Month: March 2021

A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom

“They say you’re a man of vision.  Is that true?” – Lonesome Dove

I’ll never forget Pa Wilder’s last words:  “Find a woman that holds you as tight as Nancy Pelosi holds a vodka bottle.”

(John Wilder note:  Please read this post all the way through because I think you’ll find this one of the most useful posts that I’ve put together.)

Ludwig Von Mises is was an economist.  His pronouns are dead/buried.  The sure sign of the best economists is that they’re dead, because then they can’t ask to be paid for being wrong all of the time.

One thing that Von Mises left us with was a book called Human Action.  Really, it wasn’t a book, it was him sitting at his typewriter and generating a 400-page doorstop like he was getting paid by the punctuation mark.  I read some of it back in my more libertarian days.  Dry doesn’t begin to describe it – after completing two hundred pages you become as desiccated as King Tut’s armpit.

Thankfully, the main ideas of Human Action are quite powerful and also pretty simple.  And, it won’t take me 400 pages to get to the point.  Von Mises created a model of human action where he states that each and every voluntary human action requires three things:

A Vision Of A Better State:  For example, me having a beer.  If it was Friday, I might consider that having a beer would be a better state than not having a beer.  In most cases, the vision is based not on cold, logical thought, but on emotion.

A Path To Get To A Better State:  It just so happens that there’s a beer in the fridge, so if I got my sorry butt off of the couch, I could walk over and get one.

A Belief That Action Will Really Lead To A Better State:  I really and honestly believe that I could walk to the fridge and get a beer, since I deactivated the trap door that leads to the alligator pit.

How many economists does it take to fix a lightbulb?  Don’t know, they’re still arguing over why the last one broke.

In my example, I started off with a Vision first.  That’s one way that action can occur, but not the only way.  The three necessary conditions can really come in any order.  I might have a pile of lumber and a saw and a hammer.  So, I have a Path.  I have Belief that I could build something out of wood since I’m okay at building stuff out of wood (just okay, not great).  After thinking about it, I decide to build a PEZ® dispenser sized for PEZ© the size of cinder blocks with an articulated carved Anne Coulter head so her jaw can open as wide as a python’s.  In this example, my Vision of a better state (and need for a really big spring) came last.

I’ve found when analyzing the actions I personally take, a truism:  if all three of the Human Action requirements are met – Vision, Path, and Belief – then my action is guaranteed.  Likewise, if even one of them is missing, nothing (and I mean nothing) happens.

This model is useful to use when people that you’re working with aren’t doing what you want them to.  Analyze the situation:  which of the three elements of the Human Action model are missing?

People in business have been using this model on you for as long as you have lived.  Think of a typical car commercial:

  • Vision: Buy a Mustang® so hot chicks in bikinis will like me and want to pat my bald head.  See!  They’re patting the bald head of that man on the commercial!
  • Path: Go to the dealer and buy one, they have tons of them.
  • Belief: Hey, zero percent financing and no credit check.  They’re giving the money away so I can buy one!

All commercials are based on manipulating these three simple elements.  Commercials are attempting to get us to take action – or to avoid taking an action.  Most are trying to get our money, but some are trying to convince us that Steven Tyler from Aerosmith© personally cares whether or not we drive drunk.

Steven Tyler just released two books.  One’s a cookbook, and the other’s an art book:  “Wok This Way” and “Doodles Like A Lady”

Manipulation is the key to this game.  Understanding when you watch a commercial how they’re trying to change our views allows us to be on guard against that manipulation.  And, as I noted before, it is a very rare commercial that wants to appeal to logic.

Emotional manipulation is where the money is at.  The advertisers want us to use their gasoline and love it because, um, it’s more gasoline-y than the competitors?  Because it has special molecules in the gasoline that make gravy in your pistons?  Regardless, look for the emotional manipulation – it will be there.

So, we’ve saved a few bucks because we’ve kept the advertisers out of our heads.  Hurrah!  But who else is using this model?

Well, Big Government, for one.  On January 6, 2021, all the Congresscritters had at least a bit of pee in their pants.  A group of relatively aimless protestors stopped off at the Capitol to share their opinions with their elected representatives.

I was on a witness stand at a trial in Alaska, and the lawyer asked me, “Where were you on the night of November to March?”

The group’s Vision was murky.  “Walk over and complain” might be a good description.  It was certainly more peaceful than most of the George Floyd riots (and more on them in a minute).  The Path was easy – it’s not even a very far walk from their rally to the Capitol Building.  Did they have Belief that their action would allow them to “walk over and complain”?

Sure.  So they did.

But that’s not what the Congress Swamp Rats saw.  They saw a group that, with a slightly different Vision could have easily started a movement that would have ousted our current government via a revolution.  As every reader here knows (and as every Congressional Parasite knows), the rank and file of the Right are the single largest army the world has ever seen.  Even if the Right was pitiful, it could take over forty (?) state governments in 24 hours.

We are truly governed only by our consent.  Seizing power in America would be trivial if people on the Right had a Vision, a Path, and Belief that didn’t include a government more intrusive than if Google® was a proctologist and more bloated than 1977 Elvis.

