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.

Self-Experimentation And Leisure

“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade

I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat.  She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.

Seth Roberts is dead.  I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014.  He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley.  Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.

What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself.  He even wrote a paper about it (LINK).  It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood.  I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.

In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.

Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.

The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:

Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire.  Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.  In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things.  He noted that these included:

  • Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it.  Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
  • Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
  • Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things.  I think the BLM® riots might count here.

I can’t wait for their final show.  Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?

Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way.  The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.

It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up.  He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians.  They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world.  Darn it for those guys.  And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.

I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.

Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials.  It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him.  He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself.  He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously.  Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter?  Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.

Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life.  To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall.  To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment.  And most of them have worked well.  20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep.  Now?  I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.

Someone asked me what my dream job was.  “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”

How long did that take?  Years.  An experiment here that worked.  An experiment that didn’t.  I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep.  I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby.  It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow?  Is it a blanket?  No, it’s Slumberman™.

My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful.  For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.

This was a 100% solution.  Every time, it worked.  No theory.  No real reason.  And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter.  Why doesn’t it matter?  I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.

Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems.  And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.

People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.

But most of my life is in my hands.  I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are.  If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.

So, is self-experimentation good?  Yeah, mostly.  I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl.  It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar.  Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency.  The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent.  The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious.  It was the strongest economy in the world.  It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons.  I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music.  That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler.  I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency.  First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff.  If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit.  It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper.  I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end.   Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework.  Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos.  Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money.  How much?  $1 trillion.  That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust.  In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.”  Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year.  The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me.  I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars?  I’m not sure.  Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here.  Why are they headed back?  Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates?  Inflation kicks higher.  If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less.  If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t.  And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society.  Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government.  Then everything will change.  Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

How Civil Wars Start Book Review: Leftists Are Idiots

“I got nowhere else to go!” – An Officer and a Gentleman

I think I might have been the only person in my state where “Juan” was my nickname.  I guess that makes me Juan in a million.

I recently bought the book How Civil Wars Start (And How to Stop Them) by Barbara F. Walter (2022, Crown).  When I bought it, I bought it used to save a few bucks.  When it arrived, The Mrs. looked at the title and noted, “Oh, as if you weren’t already on enough lists.”

After I read the book, I was really glad that I bought it second-hand because the last thing I would want to ever do is put money into the hands of the Leftist harpy who wrote it.  I generally like people, especially people I haven’t met.  To be frank, after reading Ms. Walter’s book, I really, really detest her for reasons I’ll discuss during and especially towards the end of the review.

Not that I have any opinions.  There was, however, some interesting information.  Because of that, I thought I’d give a review of the book so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.  And, since I’m discussing 90% of the interesting parts, there’s no reason you should buy this book.

First, the way this book was written was through a series of emotionally loaded stories only then followed by the actual research.  The book was 226 pages before the notes and acknowledgements, and could have been half that length, if Walter wasn’t writing endless bad-romance-book-level summaries of people who had seen civil wars.  These weren’t interesting or useful like Selco’s Sarajevo experiences, but just stories (all with a Leftist bent) meant to make the reader feel.  I am skipping discussion of any of these insipid parts that were meant to twist your emotions because you can watch network tv if you want to.

You can thank me for that in the comments.

What do Green Eggs and Ham and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common?  They both encourage people who can barely read to try new things.

I hate being manipulated, and this book was just that, but it was manipulation at the level of a clumsy middle school girl level of soft puppy dog eyes.  For example, the first segment was a breathless analysis of the kidnap plot against Gretchen Whitmer, complete with blame of the 3%ers, Qanon supporters, and the Proud Boys.

Missing?

The fact that the entire case against the “kidnappers” collapsed in Federal court because the FBI was responsible for it from start to finish.  Yes.  The kidnapping was the idea of the FBI.  But Walter, despite having this information, is the CNN® of writers, skipping over actual facts to sell her feels.

