John – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

It Came From . . . 1980

“The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It’d take you ten minutes to hack through it with this. Now, if you’re lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go.” – Mad Max

Whole lotta 1980 in that picture.

There is, after this, just one more year to go through in the 1980s, and that’s 1981. I’ve got to say, when I thought back to 1980, I was thinking that I was going to see a lot of garbage. There is a lot of garbage, so I was right. But I was also very pleasantly surprised – there were a lot of great movies that were hiding in 1980, some of which I utterly forgot about.

1980 was one of the first years where video was a big deal (from my recollection). When VCRs became available, they were stunningly expensive, so the first VCR outside of school that we used was a rental – it actually came in a fluffy soft case and you had to hook it up to your TV. I missed many of these at the box office, and although they had a *very* liberal interpretation of who could get in to see an R rated movie (the definition was: did you have money, if you did, you were old enough to get in) I didn’t have a car or a way to get to the theater. Consequently, I saw the rest either on HBO® or on a VHS tape, mostly rented.

Once again, no sequels are on the list. To be fair, in 1980, most movies weren’t sequels – most were original creations. Looking at this list, I see that as a huge loss of cultural wealth and our Current Year as one of uncreative stagnation, mainly mining the past for ideas. Obviously, that will change.

Regardless, here’s the list:

Mad Max – I was one of the few in school that had seen Mad Max (HBO® again) before I saw The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2 for you Aussies). There was something very unique about the visual style and the practical effects that I enjoyed. The time where Max tosses the hacksaw to the handcuffed villain is classic – something Dirty Harry would have done. This movie gave us St. Mel, so, for that, I’m forever grateful.

A.I. can’t spell, apparently.

Saturn 3 – I’ll be honest, I stayed up late to watch this movie on HBO® primarily because I heard that Farrah Fawcett was nekkid in it. She was, but on a tiny television screen without zoom, well, she might as well have not been. I later found out that she was nekkid because Kirk Douglas demanded a love scene with her, take from that what you will. The movie itself is middling at best: a retelling of Frankenstein in space, and they spent most of the budget on the robot/monster. I heard that Harvey Keitel, who plays Dr. Frankenstein, did it all in a weird New York accent, so all of his lines are dubbed by another actor. Like I said, a nightmare. Oh, and, um, it looks way better on a big screen.

Breaker Morant – Ok, I didn’t stay up late at night to watch this movie because it was on in the middle of the day on HBO®. I started watching it while I was building a model tank, and got hooked. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a “Boer War” and watching this film didn’t add much to my knowledge, but it was fascinating and well done. Of the first three films, two were Australian. Good on ya, mates!

Where the Buffalo Roam – This has Bill Murray playing Hunter S. Thompson. One memorable scene has Murray having miniature-sized hotel staff play football in his room during the Super Bowl®. Bill and Hunter apparently became friends on the set, to the point that they got so drunk that Hunter tied Bill to a chair so he could do a Houdini-level escape and threw him into a pool. Thompson then had to save Murray, who apparently didn’t Houdini that well.

Friday the 13^th – The original. A very disappointing movie to me that I saw after I’d seen Friday the 13^th 3-D at the drive in, but without 3-D. Where did Jason® go? It was just a deranged mother? Then were did the monster come from? Bonus points for dead Kevin Bacon.

Chee-chee-chee . . . aww, it’s a kitten!

Fame – Ugh. Artsy movie about teen angst and trying to convince stodgy old people to get with the program. It’s really a generic movie, but I was dragged to it by an older sibling, and this movie alone convinced me that STEM was a much better way to not end up waiting tables.

The Long Riders – Okay, I was dragged to see this one by Ma and Pa Wilder, especially Ma. I’m not sure why, but she kept muttering, “There’s gotta be some clue as to where Jesse hid that gold,” and then something about a family legend. Dunno. Regardless, the people who were actual brothers in the James-Younger Gang were played by brothers in the movie. Couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Carradine, a Keach, a Quaid, or a Guest.

