Health – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Want To Get Something Big Done? Start Small.

“However, before satisfaction would be mine, first things first. Wiggle your big toe.” Toe wiggles. “Hard part’s over.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Why do the French have small breakfasts? Because one egg is un oeuf.

So, this was the topic that was originally scheduled for Friday – you can tell it has a much more “Friday” feel. Back to the usual schedule on Wednesday.

Sometimes starting something is the hardest part. When you look at the time and effort that I’ve put forth on this blog over the last three years, it’s been several thousand hours. If I had to confront that level of sweat on day one it would have been daunting.

“Do I want to put that my life and energy into it?” But every great effort starts with something small.

I was reading Scott Adams’ book, Loserthink, the other day. The book goes through dozens of topics. I recommend it even though I haven’t figured out how to get Scott Adams to pay me to recommend it.

One of the (many) stories that Mr. Adams relates is that he has a formula that he used when faced with something large that he’d like to try. Think of the absolute smallest thing you could do to start. Then? Take that small action. Start. Do it.

There is an invisible presence, which reviews our actions, passes judgement, and decides who lives and dies. But enough about the NSA.

When Mr. Adams decided he was going to start writing comics and become a world famous cartoonist, the step he took was to go to an art store and buy some high quality paper and ink. How long did that take? A few minutes. But that first step was important. Becoming a world famous cartoonist is hard, and requires thousands of hours of effort. But buying some paper is easy. Now, making a toilet paper joke is hard: I tried making a toilet paper joke at the start of the Coronavirus panic. Nobody got it.

Adams talks about his preferred strategy to get out of bed when he doesn’t want to: do the smallest movement possible. “Wiggle your little finger.” Once that action has been taken, you can move. You’ve built up momentum, you can take the next step. You’ve started with just a single ounce of motivation rather than having to chug an entire pitcher.

One alarm that always wakes me up? Rumble strips.

I do something similar when the alarm rings and I just don’t want to get out of bed, The Mrs. doesn’t have this problem because I got her an alarm clock that swears at her. Every morning she’s in for a rude awakening. Me? I think of the first three things I’m going to do, in detail. They’re easy things. Sit up. Turn off the alarm. Stand up.

Then I do them.

But by then, I’ve got momentum going, and I’ve already passed the toughest test of the day (so far). I got out of bed. I know that it’s the lowest level of achievement, probably somewhat similar to that friend of mine who was bragging he had a “participant trophy” wife, but it’s a start.

Heck, I even follow this strategy with each time I write a post. I open up Word®. It’s just selecting one icon and pressing. It’s easy. But I’ve started. I then open up half a dozen or so tabs for making memes in a new window. Then I start typing. But having those small actions to prepare for the larger post (that can take hours to finish) gets me going. It’s now automatic and almost a ritual.

The Aztecs had a wonderful motto: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

This strategy even works for me on a far larger scale. Years ago, one particular Thursday night I was at home with The Mrs. I was planning on taking a vacation day on Friday. We were enjoying a nice glass of wine while Pugsley and The Boy were upstairs asleep. We’d kissed them goodnight, which is sweet. There is nothing more wholesome than a goodnight kiss. Unless you’re in prison.

I digress. We were having wine downstairs . . . then the phone rang.

My boss was on the other end – there was an emergency at work, and they needed help. I ended up working 12 hours a day for 45 days straight without a day off. During that time, the sheer volume of work that I had to do was huge.

Every day, I started by making a list. An exceptionally detailed list. Why?

My chiropractor has just one thing on his to-do list: get back to work.

There were hundreds of things to do. By breaking them down to the forty or fifty that I needed to get done that day, I could focus on those items. Without the list, I’d have been distracted by the sheer scale of stuff that needed to be done. With the list, it gave me concrete tasks that I could do to get progress.

If I was overwhelmed? I could just pick the next item. It might not be the most important item. But it kept me moving.

At the end of each day, I’d summarize the things we’d gotten done and the major things we had to do the next day. The next morning? Back to the list.

By breaking up big, complex tasks into small ones, it’s easy to get going. Once I’ve got momentum up, the list often becomes irrelevant – I’m accomplishing everything on it, and only looking back to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

Vikings aren’t afraid of death. As pagans, they know they’ll be Bjørn again.

It has been my experience that people are happiest when they are working on meaningful work at the edge of their ability. But that kind of work is scary to start – the edge of ability means that failure is a real possibility. Often, it’s hard to start because of that fear.

The solution?

Move your little finger. And get going.

Too Much News? Take A Step Back.

“I’m a reasonable guy, but, I’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things.” – Big Trouble in Little China

An Antifa member, a communist, and a guy living in his mom’s basement walk into a bar. He orders a drink.

