July 2021 – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Greatest Game

“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn

I have a friend who has a trophy wife. It wasn’t first place.

I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys. I have always raised my own children by a simple rule: if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were. A related rule was: if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something. Especially if it made my life easier.

Five-year-olds can do drywall. I mean, through the tears, that is.

Obviously, this got mixed results. The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older. When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM. Right into the house.

Live and learn. Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet. Was I irritated he ran a car into our house? Certainly. But, independence has costs.

Learning is never free.

I promise to stop using police-related puns. I’ll give them arrest.

When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting: most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft. Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them. It made sense. We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.

In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple: building a fire. To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever. One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour. In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire. Finally, he got it going.

Me: “Okay, good job! You can put it out now.”

He didn’t. It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered. And, for him, that was true. He kept that fire going for hours.

There was a fire at Goodwill® today. No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.

I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me. In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life. When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge. He didn’t need a medal. What did he need?

Nothing. He had struggled for an hour to make that fire. His reward wasn’t anything outside of him. His reward was the skill. In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.

Give that a thought. Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt. I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic. The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.

When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.

A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal. They don’t need outside affirmation. They are who they are.

Arnold was a great gardener. They called him the Germinator.

That’s the rule of the Greatest Game. Struggle. Learn. Master. Repeat.

Missing? A trophy. Why is it missing? It’s simply not necessary.

We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle. I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss. Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere. The calories to feed a person are plentiful.

So why are video games popular?

They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat. Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.

Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human. To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time. The game has to be worth playing.

No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse. He broke all of the Commandments at once.

I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines. Our technology has changed our culture. Our culture has changed our roles in society.

These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology. Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on. That led to independence.

The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t. He was free to succeed, or free to fail.

What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.

We’re still here. We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there. Each day we have the chance: Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.

Me? I’m still learning to make a fire or two.

Investing The Oligarch Way

“Even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.” – Batman Begins

I tried to find a good joke about carpentry, but nothing wood work.

Most of my life I’ve lived in places that were sparsely populated. On Wilder Mountain during the school year, the nearest kid between the ages of 5 and 16 was about 8 miles away. Ma Wilder would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me.

I kid. The solitude was nice. I hiked by myself. Some people “summered” there, meaning they had enough money to turn a season into a verb. That was nice because that meant the same kid would show up year after year and we would go fishing or biking.

Right now, I have probably a hundred neighbors within a two-mile drive.

By many standards, that’s sparse, too. For me, it’s just on the edge of “crowded” but since my daily commute consists of one stoplight that’s generally green, I can make it work.

You want scary? North Korea has a missile that can hit New York City. If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

The trend, though, isn’t small towns like Modern Mayberry. The trend is amazingly large and increasingly dehumanized cities. I was watching the zombie movie set in South Korea, Last Train to Busan, with Pugsley last year. It was really Seoul-crushing. I decided to use the Internet to find pictures of what South Korea looks like when zombies aren’t chasing mass transit.

I was shocked by the density. It turns out that South Korea has an average population density of 1,326 people per square mile, which is even more zombies per square mile than that German zombie movie, Shambler’s List.

Sure, you say, South Korea is only half of the population density of the city of Houston. But that’s the urban part, and not including the ‘burbs. The country of South Korea is, on average, nearly twice as dense as heavily populated suburbs. On average. That includes forests and rice paddies and zombie storage lots, er, cemeteries.

Despite the obvious inferiority for personal defense when the Moderna©-Pfizer™ Vaxombies inevitably show up (That means it’s working), cities continue to draw people to them. The biggest reason, I suppose, is jobs.

Ever think that the evil aliens from They Live were a lot nicer than the human leaders we have today?

Having never grown up in that density, when I lived in a Houston ‘burb that had a population density of around 800 people per square mile. I always felt lost and anonymous in that number of people. With the flow of traffic, a five-mile jaunt to the supermarket could take 15 minutes or more.

Why did I do it? My job.

Before writing this, I wasn’t sure how long this could go on. A quick DuckDuckGo® search quickly told me the answer – Houston. Certainly farther than Houston density: one slum in Mumbai has a population density of 720,000 to 870,000 people per square mile depending on the source you choose to believe. That’s a square (roughly) of six feet by six feet for each person, which includes streets.