The Shining – To this one, I dragged Ma and Pa Wilder. One of my teachers(!) had lent me The Shining novel, and, being very, very innocent, I skipped over or didn’t understand the disturbing sexual bits. Ma was a bit horrified. As we had to drive 3 hours from Wilder Mountain to see this one, well, it was a very long, very silent ride home.

A hard day’s work and a hot tub at the end of the day makes for Jack’s boring movie.
A hard day’s work and a hot tub at the end of the day makes for Jack’s boring movie.
A hard day’s work and a hot tub at the end of the day makes for Jack’s boring movie.

Urban Cowboy – I have no recollection of how I got into the theater to see this movie, but I recall seeing Debra Winger on a mechanical bull that wasn’t even remotely trying to buck her off. My take while watching this was, “Huh, this must be how stupid people live and fall in love,” because everyone in the movie except Madolyn Smith was stupid. Stupid. I watched it again when we moved to Houston, and didn’t change my opinion. Stupid. But, a nice soundtrack.

The Blues Brothers – Many hold this to be a classic. It is, but I think the best joke is that Ackroyd and Belushi ended up making one of the most expensive movies (at the time) ever. Why? Because Belushi was “cool” and was the flavor of the moment, which was also cocaine. Had John not died so tragically (injected by the woman who was the subject of Gordon Lightfoot’s song Sundown: some people are just trouble) I think it would have been largely forgotten. Instead, it’s almost a shrine to what could have been. The movie is really about six Saturday Night Live skits strung together with a very thin plot and a lot of music. And, yeah, I’ve seen it a dozen times.

Airplane! – The tragic and heroic true-life story of Trans American Airline flight 209’s nearly fatal crash over Macho Grande, saved by passenger/pilot Ted Striker. And, no, I don’t think I’ll ever get over Macho Grande.

Just not enough sombreros in this poster.

Used Cars – I saw this one on HBO® late one night. And it was glorious. It’s a comedy from the guy who brought you Dirty Harry, Red Dawn, and Conan the Barbarian, and it stars Kurt Russell. That’s it. Why haven’t you seen it? Hal knows what I’m talking about.

Caddyshack – My big brother, John Wilder, took me to see this one. It was awesome, funny, and he made me promise to not tell Ma Wilder that we’d been to see it. I immediately went to K-Mart® and bought the soundtrack. On an album. Unlike The Blues Brothers, the manic energy (also fueled by cocaine) on this film set really worked. One of the best comedies of all time.

The Final Countdown – It’s not a horribly good science fiction movie, but it does answer the question of every kid (like me) who grew up in Reagan’s America: what would happen if we took a modern aircraft carrier to the Battle of Pearl Harbor? No, wait, it doesn’t answer that question AT ALL. Grrrr.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu – Rock a Fu. It’s Fu music. It’s not good, but it is Peter Sellers.

Flash Gordon – This movie is fantastic. The science is awful. The acting is uneven – some great, some not so great. But it’s a hero, being a hero. There isn’t any politics (though now Flash is considered a “racist movie” because Ming is supposedly a Chinese alien?) and there is a feeling of optimism throughout the movie, along with a soundtrack by Queen®.

I asked A.I. to draw “piles of white powder” but that was a violation. But when I asked for a pile of flour? Sure!

Also made the cut, but the post is already too long, so I’ll be brief:

The Octagon – Why does the UFC® use and octagon? Chuck Norris in this movie.

Super Fuzz – If you like stupid Italian westerns with Terence Hill (I do), this is your cop movie.

Somewhere in Time – Art Bell (and every girl in middle school) loved this time travel romance starring Christopher Reeve.

Altered States – Sitting in a warm, dark tub of water makes you a monkey. I guess.

Chuck’s hair, feathered like the wings of a majestic bird.

There it is, an embarrassment o f riches, and there are even more from this year I didn’t mention. Hollywood should be ashamed.

New Podcast! Our Bacardi Version – Number 151!

