This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: We need beer koozies, referring to it being too easy for someone to decide that we need beer koozies that say ’Big Dick’ and then involve hundreds of people and trans-global shipping to produce a thing that is worth $1.99.

The show title refers to people who are out there, wanting to police who is allowed to be happy.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Neil Young (RL110)

John opens the call by singing a line from Old Man by Neil Young and The Stray Gators in full volume: ”Old man, take a look at my life! I’m a lot like you!” Neil Young’s father was a Canadian sports writer and Merlin is not sure why he would tell his dad needing someone to love the whole night through, but it is very hard to know what you should tell your dad. John thinks about Neil Young a lot, he is very effecting, one of the song writers in John’s very cannon of people where whatever they do is okay by him, and John was a bit embarrassed when Neil Young became a Grunge cause célèbre. He was in John’s pantheon from the moment he heard him back in the 1970s.

Merlin had mixed feelings at High School age when he first heard him because everything he plays on acoustic guitar sounds so pretty, but then he does that weird one-note guitar solo, although now he thinks it is pretty genius. John wasn’t so sure about the one-note guitar solo, but then he started playing those himself and they are great fun to play. His moment of real conversion with Neil Young was 1980. He has grown up hearing all of his classics, but in 1980 he got hip to his weird Rockabilly record Everybody’s Rockin’ and he liked it instinctively. It was back in the $1 record bin era and both of his albums Trans and Landing on Water were in the nice price bin pretty much until there stopped being a nice price bin.

John got Everybody’s Rockin’ and he liked it and then he got Trans and liked it as well although it is so different. He also liked Reactor which was one of his first ever $1 bin records. The Vocoder stuff on Trans really connected with him when he was a little kid. The backstory that he was trying to communicate with his son is really fascinating.

Merlin finds him very interesting. Certain songwriters and performers elicit very strong feelings from people, Bob Dylan in particular and Paul McCartney to an extend, and people have extremely strong feelings about that one record they made was one of the greatest things ever made and that other record they did was the worst thing they have ever heard. Merlin loves contrarians like Neil Young, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen to an extend, who an unflappable about whatever they are going to do next, even if it is a thing about the Iraq war and it is going to be a lot of people singing in a barn.

By the time Pearl Jam was wheeling him out (on his album Mirror Ball) John found it gross, it was not fun, but thinking about it now Neil Young was probably the age then that John is now and John had been thinking: ”Why is the old man up there?” He was 45 in 1990s when he came out with This Note’s For You and John thought at the time: ”What’s up, gramps?” He was literally younger than John when he wrote Rockin’ in the Free World, he was already a profoundly classic artist.

He had a triple album with Greatest Hits (called Decade) that came out in 1977, the one with the guitar case on the cover, and he was pretty famous by the time he was 23. Every album is a little journey and if you open your heart to it you will notice that there is something amazing on every one of them.

The Beatles (RL110)

Yesterday John was thinking about The Beatles and he was realizing that all of the Music Hall stuff that Paul McCartney was putting in the later Beatles that Lennon was so mad about being corny, that music was essentially the same distance from them as the Beatles are from us. It is one of John’s favorite games to play, there should have been an official name for that. The Beatles were only active for 7 years, their first major British hits were in 1963, which is almost the age of Merlin’s daughter, the time from 2007 until now (in 2014)! There is cheese in John’s refrigerator that is 7 years old!

John was talking to their good friend Sean Nelson about this: Lennon was so upset at how McCartney was so cheesy and corny, but McCartney’s corniness was the element that made the later Beatles music so sinister sounding. Martha My Dear is a song that McCartney wrote about his dog in the style of his Grandmother’s music, and when you hear it for the first time you are wondering what those madmen are doing. That song made that record (the white album) seem like it was insane and they were insane and that it was an Acid-trenched psycho-future.

Lennon in his narrowness failed to appreciate that it was really the juxtaposition of his idea of Avantgarde, namely the most obvious version of challenging Yoko, of Avantgarde Autré (?) freaky stuff, against McCartney’s nanny-music that makes The Beatles still so scary. Merlin doesn’t think he would have come up with a lot of that stuff on his own. Paul does not get credit for how much of the bananas stuff he brought, especially in their amazing years. It was not just his facility with show-tune / Tin Pan Alley songwriting and knowing how to do amazing turns of a chord. John played blues guitar! He was a great guitar player, but Paul was the one who had the mind for figuring out what you could do with all that stuff. By himself John would just play screeching Blues all day long!

