GMO Yeah

Hi. Today I’d like to address the plight of the poor lonely downtrodden…..scientist. Everyone these days is an armchair scientist. It doesn’t matter if they have a PhD, an MD, a degree from the school of hard knocks, or (God forbid) an English degree. What kind of loser gets an English degree? Oh wait…. Fortunatley obtaining an English degree should allow you to write a very eloquent letter of apology to your parents.

But kids, what if I told you there was an issue out there which has a fairly strong consensus among the experts and yet only about a 50/50 consensus among the public? And no, I’m not talking about the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Tree of Life, I’m talking about climate change. If the scientific community and Leonardo DiCaprio say it’s real, that’s good enough for me. But approximately 0 percent of Rush Limbaugh listeners believe it’s real even though 99 percent of them believe Hillary is a mass murderer and Obama is an ISIS spy. (NOTE: this is based on a non scientific poll).

Actually I just dug up a real survey which said 63 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans consider it a very serious issue. Our President-elect opined that it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. And if you think he’s not a science expert, just note that he saw Interstellar. Half of it anyway. He got bored and told his assistant Chris Christie to load up video clips of him berating Bret Michaels on Celebrity Apprentice. That’s how he got pumped up for his rallies.

But before you leave, this blog is not about climate change or its deniers! That seems like too settled an issue to even be worthwhile. But what if told you there was another issue that apparently has a scientific consensus yet many don’t believe in? I’m afraid to even say what it is. Deep breath……GMO’s.

This English major has no firm opinion either way but I will say that I’ve come to realize climate change and GMO’s are very different. To be honest, I started to question my assumption that GMO’s are bad when I stumbled on a statement made by the celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. This guy is an astrophysicist, so maybe even he is out of his element on GMO’s, and perhaps his “celebrity scientist” status should make us scratch our heads—as with the celebrity physician Dr. Oz, whom many believe is a pill peddling quack. Those qualifiers aside, Tyson said being anti-GMO is being anti-science no less than being a climate change skeptic is being anti-science. He also said that the very notion of non GMO food is a myth because we’ve been modifying food for millennia through selective breeding of animals and crops. The apples we eat are far sweeter than wild apples not because we discovered ones that way, but because we made them that way through our own manipulations. The only difference with modern GMO’s is we are now doing it in a lab, but that shouldn’t scare us. Maybe it’s playing God, but we’ve been playing God all along. We just changed the venue.

Oh boy. This means that if one is a climate change believer and a GMO hater, one can’t use the same argument to defend both: I trust the scientists. In fact, to be anti-GMO, it seems one has to essentially mimic the right wing argument against climate change: scientists are often wrong, scientists might be on the payroll of corporations that bribe them into saying what they want, etc. It’s the hoax argument. But my pave pounding research (you guess it: Googling at my computer) indicates Tyson’s GMO opinion isn’t the outlier, it’s pretty much the mainstream scientific view. GMO's have been studied and found to be harmless by the EU, the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One method they used was to compare incidents of cancer in the US where GMO foods are everywhere and the EU where they are almost nowhere. They found no differences. Ditto many other diseases. Listen, no one is more cynical than me, but can they all secretly be on Big Food's payroll?
Or could GMO's actually cause cancer but they just haven't been around long enough to do their damage? A person who has smoked for 20 years is less likely to get lung cancer than a person who has smoked for 30 years--which is longer than GMO's have been on the market. Beats me.

But another problem: supporting clean energy as well as supporting organic food seems tricky. One is forward looking, the other is backward looking. Electric, solar, and wind energy represent a technological advancement over digging up liquefied pre-historic fossils buried in the ground and using them to fuel our SUV’s. But electricity and batteries are also a less “organic” form of energy. Oil isn’t produced in a lab; it has to be found in nature. It’s just the recycling of old life for modern usage.

Favoring organic food production is the opposite: it’s saying the old way was better. All food was once organically made—because science hadn’t figured out how to produce GMO’s any more than they had mastered the electric car or the smartphone. Clean energy is progressive technology being championed by progressive thinkers. Organic farming is regressive technology being championed by progressives. The former says, “The past is a gas guzzling nightmare we have to awake from in favor of a brighter, cleaner future”, the latter says, “Things were so much better in our grandmother’s day before modern science poisoned the well, so let’s return to that organic Eden before the GMO serpent ruined everything”.

But what are GMO’s anyway? Genetically modified organisms, but what else? And why do scientists even go through so much trouble? Much of it has to do with the two arch enemies of farmers: pests and weeds. Traditionally the farmer has had two basic weapons against them: spraying and plowing.

If you polled the average person and said, “Which do you think is more harmful for the environment and human health? Plows or chemical sprays?”, I imagine people would overwhelmingly say sprays. Plows just seem natural. There’s the tractor drawn plow which makes us think of modern country musical masterpieces like She Thinks My Tractor Is Sexy or there’s the more quaint, rustic visions of horse or ox drawn plows. It’s all so country pure. Chemicals? Cancer in a bottle!

But apparently it isn’t quite as simple as that. Tilling the soil with a plow has plenty of its own problems. In short, it’s terrible for the environment. For starters, plows are huge gas guzzlers which release carbon into the air. On top of that, when plows overturn the soil, they release still more carbon into the air. On top of that, it also releases nitrous oxide into the air—an even nastier greenhouse gas that is just no fun to deal with in non-balloon form. The irony? Organic farming in 2016 is more reliant on this traditional method. Can one even be an environmentalist and pro-organic and be intellectually consistent?

Then there is no-till farming. This reduces if not eliminates all the above mentioned problems of plowing the soil. And….it’s primarily practiced by GMO farmers.

So back to GMO’s…. One way crops are genetically modified is to add something called Bt, or Bacillus Thuringiensis: a bacteria with a crystal protein which acts as an organic insecticide. For the last 20 years, most corn, soy, and potatoes have been modified to contain Bt. The advantage is you don’t have to spray these crops with insecticides because they can now take care of pests on their own. The other advantage is Bt only targets certain pests rather than anything that comes within its sight, like a mountain lion or Donald Trump, so it’s apparently perfectly harmless to most insects and all humans. It’s understandable why eating something that contains a built-in insecticide would makes one queasy, but it should be asked: did you have a cup of coffee this morning? Or tea? Caffeine is an organic insecticide. The coffee plant—unlike corn, soy, and potatoes—has this built-in defense mechanism in nature without even needing to be modified. Nicotine and cocaine are other natural insecticides. Is it then ironic to rail against pesticides over a latte in a Starbucks? Should pesticide fearers start with quitting coffee or perhaps cutting back on freebasing cocaine as a New Year’s resolution? Also organic famers use Bt as well—in spray form.

A second GMO tactic—and this is the most controversial one—is modifying crops so they will be resistant to herbicide sprays: the most famous/notorious one being Roundup or glyphosate which is made by the shadowy and evil multinational corporation Monsanto. They also created Roundup Ready genetically modified crops which are advertised as being immune to any toxic effects from Roundup spray—but the weeds around them will be destroyed by it. Monsanto has intellectual property rights on Roundup and Roundup Ready crops AND genetically modified, Roundup resistant seeds are sterile, so instead of being able to re-use the seeds the next year, you have to buy a whole new batch from Monsanto. So yeah…..a huge proprietary money grab? Probably. And many screeds have been written about this from many a Macbook….with their proprietary ports and accessories that Apple would love to sell at a Genius Bar near you.

So in one case genetic modifications allow the end of the need for spraying (Bt modified crops) and in the other they create a built-in immunity to a chemical spray (Roundup Ready crops). And reduced plowing? Win, win, and win. Of course anti-GMO people say GMO’s don’t in fact facilitate no-till farming, it's grown independently from them. They also note the problem of weeds developing a resistance to glyphosate similar to the way microbes mutate to develop immunities to antibiotics. They also say organic farming allows for more crop rotations vs. single crop monocultures and this is beneficial to the environment. So…..I don’t know. I’m not a scientist or a farmer. But I can write you a killer 5 page essay on Moby Dick.  