That’s exactly what happened when the Berlin Wall fell.  The people suddenly had a Vision:  sexy American girls in bikinis, CD players, and not having to drive crappy commie cars anymore.  They had a Path:  tear down that Wall.  Once they had Belief?  The Wall didn’t last an afternoon.

As another Floyd, Pink Floyd© tried to metaphorically tell us, The Wall is built in our mind, brick by brick.

Communism is the noble struggle of the proletariat to overcome the problems that are only caused by communism.

Anyone who thinks the “assault” weapon grab has anything to do with “mass shooting” has bought the emotional propaganda that Big Government (along with Big Business and Big Media) is selling.  Big Government wants the guns off of the street because they are the only real threat that Big Government sees to itself and the privileges that it has given itself.

That’s why the George Floyd riots were so important to Big Government.  What were the protesters protesting for?  More Big Government, more handouts, and more government control – this time not only of our rifles that are rarely used to shoot anyone (484 people a year in the United States for all rifles, compared to 1,476 for knives and other pointy things), but also our speech, our national heritage, and even our thoughts.

The BLM riots weren’t stopped because they’re everything Big Government wants.

I started carrying a pistol after a mugging attempt.  Now my muggings are more successful.

The biggest trick the Devil tries is to convince you he isn’t real.  The biggest trick that Big Government tries is to convince you that you have no power.  But if we have no power, why are there more troops in Washington D.C. than in Afghanistan?  Big Government has set the Right as the enemy.  I assure you, they are more afraid of the 80,000,000+ people on the Right than they are of the Chinese.

Now that you know their intentions, what else is Big Government, Big Media, and Big Business trying to make citizens feel?

Does this change your Vision, Path, and Belief?

Listen To This Because You Want Top Rated Post Apocalyptical Streetfighting Headshot Humor

First – in amazing news, last week Bombs and Bants was ranked at #169 in Apple Podcasts, News and Commentary (United States).  I’m actually serious.  We’re as popular as Luxembourg is populous!  Maybe that should be our motto:  “the Luxembourg of podcasts.”

Yup.  We’re screaming into popularity.

This is not unexpected, as we’re planning on dominating the world.  And I’ll say – I was there when this was made and it makes me laugh, so we are getting much better.

Second, I discuss the lighthearted aspects of foraging after societal collapse, The Mrs. inexplicably discusses streetfighting, and Mark discusses reaching out and touching terrorists.  The show is brought to you by Mask-Be-Gone, and we have the first-ever episode of our cooking show, “In the Kitchen with Nancy Pelosi.”

I had promised that I’d post a link when The Boy got Bombs and Bants up on other formats, and here it is (Bombs And Bants) for Bitchute, Apple podcasts, and Odysee.

City And Country: The Dividing Line

“And I want a bigger office. And I want a new car. And I want the city to pay for it all!” – Robocop

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time.

We’ve lived in Modern Mayberry for a dozen years now.  It’s a small town, and The Mrs. has roots here that go back generations.  We never expected to move here after I got arrested for driving on the sidewalk – I told the officer it wasn’t my fault – it was hard to see with all of those people on my hood.

The Wilder Family moved here from Houston.  The Houston metropolitan area is amazingly (for us) large.  From where we lived on the southern end, we could drive through nothing but dense city for over 90 minutes at highway speeds.

In Houston, speed limits are nothing more than a suggestion – I regularly saw people driving at 90 mph in 50 mph zones.  As we all know, speeding doesn’t kill anyone:  it’s stopping suddenly.

Driving really fast without being pulled over is one advantage of living in the city.  The real advantage of living in a big city is that’s where most of the high-paying jobs are.  Of course, along with high pay comes high rent and high cost of living, too.  Thankfully it’s not like living in Norway, since I don’t think I could a-fiord living there.

The move to Modern Mayberry was very welcome for us.  Houston is huge and impersonal.  Although it had tons of restaurants and other attractions, most of them were more trouble than they were worth to go and visit.  Driving to a restaurant meant a 30-minute trip and a 30-minute wait for a table on a Friday night.  Heck, I heard that even the Houston libraries were crowded – I heard they were fully booked.

Not worth our time.

The schools were likewise large and impersonal.  The nearest high school had over 2,000 students.  Although I’m sure that it allows them to field a great football team, I can’t imagine the social pressures in a school that large – my high school had 500-600 kids, and I had to pay people to be friends with me.  You could call it clique bait.  But that school was large enough to offer a large number of activities, but not so large that you couldn’t participate in them.

If you repeat your first year, does that make you a refreshman?

Where I grew up there was much more than that.  There was a sense of community.  If you misbehaved in public and were observed by an adult that knew your parents, you could be sure that they’d either correct you right then and there, or they’d let your folks know.  If they let your folks know, well, that was worse.  Parents in my hometown back then didn’t take the side of their kids.

No need to tell you I got spanked a lot.  Me, I don’t believe in spanking Pugsley when he’s bad.  Instead, I send him to school wearing crocs and anime t-shirts.

