Florida Travels

We just returned from circumnavigating the State of Florida assessing the “state of Florida.” You did miss us, right? Our 3-week voyage by car took us above the I-4 corridor that separates the Galactic Republic in the south and the Galactic Empire to the north. This north-south divide is similar to the fictional autocracy introduced in Star Wars while the one in Florida is just a DeSantis fantasy.

The Force was with us and we made it safely home where some measure of sanity, miniscule as it might be, still exists. We survived our voyage to the LOT (Land Of Trump) and the dangers of the Dark Lords of the MAGA Republic traveling throughout the north Florida DeSantis Empire. They rode in their F-150s, Silverados, Rams, and Sierras. Their bumper stickers and Confederate, American, and/or Trump flags flying in the breeze made them easy to spot. Our white Starfighter (Honda Pilot) concealed our presence.

We reversed our usual counter-clockwise around Florida route and started with an E-W crossing via Alligator Alley to Naples. We then went north to Tampa and on to Tallahassee. As we left Tampa toward Tallahassee we crossed the I-4 divide which is the unofficial DMZ Mason-Dixon Line of Florida politics.

Our GPS vacillated between suggesting I-75 to get to Tallahassee and an alternate route using State Roads 589/98/27/19 (aka the scenic route). As we left our waterfront abode in Tampa, Android Auto finally decided against I-75. We would drive through the more “picturesque” towns of Citrus Park, Odessa, Shady Hill, Old Town, and Crystal River.

This stretch between Tampa and Tallahassee provided a glimpse of a Florida unknown to many. I would guess that when you hear one of those bizarre “Florida Man” stories, this is where they were born. It is the land of tattoos, piercings, trailer parks, fast food, bars, nail salons, and every flavor of Christian Church you might want.

The typical town has at least one stop light, four nationally branded fast-food chains, two Christian churches, a walk-in clinic, an abandoned motel, and an abandoned restaurant. The churches will have names like the First Church of the Last Chance World on Fire Revival and Military Academy (real name) or the Original Church of God, Number 2. I imagine Trump has sold more than a few $60 Bibles along this route.

We stopped for lunch at a Subway in Old Town, Florida. The Subway shares a strip mall with a Cricket cellphone wireless provider, a nail salon, and Hungry Howie’s Flavored Crust Pizza. Old Town is situated along the Tampa-Tallahassee leg of our trip at a bend in the Suwannee River. It has a median family income of $40k placing it well below the $68k middle-class minimum for Florida.

We were the only two people in the Subway without tattoos and more piercings than the wall next to a barroom dart board. Now tattoos are nothing of note today, but most of these folks had little in the way of unclaimed tattoo real estate. I assumed this skin art costs these people money they cannot rightly afford.

I looked it up and, according to the “Derm Dude,” even a tiny tattoo would cost over $100 with larger ones costing $5,000 or more. People were driving old broken-down cars and pickups, pushing baby carriages, and wearing ratty clothes, but also sported thousands of dollars worth of tattoos and piercings. Most of the women would have long fake nails with exotic designs. Life does have its priorities I guess.

Since, outside of fast-food joints, gas stations, and the pulp wood businesses, I saw little in the way of employment opportunities. Certainly, none that would generate more than subsistence incomes. Perhaps the local meth labs are doing well.

This was the northwest section of the state and the poverty here lies in stark contrast to the more affluent coastal areas that most of us frequently think of when “Florida living” is mentioned. I don’t mean to disparage these folks as they probably didn’t have many good opportunities and the economy we talk about when pointing to the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500, has little meaning here.

We arrived in Tallahassee to visit family. We managed to reconnect all along our route with friends and family. We saw over a dozen people on this trip whom we don’t get to often visit. The final leg of our trip brought us to the east coast starting with Amelia Island (outside Jacksonville), down to Vilano Beach near St. Augustine, then on to Vero Beach, and finally Boynton Beach. We took well over 10,000 pictures between us which I supplemented with cellphone, GoPro, and Brinno time-lapse video. Editing these pictures and posting the finished slideshows and videos to my photography website will take longer than the three weeks we spent on the road.

Florida is a beautiful state. All of the people we met along the way were nice. We avoided politics and all was right with the world. My reference to the north-south divide and comparison to the Galactic Empire of Star Wars fame that was ruled for years through fear, intimidation, and tyranny, isn’t a reality, only a possibility. My seventy-plus years spent living in Florida have seen a gradual shift away from its roots in the Confederacy of the Deep South. We returned to Miami before Florida’s official Confederate Memorial Day on April 26, 2024. It is an unpaid state holiday, but it is still on the books.

You really appreciate your own home after spending time away. It is good to be back.

We Are All Binary; Go Forth and Multiply, or Not

 

A recent foray into my Wired magazine and a trip to Publix created, for me, one of those lightbulb moments. Two articles and a grocery trip came together in a revelatory understanding of the universe. Well, that’s perhaps an overstatement but I did find it all to be of interest.

The first article was about something that has been around for two decades and I had never heard the term, BCI. It was written by an endovascular neurosurgeon who has come to specialize in Brain Computer Interface procedures. A BCI is a device that lets the human brain communicate with and control external hardware and software. The BCI is designed to allow the subject to move a robotic limb or screen cursor using only their brain. Individuals with severely debilitating diseases like ALS can once again communicate with their world.

