Bad Smells – Page 10 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Some Signposts On The Way To Collapse

“It’s a growth economy, Gus. We’ve already made like, 500 rupee.” – Psych

What’s worse than rushing to the liquor store five minutes before it closes? Getting there thirty minutes before it opens.

For the most part, I like to have my posts be about a bigger, underlying principle. In my life, I have found the first thing I enjoy is making people think about life in a different way and examine new possibilities. The second thing is a never-ending stream of jokes. To be clear, I never tell jokes to amuse others; I tell jokes because they amuse me. They maybe Dad jokes, that’s why I save them in a Dadabase.

Tonight, however, I’m going to just enjoy our current economy, and just give some milestones on the current descent into whatever economic future that we’re creating in a relatively short post.

First up, is the idea that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore:

How many Zoomers does it take to change a lightbulb? 100,000. One to change it, and 99,999 to throw the parade.

I kid, a bit. Zoomers certainly are the most fragile generation that we’ve ever produced, since when I was growing up trigger warnings was what Pa Wilder gave me if he saw my finger head towards one when I wasn’t planning on shooting. A safe space? That was the place that Pa had a safe.

As much as I’d like to bag on the Zoomers, it really is a rough world that they’re coming into, economically and otherwise. Most of the jobs are in the cities, and the housing costs there are ludicrous. I’d rent in the cities for longer than two months, but I only can afford to give up one kidney.

A policy of unpoliced and encouraged illegal immigration for decades has consequences? Perish the thought!

It’s not just housing which has become more unaffordable than at any time in history (at least in the cities). Cars have recently gone to silly levels – the latest average monthly payment for a new car is $716 for an average of 69 (hehe) months. The average loan amount is $41,445. The last three cars I bought (all used) totaled $45,000 or so.

To be clear, people don’t have to buy a new car. I haven’t bought a new car since 1997, all of mine have been used. The average used car goes for nearly $28,000, with a monthly payment of $526 at an interest rate of over 10%. Ouch!

I wonder if this app is the biggest cause of suicide for Tesla® owners?

While the next two items are from Canada, I wonder how far behind the United States is.

For those who aren’t used to metric, a kilogram is roughly two pounds, and a Canadian dollar is roughly a handful of rounded pebbles that you might collect at the bottom of a stream – I think it’s called a metric dollar.

It’s pretty bad in Canada. They could have had it all: America’s sense of freedom, British literature, and French cuisine. Instead? They got French immigration policy, Britain’s love of pointless bureaucracy, and American economic policy. And they’re paying for it, literally.

Thankfully, some folks are doing well in the economy. I heard a rumor that one person was taking dollars to buy diesel fuel from a European source, but instead bought it from a Russian source. Amazingly, when you make smart decisions like that, you can save a lot of money.

Me? I’ve seen corruption, bribery, blackmail, jealousy, theft, fraud, and deception firsthand. I’m never playing Monopoly with The Mrs. again.

To be fair, I will share that Russia has a new technological innovation that I can share, to at least partially offset all those leaked documents. The Russians have apparently developed a new technology that allows them to see with the vision of one of the most ruthless killers on Earth:

Remember when Putin said he didn’t have any plans to invade the Ukraine? I think he was telling the truth.

Again, this post is just is a different one, just a signpost on road that we’re on. I’d offer $100,000 for your thoughts, but it would be that Canadian metric money. What’s it called? A rupee?

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead. I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development: the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States. Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff.

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

Lots of nuclear weapons,
A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
The premier military force in the world,
The premier economy in the world, and,
The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory. We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had. There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place. Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world. Period. We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed. Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia. Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world. Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck. We led in technological and information systems. By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started. I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy. Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage. Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters). That presented a problem. In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff. Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything. I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent. Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia. Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975. And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in. It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia. They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism. Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973. One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them. Russia’s a case in point. Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict. It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine. For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn. They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election. And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

How An Army Commercial Shows We’re Rapidly Falling Apart

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual. But now I know why I have always lost women to guys like you. I mean, it’s not just the uniform. It’s the stories that you tell.” – Stripes

I didn’t know I was a lycanthrope. I guess that makes me an unawarewolf.

