Month: March 2022

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone?  He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series.  Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War.  The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

  • Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
  • Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
  • Legalized disco, and
  • Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact:  It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.©  Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget:  in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional.  War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty.  His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today.  As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready.  It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer.  It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse.  It makes me so mad:  if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste.  He created power structure after power structure in the country.  Social Security.  Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only.  Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency.  And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued.  What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator.  In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs.  The easiest way to do that?  Dispersed knowledge.  Incentives.  Voluntary cooperation.  In short, capitalism.  The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States.  It’s ironic:  the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here.  They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

  • Colleges and Universities
  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho.  How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society.  It rots society from within.  The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

  • 70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
  • Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
  • George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
  • The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
  • Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
  • Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
  • Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough.  The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary.  Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®.  I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States.  We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency.  This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing.  In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture.  Now?  Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy?  That’s a lot of hungry people.  A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope.  A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions.  The Strong Man.

The response?  That’s Friday’s post:  The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

  • A decadent people
  • Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
  • Because they live in abundance
  • Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

The Space Between The Words

“Well, I don’t care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.” – Futurama

I love my step ladder, but it’ll never be my real ladder.

It was March of 2005.  I remember it fairly well.  It was when we were living in Alaska.  The move had been a big risk for The Mrs. and I – moving north across the better part of a continent for work.  I was fortunate to have a good boss and good co-workers.

It was there that I had what I would normally call an epiphany, but epiphany seems too strong.  A realization?  Maybe.  Regardless, to me, it seemed profound.

The Space Between The Words . . . it was a throwaway line by a guest on a radio show that The Mrs. and I were listening to on KFBX, the local AM station.  But sometimes a phrase sticks with you, and this one stuck with me like the phrase “floozy crotch snout” sticks to Kamala Harris.

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

Yup, real quote.  Her real words are better than almost any meme.

Regardless . . . The Space Between The Words.  It seemed as insignificant as Hunter Biden’s willpower until in that hypnogogic state between wakefulness and sleep I thought about it . . . The Space Between The Words.

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

My realization was that The Space Between The Words isn’t made of silence.  It is far from that dead and sterile nothingness that silence implies.

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

For me, that space is infinity.  It is the engine of creation itself.

I wrote “The Space Between The Words” down on a piece of Post-It® note and taped it to my computer monitor.  I still have that piece of now-faded pale yellow paper stuck in a book I carry with me every day.  To me, it is a touchstone and a personal reminder.

Why does it matter to me?

When I am talking, (or doing public speaking, which I do 10,000% more often than I want to do and potentially 20,000% more than the audience wants me to do) if I ever get flustered, I can just stop.  I can pause.  I realize that I can tap into The Space Between The Words, that creative power that allows me to choose whichever of the thousands of words I know as the very next one.  I get to choose that next phrase.  I get to choose the way the conversation can go.  I get to create the possibilities with only the choice of my words.

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

If I choose well, I can turn a simple conversation into something meaningful.  One of the powers of words is that, when applied correctly, is that they can become something transformative.  A simple conversation can change a person’s life forever.  Especially if it’s on tape – just ask Richard Nixon.

My buddy and I got a huge contract to make toy vampires.  There’s only two of us – I have to make every second Count.

The choice of words is, as I mentioned before, the power of creation.  I don’t claim to own that power.  Again, the word I would use isn’t that I came up with the idea or invented the concept I’m describing now.  I just discovered something that I’m sure many others before me knew was there, just like I discovered that someone was keeping a list of all of my jokes in a dad-o-base.

I won’t claim to be a great or charismatic public speaker.  I’ve had my moments.  But I do know that I’ve changed at least one or two lives through things that I have said, and I do know that I’ve said more of what I mean with greater clarity when I allowed The Space Between The Words to guide me.

I bet no one expected that meme.

Likewise, when I write, I don’t claim to be a great writer.  I do, however (when it’s not 3am!) try to carefully edit what I write so that it has the meaning I want to share.  Sometimes I don’t get there.  Sometimes, when writing one of these posts, the content takes a sharp turn, and I let it run.  I know that the full idea I was trying to get out will get born, eventually.

Or it won’t.

That’s the beauty of The Space Between The Words.  Even when writing, it is there.

And, to a certain extent, it has changed me.  I’m no longer afraid to stop, to pause, and to collect.  In one sense, that vast galaxy of creation that I feel I’ve tapped into is something much greater than I will ever be, especially if I keep losing weight.

I wonder what other planet worms exist on . . . otherwise why do we call them Earth worms?

In a religious sense, it feels like I’ve come into a brief (and unworthy!) contact with Logos – a deep universal well that I can only see dimly.  Not Legos®, but Logos.  Legos™ just hurt your foot when you walk down the hall in the dark.

In my experience, The Space Between The Words contains wisdom.  The Space Between the Words contains creation.  The Space Between The Words contains . . . redemption.

Listen for it – I assure you there is no silence there between the words.  There is no self-doubt.  It is calm.  It is patient.  It is Good.  And, for me, it has certainly been worth keeping that Post-It® note around.

Warning:  next week we’ll take a darker turn, probably all week, if not longer.  I’ll still try to be the “Mary Poppins of Doom” and interject humor and a smile where I can, but realize – there are many twists and turns ahead, and probabilities leading to a dark future are rapidly coalescing.

