Feed Your Head – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Is There Room For Anything But Materialism?

“Our great war is a spiritual war.” – Fight Club

Does a llama think the end of the world is called the Alpacalypse?

Generally, around holidays, I let my remaining seven strands of hair down and allow a post or two to deviate a bit from the normal categories. Why? Because we live in a world where often unusual ideas will eventually be found to be true, and I like to ask, from time to time, “What if?”

Enjoy!

Just as the pendulum of society has oscillated to the GloboLeft position (and, is oscillating back to the TradRight as we speak) there has been an oscillation of the way people think about the world.

Now, I would suggest, Western Civilization is at another peak: peak materialism. By materialism, I mean not that people are into material goods (even though they are) but that the entire focus is that there is a material explanation for everything, including why Kamala Harris exists.

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has one tooth in the middle of his face? Now you’ll never be able to unsee it.

This isn’t a revelation to anyone in the West, since this is what we’ve been dealing with for the majority of our lives. We have a mechanistic determinism that says that everything has an explanation, and that those explanations are all based in some sort of material, physical, phenomenon.

I used to play rugby, back in the day (prop) and our coach would, during practice, say “bad luck!” when someone goofed up. My immediate thought was, no, that wasn’t bad luck, the player goofed up. But was I right?

Well, if the world had taken a slightly different turn, the ball a different bounce, the opponent a different line, maybe the decision the player made would have been the right one. Perhaps, then, there is a place for luck.

What’s the difference between a teabag and the American Rugby World Cup team? The teabag stays in the cup longer.

And I do believe in luck. Part of is because my life has been an extraordinarily lucky one. And, no, not the “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” definition, but “How is that stupid SOB so lucky?”

Okay, that’s a sample size of one, and the average scientist would say that’s just one data point, and not a series. But, it’s not: a series of improbable events in a single lifetime isn’t just one datapoint, it’s a series of them.

But what about actual studies that show phenomena that are far outside of the real of anything science can explain?

This one (LINK) shows that 90 experiments across 33 labs in 14 countries have shown that precognition exists. What’s precognition? That’s knowing the outcome of a future event, before the event occurs.

What kind of event? Well, one study that I read used sensors on someone viewing a computer screen. The screen would show random images, most of which were rather dull. Occasionally, though, the screen would an emotionally charged picture – think nudity or an accident victim, meant to be a “shocking” picture. The sensors recorded (in general) things like increased heartrate and increase blood pressure before the emotionally charged images showed up onscreen.

I went to a swimwear store and asked them if I could “Try on the bathing suit in the front window.” They told me I’d have to use a changing room.

The subjects “knew” subconsciously that something was up and their bodies reacted.

Now, I can certainly come up with several ideas from quantum physics that might allow for this time-reversed phenomenon, you know, when effect happens before cause. But people before, say 1900, would have just said that precognition was part of life – from the ancient Greeks to the prophecies of the Bible, precognition was just accepted as a part of reality – one that couldn’t be explained.

I’ve even had weird, precognitive dreams about odd events. One time when I was in seventh grade, I awoke, laughing. Why? Because someone had stolen the lock off of my school locker, but left the valuable stuff inside. I found it really humorous that someone would just steal the lock.

The next day? After fourth period (the period immediately after I’d told my math teacher the humorous story) the lock was . . . gone. My stuff? There.

I can’t understand kids these days and their overwhelming Axe®-scents.

Certainly, it could be a coincidence. But the odd perfection of the dream and the reality was jarring. I’ve had other dreams that came true as well. Most have been relatively boring things, and, certainly I’m not above calling them coincidences.

However, .gov, (in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute) created a project for remote viewing – clairvoyance, where they created a program that produced (according to some sources) actionable information and according to at least one independent statistician were clearly 5-15% above random chance.

Those are just two examples of potential phenomena that exist outside of our ability to explain using purely material descriptions. And, no, I’m not wedded to the idea that those phenomena exist, but that would certainly be the simplest explanation for several events in my life. But, I am a committed Christian, so obviously I have the belief in things that have and always will be beyond the understanding of men.

And, again, before 1900 or so, the vast majority of people in all civilizations all over the world would have agreed that while there is the material plane of existence, but there is also the spiritual plane of existence, with as much (if not much more) relevance to our daily lives than the physical.

I like Chihuahuas, but not enough to eat a whole one.

One thing I’ve learned during my life, is to understand that there’s a lot that I’ll never understand, but that I do think that there is far, far more to our lives than just materialism. Heck, if I had a dime for every time I thought about materialism, I could probably afford some Gucci™ socks.

Illegal Immigration: It’s a Pyramid Scheme

“If you’re trying to extort us because we are immigrants, we know the law.” – Taken

If you would like a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our lives, please press 1 for English. (All memes today are as found.)

As I look to the vast, teeming hordes of illegals washing on to our shore daily, I ask myself, what rational nation would make it easy for hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to easily enter the country each month, every month, for the entirety of the Biden administration?

Some have claimed that as many as 11 million to 13 million of these fighting-age men are entering the country every year. That’s a total of nearly 40 million in the three and a half years since Biden assumed the office. Of military aged men. Who won’t be in the military. At least not our military.

