President Trump’s first week in The White House, according to Mme. Galzogorist

The Crank's favorite fortune teller

predicts exactly what President

Trump will do in the first seven days.

Hold on tight to your shorts.

I recently paid another visit to Mme. Galzogorist, the fortune teller whose predictions have graced this space from time to time. I asked what President Donald Trump is likely to do in the week following his inauguration. 

Mme. Galzogorist tensed up defensively.  

"First of all, I want it known that any predictions I may have made concerning Hillary Clinton becoming the next President were based on faulty inputs,” she said. 

“I can’t help it if all those pollsters called the same nineteen people who are still listed in the phone book, and disturbed them at dinner time, creating misleading replies. ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ as we say in the fortune-telling profession.”

“But what will Trump do his first week in the office now that we have him?” I asked. 

“Grab a pad and a pen,” she said. And she began to dictate. Here are my notes:

Day One: As promised, President Trump (get used to that title) repeals Obamacare the first day after inauguration. Informed that he must have the approval of Congress and the Senate to do this, he sends armed troops to their homes. The lawmakers are rounded up in their pajamas and skivvies from their beds, where they’ve been sleeping it off following a mad whirl of inaugural balls. They are bussed to the Capitol Building. While standing under the bright floodlights they are permitted to affirm the repeal of Obamacare by blinking.

Things get just a trifle dicey when the elastic on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's boxers breaks under stress and he drops his shorts, but order is rapidly restored.

As promised, Obamacare is replaced with something better — a $42 dollar Starbucks gift card, which can now also be used to help pay medical bills for certain approved services such as open heart surgery, although patients will be responsible for  the balance of their doctor and hospital bills. This will make them “more careful healthcare consumers,” House Majority Leader Paul Ryan says in a joint statement with President Trump.

“This Starbucks Card is much better than Obamacare because even if you don’t get sick, you can still use it to buy a latte,” the President adds.

The gift cards are funded by withdrawals from the savings, checking or IRA accounts of the beneficiaries. As such they are revenue neutral “and don’t cost the taxpayers a red cent,” President Trump says. “Is this a yuuge improvement or what?”

Day two: After a “lengthy and exhausting” 17-minute treaty negotiation by telephone between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, the United States and Russia announce an accord for “peace in our time.” (“And by the way, that’s a phrase my beautiful wife Melania just wrote,” Trump adds. “This just goes to show that you can be a ten and still write a great tweet.”)

Under the terms of the phone-in treaty, the United States will withdraw its NATO troops from all of the former “satellite nations” and expel those nations from NATO. In return, Putin will be permitted to re-install the nuclear missiles in Cuba that were shipped back home during the Kennedy administration. “Nobody can negotiate like I can,” President Trump declares.

Day three: In an effort to “put America back to work again,” President Trump announces a series of “shovel-ready” projects and sends Congress a bill for funding them. These projects include repair work to the facades of ten “critical, key, major, beautiful” skyscrapers in New York, all of which by coincidence happen to have the name “Trump” on them in gold letters.

Further, Congress funds 175 new jobs for golf course groundskeepers, all of whom“initially will work on Trump golf courses until we find others that are as good.” 

Trump takes a tax-deduction under another new program that gives tax breaks to job creators who pay their workers with money from the United States Treasury.

Day four: Hillary Clinton is arrested under orders from Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani and sent to prison for “Life plus 100 years” on charges to come concerning her e-mail server. 

When Clinton’s lawyers go to the Supreme Court for an immediate stay, claiming that she cannot be imprisoned without specific charges on which a jury finds her guilty, newly appointed U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Rudolph Giuliani sides with Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani. 

“Everybody knows she’s guilty, so why bother with a trial?” Giuliani chuckles. “It would only cost the taxpayers money we don’t want to waste.”

Day Five: President Trump defends his appointment of Giuliani to more than one Federal job at the same time (supported by voice vote of the Republican Congress and Senate) because, “appointing one person to multiple jobs will cut salary and overhead costs, and gives us more productive, more efficient government officials who have less time to be corrupt.”

