John – Page 102 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.

“In 1539, the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels. But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery . . .” – The Maltese Falcon

In Malta they don’t check your bags for guns, they check them with guns.

Sometimes advice that is good for a country is really bad for an individual. I tried building my own navy once, and it was an abysmal failure, since I’ve never lived near water all the ships just sat on the gravel. Thankfully it was still enough of a navy that France surrendered anyway. So, memo to self: don’t build a navy 1000 miles away from water unless you want to take Paris.

But why beat on France? I’ve discovered that on this blog, it’s really okay to trash-talk the French because in the last year I’ve gotten more traffic from Malta than I have from France on an absolute basis. On a per capita basis, Malta is ahead on visitor count of any place in the world. The United States is second, but it’s gaining ground. Malta, spread the word!

I digress because it’s late and I’m a bit punchy – so I’ll get back to the point. One place where the advice for a country and the advice for an individual both make sense is when it comes to know-how. Where does know-how come from? Sweat.

I had a boss fairly early in my career (technically a grand-boss, i.e., my boss’s boss) who was fairly fond of saying, especially when assigning a task that would entail huge hours of overtime and personal sacrifice, “Think of it as short-term pain for long-term gain.” He’d smile when he said it, but that didn’t make it better.

Being young and stupid, we grumbled about what he was saying: “What does he know? It’s always short-term pain. We’ll never get to the long-term gain.” This was exactly the type of short-sightedness you’d expect out of a kid. And we were kids, really. We also worked our butts off while we were in our twenties, and most people who started in that group did okay. The short-term pain translated (finally) into long-term gain.

Please donate to Malta so they can end this horrible poverty.

It’s that way for individuals. Is it that way for countries, too?

Yes, absolutely.

When you do something productive, anything productive, you learn. You learn as an individual. You learn as a company. You learn as a country. If you do it right, it’s painful. It’s hard. It’s work. It’s frustrating. And when you finally win? It’s exhilarating.

If you do a really, really, really good job? You get rewarded, by trying to do it again.

And those results are consistent between an individual, a company, and a country.

Imagine a kid who was born wealthy. Given tutors. Given “help” getting into a good college. Coasted in college. Coasted in Daddy’s company. Unless Daddy was very, very wealthy, the kid will ruin the company as he runs the company. Why? The kid never had to work, never had to learn.

The entire life of the child was built around pain-avoidance.

Okay, I’ll admit, that water looks the complete opposite of painful. I guess I wouldn’t learn anything there.

I’m not going to blame wealth – wealth is neither moral nor immoral. I’ve known wealthy kids who were better people than I’ll ever be. I’ve known wealthy kids who weren’t worth gum on the bottom of my sneaker. But poverty is no virtue, either. I’ve met horrible people who had no money. And, again, I’ve met people who were dead broke that could qualify for sainthood.

Morality aside (for the moment) the one thing I know about effective people is that they know how to work hard. They are driven. Most of them, wealthy or not, were not spoiled.

Pain and sweat is good for companies, too. It makes them shed employees, it makes them focus on the things they do that actually provide value to the customer. Or they die. And the death of inefficient companies is good – those resources can go to companies that can be efficient, can meet the needs of their customers, like PEZ®.

But the critical step is playing the game. If iPhones® aren’t made in the United States, we simply won’t know how to make them. Certainly someone knows how to make them, but it’s not Apple™. I won’t argue that Apple© designed the phone, but there is a world of difference between designing a complex integrated electronic component and building it. In building iPhones™, the Chinese have solved the technical details on how to implement that design and how to stack all the apps behind that sheet of glass so they don’t fall out. I’m relatively certain (though I’m not in those meetings) that Chinese teams from the manufacturer meet regularly with the Apple™ teams on design. The Chinese teams tell Apple® most of what Apple© wants to know, but the Chinese teams learn:

Global logistics
Effective employee training
What stock options are
Management of complex system integration
Where the best restaurants are in Palo Alto
Quality control

All of that’s pretty good, but they also develop the teams on ground – the engineering know-how to solve the production problems that invariably start. You might have a complete set of drawings of a baby, but you certainly don’t know how to build one from start to finish. Nobody does.

Oh, wait. You probably do. Okay, pretend the baby is a 1966 Mustang™. That you don’t know how to build from start to finish. You have to go all the way from smelting iron to figuring out how to put numbers on the AM radio dial.

That’s (one of) the problems that we have getting into space nowadays. We forgot how to build the Apollo stuff. Certainly we know, for instance, what chemicals went into the heat shield on the Apollo command module, but we had to figure out how to build one in 2018 – the engineers who did it in the first place are all retired. My bet is that they didn’t figure out how to build it the way they did in the 1960’s – they probably figured out a new solution.

More fun facts: If you stacked all of the current residents of Rome in the Pantheon, someone would arrest you, unless they were at the bottom of the stack.

This isn’t the first time we’ve lost technology. The Romans used concrete to build many structures, including the largest un-reinforced concrete dome ever – at 142 feet in diameter. How do we know this? The dome still exists today – it’s in Rome, and it’s called the Pantheon, and like your mother, it’s almost 2,000 years old. Yes it’s made of concrete, as in concrete just like your garage floor is made of. But after the Goths came over for an extended visit, the Romans . . . forgot how to make it. Consequently, concrete wasn’t “invented” again until 1824, and we weren’t that great with it until 1900 or so. The Romans had a quality of concrete that was so good, it wasn’t until the last few decades that we were able to match it, and some of the properties we still can’t figure out.

We don’t have records on all the failures and sweat that the Romans had as they perfected their concrete, but they were good at it.

This floor could break a LOT of plates.

But as the Romans learned, if you don’t make stuff anymore, you forget how to do it. You specialize it, you ship it abroad. The Romans didn’t have time for nasty old industries like making dinner plates, so they shipped it off to a lower labor cost area in what’s now France. Archaeologists know this because when they sifted through the trash, they found these really nice plates. But after Rome fell, trade fell off with France, and the factories closed because they didn’t have customers. Archaeologists love plates because people break them on a periodic basis, and even more often if there are teenage boys in the house. Thus, they go into the trash at a regular rate, and you can date the trash by the style of plate.

