South Korea vs American Food Health

South Korea has the best healthcare in the world. America, not so much. Ours, frankly, is embarrassing. 

Food health, similar issue.

Recently Kara Swisher's new show, Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever, is worth a look. Especially, her episode on South Korea. I've been listening to her for years, her podcast for the past year, Pivot with Scott Galloway, and her own On With Kara Swisher.

Highly recommend any of those shows.

But for now we're considering her new TV show on CNN about two systems that are fascinating to compare, especially right now. Actually for us, rather depressing. Ask Koreans if they would like to live in South Korea, or American, they'll likely choose South Korea, mostly for the healthcare situation which in South Korea (especially compared to America), is rather remarkable. 

We really should follow suit. Stop listening to those who say it's not possible, who give one ridiculous, or sane reason to be honest, over another against better overall healthcare, and just force America to get our act together. Our healthcare is failing and in watching this episode of Kara's show, you can see why.

It in part has to do with our not putting our money and our mouths where the issues actually are.

Here's a breakdown.

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Structure and Visual Metaphor

South Korea doesn't actually use a pyramid anymore. The Korean Nutrition Society introduced the Food Balance Wheels in 2010, designed as a bicycle: a large rear wheel divided into the six major food groups, and a small front wheel representing a glass of water -- the whole image is meant to symbolize physical activity as inseparable from diet. There was an earlier tower/pagoda model. The MAHA guidelines, by contrast, use an inverted pyramid structure that puts meats, cheese, and vegetables in the widest part at the top -- flipping the old American pyramid where carbs were the foundation. PubMed CentralCNN

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Grains and Carbohydrates

This is a significant philosophical split. In Korea, grains -- particularly rice -- form the base of the pyramid, suggesting they should make up the largest portion of meals. Korean guidelines even specifically urge people to "enjoy our rice-based diet" as a cultural value. Korean Garden BostonPubMed

The MAHA guidelines move in the opposite direction: whole grains are still present but requirements were reduced, leading to concerns about inadequate fiber, while refined grains and added sugar are sharply discouraged. U.S. News & World Report

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Protein

Both systems emphasize protein, but they diverge on sources. The Korean diet historically relied on fish, poultry, fermented soy products, and legumes as primary proteins, with red meat being rare in the traditional agricultural context. ScienceDirect

The MAHA guidelines are far more meat-forward. Even so, the guidelines urge Americans to "prioritize protein foods at every meal," emphasizing animal sources such as red meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs, alongside plant sources like beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and soy. One of the key recommendations is increasing daily protein consumption from 0.36 grams per pound of body weight to 0.54 to 0.73 grams per pound. U.S. News & World ReportHealthline

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Dairy

Both systems include dairy, but with very different emphasis. Korea recommends dairy in moderate servings, with the Korean Food Guidance System offering an A-type pattern of two dairy servings for children and a B-type of one serving for adults, reflecting differing calcium needs. PubMed Central

MAHA puts dairy much more prominently. The new inverted pyramid places dairy products such as cheese near the top, while the guidelines specifically recommend consuming full-fat dairy with no added sugars. Healthline

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Fats

Traditional Korean cooking uses sesame and perilla oil, limits deep-fat frying, and relies on fermentation rather than fat-based preservation methods. MAHA takes a rehabilitated view of fat broadly: the guidelines recommend incorporating healthy fats from whole foods such as meats, seafood, eggs, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados. ScienceDirectHealthline

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Fermented and Whole Foods

This is where Korean guidelines are notably distinct. The Korean diet is characterized by a wide variety of fermented foods -- kimchi, fermented soybean products, and others -- rich in bioactive compounds that support cardiovascular health and glycemic control. Korea's guidelines treat fermentation as a cultural and nutritional pillar. ScienceDirect

MAHA's "eat real food" framing gestures in a similar whole-food direction but doesn't specifically address fermented foods. The 2025-2030 guidelines reestablish food rather than pharmaceuticals as the foundation of health, with a clear "common-sense" message. HHS.gov

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Sodium

Interestingly, both countries have sodium problems but from opposite directions. South Korea has launched extensive low-sodium campaigns, including a "low-sodium meal service week," smaller soup bowls in restaurants, and a Samsam Low-Sodium Food Service system limiting lunch to under 1,300mg of sodium per meal -- because the traditional high-salt fermented foods drive excess intake. MFDS

MAHA's primary concern is added sugars and ultra-processed foods rather than sodium specifically.

