John – Page 96 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Defeating My Biggest Enemy: Me, Complete with Hairy Kardashians and Video Games.

“I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!” – The Empire Strikes Back™

Nah, I got an A. Got a perfect score on the final, plus I got to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate during winter break.

Ever think you could accomplish more? You can. Read on. It’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

When I was in college I took a course called Probability and Statistics, or as we referred to it at the time, Sadistics. During one lecture the instructor told the class a story about how a graduate student working on his Ph.D. was late to a class – so late that he’d missed the start of the lecture. The student saw two math problems on the blackboard. Thinking they were homework problems, he copied them down, and spent the weekend working on them. They were a little harder than usual, but he managed to finish them.

On Monday he returned to class, and showed the instructor his results. Turns out that the problems weren’t homework: these were two unproven theorems in statistics; unproven theorems that George Dantzig (the student) finished because he had no idea that they were too hard for him to do.

In Dantzig’s own words:

“A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, [his teacher] just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems up in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

At least he didn’t have to shag the professor, baby.

That’s a pretty good story, especially because it’s true and a great example of how much you can achieve when you’re too stupid to know that what you’re doing is impossible. It’s also a very good story to tell the boss the next time you’re late for a meeting at work, because his reaction will likely allow you time for independent exploration of all the employment opportunities this great nation has to offer.

So how do people sabotage themselves so they don’t achieve all that they could? How do they turn themselves into their own worst enemy? Today I’ll present three reasons. There are more, but what do I look like, a budget Tony Robbins?

I was wondering why that seminar only cost $14.98.

I think the worst is negative inner dialogue.

Ever make a mistake? Ever beat yourself up about it? Yeah, me too. But what I noticed is that when I beat myself up, I used to say things to myself that were meaner than any person had ever said to me in real life. Notice I said “used to” – I simply don’t put up with it any more. When I sense that inner beat down coming, I just shut it down.

If your best friend who has your best interests at heart wouldn’t say it to you, why would you say it to yourself?

Recently I read about a research study that indicated that you had more impact when motivating yourself if you encouraged yourself in the third person. Saying to yourself, “You’ve got this, John,” is much more powerful than, “I can do this.” Why? I have my guesses – it’s probably that you don’t want to fail when you’ve got some other person involved, so you dig that much deeper.

If that’s the case, how much more damaging is beating yourself up verbally in the third person? “I’m stupid,” versus “you’re stupid.” Think about it – and I advise you not to put up with your nonsense. Shut it down.

Yes, this happened.

Negative inner dialogue doesn’t help me, especially since whatever mistake I made was generally not even noticed by others. I hate to break this to you, but outside of your family, you’re less important than you think. People don’t notice the things you do all that much, and if they do? They don’t remember.

That may seem like a downer, but it’s really the opposite. It’s freedom, and another reason not to beat yourself up.

Next on the list? Belief that your goal is impossible.

Well, it isn’t possible, until you actually do it. Nobody had solved Dantzig’s theorems until he solved them. Heck, the Kardashians are too dumb to know they shouldn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars despite an utter lack anything resembling talent or a redeeming feature. Oh, unless you count their copious amounts of body hair. And I wouldn’t advise that you count their body hair, since that would take far too long. Plus? You’d get Kardashian grease all over you.

This is right before the hair covers them entirely in a protective cocoon so they can become giant genderless moth people.

I’ll note that nearly every time I was given an assignment that seemed impossible at work, I managed to crack the problem. What was off was my definition of impossible. I eventually ended up working for a boss that pushed me even farther. Nine times out of ten, he gambled and won. The tenth time? They fired him. Don’t feel bad for him – his severance package was about $2 million.

Finally, there’s not giving it all you’ve got.

This one is insidious. Here’s my example: in my career (the one that pays the bills, not this one) I’ve accomplished most things that I’ve ever wanted to do and have a whole batch of odd stories that I’ll maybe get around to telling someday. Does this mean that I aimed too low, that I didn’t push hard enough? Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve seen what some of the people at the top had to do to get there, and I like sleeping well.

It’s tough at the top. Everything is a tradeoff.

But here I can push myself, and sleep well. So, I write. I give that all that I’ve got, especially once I understood that I’d never get better unless I really pushed myself. And I can see results. I had a post that related to one I’d written back in 2017 that I was thinking of linking to. I pulled up the old post. I read it.

What made me happiest about the old post is: I’m better now than I was in 2017 – a lot better. How much better will I be if I keep pushing it, keep focusing on it for 20 hours a week for another decade? I have no idea. But we’ll see.

But I had my own George Dantzig moment before I ever heard his story:

I was in high school and a friend came over to my place. He and I sat down to play some video games, since we didn’t have a car. He went first. Normally on my first guy I’d score 10,000 or so. But my friend scored 50,000. I was amazed – I had no idea it was possible. So, my first guy up? 50,000 points. This was my best score ever.

I know – it looks exactly like a scene from The Empire Strikes Back©. But, trust me, this is really a video game.

What had been missing was belief. Seeing my friend play with no higher a skill level than I had do five times better than my best ever score flipped a switch. I believed. I could perform better than I ever thought possible.

But right now, it’s time:

Time to believe in yourself. Time to believe that your goal is possible. Time to work harder.

Go on, you’ve got this.

Black Holes, Money, Population, and 2050

“Using layman’s terms: Use a retaining magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons. These, in turn, fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large, and you produce a singularity.” – Event Horizon

I tried to explain the budget to my ex-wife, but she couldn’t grasp the gravity of the situation.

Right around the year 2002, I first heard of a geophysicist named Didier Sornette. Sure, you say, with a name like that, he’s French, how smart could he be? Well, let’s get this straight – I still blame the French for cigarettes, Leftism and the metric system, but Sornette is an original and first-rate thinker, even though the actual pronunciation of his name is probably “Dipstick Snort” because the French haven’t in the last 1600 years mastered spelling a word with any relationship to the way it is actually pronounced. In addition to Sornette, the French gave us Sophie Marceau, so there’s something they did right.

Even though Sophie Marceau played a villain, Bond© thought spending time with her was 00heaven.

Sornette is a geophysicist by degree. He initially studied the physics of earthquakes. Earthquakes, Sornette noted, don’t come about due to any single failure, but as a result of the microscope failure under pressure at LOTS of different places that at some point becomes critical. The pressure builds up, and it’s not the first little crack in the rock, but rather the aggregate cracking that eventually releases the stress. It does that all at once.

Sornette thought that he could use math to describe the behavior of rocks, and model it so he could understand earthquakes better. He worked for twenty five years on doing this, and found that there was a mathematical “signal” was present before the earthquake occurred. It wasn’t useful for predicting exactly when the earthquake would occur, but like everybody with a new tool, Sornette looked around and wondered where else it might be applicable.

Sornette looked at the financial system, specifically stock markets. He noticed that stock market crashes looked a lot like earthquakes. And, unlike earthquakes, financial crashes could devastate the world globally. He switched his focus to that, using math to model the financial bubbles that led to the high values that then came crumbling down when the market finally crashed.

In 2001, he decided to take this modelling a step further. What if, he asked (along with fellow researcher Anders Johansen) we try to model not only the financial system, but world population, too?

Okey, I’m betting Anders Johansen-a duesn’t ictuoelly telk leeke-a zees. Prubebly. Bork Bork Bork!

The result was the paper Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic, and financial indices, or FEEnite-a-time-a singuolerity in zee-a dynemeecs ouff zee-a vurld pupuoletiun, icunumeec, und feenuonceel indeeces in Swedish. That’s a really long title that could have been shortened to, Yo, something weird is coming, and I don’t mean your mother. You can find a copy of the paper here (LINK). It shows a May 29, 2018 date, but I don’t think there’s been any changes to it since its initial publication in late 2001. I’ll warn you – there’s a wee bit of math involved.

