has happened. Lovely. So you can get a sugar craving, but sugar exacerbates the condition. This truly is in so many ways a nasty insidious disease. Considering other things it does like merging cells and spawning "pillars" within or on veins and vesicles (It's in my book, "Suffering Long Covid".

After a year of having to be very careful about what I eat on a strict diet, my weight had gone down like 15 pounds to where I was feeling pretty good. But now it’s back up to where it had been, for years because how how hard this past winter was to get through. At 6'1" and 225 pounds, I’d much more prefer to be about or just under 200 pounds. I had been down as low as 213 pounds some months back. And then these sugar cravings started, which I didn’t recognize because of a feeling that I could enlarge my diet. Thinking I was getting over long covid, it was a treat to eat more varied foods. After so long being miserable and being able again to get back to a more normal diet was a joy. But I may have gotten carried away. So I’ve cut back. And I’ve been trying to supplement sweets with fruits. I know you have to be careful when you include fruits in the diet, as they are generally full of fructose, which is still a sugar. But if you continue to replace not as good things with better things, it's gonna be a process but in the end, very useful and healthier.

I’ve been finding AI very useful this past year. Chat OpenAI and Bing (where you need to use MS Edge browser). It cannot write as well as I can, but it can produce really good content that I can then massage into readable format. As at one time I was a senior technical writer, one of the things I did professionally was research, writing and massaging content to fit various requested subject matter and formats. For years, I found Wikipedia immensely useful. Not as a subject matter expert source, but as a reference...with sources. So, when I use Wikipedia, it reminds me of things I ad forgotten and it offers things I didn’t know about, hopefully referencing the source(s) which I then use to vet my information before utilizing it to send out to the public. AI is similar. Until they get this “hallucinations“ issue under control and eliminated, where it will say things that have no bearing on reality simply because it doesn’t know what else to say. It will have to remain a reference for now. But the thing I find I’ve been using it for a lot lately, is for things I might query a search engine on. There’s times where I ask "what does this phrase sentence or word mean?" And it will give me the information I’m looking for. Whereas the search engine may offer me a definition, initially, and then many links to things that most are totally irrelevant to what I'm seeking. AI though tends to give me exactly what I want to know. It’s like querying an encyclopedia, only it seems to be more understandable and it’s results are more relevant. And more frequently.

I was just talking to my son about this. He said that Chat OpenAI can now analyze photos you send it. And I said, "Great. It won’t be long before it’ll analyze videos." I’m really looking forward to sending it a video of length, or a text file or link, to have it analyzed it in various ways. I would love to be able to send it one of my films or one of my novels or non-fiction books and have it analyze them in different ways. I would lost to see the result of that. I look forward to one day pointing it to all of my films, or all of my writings and have them analyzed. At this time, I can only send it several pages. Which in a book like my “Death of heaven” book has so many different parts of the book that analyzing one part tells you nothing about another or the book overall. To analyze it overall would be very interesting.

One of the things I would like to see regarding my writings is what we’ve seen done before where someone will read all of an author's writings, and produce a paper or a book sharing “the central theme, or core of an author's writings… “ because, I would find it interesting to see what my writings boiled down to. Or, as someone pointed out years ago, I have written more than once in my fiction about young children in horrific situations. The story I wrote for my first fiction writing class at University was, “Andrew“ about a five year old who experienced a horrific event. Years later, that short story that had grown into a novella, grew into my book “Death in heaven“. That novella at the end of my very first published work, “Anthology of Evil“ (first in the series) is a story about a young boy whose parents were geniuses and had raised him as an intellectual experiment. In a more recent story of mine, a sci-fi tale on another planet, “Jaonny’s Apple Tree”, seems to imply some perhaps emotional evolution on my part, in that again it’s about a young (this time a slightly older) child, with highly talented and intelligent parents whose child (and by the way, neither story being my childhood experience... although my mother was admittedly very clever), became empowered and makes some questionable choices. At the end of the story, you really have to rethink and question if this child, "Jaonny", is evil, or perhaps, justice incarnate?