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Ultra-Processed Foods

This is where the two systems actually converge most clearly. MAHA calls for a dramatic reduction in highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives. Korea has been pushing a similar message, worried about the shift away from traditional diets. South Korea has been battling increasing obesity as people shift away from the traditional diet heavy in pickled vegetables toward more processed and fast food. RealfoodFacts and Details

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Bottom Line

The Korean system is carbohydrate-foundational, vegetable-heavy, fish-and-legume-centric, and deeply integrated with cultural food identity and fermentation tradition. MAHA inverts that structure -- making protein and full-fat animal products the anchor, reducing carbs, and framing the whole thing as a return to "real food" after decades of processed food damage. They share a common enemy in ultra-processed food, and both fold physical activity into the framing, but they'd produce very different dinner plates.

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.

The Costs of Allowing Selective Ignorance Rule in the White House

 Donald Trump. "Stable Geeenuiuuussss..."

Remember when people were asking if you really want the guy who used to stand by the keg at a kegger be our Commander in Chief?

George W. Bush. The guy you'd want to have a beer with -- which was literally the media narrative sold as a virtue in 2000 and 2004. Folksy, inarticulate, legacy admission to Yale, disappeared from his flying a fighter jet to help on his dad's campaign, dodging his own military service (then dressed up in a flight suit as president to play soldier for a war in the wrong country that he started). Ran three businesses into the ground before his dad's friends handed him a baseball team and then a presidency.

And the keg analogy holds. You don't want the keg guy running the nuclear codes.

When Obama was elected I said, "Well, the Republicans can't go any lower than George W. Bush -- and I voted for his father."

Boy, was I wrong. Bush as president is not almost quaint, a country gentleman even, much as he might wish to be perceived.

It was catastrophically wrong. Because with Donald Trump, the bar didn't just get lowered -- it disappeared. In his first term he had to step over it. Now, in his second, you need a metal detector to even, hopefully, find it beneath the surface. 

Which, to be honest, was always exactly what Trump wanted. Not the presidency as public service. The presidency as Al Capone-level immunity -- power without accountability, authority without consequence, the office as a personal get-out-of-jail card. Permanently.

Now, about that "sea/see" incident just happened this week.

While giving a speech, Trump said "by sea, by ocean, by water" and then explained: "A lot of people say, 'What do you mean by sea? Is it see? Like vision?' No, it's sea, SEA."

As Raw Story noted, when Trump says "a lot of people" or "many people" think something, it typically means he used to think it and got corrected. In other words, he was projecting his own former confusion onto a hypothetical crowd. 

There's others like that. MANY, many others:

800 percent off

Windmills cause cancer

Hannibal Lecter is real

ID to buy cereal

Napoleon was short, that's why

Inject bleach

Tim Apple

The oranges of the investigation

Frederick Douglass is doing great work

I invented "priming the pump"

Rake the forests

Covfefe

Revolutionary War airports

Look. This is just a dumb man trying to sound smart, pure and simple.

He also has a habit of saying people call it, or it's what is called and then says something stupid

Claude responded: Yes -- the classic "some people call it" setup where he's clearly the only person who calls it that.

Or his classic "some people call it" setup where he's clearly the only person who calls it that.

• Some people call it the snake" -- reading a poem about immigration as though it were his own insight
• "People call it the super drug" -- about hydroxychloroquine
• "They call it the Chinese virus, some people call it that"-- he called it that
• "People call it the deep state, I call it the radical left"
• "Some people call it a revolution, I call it common sense"
• "They call it the green new disaster"
• "People call it the laptop from hell"
• "Some people call it the fake news, I call it the corrupt media"
• "They call it the big beautiful wall"
• "People call it the death tax, I call it unfair"
• "Some people call it the swamp"
• "They call it the Gulf of Mexico, I call it the Gulf of America -- and it's a much better name"

That last one is the purest example -- he renamed a body of water and then complimented himself on the rename. The "people call it" construction is doing a specific job every time: it creates the illusion of consensus around something he alone believes, or distance from something he very much said himself.