Day Six: In a ceremony near Del Rio, Texas, President Trump and ICE Director Rudolph Giuliani wade knee-deep into the Rio Grande River and, with a pair of golden shovels, ceremonially “break water” for the new wall between the United States and Mexico. 

To quickly construct such a long barrier over water, the new Trump Administration has solved a difficult engineering problem by designing the wall to float on pontoons. 

When the Administration is alerted to concerns that desperate immigrants will then simply swim under the wall, teams of formerly-unemployed workers are hired to trap stinging jellyfish from the Gulf of Mexico, and transport them to the Rio Grande wall. Here  other newly-employed workers shovel the jellyfish off the wall into the water at regular intervals.

“That’s what I mean by shovel-ready jobs,” the President declares.

The appearance of a Hispanic-looking day-workers with blotchy sting marks on their arms, most of them carrying signs that say, “Will work for food,” outside 7-11 stores around the country gets brushed off by the White House as “a coincidence.”

Day Seven: President Trump publicly shreds the recently-signed treaty with Iran that limits their development of nuclear weapons. But Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says the treaty didn't concern him anyway because, following Trump's election, he  put in an order for 50 nuclear warheads from North Korea. North Korea  jests, “we just might drop off a few in the United States on the way over.” 

Meanwhile distraught and concerned Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany makes a surprise visit to the White House to plead for the restoration of NATO in Western Europe. Trump says the U.S. withdrawal is non-negotiable, but as a gesture of friendship, he invites Chancellor Merkel to the Oval Office for tea and a photo-op. When they stand for what photographers assume will be pictures of them shaking hands, Trump grabs Merkel’s crotch and kisses her on the lips.

Two Words On The Election Of Donald Trump

No comment.

FBI admits it has nothing to go on in its witch trial of Hillary — and the “wisdom of the market” literally jumps for joy

The "wisdom of the market: when

the FBI clears Hillary, the trend

reverses and heads upward. Is there

a moral here, or what?

Hey there, Conservatives. I’m talking to you, lovers of Trump-style authoritarianism.

Aren’t you the folks who said there’s nothing wiser than “the wisdom of the market?”

Well, the market has spoken, and what it has said is, “Dump Trump.”

With new so-called “evidence” from the FBI recently concerning Hillary’s e-mails roughly a fortnight ago, the market went into a long, slow, downward slide. With its loss of confidence would have come losses of jobs, incomes, growth, and tax revenues. The only growth would have been in the deficit.

But on Friday FBI Director James Comey fessed up that he had nothing but a bunch of duplicates of the e-mails he had previously looked at, and nothing else of any particular interest.

And this morning, the stock market soared.

Whether that's the wisdom of the market, or merely of savvy investors — real business people who can foresee what an unmitigated disaster Trump will be — the market has had its say, loudly and clearly about Donald Trump, the people around him, and the Congressional and Senate hacks who support him. 

Moral: Trump is a businessman, but not a smart one. The smart money has confidence that Hillary can turn the economy around, and Trump would just make it worse. If you want to make America greater, vote for Hillary Clinton and for Democratic Senators and Congressional Representatives.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves”

Chelsea Manning, the transgendered soldier imprisoned for 35 years in the WikiLeaks affair, tried to commit suicide at Leavenworth prison and was sentenced to a week of solitary confinement as punishment.

On October 4th, as she was beginning that sentence, she attempted to commit suicide a second time.

The New York Times reports: “A support network member said Thursday that Ms. Manning had been informed by the Army that it would hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide and that she possibly faced new punishment.”

Gee, how do you suppose that’s going to work out?

Will Donald Trump actually win the election? If so, get ready for the economy to crash. It’s already jittery.

Headline from today’s financial news from the Reuters wire service:  

"Wall Street dips on election jitters, weak oil."

Why the sudden election jitters? Hillary’s polling numbers have gone down a bit, while Trump’s are up a bit, opening the possibility that he could actually be President.

