April 2022 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

1990s Movies – Because I Said So

“Flores! Flores para los muertos!” – Quick Change

Someone said the next Bond should be a woman – imagine he car explosions and wrecks, and that’s just when she’s parking.

Movies. I grew up with them – it was where I took my girlfriend on a Friday night before we went to the pizza place and then, um, drove to look at the stars. I once took a date to go see one of those graves that have a constant natural gas torch, but it turns out that is a bad idea – you should never take a date to go see an old flame.

But more than Friday night fun, movies were our cultural mythology. As man 20,000 years ago told stories around the fire to establish and share the history of the tribe, our history was told with movies. In essence, movies and television became our campfire, our shared cultural experience. When people say that the United States has no culture, or is guilty of cultural appropriation, they’re wrong and I want to punch them. But I can’t, because I’m not Irish.

As our shared culture, however, movies have always had a huge power to change our minds. As propaganda, they changed our culture, many times not for the better. Movies were also a huge opportunity to change our culture, change our lives, nearly as much as early metallurgy – after all, those who smelt it, dealt it.

I hear when you eat aluminum, you sheet metal.

I used the term “were our mythology” intentionally. The world has changed. The ‘Rona took movies and fragmented them further. Now, to see a big movie you can still go to the theater, but streaming now allows people to focus on narrow interests. Heck, even Putin watches Nyetflix®.

At work, unless we have the same streaming service, we’re not watching the same things. Better Call Saul? I asked people sitting at a table today if they’d seen it. No one had. It’s a gem, and probably the best thing on television today. But no one else had seen it.

There went a shared conversation, a shared moment.

And, like I said, movies are fragmented and not a part of common culture. Why was no one watching the Oscars®? Because no one cares. The Academy Awards® don’t reflect anything about America anymore, since the moves . . . suck. Even as late as four or six years ago, the movies were better. Now, many are simply unwatchable mainly because many have been infected with “woke” culture.

So, for today’s post, I thought I’d go back into history, to the 1990s. Why? It’s my blog. And movies in the 1990s were far more fun than movies today.

I tried to research LGBT stuff, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.

I’ll say that I tried to pick movies that weren’t propaganda, but were, rather, just fun. So, without any further nonsense, here are my favorite movies of the 1990s, year by year. I probably missed some, but this is the list I’m going with at 1am.

The structure? My favorite movie in each year. My criteria? The one that mattered to me. So, let’s get into the time machine and hit. . .

1990:

Quick Change.

I’m a sucker for Bill Murray. I even watched him in Razor’s Edge, which made me think of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters as a hollowed-out shell of a man after World War I. Yeah. That movie didn’t work at all. That being said? Quick Change is funny. It has monster trucks, a heist, and mistaken identity.

In a (very) distant second place is Joe Versus The Volcano. Tom Hanks wasn’t so serious, and there was a quirky fun with watching him go to work – we’ve all had that job. Would I recommend it or change channels to watch it? No. But I do remember it. Hula girls, unite.

1991:

1991 was a MUCH better year for movies. Hands down, Silence of the Lambs wins. It’s tense. It’s 100% related to the book, and Hopkins and Foster never have had better roles. Ever. This is obviously a movie that couldn’t be made today because the character that was the baddy was a mentally deranged person. You know the plot. It’s a movie that you can watch once and the writing is branded into your brain, and it’s perfectly cast, perfectly delivered.

I guess we now understand what Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health was doing in the 1990s.

In second place is Hudson Hawk. I am, perhaps, the only person besides The Mrs. that loves this awful, awful movie. It’s campy. It’s silly. The premise? Ludicrous. Whatever. I loved the stupid movie.

1992:

Reservoir Dogs was amazing, though I didn’t see it until 1994. Wow. There are no reservoirs or dogs in the movie, but despite that, the movie is amazing. It is (perhaps) Tarantino’s best movie. The acting and pacing and tension are amazing.

As honorable mention is . . . My Cousin Vinny. I rewatched it last year with Pugsley, and it was a hoot. Perry Mason crossed with Green Acres. When a movie hinges on the cooking time of grits? Good stuff.

1993:

Army of Darkness is campy fun. Okay, it’s really like the Three Stooges meets H.P. Lovecraft. If that sounds good, watch it. If you hate either of those things? Run. Really. It’s a movie I love because it’s horribly stupid cosmic horror. It also has multiple endings, depending on the version you watch. I can’t pick which one I like best, but I don’t have to.

Honorable mention? Demolition Man. Which isn’t a great movie, but 1993 wasn’t a great year for movies. It takes place in 2032 after Political Correctness takes over the United States. It is not a good movie, but it is fun.

1994:

I would pick Pulp Fiction but I’ve already picked a Tarantino movie so instead I’ll pick Pulp Fiction. I believe this is the only movie on the list where a co-worker said, “Oh, you’re the guy from Pulp Fiction.” Which character was I compared to? The Wolf. That’s me, when I’m at my best.

Mmmm. Good coffee.

I can’t believe this movie isn’t older, but honorable mention is . . . The Crow. If you’re gonna die after one movie, this is the one. Brandon Lee did an amazing job, and the movie would have made him a star, if Alec Baldwin hadn’t been in charge of props that day.

1995:

Wow. I had a big list. 1995 had a raft of great movies. I’m going to pick a movie I hated the first time I watched it: In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness wasn’t what I expected, but every time I watch it, it gets better. Sam Neil in a Lovecraftian (see a pattern yet?) horror by John Carpenter? Yeah.

I have five other movies on my list from 1995. I’m going to pick 12 Monkeys. 12 Monkeys is weird. It bends reality because it involves time travel if Monty Python designed the universe. It’s not funny. It’s also the first time I saw Brad Pitt, and I definitely can’t get the charge nurse to make it yesterday.

