December 2018 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust

“Gentlemen, question mark? Put it on the penultimate, not on the diphthongic. You want to brush up on your Greek, Jamison. Well, at least get a Greek and brush up on him.” – Animal Crackers

I got a new camera. Not at Best Buy®. I mean, I took the picture at Best Buy©, but I got the camera elsewhere.

We had another wonderful Penultimate Day this year. The origins of Penultimate Day are shrouded in mystery, lost to the ages in the murky past before recorded history, way back in 2012. On December 30, 2012, sensing that the world wasn’t really going to end as the Mayan calendar expired, The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and drove two hours to buy cell phones. Stupid Mayans, if only they could have managed the whole end-of-the-world I wouldn’t have had to go shopping.

But I did have to go shopping. Our cell phone carrier doesn’t have a store within 100 miles, so we decided to make a day of it. The first time we’d bought phones, we’d bought them at a Best Buy®, so we went back to Best Buy© to look at new ones. We didn’t find something cheap what we wanted. We decided to keep our “has an actual keyboard” Blackberries for another year or two.

After not buying a cell phone, we ate dinner at Olive Garden™. We had joked on the way back that December 31 was the “ultimate” or last day of the year. We used the word “penultimate” to describe December 30, since penultimate means “next to last” and has even more syllables and sounds really nerdy. Thus, December 30 became Penultimate Day.

We’ve celebrated Penultimate Day in proper fashion five or six times now. I think one year a snow storm might have made the trip our pilgrimage impractical, but we did go again this year.

So, to recap, Penultimate Day requires:

Get in the car
Travel two hours
Go to Best Buy©
Whatever you do: Do not buy a cell phone
Eat at Olive Garden™

I would like to have Penultimate Day replace New Year’s Day – I’ve never seen the attraction in a holiday that celebrates the obsolescence of millions of calendars and the shared hangover of people who spent the night getting sweaty, drinking Jägermeister©, and saying “woo” in crowds still and have no idea how they ended up in that alley with Johnny Depp, a juicy oven-warm ham, gravy, and that gun.

Some Penultimate Day observations over the years:

Best Buy™ is largely irrelevant and more so every year. Best Buy® sells physical copies of movies, which is like putting a little bit of the Internet on a DVD® and selling it, making it more inconvenient to find when you want to watch it at 11PM. They sell music, which is quaint. Why buy music when I live in a universe where Pugsley’s phone did a Bluetooth© connect to The Mrs. car and we listened to whatever song we could think of on the way home, all thanks to YouTube®?

We introduced Pugsley to Dread Zeppelin on the way back home. What’s not to love about Led Zeppelin® music sung by an Elvis™ impersonator to a reggae beat?

We left Best Buy© without purchasing anything and passed the fourth test of Penultimate Day. No cell phone purchased. Thankfully, the Gods of Corporate Provenance placed the Olive Garden™ pretty close to the Best Buy®. I guess lots of people who don’t buy cell phones like Italian. We got a table immediately and from the beginning I noticed that the service was excellent, which must mean the economy isn’t doing so well.

Wilder’s 80^th Rule of Economics states that the primary effect of a great economy is horrible waiters at corporate chain restaurants. Great waiters get hired to sell stocks or become corporate lawyers or become the district manager for a PEZ™ distribution company. When the economy starts to stall? Great waiters show back up and the bad ones are sent to the Cool Whip® refineries. I’d rather have great waiters than more corporate lawyers, and remember, someone has to pump the raw Whip from deep underground and refine it into precious Cool Whip™.

The food at Olive Garden™ has gotten better every year. Sure, it’s corporate chow whose primary virtue and charm is consistency, but at the rate of once or twice per year it’s pretty tasty. But just before I left the restaurant, I noticed a black and white photo of a little Italian market along a crooked little road between buildings in the restroom. I would have taken a picture of the photo to show you, Internet, but my probation decorum prohibits me from pulling out a camera in a public bathroom. Like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Never trust a man with a camera at a urinal. Nothing good can come of that.”

The picture I saw was kinda like this one.

What really got to me about that picture (the one I saw, not the one sort of like it above) was that there was no one in it, but that lots of food from the market was out in front, for anyone to take. And there was no one around to watch the food. It got me to thinking, what kind of society builds that kind of trust, to leave food outside where anyone could steal it with only a tiny chance that they’d be caught?

Coming from where we live in Modern Mayberry, there is great degree of societal trust. It seems like once a month Pugsley or The Boy leaves the garage door open all night long – I can tell because there’s no way that all of the junk in there is mine – our neighbors must come and put extra tools and tarps and motorcycles on the floor. The Mrs., after several years, has managed to convince me that unlocked cars aren’t much of an issue, either. I do lock the front door to our house – I especially don’t trust thieves at night – they know that you’re home and are prepared to be violent. Thankfully, in our town guns outnumber people by a 2:1 margin, so the occasional murder is about passion or drugs and not random violence.

I mentioned the picture to the family as we drove home. We talked about trust in society. The Mrs. had a great observation: “Not long after we moved to Modern Mayberry, everybody knew who we were and what our business was. In a town that size, there’s no way that you can be a bad person and people not know about it.”

She’s right. There is crime. You generally know who was responsible. They’re generally caught, and generally sentenced to fair sentences, though I will say the latitude for self-defense when you’re being robbed at gunpoint is amazingly high – you don’t want to rob an armed house if people are home unless you don’t want to see how Game of Thrones® ends because, you know, early exit from breathing.

In Modern Mayberry there’s an amazing amount of agreement on ethics, religion, and the law. That provides the backbone for Societal Trust. Societal Trust is important – it provides:

Trust in neighbors to not steal
Trust in business partners to meet their end of the deal
Trust in government to be fair
Trust in media to be unbiased
Trust in elections to be honest

No, Modern Mayberry isn’t a paradise where all of these things are true. But our government isn’t big enough for big corruption. Neighbors don’t steal, but the kid three blocks away does, and we know who he is. And the ladies who count the ballots take it seriously and are sincere when they thank you after having handed you your “I voted” sticker. In high trust societies, things are easier, life is better. People will stop and help you if you have trouble.

The size of Modern Mayberry is small, the residents have been around forever. People are a known quantity. Trust isn’t at the level of “When you’re here, you’re family™” – no, that level of trust is saved for Olive Garden®. But people in Modern Mayberry do and will pitch in to help their neighbors.

Behold the saturated beauty of the Olive Garden© logo. Worship it!

I had always thought that there was anonymity in cities. But when I spent some time in a Chicago for work I saw that it wasn’t that way at all. The neighborhoods were tightly grouped, at least on the South Side. The Polish? They maintained the Polish neighborhood. Supermarket signs were in Polish. The Italians? They had a neighborhood that was next to the Polish neighborhood. Nobody crossed the street between the neighborhoods. There was a wall, but it was invisible, and each side patrolled their own side. If you were Polish or Italian, you knew better than to cross the line. They managed to find harmony though minimizing cultural friction along ethnic lines, the same way most modern suburbs divvy up the land based upon economic lines. But that’s not enough. Some leakage across boundaries is inevitable, and some areas fracture within ethnic lines. That’s why Chicago has such a high murder rate.