There was a sense of public participation in the small towns, too.  Pa Wilder was president of the school board for a time, and both he and Ma Wilder participated in a variety of civic organizations over the years.  Try that in a city where the campaigns to get on the school board cost $16 million or so (Los Angeles).

Having lived in both large and small towns, the small town experience is far superior in almost every respect, especially for raising kids.  The other thing I’ve noticed is that almost every small town I’ve ever been in has supported values on the Right, and rejected Leftist values.

We also tried to avoid the Illuminaughty.

Cities are the exact opposite in 2021.  Of the top 20 cities by population, 18 have Leftist mayors, and (generally) the larger the city, the more Leftist it is.  You can even tell that many of the riots were held in Leftist cities because they stopped after four days.  I mean, you can’t expect a Leftist to work all week.

Sure, not all cities are Leftist, and not all rural areas are on the Right, but it’s close enough to make that generalization.

This has consequences.  Around the country, rural areas that are strongly on the Right find themselves overruled by just a few counties that have large populations of people who are strongly Leftist.  There are, of course, reasons for this:

  • Cities are Anonymous – When you live in a city with hundreds of thousands of other people, you’re effectively anonymous. This anonymity encourages people to be tools  What does it matter?  You won’t see that clerk at the store ever again.  When people aren’t polite to each other, the demand for a government solution builds.  Much of the root of Leftism in cities is just poor manners.
  • Cities Require Services – New York City has a line where you can complain about everything because, in a city like New York, the local government controls everything. And complaining means that it’s someone else’s problem.

A group of Karens is called a complaint.

  • Cities are Demographically Different – Certain ethnic and racial groups statistically vote Leftist more than others, and these groups often congregate in cities.
  • Cities Reduce Options For Individual Control – I can know, on a first-name basis, every elected leader in Modern Mayberry. I could walk into the County offices and talk to the elected leadership there, too.  And not some flunky – I can talk straight to the elected official.  Try that in New York.  I mean if you’re under 24 you might get to see the governor, but . . . .

The divide between City and Country is bad, and getting worse.

I have been planning this post for several weeks, so it was a nice coincidence when Vox Day (LINK) pointed to an article that indicated that a Minnesota state lawmaker was trying to get the counties west of Minneapolis to be allowed to leave Minnesota and join up with South Dakota (LINK), which would be the first time people voluntarily went to South Dakota.

The divide between values is so bad that the Right just wants to leave – and the big fight will be over who has to keep the Minnesota Vikings®.  Seriously, though, I strongly doubt that the Leftists at the state or Federal level will approve the request, even if the people are tired of St. Paul’s Leftist ambitions.

People on the Left?

They simply cannot allow anyone to leave – the people belong to the state, after all.  Remember, the Berlin Wall wasn’t put up to keep people from out.  Allowing reliably red South Dakota to have more population and importance is not in their plans, besides, summer in South Dakota might fall on a weekend this year.  Regardless, the Leftists in St. Paul won’t give up the power, and the Leftists in D.C. want to gerrymander the nation so that they can create a permanent lock on all of the major branches of government.

What was David Bowie’s favorite song about the fall of the Berlin Wall?  Under Prussia.

I do know that, despite my jokes, a lot of really wonderful people live in cities.  I’ve lived in large(ish) cities as well.  Once a year or so, The Mrs. and I visit a big city.  The main reason?

To remind us why we live in Modern Mayberry.

Will we spend the rest of our lives in Modern Mayberry?  Maybe, maybe not – when Pugsley clears high school, who knows what the world will bring our direction.  One thing I’ve learned over time is to not make absolute statements.

I’m certain that’s a good idea.

Blinded By Science: But Are We Wiser?

“Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences. But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur. It bites.” – The Tick

It sucks being the youngest clone – all your genes are hand-me-downs.

One of the things that I am really fascinated about is the limit of human knowledge.

Imagine, only a few decades ago:

  • We had no proof that there were planets around distant stars,
  • We had no idea that Neanderthal DNA was a part of modern humans, and
  • We thought Jimmy Kimmel was funny.

As time goes on, human knowledge keeps increasing. We learn a lot more, well, stuff. That’s not to say that we’re any the wiser.

A typical adult male on a homestead in 1880 could understand nearly any device on his farm. Beyond that, he could fix many of them. My Great-Grandpa McWilder was an example of just that. He had a shop that smelled of oil, wood, and leather. The tools were, by today’s standard, ancient.

Grandpa McWilder’s power drill was cordless – that meant it was a drill bit in a chuck that was hand-cranked. The power to run it entirely off of McWilder power. The faster Grandpa cranked the handle and the harder he pushed the drill bit into the wood, the faster it would drill.

What’s my favorite drill dance? DeWalts®.

There was a certain intimacy with the wood that kind of drill gives, that’s lacking with a power drill. Of course I noticed that when I was drilling into the trim around the door, and the floor, and the workbench.

When I had complained that I didn’t have a suitcase to visit Grandpa (as a five-year-old would), he took an old suitcase that he had in the closet and gave it to me. “This doesn’t have a handle,” I complained. Within twenty minutes, Great-Grandpa had selected an old leather belt and braided it into a handle that still graces that suitcase today.