GMO’s have also been created for other purposes. The insulin that is provided to diabetics is a synthetic GMO whereas at one time it was pork insulin—obtained, you guessed it, only by slaughtering pigs and taking insulin from their stomach linings. (Why did Ozzy Osbourne never think to do that on his Bark At The Moon tour?). There is also something called golden rice which has been genetically modified to contain beta carotene—a precursor to Vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is a big problem in developing countries; it kills an estimated 670,000 children under the age of 5 each year. This product is still in development. GMO sweet potatoes are also being developed that should resist a virus that destroys African crops—it may save countless lives. GMO’s are poison we are told, but boy do they sound like medicine to me--at least in some instances.

So…..I don’t know. I mean I’m supposed to view GMO as the most evil and scary acronym in the English language next to ISIS and GOP but I just don’t know if I’m seeing indisputable evidence for it. Couple this with another fact: GMO crops have much higher yields than organic crops. Higher yields mean, yes, bigger profits for greedy factory farmers, but they also reduce the need to carve up more land for farming to get the same production of food. Also, the world’s population is exploding. What if organic advocates got their wish and we reverted 100 percent back to the older, less efficient, lower yield (albeit more natural) methods? Would this actually make world hunger and starvation a bigger problem than it already is? Maybe we miss this factor because here in the first world we just don’t see real starvation. Is GMO fear…..dare I say it?.....a first world problem?

There is the remaining question of the toxicity of sprays. Yes, Roundup is toxic but it’s far from the most toxic spray. And one assumption I had before I started researching this was that organic food/farming was free of pesticides and herbicides. Chemical free food! Isn’t this what most organic marketing claims or at least implies? It’s not so. Both types of farming use chemicals. In a world with weeds and pests, there is just no way around it. Over 20 types of sprays are regularly used by organic farmers. And organic sprays are often less potent than synthetic ones so they have to actually spray crops more often. “But it’s natural, so it’s okay”. True….but cocaine is natural. Heroin is natural. Earthquakes are natural. Steve Bannon is natural. Maybe the poison is in the dosage, not whether it's natural or synthetic.

And remember that Chipotle E Coli outbreak? This happened shortly after they went (mostly) GMO free. Maybe not a coincidence. A study showed that diseases like E Coli and salmonella are actually more common on organic farms. Probable reason: bacteria is transmitted through fecal matter. Organic farmers only use manure as fertilizer. GMO farmers use manure as well but they add synthetic anti-microbial agents to fight against diseases like E coli. Organic farmers skip their flu shot, you might say.

And remember….organic food isn’t just a “movement”, it’s a business model. Yes, Monsanto, General Mills, and ShopRite are large for-profit corporations, but so is Whole Foods. And the organic industry is trying to do something that’s always tricky: offer the same products at a higher price. So they have to make the Mac vs. PC argument. They have been pretty successful at this since the organic industry is now a $52 billion global business. Sure, Big Food has lobbyists, but so does the organic food industry. Can we be sure that at least some of the anti-GMO arguments are anti-science fear mongering motivated by the pursuit of the almighty dollar? The flip side of anti-science greed driven practices by the likes of Exxon/Mobil? And if we believe GMO farming reduces the need for gas guzzling tractors, are Big Oil and organic food……..strange bedfellows?

Whatever the truth is, it’s understandable where this all comes from. We live in a very sick society. Obamacare premiums are going up because they underestimated just how sick people are. As a disability examiner for Social Security who reads medical records every day, I could have told them people are really, really, really sick. It’s only natural that people would look around and try to find the cause. And it’s reasonable to ask whether GMO foods are a major culprit. Especially since this is uncharted territory. The explosion has only happened in the last 20 years but already 88 percent of corn, 93 percent of soy, 90 percent of canola, 90 percent of sugar beets are GMO. The whole push to label GMO foods actually seems pointless at this point because unless it has that certified organic label, guess what? It’s GMO. (And maybe even with the organic label). And before you say, “Dude, I skip corn in my burrito bowl and I haven’t had a beet since Thanksgiving ‘93. I’m in the clear!”. No you’re not. A huge percentage of our food uses corn, soy, canola, beets, etc. as ingredients. So our food is overwhelmingly GMO. But….scientists just haven’t been able to find evidence that GMO’s are harmful. In some cases, they may have nutritional advantages. Could the future prove them wrong? Sure. Scientists once told us the earth was flat. They once took a stance on smoking that went something like, “Just don’t go too crazy and smoke a carton a day. But other than that, smoke up! In fact, I’ve seen three patients in a row and I think it’s about time for me to light up. I’m having a serious nic fit”.

But while we do have a sick society, does the GMO obsession help or hurt the problem? I read a really interesting article a few months ago in The Atlantic. The author argued that GMO fixation from food purists like Michael Pollard was possibly harmful. He noted that while the evidence is just not there that GMO’s are harmful, the evidence that obesity is harmful is overwhelming. Many believe it's worse than smoking. He also said that given the cheaper prices of fast food and processed food and the fact that basically all of our food is already GMO, the anti-GMO crusade does absolutely nothing to help the segment of the population most prone to obesity and poor health: poorer people. For better or for worse, they are going to eat GMO food. So maybe we shouldn’t sneer every time McDonald’s announces a new menu item that is lower in calories or fat. Maybe such adjustments may actually do more to improve our nation’s health than Whole Foods is ever gong to do even if it’s not our food. That’s a very pragmatic, unsexy argument. It appeals to none of our sense of food ideals. But maybe it’s correct.

Whether it’s GMO’s, or the anti-gluten movement, the anti-dairy movement, Paleo diets, vegan diets…. Sometimes I think we make this more complicated than it has to be. I think we all know how to be healthy—it’s just that it’s not the answer we want to hear. Ten years ago—motivated actually by the fact that I got on a scale and realized I was about 20 pounds heavier than I thought—I went on a diet. It had nothing to do with GMO’s or any fancy specialty diets involving demonizing entire food groups. I found a website called The World’s Healthiest Foods which lists….the world’s healthiest foods according to them. It follows a pretty traditional model: all the food groups are allowed. Some dairy is allowed—just not ice cream. Grains are allowed—just not white bread, etc. Oh and no mention of coffee or booze—just milk and water. For a few months I adhered pretty strictly to this. I lost about 20 pounds and felt great. But I didn’t stick with it….because it was hard! People know how to be healthy—just don’t eat chips, cookies, ice cream, pizza, etc. Don’t drink beer. But that’s no fun! Maybe more fun: make non-organic food the enemy. So just drink organic beer! Eat organic pop tarts! Or make gluten the creation of Satan himself. Gluten free brownies or pizza anyone? That’s a bit easier. Maybe when it comes to our diets we look for scapegoats because simply cutting out all the common sense bad stuff just seems to damn unbearable! What are we, Mormons?

So don’t worry about GMO’s….or do. Again, I don't actually know what the f%^k I'm talking about, but I have a keyboard.

If you will excuse I have to walk down to the grocery store. Anyone need anything at Whole Foods?

I Don't Think We're In Kansas Anymore

This may not be Stranger Things, but I think we’re living in the Upside Down. Only Eleven can save us now! Nothing we think we know about America makes sense anymore and this election proved it. Do we even know what “Democrat” and “Republican” signifies anymore? At least in the northeast, it used to be that Republicans (broadly speaking) were rich people. Democrats (broadly speaking) were poor and working class people. Guess what happened this year? In Connecticut, Hillary carried much of filthy rich Fairfield County while Trump carried filthy Torrington and Enfield. Are Republicans losing the rich? Are Democrats losing the working class? And if so, do our conventional working definitions of D and R even have meaning anymore?

