Month: April 2024

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior.  Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails.  Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations.  It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were?  In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this?  The book in question is A Farewell to Alms:  A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.  How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

  • Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results.  (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me)  After a bit, I finally found it.
  • On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor.  Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all?  Guess you’d better start picking favorites.  In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why?  The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever.  Houses (if they even  had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.”  The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler:  “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor.  Great Britain was no exception.  There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor.  The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids.  But the poor kids also die more often.  This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy:  the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up.  Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close.  It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close.  The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows.  Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life.  And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless:  marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft.  Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft.  And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors.  It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down.  It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK).  To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy.  So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.

Forbidden Opinions: The GloboLeft Versus The Beautiful

“Look, there is light and beauty up there, that no shadow can touch.” – The Return of the King

I’m trying to improve my double entendres.  But it’s not easy.

This is the last in the series about the GloboLeft’s war against the Good, Beautiful, and True, at least for now.  We’re down to Beautiful.  Why did I do them in the order of True, Good, and Beautiful?  Because they’re not really in order, and they each complement the other.  Or maybe I have a problem with authority – who can say?

Which one of the three is best?  Each of them.  They all work together.  That is why the GloboLeft fights these so very, very hard.  Their typical pattern is to pick a value, and then pick its absolute opposite, and then celebrate that.  To pick from Monday’s post:  why to they look at men dressed as women and call them women?  Because that’s the opposite, and it must be celebrated.

(as found)  My take?  There are two sexes, two genders, and about a million fetishes.  I mean, I have a logic fetish – I can’t stop coming to conclusions.

Beauty is the last of the three that we’ll discuss, but it figures in so much of what we see in our lives today, especially since everything that’s ugly is now celebrated, and there is an active attempt to remove beauty from public life.

A GloboLeftist would try to convince you that beauty is subjective.

It is not.  Back when people were allowed to experiment on human babies, they’d show babies pictures of pretty things and ugly things.  Babies reacted positively to pretty things (and people!) and negatively to ugly things (and George Soros).  It is a part of us.  And we know it when we see it.

So, here are some of the statements that the GloboLeft actually believes:

GloboLeftists believe that every female is stunning and brave.

Not so much with males, since they don’t like the patriarchy.  Or something, not sure what, but it’s still okay to make fun of dudes.  This is one where they’re specifically talking about female (which includes, bizarrely, transexuals) beauty.

Here’s an example:  Lizzo is just as beautiful as (insert actually attractive actress here).  I wasn’t originally aware of what a Lizzo even was, until I saw a video of her playing a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison.

(meme as found) Where do you find the scariest part of the internet?  HTTP Lovecraft.

Wow.  She (at that point) looked to weigh about as much as a World War II Iowa class battleship.  And she wore a skintight leotard.  There isn’t enough eye-bleach in the world.  It looked like a potato (Lizzo) with a crystal toothpick.

Another example:  Zendaya was named one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world.  I’ll admit that she’s a middling character actress with a range of emotions that go from “irritated” to “thinking about talking to my doctor about my inability to have regular bowel movements.”

10 most beautiful women in the world?  She wouldn’t have been in the top 10 in my senior class.  Plus, I think she’ll fill out and look like a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears® before she’s 35.  The good news is I don’t think she’ll go full Lizzo-potato.

I know which choice I’d McMake.  (meme as found, so my criticism is not unique)

The GloboLeftists believe that all art is valid and beautiful.

There are so many different ways that humans work to create beauty that it’s hard to catalog them all.  But I’ll start with architecture.  Sure, I don’t live in a city, but lots of people do.  Here’s one made by actual humans in Copenhagen versus a nameless, faceless, commieblock.  Which is more beautiful?  Which makes you feel more human?  Which would contain more PEZ®?

I worked with an Asian who dipped Copenhagen.  His name was Mr. Chu.

And then there’s music.  We started the 20th Century with Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1908) moved to I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1963, 55 years later.  What came out 57 years later?  Wet Ass Pussy.