Life was simpler then.

Now, not one person in a thousand could explain how an old tube television works. The Internet we use today? Very few people understand even the basics of how it works.

And yet, we’re bombarded on all sides with information about things we should passionately care about, even though we don’t understand them even a little bit. Net Neutrality? Sure, a blog written by someone from Netflix® or Comcast™ tells you, “Hey, care about this.”

In reality? Network Neutrality is a fight between billion-dollar companies about who gets the spoils of our Internet and streaming fees. If that were our only knowledge problem, well, that’s something we could easily conquer, I mean, if we cared.

But it’s not the only thing we don’t understand.

The very fundamental parts of the Universe we live in are still quite a puzzle.

Step off the Trump Train, and onto the No-Fly List.

General Relativity is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. When Relativity predicts something, often our observations prove that Relativity is correct to as close as we can measure. Without Relativity, we couldn’t explain why Mercury orbits like it does. GPS would be impossible without making relativistic corrections. And, good heavens, how would I ever convert matter into energy in my kitchen?

Quantum Mechanics (QM) is similarly successful. Every time we make a measurement based on this theory, it’s also as close to theory as our instruments can measure. Lasers and transistors depend on Quantum Mechanics – they are well explained by that theory.

But both theories can’t be correct. And we have no idea why. Scale Relativity down to the QM world? Nothing makes sense. Scale QM to the Relativity world?

It doesn’t work, either. So, our two best theories in physics don’t really mesh.

Women are like an open book, but it’s about Quantum Mechanics and it’s written in Chinese.

There’s a gulf there in human knowledge. Sure, you don’t have to know how beams and columns work in order to build a house – otherwise we would have lived in caves until 1700 or so. But we just have no idea how two theories that interact to form the cutting edge of technology could ever be compatible.

So, there’s that. Okay, physics is messy. Surely biology is better, I mean, we can dissect pandas and giant turtles to see how they tick.

Sadly, biology is a lot messier, and that’s even before you carve the panda into steaks. Richard Nixon declared a “War on Cancer” back in the 1970’s, and cancer appears to be just as successful as the Viet Cong. It’s winning. Sure, we’re better at fighting it, but I’ve read about a dozen “silver bullet” cures for cancer over the last decade.

Biology is much worse than physics, because we can’t do proper experiments. I’ve made the point in conversations with friends that if we conducted controlled experiments on people with cancer and let the researchers have immunity from prosecution (on pesky Nuremberg-level crimes) for five years to a decade? We’d have real silver bullet cures for cancer.

But even outside of my war-crimes-level thought experiment, biology is a basket case compared to physics. Biology can’t explain some really, really basic things, like why I should care what a woman thinks.

Or, like DNA.

DNA is the most miraculous (word choice consciously made) molecule ever. DNA information density is far beyond anything humans have created. 0.141 ounces of DNA (four of some communist unit called a “gram”) could hold all of the information all of human activity from ancient Egypt to 2011, including the useless information like what The Mrs. asked me to get at the store.

Four grams = two zettabytes of data, Marty!

I tried to mix killer whale DNA with human DNA. What did I get? Banned for life from Seaworld®.

The idea that biology professors try to support is: DNA is the result of an accident in slimy pools at the beginning of the Earth.

DNA is the greatest level of information density in the known Universe. Heck, DNA represents the greatest level of information density conceivable in our world today. It’s just a coincidence that it’s able to be read and written by squishy cells in squishy people.

An accident.

Sure. Anyone who believes that probably voted (D) all the way down the ballot in the last election. Some of those people, presumably, were even alive.

But that’s not a question scientists can approach today (either elections or the origin of DNA). A big problem with science today is that it is just a larger, more grey-haired version of Twitter®. The questions before science aren’t small:

  • Don’t believe in Global Warming®? Heavens! Heretic! Cancel them! Even little Swedish girls know better.
  • Think that Dark Matter is more properly spelled Dubious Matter? Is Dark Matter the physics equivalent of bloodletting and leeches?
  • Why aren’t we seeing or hearing aliens? Is it because they didn’t pay their cell bill? Did they block us because we made T.?
  • Why do we sleep? I mean, not me, because I blog. But why do humans have to sleep?
  • How are space, time, and gravity connected? Heck, we don’t even know how dementia, the Presidency, stairs, and gravity are connected.

Biden tried to get off of stairs, but it was a multi-step program.

In the first paragraph, I noted that we’ve learned a lot of things recently that would have been incomprehensible to people 100 years ago. And I stand by that. But here’s the paradox:

Even as we’ve learned so much, science is currently broken, and hopelessly politicized. The vast sums of money and decades required to run experiments that will give us a glimmer of the next revelation of science require that the scientists who design and run the experiments are from the orthodoxy.

To be a part of orthodox science means you have to ignore inconvenient facts. There are entire fields of study that cannot be researched because people might have their feelings hurt. Actual people who claim to be scientists say that there is no difference between men and women.

