A Year of Travel – A Lifetime of Travel

JWise Thoughts, Travels

Caroline Wise in the surf in Santa Monica, California

Back in the first week of January 2022, while others shivered under the chill of winter and probably snow, Caroline and I were over in Pacific Palisades, California, visiting the Getty Museum before also spending time at the Armand Hammer Museum, a botanical garden, the La Brea Tarpits, Little Tehran for Persian lunch and ice cream, and the San Pedro Fish Market at the Port of Los Angeles being serenaded by an Elvis impersonator.

Caroline Wise at Teakettle Junction on the Road to Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, California

Still early in 2022, just two weeks later, we made yet another trip into Death Valley, except this one was taking the proverbial road less traveled. We’d booked an excursion out past Teakettle Junction to Racetrack Playa, something we’d wanted to do for decades. Don’t think for one moment we skipped the hot spring in Shoshone outside the park or communing with the wild donkeys of Beatty, Nevada.

Caroline Wise at the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

By February, with the weather on our side here in the desert southwest, we ventured up to the Grand Canyon. Hardly our first time here, and maybe the total number of visits is now unknowable, but this place is not something you know, even after your first dozen travels here.

Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona

In the golden age of travel, the average person out on the roads could know opulence as there was a time when presentation was an important aspect of knowing that your evening and morning times were as significant as the moments between. And then travel became a utility of capitalism, and what you do aside from handing some cash to those who offer a functional option to move and house you no longer mattered. — Our hotel on the Mexico-Arizona border in Douglas on a wonderful February weekend.

Weaver Maruch Sanchez de la Cruz in Zinacantan, Mexico

I could lament that March only saw us on vacation one time, but we were out for nearly a dozen days in Mexico, most of that down south in Chiapas, visiting Mayan fiber artists. Choosing this one image to represent 11 days immersed in Mexican culture out of a million impressions and thousands of photos was difficult, but isn’t that indicative of even trying to figure out where we’re going when a million options exist drawn from the billions of impressions we collect over our lives. — Mayan weaver in southern Mexico.

On AZ-86 west of Tucson, Arizona

Even when you must travel in the dark with uncertainty about what lies ahead, there can be astonishing moments of beauty surrounding your experience, but if you never get out, how will you know that just beyond the limits of what you think you know, there are these places you never dreamed of? — On the way to Ajo, Arizona, in April.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Southern California

Art needs to reflect society, a cultural moment in time; it should express something about who we are. We who are not creators should then invest moments to see what we cannot and visit a museum where those who care have taken time to create impressions of the zeitgeist. — April trip to Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Fairyland Trail in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah

The exposed earth created by nature shows us the zeitgeist of time we didn’t live in. While museums and images over the internet and television might be easier to have firsthand experiences with, everyone with the means should venture into the parts of nature that can show them something about the history that existed long before people ever appeared on this planet. — It’s still April when we took this hike in Bryce National Park, Utah.

Total Lunar Eclipse producing a "Blood Moon" as seen from Fountain Hills, Arizona

On our return from the Zuni lands of New Mexico in early May, let’s just say we were kind of on the moon.

Sunrise in Monument Valley Arizona

After sunrise in Monument Valley, we left the well-traveled path for a rare visit to the nearby Mystery Valley. And that was our travels for the month of May.

Caroline Wise at the Arboretum in Flagstaff, Arizona

June didn’t go according to plan. We were supposed to be on a train from Winslow to Las Vegas, the one over in New Mexico, but Amtrak proved too unreliable for our schedule, and so instead, we licked our wounds at our poor investment and, for a consolation prize, seized on the opportunity to visit the Flagstaff Arboretum to smell the ponderosa pines, and sure enough, they smell something like a cross between vanilla and butterscotch. It wouldn’t be until the end of June that we’d head out again, but that will count towards July.

Caroline Wise on Utah State Road 35 southeast of Kamas, Utah

Happy 4th of July from somewhere in the middle of Utah.

Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico

We weren’t done with July, though; a call came in asking my wife to spend all of our money at the Santa Fe Folk Art Market, which we happily obliged as it was years of desire that would be quenched by finally visiting. There was the added benefit of hikes in the area, some of that famous New Mexican cuisine, and, of course, a visit to Meow Wolf that was enchanting as this photo is candy coated with almost neon colors.

