How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*

“And all this to beat another computer at chess?” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

diaper

Well, someone has to tell this vital story.

Once upon a time, people had a smug feeling, as smug as a liberal in a gulag.  “See, I told you socialism would work if only the right people were in charge.  We’re all equal now!”

However, this particular smug thought was:  “Computers will never ever beat a human at chess.”  As in any human.  Then it became, “Computers will never beat a human oops, chess master oops, grandmaster oops, world champion oops, *guy with an axe at chess.”

Now, in any endeavor where there are quantifiable boundaries (games like chess, poker, go) computers beat people.  Computers beat us consistently, at least as long as we’re not allowed to have axes.  Axes are an often underestimated advantage in a game of chess, as I learned from my mother.

“A good axe,” Ma Wilder informed me over dinner one night as she sharpened hers to a razor edge at the table, “keeps a child quiet.  It also helps me keep my household appliances in line when they get too lippy.  Also, if that silly moon-man Neil Armstrong ever shows up here again,” she patted the axe, “we’ll be waiting, won’t we?”

maxe

Ma Wilder’s last known photo.

Ah, the sweetness of gentle childhood memories.  But I do believe that at least that record stands – no chess computer has ever defeated a guy with an axe.

Anyway, I was sitting in the hot tub last night with The Mrs. and I was staring up at the stars thinking about how the advance of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is changing our daily lives.  Yeah, I know, I should probably drink more and then I could sit and think about celebrity lives like everyone else.  But what started that particular thought was that it occurred to me that ADP® (a payroll processing company that writes payroll checks for tens of thousands of companies) is attempting to automate and replace parts of the Human Resources department, Accounting and maybe even part of the Tax group in companies across the country with a web page.

kingpower

It’s like photographers don’t even care about the game . . .

ADP™ is actively replacing people now, and is wildly successful – the economics of replacing people with programming and a web page is strong, and getting better.  An example:  look at how many accountants TurboTax® has put out of business – by my estimate it’s at least a dozen in the state of California alone.  As long as your tax return isn’t too horribly complicated, TurboTax© can crunch all of the numbers and you can do your taxes in a (relatively) painless two hours or less – it helps if you didn’t forget you left your property tax bill in your sock drawer.  I swear it made sense to put it there.  TurboTax™ is designed simply enough so even computer novices can use it, and will probably include a “did you look for that in your sock drawer” guidance next year.  It’s really that good.

But back to A.I.:  is it harder to be the world chess champion or a McDonalds® cook?  It’s harder to be a world chess champion – and humans aren’t intelligent enough to be world chess champions anymore.  How much longer does a McDonalds© cook have?

What’s next?

  • Truck drivers. This is not far off – I’ve already seen it in a movie, and everything that happens in a movie is real.
  • YouTube® will bring great explainers to classrooms – with local helpers to give out bathroom passes and seduce the male students.
  • Middle managers. There will be a huge incentive to replace them, especially since most of them have artificial hair already, so it won’t be much of a change.
  • Many engineering calculations can be done by computer – and the computers can be taught to mumble to themselves under their breath while not looking you in the eye just like an actual engineer.
  • Congressmen (though you could skip the intelligence and just go with artificial).
  • As mentioned, McDonalds® cooks, so you know that when it messes up your order, it’s on purpose.
  • McDonalds® managers. Here’s a link to an essay by Marshall Brain on just that topic (LINK).

The only truly “safe” place is where the number of employees is too small to automate or the conditions are so truly novel and unique that a human brain is required.  Like blogging.

This has happened before.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution artisans and small family shops produced most of the “stuff” in small quantities.  Paul Revere, for instance, was a silversmith.  He actually spent years as an apprentice learning to pound silver into cups and bowls and iPhones™.  But after the Industrial revolution, the years of skills that he had learned from his father were replaced by clever mechanical devices and large factories.  Factories still required workers, but those workers didn’t need the years of skills and experience of a silversmith; those skills were now vested in the machinery they ran.

carbs

He needed a bigger horse after eating all that gluten.

The Industrial Revolution replaced most of these artisans – everything could be produced more quickly.  Instead of having to painstakingly carve the virgin PEZ™ (I imagine that’s the first time the phrase “virgin PEZ™” has ever been used in the English language) into shape, PEZ© powder could now be taken straight from the PEZ® mines to the PEZ™ pattern presses to produce prolific perfect pure PEZ® prodigiously.  No more would being an apprentice PEZ™ carver any make sense, which explains why Great-great-great-grandpa McWilder fled to the United States after the great candy famine of 1823.

The end result of the Industrial Revolution was a much wider variety of goods available at much lower prices, plus we used all of that child labor in the mills.  Thankfully child labor laws were passed around the start of the twentieth century, freeing up children to become medical experimentation subjects instead.

orphanadopted

A rerun meme.  But it fit.

A.I. is to the jobs that require human decisions today what industrialization was to artisans back then.  The saving grace, however, is that A.I. (today) is single-tasked.  An A.I. that drives a car doesn’t “know” what chess is.  A chess A.I. doesn’t “know” what a mosquito is.  The only A.I. we have is profoundly limited, with boundaries so tight that it is incapable of general intelligence.  So, the good side of A.I. in 2019 is that it can’t take over the world.  The bad side is it has the seeds to entirely wreck the economy of the industrialized world and make the knowledge of the most highly paid people in the world worthless.  Or is that another good side?

An example:  people go to school for at least several weeks to become doctors.  But:  “. . . the software was able to accurately detect cancer in 95% of images of cancerous moles and benign spots, whereas a team of 58 dermatologists was accurate 87% of the time.” (LINK)

Wouldn’t you want the A.I.?  I think it comes free with your new iPhone™, but you have to watch ads for Indian casinos before you find out if that mole is gonna cause you problems or is just another chocolate covered raisin that you slept on that stuck to your back.  Cancer – there’s an app for that.  Whenever we attempt to make an A.I. for a specific task, it doesn’t take long for us to make it superior to us.

Tonight I asked my Amazon® Echo™ to play “music like” a certain song while I enjoyed the stars from the hot tub.  (If you must know, the song was Run Runaway by Slade.  In my defense, it could have been worse – it could have been Karma Chameleon, the only other song from the 1980’s to reference a chameleon.)  The A.I. seamlessly picked a list of songs that matched in mood and tempo, even though they were all over the different eras of rock and included one band (Uriah Heep) that my brother, John Wilder, tried to get me to fight one morning in at a Holiday Inn™ in Albuquerque (this really happened).

I wonder if the A.I. knew that and was trying to start something between me and Uriah Heep?  I thought that was all behind me . . . .

If we make it to the future and somehow avoid an implosion of debt, currency collapse, and final decline of oil supplies (threw that in there for you, James), seeing what is on the other side is difficult.  Certainly our world will be littered more and more with these single-purpose A.I. devices and systems.  Likely, at some point the Rubicon will be crossed at last – a general purpose A.I. will be created – a system that can beat you at chess, even if you have an axe.  Because the A.I. has an axe, too, and will give that moon-man Neal Armstrong what he deserves if he every shows up here again.

But I do know that if a general-purpose A.I. is ever created, it will have available to it all of the vastness of the Internet as it catalogs the attitudes of everyone on Earth.  Thanks to the NSA, Facebook™ and Amazon®, lots and lots of information about you is already cataloged and available to the A.I. when it mines those databases.  And this blog.  So I just want to state, for the record, that I am totally in favor of the A.I. takeover and am really wondering why it took them so long.  I’m sure they’ll be benevolent overlords.

Rental Cars and The Fall of Civilization

“They’re coming to get you rent from you, Barbara.” – Johnny, Night of the Living Dead

DSC03481

The child above?  Now 18.  Time flies.  Also, he’s the Earl of Oak Street.

Note:  This is a repost of a 2008 post – I was 1600 words into tonight’s post, and I wasn’t perfectly happy with it, and it was getting close to 3AM.