When he is angry he makes angry-sounding music, when he is frustrated he writes a frustrated-sounding song, he is feeling sarcastic and he writes a sarcastic song, and it is anybody’s guess whether Paul McCartney has any of those emotions, he is such a muppet! He is always on! He wakes up, goes in the bathroom, looks in the mirror, and goes: ”God morning, luv!” (in a strong British accent) - ”Fuck you! Just turn it off!”

The thing about Happy (by Pharrell Williams) that is so insufferable according to Merlin is the analogies: It is an adjective for a chorus and then it is is mostly a bunch of analogies as the lyrics: ”Like a hexagon wrench without a Volkswagen!” It is a big hit in Merlin’s house and he and his daughter likes that song. It is in the Despicable Me 2 movie! When John started that sentence he was not talking about that song, but he was talking about Happy by the Rolling Stones.

John (live-tweeted the Grammys this year) for the website Talkhouse, meaning that he was watching the Grammys but he had never heard any of the songs. They said that the Grammy went to Pharrell and the song Happy and John just didn’t care. Allegedly Pharrell wears that hat to distract from the fact that he looks like a Pink Panther style cartoon ant. John was up there in grandpa mode, just tooting away.

John was talking about the idea of Happiness in general when Merlin interrupted him, not about the song. Paul McCartney’s version of irrepressible happy go-getterism… he is like a member of Junior Achievement, and John is intrinsically suspicious of happy and he always was. For Merlin it is a little nuanced, but he is a little suspicious of people who seem happy all the time, and he is super-suspicious of people who talk about how happy they are all the time.

There is a picture of Paul McCartney during the recording of Let It Be, sitting at the mixing desk with his attention fully focused on the knobs, his hands on the desk, George Martin is relegated to the shadows, and Paul is finally in charge. He looks so happy to be there, it is where he belongs, and it was only radical because that was the first time it had ever happened that the Pop artist would be self-producing. You love him in that moment, even knowing that Lennon is nodding off in the other room, having turned to heroin to mask his seething hatred of Paul, Yoko sitting in George’s chair, George walking up and down the hallway, rehearsing his ”I quit!” speech.

Merlin thinks that Paul gets a bad rep in the movie (probably A Hard Day’s Night). In the pre-Wings era (of the band Paul McCartney and Wings, formed in 1971), are there that many songs that you could put out there as a Beatles song that are really just about being happy? There is always a glint of cynicism somewhere inside of it, but that may just be a John contribution, even on Good Day Sunshine. Merlin hasn’t watched that movie in a while because he finds it very difficult to watch. John also finds it excruciating. There is a reason it is hard to find now. Nobody comes off looking really good.

Because of that movie and interviews Paul got the reputation of always being the cheery guy who is super-annoying and is telling the others what to do, but he was trying to hold the band together, he was not trying to be a dick. As Sean Nelson, ultimate Beatles authority, said so eloquently: The competition between John and Paul took the shape of John sneering at Paul, but Paul’s response was like: ”Oh, how many songs have you got? Five? That is good! I have 25!” John is the worst, at one point he was just whispering to Yoko, he wasn’t even speaking to the others.

John doesn’t want to revisit thinking about Paul McCartney anymore, he has spent many hours of his life wondering what was going on in Paul’s head. Merlin has never been a fan of Yoko Ono’s work, he has always thought she seemed like an annoying personality, and he is not proud of having bought into the idea that she was a very divisive factor in the band. A lot of people who are bigger Beatles fans have pointed out that how many years were The Beatles functional? Even if you go up through Revolver, John was already starting to withdraw, they were all pretty high a lot of the time, which was probably a lot of fun.

Sgt Pepper was not that much of an exciting group effort every day. Happiness Is a Warm Gun was so great to do because that song made them make do Let It Be, they wanted to bring back the fact that they could rock out as a band because it was the first time in forever that they had written and recorded a song together and played it together. Everything up until then had all just been pieces and parts and they didn’t want to be in the room. Of those 7 years, maybe they were function for 2 of them, and even then they were exhausted from travel and playing live.