In the trash 100 years after the fall of the Empire (in the west), the plates were rough. Even the most wealthy people ate off of plates that were inferior in every way to the plates common people had easy access to in the past. The future didn’t get better, because the Romans forgot.

I worry sometimes that we’re the wealthy spoiled kid, shipping off our work to other people so that they learn how to do it while we ship them money that we’ve printed out of nothing, short-term gain for long-term pain. But that’s okay.

Based on the recent protests in France, I think the French are planning something. Maybe they’ll surrender to Malta?

Nah. The Maltese are too good for the French.

Pantheon photo: By Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via wikimedia

Malta floor photo: By Sudika [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via wikimedia

How the Constitution Dies

Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence. As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us. My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America. It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area. Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily. Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before. I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did. They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade. These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal. Bastogne. Chosin Reservoir. Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944. His sister was a friend of my father. As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math decades before I was born. He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18. No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name. Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism. The value of the Constitution. The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church. Those boys who travelled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving. The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny? Yes.

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when. A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built. There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms. These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years. It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens. Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population. A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American. 10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night. The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there. I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by. She spoke no English. One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?” I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.” It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States. I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers. Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom. This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark. I love England. I love Denmark. I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee. Or Amerikansk in Denmark. My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English. They wouldn’t be Danish. They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.” Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish. I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria. One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060. The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp. These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity. They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government. Division is the strength of these politicians. “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?” “Abolish ICE.” “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.” “Living wage for all.” “Common sense gun laws.” Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take. They don’t get any of this from their family, either. Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did. It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution. It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text. On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all. But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four. Change that number? Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything. It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it. The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

The Ides of March, Bad Drawings, and Why I Write

“All right, why did the soothsayer tell Caesar to beware the Ides of March? Who wants to take a stab?” – Daria

Now this is a tough day at the office.

The Ides of March is today (if you’re reading in real-time) – and it’s been showing up a lot this year in coincidences – even a warning in a comment on this blog! – so I thought I’d write about the historical implications of the Ides of March on the career of the most beloved humor writer in American history.

Me. Hopefully nobody brings up that Mark Twain poseur again.

Historically, the Ides of March was a Roman time for settling debts, and boy did the Roman Senate settle one in 44 B.C., which was the subject of my first long-form humor attempt. In seventh grade, my history teacher showed us films. As an adult, I’m thinking that history teachers show films due to hangovers (it’s dark, quiet, and they don’t have to lecture or even be awake as they sleep the scotch off in second period), but my utterly innocent seventh grade self didn’t make that connection. And make no mistake – this was in the era before video tapes had taken over, so when we watched a film, it was a real reel, sprocket, and stuttering film noise affair projected onto a portable screen smaller than the average computer monitor at the DMV.

This device was wonderful – regardless of the subject, you could coast that day in school.

The film in question was about Julius Caesar, and I do think we watched it around the actual Ides of March. I don’t recall a lot about the film, but I do recall this – Caesar was assassinated. And not assassinated in any sort of short, quick, reasonable way. No. Caesar was stabbed in full cinematic glory dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But it wasn’t graphic – it was G-rated. Consequently the assassination was, in my estimation, was pretty close to the scene with the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail©. Man, could Caesar take punishment – no wonder he was in charge! And it went on, and on, and on, and on.

This is the second best fight scene in movie history, without question. It was also available on PBS® when I was growing up, and proved the old adage: PBS© – good only for Monty Python™ and Doctor Who©.

So I wrote about Caesar’s assassination. I created the one and only issue of The Roman Times. The lead story of The Roman Times was about Julius Caesar. I think I could nearly do the artwork and story from The Roman Times verbatim. Let me give it a try:

Today’s news from Rome: Caesar stabbed, shot, poked, prodded, speared, impaled, jabbed, skewered, perforated, and bayoneted MMLXVI times. Doctors say he would have survived, however he did also have quite a nasty infected splinter and wasn’t wearing clean underwear, much to his mother’s disappointment.

Okay, I was kinda shocked when I found out that the Romans had bikinis. Not only did they have bikinis, they had a swimsuit mosaic edition of Gladiators Illustrated®.

It’s more of a thesaurus approach at humor than my current subtle use of bikini jokes. But I feel confident that if Julius Caesar would have known that a seventh grader would be laughing about his assassination 2000 years later, well, he could have died happy rather than screaming and bleeding because of the 23 stab wounds. Yup. We know it was 23 stab wounds because Caesar also had the first documented autopsy that we know of. To make it all official, the Roman Senate held hearings and after reviewing all of the evidence discovered that Julius Caesar’s assassination was all the work of a single assassin, Longinus Harvey Oswald, who stabbed twice from the sixth floor of the Roman School Scroll Depositorium.

Artist’s conception, as nearly as I can recall my seventh grade drawing – that thing behind him is supposed to be a bear trap. Apologies to real artists like Steve (LINK).

The end result of all of this Ides of March musing is that I’ve been writing funny things for most of my life. And this is Friday, and Friday means a health post. So what does a dead Julius Caesar and schoolboy drivel have to do with health?

I write because it makes me happy. I think I’ve mentioned before – when I’ve written a good post, one I like, I am happy. It’s hard to sleep. I know that sounds silly, especially since, if I finish the post early I’ll have four or five hours of sleep, and if I get distracted and research ancient Roman bikinis and then somehow end up researching the history of the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force the post runs late I might only have two or three hours of sleep that night.

But it still excites me to do good work. And I recall that I was giddy when I was in seventh grade, putting together The Roman Times. I enjoyed it so much I put together a sequel: The Medieval Times, although I’m quite sure that I spelled Medieval wrong and I think the lead story was about some knight getting stabbed, poked, speared . . . et cetera. Why does writing humor give me a sense of fulfillment? I think for several reasons – I get a chance to learn and research new things, often with a purpose. I love new ideas, new thoughts, and probably the best thing is when you laugh out loud.

No, not a generalized you. You, dear reader. I write this for me, but also for you, because I know that someplace out there this post made someone’s day better.

But not Caesar. His Ides of March was pretty rough. But at least his fame will live on through my glorious art, because otherwise people might forget all about him.

Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth

“Well, you know, 80% of all homeless rickshaw businesses fail within the first six months.” -Seinfeld

Pareto: He was into economics before anyone else was, but it was only because it was ironic.

