Big Thoughts – Page 65 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Key To A Great Job? The Right Mixture Of Important And Urgent.

“Daniel Dravot, Esquire. Well, he became king of Kafiristan, with a crown on his head and that’s all there is to tell. I’ll be on my way now sir, I’ve got urgent business in the south, I have to meet a man in Marwar Junction.” – The Man Who Would Be King

Well, maybe not this doctor.

I have a friend that I’ll call “Joe”. Mainly I’ll call him “Joe” because that’s his name. Since there are estimated to be 1,782,432 people in the United States named “Joseph” that’s really not blowing his cover, except to (I think) two readers. And, no, his wife’s name isn’t Mary.

Joe is fantastically smart. He has an intelligence that makes correlation leaps that catch most people by surprise. In one instance he pointed out a basic physics flaw that showed a billion-dollar business deal was destined to fail. The company did the deal anyway. Physics won – physics always wins.

Joe had been right. You’d think that being right about a fatal flaw in a billion-dollar business would be rewarded, that Joe would be sought after for advice.

If you think that, you’ve never worked in the corporate world. Being right about something like that means that an executive was wrong. Executives never like to have people around them that remind them of when they turned $1,000,000,000 into $100,000,000.

There are times it doesn’t pay to be smarter than the boss.

My boss caught me taking NSFW selfies. They’re serious about mask-wearing.

Besides being right when an executive was wrong, one problem that Joe had is that he had a fairly high capacity to do work. Normally that would be a good thing, but most work was routine for Joe. When he and I were working as peers, he would often do no work at all for days on end.

None. He’d goof off all day, or just play and experiment. He’d break the software in his computer just to see if he could fix it.

Then, in a furious burst of energy (often before a deadline) he’d work. Sometimes, the work would last through multiple 20 hour days.

“Joe, you realize that you could have done that work last week when you were trying to get unauthorized access to the company’s main software server and setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail just for the group. Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“That would be boring,” Joe responded, “so I waited until I didn’t think I’d be able to do the work on time and that I’d miss the deadline. Then it got interesting.”

I got pulled over while going to work with my loom in the front seat. The cop said I was weaving all over the road.

In truth, I’d seen some of the same characteristics of creative procrastination in me, so I immediately understood what Joe was saying. The work itself was rather routine, so the way to bring challenge was to wait until the real risk of losing my job led to peak production. I had a mortgage and Joe didn’t, so I didn’t fly nearly as close to the flame.

But that’s not the only kind of job there is out there.

On the other end of the spectrum is a job that’s chaos. Everything is an emergency. Everything is urgent.

Priorities keep shifting on a daily basis – sometimes on an hourly basis. It feels like there’s no end to the work, and the pressure is unrelenting. There are long lists of things that have to be done – now. The previous day’s plan gets thrown into the trash due to the events of today.

Well, that’s not a job that’s boring.

Don’t worry – they got jobs with Elon Musk, so they could go to otter space.

Lose a day on a job like that, and it feels like the business might implode. I once told The Mrs., “I can do any job for two years.” I had that particular chaotic job for 32 months. 32 months really was 8 months too long – there are only so many 70 hour weeks that I could do consecutively and not become as mentally vacant as Joe Biden circa 2021.

An example from my time in ChaosCorp®: on Sunday around noon when I just started to feel normal, I’d realize that tomorrow was Monday, and I’d have to go back to work. Goodbye feeling normal. I knew there would be some fresh crisis on Monday, I just didn’t know what it would be this week.

This was a time when life was too interesting.

Perhaps, though, there was another way?

Going into my Wayback® Machine, I actually created a picture that I can use to illustrate this. This is from a post back in 2018 (Franklin, Planners, The Terminator, My Unlikely But Real Link With President Eisenhower, Star Wars, and Kanban):

Gotta love Microsoft® Paint™, making a $500 computer just as effective as a box of Crayons® and a sheet of construction paper (plus a sticker).

In this particular graph, one axis shows how important a task is, and the other how urgent. We’ll skip the unimportant stuff, and only focus on the two boxes on the right side of the graph:

Important and Urgent, and Important and Not-Urgent.

The job I described above where everything was chaos? Almost all of our work was Important and Urgent. It’s the kind of work that causes people to get ulcers, gray hair, a facial tic, and start muttering to themselves when they’re hanging out by the coffee machine.

That was me for thirty months.

The “boring” first job I described? That was one where almost all of our work was Important and Not Urgent. This was reasonable work that was really important, but we had sensible timelines. Being generally Type-A personalities, there wasn’t enough pressure for Joe (and me), so we had to invent it ourselves.

Recently, though, I’ve come on a revelation: the optimum amount of work types (for me) is probably about 80% Important and Not Urgent and 20% Important and Urgent.

Pareto would be proud of that blend.

I tried to put my dog on a vegan diet, but we ran out of vegans.

The nice thing about Important and Urgent work is that it gets me going. Rather than get to work and plan about the plan I need to schedule to put the Important and Not Urgent work together, Important and Urgent work has to be done. Now. It has immediacy. It gets me going. Once I get momentum and a pace going, well, it’s easy to keep it going.

Then I get the Important and Not Urgent work done.

The great thing about a day with a good mixture of work like that is that, at the end, my productivity is nearly maximum. As I get in the car to go home, I realize that, yeah, I really did give it all at work, and it felt pretty good.

But writing these posts? That’s Important and Not Urgent. Until I wait to 11PM to get started on writing, like I did tonight.

Then writing becomes Important and Urgent.

Joe would be proud.

Hey, look, the Sun is coming up . . . .

Money Is A Meme

â€œThe Mandela Effect has been an InternetÂ memeÂ for almost a decade. It’s always been called that.â€ â€“ The X-Files

Where does the Federal Reserve keep inflation?Â In debasement.

What is a meme?Â In general, a meme is like a bit of cultural information.Â Itâ€™s an idea that spreads virally.Â What are some examples?

â€œAll men are created equal.â€ Itâ€™s an idea that no one believes in literally, because itâ€™s not true.Â But it does carry the idea that we should all have the same rights, citizen and elected official alike.Â Even though we know thatâ€™s not true, either.
â€œTaco Tuesday.â€
â€œOne man, one vote.â€ Again, another idea that is so deeply bored itself into most minds that we donâ€™t even question if there are some people that shouldnâ€™t
â€œNever deduct a loss carryforward in a tax year when the alternative minimum tax applies.â€ Well, everyone knows that, right?
â€œViolence never solves anything.â€ Ahh, World War II was won with NerfÂ® rifles?