Trust consists of finding points of agreement. In my first Penultimate post (last year) I talked about what I felt was the biggest story of the year for 2017. In this post? The biggest story for 2018.

We are unraveling. Our trust is fine here in Modern Mayberry. It’s probably good in most of the suburbs. Heck, most of the localities and neighborhoods across the country are fine. 2018, however, has shown the greatest division in at least the last 150 years building nationally. Here’s a previous post on this: Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

But what will bring back our trust nationally when we don’t even agree that we should all throw off our shackles, drive to Best Buy© on December 30^th and exercise our right to not buy a cell phone and then eat corporately-designed Italian food? Unify the United States: replace New Year’s Day with Penultimate Day, a far superior holiday!

Health, Sexy Hot Water Heaters, and Elven Cultural Appropriation

“Gentlemen, as you all know, a reservoir is composed of water. Except the part that holds the water. Which is made of concrete.” – Green Acres

You should be ashamed! (Found on Pinterest)

“You understand that it’s healthier to take cold showers. The data is clear.”

The Mrs.: “I don’t care.”

“Cold showers stimulate weight loss, increase alertness, and improve your immune system.”

The Mrs.: “I don’t care. And I don’t like it that you’re implying that I’m a fat, diseased, dullard.”

“But, cold showers lower stress and ease depression?”

The Mrs.: “No. You can’t talk yourself out of buying a water heater. We’re getting one today.”

The old hot water heater had stopped being automatically functional. We discovered that Christmas morning. And by “we” I mean The Mrs.

“Got bad news. I think the water heater is out. Shower was cool, like maybe the heater turned off 12 hours ago.” My shower was cold, too. Not “glacier on Everest” cold, more like, “implying that my wife is a fat, diseased, dullard” cold.

The heater would still light, but it would go out after about 20 or 30 minutes. And as much as I don’t respect Pugsley’s time, it seemed a bit much to ask Pugsley to go and relight the burner every 20 minutes for the next six years. Unless I chained Pugsley in the mechanical room, you know, for his own convenience.

But the heater going out was probably a faulty thermocouple. A thermocouple is a magical device made of elves that pokes the fire dragon inside of the water heater to let him know that the pilot light is still going so the dragon doesn’t spew unignited natural gas fire breath inside the house and make it go all Mount Doom. That appears to bother Allstate®, since my policy specifically excludes damage due to any Hobbit-related conditions. Strict, but I understand the business reasons for it.

Wait, this is a picture of Pugsley’s room . . .

I could tell my dragon-poking-fire-elf (thermocouple) had failed because he was singed, and his hands shook noticeably as he drank my scotch. He was used up. A thermocouple replacement is about $18. I think they’re that cheap because they’re made out of Chinese elves nowadays. The water heater is 14 years old, and, like a child, they have to be replaced at around that age. Since the previous owner installed it without a pan underneath it, when it failed we’d first notice when it started soaking everything in the house like a poodle with a bladder condition. Oh, sure I could put a pan under this one, but by that point I’d have to unhook it and do 90% of the work of replacing it. And then I’d have to buy a new one next year.

If we don’t allow illegal alien elves, who will power our iPhones?

So I replaced it. There was yelling, there was cursing, and then we finally got to the store to buy one.

I wasn’t expecting a cold shower on Christmas, I wasn’t expecting to buy a new water heater. But a lesson in health and life is: If you can’t control the situation, embrace it. So, I gave the water heater a big embrace as The Boy lifted it over the edge of the drip pan.

Life is a series of unplanned events. I once read a quote by Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” And life is very much like that – nobody expects a broken water heater on Christmas. Since I saw the Heating and Air Conditioning Repair van outside a neighbor’s house yesterday, I’m betting they didn’t expect to wake up at 40°F in their house this morning. Guess they have elf problems, too. It’s a stereotype that elves don’t want to work after Christmas, but, really, let’s face the fact – the stereotype exists for a reason.

The new water heater is installed. And heating water. Don’t call it a “hot water heater”, because if the water was hot, why would I need to heat it? I’ll admit I did call one model a hot water heater while shopping. But in that case, it was a really sexy water heater. Just check out the nameplate:

I’m too sexy for my heater, too sexy for my heater, too sexy per square meter!

Sadly my family is now unhealthier, stuck as it is without the benefits of cold showers – the increased alertness, lower stress and depression. We are stuck with perfectly warm water for bathing, showering, and cooling down singed elves.

What does your ideal day look like? Probably Rosie O’Donnell-Free?

“I’ll give you a winter prediction: it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

Never let a groundhog drink and drive. Or, drive. They always look at intersections too long, looking left, looking right, checking for shadows.

“What does your ideal day look like?” – Ryan Holiday (LINK)

I wrote that down in my notes the first time I read it – it seemed important, a question too few people ask. Thinking about it, it seems even more important because I think that we often sleepwalk through life following the plot of one of two tragedies:

We live the life we live – because one day we’ll change it.
We live the life we live because we think we’re forced to.

Let’s look at the first one:

“We live the life we live – because one day we’ll change it.”

I think this is the mode that most people get into. They get up, and go to work. They live a life of unending Tuesdays – it’s not horrible, but it’s unchanging. Existence consists of a grey world that gets them from the chiming of the alarm in the morning that wakes them up to the flick of the light switch that’s the last sound they hear before closing their eyes. It’s like Groundhog Day, but without Bill Murray’s zany antics.

And again. And again. And again . . .

It’s not a bad life, but by my observation this life is filled with lots of “One Day I’ll” thought. One Day I’ll go to Europe. One Day I’ll climb that mountain. One Day I’ll (fill in your blank here). Heck, you could put anything in that blank because it’s something you’re never going to do – most of those One Days never come. This life is built upon dreaming about the things you’ll do. One Day.

The second life is more tragic: “We live the life we live because we think we’re forced to.” In this case, each day is a prison. We spend that day not because we’re doing something we want to do, we’re doing it because we have to do it. Our lives are at the whim of outside forces in the universe. And they keep us confined, in small corridors. If the first life is grey and unchanging, this one is a very dark grey and seems to get darker and longer each day. It’s the life-equivalent of being married to Rosie O’Donnell, and never being able to be away on a business trip.

This is a life that isn’t built around One Day. This is a life that is lived in regret, sacrificed to the past and I Should Have. It’s about the choices you think you Should Have made and how you are a slave to those results, today. You cease to be in control of today because you allow the Should Have of the past to determine who you are today and who you will be tomorrow.