The underlying claim is also nonsense.

Trump said "drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent" at a January 29 White House briefing, but experts called the assertion ridiculous, invented, or involving disingenuous numbers meant to deceive.

"It wouldn't be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth," said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. And notably, a 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States. It isn't. And the Trump numbers keeps shifting -- he's said 94%, 96%, 97%, and 98.2% at various points.

what do you call the "sea/see" thing academically or psychologically?

Several overlapping concepts apply here:

Projection of ignorance -- The classic "a lot of people are saying" construction is what linguists sometimes call a distancing hedge. He's attributing his own confusion to an unnamed crowd so he can explain it without owning the original ignorance. It's face-saving through deflection.

Illusory superiority / Dunning-Kruger effect -- The irony is that he's spelling out S-E-A to sound authoritative and clarifying, when the very fact that he felt the need to do so reveals the confusion was his own. Someone who never confused the two homophones would never think to clarify them publicly. The performance of intelligence actually advertises the deficit.

Compensatory verbosity -- A well-documented pattern in his speech: when uncertain, he doesn't go quiet, he adds words, repetitions, and elaborations ("by sea, by ocean, by the water, you know") as though volume substitutes for precision.

Confabulation -- This is the clinical-adjacent term. Confabulation isn't exactly lying; it's the brain filling gaps with plausible-sounding material, often without awareness that the gap exists. Trump regularly produces figures (97%, 25,000 lives per boat) that have no factual anchor but feel convincing to him and his audience in the moment.

Is it stupid? Childish? Or performed?

Probably all three operating simultaneously at different layers. The confusion itself may be genuine -- this is a man with a demonstrably limited reading life who processes the world aurally. Homophones trip up people who don't encounter words primarily in print. The performance of explaining it is where the compensatory behavior kicks in -- an attempt to reframe the gaffe as expertise. And the political tribalism around it means his base hears "he's so relatable, he explains things plainly" while everyone else hears "he didn't know what 'by sea' meant."

None of that amounts to clinical proof of cognitive decline. Trump's allies argue that his tangents, riffs and verbal detours are part of a long-established political style. What is clear is that in 2026 every stray Trump sentence is being dissected for signs of either cunning or collapse.

The honest answer: the line between "he's performing folksy" and "he genuinely didn't know" blurred a long time ago. At this point they may be the same thing.

The academic frameworks are useful for dissecting the mechanics, but they can also inadvertently dignify what is, at its core, exactly what you said -- a man of limited intellectual depth who has spent 80 years developing workarounds to avoid being exposed. The spelling out of S-E-A isn't a cognitive symptom or a rhetorical strategy. It's what a guy who didn't read much and got confused by a homophone does when he's standing at a podium and the words just come out.

What makes it politically durable is the audience. His base doesn't hear inadequacy -- they hear a plain-spoken man cutting through complexity. That's the one genuinely shrewd thing about it, though I'd argue even that isn't calculated so much as accidentally discovered over decades of bluster. He found out early that confidently wrong lands better than quietly uncertain in certain rooms, and he never had reason to update that.

The tragedy -- and it is one -- is that the office requires the opposite. Precision, intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity. Every "by sea, S-E-A" moment is a small but real reminder that the gap between the demands of the job and the man filling it is about as wide as it gets.

I so look forward to intelligence returning to America with leaders of knowledge, education, wisdom, accuracy, precision of speech and, democracy.

The return of intelligence, knowledge, education, wisdom, and precision of speech to American leadership -- and with it, democracy itself -- cannot come soon enough.

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.

Respect Is the Foundation of Citizenship — Not a Reward

I have what some people might call a strange orientation. I believe respect is foundational. Not optional. Not conditional. And not something you earn only if you behave or think the “right” way.

The President of the United States and the government, work for US, we do not work for them. That seems to get lost a lot anymore.

Donald Trump & MaGA, our national disgrace

In a functioning democracy, citizens owe one another basic respect simply by virtue of shared citizenship. That obligation is mutual. It runs horizontally between neighbors and vertically between the public and the state. When that respect breaks down, everything downstream degrades with it.