“That’s it, I’m going to have to stop,” The Mrs. said.

John Wilder: “Stop what? I mean, please don’t stop gourmet* night.”

The Mrs.: “No. The news. I’m going to have to stop reading it. I’m just so mad I can’t see straight.”

I agreed with The Mrs. I usually do: she knows where most of the shooting irons are, and I sleep pretty heavy. The Mrs. had been following the news of our current national situation, which is usual. But in this case, The Mrs. had been getting pretty mad.

It was fairly obvious. The Mrs. often talked politics with me when I got home, but this week it was different. Her voice was louder, and she was visibly angry. This wasn’t like her at all, unless I had forgotten to install that hardwood flooring I’d promised to put in. Five years ago.

“If it bleeds, it leads” was first used in 1989 to describe the practice in journalism of focusing on the most horrific story possible. Even though the phrase was new in 1989, the practice wasn’t: there’s a reason that we got into a war with Spain, and it didn’t have a lot to do with the U.S.S. Maine.

Really, this was like picking on that one kid whose parents dressed him in a collared shirt and tie for school.

But back in 1989, news was different and less available: there was the evening news, newspapers, for the first five minutes on the top and bottom of the hour on the radio, and monthly magazines. Sure, if you had CNN®, you could get a constant stream of news.

In practice most people didn’t hook into the news. They spent time living their lives. You’d think that would make it easier for tyranny to take root. Not so. But more on that later.

Back in 1989 the news simply occupied a much smaller place in public consciousness. I think that 9/11 was what changed Americans (I can’t speak to other countries) for good, and addicted us to a continuous stream of atrocity and terror, as we all waited for the next event that would transform our lives.

I still miss Weekly World News. Wonder what ever happened to batboy?

Now news is created and brought into our lives constantly. We’re never more than a click away from news. And news is crafted to trigger our brains. Which parts? Not the parts that glow or fizz or sparkle or whatever it is a brain does when we’re happy. No, the news is crafted to stimulate an easier and more powerful set of emotions: rage and fear.

The news is extreme. And since we now have news that casts a net across the world, you can see:

Time-tested principles and values tossed in a heap weekly,
New divisions in society delivered daily,
And new outrages, fed straight to your smartphone hourly.

It seems like too much. And it is. Tyranny seems to love this situation. The important portions of news are buried in the static. When we watched half an hour of news, we had to focus on the important parts. Certainly it was easier to bury things from the American public back when news was less a part of our immediate lives, but now the news is a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour source of distraction, how often are we so inundated we can’t sort the out the important threads from the millions of false leads?

We don’t have to live like this.

Wait until he reads what the mice are up to.

Scott Adams, Dilbert® cartoonist mentioned in one of his articles that he didn’t watch scary or sad movies. He avoided them because he didn’t want to watch things that made him unhappy. It wasn’t a casual choice for him – it was a rule.

Mr. Adams probably wouldn’t do so well in our house, since we consider Predator to be kid friendly. Heck, when Pugsley (then about 9) saw me field dressing a deer I was worried that he’d be squeamish. Nope. Pugsley was ready to put it on the grill.

I think Mr. Adams is probably a bit on the extreme side. I’m not criticizing, the special sauce on his burger is working out pretty well for him. You don’t have to remove yourself that far from the reality of the situation.

But like The Mrs., you can step back for a bit, too.

Sure, things are rough in this minute if you watch the news. You can only control so much, and can’t (at all) control the actions of Leftist big city governments in Seattle or Minneapolis or in dozens of other cities across the country.

Beer is probably a good start with your preps. Don’t forget to rotate the stock!

None of this is telling you not to prepare. You should. If we’re this far down and you don’t have a Plan B? Shame on you. Work on that. But the news won’t help you prepare for 2021 when the aliens show up. Shut out the noise, step back, and think. If you want to prepare by stocking up on food, do that now. If you want to prepare by stocking up on ammo, do that now. And if you plan to bug out at friend’s place when things go bad? You’d better toss him some money now so you’re showing up to your supplies that he’s keeping for you, and not expecting that he has planned for 34 of his closest friends to show up and eat his preps.

For most people reading this, in this moment you have every physical need met. The troubles you have already conquered are in the rearview mirror. You’ve done great. Congratulate yourself.

The troubles you may face aren’t certainties. There’s no need to fear them now. Prepare yourself? Certainly. But do it cheerfully. Tomorrow will be a great day. The Sun has yet to go out of business.

Turn off the news and your cell phone. Enjoy this day, and prepare for the rough days ahead. You’re up to the challenge.