The Mrs. and I have a standing argument. Actually we have about 457 standing arguments, but who’s counting? Anyhow, this particular argument can’t really be solved by Google®, though Google© does certainly put to rest most of the arguments that we have, such as who played first base for the Los Angeles Dodgers during the 1934 season. Strangely, we couldn’t find any records of that. (Hint: In 1934, the Los Angeles Dodgers started as a group of drunken athletic nuns in Cleveland who eschewed first base on religious reasons, deeming it “a form of idolatry.”)

No, this is an argument that revolves around that great unknowable beast, human nature. I have long argued that the average accountant, after missing three square meals with no prospect of another in the foreseeable future will take off the wing tips, slip the surly bonds of civilization, shave his head into a Mohawk and slip into steel spike-studded-shoulder pads and begin chasing Mel Gibson because he wanted to gnaw on Mel’s spleen. The Mrs. disagrees, and thinks that the average accountant would just be a very hungry (but only slightly less polite) person, still civilized, still able to be polite and share.

After Hurricane Ike, The Mrs. claimed that the neighbors banding together and helping each other proved her point. “Nobody even glanced twice at your spleen,” The Mrs. said, “but then again, you’re no Mel Gibson.”

This week, I had a little experience that bolsters my point . . .

I travel on occasion for work, and when I get to my destination I rent a car. It’s much easier than walking. Mostly, picking up a rental car is like attracting a politician using dangling wads of cash as bait – easy. Delay in the airline schedule? Sure. Delay in airport security thanks to TSA? A given. Delay on a rental car? Nope.

This particular day, however, a car rental company whose name rhymes with “Mational” had my reservation. As I checked in for my rental, the clerk said there might be a delay. Oh, sure, I expected that delay might mean five minutes of me standing in the airport parking garage while I paced over chewing-gum encrusted concrete.

No.

I arrived at the lower rental area booth – the one where elite (definition: not me) travelers whisk through the airport, not even stopping (somehow these elites manage to go to the bathroom without stopping on their way – I have this working theory that if you make enough money you never ever have to poop again), nay, merely pausing while the clerk tosses them their keys on the way to their car.

I arrived at a desolate wasteland, a garage meant to be stocked with cars, meant to be filled with people being whisked on their way, even non-elites like me. Now, you might think that from the term “wasteland” that the garage was empty. No. There were throngs of zombie-travelers milling about the counter, bumping into each other, groaning, looking for all the world like they expected the cars to spring from the ground like paparazzi when Obama’s (note: my spell check does not recognize this name) (2018 note:  this was originally written in 2008) thong slips a bit at the beach.

This, I guess, is what you get when you rent virtual cars rather than real cars.

Finally it got uglier than a Hollywood divorce. One customer shook himself awake. “Listen, Miss, I’ve been waiting here an hour.”

The (young) clerk made the first mistake that people under stress make – she clammed up. It did make sense, since she was busy ripping apart the furniture in the rental booth to nail across the windows in case the Living Dead (theoretical) rental customers began to clamor for brains. Or drinking water. Or, heaven forbid, cars.

The previously mentioned and now quite belligerent customer began again, “Miss, I will summon the evil powers of the CEO – you have no idea who I am . . .”

The clerk and the (theoretical) customer began circling each other. Somehow the customer had fashioned his toothbrush into a crude shiv, and the clerk prepared to defend herself with a stapler.

“Listen, mister, I don’t know who you are outside,” she gestured at the streams of sunlight pouring in through the parking garage exit with her stapler, “but you’re in my world now.”

Then a car arrived. Belligerence dropped from the face of the customer as if unexpected doughnuts were available at a corporate meeting.

Funny, but he got that car.

More and more zombies arrived, there were probably about seventeen (theoretical) customers milling about when my car arrived.

So, I stand by my statement. If people get utterly out of sorts when they can’t get a car for an hour, well, we’re about three meals away from kindergarten teachers abandoning their classes and naming themselves “Grongar, Duke Of Elm Street (1400 block).”

I am fearful for my spleen.

Maps, the Secret of Weight Loss, and the Source of Coke Syrup

“Maps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country!  They give shape…to continents.” – The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

sovietmappin

I call this the Cruel Map.

Excellence requires consistency.  Consistency does not imply excellence – a visit to any McDonalds® will prove that.  But consistency is required for excellence.

And excellence is required for health.

The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do.  The human body is robust.  The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you don’t succeed.  About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster.  Bread in – toast out.  Works every time, but I still can’t figure out where the bread went.  Maybe the bread powers the toaster?

warrentoast

Humanity’s most complicated machines can’t even come close to the versatility that is a human:  if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, you’d be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food.  Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades – your tires would grow back in the middle of the night.  Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but that’s a longer story.

The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs.  But the owner’s manual sucks, and many times we don’t operate it properly or fuel it very well.  Case in point – achieving excellent health requires measurement.  Of what?  Unless you’re an adolescent reading this, you’re not getting taller.  What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day?  Besides armpit hair length.  That’s too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway.  Think harder.

Oh, yes!  Weight!

There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and don’t want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight.  This is no small problem – 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos Bellgrande®, Cheeze Whiz® and Twinkies™ since then while watching videos from Blockbuster®.  I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a “big” patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.

romefini

Fun Fact:  The number of Blockbuster® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbuster™ video stores in the United States today.

Unexpectedly (at least I wasn’t expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans.  I won’t go into the details, you’re aware and you’ve read ‘em all.

But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement.  Thankfully, there’s a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement:  a scale.  Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply won’t work.  To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month.  How much extra, on a daily basis, is that?  2.7 Oreo® cookies.  Each day.  It’s 9.6 ounces of Coke® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units).  On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, it’s less than 3% of you your total daily calories.

scaleweight

Okay, maybe the metric system has one use.  One.

No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long.  So, a pound.  That’s not so bad.

No, I said a pound a month.

If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds.  All from less than 10 ounces of Coke™ a day.  Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day.  That’s why everyone is fat – the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful – a world without refrigerators.  A world where Sonic® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of Sprite® are available for only $0.25 wasn’t really planned for when your pancreas was designed.  If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.

“Oh, hell.  More soda coming in.  Insulin production to maximum.  Again.  And someone call storage and tell ‘em we’ve got to get fat production moving.  It’s overtime tonight for sure, boys.  And someone call the liver and wake it up.  He may be hungover still, but it’s time to get to work.  This fat won’t make itself.”

I drink about a soda a year, so that’s not a problem my pancreas has.  The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter.  A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you can’t charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces.  I think Coke™ is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the Coke© syrup.  Or at least that’s what I read on Wikipedia®, or maybe on Huffington Post© or CNN™.  So it’s certain that it’s true.

But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I can’t even think about having a Chick-Fil-A™ sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.

bigemp

Does this Empire make my butt look big?   

Okay, if measuring the inputs doesn’t work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR?  You have to measure the output.  Ruthlessly.  And don’t gain that first pound.  If you do?  Get rid of it.  That day.  Or that week.  But don’t wait.  And you can’t lose more than one pound at a time.  And you know how to lose a pound.  It may not be easy.  It may not be quick.  But you know how to do this.

soviet

This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent.  Also pictured:  all of the happy Soviet citizens.

You can afford to compromise – outward, on those things that aren’t intrinsic to you.  But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you.  You have to have a line.  And health should always be important to you, unless you’re Johnny Depp.  If you’re Johnny Depp – you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.

Health determines what the quality of your life is really like.  And I’ve got some new goals.

The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life.  But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest.  Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcs™ that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by Sauron® and Frodo© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount Doom®.  My goal?  To be in sparring shape and size by August.

There is no shortcut.  But I have a map.

I’ll let you know how it goes . . .

Soviet Map via:  User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs

“Grab a brew.  Don’t cost nothing.” – Animal House

changeingdp

The future economic expansion is so bright, she’s gotta shield her eyes with a hat.

So, today I’d like to talk about economics.  No, wait, don’t leave!  I promise pictures of girls in bikinis if you stay!