1996:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Movie. That would mean something if my hands were made of metal.

Hamlet, honorable mention. Mel Gibson chews the scenery as the mad prince of Denmark. Alas, Yorick, I won’t give any spoilers, since this plot is only 400 years old.

Reminder – never go on another vacation with Sam Neil.

1997:

Event Horizon. Sam Neil. Check. Lovecraftian. Check. Yup, I’m a junkie. This is not an easy movie to watch, and the story of how they made it is hilarious – they did second unit filming on weekends when the executives weren’t watching and that’s when they filmed all the disturbing stuff. Not for kids. I mean, not for your kids. Mine are made of sterner stuff. Also, Sam Neil is known around our house as The Evil Sam Neil.

Second place? Fallen. I liked it. It’s a one-trick movie, but I enjoyed the one trick.

1998:

So, this is a tie. Vampire$, which is a great movie with guys who hunt vampires for money directed by John Carpenter and BASEketball, which is (early) South Park mixed with Airplane. It was too tough – but if I had to pick one I’d pick BASEketball because it is so very stupid.

It was losing the truck that really made them mad.

An honorable mention is: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s rough, but so is the original source material. Johnny Depp captured the manic intensity of Hunter S. Thompson, but my guess is that’s what Johnny Depp is really like, 24 hours a day. Beware of bat country.

1999:

The best year on the list, easily. Bowfinger. Galaxy Quest. The Matrix (wish they made a sequel, right?). Office Space. Fight Club. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I’m not picking. Of these, though, I’d probably (if I had to pick one to watch tonight) pick Fight Club or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but that’s probably just my mood tonight.

The 1990s was a decade before The Narrative took over, and you can tell – the movies themselves were more innocent than today. We’ll look at more decades in future months – you can bet the 1980s had the best teen comedies. Better Off Dead, anyone?

So, what did I miss? Which movies from the 1990s had the biggest impact on you (assuming you’re not Johnny Depp)?

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name. I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy. One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system. M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up. It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt. Half of M2 has been created since September 2013. In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity? A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy. I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high. Why pennies? I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest. But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited. Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk. The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again. That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance. That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around. Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008: the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken. Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash. Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing? What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch? Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies. But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure. At first, it looks good. It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits. Housing prices take off. Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away. Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price. Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper. And those higher house prices? The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on. But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle. But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up? When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes. It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk. In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted. How does that happen? Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there. The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200. When the loan defaults, there’s only $100. And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup. Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation. And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update: our appeal at Google® was approved. The podcast was restored (LINK). Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

Censorship Comes Home

“The name’s Francis Sawyer, but everybody calls me Psycho. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I’ll kill you.” – Stripes

Yes, YouTube® gave themselves a free speech award. It’s not parody – this happened.

The Mrs., Mark (LINK) and I have a little podcast we’ve been working on for a while. It’s not very big, but I don’t advertise it much, either. We livestream every Wednesday at 9pm Eastern. You can find it here (LINK) if you’re interested. It’s a lot like The Grand Tour® (or old Top Gear©) with me as Clarkson, Mark as May, and The Mrs. as Hammond. Note: The Mrs. does not wreck nearly as often as Hammond does.

What we have been doing with it is practicing – we’ve practiced format, and types of stories, and even how we interact. I like to think that in the last few months we’re getting better on all points. I think we’re getting better, because more recently after completing the podcast I feel “up” and excited, like we did a good job and I know we did. The podcast content is pretty lightweight, mainly commentary on the news and making fun of The Powers That Be.

One thing that has always been in the back of my mind was that we would (at some point) be censored.

Our first strike was a copyright strike.

Why?

How does a polygamist hippie count his wives? “One Mrs. Hippie, Two Mrs. Hippe, Three Mrs. Hippie . . .“

The Mrs. used a bit of Rockin’ in the Free World to make fun of Neil Young and his blatant attempt to gain publicity in order to censor Joe Rogan’s ‘Rona commentary that differed from The Narrative. The irony on that one is hilarious. It’s obvious that Neil’s idea of an ideal “free world” would probably make Stalin red with envy.

So, that was the first censorship. The Mrs. replaced the now-verboten Rockin’ in the Free World with a public domain music bed and that podcast was re-uploaded. The fact that we were using only a snippet of Neil’s music and then criticizing him for being a hirsute hippie hypocrite of questionable personal hygiene would probably have made a claim of Fair Use quite defensible.

But, whatever. It was easy enough to cut out that bearded road apple’s music.

This time, however, I accidently touched one of YouTube’s® third rails – an absolutely verboten opinion. Here’s what I said in the podcast:

“There is a theory that I’m working on: Wilder’s Theory of Greatest Amusement. What would be the most amusing 2016 election? Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. What’s the most amusing outcome? Donald Trump winning. Let’s go to 2020: what’s the most amusing opponent for Trump? Joe “Dementia” Biden. What’s the most amusing outcome? Biden stealing the election.”

That’s what I said, more or less. I can’t give you the exact quote because YouTube™ nuked the podcast not only from external view, but we can’t see it ourselves. When Google® is serious about putting something in the memory hole, they are serious.

They did highlight the offending bit: “Biden stealing the election.”

Out of a fifty-minute podcast (more or less) it was a throwaway line. The Mrs. appealed the strike. It turns out of you appeal a strike and the strike is upheld, the appeal is a second strike. The end sentence in her request for an appeal? “Lighten up, Francis.”

When I played baseball we couldn’t wear Adidas©. Three stripes and you’re out.

I’m not sure that the millennial who is in charge of determining if we violated “community standards” will get the reference. But if his, her, or xirs name is Francis? Maybe he’ll lighten up. I don’t think they’ll accept the appeal – and in that case we get an immediate suspension.

But if we get three? They delete our channel forever.

