Month: December 2022

Penultimate Day, 2022

“Well, I simply observed, sir, that I’m felicitous since during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.” – Blackadder the Third

I wish there had been a sequel to “Lord of the Rings” starring Alan Rickman as an elderly Frodo.  It could have been titled “Old Hobbits Die Hard”.

First note: If The Mrs. is feeling well enough, her idea was that we should do our podcast on the eve of 2023.  I’m thinking 9pm Eastern.  I’ll post a note here before the show to remind everyone – and you can get that delivered straight to your email inbox if you subscribe.  Like the vaxx or putting river water in your socks, it’s easy and free.  Unlike the vaxx, 100% proven to not cause a heart attack, unless from laughter.

Penultimate Day.  This is a particular institution of the Wilder family.  It started over a decade or so ago.  The Mrs. was having problems with her Blackberry® phone (the one with the cool trackball) and wanted a new one.  I wasn’t working, and the closest place that sold phones with our carrier was 90 miles away.

So, we popped the kids in the car, and headed south to buy a phone.  We went to Best Buy®.  We ended up not buying the phone (the deal was awful) and decided to eat at Olive Garden™.  As I drove home, I decided to have fun with the kids, and told them that this was the Wilder holiday – one that no one else observed.

The next year, we remembered, and did the exact same thing.

What are the rules of Penultimate Day?

  1. Drive 90 miles south,
  2. Look at cell phones,
  3. Under no circumstances whatsoever, buy a cell phone, and,
  4. Have some Italian food a casual-dining chain.

That’s not a tough holiday.  I can testify that (with the COVID exceptions) the Wilder family has kept the spirit of Penultimate Day and have purchased exactly zero cell phones on December 30 of any year.

Our waiter this year spoke Spanish.  He asked, “¿Que past?”

This year, we had a different observation of Penultimate Day.  The Boy decided to go back to see some friends.  So, he headed back and specifically told us he’d be celebrating Penultimate Day with his friends.

That left The Mrs., Pugsley, and me.  The Mrs. has been feeling a bit down after her most recent bout with Ebola.  She said that Pugsley and I “should go”.  Now, if you have been married, you will recognize that there are exactly two ways a wife says that – the first is a deadly trap, indicating that “should go” is the last thing you should consider doing and that there will be much grumpiness.

But she meant it in the second way, the “I’m not feeling well and you boys should go and have a good time” sort of way.

So we did.

Pugsley drove.  The first Penultimate Day, he was a backseater, and now he was driving.  We ended up talking about various things on the trip, since he was far more interesting than he was a decade ago.  We talked about fatherhood, and what my goal had been with him.  It has long been my theory that if you can get a boy to 16, that’s the character they’ll take with them for life.  But getting them through the minefield of puberty to that character is the difficult part.

We talked about that.

The Mrs. and I are skilled at making the tough choices.

We made it to Best Buy©.  I can happily report we didn’t buy a cell phone.  I might have bought a cell phone case, but Pugsley immediately called me a heretic, noting that the provision for cell phone purchases should obviously be considered to be prohibited based on the emanations and penumbras of rule three.

Just kidding.  My phone is so old that it needs a pull-start and two-cycle oil, so they didn’t have it in stock.  Samsung™ has released at least ten versions since I purchased my phone, several versions of which have been nearly explosion-free.  So I bought a phone case on Amazon™ when we got home.  After midnight.

Just in case.

I found an old Nokia® and hooked it into a charger.  The power company ended up paying me that month.

An observation about Best Buy© itself – it was dead.  A decade ago, there were shelves of DVDs and CDs and video games.  There were a few dozen of each of those, but they were like the lingering holdouts.  Why would you buy a piece of physical media when you can just download it over the Internet?  That war is over, except for weird titles that are either typed up in legal limbo or aren’t popular enough to stream.

The televisions were amazing, and also not so much.  When I was a kid, watching the world on a 24” analog set, the idea of having a television that was five feet across was saved for the main screen on the Enterprise® in re-runs.  Now?  They’re cheap.  The coolest one there was a Samsung™ that, when turned off, looked like a painting.

That was cool.  As were the refrigerators.  They were (oddly) plugged in and running.  One of them was the current version of the fridge we bought seven or so years ago – and was $2,000 more than I paid for it.  You could also (oddly) get one with a streaming television in the door.

That confused Pugsley and I, since I didn’t think talking to my fridge would get my beer any colder.  Best Buy™ looked more like a visit from Penultimate Days’ past rather than a store that had anything we were much interested in.

