Ken's Blog

Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that in its decisions it will no longer factor in the costs of people getting sick and dying from air-borne fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone and other toxic chemicals in the air. It will only take into account how much any given decision costs industry.

Note: You might think this post is a parody, but it is not. This is literally the new EPA policy, as you can read for yourself.

Given this new focus, it seems to me that it would be logical, for the sake of clarity, for the EPA to change its name. Maybe it could call itself the IPA, or Industry Protection Agency.

One nice thing about this is that agency employees could stay on brand by playing a fun game: Every time another 1000 Americans become sick or die from asthma or heart and lung disease, everyone in the office drinks a pint of IPA.

To be fair, such an activity might lead to charges of corruption. Why are government officials spending U.S. taxpayer money to sit around the office all day getting drunk?

But there is a simple solution to this: In order to keep things aboveboard, all those many barrels of beer could simply be donated by industry.

Problem solved.

Yesterday somebody forwarded to me this beautiful and powerful video, which I would like to share with you. That kind of courage and clear thinking gives me a little hope.

I am still haunted by the last words of Renee Good: “That’s fine, dude I’m not mad at you.” The video from the ICE agent’s phone, just released by the government, shows her saying those words cheerfully, while rapidly turning her steering wheel to the right, in order to avoid bumping her car into the man who a moment later shot her three times in the head.

I think people should make t-shirts with those words printed on them. Although it might now be official U.S. government policy that if you wear that shirt while looking friendly and relaxed, some masked goon is supposed to respond by fatally shooting you in the head.

Meanwhile, here is a video from forty five years ago where the dialog seems to accurately describe, from around 4:00 to 4:50, what’s going on with the current occupant of the White House. I recommend watching the whole thing from beginning to end.

Today somebody was talking about their grandfather. He drank like a fish, yet lived to a ripe old age. “He was always proud of his liver,” they said. “No matter how much he drank, his liver was always incredibly healthy.”

The conversation then turned to their grandmother. “Smoked every day for many years, but still perfectly healthy at eighty.”

It seemed like a theme was developing. I hated to burst their bubble, but I felt I had to speak up. “Unfortunately,” I said, “that’s not how statistics works.”

I’m still haunted by the events in Minneapolis. It’s not just that the killing of Renee Nicole Good was horrifying.

It’s also the way that our government then flat out lied about it, telling everyone in the U.S. that what we had all plainly witnessed had not happened. As they used to say back in the days of Watergate, it’s not just the crime, it’s the cover-up.

Except here it’s something much worse: It’s not just the crime, it’s the gaslighting. Can you really successfully gaslight an entire nation, and get millions of people to disbelieve what they have all just seen with their own eyes?

I hope not.

I’ve started to read the poetry of Renee Nicole Good. Her poems are deep and powerful, and ask important questions about the emotional connections between us as humans.

It would have been good to read future poems by this talented lady. But that is not going to happen.

Yesterday an idiot with a gun murdered her in cold blood, shooting her three times through the head. Her “crime” was the act of swerving her car to get away from him and the other masked ICE goons who were menacingly waving their guns at her.

But the more deliberately evil crime may be the one then perpetrated by our “leaders” in Washington. Despite the abundant video evidence to the contrary, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Ms. Good was trying to run her car into the idiot with the gun.

That “blame the victim” falsehood was then repeated by our idiot president. Now millions of people have seen those videos, so everyone knows that those were flat out lies.

My heart goes out to Ms. Good’s family. I also weep for our country.

I don’t know whether Stephen Miller is pure evil, but he at least wants us to think he is. Here are his exact words in an interview on CNN earlier this week:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Several fictional characters with similar philosophies come to mind, including Lord Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine, and Sauron. You can probably add to that list.
The most similar real world historical figure might be Hermann Göring. As someone recently remarked, it might have sounded better in the original German.

It was five years ago today that a violent mob was directed to attack our beautiful nation by a criminal idiot. Unlike that idiot and his gullible followers, true Americans know that violence is not the answer.

The answer is to show up on Election Day and vote. Let us all pull together on November 3 and restore dignity and honor to our nation.

Our Constitution is more than a piece of paper to be trampled on by self-serving kleptocrats.

When I was a little kid, there was a recurring ad on television. The ad was for a collection of music you could send away for called “From Classics to Moderns.”

In the ad, an older guy with a mustache showed up on screen and introduced various popular songs, and then revealed that the music for those songs was actually lifted from classical music. For example, the music for “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” is actually straight up lifted from the “Fantaisie-Impromptu” by Frédéric Chopin.

My favorite moment was when the ad started playing the song “Stranger in Paradise” from the musical Kismet (one of my favorite melodies). At that point the man with the mustache would proclaim, rather dramatically, “But did you know that this is actually the ‘Polovtsian Dance Number Two’ by Borodin?”

After I grew up, I totally forgot about that ad. But then something happened many years later, when I was in grad school.

There was a review in our local newspaper for the Jim Jarmusch film “Stranger Than Paradise”. Except they got the title wrong, and printed it as “Stranger in Paradise”.

The moment I read that, it all came back to me. I found myself proclaiming out loud, rather dramatically, “But did you know that this is actually the ‘Polovtsian Dance Number Two’ by Borodin?”

It felt ridiculous, but also oddly freeing.

Now that the United States has begun collecting foreign presidents, maybe it’s time to go all in. This could be our new national pastime, sort of like Pokémon, but with foreign heads of state.

We could be systematic about it, going nation by nation. First we make up some sort of intentionally false premise (like pretending that the country in question is a major exporter of drugs), then we send in a SWAT team to extract that country’s head of state and their spouse.

We would put our captives and their mates to a holding cell in Brooklyn, and explain that the U.S. is now going to run their country. Which would give us unfettered access to that country’s natural resources, which of course is the real reason for this fun activity.

Sure, the extractions would each end up killing a few dozen people. But hey, nobody cares about that anymore, right?

Once we have collected enough foreign heads of state, we could set up public showings of our captives and their mates. The Brooklyn Zoo is an ideal location for this, because it already has people in place who know all about the care and feeding of exotic creatures from around the world.

We could even charge for those public showings, and that would generate revenue. You know, just to cover any unanticipated expenses after we are running all those foreign countries.

What could possibly go wrong?

I have a question.

Suppose, hypothetically, that Venezuela decides to try and convict, in absentia, the president of the United States for crimes against Venezuela. Given the various military actions taken in recent times by the U.S. government against Venezuela, that isn’t too farfetched a supposition.

Now suppose that in a bold and daring operation, Venezuela manages to capture the U.S. president and his wife, and bring them, blindfolded and handcuffed, to Caracas to stand trial for their crimes. One could imagine a news item something like this:

The American president and his wife were captured by Venezuelan forces in a raid in Washington D.C. and flown to Caracas, arriving at Simón Bolívar International Airport on January 6, 2026, to face federal charges including international terrorism and murders of Venezuelan fishermen, following an operation announced by President Maduro. The U.S. president is expected to appear in a Caracas federal court soon for charges stemming from a 2025 indictment.

You would think that this would lead to chaos in the now leaderless North American nation. But fortunately, Maduro also vows to run the United States.

So here’s my question: Would that be ok?