Republicans on social media love to boast that they were the party to end slavery while evil, hypocritical Democrats fought to keep those whips lashing. This is true—but not true. Democrats and Republicans have switched places. At one time, the Republicans were the progressives, Democrats the conservatives. Republicans always carried the north, Democrats always carried the south. Is it possible we’re in the beginning stages of yet another flip?

Let’s talk about the 1888 election! Don’t get too excited. I stumbled upon this because, like the 2016 election, the Electoral College winner lost the popular vote. William Harrison defeated the incumbent President Grover Cleveland. And like this year, trade was arguably the biggest issue of the campaign. Just as free trade opposing Trump beat (mostly) free trade supporting Clinton, free trade opposing Harrison beat free trade supporting Cleveland. And then as well as now, the issue was the protection of American jobs. Outsourcing wasn’t yet a thing in 1888 (couldn’t E-mail the factory foreman in Shenzhen) but they thought if you didn't impose tariffs on imports, consumers will have every incentive to buy foreign goods and that will hurt the American industrial worker. Today the problem is that without tariffs, you create every incentive for the companies themselves to physically move the entire factory overseas and just import goods back here without having to worry about a tariff. Yes, the benefit goes to the consumer: if the goods are cheaper to make and there’s no added tariff, the savings is passed to the consumer and they are cheaper to buy. But what if they are actually more expensive in the end—because the potential buyer is now out of a job.

But here's what is interesting: free trade opposing Harrison was also a champion of Native Americans and he passed our nation’s first anti-trust law to limit corporate monopolies….he was a progressive. Free trade loving Cleveland was a conservative.

Flash forward 128 years. Who was the progressive? Clearly Hillary, right? The conservative? Clearly Donald “Women Should Be Punished For Having An Abortion” Trump, right? Except it was Trump who took the traditionally progressive stance on trade and Hillary who took the traditionally conservative stance. So are we sure we even know who is progressive and conservative anymore? It was the Democrat Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA in 1994, it was Republican George W. Bush who signed the free trade deal with China, it was Democrat Obama who has been pushing for the free trade expanding TPP. In 1888 as well as 2016, the conventional wisdom has been that free trade hurts the American worker, but for decades neither the “working man’s party” of Democrats nor the more traditionally business/management friendly Republicans have practiced a trade policy aimed at protecting the American blue collar worker at all costs.

And this……cleared a path for both the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the primaries and the even less expected election of Donald Trump. If you’re a blue collar worker and you feel you’ve been forgotten and left for dead, it’s probably because you’ve been forgotten and left for dead. D’s and R’s alike told you to lose their number. You're living in the world of Stranger Things, but you're not even Will. Where's Winona Ryder to hysterically blow holes through the wall looking to find you? No, you're Barb, my friend. "Barb's missing? Barb Who? Meh, win some, you lose some".

In short, Democrats can blame Joe Six Pack Trump loving guys in rural Pennsylvania all they want, but they should probably blame themselves for the mess we now face: a racist, sexist reality TV host as President. But our President-Elect may have bad hair, but he’s no dummy. He saw that there was a wide segment of the country Democrats had let slip through their hands and he cast himself as their champion and savior. He called them the "forgotten people", his opponent called them a "basket of deplorables". Because the unwashed politically incorrect masses offended her (in some cases justifyably, I mean have you seen Twitter?) she had her Mitt Romeny "47 percent" moment. But like the showman and salesman he is, Trump saw a product almost everyone had stopped selling. But he knew there was still an untapped demand for it, so he started selling it himself; and unlike Trump Steaks, this product moved off the shelf like hotcakes. So what if the seller a blue collar paradise regained is an Ivy League billionaire real estate mogul from New York City? Out of work Gary from Gary, Indiana will take whatever he can get.

Was Bill Clinton cruel and heartless to abandon workers by signing NAFTA? I’m not sure if it was that simple. I remember Bill Clinton’s theme song in ’92 was Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow. Industry? Factories? Textile mills? Coal mines? Was this the future? Clinton didn’t wanna stop thinking about tomorrow, Obama wanted hope and change. These guys were looking forward and trying to create a brighter future than could ever be found in a dark, dingy, filth belching refinery. Good bye and good riddance to all that. If they were blinded, it was by the sun in their eyes: the morning sun of the brighter, better future that was supposedly dawning in America.

But when does that future get here? And what is that future exactly? Our country began as an agrarian society in which the vast majority were farmers. Then we industrialized and many worked in factories. Now we’ve let many of those factories go to make way for the new economy. But what is the new economy exactly? Ask the average American and I don’t think they know. Everyone understands a farm, everyone understands a factory, but what is this new amazing thing? “Service economy”. What does that even mean? Is it a world where everyone works in an office? And if that’s the case, can we ever really supply enough jobs for everyone? Already computers and automation have reduced the need for many office tasks. Are we all going to become app developers and virtual reality headset salesmen?

If free trade advocates on both sides can’t answer this question in a way that Americans can understand and believe in, they have a big problem. We are willing to follow you into the future, but are we sure we even have MapQuest turned on here? And where do we program our destination exactly? I don’t think any of the free trade / "adios manufacturing" politicians have been able to clearly articulate this and that’s why we’re here. It's why Trump was able to gain so much traction by saying, “F the future. Follow me and I’ll bring back the good old days! Non-GMO food? I prefer Big Macs! Not objectifying women? I run beauty pageants! Oh, and I’ll bring those factories back from China too. I’ll make American great again”. Was this race about Democrats vs. Republicans, a man vs. a woman, or was this a referendum on the future? And did the future lose? The New World Order is collecting dust on the shelves, people want the Old World Order back. No more selling the miracle of CD’s, people want vinyl. “Like boats agains the current, we are ceaselessly borne back into the past”.

And the worse part…..I don’t know the answer to the riddle of the future either. And I have a blog!! Do you? Could Trump be right? Maybe this magical new economy is an illusion after all and our only hope is to try to recapture the old manufacturing base or face permanent problems with unemployement / underemployment. Jobs are always an issue and they are probably only going to become a bigger issue if the trend continues: a steadily rising population and a steadily decrease in available jobs. Job loss due to outsourcing to Mexico and China, sure. But also technology. “Oh you used to be a bank teller? They have an ATM for that now. Oh you used to work in a printing press? Sorry, it’s all on iPads now. Oh, you used to work as a cashier? There’s a self-checkout line for that now. Oh, you used to drive a cab? There’s a self-driving car for that now…..”.

Was allowing the outsourcing of jobs then something we actually couldn’t afford to do? Were we blinded by the light of a future that we hadn’t even sufficiently defined and mapped out? I don’t know and I don’t think a lot of people know and I think that’s why Donald Trump is our President. When people are more scared than hopeful about the future, a past peddler will win.

The words “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” are tossed around often—and these days almost always in negative terms. Usually these ideas seem to be depicted as shadowy, conspiratorial, and evil. But my theory is this: at their foundation both are actually rooted in blind optimism more than evil. It’s an optimism which is believed so thoroughly that adherents to this mode of thinking are willing to charge head first into things—often without a clear plan for what will come next because their optimism soars above any ground level need for a concrete outline or plan. They build the house before building the foundation. With neoconservatives this often applies to foreign policy: the idea of a Pax Americana that we can create through military invasions, removing of foreign leaders, etc. that will re-make these nations in our own image as beacons of democracy and freedom. I think this is what drove the Iraq invasion: the blind faith that we could turn Iraq into a peaceful Muslim democracy and bring peace to America and the middle east. Instead we increased Sunni vs. Shia hatred and paved the way for Isis. Neoliberalism seems to largely involve the blind faith in a new and better globalized economy not driven by the dirty work of farms and factories. (And nationalism). But instead of a prosperous nation of well compensated information age workers, we seem to have a lot of anger and Donald Trump. Hope and faith and optimism are great—but they can never be substituted for a plan. Maybe 2016 America shows the unfortunate consequences of declaring “mission accomplished” when you didn’t even fully understand the real mission yourself.

