Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

One Problem? People Who Don’t Want To Solve The Problem.

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices. Yes sir. Here’s an example. It’s a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, for sixty-two ninety-nine. That price . . . is too high.” (shoots the car) – Used Cars

But I hear he does know Tae Kwon Dough.

I’m amused that something called the “Inflation Reduction Act” has the same initials as the Irish Republican Army, but at the same time is a lot more destructive than the IRA ever was.  The idea that solving inflation involves the government spending metric-Lizzo-Tons® of cash on boondoggles that will benefit Democratic donors is an idea that only someone with a child’s intellect could come up with, so at least we know what the Veep has been doing when she’s done with the construction paper for the day.

Here’s Brandon’s Tweet®:

I also hear he’s a fan of putting out fires by throwing more gasoline on them.

Don’t think this is a naked Leftist slush-pile for donors that will make Sam Bankman-Fraud’s scheme of taking American taxpayer dollars given to Ukraine and donating them after deposit to Leftist political schemes in the United States?  This is bigger by far.  And not only that, it’s being overseen by that paragon of virtue, John Podesta.

Yeah, that same John Podesta who on a scale of 1-10 for being creepy rates “Drag Queen Story Hour”.

As Podesta always says, “If you want you be a successful stalker, you must do the following.”

Green Energy isn’t about energy, it’s about the green.  And the particular green in question is money.  The alchemy that the Left wants to work is to give it to people and companies who give money to the Left.  Hakuna Matata, the Circle Of Politics!

How does it work?  Simple!  Pay taxes, have the Left direct the money to people who support the Left.  This is what they mean by “Our Democracy®” since the people involve in “Our©” don’t include you.  Or me.  They include people who support the Left, or can be bought to support the Left.  Green (remember, that means money laundering) energy company Solyndra™ received over $535,000,000 in loans from Obama, and produced nothing but accounting irregularities.

This was actually the subject of the 1994 Nobel Prize® in Economics.  I’m still waiting for one in blogging, and have my fingers crossed, but regardless, the idea was that if government could give everyone in the United States $1, it would be a much better deal for the political weasels to give three people $100 million.  This is also the basis for every decision made in Congress.

Cats are better than dogs.  Cats don’t work for the cops.

(Also, for the record, there is a Nobel Prize® for Literature, and if some nice reader would nominate me for a Nobel©, then I would be one of the very few nominated for both a Nobel™ and a Hugo®.  Winning?  Who cares, it’s an honor just to be nominated.)

The Nobel Prize™ was won by three dudes, one of which you might be familiar with:  Graham John Nash, who also wrote Teach Your Children Well was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.  Sorry about the confusion.  I guess Graham is no Nash-trophysicist.

The result of this is a very, very unserious economy.  Green Energy in most cases just means, “La-la-la I’m not listening, I can’t hear you because my fingers are in my ears, so the laws of thermodynamics do not exist and if they do, Congress can pass a law to change those laws” energy.  Unserious.

I hear that there is now a way to make the turbine blades 99% recyclable (true!).  All you have to do is chop them up into small pieces and ship them down to Louisiana where more energy than was used to create the blades is used to recycle them!  What a win! (/sarcasm) 

AOC’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti even let the mask slip and noted that the real goal of Green Energy policy.  In his own words, according to Sam Ricketts, WaPo® reporter:  “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.  Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?  Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”

The entire economy.  Why?  Because they don’t like you.  They want to funnel money to the people that give them the big shrimp parties, and give them money to put out ads so they can run again.  The thing that fuels Washington, D.C. isn’t electricity.  It is cash.  And shrimp.  And the quest for power – over you.

If we arrested all the corrupt politicians, who would we vote for in November of 2024?

The idea that solving the problems that we have with our economy is hard is laughable.  Solving those problems is trivial.  Really.  Why does no one do it?  Solving those problems is painful.

  • If solving them involves increasing the interest rates until the banks squeal, and some of them fail?
  • If solving them involves the destruction of entire portions of the economy only kept alive via corruption?
  • If solving them involves reducing the payments to those who could, but don’t contribute?
  • If solving them involves changing the rules so that people who game Wall Street rather than producing anything can’t rig the game?

Washington, D.C. won’t be for them, because they’d rather let a paper cut turn into an amputation than make any decision that will stop the shrimp parties with the beautiful people who are just rubbing their hands at the idea of an “Inflation Reduction Act”.

The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.

Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars

“How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.” – Fight Club

Bach used to be a composer.  I guess he’s now a decomposer.

I remember listening to the radio . . . you remember the radio, right?  That’s where people take a part of the Internet and send it out using big towers and as many watts (ounce-inches per fortnight in non-commie units) of power as is used in the The Mrs.’ hairdryer so that this faint amount of energy can be picked up by a metal strip and then amplified a zillion times so you can rock out while cruising Main.

