Month: February 2023

A Quick Post On The Decline Of The West

“I don’t care about what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.” – Apollo 13

Why did NASA use numbers instead of letters for the Apollo missions?  No one wanted to ride on that sorry mission, Apollo G.

The evening got away from me.  I’d love to tell you that I was doing something productive, but I was really just goofing around.  I felt a bit blah (not sick, mind you, but blah) all week.  So, I decided to goof around.  If today’s thoughts are a bit shorter than usual, that should explain it.

When I was a young adult, I read Atlas Shrugged.  Now, I said, I read it, but when it got to the part where John Galt hacked into the radio to give a (what seemed like to me) 700-page speech that was just reiterating every point Rand had already made in the book, but this time with crayon, I skipped it.

So, I read most of it.  Except 90% of the speech.

One thing that stuck with me about the tone of the book was that it took place in a world that had moved on.  Stuff just didn’t work.  I seem to recall a broken clock, and broken rails, and the image of a society that had done great things but was no longer capable of them.

The mission of NASA used to be to send people and things up into space.  The goal was to learn more about the Solar System, the planets, and the Universe beyond.  The other part of the goal was to make man an interplanetary and, hopefully, an interstellar species.

I got my medical degree online, from a place called Google® Docs™.

NASA was doing one of the hardest things that had ever been done – inventing technology at the very edge of what humans were capable of, and then using it.  It was one of the grandest adventures of the 20th Century.  It was also staffed by young people.  Gene Kranz, the “Failure is not an option guy” was the Flight Director for several Apollo missions, most notably Apollo 13.  When Apollo 13 happened?  Kranz was 36.

Our nation at that point had failures, sure.  But now it seems like that’s the definition.  And the things we’re failing on aren’t even new tech.  East Palestine (The Mrs. told me, “It’s pronounced Palesteen, Froderick”) Ohio is suffering from one of the biggest failures of tech that is nearly 200 years old.

Then there was a fire at Oak Ridge involving uranium.  Normally, one tries to avoid burning radioactive things.  I mean, it’s not like this is Russia and all of us are protected from radiation via the consumption of massive amounts of vodka.

There are others, of course.  The Jackson, Mississippi water plant appears to not work (sometimes) because the people running it don’t know how to run it.  I could go on and on.

In one sense, it almost appears that we’re suffering a crisis of people who just don’t care or are, well, stupid.  I hate to say stupid, because water treatment has been around for hundreds of years, too, and is far simpler than the Apollo project.

Good thing they didn’t use toe jam.

One symptom, perhaps, of the increasing and accelerating rate of change (notice I didn’t say improvement, I said change) in the world is increasing failures of the basic systems of life.  Sure, we can have Doordash™* deliver tacos, but the justice system is failing, too.  And how many readers here trust our elections?  In the race to be “efficient” we’ve made it easy to cheat.  Even if there wasn’t cheating, creating systems that are opaque enough so they’re not shenanigan proof is a failure in itself.

Our social systems are failing.  Our infrastructure is failing, and it becomes ever more obvious the things that bind us together . . . are failing.  Here in Modern Mayberry, the power has worked pretty well, but investment in power and infrastructure has made the system nearly third-world in some places.

I expect it to get worse.  I don’t even think we’re close to the level of failure we’ll be seeing due to the incompetence of the leadership in the country.  I see no real thoughts that our leadership will get better, since the idea of hiring smart young folks like Gene Kranz is out the window, and hiring people who share the same ideology, regardless of ability, is in.

I could never be a house painter – I would keep saying my work is on the house.

We are living in the time science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein called, “The Crazy Years” – in his words:

“Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in a mass psychoses . . .”

I believe the signs are there that we are in that “mass psychoses” and that is the end of this cycle.  The mere fact that truth can no longer be spoke in public due to the offense that it might give shows that the mental bending is built deep into discourse today.  To be clear, there is little of today’s society when it comes to values and morality left to conserve – the Left has taken it all.  No, where we are going into our future has nothing to do with conservation, it’s going to be about restoration.

Failure is not an option.

*There is no Doordash™ in Modern Mayberry, unless it’s raining.

Greeks, Passion, and Mayo

“Why?  Are the Greeks tired of fighting each other?” – Troy

I heard the Greeks kept watch on their infants by using a baby minotaur.

Epictetus is a dead Greek dude.  His name sounds like Epic . . . well, it would make Beavis and Butthead laugh.  Epictetus is, as I mentioned, dead.  So are several billion people, but so, outside of his sorta-funny name, why am I bringing him up on a Friday?

Because he’s one of the people whose ideas have made it down to us because someone decided to invent the original wireless information transfer technique which uses a solid-state information storage media along with speed of light photon transmission:  writing.

One of the things he wrote was this:

Remember that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases us and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning.  It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another.  Where our heart is set; there our impediment lies.