Vilfredo Pareto was born in France in 1848. At birth he was given the name Fritz Wilfried but his parents changed it to Vilfredo after the realization that they weren’t German (really – this sounds like a goofy fact I would make up because it might be true, like Lutherans being secret space-vampires, but Vilfredo/Wilfried’s parents actually were kinda nuts). Vilfredo died in Switzerland. The logical conclusion? He must have been Italian. And he was.

Outside of his extensive collection of Abraham Lincoln-themed women’s undergarments, Pareto is best known to us for the Pareto Principle. As the story goes, Pareto was in the midst of trying to figure out what laws governed the distribution of wealth, and had pulled together historical economic records from all around Italy. Now, modern Italian record-keeping is on a par with modern Italian engineering – I mean, has anyone ever been able to keep the oil on the inside of an Italian engine? But the story goes that while working on this economic problem, Pareto was messing around with the peas in his garden and noticed that 20% of the pea plants produced 80% of the peas.

I don’t believe that story for a second. It’s a well-known fact that Italians explode like watermelons dropped from the Empire State Building if they are in the same room with a pea. Don’t ask me about how I know what a watermelon dropped from the Empire State Building looks like – Homeland Security® still hasn’t figured out how the watermelons were smuggled up there. I’m just saying, never go to Olive Garden™ on Fresh Green Pea Night. It takes them a week to clean the place up from all of the exploding Italians.

The pea proportions that Pareto allegedly observed, that 80% of peas came from 20% of the plants, seemed to match up with his data in economics. 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.

Looking further, 80% of a business’s profit comes from 20% of its customers. 20% of the words in a language account for 80% of the words used. 80% of crime is caused by 20% of criminals. 80% of car accidents are caused by my Mother-In-Law. Seriously, do NOT be around the woman when she puts the car into reverse.

The numbers aren’t exactly the same in every example but 70/25 or even 75/30 is close enough to prove the point. 80/20 is nice because the math is simple. It also adds up to be 100, which is nice and makes the number taste better on the tongue, just like watermelon that has been pulverized by being dropped from a great height, even though there is absolutely no reason for the numbers to add up to 100.

To me, however, this proves the idea that the universe isn’t fair. Talent isn’t equally distributed, and, when you toss in the idea of chance, the result is inequality. And it’s a vast inequality: the 80/20 rule holds for wealth. But you have to dig deeper: the top 20% that owns 80%? The top 20% of the top 20% (that’s the top 4%) owns 80% of the 80% (that’s 64%). So, the top 4% owns 64% of the wealth. Going one more time: the top 1% owns roughly 50%. The real number for the amount of wealth owned by the top 1% is around 38%, so it’s pretty close for an approximation and the missing 12% is probably under a mattress at the Elon Musk’s house. Pareto’s rule is alive and well in 2019.

It also tells me that even though intelligence and other human attributes follow a bell curve, wealth does not – it grows geometrically. An old story I use to illustrate this is: If you have fifty people in a room and bring in the tallest person in the world, well, the average height in the room goes from 5’ 9” (16 meters) to 5’ 10” (30 centimeters). But if you add Bill Gates to the room, the average person in the room is a billionaire, though your credit rating might not improve as much as you are expecting. Our brains are used to dealing with that normal distribution, but are inadequate when dealing with these quantities that grow geometrically. And I think the thing that fosters that geometric growth in today’s society is increasing returns.

When I was just starting at work after college I knew a little more about computers than the folks I was working with. Just a little. But because I knew just a little more, my coworkers would ask me questions if their computer broke or wasn’t working right. I didn’t necessarily know the answers, but I was able to learn more because I (and another coworker) kept getting all the questions. Pretty soon I knew lots of arcane stuff about how the computers worked and how the network worked.

The point isn’t that I’m a computer wizard, or even an apprentice magician anymore. I got better at computers because I had a tiny advantage over my coworkers. Magnified by a couple of years? Expertise. But expertise has to be used to be kept, and I didn’t keep my computer mojo. The Boy and Pugsley have me beaten (by far) at this point. The point is clear, however: increasing returns is the rule, rather than decreasing returns. You get better the more you do, and those slight advantages, that slight edge in competence adds up. You get better by solving those problems that exist around you – much better. And you don’t have to be perfect – you just have to be a little better than anyone else.

That was the story of manufacturing in the United States. There is a ton of knowledge in books about how to make things, but what’s not in the books is the everyday know-how that’s required to actually make the machines run. The more manufacturing we did as a country, the better we were at it, and the more know-how we had accumulated. In one story that amazes me still – the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest manned, air-breathing aircraft that officially exists, was built from contract to flight in just over two years in the early 1960’s. The X-15 was faster, and also built in the 1960’s but it’s not a fair comparison, since it’s essentially the same as flying a rocket.

Now? Fighter development takes decades. Sure, they’re more complicated, but it took eight years from contract to prototype, and a further fifteen years to be put into service. I doubt we could make the SR-71 today in less than a decade, if even then.

I think that one of three things is happening: the first possibility is that we’ve forgotten how to make great stuff quickly, which Pareto can easily explain. The second possibility is that we’re stupider, which I’ll cover in a post within the next month. The third is we’ve forgotten how to make stuff AND we’re stupider. It’s like we’re sitting drooling drinking warm Coca-Cola® because we forgot the recipe to make ice.

You can wipe away the drool because the bright side is this: most of the decisions that you make don’t impact you all that much. Pareto is at work here, too. 20% of your decisions, actions, and habits account for 80% of where you are in wealth, health, and wisdom. The nice thing is that you already know what habits are good or bad, which ones take you away from your goals, and which ones help you.

The best part? You don’t have crazy Italian parents who can’t decide what your name should be.

Colonies, Leftists, Madonna (sort of) and Science Fiction Movie Casting

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” – Life of Brian

Well, since the Romans subjugated what is now France, Britain, Germany, and England, it’s sad that they never managed to flourish as independent countries. Because colonialism is awful, right?

I was having a conversation over the phone with a friend who is a little bit more politically correct than me.

“Maybe colonialism wasn’t such a bad thing after all.”

