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.

Your Limits: Are They Real? Or Can You Do More?

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Magnum Force

I’ve heard coffee is bad, but O.J. will kill you.

Knowing yourself is important.  There are two aspects of that that aren’t considered enough – knowing what you can do, and knowing what you can’t.  In practice, since abilities define a large part of who I am, knowing these limitations and abilities is crucial.

To start off, I have a list of things that I know I’ll never, ever, be good at.  When I was in junior high, my music teacher tried to convince me that everyone could sing.  Then he heard me and began noting that the Geneva Convention probably outlawed me singing, and also that he was wrong – some people can’t sing.  So, I’ve known since I was very young that however much I might like to sing, I will never, ever be able to.

Strike that – I can sing, I’ll just never be able to sing in a manner that other people find pleasant.

Other things are also off limits.  Basketball, for one.  I have been graced by genetics with a very powerful frame that gains muscle very easily.  My body is suited for trudging through snow, chasing priests, rowing longboats, forming a shield wall, and general pillaging.  Basketball?  If I can tackle people that might work out.  Basketball with an axe or a sword?  Even better.

Knowing what I absolutely can’t do is important.  It prevents frustration.

Are Viking Christians Bjorn again?

The next category is things I can do that are easy.  Now, many of the things that are easy for me are hard for other people.  And as I grow older, I find that things that used to be easy are becoming not so easy.  This pattern will continue, up and until a thing that used to be easy (breathing) will cease to be easy.  It will be difficult, and loud.  And hopefully someone will make the joke, “oh, Wilder’s just venting.”

But easy is still important.

Then there are the things that I can learn to do.  Taking great pictures is one, and I was working on that, trying to get the right light at the right time.  I still have a lot to learn, because the teacher kicked me out of class for indecent exposure.  All kidding aside, I’m okay at photography, but haven’t spent the time to be great at it, but I can picture getting good at it.

One time I thought I had a “long distance relationship”, but she called it a “restraining order”.

Learning is crucial.  It is the thing that can multiply capabilities, and when they’re used for something important, it can work wonders.  When those capabilities are used for nothing important, it’s the same as multiplication in the real world – it amounts to nothing.

That’s important.  Learning can make us better.  The last category is, in my opinion, where the magic happens:  things I can do, but I think I can’t do.

Like I said, this is the magic.  I had one boss who believed in me even more than I believed in me.  On more than one occasion, he said to me when he gave me a task that I thought was impossible, “Wilder, you can make this happen.”

My boss at the suicide hotline asked me to be a bit less positive.

Nine times out of ten, he was right.  So, nine times out of ten he knew and mentored me to do more than I thought I could do.  That is either the definition of a great boss or a psycho.  In this case, he was a great boss.  The downside?  He set ten impossible goals for himself before breakfasts, too.  In one of those cases, he was wrong.  As I recall, it only cost a few billion (really, not making this up) to the company.  It wasn’t fraud, mind you, he just wasn’t able to do what he thought he could do.

Obviously, he was fired.  And then he managed to make another billion dollar company and make himself several tens of millions in the process.  Even the thing he screwed up still is worth billions.

All because he didn’t allow those that he worked with to limit themselves.

Looking back, the biggest mistakes I made were in overly limiting myself.  When I look at some other friends, I see the same, not swinging for the fence when they had it all.  When I get those phone calls or texts, from the outside it’s generally a trivial call to give advice because I can see the capabilities of my friends and I believe in them.

Sometimes more than they believe in themselves.

The Mrs. has a simple test to see if a cat is a psycho.  “Is it a cat?  It’s a psycho.”

Am I done?

No.  I still have a goal – I want to kick a dent in the Universe.  I think I can.  If my old boss was right, it’ll be a bigger dent than I think it will be.  I’m really hoping that it isn’t the Russian’s weaponizing my singing to use in the Ukraine.

Some things are more horrible than war.

Discipline, Romans, And Spending All The Money

“That’s newspapers for you.  You could fill volumes with what you don’t read in ‘em.” – The Green Berets

I decided never to jog with Marcus Aurelius.  It’s always dangerous to run with Caesars.