Beer, Hangovers, And The End Of The Party

“We hope you enjoyed the beer, oh, like I mean the movie, eh.” – Strange Brew

They never talk about the worst pupil of Socrates: Mediocrates.

I was 22 when I bought two six packs of “Old German Lager®” for $1.25 each. Not each beer, each six pack, and as I recall this was when a decent beer cost nearly a buck a beer. I then went down with my friend to watch the local minor league team play on a Tuesday afternoon. That is something you can do when you’re in college. Now, Tuesday afternoons are mostly 72°F (43 hemi-demi-centi-meters) and partly-fluorescent with a chance of popcorn smells from the communal microwave.

I used to think that the best beer was one that was so cold it was nearly ice, and best served in an ice-cold mug. Then my nephew brought me a hot one on a summer day that he’d been shaking for five minutes. That one was pretty good, too. However, I can say that Old German Lager™ was the single worst beer that I have ever had in my life.

But more on that later.

The world is a really big place. Oh, sure, sometimes people say (when they run into a coincidence) that it’s a small world, but my standard response to that is, “let’s see you paint it.”

I tried to get thinner at the paint store. It didn’t work.

The world really does seem large. When I’ve spent time on a plane flight for work over the breadbasket, I can recall sitting for hours just looking at the patchwork of fields filled with cattle or crops stretching to the horizon. It seems huge.

And it is huge.

The miracle of the modern world is certainly not the iPhone®, but agriculture – it’s what allows people to keep living. Mankind has always known hunger and many people in history have expired from the “diet plan that never fails”. But in the last 20 years, as our population reached the highest levels ever, there were more fat people than starving people for the first time on Earth.

The problem of solving world hunger was no longer a matter of producing the food, it was no longer a matter of being able to distribute the food, it wasn’t even a matter of paying for food – all the hunger on the planet was simply a matter of politics.

In 2022 that won’t be the case.

Fertilizer prices are at record highs. Additionally, the diesel fuel the farmers rely on to plant, harvest and transport the food is at near-record highs. Right now, we’re living on the harvest from last year. This year, we’re perhaps . . . headed towards a disaster.

I’ve mentioned before that Russia and Ukraine together account for around 25% of global wheat exports. Russia has a harvest projected that will lower its exports in 2022, and is currently exporting at least some grain (though I bet China and India have a coupon to jump to the head of the line to buy food). Ukraine? I’m thinking that planting and harvesting and producing fertilizer (Ukraine was an exporter of fertilizer) is the last thing on their minds.

I guess that would make me an entremanure.

Food production is pretty finely balanced with consumption – there is no Strategic Doritos® Reserve that the President can tap into if the party runs low. In reality, the world typically has some buffer – about 100 days (from the latest data I’ve seen) of grain. Most of that isn’t in countries that are importers – it’s in grain silos near the farms, waiting for shipment to the Doritos™ factory.

That’s good news. But the recent things I’ve seen show that, at least in the United States, farmers are attempting to plant everything they can, but the markets today are weird. Several stories have pointed out that some local grain elevators aren’t buying grain, because they’re worried the market will collapse and they won’t be able to sell the grain at a profit.

The farmers depend on those sales to buy . . . fertilizer and diesel. Will prices collapse? Probably not, since money printing even more money seems to be the only thing that Congress can agree on. It will be painful in the United States. It may be catastrophic in countries where the oligarchs live on $0.47 per day.

A friend’s wife ran off with a tractor salesman. She wrote him a John Deere® letter.

The world economy is likewise balanced in the production of “stuff”. There’s a shortage of cars. Why? There’s a shortage of chips. So, the 20-year-old hulk of a car that has traveled just as long as light travels in a second that I have for a spare if my spare breaks down has doubled in price in the last year. Last year, it was worth $2,000. Now, Pugsley says it’s going for $4,000.

Progress, I guess, if you own a used car that’s within three oil changes of traveling as far as the Moon’s orbit. I might even get a few extra bucks from Elon Musk.

Metals are likewise going through the roof – basics like copper and nickel are increasing. I got a burger last week – it was up 25% – in two weeks. Tires? The local dealership said that they were up 25%. This month. And PEZ®? Forget about it.

Want inflation?

It’s here.

The drivers that started the snowball running down the cliff was all the free money during the Great ‘Rona Rave of 2020-2021-2022. Politicians have the idea that they have to do something, even if it’s stupid. Printing money and paying people not to work is, 100%, stupid.

Of course, the next idea is one right out Nixon’s playbook – before the election, heat up the economy so that everything is running on full speed when the votes are cast. It’s the same idea as throwing vodka in the punchbowl to get the party going. Hangovers? Who worries about hangovers at midnight?

Except if you’re drinking Old German Lager©. I said that Old German Lager™ was the worst beer in the world. It was. We drank it and it tasted, at best, questionable. But it’s beer, right?

Well, about the sixth inning the headache started. But neither my friend nor I were in the slightest bit buzzed. We were completely sober, but had gone straight to the hangover.

“Premium” might be false advertising.

That’s what we’ve done. Like Nixon’s inflationary party in the 1970s, we went straight into the tough times. We went from the Vietnam boom to the bust, complete with high oil prices and a Cold War. We are in the hangover part of history.