Sedona, Arizona

August was a mixed bag as a bunionectomy for Caroline altered what could be done. There’d be no long walks and it turned out no long drives. Though we enjoyed a day out in Sedona, Oak Creek Canyon, and Flagstaff, the start of the school season at NAU put a premium on lodging we weren’t going to indulge in. Then, on another day, the road we were traveling was covered in mud due to recent heavy rains associated with our monsoon season, and instead of trying to find a detour, we went for lunch and called it quits. Knowing what awaited us in just a few days, we weren’t feeling cheated.

Pacific Grove, California

It’s September, and we are obviously at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Okay, we were on our way to breakfast before heading over to commune with the fishies, Caroline with her new spirit animal, the hagfish, and me with the always mesmerizing cuttlefish with their eyes that reflect the universe.

Great Basin National Park in Nevada

We weren’t done with September yet as we needed to pay a new visit to the Great Basin National Park in Nevada to see if the bristle cone pine trees appeared to have aged. I guess after standing here for some 4,000 years, a decade or so wouldn’t make an appreciable difference, well, not to us, anyway. By now, I have to admit to some travel fatigue as we’ve been away from home for 66 days, and we still have 3 or 5 more trips ahead of us.

Near Lees Ferry on the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon, Arizona

Wow, were we really home for more than two full weeks? You betcha, but here in the middle of October, we finally broke out of being couch potatoes, though we don’t own a couch, and pointed our car north. Grand Canyon North Rim, here we come. First up, we had some hiking to do, and we did it all, I do mean all of it. The morning started out up near Lees Ferry for a hike up over the Colorado River; for lunch we hiked up the Paria River into its canyon, not far but far enough. Next up was Soap Creek Canyon, where we went to where we could go no further. Time to check out some condors about to be released in the wild before finally taking ourselves to the Grand Canyon for its last night of business before closing for the season.

The art of Don Carlos at the Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona

We don’t celebrate Halloween, but we do believe in treating ourselves, and so it was when we drove east to Duncan, Arizona, for a weekend at the Simpson Hotel, visiting with the proprietors we’ve become friendly with. By this time, we know that Caroline will be in for another bunionectomy, but this time on the other foot. This means that this trip coming up in November will be the last for the year.

Caroline Wise at Thor's Well at Cape Perpetua Scenic Area in Yachats, Oregon

Here we are at the 19th and final trip of 2022. Twelve days on the Oregon coast is about as good as it gets unless you consider any of the other 18 trips this year, which were all spectacular, too.

It would be obvious to most anyone seeing this post: we enjoy our travels. They might also think we have extraordinary access to financial resources. I’ve not worked in 5 years while Caroline works as a database programmer for a small company that allows her to take 20 days of paid vacation. Living frugally offers us a wealth of opportunities that we choose to use in ways that speak to our sense of gathering big impressions and a ton of memories that should last a lifetime.

Our discipline of only using what we need has allowed the two of us not just these 19 adventures over the course of a single year but 302 others since the beginning of the year 2000. Over the course of the intervening 22 years, we’ve ventured away from home for a total of 1,371 days, averaging about 13 getaways per year. That’s close to 60 days per year of what we consider vacation time, though much of it might just be a long weekend and, on occasion, a day trip, even if it’s all the way to Los Angeles and back to Phoenix in a day, in a car at that! I only know these numbers right now because I’ve just finished a complete index listing of our travels featured in the right column of this blog. There are still photos missing as I’ve not always taken my blogging responsibilities as diligently as I should have, but where I have them, they will be added.

There is no encore to this type of indulgence; there is only the continuation of trying to accumulate the experiences we believe lend a sense of the extraordinary to our lives and shared time.

Regarding 2023? Of course, there are some tentative things on the itinerary, actually a lengthy spreadsheet because who could keep track of all these details that will be worked on in the new year? The following is under consideration with a couple of things already firm: Europe, New York City, Chicago, Craters of the Moon in Idaho, Kartchner Caverns, back to Santa Fe and the Folk Art Market, and likely another Thanksgiving visit to delightful Oregon. Obviously, that’s simply not enough for us to consider ourselves human, and other travels will have to fall into our plans as long as we’re capable, healthy, and in love.

Update: It’s December 20, 2023; when I dipped back into this post and reread my predictions for the year that’s been, I thought an update was in order. We never made it to New York City, Chicago, Craters of the Moon, or Oregon, but we did spend nearly a month in Europe with our first visits to Norway and Sweden in addition to returns to Germany and Denmark. Kartchner Caverns and the Santa Fe Folk Art Market were also enjoyed. A trip to Southern Arizona saw us visiting Coronado National Memorial and a bunch of snakes, while in April, following my birthday, we did some serious hiking in Death Valley. Up on the Navajo Reservation in June, we visited the Sheep is Life festival, and in July, we enjoyed a day trip to Kaka, Arizona, followed two weeks later with a tour of the Mount Graham International Observatory. Our last trip of the year will be for New Year’s over in Duncan, Arizona, for some hopeful Sandhill Crane viewing.

