Month: July 2020

Don’t Run Out The Clock On Life.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Blade Runner

RIPLEY

Why haven’t aliens been here more frequently?  They saw the reviews – one star.

One of the benefits of living in Modern Mayberry is that there are no shortage of places where you can contribute.  After being assistant peewee coach for The Boy’s football (the one men play, not the game for socialist European women) I volunteered to be head coach for Pugsley’s team.  The first season, I was less than spectacular.  And saying I was less than spectacular is being generous.

Let me be clear – when you’re coaching third and fourth graders who can’t even calculate the orbital dynamics of the planet Mercury because they don’t know relativity and keep getting the wrong answer using Newtonian mechanics, it’s the coaching.  The kids are, more or less, equally inept and equally talented.  You put the big kids on the line and the fast kids as backs and receivers and wonder what to do with the small, slow kids.

As a first year coach?  I was like a small, slow kid.  I’m not sure we won a game my first year.  That wasn’t the kids; that season was on me – it was all my fault.  I’ll admit I have faults, and so will The Mrs.   The Mrs. says I have two main faults – that I don’t listen and some other one.

REFS

In Europe they call it 30.48cm ball.

I remember the first game of my second pee-wee football season as clearly as if it were yesterday.  The offense was on the field.  We had just made a first down.  There was a minute and twenty seconds (seventeen metric minutes) left on the clock.  I did the math – thirty seconds a play, four downs . . . and they were out of time outs.

Wait a minute, I thought.  We were up by five points.  If we just ran three plays and didn’t fumble the ball and let them score a touchdown – we would win!

All we had to do was run out the clock.  Our only enemy was time.

I told the quarterback to just kneel down when the center hiked the ball to him.  For a second, he looked confused – we had played the whole game being aggressive on offense, and we’d racked up 28 points.  Then it clicked in his head – he was a really smart 4th grader.  All he had to do was not fumble.

He had figured out what caught me almost by surprise:  we just had to run out the clock.  Spoiler alert:  we won.  Running out the clock in a football game is a valuable strategy.

EX

I was going to tell another football joke, but it had an offensive line.

How does this translate off the field?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post – I use a planner.  Some of the things that are on my daily to-do list are straightforward.  Plan to take over the world.  Remember to feed the kraken.  But I recently added one:

Are You Running Out The Clock?

You might think that’s a weird thing to think about every day when you go into work, and maybe it is.  In the crazy, deflating and inflating economy of 2020, a job might be something that’s required for survival.  But a job also might be something you’re going through the motions on and running the clock, and your life out every day watching the seconds tick away until 5pm.

Now, don’t get me wrong – if it’s important to get money to live, fulfillment isn’t the goal – feeding the family is first.  In 2020 and 2021 jobs will be hard to find, so if you’re bored but have a family to feed – FEED YOUR FAMILY AND STAY UNTIL 5PM.

JOB

I quit my job at the helium plant – I will NOT be spoken to in that tone of voice.

But what happens when a job or your life becomes another exercise in running out the clock and you don’t have to worry about feeding the family?

That’s not a win.

Humans were made to be the most multi-purpose machine in the history of the planet.  We’re essentially the Swiss Army® animal.  Where other animals inhabit a specific niche or even several niches on the planet, humans alone have consciously gone from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the moon.  We can run, swim, climb, think and even make new elements while we try to figure out how to harness the power of a star.  We can then rip atoms apart just for fun, and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  And all of this before breakfast.

WILL

You know that in freshman English William at least got a B on the Romeo and Juliet section. 

Then we can write a sonnet, or, as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man.  How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.  In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel.  In apprehension how like a god!

The beauty of the world.

The paragon of animals.

Humans are amazing.  Shakespeare really got that.  If I live my entire life, I’m not sure I can string together six sentences that are so amazing and so understand just how amazing a creature humans are.

Then Will followed up with this:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Four hundred years ago, the Bard was ahead of me.  It’s amazing to be human.  We have great capabilities.  But then?  Hamlet goes and decides he wants to run out the clock.

But we’re not made for running out the clock – that’s why Hamlet is a tragedy.  Hamlet was only thirty years old.  He had grown weary of life, and he didn’t even have the excuse of having met my ex-wife.

We don’t get a deposit back for bringing our bodies back in great condition after we’re done with them.  Let me be clear:  we have a one use rental on these things.  You need to use your body and your life like you stole it.  My left hip hurts at least once a month.  A lot.

SOA

My vacuum has Roomba®-tiod arthritis. 

Good.  I popped it out coaching those peewee football players.  If I get arthritis there?  It’s like a gray hair in my beard – I’ve earned it.  I want the coroner to look at my body at the end and say:  “I’m glad he’s not donating these organs.  He used all of them up.  How do you wear out a bellybutton?  This guy did.”

I’ve seen a “running out the clock” mentality in my own family.  When Pa Wilder started to get older, one thing I noticed is that his life seemed to revolve not around achieving, but around existing.  He walked.  He ate.  He watched TV.  He took his medications.

But he ceased doing anything of meaning.  He ceased fighting.  I’ll admit, people deserve a rest from time to time.  But even in old age, even if disabled, and even if depressed – you can do something.

There is no time in your life where you can’t matter.

Running out the clock isn’t a goal – unless it’s a peewee football game.

How will you make a difference today?

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres

RIGHTMEOW

I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.

Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:

Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.

Why do I bring this up?

GREENACRES

If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.

This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”

“Move.”

I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.

“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”

“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.

Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.

CONAN

I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.

“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”

The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.

My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.

“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”

After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.

That’s what scared The Mrs.

ALUM

I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.

Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.

And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.

The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.

RAIDERS

This is a true statement.

If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.

The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.

And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.

Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.

NEWYORK

Riots, Misplaced Virtue And The Parasite Class

“Don’t worry. Many women learn to embrace this parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with other parasites.” – House

PARASITE

But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder.  I guess it was a nervous tick.

I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima.  This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E Marts®.  They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time.  This makes sense – those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.

Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world.  Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine.  Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.

That’s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isn’t so good in an environment filled with Twinkies™, Ruffles™, and two-liter Coke™ bottles.

What got me thinking about all this?

DIABETES

What do you call it when a diabetic won’t follow directions?  Insulince.

Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange.  I’m certain I’m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so don’t blame him for this piece.  For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind.  One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination.  Here it is, in Joe’s words:  “Biologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution.  Their reasoning is thus: many features in isolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.”

If you’re not reading Joe’s stuff, you really should be (LINK).  He’s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny.  His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.

PORPOISE

Is evolution overkill?  Did it defeet the porpoise?

As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it – rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.

