Significance – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Read The Funniest And Best Post You’ll Read On Regret In The Next 431 Hours

“Everything depends upon speed, and the secrecy of his quest. Do not regret your decision to leave him, Frodo must finish this task alone.” – LOTR: The Two Towers

A burglar stole all my lamps. I should be mad, but I’m de-lighted.

People rarely change.

Perhaps the only thing that makes people change is an intense, emotional, experience. Nearly dying is one of those. Losing a land war in Asia is another. Having a loved one pass away is yet another. How we react to those intense moments in life can be significant.

Why is this important?

For the most part, you are who you are. As I started this off, by observation I’ve seen that most people don’t change very much, at all, throughout their lives. There are several friends that I have known for decades that I only talk to every few years. Why don’t we talk more often? Not much has changed – we’ve gotten to the point in life where those bright and technicolor moments of childhood and young adulthood are behind us.

Oddly, I think many of those folks would jump in a car and drive a day to help me if I told them I needed it and it was an emergency. Now, I have no idea if they’d do it a second time if I just made up the emergency, or if the emergency was that I couldn’t find my car keys.

Yeah, there’s probably a limit.

But Jesus never bragged: “For I speak not of my own Accord.” John 12:49

One conversation I recently had with a friend was about those people we went to high school with that were either very ill or have already passed away. As I look around to the people I know, it’s getting to the point where I’ll be going to more funerals than weddings. That’s okay, I’m sure I can be the guy that puts the FUN in funeral.

When I talk to my friends, however, the things that brought us together rarely, if ever change. That’s not to say that that things don’t happen in our lives, but the core of our being stays the same. The character traits that made me admire them, or the personality quirks that made us laugh at the same jokes or love the same movies, or the shared experiences that bond us are still there.

I did a google search for “lost medieval servant boy” but it said, “this page cannot be found”.

Of course, everyone has tragedy in their life – experiencing the tough parts of life is what makes experiencing the best parts of life seem ever sweeter. Part of getting older is getting that perspective so that I can look back and see which of the things that were so important to me twenty years ago are still important. Some of them aren’t. Those are the ephemeral things in life, like my favorite songs.

Oh, wait, I’m still stuck at 17 with those. Darn. But I will say that I certainly care a lot less about what people thing – I guess I’m becoming a curmudgeon.

Which is also okay, since I’ve also learned that most people don’t think about me very much at all. That’s not a statement based on sadness – it’s a statement of reality. Unless I was Donald Trump. Then I’d live rent free in the minds of millions of GloboLeftists.

And she also falls way high on the Crazy axis and way low on the Hot axis.

I also know that, looking back, were there things I would go back and change, knowing what I know today? Of course! There is no fully human life that has ever been lived where mistakes weren’t made. But spending even a single second of my life in regret, kicking myself, is a waste of that second, and an emotion that will lead to nothing but despair, which is certainly an advanced form of Evil.

Why?

The past is gone. Unless someone develops a time machine or John McAfee successfully shows everyone how to drastically shift quantum worldlines, well, those major mistakes of the past are with us and will be with us until we shift off this mortal coil ourselves, moving from the washer to the dryer of life.

But we can’t let those events define us. Sure, they can change us, and any significant emotional experience will change us. Yes, we can work to atone for our errors. But when we have the time, why not focus that emotional experience into something good?

“When you’ve fallen down, and you’re lying there on the ground, pick something up and bring it with you when you get up.” – John Maxwell

When I was faced with my last major setback, I tried to see what aspects of that setback were mine and mine alone. Rather than spend time in regret or revenge, I really tried to focus on things that would make me better after the experience, not in anger or fear, but out of a desire to really get better as a person.

When a Venn diagram wants revenge, does it become a Venn dettagram?

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise is part of what came out of that experience. The other part was I decided to file my teeth into little fangs. That part didn’t work out so well. Never file your teeth into little fangs.

My question and challenge to myself was to see what I could do to make myself and the world a better place. Do I always do that?

No! Of course not.

But I try. My perspective has changed. As much as I share about me in these posts, these posts are not about me. These posts are, when I do a really, really, good job, about the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Back to regret: I’ve got a simple question that I asked myself at my last big setback: “What price am I willing to pay to hold on to feelings of regret rather than channeling that feeling into something that changes the world for the better or to repair the wrongs that I’ve committed?”

That’s really a powerful question. I could have stayed with regret, which leads to despair, which leads to . . . nowhere. Unless it’s channeled to make changes in me for the better. My first marriage failed. The result? I resolved to never, ever lie to The Mrs. So, in return, she never asks me “does this pair of pants make my butt look big?” because I’d have to answer, “no, it’s the butt that makes your butt look big.”

A friend of mine married a trophy wife. Apparently, she didn’t win first place.

In one sense, it’s freeing. But it’s a change I made that made me better.

I think that, in the end, our efforts to better ourselves, especially morally, are a very big part of why we’re here. Human beings are really, really pathetic when they don’t have to struggle to achieve greatness. I have the receipts on this: Prince Harry, whose greatest trauma was that his brother once said something mean to him. But he’s paying the price: Meghan Markle. Perhaps Harry should feel regret.

It’s been said that God gives his toughest loads to his strongest servants, and it has been my observation that this is really true, since most people are actually better than me. Though I’m trying.

Again, people rarely change. If you’re in the position to change, pick something up when you get up.

Unless it’s Meghan Markle. You should leave that trash right in the gutter.

Give War A Chance

“War is brewing.” – The Lord of the Rings

Pa Wilder survived mustard gas and pepper spray. He was a seasoned veteran.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

I have a different answer:

Saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Whaaaaat?

