Living in a War Zone - The Shape of Things to Come

Inheriting a house could be an unusual and foreign experience.  Most children, because they have developed their own lives and families, chose not to go backward in time.  It is understandable.  Our pasts often are laden with personal baggage, and it is all we can do to unload it.  Choosing to revisit past chapters of our lives is risky.  Concurrently our past is who we are.  It is our soul and our history, but a man is what he does.  As you age assembling that new agenda each and every day becomes more difficult.  Your mind slows, and it becomes helpful to have visual cues to remind you of yourself.  I never pontificated any of this, until I inherited my mother's house.  (Of course it was the family home, but upon my father's death and because both children were grown, it became my mother's house.)  It was surprising to me the things she was willing to dispose of, and what she adamantly needed to keep.  The first things to go were my father's chair and footstool, our brown den couch, and our Roses store coffee and end tables.  It was not long after that we bought a brown leather recliner to take their place.  The process of getting rid of things that remind you of strife, sorrow, and grief is large and complicated.  If you listen to your soul it will tell you the correct answers.  There are just certain things you can't remember, because they are too painful.  There is no reason that a home cannot be repurposed even by the family, but it is a soul-wrenching, lifelong, difficult task.  What I have discovered is the clutter of which people often speak is as destructive as they suggest.  Clutter from the past in particular keeps you in the past, but this clutter or sentimental memorabilia is a part of us.  It is our memories, our good times, and our family.  Who would want to dispose of those?  As such on the shelves of the garage is all of our family's Christmas paraphernalia.  These spiritual, religious, and personal decorations defy qualification, and therefore they deserve to be kept.  In most older generation attics you will find the complete history of their family.  A few visits to estate sales and quickly you will understand other people feel the same way.  Personal items from older generations are the roots of our own generation, so they are kept.  You don't want to look at these each and every day.  In my case when I returned home to ensure both my parents adequately were cared for, I gave up my previous job.  I was a ship's pianist, and I had spent ten years playing in the orchestra for three large cruise lines.  Ten years as a caregiver was long enough to eliminate these memories.  That isn't true, but hanging on to that lifestyle was pointless.  I didn't want to, because it was extremely challenging and a full time job.  Because I was not earning money as a musician anymore, and because I was living at home my musical interests took a different direction.  I began to restore vintage keyboard instruments, and my interest in audio recording returned.  These were things I could do with the aid of a house, a structure that lent itself to housing instruments.  It had a garage, which I began to use whole heartedly.  When my mother died and I inherited this house the decisions began.  Could this home, this structure, provide the infrastructure I needed for another musical life?  I began to think of it this way.  Successful people plan their work and work their plan, and you must be able to visualize the completion of your goals.  I began my journey alone in this house that way, and I completed most of my tasks.  Was it out of the question or out of bounds to believe a home in a neighborhood could be used to record music?  We had a Hammond A-100 organ and a Knabe baby grand piano.  Likewise I had the instruments I had restored, which amounted to FIVE Rhodes electric pianos.  These are rather large and heavy, but I managed to find places for them.  Each piano over time acquired its own recording system, so that no matter which one I chose to play, with the connection of a few cords I could produce an extremely high quality Quicktime video.  I spent hours fine tuning these little rigs, and these Rhodes pianos sound better than most.  One reason why is they benefited from stability.  I was not on the road with a band, living in an apartment or a rental property, or otherwise unstable.  Other than the rumbling of freight trains and the pressure waves of ascending commercial jets, for the most part things remain the same.  The question has become can it go a step further?  Can and will these instruments get used professionally, or are they being wasted?  I continued on this path with fervor fully deserving to use this home for its best purposes, but it did not take long before I was shot down.  With many more years of musical work experience, and having newly studied American Roots Music, my realization of music was at its peak.  Stop for a moment and imagine that unless  you live in a million dollar house in a gated community, you are just like everyone else.  Every neighborhood, no matter what  income, is just a trailer park with people piled on top of each other.  You may live in separate buildings, but what is common knowledge is everyone knows what everyone else does.  If Blind Willie McTell, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Bill Evans, or Arthur Rubenstein live next to you, you know it.  There is no way that music cannot spill out into the neighborhood, even if you have spent thousands of dollars insulating the house.  The more operative realization is, gentrification has occurred.  My mother was ninety-two when she died, and her death was accompanied by a mass exodus of her generation in our neighborhood.  All of the homes that were cornerstones of the neighborhood, and had stood unchanged for decades, suddenly are vacant.  What is the new clientele?  They say, "Yes sir, no sir," and go to bed a seven o'clock at night and get up at three a.m.  Irving Berlin would not be happy, because most creative work occurs when the world rests.  It only is when that annoying nag of the military stops, that anxious, "Hurry up and wait," that the accompanying community can indulge in their own interests.  As it turns out ninety percent of the time we are swept away in their rip tide.  I for one do not have to be ready to deploy in 48 hours.  It is a grand failure of Nature verses Nurture, because no matter how much music you have in your head and heart, it cannot defeat seven Apache helicopters.  

Living on the Street

 The percentage of parental deaths resulting in positive results of their wills must be small.  It has become humorous and anecdotal especially for the television industry, no matter how disturbing it may be to the inheriting family members.  Fighting over the inheritance is common, and it has become a part of the fabric of life.  There are numerous reasons why there is contention in the inheritance process, but the number one determining factor should be eldercare.  For the wealthy this is not such a problem, because the parents will see to it they are cared for.  For what is left over the drama begins, and all kinds of morality tales, rationalization, and he said she said may ensue.  The scenarios are plentiful, colorful, and also destructive.  Why is it so easy for life long familial relationships to suddenly go awry, when some money and property are at stake?  In our situation it is not dissimilar.  Each child may and will have their own opinion about the process.  As eldercare should be the primary requirement of an estate, it should also be understood that inheritors have no privilege of knowing before a parent's death what they are to receive.  The Will is read after the death, and in most cases it will stand.  Any knowledge beforehand of what goes to whom is gratuitous and rare.  The only disparity that occurs is if and when a child decides not to believe the parent's choices.  It could be easier to slander a sibling rather than accept the fate that you didn't get what you wanted.  Reality is the requirement for resolution of this dissent.  In our case the house was the issue.  For two children to inherit a home together it would require either of two things.  One is to sell the property and split these assets, and the other is for one sibling to buy out the other if they wanted to keep the house.  Depending on the current value of the home the latter option may not be feasible.  If a home is worth $400,000.00 in today's market, not many children could come up with $200,000.00 in cash.  If they did they would deplete their savings and end up poor with a home in which to live.  In some states there may be an option to keep the home with two owners, but this often is where the trouble begins.  As our lawyer suggested having co-executors of the Will is not a good idea.  For the children to find resolution while grieving their lost parents would be rare.  This bereavement often is the reason why the first option is chosen most often.  The sheer emotional turmoil, grief, and loss of a family home filled with belongings is too much for most.  Instead they choose to sidestep this process of reflection and difficult decisions and leave the family stuff to a qualified estate company who will happily empty the house of its belongings getting it ready for sale.  As it would seem I was the dissenting 1/3 who did not want this process, an estate sale and being forced to sell a house because of an inability to process the emotions attached to the history of the home.  It seems like dumping a stepchild without giving them a chance.  My opinion was not a part of my mother's decision to will me the house.  She looked at our family and made a sound decision that the best use of the property was for me to have it for what it offered as a domicile.  Most people would agree with today's housing market, having property is best.  Of course the monetary value of the home is appealing, but that is for someone who does not need a  home.  In our particular situation these arrangements were made over twenty years ago.  As things changed and my father developed dementia and had to be placed in a nursing home, the necessity of having to sell the house to satisfy the preexisting will became burdensome.  When my father died in 2017, the house became my mother's house.  That was a change, and she made her own decision about her house.  Unfortunately it meant that the Will had to be changed.  This was not a problem, but surprisingly documents were penned at the same time reinforcing this original decision to split the house.  Suddenly they came back from the dead and an attorney involved in the original Will produced these documents and filed them before my mother could say otherwise.  It took all of a half an hour her drive to the courtyard to file these antiquated documents.  It was not what my mother had chosen, and she was taken advantage of.  After understanding what had happened, and that another opinion was usurping her own right to choose what to do with her own house, she decided to change it.  I will say after graduating college at UNC-Chapel Hill, watching this change take place was the most difficult thing I have experienced.  No one wanted to help us, because they were afraid of being sued.  The fact remained the house became hers, and she could do with it what she pleased.  The majority of the scrutiny was not on the ill-timed twenty year old documents that got filed against my mother's will.  The scrutiny was on me, the caregiver and son.  Knowing my mother's stubborness, and her unwillingness to listen to my opinion, it was the most surprising thing that could have happened. 