Sorry for the digression.  I remember listening to the radio way back in the before time, and hearing a song that sounded pretty good.  The singer mumbled most of it, but the big, brassy chorus of Born in the U.S.A. was pretty strong.

Made me feel good, made me think that in 1985 we were ready to unite as America.  Then I finally made out the lyrics.  Hmmm.  After listening to them, I came to the (correct) conclusion that typical Leftist-Simp Bruce Springsteen was just another Leftist-Simp who made a bunch of money because he had a good chorus and everyone thought he was on America’s side.

I’ll leave you with this, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” – Bruce Springsteen, talking about Trump to Australians in 2016

I have not changed that position.  If you like him, fine.  You’re wrong.  Springsteen is a tool.

Another song like that was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow.  When I first heard it, all I heard was they chorus, and figured it was some empty-headed pop song.  Meh.  I’ll skip it.

Then I listened to it.  Wow.  Deep.  I was shocked.  I thought it was vapid pop, but here was a song that had some soul, and talked about people drinking beer at noon on Tuesday in a bar because that’s all they have.  The lyrics . . . “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” is shocking – it jarred me because these people were a contrast to the gloom and despair on display in the bar.

Another one that I just found out about was Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonny Tyler.  What’s it about?  Vampires that want to share more than blood (wink wink).  Honestly, I didn’t really care about this song ever, and still don’t, but like it a bit more now that I know that it’s just a bit weird.

Did she have to book a second ticket on the flight just for the hair?

Don’t even get me started on Squeeze Box by The Who® since when I heard it I was certain that it referred to a particularly musical family and even made the defense of the virtuousness of the song to a friend’s mother with all of the innocence of an entirely ignorant 10 year old who is smarter than he is experienced.

My Friend’s Mom:  “That song . . . is that song about . . . sex?”

Young John Wilder:  “No!  That song is about a family and the mother has a concertina, an instrument played by compressing air and passing it through a series of reeds to make a melody like an accordion.  She plays it and the house is filled with glorious music all night.”

My Friend’s Seventeen Year Old Sister, Butting In:  “No.  The song is totally about sex, Mom.”

Barbie?  If you’re reading this?  Yup, I got that one really wrong.

And don’t get me started on how badly I misunderstood Lola.  I’m ashamed to say that I was over 21 before I got that joke.  In my defense, that wasn’t a thing anywhere around Wilder Mountain, and the only burned-out old tranny I was familiar with was the one in my 1976 green GMC® truck.

Good news!  It just needed a new clutch.  Sometimes young drivers get a awkward and anxious and burn out clutch pads by popping the power too soon to the drive train.

I miss the days when working with a difficult tranny meant it was an automatic transmission.

Life, and experience, changes interpretation of events.  Like a song, an experience may have one meaning when young, but yet another experience when older.  The very experience of living life changes the message we get from those experiences.  All through life “we see through a glass, darkly”, but as we age, we see the world differently.

That is natural.  We age, we learn, we understand.  Our innocence is, especially in 2023, horribly brief.

Cell phones and the Internet bring knowledge to children long before they can really come to grips with what they are seeing.  In my age, a furtive glimpse at a Playboy® was how we gained forbidden knowledge.  In 2023, 10-year-olds know all about Lola and are even taught in class that what once was forbidden is now exalted – there’s even a month for pride, yet not even an afternoon set aside for humility, but I guess if you’re Hunter Biden there’s a 20-minute plea bargain case with the DOJ.

So, I read today Hunter didn’t pay taxes on over six million dollars, and deducted the amount he spent on whores as business expenses.  I wonder if he ever paid Lola?

Change is part of growing up.  I am certainly not the person I was at 18, nor the person I was at 38.  And wisdom has a price – innocence is free, but innocence is also harmless.  As we grow and learn, we learn what is worth passing on, and what is worth fighting for.

I also believe this one weird thing, that this knowledge is not without structure.  When I look back at the hard things, the difficult things, the things that seemed like a catastrophe at the time, all of those things led to better things as I grew up.  I just had to live through them to understand.

My life will probably never go back to the simpler days.  Like a character in a spy movie, I now know too much.  But I can still, on a summer day, roll down the window and listen to a song and sing too loudly as I drive.

But it certainly won’t be Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a tool.

Tucker Carlson And The Corrupt Biden Banana Republic

“Wow. Anybody watching must’ve thought this was a negative reality inversion.” – The Young Ones

Jenner might join the Marvel® movie universe – I hear they’re casting for ex-men.

I lost a job once, not because I didn’t do what my boss asked me to do, but because I wouldn’t tell him I thought just like he did.

When he asked me to do something that wasn’t illegal or immoral or fattening or didn’t violate my principles, I’d do it since that’s the definition of “boss”.  But no.  He wanted me to admit that my opinion was wrong.  I refused.