In 2021, you have to be politically correct, and heaven help you if the Woke Left doesn’t like your shirt choice. Remember that poor guy who wore a silly Hawaiian shirt? You know, the guy who just helped land the Rosetta probe on a comet in frigging space in 2014? In 2021 they’d have just taken and immediately burned him at the stake, live on Facebook™.

See, there’s an answer to every difficult question.

Guilty admission: I really did email the guy and asked to buy the shirt. I figured it was at least worth a shot.

As we advance in science, it seems we learn more and more about less and less. Yet, as we’ve learned more we’ve created a world that’s increasingly alienating to the individual through a haze of increasingly impenetrable technology. Perhaps the future of the human race is a VCR clock, flash 12:00PM endlessly?

The world has also become increasingly hostile to simple variations in individual behavior that fall out of the current norms. In the case of people like Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Seuss, they can be charged and found guilty in the court of public opinion because the ideas of 100 years ago or 160 years ago don’t agree with today’s ideas.

That’s okay. I still have the suitcase that Grandpa McWilder fixed for me. The handle he made from the leather belt is still doing its duty, better than anything made today.

Bonus: Here’s the pattern on the material that the guy’s shirt was made from:

When It Comes To Economics, Karl Missed The Marx

“It was a Russian ship. They taught me all about you imperialist swine. I was exposed to the works of great thinkers - Karl Marx, Lenin, L. Ron Hubbard, Freddie Laker.” – Top Secret

Pa Wilder wouldn’t let me date girls who ran in track.  He didn’t want me hanging around with fast women.

One of the advantages of writing these posts are the times when my family will ask me what I’m writing about.  They’re not reading it, of course, but it’s always a good conversation starter and it gets me off of the topics of “Why isn’t the trash out?” and “Who is going clean the lint from between Dad’s toes?”  Tonight Pugsley was the one who took one for the team was interested.

“What are you typing about tonight, Dad?”  He knows that as a writer I’m a fair typist.

“Well, it’s about economics and bad ideas.  Probably one of the worst ideas ever.”

“What was it, Cheetos-flavored Chapstick®?  Crystal Pepsi™?”

I gave The Mrs. Gorilla Glue® Lip Balm.  That left her speechless.

“Well, one economist in particular had some pretty bad ideas.  He had the idea that the things we made were only worth the labor that went into making them – nothing more, and nothing less.”

“So what about the $200 sneakers that toddlers make in Pakistan and only cost $2 to produce?”

“Well, that’s another idea that we’ll get to, but we can use that example.  In this economist’s mind, the toddlers who made the sneaker should have made most of that $200.  He would have argued that the $198 profit in the sneakers was exploiting the worker.”

Of course we were talking about Karl Marx.  Although he wasn’t the first one to embrace the “Labor Theory of Value”, this horrible idea was used to make more people miserable than the Kardashians ever have.

The biggest flaw inherent in the Labor Theory of Value in Marxism was the destruction of the price system.  In this case, if we had the same labor component in our sneakers and in, say, a polished piece of poo (don’t laugh, they did it on Mythbusters®) then they should cost the same.

Whoever stole my furniture polish, I will find you.  That’s my Pledge®.

Yes, shiny polished poo and fashion sneakers should cost the same to a Marxist – heck, if it took more time to make it really shiny, that would be worth more than the sneakers.  This sounds like nonsense, but the commies sold it to the revolting masses in Russia.  Why should other people make money?  The idea that they’re making a profit means you’re being cheated!

While this might have been a good strategy for children playing “store” in kindergarten or Hollywood™ stars protesting for (insert weekly cause here) it didn’t work out so well in practice.  The Labor Theory of Value caused all sorts of problems in the Soviet Union.  One of the first stories I ever heard about this is one I’ve related before – the Great Soviet Nail Failure.

The story goes like this:

A Soviet factory is told by Moscow to increase nail tonnage.  The solution?  Very large nails – one pound railroad spikes.

Obviously, the commissar in Moscow got in trouble.  The next commissar (after the first one got, umm, fired) gave a new order to the factory:  “Make lots of nails.”  So, they made thousands of tiny finish nails.  They were sad that the whole “invading Finland thing didn’t work out, or else they could have made Finnish nails.

Looks like they’re gonna need a new commissar.

I got a job at the chess factory.  I took a knight off.

While the nail story can’t be corroborated, what can be proven is that one Soviet factory produced exclusively shoes for young children with the leather they were sent.  Why?  They got a production bonus for making more pairs of shoes, regardless of if there was a need for them.

What they were missing, of course, was price.  No one sent a signal back that they made too many tiny shoes.

The entire reason for this nonsense is that profit simply didn’t exist.  You can’t have fully automated luxury communism if there aren’t prices for the things we use based on supply and demand.  Price tells factories what to make without requiring armies of bureaucrats to decide.  Failure means you lose your factory and someone smarter (or, luckier) gets it.

This is, of course, the reason that 21 year old girls are getting college degrees in Medieval Rap Lyrics.  Their labor is as good as anyone else, right?  So why don’t they get a job paying $235,000 a year with a company car and an apartment in New York and a clutch of sassy rich trampy friends?

