Arm yourselves!

 A lot of people are talking about arming themselves against the unrest they fear will engulf our relatively safe country. I mean people who weren't already arming themselves and preparing to live in their little fantasy forts when everything collapses. That's fine as far as it goes, but if the apocalypticists get their wish, the period of violence and shortages will outlast the supplies of nearly everyone. The best-prepared of the extremely wealthy will be warlords. Everyone else will live tenuous lives, trying to find a place in their service or a fugitive life avoiding them.

Conflict resolution is difficult at the best of times, and we're definitely not entering the best of times. A slim majority of American voters decided that they're completely finished accommodating anyone they don't like. Some of the voters choosing the dictator cared so little for any of the other branches of government that they didn't bother to fill in any selection below the top spot. They can't wait for that big hammer to fall on everyone that they view as a nail.

Eradication of opposing viewpoints is tempting. Who hasn't had a momentary -- or longer -- flash of rage and imagined carpet bombing an imaginary gathering of opponents in a glorious fireball? There! That'll teach 'em! It might, for a while. But the treatment must be applied frequently. It can get out of control. So we use economic pressure instead. Deny employment and housing to "undesirables" and to people who have failed to thrive in the existing system. As a country, we do use military force and the threat of it. As individuals, armed citizens use the threat of death to stifle disagreement. This is the world they think they want to live in. How soon before shootouts become everyday occurrences? I know they already are, but they're not everywhere yet. How long before we bring back dueling? So many things wrong with that, but it's a natural outgrowth of a society structured on cruelty and force.

Violence can be inserted into society in a number of ways. I'm sure that the people eager to initiate it imagine specific scenes in which they prevail over their clearly inferior foes. When it comes to deadly force, you want to dish it out, not take it. Look at the evolution of warfare: armaments were developed to inflict damage on opponents while receiving as little as possible in return. The ideal battle ends in extermination or rapid surrender by one side. It's not a game. It's pest control.

You might get away with a threat display, but if that fails then what? Your threat is less effective if you yell it from behind a protective object. And that assumes that the object you might hide behind will actually stop a bullet.

Your best defense is often to run like hell. In an unstructured confrontation, it's all variables. Can you run? Where can you run? What can you hide behind? How are you armed? Do you have enough ammunition? Is your adrenaline making you shaky? Are you not as ready as you thought you would be? How can you really be ready for someone trying to kill you?

Whether our country survives this crisis and returns to therapy in search of sanity, or just degenerates the rest of the way, we might consider setting up recreational death facilities where consenting adults can try out deadly confrontation on willing foes in a sealed environment. Forget wussy paintball. The blood is real. Flesh is torn, bone is shattered. Losers die. Even winners might die, depending on how ferocious the exchange was. Whoever draws the last breath is the victor. Just leave everyone else out of your personal drama. But who are we kidding? Dragging in helpless bystanders is part of the fun, isn't it?

Initiators of violence love the power trip. They take control of the lives of everyone around them. Maybe they don't have perfect control of the outcome, but for as long as they present a threat, everyone has to react to them. If they aren't as good at it as they thought, their moment is brief. Just because you start something doesn't mean you will be able to finish it.

Even if you plan to act only defensively, you need to practice, practice, practice, with live rounds, so that your muscle memory is as ingrained as possible with the actual weight and recoil. You need to shoot in different positions and situations, at least some of the time without hearing protection, so you're ready for the actual volume of sound. Or maybe you will get lucky, whip off just the shot you need when you need it, and scamper away to run another day.

Civilization is nice. It's comfortable. Only a fucking idiot looks forward to its collapse and the hell that follows. Tough guys of all genders like to growl that anyone who gives up liberty for safety will have neither. That's one of those logic trails that leads to a scorched landscape of constant killing, as we do nothing to restrain murderous impulses because doing so would mean giving up the freedom to indulge our wrath. Freedom in that case belongs only to anyone ruthless, powerful, well-armed, and skillful for exactly as long as it takes for their luck to run out anyway.

The military forces that defend our very own Land of the Free begin their careers by giving up their freedom. It's a very rule-bound life. Freedom of religion means that believers get to give up their personal freedom for the sake of satisfying the rules of their faith. We give up freedom all the time, for very sensible and grownup reasons. You might say it's fine if it's voluntary, but once you're in it it's coercive. The military has disciplinary options including imprisonment and , in extreme cases, death. Religions dangle the threat of eternal damnation over you if you stray. You can resign from the service or be dishonorably discharged. You can serve your hitch and take a regular discharge. You can quit your religion and take your chances with the eternal damnation, or sidestep over to another religion which will curtail your freedom. Point is, if you participate in a society of any kind, you will face restraints.