36,300 people would be mashed into my five-acre lot. I hope the ones that get assigned a space in the lake can tread water. At heart, I’d prefer an Italian slum to an Indian one – I think I’d do okay in a spaghetto.

In other news, I now count as a family of three.

I’m pretty sure that mankind wasn’t designed in any way to live in conditions like that. One article (which attempted to make the slum sound a lot less like a war crime) still mentioned the smell. I guess in India none of the houses had base-mints.

Again, a slum in India isn’t a how-to manual for human habitation on Earth, but that’s a major trend in the United States today. When I joke that they want you to live in the pod and eat the bugs, keep in mind that’s more than a joke to the powers that be.

See, I’m not kidding.

The solution, of course, is to own actual land. Bill Gates and the other members of the Oligarch Class certainly have figured that out as well. Bill recently bought 242,000 acres – enough to hold nearly 1.8 billion people by Mumbai-slum levels of packing ‘em in.

Although Mr. Gates is recently become exposed as über-creepy, no one accuses him of being stupid, except for the time when Melinda Gates told him, “Bill, this marriage isn’t working.” Bill responded, “Well, let’s get divorced, remarry, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.”

The land rush is on. Generally, these booms are followed by busts. But when one of the things that is likely going to go bust is the currency itself, well, a small fluctuation in land prices doesn’t seem to matter much. It must be a good deal, too. Nearly half the land in Scotland is owned by just 432 people. That might be why people are unhappy there – I hear even their flag is cross.

They want you to have a Land Rover® and a landlord.

Over time, the Oligarch Class has managed to create a pretty good way to hang on to wealth for generation after generation: massive tracts of land, art, and precious things. The Oligarch Class isn’t stupid – they keep the land and art in trusts so it moves from generation to generation seamlessly. They never own it, but they control it. I imagine that it would be even to imagine some of the assets tied up in trusts by the Oligarch Class.

Art? If you have art in your family for 100 years, well, it’s bound to be worth something. If you have it, you can sell a Picasso when revenues are down, and buy a Monet or a Manet when revenues are up. And jewels and gold are great ways to move lots of assets in a small package.

The nice thing about being in the Oligarch Class means that no one ever gets to tell you to live in the pod and eat the bugs. Heck, they’ve already got every need covered. I thought about trying to set up a charity for the Oligarch class after the last land bust, but then I realized they already had one: the United States Treasury.

Is it possible to generate this type of wealth? Sure, some people have done it. It’s not easy, and something tells me that behind most amazingly large fortunes are amazingly large crimes. But after a few centuries? Most people just forget about the crimes as you marry your kids off with other members of the Oligarch Class after they meet at Harvard™.

Getting in with the Oligarch Class is tough – entry level isn’t measured just in billions, it’s also measured in years. Newly minted guys with just a billion or so need not apply. They have to have standards to keep the little people out.

I’m not a hermit, at least I’ve never heard anyone call me that.

For now, at least, I live in a part of the country where I have instant and unfettered access to hundreds of acres of land to hunt on, shoot on, or just visit. It may not be Wilder Mountain, but it’s much closer to that than Houston was for us.

Now, did I leave that Picasso in my other chalet?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: F-15 And Nukes Edition

“Computer, this is Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Begin 30-second countdown. Code zero-zero-zero-destruct-zero.” – Star Trek

When you kill the last Dracula clone? That’s the final Count down.

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

June had (again) increased levels of violence over the norm, but it was down from last June when the George Floyd riots began the active operational phase of the Leftist Coup. Again, none of the violence that I could see originated from the Right. None.

I’m holding June at 9 out of 10. That’s still two minutes to midnight. Last month I repeated that “ July or August could take us to a 10” and the reason is becoming clear as hot weather and economic woes are showing up on the street.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) hanging in at around 900 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Extremist Content – Violence And Censorship Update –– Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Demonizing America – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 500 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

Extremist Content

It’s been a while since the person sworn in as President of the United States threatened his own people with violence. Here’s what Mr. Biden said recently:

“Those who say the blood of patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government, if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

I wrote about that here (The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden), but more on that later.