My opinion is mine.  I’ll do (mostly) what the boss says at work, but there is nothing that will make me give up my soul.  And telling him I agreed with him when I didn’t was a gulf I couldn’t cross, because my virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Why did Tucker Carlson get sidelined by Fox®?  I think it’s a business model.  I cut the cable some time ago, and hadn’t watched Fox News™ for quite a while, mainly because they seemed to be, like Sean Hannity, just a spear carrier for whatever the message is that he was supposed to carry that particular day – he never had an original idea, and his commentary was so between the lines that he was being the television equivalent of a Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy or a bucket of warm spit.

But since they fired Tucker?  Wow.  Maybe I just missed his evolution, but since he’s been at Tucker on Twitter™ he’s thrown out bomb after bomb, right on target with some of the most cogent and, dare I say, dangerous analysis of anyone with a major media voice.

I think Tucker is singlehandedly killing cable news, the MSNBCNN® model of cable news was long on the verge of death, and Tucker now has more views on a single Twitcast® than all of cable news, plus probably most television shows.  Combined.  That’s the power of the Truth.

What’s the difference between the FBI and the CIA?  Acronyms.  Plus, one killed JFK and the other killed MLK.

I had long talked about inversion.  It wasn’t me who coined that term, and it’s been long enough that I can’t remember where I first saw it – probably Vox Day was the one that brought it to my attention using the idea of Satanic Inversion – take a virtue, invert it, and glorify it.

It really defines a lot of what we see today.  My parents taught me that humility was a virtue.  The inversion?  Pride.  What is June?  Oh . . . an inversion.  My parents taught me that chastity was a virtue (to be fair, I did my best to actively not be chaste when I was in high school because drive-in movies were still a thing) but now the virtue is indulgence.  If it feels good, it must be right.

Certainly, there are no trails of childless women who pursued meaningless hookups in their 20s and then found that, their youth and innocence spent, that they were incapable of finding a decent man.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened.

If those women did find a decent man, they were so addled by the mindless sex that they’d had that they were incapable of bonding into a proper relationship.  They found themselves doomed to single motherhood or the life of a lonely, bitter spinster or in a relationship where they might become bored in an afternoon and blow it up for the dream of a man that had dominated them when they were 22. 

I wonder what the bikini waxer will say to her when she’s sixty?

Virtues are virtues for a reason.  They matter, and when we toy with them, we toy with the very foundations of civilization itself.

When it comes to economics, the virtue was to save and be frugal and build.  Now?  The virtue is to be like BlackRock® and, well, say things like, “It’s not who the president is – it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president,” and “You’ve got $10,000?  You can buy a senator,” and, “War is real f*****g good for business.”  Don’t’ believe me?  Here it is in the words of someone who works for Blackrock™.

To be clear, BlackRock® has $9,000,000,000,000 in assets that they manage.  So, they can crush anyone they want to like a bug.  Don’t like something someone says?  With spare pocket change they can buy the company that person works at, and have them fired.

Which might explain Tucker’s recent free time.  In Tucker’s latest video, he talks about “inversion” of morality.  I have zero hubris to think he’s reading me, but the fact that the concept has made it to a person that can get 100,000,000 views a video means we’re winning.

And BlackRock® will loose a few hundred million on Fox™.  I think they have that in their couch cushions.

It also explains the reason that Tucker got sidelined.  Blackrock® owns 15.1% of Fox Corp.®, the parent of Fox News©.  If you want to buy a president, it makes sense to own the news.  They also own 12% of CNN™.  And 13% of Comcast™ which owns MSNBC®, NBC™, CNBC©, and Sky®.

BlackRock™ wants to own the media.  I mean, with $9 trillion they can control the media, own what Tucker says (if he works for them) and get all the war they want, because, in the words of their own employee, “War is real f*****g good for business.”

That?  That sounds exactly like an inversion of values to me.  Getting rid of Tucker had nothing to do with anything but this:  he was against war, which as probably really f*****g bad for business at parasite companies like BlackRock©, who produce nothing but profit from every misery on Earth while cloaking it in the preening moral finery of people who worship at the Leftist inversion values of “Environmental (Live in the pod, eat the bugs!), Social (Illegals are good for business!) and Governance (I get to choose the incompetent people on the board who never would have gotten a board seat without me).

We are faced with a world where the inversion of values is celebrated, and actual, real values and virtue are hated.

Case in point?  Hunter Biden.  Real people who are caught on camera with handguns doing crack do time – hard time in federal prisons.  Income tax issues?  Ditto – the one thing Uncle doesn’t like is shorting him on his part of the take, yet Hunter gets a pass.

He seems happy.  I wonder if he got childrens’ hair to sniff for Fathers’ Day?

But Hunter?  Hunter will keep selling his fake art for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who allegedly want favors from his father after selling exactly zero alleged expertise to Ukrainians and Chinese for allegedly tens of millions of dollars that he allegedly funneled to “the big guy”.  Allegedly.

Thankfully, the media is all over this.

What?  They’re all owned by BlackRock™ who thinks “War is real f*****g good for business”?  And the media is silent about what is likely the biggest corruption scandal in the very history of the country?

