Complacency – Page 28 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Fear: Don’t.

“The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” – Star Wars™

It’s hard not to stop and stair when you’re on an escalator.

On most Fridays, I try to get away from the heavy topics – the ‘Rona and Afghanistan will be there next week. And, probably the week after. And the week after. I believe we are in now week 70 of “two weeks to stop the spread.”

There is probably more similarity to both of these failures than most might imagine, but that’s probably fodder for another post. That would make a good topic for a Monday. We’ll save the coming economic collapse for Wednesday. By Friday, though, I’m getting ready for the weekend and figuring out ways to best spend time with family.

I do have an issue, though:

One particular problem I have is, well, I think. Give me a potshard and I’ll try to reconstruct the political and economic history of the Mayan civilization that created it. When I find out it was from a $1.99 plate from Wal-Mart that broke when Pugsley was experimenting with motor oil, aluminum foil, and topsoil in the microwave, I can just start on a new theory.

“I wonder how the Mayans got aluminum foil?”

Back in 2012 people were making Mayan jokes like it was the end of the world.

Part of thinking is that I often think about things that can go wrong. I have accurately predicted four of the last two recessions. I know where my house sits relative to former ash deposition related to the past eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano. I have a (fairly) accurate caloric inventory of the food I have stored “just in case.”

Thinking is not quite a superpower, but it’s close.

One of my friends says he has the superpower to talk to dead people. It would be amazing, but they can’t talk back.

But it doesn’t help me sleep at night. It’s like looking up the disease that you might have on the Internet when you have three symptoms. “Hmm, it could be the common cold, or it could be a rare form of Dengue fever that would cause my bones to rubberize and my intestines to liquify. Heck, then I’d be spineless and gutless, just like Joe Biden.” Then I’d worry.

So, I don’t look up symptoms anymore.

The ability to predict bad things is important. It is something that’s so hardwired into all living things that even the lowly slime mold reacts to predictably changing conditions by anticipating them. If only Joe Biden could do that!

Lately, though, I’ve been a bit concerned when I make my rounds on the ‘net that there seems to be a consensus that something is now really, really wrong. Again, I generally predict that things will be much worse than they end up being, and therefore I am happily surprised when things turn out much better than I expected.

This is normally the case. My bones have yet to turn into a gelatinous mess.

Looking on just the bad things that can happen is limiting. It’s no way to live a life. It’s a weakness.

If you lose a Dalmatian puppy, don’t worry. They’ll always be spotted.

My solution?

I’ve learned how to turn it off. To just stop worrying about everything. Sure, I can see horrible things that might happen. In reality, seeing more of the downside than of the upside has probably cost me an opportunity or two.

That’s okay. I’ve avoided enough bad things that I think they balance out, at least so far.

One of the things I noticed from Pa Wilder as he got older was that he got more afraid as he aged. He had seen more of the world. He had seen things that could go wrong. Often, years will do that to you. Even though I’d never seen him wanting, he could see many different ways things could get tough.

I’m not sure that it impacted the quality of his life, but I decided that I’d take a different route. I could live with a lot of things, but I decided that fear wouldn’t be one of them.

So, what did I do?

I decided that, whenever possible, I would face my fear, head on. Okay, that’s easier said than done if I have a fear of walking into traffic. But when I developed a fear, I decided to not let it sit (G. Gordon Liddy Post).

Fear debilitates. It creates a barrier to rational action. Fear is one of the ultimate enemies because it leads to despair. When we look at the biggest tool used to turn good men bad, it’s generally this one:

Fear.

And if a giant trips on a volcano, does he Krakatoa?

If we look at the way fear of the ‘Rona has been used in the last year, it has been masterful. Create pictures of people dropping dead on the street in China. Use fear to create a fear of gatherings, to create a fear of the most basic of human interactions.

As a society it’s almost like we’ve become addicted to that fear. We have the choice to not let it win.

We head together into an uncertain future. Many of the news stories that I read don’t give me hope that much of what we have become used to will long hold together.

That’s okay. In some cases that will be good. In others, well, not so good.

Much of the future is beyond our ability to project. As Pa Wilder would have said, “Don’t pay interest on money you haven’t borrowed.” Our future is not set, so spending our lives worrying about it gives us nothing.

What is the proper way to recognize someone who stopped bleeding? “Coagulations!”

Certainly, we should think. Absolutely we should prepare. But do it without fear. When you’re afraid, face that fear.

It’s a lot more fun that way.

And, it’s Friday. Have a good time this weekend.

Efficiency: Not Always Our Friend

“Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.” – Star Trek (TOS)

I’d tell you a German knock-knock joke but they already have AI-enabled sensing that lets them know who it is.

Let’s pretend that you had to break a big rock. A really big one, say the size of your mother-in-law’s butt.

Okay, that’s a big ask. The last time I had to break a big rock that big was . . . never. That’s a big rock.

Big rocks, mothers-in-law? You’re thinking, have you had too much ale, John Wilder? Bear with me, this will make as much sense as Joe Biden’s economic policies.

So, we’re back to breaking a stupid rock in our mind because John Wilder asked us to. What’s the most direct way to do it?

What does a member of the Southern Buddhist Church say when they die? “What in the reintarnation is going on here?”

You might think you could use a sledgehammer, but not so fast, Thor. That’s not the most direct way, and Disney® will probably sue me for mentioning Thor because they now have the intellectual property rights on all things Norse. Ignore Disney®, since they don’t have (yet) a copyright on hammers. But I don’t want to give them ideas, because soon enough they’ll have a copyright on interstellar space.

To have a steel hammer, you’d have to make one. That would involve having a mine for iron ore. Then the ore would have to be processed into steel. After you figured out how to do that, you’d have to forge the head of the hammer (it has to be strong, right?).

Even then you’re not done. You have to find a tree, get some wood suitable for a handle, invent an entire industry to just get the knife to carve the handle, and finally mate the handle to the hammer head.

Nope. A hammer isn’t that direct. To have a hammer, you have to have a functioning civilization.

Thor’s enemies never get drunk: they just get hammered.

For the most direct way, you’d have to grab a stone or something hard nearby and just start thwacking the rock.

That’s not very efficient.

A hammer is more efficient. But how about you build a piece of high-strength steel to use as a drill? That’s faster. But the drill requires advances in metallurgy even greater than the hammer head.

Okay, what’s the most efficient way to break rock?

How about you blow it up?

Note to the ATF, this is economics, not a suggestion.