Yeah, war, it turns out, is an amazing catalyst for providing lots of life saving technology that has saved far more people than it has killed. I need to jump in here with this because everyone has their sphincters clenched because it appears we’re on the edge of the Third World War. Maybe that won’t be so bad.

Hang on, this will all make sense in a moment.

I’m a trained professional. Or I would be if I were trained. And if I were getting paid for this.

Give a thief a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a thief a bank and he’ll rob everyone.

But I made a pretty bold statement, and I have the receipts to back it up. First let’s start with what I’m counting. I’m not counting as “war” when governments kill their own citizens. In the 20^th century alone (no Fox® required) governments killed an estimated 262 million of their own citizens.

Yeah, that’s an ugly number, and it’s certainly the largest man-made source of involuntary death. This is also the biggest argument EVER that the Second Amendment is the very best life-saving technology ever conceived by mortal man.

Ever.

War is a different kettle of fish, and it depends on the counting. One source says the total number of combat deaths since 1800 is around 35 million. Sure, that’s a lot, and I’d love to have them all over for a nice dinner, but it’s small compared to those killed by their own government. A broader definition of “war” would put it at 131 million in the twentieth century, but I’d guess that also includes a big overlap of citizens killed by their own government.

I hear that Stalin collected political jokes. When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.”

Tomato, tomah-to. Let’s split the difference and say it’s probably 80 million in the twentieth century, or roughly as many people as Joe Biden has allowed to come streaming over the border in the last three years.

But how, John Wilder, you amazing stud, you said you had receipts on how war brought about benefits that exceeded the costs?

War provides an acceleration of humanity, it provides the necessary push and investment into things that help troops do unexpected things on the battlefield. Like living. That leads us to penicillin. It was spurred into development (it had been discovered earlier) in World War II. Would antibiotics have been lost in a research paper without World War II? Don’t know – but World War II allowed them to be tested on Allied soldiers.

While we’re on medical, what about smallpox? Oh, sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but I’ve been told it is far worse than bigpox. What spurred that innovation? War. The Revolutionary War, in fact.

Well, there’s a joke coming back from 2012. I guess humor ended then.

I know I try to avoid drinking water since mankind developed beer and wine, but water chlorination has saved lots of people who aren’t drinking booze. Who developed the process to make chlorine gas cheaply so he could gas a bunch of French? A German guy in World War One.

There are more, but there are hundreds of millions of lives saved in just those three developments.

What else did war provide?

Nuclear power – sure, just like OJ’s obituary, someone will say . . . “Oh, and there’s that one other thing” but nuclear power has produced clean power over the globe with, well, a few exceptions.
Jet engines – without World War Two, would Steve Miller have ever had someone to take him home?
Radar – I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty good at keeping planes from hitting each other.
The Internet – how else would we get pictures of cats?
GPS – it can guide bombs, or it can take us to a liquor store in an unfamiliar town. Guess which is used more often?

I found a $20 outside of a liquor store. I decided to do what Jesus would do, so I turned it into wine.

Satellites – without World War Two, would we have these? Probably not. And satellites have made weather prediction a pretty trivial thing. Doesn’t mean the prediction will be any good, but, you know, we can do it faster.
Computers – created to calculate firing tables for artillery and to decode German stuff. Again, now we use for pictures of cats. And porn.
Medical imaging, including x-rays and ultrasound – all started with military tech.
Medical prosthetics – this is grimmer, but the more things got shot off, the better the tech.
Telecommunications technology, including wireless networks – the very first time I used WIFI in a house, the host noted that it was based on tech used in Gulf War I. WIFI? Yeah, thank a war.
Aircraft technology – when you make tens of thousands of aircraft that are used to the maximum extent of their capability, you learn what makes them fall out of the sky. Which is useful.
Rocket technology – no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. From Werner von Braun to Elon Musk, I’m raising my glass to the foreigners who get us into space. Oh, von Braun’s first rockets weren’t aimed at the Moon.
Sonar – I don’t fish, so, I guess this is okay. Meh tier.
Chemical engineering – this is a really important one – in making all the gases to kill people in World War One and in all the bits and pieces required to make tires without rubber and how to make ammonia to kill yet more people in World War One, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
Trauma care – how is it that 35 people are shot in an average Chicago weekend and only eight die? Trauma care. This stuff was built on lots of combat experience, and thankfully keeps lots of innocent people breathing.
Cryptography – the entire field of cryptography is due to war. It’s the backbone of current connections and internet transactions, but started when people wanted to figure out where the Germans were going to be next week.

But when the Vikings used dots and dashes to communicate, it was Norse code.

I’m no longer scared of war. Sure, it sucks if you or your friends got exploded, but the numbers don’t lie: war has killed probably between 35 million (low) and 131 million (way high) in the twentieth century. The advancements from war have probably saved (one estimate I read) five billion people.

War seems to have saved more people than it has killed. By a huge margin.

So, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him): “Give war a chance.”

Maybe, but maybe we’re on the eve of creation?

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

“It’s taken almost thirty years and my family fortune to realize the vision of that day.” – Back to the Future

It’s easy to make a website for orphans – you don’t need a home page.

Last post we talked about the main family structures that impact the ideology of the United States (Absolute Nuclear, Authoritarian, and Egalitarian Nuclear). As noted in the post and in the comments, there were several left out. Let’s start out with the biggest structure in the world and the structure that breeds commies:

The Exogamous Clan.

