Category: Energy

Recharge Yourself.

“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.

It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.

Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.

Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.

Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.

Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.

But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.

I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”

It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).

Teaching someone something new to them.

When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?

That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.

I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.

Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.

There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.

A crisp autumn day.

Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.

Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.

One out of our four cats.

We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.

But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.

The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.

That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?

My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.

As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.

What charges you up?

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.

When It Comes To Economics, Karl Missed The Marx

“It was a Russian ship. They taught me all about you imperialist swine. I was exposed to the works of great thinkers - Karl Marx, Lenin, L. Ron Hubbard, Freddie Laker.” – Top Secret

Pa Wilder wouldn’t let me date girls who ran in track.  He didn’t want me hanging around with fast women.

One of the advantages of writing these posts are the times when my family will ask me what I’m writing about.  They’re not reading it, of course, but it’s always a good conversation starter and it gets me off of the topics of “Why isn’t the trash out?” and “Who is going clean the lint from between Dad’s toes?”  Tonight Pugsley was the one who took one for the team was interested.

“What are you typing about tonight, Dad?”  He knows that as a writer I’m a fair typist.

“Well, it’s about economics and bad ideas.  Probably one of the worst ideas ever.”

“What was it, Cheetos-flavored Chapstick®?  Crystal Pepsi™?”

I gave The Mrs. Gorilla Glue® Lip Balm.  That left her speechless.

“Well, one economist in particular had some pretty bad ideas.  He had the idea that the things we made were only worth the labor that went into making them – nothing more, and nothing less.”

“So what about the $200 sneakers that toddlers make in Pakistan and only cost $2 to produce?”

“Well, that’s another idea that we’ll get to, but we can use that example.  In this economist’s mind, the toddlers who made the sneaker should have made most of that $200.  He would have argued that the $198 profit in the sneakers was exploiting the worker.”

Of course we were talking about Karl Marx.  Although he wasn’t the first one to embrace the “Labor Theory of Value”, this horrible idea was used to make more people miserable than the Kardashians ever have.

The biggest flaw inherent in the Labor Theory of Value in Marxism was the destruction of the price system.  In this case, if we had the same labor component in our sneakers and in, say, a polished piece of poo (don’t laugh, they did it on Mythbusters®) then they should cost the same.

Whoever stole my furniture polish, I will find you.  That’s my Pledge®.

Yes, shiny polished poo and fashion sneakers should cost the same to a Marxist – heck, if it took more time to make it really shiny, that would be worth more than the sneakers.  This sounds like nonsense, but the commies sold it to the revolting masses in Russia.  Why should other people make money?  The idea that they’re making a profit means you’re being cheated!

While this might have been a good strategy for children playing “store” in kindergarten or Hollywood™ stars protesting for (insert weekly cause here) it didn’t work out so well in practice.  The Labor Theory of Value caused all sorts of problems in the Soviet Union.  One of the first stories I ever heard about this is one I’ve related before – the Great Soviet Nail Failure.

The story goes like this:

A Soviet factory is told by Moscow to increase nail tonnage.  The solution?  Very large nails – one pound railroad spikes.

Obviously, the commissar in Moscow got in trouble.  The next commissar (after the first one got, umm, fired) gave a new order to the factory:  “Make lots of nails.”  So, they made thousands of tiny finish nails.  They were sad that the whole “invading Finland thing didn’t work out, or else they could have made Finnish nails.

Looks like they’re gonna need a new commissar.

I got a job at the chess factory.  I took a knight off.

While the nail story can’t be corroborated, what can be proven is that one Soviet factory produced exclusively shoes for young children with the leather they were sent.  Why?  They got a production bonus for making more pairs of shoes, regardless of if there was a need for them.

What they were missing, of course, was price.  No one sent a signal back that they made too many tiny shoes.

The entire reason for this nonsense is that profit simply didn’t exist.  You can’t have fully automated luxury communism if there aren’t prices for the things we use based on supply and demand.  Price tells factories what to make without requiring armies of bureaucrats to decide.  Failure means you lose your factory and someone smarter (or, luckier) gets it.

This is, of course, the reason that 21 year old girls are getting college degrees in Medieval Rap Lyrics.  Their labor is as good as anyone else, right?  So why don’t they get a job paying $235,000 a year with a company car and an apartment in New York and a clutch of sassy rich trampy friends?

Economics.  The highest value of labor of a 21 year old girl getting a college degree in Medieval Rap Lyrics is worth exactly as much as she can get in tips at Hooters®.  But they honestly believe that they deserve that cool job because . . . they work as hard as anyone else.