*Gourmet Night was inspired by the ABC® television show Hannibal. Hannibal was a series about Hannibal Lecter, the character from Silence of the Lambs, but portrayed by Danish actor Mads Mikklesen, who does even better than Hopkins with the character. But the show itself has some wonderfully creepy scenes where Hannibal is cooking a fancy dinner and you have no idea if he’s cooking pigs or people. Oddly enough, this inspired The Mrs. to cook intricate dishes for dinner like beef Wellington or ribeye with crème sauce. Hence, gourmet night, which has been a success at our house.

But wherever does The Mrs. get such tender meat?

500th Post, Including Nic Cage

“Well, my normal fee is $500, but seeing that it’s for you, I’m gonna need it in advance.” – Futurama

You can always tell an identity thief’s Twitter page. Their pronouns are ‘you/yours.’

Dear Readers and Friends,

This is my 500^th post here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, so I’m going to celebrate by writing a letter to you, which is great because I don’t have to steal from other bloggers research notes and prepare. Yay! Up front, I want to say that I appreciate you coming by more than you know, and I appreciate your comments, too.

I thought I’d start out by answering a question I’ve seen on the blog. I have seen more than one comment of the general flavor: Why do you do this? I’m not sure if it was:

Why do you do this? or,
Why do you do this? or,
Why do you do this?

The answer to all of those questions is the same: I really enjoy doing this. That’s at least the start of the answer. Do I have some other goals with this project someday? Sure. Maybe. But I love writing and all of those other projects depend on that fact.

I must love it though: the schedule is rough.

I heard there are no cats on Mars – Curiosity got to them first.

Often I don’t manage to finish writing these gems until it’s 4:30AM or so. On a couple of occasions I’ve jumped right from writing a post overnight into the shower to get ready for work. Why does it take so long? Well, there’s work, and then time with family, and then the time spent smoking cigars that I lit with flaming $100 bills in my hot tub filled with rare Mongolian* champagne.

Those are things I just won’t give up.

So in order to write, I have to replace the one thing that’s sort-of negotiable – sleep.

It didn’t used to take me until 4:30AM to do a post, I’d generally knock them out by 2AM at the latest. I blame The Mrs. for it taking so much longer. The Mrs. told me in 2018, in no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t working at my writing. It was okay, she said.

But.

The Mrs. then told me that the quality of my posts hadn’t gotten better in some time. Really thinking about this, I realized that The Mrs. was right. I’d been coasting in my writing like Nic Cage has been coasting in his acting since 1998.

Despite all my rage, I’m still just Princess Cage.

When I was younger, that sort of criticism might have stung me or I might have ignored it like Nic Cage does. But 2018 me realized that ego is a tool. I can dial it up, or dial it down. And dialing it down is the only way a person can have a receptive mindset so that they will listen, take advice, and improve. So I listened. And I studied. And then I did what I did in college when I had a test in Numerical and Voodoo Simulation Methods for Advanced Partial Derivatives: I worked really, really hard.

The problem with hard work is that it takes time. The odd thing I’ve found is, as I’ve gotten better (my perspective, yours may vary) I cannot abide by turning out work that I consider less than my version of my best effort. I just can’t. And the paradox of this is, as you get better, your best effort does, too. And that takes time.

If only I had low standards like Nic Cage.

Seriously, is he hiding both his receding hairline and his butt?

An example: commenters here are really sharp. One commenter (I’d mention your name, but don’t want to draw attention unless you want me to) mentioned an error I made, and followed up with, “I’m not giving you a hard time, I just got the idea from your writing that you’d want to know.” That was a really, really perceptive statement.

Old me who was driven more by ego? Would he want to know? No.

Me now? Yes.

I want to make these posts as perfect as I can make them. I want to make people laugh, out loud, and be a little embarrassed that they did. I want to present ideas that people haven’t had, and have them be intrigued at the new horizon I’ve opened up. Either one is a win. In my very best posts, I hope I do both, and have you laugh as your mind expands. It’s a good thing, because when you’re laughing as your skull gets bigger, it distracts a little from the pain.

This guy should be feeling zero pain.

What happens when I think I’ve written a great post? I hit “publish” and schedule it for 7:29AM Eastern, and I think I’ve done a good job, I’m as happy and excited as Johnny Depp when he finds out he’s purchased square whiskey bottles that don’t roll under the bed. I find it nearly impossible to sleep because I’m so happy.

When you’ve been up for 22 straight hours and are too excited to go to sleep?

That’s a pleasure. Or it’s Johnny Depp some Hollywood® celebrity on an ether binge.