It has even gotten to the point where the normies that tend to vote left (not the committed GloboLeft, mind you, but the normies who voted for Biden) have come to realize, “No, this is too much.”

It’s gotten to the point where other immigrants have said, “No mas.”

It’s gotten so bad that Joe Biden, he who Executive Ordered out of existence Trump’s border strategy in the first forty minutes after he took the oath, had to pretend it was the Republicans who were against border security last month.

Oh, and a few minutes after that he then offered immediate legal status to 500,000 spouses of illegals. It must be wonderful to be a GloboLeftist and have the memory of a goldfish.

Of course, one of the main reasons the GloboLeft want to haul in illegals over the border is that most people who are illegals want free stuff, and most immigrants in general (not all, but in general) have come from countries where a higher degree of socialism is the norm. Plus, many don’t speak the language, so they’re left to whatever the local GloboLeftist “Community Organizer” tells them for political beliefs.

But, perhaps, another reason that the GloboLeft wants so much immigration is debt. If you look at average debt in the United States, it’s at $104,000. Even Gen Z is getting on the debt train: the average Zoomer debt is about $30,000, even though the oldest Zoomer is 26.

Average illegal (or legal) immigrant debt load? Zero.

The opportunity then appears: load the illegals up with loans at silly high interest rates. Keep in mind, they have crappy credit, so a 20% interest rate to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place seems like a good deal. Illegals also have, generally, lower reading comprehension and less experience with the debt-industrial complex, so renting to buy a tv, a car, furniture (rent to own!) which makes it look like the immigrant is actually adding to the economy rather than subtracting from it.

And they are subtracting from it: medical care, schooling, infrastructure, housing, and criminality all pile on. While American might have become a third-world hellhole all by itself (which I doubt) illegals are a pyramid scheme. The scheme requires more and more illegals to take on the debt and consooom the resources.

The solution to all of these problems brought on by the immigration? GloboLeftists want to import yet more illegals to solve the problems caused by all of the previous illegals. The endpoint of this is disaster. It ends up destroying the countries, no, nations, that were insane enough to practice this importation. A nation, like Ireland, filled with Irish people ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish. A Moroccan born in Ireland is no more Irish than a mouse born in a stable is a horse.

No, Ireland then ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish, and then it becomes a country, and it will never be the same. I think the Irish have figured this out, as they’ve been pushing back on the GloboHomoElite as of late.

Several years ago, I was listening to NPR™ before I gave up on it entirely – it was probably 2016. This was an out-and-out propaganda piece, and I realized it at the time. In this snippet, the child of Iranian parents that had lived in California had moved to Copenhagen. He was quite upset that his daughter (born in California) was not considered to be Danish.

Well, she’s not. She never will be. Persian? Sure. Danish? Never. At best, a resident. Her children, three or four generations hence? Maybe so, as soon as they are named Viggo or Alfred or Clara or Freja.

These changes have consequences that range far deeper than just the economic. England was a country made for the English, and that’s how it works. The customs and attitudes of India or Pakistan? Well, import enough of that, and England won’t be England.

America is not Ireland – I’m of Scots-Dane-English extraction, and no Scot, Dane, or Englishman would claim me as anything but their very distant kin, which I understand. But I am more than three generations American, so I have no other home, no other place that is mine.

And just like England was made by and for the English, America was made by and for the Americans. Whoever is coming across the border is not an American, but someone who is actively destroying America.

None of the GloboLeftElite care that this will ruin all of the nations of the West economically or demographically. As an anon put it,

“They’ll destroy it all, all of society, for a lifetime of personal hedonism and debauchery, funded off of the suffering of billions.”

I’m not sure that’s right. The forces of the GloboLeftElite do like their pleasures, but many of the foot soldiers of the GloboLeft simply want to watch it all burn. They don’t care, particularly, to see anything grow in its place, just so long as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are destroyed.

Destruction, though it may be easy, and though it may be very common in the coming years, will not be the final say. In the end, since the beginning of man, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good have proven to come back alive, again and again, even when the night seemed the darkest.

I have never said the path is easy, and I’ve never said any of us will live to see the end of the tale, and I hate to give spoilers, but we’re not done.

Not even close.

Why Haven’t Aliens Visited? Maybe Our Reviews Are Bad: “Earth? Just One Star.”

“This object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.” – Star Trek: TNG

When I was 12 I was abducted by aliens, they told me to do chores, eat my vegetables, shower, and brush my teeth. I guess I was on the mother ship.

When I was a kid, humanity knew about nine and only nine planets. One big question that we had was, because we were a sample size of one, is whether or not planets were common in the galaxy or rare. The first extrasolar planet discovered was51 Pegasi b in 1995.

The question was answered: there were other planets. But how common are planets?

We keep finding them wherever we look. Humanity has found thousands and thousands of extrasolar planets. In 2014, the estimate was that one in stars have planets about the size of Earth with a surface temperature where life (as we know it) could exist. If that’s the case? It’s certain that life exists outside of the Solar System.

That’s a lot of real estate. But is there any evidence that any of it is in use by things smarter than a paramecium or Kamala Harris?

Kamala, just Biden her time.