My hope? The Democrats get a grip, do some inventory and realize they need to change. A party which is vulnerable to Wikileaks love letters to Goldman Sachs…..this can't happen anymore. The Democrats have lost their populist ways and given people too many reasons to believe they have become the elitist party. Again, why did Democrats carry rich Fairfield County but lose struggling Enfield? Yes, the crassness of Trump may have offended the refined tastes of Greenwich residents and yes an underlying blue collar sexism might have turned Enfield's nose against a pantsuit President. But we probably have to look beyond the individual traits of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. There are real reasons for working people to think the Democrats don’t speak for them anymore. And when you look at the national county by country electoral map, you see how narrow their margin for error really is. Almost all of the country is red, not blue. It’s only the population density of the blue, urban, mostly bicoastal areas that gives Democrats any chance at all. Populism, not elitism, is the only hope to widen the base. There are more poor working people than hedge fund managers.

But being a populist isn't so easy. It means checking one's values at the door sometimes. According to an article I read in The Atlantic, Democrats began to stop fighting for unions so strenuously and eventually stopped fighting to even retain unionized blue collar jobs in America largely because new, college educated Democrats in the 70's started looking at union members and saw.....a basket of deplorables. New Democrats were not "break up the banks, help the farmer" Woody Guthrie fans, they were anti-war, pro feminist, pro gay, pro minority. The realized many working class whites....were really none of the above. They were often racists. This caused Democrats to kind of drift away from them. But maybe in hindsight they should have graded them on a curve instead of viewing them from their ivory tower. As long as they weren't going around actually lynching African Americans, should they have recognized that they still were a relatively powerless group who needed them to protect them by keeping them unionized and keeping companies from abandoning them for cheaper labor. They didn't and that may very well be the reason they are struggling so much today and feel so angry.....and decided Trump was better than the Democratic Party. A candidate who himself acts deplorable makes them feel less unworthy than a holier than thou politically correct party who maybe didn't have their back for a few decades because they didn't live up to their sense of decorum and progressive values.

Or……these things will just flip and Republicans will become the new Democrats and vice versa. What if--and this is a big if--Trump actually prioritizes those struggling folks in the Rust Belt and actually succeeds in brining jobs back form overseas? That will mean the Democrats have lost them forever. Or at least indefinitely. Will they then feel that in order to survive, they have to insure they hold onto those rich Fairfield County folks who just voted for them? The ones who used to vote Republican? Rather than scale back their Goldman Sachs coziness, will they then grab a sleeping bag and cozy up to them even more? If that happens, the constituents and the role of the two parties may reverse for the second time in American history.

 But….I doubt it. Trump talked a a big game, but when it comes to his policies? Looks like your standard issue Republican playbook: tax cuts, cuts in government services, “bombing the shit out of them”: things that will help his rich cronies but will actually hurt the southern, heartland, and Rust Belt people he promised to rescue from Obama’s supposed reign of terror over their lives. Only Democrats are really in a position to align a populist rhetoric with policies that will actually help those who are struggling: tax credits to the work working poor instead of tax cuts for the rich, raising the minimum wage, widening health insurance for the uninsured, etc. Right now we have a completely bizarre system where the President-Elect is with the downtrodden common man in name but probably not in practice but Democrats are perhaps with them in practice more than in name.  

People have the power. The donor class can walk you to the door, but only the people can open it for you.

Election Post Mortem

When you’re star they let you do anything you want. Even be President.  

This is all a bad dream, right? Are we being punked? 

I’d like to start out by saying something maybe a little unexpected: there is a small part of me that understands the Trump phenomenon. For one thing, at least before his act got really old, I thought he could sometimes be a little entertaining--in a guilty pleasure sort of way--compared with the stuffshirt Mitt Romney, the cranky old man McCain, the stiff as a board Kerry, the stiffer than a board Gore.... "There you again, Little Marco". "Very low energy guy". I mean it was a little funny at least for a while. John Oliver echoed my thoughts several months ago: "There's a part of me that almost likes this guy. It's just not a part of me that I don't particularly like".     

It’s also easy to say Americans just fell for the richest, loudest, cockiest guy in the room, but the whole Brexit vote this summer suggests that the underlying theme of Trump’s campaign really does resonate immensely with more people in the Western post-industrial world than the elite ever thought. We have a new economy now. Globalization, outsourcing, and free trade have basically destroyed blue collar America. Trump ran a “make America great again” campaign which told all those people who feel betrayed and disenfranchised that he was going to make it better. He was going to avenge the injustices that had been done to them. He was going to destroy NAFTA, destroy free trade with the Chinese and bring back American manufacturing jobs.

And those angry people? In many ways, I think they may have every right to be angry. You’ve been working at a job for years but your company decides to ditch you and everyone you know in their race to the bottom, their never ending quest to get the same work done for less money in other countries. And by negotiating free trade deals which allow American companies to import those goods from Mexican and Chinese factories back here without paying tariffs, the government gave those companies a permission slip to destroy your livelihood—all in the name of greed, cheap labor, higher profit margins, better stock prices for shareholders, campaign contributions, etc. And let’s say you’re 53 years old and have no other skills and probably can’t afford to go back to school because of the insane costs of higher education….. You’re likely screwed. Trapped. Left to file for disability just to avoid foreclosure. You’re angry—and who wouldn’t be?

That very real gripe fueled this. Before Trump—and Bernie Sanders—came along, the bipartisan party line was free trade was awesome, we were going to replace those crummy factory jobs with new cooler jobs and everyone would live happily after. For many people, that hasn’t happened and they just feel they’ve been sold a fairy tale, a bill of goods.

Of course was the old industrialized, non-globalized America really a paradise that’s been lost? Well…no, but time and nostalgia and the inability to replace those old times with something better will tend to distort perceptions. I recently read two rock bios: Ozzy Osbourne’s and Bruce Springsteen’s. Ozzy talks about briefly working in a factory in blue collar Birmingham, England in the late 60's, hating it with a passion, seeing all these lifers who were so miserable that all they could do to cope with the dreariness of their job was get shitfaced every chance they got, and Ozzy dreamed of music as his only possible escape from that hell. Ditto Bruce. His dad worked in a factory in blue collar Freehold, New Jersey in the 60's, was also miserable and abusive, was also an alcoholic…and Bruce wanted out of that town that rips the bones from your back, that suicide rap. He wanted to get out while he was young cause baby he was born to run. And this is the “great” America Trump has promised to give us again.

So globalists like Hillary, Obama, and Bush could justifiably claim there’s no paradise to return to, so why don’t we focus on a better future rather trying to reclaim a lousy, air polluted past? But even a bad job is better than no job. And not everyone has the skills to become an app developer. 

Never mind the fact that this populist champion of the downtrodden is himself a billionaire real estate mogul who wears pink ties, not hard hats and graduated from an Ivy League business school, not a technical school. He told them what they wanted to hear so they anointed “Mr. Trump” one of their own. And never mind that Trump seems far better at diagnosing the problem than prescribing the solution. First he proposed changing trade agreements and slapping stiff tariffs on imports but he seems to have backed off that—probably because that would risk crashing the economy. Recently it sounded like he had shifted to the old Republican playbook: lower taxes, trickle down economics. We’ve seen this before. That will be a benefit to the rich like Donald Trump but I’ll bet Trump a taco bowl on Cinqo De Mayo that that such corporate welfare will be of no help whatsoever to laid off Bad Company fans named Gary in Lansing, Michigan.

