Happy 4th, my book is out.

 Fort Wayne: A Novel is out. 

Here it is on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Chapter One of FORT WAYNE: A NOVEL

 

CHAPTER 1

SAMARA

You know how at funerals, they only say good things about the deceased? This is how I'm going to talk about my childhood, which is thankfully over. I met Avery Baker when we were in special ed together. He had wild, dark brown curly hair and sharp angled eyebrows. Whenever I noticed him looking at me, it was like he was trying to figure out what to do with me.

 

Rumor had it that he killed another kid and somehow got away with it. Some versions of the rumor had him beating a boy to death in front of the class, other versions had him stabbing a girl. But every version involved multiple eyewitnesses watching him getting arrested. And yet there he was, in class and on the bus with me and other kids.

 

Would the powers that be really let a killer finish high school? How could they be sure that he wouldn't snap again? His very presence made me curious. And if he were to snap again, it would have been better if he came after me instead of someone who wanted to live.

AVERY

Everyone who grew up in Fort Wayne remembers that one little blonde girl who went missing and ended up on national television. Nobody in Fort Wayne remembers Ronnie Barker. Nobody gave a shit about him. Not even me, not at the time and it's too late to give a shit now. But his story deserves to be told. It's not what you wanted to hear about, but it's shorter than my story. And maybe it kind of explains how I turned out.

Ronnie sat next to me in kindergarten, first grade, third grade, and fourth grade. Our names were next to each other in alphabetical order. He was fat and he smelled like smoke all the time. I hung out with him at recess, not because I liked him but because he grossed out all the other kids who wanted to fuck with me.

In middle school, he would buy my Ritalin for $5 a pill. I hate drugs, and I refuse to take them. But it seemed like such a shame to waste them, and $5 is $5. This is why I never considered him to be my friend. Many arcade machines of the era warned us that "WINNERS DON'T DO DRUGS" and "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS DO DRUGS". Well I took that to heart and decided that Ronnie could not have possibly been a winner or my friend because I was totally letting him do drugs.

He did make people laugh sometimes, although he stole jokes from me. The school bus driver would set the radio to a station that played love songs and country music. The girls liked it and the boys hated it. I told him once, "Boy band music is like sucking dick. Country music is like sucking your dad's dick." He would repeat this over and over again to everyone else. The other kids claimed that he was admitting to giving head to his own father. I'm not sure if he ever knew his father.

In the 7th grade, he developed bad acne that made him repulsive to all the girls he was starting to have feelings for. I didn't date anyone at all before that point in middle school: flat chested tweens were no match for the busty porn stars in the magazines that I swiped from Dad. I let Ronnie borrow the July 1991 issue and he never returned it. All those magazines are gone now, all the same articles and pics are online, but I still remember that. I forgave him, because I was making $70 a week from him.

One day on the bus ride home, he opened up his dirty Detroit Lions backpack that I used to give him shit about.

"Look in here," he said with a smile.

I looked inside. I just saw his Spanish book that he liked to draw graffiti in, some old comic books, and his three ring binder with the ball point pen drawing of Pamela Anderson.

"Ronnie, I don't want your help with homework."

"Look closer." He opened the bag wider. There was a metal grey thing among the papers. If he was this proud and this secretive, it had to be a weapon. Since it didn't look like a knife, either he had a gun or wanted me to think that he did.

"Is it real?" I whispered.

He nodded. The two girls in front of us were chatting about last night's episode of Beverly Hills 90210. Monica and Stacy were just pretty enough to get me to stop thinking about my porn stash, but I didn't really have anything in common with them. They didn't look like the type to have a porn stash.

"Where did you get it?"

"I saw a car drive up and toss it in the dumpster at our apartment. I didn't recognize the car, but it had Illinois plates. I figured it would be something that he didn't want nobody to find if he came that far just to throw something out right before trash pickup. He had it wrapped up in a plastic sack with some other garbage, thinking that nobody would look through it. But I found it."

"Does it work?"

"Dunno. Bout to find out."

He pulled the gun out and I flinched.

"You're scared," he teased. He put the gun up to the right side of his head. He closed his eyes. His face was blank, neither smiling nor frowning, in a way that I only saw when he was taking a test and I was trying to copy off of him.

"I feel like I'm about to step through a door." Stacy and Monica giggled, blissfully unaware of what was happening right behind them. Part of me wanted to tell them to duck just in case. Part of me wanted to invite them to watch.

"Ronnie, we go through doors every day. The school has doors, the bus has doors, my house and your apartment have doors-"

BANG! It was so loud that at first I thought it was a bomb disguised as a gun. Bright red blood and goo covered the shards of the bus window. Ronnie groaned, then sank out of his seat to the floor. The girls in the seat in front of me saw this and started screaming.

"Stop setting off firecrackers!" yelled the driver. "I will stop this bus if this happens again!"

Poor Marty the Bus Driver. I never learned his last name, but word got around that he was a Vietnam vet with PTSD. So of course, kids had been lighting off firecrackers on the bus since August. Maybe it was divine intervention that kept the bus from burning or crashing, but I don't know why a kind and loving God would allow middle school kids to have free will.

Stacy got up and ran down the center aisle. "Marty! Marty! Avery just shot Ronnie!"

"Sit down!" Marty yelled.

Monica looked at me and the red smear on the glass. Her eyes got wide and she ducked. "Stop the bus!" she pleaded.

Marty did stop the bus. Some kids scrambled out of the back emergency exit, which set off an alarm. Other kids ran towards the front. One grabbed the door lever and opened the front exit. Marty got up from his seat. I was the only one he saw who wasn't trying to get away. He saw the blood on the shattered glass, then bolted out the front door.