Self-discipline is hard, but it starts with the smallest step.  Even (the dead) Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations talked about how hard it was to get out of bed in the morning.  Marcus talked about how warm and comfy he was under the covers, and how he’d like to stay there, curled up.  In then end, though, he got up because he had responsibility to govern the Empire that was a bit more important than his desire to be comfy.

Me?  There are some mornings I would have given up Gaul for another fifteen minutes.  Okay, maybe not Gaul because of the food, but definitely Judea.

Marcus did the tough (maybe he had a hangover?) thing because he had a responsibility to millions of citizens to do his very best for them, and as nearly as I can determine, he took that seriously.  Plus?  It’s good to be the Emperor.  I hear they didn’t have to wait in the drive through for Chicken McNuggets® and always got enough Hot Mustard™ sauce.

My advice?  Never eat a Kid’s Meal at McDonald’s®.  Their mothers tend to get upset.

The difficult part of discipline is that it requires, well, discipline.  Getting good things in life is difficult – that’s why we work for them.  And that’s why it’s called work.  It’s tough.  But when the seeds are planted, cared for, and weeded, then at harvest it’s time to reap the rewards.  Discipline is like that.  Heck, some sort of east Asian place that I can’t be bothered to look up has a proverb that says that, “A woman who marries a man who works hard every day will never starve.”

I don’t think that was China, because if it was China, they have been starving every century by the tens of millions, especially when they embarked on the Chinese Diet Plan called Communism.  Maybe it was Puerto Rico?  Or Applebee’s™?

Probably not.  But I think it might have ended in a vowel, but not Y, because that’s sometimes only a vowel, and I don’t think that Asians use the same fonts.

So, if even a dead Roman can figure it out, why can’t we?

Some people want to ban Roman numerals.  Not on my watch.

The latest bouts of fiscal insanity in the United States have made me think that none of them have read Marcus Aurelius, or maybe even can read.  What triggered this post is the recent Supreme Court Case about ghosts.  Oh, wait, that’s later.  No, student loans.

Student loans in the United States are a particularly horrible thing that gives money to Leftist professors so that they can indoctrinate youth but the youth has to pay for it until they lose all their teeth or pay it off.  I think that was in the terms and conditions of my student loans, but I can’t be exactly sure, since after I signed my name, they gave me $7,500.  Duh.

The most pernicious thing about student loans is that they live forever.  I paid mine off in January, 2013.  I paid ahead, but didn’t want to pay them off completely if the world ended in December, 2012 (which was a thing).  Oddly, this is a true story, and illustrates how far I’m willing to take a joke.

But student loan forgiveness is just the tip of the iceberg.  For the last five or so years of my life, the government (both Right and Left) has been like a fat girl who decides on a Tuesday night that the diet is over.  That cookie dough?  Sure.  I can eat a tube or two.  Covered in frosting.  Oh, and I’ll just tidy up the frosting container so it doesn’t go bad.  If you’ve given up, why not go all in?

The cannibal decided to go on a vegan diet.  He found a family of them at Whole Foods®.

The government (again, both Right and Left) has decided that there is no limit.  Every Tuesday for them is time to give Ukraine more money for . . . (spins wheel) dental x-ray infrastructure.  Will $23 billion cover that?  Sure, if it were just Ukraine, that would be one thing.  But it’s not just that.  Biden’s Build Back Better means that we’ll just burn cash to make us warm if we run out of oil.

If I seem a bit cynical, it’s because that at every single turn in my life, that I’ve seen fiscal discipline further erode, and money fly a bit freer each day.  At no point have I ever seen (outside of Ron and Rand Paul) and politician say, “stop”.  Apparently, when elected to Congress, the “spend money on everything light” blinks on the dashboard of their cars.

My dashboard keeps telling me “trunk is ajar”.  Silly car.  A trunk isn’t a jar.

There is no discipline.  There is no pretending to have discipline.  It’s all just comfy warm covers and Chicken McNuggies™ while every sense of fiscal discipline is overridden by another trip of the spoon int the Pillsbury™ chocolate frosting.