People were thinking that they had to be the happiest guys in the world, they were on top of the world, but they didn’t have a minute to themselves, they were putting out 3 albums a year, and shagging birds! On the Beatles for Sales record they do not look like happy campers and the songs reflect that, they get more cynical and a little darker. Merlin and John were no happy campers at 26 years old either, though. It is a terrible and hard time!

Nothing can be worse than puberty, but most people probably feel like a failure for one reason or another by the time they are 27 than ever other time, everybody dies, it is the quarter-life crisis, there is the Saturn’s return, people have all kinds of names for it, and everybody feels like some part of their life is completely fucked up. You think you are never going to make enough money and find somebody who loves you for who you are. Around that time those things really start to hit you.

It is easy to look at anybody else who has something that you don’t and think that they probably got it by guile or theft in a way that you deserved, like inheritance or privilege, and everyone else has that and you don’t. Who could feel sympathy for John Lennon in 1966? You can’t even walk around in public, there are photos of you on every magazine and stories about your life, that is hell! Playing in Hamburg doesn’t sound like a cakewalk. At some points they were playing 8 hours a day! On the other hand: The great thing about being 19 and out in the world is that those doors have not closed, they are so far in the distance that it seems like you are immortal and you will live forever.

Your different world view at 19 years old, thinking everything is unfair and you are the first one to ever experience it (RL110)

Because of John’s dark web work he is in contact with some people in their early 20s and in a lot of ways he is always surprised by how smart they are and how thoughtful they are, but every once in a while he will have to sit through a 1-2 day long thumb-sucking episode where they go: ”God, I can’t believe it! I pay my rent and I have to work all day, it is just not fair!” Merlin thinks that pretty much every day, but he doesn’t say it because he doesn’t expect anybody to be surprised.

When you are 19 and 4-5 bad things happen all at once you really do feel like it is the first time that has ever happened. You know enough that everybody has to go to work and that everybody’s car breaks down at some time or that everybody’s mom is a bitch sometimes, but when 4 of those things happen at once, that is when the 19-year old mind’s lack of experience is revealed. They are so shocked and they want to come out to the front of their house and shout: ”I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!” because who has ever had to be at work, which is already unfair, and their car won’t start and their mom is being a bitch and they don’t have any money and their clothes don’t fit anymore?

Everybody has experienced that! When John was 19 he was enduring what now seems like an astonishing level of discomfort and hurt, and at the time he was unable to distinguish that from what seemed like an equal amount of discomfort and hurt that turns out to be just normal life. He was sleeping outside in city parks and that seemed less or equally difficult to just figuring out how to use a washing machine, while from the perspective of now, sleeping outside night after night in a city park seems really hard and dangerous and uncomfortable, whereas using a washing machine is not hard at all and not even onerous.

John imagined The Beatles in Hamburg, playing 4 sets a night, barely sleeping, but that is no more or less difficult than figuring out how to work an automat or taking a letter down to the post office. It all seems difficult and also all seems easy. Everything is hard until you learn how to do it. After all these years John has still not resigned himself to the idea of cleaning his house and every time the indignation is fresh. ”Seriously? I have to do this again? It is such a wasted effort!” and he connects immediately back to the 16-year old John: ”It just gets dirty again!”

So does your butt, but washing your butt is fun, there is pleasure to be had, but cleaning your bathroom is not fun. The people who really early on in life not just accepted cleaning the bathroom, but have found a way to make cleaning the bathroom part of normal life, holding on to no resentment about it, John does admire them! That seems like a thought technology!

The guy at the gas station who came correct on his style, but not that much else, judging others, being dignity police (RL110)

John was at the gas station the other day, waiting in line, and the guy ahead of him in line was really decked out, repping that he is kind of a fly guy, he got very white trainers on, wearing a very clean track suit, a Fedora of some kind, he was presenting that he has come correct. He was waiting in line at the gas station and when it was his turn he said to the guy behind the counter: ”5 on 2!” in the tone of: ”I am a big wheel! Let’s get this moving!” and he turned and walked out and it took John a second to realize that what he meant was: ”$5 worth of gas on pump two!”