I bumped into our fridge once, but it was cool with it.

Olive Garden™ (Motto:  when you’re here, you’re here) was pretty good.  I had the chicken and shrimp carbonera, and it was quite tasty.  We grabbed some to-go food for The Mrs., and headed home.  The Mrs. had hers, and then went to bed, since she was still not feeling good.

Although it was the most sparsely-attended Penultimate Day ever, I was mostly happy.  The one down note is that The Mrs. is still feeling a bit puny.  The up notes, though, were many.

Change is a part of life.  By slicing it up to review one single day a year, over the course of years, change becomes so much more observable.  The first change is in my sons.  Both have grown up, and both are past the danger zone of 16.  I’m proud of both of them.

The second change is in The Mrs. and I.  We’re growing older, too.  I accept that.  That is not a bad thing.  There is a sense of completion in that.  That’s not bad.

I know purists will say that Olive Garden® isn’t real Italian food, but I’m not Italian.  It’s tasty.  That’s been good over the years, though you can certainly see the prices going up over time, but still with unlimited stick.

And I’d give customers a penne for their thoughts.

In a few years, when Pugsley goes off to college, and The Boy is deeply involved in his own life, it will likely be down to just The Mrs. and I enjoying our family Penultimate Day together.

Well, and all of you.  Hope we all have a happy and wonderful 2023!

Energy: The Big Picture

“Dr. Norman was experimenting with energy and mass. To make it brief, it got away from him. He found he had made a mass of energy that somehow came alive. It feeds on more energy, and it lives only to feed. I’m afraid it consumed Dr. Norman before he could stop it.” – Jonny Quest

I was once kidnapped by a gang of mimes.  They did unspeakable things to me.

Apologies to all on missing the podcast tonight – The Mrs. was feeling great this morning, and then headed south about two hours before the show.  Darn her for demanding that she have actual oxygen in her blood.  So selfish!  Should she feel okay, we’re looking at having a New Year’s Eve show (her idea) on, wait for it, New Year’s Eve.  I’m thinking 9pm Eastern, but who knows – her blood is fickle.

So, on to today’s post, inspired by a reader’s comment on email . . .

The most fundamental economic and political choice of our lives is energy.  I phrased that intentionally – the impacts of the energy we use as a society are economic.  Energy has been political since the 1930s, at the very least.

The idea of energy might be economic and political, but the reality is pure physics.  There is no law that Congress can pass that can create more energy – only allow that which exists to be used.  And there is no amount of money that can be printed to that can make energy appear where none exists.

Some Leftists say truth is subjective, but let them try to pretend that their house at -40°F is actually 70°F.  I guess that you could say that they’re trans-comfortable?  No.  They’re frozen.  Reality is like that.  And energy is like that, too.  Unlike monetary policy or laws, energy doesn’t care what people want.

The story of energy, though, is the story of human culture.

Energy has been a part of human life since the first waggling finger (thank you, Rudyard, original poem below) burned itself on a fire.  Meat tastes good, but tastes better once it has been cooked.  It also heated the caves and tents that early man lived in.  It was the original killer app – I can guarantee that at some point, a fire in a cabin or tent or cave saved someone who was your direct ancestor.

I hear you can get fired from the keyboard factory if you don’t put in enough shifts.

In the form of crude wood fires, energy did a few things for people, helping to tan skins, cure meats, harden wood, and eventually fuel fires that made the first man-made metals and ceramics.  The demand was low, but the impacts were huge.  Food, clothing, weapons, and the basis of civilization.  You can’t have beer unless you have a beer bottle, right?

Romans used it even more – they had central heating in their villas in Roman Britain, heated baths, and used it in lots of other ways I’m too lazy to look up.  One hint:  those Roman shields and swords didn’t make themselves.  And the iron nails in Jerusalem, circa 32 A.D.?  Yeah, those required energy as well.

Romans were amazing at using energy, but most of the energy they used was human; they didn’t exactly have outboard motors on their ships.  It was wind or oars.  The Romans used fire, but the real energy source for Empire was animal and human.  That source of energy was totally renewable – people are born every day, and they eat food that is raised every year.

There are huge implications to this:  slave labor was the original renewable energy.  Oops!  That’s not politically correct, though the World Economic Forum® did take notes.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, people continued to innovate.  That’s what we do.  Dams provided water power for mills.  Mills could grind grain, or they could operate pumps to pull water out of mines.  And wind?  Windmills could use wind to mill.  Duh.  It’s in the name.