Society is made up of individuals, so I thought I’d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy.  When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:

  • Altruism
  • Empathy

These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States.  They’ve been common in other places, too, but I’m going to focus on America.  These traits were the basis for and result of a “high-trust” society.  A high-trust society is one where most interactions aren’t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law.  Where I live, there’s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down.  It’s just something we do.

TRUST

I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.

Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasn’t a government program – people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them.  This had a benefit – it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt.  It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.

Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s.  The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:

It turns the act of charity into taxation.  Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes.  Last time I checked, if I decided I didn’t want to support ‘charity’ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years.  This removes all virtue for taking part in charity.  Forced charity isn’t charity, it’s extortion.

That’s bad enough.

But it gets worse.

STARVE

Crabs don’t donate to charity.  They’re shellfish.

The second thing that forced charity does?  When a person gives another person help, they’re often grateful – it’s human working with human.  When a government agency gives that same person help, they’re resentful.  Why?  There is no end to the needs an individual has – and when government doesn’t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment.  Let’s face it – nearly every government welfare program sucks – it’s just enough to get by in ratty conditions.  Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.

Add in the impersonality of the cities.  Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers.  Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees.  Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.

Stir.

The result is chaos.  The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society.  Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved:  as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.

What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?

Whoever had “go crazy in an orgy of destruction and violence” fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.

RIOT

Is it riot season or COVID season?  I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.

I thought a bit about how Antifa® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matter™ grew.  The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow.  Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, they’ve increased the growth rate.  In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.

Why?

Though born of misdirected virtue, Antifa© and BLM® have their own traits.  They contribute nothing to society.  They’re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people.  In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.

There’s a word for an organism living in this niche.  The name for that organism is parasite.

It becomes increasingly likely that Antifa™ and BLM® will leave city after city economically destroyed.  Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now?  Portland?  Seattle?  The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.

ANTIFA

Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it? 

The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation – criminals aren’t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges.  Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class.  If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances.  Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply can’t be allowed.

Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they don’t kill the host.  The mosquitoes I fed tonight didn’t kill me – just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so.  But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.

INSPIRE

Accountability: Now With Cheetos and Vicks

“There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” – Terminator 2

ZERO

I believe there is a man we cannot see who watches our every action, passing judgement, and deciding who lives or dies.  But enough about the NSA.

My daughter Alia S. Wilder came to visit, and brought her son, Mosquito.  As we were sitting upstairs chatting, Alia looked over at Mosquito.  “Mosquito, please get me a Coke®.”  As all of our beverage fridges were downstairs, Mosquito buzzed downstairs to get Alia a Coke™.  There wasn’t anyone downstairs, but that was okay – I had removed all the anti-personnel mines and deactivated the laser defense grid for the weekend.

At least I think I did.

Mosquito bounced back up the stairs.  He proudly presented Alia with a can of Coke©.  It was already open.  Alia was surprised – she didn’t think that Mosquito had learned how to open cans of Coke®.

“Did you open this?”  I could hear the pride in Alia’s voice, a pride that her son had figured out how to open a Coca-Cola™ can.  Hey, we all know that kids are stupid.  I can prove it, too.  I can draw better than 94% of kids 7th grade and younger.

There was a pause.  Mosquito replied:  “Someone did.”

711

No one every asks how Coke® is doing – it’s always:  “Is Pepsi™ okay?”

Since the Family Wilder has a habit of leaving semi-full Coke™ cans around the house like the Easter Bunny leaves spent radioactive fuel rods around the Former Soviet Union, we were all pretty sure that Mosquito had found the remnants of Cokes® from a bygone era.  Maybe the Upper Pugslevanian epoch?

We laughed, and then sent Mosquito back over the wall to get an unopened can of Coke®.

Mosquito had inadvertently provided me with blog fodder.  The topic?

Accountability.

The reasons I love accountability is what it means:  it’s the person who is ultimately be the one who will reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of their decisions and actions.  One of the reasons I hate accountability is that it has become a corporate buzzword which tends to turn a good word into mindless mission-statement-speak parroted by unthinking corporate lackeys.

Like me.

BUZZWORDS

Buzzwords, do you speak them, Mister Falcon?  (Hint:  Google® “Mister Falcon”)

One of the things missing from society today is accountability.  I really think that this lack of accountability is at least partially responsible for the riots we’ve been seeing.  What are the rioters accountable for, besides roasting Air Jordans® over a gently crackling police precinct fire?  Are they even accountable to get up tomorrow and go to a job?

No.

Thankfully, real life provides some help in giving great examples of accountability.  People are ultimately accountable for many of the decisions they make:

  • Choose a horrible degree in “French Medieval Gender Studies” and spend $273,432 getting it? You have to pay it back.
  • Have a baby at 16 from a daddy who skipped to Canada? You have to raise it.
  • Miss an appointment for your dream job because you slept in? I’m sure they’ll understand.
  • Decided to spend your twenties travelling to distant continents while your friends worked hard? No, it’s not luck that they’re comfortable in that house in the suburbs and having kids while you can’t afford a studio apartment.
  • Living your “Best Life” (The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies))?
  • Realizing that your strategy of “delaying gratification is hard and only pays off later, while eating Cheetosâ„¢ always pays off now” has resulted in you catching Cheeto® lungâ„¢ and weighing as much as a Buick©?

CHEETOS

You can tell a college student:  they’re looking for breakfast wine that pairs well with Cheetos®.

But I am here to announce an amazing idea:  accountability is freedom.

The thing I normally see is that people run from accountability.  They don’t want to be judged by what they did.  They don’t want to sign the bottom line.

But seeking accountability is really freedom.

Why is it freedom?  Being accountable is being in charge of your own life.  Too many people seek to run away from accountability, but deep down, they know that fleeing accountability is weakness.  The reality is that you are in charge of your own life, just like Darth Vader® was accountable for not one but two Death Stars™.

If, like me, you’re carrying a few too many pounds?  PEBCAP – the Problem Exists Between Chair And Plate.  The alternative is that you make yourself a victim of some vague conspiracy between biology and high fructose corn syrup.  You take the conspiracy route?  You’ve made yourself a victim.

THEORY

When I was working at a convenience store I got the idea that 7-11 was an inside job.

Who likes being around a victim?  Nobody.  People like those who are accountable, and stake out that position.  It’s one of strength.  It’s the path of the virtuous.

But it has to be earned.  And, in my case?

Learned.

When I was going to High School, I often spent time at my long-term girlfriend’s house.  Her family was great.  Her father’s favorite movie was Patton.  General George S. Patton was my personal hero at that time in my life, so let’s just say that he and I got along very well.  When I went over to his place, he treated me like his son.