This is the family structure that was seen in China, Cuba, northern India, Russia, and the part of France commies come from.
The basic structure is that marriage occurs with women from outside the clan, and the husband brings the wife home.
This is a wickedly high stress scenario: more than one woman in the household is insanely susceptible to the competition and emotional games that more than one woman can bring, plus lots of adult males and jealous wives under the same roof.
The result, the father has to have huge amounts of power. Women are pushed down relentlessly to keep peace in the family. This is reflected in that the sons’ wives are chosen by the parents, and even the sons are fairly replaceable.
The idea of independence never comes up until the father dies and the son has to form his own clan and only then does the family break apart.

The result of this is that the culture where the Exogamous Clan is the family structure prizes discipline, social duty, conformity, and not being different. The culture lends itself to strong central governance: strong emperors or a strong central government – looking at you, Chairman Xi. In China, the initial failed attempts at communism were attempts to move this Exogamous Clan structure to the societal level.

And they decided they didn’t need to teach him, they said, “Hilfinger it out.”

When these cultures have an overthrow of their leadership, the bloodshed is epic until the new father figure takes over. Children from this family structure will have a really hard time understanding the Absolute Nuclear and Authoritarian since independence is prized in the Absolute Nuclear and Authoritarian and is a cancer to the Exogamous Clan structure.

The next stop on our world tour leads us to the Islamic world, which pretty much all follows the same family structure:

The Endogamous Clan.

The Endogamous Clan is essentially and nearly exactly the Islamic world.

These are marriages based on arranged cousin marriages.
There isn’t much family stress since everyone is already family and is already inbred related so everyone pitches in.
Dad busy? There’s an uncle who will help you out. The “Patriarch” rarely has to rule because the uncles will form an opinion and go with it.
Women aren’t outsiders, and they are the ones who end up setting up the marriages, picking and choosing which cousins should marry.
They consider the entire world a clan, and their goal is to carry their clan, Islam, to everyone.
If you’re outside the clan, however, slavery is just fine with them.

If you think about having kids with your cousin and go, “ewww, gross” you’ve been inoculated against Endogamous Clans. For good reasons: one study in Bradford (U.K.) determined that childhood birth defects in Bradford was double the national average – largely because of Pakistani first cousin marriage. I guess it’s okay for them to sleep with their second cousin, if the first cousin doesn’t mind.

Islamic pubs are the worst, no drinking, no dancing. But the women can get stoned.

The English and the Pakistani (and other East Asians from Endogamous Clans) living in England will never really understand each other. The English will see a group that they want to assimilate, and the Pakistani are there only for conquest. Why did Pakistani kebob shop owners chop up and cook and sell an English child (to other English people)?

The kid was not a member of the Clan, so who cares? This is a significant cultural clash that has yet to come to a head.

The last major group is from sub-Saharan Africa. This was classified by Todd as a Flexible System. There’s a system, but that system is defined as “whatever”.

This is primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, and Todd found it also in the United States cotton belt.
Monogamy? Polygamy? Whatever.
Women raise the children while men wage war and herd cattle.
A large number of the men don’t have the opportunity to have sex: polygamy leads to periodic civil wars.
Men join together in war bands to take women or create social status.
Power is important, but responsibility is not prized.

Africa has been chaotic, and it appears that much (not all!!) of the social system seen in the United States today from African descendants has been a replication of the Flexible System, which appears to be in many cases becoming the predominant urban family structure for all people, not just African descendants.

Since Ford V. Ferrari was such a hit, Chevy tried to release a film: Total Recall.

The final two are Asymmetric and Anomic.

Asymmetric is:

Weird and limited to India, consisting of arranged marriages from the cousins of female relatives only.
It’s India, so like all things Indian it’s confused and chaotic and covered in curry powder.
I’d like to ignore it, but it’s like a billion people. But it’s a billion Indians, so I’ll ignore it.

India probably breaks every rule, primarily because regardless of the family structure, that structure also has to contend with the caste system. When I was interacting with Indians, they looked to see what caste I’d have been in if I were Indian. Due to several questions, they seemed convinced it would have been the warrior caste (they were warrior caste) so we were cool.

India will keep being India, and Indians (wherever they go) will want to hang out with other Indians more than anyone else, including getting all of their family hired.

What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him, and pitch to the rhino.

Anomic is:

No fixed structure, whatsoever.
Tribal, think rainforest tribal.
Consists of oppressive empires and peasants, with consisting of military dictatorships coupled with coups.
Comically ineffective at doing anything of note.

I have no doubt that Mssr. Todd would not write this book today in the current climate of moral relativism. In choosing to review cultures and compare them, by definition some will come up short in some way or another – the greatest burst of human invention, ever, came primarily from two family systems, the Absolute Nuclear and the Authoritarian. Cultures like the Exogamous Clan structure have provided innovation, but for the most part (until recently) tried to turn their back to the world since dealing with foreigners is, well, messy.

What did Malcom X name his son? Malcom XI.

But it does explain that to the CCP and Chairman Xi, if you are Chinese-American, you’re still Chinese. Back in (I think?) the year 2019 I read that China had naturalized 4,000 citizens from other countries. That’s not a typo. 4,000. Conformity comes from being Chinese, which is why I don’t really expect them to ever be interested in taking over the world. They like Chinese people, and I’m pretty sure they think they’re a separate species.

Will China fight for resources? Certainly. Will China fight for Taiwan? Yes, to the Chinese, those are just more Chinese. Does China want to control Japan or Korea or Vietnam? No. They want them to do what China wants, but China has been, historically, very happy staying at home, likely (in part) for the reasons Todd discussed related to family structure.