That’s okay. Our channel has an approximate net worth of . . . zero. There are literally an infinite number of channel names we can come up with, and an infinite number of email addresses we can us to create those channels. It’s not like the podcast team is worried about losing out this name. Heck, we’re not even a streaming channel that investors spent $250 million putting together.

Here’s the policy that they say we violated:

Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to:
- Any past U.S. Presidential election

- - The 2021 German federal election
  - The 2018 Brazilian Presidential election

Free and fair elections?

So, the result is simple: if there is ample evidence that there was fraud that impacted the 2020 election, (and there is) you can’t make that claim on YouTube®. Why? Because they have already determined that those claims are “false”. 2,000 voters all registered to one address in Georgia? One person committing multiple felonies on film by delivering votes to boxes? Stacy Abrams eating the votes that had “Trump” marked on them?

I did searches of those very serious stories, and there were no hits on YouTube®. Zero, despite evidence on film of these things having occurred. Obviously, according to YouTube®, those things never happened. They’re facts (well, not the Stacy Abrams thing), but facts that YouTube® suppresses like a 1915 woman voter.

The classroom even had a duck. They made it wear a mask. It was strange looking, but it fit the bill.

It actually gets worse. If a person’s YouTube™ videos are nothing but, oh, I don’t know, hairstyles for squirrels, but it turns out that you actually write and perform disco music? Okay, that might be justified. But the reality is that once a person becomes “unpersoned” it happens across all platforms at the same time. Facebook™, Twitter©, and YouTube® (and others) will permaban you.

And you’re done. There’s no appeal. And if you have information stored on their services? Gone. Where do you do your recovery passwords? Records? Past email files?

Strangely, this cast of characters is very familiar . . .

From the trends that I’ve seen, eventually, all media on the Right that questions The Narrative will get banned. One website I try to visit regularly has been under DDOS attack for weeks. Others, like Western Rifle Shooters Association, were deleted (and came back, thankfully!). But tonight, I tried to hit one of WRSA’s links and found . . . .

No such page. There are tons of reasons other than censorship, but, let’s be real. It’s censorship. Some of my most popular posts led to unwanted attention, to virus attacks, and to being taken offline.

The momentum is headed towards more, not less censorship right now. The Digital Services Act recently passed by the EU parliament increases censorship. Expect more here in the United States.

If Hillary wins in 2024, I’m moving to Benghazi. At least I know she’ll leave me alone there.

They say that it’s darkest before the dawn, but sometimes it’s darkest before things go pitch black. I fear the times will get even darker. That’s okay. It just makes some of us search ever harder for the Truth, and we all know: the signal can’t be stopped.

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin. “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place. No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®. No, it is something that normally people are happy about. I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question. I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order. Okay. Restraining orders. My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

a lack of ambition,
waking up with amnesia
too much success, or
having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one. I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot. Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden? Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have? Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition. In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want. And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore. At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week. I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first. One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”. When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza. It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago. I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner. The charm of traveling went away. The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that. There are compromises that I’m not willing to make. And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know. I need to borrow chairs.

What about family? Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver. But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take. Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent. That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers. The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions. No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay. Work was fine. Family was fine. What now?

That’s what I was struggling with. What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years. Talked to him last week. I’ve mentioned Joe before. Pure genius. Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job. So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace. If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst. They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either. The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial. It didn’t make Joe better. It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body. Now what?”

So, I thought about it. And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough? What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place. That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts. Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing. And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes? Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®. Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good. I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within. Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

Negotiation: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

“We have been negotiating with men in UFOs for seven years. If we don’t get to Washington by Friday, the whole deal will be off.” – Real Men

Johnny Depp is sorry he doesn’t have Amber Heard immunity.

Elon has been negotiating for Twitter®, recently. I thought I’d dust off some old comments about negotiation that I had laying around. He is looking for a deal. In most of his career, his deals have been very much of the “there’s no way that will ever work” type of deal. He made $3billion off of PayPal™ and then risked it all on SpaceX®. That deal and his hair plugs have worked out very, very well for him, so I bet he’ll be able to close the Twitter™ deal.

So, I thought a post about negotiation was in order.

Why talk about negotiation now? As society changes, there are going to be many, many points where deals will be made. I can’t predict what deals will be available, but you’ll never know when you might need to swap some pickled yak funk for a tub of dingo chum. Mmm, fresh dingo chum.

I have observed that the people who get wealthy off of deals look at many more deals than they ever make. The last time I played poker (years ago), I played 30 hands for the evening. I won two. I walked out of the place with thirty bucks – I had started with twenty. I would have made more, but I kept trying to lose after a certain point so I didn’t walk out of my neighbor’s house $80 up. I would have considered that rude because it was the first time I played poker there.

Lots of bad deals, two winning deals.

That lesson leads to the zeroth rule, mainly because I realized I was done with the rest of them and am too lazy to renumber everything.

Rule 0: The Stakes

It’s easier to win or create great deals when the stakes are so small that you can think calmly and rationally. Hence: rich dudes (say, Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos) can make lots of small bets that were white-knuckle negotiations on the other side of the table. Jeff Bezos probably uses living human kidneys (still in the human) as table stakes at his poker games.

The Mrs. wanted to play strip poker, but I figured she just wanted to do laundry. So I folded.

Rule 1: BATNA

The first rule of negotiation is that you don’t have to end up with an agreement – you need to know your BATNA – Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In the poker example, I folded and was out a buck or two on each hand I walked away from. Several times in my life I’ve walked away from job offers because they weren’t right, and no amount of negotiation could have made them right.

Sometimes, (really most times) the best deal is no deal. Take my ex-wife. Please.

Rich people generally walk away from most deals. People like Warren Buffet could literally do almost any deal he wanted to do, since most companies are smaller than the available cash that Warren keeps in the sweaty folds of his skin. Buffet reminds me of the story about the guy on the golf course who kept talking about how much money he was worth. Another golfer, an old Texan, couldn’t stand it.