Recently there have been two studies by astrophysicists that point to the possibility that there are observable technosignatures, specifically the excess infrared radiation that would accompany something like a Dyson sphere. One group focused on a particular kind of star and found 7 candidates; the other study found 53 candidates looking in a different way.

I am of course referring to the physicist Freeman Dyson who popularized the idea that a civilization could take the material in a star system, munch up the planets, and surround the central star in order to use the energy. Oh, and Dyson also invented the vacuum cleaner. That’s a different Dyson, you say?

Dang.

Why would they need that much energy? Oh, they could use it for anything, making video games, or making PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ powered starships, or running the air conditioning with the doors and windows open and leaving the fridge door open and the lights on. Man, as a dad, it hurts me to even write those words. But I still claim to be the first person, ever, to use the phrase “anti-PEZ©”.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

The starlight would fall on the sphere, it would be used to create useful energy, and the remainder would be infrared, otherwise known to most humans as “heat”, but not the 1995 movie since aliens don’t have any use for Robert DeNiro either. The big surprise is that some of these stars were radiating more than 60 times the amount of “heat” that they should be, indicating it has been absorbed by . . . something.

But some sponges are more a-loofah.

Now, that could just mean that Yo Mamma is hanging out around in space, or it could mean that there’s an explanation we’re not yet familiar with.

But then there are the fleeing O-Class stars. O stars are very hot and very young stars that burn out very, very quickly (in a cosmic time scale), with total lifespans of as low as 4 million years. Sure, that sounds like a long time, but it’s only half as old as Joe Biden.

The end of an O-Class star is nearly always a supernova – a huge explosion. Isn’t it odd that 25% of the O-Class stars that have been found are being ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a high rate of speed? It’s almost like there might be an alien intelligence throwing bums out of the neighborhood before the pee on the garage.

What does Taylor Swift have in common with John Wilkes Booth? They both know how to get a crowd excited.

Well, I guess that was an oddly specific example.

I’ve also written before about other examples of possible technosignatures.

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

If other intelligent life has existed in the past and developed significant technology to gather most of the energy from their star, would they come visit?

I’ve made my opinion clear that if intelligent life exists elsewhere (which I think is probably a certainty) then the Solar System has probably been visited. By Little Green Men? Dunno about that, but it’s much easier to send a toaster than a living critter into space. They could send an A.I. out here, have it wait and watch.

This is called a Bracewell probe, and is really the plot to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sending a probe out would be relatively cheap and easy. Okay, I couldn’t afford to do it, but it would be cheap and easy if you have experience throwing O-Class stars out of the galaxy to improve the resale value of your Dyson sphere.

“Hot singles are looking for dates in your area, Dave.”

If we start hunting around the local Solar System, that would be my first guess of what we’d find, and it would probably be on some sort of weird elliptical orbit around the Sun so it can observe without being observed.

Will we ever make the jump to becoming a species that harnesses the power of our star? I don’t know. We certainly have some roadblocks to doing so.

We’d have to overcome our tendency to turn wealth into hedonism, and avoid a civilizational tombstone that says “We Were Happy Childfree Couples and Wine Aunts” in our own Mouse Utopia (link below).
We’ll have to make sure that A.I. doesn’t turn on us.
We’ll have to ditch anything made by Boeing™.
And, of course, we need to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

At some point, and I think this might be in the next decade if we haven’t blown ourselves up, I think we will finally have reasonable proof that intelligent life exists. In my lifetime, then, we will have gone from not knowing if other planets exist to knowing that other life exists out there.

And if other life exists out there, there’s one thing I know for sure.

If it bleeds we can kill it.

Scott Adams, Charles Murray, And Why The Government Doesn’t Like Families

“Well, I didn’t know you wanted to get involved with the discussion, Mr. Helper.” – Back to School

I thought nice things about Nancy when I heard that she said she helped blind children, but then I figured out she meant verb, not adjective.

A few weeks ago I was driving all over creation, so I had a chance to listen to a few podcasts as the miles of Upper/Lower Midwestia melted by over dashboard. One of the podcasts was from Scott Adams.

One of Scott’s topics was about the concept of identity. In dealing with young kids, say four or five, researchers were trying to figure out how to best motivate these snot-covered disease machines to help tidy up a room. I must take a moment to note that forcing toddlers to replace hotel staff could potentially really help the bottom line of Marriott®, so I’m definitely for it.

Regardless, the researchers tried to ask the young kids to “help tidy up.” This had the effectiveness you might imagine, as my experience has shown that the typical five-year-old has the attention span of Robin Williams on cocaine.

But then the researchers tried another tactic. They asked the kids, “Are you a helper?” That worked, and so did the kids. They stayed on task for longer, and were apparently not as useless as they normally are.

I keep falling off of my bike – it’s a vicious cycle. (meme as found)

Adams finished up the segment. He moved on to another topic, which was some random piece of GloboLeftElite propaganda that was circulating on CNN™ or MSNBCommunist©. He then asked his audience, “Do you believe that?”

None of them did. Scott then made the statement: “You are immune to the propaganda of the Left. Why?”

Various answers came back.

“Oh, let’s see, FakeName52 said, it’s because we’re smarter? True, FakeName52, but that’s not it. VirginiaFats says that it’s because we’re more rational? True, but that’s not it either.”