Trump the con artist knew what con to play. A brighter future? Nope, people want the past again. Better together? Nope, people want to stay in their own tribes. He played on everyone’s baser, angriest, most fearful instincts and everyone fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Hail to the Chief.

But in every con there has to be a kernel of truth and globalization is a mixed bag to say the least. I think a legitimate case can be made that the average American is not the beneficiary of it. But Trump appealed straight to America’s racist heart by using globalization to fuel anger at those
“rapist” drug smuggling Mexicans and those Chinese who have supposedly"stolen" our jobs from us. Or….there’s the Bernie Sanders perspective: maybe the villain is not the Mexican or Chinese worker. They are just people trying to put food on the table like everyone else. Maybe it’s the greedy multi-national corporations who have allowed themselves to become slaves to Wall Street and their insatiable and insane hunger for growth, growth, growth every quarter which drives companies to look for higher profit margins any way possible—including leaving American workers out in the cold in exchange for cheaper pastures outside our borders. Trump and Bernie were actually telling the same basic story but Bernie went after the big shots, picked on someone his own size. Trump, as his habit, picked on the little guys, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the ones earning pennies an hour. This is consistent with how he picked on Little Marco Rubio, mocked a disabled reporter, and groped women less powerful and wealthy than him….The Donald is all about finding easy prey. He’s like Kramer on Seinfeld wrestling children.

But there’s another aspect of this whole thing that interests me. The aspect of gender. The race fell along gender lines. Trump won among male voters 53 to 41 percent. Hillary won among women 52 to 42 percent. In the last two elections, McCain and Romney carried the white vote, Obama the non-white vote. People still generally vote for their own! (Except me: I voted for Obama and Hillary). Also interestingly this time: Obama got 35 percent of the white male vote in 2012, Hillary just 31 percent. But it’s not just guys. 53 percent of white women voted for Trump! This does beg a question, doesn’t it? Take your typical white person, your Joe Six Pack, does a black guy as President bother them less than a woman as President?

Case in point, when Trump spoke at the Convention Center in Hartford during the Primaries….I didn’t attend. But I did walk outside on my way home from work. Vendors were selling a couple of “witty” T-shirts and announcing what they said to everyone within earshot. One said "Trump That Bitch". Stay classy, Trump fans. The other—parental discretion is strongly advised on this one--“Hillary Sucks, Monica Swallows”. I heard absolutely NO “Get your Make America Great Again T-shirt here!” sales pitches. Again, this suggests Trump fans don’t even love the orange sniffling freak, they just hate Hillary SOOOOOO much?

Now I know it could be said we can’t make any broad inferences about gender or race because we’re dealing with a specific black guy in Barack Obama and a specific woman in Hillary Clinton. In fact Obama’s relative success with white voters could be chalked up to the simple fact that he’s better at making speeches. His recent campaigning for Hillary was a reminder that he’s really more articulate and charismatic than either Trump or Hillary could ever hope to be in their wildest dreams. Can you imagine either carrying off a “Fired up! Ready to go!” chant. Awkward.

That qualifier out of the way, indulging in broad speculation is what I do here! Again, people—including women—voted for Trump in droves. Despite his boast that his star power and Tic Tacs granted him a permission slip to kiss and grab women by the pussy whenever he felt like it. Despite Megyn Kelly, who dared to ask him tough questions about his past statements about women instead of bake him cookies or model lingerie. Our President elect’s response to her: “She had blood coming from her eyes. Blood coming from here….wherever”. The old, “Guys, you know how these women are on their period!”. They voted for him despite the fact that he bragged to Howard Stern that as pageant operator, he and only he can walk in and leer at Miss Universe contestants while they are getting undressed backstage. They checked off the name of the guy who said his daughter is his type and he would probably be dating her if she wasn’t his daughter. THIS GUY GOT 53 PERCENT OF WHITE WOMEN TO VOTE FOR HIM. He is our soon-to-be Douchebag In Chief.

But this didn’t happen in a vacuum. He got these votes against a specific woman with her own specific history. We all saw that Trump’s response to the leaked Access Hollywood tape was a full scale attack on…. Bill.

So now we get to my question—which probably none of the pundits will go near. What role did Monica Lewinsky play in the 2016 election? I mean it shouldn’t have played any role, right? Bill wasn’t running for President, Hillary has never cheated on her husband as far as we know….non factor. No scarlet letter to pin on her. But to what extent do we perhaps still hold women accountable for their husband’s actions? Is it still assumed among many—perhaps even among many women—that of course all men are tempted to cheat, to mess with the intern, but it’s the wife’s job to keep him happy enough so that he won’t. And if he does? Is it her failing? It’s 2016 and what I just said sounds like it’s from the Stone Ages, but is it still believed consciously or subconsciously by many Americans?

And then what do we make of a woman who is cheated on—in this case in front of the entire world—but stays with her husband? Are there some who judge such a woman harshly? Did the sins of Bill Clinton sink Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016? Did their sordid, blue dressed stained history turn people off to such a degree that the thought of them returning to the White House was less a turn-off than letting a guy enter the Oval Office who is a blatant, shameless, chauvinistic pig who would have almost seemed behind the times in the 1950’s?

If any of this has any truth, all I can say is this: it’s still a man’s world. Reading the level of utter hatred toward Hillary on social media—surpassing even anything I’ve seen about Obama—has been pretty eye opening. I don’t think there was this much demonization at the Salem witch trials.  You would swear Lady Macbeth was Mother Theresa compared with Killary. You're telling me this had nothing to do with her gender? But again.....many guys who may be out of work, struggling to get by, living off government assistance, they probably feel powerless, impotent, emasculated. So for them a WOMAN having far more power than them? Being President? It's a major threat to them. Just like scapegoating Mexican and Chinese workers, it's taking out their legitimate frustrations in illegitimate, toxic ways. 

I might have once said sexism wasn’t even a real thing anymore. Granted, my perception might be skewed by working in an office where women are the majority—including management. But this is not the whole world. I mean creating signs about Obama which addressed his race in any negative way would have been completely unaccepted outside of maybe a KKK rally. But Trump That Bitch signs outside raised ranches in leafy suburbs? That was just “a joke”. Another “joke” was told a few years ago when the left was attacking Sarah Palin. People like Howard Stern and Bill Maher called her The C Word. I think Sarah Palin was annoying and unqualified and kind of an airhead, but doesn’t it seem stange that even liberals can toss around the C Word for laughs and continue to make millions and have highly rated shows? Iin stark contrast, Michael Richards—aka Kramer from Seinfeld—attempted to use The N Word for laughs a few years ago in a stand-up routine. Anyone heard from him since? 

Misogyny is real. We now live in a culture where feminism is a dirty word—synonymous with feminazi. It’s almost assumed that any feminist must be an angry lesbian.  We have a world where a well-informed, sane former US Senator and Secretary of State was deemed less qualified to lead the country than a guy with zero experience in elected office but a ton of experience starring on reality TV and selling steaks online.

You can’t make this up.

Oh well, we just have to hope that our system is so strong that even Donald Trump can’t ruin it. Our system of checks and balances does allow for some child proofing. Or, in this case, Trump proofing.

The Internet Sucks (An Internet Blog)

Hi. So here I am again. Blogging. Is there anything more quaint? Asking people to read more than a few words? Who do I think I am!? If our current culture had a name, it would be 140 Characters. This is of course what you are allowed in a tweet. The fine folks at Twitter must have determined this is the absolute outer limit of most human attention spans in the 21st Century. Facebook does have unlimited character ability—but for no apparent reason. People routinely only read headlines of articles before proceeding to comment, often asking questions answered in the article or making statements contradicted in the article. But no one seems embarrassed, they just move on to the next headline to comment on. And as each day passes, status updates seem self- indulgent and laborious. It’s all about the meme. Usually two sentences (or sentence fragments) with pictures!

