Category: Complacency

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side.  When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla.  Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis:  that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed.  To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation.  What a stupid son of a bitch.”  You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything.  Some items are starting to deflate now.  Houses, for instance.  The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan.  And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans:  fewer people qualify?  Less demand.  Less demand?  Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days.  These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand.  Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry.  With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs:  an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage.  He liked ice before it was cool.

Now?  Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down.  Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here.  That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit.  For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down.  Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down.  For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation.  This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks.  Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate:  Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate.  That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20.  Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers.  There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time.  But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers.  At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks:  if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too.  For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet.  If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing.  Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers?  Less money for chow for the Egyptians.  We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012.  Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government.  The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria.  Some things don’t change.  If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen.  Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores?  She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed.  The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion.  The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion.  (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up.  That means less money available for everything else.  When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in.  That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work.  It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors.  If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy.  If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily.  We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger.  If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index.  You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK).  It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple.  The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age.  The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

  • Black Monday (1987),               MMMRI 234
  • Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000),   MMMRI 208
  • Great Recession (2008),           MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup.  MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up.  But you knew that.  Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill.  So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo.  Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

  • the police,
  • the Constitution,
  • the courts,
  • the military,
  • congress,
  • and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows.  “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits.  Let’s take . . . the Earth.  The Earth is absolutely filled with life.  It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons.  Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life:  temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small.  Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time.  Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy.  Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things.  No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant.  The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell.  No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser.  But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser?  Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled.  The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me.  I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it.  Yup, that’s a sobering thought.  Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering.  All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

  • Baby Formula Shortages
  • Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
  • Short Tempers
  • Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences.  Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry.  A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down.  Forever.  The owners threw in the towel.  Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks.  I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them.  It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch?  Let’s just talk a single variable:  fuel.  By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy.  That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything.  Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800.  Per person.  Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family.  If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income.  Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable.  Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring.  And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation.  I got a B.

Here’s another data point.  I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®.  Don’t judge me!  They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out.  We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay.  I’ll take one.”  Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.”  It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty?  For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit?  And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that.  First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth.  I drove out of the line and off on my way.  Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance.  Badly.  We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly.  Be prepared for a change in temperature.

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once.  It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat.  When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km).  This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings:  a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense.  If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts).  Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop.  But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off.  There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting.  Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices.  So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F.  But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met.  Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test.  Cover one eye.”  Norm covers one eye and reads the chart:  “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on!  I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue.  At all.  They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor.  Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods.  But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial –  Lawyer:  “Did you see what happened after you left?”  Depp:  “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated.  “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk?  How does that happen?  Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome.  My sides are still in stitches about that one!  But when it’s us, it’s scary.  I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case.  When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it.  Sure, it’s dangerous.  And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable.  It’s just one variable.  Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute.  Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas.  When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation.  Really, that was their plan.  But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices.  That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely.  An example:  a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield.  Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue.  So, he deals with the “natural” yields.  Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle.  So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle.  More expensive food for cattle?  Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd.  Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea:  every action has a reaction.  Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices.  Others are longer-term.  There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer.  That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system.  The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system.  If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound.  It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know.  It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil.  Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium.  However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless:  it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something:  that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate.  Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal.  This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense.  If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer.  To make it clear:  The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource.  Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs:  “Cocaine use?  I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™.  That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line.  As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons.  You might want to soap up when you get out.  Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example:  back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive.  The CPU was the pivot point.  In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast.  Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too.  But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap.  There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up.  I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized.  Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers.  If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month.  Unless you’re in a Boeing®.  Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff.  What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!”  Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup.  And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend.  What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity.  It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies.  It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small.  It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive.  But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances.  I think it was Baltimore.  Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved.  We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup.  Totally solved.  More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©.  Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares.  Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry.  But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes.  Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food.  But that world hunger thing?  Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh?  I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon?  Well, no.  Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008.  The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks.  Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did.  And now interest rates are higher.  But who needs money?  The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy.  The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup.  Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up.  And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance.  Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

5 Things Biden Has Done For Us???

“Here’s to failure!” – The Producers

When a cow runs out of milk?  Udder silence.

I was flipping through my phone and an article caught my eye.  In this case, it wasn’t about the story, “Woman Mistakes Menu Prices For Calories” (an Actual Story) but instead it was “5 Good Things Biden Has Done For All Of Us”.