This is not a soft or sentimental idea. It is structural. Systemic. So when it goes wrong, bad things happen. As we're seeing today under Donald Trump and under his Republicans, all who seem to think we're theirs, but they are not ours. 

Let's take a quick look at global trust.

2026 Edelman Trust Report / Barometer

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that global trust is fragmenting rather than simply declining. People increasingly distrust those who do not share their values, identities, or information sources, leading to social insularity and the breakdown of shared reality. Trust in governments and media remains weak, while business is still relatively more trusted but under pressure. Optimism about the future, especially for the next generation, continues to fall. Overall, the report warns that when societies lose common ground on facts and legitimacy, democratic cooperation and stability become much harder to sustain.

Trump, is not helping. He's exporting his nationalistic authoritarian tendencies now to the world.

Citizenship Requires Mutual Respect

Citizens must respect one another if a democratic society is going to hold. That doesn’t mean agreement. It doesn’t mean approval. It doesn’t mean silence in the face of harm. It means recognizing the humanity, agency, and dignity of the person on the other side of a disagreement.

People aligned with MaGA politics are not stupid. Mostly.

Reducing millions of people to that caricature is lazy and counterproductive. It is the first step of fascistic dehumanization, toward totalitarian power. What is true is that MaGA thinking often operates within a narrow scope — simplified narratives, grievance framing, and a tendency to collapse complex systems into enemies and slogans.

Limited scope, however, is not a moral failing. Disrespect is.

And disrespect has become a defining feature of MaGA political culture — not disagreement, not conservatism, not populism, but contempt. Contempt for fellow citizens. Contempt for institutions. Contempt for expertise. Contempt for the idea that other Americans might be acting in good faith.

That contempt did not arise in a vacuum, but it cannot be excused by grievance either.

We have, through ever poorer funding starved education, through allowing a festering subculture addicted to victimhood to bloom, to be weaponized by an autocratic career criminal, and blossom into overtaking and controlling a major political party.

Government’s Obligation Is Even Higher

If mutual respect is the baseline among citizens, then government actors carry an even greater obligation. Law enforcement, civil servants, judges, corrections officers — all exercise power on behalf of the public. That power must be restrained by respect, or it becomes abuse.

This is where the Constitution matters, not as an abstraction, but as a moral boundary.

The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Yet in practice, American punishment is often cruel and entirely usual. Our prison system is designed less around rehabilitation than degradation. When people are caged, neglected, psychologically damaged, and then released back into society, we act surprised when recidivism follows.

That surprise is dishonest. You reproduce what you model.

Once the state deprives a person of liberty — citizen or not — it assumes responsibility for that person’s physical safety, mental health, and basic dignity. Anything less is not justice; it is abandonment disguised as punishment.

Profit and Punishment Do Not Belong Together

For-profit prisons are a moral contradiction. When incarceration becomes a business model, abuse is no longer an accident — it is an incentive. The same logic applies more broadly to essential public institutions.

Some functions exist precisely because profit should not be the motive. The USPS is one example. Education is another. A society that forces its citizens into lifelong debt to participate in mandatory systems is not acting in its own long-term interest.

Remember Trump’s own statement: “I love the uneducated.” On the surface, it can sound almost wholesome, even inclusive. But just beneath that surface, it is a revealing and deeply troubling admission.

Education correlates with resistance to manipulation. Educated populations are more likely to question claims, recognize contradictions, understand institutional guardrails, and demand evidence. Ignorance, by contrast, is easier to flatter, inflame, and mobilize through grievance and fear. How hard IS it to take a victimhood addicted subculture and enflame into a grievance driven political party. 

Not that hard apparently. as we've seen, if you hit all the right stress points. Even by such a fool as Donald Trump. But, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," just to shut the "baby" up. But that is the most wrong orientation possibly, as it emboldens and empowers the worst behaviors possible.

The strategy is not simply to manipulate the uneducated. It's to use that manipulation as leverage. Once you can mobilize a sufficiently large, uncritical base, you can intimidate or neutralize the checks and balances of government. And once those guardrails weaken, even educated people, professionals, institutions, and powerful actors, as we've seen...become vulnerable to pressure.