Skipping to the parts that are interesting, she notes that there has been an attempt to classify where countries lie along a spectrum of governance:  +10 is a full democracy, like Denmark.  -10 is a full autocracy, like Best Korea.  Very few civil wars occur when countries are close to the ends of the spectrum.  Why would you have a civil war in Denmark?  What, you don’t like pastries and hot Danish girls?  And in Best Korea, the state has such control from cradle to grave of the citizens that the idea of revolt is nearly impossible.  The country even has approved hairstyles.

From the book, page 22.  How I got the weird light effects, I’ll never know.

So, -10 and +10 are safe from civil war.  The danger zone is -5 (think, Czar Nicholas II) to +5 (think Putin/Zelensky/Biden).  It’s a time where the state is generally moving from either democracy toward autocracy or vice versa.  Due to the change, it’s weaker.  The name they made up for a country in that zone is an anocracy.  Examples provided include places where I’d never want to have a vacation:

  • Serbia (1990s)
  • Bosnia (1990s)
  • Spain (1930s)
  • Rwanda (1990s)
  • Ukraine (2010s)

I found it interesting that the state being poor, unequal, heterogeneous, or repressed didn’t count as much as to where the country sat on the governance scale.  The idea is that the countries are weaker – there is division, there are no social guardrails, and the state is therefore susceptible to a chain reaction due to an event – think George Floyd or cancelling Firefly – that will start the war.

The next condition increasing the likelihood of civil war is the creation of factions.  These factions were often based on racial groups, ethnic groups, or religious groups, or some combination.  The biggest sign of coming difficulty was the exclusion of these groups from power.  Losing the presidency through changing all the rules into Biden’s favor (and perhaps some counting shenanigans) in 2020 is livable.  2024 loss?  Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue.

But in this case, a particular group senses opportunity or demographic change (from the book).  This results in increased tension, partisanship, and group identification.  Chances double if there is a group tension.  If the country is an anocracy?  The chances of civil war go up by a factor of thirty.

Blacksmiths generally box in the smelterweight division.

Want it to get even worse?  If the tension is ethnic/racial plus religion, class, or geography?  That increases the chances of civil war by a factor of 12 versus a homogeneous society.  In the United States in the 1950s (for example) the chances of civil war were nearly zero because the society was very close to homogeneous.

When a group is left out, and no longer has a chance of winning, no access to government, no access to political power, that tension is formed.  It’s even larger if that group used to be in control and lost power.  One researcher called these people, “Sons of the Soil”.  The characteristics of this group were:

  • They lived on territory they conquered or settled
  • They consider themselves “native” and the rightful heirs
  • They were or had been the majority

This group is likely to rebel at twice the rate of others, and are generally a much more capable foe.

What sets these Sons of the Soil off?  They see their:

  • Culture,
  • Language,
  • Holidays, and
  • Religion replaced.

Outsiders swamp them.  Walter quotes David Horowitz, “Numbers are an indicator of whose country it is.”  Of course, by that standard, California is Mexico, and immigration is often a flashpoint to civil war.

Yes, this is a thing that’s happening.  But by “back” they mean Texas.  Silly cosmopolitan elites!

Finally, loss of hope is a precipitator for civil war.  If there is no route to power, hope disappears, just like happened to the South during Civil War 1.0.  What is a loss of power?  As we discussed previously, in real terms, two losses in a row at the national level is a loss of power.

One thing Walter doesn’t like is social media, and the voice it provides people.  She notes that it heightens ethnic, social, religious, and geographic divisions.  My general take from reading her was, “we control the media, and if you don’t like it, too bad, racist.”  Proof?  She’s upset that Swedish people are running on the idea of “restoring their national home” and stopping the never-ending influx of rather lawless refugees that are anything but Swedish.  For the Swedish people to want a national home is apparently racist.