Sure, Take Me Out to the Ballgame doesn’t mention virtues, but it’s innocent.  I Want to Hold Your Hand shows a little intent.  But Wet Ass Pussy?  It’s beyond crass and replaces Beauty with it’s very opposite.

Likewise, literature (mainstream) has gone downhill.  I’ll pick science fiction.  Why?  I’ve been reading that since I could read.  Around 2010 I had the idea that I’d outgrown science fiction, that I was older, jaded, and the genre didn’t have anything for me anymore.

I then picked up one of the old books I’d loved as a kid.  It was still awesome.  I hadn’t changed, the genre had become ugly.  And that’s coming from a Hugo®-nominated (really, this is true, under a pseudonym) author.  But there are still great novels out there.  And maybe one of those authors will (hint) post links to his stuff below.

No, the Beauty still exists in literature, but the GloboLeftElite that controls the mainstream press wants to make it ugly.  That’s the same reason that movies are sucking now, and actresses often look like a burlap sack filled with doorknobs.  The movies are no longer meant to exult in what’s best in us, to show and celebrate virtues.  Nope.  Movies are there to sell the opposite of the values and the opposite of Beauty.

Speaking of movies, Disney® apparently is forcing video game creators to make characters ugly.  From Overlord DVD (a YouTube® channel) comes the news that a new Star Wars® video game is . . . ugly.  The rumor is that Disney© is requiring that the studio make the characters that way.  Why?

(as found at Overlord DVD’s channel)  “Fugly girl, come out to play . . . Fugly giiiirrrll, come out to pla-ay.”

Disney© isn’t doing this to make money.  There must be another purpose.

I could go on and on, but at some point I need to hit the hay.  Here are more examples, and you no doubt could make a very, very long list where Beauty has been replaced by ugly recently:

  • Painting contests, won by an actual chimpanzee.
  • Celebrating every family structure except ones with mothers and fathers,
  • Natural foods versus slop – I think nacho cheese is probably made in a refinery out of Vaseline and yellow crayons, but I can’t prove this.

The end process is to pick a value, invert it, with the goal of subverting the actual value.  The best news is this:  The True, the Beautiful, and The Good are going to win.

How do I know this?

Even the GloboLeft knows the True, the Beautiful, and the Good when they see it.  They just hate it.

So, they dress up a potato and celebrate it playing a flute.  This is their best play.

We’ve got this.

Forbidden Economics: The GloboLeft Versus The Good

“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history.  One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

My neighbor has had a bad financial crisis.  He has to drive a car without a top and his car doesn’t have a roof.

Monday’s post was about Forbidden Science.  These are inconvenient truths that simply don’t fit into the ideology of a GloboLeftist.  In the tradition of the very best GloboLeftists, whenever this inconvenient set of facts conflicts with their ideology, they do what rational people have always done – they consult how the facts disagree with their ideology and change their positions.  Nah, just kidding.  Instead GloboLeftists ignore them and stick their fingers in their ears and yell loudly “I’m not listening to you!  I’m not listening to you!  I’m not listening to you!”

Wednesday is the day I typically post about economics and related issues, so what better topic than Forbidden Economics?  Just like on Monday, I’ll start with things that the GloboLeft actually believes and then make fun of them, primarily because they deserve it.

Me?  I say bring back the positive power of bullying.

I was a bully to this orphan kid in school.  I mean, it wasn’t like he was going to tell his parents.

GloboLeftists believe that Modern Monetary Theory isn’t just made-up justification for “I spend what I want”.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has quietly taken the place of any sort of rational thinking.  When I first wrote about it, it seemed so fringe and tongue in cheek that I was shocked anyone smarter than AOC would fall for it.  I know, I know, that leaves about 85% of the country, but the GloboLeft has willingly and enthusiastically embraced MMT.

