John – Page 91 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Questions: Important For Llamas And Finding The Truth

“Have you calculated the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Sean Connery is a stickler for grooming. I was stuck in a burning building while he was using the extinguisher to keep a path open for me. Then he told me, “shave yourself!”

A few years ago I was meeting with a person that reported to me at work. I was asking a question with a yes or no answer. One thing that being in thousands of hours of corporate meetings has taught me is that if you ask an open ended question, people will talk. And talk. And talk. Even if they have nothing to say – those meeting room corporate doughnuts aren’t going to eat themselves.

So, a lot of my questions were phrased in the form of, “Do you know where the llama is?”

My company doesn’t use llamas except for unlicensed medical experimentation to find a cure for chronic nose picking, so in this case “llama” is really easier than referencing the “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” that we really make.

There are really only two answers:

“Yes, John Wilder, the llama is in the break room playing beer pong with Vladimir Putin.”
“No, John Wilder, I have no idea.”

Well, I guess we know what’s going to happen in July.

A pattern that I had noticed was that when the answer was “Yes, I know where the llama is,” people would just say, “Yes.”

Simple. We’re done. Move on to the next question.

But if people didn’t know where the llama was, what I mentally thought of as “The Story” started. The story had a million variants: “No, John Wilder, I don’t know where the llama is because it had sticky glands and we were out of llama soap and a friend came in from out of town and I just quit heroin and Vladimir Putin took off his shirt and making sweet talk to the llama last week.”

The Story is long. The Story isn’t really relevant.

People didn’t want to tell me “No.” If they had, and knowing where the llama was mattered, I could follow up with a question. Most of the time my question was, “Well, when are you going to find the llama?” Frankly, I’ve heard more excuses than Joe Biden has lost memories, so “Why don’t you know where the llama is?” was most of the time something I didn’t really care about. But they made the decision that I cared why they didn’t know where the llama was.

Never worry about food when you travel with llamas. Alpaca lunch.

I had one very bright employee, Bill Nothisrealname, that a recent college grad. He started to explain why he didn’t know where the llama was: he was winding up to tell The Story.

I stopped him.

“Bill, you were first in your class in high school, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then you went to college at Southern North Eastern Midwestia State, which is a pretty good school. Heck, I bet that you were in the top ten in GPA in your degree?”

“Yeah, I was in the top five of the class.”

I gestured at the offices up and down the hallway. “Bill, everyone here was at the top of their class in high school and graduated at the top of their class from college in a degree just as tough as yours. My boss, Boris. He’s as smart as a Vulcan that crossbred with a computer and has the personality to match. When he asks me a question, he wants me to answer that question. He’s no dummy.

“And Boris isn’t afraid to ask questions, either. He’s realized that even as a top executive in the company, he doesn’t and can’t know everything.”

Bill nodded.

I never really liked that Coppola movie, Alpaca Lips Now.

“Here’s what I think. When you were in third grade, you were smart. When the rest of the class didn’t know the answer, the teacher looked at you, right?”

“Yes.”

“And that didn’t change in high school. Or, for you, even in college. I think that you think you have to know the answer, because you were the smart kid. Bill, everyone, and I mean everyone here is that smart. You weren’t hired because you knew all of the answers – you were hired because you were smart, and had good character. Don’t be afraid to not know everything – asking questions is a sign of power. And . . . answer the question that was asked.

“Bill, do you know where the llama is?”

“No.”

But don’t-a worry – health is her new issue. She’s still all-in for Ollamacare.

I moved on to the next question. In this case, the llama wasn’t all that important, except as it related to teaching Bill that he didn’t need to know everything, and that asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of self-confidence. And if it sounded like the exchange was mean, it really wasn’t. Bill’s worldview was just a bit off. Besides, I knew that once Putin got his claws into a really pretty llama like this one, we wouldn’t see either of them until they’d ridden through the mountains together and hunted the Rocky Mountain Spotted Poodle – the only true sport for men.

The point is still valid. Whenever I’ve seen a good leader, that leader isn’t afraid to ask questions, and isn’t afraid to admit that they don’t know everything. Part of writing this blog is me answering my own questions. And I have to be right – you’re a tough but fair crowd, and you tell me when my participle is dangling.

Questions are important.

The first thing I like to question is myself. Scott Adams says that two people might watch the same event and give it entirely different meaning – he calls it watching two movies on one screen. An example is Trump: Leftists think that everything, and I mean everything he does is comprised of a pure evil that requires he eat a live puppy every day. There’s even a name for it: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The symptoms include being triggered, literally shaking, wandering around in a circle muttering, “impeach . . . impeach . . . impeach.” Thankfully, many sufferers have found work as extras on The Walking Dead.

That’s one movie. There’s a second group that views Trump as a genius God Emperor who is sixteen steps ahead, playing 11-dimensional chess. This group thinks that the riots are perhaps his crowning achievement since he can use the riots to . . . ummm, I’m not sure what. I bet that plan shows up soon.

Both groups are wrong. My experience is you can talk to the God Emperor crowd, but the TDS sufferers just can’t discuss Trump. At all.

How much of my reality am I allowing to be filtered? How much am I deluding myself? These are the questions I repeatedly ask as I look for Truth.

Or you could just take their lunch money and buy yourself something nice.

The second question are my sources. People write all sorts of things, and on the Internet I can find a theory that all of the Challenger space shuttle crew survived the explosion and are still living today. Why? Because the Earth is flat. Really, that’s what they believe. There are also people who believe that the world is run by reptilian aliens who run the banks.

Of course those are absurd. The Internet is so questionable when it comes to facts that I’ve even seen Internet reports that I have hair. But how many shades of truth do we believe in each day without checking? I know that I’ve been shocked when I do research for Wilder, Wealthy and Wise that it’s not what I know that shocks me: it’s what I know that isn’t right. Who knew kittens couldn’t fly, even if you used a really big slingshot to give them a good takeoff?

The next question are my viewpoints. How many are wrong? In some cases I have taken years to figure out what I think about a subject, because I just hadn’t figured out the right way to look at it: I just don’t have a mental or moral model that fits it properly. I ended up being a ping-pong ball. There were good points on each side. How do the pros and cons line up?

When I was younger, I was more of a pure libertarian, even sometimes a Libertarian. I believed that if McDonalds™ wanted to sell me a hydrogen bomb and I had the cash, I should be able to order a McNuke®. As I get older, maybe not. And I now think that young children shouldn’t have guns: they’re much more effective using a crew-served weapon like a heavy machine gun or a mortar since they can overcome their inherent weakness by working together. If only a six year old could lift artillery shells….

My militia may be small, but they work for chocolate milk.

The final question is what can I learn from others? And I can only do that by asking questions – and having the humility to listen to the answers, no matter how stupid they are. I kid. I really have learned a lot by listening instead of talking.

So, anybody know where the llama is? Did another one fall in love with Putin?

Free Speech: Endangered Species – WRSA is Down

“Uncomfortable silences.” – Pulp Fiction

Censor for the children! They shouldn’t think for themselves, right?

I originally was going to write a lighthearted post tonight about the economics of deflation, banking, and the Fed that shows that deflation is the thing that scares the Powers That Be the most right now. Who knows, there might even have been bikini economic graphs. I mean, the world loves humor about banking and economics, right? I hear it’s right up there with dentistry jokes.

But deflation is not what scares the Powers That Be. It’s information that scares them more than anything. What information? Anything counter to the Narrative.

Western Rifle Shooters Association (WRSA) was taken down on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Here’s the message from Concerned American, the proprietor of the site:

POST #1 WRSA REBOOT CYCLE
1955E 2JUN2020

That Would Be Called An “Indicator”

One of the early goals of all Red revolutions is the seizure or destruction of all information distribution outlets.

There is only one truth to the Communist: that day’s party line.

Woe unto those who do not adhere.

The second iteration of the Western Rifle Shooters Association (WRSA) blog, hosted by WordPress, was nuked today.

While it is a loss, it was a deliberate sacrifice of a player to increase situational awareness.

The Reds are on the move.

The prize is the former United States of America.

The Red cares not about race, except to the extent it can and is used to befog the naive about the Party’s real goals.

WRSA was, first and always, a freedom advocacy site.

It was shot out of the saddle today by an arm of the Communist enemy propaganda machine.

Their attack did not kill WRSA.

Nor did it kill a single one of its followers.

The totalitarian bastards really can’t stop the signal.

Take heart, not just in this tiny skirmish but in the overall struggle to save the West, from WRSA’s final masthead:

“This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

― Winston Churchill

Forward.

I think he might need some Chapstick®.

His older blogsite is here (LINK). I don’t know if he’ll be posting again there, but I can certainly bet he’s not done. He built the 127,000^th most popular website in the United States, before WordPress® nuked his paying subscription from orbit without explanation.

This is an example of the desire on the Left to make the First Amendment irrelevant. You can say anything you want, but if they won’t let you say it where people will hear you, does it matter? Another way to say that is, “If a blogger memes in the forest, will anyone LOL?”

The libertarian take on censorship by corporation is a fairly solid version of “if it’s a private company, they can do what they want.” Frankly, it’s a view that I subscribed to a while back. But a while back, Twitter® also tried to humorously advertise itself as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” And they still are big fans of free speech. Well, they’re fans of free speech, as long as you are on the Left. James Woods popped out the following tweet last year:

Woods was banned until some flunky at Twitter™ removed the offending Tweet® for him.

I started out on Twitter™ to try to build an audience for this blog. It worked, sort of. I’m not sure that I caught many long term readers there, but it gave me enough hits to keep me writing and not giving up until a real audience built. Concentrating on writing more better might have been part of building an audience as well. And maybe adding bikini graphs didn’t hurt.

Okay, here’s one.

But I noticed over time that my voice was “turned down” on Twitter©. Tweets® that got tons of impressions (78,000 for one!) dropped off to just a few as my voice was progressively (word choice not an accident) muted. By then, I didn’t have to trick people to come to the blog with free candy. I did know, however, that something that Twitter™ had done lowered the number of people who got to share in my nuggets of wisdom.

Twitter© isn’t just a fun thing anymore. Yes, it’s a private company. But it has developed into a public square. Do I advocate government control of Twitter™? Not really. But censoring people based on political viewpoint is wrong, especially when James Woods gets banned but the Islamic Council of Iranian Chowderheads makes threats about sinking the Navy of United States. Iran is being responsible, but James Woods is the terrorist?

An early version of the Trust and Safety Council.

To ban someone is no longer a private affair – it effectively removes their opinion (and a lot of uncomfortable facts) from the public stage.

And that’s wrong. Freedom of speech isn’t about supporting popular opinions, like all of the “brave” companies like Apple™ that have tossed up a pride flag or Sony® black square as their profile picture. That’s not brave.

Apple© and Sony® protesting the child and slave labor that manufactures their games and gizmos in an unending series of 12 hour days, 28 days a month? Now that would be brave, especially since they hired those companies.

Facebook™ is a similar beast. I use Facebook© only very sporadically, say, four times a year. But the rest of the world seems to use it. To ban Alex Jones? It’s like banning the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment™ because people might think the wrestling matches are real.

But at least I hear the benefits are good.

I cannot hold WordPress® to the same standard as platforms like Twitter™ and Facebook©. There are other places that provide hosting. I do, however, find fault with WordPress®. If bakers have to bake a wedding cake for gay people, yes, WordPress™ should have to host a blog of someone who is an advocate for freedom.

Where do I find a nice profile icon for that?

Well, there it is. I really wanted to write that post on fractional reserve banking. Next Wednesday, I promise. I know you can’t wait. You say you come here for the bikinis, but I know it’s really all about the economic analysis.

The Rule of Law: It’s not just for breakfast anymore.

“You used the law and a badge to heal that scar on your neck.” – Hang ‘em High

I would recommend him as a lawyer, but he told the judge he ate my appeal.

About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king by the name of Urukagina developed the first known civil laws. They certainly weren’t the first laws, but they are the first ones we have written proof of. Perhaps the biggest mystery of Urukagina is how he got through middle school with a name like Urukagina.

Law is the bedrock of human civilization. If we don’t have rules we all (more or less) agree to, we can’t live together. Sometimes the laws are complex: I’ve heard that it’s a law that you have to turn on your headlights if it’s raining in Sweden. I’m not sure how am I supposed to know if it’s raining in Sweden, so I guess I’m quite the rogue when choose to live on the edge and drive without my lights.

Sadly, everyone can see what happens when laws break down. The riots that started in Minnesota are an example that won’t be forgotten soon. The breakdown that started in Minnesota is currently still spreading across the United States. That’s not good. In my opinion, the only good riot is three dyslexics.

Laws are like money – they’re a virtual system. They exist only because we all agree that they exist – the same way that East Germany disappeared as soon as people stopped being afraid of it. As soon a majority of people in an area stop believing in them, laws are as worthless as Johnny Depp’s liver on the black market.

Johnny Depp told David Letterman he never watches his own movies. What a lucky guy.

The anti-police-violence riots were based on a winning argument that could have resonated all across the political spectrum – not allowing the police to use excessive force. Had the protesters brought out the cases of LaVoy Finicum and Daniel Shaver as additional examples, I think they would have been surprised at the support they got. Instead? They rioted, burned, and all they got was a free t-shirt from Target® and enough looted liquor to fuel the protest for the next night. Can’t go looting without a nice Natty Light®.

However, the protesters managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Most of the time, when cops are presented with that awful decision to pull out their gun and shoot, it’s justified. But the larger injustices are the ones we see when police do things that, if you or I were doing them, would put us in jail. Rather than engaging others with that simple and powerful point, they protested entirely through the lens of race. The protests escalated into riots. The violence and property damage have ironically made the case for the use of significant force in putting down the riots.

They were never serious about protesting against police violence.

It’s lucky for those that like living in a stable society that people generally like laws. They want to know where they stand and have a predictable society. Research has shown that people have an innate sense of justice – it’s something that we appear to have been born with. When the legal system works, it makes the Karen inside each one of us happy. We generally want people who do bad things to be punished. We want innocent people to go free. And we want Whoopi Goldberg to develop a decade-long case of laryngitis.

Looks like Minnesota picked the wrong week to stop snorting glue.

We’ve had good laws and bad laws during the time humanity has been on Earth, but regardless, the law represented a standard. The only reason that we grant the state a monopoly on the use of force is that we trust that the state is just as bound by the law as the people are. There’s a satisfying symmetry in that.

That shared submission to judgement based on law is what makes the law work in the first place. If a random citizen commits a crime and is punished, a member of the police committing the same crime should receive the same punishment. If a citizen commits a crime and a politician commits that same crime, the politician should receive the same punishment. Even if the law isn’t fair, it should be equally applied.

The cries of “drain the swamp” from the Right are a recognition that this really isn’t so – a politician or Federal bureaucrat can commit crimes that would send you or I to jail and never have to worry. There is ample evidence that there isn’t a single system of justice – there are three. One group follows the rules as best as they can, but could still be found guilty of obscure crimes. I just hope that if I’m ever in that position I have a great lawyer. A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.

If I lied in testimony before Congress, nice Federal attorneys would seek to take away my voting rights by making me a felon as they did with Roger Stone. If former CIA chief John Brennan does it? Well, it appears nothing happens. That’s the sort of immunity you get when you’re in the club.

In a rare moment of clarity for the FBI, Peter Strzok was fired. Don’t worry – he’s suing to be reinstated with back pay.

People have lost trust; that’s where we’re at as a nation. There appear to be three systems of law in the United States:

one for the favored elite, where they are untouchable,
one for police, where (sometimes) crimes are never investigated,
and one for everyone else.

It’s not that the favored elite have great lawyers and can use them to avoid being convicted. The favored elite is never even charged with a crime. Hillary Clinton admittedly broke laws, and the FBI further pointed out that she had broken laws. Charging her, however, was just not something that they wanted to do. They know how enemies of Hillary end up. Heck, 2 out 3 presidents that were impeached were impeached for embarrassing Hillary.

For all I know, the systems for the elites have been in place as long as the elite has been in place. But now it’s visible. Ford had to pardon Nixon so he wouldn’t be prosecuted. Obama appears to have gotten a hall pass from Attorney General William Barr – pardon not required. Congress is much the same: Charlie Rangel evaded Federal taxes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. At least.

Any member of the non-elite class would have been sent to jail. Obama is buying mansions; Charlie retired from Congress. Oh, Charlie got “censured” which I guess makes it all better. And Obama is stuck living with Michelle.

She might be mad that an immigrant took her job?

The Deep State is similar – members of the FBI can do pretty much whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t make the other elite folks unhappy. I talked to a former Federal banking regulator once who mentioned that the only real trouble he could have gotten into was if he tried to be tough on a big bank. Otherwise? He could have stayed there for years, doing not much of anything. The Deep State first and foremost protects its own.

Like the elite, the police have a different process, too. You or I would get arrested, but a cop gets to have his behavior examined administratively. By his buddies on the force. This is where the case is reviewed by the people who hired him to see if there was a violation of policy. Most of the time officers are cleared.

If you or I shot an intruder into our homes, we couldn’t just grab a group of people in our families to check to see if they thought we did the right thing. Nope. There would be independent review by a District Attorney to see if our actions were justified. If our actions were not justified? We would be charged with a crime. I hope my lawyer thinks I’m a penguin when going for bail – then he can tell the judge I’m not a flight risk.

Penguins don’t go to England – they don’t like to be that close to Wales.

I can absolutely understand the need to give officers benefit of the doubt, and I think a jury generally does. But if an officer can say “I was in fear of my life,” on the stand, it ought to work for me, too. I think the system with police accountability is broken. But I think it’s easier to fix than the problems with the elite.

Is there hope for our system? Perhaps. But unless the rule of law can be made to be truly impartial, we’re going to be in for a rough time.

It could be worse. It could have been me who was named Urukagina.

Your one job? Be a good person.

“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?” – Flight of the Phoenix

Well, at least someone gave this post two thumbs up.

My older brother, John Wilder (our parents were notoriously uncreative), got a job at a motel when he was in college. His duty was to sleep in the apartment above the front desk, and if anyone wanted a room late at night, to get up out of bed and check them in. Technically, he got paid to sleep on the job. When I try to explain that’s what I’m doing to my employer, they seem to think it’s a violation of company rules. They won’t even listen when I explain I won’t be sleepy on the job if I just sleep on the job.

Go figure.

One day the owner of the motel was looking for someone to do an extremely important job: sweep the parking lot every Sunday. As I had heard of a broom, my brother put in a good word for me, and I ended up with my first official job. As I don’t recall quitting, they might be irritated at me because I haven’t been in to work in decades.

This was a job that I was well suited for, since I was willing to work for the one-ish hour a week (on Sunday) sweeping up the parking lot. I even had a time card, and got paid minimum wage. So early each Sunday morning I’d get on my ten speed and bike down to the motel and sweep the parking lot.

My bike kept trying to kill me, though. It was a vicious cycle.

The best part wasn’t the few bucks after tax that I made, but rather sitting down with my older brother and having breakfast in the office. I timed it so that I’d be done sweeping so we could watch a television show on TBS® together: The Wild, Wild West. I’m pretty sure I saw my first episode ever in that motel office.

By the time my brother and I watched it on the 12” screen in the office, The Wild, Wild West was decades old. And yet it was better than anything on prime time television. The Wild, Wild West, if you haven’t seen it, was Robert Conrad starring as secret agent James West in the 1870’s Western United States, complete with science fiction gadgets.

The villains were ludicrous. One episode featured obviously rubber cobras. And in one fight scene, Robert Conrad’s pants split wide open and they just kept filming – they were on a schedule, you know. On top of that, the costumes resembled nothing ever worn by an actual human in any place and during any period in human history.

Silly? Certainly. But why was the show good enough that I planned getting up early to watch it?

It’s because the character James West (and his fellow secret agent, Artemus Gordon) were good. West was a hero. He was smart. He could fight. He had wit. He laughed in the face of death. And if he had a weakness, it was for a lovely lady.

We’ll pretend that Will Smith took 1999 off. There can be only one Jim West.

Why was James West’s contemporary, Captain Kirk so popular? He was a cut from the same mold as West.

A boy needs a hero to look up to, who models virtue and strength. And you could do much, much worse than either James West or Captain Kirk. For some reason, the values of the networks changed, and The Wild, Wild West was cancelled (like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies) in 1970 even though they did great in the ratings. Hmm.

It was like there was a social agenda . . . .

As time has gone on, many of the “heroes” in movies and television are given “depth” cheaply by making them either morally weak or having the system they work for be compromised in some way. When a hero sneaks by like Mal Reynolds on Firefly, well, the system takes care of him pretty quickly.

Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.

Culture is, of course, upstream from politics. Culture is in part created by those heroes we are given to worship. Where do those heroes come from? Well, I mentioned James West, but I recall being pretty psyched about the Founding Fathers when I was a kid. Dad got pretty mad after the third cherry tree.

Our political reality is therefore created in part by media (now a tool of the Left) and academia (also a tool of the Left). And now the Founding Fathers are, instead of being revered for attempting to create a whole new type of country are regularly bashed in schools.

This attempt of the Left to steer culture obscures the real message. As a human, we have one (and only one) job.

That job is to be a good person.

It’s that easy. We waste a lot of time and effort wondering what it is we should be doing, when the answer is laughingly simple. You can’t control your height. You can’t control your intelligence. You can’t even control society. What can you control? Your actions and attitudes.

So, be a good person. That’s it.

The Left tries to obscure that simple truth because it has to. The Left doesn’t want you to be a good person. The Left wants you to be a Leftist. When I look at the memes from the Left, I’m astonished by two things:

They’re horribly unfunny, and
They’re based on a big wall of text.

No editing required.

The Lefty memes aren’t funny because funny requires truth. I wrote about that recently in The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition. When truth is strangled, humor disappears which is why tyrants will kill comedians before they kill dissidents. Humor is one of the most potent weapons of truth.

The Lefty memes have to rely on a large blocks of text because half of the meme is required to try to refute reality and re-define it. If you’ve ever heard an actual Leftist talk, half of it is redefining terms: boy used to mean boy, but now it’s an entire spectrum which might indicate that boy means boy on Monday, but when it’s time for the state track meet, boy means girl. Sometimes.

If you want to watch real Olympic®-level verbal gymnastics, watch a Leftist try to define “racism” – it’s a hoot. For bonus points, see if you can get them to read the dictionary definition.

That’s the good news. Your job, being a good person, is so simple it’s hard for even the Left to mess up. But I bet they could come up with a 600 word meme to describe that “good” is only “good” if it results in more Leftist votes and the abolition of private property.

I wish that I could promise to you that if you were a good person, you’d be rewarded. That would be a lie. Being good doesn’t guarantee a tangible reward, or even that you will succeed, or even be liked and admired in your time.

