John – Page 106 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Dear Diary: Ocasio-Cortez talks about being moist

WilderAnon, or WAnon transmitted this information to me tonight which explains this first-ever Tuesday post. How he got it from the future is beyond me – something about a paradox whereby I avoid all legal liability. I’m liking that. To read about QAnon go here (LINK). I have no idea if WAnon represents a Deep State operative of the NSA with a time machine or the voices in my head.

January 3, 2019, 11:03 EST

Dear Diary,

It’s nice that I have a place to share my secrets and intermoist, er innermost thoughts. Ha ha ha, I wrote moist. Must be me thinking about Marco again (blush).

When I started moving my stuff in today, I was pretty excited. Then they told me that what I thought was my office was just the coat closet. I sure wish I was stuck in that closet with Marco! I sat in my pretend coat closet office in the corner for about two hours until my staff found me. They seemed really excited. It was nice to get out of that office because there isn’t a light in there, but I didn’t want to complain because I didn’t want to get fired on my first day.

Ever wonder what you would do if you were in a dark closet for two hours? I licked the walls, like anyone would. They were pine, but they tasted like salt. I sniffed the carpet, and it was surprisingly odor free, except for one corner. I played with my eyebrow. Oh, eyebrows since the electrolysis worked to remove the middle part and I now look less like a dwarf from Lord of the Rings and more like Liv Tyler.

My real office is big and has a nice desk, and there’s a brand-new laptop there. I asked my staff where I’m supposed to clock in so I get paid, and they explained to me that I didn’t have to clock in. Honor system, I guess. I’m not sure how I’m going to get overtime if I don’t clock in. Maybe there’s a timesheet. There’s a nice couch in my office, too. It makes me think of Marco and his broad shoulders and spending time with him on that couch. And that makes me blush!

I looked in my desk and found that they already had stickers, multi-colored erasers, gel pens, and the latest episode of Tiger Beat® ready for me. But I also have this new laptop. Somebody from IT set me up on this computer, and said that they had even set up a place for me to share my thoughts, and gave me a link to this diary. ZOMG! So excited!

I have 10 people on staff, and they asked me where I want them to be. Well, after the one who gets me Sour Patch Kids®, the one who picks up my dry cleaning, and the one who gets me latte, I’m not sure what I want the others to do. Maybe write plays about how power corrupts?

I am so glad that I brought up the fact that, in addition to being Spanish, Puerto Rican, and Native American I am also Jewish. I’m thinking of playing up that aspect in my next campaign, because who doesn’t love the Jews? I am biding my time to when I will announce that I’m also descended from interstellar visitors from Ceti Alpha 3, and a previously unknown race of sentient cats, and I am their kitten. If only I was in a relationship with someone who was gay, I would be the queen of intersectionality!

My new apartment is nice. I got there last night and moved in my futon and my clothes. My milk crates and planks are a great bookcase for my Karl Marx Swimsuit edition coloring book. Heat is free with the apartment, so last night I turned up the heat to 80 and walked around wearing only my Uggs®, while listening to Ariana Grande while sipping a pumpkin-spice latte. I then spent some time plucking my mustache. Marco says that if I don’t, I look like Fidel Castro.

Oh, Marco. I can’t stop thinking about him and his flowing brown hair, and his strong, muscular arms . . . Marco, Marco, Marco. I asked him to move down here to Washington with me, but he turned me down. He said that his life was in New York. It bothers me that I can’t get Marco out of my mind, since he’s never even kissed me. Sure, we go shopping together, he has such great taste. And he helped me decorate my apartment, too. Now I just walk around my new apartment naked and spend time eating Cocoa Puffs® – Mom isn’t here to tell me I can’t! I’ll sit here, naked, eating Cocoa Puffs©, plucking myself, and thinking about Marco.

Well, Dear Diary, I’ll hit save and go wander around for a bit. Honestly, I’m feeling a bit . . . restless after thinking about Marco. I needz moar pumpkin latte!

January 3, 2019, 3:03 EST

Dear Diary,

Well that was a surprise! My staff came running into the office about twenty minutes after I left you and told me that my Diary was going out to everyone on the Internet. Silly staff. I had to explain to them that there was no way it was going out to the Internet, since it was on my computer, right here. I showed them, and everything, but I don’t think they understood. They just walked out half an hour later shaking their heads. I’m not sure that they’ve ever had someone as smart as me in office, maybe I need to explain it more slowly to them that if I can see it on *my* screen, it’s not on the Internet.

Some people are so slow.

Oh, I’ve been working on writing my first piece of legislation. It’s about medical care. Each person deserves their own doctor, and if my legislation passes, each person will have their own, individual doctor. Someone who is concerned only with their health. My legislative staff laughed, because they said we would need 300,000,000 doctors if my plan passed. Well, if it’s the law, we’ll have 300,000,000 doctors! You can’t break the law!

Another one said that President Poopyhead would veto it. I told them I was too smart for that, because in the bill I’d put a clause that said he couldn’t. They shook their heads. I think they’re surprised no one ever thought of that before.

I think that I’ll call Marco to celebrate! I imagine he’s home by now. He shares his apartment with his best friend, Chad. They must be close – they only have that one bed that they share.

I miss Marco.

To regular readers: this is an experiment and depending on how it works this won’t replace any existing content, but will become a feature in addition to the existing content. We’ll see. Don’t forget, you can subscribe by putting your email in the box up there. I will never share (unless congress subpoenas it) or spam it.

Picture of Cortez via Wikimedia, by El Borde [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face. Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States. I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means). In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States. But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically? Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary. After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill. How many of the college degrees awarded are useless? Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it. Facts prove my guesses are pretty good: 40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees. Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever. When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans. That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe. Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda. In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs. Photo – Chicago Sun-Times.

The article on Amanda continues: “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.” Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist. I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there. I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad. Not at her college. No. Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are ~~stupid~~ maybe not grounded in reality. Not the professors – they’re her friends, right? I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail. Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes. Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans. I’ve got nothing against Amanda. Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place. Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities. And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left. The college financing system is itself creating leftists. And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students. Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college: a diversity of thought. The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students. In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination? And, no, this was not made up. Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power. Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong. In squishier subjects? If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades. Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . . some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus. There’s just . . . calculus. The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new. I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative. He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40). My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to. I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there. Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change. But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were. He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon. But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin. I was . . . shocked. I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology? In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination. Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas. I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books. For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education. As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts: the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education. If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.

The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.” – Elf

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls. The Toll House tolls for you!

Normally when I do a health post I put my weasel words saying “I’m not a doctor” at the end of the post. I mean, if you’re at this website the last thing you are is stupid. You KNOW I’m not a doctor and I don’t prescribe drugs except on an amateur basis, and then it’s generally, “Pipe down about Ariana Grande masterminding the fake moon landing and have another beer. Everyone knows that an Ariana Grande is actually a yeasty pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks©.”

However, in this case I’m not talking about yeasty, mediocre pop singers, I’m telling you that the Centers for Disease Control® (CDC™) is staffed by (at least some) idiots who really are doctors, well, the disclaimer should come up front. So, here it is: I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and take some damn responsibility for your own life and everybody knows that it was Katy Perry was the mediocre pop singer that masterminded the fake moon landing.

So hardcore she killed that Muppet® herself, just to show the other Muppets© how fearless she was. Or was that G. Katy Perry?

Okay. Now for the actual rant.

In its continual bid to be the ugly, smelly kid in class who stares at you just a little too long with the charisma of a damp goat, the Creepy Disaster Chumps© (CDC™) issued its annual holiday pronouncement of, “Hey, it’s Christmas, America. Have a good time and we’ll talk after the New Year. Sound good?”

No. This is government, so of course you’re being warned against the civilization-ending threat of (I’m not kidding) raw cookie dough the by the Centers for Disease Control Cookie Dough Committee® (CDCCDC™). Yes. Raw cookie dough, that scourge of humanity that brought down the Incan Empire, the Ming Dynasty, and Johnny Depp’s career.