What is MMT?  It’s the theory that, since money is entirely made up in the first place, that it doesn’t matter how much you print.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The idea is that money is like points in a football game.  When a team scores a touchdown, there aren’t some vat of points that are decreased to add points to that team’s score.  Instead, they’re made up.  The limit to the number of points that can be scored in a game is based entirely on the productivity of the teams.

If we reset to zero every day and all played NFL® football, well, that might make sense.  In MMT, the idea is that extra cash is just soaked up via taxation rather than the game ending.

What happens when the score keeps going up from game to game.

But the GloboLeftElite really, really don’t like to be taxed.  As much as Warren Buffett complains that he’s not taxed enough, the one thing Warren never, ever does is send more than he owes in taxes in voluntarily.  In fact, he has fleets of lawyers working every angle possible so that he pays the least amount in taxes possible.  (Note:  If Donald Trump were to try this he would be tried for felony tax evasion.)

There are two types of people in this world:  Those who can find an answer through simple deduction.

This is not a new thing.  It really started under W., and has continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden.

But what could go wrong?

GloboLeftists believe that women are cheated in the workplace, earning less than men.

I’ll start by reminding everyone that GloboLeftists don’t even know what a woman is, to the point that a sitting Supreme Court Justice was unable to define what a woman was during her Senate confirmation hearings, and sits on the Supreme Court.

However . . .

The reality is that women actually make more than men when their wages are controlled for things like, oh, career choice, amount of overtime put in, time taken off to have children, et cetera.  The idea is so simplistic in that it takes everyone, puts them in a bag, and says that the average man makes X, and the average woman makes 0.8X.

Yes.  That’s true.  But when I went to a college graduation several years ago and they called out the engineers, 90% plus were men in some fields, and in no engineering field were women even close to a majority.

And they both give sound advice.

I wonder if that could be partially a reason for a pay difference?

Nah.  Sexism is easier, and if people will swallow MMT, they’ll swallow anything.  I mean, we already knew that about Kamala.

GloboLeftists believe that increasing a labor supply won’t decrease wages.

Immigration is an amazing source of brain rot for GloboLeftists.  They think that bringing in hordes of illegal aliens won’t drop the price of unskilled labor.  Now, not for one minute do I believe that’s the case, and neither do the people (the GloboLeftElite) that are feeding those thoughts to the rank and file.

But lower labor costs mean higher profits, so why not bring in not only illegal aliens, but tons of people on H1-B visas to take the jobs that Americans had – the number of stories of people showing up to work only to be forced to train their replacements to “earn” their severance package is so common as to be boring.  It doesn’t even make the news anymore.

Yet the flip side is that they also don’t think that raising the minimum wage will have any impact on prices?

As found.

The last belief that I’m going to touch on that the GloboLeft has is this:  history has nothing to teach us about the danger of an irreligious society basted in feminism and socialism.

Hey, wait, do you hear someone yelling “I’m not listening to you!  I’m not listening to you!  I’m not listening to you!”?

I’m sure it’s not just me.  You can hear that, right?

Oh, and as a follow up to Monday’s post, here is NASA’s Administrator.  He believes the far side of the Moon is always dark.  Really.

Forbidden Science: The GloboLeft Versus Truth

“Archeology is not an exact science.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

I failed my medical school test because of nerves.  The right answer was bones.

It has become clear that the GloboLeft has become truly Soviet in the way that they view that basic reality must conform to their ideology.  Their ideology isn’t based in any sort of reality – it’s based instead on the equivalent of a child’s wish list for the way that they’re really, really like the world to be.  And if they wish it enough, it must be true, or they’ll hold their breath until it is.

Here are a few ways that the “I f***ing love science” crowd get more wrong than the Vaxx:

They believe that there are no significant personality and physical differences between men and women.

They really believe this.  To be fair, if all they had to deal with were GloboLeft troglodyte women and pencil-neck Antifa® dudes, that might be an assumption that might make sense.

If they really buy into this, (and they do) then the transification of the world starts to make sense.  If anyone feels like they’re a woman, then, boom, they’re a woman.  Actual women then become “uterus havers” or some other such nonsense.  That’s not made up – I don’t even have to write jokes with their newspeak silliness.