That’s a really good way to make a big rock a bunch of tiny rocks, quickly. But in addition to making your hammer and drill, you have to also create an entire industry dedicated to making explosives.

This points out a lesson from the (dead) Austrian economics dude, Ludwig Von Mises: the most efficient way to do something is the most indirect.

To break a rock more efficiently, you have to look for increasingly more indirect methods. That requires time. It requires effort. And, it requires resources that might be hundreds of miles (around 7 kilometers) away.

We have a really efficient society. We can have fresh strawberries delivered to us (cheaply) in January because they grow them in Peru or some other country that rarely visits here. We can have fresh roses for Valentine’s Day® because we have airplanes that deliver them directly from the cocaine fields. Or something like that. I’m not a botanist.

Efficient is better, right?

Well, no. I’d like to put forward as Wilder’s Exhibit A the human body. Nobody needs two kidneys, at least that’s what the girl in the motel in Vegas told me before I woke up in the bathtub. Yet we have (on average) two. We have two lungs. Everywhere that having a spare part might make it easier for you to pass along your genetic information, the parts are paired. I’ll leave the other locations of other paired organs as an exercise for the reader. I mean, everyone has six toes on their left foot, right?

Wow. Looks like Chee-toes® instead of actual toes.

Not everything is paired. We each have (on average) one brain, though I think my ex-wife had six or so brains, one for each personality and species of venomous snake that she would normally impersonate.

But that single brain is armored as well as it could be. Likewise, physics says that having two hearts works as well as having a man living with two women living under the same roof. Thankfully, we have a solution that’s the next best thing – death.

Two eyes. Two ears. I could go on and on. It appears that humans are designed based on the philosophy that “two is one, and one is none.” Huh.

Efficient designs are vulnerable.

From experience, I can say that any business that has any spare capacity will do anything to use that capacity. Wall Street doesn’t want 90% utilization – Wall Street wants 99%. They want . . . efficiency. They don’t want profits for the next decade, they want profits this year.

Just like I have two lungs, I’ll say this again: Efficient designs are vulnerable.

How many of the semiconductor chips in your life came from Taiwan?

A lot. Here’s what the Financial Times noted:

“Yes, the industry is incredibly dependent on TSMC, especially as you get to the bleeding edge, and it is quite risky,” says Peter Hanbury, a partner at Bain & Company in San Francisco. “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.”

So, most of the best information and knowledge in making computer chips that define the very essence of your life are built at one factory in a country that the Chinese now know that Joe Biden will defend with all of the force of . . . a strongly worded speech.

The Chinese word for Asia is the same as their word for Taiwan: China.

It’s efficient.

I can’t help wondering how many of the current shortages of “stuff” that we’re seeing is just China messing with us. “Hey, if we turn this lever, what happens to the United States? Oh, man, that was funny. Did you expect to see used car prices go up? And those pickles and baking soda? That was a hoot.”

Outsourcing and internationalizing is efficient. Having no surplus production stored in warehouses is efficient. Having no redundant capacity is efficient.

When efficiency works, it means everyone has more stuff. The factories are working at 100%. The people are consoooming apps and video games and pantyhose and PEZ®.

Did I mention that efficiency is vulnerable?

What happens when an efficient process gets disrupted?

Shortages. Price increases. Business failures. Revolutions.

Maybe the question that we should ask is what can we do to make life less efficient?

I guess I have stock-home syndrome.

More efficiency means empty warehouses. Do you have food storage? Do you have ammo storage? What happens if you lose the grid for an hour? A week? A month?

What happens if you lose the efficiency of modern life for a day? For a week? For a month?

What happens if you lose it for the rest of your life?

What happens if you have to live a life that’s less efficient?

I guess there are always more rocks, right?

Remember: Your Mission Isn’t Done

“Santa Maria! Captain, you cannot punish the crew like this. They will mutiny!” – Sealab 2021

The big problem with the French Revolution is that lots of folks lost their heads.

One winter, while hunting elk up on Wilder Mountain, we had, well, an issue. We were about fifteen or twenty miles in from the nearest pavement, and headed home.

It was overcast. It was lazily spitting snow, with a breeze that was slowly picking up. Looking to the west, where there should be a resplendent sunset, the sky was dark, heavy, and pendulous with brooding storm clouds that blotted out even a hint of the winter Sun.

That was when the problem hit. Pa Wilder, while driving over a “road” that was little more than a common path cut by four-wheel-drive vehicles over the course of decades of hunting and firewood gathering, drove over a small branch that had fallen in the road. Not a problem, right?

Well, it was a problem. In this case, the branch had the stem of a broken off limb, sticking straight up. Pa drove the GMC Jimmy® right over that sharp shard of limb.

In the span of a dozen or so feet, we had lost not one, but two tires. It penetrated the center of each tire, poking a hole the size of a half-dollar coin in each.

Amazingly, we had lost another tire already that day, already.

Ahhh, I remember this trip. Those were the Goodyears®.

We now had a four-wheel drive with five tires and three flats. In winter. As a blizzard approached and night was setting in. And all of this was in country where it could easily hit -40°F as night descended.

I bring this up to say that we had a mission. Our mission at that point in time was to get home. There were several challenges, and I’m pretty sure if most people were in the backcountry as a blizzard was descending that the last person they would choose would be a 12-year-old boy to be a guy on the team.

Which is sad.

Children can have missions. Children can face danger. Children can do important things. We forget that because we’re in a society that doesn’t give children important things to do, mostly. Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were as young as 14.

I hear the Russians just canceled their Penguin Army program. Now all they have left is Navy Seals.

To be clear: Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were 14. A midshipman is an officer. If you were unaware, the Royal Navy wasn’t a social club, and often those boys fought in wars. As officers.

So we forgot that boys can be given real, substantial responsibility. But there’s also the chance that we forget something else: that each of us is on a mission. And each of us has a role to play.

We currently are in a place where freedom is an increasingly precious and rare commodity. It’s not just in the United States – Trump may have said, “Make America Great Again” but down under they seem to be following the “Make Australia A Prison Again” plan. And Canada?

I love our Canadabros that come by regularly (Canada is the second-largest readership here), but Canada seems to be determined to become the Soviet Above the 49^th Parallel, led by that Tundra Trotsky, Trudeau.

Pictured in background: the only two Canadians Justin’s mother didn’t have sex with.

It seems like in this day and age we all have a mission. Just like 12 isn’t too young, 80 isn’t too old.

Frankly, we need all hands on deck. The size of the mission is the largest on the North American continent since 1774. I almost wrote that the idea was to preserve the Constitution and the Republic. Seriously, I’d love nothing more than to write that.