That joy went from showing up monthly, to showing up weekly to now happening most (but not all) of the time. That’s killer when you have to get up 100 minutes after your head hits the pillow, being so excited you can barely sleep. But I still go to sleep with a smile on my face.

That’s not the whole story. I’ve never heard of a writer that writes only to write and shove boxes of paper in a trunk. A writer writes to be read, even if they’re writing a personal journal – they imagine their kids will read it someday. With me, as I mentioned above, it’s at least partially about making people laugh. Making people surprised at a new fact, idea, or concept works, too. But in order for people to experience that uplifting humor or mind-expanding concept, they’ve got to read it.

I try to write so the message will be timeless. But yet often the messages and the inside jokes are tied to our time and culture. That’s a contradiction.

Yes, a meme on a guy who was burned at the stake 420 years ago. Oh. Burn? 420? How blunt.

I bought Giordano Bruno’s book The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (published 1584 A.D.). Why? It was one of the breadcrumbs I was looking at for some reason I can’t remember. Then the book showed up. After about six pages, I realized he was making references to stuff you could have only seen in the 1584 version of The Tiger King®. Let’s be real: in the year 2050 nobody is going to remember Joe Exotic or Stupid Carol unless they follow the footnotes.

Even though Bruno was burnt at the stake for his dangerous thoughts, going through his (relatively half-baked) ideas was going to take twenty minutes a page to sift through the references. Likewise, in the year 2436, I’m pretty sure that no one will get any of my Escape From New York® references about everyone thinking that Snake Plissken™ was dead. The good news is that I don’t expect the Catholic Church in Italy to sentence me to death via Inquisition.

I guess no one expects the Italian Inquisition, which I guess is one of their main weapons?

In the year 2025, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find: Joe Exotic (Zager and Evans and Wilder)

Regardless, I’ll own the topical jokes that I make. It should at least be interesting to the archaeologists in the year 3351, so there’s that. Bruno had friends that put up with him while he was writing his crazy books filled with made up heresy.

And I’ve got you guys.

I spent an hour putting together a list of people and commenters who helped along the way. I got to forty, and realized I wasn’t even halfway close to a good list. Then I had the realization that even when I got to a good list, I’d be leaving someone important off.

Dangit. And I thought I’d be getting to bed early tonight.

I had one guy who worked for me who told me, “John, you’re one of the first people I’ve worked for that says, ‘Thank you’ on a regular basis and I appreciate that.” He’d worked for over forty years when he told me that, and that meant something to me. Too often we walk through life without gratitude to those we are close to, those we work with. And those that care for us. I want to be clear – I’m 100% grateful to the people that have helped me grow and introduced me to larger audiences and commented here.

How long will I keep the writing up? My best guess is at least 750 more posts. That’s five years. And, if this experiment goes the way I think it will? They’ll have to pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands because I’ll never stop because I’ll be court jester to the new Emperor of North America.

Michael J. Fox was a little shaky on me using this meme.

We will be looking at difficulties in the future – I think we all can feel that. But look around and realize that we can and should be thankful for the people around us, and the good fortune we find. And I am thankful for you, and thankful for the circumstances that brought us all together. If you’re reading this, that includes you.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Sincerely,

John

*0.00075% of my readers are Mongolians (and that’s an actual number). I like to think it’s The Hu.

Questions: Important For Llamas And Finding The Truth

“Have you calculated the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Sean Connery is a stickler for grooming. I was stuck in a burning building while he was using the extinguisher to keep a path open for me. Then he told me, “shave yourself!”

A few years ago I was meeting with a person that reported to me at work. I was asking a question with a yes or no answer. One thing that being in thousands of hours of corporate meetings has taught me is that if you ask an open ended question, people will talk. And talk. And talk. Even if they have nothing to say – those meeting room corporate doughnuts aren’t going to eat themselves.

So, a lot of my questions were phrased in the form of, “Do you know where the llama is?”

My company doesn’t use llamas except for unlicensed medical experimentation to find a cure for chronic nose picking, so in this case “llama” is really easier than referencing the “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” that we really make.

There are really only two answers:

“Yes, John Wilder, the llama is in the break room playing beer pong with Vladimir Putin.”
“No, John Wilder, I have no idea.”

Well, I guess we know what’s going to happen in July.

A pattern that I had noticed was that when the answer was “Yes, I know where the llama is,” people would just say, “Yes.”

Simple. We’re done. Move on to the next question.

But if people didn’t know where the llama was, what I mentally thought of as “The Story” started. The story had a million variants: “No, John Wilder, I don’t know where the llama is because it had sticky glands and we were out of llama soap and a friend came in from out of town and I just quit heroin and Vladimir Putin took off his shirt and making sweet talk to the llama last week.”