After some research, this isn’t the first time that Mr. Biden has said something similar, though last time he described committing mass murder of Americans using American troops he avoided mentioning nuclear weapons. He just stuck to Hellfire® missiles. I guess those are more humane, though I heard if I throw my shoes into hellfire, I could watch the soles burn.

I guess this might work. I hear Pakistan uses Sikh-heating missiles.

To be clear, if any of the people writing on the Right had mentioned using weapons of mass destruction against either the Left or FedGov I imagine they would have gotten a meeting with the FBI in a small hot room in a distant state and the chance to see if Ted Kaczynski has written anything recently.

Thanks, I’m John Wilder, and welcome to my Ted Talk®.

But Mr. Biden does it, it just makes the headlines for the afternoon. This is not only the single most extreme thing that any sitting president has ever said, at least in my recollection. The scary thing is the lack of reaction from the news media. Had Trump mentioned one-way helicopter flights for Antifa®?

Imagine the collective panties in a bunch.

I ain’t got time to bleed.

Extremism, though, is the problem. The Left has become unhinged in its quest to take over every element of life in the United States. About the only thing left are 100,000,000 or so people who reject Leftism. And all of those people have guns. So many guns. And they don’t want to sell them to the government – they couldn’t imagine selling them to organized crime.

I guess that makes us the extremists?

Violence And Censorship Update

The beatings and low-level constant riots in cities across the country continues. The level of violence we face today would have been considered off the scale in 2000. But today? They are what we call “another Saturday night in Portland.” How is everyone enjoying the new normal?

You want a civil war? This is how you get a civil war.

Censorship is the main story in the Violence and Censorship Update. The first story starts with:

Me.

Of the 1,569 some-odd days that this blog has been operational, it has gone down twice. The first was because of (as near as I can tell) a botched update of the WordPress® version software. It was down for just a few hours on a Saturday. The post that was up wasn’t anything more or less controversial than usual. It probably involved PEZ©.

Last week, however, I experienced an . . . unusual outage. It was while this post (The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden) was up and running. The entire site shut down just as one of the widest audiences that I’ve ever had was coming by to read that story. After hours of wrangling and two botched solutions, the blog was back up and running.

Who was it? I have a good friend who knows about such things, and he thought that it didn’t smell right. Rather than a big government conspiracy, it was, he thought, more likely to be an amateur who didn’t like the message. To be sure, the wheels of government are so large and we are all so tiny that any of us (any, up to and including Gates and Bezos) could be crushed by it and it wouldn’t even slow its spin.

So, a message? A coincidence? As people tell me, there are no coincidences. Regardless, I write.

But if you’re on Facebook®, please note that the following is no coincidence:

I’d love to meet Zuckerberg. He’s someone really is interested in my hobbies, political interests, job, spending habits, history, and friends.

Yup. Facebook™ is now actively checking the people you interact with, and warning you if they Facebook© doesn’t like their opinion. It is even offering you expert help.

Hurray! That’s just what I need, support from a global corporation on what to think about the unapproved media I consume. Thanks, guys!

I haven’t been on Facebook® in, well, a very long time. But if you’re one of the people still going there, be happy that they’ll tell you what to think.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is down again in June. Is it really down, or are we just used to seeing it?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability increased this month, as expected. As I predicted last month, instability is down right now. Unless there’s a crisis, I expect political instability to remain low until at least September.

Economic:

Inflation is finally beginning to hit this measure. Right now we’re in a trap: take measures to stop inflation, and you tank the economy. Take measures to keep the economy going, you increase inflation. Sounds like my first marriage.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for every year I have data for. I think it’s plateaued because the bus won’t take any more people over. I guess Congress will authorize more money for busses? Or maybe, just maybe, the Border Patrol is just letting them go on by because they know that their actions won’t change a thing?

Demonizing America

There is a complete effort by the Left to demonize traditional American values. It starts with the flag:

If your basic idea of loving a country New York Times is to hate everything about it, you might want to rethink what loving a country means.

This particular article is by Sarah Maslin Nir. “Ms.” Nir, who from her online photos appears to be transgender, is the writer. “She” has had several other pieces of “journalism” published, where “she” has displayed a continual hate for the United States.

