John – Page 96 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Know Your Limitations: Find The Right Job.

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

I assure you, playing Risk® with Clint Eastwood is difficult. He brings real artillery.

Ma Wilder was into pot.

Pots, really, ones made out of clay. Which led to the next step: Ma Wilder wanted a pottery wheel. Why? She was making pots, and the closest public pottery wheel was 45 miles away. Heck, Ma Wilder and some bored doctor’s wife were probably the only people who had a pottery wheel in the whole county.

Being that Pa and Ma Wilder had enough money to pay for Wilder Redoubt, feed me, and to pay for the pottery wheel, Pa bought a pottery wheel for Ma. Since this was before Amazon® Prime™, Ma Wilder ordered it out of some magazine, probably Bored Doctor’s Wife’s Hobbies Quarterly, and a group of burly UPS® drivers drove an hour out of their way to deliver the wheel.

What arrived wasn’t a fully assembled pottery wheel – it was the parts. This particular contraption was heavy – it had a large concrete wheel several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick. The idea behind a pottery wheel is that you get the whole contraption spinning, and the inertia of the heavy wheel would keep it going while you turned a $3.00 piece of clay into a lopsided $1.50 pot that only a kindergartner’s mother could love.

It was Ma Wilder’s goal that they name a radioactive turtle after her in 300 years.

Pa Wilder spread the pottery wheel parts out on the shag carpeting in my bedroom. My bedroom had a door to the greenhouse where Ma Wilder wanted to set up her pottery studio, so it was nearly a logical place to put the pottery wheel together. Pa Wilder had many things that put him in a good mood – but assembling pottery wheels was not one of them, and I could tell that this particular Saturday morning he was not amused. Grumpy, I believe is the term, but grumpy doesn’t convey the sense of hate that I felt emanating from him onto the parts arrayed on the floor like the internal organs of a Muppet® after an autopsy.

This particular Muppet® kermitted suicide.

I sat quietly watching, as it was my bedroom, after all. I think I was in fourth or fifth grade. Even then, I liked to build models – model planes, model spaceships, model tanks, model ships, and model cars. I loved the feel of the parts fitting together, the minor polishing and trimming to make them fit perfectly, and look perfectly. Modelling to me was intuitive, as was assembling most mechanical things. It also was a great protector of my virginity.

While Pa Wilder made many wonderful things in his woodshop, they were things he designed, things that he built in his mind before he ever let his saw cut into the wood. I still have a bookcase he built when he was in high school – a beautifully crafted piece of furniture that was assembled without a single nail. But when it came to building things that other people had designed, especially mechanical things?

Yikes.

So, as I sat and silently watched him cuss the pottery wheel together – mostly various forms of “damn thing” and, certainly no f-bombs – I tried to psychically will him to put the right Tab A into the correct Slot B. Eventually he did. The pottery wheel was built well – all the pieces were well manufactured, and fit perfectly when they were assembled correctly.

I was pleased to find a picture of the exact same model. Not included: Pa Wilder.

Pa Wilder, at times, looked like he was attempting to build a trap for some sort large aquatic animal, say, a beaver. It was difficult watching him put uprights in upside down. He stared at the end caps that covered the tubing like a Neolithic caveman attempting to understand quantum mechanics written in a language entirely derived from rap lyrics, yo. But, he finally got most of the parts together.

Then it came to the final step – assembling the motor. This particular pottery wheel had an attachment, a motor that you could install so you could skip kicking the concrete disk and use electricity to power up the wheel to optimum clay-wasting speed. Pa was attempting to install it. I watched him, frustrated, try to put it in exactly backwards. I finally burst.

“NO! It doesn’t go that way. You have to turn it.”

He looked down at the instructions, grimaced, and looked back at me. He held out the motor assembly.

I took it. I fitted it to the upright. “It fits this way – you have to adjust it so when you push your foot on to this pedal,” I pointed, “That it pushes this switch down. That turns on the motor.”

This is the pottery wheel equivalent of vaping.

He pulled out the wrench and tightened down the bolts holding it in place. He smiled. Rather than being mad at his odd son, he was pleased. And as he looked on the completed pottery wheel, he was happy.

For about a minute.

“Dad,” I pointed at the door to Ma’s new pottery shed, “I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to fit through the door.” To his credit, he still didn’t drop the f-bomb.

It went together more quickly the second time.

Different people have different aptitudes. And while Pa Wilder was wonderful at many things, like running a business and not killing his son for waiting to tell him about door widths, there were things he wasn’t good at. He wasn’t mechanically minded at all, and seemed to have a “deer avoidance radar” during hunting season.

That pottery wheel frustrated Pa Wilder to no end.

There was a time when I thought I could do anything. I felt, flush with the hubris of youth, that I was invincible, bullet-proof, and a dozen feet tall, and that was before I discovered tequila. But after a while, I realized that there were jobs that, while I might be able to do them intellectually, I would never be able to do them for a living. Well, I might be able to do them, if they took all of the sharp things out of the room, and maybe covered all that tough drywall with padding so I didn’t hurt my head when I slammed it into it.

Accountants have a heck of a time getting to sleep – if they’re counting sheep and miss just one . . . .

Let me give you one example: accounting. I would suck at that. I saw an accountant chase $1.37 for a day. Why? Because the books had to balance. It didn’t matter that the $1.37 was out of about $700,000. Nope. Still had to find it. So, accountant is out. I could name a dozen more jobs I would hate doing. But for me, knowing what I’m unsuited to do is victory enough, especially since I can do other things, like polish Johnny Depp’s philtrum and uvula after he’s had a hard night with the “ladies”. I don’t spend time trying to fix my accounting weakness, rather, I spend time trying to learn and get better at things I’m good at, which people might also pay for.

A large part of avoiding frustration in life is understanding what you are good at. More importantly, understanding what you are good at that will make money for you. As good as I might be at making models (and I’m not anymore, but 14 year-old me was), there’s certainly no demand for people who make models. Unless they’re Cindy Crawford’s parents.

Cindy spent an hour staring at an orange juice can – it said “concentrate.”

Yes, you have to be who you are. Doing things that are fundamentally unsuited to you, your skills, and your personality will kill you. And, no, getting up at 6:30AM or even 5:30AM every day is not fundamentally unsuited to you. And no, working hard and sweating is not a skill you don’t have – we all have that skill. Your personality? Yeah, it can include giving everything you have each day.

None of this is an excuse for anyone to not meet their obligations or wait in Mom’s basement until they get the invitation to interview as CEO of a video game company. In fact it’s the opposite. Most people would suck as the CEO of a video game company, and very, very few would be any good at it.

Speaking of being not good at something . . . .

After Ma Wilder got her pottery studio going, she decided to do the natural, maternal thing. No, not drink wine until 11PM while listening to Tom Jones®. She decided to show me how to use her pottery wheel. My attempt at making a pot was similar to Pa Wilder’s attempt to put the pottery wheel together – except Ma looked dimly upon me cussing.

After my one, very sad and utterly talentless pot, Ma Wilder relented and let me go trout not-catching. It would be called trout fishing if I ever caught one, but it was a great way to spend the day down by the river. Fish? Never caught one there. But there were lots and lots of rocks.

At least I can skip a stone. Does that pay very well?

For Fran:

Time: It’s all you have. How are you using yours?

“I’m not going to kill you. Your job will be to tell the rest of them that death is coming for them, tonight. Tell them Eric Draven sends his regards.” – The Crow

You would have thought that Doc Brown would have warned Marty about the Parkinson’s.

I was at my job in Alaska, talking with a co-worker, Jim. We were talking about finances – Pugsley had just been born, so I was probably whining about how babies are expensive and that The Mrs. and I were running out of corners filled with oily rags for children to sleep in. I suppose I was thinking about selling Pugsley to the Iranians for some of their spare enriched uranium, and Jim said, “Well, that’s just money. You can always make more money.”

For whatever reason, that phrase struck me. It took the way that people normally think and feel about money and inverted it. Money was available, and there was no shortage of ways to get it. Most people feel the opposite – that money is as scarce as evidence in a House impeachment inquiry.