Of course raw cookie dough is bad for you, but not in the way the Citizen Drama Creators© (CDC™) thinks. Raw cookie dough is bad for you since it’s loaded with carbs and sugar and tastes the way that I can only imagine heroin feels. But cookies are tasty, and, even if you’re a low-carb cultist (I am), a cookie at Christmas is okay for you unless you inject the dough. Protip: if a syringe is large enough to inject a chocolate chip, it’s not gonna make it through airport security no matter what story you tell.

It does, however, appear that raw cookie dough can make you ill in rare circumstances. You see, in the United States, one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella. 20,000 eggs? It would take 64 years at 6 eggs a week to get to 20,000. Cooking, thankfully, kills salmonella – so it’s 64 years of raw or undercooked eggs. Clearly, this is an unacceptable risk. Your eggs should all be cooked to the consistency of a leather thong.

You were thinking something else! So was I. There are places you just don’t want to go on Google®.

But wait! The Chowder Disco Cowgirls® (CDC™) reminds us that cookies contain raw flour, too. Raw flour? Is that a thing? Yes! In fact, 63 people in the United States were made ill by raw flour in 2016. 63! It’s an epidemic! Soon these people will become raw flour zombies and the streets (okay, one really small one lane street) will be filled with them and their insatiable desire for raw flour.

Thankfully, I’m betting that Grandmothers everywhere will still be handing the rich, doughy beaters covered with cookie dough off to the greedy fat hands of toddlers (it’s really the only way to get their iPhones© away from them) for a sticky, sugary treat. From there, the cookie dough/saliva mix creates a compound stronger than diamond plated steel that instantly bonds itself at the molecular level to any surface, which explains why it is still stuck to the bottom of the Wilder kitchen table after fifteen years.

If I were him, I’d hide. Katy Perry is looking for something to wear to the Oscars®. And it’s between Cookie Monster© and Oscar the Grouch™.

But as a society, what does that say about us if we’re that afraid of . . . cookies? According to one study I read, the lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid are 1 in 250,000, which is still higher than your odds of meeting someone who works for the Department of Motor Vehicles that has a sense of humor.

The number of verified deaths from eating raw cookie dough that I found was . . . one. Out of 300,000,000, people, this equates to a risk of 1 in 3.8 million over a 78 year lifetime. But let’s pretend that one person a decade dies from eating raw cookie dough. You’re still 4,500 times more likely to die falling out of bed. But the Chronic Doom Cherubs® (CDC™) have yet to weigh in against the scourge of pillow-topped mattresses ravaging our land.

I then went against all of my better instincts and did the one thing a blogger should never do: I researched. The origin of the Centers for Dingo Carnage© (CDC™) is actually a noble one. During World War II, the United States decided that we wanted to kill the enemy and not let malaria spoil all the fun, and got pretty good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria. Fun fact: the atomic bomb was originally designed to kill mosquitos but was abandoned because it couldn’t be made to fit into a spray can.

Modern Mosquito Hunting Techniques.

But all good wars end, and here were a bunch of bona fide mosquito-killing ninjas who were good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria. The government decided that we could use those guys to stop malaria in the United States. They went straight to work, and malaria was all but eradicated by 1951, only four years later – in 2018 the paperwork alone for starting the project would take a decade as the Friends of Malaria sued in federal court to stop the eradication of the endangered mosquito. But living in a less enlightened era, they eradicated malaria and everyone was pretty okay with that. So, they disbanded the agency, and put people to work doing other productive things.

No, I’m kidding! Once government builds a hammer, after they run out of nails they keep using it on the dishes and drywall. It worked great on the nails, right? Maybe we need a committee to develop stronger dishes?

The newly named Communicable Disease Center (this name is real, and is the original word salad that gave us the CDC™ initials) became a solution in search of a problem. We expected the Koreans or Chinese (or someone) to spray us with biological agents. So, the CDC® said, “Hey, we can fix that problem that we just made up.” Thankfully, they’ve never had to do anything significant on that front.

Eventually, the CDC™ also got bored and distracted enough sometime during the 1960’s that they led the effort eradicate smallpox, and even someone as cynical as I am about government agencies have to give them a golf clap for that one. To this day the CDC™ and the Russians have the last two samples of smallpox in the world, and the CDC™’s is stored in the fridge next to the guacamole and that Wal-Mart® chicken salad that Carol left in there last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong: The CDC™ has a legitimate role as a coordination center for communicable diseases, and protecting the United States from diseases originating all around the world – 70% of the tuberculosis cases in the United States are from people that weren’t born in the United States. And Ebola or its yet-undiscovered cousin lurking in the rainforest (hopefully they get that pesky jungle cut down soon) has the potential to be devastating in our high mobility society complete with populations concentrated in megacities across the planet. Like an asteroid strike, this is a very high consequence event that will impact us in the future. World War One killed as many as 20 million people. The Spanish Flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, or between 3% and 5% of the world’s population, in 1918 and 1919.

Yikes. Yeah. Somebody needs to be working on that.

And somebody should also be working on protecting us from bioterrorism, but I strongly doubt it’s the CDC™. The CDC™ is the only agency I know of that’s managed to misplace smallpox in their other pants, along with the keys to the CDC™ golf cart. Oh, and the CDC™ also exposed their own employees to anthrax, and not just the heavy metal band. Since these things really happened, we need to make sure an adult is at the wheel. And, please Comic Distribution Clowns® (CDC™), no more comic books about zombies. If there is anything with less soul than a comic book about zombies by a government health agency, it might be a government health agency warning us about eating cookie dough.

Readers of this blog know I’m all for people being prepared. But the CDC®? Zombies™? Please leave the misleading and incomplete preparedness information to FEMA™.

So, by all means, please have the charisma of a wet goat the CDC™, avoid the consequence of minimal personal responsibility involving infinitesimal risk, and just tell your grandchildren “no” when they want to lick the beater after you make sugar cookies. I’m not sure that kids of today would even notice – recess at school nowadays consists of “competitive sitting quietly,” “standing quietly and motionlessly near the wall,” and “counting the days until a government-based Christian theocracy turns women into harems for Trump supporters.” That sounds so much more fun than playing tackle football in the fifth grade on a rock covered field and having snowball fights. And actual fights. I sure missed out as a kid.

Yes, it’s a retread. But it’s a sexy theocratic retread.

This certainly isn’t the case of a government agency that’s looking for publicity by making outlandish claims to scare people about risks that are less likely than being killed by lighting? Nah. Government is here because it loves you! Or because government needs something to do between drinking yeasty Ariana Grande lattes and faking moon landings.

Not mine, but funny.

Recession? Depression? Oppression? At least there are Bikinis.

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the . . . anyone, anyone? The Great Depression, passed the . . . anyone, anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act?” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Did George R.R. Martin study economics? It certainly looks like he’s studied bratwurst.

Not that there’s anything to see here (yet) and I don’t want to go around spreading panic, but I just thought I’d dust off some information about recessions. And depressions. No particular reason. Nope. Just stretching my legs.

What is a recession?

A recession is a period of time when the economy gets a little smaller for at least six months or so. Generally, the recessions of the past have seen the economy drop by no more than 5% in any three month period. When you look at the numbers, even most years when there is a recession, the economy still grows overall.

Looks like this would be a good comb for Dwayne Johnson (The Rock®), or a really complicated game of Tetris®.

The blue areas are the economic growth. The red? Contraction. The average recession length since 1945 has been about 10 months, and the average economic expansion has lasted about five and a half years. The general idea is that the economy is based on constant growth.

How much of the economy is geared to growth?

I’m not sure, but I estimated it using publicly available figures. I guessed that 2/3 of construction work was geared towards growth, 20% of manufacturing, 10% of retail (Home Despot® and such), 20% of finance (can’t build if you don’t have cash), and 20% of hotel/restaurant jobs. I did the math, and that comes out to 12,000,000 jobs. How close was that? It’s roughly 10% of the workforce, and unemployment can hit 10% after a recession. So, as a first guess it’s probably not too bad. 12,000,000 jobs, at minimum are required for growth. And those same jobs disappear when growth disappears.

