Things are coming together, as they say. This column was published around Election Day 2020 and completes 48 consecutive years of my writing it. Over this time, seven out of 10 reader responses have been kind and positive. 

As I’ve noted before, my job has been to “watch government and report how they screw things up” or write on factual stuff related to business that can help readers of Industrial Heating. Mixed with this I have written similar columns in journals doing the same chores and had the pleasure (and heartache) of writing several books under contract, the topics of which probably made maggots gag. In addition, I’ve had the privilege of forming two plastics manufacturing businesses and helped in the formation and management of several electronic equipment makers.

Lately, my friends and I have helped illegal moonshiners become legal and, in a related business, used shine to make medicinal preparations. And for dozens of years I have helped in commercializing new technologies, especially bringing them to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. All of this after I started in 1959 with a “proper job” in the design and development of rocket motors for the military trying to squelch the rising threat of terrorism in the Middle East. Then, during the second half of the Cold War, I represented the sole U.S. maker of nuclear warheads on Capitol Hill. 

Now you have some insight when I say I’m the luckiest man to ever walk the face of this Earth.

Yes, my job has been to watch politicians and bureaucrats. And, yes, I have learned to call most of them what they are – snakes and lizards. For all practical purposes, I’ve never met any fully honest one. Ronald Reagan was by far the most straight-up. Indeed, things have become progressively worse over these past five decades. The public will plainly see this election year as the worst.  

America has corrupt federal employees in all three branches at the federal level, and citizens have seen all of this without satisfactory elimination of said corruption. Bureaucrats thrash around, never able to get a job done, and continue to collect (large) paychecks. The press and media have become involved (due to being paid money) by lying excessively and selling instead of reporting facts and truth. Watching America being destroyed by its own people this year has been the worst thing ever.

The incivility in public, political and media discourse is appalling as is the continued lack of factual knowledge among the citizenry about the basic structures of society and life truths. For example, everybody wants electric cars to make the earth “green” again, but they have never thought about where the electricity comes from for the batteries.

A very large part of the American public, about 40% in my estimation, are ill-informed, uninformed or stupid. That is the great American problem. Correction of the public education situation is mandatory and is the only real solution to the cumulative American problem. No nation can prosper with an incompetent and uncivilized citizenry. Readers, if you care about America’s future, please find and take a role to resurrect our country. 

It is discouraging and with a truly heavy heart that I write this last column, but I must thank the many readers over the decades. My job for you must close, as will my time here, before I soon join my wife and friends. 

As my acquaintances have said to me in the past, and now I to you, “I hope we meet again on the other side.”