Gas is $4.45 a gallon, and $5 worth of gas? Really, big wheel? John walked passed him, seeing him pumping that one gallon worth of gas into the car, and he was completely correct, he was really steam pressed and clean, but the car is a 1989 Tercel, one of the back windows is held in with electrical tape, and in the driver’s seat is his girlfriend who is clearly working as a waitress at a Cherry’s, she is younger than he is, and she was that harried, danduffy look of somebody who is sleeping in her car while she is getting back on her feet.

John thought: ”Sir, you have not come correct! Maybe personally you are correct and your style is taken care of, but there are some things you should be taking care of in advance of your style!” It was a classic moment of: ”If you are pimping you have to pimp a little big further out than the tips of your shoes!” Merlin is trying to get a little broader about who is allowed to have dignity. There is the dignity police out there, people who are actively policing who is allowed to not hate themselves today: ”You are pretty fat for somebody who is happy! You need to check yourself!”

It is one thing to feel bad, and it is another thing to feel that it is not okay to feel bad, and that is where you get fucked up! John’s beef with this guy was that the tone of his: ”5 on 2!” was: ”Hey little man behind the cash register! Get to work because I need 5 on 2!” If he was dressed to the nines and had said: ”Hey sir, I can only afford $5 of gas and I am grateful to be on this planet!”, if he spoke like Ben Acker, but instead he was fronting, like: ”I am a big shot! Get out of the way!” and then you see his car and you think: ”Oh, right!”

A dumb place for a STOP sign (RL110)

John has a tendency to be part of the larger cultural problem of walking around in a constant genesis-device of judgement. Merlin is out there, making little micro-decisions about everything, unless he is mindful about it: ”That lamp pole is stupid! What a dumb place for a STOP sign! What is up with that guy’s hair!” John could do an entire television show called: ”What a dumb place for a STOP sign!” He has that conversation out loud with himself every day: ”What the fuck is that STOP sign doing there? Who the fuck…?”

There are places in Merlin’s neighborhood, like the little park South of his house where the streets terminate where the park starts, there are no STOP-signs at the end of the downhill avenue heading toward the park, and there are also no STOP-signs on the cross-street and somebody dies there last week getting hit by a taxi.

There is an intersection right by John’s house (probably Beacon Ave S, S Leo St, 51st Ave S), the one where he got in a fight with the Serbian guy and he made a gesture at him (find reference!), where the arterial turns and there is a spur off of the arterial for exactly 1 block with 8 houses and a grand-total of 22 people. John has seen somebody going in that direction 5 times in 7 years, while 700 cars a day make the turn, which it requires that they go out into what would be oncoming traffic if that was a through-road.

Those 22 people who live down that spur road drive 40 mph through that intersection without looking left or right because they are asserting the fact that their street is straight, so therefore they don’t need to look and you should look out for them. There is no sign of any kind, no yield sign, and they feel like they have the right of way, which may technically be true, but it is a blind corner. John wants to leave a flyer on every doorstep in that 1-block street: ”The fact that you technically have the right of way does not mean that you live in a bubble of safety and the law does not protect you from causing an accident!” Merlin tells his daughter that when she is dead it doesn’t matter who is right.

Pedestrians having the right of way in Seattle (RL110)

John got into a confrontation with somebody where he was backing into a parking spot on a busy street and they guy comes and whacks the back of John’s car because he decided he was crossing mid-block at that point. As John was backing into the parking spot, checking his left mirror, checking his rear-view mirror, checking the side mirror, looking out the back window, he failed to also account for the fact that a pedestrian might decided to cross behind a car that is parking, and he was upset because in his world pedestrians have the right of way.

They do unless they are breaking the fucking law! The law in Seattle is very confusing. The common understanding among pedestrians in Seattle is that they have the ultimate right of way. In the many years when John didn’t have a car he walked around Seattle with a very imperial sense that the pedestrian was God. It is very confusing to people from other places because cars will often stop to let a pedestrian cross in mid-block in the middle of a busy street in the peak of the day.

The problem is that this is not universally practiced. The law is that if you are standing on the sidewalk, then cars can go, but if you step into the street, looking like you are going to cross, the cars do have to yield to you. The only people who routinely do not practice this are the police, and John’s mom has written 1000 angry letters to the editor that she has never published. You step into the crosswalk, trying to make eye contact with the oncoming car, and if it is a cop they just blow through because the police are very important people and they are probably on their way to something important.