Walter categorizes the Right as appealing to the “primitive” (her word) ideas of nation, protection, The Other, anger, and fear.  I mean, why shouldn’t the Swedes want to an import a group of people that rape so much that the police stopped reporting demographics of the rapist because they didn’t want to support hate?

I mean, really, why would we want to make Sweden more Pakistani?

On Ms. Walter’ chapter, “How Close Are We” she:

  • Spits out a litany of Leftist talking points about January 6 and Michigan, ignoring entirely the George Floyd protests.
  • Notes that “Global trade agreements were signed that benefited coastal elites (her words!) at their (working class whites) expense.

Open insurgency is the last phase.  Where are we now?  Here is Walter:  “We are a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means that we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

Walter has a chapter on, “What A War Would Look Like”.  I’ll summarize it this way:  it’s the same sort of thoughts that a bright six-year-old might have about drinking beer at a frat party.  Sure she might be able to describe it in vague terms, but, let’s face it, until you’ve carried your drunken buddy upstairs to pass out near a trash can, it’s all academic.  She’s bizarrely fixated on 4chan, to the point that she thinks the Boogaloo Bois weren’t just a meme.  Imagine, an academic trolled by /pol/ by pretending that the civil war will be led by people in Hawaiian shirts?  Again.  Like it hasn’t happened about 200 times at this point.

Also, the book was written before the chip implant change.  She thought that the Right would flock to Ukraine to fight on the side of the Neo-Nazi Azov group.  Huh.  Guess that idea aged like milk.

Her final chapter is on how to prevent a civil war.  It’s simple!  Just do anything that AOC says!

Really.  This chapter is nothing more than list of “do everything on the main list of Democrat objectives in 2021, and the world will be awesome!”  This particular chapter raised my blood pressure high enough that when I started sweating my handkerchief came away pink.  Sample line:  “Countries that try to stop immigration will slowly die . . . “  Yeah.  It’s chock full of lies.

This is also when we found that Barbara’s parents were both immigrants to the United States, and Barbara, though born here, seems to hate here.  She wants to change the United States that drew her parents here (89%+ white, homogeneous, far-Right by her standards) into a nation that resembles the mess her parents fled from.  Her husband seems even worse – he’s a dude that doesn’t have the guts to have his wife take his name, was born in Canada from immigrant parents that fled Soviet-era Hungary.

And it sounds like Barbara would be happier living in the approaching Soviet Canada than in the United States that she and her ilk helped create through their ideology since they discussed moving there.  She’s an American because of a piece of paper issued by a bureaucrat, has no roots here, and will happily move on to the next country to destroy.

Shocking, that.  Walter thinks that people with the values of the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s are now “Far Right” and wants them out of the military.  In reality?  It was always, always those guys who made up the military.

Barbara F. Walter is a member of the cosmopolitan elite (her quote, not mine!) and is a rootless blight on the world and is no more American than that Chinese kidney I bought off of Ebay® the other day.  Since she and her gutless husband wanted to run and hide at the slightest bit of trouble in her Leftist dreams, she and I?

We are not the same.  I am American, I’ve got nowhere else to go.

Matt:  Tell me:  what’s the difference between us and them?

Jed:  Because . . . we live here.

Reason 453 Why The Right Is Sane, And The Left Is Nuts

“John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.” – Demolition Man

What happens when you put a zebra in the lion cage?  Well, me?  I got fired from the zoo.

On Monday I put together a post on how toxic empathy is destroying the world.  Really, it is.  That was, however, just one, small bit of the picture.  To go a little deeper, we have to understand the pathology of the most wretched hive of scum and villainy.  No, I’m not talking The View®.  Okay, I’m not talking The View™ exclusively, I’m talking about the minds of Leftists.

Jonathan Haidt is a PhD in something or other.  To be an academic, they all have to write stuff down, and have other academics pretend to read it.  If enough academics pretend to read it, then they can write books that the cosmopolitan elite buy and put on their bookshelves so other members of the cosmopolitan elite can see that they have the same virtuous books on the shelf.