But that’s okay.  I’m sure it will end fine.  Where’s the frosting?  I think I want to sleep late today.  Oh, but have we spent enough money on Ukraine?

A Quick Post On The Decline Of The West

“I don’t care about what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.” – Apollo 13

Why did NASA use numbers instead of letters for the Apollo missions?  No one wanted to ride on that sorry mission, Apollo G.

The evening got away from me.  I’d love to tell you that I was doing something productive, but I was really just goofing around.  I felt a bit blah (not sick, mind you, but blah) all week.  So, I decided to goof around.  If today’s thoughts are a bit shorter than usual, that should explain it.

When I was a young adult, I read Atlas Shrugged.  Now, I said, I read it, but when it got to the part where John Galt hacked into the radio to give a (what seemed like to me) 700-page speech that was just reiterating every point Rand had already made in the book, but this time with crayon, I skipped it.

So, I read most of it.  Except 90% of the speech.

One thing that stuck with me about the tone of the book was that it took place in a world that had moved on.  Stuff just didn’t work.  I seem to recall a broken clock, and broken rails, and the image of a society that had done great things but was no longer capable of them.

The mission of NASA used to be to send people and things up into space.  The goal was to learn more about the Solar System, the planets, and the Universe beyond.  The other part of the goal was to make man an interplanetary and, hopefully, an interstellar species.

I got my medical degree online, from a place called Google® Docs™.

NASA was doing one of the hardest things that had ever been done – inventing technology at the very edge of what humans were capable of, and then using it.  It was one of the grandest adventures of the 20th Century.  It was also staffed by young people.  Gene Kranz, the “Failure is not an option guy” was the Flight Director for several Apollo missions, most notably Apollo 13.  When Apollo 13 happened?  Kranz was 36.

Our nation at that point had failures, sure.  But now it seems like that’s the definition.  And the things we’re failing on aren’t even new tech.  East Palestine (The Mrs. told me, “It’s pronounced Palesteen, Froderick”) Ohio is suffering from one of the biggest failures of tech that is nearly 200 years old.

Then there was a fire at Oak Ridge involving uranium.  Normally, one tries to avoid burning radioactive things.  I mean, it’s not like this is Russia and all of us are protected from radiation via the consumption of massive amounts of vodka.

There are others, of course.  The Jackson, Mississippi water plant appears to not work (sometimes) because the people running it don’t know how to run it.  I could go on and on.

In one sense, it almost appears that we’re suffering a crisis of people who just don’t care or are, well, stupid.  I hate to say stupid, because water treatment has been around for hundreds of years, too, and is far simpler than the Apollo project.

Good thing they didn’t use toe jam.

One symptom, perhaps, of the increasing and accelerating rate of change (notice I didn’t say improvement, I said change) in the world is increasing failures of the basic systems of life.  Sure, we can have Doordash™* deliver tacos, but the justice system is failing, too.  And how many readers here trust our elections?  In the race to be “efficient” we’ve made it easy to cheat.  Even if there wasn’t cheating, creating systems that are opaque enough so they’re not shenanigan proof is a failure in itself.

Our social systems are failing.  Our infrastructure is failing, and it becomes ever more obvious the things that bind us together . . . are failing.  Here in Modern Mayberry, the power has worked pretty well, but investment in power and infrastructure has made the system nearly third-world in some places.

I expect it to get worse.  I don’t even think we’re close to the level of failure we’ll be seeing due to the incompetence of the leadership in the country.  I see no real thoughts that our leadership will get better, since the idea of hiring smart young folks like Gene Kranz is out the window, and hiring people who share the same ideology, regardless of ability, is in.

I could never be a house painter – I would keep saying my work is on the house.

We are living in the time science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein called, “The Crazy Years” – in his words:

“Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in a mass psychoses . . .”