But one particular night, his daughter backed her car (a Mustang®) into my 1972 green GMC™ pickup.  It sent a long dent up the back end on the driver’s side.  Her father told me to go get an estimate to fix it, and I did.

The estimate was about $700.  My girlfriend wrote me a check from all of the money she’d made working fast food for several years.  I cashed it.  But then I found someone who promised they’d fix it cheaper.  How much cheaper?  Half.

I got the pickup fixed.  It looked better than new.

Great news, $350 buck for the John Wilder fund, right?  I imagined all the things I’d spend it on, since my girlfriend and I had already broken up – probably a car horn that played Judas Priest songs and maybe a car stereo that got FM as well as AM.

VICKS

This truck belongs to my friend, Ben Thunder.  When I borrow it, I’ve Ben Thunder’s truck.

Pa Wilder rained on my parade.

Pa:  “Did your girlfriend pay for you to fix the truck?”

JW:  “Yup.  And I got it fixed for half that.”

Pa:  “So, why does that mean that you’re entitled to that money?”

Dang.

Dang.

Dang.

Pa Wilder had it all figured out.  My ex-girlfriend had made herself accountable for fixing my car when she gave me that check.  My implied promise was that money would go to fixing my truck, not buying a collection of small pewter animals with all of that money that she’d made working at the local chicken restaurant.

So, that put me in the uncomfortable position of having to go to an ex-girlfriend’s house and give her a check for several hundred dollars.  The upside?  That was a good time to ask for my old Alice Cooper® cassette tape back – bonus points for anyone in the comments that figures out which Alice Cooperâ„¢ tape it was.

But even better than getting the Alice Cooper© tape back was in knowing that I’d done the right thing.  I understand now that she had been accountable for fixing my car.  And I was accountable for doing it in the most cost effective way possible.

Did I give her that money back?

Well, as Mosquito would say:  “Somebody did.”

But What If You’re Wrong?

“What if you’re wrong, Evil? What if Dandridge is a vampire and he thinks you know it? Would you walk down that alley then?” – Fright Night

MATH

How many vampires are good at math?  Can I count Dracula?

“Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in,” wrote Mark Twain.

Yet, so many people are certain that they can determine what good luck is with great certainty.  As I get older, like Twain, I’m not sure that I can tell good luck from bad on any given day.  So, I try to take it as it is.  Rain?  Good.  We needed rain.  Hot?  Well, the air conditioning works.  Snow?  Great – it will kill the insects.  A massive hail of arrows that blots out the Sun?  Excellent.  We can fight in the shade.

I came to this conclusion after one day when I looked backward at my life around the age of 32 – the things that I had hoped for – recognition, money, and a bountiful supply of PEZ® hadn’t made life better.  The things I had tried to avoid – a near zero bank account, 16+ hour days as a single dad with a job, and life without a spouse made me a better man and made me think about the relationships between virtue, money, and meaning.

The time of plenty hadn’t made me better, but the time where I spent six months raising kids by myself before I had a spare $150 to buy a used Fender® and an amp at a pawn shop had.  Huh?  How could that be, especially when I got cheated on the guitar – “no strings attached” had a different meaning in that pawn shop.

BEAR

I gave up and sold the guitar to a guy in town who doesn’t have any arms.  I asked how he was going to play it, and he said, “By ear.”

It was then I decided that getting everything I wanted would have been the worst possible thing for me.  Instead, getting a tougher life made me better.  I was in my 20s when I had that revelation, and it has stayed with me.  It also has led me to always ask myself:

What if I’m wrong?

Not wrong.  But really, really wrong?

In some sense, people might call this indecision, like I don’t know what I want.  I mean, indecision was when I couldn’t decide between churros and sopapillas for desert, which caught me off guard – no one expects Spanish Indecision.  But this is different.  I call this humility.  I might have a clear sense of what I want, but have no real idea what is good for me.  Call it the Twain Zone.

It leads to some interesting thought experiments – what if the exact opposite of what I’m expecting happens?

Historically, I can give numerous examples of surprises that “no one” was expecting – where nearly everyone was wrong.

  • The U.S.S.R. looked strong and invulnerable in 1985. Rocky IV and Red Dawn reflected the public mood that the Soviets just might win.  By 1987, cracks were showing, by 1989 areas were in open rebellion, and by 1991 the U.S.S.R. voted itself out of existence on December 26.  That’s a shame.  I heard that Soviet bread was so good that people would wait in line all day for a single piece.
  • Stock prices have reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Irving Fisher, Yale economist, on October 10, 1929. October 24, 1929 was Black Thursday, where the market lost 11% in a single day. Oops.  I will say that COVID-19 makes it feel like 1929 – the stock market is tanked and the bars are closed.
  • On August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned, less than two years after crushing his opponent George McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College, winning every state but Massachusetts, where the penalty for drunk driving is re-election to the Senate.

NIXON

Spoiler alert:  Nixon’s decorating crimes would not stand.  He resigned office and quit eating spaghetti on the same day – it’s all in the pasta now.

In a financial sense, I think everyone reading this post knows that something is horribly wrong with both the currency and the stock market.  The old line attributed to Gary Shilling rings true, however:  “The market can remain irrational much longer than I can remain solvent.”  Just because you or I might have seen that real estate was overvalued in 2006, doesn’t mean that the market did.  Irrationality can persist longer than logic, especially when everyone says, “Real estate?  It never goes down.”

Okay, John, you’ve convinced me.  Now what?

Well, that’s up to you.  I can’t judge your situation unless you send me a few goats, some silver, and a throwout bearing for a 1973 GMC pickup.  But what I was hoping is that you’d look yourself and ask a few questions:

  • If you think that we’ll have unending prosperity and no shortages, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that the riots in (INSERT YOUR CITY HERE) won’t reach your neighborhood, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that things can’t get better than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that things can’t get worse than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that the stock market can’t go up, what if you’re wrong?

WENDYS

I was also wrong about my chiropractor.  I stand corrected.

The situation that the United States enjoyed from 1945 until recently was the most prosperous in (perhaps) the history of the world so far.  A good weather forecaster’s most accurate forecast is to say that tomorrow will be like today, obtuse (as in greater than 90 degrees).  Until it isn’t.  The hot spring day is followed up by the tornado – the winter storm strikes furiously from the north.

So, not knowing where the wind is coming from, I’m okay with it.  Hot today?  I’m fine.  Cold tomorrow?  Great.  Hurricanes?  Wonderful, let’s get to sea in our shrimp boat.

I guess the reason I’m so agreeable when the conditions of the world would indicate that I should be grumpy is that I’ve seen one thing again and again:  when I try to divine the future from my current situation, my track record is horrible, since the returns aren’t yet all in.