But even with the economic hardship and dislocation, recessions are good. Think of a small, quick fire in a forest. After the dead brush piles up, clearing out the underbrush makes the forest stronger. The strong trees survive, but the weak and rotten trees get burned down. In this part of the Midwest, a regular feature of forest management is a burn off – some places do it every three years or so. The fires are always small, and the danger of a larger fire goes away because all of the dead wood is consumed, but we do keep a supply of elephants on hand to stamp out the burning ducks. Just in case.

Bad businesses fail during a recession. Those on life support go away – they clear the way for growth and good, strong businesses to take their place – the end of a recession is a time of renewal, much like in Hollywood® when the Plastic Surgery Fairy drops by the homes of all good actors and actresses on George Clooney’s birthday.

A depression, however, is a wildfire in a forest that’s built up dead wood and standing dead trees for decades after a gasoline rainstorm. Wildfires burn out of control. Whatever is in the path gets burned. Healthy trees? Doesn’t matter – the inferno takes them along with the dead wood and no amount of well-trained ducks can stamp the flames out.

Healthy business? Doesn’t matter. Business failures start, and then cascade. People panic, and hold onto money. Companies panic and hold onto money. One sign of a depression (besides a sudden drop in male underwear sales – this really happens) is that debt levels actually go down. People don’t buy anything during a depression – they never know when they’ll be able to replace the money that they have. Debt levels also drop because the debts are written off – bankruptcy is another way to lower debt levels.

What causes a depression? A Soviet by the name of Nikolai Kondratiev had an economic theory – namely that the business cycle we stupid capitalists kept running into was based on debt and that the capitalists were stupid and over the course of decades would forget that debt was, you know, bad. Lenin loved him, but Stalin? Not so much, especially after a communist-sympathizing professor at the University of Minnesota ratted him out to Soviet authorities for a visit with an anti-communist when Kondratiev visited the University of Minnesota.

Minnesota has been a leftist state for a long time. Wondering if we could trade it to China for a box of magic beans? Or regular beans? Or an I.O.U.?

It’s debatable whether or not Kondratiev’s economic theory is correct, but it certainly fits the technologically-driven cycles of debt and discovery that lead to boom and bust that we’ve seen in the United States over the last three centuries.

I told The Mrs. I would use these graph-ruled index cards. See, I told you I would. Bonus: thinking about girls wearing bikinis.

Let’s talk about the economic cycle. (That was one of my best pick-up lines in college, but I would add “baby” at the end to make it totally sexy. Because, really, who isn’t put in the mood by discussion of aggregate economic activity?)

So, let’s talk about the economic cycle, baby.

In Spring, new businesses are formed. As economic activity expands, existing businesses expand. Optimism is the atmosphere. And, since debt is low (and people don’t want debt), there is money to buy stuff. And stuff is relatively cheaply as the currency gained a lot of power during the deflationary winter. Social cohesion and trust in newly-rebuilt institutions is high. And it’s nearly bikini weather! Think 1945 to 1965 in the United States.

I’m sorry.

Summer=bikinis! Who needs anything else? Oh, and also relaxation, and growth, and profits, and expansion. The greatest degree of questing for personal growth and whatever hippy course you want to take to validate yourself occurs in summer. The focus on strong institutions passes – but the quest for self-gratification takes over, and it really doesn’t matter because inertia in the economy keeps things going. 1965-1985 is representative of Summer.

I’m really sorry.

Harvest happens in Fall. You could call it Autumn if you have to be all East Coast, but if you do, I’ll call it Efterår, which is Danish for Fall and sounds like what a Viking could yell it at you before you got totally pillaged. But Fall is a great analogy since at this stage the economy is harvested. All the work that went on in Spring to prepare for economic success, all the growth that took place in the Summer, well, it’s time to harvest it in Fall. And greed is good, right? And debt hasn’t hurt us for the last fifty years, so, please, have as much debt as you can eat. Yup, you got it. 1985-2005.

Okay, does this make it better? And, Oktoberfest is in fall. Or efterår.

And now? If Kondratiev was right, Winter. The last Winter in the United States was the Great Depression, which lasted 253 years if you listened to my Grandma. But the Winter was difficult – debt collapse, financial panic, bank failures, tariffs, plant closings, unemployment, greater government control of the economy, breadlines, and no bikinis at all. Oh, and war brought about by the crisis. If Kondratiev is right, this would last from (roughly) 2005 to 2025.

Oh, sure, she has to top every story. But she also dated Andrew Jackson when he was just a kid.

This graph shows the velocity of money – how it moves in the economy. It’s clear that we’re in a place where money isn’t moving as fast as it used to throughout our economy – it’s at a record low since we’ve been measuring it. The low velocity is not because everyone is wealthy, it’s because tons of dead dollars sit on the books of various banking institutions. We’ve also pumped massive amounts of money into the system:

Now, if that money starts moving around like it used to, and there’s bunches of it . . . nah, that wouldn’t lead to inflation, would it?

Kondratiev’s cycle is roughly as long as a human life – which makes sense. Like a bad Arkansas carnival ride, you have to forget what you learned in the cycle in order to want to repeat it. Kondratiev’s work was also picked up by Strauss and Howe in their bestselling book The Fourth Turning. It’s a good book, and in some cases it almost reads like prophecy (it came out in 1997). I’d toss a link to the book up here, but you can figure this one out, or at least your Mom told me you could. She also said you could dress yourself, but she was pretty worried about your diet.

Depressions bring down banking systems, currencies, and governments – from Weimar Germany to the Russian Revolution. The chaos from just a financial mess can last for decades. But during the 17^th Century in Europe, things got even worse:

The massive quantity of silver and gold that the Spanish brought back from the New World distorted the economy of all of Europe, leading to inflation. But then, the Maunder Minimum (LINK) hit. The Maunder Minimum, a decrease in the overall output of the Sun, added poor harvests and exceptionally cold winters to inflation. The regular resources that Europe depended on became scarce. When accompanied by resource constraints like Europe during the Maunder Minimum in the 17^th Century, the chaos can last for a century. I wonder what it would look like if oil were much more expensive? (But that’s a future post.)

I think that we were pretty close to a financial system collapse back in 2008-2009. The solution was to pump astonishing amounts of money into the financial system leading to distortions that have caused commodity prices like oil and grain to lead to the Egyptian revolution and the Syrian revolution, all while we wage wars in two countries. I don’t think our financial system is remotely fixed at this point – debt continues to rise. It’s up to $70 trillion dollars – thankfully that’s only about a million dollars of debt for each family of four. We can work that down in a year or two, right, if we cut back on going out for dinner?

The kink in the curve? That was what caused a worldwide recession and panic in 2008 and 2009. Hope nothing changes. Debt’s good, right?

Is there a draft in here? Seems chilly. Winter’s coming, I think.

The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means

â€œDon’t worry, man. Â Those aren’t narcs, they’re Las Emigras; you know, theÂ ImmigrationÂ Service looking forÂ illegalÂ aliens.â€ â€“ Up in Smoke

Who knew that would be the impact of that one little change?Â (H/T me.meÂ LINK)

The Caravan on our southern border is an expression of war, and itâ€™s abetted by collaborators right here in the United States.Â Or at least in Chicago, which I hear shares a border with the United States.

Iâ€™ll explain.

We live in an era dominated by 4^th Generation warfare, and have been living in that era since Vietnam.Â The â€œCaravanâ€ of illegal aliens on the southern border of the United States is a concerted attack on the United States using 4^th Generation warfare techniques.

Huh?Â What the heck is 4^th Generation warfare?