There were abandoned backpacks and books on some of the seats. One black shoe with a bow on the toe sat in the middle walkway. I went out the front exit, looking for a girl with one bare foot so I could tell her she left her shoe behind. But all the kids were gone. A line of cars was waiting behind the bus, obediently waiting for the stop sign on the bus to be retracted. I saw Marty shuffling away as quickly as a man with an artificial hip could be expected to. He walked up to the driver’s side of the blue station wagon immediately behind the bus and banged on the window.

“That kid has a gun!” he yelled while pointing at me. “He shot another kid! We have to get out of here and find a payphone!” The driver allowed Marty to get into the back of the car, and then sped off, with tires squealing. All of the other cars behind the bus followed suit, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t normal for a school bus to have its rear emergency door open.

It didn’t feel right for me to leave Ronnie behind on an empty school bus with its exit alarm going off. But I figured there wasn’t anything I could do for him, so I just walked the rest of the way home.

Thoughts on AI

I'll go ahead and disclose that I've played around with AI image generator to make silly images like my cat fighting in WW2 or the Indianapolis Colts winning the World Series. I've decided to put a freeze on that because I'm at a point in my life where I'd just rather make more friends than enemies.

I'm old enough to remember when most people didn't want computers in their homes. There was even a time when I didn't want my own cellphone. I was 26 when I first signed up for one in 2005. We didn't see a need to be constantly connected with everyone else back then. We still had books, magazines, newspapers, vinyl records, cassettes, CD's, TV's, and radios. We had lots of ways to stay entertained. But computers started creeping into homes. Your nerdy friend might show you how cool America Online was, and maybe you'd snap up his old PC cheap when he wanted to upgrade. Eventually we got to a point where the luxury became a necessity. It's a big crisis now when your computer won't boot up, unless it's backed up to the cloud and you can access your data with your phone. We were afraid of becoming dependent on technology, and yet here we are now, a nation of digital junkies.

We can talk about AI generated entertainment. If you work in entertainment, someone should have told you up front that job security isn't a thing. You will likely have to tend bar or work in a warehouse to make ends meet if you want to be an actor. However, there will always be demand for human generated content. I don't use AI to write my stories for the simple reason that I can do a better job on my own. But I think some people might be worried about the possibility that one day, they might discover a new book, read it from cover to cover, decide it was the best thing ever put to print, recommend it to all their friends, buy all the merch, watch the Netflix miniseries based on it, and then find out years later that the story was AI generated. It would be like taking someone home from the bar and having the night of your life and finding out in the morning that they are married or they only make $40,000 a year. 

So yes, I have used AI for memes, but I'm never going to use AI to write. I'm not going to put "No AI Used" on the cover of my book because that's like putting a "No Crack Sold Here" sign in front of my house. Trolls have accused me of being a bot in the past and I'm sure they will again. I'll just roll with it.

A common objection I hear about AI is that data centers consume a lot of water. A data center is being planned in my town, and it would use water from the same source as my house. If there was a drought and push came to shove, I would expect the city would cut off the water to the data center before letting people die from thirst. Because it takes three days to die from dehydration, that would be two days more than it would take a mob of thirsty people to rip open the water main that leads to the data center. I think my own town will have it figured out when it comes to water, so I think we're good on that front and I hope other communities with data centers have it figured out as well. Other countries could build more desalinization plants to increase the world's supply of potable water. So I don't think the water conservation argument is very compelling.

Another objection is that AI uses other people's art to generated prose and images. If you believe your work is being used without your permission, then you are welcome to file a lawsuit for damages. But AI firms could get around this ethical and legal issue by using public domain works to train AI. They could also pay artists for the use of their portfolios. I can see some artists cashing that check if the rent was due and they were low on options. But they are never going to admit that to their friends. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing that fair use might be a defense if you see an AI image that looks way too much like your IP.

But even if the problems of water usage and plagiarism were solved, what it really boils down to is that lots of people just hate AI. Personally, I don't want to talk to a machine like it's a person. I don't want to talk to Alexa or Siri. Machines don't need personalities or moods. They need to function exactly they did when I first started using them and continue to do so until I don't need them anymore. And I'm not a fan of all the uncanny valley images of Jesus walking around in the present day. To be sure there were lots of humorous images that I found funny, but there is so much absolute crap that gets cranked out.

A company might have paid someone to design a new logo in the past, but now they can just enter a prompt and find options that would serve the same purpose. Companies are now using AI to make ads, training videos, and even wall decorations. Some are using AI to make critical financial decisions. Does it make it better or worse if you get laid off by an app instead of a person? A lot of this is just outsourcing responsibility. "I didn't want to lay you off, Bob. The app said we had to!"

So while my own feelings are nuanced, I get why people hate it deeply, and they have a right to try to avoid AI content. Just saying that you hate it is unlikely to result in a ban. If the President is using it openly and corporations are pushing it, then it would appear that generative AI will be around as long as COVID in one form or another. It's a issue that you might be able to mitigate with great effort, but never fully solve.

I do thing there should be a social media platform that does not allow AI content or bots. It would have to be moderated by humans, and those humans would have to be paid. So it would likely have to be a subscription based model. Like if you wanted to sign up for the platform and break its rules, you still have to pay for the privilege of getting permabanned. If you want to create a new account from scratch, you got to pay again. It might be a bare-bones, 90's bulletin board experience, but I think it could work.

Red and Blue (Short fiction)

 

I woke up to find Sheila Nellis, my old high school crush from decades ago, standing in my bedroom in a red sling bikini and six inch Lucite heels.

At first I thought I was dreaming because she still had her braces and her hair was in a Karen bob that nobody under 50 had anymore. And I would never admit even anonymously online that I found Karen bobs and braces to be as sexy as a bikini.

And Sheila was happily married and lived two states away.

She smiled with a mouth full of metal. "Do I have your attention, Seth?"

"Sure."

Suddenly she was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans.

"You already know that I'm not Sheila. But you aren't dreaming either. I'm more real than you are. Say My name."

"You're Satan."

She smiled. "For as long as I've known him, he has never admitted to anyone who he is. Try again."