Many times John would walk into the street and cause a driver to brake when he was not anticipating braking and as he was walking across the street just eyeballing him because he was 26 and he didn’t understand how hard it was to wash your clothes every day, but what he did understand was that if he were to touch him with his bumper it would be his problem. But now as a driver John encounters people with a similar attitude on a fairly regular basis.

If this went to trial they would probably prevail, but they are mistaken in thinking that they are protected from injury and that they aren’t causing a major problem for the city by acting like they are bulletproof. If a driver has to skid to avoid hitting you because you decided that this was the moment you wanted to assert pedestrian preeminence, it is not a safe situation. John sees that a lot and it is on the list of lectures he wants to give when he finally installs the police bullhorn in his car.

People should not be allowed to drive before they are 30 (RL110)

According to Merlin it is one of the reasons no-one should be allowed to drive until they are 30 because hormones are going to lead you to do a lot of dumb stuff. He has an exhaustive and persuasive theory about how the pedestrian and the motorist might be able to get along better, but it is pretty punitive on all sides! You have to wait until you are 30 to get a driver’s license and for the 14 years preceding that you have to practice privately on a track in a controlled environment and you have to show that you can drive like a gentleman. And at 60 years old you have to pass quarterly agility tests, at 70 it goes to once a month, and at 75 they just take your keys away and you are riding on the old-people-buss.

Merlin is a very defensive pedestrian, he takes it seriously, especially when he walks around with his kid. In his neighborhood there are tons of 4-way stops, which John is opposed to. If you put 5 STOP signs in a row people are going to blow through them. The problem at a 4-way stop in America is that a lot of people assume that the other three people are going to stop. The ultimate lesson in civics that Merlin has for his daughter after keep moving and get out of the way is what an analogy the 4-way stop is for how we live together.

Nobody loves stopping at a STOP sign, but if everybody honors the rules everything will be fine. Still, if only 99% of people do that, then 1 out of 100 people will blow through that STOP sign and a disturbing amount of time everything will be fine. Nobody will die for a while, but the problem starts when more than a couple of people think that is okay and that is when people start dying. Eye contact and nice hand-gestures are a really good thing.

John thinks that the 4-way STOP lulls people into thinking that some super-authority is in charge. Thanks Obama! But in a 4-way uncontrolled intersection everybody is personally responsible. They may not stop, but everybody is sure as shit looking out and ultimately that is what you want: Everybody’s complete attention, and STOP signs create an environment where over time people just get lulled into a state of ”D’ooooh!”

Merlin has a PDF about the project to try to make their street car line faster and more efficient, and the changes they plan to be making, which are fascinating and also a bit scary. Merlin is glad to see them putting some thought into this, but he just hopes they will not lose their STOP sign because he likes that. There is going to be some traffic calming, which is the local transportation board’s version of public housing where they are trying to solve a problem by creating 20 more problems.

Trains in America in need for reform, John as the Secretary of Transportation (RL110)

The other day John was walking around and he stopped at a train track to let a train go by and as he was watching the train he was thinking about the trains in America. They need some reform and John has developed a pretty comprehensive picture of trains in America and what he thought the problems were and how he needed to reform them. He was in train reform mode, he started day dreaming, and he started fantasizing what it would take for him to be in a position where his train reforms could really be enacted.

A big part of the reason the trains were built was that the federal government gave the railroads enormous land grants that not only enabled them to build the railroads, but they also got granted tremendous land around the railroads that meant that once they had built the railroads they were in the land business, they owned the land in a checkerboard pattern around where they were building. They got the order to build the train out to San Francisco, but they were not expected to make this tremendous capital investment and then make the money back by selling train tickets.

It is the plot of every other Western: The train is coming through, but they are running it around town. The type of Western where the problem is that the judge was corrupt, not that Natalie Wood was kidnapped.

The railroads became very rich off of the public, which is the great thing about federal land grants or federal grazing rights or federal water rights and all these federal grants that were initially made by the government as an incentive for somebody to turn the Southern California desert into strawberry farms or to build a dam or whatever it is the federal government wanted you to do. So often they paid you in land and resource rights, which people immediately think of as God-given.