8BALL

Okay, I looked it up and the blue stuff is either water or alcohol.  Either way I wouldn’t drink it, since if it’s methanol, you won’t see what hit you.

So, evaluate where you are, ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” and live a life worth living.  I don’t get to choose all of the events in my life, but I certainly can choose how I react.

Unless I’m wrong about that.

Random (Funny) Thoughts, July, 2020

“Random chance seems to have operated in our favor.” – Star Trek (TOS)

CHICAGO

My high school buddy moved to Chicago and told me it isn’t that violent.  He’s a tailgunnner on a school bus.

Once or twice a year, I decide I’m going to relax with a post.  Instead of the tightly-constructed gems of wit and wisdom, it’s just a list of things I’m thinking about.

  • A fish wouldn’t understand what water is, no more than an American would understand what Western Civilization is. Only one of them tastes good with tartar sauce.
  • Mark Twain knew that most people can’t tell a good event from a bad one. The best things in my life have come from events that, at the time, felt awful.  Think about a baby just before birth – nice and warm and then twisting and constricting and exposure to cold and harsh light.  How could the baby ever have beer unless it was born??   I’ve learned.  I wait to see what happened before I judge if something is good or bad.  This makes me look like some sort of Zen-master when I’m calm and everyone else is panicking.
  • War in the twentieth century was built around maneuver and destruction of the enemy’s capability to fight. War in the twenty-first century will be built around information and the destruction of the economy before the fight can begin.

CAT

  • The Boy and Pugsley went out to Wal-Mart® today to go shopping. They announced a weird and perplexing list of shortages.  We may have moved into a scarcity economy.  At least we have Netflix®, right?
  • Western Civilization (i.e., freedom) has been under attack for over 100 years.
  • Mandatory vaccinations were approved by a Supreme Court decision. That same Supreme Court ruled that you could have mandatory sterilization of mentally inferior people.  Be careful what you cite.
  • COVID-19 might be the seed for the final breakup of the United States. Just like the sniper said to his ex-girlfriend:  “I won’t miss you!”

AUSSIE

  • Why does the Left get bent out of shape about Russia? I think it’s because during an interview, Vladimir Putin was asked if a woman could become president of Russia.  Putin responded, “No, because I am not a woman.”
  • Antifa® appears to be a group of middle-class kids with daddy-issues who can still afford tattoos, piercings, and black clothing. If they win, I’d love to see their faces as they learn during harvest season that potatoes don’t originate at Whole Foods®.
  • 650,000 people moved out of California last year. Number moving to Modern Mayberry?    Good luck, Idaho!
  • Would we even know that COVID-19® existed without the media?
  • In the minds of most of the Center and Right, Black Lives Matter® is 100% tied to violence and looting.
  • What if the role of 2020 is to play, “Think that’s cool, 2020? Hold my beer?” as everything rolls of the edge?    Don’t worry about that or prepare for it.  It’ll be fine.
  • The Redpill is a meme from The Matrix (1999). It means that you understand what reality actually is.  Heck those LGBT+ folks won’t take a straight answer.
  • Gingko Biloba is a plant that’s not really related to anything on Earth for the last 270,000,000 years. It’s almost as old as your mom.

MARX

  • Cancel culture is hilarious, since right now it’s eating the Left. Remember what Napoleon said:  “Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.”
  • Free markets (within a nation) are still better than any alternative we’ve found. Free markets between nations is a neat goal – as long as the nations are free.  But they’re not.
  • Joe Biden may be the first politician who thinks they won an election against Ronald Reagan.
  • I woke up this morning and my hip hurt, probably for something I did in one Thursday in 2013. Is my hip officially cancelled?

ZUCK

  • The most consequential invention of the 2000’s is the iPhone®. It’s also the most destructive invention of my lifetime.
  • During my lifetime, it was certain that the Soviets, Japanese, and Chinese would become the most powerful economic power on Earth. Now?  The Soviets don’t exist, and the Japanese have become focused on anime and talking cats.
  • Marriage that produces kids and lasts is good.
  • The new definition of far-right extremist includes: a desire to be monogamous and marry and have kids, avoiding drugs and porn and alcohol, reading books and hiking.

RAKE

  • The undercover Rightwing political operation to completely discredit Leftists, codenamed: “Just Let Joe Biden Speak” is apparently working.
  • Hierarchy is necessary for a civilized society to survive.
  • The United States has 140 operational bombers. Not in a bomber wing or squadron.  140 bombers.    60 or so of them (B-52) entered service in 1955 and, although not quite as old as Joe Biden, are pretty old.
  • Don’t let Russia determine the 2020 election! Demand Voter ID!

WOODS

  • If COVID-19 has killed more businesses than people, was a lockdown the right call?
  • Ever notice that since the British gave up all of their guns, that now teenage kids in Great Britain can get put into jail for offensive jokes that teenage kids make?
  • Imagine what seven billion people on the planet could do if they just left each other alone?
  • The first rule of being in a gunfight? Have a gun. (Jeff Cooper)

REALCHAD

  • Long time readers would be surprised to know that I do have appreciation for some metric measures: 9mm, 7.62x39mm, and 5.56mm.
  • What happens when rent is no longer deferred and the unemployment checks stop?
  • If the aliens ever come? Don’t get on the ships.  How to Serve Man is a cookbook.

Meaning: Do It Right.

“Bender, it has come to my attention that this company has been paying you to do nothing but loaf around on the couch.” – Futurama

MEANING

I gave The Mrs. a dictionary for our first anniversary.  I wanted to give her something with a meaning.

Imagine you’re between 16 and 24.  You live in a country (Great Britain) that has a robust social safety net.  Your parents are doing okay.  Not millionaires, but doing okay.  The U.K. has a huge safety net if you can’t work, or don’t want to work.  For instance, in London you can have:

  • Council flats (apartments) – in U.S. English: subsidized or (nearly) free housing.
  • Free crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies) delivered by singing Welshmen in chimney sweep attire.
  • Free Dr. Who™ costumes, though they only come in the sizes of “elfin” and “aircraft carrier”.
  • X-Box® games delivered at no cost via the luminiferous information aether (Internet).
  • A majority Pakistani population.
  • Free healthcare, including funds for Cockney coal-miners to blast and carve your teeth into pleasant looking shapes.
  • A zero effort, zero risk life.

At least 1,500 citizens of Great Britain turned their back on this life of shabby luxury to go live in a land without air conditioning, bangers and mash, Top Gear™, and cell phone reception for the opportunity to become bloodthirsty Junior Assistant Jihadis in the ISIS® organization.

Why?