The United States’ Army has a new ad campaign out. The slogan, however, is fairly familiar: “Be All That You Can Be.” This became the slogan of the Army’s recruiting campaign back when they had to convince people to join because driving a fast car like Burt Reynolds while marrying busty blondes was a much more interesting career option.

That slogan lasted from 1980 to 2001, with “Army Of One®” was replaced by Call of Duty™ online mode. The Air Force was encouraged by that slogan, and decided to use “Air Force Of Only One Plane®” since that was all they could afford if they decided to go with the F-35.

But things have not gone well for Big Green recently. I heard in the last year, they actually recruited only one soldier, and he was a decoy. I kid. They had a goal of something like 60,000, but only recruited 45,000. I’m guessing that’s because the other 15,000 decided that working at McDonald’s® was a better option.

Want me to stop telling Rolling Stones jokes? You can’t always get what you want.

And, why not? The videos showing recent Army performance have been, um, less than stellar. From the pullout of Afghanistan, to Biden forcing troops to take the Vaxx or take a hike, it’s been bad. The commercials for recruitment have likewise been horrific. If it’s not good enough for the wise Latina child joining the armed forces and then looking back on her lesbian biracial parents who gave her hormone replacement therapy at age three, well, it’s not good enough for me.

I think the Army missed some real gems in going back to that old slogan. They could have chosen some of these:

Join the Army, where the camouflage makes you invisible to your ex.
Join the Army, and let us take care of your social life . . . because you won’t have one.
The Army: Where you can kill two birds with one grenade.
The Army: If you needed a good excuse to shave your head.
Join the Army: Where you’ll find that “hurry up and wait” isn’t just a saying, it’s a way of life.
The Army: “You’ll learn to stay awake while standing up.”
Join the Army and see the world, through the scope of a rifle.
The Army: “You’ll make lifelong friends. Or enemies. Or both.
The Army, where you can put your Call of Duty™ skills to use, just without the respawn.
Join the Army, and get one free PEZ™ dispenser every year.

Why did the magician sleep at Motel 6®? Because only he could make the stains disappear.

I mean, who traditionally makes up the Army, anyway?

Actually, white dudes. In the terminology of today, people who were born male at birth and score low on the diversity index. Hell, in 2023, I’m wondering when “mail” will show up as a gender – “Oh, baby, put me in the big slot! I’m an oversized package!”

I looked up the makeup of the Army using the most recent statistics I could find. They’re kind of murky, because they don’t break out “Hispanic” by itself. I guess I can understand that. Even though I’ve been described as “so Danish that’s the picture in the dictionary” I can also claim that at least 25% of my ancestors were born in Mexico. Were they Danish?

Yeah. Still don’t understand how they dealt with the sunburn. But Pugsley can check that box on the college application.

2 is a prime number. That’s kind of odd, right?

So, the stats I could find are murky. It looks like the numbers of white people in the Army has gone down 2% in two years from 70% to 68%. And what’s one percent? About 5,000 guys. So, of their missing 15,000, you could make an argument that 10,000 of them might have been white guys that didn’t join up.

I know three kids that were friends of The Boy that were gung ho about joining the military, until November, 2020. Then?

“Nah, I think I’ll work.”

So, to recreate the idea that perhaps the Army wants white guys to join up, the reversion to the “Be All That You Can Be™” slogan was the reaction from the Army. To be clear, they’re still using food made before 1960, ammo made before 1970, so why not a slogan that was made in 1980?

Oh, Francis, where are you now?

Enter the new video. Where in the last few, the only thing not visible was a white guy, this video is chock full of white guys. At one location where the video was stored on YouTube©, the comment section was more disastrous than French naval performance at Trafalgar. I mean hundreds and hundreds of comments that, well, I’ll just post a few of them and let you draw your own conclusions. I did not cherry pick these, and did not see a single, not one, zero positive comments. Feel free to go give a look yourself – the video is here (LINK).

Yup, pretty bad. Both of my sons have received text messages from Army recruiters, heck, as late as 2016, I presented to The Boy the options of West Point and Colorado Springs for colleges. He noped out of both choices. Pugsley is not at all interested.

I am not disappointed – rather, the opposite, and became doubly so after the decision by the Biden Administration to force armed forces members to Vaxx up. Sure, the DOD rescinded the requirement this year on January 10, but that didn’t help the people who already Vaxxed up. Wonder if the VA is going to cover that?

Regardless, I would hazard a guess that confidence in the cohesion of the country is lower than at any time in my life. Perhaps the real slogan should be “Be All That You Can Binge-Watch On Netflix®”?

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die? Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive? He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate. Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate? Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it. Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me. And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened. But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion. And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19^th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform. To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff. Bereft of life. It rests in peace. If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It’s off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit. I’ll explain. You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it. They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment. Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back. I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that? I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone. “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™. I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month. They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers. Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah. Things don’t go up forever. So when they end? It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks. The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™. Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope. They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos. In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low. If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power. Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka. Roads? Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people. Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now. The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?” Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less. Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks: Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it. Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window. That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code: this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay! That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe. But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters. Interest rates go up? Bond values go down. It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds. How many? Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value. And it’s not limited to them. Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000. Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank. Turns out that the United States blinked: “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already. You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run. The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system. They even say so. Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them. I own a car from 2003. In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it. Here’s proof:

See? I’m a respected journalist. Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero. You can check it out. This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued. (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed. They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation. But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation. Biden cannot be re-elected. Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops. I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me? My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months. Six or seven? Maybe. Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it. New projects? They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop. New housing? Forget it. The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant. We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end. But you can see it from here. While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune? He’s always been a whiney bitch. Ignore Neptune.

Things You Can’t Say . . . 2023

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

In reverse, The Matrix is about a guy who quits drugs and gets a job.

What opinions do you have that you can’t tell all of the other people you know? I’m willing to bet that since you read here, you have quite a few. I have plenty of them. When someone doesn’t have views they can’t share, well, I think that’s probably the best definition of an NPC: always believing the current thing. I swear, if an NPC takes over, it will be a dictator-sheep.

One of the more difficult things is keeping track of what to believe. Scott Adams (more about him in a future post) famously noted that the anti-vaxxers were right, but there was no way that they could have known that they were right based on the evidence at the time. I respectfully disagree. The application of a new technology to stop a disease in a panic? What about that says, “wise decision”? Especially when Pfizer™ and the other “vaxx” manufacturers demanded secret language in their contracts to absolve themselves of liability.

Literally nothing about the vaxx looked legitimate. There were more warning signs than a cocktail with Bill Cosby.

What about January 6? The most visible icon of the January 6 “insurrection” was the face painted dude with the bison headdress. Turns out he was led around by various security folks until they found an unlocked door for him to go through. It’s like they picked the silliest looking person for the photo opportunity of a decade. Yet, folks didn’t see through that, either.

Not pictured: someone who actually broke into the Capitol.

If the January 6 protest was a real insurrection rather than people who (mainly!) were there peacefully, even observing the velvet ropes. How did I know it was fake? If it were a real insurrection, they’d still be there.

January 6 was political theater, and was misrepresented by nearly every news media outlet, and was also lied about by the Left every chance they got.

Am I correct in everything I believe? Certainly not. But I try, every time that I can, to look to the things that are True, Beautiful, and Good to be my guideposts. Some of my calls are wrong, but with those guideposts, it’s difficult to be too far off the mark.

It is clear that if we don’t think different thoughts than those the media would put in our heads, there is something wrong with us.

When the Kardashians die, they won’t be buried or cremated – they’ll be recycled.

It’s odd, because the pushback comes the closer we come to the Truth, because that’s dangerous. If I were to walk around proclaiming that Hillary Clinton is 40 feet tall (6 milliliters), blue, and made of cheese, people would think I was a nut and ignore me. But when I wrote about the “vaxx” – the website came under the biggest attacks ever.

The attacks don’t come when people are silly – the attacks come when the ideas presented might make people think. And the attacks come with a fury that is only reserved for those who have committed actual heresy.

Leftism is a religion. Sure, some of them say they have other religions, but Leftism is generally their guiding star. Recently Jane Fonda suggested murdering anyone who was against abortion. And abortion is one of the greatest sacraments of their church. No one on The View told her she was wrong, just that she shouldn’t say that in public. And a Leftist, as long as they are a True Believer, will always be excused for amazingly horrible comments like Hanoi Jane spouted out of her wrinkly piehole.

At her age, I’m sure she casts a lot of smells.

But someone on the Right? The guy who ran the Firefox™ project was essentially fired because he donated to a group that was against legalizing gay marriage years earlier. Years earlier when Obama was likewise “against” gay marriage.

Now it’s microaggressions and any perceived slight that someone can make up.

There are only a couple of reasons to do this. The biggest is the one that I think that is operative here: they’re scared because they think they might be wrong, or that they know that they’re lying. Again, if I go outside and tell someone who is a Leftist that they’re an idiot because their house is floating, well, they can be confident that life is okay for them because their house isn’t floating. They know it to be true, and don’t need me to validate that for them.

Their economic ideas? They’re upset at me (mostly) because they’re not sure they have the Truth, and they simply cannot have anyone thinking about alternatives to their ideas. I mean, I’m totally sure that communism would totally have worked if only the average 20-year-old at Harvard® had been in charge.

I remember the time I came up with a cure for dementia. That brings back memories!

And that, partially, is why I write the way that I do. If you can make a great point, you can win the debate. If you can make a great point and poke fun at the idea? The idea itself becomes the joke.

As near as I can tell, that’s always one of the biggest crimes of totalitarian regimes: a joke about a Communist Party official could send an unlucky Soviet citizen to the GULAG for 25 years. That isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of fear.

That is why they want to shut down the conversation – they’re afraid. They know as well as anyone that putting a 300 pound model in lingerie isn’t Beautiful, True, or Good. It’s hilarious. But until we’re not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes (and that the lingerie model needs more) you can tell that the struggle hasn’t been ridiculed enough, though that time is coming.

And then maybe we’ll all find out our secret opinions were shared by millions. Except that one I have about motor oil, shower curtains, escalators, and garden tools. There are places I’m not gonna go.

Greeks, Passion, and Mayo

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

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

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

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

One of the things he wrote was this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kinda yes, and kinda no.

Yo momma so old? Her first crush was Diogenes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a family friendly place.

Anyone have TP?

Funny Lessons From The Franco-Prussian War in 2023

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

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

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

Coffee does that have effect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*He was actually a pretty good basketball coach.

No Way To Go, But Forward

“It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” – The Blues Brothers

I’ve seen this meme a dozen times, but this is the first time I noticed that Keanu was talking to Sponge Bob and Patrick Starfish. Now I can’t unsee it. (All memes today are as-found.)

Today was . . . busy. On the average day, I manage to manage stuff so that I get my normal life done and then have time to post or do other creative shenanigans. Not today. I could give a much longer explanation, such as: “I ran out of gas. I . . . I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God!”

But I won’t. I half expected this, but there was still the outside chance I’d come back in time.

I wasn’t out doing this, but it looks like fun.

So, a very short post on a Friday, and I’ll leave just one thought – there’s no use looking into the rearview mirror of your life. You can’t go back there. The only path that you and I have (provided you don’t have a time machine) is forward.

Me? I look around, and take stock. The mistakes I’ve made? I don’t dwell on them, because I can’t change them. I can only look at what I have, the talents I have, the support of the people who love or believe in me, and go forward.

There is no way out, but through. Unless you live in Canada, where the “easy way out” is now a prescribed medical treatment.

I always thought we’d see another Pol Pot, just didn’t think he would be as much of a pansy as Trudeau.

So, remember, there is one direction, forward. There is one attitude, determination. And there is one moment: now.

What you do with all of that, is up to you.

As for me? I’m going to go hit the hay. I’ll comment on comments from the previous post tomorrow.

I’m sleepy.

Your move, Mr. Bond. Do you really think those Space Marines® can hold out?

The Destruction of the American Education Society – On Purpose

“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.” – Horse Feathers

Remember, if you teach homeschool, you can’t get fired for drinking on the job.

Jimmy Carter doesn’t deserve all of the blame he gets. He handled inflation poorly, energy poorly, lost a lot of helicopters in the desert. Oh, wait, was I talking about Biden?

Nope. Carter. One of the biggest things to blame on Carter was the creation of the Department of Education, which he did in an election year to get more votes. Of course, Carter didn’t start the rot, that really started with Franklin Roosevelt, who attempted to federalize education, because he wanted to further centralize power. Roosevelt started a quite lot of rot, but it took longer for some of it to surface than the run time of Avatar 2.

