Never Let Them Demoralize You, Complete With Gratuitous Economic Bikini Graph

“Maybe we got ’em demoralized.” – Aliens

I was reminded that, even though I bragged I was the Inventor of the Bikini Graph®, I had produced no bikini graph in a recent post.  My apologies.  Here is the most recent GDP of the United States.  With bikini.  How can you be sad after seeing these results???

I was on the football team at my high school.  I know the football teams on television are all above average, but they had to play someone.  And we were the ones they got to play so they could be above average.

Going from memory, I’m certain we never had a winning season in high school.  My senior year, we won a single varsity game, and that was by a margin of two points – we won 8-6.  A record of 1-8 might sound like it only took nine weeks to make, but it seems a lot longer while you’re making it.

One particular game we went into the locker room at halftime, down by some amazing deficit that rhymes with 38-6.  It was winter.  The rain that was coming down on the field was freezing creating a wet yet frozen field.  It was a miserable day, but still better than watching a Disney® movie made in the last 20 years.

Our head coach then said to the team, “Listen, guys, go on out there and play like it’s zero-zero.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into a locker room, realizing you were going to have to go back out onto the field and spend the next hour of your life going toe-to-toe against another team that was, statistically speaking, certain to win.  It’s as unpleasant as spending time in an elevator with Bill Clinton and his old-man onion breath.

Bill Clinton thought that the only thing that could make him cry was an onion.  Then Hillary started throwing ashtrays at him.

Now, I may not be a math major, but our team was down by 32 points.  Playing like we were zero-zero was like assuming that we were not already getting hammered like Hunter Biden on a Tuesday morning.  To me, this didn’t make sense, I even thought it was borderline delusional.  It wasn’t zero-zero.  It was at least 32 points below zero-zero.

As I got older, I began to figure it out.  What the coaches were trying to help us overcome was simple.  Demoralization.  We weren’t winning.  We weren’t going to win, since our quarterback couldn’t throw farther than about forty feet, and couldn’t count higher than 12 without taking off his shoes.  Of course, having six fingers on each hand did improve his grip, so he rarely fumbled . . .

But there is a choice in life.  You can live, knowing that you are going to fail, and acting like you’re going to fail.  Or you can live, and just do your best in every moment, knowing that you’ve left it all out there, like a monkey in a minefield, when everything goes ba-BOON.

It’s a fact:  humans eat more bananas than monkeys.  Personally?  I find that monkeys are more filling.

Living life as a failure is demoralization.

But what is demoralization?  Demoralization is depriving people of spirit, of morale, of courage.

I don’t know about you, but I was proud to go back on the field when we were losing.  Not proud that we were losing.  But proud that we had the guts to go back out there, again and again, and give it everything we had on each play.

I’m not telling any secrets when I say that it’s the goal of some groups to demoralize the people of the United States.  The news in 2020 has been a constant drumbeat to demoralize anyone who would oppose the Leftist, globalist agenda.

If you were to take them at face value, there’s no way that Americans could ever be sovereign in their own nation again.  And certainly, we should live in fear of disease for the rest of our lives and put everything on hold because of it.  Masks?  Why not make them mandatory forever.  To me?  That sounds like giving up.  And also, Wal-Mart® may not enforce the mask policy, but they still get pretty upset when I show up without pants.

Uncle Hunter always said, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  Uncle Hunter did crack.

That demoralization is not where it ends.  Looking at the news, we have seen our cities burn for months.  Sure, I don’t live in Minneapolis, and I’ve only been there a few times.  But Minneapolis is an American city.  To watch it burn is demoralizing – I don’t live in Minnesota, but if I’m an American it does hurt to watch an American city burn.  How bad is it?  BLM® and Antifa© have made cops look good.

It also shows us how far we’ve fallen.  Just like when we see people beaten on the streets for the crime of wearing a red hat that shows support for the president they voted for is a defeat for law and order.  I even heard where a protest started because an amputee’s limb got stolen – that was completely out of hand.

How do I know this?  Despite being the very example of an iron-willed observer of American politics, I occasionally admit to being human, too.  I don’t want Seattle to burn.  Or Minneapolis.  Or Portland.  These are American cities, built with American hands and American material and American labor.  We should be proud of them – we should want them to thrive.  Watching evil people destroy them?

It’s demoralizing.

Man, I hope I can get the two gyros for $6 deal there.

Me?  I’ve done several things to stop being personally demoralized:

  1. I’ve stopped listening to/reading things that sap my spirit.  I used to listen to NPR® – they used to tilt left, but still provide a decent coverage that wasn’t unhinged. Not after 2015.  I got very sick of the constant partisanship and anti-Americanism.  In one segment, an NPR™ correspondent told us how awful it was that we followed our own immigration laws and that it was immoral to report illegals.  In the very next segment?  Another correspondent told us how human trafficking of illegals was evil.    I’m gonna need a bigger scorecard for this one.  Which laws are we going to enforce this week?  Are pants optional?
  2. Drudge® used to be a great source of news. I thought he was balanced.  Now, after the Chinese bought his site?  Horribly tilted to the Left.  Me?  Scott Adams put me on to Ground News (LINK).  It’s a great site that actually analyzes the news in the most nonpartisan way that I’ve ever seen.  It shows which news stories are being slanted by the Left, and which ones are being slanted by the Right.  Goodbye, Drudge.  Last I heard he had an opinion about North Korean journalism:  “Can’t complain.”

I hear Best Korea is great at geometry.  They have a supreme ruler.

  1. I increased listening to/watching/reading things that add to my spirit.
    1. I like Scott Adams while I’m exercising.  There are more that I like and will share if you’re interested, but I’d love to see your suggestions below.
    2. Lots of new movies are just awful. They’re preachy, but to make up for that defect, they’re also not good.  Give me the Outlaw Josey Wales any day of the week over almost any movie not made by Mel Gibson in the last five years.  I think I enjoyed three new movies in all of 2019, and none of them were as good as Sean Connery’s home videos where he just eats crunchy breakfast cereal on camera and then asks for a bottle of gin.
    3. New books are, mostly, not as good as older ones. Missing?    Missing?  Humanity being the goal, not the problem.  Missing?  Girls in metal bras on the cover.
  2. It also helps to maintain or increase positive habits.
    1. Get enough sleep. This is one where I’m a chronic offender, at least during the week.  I’ll make it up on the other side of the dirt, I guess.
    2. Eat better. That’s been off and on this year.  Sadly, more off than on.  But I have found that what food I eat is very, very significant on my mood.  Also?  Rubbing butter on my chest may not help my attitude, but it does make my skin shiny and the dog will play with me.
    3. Exercise more. This is one that has immediate payoffs and long term payoffs.  The sad part is my employer seems to take a dim view of me just hanging out all afternoon in the gym with the weightbrahs.

A Canticle for Gibson?  At least one reader will get this.

There are some other things that can help, too:

  • Get rid of habits that make you feel bad. Which habits?  I know mine.  Do you know yours?
  • Fix things about your environment that upset you. Or don’t let them upset you.  I have a banister that’s been hanging for the better part of a decade now.  I walk by it at least once a day.  It doesn’t really bother me.  It’s also on my list.  I’m sure I’ll have it fixed by 2030 or so.
  • For me, prayer works. Your mileage may vary, and I certainly don’t criticize readers that think that all of the splendor and wonder and amazing complexity of humanity that lead to symphonies and sonnets and songs and Gilligan’s Island around us are random effects of a cosmic fluctuation.  Because all of that random probability is more likely than God, right?  Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have put Gilligan’s Island on the list, though that might be proof of Satan if it weren’t for Mary Ann.

A friend in college grew up next door to her.  She would come over and have coffee with his mom.  He had, um, conflicts about this.

We all own what goes into our minds, at least at this point in 2020.  We cannot be forced to consume media.  We choose what we watch, what we hear, what we read.  We don’t owe it to anyone, anyone at all to consume lies in the news that have more holes in them than Batman’s parents.