Streams will show up at 9EST (click the link below), that’s in just under 30 minutes! (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

War and Stuff
On This Day
Jackass of the Week
Conversation Street
Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
ThinkRealFast
I Heard It On The X

High Trust Societies, Wealth, and PEZ

“These are volatile times, Your Highness. The American Revolution lost your father the Colonies, the French Revolution murdered brave King Louis, and there are tremendous rumblings in Prussia, although that might have something to do with the sausages.” – Black Adder the Third

What was Bismarck’s favorite Queen song? Under Prussia.

The world that most of us grew up in was far different from the world that we’re seeing today. Among the biggest differences is that the United States was unequivocally the strongest economic power in the world. Couple it with the “Western” bloc of non-Soviet Europe and Japan, it was amazingly dominant. The United States even stood next to smaller nations at the urinal, right next to them even though there were other urinals open, just to show that dominance.

When people today talk about cultural appropriation, they seem to forget that it’s largely American and British Commonwealth culture that was appropriated throughout the world. Blue jeans? Not invented nor popularized by Commiebloc nations, nope. Nor rock and roll.

In that Western world, there was actually a stunning lack of diversity. Want rock and roll? Sure you could listen to the Scorpions® from Germany, AC/DC™ from Australia, Iron Maiden© from Bongland, or Dio™ from the United States, but it was all the same root. The western world was a very homogeneous place, filled with trust due in large part to that shared sense of purpose and values.

A Catholic friend gave up cleaning the dryer filter. For Lent.

The level of trust probably peaked in around 1965 in the United States. In 1965, 77% of people felt that most people in the country were trustworthy, and now it’s down to 58%. We lived (well, those who were alive in 1965) in a high trust society that rivals the top levels of trust in the world today, sort of like Denmark but without all the smørrebrød, bicycles, and yurp-de-yur sounds.

The thing about a high trust society is that transactions are easy when we have trust in one another. If you show up to buy a 1884 Iron Chancellor Bismarck® PEZ™ dispenser that I’ve got for sale, well, you trust me that I own the PEZ® dispenser, that it’s real, and I trust you that the check you just gave me will clear or the cash you just gave me isn’t stolen.

And if the check doesn’t clear, you trust the local cops will solve the problem for you. They’re not corrupt, or if they are, they’re not so corrupt as to ignore crimes, especially when they involve the Franco-Prussian War Limited Series PEZ® dispenser set. A belief that crime is low and corruption is low is the key to creating the social trust to make a high trust society.

In a high trust world, this works well.

Is a sketchy Italian neighborhood called a spaghetto?

A high trust world, though, is not an anonymous world. Conmen from Nigeria and India use the anonymity of the Internet to create situations where they can create the relationship required, the “confidence” that is the “con” in conman. They then prey on people based on the residual trust from their high trust past. There is a reason that the elderly are primary targets – they remember an America where predation was not the norm.

Right now, oddly, one of the highest trust cultures in the world (according to the Integrated Values Surveys, 2022) is China. There are certainly several reasons for this. First, the government will kill bankers for fraud. Second, they’re almost all actually Chinese, which makes them a nation, not a country. They (mainly) share the same culture, values, genes, and language. That goes a long way – blood is thicker than water is a cliché that exists for a reason.

Generally, the higher the trust in a society, the greater the level of GDP per capita. Denmark has the highest trust on the world, and is fourth in world GDP per capita. It’s not perfectly correlated, though, the Chinese are high trust, they are low income. But compare with India, which is close to the worst country, with a trust level of 17% and an annual GDP per capita of a used 2000 Nissan® Xterra© with a broken air conditioner.

I hear that Biden has just signed an order to combat global warming on his way out. He sent three battalions of Marines to invade the Sun.

It doesn’t take much, though to turn a high trust world into a low trust world. Basics like faith that elections are fair, and that only valid votes are counted go a long way toward maintaining stability. You’d think that would be easy in 2024, but it’s not, since at least a third of the electorate wants any vote cast to be counted, rather than just valid ones. But a conflict of visions like that lowers trust in our basic systems.

