Communism – Page 31 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Alternative Investments

“Well that’s fantastic. A really smart decision, young man. We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand it’s gone.” – South Park

I’ll have you know there are at least three things that you can use an empty potato chip bag for.

I was reading Bison Prepper (LINK) (and you should, too) last week when Lord Bison mentioned that stocking up on things that you used regularly as consumables was a survival strategy. It is. Beyond that, it’s also an investment strategy.

In the world of investment, when you buy a stock thinking the price is going to go up, it’s called “going long.” If you were to buy Apple® stock thinking that the world hadn’t had enough iPhones®, iPads©, or iCrap™, you would be “going long.” For this strategy to pay off, when you finally decided to sell Apple©, it would have to be worth more than when you bought it. Buy low, sell high.

Duh.

But I started this post by writing about consumables. What’s the deal? Those aren’t investments, right?

I recalled reading another article a few years ago about a financial writer showing up on the Tonight Show™ with Johnny Carson, so I looked for the interview and found it – a whopping 200 people had watched it, even though it had a glimpse of Susan Sarandon while she was still cute and before her eyes popped out of her head like they were trying to escape. The writer that Johnny was interviewing was Andrew Tobias. Johnny said in passing: “I like how you said that if you had $1000, you should invest in tuna.”

I was really shocked when he said, “Sit on it.”

Tobias responded: “If you want to make 40% tax free on $1000 you can . . . if you buy tuna fish . . . and shaving cream on sale, and get a case discount.” The audience didn’t laugh – they were living in pretty uncertain times and the advice was serious.

Andrew Tobias posted this clip on YouTube®, and was really irritated with himself – since his jacket was buttoned it looked like he was forming a human air scoop as he sat down with Johnny.

Back when this clip was filmed was in the late 1970’s, and the economy was in trouble. The interest rate was high – a mortgage (if you had great credit) would charge you really high rates, between 10% and 14% . . . compared to a tiny 4% or so today. Inflation for nearly everything you could buy was running around 10%.

The entire key to making this odd investment strategy work is that you have to buy things that you’ll actually use. Sure, Wal-Mart® sells five-gallon troughs of flaming pickles soaked in Cheeze® Ballz™, but will you actually eat that?

It was even worse when she flipped off people we passed.

What’s a list of things that most people buy that this would work for?

Tuna (and long shelf life canned food) – especially good if you need to keep your mercury intake up.
Shaving cream and razors – buy extra if your wife is a Kardashian or you’ll look like you’re married to a Chia Pet™.
Various condiments – mustard keeps forever, and can be used to slow Kardashian hair regrowth.
Laundry soap – I have to keep this on the list, my hands are Tide®.
Paper goods – I’ll make a toilet paper joke, since I’m on a roll.
Wheat, rice, and other grains (properly stored)
Honey – They’ve found 5000 year old honey that is still edible, so it probably gets the nod as the most stable food ever. Plus it’s really handy to have local honey if you’re in Russia – I hear it’s made there by cagey bees.
Ammunition – Don’t be like JFK and have this be the last thing on your mind.

Now, you should be smart about this – if your family won’t eat cans of clams, buying them when they’re super cheap won’t really help you because then you have cans of clams that no one will eat, until there’s a food drive, and then you give them the clams. If this sounds oddly specific, well, we don’t have canned clams anymore. Likewise, if you decide to grow a beard, six cases of shaving cream suddenly become worthless until you decide to shave again.

The Mrs. didn’t buy the line, “But she looked so lonely, like she could use a good home.”

And don’t be nutty. If you live in a tiny house, putting several thousand cubic feet of tuna and wheat might not be the greatest idea. Unless you like sleeping on cans of tuna. There’s a limit. When Tobias gave that advice, he suggested that it could be used for $1000 worth of stuff. Today that translates into about $4,500 worth of stuff, if the inflation calculator is to be trusted. That’s certainly a lot, and would translate into 20 or so tons of wheat, but you’d probably have to stack hide some of it under the bed.

One dangerous point: if you buy something, like, say, wine and get a 10% case discount, it doesn’t really help your cause if you drink the wine twice as fast. Or if when you see a Ding-Dong®, you immediately rip open the silvery plastic sleeve and try to suck out the “cream” filling until you are sitting in the corner in a sugar coma. So you might want to reconsider stocking up on things where your self-control will turn a savings into a disaster for your liver or waistline.

9 out of 10 doctors recommend water over alcoholic beverages for health reasons. The other doctor is from Flint, Michigan.

In the 1970’s, you could do this strategy with nearly anything since prices were going up on everything, as long as you didn’t have to borrow the money – interest rates on credit cards were 18%. As opposed to the 18% today. Hmmm.

Regardless, if you have high-interest debt, get rid of it. The sooner the better. The future is uncertain, so getting rid of debt is a certain way to be in better financial shape.

In the last decade, inflation is most prominent in two things that you can’t collect like tuna: health care and college tuition. Oh, sure, you could pre-injure yourself, but who has the time? Likewise, you could avoid steep college tuition hikes by sending your three year old to college, but that would make congress unhappy. They hate competition that’s smarter than them.

The best information that I can find is that 401k plans returned an average of 7% for the last five years. Better than a jab in the eye with a sharpened terrier, and probably still a smart thing to do. I have one. The beauty of mine is that my company kicks in an instant match – and whatever match I get is an immediate return – if the company matches dollar for dollar, it’s an immediate 100% return. If it “only” matches $0.50 on the dollar, it’s still an immediate 50% return. I’ll pay taxes on it after you begin to pull it out, assuming that it hasn’t been confiscated by Bernie Sanders to fund his “waterslides for the poor” initiative.

But the 401k immediate return is hard to say no to.

For me? I’ll take belt sanders over Bernie Sanders any day.

But I can easily make 30% to 40% return tax free on toilet paper, if i buy it on sale, and in bulk. And I’ll never pay taxes on that return. It’s just free money – again, assuming I don’t have any debt.

If I have a mortgage of $100,000 at 4%, and I pay it off, I’ll make a $4,000 return before taxes. Not bad, but after taxes, it’s really as low as $2,000 depending on the rest of my income. But if I get a sweet deal on non-dairy gluten-free vanilla creamer, I get all of the money I save.