ISIS

I’ve heard that ISIS has a new name.  WASWAS.

At least partially because life had no meaning for them – they weren’t accomplishing anything, and they knew it.  Carl Jung observed this problem in the early twentieth century.  Jung’s observation was made as religious belief was waning in Europe, and as people there were continually centralizing themselves in cities that became larger and larger.  Jung saw that the loss of a belief system that allowed them to have a higher purpose in any setting – large or small, was devastating.

Also, Jung saw that this was coupled with the anonymity and lack of true community of large cities.  To put it bluntly, for 99%+ of people living in a city, the city doesn’t care if you are there.  Your contribution to the whole is diluted to the point of meaninglessness, like the guy in the BMW® factory that installs turn signals.  Jung had ideas as to the result of this situation:

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power.  It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.

JUNG

Did you hear about Carl’s daughter?  She was a little Jung, too.

In modern society, the numbers of people are huge when compared to the historical setting that mankind has experienced through time.  I wrote a somewhat related post here (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings).  Modern people have, at least a bit, developed ways to replace the meaning of religion and the belonging that only occurs in small bands:

  • Sports teams. This allows achievement by proxy.  Your team wins, even though exactly one player out of 50 are from the state the team is in?  You won!  Your quarterback gets traded next year?  He’s dead to you.  Logical?    Effective?  Yes.
  • Video games. Video games are a form of artificial achievement.  You achieve a pre-programmed victory designed to manipulate you into feeling good.  Designers of video games have turned this into a stunning skill, making successive video games more immersive.  And despite this immersion, it doesn’t make kids more violent – I rarely lose a fistfight with a sixth grader.
  • Work hard, do well, feel good.  It’s a simple enough equation.  It’s also one of the most real and most wholesome things on this list.  Especially if you are a mummy – they aren’t evil – they just got a bad wrap.
  • Consumeproduct culture. No, that’s not a typo.  What is a consumeproduct culture?  It’s one that replaces shopping for meaning.  Did you find a new Brad Pitt® flavored toothpaste to buy?  Great!  It shoots endorphins into your brain that make you feel you’ve achieved something.  But it wears off, and you’ve got to find Johnny Depp shaped vitamin C gummis and buy them tomorrow to feel okay.
  • Politics.  Just like sports teams, cheering for your side allows you to feel good when you win, and bad when you lose.  The current Leftward polarization of the Democrats is very tied into this.  How many Leftists does it take to change a lightbulb?  2500 to protest, and none of them working to change anything.
  • Mind altering substances.   Cocaine.  Alcohol.  Marvel® movies.  These allow you to escape just for an hour or two.  Oddly, the common denominator in all of this?  Robert Downey, Jr.

RDJ

I just got back from my heroine dealer.  I got Wonder Woman®, She-Ra™, and Black Widow©.

I’m not saying that these coping mechanisms are evil, or harmful.  Some, like working hard, have huge societal and personal benefits unless you’re working for an evil company.  Others, like politics?  Not so much, especially the Leftist variety.  Again, Carl Jung saw the rise of Leftism in his life and correctly described its rise in these two quotes:

Such people are very likely to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as having the power they as individuals lack.

If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.

So, the “British” ISIS-Bois sashayed to Samarra and moseyed to Mosul out of their comfortable council flat life.  They did this because they felt no meaning in Great Britain.  Great Britain was a country that they and their ancestors had no hand in building.  They and their ancestors didn’t really contribute to Great Britain in any significant way.  They knew that they were no more British than I am Martian, and won’t be until their great, great, grandchild is named Nigel and has horrible teeth.

TOOTH

What’s red and bad for your teeth?  A brick.

Therefore, they weren’t assimilated enough to move their search for meaning to Manchester United®, so might as well go and kill some people down in the Middle East.  This is just another example that soccer is an evil game devised by aristocratic European women so that they could play it while their husbands did the dishes.  (Apologies to Mike Judge)

This isn’t just a crisis of the ISIS-Idiots.  This is a crisis that faces mankind in general.  Many of the spiritual, social, and political ills the world faces right now stem directly from the minimization of religion and the urbanization of population.

Big cities are dehumanizing.  Do you know a person on your city council?  Do they know you by name?  Do you have their cell phone number in your cell phone?  Do you have proof that they plagiarized in high school?  Do you know what happened at Uncle Tom’s cabin, and what’s down in the wishing well?  Would they pay attention if you called them on a Tuesday afternoon?

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

Does it make sense for any person to live in a city where these things are not true?  Does it make the citizens of Dallas better off to have a city of a million people where their voice is so diluted that they are just one among millions, feeling no control?

LONELY

My doctor says I should take meds for my schizophrenia.  But look who doesn’t get lonely during quarantine – this guy!

Adding to the frustrations is that most decisions are made not at the local level in those massive cities, but at the national level where hiring a stupid person isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature.  In the United States, most regulations that impact people on a day-to-day basis aren’t made in the Modern Mayberry office.

Nope.

Most regulations are made far away in Washington – and not the good Washington where the volcanoes and earthquakes will eventually eliminate all the Leftists.  This results in one-size fits all regulations that meet the needs of the lowest common denominator.  Why does the EPA design wood stoves for use in Alaska?  Can’t the Alaskans be left alone to figure that out?

These rules do more than frustrate individuals.  The confine those that could become great.  Could a company like Apple® be founded today?  I don’t think so they would be crushed by regulations – they would have to remain as an open sauce company.  My next door neighbor, who runs a small farm bank, told me that starting a small bank from scratch today would be nearly impossible.  The small has been eliminated, the middle is discouraged, and only large companies can compete.

The result is that people on all sides are done with the current system.  On the Left, there is a desire for what only could be called a Marxist revolution because the state isn’t powerful enough.  On the Right?  There’s a feeling that the United States became a little too centrally powerful around 1843.

I side with the Right.

CIVILIZ

What civilization had the best tattoos?  The Ink-ans.

We have learned that the solutions from the Left, in the end, provide only death and tyranny.  The “British” people who went to join the jihadis were fans of death and tyranny in their own way.  The rioters of BLM are fans of death and tyranny, as well.  As mentioned many times, that path is the path of destruction.  The Left wants to destroy our civilization, the Right wants to build civilization.

On the Right, I’d suggest leaving the cities.  Outside of the danger we’ve seen recently, like Mars, cities ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.  Find your Modern Mayberry.  Meet your neighbors.  Build relationships.

Find meaning from something more than an Amazon® shopping cart.

Ohh!  Did you see that Lighting Deal®?