“How much are you worth, son?” asked the Texan.

“Fifteen million dollars,” the other golfer said, proudly.

The Texan responded . . . “Flip you for it.”

The question you have to ask is . . . what happens if you don’t come to an agreement?

If you’re Buffett, there’s no deal you have to make. But me? That’s a different story. Sometimes there are consequences from missing deals – sometimes significant.

One particular negotiation that I had to make involved negotiation over some land with a guy worth about $80 million bucks. That leads to rule 1A (yup, being lazy again).

A lion would never play golf, but a Tiger Wood.

Rule 1A: If you can help it, NEVER negotiate with someone worth $80 million because they don’t care, so there is no BATNA-level leverage. Unless the deal is ludicrously good for them, they have NO reason to even speak with you. Unless, your kid is in the same calculus class and football team as their kid, which my kid was. So, the rich guy talked with me.

He offered my company his land at ten times the going rate.

Our alternative as a company? It was spending several million more than his offer on another patch of land. We almost bought the other land, on principle, but my boss decided that he didn’t want to explain why he spent several million dollars because he had no leverage in a deal.

The rich guy? He literally wouldn’t have cared. Our deal, as awful as it was, was worth more than the average family makes in years, and was literally a favor because his kid went to school with my kid.

Sometimes your alternative sucks. But we had one.

Another big mistake is buying into the frame of reference of the other party. If his opening position is that he’ll trade you a handful of magic beans for your two children, negotiating him down to just one child isn’t awesome negotiation (unless you really want him to take both). No, the deal is bad and probably isn’t worth negotiation.

Rule 2: Don’t negotiate against yourself.

I worked with a guy who I’ll call Moe (because that was his name) who was a genius at negotiation. We would drive around on company time and he would take me, the new kid at work, out to look at “jobsites”. This may or may not have involved beer on several occasions.

Sometimes, these trips would involve Moe’s personal shopping, as well. He was a golfer, and one time we walked into a golf shop and he asked about a specific club. He then proceeded just to walk around the store, and the clerk would follow him around, constantly lowering the price. The clerk was negotiating against himself, while Moe looked disinterested, and cut the price of the club in half without Moe saying a word. I tried the same tactic later that week at a furniture store – same result.

Rule 3: When you get to yes, shut up.

This one is pretty simple. I constantly tell that to Pugsley after I’ve agreed with his latest crazy scheme. “You got to yes, shut up. Keep talking and it might turn to no.”

I’ll just shut up now.

How do we know that aliens aren’t vegan and don’t do Cross-Fit®? Because they would have told us.

Rule 4: The deal isn’t done until the deal is done.

When I bought my first car from a dealer (which was a huge mistake in itself), I was surprised that negotiation wasn’t done. We had just negotiated price. Then there was financing. And undercoating. And floor mats. And add on maintenance contracts. And a timeshare in Bermuda. And about half a dozen other things. The deal wasn’t done until after another dozen “deals” were done where I had to say, “No” again and again and again. They tend to push these deals on me after hours of negotiation, when I was tired.

Rule 5: The more information you have the better you can understand what a good offer is, and whether to accept it.

Whenever you negotiate for a job, the employer has more information – how much they can offer for the job, and what other things they can do to sweeten the deal. One colleague I know started a job in management at a company after accepting their offer. Three months later, a new employee of his started, a new employee he had hired. The new employee had gotten a signing bonus: my colleague hadn’t. Heck, one time my boss offered to give me a bonus if I acted like a frog. I jumped at that opportunity.

Oops. He was forever upset about it, and it later cost him his job because he was always griping. Goes to show the moral of that old joke is right: Why did my chicken cross the road? The road betrayed him first.

Rule 6: Know what is important to the other party.

It might be money. It’s probably money. But it also might be looking good to their boss. Understand what they want, and then see how to best give it to them. It might be something simple like being able to leave early every other Thursday at 3pm. It might be that they won’t stop until you give them a coat made from bigfoot hair stained from a pigment derived from the colors Rudy Giuliani leaves on his towels.. Or maybe it might even be something unreasonable.

Rudy was my attorney on a speeding ticket once. He successfully got it pled down to second-degree murder.

Rule 7: If you live longer than age five . . . you will run into unethical negotiators.

They might lie. Which looks and sounds a LOT like bluffing. But it’s not, and you know the difference.

They might threaten. One salesman always talked about all the people that got fired for buying the competing product from his competitor. How did that affect me? It made me want to never buy his product (I’m contrarian that way – push me on fear and I never trust you).

They might try to impact the negotiation by “accidentally” letting information slip. Information carefully prepared to skew your decision or offer.

My best advice? Be honest. No one can cheat an honest man.

Always be ready to walk. Most of the time there are other deals.

Except for Elon. I think he’ll negotiate so hard against the Twitter® board that they’ll need tweetment.

Real Life isn’t exactly like Twitter™. Women seem to get upset if you follow them.

Elon Musk Vs. The Leftist Narrative Machine

“Can we stop twittering like fishwives?” – The Death of Stalin

The new Cybertruck© won’t have a new car smell, it will have an Elon musk.

Elon Musk started a war.

In this case, for Twitter®.

I was fairly amused when I heard his offer per share ($54.20) included a marijuana joke. That’s like him, though. When Bernie Sanders called him out on Twitter™ for some trivial violation of Leftist badthink, Elon’s Twitter© response was simple:

“Oh, I forgot you were alive.”

Elon Musk is what happens when you give a 12-year-old several hundred billion dollars.

There is a freedom that comes with several hundred billion. For the most part that freedom extends to not really needing to follow any of the laws of mortal men. That is, of course, until you start questioning the toys of the Left.