Additionally, trust that criminal prosecution will be fair and unbiased has to be held very highly, otherwise gangs of people seeking a justice that the courts didn’t give them will replace the system. I’m thinking the political prosecution of the January 6 protesters is a horrible indicator.

In turn, this will lower the amount of wealth that can be created in society. Trust is a form of wealth, but it’s also (mostly) a precondition for a country getting wealthy.

When I was born, I had four kidneys. But as I grew up, two turned into adult knees.

But trust in society isn’t the same at every single place in society: in Modern Mayberry, trust is pretty high.

Crimes are rarer here in Modern Mayberry, especially major crimes. Mainly, we all know each other, and so except for drifters and tweakers, people are (mostly) honest. People even drive more politely and more forgivingly in small towns because, if you’re a tool, sooner or later everyone will know. Oh, and we have guns and constitutional carry and crime rates are much lower in places where people aren’t walking victims. And the local prosecutor won’t charge a store owner with shooting a robber if the robber was armed.

Here in Modern Mayberry, it is still pretty high trust. My kid drops off our car to get fixed and picks it up when the tire’s been replaced even before I pay. The guy knows I’m good for it – I’ve been going to his business for over a decade. Commerce is easy here, and so are most transactions.

Part of that, I think, is that the world here is still mainly local. We don’t have a big-name chain bank, instead we have a few local banks run by local people that already know the families that live here. For a farmer getting a loan, it’s much more about reputation than credit score, and a banker giving a loan that might wreck a borrower . . . won’t wreck the borrower.

There’s a moral implication when we work together as a community, a moral implication. Huges systems are efficient, but the rob us of something

As we become more atomized and less homogeneous, trust is replaced by systems and barriers. Our relatively homogeneous culture is replaced by a disingenuous god of diversity, where the beliefs of every culture but our own are celebrated.

Not all jokes about agriculture are corny.

A low trust culture is part of the definition of those “bad times that are brought about by weak men”. And we have seen countries around the world be low trust for millennia. That, though, has never been the fate of the West, at least not for long.

As I have long said, none of this will be easy. But there is one problem – in a low trust society, how can I be sure my Limited Edition® Franco-Prussian War Commemorative Series™ PEZ© dispensers will be authentic?

Are We Seeing A Crack In Leftist Control?

“By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Smoking will give you diseases, but it cures salmon.

The GloboLeftElite have long been planning the takeover of the United States. It’s obvious that this is the case because their thinkers have been plotting the roadmap since, well, forever. Antonio Gramsci was one such leader, and here’s a quote from him:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Gramsci may have been a (really) sub-60-inch-tall Albanian cripple who was in constant pain, born to a criminal father, but let’s let bygones be bygones. This is nearly exactly what the GloboLeftElite did. Their scholars left Europe ahead of certain German extended continental excursions in the 1930s, and many of them made their home in the United States.

Note, they didn’t all go to the socialist paradise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Nope. The Soviets were too busy starving themselves, executing each other, and building GULAGs for fun and profit.

Instead, these “Socialists” wanted to come to a functional society that was producing wealth and wreck it. Gramsci didn’t join them, because he died. Based on the list of things that Antonio was suffering from at the time – spinal deformity, arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout, and acute gastric disorders – if he was a dog his name would have been “Lucky”.

The functional society that they wanted to wreck? The United States.

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still called a “hearing”?

The United States during pre-WWII time wasn’t the same as Europe. Europe had always been a class-driven society, and from conversations with friends it still is. Moving from one class to another is difficult, unless you’re a family-wrecking divorced tramp like Meghan Markle. In the United States, not so much, since we view Meghan as classless.

Many successful businesses were made by people of humble beginnings, and even our presidents didn’t all come from wealth. Mobility was very possible and that was visible. People could see that if they came up with a great idea, great wealth was available. The ideas of class that had driven division in largely racially homogeneous Europe to create revolution didn’t work, so they had to work on other things.