Adams’ answer?

It’s the same thing as the toddler answer: we’re immune to (lots of) the propaganda of the GloboLeftElite not because we’re smarter (we are) or more rational (we are) but because of who we conceive ourselves to be: the lies of the GloboLeft become apparent when viewed through the filter of being someone who finds family important, for instance.

When deaf people go to court, is it still called a hearing?

That’s a pretty deep thought: Who I am is more important to me than what I’m doing. If I think of myself as more honest and trustworthy I’ll actually be more honest and trustworthy. If I think of myself as a victim and incapable of dealing with the world, that’s also exactly who I’ll be.

Simple as.

And, if that was where my podcasting journey ended, that might have been good enough for a Friday post – it feels like that sort of topic, since it’s essentially a way to change the way I look at and interact with the world. But the next podcast up was John Stossel interviewing Charles Murray.

Just like O.J. was best known for, um, one thing, Charles Murray is best known as the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book about I.Q. that touched a third rail by showing data that I.Q. is at least partially inherited. Scandals!

If a cannibal doesn’t like eating brains, think his friends will give him a hand?

But before that he wrote a lot about government policy, even being quoted by Ronald Reagan from time to time. Murray wrote about the interplay between government policy and outcomes, and one of the things that he found that bothered him the most is that all of the policies that give money to unmarried women had the consequence (intended?) of kicking the man out of the house.

The woman don’t need no man because .gov steps in and becomes the breadwinner. Heck, the government is even better than an actual husband and father because the government never judges, always pays on time, and let’s the woman sleep with whoever they want whenever they want.

So, no father, no problem. Right?

Well, not exactly. Young boys look to fathers as role models, as someone that they’d like to be like. Since Uncle Sugar is now the de facto father, that means that the only role models available to a young boy in a situation like that is, in the words of Charles Murray, “the worst possible role model: the most aggressive and meanest person in their circle of friends.”

I built a model of Mount Everest and The Boy asked if it was to scale. I said, “No, it’s to look at.”

We see the consequences of that all around us. How many of the “youths” shooting up Chicago or Baltimore have a father at home? Seven out of ten blacks (2018 data) were born out of wedlock. No father, or a revolving door of fathers removes the role model the boy should have had. The numbers for whites aren’t encouraging, either: nearly three out of ten whites is now born out of wedlock.

This should be no surprise if you’re familiar with r/K selection theory. I’ll give a quick explanation. This will be a refresher for some, or you can read one of my previous posts here (link below) for more a more in-depth discussion.

r/K Biology And The Coming Cold Winter

r selection is the selection process followed by rabbits. Rabbits live (generally) in an environment with large numbers of resources, so they have rabbit sex all the time. They produce lots of little rabbits, and, for the most part, the rabbits have little involvement in raising all of their baby rabbits. Rabbits also don’t particularly care who they mate with, there are no pair bonds. Rabbits survive based on a numbers game. In high resource environments, it’s about sex, all the time, with anyone and everyone.

When dentists get awards, they don’t give them trophies, just a little plaque.

K selection is different – it’s the selection process that wolves have. Wolves often live in low-resource environments. They pair-bond for life, and a huge amount of resources is expended in the long process of turning a wolf pup into an adult member of the pack.

Obviously, the environment for women right now favors r selection, and I can’t help but think that this is entirely on purpose. That attack on the family seems to serve the GloboLeftElite’s agenda. Families are the atoms of civilization, and to fundamentally transform civilization, the families have to be controlled first.

As for me? I’m a helper.

The Post On Nihilism I’ve Been Working On (Here And There) For Weeks

“Think his nihilism got the best of him and he tried to kill himself?” – House, M.D.

Nietzsche couldn’t use pencils. He thought they were all pointless.

A big danger is Nihilism.

It’s certainly one of the biggest dangers that society faces today. As our society has become less religious, more urban, and has a greater and greater embracing of technology, people begin to ask:

Does any of this matter? Do our values have any real meaning?

My answer to both of those questions is, of course, yes. Values and virtues don’t become outdated.

But what is Nihilism? Nietzsche defined Nihilism fairly simply:

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no thing in itself. This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

To a Nihilist, nothing matters and everything that anyone can think of is true. Read that sentence again, and tell me what I’ve missed in what’s ailing society at its foundation, right now, today. To quote Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, if Nihilism is the “extinction of the individual, then this world and everything in it – love, goodness, sanctity, everything – are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any ultimate consequence, and the full horror of life is hidden from man only by the strength of their will do deceive themselves; and ‘all things are lawful,’ no otherworldly hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and suicidal dreams.” I’m guessing he knew my ex-wife.

Observance to a religion gives a society many things: purpose, values, unity, and stability, among others. But a Nihilist would say that all religions have the same validity, just like all cultures have the same validity.

But that is observably false.

Say what you will, but the Aztec people had a great motto: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

I’ll cherry pick an example: Aztecs. The Aztecs were a bloodthirsty, cannibal, slaving religion. When their ancestors escaped up north, they became known (later) as the Anasazi, and were so hated that they managed to get a huge coalition of all the other tribes together to unite to kill them, probably because having cannibals as neighbors is horrible for property values.