I can understand the attraction of Should Have. It’s scary to look down the barrel of life and to think that you’re living a life that you chose. It’s much more of a comfort to believe that your actions today won’t change anything – that you’re the victim of those that would control you, or of your own past choices. Being under the control of your past choices is the best one because it’s guilt that makes its own gravy!

Should Have assures you that each day of your life is lived in prison. I worked with one particular gentleman who didn’t like his job, not at all. He didn’t like his wife – I think he was afraid of her. Pretty sure he didn’t even like where he lived. And you could see it wear on him, every day. Why did he do it? Honestly, I’m not sure – I think he might have liked his Prison more than the scary idea of being responsible for himself.

There is, thankfully, a third choice, and it comes back to Ryan’s question from the beginning of this post: “What does your ideal day look like?” That’s crazy, because the question itself implies a choice. You could live your ideal day. Not every day, perhaps, but many of them.

If you live the Eternal Tuesday, your ideal day is One Day. If you live in Prison, your ideal day is release from Should Have, which, unfortunately, is also your life. Neither of those sound too good, but both sound better than the whole Rosie O’Donnell marriage thing. I imagine she smells like 7-11® nacho cheese left over from the Clinton era.

Comment redacted.

However, if you live a life of Now, you realize something pretty cool – in almost every moment of your life, the past three seconds were okay, and the next three seconds are okay. While you don’t have the ability to change your past, you have the ability to choose how you feel about today. This paragraph is from the conclusion to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Shukov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: They hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled a bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned a favor from Tsezar, he’d bought that tobacco.

And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the cell to the last clang of the cell. Three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.

The three extra days were for leap years.

Apparently the Soviets didn’t teach drawing in kindergarten – no time for such trifles: Soviet Youth must be strong to plant potato on Collective Farm #8675309. (Ask for Jennyski.)

I recommend the book. Short read, with a decent ending that I just (mildly) spoiled above. I’m not going to apologize for a spoiler on a book that was published 56 years ago, because if I do, you’ll just be upset when I tell you that Soylent Green is people or that Bruce Willis is really one of the dead people, or that the people from Atlantis killed Kennedy.

In your next three seconds, you will be okay. I’m not telling you that you don’t have to be concerned about the future, and I’m not telling you that your choices in the past don’t determine your present. Both of those things are absolutely true. But living in the future is a lie, and being chained to the past is a torture. You have now. So, if you want to fight to make the world better, yes, please do so! I try to do that daily. This blog is part of it. And though my present actions are limited by my past choices, I still have it in my power to do amazing things with every year that I have left to me.

I’ve spent time in the Eternal Tuesday, that’s why I can describe it so well. In the Eternal Tuesday one day blends into the next. I kept putting off things that I wanted to do, because I’d do them One Day. I sifted through my memories trying to give an example, but I simply can’t think of anything interesting to tell you about an Eternal Tuesday – it’s always Tuesday. Always grey, always featureless, and not a lot happens until you wake up and realize a year of your life has passed without you noticing. It’s like being in Congress, I think, but with less self-loathing.

I’ve lived in my own Prison of the Past, too. Mainly for a fairly short time, but it’s a dark place to be. In my case, the prison was brought about by internal office politics – even if you try to stay out of them – I assure you that they will take an interest in you. I’m not even saying I’m blameless – if I didn’t cause the situation, I certainly didn’t manage to stay out of them. But I escaped each of them either by taking action to change them, or, like Shukov in the quote above, I’d managed to understand that I could be happy with my life as it was right now, not to be upset that it wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but still work with every fiber of my being to make my life better.

But you have the power in your hands to make today your ideal day, and you’re not married to Rosie O’Donnell.

So, why not give that a shot? (The ideal day thing, not the marriage to Rosie.)

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes. But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen. People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn. We can become better. The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one. It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun. No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story. And I was there for this one. As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning. In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts. We were insufferable. My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun. It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic. I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun. And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

It looked very real. Mine was the one on the bottom. It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times. Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun. This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me. Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car. I still have the BB gun and the boots. I lost the knife, probably at school. It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun. My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it. I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot. I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t. I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record. (For kids: Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm? I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside. It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this. Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes?? Oh, yeah. Soviets. Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill. I kept going. What was I looking for? I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly. I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step. But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do? Hunt. Win World War II again. Look for communists. It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans. Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best. I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road. I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner. All of those applied. But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike. About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear. It was a black bear. I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all. Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone. I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well. Communists? Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears? Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy. He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time. My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me. I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear. Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would. Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times. Why? A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside: In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets. Or, does it? When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs. I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free. But back in the day? We weren’t building weak Soviet children. No! We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual. I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom. Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door. I stamped my snow-covered feet inside. Yeah, I know. But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!” I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear! It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts. A bear! A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head. “Bears are hibernating. None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face. “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started. I know that look because I saw it then. Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed. Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road. I had my BB gun. I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked. I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story. I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).” As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship. Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies. We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away. It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it. I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless. It must be dead! Pop Wilder killed it! Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet. We walked home in silence.

So, there was that: the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic. Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below? Merry Christmas to all.

The Winter Solstice, Hardship, Cthulhu, and You

“You know, that for almost the entire history of Western Civilization this month has been a holy time. The Druids, winter solstice, Hanukkah, the Romans converted Saturnalia into Christmas.” – Millennium (TV Series)

Funny, X Wife said that every day with me was the longest day. Tiebreaker?

December 21^st is the Winter Solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere (where I keep all my stuff) that means it will be the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. In the Southern Hemisphere on the Solstice, I believe that means there are fairly reasonable prices on quality, sturdy footwear. Or maybe the Wiccans sacrifice the town elders to credit card companies. I’m not sure, the documentary was blurry, I don’t speak Paraguayan and they wouldn’t remove the blindfold all the way.

There seems to be another holiday coming up . . . St. Zeno’s Day on December 26^th!

Just kidding. I’ll have a Christmas post on Monday. But St. Zeno’s Day really is on December 26^th. And not the St. Zeno that was brutally dismembered because he was so popular, the other one, who died peacefully in his sleep. Focus groups tell me not to use “brutally dismembered” because it doesn’t test well for humor value. So, the one who wasn’t “brutally dismembered.”

Christmas? I’m a fan.

But the 21^st is also notable because it’s the (traditional) feast time of the northern peoples of the world, and you can see multiple cultures built physical devices to track the solstice, places like Newgrange in Ireland, Stonehenge in England and the High Bank Works at Chillicothe in North America.

And, my house.

Yes. My house. I didn’t build my house aligned to the solstice, but whoever originally did managed to do so, either intentionally or by dumb luck. Since my house is parallel to the road, I’m thinking it was just dumb luck. But on the shortest day of the year, we end up having the most direct sunlight streaming in through our front window, warming the house, and in the summer the opposite result – although well lit, we get little direct sunlight. The advantages of this are lower heating and cooling bills, all of which (likely) are a result of an accident of geometry. Or at least that’s what I tell the Druids that start chanting at sunrise every year in my backyard. Stupid Druids. Please don’t tell them that Cthulhu is who we bought the place from.