Focus

JWise Thoughts

Thorns and flowers

What do we choose to focus on, and what impact does that have on our daily lives? For a month and a half, which includes the time from mid-November until the end of that month when we were on vacation in Oregon through the entirety of December, when I was preparing the lengthy blog posts that I shared here, my focus was on the details that surrounded that trip. Along the way, I learned more about the geology of the coast, the fungi, the sea life that calls the shore home, and a few lessons about perspective. Each day while traveling, my sense of happiness in spending time with my best friend was reinforced, and afterward, on each day prepping photos or writing I bumped into impressions of her that often had me smiling at my computer screen. Mind you, this was but one trip of the 19 that we took during 2022.

Now consider those whose gaze is attached to routines that only rarely waver. Sure, many are drawn into the experience of travel when so fortunate to be able to indulge in those pastimes, but it is what we do outside of those kinds of singularities that also matter. Are you dreaming of what’s next and celebrating what has been or are you bored with the same old stuff you’ll wallow in this evening and dreading the approach of bills you’d rather avoid?

When jobs and routines define much of who we are, where do we turn to force a perspective shift? What do we give up, alter, or intentionally move in order to discover something about ourselves with a mindset ripe for a break from our fixed ideologies and expectations? Is such a process even possible?

In a recent blog entry titled Stages, I posted a list of my interests over time, roughly grouped by age. Some things remain ever-present over the course of my life but they’ve been evolving while others were discarded. Looking at that list while writing this now, I am wondering what the main constants were that stayed with me and grew; I added those at the bottom of that post. Not that I want to refer you to that entry, but it was an exercise for me to think out loud that much has come and gone in my life, and while the decision to abandon something is not always a conscious one, it’s possible to leave parts of ourselves behind. I don’t know if leaving something is really an intentional act or just something that is bound to happen when we bring in new stimuli and grow beyond the utility of what something else had once offered us.

This, then, would appear to be the formula for change: always be open to bringing in new information, experiences, and challenges. Each time you alter a pattern, there’s a ripple into your past that allows you to understand that you are moving beyond that part of you that once served a purpose. We intuitively know this when it comes to playing with toys at 30 years of age it might be awkward to take a date to our place to play with dolls and model cars, though that might be cute the first time. And yet, this is exactly what we do when it comes to many of the activities and interests we gathered from the age of 15 to 30 years old. Just consider how many people still watch the same sports teams, listen to the same music, or watch their favorite teen movies well into adulthood. I get it; there’s room for nostalgia, but what I’m describing are those on a treadmill of life repetition.

We must, at times, take inventory of our progress, or lack of it, and foment a personal revolution that questions why we are on a trajectory that likely stalled out. It is the job of capitalism to blind us or at least take away the focus of seeing ourselves clearly enough to desire change. As creatures who tend to develop repetitious behaviors, we become beholden to those who parse out happiness through consumption, but this is not a path to real happiness. To paraphrase German philosopher Walter Benjamin, self-revolution is the emergency brake saving ourselves from cultural self-immolation brought on by capitalism.

Sustainability

JWise Thoughts

Caroline Wise braiding a shawl in Phoenix, Arizona

I continually contemplate what is sustainable. It is an engrained natural attitude that is as second nature as wearing shoes when I travel away from home. But, like wearing a pair of shoes beyond their lifespan and then developing foot pain, I don’t always do what’s in my best interest. Amazon is an essential service in my life that offers things that are not easily acquired within 15 miles of where I live, and so being cognizant of the environmental impact of the packaging material, I allow the number of items in a shopping cart to collect, so what might have required 3 or 4 trips to various places in my car, I can have delivered as one larger bulk of items. Part of me can justify this use of Amazon because I also know that their vehicle will be delivering multiple packages to the neighbors in our apartment complex. We live in an apartment of 836 square feet because the two of us do not require a 1,600-square-foot home. Certain foods I buy in bulk if they are perishable but can be frozen, we have a vacuum sealer to extend their fresh date, or if I’m purchasing ingredients for making my cereal, I buy them online, typically from a family farm that will send me 8 to 10 pounds of the nuts or seeds I require. Our air-conditioning is never set to cold but hovers around 78 in the summer and 64 in the winter. Our car is a hybrid that offers us a wonderful 47 miles per gallon, and if an electric car offered us 500 miles of range, we’d rather own that.