I’d love for that to happen. I’d love for us to come together. I’d settle for the laws to look like they did 90 years ago. Heck, even 70 years ago. That would be preferable to today.

A reversion, sadly, is impossible.

Whatever will come from tomorrow will not look like the past. It may be a shadow. The Holy Roman Emperors weren’t Roman. And the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Empire.

And I hear that soon enough he’ll be sending ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire, too. Can’t you just sniff the leadership?

Or it may be something entirely different.

I think it will be entirely different.

And that’s where you come in. Yes, you.

You have a mission to create a new nation here. It won’t look like what we have today – it simply cannot, since we have created a situation that is at the far end of stability, but more on that Wednesday.

I assure you, you play a part. The initial conditions of what happens are crucial to the final outcome. If George Washington had wanted to be King? If Thomas Jefferson had been a Martian Terminator Robot like the one that keeps triggering my motion detector lights at night even though the sheriff won’t believe me?

Things would be entirely different.

And you are important. Your actions in the next decade are critical to the creation of what will come after. Do we want a nation that will be based on slavery, control, and that eternal boot stamping on a human face?

I’d vote no. If you’re a regular here, I’m betting that’s your vote, too.

I think everything he wrote was Orwellian.

If so, let me shout as loudly as I can: You Are Not Done. This is Not Over. What is it that you can do to create a world where freedom beats slavery? What can you do to create a world where children can run free from the indoctrination of an all-powerful, all-regulating state?

There’s a lot.

Our nation was, thankfully, built on the consent of the governed. Most things that local government provides, we want. To quote Python, Monty:

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

To be clear: the Federal government does very little to make anything in the list above better, and often does a lot to make them worse. Except for the interstate highways. Those are actually pretty cool.

But I will tell you – you are the seed of the future of this country. You are the seed of the future of this continent.

Never cross a Scrabble® player. They’ll send you threatening letters.

You are the seed of the future of this world. It doesn’t matter how old you are. The time is coming, and coming quickly where great injustices will be attempted. And you are the seed to make what comes after better for humanity. Would the world rather live in 1950’s America or 1930’s U.S.S.R.?

The choice is stark.

Your mission is clear. How will you act to make your county, your state, your country one where free men can walk?

It’s up to you.

Back to the mountain.

For me, it was a game. That’s the advantage of being 12. Pa Wilder and my older brother (also named John due to a typographical error) and I wheeled the tires so we had two good ones in front. We locked in the hubs on the four-wheel drive.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive up a mountain path in a car with only two tires in a snowstorm as it got darker every minute. It doesn’t work very well. The flat back wheels couldn’t push the Jimmy® up the hill.

That’s where I came in. It was my job to take the winch cable, run up the hill, and loop the cable up the base of a tree. Pa would then use the combination of the winch and the two front tires to pull the Jimmy© up.

Tree by tree, cable length by cable length, we worked pretty flawlessly as a team to get the Jimmy™ to the top of the hill. Thankfully, for the most part it was downhill from there. Although Pa was driving on the rims, we got it home.

Don’t let the jack slip on your foot when you’re changing a tire. You might need a toe.

Was there danger? Certainly, there always is. We had snow, so we had water. Ma would have called the Sheriff not too long after dusk, and even though the mountains were a labyrinth of roads, people had seen us. We also had matches, hatchets, wool blankets, gasoline, and a mountain’s worth of firewood to keep us warm.

But we also had a mission. Each of us served our purpose, and we got home.

Pa was a bit raw about having to buy two new rims and three new tires for a day’s worth of not seeing any elk, though. For the record, I never saw a single elk when hunting with Pa. I’m telling you, that man knew how to hunt. Finding? Sometimes I think he just wanted a good drive in the woods and hike with his boys, teaching them about living. Teaching them about missions, and the part that they play, whether they know it or not.

In this life, we all have a mission, and we all play a part in it. I can assure you that your part is not done, because you’re above ground, breathing, and reading this.

I hate to repeat something so trite, but in this case, it’s true: you are not done. This is not over. And the whole world depends . . . on you.

It’s up to you. You will create the future.

So, go do it.

Bread and Circuses, 2021 Version

“We soon forgot the taste of bread, the sound of wind in the trees. We even forgot our name.” – Lord of the Rings

I promise I won’t make too many bread jokes; I’m not a gluten for punishment.

One of the reasons I keep mentioning the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is that they were an amazing civilization. Many of the things that we take for granted as being a part of our civilization were a part of Rome 2000 or so years ago. They invented the Slap Chop® and Sham-Wow™ even before it was cool.

I recall reading Letters from a Stoic – which were the collected letters of Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (whose wife said, when she was mad, “Lucius, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”) to one of his friends. I recommend it. Some of the details Seneca mentioned in his life were stunningly similar to life today:

Seneca wrote about government regulations.
Seneca wrote about stopping overnight at a hotel.
And, while at that same hotel, his room looked out over the weight room where men were pumping iron and working out.
I’d joke that he complained about the free continental breakfast, but, hey, everyone knows you’ve got to get there early to get the good waffles.

What a Roman hotel might have looked like.

The Romans, it seems, are not so different than we are. In some ways, their technology has outlasted time in ways that many of today’s structures won’t:

They had concrete that was objectively better than almost anything we could produce until the 1950s.
They built aqueducts that brought clean, fresh, water to hundreds of thousands. Some of these are still in use today (though some have been reconstructed).
Roman roads and bridges are still in use today.
Romans invented algebra, but, sadly, X was always equal to 10.

One of the earlier mistakes was in 140 B.C. when Rome was still a republic: it was called the cura annonae, which was just welfare in the form of grain, or, later, bread. Why bread? I assume the Romans had yet to master Hot Pocket® technology.

Regardless of what you call it, it was Roman welfare.

Why?

Why do politicians create welfare? For votes. Duh.

Just like Goldilocks, I wondered if a food could be hot, cold, and just right at the same time. Then I remembered Hot Pockets™ exist.

Don’t get me wrong – just like there is a proper time to have a roll of duct tape, rope, a sharp knife, and garbage bags in the trunk, there is a proper time and place to have welfare. Sometimes people are too old, too unwell, or too mentally deficient to work. But enough about Joe Biden.

Eventually, though, public welfare always proves to be corrosive to freedom. It creates a class that votes for sustenance instead of working. And since it’s a government program, the only way that it can be administered is if (eventually) everyone is caught in the snare.

So, that’s the bread.

What are the circuses?