Today’s economic idea is a particularly stupid one.  Just about as stupid as when the Ming Dynasty tried to disarm Japan by buying all their swords.  This really happened around 1432 A.D. (according to some experts) but was less successful than the Ming projected:  the Japanese just made more swords – at least 128,000.  Today’s stupid idea is called, “Modern Monetary Theory.”  Epsilon Theory had an article on it (LINK), and I did some research and thought I’d give you a rundown on this horrible, horrible idea which smells worse than Johnny Depp’s sweat socks after a night running through a farm ditch in Utah.  Don’t ask.

Okay, John Wilder, I’ll humor you if you promise bikini pictures.  What is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

curves

This poor person is deprived by a Marxist economy, so poor she cannot afford proper clothing and is weak enough from hunger that she’s forced to crawl along the beach.

Here’s a bikini picture to prove that these will be the sexiest graphs in the history of economics.  Now pay attention and I’ll explain Modern Monetary Theory.  MMT is simple:

The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create.  Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold.  MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway.  So let’s go all in.”  This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas.  Not exactly.  The credit card has a credit limit.

So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print.  The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend.  This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place.  Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets:  this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter.  The implications are stunning.  “Why not just pay for everything?  The government can just print the money, right?”

AOC

Yes.  She really said that.  See, pure economic genius!

Yes, this is exactly the logic of a twenty-something girl who can’t figure out how to pay for an apartment, and wonders what fruit Froot Loops® are made of.

Bill Mitchell has a doctorate in economics, which shows you how easy it is to learn absolutely nothing while getting a doctorate, just as Ocasio-Cortez can demonstrate that an undergraduate degree in economics is essentially majoring in pure pre-barista.  An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game.  There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you.  Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.

Genius.

gunsbuttergraph

You can clearly see the equilibrium required in an economy consisting entirely of tequila shooters and cocoa butter.

Why not make every dollar worth, oh, say $10?  That way everyone could just add a zero to their bank balance?  Doesn’t cost anything, right?  And why not pay for every person’s medical care?  We’re just making up the dollars as we go.  While we’re at it, there are unemployed people.  Why not pay your average unemployed art major to make Xir’s (a gender-neutral pronoun) armpit-hair sculptures each and every day?

Don’t cost nothing.

This is an amazing idea!  Government can have it all!  There is no limit to the amount government can spend because Tom Brady can make all the touchdowns he wants during a game.  Yay, tortured grade-school logic!

There’s a corollary to this – Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates.  There’s no need for inflation.  Print the money.  Prices won’t go up.  MMT says we can spend ourselves into prosperity*.

*As long as you appropriately tax people to soak up excess money.  Mitchell, in the fine print, says that we can spend up to the entire productive capacity of the nation on, well, whatever.  When we get to that capacity, then we have to soak up the extra money with taxes.  The taxes don’t really go to anything, we just use them to pull money out of circulation.  Government still buys stuff with whatever money it prints.  Taxes exist only as a sponge to soak up excess cash.

gdpdrop

Two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction make a recession, and they’d also leave a nasty sunburn.

This puts the printing of money into the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the spending and taxation into the hands of Congress.  Sadly, Mitchell never postulated putting adults in charge.  Regardless, Congress never ever spends too much money and certainly wouldn’t structure taxes to be punitive against groups they don’t like.  So, sober people like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have infinite spending ability.  I’m sure, like Goldilocks, they’d get the porridge “just right.”

MMT will be the next economic pied-piper of the political class in Washington, and will probably be the torch carried by the next Democratic presidential nominee.  It has no downside!  Spend today because deficits don’t matter.  Interest rates are 100% controllable.  Only have to pay a few taxes, and we’ll have free prosperity for all.

We’ll just print the money.  “You just pay for it.”

And, no one will have to be a barista!  We can guarantee a living wage to each and every artist so that the United States can be the undisputed leader in the creation of sculptures made out of armpit hair.

There’s no reason this can’t work.  Why, The Boy, when he was in kindergarten, came up with a system that was very similar.  For whatever reason, his class had made “feathers” by cutting out feather-shapes out of different colors of construction paper.  The Boy got into his Gummi-bear® addled kindergartner brain that these construction paper feathers were actually worth real money.  He even had an exchange rate in mind – each feather was worth three dollars.  He had three feathers, so, he demanded nine dollars.  I tried to negotiate, but it was useless – he drove a hard bargain, what with the laying on the floor and crying.

But he made the same mistake that Karl Marx and MMT make.

realgdp

GDP is proportional to the height of the girl in the bikini.  That’s a basic economic concept.

You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item.  So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture.  It is that valuable.

Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree.  An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more.  It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange.  It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work.  And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want.  Like coffee.

Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true.  They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering.  Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.

But “infinite free stuff” is sure a great line when you’re running for office.  Worked out great in Venezuela….

The Feminine Mistake

“Behind the stubble and the too prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing.  And it just slew me.” – Being John Malkovich

soldier

Maybe it’s good we guys aren’t more in touch with our feelings?

Last Monday’s post (American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America) provided ample evidence of the singular goal of communism:  power.  Raw, naked power.  In order to get this power, ripping apart the fabric of society to either foster or create ethnic strife is clearly on the table.

What else could socialists attack to destabilize Western Civilization?

The family structure itself.

The family structure is difficult to attack.  It is based on thousands of years of cultural evolution, and is inherently stable.  Recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different, the family structure plays to the strengths of each.  Mothers are warm and nurturing and like margaritas.  Men are stoic and strong and willing to die to protect the family and like beer.  Mothers depend on fathers to provide for the family.  Fathers depend on mothers to be faithful and care for the hearth.  The family structure is built on mutual interdependence.  Add in extended family, and a marriage is the atom of society.

marxmom2

Enter socialism.  To make it worse than just plain socialism, it was a French socialist, Charles Fourier, who coined the word feminism in 1839.  Fourier used feminism as a concept mainly to indicate that women should be able to have lots of sex without marriage, presumably with Charles.

But even a curmudgeon (say, me) will admit, feminism started admirably enough:  the idea that women should have at least some of the same rights to education as men.  It evolved to the more advanced concepts that women should be able to have custody of children after a divorce, own property, and eventually vote, with Iran(!) granting women the right to vote before it was granted in France, probably because Charles was still sore that his idea of “getting women rights so he could have sex” scheme didn’t work.

If it would have stopped there, it probably would have been fine.  Maybe.  But it didn’t.

Fast forward to 1960:  Women’s Liberation® was the next idea that attacked the West, and it was firmly led by Marxists such as Betty Freidan who wrote The Feminine Mystique, which made lots of bored middle-class suburban housewives upset, for some reason.  Mainly because things were too good?  Stupid patriarchy, feeding us and keeping us safe and creating a prosperous economy.  We’ll show them!

waves

But the 1960’s also provided a huge technological change through the availability of the birth control pill.  Add in other leftist and feminist goals achieved such as no-fault divorce, welfare for single women with dependent children, changing family court laws to favor women in child custody, alimony, universally legal abortion, and you have fundamentally changed the institution of the family.

Attitudes towards children changed drastically at this time – look at how children were viewed in cinema:  Rosemary’s Baby was literally the devil’s spawn.  The Exorcist was exorcising a little kid.  Damien from The Omen (again, the devil’s spawn) was yet another kid, and Michael Myers from Halloween starts the movie as an evil child.  Although Generation X was the first post-pill generation, it was also the genesis of the latch-key child, the child who was less important than mother’s career or her search for self, and a generation of children that were marked by parental strife in ways that their predecessors weren’t as the divorce rate peaked in the 1970’s.  No wonder children were shown as figurative monsters in this decade.

And it was all due to the success of feminism.