Inversion.

The very wonderful thing about this is that it won’t stand.  It can’t stand.  Not because we’re powerful, but because the inversion of virtue brings, ultimately, the inversion of prosperity and success.

The way to prosper financially in this environment is to give over to the inversion and engage in all of the inverted virtues that firms like BlackRock™ take as their sacrament and holy scripture.

The success, though, is fleeting.  The cost is high.  Think Joe Biden looks at the perverted wasteland of his family and feels any pride?  Well, bad example, since Joe traded his metaphorical (and maybe literal) soul long ago and probably the strongest emotion he feels in 2023 is the desire to have his tapioca pudding at exactly 11:45AM.

Joe must be so proud.

But if I ascended the highest halls of power, and saw my progeny was as decadent and useless as Hunter, I would know that I had failed at my most fundamental duty as a father.  And if I looked at the country and saw the destruction I had created, I would know that I was a failure as a leader.  Despite all of my power, I would know that it would have profited me little to have gained the whole world, having lost my soul.

Looks like Tucker understands that, too.  He’s playing a game on the big stage, and naming those who are inverting everything of value, everything that has brought harmony and goodness to the country.  He could just sit in his basement with tens of millions of dollars, which is just what BlackRock© wants him to do, because that would be real f*****g good for business.

I guess Tucker decided he wouldn’t give up his soul.

So, Tucker decided he would fight.  Because virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Dispatches From The Culture War

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” – Star Trek: TNG

My body is like a Greek temple as I age.  In ruins.

There is so much going on any given news cycle in the last few months that it’s now difficult to be amazed about anything.  Credible sourcing that Joe Biden took bribes?  When asked about it, he said, “Then where’s the money?”

That’s not the way that innocent people act, rather, that’s a taunt that’s similar to a mobster saying, “You got nothin’ on me, copper.”  Biden did it, might even remember he did it, and is now telling the world that he’s above it all and doesn’t fear anything.  Of course, he’s a thousand years old now, so he’s probably pretty deep in “old guy DNGAF” mode.

Certainly, Biden (or whoever has the remote control that makes Biden say thinks like a big flesh robot) gave the nod before Trump was indicted.  This was intentional.  There is something about Trump that the Left and Official Washington and Big Money despises that caused them to set up a propaganda campaign among their followers like few before it.  They even got high on their own supply, believing that the echo chamber that they had created was a reflection of reality, rather than just their own words played back to them on an infinite-repeat loop, like I play The Accountant, or Big Trouble in Little China.

Regardless, the split is deep, and, although I don’t think Pew® has updated their Left/Right split data, I think that the split has become ever deeper.  The Los Angeles Dodgers® can’t even fathom why Catholics would protest the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT+ group that openly mocks Christian faith.  They can’t understand why most Americans don’t want to go to war due to two oppressive Eastern European countries fighting each other over land that’s been fought over so many times that I think they’re on the Juneteenth Battle of Kharkov.

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

Trump embraced the LGBT+ agenda explicitly, so it’s not that.  His performance on illegals, while much better than Biden’s, looked more like Obama than Eisenhower.  So, it must be the war thing, since Democrats and the Neo-Con branch of the RINO party have been all-in on Ukraine for decades.

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO?  Sigh.

Whatever was the common core of America is no longer common.  Using Michael Savage’s mantra of borders, language, and culture to define a country (not a nation, that’s different) is a bleak exercise.

  • Borders: The Right would like some.  The Left thinks that borders are fundamentally racist and that everyone is a citizen of the United States, they just haven’t gotten here to vote for them.  Biden still thinks that Borders® is a bookstore.
  • Language: The Right would like just one, English.  The Left celebrates multiplicity of mutually unintelligible people.  A few years ago, I listened to an NPR® station that had a late night talk program that focused on the idea that it was racist if you couldn’t understand what some dude who just crossed the river or got off the boat said, regardless of how heavy and thick his accent is.  I mean, at least fish have an excuse for having a Finnish accent.

Archeologists never get married.  They’re only interested in dating.

Border and Language are in absolutely horrible shape.  Culture, of course, is the worst off.

One of the constant cries of the Left is that the United States has no culture.  This is patently a lie – fish don’t know about water because they’re surrounded by it, all the time.  So are Leftists, but they hate it.  But I said it was a lie.  Leftists do see the culture, and want to destroy it and rebuild it to fit their ideology because the last thing they want is to see happy people.  Here are just a few segments of culture, and what the Left is doing to try to destroy it.

A huge target for the Left has been the effort to dismantle the history of the West.  Slavery?  Even though it was far from a Western invention, and even though the United States fought a war to end it, and even though Great Britain used their navy to end the trade, it has been painted as only a sin of the West.  The effort is also in full swing to distort and demean every single historical figure that generations of schoolchildren idolized.  Why did the Left start tearing out statues?  Any previous hero must be destroyed so that the Leftists can choose new, acceptable heroes.

