Category: Civil War

Alexander the Great, Smallpox, and Saving Western Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what?  It’s not worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that illuminates the real problem.

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

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

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

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I guess Hillary is still looking for Mr. Riot.

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

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

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

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

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

How do we solve this puzzle?

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

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

34 Random Thoughts About The Economy, Money, and Jobs

“Well, Saddam owed us money.” – Arrested Development

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Maybe I should get more sleep.

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and the next few weeks will be busy.  Now that The Boy is off at college and no longer engaged in half a dozen activities, we’re down to just having to chase Pugsley around.  Not so busy that there won’t be a full slate of posts – those are planned for the next few weeks, barring a change based on current events or me being distracted by shiny objects.

Today, though, I thought I’d change it up a bit, so here are a few random thoughts on business, economics, and wealth.

  1. The last economic crash was about a housing bubble. The next economic crash will be about our “everything” bubble where money flows faster to chase smaller and smaller returns.
  2. The biggest thing to crash after the next bubble pops will be money. It’s never fun when the value of money drops to zero, since having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant – not much happens at the beginning, but by the end everyone is yelling and screaming and covered in blood.
  3. The next economic crash will be the biggest in our lives.
  4. Or not. I’ve been wrong before.
  5. But I still think 2025 will be interesting.
  6. Most jobs don’t require thinking nowadays – they are a set of procedures and rules based on the lowest common denominator employee. The best jobs like this are at the DMV, which at least allow you to be mean and unpleasant, plus government benefits.
  7. Jobs that don’t require thinking can be paid at the lowest possible wage. If you’re lucky enough to be hired at Old MacDonald’s farm, I hope you can rise to the C-I-E-I-O position, but you’ll have to be out standing in your field.study.jpg
  8. Businesses that do things immorally don’t automatically fail because they do things immorally – many immoral and even evil businesses flourish. It’s only in the movies that the good guys always win.
  9. When I gave career advice to The Boy, I advised him to build expertise and skills in things that couldn’t be done over the Internet or by an outsourced employee working in a country where the native language consists only of vowels, grunts, and humming noises but yet has 355 terms for “waddle”.
  10. Always be worth more to your company than your company is paying you.
  11. “What have you done for me lately?” is a good and fair question from any boss.
  12. The second mouse gets the cheese in the trap. No, I’m not going first.
  13. If it’s choosing between money and honor, choose honor. The bills might be more difficult to pay, but at least you can look yourself in the mirror.  Until the power company cuts the electricity.
  14. Seriously though, choose honor.cat.jpg
  15. It’s the risk that you don’t take that you’ll regret. But you only hear successful people say that.
  16. Never build a business on what you love, since no one cares about medieval Norse poetry. Build a business on what you do that other people love and will pay for.  You’ll learn to love it.
  17. Capitalism works great to allocate spoils in an expanding market. Capitalism fails in a contracting one.  There’s nothing easy about the transition.
  18. Being short of money and optimistic about the future is better than having lots of cash and being pessimistic.rain.jpg
  19. Money can’t make you happy, but you can avoid most of life’s miseries by having a few hundred thousand dollars. Not every one of life’s miseries, but most of them.
  20. Whenever anyone says it’s not about the money, it’s really about the money.
  21. Whenever anyone says cost is no object, you can expect that statement to be proven false once the estimates arrive. Make them pay in advance.
  22. The reward for work well done is more work. This is actually a pretty good deal – we tend to buy video games built around this same premise.
  23. The rewards aren’t linear – the closer to the top, the greater the rewards. But you have to fight the big boss at the end before you retire.
  24. Great bosses are rarer than you might imagine. Most bosses are okay.  Some are awful.
  25. The worst kind of boss is a weak boss. They will praise you when you don’t deserve it and sell you out when you don’t.
  26. Teamwork makes it easy to blame someone else.
  27. In America, when two men meet, they ask “What do you do?” Too often we equate ourselves with “what we do,” while forgetting we get to choose who we are.  Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you are stuck being Johnny Depp.question.jpg
  28. If you find yourself dreading the alarm clock and not wanting to go to work you go anyway. It’s your job.  If it’s too much?  Find another job or retire.
  29. True story: a friend of mine had a sister that decided to retire one day when she was about 30.  She was shocked when the checks stopped coming, she seemed to think that when you retired, the company had to keep paying you.  I think she’s a Bernie® voter now.
  30. Me? I’m trying to start thinking about retirement before my boss starts thinking about my retirement.pounds.jpg
  31. When I was first hired into a job, I heard a statistic that 70% of a typical workday for a typical employee was unproductive. I was shocked that the figure was so high.
  32. Now, after working for years, I’m shocked that the figure is so low. I tried to come up with jokes about lazy people, but they just won’t work.
  33. Meetings often happen just because they’re on the schedule. Look like you’re paying attention and don’t sleep, no matter how quickly it makes the meeting go.
  34. I had a friend who worked at the Unemployment Department who got fired. He still had to show up the next day.

You Are The Resistance, Plus? Lots of Star Wars Bikinis

“Resistance fighters, humans, sent back from the future by John.  And what?  Are they manning some kind of apocalyptic paramilitary convenience store filled with fake IDs and guns and money?” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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That also explains why I have a piano player who is only a foot tall in the house.  Stupid genie.

Back in 2015, like a few hundred million other people, I was excited to see The Force Awakens®.  This was the first movie since Disney© had purchased Star Wars©.  Since Disney™ had done a good job with Marvel©, I hoped they’d turn the Star Wars™ universe into a compelling and entertaining set of movies.  I got The Boy and Pugsley and we headed off to the theater.  They don’t allow us to bring in outside food, but that’s okay.  We Wilder’s have a few Twix® up our sleeves.

I’m not going to turn this into a complete review of a movie that I feel is fatally flawed and ultimately stupid in many ways.  The plot of The Force Awakens® was an inferior remake of the first Star Wars® movie.  This was a flaw, and perhaps a fatal one – how many Star Wars© movies would end up being about blowing up yet another Death Star© – I’m beginning to think that Death Stars® might be hard to get insurance for.  And does a Death Star™ require homeowner insurance or vehicle insurance?

Regardless, The Force Awakens was as unsatisfactory as Joe Biden’s hair plugs.  But I did notice one thing that bothered me:

After destroying the largest weapon ever created and killing the Emperor™, the Rebels® had failed.  The ending of Return of the Jedi™, with fireworks and celebrations on world after world seemed to indicate that the Rebel Alliance© won, that the Empire® was finished.

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I find the best alarm clock are the rumble strips.

Yet, here, in the first sequel after Return of the Jedi®, we find Princess Leia© at the head of the Resistance™.  What, exactly, is she resisting?  The new government that was set up after the defeat of the Empire™?  Bad scriptwriting?  No.  It’s the Empire™, but I assume we can’t call it that because otherwise Disney© has to pay George Lucas ten percent.

There are thousands of great plots that could be made about the Force™, the New Republic©.  Lots of these are of big ideas worthy of an entire galaxy and the fun derived in the first Star Wars© movies; great ideas worthy of a cast of heroes that we knew from previous episodes.  Heck, The Mrs. and I when discussing this post came up with a plot idea good enough to give me chills – Stormtroopers™ in bikinis, of Kini-troopers©, if you will, learning to use the Force™ at a summer camp in the 1980’s.

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And did the Stormtroopers think they were the good guys, working on a thing called the Death Star?

But why the Resistance©?  After reflection of several years and several other movies, it has become clear – the producers of Star Wars® are leftists.  The ideology of Star Wars© becoming Leftist ideology was more important than the story.  It was more important than the money.  Star Wars™ had to be made to fit the narrative of the Left.

The narrative of the Left has always been of a smaller force fighting a larger opposing force.  The story of the Vietcong, the story of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the story of Antifa© are all the stories of resistance to larger powers.  This is the myth that the Leftist leaders use for propaganda when they want to explain to the peasants why they don’t have any food, why they are poorer this year than last.

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There’s a reason he’s called Darth™.  All the Stormtroopers laughed when he went by “Master Vader©”.

The Resistance© is the narrative of the Left, and so Star Wars™ had to portray the good guys as the underdog no matter what.  The Resistance® is how they see themselves – at the mercy of large systems that will destroy them – it’s in the mythos of all of the Left’s literature and entertainment.  Thus, this curious choice:  taking the victors and making them the victim.  The only reason I can see this is because it was written about the Left, for the Left.  Plot?  Entertainment?  Nah.

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Stormtroopers© get cash from an AT-ATM.

The Mrs. and I talked for a while about why this was.  My theory was that the Left’s power was ultimately derived from being a victim – that’s why the language of the Left is the language of victimhood, and the conversations of the Left are about creating division based on that victimhood.

Hence, the Resistance™.

The Mrs. thought that it was interesting that the Left also chooses to characterize its enemies in terms of the two wars – the Left is fighting Germany in World War II.  The Left is fighting the South in the Civil War.  Why?  The Left views these wars as moral wars, simple wars complete with cartoon villains so it can remove complexity.  This allows the Left to feel good about itself while teaching and preaching hate.  It’s clear the Left is moving further left, while the Right retains roughly the same values as it did 40 years ago, which is intolerable to the Left.  In the view of the Left, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama aren’t on the Left – no.  Clinton and Obama are considered center-right, if not farther right.

But back to the Resistance©.  As I listed in a previous post (American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny), the Left controls:

  • 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) Fortune® 500™ companies.

It should be clear from the above list that the Left is marching through American institutions quickly.  When Donald Trump was elected president, immediately, however, the Left returned to its normal nomenclature, it advertised itself as “The Resistance®” even though it had quietly amassed major power throughout nearly every phase of American life.

I'll Have Two Scoops

 

The real crime is noticing.

You and I know that the Left isn’t the Resistance, it’s in control.  Why doesn’t the Right protest in hats made to look like genitals?  Because we have jobs and families.  But if you stand against the goal of state control, against the goal of only the “correct” thoughts being allowed, against being put at the mercy of the confederacy of victims?

You are the real resistance.  And they’re afraid of you.

A.I., Health Care, Google, and Elon Musk

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack.” – Pulp Fiction

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I wanted to get a doctor appointment to treat my invisibility, but he said he couldn’t see me right now.

A computer can predict who will die using medical data better than a doctor.  As of today, like science has no answer as to how California copes with the landfill requirements of Kardashian body hair, science has no understanding of how the computer is doing it.

A gentleman by the name of Dr. Brian Formwalt led a study where approximately 1,770,000 electrocardiogram records were fed into a computer.  An electrocardiogram is also known as an ECG, for obvious reasons.  For less obvious reasons, it’s also known as an EKG.  EKG stands for elektrokardiographie, which is exactly the same thing as an electrocardiogram, but in German.  If your doctor calls it an EKG, he just might be thinking about expanding his living room.

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Always be careful when Germans research expanding anything.

But back to the study.  So, there were 1,770,000 records, but only 400,000 people in the study, so the average person had more than four records.  Obviously, these weren’t all healthy people, since I have had (I believe) exactly one ECG in my life, and it was for a pre-employment physical as an astronaut for Wal-Mart®.  At least the recruiter told me Wal-Mart© needed astronauts, before Wal-Mart™ cancelled the program when China accidentally delivered 50,000 small space shuttle toys rather than one life-size one.  I guess that’s what happens when you buy space shuttles by the pound.

But what is an ECG?

Electrocardiograms are the little machine light that makes the beep sound every time your heart beats.  The beat is measured by injecting elves into your body that send radio signals to the machine every time that your heart muscle squeezes them.  Okay, the technical side might be a bit off, but it doesn’t really matter if you or I know exactly how the machine gets the data.  It’s just the device that goes beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep to let you know that John Wick’s® dog died.

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Cardiac surgeons are the guys you want to see for a change of heart.

Okay, so now you know everything that you might need to know about technology invented in 1895.  But it now produces an electronic file rather than the old method, where the heart rhythm was tattooed on the backs of ill-tempered Chihuahuas.  The 1,770,000 records were then fed into a computer that had been previously taught to read ECGs.  The simple question was asked – which of these patients will be dead in a year?  I mean it used to make me feel better when my doctor told me, “that’s normal for your age,” but then I realized that at some point being dead will be normal for my age.

Since all of the records were over a year old, it was known which of the patients were alive and which were dead.  Essentially, the doctors were (with very little data) asking the computer to predict the future.  It did.  And it did it better than human doctors.  Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors – they detected no abnormality, yet the computer was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.

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Then the next doctor told me it looked like I was pregnant.  I said, “But I’m a guy.”  He replied, “But it looks like you’re pregnant.”

It doesn’t surprise me.  Computers are powerful tools that are great at taking lots of data and being able to compare it quickly.  The reason that they can do this is they:

  • Have 100% focus, and if they get a sore throat you can give them Robo-tussin®.
  • Don’t need to make payments on second wife’s Mercedes® and third wife’s Lexusâ„¢.
  • Can retain every previous ECG reading ever seen and instantly recall the pattern if needed, much like I can retain the plot of every one of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
  • Don’t get distracted by how healthy a patient looks or how much kale he eats.

These are great advantages.  In the future, machines will be able to do things where we may never understand how they made a correlation, or, as in this case, even what the correlation is.  Arthur C. Clarke Third Law states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and he’s right.  Health care generates amazing amounts of data, and also outcomes.  It’s only a matter of time until some big corporation gets evil . . .

Oh, yeah, Google®.  It bought Fitbit®.  Now it knows what you’re searching for, and it also has a treasure-trove of heartbeat and fitness data.

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Google® is female.  It won’t let me finish a sentence without giving suggestions.

Well, I guess that’s kind of scary.  But at least Google© doesn’t have access to medical records.  Oh, Google™ has patient names, diagnoses, prescription data, and records from 2,600 hospitals.  Millions, perhaps tens of millions of patients?  In (possibly) all of these states:  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida?

Nah, that should work out fine.  There isn’t a record of Google® ruthlessly monetizing every corner of the Internet not already inhabited by Facebook™, Amazon® and Microsoft©.

I think the case is clear for someone to go through this data.  With only a few records and outcomes fed into it, a computer is better at predicting medical outcomes than a very good doctor.  If all of the data could be available?  I think we’d have a legitimate revolution in health care.

Frankly, if we don’t descend into civil chaos, I think that this health care revolution is certain.

But Google®?  Google™ has proven itself untrustworthy.

I’d suggest that we give control of the initiative to a leader that’s more trustworthy than Google®, like Bernie Madoff, but he seems to be otherwise, um, detained.  And I’m sure that Jeffery Epstein has better morals, but, um, he seems to have accepted a unique opportunity with the Clinton Foundation.

Heck, let’s give the job to Elon Musk.

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Patrick Henry, The Constitution, and You Can’t Blame The Boomers

“The colonel behind me… that’s Colonel William Aylett. Now, his great-grandfather was the Virginian, Patrick Henry.” – Gettysburg

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While salting his food, Patrick Henry said, “If this be season, make the most of it.”

The biggest genius of the Constitution was an afterthought, the result of a protest.  Patrick Henry refused to go to the Constitutional Convention held in 1787, convinced that it was merely an excuse to create a strong central government out of the relatively loose Articles of Confederation.  And even though it’s my policy to never trust anyone whose name consists of two first names, I’ll admit that Patrick Henry was right.

When the new Constitution was finally released, Henry (among others) complained, mainly that it didn’t contain a bill of rights.  The promise was that if the Constitution was passed, the first act would be to create a bill of rights.  Unlike a political promise in 2019, the framers actually did what they said, probably because in 1792 a state could have fairly easily left the United States, since at the time that was widely assumed to be a right held by states.  The states voted into the agreement, the states could vote themselves out.

The Bill of Rights was passed by the House and Senate, and sent to the states for ratification – 10 of the 12 proposed rights were ratified.  The 11th, the Right for Ben Franklin to be Naked Whenever He Wants was narrowly defeated by people who had seen Franklin naked.  The 12th, establishing a National Taco Tuesday and Mandatory Metallica® failed initially but was finally ratified in 1994, much to the relief of radio stations everywhere.

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When does this bill show up?  Is it monthly?

One objection to the Bill of Rights was that it was felt that the states could do a good enough job protecting the rights of their citizens – the Federal government didn’t have all that much power, right?  Another objection?  It was felt that listing the rights would allow people to think that those were the only rights.  That second objection is somewhat prophetic, especially since (by my count) nearly every right in the Bill of Rights has been violated at some point.

Me?  I’m pretty glad Patrick Henry got the job done – the Bill of Rights has been instrumental in keeping us as free as we are today.  My Aunt told me I was related to him somehow, and that’s not hard to believe – he had a total of 17 children, so there have to be a zillion descendants.  Being his great-great-great-grandkid isn’t all that rare, though I imagine getting a good night’s sleep at the Henry household was rare – especially for Mrs. Henry.  If I were to brag about being related to Patrick Henry, it would be like an iguana bragging that he was descended from a velociraptor.  While it may be true, it won’t help the iguana get a part in the next Jurassic Park® movie, especially after what his cousin, Harvey Weinstein did.  Most people don’t know that Weinstein is part iguana, on his mother’s side.

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I hear that freedom weighs a WashingTon.

If that’s where we ended, with a stronger central government and a strong bill of rights, we’d be fine.  We’d have a Bill of Rights that protects Americans from abuse by their government in many different ways.  But in the decision of Marbury v. Madison, the newly installed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, had a tequila-inspired vision that the Supreme Court had the power to invalidate laws that it felt were contradictory to the Constitution.

This is nowhere in the Constitution itself.  Marshall made the logical leap that since the Constitution wasn’t a vague set of political principles but rather the supreme law of the land, it had to be followed as if it was a law.  So far, so good.  If Congress made a law that couldn’t be interpreted to follow the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, the law had to be made invalid by the Supreme Court.

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A Supreme Court is just regular court, but with sour cream and tomatoes.

Thomas Jefferson had a different view:  he felt that each branch of government had the power to declare acts by the other branches unconstitutional.  Presidents have, in multiple cases, not enforced laws they felt were unconstitutional.

Jefferson further felt that states could declare laws that were especially in violation of the Constitution void.  The recent legalization of marijuana in multiple states without intervention from the Federal government has proven the principle that Jefferson wrote about early in the life of the country.  If it took a Constitutional amendment to make booze illegal, why shouldn’t it take one to make marijuana illegal at the Federal level.  How can the Federal government legally make enforceable laws dealing with the amount of decongestant I can buy?

Because power keeps flowing to the Federal government.

The Constitution was written in 1787, and the Bill of Rights was fully ratified in 1791.  The words in the Constitution clearly have changed only through the 27 amendments to the Constitution.

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Hey!  I can write bathroom graffiti that kids can’t understand!

One concept in English Common Law is that of precedent.  From Wikipedia®:  Common Law Legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules, so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained.  The precedent of the Supreme Court is supposed to remain unchanged.

Most of the time, it is.

Yet there have been 141 cases where the Supreme Court changed its opinion and rejected previous Supreme Court decisions.  102 of those cases came during or after 1960:  that was about the time that the Supreme Court became activist in finding new “rights” – the right of people to use contraception or be free from hearing a prayer at the start of school.  28 of the 141 reversals of precedent were in just a single ten year period between 1960 and 1969.  Earl Warren was Chief Justice during that time.

When the right involves the federal government being prevented from interfering with liberty, I’m for it.  But the Warren Court specifically focused on creating new rights and new judicial power and accomplishing goals that the legislatures either at the state or Federal level wouldn’t – the Warren Court was about fairness and equity rather than justice – the Supreme Court decision mandating participation ribbons and allowing soccer into the United States came from the Warren Court.

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I had to play soccer with second graders the other day.  I really should save up and buy a ball.

Any action provokes a reaction, and the Warren Court specifically was opposed by the newly formed doctrine of “originalism” – the idea that the Constitution means what it says in plain language, and not what you want it to say.  If that’s the case, the Constitution just becomes a series of popular (on the Left) interpretations like “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” should really be read as “the state has the right to arm the police,” and “Congress shall make no law” really means “Congress can do whatever it wants to do this week – it’s having a midlife crisis.”

It can be shown that the 1960’s and early 1970’s was the time that set the stage for every problem that we’re experiencing today.  As much as blaming the Boomers is popular (I’m not a Boomer), it’s really not deserved.  The Boomers had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time – I can make the case that 1973 was the high-water mark for the economy of the country, and the Boomers did what anyone would do – make the best of their time, while wearing dark socks with sandals and listening to way too much Bob Dylan®.

The real culprits of our situation today are the leaders in charge in the 1960’s.  The Greatest Generation really created the Greatest Problems.  They fought and won a world war, but they put in place policies that are demographically tearing the United States apart today, and have put our economy at risk through a debt that grows exponentially.  The Boomers didn’t take us off the gold standard.  The Boomers weren’t responsible for Green Acres® being cancelled.

The Boomers did, though, give us Led Zeppelin.  Even better when sung by a rubber chicken being observed by a cat.  

The Constitution was awesome for a very long time, but it won’t save us – the Constitution of the Soviet Union provided for “freedom of speech” after it was, of course, reviewed by the appropriate government censor.  The next Leftist president will happily appoint as many Supreme Court justices as required to interpret the Constitution to mean whatever the Left wants it to mean.  The Warren Court wasn’t an aberration- it was a test case, one that set the stage for the future dream of the Left – complete power.

One thing stands in their way.  You.

Virginia in this November’s election shows that the solution isn’t to vote moar harder.  Virginia, the state that gave us Patrick Henry, is now permanently Left, with both houses and all top state-level jobs now held by Democrats.  The Left wants more and bigger government, the exact opposite of Henry wanted.  When I was growing up, and someone wanted to do something, I’d often hear, “It’s a free country” as an answer.  That meant, essentially, do whatever you want.  I rarely hear that phrase anymore.

However, the Right isn’t done yet.  Remember what Janis said –

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free, no no

And while you can vote yourself into tyranny, you can’t vote yourself out of it.

Free Speech? Not If You Want Healthcare.

In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, “Ow, I hurt my leg. I can’t run. A lion eats me and I’m dead.” Well, I’m not dead. I’m the lion. You’re dead. – The Office

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Thankfully we have the United Nations – where governments that oppose free speech can finally be heard.

On Monday, November 4, 2019, the National Health Service (NHS) of North Bristol, like my ex-wife, implemented a policy to deny service to people whose opinions they don’t like.  The italicized text directly below is me quoting the NHS directly.

The abusive behaviour policy covers anyone (visitors or patients – J.W.) with mental capacity making (sic):

  • Racist or sexist language, gestures or behaviour.
  • Excessive noise.
  • Abuse of alcohol or drugs.
  • Threatening and offensive language.
  • Malicious allegations.
  • Intentional damage to trust property.

I’m pretty sure my ex-wife’s list is shorter, consisting of only one item: “Being John Wilder.”  Breaking those NHS rules will get you banned from the hospital.  If you are a patient, they’ll at least wait until your life isn’t in immediate danger.  And then they won’t serve you anymore.

You can read it all here (LINK).  First, I’m assuming that whoever wrote the web page knew English, but the English spell it behaviour – we spell it behavior.  They spell it colour, we spell it color.  Flavour?  No, flavor.  I guess that must be why George Washington texted King George “LOL, getting rid of u” in 1776.  Second, this seems like a pretty reasonable list, right?  How could you be upset about those things?  If someone were coming into my place of business, I’d kick them out for doing many of the things listed.

But this isn’t a private business – this is the provider of healthcare for 90%+ of the population of the United Kingdom.  And the plain language that you and I might agree was reasonable will morph over time.  A guy casting a porno movie is being investigated for a hate crime in Britain because he didn’t want to cast a transsexual with, um, man parts for the porno he was filming about sex between a man and a woman.  Why is that a hate crime?  Because the transsexual (who, I remind you, has man parts) identifies as female and wants to play the woman’s part in a porno, but without having woman parts.

Yeah.  I need a scorecard, too.

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I guess there’s no Internet in Farmington, NM.

But the silliness doesn’t stop there:  a comedian that goes by the Internet name “Count Dankula” was sentenced to an £800 fine for teaching his girlfriend’s dog a trick.  Was the trick eating toddlers?  No.  The trick was teaching the dog a salute that was fairly popular in Germany between 1932 and 1945.  Why would he do that?  He was irritating his girlfriend, and unless he can teach the dog to pilot a bulldog-scale Messerschmitt Bf-109, I think the United Kingdom is safe.  Since the dog was featured on a YouTube® video, it is, therefore:  hate crime.

Given the two examples above, if I were British, I’d have zero confidence in the way those “reasonable” points on the list above would be interpreted in the future.  Deny white privilege?  Obviously hate speech – we’re not going to work on your broken leg.  Oppose continual reparations for (INSERT GROUP HERE)?  Obviously racist – we’re sending you to racist jail!

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Help me eliminate all Cancers.  Then we’ll move to the Capricorns.

Great Britain has had the National Health Service since 1948, since they decided that German bombs weren’t effective enough at destroying their economy.  I kid.  The English seem to generally like the NHS – like Social Security in the United States it appears to be a political third rail.  Touch it, and your career in eating crumpets, bangers, mash, and drinking tea in Parliament is over and it’s back to fish and chips and sending your children to the mill so you have enough money to buy cheap gin.

The service has drawbacks, but seems to work for the English, for now.  I have some doubts about long-term viability, but I’m not British, so I don’t get a vote.  But “Baby Oliver” is alive today (LINK) because even though the NHS refused to operate on him, he got surgery in the United States.  It appears that the NHS learned their lesson with that publicity – they wouldn’t even let “Baby Alfie” out of the country (LINK).

On the bright side, dentistry is free(ish), too.

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The British have sensitive teeth.  They’re so sensitive, just saying that offends them.

The kicker is, of course, the control.  The most ominous line in the press release is:

Any cases will be reported on the trust’s (a subdivision of the NHS – J.W.) incident management system and on patients’ individual notes.

Back when I was in grade school, teachers would say in a really grave tone that certain behavior would end up “on our Permanent Record.”  They really said that, and you could hear the capital letters when they spoke.  It was as if that in some far-flung future where Snake Plisskin was attempting to break the President out of New York and I was applying for a job and it would still be in the Permanent Record.

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The Secret Service expenses for all of the living ex-presidents are highest for Bill Clinton.  That party bus ain’t gonna drive itself!

I imagined that when I finally got that great interview to be Starship Captain or whatever the interviewer would pull out a copy of my Permanent Record, shake his head disapprovingly, and say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilder.  We simply cannot offer you a job because in fifth grade you called Brenda Vincent, a,” he would then take a long pause and adjust his glasses while staring at the paper, “poopy haired chum smuggler.  We simply cannot have a man like that at Enron®.”

In reality, my Permanent Record from grade school was probably sent to a landfill when they tore the building down.  Brenda’s bait smuggling history is now lost to eternity.

But in 2019 we really do have permanent records, and in greater detail than most people realize.  I get ads on my laptop in the evening that relate to conversations that I had in the afternoon when the laptop was off but my phone was nearby.  There are networks of cameras that cross the nation that track license plates.  If you use a credit card, you can be tracked from gas station to gas station and hotel to hotel.  Your Internet search history?  If your ISP doesn’t have it, the NSA does.  Speaking of job interviews – you don’t really have to apply to the NSA – they already have your resume, cover letter, and know all of your references.

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At least someone is interested in my life.

Increasingly in our “capitalist” system, people with unpopular opinions keep getting being censored, but it gets worse. Recently, Stefan Molyneux, who is more of a libertarian than anything, was kicked off of PayPal® – though at this writing those links were still up.  If he were in the U.K., he might be denied medical services as well, and since he’s suffering from Stage 4 baldness, I hate to think about the potential future complications.

To be clear:  in a socialist medical system, if you disagree with their opinions, the Leftists want to deny you medical service, and hope that you die.  In a capitalist technocracy, if you disagree with their opinions, the Leftists want to silence you, deny you banking services, and hope that you die.

This will be a factor in your life.  Life may get very rough before it gets better, and “rough” may last quite a few years.  But I tend to think that the Right will win in the end.  Why?

Because my ex-wife is on the Left.  And I wasn’t sure about Hell until I met her.  Now I’m sure.

So if there’s Hell?

There’s Heaven.  Onward, my friends!

Life is Struggle. Struggle is Easier with Panzers. Especially if You’re Struggling with France.

“Your death will stand as a landmark in the continuing struggle to liberate the parent land from the hands of the Roman imperialist aggressors, excluding those concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture and any other Romans contributing to the welfare of Jews of both sexes and hermaphrodites.” – Life of Brian

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Fun fact:  the first winner of the Tour de France was a Panzerkampfwagen III.

A few years back I worked with a friend named Will.  Will was one of the more creative people I’d ever worked with.  One particular week, I knew he had a deadline to finish a rather significant project for our boss that Friday.  It was Tuesday and I asked him if he had finished it, since he was goofing off enough to make George R.R. Martin’s writing progress look like a cocaine-snorting crotch-weasel.  And cocaine-snorting crotch-weasels move pretty fast.