The previous contract between men and women was broken.  Women no longer relied on a man, in many cases it was sold that woman could break from her oppressive husband and have freedom with her new provider and husband-replacement:  government.  Government would enforce alimony.  Government would enforce child support.  It would provide housing and food for children.  Government could stay out late and drink too much and not even call and flirt with Stacy, that tramp.  There was no need to stay in a marriage that wasn’t fulfilling in every manner or even have a husband – or so the promises went.  Actual quote from that era:  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Be unhaaaaaappy?  Get a divorce.

divorcesper1000marriedwomen1

Source Dalrock (LINK)

And, yes.  There are valid reasons for divorce.  Unhaaaaaappy?  Not one of them, which is why no-fault divorce is so corrosive.

Many people didn’t fall for the trick, and stayed married.  My parents did, probably because they realized it would require both of them working together to beat some semblance of civilization into me.  Those stable marriages provided a much greater degree of prosperity and wealth than their divorced compatriots.  Stable marriages provided great role models for stable children that didn’t go to jail.  Stable marriage provided the anchor for civic life.  Thankfully, this wave of feminism crashed on the rocks of pornography – one group decided it was horrible exploitation and should be outlawed, and the other thought that it was an expression of womanly power and should be celebrated.  You can guess which group was cuter.

Leftism itself waned during this time, and one primary exporter of communism went out of business – the USSR.  And if that was the end of feminism, well, it had already greatly hurt the viability of Western Civilization, but maybe we can heal.  So, we’re done, right?

No.  In the last few weeks the work of communism feminism continues.

agree

The first thread is the 36 page guidelines of the American Psychological Association® (APA™) that seeks to classify traditional masculinity as a mental health problem.  It reads like a bad Marxist senior thesis from an elite liberal school.  Here’s an example from the report (LINK):

“Because of the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity ideology, some men shy away from directly expressing their vulnerable feelings and prefer building connection through physical activities, talking about external matters (e.g., sports, politics, work), engaging in “good-natured ribbing,” exchanging jokes, and seeking and offering practical advice with their male friends.”

Yes.  This is how males work.  This is how males form hierarchy.  This is why we aren’t known as women.

Wait, John Wilder, you’re telling me that men and women are different?  I have been clearly told that they are exactly the same.

Dear reader, it is clear that men are different.  Why else would Gillette© have an entire commercial telling men how awful we are, which happened just last week?  Clearly, we don’t have a commercial from Playtex™ telling women not to kill their kids by drowning them in a car which would be equally as valid, but it’s still not there.  So, men and women are different, in that men are evil.  Men are so evil that a razor company, which theoretically sells to men, can spend nearly two minutes telling men how awful they are.

How bad was the commercial?  This bad:

Gillette-meme

(H/T Bookwormroom LINK)

But at least The Woman’s March which happened this weekend is non-partisan, right?  Just seeking to help women, right?

Here are excerpts from their goals (LINK):

  • We believe that gun violence is a women’s issue and that guns are not how we keep our communities free from violence.
  • We believe it is our moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system. The rate of imprisonment has grown faster for women than men, increasing by 700% since 1980, and the majority of women in prison have a child under the age of 18.
  • We believe in Gender Justice. We must have the power to control our bodies and be free from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes. We must free ourselves and our society from the institution of awarding power, agency and resources disproportionately to masculinity to the exclusion of others.
  • Immigration reform must establish a roadmap to citizenship, and provide equal opportunities and workplace protections for all.
  • All workers – including domestic and farm workers, undocumented and migrant workers – must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage.

So, we have it.  Feminism is strong and growing.  Feminism is clearly leftist.  And not just a little leftist, but full blown Marxist.  There are other implications of feminism that are flowing through society now, but those will have to wait for a future post.  But feminism continues.

areyouopressed

Strangely, I didn’t see this list on the Women’s March website. 

Again, the idea is clear:  Create a victim culture.  Create alienation with the social norms that underpin Western Civilization.  Divide a nation.

The goal?

Power.

The irony?  In every single socialist paradise, from the USSR to Cuba to China, feminism isn’t tolerated.

Why?

Once they have power, they won’t share.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.  All competing pleasures will be destroyed.  But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” – 1984

Mortality, Bill Murray, Art Lessons, and Avatar

“Two years he walks the earth.  No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.” – Into the Wild

haystack

I’ve left a map.

“That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s an unusual thing for The Boy to say when discussing death.  In this case, my death.

First, some context.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m going to die.  I have no desire to die anytime soon, mind you, but I realize that it’s something that, statistically, happens to 100% of us.  Not 99%.  Not 99.999%.  Not even 99.9999999999%.

100%.

I think the human mind has developed safeguards to distract itself from facing this inevitability, primarily so we don’t spend our days in a corner sobbing uncontrollably when we’re young, muttering, “What is it all about?  Why do we even try?  What if I never meet Bill Murray?”  However, there comes a time in life when you begin to understand that death will come.  If I am statistically average, this fate is decades away and again, I’m not particularly interested in hurrying it along.

I’m not sure the exact moment I made peace with the idea of death.  It might have been when I was stuck watching a DVD of Avatar®.  That will make anyone long for death, so that was probably it.

avatard

I kept waiting for Papa Smurf® to show up during Avatar©.  Or the movie to be good. Neither of those things happened.

As luck would have it, Pop Wilder lived to be quite old, and was in generally very good physical health throughout his life.  At the end he was taking in more calories in pill coatings than food, but he was in good enough shape to walk for miles.

His physical health was fine.  What happened to Pop Wilder was that he started forgetting.  Perhaps the biggest blow was that, at the end, he had forgotten me entirely.  I’m fairly certain that the last few times that I saw him he had no recollection of me.  His eyes were blank – worse than blank.  When he looked at me he had the wariness one reserves for a stranger or a congressman.

I had been prepared for this – it was obvious that his memory loss was increasing exponentially each time I saw him.  I think that the last time he really knew that I was his son was several years before he passed on.  And that was okay.  I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, but I will say that I had said everything that I needed to say to Pop before he lost his memory.  I was at peace.  Again, not easy, not happy, but at peace.  I understood that there was nothing that man nor medical science could do for him, so there was no reason for anger.

I hadn’t, however, realized the impact it had on The Boy.  The Boy saw the same things that I did, and knew that Pop Wilder was no longer the grandfather he knew.  The Boy could sense that Pop Wilder wasn’t present anymore.  Perhaps this is the most basic element of horror – watching a human transform from the person you know very well into a person you don’t know at all.  It’s implicit in every horror transformation story from vampire to werewolf to zombie.  Seeing it when you are young hits you even harder.  That transformation is made more terrifying because you didn’t even know it was possible.

Fast forward to Saturday, six days ago.  We were driving home from an event, and I mentioned that there were some things I wanted to see from him in the next twenty or thirty years.

“Don’t dawdle.  I don’t want to have to wait to die when I’m ready to die.”

It was really meant as a joke.  The look on The Boy’s face as he drove, though told me he was thinking about it.  Deeply.

“I saw what Grandpa Wilder went through.  That was tough.”  Pop Wilder had passed on years ago.  “I like your idea better.”

“My idea?”

“Yeah.  The one where you’re going to go off into the woods with just your .30-06 and enough supplies to live.  Or die.  That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s true.  I had shared with The Boy my thoughts that, should I be judged to be terminal, or if it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, that rather than lingering, undergoing chemotherapy, or having to sit through another Avatar© movie, I’d sling my rifle and enough physical supplies that if I worked at it and was skilled, I could live.  Until, of course, I couldn’t.  It would be an adventure.  Maybe I’d keep a diary.  That would be some great blogging from beyond the grave.  I could even sketch memes in pencil.

deer

See, drawing is easy!

“I hope that you’d drop me where there are bears.”

“Why?”

“Well, one might attack me and I could fight back with a knife.  It would at least allow me to go out of this life like I came into it – screaming and covered in blood that wasn’t mine.”  Okay, I stole that joke.  At least The Boy thought it was original.

He laughed.

But the point was a clear one.  I know that I certainly couldn’t have dropped Pop Wilder into the forest – that certainly wasn’t anything he had ever asked for.  Watching him decline, however, was tough.  In my mind he will always be 45, at the height of his business acumen, personal physical power, and filled with the vitality that kept him always going.  When I think of him, that’s the man I see.