Sarah Maslin Nir comes into the bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?”

It’s okay if “Ms.” Nir wants to use her journalistic platform to go after the traditional values of the United States every single time she writes. It has also become clear that the New York Times® will go after traditional values whenever they can. The stories that the newspapers publish aren’t things that happen by mistake like my conception, they’re a choice like Jeff Epstein’s death.

And that choice is to demonize everything about the United States. Another example? Shockingly, it’s from the New York Times™. Again. It seems like they’re always behind this. At what point can you declare a newspaper an enemy combatant?

To destroy a people without bloodshed, the first thing someone must do is destroy their connection to their past. To vilify that which was good. They even tried to vilify fireworks by pointing out the people with PTSD might be triggered. As if they didn’t know July 4 was coming?

When would you do this?

On the most favored holiday of what you want to destroy. For Americans, that would be July 4. To win a civil war without fighting, you’d demoralize a people so they had no will to fight back.

You’ll never convince a patriot that the Constitution was a bad idea. Sure, some of them think the bill of rights didn’t go far enough. But most people raised with traditional American values won’t be convinced by the 1619 Project© or any of the drivel I’ve posted above.

So why do they do it?

Remember, for Leftists, Orwell is a “How To” and not a cautionary tale.

To create division. To widen the gap. To demoralize. To destroy the people that made the United States great.

So, for a Leftist? Tuesday.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Fed Clowns To The Left Of Me…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-us-never-been-as-divided-since-civil-war

https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/civil-war-documentary-peacock-juneteenth-history.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJoU520xQnU

Joker States To The Right…

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-06-24/us-civil-war-now-table-new-alliances-form

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article252170028.html

https://sanctuarycounties.com/2021/06/20/more-than-61-of-american-counties-are-now-second-amendment-sanctuaries/

Here I Am, Stuck In The Middle With You

https://www.alreporter.com/2021/06/11/mo-brooks-alabama-legislators-arent-real-republicans-another-civil-war-could-be-coming/

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/560681-trump-supporter-warns-cnn-reporter-of-civil-war-if-former-president-not

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2021/americas-next-insurgency/

https://www.valdostadailytimes.com/opinion/columns/elza-how-to-avoid-a-civil-war/article_371a2975-ed57-5170-aa14-3663ea375509.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/162637/third-reconstruction-second-civil-war

https://thebulwark.com/the-civil-war-they-seek/

Law And Order Breakdown, Orange Cards Bad Edition: GOOJF (Get Out Of Jail Free)

NYC: https://nypost.com/2021/06/20/hundreds-of-nyc-rioters-looters-have-charges-dropped/

DC: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/prosecutors-drop-many-rioting-charges-as-dozens-charged-in-dc-protests-appear-in-court/2020/06/01/b581d5d2-a38b-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

Houston: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/harris-county-district-attorney-dismisses-charges-protesters-george-floyd/285-0279e98b-0d54-49c1-90ff-07be2fb373ac

Denver: https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/adams-county-da-drops-all-charges-against-elijah-mcclain-protest-leaders/

Portland: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/multnomah-county-da-charges-10-people-for-protest-related-crimes/283-14b55c8f-d8a3-4576-b0b7-34d0d6518523

Seattle: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/dozens-protesters-arrested-by-seattle-police-may-never-be-prosecuted/TQMXRMHYXBFZ5KZVTMEDU2S4IE/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/beware-of-george-soros-trojan-horse-prosecutors/

https://ammo.com/articles/george-soros

Temps Rising In The Ongoing Cold ACLU Dem GOP Race War…

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/syndicated/cold-civil-war-division-multiracial-democracy-anti-democratic-minority/

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/558433-the-aclus-civil-war-over-old-values-free-speech-only-for-the-woke

https://nypost.com/2021/06/08/get-ready-for-a-full-scale-democrat-civil-war/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/07/idaho-republicans-far-right-mask-mandates

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/

And Boiling Over on the Streets: Welcome To The Party, Pal…

https://twitter.com/pix11news/status/1405928349311057922?lang=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaucPPrYZJQ

https://twitter.com/lourdesubieta/status/1406738672909684736?lang=en

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQg7Vt6AVIy/

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-grim-trade-off-of-blm-29d

Parting Shots…

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/north-korean-defector-us-similarities-insane/