But the solstice doesn’t represent the coldest part of the winter. The coldest part is yet to come as the Arctic air blasts down from the north in January and February. And before it gets cold, the choice had to be made: feed all of your cattle through the winter, or have a really big drunken party and a bonfire after turning a few of the cattle into ribeyes?

Yup. Party. And the older name for it is “jul” which eventually became the words “Yule” and “jolly.” Must have been some pretty legendary parties, like when Teddy Roosevelt partied with Led Zeppelin at Wellesley. Hillary still talks about that one.

Mmm, eggnog. Can there be something worse for you? Yes, regret. Enjoy your eggnog.

But the grim circumstances remain. It’s going to get colder soon. That last feast is the final preparation for the coming hardships of winter. People who aren’t used to the north (and New York is roughly the same latitude as the south of France, so most of the United States isn’t north at all) think it’s the dark that gets to you. It isn’t. It’s the brutally cold days that follow the solstice. When we lived in Fairbanks we noticed that people did fine during the dark periods of winter. But when spring was around the corner, that’s when the odd stories of people going a bit nutso would show up in the paper, and the wives who had spent 20 happy years in Fairbanks would look at their husbands and declare, “I’m leaving. I’m not leaving you, but I’m leaving here. You can come with me if you want to.”

Winter is about deprivation and hardship, which might just be the greatest teacher:

“They are not spoiled by luxury, soft and weak (relatively speaking, obviously). They are learned in deprivation and hardship.” – James Dakin at Bison Prepper, 11/9/18 (LINK).

But those hardships were their friend.

They had to plan. And they had to plan months and years ahead. There is simply no getting through a winter at -30°F (-651°C) without a plan. They didn’t have the option of going to a supermarket and getting fresh strawberries in the middle of winter. Or, well, anything in the middle of winter, except maybe some poor caribou that forgot to duck.
They had to learn to be nice. There was no getting through winter alone. There was safety in the group. So, in order to stay alive through the winter, they’d better be able to create and maintain good relationships with not only their neighbors, but also the people in their family – they were certainly going to be seeing a lot of them during the winter. Also? They never knew who they would need to ask for a favor. As in “Olaf, Sven got lippy at dinner. Where can we hide the body?”
They had to be patient. Eat all the food in month one? Month two would be difficult. Eat the seeds you were planning on planting in spring? I guess you just get to starve next winter. Patience pays – not now, but later.

Outside of having all of that ribeye, and the big fire, why party?

Well, the solstice marks the day that the Sun stops moving south. There’s even an instant (if you had the proper equipment) that you could observe the Sun standing still in the sky, not moving north nor south, that’s technically the solstice. But you can see, using relatively simple tools (like Stonehenge), the same thing over the course of a day. The Sun will move north again, and the days will get longer. And it is that moment that the celebration of hope begins, not for the winter that has been vanquished, but for the winter that will bring us hardship and make us stronger.

Because what better gift is there than being stronger?

Thankfully, there’ll soon be an app for your iPhone® to tell you when to celebrate the solstice. Stupid Druids.

Your Money or Your Wife . . . Take the First Wife, Please . . .

“Of course there’s a catch! You have to spend the thirty million, but after thirty days you’re not allowed to own any assets. No houses, no cars, no jewelry. Nothing but the clothes on your back! Now, you can hire anybody you want, but you have to get value for their services. You can donate five percent to charity and you can gamble another five percent away, but you can’t give this money away, and that includes buying the Hope Diamond for some bimbo as a birthday present.” – Brewster’s Millions (1985)

Thankfully, they won’t let me down.

I’ve spent quite a few posts talking about money. Money is important, because they won’t give me beer and PEZ® without money, so that’s why I write about money and the jobs that will get you money. Money is also the underpinning of the financial system that runs the world that brings me that beer and PEZ™, so I get to write about that, too, and it’s fun since I’m an economics nerd.

But wealth is more than a 401K and a stock portfolio and stacks of gold coins hidden in a fake plastic pipe in a building somewhere downtown, though those are a good start. (And with a blowtorch and some pliers I managed to get the old man to tell me where that fake pipe was.) Wealth, true wealth, mainly involves you. And a blowtorch. But don’t forget the pliers because you never know where their weakness will be.

If you’re satisfied with what you have, you’re wealthy. It’s that simple. And it doesn’t need to be as much net worth as a typical Congressman has ($900,000 in the House, $3.2 million in the Senate) to be wealthy. Your wealth is determined by what you need. If I could tattoo that phrase on every kid in America on their forehead (backwards, so they can read it every time they look in the mirror), then my kids would not look so out of place with their forehead tattoos with that same phrase. I’m sure that interviewers for future jobs will be impressed by their dedication to personal financial management. Or, you know, the blowtorch and pliers will convince them that these kids are a great fit for the position.

But the biggest determinate for wealth for many people is simple. I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten to this topic in all that time, since it’s so very basic.

Your choice of spouse is the most important factor in being wealthy*.

*This doesn’t apply to Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Nor, really, does it apply the really, really wealthy people in the world. If you have so much money that your spouse can’t spend it all, you’re fine and you can skip the rest of this post, though there will be questions on the final about it.

Less than $15,000,000 or so net worth? Keep reading.

Why is a spouse so important? A spouse often determines the minimum lifestyle the family will accept.

Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t a factor with your spouse. Overheard story: “I’m so jealous of Sheila, she’s rich enough she doesn’t have to drive a brand new car.”
The spouse may make the majority of the spending decisions in the house. In my case, I bought our present house without The Mrs. ever having been to it. The Mrs. only saw a few dodgy photos from my cell phone, which was a really cool Blackberry® with a keyboard.
Open and honest communication about money is crucial. And I assure you that money conversations can be brutal when you don’t have a bunch of cash in the bank. The conversations can be brutal even when you have money. Conversations about money are conversations about values, about choices, and can be the most emotional conversations outside of who gets to pick the next movie on Netflix®, since we all agree that Netflix™ is serious.

Way back in the 80’s, there was a movie called “Brewster’s Millions.” A guy (Richard Pryor) had to spend $30,000,000 in thirty days and have nothing to show for it so he could get $300,000,000, which was exactly like my first marriage, except that it didn’t involve John Candy and we didn’t get $300,000,000 if we got ourselves into debt servitude forever.

My first marriage, in a movie involving John Candy.

I’ve been married once, even though the law says twice. I’d say that the first marriage was an assignment in creating as much debt as possible in the shortest amount of time while leaving nothing to show for it, but that minimizes the hate and discontent. Let’s put it this way – it was like a Mad Max® movie, but with less civility and shotguns, and more lawyers and spreadsheets.