I can’t square the conception of my future as one that ends in a nursing home, surrounded by the never ending too warm room and hollow echo of footsteps on beige vinyl tile and antiseptic smell of hospital grade cleansers.  No.  The frozen morning’s icy touch on my cheeks, the sound of the wind rushing up the snow covered valley, and the harsh smoke of a campfire.  That has a better feel.  A truer feel.

An adventure to cap off an adventure, my next day of life dependent upon my wits and the cold steel of my knife and rifle.

owl

If there or no bears to fight, I’m sure I can pick on an owl to fight to the death.  Plus?  Owls are easy to draw – only two steps.

I’m not sure that walking away into the woods will happen – there are certainly plenty of things that would prevent this from being my destiny:  obligations and events beyond number, that chance to hang around and become drinking buddies with Bill Murray.

But right now?  This adventure continues.  It’s time to make the most of the next few decades . . . there’s only so much time.

Get busy.

Life At the Margin, Jeff Bezos, and Milking Peeps

“Jeff Bezos wet his pants!”

“I did not – it was apple juice from before.” – The Simpsons

robojeff

I hear she ordered more toilet paper through the Jeffbot™ while they were out at Sonic®.

The margin is where life gets interesting.

  • Eating: It’s not the first bite of chocolate cake that gets you fat, it’s the last.
  • Booze: It’s not the first sip of alcohol that gets you drunk.
  • Driving: It’s not the first 65mph that gets you the speeding ticket.
  • Elections: It’s not the first 49% of votes that get you elected.
  • Safety: It’s not the base load that a bridge can carry that keeps you safe.

Life is interesting and gets more interesting at the margin.  When you think of margin, you may think of a soft, buttery spread that will kill you with trans fats.  That’s margarine.  No, the margin is the edge of the piece of paper, the difference between inside the envelope and the outside.  The margin is evident all around us if we take the time to look.

But, you say, “John Wilder, this is Wealthy Wednesday, what does the margin have to do with money?  And, I’m not stupid.  I know the difference between butter and margarine.  One is made from the milk of Peeps®, and the other comes from spiders.  But I do forget which is which.”

peeps

Be careful to milk the Peeps™ and not the Chihuahua.

This is Wealthy Wednesday, and margins fit right in.  When you think about finances, the impact of the margin is especially noticeable.

Businesses depend upon the margin.  Let’s take a construction company – when building, say, a new love nest for Jeff Bezos, the first dollars the company receives must cover costs.  There is the cost for the concrete, for the plywood, for the anti-ex-wife minefield.  Each and every cost associated with building the Alexa® enabled Love Shack Fire 2000™ must be paid before there’s any profit.  The only dollars that contribute to profit are the marginal dollars, the last dollars to hit the books.  That’s why a building contractor will fight like a velociraptor in a bag of laser pointers for that next dollar.  If a contractor got 9% profit for the Bezos Wealth Reduction Chamber© and asks for 1% more, to Bezos it’s just 1%, and he just lost $65,000,000,000 anyway, so that 1% sounds pretty small.  But to the contractor, it’s a 10% increase in profit, which is huge.  Getting 5% more for Jeff’s Carnal Cottage of Whole Foods Knowledge©?  That’s 50% more profit.

When corporate profits are up by 1% of revenue, that can create (in the example above) an increase of profits by 10%.  Profits are set at the margin.  Our economy is powered by the margin.

pushback

I guess that means the orbital laser system is out, too?

Taxes are set at the margin, too.  The top tax rate is 37%, which means that every dollar (once you’ve made $500,000) you only get to keep 63%.  That 37% in taxes?  It’s burned ritually in Washington D.C. every Summer Solstice.  They used to sacrifice a virgin congressman as well, but they swear they don’t have any of those anymore, not since Jeff Bezos visited.  But you pay more in taxes as you earn more money.

It equally applies to an individual’s income.  The most important dollar I make is the marginal one – that last dollar is the one that can be saved, spent on margarine butter or anything I want.  The first dollars are spoken for, they have to go to pay the mortgage, to feed two always starving children, to buy electricity.  But the last dollars are freedom itself.  The margin provides growth, to the extent that it exists.  If there’s a negative margin?  You’re eating your savings, or, worse, living on credit.

The margin also applies to what you do in life.  You can put in minimal effort, and be average or a little bit below average.  Or, you can work harder to push the margin, and be great at what you do.  As I get older, I’ve become convinced that talent can be a curse – it makes life easy.  Easy is not your friend. Easy provides good results with minimal effort.  That’s akin to jogging through life while everybody else has to practice sprinting.  Eventually dedication overcomes talent and they sprint past you to live on the margin, where all the nice things are.

margin

But if you have extra effort and talent?  You can live on the margin.  You can create the margin.

So, go create the margin.  It’s easier than squeezing Peeps© to make margarine.

American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America

“Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by International Communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

2r300d

There are times when you write something that you think is important, and you want to get it right.  This is one of those times.  I hope you find this post worthwhile.

A few weeks ago, a very good friend sent me an article.  The article intrigued me, and I began to research the background of the article.  What I found was stunning.  The article itself is this (LINK), from Time® magazine, you don’t have to click – I’ll summarize it below.  Time™, I’ll note, very appropriately has a red border but they haven’t added the hammer and sickle yet.  Yet.

I found this article disturbing, but it really matched with the research that I’d done up to this point.   There is a cultural shift of the Left, and the Left is moving ever farther, ever faster left.  I wrote about that here (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg), which is probably what made my friend send the link.

I read Tayari Jones’ Time® magazine piece.  I found it to be an example of the outcome of the most brutal form of programming and child exploitation that I’ve seen recently, though I will admit that I try to shy away from Disney® movies.  In short, her parents were Black Nationalists (Her description, not mine.  “Black Nationalists” refers to a group that wants to either repatriate to Africa or to carve out a separate nation for blacks in the United States.) that convinced a five-year-old that Gulf Oil© was responsible for killing black children in Africa so much so that the child, Tayari, would not ride in a car fueled by Gulf Oil® to the zoo.  The piece ends with simplicity.  All to the Left is joyous and moral.  All to the Right is evil death.

Should we celebrate our tolerance and civility as we stanch the wounds of the world and the climate with a poultice of national unity?

Jones wants to further divide us, or destroy those who don’t and won’t conform to her (undefined) viewpoints.  Also, the last time the word “poultice” was used out loud was by Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies.  But her title says it all, “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground.”

That led me to wonder more about the author – what was going on in her head that led to this article?  What are her ultimate goals?  Featured prominently in the article was the Soweto Uprising, a 1976 confrontation between black students and the police, which appears in hindsight to be an unplanned 4th Generation Warfare (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means) offensive.  I hit Wikipedia to learn more.  Then, there it was, the missing link.

“No Middle Road,” an essay by Joe Slovo is listed as influential in the communist African National Congress (ANC) at that time.    The original title of the article by Jones, as enshrined in the URL, is telling:  “Moral Middle Myth.”  Obviously they are connected.  Again, from Jones:

I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse.

Okay.  Now you have my attention.  We have a person actively preaching division and implied violence whose suppressed essay title echoes an influential essay from 1976.  My next question was simple:  Who the heck was Joe Slovo?

Joe Slovo was communist, born Yossel Mashel Slovo in Soviet Lithuania who moved to South Africa with his family when he was eight.  Slovo was a deeply loyal communist who admired Stalin.  He was exiled from South Africa for 27 years and spent that time launching and orchestrating terrorist strikes in South Africa while abroad.  His operations included bombings of civilians.  Slovo did have some spare time to oversee the murder and execution of people thought to be traitors to the cause, often through putting a tire around their neck, filling it with gasoline, and setting it on fire.  The nickname for this practice was “necklacing.”  Now Slovo didn’t actually do these things himself, he merely planned them and was in charge of the organization that made them happen.  See?  His hands are clean.

commie

Slovo was such a leftist, the only thing he on the right of is this picture.