Okay, the truth is, he didn’t write that at all.  He wrote some sort of gibberish with lots of Latin or Greek letters.  Sadly, no one left alive can translate those languages, so we had to guess at the meanings, like Bulgarian mall lawyers poking at the internals of a laser printer with a pen, dimly thinking that might somehow fix the complicated internals and make the magic printer work again, like humans at the dawn of time, worshiping an almighty being, hoping one day to be rewarded with things like mayonnaise, or French fries.

Only you east of the Rockies will get this. I grew up with Best Foods™, which ruins this joke.

Yeah, that’s a run on sentence, but so is the Preamble to the Constitution.  Classic things can’t be rushed.

Anyway, the good thing is, Bulgarian mall lawyers are absolutely amazing at fighting judges over silly restraining orders.  I mean, how could I be charged with trespass if it was just my drone looking in their window?

But Epictetus was trying to tell us something deeper than any silly restraining order.  It’s that what we want is what controls us.  Epictetus just made the point that the desire for power and the desire for peace and a restraining order are equally controlling.  Diogenes, another dead Greek dude who pathetically didn’t speak English, said, “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.”

Remember, Diogenes often walked around naked, yanking his crank in public, so, you know, ewww.  I think Diogenes must have had Bulgarian mall lawyers because I never read that he had a restraining order against him.

What do you call it when a Bulgarian uses bad language?  A Bulgarity.  (This is not my first choice joke, but the other one was pretty rough.  Email me and I’ll share.  It starts with, “how do you get two Bulgarian brothers off of a couch?”)

These dead Greeks, though neither of them ever had a hamburger from McDonald’s™, did point out a very simple truth:  our passions, our desires are what we give ourselves over to.  And those desires don’t have to be bad to control us.

Some of the best times in my life are when I was single mindedly focused on a goal.  In one sense, it is a freeing moment.  In the very best of those times, I become the work.  I lose myself entirely, because I am the goal.  It may sound weird, but there are those moments where time ceases to exist, where I am 100% engaged with what I’m doing.  I lose myself entirely.  This has happened while gathering firewood (I used to call it getting wood, but then I read about Diogenes, so I changed it to gathering firewood) or working on a project, or even writing one of these posts.

It’s awesome.  A day at work goes by in seconds.  And I look at what I’ve done and am satisfied.  I have lived a day that had purpose, that had meaning, even if it’s only meaning that I gave it.

So, were Epictetus and Diogenes wrong?  I mean, it’s not like they’re going to come to my house and give me a wedgie if I make fun of their moms.  They’re dead.

Kinda yes, and kinda no.

Yo momma so old?  Her first crush was Diogenes.

The point is we are not small g gods.  We’re people.  We have desires, like pooping.  Or another glass of wine.  Or eyedrops when our eyes are itchy.  To be a person without desire isn’t to be as a small g god, it’s to be . . . dead, or worse, a zombie or an ice cube or a houseplant.

It’s living in a world where the salt has lost its savor and every day is like going to a gray cubicle with gray carpet and gray walls and a gray chair and doing work that I don’t care about.

Yes, they may be dead (and in the case of Diogenes, a dead chronic masturbator) but I think people who have interpreted them have missed the point.

If we choose our passions, choose what we will do, what makes us mad, and what makes us happy, we have an amazing small g godlike power:  we choose the people that we want to be.  In those moments when I get mad (it happens) I try to step back and ask a simple question:  why am I mad?

I had to kick some resistors that didn’t work out of my house.  Now they’re Ohm-less.

I’ll allow it if it ties to virtue or values.  Otherwise, it’s ego, and I try to choke it back, because in 100 years, absolutely no one will remember it.  My virtue or values?  Those aren’t for sale.  I own those.

I really do think what Epictetus and Diogenes (when he wasn’t gripping the one-eyed wonder weasel) were really trying to tell us was to pick what we were willing to be controlled by.

I choose to be controlled by putting these posts out, three a week.  I choose to do the best podcast ever done weekly.  I choose to go to work, and, on days when there’s enough coffee, to give it everything.

I choose.  If I am to be controlled by my passions, I get to choose them, and I make it a conscious choice.

And if I could choose my Greek name it would be Epic . . . well, I’d better stop there.

This is a family friendly place.

Anyone have TP?

Is The End Of The Road Nearly At Hand?

“If they have him, and they can somehow piece the country together, get communications up, they’ll control everything; the Federal Reserve, the military.” – The Last Ship

Where does the Fed® hide its monetary mistakes?  In debasement.

Pa Wilder was a banker, and when we communicated via a while back, I’d send him long-ish messages about most everything.  One time, I broached the economy with him.  As a small farm banker with more than 50 years of experience, he was familiar with the way the system worked.

When I first heard that the Federal Reserve™ wasn’t owned by the government, but by the member banks, I asked him.  I figured he’d tell me, “Nah, John, it’s really owned by the government, aliens aren’t real, go back to sleep – we won the war.”  Nope.  He then went through how each member bank was required to buy stock in the regional Federal Reserve Banks (as I recall) with at least 6% of their deposits.