Twitter© had started out as an interesting startup – short strings of words, maybe a picture. I got on for a while. In 2012 it wasn’t all that interesting to me. I gave it up for about six years.

By then, the landscape had changed immensely. Twitter® had become (at some point) one of the leading methods of idea communication, especially for politics. All in 280 characters per Tweet©.

When the Lincoln-Douglas debates were staged back in 1858, the format was that one or the other would start with an hour of oration. Then, the respondent would get ninety minutes. Then, the original speaker would get thirty minutes to rebut. Sure, this is shorter than the average Lord of the Rings movie, but it was three hours talking about politics.

Three.

Hours.

Okay, I’ll admit that this was an interesting three hours.

I don’t like to do things I like doing for three hours. Yet here two men were able to talk coherently and keep an audience interested for that time. I would bet that we don’t have the politicians that can do that anymore, nor do we have audiences that can sustain that level of interest.

Now, we’re 164 years past those debates.

What do we get instead? The main political debates, the main political points all show up first on Twitter®. Sure, I’m not an active user – but Twitter™ is still driving the debate. I was watching a documentary tonight and to prove a point of an idea going viral, they showed the Tweets© in fast succession showing the spread of the idea. Twitter® has a reach far beyond the number of users.

And far beyond newspapers . . .

You know it’s a bad day when Bezos says he feels like a million bucks.

One of the reasons that I stopped going to Twitter© was that (I noticed) as my content got more political, my Tweets™ had a much smaller reach. I had been de-tuned. I am nearly certain that it wasn’t personal, but I had some very timely responses to big stories that were on point . . . that died.

The techs at Twitter® kept fine-tuning the algorithm to remove the voices and ideas that they didn’t like, and amplify those that they did. The same thing was going on at Google® and YouTube™. Virally spreading ideas had gone under lock and key, unless you were a member of the inner club. Or two big to ignore. Here are some sample things that Twitter™ had no problem with:

I trust Twitter® to make sure that conversations are civil and safe.

Elon Musk is in that category, but from the moment he began talking about “free speech” and then offered nearly twice what the stock had been trading at if he could have it.

The response to this generous offer? Well, I’ll just let the Leftists of Twitter® tell you in no particular order as they have mental breakdowns that someone might steal their toy:

Does this seem like the response of people who are secure in their ideas? Certainly not. This is the response of a group of people that want you to allow them to talk to five-year-olds about gay sex and expect you to believe a dude is the woman’s NCAA swimming champ. The only way that their ideas don’t seem to be insane is if they control the context of every conversation. Don’t believe me? Check out this conversation:

They certainly don’t want you to know that the Emperor not only has no clothes, he has no castle, no empire, and tries to shake hands with invisible people. The only way that they can do that is to control speech, to drown out the voices of rationality, tradition, virtue, and morality. Oh, and let’s term any idea that doesn’t support The Narrative.

How serious are they about protecting The Narrative?

Within hours of Elon’s bid to buy Twitter©, the poorly named Department of Justice announced that they were investigating everything up to and including how often Elon launders his underwear.

Elon has started a war. He’s beaten the odds again and again. Here’s hoping he figures out how to shut down the censorship of all things outside of the Leftist Narrative. If there’s someone with 300 billion ways to do it, it’s Elon. And I hope they don’t call the DOJ investigation “Elongate”.

That would be a stretch.

Regret And Dread – Two Problems You Don’t Really Have To Have

“I have people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, they never will. They’re protected. But I do what I do so they can have a better life. And if I live or if I die, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they have what they need. So when it’s my time to go, I will go knowing I did everything I could for them.” – Better Call Saul

If you press your gas and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.

I tend to like writing my Friday posts the most. Why? Most generally, I get away from the reality of the present situations that we are living in. That’s nice.

Why do I feel like I can do this?

Because nothing is done yet, and nothing is settled yet. I’ve written posts about regret. I still feel that regret is a wasted emotion – the past is done. Of course, I try to learn from my mistakes. But I can’t spend my life being upset about them. The real question is how can I incorporate the mistakes so I have a better future? I even told The Mrs. that she should embrace her mistakes, too. She was so happy she hugged me.

Especially of note are those mistakes I made that weren’t mistakes I made based on a lack of virtue. If I did the right thing, for the right reason, the result is the result, and I will live with the consequences. Sometimes bad things happen when you do everything right. I mean, when the doctor told me I had a rare disease, I asked, “How rare?”

“Well, you get to pick a name.”

Those are the breaks.

Firefighters in Athens have it tough – you’re not supposed to put water on Greece fires.

A similar emotion is dread.

I read a quote when I was a kid – Heinlein? Twain? A fever dream while on laudanum writing about Xanadu? – that stuck with me. “Worrying about what might happen is paying interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet.” It’s a good quote.

Regret is looking at the past, dread (or its cousin, fear) is about looking at the future. But they’re the same. Neither of those two things are real. One once was real, and one might be real.

I’ll admit that when I look out at the future, I do see dark days ahead. But right now, I’m sitting in my basement, The Mrs. had gone upstairs for sleep, the basement is perfectly comfy, and all is right with the world. Something might happen next week. Next month. Next year. The price of tires is up. The price of gasoline is up. Heck, Hunter Biden can’t even find decent meth nowadays. It will get worse.

So?

I fell down at the airport once. Almost missed a flight.

I think that often we are more upset by the thought of potential future discomfort than actual, present discomfort. It can be consuming, and all for something that hasn’t happened yet.

And, it used to be me. I used to do the math – how many months could I make mortgage payments if I lost my job? How many days could I feed my family? And, it’s one thing planning for that, but I was also sometimes scared.

Until one day I just decided to not be scared – I’d go through life and do my best, and let the chips fall where they may. I decided that it was fine to plan, it was fine to economize to save money, but it wasn’t fine to worry.

So I stopped.