To be clear:  this isn’t an attempt to avoid reality.  We must face truth unafraid.  Each of us must be ready to go back onto that field in the freezing rain after halftime, down by 32 points.  And I’ll agree with you if you said we lost the game – the scoreboard would agree.  But we didn’t fail.  We played every down as hard as we could.

I’m not saying we should be deluded into thinking we’ll win every game we play, but giving in to fear about possible futures is demoralization itself.

The truth is that we cannot be demoralized without our own consent.

The easiest path?  Don’t consent.  Understand that, in the end?

We win.

2020 Isn’t Over: The 2020’s Are Just Starting

“Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too.  ‘Cause chicks dig dudes with money.” – Office Space

How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?  No idea.  They’re all still arguing over why the last one broke.

Why do I write about economics?  When people talk about economics, they have been trained to be bored.  Just talk about supply and demand curves and you’ll see eyes glaze over.  That’s why I, John Wilder, invented Sexy Economics®, because curves in bikinis rarely cause eyes to glaze over.  See, genius!

Economics is real, and it’s important.  And if you want to understand economics you’re probably more likely to learn it from a supermodel than from a Ph.D. in economics.

Catastrophes happen – heck, they happen all the time.  My first marriage was a catastrophe, and it only caused the First Gulf War and the eradication of several Bolivian villages.  That’s one of the reasons I got divorced – I didn’t want to be responsible for the thermonuclear destruction of mankind.

Some relationships are just that bad.

I just ended a long-term relationship.  Good thing it wasn’t mine!

As I look towards the 2020’s, I originally was going to write a year-by-year commentary on the coming decade, at least as it pertains to economics and the potential difficulties we face.  In one sense, it doesn’t matter who is going to be elected next Tuesday (or, a month from Tuesday if the courts get involved).  Part of the fate of the United States, and world economy in general, is already baked in the cake.

At this late stage in the American Experiment, both Republican and Democratic parties agree on one thing – spending money is exactly what each side wants.  In many cases, the spending that both sides want is identical, but differs only in very small ways:  ‘Rona stimulus bux?  Both sides agree.  Both sides (roughly) even agree on amounts:  “all of it.”  It’s easy that way – it’s not their money.

The only real difference (from what I’ve seen) is that the Democrats want to add in lots of payoffs to their favored groups and make it hard for Republicans to pay of their favored groups.  And vice versa.  Both want to open the money spigots.

Where does the money come from?

Printing it, silly.  Depending on tax revenue is for amateurs.

Printing money does, however, have consequences.  One consequence we’ve seen so far is that the previous WuFlu stimulus bills have been a money conveyor back to the richest people on Earth.  Can’t go shopping at the mall?  Your local store has been shut down by a totalitarian governor?

Bezos® can bring it!

I ordered hay for my horse from Amazon.  It upset me that two days later they wanted my feed back.

Need entertainment and can’t go out?  Netflix® can bring the latest repulsive Leftist propaganda!  Facebook®?  Twitter™?  All available.  And all ready for your stimulus bux, and all brought straight to Americans on Coronavirus-free, totalitarian-approved broadband.

How is it paid for?  Those same Stimulus bux.  The stimulus to the economy has been a conveyor of money straight to the wealthiest people on Earth.  The economy?  Well, it, at least temporarily dropped to 2008 levels.  And I shouldn’t have to remind you that 2008 wasn’t exactly a great year, unless you were John McCain’s brain tumor.

But what do the 2020s have to offer?  What trends will end up influencing our lives if we don’t end up as victims of John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon in Civil War 2.0?

  • Dollar Collapse.

To be fair, I’ve been expecting this one since the late oughts.  It really took years and years and years of utter mismanagement to get us to where we are today, and we really shouldn’t waste them.  I mean, we should take the example of the Australians.  They stocked up on toilet paper during the COVID-19 crisis, and were okay down under.

The signs of this particular currency collapse crisis will be unique, and an early warning will be a general increase in prices, like going to Wendy’s® and having to pay $5 for a burger.

Oops.

Government services will actually decrease.  Taxes may or may not go up, since no one really cares how much money the government has anymore.  As of 2020, the only thing holding the value of money up in the United States is inertia.  We can spend dollars internationally because everyone on Earth . . . will let us.

Why would they do that?

Unrelated news:  Chuck Norris burped today – Dallas gone.

The United States has thousands of nuclear weapons.  Who said that was a wasted investment, eh?  The Golden Rule isn’t really, “he who has the gold makes the rules,” it’s really, “he who has a nuclear arsenal and an advanced military and navy makes the rules.”

The biggest threat to the dollar isn’t the Federal Reserve™ printing it right and left.  Nope.  The biggest threat to the dollar are the Russians, Chinese, and Europeans saying that they’re not afraid anymore.  After that?  It’s autarky, where we have to depend on our own production.  That’s been the standard throughout much of history – countries have been, through the tyranny of distance, forced to be self-sufficient for all but the most luxurious of goods – if you’re in 1500’s Europe, you won’t be importing firewood to France over the Silk Road.

It won’t be so bad – the United States is still wealthy in energy, minerals, and agricultural products, and if we’re not?  We can push Canada over in an afternoon.  Trudeau would probably surrender if we sent him a nasty email.  (I love Canada, but, really, Trudeau???)

When does it hit?  Like I said, I’ve been expecting this one for quite a while.  I’m not sure the United States makes it to 2030.  Our primary saving grace?  The rest of the world’s economists ate glue in kindergarten and rode the short bus, just the same as the economists in the United States.

Consequence?  7/10.  Life goes on.  Except shabbier.  In some cases, especially older folks, life is far worse.  Most currency collapses take place in a span of a year or two, and people rapidly adjust.  Of course, those that only had the local money are now poor.  Precious metals are still the best investment:  gold, silver, and lead.

  • Energy.

The secret to American energy independence is fracking, and I don’t mean all the fracking that Hunter Biden has been doing in all of those pictures on the Internet.  But a little secret of fracking:  the fracked oil wells deplete very quickly – in some cases producing 90% of all of the oil they will ever produce in the first year.

Right now, the United States is not drilling so much.  Last year at this time, over 700 oil rigs were poking holes in the ground looking for sweet, sweet oil.  Last week there were 189.  Sure, that’s more than zero, but it’s not a lot.  Oil production is down.  That makes sense, since gasoline prices are so low you could use it instead of water for bathing in Texas.  Oil demand is down, by 15-20%.  You Texans?  Take more showers.

Hunter Biden has religion.  I heard he was a Crystal Methodist.

A nation doesn’t go from 700 active oil drilling rigs to less than 200 without sending a lot of people home.  And putting rigs in garages.  Or, more likely, losing those rigs to bankruptcy attorneys.  Heck, even my attorney was so hurt by the oil collapse he had to take a job cooking.  He’s now a sue chef.

So, if the economy ever gets going again it will hit a hard limit:  energy.  In the last few years people have forgotten that high energy cost is a tax that impacts almost every bit of physical production.  If it gets to your house, it shows up on a truck.  And you can’t cheat the system.  A currency collapse is like a hurricane or an ex-wife – it starts out crazy and wild, but in the end, it will take your house.

Imagine that, everything is starting to look good, and then?

Wham.  $6 a gallon gasoline.

That’s a great way to turn an economic recovery into an economic failure.  Regardless of Biden or Trump this will happen.  Biden will just make the response worse, because he’s like my browser:  17 tabs open, and he has no idea where the music is coming from.

When does it hit?  My bet is 2023 or 2024.

Consequences?  4/10 if Republican leadership, 8/10 if Democratic, since Leftists will use this as an excuse to put in Green Energy®, which has is not an energy program, it’s a program of social control.

 

  • Healthcare.

Ironically, healthcare is probably the biggest sickness in our economy.  Even before COVID-∞ showed up, our healthcare system was set up to fail.  The reason for failure is simple:  as a compassionate nation, we don’t really refuse service to anyone.  So, if an illegal immigrant mother from Mongolia and show up in an emergency room because one of your four hundred and fifty-one goat-children has the sniffles, they have to treat it.

And they can’t charge her if she can’t pay.