Whoa.  His bank owned a tiny part of the Federal Reserve Bank®.  Certainly not much, but part of it.  The Federal Reserve Bank© is a private institution.  It was the 1913 mechanism to get the politicians out of the economy.  The Great Depression shows how well it worked.

What do you call a talkative Colombian?  Hablo Escobar.

After World War II, there was a time of relative stability – Europe and Japan were shattered, and the United States had industry that was just waiting to stop making weapons and start making washers.  The sudden influx of labor with the demobilizing G.I.s made a combination for economic growth.  After they drank the bars dry and made a zillion babies.

Even with the added costs of Social Security, it worked.  The economy was working so well that we could build an interstate highway system without breaking a sweat.  The highway system even added to the economic boom by lowering the cost and time required to move goods, effectively shrinking the country.

However, every good party has to end.  Johnson’s Great Society and financing for the Vietnam War out of “money we just made up” caused Nixon to end the last tether between gold and the dollar.  Sure, the Fed® had been cheating about the amount of cash it had been printing, but when the bluff was called, Nixon had the option of sending all our gold to France or saying “just kidding”.

He chose the latter.  I think it was a good idea, because it wasn’t like France was going to do anything about it, anyway.  The result was the petrodollar – the idea that all international transactions in oil would take place in dollars.  That also resulted in almost all transactions taking place in the dollar.  The inflation of the 1970s was the result – it was before we figured out how to tax the world by printing dollars in a sorta responsible way.

If I had a dime for every time I didn’t know what was going on, I’d say, “Hey, where did all these dimes come from?”

So, people all over the world needed dollars, even though we were printing them like we were, well, the Fed™.  As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a counterbalance to the United States, so at least there was some check.  But after they went tango uniform?

That’s when the responsibility completely ended, the cash was printed, and the instability really started.

The Dotcom Bubble was the first – fed by cash from the Fed® with no place to go.  And then it tanked.  So the Fed™ printed a few trillion bucks.  That led directly to . . .

The Housing Bubble.  You probably have heard of it.

But this was different – it actually lead to protests against the banks.  A reprogramming was necessary – “put the bankers in jail” had to be stopped, because bankers like to use our money to buy themselves nice things like that tiny part of France where they don’t let Muslims in.  Except the Saudis.

I read that photographers and art thieves both take pictures.

A reprogramming was needed – Occupy Wall Street™ had to turn to . . . something.  That reprogramming of the Lefty rank and file was into “white people are awful” and it got the heat away from the bankers.  And made movies suck.

Meanwhile, the money hijinks led to country after country having revolutions, from Libya to Egypt to Syria.  Why?  Because inflation in the United States (at that point) meant that people had to pay a nickel more for Cheetos®.  In Egypt, that meant that one of the children had to be sold into medical experimentation.

The key to all of this was keeping the dollar as the key currency used in international transactions.  To be clear, Russia was a big threat in this.  Sure, Russia is ruled by corrupt folks who kill people who threaten them, but I can raise you a Jeff Epstein, a Hunter Biden, and Hillary.

The Russians certainly threatened all of this with Nordstream® and Nordstream II©.  These pipelines pushed natural gas straight from Russia to Europe.  Now, Russia could take . . . euros for gas.  Dollar not required.

Watch a 10-hour movie?  No.  But have Netflix® break it up into 10 one-hour movies?

And scary.  All the investment of the Left in Green Energy® led them to shut down nuclear power plants (Germany, I’m looking at you) and replace them with natural gas plants.  And you see the results.

(hint:  Ukraine and certain underwater explosions)

Now we find that we have a currency that’s becoming worth less every day, foreign folks are building ways to not take the dollar.  So they need fewer of them.  And want fewer of them in their pockets.

It doesn’t help that we’re in debt by (spins wheel) over $25 trillion bucks, the economy is distorted, and that Medicare® and Medicaid™ will soon cost more than Joe Biden’s hair plugs.  And we’re going to double that in the next eight years, and double it again in the next eight.  That’s $100 trillion dollars.

Does anyone reading this believe we can last that long?

Oops.

Pa Wilder said 20 years ago that he didn’t see how it could last.  But many folks have gone broke by betting against the Fed™.  That one day they can’t paper it all over?

Nah.  Don’t worry.  It’ll be fine.

Funny Lessons From The Franco-Prussian War in 2023

“By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William the Second I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.” – The African Queen

The Kaiser never smoked weed, because he had no idea where Fort Wenty was.

In high school history, I’m pretty sure that the Franco-Prussian War was never mentioned.  Or, if it was, it was in World History when I was a freshman.  That was my first class, and the teacher was the head basketball coach.  His typical procedure was to tell us to read the chapter or watch a film.  There were a lot of films.  Then, he would wander down to the locker room, where he would make use of the coaches’ bathroom.

Coffee does that have effect.