How is this easily provable?  The under-15 boys’ team in Dallas beat the U.S. Women’s World Cup® team.  Yup, the very same team that featured the pink-haired piece of beef jerky Megan Rapinoe.  Yet, this is ignored because . . . reasons.  Back when I was in college, one of my friends was on the (very average) Division 2 college swim team.

Cinderella was awful at soccer – she kept running away from the ball.

“Yup, beat a world record tonight,” he said as he came back into the house we lived at after practice.  I did a double take.

“What?”

“Yeah, the woman’s world record.  Everybody on the team can beat it.”

The consequences of this are many, but it’s clear to see that if this isn’t checked, there won’t be any reason to have sports where actual women compete.

So, there are physical differences.  And personality?  Woman have been charged with being the nurturing caregivers for children since forever.  I could list all the differences here, but that would be a post all by itself.

The GloboLeft indicates that biological race has no basis in fact, despite the evidence becoming clearer and clearer every year that this is very much the case. 

One meme I saw on the Internet was an organ donation organization asking for more organ donors that were black and Hispanic.  I believe it was on InstaFace®, but wherever it was, the organ donation organization was immediately swamped by people calling it racist because, “all organs are the same.”

What’s the worst thing to hear during open heart surgery?  Anything.

No, they aren’t.  It’s not that a black person has to have a heart from a black person, but the chances of a match go up tremendously when the donor is of the same race.  Mixed race people, especially, have difficulty in getting organs that match.

And this should surprise no one.  Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior.  Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails.  Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations.  It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were?  In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

Is another term for a mattress a “loaf of bed”?

How has that changed them?  And, how could a professor think to share that information in the Cancel Culture?

The GloboLeft believes that people are blank slates, and not dependent for 50-80% on genetics for their personality, sense of humor, and intelligence. 

The Wilder Family is a fun one, but I can certainly see the interplay of the genetics from The Mrs. and I in our children.  I have the unique opportunity to have been adopted, but I did manage to meet my biological father later in life, when I was an adult.  There was no subject that I was interested in that we couldn’t discuss, in depth.

I had never met the man, yet his personality contained no surprises.

If they genetically engineer pigs, will we get CRISPR bacon?

Absolutely there is a place for nurture in the world, but the numbers are showing that most 100% biological siblings share much more than nurture – we’ve all seen those news stories about twins raised separately that have the same job, same hairstyle and often very similar wives.  The Minnesota Study on twins reared apart showed that the twins showed generally were the same as twins raised in the same household in terms of personality, interests, and attitudes.  The twin study came up with about a 50% nature score, though observationally it’s more than that.

Again, the GloboLeft can wish all that they want, but the facts don’t follow their ideology.  In the end, Truth always wins out.  But the GloboLeft doesn’t like the Truth.  I guess that’s why the listen to NPR® and CNN™.

Read The Funniest And Best Post You’ll Read On Regret In The Next 431 Hours

“Everything depends upon speed, and the secrecy of his quest.  Do not regret your decision to leave him, Frodo must finish this task alone.” – LOTR:  The Two Towers

A burglar stole all my lamps.  I should be mad, but I’m de-lighted.

People rarely change.

Perhaps the only thing that makes people change is an intense, emotional, experience.  Nearly dying is one of those.  Losing a land war in Asia is another.  Having a loved one pass away is yet another.  How we react to those intense moments in life can be significant.

Why is this important?

For the most part, you are who you are.  As I started this off, by observation I’ve seen that most people don’t change very much, at all, throughout their lives.  There are several friends that I have known for decades that I only talk to every few years.  Why don’t we talk more often?  Not much has changed – we’ve gotten to the point in life where those bright and technicolor moments of childhood and young adulthood are behind us.

Oddly, I think many of those folks would jump in a car and drive a day to help me if I told them I needed it and it was an emergency.  Now, I have no idea if they’d do it a second time if I just made up the emergency, or if the emergency was that I couldn’t find my car keys.