I Don't Want a Big Brother

 I'm tired of blogging, but there isn't much to watch on free over-the-air TV.  What is interesting is the new face of college football.    You can't help but chuckle at UNC's loss.  Millions of dollars spent on a Superbowl winning NFL coach, but college ball is not the same as the NFL.  It's like trying to scrape the icing off the cake without ever having baked the cake.  College football isn't professional football.  It is a sport or extracurricular activity at an institution of higher learning.  I guess players are going to learn about multi million dollar professional contracts.  Their names and likenesses should not be exploited, but I disagree with paying them.  Yes, they induce millions of university dollars in contributions for glorified tailgating, but sports should not change the system.  The college and university systems are in disorder just like America.  Methodist University, once Methodist College, cut its entire music faculty this year.  Most of the music students were on scholarships and being paid to get a degree.  The department was producing no revenue.  The salaries of the music professors were a drain on their finances, and they needed money to pay the new medical school faculty.  Difficult decisions must be made.  Partner with Cape Fear Valley, start a medical school, fire the music faculty, and hire new doctors to teach.  The field of music never was a big earner of revenue.  Like many of the humanities, we recognize its worth, value, and benefit to humanity and subsidize it from other areas.  Methodist since its inception has had a music department.  I know a handful of pianists who earned degrees from there, and the education was substantial.  The community benefited from the music department.  Now there is a void, a cultural void, and the community has lost a limb.  Who are the Charlotte 49er's?  You mean UNC-Charlotte football team.  Who beat UNC this past week?  Are they even in the ACC?  Shiny new helmets, spiffy uniforms, and college athletes feigning professional contracts.  What I watched today was skilled and entertaining football, but college ball is not the NFL.  So enough about college sports.  I want to write about microwaves.  I can get no one to recognize the dangers of airborne Radio Frequency energy.  Perhaps the original frequencies America has used for early radio and television are not harmful to humans.  The higher frequencies of the Electromagnetic Spectrum were reserved for the military and NASA.  Microwaves for consumer use remained in our kitchen ovens.  Bill Clinton had a revolutionary idea.  Why not ignore the stated dangers of these waves, use the Presidency to access these reserved frequencies, and auction them off to the highest bidder?  Let's create a cell phone market and convert the American economy to wireless.  We have spent almost four decades replacing the Bell telephone network with wireless clones.  There was nothing wrong with this wired network, other than it became a monopoly.  The government sued and broke it up and created the Baby Bells.  Long distance was expensive, but eventually modems were made that allowed computers to connect over these phone lines.  Those in businesses and academic environments were lucky to have a T3 line, the fastest internet connection.  In looking back at this progression I can see no substantial benefit of having created this cell phone industry.  The introduction of the smart phone has changed business, but everything done on a cell phone except except paying by tapping can be done on a PC in your home.  To this day this is what I use.  It is what I choose to use.  I don't want my freedom of mobility burdened by a thousand dollar, portable, miniature, wireless computer.  The majority of America feels differently.  America was a more efficient, more productive, more well adjusted populace of citizens without cell phones.  It forced us to be adults.  It has been known the higher frequencies of the Electromagnetic Spectrum are dangerous and can cause cancer.  America had made great strides fighting cancer, until this change to microwave wireless telecommunications.  We are in denial, and no one will say anything about these dangers.  The basic regulations governing the use of cell phone towers have been eliminated.  The more concerning use of this energy is with satellites, and who has become the major provider of civilian and military satellites for the United States.  In providing contracts to Space X for internet and American spy satellites, Elon Musk's friendship with Vladimir Putin comes into question.  They are friendly.  The man who owns the company that produces America's spy satellites for the Pentagon, has close ties to Vladimir Putin.  These satellites are a nemesis, because they are not using single microwave transmitters like older models.  They are using supercharged, phased array, directed beam antennas that are one thousand times more powerful than anything in the sky before.  Multiply this by the number of satellites current circling the Earth, and we have electromagnetic radiation like never before.  The brass at Space X said it was easy to attach weapons and surveillance to these unit.  These are non-lethal weapons that are responsible for the Havana Syndrome.  Whether these symptoms were the result of conscious surveillance or the intent, no one yet has acknowledged their source.  They do exist, and people have been rendered impaired.  What question can there be as to their source?  Because we can't see them, makes them the most effective nonlethal weapon in existence, more so than a biological pathogen.  Now we cannot escape them, because they are hiding clandestinely in outer space.  Star Wars has become a reality with or without exploding nukes.  I imagine it is addictive playing God, watching anyone in the world take a piss, or choosing to punish them for watching pornography on the computer.  All with the push of a button.  Considering Richard Nixon's List and a contingency of troops specializing in Unconventional Warfare, these satellites render them inconsequential.  They monitor our speech, our emotional responses, and our intent just like George Orwell predicted in "1984."  We don't know it yet, but Elon Musk is Big Brother. 

Do We Need a Soul Vaccination?

 If America were to dispense with her entire factual history of the fight against disease, including Polio, TB, Mumps, Measles, Mono, and the rest, we could say an effective vaccine could be developed in a few months.  It is more feasible and lucrative to create an antidote, such as an antidote for snake venom.  The circumstances surrounding the emergence of Covid 19 defy logic.  It was gaslighting that dominated the entire pandemic suggesting a virus such as Covid was naturally occurring.  Any knowledgeable scientist knows otherwise.  When HIV and AIDS emerged doctors in Europe found all kinds of diseases enveloped in the capsule.  It was concrete evidence that the virus was created in a lab from other manipulated pathogens.  This is no revelation, and governments and militaries had been experimenting with biological weapons for decades.  That a particular product of this endeavor was used for private, confidential, and political reasons is criminal.  It is genocide.  The current argument about vaccines is merited because of the Coronavirus, and I applaud Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for expressing dissent.  Most Americans would agree in retrospect that the entire affair smelled pretty fishy.  We were so desperate as a nation to live and remain healthy, most of us took the vaccines.  With only a few years of research and information about these vaccines, we where shooting in the dark.  There were horror stories about the vaccines, and people dying from them.  The gaslighting was so powerful, it was difficult to discern what was true and what was not.  Was it Covid or the vaccines that caused the illness and death?  Perdue Pharma had not set an ethical example for drug manufacturing.  They created the Opioid Epidemic by consciously constructing a program to addict people to their drug of choice, Oxycontin making them more rich.  Members of the organization pressured the medical community to over prescribe this medication creating a national crisis.  Many people died of overdoses from this drug, and the Sackler family is guilty or murder.  We are dealing with fire.  We know Vladimir Putin's protocol for poisoning traitors to his cause.  With these types of biological weapons and emerging wireless satellite communication which allows unmanned aerial vehicles, no one is safe from a specific attack on their home.  The latest addition to the arsenal of appropriate aircraft are Air Tractors, crop dusting planes with a hopper for chemicals or liquid.  Unmanned flight in normal planes is becoming more common, and regularly I watch a Cessna Grand Caravan take off and fly to Fort Detrick.  Their website celebrates this unmanned flight.  Of what possible use could an unmanned Cessna suffice?  If it were loaded with dangerous biological pathogens, then a pilot would not be in jeopardy if he were not present on the aircraft.  Drones are commonplace in today's warfare, but unmanned, small, civilian-looking planes should be against the Geneva Convention.  Biological warfare should be illegal.  We must make our own assessments.  I took most of the vaccines, and I think they helped me.  The last one did not, because it was taken with the Flu shot.  The result of the Covid Pandemic is that is has almost ruined America.  Had we not all been subject to a sweeping deadly pathogen for so long, the labor force, economy, and infrastructure still would be in tact.  We have weakened the human race so much, it is difficult to recover.  We will not recover until we uncover the truth.  To voice a blanket statement that all vaccines are bad or ineffective is inappropriate.  It is these vaccines produced with scholarly studies and trials over long periods that have saved millions of Americans.  We should adhere to them if these vaccines still are being produced the same way.  If RFK is pulling funding for specific research, then it is this methodology that is in question.  Big Pharma is not in good standing, and they should be accountable for their products.  With the federal government and civil service in a shambles of deconstruction from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, how is anyone to know what is true?  For all intents and purposes it seems as if the Trump Administration is working for Vladimir Putin trying to deconstruct America from the inside out.  

The K Cup Keurig Microplastics Debacle

 I am too tired from illness to spend much time reading about the villain.  He has affected me, and I concede.  I will not give up with my scant local health care, each day yielding yet another source of potential sickness.  Green in the Keurig.  Blue on my bread.  Chunks in my milk.  Black on my faucet.  The Amish and other puritan early Americans had the right idea.  My Keurig coffee machine now sits in the garbage can, so those plastic pods no longer can leech dangerous micro particles into my testicles.  It is an equation straight from hell.  Dangerous plastic, hot water, and whatever you call coffee.  Did anyone else get this memo?  I'm keeping the Nespresso, because unlike Keurig their pods are made of food grade aluminum.  I am taking the risk, because I need and like quick espresso fixes.  Whatever is in that Starbucks coffee bag along with NICE spring water and a Fabreware percolator (my old tried and true), at least I am cutting the supply line to tainted coffee in my belly.  I began with PFAS laden ice cubes.  When I had a new kitchen floor installed, Rex caused my water line to the ice maker to begin leaking.  (I all ready had repaired this once with a pressure fitting)  After contemplating fixing it again, and I bought the parts, I decided not to.  I turned the water off underneath the sink, and began using my silicone ice cube trays again.  Bottled water.  Bottled water in glass containers is best.  A case of Aqua Panna at the Sprouts is $36.00.  That's twelve bottles of 1 liter?  After buying a case of Topo Chico Mexican carbonated mineral water, and thinking I was making a good decision for $17.00, I read that it has the highest PFAS level of ALL bottled water.  I think the ragweed got me.  I have been sick for three days with pain that is incomparable.  Maybe it was a kidney stone.  Did anyone else get the memo on the Keurig? 