Marx would be proud.

I tried to pay for my dinner at Hooters® with an energy drink.  I guess Red Bull™ doesn’t always give you wings.

While we were talking about economics, Pugsley started getting the idea.

It turns out that Pugsley loves computers, and is really irritated.  The nice graphics cards he likes are in short supply.  First, the ‘Rona ruined the supply chain, so there are shortages up and down the line in the computer manufacturing world.

Second, high-end graphics processing cards (so they can watch the Pac-Man® in High Definition™) for computers are in really short supply.  It turns those graphics cards are they’re great for mining for cryptocurrency.  One video card with a manufacturer’s list price of $700 was going for $1,500.  The high-end graphics card is going for $3,000.  Pugsley figured that the higher-end card could pay for itself in crypto (at current prices and mining rates) in about nine months to a year.

So, yeah, it makes sense that these things cost $3,000.  Heck, at $3,000 they’re still a bargain, assuming crypto doesn’t disappear down a black hole to zero.  Which it could, because crypto is the ultimate expression of the opposite of Labor Value – every bit of crypto value is based on subjective value – it only has value because we agree it does.

So why doesn’t the manufacturer raise the price so that they can keep more of the value of their video cards?

I went to a topless Amish bar the other night.  No bonnets.

Well, in this case, their core audience is gamers, who can be very, very loyal.  Crypto mining might go away in a year or two.  But if the video card users/fans feel they’ve been robbed?  Gamers will go to the number two manufacturer.  But they still won’t have girlfriends.

The manufacturer is playing the long game.

The high prices irritate Pugsley.  Pugsley would dearly love to have a nicer graphics card, but can’t afford them at these inflated prices.  His (minor) revenge is that his graphics card is whirring away right now mining itsy-bitsy amounts of crypto.  In a small way, he’s benefiting from the whole process.

In a free market you get people who take advantage of price-mismatches like that.  Scalpers fill this role, too.  As long as they don’t cheat the system (which they often do) it’s an honest living.  Me?  I had season tickets to an NFL© team for a time.  They were doing well, and I generally doubled my money (on the games I didn’t go to) every year.  Heck, I even reported the income to the IRS.

The beauty of a transaction in a free economy is that both people win.  If I want a burger and it costs $2, well, it’s because Dairy Queen® wants the $2 more than it wants the burger.  Me?  I want the burger more than I want the $2.

Which is also what they pay for their corn.

In a free exchange, both parties win.  And if I think $2 is too much for the chewy hockey-puck burgers our Dairy Queen™ makes in Modern Mayberry?  Well, they get a signal that people aren’t buying their burgers.

Or Cheetos®-flavored Chapstick™.

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, back to Texas.

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

If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.

And that’s just one problem.

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

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

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

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

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

Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.

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

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

The system fails.

An aside:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The system fails.  Power goes out.

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

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

But it does show us the limit of our systems.

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

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

America: Walking The Razor’s Edge

“The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge.” – The Razor’s Edge (1984)

What did the hobbits say as they rode the Ents into battle?  “Run, forest, run!”

It was on July 4.  I had convinced two of my friends to follow me on a bizarre quest – we were going to climb one of the tallest mountains in North America.  By one of them, it’s in the top 50.  So, in my book that counts.

The trip started using gasoline – we had a borrowed Jeep® that we took as far up the hill as we could, since it was a borrowed Jeep™.  My friend who had borrowed the Jeep© didn’t want to wreck it, since it was before YouTube® and we wouldn’t even get likes from a cool video if we wrecked it on the amazingly rough road.

We decided to make this hike a three-day event.  On the first day, we’d do nearly a mile gain in elevation while we camped out 1000’ below the summit of the mountain.  Then, we’d summit the mountain and spend the next night at our basecamp.  Then we’d hike out the next morning.

Of course, it rained.

At the elevation of our basecamp, trees can’t grow, so we boiled filtered water in the rain.  It worked, sort of.  At that elevation, water boils at less than 190°F.  It was enough to reheat a fifteen-year-old dehydrated Mountain House® Chili Mac, even though the beans couldn’t get hot enough to not be crunchy.

After climbing up a mountain, crunchy beans and all, it was the best dinner I’d had in years.  I think I ate two.

The chili mac wasn’t red hot, but there was no way I was going to give it away, give it away, give it away now.

The next day morning we were sore – but we could leave our packs at the camp so we’d just be carrying ourselves and our water.  It was nearly half of a mile to get to the summit – a half of a mile straight up.