The endgame of this is complex – as family structure in nations changes due either to technological progress, social change (divorced moms), and/or the influx of foreign family patterns, the very ideology of nations is bound to change.

Family patterns may change, but remember, to an orphan a selfie will always be a family photo.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off. I walked through the room naked. (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart. He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects. One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical. I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand. You can read it in Ted’s work. Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski: it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy. People like the struggle. I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe. Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days. Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder: “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe: “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge. Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame. But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks? A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key. And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy. Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him. Imagine fighting a kitten. I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals: they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there. All the time. They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them. Maybe winning an Oscar™. If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders: they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this: the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier. Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers. They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God. They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me. Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo. Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good. I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone. We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears. That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live. So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not). One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out. But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself. You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House. The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so. Men need quests. Society needs quests. We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning. And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

Be Bold. Life Is Too Short For Anything Else.

“That’s a bold statement.” – Pulp Fiction

A lion would never drive drunk. But a tiger would.

One of the problems with life in Modern Mayberry is that it often moves at a fairly slow pace. Especially in the time when an adult is focused on raising kids, the days tend to blur one into the next.

If your life is good, this isn’t really a problem. When I was younger, my life was spent going to weddings. Now that I’m older, more time is spent going to funerals. It is important to not get mixed up as to which you’re at, although sometimes “My condolences,” is appropriate at a wedding and I’d almost be willing to bet $20 that at least one person will say “Congratulations!” after my funeral.

However, in the event that I’m wrong, collecting on that bet might be a problem.

Maybe I’ll add bikini girls. Will that put the “fun” in funeral?

One thing that facilitates this blur is reading stuff on the Internet. One blogger I read (LINK) is giving up doomscrolling (or reading the unending list of negative stories that are available in the news) for Lent. I suppose you could leave him a comment, but you’d have to wait a few weeks to get a response.

But when it comes to doomscrolling, there are huge numbers of these stories available. The business model is simple: scary stuff attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs means revenue. As I look at my own past posts, I’m thinking that, even though I talk about a lot of scary stuff, that I’m mostly relentlessly positive. I can even recall a comment section or two where I’m called a Pollyanna because I’m so positive.

What do we want? Hearing aids. When do we want them? Hearing aids.

I can live with that. Being positive, being for things and knowing that, in the end it’s all going to work out keeps me positive. In most cases (most, not all!) the things I write about don’t make me angry, either.

Again, stress on the “mostly”. And I try not to get worked up about events occurring half-a-world away that I can’t control or even much influence. Things are what they are.

And, for most of us, things are generally pretty good on a day-to-day basis, even when things aren’t perfect. Even on a bad day, most parts of the day are good. The thing that gets us is built into the doomscrolling: spending time worrying about things that simply have not happened.

My friend wrote me a text that said, “What do you get when you mix a gullible person with an optimistic person?” I replied, “I don’t know!” He texted back, “Read it again.”

I write about the coming Civil War 2.0 not in hopes that it comes, rather to make people aware that it’s coming. Do I sit and worry about it daily?

No!

That would take away from the time I spend thinking about the Roman Empire.

In this moment, there are things that I could let bother me. However, I realize that letting them bother me gives them power over me when that’s the last thing I want. “Take not counsel of your fears,” is attributed to George S. Patton, Jr. I’m sure other people said the same thing in similar ways in the thousands of years that people have been saying things, but when Patton says it, well, it’s been said.

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.” – GSP

If I let my fears fill me up, I live a life of fear regardless of if it’s a perfect 63°F, and I have a wonderful cigar, and a great book beside me while sitting in a comfortable chair.

I think fear comes to people as they age. I certainly saw Pa Wilder get more and more cautious as he aged. I could give a few examples, but it doesn’t much matter. I did notice. And when I saw the tendency to do it start to crop up in myself, at least I understood what was going on and I could choose to be cautious or choose to be bold.

I think, however, that as I get older it is precisely the time to be bolder. Life moves in a blur, and days stack up faster, so they should mean something. If I knew I had only a year? What would I do?

Something to make that year worthwhile. If a month? A day?

The shorter the time left, the more that boldness matters and the less caution should. If I only had an hour of my life left, you can damn sure bet I’d do something with it, as much as I could.

Oh, that’s Samuel L. Jackson, not the famous English dude Samuel Johnson. I guess that’s the Netflix® version of the quote.

But life is built on compound interest. The more I try to write, the better I get. The more I lift, the stronger I get. The time to start is now.

The actions should be bold. While my days may pass fast, the more I can do with them, the more I will do.

When I pass, what will be left are the lives I’ve touched, the children that I’ve raised, the ways I’ve made the world better, and the words that I have written. Since the restraining order dictates who I can touch, and the lessons to the children are mainly done, that leaves making the world better and writing.

Even a full human lifetime isn’t enough, because they are so very short. But I’ll make do. With the remaining decades (hopefully) of my life, how big a dent can I kick in the Universe?

I guess I’ll see. And I’ll smile some, every day. And enjoy that cigar, and book, and chair when I’m not being bold.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

A.I.: The Most Important News Of 2023?

“This is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

I asked Microsoft’s® Bing™ A.I. to draw itself, and it looks like the A.I. is dying for a microbrew. All drawings this post are from A.I.

It’s between Christmas and Penultimate Day (that’s Saturday, December 30 this year), and I often write about “whatever” during that time frame, so I’ll focus on what a truly goofy year this has been while I watch The Fellowship of the Ring in the background.