I’m not sure I can promise a leprechaun will deliver them, though.

Likewise, being bad doesn’t guarantee punishment. Heck, some research indicates that 4% of Chief Executive Officers of companies are psychopaths. If you think long enough, you can come up with several names of people who are downright evil, but seem to be thriving.

The other bad news is that being good is hard work. First, you have to figure out what good is. Society isn’t necessarily a help here. As I write this, The Boy is watching livestreaming rioting and property destruction across multiple cities. When I try to calibrate the whole good/bad thing, I’m not sure that looting a Target® or burning a Hyundai© serves much of a purpose.

Being good isn’t about being good for today, either. I could easily ruin a child by making life too easy, or not holding them to high standards. Would it result in a happy child now? Sure. But every parent knows that short term success builds children into monsters who end up burning a Target™ or a Hyundai®.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.

To be good, a moral code and the courage to follow it is required. Christianity is the one that built the West, and you could do worse – you rarely hear of Amish drive-by shootings, since everyone can hear the clip clop of the horses from pretty far away.

The Romans (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) had a well-developed system of virtue thousands of years ago and spent a lot of time working to figure out how to be good – that’s pretty close to the basis of the Stoics. Making it up your own individual code as you go can lead to rationalization and relativism. If it feels good, it may not be good – a lot of bad things feel very good at the time.

But generally, if it feels bad, it nearly always is.

Be a good person. Ask yourself: WW(JW)D? No, not John Wilder.

Jim West.

But make sure you get your sweeping done first.

Scott Adams, Debt, and Economic CPR

“Could be worse. Could be raining.” – Young Frankenstein

I heard Joe Biden was thinking of having a horse for a vice president, to make the economy stable.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert® and a close personal friend who I bonded with during the Olympic trials for rhythmic gymnastics. Okay, that’s not quite true. Scott’s a long-time acquaintance and we go to some of the same parties. Okay, that’s not quite true, either. Probably a more accurate statement is that I have quite a few of his books and he liked exactly two of my Tweets® back when I Twittered™ on a more regular basis.

The last one is actually true.

Anyway, Mr. Adams used to be a blogger, and had some interesting written posts over the years. Now, he spends more time doing a YouTube® show rather than blog (LINK). I listen to him a couple of times a month as I drive to work. I’d watch him, but the people on the sidewalk seem to mind. I guess I’m not as bad a driver as Helen Keller. But she had a real excuse, being a woman and all.

One comment I’ve heard Scott make at least twice during the COVIDanomic® crisis is that he’s optimistic about the economy restarting and taking right off. More or less he has said, “Unlike a war or some other catastrophe, everything we need for a successful economy is still sitting there. All we have to do is restart it.”

One thing I’ve enjoyed about Mr. Adams is that he’s incredibly perceptive, and the reason I listen to him is he’s a constant source of unique opinions. He was one of the first to pick Trump winning in 2016. Adams noticed the way Trump uses the language of persuasion and thought it would be the difference in the election. Me, I generally vote based on lawn signs, which is why I voted for my realtor last election.

Jeb was a pallbearer at his dad’s funeral, so he could let him down one final time.

Trump’s persuasion immediately frames and freezes the way people think about public figures. “Low energy Jeb (Bush),” and “Little Mike (Bloomberg)” were the verbal equivalents of public political homicide. Once Trump Tweeted® those phrases, ¡Jeb! and Little Mike could still campaign, but their chances of winning were the same as a belt made of watches – a waist of time.

So, when Mr. Adams speaks, I pay attention. New ideas are fairly rare and I like to steal mine while they’re fresh. As noted, many times he’s very perceptive in ways the news media forgot about being when they first caught Trump Derangement Syndrome. In this case, I think Scott is wrong. Everything may still be there, but you can no longer restart the economy to the previous levels than you could resuscitate Grover Cleveland by giving his corpse CPR. I mean, I can give CPR to a steak, but it still won’t moo.

Just like Grover Cleveland, everything is there, but putting him in a lawn chair and propping him up with a tropical cocktail (with umbrella) won’t really help. Everything’s there.

But it’s really not.

If only Grover Cleveland had Twitter®, I’m sure we’d still be laughing at the dank Benjamin Harrison memes.

Just like you can’t restart a heart after a few weeks of it sitting on the bedside table, you can’t restart an economy after months of it sitting dead in Coronapause©.

Let’s take the human body analogy a bit farther. A business is an organism. It consumes money and raw materials and produces goods and services as a byproduct. You could even call that byproduct a waste if it had anything to do with Kardashians. Companies eat metal and energy and use employee labor to pop out automobiles and beer and knee braces and fruitcake bloomers. And where would we be without fruitcake bloomers???

A lack of oxygen makes cells in your body die. No oxygen, no cells.

In business, a lack of money causes employees to die. Oops. They don’t die, they just don’t come in anymore, unless your business was in the Soviet Union, where ‘being terminated’ had an entirely different and completely Schwarzenegger-free meaning.

That lack of money for a business is called debt, and debt is what kills an economy. Just as weak people like The Mrs. complains that she needs a constant supply of oxygen after being stuck in the car with me after a week-long backpacking trip, debt is a mechanism to make sure that people and companies require a constant flow of money.

Why would a company be in debt?

Well, for small ones, the same reason that you or I would go into debt, namely because they don’t have the money to pay for everything up front. Debt can also provide money for the business to grow.

And moderate sized companies that you can buy on the stock market nearly have to be in debt. Without debt, a guy from New York would buy them out using the cash that the company had hanging around for a rainy day. They even have a name for this – a leveraged buyout (LBO). In an LBO, the person buying the company buys it with money that he borrowed against company he’s buying.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. An LBO is the same thing that happens when you sell your house. The person buying the house uses the house as the basis of the loan to buy the house from the owners.

And good news, it’s already several trillion higher than this!

But in the case of the company being bought out, the resulting company after the LBO is actually weaker and more likely to fail since it’s now saddled with debt. Just because you can borrow the money doesn’t mean you should borrow the money.

Giant sized companies don’t face this problem nobody but Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy his stake in Amazon®, plus he’d send his android double to come kill you if you tried to buy the company or made fun of his girlfriend. Apple® is similarly large, so they can have billions of dollars in cash on the books, too, but Apple™ doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yet.

The chain of death of a business in after WuFlu looks something like this:

Lockdowns stop businesses from being open, which
Stops the money coming to Employees so,
Employees stop buying, therefore
Businesses don’t have money.

Keep this cycle up for two months and in some cases you’ve used up more reserves than the business has. The result is either more debt, which the business still can’t pay because debt is the problem in the first place, or bankruptcy.

Well, TP is one problem that’s been wiped out.

The same cycle can be seen with landlords.

A dollar owed for rent isn’t owed to a random person,
It’s often owed to a person who has a mortgage against the property, and
If the rent isn’t paid, many times the landlord can’t pay his
But when the landlord can’t pay the mortgage, the bank isn’t paid.

If you’re worried about the bank, don’t. The old saying is that “Debt is always paid, either by the borrower, or the lender.” In the case of banks, there’s the three Fed Amigos: the Federal government, the Federal Reserve™, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The reason the FDIC was created was that banks failed faster and more frequently than FUNNY during the Great Depression. If people keep their money in Mason© jars in the backyard, it’s pretty hard for the other two Feds to track it, so they had to convince people the banks were safe.

They idea behind the FDIC is that if a bank goes bankrupt, the insurance will pay off the depositors. I was going to look up the total assets of the FDIC to see how big a crisis it could cover, but decided it was irrelevant. The Federal government (Treasury) or the Federal Reserve© or some group will simply print all of the money required to pay off the depositors.

I knew there was a reason that clowns scared me.

If my bank runs out of money? Well, the Fed will just lend them some. The FDIC is for amateur problems.

But lending money into a system where the primary problem is debt isn’t the solution, and it explains why things won’t just “start right up” after months where car sales are at 50% of last year, and airline flights are at 10% or less. The debt is the reason that the economy was able to fall so far, so fast. And you can’t loan more money to solve what is, at the core, a debt problem.

I do hope my close, personal friend Scott Adams is right. But I fear he’s wrong. But hey, we’ll always have those Olympic™ medals we won for rhythmic gymnastics.

Memorial Day, 2020

This is my post from last year.

Names_of_Vietnam_Veterans

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall-Hu Totya via Wikimedia, [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

One of the things I love most about writing this blog is finding out when I’m wrong. Yes, I know that’s a well with no bottom, but I’ll describe it thusly: The Boy and I were sitting out in the hot tub tonight talking. He brought up how angry he was that there had to be a Federal law passed to prevent discrimination against Vietnam veterans.

We don’t live in a “safe” house. Any opinion is open for challenge. Any opinion.

“Do you want to know what I think about that?”

He paused. He wasn’t looking for the “right” answer. That’s a recipe for being intellectually and emotionally gutted and left to dry in our house. “I guess so.”

“Why do you hesitate?”

“Well, now I know that after we discuss it, I’m going to look at all of it through different eyes. You’ll bring a perspective to it that I hadn’t thought about.” I could see on his face that he both liked and hated it. It was like an itch. It sucks being itchy, but it feels so good when you scratch, unless you’re like my Uncle Harold and are itchy because the Moon Men were talking to him through the television. Again.

I’m not sure I messed with The Boy’s mind too much during this particular conversation. We had a discussion that the Vietnam War certainly wasn’t lost by the military. I described the Tet Offensive to The Boy. During the Tet Offensive an all-out assault was launched in multiple locations in South Vietnam against both American and South Vietnamese targets. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the enemy (Viet Cong and NVA) as they were soundly defeated by a factor of at least ten to one and failed to achieve any useful military objective.

Back during the Vietnam War, the only real sources of information were: word of mouth, the local paper and the television news – websites with unapproved thoughts simply didn’t exist. Leftist propaganda on the Tet Offensive and was poured into the minds of the American public by a willfully complicit media, led by Walter Cronkite. I’d call him a Leftist prostitute, but they didn’t have to pay him extra. Let’s just call him, “easy,” since apparently he’d do his duty for the Left for a coke and a burger.

What Walter said just wasn’t so, but there was no voice to contradict him. That being said, this post isn’t a defense of the Vietnam War as an appropriate policy, and it isn’t attacking it, either – I’m not opening that particular bag of angry housecats tonight, and it’s not important for the point of this post.

Rather, tonight’s post is an example of just that conversation that I had with The Boy – I started writing on a completely different topic, and, after research, decided I was either wrong or more research would be necessary to make sure I was right. Maybe that topic will show up as a future post, but it won’t be today. Too many inconvenient facts that have (once again) made me rethink what I was going to say.

The world is funny that way – facts don’t always match preconceived notions. Honestly, that’s one of the joys of writing this blog – finding out things that I think, that just aren’t so, and finding out more about the way the world really works.

Back in the day, The Mrs. did the news on a radio network, she wrote her own copy, and selected stories, and put it all together for broadcast at the top and bottom of every hour. Even though we lived in a state where basketball was popular, The Mrs. didn’t cover it on the news – at all. She covered football and hockey, but never ran news about basketball. This was on a radio network, listened to by (probably) hundreds of thousands of people, daily.

Subtle? Certainly. Probably nobody noticed that there were no basketball scores on the radio – heck, if they were basketball fans they probably knew the scores already. But it impacted me – someone controls what stories made the radio news. Therefore, someone controls the stories that make the national news.

Did The Mrs. have a political agenda? Not really. Did Walter Cronkite? Certainly. If there was any doubt, his later quotes (you can look them up) showed him to be firmly on the Left, and firmly in the camp of a one-world government.

When you watch the news, ask yourself two questions about every story: “Why are they showing me this now?” and, “What are they not telling me?”

It was intentional that I brought up Tet on Memorial Day weekend when talking with The Boy. I had an agenda. He needs to know the sacrifices that were made by our troops and others, and to know, certainly, that there are forces that actively oppose freedom. Thankfully, there have been plenty of brave men who fought on the side of freedom.

But far too many died. This our day to remember them.

COVID Nightmares: The Karen, The Mrs. Grundy, and the AWFL

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The Four Three Horsefaces of the Apocalypse. (Concept via JW, Photoshop via Pugsley, after an idea by Sergio Leone.)

“Okay, everyone, I’d like to welcome you all to this meeting of Karen Anonymous. Who would like to start?”

I raised my hand.

“Hi, I’m John, and I’m a Karen.”

The voices responded in unison, “Hi, John.”

“I’d like to tell you my story. Two weeks ago, my family ordered dinner. Due to the virus, we couldn’t go to the restaurant. They delivered. When they brought us the dinner, they forgot to bring the entrée for my son, The Boy.” I paused. “The Mrs. called them back and they said they would bring it. They forgot.”

Everyone in the room nodded. I could see the tension. This was fertile ground for a Karening.

“So, the following Friday, I suggested we order again from them. As The Boy was finding out what everyone wanted, he asked me if I wanted the Bigfoot roasted over moonrocks with a side of fried Dodo wings, which is my usual order. I told him, sure, it’s not like money is an object, but then I reminded him that they hadn’t brought his entrée the previous week. I told him we should get it for free.”

I looked at the rest of the KA members. I could see beads of sweat on a few brows. I could see a pulsating vein in the temple of one lady to my left.

If you’ve never seen a pack of Karens migrate, you don’t know true terror.

“The Boy said, point blank, ‘Dad, if you want to do that, if you want to call them up and tell them that, it’s fine. You go ahead and do that. But I won’t. You’re being a Karen about this.’ I was shocked. I asked him exactly how I was being a Karen, and he responded, ‘Dad, this is a small restaurant, not part of a big chain. The owner just bought it right before the virus hit. He’s being beaten up financially already. And now you want to bust his chops over an eight dollar chicken and rice dinner when we will never even notice eight dollars missing in our lives? No. I won’t do it.’

There were a few tears, and nods in the audience. I continued.

“Yes. I was being a Karen. I had lost perspective. And I was proud that The Boy called me on it. I realized right then: I don’t need to see the manager.”

Then they applauded, hugged me, and made me king of Lower Southeast Modern Mayberry.

What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it? That’s the last time the mailman will argue with me!

Okay, there isn’t a real Karen Anonymous, but The Boy really did call me out for being a Karen, and I was proud of him for doing so. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop wearing the crown around town.

Karen is pretty simple to explain, and in reality. We all know her. Her hairstyle alone tells us a lot. Karen wants things the way she wants them. And if she can’t have them her way? She’d like to see the manager.

That was me over The Boy’s entrée, which was the absolutely true part of the Karen Anonymous meeting. It didn’t matter that I was technically correct, as The Boy pointed out, in the bigger picture of the world I was absolutely wrong. The restaurant is small, locally owned, and has generally given us both great service and great food.

Is being a Karen morally wrong? No, not really. Karen is looking out for the best for her and her family, mostly. Would I like to be a husband to a constant Karen? No, it would be hard to decide who had to give birth to the kids.

Is it bad that the first thing I notice in this picture was the trigger discipline?

In the larger sense of things, Karens are harmless. Karens stop worrying about most everything after they’re happy. Sure, they might make noise, and they might be annoying FaceBook® friends, but if the manager has a designated employee to pretend to “fire” when Karens are on the warpath, Karens are happy. They rule their own little world. They have no real reason to mess with you, they just want things to go well for them.