The paper starts with the statement that for most of the known history of the human race, our growth rate hasn’t been exponential, it’s been far faster than that. It took 1600 years to go from 300 million people in year 0 Anno Domini to 600 million. To get to a billion total only took 204 years. Double to two billion? We did that in 1927. Three billion in 1960, four billion in ’74, five billion in ’87, six billion in ’99, and seven billion in 2011. Now as I write this in 2019? 7.7 billion people. And only forty people are friends with you on Facebook®.

What allowed this population growth? Knowledge. The revolutions in agriculture (the first one, which I wrote about here: Beer, Nuclear Bikinis, and Agriculture: What Made Us Who We Are), industrial, fertilizer, medical, and information have allowed the population growth to accelerate like it has.

Sornette and Johansen studied several data sets. Population was one set, and another was the economic growth rate of the United States, as measured by the stock market. Even though the Dow Jones Industrial Average© (DJIA) didn’t exist before Dow married Jones, several economists have created data on what the data might have looked like. Is that a bit of a guess, like your mother’s weight since there aren’t scales that big? Sure. But, as we will see, it might be close enough.

Math is funny. When you divide something by zero, you get infinity. Several mathematical functions that describe things going to infinity do exist – we call those singularities. The funny thing is that they appear to exist not only mathematically, but in real life as well. They have real properties that we can predict, measure, and see. One popular example of a singularity is the black hole. Some scientist said, “Okay, gravity sucks, like your mom. But what if something had so much gravity that it trapped even light, like your mom?”

That concept blew their minds, but it was there in the math in 1916 when Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equation and divided by zero. A black hole is a singularity based around gravity – where gravity is so intense that we have no real understanding of what happens inside, like God divided by zero, liked what he saw, and said, “Yeah, this is the ultimate practical joke.” But singularities aren’t limited to stuff that would only interest starship crewmembers. Other singularities regularly occur in physical systems. Earthquakes.

Stock market crashes.

A scientific discussion of gravitation inside a black hole.

This wasn’t the first time someone calculated the date of a singularity based on population. In 1960, the prediction was published in the journal Science that the population singularity would hit on (somewhat tongue and cheekily) Friday, November 13, 2026. Didier and Johansen relooked at the data, and came up with an equation that they felt gave a better fit.

Their date for the singularity? 2052, +/- 10 years.

They then looked at the data (keep in mind, this was in 2001) and modeled the behavior of the DJIA©. What did they find? A singularity in 2053.

That was too close for coincidence. Two different data sets show the same predicted end date?

Thankfully, Sornette and Johansen are wrong, right? They certainly didn’t predict that the DJIA™ would be as high as 27,000 in 2019?

In fact, their prediction (in 2001) was that the Dow would hit 36,000-40,000 by 2020. They did leave some weasel space, noting that, “. . . the extrapolation of this growth closer to the singularity becomes unreliable . . .”

It’s say that they were pretty close, and far closer than I was in the year 2001 when I would have predicted the aggregate stock value of the DJIA© in 2020 would be worth a less than a handful of ramen noodles and ten rounds of .22 ammo. So they were far closer than I was.

One thing Sornette and Johansen noted was that the minor ups and downs would be of less consequence the closer we move to the singularity point. What happens each week is less important than the overall trend, so the data errors associated with “creating” a Dow Jones™ index before there was one probably isn’t too much of an error.

Here’s 100 years of stock market data, now with snarky comment.

Another conclusion of the equations is that population, technology and wealth is intertwined. The number of people that the world can hold is very much tied to technology. When modelling prehistoric population, no fewer than three technological ages – have to be mathematically introduced: hunting, followed by farming, followed by primitive technology are required to accurately model the actual population.

But when these intertwine, does the increased population lead to the technology, or do they feed on each other causing an explosion?

They feed on each other, causing an explosion in technology and population and wealth. More people lead to more wealth. More people leads to more technology to feed people which leads to even more people which produces more wealth which leads to . . . more people. The end dates are similar because the functions of wealth and population are related. You can’t have the super-exponential growth without the interactions. Sornette and Johansen came up with approximately 2050 for the end date. Ray Kurzweil (futurist) predicted the technological singularity would hit around 2045, which is pretty close.

Bill Gates gave up lap dancing and stripping after pulling a hamstring at a bachelor party, and he had to settle for his second love – computers.

But what happens next? What happens if and when the singularity hits? The authors indicate we’re probably in it a transitional phase already – the population growth rate peaked in 1973, and so did the world per capita energy use. Sornette and Johansen came up with some silly ideas of what’s next, but let’s be real: no one can predict what happens after a singularity – dividing by zero changes every rule.

We have no idea what happens inside a black hole.

I know that many of you sense the same thing that I do – we are changing at a pace that is already fast but that seems to accelerate: it’s faster every year. This is the case, and I don’t anticipate that things will slow in the next decade or two. Beyond that? It’s anyone’s guess.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Didier Sornette? He runs a group called the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, where they try to observe financial budget growth in real time. It’s here (LINK) and worth a few minutes of review.

So, if they’re right, it’s the best time to be in stocks, at least until the singularity occurs, the population collapses and the robots decide that to get rid of their pets . . .

Dow chart from here: (LINK)

China – What’s the deal?

“What does that mean? ‘China is here.’ I don’t even know what the hell that means.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Had enough Mongols? This is how you avoid Mongols, unless the 9^th Circuit says you have to let them in.

I’ve had my eye on China for quite a while. It knows why.

Anyway, China has in the past 50 years transformed itself from an example of the nation your parents warned you about: “See, eat your peas and study hard, you don’t want to be like China,” to a country competing for prime representation in the International House of Pancakes®. Okay, I made that up. I don’t even know if they have Frosted Flakes™ in China, let alone pancakes©.

For four thousand years, China looked inward. Only conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchu, the 20^th Century was a succession of weak leaders until the communist takeover at the hands of Mao Zedong. Mao seemed content to play with the Chinese people and the Chinese economy like a Doberman’s chew toy until his death in the 1970’s.

AOC will never be a doctor – she’s committing political Mao-practice.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked around at the huge Doberman spit-covered collectivist mess left by communism, and decided that something had to change. After visiting the United States, he decided that China needed way to get convenient chocolate milkshakes like that one Jimmy Carter got him at McDonalds®, and began reforming the economy based around market lines. You know, capitalism.

Capitalism worked amazingly well at saving a communist economy. Shocker!

The collective ingenuity of over a billion Chinese coupled with capitalist incentives and totalitarian controls has led to growth. The economy of China in 2019 is 91 times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng’s reforms began. Some before and after pictures become relevant at this point:

Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

What China has effectively done is make its citizens nearly 100 times richer since Star Wars® first came out. Perhaps more impressive is the amount of expertise that has been imported to China. By making first cheap junk in the 1980’s to radar detectors in the 1990’s to iPods® in the early 00’s to iPhones™ today, China has imported not only the technical know-how of cutting edge technology is design, it understands better than any other country in the world on how to build most things.

See, I told you I wasn’t exaggerating much. Two day shipping really changed their lives.

An engineer in California (who may or may not even be an American) designs the iPhone©. In China, they figure out how to build it. That know-how isn’t in a manual, it’s built up in thousands of mistakes that require solutions to produce a finished product. All of those solutions are known by the workers and engineers in the factory, and used to make production lines that much faster.

In this way, China has traded lots of cell phones for zillions of dollars that we just printed up out of thin air, sure, but it’s also trained itself on how to be an industrial superpower.

Industrial. But what about military?

No. China has seen our military and has no ambition that it can in the near future compete with American military power. Unlike the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Congress, China has no desire to fight World War II again. While the United States has fought in numerous conflicts in the last fifty years, China has fought in exactly one, an incursion into Vietnam back before Reagan was president. The Chinese make the Italians look like Patton with Pizza.

So, rumor is that they also have a tricycle attack brigade, but they were at nap time.

If I were Chinese President Xi Jinping, I would have no illusions about my military. Even if it fielded better tanks and planes than the United States, it still would come up short because outside of games of Call of Duty®, the Chinese military has no experience.