Coming out of the blue like that, it was, I could tell, a difficult concept for him. Certainly he understood the words, but in the life he leads, I imagine absolutely no one would have said anything like that to him, ever. He was currently in a very, very, very liberal establishment. His brain might have broken from the unapproved thought. It wasn’t as bad as saying, “I decided that maybe killing and eating calico kittens and wearing their fur as a hat might be a thing I’m in to,” but it was close. One thing I like to do, in real life and in this blog, is to make people think thinks they haven’t thinked. Very few pleasures exist for me as when I make people make that face which I call an Oh-face, as in, “Oh, my, I never thought of that.”

Of things that have a bad reputation since the year 1900, the two things that come to mind with the worst reputation are Madonna and Colonialism. And nobody wants to be compared to Madonna. What spurred my comment to my friend was an article by Dr. Bruce Gilley, of that noted bastion of conservatism, Portland State University.

Madonna is over 60 now, which might explain her overuse of eye makeup. Oh, and the hormone replacement therapy . . . .

Dr. Gilley put forth a relatively straight-forward question: Is there a case for colonialism?

His paper, The Case for Colonialism (you can find a .pdf of it here – LINK) was published in a scholarly journal with the unlikely name of Third World Quarterly. Third World Quarterly was described by at least one scholar as a location to come up with anti-colonial ideas. The reaction was predictable. Over 10,000 people signed a petition at Change.org noting, in part, that “We thereby call on the editorial team to retract the article and also to apologize for further brutalizing those who have suffered under colonialism.”

It would be difficult to find many people who had suffered under colonialism who were still alive, since the last thing even remotely like an atrocity was the British reaction to the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. I can’t find numbers that the Mau-Mau killed, which is a key indicator to me that the number was larger than anyone wants to admit. Did the British commit atrocity in response? Yes. So, if you were counting, probably the last colonial victims would date to the 1950’s, making the minimum age of someone who suffered under colonialism somewhere in their 70’s.

In my mind it’s also pretty tough to claim that a magazine article brutalized anyone, but maybe it’s just the “magazine article proof” vest I wear and a vestige of “magazine article proof vest-wearing privilege.” For the record, I wear the vest because I was once highly offended The Family Circus.

Yes it DOES look like Steve Buscemi! Triggered!

Gilley has the temerity to point out that since colonialism ended, things have not always been the picture of health in Africa. In his paper, Dr. Gilley notes:

Yet until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonised to colonised areas, fought for colonial armies and participated in colonial political processes – all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and areas concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives. The ‘preservers’, ‘facilitators’ and ‘collaborators’ of colonialism, as Abernethy shows, far outnumbered the ‘resisters’ at least until very late: ‘Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull’.

The legacy of colonization appears even today – those areas that were colonies of the British Empire are freer and have lower levels of corruption than those that weren’t colonized by Britain. Why? Perhaps the colonies offered rule of law versus tribal vengeance. Perhaps the colonizers offered science, medicine, and education. Perhaps the liberty of Western Civilization was fascinating. Me? I’m betting that it was mail-order catalogs that were filled with pictures of lacey undergarments, or maybe the taxation system.

We’ll apologize for colonies after they give up the Internet.

But the relics of de-colonization were also pretty clear. This is one additional case Gilley makes. In Gunea-Bissau, 25,000 people were killed as colonialism ended. 150,000 were displaced – all from a starting population of only 600,000. Thankfully, Marxists took over and turned it into a worker’s paradise, dropping rice production from 182,000 tons per year to 80,000 tons per year. No more tedious time spending cooking and eating! That Marxist diet plan always works, and thankfully the government feels so much love for their people that they provide a secret police, too! Gilley notes that at least half of the nations that de-colonized during the twentieth century had similar success at eliminating pesky excess food supply and pesky excess population.

I don’t think that colonization was all party and no hangover. There are plenty of descriptions of older colonial atrocities, especially when you go back to the 1700’s or 1800’s – the Belgian Congo under King Leopold was one very notable horror show so that the Belgium government took it away from him in 1908 prior to giving the Congo full independence in 1960, yet, today (from no less than The Daily Beast):

Wembore calls life under Belgians “très bon,” despite the segregation, and many of Stanleyville’s residents agree. “I look at the river, I used to see speedboats; now I see wooden boats,” he says, gesturing to the long, roughly carved canoes on the Congo River filled with traders. “This is poverty.”

So Gilley has confirmation from at least some Congolese that being colonized wasn’t all bad.

That doesn’t stop his University from “investigating” him. You can read about it in this article, but it doesn’t say much (LINK). Since he still has a web page up, and is still publishing papers that specifically poke the finger in the eye of academia (like this one on how Yemen did much better as a colony (LINK) and this one about how non-leftists are treated in academia (LINK)), I think he probably came out okay.

The question of colonialism remains. I tend to think that colonization can help a nation, especially if it brings about the systems that allow for efficient administration of a free country and gives the people faith that those systems can work. None of this happens in a short period of time, and it’s susceptible to corruption and tribalism. But we simply have to have colonies in the future. Why?

If we don’t we’ll never get Colonial Marines.

Okay, true fact, Vasquez in Aliens® is John Connor’s™ step-mom in Terminator 2©.

Addendum: Per the Comments.

With Personal Seal:

Dealing With Children In The Idiot Zone

“They are contemptuous of authority, convinced that they are superior. Typical adolescent behavior, for any species.” – Star Trek: Voyager

Okay, I couldn’t resist that one. If I were a lawyer I’d never pass a bar.

The Mrs. used to watch several reality shows, one of which was Intervention. If you hadn’t seen it, a drug or alcohol addict is followed around for several days by a film crew. Why they let them follow them around while they drink (in one case) five liters of vodka a day, every day, is a mystery. My bet is that they don’t make many good decisions, so inviting a camera crew to watch and record as their personal misery unfolds is just another bad day, just another bad decision.

I have never felt like less of an addict after watching that show. To put it mildly, those people had problems.

Now I see where Intervention got the idea.

At the end of each episode, family members and friends ambush the addict with an intervention, where people who love the addict gang up on them in a room and offer a choice: go to rehab or get cut out of their lives. Most chose rehab. On the follow ups, most of the rehabs failed.

I have to be fair.

After a while it became clear – the stories weren’t all the same, but each one rhymed with the others. And I noticed one particular facet of almost all of the stories that was the same: intense trauma of some type on the addict when they were between the ages of 11 and 14, which I call by its scientific name: The Idiot Zone. Again and again horrible things happened. Parents divorced. A parent died. Something else that was dramatic happened.