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-systemic-risk-no-one-sees.html

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/ready-fearless-jason-whitlocks-letter-to-black-america-explaining-the-real-purpose-of-made-for-tv-racial-conflict

https://thebulwark.com/thucydides-on-partisanship-insurrection-and-the-risks-of-civil-war/

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/30/incremental_outrageousness_is_killing_america_146008.html

https://www.amazon.com/New-Civil-War-Exposing-Restoring/dp/1645438406

Special July 4th Podcast

Okay, it’s probably getting to you on July 5th, but I was in a burger and fireworks coma until now. It’s pretty short, clocking in at around 7 minutes.

The Blog will return with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report which will show up at 7:30 AM Eastern on the page and, as usual, sent out to subscribers.

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.

Life: We Spend It Every Second

â€œThis is your life, and itâ€™s ending one minute at a time.â€ â€“ Fight Club

In life, donâ€™t burn your bridges.Â Theyâ€™re all made of steel and concrete now.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day, and asked him what exactly it was that he wanted out of life.Â I know that sounds weird.Â But I like to understand people, so I ask them weird questions.Â The really odd part of that is if you ask someone a question (especially an odd one), most of the time they wonâ€™t lie.

I have no idea why.Â Itâ€™s the same reason that when you ask Joe Biden a question he says, â€œUmm, er, ahhh, blonde leg hairs, wanna touch â€˜em?â€Â See, not all politicians lie.Â Just the ones who donâ€™t have dementia.

Back to my acquaintance.Â â€œWhat do you want out of life?â€Â He paused.Â It was a longer pause, so I was expecting something profound.

â€œYou know, I think Iâ€™m looking forward to being old enough to retire.â€

This particular gentleman is in his thirties, and plans to retire at 65.

Rowan Atkinson is now a has-Bean.

First, retirement at 65 might be a dream for most people in their thirties today.Â I have no idea what the future economy will look like.Â It may involve BitcoinÂ® and jetpacks, or it might involve cannibalism and burning old VHS tapes of Whoâ€™s The Boss? so Tony Danza can keep us all warm with family-friendly humor and the thermal energy from burning plastic.Â In 2021 Iâ€™m betting on Tony Danza.

Second, I can recall being in my thirties pretty well.Â The one thing I certainly wasnâ€™t thinking about was retirement.Â I was thinking of ways to have fun, and ways to contribute to humanity.Â Heck, back then I thought I might even start writing at some point in my life to both contribute and have fun.

At some point.

Here, among people I know, is an example of a person who is actively sleepwalking his way to being 65.Â My acquaintance is wishing his life away.Â Now, I have a lot of faults and have done things that would have made the Portrait of Dorian Gray melt like the reactor at Chernobyl, but wishing my life away isnâ€™t one of those sins.Â (I do apologize for green chili flavored-PEZâ„¢, which was sort-of my fault.)

Yes, there have been times that I couldnâ€™t wait for something to finish, especially when it was the end of a seemingly endless stream of 84 hour work weeks.Â Yeah, I was glad when that was over.Â But Iâ€™m also glad I did it.Â Nothing tells you what you can do until youâ€™ve done more that you thought you ever could.

Whatâ€™s Joe Bidenâ€™s favorite gum flavor?Â Retire-mint.

Ben Franklin said it best, in a quote that Iâ€™ve used multiple times:Â â€œDost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.â€Â He was right.Â And Franklin was not known for wasting time, especially when it came to the ladies.Â The man was a beast on Tinderâ„¢.Â Here is his message to Mistress Fancy Pantaloons 1769:

â€œIf thou desire many things, many things will seem but a few.Â A few compared to my most magnificent biceps and firmly corrugated abdominal musculature.â€

I have become convinced that a significant number of people in society have not only started squandering time, but are intentionally doing so.Â They are stuck shuffling their feet, mark time, until some future event when â€œthings will be better.â€Â What future event?

There are many:

I was ready to go home after a few days on a sleepover, and called my Mom.Â â€œMom, Iâ€™m ready to go home.â€Â Her response?