What has happened since education has come under the control of the feds?

How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb? One, unless he needs help. Then it’s still one.

Previously each state and local area ran its school system. The schools themselves were, generally, of excellent quality. But a bigger bureaucracy led to two things. The first is the activation of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Dr. Pournelle’s description of it is below:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Sure there are local school boards that are awful. I’ve heard horrible things about Los Angeles, and other large cities. Why? Because the boards are so large that they have to have massive infrastructure – the idea of the neighborhood school disappears, replaced by massive numbers of administrators in a Soviet-style collective.

I couldn’t answer my daughter’s question, “What does a ballerina wear?” I couldn’t put tu and tu together.

To make this better, we add in the feds???

Yikes. That’s like solving an ingrown hair with a flamethrower. It works, but what’s the cost?

Good teachers, for one. Teaching has always been an important profession, and with local control, the messages that went out to the kids reflected both American values, and local values. Even if you didn’t agree with the values of Los Angeles, you could move to a place where the school district mirrored your values, like mine, which has classes in PEZ™ dispenser maintenance.

But with federal control, you get federal rules on what can and can’t be done. The result was the second problem with federal control:

Indoctrination.

I tried to indoctrinate a hairdresser, but I couldn’t condition her.

Schools used to start with teaching basic skills. If there was a student who wasn’t getting it, they were flunked. Try to flunk a kid today? It can’t happen. The result in (as I recall) the Baltimore school district is that the parents are suing the schools because, after 13 years of education and a diploma, graduates can’t read. For the sake of the school district, I hope the plaintiff’s lawyer went to school there.

But why can’t the students read?

The idea was that there was a certain minimum competence in reading, writing and math that was required and expected. The basics of history and geography were also taught, as well as classic literature.

And that was it. Bring your own lunch. Need someone to talk to? Go talk to your friends.

The basic function of the school was education. Sometime around 2006, though, the competence level was reset to “breathing”. Now? Biden’s Department of Education wants “projects” that increase Critical Race Theory usage in schools. The same initiative is called “Promoting Informational Literacy Skills” which essentially involves coming up with ways to convince kids that The Current Thing is correct, i.e., not to “do your own research” and to only trust .gov sources.

I guess she was just biden her time.

The bureaucracy was bad enough, but the indoctrination is worse. The difficulty is that most school districts compete for federal money, and when they accept it, every single rule applies. Remember, the first rule of government club is that you do whatever the government says.

Back during Obama, the Department of Education even put out a “letter” that indicated they would investigate any school who didn’t discipline students the way the Leftists in Washington wanted. So, suspensions and detentions essentially ended in many school districts. The result? Well, I don’t think anyone is complaining the schools have too much discipline nowadays.

Why would they want that?

We can be assured that the Department of Education never educated a single kid, in fact whoever was responsible for my algebra homework was fired. But they have been responsible for indoctrination with Leftist values.

If you listen to Pink Floyd and eat ice cream, you become comfortably plump.

The solution starts with saying no. No to federal rules, no to federal money. And if anyone wanted to actually improve education in the United States, the first thing to do would be to abolish the Department of Education and every single one of its rules.

After that?

Time to think about that pesky Department of Energy . . .

Credentials: Costing Trillions

“Credentials. The only credentials I have is that I’m the only pilot willing to fly you up there. You don’t like those credentials? Walk.” – The X Files

Biden doesn’t think of those kids as hostages, just a captive audience.

Warning up front: I’ve got family obligations on Thursday that involve traveling late, so I might not have time for any sort of post on Friday. If so, be back in full force on Monday.

The Mrs. went into the hospital last year for “having lungs that were as useful as used party balloons”, which I think was the technical definition. In reality, one doctor said he thought she had Legionnaires’ Disease, which is weird because she never hangs out down at the Legion even though she likes mustard and bologna (one of you will get this joke and really, really laugh)*.

The reality of the care The Mrs. got was that she sat in a bed, they gave her some antibiotics, and then sent her home until her lungs looked less like they were filled with Jim Beam® bottles that had gone through a wood chipper. The care was just fine. Then the bill showed up – for two days in the hospital, the cost was about $16,000, which included a (I kid you not) $2,000 COVID test, which was negative.

But it was $2,000.