I have theories about most everything, and my theory on this one is that middle school kids are awful, horrible people, probably the worst people on Earth, which makes me wish that we could just abandon them in a forest for four years.

Why does the Idiot Zone exist? Middle-schoolers have developed feelings. They have learned to be mean. They just haven’t learned either empathy or how to be nice. If I were to pick a crucial age range for character development (and development of virtue!) I’d pick ages 11 to 14. Having a parent to model for character is crucial.

Screw this test up as a parent, and you’ve lost your last major chance to influence them. After that, you lessen as an influence every day.

Everybody’s kids do stupid things – The Boy and Pugsley are no different. I specifically don’t give out much information about my sons, and nearly none of it is negative because these words will live on long after they’ve moved to make their own way in the world. That’s okay. I make plenty of mistakes to keep the Internet entertained.

But Pugsley is now in the Idiot Zone, and he and I have been on an escalating aggression trend for several weeks. It’s a long game, and I’m older than he is and I can hold out forever to get a win. And I will get a win. But today I had an idea. I looked him in the eye when I got home from work.

“I have decided what I’m giving up for Lent, Pugsley. I am giving up anger. I’m not going to get mad at you for the next 38 days. No matter what. Like that idea?”

He nodded.

In looking up Lent and the history of fasting, I read a story of a seminary student who didn’t select what he gave up for Lent – his roommates did that for him. I decided that was good enough for Pugsley.

“In return, you’re going to give up _______ and _______.” You can fill in the blanks with minor character faults. You could even do a Madlib®: “being an idiot” and “not bathing after rolling in three week old rotting deer carcass”

Okay, they weren’t that bad, and he’s not a dog. He rightly responded, “You know, Dad, we’re not Catholic.”

My rejoinder: “Well, you could be. I hear you get a pretty white dress on your confirmation. Also, be careful. If a Catholic bites you, you rise from the dead and become one.” The Mrs. and I had considered becoming Catholic, but didn’t – the sheer amount of paperwork was huge, and I was told the written approval of the Pope himself would be required, given that I had previously been married to a shape-shifting she-demon.

He was obviously not amused by the confirmation dress comment and, in best adolescent form, ignored it entirely. Pugsley is also going to Catholic school, and getting an “A” in religion so he fully understood that Lent was the period from Ash Wednesday lasting until Easter. I continued, “Besides, giving up being a _______ and ________ would be good for you.” And it would be good for the rest of the family, too. Nobody likes living with a ______head. And Pugsley has been a real royal _____head recently.

I’m not sure Pugsley believed me when I said I was going to not get angry no matter what. Consciously or subconsciously, he tried to push every one of my buttons this afternoon. He knew very well which behaviors of his drove me nuts. And in the span of fifteen minutes tried them all.

I didn’t get angry, not even inside. Finally, when he saw that no matter what he did I wouldn’t react he became emotional. He discovered it’s tough to have a fight when the other side just won’t escalate.

I’ve long felt that perhaps the only thing we entirely control as humans is the way we feel about things. People or the government can take away my guns. My vast fortune. Sedation dentistry. Stately Wilder Manor. All those material things can be taken away.

However, no one can take away my thoughts. I can choose not to be angry, which may also explain why I don’t listen to NPR® on the way to work. My feelings are my choice. Pugsley will figure that his feelings are his choice, too, and when that happens? I’ve won.

This is a health post, what with it being Friday. Giving up anger isn’t the only thing I’m giving up for Lent, but it’s a big one, and there are tons of health reasons why not being angry at Pugsley will make me healthier – lower stress, I won’t be hoarse from yelling, but the negative is that my home state will no longer be to exploit my blood pressure as a renewable energy resource providing 54 megawatts of power.

I am religious, but even if you aren’t, I think the practice of giving up things has value. I rarely drive my favorite car. Why? Because if I drive it every day it loses its magic. Giving up pleasures for a time makes us stronger, and makes the pleasure that much better when you finally get to experience it again.

I am so going to enjoy becoming enraged on Easter. I might yell and scream for days.

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

“Kim Kardashian is so sexy, her butt is like a big mountain of pudding.” – South Park

I hear the only way they can be avoided is if you don’t have any money.

This is the last of the series of three posts about virtue, at least for now. The other two are linked near the bottom.

If you look at rich people, you can see fairly rapidly that being wealthy isn’t a sign of a virtuous life. There are no shortages of bimbos in Hollywood® who get famous by “leaking” a sex tape to get famous, in fact it’s odd now to have a famous person who doesn’t have a series of sex tapes, although if you take my advice you’ll skip the Ruth Bader Ginsburg tape.

This unearned fame is perplexing to me. It seems to be that to progress as a celebrity you should have done as little as possible to help mankind. The entire idea that people willingly give money to the Kardashian family makes me vaguely ill, or maybe that’s just thinking of the Kardashians in general. The Kardashians look like a species that’s closely related to humanity, but just far enough apart from us that mating with them would be illegal in almost every state, except maybe California.

Come to think of it, they do live in California. Hmmm.

A Kardashian in its natural state. I believe they have insurance against Velcro.

As I’ve mentioned before, Epictetus (a dead Stoic Greek philosopher dude) felt that wealth was neither virtue nor vice in and of itself. The Stoics certainly thought that preferring wealth was okay, but getting all bent out of shape about it (or about anything) wasn’t. But, Kardashians aside, are there virtues that are associated with getting wealthy?

I looked and found (LINK) a study of traits were found to be present more in high earners than “average” earners. They were:

High earning people don’t hate or worship money – they don’t avoid wealth nor place too much importance on money. Of course, when you’re pulling down $400,000 a year, a few extra bucks for a giant-sized plutonium-plated Elvis™ PEZ® dispenser doesn’t even get your attention. However, if you’re making $14,000 a year, counting the grains of rice in a box of Rice-a-Roni® (The San Francisco Treat™!) makes sense to make sure that the Dollar Store© isn’t cheating you again.

All hail Elpezvis! And thanks to Karl for this wonderful photo!