Money in Your Pocket Any Way

It is difficult to synthesize the amount of strife America has experienced since 2020, and synthesis is common for me.  I have synthesizers, but they don't try to kill you.  Instead through various sonic architectural engines such as FM, subtractive, and modeling machines full of sophisticated electronic circuitry create interesting, useful, and sometimes beautiful sounds.  The field of music never was an enemy of anyone except the Nazi's.  They called Jazz devil music.  Because I am a jazz musician I am going to try to remember the Nazi's felt this way.  Jazz also is the least popular music in America, its birthplace.  American Jazz was a synthesis, but it doesn't try to kill you.  It, this improvisatory swing-based music, was the result of diversity in the Port of New Orleans.  Would Jazz have emerged without African-Americans?  The answer is probably no.  If one looks at the Caucasian roots of European-based chamber and orchestral music, there is no evidence of Jazz.  The one similarity is Basso Continuo in Baroque music with its use of Figured Bass.  It is the example for a jazz chord chart or lead sheet.  It tells you the root of the chord written in the bass staff and a numerical figure written above it to represent the appropriate intervals for the keyboardist to build a chord.  One must understand music theory to do this.  Jazz lead sheets are easier, because they eliminate the numeric representations of intervals and use other symbols for the differentiation between major and minor.  There is variance in different fake books, but the standard is a triangle for a major chord and a dash for a minor.  The sevenths and other chromatic alterations of the chords still use numbers.  When chords get more complicated, a short cut can be used that the best jazz players utilize.  It is Polychords, or one chord superimposed over another with a slash separating them.  I use these when I compose, and it is of great benefit.  If you want to sound hip and modern in your playing (which is not playing the 1, 3, 5, and 7 of a dominant 7th chord) you find another major or minor triad from a different key that contains only color tones or chromatic alterations of the dominant 7th chord.  For me realizing half diminished chords is facilitated with the superimposition of a minor triad a minor third up from the root.  That would be a d minor triad over a b half diminished chord (or b minor seventh with a flatted fifth.)  Enough music theory for the moment.  There was improvisation in European music usually presenting itself as a cadenza at the end of a piano concerto.  Most people agree that Beethoven swung (with syncopation), but the formal court-like behavior of European royalty wasn't known for its physical, athletic, and emotional outpouring of casual music.  Jazz is a folk music, and while it does now have a written catalog or repertoire, it is performed mostly impromptu and for the moment.  I don't think it can be argued that the severity and seriousness of slavery is what infused Jazz with its emotional content.  Had there been no racial strife, Jim Crow laws, and illegal lynchings would musicians just have continued plucking banjos on barges on the Mississippi River?  Were the Blues a metaphor for the oppression of slavery?  Perhaps poverty alone could have evoked this deep emotional lamentation, and easily it can be found in the folk music of other cultures.  These Scot/Irish and English "ballads" were stories, and often they were sung in minor mode like Gregorian Chant.  The contemplative character of this music is clear, and other practices contributed to a serious or pious tone.  There can be no greater lamentation than Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, and the singing of modal music at a slow tempo with a Latin text in a huge cavernous cathedral is a perfect metaphor.  The white settlers in America who fell on hard times from the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression saw equal depths of despair, but angry Confederates were not trying to kill them because of the color of their skin.  The nature of slavery while brutal was a part of Jazz music.  While pundits will dispute the analogy of suffering being necessary for anything positive, often the depths of despair are what force the human mind and soul to actualize.  We as the human race have the power to rise up and change our plight.  It is unfortunate the United States of America, with a newly elected dictator, has chosen to augment our plight.  It is unfortunate a pathogen was created in a lab and unleashed on the world for a plenitude of reasons, ethnic cleansing only being one of them.  Maybe it was an accident, but HIV was not.  There are too many similarities.  The problem is the inability of people to be willing to accept that they have been forsaken by their own country blindly following the image of what they would like to represent their own perception of honest American leadership.  We have lost that.  The quicker you understand the better chance you have of survival.  When your entire medical establishment influenced by the corrupt Sackler Family turns against the populace, you better wake up.  I saw it coming two decades ago, and it always leads right back to Dick Cheney.  It is fascism, and they enjoy torturing and killing people.  How can you determine the difference between average Americans and immigrants?  Lump them all together and send in the National Guard.  Can we believe what we are seeing, and the courts are our only defense.  The debacle of the botched response to Covid will go down in history as one of America's most grievous missteps.  Not only did it thin the population, it made specific pharmaceutical companies rich.  Who would have been the model for this behavior?  Flu vaccines have coronaviruses in them saith Dr. Judy Mikovits.  Never has it been a good idea to take the flu vaccine with the Covid vaccine.  I did at the behest of Walgreens, and it made me sicker.  Emphatically I can say with my experience with local doctors, I would not trust any of them.  Upon scrutiny of their suggestions often they make you worse, but they get to continue treating you.  Money in their pocket is more important than helping you.  Sounds like our President. 

The President as a Jazz Musician

 If one were to assess the Trump presidencies with the absence of political bias, there is not much there.  It is like playing fooseball.  When I was on the Carnival Victory, often I would play this game with our Puerto Rican lead trumpet player.  I was a novice but learning.  Never would he cease to defeat me at a game, if I played aggressively and emotionally.  His instincts and skill were so ingrained, that reflex action acted for him.  If I abandoned this machismo approach and adopted a cynical and manipulative mood in my game with very little athleticism, he would buckle and I could win a point.  Trump's presidency is built on altercation, antagonism, drama, and misdirection, and it is all self serving.  If you strip this superficial but intense emotional energy away, there is not much left.  When musicians practice their craft and art, often they are assessed by the depth of their knowledge and experience.  In Jazz this is a sharp as a razor blade.  When one improvises in a tune it becomes clear immediately who is the beginner, who is the novice, and who is the professional.  This evolution is based on time, study, practice, and experience.  There are those who are fortunate enough to emerge from the womb with these things genetically stored like computer discs.  How else can we justify that Mozart was writing full symphonies as a young child?  How else can we justify that an Indonesian child plays jazz piano like Herbie Hancock or Oscar Peterson?  Some people are blessed with this talent, and it is genetic.  It is in the genes.  Often if you look at successful artists, you will find the fruit does not fall far from the tree.  People are given a leg up.  When an aspiring jazz musician improvises, immediately you will hear the depth of their approach.  One can only go so fast and absorb so much aural musical information, so it is important to begin early.  Those most successful as musicians began life hearing music.  It begins in the womb, because the ears and hearing is not the only sense involved.  Autoacoustic hearing (although modern science has changed the connotation of this word) is hearing that occurs within and through the body via the skin and central nervous system.  When I play Fender bass guitar I position the amp near my buttocks, so I can feel the vibrations on my body.  The best music is penned or performed with the emotions and body involved.  Igor Stravinsky would argue with this premise, but Arnold Schoenberg would support it.  Schoenberg said the more music is distanced from dance, the more it suffers, meaning that movement in the human body is crucial to music.  It would be difficult to find an academic curriculum that embraces this concept.  Perhaps Suzuki and Kodaly are the closest to understanding that  rhythm is innate in the mind and soul, and the earlier and more casual you nurture it the better.  When one strips the Trump presidencies of the rhetoric, spectacle, and drama, there is not much left.  That is because he truly he does care about the American people.  He wants to be loved and revered by the American people, but he does not want to serve them.  That is the job of the President.  He is a public servant.  It is not Donald Trump's responsibility to change the charter of the United States of America and the tenets of the Constitution, especially without the agreement and support of Congress and the American people.  That he has created a new self serving concept for the American President is criminal.  What has Donald Trump done to even suggest he cares about anyone else?  Has he embraced anyone outside of his family and organization?  The answer is no.  Instead he criticizes and attacks everyone.  Instead of paying homage to the rich history of American culture through living and dead icons, a harmful and degrading policy of Cancel Culture is trying to erase it.  The eradication of the knowledge of slavery is the primary goal of this Cancel Culture, but you cannot separate American from these roots.  It was the practice of slavery and its intense implications and ramifications that forged much American culture such as Jazz.  Has Trump ever applauded American culture, popular or serious?  Has he mentioned a film, piece of music, or painter that he admires?  I would equate Donald Trump to a beginner jazz musician.  His solo is remedial, shortsighted, and devoid of devotion and historical perspective.  Who is Donald Trump?   