As such, a lot of it is garbage.  Case in point?  Actual people who are professors at colleges talking about girls with outies and boys with innies as if that was somehow “science”, forgetting that we’ve known about the x and y chromosomes since Nettie Stevens was studying worm sperm at an all-woman college and found the y chromosome.  Then, in the 1920s, the improbably named Theophilus Shickel Painter determined how the x and y chromosomes made boys and girls.  And none of this paragraph is made up.  Sometimes, history writes the humor for me.

My XY chromosomes are awesome.  They look great in a pair of genes.

So, Haidt had to write something, so he came up with Moral Foundations Theory.  I’ll spare you the details because you have a search engine, and can read.  Originally, they broke the foundations into five.  I think they added a sixth, changed the name of one, and following it is like following a soap opera, since Haidt has to write more books to keep that sweet, sweet money coming in from people who buy copies of his book to look smart to the other members of the cosmopolitan elite, and it helps if he does TED® talks.  Here are the original five, with rough definitions:

  • Care/Harm – this is really the empathy I discussed on a post (LINK) earlier this week. It is the real foundation for the toxic behavior of the Left.  It’s a focus on a concern for the wellbeing of others, compassion, kindness, . . . sorry, fell asleep for a moment.
  • Fairness/Reciprocity – this is really based on the idea that people should have equal outcomes in the test I took, regardless of their contributions. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards that.  As a friend once told me, “We can treat everybody equally, or we can treat everybody fairly.  It’s not the same.”  As shown in the graph below, this is sort of blended.
  • In-group/Loyalty – this is about dedication to your group, distrust of non-group, and self-sacrifice for one’s community. True patriotism is a part of this.
  • Authority/Respect – it’s a respect for hierarchy, duty, and traditions.
  • Purity/Sanctity – this is tied to religious sanctity, as well as some ideas or objects having an innate value and they are sacred. The flip side is a revulsion against dirty and degenerate things.

I hear he liked to vote by mail.

To be clear, I am not endorsing Haidt’s work uncritically.  His is just one tool that we can use to slice the way the mind works via data to better understand ourselves, and how we as humans differ from one another.  I took the test at yourmorals.org and determined that I am somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan.  Not sure if anyone wants to know, but I have zero time for slackers, don’t care about hard luck stories, am more loyal than a Sardaukar, am huge into tradition, and my sanctity scores were really high.  They added “proportionality” which meant, those who contribute, get rewarded, and that was very high, too.

I think this will surprise zero regular readers.  I can imagine my FBI agent dutifully noting all this in my Permanent Record, though.

This, however, is not about me.  Let’s take a closer look at what they did with the theory.  In essence, they tested lots of folks along with their self-identified political leanings.  The result is the graph below, which is enough for a TED® Talk:

So, I see 2chan and 5chan.  Where is 4chan?  Original by J. Haidt, CC BY-SA 4.0

Turns out that Leftists are fixated on empathy and on equity.  They’re the kind of people that look at a pit bull that just ate an orphanage and say, “Awww, she’s such a sweety, I wonder what those orphans did to provoke her.  We just need to give her one more chance – pit bulls are just as safe as any other dog.”

This is how the Left processes things – through those two small channels.  Those are the filters they use, and every problem in the world is first filtered through a hazy gauze of empathy and equity.  Why are there an unceasing horde of illegals surging through what used to be a border?  The filter is, first, empathy – “They just want a better life,” and then equity, “Everyone deserves the life we have her in America.”  As each one of my children will tell you, I find there is no word in the English language I despise more than the word, “deserve.”  I guess it’s my inner Viking showing through.

Will Smith, what a giver, always helping comedians work on their punchlines.

On the other side, on what Haidt labels “conservatives, the values converge.  The empathy and equity are tempered with tradition, group health, and respect for hierarchy.  In this much, much healthier worldview, values are kept in proportion with one another, not in this maladjusted split that drives the far Left.