Even if you're in the militia of your favorite post-apocalyptic warlord you can only engage your enemies in specific ways. Go rogue and you might make your boss nervous. You get no job security when you work for a warlord who doubts your loyalty.

Compassion Deficit

Although New Hampshire went for Harris in the recent election, her opponent enjoys considerable support from people who have flown his banners continuously since 2015. Because the state population is predominantly white and conservative, with a deep puritanical tradition, most of the residents will feel only the generic ill effects of the incoming administration's economic policies, rather than the targeted persecution promised by the winning party's campaign. Hard to say whether anyone in the protected majority right around here will bother to lash out at marginalized people. I expect few serious personal attacks and atrocities, just slurs and shoves.

Legislatively it's a different story. With a Republican governor and legislative majority, and MAGA still controlling the national Republican brand, women's freedom and health remain at risk, education funding is in peril, and the future of federal funding the state has relied on to keep its parsimonious tax system on life support is questionable. The tourism economy depends on at least the appearance of a clean natural environment, but with the economy likely burning down nationwide, who will have the money to be a tourist? And the ski industry is clearly doomed by the abandonment of any efforts to slow climate change.

We always have our wealthy summer residents. They are buying up more and more of the quaint towns and villages they treasure as theme parks of family memory, which stimulates the incomes of building contractors and maintenance staff to keep everything nice for them in the off season. Anyone outside of these bubbles will be struggling, but then they always have. It's a point of pride to work long hours at a brutal job like logging, and vote against anything that might make your life more comfortable. The risk is too great that it might make someone else's life more comfortable, someone who doesn't deserve it. And that is the root of the compassion deficit that fuels MAGA.

Compassion deficit underlies all conservative political philosophy, but MAGA concentrates it to a high potency drug. If a conservative person isn't experiencing difficulties, anyone else who experiences those difficulties brought it on themselves. Difficulties are a sign of poor character. If your unusual circumstances make you a target for hardship, quit being unusual! Being normal isn't so hard. Just be normal!

If your norm is based on being a white male or a white female under the protection of a white male, how do you expect someone of a darker hue or not in a safe, subservient relationship to normalize themselves to your satisfaction? The country was built on incurable disparities. Slave labor built the Southern economy, and much of the early infrastructure of the federal government. The abolition of slavery didn't miraculously transform the freed population into acceptable citizens. The conflicts of the 1840s and '50s continue today. And the country's embrace of immigrants has added more unrest.

The Statue of Liberty will probably be melted down now to make ammunition for the Border Patrol.

A progressive attitude depends on people who realize that our entire species will do better once we make it a priority to help our entire species do better. You can't keep exporting your problems, putting dirty industries in seemingly distant lands. Their smokestacks belch poison into the same atmosphere we all use. You can't exploit labor in countries far away and not expect to pay for it in some other way. You can't ignore massacres because no one happens to be massacring you at the moment. If you make your country good for yourselves, expect displaced people from the ruined lands to want to get in here. If you isolate yourselves from the world, your nation still has to hold its place among rivals all too happy to close in if you let your guard down. The alliances with dictators that led to the installation of the one we are going to coronate on January 20, 2025 obligate our dictator to those other ruthless powers. Our dictator is not a fighter. His counselors are not fighters. They're sleazy quislings who will deal away the lives of ordinary citizens to preserve their own comforts in the hateful world they helped create.

We have a few chances to pull the country back from complete submission to the will of tyrants. It's not tyranny when your old racist jokes aren't funny anymore, and people abandon bigoted attitudes. It's not tyranny to tax businesses and individuals that have grown fat on, among other things, government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. It's not tyranny to release women from second-class citizenship. It's not tyranny to release health care from the grip of insurance and pharmaceutical profiteers. It's tyrannical to deny these things and to codify a tiered society in which some people are more equal than others. That's about to happen.

Cynics will say that we already live in that society, and they're not entirely wrong. However, we still had mechanisms to exert our own leverage, if we had been able to gather enough voters to weigh that plank down. The beneficiaries of our ignorance and distrust have dumped enormous bags of money on the other end of it. They fund all of the information channels that keep us apart. The mechanisms survive, but barely. Mostly dead isn't the same thing as completely dead. But we do have to survive a couple of years, minimum, of whatever chaos the incoming government unleashes on us in their greedy bumbling.