I fail to present a reusable cup at the coffee shop; I’m still using plastic bags at the grocery and justify them because we need trash bags. I feel horrible when we replace car tires or change the oil as they are ugly reminders that we produce far too much waste, but we live somewhere that has a horrible public transport system that often acts as an air-conditioned homeless person shelter on wheels. We travel too much, which uses a lot of gasoline and then requires others to use natural resources to clean up after we’ve used motels, dishes, and various other services that produce waste. On the other hand, neither Caroline nor I buy much in the way of clothes; even our underwear becomes an embarrassment as we try to maximize their use.

But there are very selfish reasons for our mindfulness about sustainable practices: frugality breeds a kind of luxury that we thrive with. The reward for consuming less is found in our travels and ability to live experiential lives. We are not easily entertained by pop culture as it’s known by the masses; we need books, tools for making music, fabric, socks, and art. Those things can easily be tied into our travels as Caroline reads to me in the car as we drive along while on occasion, I have brought an instrument with me, and at a minimum, I have my computer that has a ton of music software for me to doodle with if I weren’t so busy working on photos and writing. Caroline is never far from knitting needles or a small drop spindle used for making yarn. If you could look at our search histories, you’d see a near-daily search for definitions of words, their etymology, the history of a place or thing, or following a literary reference of something we don’t know about, so our phones are most often used as tools to enrich our lives.

The less we waste, the more empowered we feel walking down a beach.

The Foggy Price of Food

JWise Food, Thoughts

Foggy Phoenix, Arizona

Earlier this summer, I wrote a post called Gas-Lighting and how the media’s attention to the inflationary price of gas and the consumer obsession with it is a red herring. Today, I’m going after the foggy shroud created around food and the supposed inflation people are suffering from in order to feed their families. Before I even work out the details of what Caroline and I spend on our luxury diet that one might perceive to be pricey, I’m going to say that it’s actually incredibly inexpensive.

Like everyone else, when I go shopping, I have some sense that I’m spending a lot of money on groceries as I pay the bill, and then there’s all the stuff I have to buy online because things like ပင္ပိ်ဳရြက္ႏု a.k.a. Burmese Crispy Mixed Beans are not available anywhere in the entire state of Arizona. Should you ask if there’s no substitute for ပင္ပိ်ဳရြက္ႏု, I’d have to beg for your understanding that without that a Burmese preserved ginger salad is just not authentic. Nor can I begin to accept the idea of an avocado and cherry tomato salad without my favorite Terre Bormane white vinegar at $20 per 16.9-ounce bottle from Amazon.

But then I go through the exercise of breaking down how I use ingredients and what they cost per portion. Two years ago, I examined the crazy price of my homemade dehydrated granola, which requires no less than three days to make after soaking, grinding, and drying for a couple of days. When my 10 pounds of raw organic almonds (yes, they are raw, almonds generally are pasteurized) from California after paying $100, it feels like those are some expensive nuts, as who spends $100 at a time on nuts? And you can bet I do the same for the eucalyptus honey, walnuts, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, oat groats, and rolled oats that go into my morning meal. Well, it turned out that an entire 6-pound batch costs us about $45; again, who buys $45 of cereal at once? But that aside, my granola at forty-seven cents an ounce is costing us $1.88 a day. There’s also the matter of the eighty-five cents spent on soy milk per bowl of granola.

Unless we have eggs, which is what we do on the weekend. Take the four brown eggs, three slices of Kirkland bacon, one Vidalia onion, and a package of Chinese Chongqing Fuling Zhacai Preserved Mustard, and this hardly breaks the bank, costing a modest $2.81 each or $5.62 for the two of us to enjoy a homemade hot breakfast on the weekend.

Now, keep in mind that when we are eating breakfast at home, the most we typically spend, on average, is $2.76 per day. I’ll come back to this.

Lunch obviously gets more expensive, but not by much. Leftovers play a serious role in our lunchtime routine outside of the weekend when I can make something fresh for both of us. While there’s a gamut of meals, I’ll share two sides of the equation, one quick and easy, the other a lot more involved. On the one hand, it’s convenient for me to throw in a pre-cooked Angus burger from Costco, which sells by the dozen for $20.70 or $1.73 each. On top of this, I add an entire avocado that also comes from Costco, so $1.27 for that brings my lunch to $3.00. As for the peculiar lunch, being diabetic, I have to measure my options when it comes to carbohydrates.