The Story is long. The Story isn’t really relevant.

People didn’t want to tell me “No.” If they had, and knowing where the llama was mattered, I could follow up with a question. Most of the time my question was, “Well, when are you going to find the llama?” Frankly, I’ve heard more excuses than Joe Biden has lost memories, so “Why don’t you know where the llama is?” was most of the time something I didn’t really care about. But they made the decision that I cared why they didn’t know where the llama was.

Never worry about food when you travel with llamas. Alpaca lunch.

I had one very bright employee, Bill Nothisrealname, that a recent college grad. He started to explain why he didn’t know where the llama was: he was winding up to tell The Story.

I stopped him.

“Bill, you were first in your class in high school, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then you went to college at Southern North Eastern Midwestia State, which is a pretty good school. Heck, I bet that you were in the top ten in GPA in your degree?”

“Yeah, I was in the top five of the class.”

I gestured at the offices up and down the hallway. “Bill, everyone here was at the top of their class in high school and graduated at the top of their class from college in a degree just as tough as yours. My boss, Boris. He’s as smart as a Vulcan that crossbred with a computer and has the personality to match. When he asks me a question, he wants me to answer that question. He’s no dummy.

“And Boris isn’t afraid to ask questions, either. He’s realized that even as a top executive in the company, he doesn’t and can’t know everything.”

Bill nodded.

I never really liked that Coppola movie, Alpaca Lips Now.

“Here’s what I think. When you were in third grade, you were smart. When the rest of the class didn’t know the answer, the teacher looked at you, right?”

“Yes.”

“And that didn’t change in high school. Or, for you, even in college. I think that you think you have to know the answer, because you were the smart kid. Bill, everyone, and I mean everyone here is that smart. You weren’t hired because you knew all of the answers – you were hired because you were smart, and had good character. Don’t be afraid to not know everything – asking questions is a sign of power. And . . . answer the question that was asked.

“Bill, do you know where the llama is?”

“No.”

But don’t-a worry – health is her new issue. She’s still all-in for Ollamacare.

I moved on to the next question. In this case, the llama wasn’t all that important, except as it related to teaching Bill that he didn’t need to know everything, and that asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of self-confidence. And if it sounded like the exchange was mean, it really wasn’t. Bill’s worldview was just a bit off. Besides, I knew that once Putin got his claws into a really pretty llama like this one, we wouldn’t see either of them until they’d ridden through the mountains together and hunted the Rocky Mountain Spotted Poodle – the only true sport for men.

The point is still valid. Whenever I’ve seen a good leader, that leader isn’t afraid to ask questions, and isn’t afraid to admit that they don’t know everything. Part of writing this blog is me answering my own questions. And I have to be right – you’re a tough but fair crowd, and you tell me when my participle is dangling.

Questions are important.

The first thing I like to question is myself. Scott Adams says that two people might watch the same event and give it entirely different meaning – he calls it watching two movies on one screen. An example is Trump: Leftists think that everything, and I mean everything he does is comprised of a pure evil that requires he eat a live puppy every day. There’s even a name for it: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The symptoms include being triggered, literally shaking, wandering around in a circle muttering, “impeach . . . impeach . . . impeach.” Thankfully, many sufferers have found work as extras on The Walking Dead.

That’s one movie. There’s a second group that views Trump as a genius God Emperor who is sixteen steps ahead, playing 11-dimensional chess. This group thinks that the riots are perhaps his crowning achievement since he can use the riots to . . . ummm, I’m not sure what. I bet that plan shows up soon.

Both groups are wrong. My experience is you can talk to the God Emperor crowd, but the TDS sufferers just can’t discuss Trump. At all.

How much of my reality am I allowing to be filtered? How much am I deluding myself? These are the questions I repeatedly ask as I look for Truth.

Or you could just take their lunch money and buy yourself something nice.

The second question are my sources. People write all sorts of things, and on the Internet I can find a theory that all of the Challenger space shuttle crew survived the explosion and are still living today. Why? Because the Earth is flat. Really, that’s what they believe. There are also people who believe that the world is run by reptilian aliens who run the banks.

Of course those are absurd. The Internet is so questionable when it comes to facts that I’ve even seen Internet reports that I have hair. But how many shades of truth do we believe in each day without checking? I know that I’ve been shocked when I do research for Wilder, Wealthy and Wise that it’s not what I know that shocks me: it’s what I know that isn’t right. Who knew kittens couldn’t fly, even if you used a really big slingshot to give them a good takeoff?