Will responded, “No.  I think I’ll start on Thursday afternoon.”

In the conversation that followed Will admitted that work was pretty easy for him.  “But if I wait until I have some important deadline, until I’m not sure that I have enough time to finish, then work gets pretty interesting.”  He was completely serious.  He didn’t really care if he got fired or in trouble – he just wanted life to be interesting.  I thought about it, and, looking back, had noticed that I had done much the same thing.  In fact, it’s so common, there are thousands of posters and jokes about it.  I mean, if they threatened to kill one of my friends each hour I procrastinated, I could probably be pretty productive.  But, you know that depends, too:  which friend?

In retrospect, this points out that winning doesn’t make people happy, in and of itself.  If that was the case, Will would have done his work in advance and goofed off later rather than earlier.  That’s simply not the case.  Most people do the same and procrastinate in some fashion.  Statistics show anywhere from 25% to 95% of people procrastinate.

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Procrastination will be my downfall.  Emphasis on “will”.   

That’s a wide enough range to be utterly meaningless.  And since social scientists did the study, I trust it about as much as I trust drunken toddlers run the legislative branch of our government.  Congressmen probably would agree with me, since I know that they generally really hate that kind of competition from intellectually superior people who are at least attempting to be potty trained.

Why procrastination?

I think there’s a lot of stress today in the workplace because the work is no longer optimized for the worker, it’s optimized for the lowest common denominator.  Most companies want most processes to be able to be done by someone of limited *ahem* intellectual means.  That makes the pool of qualified workers so much bigger, and they can pay lower wages.  Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s working a job that’s designed for an I.Q. of 85 has an I.Q. of 85 – far from it.  But take someone of average (100) I.Q. and dump them in an 85 I.Q. job?  There is more than a little potential for boredom.

And with that boredom can come mischief.

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Horseplay?  Quit foaling around.

The best possible job for anyone has certain characteristics – you know what’s expected of you.  You have the tools to do it.  Crucially, the job can’t be so easy that it’s trivial.  The job should also not be so hard as to be frustrating.  There’s that middle road, where you’re learning, where there’s enough challenge to keep you fully engaged in the work.  Thankfully, many jobs have a ladder where as you increase your competence, you get increased responsibilities.

The downside, of course, is that the most skilled carpenter might make a really crappy carpenter foreman.  The skill set from one spot in the organizational hierarchy to the next step up may not even be remotely related.  The idea and general practice of promoting the best carpenter to foreman at least has one advantage – at least we know that the foreman is good at something.  That something may not be leading people, but worst case, his people know he’s good with a hammer.

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H.P. Lovecraft loved getting hickies, but would only get them from neck romancers.

I’ve mentioned the following story more than once, but I keep bringing it up because it was one of my “a-ha!” moments of understanding in life.  In the very old HBO® series Dream On the protagonist was a literary agent.  He had a secretary named Toby, who specialized in being unhelpful.  In one episode, Toby was at work, playing a supermarket simulator on the company computer.  She started as a bag boy.

“Cleanup in Aisle 9!” she screamed at one point in the episode.  She showed an intensity playing the game that she never showed on her job.  “I’ve been moved to cashier!”  She was thrilled at the promotion.

Finally, her crowning achievement.  Toby had won the game.

“I did it!  I did it!  I’m the manager!” she yelled, with excitement.

A long pause.

“Of a supermarket . . .”

Now her voice had dropped into a questioning tone.

“that doesn’t exist.”  The last line was delivered with profound sadness and self-awareness that her day had been wasted.

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Me:  What’s up, glitches?

Toby, the secretary had been thoroughly engaged in the game in a way that was never available to her in real life.  I’ve played a few video games since seeing that episode, but for the most part that one line stripped them bare to me:  “Manager . . . of a supermarket . . . that doesn’t exist.”  It showed that her victory was as hollow to her as the skull of a congresswoman from New York.

Since many jobs have been defined downward in so many ways, I can certainly see the rise of gaming.  Gaming sells the experience people want and need.  Good games provide a tutorial system to show you how to use the controls.  They then run you through a series of challenges that teach you to be more competent with the in-game systems and controls, and provide tools that are in many cases only barely adequate for the job, requiring focus and concentration for you to succeed.  Winning the game requires an investment of work, study, concentration, focus, and control.  And $60.

Games provide the challenges that work really should be providing to the younger generation.  They often have tools and abilities that far exceed what their job should provide.  How do they cope?  Killing cops, stealing cars, shooting radioactive zombie cowboys.  But eventually you have to go home so you can play your game that you paid $60 for.

Gaming is popular because humans are machines built to compete.  If life offers sufficient competition to keep us interested?  Fine.  But if living standards are great and everything is going well, but the people aren’t challenged?  Hello, World War One.  There was simply no reason for Europe to descend into that madness other than things were going well and the people were rich and bored.

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If you survive assault, pepper spray, and mustard gas, are you a seasoned veteran?

Easy success is boredom.  What happens to a society, a world, where success is set on easy?  It breeds discontent.  We see that in Europe now.  Germany was nice and happy and reunited and things were going well.  Boring.

Here’s an idea!  Let’s import a bunch of foreigners.  That should spice things up!  Foreigners now make up 12.8% of the population, but commit 34.7% of the crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal®.  Why do they commit the crimes?  I’m pretty sure I don’t care.  But why would Germany want to import a population that commits 30% of the murders and over 41% of the burglaries?  They were bored.  Things were going too well.

Normally, when things were going too well, Germany would fire up the panzers and take a trip west, but that turned out just to be too easy.  And I like giving the French a hard time – I get more visitors from Malta (Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.) than from France.  And the Germans certainly couldn’t take over Malta, mainly because the distance to Malta isn’t measured in panzers per baguette.

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I recently read a book about French war heroes.  That was an inspiring six pages.

But if you have the difficulty of your society set too hard?  Riots and revolution and turning into a tyrannical dictatorship.  The difficulty is no easier, but at least you get brainwashing and random executions, so there’s that.

Western Civilization has been fairly stable is that it’s built on two fairly strong foundations – capitalism and hierarchy.

Crony capitalism is inevitable.  If I were to say “in a properly functioning capitalist society” I’d be no better than the Leftist weasels that lament that their particular brand of Hell on Earth has never been tried.  No.  Capitalism in the United States isn’t fair, and the rich get to make a lot of the rules and restrict competition.  But you have the ability to join them.  The system isn’t so rigged that mobility is impossible.  And you can certainly trace out a comfortable life, especially if you’re born rich.

But capitalism really does provide competition – it’s hard to dominate a system (unless your name is Bezos) that is so huge, just like Jeff’s mistresses butt.  It’s a game of nearly infinite complexity.  You can play as hard and as long as you want on so many different angles.  That leads to stability.

The other factor leading to stability is hierarchy.  Men, left alone, will soon develop a hierarchy.  They want the hierarchy.  It gives them a place.  It creates (generally) healthy competition to reach the top, unless your name is Macbeth.  That hierarchy is often replicated in structures across the country – from homeowners associations at the very bottom, to Elon Musk at the very top.

Sure, there is only one Elon, but you can live in the middle to upper half of the hierarchy without having to even have a job.  There are many activities that pay nothing and lead to huge amounts of mojo.  Musician.  Biker.  Actor waiter.

Blogger.

