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By Ande Jacobson

There’s a serious misconception driven by decades of GOP propaganda regarding taxes. While there is a group of pro-business/anti-regulation Republicans who see tax cuts as the cure all solution to what ails us, the vast majority of Americans don’t see tax cuts and elimination of all regulations (or protections) as a positive thing. People understand that the government services they need have costs that we all must share. What upsets the vast majority of people is that the morbidly wealthy and corporations keep finding ways to avoid paying their fair share. Additionally, the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump administrations have seriously hurt the vast majority of Americans with their blatant market manipulation and tax cuts while at the same time creating the most extreme wealth gap in American history. It’s not that the country lacks wealth. It’s that under modern Republican administrations wealth has been systematically been moved from the lower 90% of the population and concentrated at the top 1% at the expense of the services that we all need since around 1981. The result has been the destruction of the middle class and the creation of a small group of billionaires who have benefited. Continue reading →

By Ande Jacobson

At the end of Part 4 of my journey, I was regularly playing in three community symphonic bands, a couple of small ensembles, and playing in the pit for musical theater any chance I got. I was playing between five and eleven musical runs a year in between everything else while also continuing my software/systems engineering career. Outside of work, my routine amounted to a cycle of practice, performance, and repeat. This included a minimum of three rehearsals per week and a maximum of either a performance or rehearsal every night along with an added rehearsal or performance during the day on the weekends. On those rare occasions when I didn’t have an organized rehearsal or performance in the evening, I would practice on my own for an hour or two when I got home from work, and even longer on the weekends. For the first three years after getting back into organized music, I was also taking flute lessons one evening a week and getting in a bit of flute practice every day or evening at some point. I suppose in some respects, I was making up for all that lost time during my 17 year hiatus from organized music. Continue reading →