If a former president didn’t like windmills, could we call him Donald Quixote?

All of that was a necessary predecessor to the real powerhouse:  steam.  Sure, steam-powered toys had been created 2,000 years earlier, but steam power was needed because of the mines that were needed to get the metals to manufacture electric guitars and iPads® back in the 1600s.  Or whatever they did with them.  Maybe banjos?

The Industrial Revolution came almost entirely based on the use of energy.  The developments in the 1800s changed everything.  Transport?  Trains.  Communications?  Telegraphs.  Cool products?  Factories.  Navy?  Fast steamships.  This is a wickedly small set of examples – the availability of energy changed everything.  But at this point, the energy mix changed.  Prior, it was mostly wood.

Now it was the age of coal and steel.

The biggest change it created was the ability to have a metric butt-ton of additional people.  Energy changed agriculture and changed food distribution.  After the Haber-Bosch process allowed for the fixing of nitrogen for increased plant yields (which required another metric butt-ton of energy) but this changed the demand.  Coal was still pretty nifty, but it was no longer enough.

Now was the age of oil.

Cars were required to move products.  Gas was required for fertilizer, and heating and chemical products.

Tesla® cars are expensive because they charge a lot.

The result of all of this was amazing – an explosion of the numbers of people living on Earth like never before, even in places that could never support them.

Wars were fought over energy.  Why did the Germans fight at Stalingrad?  Because they were trying to secure oil.  There was no hybrid-panzer.  The Allies won because there were lakes of oil underneath Texas, mountains of iron ore in Minnesota, and marksmen from Georgia.  The biggest contributor?

The oil.

Without it, the Shermans don’t sherm, the Mustangs won’t must, and the carrier fleet are amusing, odd-shaped coral reefs.  Oil won World War II.  If the Germans had the reserves of Texas under Bavaria, Stalin would have been a minor footnote in history after 1942.

Oil was pretty plentiful as geologists wend around the world hunting for it after 1945.  It was found in the wastelands of the Arctic, the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, and on the coast of California.  Really, anywhere where people don’t want to live in 2022.

The lakes of oil in Texas weren’t infinite.  In 1973, Texas removed controls on production.  The straws weren’t dry, but the abundance was done.  The Arabs also decided that, perhaps, oil was now (for the second time since 1943) the most potent weapon in the world besides nuclear bombs and Leftism was unleashed.  The oil embargo showed how much the world depended on oil to make Big Macs™ and G.I. Joes©.  One oil shock (combined with Nixon’s taking the United States off the gold standard) was enough to send the economy into the stagflation of the 1970s.

But I heard since he died, he’s a great cook.  His pasta is Al Dante.

Oil is why the Cold War ended.  Star Wars was an important initiative, but the bigger cause of the failure of the Soviet Union was that Reagan convinced the Saudis to pump oil like it was free.  The Soviet economy, dependent on oil revenue to keep their machine going?  Done.  Oil killed the two out of three of the great empires of the twentieth century.

That brings us to today.

Almost all of the growth in oil production since 2008 was based on fracking.  The previous pools of oil were still producing, but the oil companies had to go farther and farther afield, such as deep water miles deep in places like the Gulf of Mexico.  Places where getting the oil was expensive – it’s not like we found another several billion barrels in the backyard behind the garden shed.  Regular places where oil was were drying up.  A game changer was needed.  Something different.

Fracking was different.  It was difficult, required new technologies, and grew by a factor of ten in only ten years, making the United States a net energy exporter for the first time since before John Kennedy did an afternoon drive in Texas.

Oil is an amazing fuel, and I bathe in sweet, sweet gasoline every night.  But to meet the needs of the world, the struggle is difficult.  Cheap energy takes huge investment, but that’s not all.  It requires the energy source to be there.

The Mrs. says I’m cheap.  I’m not buying it.

Our energy has been cheap since about 1920 or so.  The idea that it will be cheap forever is magical thinking, unless oil is infinite (it is not).  Our choice on energy isn’t economic, it’s based on physics.

And, with everything I’ve read, the physics of alternative energy solutions, especially the “renewable” ones that are touted based on political reasons, result in the energy cost doubling (at least) and that’s after the investment of trillions of dollars to build the necessary energy production facilities and infrastructure.  This will likely be the subject of future posts.

I hate to break the Christmas spirit, but it is the single most important question facing humanity today.  When the price of energy is low, freedom is high.  When the price of energy is high?

Oh, yeah.  Slavery.