"You're an angel."

"That's not a name, and you're way off. I'll give one hint, and one more guess. There is only one of Me."

The way she enunciated that first person pronoun was the final proof.

"You are God,’ I told Her.

She nodded.

“Sorry that I was an atheist since high school.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t need you to believe until now.”

“Why do you allow bad things to happen to good people?”

She wagged a finger, and Her voice reached a deep baritone, deeper than any man I’ve met “I decide what is good and what is bad. I decide what is right and what is wrong. And I decide who is good, who is evil, and all shades of grey in between. And I allow you all to have your own opinions based on the very limited information available to you. But now that I’ve established my identity, I have orders for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Of course. In one week, all humans with Internet access will be required to vote red or blue. Everyone who votes red will live. Everyone who votes blue will only live if more than 50% of all votes are for blue. You will have from noon to 1pm local time to decide. I’m going to spare indigenous tribes, coma patients, and infants, but anyone with their own email account must participate or die.”

“This has to be an elaborate prank, but it’s pretty dumb too. Nobody cares about that meme anymore.”

“I was inspired by the meme to impose the test. Eight billion people around the world are getting the same message as you, Seth. Good luck.”

She vanished. I assumed it was a dream until my mother called. I answered.

“You saw Him too, right?” she asked.

“I did,” I admitted.

“Good. I thought we were all losing our minds in the hospice. The staff saw Him too, but I thought they were just humoring us. What did He look like to you?”

“He looked like a woman.” I was never going to tell anyone about the bikini.

“Well He looked like that one actor who played Him in that movie. I can’t remember the movie but do you know the one I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Well my friends and I are all voting blue. We’re just about ready to go. God’s calling us all home, so we’re all getting on the bus. But you’re my only son, so promise me you’ll vote red, okay? You have a lot of years ahead of you.”

It was the most sense she made in decades. In a way, that was more miraculous than the divine revelation in my bedroom.

My phone made an irritating beep even though I always kept it set to vibrate.

IMPORTANT PRESIDENTIAL ANNOUNCEMENT, said the notification. Then a video started playing even though I didn’t click anything. The President was standing behind a podium. He was in his suit, but his hair was a mess and he was ghostly pale.

He sighed, then just started talking.

“Look, I saw Him, my Wife saw Him, so we need to talk about this. I’ve agreed to issue an executive order for the development of an official, divinely ordained voting app. All Americans and visiting foreign nationals will be strongly urged to use it to make their selection next Saturday.”

He swallowed hard, then went on “As your commander in chief, I fully support every American’s right to make their own choices…but I’m choosing blue. It’s pretty clear that I have a lot to answer for, so I’m just not going to make it worse for myself. “

I wrote my own post to my 655 followers. “The President is voting blue. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Let’s vote red and save ourselves.”

I scrolled down to find a video from a verified legacy media account. A pastor of a Texas megachurch declared that he and his followers would all voted blue in order to leave this wicked world behind.

My original post got flamed and ratioed. Three likes and 6K comments. I was declared to be a selfish baby killer, even though God had already said infants were exempt.

So I made a video.

“Folks, it comes down to this. You are NOT going to tell your kids to vote blue. And you shouldn’t want them to be orphans, so you’re going to vote red too. But you want to look like self-important martyrs. Like you’re so special because you want to die and the rest of us want to live.”

My video got taken down and my account got suspended. I shrugged. Soon either all those #VoteBlue clowns would either be dead or exposed as hypocrites.

The Pope issued a statement insisting that he personally would vote blue, but his designated successor would vote red. He also urged all pregnant women to vote red.

Nobody was talking about anything else beside Saturday’s vote. The weekly episode of World War Woke had a darker tone as Toxic Teddy interviewed B-list popstar Daisy Short. The interviewed was held remotely; both sat wearing headphones in their own personal studios  with YouTube plaques in the background.

“I’m still processing this whole existence of God thing,” said Toxic Teddy. “I think it says a lot about the way our culture is headed by His appearance. I think that He has had it with all these virtue signaling hypothetical questions. So what if you would take a bullet for the President or the Pope or Bernie Sanders. That isn’t your job. So what if you would give up your seat in a lifeboat for you wife. You never take her on a cruise anyway.”

“I think God wants us all to vote blue as a show of unity,” said Daisy Short.

“Toxic Teddy held up a hand. “Consider this. God gave us free will. He gave us the power to choose. If He just wanted us to die, He’d just kill us. But now He is giving us a choice. We can choose to live by voting red or choose to die by voting blue. People who are suffering will choose blue. If all these healthy do-gooders get what they say they want and most people choose blue, then they are denying a merciful end to thousands of terminally ill patients. On the hand, the results could be even more disastrous and billions of healthy people will die in one weekend.”

“Is that really a bad thing though?” asked Daisy.

“Excuse me?”

“Consider that our planet is dying. We won’t do the right thing and cut back on carbon emissions. It’s not even a matter of limited resources; we are choking to death on our own waste. So God is stepping in, and putting the solution in front of our faces. Everyone in the Global North should choose blue, and everyone in the Global South should choose red.”

Toxic Teddy snorted. “No! Look, the way the original red-blue question was framed, you had to make the choice instantly, without communicating with anyone else. But here, we’ve been given a whole week to talk it out and make the right choice. And the right choice is red! Folks, I apologize. I agreed to interview Daisy a month ago, before all this God thing happened.”

“Seriously, Teddy, people like YOU are what’s wrong with this world!”

“Okay, you’re all going to be dead after Saturday, so I don’t need to care about what you think. Goodbye.”

The next day, a #ChooseBlue activist posted a video of himself beheading Toxic Teddy with a machete. I couldn’t tell if it was AI or not, but the safety algorithms were allowing all sorts of content like that.

Finally, Saturday came along. I voted red. I went online and saw dozens videos of people filming themselves voting. There were way more people advertising their choice to vote blue, but there were still a few reassuring me that red was the right choice.