Karen memes are peaking right now, so I feel safe in saying that we’ve reached Peak Karen™. Heck, I bet in a few years it will be safe again for middle-aged women to wear the “can I speak to the manager” haircut without fear of becoming an Internet meme.

The second personality type that the WuFlu has brought to the forefront are the Mrs. Grundys. Where the Karen is concerned about Karen, Mrs. Grundy is concerned about you.

Who is Mrs. Grundy?

Mrs. Grundy is Karen’s great-great-grandma who entered the English language in 1798. Mrs. Grundy is obsessed with the rules. The smaller and more petty and more obscure and meaningless, the better. But if it were just Mrs. Grundy following the rules, that would be okay. No. It’s worse. Mrs. Grundy wants you to be observant to the rules, and has appointed herself judge, jury, and executioner. Me? I say before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way you have his shoes and you’re a mile away.

The judge told me I was in court for drinking and kissing women. I don’t think he was pleased when I said, “Excellent! When do we start?”

Your grass is ever so slightly too tall? Mrs. Grundy is calling the Home Owners’ Association (HOA). But more likely, Mrs. Grundy is running the HOA. She’s and her fellow Grundys are the first to try to be appointed to the HOA and the only ones who care enough to want to be in a cycle of continual judgement over their neighbors.

Why? It’s likely that they’ve never had real power in life, so seeing the next door neighbor paint his house an unapproved shade of tan gives them the shiver of pleasure in anticipating the pain that they’ll cause their neighbor. But they’ll wait until he finishes, first.

Is it easy becoming a Grundy? Sure. Heck, I was taking a walk in the city where I work (Modern Mount Pilot) and almost Grundifyed myself. I was taking a walk during my lunch break, and saw a guy in an SUV pull up to a dumpster at a baseball field. He popped his trunk and began dumping his garbage into the dumpster.

I had a moment where I managed a bit of indignant outrage, but then realized: it wasn’t my city, it wasn’t my ballfield, and for all I knew the city was fine with what he was doing. He certainly wasn’t dumping his trash all over his front yard or in the road. I calmed myself, but I could easily see how one gives in to the Grundy side.

I’ll give in to the Mrs. Grundy side when my badge shows up in the mail.

Mrs. Grundy has been such a feature of culture that she’s a fixture of Western culture. C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Dickens, Barnum, Chesterton, Joyce, Heinlein, Jack London, and even P.G. Wodehouse have all referenced her in their writing. And now her crowning achievement of recognition: I mentioned her.

Whereas the Karen just wants the world to fit her expectations, Mrs. Grundy is far worse. Mrs. Grundy wants the world to follow the rules, which she conveniently knows better than anyone else.

Karens don’t want to wear a mask. Mrs. Grundy wants to see you executed for not having one, preferably after the torture of, say, having to listen to Miley Cyrus describe quantum physics. Thankfully, Mrs. Grundy, however is only dangerous if you live in that small circle of control where she can stamp her puny feet and shake her wrinkled fists in rage. Which is normally within 200 feet (37°C) from where she is at any given time.

But then there’s the last one: The AWFL. AWFL stands for Affluent White Female Liberals. And if Karen is annoying and self-centered, and Mrs. Grundy is the would-be tyrant, the AWFL is the Queen of the Left.

It’s also how many times she had to watch the Sesame Street® episode on the letter “O” before she realized that was her middle initial.

What’s an AWFL?

She’s a 30 year old Yale graduate in Woman’s Studies who marches against white privilege hand in hand with her Harvard husband who works in investment banking while their surrogate-born child is in the care of their illegal Guatemalan nanny.
She writes letters to the congressman she knew back in prep school about the lack of government spending for poverty while wearing a $380 sweatshirt that was hand embroidered in Pakistan.
She sends her kids to a private school for a “better education” than they could get in the local integrated school, and lives in a gated neighborhood to keep out undesirables.

A prototype AWFL is the Governor of Michigan.

Yes, this really happened.

Gretchen Whitmer outlawed, based on Corona (and I’m not making up any of this):

Driving a car between two houses you own. Because COVID-19 hides in vacant houses and might slit your throat because it hides behind the door with a knife to ambush you when you come in.
The Gretch said that grocery, pot, liquor and abortion stores could stay open, but buying plants was forbidden. Because having an abortion while stoned is a right, but growing food in a garden is a privilege.
Kayaks? They’re ok, liberals like those and they allow you to buy those cute outfits like Stacey has, and you look so Motorboats? A sure sign of the viral apocalypse.
And science certainly shows that fishing and hunting is the number one way that COVID-19 is transmissible. It’s proven science according to YouTube®.

As I said, I think we we’ve hit Peak Karen. Karen is harmless, and fun to make fun of. But when I see her show up all over the place at the same time? Yeah, that meme is a month from being a Doge.

Keep Doge alive!

Mrs. Grundy? I’m on a solo quest to bring her back as a meme. Mrs. Grundy makes society worse for all of us.

But the AWFL?

The AWFL is probably the single most dangerous thing in society today, and Whitmer is the Ur-AWFL. And if you repeat “Ur-AWFL” fast enough, you can sound just like a Muppet®. But Whitmer isn’t a Muppet™. She has power. She has money. She has control. And she’s not alone. Even in a crisis, Whitmer’s ideology overwhelms actions that could actually be reasonably put in place to save lives.

And that’s AWFL.

Of the three? I’ll take Karen any day.

Healthcare, Unemployment, and Soviet Nails

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.” – Firefly

But that’s not as bad as the unemployed jester: he’s nobody’s fool.

As I looked at the headlines today, two of them jumped out at me. The first was this (capitalization same as the original):

82% WANT MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS . . . . (LINK to actual study)

As usual, there are some misleading bits behind the headline. If you clicked through the fluff pieces (several times) to the actual study on the stimulus checks that I linked to, it really says that 82% want stimulus checks as long as the government is mandating a shutdown. That’s a lot more reasonable, since it’s not asking for that money, you know, forever. Except in Michigan, where I believe governor will keep the economy in shutdown mode until scientists develop immortality.

So, the headline was misleading, and people didn’t want the money forever. That made me happy. Until I read the real story embedded in the study and saw this statistic:

74% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats agree that we should move to a universal health care system.

Stick a fork in it, folks, like a doughnut around Stacey Abrams, it’s done. If the numbers in that study are correct, regardless of how you or I might feel about it, nationalized health care in some form is now probably just a matter of details and whose name goes on the package.

At least the Washington Post can explain that unusual eclipse on the East Coast now.

I could spend a lot of time talking about how and why we got here, including discussion of how the system we have is just like Michael Moore: it incorporates the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of socialism. But I won’t. This battle, I think, is effectively lost. A shrewd candidate for president will make this a centerpiece of his campaign, and the only difference will be if the final version is called TrumpTreatment© or BidenBenefits®.

Obamacare has served the only purpose it was designed for: it is the capstone of a series of Federal mandates since the 1980s that have served to make the costs of healthcare in this country so incredibly high that literally anything is better than the status quo. Healthcare in the United States doesn’t in any way mimic a free market, except in plastic surgery and laser eye surgery. Those costs have gone down because insurance generally doesn’t pay for them and doctors have to actually compete. I guess the other nice thing about being a plastic surgeon is that they get to see new faces every week.

Healthcare should remind everyone of the mantra of the Left: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This crisis has been made through successive actions of the Left to make hospitals have to charge responsible people for every drug addled meth and crack head and pregnant illegal alien that drools or waddles their way into the emergency room. But there’s enough blame for everyone, since the corporatist wing of the Republican party has taken action to ensure that insulin makers can charge Americans six times the cost for a life giving drug (insulin) in the United States as compared to our neighbors to the North.