We live in a nation where academics and the news media are trying to normalize everything from cannibalism to “minor-attracted persons” to men pretending to be women. The only, and I mean only, way that this sort of normalization attempt occurs is because the GloboLeft are a group of nihilists that don’t have any fixed beliefs, at all. They were HATING former FBI Director James Comey before Trump fired him. Then, in the span of a single day, they were converted to loving him.

“Comey was always the good guy.”

We were always at war with Eastasia.

When Amy was a child, she said she wanted to go into comedy. Well, no one is laughing now.

If horrible religions like the Aztec religion can result in murder, wholesale slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, imagine how much worse it is to have no religion at all? Now, it becomes open season on anything. The Mrs. likes to talk about an article she read once (maybe it was back when we subscribed to Reason?) about the author attending a Washington, D.C. dinner party.

The conversation went something like this . . . .

“Well, of course Africa is a problem, and probably has 200,000,000 too many people. I think that it can be solved, though, by withholding food supply.” This wasn’t a politician, but probably a GloboLeft academic or regulator.

The author confronted the GloboLefty: “You’re casually talking about starving 200,000,000 people to death?”

Apparently, the GloboLefty didn’t really like it when it was phrased that way, but when he could hide behind pretty words that disguised the real meaning of what he was saying, well, he was good with it.

I was going to donate my clothes to starving people in Africa, but I decided not to. If my clothes fit them, they’re definitely not starving.

The French Revolution was, perhaps, the very first example of this sort of extreme Nihilism, where the idea was not a war on man, but an organized war on God, Himself. Mankind has certainly had its share of civil wars and genocides throughout history, but the French Revolution was something entirely new – the desire of an idea, Nihilism, to remake an entire nation and discard every idea from the past.

To a Nihilist or a GloboLeftist (but I repeat myself) I am nothing. You are nothing. We are not even worthy of consideration as humans. We are beneath contempt. To quote Rose again, “The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.” In the words of V.I. Lenin: “. . . there will be no way of getting away from it, there will be nowhere to go.”

Really.

Should the Russian Revolution be renamed the Tsar Wars?

The greatest horrors (that’s “horror” – I’m not talking about Madonna) in the history of humanity have been brought about by GloboLeft governments while being run not by atheists, but by antitheists. Period, and that’s verifiable by actual numbers. The end stage of this is the Nihilism we see around us now: The Nihilism bent only on destruction. The French Revolution started it, but you can see it daily at work

As I’ve said again and again, I believe we will win, because we stand for something and to win they have to kill us all. Every single one of us.

They can’t. After 74 years of trying, the Soviets couldn’t erase Religion and the values it provides. Today, only 13% of Russians are atheists. Infecting everyone with Nihilism is really, really hard.

My doctor said I should drink more wine. He actually said, “less beer”, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines.

Why am I so certain we’ll win? Because we’ve been winning for at least 2000 years, and that won’t stop now. I do believe in Truth. And I know others to, too.

That’s all it takes to win.

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

“It’s taken almost thirty years and my family fortune to realize the vision of that day.” – Back to the Future

It’s easy to make a website for orphans – you don’t need a home page.

Last post we talked about the main family structures that impact the ideology of the United States (Absolute Nuclear, Authoritarian, and Egalitarian Nuclear). As noted in the post and in the comments, there were several left out. Let’s start out with the biggest structure in the world and the structure that breeds commies:

The Exogamous Clan.

This is the family structure that was seen in China, Cuba, northern India, Russia, and the part of France commies come from.
The basic structure is that marriage occurs with women from outside the clan, and the husband brings the wife home.
This is a wickedly high stress scenario: more than one woman in the household is insanely susceptible to the competition and emotional games that more than one woman can bring, plus lots of adult males and jealous wives under the same roof.
The result, the father has to have huge amounts of power. Women are pushed down relentlessly to keep peace in the family. This is reflected in that the sons’ wives are chosen by the parents, and even the sons are fairly replaceable.
The idea of independence never comes up until the father dies and the son has to form his own clan and only then does the family break apart.

The result of this is that the culture where the Exogamous Clan is the family structure prizes discipline, social duty, conformity, and not being different. The culture lends itself to strong central governance: strong emperors or a strong central government – looking at you, Chairman Xi. In China, the initial failed attempts at communism were attempts to move this Exogamous Clan structure to the societal level.

And they decided they didn’t need to teach him, they said, “Hilfinger it out.”

When these cultures have an overthrow of their leadership, the bloodshed is epic until the new father figure takes over. Children from this family structure will have a really hard time understanding the Absolute Nuclear and Authoritarian since independence is prized in the Absolute Nuclear and Authoritarian and is a cancer to the Exogamous Clan structure.

The next stop on our world tour leads us to the Islamic world, which pretty much all follows the same family structure:

The Endogamous Clan.

The Endogamous Clan is essentially and nearly exactly the Islamic world.