After the voting was done, my phone started playing a video.

It showed a glowing orb  hovering behind the president’s podium.

“Yeah, he died. You need to know that he lied about voting blue, and he actually voted red. And then he had a heart attack. I didn’t kill him. In fact, I’m not killing anyone, even thought the tally was 48% blue. This was just a test, like that time I told Abraham to kill Isaac. Yes, that really happened, but I just wanted to see what people would do. Please just be good to each other. See you in a few thousand years or so.”

 

We had a new President and we all moved on with our lives. After a couple days, the entire Internet had been scrubbed of content related to the red/blue vote. Nobody I’ve talked to seemed to acknowledge that it happened. There were numerous conspiracy theories about the old  President being poisoned, but people rarely about the glowing orb or the voting. When it is brought up, people will dismiss it at an elaborate prank.

But I KNOW it happened. Because it changed me. Because I now believe in God, and I know He hates hypothetical scenarios. And I am making this my entire personality from now on.

The TMI War

 

This war in Iran will be a way different experience for those watching at home. This would be the first major American conflict where the other country’s civilian population has smartphones. We are going to see things that Trump doesn’t want us to see, the Ayatollah doesn’t want us to see, and that we don’t want to see. If you are already opposed to this war, it’s okay to take a mental health break from the Internet. There will be violent images that will trickle past any filters that Zuck and Musk can put up.

A lot of people aren’t going to be ready for what they are about to see. I’m used to seeing gory pictures from EMT classes, and I still might not be ready. We might get HD quality images of atrocities in our timelines. You might want an image blocker extension for your browser if you have to use the Internet after the next ground invasion.

Still, many people will look at their phones and see pictures and videos of dead and dying soldiers and civilians. Trump will not be able to hide how hideous war is, and he never had any idea of the hideousness that he himself hid from. (He was right to hide from the Vietnam War, his participation would have served no purpose.)

We might reach a point where too much information about war makes it politically unthinkable. This will bother the kind of man who thinks of war as being good for a society. The kind of man who insists that “hard times create strong men; strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” As to prove their point, they elected the softest man ever to stand behind a podium and went on to create the hardest of times in the post Cold War era. Do they propose to break the cycle by ending prosperity forever to ensure that every generation of men will be hard?

Some of us have spent the past four years watching what Ukrainian drones can do to Russian soldiers and vehicles. No leader will be able to start a war again unless he’s willing to let his voters watch that happen to his soldiers. Maybe that will be what creates a new cycle of peace.

Seriously, the draft is dead.

So people who know me know that I voted for Harris, and I think that Trump and Hegseth should be impeached. They should have been impeached for blowing up Venezuelan boats last year, and they definitely should be impeached for blowing Iranian school girls this year.

 But I need you all to understand that you don't have to worry about a draft. You might WANT to worry about a draft, because that places everything out of your control. It won't be your fault if you end up in the military, it won't be your fault if you get killed, but if you survive this war you didn't want and have some cool scars to show to potential sex partners, well that's still way more fun to think about than how to pay your bills next month, isn't it?

Young people should be worried about things like school, employment, and the upcoming midterm election. You still have control over the small things like your grades, job performance and how clean your room is. I think you should get involved in the upcoming midterm elections, but even if you refuse to get involved, it would still benefit you to understand how politics works.

Trump can be unpredictable. We can't be sure what he'll do next, but he is still constrained by certain realities. He isn't Thanos or anything like that. Legally he needs Congress to reinstate conscription and actually start drafting people. Even if he tried just signing an executive order, he'd still need Congress to fund a draft unless he intended to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Here are all the reasons why you won't be drafted.

1. The Pentagon doesn't want to draft you. Sorry, but you just don't have any skills that they are looking for. Your Call of Duty K/D ratio isn't going to cut it. The military would happily teach you those skills, but how well are you going to learn them if you don't want to be there in the first place? Historically, conscripts just didn't perform as well as volunteers. A draft is only useful if a military wants lots of infantry and doesn't care about how good they'll be in the field. Modern militaries care more about quality than quantity.

2. Congress doesn't want to draft you. This is a midterm election year. All members of the House and one third of the Senate are up for re-election and they know this is an unpopular war. They are funding it anyway, and they hope that their voters will care about things other than the war. A draft will make the war a much more important issue. It will make it harder to ignore the war. That is a big reason why they are making registration automatic, so that you won't have to think about it. As an American civilian, you can potentially lead a prosperous life without thinking about the Iran war at all. You shouldn't do that, but Congress is committed to giving you that option.

3. Trump's base doesn't want a draft. Seriously, who wants to be drafted? If you want to be in the military, you talk to a recruiter. You don't sit around the house and wait for them to make you go. So there are Trump supporters in the military, Trump supporters who would join but can't, and Trump supporters who just would rather finish college and work for Daddy than go serve overseas. And they don't see this as hypocritical. See, you have a fire department in your town. Do you support your fire department? Why don't you sign up to be a firefighter? Or maybe you are a firefighter. Do you support curbside trash pickup? Why don't you become a garbage collector? Because even if you think a war is just, the reality is that most people won't have to fight, and won't even be allowed to go even if that's what they want. And hawks tend to grasp this more than my fellow doves.

I'm a Democrat today, but I was a Libertarian for a long time. I've posted multiple opinion pieces calling for an abolition of Selective Service. When I've done so, I've gotten more kudos from Republicans, and more pushback for other Democrats. Which is fine; I'm an old fart and this isn't a dealbreaker issue for me. For better or for worse, many Republicans don't have any problem supporting a war without participating directly. For them, it's like my point about the fire departments. Also, I think they grasp that a draft would result in lots of left wing young people receiving arms and military training, and I think they could do without that.