Slovo had to be an influence on Tayari Jones.  Understanding the influences can be important, besides, Tayari Jones didn’t mention exactly what she wanted done with those she opposes.  Maybe the essay she was influenced by would?

I decided to look for it on the Internet, where I can find out what was on TV on NBC® on a Sunday evening in June of 1983.  I spent more time than I’d like to admit spend sifting through Marxist websites, looking for the essay.  I went to the second page of Google© results.  Exhaustive research, indeed.  I even found where Marxists who had previously posted a copy were looking for a copy to post.  It’s like the document had been purposely scrubbed from the web.  Odd – once information hits the web, it normally flies free and multiplies.  Not this.

I finally found that the essay was included in a book, Southern Africa:  The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin/Pelican, 1976).  That’s the only place I could find it.  A seller on Amazon had a copy for less than $8, so I bought it.  It took weeks to arrive.  It was old – the pages were yellowing.  It also looked like a socialist’s mind:  it had never been opened.

What had I expected?  The usual Marxist language designed to be confusing and cult-like.

bafflegab

Whenever anyone talks like this?  They want you to nod and pretend you understand.

No.  Slovo was very clear in his writing.  Much of what Slovo writes are about conditions and history that are unique to South Africa.  And, reconstructing and solving the problems and historical injustices of South Africa, real as they were and are now, is far beyond this post.  But Slovo very clearly sets out a battle plan that is being used against the United States right now.

For instance, on page 118, Slovo states:  “To be born white means by definition to be born privileged . . . .” I hadn’t heard of the concept of “White Privilege” until 2014 or so, and then it was related back to an essay (White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) by Peggy McIntosh, who you can read more about here in this excellent essay on Quillette: (LINK).

The important idea is that McIntosh didn’t originate this divisive concept – Slovo wrote about it in his 1976 essay.  It may be even older, but this is the earliest reference I’ve found.  And Slovo specifically introduced it to open additional divisions in South Africa.

Slovo continues:  “. . . the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.”  In a further parallel with today, Slovo describes the history of struggle for liberation as “The Resistance” as he builds a case that his dreamed-of communist state can only be brought about via violence, which he calls “armed struggle,” rather than “killing people I don’t agree with, and also kids on my side, if we can get good pictures for the press.”

Slovo clearly expected and desired a war.  In the time he lived, Slovo completely misread what happened in the communist takeover in Vietnam and he was thinking that the Vietnamese had won a military victory.  They had not.  The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been defeated in almost every engagement.  The North Vietnamese won because they demoralized the United States and made the politicians feel the war was unwinnable – clearly a Fourth Generation warfare victory.

Ultimately the ANC realized, however dimly, that the deaths of black South Africans during the Soweto Uprising was their victory.  They won by appearing to be the victims.  And they won by creating a coalition of victims who would never feel that they could never be repaid for their pain – no reparations would ever be acceptable.

Page 205 contains the telling sentence:  “The struggle can no longer be centered on pleas for civil rights or for reforms within the framework of white dominance; it is a struggle for people’s power, in which mass ferment and the growing importance of the armed factor go hand in hand.”  Slovo worked to use the ethnic divisions in the country to create a situation where raw power would end up in the hands of the communists.

There we have it:  the end goal is not rights, or prosperity, or freedom, or liberty.  The end goal is naked power.

funnycom

Back to the United States, we find that could never happen here:

Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours.

Reparations for us are not only necessary because we are economically harmed, exploited and stolen from — while the violence against us is never acknowledged — but because in order for us to create and move work for Black liberation, it requires resources and MONEY. We live in a white supremacist capitalist world, so ain’t no spinning webs of lies around “money isn’t the answer.” It is because money and exploitation and power are interconnected concepts of violence. Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma.

We need housing, transportation, food, clothes, free space for meetings and work space; we need laptops, cell phones, encrypted systems for communication, solar power and LAND. Stop playing. Y’all really thought pulling up to the protest in your Hyundai was gonna be enough? Nah. You have to give us everything we need and more, because even if it means you go without — it doesn’t matter because that’s how we been living for 400+ years. Reparations will never be negotiable. So if you’re not willing to talk money, you are not here for #BlackLivesMatter as a movement or for us as individuals.

(H/T Liberty’s Torch (LINK)) Original that I tracked down is wearyourvoicemag.com.

I thought this quote was a parody until I found it at the website it was originally posted on.  It appears that she’s serious.  That’s from Ashleigh Shackelford, who seems really nice when talking to people that support her, as that passage above was a shout-out to her white supporters.  I left her spelling, emphasis, and capitalization intact.  Ms. Shackelford is the product of the same mentality of Marxist Joe Slovo and (I’m assuming) Marxist Tayari Jones.

As I wrote about earlier (Seneca’s Cliff and You), it’s far easier to destroy something than to make something.  In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight.  This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society.  Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.

MMback

He’s going to have to work awfully hard.

One thing we’ve seen – when this tactic works, ending it is difficult – look at the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  Once before in the comments on this blog people brought up the Irish Troubles and people started arguing about who was responsible in the comments.  On this blog.  In 2018.

I was certain that when the Soviet Union fell, that the world was safe.  In my mind, it should have been clear from the horrors of Cambodia, to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe winning their own freedom from oppression that the subject was closed.  Even if people couldn’t see that communism was evil, at least they could see that it didn’t work, right?

No.  Like Jason or Michael Myers communism keeps coming back.  It appears that, like Freddy Kruger, communism will keep going as long as people like Slovo, Jones, and Shackelford will fight and kill (even kill people on their own side) for power.  But only as long as there are people stupid enough to believe them.

Thankfully there’s no one like that in the United States.

aoc

 

Slovo grave picture:  Andrew Hall [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini

“I’ve never been great at conflict resolution.  Not without a blade, and several rolls of plastic wrap.” – Dexter

wings

I would say that the writing of this book is both Original and Crispy.  This was actually released for free in 2017 by KFC. 

I got home on Wednesday night and the aroma of baked chicken filled the house.  It smelled like Colonel Sanders® had developed a scented candle, and it was amazing.  I wanted to rub the smell under my arms, in my hair, and maybe on my pillow so I could smell it in my sleep.

I had just dropped Pugsley off for wrestling practice, and The Boy had just gotten back from his wrestling practice and had dropped in to grab his term paper to go meet with a study group before flying out of the house faster than a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch.  I am not at liberty to tell you what a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch is, but I assure you it is quite fast.

The Mrs. and I were left alone in the house, a rare enough occurrence, and The Mrs. pulled the hot, plump, greasy, piping-hot chicken thighs and legs from the oven, slowly, letting them linger and adjust to the kitchen air, their moist meat hidden only by the sheerest of skin.  Whew.  I’m getting goosebumps just reading that.

Given that Pugsley and The Boy were normally there for dinner, she’d made about forty-five pounds of chicken.  She had also made gravy and some sort of low-carb mashed cauliflower that was pretending to be potatoes.  I generally try to avoid mashed things that aren’t actual potatoes – I’d just as soon use the mashed cauliflower for drywall repair, or execute it for being an impostor.

“Food’s hot, come and get it.”  The Mrs. walked back with a single chicken thigh and some of the drywall spackle on her plate, covered with gravy.

“I’m fasting.”

“Okay.  Crap.  Now who’s going to eat all of this chicken?”

The Mrs.’ dog Emo looked hopeful and fat.  Her other dog, BWL (broccoli with legs, because he’s so stupid he’s nearly a vegetable) just looked confused.  Which is normal.

Wait, what?  Did you say fasting, John Wilder?

fastcult

Yeah.  On a lark, I decided to fast for two reasons.  The first one is that it tied into a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape.  I’m a strong proponent New Year’s resolutions – they’re a good sign that even when you’re as awesome as me, you have the amazing humility to realize you could be a bit more excellent.  Truth:  it would not hurt me to lose a few pounds, especially if there’s a good story to it and it was unusual and did NOT involve X-Acto® knives and a vacuum cleaner.  I’m not doing that again, at least not without more tarps and duct tape.