I was a bit surprised by the title, but, hey, I could go with that.  What did the author (a long-time water-carrier for the Left) have to say?  It’s no surprise that nearly every adult who hasn’t had a prefrontal lobotomy or isn’t a committed Leftist (but I repeat myself) has been disappointed by Biden.  And that was from a really low bar of expectation so that “speaking coherent and complete sentences and not doing anything” would have been considered a win.  However, this article title was the equivalent of, “Smallpox And Native Americans, The Bright Side For The Sioux”.

I’m worried that my smallpox joke is old, and that people just won’t get it anymore.

What did they credit droolin’ Joe with?  First, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.  This will add over a trillion dollars to the debt.  Why should that matter?  Well, the last time I checked, inflation was over 8% by the “official” numbers that likely understate it by half or more.  Spending another trillion probably won’t destroy the economy that much faster than the other crap Joe’s messing up, or will it?

Sure, the roads could always use more funding, but most of what I’ve seen would benefit the large urban centers with the types of large government plans that Leftists love.  I, for one, am thrilled that the government is going to fund electric charging stations and freight rail, you know, things that private companies could and should do instead of having Washington fund it.

Don’t worry, if the government makes electricity stations for cars, they’ll be free of charge.

Second, the Leftist hack had the guts to credit Biden for the economy.  Yeah, I know, it was tough to type that without laughing.  I won’t try to explain the tortured pretzel logic.  It was similar to everything that a Leftist ever creates:  a huge explanation of why something isn’t what it really is, like why babies are dangerous or murderers are really the victims.

The economy is a wreck.  Even without inflation, the stock market is crashing, the jobs that are being created are awful, and we’re importing record amounts of stuff.  Oh, sure, we’re exporting, but it’s mainly free stuff to the Ukraine and marketing of Hunter Biden’s valuable “services”.

I’m betting it’s like sauerkraut, smoke, and six-day old sweat.

Okay, what’s third on her list?

NATO.  I’m laughing at that one.  Leftists spent decades wanting to tear down NATO because it was in opposition to the place they really loved, the Soviet Union.  Now that the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is the current bad guy, the Left loves NATO like Nancy Pelosi loves vodka.

I used to like NATO, but that was when we had an existential crisis brewing with the Soviet Union – it was them or us.  It served its purpose and the Soviet worldview based on world domination lost.  So, why do we need NATO?  Oh, sure, Russia.  The same Russia that’s currently spent 82 days gaining approximately six acres in the Ukraine?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of a strong defense, but I’m just not sure what NATO defends against right now.  But, hey, they have 62 acres of office space in Brussels right next to some pretty cool chocolate shops and a cool gay NATO flag.

If the war keeps going like this, Russia might want to join NATO for protection against Ukraine.

Fourth on the list is child poverty.  I can understand Biden’s desire to avoid child poverty, since it makes their hair brittle and not smell so appealing.  On a serious note, the way he’s doing this?  The way the Left does everything:  pouring more money that they printed into it.  The irony is that the short-term, minor reduction in poverty will be utterly dwarfed by the size of the economic destruction that the unending streams of free money cause.

The last thing on the writer’s list?

Diversity.

I could go on and on about this one, but Diversity as used by the Left means, “not a white guy who likes girls” – anything else is Diverse.  I have no idea why diversity is listed as a strength, but everyone keeps saying that, which is like asking “do you walk to school or carry your lunch?”  It’s nonsense packaged as being self-evident.  Is there any possible way that having sex with men helps the comically named Pete Buttigieg a better Secretary of Transportation?  Is there any reason that having more women in the White House is a benefit, I mean, outside of paying them 30% less?

No.

What does Diversity mean to me?  A lot of different things.

The end result is this:  the Left is grasping at straws – any straws.  Anything and everything that Joe Biden has done has turned into failure.  Not small failure, but the worst type of humiliating, debilitating failure.  It’s funny when it’s just him and Hunter, but in this case we’re paying the price.  On the bright side?  At least Hunter has something to do . . . .

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant.  I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans.  During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration.  I can taste it.”