 

As promised, here’s Kipling, 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 Gorilas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither clud 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 worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promiced these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promiced 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 promiced the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor 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 selective 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.’

The the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tounged wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to belive 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!

Exactly Who Is The Enemy?

“That is not a healthy internal narrative.” – Andromeda

I wouldn’t take a job in Seoul – I don’t think it would be a good Korea move.

I decided last night to shift everything over by a day this week.  Why?  Christmas.

Christmas Day was pretty mellow.  We are Christmas Eve package openers, so there weren’t many surprises.  We had a nice ham dinner starring mashed potatoes, gravy, sautéed mushrooms, and great company.  After that?

A chess game broke out.  It turns out that Pugsley decided he wanted to learn to play, and has been on chess.com playing games.  We played a couple, then The Boy (on college break) and I split a couple of games, and then The Mrs. was even coaxed into playing a game, too.

So, you can see why I skipped out on writing Monday’s missive.

Christmas is over for this year, so we can begin to return to dealing with the problems at hand:  The Narrative.  First:  who, exactly, is The Enemy?

Oh, sure, the Ultimate Enemy is obvious to folks like me who are Christian.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the minions.

My evil clone was planning to attack me, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

One thing that’s become very clear is that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is simple:  the good guys want government and economic system to work for the people, and the bad guys want the people to work for the government and economic system.  I’ve used the terms Left, Leftism, and Leftist to name them, but it’s a clumsy, inaccurate term.

I think I’ll keep using the term, but I just wanted to recognize that it is an approximation.

In the real world, the actual Commie left has been co-opted.  The goal has been to remove the economic from the political.  That has been hugely successful.  When is the last time that either party actually did something real on the economic front?  The latest spending bill was nearly 4,200 pages, and most legislators had only a few hours to review it.

What’s in it?

Who knows?  It’s certain that economic policy isn’t debated, and the Federal Reserve Bank® isn’t federal, yet makes decisions that widely impact the nation and the world.  Without meaningful oversight.  Without significant debate.  If politicians don’t control economic decisions, what chance does an individual have to change the system?

Economics have been pulled from political control.  And what’s the goal?

I hear janitors keep their houses at broom temperature.

Whatever makes folks work for the economic system.  As the World Economic Forum® stated, the goal is that nothing is owned, and everything is rented.  Need a frying pan (to cook your state-approved dinner)?  That’ll just be a rental fee of $1.50 for the night.  There’s a cleaning fee if you don’t return the pan clean.

And the food?  Bugs.  It’s not like there’s a great technology that turns bugs into human-friendly protein, called, “a chicken”.

I bought a deck of cards from Amazon® that never showed up.  Amazon© says they’re dealing with it.

The Far-Left (think the actual committed Commies in Antifa®) have been co-opted into being race warriors and fighting for “rights” based on fetishes.  When they do this, they are no threat to the economic system, at all.  The George Floyd riots weren’t about solving racial inequity.  The George Floyd riots were about reprogramming the Left into something harmless to the system.

But even those fetishes are being sold as products.  Think about the profit opportunity in just one sex-change surgery.  The average transsexual is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy.  That’s the goal – a society that looks like a pyramid, with just a few at the top.

What threatens the system?  Anything that offers resistance.  Anything that wakes people up.  Anything that makes people upset at a system that is designed to transfer wealth out of their hands can concentrate it into the hands of a global elite.  I understand that this is Evil, and wonder how many of them have actually made the decision to be Evil themselves.  Ghislaine Maxwell went to jail over a client list that had to be sealed.

Why is that?

I would like to get to the bottom of what happened to him, but I’m afraid I’d be left hanging.

To those not in the inner circle, it probably looks like people trying to create control, to make a profit.  To do this best, you need international treaties that people can’t see or control, that are made without their knowledge or consent.  This creates a structure that allows every important decision to be made outside the realm of politics.

See?  No politics in the economics.  And to do that properly, it has to be done so people don’t care.  Trump was a surprise to them.  Trump was always focused on the deal, yet he (either intentionally or by mistake) created a situation where tens of millions of people “woke up,” at least for a little while, to the system that was set up beyond their control or even knowledge.  He was a glitch in the matrix, a spelling error in the Narrative.

I was recently reading a book, and in it, the author indicated that the reason that German propaganda failed in the Netherlands during World War II was that the Germans didn’t mindlessly repeat the same slogans like a Korean War Era communist concentration camp.  No, they tried to appeal (according to the author) to reason.  And when you appeal to reason, that leaves room to think and to choose something else.