Yeah, there’s probably a limit.

But Jesus never bragged:  “For I speak not of my own Accord.”  John 12:49

One conversation I recently had with a friend was about those people we went to high school with that were either very ill or have already passed away.  As I look around to the people I know, it’s getting to the point where I’ll be going to more funerals than weddings.  That’s okay, I’m sure I can be the guy that puts the FUN in funeral.

When I talk to my friends, however, the things that brought us together rarely, if ever change.  That’s not to say that that things don’t happen in our lives, but the core of our being stays the same.  The character traits that made me admire them, or the personality quirks that made us laugh at the same jokes or love the same movies, or the shared experiences that bond us are still there.

I did a google search for “lost medieval servant boy” but it said, “this page cannot be found”.

Of course, everyone has tragedy in their life – experiencing the tough parts of life is what makes experiencing the best parts of life seem ever sweeter.  Part of getting older is getting that perspective so that I can look back and see which of the things that were so important to me twenty years ago are still important.  Some of them aren’t.  Those are the ephemeral things in life, like my favorite songs.

Oh, wait, I’m still stuck at 17 with those.  Darn.  But I will say that I certainly care a lot less about what people thing – I guess I’m becoming a curmudgeon.

Which is also okay, since I’ve also learned that most people don’t think about me very much at all.  That’s not a statement based on sadness – it’s a statement of reality.  Unless I was Donald Trump.  Then I’d live rent free in the minds of millions of GloboLeftists.

And she also falls way high on the Crazy axis and way low on the Hot axis.

I also know that, looking back, were there things I would go back and change, knowing what I know today?  Of course!  There is no fully human life that has ever been lived where mistakes weren’t made.  But spending even a single second of my life in regret, kicking myself, is a waste of that second, and an emotion that will lead to nothing but despair, which is certainly an advanced form of Evil.

Why?

The past is gone.  Unless someone develops a time machine or John McAfee successfully shows everyone how to drastically shift quantum worldlines, well, those major mistakes of the past are with us and will be with us until we shift off this mortal coil ourselves, moving from the washer to the dryer of life.

But we can’t let those events define us.  Sure, they can change us, and any significant emotional experience will change us.  Yes, we can work to atone for our errors.  But when we have the time, why not focus that emotional experience into something good?

“When you’ve fallen down, and you’re lying there on the ground, pick something up and bring it with you when you get up.” – John Maxwell

When I was faced with my last major setback, I tried to see what aspects of that setback were mine and mine alone.   Rather than spend time in regret or revenge, I really tried to focus on things that would make me better after the experience, not in anger or fear, but out of a desire to really get better as a person.

When a Venn diagram wants revenge, does it become a Venn dettagram?

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise is part of what came out of that experience.  The other part was I decided to file my teeth into little fangs.  That part didn’t work out so well.  Never file your teeth into little fangs.

My question and challenge to myself was to see what I could do to make myself and the world a better place.  Do I always do that?

No!  Of course not.

But I try.  My perspective has changed.  As much as I share about me in these posts, these posts are not about me.  These posts are, when I do a really, really, good job, about the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Back to regret:  I’ve got a simple question that I asked myself at my last big setback:  “What price am I willing to pay to hold on to feelings of regret rather than channeling that feeling into something that changes the world for the better or to repair the wrongs that I’ve committed?”

That’s really a powerful question.  I could have stayed with regret, which leads to despair, which leads to . . . nowhere.  Unless it’s channeled to make changes in me for the better.  My first marriage failed.  The result?  I resolved to never, ever lie to The Mrs.  So, in return, she never asks me “does this pair of pants make my butt look big?” because I’d have to answer, “no, it’s the butt that makes your butt look big.”

A friend of mine married a trophy wife.  Apparently, she didn’t win first place.

In one sense, it’s freeing.  But it’s a change I made that made me better.