The Hypocritical Mantra of MAGA

PWC (the Public Works Commission) in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was just allotted twenty million dollars specifically  to remove PFAS from Glenville Lake.  This is part of a "mini budget" passed by the  General Assembly in recent days.  The state legislature punted on the budget, because the previous budget would sustain if a new one was not passed.  Although the EPA severely has been weakened, and DOGE and far right leaning Republicans want no regulation or corporate oversight, the courts eventually speak.  This takes time.  If the Trump family wanted a lineage for their enterprises, suing would be their forte.  Considering the drinking water in Wilmington, NC was the first discovered evidence of forever chemicals in the state's watershed, it is interesting that the state legislature would be so specific about water clean up.  They have found PFAS up the Cape Fear River in Jordan Lake.  This suggests that Chemours is not the only culprit polluting the state's water supply.  Fayetteville has some very specific monikers.  Originally the city's logo was "History, Heroes, and a Home Town Feeling."  Recently Fayettenam was designated the most depressed place in the country.  The water in Cumberland Country after testing was the worst in the state.  Teacher's salaries are low statewide, in the bottom three.  I reckon there is a reason to be depressed.  There are other reasons why the circus has left town.  The Covid outbreak only was part of it, because in light of a deadly pathogen trying to kill you, there are other things.  Traditionally your community is supposed to provide support, not antagonism.  It would be difficult to sidestep that antagonism knowing that the war preparation machine is churning 24/7.  How will that twenty million dollars be spent?  Is their a tried and true method for removing PFAS from water?  Will they purchase and install this equipment in the near future?  To merit such a large grant from Governor Josh Stein, there are reasons.  For the first time since Covid I ventured out to the Cape Fear River Trail to ride my mountain bike hybrid.  It was the first temperate day we have had since the hot humid summer, and the ride was enjoyable.  The level of the  Cape Fear River was strikingly low, and as I passed the sewer plant on its banks it made me think.  No wonder out tap water is putrid.  I acutely remember the time when corporate America decided to bottle tap water and well it as something more.  Bottled water mostly is a scam, but there are some exceptions.  Perhaps other more metropolitan areas are better kept than Fayettenam such as Charlotte, the Triad, or the RTP.  The home of the world's largest military base should aspire to more.  There is some funky history in this town, and it is criminal in nature.  I think it ties to the drug trade because of the I-95 corridor and the military.  Always I have had a virtuous view of the military, because my father instilled that patriotism in me.  His stint as a corporal was only two years playing trumpet in a band in Germany.  Often he said it was the best two years of his life.  Likewise the best two years of my life were playing with a black R&B Hip/Hop band in Columbus, Ohio.  We are a musical family.  The kind of devotion and patriotism once found in America has waned, and I no longer trust the military.  Aside from the abundant poppy crops in Afghanistan, which was one reason why we were there, our most recent perception of the United States military was the television war waged by George Bush Sr. in Kuwait and Iraq.  Saddam Hussein was their target, and the sole reason for the invasion and destroying of Iraq was a lie.  He didn't win reelection.  Other than World War ll when the world was fighting the Nazis, the United States does not have a virtuous history of warfare.  Ronald Reagan and Ollie North did not help the situation, nor did waging a ten year war in Viet Nam.  America's recent military past is smeared with ulterior motive, imperialism, and egotism.  The honorable tenets of serving one's country and its people largely are absent.  In Donald Trump's great plan he has pitted Americans against one another rather than trying to unite a populace.  Petting infighting has become the sole job of most Americans trying to survive.  There is little room for enlightened living.  It is this I face everyday I wake up in Fayettenam.  When I sat down to blog it was not my intent to trash Fayetteville.  We must find more productive things to do, and they must be positive.  Spewing sour grapes only will pull you further into the abyss.  This particular blog entry all ready was penned about the information about cleaning PFAS out of Glenville Lake.  There is more to that issue, and it merited exposure.  To know that interior lakes fed by tributaries of the Cape Fear River contain forever chemicals is tragic.  Your child is swimming in tainted water with PFAS and Canadian duck poop.  That we have allowed these birds to compromise public health in an entire city is irresponsible.  They should be eradicated.  In thinking about the underlying criminal impetus of Fayetteville and the forever unanswered question of whence the drugs come, I made an interesting discovery.  CSX has been on my list of superfund sites, since they implemented AC traction in the early 1990's.  They are not a virtuous company, and consequently they have passed off much of their liability to welcoming Wabtec.  What began as Westinghouse Air Brakes recently has grown into a railroad corporate monopoly buying up most of the industry.  This includes rebuilding traditional DC locomotives to AC specifications and/or converting the traction motors to brushless AC drives controlled by a microprocessor.  Much of this activity occurs in Altoona, Pennsylvania.  They also embraced distributed power or wireless remote control of motive power or split consists in a single train.  I have a study sitting on my desk of the radio capabilities of these large diesel electric freight locomotives.  The arrays are so diverse and so complicated, they could measure the RF energy potentially causing interference to human infrastructure.  GE in particular with their electrical roots uses every imaginable means of wireless communication to control these two and three miles monstrosities.  They disrupt both my on air television reception and FM in my house, not military aircraft.  You would be cast as a dinosaur using such outdated technology, which was a precursor to any of the current microwave energy being used for consumer satisfaction.  As a nation were were better without it.  On air television and AM and FM radio were enough to unite the country a create a mainstream.  The sprawling and unwieldy conglomerate that has emerged with little governmental regulation or understanding has proven itself weak and convoluted, nothing more than a channel for each show.  Electricity, wireless electricity is our economy, and it has failed the people.  It was Bill Clinton who made this happen.  I am no fan of CSX, and singlehandedly they have lessened the quality of lives of Americans.  When looking up a freight schedule for CSX, a private entity with unpublished data, I found FEC, Florida East Coast Railroad.  This Class ll railroad owns and operates the trackage between Miami and Jacksonville, Florida controlling the ports of Miami, Everglades, Palm Beach, and Canaveral.  The Florida East Coast Railroad is owned by Grupo Mexico.  This Mexican conglomerate also owns Texas Pacifico Transportation Limited, a Class III railroad in Texas.  How is it that a Mexican conglomerate own major rail right-of-ways in the two largest states on the Gulf of Mexico, and the states with the most accessible ports?  This is Mexico, the country with which Donald Trump has declared holy war and wants to build a wall to separate them from the United States.  When Mexicans all ready own the transportation systems responsible for moving imported goods within the continental United States, the wheel is all ready greased for easy logistics of foreign products, including drugs.  Is there any federal oversight of Grupo Mexico's rail systems?  I was sure that CSX must own the right of way up and down the east coast, but no.  That vulnerable and venerable corridor from Miami to Jacksonville is owned by Mexicans.  The targeting of average people seeking asylum from persecution in Latin America and labeling them criminals while allowing foreign corporate monopolies to run amuck infringing upon the lives of Americans is quintessential hypocrisy.  This is the rich taking advantage of the poor, the emerging mantra of MAGA.  

The Music of the Night

 There was a reason why Muscle Shoals was fruitful for American popular music.  Florence Alabama Music Enterprises was founded by Rick Hall in 1960.  Under his tutelage the Swampers formed, a capable rhythm section, and recorded and created the Muscle Shoals sound.  Diverse musical artists were drawn to FAME, as it built a reputation for musical creativity and production.  Not unlike Stax Records in Memphis both studios were known for racial diversity.  Muscle Shoals was a remote location on the banks of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, and was the butt of many jokes.  Music in a broad sense encompasses many human sensibilities, not just aural sound.  With the advancement of wireless technology, our understanding and thus production of music has waned.  Music is more than a short wave radio signal, a dot or dash of Morse code, or a simple sound byte.  Why is it that burgeoning wireless technology has hurt the field of music?  Watershed cultural events in America's history like radio and television easily are not usurped by a PC.  All of the 1's and 0's cannot create art, a deep contemplative study, understanding, and creative interpretating of life.  Convenience in a frenetically paced world does not suffice.  Immediate gratification is a shallow and unsatisfying anodyne.  We have come to live in a disposable society, and we are suffering the consequences, a lack of soul.  What is missing from digital music?  There is no question the storing and sharing of digital music via Napster changed the music industry.  It could be said this network gratuitously offering contraband music to the masses annihilated America's traditional music industry.  Who could resist the immediate gratification of downloading music immediately for free?  In a business sense like loosing weight from a smart phone, sending your gold jewelry to a company in the mail and expecting a check, or collecting millions from the lottery, continuing to steal commercially recorded music from the Black Web is not beneficial for the American economy.  We have lost sight that if money is to circulate representing goods and services, than all goods and services must be included, not just energy, housing, and food.  The basis of a Democratic Republic choosing Capitalism and a free market, is based upon everyone being included, not just the wealthy and empowered.  This is how America has changed in the last several decades.  We have become a nation of success or failure on a grand scale and of great spectacle, and the model of this irresponsible behavior is foreign television programming that that has convoluted America's premiere maiden communication offerings.  With the sheer amount of time, devotion, impetus, and money spent building America's first wireless radio networks, and the positive affect they had creating solidarity in America, especially in rural areas, cheap, trite, superficial talent shows exploiting average Americans has been extremely detrimental to our economy.  In essence the opportunity, fluidity, and power of average people has been hijacked by the elite wealthy.  This hijacking was the Big Short in 2008, when banks foreclosed on un-vetted pooled mortgages that continue to make hedge fund managers filthy rich.  Unknowing buyers at the urging of President Bill Clinton bought outside of their means with easily obtainable free flowing credit, later to be foreclosed upon when raises in premiums doubled and tripled with the written terms of the contract.  They were fleeced, and it was this practice that has stolen America's money.  A small group of Wall Street investors saw this coming and created custom financial instruments that were forced to pay them off moving the bulk of America's capital to their own offshore bank accounts.  We have not recovered, and to this day that money is just sitting stagnant.  For Capitalism to work and America to become healthy again in a free market system, this money has to flow.  Instead a plutocracy has been created with a committee of oligarchs.  We have become a nation of rich and poor with very little middle class, the class that has been the cornerstone of American achievement since her inception.  What is the best example of the middle class?  It is the group of professionals responsible for educating your children and creating the future leaders of our nation.  The Troubled Assets Relief Program, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, used federally funded taxpayer dollars to bail out corporate America, and the Tea Party began.  Before our economy will be refurbished,  American priorities must change.  Donald Trump's grand push to autocracy should stay a dream in his head.  No one would argue that the personal computer has changed the world, business, and economies, but we are human.  Money is not the only thing we need, and our planet Earth is the best example of this.  Billions of dollars in paper money cannot affect the change needed to heal her.  Mother Nature is a fickle beast, and unless we curb the sheer amount of microwave radiation and carbon emissions currently in play, we will perish as a race.  The predictions in the Book of Revelations will come true, and fire will rain down from the heavens and bubble up from the oceans.  God will come again and judgement will happen.  Those who have accepted Christ will be transported to a new planet, and the traitors, sinners, and Agnostics will be left on earth like a smoldering Hades.  The goodness of America has been lost.  It is disconcerting that America reelected Donald Trump, and the rest of us are living with self-proclaimed self-serving fascists.  This is not what I want to think about when I get up in the morning, but after watching several quality Hollywood films such as "A Most Violent Year,"  it become evident that in a free society your neighbors also are your competitors.  When their level of intelligence and civility dips below an acceptable level, we are forced to reckon with their irresponsibility.  The cusp of civil war in this case is ill timed.  America needs regeneration, and like Trump wanting a Nobel Peace Prize for sanctioning a violent siege of our nation's Capital, his Make America Great Again should be interpreted as make it great for the white and wealthy.  He coerced minority voters and immediately forsake them.  Even as grocery prices continue to rise and the earth gets hotter, and full fledged attacks on average working Americans, especially in the Civil Service, are carried out, America continues to choose a Hitleresque dictator over a black woman.  Our recent Presidential campaign was not elegant, effective, or streamline.  Like Joe Biden has become, it was a stumbling attempt to keep the democratic party in power.  Only conceding his candidacy for President months before the election, no democrat had the time to mount a potentially successful and winning campaign.  Knowing that the electing of a woman for the first time in American history, and an African-American woman at that, nearly was impossible, Kamala Harris had no real chance.  Like everything in America, the election process has become broken.  How does American popular music have anything to do with politics?  I don't know the quick answer to that, but I do know that commercially recorded music once was a profitable, satisfying, and sometimes artistic machine.  Music, television, and film have contributed to a social and moral consciousness in America, and it is needed.  What is not needed is foreign entities hijacking American businesses such as Chemours and DAK Americas.  Mexicans and the Chinese are not citizens of the United States of America, so why do they own and have control of American businesses in our backyards?  I have developed judicious animosity towards North Carolina since moving back.  While Phil Berger has replenished the state coffers to some extent, priorities here have moved in the wrong direction.  I agree with legal prostitution, but prostituting your state purely for money is a mistake.  North Carolina has failed in the most massive way, failing to provide clean water and clean air.  With the amount of aeronautical industry slated to build in North Carolina, a PFAS-laden Cape Fear River basin is no longer is our first priority.  With Ground Forces Command moving to Fort Bragg, with them they brought increased and plentiful air pollution.  American, Delta, PSA, and Piedmont airlines are not helping spewing downtown Fayetteville with black microdust every time they take off and land.  If we did desire a resurgence of American popular music, and its long term affects on the human soul, no longer is it easy to achieve what once was in the mid years of the twentieth century.  While shared recorded music now may exist in earbuds in private, the process of creating music always has and should be conducted in a plural human realm.  Music production can have its solitary aspects, but as communication of ideas, thoughts, and feelings it cannot exist in a vacuum.  The music will be richer, more plentiful, and more satisfying if it is allowed to gestate in real time, such as how a composer pens a major work.  The best metaphor for this process is imagining Frank Sinatra singing a sonorous vocal in an isolated, insulated, vocal booth with headphones.  His intonation will suffer, because of the inability of headphones to represent live bass frequencies, and there is no acoustic reinforcement of his voice.  What does this mean?  It means like a community, your end product will be better if it has support rather than opposition.  Imagine Frank trying to sing this vocal rendition in a trench on the battlefield with guns a blazing.  Then imagine him at his prime early in his career singing in front of a live orchestra for thousands of military spouses missing their deployed husbands.  The symbiosis of all of this support via emotional energy conveyed in person in real time is insurmountable.  It takes a village. 