No, I don’t dress that way.

Again, the staff was nice, the doctor competent, but the real hero was the antibiotics that The Mrs. took. I don’t recall the line item for those, but I assure you, it wasn’t the food that caused her lungs to allow sweet, sweet, oxygen to once again saturate her hemoglobin. It was the antibiotics. I tried to get her to take my homemade antibiotics made of lead, some of the fuzzy stuff I found in the fridge, and several unlabeled vials of chemicals that were in the house when we moved in.

She turned me down. But $16,000? What’s up there?

Well, liability and gatekeepers. The idea is that every job has some liability associated with it. And courts have ruled that if I own a hospital and hire the neighborhood kid who mows my lawn to do brain surgery, that things might not go well. Well, in 2022, they wouldn’t go so well.

In the past, however, being a doctor was a state of mind. The Mrs. gave me a nickname over 20 years ago: John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon. Most of the operations that the members of my family have had, from splinter extractions to blisters to the occasional tracheotomy using a ballpoint pen and some duct tape and super glue have been performed by me. I got my medical degree in . . . nowhere.

What was Morgan Freeman called before the Civil War? Morgan.

In a real sense, almost everything I’ve done was just a matter of first aid, most not really complicated, and all really easy once I determined that no matter how much the other person is yelling, it is good for them and doesn’t hurt me at all. That last sentence will amuse at least three of you, so at least the jokes are getting broader as we go along.

I would assess, that at current prices, that I’ve done at least $4,349,209 worth of medical work on my family. So, enough to buy two Happy Meals© and a Big Mac©. Some of it was especially hilarious, like the time Pugsley (then aged three) slid sideways along a wooden bleacher at a wrestling tournament and ended up with three cords of splinters in his butt. Actual conversation from the bathroom while we were in the handicapped stall (the bathroom was filled with people): “Listen, hold still,” (Pugsley screams as I pluck a four-inch-long splinter out of his butt) “It won’t take long if you stop fighting.”

I did like the comfy chair very much, though.

But if anything goes remotely wrong, my family can’t sue me. When anything goes wrong at a doctor’s office, they can get sued. So an entire labyrinth of credentials has been created. This does two things: it makes sure that doctors have achieved a set credential, and it also assures that doctors are in short supply, and thus their cost is huge.

And that’s the basis of credentialism. From doing hair to doing nails to being a cop or a firefighter or . . . a zillion other professions, there are a myriad of professional credentials required. Heck, there are even credentials required to embalm dead people, and it’s not like they can lose a patient.

Credentialism makes sure that every person involved in every chain has a string of credentials a mile long. I’ve been through lots of training courses where I didn’t learn anything, and (in some cases) an “eight hour course” involves a lot (I mean a loooooooooooot) of breaks.

The credentials are required, of course, so that the company doesn’t lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit, even if they don’t have a practical impact on the job. They’re all made so that in a courtroom a person on the stand can say, “yes, I had the eight hour training on not shoving a cotton swab so far into my ear that I could feel my brain”.

Also, a colon can completely change the meaning of a sentence: “Wilder ate his friend’s sandwich,” vs. “Wilder’s colon ate his friend’s sandwich.” See? It’s the small things.

Certainly, there are professions that require more training. The bridge disaster in Florida shows that people should have training when dozens of people can die in an accident. But, whoops! All the people involved did have training. And, yes, I’d prefer not to go to a doctor who got his training at Doctor Bombay’s Surgery School and Meth Laboratory. Yet, Sam Bankman-Fraud was allowed to steal and/or lose billions of dollars based on being weird, something-something crypto, sleeping on a beanbag, and being able to fool Tom Brady.

Maybe he should have had a credential? “Unable to fool Tom Brady”?

But this design of creating every job with a nearly infinite number of credentials is adding billions of dollars in cost to the systems that we depend on, from filling up a car with gasoline (the tank, not covering the passengers) to buying PEZ© at Wal-Mart®. Some of them add a great deal of value, but some just add friction to the system.

Just like $15,890 of The Mrs.’ bill. And I’m not letting her go down to the Legion anymore.

*This is a reference to a song. It’s by “Bubbles” and you can find it if you search for “youtube mustard and bologna bubbles”. Not one you’d want to play if your office is near HR.