That’s why COVID-19 became the litmus test – everyone was supposed to listen to the slogans, repeated endlessly.  The slogans were calibrated, repeated endlessly from every source:  “safe and effective,” “free and easy.”  If there weren’t side effects on millions of people, it would have been bad enough.  But it shows just how easy it is to control a population.

Noah’s diary, day 48:  “Unicorn steak is delicious!”

That’s also why Trump was dangerous.  He certainly didn’t accomplish much, outside of several Supreme Court picks, but from the beginning, there was a hard push-back against him.  Why?  He wasn’t like ¡Jeb!, just another controlled candidate from the system-loving uniparty where the only decisions politicians make are the unimportant ones.

And the only thoughts you’re allowed to have are those that don’t interfere with the Narrative.

Christmas Is A Puzzle?

“Now I have a machine gun.  Ho ho ho.” – Die Hard

And AOC couldn’t return it, because Kellogg’s® wouldn’t take it unless she found the cereal number.

I think, for a kid, the optimum age of Christmas is around 12 or 13.  That’s an amazingly powerful age:  the body is beginning to change into an adult, but hasn’t yet.  The full burn of testosterone (or estrogen) hasn’t yet kicked in.  In my case I was smart enough to know that there was a joke, and dimly aware that I wasn’t yet in on it.

Books were magical at that time, and for the same reason.  I could be reading away on a book from decades earlier, and be thrilled by new plots (to me) and new ideas (to me) as I sat in the school bus on the way to and from Wilder Mountain.  I still recall reading about Conan the Buccaneer fighting and leading men into battle for Crom, women, and glory.

Conan’s favorite cereal was Cimmerian Toast Crunch.

Christmas though, was magical.  It was a time when parents conspired to . . . make you happy.  To give you a gift that made your day.  While I never thought my parents were evil, exactly, they were never free with the cash.  Generally, if I wanted something (outside of food and clothing) that wasn’t a book, I had to work for it and earn it.

I’m glad for that lesson, which in itself was a gift.  Nothing is more empowering than the idea that you get what you earn.  Victims are at the mercy of life.  People who focus on earning tend to feel that each day of life is a gift and an opportunity, and not a present left by Santa.

Speaking of Santa, by 12 I was long past him.  Over a December dinner not long before Christmas, I announced at the table that Santa wasn’t real.  I was in kindergarten.  I don’t recall how I figured it out, but I do recall being very proud of the fact that I knew.

Santa’s workers aren’t required to have Obamacare.  Technically they’re elf-employed.

However, my brother, (also named John Wilder because my parents were horribly uncreative), was in seventh grade.  His response to my dinnertime revelation was to kick me in the shin.  Why?  First, he wasn’t particularly fond of me at that point.  Second, he knew that when I told Ma and Pa Wilder that there was no Santa, that the presents in the stockings would become a trickle.

He was wrong.

As we got older Christmas didn’t get worse, it got better.  I recall one Christmas when it peaked.  It was the best Christmas ever, and I was 12.  Honestly, I can only recall one gift I got – a Star Wars® jigsaw puzzle, back in the time back before Star Wars™ sucked.  I still recall the calmness of that Christmas afternoon – the Sun shining down on the pure white snow outside – a bright, cool day, no warmer than about 25°F (two megaliters).

Mark Hamill found that role Luke-rative. 

My brother and my Dad took Great-Grandma Wilder (age:  about a million) home.  When they got home, in a weird coincidence, everyone met at the same part of the room at the same time.  And?

The one and only spontaneous group hug I’ve ever been in.

Outside of the puzzle, I don’t really recall what present I got or what present I gave anyone.  Maybe there was a Nerf® football.  But it was all nice and perfect, from the day, the weather, the food, and the quiet.  This was a time before every movie was available at every moment in time, a time before cell phones, and a time when if you didn’t know something, it had to be important enough to walk over to the encyclopedia to look it up.  Everyone was happy, and it was the greatest amount of peace that I ever felt as a kid at Christmas.  Of course, the best present I ever got was still the BB gun (LINK).

Why can’t any tyrannosaurus rex catch a football?  They’re all dead.

Sometime after 13, my imagination was so big that it was impossible to surprise me.  It’s not that Christmas was disappointing, it’s just that my innocence was over.  As an adult, I found the same answer: the perfect age to have kids at Christmas was also 12 or 13.