Instead: “China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare. These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare…” (United States Army Special Operations Command, 2014)

In particular, China has focused on trade. In the last five years, China has started an international cooperation scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has led to (so far) agreements with over 68 countries. The stated objective of BRI is that it is meant to produce closer ties and stronger trading arrangements between China and the rest of the world.

See, need some place to keep my stuff – Mom’s basement is full.

BRI consists of at least a trillion dollars of planned Chinese spending, and by spending, I mean loans. China will loan countries money to develop infrastructure – pipelines, roads, harbors, PEZ® mines, railroads, industrial parks, electric power grids, and airports to better move people and goods throughout the world. Certainly China won’t take advantage of the loan conditions if a country has trouble repaying it?

Actually, so far not really. In only one case has China seized assets, and the rest of them it has either renegotiated debt payments or forgiven them entirely.

So what is China doing?

It came to me one night while I was thinking about the blog and just drifting off to sleep. Thinking about this like a banker looking to gain leverage wasn’t the right framework. China isn’t building this trading network to compete with the United States. China is building this framework for life without the United States. BRI replaces our markets, and replaces what we’re shipping to them. But there’s more.

When you look at what China has, it is people, industrial capacity, and ingenuity. China needs raw materials. It’s short on food. It needs oil. By making inroads into Africa, China has started new mines, run by Chinese administrators and Chinese miners. China has built, using Chinese laborers and Chinese steel, new railroads in Kenya.

And all of this BRI stuff isn’t paid for in dollars. China has seen that the United States has managed to pay for debt in dollars it printed. If China can be the dominant country, it can pay for things in Kenya with Chinese money printed by China itself, rather than have to make iPhones® and send them to iNdiana© in exchange for dollars.

Perhaps it’s just the economy of the United States that China expects will be gone?

Beyond that, closer economic ties with a country that could dominate your economy certainly isn’t dangerous, is it? They’d never use their influence to change your laws, or influence your movies, right?

Set from the 2010 remake of Red Dawn before China demanded they not be the villain. Hmmm.

Belt and Road graphic (pre-meme) By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561

Stonewall Jackson, Patton, Wrecked Cars and Dealing with Fear

“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity

Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.

I had a Ford® Taurus©. Yes, that’s an admission of guilt. Even worse? It was a pale-lime green. I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair. After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays. But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.

As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display. Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question. The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office. I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on. After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.

I wanted it to show the thermometer.

Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.

I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia. I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®. I hesitated. What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French? Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?

Then I started to panic. Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric? I don’t even know how to drink in metric. Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink? How many metric days until Christmas? How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®? Perish the thought of being French and metric. That’s how we got Canada, after all. Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.

Sure, they look polite. But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.

The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together. That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers. If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways. Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.

An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.

Oops.

Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room. I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on. I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.

I’ve done stupider things. Some of them even when I was sober.

So, there I was sitting in my car. Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.

What? I came to my senses. It’s just a car.

I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely. And I got rid of the hesitation.

What led to the hesitation?

Fear. It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.

General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line. “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Not a bad way to get a nickname.

Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy. Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.

For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything.

So, why is fear so bad? What’s wrong with a little fear?

That’s simple: fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world. Period. I understand that’s a pretty bold statement. Can I back it up? Sure.

Let’s take envy. It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy. What causes envy?

Insecurity. Think Elon Musk feels envy? Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy. They’re not envious because they’re not insecure. They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt. All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.

That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera. It’s just another face of fear. And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.

Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?

Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery. But the concept is right. Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life. And fear is used to manipulate you. Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page. Here’s my analysis:

3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
25 were utterly useless.

I read the amusing stories. I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment. I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories. I skipped the fear manipulation stories. Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values. There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.

What’s the cure for fear?

Action. Press the button. Ask the girl out. Lift the weight. Press the button in your car. Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear. You will be stronger. You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear. And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.

Is fear useless? No. Fear can be used. Fear should be used.

General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

Fun fact: General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.

So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

Bikini Economics, Guns, and the Problem with Free Stuff

“Good job, isn’t it? Type something will ya, we’re paying for this stuff.” – Ghostbusters

I like guns. And butter. Especially cocoa butter. Admit it – you’ve never enjoyed economics more.

Economics means choices.

One choice presented by Marxist economics professors to hung-over sophomores in college is between “guns or butter.” This is a classic economic model. In it, a choice is presented: produce guns for defense, or food for the people, or another shot of Jägermeister© before Calc 201. I added the Jägermeister® for the sophomores. No one should have to learn 3-space vector calculus sober.

The idea is that there is some balance where government can feed people just enough so that they can make guns for beautiful Marxist bikini soldiers to take over the world with love and kindness and AK-47s. In this fable, once the world chooses peace (that means Marxism), guns will no longer be produced and the glorious workers will now luxuriate in a worker’s paradise.

These are the deep thoughts of a dimwitted socialist like Kamala Harris, or of an overly caring 11 year-old who is earnestly trying to solve the world’s problems. But I repeat myself.

Don’t be mean to Kamala. She already enough difficulty explaining to her husband why she’s in the top results for “slept her way to the top” on a Google® image search (this is true).

Just because Marxists were wrong about economics doesn’t mean that economies that there aren’t economic choices to make. There are. The biggest actual economic choice to make is whether to spend the output of that economy on building additional productive capacity or on Free Stuff.

Building additional production is investment in the economy. Sure, Leftists like to use “investment” as just another word for Free Stuff, but investment, by definition, produces a return. In the case of investment in an economy, after the investment is done the economy produces more than it did before. Instead of dividing a finite economic pie between guns or butter, the genius of investment is that it creates a bigger pie for everyone. By definition, that’s a win, because it also means more guns for everyone!

There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to lie. If she’s holding an AK, it’s time to lie.

This was self-evident in Western Civilization during the Cold War. We picked the strategy that we invest in our economies so that they became larger, and we’d defeat Communism by out producing them. In order to do that, we increased freedom of the free market so that instead of handfuls of production bureaucrats and commissars guessing what should be produced, millions of free people experimenting in an open economy would make that choice. The winners were selected by the market, and even when things like the Hula-Hoop® or Justin Bieber became wildly popular, industrial capacity was increased all across Western Civilization (and Japan, which had largely adopted all of the winning parts of Western Civilization).

I would try to Hula Hoop©, but last time the neighbor called an ambulance because they thought I was having a seizure.

We allowed this to guide our military spending, too. Multiple companies competed to produce new jet fighters that were more capable, missiles that were more accurate. The technical prowess of the military came not from a top-down dictate, but from the companies competing to produce better defense products. Sure, some of them were horrible, but most of our equipment and doctrine was better than the Soviet stuff. How much better? Ask Saddam Hussein.

As the focus of our economy was growth, the economy grew. How big did it grow? It grew to the point where Reagan could consciously bankrupt the entire guns and butter Soviet economy through pretending that the Star Wars™ missile defense was going to make intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete. The economy of Western Civilization was such a potent weapon because it harnessed the ingenuity of everyone through capitalist incentives and rewards. The system of capitalism was so obviously successful that China®, Inc. decided to copy it for their economy and get rid of the silly Maoist collectivism. Keep in mind, capitalism does not mean freedom.

Economies still have limits. There’s a maximum amount of “stuff” that the economy can produce, and certainly there’s a limit based on sheer physics, if nothing else, though we’ve yet to see it. The real choice isn’t guns or butter, it’s investment versus Free Stuff. It used to be that money mattered, but that was in the time before Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) fans tossed bottles of Jägermeister© into Congress and told ‘em to spend as much as they wanted.

If Venezuela had a dollar for every time giving out Free Stuff worked, they’d have zero dollars. Oh, that’s exactly what Venezuela has. Never mind.

What Free Stuff do the Leftists want to toss out?