And, yes, there are days when I put off things, too.  I’ve had this one project I need to do at work.  I’ve had it since July.  It’s due next Friday.

Guess I should be starting that one pretty soon . . . .

Life Insurance? Nah, They Can Suffer.

Dot:  I’m sure you have the life insurance squared away?
Ed:  Have we done that honey?  We gotta do that honey!
Dot:  You’ve got to do that H.I.!  Ed’s got her hands full with this little angel.
H.I.:  Yes, ma’am.
Dot:  What would Ed and little angel do if a truck came along and splattered your brains all over the interstate?

-Raising Arizona

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Is it just me, or was it Transformers® who started the trans debate with whole “robots identifying as trucks” thing?

A long time ago, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert®, came up with a handy, short guide to finances.  His quip was, “I’d write a book of financial advice, but it would only be one page long.”  I wrote about it before, but that was two years ago and this will be funnier.  The nice thing is that his list of financial advice is simple, and applicable to most people in normal times (from, say 1950 to 2020):

  1. Make a will.
  2. Pay off your credit cards.
  3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support. 
  4. Fund your 401k to the maximum.
  5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.
  6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
  7. Put six months’ worth of expenses in a money-market account.
  8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.
  9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, or tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

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I don’t carry life insurance – I want to die just as I was born – as a burden to my family.

I think, for various structural reasons, normal times won’t continue, but I’ve blogged about that more than once.  We’re seeing inflation accelerate (10 Years (or less) To A $10 Big Mac – How To Explain Inflation To Your Friends) and we are, perhaps, getting ready to party like its 1859 again.  So, yeah.  It all might be going to hell, but it could also be much better than my worst projections, and some of the above might matter.  Yeah, I know, this is like having a mortician say, “But on the bright side….”

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My insurance company is dependable – every month since I’ve had my policy they’ve sent me a bill.

So far, I’ve accomplished most of the things on the list above by Mr. Adams.  When I’ve varied from the suggestions, I’ve actually suffered financially – Scott is a pretty shrewd fellow, and he’s certainly more successful financially than most people.  For instance, if I had kept more money in the market, I would be that much more heartbroken when Netflix™ costs $12.  Not $12 a month, but $12 for the whole company.

Being wrong in my case is okay – I’m in pretty good shape financially – I was able recently to add meat to the Hamburger Helper® (I’m not saying it was hamburger, and what neighborhood will miss a cat or two?), so not being 70% in the stock market has been okay.  I’m able to sleep better at night and not worry.

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Sadly, Hamburger Helper™ only works if the hamburger wants help.

But one thing on Mr. Adams’ list above that isn’t on mine anymore:  life insurance.  Sure, I take the company life insurance policy because it’s cheap super cheap, and if I were to pass away, The Mrs. would get the princess-ly sum of $500,000, which in the year 2029 will buy you a pack of illegal vaping juice.  I hope (on any given day) that I’m worth more alive than dead to her.

Besides, if anything suspicious happened to me, she’s an author and her Internet browser history looks a list of creepy websites the Zodiac Killer was too scared to go to.  The Mrs. could be 100% innocent, but it would still be difficult to explain why she’d spent several weeks researching “undetectable poisons to kill your bald husband with.”  Wait.  That’s just a bit too specific.

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Mental note:  eat only what The Mrs. eats.  Also:  wear a helmet.

The purpose of life insurance is simple – it’s not a lottery – it’s a mechanism so that if the breadwinner was to die early, the family could be financially secure without the income they provided.  But what financial security does my family need to provide for?  The Boy is off at college, and with his scholarships I think he pays tuition, room and board in pocket lint and beef jerky wrappers because it doesn’t cost very much to go to Bob’s State University and Discount Amateur Asbestos Mine if you do really well on the ACT®.

Pugsley will in a few short years be off at college, too, and that’s it.  Our last financial challenge.  We’re in good shape for that today.  Also, if I were to die, the major source of weird family expense goes away.  The Mrs. is unlikely to spend nearly as much as I do on hobbies like ham radio.  I know that no one was more shocked than I was to find out that you couldn’t use a store bought ham.  I think you have to get a fancy farm raised ham.

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If a pig eats ham, that must make a really good radio?

So if I passed on, then what?  The Mrs. would have to get by on our nest egg, which should work great as long as she doesn’t’ have any fancy needs, like electricity.  My need for life insurance now is nearly zero.

But it wasn’t always so.

When I was younger, I actually bought the greatest amount of life insurance the company offered.  The nice thing about life insurance is that it’s one product that’s priced appropriately – when you’re youngest, it’s cheapest.  And when you’re older, it costs more.  When I was young, I wanted to make sure that the family had its needs taken care of.  I don’t recall it ever costing much more than $30 a month, and that was for $2 million or more.

That was good.  When The Boy was first born, we didn’t have much as far as savings and we had almost two decades to plan for.  And we had no idea if he would get scholarship after being dropped on his head all of those times.  Now?  We can afford to go bowling whenever we want.  And we can get some of that fancy box wine when company comes over.  And our risks as a family have dropped significantly.

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Think of box wine as juice boxes for adults.

Frankly, I never needed life insurance at all.  It was a product I was paying for that did me absolutely no good.  I would never see a dime of return.  Silly people I live with, wanting to be protected.

But in 2019, what would I add to Scott Adams’ list?

  1. Live in a safe place. Think about population density when you determine safety.  Be there and be part of the community.  If the place is too big to recognize people in the stores regularly?  It’s probably too big.  Be there sooner rather than later.
  2. Have food. Start with a month’s worth – nobody thinks you are crazy for having a month’s worth of food.  More is better.  Farming areas are nice – people are generally friendly, and they make the food.
  3. Be able to get water. Clean water is good, but there are ways to make water clean.
  4. Know what you can’t live without. If it’s PEZ® or insulin or fabric softener, know and either save it up, or learn how to do without.  I regularly shame The Mrs. pancreas to try to get it to produce insulin.  No luck so far.
  5. It teaches you what you need and don’t need faster than anything.
  6. What would you add?
  7. Did I mention PEZ™?

Leftism is a Religion, and Kipling is the Cure

“Remember, we can’t question the mores of the natives.” – The Man Who Would Be King

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Our main weapons are . . . oh, sorry.  I triggered Briana by saying “weapon.”  To the safe spaces!

I had a subject picked out for today – despite your thinking that I might think up these topics in a booze and PEZ® induced haze on the spur of the moment by throwing Velcro®-covered toddlers* at a “Wilder Post Idea” mat placed on the wall to come up with humorous combinations of idea, I don’t.  Maybe I should – it actually sounds like a lot of fun, except, well, having to be around toddlers.  The upside would be throwing them.

No, dear reader, I try to map out these posts at least two weeks in advance using the much less amusing no-toddler-involved pen and notecard method.  I then do notes and research at least a few days in advance.  But last week I looked at my notes for the post I had planned.  It’s a big, complicated, ambitious post, so I’d been working on those notes for more than a week.

It’s not ready yet.

Thankfully, I have toddlers, Velcro© and a wall I have a list of ideas for posts written on notecards that I keep in several notecard boxes.  I’ve got several hundred ideas, depending on the category.  In truth some of them are little more than crude sketches in in crayon.  In reality, these are not second-rate ideas – they’re just ideas that I haven’t gotten to yet.  And I pulled this one out of the box:

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It means: “Leftism as a religion.”  It’s obvious, right?