The trip up was a true scramble – a broken field of boulders that we sometimes had to ascend on all fours.  It was steep – very steep.  As we intersected the ridge that led to the summit of the mountain, I looked forward to seeing what was on the other side of the ridge.  I was certain that it must be flatter than the steep boulder field we’d just climbed – there was no way it could be as steep.

I got to the edge of the ridge, and looked down.

Until that moment in time, I had never been afraid of heights.  But I was not expecting to see what I saw.

It was a cliff.  A sheer drop off – I was looking at a certified Wile E. Coyote precipice.

When I was stuck on that cliff, they told me not to “look down.”  So, I smiled.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked straight down and seen a cliff that went nearly three-quarters of a mile straight down when you weren’t expecting it.  For the first time in my life I was experiencing vertigo – it felt like the mountain under me was going to slide off down that cliff.

I moved back down the ridge.  But I still had to climb a few hundred feet upward to reach the summit.  Up the side of the ridge I went.  I assure you, I stayed back from that knife-edge as we crawled up that hill.

Then, finally, tantalizingly close, there was the summit.  I was nearly to the top of one of the highest mountains in North America.

There was one little problem.

Between the ridge I was on, and the top of the mountain there was a path.  It was about six or eight feet long, and probably a foot wide, and it was flat, like it had been machined.

What’s the difference between Humpty Dumpty and 2020?  One of them had a great fall.

On one side of it was, you guessed it, a sheer cliff that bottomed out 3,000 feet or so below me.  On the other side of the path it was a lot better.  There was only about a 1,000 foot drop.

Wait, was 1,000 feet better?  I’d get more time to live if I fell down the 3,000 foot side.

Choices.

But when facing that last few steps, shaky with the first vertigo in my life, I’ll admit those were some of the toughest steps of my life.  But, hey, what was I going to tell the folks back home?  That I climbed to a spot nearly three miles into the air to stop two feet before I reached the top?

Nope.

But that ridge (to me) was a razor’s edge.  On either side was disaster.  I took a deep breath.  I put one foot in front of the other.  And I walked – one step, two steps, three steps – to the top, where my friends were waiting.

What brought this to mind was an email forwarded by frequent commenter, 173dVietVet, where he said (in part) this on discussing where our country is:

“(I’ve) Done a bit of mountain climbing in my Ranger days and I know full well the meaning of knife’s edge, where any wrong step throws you headlong forever into the abyss of death that lies on BOTH sides . . . .”

We are in that zone.  In climbing mountains, the knife edge is more than a metaphor – it’s real.  On either side is death, and it’s not metaphorical death, it’s mangled into a wadded pile of Wilder by the combined forces of gravity and the sudden stop on the rocky outcropping at the bottom.  Sure, Wile E. Coyote could survive, but not me.

Everything went downhill after gravity was invented.

But in life, the knife-edge is a metaphor.  We’ve created a financial situation where the economy is horribly broken, and for the last year we’ve survived mainly by printing money and not allowing people to be evicted from houses, despite the questionable legality of that.

A bigger component to our knife edge is that the rule of law has been progressively ignored in the country.  Where is the right of the Federal Government to stop evictions of tenants?

Oh, there isn’t one.  They just made it up.

That would be (at best) an action by a State, though even then it’s of questionable legality.  But then the Patriot Act made spying on American citizens “legal” so who cares about legal, anyway?  Then every agency with three letters of an alphabet decided to swallow up all of that online data, and all of the phone calls, despite laws to the contrary.

Of course, Federal employees were put in prison.

Hahahaha!

No.

The NSA:  a government agency that actually listens to you!

Despite obviously illegal orders, no one was put in prison, and the only one likely to be put into prison is the whistleblower (Edward Snowden) if he ever shows back up in the United States.  It used to be the Constitution that was ignored, but that’s so 1940s.

Now, the government can ignore any inconvenient law it wants to ignore.  Of course, the people that can ignore the law are those that are either leaders, government employees, or those favored (think Antifa™) by the government.

Destroy evidence?  A felony for most.  But when the government does it?  It’s “a regrettable incident.”

What people misunderstand is that Trump isn’t at all the cause of our problems today.  Trump is a symptom.  Without Trump, the answer would have been (yet another) Bush, this time Jeb, versus (yet another) Clinton, this time Hillary.  Oh, the excitement for electing ¡Jeb!

The difference between another Clinton and another Bush?  Nothing, really.  And America didn’t want that – so America elected Trump.  If anything, Trump cleared the fog, and made the knife edge we were walking clearer.