I kept making a statue of St. Peter and the city kept tearing it down.  Then they gave me a ticket – they said I was a re-Pete offender.

The customs and traditions are being erased.  Examples are everywhere, but just look toward the military of the United States for some particularly egregious examples.  I’m fairly certain the Marines will soon be issued Nerf® guns so they don’t hurt themselves.  Etiquette is also falling apart, where Americans are told that they have to conform to the etiquette of foreigners and Leftists.  Previously, it was accepted that aliens would have to adopt American customs and traditions.  In 2023, that is racist, of course.

The arts and literature of the nation are being changed.  Movies, which morphed from the pro-American fare of the Disney® era now is actively anti-American.  Thankfully, many of the ideologically driven writers, directors, and executives that are now in charge make horrible movies, but it’s clear that the last decade has brought fewer good movies than the year 1986 did by itself.  Literature now consists of horrible screeds against racism, but they’re not content with that – publishers are now actively editing works from the past to make them conform to Leftist principles.  Electronic media is all subject to that so books and DVDs might be the only way in the future to see the real deal.

Education is a cornerstone for any culture.  Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”  The commies have always focused on this, and they’ve done a really good job on the education centers of the world.  But it doesn’t happen all at once.  First, they grabbed the colleges.  Then, bit by bit, they grabbed each teacher that they could coming through the system and indoctrinating them into Leftism.  When I was in school, the real first wave of hardcore Leftists were hitting the schools, but it was just one or two.  Now?  Videos I’ve seen in big cities show they’re Lefty, through and through.  Even in Modern Mayberry are they attempting to take over.  Thankfully our school board is pretty good at keeping those zealots out.

And Joe is smart enough to figure out how to make a train go across the Indian and Pacific oceans!

I started writing this post on Fathers’ Day, and was amused because it’s not really Fathers’ Day anymore, it’s “I’m a single mom so I am both father and mother and this is about me” Day.  The destruction of the traditional and nuclear family structure is the first thing Leftists have attacked, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution to the communist version of Spain that Franco destroyed.  It’s a shame Franco didn’t have helicopters.  The social organization of a country is the what regenerates it.  Family structures and gender roles reinforce the culture.  Every wonder why those are marked for change?

Finally, the values and beliefs of a culture help define it.  It used to be that prostitution was a dirty little secret.  Now?  Leftists argue that “sex work is real work” and Moms spend time making money on Only Fans®.  Was there hypocrisy in old America?  Sure.  But shame and ostracism were powerful motivators to keep the rot down.

I did hear that Hunter was sad because he wasn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas.

This list could go on and on – I have over 10 more categories where I could go through the same exercise, but the answer wouldn’t change and this post would then be 4,000 words and I’d get no sleep at all tonight.  The Mrs. keeps reminding me that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, and I’ll have plenty of time to rest after I’ve died.

As I’ve recently been saying, the idea isn’t to conserve our culture, since it has been turned into a smoking crater by Leftists appealing to the vanity and pride of susceptible folks.  This will end as it has always ended, since the reason American culture was successful will cease to exist as American culture ceases to exist.  From there, there will be tears.

And then?  Our job is to rebuild and restore.  And most of the people that formerly fell into the Leftist trap of dismantling the success and wholesomeness of the culture will welcome that restoration, after having seen what their depravity has created.

Rebuilding a culture takes time.  It won ‘t be done in my lifetime, but probably will be in the lifetime of my children.  And that’s good enough for me.  Our job is to keep the fire lit, and to not let the Left get away with the lie and call the destruction they’ve created to be simply called “bad luck”.

Oh, and I almost forgot!  Don’t forget to celebrate Juneteenth!

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Flash Gordon (1980)

How many horses could you fit in a pyramid?  A pharaoh mount.

Way back in the before time, say 2015, a scientific paper by one Tabetha Boyajian hit the news.  Oh, boy, did it hit the news.  What Boyajian had discovered was a particular little F class star that dimmed.  And not dimmed like Joe Biden in the afternoon when the meds wear off and Jill has to put him in the special dark room.

The dimming was unusual.  It wasn’t a planet.  It wasn’t a comet.  It wasn’t like anything anyone had ever really seen.  Because of that, she got a star that’s now known by several names, the most common of which is Tabby’s Star.

Kinda cool, right?  Some also call it Boyajian’s Star, and other sticks in the mud call it KIC 8462852 (A), but I think all of the people who like to call it KIC 8462852 (A) work at the Interstellar DMV and have to share the same soul on alternating weekends.

The reason for all of that excitement is because Tabby’s Star can’t be explained by any sort of physical processes we yet know of.  If it were the usual “stuff” we’d expect to see the light from the star absorbed in the physical material and re-radiated outward as heat, likely because the kids won’t turn the damn thermostat down in winter.