He describes using a new Stentrode which is inserted into the juggler vein and placed in blood vessels next to the brain. This is then connected to a device placed under the skin of their chest where it may communicate through Bluetooth to external computers or devices. The surgeon went on to predict that in the next decade, such surgeries will be more routine, even done by robots, to also treat seizures, depression, mood, and eating disorders, with further advancements in communication and motor function.

The second article was more cryptic. As someone who spent years working with computers but who was never a programmer, I could only glean a cursory understanding of the topic. It was written by an individual who had mastered Python, a mid-stack level programming language used to build websites, automate tasks, and do data analysis. It is an unspecialized language suitable for a wide range of tasks.

The article delved into what was described as our age of abstraction as discussed by German historian, Oswald Spengler. He went on to talk about the “stack” where the top of the stack communicates through the stack to the bottom of the stack where instructions are compiled into machine language of ones and zeros understandable by the computer’s central processing unit or CPU. If you aren’t bored yet, you should be. My only takeaway was that much of our existence has now been reduced to its basic form as coded in a binary world.

The Borg; Capt. Picard Assimilated

Flash forward to that same afternoon after reading these two articles. I was making my semi-monthly Publix run for cocktail ice and things we can’t get through home delivery when I approached the area in front of the store. The entire paved area between the Publix and the parking lot has been wisely painted with broad white stripes to mark it as a pedestrian crossing.

As I approached this crossing area I had to hit my brakes as I saw a man slowly walking out of the parking area toward the crossing zone. His hand held a cell phone just inches from his face. He was unaware of his surroundings and thoroughly enthralled with whatever was on that small screen. He moved at but a glacial pace across the striped area and into the store. He never once looked up to see that people in cars approaching from both directions were awaiting the completion of his journey into Publix.

This person had become one with a Matrix of his own creation. His reality was but a simulation of reality as he chose to ignore the real world to live a binary existence and become a mere extension of a digital device. He had the luxury of not needing a BCI to communicate and navigate through his world but chose to live in a land of ones and zeros. His was a self-imposed isolation, an abstraction.

Beyond the reference to the Matrix, another analogy might be Star Trek and the assimilation of Capt. Picard. The part where he becomes part of the Borg Collective and a mere cog in their electronic thinking machine is most appropriate.

Artificial intelligence, I laugh at you. I will assume that AI is also laughing at us. I am reminded of the famous Timothy Leary quote, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” I fear we have found our drug of choice and it has nothing to do with LSD, shrooms, or IRL.

Schedule F and Why it is Important in the Upcoming Election

When we look at the candidates for president this November, we shouldn’t look only at specific issues. If our democracy survives this political season, those issues will be democratically debated and any changes to our laws and direction will be made following the rules that were established by our founding fathers and enumerated in the US Constitution. We need to look beyond these immediate issues and look to the character of the individual who will set the tone for the executive branch of our government.

Our Constitution provides for a balance of power between the three branches of that government. It was wisely established that no one branch should hold all the power and that dividing that power would help ensure that we would never again be governed and dominated by a single individual. During the American Revolution, King George III represented the tyranny and arrogance of the existing European aristocracy.

Enter Donald John Trump. Among the utterances of this former president and current candidate have been: His consideration to shoot missiles into Mexico to fight drug cartels; Seizing ballot boxes in those states where he was losing; Shooting protestors in Washington, DC who were marching in demonstrations surrounding the shooting of George Floyd; dropping a nuclear bomb on hurricanes as they emerged off the coast of Africa to disrupt their formation; Demanding government workers sign an oath of loyalty to the president (not the Constitution) as a condition of employment; and an expansion of the Schedule F classification to include anyone he deems necessary for inclusion.

That last one was a bit cryptic but very important. President Trump issued Executive Order 13957 on October 21, 2020, which was designed to expand Schedule F classifications for all federal agencies. By this executive order, he would remove Civil Service protections from all who get so classified. This classification would then allow the president to hire and fire government officials at his sole discretion well beyond the originally intended policymakers in these government agencies. This list would include tens of thousands of classified positions.

Luckily Trump lost his reelection bid and this authoritarian takeover was never enacted. Trump has promised to reissue the order if elected. He would essentially control all agencies of government and would have the ability to appoint loyalists at all levels of government.

In mid-2022, Trump and his allies had identified 50,000 workers who would be fired by the president. An entity known as Project 2025, led by The Heritage Foundation (an activist conservative think-tank), has identified 20,000 potential Schedule F appointments.

While controversial, the original Schedule F classification had some logic. The proposed expansion would however go far beyond the original intent of covering policymakers and would now include office managers, human resource specialists, administrative assistants, cybersecurity specialists, etc. The overt purpose of a Schedule F expansion is partisan politicization of all government agencies based on political loyalty to the president and not the Constitution. Political appointments to many of these positions would seriously jeopardize their level of experience and expertise in exchange for absolute presidential control.

If Donald Trump had been reelected in 2020, his Schedule F takeover of our government would have begun on inauguration day in 2021. With the Biden win, that executive order was rescinded but all attempts to legislate restrictions on Schedule F expansion have been thwarted by Republicans.

If Donald Trump becomes president on January 20, 2025, the Schedule F expansion will begin. With a conservative majority in the Supreme Court and three Trump loyalists among them, he would effectively control two-thirds of our government. While we survived the first Trump presidency, often through the career sacrifices of responsible Republicans, there would be no checks and balances on Trump 2.0. King George III would be envious.