Economics.  The highest value of labor of a 21 year old girl getting a college degree in Medieval Rap Lyrics is worth exactly as much as she can get in tips at Hooters®.  But they honestly believe that they deserve that cool job because . . . they work as hard as anyone else.

Marx would be proud.

I tried to pay for my dinner at Hooters® with an energy drink.  I guess Red Bull™ doesn’t always give you wings.

While we were talking about economics, Pugsley started getting the idea.

It turns out that Pugsley loves computers, and is really irritated.  The nice graphics cards he likes are in short supply.  First, the ‘Rona ruined the supply chain, so there are shortages up and down the line in the computer manufacturing world.

Second, high-end graphics processing cards (so they can watch the Pac-Man® in High Definition™) for computers are in really short supply.  It turns those graphics cards are they’re great for mining for cryptocurrency.  One video card with a manufacturer’s list price of $700 was going for $1,500.  The high-end graphics card is going for $3,000.  Pugsley figured that the higher-end card could pay for itself in crypto (at current prices and mining rates) in about nine months to a year.

So, yeah, it makes sense that these things cost $3,000.  Heck, at $3,000 they’re still a bargain, assuming crypto doesn’t disappear down a black hole to zero.  Which it could, because crypto is the ultimate expression of the opposite of Labor Value – every bit of crypto value is based on subjective value – it only has value because we agree it does.

So why doesn’t the manufacturer raise the price so that they can keep more of the value of their video cards?

I went to a topless Amish bar the other night.  No bonnets.

Well, in this case, their core audience is gamers, who can be very, very loyal.  Crypto mining might go away in a year or two.  But if the video card users/fans feel they’ve been robbed?  Gamers will go to the number two manufacturer.  But they still won’t have girlfriends.

The manufacturer is playing the long game.

The high prices irritate Pugsley.  Pugsley would dearly love to have a nicer graphics card, but can’t afford them at these inflated prices.  His (minor) revenge is that his graphics card is whirring away right now mining itsy-bitsy amounts of crypto.  In a small way, he’s benefiting from the whole process.

In a free market you get people who take advantage of price-mismatches like that.  Scalpers fill this role, too.  As long as they don’t cheat the system (which they often do) it’s an honest living.  Me?  I had season tickets to an NFL© team for a time.  They were doing well, and I generally doubled my money (on the games I didn’t go to) every year.  Heck, I even reported the income to the IRS.

The beauty of a transaction in a free economy is that both people win.  If I want a burger and it costs $2, well, it’s because Dairy Queen® wants the $2 more than it wants the burger.  Me?  I want the burger more than I want the $2.

Which is also what they pay for their corn.

In a free exchange, both parties win.  And if I think $2 is too much for the chewy hockey-puck burgers our Dairy Queen™ makes in Modern Mayberry?  Well, they get a signal that people aren’t buying their burgers.

Or Cheetos®-flavored Chapstick™.

A New Podcast? Watch It Because It’s Even Better This Week.

I told you that the podcast would keep getting better, and it is.  I’m betting that by summertime we’ll have reached a singularity of funny that might swallow YouTube whole.  In addition to our normal batch of helpful stories and hilarious banter, we have:

  • A commercial for the Canadian Tourism Board, eh, and
  • The first-ever episode of Mister Government’s Neighborhood
  • Bitchute?  We have it. (Bombs And Bants)
  • Apple podcasts?  We have it. (Bombs And Bants)
  • Odysee?  Whatever that is, we have it. (Bombs And Bants)

Leftists, Lawnmowers, and Liberty

“Except lawnmowers don’t have turn signals.” – Psych

It’s obvious that guy never read the script.

Today I welded up a riding lawnmower deck.

It was the first time in years that I’d had the garage clean enough to get whatever tool I wanted without conducting a gymnastics routine worthy of a gold medal – and I didn’t even have a Soviet Commissar that was getting ready to shoot my family.

My garage had been so chaotic that it could have been the White House press corps falling all over themselves explaining why President * intended to lose a fight with gravity going up Air Force One. But that’s another story. I’m sure Snopes® has already debunked that President * fell down, and instead called it “Mostly False” because he obviously fell up the stairs.

Back to welding up the mower deck:

My welding is really, really bad – it looks like toddlers played with molten metal, but without all of the emergency room visits. Regardless, the mower deck seemed more stable when I was done. Pugsley pronounced the mower “fixed” and was happy. If the crack in the mower deck stays fixed it will be due to luck and not my Civil War surgeon-level skill at welding.

You can imagine my glee when my kids had splinters. “Fetch me the hacksaw. . .”

Fixing the mower deck was important for several reasons. First, it showed Pugsley that when something is broken, if we think we can fix it, we should at least try. There have been a couple of times that this has backfired on me like the time I burned out a wiring harness on a Nissan Altima™ installing a stereo. Likewise, I try to tell The Mrs. that if she wouldn’t have stopped me from drilling that hole in my skull, my plan really would have worked.

Second, it showed Pugsley that our destiny is in our hands. Sure, that’s not always exactly true. Those dinosaurs munching on dino cabbage on the Yucatan peninsula certainly were having a legendarily bad day when the meteorite blazed them into future motor oil and plastics for making G.I. Genderless® action figures.