Capitalism and Crisis

“Four-alarm fire in downtown Moscow clears way for glorious new tractor factory.  And, on lighter side of news, hundreds of capitalists soon to perish in shuttle disaster.” – Airplane II, The Sequel

COMDOG

I know how they feel.  When my alarm goes off late – I end up Russian all morning.

Capitalism is a great system for allocation of winners and losers in an economy.  It does this more or less automatically, because the transactions are voluntary on both sides.  If I want weasel snouts and have money, and you have weasel snouts and want money, as long as we can come to an agreement, we both win.  Nothing better than a warm weasel snout on a cold night.

Capitalism is good at creating rewards for those win-win transactions.  Because it’s good at that, capitalism is probably the best creator of abundance the world has ever known outside of Bernie Madoff.  Capitalism is also set up to be very compatible with those on the Right.

Transactions are based on free will and free exchange of goods, even transactions for things like natural gas.  Here in Modern Mayberry, if I don’t want natural gas, I can cut firewood and burn it to heat my home.  My insurance company would probably prefer me to get a fireplace first.

But natural gas is amazingly cheap because, thanks to capitalism-inspired innovation, it’s abundant.  I would be foolish to try to heat water in my house over a wood stove in summer when I can spend the $12 or so a month for hot showers.  I choose that because of free will, and also because I don’t want The Mrs. killing me in my sleep.  I think that was one of the things on her list before she accepted my marriage proposal – “Does he sleep heavier than me?”

SOCIALISM

Veganism is like socialism.  They’re both fine, unless you like eating.

Capitalism has positive incentives – make someone else happy with the transaction, and you win.  If you do it in a significant enough way?  You can win bigly.  If you don’t win bigly?  You can at least do better than your parents.

That has been the fuel of what we’ve called the American Dream, the idea that you could have your own struggle and the outcome is determined largely based on your effort, along with a bit of luck.  Heck my boss gave me a raise yesterday.  He said he wanted my last week here to be happy.

The United States has been a place of abundance for the last 75 years.  Have there been recessions and setbacks along the way?  Certainly.  Has there been poverty?  Absolutely.  I like to do my best to fight poverty, but I’ve found the homeless aren’t very good at wrestling.

RAMEN

Where can you hear songs about poverty?  Singapore.

One of the things that has been proven by President Johnson’s attempt to make a “Great Society” is that, despite trillions in .gov spending on poverty, it will always be with us.  Even before Johnson’s “Great Society” program, the poverty rate had dropped to below 15%.  That’s why a Mercedes-Benz® and poverty are the same:  Princess Diana couldn’t stop either of them.

Since 1966, poverty has bounced around between 11% and 15%.  Perhaps, in some fashion, these programs have prevented higher levels of poverty during recession?  It is certain, however, that we didn’t even have an official poverty measure until 1959.

The structure of the economy, however, began to change.  A typical factory job, obtainable with a high school degree, provided enough money for a house, car, and necessities for a family.  Note I said job – wives working was something that happened before the kids were born and after they were in school, at least in the growing middle class.  The middle class has learned that, while money can’t buy happiness, poverty can’t buy anything.

Even though a typical family is now supported by a working husband and wife, things had been good.  At least some of the additional wages from both spouses working went to an upgraded lifestyle – capitalism was more than happy to provide new things to buy with the income, like Zima® wine coolers and Dan Fogelberg™ CDs.  Capitalism had taken us from the scarcity and hunger of the Great Depression to abundance and humongousness of actual obesity caused by an abundance of cheap, excess calories.

Although it’s trivially easy to prove that communism is nearly certainly the most evil system ever devised on the planet, capitalism has its faults, too:  Capitalism has no soul.  It is a blind force that will sell you anything, even if it’s something bad for you.  Taken to an extreme, capitalism will provide more than just immoral items, it will provide things that are illegal.  And never mix Islam with capitalism – they don’t like profit jokes.

Capitalism also provides incentives to manipulate.  Advertising does a wonderful service when it makes us aware of new products that can help us, but advertising can manipulate desires, like Edward Bernays’ propaganda campaign to convince women (who didn’t smoke at the time) that smoking cigarettes was exciting and fashionable.  Now?  Type “women smoking” into Google®, and you’ll get 810,000,000 matches.

Another fault of capitalism is that it produces products that are designed to fail.  Want your iPhone® to last five years?  Good luck with a battery that lasts only three.  Apple™ did one better:  it made software changes that slowed older iPhones™ down.  Why?  To get you to buy a new iPhone©.  I did click on one of those, “You just won an iPhone®” pop-ups.  Thankfully, it was just a virus.

IPHONE

It could be yours, for only 36 payments of $375,221.43.

Making your products bad isn’t new.  Lightbulbs, when initially manufactured, lasted too long.  A cartel devised a standard that made sure that light bulbs were constantly failing.  Why?  So you would have to buy more.  Another example?

Two words:  printer ink.

Those failures of capitalism, however, are a symptom of abundance.  People can afford those things, so companies do whatever they can to get as much of their money as possible.

I fear our economy may be slipping into scarcity.  Not next week, not next month.  But as we see increased tensions, the possibility of prolonged outages of things we take for granted are likely.  Higher rates of unemployment are likely, too.

There is a sign that the government attempting to prop up the economy is starting to create disastrous distortions.  From today’s news, this story (LINK) describes how the Federal Reserve’s® pumping of trillions of dollars into the system is having the effect of blowing bubbles in the economy.  Color me surprised.

Abundance of the “one income for a family” type is gone for many professions, if not most.  If the Fed™ decides that it wants to keep blowing bubbles with trillions of dollars just made up on the spot, the result will be inevitable:  a currency reset.

People will blame this on capitalism.  I won’t.  The condition we find ourselves in is the result of decades of currency manipulation.  You can’t print money forever without an impact.  What we will be left with is a contracting economy.  What system works best in an economy that’s getting smaller, not larger?

I know what will be sold – communism.  The reason people keep falling for this one is in times of difficulty is that they believe that it will solve their problems.  The reality, every single time, is that communism will end in murder, scarcity, and hunger – it’s like a game of Russian roulette, but in this game a few hundred million die.  But, hey, maybe this time?

FAILED

Unemployed leather workers have nothing to hide.

Capitalism has been the only reliable way to deal with economic crisis in the past.  The incentives it provides minimized the hunger and the pain of the Great Depression.  But it’s not the “capitalism” we see today.  The people of the United States in the 1930s helped each other, and capitalism was a way to run the economy, not the highest moral good.

Was it a massive Federal program that saved people during the Great Depression?  For the time during the Great Depression, the spending of the Federal government tripled compared to years before the Great Depression.  In my reading, the Federal government enacted thousands of policies, many contradictory to each other.  Unemployment was still 14%+ when World War II started.  The war clearly ended the Great Depression.