The other lunch falls right out of the lap of luxury; it is called kimchi sundubu-jjigae, which is a Korean stew. The soup base I make in large batches and store in the freezer; it’s comprised of ground pork, onion, green onion, garlic, Korean chili powder called gochugaru, soy sauce, salt, avocado oil, and sesame oil. The rest of the ingredients include pork jowl, Korean dried green veggie (aster scaber is our favorite), shiitake mushrooms (preferably fresh), kimchi, extra soft Korean tofu, and a drizzle of sesame oil, sometimes a raw egg too. The cost of sundubu ends up being $14.00 or $4.66 a portion, as it’s inevitable that we have leftovers that Caroline gladly takes to work.

In order to come to an average cost of lunch, we’ll have to work through some of our evening meals as they fill in for lunch on many days.

Obviously, dinner is going to be a pricey affair but then again, not. As with our other two meals of the day, there is some diversity when it comes to our final meal of the day, too. Trying on occasion to keep things healthy, we are not beyond incorporating a couple of vegetarian options each week, such as kadhai paneer, which is Indian cheese with bell pepper, Roma tomatoes, and a few fenugreek leaves, served on our brown rice/quinoa mixture. Then there’s our obsession with beans, almost always from dry beans. We are comfortable buying Peruano/mayocoba beans from a local discounter for as little as $1.85 per pound or purple ayocotes that ring in at close to $9.00 per pound. Both crockpot dishes make at least four portions; we’ll go with 4 for ease of calculation. The cheaper dish with the Peruanos, an onion, six slices of bacon, and a quart of chicken stock costs about $8.00 or $2.00 per portion. The pricier ayocotes with onion, crushed San Marzano tomatoes, 1/2 a roast Costco chicken, a 4-ounce can of green chilies, and chicken stock come in at nearly $19.00 or $4.75 per portion. Mind you, it’s more common that a crock of beans will supply us with at least four dinner portions and 1 or 2 lunch containers for Caroline to take to work.

We are certainly meat eaters, and while we try to balance our expenditures there, the fish we order online from Canada costs us between $10 and $19 a portion. I can buy pork chops from Costco that end up costing only $2.30 a chop, but we also keep a supply of Mangalitsa pork chops on hand that, while considerably thicker than Costco’s, are $16.50 each, which in turn make the prime filets that cost $13.00 per 6-ounce portion seem almost cheap. Then, for a further example of our diet, we’ll fix pasta maybe once a month (I’m diabetic, so there’s a reason our diet is light on carbs). My goto pasta starts with red lentil/quinoa fusilli, Rao’s Arrabiata sauce, a can of corn, 1.3 pounds ground beef, an onion, and a handful of capers, which adds up to about $20 for a solid four portions or $5.00 per person.

Rounding our average meal costs up for breakfast to $3 per person per day, lunch of $5, and dinner of $8.00 brings us to the extravagant gourmet eaters spending between $800 and almost $1,000 a month on food. Mind you that over 90% or more of our ingredients are not processed; they are raw ingredients, often organic. With the international ingredients and online meat and fish, we spend an inordinate amount on those items.

Just remove the pricey meat and fish options, replacing them with meat and fish from any regular grocery store, and our average dinner costs drop down to only $4.40 per person, while lunch comes in at $4.13. Now, with breakfast at $2.76, lunch, and dinner, our daily costs are only $11.27 per day per person or $676 per month.

Of course, there’s the issue of time to shop, prepare, and clean up these homemade, healthy meals, and while we have the luxury of one of us having that time and the inclination to accept that to eat well, there’s a cost that comes with that. The alternative is what? Egg and bacon burrito at a drive-thru joint for $8.00, spicy chicken combo at Chick-fil-A for $7, and a couple of pasta dishes at a nearby Italian place for $50 for the two of us? We would easily be spending between $80 and $100 a day for the two of us doing that. So, if we ate like that just twice a week, we’d spend an additional $640 minimum on top of whatever we made at home, which would still cost about $500 a month for the two of us.

The price of convenience is contributing to poor health, use of income, and family time, while the perception and constant lament about rising prices delude people into thinking they can’t afford to eat at home while the purveyors of this refrain of madness continue to profit.