I think that, in the end, our efforts to better ourselves, especially morally, are a very big part of why we’re here.  Human beings are really, really pathetic when they don’t have to struggle to achieve greatness.  I have the receipts on this:  Prince Harry, whose greatest trauma was that his brother once said something mean to him.  But he’s paying the price:  Meghan Markle.  Perhaps Harry should feel regret.

It’s been said that God gives his toughest loads to his strongest servants, and it has been my observation that this is really true, since most people are actually better than me.  Though I’m trying.

Again, people rarely change.  If you’re in the position to change, pick something up when you get up.

Unless it’s Meghan Markle.  You should leave that trash right in the gutter.

Zoomers And Pools Of Cash

“The pools of blood that have collected, you’ve got to soak that up.  Now, Jimmie, we need to raid your linen closet.” – Pulp Fiction

How do you drown a programmer?  Put up a sign that says, “no swimming”.

If I were to come up with a metaphor for today’s situation, well, it might be this . . .

While I was half asleep this morning I visualized in that gauzy dreamy sort of way, dark pools, sitting quietly behind a large earthen structure.  At first, the surfaces of the pools were smooth and reflective like glass as they slowly filled.

It was calm, and serene.  For now.  But the level was coming up.

What was the defining moment of my generation in our youth?  Probably the fall of the Berlin Wall.  I can still remember the news stories piling up day by day as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations slowly turned away from communism and then someone said the Berlin Wall didn’t match the Iron Curtains, so, it had to go.  What a time to be alive!  Heck, women were still winning women’s swim meets!

If I were born a bit earlier, it would probably would have been the Iranian Hostage Crisis, or Carter’s Stagflation, both of which led to Reagan’s election and eventual conversion to MechaReagan®, who fought Godzilla® and Mothra™.  But that’s another story.

Anyway, think about those defining moments, the defining events of Gen Z are still out there, and I wonder what that would be.  In the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a story that, at the time, was filled with hope.  Here was the collapse of a political system bent on the forceful subjugation of humanity.  What’s not to celebrate?

What was the favorite song of East Germans before the Berlin Wall came down?  “Under Prussia”

In the end, though, what was lost in that moment was restraint.  Just like Gingrich restrained the worst (political!) impulses of Bill Clinton (“What, I can’t spend what I want to spend because of the way the bond market might react?”), the Soviet Union constrained the worst impulses of the people in power in Washington.  That restraint really ended with Clinton who had to fight to save his political career after lying under oath about dallying with the help.

But after Clinton, after 9-11?

Bill Clinton will be remembered for the economy.  Oh, and that one other thing . . . .

All restraint fell.  Oh, sure, we needed to go and find Osama Bin Laden, but did we need to invade Iraq?  In hindsight, almost certainly not.  Did we need to stay in Afghanistan for 20 years?  Again, almost certainly not.  And these adventures cost trillions of dollars, all of which we didn’t have.  But that’s okay.  Cash isn’t for earning.  It’s for spending.  Like AOC said when asked where the money would come from for one of her socialist programs:  “You just pay for it!”

She was, and is, serious about this, since her understanding of cause and effect is limited to her goldfish-like memory.

But those dark pools of my dreams, they were filling.  And while they filled, they began to destabilize everyone tied to the United States.  In Egypt, for instance, I think they eat nothing but rice, sawdust, and the occasional house pet, which is fairly inexpensive.  So, a small change in the price of rice or a decrease in the availability of sawdust causes people, real people, to go hungry.

Does Biden look like he needs more fiber in his diet to you?

As Snickers® told us, “You’re not you when you’re hungry” and hungry people are the ones that overthrow Middle Eastern despots.  But that’s okay.  You just pay for it.

What does the Left think about all the illegal aliens that are teeming over the border in relentless streams?  You just pay for them.  And you have to.  Even when we’re not stacking them like cordwood in Chicago or displacing vets to house them in New York or trying to teach them to ski in Colorado, there is one horrible fact about illegal aliens:

They cost more than they create.  We can’t get a volume discount if we import them by the millions.  No, they just cost billions more.  The net annual value of an illegal to the economy is, at minimum, -$10,000 per year.  NEGATIVE $10,000, and that’s after the work they provide.