“Free” Healthcare – for everyone. Including illegal aliens. You might think that they don’t give it away now – they do. A pregnant illegal alien show ups to have a baby? You get to pay for that right now. I guess the good news is you don’t have to change it’s diaper.
“Free” Daycare – for everyone. Why? Because who could be better at raising your children than the state. They do such a good job at the DMV.
“Free” College – for everyone. That kid that sat behind you with his finger up his nose, who talked about how he wanted to ride a tyrannosaurus on Mars? When he was a senior in high school? Yeah, he gets free college, too. Although riding a tyrannosaurus on Mars does sound cool.
“Free” Income – for everyone. Why not give everyone $1000 a month for free. It won’t distort the economy at all.
“Free” Reparations – not for everyone. People who were never slaves would get paid by people who never had slaves, for the sin of slavery. Makes about as much sense as the rest of this list.
“Free” Housing – just not in the gated communities where Congressmen live.

Oh, and don’t forget regulations, since regulations is another way to give Free Stuff. They take freedom from the economy and create winners and losers. The Green New Deal is an example of this – the idea of the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment – it’s all about creating a socialist economy. In the words of AOC’s advisor: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Regulations are used to change the economy.

Take a look at all of the innovation spawned by Communism!

At some point Free Stuff will grow to encompass the entire economy leaving nothing for productive growth. Ever notice that every Communist economy freezes at the technology level (outside of military technology) that existed when it went Commie? Cuba is a great example, what with all of the vintage 50’s Ford® and Chevy© rust buckets and fine Soviet cars they have on the streets. If only they would have waited until the 1970’s to go Communist they could have had Ford© Pintos™. That would have made driving exciting!

The same thing happened in Venezuela. PDVSA was a very profitable oil company before Hugo Chavez gutted it to provide Free Stuff to the Venezuelan people. Now? PDVSA is deeply in debt and incapable of producing as much oil as it did in 1998, despite having 77.5 billion barrels of reserves.

Yeah. Free Stuff can make a country bankrupt.

The nice thing about this concept is that it also applies to individuals. Every day each of us has a choice: do we work to make ourselves better, or do we goof off? The choice is an important one.

Do you invest time in increasing your capabilities every day? Do your work to make yourself better? I mean, really work? Take Steve Martin’s advice – “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” (“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.)

You have the choice. And time is running out. And I’m certain you can’t afford Free Stuff.

Neil Armstrong’s Secret Moon Diary, Revealed at Last

“The Moon Unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

There’s always that one kid who won’t smile in the team picture.

I was at a garage sale the other day when I came across a small leather-bound journal in a box filled with Tupperware®. Embossed on the worn cover was a now faded and flecked NASA logo that had once been a solid, shiny gold. In the lower right-hand corner I noticed, so faded they were barely visible, two initials: N.A. I flipped through and saw page after page of journal entries in what I assumed to be Neil Armstrong’s printed writing. I quickly paid the $2.50 price on the orange sticker on the book.

Here are the journal entries:

7/14/69, 21:00:00 GMT

Countdown begins. I will admit to being a bit excited. A rocket launch is never a routine event. They’ve kept us busy though, re-practicing procedures, re-reviewing maps of the Sea of Tranquility, and, for Buzz Aldrin, eating meals consisting entirely of re-fried beans. He says it’s for luck. Michael Collins continues to be . . . Michael Collins. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile. Or blink.

7/16/69, 07:22:15 GMT

Last shower, shave and breakfast. Collins doesn’t eat anything, stares blankly ahead – I guess that’s the way he deals with stress. Buzz had 16 cups of coffee – I counted them – and about thirty eggs. “For luck.”

Fun fact: your car insurance may cover you if you’ve got a rental, but generally not if you leave the United States.

7/16/69, 13:00:00 GMT

Ignition of the main engines, then 17 long seconds later, liftoff as the Saturn V slowly moves past the tower. The first stage burns for three minutes, total, and then stage two kicks in after a brief lull, and burns for nearly six minutes. Two minutes later, we’re in orbit. All of this is exactly as planned, exactly as written down in the procedures. Eleven minutes for Apollo 11 to enter orbit. That’s got to be a good omen.

For the first time in the mission, we’ve got some time to kill. I can’t stop smiling. Collins continues to stare directly ahead. “Mike, are you doing okay?”

He slowly turned his head towards me: “All of my systems are operating at nominal levels.” He then turned his head back towards the controls.

Does he blink? I’m interrupted by groaning coming from Buzz.

“Oh, man, I’m hurting. I didn’t think about the pressure differential.” He’s holding his stomach.

The pressure inside the Apollo Command Module, Columbia, is only 5psi, or the pressure at the top of Mount Everest. At sea level on Earth, the pressure is 15psi, or three times as much. We don’t pass out, because the atmosphere is 100% oxygen.

Apparently the food that Buzz ate is causing him discomfort. A minute later, Buzz sighs.

It smells horrible. I said, “Oh, Buzz, how could you?” My eyes are watering. Eggs and beans. The smell is nearly incapacitating.

Even Collins jumped in, “My nasal sensors detect a significant increase in organic gasses in the atmosphere.”

Collins was rechargeable, thankfully.

Mission Control: “Apollo, are you alright up there? We have just monitored a significant increase in methane in the cabin? If this keeps up, your atmosphere will become explosive. Do you have a situation?”

Buzz sighs again.

7/16/69, 16:16:16 GMT

Translunar injection burn started – that’s the boost that gets us to the Moon. Six minutes later, we’re on the way. Thankfully Buzz’s extravehicular emissions end about an hour later and the atmospheric scrubbers manage to keep the atmosphere safe until Buzz is finished.

7/16/69, 16:56:03 GMT

While we’re on the way, it’s time to dock with the Lunar Module. It’s in that last stage that boosted us to the Moon. Buzz then gets an idea.

“Hey, let’s change the name of the Lunar Module from Eagle to something else. How about we name it something funny, like Soviets Suck?”

I’m against this. “Buzz . . . we can’t do that. NASA already has the t-shirts printed.”

Buzz continues, “Okay, let’s vote on it. All in favor?” Only Buzz raised his hand.

Collins added, still staring straight ahead: “This violates mission parameters.”

7/17/69, 00:04:00 GMT

We go on television four times over the next two days. Collins follows the NASA script exactly, word for word. Aldrin brings up his new product, Aldrin’s Hair Care for Men®, along with Aldrin Cola© and Aldrin Paste™, which I believe to either be toothpaste or silverware polish. I think it must be toothpaste because he says it’s perfect for astronauts – “it’s zero cavity.” NASA has a private radio conversation with him after the first time he promotes his products.

The long distance rates shut that particular business down.

We can hear his side of the conversation: “What are you going to do, send NASA police up here and put me in NASA jail? Ha!”

It’s about this point that Buzz starts to try to read over my shoulder as I write in this journal. He pretends he’s not looking when I catch him.

7/19/69, 17:27:47 GMT

Lunar orbit. We’ll spend about a day here while we get ready to go down to the Moon. I’m starting to get a little irritated with Aldrin. First, there’s the humming. He won’t stop humming the theme to the Wild, Wild West®. Then, there’s his ear hair. Doesn’t he know that it’s there? It’s this one, long, 2 inch hair coming out of his ear.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I swear I hear a faint whirring, as if from small electric motors and gears from Collins during sleep period. Maybe it’s the space ship. I hope it’s the space ship.

7/20/69, 17:44:00 GMT

Lunar Module undocked. When we said goodbye to Collins, Buzz made a joke, “Hey, don’t go out joyriding while we’re gone!” Collins said, “No. I will be in rest mode while you are gone to conserve supplies.” Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Michael eat during the trip so far.

7/20/69, 20:17:39 GMT

The Soviets Suck Eagle has landed! This is the first gravity we’ve had in days. Aldrin immediately takes the opportunity to, umm, do things that are easier in gravity. The Lunar Module doesn’t have a vent fan, but we will dump the atmosphere when it’s time for our EVA. Which can’t come soon enough.

7/21/69, 02:56:15 GMT

First step on the Moon! On one hand, it’s pretty exciting. On the other, the responsibility is pretty big. Buzz follows behind me after about twenty minutes. He’s sulking – we rock-paper-scissored for the chance to go first, and he lost. He always, and I mean always throws rock. Speaking of which, it’s time to collect a few.

Heck, we can’t even do it since we’ve started using the metric system a little.

7/21/69, 05:11:13 GMT

The walk on the Moon is complete. We’re supposed to sleep, but we’re on the Moon. Buzz tries to tell spooky stories, but I’ve heard the one about the hook on the spaceship door before. He tries to make it scarier by thumping on the wall of the Soviets Suck Eagle. I remind him that even though the wall is supposed to be tougher than a steel beer can, we left the duct tape on Columbia.

Thankfully we were AAA members.

We’re supposed to sleep. Aldrin is laying down on the floor, and I’m propped up on the ascent engine cover. Not really sleeping, neither is Buzz. Finally Buzz stops humming the Wild Wild West® theme, only to start humming “In the Year 2525.” This is not much better.

This was the number one song as Apollo 11 lifted off. Even the Moon wasn’t far enough away to escape it.

“Neil, we need women astronauts.”

“Why, Buzz?”

“Those sandwiches aren’t going to make themselves.”

He’s not done.

“The next time I dump a girl, I know what I’m gonna say.”

“What, Buzz?”

“I need more space.”

Neither of us sleep at all that night, though I do come to the conclusion that there is no jurisdiction that I could be convicted in if I were to kill Buzz.

Yeah, I know. I’m mad, too.

7/21/69, 17:54:00 GMT

Liftoff from the Moon! Heading home.

“No, you’re upside down.”

7/21/69, 21:35:00 GMT

We’ve docked with the Columbia. As we open the hatch we see that Michael Collins is in the same exact position that he was when we left. It was as if he’d never moved.

“Welcome back, fellow humans. Was your excursion enjoyable?”

Buzz responded, “It was like any spacewalk, Collins. No pressure. Get it? No pressure!”

Collins stared blankly and then said, “I am not programmed to respond in that area.”

Getting back into the Columbia was pretty rough. It smelled like swamp and wet dog, and that was after Buzz had already been gone a day. Ugh. Why did Aldrin choose so many space tacos and burritos for dinner?

7/22/69, 04:55:42 GMT

We fire our engine to return to Earth. Two and a half days to home. Did Aldrin really order refried beans with every meal?

If I my rice is too dry, do I put it in a bag of cellphones?

7/24/69, 16:50:35 GMT

Splashdown. I never thought that smelling air would be so wonderful. I couldn’t wait to open the hatch to the Columbia. A deep breath with 100% less Aldrin.

7/24/69, 19:58:00 GMT

In quarantine – Collins, Aldrin and I are stuck here so we don’t start an epidemic of space pox. I can certainly understand why we would want to quarantine aliens so they didn’t bring in epidemics of disease.

There was a two-drink minimum.

8/10/69, 20:00:00 GMT

Release from quarantine. I’m outta here. Maybe I shouldn’t share this journal, after all. Perhaps it’s best if history remembers the official story . . . .

100% heroes.

Okay, yes, this was parody, or at least that’s what my law firm, Dewy, Cheatum and Howe suggests I say. Outside of my supposition that Michael Collins is really a robot, none of this is true. The Apollo astronauts represented the best of us in our nation at the time, men able to go into space, yet with enough humility to understand that their achievement was made possible by 400,000 other Americans working together to design everything from their underwear to the F-1 engines of the Saturn V to the food that they’d eat during the three weeks they spent in quarantine after returning to Earth.

An aside, they really did have problems with bad smells and space gas. NASA even calculated to see if the gas would build up enough methane to cause the ship to explode.

The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)

“Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos® and masturbating does not constitute plans in my book.” – Breaking Bad

In a constantly downward spiral, Kermit finally found the downside in living his best life.

A few weeks ago my daughter, Alia S. Wilder was in town. We were in the middle of preparing dinner of steak, steak, and more steak for the grill when I saw Alia diving face first into a plate of cookies.

When she came up for air I asked innocently, “I thought you were on the keto diet?”

I did notice a mood change when I was on the keto diet: I got tired of cheese and my only joy in life consisted of watching television shows about murder.

“No, she said, “I’m living my best life.” I could even hear the italics in her voice. It’s amazing how well font choice carries in my kitchen. I think it’s the tile.

John Wilder: “Umm, what exactly does ‘my best life’ mean?” I thought I could tell by context, but I wanted to give her a chance to explain.

Alia S. Wilder: “It’s living your life by being who you are naturally. It’s doing what you want.”

I slowly shook my head. That’s exactly what I thought it was. Cue volcano erupting:

One of the nice things about being a parent is that you can be honest with your children when they are being utterly foolish. This was one of those times.

My first words were: “You know this is going to go into the blog, right?”

Is this why they hold the neighborhood block party when we leave for vacation?

I then started a tirade. As this was the second time that I’d met her boyfriend, you’d think I’d hold back to give a good impression that I was a nice, genteel father who wears cardigan sweaters and puts on loafers and talks to hand puppets as if they were real. You’d be wrong, and I tried the hand puppet thing, but one of my personalities thought it was creepy. No, Mr. Rogers© wasn’t here that night. I let loose with a full broadside worthy of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

I was a horrible pirate captain. They told me, “The cannon be ready,” and I responded “are.”

“You realize that’s the single stupidest piece of advice you’ve ever been given, right?” I continued, not even having gotten warmed up yet. “It’s the advice a teenager thinks up in the shower and then considers it a deep thought because, well they’re a teenager in middle school, and middle school age children are the single stupidest subspecies ever set loose on planet Earth.” I paused for breath. You need decent lung capacity if you’re going to go into full rage enhanced by spittle.

I continued. “Why is it stupid? Because people are awful. You’re awful. I’m awful. We have to work each minute to NOT do what we’d like, because what we’d like to do, if left only to our own desires is . . . also awful. You, me, every single one of us.”

I could feel the full rolling boil starting.

“Living my best life is the strategy of a three year old that wants to eat an entire box of Oreos® at one sitting and then lie about it and blame the poodle. Living my best life combines all of the worst ideas of abandoning duty, honor, and responsibility in only four words: ‘living my best life.’ Oh, I decided not to work today. I’m living my best life. I decided that I would rather spend my money on avocado-flavored non-fat organic vaping juice rather than baby formula. I’m living my best life. I don’t care if I offended you, I have to speak my truth when living my best life. Oh, I’m sorry Western Civilization, we can’t go back to the Moon and advance the human race to the stars because I’m busy shopping. I’m living my best life.”

What came to my mind during this tirade conversation were the words of the dead French scientist, mathematician, religious philosopher and part-time Uber driver Blaise Pascal:

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing that he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus, it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing that one is wretched.”

In this quote when Pascal wrote “wretched,” he meant, “of inferior quality; bad.”

Follow your nose, it always knows. Specifically all about pressure, mathematics, and designing a computer by the age of 19, in 17^th Century France.

Pascal didn’t think mankind was naturally awful, he knew that mankind was naturally awful: prideful, selfish, lustful, mean, and greedy. I’m not sure how Pascal got that idea, maybe he was picked on about nose size when he was in middle school. But he was correct. We’re inferior. But our greatness comes not from that obvious inferior quality, it comes from knowing that you’re awful; and then not being awful.

If we know that we’re awful, we can do something about it. If we think that being awful is okay, that we can live our best life, then it’s an excuse to be awful. In fact, it’s worse than that. Aleister Crowley wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which has been appropriated by the Church of Satan® and correctly interpreted to mean . . . do whatever you want to do.

Apparently living your best life allows you to dress like Dr. Evil on a regular basis.

One particular website (not gonna given ‘em a link, they’re the first one listed when you Google® “living my best life”) has a list, which includes the following gems of personally corrosive advice on how to live your best life (note, my comments are in italics):

Do what you want – let your inner three year old make all your decisions.
Speak your truth – not the truth, your truth since hearing the actual, real truth from other people might make you sad.
Practice sacred self-love – and everyone should celebrate you for your sacred self-love, since you deserve to live your best life because you suffered so much because of your (INSERT VICTIM STATUS QUALIFICATION HERE).

Not all of the advice on the website was horrible, but most of it was shallower than the gene pool that produced Johnny Depp your typical congressman.

So, under this philosophy, if I’m fat, the problem isn’t that I’m fat and should have fewer cookies: the problem is the world is fataphobic.
If I think I’m a cat, the problem isn’t that I’m delusional: the problem is that the world is transspeciesphobic.
If I think that being an American has nothing to do with the values and norms of the last 300 years: the problem is your problem for being tied to the past.

When the cookies ran out, the monster came out.

So, in summary, living your best life is nothing more than permission to be the very worst person you can be. All that being said, Alia S. Wilder really does make some tasty cookies.

Sushi, Strippers, ATMs, Sears and Me

â€œLet’s go getÂ sushiÂ and not pay.â€ â€“ Repo Man (1984)

I prefer my 7-11Â® sushi with a side of WD-40Â® and a banana-bacon-shrimp SlurpeeÂ©.Â Nothing says great sushi like sushi bought at a store where you can get gasoline and lottery tickets!

On Sunday afternoon I was finishing up work on the last post (The Bridge on the River Kwai Moment), and sitting at the dining room table with The Mrs., enjoying air conditioning and some coffee.Â The Boy and Pugsley had hatched a cunning scheme whereby they were going to go into town to buy food, probably 7-11â„¢ sushi.Â Yes, I know, but when you live in Modern Mayberry sometimes 7-11Â© sushi is the only sushi if Wal-MartÂ® sushi is sold out again.

I assumed the position of the First Bank of Dadâ„¢, and rummaged through my wallet for cash.Â Looking, I had a ludicrous number of single dollar bills – $16 in ones.Â â€œOkay, guys, hope you donâ€™t mind ones.Â Here is $15 in ones, and a $10 and a $5.Â That should keep you in raw fish and botulism.â€

Pugsley laughed, â€œItâ€™s like Dad went to a strip club and got too many ones from the ATM!â€

The Boy stopped and immediately defended my honor, â€œWhat are you talking about? Â Dad would never, ever . . . go to an ATM.â€

Thatâ€™s a direct quote.Â Thanks, pal.

I think if I were going to be a stripper, I think I would use the name Brax ThÃ¼nderhyde, and dress as a construction worker.Â Probably a building inspector â€“ theyâ€™re sexy, right?Â I hear chicks did clipboards.

This really happened, nearly word for word.Â The Mrs. immediately started laughing, as did I.Â I hadnâ€™t been to an ATM since college, when I determined that an ATM was just a hole in your bank account that your money leaked out of.Â When I was about 20, I found out through bitter experience that either I didnâ€™t have enough money, discipline, or intelligence to have an ATM card, so I cut it up.Â My life has been far better since then.Â So, yes, The Boy was right, Iâ€™ve been to a strip club more recently than Iâ€™ve been to an ATM.

The ATM card was my first exposure to the concept that banks were certainly not on my side â€“ I wasnâ€™t their friend, I was simply a way for them to get fees.Â ATM cards were a way to charge me to get my own money â€“ Iâ€™d pay a $1 fee for $100 in cash.Â Thatâ€™s an immediate 1% for the privilege of using my own money, on those rare occasions that I had $100.Â In the far more realistic case that I was pulling out $20, it was the same fee for $20, so thatâ€™s a 5% fee.Â The good thing is that I could also check my balance at the ATM.

I was in college and could do calculus, but I certainly wasnâ€™t smart enough to do basic subtraction.Â Take $21 out of your account too many times?Â End up with negative numbers in your bank account.Â That led to the really fun set of fees â€“ charges for having less than zero money.Â Like the lottery, bank fees are a tax on bad math and poor impulse control.

After I had to pay overdraft fees the second time, I cut up the ATM card.Â If it was Friday and I needed cash for the weekend?Â Iâ€™d go down to the bank and cash a check.Â That was it.Â You canâ€™t use an ATM machine if you donâ€™t have a card.Â This had two good effects â€“ I had to plan how much I was going to spend on Coors LightÂ® for the weekend, but, once I ran out of money, I had to stop spending.Â No choice, no poor willpower.Â I had to stop. Â And if I had to check my balance without an ATM?Â I could have a friend shove me really hard.

But dumping the ATM card was a good one.

I havenâ€™t had an ATM card (or even a debit card) since then, and donâ€™t think Iâ€™ve paid a fee to a bank for anything other than mortgage interest in almost two decades.Â I learned a big lesson from using an ATM: to the bank, I was the commodity.Â I was nothing more than ATM transaction fees and overdraft fees.Â My bad math paid their salaries.

That realization made me look around and observe how other companies viewed me.Â I realized that entire businesses have been built around using consumers as commodities.Â In the 1990â€™s SearsÂ® attempted to get every financial dollar conceivable out of a consumer short of turning them upside down and shaking them to see if any singles were left over from the strip club would fall out.Â How did Sears do this?

You could buy your clothing, hardware, crib, bed, refrigerator and lawnmower at SearsÂ®.
You could invest your spare cash with your broker at Dean Witterâ„¢, also owned by SearsÂ®.
And anything you didnâ€™t buy at SearsÂ®, like Coors LightÂ®? You could charge everything else with your DiscoverÂ© Card â€“ also owned by . . . SearsÂ®.

When (in the late 1990â€™s) I realized that SearsÂ® at one point or another owned all of those companies, it became clear to me that SearsÂ® was attempting to get a piece of every dollar that I could spend that wasnâ€™t given to directly to a mortgage lender.Â They then sold off these businesses, and have been very successful since then:

I kid.Â SearsÂ® remains every bit as relevant today as fax machines and slide projectors.

It was around the same time that I first heard the word â€œmonetize.â€ Â Taken literally, it means, â€œmake into money,â€ and an example is what the Clintons did with the presidency and Jeff Bezosâ€™ girlfriend did with Jeff.

But back to me.Â It was the late 1990â€™s and a friend of mine had moved into the financial side of the business we were working at.Â She mentioned that they were going to â€œmonetizeâ€ the Werewolf RepellentÂ® that our company made by selling it while it was still in our warehouses, and then lease the warehouse out to somebody else and rent back the space from the people we leased the warehouse from to store the Werewolf Repellentâ„¢ that weâ€™d (by then) sold to someone else.Â Our salesmen would (eventually) sell the Werewolf RepellentÂ© to yet a different person, but the money would go to the person who now owned it with a cut to the person leasing our warehouse from us.Â It was a way to make money without having to actually sell anything to a pesky consumer.

To me, the scheme seemed unnecessarily complicated, like trying to play a trombone using a vacuum cleaner, a live chicken, a brick, and a purple condom.Â It was explained to me that this was a way that our Werewolf RepellentÂ© could make money for us even when it was sitting in our own warehouse not repelling even a single werewolf.Â I think they gave up on the idea when they found that the only money we were making from the scheme was due to accounting irregularities and by saving aluminum cans from the employee lounge.

When she was describing the scheme, I nodded and mumbled â€œokayâ€ and pretended like I understood what she was talking about, even though I still didnâ€™t get it.Â But it did spark another thought.Â If we could monetize our Werewolf RepellentÂ© that was just sitting in a warehouse, then what was SearsÂ® doing?Â It was pretty simple.Â They were attempting to monetize me.Â I now had a word for it.

Capitalism works best when people look for ways to create better service for you so that you will give them your money.Â This is the power of capitalism â€“ people competing to make you happy.Â This provides a springboard for innovation.Â It provides a reason for people youâ€™ve never met to cooperate with you to allow both of you to meet your goals.

And I hear that their diet plan works great, too!