As we're seeing today. Some educational institutions have bent the knee, rather than resist. Corporations have accommodated themselves to autocratic behavior. Legal, financial, and media institutions have shown a willingness to comply, hedge, or remain silent in the face of a rogue presidency and a criminal administration. 

CONGRESS, Republicans... to be sure, have not just bent the knee, but are apparently down there, living on their knees under Trump, showing their "soft under bellies" to him in supplication.

This is how democratic erosion works. You do not need to convince everyone. You only need to disable resistance early enough that compliance becomes the safer option later.

In that light, “I love the uneducated” is not a compliment. It is a tactical confession. When government offloads its core responsibilities to profit-driven entities, it isn’t shrinking government. It's evading responsibility.

How Disrespect Scales Into Authoritarianism

When respect erodes at the citizen level, and responsibility erodes at the government level, something has to fill that gap. What fills it is simplistic thinking, grievance politics, and the appeal of strongmen who promise order without accountability. Perfect for social media today. Shallow thinking, and a lot of it. Low information levels used to make judgements. 

The advent of the Stupid Society.

Authoritarian figures thrive in environments where civic understanding is weak and contempt is normalized. When politics becomes about dominance rather than coexistence, rather than decency and community, democracy becomes unintelligible to large portions of the public.

This is not an accident. It's the logical outcome of a culture that replaces respect with punishment, complexity with slogans, and responsibility with blame.

Respect Is Not Weakness

Treating people with dignity does not excuse bad behavior. It does not mean tolerating harm. It means understanding that a society built on humiliation and contempt cannot stabilize itself.

Respect is not a reward for compliance. It is the minimum requirement for coexistence.

If we want less violence, less extremism, less recidivism, and less attraction to autocrats, we have to stop pretending that disrespect is strength. It isn’t. It’s corrosion.

A democracy that forgets this does not collapse all at once. 

It decays — slowly, visibly, and then suddenly, all at once, it collapses and whoever is in power at that time, as total power over all.

I wish us the very best. And we can have it. IF we just pay attention. See what we are doing and not doing, and NEVER shut up about it.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Poorer Citizens, Richer Corporations Equals a Poorer Nation Overall

Originally, companies, now massive corporations, have been exploiting our nation since the Great Depression. The groundwork for this was set at America’s founding. And somehow, we have been thanking them for it. Why?

I've talked about this recently: Corporate Thought - The Corporation, 14 Years Later: The Thought That Ate the World

As corporations have taken more and more profits from both the public and the government, our nation has invested less and less in the things that sustain us. Our infrastructure, education, and public health have all been left behind. 

To distract us, corporate interests have pushed one of our major political parties to make tax cuts a priority. The claim is that it helps people keep more of their income, but in truth that income has already been rerouted to corporations. The result is a government that can no longer keep up with the demands of time or the needs of its people.

Look around. Bridges are failing. Roads are deteriorating. Schools are outdated and struggling to meet global standards. Ignorance is rising, and people are teaching their children that evolution is a lie and that the world is only 6,800 years old. How do you think that happens? Because we have stopped investing in knowledge, in science, and in progress.

We must pay our taxes, not as a burden but as an act of shared responsibility. Government needs to function properly so it can maintain what individuals and corporations will not. That also means people must be able to live decently, earn enough to build and improve their lives, and still contribute fairly to the system that supports us all.

Meanwhile, monopolies are reappearing, even though laws were written to prevent them. Comcast’s merger with Time Warner, two of the lowest-rated companies for service, shows how consolidation limits competition and degrades quality. In too many cities, one company controls access to the internet, entertainment, and communication. Many of these providers also own the content they deliver. That does not create progress. It creates control.

Monopolies do not exist to make our lives better. That is what governments are for. Corporations exist to make shareholders richer. Governments should never serve that purpose.