The next question are my viewpoints. How many are wrong? In some cases I have taken years to figure out what I think about a subject, because I just hadn’t figured out the right way to look at it: I just don’t have a mental or moral model that fits it properly. I ended up being a ping-pong ball. There were good points on each side. How do the pros and cons line up?

When I was younger, I was more of a pure libertarian, even sometimes a Libertarian. I believed that if McDonalds™ wanted to sell me a hydrogen bomb and I had the cash, I should be able to order a McNuke®. As I get older, maybe not. And I now think that young children shouldn’t have guns: they’re much more effective using a crew-served weapon like a heavy machine gun or a mortar since they can overcome their inherent weakness by working together. If only a six year old could lift artillery shells….

My militia may be small, but they work for chocolate milk.

The final question is what can I learn from others? And I can only do that by asking questions – and having the humility to listen to the answers, no matter how stupid they are. I kid. I really have learned a lot by listening instead of talking.

So, anybody know where the llama is? Did another one fall in love with Putin?

Your one job? Be a good person.

“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?” – Flight of the Phoenix

Well, at least someone gave this post two thumbs up.

My older brother, John Wilder (our parents were notoriously uncreative), got a job at a motel when he was in college. His duty was to sleep in the apartment above the front desk, and if anyone wanted a room late at night, to get up out of bed and check them in. Technically, he got paid to sleep on the job. When I try to explain that’s what I’m doing to my employer, they seem to think it’s a violation of company rules. They won’t even listen when I explain I won’t be sleepy on the job if I just sleep on the job.

Go figure.

One day the owner of the motel was looking for someone to do an extremely important job: sweep the parking lot every Sunday. As I had heard of a broom, my brother put in a good word for me, and I ended up with my first official job. As I don’t recall quitting, they might be irritated at me because I haven’t been in to work in decades.

This was a job that I was well suited for, since I was willing to work for the one-ish hour a week (on Sunday) sweeping up the parking lot. I even had a time card, and got paid minimum wage. So early each Sunday morning I’d get on my ten speed and bike down to the motel and sweep the parking lot.

My bike kept trying to kill me, though. It was a vicious cycle.

The best part wasn’t the few bucks after tax that I made, but rather sitting down with my older brother and having breakfast in the office. I timed it so that I’d be done sweeping so we could watch a television show on TBS® together: The Wild, Wild West. I’m pretty sure I saw my first episode ever in that motel office.

By the time my brother and I watched it on the 12” screen in the office, The Wild, Wild West was decades old. And yet it was better than anything on prime time television. The Wild, Wild West, if you haven’t seen it, was Robert Conrad starring as secret agent James West in the 1870’s Western United States, complete with science fiction gadgets.

The villains were ludicrous. One episode featured obviously rubber cobras. And in one fight scene, Robert Conrad’s pants split wide open and they just kept filming – they were on a schedule, you know. On top of that, the costumes resembled nothing ever worn by an actual human in any place and during any period in human history.

Silly? Certainly. But why was the show good enough that I planned getting up early to watch it?

It’s because the character James West (and his fellow secret agent, Artemus Gordon) were good. West was a hero. He was smart. He could fight. He had wit. He laughed in the face of death. And if he had a weakness, it was for a lovely lady.

We’ll pretend that Will Smith took 1999 off. There can be only one Jim West.

Why was James West’s contemporary, Captain Kirk so popular? He was a cut from the same mold as West.

A boy needs a hero to look up to, who models virtue and strength. And you could do much, much worse than either James West or Captain Kirk. For some reason, the values of the networks changed, and The Wild, Wild West was cancelled (like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies) in 1970 even though they did great in the ratings. Hmm.

It was like there was a social agenda . . . .

As time has gone on, many of the “heroes” in movies and television are given “depth” cheaply by making them either morally weak or having the system they work for be compromised in some way. When a hero sneaks by like Mal Reynolds on Firefly, well, the system takes care of him pretty quickly.

Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.

Culture is, of course, upstream from politics. Culture is in part created by those heroes we are given to worship. Where do those heroes come from? Well, I mentioned James West, but I recall being pretty psyched about the Founding Fathers when I was a kid. Dad got pretty mad after the third cherry tree.

Our political reality is therefore created in part by media (now a tool of the Left) and academia (also a tool of the Left). And now the Founding Fathers are, instead of being revered for attempting to create a whole new type of country are regularly bashed in schools.

This attempt of the Left to steer culture obscures the real message. As a human, we have one (and only one) job.

That job is to be a good person.

It’s that easy. We waste a lot of time and effort wondering what it is we should be doing, when the answer is laughingly simple. You can’t control your height. You can’t control your intelligence. You can’t even control society. What can you control? Your actions and attitudes.

