There’s no nice way to put this, so I’ll cut right to the chase: Last night, my brother Mike collapsed and, as a result of a massive brain bleed, died hours later.

For obvious reasons, I considered taking a day off from my writing schedule.

For other obvious reasons I considered writing a eulogy about the man who was my idol from childhood — among other things, a star athlete, a career Marine, and my constant competition in a contest to see who could be the family’s blackest sheep. He was a good man, he was my brother, and he was almost certainly the best friend I’ve ever had or will have in this world.

But like me, he was also a curmudgeon who did not suffer a great deal of nonsense, and I think he’d want me to write what I’m about to write.

No sooner had I mentioned Mike’s death on Facebook than the condolences began coming in from friends and acquaintances. And, scattered among them:

“Was it the jab? Could it have been the jab? I bet it was the jab. He shouldn’t have got the jab!”

My carefully considered response: “What the [expletive] is wrong with you people? Are you throwing this garbage at his widow, too?”

I’m thick-skinned by nature. My feelings aren’t hurt because, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I don’t have feelings. And I’m capable of considering insensitive questions/theories and trying to offer rational answers. Like this:

My brother collapsed with a brain aneurysm for the first time in the 1990s. That happened after he retired from the Marine Corps and while he was attending a police academy. He recovered, graduated, and eventually retired a second time as a cop.

A few years ago, while looking at or for something else, doctors discovered and treated several aortic aneurysms.

For more information, consult the dictionary entry for “predisposition.” If I’d had to bet money on how my brother would die, I’d have bet on him dying exactly how he did.

Due to injuries sustained over the years, he became less mobile and gained weight. He had high blood pressure. He smoked, he ate what he pleased, and he professed to be neither in any hurry to die nor in any great fear of dying, only hoping he’d go quickly and with minimal pain, which seems to have been the case.

His vaccination status? I’m pretty sure he was vaccinated early (as a disabled veteran he was in the early wave of eligibility). I don’t know that he got any boosters. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE that the COVID-19 vaccination had something to do with his death, but it seems unlikely.

Suppose that it was likely, though. Does throwing your pet theories at bereaved families offer any clarity or closure? Does it make anything better?

I may not have feelings to hurt, but others do. Please be kind to them. Or, if you can’t be kind, shut your trap and go be unkind somewhere else.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Former US president Donald Trump supposedly absconded from the White House with reams of classified documents, stored them at his Mar-a-Lago home, responded first lackadaisically then combatively when called upon to hand them back over, finally resorting to weird claims about having declassified those documents by “thinking about it.”

Former US vice-president (now president) Joe Biden supposedly absconded from his official residence at the US Naval Observatory with reams of classified documents, which ended up in a closet at a private office, in a garage at one of his homes, and possibly elsewhere. He began returning them of his own volition, but apparently discovered them before, and waited to mention them until after, the 2022 midterm elections.

Either situation would constitute marvelous grist for the scandal mill;. In combination the effect is exponential. Most of that grist has to do with double standards:

First, why do presidents and vice-presidents get to just walk around (and, apparently, out) with classified information when members of Congress have to look at it in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and hand it back over immediately?

Second, why are presidents and vice-presidents who apparently drive away moving vans full of the stuff treated more leniently than lowly government employees who (possibly unintentionally) take single classified documents home from work in their briefcases?

I’ve written before about a third, non-grist category of scandal: Why do we let the government treat much, or for that matter any, information as secret in the first place?

But here, I’d like to focus on a fourth question: What does this whole thing tell us about the quality of management in the managerial state?

Running back to the first two paragraphs, we should probably understand how unlikely it is that either Trump or Biden personally walked away with those documents. They’ve got staff members to take care of such things. Neither of them has ever been lauded as intellectually curious or an avid reader. Heck, they may not have KNOWN they had the documents until they were told.

The president is the “chief executive” of the federal government. Strip away the pomp, circumstance, and ceremony, and he’s just a manager. He supervises a boatload of employees. Most decisions he makes really amount to signing off on other people’s recommendations.

Two presidents in a row have proven they can’t even impress upon their underlings the importance of not abandoning the nuclear launch codes in a garage or on the floor of a resort.

Would you trust someone with such poor management skills to run a convenience store or coffee shop?

If not, why on earth would you trust him to run the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most dangerous organization in history?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“By the end of this year,” Michael Munger writes at Reason, “GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of.”

Which, coupled with a couple of “conceptually simple” steps, leads to a “text singularity” in which writing as a human activity essentially stops. Artificial intelligences automagically write … well, all the things. People are reduced to mere readers.

As a working writer, I can’t help but shudder for the same reasons that inspired Ned Ludd and his disciples to rebellion against early factory automation in the 19th century. If machines can do what I do — better, faster, and cheaper — I guess I’m out of  the writing racket.

On the other hand, as a working writer, I’ve pointed out numerous times that automation is, generally speaking, a good thing.

Automation results in products that are more available, less costly, and often of higher quality.

And since that results in more demand for such products, it often creates more jobs than it eliminates — more people to bring material to the machine, more people to haul away and sell the machine’s output. In fact, England employed far more textile workers after the  automation of weaving than before, putting the lie to Luddism’s complaints.

Maybe I can get a job dusting cooling fins or replacing defective cables at the Big Writing Machine’s server farm.

Or maybe I won’t have to.

Much as it grinds my Austrian economics devotee gears to think so, it could be that the impending “text singularity” and similar developments are bellwethers leading us toward the post-scarcity of Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an age in which few if any humans really need to “work” because automation makes EVERYTHING abundant and free or nearly so.

That sounds like the better side of the utopian science fiction milieus I immersed myself in as a young reader. Whether we can avoid the worse sides — which usually involve political schemes to subjugate us all — is a different question.

It also sounds unlikely, but perhaps my long-held prejudice toward the value of human creativity, ingenuity, and motivation as the way toward a better future are skewing my viewpoint.

Either way, history runs forward, not backward. And the future promises, if nothing else, constant fascination.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY