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.

When You Need A Friend . . .

“Dayman.  Champion of the sun. Ahh-ahh-ahh. You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone! Dayman.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The Earth is covered over 80% by water, and most of it is not carbonated.  The Earth is flat.

On a recent version of his podcast, Scott Adams said (I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up), “I’m giving it one year.  Not two.  I’m not going to live another year like this.”

Wow.  I did hear that (in a later podcast) he reported that he changed his blood pressure medication and his mood improved, but am likewise too lazy to verify that, either.

To be fair, Scott has had a pretty bad year.  He’s had health issues, relationship issues.  How bad were they?  At one point in his podcast this spring, he melted down and tore into a viewer in a greatly disproportionate way.  It was like using a chainsaw to trim toenails.  Sure, it’ll do the work, but it will leave quite a mess.

This was the big sign to me that Adams was under a lot of pressure.

After hearing me sing, the choir director told me I was a natural tenor.  “Yes, John, stay ten or twelve feet away from a microphone.”

The point isn’t to diagnose Scott’s health or love life, but rather to point out that regardless of wealth (Adams is loaded) and options in life (he could live anywhere in the world he wants to, drive whatever car he wants to, and never worry about a bill ever again in his life), there is the possibility that someone you know needs a friend.  Scott certainly does.

One of the things that we have seen decline over the past few decades are those institutions in society that were devoted to fraternity – the Elks, Masons, Moose Lodge, bowling leagues, Boy Scouts® etc., have all seen membership declines – some so much that they’ve folded up in many locations.

And in our club we eat the same thing for breakfast:  Synonym Toast Crunch.

Over a decade ago, I was involved with Scouting™.  We would have leader meetings, which I ran.  I had an agenda, and we’d go through it in a rather business-like fashion.  At the end of one of the meetings, another leader, Chuck, pulled out his new cell phone and was showing me its features.

After the meeting, as The Mrs. (she was a leader, too) and I got into the car, I said, “That was weird, Chuck showing me his phone after the meeting.  Why do you think he did that?”

The Mrs. looked at me as one would look at a not-so-bright child, and said, slowly so my dim brain could comprehend . . . “Because . . . he’s your,” long pause, and then “friend.”  She said friend slowly enough that it was about two seconds in length.

My friend asked if I could sleep with someone dead or alive, who would it be?  I answered, “Obviously, someone alive.”

Of course, she was right.  I had been so focused on the “business” side of running the Cub Scout stuff that I had forgotten entirely about the personal side.  Chuck was my friend.  Duh.  But the lesson I learned was simple:  friends really are out there.  Chuck moved away, but I still call him once a year.  And I do my best to stay in contact with friends that, in some cases, I haven’t seen physically in 15 years.

That network of friends is important, at least for me.  While some people might go through life alone and do fine, I find that having a good network of friends helps me.  I can get good advice.  I can complain.  I can share my journey.  I can get good ideas.  I can laugh.  I can share my troubles.

I don’t go through life alone, and I’m stronger for it.

One of the joys of childhood was how easy it was to make friends.  In many cases, we didn’t have anything in common but being the same age, but that was enough.  Something about endless summers and going through similar difficulties was great for bonding.

I then started a camp to train kids needlework.  It was sew in tents.

I think technology has had a big role in our current dislocation.  Our televisions can now bring us nearly every movie from the last twenty years at a touch.  YouTube™ has millions of videos on almost every topic.  And don’t forget that friendship requires trust, something that is in shorter supply today than in years past.  In the end, regardless of why, we can change that.

My request is this.  Look around as you go about your day.  Try to, as much as possible, spread joy to those that deserve it.  And maybe even a little to some who don’t.  A little.  I know that most people who act like jerks are really jerks, but some are just going through a bad time.

Also?  Find and make a new friend.  This takes time and commitment.  And trust.  And there’s the fear of loss, too.  But the wonderful thing about friendship is this:  when it exists, it’s work that helps both people.

Hopefully Adams has found a friend.  If not, I’d be glad to show him my phone.

Problem-Reaction-Solution: Coming Soon To A Country Near You

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

If a Higgs boson kills someone, does that make it a mass murderer?

Problem-Reaction-Solution has been the playbook of the Left for a long time.  What’s that?  First, there’s a problem.  It may be a real problem, or it may be entirely invented, like my résumé.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, was famous for saying “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  In his own words, Rahm explained, “ . . . what I said was, never allow a good crisis to go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn’t think were possible.”