It was weird – one night I was worried, and the next night I decided that I wasn’t going to worry anymore. I just made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to worry anymore about that. It was the last significant worry that I gave up. I also worried about my short attention span, but that problem seems to solve itself.

The Kamikaze instructor to his class: “Now, class, pay attention because I’m only going to do this once.”

And it’s not like I live in a world where bad things don’t happen. I know bad things happen – horrible things. But today, I can choose not to worry about them.

Heck, I can pick something that is real and we can be certain that is going to happen – death. The shadow of death looms above us all. But to be consumed by it so that it causes a life lived in fear? That’s like already being dead.

It might surprise some people, but death is something that isn’t new. Seneca, the (very dead) Roman stoic philosopher, said:

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

Kelvin and Celsius interviewed for a job, but Celsius got it. Kelvin absolutely didn’t have a degree.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours? This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

Today is pretty good. Enjoy it. Skip the regret, the worry, and the dread. While you’re breathing, live.

What can you make happen today?

Inflation: Crowding Out The Real Economy

“You don’t? Well, you don’t have to understand what it eh, it eh . . . It was printed in eh . . . Washington. Well, and when they print something in Washington, they know what it means.” – Green Acres

“Never trust an actor with a gun.” – Abraham Lincoln

Like the beginning of a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin, you know one thing: the pain is only starting.

The pain I’m speaking of is inflation, though. I’d love to be the bearer of happy news. I’d love to say, “Nah, as soon as things straighten out in (spins wheel) China West Taiwan, things will be better. Nope.

Let me explain.

The Federal Government is really good at exactly two things, and one of them is spending money. Since they already donated a few billion bucks worth of stuff to the Taliban, they decided to go for a few trillion to everyone who was breathing.

What’s the difference between a rake and an AK-47? Don’t ask me, I just fly the drone.

The spending has been amazing, and it has created the expected result: inflation. It’s not done, though.

As I said, the Federal Government is good at spending money, but it’s slow at spending money. Although it looks like the Federal Government is just willy-nilly stuffing the money it just printed into the mouths of anyone nearby, it’s much more complicated than that.

First, a bureaucrat has to invent the program. And that means?

Paperwork. That has to be reviewed and approved. And every buzzword of sustainable and underserved and economic equity has to be mashed into the program and form. Once complete?

The program has to be announced, and various states, counties, alternative bands, and alternative energy providers then pounce on the paperwork to ask for buckets of cash. Biden’s grants for free crack pipes won’t figure out what communities they need to go to by themselves!

This process takes months. Then, once awarded, people need to order the crack pipes from China Terre Haute. Why not China? This is the Federal Government, and we know it is charged with protecting the American Crackpipe Maker Equalitarian Sisterhood (ACMES). So, all the crack pipe materials will be locally sourced from approved Wiccans.

How to cook crack and clean crabs: step one – use commas.

If it stopped at crack pipes, it would be fine, probably. But it’s not just that. It’s concrete for a burst of road construction. It’s rebar for the concrete. It’s plywood for the forms.

There was already price pressure on almost everything. Now that some of the largest steel (around 100 million tons of production) works in the world are shut down or sanctioned due to Vlad’s Spring Vacation, (not to mention fuel costs shooting up higher than a T-72 turret) that rebar is now much more expensive.

If that were the only problem, these sort of crushing cost increases would probably be something that we could live with. But whenever the government wants to buy a cubic yard of concrete to make a new office to process paperwork for Build Back Better Bux applications, well, that increases the cost.

For everyone.

In Denmark, they tried to repave a street with Legos®. They ran into a lot of roadblocks.

It makes the cost of building or expanding a business higher, unpredictable, and perhaps unattainable. Government spending – trillions of dollars of government spending that came from money that was simply wished into existence – crowds out private spending.

That means the new Pizza Hut® can’t be built because concrete is too expensive. That means the new PEZ™ factory can’t be built to keep up with the PEZ© demand because steel for the machinery costs too much. The alternatives that create a productive economy are walled off due to increased costs.

So, it’s happening now.

A little.

I’m telling you now, the big waves of Fed.Gov spending have yet to hit. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than the usual printing are hitting the economy – each month. The pressure from printing has yet to stop. It has yet to slow. It is still increasing.

I don’t think my doctor likes me. I called him and told him that I took a bunch of sleeping pills. He told me have a few drinks to relax.

The economy of every country that hyperinflated did so because of one simple reason: the leadership seemed to not understand that printing didn’t lead to prosperity. They had some sort of belief that money was a magical totem so that they could print more, and people would be happy.

In small quantities, it works. Home prices go up. Prices go up. People who save (as always) are the ones that get burned as their saved cash lowers in value.

Germany hyperinflated in the 1920s because they wanted to print cash. Lots of it. They didn’t have the good fortune to be able to create all they wanted with computers and the press of a button, so they had to hyperinflate the old-fashioned way: printing.

How bad did it get?

That certainly didn’t lead to any sort of social upheaval.

They managed to double the capacity of the printing press by only printing on one side.

I bet we can match that: I bet we can start making electronic money with only four bits per byte. I guess I can be the bearer of glad tidings and report there is good news, though:

We don’t have to watch a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin. We’ve got that going for us.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part IV: Grooming A Society

“I’m sorry, I believe in good grooming.” – The Simpsons

I was outbid trying to buy a shopping center. I guess the old saying is right: you just can’t win a mall.

The biggest part of a dictator’s ability to control a people is the control of their thoughts. Sure, a large supply of bullets is nice, but if you use that method, sooner or later you run out of people to control. How, then, is that sort of mental crowd control done in a nation that once staged a rebellion over a tax on whiskey? The answer is simple –a little bit at a time.

The first step in that is to program the people. The easiest way to do that is to control their education and their entertainment. In the modern world, it is that combination of education and entertainment that form our modern-day mythos – the very definition of who we are and what we stand for.