And this time, we didn’t even get the buzz.

41 Things I Think I Know (2022 Revision)

“That’s a short list. That can’t be everyone you want to kill. Are you sure you’re not forgetting someone? – Game of Thrones

The Mrs. asked me to put ketchup on the shopping list. Now I can’t read it.

This is a revamp of an older post from way back in 2017. Are these fundamental rules? No. But between when I first wrote them and today I didn’t see much I’d change, except item 22.

  1. Tell the truth. This will have the beneficial added benefit of changing your behavior so you’re not ashamed of what you do. The whole truth. Even about that. And that. People might not like you, but they’ll respect you. Except for the thing about the cat. Keep that to yourself – no one will understand.
  2. Showing up on time is important. It shows respect. It is also is easy to track, if you’re a boss wanting to get rid of people. Even if you do a great job, you’ll be the first to go if you show up late. I guess that’s changed since the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions – everyone has stopped Russian.
  3. Don’t give up. Sometimes break-out success means ten years of study and effort and of not giving up. Even Johnny Depp succeeded, which proves that anyone can.
  4. There are no friends like those formed in youth. When you’re ten, there are no pretenses. The cruel calculus of testosterone and estrogen has yet to set in. Greed is not an issue.
  5. Be nice. Life is already really hard enough for many people. Don’t be their villain, unless it pays really well, and even then, the karma is . . . tough.

One time I asked for a lobster tail at dinner. The waitress started, “Well one day this brave lobster . . . .”

  1. When you speak, or write, or think, you own the space between the words. You have the ability to turn your words into something amazing, since infinite possibility lies between one word and the next. This is the one most people will ignore, but one of my most powerful things that I found out for myself.
  2. Don’t continually do things you hate, or things that make you feel like a failure. Putting yourself in situations like that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also destroys your ability to naturally smell like musk and sandalwood.
  3. Apologize. But only when you are wrong, which, if you regularly read this blog, is hardly ever. If you were not wrong, don’t apologize.
  4. Be of value. If you don’t contribute, you’re part of the problem. Which problem? All of them.
  5. Don’t make yourself into a victim. Almost everybody is where they are because of their choices. Own your choices, and own your outcomes. No one likes victims.

Jussie was just sent to prison. I hope he doesn’t beat himself up over that.

  1. If you really are a victim? Act like you’re not. Because even if victimhood status is legit, see item 10. No one likes people who act like victims, even when they really are.
  2. Opportunity is found where responsibility is neglected.
  3. Solve someone else’s biggest problem: that’s the virtuous road to wealth. It’s also harder.
  4. Remember, giving a gift creates a debt in the mind of the recipient. The larger the gift, the bigger the debt. And nobody likes someone they owe a lot of money to – giving large gifts can make people not like you.
  5. If you don’t want to go to bed because you don’t want to get up tomorrow? Fix your life.
  6. If you don’t want to get out of bed because you don’t want to live the day? Fix your life.
  7. Have children and have them early. But only if you have a spouse. And can keep your spouse.
  8. Cooking your own food is cheaper. And it gives time for conversation. Some of the best conversations occur around the barbeque grill and the deck late into the night.

I grilled for the board of directors once. It pleased the steakholders.

  1. Be tough when you have to be. To be kind when toughness is required results in tragedy.
  2. A pleasure repeated too often becomes a punishment.
  3. Beware of ignoring public opinion. Public opinion resulted in witch burning, the guillotine and Hula Hoops ®. You can be on the other side, but understand there may be consequences.
  4. Don’t see conspiracy when simple laziness, plain stupidity, or normal greed would explain the situation just as well. Removed after living through 2019, 2020, 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.
  5. Schools used to be run by school boards. Now they’re run by unions and lawsuits. None of these groups have the students in mind.
  6. You don’t win ‘em all. Deal with it.
  7. You are the sum of your experience, your intellect, your body, your surroundings, and the people you interact with. You also control your own change. So, get up. The you of today isn’t ready for tomorrow unless the you of today is changing to meet those challenges.
  8. Betrayal of trust is an indication of character. Never trust someone who betrays you. Forgive? Perhaps. Trust again? Never.
  9. Real personal changes don’t happen unless an emotional experience occurs. The bigger the change, the more significant the experience needed.

What’s worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? Getting shot.

  1. You have your shot. Would have and could have don’t exist. (Unless the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics is correct, in which case all things happen, so have another beer.)
  2. The best (and maybe only) way to win at gambling is to own the casino.
  3. No matter how awesome your idea, it has no value unless you make it real. This takes risk, execution, and work. Which is a lot more difficult than talking about your wonderful idea.
  4. Unless your boss is a good boss, being younger and smarter than him won’t impress him, it will make him jealous or fearful. Neither of those things are good.
  5. Having a boss that makes less money than you is also not good. Envy is a powerful emotion.
  6. Know the strengths and weaknesses of your (biological) parents. You’re not too much different than them. At best, you can avoid their weaknesses. At worst, you’ll follow every one of their downsides.
  7. Tip well, if you can afford it. Waiting on tables is tough work. And if you do tip well? They’ll remember you and take care of you. It’s nice to show up and find the right bottle of wine waiting for you.
  8. You’re not going to win the lottery. Unless it’s the one that Shirley Jackson wrote about. (LINK)
  9. If you’re traveling in winter, travel on the top half of your gas tank. It doesn’t cost any more.
  10. Keep your napkin in your lap while at the dinner table.
  11. Always use deodorant. And if in doubt? Have a breath mint, too.
  12. Keep in touch with people who have helped you, so you can help them. And because you’re a person.
  13. If you have too much stuff, your stuff will own you. Except books. You can have as many of those as you want. And ammo.
  14. The only way that you can know another person across centuries is to read what they’ve written. Have you written anything worthy of reading by your great-great grandchildren? No? Get to work.