There is one other advantage of putting some of your money into stuff that you’d use – you’re making yourself more resilient. If the dollar (the United States one, not one of the phony dollars they use in places like Zimbabwe or Philadelphia) were to weaken, you have investments in things other than dollars. I heard a story of a German boy who got a gold coin as a tip while working at a hotel. After the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, that same German boy was able to buy the same hotel for that same gold coin. Of course then it became a target for B-17 bombers, but who’s keeping score?

Oh, yeah. Everybody. Except the French – they’re waiting for their record to improve.

A French border guard was questioning a German. “Occupation?” “No,” replied the German. “Just visiting.”

The idea that I’m trying to convince you of is that you should think of your average daily purchases as if they were investments – because they are. It’s not only stocks, bonds, precious metals and a 401k that are investments – what you buy on a day to day basis and how much you pay for it can also be an investment.

The other thing that many people overlook when they think of investments is their time. How are you spending yours? You can, like me, spend your time in a PEZ®-addled haze, watching Bojack Horseman™ on an endless Netflix© loop, or you can spend it productively, making yourself better. That’s tax free, too.

Remember, investment means more than stocks and bonds. It’s the things you buy, the way you spend your time, and avoiding B-17 bombers by not buying German hotels.

Virginia: How We Got Here, In Four Levels

“I’m branching out from self-loathing and self-destruction.” – House, M.D.

How does Leo avoid getting his girlfriend pregnant? Conception.

As I sit writing on the eve of the potentially fateful protest in Richmond, a reasonable question to ask is “How did we get here?” Like Inception©, there are several levels of answer to that question, each deeper than the last. Ah, Inception™. Leonardo DiCaprio really had a dream job in that one.

The highest level answer is, “because an election was lost.”

And this is true. A single election has completed the transformation of Virginia’s government from one where there was representation on both sides to one that is under sole control of the Left.

It wasn’t a surprise to the Left. On day one, the Left was ready to take advantage of their new power. A slate of model gun control legislation topped their agenda. Everything from banning semi-automatic weapons to requiring universal background checks to red flag laws was on the table. Already several bills are moving through the legislature. As of this writing, it appears the semi-automatic ban has been removed, but that won’t last long.

Making guns illegal will stop all gun crime – that’s how we finally stopped everyone from doing drugs . . .

In addition to the anti-gun agenda, the Left is proposing a series of laws aimed at making sure that this is the final change of government that Virginia will ever see – I read about a bill that would move the governor’s vote from popular vote to a majority of the congressional districts. As the districts will be gerrymandered, that assures a Leftist governor for ever and ever. Also included was a provision to give Virginia’s electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote. So, no popular vote for governor, and the people don’t get to vote for president at all.

Ain’t the Leftist version of freedom grand?

The second level is because the demographics of Virginia changed.

I know that lots of people have arguments that “ENTER IDENTITY GROUP HERE” have more in common with the Right than the Left. That might be true. But the only group that reliably votes for the Right are people who might name their kids “Brandon” or “Logan” or “Sarah” or “Amanda.” These people reliably want to vote for the traditions that created the United States, whereas many first, second, and even third generation citizens want to replicate the culture and country they left – including replacing the national currency with tortillas, which, the more I think of it isn’t that bad of an idea.

A new study just came out that showed that people who want to commit murder just might ignore gun-free zone laws.

You might not like that it’s true. You might have a fancy explanation why it shouldn’t be true. But nevertheless, it’s true. Immigration, urbanization, and being close to the Leftist center of power, Washington, D.C., has turned Virginia Left.

A third level is because it was planned.

The election of Donald Trump was, perhaps, the single most traumatic thing to have happened to Leftists since, oh, the election of George W. Bush in 2004. Which was nearly as traumatic as George W. Bush winning in 2000. To think: if only we had elected Gore president, polar bears would have not gone extinct.

What, polar bears are doing great? Shhhhhh.

Not all of the systems on the Titanic have failed. The swimming pool is still full.

But the cumulative result of this trauma is a push towards deeper Leftism, plus a push to get all of the state legislatures they can for the Left before the next census (LINK). Why? To gerrymander all of the congressional seats they can. Also on the agenda for a repeat of what went on in Virginia? Texas and West Virginia.

Perhaps the deepest and most basic level is because Leftists hate themselves, and herd with other Leftists.

Certainly not all Leftists are exactly this. I know a few people that are committed and are on the Left and are that way for the understandable, rational reasons. People, who, for instance, think our health care system is crazy and think the solution is more government. I think our health care system is crazy, and think that the solution is less government. I can understand their motives. They can understand mine. We have good conversations; fun arguments that don’t result in a desire to set up a duel with sabers at dawn. Dawn is much too early for a duel. If I’m going to die, I at least want a nap first.

But there are Leftists that hate themselves, and I think this is most of them. You’ve seen them – people who expend amazing amounts of emotion on behalf of other people, like the white liberals who got upset about Speedy Gonzalez and had him pulled from Cartoon Network®, despite his popularity in Mexico: “He was like a superhero to us….”

Leftists don’t feel bad just for others. Any comment you can make about a Leftist (or someone they feel protective over) is interpreted in the worst possible way. It’s as if every time someone used the term “guy” or “buddy” and men got amazingly upset. Even worse, if people got amazingly upset because we were called “guy” and decided that they would step in and protect us poor men and stop badthinkers from calling us “guy” and get anyone who said that hateword fired from work.

Secretly, the Leftists believe that the identity groups that they protect are inferior. Why else would they need to protect them and think up new terms for perfectly good descriptive words like “handicapped” or “secretary”? It’s not like if we called handicapped people something else they could, oh, walk again?

I think I saw this flag burning on video, and one of the Lefties managed to burn himself when molten drops of plastic from the American flag they were burning fell on his wrist. He said it was the same burning feeling he got when he thought about getting a job.