Yes.  He said that.  It is probably not true that he stood next to a South American quadruped and a doorbell for his senior picture, because that would leave us with Rahm, a llama, ding-dong.

Rahm’s crisis is really just a way to restate the Problem-Reaction-Solution paradigm.  It’s a way to make people do things that were otherwise unthinkable.  Why?

Because some leaders want their people to accept what would otherwise be unthinkable.  This has long been the playbook of the Left.

It has been used by the Left since, well, forever.  The problem-reaction-solution is often called a Hegelian Dialectic, but that has too many syllables for 1:43AM.  And Hegel died in 1831, so I’ll just leave it that this sort of crisis-seeking isn’t a new thing.

Apparently, Hegel didn’t have a side that flattered him.

The Left turns out to be pretty good at this stuff.  Examples?  Well, in Australia, all it took was one mass shooting and the politicians convinced the Aussies to turn in their guns.  The problem was that single shooting.  The reaction?  A well-formed media manufactured panic.  The solution was to turn in all the guns.  The Australian Leftists certainly didn’t let that problem go to waste.

The end result?  Australia had some of the most oppressive COVID-19 restrictions on the planet including concentration camps.  Which is just what government wanted – to turn citizens into subjects.  Taking guns away is a good way to do just that.  The joke is that everything in Australia can kill you easily.  Now that includes the police.

The same attempts were made in the 1990s with the assault weapons ban in the United States.  It went into effect.  Without the Internet, I imagine it would still be in place.  But, luckily, there was a way to bypass the media, and people got together to push back.  I’m not sure that George W. Bush was in favor of rolling it back, but every Republican that had a job and wanted to keep it knew that making it go away in the next election was in their best interest.

People say that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together to accomplish anything, but I’ll remind you, Jeffrey Epstein is dead.

So the problem wasn’t big enough, and (at least so far) hasn’t been big enough because events like Uvalde proved one thing:  waiting for the police to come and save you isn’t a good strategy.  In a way, using the Australia example just isn’t going to work in America.

But what about other things, like money?

It has worked before.  One of the first things that Franklin Roosevelt did after becoming president was to confiscate almost all the gold of American citizens and then make the dollar worth less.  It was the same formula.  The problem was the economy had cratered.  The reaction was that people were panicking.  The solution?  Almost anything Roosevelt wanted to try, he could try, up to and including taking the country (eventually) into a World War.

Whereas Americans seem to have a strong distrust of government taking their guns, the distrust with politicians destroying our money doesn’t seem nearly so strong.  Which brings us right back to today.

The economy has been a mess, for quite a long time.  I could delve back into history even more than I’ve done so far, but I don’t want to write a 20,000 word post.

Moses went to Mount Olive.  Popeye was furious.

But where we are today is precarious.  It is certainly the problem unfolding.  In 2008, when inflation was “tolerably” low, the Federal Reserve® could print money at will.  This allowed bankers to keep the profits that they had made, while the financial system used the Bounty™ Currency Quicker Printer Upper® to socialize the losses.

This wasn’t without creating ripple issues, but it kicked the can down the road for more than a decade.  Then, COVID.  Same playbook:  print all the cash!!!

This time, however, the cash didn’t just go to cover paper losses at banks.  People got the cash, and did what people do:  they spent it.  Another part of the idea was to inject as much money as is possible into infrastructure projects.

Now, I like roads and bridges as much as the next guy, but when all that money chases concrete, it pushes the price of concrete up – that’s supply and demand.  And whatever the government was buying went up in price.  Now, decent cigars haven’t gone up much in price, but eggs, bacon, and gasoline certainly have.

If I want to light a cigar but don’t have matches, I just cut the end off.  Then it’s a little lighter.

So the Fed© can’t print itself out of this one.  Heck, every time the Fed® tries to stop, the economy lurches like a Pelosi getting out of a Porsche™.

So, the problem is here.  The reaction is going to be significant as the economy continues to wobble and waver, and I believe is headed for even darker days.  Forget Netflix™ and avocado toast:  people get grumpy when they can’t afford to eat or buy gas.  The normal solution (printing cash and making it rain) can’t be used.

That leaves us with a crisis that would make Rahm Emanuel drool.  The idea from the government will be to create a solution that, right now, we’d consider unthinkable.

I hear that atheists own more cats than Christians.  Apparently, owning Christians is illegal.

Just like our pushback on the unthinkable banning of guns, it’s our job to push back on whatever nonsense is coming, because I can assure you that it will leave most of us poorer and with less freedom.

Why most of us?  Remember, there’s a reason why people like Rahm Emanuel look forward to things like this.  And it’s not because they lose power or money.

Elon Musk: “This one weird trick drives Leftists nuts!”

“Can we stop twittering like fishwives?” – The Death of Stalin

Where did Sauron take his driver’s test? The department of Mordor vehicles.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter® finally went through. It’s almost as if he’s bored running a car company, a space exploration company, and managing his hair implants.

His purchase of Twitter©, though, is different. It’s made all of the Leftist intelligentsia as crazy as evening visitors to the Pelosi house.

Of course, Elon Tweeted® about that:

But when he was challenged, clarified:

Hillary Clinton responded that she was outraged:

And members of her party were puzzled:

The reason Leftists are upset is simple: Twitter™, though it’s never been horribly profitable, has an outsized grasp on public attention. We’re no longer in the world where the Lincoln-Douglas debates where each candidate would speak for a total of ninety minutes in a three-hour debate. Nope. Twitter™ is a platform that allows no more than 280 characters in a Tweet©.

It does match the attention span of the audience, and it has a format that’s very simple for amplifying very short ideas. It’s like taking an idea or an emotion and distilling it down to the smallest bite. If the Declaration of Independence would have been a Tweet®, it would have been, “No way, dude. Make me.” It seems to lose a bit of the majesty that way, but Franklin would ReTweet™ it to King George with a woodcut picture of Washington’s wife’s butt.

Twitter™, then, is important to the Left. The primary reason it’s important is that, until Musk bought it, it was entirely owned by the Left. For a while, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter©, maintained it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” and most content that wasn’t illegal was a go.

Gradually, though, the Left began to hate that. No matter what Trump may or may not have done in office, he was the master of the Tweet©. He could, in a few short words, eviscerate an opponent in such a way that they could never recover. And it was an unfettered way to reach millions.

And the Left hated that. Since they had captured the media, both print and broadcast, they hated anyone who could escape their gatekeeping. Someone like Rush Limbaugh or a group like Fox News™ had to be co-opted, tamed, and turned into a loyal opposition. Rush Limbaugh of 2002 was just a shadow of Rush Limbaugh 1992. And Fox News© never veers too far off of the mainstream.

But Twitter©? It could go to any topic, and ideas could spread at the speed of the Internet across the globe. Any idea could spread this fast, and it could be amplified by tens of thousands. It was important enough that bot nets were created to retweet and comment to give oxygen to topics that certain people liked, while attempting to bury content that certain people didn’t like. How bad are the bot nets? Elon now has the receipts:

On one hand, this was a massive amount of intelligence that I’m sure made the CIA and NSA and FBI very, very happy. Not since Facebook™ had such information been available to them: names, places, private conversations, email addresses, locations, and beliefs.

I stopped using Twitter® and just started yelling my views in public. I have three followers now, but I think two are FBI.

Trump, though, showed the danger in this system. The wrong ideas, unapproved ideas, could begin to spread. The result was that banning for ideas started. Alex Jones in 2018 was the first, and his accounts had over six million followers. Why? Because his accounts had over six million followers.

Steve Bannon was banned. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned for not liking an actress. British politician Katie Hopkins was banned for badthink. Marjorie Taylor Greene (a sitting member of Congress) was banned for daring to share her belief that the 2020 election was hacked.

Those are obvious – but dozens of people have been banned for opinions about the COVID-19 “vaxx” that have been proven, over time, to be 100% true. But they’re banned.

70,000 accounts were purged in January, 2021, for sharing QAnon stuff.

There have been Leftists banned, sure. But Twitter© had become the official mouthpiece of the Leftist oligarchy. Have an opinion that drifted too far from the accepted window of opinions? Banned. And the Left loves it. Check out a list of their demands:

I demand to be recognized, too. I identify as non-Bidenary.

This illustrates the mode of operation of the Left – free speech is their stated goal, right until the minute when they have power. Then? Speech must be controlled, in ever smaller boxes, until the only opinions one is free to share are the official and accepted opinions of the Left. To be clear, this is nothing new. Freedom of speech was officially part of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, but actually attempting to use it would nearly certainly result in voluntary visits to the GULAG if not just a single accidental 9x18mm Makarov shot to the head.

That is the way the Left likes their free speech. But Elon messed up their plan.

To be clear, I don’t think Elon is a savior. He’s just, like Trump, a wildcard that the Left didn’t anticipate. He’s been willing to play their games. Tesla™ made money early because of tax incentives. SpaceX® makes billions a year from government contracts. And Elon’s hair was developed in a secret government lab, like COVID-19. And like COVID, it’s growing wild.

In the end, I think it’s another iteration of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – if there are two possible outcomes, the most amusing outcome will be the thing that happens. I mean, if Jimmy Kimmel is mad at you, you know you’re doing something right.

Halloween and Scary Movies

“You don’t get it do you? Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think upon itself. Nobody is going to care about exact handwriting.” – Heathers

Why don’t vampires go to Africa?  They heard someone blessed the rains down there.

Happy Halloween.

The origins of Halloween are older and murkier than what can be teased out of history.  Is it a Christian holiday tossed over the top of an old pagan one?  Is it a purely Christian holiday?  Is it a floor wax?  Is it a dessert topping?

Why not all of the above?

Regardless, Halloween happens at my favorite time of the year.  One of the things that we lose in the frenetic pace of modern society is a loss of connection to the cycles of life.  There are long cycles:  Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood, and Maturity.  Technology certainly has changed those cycles – children play on tablets seeing things they ought not, and Madonna© pretends she’s sixteen rather than sixteen minutes short of eighty.

The shorter cycles are changed, as well.  A typical day had time when we were fully engaged at work, and time when we weren’t.  Now?  Technology has made it so we’re partially engaged at work, and partially engaged with family.  At least we don’t have to be engaged with Madonna®.

Thankfully Madonna™ can’t walk through walls – she’s a material girl.

But the year, that’s something that technology can only partially mess with.  We can be warm in winter, and cool in summer, but unless we stay inside all year sealed in Tupperware™ (like Madonna®) we are exposed to the changing lights and temperatures of the season.

That is good.  We are humans.  Or at least I assume we’re all humans, since we all enjoy ingesting nutrients and drinking fluids that hydrate us while listening to sounds of non-random frequencies arranged in a mathematical progression juxtaposed with potentially emotionally triggering lyrics about mildly iconoclastic behavior.  Correct?

But all of that aside, I love that we’re still connected to the world via the changing of the seasons.  I’m not particularly a fan of summer.  But I love the other nine months.  And October is the sign that another damn summer is gone.  And Halloween is when the weather turns, and in October there is one particular day when I can know that every day for the next five months will be colder than that day.

And I love that.

I hear Spiderman® got a job as a web developer.

October is also the month when the harvest is done.  The time has come when the cycle is done.  Planting in spring, growing in summer, harvesting in fall.  Winter then comes, and the season has a pause.  This is the time humans need for reflection, for learning, for being together, for planning.  In short, none of the things that Madonna™ does.

For this cycle, at least, technology hasn’t stopped us entirely from getting to our roots.

Autumn is when the die is cast:  we have either done what we need to do to make it through the winter, or we haven’t.  I think that’s why horror movies are part of the season – harvest reminds us that we’re mortal, and for this part of the year we also, historically, had time to reflect on life and death and the cycle.

What nursery rhyme character loves this time of year as much as I do?  Humpty Dumpty.  He had a great fall.

So, thinking about death is natural – it is certainly part of the cycle.  And that’s my guess as to why horror movies seem to fit so well with Halloween.  And I like horror movies.

Many countries do horror movies really, really badly.

  • The Germans, for instance, make horror movies that are these weird psychological horror movies that probably only make sense if you wear rubber suits to go to the bank.
  • The Italian horror movies are nearly incomprehensible as German horror films, but the people in the movies look absolutely fantastic and change sides halfway through the movie.
  • English horror movies are generally as scary as the discussion of tax rates in the House of Commons. I guess that might be scary if you make enough money.
  • The three or four horror movies I’ve seen from Spain look like shoddy copies of Italian horror movies, but starring some American star like John Saxon. Why John Saxon?  Why not – he can fight green goo as well as anyone else.
  • Japanese horror films started as clumsy metaphors for being bombed with nuclear weapons, but then morphed into clumsy metaphors for being overworked by evil corporations after being bombed by nuclear weapons.

I will say it was a touching story.

Nope, for me?  It’s American horror films.  I think we do this particularly well.  My favorites are (in no particular order):

  • The Thing.
  • Alien.
  • In the Mouth of Madness.
  • Reanimator.
  • From Beyond.
  • Salem’s Lot.
  • Scanners.
  • Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973 only).
  • Event Horizon.
  • Night of the Living Dead.
  • Ravenous.
  • The Exorcist.
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
  • Phantasm.
  • Prince of Darkness.

I didn’t rank this list on purpose.  If you’ve seen some of these, you’ll know right from the start if this matches up with what you like.  But I’ll add this part, too.  A horror movie doesn’t have emotional impact in a vacuum.  Night of the Living Dead?  To me, it was scary only because I saw it when I was five.  Watching it now, it might be one of the tamest movies on the list, so, your mileage may vary.

I guess that’s what happens when you ask Kanye to enter a bodybuilding competition.

With minor exceptions on the list, most of those have a fairly intense paranormal component.  I think that’s scarier than just people, otherwise numerous other classic movies like Silence of the Lambs would have been on the list.  Sadly, there newest movie on the list was done before the year 2000.  Have there been scary movies made since then?

Yeah.  And I’ve seen bushel baskets of them.  They’re just not nearly as good as what came before.  Except for that one horror star.  She’s scary.

Oh, wait.  That’s Madonna®.

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me.  That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat.  He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK).  So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced.  Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts.  I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring.  There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature.  That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010.  The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini?  It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day.  I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months.  In 2022, those stories are coming out every week.  Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter?  Check.  Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem?  People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war?  Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way.  The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction.  I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival.  He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant.  On (spins wheel) vodka.  “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess.  Why, people had to have actual gold to back money.  And if a bank got sideways?  It failed.  Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though.  Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin.  If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah.  But that pesky gold remained.  So, FDR confiscated it.  All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control?  His personality.

Why?  So he could immediately make the dollar worth less.  It was a con.  But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea.  Seriously.  Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then.  If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971.  There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm.  Why are we saving the beer?  Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold.  That was because the French had figured out the game:  they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars.  Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this:  France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed.  Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or  . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed.  Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency.  That was built in.  Social Security and Medicare

Hang on.  Need more vodka for this.  Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy.  They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits.  But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto:  No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more.  But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls:  printing money, and interest rates.  Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates.  When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary.  I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out.  So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there.  In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it.  There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet.  I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession.  The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates.  Poof.  Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it.  That’s the Great Recession.  So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked.  Sort of.  When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way.  You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail.  But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked.  Sort of.  The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger.  We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID.  Solution?  Print money.  Now, we’re back to inflation.  The solution is simple:  raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump.  But we can’t!  Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world.  It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide.  Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already.  We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade.  Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point.  But, I still have you, vodka.

Feminism: The God That Failed

“Now, I know you’re a feminist, and I think that’s adorable, but this is grown-up time and I’m the man.” – Family Guy

My friend was a manager and hired a woman.  He told her that her first job was to make him a sandwich.  She quit.  Subway® is so sexist! (FYI, most memes today are, “as-found”)

Feminism.  It sounds so, well, reasonable from the start.  “Women just want equal rights.”  Sure, it sounds reasonable until you recall that the rise of feminism was the rise of the temperance movement, which made having a beer after work, umm, complicated.  But it was women who were at the lead of that absolute failure, too.

The result was two atrocities:  women got the vote, and you couldn’t get a beer.  All they missed was a Constitutional Amendment mandating Fran Drescher’s voice doing every public announcement and commercial and sports play-by-play and the world would have been an absolute hell.  Yes, it would have been worse than actual 2020.  But not by a lot.

How much beer does it take to get an astronomer drunk?  At least 4.5 light beers.

Again, it sounds reasonable.  Don’t drink.  Oh, wait, your humble purveyor of dank memes and attempted witticisms is maybe two glasses of wine in and I’m enjoying that.  I’m not arguing that not drinking is better for you than drinking.  Mormons and other people that don’t drink live until they’re essentially dust connected to other bits of dust by regret, but, hey, I’m not judging.

Mark Twain, though, had a few choice words:  “Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink – under any circumstances.”  But we’re not talking about booze here, we’re talking about feminism.

Again, I’ll reference Twain:  “A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize.”  I honestly think that’s the history of feminism.

What’s the difference between a Sumo wrestler and a radical feminist?  The Sumo wrestlers shave their legs.

I’ve attacked feminism several times in this post so far without any sort of backing.  What sort of backing do I need?  I mean, should we start all the way back at the 19th Amendment, which granted women “universal sufferage” – which I would have thought would have been a bad idea.  I mean, The Mrs. suffers a lot, but that’s just because I’m me.

The difficult part of feminism is that it attempts to first create a division between women and men.  And, the fair part of that is that women and men are fundamentally different.  They’re different biologically down to the genetic level.  When studies were done of the brains of women and men, it was found that those brains were fundamentally different.  The Mrs. can see about 175,083 colors.  I see seven or so.  The Mrs. likes to be warm and comfy on a campout.  I realize that discomfort is a transient condition and if the tent leaks, it might be irritating.

If you love someone, let her go.  Hopefully, she won’t call the FBI.

But “science” assumed for decades that the brain of a dude was the same as the brain of a broad.  It’s simply not so.  It’s actually 100% provable that dudes and broads have different brains.  When studying babies, baby boys like men toys – wheels, cars, machines.  Baby girls like plush toys and fuzzy warm girl things.

Science had (and still has) a weird egalitarian streak that assumes that any baby created from any combination of parents on Earth might be shorter or taller, fatter or skinnier, browner or paler, and yet still has exactly the same brain.

Let’s pretend that utter fiction was true (it’s not).  If so, what happens when those kids get flooded with the white-hot hormones of puberty, estrogen and testosterone?

Yeah.

This is your brain on feminism.

Men and women are different, and they’re born different, and develop differently.  Dress a man up like a woman?  That’s the same as turning a classic Pizza Hut™ into a bank.  We all know that whatever color you paint it, or what sign you put on it, it’s still a Pizza Hut®.

Even worse?  Men and women have utterly different motivations when it comes to mating.  Why?  Men are involved, but women are committed.  A man can have nearly unlimited offspring in a lifetime (as Genghis Khan can attest, 35% – not a typo, 35% of Mongolian people today are his descendants) but women can only have a few kids so they are choosy and choose the best dude they can find.  The result?

35% of Mongolian people are the descendants of Genghis Khan.

When women aren’t constrained by society, they’ll have the kids of the most macho dude they can find.  Women practice hypergamy – they try to marry up in either social caste or intelligence or whatever floats their boat.  Men practice, well, “Dude, did you see her?  She’s hot.”

Hint:  having a majority of young males that have no interest in the future of society isn’t a good thing.

I am a result of such hypergamy.  As many of you know, I’m adopted.  Unlike many adopted kids, I have a lot of data about my biological parents.  My biological mother was at college and decided, “Whoa, that dude is really smart.  I want to have his baby.”

Yes.  This happened.  The dude was a freshman.  My biological mother was a senior.  The poor guy never had a chance, and, thus, I exist, entirely due to hypergamy.

I say “the poor guy” because it was true.  He was a mark in her game.  She wanted his genetics in her child.  That was it.  There wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t love.  Hypergamy isn’t about those things, it’s a transaction.  For him, it was her saying, “Hey, baby, I like the way you fill out those genes.”  The long-term result for her from this strategy is pictured below:

And  . . .

But, when it came time to take care of me, my biological mom was not up to it.  I assure you, that given the combinatory genetics of her willful and cunning plotting and his intelligence, I was probably the most capably evil baby born that year.  Seriously.  I was the most awful child in stunning ways.  I could list them, but you’d be shocked.  I mean, how many other seven-year-olds have convinced their grandmothers to buy them magazines with actual boobage in them?

Yeah.  And that doesn’t include . . . . oh, so many things.

Hypergamy is a less-than-zero-sum game, though.  Whereas conventional morals would indicate that a married couple should really try to stick it out unless it was a morally untenable relationship (see:  my first marriage, which would have been dissolvable in any Christian year since ever) now the woman is encouraged to blow it all up for games and prizes.  And demonize men in the process.  Why?  Because they’re there.