The list makes it quite clear:Â memes donâ€™t have to be true to spread and no one should ever take tax advice from me.Â What memes do have to be is simple and compelling.Â This is why this particular meme was so popular back in 2014:

So thatâ€™s what an elected lord and chief of state in several Italian city-states, notably Venice and Genoa looks like!

Doge was and is funny.Â Itâ€™s simple.Â Itâ€™s stupid.Â Almost anyone gets it.Â The idea stays with you, and, in 2014 Doge was the rage.Â Sure, in 2020 there were plenty of memes about quarantine, but those were all inside jokes.

Back to 2014: Â Bitcoin was still in the early stage, and numerous people used the same idea to come up with a huge variety of alternative crypto offerings, most of which are worth zero now.Â One alternative was the Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on the Doge meme.Â It was done as a joke.Â Recently, though, Dogecoin spiked up in value.Â The current market value of all existing Dogecoin?

Over $7 billion.Â Iâ€™m not making that up.Â Dogecoin, a crypto based on a joke, is worth more than Uzbekistan.Â It had a huge jump recently.Â Why?Â Elon Musk made a joke about it.

Elon is like SupermanÂ® – but every Monday evening he trades Bitcoin.Â Thatâ€™s his crypto-night.

So, thatâ€™s one data point.Â Hereâ€™s another.Â This is from the Wall Street JournalÂ®:

Michael Levy was scrolling Twitter last September when he noticed someone mention something that he wanted to know more about. What is NBA Top Shot? He wondered.

This platform to buy, sell and collect officially licensed video highlights was months from becoming a market that would captivate and mystify basketball fans, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, sneakerheads, pandemic day traders and thousands of people stuck at home. But it wasnâ€™t long before Levy texted his friends: â€œThis could be big.â€

He [Levy] was so convinced that he decided to spend $175,000 over the next six months on digital trading cards. They are now worth $20 million.Â Levy is one of the biggest winners of a manic new market that true believers say is the future of collecting and skeptics call a slightly absurd form of speculation.

That second data point was clear to me.Â Unless Levy is money laundering for the mob, there is only one logical conclusion:Â Â Money is a meme.Â There is no other logical reason for a video clip to be worth $20 million unless it shows Jesus and Jimmy Hoffa riding the Ark of the Covenant.

I had been playing with the idea that money is a meme recently.Â Historically gold and silver were the currencies of choice, possibly because when the Hittites traded with the Aztecs there werenâ€™t enough computer servers to validate a blockchain, and the Hittites werenâ€™t big fans of Michael Jordan, so they couldnâ€™t trade NBAÂ® clips, either.

Little known fact:Â the Aztecs worshiped a salted baked bread god called Pretzalcoatl.

Nope.Â They had to settle for the original meme, which is a little bit heavier than the data.

It was a lot, lot later that the Romans invented their own particular meme:Â they took the silver out of their money and started making it out of Chinesium – you know, that mystery metal you get with cheap stuff from China?Â To substitute for making crappy coins, they had to make a lot of coins, thus creating the meme of inflation.

Why Iâ€™m concerned about inflation is this:Â collectively, we as a nation believe inflation into existence just like a cartoon version of Santa Claus.Â Right now, money is sitting in huge pots everywhere.Â As soon as people start believing in inflation?

Theyâ€™ll buy stuff.Â Any stuff.Â Theyâ€™ll want to turn their cheap money into something that isnâ€™t losing value day after day and it will flow like quicksilver through the economy.Â One story from Weimar Germany during their inflation mentioned a person who bought bedpans.

Why bedpans?Â It was better than hanging on to the German Mark.Â At least it was worth something.

AppleÂ® is doing a great job to help the economy â€“ theyâ€™ve already adjusted their prices for the next 15 years of inflation.

Inflation isnâ€™t a big thing, until it is, until we collectively believe itâ€™s a problem â€“ as soon as the meme takes hold?

Wow.Â Much moneys.Â Much smalle.Â Sad.

Disclaimer:Â John Wilder is an Internet humorist who is much better at writing dank memes than predicting the economy and is not a registered financial advisor.Â Be responsible for your choices. Â Â Â Â Â

A Wolfe, Stab Wounds, Dolphins, And Snot

“I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.” – Pulp Fiction

What’s the difference between a knife juggler and a multiple stab wound victim? Practice.

I first started reading Claire Wolfe back around the turn of this century in Backwoods Home Magazine. I have several of her books and have enjoyed them greatly. Claire is one of the most wonderful of wordsmiths about freedom, and she has a great post up (LINK) now. The title says it all: “Freedom Is Dying: Be Of Good Cheer.”

Of course, regular readers know that I couldn’t agree more.

Claire has a great story that’s contained in the post. A person named “Lox” came into Claire’s Internet freedom group, and the group tried to help him to freedom:

But “poor” Lox sucked up everything we had to offer, then spat it back out. None of it applied to him. He told us a thousand reasons why all our ideas and experiences were worthless. We were blind and insensitive to the depths of his plight. Nobody had ever been as unfortunate as he. Nobody had ever been as helpless as he. No one had ever been as depressed, as oppressed, as mistreated, as ugly, as inept, as trapped, as misery-laden as he.

Of course, there’s more, and Lox shows himself to be even worse than what’s written above. Seriously. I’ll let you read the rest over at her place, because if you’re not going to her place regularly, you should.

Genghis Khan was a ruthless baby. Why, I remember when he took his first steppe . . .

I’d like to focus for this post on what Claire wrote about Lox in the quote above.

When I was younger (and not yet a wiser Wilder) I can recall running into more than one person like Lox. The names were different. The situations were different. But the behavior was always exactly the same, so I will collectively name them Blandy Blanderson:

Blandy has a problem. It is the worst problem of anyone ever.
I try to help, either though giving advice, or giving them assistance. I’ve moved furniture on a Sunday evening when Blandy was being kicked out of an apartment, I’ve waxed dolphin armpits (flipper pits?), and I’ve even lent Blandy money so that the Auckland Auk Ark Cartel wouldn’t break his leg.
Even if the initial problem is solved, Blandy will then have another problem.
I try to help. The next problem is solved. I’m never going to do dentistry on a dolphin again, let me tell you.
Blandy then comes up with problem number three.
I decide that Caller I.D. is worth every penny.

If I Photoshopped® myself a dentistry license, would that a doctored image?

I had finally figured out that Blandy didn’t want the problem to be solved. And I realized that there would always be a problem. Blandy was in love with the problem.

This was new to me. I have always had a sunny disposition – one of my Professors in college always said, “Keep smiling, John.” That’s why it took me so long to understand Blandy. Why would anyone want to be sad?

I couldn’t understand it, so I observed it.