Entertainment. Generally, entertainment of the lowest common denominator type. It’s an amusement for the masses. Why focus on learning? Why focus on things that are difficult? Don’t study physics, it’s hard. Study gender studies. They have cookies after class.

I hear a chopper is the best way to get the aristocracy out of France as well as the best way to get commies out of the United States.

That’s what the circus brought to Rome. The Roman citizens wanted action now. They wanted the gladiators spilling blood in the Coliseum. They wanted plays performed on the streets. And Senators (and Senator wannabees) and Emperors alike provided games and carnivals and distractions.

Generally, what distracts and amuses one generation isn’t enough for the next, so the idea is that the amusement has to get progressively edgier – more violent. More degenerate. It’s all fun, right?

After the fall of the Republic and the rise of Empire, a humor author named John Wilder no, Zeus Ferocior (I expect certain people, cough, cough to fix my poor translation of John Wilder into Latin, but Zeus Ferocier just sounds so cool, as long as no one calls me Dr. Zeus), no. The guy’s name was Decimus Junius Juvenalis, (but folks just call him Juvenal) and he made this wonderful observation:

. . . the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

Actually, it looks like a picture of a person drawn by someone who has never seen a person.

Think about that. After a period of hundreds of years where civic virtue was defined by participation and improving the public welfare, civic virtue became defined by being good at getting free stuff. Hard times, of course, caused the politicians to multiply the amount of bread and circuses given to the people.

Why?

The leaders were smart. The easiest way to keep the citizens quiet is to keep them well-fed with glazed eyes – something people who own sheep already know.

The object was simple: to keep the sheep citizens thinking, not of the Republic, but of themselves. Bread and circuses wasn’t an appeal to the strongest and best parts of man, bread and circuses was an appeal to the lowest and weakest parts of man. Rather than think of what a wonderful civilization we could create, how about we think about the greatest pleasure we could create for ourselves, right this minute?

Want to hear a sheep joke? Stop me if you’ve herd this one . . .

COVID has been our multiplier. It’s pushed the people to their most dependent, and pushed the bacon-wrapped-shrimp class to their most manipulative.

What is beyond the Federal government now?

Landlords in the several states can be forced to provide property for free. Forever, apparently. Depravation of property without due process? That’s rookie talk.
Entire economic sectors can be shut down at will. The final victory of large corporations over small owners can be enshrined forever.
Mandates can be issued that people can be forced to take experimental injections of a dubious nature that appear to have limited benefits and unknown side effects. Because? Because we said so.
Coordinated public/private attacks on speech have become the norm. Have an unpopular idea? Have facts that contradict the narrative? Shhh, comrade.

So, nothing is beyond them. Property isn’t protected. Livelihood isn’t protected. Bodily autonomy isn’t protected. I’d say that Netflix® is still there to account for “the pursuit of happiness” but have you seen the shows on Netflix™ recently?

Ugh.

Momma always said life is like Netflix®. It has a monthly price and hates you.

I guess that’s a wrap. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are out. Bread and circuses are in. Give me freedom or give me Doritos® and Hulu Plus©.

The end result is a difficult one. Collapses in liberty lead to collapses in economic systems. And vice versa. When the economic freedom drops out, the Doritos™ and Hulu Plus© become gruel and occasional candles at the GULAG. If you’re lucky.

When a culture is young and vibrant, economic liberty leads to prosperity. That freedom to create results in economic winners and losers. Winners are rewarded, losers drop out, or join the winning team. That’s in a free market.

Unlike real communism, real free markets have been tried. And they’ve resulted in the greatest prosperity and freedom that the world has ever seen.

We have reached the intersection of economic system collapse, collapse in the faith of the governance structure of the nation, and collapse in our trust for each other.

I stopped burning bridges in life. They’re made of steel now.

How long can that go on?

Well, Juvenal was writing not from the period of the Republic, but from the period of the Emperors. As I’ve written before – the choice that will exist is far larger than the ‘Rona ever was: the choice between dissolution of our country and a new Emperor, whatever he may be called. Czar Wilder sounds nice, but hey, I could stand being a silly old king.

And I can assure you, that Juvenal’s observation of (panem et circensenes) bread and circuses, will be on the mind of whatever new Emperor might emerge.

It worked for the Romans for a few hundred years, after all.

I wonder who will be writing about us in 2000 years?

I hope he’s a steely-eyed blonde dude by the name of Zeus. Or, John.

The Best Post You’ll Read About COVID This Week: COVIDIOCRACY (with bikini ending)

“Quite frankly, we have had some very reliable intelligence reports that quite a serious epidemic has broken out at Clavius, something apparently of an unknown origin. Is this in fact what has happened?” – 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’m not against all Gene therapy.

Note 1: none of the memes for this post are original (most all of my regular post memes are), these are “as found” on the Internet. I don’t think that there are any major inaccuracies, but, as always, engage in critical thinking.

Note 2: this isn’t medical or life advice. You have to assess your own situation and make your own choices.

I was wandering through the Internet this week when this little gem of information caught my eye:

When I caught a bacterial infection, the doctor told me I was a man of culture.

The “jab” (which is not a vaccine, more on that in a bit) had proven not to decrease the rate of infection. Nope. The #clotshot looks like it turns those that have taken it into super-spreaders. They have the ability, if infected, to spread even more of the disease to other people.

Think about that for just a second: the “vaccinated” are very likely making the “normal DNA” population less safe. It’s a paradox. But at least they don’t get it themselves, right? Well, in the immortal words of Aesop: natzsofast . . . .

So, this gives a whole new meaning to Royal Navy “carrier”. Something tells me they should have seen this one coming.

It has become abundantly clear that the “jab” is (at best) only moderately effective. I have had the ‘Rona. The Mrs. tested positive for the antibodies, and when she was sick she was helpfully coughing directly on me all night. It’s not as bad as licking a doorknob at a bathroom hobos use, but it’s close.

The symptoms for me were mild. A bit of a coof, and a fever of around 99°F for about four hours. For The Mrs.? Worse, but not the sickest I’ve ever seen her.

For me, a fever of 99°F is something that happens about once a decade, at most. I last took a sick day in 2001 or so, so I’ve generally been fairly healthy. The flu in 2012 was much, much worse for me, but that’s only because I let it get in my lungs. I guess it was swine flu, so I should have had some oinkment.

Blofeld: “Mr. Bond, I’ve poisoned your glass with the measles vaccine. Now you have autism.” Bond: “That’s fine, Blofeld, I’ve disassembled your doomsday device and organized the parts by size.”