How bad is it? This level of moral relativism and “there is no truth” required by modern Leftism actually makes the assertion that all cultures are equivalent. Certainly not – especially in outcome. If you were to compare the culture of Japan to the culture of North Korea, you can certainly determine that the cultures are different, and that the Japanese culture is superior in nearly every way a culture can be measured.

The Left has made the nonsensical claim that women are physically equivalent to men, which I’ve seen from the Left to justify men competing in (and beating) women in high school track events. Deep down, they create this ferocious level of defense because they know that a man who says he’s a woman isn’t, but yet have to justify the insane idea that they are.

I blame the dames and broads.

If only I had time to put Greta Thunberg’s face on this meme . . . .

And the Left hates everything good, and pure. It hates the family. It hates the way the wind would blow through my long locks of shiny hair, I mean, if I had hair. And, even though the United States has done plenty wrong in its existence, it’s a shining beacon of hope that people risk their lives to get to. Leftists hate the heritage of America. They hate Western Civilization. They hate tradition. They hate rationality. As I discussed last week, the Left idolizes the profane, and treats it as if it were sacred (Why The Left Can’t Handle Reality).

Individualism and individual achievement is their kryptonite®. Why? They are afraid that they are inferior, afraid that they cannot compete. Bernie has to solve these problems, because our typical Leftist doesn’t think they can help themselves because he is a loser. He also thinks that the Identity Groups are inferior, and could never compete. Leftist philosophy is built on envy of those who are strong, and greed to take what they have made.

And Leftists are sure that they will be found wanting if judgement is ever made. Why? Because they feel they are inferior and are of no real value to society. Thus reason, science, grades, objective tests (like I.Q. and SAT tests), and norms of behavior are to be avoided in schools. If a child acts out in school? It’s not because of lousy parents. It’s not because the child has a mental or genetic defect that makes self-control impossible. No. It’s society’s fault.

So, now you know where participation trophies come from.

Thankfully, all of the millions of dollars we’ve spent on trying to solve the problems of “society” have led to the best educated and behaved children on Earth. No? Hmmm. Must be society’s fault.

Leftists, however, will do anything to protect their group. When someone on the Right commits a foul against Political Correctness, even decades in the past, they are disowned. Yet there is no behavior that any Leftist feels that they should be held accountable for – which brings us back to Virginia.

The current governor of Virginia has allegedly committed offenses against racial political correctness to the point that, if he were on the Right, he would be shot into the Sun and his family sent to exile in northern Canada where an old liberal would be sent ‘round to kick them every week.

Why would this be so?

I said that Leftists are herd animals. All humans seek the company of other humans – it’s normal, and belonging is the most basic need outside of food, water and oxygen. But Leftists seek safety in the herd. Again, the concept of individuality is hateful to them, so the collectivist action mimics that of the herd. The result is they’d never sacrifice a member until he was nearly dead – the biggest fear of the Left is that they’d be judged objectively.

The result of this is that the Left is dangerous due to this self-loathing. They’re like people who feel themselves to be inferior always have been – vengeful, spiteful, and hungry for power so that they can finally be someone.

So, that’s how we got here.

Why The Left Can’t Handle Reality

“Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality.” – Star Trek

And where I’m drawing, there is no art.

I love those moments when I make connections, mixing together equal parts of theory, experience, and coincidence together for an observation. It makes me feel like the big picture is coming together, and I’m at least one step closer to understanding the way the world really works. Sadly, I still can’t figure why the dentist tries to make conversation when his hand is in your mouth up to his wrist, but I did solve another puzzle.

The realization I came up with the other day is a simple one: Leftism contains a requirement to deny reality. The best current example is, of course, transgenderism. I had already decided to write this post prior to this weekend, but I came across an article titled, For Transgender Men, Pain of Menstruation is More Than Physical on NBC™(LINK) today. The article goes on to complain that transgendered men are somehow discriminated against because they can’t buy feminine hygiene products in a men’s restroom. You can’t buy cheesy-beef chimichangas in men’s restrooms either, but you don’t see me complaining.

I’m not making this up, the way I taught my kids to say “hit me” instead of “I’m sorry”, just so when they got to school that they’d feel silly. Pugsley was not pleased and has indicated that this will be a major factor in his nursing home selection criteria. I do know that men complaining about having menstrual pains has been the punchline of jokes in the past. Heck, I even had a sound clip of Bart Simpson™ saying “ohhh, my ovaries” once upon a time.

Poor Optimus Prime. He identifies as a truck.

All of this restroom nonsense is certainly a bit beyond the initial LGBT rights request of: “Let consenting adults do what they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms.” Now, that apparently includes letting consenting adults do whatever on the dining room table during Thanksgiving. And you’re ___phobic if you don’t applaud position changes. Pro tip: get your mashed potatoes early.

This has had consequences outside of the evil patriarchal bathroom conspiracy. Sure, someone born as a biological women being upset that they have periods takes the absurdity meter to 10. This level of denial of reality is so profound that the denier is shocked when basic biological processes that have existed since before humans invented cell phones . . . still apply to them in the current year. To complete the cycle? The denier demands everyone else play along in the same game of pretend.

How much are they wanting everyone else to play along? This one person in the article was upset that feminine products companies had the bad taste to market feminine products only to women. It’s like a company was being called bigoted because they didn’t manufacture tires for aircraft carriers.

I don’t dislike women pretending to be men, or vice versa – I’m just not sure I care at all.

I bet his new transgender name is: Pebbles.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever even met a trans person, since they are rarer than a squealing, strudel-serving sheepdog. The percentage of trans people probably reaches 0.005% of the population or so. The number is about one trans person in every 20,000 people. That means that in all of the United States, there might be 16,000 or so actual transgendered people – heck, let’s double it and call it 32,000 people, which are more people than are fans of the Cleveland Browns®.

32,000 bottle is a lot of Coca-Colas© for me to have to drink in one day, but a group of 32,000 people in the United States is hardly the basis for public policy, or a good business basis for Gillette™ to alienate actual customers. Aw, who am I kidding: it certainly makes sense to change every bathroom in the United States and offer feminine products to women who want to use the bathroom with men.