After thinking about it, I decided Jim was right. There are dozens of ways to make money, and some of them are even legal according to my lawyer. Does this philosophy apply to more things than just money?

I was going to tell another time travelling joke, but you guys complained about it in the comments. Also, Einstein didn’t kill himself.

Yes. In my experience, almost anything you need, including money, you can get more of. This is especially true if you have a lawyer in a wheelchair with rabies – they play well to juries. I’m not saying that it’s always easy to get money, and I’m not saying that money isn’t important. But you can get more of it. But not everything is like that. But the one thing you can’t get more of is time. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote about just that nearly 2,000 years ago:

“You are living as if destined to live forever. Your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply, though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”

So, of all the things that you can have, the only one you can’t get more of is time.

Bill and Ted is an underrated time travel movie.

Why is that important? Well, to toss out another quote, Benjamin Franklin said: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It’s important because time is all you have – it is the single most precious commodity, after PEZ®.

So, what to do?

Stop wasting time. Every minute you waste is a minute you’ve lost. Most people have a life that’s long enough to accomplish what they want, as long as they don’t waste it. How many lives are lost, a minute at a time, staring at a clock, waiting for it to show 5:00? How many lives are lost a mile at a time on long commutes?

I used to be addicted to time travel, but that’s all in the past now.

When I was younger and didn’t have much money, whenever there was a chance to trade my time for money, I did. I put on my own roof after a hailstorm. I built my own deck. I fixed my car myself, changed my own oil. This was a good trade at the time. I was longer on time and shorter on money, and I learned skills that helped me understand the world just a little bit better.

Now time is shorter, and I don’t have an infinite supply of full Moons ahead of me. Here’s a pretty powerful quote from Paul Bowles’ book, Sheltering Sky:

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full Moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless . . . .

I wonder if there’s any future in time travel?

Don’t waste your time – don’t waste your life. Make yourself better every day – you can always make more money.

Civil War Weather Report #7 – The War In The Right

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

You can always tell a hungry clock, they go back four seconds.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.

I’m holding at Stage 7 this month. A more formal structure on the Right needs to be in place to get to Stage 8, as the Left has the structure of control in place.

In this issue: Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – The War in the Right –– Updated Civil War II Index – Virginia and Demographics – Links

Welcome to Issue Seven of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first or second Monday of every month. Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK).

ISSUES LINKS

Violence and Censorship Update

Censorship strikes again. Owen Benjamin, comedian, had dozens of YouTube® videos. Had. He also had several hundred thousand subscribers and had accumulated tens of millions of minutes of time spent watching his videos. I probably accounted for about thirty minutes – YouTube© suggested him to me, and gave him a try, but he wasn’t for me. He was hardly offensive in the time I saw him. He was goofy, as in didn’t believe that we’d been to the Moon and was sniffing around flat Earth territory. Reality or the contrived personality of a comedian? Beats me, but if I’m ever in a car with him I’m keeping him away from the map.

But people spent tens of millions of minutes (this is not an exaggeration) watching him. Now he’s gone from YouTube™. Other channels have been demonetized: for a channel with large numbers of subscribers, that can mean the loss of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. YouTube® is playing for keeps, and some content creators are going to have to try to learn to make espresso if they want a shot at that barista job at Starbucks® in Tempe.

What’s the difference between coffee and a barista’s opinion? I asked for coffee.

Even if a channel isn’t banned or demonetized, YouTube® is manipulating search results to mute content it doesn’t like. Edgy political content it used to send to me as a matter of course in recommendations doesn’t show up in my suggestions anymore – now I get videos on science, stuff that explodes, and how to knit using yarn you spin at home out of cat fur.

The channel “Press for Truth” did an experiment (LINK) where they did a search for “What do the Rothschilds think about Brexit?” Press for Truth had a video with exactly that title that had over half a million views. The result? Press for Truth’s video (when I did the search) was fourth, behind older videos that were (mostly) less popular, but were from “established” news organizations.

I’d be a bit more sympathetic of YouTube’s® actions if we hadn’t seen again and again how the mainstream news organizations will bury news stories that are damaging to the Left (Weinstein, Epstein, etc.). These same news organizations will also misleadingly phrase stories about people they don’t like. For example, if I mentioned that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki just might have had something to do with the Japanese surrender, we’d get: “John Wilder’s unfounded claims that nuclear weapons had a part in ending World War II.”

Owen Benjamin went elsewhere to stream video, as did all of the other creators that have been banned by YouTube®. But the new locations are far less lucrative, and have far less visibility. It’s the electronic equivalent of setting up “free speech” zones. Leftists make a great deal out of the fact that these are private companies making the censorship choices, but when a private company violates a principle of the Left, like making a Satanist remove a “hail Satan” shirt before getting on an airplane (this really happened)?

I want nothing to do with the Devil. I hate dealing with my ex-in-laws.

That’s a public shaming and a lawsuit, baby.

But not by the Right. Censorship marches on.

The War in the Right

War has recently broken out in the Right. The Zoomers (say, 1995 births to 2015 births) are now beginning to have their voices heard on the Right as well as the Left. On the Left, they make up some portion of AntiFa, but on the Right they’re called “groypers.” Don’t ask why they’re called that, it’s ultimately as meaningless as Madonna’s purity ring.

What the groypers are doing is rejecting the Leftist-friendly premanufactured conservatism that is being pushed at them by Conservative, Inc., as exemplified by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA®. At one point, Charlie Kirk said, more or less, that a green card should be stapled to every diploma earned by a foreign student in the United States. In November, after attacks by the groypers, Kirk relented:

“I said something a couple weeks ago that was not an opinion I still currently hold where I said something about F-1 Visas where I said that F-1 Visas should be given out basically to every single person who goes through the college education system. I was wrong when I said that.”

When asked if he would support a policy that was good for the United States, but not good for Israel, Kirk refused to answer. Charlie Kirk wasn’t the only victim of the groypers:

Unlike illegal aliens, E.T. eventually went home.

The Zoomers see that they’re a generation that sees lower job opportunities because they’re facing increased competition by lower-paid immigrants, legal and illegal. They also don’t see a “conservative” case for making LGBTWXYZ+ a part of the platform, when there is nearly zero support for the Right from that group.

Silencing the groypers won’t make them go away, and is probably not possible – they’re bright and tech savvy in a way unlike any generation before. Regardless, this is another sign of our nation unravelling.

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs, with full bikini treatment.

Violence:

Up is bad. Violence is finally starting to drop for the winter, though it’s still higher than it was in spring. Will we have real riots in June, July, and August of 2020, or will the Left take a “wait and see” approach to see if their candidate is elected? Oh, wait . . . Biden? Yeah. They’ll riot.

Political Instability:

Up is bad, and it is up (a little) this month, and you can see this graph has some very interesting curves. It’s surprising to me how little, but I think that’s a reflection that, outside of between AOC’s ears, no one thinks that impeachment is going anywhere, and she thinks it’s a gum flavor, like spearmint or peppermint.

Economic:

Down is bad. The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in November. This is likely due to the Coppertone® we applied back to the economy back in October.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in. The numbers are down this month, and as you can see if you observe around the southern border. We could drop illegal immigration to zero if all new illegals were forced to watch MSNBC®.

Virginia and Demographics

The Virginia elections gave control of essentially all statewide institutions to the Left. From 1952 to 2004, the only Democratic candidate for president to win Virginia was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Since 2008, Virginia presidential elections have gone uniformly for Democrats – and now the transformation of the state is complete. Sure, there are still Republicans there, but from now on they will control nothing. As I wrote a year ago (Trump: The Last President?), this demographic shift isn’t only occurring in Virginia, but in Texas as well.

I can see why – old people really give you something to chew over.

As long as the demographic shift of new immigrants (yes, even legal ones) to places like Texas and Virginia continues, this trend is inevitable. The mathematics are simple – two out of three immigrants vote for Democrats. You cannot continue to import people who vote for Leftist policies and not expect that they’ll eventually win. The odd thing is that I’ve seen comments from folks in Texas saying, “It won’t happen here.” I’m sure that the folks in California and now Virginia might want to have a word with you.