That explains why Pugsley went to the emergency room and got three stitches because whittling your left hand is easier than whittling a stick, it cost me $2400.  And, yes, I have insurance.  My insurance paid zero, though it did make me wish I’d have pulled out the needle and thread.

A native Alaskan tried to convince me to become an eye doctor when we lived in Alaska.  Sadly I was suffering from an Optical Aleutian.

This isn’t just an individual problem – it’s a system problem.  The first rule of real economics is:  incentives matter.  Thomas Sowell once said that if decent economists were in charge of bringing down automobile accidents, they wouldn’t put an airbag in the steering wheel – they’d put a Bowie knife pointed straight at the driver.  Then?  The driver would have the proper incentive to not cause an accident.

Our health care system has nearly zero good incentives.  Because of that, the system is broken – it’s a hidden tax on tens of millions of people who take responsibility versus a nation of tens of millions of freeloaders.

And it will, over time, bankrupt us.

When does it hit?  For the last 20 years, but it will become unsustainable (if trends continue) by 2028.

Consequences?  5/10, but 8/10 if you’re really sick or old.  Collapse of the healthcare system as it is.  Destruction of the insurance industry (which may be a good thing).  Eventual rationing of healthcare based on either cash, government mandate, or both.  Even for seniors.

There they are:  three potential fates for the 2020’s.  And you thought things would get better after 2020.

Ha!

Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Don’t eat the eggs. We put LSD in the eggs.” – The Men Who Stare At Goats

I never trust a goose journalist – too much propa-gander.

Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C.  This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process:  hemlock.  To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”

But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks.  The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife.  They have a goose.  Each day, the goose lays a golden egg.  I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me.

11 year old me thought that was amazing!

In Greek mythology, Chiron was a half-horse, half-human doctor.  I guess he was the Centaur for Disease Control.

Current day me?

I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home.  We could call it Manhattans With Musk®.  Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.

Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot.  I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch.  Blendersnout Clumberbake?  Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.

Okay, this is actually a chocolate statue of Bunderslam Camberthatch.  We had a dog that weighed six pounds and ate a one pound bag of chocolate.  Killed him.  14 years later.

But back to Aesop.

In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day.  Nope.

An aside:  How much would a golden goose egg be worth?

The answer, at $1900 per ounce gold, is $176,640.  (For those of you playing our home game:  remember to convert to troy ounces.)

So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $176,640 a day show up out of the goose’s butt.  So?

They killed it.

What do the Irish call fool’s gold?  Shamrock.

Yes.  They killed it.  And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold?  They found nothing but Greek goose guts.  Oops!  Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose.  Pâté de foie gras?  It’s okay if you want your goose . . . de-livered.

I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization.  I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed.

And it really is happening.

Right now.

The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind.  Heck, North Korea loves western rock:  Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs.  They love the Guns,  but said we can keep the Roses.  Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been.

Ever.

Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization.  Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization.

So, we all win, right?

Well, no.

I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid.  This is, of course, a Big Lie®.  I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®.  Certainly not!  If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras?  That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it.  Nah, I don’t – just kitten.

But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.

Cannibals never eat entitled kids – they always taste spoiled.

But in 2020, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating?  Sure!  Let’s call it a right.  They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too?

As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism.  Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal.  That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.

Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code.  I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.

The answer is always famine.

But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement.  Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all.  Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.

This is the reality of Leftism in the West:  Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck.  Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved.  Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.

This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s:  People are the property of the state.  Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences.  Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right?

According to Leftists, yes.

As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country.  The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious:   that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.

Used with permission.

This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2020 is that cultures that exists on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.

For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth.  It’s beyond this post to describe why that is.  I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random.  Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator?  Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth.

But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock.

Right?

Liveblogging: The Debate At The End Of The Universe

“To cover some hot news?  Like the Lincoln-Douglas debates?” – Kolchak, the Night Stalker

I have a lot of experience with debate – I use debate to catch defish.

This is the post where we’ll do the liveblogging in the comments tomorrow.  I know there are probably some technically better ways to do it, but I’m going this way because everyone already knows how to get here and how to hit the refresh button on your browser.  Clumsy as a pit bull doing brain surgery?  Sure.  But that’s politics.

This will be the last debate for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  That’s not as bold a prediction as it might sound at first.

Donald will either retire after his next term (most likely), declare himself emperor (second most likely) so he’s done.  But if he declares himself emperor, imagine the reign of Trump Barron the First, as he annexes first Canada in Operation Leafblower, then Mexico in Operation Tequila Shooter, and finally Europe.  There won’t need to be an actual military action to take over Europe, they’ll just send over six Texans with varmint rifles to handle the light work.  As long as the Texans speak the national language of Europe, Arabic, it’ll be easy.

I’m sure this was what the Resistance was fighting for, n’est-ce pas?  (used with permission)

In this timeline, we all rise and salute the birth of the American Empire where there is a burger in every mouth, and riding mowers for every butt.  But there is another timeline.

Joe Biden is obviously still good at reading things if he’s had his Ovaltine® and seven straight days in a hyperbaric Tupperware™ container.  Since there won’t be a teleprompter at this debate, he’ll have to make due with radio signals.  If Joe wins, however, there is zero, and I mean zero probability that he will be able to finish a term as president without being removed from office because he lost every memory that occurred after that time his grandpa made him a scooter by nailing rollerskates to planks during the War of 1812.

Biden is gone, mentally.  If Biden is elected, I’m expecting that President Harris will take over by, oh, February.  She and Vice President Amy Schumer will then begin the exhausting task of attempting to subvert everything that produced prosperity in America.  I predict they’ll start by introducing a strict set of regulations governing how food in breakroom refrigerators is treated, even though Antifa® will by this time have conquered Sesame Street® and have declared it a sovereign nation, with focus on the letter ‘C’, the number ‘1917’ and the month of ‘October’.

Joe Biden finished a Sesame Street puzzle in only six hours.  He was proud.  On the box it said three to five years!

In a rare scoop for this website, I have obtained internal Biden-Harris campaign emails discussing the response to the ongoing Chinese Water Torture® release of ever more damning information about the Biden family.

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon (Campaign Manager for Joe Biden – J.W.)
Subject:  Hunter’s Sex Drive

Melanie.  I mean Susan.  How do I switch this thing over to Showtime®?

Can I get some of those hard candies?  The yellow ones.  The peppermint ones make my eyes ache, which makes it hard to read the helicopter.  Butterstache are my favorite.

Did I hear someone say that Hunter’s sex drives have been found?  There were people yelling that as I was, well, I’m not sure what I was doing.  But why is everyone worried about Hunter’s sex drives?  Wasn’t him knocking up a stripper proof enough, you dog faced pony soldier?  The man’s got plenty of sex drives.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re:  Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

No, what they found were hard drives from Hunter’s old computers.  It seems that he took laptops from the Beau Biden Foundation (the place where we launder get money from Soros and the Clintons) and then used them for Facebook® and porn surfing.  I think he liked Netflix™, too, but it seems that he’s using your login information.  At least I hope that’s the case, and that it wasn’t you watching Cuties every night since it came out.

All we can piece together is that, incredibly high on crack, Hunter couldn’t figure out why the computers weren’t working.  The fact that he hadn’t charged them in a month was a mystery to his drug-addled brain – he kept getting new computers and using them and then, assuming they were broken, took them all in to get repaired.

He had no idea, zero, of where he took them.  Did you know he was sniffing model airplane glue again?

Looks like he did give the repair place his password, “BIDEnROX69DUDE.”

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Oh.  The n doesn’t look right.  Is that how they spell now?

I’m glad he’s making models again.  Spent enough money on that kid’s model making hobby when he was a kid to buy a Syrian child.  Funny, Hunter said he just needed the glue – he said he could make his own kit.  He was dedicated – making models until he was thirty-five!

Where are my pants?  Has anyone seen that Filipino kid?  The one who smells like jasmine in the jungle?  I need someone to rub my feet.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

Great news!  I called up our contacts at Twitter®, Google™, and Facebook© and they’ve all agreed to make sure NO ONE sees this story.  It turns out that these emails suggest you took millions of dollars of money from Hunter and then used the power of the United States Government to cover it up!