Not fans of luck. The psychological name for this was “internal locus of control.” Yeah, sounds like part of the navigation system on the U.S.S. Enterprise. In human-speak, it means whether or not they felt they were lucky (or unlucky) or their situation in life was due to their hard work and effort. My bet is if you ask any really successful person this question that they’ll give that answer – but I’m also aware that MANY people work even harder than the average CEO, putting in more hours doing harder, messier, more thankless work.
Rich people wanted to be wealthy and put more value on it than average income people. Part of this might have been related to average income people rationalizing – I know that I put less importance on hair now that it’s left my scalp like Guatemalans leaving Guatemala because it’s Guatemala. I wonder what my hair had against my scalp? Could I build a wall to keep it from migrating down my back?
Had more “financial knowledge” – this was self-reported – they didn’t give them a test.
Workaholics had more wealth, which doesn’t surprise me, and high-earners were “enablers” – loaning money to deadbeat relatives. I’m guessing this is a function of “not trying to borrow money from people who don’t have it.”

The only virtuous bit I could find in all of that (and I had to stretch to do it) was that the rich seem to develop an indifference to money when they have some. It’s like an indifference to pizza after you’ve had enough lasagna to stuff Sardinia, however. Sure, it’s virtuous, but only just barely.

What I didn’t see on the list was conscientiousness, or faithfulness, or discipline or even self-control. True virtues seemed to be missing. I guess I have to deal with facts: jerks get rich. Unscrupulous people get rich, nepotists get rich (a lot!). CEOs trade in wives like used Yugos®, and CEOs move from company to company the way I move from room to room in my house.

Ahhh, all the luxury of communist Eastern Europe combined with the reliability of an Italian car. How could it lose?

Do I hate wealth? I absolutely do not. Do I hate the wealthy? Not a chance, some of them are awesome. Do I think that churches preaching “prosperity gospel” are helping Christianity? Probably not. I’m pretty sure that God wants your faith more than he wants you to have a Mercedes-Benz®, even if all your friends do drive Porsches©.

But wealth is fleeting. Companies fail over time. Sears™ used to dominate multiple fields – appliances, tools, insurance, even their own credit card. Now they’re tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. And that serves a purpose, just like the death of an individual. The economy must be cleansed over time, or else it becomes, well, sick.

Stealing from Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) where he compares the economy to a salmon stream:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning. It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet. The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed. They were a desert for salmon fry.

His blog is excellent, and you should visit it daily (LINK).

But like that salmon stream, when we seek to get wealth without virtue, have a country without virtue (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) or even attempt to become immortal (Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)) we condemn ourselves to a world where hairy near-human Kardashians are free to wander without fear of a razor.

And that is a world no man wants to live in.

It’s . . . spreading!

Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python

“Romanes Eunt Domus? People called Romans they go the house?” – Life of Brian

Okay, you could argue that the last R should be a W. But I need all the exposure I can get.

“Delenda est Carthago.”

Cato the Elder was a Roman Senator during the time of the Roman Republic. Every time Cato spoke in the Senate he ended his speech with that phrase (or some variant, I don’t want to get into an ancient Latin grammar slapfight). Translated, Cato meant: “Carthage must be destroyed.” Since I knew that fact when I was in high school also directly led to the loss of my virginity (really), but that’s a much longer story for another day . . . .

“Romans go home . . . “

The Punic (yes, that’s spelled right) Wars were the wars that Rome fought against Carthage. In the First Punic War, (264-241 B.C.) there were 400,000 or so Carthaginians killed to 350,000 Romans. The Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.) is the one most people know about, where Hannibal (a Carthaginian) took his elephants through the Alps to sneak into Rome via the back door. Sneaking with elephants is quite an accomplishment, and Hannibal roamed around Italy, destroying over 400 towns before he (and Carthage) were defeated again. The Romans lost 300,000 dead, but the Roman general Scipio Africanus finally defeated Hannibal when he was forced to withdraw to Carthaginian territory after years spent ravaging Italy.

Is it just me, or could they have made it easier for the ten guys rowing if they got off the elephant?

It was after this war that Cato just wouldn’t stop talking about Carthage. Eventually, he got his way and the Romans made an excuse and started the Third (and final) Punic War. When the war was over, Carthage had been destroyed – and not destroyed just a little, but destroyed – the Romans burned the town for 17 days. The few people that survived were sold into slavery. Salt was plowed into the ground at the site of the city so that nothing would ever grow there again. Despite all of this, they still couldn’t manage to cancel their FaceBook© account or get rid of their tracking cookies.

Part of me thinks that the Carthaginians just pissed the Romans off, even more than trade or greed would account for. It’s now certain that Carthaginians burned their children alive as sacrifices to Baal. Yes. Alive. And the ritual required that the child be awake. Oh, one other goodie – you couldn’t just adopt a local urchin and toss that one in the fire. Nope, that just brought bad luck. It had to be your kid. Your favorite child.

This was thought at one time to have been Roman propaganda, but it turns out to have been utterly true. The Carthaginians were evil on a biblical level. Everything about their religion and public life was against the Roman ideals of virtue, and Roman virtue was a big deal. In Rome, virtue acted hand in hand with two other pillars: the law and religion. Each of them were a leg that helped make Roman society stable enough to last and thrive for hundreds of years, until they discovered Netflix®.

Roman law and Roman virtue are foundational to all of Western Civilization. What were the Roman virtues? This list is based on the Wikipedia entry:

Fides – the root for fidelity, and really covered by the word faithfulness, to gods, country, and family. You’ll see that trio again.
Pietas – respect to gods, country, and family. Told ya.
Regilio – following traditional religious practices.
Disciplina – this one is pretty straightforward.
Gravitas/Constantia – dignified self-control and perseverance.
Virtus – ideal male values, knowing good from evil, shame from dishonor, pilsner from bock.

The end goal was Dignitas and Auctoritas. Dignitas was a reputation for worth, along with the honor and esteem it brought. Auctoritas was the prestige and respect that came from being virtuous, along with one of those cool leafy hats.

If you did a bad thing in Senate they made you sit in time-out.

This threesome – law, religion and virtue was what made Rome great. Rome was a culture where these things were held by all to be of value – old Roman politicians would try to ruin their competitors just by destroying their reputations. Roman youth all the way up to Julius Caesar tried to prove their worth on the field of battle to show that virtue. From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long:

“No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.”