If the first headline wasn’t bad enough, the second headline was:

68% Of Unemployed ‘Eligible For Payments Greater Than Lost Earnings’ . . . . (LINK to study, and not three layers of journo-fluff)

This is one with which the extended Wilder family has some experience. Alia S. Wilder was recently working from her home composing Mongolian throat-singing mix tapes for the black market. Normally she does this in an office, but due to BatFlu, she was sent to work from home. Her boss called and told her they were temporarily shutting down the business.

The cat then told me, “Snitches get stitches.” I had no idea he was closely watching health care policy.

Since the market they serve of throat-singing aficionados was entirely shut down by Corona-chan, it was a logical business move to make. Alia S. Wilder was also one of the first people to get called back. Good? Well, yes. But she had to take an income cut to do so, since her job pays less than unemployment insurance plus the $600 a week that Uncle Sugar was kicking in.

I was proud of her that her complaint level was exactly zero: she was roaring and ready to get back to work. Those mix tapes won’t make themselves, after all. But how many people would just love to stay home and collect the WuFlu bucks? Get paid for doing nothing? It must be that “new normal” that people keep talking about.

I actually understand the reason people would like free money, and would prefer to stay home and eat nachos and smoke weed on Gram-gram’s couch rather than deliver pizzas. However, the $600 a week bump sets up bad incentives: I read one story of a guy who needed pizza delivery dudes, and no one would take the job because unemployment paid so much more. I can see that, given the horrible hiccup in the economy, why the government would want to print lots and lots of money encourage consumption, but the increased payments have essentially raised the minimum wage to somewhere between $20-$25 just to break even with current unemployment payments. How much more would you have to pay people to actually work?

For markets to work, there needs to be some sort of connection between supply and demand. If you pay people $1000 a week, how many will think that working for $1200 a week is a good idea? Not many. And I’m willing to bet that if the economy is as bad as I think it is, the Federal government will continue the payments for longer than the current end date in July. During the Great Recession, the Federal government continued unemployment insurance for 100 weeks. Two years.

What kind of distortion will that have on the labor market?

Yes, this happened on a CNN special last week.

In thinking about this story, I was reminded of an old story that I heard about the Soviet Union:

There was a Soviet nail factory. In the factory, the communist leaders from Moscow called and told the manager, “Make sure you increase production of nails! You must increase the tonnage for Comrade Stalin!”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make very, very large nails this month.”

Accordingly, the factory had a record production month in tons of nails produced. The communist leaders printed a picture of the factory manager receiving an award. But soon enough, the leaders in Moscow realized that not a lot of people needed nails that weighed two pounds each. The communist leader called the manager back. “The tonnage was good. But this month, make more nails for Comrade Stalin.”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make many very, very, small nails this month.”

Not my translation. The KGB spy school told me to pretend I don’t speak fluent Russian.

I wasn’t able to verify the basics of this story, but I did find the accompanying cartoon which at least hints that the Soviets themselves were aware that something was broken in their system. And I did find a story about a Soviet plant that made a machine to help make tires. They developed new technology that allowed the machine to make tires much faster, but refused to make it.

Why?

Then they would make fewer machines. In a market-based economy the company would celebrate their new, better machine and use it as a selling point to beat their competition. But in this case, the incentives were to make more machines rather than make better machines.

This is the primary failure mechanism of socialist systems. They have bad incentives. I read once that in Great Britain that people ring up the ambulance to take them to the doctor. Why not? It’s “free,” right?

Once a “free” system takes hold, however, it will never leave until the economy collapses under all the “free” money and “free” services. Why? People become dependent on free things. If you want to make someone dependent on you? Give them things. Proof?

Ever hear your parents say, “My house, my rules?” Giving is a form of control.

I think the last person I saw driving this windowless van was named Bernie.

Freedom comes from saying “no” to free things, but I have the sense that people are going to be saying yes to free stuff.

Always think back to what Admiral Ackbar says at a time like this:

The Lighter Side of Leading A Divided Nation

“All is going according to plan, Fearless Leader.” – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

I hear Kim won’t go to Heaven – he has no Seoul.

Various people are good at different things. Very few people are perfect at everything, except me. I even have proof: one of my co-workers even told me I was a perfect jerk the other day. President Trump is actually pretty good at a lot of things. Top of the list is making a deal, and the top skill in making deals is persuasion. Trump is generally good at reading the mood of citizens who might vote for him, and setting an agenda that resonates with his voters.

Not even Trump can negotiate with or persuade a virus however, so Trump’s skills will never cure Coronavirus. Put him in as a leader to drive policy make a functioning economy stronger? Probably one of the best presidents in the last few decades. Heck, the money that he’s made mining salt from Leftist tears is probably bigger than the GDP of Bulgaria.

What’s the fastest thing in Bulgaria? Light.

Put Trump in as a leader trying to rebuild an economy on the edge of a new Great Depression? I don’t know. I guess we’ll see on that one. The fact that he was aggressively trying to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing even before the CoronaCrisis® was a good start and shows he might have the instincts to make the best out of a bad situation like I did when I cheered up the orphan kid by telling him his favorite beer was gonna be Fosters®.

In an email conversation today, one of my friends mentioned that his biggest hope for Trump was that the chaos that he was inflicting on Washington would “shake up the status quo” and would clear the path for someone new. Of course the Democrats are nominating Joe Biden, who has been in politics longer than most of the people in America have been alive. Thankfully, that gives Joe whole new generations of people to sniff.

My friend was looking for someone who might be a better leader than Trump during this current crisis. It’s not a stretch to say that America is divided, and I certainly won’t win a Pulitzer© prize for that obvious observation. But when it comes to leading America, which America did my friend mean, and can Joe Biden sniff them, too?

Funny, Joe Biden is always telling girls that their hair smells different when they’re awake.

Americans have obviously been divided before; the years between 1861 and 1865 are a hint that America isn’t necessarily a forever thing. We’re at a similar juncture here. But, outside of being a 1970’s folk rock band, what is America, anyway?

America was conceived, at least by the Constitution, as a collection of sovereign States. The Constitution defined the power of the Federal government, and provided a basis for the States to create experiments with freedom unmatched anywhere in the world. This was a self-governing freedom that was, above all, based in the rights and responsibilities of the individual. I’d make a joke about freedom, but the folks in Hong Kong won’t get it.

The ideas that formed this government were based in rights and laws that came from Europe, but they led to true individual liberty here in the United States as well as other countries around the world.

I wrote Europe in the above paragraph, but really those ideas experienced their greatest growth in Great Britain. Although some of the concepts that led to a free society had a run in Rome, the 2.0 version came directly as a result of the geography of Great Britain. What made Great Britain historically unique was that it was an island in Europe. Sure, there are a bunch of European islands, but Great Britain was large enough and cold enough and miserable enough that no one but the Vikings were insane enough to try to conquer it. But even the Vikings failed and were booted out of England. All their children were left with were novelty shirts screen printed with: “My Parents Tried to Conquer England and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

I only have one more Viking joke, but I’m gonna skip it – there’s Norway you’d laugh at it.

So, as an island nation, the English were more-or-less safe from actual invasion. Beyond that, the local Lords got it in their head that if the King go out of line, well, they just might find a new King. As such, they made (swords are generally a big inducement) King John sign the Magna Carta. It really was for the benefit of the aristocracy, but some of the points might look familiar:

Pizza on Fridays if you do all of your chores.
No taxes unless approved by a new thing called the “parliament,” which put a curb on things the King could do. This was the first real limit on a monarch.
The right to due process, which led eventually to our concept of trial by jury.
Bedtimes can be later in the summer since there’s no school.