I kid.  It’s all physics.  This is what happens when light from the Sun hits my driveway.  The energy from the light warms the driveway, and the energy from the light ends up going away by radiation and convection (because there’s an atmosphere).  It’s also what happens when a picture of an attractive girl in a bikini is taken:  it’s sheer thermodynamics that makes her hot.

Entropy:  it isn’t what it used to be.

We’d expect that any matter that got hit by the light from Tabby’s star to warm up, and we’d see infrared energy like from a driveway or a supermodel.  Seriously, if you want the actual math, you came to the wrong place, though I will say I was the first person to calculate how much PEZ® and anti-PEZ™ it would take to cross the Milky Way, and the very first person to ever use the term “anti-PEZ©” (LINK).

There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic.  Like nanobots.  But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.

None.  However, I thought (based on my prior reading) that around 2019 they called it solved.

Nope.  Not solved.  I found this out by listening to a YouTube® vidya from The Angry Astronaut.  I’ve only recently found him, and have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far.  Here’s how he describes himself from his Patreon® page:

“I create unique educational videos which focus on Spaceflight, Space Policy and Space Science. My approach is unconventional, and sometimes controversial. The future of our species depends on an aggressive effort to explore and colonize the Solar System…something that we have woefully neglected for too long. It is time to stop being polite and start getting ANGRY!”

To be clear, I like the cut of his jib, as my constant criticism of NASA might indicate.  An example is here (LINK).

I hear there are flat-Earth people all across the globe.

In the video I watched, The Angry Astronaut noted something I was unaware of – not only was the problem of Tabby’s Star completely not solved, but an astrophysicist from the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edward G. Schmidt, had found more stars that acted like this.  The Angry Astronaut was kind enough to point me in the right direction for Dr. Schmidt’s paper.  Hats off, sir!

More stars!  Excellent!  That means that, whatever is causing the issue is probably natural.

Then I read the paper.  You can read it here (LINK).  You can watch The Angry Astronaut talk about it below (don’t forget to like and subscribe!).

Dr. Schmidt found this dipping in several stars, and those he found were all in F and G type stars.  For reference, my favorite star, the Sun, is a G-type star.  F-type stars are a little bigger and a little brighter.  Together, they make up about 6% of the stars in the Milky Way, my favorite galaxy.  They are long-lived, and are probably in the sweet spot to have habitable planets since 100% of the planets we have found life on exist around a similar sized star.

So, Schmidt looks at stars.  Finds more that periodically dim in just this same exact weird way that no one can explain, but only around very specific kinds of stars nearly exactly like ours.

Is every mattress he sleeps on queen-sized?

The great news is that they’re randomly distributed all over the place, so it’s probably natural, and the whole thing is common.  Oops.

No.  Not really common at all.  They looked at over 1,337,101 stars in the study areas.  They came up that these stars showing the dimming were very rare, with between 11.2 and 4.9 candidate dimming stars per million depending on the region reviewed.

Not common.

But randomly distributed, right?

No.  Look at the graph below.  The circle with the dot in it is my favorite Sun and my favorite planet.  The star is Tabby’s Star.  The filled-in dots represent stars that dim like Tabby’s Star in a specific region.  The open ones are stars that have the dimming outside of that region.

Why two graphs?  Because I can’t send you a three-dimensional post, and I snagged it from Dr. Schmidt’s paper.  Pretend one is looking at the stars from the top, and one is looking at the stars from the side.  Yup.  They’re all in a bunch.

(from the Schmidt paper linked above)

So, we have this really rare phenomenon, and it happens only in stars of approximately the same size, and is concentrated in this one particular area.

I mean, if a civilization were harvesting the energy from specific types of stars and spreading out to make a galactic empire, what would it look like?

It would look exactly like this.  I should know, because I watched the 1980 film Flash Gordon and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what Ming the Merciless™ did before James Bond helped the blonde dude save every one of us and then end up with more hot chicks in bikinis.

Okay, not a bikini.  But it was Alien.

I’m spitballing from the data, but I’m thinking that the closest one of these stars is about 750 lightyears (3 liters) from Earth, which is generally farther than I like to do on a daily commute.  Heck, I’m not sure my odometer even goes up that far!

What is it?  We don’t know.  It might be the stars in question keep forgetting to pay the power bill and keep getting disconnected.  It might be that billions of clones of Lizzo are in orbit around some of these stars, because I don’t think anyone has yet tested that hypothesis.

Or it could be . . . aliens?

High Trust, Low Trust, And The Coming Breakdown

“I know what you mean, Blair. Trust’s a tough thing to come by these days. Tell you what – why don’t you just trust in the Lord?” – The Thing

He also broke up with his moonshiner girlfriend, but he says he loves her still.

One of the places we vacationed once upon a time was Branson, Missouri.  It’s absolutely a tourist town.  One of the places we went was Silver Dollar City®.  It’s like one of the large theme parks you’d find almost anywhere.  It’s also a nice place to go, not like that theme park that discriminates against the blind – Seaworld®.