This demographic change will lead to a permanently politically dispossessed class – and a feeling in the Left that the Left can make any law they like. And that will lead to a very difficult reaction. Heck, I’d consider moving overseas, but I’m scared of the six month rabies quarantine. I mean, would I have Internet?

Links

Please leave links either in the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you’re shy. If you email me, I won’t say that the link is from you unless I get permission. JOKE HERE.

From Vote Harder at The Burning Platform:

Bad Cop One – Taser Torture

Bad Cop Two – Mom Robbed of Bail

Bad Cop Three – No Such Thing as Excessive Force

Bad Cop Four – Growing things? That’s a raid.

Privacy? What’s that?

Overdue books? Jail. (I have two books that are overdue by thirty years.)

From AC at The Burning Platform:

AntiFa Assassination Guide

Groypers.

From KaD at The Burning Platform:

Al-Cleveland

From “Mygirl…maybe” at The Burning Platform:

More Virginia.

From Hank Curmudgeon:

Where the food is.

From Ricky:

Free Range Love

Food: Pigs in Danger

Coup?

Nearly a half billion guns in American hands.

Avoiding Civil War – Mises.org.

Robert Gore –Alternative Reality.

Trump.

The Atlantic: How America Ends.

AP on The Atlantic article above.

Trump Impeachment/Civil War.

Sessions protests.

Chinese Chess Game.

Coming soon: Weimar America.

Global Obesity, Axel Rose, and at Least One Orphan Joke

“Because when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby. Chubby rain!” – Bowfinger

Rumor has it that Axel Rose ate the rest of the members of Guns n’ Roses after their bus broke down while on tour and they were separated from food for several hours.

It’s the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it’s a time when people traditionally gain weight like Christian Bale getting ready to star in a movie about as your mom. On an annual basis, this had been my norm. Up until about four years ago, January started a (fairly) simple routine where I’d work out really hard, and lose the weight I’d gained in December in a few weeks, or maybe even into February. As I get older, the techniques of youth begin to not work so I have resorted to hacking off unneeded limbs until I get to an acceptable weight. I mean, who needs both a right arm and a left arm?

Christian Bale lost weight down to 110 pounds (653 kilograms) to play the role on the right. His diet was an apple and a can of tuna a day. After a while, I’d probably include the label and the can for extra fiber.

But it’s not just me that’s getting heavier over time. Since it’s easier to think about why in a bigger picture manner than it is to think about the fasting (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) and treadmill time I’ll be spending in 2020, I thought I’d think about what’s going on, globally, since it appears that the individuals that comprise humanity seem to be more globe-shaped every year.

Despite the world stereotype that the United States is filled with fat Americans, it’s not just the United States. The entire world is pretty chunky now. As you can see from the (pretty neat) embedded video, in 1975, the world wasn’t particularly fat.

The video only lasts about 40 seconds, so if you have a couple of Snickers® bars, your mom should be able to make it through the video.

From the video it’s obvious that the Soviet Union and the United States were pretty good at feeding their people, maintaining and obesity rate of somewhere between 10%-15%. I’ll maintain that a well-fed society is going to have some natural variation in weight, and in order not to have malnutrition, some portion of the population (including your mom) is going to be obese.

Of note, the places in Africa and Asia where you’d expect starvation back in 1975 show less than 2% obesity. Yup, science is proven right again – people starving to death rarely get obese.

If lifting weights was easy, it would be called “Your Mom.”

Fast forwarding to 1987, the very first country to increase to a greater than 20% obesity rate is Saudi Arabia. At that point in time, Saudi Arabia was transforming into a very wealthy country based on oil money. The next two countries to trip the 20% threshold were Libya (!) and the United States in 1992.

In 1998, Saudi Arabia jumped to 25% to 30% of population being obese. In 2000, the United States joined the Saudis, and Canada, Mexico, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Argentina and Chile all joined the 20% club.

Getting to 2014 (when the video ends) with the exception of Africa, China, India, (for major regions) and some smaller places here and there, the rest of the nations of the world have a greater than 20% obesity rate. The world is officially ranked: Mostly Chubby.

So, I’m officially not supposed to know that fat Bugs Bunny® is known to the Zoomers as Big Chungus. Pugsley HATES it when I know something like that. I even say “yeet” to really drive him nuts.

The title of the video is “How the World Became Obese”, and it’s a bad title. The video shows where the world become obese, and it shows when the world became obese. However, it never showed how the world became obese. Heck, even how is a boring question. How is just a matter of shoveling more Milky Way® candy bars into my body than my body needs for energy. Thermodynamics is simple that way.

As a result, kids are objectively bigger now. One kid on Pugsley’s 8^th Grade FB team was over 260 pounds. On my high school football team, the heaviest guy was 218, and he was 6’4”.

To me, the question is: why?

I don’t think you can pin the increase in obesity to a single factor. Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of reasons we’re fatter:

Kidnapping is word that has such a bad connotation – my parents just called it a “surprise adoption.”

Wealth. The world, as a whole, is wealthier now than at any time in history. It’s no mistake that wealthy countries got fattest fastest. Heck, we’re wealthy enough that Jupiter called and told Earth to get its own Netflix® subscription.

Inexpensive food. While the world is getting wealthier, food is cheaper than at any time in history. Farmers now have the ability to analyze in real time the missing nutrients for optimal plant growth, and apply the right amount of fertilizer to maximize profitability. Just like nutrients are managed, moisture can be managed as well. Finally, inexpensive herbicides and pesticides have kept bugs and weeds from getting fat instead of people. Food costs for a family in the United States have dropped from about 17% of disposable income in 1960 to about 10% today. Food is cheaper than your mother now.

Air conditioning and heating. Yes, mankind has been heating shelters for warmth since at least 1973. And that’s a long time. But mankind also used to have to work for it, gathering and chopping up firewood, and that burns a lot of calories. Air conditioning has been around at least since ancient Egypt (really), but it involved a lot of work, too. Perfect temperatures all the time with little physical effort is certainly a new condition for humanity. I don’t mean to brag, but I turned on my air conditioner before it was cool.

Improvements in transportation and logistics. When I was a kid one winter day Ma Wilder asked me what fruit I’d like from the store to put on ice cream. I answered, “Strawberries.”

Ma Wilder: “Nope, not in season.”

Obviously, this led to a long discussion of what “in season” exactly meant. Even when I was a kid, most things were available most of the time. And, when I was a kid, that didn’t mean that you couldn’t get strawberries, merely that they’d be hugely expensive. More often than not, Ma would just buy frozen strawberries instead. That was okay with me, since they were packed in sugary syrup. Just like blood is thicker than water, strawberry syrup is thicker than blood, so I have proof that ice cream is more important than family. I apologize to those of you that were offended, that joke was just perpetuating a viscous cycle.

Today, most foods we eat don’t go “out of season.” If it’s not the right time of the year in the United States for a food to grow, it’s the right time somewhere. Perishable foods are produced year-round, and shipped with great speed to your supermarket.

In an early example of international food trade, 10,000 cases of Hellman’s® mayonnaise were on the Titanic, headed for Mexico. The Mexicans were so upset that their precious mayonnaise was lost that they commemorate the day every year – Sinko De Mayo.

Inexpensive fuel. Increased production and fast transportation of refrigerated perishable food requires lots of fuel. Moving people around in cars, buses, trucks, and airplanes requires lots of fuel. Fuel is, even at $2.50 a gallon, historically cheap. It’s so cheap, I’m thinking about filling my hot tub with kerosene instead of water, so I can get that freshly waxed smell all of the time.

The additional effect is that motorized travel is the standard. Rather than walk to dinner, people drive, even for a few blocks in many cases. Schedules become built around cheap transportation – rather than spend fifteen minutes walking, I’ll drive it in three – and the remaining twelve minutes I can do whatever I want to do. Uber and other rideshare services probably add to, rather than subtract from this problem.

We walk less, bicycle less, and, in general, get less exercise walking around than at any time in history.

Infinite amusement exists. When I was growing up, we had two televisions. And they were small. And there were only three channels – pretty much nobody counted PBS® as a channel. When we said there was nothing on, there was (especially after they turned off the station for the night) really nothing on.

Now, when my entire immediate family is in the basement, (The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I), there might be as many as 10 screens available to entertain us in the room. I’ve been watching a television show and looked around the room to see The Boy checking his phone, me writing this blog, Pugsley on his computer, and The Mrs. on a tablet.

Available to us now instead of the three channels of my youth are hundreds of channels, thousands of movies on streaming services, and most of the knowledge of human existence along with pictures of billions of humans. Some of these pictures even include clothed people, I have been told.

How could that not be the single most addictive thing in the history of mankind? That’s far more interesting than learning how to skip a stone or catch a fish. It’s certain that the Internet reduces physical activity in nearly every kid growing up today.

Hey! I have a crazy idea – let’s go stare at our phones somewhere interesting this weekend!

Types of food consumed is changing. 150 years ago, a typical diet would have had whole-wheat bread made from four ingredients, whole milk, butter, onions, cabbage, beets, apples, plums, actual meat, fish, corn and potatoes – food with virtually no artificial ingredients. And sugar would have been rare.

You know what you eat now, and it’s nothing like this list, at least for most people.

Food itself is changing. A million years ago we invented cooking. 10,000 or more years ago, we invented beer and decided farming was a good idea so we could brew more beer (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer), which also added grains as a big staple food. About 3,000 years ago, we began to change a single plant species, brassica oleracea, into over 21 different foods (LINK), and began to cultivate hundreds of other plants as well. We were changing the food.

Five hundred years ago, Columbus took smallpox to the New World, but brought back syphilis, as well as corn and potatoes. I guess it was a fair trade. But our diet changed again.

In the 20^th Century, however, all of that changed. Doritos© have more than forty ingredients. French bread? Four. I wrote a little bit more about that here: (Doritos, Obesity, Addiction, and Nic Cage). Now with replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup? Certainly the same thing, right? Oh, they’re metabolized differently? Nah, that shouldn’t matter.

Okay, I know I’d get in trouble if I didn’t include this one.

Work is changing. As people innovate, jobs become less labor intensive. Even small jobs have specialized mechanical tools to save labor. Desk jobs are now more numerous, and they have changed, too. Computers likely lower overall movement in an office – I haven’t seen a study to this effect, but I’m guessing that the average person sits twice as long at work in 2019 as compared to 1975. I discussed that here (Sitting? Death. Get up. Neal Stephenson says so.)

Lower tobacco consumption. Tobacco has the obvious negative issues, but it has some positive ones as well: it helps keep weight down. As tobacco consumption decreases, the stimulant/weight loss effect of tobacco disappears, and weight goes up.

None of these factors constitute an excuse – it’s an explanation for a global trend. We actually live in the first time in human history when hunger is the exception, rather than the normal condition. I certainly hope that’s a condition that we have for a long, long time.

If you are, like me, carrying more weight than you’d like – own it. If you don’t own it, you’ll never do anything to change it. Now where is that egg nog?

It’s A Big World – Big Enough For Success

Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” – Lord of the Rings

It’s almost as much fun as when I get the USB in on the first try.

Two pennies.

But I’ll come back to that.

One day, Aesop over at the Raconteur Report (LINK) had linked to one of my posts. The result whenever that happens is quite a bit of traffic – the Raconteur Report is pretty popular. I thanked him in the comments section over at his place. His response? Something on the order of, “No problem. It’s a big Internet.”

His reaction was typical of every rich, confident and successful person I’ve met. They want to help other people, and they want to see them succeed. I think part of that is the desire for a legacy. When you’ve already earned more money than you’ll ever spend in a lifetime (or have millions and millions of pageviews), you have to have other goals.

Really rich people have iPhones® and both kidneys.

In my life, I’ve had the good fortune to know quite a few people that were very, very, successful. The really rich people I knew who had built their own businesses had a surprising similarity: they wanted to help others become successful. Each one of them gave some of their time to do so. They had determined that success was something not to be hoarded, but to be shared. They wanted more people in the club, because those cigars made of $100 bills won’t smoke themselves. At one particular career crossroads, I spent some time with one of these friends, charting a path forward (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman).

This blog is at least partially a result of discussions I had with my wealthy friend. This first three years have gone (more or less) according to plan. Next? Well, after I get my underground volcano lair running and staffed with henchmen, you’ll see. It’s hard to find good henchmen nowadays, and even harder to insure them – the actuarial tables show a high rate of workplace-related injuries when henching.

But think of all of the pension plan savings!

My friend died not long after I started writing, and certainly before I had any lasting success. He was an early encourager. I had a few other business ideas, and I ran the ideas past him. He was encouraging, but his encouragement wasn’t in order to make a buck: his success was me being successful. Like most good teachers, he didn’t tell me what to do, he asked questions, very good questions, like:

How big is your potential audience?
How do you connect with them?
Why did you lick your finger and put it in my ear?

Rich guys have figured out a secret – helping other people to be successful doesn’t make a rich person poorer. Let me explain:

The average home swimming pool is something like 20,000 or 30,000 gallons of water. Let’s use 30,000 gallons since I already did the math with that number. The economy is $21.3 trillion, per year. Let’s imagine that $21.3 trillion economy is represented by the water in the pool. How much water represents $1,000,000?

It’s 1/5 of an ounce. A shot of whiskey would be the equivalent of $15 million. 1/5 of an ounce is really small – let me give you another comparison. What weighs the same as 1/5 of an ounce of water?

Two cents. Or, as I started this post, two pennies.

You can take millions from that pool every year and no one would ever notice – like I said, this is $21.3 trillion annually. I hate to be all cheerleader-y, but it’s true – even now we live in an era of amazing abundance.

And they said Mittens didn’t have the common touch.

Yes, I know, the economy is awful for some people. Certainly, we’re faced with significant structural issues that will be challenging for years to come. But the ocean is still huge. The opportunities out there are amazing. Yes, it’s possible to make $1,000,000 a year. Heck, I went on Facebook® one time, and saw some guys that graduated about when I did. One of them had a successful restaurant. The other? Sold a successful business and was going to retire.

And, no, these weren’t Stephen Hawking-smart guys, heck, they didn’t even have wheelchairs. They didn’t even have amazing, unique business ideas, one has a restaurant, the other a small manufacturing business. They were average guys who worked very hard, and failed and failed and failed and then succeeded.

Why don’t more people make a million, or at least a few hundred thousand? Most often, we limit ourselves. I’ve written before that I don’t think that most people use even one tenth of their capability, and the reason for that is that they:

Are too cautious – they never take any risks. For many folks, this works fine. Being a dentist has a better average payout than winning the lottery. But, you have to live with being a dentist, dude.
Don’t believe in themselves – caution is one thing, but I have seen people limit themselves because they don’t believe in their own talent. And to think that Kamala Harris didn’t believe enough in her best
Stuck in a mindset that success only happens to other people, and that the only success they will ever have will come when other people allow it.
Afraid of failure – failure can be awful, debilitating, and soul crushing. Oh, wait, that’s my ex-wife, not failure. Failure’s bad, too.
Afraid of effort – success starts with, and ends with, work. And having parents that have fifty million dollars.
Have pants filled with raw liver – men who have pants filled with raw liver have had very little influence over world events, historically.
Don’t have a goal – if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. This was, from time to time, my problem. I’d achieve a goal, and then? Shrug and say, “What next?”

Hey, at least she has experience.

I’ll admit, the first time one of my posts really hit big, it was featured by Remus at the Woodpile Report (LINK). I was happy, but almost apprehensive, like a dog that finally caught a car. What the hell do I do now? I was ringing up more views in a day on a single post than the entire blog did in the first nine months of existence. My apprehension: Was it good enough? Was there enough content on the site to keep readers? What the hell do I do with this car?

I guess I have to add another two reasons people fail is that they are:

Are afraid of success – I’ve seen people self-sabotage because the very idea of succeeding scared them. Their solution? Screw up.
Feel unworthy of success – likewise, people who don’t feel worthy will actively avoid situations where they are successful.

I’ve been lucky throughout most of my life to not be afraid of success, but driven to achieve it, maybe a bit too much. My wife says this is one of my personalities. There is easy-going Juan DeLegator, but this one she just calls The General. The General doesn’t care what time it is. The General doesn’t care if you’re tired. The General wants results. Now. I imagine it’s just as pleasant for everyone around me as it sounds, but, honestly, I enjoy it. Plus? The General gets results.

A personal hero, plus he shows up every Christmas to remind me of the true spirit of Christmas: maneuver warfare. The neighbors will never try to sing carols here again.

My idea is that what I accomplished yesterday was fine, but what I’m going to accomplish tomorrow better beat it. I have worried from time to time that the best post I’ll ever write is in the past. Then, however, I’ll put together a post that I like so much that I find it hard to go to sleep afterwards because I’m so excited about what I just wrote. I’m sure that someone is going to laugh, or learn, or both.

It is a big Internet. It’s also a huge economy. And to go out and make more money is, generally, easy.

But success isn’t necessarily only measured in money. There’s also other things. Like food and cars and cable television: the things that money buys.

Oh, okay, fine. There’s also family. And community. And faith. The same principles apply there, as well.

See what you made me do? The General is not amused. But he’s just pitching in his two cents.

“Should Have” – How Democrats Create Division

“The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” – Terminator 2: Judgement Day

I had a pet duck once, but he kept getting me up at the quack of dawn.

Probably one of the biggest traps I’ve seen people set for themselves is the trap of “should have.” Should have means that there is some promotion they should have had. There was some girl they should have dated, some relationship they should have salvaged. This “should have” then dominates their life. Like a short chubby kid trying to climb a greasy wall, they just never get over it. I should know, I installed a greasy wall to keep short chubby kids off my lawn. They do try to gnaw their way through.

As I’ve written about regret (Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.) before – that advice stays the same: learn from the past, but no one has enough time for regretting past actions. Trading regret for virtue is the best you can do. It may be unpopular, but some of the best of human traits can come as a direct result of the worst of times that we go through. While we may not be responsible for every situation we find ourselves in, the way we react to those situations is entirely ours, unless of course you’ve been hypnotized by the used Chinese smartphone you bought on E-Bay® and turned into a communist. If that’s the case I’d like to ask: what is it like to work at the New York Times™?

I guess my neighbor’s house is zoned as “doorway to hell” – only problem is that Castro keeps climbing out, wanting to bum a cigar.

But “should have” is a peculiar disease that is related to but is in some ways more corrosive than regret. It infects the victim with an entire alternate universe. This particular alternate universe is one where the world exists and the promotion was received, the girl was dated, the relationship salvaged. It’s a beautiful world, but it’s one that doesn’t exist.*

Probably the best view of this “should have” is the current scheme whereby votes are traded for grievances. Thankfully, when inventing a grievance, facts aren’t important – it’s only the feelings that matter. Clear thinking due to consistently defined language is actually the enemy. One example is the term “racist”.

I had occasion to visit a friend that I had known for years. I caught up with him on a great fall night. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t bring up politics – I knew that he was on the Left. For the most part it worked. We had a pleasant evening. But then he brought the subject of racism up.

Judging people by their race and sex is wrong! You white men should get that by now.

I had learned long ago that racism had a fairly specific meaning – it meant that the person felt that one race was superior to another. Superior how? Well, for the purpose of this discussion it simply doesn’t matter, because no one uses the word that way anymore.

The general definition of racism at some point changed to this: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity.” It is completely different. One means feeling superior, the other means being a jerk. As near as I can tell this shift in meaning seemed to occur during Bill Clinton’s time in office, because we couldn’t even agree what “is” meant in the 1990’s.

The beautiful part of either definition is that anyone can be racist – it’s an egalitarian definition. I’ve seen literature from EVERY race and ethnicity where they make the case that they’re the superior ones. And, I’ve seen examples of every race being discriminated against due to race. All of ‘em. In a sense, either of those definitions of racism is fair.

Fair? That simply won’t do.

After discussing the definition for about an hour, I finally teased out of my friend the idea that every white person was racist, and that only white people could be racist. He claimed he was a racist, not because he wanted to be, but he nevertheless was. Why? Racism had been redefined in his mind as the systematic oppression of non-white people. Could a black person be racist? No, because they weren’t white. Only white people can be racist. Chinese? No. Hispanic? No. Penguins? No.

Racism had been redefined from an equal opportunity word, to a word that could only be used against white people. Will Smith, with an estimated net worth of $300 million dollars, was somehow oppressed by the system more than, say, me. Colin Kaepernick, who almost no one knew or cared if he was black, started his own controversy by kneeling as a result of grievances. Colin also identifies as a quarterback, but that’s a longer story. Rodney Harrison (who is black) oppressed Colin when he said, “I’m a black man, and Colin Kaepernick, he’s not black. He cannot understand what I face and what other young black men and black people or people of color face . . . .”

Oops.

Colin Kaepernick – making Tom Brady the second most hated quarterback in the NFL©.

And academia forms a pipeline for the grievance system. The Master’s thesis of Jack Merritt, who was stabbed to death on the London Bridge by that recently released Muslim terrorist in England was: A Critical Analysis of Over-Representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Males Aged 18-21 in the British Prison System. Well, that thesis aged poorly.

Oops.

Grievances don’t have to be about race. They can be about your sex, or your orientation. If INSERT GRIEVANCE CLASS HERE didn’t get the job designing nozzles for whipped cream propelled by nitrous oxide? It had nothing to do with their 1.93 GPA in ancient Celtic dialects, it’s because they’ve always hated people like GRIEVANCE CLASS MEMBER.

The incomplete list of grievances includes: “cisgender, fat shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture and whiteness.” This comes from the Wall Street Journal opinion piece “Idea Laundering” in Academia, (LINK, BEHIND PAYWALL) by Peter Boghossian. These are the things the Left hates.

This list perfectly paints the villain of the Left: a white, married father in a committed and strong marriage with his wife. He’s not in favor of rape, but since he’s a male in a marriage he must be guilty of it, since marriage is just using the patriarchy to enforce that horrible male concept: monogamy.

What is the motive for all of this? Colin Kaepernick got notoriety while winning a total of one game in the 2016 season. He’s now sitting on a $20+ million fortune, plus an undisclosed amount of money from his Nike™ contract, reported to be in the millions. I mean, some people work all year and don’t make a million dollars.

Thankfully we live in a society where academics have no consequences for the real-world application of their ideology.

The student, Jack Merritt stabbed to death on the London Bridge on November 29, 2019? He was rewarded with a Master’s degree for agreeing with the narrative. All of the academics that supported this system? Grants. Tenure. Bacon-wrapped shrimp parties where they talk about how inferior the hoi-polloi (you and me) are. Leftist politicians who fund this mess get votes – and the more grievance they can find, the more likely they’ll get great ‘voter-engagement’ – which translates into more people voting. Heck, it’s worked on Pop Wilder – after he died he’s been consistently voting Democrat.

We live in, by far, the most prosperous and egalitarian society (the West in general) in the history of mankind. Every system that government doesn’t meddle in (like education and medical care, and Aesop has already solved those in my favorite post of his – ever – LINK) generally goes down in cost. But that doesn’t stir up voters. So, let’s get involved in college education, so we can create more grievances from people who had no business going to college, getting degrees that had no probability of being worth anything. Sounds like a Sanders voter in the making!

There’s nothing bad about fighting to make the world better. There’s nothing wrong with making the future a better time for everyone. But when you get stuck on the way things should be?

Yeah.

*Unless the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. If it does, everything happens, which means that there’s a universe where I have hair and have just been re-elected Emperor of Wilder Land, where everything is covered in barbeque sauce, except for the things that require ranch dressing.

FYI – The Civil War Weather Report will be next Monday – there is some data I need that isn’t published until the first Friday of the month. I do promise a high likelihood of bikini graphs.

Black Friday, Cindy Crawford in a Swimsuit, and Karen

â€œWe can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.â€ â€“ Marge Simpson

Okay, I used this last year.Â But, really, fizzy toots?Â Itâ€™s a holiday classic.

Thanksgiving morning I was in bed, in that half-slumber that I slip into when thereâ€™s no danger that I have to go to work.Â The Mrs. stirred next to me.

â€œWhenâ€™s the turkey going to be done?â€

John Wilder:Â â€œYeah, babe, when is the turkey going to be done?â€

The Mrs.:Â â€œNo, I mean it.Â I have some other things I need to cook.Â When will the turkey be done?â€

John Wilder:Â â€œOhhhhh, I havenâ€™t put it in the oven yet.Â I thought, as much as you were making six other dishes, that you were gonna do the turkey, too.â€

This was, of course, a stupid idea.Â I have cooked the turkey every year, ever, since weâ€™ve been married.Â Everything else (except pumpkin pies) has been The Mrs.Â Why would I assume that The Mrs. was going to cook the turkey?

I have no idea.Â But I did.

We Wilders are night owls, when allowed to go feral unconstrained by the tyranny of work, so having a dinner at supper time (or a supper at dinner time) would just be fine.Â Since we bought everything weâ€™d need for dinner yesterday, I knew weâ€™d be fine â€“ no last minute trips to stores for us, and that was good.

Reprinted with permission, now 50% off!

Because I hate going to the store â€“ especially anytime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.Â I hate it so much, that when I was (much) younger, Iâ€™d do all of my shopping for presents during a two hour period on Christmas Eve.Â But yet, there are people who look forward to Black Friday, which to me is the sort of hell I imagine that H.P. Lovecraft reserved for Beto Oâ€™Rourke, except Betoâ€™s hair would be on fire and he would have surgically attached flippers instead of arms.

Black Friday is a day that some people look forward to.Â While I donâ€™t share in their enthusiasm, I can understand it.Â There is something about shopping that makes people feel good, unlike the turkey tartare I tried to serve the family on Thanksgiving.Â Who knew you had to thaw the turkey before sticking it in the oven?

Shopping is of vital importance to businesses â€“ they want to capture as much of your money as possible.Â They study ways to arrange merchandise so it is most attractive, to create advertisements that engage with your psychology to drive you to purchase, and purchase from them.Â If you look at shopping as a science, shopping has been studied by economists, business majors, and psychologists more thoroughly than I studied Cindy Crawfordâ€™s, umm, charm, in my younger days.

Remember, actresses are different than models â€“ actresses can read.Â Also, I donâ€™t know if I can fit an actress in the basement freezer.

Again, I donâ€™t begrudge people who are on a tight or fixed budget that are attempting to get a good deal â€“ that would be heartless.Â But yet, isnâ€™t Black Friday based at least in part in . . . greed?

The idea of getting a 65â€ 4K PhilipsÂ® television for $278 when it normally retails for $448 is the essence of Black Friday.Â Â $10 CrockÂ© pots with a $10 mail-in rebate are Black Friday.

If you buy three Rose Ticoâ„¢ figures, youâ€™ll spike worldwide sales by 3000%, and give DisneyÂ® hope that Star Wars:Â The Ruse of SoywalkerÂ© will be successful!

Why do we get such satisfaction over buying things?

It is wired into us â€“ once upon a time, we were hunter/gatherers. This is similar â€“ shopping isÂ Hunting is still hunting, which is good.Â Work?Â Work is where men go to avoid gathering and think about hunting.
Shopping distracts us from our problems. If weâ€™re worried or sad?Â â€œRetail therapyâ€ can be cheap â€“ if you have inexpensive tastes.Â But when the shopping is done – if you have a real problem like having surgically attached flipper arms â€“ theyâ€™re still there.
In todayâ€™s world, there are a lot of people that live lives that are marked by a nearly complete lack of control. Theyâ€™re controlled by spouses at home, bosses at work, and the number of choices that the own are small.Â Shopping gives them a sense of control.

There was a hurricane this year named Karen.Â Managers everywhere quaked with fear.

Instant satisfaction is built into shopping. Why wait for later, when you can have it now (or in 36 hours with AmazonÂ© Primeâ„¢)?Â Rather than wait for what your goal is, you can have some smaller thing now.Â And itâ€™s certain.Â Who cares if it derails your longer term plans?
Shopping for neat things floods your brain with serotonin like an autistic clown with a firehose. Serotonin stabilizes mood, so if youâ€™re depressed, shopping can make you feel better, and you donâ€™t need a prescription for XanaxÂ®.
Shopping resolves boredom. Kids doing well in school, job going well, no financial problems and relationship with spouse is fine?Â So boring.Â Hey, letâ€™s spice life up by shopping for things we donâ€™t need!
When we lived in Alaska, we would go to auctions because it was fun. Every so often some family would say, â€œThatâ€™s it!â€ and decide to move to the Lower 48.Â Thus?Â Â I bid $70 on a table saw that I could have bought for (drumroll) $70 â€“ yes, it was a pretty crappy saw.Â Why?Â Scarcity.Â People were bidding, and, well, I won.Â And scarcity is the true key to Black Friday.Â Only seven fruitcake-toasters at $92 off the retail price of $292?Â I must have one!

Most vices, when kept in check, arenâ€™t a problem.Â Â But Black Friday seems like a drug thatâ€™s designed to take advantage of the various â€œsatisfactionsâ€ listed in the bullet points above.Â Thankfully, there are other cures.

We live in a society where most of the basic needs are easily met for most people, at least for now.Â Yes, you might not have a 65â€ LED television that doubles as a tanning bed.Â But nearly everyone has food.Â Nearly everyone has power, heat, and access to a library.Â How else could people spend those same hours and minutes that would otherwise be spent in a WWEÂ®-level fight over an inexpensive radium-powered popcorn popper and a coal-powered flashlight?

In breaking news:Â Coroners report that Jeff Epstein was injured at a Black Friday sale.

They could write.Â They could visit a sick family member.Â They could face digestive difficulties because Dad put the frozen turkey in the oven.Â They could play cards or board games and have family fun.

Oh, wait â€“ that describes the Wilder family.Â I really should have realized that putting a turkey filled with ice into the oven wasnâ€™t my best idea . . . .

Axis and AlliesÂ®, anyone?Â I have PeptoÂ®.

â€œGoing to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.â€ â€“ Norman Schwarzkopf

Happy Thanksgiving 2019: Including Booze, Zombies, Joan Crawford, and George Washington

“Thanksgiving is falling on a Thursday this year?” – Home Improvement

You can make more friends with six bottles of wine and a kind word than with just a kind word. I think that is somewhere in the Bible?

Thanksgiving is, I think, my favorite holiday. When done properly, it is a holiday devoted to, well, giving thanks. It’s like a super easy quiz question – what you’re supposed to do is right in the label.

When I was growing up I certainly looked forward to getting presents at Christmas. But the very presents that made Christmas so exciting when I was five or six somehow detracted from the holiday when I was eleven or twelve. Getting presents was still nice, but when it came to serenity, nothing matched Thanksgiving. At a younger age, presents were more important than serenity. As I grew older? Serenity took a lead. Now? Serenity is miles ahead of presents.

Ma Wilder saved the tins. I have no idea why. Also? Better if the sauce is not too blue.

I should point out, that when growing up, I lived in our mountain redoubt, Wilder’s Nest. The nearest town that had a fast food restaurant was 45 miles away. The nearest store that you could buy a cassette tape at was 45 miles away in that same town. In a radius of 10 miles from my house, the total population was probably 200 people or less. It was so rural that I thought laughing stock were amused cattle.

But Black Friday didn’t exist. Shopping the day after Thanksgiving? Nope – in fact if we left the property at all (besides driving 30 miles to pick up Grandma Wilder to bring her to Thanksgiving dinner and drop her off afterwards back at her place) it would be to see how deep the snow was up on the pass. Not that we didn’t go outside – on Thanksgiving day my brother and I would often throw a football in the front yard, if it wasn’t too cold. And as the youngest, it was my job to bring firewood from the pile to the house.

You have to be very careful hanging coats at Joan’s house. Apologies to Blue Oyster Cult®.

What we did do, however, was be together as a family. We played cards. We (minus Ma Wilder) watched football. I read novels. Pa Wilder might fiddle in the shop with something, especially if Ma Wilder was irritated about something. It was past hunting season, but too soon for snowmachines. The weekend was quiet. And not quiet like hanging out in the bushes at the neighbor’s bedroom window quiet, I mean really quiet.

I can’t say that Christmas was quiet. Heck, it’s not quiet now. And while most Thanksgiving holidays looked the same, Christmas was often much more memorable – but memorable for the wrong reason. My junior year left me as mad as I can remember after a Christmas, and not because I didn’t get what I wanted. But I can’t remember a bad Thanksgiving.

Even now, Thanksgiving has always been a relaxing day for The Mrs. and I – we never let it be dictated by outside forces – Thanksgiving is a family holiday – our immediate family. Since we’ve been in Mayberry, we certainly do have dinner often with my in-laws, but if we decided to go to Nepal to have tea with Liam Neeson so he can paint our toenails again, well, we’d do that. On Christmas, we give into that pressure. But not on Thanksgiving.

I resent vegans. They eat the food my food eats. So inconsiderate.

But the name is Thanksgiving. Being thankful, having gratitude for the things around you is very healthy. People who are grateful are more healthy, have better relationships, sleep better, and have better self-esteem whether or not they get a participation trophy.

What am I thankful for?

My family.
The fact that my family puts up with me.
Canned corn.
The relative prosperity I live in and my economic situation.
The readers of this blog.
That the aliens from Tau Ceti no longer come at night and impregnate me.
That the aliens from Tau Ceti pay child support for the stupid alien babies.
That we have the freedom that we do have in our country today.
That The Mrs. uses a snow-globe instead of her glass eye during the holidays.
That the troubles I have had in life have made me better.
That I still see amazing things every day – a great sunrise, a tree silhouetted against the stars.
The health of my family.
People being kind when they have no reason to be.
That every week I get to learn something new, and make something new.

Okay, the two of you that saw Firefly® are laughing.

George Washington tried to capture the essence of Thanksgiving in his first proclamation:

By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks:

for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation

for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war

for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed

for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted

for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;

and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions:

to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually

to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed

to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord

to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us

and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Geo. Washington

George Washington spent about 10% of his presidential salary on whiskey. He had more than one gun. He grew tobacco. So, is the ATF proof of British collusion?

I know that George isn’t universally loved: Lord Bison, for instance, is not amused. But Washington did do some things right, and set a precedent that more or less set the stage for retaining the freedoms we still have left, and has the best eggnog recipe (Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE). And as to his proclamation of Thanksgiving: I’m not sure that a similar document could be written today, especially since we have spellcheck.

It’s well known that zombies will ignore Congress. They want to eat brains, right?

Regardless of what you are thankful for, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving!

Alexander the Great, Smallpox, and Saving Western Civilization

“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread. See what it unravels.” – The X-Files

Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear had one thing in common: same middle name.

In 333 B.C., Alexander the Great entered the city of Gordium. In the city there was a really tangled piece of rope – so tangled that no one could see how the intricate knot was made. It was ancient. The legend was that whoever could solve the knot, would become ruler of all of Asia. We have a similar puzzle in our laundry room, and whoever can sort all of the socks can choose dinner next Wednesday.

Alexander the Great, it is said, fiddled with the knot for a few minutes. After deciding that was as useless as trying to push a piece of spaghetti, Alexander drew his sword and cut the knot in half. Problem solved. Was he worried that the locals would think he was cheating? Nope. He had an army. From this story we get the phrase “Gordian knot” for a problem that can’t be solved under the terms it was created.

I’m just hoping Pugsley doesn’t solve that sock problem by putting them down the garbage disposal. Again.

Okay, this isn’t my laundry room. But I once did own a hat just like that one.

We are in a strange place. In the nation, and in nations all over the world. We are all separating. The world is falling apart. But don’t consider world civilization a complete failure – remember, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still full after over 100 years so that counts for something.

The unravelling of society, however, can be seen in many ways:

Vaccine Believers and Anti-Vaxxers
No Brexit and Brexiteers
Global Warmists and Climate Deniers
Globalists and Nationalists
Flat Earthers (they’re all around the globe!) and, um, I guess Sphere-ists.
Left and Right
Nuclear Power Advocates versus No Nuke Activists

This separation was pointed out to me in an email from my friend who I will call John, because he has an awesome first name, and I promise is totally not my alter ego. The questions he asks are deep, and the answers aren’t necessarily obvious. When I finally get to a post based on one of John’s ideas, it might have taken dozens of hours of study and research where I try to prove my ideas wrong with the data. Occasionally, I do prove myself wrong. As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

If you haven’t seen this, it’s Thanksfabulous.

I won’t go into detail on all of the symptoms of unravelling listed in the bullet points above, since if I did I think the post would be longer than Bill Clinton’s address book. And I could easily add additional topics, like the validity of the Moon landing, homeopathy, and court verdicts like the one showing RoundUp® causes cancer. But I’ll discuss just vaccines, for an example.

All vaccines are safe and a good idea. Well . . . maybe not. I looked first at chickenpox. Deaths from chickenpox have dropped since the chickenpox vaccine became mandatory from about 100 deaths per year in the United States to (as near as I can find) zero. But let’s face it – to die of chickenpox a kid has to have a pretty weak system already. If it wasn’t chickenpox, somebody would have probably popped the kid with a Nerf® gun or the kid would have faced a strong breeze and it would have finished him off.

But let’s assume that the 100 who died were perfectly healthy kids. The vaccine costs about $300. Multiply that by the 3.9 million kids born in the United States each year, and the cost of the vaccination alone is nearly $1.2 billion dollars. Divide by the one hundred substandard kids you would have saved, and that’s (drumroll) nearly $12 million dollars per kid “saved”. I assure you, you can make a new one for far less than that.

He also lifts dictionaries to work out. He says that’s how he gets definition.

The cost benefit ratio is silly. If anyone said we had to spend a billion dollars to save 100 random kids, we’d never do it – don’t believe me? Our school buses are made from thin sheet metal by the lowest bidder. If we spent that same billion dollars on safer school buses, we’d save far more than 100 lives. I don’t doubt that the vaccine works.

So what? It’s not worth it.

I moved to the next vaccine: Gardasil©. Gardasil™ protects against nine variations of HPV – HPV is the stuff that gives humans warts. In this case, Gardasil® protects against warts on your naughty bits. So, I started to research, but I assure you I avoided pictures. Ewwww.

I attempted to look into vaccine safety for Gardasil©, and found a most curious phenomenon. When I tried to find information that showed data that put Gardasil™ in a bad light, Google® was useless. Any query about deaths related to Gardasil® led only to how safe and wonderful it was and how we should probably rub it into the fur of our pets, bathe in it, drink it in shot glasses.

I swapped over to Bing© and got actual answers to the question about Gardasil© safety, learning that there were nearly 63,000 reported adverse reactions to Gardasil™, 317 reported deaths, and a study indicating that maybe Gardasil™ causes infertility in 1/3 of the women that take it.

In fairness, it is thought that the vaccinations of Gardasil© might save 2,900 lives a year from cervical cancer starting sometime in the year 2046. This sounds like me trying to make a joke, but most cases of cervical cancer won’t hit until a woman hits her fifties, and the vaccinations didn’t start in earnest until just over a decade ago on teenage girls.

So, what if Gardasil© is the vaccine that causes the zombie apocalypse? Hmmm? Didn’t think of that in your double-blind studies, did you?