And even if it's only a slim chance, the thought of Trump in the White House has begun to freak out the market — the business people, investors,entrepreneurs, money-makers, job creators, and the “collective wisdom” of investors.

The people in the know seem to know one thing for sure: Donald Trump would be an economic disaster, crashing the market, closing companies, throwing people out of work.

As for “weak oil?” 

Remember when fracking was producing so much oil that oil prices were dropping? Well, they’ve dropped. And now the oil companies, and the people who work for them, are screwed. 

That’s what you get when you follow the Republican advice to drill baby, drill.

The truth of the matter is that Republicans are, and always have been, at least since 1929, bad for business and bad for the economy.

So if Trump somehow wins — see you on the bread line.

America’s Raiders of the Lost Ark election

Have you noticed the similarity between this year's elections and a certain movie?

It finally occurred to me what’s going on in this nation. We’re not really having an election. We’re having a movie.

It’s a a movie of the thrill-a-minute, surprise-at-every-turn genre. A kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark, edge-of-your-chair piece of outrageous and totally improbable entertainment.

First a Stone Age Insult Comic insults his way to the top of the Republican ticket in a presidential race.

Meanwhile, the Wife of the Former Leader is challenged by Yoda (wrong movie, I know, but you get the idea) for the hearts and minds of the people. Yoda’s cause seems hopeless, but then suddenly it's not hopeless and he seems to be gaining on her until….

She shoots Yoda’s horse from under him. He falls, but then pledges fealty to her. Whereupon it’s discovered that her evil advisor, Lady Debbie of Thuglia, has been necromancing Yoda’s campaign.

But then  the Wife of the Former Leader and the Stone Age Insult Comic have three duels of words. He falters. He is injured. He is about to fall of his horse and onto a row of sharpened pikes.

But no, thanks to the previous machinations of Weiner the Lance, a gremlin from the past of the Wife of the Former Leader,  the Stone Age Insult Comic is saved from certain doom. He is wounded. But he’s struggling back to his feet. And next…

Well, we’ll have to see what happens next. Perhaps the Prehistoric Insult Comic will light a bomb and accidentally blow himself to kingdom come.

Perhaps, just as the fuse burns all the way down to the bomb, the Wife of the Former Leader will charge the Stone Age Insult Comic with a mace, but the bomb will blow up her horse and throw her into the air while he escapes uninjured.

My favorite scene from the original Raiders of the Lost Ark was when Indiana Jones, using only his bull whip, whipped weapon after weapon out of the hands of various approaching evil beings until finally he tires of this, yanks his pistol from his holster, and shoots the final sword-wielding evildoer dead in his tracks. Perhaps Hillary ought to arm herself with a bullwhip and a pistol.

Or perhaps…

Well, no matter how badly you want another bucket of popcorn, no matter how desperately you need to pee, stay glued to your chair. Because this movie isn’t over yet. And you don’t want to miss even a millisecond of the thrilling action to come.

P.S. I’ve been trying to figure out what I make of James Comey, the strewer of land mines that seem to indiscriminately blow up both sides. Is there any motivation, save his self-interest? I think not. Except that every time he makes a move, he shoots himself in the foot, furthering the impression that he's a total dimwit. So I’m just writing him off as a Keystone Cop character who wandered onto the wrong movie set.

The new Donald Trump campaign theme song

The question came to me out of nowhere last evening. Where did Donald Trump develop his affinity for Tic Tacs when he's of a mind to pursue women?

And then the answer popped right back into my head after all these years . It was a jingle I wished I had written (but somebody else did it)  back in my Mad Men days — a song for a mint candy filled with barely disguised sexual innuendo. See for yourself.

The Donald was an impressionable age 25 or so when this spot ran. I think it's safe to say it taught him everything he's ever learned about life.

Poets’ heads burst into flame over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

I’d better get my prejudices out of the way first. I don’t think it’s the job of readers and listeners to pay painstaking attention to poetry. Rather, it's the job of poets to capture the attention of readers and listeners.