As the marriage unwound, we both agreed it would be best if X moved while we had a nice meal at Taco Bell®.

X: “I think it would be good if I moved out.”

John Wilder: “Yes, I think it would be good if you moved out.” (Inside John Wilder’s head: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD YES, SHE’S GONE! GONE GONE GONE!)

On her last day at the house, she put a plastic grocery bag filled with bills on the kitchen table. She then handed me a checkbook. “I have no idea how much money is in there,” and walked out.

Several hours later, after going through eight inches of bills (this is not an exaggeration) I realized that I was, outside of my mortgage, more than a year’s salary in debt. Adding my mortgage? The debt went up to everything I made for three years. And that didn’t included all the other bills like food, water, power, bubble bath, and PEZ®. And you, Internet, know my maxim is: “if you can’t solve it with a spreadsheet, you can solve it with a shotgun.” The spreadsheet was gloomy.

The spreadsheet may be gloomy, but wine never lies. Until the alarm goes off at 6AM. Then wine is a big cheating liar.

All in all, I guesstimate that the first marriage cost me $250,000 directly, and more than that indirectly when you count up the money I could have made if I could have saved that money. A lot more. Let’s just say that it’s not a lie to say that my first marriage probably cost me $1,000,000 in the long run.

But Henny Youngman answered the question of, “Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

X did not see eye to eye with me on a lot of things, and money was one of them. Spending now for fun now that you had to pay for later, was okay with her. It wasn’t so much with me, and that was not good for either of us. We didn’t agree. Divorce eased a lot of stress.

When I met The (soon to be) Mrs., I was curious about her relationship with money. The fact that she managed to live in a tiny apartment with minimal needs, infrequent and small purchases of frivolous items like PEZ® dispensers, made me pretty sure that we were on the same page as far as money and PEZ™ went. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.

And in our relationship, we eventually set up spending rules – if it wasn’t food for dinner or at a cost of $20 or less, we had to confer. Yes. $20. Amazingly small for 2018, so let’s call it $60 today. It’s not our current limit for buying stuff without conferring, it’s a bit higher, and, honestly I’m not sure it’s defined at this point. But that limit, back then, was important. We had mutual accountability, and we had to want something enough that we were willing to pitch it to the other.

“Really honey, I need a framed poster of Daffy Duck©, and look at the price!”

Yup. Miss that poster.

So, we drove used cars for years. Just kidding. We still drive used cars. They’re nicer used cars now, but still they’re used cars, even though we stopped being in debt outside of our mortgage after only three years after being married. We haven’t bought a new car . . . this century.

We go out to eat more than once a month now. A lot more than that – often between picking up kids from practice and the other million things we do in a week, well, we end up eating dinners of fast food that cost more than ribeyes for everyone grilled to perfection at home. These are tradeoffs.

But we don’t have as many “needs” as we did even a decade ago. The Mrs. gets a very nice bottle of scotch for Christmas and manages to snort it down during the year – The Mrs. even shares that scotch when The Mrs. is in a good mood. If I didn’t get any presents for Christmas? I’d be fine with that. If I had enough time to devote to the hobbies I already neglect, that might be the nicest present. One day I’ll build my own ICBM.

I’d call it Johnny Wilder Blue™ but they never asked me.

But if The Mrs. needed a new BMW each year? If we had to have the nicest house in town? If we had to have furniture that was new and coordinated? If The Mrs. needed the newest fashions from whatever place in New York? If the elastic waistbands in our underwear needed to work?

We’d be poor.

Because we don’t need those things, we’re wealthy. An example: I bought The Mrs. a new car. It was actually used with 28,000 miles on it, but it was new to us. The Mrs. hadn’t even seen it, outside of a crappy cell phone picture I sent to her. When it arrived at our house, The Mrs. liked it. Mostly. Then I told The Mrs. that it cost 25% less than she thought it cost. I’d put the car on my credit card, and got six hotel nights, too, as long as we were willing to spend the night in Albania.

“I love it.”

Tonight, I was driving one of our cars across the state to go watch The Boy wrestle tonight. I realized I had more cash in my wallet than the car was worth according to the Kelley Blue Book®. I’m thinking that if you can say that and you’re happy? You’re wealthy.

Oh, and The Boy won. He didn’t even have to use the blowtorch.

See how wealthy I am?

Dear Diary: Ocasio-Cortez talks about being moist

WilderAnon, or WAnon transmitted this information to me tonight which explains this first-ever Tuesday post. How he got it from the future is beyond me – something about a paradox whereby I avoid all legal liability. I’m liking that. To read about QAnon go here (LINK). I have no idea if WAnon represents a Deep State operative of the NSA with a time machine or the voices in my head.

January 3, 2019, 11:03 EST

Dear Diary,

It’s nice that I have a place to share my secrets and intermoist, er innermost thoughts. Ha ha ha, I wrote moist. Must be me thinking about Marco again (blush).

When I started moving my stuff in today, I was pretty excited. Then they told me that what I thought was my office was just the coat closet. I sure wish I was stuck in that closet with Marco! I sat in my pretend coat closet office in the corner for about two hours until my staff found me. They seemed really excited. It was nice to get out of that office because there isn’t a light in there, but I didn’t want to complain because I didn’t want to get fired on my first day.

Ever wonder what you would do if you were in a dark closet for two hours? I licked the walls, like anyone would. They were pine, but they tasted like salt. I sniffed the carpet, and it was surprisingly odor free, except for one corner. I played with my eyebrow. Oh, eyebrows since the electrolysis worked to remove the middle part and I now look less like a dwarf from Lord of the Rings and more like Liv Tyler.

My real office is big and has a nice desk, and there’s a brand-new laptop there. I asked my staff where I’m supposed to clock in so I get paid, and they explained to me that I didn’t have to clock in. Honor system, I guess. I’m not sure how I’m going to get overtime if I don’t clock in. Maybe there’s a timesheet. There’s a nice couch in my office, too. It makes me think of Marco and his broad shoulders and spending time with him on that couch. And that makes me blush!

I looked in my desk and found that they already had stickers, multi-colored erasers, gel pens, and the latest episode of Tiger Beat® ready for me. But I also have this new laptop. Somebody from IT set me up on this computer, and said that they had even set up a place for me to share my thoughts, and gave me a link to this diary. ZOMG! So excited!

I have 10 people on staff, and they asked me where I want them to be. Well, after the one who gets me Sour Patch Kids®, the one who picks up my dry cleaning, and the one who gets me latte, I’m not sure what I want the others to do. Maybe write plays about how power corrupts?