Taste it.  Yes.  Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig.  “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like?  Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive.  A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems.  I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts?  Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I?  When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .”  Yes.  He said that.  Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought:  “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people.  They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev.  And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”.  In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing).  Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured:  White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman.  Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.”  It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is.  How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy.  The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet.  Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree?  It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy.  Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”.  Really.  That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option.  The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare.  Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too.  Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs.  Why do that, to help people?  No, the aim was revolution in the United States.  And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing.  It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible.  Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change.  They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

1990s Movies – Because I Said So

“Flores! Flores para los muertos!” – Quick Change

Someone said the next Bond should be a woman – imagine he car explosions and wrecks, and that’s just when she’s parking.

Movies.  I grew up with them – it was where I took my girlfriend on a Friday night before we went to the pizza place and then, um, drove to look at the stars.  I once took a date to go see one of those graves that have a constant natural gas torch, but it turns out that is a bad idea – you should never take a date to go see an old flame.

But more than Friday night fun, movies were our cultural mythology.  As man 20,000 years ago told stories around the fire to establish and share the history of the tribe, our history was told with movies.  In essence, movies and television became our campfire, our shared cultural experience.  When people say that the United States has no culture, or is guilty of cultural appropriation, they’re wrong and I want to punch them.  But I can’t, because I’m not Irish.

As our shared culture, however, movies have always had a huge power to change our minds.  As propaganda, they changed our culture, many times not for the better.  Movies were also a huge opportunity to change our culture, change our lives, nearly as much as early metallurgy – after all, those who smelt it, dealt it.

I hear when you eat aluminum, you sheet metal.

I used the term “were our mythology” intentionally.  The world has changed.  The ‘Rona took movies and fragmented them further.  Now, to see a big movie you can still go to the theater, but streaming now allows people to focus on narrow interests.  Heck, even Putin watches Nyetflix®.

At work, unless we have the same streaming service, we’re not watching the same things.  Better Call Saul?  I asked people sitting at a table today if they’d seen it.  No one had.  It’s a gem, and probably the best thing on television today.  But no one else had seen it.

There went a shared conversation, a shared moment.

And, like I said, movies are fragmented and not a part of common culture.  Why was no one watching the Oscars®?  Because no one cares. The Academy Awards® don’t reflect anything about America anymore, since the moves . . . suck.  Even as late as four or six years ago, the movies were better.  Now, many are simply unwatchable mainly because many have been infected with “woke” culture.

So, for today’s post, I thought I’d go back into history, to the 1990s.  Why?  It’s my blog.  And movies in the 1990s were far more fun than movies today.

I tried to research LGBT stuff, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.

I’ll say that I tried to pick movies that weren’t propaganda, but were, rather, just fun.  So, without any further nonsense, here are my favorite movies of the 1990s, year by year.  I probably missed some, but this is the list I’m going with at 1am.

The structure?  My favorite movie in each year.  My criteria?  The one that mattered to me.  So, let’s get into the time machine and hit. . .

1990:

Quick Change.

I’m a sucker for Bill Murray.  I even watched him in Razor’s Edge, which made me think of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters as a hollowed-out shell of a man after World War I.  Yeah.  That movie didn’t work at all.  That being said?  Quick Change is funny.  It has monster trucks, a heist, and mistaken identity.

In a (very) distant second place is Joe Versus The Volcano.  Tom Hanks wasn’t so serious, and there was a quirky fun with watching him go to work – we’ve all had that job.  Would I recommend it or change channels to watch it?  No.  But I do remember it.  Hula girls, unite.

1991:

1991 was a MUCH better year for movies.  Hands down, Silence of the Lambs wins.  It’s tense.  It’s 100% related to the book, and Hopkins and Foster never have had better roles.  Ever.  This is obviously a movie that couldn’t be made today because the character that was the baddy was a mentally deranged person.  You know the plot.  It’s a movie that you can watch once and the writing is branded into your brain, and it’s perfectly cast, perfectly delivered.

I guess we now understand what Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health was doing in the 1990s.

In second place is Hudson Hawk.  I am, perhaps, the only person besides The Mrs. that loves this awful, awful movie.  It’s campy.  It’s silly.  The premise?  Ludicrous.  Whatever.  I loved the stupid movie.

1992:

Reservoir Dogs was amazing, though I didn’t see it until 1994.  Wow.  There are no reservoirs or dogs in the movie, but despite that, the movie is amazing.  It is (perhaps) Tarantino’s best movie.  The acting and pacing and tension are amazing.

As honorable mention is . . . My Cousin Vinny.  I rewatched it last year with Pugsley, and it was a hoot.  Perry Mason crossed with Green Acres.  When a movie hinges on the cooking time of grits?  Good stuff.

1993:

Army of Darkness is campy fun.  Okay, it’s really like the Three Stooges meets H.P. Lovecraft.  If that sounds good, watch it.  If you hate either of those things?  Run.  Really.  It’s a movie I love because it’s horribly stupid cosmic horror.  It also has multiple endings, depending on the version you watch.  I can’t pick which one I like best, but I don’t have to.

Honorable mention?  Demolition Man.  Which isn’t a great movie, but 1993 wasn’t a great year for movies.  It takes place in 2032 after Political Correctness takes over the United States.  It is not a good movie, but it is fun.

1994:

I would pick Pulp Fiction but I’ve already picked a Tarantino movie so instead I’ll pick Pulp Fiction.  I believe this is the only movie on the list where a co-worker said, “Oh, you’re the guy from Pulp Fiction.”  Which character was I compared to?  The Wolf.  That’s me, when I’m at my best.

Mmmm.  Good coffee.

I can’t believe this movie isn’t older, but honorable mention is . . . The Crow.  If you’re gonna die after one movie, this is the one.  Brandon Lee did an amazing job, and the movie would have made him a star, if Alec Baldwin hadn’t been in charge of props that day.

1995:

Wow.  I had a big list.  1995 had a raft of great movies.  I’m going to pick a movie I hated the first time I watched it:  In the Mouth of Madness.  In the Mouth of Madness wasn’t what I expected, but every time I watch it, it gets better.  Sam Neil in a Lovecraftian (see a pattern yet?) horror by John Carpenter?  Yeah.

I have five other movies on my list from 1995.  I’m going to pick 12 Monkeys.   12 Monkeys is weird.  It bends reality because it involves time travel if Monty Python designed the universe.  It’s not funny.  It’s also the first time I saw Brad Pitt, and I definitely can’t get the charge nurse to make it yesterday.

1996:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Movie.  That would mean something if my hands were made of metal.

Hamlet, honorable mention.  Mel Gibson chews the scenery as the mad prince of Denmark.  Alas, Yorick, I won’t give any spoilers, since this plot is only 400 years old.

Reminder – never go on another vacation with Sam Neil.

1997:

Event Horizon.  Sam Neil.  Check.  Lovecraftian.  Check.  Yup, I’m a junkie.  This is not an easy movie to watch, and the story of how they made it is hilarious – they did second unit filming on weekends when the executives weren’t watching and that’s when they filmed all the disturbing stuff.  Not for kids.  I mean, not for your kids.  Mine are made of sterner stuff.  Also, Sam Neil is known around our house as The Evil Sam Neil.

Second place?  Fallen.  I liked it.  It’s a one-trick movie, but I enjoyed the one trick.

1998:

So, this is a tie.  Vampire$, which is a great movie with guys who hunt vampires for money directed by John Carpenter and BASEketball, which is (early) South Park mixed with Airplane.  It was too tough – but if I had to pick one I’d pick BASEketball because it is so very stupid.

It was losing the truck that really made them mad.

An honorable mention is: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It’s rough, but so is the original source material.  Johnny Depp captured the manic intensity of Hunter S. Thompson, but my guess is that’s what Johnny Depp is really like, 24 hours a day.  Beware of bat country.

1999:

The best year on the list, easily.  Bowfinger.  Galaxy Quest.  The Matrix (wish they made a sequel, right?).  Office Space.  Fight Club.  Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  I’m not picking.  Of these, though, I’d probably (if I had to pick one to watch tonight) pick Fight Club or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but that’s probably just my mood tonight.

The 1990s was a decade before The Narrative took over, and you can tell – the movies themselves were more innocent than today.  We’ll look at more decades in future months – you can bet the 1980s had the best teen comedies.  Better Off Dead, anyone?

So, what did I miss?  Which movies from the 1990s had the biggest impact on you (assuming you’re not Johnny Depp)?

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin.  “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place.  No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®.  No, it is something that normally people are happy about.  I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question.  I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order.  Okay.  Restraining orders.  My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

  • a lack of ambition,
  • waking up with amnesia
  • too much success, or
  • having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one.  I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot.  Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden?  Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have?  Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition.  In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want.  And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore.  At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week.  I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first.  One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”.  When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza.  It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago.  I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner.  The charm of traveling went away.  The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that.  There are compromises that I’m not willing to make.  And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know.  I need to borrow chairs.