They chose race and sex. For whatever reason, our most prestigious colleges snapped up these horrible foreign commies – people like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and the like. There are dozens more that infected the country at that time and given cushy jobs with nothing to do but try to create rot in our country. Oh, wait, I just described Biden’s appointees.

What’s key to a good mailman joke? The delivery.

And it worked. Infiltration of the schools, especially the normal schools that taught teachers took a decade or two, and a decade or two later the teachers started their indoctrination work inside the school system – first slowly and covertly, then quickly and openly.

Christianity has flirted with this hardcore communism for years, but since commies don’t go to church, it has largely been thwarted, though the “send more refugees while we have lesbian pastors and free abortions during Passover” churches are slowly gaining ground, though there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for them. So, Gramsci has had a harder road there.

The last on Gramsci’s list is the media. That has been firmly in the hands of the GloboLeftElite for decades, shows like All in the Family and Maude were the first “in your face” move to take over television. In 20 years we went from Lucy and Ricky not being able to share a bed . . . to Maude, who in a “comedy”, decided to kill her child because it wouldn’t be convenient to have one.

I’d go onto LGBTQ characters introduced in cartoons for young children, but that started, firmly, in 2013. If I were a parent with small children, let’s just say they wouldn’t be watching Cartoon Network®.

To further this, more and more “mainstream” social media like Twitter™ and content aggregators like YouTube® turned the screws – cancelling people as innocuous as Stefan Molyneux, who just liked to talk about philosophy and preached that you shouldn’t spank your kids. Obviously, he never met my kids. Regardless, Molyneux was frozen out.

Chuck Norris invalidated the periodic table, because Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.

Recently, though, I sense a thaw when it comes to the media. The biggest cause of this thaw is because the American public no longer believes in mainstream media, at all. Depending on the poll, over 70% of Americans have little to no trust in mainstream media. 70%. That means that only 30% give it any trust. This is nearly an exact flip from 1972. We now know when the mainstream media is lying: when they’re talking.

This has led to a wholesale rejection of what the mainstream says. Now, in many cases, like the Vaxx®, ignoring the mainstream was a good idea. They have to admit it because the science is now in – the Vaxx™ has been shown to be worse than the ‘vid.

And that had to be shut down. After COVID, after the George Floyd Mostly Peaceful Riots®, the idea that control of information was crucial became the mantra of the GloboLeftElite. It still is. Hillary Clinton said the quiet part out loud when she said, “. . . if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook® or Twitter© or X™ or Instagram® or TikTok©, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control . . . .”

All of those Clinton friends who killed themselves that never left notes . . . would it have killed them to write a few lines?

Yeah, she trots out the “it’s about the children” but Hillary’s version of the perfect world is the GloboLeftElite version of the perfect world. They want a world ruled by their bureaucracy, managed by and for them where coloring outside of the lines really does go in your permanent record.

But, please. The Earth is not flat. You can prove that yourself with a car, 24 hours, a map, a protractor, and a Sharpie™. I think this nonsense is a psyop to make anyone with a “conspiracy” theory sound unhinged, despite so many of those theories being found to be 100% founded in reality.

And enter Elon Musk. I’ll admit that I didn’t think that much would change when he purchased Twitter™ and rebranded it X®. Now, though, I go on X™ and regularly see memes that I’d only seen on /pol/ as produced by that hacker, 4chan. (Mostly) free discourse is now allowed, out in the open.

/POL/ – it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

It is respectable once again to talk about ideas that had been cancelled, not because it’s fashionable, but because the ideas are True. The biggest enemy of those that would lie is the Truth. I left Twitter™ when it was kicking off people telling the Truth, and returned when it again (mostly) allowed the Truth.

Can you say anything on X®? No. But is it much, much closer? Yes.

Gramsci won’t win and turn Socialism into a new religion, because at the heart of Socialism are lies meant for controlling man. And Truth, along with Beauty and the Good, always wins.

And you can tell any short Albanian commie named Lucky that you meet that Wilder says so.