I noticed that whenever I helped Blandy, especially if my help solved the “problem of the day”, Blandy would never, ever say “Thank you.” Why would you thank someone who took away the problem you secretly loved?

I can only speculate the causes of Blandy’s behavior:

If Blandy could blame someone else, then they weren’t responsible for their situation. Someone or something else was responsible. They could live their life blaming others.
How could Blandy get attention? Having problems got people to pay attention.
By having problems, Blandy could get sympathy from others. Without problems, what would start the sympathy flowing from others?

I’m sure that after I stopped helping, I became yet another one of the long list of Blandy’s problems. “Oh, Wilder, he’s so lucky and fortunate, but he never helps anyone else.”

Dracula returned a mirror to the local Wal-Mart®. When they asked him why, he said, “I can’t see my self using it.”

In one sense, Blandy’s behavior is vampirism. Blandy takes a personal tragedy and exploits it so he can get fun and prizes and emotion from others. The bonus for people playing along at home is that Blandy can also shield a fragile psyche from the consequences of his actions.

But wait, don’t people have real problems? Don’t people really need help sometimes?

Certainly.

I recall one time calling up a friend and saying only, “Bar. Now.” It was noon. It was an awful day. He picked me up in 20 minutes, and he got me home safely later that night, even though it took more than a little while to work myself out of the problem.

There are times that people have streaks of bad luck. I can recall once when I was on such a streak. I called my friends for help. They did. But I noticed that the longer I had my problem, the less one particular friend was interested in talking about it.

That’s when I realized: by staying negative on a topic and not owning it and putting it behind me, I was starting to turn into Blandy. That was my signal that it was time to put the problem behind me and stop complaining.

Even Liberals aren’t safe you see; the Left always eats itself, yippee!

Perhaps the biggest takeaway in learning to deal with my problems is that I own my attitude – no one else does. If something bad happens, well, I could spend every moment of my life being mad at the situation. Does the situation care?

No.

Heck, I could spend every moment swimming in the salty warm viscous mucus of self-pity. If I do that, all I get is sticky and become the Michael Phelps of victimhood mucus swimming. Maybe Coca-Cola® would sponsor me?

Good things and bad things will happen to me. If my happiness is dependent upon only good things happening to me? I’ll be forever disappointed because bad things happen, too. Tires go flat. Plates break. The Yellowstone volcano erupts.

Know the difference between snot and broccoli? A five-year-old won’t eat broccoli.

The Truth as I’ve seen it so far: if I’m happy on my bad days, I’m going to be ecstatic on my good days.

Do I see many difficulties in the years ahead? Certainly. Does sitting around worrying about them make them go away? Does it make them better?

Nope.

The Blandy Blandersons of this world waltz through it surrounded by a cloud of misery.

I think I’ll skip that.

It’s much more fun being John Wilder. I’ll echo what Claire says: “Be of good cheer.”

The Great Purge Ahead

“When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural.” – Batman Begins

Stalin was better than most magicians. He really made people disappear.

The Soviet Great Purge started in 1936. Stalin already had a bad reputation as a Dictator who couldn’t say no – he had gotten rid of millions already in the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver!). The Great Purge was different. The piles and piles of earlier dead had been peasants and kulaks (kulaks were peasants that had enough money to own a cow), mainly. Even before the Great Purge Stalin had the world record for Russian killing, a record he still proudly maintains.

By 1936 Stalin, always paranoid, decided his main opponents were, surprise, still Russians.

Anyone who had been a trusted advisor of Lenin had to go. Anyone who looked like a threat to Stalin? Had to go. The Red Army had troops with guns. Three out of five Soviet Marshalls were executed. 13 out of 15 army commanders, 50 out of 57 corps-level commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders were caught up in it.

The very top of the Soviet Military was decapitated. But that was a small portion of the Great Purge. In the end, probably a million or more were murdered or died in the Gulags. Anyone in politics was fair game, and the more power the bigger the target on their back. Many of the people who helped Stalin with the Great Purge eventually were victims of it themselves.

What did Jack Nicholson say to his dentist? “You can’t handle the tooth.”

What was the basis of the Great Purge? Even though Stalin binged and purged, it wasn’t bulimia, it was Power. Stalin wanted to keep power. His greatest weapon?

Fear.

And fear is currently the weapon (predictably) used by the Left today. They want to push people to the fringes, isolate them, and then purge them. The first step is making them feel alone.

Of course, there haven’t been executions in the United States. However, Obama purged 197 high-level officers in the first five years of his administration. That’s quite close to the Stalin numbers, and perhaps even greater when you consider that the military in 2000s America is far smaller than in late 1930s Russia.

The purge has lately increased. The current SecDef has made it clear: “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies, but we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

Just let that sink in. The current Secretary of Defense has stated that he thinks that the biggest enemies of the United States are in the military, right now. Today. The leadership of the military has already been purged. Now? The rank and file is in the process of being purged. Anyone not actively supporting the Leftist agenda will be drummed out.

If you need sink jokes, I’m at your disposal.

They want to purge anyone who is involved in “extremism” from the military. As far as commies, I certainly agree. But extremism for a Leftist is mere disagreement with a Leftist. Don’t agree that having a 9-year-old boy dance as a girl in front of gay men at a strip club is entirely good and appropriate?

Extremist! Behavior that would have resulted in imprisonment for the mother in all but the last 10 years since 1787 is now considered so sacred that it is impossible to challenge. Now, speaking out against it is extremist.

Hollywood® is already on the job with this requirement. Star Wars® was a part of my childhood. I saved money when I was 12 to buy overpriced dolls action figures. The mythos of Star Wars© was always one of Good versus Evil, which burned itself into my young imagination.

Now? It’s Leftism versus the Right. At every opportunity, the creative element at DisneyLucasFilmStarWars™ has abandoned the production of good movies to produce movies that are water carriers for the narratives of a Leftist agenda.

I grew up loving Star Wars©. It was fun. It was escapism. It was a place where there were good heroes and evil villains. Okay, I’ll admit, the entire series should have ended when the Emperor© said, “And now you die, young Skywalker™” during Return of the Jedi©.

Luke was late because he had to take an R2-Detour.

The latest is that an actress got fired for expressing mildly Right viewpoints. Heck, they weren’t even something that 95% of every American wouldn’t have agreed with when Kurt Cobain was still sucking air instead of pushing daisies.

And that is the technique of the Left. If they can’t directly imprison you, they do their best to turn you into an unemployed, destitute outcast of society.

Imagine 50,000 Leftists watching everything you re-Tweet® to catch you.