Ma Wilder just said, â€œJohn, youâ€™re married.â€Â Yeah, my first marriage was pretty bad.

So, I object to wishing your life away.Â I mean, unless Iâ€™m at the dentist.Â I just want that stuff over with.Â But each and every moment of my life has one thing in common â€“ it is a minute of my life that is forever lost.

Died in 1973:Â Still releasing books on a more regular pace than George R.R. Martin.

Certainly, there are minutes that I cherish more than others.Â But as I get older, I find that I have fewer minutes that I want to spend on bad movies.Â If Iâ€™m going to spend some time in someone elseâ€™s dream, it had better be a damn good dream, and not the ones I have when Iâ€™m sleeping about forgetting to wear my pants to the White House and finding that Joe liked that idea.

(shudder)

As I get older, I find that I certainly think differently than I did when I was just a kid.Â Fluid intelligence, that innovative creative rush that allows physicists to intuitively feel their way to ever more accurate and complex models of reality at both the subatomic and galactic levels seems to peak at around thirty.Â I still wonder why my â€œthe Universe is actually a melty plate of cheesy spaghetti with meat sauceâ€ theory never got the attention it deserved.Â I guess that the other physicists thought I was an impasta.

Thankfully, for older folks, thereâ€™s more than one dimension of intelligence.Â Crystallized intelligence, which consists of the increasing ability to connect ideas and increasing ability to communicate them seems to be dominant later in life.Â This may explain while an older professor might not be doing world-shaking innovation, but might still have much to add to science, and would almost always be a better teacher.

Regardless, whatever I end up doing, I know that for me to make the most of life I actually have to live it in the here and now.Â Sure, I have to reminisce about the past â€“ thatâ€™s how I learn.Â And I have to plan for the future â€“ thatâ€™s how I avoid criminal charges for tax evasion and fines for my grass being too long.

Communism is like tax fraud.Â Both seem great at first, but both end with government agents knocking at your door.

Dwelling in the past is a recipe to live with regret.Â Dwelling in the future is a way to live in the false opiate of the dream.Â To make the past worth the scars you earned and the future possible, you have to live and take action in the present.

Action.

Action is what men do.

If the action is worth taking?Â It requires courage.Â Courage, because failure is always a possibility.Â Courage, because a future worth taking action for isnâ€™t an easy decision.Â And courage is required to stand up to the school bully, even though itâ€™s been quite a few decades since Iâ€™ve beaten up a seventh-grader.

Iâ€™m not saying it didnâ€™t feel good, but when I had my lawyer sue her?Â That was the best.

The good thing about the past is, at least, that itâ€™s over.Â The bad thing is that if the scar tissue is too deep, it can cause me to hesitate.Â There are tons of different ways that things can go bad, and in my life, Iâ€™ve explored more than one of them.Â Heck, when I told The Mrs. she should embrace her mistakes, she hugged me.

There is hope, however.Â A friend of mine once told me when I was down:Â â€œJohn, if you had a line of troubles in front of you, half that youâ€™d lived through, and have that you hadnâ€™t youâ€™d always pick the ones that you have already conquered.â€

Most problems (not all) that make me the most apprehensive are the problems I havenâ€™t faced.Â Is that a lack of faith in me, or a fear of the unknown?

Iâ€™m not sure.Â And Iâ€™m not sure that it matters.

Why did PETA send cats to Mars?Â They heard about the Curiosity rover.

But I do know this:Â each and every day I have a choice whether to phone it in, or to give it everything I have.Â I wonâ€™t lie, there are days I phone it in.Â And there are days when I get in the car to come home and say, â€œYeah, that was utterly worth it.Â Nobody could have done that better.â€

Those days normally run like a breeze â€“ I walk in the door and canâ€™t believe itâ€™s time to walk out.

Sadly, by doing more and being more, subjectively, Iâ€™ll burn through my time much faster than my acquaintance.Â Thatâ€™s okay.Â Iâ€™m living for something, not just passing the time.

And when I type these words, Iâ€™m doing everything.Â Iâ€™m living in the moment.Â Iâ€™m using my past.Â And Iâ€™m doing whatever little bit I can to help the future.

Donâ€™t just exist.Â Mean something.Â Be significant.