Jeb has a perfect place in government, as the Secretary of Low Energy.

And now, we are walking, and the knife-edge is sharper and narrower than the one that I walked to get to the top of that mountain on July 4th a couple of decades ago.

We have left the bounds of Constitutional governance some time ago – people think it’s quaint when I bring the entire idea of the Constitution up.  Is there a path back to an actual Constitutional government?

Sure.  It’s narrow – a knife-edge.  But so was getting that Constitutional government in the first place.  But getting that original Constitution depended upon men climbing a mighty steep mountain several hundred years ago.  Were they afraid when they saw the cliff’s edge, the price of failure?

I’m sure they were.  But yet they continued.  And when it was time to thread that final few steps to the summit?

They did, and damn the dangers on either side.

We face the same knife-edge.  Where are we going?

A Tree Fell On My House, But I Have A Chainsaw

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.  I sleep all night and I work all day.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

What’s black and white and red all over?  Two mimes fighting with chainsaws.

I saw a quote this week that made me smile a lot.  I’ll share it with you:

“When God put a calling on your life He already factored in your stupidity.”

A few weeks ago, a tree fell down and hit our house during a storm.  And by a tree, I mean a huge one.  I had snapped off 15 feet (57 Joules) up the tree.  It was nearly horizontal, and resting on my favorite roof.

I’ll admit that I was sitting in the hot tub during the storm that brought down the tree.

It was glorious.  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a tree fall.  It’s wonderful.  Approximately once every five minutes, I’d hear the tearing of wood and then, after a pause for the amount of time it took for the vertical tree to become horizontal, the crash.  The next day, one more tree fell.

It fell into my house.  The Mrs. sent me a picture.

I waited until Saturday when The Boy was down from Upper Lower Midwestia University to solve the problem, because the one thing a boy home from college wants to hear?  “Hey, son, glad you’re back from college for a weekend of rest.  I’m going to grab you and your brother and we’re going to work all day in one of your dad’s crazy adventures.  Oh, and it involves you getting up early and chainsaws.”

Honestly, he should be used to it by now.

Looking back, I realize that in a normal world, I would have called my insurance company.  They’d send out adjusters who would look at the tree.  They’d measure it, weigh it, and sensuously cup its fallen boughs, which still happens to be legal in my state.

I’ve heard you can save a lot of money on car insurance by switching.  Switching to reverse and leaving the scene.

They would look in the book of “Tree Falling On House Payments.”  They’d then tell me that elm trees falling on houses in Upper Lower Midwestia were excluded.  I would then correct them because I live in Lower Upper Midwestia and the tree was actually a son of a birch.

Then he says, “Oh, you’re that John Wilder.  Of course!  Insurance will cover it.”

Then, I would call a tree company to come and move the tree.  Since everyone in town had a tree fall on their house, it would take a month for them to show up for an estimate, and another month for them to remove the tree.  After the tree company charged me $2200 to move it, I’d toss the bill to the insurance company.

I’d pay the deductible (which is currently set at my left kidney for my homeowner’s policy, and my cornea for auto), and that’s it.

But would that be the Wilder Way?  Of course not.

I can sleep in on the weekends.  The Mrs., who is borderline insomniac, feels that this is my superpower.  Generally, I can get to sleep in less than five minutes, often in less than one.  The Mrs. can only sleep on Tuesdays after 9 P.M. if it’s not Daylight Savings Time.  The Mrs. has walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and returned to find me sound asleep.  I can even do it when I’m driving, though my passengers don’t seem to care for it.

What’s green, fuzzy, and will kill you if it falls on you out of a tree?  A pool table.

The reason I can sleep is only when I don’t have a Mission.  When there’s a Mission?  I wake up and I’m ready to go.  I don’t even need an alarm clock.  The tree on my house represented a Mission.

As it was, I had Pugsley and The Boy available, and daylight was burning.  I knocked on each door as I went out to start work.

I started with the branch trimmer.  Alone.  The sleeping leviathans inside had yet to move.

Branch trimmers are like the scissors that Hannibal Lecter would use to, umm, prune a rose bush.  This was my third set.  The problem with the first two is that The Boy and then Pugsley pulled the handles too hard and bent the metal.  Sometimes, living with them is like living with five-year-olds that don’t understand that they can twist metal with their bare hands.

So, a paid for the expensive trimmers this time.

Trees don’t walk.  They lumber.

These trimmers were good enough to cut through about a 2” branch, which is pretty stout.  I took the trimmer and started hacking.  I was about 30 minutes into hacking when The Boy showed up.  Pugsley showed up slightly later.  It took us 10 years to convince him he had to shower, and now he has six of them a day.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he takes a cheese plate into the shower.