Pugsley is our youngest, and he’s well past 13.  On Sunday, Christmas will be mellow.  I got The Mrs. the same gift I’ve gotten her for the last 10 years (a very, very nice bottle of scotch).  She’d be just as happy if she didn’t get anything, but I do know she likes it.  I’m thinking the element of surprise is gone.

Pugsley and The Boy?  Well, they just might be reading this, so I’ll not spoil anything.  I may not have a lot of surprises, but I think we’ll get a smile or two on Christmas morning.  Me?  I’d be just as happy putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a bright winter afternoon.

I guess getting older was a Sidious error.

But the sunlight of those days is long past, and my world has moved on.  And that’s as it should be.  Christmas will itself be the gift.  And an opportunity.  So I’ll treat it as such.

To all of you reading this:  Merry Christmas.  May it be filled with joy, love, and peace.

The Most Inaccurate (but funniest) Predictions For 2023, Guaranteed.

“It’s getting almost predictable, isn’t it?”– The A-Team

What is a teenager under stress called?  A teenager.

Here is the annual Wilder Prediction Page, proven so far to be absolutely 0% right.  A few years ago I started to put actual predictions about economic and political stuff out quarterly.  Real ones.  The rationale behind that is, if I put it in writing and then revisited it, I at least owned it.

Those were absolutely the least popular posts I did.  They were like posts that were drenched in mosquito-carried Ebola AIDS.  I got the hint, “Shut up and play your piano, Wilder.”  I can see the reason, frankly.  That was a post about me and my thinking, and it wasn’t what I do best.

What do I do best online?  Writing about life, philosophy, and nonsense.  I also can prove that the Right can be funnier than the Left.  This is becoming more difficult in 2022, because they keep letting Kamala and Joe say words into a microphone.

So, welcome back to the nonsense!  In chronological order, here are my predictions for 2023.

January:

Russia appoints Charlie Sheen as the head of the Stavka.  He immediately gives the entire army a ration of Tiger Blood, declares they are “Winning” and passes out in pool of vomit.  We have no idea whose vomit, exactly, since “you can’t really dust for vomit.”  Sheen proves to be the most effective commander for the Russian army since Zhukov.

What did Charlie do when he was mad at his wife?  Rage against the Mrs. Sheen.

Six movies are released featuring Nic Cage, and seven people actually see three of them.

February:

Kamala Harris is featured in a major policy speech, talking about the massive snowstorm that hit the East Coast in early February.  The results were catastrophic, causing Chuck Schumer’s hair to freeze in place on Nancy Pelosi’s thighs.  Harris notes that this is “evidence of global warming, where the globe, which is a round thing hanging in space, is warming, which makes things cold because space has COVID.”

The California Legislature votes to allow “consenting adults to have sex with animals in schoolyards as long as the animals have claws or fangs, since that is a sign of consent.”  Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill publicly, though the signing was difficult since both of his hands were wrapped in gauze.

March:

Volodymyr Zelensky demands the West send him “seventy bazillion dollars to rebuild the Ukraine on and, like, ten gajillion tanks” and that the heads of state of the EU personally retile the bathrooms in his Florida mansion.  “Be careful with the grout!”

What do Putin and Peter the Great have in common?  They both have 18th Century Russian armies.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise© welcomes the 500,000,000,000,000th visitor, as it becomes the most popular website in the galaxy, as the hivemind of Melexcor III learns to appreciate dad jokes.

April:

The new COVID variant mRNA booster shot for  Super-Mega-Death-Cannibal-Famine® COVID is approved by the FDA because “Omigod, why won’t you damn people panic again!”  Australia implements “Super Peaceful Completely Voluntary We Mean It Leisure Camps”.

Disney® releases its new children’s film, Honey, I Turned All Our Children Hyperactive, Bipolar, Transgender, Gay, And Multiracial.  The three families that have hyperactive, bipolar, transgender, gay, and multiracial children attend, and the film’s three-week box office in 2,000 theaters is $90.  Disney© blames the audience for being, well, you get the idea.  The film loses $350 million at the box office.

May:

Elon Musk pulls off a rubber mask and indicates that, underneath, he was really Elon Musk.  “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you pesky kids.”

The Supreme Court rules in the case of Idiots v. Rationality, that, “Uh, really, that’s a dude.  He may be wearing a dress, but, per the original understanding of the framers of the Constitution, that’s totally a dude.”

Back when I was a kid, if a spy had to go undercover dressed as a woman, that was a transmission.