I don’t remember the coach talking about the Franco-Prussian War, but, then again, through two semesters I don’t think he spent more than 10 minutes a day in the 45-minute class.  Perhaps he needed prunes?

Recently, though, I saw a documentary about the Franco-Prussian War that I found to be fascinating.  It’s long -6 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds, according to YouTube®, so roughly as long as Hunter Biden goes in a typical day without photographing himself with hookers and drugs.

The reason that this war happened was fairly simple – the French wanted to fight the Germans to look good with an easy win, and the Germans were, well, Germans, and invading France is as German as bratwurst, panzers, or invading Poland.

I think the blue could also stand for “reliable allies”. (meme as-found)

Napoleon III was Emperor of France, and his wife (really!) wanted to fight because she wanted to make sure that the country was united around her husband and son, so he’d inherit a kingdom strongly behind him.

Germany had other ideas, and Bismarck (the dude, not the ship) was trying to unite all the German countries.  Hmm.  I’m sensing a pattern here.  But Otto von Bismarck’s goal was to turn Wilhelm from King into Emperor, or Kaiser.  Bismarck was determined – you could say he was on a Kaiser roll.

It surprised no one when war broke out.  The Germans reacted as Germans do – troops showed up at the right time in the right place and weapons, ammunition, food, and other stuff was already there, waiting for them when they mobilized.  At the time, one person noted, “It is as if every cow knew which pot it was scheduled to be cooked in.”  Or something like that.  I’m not looking it up at 1:38 am.

Why do Germans drink beer?  To convince them mating is logical.

The French reacted as French people do.  Rather than go someplace logical, like toward the enemy, troops had to go to where their regiment was located.  If you were right next to Germany, and your unit was in Algiers, you’d have to go to Algiers to get with your unit, and then go back as a unit to the site of the war.

Yeah.  It doesn’t get better for the French.  The war started on July 19, and by September 2, the Germans had captured Napoleon III and over 100,000 dudes.  In previous years, this would be it.  And, in fact, after Napoleon III had fallen into German hands, he was sent with his butlers and support staff to a fancy mansion to hang out.

War of king versus king was like that in that time and place.

Again, it being France, the first thing they did is declare a Republic, their “Third” – (they’re now on their fifth).  Having seen what happens to French Empresses when things go south, Napoleon’s wife snuck out in the middle of the night and snuck away to England, which was thrilled to have a French person around they could make fun of.

I hear that Chinese probes are still doing stuff on the dark side of the Moon.  Seems shady to me. (as found)

So, France’s army was shattered, surrendered, or besieged.  Two weeks later, Paris was surrounded by Germans.  The war had been as polite as war could be up to now, and the French armed forces had been as effective as an army of kittens attacking a velociraptor.  The logical thing to do would be to surrender.

What the Germans were asking for was Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces that France had for a couple hundred years or so, but about 90% of the folks there spoke German as their primary language.  The new French Republic was fairly scared that surrendering those provinces would make them look bad, so they refused.  To be fair, the French wanted to annex a bunch of German land, too, but didn’t have the chance since they suck at war.

Their armies shattered, Paris surrounded and besieged, the French didn’t surrender.  One thing I noted was that when it was a war of one king versus another, as noted above, war was, while still awful, not personal.

When the Republic was formed, it was no longer a war of one king against another – it was a war of the people of France versus Germany.  The fact that the Germans were in France wasn’t really the fault of the Germans, both sides had wanted the war, and the French had, in fact, crossed into Germany before the Germans gave them a full hammerlock.

Hulk had to deal with anxiety about his career.  I guess you could call it wrestle-mania.

Regardless, at that point individual French citizens fought harder after losing their Emperor, Napoleon.  At first, this surprised me.  But it’s categorically different when people fight for something they own – they fight harder and longer.  Since they were untrained, poorly armed, and poorly lead, the effort was even less effective than the Afghanistan army, circa 2022.

The Siege of Paris lasted for four months and ten days.  In 2023, the average supermarket in the average city holds enough food for three days.  The average house has that same amount.  After a week, people would probably be fairly hungry, and would trade anything but their cell phone for a bag of Cheese Doodles® or High Fructose Flakes™.  In Paris of 1870, they didn’t run out of wine until late December, and I’m not sure the French have ever figured out that they could drink water.

Oh, wait, they did start drinking the water, leading to multiple epidemics that cost almost as many lives as the war itself.

Apparently, it’s now illegal to drink wine, shave, brush my teeth, and take a nap.  Driving is awful in 2023.

Eventually, the French agreed to an armistice, and, being France, they immediately had a communist revolution, but only in the cities, primarily in Paris.  This wasn’t a repeat of the French Revolution, since in this case, very few people were harmed, fewer than a thousand French dead.  Oh, and up to 20,000 communists, but they don’t count.  It also proves that the only war the French can win is against other French people.