Playing in a Cover Band

 ...is not anything ever to which I have aspired.  While I heard a few bar bands while I was in college, including "Hootie and the Blowfish" in Columbia, and a few good bands in the Research Triangle Park, or Triad, or Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, never was I motivated to want to play in such a group.  The music was interesting to me, but I grew up listening to jazz.  My father was a jazz pianist, and some would call him a stylist.  His approach to the piano was Milt Bruckner's "Locked Hands," of which George Shearing adopted and brought to a wider public.  It is a particular harmonic approach to realizing tunes from "lead sheets" or "chord charts" that states the melody in an octave spacing, usually between the little finger in the right hand and the thumb of either the right or left hand.  Barry Harris is the more modern purveyor of this style based on the ascending melodic minor scale.  It uses a diminished chord as a V, so as you harmonize a diatonic scale ascending I,V, I, V, I with diminished chords substituting for the V7.  It sounds very lush and sophisticated.  These little diminished chords were notated in my father's hand-written fake book, and never did I understand what they were.  If you play a tune with this stylistic approach, you must really know the melody of the tune, meaning you have harmonically analyzed the intervals of the melody and are capable of inserting passing chords in between the notes in the melody.  It is the common practice of most jazz pianists.  In essence when "faking" a tune, the pianist realizes a more complicated and sophisticated sounding accompaniment becoming an impromptu arranger on the spot.  You are doing something different than playing "licks" or fills behind the melody, which becomes distracting quickly if you are not tasteful.  I will admit that although I am a solid jazz pianist, I never spent the time on each and every jazz tune I play.  I always have played the melody mostly by ear, hunting and pecking away in a rather ignorant approach.  My pianistic touch is subtle and dynamically expressive, and my ear is keen, so never has it been a problem.  But (and I don't usually begin a sentence with a contraction) I can't tell you the notes of particular melodies.  When I compose music, and with two composition degrees, I do use harmonic analysis along with my heart and ear.  I write this analysis on top of the staff like a lead sheet.  When you play, you do not think this way.  You sing the song, and that singing is in your head.  I have only recently realized that this singing makes the realizing of a tune much much easier.  Your ear remembers or knows the tune, so aural tradition plays a large role in your performance of the song.  So was the case for much American popular music.  It was not written down in musical notation.  The melodies were passed down through the generations from person to person.  There were a handful of "Tune Catchers" who traveled to Appalachia to find and transcribe this mountain music, as did Alan Lomax traveling to the American South to record blues, work songs, Negro spirituals, and other indigenous music.  In the last five years I made it a goal to study the lineage of American Popular Music, and I never realized what a huge undertaking this was.  It is a massive undertaking, and still yet has it not has been done.  Ken Burns as made a sizeable dent in this archiving with his series on Jazz and Country music.  I have accomplished some of my goals as a musician, composer, and performer, but it was not until I became a caregiver for my mother that my life's musical perspective changed.  Never did I realize how much I don't know about American music, and that is because I never studied it.  Classes about American Popular Music were scant during my college years.  It is important, critically really to understanding who America is a nation.  More importantly this musical heritage is diverse and includes both Native and African American roots.  This is not a rich political era for recognizing these roots.  In fact it may be the worst in our lifetimes.  Only this week news commentators  were vocal in saying, "Dixie has returned to Washington, DC."  What does this mean?  In a slight pause I will mention that life has not been easy recently for anyone, and the entire nation is hesitant to push back on the policies of our President.  My vote for Fayetteville mayor was changed in one split second, when the candidate for which I had chosen to vote decreed his agenda for mayor would mimic Trump.  A Nobel Peace Prize?  Let's reflect shall we at the absurdity of that notion?  A Nobel Peace Prize for a sitting President who sanctions a violent extremist entity indoctrinated with his cult-like desires?  They attack the United States Capital and try to stop validation of Joe Biden's win for President.  He fails to respond to this violent incursion deploying no one, and several people lose their lives.  This mob violently breaches the Capital Building as working lawmakers scurry to safety hiding in various places.  This action in the pinnacle of the opposite of a peaceful transfer of power in Washington.  There is no more absurd suggestion that Donald Trump could or would earn this prize, because his policies and the ramifications of his ideologies have caused much more violence, separation, and unrest in America since his election as President.  It has been a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.  Life in America since 2016 markedly has been worse than before, and violence has escalated.  It has been the worst decade of my life, and this is one week out of having had Covid for at least the 8th time.  The corruption of America has become so deep, we are beginning to lose the border of reality.  The news media, not unlike the rest of Corporate America, has fallen prey to the intimidation and legal coercion of the Trump Organization through mob-like action.  Trying to keep the torch of America's true history alive has become daunting, because Cancel Culture has infiltrated the mainstream.  Education has become so compromised and Americans so put upon and sheltered, as a populace we are not capable of seeing or understanding the truth.  Everyday is just another reinforcement of Donald Trumps autocratic tendencies, and many local leaders have joined his party.  As a musician and now self-proclaimed music historian, finally I have realized why this journey is difficult.  As I have been looking backward to the roots of American popular music, the Trump Organization (now the Trump Administration) is looking to sanitize, homogenize, and marginalize American achievement.  It has been American democracy, that out-of-bounds, dirty, disruptive, and aggressive force which has made leaps and bounds in civil rights.  It means that in freedom, not everything is going to be in your liking.  Most things may stray from your own personal perception of American live.  That is the definition of diversity, and the question looms as to whether America is and has been diverse since its inception.  The unequivocal answer is, "Yes," and there is n denying it.  To put the pedal to the metal, early Americans bought slaves, African-American slaves.  These slaves were captured, shackled, and shipped to southern American ports, where they were sold to affluent white people.  If you mean to say America is not diverse, than you would not have brought indigenous Africans to America in bondage.  One only has to look at the history of the Minstrel practice of Blackface to understand.  The images derived from slavery and used as entertainment often were accurate.  The basis of the images, while sometimes exaggerated, were true.  There were Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Toms.  The basic hierarchy of a plantation was the "Mammy" ran it.  A large, powerful, masculine, and often rude woman was the authority figure of the inner workings of a plantation.  One could suggest she was a lesbian, because she was not to be the object of the affection of the master.  That would infringe upon the romantic sovereignty of the wife, thus her responsibility was to be feminine.  The images used as entertainment during the period of Blackface, while seemingly startling and possibly unsettling were accurate.  African culture at the onset of slavery, because of its pure roots, markedly was different than European,  now new American sensibility.  This disparity in culture truly is the soul of America, and over several hundred years evolved into the true roots of American culture.  To deny African or Native American influence is erroneous and in insult to Jazz, Pentecostal, R&B, Blues, and Soul music.  Without the Black Church, upon which freed slaves came to rely, American Popular Music would be a shell of itself.  Try to tell our modern generation of Americans this tale.  Black music?  Blues artists?  Gospel Music?  Soul?  Jazz?  Jazz is the least popular music in America.  To understand the soul of America is to understand the oppression and despair of freed slaves being lynched in the American South.  What was it about African-Americans that merited such murderous behavior, being whipped and hung from trees to die?  What was so antagonistic about Joe Biden's win of the Presidency, that merited a violent mob attacking our elected leaders while they tried to confirm the vote?  Simply it is racial discrimination or White Supremacy, or "Dixie comes to D.C."  I have been writing about Jim Crow Jr. throughout the Trump Presidency, and I never knew I was living in a chosen red state.  Red states lack soul, understanding, empathy, and compassion.  Their social and political sentiments could be attributed to the same Red Skins erroneously earmarked as as savage and self-serving.  By what is the Republican Party under siege?  Much of their fodder is being created for the purposes of their own rebellion, otherwise America may have continued as a peaceful and prosperous entity with democratic rule. 