What’s the name of the Grim Reaper’s dog? Snuffles.

  1. You’re going to die, and we all die alone. Understand that the only person with you throughout your life is . . . you. Be prepared to keep yourself and those you love alive in any emergency you can imagine. Our time will come when it comes, but there’s no reason not to push it back as far as you can.

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World.  They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed.  As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy.  That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

  • Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need.  As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative.  Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life:  you can’t outrun your teeth.  But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
  • Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them.    Will one a week kill you?  No.  Will one a day?  Maybe.  Same with chips.  I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago.  Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy.  Same with donuts.  When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product.  Which they are.  Corollary:  don’t let your teeth dig your grave.  I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
  • Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff.  A baked potato or French fries?  Baked, thank you.  Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap.  If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week.  At most.  Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today.  It sure made his parents mad.
  • The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier?  Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full.  Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour.  Insulin tells your body to store fat.  Do the math.
  • Get exercise.   It’s good for you.  If nothing else, walk.  If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain.  One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away.  Keep moving.  Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
  • Avoid it, except, say, once a week.  Maybe.  I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®.  I want to hear the news.”  Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

  • Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth.  Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting.  Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative.  And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Psaki about COVID.
  • The media lies. But I repeat myself.  “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet.  Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait?  She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.  Look it up.  Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this:  your emotion is the aim.  Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
  • Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
  • Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad.  There’s plenty.  Twitter® is a sea of it.  Most social media is a sea of it.  That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13th
  • For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now.   There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them.  Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy?  There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad.  When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim.  Stop it.  Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once.  It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage.  These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on.  It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago.  If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

  • If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care.  A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly.  And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
  • Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps.  And never go casual.  Get competitive.
  • If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why?  Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
  • If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
  • If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values.  Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
  • If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
  • And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have?  Yours?  The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate.  Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

  • Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice.  Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it.  Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
  • I have one.  I could pay it off in cash.  Why could I pay it off?  Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997).  I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
  • Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month.  Second, there’s a moral cost.  Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character.  But every month, and forever?  It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
  • Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time?  Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights?    GTA is a life stealer.  And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
  • Why live in a big city? The high housing cost?  The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you?  Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
  • Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them.  When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question:  “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?”  If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on.  The worst case?  Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
  • Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau.  How will you prepare for that?
  • You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away?  It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic.  It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life.  He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario.  It isn’t.  Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

 We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

 We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

 With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

 When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.” 

 On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” 

 In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”  

 Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

 And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg.  Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us.  The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating).  This last one deals with the essence of the modern world:  Money.

We are being farmed.  For money.  For time.  For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s.  I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman.  To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee).  Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921.  Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough.  Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car.  Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies.  You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys’r’Us© kid . . . bankrupt and empty inside.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff.  Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me.  The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction.  Then they (generally) fail.  I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required.  Example?

Car insurance.  There was a time it wasn’t required.  As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding).  Before 1956, no states required car insurance.  Is it a good idea?  Yeah.  But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird.  The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking?  The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

  • Cable TV,
  • Subscription streaming,
  • Internet,
  • Elvis impersonators,
  • Property taxes,
  • Mortgage or rent,
  • Trash,
  • PEZ®,
  • Water,
  • Water soluble dog wax,
  • Sewer,
  • Johnny Depp, and
  • Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going.  Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes.  Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory.  It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association.  And Johnny Depp?  Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse.  It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income.  Then, enter feminism.  It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®.  Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s.  Help the Clampetts?  I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday.  I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce.  So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result?  Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much.  The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress.  The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me?  Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up.  And government dependency went up.  Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes.  How can the Left keep winning like this?  That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money.  The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™.  The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business.  But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school.  But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan.  This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school.  I don’t think I can ever repay you.  I kid.  But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013.  I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts.  More students plus higher tuition led to more loans.  This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000.  The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go?  To climbing walls.  To cool dorm rooms.  To spring breaks.  To new buildings.  And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have?  Part C.

Yes.  Medical care.  In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can.  Eat healthy food.  Get exercise.  Stay hydrated.  Wash your hands.  Try not to get crushed under heavy things.  Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry.  Healthy people are lousy customers.  Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”  Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea.  No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight.  No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes.  And they actually want you to get cancer.  This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report:  “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm.  Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now?  If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event.  Does that sound sustainable?  I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites.   The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset.  According to their thoughts:  We’ll own nothing, and like it.  Then, our time could be farmed forever.  Our desires could be controlled and programmed.  We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed.  And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them, in their own words:

The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating

“I am not aware of that tradition, Mac. In fact, I think that you and your parents were just stealing from that home.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I had Mennonite Flu last week, first a little horse, then a little buggy.