Donâ€™t worry â€“ Iâ€™ll explain.Â Iâ€™m a trained professional member of Blog Clubâ„¢, and the first rule of Blog Clubâ„¢ is to mention your blog whenever possible â€“ this thing wonâ€™t market itself.Â Regardless, donâ€™t try this at home or you might end up with and adverb slammed up your philtrum.Â To understand what the 4^th Generation is, letâ€™s move back in time and understand the first three generations.Â These descriptions follow concepts originally developed by William S. Lind (LINK).

In the 1^st Generation of warfare, Lind picks the formation of the Treaty of Ghent as his starting point.Â Or maybe it was the Simpsonâ€™s Treaty of Springfield and Shelbyville.Â Regardless of what treaty it was, it essentially took warfare out of the control of small feudal lords and placed primary conduct of war in the smooth clammy fish-like hands of nation-states.Â Since warfare back then consisted of cannons, very inaccurate muskets, and lots and lots and lots of dudes, the height of military strategy consisted of lines and masses of men moving to fight lines and masses of men.Â It (sort of) made sense.Â The muskets were crappy, so everybody shooting all at the same time was a good way to kill the enemy.Â Besides, the cannons were inaccurate, too, and needed big targets to shoot at.Â Napoleon was certainly the best general of 1^st Generation warfare, but, you know, that whole â€œdonâ€™t get involved in a land war in Asiaâ€ started with him.Â He won lots of battles, but lost the war.Â Twice.

2^nd Generation warfare showed up when machine guns and accurate artillery made standing up in huge masses of dudes a certain prescription to lose the battle and also lose all of your pesky taxpaying citizens who used to be alive.Â The real innovation of the 2^nd Generation was â€œhidingâ€ from the machine guns and artillery.Â The Civil War in the United States started as a 1^st Generation war, and finished with aspects of the 2^nd Generation.Â The trench warfare during the First World War was the height of 2^nd Generation warfare, proving to be an even better way to eliminate your own citizens than standing them up in a line.

Guess thatâ€™s a last tag with Todd.

The Kaiser is still on Myspace.Â Sad.

The 3^rd Generation of war incorporated mobility and the idea that the most rapid gains were based on combining infantry, armor, artillery and air power into a war of motion and position.Â The German Blitzkrieg, literally meant â€œlightning warâ€, which is probably a good description for the 3^rd Generation.Â The French had ended 2^nd Generation warfare by perfecting it â€“ they created the Maginot Line, a series of fixed fortifications.Â This forced the Germans to invent an entirely new method of war to defeat it.

During and after World War II, the United States perfected this 3^rd Generation warfare â€“ learning every lesson that the Germans could teach.Â And then spending trillions of dollars to perfect an armed forces that is perfectly designed to win World War II.Â Again.

Those panzers wonâ€™t fuel themselves!

The 4^th Generation of warfare started in the latter part of the Vietnam War.Â 4^th Generation warfare strikes at the legitimacy of the state.Â Tanks, bombs, and mobility donâ€™t count.Â The idea is to win the war without (necessarily) winning any battle.Â Whereas the 1^st Generation of warfare arrived with the nation-state, the 4^th Generation arises as people around the world cease to identify as citizens and begin to primarily identify with tribal, racial, religious or cause-based allegiances.Â And yes, you can make the argument that Julius Caesar faced the same sort of guerilla tactics when he invaded Britain, but he didnâ€™t have PNNÂ© (Parchment News Network) showing photographs of the slaughter.Â Pics or it didnâ€™t happen.

H/T:Â Weapons and Warfare (LINK)

What are some examples of 4^th Generation warfare?

The Intifada: Palestinians use children to attack Israeli soldiers, hoping for an Israeli soldier to kill the children for an awesome photo opportunity.Â Palestinian leaders then launch rockets and missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools, again hoping for as much of their followers blood to be spilled as possible.Â Israeli victory depends on . . . not killing these kids.
Mogadishu: The warlords walked the streets, surrounded by women and children, again knowing that an American Marine is not going to shoot up non-combatants to get to a bad guy.
Antifaâ„¢: To the mother that left her kids out in Berkeley, could you come pick them up?Â Theyâ€™re beating up both AntifaÂ® and the police.
The Caravan.

Wait, what?Â The Caravan?

Illegal aliens strike at the heart of the nation-state.Â If a nation isnâ€™t allowed to control its borders, then how is it a nation?Â And there is a group of people inside the United States that are collaborators with the invasion.Â They deny that borders should even exist.Â An example of tweets from #abolishborders:

Shooting teargas at women and children is not “border security”. It’s terrorism.
Guess it wasnâ€™t enough for the U.S. government to throw children in concentration camps. This is beyond inhumane. All dirt is the same, and free movement is a human right.

Military force is ineffective against an invasion like the Caravan.Â Scenes of violence against unarmed people on TV is powerful propaganda against the middle portion of the United States population that can be swayed to support the aliens.Â Imagine the sympathy fest as weepy single moms emote on their way to drop off Brayden, Jayden, Hayden, Aiden and Kirk to their dad who lives in a one-room apartment above the pool hall hear the news on NPRÂ®.Â How sad!

Von Clausewitz talked about war being waged on three levels:

Physical â€“ Breaking stuff and killing people and taking land.
Mental â€“ Making the enemy think what you want them to think. Confusing them.
Moral â€“ You have to believe that what youâ€™re fighting for is right, just and correct.

Most military thinkers through the ages (including that French dude, Napoleon) feel that the moral level of war is the most crucial.Â If you think what youâ€™re doing is wrong and evil, itâ€™s probably a good bet youâ€™re going to lose.Â And if the people back home think youâ€™re evil?Â Well, we have Vietnam where news that was looking to support a narrative convinced the majority of the American people that we were on the wrong side morally in the war.Â So, we declared victory and left the communists to win.

What if you decide you’re the bad guy?

But there are 4^th Generation collaborators on the inside of the United States right now.Â A primary organizer of the Caravans is the United States based organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras.Â Started by leftist Emma Lozano, this organization is also affiliated with La Familia Latina UnidaÂ (LFLU, â€œThe United Latin Familyâ€), and Ms. Lozano is virulently against the United States, noting, â€œWe ride for freedom from our oppressors and we donâ€™t say, â€˜please, accept us, we are good workers,â€™ and make contributions, and wave the U.S. flag. Â We know our history â€“ half of the entire United States was originally Mexico. Â We have every right to be here.â€

According to an email obtained by theÂ Washington Times:

Lozano told supporters that â€œwe will march and run our own Latino independent candidate for president of the United States.â€ When a staffer for Rep. Gutierrez announced that the congressman wasnâ€™t interested in running for president, Lozano responded that â€œweâ€™re obligating him to run, weâ€™re not asking him. Weâ€™re in a war and when youâ€™re in a war you fight. Weâ€™re drafting him.â€

You can find much more about Emma here (LINK) or through a casual GoogleÂ® search.Â Based on everything I can find about Ms. Lozano, I would expect that sheâ€™s in favor of a racially-based communism that results in the destruction of the United States as we know it and lots of free stuff for people she likes.Â And lots of concentration leisure camps for the rest of us.Â Free RV parking!

Ms. Lozano is a general in a 4^th Generation war.Â She is actively seeking to abolish the United States â€“ by directly replacing its people with people that she likes better.Â And these activists seek photo opportunities that allow them to establish moral superiority.Â I watched footage where a Mexican police officer said (more or less, Iâ€™m going from memory):Â â€œPlease, please donâ€™t put your women and children in front like this man,â€ pointing to an activist, â€œtells you to do.Â Itâ€™s dangerous.Â And he doesnâ€™t care about you or your children.Â Iâ€™m begging you, donâ€™t put your children up front.â€Â Pueblo Sin Fronteras is certainly willing to sacrifice your children for a cool photo.

How an organization that encourages and abets breaking the law (Pueblo Sin Fronteras) can operate and not be indicted based on conspiracy charges is beyond me â€“ if this were a right-wing organization I believe the organizers would have been taken to the International Space Station just so they could be shoved out of an airlock as a lesson to others that embarrassing the state is simply not an option.Â I guess that Iâ€™m forced to conclude that Pueblo Sin Fronteras is doing exactly what government wants them to do.