I believe the signs are there that we are in that “mass psychoses” and that is the end of this cycle.  The mere fact that truth can no longer be spoke in public due to the offense that it might give shows that the mental bending is built deep into discourse today.  To be clear, there is little of today’s society when it comes to values and morality left to conserve – the Left has taken it all.  No, where we are going into our future has nothing to do with conservation, it’s going to be about restoration.

Failure is not an option.

*There is no Doordash™ in Modern Mayberry, unless it’s raining.

Greeks, Passion, and Mayo

“Why?  Are the Greeks tired of fighting each other?” – Troy

I heard the Greeks kept watch on their infants by using a baby minotaur.

Epictetus is a dead Greek dude.  His name sounds like Epic . . . well, it would make Beavis and Butthead laugh.  Epictetus is, as I mentioned, dead.  So are several billion people, but so, outside of his sorta-funny name, why am I bringing him up on a Friday?

Because he’s one of the people whose ideas have made it down to us because someone decided to invent the original wireless information transfer technique which uses a solid-state information storage media along with speed of light photon transmission:  writing.

One of the things he wrote was this:

Remember that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases us and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning.  It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another.  Where our heart is set; there our impediment lies.

Okay, the truth is, he didn’t write that at all.  He wrote some sort of gibberish with lots of Latin or Greek letters.  Sadly, no one left alive can translate those languages, so we had to guess at the meanings, like Bulgarian mall lawyers poking at the internals of a laser printer with a pen, dimly thinking that might somehow fix the complicated internals and make the magic printer work again, like humans at the dawn of time, worshiping an almighty being, hoping one day to be rewarded with things like mayonnaise, or French fries.

Only you east of the Rockies will get this. I grew up with Best Foods™, which ruins this joke.

Yeah, that’s a run on sentence, but so is the Preamble to the Constitution.  Classic things can’t be rushed.

Anyway, the good thing is, Bulgarian mall lawyers are absolutely amazing at fighting judges over silly restraining orders.  I mean, how could I be charged with trespass if it was just my drone looking in their window?

But Epictetus was trying to tell us something deeper than any silly restraining order.  It’s that what we want is what controls us.  Epictetus just made the point that the desire for power and the desire for peace and a restraining order are equally controlling.  Diogenes, another dead Greek dude who pathetically didn’t speak English, said, “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.”

Remember, Diogenes often walked around naked, yanking his crank in public, so, you know, ewww.  I think Diogenes must have had Bulgarian mall lawyers because I never read that he had a restraining order against him.

What do you call it when a Bulgarian uses bad language?  A Bulgarity.  (This is not my first choice joke, but the other one was pretty rough.  Email me and I’ll share.  It starts with, “how do you get two Bulgarian brothers off of a couch?”)

These dead Greeks, though neither of them ever had a hamburger from McDonald’s™, did point out a very simple truth:  our passions, our desires are what we give ourselves over to.  And those desires don’t have to be bad to control us.

Some of the best times in my life are when I was single mindedly focused on a goal.  In one sense, it is a freeing moment.  In the very best of those times, I become the work.  I lose myself entirely, because I am the goal.  It may sound weird, but there are those moments where time ceases to exist, where I am 100% engaged with what I’m doing.  I lose myself entirely.  This has happened while gathering firewood (I used to call it getting wood, but then I read about Diogenes, so I changed it to gathering firewood) or working on a project, or even writing one of these posts.

It’s awesome.  A day at work goes by in seconds.  And I look at what I’ve done and am satisfied.  I have lived a day that had purpose, that had meaning, even if it’s only meaning that I gave it.

So, were Epictetus and Diogenes wrong?  I mean, it’s not like they’re going to come to my house and give me a wedgie if I make fun of their moms.  They’re dead.

Kinda yes, and kinda no.

Yo momma so old?  Her first crush was Diogenes.

The point is we are not small g gods.  We’re people.  We have desires, like pooping.  Or another glass of wine.  Or eyedrops when our eyes are itchy.  To be a person without desire isn’t to be as a small g god, it’s to be . . . dead, or worse, a zombie or an ice cube or a houseplant.

It’s living in a world where the salt has lost its savor and every day is like going to a gray cubicle with gray carpet and gray walls and a gray chair and doing work that I don’t care about.