These are marriages based on arranged cousin marriages.
There isn’t much family stress since everyone is already family and is already inbred related so everyone pitches in.
Dad busy? There’s an uncle who will help you out. The “Patriarch” rarely has to rule because the uncles will form an opinion and go with it.
Women aren’t outsiders, and they are the ones who end up setting up the marriages, picking and choosing which cousins should marry.
They consider the entire world a clan, and their goal is to carry their clan, Islam, to everyone.
If you’re outside the clan, however, slavery is just fine with them.

If you think about having kids with your cousin and go, “ewww, gross” you’ve been inoculated against Endogamous Clans. For good reasons: one study in Bradford (U.K.) determined that childhood birth defects in Bradford was double the national average – largely because of Pakistani first cousin marriage. I guess it’s okay for them to sleep with their second cousin, if the first cousin doesn’t mind.

Islamic pubs are the worst, no drinking, no dancing. But the women can get stoned.

The English and the Pakistani (and other East Asians from Endogamous Clans) living in England will never really understand each other. The English will see a group that they want to assimilate, and the Pakistani are there only for conquest. Why did Pakistani kebob shop owners chop up and cook and sell an English child (to other English people)?

The kid was not a member of the Clan, so who cares? This is a significant cultural clash that has yet to come to a head.

The last major group is from sub-Saharan Africa. This was classified by Todd as a Flexible System. There’s a system, but that system is defined as “whatever”.

This is primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, and Todd found it also in the United States cotton belt.
Monogamy? Polygamy? Whatever.
Women raise the children while men wage war and herd cattle.
A large number of the men don’t have the opportunity to have sex: polygamy leads to periodic civil wars.
Men join together in war bands to take women or create social status.
Power is important, but responsibility is not prized.

Africa has been chaotic, and it appears that much (not all!!) of the social system seen in the United States today from African descendants has been a replication of the Flexible System, which appears to be in many cases becoming the predominant urban family structure for all people, not just African descendants.

Since Ford V. Ferrari was such a hit, Chevy tried to release a film: Total Recall.

The final two are Asymmetric and Anomic.

Asymmetric is:

Weird and limited to India, consisting of arranged marriages from the cousins of female relatives only.
It’s India, so like all things Indian it’s confused and chaotic and covered in curry powder.
I’d like to ignore it, but it’s like a billion people. But it’s a billion Indians, so I’ll ignore it.

India probably breaks every rule, primarily because regardless of the family structure, that structure also has to contend with the caste system. When I was interacting with Indians, they looked to see what caste I’d have been in if I were Indian. Due to several questions, they seemed convinced it would have been the warrior caste (they were warrior caste) so we were cool.

India will keep being India, and Indians (wherever they go) will want to hang out with other Indians more than anyone else, including getting all of their family hired.

What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him, and pitch to the rhino.

Anomic is:

No fixed structure, whatsoever.
Tribal, think rainforest tribal.
Consists of oppressive empires and peasants, with consisting of military dictatorships coupled with coups.
Comically ineffective at doing anything of note.

I have no doubt that Mssr. Todd would not write this book today in the current climate of moral relativism. In choosing to review cultures and compare them, by definition some will come up short in some way or another – the greatest burst of human invention, ever, came primarily from two family systems, the Absolute Nuclear and the Authoritarian. Cultures like the Exogamous Clan structure have provided innovation, but for the most part (until recently) tried to turn their back to the world since dealing with foreigners is, well, messy.

What did Malcom X name his son? Malcom XI.

But it does explain that to the CCP and Chairman Xi, if you are Chinese-American, you’re still Chinese. Back in (I think?) the year 2019 I read that China had naturalized 4,000 citizens from other countries. That’s not a typo. 4,000. Conformity comes from being Chinese, which is why I don’t really expect them to ever be interested in taking over the world. They like Chinese people, and I’m pretty sure they think they’re a separate species.

Will China fight for resources? Certainly. Will China fight for Taiwan? Yes, to the Chinese, those are just more Chinese. Does China want to control Japan or Korea or Vietnam? No. They want them to do what China wants, but China has been, historically, very happy staying at home, likely (in part) for the reasons Todd discussed related to family structure.

The endgame of this is complex – as family structure in nations changes due either to technological progress, social change (divorced moms), and/or the influx of foreign family patterns, the very ideology of nations is bound to change.

Family patterns may change, but remember, to an orphan a selfie will always be a family photo.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

“Without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other more aggressive ideologies then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear. That is why we’ll always need an army.” – Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

Geology is great, but geography is where it’s at.

The ideology of a group can come from many things, including the propaganda that we are all exposed to from a very young age. Another part of it comes from the family structure that we’re surrounded by. A French dude named Emmanual Todd spent a lot of time thinking about this in the 1970s, and decided that the ideology of a country, in part, could be determined by the family structure that the country. I was introduced to Mr. Todd’s ideas by the WhatIfAltHist YouTube® show. I recommend that show.

First, I was intrigued. A French guy named Todd.

Weird.

And who loses when I post an image of Heather Graham? No one.

Second, it felt right. One of the things that people often don’t rate highly enough in the world is genetics. Genetics are very powerful, and influence far more than just hair, skin and eye color or other merely physical attributes. No, from what I’ve seen, genetics very much impacts the basic way related people think. It’s as if family structure, that which literally gives birth to genetic structure, could be a selection mechanism to create and reinforce ideology as well. That would entirely be in line with my observations of both people that I know, as well as the flow of history.