The War in Viet Nam May Be Over, but Fayettenam is Alive and Limping

The strains of, "If you lived near Camp Lejeune, you may be entitled to a settlement," have waned on television.  Unfortunately this phrase is a metaphor for a common remedy in The Swamp.  I don't believe Washington, DC always was evil.  It was not until the career lobbyists took up shop with their professional coercion of elected officials, that American democracy began to crumble.  It didn't help  the Russians bought Donald Trump and secured his freedom from a slew of grievous felonies including theft of confidential material, election rigging, treason, conspiracy, and fraud.  Oh, he got nabbed for that one, falsifying insurance property values for his gain.  He was in deep water, but investors bought him out.  Russian mafia.  Is there a difference between Putin and the mafia?  Probably not.  When you bring this stench to Washington, it has an effect; it is not the effect of people smelling your soiled Depends and knowing that you are incontinent.  Why should we know these things?  Is it because our President is too old to handle the job of president?  If the supporting Deep State of the Marines at Camp Lejeune didn't care about contaminated ground water at the base, then they don't care now.  Fayettenam is the litmus test.  Fayetteville, North Carolina is the modern Camp Lejeune, but its exploitation, wounds, and casualties may be worse than people suffering from disease and dying of cancer.  We are experiencing it in real time, and nobody knows.  If they do know, they are too afraid to resist the military industrial complex.  Rest assured it is industrial, and it is complex, and like Koch Industries, everyone is all in.  The military is the second largest economy in North Carolina.  Let me say that again.  No textiles.  No Big Tobacco.  No hogs and chickens.  No produce.  No tourism of the beautiful Atlantic beaches or the Great Smokey Mountains.  The military has overtaken the Eastern Seaboard.  If you go to the shore, you will hear the military in the sky and in the water.  Did anyone ever stop to ask the constituency of North Carolina, if we wanted this?  Roy Cooper is mum, and the future of aviation has burgeoned from his governorship.  Why is Fayettenam the new Camp Lejeune?  The Deep State was overjoyed when BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) decided to move Ground Forces Command to Fort Bragg.  The decision began in 2005, but in June of 2011 FORSCOM moved to Fort Bragg.  The gentle strains in the community then were not, "You deserve financial compensation for your suffering."  Instead it was, "Those army generals are coming, moving from Atlanta to Cumberland County."  The word on the street was someone wanted to see troops out their window.  Fourteen years have passed and one Trump Presidency beginning in 2016.  We didn't notice much amiss in the Fayetteville community until later.  There was a time when Trump told some truth.  It was true when he said "we" rebuilt the American military.  Two installments of 800 billion dollars.  Military life has not changed much, so what of that money?  Take a look at Youtube.  The number of shiny, spit and polish, seducing websites chronicling the exploits of the modern military technology are rife.  It is like a propaganda campaign.  Like?  Websites that prop up policy.  The internet.  Video.  "Content."  You can't buy any product without the internet somehow being involved or an iPad.  Is it a promotional video?  A copy of the contract?  When you watch these videos, it is another Cold War.  "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours!"  It is complex, industrial, and high technology.  Long gone are the days of lying in a trench computing trajectories with math by hand.  Today they use the AN/MPQ-64 radar.  While there are many contributing players to the game of military gentrification, and some of them are civil or private, this single Raytheon-built device is a major player transforming Fayetteville, North Carolina into Fayettenam.  The 30+ million dollar Apache helicopter firing range is a close second, but only because each aircraft has two gas turbine engines that operate at temperatures of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.  Fayettenam must be the only city in America that gets hotter after the sun goes down.  I'll never forget the first time I saw a rail car filled with molten sulfur on a CSX track.  The entire metal car was molten red, not just the sulfur.  There is a rubber vulcanization plant in downtown Fayetteville.  We quietly can rejoice at the closing of DAK Americas, but I have figured out when the Q-64 is watching.  It is like the TET, an autonomous, all seeing, all knowing, electromagnetic maelstrom of targeting information.  How can and does the Army differentiate between their hypothetical enemy and the citizens of Fayetteville that live around the base?  Because housing is so direly needed, people literally live on the edges of the drop zones.  Fayetteville always has been integrated with war games at Fort Bragg, but evolving and available technology subsidized by 1.6 trillion dollars of Trump appropriated dollars has created an elite, mostly covert, almost private sub military having nothing to do with grunts in a trench.  It is reliant upon the electromagnetic spectrum solely for its information.  Fort Bragg, now the home of Ground Forces Command and Special Operations, has been playing high tech War Games since this infusion of revenue.  In contrast to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's ruthless approach to annihilating Iraq, wiping out their infrastructure from above and disabling human life, is "Unconventional Warfare" any more humane?  I say not.  It is happening now, and no one knows it, because it cannot be seen.  What is the difference between a biological and chemical weapon?  A chemical weapon has a physical footprint.  It is a liquid or a gas, and it has to be applied.  It is dangerous to handle, and its refuse is difficult of which to dispose.  A biological weapon, something former George W. Bush Vice President Dick Cheney sanctioned Dr. Anthony Fauci to create is much more sinister.  While the visual images of the Black Plague are gruesome and painful, slowly dying from the inside out with no concrete diagnosis of multiple causes is pure evil.  Like the effects of the Q-64 radar on the human body, you can't see the pathogen.  Let's combine the virility of a lab-created virus with radiation.  In any given scenario whether the radiation activates the pathogen, or the pathogen is exacerbated by skin penetrating millimeter waves, the outcome is morbid.  It is difficult to qualify if and how the disparate players in the game of democratic deconstruction are cooperating.  Certainly CSX has been a major player in transporting the goods of the treasonous.  The smell of Vodka wafting down from the skies, as Russian pilots assault the American people in ways not definable is unmistakable.  The trifecta of military, air, and rail on a domestic community has ability to impart change.  In a democracy that change may be for the people.  In the case of Donald Trump, a traitor, that change is akin to any other fascist dictator attempting to oppress, silence, and eventually kill his own people.  With the citizens of Fayetteville dead, Fort Biberty will be free to spread out like the communist enclave it is meant to become.  The sight of Stepford Soldiers earning their daily keep will usurp any semblance of cultural life and art, and the disparate strains of diverse lineage through sound, race, and presence will melt into one great chorus of, "Hile Trump." 

Is Your Microwave an Intercomm?

I began to have premonitions about the ease or difficulty of American life, when I became a caregiver for my mother.  She lived through the Great Depression.  She picked cotton in the fields and cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps.  She slept in the same bed with her six brothers.  I never realized how strong she was, until I no longer was her charge.  She became mine.  When this happened is when I learned who my mother really was.  It became clear to me although I had pitfalls in my life, others had it worse.  Jews.  Slaves.  The Homeless.  Addicts.  I could be kind to myself and say my life has been fortunate, but it has not.  I have been cared for, and I will have an eternal debt of gratitude for parents who provided altruistic love.  With that support I made the best of my life.  This life consequently revolved around music, not familial love.  There was never any time to stop my pursuit of musical enlightenment and settle down with a family.  If I did feel the pang to do so, the opportunity evaporated over time.  Ironically my married life came earlier than most, almost as early as Jerry Lee Lewis.  I was not an adult Rock 'n' Roll star.  I was fourteen, but I had been waiting for love since I was born.  My childhood had been difficult, not because of my family but because of our town.  Fayettenam.  I haven't dwelled on these experiences, because to be successful you must overcome obstacles.  Music was how I actualized my father's genetic musical talent and my own stubborn pride.  Music at an early age also provided the love I sought.  My musical ability, like Jerry Lee Lewis, provided the same thing for which he was persecuted.  The difference was, I also was fourteen years old.  The world looks differently at two adolescents in love than a seeming pedophile and an underage girl.  There are other cultures in the world that condone marriage at this age with predetermined contracts.  My first marriage began at fourteen and lasted seven years through high school and three years of college.  Needless to say the high school years were the most rewarding, because the responsibilities of a real marriage were absent.  Simply we plucked the best experiences of romance from the movies and actualized them for ourselves.  Several other marriages occurred, and each lasted about three years.  One of these did include cohabitation.  The only experience missing from my formative romantic relationships was offspring.   Today I lament that absence.  My later life after caregiving is different than the new neighbors living around me.  College.  Marriage.  Jobs.  Homeowners.  Family.  Nothing ever told me to do these things in a particular order.  Instead I was compelled to pursue a music vocation, which entailed piano and trumpet performance, arranging jazz and commercial music, and composing contemporary classical music.  Later computer music production became the core of my interest, not C Sound or C Music programming language, but using a Macintosh computer as a miniature recording studio.  The laptop computer did revolutionize the music industry.  Unfortunately Napster and the iTunes store annihilated it.  A once viable and burgeoning cultural business acumen based around the production of American popular music was rendered moot in a few short years.  It became "streaming."  What reaches you through a compressed MP3 audio file, chosen by a conglomerate managing all available music on a mass scale, is not going to be quality.  It is going to be shit, the same shit that is on free over-the-air television.  I am thankful for the handful off free TV channels I receive, but an outside force determines how many and when I can enjoy them.  The same is true for my FM radio reception, which to most people would be an archaic dinosaur.  Over-the-air analog television and AM and FM radio were the norm in America.  The country was built and grew on these communication mediums.  If one studies the history of country music, for example, radio and its subsequent advertising are at its core.  It is a history of America.  We have lost that history.  We have lost decades of tried and true wireless tradition only because someone decided that microwaves were better.  When I look at my personal music collection, which contains many Time/Life music collections I have purchased for $150.00, I feel grief.  Why did I decide it was important to have this music?  AM Radio.  Soft Rock.  Disco.  R&B.  Gospel.  Each of these collections was a chapter in the cultural history of America.  The industry that surrounded this music and produced it at one time was more powerful than Hollywood.  This music embodied attitudes about American life, empowered personal expression, and emboldened the common man.  In a nutshell it was the conscience of America.  This music industry largely was responsible for integration, because music making rose above personal vices.  Interracial musical performances set an example for America.  Seeing African-Americans successfully performing on stage and on television finally showed the American South all Negroes were not slaves.  The oppression that forced that resultant behavior was a self fulfilling prophecy.  The freeing of slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, and the massive loss of life incurred in the Civil War show the extreme shortcomings of a sheltered and uneducated people.  It took almost a century to cement this grievous wrong, but the Civil Rights Movement took America past this brink of insanity.  The music industry helped.  The shift to microwave-based wireless communications has not helped America as a whole.  It revised the American economy and handed wealth and power to a different sector.  Most people would agree the resulting commodities offered by the annihilation of television and radio are but a shell of their potential.  Why not let common people be the actors?  As my premonitions about the ease or difficulty of ensuing American life began to come to fruition, the rock solid foundations of our free nation began to crumble.  In many ways microwaves are the culprit.  A duality of magnetism and electricity coexisting on different poles transmitting through the air on every conceivable frequency, it is not surprise that the neglected infrastructure of our cities and towns has begun to crumble.  The naive and irresponsible belief is we the people will continue to live in the sheltered and easy existence of cyberspace.  What else is there to do when it is 110 degrees outside? 