Yes, they may be dead (and in the case of Diogenes, a dead chronic masturbator) but I think people who have interpreted them have missed the point.

If we choose our passions, choose what we will do, what makes us mad, and what makes us happy, we have an amazing small g godlike power:  we choose the people that we want to be.  In those moments when I get mad (it happens) I try to step back and ask a simple question:  why am I mad?

I had to kick some resistors that didn’t work out of my house.  Now they’re Ohm-less.

I’ll allow it if it ties to virtue or values.  Otherwise, it’s ego, and I try to choke it back, because in 100 years, absolutely no one will remember it.  My virtue or values?  Those aren’t for sale.  I own those.

I really do think what Epictetus and Diogenes (when he wasn’t gripping the one-eyed wonder weasel) were really trying to tell us was to pick what we were willing to be controlled by.

I choose to be controlled by putting these posts out, three a week.  I choose to do the best podcast ever done weekly.  I choose to go to work, and, on days when there’s enough coffee, to give it everything.

I choose.  If I am to be controlled by my passions, I get to choose them, and I make it a conscious choice.

And if I could choose my Greek name it would be Epic . . . well, I’d better stop there.

This is a family friendly place.

Anyone have TP?

Is The End Of The Road Nearly At Hand?

“If they have him, and they can somehow piece the country together, get communications up, they’ll control everything; the Federal Reserve, the military.” – The Last Ship

Where does the Fed® hide its monetary mistakes?  In debasement.

Pa Wilder was a banker, and when we communicated via a while back, I’d send him long-ish messages about most everything.  One time, I broached the economy with him.  As a small farm banker with more than 50 years of experience, he was familiar with the way the system worked.

When I first heard that the Federal Reserve™ wasn’t owned by the government, but by the member banks, I asked him.  I figured he’d tell me, “Nah, John, it’s really owned by the government, aliens aren’t real, go back to sleep – we won the war.”  Nope.  He then went through how each member bank was required to buy stock in the regional Federal Reserve Banks (as I recall) with at least 6% of their deposits.

Whoa.  His bank owned a tiny part of the Federal Reserve Bank®.  Certainly not much, but part of it.  The Federal Reserve Bank© is a private institution.  It was the 1913 mechanism to get the politicians out of the economy.  The Great Depression shows how well it worked.

What do you call a talkative Colombian?  Hablo Escobar.

After World War II, there was a time of relative stability – Europe and Japan were shattered, and the United States had industry that was just waiting to stop making weapons and start making washers.  The sudden influx of labor with the demobilizing G.I.s made a combination for economic growth.  After they drank the bars dry and made a zillion babies.

Even with the added costs of Social Security, it worked.  The economy was working so well that we could build an interstate highway system without breaking a sweat.  The highway system even added to the economic boom by lowering the cost and time required to move goods, effectively shrinking the country.

However, every good party has to end.  Johnson’s Great Society and financing for the Vietnam War out of “money we just made up” caused Nixon to end the last tether between gold and the dollar.  Sure, the Fed® had been cheating about the amount of cash it had been printing, but when the bluff was called, Nixon had the option of sending all our gold to France or saying “just kidding”.

He chose the latter.  I think it was a good idea, because it wasn’t like France was going to do anything about it, anyway.  The result was the petrodollar – the idea that all international transactions in oil would take place in dollars.  That also resulted in almost all transactions taking place in the dollar.  The inflation of the 1970s was the result – it was before we figured out how to tax the world by printing dollars in a sorta responsible way.

If I had a dime for every time I didn’t know what was going on, I’d say, “Hey, where did all these dimes come from?”

So, people all over the world needed dollars, even though we were printing them like we were, well, the Fed™.  As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a counterbalance to the United States, so at least there was some check.  But after they went tango uniform?

That’s when the responsibility completely ended, the cash was printed, and the instability really started.

The Dotcom Bubble was the first – fed by cash from the Fed® with no place to go.  And then it tanked.  So the Fed™ printed a few trillion bucks.  That led directly to . . .