Our team did a great job on the cover up.  And I think that we can count on places like Snopes®, the New York Times©, and the Washington Post™ to bury this until after Kamala takes over you’re elected president!

We’ll just hide you until the debate.  We’ll practice on Wednesday.  And no walking outside in your bathrobe like last week.

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 20, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Just got up.  Man, I feel better.  What was in that blue pill?

The Facebook® is that button on my Blackberry™, right?  I just press it.  Then my snap chats, right?

How did you fix the button on my thingamabob so that it doesn’t talk to me about Hunter’s sex drives?  Did you have to change the floppy drive?

Oh, and if we want to practice debating, we should get Jeffery Toobin in here.  I hear he’s a master debater.

I hear Jeffrey Toobin wrote a romance novel – it was a real tearjerker.

Okay, these aren’t really their emails.  I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see the real emails.  They’re probably higher in actual humor value than these.

See you tonight.  I’ll even drag The Mrs. downstairs for the final debate.

Life Is A Road. I Drive A Used Car.

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – Silence of the Lambs

The local bank in Modern Mayberry was robbed by a ghost – it was a polterheist.

Blog note:  I will be live blogging the debate on Thursday night along with The Mrs. but I cannot promise to drink as much as last time.  I’ll be here 15 minutes beforehand.  I’ll put up a post tomorrow for the liveblog.

As careful regular readers have probably noticed, I’m generally a strong advocate of living within your means.  That means not blowing all of your money on PEZ®, fast women (or slow men), and anything related to the movie Highlander II when your paycheck hits the bank.

If you look at life as a road, debt is a great valley.  Once you drop in, it’s very hard to get out, because the deeper you get in the steeper the valley walls are.  I mean, yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Debt, at least it’s nice to get some time outside.

Even though I’m against debt, there are exceptions, unlike my “no exception policy” about dating married women.  The Mrs. gets a little irritated about that one.

Never date a girl with a lazy eye.  They’re always seeing someone else.

Houses don’t count, as long as you live in them and don’t consider them an investment.  I understand that few people have the cash to buy a house, so everyone gets a pass there.  Heck, I’ve paid off most of my mortgage, so now it’s officially lessage.

The other debt that is (again, generally) acceptable is a marketable education.  Does this include a degree in Grievance Studies, X-Box Couch Engineering or Snack Maintenance?

Of course not.  No business wants to hire those people, unless their HR department needs drones to be sacrificed to feed the Queen HR Bee her nectar.

The biggest killer to a happy life is debt.  It hangs over you.  When I was in debt, I thought about it several times a day, wondering how I could ever get out of debt.  Thankfully, no one really needs both kidneys.

Even worse than debt is the interest you have to pay on debt.  Not only do you have to pay back money you didn’t have in the first place, you have to pay more back.  Probably the only weapons greater in destructiveness in international relations than nuclear bombs are interest rates.  Oddly, it isn’t listed as an act of war to send in the International Monetary Fund to make loans to nations who can’t afford toilets.

My mother-in-law said her dogs liked to drink out of the toilet because the water was cool and fresher than the water in their bowls.  Then I began to wonder – how did she know that?

As an aside, I indicated once that I thought that a moratorium on all interest payments was worthy of consideration.  There was a huge pushback from readers indicating I didn’t understand how the modern economy worked.  In the meantime, European Central Banks have issued debt with a negative interest rate.  For those not paying attention, that means if you deposit money, you have to pay the bank for the privilege of depositing it.  It just shows the old story is true, give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a man a bank?  He’ll rob everyone.

Hmmm.  And I was told that I don’t understand how the modern economy works.  I think I’ll win this one in the long run.

Debt is a killer.  Many Americans borrow money for a cool pickup truck to drive to work to have enough money to pay for a cool pickup that they can drive to work so they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup so they can drive to work so that they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup . . . .  (Lather, rinse, repeat.)

Hmmm.

What do you call a fight between loan sharks?  A conflict of interest.

I did tell an employee that was reporting to me that I suggest that people never buy a new car unless they had a cool million, cash.  I stand by that.  There are reasons for that:

  • Older cars last longer than almost every Hollywood marriage. Especially to Angelina Jolie and her coven of children stolen from each continent on Earth, except Antarctica, because there are some things that even penguins won’t put up with.
  • Generally, older cars cost less to maintain than a Hollywood starlet. And they maintain their value better, too.  Ever try to trade Jamie Gertz for a ’67 Camero?  Zero takers.
  • If you follow the N+1 rule (one car for each driver in the house who has to go to school or work plus a single spare for the whole family) your job is safe. You always have a car that works even if that car is older than Madonna’s first facelift.

Following this rule has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car payments.  It has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car insurance payments, tens of thousands of alimony payments to disgruntled starlets, and thousands in car taxes.  But it’s also a lifestyle – you have to be comfortable not having your ego wrapped up in cars.

That’s just one facet of turning down luxury.

My friends say I have a big ego, but enough about them.

Your income will fluctuate throughout your career.  It’s really okay to indulge from time to time, based on that income.  For me, that indulgence has been reflected in:

  • Nicer wine. Not great wine, but not pruno, either.
  • Amazon® doo-dads. If I saw a sphere of tungsten on Amazon™ and it was 2AM and I had a few beers, maybe I’d buy it (it’s on the sitting room coffee table).  For those not in the know – tungsten is extraordinarily dense, somewhere close to gold, but not as dense as a CNN® contributor who can’t tell if the Zoom© call is on “mute” before defending Sparta all by himself, if you know what I mean.
  • Not questioning every purchase of The Mrs. When dollars are tight, the marriage has to be tighter, since every purchase is a joint decision.  Then I become, “why did you have to use two sheets of paper towel on that” man.  For reference, Jeffery Toobin only needed one sheet of paper towel.

But built into this is that purely fun purchases happen only if you’re debt-free with a good income stream coming in.  If not?  It’s a joint decision.  With projections.  And charts.  It takes a good marriage to deal with that.

The most important part of luxury is making sure that you can walk away from it.

Is my pride in my car?

Well, no.  Obviously.  My newest car is five years old and that’s The Mrs.’ daily driver.  The one I drive regularly was built just after they found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in the desert.  My ego isn’t wrapped up in my car.

I bought a cheese grater that was owned by both Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  It was the grater of two evils.

One of my favorite stories revolves around a group of Dallas housewives who were at a kid soccer game.  All of the mothers are there with the latest models of cars from Lexus® and Mercedes™ and Audi©.  But one mother drives up in a ten-year-old Buick™ and drops off her kid.

“I wish I was like her,” one mother said to another, “so rich that she can drive an older car.”

I read a statistic a few years ago – I’ve never been able to find it again.  But it said that something like 70% of people driving around in a Mercedes™ had a loan on it.  Think about that – me in my old car with one light-second of miles on it, owned free and clear, has more money than the average Dallas housewife.

Pursuit of life for the pursuit of pleasure is, in the end, a meaningless pursuit.  The idea isn’t that the road is easy, the idea is that you have the strength for the road.  Pleasure isn’t a goal, it’s a side trip that should last a few days.

Then, back to the road.

Free Speech? This Week Proves It Is Not On The Menu If The Left Wins.

“If you got a gun in your hand, you’re free to make any speech you want to.” – All in the Family

I believe this meme to be false.  Does that mean Snopes® has been debunked?

The biggest story of last week wasn’t the emails that allegedly show that Hunter Biden snorts coke off of hooker butts.  Oh, and that he and his father worked in an alleged scheme to illegally take millions of dollars from foreign companies and governments to gain influence inside the United States, or what politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. call “Tuesday.”

No.  That wasn’t the story.  Corruption?

The biggest story of last week was censorship.  Again.

This time, the censored were targeted by two of the usual suspects, Twitter® and Facebook™.  What they censored (fairly effectively) was all of the Hunter Biden-related pictures and emails.  Sure, millions of people have seen them, but they have largely been effective at shielding voters who are undecided from this information.  Let’s face it – the Democrat idea of a bookmark is a lit match.