So, be a good person. That’s it.

The Left tries to obscure that simple truth because it has to. The Left doesn’t want you to be a good person. The Left wants you to be a Leftist. When I look at the memes from the Left, I’m astonished by two things:

They’re horribly unfunny, and
They’re based on a big wall of text.

No editing required.

The Lefty memes aren’t funny because funny requires truth. I wrote about that recently in The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition. When truth is strangled, humor disappears which is why tyrants will kill comedians before they kill dissidents. Humor is one of the most potent weapons of truth.

The Lefty memes have to rely on a large blocks of text because half of the meme is required to try to refute reality and re-define it. If you’ve ever heard an actual Leftist talk, half of it is redefining terms: boy used to mean boy, but now it’s an entire spectrum which might indicate that boy means boy on Monday, but when it’s time for the state track meet, boy means girl. Sometimes.

If you want to watch real Olympic®-level verbal gymnastics, watch a Leftist try to define “racism” – it’s a hoot. For bonus points, see if you can get them to read the dictionary definition.

That’s the good news. Your job, being a good person, is so simple it’s hard for even the Left to mess up. But I bet they could come up with a 600 word meme to describe that “good” is only “good” if it results in more Leftist votes and the abolition of private property.

I wish that I could promise to you that if you were a good person, you’d be rewarded. That would be a lie. Being good doesn’t guarantee a tangible reward, or even that you will succeed, or even be liked and admired in your time.

I’m not sure I can promise a leprechaun will deliver them, though.

Likewise, being bad doesn’t guarantee punishment. Heck, some research indicates that 4% of Chief Executive Officers of companies are psychopaths. If you think long enough, you can come up with several names of people who are downright evil, but seem to be thriving.

The other bad news is that being good is hard work. First, you have to figure out what good is. Society isn’t necessarily a help here. As I write this, The Boy is watching livestreaming rioting and property destruction across multiple cities. When I try to calibrate the whole good/bad thing, I’m not sure that looting a Target® or burning a Hyundai© serves much of a purpose.

Being good isn’t about being good for today, either. I could easily ruin a child by making life too easy, or not holding them to high standards. Would it result in a happy child now? Sure. But every parent knows that short term success builds children into monsters who end up burning a Target™ or a Hyundai®.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.

To be good, a moral code and the courage to follow it is required. Christianity is the one that built the West, and you could do worse – you rarely hear of Amish drive-by shootings, since everyone can hear the clip clop of the horses from pretty far away.

The Romans (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) had a well-developed system of virtue thousands of years ago and spent a lot of time working to figure out how to be good – that’s pretty close to the basis of the Stoics. Making it up your own individual code as you go can lead to rationalization and relativism. If it feels good, it may not be good – a lot of bad things feel very good at the time.

But generally, if it feels bad, it nearly always is.

Be a good person. Ask yourself: WW(JW)D? No, not John Wilder.

Jim West.

But make sure you get your sweeping done first.

Scott Adams, Debt, and Economic CPR

“Could be worse. Could be raining.” – Young Frankenstein

I heard Joe Biden was thinking of having a horse for a vice president, to make the economy stable.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert® and a close personal friend who I bonded with during the Olympic trials for rhythmic gymnastics. Okay, that’s not quite true. Scott’s a long-time acquaintance and we go to some of the same parties. Okay, that’s not quite true, either. Probably a more accurate statement is that I have quite a few of his books and he liked exactly two of my Tweets® back when I Twittered™ on a more regular basis.

The last one is actually true.

Anyway, Mr. Adams used to be a blogger, and had some interesting written posts over the years. Now, he spends more time doing a YouTube® show rather than blog (LINK). I listen to him a couple of times a month as I drive to work. I’d watch him, but the people on the sidewalk seem to mind. I guess I’m not as bad a driver as Helen Keller. But she had a real excuse, being a woman and all.

One comment I’ve heard Scott make at least twice during the COVIDanomic® crisis is that he’s optimistic about the economy restarting and taking right off. More or less he has said, “Unlike a war or some other catastrophe, everything we need for a successful economy is still sitting there. All we have to do is restart it.”

One thing I’ve enjoyed about Mr. Adams is that he’s incredibly perceptive, and the reason I listen to him is he’s a constant source of unique opinions. He was one of the first to pick Trump winning in 2016. Adams noticed the way Trump uses the language of persuasion and thought it would be the difference in the election. Me, I generally vote based on lawn signs, which is why I voted for my realtor last election.

Jeb was a pallbearer at his dad’s funeral, so he could let him down one final time.

