Wish I'd Said That

 "AI is this years Beanie Babies for billionaires."  

I HATED THE BI-CENTENNIAL hype and hoopla fifty years ago.   We'd just come off of a terrible war and a terrible scandal in Watergate, and Ford had pardoned Nixon so the biggest criminal in both was getting off.   His associated criminals were, to some extent, getting some punishment for their part in Watergate though the bigger criminals, such as Kissinger, weren't even in any real danger for their war crimes and genocidal scale killing.   1976 was not a year for celebrating the "American experiment" as it was called.   I already saw the real nature and potential disaster of Buckley v Valeo, one of the landmarks in the destruction of American democracy - after all I'd seen the role that media lies and campaign ads had played in putting Nixon in the presidency in 1968.  That year was my start in understanding the real nature of "free press-free speech" which included media lying for profit with impunity. 

When one of my mother's cousin's housebreaking was breaking up as he went into a nursing home - they had no children and no siblings and my family were the ones they turned to - some odds and ends came my way.  One was a fake leather folder with a $2 bill in it from the bicentennial year - the kind of crap they peddled in the Parade Magazine - they were suckers for such touted investments.   Her mother read the Record American (aka "the little picture paper") after all.  Loved aunt May but she would believe anything.  I looked up the value of it last year,  yeah, it was worth $2 in 2026 dollars so, according to an online calculator of the value of money:

$2 in 2026 is worth $0.34 in 1976

I wish I knew the amount that my mother's cousin paid for postage and handling and the, no doubt as advertised "real leatherette display folder."   I don't know if that enhances the worth of it as an object, though I doubt it. 

About the only good thing I can think of that came from what the surprisingly still active Jeremy Rifkin called "the buy-centennial" was the New World Records lable, which started to put out many fine and some not as fine, LPs of American music, classical, jazz, "experimental."  It somewhat diminishes my pleasure in it that it was started with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation - I don't much trust anything with that name associated with it but it was only a grant.   And they took in the sadly discontinued Composers Recordings Inc, the venerable CRI label which issue many fine and fascinating recordings of American composers.  And some not as fine though interesting in an antiquarian way, if you're interested in now obscure American composers.   Some of that obscure music is very good and would enrich the musical scene if it was played from time to time.   I wonder if any of my old CRI LPs have increased in value.  I took good care of them. 

Update:  I never read Rifkin's controversial book Algeny which apparently got even the leftist Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould pissed off at him - the Wiki article on Rifkin quotes his scathing review.  I'd be curious to see if his critique of Darwinism has any relevance to mine and how the claims of the scientists who objected to his book match current biology.  Forty years ago they were making all kinds of claims in evolutionary biology that have fallen into a state of desuetude as much as much of the conventional biology in my high school bio textbook - many of those which became the reigning ideology of biology  Gould, himself, was in the business of debunking.