I was walking there with The Mrs., The Boy, and Pugsley when we were all a decade younger than we are today.  All of a sudden, a young blonde man who looked like a fullback ran up to me.  He was probably 19 or so.  “Sir, sir, sir!  You dropped this!”  He handed me two $20 bills – they’d been in my pocket after getting change from buying sodas for the family.  They’d fallen out.

I was . . . stunned.  I couldn’t see this happening in most places that I’d been.  I thanked the young man, shook his hand, and he loped off to catch back up with his girlfriend.

That is the example of a high trust society.  People do things like that because they’re the right thing to do.  They get enjoyment out of doing them.  When I was surprised by behavior, like I was by that kid handing me cash, it made me feel great.  It gave me hope for society.

This also gives me hope for society. 

It was also a lesson for The Boy and Pugsley on how to behave.  Here is a person who could easily have walked away with $40, but who did the right thing and returned it.  No one would have ever known except for him and his girlfriend.  But, I’m betting, he didn’t want to have to live with being the type of person who didn’t live his life virtuously.

I think it also made the kid feel great to do something nice.  He got a great story to tell people about the goofy man with the little kids who dropped forty bucks out of his pocket.

Trust is crucial for a really high-functioning group of any type, from a family to a state to a country.  Trust provides a glue that keeps people together, and gives them common ground to collaborate.  People who trust each other tend to reciprocate, cooperate, and take care of each other.  It’s like the Mafia, but with fewer people being “taken care of”.

Trust also leads to prosperity.  Trust plays a huge component in how easy transactions are.  In a society where people keep their word, contracts aren’t as important because honor is important.

Where do you live?

Trust leads to greater governmental stability.  While there have always been awful people in government who were only out for themselves, I think we’ve reached the bottom in having awful people at all levels of government.  There are some good ones, but the FBI is generally pretty good at having them transferred to Fairbanks.

One of the things about cities is that they tend to breed anonymity.  In Modern Mayberry, we ignore gunshots and get concerned when we hear sirens.  In most cities, they ignore sirens and get concerned when they hear gunshots.

They were going to film part of the Transformers movie in Detroit, but Michael Bay said they couldn’t afford the CGI costs to repair the buildings.

A high trust society requires rule of law instead of rule of men or rule of The Party.  It’s that trust that the judicial system is impartial and does its best to send guilty folks to jail (or worse) and let innocent folks go free, no matter who they are.  There hasn’t ever been a perfect justice system, but if the people feel that it’s as good a system as people can create, it does the trick.

So, that’s what it’s like living in Heaven.  What does a low trust society look like?

  • High levels of apparent corruption,
  • Low confidence in public institutions,
  • High crime rates,
  • Political polarization,
  • Lack of any sort of sense of a coherent society, or common goal, and
  • Social unrest.

It’s clear that, as a nation, we’re closer to a low trust society than a high trust society.  Rather than just being a social or philosophical question – it’s one that costs money and determines what services are available.  An example is the new Walgreen’s® store in Chicago.  Apparently, Walgreen’s© got tired of having urban hunter-gatherers wander in and loot the store in broad daylight with little fear of any sort of legal jeopardy.   Walgreen’s© has closed nearly 30 stores in just San Francisco alone.

I guess they were asking for it.  And, yeah, I’m back on Twitter®.

Walgreen’s™ decided to build a store with no shelves, just a little kiosk where people can pick products from a digital tablet.  The idea of wandering down the shelves, shopping leisurely, comparing one product against another is dead in this store.  Pick the Preparation H™ and some clerk will wander to a shelf in the back room and pull a tube down and stick it in a bag.

Then, after the customer pays, they’ll hand them the stuff.  Walgreen’s© used to trust customers in Chicago.  Now, they don’t.  Their revenues will go down (nobody ever goes to the store to buy cashews, but when you walk by them . . . ) and their costs of having to have people run to get products will go up.

Why?  Stores are being looted on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, you could walk into Wal-Mart® here in Modern Mayberry and see every towel neatly stacked, all of the shelves full, and nobody stealing anything.  Yeah, they check my receipt as I walk out the door now, but the lady at the door only pretends to look at it.

Wal-Mart™ makes money here.  The Walgreen’s© in Chicago doesn’t.  San Francisco, plagued by a new breed of criminals that the police won’t arrest (or if they are arrested, the DA won’t charge) systematically loot store after store of products when they’re not busy pooping in the streets.

San Francisco is now low trust.  This is spreading.  I wonder where it will end up next?  Oh.

The War On Victims – About Time

“Isn’t it your picture in the newspapers? Didn’t I see you on the video this morning? Are you not the poor victim of this horrible new technique?” – A Clockwork Orange

I hear he was convicted – I hope he didn’t beat himself up over that.