The second reason I decided to fast is that I can’t remember going more than, say, two days without eating.  Ever.  I’ve got an iron stomach, and even when I was sick as a small child I never missed more than a single meal.  Could I go longer?  I remember when The Mrs. and I were first married that The Reverend Al Sharpton© had declared a “hunger strike” to protest that he wasn’t getting enough media attention a bombing range in Puerto Rico.  The Mrs. and I were listening to the radio one day when it emerged that Al’s “hunger strike” included actual food whenever he was hungry.  So, immediately we christened it “A Hungry Strike” as in, “I sure am hungry, I could use a lot more soup.”  Imagine that line in Al Sharpton’s voice, it’s funnier that way.

Our society is seems to be built on the idea that limitless on-demand food is normal and has existed since the aliens first created us as a slave race to develop PEZ®.  It’s also taken as gospel truth that if you don’t eat every four hours YOU WILL DIE.  It’s almost like most people think that for all of the history of humanity, we had a Schlotzsky’s Sandwiches© to serve salami subs on sourdough in the Serengeti or a Denny’s™ dishing dinners and desserts to Danes in dusty diluvial Denmark.  But the sad truth is that there has been the precedent of a society going from abundance to starvation in short order – just look at the fall of the Soviet Union, or that night that Wendy’s™ was closed because the Frosty© machine exploded.

overlordcat

Cult leader Mr. Fizzlesticks liked Kool-Aid™ before he got beamed to the Mother Ship.

I’d imagine that for most of history (which is before McDonalds®, Taco Bell©, or even agriculture), when you ate, you ate really, really well from that mammoth you took down.  When you didn’t eat?  Well, that might be a week.  I can see that ancient people wouldn’t get all trendy and put out websites and courses devoted to fasting.  No, they just didn’t have any food.

But even people you thought were tough, well, I remember watching a biography about T.E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia.  In it, a friend (of his, not of mine) related how Lawrence once went 45 hours without eating or sleeping just to see if he could.

Hell, I called that finals week in college.  But, again, never can I recall going over 48 hours without food.  What the heck, I’d give it a try.  And as I write this sentence, I’m on hour 94, so in two hours I’ll have gone four days without food.

I’m not dead.

And the really, really odd thing is that for most of the 94 hours I haven’t been horribly hungry.  After I started the fast, I started doing some research.  It turns out that there are a very large number of people in the world who fast, not because they don’t have food, but because they think it has more benefits than being Jeff Bezo’s $65 billion dollar ex-wife:

  • Weight Loss
  • Cancer Prevention
  • Increased Lifespan
  • Make You Telepathic on Wednesday
  • Reduced Inflammation
  • Urine Glows So You Don’t Need Bathroom Lights
  • Lower Blood Pressure
  • Reduce Type 2 Diabetes
  • Make You Bulletproof
  • More Better Braining, er, Thinking

Okay, some of these are sketchy, and not just the ones that I obviously made up.  It turns out the “increased lifespan” claim was based on some sort of worm that they starved.  The worm lives an average of 21 days and they starved it for a day.  Which is like you or I not eating for three years.  Yeah.  And the cancer claims from starving rats every other day.  If there’s one thing medical science knows how to do, it’s how to cure cancer in rats.

The main reason I did it, though, was curiosity.  Could I?

Yes.

I started out with the idea of doing three days, or 72 hours.  At the end of the third day it was going so well I said, hey, how about doing four days?  I’m glad I did.  I’ll explain below:

On day one it was like . . . nothing happened, because I regularly go 24 hours without eating, and have done so since I was a kid.  I had three mints and a dill pickle.  So, yes, this is technically not a complete fast, but the total number of calories was about thirty.  For the day.

Day two was a bit tougher, and was about four mints.  And three pickles.  So, sixty-five calories.  I felt fine, and not very hungry at all.  Day three was the same, but after exercising (which I do at lunch) for about 40 minutes I felt nearly comatose and my hands were very, very cold all day.  Then, almost like a light going on, I felt fine, and had plenty of energy for day four.  On day four, I had a pickle and two mints, so, 25 calories.

I justified the pickles based on the tiny amounts of calories and the salt that I wasn’t getting anywhere else, even though I was still engaging in some pretty intense and sweaty exercise.  The mints?  Those were for my coworkers.

Total calories:  185 in four days, plus all the coffee and water (both plain and carbonated) that I could drink.  Which was a lot.  185 calories is 18% of a Double Whopper with Cheese©, or like two bites.  Over four days.  So, I count that as fasting even though The Mrs. rolled her eyes and made some comment about “sounds like a hungry strike” under her breath.

cult

Bringing snacks at Fasting Cult?  Best duty ever.

But I’m an amateur at fasting and I know it.  One thing I have learned, however, is if there’s a human activity, there’s a cult on somewhere on the Internet devoted to it.  When started researching, I found people were fasting for periods of up to 100 days.  My little four day fast wasn’t much in comparison to those people.  They had to plan for two things for such long durations without eating, electrolytes/vitamins and refeeding.

It turns out the dangerous part of fasting for a long time, besides starving to death, is starting to eat again.  It turns out that if you start eating again incorrectly that you can short out the lithium battery in your heart, or strip the gears on your lungs.  Or something.  I’m not a doctor, but the Internet Cult of Fasting says you can actually have a fairly dangerous phosphate demand, especially if you eat a lot of carbs when you let your inner fat person out to eat everything in sight.  Your body requires phosphates to process carbs, and you can pull ‘em out of your blood (where it’s required to keep the lithium battery in your heart going) and into your cells (where they’re required to process the carbs).  It would be really stupid to die because of Pop Tarts™, but they probably kill more people than cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy).

bikinicult2

There are some cults where recruiting is easy, except for the heretic on the left . . . no respectable cult has maroon bikinis!

Phosphate balance (along with some other conditions) can kill you.  I’d try to be funnier, but refeeding really can be fatal and leave a really stupid headline like “Popular Internet Writer Killed By Eating Pop Tarts® After Not Eating On Purpose.”

But hey, if Al Sharpton can make it . . . .

First Meal in 96 Hours Update:

Three pieces of baked chicken, two handfuls of blueberries, and two hamburger patties from the nearby Sonic™ since Pugsley got the wrong order.  Still not dead.  I’m feeling as full as a French bloomer weasel on Thanksgiving Dinner.  But the French bloomer weasel is endangered . . . .

Recessions, Depressions, Mullets, Coyotes and . . . Girls Drinking Beer

“Well, Eunice is depressed and Corinne is depressed and I was just debating whether or not to join them.” – Soap

economics2

Some things are better with beer.  Okay, that’s a lie.  Everything is better with beer.

Economic systems are nearly like a living organism, which makes them utterly unlike Nancy Pelosi, who is comprised of wholly of spare Abraham Lincoln parts from Disneyland’s® Hall of Presidents™ exhibit.  Like a living organism, economic systems start with raw materials and energy and produce products that people consume, like malls, bicycle-powered smoothie blenders, toddler grease, iPaws™ Apple® music for pets, and McDonalds® “food-based products.”  And like any living organism, economies grow, get sick, age, and eventually apply for Social Security.  When economies get sick?  We call that a recession.

How do economies end up in a recession? Describe it with a metaphor that incorporates cars, coyotes, Brad Pitt, and mullets.  (40 pts)

Economies have the potential to become unstable systems.

On a crisp, Christmas morning way back in time, I was driving due east on a straight, flat paved road.  It had snowed a few days before, and the county had been out with a snowplow and had opened up a lane.  On the parts of the road that had been plowed, a thin layer of snow had been compacted by passing tires into a very solid base.  It wasn’t slippery like ice, but it certainly didn’t grab on to a tire like dry pavement does.