The big reason that I’m writing about the Franco-Prussian War is that illuminates several things that are still important or true in 2023:

  1. Governments have and still create wars to keep themselves in power.
  2. The French are awful at war.
  3. One big loss can destabilize an entire country if the people are demoralized.
  4. I guess there’s a reason the French don’t drink water.
  5. People fight harder when they have ownership, even if what they’re fighting for isn’t worth it.
  6. I don’t have nearly enough storage food.
  7. Commies always either gravitate to, or are made by cities. Another good reason to avoid them.

I’ve always loved history.  Perhaps that’s why they ask the question about what’s the difference between a bad* basketball coach and a constipated owl – the coach can shoot but not hit.

 

*He was actually a pretty good basketball coach.

Red Pill? Blue Pill? What About The Green Pill?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – The Matrix

What happens if they try to get a new actor to play John Wick?  Keanu leaves.

The movie The Matrix is a classic.  Too bad they never made a sequel or three.  I’m sure they would have been fantastic.  Imagine taking the adventures of Neo™ beyond that big battle with Mr. Smith®!

Regardless, The Matrix did include several ideas that have made their way into the main stream, and stayed there.  The biggest, perhaps, is the idea of The Red Pill and The Blue Pill.  In the movie, Neo© is given the choice of taking The Blue Pill, which will allow his version of reality, the things he knows, to remain, even though they are founded on pretty little lies.

I’ll admit, The Blue Pill is attractive.  It’s comfortable.  But it is, in the end, a lie.  I imagine that since you’re here, lies aren’t the thing that motivates you and more than they motivate me.

If Bill Cosby had played Morpheus, I think he would have pushed the blue pill.

The alternative is The Red Pill.  The Red Pill is the The Truth.  The problem with The Truth is that it’s ugly.  The world we want to believe in is in The Blue Pill, because those lies speak to us so clearly.  When I first took the Red Pill on a particular subject, I felt betrayed.  Here was an entire line of propaganda that I had been fed since I was a child – it was a part of my base programming.

That’s the problem with The Red Pill.  Once I took it, I began to question everything.  Like a potato chip, you can’t have just one.  And once I began looking, I found even more to question.  That was difficult, because I had to reevaluate where I was wrong.  And what ideas I had were built around those incorrect ideas.

The Red Pill is demoralizing.  It’s not pleasant to have to reevaluate basic beliefs, especially those that comforted me and that I now know are wrong.  In part, this website is about that.  It’s looking at the things I think I know, and trying to distill what is true.  On more than one occasion, a post was nearly complete when I found an inconvenient fact.

In algebra class, people always thought I was plotting something.

That meant I was wrong.  That meant my post was wrong.  In one sense it sucks because it kept me up later to write something else.  But it never upset me, because I had learned something new, and was a bit closer to The Truth.

A key to getting through The Red Pill is to embrace The Truth, and improve.  However much.  A little each day is enough.

I suppose you could call that The Green Pill.  Or, for weightlifters, The Iron Pill.

So, which one makes me The Hulk if I’m angry?

It’s the idea that instead of being upset that the world isn’t the way that I want it to be, I don’t focus on that, at all.  Instead, I try to focus on improving myself.  Not a lot, just a little each day.  Can this post be better?  Can I get stronger?  Can I get in better shape?  Can I learn another useful skill?

Life is nothing without difficulty.  There is no honor in fighting weak opponents.  I mean, I could spend my day boxing three-year-old kids.  But my arms would get tired.  Unless there weren’t that many, or if they were all especially weak three-year-olds.  Like vegan-weak.

No, for a victory to have meaning, the challenge must be sufficient.  It would have to at least be boxing six-year-olds.  Or, maybe helping the world, or even one person, see what they normally would never have seen.

I had a globe on my desk, and met the guy who made it.  It’s a small world.

I have to have a quest.  The grander, the better, and I even live with and am comfortable that I won’t live to see the ultimate impact that I have on the world.  That’s fine with me.  Small pushes, over time, change the world.

Never let The Red Pill get you down.  The real choice, even in a world gone mad, is to keep our virtue, and never to give up in making ourselves better, and to improving what we can, even if it’s only a little.

The Red Pill is difficult to swallow, but it is a gift, and victory in finding and spreading The Truth is the challenge that fuels me, and is way less tiring than fighting either endless streams of toddler or endless streams of Agent Smith.

Dang.  Sure wish they had made a sequel to The Matrix.

Want to win? Have a good wife.

“Are you drunk?”  “It’s my birthday.  Again.” – The Experts

I ate an abacus – it’s inside what counts.

So, it’s St. Valentine’s day.  Again.

For this year, I decided to go into the deeply romantic box of ideas, and got The Mrs. a bottle of scotch.  Not great a great bottle of scotch, because that’s what I always give her for Christmas (saves on thinking, gents).  Well, this wasn’t a great bottle, but it was also not something you’d use for lighter fluid, either.

Not that The Mrs. won’t drink lighter fluid (don’t ask me about that story!), but because The Mrs. sounds like Kim Carnes afterward.  Anyone else but me listen to Bette Davis Eyes and not think “Marty Feldman Eyes”?