And it wasn’t random “conspiracy theorists” – this time it was the New York Post®, the newspaper with the fourth-largest circulation in the United States.

Yes, that’s a real headline. 

Twitter® suspended account after account for publishing links to the New York Post™, including a White House press secretary, James Woods, and journalist Jack Posobiec.  Yes.  Twitter© turned off their accounts for publishing a link to a story in the New York Post®.  Then Twitter© changed their software so you couldn’t even post the link.

Normally they also delete posts that are connected to barbed wire – they don’t want to cause a fence.

What reason did Twitter™ give?  That the story contained personal email addresses and phone numbers, and that the story relied on illegally obtained material.  Well, there certainly are email addresses and phone numbers in the story, but those had already been obtained by thousands of Ukrainian strippers and also printed in the New York Post™ for over 200,000 people, and unknown (but huge) numbers of readers on the Post© website.

Yet, when Trump’s taxes were the subject of the disappointingly boring story that Trump has good tax attorneys?  Twitter® censored those posts, right?

No.

But Twitter™ took the account of the New York Post© offline.  Yup.  A newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton before he became black were taken offline for  . . . publishing news.  This like when they canceled the Chicago performance of Hamilton, the Musical because it was too cold.  Once again Brrr killed Hamilton.

I once locked my keys in my car.  Bothered me because it was going to rain and the top was down.

Twitter™ even placed a message on a Tweet® by a Senate Committee that the link listed was “potentially unsafe” and Biden hadn’t even sniffed anyone.

My mechanic told me my car was unsafe.  I told him that bad brakes had never stopped me before.

Facebook™ did much the same, by “limiting sharing” of the story and noting that it would be fact-checked.

By who?  Who is in charge of making these decisions?  Generally, the “fact-checking” executives and organizations are heavily Leftist.  And why not?  The Left views control of speech as a primary weapon in the cultural war.  Thankfully, there is someone checking on the checkers:

See, I thought corruption was only a problem at pretzel companies, where they’re all twisted.

Effectively, Facebook® and Twitter© have taken sides in an election.  How much would the Biden-Harris campaign pay for those companies to shut down negative coverage of Joe?  $100 million?  $200 million?

Yes.  They would (and could) pay them that much.  But they don’t have to pay them, because they are doing it for free.  At least it’s just Twitter™ and Facebook©?

Well, no.  Try Wikipedia®’s article on the Hunter Biden controversy.  If you were to believe that article, you’d be told that it was absolutely false that Hunter Biden ever did any of the things that we are now getting email confirmation of.  Here’s a Breitbart article on this (LINK) subject.  Thanks, Wikipedia™.

But not to be outdone, the New York Times™ shows that it’s been in the bag for Joe for months:

I heard a lot of New Yorkers had to use the newspaper for toilet paper during the Coronavirus shortage.  The Times were rough.

I suppose that everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  But when factual information that shows that potential crimes have occurred at the highest levels of our government are suppressed?  That shows that, finally, Leftist ideology will triumph over journalistic integrity every time.  But the biggest integrity champion?  The swimming pool on the Titanic.  Still full.

There is, of course, the big libertarian argument:  Facebook™, Wikipedia©, and Twitter® are private companies and can do as they wish.

Well, no.  They are private companies and can do any legal thing that they wish to do.  As I mentioned above, the Biden-Harris campaign would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for favorable treatment like they have been getting.  Have they written a check to those companies?  No.  But Biden and Harris intend to give them billions of dollars.

How?

Through laws that have yet to be put in place that will favor them.  Today’s actions to repress knowledge are (in my non-lawyerly opinion) nothing more than in-kind campaign contributions, even though Kamala has the California black vote all locked up.

Poor Bernie – he has Post Traumatic Debate Disorder.

YouTube® has joined in, too.  Thirty big channels were just permanently shut down – big in that some had nearly a million subscribers.  Here’s a list of just those greater with more than 200,000 subscribers, thanks to USSA News (LINK), H/T to Vox for the source (LINK).

  • X22 Report (952,000 subscribers)
  • SGTreport (630,000 subscribers)
  • Edge of Wonder (467,000 subscribers)
  • Praying Medic (391,000 subscribers)
  • And We Know (385,000 subscribers)
  • Amazing Polly (375,000 subscribers)
  • Joe M (367,000 subscribers)
  • Dollar Vigilante (304,000 subscribers)
  • Mouthy Buddha (296,000 subscribers)
  • JustInformed Talk (281,000 subscribers)
  • RedPill78 (269,000 subscribers)
  • The Patriot Hour (248,000 subscribers)
  • In Pursuit of Truth (242,000 subscribers)
  • Destroying the Illusion (238,000 subscribers)
  • TRUreporting (215,000 subscribers)

I wasn’t a regular listener of any of them, but I had heard a video or two from some of them.  The common thread?

All of them were on the Right.

This has been a theme since Alex Jones was shut out of the Twitter®-YouTube™-Facebook© ecosystem.  Jones was a canary in the free-speech coalmine, and when they attempted to silence him it was greatly disturbing to me.  Someone asked why I was so upset that a conspiracy theorist had been banned, and I said, “Why?  Who are you working for??”  It was obvious that this would not be the last banning, and the reasons for banning would become increasingly frivolous.

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar.  You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence!

Now, banning takes place regularly and goes after increasingly more innocuous content.  Innocuous unless you are on the Left, that is.  If you’re on the Left?  No dissenting voices are allowed.  How bad are they?

Worse than you can imagine.

A Reddit link sent me to a comment section there, where they argued that all (and I mean all) of the 1980’s action movies were fascist.  The people commenting were unwittingly sharing their true agenda – the destruction of everything that the United States ever was, or ever stood for.  I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was upset, even though he has given up movies for the pest control business: he is an ex-terminator.

Earl could talk for 70 minutes at the Town Council meeting about the best ways to feed gophers.

Freedom of speech was popular with the Left as long as they could use it to push their minority opinion.  Now?  They realize that freedom of speech is their mortal enemy once they get into power.  It’s fine to pretend that Leftism provides answers as long as we don’t actually use those ideas.  Every time, and I mean every single time they’ve been tried they lead to misery.

How do you keep miserable people under control?  No freedom of speech.

Oh, and never forget, the Second Amendment?

It protects the First.

The 2020 Election: Don’t Let It Make You Crazy

“We’re here to preserve democracy, not practice it.” – Crimson Tide

The Times Square New Year’s Eve Committee asked Hillary to join the committee.  Turns out that sometimes dropping the ball at the last minute is a resume builder!

We are currently in the “crazy season.”  As years of elections go by, people on every side of the political question have become better at influence and persuasion.  Why?  The prize is huge.  Political power provides billions of dollars, if not trillions, for favored industries.  In the 2020’s – it also means immunity from prosecution for supporters of the winners.

Like Hunter Biden, the stakes are high.

Political campaigns, unlike the NBA®, learn over time.  What worked last election?  What didn’t work?  What does the focus group say?

After the primaries, the campaign isn’t focused on getting the votes of die-hard supporters.  All seven of the people in the United States who are “really excited” to vote for JoePedo will vote for JoePedo.   Who is JoePedo?

JoePedo was an early slogan of the Left that sorta backfired on them.  They were going for Joe as a torpedo, not as, well, a Pedo.  It’s important to understand how people might make fun of your name.

Thankfully, in 2020, ISIS is WASWAS.

About 99% of Biden voters are only voting for Biden because he’s Not Trump.  They will continue to vote for Biden as long as he doesn’t turn into Trump.  Biden could kill and eat live kittens on during the debate, naked, while taking billions of dollars in checks from Satan for “services rendered”, and Never Trumpers would still vote for him.  Heck, let’s be really honest:  they don’t even require a pulse.  Given Biden’s mental, umm, “difficulties” it’s obvious that even dementia isn’t a disqualifier.

Trump voters are (mostly) voting for Trump because he’s Trump – a finger in the eye of the establishment.  Trump voters are unhappy with a country that they see is no longer a country.  In the view of Leftists, the United States is nothing more than an economic entity, one which every person on the globe has a right to move to.  Trump voters reject that.