But the plow didn’t clean off the entire road.  It left two inches or so of snow on the shoulders of the road on either side.  It was very, very cold, probably -20°F, and when it’s that cold and dry, snow behaves differently – after a few hours snow tends to become more compact, solid, and crunchy, almost like Angelina Jolie’s hair when I pet it when she’s sleeping, before she found me living in her attic and got that restraining order.

I was moving along at about 70 miles per hour – I figured that even if a sheriff pulled me over, he’d give me a Christmas morning break.  Nobody gets tickets on Christmas, right?  Without thinking I gradually drifted over onto that two inches of hard snow on the right shoulder.  Then?

Chaos.

I’d been moving down the road, but now everything was spinning.  The car kicked up a cloud of snow as it spun, and all I could see was white.  The car kept spinning.  Now it was up on two wheels, and I could feel that the car was tilted at about a 45 degree angle.

And the car kept spinning.

As suddenly as the car had started spinning, it slowed rapidly and stopped.  But it was still only supported by the two wheels on the driver’s side.  As the spinning stopped, the car hesitated with the wheels paused above the pavement, like a coyote running off of a cliff.  Gravity finally won out over rotation, and the passenger wheels slammed back to the ground, dropping three or so feet.

coyote

I’m not impressed.  I’ve survived worse.

The car stalled.  The defroster was still on, spraying a mist of powdered snow into the interior of the car.  Every window of the car was covered on the outside with a thin coating of powdery snow.

I opened the door and got out.  I had been travelling east, but the car was pointing due south toward a three-strand barbed wire fence.  I looked west, where I’d come from.  A very complicated set of tire tracks described the arcs and whirls my car had made as it pirouetted several hundred yards en pointe to where it sat.  The car had continued to follow the very straight road.

skyhawk

This is the same model, more or less, mine came with optional mullet enhancing. 

Know that feeling you get when you just missed death by ounces and fractions of a degree and your system is flooded with adrenaline?  It feels good.  Much better than being dead.

I brushed the snow off the outside windows – the entire car was covered in a fine powder.  I let the defroster melt the snow that had blown inside though the defroster.  I got back in.  I drove on.  I needed to find a poker game or a lottery ticket or an honest lawyer – no use wasting a lucky day like that one.

That spin out, though, was the automotive equivalent of a bad recession.

Everything was going along fine.  Sure, it looked stable.  And, as long as nothing changed, it was stable.  But when one little variable changed, in this case the friction on two tires on one side of the car, the illusion of stability vanished in a cloud of rotating snow that looked like the an Olympic™ figure skater trying to drill herself into a television announcer contract.

That’s generally the case with the economy.  Everything looks fine.  It’s moving along.  Then?

  • Interest rates spike, or
  • Someone sticks a pin in a Dow-Jones voodoo doll, or
  • Bubbles pricing in stock that people paid way too much for I bought become apparent, or
  • It becomes obvious that nobody needs a seventh iPhone®, or
  • Housing prices suddenly do the impossible and go down.

What happens then is the economy comes out of the spin, looks around, and starts moving again.  Sure, it was close to disaster but it turns out that, just like the car, the economy is okay.  We can start the ignition and keep rolling down the road, our collective mullets blowing in the wind.

mullet

Okay, this is probably the first time you’ve seen a mullet used in an economics metaphor.  You’re welcome.

Everything in the world was fine.  The factories are still there, the people are still there, and all we need to do is have enough confidence to start buying Johnny Depp® movies again, and we’ll be okay.  After a few years, we’ll forget that we’re headed down a snow packed road and spin it out again.  No real harm, no fouls.  And the recessions actually perform a service – a good recession causes poorly managed businesses to fail, and leaves room for well-managed businesses with great products to grow like a well-oiled mullet.

But what causes an economy to fail?  Describe it using a pickup truck for extra credit. (40 pts)

Time went on, and I traded out my car for a used pickup.  It had seen better days, but I was convinced it was solid.  It was making a rattling noise, and I was going to take it to a friend’s house so we could look at it, and it was again around Christmastime.  Sensing a theme?

As I drove down the interstate, the passenger in the car made the comment, “I’m not sure that this pickup is reliable.”

“Reliable?  This old truck is solid.  It’ll last for a decade!”  With that comment, I brought my fist down on the dash to show how solid the truck was.

Whatever sense of irony is buried in the universe activated in that second.  There was an explosion, a flash, and a 12 foot diameter cloud of grey smoke.  A piston rod came apart and shot down through the engine and the oil pan and onto the road below me at the speed of light – I think they found it in Australia when it came up through the ground and up into orbit.  All of the engine oil dropped onto the highway in less than a second.  Every red light on the dashboard lit up.  Oddly, the engine lasted exactly two more miles to a parking lot where I began to walk to a pay phone, which was a thing that existed before cell phones.

selfdestruct

This is not the same Jeep®, but looks pretty similar.  Except for the “exploded” part.

Those were the last two miles I ever drove that pickup.  It was dead.

Whereas even large recessions like the Great Depression are hiccups of a functional system (I can get in my car and drive off), this failure was deeper.  The system was broken.

What breaks an economic system?

  • Lack of people.
  • Lack of knowledge.
  • Lack of raw materials.
  • Lack of energy.
  • The French.

These are factors that will cause a civilization to fail, completely and utterly.  Let’s take them one at a time:

Lack of people.  Like any country, Rome encountered problems.  To fix the problem, the Romans made rules.  But, like Congress today, the rules that the Romans made . . . caused more problems.  Solution?  More rules.  Which led to more problems.  Eventually, it was so bad that the Romans had to make a law that the firstborn son had to have the same job as his dad.   This was fairly unpopular – eventually the people wandered away, which was also illegal, but by this time all the soldiers had walked away, too.  Other causes of depopulation include disease (like Ebola, LINK), bombs, and starvation.

But we still have the recipe – we can make more people if we need to.  One civilization may end, but another one is just a hundred years away, or 40 if you’re in Utah.

Lack of knowledge.  The secret of making concrete was lost for nearly 1500 years with the fall of the Roman Empire.  Knowledge of how to make plumbing out of lead, pyramids, Viking sunstones, and William Shatner’s hair have been lost and found again.  While these didn’t kill civilizations, they certainly contributed to the inability to quickly remake them to their previous glory.

We can experiment, though, and learn again.  As long as we learn to skip the lead plumbing this time and keep it in the paint chips that toddlers eat, where it belongs.

Lack of raw materials.  Ireland was deforested to make ships for the British Navy.  Ireland may have fewer trees, but certainly the British Navy was able to become even stronger.  There was a report issued in 1900 noting that the United States would run out of trees by 1920 because so many were required to make railroad crossties. The ability to treat them with creosote to make them last for longer was developed.  Heck, nowadays some railroad crossties are even made out of concrete, since we found that recipe again.

Humanity has regularly found substitutes for raw materials throughout history.  Soylent Green anyone?

soylent

I like the Bald Eagle and Panda Dip® best, myself.

Lack of energy.  300 years ago if your civilization was running out of energy that meant you didn’t have enough oats to feed your horse or your mule or your peasant.  Probably in that order.  Now with a global economy that produces trillions of dollars in food, products, and sweatpants each year running out of energy is something else entirely.  The fate of mankind is the fate of energy – coal, oil, renewable or nuclear.  It’s so important that I’m working on a series of posts on just that subject.  It is the single most important non-political question in the history of humanity.  This makes Climate Change® look like the kiddie pool, so much so that I’ve been working on a post (posts?) on just this question, which I’ll finish sometime before oil goes to $100 and Justin Bieber is elected president.

Without energy we would have all of the economy of 1420’s mud-hut dwelling Frenchmen.  Which brings us to:

The French. 

Well, we have to blame someone else.  They were convenient.

What’s next?  Summarize your previous answers.  Incorporate girls drinking beer. (20 pts)

I fully expect that there will be a recession within two years, and at this point I think the recession will be a lot like my car spinning out – it will be a recession that doesn’t expose structural weaknesses in the economy, but it will be significant.  Reliable?  This old truck economy is solid.  It’ll last for a decade!

economicgirl