But most of the time, it really is true. We make our own destiny. Our choices, our courage, our virtue, and our tenacity are much greater indicators of our futures than any outside force. That’s a message I want etched in Pugsley’s mind. Of course, I might regret that if he chooses my nursing home – he might choose the Ayn Rand Retirement Villa®, where their motto is: “We only feed you if you have the will to get to the dining room.”

Just like Schrödinger, I should probably have an open casket. You know, to be sure.

Third, we don’t give up. If we fail, we try again. I fully imagine my preschool-level welds will have been just like bear porridge: too hot or too cold and not at all just right.

That’s okay. Another message to Pugsley is that we’ll try again. Honestly, these were very bad welds, but they were the best welds I’ve ever made. They may hold, but I doubt it. I think the metal will crack so badly that Pugsley will claim he was from a broken home.

Then? I’ll weld it again.

One of the reasons I engage in these adventures is that I want to inoculate Pugsley against Leftism. Fixing a mower deck is a small part of that, but still, those messages remain.

How will this inoculate Pugsley? The Left’s main reason for living is being a victim. The Narrative of the Left is always, everywhere, the same:

  • They Are The Victims

This is the first tenet of Leftism. Everywhere, always, the Left is the victim class. Can I prove it? Sure.

Look at any protest. Ever see a Leftist throw themselves in front of, say, a semi-truck? They want to die. They hate themselves. They look to the world and see how utterly wretched they are, and they hate the world that made them with a religious fervor. If they can’t die, they want to see the world burn.

There is no redemption for them.

I was going to go as a suicide victim for Halloween, but I decided to go as Jeffery Epstein instead.

  • They Seek To Convert By Creating Envy

Not everyone can be a True Leftist. Many are converted by creating a culture of envy. Envy is a powerful Evil. Why?

Envy makes a person want what others have. Did the other people earn it? In many cases, certainly not. Trust fund kids didn’t earn the right to drive a Lamborghini®. And lots of people who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year don’t work nearly as hard as the people who fix the streets or flip burgers.

Looks like COVID inoculation day in a Red State.

That’s a fertile ground for Envy, since in many cases there is only a minimal relationship between happiness and money. When Envy takes over, however, I’ve seen teams tear themselves apart because a single team member convinced everyone that The Man was taking advantage of them.

In 2021, I also see Leftists upset because other people get better jobs. I mean, why wouldn’t someone with a degree in Medieval Albanian Poetry not be making $234,000 a year two years after college? I mean, they were so smart in understanding what Murgatroid the Great meant when he said, “Oh, my headache ist such embiggened by a trough of wine thy previous night.”

  • They Seek To Divide The Country By Making A Country Meaningless

What is a country? A country is made by people born there from parents who were born there from grandparents who were born there. There, I’ve said it. If a person’s lineage isn’t at least that deep?

They’re not really American. Oh, sure, we’ve welcomed them, but unless they’d name their son Brandon or their daughter Kayla (both names I detest) they’re not really American.

If they have a second passport? Not American. Their loyalty is divided.

Being a part of a country means something.

The Left seeks to make it mean nothing. The Left thinks we should take care of a child 15,000 miles away the same way that we would take care of one in our hometown. Certainly, I understand that, but, really, doesn’t that kid have parents and a government? I am compassionate – but I care a lot more for the people in my town than for people who aren’t.

In Chicago, you ignore both.

The Left wants an endless stream of refugees into the United States. Why? So everything that made the United States great becomes the average of countries that were so awful that people came here instead of staying there.

  • The End Goal: To Gain Power.

Aesop rightly pointed out that this is the end goal in the comments a few weeks ago. And, he’s right. Leftists can’t gain control of the country unless they subvert the things that made the United States wonderful. This is also true of the West in general.

They must create enough anger, distrust, and division as possible. In this crisis, they imagine that they will step into power. This worked in France. In Russia. In China. In Venezuela.

The goal is that this will work in the West the same way it worked all over the world.

To make this happen, the values and beliefs of the Right have to go: they become politically incorrect in a storm of feigned weakness and victimhood. If you’ve seen pictures of Antifa®, one thing is amazingly obvious: they’re physically weak.

I’m sure he’s planning to be the poet in the collective farm. Or maybe make special bracelets for the farmworkers.

People who lift weights are more likely to become . . . Right wing. Lifting a weight removes illusions – it’s me against the weight. The man isn’t holding me back. No outside force is oppressing me. And, lo and behold, the people who are lifting will help you.

But only if asked. They won’t come out and suggest a thing. It’s you versus the Iron. They’ll help, but the know, deep down inside, it’s your struggle, not theirs.

So, it’s that simple. Learn strength.

And, teach strength. Teach responsibility.

I’m sorry. I meant weak bedwetters.

That’s why Pugsley and I welded the mower deck. We’re responsible. We can try to fix it. And we won’t give up.

If you want an antidote to the Left, you won’t get much better than that. Lift weights. Be responsible for your own life and your own surroundings.

While I’d like to be able to weld better, but as you can see, fixing the deck a dozen times might provide a much better result.

When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.