I’m worried that our standard of public discourse has now become “If it’s not against the law, it’s virtuous and must be celebrated.” Public life in the past (before my time, certainly) was different. The law was one leg, but a person’s virtue was also important. Prior for a mortgage to be issued, it wasn’t uncommon for the bank to see if a person was a faithful churchgoer. In public, if you were misbehaving in a grocery store, any lady would have felt free to tell you to get your behavior in line. I can recall buying a comic book when I was 10 and taking crap from the clerk (who knew my mom) about biting my fingernails.

How has life changed in 120 years?

In 1900, your only contact (on an average day) with anything related to the Federal government was limited to the cash in your pocket (which was backed by gold) and the Post Office. And that’s it for almost every day.

In 2019, you wake up with EPA electricity running an alarm clock that pulls in FCC-sanctioned FM radio, and turn on light bulbs that are of a government-mandated type. You brush your teeth with FDA approved toothpaste and shower with water that’s also regulated by the EPA. We won’t cover the trade agreements that cover your coffee. Or the DOT and FHWA road that you drive on. And we’re not even to 8AM yet.

That’s just the Federal government. Has life gotten better since intact families (including real, actual fathers) declined in popularity? Since the number of sex partners is up? Is FaceBook® really better than getting together to play cards and catch up? The Romans largely got it right. They brought together virtue and tied it to law and created stability.

Or is it Baltimore?

Beyond that, the Roman ideas of virtue are familiar to because they are the foundation of Western Civilization. Other things that provide a basis:

You don’t have to be a Christian. You don’t even have to believe in any god of any type. But the values that flow from Christianity are fundamentally compatible with the Roman virtues and have produced the society where we still (more or less) trust each other.
Q. It’s important. Different countries have different I.Q.’s and economic output is tied to I.Q. Also tied to I.Q.? The ability to self-govern.
History/European Culture. History, good and bad, is important. I read that on a poster somewhere.
I read about a researcher who looked into British genealogy. He found that almost every person of British descent was descended from a majority of royalty/upper class. What happened to the poor? They didn’t have kids, didn’t reproduce. I’d bet that was repeated all over Europe for hundreds of years. Not only have we created Western Civilization, Western Civilization has created us.

When you reflect on the virtues of the Romans of the Republic and the ideals that they aspired to, I’m sure 200 years later in the days of the Roman Empire they were viewed as antiquated. Virtue was silly. “Do what thou wilt,” became the plan, but from time to time you gotta burn some kids.

Thank heavens we’re still a society that values virtue, religion and the law!

Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel. And I am immortal.” – Highlander

Or maybe it was the scotch that made him immortal? When I drink scotch I’m bulletproof.

I once had a Grandboss (my boss’s boss) that once said, “Reading is the only way that you can know great minds across centuries.” He was deeply philosophical and attempted to use that philosophy to improve business results, and also to use history as analogy for business conditions. Prior to the movie 300 coming out, he was discussing the battle of Thermopylae and the courage of the Spartans to fight to the last man as a business analogy. Needless to say, when you’re using a battle where every single solder dies as an analogy, business isn’t going all that well.

Grandboss also assigned On War (a treatise on war and strategy during the Napoleonic era) by Von Clausewitz for us to read. I’m probably the only guy who actually did read it, and still have my copy. Needless to say, I loved my Grandboss, and still send him cards on Grandboss day. When I quit that job to take a new one, I told him first, and as a goodbye present? I gave him a book.

My Grandboss was right, though – reading allows us to know great minds across centuries. The nice thing is we can read the thoughts of dead Greeks like Epictetus. Epictetus spent his entire life studying and living stoic philosophy, which was a pretty hard thing to do when you were a slave with a gimpy leg. Epictetus eventually became free – we don’t know how, but I imagine he won the annual caddy’s golf tournament and got a scholarship from Judge Smails.

I bet Epictetus just wishes he wrote, “You’ll get nothing and like it.”

One thing we do know is that Epictetus did was spend a lot of time thinking about virtue and vice. We’ll spend more time on virtue on Monday’s post, but Epictetus came to the conclusion that the following things were neither vice nor virtue:

Wealth
Health
Life
Death
Pleasure
Pain

As wealth and health are at least two nominal themes of this blog (this is Friday, so I’m stretching it and saying this is a health post) it might seem a bit hypocritical that I spend time talking about health and wealth and then quote a dead lame Greek that says that neither of those are virtuous. But I would argue that my message on wealth is that true wealth is in having few needs (Seneca, Stoics, Money and You), and although I prefer pleasure to pain, I recognize that a pleasure repeated too often is a punishment (Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick). And we also know that health is more controllable by our choices today than Epictetus did.

Immortal and omnipotent. And good on the mariachi trumpet.

Heck, I even got challenged by an Orthodox priest friend on whether or not learning for learning’s sake was, in a religious context, a vice. If so, there goes most of my Monday posts. The priest and I (as I recall, over a BBQ lunch) came to the conclusion that learning for learning’s sake was maybe a vice. Since he was also a fan of learning for learning’s sake, if it was a vice we were both guilty.

Going back to Epictetus’ list, Life and Death are on it as being neither virtues nor vices. I’m not sure about you, but I really prefer Wealth to Poverty, Health to Illness, and Life to Death. Epictetus felt the same way – it was okay to have preferences with the understanding that neither condition is, in itself, virtuous. I finally came to understand that while not virtuous, death is required for life. Oddly, I thank Bill Clinton for this realization.

It was during the Clinton presidency that I first looked around at the national leaders for both parties and thought, “Jeez, what a bunch of bozos.” Both sides were stupid or corrupt. Some were stupid and corrupt at the same time (looking at you, ghost of Ted Kennedy, I’ve imagined you’ve been plenty warm this winter). Back then I was a capital-L libertarian, and could see that both sides had as primary goals the restriction of freedom on their agenda in addition to being incompetent.

Beyond that, they were . . . awful. Spineless. They were tools of groups with different names but the same objectives – objectives that mostly didn’t favor you or me. Throw into this mix that one day at lunch I was thinking about immortality and the implications of living forever, which was spurred on by eating a tuna fish sandwich which might have been as old as Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D.

Elvis will never die. Mobility? That might be an issue.