But, thanks to me, you can watch the purge unfold in real time. The Long March through the institutions of the United States is ongoing. Here’s the current status of the things the Left owns:

The K-12 educational system.
Colleges and Universities.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The psychological establishment.
The American Medical Association.
All mainstream news media.
All mainstream entertainment media.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

The result in 2021 is that of the institutions of the United States, the Left has or is consolidating control over nearly all of the important ones. What remains? Junior officer and enlisted men in the armed forces (at least for the next few months) and the governors and legislators of a few states.

Oh, and at least 80,000,000 inconvenient people.

The idea is to scare Americans about the Purge, to scare them about their place in society. If the State and the Media can scare Americans like that, they can achieve their ultimate goal: to make them be quiet.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve had from a friend about this website was this, “If they (the powers that be) were really reading and understanding the things you say, you’d be much, much higher on The List.”

The Mrs. prefers the elevator, I prefer stairs. I guess we were raised differently.

The reason I don’t feel fear is this: I’m not alone. As I said earlier, there are 80,000,000 other inconvenient people on the list.

Standing together? We can’t be canceled.

Standing together? We can’t be purged.

Standing together? We can’t lose.

This isn’t over. We’re not done.

Fear, Rats, G. Gordon Liddy And A Machine Gun Bikini

“Hold them back! Do not give in to fear! Stand to your posts! Fight!” – Return of the King

I can jump higher than any fence. Fences don’t jump very well.

When The Mrs. and I were newly married, and before the stork brought The Boy, The Mrs. and I had time to just do, well, whatever. That often involved driving, and driving in that involved radio. We listened, mainly, to talk radio. We had to, because we had been banned from a gas station for listening to a song by The Who too loudly.

I guess we won’t get fueled again.

One day we were listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show. For those of you who don’t know, Liddy was sent to prison as part of the Watergate break in during the Nixon era. If I had just one word to describe Liddy, it would be intense. I hear that Liddy was doing five hundred sit ups a day, but had to stop – he couldn’t take the ab use.

In particular, I remember one story of Liddy’s very vividly. The dialogue below isn’t exact (this was over 20 years ago and I slept at least once since then) but it’s pretty close:

“When I was younger, I had a particular fear of rats. It was a very, very strong fear. I didn’t want to be afraid of rats, but I was. So, to get rid of the fear, I killed one, cooked it, and ate it. I was never afraid of rats again.”

If a relative passes away, you can get a free Starbucks®. It’s your mourning coffee.

See? Intense. Also the kind of thing that made me glad that Liddy wasn’t afraid of me, since I have no idea if I’m good with ketchup.

On one hand, that level of behavior is bordering on insane. On the other, it showed an amazing amount of self-awareness. If Liddy’s goal was to go through life without fear, facing it was certainly the way to overcome it, although I’ll say the number of times I’ve come face to face with rats is exactly zero. If that’s your top fear, you’ve gotten rid of most common fears.

I’ve related in the past how when climbing a really tall mountain I reached a ridge and looked down over, expecting that there was no way it could be as steep as what I had just climbed. I was wrong. Sheer cliff. I was looking down very far.

Several mountain climbers caught the ‘Rona but didn’t give it to anyone. Scalers aren’t vectors.

I never had vertigo before, in fact I never had much of a fear of height at all. But in that moment, I developed it. From then on, whenever I could find a tall spot to stand on and look down, I would. And I’d stay there until the vertigo went away.

It was a lot harder than just killing and eating the cliff. It also took a few months, but the vertigo went away. It’s mostly vertigone now, though I will admit that sometimes I get a chill when I watch Internet videos of people doing stupid stuff on very tall buildings. Most of the videos seem to come from Russia, for whatever reason. I’m betting it’s vodka, but it could also be . . . no, it’s vodka.

Bad pun? Check. Bikini? Check. Machine gun? Check. Russian hat? Check.

Not all fear is bad, and not all fear is debilitating. A lot of Evil comes from fear. I used to think that all Evil came from fear, but that’s certainly not correct (Three Kinds Of Evil).

But a lot of Evil does come from fear. Why? Fear is fuel for Evil:

Fear leads to cowardice.
Fear leads to deceit.
Fear leads to anger.
Fear leads to hate. (Quote about the Dark Side®, there may be here.)
Fear leads to regret.

Cowardice might be the worst, though.

The reason is that cowardice is, at the root, a betrayal. First, a betrayal of internal values. Second, a betrayal outwards. A perfect (but small) example is someone who is afraid of the consequences of disappointing a customer. That leads to a lie to the customer. Which leads to another lie, which will eventually end up with a very angry customer.

The Mrs. and I started our relationship with a strict “no lies” policy. That’s why The Mrs. never asks me, “Do these pants make my butt look big?” She knows I’ll tell her the truth.

“The pants? No, the pants don’t make your butt look big.”

It was half an hour outside of Bakersfield when the catnip began to take hold.

Fear is natural. A healthy respect for fires and firearms is a good thing. But when any single fear? That fear has to be confronted.

It has to be killed and eaten. It can change the world. Say, if you were afraid of undercooked bat . . . .

Consequences Of The Broken Balance

â€œUmmm, I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. Â So if you could be here around nine that would be great, ummm kay. Ahh, I almost forgot ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ahh, we sorta need to play catch up.â€ â€“ Office Space

Would John Henry have upgraded to the iPhoneÂ® 12?

There have been some pretty significant trends of dehumanization of the workforce.Â It might seem like dehumanization is a story right out of 2021, but this trend isnâ€™t new.Â The legend of John Henry, that steel drivinâ€™ man that raced a steam drill shows that the fear of machines replacing people and changing the way they work dates back at least as far as the 1800s.Â At least John Henryâ€™s performance review only ended with his heart exploding.

I blame Materialism, but more on that in a bit.

There are more and more jobs where each second of employee performance is analyzed and optimized and timed.Â Iâ€™ve written (some) about this previously (How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*).

There are more people today working under deep surveillance at work than ever before:

Donâ€™t perform as well as the computer metric says you should in customer satisfaction surveys?
Bosses that are upset that people get sick on Wednesday and never on Saturday or Sunday? And employees blame their weekend immune system.
Donâ€™t move in the optimum path from one place to another to pick an item off of a shelf?
Bosses firing people with the worst posture? Well, we all have a hunch who that is.
Take too long per item to ring out a customer?
Not enough keystrokes per minute on the company computer?

These are jobs that are created that use humans as interchangeable parts â€“ ones that wear out or are defective and that can be replaced.Â Of course, jobs like this have existed since, well, jobs existed.Â Mining comes to mind.Â Building railroads probably wasnâ€™t a ball of fun, either.Â But in both of those, at least, the job had room for innovation, thought, and human ability.