4. Trump's billionaire donors don't want a draft. Of course they are too old and rich to worry about themselves getting drafted, but they still don't want you getting drafted either. Of course they don't care about you as a person, but they want to be able to exploit your labor and sell you crap. Which is easier to do if you are in the US and not in the Middle East.

In fact, it was laissez faire economist Milton Friedman who convinced Nixon to end the draft in the 1970's. So any movement to bring back a draft is going to have a lot of right wing money fighting it.

The draft is dead.

 

The draft is dead. This death might be permanent.

By the end of this year, young men turning 18 will no longer have to register with Selective Service. Instead, registration will be automatic. Generation X had to register at the post office. Millenials and Gen Z could register online. Gen Alpha won’t have to do anything special, and many probably won’t know that they are registered.

Getting rid of Selective Service has been a pet issue of mine. On the one hand, I’m glad that young men won’t be penalized for noncompliance. On the other hand, conscription may be even less of a credible possibility for young men, so that’s one less of a reason for them to pay attention to politics.

It might seem like poetic justice for Nick Fuentes and Barron Trump to be drafted into the army and sent straight to the front. But that’s just now how the leopards choose which faces to eat. Fuel prices will go up, the economy will suck, and Iran might retaliate in ways we can’t predict. This war will suck for all of us and not just the people who voted for Trump. It’s not fair and it can’t be made fair, but that is how it is.

Conscription is an institution created by warmongers for the purpose of waging war. Peace activists should oppose the draft as a tool of war. We should refrain from saying “draft Barron Trump” because nobody should ever be drafted. No American should be forced to fight in Iran, because no American should be allowed to fight in Iran.

The draft and the current war have always been interconnected, but distinct issues. During the Iraq War, there were pro-war people who were anti-draft, and anti-war people who were pro-draft. Both sides understood the draft would make the war even more unpopular. But a young man who does not want to be drafted might be more motivated to support an anti-draft hawk candidate over a pro-draft dove. Because the issue of the war itself is more important than the draft in particular, we should resist the temptation to propose bringing back the draft. Yes, the thought of a drill instructor yelling at a squad of alt-right incels crawling through the mud is immensely gratifying. But fantasies often make for bad public policy.

For that matter, I refuse to call Donald Trump a “draft dodger”. He is a demented sexual predator who either belongs in a prison or a memory care ward, but at no point in his life did he belong in the Army. Avoiding military service was one of the best choices that he made.

The draft is dead, because not even warmongers have a use for it anymore. We can carry on the fight against dumb wars without it. We can talk about American military casualties, Iranian civilian casualties, higher gas prices, and higher inflation. We can even finally kill the blood-soaked myth that war is good for the economy. But let’s not get distracted by a draft that has no chance of happening.

History blindness.

 There are people who lack a sense of history. I'm not even talking about a lack of education: somebody who only watches TV can still grasp that there was a time before TV when people had to watch plays instead. I'm talking about people who don't seem to grasp that an era ended before a different era began.

Here are examples that I have observed from just talking to people. These are adults who are at least mentally sound enough to have gainful employment, and did not seem at all sarcastic when they said what they said.

1. I joked to a coworker that a different coworker was so old that she had a Confederate birth certificate. He looked at me and said "Really?" as if I was telling him a weird fact instead of a joke. A high school graduate should know when the Civil War happened and the limits of a human lifespan.

2. I was chatting with a coworker who was a Vietnam veteran. He told that he shook hands with a general and got rifle grease on his hands, and the general just laughed it off. I asked him if it was General Westmoreland. The vet confirmed that it was Westmoreland. Another coworker overhears this, looks at me, and asks "How old are you?" with a confused look on his face.

3. At a party, I was talking about a place that I used to work at. At that location, uranium was rolled into bars for the Manhattan Project, and workers had no idea that these bars were being used to develop the first atomic bombs. A woman asked "But you didn't have anything to do with that, right?"

4. A friend of mine was telling me about a guy in her gaming group. She said that he was in his 50's and had served in World War 2. This is especially egregious because I met her grandfather who raised her and had actually served in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruthlessness doesn't work

 So I see a lot of posts on Threads where MAGAhadeen are celebrating the destruction of boats. A couple thoughts. 

1. The war on drugs is an expensive mistake. If you actually care about saving addicts from themselves, focus on treatment and harm reduction, not incarceration.

2. Sinking a boat is only justified if that boat shoots at our people. Boats that try to run can be incapacitated by shooting the engine.

3. The only way to tell if a boat is a drug boat or a fishing boat is to board and inspect it. Because any commercially produced boat can carry both drugs and fishing gear. If you think a boat has illegal goods, you can signal it to stop, shoot the engine if it tries to run, arrest the crew, and seize the boat and its cargo.

4. Ruthlessness is a bad strategy in general. Imagine if a future Democratic president issued an executive order that required police to shoot anyone flying a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika. Most of these people cheering for exploding boats might squawk at the idea of 21st century Nazis being shot in the street. Because they already know where that slippery slope is headed: if I say that all fascists should be shot and I get to decide who is a fascist, then I can just say that anyone who says negative things about me is a fascist.

There are real world examples that prove my point. Germans who surrendered to the Soviets could expect to be sent to a gulag and possibly freeze or starve to death. Germans who surrendered to Americans could expect to sent to a camp in the US and get fed and even take correspondence courses for credit with German universities. So of course they fought hardest against the Red Army, and that's a huge reason why the USSR suffered more military casualties than all of the Axis powers combined. So even when you are fighting the most evil regime in history, it still pays to show compassion to men who can't fight back anymore.

My theory on Trump's endgame

One of the most famous line from Game of Thrones is "Tell Cersei I want her to know it was me."

If you haven't watched the show, Lady Olenna knows she's going to die anyway, so she admits to killing King Joffery, the least popular character on the show. This is relevant, because there are things that people do that they have to keep a secret, but still really want to brag about. They want for a time that is right, even if they have to wait for their deathbed.