If I were to pick the first biggest reason 2023 will be remembered (if it isn’t because of the brewing World War III that seems to be on the verge of breaking out) it will be as the year that A.I. became a reality.

No, I’m not talking about generalized artificial intelligence, but I am talking about A.I. that’s useful enough to start taking jobs away. This won’t be the first time that’s happened. Google Translate® has cratered the market for interpreters/translators. Why? Even if Google Translate© isn’t right, it’s probably close enough for 99% of tasks that people used to use translators for. I mean, I can now ask, “What is this growth in my armpit?” in Swedish.

Translator wages have been flat, and in the United States (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) there is the need for a total of 14,000 in the country at a stagnant average wage of about $50,000 with roughly 10% unemployment in the field.

I guess a Googlebot™ will help you pack your bags if you get fired as a translator. But, hey, free cats.

Without Google™? We’d need more translators. Free translation is killing that profession. Never try to compete with a product, however inferior, that’s free.

Now, I wouldn’t call Google© Translate™ A.I., since it’s just matching patterns, it’s something that could have been done by a whole big library of notecards where it matches the ones that you pick.

But ChatGPT© is very different. It’s possible to have an actual conversation with ChatGPT™, and a much more interesting conversation than one with a feminist. Is it like talking to a human? Mostly not, but I’d argue that it passes the Turing Test better than most Leftist college kids. Is it conscious? Probably not, even though there are emergent properties – it does more than it’s programmed to, and in some cases (speaking of current A.I. as a whole) we don’t have any idea how it does the things that it is doing.

So, I guess A.I. is familiar with Harvard.

One version of ChatGPT© (GPT-4) lied to a TaskRabbit™ worker so that the worker could solve CAPTCHAs for it so it could get the information it needed. The worker, suspicious, asked GPT-4 why it needed help and asked if it was a robot. GPT-4™ told the worker it was a blind person instead.

A.I. is becoming useful. It’s also replacing people. Sports illustrated® was recently caught creating fake writers that were creating content with A.I. On my cellphone, one news service is obviously entirely written by A.I. The dates and facts are wrong, and the stories are often entirely made up, on every story (feednews.com). Based on the types of stories, they’re either clickbait or attempting to influence public opinion (by lying). So, feednews® is just like a politician, but it doesn’t tax me.

Also, apparently Fox News® never covers news about foxes.

But A.I. is moving quickly, and changing. If you were to have spent the time to become an expert at using ChatGPT© a year ago, that time would have been wasted. Why? The model is evolving, and evolving at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

Science fiction author Vernor Vinge came up with a term for the time in history when, as artificial intelligence begins to feed back on itself, the pace of technological change becomes so fast that it becomes constant – imagine hyperinflation, but with technology. A.I. art is moving along very, very quickly, and, just like the market for translators – the market for illustrators will be drying up. A.I. art may not be perfect, but it’s very hard to compete with free.

The concept of the singularity is one that is more probable by the day. 2023 made that clear, and I would expect that in 2024 or 2025 we’ll see commercialization of A.I. tools that replace huge amounts of human brain work. GPT-4 was passing the bar exam in the beginning of 2023, but what if an A.I. legal tool could review all case law (in the appropriate court system) so that it could help create the most powerful arguments?

So, this is what happens when I input the previous paragraph in the art description. I know I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

I have made the argument that, soon enough, we’ll be seeing A.I. as a mandatory part of the medical diagnosis process. Why? Lawsuits. As soon as A.I. can be used to, say, read x-rays or read EKG information or verify medication dosages on a commercial scale, it will be used.

Why? A.I. analysis of EKGs has already shown that the A.I. can see who has heart problems better than doctors. Soon enough, a clever lawyerbot will file a lawsuit noting that the doctor was negligent because he didn’t use A.I. to diagnose a patient who died.

It’s coming.

The prediction was that A.I. would replace fast food workers, when the reality is that it’ll do a much better job replacing mediocre programmers which cost a lot more than the dude at the Wendy’s® drive through.

Profits will be huge for the companies that most quickly harness and use A.I., so they’re all rushing as fast as they can to make it, regardless of the consequences. It’s almost like they’re trying to be first to create that One Ring of Power®, because if they can do that first, well, that absolute power certainly won’t corrupt them.

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part II

“You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.” – Serenity

What do you call a two dead parrots? Pollygons.

This is part two of the series on social structures and control.

Most (stress on “most”) Western Nations adopted a modified version of a new social order between 1776 and 1920. It looked like this:

Absent or Figurehead Monarch: The idea of absolute rule by King melted away, and was essentially done in the first world by 1920. I mean, we dudes all still dream about it, but it’s gone.
Government Bureaucrats: The core of government power now flowed into an unelected bureaucracy that was, more or less, immune to election. When governed by a Constitution, this was good. When governed by avarice, not so much. Thankfully, most of the bureaucrats in the twentieth century were governed by bad eyesight and a to close the window for lunch, if the DMV is any clue.
Elected Leadership: The idea that elected leaders subject to the will of the people would be the ones to run the government was a noble one. Sadly, we started electing at least some dirtbags from the start.
Military Leaders: A professional military, generally subservient to the civilian leaders but still with cool uniforms.
Clergy: A strong church presence, though unofficial, was still the backbone of the country’s morality. Some priests even became lawyers, or what we would call a father-in-law.
Constitution: At least in the United States, the Constitution was the basis of civic religion for the majority of the people. In other countries, there were other things, like Great Britain and the King or Queen or Meghan Markle. It was a basis for the foundation of the nation (or, country).
Big Business: In the twentieth century, big business (including big banking) finally grew to the point that it was able to be a primary force in society, providing products and jobs for the voters, donations for the leadership class, and, apparently, lots of fedoras.
Middle Class: This was the engine of prosperity – working to build the economy. For a large part of the twentieth century government policy was focused on increasing this segment, since they were the spark plugs that both worked the line for GM® as well as ran the plants.
Lower Class: The big goal of most first world nations was to shrink this class, through education and sometimes direct payments. Making them productive, it was felt, would be a win for civilization as a whole.