June:

Joe Biden announces, for the thirteenth time, that he’s running for president.  “I promise to make America great again after the problems of the housing bubble that George W. Bush created.  America will once again be great, starting in 2009!”

Argentina declares war on Great Britain over the Falkland Islands.  Again.  They send their victorious World Cup® team in the initial invasion.  Great Britain counter-attacks with what they call “food”.  France surrenders.

July:

I might go on vacation for a week.  Maybe someplace where I don’t need air conditioning.

California governor Gavin Newsom declares “Citizenship Day” where everyone in the whole, wide world becomes a citizen of California.  Oklahoma declares war.  “No way are we gonna do that.”

August:

California becomes part of “Greater Oklahoma.”  “If only we had greater legal magazine capacities,” said Gavin Newsom before he was headed to a minimum-security prison with knitting classes in southern Oklahoma.

Biden announces that gasoline is now illegal.  “People have been burning that stuff up!  Not on my watch.  Now the only people that can have gasoline are,” (checks teleprompter) “people who are in disadvantaged communities that are the victims of systematic race horses.”

In 2023, a man can identify as a car, unless he doesn’t meet Federal standards.

September:

The 2023 NFL® season starts, with a new team name in Cincinnati.  The name, “Bengals” has been described as “transphobic” by NFL© Commissioner RuPaul, “They aren’t “Been gals, they’re totally gals!”  Their new team name is the Cincinnati LGBT 2S+.

The Beatles reunion is complete as Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney engage in a steel cage death match over who like John Lennon the least.  Neither ex-Beatle survive, since Ringo inexplicably chose hand grenades as a close-in melee weapon.

October:

Dammit.  More crap about the English royal family.  Oh, wait, that’s every month.  This month Meghan tells how King Charles made her pick cotton on the plantation in south Brighton for 20 hours a day because she didn’t curtsey properly.  Markel is beheaded in Piccadilly Square, and Queen Elizabeth II rises from the grave and fights Mecha George Washington on Skull Island.  Oh, wait, that was a dream I had.  Nevermind.

On Halloween, children are warned not to get double-secret COVID.

November:

An article appears in the New York Times™ titled, The Final Crusade Has Started:  Why That’s A Good Thing.  Deus Vult ensues.

I’m probably having some turkey and beer around Thanksgiving.  This one isn’t much of a stretch.

What band did Indiana Jones hate?  The Rolling Stones.

December:

Avatar XXII:  Why Slavery Is Bad is released.  James Cameron is executed at Times Square in New York City because that his comment, “I’m king of the world” was culturally insensitive and totally colonialist.  At least 500 people see Avatar XXII, with many reviewers noting that the blue fish people’s ethnic cleansing of the humans is “culturally insensitive”.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise™ becomes the most popular website in history of the universe as time travelers from the year 28,764 discover that it is a humane alternative to their other form of capital punishment:  sitting in a comfy chair.

How Scarcity Has Changed Your Life, And Will Change It Again. But With Hot Chick Pictures.

“Dad! Bob broke your beer!” – Strange Brew

Here’s one only 1300’s kids will get: The Black Plague

Part of the history of humanity was scarcity. Scarcity has formed society since, well, forever. What do I mean?

Well, before agriculture, there was a scarcity of beer. My personal theory is that civilization itself is because we wanted beer on a regular basis (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide® Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer). Click on this one, it’s a fun read and one of my Original Wilder Thoughts.

So, beer was scarce, and we made agriculture and farms so we could get beer.

But what became scarce then? Labor.

Prior to having agriculture, slavery was a net negative. To have a slave, you had to feed him or her, and what were you going to have them do all day, hang out and play Nintendo®? If you sent them out to hunt or gather, they’d never come back. But once you had work to do every day to make sure the farm produced pre-beer?

Slavery made sense because having more slaves resulted in having more beer.

If agriculture was the most disruptive technology in history besides Über®, slavery was an unintended consequence. Labor stayed as a scarce resource for a long time, until the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was amazing precisely because it changed the game on labor.Why did Leia passionately kiss Luke? She was looking for love in Alderaan places.

Sure, labor was needed, but the entire type of labor needed to be changed. It went from artisans and craftsmen making “one of a kind” items to people working in a factory making standardized items that were all the same. Because of the nature of the process, people generally worked on only one part of whatever was being made. The jobs were simplified, so that people could do one, repeatable task again and again.

People became replaceable, just another cog in the machine, but the scarcity of labor that created the need for slavery changed to make slavery uneconomical again. Why have a slave that you have to take care for, when you can have an employee that you can fire when they get old or injured?