If people were generally immortal? Our birthrate would plummet – 200 year old women have very few kids. As for me, I’d have plenty of time so rather than putting things off until next week, I’d put stuff off until next century. But the worst consequence?

Bill Clinton would forever be an elder statesman, always trying to increase his (and Hillary’s) power for all of eternity. Our current batch of elected officials would be about the best we’d get, or maybe the only ones we’d get. Senators and congresscritters already stay in office until the only way to keep them alive is though that experimental technique that turns them into zombie-like creatures that feast on living human flesh like Nancy Pelosi, or immortal robots like the Ruth Bader-Ginsbot™ 3000.

Thankfully, we live in a world where things die and the world moves on – just like a cell in a human body ceases to exist so new cells can take over. We have a name for immortal cells – cancer. Just like cells pass away, so do we to leave this world to the youth. I didn’t say death is “good” – just that it serves a purpose.

Okay, this is one boy who loved his mother.

Part of that purpose is focusing us on the here and now: in this way we don’t lose sight that life is precious and fleeting, like sedation dentistry. Perhaps the most precious thing we have is the shared time with those who have meaning to us (like your friendly blogger). But for those who have left us, honor them with the virtue that they helped you obtain. Be glad you had a part of their life, and had a chance to witness their virtue and learn from their vices. Look at how they have changed you, made you better so that they live on through their influence on you.

Lastly, for heaven’s sake, write something down. It’s the only way that someone can know your mind when you’re gone, unless they check your browser history.

Limits to Growth and Exponential Feminists

“Look, man, do I look like an ichthyologist to you? Big damn bugs, all right? The size of my fist. The size of a peanut butter and banana sandwich. What do I know? I got a growth. . . .” – Bubba Ho Tep

Zombies or Mad Max®.

When my older brother, also (really) named John Wilder, (my parents didn’t want to have to call two names when they called us for dinner) came back from college one year, he brought back a large number of textbooks. Most of the books were exceedingly dull, written by exceedingly dull college professors about business. I’m not sure what a college professor would know about business, since if they were any good at business they’d have one, not teach it. Honestly, I have no idea why you’d want to get a college degree in “business” at all, unless it was because you like spending $20,000 a year to drink beer and go rock climbing with college girls wearing skimpy outfits . . .

Oh, that’s why you get a degree in business and take six years to get it. Never mind.

But one of my brother’s textbooks caught my eye, a copy of Limits to Growth. It was a dog-eared paperback with a bright yellow sticker on matte black background proclaiming it, “USED.” Knowing my brother’s interest in subjects like economics and the fate of society, the only way that particular textbook was USED was as a doorstop or beer coaster. I’m surprised that Limits to Growth was being used as a textbook, since my brother was going to school at a community college on a competitive mixed doubles checkers scholarship, and actually teaching something to a student athlete at a community college can cause the college to lose its accreditation, I’ve been told.

Limits to Growth was a book based on a computer model back when a 2006 Blackberry® had ten times as much computing power as a the computer they used. The study came out in 1972, when, for whatever reason, the entire world mood started to get gloomy. Here is a book cover from a novel published that same year:

Yes, Ma Wilder bought this for me (at my insistence) when I was about 12. It was a little gloomier than Harry Potter® or Captain Underpants™.

This particular computer model used by the authors was one that purported to take a bunch of inputs and determine future economic growth and population. Because computers are magic, I guess.

Spoiler alert! The results were not good.

Well, this is one solution for overpopulation . . .

You can fiddle with the model yourself over here (LINK). I played with it a few times and, like an amateur knitter gladiating against Spartacus at the Coliseum™ on Ladies Night (two for one Buffalo wings!) I kept losing. I guess my inability to make the computer model turn out well means billions of you are going to have to die and civilization will collapse. Sorry. Bright side? Buffalo wings.

The one fault I have with the model is that most of the “solutions” that drive longer human civilization timelines or stability involve state control and a general shared misery of technological standstill. Oh, and almost all of the solutions had to be implemented back in 1972 for them to be useful.

The cure was to stop economic progress, to live in a world that’s much like Cuba – stuck in the 1950’s with oppressive government limiting actions of individuals, up to and including mandatory beards and licensing of new children. I say “was” because, in the terms of the authors of the original study, it’s too late now to avoid a population growing beyond the capacity of the Earth to provide for it (overshoot) which inevitably leads to a collapse in population.

Normally I am skeptical of model runs. Reality has a way of pointing out all of the things we really don’t know when we place too much faith in models. And yet . . . exponential growth is, well, exponential. Let me illustrate with a story you’ve probably heard before:

You can smell the cats through the computer monitor.

If your town has angry feminists with unnaturally-colored hair in it, and they double in number every day, and you know on day 30 that the town will be overrun with feminists, how many much of the town will be overrun on day 29?

Half. I won’t mansplain that. But on day 28, only a quarter of the town will smell like cat-loving harpy. On day 27, only 12.5%.

Oops. I guess I mansplained that. But the human brain is not wired out of the box to understand exponentials. Thousands of years have taught us that people don’t double in height during a day, that the number of villagers don’t double in a month. But after we study it long enough, we realize the power of exponential growth. If the number of pageviews on this blog increased like they did on a consistent basis, by the year 2026 I’ll have almost 22 billion pageviews a day. Heck, some blogs go a whole year and don’t get that many pageviews.

Okay, that really won’t happen. I’d be lucky to have everyone on Earth visit just once a day.

We’ve been stuck with the exponential growth of humanity. Al Bartlett (R.I.P.) was a professor of physics at the University of Colorado who lectured a lot about exponential growth. His website remains up here (LINK). His conclusion is that, given finite resources, infinite growth isn’t possible. A guy named Thomas Malthus came to that same conclusion in 1798, but his website was on Myspace® and is down now.

Malthus has been for now, wrong, with respect to Western Civilization. Technological progress has increased the carrying capacity of Earth and (generally) increased the standard of living of the vast majority when compared to 1798. At least for now. As we look at civilizations in the past, from the Romans to the Mayans to Easter Island (and others), all collapsed due to unchecked growth.

So, maybe Bartlett, Malthus, and the Club of Rome will win in the end. But until then, I guess 20 year olds will spend six years getting business degrees for the beer and the babes. Might as well enjoy the decline . . . .