Podcast is over, I switched to "AI trends: a Latent Space crossover"

Speaking of which, for those who have a fear of AI, do instead have a fear of Donald Trump and his anti-democracy, autocratic toxically capitalistic endeavors. That’s really something to fear. Because it’s happening, it's BEEN happening now for years, decades before he so ludicrously became POTUS45. Realized fears about AI are indeed on the horizon but we still have a chance to be proactive. Something we didn’t take advantage of with the bulbous ignorant one (Trump).

The podcast is talking about Prediction Guard, a company who offers more than something like Chat OpenAI.

As I mentioned above, about sugar… wchich has to do with blood, sugar levels, and insulin. Years ago I started looking at things from an insulin point of view. If I drink, and some alcoholics may not feel hunger, some of us will get hungry... we well may all have gotten "the munchies" at 2 AM after drinking at a bar all night. Or crave sweets. Whenever I have even a glass of wine, or something, it kicks my sweet tooth within an hour or two. It seems to now with long covid, affect my vagus nerve. I found months ago that I could once again eat sweets or have at least one glass of alcohol and so I knew my lung Covid was healing. Recently I’ve had the experience that only two glasses of wine will make things uncomfortable for me at bedtime. I thought I would try to introduce alcohol on a regular basis and see how that affects things. Will  it lengthen this duration of long Covid? Will it help me acclimate and heal faster? The thing about long Covid is… what is normally common sense, may no longer have a bearing. Obviously there’s common sense involved in long Covid, but we’re only now learning a bit of how it works in this new paradigm of viral activity against humanity and biological organisms. Not knowing in the beginning that it was affecting the vagus nerve, really made the thing seem a bit crazy, back when long Covid first hit (me certainly in February) of 2020.

At 67 now, I’m still learning to be proactive about things in life, though I've always been proactive on many things. ADHD I found forced that on me. America is over 200 years old and we still haven’t learned to be proactive. We tend to be too reactive. Waiting till bad happens, then reacting. When we need to prognosticate and set up an environment to alleviate or avoid. Problem in that are conservatives who always go overboard when fear or concerns are involved (Probably why we're not proactive as it "triggers" conservatives into their weird forms of insanity). Our laws, our prison system, etc., could be so much better if we were fundamentally proactive. The more conservative one is, apparently the more being pro activity is anathema to your paradigm of ideology. Thus Republicans have been the longest hold out on climate change issues. And now I’m supporting what conservatives will label "authoritarian", at least in part, because their own toxic capitalism ("corporate thought") makes it ever more invisible to them. It's a mad world, surely, for some.

By the way, I learned years ago before Covid hit, that if I was going to have any alcohol, it should be as early in the day as possible. No not for breakfast (though as Sheryl Crow sang, "I like a good beer buzz early in the mornin'..."). But if I was going to have a drink? Lunch is better than dinner. There was a time in life, when I could drink, go out for a night, come home drunk, crash and wake up the next day little hung over, but pretty much feeling great, as long as I didn’t overdo and especially if I drank enough water the night before, before and during drinking. Long Covid magnifies things. So if there’s anything about your system, you know or don’t know about, it could end up exhibiting itself worse under lung Covid. Which is why when I first caught it the last time, maybe the third time since February 2020 (back in May 2022), anything I ate seemed to give me an allergic reaction of sorts. Initially, my pulse would go nuts. A week later my blood pressure issues started. I've never had heart issues. Quite the contrary and my DNA indicates I am above average on absorbing oxygen and muscles able to continue more quickly than normal but I'm more of a sprinter than a marathon runner (I'm more anaerobic than aerobic, basically more oriented toward weight lifting than running). This is detailed in my book, “Suffering Long Covid“. The first week on this last infection, within that first two weeks I had paramedics at my house twice, at 2AM. The first visit led to an emergency room stay of four hours. I dropped my diet down to nothing that first day, but hard boiled eggs that first day and then six hours later had another egg when I didn’t experience a reaction. If I had too much salt or sugar...life was hell.

What is “stable diffusion“? Is it this?

I am so sick of jingles for drugs in ads on TV.