In a place where people were constantly being invaded into oblivion, blackmailing the King was a pretty bad idea. In most of Europe, people needed to follow the local King without a lot of question, otherwise when the very flammable Bulgarians invaded, the local King might just ignore them when it came time to borrow matches. Irritating the Boss if you were being invaded by Napoleon, the Romans, the Poles, or the Ottoman Empire was probably a good way to learn first-hand what the word pillage meant.

This explains Germany. And Russia. And France. And at least two world wars. And why England was different. Great Britain had the time and space to develop freedom without the external pressures of imminent invasion. Even today, if you look at the Freedom House annual report, almost all independent small island states are democracies (LINK) and serve flaming drinks with umbrellas. The factors that led to Great Britain developing freedom 800 years ago? They are still in place on these small islands today.

In America, the idea of individual rights and freedom was part of the reason many of the colonists came to the New World. Well, also indentured servitude, but we try to forget about that part. And when they got here, if they wanted more freedom? There was always the chance to move west into an ever-expanding frontier. If you didn’t like the government, you could probably move faster than it could, even if you were moving west at a walking pace. Freedom was found in the frontier.

Until there wasn’t a frontier

I hear old coots don’t roll joints, they tumble weed.

Then people gradually to cities. Cities are islands, but islands of dependency. The anonymity of a city leads to rudeness. Rudeness leads to anger. Anger leads to armies of Karens demanding to see the City Manager. Eventually? Laws, Homeowners’ Associations, and YouTube® terms and conditions.

Despite the cities, some people living there still maintain the traditions and beliefs in the individual freedoms and individual responsibilities that helped to create the United States. These are passed down from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters. If living in the cities was the entire cause of the divide, it would be one that could be bridged. It was in the 1930’s, and even in the tumultuous 1960’s. But just like my biological dad’s name, address and phone number after my biological mom got pregnant, things have changed.

Into this divide have been added millions of people legally and illegally from foreign countries. Virtually all of these countries have zero experience with the idea of limited government. Most of their home governments are so corrupt that they make North Korea look good. When it comes to a job that allows you to avoid corruption, make sure you choose the right Korea.

At least in 1920’s America, those immigrant children would have been instructed by teachers who liked and respected individual rights and responsibilities in the United States. Now? How many teachers in the Los Angeles School District are teaching those immigrant children about limited government? How many are just teaching the much simpler concept of the United States is the “worst country in the world”?

In a country where one side believes in limited government and personal responsibility, and the other collectivism and unlimited state power, where exactly is that middle ground?

Trump is about the Art of the Deal®, but how do you deal with a group whose beliefs are the opposite of the ideas founded the country and have no desire for anything but the economic benefits of living in the United States?

In a country so divided, who exactly could lead both groups?

If we’re taking applications, I know a guy who might be interested . . .

The Funniest Post You’ll Read About Life and Death, Featuring Vikings.

“I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” – Fight Club

I don’t want to be killed by a large sneeze, though. I don’t want people saying I bit off more than I could achoo.

As a culture, at least in the developed West, fearful of death. We hide from it to a degree that I’m not sure most of us are aware of. How could we be aware? Like our browser history, we’ve spent so much time and effort hiding it from public view.

I noticed a pattern in my life. First, when I was young, we went to funerals. Those funerals were where we buried my grandparents. As I got older, I started going to a lot of weddings as friends tied the knot, and funerals dropped to nearly zero. But as I get older, I’m seeing more funerals again. Most recently, it was for The Mrs.’ grandfather. Her grandfather was a crew chief on B-17’s for the 8^th Army Air Force. He was buried in the same Army olive drab uniform that he’d worn in World War II.

Funerals are, and should be, a time for reflection. When I looked a little at the big picture, in modern America most people rarely see dead people unless it’s in a hospital bed or at a funeral. Sure, there are exceptions. Cops, soldiers, people in medicine, and morticians see them all of the time outside of those limited settings, but those people are a pretty small percentage of the population.

When I pass away, I don’t want a fancy funeral. One like this is fine.

I was half-watching a movie, perhaps in the 1990s, so I’m a little shy on details. The movie was set during the Great Depression, and the husband had died. The wife had prepared the body and it was sitting ON THE DINNER TABLE for people to come and see for the visitation. Okay, not sitting. But the husband’s corpse was stretched out where they ate their fried okra and possum sushi or whatever it was people ate during the Depression.

What the heck? “Surely they didn’t really do that,” I said. There was an older person in the room who had lived through the Depression. He corrected me. “Surely they did. Funeral parlors were for rich people. And what are you gonna do, put him on the floor?”

Wow. I guess the old saying of “dust bunnies don’t mix with the dead” is true.

Being a product of my time, I hadn’t really thought about that at all. Dead people? Call a professional. Very nice and tidy and nothing but a bill that you can pay by check or credit card.

But when you look back at life in the 1930s and before, I guess there was a reason that people had little graveyards on the farm: they were used to dealing with death and couldn’t pass the duties required by death to someone else. Who else was going to do it? You couldn’t hire it out like today. Our ancestors knew what we have now forgotten. Just as birth starts a life, death ends it. I heard a statistic from the CDC® that life has a nearly a 100% mortality rate.

I will say I’m in favor of the new congressional cheese support bill. Count me as pro-volone.

Close physical contact with our dead relatives used to be the norm, not the exception. For them, death was a part of life. My mother-in-law was doing genealogy of her family. For the most part, genealogy is not horribly interesting to me unless there’s a story. Just knowing that I had a great-great-great-great grandpa called Duncan McWilder back in 1788 doesn’t tell me a lot. Was he a scoundrel? Why did he hop the boat to America? Was it for better Internet?

I did jump on the Mormon database and at least someone thinks I am the great²⁹ grandson of Harald Hardrada, who had a notoriously bad day in 1066 A.D. when he forgot to put on his armor when going up against the English. At least Harald has a story. After one of Harald’s vacations in Bulgaria, he got the nickname “Bulger-burner,” which is probably a lot funnier of a nickname if you’re not from Bulgaria.

And I hear that dead Viking Scrabble® players go to Vowel-halla.

Okay, that was a digression. I’ll see if I can’t get off at the right exit this time. Anyway, my mother-in-law was doing genealogy. One particular male relative had three or four wives. Polygamy? No. His wives kept dying in childbirth or from some plague that we can fix with a shot or thinking that arsenic and lead were what made makeup good, or wearing asbestos corsets and radium jewelry. People were acquainted with death in a real and up-close manner in the Victorian era.

Sad clowns don’t wear arsenic makeup, they use frown-dation instead.

I think that as we isolate ourselves from death, we start to pretend that it doesn’t exist. In some cases, people like Ray Kurzweil are attempting to figure out how to stop aging and live forever. Failing that? Ray is planning on being frozen into a corpse-sicle for later defrosting and infinite life. My bet? People will be able to live longer, but they won’t be able to live forever, because testing immortality drugs takes forever. And everyone is doing it: a guy outside of Wal-Mart® was selling immortality supplements, and it looked like a scam, so I called the cops. They were aware – they arrested the guy last year, in 2000, in 1968, and even, they said, back as far as 1880.

Ray may be able to squeeze a few more years out, but I thing that physical immortality isn’t something that we’ll see. At least not in my lifetime. Sorry, but immortality jokes never get old.

Even though life is part of death, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. But we don’t have to fear it, either. Very few of us will get to choose the time and place of our death. But we have the choice as to what we are going to do tomorrow to make this a better world – to do things that matter.

If a Viking is reincarnated, is he Bjorn again?

Heck, if I was immortal, I’d probably never get around to doing things that matter, since there’s always another tomorrow.

Until there’s not.

Just like Harald Hardrada, there will be a time and place when we’ll die. But Harald was a smart Viking, and he knew he wouldn’t drown. He knew that you could lead a Norse to water, but you can’t make him sink.

So, get going. And don’t forget your armor.