As I ended Friday’s post (LINK), I tossed out the idea – what if traditions were essentially just solutions to problems we forgot we even had?

They are.  But modern life has eroded those traditions in many ways.

If I asked the question, “What is American culture?” how many people would answer with questions that described companies and brands?  McDonalds™.  The NFL©.  Nike®.  I could keep going on, but these aspects of American culture are all new – McDonalds® is everywhere now, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that it started expanding everywhere . . . like your mom.

Along with something else . . . what ever could that be?

In fact, the idea that most people are employees of someone else is fairly new, too.  In 1880, almost 70% of Americans were in agriculture.  Sure some didn’t own the farms and worked on farms for a wage, but farming has generally been an occupation run by families, owning and working the land.

Farmers, especially back then, were not a group of people who were dependent, it was a group of people who lived based on their own work.  The “employment” model was used, certainly.  Sailing ships and railroads and industry required it.  But it was not the predominant model.

Neither was rent.  Neither was the subscription model – about the only subscription many folks would have would be the newspaper and maybe a magazine or two.  Neither was contact with the Federal government.  In 1880, more than likely the only contact a citizen had with the Federal government was when the mail showed up.  If you asked what the culture of America was then, the answers would have been fairly easy to guess:  Freedom.  Independence.  The Constitution.  Open skies, far horizons, amber waves of grain, and cooperation.

Cooperation?  Certainly.  The cities and towns that grew every ten miles or so were founded on people wanting to get together to create places of gathering.  Places for churches.  Places for schools.  And, places for commerce and the optimistic growth of a nation.

Funny, the 2020 Chinese plans look like the 1880 American plans . . . .

Was there corruption?  Yes, there were people and money, so certainly there was corruption.

But then, largely driven by technology (but also driven by changes from incorporating the large numbers of people emigrating from Europe) that culture changed.  Farmers no longer had to feed the horses that moved so much of American commodities – now those were moved by a rail network and internal combustion engines.  Also, those same engines allowed farmers to farm much more with lower input from individuals.  Sons left farms for jobs at factories, or to go to universities to learn skills to get jobs.

Renting and mortgage became the norm.  Companies (because of a Supreme Court decision) became forever, and became larger.  Entire new industries were born that required employees.

The culture of America changed, too.  Immediately after World War II, the culture moved to one of suburban living matched with jobs working for big corporations, sometimes in places far from family.  In general, an attractive package was set up.  Work 9 to 5, come home to a freshly made meal by the wife and have a round of catch in the front yard with the boy.  Church on Sunday.  Then repeat.

The Vatican won’t accept Visa® or Mastercard™.  It’s a Paypal© State.

For some reason, this was sold as soulless, and resisted by the “spirituality” of the Lefties in the 1960s.  Most of the rebellion was about weed, LSD, and sex, but at least part of it was about something where they actually had a point:  the core of the nation was moving from businesses supporting people, to people supporting business.

How so?

Monthly phone bills, power bills, subscriptions to TV Guide®, rent or mortgage, insurance, and car payments became the norm.  What was happening was that people were being incorporated as economic farms for banks and companies to harvest every month.  Go, work, and be harvested.  When you’re used up, you can rest until discarded as the world moved around you.

This was bad enough, because it took people out of the reason for the system, and made people into components of the system.  But even more changes were soon to show up which would add to this and create our world today.

First, the birth control pill.  The relationships between men and women had always been governed by one basic concept – one man can make many babies at a time, but one woman can only make one at a time.  As such, even though men might have been the keymasters, women had to be the gatekeepers to sex.  Women had to be choosey.

See, choosey.

Society had solved that problem through a pretty strict system of monogamy tied through both religious and social rules.  If a girl got pregnant, there was an expectation that the boy would marry her, even if a shotgun was necessary to induce him to do the honorable thing.

Once married, the couple were strongly encouraged everywhere to keep the marriage going.  There were real difficulties in breaking up a marriage – for instance, unless someone was at fault and the other party could prove it in court, a divorce could be contested and not granted.  And what would the woman do, anyway?  Who would want a woman with kids as a wife?  And how would that woman support the kids if the man chose to not give them resources?

Those are powerful inducements to working out a fight rather than calling it all off, if you’re the woman.  And women today file 80% of the divorces.  Why?  Fun and prizes!

And some say we should ignore the old values . . . .

Fault is no longer a requirement.  So, for any or no reason a woman can opt out.  Johnny, show her what she’s won!  Child support, alimony, and, welfare!

Heck, with welfare, there’s no real reason to get married anymore.  One of my high school teachers noted that she had a 16 year old student who wanted to get pregnant as soon as she could so she could, “get her own welfare check every month.”

This has led to significant consequences in the dating market in 2022.  Many women spend their 20s having relatively anonymous sex with large numbers of men.  Tinder® has been devastating for the dating market – see the graph below based on OK Cupid™ data – the “average” man rates the “average” woman as a 3 out of 5 stars.

Perfect!  Good job, guys!  You did it!

The way the “average” woman rates that “average” guy, however, means that only one guy out of six is rated as “above average”.