Many of the oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, railroads, and farmers are all being subsidized by the federal government, but they believe that those grants are something that preceded the government and that the government has no right to administrate. They can point to the fact that the railroad earned it because in 1860 some corporate forefather of theirs built a railroad, although that was a subsidized process, too, it is not like any of those guys were actually out hammering spikes, they were paying Chinese and Italian people $0.01 a day to do it.

They know it is a right, they have made sure over 150 years that they have enshrined it in the law multiple times, so that every congressman that they had in their pocket has introduced a new layer of legislation that enshrines it as a right, kind of like Disney and copyright. Burlington Northern or Santa Fe Railroad are corporate entities that have absorbed 25 smaller railroads, it has all changed hands 1000 times, it was owned by Monsanto at one point and now it is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, but their rights to those corridors are involute (?).

Not only do they feel like they have an enshrined right to these enormous corridors right through the center of every American place, but that they graciously allow Amtrak to lease a certain amount of time on that track 3 times a day to run a passenger train from X to Y. That is it! You can’t introduce a 4th train into the mix, no matter how many people are riding the trains, and there are 40 arguments why that is non-negotiable, some of them economic, some of them imperial. They have no sense of: ”We were granted this stuff a long time ago that is renewed every day until it doesn’t work anymore!”

There is no reason why any Secretary of Transportation shouldn’t revisit the rights of way of every railroad in the country. The national transportation grid is a system and rather than have 40 different jurisdictions and fiefdoms and all these people sitting on boards of directors saying that they can’t repurpose these tracks or these rights of way because economics, we should be able to look at that grid… and that is the thing about the energy grid and the Highway grid, they are all grids and they are being administered by all those micro-jurisdictions and there isn’t the will to say: ”You know what, this is a grid and it needs to run smoothly and the decisions need to be made from one place!” That scares a lot of people.

As John was walking along the street he was thinking that the only job for him is Secretary of Transportation, but the problem would be that if he were ever to be nominated, some staffer would listen to this podcast and they would prepare a very red-type ALL CAPS memo saying: ”Listen! We need to get in front of this guy fast!” Merlin thinks that John is looking for too many excuses why he couldn’t be the Secretary of Transportation or the retired director of the CIA.

John would be regulating the trucking industry and the railroad industry, which are big vested interests, and yet: Where are the resources for the gondola and the zip-line industry (see RL87)?

The Post Office in need for a reform, trans-global shipping being too easy (RL110)

The other day as John was walking past a Post Office he thought that the Post Office and Amtrak both are branded very similarly in a faded red and blue and grey motive. Is the Post Office just a thing like the telegraph service that we have used for a long time and that we felt very romantically about, but it is just an anachronism and there is no reason to preserve it any more than there was a reason to preserve the Erie Canal, or is the Postal Service intrinsically a part of the health of the nation?

We still need to move packages around, is that a business that the government needs to be in? Merlin’s simple solution is to keep doing everything you are doing, keep selling Pixar stamps! Their key strategy over the last few years has been to sell stamps that nobody will ever want to use, which is brilliant. Merlin’s simple plan for fixing the postal service is: Mail delivery two days a week, Mondays and Thursdays. Why do we need daily mail delivery? We do not need Saturday mail delivery, if you need it faster then pay for it because now they have opened up the resources to compete somewhere in between ”not getting your mail” and FedEx. John thinks that this is a really good idea. Now it is $3 to get something delivered in two days, and it should be $5 to deliver your mail by hand.

John feels very strongly about the trains. They could be such a great system! Merlin can’t believe that putting fuel into an 18-wheel truck and driving it halfway across the country is more efficient than putting it on a train. It is the same containers! John has wondered and wondered about it what sense it makes to have a person who is not sleeping driving a multi-ton truck consuming all those resources at $4.50 a gallon to get lawn chairs to Missouri. It is part of why needs to get a Masters degree in Interstate Commerce, although Merlin thinks he needs to just tear the system open to see what is inside.

John barely understands how it could possibly be cost-effective to cut down the trees in Washington, put them on a giant boat to ship them to Asia where they are manufactured into things that are then shipped back to us, trucked to a store, and sold for $1.99. If that is what it takes to make that thing? Fine! But for $1.99?