It is certainly not possible for trans people to anticipate the entirely predictable, periodic, and monthly tyranny of menstruation and, oh, plan ahead. That’s hateful speech. Let’s instead spend MILLIONS of taxpayer and consumer dollars creating an infrastructure for between 16,000 and 32,000 people not bright enough to remember that they menstruate.

This delusion carries on beyond rare mental conditions – it is an active belief of some Leftists that natural men who are “transgender” should be able to compete in sports against natural women. This has had the result of men crushing women in event after event where it’s allowed, from bicycling to track to weightlifting to Australian Rules Football. Because, of course, the Left also believes the lie that there is no difference between the biological ability of men and the biological ability of women.

But this isn’t only about transgenderism. Where else does the Left deny reality?

After all, it isn’t fair. There are three people attempting to bring that poor transwoman down.

How about citizenship? In the eyes of a Leftist, an illegal alien is exactly the same as a citizen. Illegal aliens deserve all the benefits of a citizen, and on top of that, should be able to vote. I’m not making this up. In March of 2019, the Leftist-controlled House of Representatives voted to support communities that granted illegal aliens the right to vote – and on top of that the Left has stood in the pathway of most changes that would lower the number of illegal aliens in the country.

In fact, the inversion against facts borders on religious:

PETA® is against killing an animal, but babies are fair game.
Vegans? Vegans treat accidental animal consumption as a violation of a religious commandment.
Fat jokes are taboo.
Sex with anyone or anything anytime is sacred and must be celebrated under every circumstance. If you have a desire? It’s good.

The religious connection goes farther.

Back in October, right before the 2016 election, the “gotcha” moment for the Left was the Trump tape where he talks about his ability to make time with the ladies and grab them . . . well, you heard the tape. “This,” the Left thought, “is it. When America hears this tape, Trump will have to crawl back under a rock and Hillary will be our anointed one.”

When Trump actually was elected, the shock to the Left was nearly religious in nature – levels of despair reserved for when a Pope dies or a Kardashian comes to town. The people that voted for Trump didn’t vote for him because of ideological purity. People didn’t vote for him out of religious fervor. People voted for Trump because they thought he might be able to fix some things that bothered them. Rightly or wrongly, people voted for him because of his leadership.

This thought process is not something the Left understands. When voting for Hillary, the Left was not making a vote for a political leader; they were voting for a religious leader, a prophet. It was even in her slogan, “I’m with Her.” It wasn’t about Hillary being with the people, it was about Hillary being their religious leader.

This is why if you say bad things about a leader on the Left the reaction is so stunning, swift, and predictable. If you mock the left, you’re at best a heretic. The reason you’re considered a heretic if you mock the Left is they’ve done a skillful job of elevating the profane to the sacred.

Profane doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it does – it really means “something that’s secular and not religious,” instead of “Daddy’s drunk on a Saturday night and just stubbed his toe.” The opposite of profane is sacred, and you need to refute the Truth in order to allow the profane to become sacred – if people can see the Truth, they’ll never accept the change.

And last I heard, the reindeer were in quarantine.

One example? Instead of saying “the Truth”, people on the Left say, “My truth.” Truth is blurred from an objective reality to a shared subjective reality. This is a necessary condition because if Truth exists, there is room to doubt the ideas of the Left. That’s simply unacceptable – there is no universal Truth, merely a diversity of individual truths.

Well, “my truth” includes gravity and things like the Sun.

Regardless, the Left has managed to turn the following things into its sacraments:

Abortion – which is never taking a human life, rather it’s the eradication of a bunch of cells, like a wart that could have been a concert violinist.
Sexual Preferences/Compulsions – it used to be that people were restrained when talking about sex. Now? Have a parade about it whatever your kink is.
Being Fat – the “healthy at any size” is certainly supported by most really fat scientists.
State Solution Supremacy – despite a continuous supply of state failures, the true salvation of people lies in the state doing something for them. Self-control? Personal responsibility? Hate crimes.
Illegal Aliens – If we import several million Mexicans into the country, the country will be exactly like it was before we imported them. They certainly won’t recreate the problems of Mexico in Los Angeles.
Race/Ethnicity – They either don’t exist, or exist as social constructs. Very useful for extracting victimization to farm votes for the Left.

In order to make room for the new sacred things, the Left had to make the following things profane:

Christianity
Marriage
Family
Individuality
American Traditions
American Values

If you look back, the making things on the list above (like Christianity) the butt of jokes was intended to strip the reverence that people had for them and make those subjects profane – less than desirable. People and organizations who were virtuous were mocked, or worse, were portrayed as secret hypocrites even when they weren’t. Disney® movies went from celebrating virtue and the American culture and values in the 1970’s (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, etc.) to mocking virtue entirely in the 1980’s (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, etc.).

The good news is that Bernie Sanders promised him he could vote next election.

But if you look at the list of the new things held to be sacred by the Left, you’ll see that these are the things we’re now prohibited from mocking. We can’t make fun of them. The Left isn’t looking to elect a President. The Left is looking to anoint a prophet. And that’s dangerous. Religious feeling has always been part of Leftism – that’s why they hate religion. It must be replaced with ideology.

The new sacred must not be mocked. And don’t ever try to contradict it with facts – the Left doesn’t care much for them.

Dangit. Now I’m in the mood for a cheesy-beef bathroom chimichanga.

Addictions – You Have Them. Now Laugh At Them.

“His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.” – Fight Club

Every day is the wrong day to give up Wilder.

It was the first day of third grade. I was new to the class, and was nervous. As I walked through the rows of desks, I felt very shy, apprehensive. One third grader approached me. He pointed at a girl sitting in the desk next to his.

“That’s my girlfriend.”

So many emotions. There was a fierce determination, an aggression in his eyes. I felt threatened, and I’ll admit, I panicked. I balled up my fist and hit him.

The rest was a whirlwind. I can’t remember anything after that until I looked at the face of the school nurse, who stared back at me with a shocked expression on her face.

“What did you do? His jaw is broken!”

I guess I’ll never teach at that school again.

Okay. That never happened, except on 4chan.