You may or may not have a religious beliefs – I do.  I don’t bring up my religious beliefs on this blog as religious concepts for the purpose of discussing religion – I’m not the guy who would be good at that.  I try to stick with religion and how it relates to society.  With the exception of the immediate cultural references and political figures of our time, I aim to make a lot (50%?) of these posts timeless – something someone could pick up in 20 years (or 200 or 2000), and still get a chuckle and a bit of wisdom out of while wondering just who the hell Johnny Depp was, and why does the Great Bard of The New Dark Ages™, that handsome devil John Wilder keep writing about him.

But in 20 years (or 200, or 2,000), Leftism will still be seen as a religion.

I think religion is built into us, biologically.  In 2012, the best scientific research on this was:

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.” (LINK)

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Okay, is it just me that thinks that it’s funny that the guy who studies brains and religion goes by the name of “Brick”?

As Brick says, most people have a religious inclination.  Some folks who read this blog are atheists – and I’m not here to try to convert them.  The ones that are here are the cool kind of atheist who, most often, don’t hate people who have religion.  They are, for lack of a better term, libertarian atheists – they don’t care if you believe.  Just leave them out of it.  On average, however, people want to believe in something.  Our brains are hard-wired for it.

And that’s why Leftism appeals as religion – it’s an effective way to drum up a group, and nearly 70% of atheists are Leftist in the United States.  So, Leftism cloaks itself as a rational, political movement, but it’s really a religion:  a religion as weird and deformed as Bernie Sanders’ aorta.  Let me explain:

Religion is a relationship between man and a higher power.  The deformation present in Leftism is that man is that higher power.  Look at the statues to Lenin, Stalin, and the posters of Fidel and Hugo Chavez.  Man has replaced the higher power – man is the object of worship.  Let’s dig a little deeper.

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I saw Lenin pick his nose the other day – I always knew that communists had no class.

The components of a religion are:

  • A belief system that doesn’t require proof.

It’s taken on faith. Leftism doesn’t require any more proof than is in Hillary’s chardonnay.  Every single Socialist or Communist government has resulted in thousands to millions of deaths, and all of them fail, either Soviet-style, Cuba-style, or Venezuela-style over time.  Ask an ardent socialist or communist, and they really will tell you that socialism in Venezuela would have really worked if only it had been given a chance.  I guess 10,000,000% inflation (per year) in a country with the greatest oil reserves in the world is a sign of a successful, functioning socialist economy.

  • There are (in most religions) demons – a power opposing the higher power.

Just as people are the higher power in Leftism, people are also the demons.  It’s the unbeliever (people like you and me) that is causing difficulty.  Leftism is great at finding and identifying scapegoats to point at to proclaim that they are the cause of all problems, Stalin and Mao were awesome at that(In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!).  Most commonly, it’s people who are successful.  In Leftist terms, people are successful only because they are taking the success that rightfully belongs to the victim class.  Communism is great at finding villains, and great at finding victims, too.  Sadly, it runs out of the money of the villains.

  • There is a method of salvation.

The method of salvation for a Leftist is joining the Left.  It is becoming versed in the various High Holy Words of Leftist Salvation such as privilege, Climate Change© (formerly Global Warming™, the 1%, racist, social justice, assault rifle, greed, change, economic justice, fascist, and progress.  No actual change in personal comfort is required – taking a private jet to transport Leo and his starlet of the week to a Climate Change® conference is okay, as long as Leo keeps repeating that fossil fuels are evil.  I mean, a Leftist donates one kidney, he’s a hero.  When I donate ten?  They called me a monster.

  • There are sins – rules that cannot be broken.

You would think that most actions that were counter to the High Holy Words of Leftist Salvation would be wrong and would brand you a sinner.  That’s wrong!  You can falsely claim a person of another race put a noose around your neck when you went to Subway®.  It’s sad that you then have to hire immigrants do it, because it’s a job American’s won’t do.  Or falsely claim that a person of another race cut your dreadlocks.  Obviously, these are racist acts, but there is to be no punishment for them, because being a racist isn’t a sin, as long as you are a believing Leftist.  Being rich because you’re an evil capitalist isn’t even a sin.  There is only one true sin:  heresy (see below).

  • There is heresy.

This is the ultimate sin.  Thinking a thought counter to the ideals of the Left is bad, and itself punishable by re-education in a Leftist government.  But to dare utter a thought that’s counter to one of the catechisms of the Left?  That is the ultimate sin:  heresy.  Wrongthink.  Thoughtcrime.  But it’s okay if you’re not from this country.  You can ignore all of the above, because it’s wrong to judge an immigrant on a moral basis.  I mean, what could go wrong with marrying your sister?

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I’m worried about a cat and chardonnay shortage in 2023.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that the people on Wall Street care about me any more than your average communist.  But thieves and people on Wall Street (but I repeat myself) only want my money.  Leftists want my money and my soul, The Mrs.’ soul, and the souls of my children in exchange for power.  I keep wondering . . . what’s the catch?

I used to enjoy engaging in light argument for fun with people who disagreed with me politically.  It was nice.  I learned a lot.  I learned where my arguments were weak.  I learned where I was wrong.  And when I was wrong, I admitted it, gave them the point and moved on.  It was fun – a great way to be exposed to new ideas and learn.  One two hour argument with me being pro-Second Amendment arguing with a friend who was against gun ownership ended . . . when I asked him if he had a gun.  He started laughing, and admitted he had what CNN® would call an arsenal.  He was having fun with me for two hours.  But I learned.

I don’t do that in person anymore.  If a friend who is Leftist brings a point up, mainly I’ll ask questions.  I don’t argue.  Friendly light arguments have gone from an enjoyable conversation to one where true emotion is unleashed and the person on the Left gets angry.  Heresy, you know.  So, I ask questions.  I don’t try to make points – I listen, and ask what the solutions should be.  But interjecting Wrongthink?  It simply won’t work.

That, primarily, is the difference between the Right and the Left.  The Right is confident enough that history has shown that the answers of the Right, though brutal, are effective (Kipling, Gods of The Copybook Headings, and It’s Different This Time).  The answers of the Right will return, not because they are ideologically pure, but they are the only methods known that actually work.  I’ll leave the word last to Kipling*.

*No toddlers were hurt in the writing of this post or the associated poem.

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I spent several hours trying to fix the kipling on my car today with Pugsley.  Turns out it was just a corroded battery terminal.

Gods of the Copybook Headings,

By Rudyard Kipling, 1919

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

 

Original of Crayon drawing by “My daughter Teresa” [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] via Wikipedia Commons.

And, no, I don’t have a daughter named Teresa.

10 Years (or less) To A $10 Big Mac – How To Explain Inflation To Your Friends

“You want the solution to inflation?  Hi, friends.  Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.” – Used Cars

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Tom Brady isn’t alone – Lance Armstrong will do anything to his ball to win, too.

I drove to Burger King® for lunch for the first time in a long time.  I don’t eat lunch most days to stay in shape, and I keep reminding The Mrs. that spherical is a shape.  On the days that I do eat lunch, it’s hard to beat Chick-fil-aâ„¢ – they’re fast, they’re polite, the restaurants are clean, and they put massive amounts of heroin in the chicken – there is no other way to explain how addictive those stupid chicken sandwiches are.  I generally prefer beef to chicken, but the people at Chick-fil-a© are wizards.