The dumbing down of America is complete.

But in a stunning upset, I’m not sure if people are dumbed down by advertising or reality TV or Sharknado 6 (at least those things didn’t seal the deal) but by their newfound, unlimited ability to comment. We’re not being amused to death; we’re commenting ourselves to death. Is an apparent freedom actually a noose? What’s more, we are often not commenting on desktops or laptops anymore, but on smartphones and tablets, so even if we did have a nuanced, thoughtful, measured, insightful thing to say, it’s just too freaking hard on a virtual keyboard so you might as well stick to, “Lock her up!”, “SMH”, or “Look, pancakes!”.

Maybe the Internet really was the worst invention ever. I know, “The Internet is only a tool. It’s as good as bad as people make it”. True. But what if some tools tend to bring out the best or worst in us? And what if the Net is a tool that brings out the tool in us?

Take an example from two minutes ago. A Facebook article was posted saying Hillary Clinton had to leave a 9/11 ceremony due to being “overheated” but she is now feeling better. The comments? “Feel better, Hillary”? “Man, this humidity has been a killer”? “Boy, these two year campaigns must be so draining on these poor folks who just want to serve”. Yeah right. A sampling of actual comments from her fellow Americans: “I guess the guilt was overwhelming”, “What a joke overheated??”, “Too bad she didn’t die”, “Time to show those medical records….NOW”, “Way to make the event about her”, “From what I hear it isn’t even hot in NYC today!”, “Well there’s one way to get out of your patriotic duty”, “It's not even that hot!!!! If she can't handle that how is she going to handle other public events as president?!”, “That's one way to handle the heat and pressure. Bail on the American people. Nice example for a presidential candidate”, and finally, “Bullcrap, and I've got some swampland for sale real cheap....”.

And then there were a few others that weren't quite as nice. Ya know....questioning one’s leaders or would-be leaders is healthy. Rejoicing in pure hate at every opportunity is poisonous. It’s not sticking it to The Man--or The Woman, it’s just being a cretin. But it’s the new normal. It’s throwing sand in the sandbox for adults. It’s worse with politics, but it applies to everything. You can read the comments of YouTube videos and see everyone calling each other a “dumbass”, or a “retard” because they have differing perspectives on the artistic merits of AC/DC’s Big Balls or Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off or Apple vs. Android. And I don’t think they are all 13 year old boys. Insulting everyone and everything as a knee jerk reaction is becoming as normal as breathing. It’s an angry online mob. And with more people spending more of their lives online, how much does this influence our thinking and attitudes even when we’re actually offline (that 4 percent of the day). Is the Internet and “social” media making us more anti-social? It is making us meaner?     

That is meaner porn addicts? Let’s say we decide porn is bad. Like, at minimum, not as good of a way to pass the time compared with reading War and Peace or volunteering at a soup kitchen. Did the Internet invent it? Of course not. But did it cause a skyrocketing in porn consumption (and production?). I think that goes without saying. I saw that recently Playboy gave up and said they will no longer feature nude centerfolds. But Playboy didn't have a chance operating under the old model. In the Dark Ages, if you wanted to buy the latest edition of Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler, you needed to WALK UP TO THE DESK AND PLACE IT ON THE COUNTER. And there was a reasonably good chance the checkout person was a 16 year old girl or a 76 year old grandmother. This was a non-starter for most. I’ll stick with Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated, thanks. Or what about video stores? (Remember those?). Up front they had the regular titles—say, Uncle Buck or Chariots of Fire—and in the back there was a curtain. Behind this curtain……..the adult selection. I think most people thought, “What kind of a loser goes behind that curtain? Without hand sanitizer?!”. Creepshow! Now your front door is your checkout desk and curtain. No one even knows. (Unless they have hacked into your computer of course). Four of the top 100 visited websites on planet earth are porn sites. They are….drumroll please…..XVideos, Pornhub, XHamster, and of course everyone’s favorite BongaCams. (I’m afraid to even look). Two of these spring from the US, one from Canada, and one from Cyprus. It’s a global phenomenon. 

Oh and all those mean tweets and NSFW videos can be deadly. There was a recent story about a guy who walked off the edge of a cliff and died in San Diego a few months ago because he was glued to his smartphone instead of watching where he was going. He lived in beautiful San Diego but he preferred the view from his screen! I just found an article which noted that in  Ontario recently distracted driving had caused 38 deaths compared with 19 caused by DUI’s. For all of the deaths caused by drunk driving, the evidence shows smartphones are twice as deadly. Walking and driving is now a life risking showdown with fate.   

Or let’s talk about money. Everyone but the top 10 percent in America is poorer than they were 30 years ago. One reason is incomes haven’t risen relative to inflation. The other reason is costs for things like college tuition, healthcare, and housing have skyrocketed. But what a money drain the Internet is! 30 years ago we didn’t have a monthly Internet bill. Now many of us have two: our home Internet and our smartphone data bill. Some might have three. Plus  there’s the cost of shiny new computer, phone, iPad, etc. You’re not even really buying the device; you’re buying the Internet. 24/7 access to it. Faster, better, access to it on a stunning “Retina HD” or “Super Amoled” display with better battery life so you never have to worry about rationing your use! An Internetless computer was a glorified typewriter. A phone without the Internet is a $50 flip phone. It’s access to this magical parallel universe that we pay so much of our hard earned money for. And even if we suspect that maybe it does us more harm than good, we pay of it anyway for fear of missing out.

And ambivalence about the Internet doesn’t seem to be as rare as we might think. Those “kill your television” folks might seem a little self-important and annoying, but when someone flashes a flip phone instead of the iPhone 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, it’s not uncommon to almost feel a bit of awe and admiration for them rather than pity and scorn. Like, “How do you like do that”? Even in the heart of the enemy’s territory (the Facebook news feed) you see memes like “I’m glad I grew up in a time before technology took over”. I’ve also seen a pic posted more than once of a sign outside a bar that says something like, “No Wifi. Talk to each other. Act like it’s 1993”. This is guaranteed lots of likes:  from people who are clearly living like it’s 2016 because they’re on Facebook . Liking a status which extolls the simple, offline quiet beauty of life in 1993!

So let’s say because people tend to spend as much time staring at their screens instead of talking to each other, it’s made us more disconnected from each other while making us more connected to the Internet--and that the two are in fact mutually exclusive. The irony is that this is driven by our desire for human connection. There’s a famous science fiction writer named William Gibson. I read his most famous book Neuromancer which portrays a dystopian future society dominated by virtual reality. (Also just around the corner if the good folks in Silicon Valley have their way!). He basically predicted the Internet in 1983—although many others did too—and it did technically already exist. (Oh and like so many others, he failed to predict the cell phone. Like no one saw that coming). After reading the book I found an article he wrote about the Internet for the New York Times in the 1990’s about his first experiences using the Internet. He said the first thought you have is, “Are they here?”. “They” being your old school classmates, the kids you grew up with but lost touch with. Did the star athlete end up a millionaire or in AA? What about that girl you had a crush on? Where is she? So he also predicted social media too. In hindsight, it’s surprising the Internet was around so long before social media came to dominate things. That drive to figure out what your old friends and acquaintances are doing was probably always there. In 1974 Bob Dylan said, “All the people we used to know they’re an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives. I don’t know how it all got started. I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives”. In 2016, this is as outdated as all those old song lyrics about “waiting at home by the phone” because now we pretty much know what they’re all doing with their lives. Friend them on Facebook and you can at least get an idea. In fact depending on their privacy settings, you may not even need to freind them! Isnt' technology amazing?