Somehow, we have to get people who don't already understand it to believe that caring about other people and promoting their acceptance doesn't cost most of us a thing. It will undoubtedly chip away portions of the obscene fortunes of a few individuals. That is not a bad thing in the least. Every person alive is a stakeholder in the planet. The few have their fortunes. All we will ever have is each other. We won't agree on everything. We shouldn't agree on everything. But if we don't resuscitate democracy we will lose even the faintest chance to participate in government rather than just submitting to our rulers. Restore the checks and balances. Suffer through the boring slog of learning how government works and why we need one. No one's liberty is absolute, but we can improve everyone's average if we try.

Have they got us by the founding document?

 I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.

Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.

The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.

You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.

Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.

Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.

The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?

We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.

The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.

The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?

To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.

Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.

Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.

It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.

Trump is not the problem

 While the 45th occupant of the Oval Office has dominated the news since he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential primaries in 2015, we lost the chance to make him a one-person problem when we failed to vote against him in sufficient numbers in November, 2016. As soon as he reached the most powerful leadership position in the world, he embodied all of the hopes of the voters and the business interests that put him there. Those hopes already existed before he placed them on the throne, and they will exist long after he is gone. If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can imagine.

When Hitler destroyed Germany with his manic obsessions, it was blatantly obvious. All of Europe was devastated by years of war. World War I failed as the "war to end all wars," but World War II succeeded as the War to Make War Inadvisable. I know it's not as snappy a title, but economic analysis bores most people to sleep. Germany reinvented itself as a bastion of tolerance because the country got to experience the ruinous consequences of bigotry run amok. If Hitler had the sense to keep his hatred within his own borders, the camps would probably still be running, in defiance of world disapproval, but global unwillingness to undermine German sovereignty. Look at how the Soviet Union behaved during its time, and how the "free world" built up arms, muttered threateningly, and stayed carefully on its own side of the line. Nukes made the stakes too high.

Global war became obsolete in the 20th Century. Warfare remains constant all over the globe, but no one with even a bachelor's degree in business wants a no-holds-barred total war for world domination. Small wars are profitable, although they have to be well managed. Big countries can pick on smaller ones, although the United States got its ass handed to it by the Vietnamese. Live and learn. Cough cough -- Afghanistan -- cough cough! Maybe not so much. But in any case the damage to a nation, its morale, its spirit, its compassion, drastic as they may be, don't damage production capacity and drain the resources of the top tier of wealth, for whom the country is run.

In 1984, George Orwell drew a broad, crayon sketch of how real global domination works. While much of the book is oversimplified, as all fiction has to be, many basic principles apply. Most notably, the common people, the most numerous, can be controlled by the information they are fed, and the necessities of life that are dribbled out in just enough of a flow to keep the strivers struggling to get their little bit, believing that their lives will get better, or at least no worse, if they just keep working for as long as they can.

Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is the visible pustule above a deep, systemic infection. You know that squeezing a zit can actually cause sepsis. Popping Trump might release a gratifying shower of pus and a momentary sense of relief, but the underlying infection would grow more entrenched. Indeed, pustule Trump was a shocking but predictable symptom of the poisoning that had been injected in steadily increasing doses since 1980. And, as we are constantly reminded, the real infection dates back to 1619, and further back, to contemptuous colonialism. The heirs to the country's worst aspects hold all of the power right now, because the numerous masses are controlled by the information they are fed, and the glorification of life-devouring work schedules that never seem to lead to that better world we were told must result from greater productivity. "Nobody wants to work anymore." Well, no shit: what has it gotten us?

Because the corrupt Supreme Court has placed Donald Trump out of reach of the law, we won't have the satisfaction of seeing the justice system work the way we were always lied to that it does: bringing any criminal before a jury of their peers, to be tried on the basis of the evidence, in accordance with the law. Until July 1, 2024, we at least could hold out the slim hope that the legal system could be used on anyone who broke the law, even though we saw it applied unequally as a matter of routine. No legal authority had officially codified any aspect of that inequality until now. With that seal broken, the tiers of the justice system may each in turn receive official sanction. The Constitution is only as good as the people who interpret it.

Real change starts from the bottom up. That's why the authoritarians shifted their focus to control at the state level at the same time that they worked diligently to eliminate federal authority. Smaller jurisdictions are easier to manage, because local voters actually have a harder time getting complete information. Sure, you can go to public hearings on upcoming issues, but who has time? Are the meetings during your work day, when you can't leave the job you desperately need for your meager income? Are they at night, when you work your second or third job, or are taking care of your family, or just resting up for the next day's toil? By removing federal oversight on behalf of ordinary citizens, the authoritarian movement guarantees that local bullies reign supreme. Your success at the local level depends on how strong local political machines are, and how dirty they can get without penalties. Like murdering civil rights activists and letting the murderers go free for decades. Authoritarian politics and organized crime are indistinguishable.