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I’m still waiting for them to offer a Steak-fil-a® sandwich.  Mmmm, now that’s probably worth a stoning!

Anyway, I ordered a burger, fries, and a drink.  The price for the meal?  Nearly $10.  American dollars – not that wrapping paper they use in Justin Trudeau’s country.  I remember back when a sit down lunch at a restaurant was available for a shiny nickel could be had for less than $5.  $10 for a burger, fries and an iced tea?

This was inflation in action.  Clearly you can see that the government rate of inflation – official truth – shows that inflation is low, at between 0.7% and 3% over the last decade.  But how true is that number?

The government does something interesting contortions when it measures inflation – it fudges the number.  When the government comes up with the inflation number, the government looks at things people buy – say, a computer.  Since computers have gotten roughly a zillion times faster over the last forty years, the government assumes that we’re getting a zillion times more computer for our money.  In one sense that’s true – my computer today has more memory and is far faster than any computer I’ve ever owned and is demanding a living wage, free healthcare, and a right to vote.

But in another sense, my computer isn’t a zillion times better.  I’m using it for a word processor.  Sure, the program is better today than in 1995, but it’s maybe 10% better, which is a metric smuckfest© away from a zillion percent better.

Likewise, if I were to play a game that would have been impossible to play back in 1995, it’s not 500% better.  There were great games in 1995 – Doom® would like a word with anyone who disagrees.  Sure, the richness of the games in 2019 is better, but Alia S. Wilder gave The Mrs. a copy of a video game that came out in 2002 for Christmas 2019.  The Mrs. was thrilled – the storytelling, she said, held up really well.

It’s not only computers, but other products like cars – add an air bag that I didn’t ask for?  That increases the “value” to the government guy doing the calculations even though I never asked for one and it’s never helped me even a little bit.  All in all, computers have been deflating in price according to the government.  This helps to offset some of the hugely inflationary items like healthcare and education.  But I’m not sick, and I’m done with school.  What’s a more realistic gauge of inflation?

Hamburgers.  One of the best gauges is the Big Mac® index:

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If this graph is right, a Big Mac™ will cost $10 in 10 years.  Or it will be made from spare Swedish people – and if you are what you eat, we’ll all be the victims of this policy. 

Graph source, Seeking Alpha® (LINK).

Big Mac© hamburgers are made across the country and the same twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun has been made for decades with little variation from Portland, ME, to Portland, OR.  Indeed, they’re made across the world and are one gauge of the value of local currency used by The Economist™ to judge the relative purchasing power of local currency.

The cost increase we’ve seen in a Big Mac™ is substantially higher than inflation.  And it’s not because it’s a premier burger on the market – in almost any city you can find a better burger than a Big Mac© so it’s not like McDonalds® can increase the profit on a Big Mac© because people will not take a substitute.  Nobody goes to McDonalds® for excellent food – they go there because of self-loathing because the food is generally consistent.  Heck, your humble author even went there today for research for this article.  You can get a McChicken™ for a McDollar©, but McDonalds® doesn’t include any McHeroin™.

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So, you’re telling me that when Congress is out of money it can just write itself a check and deposit it?

Even before McDonalds®, the United States was no stranger to inflation, just like my waistline.  During the Revolutionary War the Continental Congress authorized $241,552,780 of money to be issued – I still wonder what the $780 was for – Washington’s Netflix® subscription?

There were 2.8 million Americans during that time period and let’s assume that two out of five Americans was working (women stayed home, and kids weren’t required to report to the fish gutting plant until age five) for cash that would be nearly full year’s wages FOR EVERYONE WORKING based on the sources I could find.

The Continental collapsed in value – that’s where the phrase, “not worth a Continental” (which is strangely absent from Urban Dictionary®, the must be behind the times) came from.  After the United States was finally formed, the Continentals were allowed to be redeemed – for 1/40th of their face value in United States bonds.  I’m sure this made everyone who had Continental currency thrilled that they had gotten rid of the King.  At least in Great Britain they had Universal Healthcare and free ocelots in every pot.

The currency collapse of the Continental at least had an echo in the Constitution.  It led directly to the addition of the following clause:  “No State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”  That sounds pretty simple.

Yet.

The Constitution lists the things the government is allowed to do.  Despite reading it again and again, there is absolutely no power listed for the Federal Government to issue money.  None.  Paper money issued before 1863 was primarily issued by private banks, and the value of a paper dollar actually varied, typically dropping if the state was kinda bad at regulating banks or if the state was far away.  The value of a gold coin didn’t vary because gold is gold ().

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I think the Michigan $3 bill would have been more popular if they had put Scarlett Johansen on it, so I put her over the picture of the cow.

When writing this post I ended up writing a LOT about how the government took over the power to create money during the War of Northern Aggression Civil War and the evolution of a single national currency – United States Notes, and then decided it read more like a snarky term paper for Macroeconomics 201, which I already passed back when a Big Mac® was as cheap as my ex-wife.  So I cut it out.

TL;DR:  The story is one of increasing Federal control and centralization of both money creation and supply.  The biggest change was when Franklin Roosevelt confiscated the gold of the American people and made it illegal to own more than five ounces of bullion or coins.  The reason?  Roosevelt wanted to print more money for his alien masters so they would restore the power of walking to his withered limbs, though they betrayed him and turned him into a flightless waterfowl.  Or was that the Twilight Zone®?  Anyway, the real reason was that by law the Federal Reserve had to have 40% reserves in gold on the money it printed.  Back in 1933 apparently they pretended that laws actually applied to people in power.

But Roosevelt stole the gold.

Presto!  More gold for the Fed!  There were several high-profile cases where people were prosecuted for owning gold to keep the masses in line.  Immediately after taking the gold, Roosevelt raised its price by 40%.  He had, effectively, devalued the dollar with a stroke of a pen.  This immediately made everyone in the United States who had money poorer, which, I hear, is exactly the cure for an economic depression.

And that’s inflation:  making money worth less.  What people didn’t realize was that by taking the gold, Roosevelt took away the only constraint on printing money.  145 years after the Constitution was written, that pesky “gold and silver” clause was gone.  There’s no way that this turns out bad, right?

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Too bad they already had enough air guitarists.

Nixon took the next logical step – he removed any constraints on printing by revoking the gold standard – the dollar was now backed by nothing.  Ford, dimly realizing it didn’t matter, made gold legal to own again since after forty years it ceased to be considered money by people.  Gold was a curiosity.  Silver had been dropped from America’s coins in the 1960’s as a “cost saving measure” – so America’s money was based on a promise.  A promise made by Nixon.

We now live in an era where it’s considered virtuous to have a slight inflation of 2% or so a year.  Benjamin Franklin spotted this con over two hundred years ago when he noted that the inflation of the Continental dollar had been a tax to pay for the Revolution.  Inflation is just that, it’s a tax.  It’s a silent one.  You still have the same $100 bill you had last year.  Nobody stole $2 from you.  Except that they did, and they bought themselves something nice, like salaries for everyone at the EPA when you weren’t looking.

The government takes money through taxation.  It also takes money through inflation – and it’s been slowly stealing the savings of every American for nearly 90 years.

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The Fed ruins all the best bikininomics graphs.

Source (LINK)

It feels funny, because many of you have read this before, some of you have read this message 100 times.  Maybe, just maybe the Big Mac® can be worth something as inflation picks up speed.  Perhaps when a Big Mac® costs $10 someone might notice?

Nah.  It’ll be fine.