When Pugsley showed up, I had him get the chainsaw, mix gas, chain oil and chainsaw sharpener.  I showed him how to sharpen the chainsaw blade, which took all of 30 seconds, but then he knew how it worked.  I also showed him how to adjust the chain.  These may seem like small things, but they are rites of passage.  There are many tools in a cabinet, and some are mostly harmless, like a screwdriver.  But a chainsaw?

A fear of spiders is called arachnophobia.  A fear of chainsaws?  That’s called common sense.

For the next seven hours we were like ants, taking branch after branch off of the tree, first with the branch trimmer and then with the chainsaw.

I had a dentist who used to be a lumberjack.  He pulled a tooth by mistake.  I’ll never to Axedental again.

Finally, we were down to two major branches.  By the time we’d gotten there, I realized that what I had done was, slowly, cut off all of the minor support points.  It seemed like a good bet.  But it was also a nagging feeling that I might be making the problem worse.

I was.  While sitting down, I heard a sharp crack.

Like wood breaking.  The exact sound I had heard while having a beer in the hot tub during the storm.

One of the two branches left holding up the whole tree was cracking.  Looking at the tree, I saw that it was big.  I estimated that what remained was about 5,000 pounds (one metric “Your Momma”) and a quick check of my estimate that I did while writing this backed that number up, unless the tree was on a low carb diet.

That 5,000 pounds was going to fall on my deck, and if I wasn’t careful?  5,000 pounds dropping 15 feet is a lot of energy – enough energy to smash a deck, a Wilder, and maybe an insurance adjustor to boot.

I had The Boy and Pugsley run into the garage looking for whatever lumber they could find that was the right length to prop up this rapidly deteriorating situation.  After ten minutes, I had two 2×4’s and one mangy plank holding the tree up.  It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t stable, and it was 10.5 feet (one metric Barron Trump) up in the air.

The Mrs. took a picture of my makeshift supports.  She sent it to her high school friend list.  One friend who is in city planning responded, “Oh, no!  This looks like all of the ladder safety videos that they make us watch.”

I thought about what I’d do, and sent The Boy and Pugsley off to buy a 10’ stepladder and some ratchet tie-offs.  When they got back, I propped the 10’ stepladder under the branch, shimmed it with lumber, and then got the chainsaw-on-a-stick.

The chainsaw-on-a-stick is just that – a tiny electric chainsaw mounted on a stick.  This one has an 8” blade, and is meant to cut things far away.  That’s good, because that’s exactly what I intended to do.  I would have liked to cut this particular tree from orbit, because it was lopsided – it looked like it wanted to twist, hard, clockwise.

I used to be a lumberjack in the Sahara Forest.  Well, it used to be the Sahara Forest.  I’m that good.

I tied off the branch to a convenient tree so when I cut it loose it couldn’t fall into the garden shed.  I further tied off one of the remaining branches so maybe that it wouldn’t twist as it fell.

Pugsley pulled out his camera to record the action.

“Nope.  Put it away.”  The situation that I had put myself into was less than optimal.  I realize that as men we are here not to live a life without risk, but to live a life.  And the Sun was now going down.  It was now or never.  One way or another that tree was coming down before the Sun went down.

Getting injured because you refused to let someone else clear the tree?  That seems like a stupid and futile gesture.

Well, if you’re looking for stupid and futile gestures, you’ve come to the right place.  I just didn’t want my particular stupid and futile gesture to result in YouTube® videos of my death.  I proceeded to take the chainsaw on a stick and started to cut into the branch.

As far as tense moments go, having the stored energy of a Ford Explorer® 15 feet up in the air, dependent upon your calculations and being right?

It’s tense.

When I was back in Alaska, I could regularly drop trees within a degree of where I wanted them to go.  Was I a lumberjack?  No.  But I had to lay in dozens of metric Your Momma’s worth of wood a year just to heat the house.  You get pretty comfortable with a chainsaw doing that.

When I cut wood in Alaska, I didn’t get overtime, even though I logged a lot of hours.

But that was 15 years (3 centimeters) ago.  I cut into the tree.  I first cut a relief cut in the top of the horizontal branch.  I didn’t want stress to build up there and hang the whole mess up.  Then I started to cut from the bottom up.

You have to cut a tree that’s acting like a beam from the bottom up.  If you cut it from the top down?  It will bind the saw, and you end up in a crazy place where you have a stuck saw and a Ford Explorer®’s amount of energy dependent upon you freeing it.