Houston, we have a problem.  And it’s a doozy.  Monogamy works when people sort each other out and your 4 marries a 4.  Et cetera.  What’s set up here, is that all the 5 star guys have it easy.  Will a 5 star guy sleep with an average 2.5 star girl?  Sure.  Once, probably.  When (if!) he gets married he’ll pick a 4 or higher, though.

Ohhh, my precious!

Thus, the average 2.5 star girl in her 20s has the experience of being acceptable to Chad 5 star.  So, she expects to marry Chad 5 star, when in reality Chad 5 star has no intention of even remembering the average girl.  So, until she’s 30, she holds out, and then reality catches up to her and she’s ready to settle for the 2.5 star guy, Settle Stan.

Wow – inspiring if you’re the 2.5 star guy.  And, she’ll be much more likely to divorce Settle Stan, too.  She’s really a widow to the fun times with Chad, and Stan will never, ever be good enough.  Hopefully Stan makes money?

Well, you can see that James dodged a bullet . . . 

But what about all of the Stans who never have a chance even at an awful relationship?  The modern world has created a series of drugs to lull them gently onto that goodnight.

It takes a thick umbrella to keep out the light . . . 

This is just one aspect of the sexual marketplace that has been devastating for the country.  I’ll leave the rest consequences of the sexual revolution as a class exercise.

There are, of course, other consequences of the modern world and the ignoring of tradition on life, but I think this is certainly the most profound.  Thankfully there won’t be any more consequences of a sexual revolution gone amok.

The Modern World, Part I: Health And Strippers

“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High

“Sir, I found the IED – Ice Cream, Eggos® and Diet Coke™.”

I had (before Vlad decided to put on the Imperial March and send the tanks down south) promised a three-post series based around a single theme.  As the name of the blog implies, this first one covers the “health” theme of the blog . . . .  Unless events in Ukraine dictate, expect parts two and three on Monday and Wednesday.

What happens when society conspires to make people . . . unhealthy?  We’ve experienced an upheaval in the traditions and previously self-imposed and society-imposed limits to behavior (behaviour is the metric spelling for you in Chairman Trudeau’s People’s Republic of Canada).

By (nearly) any measure the United States is far less healthy as a nation than it was five or six decades ago.  About only good thing we’ve seen is a lowering in heart disease and other diseases related to smoking.  That’s a bright spot.  Many of the metrics are fairly grim, though on other health statistics.  Even life expectancy, which had been increasing, is now trending downward faster than Kamala Harris at the county fair zipper pull.

So, Joe Biden sent her over to manage the Ukraine situation.  I’ll bet she’ll suck at that, too.

I’ll throw out this idea:  many of the health issues that we are facing are the product of modernity – changes in society that break with time tested traditions:

  • I can pull up numerous articles that point to how America is the fattest that it has ever been. Homer Simpson was portrayed as comically obese in the 1990s when he reached the weight of 239.  Now that qualifies him to wear medium clothes.  From the child’s section.
  • We’re also at a high point of kids being raised in broken homes, which causes health issues as well. I mean, if being in jail is a health issue.
  • Finally, we’re in many ways unhappier than ever before – opioid deaths aren’t happening because life is peachy. Kids in high school today don’t think they’ll do as well financially as their parents.  And people are looking for increasing escapes from reality.

Let’s start with weight – I’ll spend more time here since I think it’s a topic where we tend to blame people because they’re fat.  However, I am not particularly a proponent of the idea that self-control just disappeared and that’s why America decided to pack on the pounds.  Nope.  Things changed which made it much easier to pack on the Dorito® muscle.

This is exactly what AOC weighs when she has both her saddle and feedbag on.

Join me for a minute in a time machine back to the 1960s.  What did people eat?

Food.  Duh.

But what kind of food?  Food with much lower levels of processing.  For example, frozen pizzas and microwave Pizza Rolls® and Bagel Bites™ didn’t exist.  If you wanted a TV dinner, they were required to be placed in an oven for approximately sixty years and then pulled out.  I never had a 1960’s version of a TV dinner, but the photos I’ve seen made them look as attractive as Nancy Pelosi.

They were a novelty.

When I was growing up, Ma Wilder made dinner.  Sure, she bought noodles sometimes, but she also made her own, from scratch.  I can’t remember my mother ever making something from a kit.  She bought me some pizza kits about twice a year where you made your own dough because I think it amused her to watch me try to cook.

No, when Ma Wilder made mashed potatoes, she started with . . . potatoes.  Then she added milk and butter and salt.  Four ingredients.  She even made gravy from scratch.  Much of the food Ma bought didn’t have labels.  Why would you need to label a steak?  I mean, the only ingredient is:  steak.  Same with lettuce.  Same with tomatoes.  It’s . . . food.

I think I channeled Aesop for a minute there.

How many moms in 2020 have the time to cook like Ma Wilder did?  How many are, instead, thrown to work and then due to time pressures toss the kids Pop Tarts® and Tropicana™ and Kid Cuisine©?  When I was a single dad (and much stupider than today) I’ll raise my hand – I did.

So did/do a lot of people.  The food that is convenient is categorically different.  And, at least until inflation makes it nigh unaffordable, it’s now ubiquitous.  Soda pop costs less now (adjusted for inflation) than ever.  Buy it in the 2 liter (2 milligrams in metric litres) bottles and it’s amazingly cheap.  Buy the off-brand stuff and you can get it inexpensively enough that you could bathe in it.