I am so glad that I brought up the fact that, in addition to being Spanish, Puerto Rican, and Native American I am also Jewish. I’m thinking of playing up that aspect in my next campaign, because who doesn’t love the Jews? I am biding my time to when I will announce that I’m also descended from interstellar visitors from Ceti Alpha 3, and a previously unknown race of sentient cats, and I am their kitten. If only I was in a relationship with someone who was gay, I would be the queen of intersectionality!

My new apartment is nice. I got there last night and moved in my futon and my clothes. My milk crates and planks are a great bookcase for my Karl Marx Swimsuit edition coloring book. Heat is free with the apartment, so last night I turned up the heat to 80 and walked around wearing only my Uggs®, while listening to Ariana Grande while sipping a pumpkin-spice latte. I then spent some time plucking my mustache. Marco says that if I don’t, I look like Fidel Castro.

Oh, Marco. I can’t stop thinking about him and his flowing brown hair, and his strong, muscular arms . . . Marco, Marco, Marco. I asked him to move down here to Washington with me, but he turned me down. He said that his life was in New York. It bothers me that I can’t get Marco out of my mind, since he’s never even kissed me. Sure, we go shopping together, he has such great taste. And he helped me decorate my apartment, too. Now I just walk around my new apartment naked and spend time eating Cocoa Puffs® – Mom isn’t here to tell me I can’t! I’ll sit here, naked, eating Cocoa Puffs©, plucking myself, and thinking about Marco.

Well, Dear Diary, I’ll hit save and go wander around for a bit. Honestly, I’m feeling a bit . . . restless after thinking about Marco. I needz moar pumpkin latte!

January 3, 2019, 3:03 EST

Dear Diary,

Well that was a surprise! My staff came running into the office about twenty minutes after I left you and told me that my Diary was going out to everyone on the Internet. Silly staff. I had to explain to them that there was no way it was going out to the Internet, since it was on my computer, right here. I showed them, and everything, but I don’t think they understood. They just walked out half an hour later shaking their heads. I’m not sure that they’ve ever had someone as smart as me in office, maybe I need to explain it more slowly to them that if I can see it on *my* screen, it’s not on the Internet.

Some people are so slow.

Oh, I’ve been working on writing my first piece of legislation. It’s about medical care. Each person deserves their own doctor, and if my legislation passes, each person will have their own, individual doctor. Someone who is concerned only with their health. My legislative staff laughed, because they said we would need 300,000,000 doctors if my plan passed. Well, if it’s the law, we’ll have 300,000,000 doctors! You can’t break the law!

Another one said that President Poopyhead would veto it. I told them I was too smart for that, because in the bill I’d put a clause that said he couldn’t. They shook their heads. I think they’re surprised no one ever thought of that before.

I think that I’ll call Marco to celebrate! I imagine he’s home by now. He shares his apartment with his best friend, Chad. They must be close – they only have that one bed that they share.

I miss Marco.

To regular readers: this is an experiment and depending on how it works this won’t replace any existing content, but will become a feature in addition to the existing content. We’ll see. Don’t forget, you can subscribe by putting your email in the box up there. I will never share (unless congress subpoenas it) or spam it.

Picture of Cortez via Wikimedia, by El Borde [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face. Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States. I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means). In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States. But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically? Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary. After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill. How many of the college degrees awarded are useless? Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it. Facts prove my guesses are pretty good: 40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees. Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever. When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans. That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe. Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda. In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs. Photo – Chicago Sun-Times.

The article on Amanda continues: “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.” Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist. I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there. I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad. Not at her college. No. Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are ~~stupid~~ maybe not grounded in reality. Not the professors – they’re her friends, right? I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail. Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes. Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans. I’ve got nothing against Amanda. Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place. Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities. And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left. The college financing system is itself creating leftists. And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students. Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college: a diversity of thought. The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students. In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination? And, no, this was not made up. Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power. Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong. In squishier subjects? If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades. Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . . some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus. There’s just . . . calculus. The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new. I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative. He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40). My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to. I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there. Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change. But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were. He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon. But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin. I was . . . shocked. I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology? In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination. Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas. I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books. For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education. As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts: the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education. If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.

The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.” – Elf

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls. The Toll House tolls for you!

Normally when I do a health post I put my weasel words saying “I’m not a doctor” at the end of the post. I mean, if you’re at this website the last thing you are is stupid. You KNOW I’m not a doctor and I don’t prescribe drugs except on an amateur basis, and then it’s generally, “Pipe down about Ariana Grande masterminding the fake moon landing and have another beer. Everyone knows that an Ariana Grande is actually a yeasty pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks©.”

However, in this case I’m not talking about yeasty, mediocre pop singers, I’m telling you that the Centers for Disease Control® (CDC™) is staffed by (at least some) idiots who really are doctors, well, the disclaimer should come up front. So, here it is: I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and take some damn responsibility for your own life and everybody knows that it was Katy Perry was the mediocre pop singer that masterminded the fake moon landing.

So hardcore she killed that Muppet® herself, just to show the other Muppets© how fearless she was. Or was that G. Katy Perry?

Okay. Now for the actual rant.

In its continual bid to be the ugly, smelly kid in class who stares at you just a little too long with the charisma of a damp goat, the Creepy Disaster Chumps© (CDC™) issued its annual holiday pronouncement of, “Hey, it’s Christmas, America. Have a good time and we’ll talk after the New Year. Sound good?”

No. This is government, so of course you’re being warned against the civilization-ending threat of (I’m not kidding) raw cookie dough the by the Centers for Disease Control Cookie Dough Committee® (CDCCDC™). Yes. Raw cookie dough, that scourge of humanity that brought down the Incan Empire, the Ming Dynasty, and Johnny Depp’s career.

Of course raw cookie dough is bad for you, but not in the way the Citizen Drama Creators© (CDC™) thinks. Raw cookie dough is bad for you since it’s loaded with carbs and sugar and tastes the way that I can only imagine heroin feels. But cookies are tasty, and, even if you’re a low-carb cultist (I am), a cookie at Christmas is okay for you unless you inject the dough. Protip: if a syringe is large enough to inject a chocolate chip, it’s not gonna make it through airport security no matter what story you tell.

It does, however, appear that raw cookie dough can make you ill in rare circumstances. You see, in the United States, one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella. 20,000 eggs? It would take 64 years at 6 eggs a week to get to 20,000. Cooking, thankfully, kills salmonella – so it’s 64 years of raw or undercooked eggs. Clearly, this is an unacceptable risk. Your eggs should all be cooked to the consistency of a leather thong.

You were thinking something else! So was I. There are places you just don’t want to go on Google®.

But wait! The Chowder Disco Cowgirls® (CDC™) reminds us that cookies contain raw flour, too. Raw flour? Is that a thing? Yes! In fact, 63 people in the United States were made ill by raw flour in 2016. 63! It’s an epidemic! Soon these people will become raw flour zombies and the streets (okay, one really small one lane street) will be filled with them and their insatiable desire for raw flour.