I cut into the tree.  A lot.  Then paused.  The opening the chainsaw had made grew larger as the stress pulled the tree apart.  I cut into the tree again.  By now, the entire 5,000 pounds was hanging by a 3” by 2” slab of wood.  Still no movement.

Finally, I cut deeper.  I hear the “crack” as the tree split.  Pugsley was watching from a safe distance.  He said the tree dropped perfectly down.  I wouldn’t know – I was headed the opposite direction.  Not only was there the 5,000 pound tree, there was also the bit still on the roof.  I could easily imagine that part whipping around as it was pulled by the main branch.

The final crack came.

The tree did come down.  Perfectly.  The bit left on the roof?  Didn’t move an inch.  Exactly as I wanted it to go.  I sat down as The Boy and Pugsley removed the rest of the debris.  Pugsley even got me a beer and said, “You’re done, Pop.  Have a rest.”

I trained my kids that if I ever choke on a beer, they should give me the Heineken® maneuver.

The damage to the house was minimal, actually.  A bit of gutter needs to be moved back into place.  One shingle lost its gravel in a small circle.  A solar light was broken.  I need to replace one deck board, one chair, and one plastic bench.  Oh, and we spent 27 hours of labor.  I was sore for the next three days.

If a tree falls on your house and that’s all you lose?  You’re as lucky as me.  Which is pretty lucky.

Or, more likely?  God has factored my stupidity into my life.

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened.  I’m kidding, of course.  I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living.  Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race.  For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President.  By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored.  Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump.  His other advantage is, well, you know.  You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind.  Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open:  21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day.  Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

  • Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
  • Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
  • Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
  • New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

  • Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
  • News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
  • Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
  • Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
  • Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward.  It won’t be.  Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire?  A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states.  A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later.  But has anything about 2020 been best case?  The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth.  In reality, the tension has been building for four years.  In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt.  We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable.  This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good.   This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral.  I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic.  In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week.  I ignore most of them.  Today?  I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate.  You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses.  Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability.  The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral.  Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it.  It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California.  Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%.  California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants.  The result?  The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money?  You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times.  They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

No Mask? No Problem. We’ll Just Reeducate You.

“John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.” – Demolition Man

LECH

2020 has me so confused.  Do I need a mask or a brick to enter a store?

The Chinese Flu has been devastating for our culture in many ways.  The biggest impact is certainly economic.  But it has also brought out divisions in our society that (primarily) people on the Left are set to exploit.  The riots have been awful, and in fact so bad that the early positive sentiments that Marxist Black Lives Matter® are eroding.  Thankfully, the cops have now found out the easiest way to break up a BLM©/PantiFa™ riot – pass out job applications.

One controversy that thankfully hasn’t come to Modern Mayberry is mask wearing.  I’ve decided firmly to not decide on wearing masks.  Do I wear one?  No, because it’s silly in a county where nobody has Shanghai Lung Rot.  Besides, masks make me sweat like an NFL® player asked to solve a quadratic equation.  Heck, one night during the pandemic I woke up with the sweats.  I worried until I changed out to jeans.

In Wal-Mart®, about one out of ten people wear a mask.  In the restaurants?  Zero.  I’ve seen fast food employees wearing them, but most of the time their noses aren’t covered, so the masks serve as, um, I guess spit deflectors and an excuse to not shave?

JOHO

The most Progressive thing about Joe Biden is his dementia.

I’ve seen horrible arguments on each side, and good arguments on each side, but pretty close to zero science on either side along with data corrupted enough to be Obama’s attorney general, so I say:

Whatever.  I don’t care.  Please don’t try to convince me in the comments.  I love you all, but the mask battle is just a distraction as our government prints more money than Joe Biden has active brain cells every week.

Sometimes, though, the Leftists tell you what they really want.  The biggest traitors in the Current Year have been our so-called intellectual elite.  On August 10, Johns Hopkins™ tweeted® the amazingly horrific tweet© shown below:

HOPKINS

But Joseph Stalin and the KGB both gave it two thumbs up.

At some point an adult at Johns Hopkins© became aware of the tweet™, and wisely deleted it.  The article it’s based on is here (LINK).  It’s actually more frightening than anything that PantiFa™ has done, since I think the average group of PantiFa© “warriors” could be taken down by the toddler soccer club here in Modern Mayberry.  I mean, those kids can hit hard if they don’t like their juice box flavor at half time.