Never-Trumpers are gonna vote Biden, and Trump doesn’t care about them.  Trump voters are gonna vote Trump.  Biden doesn’t care about them.

Neither campaign is attempting to get the votes of the diehard supporters of the other candidate.  Instead, this last campaign stretch is only to convince the people who follow politics so little that they haven’t figured out who they’re voting for.  But right now?  Both sides are pulling out all of the stops.

I can hear the campaign staffer defending his meme:  “At least it’s better than Turboanalisis.”

JoePedo will tell you that he’s running for the Senate if his handlers aren’t able to shut him up in time.  But the staffers in the know managed to get Trump’s tax records to the New York Times®.  The fact that this is a felony, well, who cares, right?  If Biden wins, a felony is just a wink and a nod.  But the taxes seem to be a poor weapon:  there’s nothing of interest, outside of the fact that Trump has way better tax advisors than I do.

But Team Biden isn’t done.  They have at least three “gotcha” attacks planned for Trump in the next 20 days.  And those attacks will escalate.  They’re saving their best attacks for last.

But Trump will fight back.  Trump has an arsenal of information on the JoePedo.  He’s going to unleash it, bit by bit, like a Chinese water torture.  And he’ll Tweet® and laugh the whole time.

My prediction that we hadn’t yet seen the craziest part of 2020 is proving to be stunningly accurate.  Honestly, it was really an easy prediction – the only prediction that is easier is that the Sun will rise tomorrow, or that Ruth Bader Ginsburg won’t.

What do you call a Supreme Court Justice that was so cheap she would eat the scraps on other people’s plates at the diner?  Booth Raider Ginsburg.

The goal of these next twenty days is manipulation.

Now, when The Mrs. was just The Miss and we first started dating, one particular date we had was one we called the Forever Date.  It started on a Friday night, when we went to play mini-golf.  Mini-golf is a great date idea.  Everyone sucks at mini-golf, and seeing how a potential spouse deals with being awful is a great insight on their personality.  Sadly the courses are packed now, since the economy is so bad that CEOs are now forced to play miniature golf.

But after mini-golf?  Dinner.  Then we walked down and got an expensive coffee at a hippy coffee bar.  Then we went back to my place and watched Babylon 5.  The next day, we had a bunch of other things on our schedule – a renaissance fair, a play, out to another dinner, and a movie.  In all, we had spent 24 hours together in two days.

In that time, we had done a lot of things.  The sheer number of things that we did made that 24 hours seem like weeks – it compressed and amplified our relationship.  It didn’t hurt that most of the activities, outside of the play and the movie, involved a lot of conversation.

In a weird way, this Forever Date was manipulative.  Unintentionally so – but when you put a compatible unmarried man and woman together?

  • And put them through activity after activity?
  • Fun things, unique things, unusual things?
  • That involve conversation?

After learning about how couples interact as I got older, the only answer is if you put people into the circumstances that The Miss and I were in?  Those people are going to become close.  And if even remotely compatible?  Married.

Jesus turned water into wine, most men drink to make a six look like a nine.

That same time compression is exactly what the manipulators want from voters right now.  They want to hit the voter with crisis after crisis until the voter’s mind is available for persuasion.  Like the Three Stooges, the candidates want Moe-mentum.

The persuasion we’re seeing now is aimed squarely at the undecided voters.  It’s ironic that the people who care the least and know the least about politics decide the election every four years.  It’s like having the Senator without thumbs winning every election, but that’s not surprising since he’s unopposed.

Remember, Kamala placed lower than all of the above candidates.  It’s okay, she’s used to being on the bottom.

So, the next twenty days will be filled with more information than in any election in the history of the United States.  It worked really well when there was a last minute announcement that George W. Bush had been arrested for Driving Under the Influence.  That cost him a lot of votes.

When John McCain was told by the news media that the problem was all in his head, he took the news media seriously.  Those videos of Sarah Palin painting seals and birds with oil?  Yeah, those hurt.

Okay, the fact that McCain’s personality had all the warmth of a Soviet Gulag and all the compassion of an African tribal war is what really cost him the election.  Sarah Palin?  I could have been Michael Palin and they still would have lost the election.

Michael is still a funnier Palin than Sarah.

But, like I said, campaigns are a learning organization, and they have learned that October is the best time to spring a surprise.  So the result is that every four years, October will get progressively crazier until each political party hires individual mimes to stalk and convince undecided voters.  There are dangers to hiring mimes:  one of my relatives became a mime – I haven’t heard from him since.

Here in 2020, however, knowing what they’re doing is enough.  It’s certain that voters are fine in convincing themselves, but when it comes to propaganda?  They resist.  The only solution is to confuse them with so much information that they become susceptible to changing their mind.  And thinking that they changed it themselves.

This particular election will be the most expensive in history.  Yet, the election will likely come down to relative handfuls of voters in a few key states.  California?  Not an issue.  But Pennsylvania?  Wisconsin?

But you’re not likely the target.  And here’s the key – if all of the nonsense you’ll hear in the next few days annoys you?  All of the radio ads?  The campaign mailers?

Ignore it.

My kids voted for pizza for dinner the other night.  They got tacos.  We don’t live in a swing state.

The real key to life has nothing to do with the daily news cycle.  The real key to life has to do with keeping your values in sight.

And that’s good news.  If you want to ignore the political nonsense going on right now, you can.

If, like me, you want to enjoy the nonsense with a bag of hot popcorn?

You can do that, too.  It may be the crazy season, but it doesn’t have to drive you crazy.

If you feel yourself getting crazy from this political season, don’t worry.  If you get lost, you can always take the psychopath.

Where We Are Now: The Cthulhu Collapse

“Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” – Batman Begins

H.P. Lovecraft walks into a bar, and the result was such that any man would be driven mad by the events that followed.  Oh, and there was a rabbi and a horse.

When I was a kid, as I’ve established before, I read.  A lot.  At least an hour a day on the school bus.  I’d read at home, too, since the nearest kid lived miles and miles away from Wilder Mountain, and occasionally Ma Wilder ran out of pork chops to tie around my neck so the dog would play with me.

Reading, though, held a very special place around our house, and was something that was revered by both Ma and Pa.  One example?  While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.

Game on.

What did I like reading?  Science fiction was number one on the list, and horror was number two.  (I also read a few fantasy novels, mainly Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open when I say most fantasy outside of Tolkien and Howard is just junk.  Oops, I just did.)

Stephen King named his son Joe.  No, I’m not joking.

The problem with writing horror is that it’s even harder to find good horror authors than it is to find good fantasy authors.  Stephen King was just about the best – it’s important to remember that at one point the guy really could write a good story that was scary.  I lost more sleep to ‘Salem’s Lot than any book, ever.  Even though there were approximately twenty people in a ten-mile radius of where we lived, I was pretty sure that at least five were vampires when I was twelve.  And most of the people were old – can you imagine the sound when the dentures with fangs sloshed around on their gums?  And then they’d offer me hard candy after they exsanguinated me.  I still shiver when I think about it.

I found Edgar Allen Poe disappointing.  Not scary.  I think it was his enormous head, which was counted as the ninth planet until astronomers had a vote.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment to me?

H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft had such a reputation for being scary.  Sadly, the man just couldn’t write.

H.P. Lovecraft’s cookbook was called the Necro-nom-nom-icon.

I bought several Lovecraft books while I was growing up, and perhaps because of the prose in the format of “great creeping masses of undulating nouns that, if stared at, would drive a man to madness,” the stories just never caught my imagination.  They weren’t scary to twelve-year-old me.  I never felt that I’d die because of a “color out of space” or that creatures from the “mountains of madness” would ever threaten me, except for boredom.

As I got older, I discovered that there was one thing that Lovecraft was good at:  amazing ideas.  And when good writers finally took his work, they produced some amazing fiction and movies.  I rented the VHS tape of Reanimator without knowing that it was a reworking of an old Lovecraft tale.  It was amazing, though I don’t recommend it AT ALL if you’re a horror lightweight.  Of people who figured out how to really bring Lovecraft to life, Brian Yuzna is the winner.