I’ll admit, my values have changed as I’ve gotten older – this is a normal process people go through.  It’s crazy.  It’s call wisdom.  I have a few gray hairs, but I don’t pluck them out.  I’ve earned every one of them.  And I’ve lived long enough to see that the wheels of justice go slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.  Me?  I’m not sure anyone under 35 should be allowed to vote.  But I also am in favor of Congresscritter’s kids being bussed to the front line in the event they send our troops off to fight.

Imagine the inauguration:  “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voice suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

There are several lessons here:

  1. Leftist really are crazy. Like a pit bull chewing through a school of orphans, I’m sure they mean well.  They’re such sweethearts.  But their morality is worse than Robert Downey Jr. and Charlie Sheen fighting over a pound of cocaine back in 1997.  Oddly, Charlie Sheen was only arrested for being Charlie Sheen.
  2. Keep life in balance. Me?  Genghis Khan was, according to stories, a legendary horseman.  That takes balance.  That’s enough for me.
  3. I appreciate The View©. Where else can you go to watch a segment called, “Should You Let Your Kids Go to the Mall” where the topic was debated between a transgender Eskimo and Muslim drag queen?

Wilder Gone Wild – Tucker, Biden Re-Selection Kickoff, Musk, and MORE! 9pm EDT – The Funniest News On the ‘Net.

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • Tucker Carlson
  • Yet more Biden shenanigans
  • Magoo running for re-selection
  • More Muskiness

and?  ThinkRealFast.

Catch it live or on replay!

Livestream in less than 30 minutes!!!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUskuritR5P3BBJpOr5gzhg/streams

A Few Good Memes

“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” – Rollerball

In a life filled with signs, be that bird.

I’ve got that “scratchy throat, feeling warm, feeling tired, and just a bit under the weather, so, here’s a low-effort memedrop based upon several themes.  All memes are cage-free, organic, and gluten-free.  Enjoy!

Someone, somewhere needs to do this:

I maintain that we’re now at “peak trans” and will soon be getting off this treadmill:

To be fair, not many thirty-year-olds have cratered an entire product line:

Scott Adams points out that LinkedIn® might be allowing companies to quietly discriminate – against white people.

Part of the story is what the media says, and part is what it doesn’t say.  See the toxic empathy of the Left showing up here:

Read more books!

And when life couldn’t get more hilarious . . .

I wonder if Netflix® forgot we have actual pictures and sculptures of Cleopatra done while she was alive?

Poor Ohio.

And, ways that we’re slipping into a dystopia:

And don’t forget COVID – remember there are no refunds.

And cats.   Why?  Why not.

Finally, random things.

See you all on Friday.

Misplaced Empathy Will Kill Us All

“Look, I just fix stuff, okay? This whole empathy thing it’s, uh, not exactly my strong point, all right?” – Andromeda

The Mrs. says I have no empathy. I have no idea why she would feel that way.

I was in a pretty deep sleep, having another stupid dream. My definition of a stupid dream is something like, “being at work, and writing an email”. If I’m going to dream, I don’t want to waste it on work, I want to be out conquering the green-skinned warrior women from Alpha Centauri, not dreaming about doing my taxes.

Occasionally, though, I have a fully formed thought so perfect that it jars me out of a deep sleep, and I have to write it down, like that time I invented the goldfish treadmill, or the silent alarm clock that slapped The Mrs. in the face with a comically large clown glove so her alarm wouldn’t wake me up.

The Mrs. did not appreciate the prototype of that alarm clock. The Mrs. then said, “The time is not right for that invention.”

Regardless, the subject of my slumber’s epiphany was . . . empathy. It started with a dream of me going to work. I was late (which never happens) so I was going 105 miles per hour (Trudeaus per fortnight) in a 25 miles per hour zone. Someone in the dream said (I didn’t see them) that, “You leave John Wilder alone. He was only speeding because he was late.” I started laughing. Here, someone was making excuses for me because of misplaced empathy.