My theory is that not only is Donald Trump a pedophile, he is proud of it and want to tell everyone about it.

Remember the 80's and 90's? Donald Trump used to. Back then, if you were gay, you often had to hide it, depending on where you live and the people around you. There were states where two men having sex could be charged with sodomy if they got caught. As a straight person, I would speak out against this injustice and people would accuse me of being gay. Other straight people probably felt the same way, but they didn't speak out because they feared risking their reputations and livelihoods. 

One argument against LGBTQ acceptance was that it would lead to a slippery slope: if gay people were accepted by society, why not accept adults who molest kids? Today, most of us believe that what consenting adult do is their own business, but children cannot consent to sexual acts.

But if a pedophile doesn't view his actions as wrong, then he might hope that his lifestyle might gain mainstream acceptance. He might test to see how other people feel about it by dropping hints. For example, he might talk about pardoning another pedophile, like Ghislaine Maxwell, and seeing how people would react to that.

And if people still don't like it, what could they do about it? Donald Trump could take a gun and sex with a little girl on Fifth Avenue and there is nothing we could about it besides impeach him again. Still, we should impeach him again.

When that fascist got fired

 Recently a fascist got fired for something he said on YouTube. I don't want to look up his name, and I don't want to make him even more famous.

Fascism is an ideology for losers. Julius Caesar standardized the calendar. Napoleon spread the metric system throughout Europe. All Hitler and Mussolini did was start and lose a world war.

But unemployment is a common problem for extremists on both the left and the right: employers prefer to hire moderates. It's challenging enough to get Democrats and Republicans to get along at work. Unless you are independently wealthy, maybe you aren't in a position to tell the world what to do.

We should be allowed to talk about suicide on social media

 First of all, I am fine and thank you for asking. I almost died from natural causes this year. Doctors and nurses put in a lot of time and effort to keep me alive, and my family and my insurance company spent more than six figures on my surgery and rehabilitation. I like being alive, like most people.

Suicide is a taboo topic on social media, to the extent that filters are employed that flag people who even use the word "suicide" in a post. On the one hand, this can deter people from advocating suicide, which is still a problem online. On the other hand, it stops people from seeking help, and it stops people from discussing how certain historical figures died.

The real motivation for these social media filters is that the topic of suicide makes people uncomfortable. If you are the type to use social media to share cat photos and pictures of your lunch while on vacation, then maybe Facebook should provide an option where such content is filtered out. But there are people out there who are hurting, and social media can be a resource where they can connect with people who know them and care about them. Maybe they don't feel comfortable calling 988 and talking to strangers. The algorithm should never stand in the way of people getting help.

Trump just likes violence.

I don’t fault Donald Trump for dodging the draft. That was a particularly foolish war, and nobody was morally obligated to participate. For that matter, I was 22 when 9/11 happened. I never bothered to visit a recruiting station either. I have respect for those who served, I just didn’t make that choice myself. Most Americans don’t. You don’t have to justify it by saying you would have lost control and punched the drill instructor.

But eventually men reach an age where they might dwell on the path not taken. War is like the hot crazy woman that we never worked up the courage to ask out. As if we could have changed her. Recently Trump has reconnected with her online. She sure changed a lot over the years, but she hasn’t exactly improved. He’s way too old to meet her in person, so he just flirts with her via DM’s and sends her gifts.

Trump loves violence like the Pope loves Jesus, but he’s just not a commitment kind of guy. Usually, state governors are more than content to handle civil unrest without federal aid, but Trump REALLY wants to stick his stubby fingers in LA. I can’t even imagine that he thinks this would help him politically; even if SCOTUS lets him run again, he has no shot at California’s electoral votes.

I will go as far to say that he likes being on the receiving end. (Don’t give him what he wants. I oppose the death penalty by both all levels of government and non-state actors.) Remember when he was almost shot in the head in Pennsylvania last year? That could have been avoided in a couple of ways. He could have not run for President, or he could have insisted on an indoor venue that would have been easier to secure. Presidents and presidential candidates should not hold outdoor rallies for the same reason they stopped riding in convertibles. I want Trump to live long enough to stand trial and serve out the sentence, but his choices do make me worried for his safety.

To all folks in LA, protesting is great but violence is not. Having said that, I feel that all law enforcement should wear clearly identifiable uniforms when making an arrest, have their faces visible or at least wear photo ID badges, and drive marked vehicles when making a traffic stop. There might be a murder case in the near future where the defendant will say that he didn’t know the victim was a cop and the jury just might believe him.

That time Trump got shot in Pennsylvania.

 Let's get a couple things out of the way. I have never voted for Donald Trump, and I never plan to. I oppose all political violence, whether it is against Trump or caused by Trump. Those are my opinions, and I know that not everyone reading this agrees with them. We live in an era where cold hard facts are treated like opinions. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks shot Trump with a rifle before being killed by the Secret Service. The FBI and the Secret Service agree on that, and yet people think I'm an idiot for believing them.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed that Biden was trying to have Trump killed. They seemed to have stopped saying this now that Trump is President and presumably has access to all the relevant files. 

Left-wing conspiracy theorists claim that Trump staged the whole thing. There is a picture of the bullet passing by Trump's head. Whatever else you or I think about Trump, I do think that he likes being alive and would NOT attend the rally if he knew his supporters were going to stage a shootout with live ammunition just to help him win Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes.

One common argument is that an AR-15 round would have obliterated Trump's ear. This thinking is likely the result of a generation raised on first person shooter games where every shot that even touches a character's head results in a kill. Real life is a bit more complicated and unpredictable. The bullet grazed Trump's ear: it rubbed against the skin and removed enough tissue to cause the ear to bleed.

"How did his ear heal so fast?" It may have had stitches or it may have been cauterized for all I know. His hair and his hat tend to block the view of any possible scar tissue. I'm not a doctor and neither are most people reading this. Trump could provide us with answers by releasing his medical records. But why would he do that? We're wasting all this energy and bandwidth arguing about it, so it's smart of him to let us bicker.