For decades, starting in the 1960s, Bob Dylan has built audiences by interesting people in listening to him. His melodies were not all that melodic. Nor was his raspy voice. But when he sang the songs he wrote, the world looked up and paid rapt attention, then repeated his message, which in large measure during the 1960s and 1970s related to the Viet Nam War.

So I was fascinated by some recent posts on the website of PENAmerica, an organization I strongly admire for the way it champions free expression and advocates for imprisoned authors and journalists. Despite this, the website suddenly has become infested by a swarm of curmudgeonly poets, their knickers evidently in an irate and not very lyrical twist, over Bob Dylan’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Smiling-but-grumpy poet 

Amy King

 Their comments are quoted at great length at this link. But before you go there, let me share some observations:

• From the selection presented by PENAmerica, it appears that while novelists and journalists and editors mostly approve Dylan’s winning the award, most of the poets are enraged by it. Why is that, do you suppose? Do you think jealousy could have anything to do with it? Nah! Or maybe not nah.

• The essence of the un-lyrical kvetching of America’s poets — or at least of the poetic darlings of academia — seem to be that Dylan’s lyrics are easy to follow. Thus Molly Brodak grouses, “If the written word is truly up against the art of songwriting for the greatest literary prize in all the land, ‘baby, baby, baby, oh baby’ is going to win every time.” 

Grumpy Poet Molly Brodak

• It's interesting that Brodak chose that passage rather than “A hard rain's gonna fall” or “the answer is blowin' in the wind,” to name just two memorable lines. As for Brodak herself, she is author of lines of this ilk:

Panic, because suddenly everything signifies,a kind of net of sunlight, pulling all directions at once;
the background's flaw is that it beckons:
the poodle's boat, Noah's palm, the dove-magnet:
a barbarity! A flame at the vanishing point!

Brodak’s complaint is part of an enormous tumor that has been metastasizing its way through academia for the past 50 years or so — the notion that one should have to work hard to understand poetry. Or that otherwise the poetry is unworthy. That’s something that, for example,  none of the many poetic authors of the Bible, nor William Shakespeare, ever proposed. Somehow I’m willing to bet that more people alive today have been touched by the first line of The Book of Genesis, or can recite the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, than any of the verses of Molly Brodock.

Grumpy poet Daniel

Schoonbeck seems to think

the Nobel Peace Prize should

promote poets. Peace? What's 

that?

Other complaints include that Dylan is white (Poet Amy King and poet Natalie, Diaz who alternatively nominates Bob Marley); that he’s a pop poet (Amy King); that “…educators do not cite his poems to study in depth,” (Amy King); and that his life’s work has not “changed the way we use language. ” (Amy King.)

All of this caterwauling ignores the fact that the Nobel is not awarded for changing language or becoming a text that students will have to parse if they intend to pass their lit courses, or for promotion of particular artists. There’s a far higher motive at the bottom of it that today’s academic poets can’t seem to grasp:

Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, became painfully aware that his invention might be used to wage war and kill thousands of people. He created the Nobel Peace Prize in the hope that it would be awarded to people who promoted peace in some powerful way. The literature prize, as well as various prizes that promote knowledge in the sciences, are spinoffs of that.

And promoting peace is precisely what Dylan’s songs did. They were part of a movement in the arts, and most particularly in folk music, that made a huge contribution toward putting an end to one of the most bloody and senseless wars in which America has ever engaged — the war in Viet Nam. Bob Marley didn’t do that. Neither did the novelist Don DeLillo, a nice guy and a favorite of the disgruntled poets, but not Nobel-level when it comes to having actually played a major role in discouraging the continuation of a war.

DeLillo's novels are certainly worthwhile. But they do not approach what Dylan achieved in persuading large numbers of people to demand peace. To quote the late David Ogilvy (who will probably be demeaned by the academic poets as a mere "ad man"):

"When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks." But when Demosthenes spoke they said, 'Let us march.'" 