I laughed, and woke up laughing. I also knew I was changing what I was going to write about today.

In my defense, the sign said, “Speed limit 35 ahead” and there were three people in the car, so three times five is 105, right?

Empathy sounds good. It is good, because empathy is really what enables conscience, remorse, and the power to change behavior that hurts others. There’s even a term for people who don’t have empathy: sociopath. Oddly, that’s what my ex-wife called me during our marriage, but I thought my car just had a great suspension.

Regardless, when I ran over that pedestrian, I didn’t feel a thing.

So, yeah, empathy is important. It’s important enough that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had it listed as number one on his list of the foundations of morality, though he used the word “care”. I’ll skip the others for now for a later post, probably on Friday, so we can focus on just one: care/harm, which I’ll call “empathy”.

That is the single foundation of morality that Leftists score higher on than folks on the Right. And, in my boredom at work (in my dream) I figured it out – the reason why the Right can’t talk to the Left is that the Left is so full of empathy that they can’t stop crying enough to have a decent conversation.

The Mrs. screamed, “You never listen to a single word I say!” What a funny way to start a conversation, right?

Before we get to the punchline, it’s very important to consider this question: Who do normal people primarily feel empathy for?

  • Those who are weaker than us. A good example to illustrate this is Bill Gates. When Bill Gates lost $30 billion, who cried? Not Bill. I don’t think Bill cries at all unless he has solid gold tissue paper infused with Moon rocks and sasquatch hair to better absorb his tears.
  • People who are experiencing similar problems to the ones they’ve had, and that are similar to them. I can’t really understand how a Kalahari Bushman feels after not getting an antelope, but I can understand how I feel when the Pizza Hut™ is 20 minutes late with the pizza.
  • Connectedness to the object of empathy. Typically, I feel a lot more empathy for The Mrs. when she’s feeling blue than I do for Kim Jong Il when he runs out of vodka during his endless game of SimKorea®. I feel more about people in my town than in the next town over, and by the time that it’s a bus full of 275 nuns and 1,043 orphans falling off a cliff in India, my empathy has drained down to, “Huh, maybe they should put up guardrails” and “Who knew that they had mountains in India? Or nuns?”

It’s not horrible to feel this way, it’s natural. I should care more about my parents (in general) than an Iraqi cabdriver in Paris. And I can only imagine so much of the pain someone is suffering if I have no basis to relate to it. And no one has felt sympathy for Bill Gates since 1982.

Leftists, though, score really high on empathy, much higher than people on the Right. My theory is that most of them live in big cities, and live a much more anonymous and disconnected life than we do here in Modern Mayberry, where I can’t go into the liquor store without the clerk saying, “Oh, Wilder, you again. Do you even have a home?” The social fabric, ability to contribute, and sense of belongingness in smaller communities is often richer.

I would look exactly like that, if I had hair, and if it was brown, and if I hadn’t discovered carbohydrates.

I think this begins to rot their brains. They have natural feelings of empathy, but no natural way to use them, so this normally virtuous process becomes subverted. Ever see someone on the Right screaming because someone couldn’t kill babies in a state they don’t live in? No.

But their empathy isn’t what people on the Right experience Leftists score higher in empathy tests (which shows how they feel), but those same Leftists contribute less to charities than people on the Right. Why? Because they think that everyone should feel the same compassion Leftists feel and everyone should share in and help out, so the Leftists raise taxes and take money by force to feed their need to be empathetic.

The result: Leftist empathy is paid for using everyone’s money. Sort of like my relationship with my kids, but if my kids had guns.

But it doesn’t stop there. The particular thought that woke me up was the idea that a Leftist would explain away any crime if the person committing it met their empathy filter, because they care about empathy more than every other foundation of virtue.