What about family?  Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver.  But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take.  Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent.  That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers.  The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions.  No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay.  Work was fine.  Family was fine.  What now?

That’s what I was struggling with.  What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years.  Talked to him last week.  I’ve mentioned Joe before.  Pure genius.  Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job.  So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace.  If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst.  They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either.  The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial.  It didn’t make Joe better.  It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body.  Now what?”

So, I thought about it.  And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough?  What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place.  That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts.  Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing.  And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes?  Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®.  Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good.  I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within.  Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

Regret And Dread – Two Problems You Don’t Really Have To Have

“I have people waiting for me.  They don’t know what I do, they never will.  They’re protected.  But I do what I do so they can have a better life.  And if I live or if I die, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they have what they need.  So when it’s my time to go, I will go knowing I did everything I could for them.” – Better Call Saul

If you press your gas and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.

I tend to like writing my Friday posts the most.  Why?  Most generally, I get away from the reality of the present situations that we are living in.  That’s nice.

Why do I feel like I can do this?

Because nothing is done yet, and nothing is settled yet.  I’ve written posts about regret.  I still feel that regret is a wasted emotion – the past is done.  Of course, I try to learn from my mistakes.  But I can’t spend my life being upset about them.  The real question is how can I incorporate the mistakes so I have a better future?  I even told The Mrs. that she should embrace her mistakes, too.  She was so happy she hugged me.

Especially of note are those mistakes I made that weren’t mistakes I made based on a lack of virtue.  If I did the right thing, for the right reason, the result is the result, and I will live with the consequences.  Sometimes bad things happen when you do everything right.  I mean, when the doctor told me I had a rare disease, I asked, “How rare?”

“Well, you get to pick a name.”

Those are the breaks.

Firefighters in Athens have it tough – you’re not supposed to put water on Greece fires.

A similar emotion is dread.

I read a quote when I was a kid – Heinlein? Twain? A fever dream while on laudanum writing about Xanadu? – that stuck with me.  “Worrying about what might happen is paying interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet.”  It’s a good quote.

Regret is looking at the past, dread (or its cousin, fear) is about looking at the future.  But they’re the same.  Neither of those two things are real.  One once was real, and one might be real.

I’ll admit that when I look out at the future, I do see dark days ahead.  But right now, I’m sitting in my basement, The Mrs. had gone upstairs for sleep, the basement is perfectly comfy, and all is right with the world.  Something might happen next week.  Next month.  Next year.  The price of tires is up.  The price of gasoline is up.  Heck, Hunter Biden can’t even find decent meth nowadays.  It will get worse.

So?

I fell down at the airport once.  Almost missed a flight.

I think that often we are more upset by the thought of potential future discomfort than actual, present discomfort.  It can be consuming, and all for something that hasn’t happened yet.

And, it used to be me.  I used to do the math – how many months could I make mortgage payments if I lost my job?  How many days could I feed my family?  And, it’s one thing planning for that, but I was also sometimes scared.

Until one day I just decided to not be scared – I’d go through life and do my best, and let the chips fall where they may.  I decided that it was fine to plan, it was fine to economize to save money, but it wasn’t fine to worry.

So I stopped.

It was weird – one night I was worried, and the next night I decided that I wasn’t going to worry anymore.  I just made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to worry anymore about that.  It was the last significant worry that I gave up.  I also worried about my short attention span, but that problem seems to solve itself.

The Kamikaze instructor to his class:  “Now, class, pay attention because I’m only going to do this once.”

And it’s not like I live in a world where bad things don’t happen.  I know bad things happen – horrible things.  But today, I can choose not to worry about them.

Heck, I can pick something that is real and we can be certain that is going to happen – death.  The shadow of death looms above us all.  But to be consumed by it so that it causes a life lived in fear?  That’s like already being dead.

It might surprise some people, but death is something that isn’t new.  Seneca, the (very dead) Roman stoic philosopher, said:

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.  Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

Kelvin and Celsius interviewed for a job, but Celsius got it.  Kelvin absolutely didn’t have a degree.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours?  This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

  • It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
  • It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
  • It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
  • You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

Today is pretty good.  Enjoy it.  Skip the regret, the worry, and the dread.  While you’re breathing, live.

What can you make happen today?