Food is also available all the time, everywhere.  When I was a kid, there was breakfast (I always skipped it due to the high quality of my genetics) lunch at school (I nearly always skipped that because I could buy a comic instead of lunch if I saved my lunch money) and then dinner at home.  Mom may or may not have made dessert – it was generally a once a week thing.  And convenience stores are selling Snacky Cakes© at 3am.  When I was a kid, everyone was asleep at 3am.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  But what if there’s no fast to break?

Compare that to today?  All school food is free for all students this year.  Pugsley could have free breakfast, a free snack, a free lunch, and then a free afternoon snack if he wanted.  Every day.  And then dinner, and then a fridge filled with snacks.

The cooks at school aren’t (mostly) getting actual food ingredients to cook, either.  They’re getting highly processed foods that contain (in some cases) ingredients other than salt that were mined instead of grown.  They contain oils and chemicals that were made in facilities that would make an oil refinery blush.  Oh, wait, the “vegetable” oil is made in a refinery that uses solvent extraction and then bombards the oil with hydrogen to create a chemical reaction to make it shelf stable.

Do we wonder why we’re fat?  We’re not eating food.  And what we are eating is so available that we’re stuffing ourselves with it constantly.

Why?

Moms have to work because society says that making PowerPoints® is more important than raising kids.  Besides, it takes a village, right?  Oh, and since all the moms are working, a family can’t afford a house on just one income.  That’s, of course, if the family is intact.  Single moms and dads have even less time.

Yup.  This modern world is a winner, am I right?

I tried pole dancing once, but Kowalski didn’t like it.

That brings us to issue two:  single parents and blended families.  Do I understand that it’s sometimes required?  Yes.  I was married to someone before The Mrs., and it didn’t work because it was a mixed marriage – I was human and she . . . wasn’t.  I kid.  She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.

Society has made divorce a go-to option.  Again, I’ve been there as a parent.

But not as a kid.

I had two parents for most of my childhood, which was awesome.  (I was adopted after the mother wolf left me on the Wilder doorstep, which was seen as a fulfillment of the Great Prophecy that I would be the one to unite the mayonnaise and mustard – the condisatz haderwich – I even survived the Everlasting Gomstopper© jabbar.) Sure, they argued.  Sure, there were problems from time to time.

I never had to worry, though, who Ma or Pa was going to bring home.

I never had to help them emotionally through a divorce.  I got to be a kid.  And when Ma said, “Wait until your father gets home,” I was damn scared.  They were united in punishment, and they would absolutely not undercut each other.

But Pa saved his blue shield for special occasions. 

If I was in trouble, I couldn’t escape the consequences.

Now?  The pathology of single parenthood is clear:

  • 43% of prison inmates grew up in a single-parent household
  • 90% of repeat juvenile arsonists live only with their mother
  • 75% of patients in drug abuse facilities came from a single-parent household
  • 63% of youth suicides are from homes without a father

I could go on and on.  Society has made divorce by women for “fun and prizes” cheap and easy.  It’s even celebrated by the “I don’t need no man” crowd.  Who suffers?  Society.  And the kids.

So, the tradition of divorce being very, very hard to get and socially undesirable seems so outdated now.  Right?

Let’s add on our final contestant for this post:  the financial pressures and collapsing economy brought out by a relentless globalization and continual change.  Careers are gone.  Gigs are in when an economy has all turned to “services” driven by cheaper labor.

In many cases, businesses are built with just the idea to use cheap labor to financialize the industry.  What’s the forty-year-old guy who used to carve gravestones going to do when the boss buys a laser engraver that does twice his work in half the time?  There’s not exactly a market for monument carvers.

At Mozart’s grave, you can watch him decompose.

Let’s also add this into the mix:  The constant streams of gratification available from infinite Internet porn to infinite Internet social apps (I hear the kids have found something called MySpace®) haven’t created the sort of real-life experiences that were common in the past.  Now, the negatives are accentuated, amplified, and immediate.  Is it a surprise that kids today are nihilistic and escapist and jaded on male-female relations?

Still, in all of this, there is room for personal responsibility.  We are each responsible for our individual outcomes.  I can’t pass the buck for my failures back to society, but I can look at the trend.  Have the people who got fat changed?  Not really.  It’s just far easier to get fat today, but still the responsibility of the individual.

Have plenty of kids from broken homes turned into champs?  Sure!  But the statistics show that parents, shockingly, matter to the outcomes.

If I pick a career that gets replaced, is that on me?  Yes, yes it is.  But how many people have picked careers where they have been replaced?  Twitter® even banned people for telling journalists (who had told coal miners, “learn to code”) to “learn to code.”  We live in a society where careers are ephemeral, coming and going faster than Nancy Pelosi’s bouts of sobriety.  And what do we do about a generation raised by computers that are programmed to be as addictive as possible without creating actual achievement?

I heard an actual journalist was recently at CNN®.  They had Security escort him out.

If I leave a kid in a candy shop politician unsupervised, it’s my fault, as well as the kid’s politician’s fault.  You just don’t leave irresponsible people where they can cause damage, even though the moral choices were made by the kid politician.

Perhaps, moving away from traditions means moving away from problems that have been solved before?