High Bribes and Blackmail

 In hindsight it is easy to discern Jeffry Epstein's underage sex trafficking ring had deeper roots than a randy Saturday night at the drive in.  Perhaps he was privy to insider trading tips and the usual perks of Wall Street influentials.  Considering the Trump/MAGA fervor which erupted seemingly out of nowhere, a past business agreement similar to Trump's other bawdy pay offs is plausible.  How is it that the entirety of the U.S. Congress has bowed to his whims?  Epstein.  Sex with minors on a private island.  Political leverage.  These equate to blackmail of the best kind.  The film "L.A. Confidential" (which should have won the Oscar) portrays it brilliantly.  On the level of the little man, the street drug dealer who uses and relies upon violence in his business acumen, a little coke and a twirl may  pay the bills.  Donald Trump is shrewd, and a potential partnership with Jeffry Epstein to bribe anyone and everyone is cunning.  It took this long to come to fruition, a criminally obtained second term of the American Presidency.  Biden's four years were the undergraduate curriculum of The Right, and whether or not just or moral they logged their hours in astronomy lab.  I agree with some of the things Trump is doing, like expelling college students using American institutions as hosts for foreign revolutions.  Hamas brutally attacked Israel but with information stolen from the House of White by Donald Trump.  It took two years to mastermind this skirmish, and Trump blatantly bragged about this stolen information in public.  "Look what I have!  Now we have a reason to raze Gaza and build Trump City."  All of that felonious criminal activity was swept under the rug by an on-the-take SCOTUS.  It was too convenient.  Like his ensuing dictatorship, winning his power through the court system was his postulate.  The example was set in Florida between Al Gore and George W. Bush.  The sanctity and power of the United States Supreme Court was omnipotent until now.  As a populace we never stopped to consider they may turn on the people.  Trump, behind the scenes, directing democratic politicians to the Virgin Islands for sex with underage girls is too good to ignore, and Washington agrees.  As for the files and their disappearance?  I'm sure there are boxes and boxes of photographs and videotapes hidden in a bathroom at Mar-a-lago.  No big surprise, but it would be difficult to side step the flying Jizz-lane Maxwell.  We will have a sideshow for a while distracting us from more important covert military activity. 

Personal Vendettas in the House of White

I am waiting for the Ritalin to kick in.  Several things are important in Fayetteville news.  DAK Americas, a manufacturing plant on Cedar Creek Road, is shuttering its doors on July 31, 2025.  From its onset, despite the spin ascribed to it by its owners, DAK Americas has not been good for Cumberland County.  It was good for CSX, formerly CSX-T, one of the largest monopoly railroads in the Eastern United States.  In their eyes that would make DAK Americas very good to them, because it was a large contract.  The Milan Yard almost is a personal sorting yard for both DAK Americas and Cargill.  (We should include the United States Military in this list.)  If one were to pay attention, the DAK Americas polyester plant was not American-owned.  Chemours, sold by DuPont, belonged to the Chinese.  Excluding Russians this makes two manufacturing plants in Cumberland County owned by foreign interests.  Who does own DAK Americas, and why are they closing it?  The melting of pellets and spinning plastic bottles out of this PET resin must be fairly automated.  There never were many cars in the parking lot of DAK Americas, which should have its name changed.  Oh, it did but not to DAK South America or DAK Mexico.  If the casual observer were to draw a conclusion about this plant, which used to spin fabric, the conclusion would be there were not many employees.  The recent news coverage states they are losing 180 jobs.  DAK was owned by Alfa S.A.B. de C.V. or Alpha Group, a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico.  Mexico.  Understanding that Fayetteville conveniently is located on Interstate I-95 and hosts the world's largest military base, is it interesting a Mexican-owned plant set up shop here?  They had their own personal rail provider which ran locals out the Vander line to the plant almost daily.  Over the years the hosts of this rail service mixed.  Sometimes Aberdeen and Rockfish locomotives did this work.  Later Norfolk Southern and CSX shared this responsibility.  If one looks at a Google map, you will see the large rail yard at the DAK facility.  As for Fayetteville and its downtown patrons who support revitalization, the closing of this facility is a milestone.  No more 8:00 pm local disturbing downtown entertainment.  That seemingly harmless small train that ambled down Russell Street should be mute in less than a week.  This is a baby step, but one can hope. The heat wave in Fayetteville largely is caused by excessive rail traffic.  Here are the rail yards:  DAK Americas, River Terminal, Honeycutt Marshalling Yard, Milan Yard, Cargill, and Fort Junction.  The list of industries served by rail is earmarked by their presence on the Cape Fear River, while the Chemours siding comes from Lumberton.  Hexion, Valley Proteins, Goodyear, Cargill, and now a Titanium plant all use the Cape Fear River for some purpose.  No one has ever suggested that illegal drugs flowing northward from South America may end up at a sparsely populated manufacturing plant.  The federal government stop policing rail freight with deregulation.  At the root of criminal activity by small players, a much larger organization exists.  In the Tom Cruise film "American Made,"  it never was made clear whence the billions of dollars came to buy the drugs from the Mexican Cartel.  Who in America could have that expendable capital to subsidize a drug trade that has crippled our youth?  At a very clear point these people stopped just trying to take our money and began trying to kill us.  To me this suggests a foreign interest.  Globalization.  In Cumberland County not only do we have the Chinese continuing DuPont's work of polluting the entire water shed, we have had a Mexican conglomerate operating freely doing whatever they please.  Who allowed this?  Was it the Federal Trade Commission?  I have not even mentioned soldiers from the Viet Nam War smuggling opioids in caskets.  This unhealthy balance in Cumberland County now favors the military, and this military is not integrated with the local community.  It has evolved as an exclusive boy's club with little thought for local citizens.  It is difficult to ignore that the gentrification of the local population in favor of Fort Bragg soldiers is occurring.  The extremism of the Trump Regime has upped the ante, and American citizens should realize their lives and longevity are in question.  It is a game of loyality.  It has become far too easy for corporate America to become the blunt intimidator allowing active duty servicemen to feign neutrality for their pay.  If we are not careful this now benign force of naive and inexperienced plebes could be bred into full fledged Stepford Soldiers not recognizing clearly the line of demarcation between freedom and tyranny. 

He Came Back Full Don

I have a Lionel .027 model train layout disassembled leaning up against a wall in our garage.  I was thinking about setting it up in the living room, because now I have room.  Our family had model train layouts most of our lives until I went to college.  It was a fun, fulfilling, interesting, and challenging hobby.  My father built the first few Lionel train sets, and one was elaborate.  It was the best Christmas present a son ever could want.  He built this L shaped layout in the bandroom at Terry Sanford High School and rented a U Haul trailer that got parked in the driveway Christmas Eve.  On Christmas day the layout was set up on our screened in porch on McGougan Road later to go into the attic.  Over the years a Christmas layout under the tree became a tradition, and when I came  home from sea to help my aging parents I decided to build another one from scratch.  It would run two locomotives at the same time.  Why would I be thinking about setting up this layout now?  The answer is there isn't much else worth thinking about at the moment in the lives of Americans.  We are not even treading water.  We are and have been being pulled under by an overt assault on the sanctity of American life.  Perhaps still we are a free people, but the necessary infrastructure of self-governance, democracy, is under attack in a class war.  The poor and what is left of the middle class are being attacked by a coalition led by our current President.  It is the only time I can remember when the elected governing body of a nation has chosen to turn against the people.  It is a coup, and in cunning stealth before our very eyes, Donald Trump is attempting to overthrow American democracy and replace it not with just authoritarian rule, but with what is becoming violent fascism.  Every conceivable conniving method is being employed in Washington to dilute governance by the people and replace it with totalitarianism.  With every bone in his body and since he could form a thought, Donald Trump has wanted to be the American dictator.  We have known this, and yet America elected him a second time signaling an obedience to this new form of government.  There is no other way to see it.  America voted "Red," and that red is Communism.  No one will say it, because it means over half of our population no longer covet and aspire to a free society of self-governance.  Somehow they think a violent, dictatorial, authoritarian society is preferable.  This would explain the recent campaign of Cancel Culture in America.  The goal is to erase the cultural history of America leaving behind no wisdom or model of life.  The nation of America would become free reign for the raping and pillaging of everyone and everything.  The people are reduced to peasantry, poverty, and survival while the elite rule from wealth.  This is not unfamiliar, but it is in America.  Why would I want to set up a Lionel .027 train layout in my living room?  Because there is nothing in the news that merits serious thought.  This tirade of Donald Trump does merit serious thought, but only in the most distracting and diverting way to average Americans seeking a well balanced quality of day to day life.  There is nothing of value happening in all of Washington, DC.  It is a covert war on the American people, and our federal government is a mockery of every principal established in the United States Constitution.  It makes me sick to read the headlines.  We know what Epstein did, and  he is dead.  To hear the words President and sex with underaged girls on a private island...  Monica Lewinsky had Bill Clinton on the front page of the paper for two years.  It is easy news.  There is no reporting.  There is no media.  It is just fodder.  It would seem this is what they have chosen to bring down The Donald.  Americans are willing to sacrifice their ultimate freedom, financial mobility, and opportunity to pledge allegiance to a cult leader, but we draw the line at having sex with our daughters.  To know that America, our home and our nation now is being run by fascists just looking out for themselves?  True dat, Homey.  It is here. 