Now, the scarcity was energy.An entire industry was built on just getting energy to feed the industrial revolution. Coal was the first, but followed soon enough by oil. The first oil wells were a boon because they produced lamp oil, and the gasoline bits were thrown away (generally dumped on the ground) and the heavy bits (asphalt, etc.) were thrown in pits.

Of course, soon enough, we determined how to use everything that came out of the ground for something, and none of the sweet, sweet oil was wasted.

Have we outstripped our energy resources? Possibly. But that’s another post . . .After I put that fence up, my neighbor was dead against it.

Entertainment had been scarcer than an Amy Schumer comedy special, too. If you wanted to listen to a song, you had to find someone who could play it or sing it. And the best version that you could get was dependent upon the best singer in town, and the best guitar player. After records showed up, now anyone could listen to the best vocalist in the world. Local bands? They weren’t needed so much anymore. Soon enough, the best actors and comedians (Amy Schumer, sit down) in the world were available, too.

You could say that entertainment was just a subset of information. The availability of that had been growing, too. From information carved into stone, set into clay tablets, handwritten on paper or parchment, to a printing press using moveable type, information kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

And faster and faster. The upside? All of Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca available in an instant. The downside? Game of Thrones™ and Maisy Williams with her unibrow.Aristotle says we are what we repeatedly do. Therefore? I am your mother. (not my meme)

There are those that hypothesized that the only reason the Mongol Empire stopped before overrunning Europe was the time it took to get communications from the seat of the Mongol Emperors of China to the fringes of Empire. Or it could have been that they didn’t watch their steppe. Communication of information around the world was impossible at 10,000 B.C. (or could take centuries), years during the Roman Empire, months after Britain ruled the waves, days after communication cables were strung ‘round the world by the end of the nineteenth century, and down to hours after radio.

Now? Tribesmen living in the middle of a South American rainforest know the daily price of gold. Information has transcended the bounds of time and space, and the greatest works of literature and film are widely and instantly available. Oh, and Amy Schumer videos.

The ability to make decisions is in the process of being phased out as a scarce item. For decades, computer control systems have replaced operators at industrial facilities, and robots not only make welds, but make the decisions on the quality of the products produced. But these processes are determined and monitored by people.

That’s changing. Difficult things that were kept to humans like diagnosing patients? Human doctors are losing to A.I. One particular system looked at EKGs, and the A.I. could predict people who were going to die, even when doctors looked at the information and couldn’t see anything wrong.What do they call the person who graduated last in his class at medical school? Doctor.

But at least we still have thought and creativity, right?

Well, no. 2022 is the advent of A.I. art. There are multiple engines, online right now that will draw pictures that are almost indistinguishable from photographs. I’ve posted one below. It may look like a hot chick, but I assure you that it is not. Don’t believe me? Look at the hands. Small details, sure. And small details that will eventually be fixed.How long will it be before novels are written by A.I., and entire movies from start to finish are created in A.I. engines? Something tells me, not long. If agriculture was the most disruptive technology in the history of mankind, A.I., even as it exists today, is the second most.

It has long been my assertion, that in any Universe where A.I. is possible, it will be created, and will spread to the stars. But what’s the densest form of information storage currently known, the wellspring of millions of species across the history of Earth?

DNA.

Such a complex structure that incorporates so much information. It’s almost like it was . . . created.

Wouldn’t it be the perfect vehicle for translating information across the vastness of space? Easy enough to encode an entire ecosystem a fraction of an ounce (megaliter). But I digress, that’s probably (likewise) a good starter for a future post.A friend of mine had a job circumcising elephants at the zoo. The pay wasn’t good, but the tips were large.

So what is the scarcity that we are facing now?

One thing I see that we’re facing right now is a scarcity of virtue.

The values that we know produce a stable society are in short supply, and dwindling. The cracks of that are spreading. It can’t, and won’t continue long. We are at the cusp of a singularity of different factors, the scarcity of scarcity, and the scarcity of virtue and self-discipline.

Good times make weak men, who create hard times, who create strong men.

We are on the cusp of the hard times, and the strong men will be back. Our civilization will not be the civilization that came before. We have the elements in place to make a future that our ancestors couldn’t dream of. There is a chance that it will be a golden era of freedom and enhanced creativity.

And to think, it all started with Urg, king of the 78-strong tribe of the Shamalama tribe in ancient Mesopotamia, wanting to have a cold beer.

Cheers!