See the podcast episode from the books to production. On this Practical AI podcast: "AI trends: a Latent Space crossover" and "From notebooks to Netflix scale with Metaflow".

My phone just got an "AirTag" notification. WTF? It says, "AirTag found moving in with you." Good to know, and something to track down if it happens to you.

I used to think…well? I believed. And people have told me this, that at least in certain specific areas, I'm kind of "genius". I've been in many situations where people were taken aback from me and exhibited amazement at something I did or said. My advising professor at university did say I was in the top 10% of the top 10% of psych students in universities across America, for what it's worth. I questioned him about that, disbelieving him (he is very smart, Prof. Rod Rees, is). He thought about it and then said he stands by his contention. He was also referring to my girlfriend whom I lived with through our college years and she was very smart. But we were smart in different ways so that we made an incredible team. I've written about that (substantiating it) elsewhere. Rod did not say we were "geniuses", just that we stood out. The term as typically used on social situations of "Genius" is a pop term just meaning remarkably smarter than others.

 I grew up thinking I was stupid (step-dad used to tell me that but I later realized he just didn't know what I was talking about most of the time. I had a friend in high school tell me that, saying he and our friends liked me, but didn't know what I was talking about half the time, so I started to "dumb down" my talking and got along way better with everyone, which helped me socially, but not academically). I used to think, "that can’t just be me", but that maybe everyone has something discovered. or not yet, that they are indeed genius about. But I no longer ow believe that. The whole Donald Trump phenomenon has aided that disbelief of mine in humanity. What I will say is that many, maybe even most people, are or can be genius in some way or another. But many will also die without ever finding it. A true genius to me is a jack of all trades and genius about anything, able to synthesize data and information form one thing to any other. Otherwise, one is merely genius in a single field or area. Many more of those than a "true genius", which may indeed be a myth.

Moving on... since this whole transition became more prominent, and since my own and youngest child came out as trans male, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this. First off, do not embarrass oneself with others, do not act in the extreme, just be humane. If I understand this correctly, one would say a trans male was born female. And I just thought of this myself… that doesn’t really seem accurate, does it. Well, those who are toxically binary, that is lacking ethics and compassion and morality, sometimes through religion and being anti-trans and/or anti-LGBTQ+, I think a more accurate way of putting it would be that if they’re trans by definition, then a "trans male" was one simply not born female, so born "non-female" not, "born female and transitioned to male". Well, many wish to use external biological references to define another person, who themself disagrees with that. But one really need look into things such as the DNA, which you cannot easily see and we may not be able yet to define it. So rather than history showing us how ignorant and stupid we are… far better to err on the side of caution and human decency. Trans males using a female bathroom are not perverts seeking titillation. You're thinking of anti-Trans types. Any incidents of CIS gendered males who are actual perverts utilizing this excuse in practice is minuscule to the point of not being bothered with it. It’s just another form of bigotry to throw a tiff over such things and to be so emotionally week and frightened, triggered, in order to deny evolving along with the rest of humanity on such a thing. Yes it’s uncomfortable, but it surely is for trans people. Some of them are being murdered just for being who they are, or who they’re trying to be. because when they try to be themselves, they feel more sane and the quality of their life. which America guarantees in the US Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence directly, should be supported and not scurried away from like frightened little, religious fools. Myself I prefer not to suffer fools, but we now have an entire political party (conservatives of course) where a quarter of America are proud to be in their Party of Fools, their political "ship of fools" where they can satiate and saute in their own stupid soup of bigotry and ignorance.

I’m finishing up my last half mile of my 5 miles today and I feel great. It was pretty easy today. As I detailed in my previous walk, two days ago, in that blog, at around mile four it was very difficult, but I pushed through it. I believe I’ve plateaued now and 5 miles, if I keep it up, will help with my long Covid a great deal as it had before winter hit. I kept telling myself that if I could just stay in shape over the winter, then winter will go much easier on me. The trouble is something always happens in late fall/early winter. It knocks me down and makes it very difficult to exercise during the winter time, meaning I really need to either be a "snowbird" or live someplace with an annual fairly even climate.