A rule of economics is that the more indirectly you do something, the easier it is.Â If you had a rock to break, you could hit it with another rock until it broke.Â Itâ€™s the simplest way, but itâ€™s also the hardest.Â You could get a steel hammer to break the rock, but now you need find iron ore and make the steel and form it into a hammer.Â Much more efficient, but much more indirect.Â Heck, you could create an entire chemical laboratory and make explosives, and taking your hammer and a steel chisel and put a hole in the rock, and then blow it up.Â Thatâ€™s the easiest, but it is the most indirect method yet.

Just like my bank tried to do when they created the ATM, the coming trend is to monetize cash.Â Itâ€™s harder to remember to go to the bank on Friday to get cash than to get cash, anywhere, at any time.Â From the standpoint of Wall Street, cash sucks.Â If I want to go buy a six pack of crotch weasels and I use cash, the only people getting a cut are the crotch weasel store and the government â€“ crotch weasel sales are taxable in Midwestia.Â Governments have this monetization thing down.

Donâ€™t get me wrong, there are a lot of products Iâ€™d miss, if they disappeared tomorrow, but monetization is also control.

Appetite: grow your own versus a buying food at a supermarket
Money: cash versus a credit card. Every credit card requires fees.
Emotion: TwitterÂ® versus not being irritated at everyone.
Attention: Netflixâ„¢ versus a book or this fine blog.
Lust: RufflesÂ®.Â You know you want some.

Okay, that might be an extreme solution.

Donâ€™t think monetization is control?Â What about EBT cards?Â Legislators have even figured out how to give banks a share by monetizing poverty.Â What happens if the EBT cards shut down?Â Yup.Â Monetization is control.Â Ben Hunt has a good post (LINK) on how FacebookÂ® is attempting to monetize money yet again to destroy cash (and Bitcoin) and give governments complete surveillance of every financial transaction â€“ and Hunt thinks that it just might work.Â (H/T Remus, at the Woodpile Report (LINK) â€“ if youâ€™re not reading the Woodpile Report â€“ youâ€™re missing out.)

If monetization is control, that means that if it can be monetized, it can be weaponized.

Stop the food â€“ without a farm, youâ€™re hungry.
Deny you credit, cancel your card â€“ youâ€™re not able to rent a hotel room.

Okay, the world would likely be better off without TwitterÂ©, Facebookâ„¢, and NetflixÂ® (youâ€™ll pry the RufflesÂ© from my cold, dead fingers) but what would we do with our time?

Go to strip clubs?Â I know youâ€™re certainly not going to catch me near any ATMs . . . .

The Bridge on the River Kwai Moment

“We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that will put them to shame. We’ll show them what the British soldier is capable of doing.” – The Bridge on the River Kwai

Air combat in the Pacific as taught by public schools in 2019.

The Mrs. and I were discussing politics, and she tossed out an interesting question:

The Mrs.: “Is the Left going to have a Bridge on the River Kwai moment?”

I thought that was a great question, but it requires some backstory.

It was a condition of my proposal to The Miss that if she wanted to become The Mrs., that she’d have to watch several movies that dripped with toxic masculinity and testosterone. Patton, Zulu, The Man Who Would Be King, and any movie involving Clint Eastwood were required watching (among others).

The Mrs. said she’d seen most of the Eastwood movies already. The Mrs. hadn’t seen Hang ‘em High, so we watched that in the hotel on our honeymoon. Most of it. Okay, parts of it.

Okay, I promise these will make sense in a few paragraphs.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was included in that list of “must watch” movies. I decided to re-watch it last week after I started to write this post. I wrangled Pugsley into watching it with me. Pugsley’s a teen now, and the movie is a pretty powerful one that he’d never seen. As the movie opened to the scene of dense jungle, Pugsley asked, “What’s this (movie) about?”

John Wilder: “Well, it’s about a World War II prisoner of war camp . . .”

Pugsley: “No, you mean Vietnam.” He gestured at the jungle. Vietnam occurred 50 years ago. World War II was 75 years ago. To a teen? It’s all ancient history. Heck, Star Wars™ debuted 32 years after World War II ended. It’s now been 42 years since Star Wars© came out. Star Wars® is closer in time to World War II than we are to the opening night of Star Wars™. Feeling old?

John Wilder: “You do realize that we fought in the Pacific as well as in Europe in World War II?”

Pugsley: “Oh.” He looked doubtful, like he thought my mind was slipping, but let it pass.

To a teen in 2019, WWII is as far in the past as a world without flight was when I was a teen. Growing up I knew all about the kill ratio of the Phantom F-4 vs. the MiG in Vietnam, but next to nothing about World War I aviation other than Germans pilots apparently ate a lot of pizza:

Notice that he’s smoking. I’m sure that’s what killed him – I’ve been told those cigarettes are dangerous!

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 movie about Vietnam World War II. In it, a group of mainly British prisoners of war are in a camp in the Burmese jungle. As in real life, these soldiers were being forced by the Japanese to build a railroad so that the Japanese could have better logistics resupplying their troops in Burma.

The movie focuses around a particular bridge that needs to be completed in order to finish the railroad on time. Never since the pyramids were built has civil engineering been so exciting and sexy: piling depths, soil bearing capacity, number of cubic yards of dirt moved, surveying . . . riveting! Okay, no rivets since they were making the bridge out of wood.

In the opening scene a British colonel marches in to camp with his officers and soldiers, after being ordered to surrender in Singapore. The Japanese colonel and the British colonel engage in a battle of will. Since the actor playing the British colonel is the same actor that played Obi Wan Kenobi™ in Star Wars®, obviously not long into the movie the Japanese colonel’s will is crushed.

Colonel Kenobi: “These aren’t the troops you’re looking for.” Photoshop credit: The Boy.

Soon, the British colonel is directing his men to perform higher quotas of work than the Japanese had set for them. In order to show the Japanese how Englishmen act, Colonel Kenobi demands that his men not sabotage the bridge, but do proper, quality work. Not long after Colonel Kenobi arrives, an American barely escapes. The actor that played the American wasn’t in Star Wars©, so I have no idea if he could use the force.

Arriving at a rear base in India, the American is encouraged to join a commando group that will destroy the bridge over the Kwai. And, by encouraged I mean not “volunteered” but “voluntold.” My kids are voluntold about a lot of things, but I have never sent them to blow up a Japanese bridge in Burma. Maybe next summer, since they haven’t successfully completed mowing my lawn yet this summer. Baby steps.

The commandos, including the American who wasn’t in Star Wars© make it to the bridge and plant explosives. In order to add a ticking clock – they are going to blow up the bridge just as a trainload of high-ranking Japanese officials are using the train to go to the Japanese Death Star®.

See, I told you they would make sense.

As the train is approaching, Colonel Kenobi sees the electrical cord hooked up to the bridge – the other part is hooked to a Looney Tunes®-style detonator that is out of sight. Oops. Colonel Kenobi and the Japanese colonel go to investigate. When the colonels get close to the detonator, a young commando kills the Japanese colonel. Colonel Kenobi then yells for help. To the Japanese troops.

***SPOILER ALERT ON A 62 YEAR OLD MOVIE***

After the young commando is killed by the Japanese, who have much better aim than Stormtroopers™, the American, who is across the river, attempts to swim and detonate the explosives. The American is shot, but as the American is dying, Colonel Kenobi recognizes him as the escaped prisoner from earlier in the movie. Colonel Kenobi is jolted back, and looks at the bodies of the two officers that are on the same side as he is that died because of his actions . . . his actions to save “his” bridge.

Oops.

In a moment of clarity, he says the four most important words of the movie: “What have I done?”

This is the payoff for the whole movie. And it’s worth it – the only thing missing is a coyote chasing a road runner with a detonator that old . . .

That is The Bridge on the River Kwai moment, when the Colonel realized that, stuck in following procedure, in sticking to rules, and in demonstrating what a proper man he was, he got people on his own side killed. Plus, he built a really great bridge for the Japanese. Colonel Kenobi had been in service to his enemy.