Thankfully, I’m betting that Grandmothers everywhere will still be handing the rich, doughy beaters covered with cookie dough off to the greedy fat hands of toddlers (it’s really the only way to get their iPhones© away from them) for a sticky, sugary treat. From there, the cookie dough/saliva mix creates a compound stronger than diamond plated steel that instantly bonds itself at the molecular level to any surface, which explains why it is still stuck to the bottom of the Wilder kitchen table after fifteen years.

If I were him, I’d hide. Katy Perry is looking for something to wear to the Oscars®. And it’s between Cookie Monster© and Oscar the Grouch™.

But as a society, what does that say about us if we’re that afraid of . . . cookies? According to one study I read, the lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid are 1 in 250,000, which is still higher than your odds of meeting someone who works for the Department of Motor Vehicles that has a sense of humor.

The number of verified deaths from eating raw cookie dough that I found was . . . one. Out of 300,000,000, people, this equates to a risk of 1 in 3.8 million over a 78 year lifetime. But let’s pretend that one person a decade dies from eating raw cookie dough. You’re still 4,500 times more likely to die falling out of bed. But the Chronic Doom Cherubs® (CDC™) have yet to weigh in against the scourge of pillow-topped mattresses ravaging our land.

I then went against all of my better instincts and did the one thing a blogger should never do: I researched. The origin of the Centers for Dingo Carnage© (CDC™) is actually a noble one. During World War II, the United States decided that we wanted to kill the enemy and not let malaria spoil all the fun, and got pretty good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria. Fun fact: the atomic bomb was originally designed to kill mosquitos but was abandoned because it couldn’t be made to fit into a spray can.

Modern Mosquito Hunting Techniques.

But all good wars end, and here were a bunch of bona fide mosquito-killing ninjas who were good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria. The government decided that we could use those guys to stop malaria in the United States. They went straight to work, and malaria was all but eradicated by 1951, only four years later – in 2018 the paperwork alone for starting the project would take a decade as the Friends of Malaria sued in federal court to stop the eradication of the endangered mosquito. But living in a less enlightened era, they eradicated malaria and everyone was pretty okay with that. So, they disbanded the agency, and put people to work doing other productive things.

No, I’m kidding! Once government builds a hammer, after they run out of nails they keep using it on the dishes and drywall. It worked great on the nails, right? Maybe we need a committee to develop stronger dishes?

The newly named Communicable Disease Center (this name is real, and is the original word salad that gave us the CDC™ initials) became a solution in search of a problem. We expected the Koreans or Chinese (or someone) to spray us with biological agents. So, the CDC® said, “Hey, we can fix that problem that we just made up.” Thankfully, they’ve never had to do anything significant on that front.

Eventually, the CDC™ also got bored and distracted enough sometime during the 1960’s that they led the effort eradicate smallpox, and even someone as cynical as I am about government agencies have to give them a golf clap for that one. To this day the CDC™ and the Russians have the last two samples of smallpox in the world, and the CDC™’s is stored in the fridge next to the guacamole and that Wal-Mart® chicken salad that Carol left in there last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong: The CDC™ has a legitimate role as a coordination center for communicable diseases, and protecting the United States from diseases originating all around the world – 70% of the tuberculosis cases in the United States are from people that weren’t born in the United States. And Ebola or its yet-undiscovered cousin lurking in the rainforest (hopefully they get that pesky jungle cut down soon) has the potential to be devastating in our high mobility society complete with populations concentrated in megacities across the planet. Like an asteroid strike, this is a very high consequence event that will impact us in the future. World War One killed as many as 20 million people. The Spanish Flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, or between 3% and 5% of the world’s population, in 1918 and 1919.

Yikes. Yeah. Somebody needs to be working on that.

And somebody should also be working on protecting us from bioterrorism, but I strongly doubt it’s the CDC™. The CDC™ is the only agency I know of that’s managed to misplace smallpox in their other pants, along with the keys to the CDC™ golf cart. Oh, and the CDC™ also exposed their own employees to anthrax, and not just the heavy metal band. Since these things really happened, we need to make sure an adult is at the wheel. And, please Comic Distribution Clowns® (CDC™), no more comic books about zombies. If there is anything with less soul than a comic book about zombies by a government health agency, it might be a government health agency warning us about eating cookie dough.

Readers of this blog know I’m all for people being prepared. But the CDC®? Zombies™? Please leave the misleading and incomplete preparedness information to FEMA™.

So, by all means, please have the charisma of a wet goat the CDC™, avoid the consequence of minimal personal responsibility involving infinitesimal risk, and just tell your grandchildren “no” when they want to lick the beater after you make sugar cookies. I’m not sure that kids of today would even notice – recess at school nowadays consists of “competitive sitting quietly,” “standing quietly and motionlessly near the wall,” and “counting the days until a government-based Christian theocracy turns women into harems for Trump supporters.” That sounds so much more fun than playing tackle football in the fifth grade on a rock covered field and having snowball fights. And actual fights. I sure missed out as a kid.

Yes, it’s a retread. But it’s a sexy theocratic retread.

This certainly isn’t the case of a government agency that’s looking for publicity by making outlandish claims to scare people about risks that are less likely than being killed by lighting? Nah. Government is here because it loves you! Or because government needs something to do between drinking yeasty Ariana Grande lattes and faking moon landings.

Not mine, but funny.

Recession? Depression? Oppression? At least there are Bikinis.

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the . . . anyone, anyone? The Great Depression, passed the . . . anyone, anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act?” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Did George R.R. Martin study economics? It certainly looks like he’s studied bratwurst.

Not that there’s anything to see here (yet) and I don’t want to go around spreading panic, but I just thought I’d dust off some information about recessions. And depressions. No particular reason. Nope. Just stretching my legs.

What is a recession?

A recession is a period of time when the economy gets a little smaller for at least six months or so. Generally, the recessions of the past have seen the economy drop by no more than 5% in any three month period. When you look at the numbers, even most years when there is a recession, the economy still grows overall.

Looks like this would be a good comb for Dwayne Johnson (The Rock®), or a really complicated game of Tetris®.

The blue areas are the economic growth. The red? Contraction. The average recession length since 1945 has been about 10 months, and the average economic expansion has lasted about five and a half years. The general idea is that the economy is based on constant growth.

How much of the economy is geared to growth?

I’m not sure, but I estimated it using publicly available figures. I guessed that 2/3 of construction work was geared towards growth, 20% of manufacturing, 10% of retail (Home Despot® and such), 20% of finance (can’t build if you don’t have cash), and 20% of hotel/restaurant jobs. I did the math, and that comes out to 12,000,000 jobs. How close was that? It’s roughly 10% of the workforce, and unemployment can hit 10% after a recession. So, as a first guess it’s probably not too bad. 12,000,000 jobs, at minimum are required for growth. And those same jobs disappear when growth disappears.