These children actually worked in a coal seam.Â Child labor laws back then werenâ€™t a miner issue.

I think the biggest problem is that people have forgotten that businesses exist for the benefit of society â€“ society doesnâ€™t exist for the benefit of businesses.Â In my younger, more libertarian days, I missed that point.Â Even though I love freedom (still!) I was always skeptical of the power of big business.

Also, I was always concerned about businesses that produced nothing.Â I didnâ€™t have the framework to explain it then, but I do now.

Businesses exist for three reasons:

To benefit society by creating value.

A business can easily fall short of this if itâ€™s an abusive monopoly or makes its profits based on political pull and persuasion â€“ an example would be solar scams during Obama, and military scams, well, any time.Â Whatâ€™s an invulnerable weapon system?Â One that has parts made in every Congressional district.Â Even if the military doesnâ€™t want it.

No, creating value isnâ€™t the same thing as government forcing money at a company.Â Creating value is a much deeper concept â€“ itâ€™s where someone makes something and society gets better.Â It doesnâ€™t even have to be a physical thing, the words written by an author arenâ€™t physical, but they create value when enjoyed by an audience.

Of course, physical items are awesome, too.Â PEZÂ®, anyone?

Z3d looks like â€œZed.â€Â Thank you for attending my Zed Talk.

To benefit employees by providing meaningful, necessary work.

When mass business first started, Henry Ford did an amazing thing:Â he doubled the wages he paid his employees.Â Why?Â First, to get a good, stable workforce.Â Second, to increase the productivity of that workforce.Â Assembly lines were new, and getting a good workforce was crucial.

The experiment was successful, and helped Ford increase production while lowering overall costs.

Today, when youâ€™ve got a good job, you know it.Â Youâ€™re working on tough things that are right at the limit of your capability.Â Youâ€™re engaged.Â Youâ€™ve got support so you donâ€™t sink.Â You know what youâ€™re supposed to be working on.Â And youâ€™re part of a team.

That sort of work is fun.

To allocate profits to shareholders and owners.

This is also required.Â Winners make profits and get more opportunity to manage bigger businesses.Â Losers donâ€™t, and their businesses fold.Â In a well-functioning society, those profits accrue to those who are creating value, which in turn allows them to create even more value.Â I donâ€™t know about you, but Iâ€™ve never gotten a job (in business) from a company that had less money than I did.

The most profitable part of the lemonade stand I had when I was growing up?Â Selling the antidote.

These three things are a delicate balance.Â Too much emphasis on any one of the three is poison to the system:

Collective farms in the Soviet Union attempted to â€œcreate valueâ€ in society by creating awful jobs for people who had no real incentive to do a good job. Result?Â Tens of millions dead, followed (much later) by the collapse of an entire country.Â But the Soviets did develop an impressive system to stand in line all day.
Government, where often itâ€™s set up for the benefit of the employees. What business would you go to where the customer (you and I) has to park farther away than the employee?Â That wouldnâ€™t happen at almost any business looking to make a profit.Â But does your local police department save the best spaces for citizens?Â Does your local DMV?Â If so, youâ€™re not the customer.Â They are.
Hedge funds, high-frequency traders are an example of a business that does, in many cases, literally nothing to help the economy outside of extracting wealth. Thatâ€™s it.Â Itâ€™s a casino view of the world, where vampires that produce no value game the system for profit.

Why donâ€™t hedge fund managers ever have problems with ticks or mosquitos?Â Professional courtesy.

Imbalance in any of these features leads us to a dystopia.Â Our current dystopia in the United States comes from the employee-centric Federal government.Â Call it The Swamp or call it the Deep State, itâ€™s all the same.

Even now, the function of some government agencies is so impaired as to be comical â€“ Â we have a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that wants to put Internet traders in jail and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that sells none of those things.Â Also?Â Itâ€™s nearly impossible to fire a Federal government employee.

Unless theyâ€™re on the Right.

Hedge funds and other Wall Street hangers-on donâ€™t care about creating value for society.Â They donâ€™t care about employees of the firms they buy and gut.Â They just want profits, and want them now, please.Â Thankfully the SEC will regulate them.Â What?Â Oh, sorry, the SEC will protect them.Â My bad.

Almost all of the horrors of the world are an imbalance between these forces, and each produces its own, unique dysfunctional society.

My friend told me that Biden was going to build a monument to George Orwell.Â â€œWhere??â€Â â€œWell, pretty much everywhere.â€

The root cause for this imbalance is Materialism, the idea that only physical things matter, and a loss of the idea that there is a higher purpose.Â Materialism is the very foundation of both Marxism and Libertarianism, and, when applied strictly, is the separation of morality from culture.

I can even prove that Materialism is in complete control in 2021:Â Is there a higher crime in society than standing up against something that is morally wrong?Â Well, in a world where the rule is â€œdo as thou wiltâ€ saying something is wrong is the highest crime.

Iâ€™d call that Materialist.Â In fact, Iâ€™d bet $10 on it.

Texas Power Outages, Global Warming, And At Least One Bikini

“You want a prediction about the weather? You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

Pugsley said it was so cold in the house that it was at absolute zero. I said, “That’s 0K.”

It has been cold. Really cold. The good thing about that is that I like the cold. It’s rarely cold enough for me – even now my fingers are nearly numb blocks of flesh mashing the keyboard and only occasionally hitting the right key.

Almost cold enough, but as I reach up I find that I still have feeling in my jaw and cheeks, so I’m not quite there.

But Texas is. Today at lunch The Mrs. and I were discussing that it was colder in Anchorage, Alaska than in Houston, Texas. That made me think. And then I ended up wondering if it was too cold for Jeff Bezos to sleep in his undies, or if he needed his pajamazon?

Okay, back to Texas.

When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house. The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.

If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.

And that’s just one problem.

The bigger problem is that Texas is supposed to be an energy source. Oil gets pumped there, sure. But the pipelines for all of that natural gas that is produced in Texas? All of those pipelines head out of state. Texas is silly with natural gas, and produces far more than it uses.

Natural gas has historically been used to heat houses. It’s relatively abundant, quick and simple to ignite, and generally relatively cheap*. It’s great for hot water heaters. It’s wonderful for forced air heaters, like we have here at Casa Wilder. Heck, in the 1970’s (I read once) they passed a law that restricted the use of natural gas so that its convenient, safe heat could be used by homeowners voters to heat their houses.

And one oil company was going to make renewable crude from insect urine. It think it was BP.