CORONA is real. But when you look at the statistics, it is a disease that simply doesn’t hurt young people. By young, I mean less than 40. So, when I see Internet harpies screeching that they don’t want their kids to DIE!!! because of selfish “unvaxxed”, what I see are people who probably dress their precious snowflake up in bubble wrap before they are allowed to go play in a playground that has been designed by dozens of engineers over thousands of hours to be safe in any conceivable circumstances.

And then they insist to replace the ground under the safe playground equipment with crushed rubber pellets that would safely allow Jeff Bezos to land on them if he jumped from orbit.

Oops, sorry. Jeff Bezos hasn’t been to orbit.

But the statistics are clear: your kid is safe, at least from COVID-19.

Never get involved with a cult of mimes. They’re capable of unspeakable acts of violence.

Here at the end of July, 2021, though, the drumbeat of COVIDIOCRACY has reached a new high. I was over at Phil’s place (LINK) and made a comment. The comment was about the coming mandate to force everyone to get “the jab” or lose their government job. This was the wife of a .GOV employee or contractor. She asked me what she should do. My response was simple – without knowing lots of intimate details of her life, there was no way I could answer.

When you don’t need a prion disease to have your brain turn into sponge.

Nearly immediately, my response was jumped on by a shill – obviously a paid propagandist. It was interesting that the only hours they were posting were when it was 8:30AM in India to when it was about 6PM in India. I’m not saying it was India. It could have been someone really late to the office in China or really early to the office in the eastern Mediterranean.

Phil had attracted paid foreign agents to his site to pop up propaganda. Propaganda for the “jab”. If it were good for you, wouldn’t that be self-evident by now?

Let’s look at the huge push on the “vax”:

Coordinated media attacks to encourage it.
Pedo Joe announcing that he’s going to make Fed.GOV take the shot.
Coordinated attacks by shills on influential blogs and /message boards/.

Sure, you could say that it’s all about Pfizer’s® Pfrofits™, but it’s only a few measly billion that they made this quarter. That’s not to say that Pfizer© isn’t Pcorruptly® attempting to manipulate the media:

The vaccine, though, might be dangerous. I was talking with a friend and described it as “an untested genetic manipulation.” He said that was too strong, and it sounded kinda crazy to say it that way. Honestly, that was a fair criticism, and I especially appreciate those: it’s a good friend that tells you when they think you’re nuts. But:

My gut instinct might have been right. DNA changes? That can’t have any bad impacts, can it?

I guess it can. And this is where the #clotshot becomes a crime. Any healthy person under 40 is much more likely to die of the mRNA treatment than COVID. There has been quite a run on heart attacks of healthy young men who were injected.

But even after this, the push for the injection is intensifying:

But why would you trust a government and a media that has consistently lied to you about the ‘Rona?

And they’ve completely expressed how they feel about anyone who has a different opinion:

Certainly, they’ll return your freedom to you after COVID is banished, right?

Be Goofus, not Gallant.

The Mrs. and I have discussed it. We are not getting the #clotshot. If this is an experiment, we’ll happily remain in the control group. I’ve had the ‘Rona, so I identify as immune.

But, in the end, you have a choice. You can submit to have a literally Biblical restriction on your life,

Or, you can take another track. If enough people choose freedom, we’ll never have to worry for a minute. You must remember – they’re more afraid of you than you should be of them.

See, it ends with a bikini!

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cache

“You would then illegally scrounge whatever material you could from a backup supply cache that I’ve overlooked. The same cache where your team are waiting for further orders.” – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I have the eye of a tiger, and the heart of a lion, and a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Cache.

It’s from a French word, cache, and it’s pronounced exactly like the word “cash” but you simply have to add the sound of a six-day-old banana being chopped in half with a rusty meat cleaver on the end. I have no idea why people say learning French is difficult.

Cache was originally a French trapper word for a place where they hid stuff like gunpowder and spare Velcro® and the PEZ® extract that they painstakingly hand-squeezed from beaver glands.

Who exactly were the French trappers hiding stuff from? Probably beavers wanting their glands back, or the rare deepwater Apache wanting gunpowder to snort.

Why am I bringing up old French slang terms? I was inspired to write this little post down because both Aesop (LINK) and Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) wrote about it today. So I decided to jump on the bandwagon.

Why don’t dairy cows wear flip flops? They lactose.

Each of them had a slightly different take than I will, so, please do give them a visit. Here’s my $0.02 worth:

What am I going to want to hide and why? First, how about what not to hide?

Food.

This is one of my pet peeves. Many, many people in America have been hungry, as in “I skipped breakfast” but few people living in 2021 America have really been hungry. I remember reading that T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia” not D.H. Lawrence who was “Lawrence of Chlamydia”) was always showing how tough he was. Why, one day, he went a whole day without having any food.

Most people in the United States could go weeks without any chow. It always amuses me when I read an article about some programmer from San Jose who followed the Apple® Maps™ direction and ended up snowbound for three days is found. Almost always, the news story ends up with some insanely stupid comment, “And Brandon survived for six days on nothing but Taco Bell® Fire Sauce™ packets.”

If you mix Taco Bell® Fire Sauce™ into ramen, it tastes just like poverty.

No. Brandon was fine going to be fine. The 86 calories he got from the hot sauce packets didn’t cover that thin margin between life and death, and he didn’t really need to eat the two people with him.

When it comes to bug-out bags (or get home bags) the last thing I’d want is to add food. And that goes for your cache, too. Food is bulky, and, over time, will spoil. Food is a difficult thing to conceal for long periods. I mean, have you ever left a ham sandwich with mayo on the counter for a week or two? Ugh.

Freeze dried food or MREs will last quite a long time if kept dry, but how many MREs would you have to bury to survive for a reasonable period?

A lot. I could do the math. And I certainly do suggest that you have a ludicrous amount of food on hand – as much as you can afford and store. But to go out and bury it? Unless you have enough land and enough money to build and bury a bunker, creating a food cache would be just as silly as creating a water cache.

Is drinking water from a straw the opposite of snorkeling?

But what should I cache? That’s where it gets interesting. What does it take to keep me alive? What do I want to hide?

As many before me have said, if you think it’s time to bury your rifles, perhaps it’s time to start loading them instead. But rifles are a great thing to have when times get tough. Rifles are a great thing to have when times are great. I just love rifles.

A rifle without a cartridge means I have to do cardio to bash the commies with my rifle butt. That sounds like work. So, why not store some ammo, too? And, by ammo, I mean a LOT of ammo. Since the prices are coming down now, it’s pretty close to the time to smash the “buy” button. So, that’s something that I might want to have.