The Fall of America

Anytime I mention genocide and Covid in the same sentence, a wrath of equal intensity rains down on me.  The origins of Covid still are a mystery,  but out of the direct line of fire of the disease, common sense is weighing in.  The most common realization would be a mask is not effective at preventing the spread of Covid.  Why?  Because the pathogen enters the body through mucous membranes, and that includes the eyes.  Covid more likely enters the body through the eyes.  I am not a scientist or a doctor, but what does it matter?  A large percentage of both disciplines has forsaken the human race for profit.  They make us sick, so they can make money treating us.  One only has to look at the "Covid Wealth" to see this.  It is the new money.  Covid is like HIV, and HIV was created by and for biological warfare.  Whether each escaped from the lab or was released is speculation, but the homosexual community in San Francisco was not well liked.  This wrath rained down on them with no mercy, and the United States military tested a biological pathogen in Haiti.  Damn those Haitian cab drivers!  The intensity, danger, and threat of these events coupled with the crowning of a new American King has thrust America into ensuing totalitarianism.  Donald Trump seizing control of the Kennedy Center with its ties to intellectual property is like the Nazi's stealing art from Germany.  It is gross, inciting, and egotistical.  There was no Kennedy Center Honors this year.  Before the "Big Beautiful Bill" was signed, legislation was being rolled back including green initiatives and most other regulatory policies policing corporate America.  The bill got signed, and now we have record-breaking heat and destruction.  Scores of children attending summer camp in Texas were viciously murdered by the effects of unmitigated climate change.  Meanwhile Trump fully is enjoying his own self-built monarchy.  Less than four days after this bill was signed, I received a letter informing me my Medicaid eligibility would be reviewed.  Lightening speed.  Clearly I remember the four years of the Biden administration being cooler.  Three months of one hundred degree heat in the summer waned, and until now we have had moderate, almost normal temperatures.  Like a switch that flipped on with a penned presidential signature, danger to humanity and the planet Earth has resumed.  It can be nothing but Satan.  There was an Apache snooping at my door all day today.  This Sikorsky helicopter can't stay away from our neighborhood taking off from Simmons Army Airfield and flying directly to my house multiple times.  I guess my yard is beautiful to look at.  When Base Realignment and Closure was enacted, Fayetteville was cast to the beasts.  Joint Special Operations Command, all branches of the military tasked with devising methods to annoy the shit out of the enemy until finally they just give up.  Wonderful.  Upon whom do they practice?  Unconventional warfare they call it, and to say the government has become weaponized.  If killing hundreds of thousand of Americans by unmitigated toxic waste isn't weaponization, what is?  I finally figured out to stop using ice from the ice maker.  Although it has a filter it is not capable of removing PFAS from this tainted water.  When the ice melts in your tea you drink it just like the liquid.  I imagine I have drunk liters and liters of PFAS laden water, and I have had an inflamed testicle and kidney.  Go figure.  It has become ruthless, and although I prefer nonviolence and humor, things they don't understand, the time is approaching for resistance.  Special Operations will annoy you until you crack and attack.  One only has to look at the outbreaks of mass shootings in America.  We're fucked.  

Wealth Achieving Tax Cuts for the Rich at the Expense of Life Saving Health Care for the Poor

 Never have I been a fan of North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis.  For a mild two days I became a fan; he chose not to support Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill."  In actuality this hugely ugly bill will eradicate my own personal health care.  Has it become personal?  After nearly a decade as a caregiver, I received coverage by Barack Obama's Medicaid expansion plan, which originally was blocked by the GOP in North Carolina.  This money was allocated, and Republicans chose not to accept it granting health care to the poor.  After a prolonged wait and with the urging of past Governor Roy Cooper, Medicaid expansion finally was approved.  I received this health insurance for the first time since leaving cruise ship work in 2014.  I became ill during the Covid pandemic, and I not yet have recovered.  It has been far easier with health insurance, because Medicaid pays for prescription medications I need.  I take it for granted, the four dollar medications, including antibiotics and antifungals which are necessary because of the lingering Covid virus.  Thom Tillis was on the cusp of becoming an exemplary senator resisting the Trump Administration's bullying and keeping North Carolina's Medicaid expansion for the poor.  After Trump's mob completed their work, Senator Tillis succumbed to their antagonism and announced he would not seek reelection.  They forced him to change his vote to support this tax bill which will add three trillion dollars to the American peoples' debt and abolish health care programs in his home state.  There could be no better metaphor for the stench of America.  Appropriately Ken Burns' documentary, "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," aired on PBS this evening showing the right thing.  No more money can be squeezed out of the poor, but the wealthiest Americans can continue to force the lower classes back into slavery.  Almost we are there now.  To allow the rich further to avoid their appropriate tax responsibilties is criminal.  To see Donald Trump's methodology of lies and slander in action to achieve his own personal goals is criminal.  Senator Tillis could either make the history books by pulling a John McCain, or he could pack his books, give up, and go home to his family.  The rest of North Carolina will not be so welcoming.  Vote, "No!"

The Dreaded C-130 Aircraft on the Domestic Front

Because of the American socioeconomic system, a business financial market which feigns a Democratic Republic host with a Capitalist free market, deception is everywhere.  Since the inception of America by our Founding Fathers, and their carefully penned Declaration of Independence and Constitution with its Amendments, America has been trying to do the right thing.  As a nation it was important to seem to care about her people.  This centuries old fight between the GOP and the Democratic party, essentially a fight between the wealthy and the rest of America, is nothing new.  The first time I heard Harry Connick say the words "Robber Barons," I was confused.  In my lifetime we had been taught to revel in the success of the upper class.  The accomplishments of the dominant families were akin to royalty in England.  The people admired and vicariously lived through the spectacle and pageantry of the Royal Family and its trappings.  If you are dirt poor and have little, seeing this wealth could gives you hope for the future.  It shows you possibility, even if it is not for you.  I would not say the British Royal Family has forsaken the people.  They were a monarchy, but instinctively they knew the people of a nation are its core.  The wealthy alone cannot domestically imperialize their own economy in a Democratic Republic, or the freedom of the people is lost and the nation becomes both Authoritarian and Totalitarian.  This can happen and all ready has through deception.  Local, state, and the federal government have been purchased for use by the wealthy, and this use is akin to abuse, because it does forsake the common people and manipulates the socioeconomic system in the favor of the rich.  They system all ready has become autonomous, and America has ceased to exist by the trade of goods and services.  We have no economy of which to speak, because the viability of small businesses has been undermined.  The wealthy seek to operate on an epic scale controlling huge swaths of commerce simply by moving money around.  The Hedge Fund has been the major purveyor of this abuse building immense power and wealth for doing nothing more than pooling and reselling mortgages.  The American economy no longer is functioning, and the Trump Regime is trying to sell us monarchy.  The good news is our Founding Fathers planned for this criminal change of regime.  It was not difficult, because this regime was from what future Americans were fleeing in England.  I am not sure Donald Trump commiserates losses of power in the Royal Family in Great Britain, but clearly his sentiments toward Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have been crystal clear.  He admires these men and their respective systems of government rule, and he wants to achieve that in America.  If a nation's economy were robust enough to provide the sustenance for a military dictatorship through commodities, that is one thing.  When a nation's economy is limping along neglected and forsaken because the people are not deemed important, then a coup will not be possible.  More ensuing poverty, inflation, homelessness, and violence only will spark rebellion against such an effort.  The quality of life in America all ready is in a state of war with only total destruction left as an alternative.  Most Americans are fighting for survival each day they rise with little to no security, future, or happiness.  What is this deception of the socioeconomic system?  It also is nothing new.  It is deregulation allowing corporate America to operate completely free of oversight or accountability to the American people.  America has become a whore to the wealthy, and the American people are inconsequential.  They have been trying to eradicate us since the advent of HIV.  One only has to look at patterns of the United States military to see questionable methods of warfare including biological, chemical, and unconventional, the now preferred domestic choice.  This relatively new practice of covert actions champions subversion, diversion, sabotage, espionage, sanctions, propaganda, and guerilla warfare.  On the domestic front think of an Air Tractor lacing your property with a hopper full of chemical or biological pathogens.   Who would consider a commercial air fertilization company could be involved in such activity?  Who would have considered commercial jets would have flown into the World Trade Towers in Manhattan?  The weaknesses of nations is from the skies, and the sky continues to host these devastating sorties.  There is no question that the presence of low flying C-130 aircraft most often brings physical illness and emotional unrest however that manifests itself.