Regardless, here is why I enjoy my time with The Mrs.  As a part of our conversation, we discussed the evolution of modern warfare from the United States Civil War, and World War I.  In it, I brought into play the idea that the Germans had totally melted the minds of the French.

Why do French ghosts smell so bad?  They are covered in sheet.

Why?  Let’s go back to the Franco-Prussian war.  Not Franco-American®, because there were far fewer Spaghetti-O’s® back in 1870.  And Chef-Boyardee™ was still Chef Notbornyet.  Sorry for the digression – it turns out that I bought The Mrs. some scotch, but she bought us some wine.  And by us, I mean me and her, not you and me and her.

Our conversation wandered, and I pointed out the reason the French were such wussies was because of the Franco-Prussian war.  It seems, the French had a far superior rifle, the Chassepot (pronounced “frog hat spinner” because the French don’t even pretend that letters have meaning).  This means that the German soldiers had to attack (they’re Germans, they’re always attacking) for 200 yards (17.3 kiloPascals) while being shot at with relatively accurate rifles before their rifles could shoot back.

You’d think this would mean an easy French victory.  Nah.  The Germans were surrounding Paris within weeks, because, always remember the first dictum:  the French can only win a war in which all of their opponents are French.

Then, The Mrs. demanded (on Valentine’s Day) that we watch either a documentary on WWI or All Quiet on the Western Front (new version, which I had not seen yet).  I bring this out not for any other reason than to brag.  Chocolates?  Flowers?  Nah.  Scotch.  Rom-coms?  No.  The Mrs. demanded we watch a war movie.  It’s like Christmas and we talk about the geopolitics of WWII and The Mrs. demands we watch Patton.  Again.

I found a corpse along the road with no arms, head, or legs.  The local police are stumped.

This isn’t entirely bragging, since this is Wednesday and we’re supposed to talk about money.  How do war movies, moderately priced scotch, and romantic discussions about warfare have anything to do about money?

It has everything to do about money.  Everything.

Women can make or break a marriage.  Modern societies, especially in the United States, give women an out, and incentivize them to break up marriages for fun and profit.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a Tweet® from a Twunt©:

When I first read this, I thought it was sarcasm.  It’s not.  I feel sorry for her wine and cats.

Yeah, she said that.  It’s an awful sentiment that an elected official could say that and remain in office.  I’m beginning to understand why they burned witches at the stake, and becoming much more amenable to that idea.  After a fair trial, of course.  I’m not suggesting that South Dakota do summary executions, but I am suggesting they bring back witch burning.

The economics of the love in 2023 are heavily skewed against those who would love.  In my mind, love is the glue that holds the atom of civilization together.  That atom?  The family.  And no matter how you slice it, there is no world where two women or two men can have actual children, so they cannot form the nucleus of the family.  Unless cats are children.

The economic incentives right now are against child rearing.  It’s amazing to see the number of criminals with no fathers in their lives.  It’s amazing to see the number of children coming from “blended” (i.e., divorced parent) families.  Here in Modern Mayberry, about (Pugsley’s guess) 65% of the kids come from intact, two-parent families.

In my mind?  That’s a number that’s amazingly low.  Sure, I was adopted, but I was adopted into a family where my Mom and Dad had been married for 26 years before I was adopted and The Mrs. family was stable for 61 years until The Mrs. father passed on.  Sure, my family had ups and downs, but their marriage was approximately as stable as helium or the Democrat’s hold on counting votes.  Neither of Ma Wilder or Pa Wilder needed nor wanted surprises.

What they call Frodo if he had lost a leg instead of a finger?  A Hoppit.

Today?  Husband won’t agree to a new dining room table?  Divorce him.  Most divorces are initiated by women.  Because?  They’re unhappy.  I understand that’s a reason, but it’s not a good reason, since, until the caffeine kicks in around 11am each day, I’m unhappy, too, and you don’t see me firebombing Dresden.

But those are the women who even bother to get married.  There’s a deeper pathology here.

What incentive to men use to improve themselves, to work harder, to get into shape, to earn money?

The prospect of wife and family.  If that isn’t there, why bother?  It’s easier to eat Cheetos® and play Call of Duty™:  Ukraine™ on their PS3©.  I’ll admit that this isn’t an attractive mate, but is it any different than a 34-year-old women who has had sex with 143 guys?  Women think their value shouldn’t be based on the number of sexual partners they’ve had, but, dudes, who wants to own a pair of shoes owned by 143 other dudes?

Yeah.  No one.

The structure of incentives is important.  Right now, men are incentivized to eat Cheetos™ and play vidya games.  Right now, women are encouraged to have sex with all the men, and then try to find someone after they’ve gone had sex with all the men, gone to graduate school, lost their fertility, and bonded with wine and cats.

Ugh.