I used to worry about the collapse of the United States because of the destruction of our nation’s values and economy by illegals, but that was too scary.  Now I just worry about celebrities. (meme as found)

Where does the cash come from?  If you’re AOC, “You just pay for them.”

And all that “you just pay for it” is what’s filling those dark pools of my dreams.

If all that cash would just sit, quietly, in those dark pools, there really isn’t a problem.  If we pay Raytheon™ for a $4 million dollar Patriot® missile to destroy $20,000 Iranian drones, as long as Raytheon© just leaves that money in their bank account, filling up the pool.

But, oops, you have to pay people to make the missile.  If it’s only the Chinese who keep the money in a bank account somewhere and never use it, that’s fine, too, because that’s just another dark pool of money.

When the Fed™ started out bailing out every bank, that’s really what happened.  The banks kept the cash in deposit, and salted it away in their dark pools.

I think it’s the dark pools of cash that will ultimately be the defining moment for Gen Z.  Well, not the dark pools themselves, but, rather, the mess they make when the levee breaks.  We’re seeing the problem starting now, and Gen Z is aware – many of them have lived their teen years seeing nothing but inflation as the pools break loose.

I’m getting tired of Gen Z, always walking around like they can afford to rent the place.

The pools are up high, and have a great deal of potential energy.  The destruction the flow will create as the cash spreads down through the economy has been bad, but it will be legendary.  When the American Continental was issued it was backed by the same thing the dollar is today:  nothing.  The phrase “not worth a Continental” was no doubt on the minds of the framers of the Constitution as they wrote that no State shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment in debts.”

But that’s quaint thought, right?

(meme as found)

Weimar Germany followed the AOC “just pay for it” formula, and German bankers eventually (after some, um, events) became the most cautious in Europe about inflation.

So, after my dream of last night, I think we have a big dam problem.

It worked so well last time, right?

Give War A Chance

“War is brewing.” – The Lord of the Rings

Pa Wilder survived mustard gas and pepper spray.  He was a seasoned veteran.

War.  What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

I have a different answer:

Saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Whaaaaat?

Yeah, war, it turns out, is an amazing catalyst for providing lots of life saving technology that has saved far more people than it has killed.  I need to jump in here with this because everyone has their sphincters clenched because it appears we’re on the edge of the Third World War.  Maybe that won’t be so bad.

Hang on, this will all make sense in a moment.

I’m a trained professional.  Or I would be if I were trained.  And if I were getting paid for this.

Give a thief a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a thief a bank and he’ll rob everyone.

But I made a pretty bold statement, and I have the receipts to back it up.  First let’s start with what I’m counting.  I’m not counting as “war” when governments kill their own citizens.  In the 20th century alone (no Fox® required) governments killed an estimated 262 million of their own citizens.

Yeah, that’s an ugly number, and it’s certainly the largest man-made source of involuntary death.  This is also the biggest argument EVER that the Second Amendment is the very best life-saving technology ever conceived by mortal man.

Ever.

War is a different kettle of fish, and it depends on the counting.  One source says the total number of combat deaths since 1800 is around 35 million.  Sure, that’s a lot, and I’d love to have them all over for a nice dinner, but it’s small compared to those killed by their own government.  A broader definition of “war” would put it at 131 million in the twentieth century, but I’d guess that also includes a big overlap of citizens killed by their own government.

I hear that Stalin collected political jokes.  When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.”

Tomato, tomah-to.  Let’s split the difference and say it’s probably 80 million in the twentieth century, or roughly as many people as Joe Biden has allowed to come streaming over the border in the last three years.

But how, John Wilder, you amazing stud, you said you had receipts on how war brought about benefits that exceeded the costs?