This is devastating at the level of a civilization. It means that, no matter what, feelings are now the highest form of virtue. Let’s take some examples of this type of thinking in real life:

  • “That man shouldn’t get a ticket for going 105 in a 25, he was late to work!”
  • “Timmy didn’t mean to break your window, he was just playing, and he’s only four.”
  • “How can they give him a DUI? His parents were alcoholics.”
  • “No mother should have to fear her son will be shot while he’s out robbing convenience stores.”
  • “It’s not fair that the homeowner had a weapon of war, an AK-15, when he shot that boy who only had a revolver.”
  • “No human is illegal – besides, they do the work that we won’t.”
  • “Those are mostly peaceful riots – only a few billion dollars’ worth of property damage was done. That’s why the store owners have insurance.”
  • “Why not give them reparations? America owes it to them.”
  • “How can Americans be bothered to have to have state-issued identification to vote? It’s unfair.”
  • “Those Christians are awful! Why else would a trans person feel like she had to kill them?”
  • “Muslim shooter kills 30. Muslims will be the most impacted by the backlash.”

Remember Bill Gates? No one feels bad for him. But Leftists feel empathy especially for those they look down on, that they feel better than. The Left feels that the people the Left gives their empathy to are somehow lesser than they are. They have no empathy for productive taxpayers, but empathy for murderers and looters.

Why do the Leftists throttle news about blacks killing blacks? Because they treat them with the same empathy they treat toddlers. Black people can’t be expected to know better, after all. Why do they elevate news of an 85-year-old white man shooting a 16-year-old black kid while burying the story of a black man shooting up an entire white family? Because Leftists view the white guy as more capable of self-control than the black guy, who shouldn’t be judged by this one event because there were thousands of people that he didn’t shoot, after all.

I wonder why one of these got national news attention?

In my humble opinion, the law should be entirely color blind. And ideology blind. That’s the reason we have the law. The January 6 “rioters” should be punished in exactly the same fashion as the George Floyd “protestors” if they committed crimes. Walking through the Capitol? Yeah, not an issue. Sitting at Pelosi’s desk and stealing her laptop? That’s a crime, and the guy should be punished in a fair and proportionate way. Period.

Many of the George Floyd rioters did far worse, yet few have paid for crimes up to and including murder and the $2 billion dollars in damages done. The law has simply ceased to be ideology and color blind and is now converged to punish only people on the Right. The idea that hate crimes have been enshrined in law and that “hate speech” is rapidly becoming criminalized despite that pesky First Amendment is telling that the justice system is becoming broken.

The last (nearly 60!) years since Johnson’s Great Society was implemented have shown trillions spent to work on the “root cause” of poverty and racial disparity in this country. There have been trillions spent on this project out of empathy. Result? Roadway design is being called, by Transportation Secretary Zoolander, racist:

And the last three uniparty presidents, looking around, decided we just didn’t have enough foreigners, so they’ll Uber some in:

Unchecked, pathological empathy by the rank and file of the Left is destroying the country – if you pick a big city, it’s nearly certain that some new horror is occurring daily, and that there is no one even pretending to stop it.

Thanks, George Soros!

Pathological empathy is killing us, literally. The destruction of society is ongoing. And we know why. What I do know is if we can see it, if we can ridicule it, and if we can polarize it we can make change happen. The guy who dresses as a girl who got his own Bud Light® can?

He was the polarizing figure that society coalesced around, coming as he did on the shooting by yet another transsexual, brought it home for many. “This has gone too far.”

So, point out the hypocrisy of this misplaced empathy when you can, and don’t dream about writing emails at work.

Choose Who You Are. It’s Easy.

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

If someone named David is a victim of ID theft, do I have to call them Dav?