Thankfully, as he was dying, he fell on the detonator, blowing up the bridge right on time.

It’s a shame that they changed this line, since it would have been a great reminder to people vacationing to remember to take their swimsuits. Such an emotional impact and such practical advice!

Victor Davis Hanson (always a good read) describes the end result of politics in California, once the most prosperous state in any union (LINK):

What caused this lunacy?

A polarity of importing massive poverty from south of the border while pandering to those who control unprecedented wealth in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the tourism industry, and the marquee universities. Massive green regulations and boutique zoning, soaring taxes, increasing crime, identity politics and tribalism, and radical one-party progressive government were force multipliers. It is common to blame California Republicans for their own demise. They have much to account for, but in some sense, the state simply deported conservative voters and imported their left-wing replacements

Where California goes, America generally follows.

When presidential candidates on the Left:

actively support giving healthcare to those in the country illegally,
make it impossible to secure the border,
make it impossible to quickly and safely deport those who are here illegally, and
support requiring American citizens to pay for all of this,

I wonder if they will ever have their Bridge on the River Kwai moment.

This particular kamikaze plane flew six missions.

When those “Conservatives” support:

unlimited globalism to export American technology and know-how,
importation of cheap labor versus using American labor via H-1B visas,
following every rule of etiquette set by the Left (that the Left doesn’t follow), and
rolling back each of our freedoms, but just a little slower than the left wants to.

I wonder if they will ever have their Bridge on the River Kwai moment. Did John McCain, on his deathbed, think, “What have I done?” I don’t think so.

How much of the foundation of this country has to crumble before Left and “Conservatives” realize what they’ve done to undermine the United States, which may be the last, best hope of Western Civilization? Do they care, or will they sell the country for two or six more years in power?

Never mind all that, an Eastwood movie is on. Haven’t seen Hang ‘em High or The Unforgiven in a while.

Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

“I’m simply seeking to inspire mankind to all that is intended.” – Constantine

See the lengths I will go to in order to deliver top-quality humor three times a week?

Sometimes you find treasures in odd places. Back in 2007, I was working a nightmare job. The days were hectic, filled with emergency after emergency, wailing, and general disarray. And then I had to commute to work. Okay, home life was generally pretty good, but work really was a nightmare. One positive thing I did, though, was clip and print things that I found to be inspiring. No, not a lot of clippings like I’d finally found the missing connection between the Rothschild family and why there are no purple M&M’s®. No, when I found these quotes there were just a few – maybe less than a dozen.

Here’s one of the quotes I found in the clippings:

“If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn’t have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the guy with a positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive. Simple as that.” – Gordon Smith, Retired Green Beret Command Sergeant Major

Training, preparation, skill and Ruffles® are all wonderful things. I recommend them all, especially if they are cheddar-flavored. The quote above, however, exactly mirrors my own feelings and experience. Stated bluntly:

Attitude matters.

I don’t have that tie, though, and haven’t worn one regularly since ‘08.

I’m a long time reader of Scott Adams dating back into the mid-1990’s. He’s most famous for Dilbert, but he has written books and blogged for decades about everything from management to life skills to persuasion. Daily, Scott Adams writes his goals 15 times (LINK). Why 15? I don’t know. But Adams has reported that it produces amazing results for him, and he’s lived a pretty amazing life. It might also have something to do with him being a genius who works really hard and tries lots of things. Nah. He must be a beneficiary of the structural capitalist patriarchy and the reason people love Dilbert is only due to white privilege. That explains everything, if you’re in Congress.

How the goal writing produces results is probably unimportant – in my opinion the most likely idea is that if you’re focused on a goal, you’ll notice connections, clues or opportunities that would normally pass you by. The focus on the goal, the attitude that you can achieve something great changes the way you look at every aspect of your day. I know that when I believe I can succeed, I seem to keep finding ways to actually make it happen.

It might seem that it’s magic, writing down what you want 15 times a day and having coincidences show up that lead you to your goal. But, perhaps, the magic is just in you – seeing farther and deeper than you normally would is the magic. Having a goal changes you. Having the attitude that you can achieve your goal changes you so you can see the path more clearly.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”

I guess it wasn’t just college papers Creepy Joe plagiarized . . .

We’ve all been around negative people. I’ve had to work with them. I’ve had to manage them, and once I even had to work for one – he was my first supervisor after I graduated college. There was nothing that was good that ever happened to or around him. He’d had a leg injury and was now stuck at a desk job when he really, really hated desk jobs. Enter: happy, enthusiastic, wisecracking, young college graduate (still with hair at that time). I think he wanted to tie me up in a burlap sack weighted down with stones and toss me in the pond behind the office. Frankly, I can see why.

This clip is super short, and from the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes. Haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes? You have your weekend assignment – it’s from back when movies were fun and not remakes.

Negative People:

Exhaust me.
Don’t accomplish much.
Take the last cup of coffee without making more.
Tend to make themselves a victim of whatever happened to them.
Infect the entire team with negativity and sometimes herpes.
Seem to get energy from talking about their pain and how the world is unfair to them.
Shoot down bad ideas. And good ideas. Any ideas, really.
Find a dark cloud in every silver lining.

I had a professor in college who had one piece of advice for me: “Keep smiling, John.” I took his advice. For most of my life, I’ve kept smiling. Even on bad days at work, I’ve kept a good attitude because most of the time, circumstances don’t care if you’re mad at them. The circumstances continue to exist just the same.

Not everyone agrees with me. On one particular job I actually received feedback that I was too cheerful. I guess being a mortician isn’t a job for everyone.

Okay, I’ve never worked as a mortician, but one of my bosses really did tell me I was too cheerful. But if I could be a mortician that hired Terminators®? I wouldn’t call that a dead-end job.

In most things in life I expect good outcomes, and generally I get them. That’s not unique to me. Throughout the history of humanity most times and most days have been good. Has there been war as long as we can look back into history? Yes. We’ve been fighting each other even before we were fully human. I imagine, though, we’ve been telling each other fart jokes for just as long. The human race has watched sunsets over the Arctic, the Serengeti, and the Atlantic and had pretty good days. An iPhone® isn’t required, but without an endless stream of Disney® live-action remakes, is life really worth living?

Nah, I like making them.

I won’t say that on my worst day there was a bright spot. The worst day of my life just sucked from 2pm until I finally fell asleep in bed. Honestly, it wasn’t much better the next day, but there were a few bright spots showed up. And more the next. And every day since then has been better than that day.

I mentioned magic above, and magic also happens on my worst days. Every one of my very bad days was the start of the time when my life started to get better, and it seemed the worse it was, the better it would eventually be. My best times have come from my worst times. One example was my divorce. The reality is that no matter how bad the marriage was, divorce is difficult. But as difficult as it was, it was the start of the next phase in my life, my marriage to The Mrs.

The longer, and the deeper the dark night of the soul, the bigger the positive that’s eventually come out of it for me.

If I ever were to get involved with the funeral industry, I’d tie the shoelaces of the deceased together in the coffin. That way if we ever had a zombie apocalypse, it would be hilarious. See, I even made zombies cheerful.

I spend time thinking about the future, and about dark possibilities not so much because I’m a gloomy guy sitting in the basement – but because it’s fun. However, in thinking about those possibilities I am prepared, at least a little more, for the uncertainty of the future. I’m cheerful, but I can see reality and know that there is danger ahead.

As I read the news I see a specter of a dark foe bent on creating a world that few of us want to see, one built out of fear and control. It’s even scarier because that foe wants you and I to think that it’s winning, so we will give up and it can win by default. Don’t. As long as people long for freedom, as long as we have each other and a dream of a better day where mankind keeps reaching for the stars, we have light. But in this time of seeming darkness, even a small light burns brightly.

If I were to give advice this Friday it’s this: be of good cheer. Be a spark in the darkness to help others. Understand that, until the last moment of your life, you have the ability to change the world for the better, to help create that better future for all of us.