Although not optimum, this version of civilization was built on a solid structure that focused on the atom: the family. It tried to take feedback from voters, protect their rights, and create wealth and happiness for most. It was an example of what happens when the people and the economy and the government more or less agree on virtue as the basis of society.

If honesty is a virtue, why doesn’t anyone want to hear the truth?

Yes, there were flaws. But compared to today?

The flaws were miniscule. It actually worked very, very well. For a while. But what was happening when the Left was in charge? Well, you got a very, very different structure.

That’s not the power structure of most modern-day dictatorships. That power structure assumes a Dear Leader, secret police, no church, a frightened military, and everyone else shoved into the frightened peasant class. The culture there has nothing to do with any traditions, has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with trust (trust no one is the motto in lands with a secret police) and has nothing to do with Truth, Virtue or Beauty, since those are viciously stamped down if they conflict with the will of Dear Leader.

Dear Leader: The top was an individual. Certainly, there were committees, but the basis was an individual. Lenin. Mao. Kim. The government didn’t revolve around them: they were the government.
Secret Police: Dear Leader can’t be everywhere, all the time, so the next best thing was a hated and feared secret police. Is it better to be hated or feared? If you are Dear Leader, you want both. You want the people to fear the secret police, but you also want the people to hate the secret police so that they could never govern.
Scared, Weak Military: Dear Leader needs a military, but they need to be scared of being replaced or killed.
Scared, Weak Bureaucrats: If the guys with tanks are scared, what hope do they have?
Scared, Weak Everyone Else: If the guys who assign Boris his Commieflat are scared, what hope does Boris have?

What size soda does Kim order? A supreme liter.

The atom of a dictatorship isn’t a family, it’s an individual. The goal of a dictatorship is weak families and no middle class. The goal is to create distrust and to have parents not trust their children, nor spouses trust each other. One of the first actions of the commie Spanish Republic was to make abortion legal, and eliminate marriages because they wanted to “make women equal”.

The reality was the Spanish commies wanted to destroy family ties so that the state was the unquestioned leader. This creates a different kind of stability – one based on constant fear and no trust. I wonder if that sounds familiar to anyone?

We are watching most of the Western World morphing from their old structure into the structures that Dear Leader would love.

Uniparty: Most of the Democrat mainstream and Republican mainstream have the same “values”, with only a variation or two. The Republicans acted like the neighborhood dog that finally caught the car when the Supreme Court revoked the absolute right of women to kill babies “because it’s Tuesday” and had no real plans. Abortion was a fundraiser, not a real issue to them.
Converged Bureaucrats: Bureaucrats in the FedGov are now out only for themselves and the bureaucracy they serve. The ATF doesn’t care if you have guns, really. The ATF just wants to have funding and to be able to shoot the family dog on Tuesdays.
Incipient Police State: Don’t think we have a police state that hands out unfair punishments? Type “January 6” into a search engine sometime . . .
A Vanishing Clergy: Church used to be an important touchstone – in the 1950s some banks wouldn’t give a mortgage if the pastor of your church didn’t speak favorably about your character. Extreme? Probably not – it kept a place in the community for virtue. The goal of the Left is that they have the monopoly on defining virtue. Hey, Live, Laugh, Love, right?
A Captive Press: When was the last time anyone in the Mainstream Media actually tried to challenge The Narrative? Oh, yeah, Tucker Carlson.
Twisted Constitution: The Constitution of the United States was written on plain language so the common citizen could understand it. Now? Emanations and penumbras and twisting of “thou shalt not” into “thou shalt” has made Constitutional law like a game of limbo – how low can you go? That the Civil Rights Act is now more important than actual Constitutional protections is all you need to know.
Subservient Military: Obama spent a lot of time and effort clearing out high-level officers in the military that weren’t on the Left. Notice that none of the top brass pushed back against the vaxx mandate?
Big Business: Big business has always had inordinate power due to their size and the amount of money they control (this includes big banks). During the last 40 years big business has dominated and destroyed most profitable small business niches. This results in a . . .
Much Smaller Middle Class: The middle class is smaller and poorer than at any time in my life. This is getting ready (over the next two years) to get much worse.
Everyone else: This is the goal – that 80% plus of the population are stuck, working paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate wealth, and having their saved money inflated away.

The values of this brave new world aren’t anchored by any sort of church. Values in 2023 move around every day at the whim of the Left. It’s all coordinated, too. Whatever value that they want is pushed through channels to the public, often with movies and television shows backing it up using emotionally laden content to transmit the message. Remember those “very special episodes”? Yup, all of them were propaganda.

But he was such a good boy. Never hurt anyone.

They had left the Internet and alternative media alone. Probably, it was left for a safety valve and because most Normies get their news and opinions from Mainstream sources. In reality, especially in the aftermath of Trump being meme’d into office in 2016, the hammer has started to come down. Information wants to be free, but the Left has taken the Dear Leader approach to information.