But Lovecraft’s ideas remain.  Those are actually interesting to read about, even though he didn’t do a great job executing on them.  Perhaps Lovecraft’s most famous idea is that of Cthulhu.  What’s Cthulhu, besides the sound my toilet made after Pugsley flushed 142 novelty-size bars of soap (this really happened) when he was three?

I read a horror book in braille once.  I could always feel when something bad was about to happen.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, Cthulhu is an Elder God – one of the creatures of the distant past.  I’ll let Lovecraft himself describe Cthulhu

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless [Chinese guy] had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

The really scary idea, to me, is that these Elder Gods are amoral.  They couldn’t care less about men.  We are, for the most part, as insignificant as the wrapper on a Whopper® to Oprah when she’s in an Oprah Whopper™ Frenzy© – trust me – keep your arms and feet away from the Whoppers™ when this happens.

Face it, we all knew that the Zuck wasn’t really from this time and dimension, right?

And, these Elder Gods couldn’t even live in our time, because the “stars weren’t right” and had to wait until the stars were right again.  That was an especially creepy thought, because who knew when that was going to be?  Was it next week?  Next year?  It was certainly going to happen, but when?

Lovecraft may be long dead, but our current economic situation makes me think that we’re living in what I’m calling the Cthulhu Collapse.  It’s a collapse that’s out there, frozen as the guy who went to absolute zero – but don’t worry about him, he’s 0 k.  Just because the Cthulhu Collapse isn’t living and breathing right now doesn’t mean it’s not real.

It’s just waiting for the stars to align.  Here are some of the stars moving into position:

  • In the fiscal year just ended, we had a deficit of over $3 trillion. This is more than all of the last three years.    Heck I know some people that don’t make $3 trillion in a whole year.
  • The overall public debt increased from somewhere around 75% of GDP to over 100%. Also in just one year.  The current public debt is higher than the highest year of World War II, and we didn’t even invent a cool new bomb or 99,465 fighter planes.  I’ll go on the record as saying that producing 99,465 prop-driven fighter planes would much more cool than bailing out a Wall Street firm.  Any Wall Street firm.
  • The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve® (which is neither Federal nor a reserve, discuss) has increased by $3 trillion.   Wonder where all that money went?  PEZ®.  That must be it.
  • For those of you keeping score on our home game, that’s a total of at least $6 trillion in additional money sloshing around. This year.  No wonder they didn’t have enough cash left to pay to make coins.

The shortest horror story so far?  2020.

  • Gross Domestic Product has dropped by 5%, at least. That means the economy produces less than it did last year, by at least $1 trillion.  But real math says you have to subtract the deficit and the Fed balance sheet gains, so my money says that the economy really dropped by 35% last year if you drop the financial steroids that have been pumped into it.  But a plane isn’t like an economy, since planes only crash once.
  • At least 80,000 small businesses shut down between March and late July, 2020. Small business’ fail, a lot, right?  This number is at least 36% higher than normal.  One report I heard said that more than half of San Francisco’s small businesses closed so far this year.  The theaters are re-opening as libraries filled with novels that have been made into movies – they’re calling it paper-view.
  • Businesses that are staying in business don’t need to rent (as much) real estate anymore. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to have the wagie workers go home and work than rent the 37th floor of the Hastur The Unspeakable Tower in downtown Chicago.  Or was that the Chase® Tower?  I get confused when I compare monsters of unspeakable horror and fictional creatures that Lovecraft wrote about.  Regardless, the lowered occupancy rates have knock-on effects.  Lowered car and transport consumption.  Lowered gasoline consumption.  Lowered tire use.  Lower number of excuses on what you were doing late on Tuesday night.  The result?  Even lower GDP.  Even more lost jobs.  Lost lingerie sales for mistresses.
  • As Federal funding (giveaways) to businesses dry up, businesses are cutting workers, permanently. In many cases, these are very good jobs.  The bright side of having your financial life collapse?  I heard about a guy who lost his wallet and then had his identity stolen.  The crook sent him a note in the mail:  “It sucks to be you.”

Do I think the economy is in serious trouble?  I do.  I’ve said that for years, and this is nothing but an acceleration of trends that were already in place.  The general consensus is that the printing presses should go into overdrive to print more money to give to people:  this is nearly the only thing that nearly every politician agrees on in 2020.

The Mrs. wants me to make more money.  Turns out you need a special paper for that.

Part of the problem is that so much of the money is sloshed into the stock markets in ways that aren’t at all clear.  This is on purpose.  How many dollars have been pumped into the market to keep it stratospheric?  It’s not a coincidence that this is the year that the billionaire class has seen the biggest gains ever in their wealth.  Elon Musk alone gained enough money this year to buy Albania.  I’m hoping he reforms the Albanian Navy – their submarines have to resurface every two minutes so the rowers can breathe.

So, even though Lovecraft’s ideas are great, his stories aren’t scary.  But when the Cthulhu Collapse hits, after the stars align?

Lovecraft put it this way:

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Horror movies don’t scare me.  What scares me?  Looking down at my phone and seeing five missed calls from The Mrs.

See?  Not scary.

But the Cthulhu Collapse?  That’s something that’s scary.  Have fun getting some sleep tonight – I hear the stars are simply lovely!

An Important Lesson Of Life? Understand Death.

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” – Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan

“Vikings don’t worry about death – they know they’ll be Bjørn again.”

When I go to bed on Saturday night, I sometimes wake up before I intend to get up.  That’s my favorite luxury of the weekends.  One technique that I use after I wake up to get back to sleep is to think about the points I’ll make on my Monday post.

This hypnogogic state (that no-man’s land between sleep and being awake) is a wonderful place for me.  I focus on a topic, and let my mind take the topic where it will.  Often, it’s back to sleep.  That’s okay.

But other times?  I end up making connections I might not have made otherwise.  I love that.  That’s one of the reasons I love my Monday posts.  I have that ability to really let my mind explore on the weekend.  I’d do that during the weekdays, but if I miss and end up sleeping?  Snoring is frowned on at work.

If you need to be creative and don’t use that hypnogogic state, I really, really, suggest you do.  It’s a really peaceful sort of place, but I’ve found it’s also one where my mind strips out the pretty little lies that we tell ourselves every day and pops me full of reality.  Plus?  It’s a great excuse to The Mrs. that I’m doing something important when I’m busy nearly napping.

I hear when Jeff Bezos sleeps, he wears pajamazons.

Monday’s posts are, in general, about philosophy.  They’re the “Wise” part of Wilder Wealthy and Wise.  Wednesday is about economics.  And Friday is about health, though more recently it has focused on clear thinking – which might be the clearest way to real health.  I’m not sure anyone wants to come to this blog for nutrition advice, since my nutrition information belongs on Tide Pods®.

All of the posts allow me to think deeply about a subject, research, and learn.  On more than one occasion, I started out believing one thing, and after my research for the post was done, I realized my original belief was horribly wrong.  Those are some of the best posts for me, because when I do them well, they change the reader and the writer.

But Monday’s are special.  They’re my favorite posts, though sometimes not the most optimistic of posts, because, like those transvestite superheroes that call themselves the “Ex-Men®”, reality is not always pretty.

This was a joke when this album came out.  Now we call it male fraud.

I had a big post planned for today.  Really, I have a big post planned every Monday.  In my mind, I want them to knock the socks off of people.  Figuratively, of course, because I have no idea what sort of foot hygiene you practice and would not want to actually have to smell your feet.  I’ll do a lot of things for a successful post, but I won’t do that.

So, why do I write?

I write because, perhaps, the biggest way I can make a difference in this world is by serving, you, dear reader.  If something I can write can make you smile on a bad day, make you think differently about a subject so your life is better?  If the cause of Western Civilization is carried forward?

I win.

That’s really why I’ve devoted such an amount of time to writing.  As The Mrs. has told me several times:  “John, if I didn’t think what you were doing was important, you and I would have words.”