The Housing Bubble.  You probably have heard of it.

But this was different – it actually lead to protests against the banks.  A reprogramming was necessary – “put the bankers in jail” had to be stopped, because bankers like to use our money to buy themselves nice things like that tiny part of France where they don’t let Muslims in.  Except the Saudis.

I read that photographers and art thieves both take pictures.

A reprogramming was needed – Occupy Wall Street™ had to turn to . . . something.  That reprogramming of the Lefty rank and file was into “white people are awful” and it got the heat away from the bankers.  And made movies suck.

Meanwhile, the money hijinks led to country after country having revolutions, from Libya to Egypt to Syria.  Why?  Because inflation in the United States (at that point) meant that people had to pay a nickel more for Cheetos®.  In Egypt, that meant that one of the children had to be sold into medical experimentation.

The key to all of this was keeping the dollar as the key currency used in international transactions.  To be clear, Russia was a big threat in this.  Sure, Russia is ruled by corrupt folks who kill people who threaten them, but I can raise you a Jeff Epstein, a Hunter Biden, and Hillary.

The Russians certainly threatened all of this with Nordstream® and Nordstream II©.  These pipelines pushed natural gas straight from Russia to Europe.  Now, Russia could take . . . euros for gas.  Dollar not required.

Watch a 10-hour movie?  No.  But have Netflix® break it up into 10 one-hour movies?

And scary.  All the investment of the Left in Green Energy® led them to shut down nuclear power plants (Germany, I’m looking at you) and replace them with natural gas plants.  And you see the results.

(hint:  Ukraine and certain underwater explosions)

Now we find that we have a currency that’s becoming worth less every day, foreign folks are building ways to not take the dollar.  So they need fewer of them.  And want fewer of them in their pockets.

It doesn’t help that we’re in debt by (spins wheel) over $25 trillion bucks, the economy is distorted, and that Medicare® and Medicaid™ will soon cost more than Joe Biden’s hair plugs.  And we’re going to double that in the next eight years, and double it again in the next eight.  That’s $100 trillion dollars.

Does anyone reading this believe we can last that long?

Oops.

Pa Wilder said 20 years ago that he didn’t see how it could last.  But many folks have gone broke by betting against the Fed™.  That one day they can’t paper it all over?

Nah.  Don’t worry.  It’ll be fine.

Funny Lessons From The Franco-Prussian War in 2023

“By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William the Second I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.” – The African Queen

The Kaiser never smoked weed, because he had no idea where Fort Wenty was.

In high school history, I’m pretty sure that the Franco-Prussian War was never mentioned.  Or, if it was, it was in World History when I was a freshman.  That was my first class, and the teacher was the head basketball coach.  His typical procedure was to tell us to read the chapter or watch a film.  There were a lot of films.  Then, he would wander down to the locker room, where he would make use of the coaches’ bathroom.

Coffee does that have effect.

I don’t remember the coach talking about the Franco-Prussian War, but, then again, through two semesters I don’t think he spent more than 10 minutes a day in the 45-minute class.  Perhaps he needed prunes?

Recently, though, I saw a documentary about the Franco-Prussian War that I found to be fascinating.  It’s long -6 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds, according to YouTube®, so roughly as long as Hunter Biden goes in a typical day without photographing himself with hookers and drugs.

The reason that this war happened was fairly simple – the French wanted to fight the Germans to look good with an easy win, and the Germans were, well, Germans, and invading France is as German as bratwurst, panzers, or invading Poland.

I think the blue could also stand for “reliable allies”. (meme as-found)

Napoleon III was Emperor of France, and his wife (really!) wanted to fight because she wanted to make sure that the country was united around her husband and son, so he’d inherit a kingdom strongly behind him.

Germany had other ideas, and Bismarck (the dude, not the ship) was trying to unite all the German countries.  Hmm.  I’m sensing a pattern here.  But Otto von Bismarck’s goal was to turn Wilhelm from King into Emperor, or Kaiser.  Bismarck was determined – you could say he was on a Kaiser roll.