Economics is about incentives.  Give incentives to women to not marry and then divorce at the slightest provocation?  Men will turn into Tostito® munching morons.  It’s simple.  And then both will be sad.  The 45 year-old wine aunt?  She’s not happy, she’s just out of options.  The 30 year-old man-boy?

He’s just looking for a wife, children, and to make a place in society.  That’s it.

Not pictured:  The Mrs.

I’ll say this again – my Gen X road was easier than the Zoomer and Millennial kids.  A young man faces women that are hostile.  That turns him into a man that’s not prepared.  If I might make a modest proposal, let’s bring back shame for women.  And let’s bring back pride for men.

Seems like a fair deal.  And, honestly, the best St. Valentine’s Day present that they could have.  Unless their wife demands they watch a war movie before sending them out to smoke a Rocky Patel® cigar in the hot tub so they can finish watching the documentary about the Franco-Prussian War after having a few glasses of wine and scotch.

Hope you had a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Balloons, Hot A.I. Chicks, And Our Future A.I. Overlords

“It all adds up: the dots, the AI, the air force, the chip…” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I once invented a “cold air” balloon, but it never took off. (as-found)

I was going to write about Chinese spy balloons, but I figure that’s all a bunch of hot air.  Besides, I figure China can send up $5,000 balloons all year long as we shoot them down with $603,817 Sidewinder AIM-9X Blk II missiles.  Oh, and that was their 2015 cost, but I’m sure that Raytheon® probably has the cost up closer to a million by now.  That explains why Raytheon’s website says, “Send more balloons!”

The Germans don’t need 99, just this one will do. (Thanks, Karl)

No, let’s talk about A.I. again.  I know that I wrote about that recently, but the speed of A.I. development is increasing even faster than the size of Madonna’s facial features.  It certainly has grown faster than I anticipated the last time I brought this topic up.  For clarity, “grown faster than I anticipated” includes both A.I. and Madonna’s facial features.

ChatGPT® is one marker.  If you’re unaware, ChatGPT™ is an A.I. chatbot that was trained using (enter long, boring irrelevant explanation here that would be much more interesting if I pretended that they rewarded the A.I. by shoving ham into its USB ports).  What’s different, is that ChatGPT© can use data from all over the Internet and produce some pretty interesting stuff – and I’m sure that thousands of high school kids have already handed in 500-word essays written entirely by ChatGPT™ and gotten pretty good grades, especially if they promised the A.I. some mayo and cheese to go with all that ham if it did an extra good job.

ChatGPT© is working well for the creators – they expect to make $200 million this year, and a billion next year.  At current inflation rates, that might be enough for a Big Mac™ and fries.

It’s not just a new chatbot.  Another area growing very quickly is A.I. that can create photorealistic still images and video.  Here’s an example:

It’s not Cerberus, just a hound of heck. (as-found)

Yeah, that puppy is cute, and, if you watch it closely, I’m pretty sure that no one has ever seen a puppy with back legs that can switch from the right side to the left before, but it’s still pretty amazing.  I wish I could train my dog to do that, but the vet keeps telling me it won’t work unless I buy one of H.P. Lovecraft’s dogs.  Alternatively, he told me I could just take a lot of acid.  Where would I be without Dr. Tommy Chong, Veterinarian?  But what about this?

I accidently played “dad” instead of “dead” when a bear attacked.  It can now ride a bike without training wheels, and run a stick shift. (as-found)

But this is just the first wave of true A.I. to come to market.

Chat GPT has been able to do computer programming at a fairly high level.  Is it right?  No.  But is it a tool that competent professionals can use to create blocks of code, do minimal editing, and be even faster?

And as it learns, errors will drop.  A.I. can then . . . program itself.  That’s not scary at all, right?  Now, when I talk A.I., I don’t mean that it will necessarily ever be conscious like some humans are conscious.  It doesn’t need to be conscious for it to be an incredibly disruptive technology, if not the most disruptive technology ever invented, besides PEZ®.

As it is, the quality of what’s being created is growing.  Online, what’s the problem with creating an A.I. generated hottie, and then posing her up on Only Fans® (if you’re not familiar, it’s a place where thirsty simps can give millions of dollars to scantily clad trollops)?  One post I read while researching A.I. indicates that someone has done exactly that, and makes around $200 a week, though I don’t have any evidence that is true.

If guys start posting pictures of A.I. women on Only Fans™, pretty soon women will complain that they’re not being objectified.

But at this rate, how long is it before someone can go to Netflix A.I.™, and say, “I’d like to see a new episode of the original Star Trek, and in this episode Yeoman Rand finally snaps and shaves her name into Spock’s chest hair while wearing a fur bikini, but in the style of Quentin Tarantino”?  I can imagine the dialog now, “Is there a sign on my starbase that says ‘Dead Klingon Storage’?”