The article is horrific.  Parker Crutchfield, Associate Professor Butthead of Medical Ethics(?), Humanities and Law at Western Michigan University (his contact information is here LINK) suggested that the best way of stopping WuhanFluhan is to secretly drug the population so they become willing sheep that will do anything authorities suggest.

I’m not making this up.  Not even a little.

Here’s the direct quote:

“Another challenge is that the defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it. As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply.” (emphasis added)

PARKER

This guy advocates drugging the population – it’s so bad that mermaids are addicted to seaweed.

His final paragraph is the most chilling:

“The scenario in which the government forces an immunity booster upon everyone is plausible. And the military has been forcing enhancements like vaccines or “uppers” upon soldiers for a long time. The scenario in which the government forces a morality booster upon everyone is far-fetched. But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change. That’s why we should be thinking of it now.”  (emphasis added)

Again, this is a “professor” who is supposed to teach ethics.  I’m just wondering what ethical system allows drugging the population to make them do what you want?  I think Stalin would have nodded approvingly, especially since this is exactly what Huxley described in Brave New World.

The fact that an idiot born from a crazed mother in an insane asylum (I made that part up, but it fits) named Parker Crutchfield, who is being paid for by Michigan tax dollars to argue for the chemical mental enslavement of people he doesn’t agree with secretly via the water supply exists?  If anyone told me that, I’d call it a crazy conspiracy theory.  But I read the article.  It’s there.  You know, the article that Johns Hopkins© Tweeted™?

MICH

Umm, anyone notice she’s not wearing a facemask?  Heck, I’d buy her a whole paper bag so we didn’t have to see her face.

I was listening to Scott Adams’ podcast the other day, and he mentioned that it’s a psychological trait of people to use language that shows what they’re really thinking – when Obama talked about Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris, Obama said, “Joe nailed it.”

Adams made the point that “nail” in this case reminded him of a “coffin nail” which indicated that Joe would only serve for a short time before Kamala took over.  Parker Crutchfield’s imbecilic writing is far less subtle.  He is openly arguing for the government to secretly drug Americans by force to make them compliant.  Beyond that, the drug must meet Parker Crutchfield’s ideological specifications – he’d love to dose you with oxytocin.

Sadly for Parker Crutchfield, he notes that oxytocin increases compliance but it also increases ethnocentrism.  Ethnocentrism is a love of your own people.  I guess that’s a drawback for Parker Crutchfield, since an ethnocentristic United States would be cohesive and centered around our culture, rather than pretending that every culture that drifts in produces equal results.

How can you have PantiFa™ if you don’t think that murderous cannibal tribes are exactly the same as your local optometrist who belongs to the Chamber of Commerce®?

All it takes for Parker Crutchfield is a chemical that produces your submission and doesn’t make you love your country and other people like you.  He’d then not only be fine with injecting it into the water supply, he’d probably pour it in himself.

ETHNO

Parker Crutchfield did not approve of this image.

Corona-Chan has been bad, but not in deaths.  The death rate appears to be trending towards less than 1%, perhaps far less than 1% since millions may have had it that have never been tested.  But the median age of someone dying from COVID-19 seems to be nearly 80.  That means that catching the Chinese Virus increases your life expectancy by two years, since the average age of death in the United States is 78.

Reality?  Coronavirus is mainly killing old folks.  If you’re 80, stay home if you want to.  Take precautions.  Don’t lick doorknobs on public restrooms.  Don’t drink the toilet water no matter how cool and refreshing it looks.

I rarely hope that bad things happen to people.  Really.  It’s not my job.  I’m a happy guy.  But I’d love to see Parker Crutchfield’s only employment opportunity being sanitizing carts with his tongue at your local Wal-Mart™ after taking the massive doses of oxytocin to make him ethnocentric.  At least he won’t poison any young minds that way.

And Michigan, seriously?  What are you guys thinking?

Don’t Run Out The Clock On Life.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Blade Runner

RIPLEY

Why haven’t aliens been here more frequently?  They saw the reviews – one star.

One of the benefits of living in Modern Mayberry is that there are no shortage of places where you can contribute.  After being assistant peewee coach for The Boy’s football (the one men play, not the game for socialist European women) I volunteered to be head coach for Pugsley’s team.  The first season, I was less than spectacular.  And saying I was less than spectacular is being generous.

Let me be clear – when you’re coaching third and fourth graders who can’t even calculate the orbital dynamics of the planet Mercury because they don’t know relativity and keep getting the wrong answer using Newtonian mechanics, it’s the coaching.  The kids are, more or less, equally inept and equally talented.  You put the big kids on the line and the fast kids as backs and receivers and wonder what to do with the small, slow kids.