And I used the word “might” for a reason. There’s no study that shows that Gardasil® will stop cervical cancer, although I’ll believe scientists are probably right. But that has to be viewed with a grain of salt, too: according to one source, the fatality rate of cervical cancer for women who get regular tests is nearly zero, with or without Gardasil©. I ran the numbers on this one, and on a cost basis it’s better than chickenpox, at only $700,000 per theoretical future life saved in 2046.

Me? If I ever get a uterus, I think I’d skip Gardasil™, though that won’t be the first thing that comes to mind if I wake up with a uterus.

I’m not an Anti-Vaxxer: my kids are vaccinated against things like diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella. Yes, I’d vaccinate them again. I think we did opt out of the chickenpox vaccine for The Boy and Pugsley, but I can’t recall. It seems like there’s a clear cut case for eliminating many diseases, like, oh, polio. I don’t think the world misses smallpox, either, which was eliminated thanks mainly to vaccines.

I have another vaccine joke, but it’s like smallpox: no one gets it anymore.

But anyone who questions a vaccine is branded an “anti-vaxxer” and ignored. In fairness, many people who question vaccines have valid questions, and want the real information so they can make a choice. Google®, however, seems to think that sort of question is not valid, and only pointed to pro-vaccine sources in page after page after page of results, no matter how I asked the question. As Mark Twain said, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.”

And that illuminates the real problem.

The legitimacy of Big Science is in doubt. The legitimacy of Government is in doubt. People are also doubting:

The educational system.
The United Nations.
Mainstream news media.
Mainstream entertainment media.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

And it’s not just in the United States – it’s spreading. Riots have broken out in Chile, which is the most prosperous nation in South America and has the least amount of income inequality on the continent. Europe is facing Brexit, the Yellow Vest movement, and the national rejections from countries like Denmark, Poland, and Hungary to unfettered migration.

I guess Hillary is still looking for Mr. Riot.

The world is unravelling. One possible reason is we’ve reached the end of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) where this sort of social chaos is to be expected. Another is that we are seeing increasing polarity in public life. While the Right has moved farther Right, the Left has gone very far Left. It’s not me imagining this, like it turned out I was imagining Tyler Durden after I started up all of those Fight Clubs®. No. This rift shows up in the graphs:

Politically we are flying apart. Is part of this demographics? Certainly. Immigrants (legal or illegal) to the United States vote overwhelmingly Left. Why? It doesn’t matter. They do. Immigrants and their children are perhaps the single largest driving force of this polarity shift, but there are other factors.

We’re also becoming more urban – this urbanization leads to a lower sense of belonging, and drives people to vote Left. Sure, you’re a fan of (INSERT FOOTBALL TEAM HERE), but how many people in faceless condos in Seattle or Salt Lake City or San Francisco know each other? When I moved to Modern Mayberry, neighbors up and down the street knew I worked at the PEZ® factory before the house deal closed. Do we know our neighbors like family? No. But we know who they are, and know a bit about them. Urbanized people are more disconnected from their neighbors than rural folks. That disconnection makes distrust in your neighbor that much easier.

Lastly, the Internet provides a source of information that wasn’t available in the past. What was only available in libraries and in mimeographed samizdat is now available to everyone. It’s now possible to research things like vaccines and global warming from your couch, and pull in better data than would have been available to almost any scientist in 1980. And news? The Internet has pulled it from the control of the gatekeepers. When John Podesta’s emails were leaked, I was combing through them, and found many things before the news media did, like the fact that a nice Nigerian Prince wanted to give him a lot of money.

These are the symptoms of a society where the fundamental premise of that society is no longer a given. The United States has been defined as meeting everything to everyone. We are finding that those are empty promises – it’s really about power and control. With the amount of information out there, however, power and control can’t be kept.

How do we solve this puzzle?

Our society, our culture, our trust won’t be regained through Congressional committees or an impeachment. It won’t be made whole by an election. And it won’t be healed through movies or television.

Someone, somewhere, is going to have to cut that knot.

Holiday Stress and Why You Don’t Need It, Featuring a Beer Drinking Baby

“Jen, if this needle goes past here, you’re fired. Does that make you feel stressed at all? Does it? Jen? Are you sure? Jen? Does it? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” – IT Crowd

Playing triangle in a band is something a Jamaican won’t do, mon. It stresses them out to be responsible for every ting.

There is a love/hate relationship with the Holidays. By the Holidays, I really mean Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve – and not any of the other 107 holidays in November or 69 holidays in December our crack Wilder research team was able to find with one Google® search. There are (really) days like National Cookie Day on December 4, International Ninja Day on December 5, and National Salesperson Day on December 13. National Salesperson Day? I’m not buying that one.

One reason we love the Holidays is how we looked forward to them when we were kids. The Holidays meant, at the minimum, time off from school. In the American Dream Household®, there was time for snowmen, sledding, and mugs of hot chocolate while we sang Christmas carols for our neighbors. On top of all of that, there was the smell of turkey on Thanksgiving, the tantalizing secrets of the wrapped mysteries under the Christmas tree, and the miracle of pulling Uncle Vern’s finger.

Okay, our neighbors had concertina wire and watch towers, so we couldn’t get within a quarter mile of their houses without the password. I’m sure we would have belted out a few Christmas carols if they hadn’t fired those warning shots.

I did accomplish one thing last Christmas. I won the Netflix® marathon.

As I got older, the hate part of the Holidays begins to show up: stress from bills, stress from dealing with corporate Christmas parties, stress from having to decide which sets of parents get which visits on which days, stress from having to deal with relatives that you’d rather never see again, and stress from hiding the bodies of those relatives you will never see again.

Some people get hit so badly with this stress that they actually panic. And panic can be a serious mental illness, not carefree and happy go lucky like the ones I have. But I gave up on being upset at Christmas years ago.

I’ve learned the secret: I don’t care.

I will say, the FBI looked more competent in Die Hard than they have for the last three years . . . .

Okay, that’s not entirely true, I do care. But I choose what I care about. And I choose what I don’t care about.

You see, the old line that “Aging is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter,” slightly modified, applies here as well. I’ll customize it a bit: “Holidays: If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

I think the biggest problem that most people have is high standards. High standards are a gateway to constant disappointment. If your life is wrapped around making the holiday perfect, then you’ll stress yourself out by trying to make the holiday perfect. And then? When you fail to achieve perfection? Your stress will increase that much more. Your stress might then turn from disappointment to depression, which I admire, because that shows real dedication that you don’t seen in those millennial kids nowadays.

As bad as that quest for perfection is, it can be even worse than that – often people want to view perfection not through their own standards, but through the views of other people. Now, on top of trying to meet your standards, you have to imagine what the standards of other people might be, and try to figure out how to meet those as well. It’s why Bill Clinton doesn’t do threesomes – if he wanted to disappoint two people at the same time, he could have just taken Hillary out for dinner.

Bill was especially disappointed when Hillary lost because he realized he wouldn’t get a fresh batch of interns.

However, you can make the conscious choice to not choose perfection. What happens if you don’t care if the turkey isn’t perfect? What happens if you don’t care if other people are upset?

Well, nothing.

Certainly, there’s something on my list above from bills to parties to relatives that is (or was) on your list. Me? Sure, I’ve had a disappointment or two, and yes, I’ve gotten stressed a time or two. But not recently.

If you’re feeling stressed at the holidays, the Internet will tell you to do lots of things. The top five tips (really!) on one particular site?

Take a walk in the sunlight.
Smell citrus.
Take yet another walk. (Yes, it was item one, and also item three.)
Take a supplement.
Squeeze between your thumb and forefinger.

Yes. These will all certainly help – help a journalist on a deadline come up with a “unique” take on holiday stress. I’ll admit, out of the 27 or so tips, there were some good ones. But when “Take a whiff of citrus” is in your top two ideas for dealing with stress? That’s almost as bad an idea as when they decided to put an “s” in lisp.

A journalist, an anthropologist, and a philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey Anderson, still no job?”

Between now and the New Year, we’ll probably not get farther than 90 miles from the house, and that will be to celebrate Penultimate Day (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust). We’ll spend time with people we like, and not people we have to spend time with.

Might there be some stress? Sure. That happens. But only if I want it to.