The restaurant industry rakes in just under $900 billion a year, while the grocery industry earns just over $810 billion, a nearly $100 billion difference. Funny, we hear about the billionaires minted out of Walmart, but we hear nothing about the extraordinary wealth being taken from preparing junk food for Americans.

Near and Far – Trip 19

JWise Thoughts

Banana Slug Sticker

Our 22nd visit to the state of Oregon will see me trying to shift my gaze, the one that peers through the lens of the camera. To the extent I’m able to bring greater intention to where I direct my focus, I’ll be traveling with a macro and a telephoto lens. Those lenses help me capture things near and far, but only if I’m able to stop trying to see everything all at once. I need to look further and deeper as a reminder to see beyond the end of my nose while also trying to uncover things often disregarded in the back of my head or behind it. Extending our scope in familiar territory is never easy because of the inclination to take a little too much pleasure in the things we’ve previously known and enjoyed. Do we then tend to want to stroke fond memories instead of uncovering the unseen and unfamiliar?

I wrote the above on September 28th in order to create a mantra for myself so that once November 17th arrives and we depart for Oregon, I’d have it in my head to follow this exercise. The camera gear and writing instruments are packed and ready to go, but I’m not quite sure about my headspace. Is it due to my encounter with Covid? Or am I distracted by the requirements that surround traveling? I’m nearly always imbued with an underlying sense of things undone that need tending to instead of taking time for a coffee and writing because that’s a part of my daily routine. Instead, I could be at home ensuring that everything’s ready to go and all that’s left is to wait for the Uber to bring us to the airport, but on the other hand, who cares what’s missing as long as we are checked in for our flight and have our documents, lodging, and car are reserved, and our few essentials are packed. Those things that’ll be inevitably forgotten are easily acquired along the way.

Yet, I’m distracted by urgencies and uncertainties. My dislike of those two states creates a strong desire to accept that those things are a normal part of my way of going into a shift of routine, even for the brief weekend getaways. And so, I put myself into doing something typical of any other day to convince myself that today is like any other day, but in seven hours, we’ll be in an airport.

In 12 hours we’ll be in Eugene, Oregon, and then in about 22 hours, we’ll be encountering the coast of Oregon at the town of Florence. At this point, everything changes. There will be an imperative question: did we have breakfast in Eugene? If not, it’s time to eat; beyond that, the only option is to decide on which beach we want to start exploring the romantic conditions of memories that have accumulated over the many years we’ve been walking along the sea. Should we turn north, we could take a walk in the Carl G. Washburne State Park on the rainforest trail on one of the two days we are promised to have clear skies and sunny conditions compared to all other days where cloud cover and rain are forecast.

Only 10 miles north of our favorite rainforest trail is the Devil’s Churn (part of Cape Perpetua), and while we’ll be in the general area of both of those places for four days while we take shelter in Yachats, the sun will be gracing both tomorrow. From there, it’s only a 3.5-hour drive south to the yurt we’ll be sleeping in down in Brookings, and well, that sounds like a perfect day, and we’ll still have ten more days ahead of us to capture experiences.

In keeping with my mantra, this is my attempt to focus on what’s out on our horizon and then use a macro filter taken from our familiarity with the environment to see a level of granularity of how our first day out might unfold, but I don’t want to look beyond that as the optics aren’t so clear and there needs to remain space for spontaneity.

Banning TikTok?

JWise Thoughts

TikTok Logo

If you don’t want the Chinese to know precisely how collectively stupid we Americans are, ban TikTok. Our grotesque level of ignorance was used by Cambridge Analytica utilizing harvested Facebook data that helped propel Donald Trump to power and England into Brexit. Knowing the weak points of a population allows those with the right tools to guide the misguided into traps by exploiting the dumbest things they believe. The American policy influencers are aware of this, of course, and many have been using this to further their own agendas. Theoretically, though, it could work the other way, too, where the exploitative force uses its data to move people away from their profound ignorance, thus subverting the agenda of those who gain from the stupidity of the masses.

I’m not saying TikTok desires either scenario, nor can I suggest that some agency or group in America would want to see the continued dumbing down of its population, but I do know that we are doing NOTHING to negate our right to believe whatever level of crazy we choose to cultivate in the name of freedom.

I started this post in early November, and just now, on November 15, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray was quoted saying he is “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the U.S. and continued with, “We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI’s end about TikTok, including the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose.”

For me, this translates to, “We don’t need a foreign government knowing precisely how stupid and easily influenced our half-educated population is.”