Tools. What kind? Knives. Hatchets. Fire starting stuff. Rope. A good pair of boots. Bitcoins.

Medical supplies. Some of them have a pretty short shelf life. Bandages, not so much – they can last as long as they’re dry and sealed. And, if it came down to it, some triple-antibiotic salve is worth having. Personally, I’d try that even if it was expired even if it didn’t work any better than rubbing cottage cheese into a cut at that point.

Well, I can’t store a year’s worth of water, but I can store high-quality, high-volume water filters that will do 100,000 or so gallons. That should give me time to figure out how to clean up the local creek water.

The Mrs. got me a bracelet with my initials on it before I went into the hospital, but they had a silly typo – instead of JW it said DNR.

Where should I hide my cache?

Any public lands are just that – public. If someone finds my cache, well, hey, “free stuff” will be what they think. In the western half of the United States where there is an immense volume of public land, it’s certainly easy enough to find places where no one has ever been. I know that in several of my trips, I’ve been places that no other person, ever, has walked. That’s a good place to hide stuff.

Depending on where you are, there might not be any public lands to speak of, especially if you’re east of the Mississippi. That means hiding it on lands that you or someone else owns. I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally think highly of people who dig holes on my land and bury stuff on it. Heck, the other week I dug down and found a wallet that someone had cached here at Wilder Mansion. Anyone know of a “Jimmy Hoffa”? I seem to have his wallet.

If I or my family own it, by definition I’m in much better shape. It’s even better if I have 50 or more acres, because playing tic-tac-toe across 50 acres gets a little tiresome.

Like anything, I’d suggest that you never trust on a single solution. “Two is one, and one is none” is old-school prepper talk. Redundancy is the key. Why have one AR-15 when you could have two? Two means that if one breaks, you have the other one. And if they both break? You just might be able to use the parts from one for the other – that’s the reason The Mrs. and I had two boys, after all.

Buy a communist a plane ticket and he can fly once. Push him out of a helicopter and he can fly the rest of his life.

The same goes with caches. They have one cache, when you can have three? Why have three, when you can have four? Having two water filters is better than having one. And having two of the same water filter is better still.

The last thing is that if I have a cache, i need to be able to find it and access it when I need it. If i hid it so well that even i can’t find it, it’s lost. Perhaps some future archaeologist might find it interesting, but that doesn’t help me. As I’ve recently seen, I can’t even remember all of the 300 or so passwords I have, so trying to remember where I buried my cache in a decade might be difficult if I can’t remember “password123”.

But whatever you do, don’t cache French fish. They’re literally poisson.

Welcome To The Unravelling

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

I imagine the guy who decided to use Velcro™ on shoes said, “Why knot?”

Well, that struck a nerve.

I’m never sure when I hit “post” how what I’ve written will be taken. Some of the things I’ve written that I’ve felt were really good don’t have much of an impact. I’m not complaining – when I’ve finished writing a post it feels like my soul is a bit lighter – like I’ve accomplished something more than turn oxygen into carbon dioxide for the day.

One clue that a post will be popular is when the post appears to write itself. That was the case with my last post. When I finished, I was in bed two hours earlier than normal. I normally go to sleep when the cows wander back into the field, because that’s pasture bedtime.

The reason, I think, that post was so popular is because I just had the good fortune to write what many other people were thinking.

This is because we’re unravelling. We just don’t have words for it. It’s not just as a nation, it appears to be all of Western Civilization.

What the media would have people believe is that there is a great, monolithic consensus. Prior to the Internet, that might have been achievable. There was only One Acceptable Opinion, and it was presented to you live, in living color on three networks. The local paper (generally) also had some version or other of the One Acceptable Opinion.

Elvis Presley’s last big hit? The bathroom floor.

That meant that stories could disappear from the public view fairly easily. Ruby Ridge? I heard of that story on a local talk radio station. The person who was telling the story, honestly, sounded crazy. Here they were talking about this crazy story of a man being framed and then Federal agents killing his family.

The guy really did sound crazy. Here he was, telling a story that I hadn’t heard of.

Crazy. It sounded like a conspiracy theory.

The government used to be considered a trustworthy source by, well, everyone. Looking back, I’m pretty certain the government never did tell us the Truth. But the important thing was everyone believed the One Acceptable Opinion.

After her boyfriend went missing in the forest, what conspiracy did Barbie® believe in? Kentrails.

Oh, sure, there were failures now and then. When Tail Gunner Joe pointed out, rightly, that the State Department and Hollywood® were filled with commies, people were upset.

Leftism was generally viewed as bad. It was so obvious that Stalin was a bad guy that even the New York Times® couldn’t hide it, as they had swept the human cost of the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver Medals) under the rug two decades earlier.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

The way the Left did that is they went to their normal playbook. How do you trump logic and facts? A plain appeal to emotion:

“Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” was how they went after Senator Joe McCarthy. They tried to make his dogged pursuit of Leftism appear to be an unhinged attack against ghosts.

But McCarthy was . . . right. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was shown that Joe was right about the scope and scale of Soviet infiltration. Where? Everywhere Joe had said. McCarthyism was just what you and I would call, “Telling the truth.”

Again, McCarthy was right. Leftism had infiltrated the Federal government. Stalin had better progress reports on the atomic bomb than those that were given to Truman. There’s a reason we celebrate Juneteenth around my house.

Why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cross the road? Because they were never on your side. (meme: not original)

Leftism has burrowed inside of our country. For decades. When Reagan was shot we couldn’t watch it on TV. There were no televisions in our classrooms. But some teachers had radios and instead of listening to a lecture on social studies, we sat and listened to the news on a tinny AM radio.

Would President Reagan live? No one knew. All we knew was that he was in the hospital.

One kid, whose parents were Leftist professors at the local college, said, simply, “I hope he dies. Maybe then the Senate will choose Ted Kennedy as Vice President.”

The split we see now isn’t new. It’s been festering in our country for decades.

I could come up with example after example. But if I were to try to create a scenario where people would be on each other like Karens on a manager, I couldn’t create a better scenario than what I see today:

Multiple cultures forced together in small spaces.
Actual propaganda presented as nightly news.
Dogs and cats, living together.
An Internet where people can check facts for themselves.
A demonization of the Culture that created the place.

My fat parrot just died after a long illness. It’s a huge weight off my shoulder.

I actively don’t believe anything I hear anymore. For months, Google®, Facebook™ and Twitter© would ban anyone who said that the ‘Rona came from a lab in China.