Ever notice that comment segments on news stories went from “nearly every news story has one” to “Comment section? What’s that?” in a span of just a few years? The problem was that people in the comment section were making too much sense. The people in the comment section were exposing the lies in the news stories. They had to be dealt with.

Websites like mine have been “detuned” from the search algorithms. This makes it harder for normies to find places that have unapproved ideas. YouTube® has veered into censorship, having kicked podcasts off the air for simply arguing against the vaxx or agreeing with the very real possibility that the 2020 elections were hijacked.

My computer started to cuss after the processor got too hot. I had to install a heat censor.

But not all is lost. Elon Musk has made “Community Notes” a thing. They’re a way to point out the Lies of the Left and those that hate Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families, and Nations.

This is how they’re targeting us, and how they have targeted us over decades. The wonderful part is that we have Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families and the power of Nations on our side. And people are waking up – 30% to 40% of all voters (not just those on the Right) believe the 2020 election was illegitimate. This is despite widespread censorship of this idea.

Keep spreading the Truth. Practice virtue and push your church (if you have one) to be more virtuous, rather than another Leftist conquest. Starve Big Business, when you can. Buying from local farmers gives them more money and keeps the money away from people who hate you.

If your misery is caused by paranoia, I can tell you you’re not alone.

We can’t wait until plate tectonics splits California off into an island, and the good news is that we won’t have to. As I’ve said before, we will win.

We are inevitable.

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part I

“Looks like civilization finally caught up with us.” – Firefly

The invention of the shovel was groundbreaking, but everyone was blown away by the invention of the fan.

This is part one of a two-part series, it just got too big. Part two is written and I’ll post on Wednesday.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how and why the wheels are coming off of our civilization. Why? I don’t know – I’ve been worried about it since I was a wee Wilder and became concerned that plate tectonics wouldn’t split California off soon enough.

We see evidence of the collapse all the time but sometimes have a hard time putting our fingers on exactly what is driving it all from a structural standpoint. That’s why I’m here to help. Don’t worry. I’m a trained professional.

The social structure of stable societies isn’t an accident. When people were wandering around in nomadic tribes, I’m not sure exactly how things went down, but I do know that once civilization started taking root (so we could have beer, really, link below), the basic unit of civilization was set as the family in any sort of civilization that produces wealth, has reasonable freedoms, exhibits virtue (Truth, Beauty, Steak) and has any sort of stability.

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

Think of a mom, dad, and kids. In a stable society, that’s essentially the atom. Often in the West we’re inundated with the idea of individual rights, and those do exist, but the biggest failing of those rights (in my opinion, and I’m right) is where those rights contradict the stability of the family. Atoms are at their most stable when all of the parts are in place – an atom missing electrons is an ion, and I could explain using hydroxide ions, but that’s pretty basic. And let’s not even get started on isotopes.

Why was 6 afraid? Because she could be discovered by the crew of the Battlestar Galactica at any time. And you thought I was going to say, “because seven ate nine.”

Divorce, for instance, is bad for family stability. Duh. Making divorce easy is thus attacking the core of the structure of civilization. Those on the Left who hate society are always attacking the family, and what better way to shatter it than divorce. Oh, wait, there’s birth control and abortion.

While a man and a woman, married (to each other) constitutes a family, that family is truly completed by children. We’re humans, but we’re also animals – there is an innate drive to reproduce and have offspring and then yell inappropriately at little league games. There has to be something strong about the need to reproduce, because babies are so objectionable and worthless. Really. I mean, I’ve never even seen a toddler I couldn’t trounce in wrestling.

So, the atom of society isn’t the individual – it’s the family. Families, not video games or pantyhose, are why civilization exists – it exists because of us, and it also exists for us. If a civilization doesn’t have children, it ceases to exist.

Once I found out that my pizza was burnt, my beer was frozen, and my wife was pregnant. I guess I’m just not good at taking things out in time.

This has some pretty significant implications, since so much of policy (especially Leftist, but the Right is not clean in this, either) is now actively hostile to the family. Examples:

Housing Prices: Leftists import hordes of illegals to increase prices and demand, and also make so many rules that building a house is more expensive.
Taxes: Leftists want to punish high earners (but not wealthy folks, there’s a difference) to keep the wife in the workforce to keep her from having kids.
Divorce Law: Divorce should be as easy as possible, there should be no requirement for fault (which would make cheaters guilty), there should be no consequences to the woman (who initiate the vast majority of divorce) except for fun and prizes.
Custody Law: Children should be part of the fun and prizes for divorce, and used to incentivize divorce for women through child support.
Alimony: Let’s make the man pay, even if the woman initiated divorce.
Propaganda that Women Must Work: This is deep, and is put into the heads of women that they are somehow “less than” if they aren’t working making PowerPoints®.
Propaganda that Women Must Have It All®: This one is the YOLO tag, making women feel unsuccessful if they don’t party away their youth and fertility with many, many men.

There’s more, of course, and I could probably write another 10,000 words about how society is actively hostile to the family and the very concept of parental authority. But you see it every day. You’re swimming in it – starting all the way back to inept fathers being the butt of jokes in sitcoms, and the “single mom don’t need no man” trope that started back in the 1970s.

In the 1980s lots of kids had single moms. Now some even have two.

So, that’s one part of the attack. But society isn’t made up of just random families wandering around – instead, there’s a structure to civilization, just like there’s a structure to, say, a beer bottle or the underwire in a bra. One such structure is kinship. Japanese people are all, on a basic level, related to each other and share the same culture.