I can recall having the exact same thought as Gibson. I’m embarrassed to say that years ago I even joined this site Classmates.com (which I think charged you to join!) just to see if I could find my old classmates I had lost touch with. They still even send me occasional e-mails begging me to come back. They are like horse and buggy salesmen after the Model T was invented. I feel a little bad for them—but not enough to come back. After Classmates.com came Friendster, then Myspace, then Facebook. Then Google +. Just kidding.  

So do we have a world which has brought us closer to our acquaintances but less close to our friends? Who has time to call when you can text? Who has time to chat with your friends at Happy Hour when you can read status updates about dentist checkups for the kids of someone you haven’t seen in the offline world in 21 years?

A defender of the phone might say, “They’re addictive because they’re awesome. Broccoli is not very addictive. Pizza is addictive. That’s because broccoli sucks and pizza is great.  But this pizza won’t even get you fat so why don’t you STFU and enjoy the awesomeness?”. So I’m only one guy…but here’s a general summary of my smartphone addiction: take phone out of pocket and check the time. I was once so carefree that I didn’t even own a watch let alone a phone! Check Facebook (posts about dogs, kids, inspirational quotes, politics…). Check e-mail. WHY would anyone check their e-mail? They’re all spam now. But I feel compelled to check anyway. All the damn time. I might click the Stocks app and read some of the tech articles. But I hate Wall Street! I click on the weather app and study any changes in the forecast since I last checked 38 minutes earlier. But I hate the weather! Unless you’re about to go to the beach, go fishing, or go to a baseball game, preoccupation with the weather is an unhealthy obsession. A) You can’t control it, B) the forecast is often wrong and/or prone to changing five times, and C) If you live in this part of the world, the weather sucks more days out of the year than not. The only way to cope? Don’t think about it. The Weather Channel didn’t succeed in getting me to care about the weather but my iPhone did. I seem to hate winters more than ever and I think it’s because I keep frequenting the weather apps on my phone and looking at that gloomy cloud icon sometimes accompanied by the rain or snow icon just to add to the despair. I’m not sure if I even hate the weather or the icon! I f#%%%g hate you Steve Jobs! I mean rest in peace of course…..

So maybe we’re often addicted to things that aren’t necessarily awesome after all. These targets of our addiction may just reduce us to OCD suffering bunny rabbits more than anything else without really making us happier or better off, but sometimes we slavishly succumb to  them anyway. I once watched an episode of Behind The Music on VH1 and The Who’s tour manager was discussing Keith Moon—their drummer who died young as a casualty to the rock and roll lifestyle. He said he would wander into bars day after day and “Keith was looking to find something that wasn’t there”. I loved that description. I think it summarizes many types of addictions—possibly including smartphone addictions. What’s really there on your phone that you look at 200 times per day? 99 percent of the time….not much. But we look the 201^st time just to make sure.

And how did we cope before? What did we do in all those spare moments of the day (or semi-spare moments) that we now occupy with our phones? We talked to each other probably a little more. And we definitely talked to ourselves more. Not out loud, of course—not usually anyway--but our thoughts are a form of talking to ourselves. You think of what you’re going to do later. You relive a funny moment from earlier in the day. Maybe you even plan out what you want to do with the rest of your life. Who knows? But maybe it’s those thoughts, that little running interior monologue we have with ourselves that keeps us sane, keeps us human. And can letting our digital devices take over that job potentially reduce us to something less? Like a battery operated toy that used to run on its own energy?

Does smart technology make us smarter or dumber? If you listen to Apple and everyone in high tech, they will always say it’s going to make us so much smarter, cooler, hipper, thinner, sexier, and richer. Are we to believe that as smart as Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Einstein might have been, they would have been that much smarter if they had an iPhone in their pocket? with full Wikipedia access? Or how much better could Edwin Moses have been at Track and Field if he had a FitBit? It wouldn’t surprise me if Einstein thought of the Theory of Relativity while walking home one day. Maybe getting the paper. Maybe waiting in line for stamps. Maybe he never comes up with it today because in that once in a lifetime moment where inspiration otherwise would have struck--that quiet moment of otherwise blank space and silence-- he would be checking out a picture of a healthy but delicious kale salad that a girl who turned him down in high school for being too geeky just posted on Pinterest.

If technology makes us dumber, it’s because it distracts us and starts doing a little too much work for us. It didn’t just start a few years ago, though. Before radio and TV were invented, how did people entertain themselves? They read books. Books are more likely to make you smarter than watching Wet Hot American Summer on Netflix. (Speaking as someone who watched Wet Hot American Summer on Netflix). Before the Billboard charts measured songs and albums by records sold, they measured them by sheet music sold. Technology was once so dumb, the average person wasn’t able to play back music at home on a turntable, let alone download it from their pocket everywhere they go 24/7. So if you liked music you had only one choice at home….learn an instrument and get the sheet music to that great song you heard in concert. Playing music takes more brainpower than listening to it, obviously. Smart people, dumb technology! Plain old newspaper articles used to feature references to Greek philosophers and literary giants, now most headline writers struggle to get “your” and “you’re” right. And let’s not even tak about “a” vs. “an”.

Maybe a part of me actually misses the days before the Internet even though it wasn’t like there were no problems. But maybe a world in which we were required by technological limitations to entertain each other and entertain ourselves more….maybe that was actually a better world. And has it made work more efficient? A couple different times this summer, airlines had a massive debacle which messed up travelers's flights because their computer systems went down. You know what was great about the typewriter? If one typewriter broke it didn’t cause 5,000 other typewriters to break. If you spilled coffee on a notepad, it had no bearing whatsoever on all the other notepads around. Not so computers. At my job I showed up just as we were fully converting to electronic cases and moving away from a kind of hybrid system that used both the computer and paper case files. The average caseloads then were…..about the same. The quality stats were……about the same.

Modern technology. It’s a miracle. 

And the growing income disparity.....are we sure that's not the Internet too? The Internet makes it easier to outsource to China and Mexico and run procurement and monitor parts production from a computer screen--and there goes American manufacturing. It makes it easier to sell everything from an online warehouse rather than employ people in actual stores--hello Amazon, goodbye retail jobs. Middle class/working class jobs gone in the Rust Belt gone, high paying jobs in Silicon Valley gained....         

Technology sucks. 

Now if you will excuse me, I will go back to fighting the urge to pre-order the iPhone 7 Plus. A dual lense camera! A “cinema quality” display! Even better battery life? No freaking way! No headphone jack but $159 wireless AirPods. That's what we call progress! YES. 

I have to calm down.

  

  

Working On (Murder) Mysteries Without Any Clues

Hi! Enough with the fun and games. Today I’m going to solve a murder. Maybe. Or maybe not. Definitely not.

Connie Dabate of Ellington, CT was killed in her home in December 23^rd of last year. This is intriguing to me because it’s my hometown—their house is about 3 miles away from the house where I grew up. She graduated from Ellington High School in 1995—four years after me. I don’t think I ever met her. Her husband Richard Dabate is from next door Vernon. The case is also intriguing because six months after the fact, there have been no arrests. “There is no update” was the curt reply from the police to the press this week. It’s unsolved as far as we know. Investigations take time but six months is an awfully long time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s before making an arrest. So something weird is going on. Your fearless blog writer would like to go through the facts that have been reported. Let’s see any sense can be made of this at all by Detective Doyle. The Shamrock Sherlock? Let’s go with that.  

Proceeding chronologically, in October police were called after someone tampered with their cars: Connie’s car on October 2^nd, Rick’s car on October 9^th. This is probably irrelevant, but it’s interesting that these incidents happened exactly 7 days apart. The calls came on Fridays and both incidents were reported as happening the night before. So two straight Thursday nights. No detail is too small for the keen detective mind.  

Connie’s car had two yellow rags placed in the exhaust system. She told the cops she “believes she know who did it”. Rick’s car had a damaged windshield on the front passenger side. After the second incident, they both said they suspected the same person they had suspected a week earlier.