But people helped each other back then during the Depression – Great Grandpa and Grandma McWilder even took in kids from families that couldn’t afford to raise them.  The United States was a far more united place, and the shared morality was more than a shared economic morality, like we see today.  Did you get aid only if you were moral and upright, or a widow?

AGAIN

If you get to choose what Hell to go to, pick the communist one.  It will be out of coal and molten sulfur.

Yup.  If you could work, you were expected to work.  But yet, in 1950s America before the advent of our current bouquet of welfare programs, did citizens let people starve?

No.

The best answer is capitalism, but a smaller, more local, and more moral version of it.  Nearly every problem we have in the United States was created by increasing power in a large central state and huge metropolitan areas.

More on that in Friday’s post, where we’ll talk about how the problems created by modern life are more than economic.

Want To Get Something Big Done? Start Small.

“However, before satisfaction would be mine, first things first.  Wiggle your big toe.”  Toe wiggles.  “Hard part’s over.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

POOL

Why do the French have small breakfasts?  Because one egg is un oeuf.

So, this was the topic that was originally scheduled for Friday – you can tell it has a much more “Friday” feel. Back to the usual schedule on Wednesday.

Sometimes starting something is the hardest part.  When you look at the time and effort that I’ve put forth on this blog over the last three years, it’s been several thousand hours.  If I had to confront that level of sweat on day one it would have been daunting.

“Do I want to put that my life and energy into it?”  But every great effort starts with something small.

I was reading Scott Adams’ book, Loserthink, the other day.  The book goes through dozens of topics.  I recommend it even though I haven’t figured out how to get Scott Adams to pay me to recommend it.

One of the (many) stories that Mr. Adams relates is that he has a formula that he used when faced with something large that he’d like to try.  Think of the absolute smallest thing you could do to start.  Then?  Take that small action.  Start.  Do it.

DIEHARD

There is an invisible presence, which reviews our actions, passes judgement, and decides who lives and dies.  But enough about the NSA.

When Mr. Adams decided he was going to start writing comics and become a world famous cartoonist, the step he took was to go to an art store and buy some high quality paper and ink.  How long did that take?  A few minutes.  But that first step was important.  Becoming a world famous cartoonist is hard, and requires thousands of hours of effort.  But buying some paper is easy.  Now, making a toilet paper joke is hard:  I tried making a toilet paper joke at the start of the Coronavirus panic.  Nobody got it.

Adams talks about his preferred strategy to get out of bed when he doesn’t want to:  do the smallest movement possible.  “Wiggle your little finger.”  Once that action has been taken, you can move.  You’ve built up momentum, you can take the next step.  You’ve started with just a single ounce of motivation rather than having to chug an entire pitcher.

ALARM

One alarm that always wakes me up?  Rumble strips.

I do something similar when the alarm rings and I just don’t want to get out of bed, The Mrs. doesn’t have this problem because I got her an alarm clock that swears at her.  Every morning she’s in for a rude awakening.  Me?  I think of the first three things I’m going to do, in detail.  They’re easy things.  Sit up.  Turn off the alarm.  Stand up.

Then I do them.

But by then, I’ve got momentum going, and I’ve already passed the toughest test of the day (so far).  I got out of bed.  I know that it’s the lowest level of achievement, probably somewhat similar to that friend of mine who was bragging he had a “participant trophy” wife, but it’s a start.

Heck, I even follow this strategy with each time I write a post.  I open up Word®.  It’s just selecting one icon and pressing.  It’s easy.  But I’ve started.  I then open up half a dozen or so tabs for making memes in a new window.  Then I start typing.  But having those small actions to prepare for the larger post (that can take hours to finish) gets me going.  It’s now automatic and almost a ritual.

AZTEK

The Aztecs had a wonderful motto:  “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

This strategy even works for me on a far larger scale.  Years ago, one particular Thursday night I was at home with The Mrs.  I was planning on taking a vacation day on Friday.  We were enjoying a nice glass of wine while Pugsley and The Boy were upstairs asleep.  We’d kissed them goodnight, which is sweet.  There is nothing more wholesome than a goodnight kiss.  Unless you’re in prison.

I digress.  We were having wine downstairs . . . then the phone rang.

My boss was on the other end – there was an emergency at work, and they needed help.  I ended up working 12 hours a day for 45 days straight without a day off.  During that time, the sheer volume of work that I had to do was huge.

Every day, I started by making a list.  An exceptionally detailed list.  Why?

todo

My chiropractor has just one thing on his to-do list:  get back to work.

There were hundreds of things to do.  By breaking them down to the forty or fifty that I needed to get done that day, I could focus on those items.  Without the list, I’d have been distracted by the sheer scale of stuff that needed to be done.  With the list, it gave me concrete tasks that I could do to get progress.

If I was overwhelmed?  I could just pick the next item.  It might not be the most important item.  But it kept me moving.

At the end of each day, I’d summarize the things we’d gotten done and the major things we had to do the next day.  The next morning?  Back to the list.

By breaking up big, complex tasks into small ones, it’s easy to get going.  Once I’ve got momentum up, the list often becomes irrelevant – I’m accomplishing everything on it, and only looking back to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

LISTDIE

Vikings aren’t afraid of death.  As pagans, they know they’ll be Bjørn again.

It has been my experience that people are happiest when they are working on meaningful work at the edge of their ability.  But that kind of work is scary to start – the edge of ability means that failure is a real possibility.  Often, it’s hard to start because of that fear.

The solution?

Move your little finger.  And get going.

Why The Left Fears The Right, And Why The Right Will Win

“Oh, haven’t you noticed?  We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300

TRUTH

When I was a five or so, my parents had horses.  One of the horses had a foal (baby horse for you city folk), and Pa Wilder brought the foal and the mare (momma horse) into the barn – it was brutally cold, and the barn was much warmer.  They brought me down to see the foal.  It was young and awkward as new horses are.

Inside the stall was a series of closely spaced rails in a square, about four feet by six feet.

I asked, “What’s that for, Pa?”

“Well, when the foal is in here, he’ll find that he can’t walk across the bars.  His hooves won’t quite fit.  That will train him so he won’t do that when he gets older.”

Even at five, I had seen cattle guards and knew cows wouldn’t try to cross them.  But here was a horse.

CATTLE

From Library of Congress.

“Won’t he try to jump over the cattle guard, Pa?”

“Some horses, the smart ones, will figure out and a cattle guard won’t work on them.  But most don’t.  Heck, you can just paint parallel lines on an asphalt road and some horses won’t try to cross them.”

The little training bars were a device, a device to train the horse that he was in a prison made up of parallel bars on the ground.  In that, the horse restricted his own freedom.