But somewhere that philosophy changed – mainly when natural gas became abundant with fracking, and when Global Warming® activists became obsessed with coal. Natural gas puts a lot less carbon into the air than coal per Btu (kiloparsec). So, it became common to build industrial plants that used natural gas for heat, as well as power plants that used natural gas instead of coal.

Natural gas is pretty nifty when you use it for a power plant. That same property of nearly instant heat is there, so if you use natural gas to drive an engine, for example, you can pretty efficiently use that fuel to generate electricity quickly. To start up a coal electrical generating plant takes a long time. To start up a natural gas electrical generating plant?

Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.

When The Mrs. and I met, I felt quite a spark. Who knew she had a Taser®?

But what happens when all of those Texas houses, not built for cold, crank up the natural gas heater? What happens when the people who use electricity to heat their house crank that up at the same time? And, what happens when all of those wind turbines that are supposed to be generating electricity become electricity sinks, since many of them have electric heaters to prevent the gears and bits from freezing up and breaking? And the wind isn’t blowing?

The system fails.

An aside:

As I wrote this, I realized that my heater hadn’t gone on for, oh, seven degrees. The internal temperature in the house had dropped to 57°F (2°C). Not good. As I went to my trusty heater, I found it flashing a series of codes over and over again like an autistic R2-D2™.

In the past, this was a failed part called a “flame roll out sensor” which appears to fail much more often than the penny I replace it with. Just kidding! I use stripped wire. Also kidding. I really don’t mess with the heater more than changing the filter every decade or so (Pugsley changes it twice yearly) and flipping the breaker on and off and then poking about the insides like an Albanian strip-mall lawyer trying to fix a copier.

Which, oddly enough, works. I know that there is some sort of computer logic that was finally satisfied – such as, “the gas is no longer explosive enough to launch Wilder into space in the most pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk since Wilder founded a company named Space Y.”

I make jokes about air conditioners, but not heaters. That’s not cool.

My guess? The gas pressure dropped a bit. Which never happens, except in February, 2021. I’ve never seen this particular error code, except the one time that I missed the exhaust portal near Yavin 4.

So, we have Texas, proud producer of natural gas, and now, neurotic consumer of natural gas. And we have all of these Texas generating stations that need . . . natural gas. And we have all of these Texas homes that need electricity to run the electric heaters (our house in Texas was one of those).

The system fails. Power goes out.

But the Germans are going to build a car in Texas. It will be called the Audi Neighbor™.

Thankfully the cold won’t last forever. And this is a cold that, in some places, has broken records that were 122 years old, so it’s not the usual sort of winter storm in any respect.

But it does show us the limit of our systems.

Dang. The heater is working again. I can feel my fingers now.

*One source I saw showed spot prices up 24,000% (LINK), from $4.00 per million Btu last week to $999 yesterday.

Courage: The Biggest Present A Parent Can Give

“Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich, tasty courage.” – Futurama

The French never go on holidays, only retreats.

The biggest pleasure of being a father is the education of my children. This opportunity varies. Pugsley and The Boy are the sons of an increasingly rare commodity in 2021: they are children of an intact family.

The Boy and Pugsley are the children of me and my wife, The Mrs. That’s rare because many, many children are raised by families that are broken or blended in 2021. Or, raised in a home with no natural parent.

Like me, an adopted kid.

I was fortunate. Even though I was adopted, my parents, Ma and Pa Wilder, were a common front. Pa Wilder knew he could enforce discipline with the same effect as Ma Wilder. That’s an aside, but it’s important. Men learn how to be men from their fathers. No matter how brave and stunning a Mom is, no Mother is, or ever will be, a Father.

The plus side? Every bag of chips is family-sized if you’re adopted.

So I feel especially good that I’ve had the opportunity to raise my boys with the full backing and support of The Mrs. The idea that Pugsley could play me against The Mrs.? Or vice versa?

That would never happen.

Even if The Mrs. and I were diametrically opposed, the idea that we would overrule each other in front of a kid? Nope. There was no way that The Mrs. and I could be split. Even if we disagreed – that disagreement would be kept to ourselves until we had a knife fight to determine who was right.

What, you don’t do trial by combat at your house? If you’re a first timer, make sure you have a suture kit available. They’re cheap, and neither The Mrs. or I go for the eyes, so we have that going for us.

Raising boys isn’t easy – the only thing it’s easier than is raising girls. From my experience, every boy passes through a gate – a gate where they engage in a fight with their father. This gate is narrow.

With each of my boys, the fight was one I considered existential: to make them men worthy of being called a man is a process. And it consists of fighting the impulses that are natural to a boy. Every 12 year old considers themselves the wisest man since Solomon, and considers their father the dullest man since Mr. Bean®.

Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive? Because she was a woman.

I have thought about it, and the most important message have I fought (in some cases for years) to put into the skulls of my sons is simple:

That courage is important.
That courage is useless unless in service of virtue.
That virtue is useless unless in service of a Higher Good.

I know, I’ve tossed around several posts about virtue that don’t explicitly state that a Higher Good is important. Virtue is important. But virtue must have a Higher Good to be, well, Virtue. (Atheists that are regular readers have a Wilder Exemption Card – you’re not Evil like the other ones.)

Tonight, Pugsley and I sat in the hot tub at Stately Wilder Manor. Pugsley is currently in the mindset where he would love to own a Mustang® Shelby© 350 or a Lamborghini™ Huracán Performante®. Thus, he has discovered Top Gear™/Grand Tour©. These are shows that are hosted by three British guys: Richard Hammond, James May, Jeremy Clarkson.

A hammer has lots of uses: it can pay for a taxi ride, a dinner, or a can of Monster® energy drink from 7-11©.

Jeremy Clarkson is the big, brash guy. He’s also an amazing presenter. For reasons that will become apparent if you watch it (and you should) Mr. Clarkson put together a documentary on the Victoria Cross.

It’s here.

The idea of watching men be courageous is important. It’s perhaps more important now than at any time in our history, because there has been an attempt to systematically erase courage.

Why?

The answer is simple. Courage is an individual action. The idea that individuals have a place in society is the anathema of the Left. It’s the anathema of Globalism. Everyone is a simple cog in the machinery of the world. You exist only for the glory of the collective.

Leftists (and Globalists) feel the world doesn’t need or want individuals with courage. The world needs individuals that do what they’re told, when they’re told to do it. No other action is acceptable – only the action approved by the collective. The convenience store clerk must be fired when they commit the crime of heroism to save a customer. Individual heroism? Courage fighting against evil?

Completely unacceptable.

I heard about this guy who donated a kidney and was a hero – so why is it that when I donate five I’m charged with a felony?