She told the cops she did not own any yellow rags matching those found in her exhaust system. I doubt she volunteered this, so the cops must have asked her—a suspicious line of questioning which seems slightly odd thought it might just be standard procedure. The trooper also took great pains to report that all evidence indicated Rick’s windshield was smashed form the inside, not the outside. No other cars parked in the driveway were damaged and there no footprints—which would have been visible due to the morning dew.

Rick said he had purchased a surveillance camera after the first incident a week earlier--but had not set it up yet.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly, it seems clear the cops suspected this was an inside job. While it seems incredibly strange to tamper with your wife’s car and then your own car and call the cops to report so-and-so tampered with the cars yet that’s apparently what they thought happened. Otherwise why ask Connie if she owned matching yellow rags? And why make such a point of noting the windshield was smashed from the inside, not the outside? Isn’t this suggesting that if vandals had shown up at their house they probably would have smashed the windshield from the outside while standing outside the car vs. opening the door, getting in the front passenger seat, and smashing it from the inside? If you’re a criminal, why would you take that extra step when presumably you would want to get away as fast as possible? But if it’s your own car, maybe getting in first and smashing it makes more sense and this was a small detail that, if he did it, Rick didn’t think to account for?

The troopers knocked on the door of the person the Dabates had accused of tampering with their cars. They weren’t home. They didn’t try back. That is also odd to me. No, tampering with cars isn’t the crime of the century, but this is sleepy Ellington. I mean that’s about as much action as those boys are normally going to get. This is the place where a cop once stopped me for rounding a corner too sharply on my ten speed. It’s a place where cows breaking loose from their pen at night is the closest thing to a riot they see, unless you count breaking up bonfires and teenage drinking on Green Road. Why wouldn’t they have followed up? Was it because they were positive Rick did it himself and was trying to play them for fools or was just it simple laziness?

Now let’s skip ahead to December 23^rd. This was a Monday. Two days before Christmas. (Obviously). A burglar alarm sounded at 10:15 AM. The cops found Connie fatally shot in the head and abdomen at their home. Rick had “non life threatening” injuries. They also saw smoke in the house.

Trooper Kelly Grant said, "Are there signs this was a domestic dispute? Sure. But again, I'm not going to make that determination. They don't want to say that and then say someone broke in and then later on that it was a domestic dispute. Right now, it's being investigated as a suspicious homicide until we make a determination."

Here is what the obituary said:

“Connie (Margotta) Dabate, 39, of Ellington, beloved wife and best friend of Richard Dabate, and dedicated and loving mother of Richard "RJ" age 9, and Connor age 6, died tragically at her home on Wednesday, December 23, 2015. Born in Rockville, the daughter of Kenneth and Cindi (Stuart) Margotta, she grew up in Vernon and Ellington. She was a graduate of Ellington High School, Class of 1995. Connie earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Connecticut, Class of 1999. She was a pharmaceutical sales representative for Reckitt Benckiser. Connie was a past vice president, and member for many years, of the Ellington Ambulance Corp. She was a loving, cheerful and kind person. Connie was the sunshine of so many lives including….”.

I have tried in vain to find another article I saw a couple month ago with the remaining piece of publicly revealed info that I know of. I hope I get this right. They had some work done on their house and there was a legal dispute which resulted in the Dabates receiving court ordered payment from the builders. Even an amateur detective like me can see that these were obviously the people they were directing the cops to when their cars were tampered with.

So…..since I’m neither a paid nor a responsible journalist, here is where I engage in rampant speculation. This doesn’t seem like it should be such an amazingly difficult case to solve. It seems like there’s only two possibilities: the contractors did it or the husband did it. If the contractors had lost money and possibly business due to bad publicity, they may have either wanted to get their money back or simply enact revenge. If the husband did it, who knows why? But in those situations you can bet with almost 100 percent certainty that an affair was involved, can’t you? Maybe she was having an affair and he decided to deal with it in the most extreme way possible? Or maybe he was having an affair, wanted out of the marriage, but didn’t want to pay child support?

But if he did it, he obviously went about it in a slightly crazy way by leading the cops directly to him. First with self-tampered cars more than two months in advance of a pre-meditated murder to set up a motive for those he was trying finger for the crime, next with the set up burglar alarm and a 911 call. Even smoke! And injuring himself! Did he take such crazy steps thinking he had the perfect fall guys lined up? Was the prior lawsuit against the contractors the ultimate opportunity to get away with murder?

If the contractors did it, it sure seems an extreme way to deal with a money dispute, but stranger things have happened. Tamper with their cars to scare them and when that doesn't yield the outcome you want, resort to killing the guy's wife? The first scenario is out of a murder mystery thriller, this scenario is out of a gangster movie. I just wish the story of the cracked windshield had answered an obvious question: was the car unlocked? If it was locked, clearly the husband cracked the windshield himself. But if unlocked, maybe vandals thought getting in the car first and smashing it from the inside would reduce noise? And if there were no footprints, maybe they thought to cover their tracks?

But again…..the cops don’t seem to think that. They clearly seem to think it’s the husband—as evidenced by the aforementioned trooper’s statement after the murder, their apparent skepticism over the tampered cars, and their lack of follow up in attempting to talk to the contractors after they supposedly tampered with cars. But why? Why did they seemingly jump to the stranger conclusion vs. the more obvious conclusion? An angry contractor who had lost in court and was out for vigilante justice almost makes sense. A husband hatching a cat and mouse, hiding in plain sight scheme with the police so he can murder his wife seems slightly more out there. Something out of a movie.

So as an irresponsible blog writer with zero journalistic credentials, why don’t I lapse even further into crazy theories? The cops were in on it! In league with the contractors! You heard me. The husband wasn’t setting up the cops, the cops were setting up the husband by feigning ignorance! Okay, again, I’ve seen too many movies and I’m just wildly speculating and I kind of doubt my own theory here, but isn’t this what the Internet is for? If it was true, that would explain their desire to hint that the husband himself tampered with the cars, their non-follow through on talking to the people he had accused, and their dragging their heels for six months without making a single arrest in a case which does seem to have enough facts to work with.

And everyone seems to suspect the husband in town. One article quoted a woman who had moved next door to him saying she carries an “extra large flashlight” when walking her dog in the morning. The most recent article quoted the owner of the Chuck Wagon—the local diner, a fine establishment! —saying he was there with his kids last week and no one came near him. Since one of the cops already more or less stated he suspects him too and the whole town suspects him, why wouldn’t you think you can present a case to a jury to get a conviction? Unless you know the contractors did it, you’re in on it, and fear any action at all will expose that but as long as it’s an “unsolved crime” no one will ever know! Or they are not "in on it" exactly but the contractors have some high up connections making them untouchable? Also the press only reported on the tampered cars through a freedom of information request but the article said the police report was heavily redacted. Why?  

I’ve probably lost it completely. Forget that. 

The cops said from the very beginning that no one was in danger. No manhunt of any kind occurred. So we have to infer that the cops knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who did it. Or least they know it was either Rick or the contractors. With the options so narrowed, again, why is it so hard to get evidence for an arrest!? Whoever is guilty, it would seem relatively easy.

Or maybe there’s no great mystery. Maybe state police in north central Connecticut are simply over their heads trying to conduct a homicide investigation due to limited experience. They know who did it, but they bungled the gathering of evidence at the start and now they have no case. And a murder may go without justice. Hopefully I’m wrong. But I believe the most important time to gather the evidence after any crime is in the immediate hours and days afterward. Otherwise, forensics has a nearly impossible job. Whoever did this, was it a stroke of evil genius to time it two days before Christmas--when you could assume many of them would be taking holiday time off from work?    

Damnit. I solved nothing. I knew it.