It's understandable that people might have lots and lots of questions about an incident like this. But we can apply Occam's Razor here and come up with the simplest explanation: one lone nutjob tried to kill a Presidential candidate. It's always one lone nutjob, because normal people tend to like being alive and dislike killing. Normal people also talk too much to be an effective part of a conspiracy.

I do think that the Secret Service should have removed Trump from the stage as soon as Crooks was detected. That is an easy thing to say in hindsight, but the Secret Service tries very hard to avoid the appearance of interfering with presidential politics. Removing Trump from the stage before Crooks had the chance to fire off a shot might have been construed as trying to cause Trump to lose the election.

I also think that Presidents and candidates should avoid having rallies at open air venues. But I'm a safety first kind of guy.

Where did I go?

 So it's been about 10 months since I updated this blog. I'll give you a quick summary.

August 2024- I started pooping blood and losing weight even though I wasn't trying to lose weight. I go to a GI special and get a colonoscopy scheduled.

September 2024- My diarrhea starts getting worse. The colonoscopy tests negative for cancer, but I'm told I have ulcerative colitis. Then on a follow up visit, they run a blood test and my blood sugar was at 400. I think that's as high as the meter goes, so it was probably higher than that. They tell me to go to the ER and I get told that I have type 2 diabetes, Crohn's disease, AND ulcerative colitis.

October 2024- I end up in the hospital again. I went to the hospital for some outpatient tests and they decided that I should be an inpatient. My numbers just looked that bad to them. A couple weeks later, I felt so sick that I called 911. It was a Sunday night, no walk-in clinics were open, so I decided to play it safe. I thought I was dying. The ER doc sent me home. I had to take an Uber. The ambulance ride was about $1500 after insurance. I asked my sister in Indianapolis if I could stay with her for a few days. I didn't even make it one night at her house before I had to go to the ER again. They told me I had salmonella.

November 2024- Still at my sister's house, still having diarrhea. I end up at the ER again and they tell me it's a respiratory  infection. I spent a few days wearing a nasal cannula.

December 2024- I keep hoping that I get to go back to work soon. The GI specialist tells me that I should be good to go back to work on January 20th

January 2025- I'm still pooping a lot and getting weaker. My feet were swelling due to dependent edema. If I wanted to cross my legs, I had to pick up my leg with my hands and drape it over my other leg. On January 14th, I had abdominal pain. I had a friend drive me to a walk-in clinic because I didn't think the ER would take me seriously. The clinic did some tests and told me to go to the ER. The ER sent me to an OR on the other side of town via ambulance. I was told that I had a perforated colon.

So they took out part of my colon and put in a stoma on my belly. I was so weak after my surgery that I couldn't walk. I was also on an NPO restriction: Nil Per Oral. That means I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything for about a week. I got all my nutrients via IV. I didn't watch the Superspreader-In-Chief's inauguration, but I kept seeing him with that Air Force One cake on the news. I kept thinking how badly I wanted cake right then and there. By the end of the month, they let me eat solid foods again and I got transferred to physical rehab.

February 2[25-I get to go home, but I don't get to go back to work yet. I'm not supposed to lift anything over ten pounds and climbing the stairs is a challenge.

March 2025- I get to go back to work. I still have to poop into a bag on my belly. I still have to wear a glucose sensor and take insulin.

April 2025-There is a woman in my life who insists we are strictly platonic. I give her platonic foot rubs and platonic backrubs. I take her to platonic restaurants where we eat platonic food. She won't let me meet her other platonic friends because she doesn't want them to know how platonic we are. We spend more time arguing about petty stuff than I did with my ex-wife. But she still keeps coming over to my house to watch TV. This is like the friendzone but with extra responsibility. Her chief complaint about me is that she can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or autistic when I talk.

May 2025- I think I'm done with my latest novel. Before I start querying, I saw that I haven't updated my blog in 10 months. So here you go.

Could a future President tweet out child porn?

 The SCOTUS immunity ruling is REALLY bad. Consider that it applies to every president, not just Biden and Trump. Consider that it not only protects the President from being charged with a crime as a result of an official act, it also prevents official acts from being used as evidence.

This could incentivize criminals to run for President. Consider wealthy pedophiles like Jared Fogle and Jeffery Epstein. There has to be more of them out there, we just don’t know who they are yet. One of these perverts might get the idea that if he was President, then he could indulge his illegal fetishes with impunity.

Consider that the moment he files to run for President, most people are going to give a candidate a huge benefit of the doubt every time an alleged victim steps forward. Her word against his word. So he could make it all the way through a campaign and possibly even win the election before the public figures out that this guy belongs in prison.

But once his hand touches that Bible on January 20^th, he doesn’t need to hide who he is anymore. He could tweet out images of child porn and those tweets would be considered official acts. He couldn’t be charged with sharing the images, he couldn’t be charged with having them, and the images couldn’t be used as evidence of the abuse that took place. And as President, he could pardon other child pornographers.

Forget becoming a dictator. This court ruling could enable a President to single-handedly legalize child pornography. And we all have Donald Trump to thank for this ruling.

Candidates who get arrested during campaign

My best advice for political candidates of any party is to don't do the kinds of things that will get you arrested. On the one hand, it leads to increased earned media coverage and can energize your base. On the other hand, it doesn't sit well with swing voters.

I have voted for three candidates who got arrested during their campaigns. Even though it didn't stop me from voting for them, I would have preferred they didn't do the things that led to their arrest.

First up is Michael Badnarik (L), who ran for President in 2004. He got arrested for trespassing when he showed up uninvited at a debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry. To be sure, he would have lost the election anyway, so this publicity stunt could be seen as a calculated risk or a Hail Mary play, depending on who you ask. Personally, it's not my style of campaigning because I like sleeping at home every night. But I voted for him because I was a yellow dog Libertarian at the time.