The world has, in many respects, moved away from individuals. Have an adversary? Hit them with missiles from a Predator® drone that is piloted by a guy sitting in a video game chair half a world away. Where is the heroism in that?

There isn’t any.

Okay. Maybe a little heroism. Just as much heroism as there is in properly filing documents associated with statistics of average foot size of Vietnam veterans from Vail or Valdez or Valdosta. So, not much.

What’s required for heroism? What’s required for courage? This is especially irritating, since most definitions of courage floated on the Internet are filled with corporate weasel words. It seems that properly filing a TPS® report when the temperature of the office was not exactly between 72°F and 74°F (2.3 kg and 3.7 dl) would qualify for the definition of modern courage. Yes. Everyone wants to live in a mall.

I got into a fight changing levels at a mall. It escalated quickly.

Honestly, most of the definitions I find of courage on the Internet make me feel that the weasels that have tried to define it are the opposite of courageous. They’re tepid things that promote the most mundane and boring of actions to the exalted level of “courage.” Go to work and do your job?

You’re a hero. You’re courageous.

I reject that. I would say that courage requires these elements:

First: Actions that are true heroism are done without regard to self. One Victoria Cross nominee was denied the award because the plane he was piloting (while he was bleeding to death) would save him, too, if he landed it properly.
Second: Devotion to duty and those around you. This, particularly, drives modern Leftists nuts. The first devotion must be the Leftism, whatever that means on any particular day. Devotion to a higher power? Devotion to the people around you?
Third: Personal danger. It may be as small as the idea of being embarrassed (for tiny amounts of courage), but for actual courage? Let’s be real. Standing up on a top of a hill when surrounded by 6,000 screaming enemies and throwing grenades until you run out? That’s courageous. The stuff that most people peddle today as courage . . . isn’t.

One definition had, “has to be scared.” Nope. Sorry. Pissed off is close enough. I imagine that 50% of the people we’d all agree are courageous were just plain mad.

There are lots of examples of people who showed great courage simply because they were angry. They had lost friends. They were unwilling to take one step back. Fear isn’t an element of courage – fear is the enemy of courage.

“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

That’s courage. Bonus points if you can name the book.

The Mrs. said she wanted to spice up the bedroom. I hope she likes paprika.

Here’s the big lie, the thing that they want you to believe: the era of courage is over. The ideas of individuals don’t matter. The actions of individuals don’t matter.

As long as humanity survives, the actions of individuals will always matter. As long as fathers teach sons, the era for courage isn’t over.

That’s why I play this game. Courage matters. Virtue matters. A Higher Power matters. Those are the things that make men. That’s why I love this part of the game. One way a man lives on are in the values he leaves to his sons.

Every time I have the opportunity to help my boys, I know I’m winning.

Always remember: We’re not done. This isn’t over.

Purpose, Virtue, Starlets, And Inexplicable Comments About Italy

“I disagree with what you said about the underlying theme of chapter eight in this book. It’s really not about man’s struggle with double-sided tape. It’s a metaphor for the Mesopotamian social hierarchy during the Bronze Age.” – Homestarrunner

The easiest way to get gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals? Kleptomania.

One theme I keep returning to in this blog is purpose. I have a friend (you’re shocked, I know) and we talk from time to time. One observation that he’s made is that they’ve done studies of people who have won medals in competitions like the Olympics®. You’d think that the person who was happiest was the person who won gold.

It’s not. It’s not the person who won silver, either.

It’s the person who won bronze.

Third place? Well, they know it wasn’t a fluke that they didn’t win. There is that “second place” guy who pops that illusion bubble. But they made it to the big show, and, heck, they’re third. Not bad!

Bronze is the Libertarian Party of medals.

The person who wins silver is usually very, very unhappy. Why? Every minute of the day they have to wonder:

What if I had worked just a little harder each day?
What if I had listened to my coach?
What if I hadn’t spent the night before the Olympic© finals at the strip club drinking tequila shooters with Crystal and Svetlana?

Little things like that begin to nag at them. Plus they get Brady Cake:

Tom Brady is so old . . . he won his first Super Bowl® while the world was still in Standard Definition.

So, gold medal winners should be happy, right?

Some really aren’t happy. They’ve climbed the mountain. They’ve spent, in some cases, tens of thousands of hours in practice at the highest level. They’ve skipped going to parties when others were having fun. They lived, in some cases, like monks to climb to the greatest levels of human performance.

Some of them get there and ask . . .

Is this all there is?

Those folks who ask that question were working for the wrong purpose. Their idea wasn’t to be the World PEZ® Flicking Champion, it was someone else’s idea.

So they went with it.

Don’t say this three times fast.

You can see those folks, especially a few years after the Olympics®. They’re the ones that are on the third DUI or are the 4’6” gymnast that looks like they’ve swallowed a refrigerator. Which, I will say, does make tumbling easier. If you call rolling “tumbling.” Meghan McCain does, especially if it’s toward a buffet.

So, what about those people who win a gold medal and are just fine? What’s different?

They have purpose. Their sport was only a part of their purpose, and was only a part of what drove them. They are centered, and the biggest part of their purpose isn’t achievement. Achievement is a byproduct.

The folks who win and don’t self-destruct have a purpose, and a purpose rooted in virtue.

To be clear, very, very, very clear:

Virtue does not guarantee victory. At all.

Virtue (and a purpose rooted in virtue) just makes victory bearable.

Why do so many early twentysomethings mentally implode when they achieve fame and stardom and immense wealth? That’s an easy question – they find themselves in a world with no real restraints. The real question is why don’t more starlets become headlines? I’m pretty sure Miley Cyrus isn’t in a good mental place.

In Europe, she’s known as Kilometery Cyrus.

In one respect, not being wealthy and famous is a great substitute for willpower: you can’t end up dead in a hotel room in Thailand surrounded by heroin, empty take-out boxes of food, bottles of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and vats of industrial-strength skin cream if you have to get to your steady job.

A mortgage and car payments have probably saved a lot of dads uncomfortable phone calls from the Italian Government as to why their 22-year-old was found “improving” the Sistine Chapel painting. Thankfully, back then they charged the fines in something called “lira”, which is just like money but is instead made of colorful Christmas wrapping paper.

An aside, things to trust Italians on:

Food.
Wine.
Car body design.

Things not to trust Italians on:

Anything you need tomorrow.
Anything electronic or electric.
Anything where the oil or engine coolant is supposed to stay on the inside.
Anything remotely resembling fiscal discipline.

Italians are great at soccer – you change sides halfway through.

And, apparently, never trust John Wilder to wander off on a tangent on a Friday post. I’ll get back to virtue and purpose, and promise not to wander too far again this post.