Monetizing the Meerkats

 Picture the classic photo of meerkats, with a couple of sentinels standing tall while the rest of the group forages. The group takes turns standing guard and gathering food, so everyone gets what they need.

Humans divide tasks more completely, using money to ensure that anyone not directly engaged in producing food or making shelter gets some. Our sentinels need to get paid in order to maintain their vigilance and reporting.

The myth of impartial journalism stems from an ideal worth striving for, and from some real life examples of it. But how can a journalist be truly impartial if there is such a thing as right and wrong? The obvious stuff may be easy enough, but, when it comes to conjectural policy, editorial bias skews everything.

In the old model of print journalism, ad revenues would determine the size of the paper. Once the ad banks were laid in, what remained was the "news hole." A paper might run at a deficit for a while, but financial reality is financial reality. In general, a paper would have to keep a sustainable balance. Thus, "All the News that's Fit to Print" becomes, "All the News that Fits." An editor decides what's worthy to make the cut, even more than when coffers are full and a few more things can be shoehorned in.

Now we have many reporters on platforms of all sizes, from a couple of planks sketchily nailed into the top of a swaying tree to concrete monoliths of established corporate media. No one has a monopoly on the truth or any obligation whatsoever to deliver it. Our sentinels keep watch and report.

Corporate media can no longer be trusted. Collectives providing information from lower tiers definitely reflect their own biases. Bias does not always bring inaccuracy. Unfortunately, your sense of accuracy depends on your vision of the present and future of the country. Those opinions are shaped by your beliefs about the past and the principles you derive from those beliefs.

In reality, nothing is secure, as the SCOTUS decision of July 1, 2024 proves. They rendered the entire constitution and Declaration of Independence irrelevant by making the president a king. For our nation to succeed, ruled by a document instead of a personage, we needed people of integrity to uphold and defend that document against all enemies foreign and domestic. Instead, domestic enemies have used the system to destroy the system. But I digress.

To keep our watchful meerkats standing tall, they needed the funds to survive. All media have been holding out the beggar's bowl for years, but it's gotten worse and worse in the past couple of decades. The people who want you uneducated and uninformed have done a good job of vilifying public education and the profession of journalism, while concentrating control of mass media in their own hands. Journalism that doesn't expose the schemes of the powerful is just public relations.

The sides are drawn: it's money versus people. We toil to get some and it gets dragged back from us. Every endeavor that might once have started out based on some intellectual and ethical principle becomes a business and turns toward the pure pursuit of maximum profit margin. This cynical and destructive model warps the entire economy.

An independent journalist does not provide food or shelter. They provide information. The truth is seldom popular, so the income is meager. There's no easy money anywhere. It's hard to rise in the pyramid scheme of capitalism. The "idle rich" have to keep scampering around looking busy, while the descending tiers of their supporters do the dirty work to keep them in power and secure the foundations of cheap labor: us.

I can say for certain that the time to observe, analyze, and write comes directly from either sleep or work. If you can't connect your efforts to a revenue stream, or even a series of discrete splashes, your income will suffer.

A Republic We Couldn't Keep

The thing about a dark day for America is that darkness doesn't fall right away. We will go through the rest of the election, with the media treating the death blow to representative government in this country as just another facet of this perfectly normal contest between the old familiar parties.

The fatal blow has fallen after a long series of maneuvers dating back to 1980. So in that sense it's not really a surprise. It happened sooner thanks to the many factors that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, but it was always the goal of wealthy people who believe fervently that the entire purpose of the United States is to make rich people richer. Everything they have done has undermined trust in the federal government and voting in general.

The flaw in government is that it's run by people. Ours used to run fairly well, but has deteriorated steadily under immense pressure from the private sector bent on proving that it doesn't work. As cooperating elected officials have fed the corporatocracy more and more money, the private sector has been able to construct an unending propaganda campaign supporting their own interests. According to the US Supreme Court, bribery of public officials is now completely legal. And just today they ruled that the president is a king, whose power is beyond the reach of the legal system. All other branches of government -- including the Supreme Court -- became irrelevant. The lesser branches can fight among themselves, but instead of checks and balances among equal members of a triumvirate, the order is hierarchical. The president is at the top, with the Supreme Court in second place, and Congress is dead last. Actually, the American people are dead last. If we continue the now meaningless entertainment of having elections, we might still place some intermediate tormentors above us in the neutered legislature, but all of us are subject to the whims of the tyrant.