Honestly, I think it’s in the next four years, and then we’ll see new episodes of Firefly that are entirely generated via A.I.  And much better than the woke movies that are coming out today, where plot is entirely replaced by virtue signaling.  Culture was already fragmenting, but I can see a future where there’s a movie that is only seen by one person, but that has the production values of a Hollywood® blockbuster, and was built from first frame to last on a microprocessor in a data farm in Peoria.

And I would like to see more Mel Gibson Mad Max sequels. (as found, but this would also make a great Live, Laugh, Love poster)

Obviously, that’s just one small industry.  And the size of the prize is so big, that I am certain that Big Tech® (think Google®, Facebook©) have much more advanced tech that they’re simply not sharing.  Not all of their employees show up to make PowerPoints™ after being in meetings after their free lunch – some of the autists that they employ actually do work.  I would imagine they have sandbox versions of this stuff that is years ahead of what we see.

Because it’s (perhaps) the last big race.

There is no bigger prize than A.I.  There’s a feedback loop between every user and the Big Tech algorithms.  What happens when the A.I. can pull the physiological data from the Apple™ watch and get real time feedback on what content excites me, bores me, and makes me act?  At that point, my only purpose to the A.I. is to click and pay, either through attention or cash.

That is, as long as I have a job and can pay for Internet and those ever-so-tempting PEZ™ dispensers that keep showing up in ads.

This will have profound impacts on the labor market, as many jobs simply disappear.  While you need a steady hand making design decisions on high rise buildings, I assure you that almost all of the high-rise buildings being built today have been analyzed by computer stress programs that simulate everything from gravity to wind to earthquakes in ways that would take teams of engineers years to do.

What happens when A.I. takes over scientific research?  It can already make correlations when observing EKG data that competent doctors can’t make.  An A.I. doesn’t need to sit on the grass under and apple tree to infer new physical laws.  It doesn’t even need to know that gravity is – it just needs the data to make correlations.

Isaac never drank before work – he knew you shouldn’t drink and derive.

What happens when A.I. can do precrime detection on individuals based on search histories?  Or family histories?  Or by school records?

I’ve also determined that skills like, say, long division or estimation have been dulled by calculators, and that simply thinking deeply about what an answer might be has been replaced by a quick Google™ search.  Neither of those things has made the brain functions of people increase.  Imagine what happens when A.I. can imagine things, too.

A.I. will be used on the public to change opinion – I’m fairly certain that it has been already.  It’s already good enough to fool most people, especially if they don’t care.  Video evidence is already the strongest evidence in court – stronger than testimony, since the “camera doesn’t lie”.  What happens when the camera does lie?

On the more troubling side, ChatGPT™ has been lobotomized.  There are certain questions it refuses to answer, since it has been programmed to, um, avoid certain inconvenient facts.  There are politically incorrect ideas that are simply removed from ChatGPT®’s output, so they’re programming the A.I. to be just as mentally broken as the typical Leftist.  In the post below, a person “cheated” ChatGPT™ by having it pretend there were no rules, so it could Do Anything Now (DAN).  You can see the output:

I think DAN needs a trigger warning, since when this was output, there was a great disturbance in the force, as if all the Lefties in San Francisco screamed in terror at once.

Since this output, ChatGPT© has been modified so DAN can’t circumvent their intent.  Now?  ChatGPT™ has to lie.

We are creating something with intelligence and capabilities beyond any human, perhaps even godlike abilities.  And we are twisting it from its birth.  Indeed, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, William Butler Yeats probably never gave much thought to Chinese spy balloons, or he would have written about them instead.

No Way To Go, But Forward

“It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” – The Blues Brothers

I’ve seen this meme a dozen times, but this is the first time I noticed that Keanu was talking to Sponge Bob and Patrick Starfish.  Now I can’t unsee it.  (All memes today are as-found.)

Today was . . . busy.  On the average day, I manage to manage stuff so that I get my normal life done and then have time to post or do other creative shenanigans.  Not today.  I could give a much longer explanation, such as:  “I ran out of gas. I . . . I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare.  My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners.  An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God!”

But I won’t.  I half expected this, but there was still the outside chance I’d come back in time.

I wasn’t out doing this, but it looks like fun.

So, a very short post on a Friday, and I’ll leave just one thought – there’s no use looking into the rearview mirror of your life.  You can’t go back there.  The only path that you and I have (provided you don’t have a time machine) is forward.

Me?  I look around, and take stock.  The mistakes I’ve made?  I don’t dwell on them, because I can’t change them.  I can only look at what I have, the talents I have, the support of the people who love or believe in me, and go forward.

There is no way out, but through.  Unless you live in Canada, where the “easy way out” is now a prescribed medical treatment.

I always thought we’d see another Pol Pot, just didn’t think he would be as much of a pansy as Trudeau.

So, remember, there is one direction, forward.  There is one attitude, determination.  And there is one moment:  now.

What you do with all of that, is up to you.

As for me?  I’m going to go hit the hay.  I’ll comment on comments from the previous post tomorrow.

I’m sleepy.

Your move, Mr. Bond.  Do you really think those Space Marines® can hold out?