And make no mistake, Dylan had us marching, by the tens and hundreds of thousands, in peace protests that brought down one president because he wouldn't or couldn't end the war, and that forced the next administration to finally put a stop to it.

If I could have one wish, it would be that another troubadour of the Viet Nam era share the prize, a troubadour who employed a single song to tell a story that helped build the anti-war protest of the 1960s. 

I’m referring to Arlo Guthrie and his song, or poem, or story, or rallying cry, “Alice’s Restaurant.” It's a musical tale that starts with a garbage dump, moves on to a draft board physical exam, and finishes with an infectious chorus of war defiance. It is also distinguished for being possibly the longest pop song in American history. You can find it here. Leave yourself plenty of time to listen.

Should Bob Dylan win — and please, Bob, accept — the Nobel Prize? Yes, because all these decades later, the answer to how popular movements help to end wars is still blowing in the wind, while too many American poets who envy Dylan (or Guthrie) are merely blowing smoke.

Tea Party Republican Congressional hack from New Jersey spills his lying bile in my living room. Now I’m mad as hell.

Rep. Scott Barrett. Good thing this

is only a head shot, because his pants

are on fire.

What is it with New Jersey Republicans? Are they all head cases, psychopaths, and habitual liars? 

First we had Chris Christie, whose shenanigans in creating a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who didn’t support him made life miserable for hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders. They  included kids on their way to school, and could have cost lives if an ambulance had to get through. And it has unmasked Christie for the malign liar he is.

Now, spewing into my Manhattan living room from Northern New Jersey comes a barrage of wildly misleading TV spots. They’re from Scott Garrett, an incumbent Tea Party Republican member of Congress who evidently can’t stoop low enough to make sure he keeps his butt on his Republican seat.

The advertising depicts a condo apartment building and discusses a woman who, according to Garrrett, was “assaulted” in the building by Garrett's Democratic rival, Joseh Gottheimer.

Garrett’s ad keeps gushing out of my television set. It declares: 

“Gottheimer aggressively intimidated and assaulted her and left her fearful in her own home.” 

And furthermore:

 “Scared and violated, the victim had to move to escape Gottheimer’s harassing environment. That’s the real Josh Gottheimer, and his values aren’t New Jersey’s values.”

"Fearful?" “Violated?” What was this, a Donald Trump-style sexual attack? A brutal mugging? A sex attack and mugging?

Nope. Gottheimer was with his wife at the time. (The apartment by the way, isn't in New Jersey. It's in Washington, D.C.) And the neighbor turns out to be one of those, umm, “difficult” individuals of whom some apartment dwellers say, “There’s one in every building.”

NJSpotlight, an online journal, reports:

According to documents filed in 2007 in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Gottheimer said he and his wife had entered the building and saw someone they did not recognize in a place where owners’ keys were kept. 

The woman’s complaint said she was retrieving her keys from an unattended key closet in the lobby when “Gottheimer aggressively approached” and “derisively asked if she was the new security guard.” 

“When plaintiff informed him that she was a resident, Gottheimer threateningly waived [sic] his finger in her face and aggressively questioned plaintiff in a loud voice and an intimidating manner about who she was and what she was doing,” the complaint said.

Gottheimer countered that when he and his wife “saw an unidentified/unknown woman searching in a restricted closet/drawer, he asked questions in order to assure the appropriateness of the conduct he was witnessing.”

So the so-called "assault" that desperate T-Party Republican Garrett refers to in his ads consists — even if we assume it’s true — of nothing more than wagging a finger and speaking in a voice that the cranky neighbor perceived as loud.

But wait, there’s more! The neighbor not only attempted to sue Gottheimer, but also another neighbor because of another “incident.” She also tried to sue one of the building’s concierges for, among other transgressions, going to the bathroom in one of the building's toilets, and in addition she tried to sue the building’s management company. Here’s NJ Spotlight again:

She said, for example, that she had been discriminated against because she was Asian, and cited numerous complaints about one of the concierges and the management company that employed her. The concierge, for example, had failed to provide the homeowner with a garage key; twice turned away a cable television technician while other technicians were waiting; twice called police to ticket vehicles making deliveries, and once failed to notify the homeowner when a package was delivered. 