Life may seem normal for a time. We will all continue to struggle to pay our bills, and be encouraged to blame the wrong people for our woes, or be told it's all our own fault for lack of a work ethic. The discrimination will become more and more blatant. We will have no recourse. Protesters can be run over, shot, beaten, and jailed indefinitely.

The legal system has long been just another tool of oppression. If we didn't have an unfair legal system, rich people wouldn't get the cushy treatment that they do, while ordinary citizens have to go through the whole wringer. For a time we had crusading lawyers who would use the system to force it to do right from time to time. That's gone now. With the entire judicial system under the control of authoritarians, anyone could get sucked in and convicted. If you displease the rulers, they have no reason to let you slide. Just about everyone will be cheap labor, easily replaced.

I will never understand how this represents freedom to the multitude who will find out the hard way that it does not. We're all going to have to take that rough ride with them. Thanks for nothing, you fucking morons.

Crime definitely pays. It just handed the most powerful military force in the world to whoever wins the next presidential election. And it got the most criminal president in the history of the United States a de facto pardon, because he will never be brought to trial. Whether he wins the election in November or not, the Supreme Court decision stands for the next criminal bold enough to take them up on it. 

Trump has a clear path to having any conviction overturned by this Supreme Court if he should happen to face trial. At the state level they'll just have to install GOP governors to grant the pardons, or threaten a Democrat and get them to flip.

 Life goes on, just trying to pay your bills. At least, as Trump himself has said, you don't have to worry about voting anymore. Just try to stay out of trouble.

When you can't tax the rich...

 A recent story about a $400 pineapple has added fuel to the burning resentment against the kind of people who can pay $400 for a pineapple. While such resentment is fully justified, and such casual luxury indicates a sickness in economic philosophy, the disparity exists. We are ruled by a wealthy elite bent on maintaining their position at the top of the pyramid. They fund our elections and bribe our Supreme Court justices to make sure that money keeps flowing to them. They pay their staff handsomely to insure loyalty in the accounting and legal departments. So how do we extract funds from them to disburse to our own little causes? Find out what they're willing to pay stupid amounts of money for.

The process is more complicated than tax policy. With tax policy you decide what the needs of government are. Ideally the needs are based on the needs of the citizens, for functioning infrastructure, safe and sufficient food supplies, fair distribution of proceeds from whatever is produced, and equal justice, to name a few. 

The power of money has distorted the system so that we have to fall back to the tactics of the servant classes in the Gilded Age, to flatter and bamboozle the wealthy into forking out cash for things that they take a fancy to. It's far from efficient. Any industry that does it well achieves so much wealth that it becomes part of the problem, lobbying for subsidies, contracts, and tax exemptions that add to the deficit that we have to fill by selling $400 pineapples, $18,000 bicycles, luxury automobiles, and attractively sited houses that fill the prettiest landscapes, occupied for a couple of weeks a year as the wealthy make the rounds of their domain. Tantalize them with handmade furniture, commissioned artwork, offerings from just the right size business. You'll never get rich, but you might get by.

A $400 pineapple is an act of desperation as much as a shameful display of decadence. Yes, it's shamefully decadent to consider such a purchase, but if rich idiots are forking out for $400 pineapples, take their damn money. Then spend those proceeds where they will do some good. I have no idea whether the luxury fruit purveyors are doing that. And no one will ever sell enough $400 pineapples to fill the holes left by tax cuts that have set us up for decades of deficits. Trickle down economics does not work. You have to find the right bait to get the rich to spend some of their money. It changes all the time, and varies from group to group. With the system constructed in their favor, the wealthy get to sit back and let the commoners guess what will attract a trickle. Most of the time, we grunts only have our lives to trade, expressing proper gratitude for the opportunity to be property caretakers and service providers, on call and cheerful.

Attempts to take a larger chunk of money and make a point, in the form of civil suits, turn out to be less successful. The bigger the settlement, the more tireless the defense. Has Alex Jones paid anything yet? Has Rudy Giuliani? Trump? Anyone? You can win a massive settlement and still have to live on food stamps and endure decades of death threats while you wait for the legal challenges to fade into the outright refusal to pay. While the legal precedents are important, the cash amounts are basically irrelevant. At best they are symbolic. Worse yet, they just put a price tag on immorality. Can you really ruin any of these people financially? It appears not. No one is kicking in doors and dragging any of them away over the refusal to pay out millions in damages, or even fines. The lawyers just keep the ball in the air, back and forth over the net, never landing.

All we have left is $400 pineapples.