Also?  Feminism.  The laws used to be if you were the reason that the marriage didn’t work, you suffered.  Later?  Not so much.  Now, women have the upper hand in nearly all facets, and in fact, start most of the divorces (70-80%) in the country.  Why?

The laws are stacked in their favor, even more so if there are children.

This is a result of feminism.  But beyond that has been the impact on society as a whole.  What would the result of the 2020 election have been (even after the shenanigans) if only men voted?

Left for you:  show how the federal deficit, abortion rate, divorce rate, rate of church attendance, number of single mothers, increase in welfare, and a dozen other things increased after women got to vote.

I want to make something clear:  I really, really love women.  I think they’re awesome and respect The Mrs. highly, and I think she’d trust me to cast a ballot she’d believe in, because we think alike.  I also think that woman’s suffrage has only resulted in suffering and believe it can be shown mathematically (shhhhh, most of them aren’t so good at math).  So, let’s put out a petition to end woman’s suffrage!  I think we can get 70% of women to sign it . . . .

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes.  Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself.  So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible.  For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works.  To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing.  But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him.  Every.  Single.  Point.  He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected.  “Show the whole thing,” was his response.  Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others.  His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years.  Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony?  I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems.  I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper.  It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper.  But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too.  One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet.  To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that.  Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it.  This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel.  Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that.  In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t.  The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions.  He thinks this is the same.  The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense.  “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.”  This is true.  One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse.  He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge.  What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults.  When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child.  This is the result of parental dereliction of duty.  Sure, there are some kids that are just bad.  Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him.  But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6th gets a Congressional investigation.  Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village.  It takes parents.  It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools.  Kid failing?  They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry.  The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings.  But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace.  Is this intentional?  The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks?  Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

Memefest, 2022

“Remember that time you tried to drill a hole in your head?” – Ghostbusters

Someone called me lazy today. I almost replied.

A quick peak behind the curtain – I normally try to get some rest, since I’m only mostly superhuman. I’m trying to evolve to the point where I don’t need sleep, and can subsist on a diet of nothing but memes, PEZ®, coffee, and fahrvergnügen, but tonight things went a little sideways.

First, I’ve been trying to salvage an hour or two a week by doing blog-related correspondence and making my rounds on the ‘net at lunch. I normally only get on for blogging-related three times a week, and if I can do it during a time I’m normally goofing off, so much the better. It’s still goofing off, but it’s blog-related. Result: two hours of extra weeknight sleep each week. I call that a win. Or, I would if I were conscious.

Whelp. Today I got sucked into listening to the vortex of oddity and Clown World™ that is the Darrell Brooks trial (Waukesha “alleged” murderer) with The Mrs. at lunch. The trial is so absurd that we couldn’t look away. Well, I thought, that’s fine. I’ll skip an hour’s worth of sleep tonight and do correspondence and blogging rounds then.

I got home about usual, but The Mrs. had some ideas on dinner that pushed it starting a bit late. That’s no biggie, either, and it was some extra fun with the family. Another hour? What’s living without two hours of sleep, anyway? I’ve done it before.

So, now it’s after dinner, and I discover a problem outside. It’s an utterly first-world problem (I’ll spare you the details) but working it out took about four hours to make sure everything was fine because it was gonna freeze tonight, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t end up doing a few thousand bucks worth of damage. I couldn’t really blog at that time, but I did have a nice cigar.

Crisis averted – everything is (fingers crossed) functional. Mainly, the fixing didn’t take too long, the rest was testing, making sure electric doo-dads were all working, and waiting to make sure that it was reliably working under all circumstances for a few hours. I was satisfied.

So, I sat down at my keyboard, and, lo and behold, it was midnight.

Ugh. I suppose that I could have done another Lame Repost from the past, but decided not to – I try to limit those to once a month or less. I had notes on several posts that would fit the bill tonight, but writing them and editing them takes time. So, I decided to clean out some proverbial closets and share some as-found memes. I make most (not all, but most) of my own memes from scratch using only the finest quality keks and chortles, but I also collect memes that others baked.

Why? They make me laugh, think, or, best of all, both. So, here’s a collection of more-or-less random memetic soup that I saved and probably won’t use in any future posts. I’ll be back on correspondence and web-rounds no later than Thursday/Friday.

I hope you enjoy!

Hint: it’s all better with a hot cup of fahrvergnügen.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and 17th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.