Also named as a defendant was another condo board member who questioned the plaintiff as she was leaving the building gym about whether she had made a complaint to the management company about building employees using the bathroom in a common area. The woman denied making the complaint, and said she felt intimidated by that board member as well.

For a complainant, the so-called harassed woman wasn’t very cooperative. Court papers show at one point the management company’s attorneys asked the judge for an order to compel the plaintiff to answer interrogatories.

Finally, when it looked as if her case was falling apart and was going to cost her a pretty penny in costs and legal fees, the woman dropped the matter. The judge in the case dismissed her case “with prejudice.” According to the legal dictionary Nolo:

“When a lawsuit is dismissed with prejudice, the court is saying that it has made a final determination on the merits of the case, and that the plaintiff is therefore forbidden from filing another lawsuit based on the same grounds.”

In other words, a court has already ruled that the charges are nonsense. Which so far hasn’t stopped incumbent Congressman Garrett from spewing lies into my home via my TV set on an almost daily basis. I find it almost impossible to watch the evening news in New York without being “assaulted” by this lying Republican from New Jersey. Maybe he took lessons from Chris Christie.

Recently, various commentators  been appropriating the old saw about the similarity between making laws and making sausages, and applying it to electoral politics. But that’s a bad analogy.

Watching many Republicans run for office is nothing like watching sausages getting made. It’s more like watching human feces gushing into a vat in a sewage plant.

Is Donald Trump sniffing cocaine?

The thought went through my head each time I've watched him debate Hillary. But I didn't want to blog about it because — well, all I had were suspicions.

But now Donald Trump has brought up the matter. The New York Times reports:

Escalating his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s debate performances, Donald J. Trump came to a state battling a drug epidemic and suggested without any evidence on Saturday that his opponent had been on drugs during their second debate.

And that makes him fair game for my suspicions than when he sniffs, and sniffs, and re-sniffs during the debates, he's trying to keep the cocaine up his nose and the white, cocaine-laden snot from running out of his nostrils and down his upper lip. I mean, look at all of this:

Trust a coke-head to get as crazy as The Donald has been acting during the past two debates.


Trust a coked-up addict to get so hyped at two o'clock in the morning that he starts tweeting insults at beauty queens.

Trust a coke-head to think that somehow he can fool a drug test. 

Trust a coke-head to be paranoid enough to think his opponent must be just as hyped up on Bolivian marching powder as he is — because otherwise why would she be doing so well in the debates? 

Trust a coke-head to think it's perfectly rational to start arming numerous nations with nukes.

And if there's a drug test and Hillary tests negative, or the Donald tests positive?

Why, he'll just say that proves that the tests were rigged. 

Trump doesn't belong in the White House. But it's possible he belongs in Phoenix House.

Does the USA need not more, but less productivity?

When robots steal almost everybody's

work, how will people find any?

A lot of people aren’t going to like what I’m about to say.

Most Republicans probably won’t like it. Quite a few Democrats won’t like it either. I’m going to describe an ugly, civilization-threatening life form that America and the world needs to come to terms with.

I'm talking about robots. Wait up, don’t run!  Listen to this. It could affect your income and your future, or even whether you will have a future.

The robot in my pants

Let me start by confessing that I have a robot in my pants pocket. You may, too. Its name is Siri, and I connect to it via my I-phone. 

Every night I say, “Hey Siri,” and follow that with a request to wake me at a certain time, usually 7 or 7:15 a.m. As I make my request, Siri types out the words that I’m speaking on my smart phone's screen. Then, in a woman’s voice it says to me, “Your alarm is set for 7 a.m."  