“As I’ve gotten older . . . I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves.  If you listen to the people – if you just sit and listen – you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.  There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that the tell – always on the receiving end of some injustice.  There’s the person who is always kind of the hero in every story they tell.  The smart person – they deliver the clever put down.  There are lots of versions of this.  And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you.  You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character.  And so, I did at some point decide:  I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.  And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

-Michael Lewis

My first question after I read this was, “Okay, which Michael Lewis?”  I’m thinking there might be a million of them, but the A.I. refused to even guess and then pouted and now won’t open the pod bay doors for me.  So, I’m guessing that every other person in Michigan is named “Michael Lewis”.  Regardless, the most famous author named Michael Lewis is the guy who writes interesting financial books, so I’ll assume it’s him.

The nice thing about water from Flint is that you can use it to make a Pb and Jelly sandwich.

Regardless of who wrote it, it’s a good and fairly true quote.

Why?

Attitude is everything.

If you believe you’re happy, if you talk about being happy, you’ll . . . be happy.  As I’ve written before, being happy is really the easiest thing in the world.  Many mornings I’ll run into the secretary administrative assistant at the door.  Regardless of the weather, I’ll greet her with, “What a beautiful day it is!”  It could be sunny and hot, rainy, cold, snowing, or even volcano-y.  My greeting is the same.

Because it is a beautiful day.  And, one thing I’ve learned is that the weather absolutely doesn’t care about me, at all.  The snow doesn’t care that I love it.  The hot day doesn’t care that I like cold weather, though I think it might be personal with the volcanoes.  But I’m alive, breathing, walking and talking.  If I spent all day hating a temperature reading, that wouldn’t leave me time to hate people who deserve it, like communists, leftists, and mimes.

How could the day not be beautiful?  I get to choose how I feel, so why not be happy about it?

My insurance agent told me I can jump in an active volcano.  Once.

I read the Michael Lewis quote and immediately recognized it to be a rule I’d been living with.  I’ve written before about how absolutely horrid victims are to be around.  Everything happens to them.  They are at the center of their own story, but initiate no action.  They have all the resilience of a bean bag, and are psychic vampires that attempt to suck emotional sustenance in the form of pity from their unwitting prey by demonstrating how mean the world has been to them.  The technical term for this affliction is “Antifa® Member”.

They sing their own lives with their story.  I avoid these types of people as if they were constructed entirely out of George Soros’ toe cheese, which I guess explains why he’s long been called the “Creamy-Fingered Puppet Master”.

George Soros wants to destroy our culture?  I knew he was behind American Idol.

The Hero?  I can live with them.  Often, they’re really newts who brag about being distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  They get their ego from being the one who has done the most, has the most gifted child, the cousin who went to Harvard®, and that they vacationed on Mars last summer.  The Hero does this this because they feel awful about themselves, and need to bolster their ego by telling these stories.

Again, I’m okay with The Hero, since if you listen to their stories and don’t try to top theirs, they eventually can be good people to hang out with, and as they get older or develop trust with you they drop the act.  They want to be liked, and if you like them for who they are, they often stop the Hero stuff.

The person who puts people down?  I don’t meet that guy (or gal) often enough to have any sort of read on dealing with them.  They just aren’t any in circle I’m in since I’ve been an adult.  I guess that tells me lots about how successful the strategy of “being a complete tool” is.

What’s the difference between a Hoover® vacuum and a limo carrying George Soros and his son?  The Hoover™ only has one dirtbag in it.

But there are lots of other ways to tell my story.  The best part is that I get to choose.  I get to choose to be the happiest guy people know.  I get to choose to be the guy in the room that is calm when everything is going to hell (I really enjoy that one, and it comes naturally).  I get to choose what I’m afraid of.

To be clear, this isn’t the Lefty talking point about “Your Truth®”.  That’s bogus, and denies objective reality.  Me?  I don’t deny that it’s snowing.  I don’t deny that it’s 103°F out.  I don’t deny that that pesky volcano keeps following me around.  But I do get to choose how that fact fits in with how I feel.

And so can you.

And so can those 5.04 million people in Michigan named, “Michael Lewis”.