“Have you paid your dues, Jack?  Yes, sir.  The check is in the mail.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Note to regular readers:  This post took a rather strange turn, as they sometimes do.  I had the topic picked, and then started writing, and found that the subject and evening led to a very atypical post.  I’m going to leave this one as it is.  I fully expect Monday’s post to be more of the usual stuff.

One of my favorite quotes was from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.”  I read that line when I was 19 or so.  I found it in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.  It was displayed in a little indy book store and it was one of those times that it seemed like the book found me, and not the other way around – it was the first thing I saw when I walked into the store.

The book store?  That store stayed in business for about two months.  The problem was that the store only had (and I’m not exaggerating) about three dozen different books.  Looking back on it, I doubt that when the bookstore closed down that all the bills were paid – the landlord really should have seen that coming.

I thought about that phrase when I moved to Alaska with The Mrs.  Moving to Alaska isn’t like moving from one state to another down in the Lower 48.  The only real way out is by plane, and you’re not going unless you planned it.  Were all my bills paid?

I made sure they were.  Pa Wilder was quite old by that time.  Before leaving for Alaska, I was quite clear in knowing that it was possible that when we moved was the last time I would ever see him alive.  I made it a point then to tell him everything I needed to tell him, to share everything I could.  I wanted him to be at peace, and I wanted to be at peace, too.

Prepping is for more than economic collapse.

Thankfully, Pa lived more than a decade after when we moved.  He even visited us in Alaska and finally down into Houston when we moved back to the continental United States.

In my mind, there’s a part of me that always sees him in his prime.  That was back when I was 12 and Pa was the father that would work 50 hours a week at the bank.  Then Pa would come home and work my brother John (yes, that’s his name, our parents were classically uncreative) and me for 20 hours over the long summer weekend days hauling and stacking firewood for the cold winter nights up at the compound on Wilder Mountain.

When I thought of him, I always remembered that impossibly tall and competent man of my youth.  When he visited Alaska I was fully six inches taller than him, and the strong arms that had swung a sledgehammer in a mighty arc to split wood with a steel wedge were now thin with age, his walk hesitant and slow.

But he was still dad.

One thing I always did, however, was try to leave each conversation with him as a complete conversation, a capstone if you will.  I wanted to make sure that absolutely every time I talked to him I was leaving nothing unsaid.  I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what I felt.

Pa Wilder lived twenty-five years longer than he expected.  But around the time I was moving to Alaska, I could sense a change in him.  The emails that he wrote gradually developed grammatical and spelling errors.  This was a change.  Previously, Pa had been as precise as an English-teaching nun in grammar and spelling.

It was a sign.  Pa was declining.

Over time, the decline increased.  I can still recall the last time I talked to him and he recognized me.  After spending two days with him, he finally looked at me and said, “You’re John, aren’t you.”

Beyond that, we had some pleasant times, but I could tell that he didn’t recognize me.  One time he looked at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m your son, John.”

There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

When word came from my brother that Pa Wilder had passed (this was years and years ago) The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and I went to his funeral.  As The Mrs. and I had a private moment between all of the orchestrated family events, she asked me, “Is there anything you need to share?  Are you doing alright?”

To be clear – I did miss and do miss Pa.  But I had made sure that everything that I ever needed to say to him had been said.  My conscience was clear.  I know that, whenever he had a clear moment, he knew that I loved him.  And I knew he loved me.

I had no unresolved issues.

It’s one thing to read the phrase, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets,” and another to understand it as time passes and wisdom increases.  When Pa Wilder passed, I understood it.  I looked deep into myself and understood that all the bills were paid.  I had no regrets.

The Mrs. had a different experience entirely with the passing of her father several months ago.  Due to COVID restrictions, he had spent the last months of his life with absolutely no physical contact, no presence of his family.  He had been recovering from surgery in a nursing home, and never recovered enough to be discharged.

For month after month, he spent his time alone, with nothing but phone calls from those he loved.

The Mrs. was very upset about this.  Heck, The Mrs. is still upset about this – the process of paying those last bills was cruelly interrupted.  She had more things to say to him – and I understand that.  There are things I’d dearly like to say to Ma Wilder, but that ship lifted too early, and now those bills can never be paid, at least not in full.

I try now to make each meeting, each contact with those around me that I love one where they know exactly where they stand with me, and vice versa.  The idea of continuing my life with those bills, or leaving those bills with someone else isn’t something I want.

To be very clear:  what brought this topic to mind wasn’t anything in particular, just the thought that this has been a helpful philosophy for me.  I do know that the future is uncertain, so I try to live my life so I don’t have those regrets, and try to manage my relationships so that there’s never anything left unsaid.

The check is in the mail.

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

Watch This, Because You Need A Good Laugh

Good news, everyone!  Bombs and Bants is back on a regular-ish schedule.  So, more to come.  I must say, we’re getting funnier and we’ve added another segment on a permanent basis.  So, this might be one show where you listen for the commercials, especially where The Boy does his best Elon Musk imitation.

I had promised that I’d post a link when The Boy got Bombs and Bants up on other formats, and here it is (Bombs And Bants).