It surprised no one when war broke out.  The Germans reacted as Germans do – troops showed up at the right time in the right place and weapons, ammunition, food, and other stuff was already there, waiting for them when they mobilized.  At the time, one person noted, “It is as if every cow knew which pot it was scheduled to be cooked in.”  Or something like that.  I’m not looking it up at 1:38 am.

Why do Germans drink beer?  To convince them mating is logical.

The French reacted as French people do.  Rather than go someplace logical, like toward the enemy, troops had to go to where their regiment was located.  If you were right next to Germany, and your unit was in Algiers, you’d have to go to Algiers to get with your unit, and then go back as a unit to the site of the war.

Yeah.  It doesn’t get better for the French.  The war started on July 19, and by September 2, the Germans had captured Napoleon III and over 100,000 dudes.  In previous years, this would be it.  And, in fact, after Napoleon III had fallen into German hands, he was sent with his butlers and support staff to a fancy mansion to hang out.

War of king versus king was like that in that time and place.

Again, it being France, the first thing they did is declare a Republic, their “Third” – (they’re now on their fifth).  Having seen what happens to French Empresses when things go south, Napoleon’s wife snuck out in the middle of the night and snuck away to England, which was thrilled to have a French person around they could make fun of.

I hear that Chinese probes are still doing stuff on the dark side of the Moon.  Seems shady to me. (as found)

So, France’s army was shattered, surrendered, or besieged.  Two weeks later, Paris was surrounded by Germans.  The war had been as polite as war could be up to now, and the French armed forces had been as effective as an army of kittens attacking a velociraptor.  The logical thing to do would be to surrender.

What the Germans were asking for was Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces that France had for a couple hundred years or so, but about 90% of the folks there spoke German as their primary language.  The new French Republic was fairly scared that surrendering those provinces would make them look bad, so they refused.  To be fair, the French wanted to annex a bunch of German land, too, but didn’t have the chance since they suck at war.

Their armies shattered, Paris surrounded and besieged, the French didn’t surrender.  One thing I noted was that when it was a war of one king versus another, as noted above, war was, while still awful, not personal.

When the Republic was formed, it was no longer a war of one king against another – it was a war of the people of France versus Germany.  The fact that the Germans were in France wasn’t really the fault of the Germans, both sides had wanted the war, and the French had, in fact, crossed into Germany before the Germans gave them a full hammerlock.

Hulk had to deal with anxiety about his career.  I guess you could call it wrestle-mania.

Regardless, at that point individual French citizens fought harder after losing their Emperor, Napoleon.  At first, this surprised me.  But it’s categorically different when people fight for something they own – they fight harder and longer.  Since they were untrained, poorly armed, and poorly lead, the effort was even less effective than the Afghanistan army, circa 2022.

The Siege of Paris lasted for four months and ten days.  In 2023, the average supermarket in the average city holds enough food for three days.  The average house has that same amount.  After a week, people would probably be fairly hungry, and would trade anything but their cell phone for a bag of Cheese Doodles® or High Fructose Flakes™.  In Paris of 1870, they didn’t run out of wine until late December, and I’m not sure the French have ever figured out that they could drink water.

Oh, wait, they did start drinking the water, leading to multiple epidemics that cost almost as many lives as the war itself.

Apparently, it’s now illegal to drink wine, shave, brush my teeth, and take a nap.  Driving is awful in 2023.

Eventually, the French agreed to an armistice, and, being France, they immediately had a communist revolution, but only in the cities, primarily in Paris.  This wasn’t a repeat of the French Revolution, since in this case, very few people were harmed, fewer than a thousand French dead.  Oh, and up to 20,000 communists, but they don’t count.  It also proves that the only war the French can win is against other French people.

The big reason that I’m writing about the Franco-Prussian War is that illuminates several things that are still important or true in 2023:

  1. Governments have and still create wars to keep themselves in power.
  2. The French are awful at war.
  3. One big loss can destabilize an entire country if the people are demoralized.
  4. I guess there’s a reason the French don’t drink water.
  5. People fight harder when they have ownership, even if what they’re fighting for isn’t worth it.
  6. I don’t have nearly enough storage food.
  7. Commies always either gravitate to, or are made by cities. Another good reason to avoid them.