Speak. Complain. Protest. Serve. Until government becomes what it was meant to be: a force for the common good.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Corporate Thought - The Corporation, 14 Years Later: The Thought That Ate the World

Back in 2011, I wrote a blog (Occupy Your World - 2011) that “The Corporation” — or more precisely, Corporate Thought — had infected our culture like a cancer. I first started talking about it when I graduated university in 1984. My older brother asked me, "OK, so what did you learn? What should I be watching out for?" I thought it an odd question as I'd learned so much. But I thought about it said, "The corporations. More than countries, start watching them closely." 

A decade later he reminded me of that conversation and said I had been correct.

I warned that what began as a legal fiction designed to organize production and protect owners had metastasized into something more insidious: a mindset. A way of thinking that valued profit above all else, even above life itself.

Fourteen years later, I wish I’d been wrong.

Corporate Thought: The Quiet Religion of the 21st Century

In 2011, “Corporate Thought” was still something you could name without being laughed out of the room. Now it’s simply the default. Governments are run by CEOs or those who want to be one. Schools teach “personal branding” before civics. Healthcare is optimized for shareholders, not patients. The human being — that messy, emotional, unquantifiable thing — is now a data point, a “user,” a metric to be mined.

When I said Corporate Thought had infected our culture, I didn’t realize how fully it would colonize our language. We don’t even talk like citizens anymore — we talk like middle managers. “Scalability.” “Monetize.” “Brand loyalty.” “ROI.” We talk about people like products, and about products like people.

The result is a society incapable of moral imagination. Everything must perform. Everything must scale. Even compassion must show “impact.”

It didn’t stop at business. Corporate Thought crept into our schools and our churches — the very places meant to nurture minds and souls, not markets. Education now functions like a corporate training pipeline, producing “career-ready” workers instead of critically thinking citizens. Metrics replaced curiosity. Creativity got labeled “disruptive.” Children learn early that compliance earns approval, and questioning the system is a liability.

Religion fared no better. Many congregations now resemble franchises more than faiths, with branding strategies, merchandise tables, and “growth targets.” The gospel of compassion has been quietly repackaged as the gospel of prosperity — salvation by way of quarterly performance. Even worship feels algorithmic: lights, music cues, applause. It’s Corporate Thought wrapped in stained glass, a business model disguised as belief.

And from that corporatized faith grew something even more dangerous: the merger of evangelicalism with nationalism, a branding campaign that sold political power as divine right. What began as moral language twisted into a management strategy for control — a way to sanctify hierarchy and erase dissent. Christian nationalism has invaded government, law enforcement, even the military, wrapping political ambition in the language of salvation. It’s not faith guiding policy anymore; it’s ideology masquerading as religion, a corporate hostile takeover of the sacred and the state alike.

The 2011 Blog Was Right About Healthcare

I wrote in 2011 that the healthcare system wasn’t “broken” — it was working exactly as designed: for profit. That’s still true. Only now it’s turbocharged by private equity, algorithmic triage, and “wellness metrics” that rank you as a risk before you’ve even sneezed.

Corporate Thought turned medicine into a business plan, and that plan has eaten the doctor’s soul.

Work, Life, and the Vanishing Dream

I also asked in 2011 why we couldn’t have four-day workweeks, long vacations, early retirements. The answer came, loud and clear: Because there’s no profit in it. 

Government should work not just to protect but to better the lives of its citizens.

Today, “work-life balance” is a marketing phrase for apps that track your pulse while you sleep. The same corporations that stole our time now sell it back to us as “wellness subscriptions.” The dream of retiring at 50 has become the nightmare of gigging at 70.

And About Cannabis…

Here, at least, there was progress — partial, imperfect, but real. Cannabis is now legal in most of the U.S. and globally normalized. You called it in 2011: the end of prohibition was inevitable. It just took a few more waves of economic desperation and corporate co-opting.

But even this victory has a shadow. The “Green Rush” was quickly absorbed by — yes — corporate thought. Weed is now a billion-dollar commodity owned by the same conglomerates that lobbied to criminalize it decades ago. The revolution was branded and sold back to us in recyclable packaging.

2025: The Year of Reckoning

We are now watching hopefully the final stages of Corporate Thought — its own self-consumption. The planet, the workforce, and the markets are exhausted. Climate lawsuits are coming for Big Oil. Antitrust is back in political vocabulary. Unions are rising again, not because of ideology but necessity. The machine is running out of parts.