Education was the easiest part, and, by necessity, the first. The problem (from the standpoint of those that would set the world up for dictators) is that educators aren’t swapped out yearly. No, educators often are in a classroom for decades, watching hundreds of their children move from grade to grade. I think my kindergarten teacher was old enough to have known Moses personally, though in her defense I was probably more of a handful than those James and Younger brothers she told stories about.

True fact: They charge a $6 entry fee to see Karl’s grave.

That’s why the real Leftism (as far as I can tell) didn’t start showing up in the classroom until, perhaps, the 1960s. That had given them time to infiltrate the colleges and begin to sway the way that teachers were taught. I knew something was up when I told one teacher I was struggling with a class.

“Who, the Bourgeoisie?” she asked.

An aside – teachers often slant Left/Globalist anyway – they work for a government, after all. The teacher unions are strongly Leftist in political leanings. Educating a group of teachers and then placing them in the schools only changes the schools slowly. But after a while, a critical mass is achieved, and government schools become indoctrination centers for Leftist thought.

To be clear – government schools have always been indoctrination centers. The previous versions prior to the 1960s had (in my opinion) more innocuous indoctrination, putting memes like these in the heads of the students:

The United States is a force for good,
Christopher Columbus was alright,
The Inalienable rights are: life, liberty, and the pursuit of PEZ™,
Hard work is important,
If you pee on the playground you have to go see the principal,
Religious values are one of the things that make the United States strong, and
There is a morality beyond mere legality that keeps society cohesive.

I could keep going on this list. But the values that the kids were programmed with led to a prosperous society that, generally, was also a society where you trusted your neighbor and, even though he might have voted for the other guy, was still on the same team. Was it perfect? No, of course not, and a lack of skepticism led to all manner of government shenanigans being ignored – MK Ultra, I’m looking at . . . what was I saying?

Is it just me, or is that glowing?

The change in schools was the vanguard of that Leftist. Ideas were infiltrated that began to chip away at the idea of values. Equity in education became a buzzword even in the 1970s, decades before managing the equality of outcomes became the goal. Heck, you could even teach math and give grades back then.

Of course, the Leftist ownership of education wasn’t the only thrust at that time. Movies and television began to change as well. I didn’t see first-run episodes of Leave it to Beaver nor All in the Family, but I could see the shows couldn’t have been more different as I watched them on reruns.

Leave it to Beaver was a show about kids going through typical kid problems, and also dealing with that oily Eddie Haskell. That also led to the Funniest untrue rumor ever: Eddie Haskell was played by a young Alice Cooper. It would have been far more interesting if Eddie had a guillotine.

I did hear that Rob Halford did move to a Tibetan monastery. I guess that makes him a Buddhist Priest.

All in the Family, though, was a show that could have been called All in on the Narrative. All in the Family was simply a tool to move the narrative to the Left, plus it showcased that family-dividing character – the ever-bumbling incompetent father. Later shows in the 1970s moved the father to a position of irrelevance: single-parent households became a staple of sitcoms.

Sitcoms were used because nothing is better at attacking power than comedy, since it allows the comedian to poke fun at the weakest parts of their enemy. I wonder why comedy is out of style . . . hmmm. Oh, wait. Amy Schumer.

I could go on about movies, but they were playing their role in pulling the narrative along. There’s a reason that The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th all had monsters that were young – essentially the monsters were all children (or, started out as kids in Halloween or Friday the 13^th). . . Gen X age. No wonder my kindergarten teacher called me a little monster!

The propaganda in both television and film was the same: show the most sympathetic case of (insert movement – divorce, abortion, gay rights, et cetera) and then milk it for everything that it was worth. It didn’t matter that the case represented the very edge of reality, that small 0.01% of cases – no, publicize it and create an emotional backstory.

Why? To program people. When I look back at many (not all!) movies from that time frame there are places I can see the Narrative Programming being implanted. Heck, when I was a kid I wondered why people on the Right couldn’t be funny. They can be – P.J. O’Rourke taught that to the world.

I saw one bee I thought was drunk. Turned out he was just buzzed.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that church attendance started to go down in the 1970s. I don’t have a lot of data on why – perhaps single-parent households are less likely to go? Regardless, there’s plenty of data that shows when. The 1970s.

The Left focuses on identity and has since before the 1970s. The big reason for this focus is that class never really existed here in the United States in any sort of formal fashion. We never had Lords and Ladies and Kings, just rich people and poor people. And most poor people think there’s at least a hope that they’ll become rich people, which is why the lottery is still a tax on people who can’t do math.

So, that left only identity. The playbook on the Left was to let every identity group know that they were a victim. Women’s Lib. The 1967 riots. Certainly, there were legitimate grievances in some cases, but the Left wanted to create division between groups – and it’s possible to show how every group has been treated unfairly. Except for the Dutch. They had it coming.

Their answer was simple: normalize the victim status of nearly every group in order to fragment society. What is normal changes, first slowly, then all at once.

Joe walks into a bar and sees a hot woman and asks her, “So, do I come here often?”

Joe Biden in 2008 was against gay marriage. Joe Biden in 2022 wants to make it illegal for states to stop kids from getting hormone blockers. Yes – the same man who said that “marriage is between a man and a woman” only fourteen years ago now wants minors to receive powerful hormones that will unalterably change their bodies. On a whim.

What is normal now changes in a heartbeat, which is easy once the fixed morality of religion is gone. Then, the only standard becomes the law: if it’s legal, it must be moral. And in a dictatorship, who makes the laws?

Next Up: There’s more to come in this series, but I’m waiting on some reference books to show up. See how hard I work for you?

The Funniest Post You’ll Read Today About The Stoics

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

Never trust Hunter Biden to pick up pizza and coke for a party.