These activists want pictures of children that were bloodied and killed at the hands of the United States government, and will stop at nothing to get them.Â They want to break down the moral will of the United States so that open borders are allowed.Â Rather than attempting to take over Dallas at the head of an army, they want to influence the families of the people who live in Dallas to surrender as they never would to what this really is:Â a leftist invasion based on an ideology of open borders.

But the logic for open borders is easy to refute:

How many people would move to the United States if they could? The answer is:Â several billion.Â This is simply not realistic.Â Where would we keep them?Â Does California have a closet and a spare bedroom we donâ€™t know about?
Moving all the Guatemalans here doesnâ€™t make Guatemala better â€“ it just makes the United States into Guatemala. Where I live, nobody locks their doors.Â In Guatemala?Â Locked doors arenâ€™t enough.Â You can even argue that, after a point, it does the people who move here no benefit as the system breaks down and the benefits they looked for disappear.Â This may be the reason that California is the New Mississippi â€“ the greatest poverty rate in the nation.
The values and cultural norms that made the United States great arenâ€™t the values of the invaders. Conscious or not, invasion by an unassimilated alien culture leads to the destruction of the American culture and norms.Â And the big value generation-device that our economy has been for 120 years ceases to work.Â We become poor.

In order to win this war:

The aliens must be gently, firmly, and quickly be sent home.
We must stop supporting them with cash if they are here.
We must make life here so unhelpful that they voluntarily deport themselves.
We must not give their nations cash if they keep coming here.
We must stop cash flowing from individuals to their home country.
We can help their home countries to build industries and meaningful jobs.
If the people like, heck, we could come in and run the country for them since they seem to suck at running countries and we seem to be good at it. Is illegal immigration really the best argument for colonization ever?
We must win at the mental and moral levels.

We are in a war.Â Are we ready to fight?Â Because I donâ€™t think that the 5^th Generation of war will be quite as nice as the 4^th . . . .

Why Are You Mad At Your Computer? It Doesn’t Care. Plus: A Deeply Meaningful Poem

â€œThey would’ve learned to wear skins, adoptedÂ stoicÂ mannerisms, learned the bow and the lance.â€ â€“ Star Trek

Okay, it was really only one color.Â But it was a LOT of ink.Â Staining and painting.Â Stainting?

I rarely saw Pop Wilder mad at any living human being, at least I rarely saw him mad after I reached the age of ten.Â And I assure you that I deserved it every single time he was mad at me â€“ drawing on the hardwood floor in ink under my bed wasnâ€™t a particularly popular move â€“ especially since Ma and Pop only discovered it the night before we were supposed to be out of the house so that the new owners could move in.

Oops.

Perhaps his even temper with people was learned.Â After being in banking for decades (and having me around for years), I imagine heâ€™d seen everything, including frogs swimming in the World War I helmet his father wore.Â It might be that he believed the worst of people, and that way when they werenâ€™t horrible, they pleasantly surprised him, and when he found ink on his hardwood floor and the family photo album soaking in the bathroom sink (I promise I had a good reason)?Â Or spray painted the fender of his brand-new car?Â Well, that was to be expected.

So, Pop Wilder was a mild and even tempered man and perhaps even a saint for not killing me.Â The one exception to him getting angry was that he would get mad at . . . things.Â Chainsaws.Â Cars.Â Snow machines.Â The blinking light on his VCR.Â In fact, the only time I ever heard him drop the f-bomb was when he was referring to his computer.Â He said it not long after Iâ€™d introduced him to the future The Mrs., and in her presence.Â â€œItâ€™s . . . itâ€™s all f****d up.â€Â Honoring Pop Wilderâ€™s tone and frustration make it a form of punctuation in our house when things have just gone completely wrong but in a comical and hopeless manner.

But what I do know is this: Â the computer didnâ€™t care.

Ahh, the United States Swear Force in action.

Dead Roman Marcus Aurelius nailed it when he wrote, â€œPray to change yourself, not your circumstances.â€Â Marcus wasnâ€™t referring to what was in his control.Â Being an Emperor of Rome, Marcus could control a lot of things, but thatâ€™s not what frustrated him.Â No, Marcus was referring to those things he couldnâ€™t control.Â Marcus was going to grow old and die, and he couldnâ€™t change that.Â Marcus would be resurrected as shoe salesman in Savannah, and he couldnâ€™t change that, either.Â Marcus wanted to change himself so he took those things that he couldnâ€™t control and not react to them.Â Why complain about gravity?

Marcus Aurelius, with a hipster beard before it was cool.

The computer doesnâ€™t care that youâ€™re mad at it.Â The computer wonâ€™t change if you speak harshly to it, though I hear Bezos is working on a computer that will buy random things from AmazonÂ® that it knows you wonâ€™t like, just to spite you if youâ€™re mean to it.Â Honestly, most people donâ€™t care if youâ€™re mad at them, either.Â The real secret is, however, that most things simply do not matter on any sort of cosmic scale.Â I even wrote you, dear Internet, a poem about that:

The Unblinking Stars

The stars looked down.
When Julius Caesar was born, they looked down.
When Caesar defeated the Gaul, they looked down.
When Caesar died, they looked down.

For every man, for every empire.
The stars looked down.
Unblinking.

When continents split, and then recombined.
The stars looked down.
Nearly eternal.

At every time, at ever place,
Every ambition, every love.
Every betrayal.Â Every loyalty.
The stars looked down.

Looking up at them, seeing into eternity.
I gasp.Â I wonder.Â I check the router.
Oh, good.Â The Internetâ€™s back up.
I wonder what just happened on Twitter?

I think that what sets us up to become angry about a situation is contained entirely within ourselves â€“ thereâ€™s a way that we think the world should be, and when the world refuses to be that way, we get angry.Â And the world doesnâ€™t completely conform to anyoneâ€™s hopes and dreams. Â From time to time, even I end up comparing my life to someone elseâ€™s life.Â But I do this particularly awful thing:Â I compare what theyâ€™re best at, to my accomplishments in the same arena.Â Letâ€™s take the business guy I knew.Â He had tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, and even a vintage fighter airplane.Â I donâ€™t have tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, or any airplane thatâ€™s not a model kit that I made when I was a kid.

Thereâ€™s a lot to envy, isnâ€™t there?Â I even think he had a pretty good marriage and smart kids.

Oh, and heâ€™s dead.Â And he died in a really dramatic fashion that probably left his widow with nearly no money after the lawsuit and attorneyâ€™s fees.Â So if Iâ€™m going to be envious, I have to be envious of the whole person, not some small aspect of their lives.Â Itâ€™s a big world and someone, somewhere has it all better than you.Â Theyâ€™re smarter than you, slimmer than you, with a really close, cool family.

And Iâ€™m okay with that, too.

One thing that helped me through my own personal envy was . . . cars.Â When I lived in Houston, there were really nice cars everywhere.Â And by nice, I mean cars that are worth more than my house.Â I felt envy.Â Then I thought about the car payment that they had to make (I read somewhere that most MercedesÂ® on the road are not paid for â€“ theyâ€™re for show).Â That made my four-year-old dad-four door car that Iâ€™d bought used seem a LOT better than the MercedesÂ® driven by the 27 year-old at the stop light next to me.

If youâ€™re a billionaire crime-fighting superhero that found an amulet that gives you super powers but also covers your body in reptilian scales while flying screaming skulls follow you around?Â I suppose itâ€™s okay if you buy yourself something nice every once in a while.

To recap:

The situation doesnâ€™t care. Donâ€™t get mad at it, especially if itâ€™s beyond your control.
Most things really donâ€™t matter â€“ donâ€™t get hung up on the trivia of now.
If you wonâ€™t remember it next year? Itâ€™s probably meaningless.Â Donâ€™t sweat it.
Donâ€™t compare yourself to others, unless theyâ€™re clearly awful in everything compared to you. Then gloat.
Expect that your children will destroy thousands and thousands of dollars of your property and at least a dozen priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms. And burn the counter with hot macaroni.Â And write on the bathroom walls.Â And . . . oh, wait, those were my kids . . .