But I was involved with an elite paramilitary organization mentioned in Red Dawn where we went camping on a regular basis. One rule of the Troop was that no cell phones went on the trip – in a tent full of boys there is NOTHING GOOD that happens with a cell phone on a campout. So we left them home.

Pictured working on their merit badge in Escape and Evasion.

Little kids didn’t care. But eighth graders? Cell phones had become a part of their lives. I saw one particular scout become despondent for a whole campout, all from missing the connections he normally got from his phone.

He was addicted to it. After a day, he was better. But he was also very happy to get back to his phone.

There are many things in life that we can become addicted to. There are the obvious ones that everyone thinks about when they use the term: Alcohol. Drugs. Gambling. Tobacco. PEZ®.

The prime addiction from the Boy Scout’s phone was social media. Much has been written about social media and its addictive effects. All of social media is designed to be addictive and features are tested on a regular basis to make sure that it engages us, that it maximizes user interaction. That maximizing user action breeds addiction. But how it is addictive isn’t the point – the fact that it is as addictive as Mel Gibson movies is.

So, what do I mean by addiction? Everyone thinks of a junkie shooting marijuana in his eye, but that’s overly simplistic, not to mention probably not what junkies do. By addiction, I have a broader definition: the psychological need for a substance of set of conditions that aren’t required for life.

You’re not really addicted to oxygen. It’s required. The Mrs. is a type one diabetic, which means that without insulin injections, she will die. I used to kid with her, “Honey, when are you gonna realize it’s a problem? You’ve got to kick that stuff. Just say no.”

While I thought it was clever, The Mrs. was less than amused. So I punched her and broke her jaw.

Again, I kid – The Mrs. has reflexes like a cat. She also has a deceptively low center of gravity – very hard to push over. But are there things that are beyond what we normally think about when we think about addiction?

Certainly.

How about . . . air conditioning. I lived in Houston, and it was easily the most awful climatological experience in my life. It was heat plus humidity – and when the wind hit you, it felt like the devil was breathing on me. Plus I wilt like lettuce in the heat.

Having moved to Houston from Alaska, we paid roughly $422,721 a month in bills for electricity to cool our house. Was it required? Well, probably not. People live, have lived, and do live in places much hotter than Houston without air conditioning. I have no idea what kind of people, but people.

Dare I say it? We were addicted to air conditioning. We could have kept the house far hotter, and saved roughly the total cost of an aircraft carrier plus escort vessels during the two years we were there, but not enough to also get the extended warranty, which is really overrated with aircraft carriers.

Likewise, when we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, we kept the house about 55-60°F (239°C) in winter when we moved there. Since Alaskans build without regards to things like, oh, building codes, our home inspection found substantial work that needed to be done to prevent our garage from collapsing. Really. The seller had a local contractor doing the work after we had moved in.

“Where you folks from?”

We told him.

“No wonder you keep the house so hot.” Yes. He considered 55-60°F hot.

Including the hat. Our contractor looked exactly like Red Green. I learned later that Fairbanks hosted a summer event called the Red Green River Regatta, sadly now discontinued.

So, in his eyes, we were addicted to hot homes.

But let’s swap to food:

What today is considered the bare minimum level for life today is, in reality, a greater degree of luxury than we’ve seen in nearly the entire history of mankind for a greater number of people. Ever. Are there crappy places to live? Yes. But the scene of the “refugee” in Tijuana saying that the beans and tortillas given to her by local people trying to provide help to her was “food for pigs” and that she might starve to death.

Given her size, that might take, oh, a decade or so. The bad news is that she’s been deported from the United States and is, “very thankful to be back in Honduras.” It’s sad – we really need more people who will assault other people with deadly weapons like Frijoles Lady did. She’ll do the attempted murders Americans won’t.

I guess she’s a lot like that alien, E.T. She finally went home.

But the fact remains – we have people going across international borders because of . . . comfort.

What was it like in the past?

I did some research for a post once, and tried to figure out what medieval French peasants (called villeins, which translates from metric French to “Dave”) did in the wintertime in the year 1315. The links that I was able to find described them as living in their mom’s basement eating pizza rolls and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Playstation®. Just kidding! The winter as a time of great poverty, and the families would essentially huddle under blankets in bed most of the winter to reduce food consumption, conserve warmth, and not die.

When you view today’s world through medieval eyes, nearly every person in the world has better winters than that, at least outside of the Democratic People’s Republics of Korea and California. The example of the French also shows that we’re addicted to eating regularly.

Fasting was easy in the U.S.S.R. Comrade Stalin was concerned about your health.

No. You don’t need breakfast. You don’t really need lunch. The fact is, unless they have an unusual medical condition, lots of people voluntarily go for days without food with zero negative health consequences outside of a slightly looser waistband. And the desire to tell everyone about it.

Are people who are fasting hungry? Absolutely. Is there a payoff? Yes. From personal experience, the first food you eat after four days without eating anything will be the best burger you had all year.

But the bigger point is this: we live in a world of unparalleled luxury.

In the United States, we have the distinction of having our poorest people having access to so many calories that there seems to be a correlation (in some studies) that shows that poorer people are fatter. Whereas those French peasants had all the time in the world, and none of the food, poor in the United States have all of the time, and all of the food. And Playstations®.
Virtually no one freezes to death, or dies from the heat. In fact, Pugsley sometimes walks around in workout shorts and a t-shirt (no socks!) and complain that the house is too cold. He does this in winter and summer. We keep our house ludicrously cold, like our hearts.
Most movies made in the last 40 years are available to you after a quick Internet search and a nominal fee. Nearly every book, ever (that we still have copies of), can be had instantly electronically. Those in paper? Might take two days. I have a lot of books, and they’re everywhere around the house. I guess you could say I have no shelf control.

I won’t say these things are dangerous luxuries. But they are luxuries, luxuries that we often take for granted. How long has it been since your power has been out? How long since you huddled in a cold tent on a freezing winter’s night or sweating on a hot day with an endless noon Sun?

But it’s okay, his butler will go get it.

How long since you went a single day without food? How long since you went two days without it?

Our ancestors did all of these things, and more. They called it “Tuesday.” Well, not “Tuesday” since their language was a series of unintelligible grunts that sounded like tubas played by jabbering twits.