Matt Kelty (R) was arrested during his Fort Wayne mayoral run in 2007 for lying on his campaign finance forms. His perp walk was on the news. I voted for him anyway because I was mad about the proposed ballpark in downtown Fort Wayne. He lost in a landslide. After the election, he plead guilty to the felony charges but didn't have to do any time. But his status as a felon prevents him from serving in state or local elected office.

Tom Henry (D) was the one who beat Matt Kelty in 2007 and became mayor. He soundly defeated three other Republicans in 2011, 2015, and 2019. In 2022, he announced that he was running for a record fifth term as mayor of Fort Wayne. Then he got in a crash and wrecked his city-issued Chevy Impala. He had been drinking and blew a 1.5, so he was arrested for DWI. But he accepted responsibility, pled guilty to the charges, and paid for the damages. With the case behind him, Henry was re-elected, but by his lowest margin of victory in a mayor's race. It hurt him politically, but he survived the election. Sadly he died of cancer this year.

So getting charged with a crime isn't necessarily a dealbreaker for many voters, but it doesn't help a campaign either.  Candidates with criminal charges should either resolve the charges before the primary or drop out of the race altogether. Serving in elected office is a privilege, not a right.

Don't give Trump money

I don't believe in vote-shaming. If you voted for Trump, that is your business. If you feel like telling me that you are planning on voting for him again, whatever. Just don't give him your money. Going back when he started those photo ops wearing that stupid red hat, his early fans were saying "At least he won't have to raise money to campaign!" Maybe he didn't have to, but he did anyway. To be clear, all competitive Presidential candidates are wealthy, and also raise campaign funds. Trump isn't special because he's rich, he is special because he has name recognition. I grew up in the 1980's, and I knew who Donald Trump was before I knew who Bill and Hillary Clinton were. I also knew who Saddam Hussein was, so don't confuse fame with virtue here. For the past 40 years, in order to be a successful Republican presidential candidate, you have to have been famous during the 1980's. This is the real reason Ron DeSantis' campaign went nowhere: he was just some elementary school kid back then. Maybe they'll run Alf next.

Anyway, he has been successfully sued for over $450 million dollars this year. There are other lawsuits that might push that total over half a billion. Trump's net worth is $2 billion, so imagine giving away 1/4 of everything you own to people you don't like very much.

I'm trying to put myself in MAGA's shoes, and imagining that happening to a celebrity that I like. Remember when Katy Perry got sued over Dark Horse? Well it got overturned on appeal. But this was probably the one celebrity court case where I felt bad for the wealthy defendant. I dealt with it by focusing on my own real life, and not sending money to Katy Perry so she could pay her bills.

Contributing to a political campaign is one thing. It's actually illegal for candidates to use campaign funds to pay off a personal lawsuit unrelated to a campaign. (Which means Trump will probably try to do that anyway.) So people are taking the extraordinary step of setting up GoFundMe accounts to raise money so Trump can pay off E Jean Carroll and the state of New York.

If you are the kind of guy who has to wait until pay day to have spending money, you shouldn't send any of it to Trump. If you have any credit card debt, you shouldn't send any money to Trump. If winning $50 on a scratch off ticket gets you excited, then you shouldn't send any money to Trump. If his vast wealth can save him, so be it. If he slides into bankruptcy, that is something you need to make peace with. You need to look after you.

To put $450 million in perspective, the Trump campaign spent $774 million trying to get Trump re-elected in 2020. So figure his campaign would have to raise that much for a competitive campaign. So imagine all the money you donated in 2020 that you won't get back, and now you have to donate all that again plus way. way more money. The MAGA folk are talking about raising over a billion dollars for a candidate who couldn't win an election back when he was still President. All of you should be saving your money and energy for whatever comes next.

My wife left me.

We are still married, for now. I'm adult enough to know that As her husband, I believe that her happiness is as important as my own. And yet she isn't happy, and I want to address it.

I'm having trouble understanding why she left. There is a communication issue, to be sure. Here is a story about why I love her.

She bought tickets online for a movie with her money. We got to the theater, and the doors were locked. There must have been a staffing issue with the pandemic. Mistakes happen. We go back the next day, and I insisted on getting a refund for the tickets. She didn't want me to bother the theater employees, even though we were clearly in the right. She would have preferred to eat the cost of $30 in wasted tickets rather than cause a moment's inconvenience to a service worker. Regina is the anti-Karen. and that is what I love about her. I still got her money back. I just showed them that we bought tickets for a day that they were closed, and they didn't fight us about it. They gave us movie passes, and we used them to watch the movie.

I like to think that she is learning to stand up for herself.

How to react when they want to do something dumb?

Sometimes a loved one wants to make a life altering decision, like taking up an expensive hobby, moving to a different state, or making a career change. And then I'm presented with three options.

1. Try to talk them out of it. (Their response is that I am trying to kill their dreams. Never mind that this is one of multiple conflicting dreams and goals that they presented to me within a short time frame. I am the Dreamkiller.)

2. Encourage them in their passion. (Tomorrow, they're going to say that I'm pressuring them into doing something that could ruin their life. As if I have something to gain by them failing.)

3. Leave it completely up to them. (Obviously it's clear to them that I don't care about anything they have to say.)

It's even more fun when they bring up, say, becoming an astronaut even though they have never been on a plane because they are afraid to fly. And now it sounds like I'm mocking them, but they never had any serious plans towards becoming an astronaut so why did they bring it up, so yeah, I guess I am mocking them.

And now they are going "I NEVER SAID I WANTED TO BE AN ASTRONAUT" and of course you didn't, because this story isn't about you in particular. It's about a lot of people I know who dream way, way too big. Like maybe the schools should stop with "anybody can grow up to be President" nonsense and just go with "anybody can grow up to be stable adults who pay their bills and don't have some kind of crisis every month".