It Was A Wonderful Thanksgiving, So Here’s A Low-Effort Mainly Greentext Post.

In all this confusion, I’m filled with eggnog and tryptophan and discovered that The Boy had never seen Dirty Harry, so we’re doing that instead of me writing a post.

Back with the usual shenanigans on Monday. In the meantime? If you feel lucky, enjoy:

I imagine her preferred mints have been used by many men?

Sometimes the party never ends!

Bangs!

Grape shot – underrated.

And was proud of it.

Don’t ask him about Chick-fil-a.

Goes without saying.

Sometimes people can’t figure out any other way than what is.

Never anger botanists.

It’s Eight-A-Bong now!

Oh, those wily Russians. This really moved the election.

Special Thanksgiving Podcast! Sorta. Goes great with gravy.

Streams will show up at 9EST (click the link below), that’s in just under 30 minutes! (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

War and Stuff
On This Day
No Jackass of the Week
Conversation Street
Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
ThinkRealFast
I Heard It On The X

The Amusement Singularity

“It bends space. Zod’s ship uses the same technology, and if we can make the two drives collide, a singularity can be created.” – Man of Steel

Bemused means to bewilder, but what if I’m already Wilder?

After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office.

“Man, it has been a long year,” I said.

“Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.”

This really made me think. I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year. It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on. All the time.

I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur. For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor.

I mean, propane, right?

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas? Car.

I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts. If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants.

Really.

I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof. Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives. The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip. If they were lucky.

In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty. And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today. I mean, they love ice dancing, right?

They told me I couldn’t be a stand-up comic, but no one is laughing now!

This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate. Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before:

“Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em”

It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.

Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history. I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results. This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems. I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.

Why is insulin expensive? It’s not called liveabetes now, is it?

There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet? It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information.

But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily. However, it certainly has sped up the world.

When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait. Stop. Look at the board. Think.” It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight. But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.

Magnus Carlsen was disqualified for using a computer to look for potential mates. Stupid Tinder®.

Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker. Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour. The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity. Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.

Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable. I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers. I think, in part, it is. But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.

It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement. An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high? As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content. In a year or two? Maybe it surpasses human-generated video.

Yeah. The amusement is accelerating. Until it can’t.

I guess her children were born with carpet burn.

The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation. The next time I have a problem? I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane.

Enjoy Your Monday. I Am.

:Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t come to the door right now. I’m afraid that in my weakened condition, I could take a nasty spill Down the stairs and subject myself to further school absences.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Automobile YouTuber Scotty Kilmer is known for over-the-top clickbait titles on his videos. I’m waiting for this one.

(All content today is “as-found”)

I figure once a year I’m due for a “not coming in for work today” day off. All is well at home, everyone is healthy, and I’m not even that tired. Just taking the day off. Enjoy these memes I found.

Back to the usual shenanigans on Wednesday, and maybe Friday. Take care!

Is Struggling The Goal?

“He’s talented. Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas

Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin? The first one didn’t seem to mind.

Gifts can be a curse. No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift. I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.

Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve: height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like. These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality. Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence. I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.

I always was comfortable dating that blind woman. I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

The flip side is what we do with those talents. Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies: diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example. These are different than talent. While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.

We call them, collectively, character.

Back to the idea of a curse. I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence. That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.

Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.

Why?

Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long. At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is. Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now? Hiro is average.

It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview. When am I supposed to bribe them?

But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?

Protagonist is toast. He will fail, and fail spectacularly. In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character. Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.

This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does. Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash? There’s a record for it.

On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?

Of course not. There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.

Zero.

To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life. Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.

These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.

Those who fail? Well, it tells us a lot about them, too. I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase: “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body. Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually. I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.

It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point. Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it. Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.

I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken: Out of Context.

I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:

“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife? Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment. Temperature a perfect 98.6K. Life was good, right? Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known. And then? Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air. Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”

I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right. Life isn’t about being comfortable. Life isn’t about being safe. Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.

Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?

Without the challenge, our character suffers. Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.

Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level. Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.

Honk! You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.