When we become addicted to and accustomed to luxury, it weakens us. Constant luxury may weaken us physically, but addiction to it weakens us mentally. Mental weakness screams that when we’re in a cold or dark house that it’s intolerable, even if it’s only mildly uncomfortable.

When we can meet adversity and understand that what won’t kill us, that being away from the Twitter®, Instagram™, and Facebook© might actually be good for us, and that sweating all day in a hot house without air conditioning is just tolerable discomfort?

Then we win.

Happy Penultimate Day 2019, and the Biggest Story of 2019: Society Unravelling

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one. I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.

If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations! It’s Penultimate Day! This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30. Why Penultimate Day? Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone. We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone. After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home.

I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012. As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar: “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.”

Or my translation may be off. Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©. Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.

Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.

You can join in on Penultimate Day, too. Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house. Then, don’t buy one. Finally: eat Italian food. Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.

My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year. In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust). The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.

In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.

The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year. And it’s not just in the United States:

Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
Yellow Vest Protests in France.
Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
Impeachment.
Left and Right Polarity.
Your family at Thanksgiving.
AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.

We know trouble is coming. The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2. How divisive is society today? In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo. This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.

Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech. Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®. Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.

Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798. And it was glorious.

Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling: an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities. He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.

These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity. What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?

Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.

Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

What did Yeats see replacing the modern world? Mysticism. Power. Blood. He was right. 1919 was crappy, but the 20^th Century was about to get a whole lot worse. He concluded:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yup. Creepy. And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.

Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another. This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages. There is more food now than at any time in history. It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories. It cannot be my hair. My shiny scalp? Sure. Not my hair.

Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite). Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.

This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of. And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .

In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast. Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait. Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting. Right now! Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.

What do Leftist want? Complete control. When do they want it? Now. Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump. Nixon? Conspiracy to commit a break-in. Clinton? Perjury. Trump? I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.

Trump is not a savior. Trump is a symptom. The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom. And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.

The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left. The Right just wants history to stop. The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well. The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what? Things are going well. Let’s burn it all down.”

As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?

And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™. The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism. As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.

This is the context we see ourselves in today. All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States. We are splitting apart.

How does this end? I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom. America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t. There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.

This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties. Remember folks, you heard that here first. But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.

Sleep? That’s for the weak.

“All persons who die during this crisis from whatever cause will come back to life to seek human victims, unless their bodies are first disposed of by cremation.” – Night of the Living Dead

Also, remember that sleep is no substitute for caffeine.

Sleep and I have always had a rocky relationship. If I were married to Sleep, Sleep would have filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment. For most people, this starts at an early age, but for me it started when I was a very young John Wilder, at around the age of five.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m adopted, but it’s the kind of adoption that involves family members. The ones that were closest to me before the adoption were Grandma and Grandpa McWilder. To me they seemed astonishingly old, even though they were in their late sixties when I toddled into their lives at the age of five.

All five year old children are difficult. I think I was more difficult than most – I found where the electricity entered their house, above a window. How difficult was I? I grabbed the bare wires coming in with one hand. After I got shocked, what did I do? Grabbed it again. I was a high maintenance.

But the benefit of being with a grandparent is the word “no” is generally a foreign word to their vocabulary. I recall discovering that Star Trek® would be on after the news on Saturday. So, I stayed up to watch it. Grandma and Grandpa McWilder had already gone to bed, having watched the weather.

Now, I have no idea why they were so concerned about the weather. They didn’t farm, they didn’t really do anything that would require them to be concerned about the weather, but they watched it every night. Me? For the most part (there are exceptions) I don’t worry much about the weather – you can’t change it after all, unless you’re a sixteen year old girl from Sweden.

After Captain Kirk® had finished gallivanting around the galaxy at 11:30pm, I still wasn’t tired. What was next? Creepy Creature Feature. As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature, I was hooked.

What was Creepy Creature Feature? It was a pair of science fiction and/or horror movies, most of which were black and white. These were generally not what anyone today would call good movies – the special effects in most of them involved foam rubber, chocolate syrup, and someone imagining what George Soros’ face would look like in 2020.

This wasn’t the logo my local station used, but you get the idea.

Okay, why on Earth would such wonderful people have such poor judgement as to allow a five-year-old to watch horror movies deep into the night?

Let me explain how I was treated when I visited Grandma and Grandpa:

Grandma McWilder would cook me my favorite dinner, and give me money to buy comic books. You’re thinking Archie® and Superman© and X-Men™, right? Sure, I bought plenty of those. But Grandma didn’t seem to care what a five-year-old bought, and the store didn’t seem to care, either.

This was a far different time and place than today. If I went to the local drugstore and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me. Five year old me. And they would have asked if I needed matches. While at the drugstore I bought issues of National Lampoon® that had mostly naked women in them. And while you may have thought that all people were fully clothed all the time before the Internet, I can assure you that it was not so.

They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though. You had to at least be in sixth grade for hard alcohol. Beer? Heck, that’s practically water.

So I bought magazines like this:

Creepy® and Eerie™ Magazines – the best in 1970’s black and white cartoon gore. Nothing unusual here, just a woman holding a disembodied hand close to her chest. Happens every day, most normal thing in the world.

And the drugstore even sold off-brand magazines like Weird™. These didn’t tell stories as polished as Creepy©, but made up for it with artwork that looked like it was done by crack addicted chihuahuas with an unlimited supply of crayons:

No, that’s not “Wired©” it’s “Weird™.” I’m pretty sure I had this issue, but sadly can’t remember a thing that went on in the comic – I’m sure there must be a reason purple-skull man and the werewolf are killing vampires. Probably California zoning enforcement officers?

Anyway, given that I had Creepy® and Weird© magazines around the house, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on after the television station finished watching invisible atomic brain monsters in 1958’s Fiend Without a Face© get shot by a .45ACP and then dissolve. When I was five, I thought it was really, really good. When I reviewed it, I seem to recall that I gave it five blankets over the head.

Thankfully, most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain wasn’t scared because there was no way that these monsters were real. Mostly, I’d just watch the giant radiation-enhanced spider fight the giant radiation-enhanced cow and then go to bed.