Third, I was interested. What Todd had to say was based on the cultures that he saw in the world in the 1970s, which, due to unceasing hordes of unchecked illegals has now changed. What tensions might conflicting ideologies based on family structures bring to countries being invaded?

But they’re as close to me as steppe-brothers.

Let’s start with the family structure that was the one that came from England and was predominant in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Normandy:

Absolute Nuclear.

It’s what I grew up thinking a normal family was – the term nuclear family was coined in 1924, and has nothing to do with atom bombs.
The mother and father met and chose each other for love.
They lived in their own house.
Their children were expected to become independent, be responsible for themselves, and their lives, after they grew up, was in their own hands.
Parents could disinherit kids, and split up the inheritance however.
God judges individuals.
Societies are mostly stable, but when internal revolts happen, they are horrific.

This is the most successful culture in history, and has been amazing for freedom. Christianity and individual salvation plus independence and individual outcomes lead to structures where people have incentives to produce, and incentives to be moral.

Why can’t you trust an atom? Because they make up everything.

Many other cultures cannot understand this culture – it appears cold and impersonal, and it values freedom over equality. For this system to work, though, high social trust is required.

Absolute Nuclear is a big chunk of my genetics. But the majority of it is:

Authoritarian.

This is just Todd’s name. If I were to name it, I’d call it the Ancient Honor culture, or something like that. It is a very big part of the culture of the United States, especially from the Southern States. Why?

This culture is that the Germans, Scandinavians, Czechs, Irish, Scots, Welsh had historically, and it also describes the Koreans, Japanese, and northern Spaniards (where Franco was from).
Only the oldest son inherits, so the clan follows the eldest.
What do the other sons do? Warriors or warrior monks so they have something to do.
The story of the society is one of a lineage that goes back through time. If you worry just a bit too much about your family story (like I might) and care about its honor (like I do) this may describe you.
The story of the society is one of the lineage of the family, the sense of history, stubbornness, and that everything thrown in front of you makes you stronger. Only the Irish can destroy the Irish, only the Scots can destroy the Scots. Losing makes them tougher.
Women have significant value, unlike in many other cultures.
These cultures typically have a large middle class, because if you don’t inherit, you’d best figure something out.
There is very little oppression in these societies, because individualism is cultivated – people like each other and will fight for their group.
These people are awful at creating empires – it took the British to unite the Irish since these groups are like a bag of cats. That’s why Japan and Germany and Scotland and Ireland were so hard to unify.

This is a very successful culture, historically, and is the other “big” Western culture. If I come across someone who wants to fight because I accidently took his parking space? Tell me you’re Scots-Irish without telling me you’re Scots-Irish. The tensions between the Authoritarians (South) and Absolute Nuclear (North) led to the Civil War.

I met the Godfather of the Scottish mafia. He made me an offer I couldn’t understand.

This is the rest, and possibly the majority of my genetics, and by far the majority of The Mrs.

Don’t make her mad on a point of honor.

The third culture that’s now impacting the United States is the one from (most of) France, (most of) the Italians, South America, Mexico, and Central America.

Egalitarian Nuclear:

In this structure, all sons inherit equally. There are several properties I’m aware of where the Spanish father split up the property (five miles by five miles) so his sons could all have access to the river that ran down the middle, so they could water their cattle. Fast forward to today, and there are several properties that are 200 feet wide by five miles long so they can still get access to the river.
Marriages aren’t arranged and females have huge influence.
Because everything gets split up into weird chunks, rich people end up buying the odd land and the sons end up with nothing to give for inheritance. This leads to massive wealthy inequality.
Because the families are equalitarian, they want equity in society, which leads to a series of revolutions because their property always ends up in the hands of the rich.
Why have most South American countries had a zillion revolutions, constitutions, communist uprisings, while the United States has had the same Constitution?
Since the daughters get nothing, it leads to an “alpha-male” dictator, but they’re comically bad dictators (think Chavez or Mussolini) that don’t get much done because, equality leads to zero discipline.

When this family structure is a significant minority, it ends up running the country. France. Italy. Most South American countries. Mexico. Why are they this mixed bag of equalitarian nonsense? Because of this social structure. Since often a minority population ends up deciding how the country is run, exactly how many Egalatarian Nuclear people can we let in from South America and still have a country that values freedom over equality?

My humor is a lot like food in Venezuela. Most people don’t get it.

We’ve created new family structures that Monsieur Todd never thought about back in the 1970s, since they were just in the process of becoming. What ideology will they create?

I have enough material for another post on this, so I’ll probably skip economics and do one more on Wednesday on family structure and ideology.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off. I walked through the room naked. (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart. He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects. One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical. I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand. You can read it in Ted’s work. Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski: it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy. People like the struggle. I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe. Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days. Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder: “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe: “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge. Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame. But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks? A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key. And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy. Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him. Imagine fighting a kitten. I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals: they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there. All the time. They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them. Maybe winning an Oscar™. If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders: they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this: the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier. Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers. They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God. They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me. Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo. Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good. I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone. We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears. That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live. So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not). One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out. But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself. You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House. The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so. Men need quests. Society needs quests. We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning. And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry: it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock. Grug grab other rock, smash rock. Rock eventually breaks. Grug happy.