As a first year coach?  I was like a small, slow kid.  I’m not sure we won a game my first year.  That wasn’t the kids; that season was on me – it was all my fault.  I’ll admit I have faults, and so will The Mrs.   The Mrs. says I have two main faults – that I don’t listen and some other one.

REFS

In Europe they call it 30.48cm ball.

I remember the first game of my second pee-wee football season as clearly as if it were yesterday.  The offense was on the field.  We had just made a first down.  There was a minute and twenty seconds (seventeen metric minutes) left on the clock.  I did the math – thirty seconds a play, four downs . . . and they were out of time outs.

Wait a minute, I thought.  We were up by five points.  If we just ran three plays and didn’t fumble the ball and let them score a touchdown – we would win!

All we had to do was run out the clock.  Our only enemy was time.

I told the quarterback to just kneel down when the center hiked the ball to him.  For a second, he looked confused – we had played the whole game being aggressive on offense, and we’d racked up 28 points.  Then it clicked in his head – he was a really smart 4th grader.  All he had to do was not fumble.

He had figured out what caught me almost by surprise:  we just had to run out the clock.  Spoiler alert:  we won.  Running out the clock in a football game is a valuable strategy.

EX

I was going to tell another football joke, but it had an offensive line.

How does this translate off the field?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post – I use a planner.  Some of the things that are on my daily to-do list are straightforward.  Plan to take over the world.  Remember to feed the kraken.  But I recently added one:

Are You Running Out The Clock?

You might think that’s a weird thing to think about every day when you go into work, and maybe it is.  In the crazy, deflating and inflating economy of 2020, a job might be something that’s required for survival.  But a job also might be something you’re going through the motions on and running the clock, and your life out every day watching the seconds tick away until 5pm.

Now, don’t get me wrong – if it’s important to get money to live, fulfillment isn’t the goal – feeding the family is first.  In 2020 and 2021 jobs will be hard to find, so if you’re bored but have a family to feed – FEED YOUR FAMILY AND STAY UNTIL 5PM.

JOB

I quit my job at the helium plant – I will NOT be spoken to in that tone of voice.

But what happens when a job or your life becomes another exercise in running out the clock and you don’t have to worry about feeding the family?

That’s not a win.

Humans were made to be the most multi-purpose machine in the history of the planet.  We’re essentially the Swiss Army® animal.  Where other animals inhabit a specific niche or even several niches on the planet, humans alone have consciously gone from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the moon.  We can run, swim, climb, think and even make new elements while we try to figure out how to harness the power of a star.  We can then rip atoms apart just for fun, and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  And all of this before breakfast.

WILL

You know that in freshman English William at least got a B on the Romeo and Juliet section. 

Then we can write a sonnet, or, as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man.  How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.  In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel.  In apprehension how like a god!

The beauty of the world.

The paragon of animals.

Humans are amazing.  Shakespeare really got that.  If I live my entire life, I’m not sure I can string together six sentences that are so amazing and so understand just how amazing a creature humans are.

Then Will followed up with this:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Four hundred years ago, the Bard was ahead of me.  It’s amazing to be human.  We have great capabilities.  But then?  Hamlet goes and decides he wants to run out the clock.

But we’re not made for running out the clock – that’s why Hamlet is a tragedy.  Hamlet was only thirty years old.  He had grown weary of life, and he didn’t even have the excuse of having met my ex-wife.

We don’t get a deposit back for bringing our bodies back in great condition after we’re done with them.  Let me be clear:  we have a one use rental on these things.  You need to use your body and your life like you stole it.  My left hip hurts at least once a month.  A lot.

SOA

My vacuum has Roomba®-tiod arthritis. 

Good.  I popped it out coaching those peewee football players.  If I get arthritis there?  It’s like a gray hair in my beard – I’ve earned it.  I want the coroner to look at my body at the end and say:  “I’m glad he’s not donating these organs.  He used all of them up.  How do you wear out a bellybutton?  This guy did.”

I’ve seen a “running out the clock” mentality in my own family.  When Pa Wilder started to get older, one thing I noticed is that his life seemed to revolve not around achieving, but around existing.  He walked.  He ate.  He watched TV.  He took his medications.

But he ceased doing anything of meaning.  He ceased fighting.  I’ll admit, people deserve a rest from time to time.  But even in old age, even if disabled, and even if depressed – you can do something.

There is no time in your life where you can’t matter.

Running out the clock isn’t a goal – unless it’s a peewee football game.

How will you make a difference today?