Wait, what?Â Iâ€™m Pop Wilder now.Â When did that happen?

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.

“Cash, every movie costs $2,184.” – Bowfinger

I made this one up for fun when working on this post. The Mrs. laughed so hard . . . I had to use it. A link here (LINK) for the age impaired. Link is probably PG-13.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

That was what Steve Martin said when he was being interviewed by now unpersoned Charlie Rose and Rose asked what advice Martin would give to a young person.

Martin continued, “ . . . it’s not the answer they want to hear.”

It isn’t.

People want easy. People want lottery money. People want step-by-step guides, complete with phone numbers and instructions on how to become rich and famous. And they want Steve Martin to do it for them. Now please, we’re waiting.

Face it: people want free stuff, not hard work and risk.

I can’t imagine that Steve Martin wants anything for free – he wasn’t raised that way. He’s been a comedian, musician, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. He’s been more successful at each of these than almost any person on the planet. When you combine these successes, Martin starts to look less like an entertainer and more like a National Treasure©. Maybe a National Treasure® we should keep in Tupperware® and wrapped in the good paper towels so we don’t scratch him. We’ll get him out when company comes over.

But Steve’s success wasn’t free. In his book, Born Standing Up, Martin talks about his road to comedy, “I did standup comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” This is what those of a certain political persuasion call unearned overnight success. It is obvious that this success was a result of Martin’s comedic privilege, because it takes a village to raise a comedian.

The concept of spending hours and hours, day after day, year after year seems a bit quaint now, when participation trophies assure every wonderful child that they’ll be successful no matter what. What seemed fresh and new in his comedy routine when his wild success began was in reality the result of work, study, and effort that took fourteen years. And he didn’t even have to “accidentally” release a sex tape to make it happen.

Did Martin know that his hard work would make him an icon known all the way around the world, worth millions of dollars? Probably not. Although it’s also certain that he didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Omigosh, there’s been some sort of error – where did all this money and stuff come from?” And that line is comedy gold if you read it in Steve Martin’s voice.

Certainly, Steve Martin didn’t and doesn’t appeal to everyone – his persona of an entertainer that’s “just really bad at it” falls flat with certain people. But Martin’s dedicated work created a skill set that appealed to enough people that Martin has true freedom – to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. At one point in Born Standing Up, Martin talks about how stand up became difficult for him when doing huge stadium shows – but he didn’t stop. There were “too many zeros,” in his paychecks. So, he died an unremembered failure.

No, just kidding. His next project, a movie called The Jerk, made $180,000,000, despite costing only $2,184 to make. That was his next step.

I realize that there’s a difference between writing whatever comes to mind and working hard every day, every post, so that today’s writing is better than yesterday’s writing. And that next week I’ll be better yet. And that my writing strikes a resonance somewhere, with someone. It creates value.

This is true. I still swoon when I think of it.

And getting good at any craft is not entirely straightforward. Scott Adams (LINK) uses eighteen elements when writing humor, and edits himself ruthlessly. Scott wasn’t a humor writing machine when he started, but he built his greatness with time and effort. And it is effort – I watched a short video of Jerry Seinfeld talking about the effort that goes into making just one joke. It can take an afternoon or more to get it right – and even then he spends time tweaking it, and this is the level of effort that is required by an experienced comedian. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to be a rookie.

For me, I’m going to work harder, steal everything I can from Martin, Adams, Seinfeld, and study it.

And learn.

Imagine if I never told Jerry to change his hair?

I do want to say thanks to The Mrs., who has greatly encouraged me to get better. The nice thing is she’s my harshest critic but also the one I won’t slug. But I will, passive-aggressively, change all the radio presets in her car to Mexican flamenco music. She’ll never guess that I changed the autocorrect for “John” on her phone to “His High and Most Worthy Lordship.”

Just kidding, The Mrs. isn’t a trained assassin. But don’t tell The Boy and Pugsley – The Mrs. just assigned them a mission to stealthily clean their bathroom.

I’m working hard to make myself better, every post. So I can’t be ignored.

But failing that, couldn’t I just play the lottery?

I’ll just leave this here:

Civil War – The Necessary Conditions

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

I hear that Robert E. Lee was voted “Most Likely to Secede” in his West Point class.

A civil war is like a fire. It consumes the energy and emotions of those around it and leaves destruction, desolation and debt in its wake – just like my first marriage. But I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about civil wars and the necessary conditions for one. After thinking about it, I’ve decided that a model for a civil war is fire.

For a fire to burn, it needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and a spark which in turn creates the continuous burning reaction. If you’re missing any one of those things, you simply do not have a fire. An example – The Mrs. and I had a clay fireplace we used out on our deck (this was a long time ago – like during Bush II). One day I was trying to start a fire in the fireplace, and the fire wouldn’t catch – the wood would just smolder – there was smoke, but no flame. The reason for that was that the wood was a bit wet. A-ha! That’s okay. I must have some charcoal starter liquid. I looked in the garage. All out.

But there was gasoline for the mower in the garage.

I poured just a tiny bit down the chimney of the fire place. A tiny bit. An itsy bitsy amount right onto the hot coals from the fire I’d been trying to make. I looked down the chimney as I dropped a match into the pit. Suddenly, a flame shot out of the chimney and washed over my face. I had a beard at that time, and as the flame hit the beard it melted and burnt into kind of a single hair shell on my chin. It smelled as good as burned blonde beard kebab. Thankfully, no one was at home, so there were no witnesses when I took the scissors and chopped the welded chunks of congealed beard hair off.

It turns out that gasoline boils at a really low temperature, and when I poured the gasoline down the chimney, it landed on the hot wood that I’d been trying to burn and immediately turned from liquid into hot gasoline vapors. The hot gasoline vapors were the fuel, fully mixed with the oxygen as they rose up the chimney. All they needed was that spark, and all the energy stored in the hot gasoline vapors ignited at the speed of sound through the chimney in a de-beardifying whoosh.

But this is a model of Civil War not an ad for the use of flame as a shaving aid. What allows a civil war to start?

Fuel – The differences in our opinions are shown pretty well in the most recent survey done by Pew, which is reproduced right below through the power of Internet sorcery. The Right is moving farther right. The Left is moving farther left. And in both cases the degree of overlap drops. This increasingly small overlap between left and right means we’re not even talking the same language. We look at the same picture, the same news story and react in entirely opposite ways. The more fuel that builds up (generally) the greater the energy released when the fire starts. Look to see a lot of hipster beards on fire.

Spark – A spark is an event that’s bold, audacious, emotional, and one that means there’s no going back, things will never be the same again. These are often followed up by escalations, each one following the narrative of the split (the fuel for the fire) of the Godly and good us versus the evil baby-hating them: shelling Fort Sumter; Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his Legions; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and that night that Donald Trump poured sugar into Hillary Clinton’s gas tank.

Oxygen – This is required for the fire to go – it feeds the chemical combustion. In this civil war/fire analogy, oxygen is symbolic of the opposing governmental structure. In the Revolutionary War it was the Congress of the States that declared the war. In the Civil War? The Confederate States organized and met. Even Caesar had at his disposal the governmental structure of the Legions that he commanded and the means to provide for them. In all cases, a civil war needs a governmental structure to move from isolated insurrection to true war.

In 2018 I think there’s a lot of fuel built up – the division between Left and Right is increasing. Twitter®, the Fake News (Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.) and the concentrated attempts to deplatform entire viewpoints (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) are examples. The Left is even rioting against free speech – the very thing the Left rioted to allow in the 1960’s.