In the last post (Money, Power, Politics, and Soros), I discussed the difference between Money and Power.  I actually finished most of the last post before I wrote the conclusion.  Money and Power as described through most of the post were entirely materialistic concepts.  Ending it with just that discussion wasn’t right, since the theme of my writing is often to balance the material with the concepts of spirit and virtue.  We live in a material world, but the reason we live is for a purpose greater than this moment.

Freedom isn’t important to either Money or Power; Freedom is actually the enemy of both Money and Power.  Throughout most of recorded history in the West, when either Money or Power get too out of balance, there is a backlash, and Freedom eventually wins.

It has for thousands of years.

And it will again.  I firmly believe that the destiny of the West is in the hands of those who love Freedom, especially in the United States.

Why?

The Left is utterly afraid of the Right.  Though they put forward a great front – they are shaking.  The American people on the Right compose the largest potential army in the history of the world.

The numbers:

There are at least 400,000,000 guns in private hands in the United States by one estimate.  That seems right.

There are 800,000 or so cops.  Assume they have two guns each.  Heck, assume they have three.  Round up.  Three million guns.  The Military in the United States owns about 4.4 million guns.  Round up.  That’s a total of less than 10 million guns in the hands of the United States government or other governmental authorities.  And that assumes that they stand with the government, which is questionable at best.

Assume only 35% of the American public owns guns, a number I think is very low.  Call it 100,000,000 people.  Assume that those owners skew mostly Right – 80/20?  That’s 80,000,000 on the Right.  Let’s do 80/20 again on those that will not stand for a communist uprising in the United States.  That’s 16,000,000 Americans ready to stand in the breach.  The largest army in the history of the world (so far) were the United States armed forces in 1945:  12,000,000 Americans under arms.

I’ll state it again:  American people on the Right have the potential to compose the largest army in the history of the world.  Period.

People on the Right, men and women, also have more and better training for field conditions.  I’d put The Mrs. up against most people on the Left if it came to a rural setting, because Leftists have no idea that trees are even made of wood, and I doubt that many on the Right will want to make the Stalingrad mistake and get caught in the cities as Leftists consume themselves.  How many people on the Right have their homes on the market to escape from Minneapolis?  From Seattle?  From any of dozens of cities where they know that they no longer belong?

I have no idea.  But they’d be fools to stay.

And even though we have the numbers on our side, there’s more good news.  We don’t even need overwhelming numerical superiority:

  • How many apostles peacefully changed the religion of Europe?
  • How many Spartans defended all of Western Civilization at Thermopylae?

“But John,” you say, “most all of the people in your examples died for their cause.”  Yes, they did.  And we remember them for that, because they changed the world.  Thousands of years before Robert Heinlein said it, they knew the truth of his quote:  “You can have peace.  Or you can have freedom.  Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

Besides, everyone is going to die.  Is it better to be a Leonidas or a St. Peter?

Obviously, it is.

Don’t be like Ephialtes (LINK).

We outgun the Left.  We have Truth, capital T, on our side.  The other day Vox Day had this inspiring clip at his blog (LINK).

It was a good clip, and one I’d forgotten.  So we watched the movie again tonight – it’s one that could not be made by Hollywood® today.  That clip also makes the point I tried to make earlier much more eloquently than I ever could.

The Black Riots Lives Matter riots are demoralizing to people of good character.  This is intentional.  The riots are meant to make you feel alone.  The riots are meant to make you feel that the Right has already lost.

The Right has not lost.

How did the Modern Sporting Lawyer make you feel?

STLOU

That’s why he and his wife are condemned.  That’s why they have vowed to cancel him, to make an example of them, to find a way to charge them with crime.  They are the opposite of demoralization.

The Modern Sporting Lawyer and his wife drive the Left crazy.  Here, their desire to destroy as a senseless mob was turned back by only two people.

Can you imagine if the Right was united?  I can.

The corollary is obvious:  quit fighting each other in the right.  Stop.  People don’t believe in your exact brand?

You can’t stand Libertarians?  You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day?  That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom?  The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?

Too bad.

We are in the same foxhole.  Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other.  Now.  If you’re not with us, you’re against us.  And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.

How do you know if you’re with us?

  • We like building statues, not tearing them down.
  • We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.
  • We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.
  • We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”
  • We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.

And that is the difference.  The Left is bitter.  The Left is seething.  The Left is angry.

Why?  Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners.  They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person.  But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.

The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left.  They see themselves as weak.  Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness.  But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good.  They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate.  The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.

The Right rejects that.  All of it.

Sex isn’t a virtue, chastity is a virtue.  Sex isn’t evil, but making it the focus of your life is no different than any other addiction – it is a vice.  But which of those does the Left celebrate?  Inside, they know that it’s wrong, and that also fills them with self-hate.

Because of that hate, and seek to make the Right weak like them.  How?  By demoralizing the Right, by taking virtues and attacking them while publicly celebrating things we use to call sin.  By coming up with never ending list of impossible demands and nonsensical redefinitions of the English language on an ever more frequent basis.  Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has recently been excommunicated from the Left for being brazen enough to indicate that women might be, well, women.

ROWLING

The Right has built Western Civilization, and built it with a compassion for the weak.  That makes the Left hate the Right even more.  They seek to make us doubt our morals and virtue:  everyone is racist, every historical figure is fatally flawed.  That is justification enough in the minds of the Left to tear down everything that has made their prosperity and wealth transfer possible.  The Left makes no real art, just caricatures of the genius that has gone before, photographs of Christ soaking in urine.  The Left is a parasite that, failing to create, destroys.

But those games won’t work anymore.  The Right is strong.  The Right is virtuous.  The Left seeks to build nothing because that is the province of the Right.  And to the Left, those who are strong and build statues to the virtues of flawed men are evil.

Was Columbus perfect?  No.  Did he open up a New World?  Yes.  How many people in Mexico City would prefer to revert to the charnel house of the Aztecs?  Some, but every hand that goes up will belong to a member of the Left.

The Right is not evil.  We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands.  Why?  Because they could never build it.  The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.

Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.

I don’t think we will win.

I know we will win.  We are the foals that recognize the painted lines on the asphalt for the lie that they are.  We are the horses that realize that they have the strength to jump over the cattle guard that we used to think was our prison.

PAINT

From Library of Congress.

I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall.  We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history.  The Right doesn’t know its own strength.  But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.

We will win.  Maybe not this year.  Maybe not next year.  Maybe not even in the next decade.  And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis.  We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.

And we will make it better.

And we will win.

We always have.

What is your profession?

I rarely ask people to share these posts, but if you have people you know are feeling down – please do.