The last five posts have been fairly dark, and Monday’s post will be dark, too. I already know that dark humor is like aid for the citizens of Ukraine – not everyone gets it (this is a repeat from 1932, LINK). That’s to be expected. We live in interesting times. But the good news is, it’s Friday. Last Friday, I happened upon a friend. I promise, I have more than one, despite what the NSA says.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

My friend noted that he had to go shopping, and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. I responded, “Well, Marcus Aurelius said that you can find happiness in whatever moment, and the limiting factor is often what you feel about the situation, rather than the situation.” I said this even though I haven’t been shopping since Jimmy Kimmel was funny.

He smiled. We continued talking, and he went off shopping. As I was sitting at my table, I found this quote, from the inestimable P. G. Wodehouse’s , as found here (LINK) from his Jeeves and Wooster series of books (also a television series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Wooster). Setup – Jeeves is the intelligent, dry-witted, valet to Bertie Wooster, an idle British aristocrat. Thanks to Wodehouse, hilarity often ensues:

“Who do you think I am, Alfred Einstein?”

I turned to Jeeves. “So, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir’?”

“I was endeavouring [Wilder note: the British cannot spell] to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: ‘Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part; of the great web’.”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

Bonus points if you knew what stertorously meant. I had to look it up. Snort.

Is she attractive? Neigh.

I’ve heard it said that life is a tragedy to those that feel, a comedy to those that think. Given that, the really funny part of life is that when times are down we don’t want to listen to the simple stoic Truths of life:

Control what you can, don’t let those things you don’t control (like the Wendy’s® drive through line, or Hunter Biden’s amazing appetite for crack) drive you nuts.
There is Virtue. We can spend our lives splitting hairs about what is virtuous, or, we could just be virtuous. Be Virtuous.
Most passions aren’t healthy. Some are, but taken to extreme, even those become unhealthy, like when I lift weights and become so strong that I can rip apart the fabric of the Universe just by tensing my glistening pectoral muscles? See, unhealthy. Understand the difference, and don’t be ruled by emotion. Passion is for 18 year olds, reason is for adults.
Johnny Depp was pretty good in the movie Dead Man.
Seek wisdom to guide your virtue.
Seek justice to create a more virtuous society. Not an equitable society, but a virtuous one. Let Disney™ know that there’s a difference.
Understand that courage is required – Virtue often comes with a price, which may be about $3.50, in 1973. Or a career in 2020.
Living outside of Virtue is the clearest definition of Vice.
Possessions are, for the most part, neither good nor bad, but what we do with them determines their value. Anyone want to buy a slightly used copy of the Necronomicon?

The lures that pull us away from being virtuous are many. PEZ®. TikGram©. InstaFace©. SnapTwit®. PornHULU©. TinderMAX®. EskimoBrotherDataBase (EBDB)™. The idea is that if we’re distracted, we don’t focus on the things that are important in life, like virtue.

One of the things that sets humans apart is that we think about our actions and the consequences. The result of all the lures? It pulls us away from improving ourselves, from having introspection and working through our issues. Issues? I don’t have issues. Like most people, I have subscriptions.

Surround yourself with people who have issues – they always have beer. And 21-year-old nannys.

True life: I was having a problem, something that really, really made me mad, like the Game of Thrones™ parents who named their kids “Daenerys” saw her turn into a war criminal. I didn’t let it consume me like a dragon consuming a daycare center, but in those small, still moments of life that issue managed to creep into my conscious.

Like when I woke up at 3am and it didn’t mean I had to go to the bathroom (which never happens, because I’ve evolved beyond needing liquids to live), I’d think about it. Finally, a hypnogogic conversation with myself provided the answer.

“John, what would you tell your best friend if he had this same problem?”

“Self,” I answered, “I would tell my friend to let it go. It happened a year ago. It wasn’t personal. And it’s probably for the best.”

Coffee spelled backwards is eeffoc. And before I have coffee, I don’t give eeffoc.

I had clarity. I had an answer. I had closure. And it didn’t come from social media. It came from thinking and understanding what advice I’d give my closest friend. Since I hadn’t talked with, well, really anyone, I had to deal with it myself.

I finally did deal with it. And now, when I wake up at 3AM? I worry about the devil since I haven’t had to pee in a month.

Introspection is our friend, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to drown in a sea of self-pity, and as long as we use it to measure ourselves against virtue. How do we measure it?

As near as I can find, Marcus Aurelius was religious, but certainly not a Christian. As Caesar, he was the Humongous Maximus of religious stuff, and his writings wondered about what impact the gods had in the lives of men, at least after he got that petroleum from those pesky kids.

Marcus Aurelius, the early years.

The impact of religion is enormous. When we live without a concept of a greater purpose, it’s like having pancakes without syrup, or thermonuclear weapons without the initial fission core that puts the hydrogen in H-Bomb. With no greater purpose, our lives are less than what they could be. As I’ve said before, most atheists aren’t atheists – they actually hate God, generally because they know that the life they are leading and/or the choices they are making are not virtuous. They know it.

Of course, I’ve met (and almost every atheist reader here) atheists that don’t hate God. Those folks? We’re cool. Generally, they don’t dislike people like me who believe in God, they just approach the world in a different way. But I’ve noticed this about the atheists that don’t hate God – they generally like living in a society where people believe in God. Why? It’s a more virtuous society, and the streets are very empty on Sunday morning.

I won’t hold myself up to be Virtuous, or even virtuous. I will note that I really, really do try. I think I’m more virtuous this year than last year, though I shower less because of my greater virtue. And that’s the point. Every day, I try to be better inside than the last. I try to make the world a bit better than it was the day before. And I try to tell the Truth.

Unfortunately, I bet sometimes people still say after a post like this, “John Wilder? Well, you can tell him from me, he’s an ass.”

Ha!

I’m not even awake.