But even with the economic hardship and dislocation, recessions are good. Think of a small, quick fire in a forest. After the dead brush piles up, clearing out the underbrush makes the forest stronger. The strong trees survive, but the weak and rotten trees get burned down. In this part of the Midwest, a regular feature of forest management is a burn off – some places do it every three years or so. The fires are always small, and the danger of a larger fire goes away because all of the dead wood is consumed, but we do keep a supply of elephants on hand to stamp out the burning ducks. Just in case.

Bad businesses fail during a recession. Those on life support go away – they clear the way for growth and good, strong businesses to take their place – the end of a recession is a time of renewal, much like in Hollywood® when the Plastic Surgery Fairy drops by the homes of all good actors and actresses on George Clooney’s birthday.

A depression, however, is a wildfire in a forest that’s built up dead wood and standing dead trees for decades after a gasoline rainstorm. Wildfires burn out of control. Whatever is in the path gets burned. Healthy trees? Doesn’t matter – the inferno takes them along with the dead wood and no amount of well-trained ducks can stamp the flames out.

Healthy business? Doesn’t matter. Business failures start, and then cascade. People panic, and hold onto money. Companies panic and hold onto money. One sign of a depression (besides a sudden drop in male underwear sales – this really happens) is that debt levels actually go down. People don’t buy anything during a depression – they never know when they’ll be able to replace the money that they have. Debt levels also drop because the debts are written off – bankruptcy is another way to lower debt levels.

What causes a depression? A Soviet by the name of Nikolai Kondratiev had an economic theory – namely that the business cycle we stupid capitalists kept running into was based on debt and that the capitalists were stupid and over the course of decades would forget that debt was, you know, bad. Lenin loved him, but Stalin? Not so much, especially after a communist-sympathizing professor at the University of Minnesota ratted him out to Soviet authorities for a visit with an anti-communist when Kondratiev visited the University of Minnesota.

Minnesota has been a leftist state for a long time. Wondering if we could trade it to China for a box of magic beans? Or regular beans? Or an I.O.U.?

It’s debatable whether or not Kondratiev’s economic theory is correct, but it certainly fits the technologically-driven cycles of debt and discovery that lead to boom and bust that we’ve seen in the United States over the last three centuries.

I told The Mrs. I would use these graph-ruled index cards. See, I told you I would. Bonus: thinking about girls wearing bikinis.

Let’s talk about the economic cycle. (That was one of my best pick-up lines in college, but I would add “baby” at the end to make it totally sexy. Because, really, who isn’t put in the mood by discussion of aggregate economic activity?)

So, let’s talk about the economic cycle, baby.

In Spring, new businesses are formed. As economic activity expands, existing businesses expand. Optimism is the atmosphere. And, since debt is low (and people don’t want debt), there is money to buy stuff. And stuff is relatively cheaply as the currency gained a lot of power during the deflationary winter. Social cohesion and trust in newly-rebuilt institutions is high. And it’s nearly bikini weather! Think 1945 to 1965 in the United States.

I’m sorry.

Summer=bikinis! Who needs anything else? Oh, and also relaxation, and growth, and profits, and expansion. The greatest degree of questing for personal growth and whatever hippy course you want to take to validate yourself occurs in summer. The focus on strong institutions passes – but the quest for self-gratification takes over, and it really doesn’t matter because inertia in the economy keeps things going. 1965-1985 is representative of Summer.

I’m really sorry.

Harvest happens in Fall. You could call it Autumn if you have to be all East Coast, but if you do, I’ll call it Efterår, which is Danish for Fall and sounds like what a Viking could yell it at you before you got totally pillaged. But Fall is a great analogy since at this stage the economy is harvested. All the work that went on in Spring to prepare for economic success, all the growth that took place in the Summer, well, it’s time to harvest it in Fall. And greed is good, right? And debt hasn’t hurt us for the last fifty years, so, please, have as much debt as you can eat. Yup, you got it. 1985-2005.

Okay, does this make it better? And, Oktoberfest is in fall. Or efterår.

And now? If Kondratiev was right, Winter. The last Winter in the United States was the Great Depression, which lasted 253 years if you listened to my Grandma. But the Winter was difficult – debt collapse, financial panic, bank failures, tariffs, plant closings, unemployment, greater government control of the economy, breadlines, and no bikinis at all. Oh, and war brought about by the crisis. If Kondratiev is right, this would last from (roughly) 2005 to 2025.

Oh, sure, she has to top every story. But she also dated Andrew Jackson when he was just a kid.

This graph shows the velocity of money – how it moves in the economy. It’s clear that we’re in a place where money isn’t moving as fast as it used to throughout our economy – it’s at a record low since we’ve been measuring it. The low velocity is not because everyone is wealthy, it’s because tons of dead dollars sit on the books of various banking institutions. We’ve also pumped massive amounts of money into the system:

Now, if that money starts moving around like it used to, and there’s bunches of it . . . nah, that wouldn’t lead to inflation, would it?

Kondratiev’s cycle is roughly as long as a human life – which makes sense. Like a bad Arkansas carnival ride, you have to forget what you learned in the cycle in order to want to repeat it. Kondratiev’s work was also picked up by Strauss and Howe in their bestselling book The Fourth Turning. It’s a good book, and in some cases it almost reads like prophecy (it came out in 1997). I’d toss a link to the book up here, but you can figure this one out, or at least your Mom told me you could. She also said you could dress yourself, but she was pretty worried about your diet.

Depressions bring down banking systems, currencies, and governments – from Weimar Germany to the Russian Revolution. The chaos from just a financial mess can last for decades. But during the 17^th Century in Europe, things got even worse:

The massive quantity of silver and gold that the Spanish brought back from the New World distorted the economy of all of Europe, leading to inflation. But then, the Maunder Minimum (LINK) hit. The Maunder Minimum, a decrease in the overall output of the Sun, added poor harvests and exceptionally cold winters to inflation. The regular resources that Europe depended on became scarce. When accompanied by resource constraints like Europe during the Maunder Minimum in the 17^th Century, the chaos can last for a century. I wonder what it would look like if oil were much more expensive? (But that’s a future post.)

I think that we were pretty close to a financial system collapse back in 2008-2009. The solution was to pump astonishing amounts of money into the financial system leading to distortions that have caused commodity prices like oil and grain to lead to the Egyptian revolution and the Syrian revolution, all while we wage wars in two countries. I don’t think our financial system is remotely fixed at this point – debt continues to rise. It’s up to $70 trillion dollars – thankfully that’s only about a million dollars of debt for each family of four. We can work that down in a year or two, right, if we cut back on going out for dinner?

The kink in the curve? That was what caused a worldwide recession and panic in 2008 and 2009. Hope nothing changes. Debt’s good, right?

Is there a draft in here? Seems chilly. Winter’s coming, I think.