I think the fuel is currently pretty wet – it’s inhibited because people just have so much darn stuff. Who wants to go down to fight Antifa© when you’ve got to get to work the next morning so you can earn money to make payments on your new F-150 and you’ve got beer in the fridge and Netflix® on the television, which is probably more fun than punching smelly hippies?

Even Antifa™ has to get home early so they can keep working at Starbucks® and Mom still has them on a curfew. But make no mistake – they have no interest in finding common ground – they want to fight. And they don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. From CNN:

“Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.” So, other people’s speech is violence, and their violence is only speech?

(H/T AR15.COM – warning, naughty words)

But a prolonged economic downturn will dry the fuel out quickly. Janis Joplin taught us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (and that Bobby McGee could really sing the blues), and we won’t have Civil War 2.0 until people have nothing to lose. The saving grace for many years has been the all the “stuff” that we have. Before then we’ve had a fairly homogeneous population with (for the most part) deeply shared values.

We have sparks everywhere – from marches and riots to new laws and elections – things that drive both sides crazy. These will intensify during an economic downturn, and will be played up in the press. Conflict sells ads.

We are, however, missing the oxygen – the governmental structure that benefits from the war. The current governing powers aren’t threatened by Antifa®. They’re not really even threatened by Trump, since very few of his accomplishments will outlast his time in office – Supreme Court Justice appointments being a notable exception. The swamp remains intact. Government certainly isn’t threatened by the very far right, since two out of three Klan members (all, what, 1000 of them?) are FBI agents or informants anyway. And individual states have been more-or-less neutered since the Civil War changed the nature of the agreement between federal and state governments.

Civil war? No. Not unless the economy worsens, and not unless there’s a structure that benefits “the other side” – and who on Earth would benefit from a civil war in the United States?

Notes:

I am not the first use the fire triangle analogy when it comes to war – I found a reference to a Major Patrick Pascall who used a similar model in a 2009 paper to describe the insurgency in Iraq (LINK). As far as I can tell, though, I’m the first to use it in this manner. Yay, me!

Fire Triangle By Wikimedia User: Gustavb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, snarky comments: me.

The Funniest Post You Will EVER Read About Genetic Engineering, Now Available in Cream or Roll-On

“Right, then! I do the best I can for you, the bloody best, to set up your sniveling, snotty-nosed kid the way you want, and all I get in return for pouring fifteen years of research into the bloody boring composition of the bloody damn DNA molecule is a pair of pathetic twits, who, when confronted with bloody stats start a pathetic wiffle-waffle. Right now, Mr. and Mrs. Stolwry, you have a perfect, beautiful specimen of a stocky, blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, quilted, male shrimp-head welder, with pods. Now, what more do you bloody want? Frankly, it makes me sick! Why don’t you go have your child naturally?” – Eric Idle on Saturday Night Live (1976) – I can’t embed the video but it’s here (LINK) and hilarious.

Now you know why chicken wings are getting bigger. If only it would make its own sauce. I bet it does, in the Twilight Zone©!

We are at the beginning of a new age of humanity, and maybe even an entirely new type of humanity. The first humans have been born where sections of their DNA (the genetic information that defines most everything of what they are) have been replaced with new information. It’s exactly like someone recutting Toy Story® using dialogue from Fight Club™. Oh, someone did that? I do live in the best possible timeline:

It’s only two minutes: give it a watch, please. My therapist says I need to share things. But the first rule is that we shouldn’t talk about it. Thankfully, I’m typing instead of talking.

But in this case, the genetic information that defines a living human being was cut out and replaced with new information. And the human is an actual living human.

How did they do it?

Tiny scissors. Really small ones. And itty-bitty pieces of Scotch® tape. Okay, they actually used a technique called “CRISPR”, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. But for all you care it could stand for Clever Reindeer Intentionally Shooting Panda Rifles. It doesn’t matter. Let’s pretend it’s really tiny scissors and itty-bitty pieces of Scotch™ tape.

CRISPR allows editing of the DNA strand by using segments of DNA to match up with and replace the parts of the DNA that we don’t like. And even though DNA is comprised of lots of molecules, in reality DNA is just information like pages in a book, or dialogue in a movie except if you try to replace passages in your book with DNA all you get is a mess and sticky fingers from turning the DNA soaked pages. But back to the DNA: some of the information on the DNA appears to be actual junk – it may not mean anything – but the rest of the information defines your height, weight, hair color, maximum intelligence, ability to play guitar, affinity for bacon, and, well, ability to write real good word thoughts (PLOT POINT!).

Editing the DNA with CRISPR allows the editing of new pages into a book, and even the individual letters in the book. But better not end up leaving out the wrong word:

This Bible was printed in 1631 and is known as the “Wicked Bible.” If anyone actually followed the instructions, there was probably oodles of amateur DNA transfer. Hopefully not on the pages.

CRISPR can be used to edit mushroom DNA. Or cow DNA. Or . . . human DNA. And now two human girls have been born and inserted into their DNA is the resistance to AIDS.

The first time I ran into the concept of genetic engineering was when I was a kid, watching Star Trek®. When I was a kid, it was a law that every other show on television was a repeat of Star Trek™. The idea of one episode, Space Seed, was that a group of genetically enhanced (mentally and physically) supermen led a war. When they lost the war, they were shot into space in suspended animation. Because prison was too complicated, I guess. The leader? Khan Noonian Singh, played in scenery-chewing fashion by Ricardo Montalban.

Even Kirk is skittish about genetic engineering.

Any measurable human trait or combination of human traits from DNA can now be changed. And almost every human trait is genetic in nature. I know this from experience. As much as you might think that I was conceived of during an immaculate conception witnessed only by the angels and attended by a gaggle of singing heifers in bloomers, well, that was not exactly the case, no matter what I tell my kids. It was sweaty teenagers. But I digress. I’m adopted, but in the weird way where I’m actually related to the family that adopted me. I couldn’t even get “unwanted abandoned child” right. Such a failure.

Anyway, for every moment of my life until I was 35, I had zero contact with my biological father. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. Empty set. And zero contact with any of his relatives. Complete isolation from that side of my personal biodiversity. But I had been told his name. Then, one night under some assistance from a bit of Coors Light® I did an Internet search and . . . called a number. He wasn’t there, but a week later we talked. And it was unusual.

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I have a rather strange set of interests. One day, jokes about fizzy toots, the next day political analysis, then genetic engineering. But when I called my biological father it was odd – there was almost no subject that either of us brought up that the other hadn’t researched. Oh, and he’s a writer (THIS WAS THE PLOT POINT PAYOFF). Please don’t get me wrong, in no way do I want to imply that I feel anything but the strongest loyalty to the family that raised me, but I could see the similarities so much that I made up a really clever original phrase: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I’m glad that when they rebuild the last remaining Internet server after the Nacho Cheese War of 2331™, that I’m certain to be credited with my wonderful, original phrase.

But your grandma who didn’t like that little tramp you were dating was right: genetics matter.

CRISPR puts the tools to optimize human traits in the hands of . . . humans. Sure, we’ve been doing the amateur kind of genetic engineering for, well, ever. And it’s resulted in some pretty interesting people, like, say, you. Our genetic engineers were our mothers and fathers. Men have broad shoulders because women like broad shoulders. Women have . . . well, we’ll skip that for now. Don’t want to say the wrong thing and have everyone think I’m a boob.

Beware of 12 year olds with the ability to create genetic modifications.

Who gets to play with CRISPR first? The rich. Specifically rich Chinese people. Yes, regulations exist in China, but the regulations exist to protect the State, not the people, silly. The only reason the Party would restrict rich kids from having SuperBabies 3000® is if the Party feels the technology is too powerful and keeps it for itself.

Make no mistake, this is an incredibly powerful technology, like alcohol on prom night. I think that the Chinese elite will start snipping and tucking DNA so that their children are smarter. Taller. Stronger. More confident. Better nose hair, you know, the kind you can braid. If you’re a billionaire, why not? The Party will be fine with that, since it gives them the ability to see what the technology does. I mean, understanding the complicated interactions between DNA molecules is tougher than dancing a polka striptease with a gopher. And we all know what that’s like.