Cool, right? Except robots have also begun driving cars, evidently in a safer manner than humans. They’re doing enormous amounts of work building cars — work that used to be done by humans. They screen callers at enterprises ranging from credit card companies to medical labs, eventually directing the caller to an appropriate extension. You've likely dealt with a robot the last time you called for your credit card balance. They screen job applicants and widgets on production lines.

The day is likely not far off when robots will be able to interview people and then write news stories. Or evaluate employees for raises or termination.  They’re already fighting and killing for us in wars — those drones that supposedly save American lives. And the list of things they do, and can do, and are likely to do keeps growing.

They’re coming for your job.

All of the foregoing means that a generation or so down the road, or possibly less, Robots will be doing most of the work that humans now do.

So what should happen to the Americans who lose their jobs to robots? Retraining? Please! There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs to retrain for as everyone from the nasty clerk in the driver’s license bureau, to the charming hospital nurse who brings pills to your bed, to truck driver, to insurance actuaries, journalists and copywriters find machines doing jobs that they used to do.

In the end, the enemy is not cheap workers in foreign countries, or immigrants replacing Americans on the job. The enemy is a microchip driving a machine. And the microchip doesn't care if it replaces you.

We could take the attitude that the replaced people can all go starve. Trouble is, in the long run “they” is likely to include you, your spouse, your kids, your neighbors. With machines doing most of the work, should every suddenly-unproductive person starve? Or should you just be on the dole, collecting a lifetime unemployment income? Or is there another solution?

A solution with long, lovely weekends

It’s time to consider dividing up the remaining jobs a bit more equitably. Instead of one person doing a job for 40 hours a week, two equally capable people could each do half he same job, each of them for twenty hours. Yes, that cuts per-person productivity in half. But it also assures that employment will be spread around a great deal more. 

A shorter work week assures that people will have a place to go each day — perhaps each day of a four day work week instead of a five-day week. It spreads around self-esteem and lessens the opportunities for people who are made to feel worthless getting into mischief.

But where will the money for this lessened productivity come from? 

Make the robots pay

Take the money from the productivity of the tireless robots who are taking jobs from people. Robots earn no salary, require no food other than electricity, need no sleep. While they steal work from people, huge masses of people can steal the fruits of robot labor for themselves.

But that means rigidly controlling how the income that robots earn gets distributed. And it means, for example, that a CEO might have to scrape along on a paltry couple of million dollars a year while a greater share of income goes to an increased number of employees, all of whom are less productive than they used to be. And it means protection in the U.S. economy against imports from places where fewer people are being paid salaries because robots are doing most of the work.

Admittedly, this idea is revolutionary and markedly socialistic idea. But the alternative is a society with far greater extremes of wealth and poverty even than we have today — a society where the 99 percent become an impoverished and idle hatchery for crime and mass insurrection.

For more jobs, we will need people doing less work. Let's have a 20-hour work week.

Feel free to discuss.

Donald Trump turns out to be a lot more toxic than even I would have guessed

The State of California says that even his
mask is poisonous

So we all know that to most people, with the exception of a tranche of largely-white, largely-male voters, seeing or hearing Donald Trump is something like sitting in a room when a 500 pound gorilla infested with fleas, lice and bedbugs walks in and sits down on your couch.

He’s hard to ignore, he looks like trouble, his presence is not only scary but also repulsive, and there’s all kinds of obnoxious stuff buzzing around him. Consequently you have an urge to not only shoe him out, but also to fumigate the premises and then take a shower.

But did you know he was toxic? I don’t mean symbolically toxic, or metaphorically toxic, or even hyperbolically toxic. I mean that even his likeness is real-world, honest-to-lab results toxic.

How do I know this?

I just went shopping on the Internet for a Donald Trump Halloween mask. I found this “Tax Evasion Trump Mask.” With it, on the same web page, came this warning:

WARNING – Certain states require us to provide consumers with special warning for certain products if those products expose consumers to chemicals above threshold levels. We care about our customers’ safety and hope that the information below helps with your buying decision.
FOR CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects and or other reproductive harm. Do not put in mouth or chew.

Chew that one over.