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure you can inflate construction costs and launder money through it.” – Ozark

I wonder if everyone can figure out why China built their own Internet now?

Biden has miscalculated.  Again.  As he has his entire life.  He has moved from one miscalculation in his life to the next.  So, it’s not surprising that perhaps the greatest failure in the history of the United States has shown up on his watch.  Let’s go, Brandon, indeed.

To be fair, it’s not entirely Brandon’s fault.  The United States economy, as I’ve gone to great pains to show over my posts, has been hollowed out over the years.  We have gone from one that manufactures things and exports goods to one that mainly manufactures movies (we’re very good at that) and consulting and intellectual property and Starbucks™.

The thing that we’ve been best at is printing and then exporting dollars.  For decades now, we have been exporting dollars that we printed and then importing stuff like fidget spinners and PEZ®.  It was a great deal for us.  People used those dollars and we got stuff, but it was essentially a global tax on the rest of the world.

That ability to tax, however, only works as long as people believe that the dollar is worth something, and that the holder of that economic power won’t bend the rules.  Just like the bank runs up in Canada started when Trudeau broke the promise that the banks won’t steal people’s money, so the same principle applies to international affairs.

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

When Russia attacked Ukraine, Biden declared sanctions.  Sure that’s a fine idea when dealing with a tiny random country, but Russia isn’t tiny.  And Russia isn’t any random country.

See, one silver lining!

Russia is of huge importance to world commerce.  Russia exports the stuff that makes modern economies go:

  • Food
  • Steel
  • Fertilizer
  • Titanium
  • Nickel
  • Oil
  • Refined Fuels
  • Natural Gas
  • Coal
  • Gold

In almost every commodity listed above, Russia is in the top five exporting nations.  In several commodities, it is the world’s largest exporter.  Check out the graphs on energy and wheat when the market gets disrupted:

What does Russia import?

  • Telephones
  • Car Parts
  • Computers
  • Medicine

Russia also exports nearly double what it imports.  If there is a country that is nearly self-sufficient in this world, it’s Russia.  There is an economic concept called “autarky” – or a nationwide independence from imports.  Looking at the list of companies that are leaving Russia, well, could it be that Russia is better off without them?

Yes, Pornhub® and OnlyFans™ are on the list.  I wonder what the effects will be?  21-year-old girls will have to find jobs that involve wearing clothes?

Russia isn’t independent.  But it’s close enough.  Most things that it is missing can be bought from either India or China.  No iPhones®?  China has a bunch of other kinds of phones.  And all those businesses that left?  It’s not like the Russians don’t know how to make hamburger and buns, so McPutins™ could open up tomorrow, though I’d skip the polonium sauce.

Russians are talking about nationalizing all of the assets of companies that have abandoned them.  Why wouldn’t a country do that?  Well, other countries could seize the overseas Russian assets.

Oops.  Too late.  So what’s stopping the Russians?

What is the threat from the West?  That Russian audiences won’t have Netflix®?  The things that Russia has been denied are, frankly, not very scary.  They won’t get to see the next Marvel© movie?  Oh, yeah, they also went after Russia’s money and tried to cut it off from the dollar-based economic system and . . . entertainment.

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

What happens when that bluff is called, when Russia and China decide that they don’t need dollars?  What happens when Russia will sell natural gas to Europe only in yuan?  Or for gold?  Or that they won’t trade their commodities for anything at all?

The tent collapses, and by that tent I mean the dollar.

I actually think that Joe’s head is so far up . . . well, I’ll be kind and guess that he has Alzheimer’s rather than being this stupid.  Oddly, this is viewed as an ideological opportunity by the Leftist henchxirs in Washington.  They hate fossil fuels to the point of not caring about the relative plight of the American consumer.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them:

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal.  No matter what it costs.

There are even well-meaning Lefties starting to write articles to cope with the failure:

But here’s a sign:  Joe tried to get meetings with the Saudis and the very friendly folks over at the United Arab Emirates.  They wouldn’t return his calls.  Imagine:  a foreign leader refusing to even talk with the President* of the United States.  It’s almost like he’s a fraud?

I wonder if he’s going to drunk-text the Emir tonight?

One person sums it up . . . .

Beyond that, the price of wheat is getting ready to go even higher.  Together, Russia and Ukraine produce over 25% of the wheat exported in the world.  A quarter.  Ukraine’s planting season has been slightly impacted by current events, and Russian exports might be diverted to feed Ukraine.

The United States is certainly self-sufficient in wheat, but the prices of wheat are like oil:  they’re tied to the international price.  What happens when a loaf of bread is six dollars?  Nothing good.  But if there are price controls?  Bread will be priced at two dollars.  There just won’t be any in stores.

Domestic inflation is bad enough, but what happens when the Saudis start taking gold for oil from the Chinese?  Or start paying for Russian wheat with the gold they got from the Chinese?  The dollar, once indispensable, is done as the international currency.

The message is loud and clear – the end of the dollar is near.  Why is gold up over $2,000?  My question is why is gold only up to $2,000?  I fully expect that, should Russia succeed, 90% of the dollar’s purchasing power will be gone in the next 14 months.

That will lead to massive changes in our economy, political unrest, and, potentially, the dissolution of the United States as we know it.

Thanks, Joe!  Where is ¡Jeb! when we need him?