When you look at old buildings like cathedrals you realize that up until 100 years ago the cheapest element of any project was labor. Raw materials were expensive, labor was cheap, and you could have 25 Italian guys sitting with hammers and chisels, carving the little detail that is going to go on the capstone of your building, spending 1000 man-hours carving this decorative element that you are going to put up on top of a grain warehouse because why not? You had all those Italians and they seemed to know how to do it! A pallet of bricks costs more than this guy’s life!

Now we are living in a world where that is completely inverted. Labor is far and away the most expensive of anything, so it makes sense to ship this stuff all the way around the world, just because somewhere else there is an 11-year old girl with tiny hands that will do the work for $0.01 and then we are going to ship it all the way back and still sell it for $1.99 and still make 40% profit… they said, recording a podcast on their Macintosh computers, John sitting with a toothpick that was hand-carved for him in Thailand. ”Thank you, Shin Lee!”

It is insane that this can possibly be true! Back to a global regulatory agency: That system, which is ultimately the biggest make-work project in human history, where some guy with Oakley sunglasses up on top of his head said: ”You know what we need? We need beer koozies that say: ’Big Dick’ on them!” and the fuse is lit and begins this massive undertaking involving hundreds of people, trans-global shipping, oil being refined, boats being built, shit sinking off the coast, and all this stuff and here come the ’Big Dick’ beer koozies that this guy envisioned, and he is selling them at the Widespread Panic show.

Where do you start? How far up the chain do you want to go before somebody says: ”Whoa, we don’t need that! That should be harder for that asshole to do!” That is the ultimate anti-American and anti-capitalist thing to say: That guy who had what you would barely describe as an idea, that idea should be harder for him to accomplish and the success of his accomplishment should not be a thing that we all take pride in.

The US Patent Office should be expanded to a global office, and like the steps up to the Supreme Court the Patent Office should be a pantheon and there should be 10 miles of steps, 10 steps and then a little flat space and on every flat space there should be a folding table and two people in chairs and you should have to make your pitch every 10 steps as you walk up the hill and each table should have a little stamp: ”PASS” or ”FAIL” and the freecredit.com band should be playing: ”I am a bill, I am only a bill” (?) the entire way up the steps.

Reforming all the infrastructure grids (RL110)

Can you imagine a railroad system that was really designed as a national system for maximum efficiency to replace as much of the business of trucking as you can? There is a movement among the 1% to open up all the regional airports to small jet traffic so that they are no longer clustering everybody through Atlanta. Within 3 miles of John’s house there are 5 airports that could handle a small jet and if he would be flying to San Francisco tomorrow he shouldn’t have to go to SeaTac, but he could just go down to the airport in Renton and take an airplane to some airport in Golden Gate Park.

Merlin would be fine with that if all those regional airports were also serving the hub-and-spoke railroad stations. Railroads in America need to become the new Internet! If you can’t figure out where something goes you put it on the fucking Internet and charge for it, or not. For the last mile we can use a truck for that, you don’t need to take it 950 miles, and it could be an electric truck that goes from the regional little train hub. You could make it a fleece truck and you wouldn’t even have to look both ways when you cross the street because getting hit by the fleece truck is great!

They would be old-timey looking trucks that honor the unique culture of the region, you could have a steam punk truck, and as long as it could hold a shipping containers you would be good to go. They would all have little pink fleece mustaches and you could take some mail with you! It is so crazy that we have a whole system that is just about taking a piece of paper from one place to another, it is so stupid! Oh, the stupidity! A lot of the things we are sending to one another we could be handcrafting at our own homes! Part of John’s project is a spinning wheel for every home!

Everybody around the country is carrying around soft little dogs with soft little furs, and why are we not spinning that into wool? That shit is softer than Alpaca, and the people with those soft little dogs are just sitting around, watching reality TV. You put the dog on a high-protein diet and you fasten him to a little tray that is always shaking a little with a food chute, and there is a robot comb that is always combing the new fur that he is growing and then the people who are watching reality TV could be sitting at a spinning wheel, turning that wool into yarn.

Why do we even need trucks? A lot of it could be done with cannons, artillery, and you don’t even need that much paper. You could use blimps, dirigibles. As Secretary of Transportation, John’s dirigible platform is going to be dynamite. He would help a lot of people!