Ban.

Now, that’s the current One Acceptable Opinion. The previous version has been tossed by a Winston Smith-type person into the memory hole. But we remember.

And now we know that the entire “conspiracy theory” smear tactic was created, explicitly, so people wouldn’t ask questions. Wonder what really happened to JFK? Dunno. There are still nearly 500,000 pages yet to be released.

Not words. Pages.

I guess everyone knows how Kennedy died. That one is a no-brainer.

But does that really matter? Kennedy is dead. What really matters is that the Feds created the entire idea of mocking people who believed in anything other than the One Acceptable Opinion. Think the COVID-19 mRNA treatment is as sketchy as sharing a needle with Johnny Depp?

You’re a conspiracy theorist. You must not believe in sCiEncE! There is One Acceptable Theory. Anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil.

But now in 2021, we have the Internet. In 1982, or in 1952 this might have worked. The sheep would go back to grazing.

Now?

It’s just more energy to help the country unravel as the One Acceptable Theory is just like the famed Emperor Who Had No Clothes.

Is there anything left to unravel?

The 1819 Project: Restoring America

“Restoration may be possible, in two days. By the book, Admiral.” – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

We can finally predict the platform that George Bush’s kids will run on.

The United States is in a bad place. Monetarily. Philosophically. Morally. It even has bad manners.

Ultimately, the systems that led us to this situation won’t lead us out. Voting won’t save us. The Supreme Court won’t save us. Conservatism?

Conservatism© certainly won’t save us. It certainly didn’t save itself, and it becomes increasingly quaint as Conservatism 2021® quietly ignores nearly every position of Conservatism 1965™, if not right out taking the exact opposite position from even a decade ago.

Conservatism® has led us to where we are today. It’s just last year’s Leftist platform, but dressed up in a suit with a useful idiot explaining the Conservative Case for Sex Change Surgery for Toddlers. Oh, and this should be done even if the parents disagree. For the good of the child, you know, which they will all nod and agree, is a Conservative™ value.

Imagine if we called the Left intolerant! That would show them!

The reason for this is the Conservatism™ is inherently a negative philosophy. It doesn’t stand for anything, merely against (mainly) Leftist ideas. Once those Leftist ideas gain a mainstream following? They become a part of Conservatism®, and Conservative™ shills pretend those ideas were always part of their philosophy.

Conservatives® were always in favor of sending troops to Uganda to secure the rights of Ugandans to have gay marriage.

But Conservatism™ in 2021 is now as dead as whatever it is that lives on top of Sean Hannity’s head. There is zero actual Conservative™ philosophy, merely a money and influence game where politicians sell their influence to the largest corporation for thirty pieces of bacon-wrapped shrimp monthly.

So conservative!

All is not lost. Look at, for instance, gun rights. Gun rights were presented not as, “what the Left wants, but more slowly” but instead as, “from our cold, dead hands.” It was that level of determination that led to the “assault weapon” ban lapsing. What started with a concealed carry movement has now led to Constitutional carry (i.e., concealed carry without a permit) in state after state.

In the year 2000, one state had Constitutional carry. In 2021 (by my count) the number is over 21. And gun rights is where the Right has had a similar victory recently. In Missouri, the governor signed into law a bill that bars the police from enforcing Federal gun laws.

All of them.

Of course, the Leftist Justice Department was quick to sperg out and say, “Missouri, you can’t do that” but Missouri just kept hitting “ignore” and sending them straight to voicemail when they called again and again. In truth, the Feds will never be able to enforce Federal law in Missouri unless they unleash the might of the American military against the people of Missouri.

The chances of that happening aren’t particularly high, plus Missouri seems entirely justified.

Amazing what a little light will show you.

Missouri is just following the pattern we’ve been seeing from States for years. Want to sell marijuana in violation of Federal law at the State level? Sure. Multimillion-dollar industries can be set up in a year. Want to exclude police from helping enforce immigration laws? Sure.

This is just the next, logical step.

And it gave me a crazy idea.

The 1819 Project.

In 1819, the Federal government didn’t have these regulations and laws. In 1819, the average citizen’s interaction with the Federal government would have been voting for a Representative and voting for President. We weren’t THE United States, we were the united States.

Until the Civil War, that was fairly clear – States were sovereign entities – they didn’t gain their existence from the Federal government, the Federal government got its existence from them.

The Federal government didn’t tax individuals. The Federal government didn’t place arbitrary restrictions on what you could do with your business, your hiring, and your land. These simply were not Federal issues.

Could the States regulate these things? Certainly, that’s what the Constitution said. Did they? I imagine they did, some of them. Were the states free to pick and choose who voted and how and why? Yes., they were, and without resorting to appeal to the nine black-robed justices in Washington, D.C.

It’s funny that I can write the speeches the governor of Oregon will give in the future.

Could Oregon turn itself into a communist paradise? Sure. But it couldn’t turn its people into serfs, and it couldn’t put up walls to keep them in. It might be able to keep people it didn’t want out, as would any State.

Sure. That’s freedom. But the Commie Rot would be stuck in Oregon. And people could leave it. Senators wouldn’t be elected, but appointed by State legislatures. This improves the ability of the States to fight against silly things from larger States, and makes the ratification of a treaty a real event, not a popularity contest.

Corporations? Well, like people, they’d have a finite purpose and a finite lifetime. If corporations have the same rights as a person, they have to die, too. 70 years might be too long.

How about 40? Regardless, in 1819, corporations had a charter, and existed for a specific purpose and had a specific lifetime. That changed with a Supreme Court decision (not looking it up, it’s late) in the 1880s that gave corporations an infinite lifespan.

Sounds good to me. Every corporation should have an end date.

But the point is that we don’t fight to conserve anything. The time has now come for a Restoration. What do we restore? A culture filled with freedom; a culture where the Federal government was a tiny, distant force that had the responsibility of national defense and regulation of interstate commerce.

No, not the creeping interstate commerce regulations we have today (where having a phone number constitutes evidence of participating in “interstate commerce”) but a very limited scope so Texas can’t put tariffs on goods from Oklahoma. This leaves room for the FAA, but very little room for the FBI since 99% of Federal crimes disappear overnight because they no longer exist. And the ATF? Only to enforce taxes and not kill women and children with fire.

Hey, it’s not easy to brutally enforce arbitrary regulations on law-abiding citizens.

Politics is downstream of Culture. What’s needed is a Restoration of Culture.