Not a radiation enhanced cow.

But then one night they showed Night of the Living Dead. Uncut. Totally uncut – bare butts and all. More importantly, all of the zombies eating uncooked (and cooked) humans was in the movie, too. This was certainly the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and only one or two in the future would ever capture the utter dread that this movie brought, along with the certainty that Grandma’s house simply had too many windows to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse. Plus, being five, the entire concept of zombies was new to me. Dead people craving the first take-out food: people.

Zombies don’t eat brains with their fingers. They eat fingers as an appetizer.

After the movie is over, it’s 1:30AM. Time to go to bed, but I don’t want to walk on the floor because it creaks. That would certainly draw the zombies my direction. I finally get up, and go to the spare bed that’s in Grandma’s bedroom where I normally sleep.

After watching zombies eat living humans my five-year-old brain processed certain facts:

Dead people might become zombies.
Zombies develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
Grandma was very old.
Old people sometimes die.
Therefore, Grandma might become a zombie in the middle of the night.

And:

I was made of human flesh.

So, if you’ve ever had difficulty sleeping because you thought your wonderful, kindly Grandma might become a zombie and eat you while you were still alive, raise your hand.

Only me?

I’m not sure that I slept at all that night.

Sleep and I have continued a dubious relationship, and during my life, whenever I could stay up late I certainly did. But when I was younger, I would never sleep more than eight or so hours at a stretch and I always avoided naps. When I was in head start, I would throw blocks at the other kids who were actually good and attempting to sleep like I was supposed to do. Heck, even before they kicked me out of head start I knew that naps weren’t for closers.

Eventually I got older and I discovered that I really liked naps. What fun! My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drifted even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon. But after graduating from college, work happened. Work started at 7:00AM, and I had to see early morning sunlight.

The break of dawn. Beautiful, you say? Not to me – if I want to see a beautiful sunrise, I can look one up on the Internet.

At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes. And, WebMD© says that weird sleep patterns are not really good for me unless you call heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes good things. The Internet further states that not enough sleep can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and make me die earlier.

I slept great last night! I got a full 73 minutes!

That sounds negative, which makes me wonder how did Edison get by on a steady schedule of only four hours of sleep a night? Well, apparently he did a lot of napping, which must not have counted. But he really did get by on less sleep than 8 a night. A lot less. And a host of famous people have gotten by with less, even though WebMD™ says they’re all going to die next week.

So, if you’re up too late and can’t sleep, here’s a copy of Fiend Without a Face, courtesy of YouTube® – I hear a remake is coming, but you can enjoy the 1950’s era effects, especially about one hour and seven minutes into the movie.

Just make sure that you have a contingency plan in place to take care of Granny if she goes zombie on you . . .

This is a revamp of an earlier post from when the blog was just starting. I like this newer version better.

Why the Left Can’t Meme, Complete with Wonder Woman and A Great Elvis Joke

“The Mandela Effect has been an Internet meme for almost a decade. It’s always been called that.” – The X-Files

When the governor of Virginia began to realize his gun policy was a mistake . . .

When I was a kid, we lived firmly in the land of controlled media. There were three networks that we could get on our television. The difference between them? The NBC® network showed more science fiction, and also more shows with girls wearing short shorts. Those poor girls couldn’t even afford bras to wear!

She also wonders why the producers keep making her jump on a trampoline.

The daily news came with a similar filter. There was the local paper, the regional paper, and the really big regional paper. Mainly we got the local paper and the regional paper on Sunday. Your choices were limited. Now you can go on the Internet and search from hundreds of different sites showing dozens versions of the news stories of the day from nearly every opinion. Then? You were stuck with one opinion, one line of reasoning. It was like Rachel Maddow lived in your head, constantly telling you what she thought.

Movies were similar – we could drive 45 miles and choose from two movies. Well, two movies if you could get into an R-rated film. The other theater typically had the PG or G-rated film. If the G-rated cartoon The Secret of Nimh (I wrote about that here: Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.) wasn’t your thing, you were just out of luck.

Situation comedy was big on television at this time. Most sitcoms were written from a liberal perspective. However, the most liberal of liberal writing was, of course: The Very Special Episode. This type of episode was so prevalent that it has its own Wikipedia© page (LINK). As usual, if you go to the Infogalactic™ page (LINK) (which forked from Wikipedia® in 2016), you can see just how many Soviets farther Left Wikipedia© has gone in three years. It’s not too bad on this topic.

The Very Special Episode took a typical, lighthearted sitcom that normally dealt with “I spilled ink on my dress for the prom” and then dealt with “Mom has HIV because she donated blood to her narcoleptic father who had seizures after saving abused piglets from a burning barn.” Or spousal abuse. Or anorexia. Author Stuart Millard wrote this about a sitcom having a Very Special Episode: “It was like having your wacky uncle interrupt an armpit fart to tell you about the time he saw a dead body and that’s why he drinks.”

The Fresh Prince wants you all to know he’s really sorry he started the Vietnam War, and he’s learned his lesson.

In the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, Hollywood® was desperate to make you feel like they feel. They were desperate that you cared, even if the issue they dealt with has nothing to do with you. Spousal abuse? I’ve never even known someone who was an abused spouse. I’ve known a couple of people who dealt with anorexia/bulimia. That episode of Cheers® where Diane can’t keep a burger down probably didn’t save either one of them. But that didn’t matter to Hollywood. The idea was indoctrination.

There’s a sitcom that’s normally about precocious teens getting in wild, improbable and mildly humorous adventures? Let’s have the script show one of them taking an accidental phone call:

(Call from Mrs. Murray down the street, who thinks she’s dialed Midvale High School but has mistakenly called Youthful Protagonist.)

Mrs. Murray: “Is this Midvale High?”

Youthful Protagonist: “Why yes, this is Midvale High.”

Mrs. Murray: “I have a note that the principal wanted to talk to my about Bobby.”

Youthful Protagonist: “Oh, yes, Bobby! One of our teachers said you sure have a little Elvis on your hands!”

Mrs. Murray: “He can sing?”