I don’t know if “have words” is fairly ominous where you come from, but here in Stately Wilder Manor, “have words” generally does not lead to a pleasant evening.  But, I am happy to note, I have The Mrs. full support in my writing, even though she says, “well, I’m sure we’re on a list now.”

I went to the library to get a book on Pavlov’s dog and Schrodinger’s cat.  The librarian said that rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was checked out or not.

This week, however, I wasn’t able to slip my writing tasks off to my conscious/sub-conscious.

Life intruded.

It turns out that today there was a death in the family.  It wasn’t one of the regular cast of characters that I’ve written about.  Pugsley, The Boy, The Mrs., Alia S. Wilder, my brother, John Wilder?  They’re all fine.  Ma and Pa Wilder?  They passed away years ago.

Actually, I’m fairly sure I have never written about the person who passed away today.  But their passing provided the opportunity to talk about life.

The simple truth is this:  we are born, we grow, we live, and all we can do is try to make the world better by the lives we touch.  As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forward, and understood in reverse.”  Of course, he was speaking Danish, so Kierkegaard probably sounded like he was describing a pastry recipe that involved using a commuter train to mash the dough because Danish doesn’t sound at all like a real language.

What’s the difference between married people from Denmark and Batman’s® parents?  It’s simple:  one is wed Danes and the other?  Dead Waynes.

Death is, of course, inevitable.  I’ve written about it on more than one occasion.  I don’t expect that this will be the last time I write about it.  Our inability to understand that death is a part of life horribly stunts the modern world, which seems to exist to deny that death is real.

Death has many different impacts on families.  It can bring them closer together or tear them apart.  The choice is, of course, tied to how the family deals with it.  The best choice is honesty and transparency.

Some observations:

  • How can you mess up a funeral? You can’t.  So why do we worry so much?
  • And why do we spend so much on a funeral? I think it’s a unique time where people don’t think straight at all.
  • Making decisions after the death of a loved one is probably the third worst time you can make a decision. Or is it the fourth?
  • Never, ever leave something unsaid between you and a loved one. When the ship sails, all debts should be paid, in full.  The last thing you say to someone might be the last thing you say to someone.
  • Death brings life into perspective – it makes people focus on what is really important. So why do we wait until someone dies to focus on what’s really important?  Hint:  we don’t have to.
  • Avoid land wars in Asia. Those never turn out well.
  • Most major religions and all of the atheists think we have one shot at life on Earth. Wasting time is then equivalent to wasting life.  So don’t do that, either.  Every minute you spend being bored and waiting for something is a minute of your life you wished away.
  • Life is too short for regrets. Fix your regrets, or live with them.  Spending a second regretting is a second you’ll never get back.
  • Corollary: life is too short to spend it worrying about how long you’ll live.  So don’t.  Should we be prudent?    But don’t let it stand in the way of you living your life.  Is that an excuse to do harmful things to yourself?  Of course not.  But it’s not an excuse to be afraid of your shadow, either.

If I’m ever crushed by a falling piano, I want a low-key funeral.

During the ancient Roman triumphs, which were held to honor victorious commanders, a slave was chosen to accompany the commander.  The slave would hold the wreath above the commander’s head.  He would whisper in the commander’s ear:  “Remember, you are mortal.”

We all are.  The only difference is what we do in life.  And what we write for our Monday posts.

Victim? No. You Have A Choice.

“We all have it coming, kid.” – Unforgiven

There’s a serial killer who is strangling victims with t-shirts and he keeps using smaller and smaller sizes of shirt.  Police say he’s still at large.

There comes a point in everyone’s life where they look at Carrie Fisher and say, “I ran out of gas.  I got a flat tire.  I didn’t have change for cab fare.  I lost my tux at the cleaners.  I locked my keys in the car.  An old friend came in from out of town.  Someone stole my car.  There was an earthquake!  A terrible flood!  Locusts!  It wasn’t my fault!”

That might even be true:  100% true.  A meteor might have fallen on your house, and you might have unknowingly chosen the slightly cheaper “meteor-exempt” policy from Allstate®, and the Helping Hands™ people would then be justified in giving you the Flying Fragment Finger™.

Everyone on Earth could legitimately claim to be a victim at this point.  This, my friends, is the biggest trap in the world.

Why?

It’s against everything that is virtuous and good.  Victimhood is the poison that destroys lives and civilizations with all of the wanton carelessness of a feminist wine aunt trying to “find herself” on a booze cruise through the Caribbean.

When alcohol says to you, “You can dance,” this is what it means.

Victimhood says there is something wrong with the situation.  Let me clarify something:  there isn’t anything wrong with any situation.  Reality is real.  The situation is the situation.  The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

Fairness is a lie.  Expecting things to be different because we want them to be is, perhaps, the most insidious poison that we dose ourselves with on a regular basis.  And that is the basis of being a victim.

Being a victim is like being in a prison, but it’s a prison that is especially strong.  Why?  Victims willingly build their own prison.

What is the essence of victimhood?

  • Like France, a victim is at the mercy of outside forces.
  • Like Sweden, a victim takes no responsibility for their current position.
  • Like Mongo, victim merely pawn in game of life.
  • Like the Italian Army, victims are weak.

Why do people choose to be victims?

Well, I said they are weak.  But they use that same weakness to control others around them.

“I can’t do this.  Can you help me?”

Never play chess with an Islamic terrorist – it’s always “pawn to C4.”

Victims are horrible to be around.  They’re constantly complaining, but take no action to make their lives better.  Honestly, they don’t want their lives to be better, since they’ve begun to use their victimhood as a weird superpower – as if Superman® won because Lex Luthor™ got embarrassed from beating him up.

Victims don’t expect anything from themselves, so they can’t fail.  The world is against them, so why even try?  They have a world where everyone is responsible for everything.

Except for them.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, the corollary is that sometimes we really didn’t have anything to do with the fate that happened to us.  It just happened.

So?

Just like there have been times when I haven’t had money, but I’ve never been poor, there are times when the breaks didn’t go my way, but I try never to be the victim.

See, this man may be broke, but he’s not poor. 

The stunning truth that many people go through life is that, even when the meteor hits their house they still don’t have to give up control.  There’s no real reason to be a victim.

  • Cold? Good!  You can make it through that, and won’t that make the hot coffee taste great?
  • Tired? Wonderful!  You can rest later, and sleep like a king.
  • Hungry? Excellent!  The next meal may be the best you’ve ever tasted.
  • Someone make fun of you? Fantastic!  An opportunity to get better and get tougher.

When I was in high school, Ma Wilder had a stroke.

Now, say what you want about Ma Wilder, but that woman had a willpower streak as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon.  This might explain some of our epic fights when neither one of us would back down.  Sometimes our fights would last for days, until the voice of reason, Pa Wilder, intervened.

Strangely, I think Ma Wilder would have liked Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

Pa wasn’t interested so much in justice as in watching Monday Night Football® in peace, and knew that a fight between a determined third grader and his 50+ year old wife (I’m adopted, but within the family – Ma Wilder was my biological grandma) would interfere.

Anyway we Wilders don’t do anything small.  Ma’s stroke was a big one, which paralyzed half of her body.  It left her in a wheelchair, an eloquent woman cut down and left unable to speak except for “yes” and, more often, “no.”

But the one thing her stroke didn’t impact was her will.

One day she wanted a Coke®.  She wheeled over to me with the Coke™ in her one good hand.  I loosened the top of the Coke© bottle so it was finger-tight but left it on for her to finish.

Pa Wilder was a little bit mad.  “John, take that off for her.”

Ma Wilder jumped in.  “No!”  She took it from me, wheeled over to the table, unscrewed the top with one hand, and poured herself her drink.  As much as that woman could do for herself, she was resolved to do for herself.

The opposite of victimhood is:

  • Strength
  • Will
  • Determination
  • Perseverance
  • Purpose

Okay, maybe it won’t regrow your hair.

Fortune may determine your circumstance.  You determine how you act and what you make of your circumstance.

And, win or lose?

It really was a fair fight.  Honestly, we really do all have it coming.