If it sounds like I’m making up a movement, I assure you I’m not. The 1819 Project is well underway and has been for years. Parents are, especially in the Leftist parts of the world, pulling their kids from government schools and putting them in religious schools or homeschooling. Why?

The 1819 Project has already started, at best, I’m giving it a name. It’s well underway in places like Modern Mayberry, where a kid can grow up (more or less) free. The Feds seem to have forgotten that rural places exist, and hardcore Leftists don’t seem to want to live here unless they can get ganja and free stuff.

That can be tough to take in. Next week we’ll start in on how he’s born to treat women badly.

Places like Missouri are going to become the norm. I anticipate that, with the coming Troubles I see, the Federal government will become weaker and weaker. The hallmark of a failing government is more tyranny, but the people of the united States have seen their share of what happens when they give up their guns. Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have provided a clear example that gun confiscation precedes life confiscation.

Will we get back to 1819 in values? I have no idea.

But I do know we need to be headed towards something, and not just reacting. 1819 is a good start.

The plan.

The Beauty Of The Red Pill

“Hey Samantha, don’t take the Red Pill!” – Grandma’s Boy

If my son wanted to be a fiction writer, I’d send him to college to study journalism.

Have you ever not asked a question because you already knew the answer, but were afraid to hear it? I’m willing to bet we all have. I try to leave occasional breadcrumbs here, especially during my Monday and Wednesday posts, but I’ve stopped short of leaving my posts in the forest near a witch’s house. Besides, I hear Hillary has security guards.

The Truth is shocking. Many times, the Truth isn’t pleasant. I remember coming to one unpleasant Truth realization in college: the college didn’t care if I did well or even if I graduated.

It hadn’t been like that in high school. But in college? I was just a number. It sounds silly to me now, but back then it was quite a realization for me. Gradually, more Truths started showing up in my life. In many cases, I denied them as long as I could, but they eventually became inevitable.

They call this the Red Pill, after the scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves gets a job painting pills red.

Never let Morpheus do the cooking at a Matrix cast barbeque. There’s a reason they call him Lawrence Fishburne.

Part of the problem with discovering Truth is that it can make you feel alone. Much of our society is based on covering uncomfortable Truth with pretty little lies. It has always been so, but in 2021 it’s at the very worst that it has been in the history of the United States. People were censored a year ago for telling what are now the (generally) accepted theories about CoronaChan.

The Truth is that we still don’t know where it came from, but vary from any generally accepted truth about COVID on YouTube® and you’ll be censored. Thankfully, YouTube™ is so committed to “truth” that they gave themselves an award for being so courageous about it. Really – there isn’t even a punchline.

Here’s another Red Pill: no one (and I mean no one) is coming to save you. No one (and I mean no one) is responsible for your actions but you. If you can’t save yourself, you’ll just have to depend on luck, which is a crappy strategy. There is no secret cabal of government good guys like Qanon® used to put in his cryptic message board posts. Q is not coming to save you.

I guess QANON was just another 4Chan teller.

Part of the problem with taking a Red Pill is that, once you’re finally awake and aware of how the world works, just like Ebola, you want to share it with people. That’s a bad idea.

The unfortunately named Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus made the silly quote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” and with the new Red Pill knowledge, you want to share it far and wide.

Sadly, Desiderius, the one-eyed man is not king.

As H.G. Wells wrote, the blind people can’t see what the one-eyed dude describes. They think him mad, and if they have a chance they’ll tie him down and remove that silly eye that keeps giving him all of those wild notions and that awful practical joke of leaving the plunger in the toilet. People will fight nearly to the death to keep a pretty lie alive, especially when the Truth is ugly.

I wrote a check to a charity for the blind, but I’m worried they’ll never see a penny of it.

But there is opportunity for an individual once the first real Red Pill hits. Seeking Truth becomes a habit. And you find that Truth exists in many, many more places than you might imagine. When I go to find Truth, I know one place I can find it very quickly.

Truth is in the Iron.

I started lifting again this week for the first time since COVID raised its head. I was stunned at how one of my standard lifts was half – HALF – what it had been 18 months ago.

That is Truth. The Iron is Truth.

Was it at all pleasant to find my strength had dropped that far, that fast?

Of course not.

But it is True.

I gave up on lifting cases of Pepsi® for exercise, it was just soda pressing.

I cannot hide from the Iron. I cannot cheat the Iron. The only things there in the weight room are the Iron, Gravity, and Me. The only thing that changes in that equation is me. I can’t blame the Iron. I can’t blame Gravity.

The Red Pill?

No one will make me physically stronger but me. And the only way I can do that is to wrestle against Gravity with the Iron. And, unless I am quite ill, it will always work.

And here is the hope. Here is where the Red Pill really begins to pay dividends.

I’m the one responsible for:

my physical state,
what I eat,
how I react,
what I say,
what I watch,
how I treat others,
my own Virtue,
who I am, and
where my life ends up.

I’m not responsible for who loves me. I’m not responsible for how much they love me. Those are the output. If I control every bit of input in my life, what happens, happens.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing more wonderful than that realization. It goes beyond winning and losing. It goes beyond the opinions of others.

The downside, of course, is seeing all of the pretty little lies and all of the attempted manipulation. Even worse: the attempts to numb minds, to distract, and to pretend that the new lie doesn’t contradict the last lie. The stunning thing to me is how many people will flitter from one contradictory opinion to another like butterflies in the Sun, with never a thought.

When I take responsibility for myself, I am a changed person.

I was born a male, I identify as a male, but according to Stouffer’s Frozen Lasagna®, I identify as a family of four.

That doesn’t mean the battle ever ends. The first struggle is, always, against myself. Why am I weaker?

I had weights at home, but didn’t lift.

Why?

Well, I could make any number of excuses, but none of them matter. I didn’t lift. That was it. So, my choice is simple: will I work to get better every week, or will I be complacent with where I am?

I asked the Iron a question. It told me the Truth.

Now, my choice is how will I answer?

I have only one answer. Sweat.

It’s never lonely when you’ve got Truth for a companion.

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic? Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929. According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends. I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose: it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too. When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin. The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well. Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up: whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization. Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife? Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape. A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them. If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke. If you want to destroy a civilization? Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011. That initial post I read back then is here (LINK). Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement. Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse. Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh. People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change. During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light. My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system. People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have. This rarely makes things better. Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems. And so on. It’s a chain reaction. To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock? Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
The First World War. The Russian Revolution. The Second World War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France.

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant. The French Revolution started in 1789. If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end. That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then. She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then. When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen. True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry? Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short. Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy. What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.