And yet, people are remembering what you hinted at in 2011: that it’s not corporations themselves that destroy us, but our obedience to their logic. The quiet surrender of our humanity to “efficiency.”

Maybe, Just Maybe…

In 2011, I ended by saying, “Maybe, lighten up. Better times may be just ahead.” At the time, we had President Obama — and another term to follow in 2012. Democracy felt steady, even hopeful. But beneath that optimism, darker forces were gathering. 

Those shadows finally erupted under Trump as POTUS45, were held at bay during the Biden years, and have now returned under a criminal Trump POTUS47 administration — a test of whether American democracy can survive the very forces it once empowered. 

In 2025, I’d say: maybe wake up. Better minds may be just ahead. With the election of November 5th, 2025, hope springs up as the authoritarian, the Corporate Thought, is being restrained and hopefully made more aware in the general populace and we'll finally get this all under control. The old guard is too old, their beliefs outdated. 

We need to let younger minds rise and give them space to lead — to move forward where we’ve stalled. The goal isn’t to turn government into communism or socialism, but to finally let it become what it was meant to be: not a servant of toxic capitalism, cronyism, or broken conservatism, but a true instrument of democracy and the common good.

The same revolution we needed then. back in 2011 — moral, cultural, not merely economic — is still waiting. 

The question is whether we’ll take it before Corporate Thought finishes digesting its host. US.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Reclaiming America from the People Tearing US Down Who Wanted to...Make It Great AGAIN?

If we’re ever going to get this country back together — not back like MaGA wants America "back", but forward into something more cohesive, functional, and humane — then we have to clean house.

• Donald Trump has to go, ASAP.
• The GOP needs to be scrubbed and reoriented toward reality.
• Democrats need to get their act together.
• Our national motto has to return to E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One.
• The Second Amendment and the gun insanity tied to it have to be addressed.
• Unconstitutional militias — meaning all of them — must be dealt with.
• Congress must get younger.
• Conservatism needs to be cleaned up.
• Education must be funded, functional, and valued.
• We also have to face some hard truths:
• We can’t keep being allergic to taxes if we want a nation that works...government, education, and social services can only function when we actually invest in them.
• Media must be held accountable for disinformation.
• Campaign finance reform is essential...dark money poisons everything.
• The Supreme Court needs real ethics rules and term limits.
• Climate action can’t be optional.
• Healthcare has to stop being a financial death sentence.
• Voting rights must be universal and protected.
• Civic education has to teach critical thinking and citizenship, not consumerism.
• And maybe most of all, we need to start holding people accountable not just to laws, but to basic decency.
• Cancel culture and extremism on both sides calm down naturally when the deeper rot...corruption, fear, greed, and ignorance...finally gets cleaned out.

So...
✅ Donald Trump HAS to go, ASAP.
✅ The GOP needs to be scrubbed and reoriented toward reality
✅ Democrats need to get their act together.
✅ E Pluribus Unum” MUST return ASAP.
✅ In God We Trust must be removed from government.
✅ The Second Amendment and the gun insanity tied to it have to be addressed.
✅ Unconstitutional militias — meaning all of them — must be dealt with.
✅ Congress must skew younger.
✅ Conservativism has to be cleaned up.
✅ Education must be funded, functional, and valued.
✅ Allergy to paying taxes must end now.
✅ Hold people accountable to more than laws.
✅ Canceling people and extremist tactics.
✅ Citizens United, gone.
✅ Abortion legalized nationally
✅ Cannabis legalized nationally with better standards and control for potency, etc.
✅ Supreme Court ethics/control
✅ Gerrymandering, ended or somehow made to be sane, so...ended.

So, we have things to deal with…

• Media responsibility
• Campaign finance reform
• Climate issues are real, deal with them, we were, until Trump.
• Healthcare, single payer
• Voting rights, obviously
• Civic education, absolutely
• Public service, unquestionably
• Criminal justice, for profit prisons ended.
• Privatizing everything as conservative ideal ended.
• Cultural respect
• Citizen respect
• Social Media (which couldn't have gotten so bad if things above had previously been dealt with)

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