Khan we fix your DNA? Yes we Khan!

Can you imagine being the master of this technology? You can eliminate undesirable human traits, such as enjoying Taylor Swift® music entirely from your gene pool. You can, if you are the Party, create the perfect Chuck Norris-like soldier. A 9 foot tall (37 meters) basketball player. The most loyal citizens.

If you are willing to sacrifice and experiment to quickly understand what the interactions are between multiple genetic changes and patient enough to await the results, you’ll quickly lead the world in a technology whose limits we can barely perceive. And in a state controlled by a central Party, well, soon enough we could see a split so wide in human ability that humanity might look more like a colony of insects with different classes of humans genetically modified to follow their role as drone, soldier, queen, scientist, and blogger than the normal wild and feral band of humans we’re used to. They’d be farther apart than Morlock© and Eloi™.

H.G. Wells couldn’t have imagined that 800,000 years of human evolution could be done in an afternoon in an uncomfortably warm doctor’s office. But he also couldn’t imagine that Leonardo DiCaprio would ever win an Oscar®.

In China in a few years embryonic DNA modifications might become as common as vaccination in the United States. Once the DNA gets into the gene pool of the country, it will stay there. Perhaps in two or three generations China will have citizens that are entirely immune to some sort of biological agent that just, whoops, “accidentally” gets released to depopulate the planet and leave it free for China.

Shhh, but I think the Chinese have already measured Africa to see if all of their stuff would fit.

But in a twist resulting from an interaction between a snip that removed unsightly ear hair and a tuck that allowed all men to grow mustaches as full and perfect as the one Burt Reynolds had in Sharky’s Machine©, the remaining citizens develop an insatiable desire for eating humans. What an ending! Then Rod Serling can come out, smoking, with a good moral to the story. Yay!

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t make me change your DNA so you’re chattier. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it, unless you have a weak, girlie-man inbox. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.

The Funniest and Most Meaningful Black Friday Post . . . Ever. Now 50% off, Today Only.

“It’s Black Friday, the day when ordinary house moms turn into vicious bargain hunting animals, blinded by low prices, and eager to get the Christmas shopping done early. If this was a zoo I’d say run for you lives, but this is Buy More!” – Chuck

Mabel’s family was upset with her on the drive home. They used Apple® products and didn’t have Windows™. (I’m sorry for that joke, but by way of explanation I’m a father.)

Like many people, I try to avoid the stores on Black Friday. If I were a mullet wearing geezer with my toga full of elf chum (please don’t ask me to draw a picture of that, I’m not even sure what elf chum is, and now that I’ve written it I feel vaguely dirty), I’d say Black Friday is maybe the one real American holiday that most people agree on. Christmas is great, but when was the last time a group of people attempted to choke each other to death to get a gift-wrapped package of underwear on Christmas? Never. But put a 50%-off tag on socks with a pattern of Iron Man® smoking a bong with Donald Duck™ on them? Heck, I’d drop kick a calico kitten through a box fan for a bargain like that! Sure, we have great holidays like Fourth of July, but nobody ever died in a riot for 2 for 1 fireworks.

Bargains! Free stuff! Perhaps that’s the new slogan of the United States – Free Stuff! And don’t forget that buying stuff is easier than actual salvation or real effort to be a better person. And even if you don’t like toast – that toaster is only $5. You can learn to love toast.

Perhaps Black Friday not only our true holiday, it is perhaps our true religious holiday.

You can tell that these zombies aren’t leftists – they don’t appear to be lecturing anyone.

I’m not going to make fun of people who are short of cash and frugal and truly need the items that they buy, but that only accounts for a small percentage of purchasers on Black Friday. As Americans, we have been conditioned to shop. Until we drop. And don’t let Debt stand in your way. And I use the word “we” for a reason – I’ve done it, too. No, I would sooner investigate my hotel room with a black light and then still stay there than go in a store the day after Thanksgiving. But I do have the Internet. And I’ve bought stupid stuff:

Dog Waxer – rechargeable! Never let your unwaxed dog embarrass you again.
Solar Powered Night Light – Works best on a sunny day.
Internet-Connected Underwear – With your app, you can check the temperature and humidity.
Night Vision Scope for Caulk Gun – Now you can apply your caulk, even in the dark.
Crossword Puzzle Book for Dogs – Just as it says.

So, yes, I’ve bought my share of stupid crap, which made me ask the question: why do we buy useless crap at all?

Impulse: I see shiny things. I must have them. The depths of the brain, that part that grunts instead of talking and that never uses underarm deodorant that drives this fascination. Just give it meat, scotch, and women and the impulses will go away.
Herd Mentality: I will fight you to the death for the toaster that puts the fuzzy face of Bob Ross on toast! They actually make a toaster that does this and I am hoping that the Discovery Channel® has a series coming where people fight to the death for consumer items. Makes me feel so, well, Roman. Humans want to have the things that other humans have, which is why so many ex-wives exist. I’ll just stop right there.

What a happy little toaster!

Makes You Feel Better: Shopping really works to make you feel better – it gives you a sense of accomplishment. No matter how hard your day was, and what tasks you face, there is a 100% chance that you can buy something and it will make you feel a little bit better. It gives you that sense of control, no matter how poor your decisions were today, you can find a breakfast cereal or, say, 436 pairs of shoes. You can make a choice and follow through. People even have a name for this type of shopping – “Retail Therapy.”

The nice thing about Retail Therapy? It costs about the same as real therapy, and you can still hate your mother when you’re done shopping for those 436 pairs of shoes. So you have hatred and shoes left. I call that a win-win.

Why not shop until you drop? You can. If it’s not a problem:

Well, if you’re going into debt for power tools just to chase the kids around with (a circular saw works well as long as you have enough extension cord) or sacrificing your ability to retire just so you can have a “Hello Kitty®” ashtray, it’s a problem.
If you have boxes of stuff you’ve never opened inside of other boxes of stuff you’ve never opened, it’s either a problem or a movie premise for Leonardo DiCaprio© for a movie called Inshopsion. There is a rule, however, that DVDs starring Burt Reynolds™ do NOT count in this category, so don’t even ask.

If you really need something to complete you, shopping isn’t it. It’s short term, and only lasts until you’ve bought the next thing. And the more crap you buy, the more confusion you bring into your life – sooner or later you have to spend more time managing the crap than it is worth. Again, I know this from experience – my own. And I still can’t find that spare kidney I bought on Kidney-Bay® on Black Friday back in 2012. Maybe it moved back to the original owner.

How do you cut back? Thankfully, the solutions are simple:

Replace shopping with something that’s a real achievement. Blogging for thousands of wonderful readers who have wonderful hygiene, immaculate mullets, and stunning good looks counts. You know, as an example.
Look for real competition in the world. I mean, soccer was invented by European beatnik nudist jugglers to provide something to do while their berets dried and they drank cappuccino. But, yes, even soccer will do. Find something.
Bored? Learn to not be bored. Take up chainsaw juggling. European beatniks do it all the time between cigarettes and poetry readings.
One of the things we don’t thing about too much when we think about shopping is time. And time, my friends, is all we have, each day that ticks away is lost forever. Plan your time to be and do something real.

We have to shop. We have to buy things. But as the Roman philosopher Seneca said, any over used virtue becomes a vice. Or was that Captain Kirk? I’ll go check my 12 disc collection of Star Trek: The Original Series Commemorative 32^nd Anniversary Edition Complete with Pink Tribble Box Set. I got it on Black Friday in 2009 on sale for $24.99. It might be here over behind the Original Smokey and the Bandit 2 jacket. Who knew that Burt Reynolds was exactly my height, but only weighed 155 pounds? Thing doesn’t even fit around the shoulders.

Eastbound and Down.

Bonus: Deliverance interview between Burt and Johnny.

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t be shy. Or I will dropkick another kitten through a box fan. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.