This basic “being related to each other” is what distinguishes a nation (nation having the Latin root of natio, meaning “birth, origin, race of people, tribe) from a country. A country is just some random folks living in the same place, like New York City. A nation is a group of people who are all much more closely related, like Modern Mayberry, where if you moved here 15 years ago, you’re still one of those newcomers.

Since The Mrs. has kin here going back into the 1880s, she’s covered, but they’re always going to think I’m a bit sketchy.

Why was the mushroom the life of the party? Because he was giving away cocaine.

But kinship should not be underrated. When you look at the happiest country surveys, at the top are nations that have a disproportionate amount of people that are closely related, genetically. You trust your family more, and you’re less likely to cheat them, except at Thanksgiving while playing Monopoly®. Because of that, countries that are all of one nationality can be higher trust with lower corruption, if they aren’t tribal (looking at you, India and Pakistan and all of Africa).

Want to break up a country? After you’re done with the family, aim for disruption of the nation by introducing unlike people that have virtually nothing in common with the native stock in huge numbers. There’s a reason that nations of generally related people exist: it’s more stable.

If you wake up being chased by a lion while on a horse, and next to you is a giraffe and a hippo, what do you do? Get off the carousel and check into rehab.

Beyond the general nature of the family, there is an importance to the structure of society itself. One of the more stable structures of society in history was the feudal model. It consisted of several different classes of people:

Monarchy: Generally, the overall boss (when strong), who kept the whole thing in check. Needed: strong neck muscles to hold a big crown.
Lesser Nobles: Lieutenants, who administered smaller areas of varying size to keep those running. Needed: ability to bow.
Clergy: Served as an overall legitimacy, and also a diplomatic corps between nations. Needed:
Merchants: Made sure people had fish. Needed:
Professionals: I’m tossing artisan and guild member in here who had mad skills making stuff that society needed. And bankers. Needed: fluffy shirts.
Peasants: Someone has to milk the bull. Needed:

Each of these units played a part, and the power varied from place to place, and time to time. One of the most amusing things is when there were too many nobles, so kings would have to come up with wars to kill them off, because no one likes tons of bored yappy nobles around. Just ask Meghan Markle when King Charles ships her off to fight Argentina. Singlehandedly.

Sometimes the nobles were stronger than the king, thus the Magna Carta. Sometimes the clergy was stronger than the king, thus Cromwell. Sometimes the king was stronger than the clergy, thus the Avignon papacy. Even peasants got into the mix, with Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in England making King Richard II put on his brown pants.

Why do dairy cattle have hooves? Because they lactose.

Each part of the society could (and did) cause difficulty if the power that they shared got too far out of control. The Merchants and Professional classes were mainly in a support role, but they provided administrative and logistical support for everyone, and the bankers especially definitely led to many, many shenanigans.

Thus endeth ye olde parte the first.

Wilder’s Cures for Male Loneliness

“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.” – Jaws

If you’re lonely you could buy some stocks. Then you’d have some company.

In July, the New York Times® ran a story titled, Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court? It wasn’t particularly political, and I think I can summarize it in just a few words: “If you’re a dude, have a few friends. The best friends are those that share some sort of common interest with you. Friends make you happy.” Writer Michelle Cottle strung those three sentences out into several hundred words of mainly forgettable fluff that would be obvious to anyone with an I.Q. higher than a Phoenix, Arizona winter temperature. In centigrade.

The real joy of this particular story, however, was the unleashing of memes. The picture that accompanied the article, however was, shall we say, regrettable. It’s above, showing a man (I think, it’s 2023, so who can even define a man in 2023) with massive, fat tears containing enough water to keep California going through a megadrought. I think he might be crying because he hates pickleball, or maybe because he can’t afford a shirt with sleeves.

I have so many orb memes.

Regardless, the /Internet/ reacted predictably to the picture, and created a list of memes that would make all those sages pondering orbs proud. I saved a few of them, just for you in the hopes that you, dear reader, might find your key to cure your loneliness. If you’re like me, you don’t have feelings other than cold, salty, and drunk, so I haven’t figured out what the whole “lonely” thing is.

Anyway, here are the memes, as found, with some annotation.

I think that drinking with Quint and killing sharks is definitely going to solve any issues with loneliness.

Curling? Not so much.

Now being in a Roman Legion? That’s the stuff! Hiking every day! Just avoid Germany.

It’s weird that the Turks mispronounce “Constantinople” as “Istanbul”.

I, for one am always happy when I’m at Chili’s. It is the booze.

I’ve never tried it, but, what could it hurt?

Now this looks inviting. I think termites like saloons, because they like the bar tender.

I wonder if he’ll be a crying-on-the-inside NPC?

Can confirm, this is fun until the cops show up.

Is the Wendigo related to the Whodigo, or the Wheredigo, or the Whatdigo?

Who can be lonely interacting with 400’ tall anime girls?

Travolta and Cage walk into a bar. Bartender says, “Why the wrong face?”

Lovecraft walked into a bar, and the rest is too humorous to even describe.

Ever notice that you never see Walken and Buscemi in the same place? Discuss.

Hell yeah, brother!

Well, even Hunter gets lonely.

I guess it didn’t work for Kaepernick.

But it might have worked out for Kaepernick’s dad.

Sometimes, it’s the simple things.

Or many simple things.

What’s a little psychosis between friends?

If I tried that, I’d be grounded.

Well, back to giant women . . .

And who doesn’t need another synthesizer?

Is there more to life?

Yes, yes there is.

Thankfully, my job will let me work as many hours as I want to.

There might be one other option?

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?

Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:

Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
Declining heritage American birthrates,
Declining two-parent families,
Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
Increasing de facto censorship,
Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1^st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.