I’ve written several posts about Virtue. It’s been a common theme. Here are a few:

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python

Ben Franklin and his Thirteen Virtues

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

So, have a purpose. Live your virtue. And when you have high achievement, when you win the gold, when you achieve amazing business success? You’re ready to deal with it.

I’ve heard of a village in Africa where they’re dealing with a drought and thirst. I hope they “Get Well Soon.”

But let’s say that you don’t win the gold. You don’t have amazing business success. Virtue allows you to be ready to deal with that, too.

Or you could just win a bronze medal and have a mortgage?

Nah, go for the virtue. You’ll eventually pay the mortgage off.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Bridge Too Far?

“War, war, war! This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream!” – Gone With The Wind

No change this month. We’ll see what February brings . . .

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

We remain in the gray zone between step 9. and step 10. I thought seriously about rolling back the clock to five minutes to midnight. Violence is down, since the Left has seriously decided to clamp down on their useful idiots of BLM® and Antifa™. The Right has (so far) not been any sort of a serious threat to anyone. The hijinks that took place at the Capitol was closer to the football team painting something naughty on a water tower than any sort of real insurrection.

But then I reviewed the stories that I’m covering this issue. Nope. The Left wants to calm down the Far Left, but only so it can turn its full attention to the Right. The pressure will continue.

The Right offers nothing to the Left. It is comprised of nationalists – people who worry more about the nation than a group of foreigners. The Right doesn’t hate the foreigners – it just worries about Americans first. And the Right, more today than ever, worries about wanting a free capitalist system to make the lives of Americans better – not a free capitalist system for the sake of the system itself.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) 650 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute.

In this issue: Front Matter – A Bridge Too Far – Violence And Censorship Update – The Scouring Of The Shire Armed Services – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Full Power Of The State – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

A Bridge Too Far

Operation Market Garden in World War II is the origin of this particular phrase. The idea was a quick run to Arnhem to open up the main portion of Germany so that Berlin could be taken by December, 1944.

It failed. It was an (overly) ambitious airborne assault on a series of bridges that would have allowed for an attack into Germany – Eisenhower approved it, not because he thought it would work, but because it was a part of a general offensive.

I hear most bridges speak Span-ish.

A Bridge Too Far would be an apt description of the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act. Thankfully, the chances of this travesty being enacted are small. This act, however, is a dream list of Leftists everywhere:

Universal gun registration.
Psychiatric tests, including input from your ex. We all know how stable those relationships can be.
$800 fee for “insurance”
All magazines of greater than 10 rounds would be illegal.
Huge penalties for noncompliance.
And so, so, much more . . . .

I won’t go into more details, because, as I said, this particular bill won’t become law. I think that even the far Left in Congress knows that passing this would be a de facto declaration of war on 80 million-plus American Citizens.

Just because it fails this time, don’t think that this isn’t exactly what they want. It may be a bridge too far now, but their general offensive will continue.

Violence And Censorship Update

Time Magazine® (LINK) is happily showing off, step-by-step, how a group of unelected hardcore Leftists from unions coordinated with Leftists in Tech, Hollywood® and:

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

Viral smears includes, of course, actual reporting of (for instance) Hunter Biden’s corruption and dissolute lifestyle – where “they” got The New York Daily News© kicked off of Twitter®. The idea was that there was no rule that they wouldn’t try to change (Constitutionally or not) in order to make sure that Trump would lose. Or that the system was set up so that they could manufacture enough votes for Biden to win.

What’s worse than 1,000 conspiracy theorists? A real conspiracy.

Censored? You and me. And it’s ongoing – one Tweet® that included a direct quote from the Time© story was identified by Twitter® as disinformation. Let that sink in.

It would be wrong, apparently, to think there was a secret conspiracy to defeat Trump.

Even when the conspirators spend 6,500 words in Time Magazine™ admitting it.

The Scouring Of The Shire Armed Services

The Secretary of Defense has just issued a 60 day stand down to combat “extremism” in the ranks. What’s extreme? No one has said. It could be a Tweet® that is now no longer in favor that a soldier made years ago.

So far, the III-percenter® logo has been identified as “extremist” and has been identified as something that has to go. No tattoos, no t-shirts, and I’d assume no posters.

The Left is afraid – a large percentage of those arrested related to the Capitol Hill incident (so far) have been veterans – 14% was a number that I saw. Of those, 8% were Marines, so the article I read said, “Of special concern are the elite units.”

So, the purges will start.

What ideologies will be purged?

Social Justice™? Certainly not! Despite the fact that it requires communism to implement, it’s the current ideology of the powers in charge.
Black Lives Matter©? Absolutely not! How could an ideology that has the support of the entire Fortune 500© be wrong? Besides, those weren’t riots, they were peaceful protests.
Antifa®? What wrong with being Anti-Fascist? Huh? What’s fascism? Fascism is whatever is to the Left of Antifa™.

Nope. Not those.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures, or I would be, if they published any this month.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and to no one’s surprise, violence jumped again in January.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability jumped significantly – getting Trump out has not made things better.

Economic:

January showed a major jump. I’d expect a market crash sooner than later – politically it’s best to get those out early in an administration.

Illegal Aliens:

No data this month. Has FedGov decided to stop publishing it?

The Full Power Of The State

I’ve documented above how the Left is taking over or already has taken over communications, social media, the military, and the voting process. That’s not enough.

Recently, the Bank of America® was requested by the FBI to provide information on its customers. What sort of information? Well, all of it, if the customer met this very broad list:

Customers confirmed as transacting, either through bank account debit card or credit card purchases in Washington, D.C. between 1/5 and 1/6.
Purchases made for Hotel/Airbnb RSVPs in DC, VA, and MD after 1/6.
Any purchase of weapons or at a weapons-related merchant between 1/7 and their upcoming suspected stay in D.C. area around Inauguration Day.
Airline related purchases since 1/6.

And, no, not everything had to click to get you on the list, but still, 211 people managed to make the list. Bank of America™ wasn’t required to give this information without a proper warrant. But Bank of America© did.

At least one citizen was questioned by the FBI based on this information.

The FBI even has a patron saint: St. Francis of CCTV.

So, now it’s not only the Federal government’s amazing ability to listen to you, follow you on social media, and track your every movement. Now they enlist banks to participate in closing the loop. Unless you pay in cash, they have a list of every transaction you make.

So, pay in cash?

Have you tried to do that with a rental car? Have you tried to do that with an airline ticket? Tried to check into a Holiday Inn Express®?

They might take cash, but they’ll need to see a credit card, first.

How else would you leave a perfect record for the FBI?

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