War provides an acceleration of humanity, it provides the necessary push and investment into things that help troops do unexpected things on the battlefield.  Like living.  That leads us to penicillin.  It was spurred into development (it had been discovered earlier) in World War II.  Would antibiotics have been lost in a research paper without World War II?  Don’t know – but World War II allowed them to be tested on Allied soldiers.

While we’re on medical, what about smallpox?  Oh, sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but I’ve been told it is far worse than bigpox.  What spurred that innovation?  War.  The Revolutionary War, in fact.

Well, there’s a joke coming back from 2012.  I guess humor ended then.

I know I try to avoid drinking water since mankind developed beer and wine, but water chlorination has saved lots of people who aren’t drinking booze.  Who developed the process to make chlorine gas cheaply so he could gas a bunch of French?  A German guy in World War One.

There are more, but there are hundreds of millions of lives saved in just those three developments.

What else did war provide?

  • Nuclear power – sure, just like OJ’s obituary, someone will say . . . “Oh, and there’s that one other thing” but nuclear power has produced clean power over the globe with, well, a few exceptions.
  • Jet engines – without World War Two, would Steve Miller have ever had someone to take him home?
  • Radar – I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty good at keeping planes from hitting each other.
  • The Internet – how else would we get pictures of cats?
  • GPS – it can guide bombs, or it can take us to a liquor store in an unfamiliar town. Guess which is used more often?

I found a $20 outside of a liquor store.  I decided to do what Jesus would do, so I turned it into wine.

  • Satellites – without World War Two, would we have these? Probably not.  And satellites have made weather prediction a pretty trivial thing.  Doesn’t mean the prediction will be any good, but, you know, we can do it faster.
  • Computers – created to calculate firing tables for artillery and to decode German stuff. Again, now we use for pictures of cats.  And porn.
  • Medical imaging, including x-rays and ultrasound – all started with military tech.
  • Medical prosthetics – this is grimmer, but the more things got shot off, the better the tech.
  • Telecommunications technology, including wireless networks – the very first time I used WIFI in a house, the host noted that it was based on tech used in Gulf War I. WIFI?  Yeah, thank a war.
  • Aircraft technology – when you make tens of thousands of aircraft that are used to the maximum extent of their capability, you learn what makes them fall out of the sky. Which is useful.
  • Rocket technology – no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. From Werner von Braun to Elon Musk, I’m raising my glass to the foreigners who get us into space.   Oh, von Braun’s first rockets weren’t aimed at the Moon.
  • Sonar – I don’t fish, so, I guess this is okay. Meh tier.
  • Chemical engineering – this is a really important one – in making all the gases to kill people in World War One and in all the bits and pieces required to make tires without rubber and how to make ammonia to kill yet more people in World War One, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
  • Trauma care – how is it that 35 people are shot in an average Chicago weekend and only eight die? Trauma care.  This stuff was built on lots of combat experience, and thankfully keeps lots of innocent people breathing.
  • Cryptography – the entire field of cryptography is due to war. It’s the backbone of current connections and internet transactions, but started when people wanted to figure out where the Germans were going to be next week.

But when the Vikings used dots and dashes to communicate, it was Norse code.

I’m no longer scared of war.  Sure, it sucks if you or your friends got exploded, but the numbers don’t lie:  war has killed probably between 35 million (low) and 131 million (way high) in the twentieth century.  The advancements from war have probably saved (one estimate I read) five billion people.

War seems to have saved more people than it has killed.  By a huge margin.

So, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him):  “Give war a chance.”

Maybe, but maybe we’re on the eve of creation?

The Space Between The Words

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

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

Lame repost today, I was about halfway through the usual post, but then everything got delayed, and then I got a book on the topic that I’m reading so the post will be better.  It’ll keep until next week, but as a bonus, I think Monday’s post will be great.  See you then!

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

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

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

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

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

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

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

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

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

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

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

Why does it matter to me?

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

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

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

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

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

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

I bet no one expected that meme.

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

Or it won’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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