I find myself looking forward to going home and kicking back, hydrating and putting those ice packs made for the knees, on my knees. to reduce swelling from this walk. I am noticing, that now I almost don’t need it. But I think it help with something. I don’t need it for the pain now (progress). I might need it for helping  the muscles to heal/grow properly after these walks. Something to think about that we often don't and also is relevant in our balance of mental and emotional (IQ/EQ) processes.

What I really need to do is get the last five blogs or so updated and online. I have one about my screenplay and true crime biopic “The Teenager Bodyguard“ [I got it updated and it's online as of the 4th of July 2023]. It’s set for July 4th, 6 AM and "a happy Fourth of July. Independence Day publish!" I apologize for these delays, but to just read through these blogs from top to bottom takes me a long time. I wish I could just hire someone to do that. It’s just basic editing to clean up the "speech to text" transcription. Maybe add some links to make it easier for people to "see" what I’m talking about at times or for reference purposes.

I still haven’t published my blogs at this walk, over the weekend past. last week, with the Russian coup. How do you say Putin is still a war criminal and still invaded Ukraine illegally. And both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump deserve the full "Ceausescu" with all due prejudice for their ongoing crimes against humanity and democracy.

To make that comment clear, Wikipedia on Ceausescu:

Execution

The Ceaușescus were executed at 4:00 p.m. local time^[30] at a military base outside Bucharest on 25 December 1989.^[10] The execution was carried out by a firing squad consisting of paratroop regiment soldiers: Captain Ionel Boeru, Sergeant-Major Georghin Octavian and Dorin-Marian Cirlan, while reportedly hundreds of others also volunteered.^[31] Before the execution, Nicolae Ceaușescu declared, "We could have been shot without having this masquerade!"^[18] The Ceaușescus' hands were tied by four soldiers before the execution.^[32] Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote that, before the sentences were carried out, Elena Ceaușescu screamed, "You sons of bitches!" as she was led outside and lined up against the wall, while Nicolae Ceaușescu sang "The Internationale".^[33]

The firing squad began shooting as soon as the two were in position against a wall. The execution happened too quickly for the television crew assigned to the trial and death sentence to videotape it in full; only the last round of shots was filmed. In 2014, retired Captain Boeru told a reporter for The Guardian newspaper that he believes that the shots he fired from his rifle were solely responsible for the deaths of both of the Ceaușescus, because, of the three soldiers in the firing squad, he was the only one who remembered to switch his Kalashnikov rifle to fire fully automatic, and at least one member of the group hesitated to shoot for several seconds.^[34] In 1990, a member of the National Salvation Front reported that 120 bullets were found in the couple's bodies.^[31]

In 1989, Prime Minister Petre Roman told French television that the execution was carried out quickly due to rumors that loyalists would attempt to rescue the couple.^[30]

End Wikipedia article.

On the concept of translating Wikipedia, into every language… Apparently that’s not workable. Because some countries don’t want a Wikipedia, because that’s not how their language works for them. While some other country's cultures are very verbal and/or illiterate, it wouldn’t do them any good. I don’t know if I agree with that. That was a comment from the podcast. You can do a verbal search online and you can receive a Wikipedia page, potentially in your language, and even have it read aloud to you so you don’t have to read it. We have translators on our phones now, as if we were "Star Trek" back in the 60s. Well they weren’t in the 60s on the show, but you see what I mean. Also, there is the concept… that was rude… I just hit my home block intersection and somebody in a truck facing me, stopped at the stop sign and just stared at me. and they had their blinker on. so I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hurry across the road as well as I could at this point, after 5 miles, and as I get up alongside their truck, they takeoff heading straight down the street, not turning. WTF? Anyway… Another way to look at having something like Wikipedia in your language, while a country may not want it, what does that mean? Who doesn't want it? The country? The citizens? The government? The educated? One of the classes, upper, lower, middle? If you have something like Wikipedia, in your language, wouldn't over time, it enhance your culture and raise your standard of living, your quality of life? These are things you can't know... without trying.

Cheers! Sláinte!