Another example: Grug want break rock. Grug create iron ore mine. Grug create coal mine. Grug find tree. Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer. Grug smash rock. Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example: Grug want to break rock. Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur. Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite. Grug break rock real fast. Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot. The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient. It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time. And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well? A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method. And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet. Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine. Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once. It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman? More like Grugman.

Yes. Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas. What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea. Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck. And they were always digging. I think they might be part mole. Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly: couldn’t buy gas. At all. Even with cash. Credit card usage? Nope. And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber. But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet. In Alaska. In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely. Information used to be hard to move. Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places. It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear. Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China. Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain. But books burn. The ephemeral website? It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon. Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today. I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice. Why would they? Their methods, their lives are the most direct. They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus. It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike. The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it. Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon. He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why? There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done. He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz. Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct. How fragile? Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom. I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Be Bold. Life Is Too Short For Anything Else.

“That’s a bold statement.” – Pulp Fiction

A lion would never drive drunk. But a tiger would.

One of the problems with life in Modern Mayberry is that it often moves at a fairly slow pace. Especially in the time when an adult is focused on raising kids, the days tend to blur one into the next.

If your life is good, this isn’t really a problem. When I was younger, my life was spent going to weddings. Now that I’m older, more time is spent going to funerals. It is important to not get mixed up as to which you’re at, although sometimes “My condolences,” is appropriate at a wedding and I’d almost be willing to bet $20 that at least one person will say “Congratulations!” after my funeral.

However, in the event that I’m wrong, collecting on that bet might be a problem.

Maybe I’ll add bikini girls. Will that put the “fun” in funeral?

One thing that facilitates this blur is reading stuff on the Internet. One blogger I read (LINK) is giving up doomscrolling (or reading the unending list of negative stories that are available in the news) for Lent. I suppose you could leave him a comment, but you’d have to wait a few weeks to get a response.

But when it comes to doomscrolling, there are huge numbers of these stories available. The business model is simple: scary stuff attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs means revenue. As I look at my own past posts, I’m thinking that, even though I talk about a lot of scary stuff, that I’m mostly relentlessly positive. I can even recall a comment section or two where I’m called a Pollyanna because I’m so positive.

What do we want? Hearing aids. When do we want them? Hearing aids.

I can live with that. Being positive, being for things and knowing that, in the end it’s all going to work out keeps me positive. In most cases (most, not all!) the things I write about don’t make me angry, either.

Again, stress on the “mostly”. And I try not to get worked up about events occurring half-a-world away that I can’t control or even much influence. Things are what they are.

And, for most of us, things are generally pretty good on a day-to-day basis, even when things aren’t perfect. Even on a bad day, most parts of the day are good. The thing that gets us is built into the doomscrolling: spending time worrying about things that simply have not happened.

My friend wrote me a text that said, “What do you get when you mix a gullible person with an optimistic person?” I replied, “I don’t know!” He texted back, “Read it again.”

I write about the coming Civil War 2.0 not in hopes that it comes, rather to make people aware that it’s coming. Do I sit and worry about it daily?

No!

That would take away from the time I spend thinking about the Roman Empire.

In this moment, there are things that I could let bother me. However, I realize that letting them bother me gives them power over me when that’s the last thing I want. “Take not counsel of your fears,” is attributed to George S. Patton, Jr. I’m sure other people said the same thing in similar ways in the thousands of years that people have been saying things, but when Patton says it, well, it’s been said.

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.” – GSP

If I let my fears fill me up, I live a life of fear regardless of if it’s a perfect 63°F, and I have a wonderful cigar, and a great book beside me while sitting in a comfortable chair.

I think fear comes to people as they age. I certainly saw Pa Wilder get more and more cautious as he aged. I could give a few examples, but it doesn’t much matter. I did notice. And when I saw the tendency to do it start to crop up in myself, at least I understood what was going on and I could choose to be cautious or choose to be bold.

I think, however, that as I get older it is precisely the time to be bolder. Life moves in a blur, and days stack up faster, so they should mean something. If I knew I had only a year? What would I do?

Something to make that year worthwhile. If a month? A day?

The shorter the time left, the more that boldness matters and the less caution should. If I only had an hour of my life left, you can damn sure bet I’d do something with it, as much as I could.

Oh, that’s Samuel L. Jackson, not the famous English dude Samuel Johnson. I guess that’s the Netflix® version of the quote.

But life is built on compound interest. The more I try to write, the better I get. The more I lift, the stronger I get. The time to start is now.

The actions should be bold. While my days may pass fast, the more I can do with them, the more I will do.

When I pass, what will be left are the lives I’ve touched, the children that I’ve raised, the ways I’ve made the world better, and the words that I have written. Since the restraining order dictates who I can touch, and the lessons to the children are mainly done, that leaves making the world better and writing.

Even a full human lifetime isn’t enough, because they are so very short. But I’ll make do. With the remaining decades (hopefully) of my life, how big a dent can I kick in the Universe?

I guess I’ll see. And I’ll smile some, every day. And enjoy that cigar, and book, and chair when I’m not being bold.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”