I’ve always loved history.  Perhaps that’s why they ask the question about what’s the difference between a bad* basketball coach and a constipated owl – the coach can shoot but not hit.

 

*He was actually a pretty good basketball coach.

Red Pill? Blue Pill? What About The Green Pill?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – The Matrix

What happens if they try to get a new actor to play John Wick?  Keanu leaves.

The movie The Matrix is a classic.  Too bad they never made a sequel or three.  I’m sure they would have been fantastic.  Imagine taking the adventures of Neo™ beyond that big battle with Mr. Smith®!

Regardless, The Matrix did include several ideas that have made their way into the main stream, and stayed there.  The biggest, perhaps, is the idea of The Red Pill and The Blue Pill.  In the movie, Neo© is given the choice of taking The Blue Pill, which will allow his version of reality, the things he knows, to remain, even though they are founded on pretty little lies.

I’ll admit, The Blue Pill is attractive.  It’s comfortable.  But it is, in the end, a lie.  I imagine that since you’re here, lies aren’t the thing that motivates you and more than they motivate me.

If Bill Cosby had played Morpheus, I think he would have pushed the blue pill.

The alternative is The Red Pill.  The Red Pill is the The Truth.  The problem with The Truth is that it’s ugly.  The world we want to believe in is in The Blue Pill, because those lies speak to us so clearly.  When I first took the Red Pill on a particular subject, I felt betrayed.  Here was an entire line of propaganda that I had been fed since I was a child – it was a part of my base programming.

That’s the problem with The Red Pill.  Once I took it, I began to question everything.  Like a potato chip, you can’t have just one.  And once I began looking, I found even more to question.  That was difficult, because I had to reevaluate where I was wrong.  And what ideas I had were built around those incorrect ideas.

The Red Pill is demoralizing.  It’s not pleasant to have to reevaluate basic beliefs, especially those that comforted me and that I now know are wrong.  In part, this website is about that.  It’s looking at the things I think I know, and trying to distill what is true.  On more than one occasion, a post was nearly complete when I found an inconvenient fact.

In algebra class, people always thought I was plotting something.

That meant I was wrong.  That meant my post was wrong.  In one sense it sucks because it kept me up later to write something else.  But it never upset me, because I had learned something new, and was a bit closer to The Truth.

A key to getting through The Red Pill is to embrace The Truth, and improve.  However much.  A little each day is enough.

I suppose you could call that The Green Pill.  Or, for weightlifters, The Iron Pill.

So, which one makes me The Hulk if I’m angry?

It’s the idea that instead of being upset that the world isn’t the way that I want it to be, I don’t focus on that, at all.  Instead, I try to focus on improving myself.  Not a lot, just a little each day.  Can this post be better?  Can I get stronger?  Can I get in better shape?  Can I learn another useful skill?

Life is nothing without difficulty.  There is no honor in fighting weak opponents.  I mean, I could spend my day boxing three-year-old kids.  But my arms would get tired.  Unless there weren’t that many, or if they were all especially weak three-year-olds.  Like vegan-weak.

No, for a victory to have meaning, the challenge must be sufficient.  It would have to at least be boxing six-year-olds.  Or, maybe helping the world, or even one person, see what they normally would never have seen.

I had a globe on my desk, and met the guy who made it.  It’s a small world.

I have to have a quest.  The grander, the better, and I even live with and am comfortable that I won’t live to see the ultimate impact that I have on the world.  That’s fine with me.  Small pushes, over time, change the world.

Never let The Red Pill get you down.  The real choice, even in a world gone mad, is to keep our virtue, and never to give up in making ourselves better, and to improving what we can, even if it’s only a little.

The Red Pill is difficult to swallow, but it is a gift, and victory in finding and spreading The Truth is the challenge that fuels me, and is way less tiring than fighting either endless streams of toddler or endless streams of Agent Smith.

Dang.  Sure wish they had made a sequel to The Matrix.