Youthful Protagonist: “Nah, we found him fat, bloated, and dead on the toilet.”

After that, we’d then have a lengthy episode where Youthful Protagonist learns it’s as wrong to make Mrs. Murray think Bobby’s cold, bloated dead body was found on the institutional tile floor of the boy’s room on the second floor. It will be nearly as wrong as when Youthful Protagonist causes a suicide and then learns it’s wrong to intentionally call a flight attendant a stewardess, which will be the subject of the next Very Special Episode.

It’s Christmas, and if you can’t afford an Elf on a Shelf, you can get a Presley with a Nestlé. The King did have a thing for chocolate.

I recall, thinking in seventh grade that it was a shame that humor didn’t spring naturally from the Right (this was before I found National Lampoon® and discovered that humor was everywhere). After all, every bit of humor I saw on television and the movies was from either a neutral perspective, or, more commonly, from a Leftist perspective. Television and movie humor in the 1980’s and 1990’s was based on moving the opinion of Americans from the wholesome fun of the 1950’s and 1960’s to full blown Liberalism. With the exception of Red Dawn®. Wolverines!

America had been taught that things like values, strong parental relationships, and strong marriages and strong families were good. Look at any episode of The Beverly Hillbillies® or Green Acres™. Both of those shows managed to be hilarious without preaching about, well, anything. Yet these shows showcased loving families that genuinely cared about each other without being so sickly-sweet that you wanted to choke the writer with a garrote woven from fluffy kitten tails.

The Left began the takeover in the 1970’s. The slide began when situation comedies emerged that centered on divorced women, shattered families, absent fathers, and infidelity. All of this sounds amazingly like the Clinton household on a Thursday night.

It was, at first, easy to make fun of the Right. In 1970, the Right controlled several institutions important to society – military leadership, many college administrations, big business, some older Hollywood® stars, and at least some church personnel.

It’s no coincidence that the high point of enrollment in the Boy Scouts of America™ on an absolute and percentage basis occurred in 1973. It was an institution of the Right. It was a target, and it was attacked because it was “square” and wasn’t cool, wasn’t progressive, wasn’t modern enough. “Boy Scout” went from something one aspired to be, and instead became a put-down for someone with a values structure that didn’t match the new progressive standards where “morally straight” was an indictment, not a virtue.

Thankfully it’s 2019, so girls can be Boy Scouts, and Boy Scouts can be fathers.

But the march of Leftists through institutions continued throughout the decades. Colleges went Left. The news media became openly Leftist. Hollywood went from a Left-Right truce to the full-blown Leftism we see today. And when the Leftists won control of so many institutions?

Comedy ceased to be funny to them at all. Comedy is making fun of The Man – it’s their weapon. It is edgy. Most of all? Comedy is used as a tool of the Left to make fun of leaders and institutions of the Right. When the leaders are of the Left? Comedy isn’t tolerated. Comedy is an attack. Thus? Free speech attacking the Right is to be fought for. But when the Right wants to use free speech to attack the Left? That is clearly hate speech, and not protected. Liberal dads get really mad when you wish them a happy mother’s day.

“Heck, Greta, you know why? Because ice cream doesn’t have bones! Would you like to stroke my leg hair?”

This is the rule when the Left is in charge:

Stalin had hundreds of people arrested in the Soviet Union for making jokes that the state found to be offensive. Even as late as 1983 a woman was jailed for making a joke the Soviets didn’t like. I can’t find statistics, but I did find a report that at least some people were executed in the 1940’s for making jokes in Germany. China? It’s going on right now – people are spending up to five years in prison for making jokes about Chinese leadership in chatrooms. I’m pretty sure the Left in the United States is envious of that sort of power.

“Soon,” they think.

The Left knows that people making fun of its authority is the ultimate risk. A Leftist regime can be treated solemnly. A Leftist regime can be feared. A Leftist regime can stand riots. It can stand disorder. But a Leftist regime cannot stand being mocked. Back when Saturday Night Live® was funny, they had this gem (LINK), which sadly I can’t embed, but it embodies the Left to me today.

That’s why it’s really fun to watch when their mask slips. Greta Thunberg, the recently anointed Ayatollah of Climatecontrolla said, “We will make sure that they, that we put them against the wall . . . .” Of course she corrected herself later that what “put them against the wall” meant was for them not to be summarily executed, but for them to be taken to fun and challenging carbon-neutral “leisure camps” that she’ll set up along with Uncle Soros.

And we’re worried about the Russians influencing our elections?

Greta herself is a prime example of the humorlessness of the Left. After placing a mentally challenged girl on the public stage, they note that it’s awful to challenge her. It’s even worse to make fun of her, heck they said only schizophrenic people make fun of Greta. We’ll show her!

Essentially, the Left likes to robe its spokespeople in a protected class status, like a +2 Cloak of Political Invulnerability. Mock Greta? It’s because you hate little Swedish girls with mental issues. Make fun of Obama’s policies? It’s obviously race. Ridicule Hillary? It’s not because she was obviously suffering from some sort of debilitating disease. It’s because you don’t want a woman to be president.

To them, it’s simple: Leftists can’t take jokes, so the Right can’t be allowed to make jokes.

Leftism is a religion. That’s why Marx hated religion – it was an ideological competitor to communism. And the biggest crime in religion isn’t being an unbeliever. The biggest crime is heresy, and all Leftists view mocking Leftism and Leftists as the single biggest heresy.

Reprinted with permission.

Leftists can’t meme – it’s because they’re in the thrall of religious ecstasy.

Maybe we can make a Very Special Episode about that?

It’s A Big World – Big Enough For Success

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

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

Two pennies.

But I’ll come back to that.

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

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

Really rich people have iPhones® and both kidneys.

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

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

But think of all of the pension plan savings!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, at least she has experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Should Have” – How Democrats Create Division

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair? That simply won’t do.

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

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

Oops.

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

Oops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Alexander the Great, Smallpox, and Saving Western Civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what? It’s not worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that illuminates the real problem.

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

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

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

I guess Hillary is still looking for Mr. Riot.

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

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

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

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

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

How do we solve this puzzle?

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

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