One of the very recurring themes in this blog has been a fight against victimhood.  This has mainly been at a personal level on Friday posts in the same way that when I, in second grade, went to my parents’ door and said, “I’m scared,” Pa Wilder sat up.  He paused, like a man who wasn’t interested in nonsense, and said:

“Go back to bed.”  The tone of his voice was such that I was, at that point, a hell of a lot more afraid of Pa Wilder than any shadow in my bedroom.

Victimhood is such a subtle and vile personality trait that I think that fathers, especially, jump on it like Whoopi Goldberg on a sandwich:  it’s messy, vicious, and you really don’t feel like eating after seeing them at work.

Pa Wilder was an especially good teacher of this lesson.  I remember whittling something and cutting my thumb.  My first reaction wasn’t fear at the spurting jets of blood from my thumb.  Nope.  It was, “Oh, no, Pa’s gonna take away my knife!”  The idea of death was only slightly more scary than the thought of being unmanly before Pa.

I guess I found him Travolting.

To be fair to Pa, he was a kind and caring man.  Mostly.  But if he thought you were being less than manly, and if he smelled even a whiff of it, he’d react in a fashion to let me know that it would never, ever be accepted to hear me whine or complain about being a victim.

Ever.

That’s the message I’ve taken with The Boy and Pugsley.  To be fair to them, our society is one that’s built on exceptional care for feelings.  The other night I was watching a YT video of an arrest (it was a hoot) where the passenger of a car tried to fight the cops.

Yeah, it ended with a Tasin’®.  The cop then, calmly asked the guy that he had just tossed to the pavement, “My pronouns are he and him, what are yours?”  The dude looked like a dude, and said “he/him” but later said “his” name was Julia.

I wonder if when Levine’s wife kicked him out if he packed up her things and left?

My thought was that this cop had been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that, “Tasin’® a he/she is okay, but don’t you ever, ever misgender them.”  The idea was that he could have pulled the trigger and sent a few thousand more volts through “Julia” a dozen times, and that would be cool.  But to misgender “Julia” would have been a career-ender.

He’s probably (in June of 2023) right.  Break an arm or two?  That’s okay.  But violating a victim’s sense of victimhood?

For shame!

At least part of the problem we’re seeing with people today is that society (schools, teachers, psychologists, cops, Bud Light®, the military, the Governor of California, the media, the Internets, etc.) encourage them to be victims.  And it makes life awful.

As I told my X-wife (X rather than ex because she came from another reality and was X-Files® worthy), “Here’s a hammer and three nails.  Why don’t you nail yourself up to another cross?”  Apparently, I’m now known as a jerk by all the soul-sucking vampires.

Mea culpa.

My X-wife made the same mistakes again and again, since she lacked reflection.

Regardless, that might have been a sign that the marriage wasn’t going well because one of the things that fills me with disgust is victimhood.  And here, in 2023, I see the push back.

The Bud Light® trans-marketing (it only identifies as marketing) fiasco was the spark.  A fire requires fuel, oxygen, and a spark.  This was the spark.  The fuel was the consistent pushing of victimhood, the oxygen was the Internet.  The only thing left?  A spark.  From that point, every bit of victimhood is on the table:  racism, speciesism, agism, colonialism, and sexism.  And if it ends with “phobia”?  Pound sand, we don’t care.

We don’t care about the grievances of any group.  Suck it up, Buttercup, and do your job.  Rub some dirt on it, crybaby.  Put on your big he/him or she/her underwear and deal with life.

We don’t care.

The primary idea of the Left was to make people think that they were alone.  Heck, marketing professionals seemed to think that the only real people were the rainbow-flagged companies on LinkedIn® and on Twitter™.  They thought that people really didn’t mind the creeping victimhood permeates our culture like capsaicin coats my mouth after The Mrs. makes traditional Wilder green chili which has been known to be hot enough to melt steel.

The answer is that it simply isn’t true.  The vast majority of people in the country are despised by the marketing people running major companies, but the people they despise were meant to believe that they were alone, that their voice didn’t matter.

I was walking across the street and I saw my X-wife getting run over by a bus, and I thought, “Wow, that could have been me,” but then remembered I don’t know how to drive a bus.

But it does.  One of the big events that let the velociraptor of responsibility represented by the Right on the kitten of victimhood championed by the Left was at least partially enabled by Elon Musk burning a few billion of his spare dollars on Twitter®.  His cutting loose on the mouths of people muzzled by the algorithm has been transformative.

Admittedly, there’s no chance of a “small” Twitter© account having a Tweet™ exposing actual Truth go viral, but we can see each other again.  We can speak.  And we can do that thing the Left hates more than anything – point out the weakness of the victimhood that all of the groups wanting something for nothing.

I hope my agent is reconsidering his life choices.

When they are denying that they’re responsible for the positions they find themselves in, that just stirs up the thing that they fear most:  the accountability of people who aren’t afraid to confront them and deny that people who are living their lives are somehow responsible for every little hurt felt by every little group in the world.

The “Expired By” date for all of that victim nonsense is dated 2023.

Thank Heavens.  Pa would have wanted it that way.