Trump’s persuasion immediately frames and freezes the way people think about public figures. “Low energy Jeb (Bush),” and “Little Mike (Bloomberg)” were the verbal equivalents of public political homicide. Once Trump Tweeted® those phrases, ¡Jeb! and Little Mike could still campaign, but their chances of winning were the same as a belt made of watches – a waist of time.

So, when Mr. Adams speaks, I pay attention. New ideas are fairly rare and I like to steal mine while they’re fresh. As noted, many times he’s very perceptive in ways the news media forgot about being when they first caught Trump Derangement Syndrome. In this case, I think Scott is wrong. Everything may still be there, but you can no longer restart the economy to the previous levels than you could resuscitate Grover Cleveland by giving his corpse CPR. I mean, I can give CPR to a steak, but it still won’t moo.

Just like Grover Cleveland, everything is there, but putting him in a lawn chair and propping him up with a tropical cocktail (with umbrella) won’t really help. Everything’s there.

But it’s really not.

If only Grover Cleveland had Twitter®, I’m sure we’d still be laughing at the dank Benjamin Harrison memes.

Just like you can’t restart a heart after a few weeks of it sitting on the bedside table, you can’t restart an economy after months of it sitting dead in Coronapause©.

Let’s take the human body analogy a bit farther. A business is an organism. It consumes money and raw materials and produces goods and services as a byproduct. You could even call that byproduct a waste if it had anything to do with Kardashians. Companies eat metal and energy and use employee labor to pop out automobiles and beer and knee braces and fruitcake bloomers. And where would we be without fruitcake bloomers???

A lack of oxygen makes cells in your body die. No oxygen, no cells.

In business, a lack of money causes employees to die. Oops. They don’t die, they just don’t come in anymore, unless your business was in the Soviet Union, where ‘being terminated’ had an entirely different and completely Schwarzenegger-free meaning.

That lack of money for a business is called debt, and debt is what kills an economy. Just as weak people like The Mrs. complains that she needs a constant supply of oxygen after being stuck in the car with me after a week-long backpacking trip, debt is a mechanism to make sure that people and companies require a constant flow of money.

Why would a company be in debt?

Well, for small ones, the same reason that you or I would go into debt, namely because they don’t have the money to pay for everything up front. Debt can also provide money for the business to grow.

And moderate sized companies that you can buy on the stock market nearly have to be in debt. Without debt, a guy from New York would buy them out using the cash that the company had hanging around for a rainy day. They even have a name for this – a leveraged buyout (LBO). In an LBO, the person buying the company buys it with money that he borrowed against company he’s buying.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. An LBO is the same thing that happens when you sell your house. The person buying the house uses the house as the basis of the loan to buy the house from the owners.

And good news, it’s already several trillion higher than this!

But in the case of the company being bought out, the resulting company after the LBO is actually weaker and more likely to fail since it’s now saddled with debt. Just because you can borrow the money doesn’t mean you should borrow the money.

Giant sized companies don’t face this problem nobody but Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy his stake in Amazon®, plus he’d send his android double to come kill you if you tried to buy the company or made fun of his girlfriend. Apple® is similarly large, so they can have billions of dollars in cash on the books, too, but Apple™ doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yet.

The chain of death of a business in after WuFlu looks something like this:

Lockdowns stop businesses from being open, which
Stops the money coming to Employees so,
Employees stop buying, therefore
Businesses don’t have money.

Keep this cycle up for two months and in some cases you’ve used up more reserves than the business has. The result is either more debt, which the business still can’t pay because debt is the problem in the first place, or bankruptcy.

Well, TP is one problem that’s been wiped out.

The same cycle can be seen with landlords.

A dollar owed for rent isn’t owed to a random person,
It’s often owed to a person who has a mortgage against the property, and
If the rent isn’t paid, many times the landlord can’t pay his
But when the landlord can’t pay the mortgage, the bank isn’t paid.

If you’re worried about the bank, don’t. The old saying is that “Debt is always paid, either by the borrower, or the lender.” In the case of banks, there’s the three Fed Amigos: the Federal government, the Federal Reserve™, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The reason the FDIC was created was that banks failed faster and more frequently than FUNNY during the Great Depression. If people keep their money in Mason© jars in the backyard, it’s pretty hard for the other two Feds to track it, so they had to convince people the banks were safe.

They idea behind the FDIC is that if a bank goes bankrupt, the insurance will pay off the depositors. I was going to look up the total assets of the FDIC to see how big a crisis it could cover, but decided it was irrelevant. The Federal government (Treasury) or the Federal Reserve© or some group will simply print all of the money required to pay off the depositors.

I knew there was a reason that clowns scared me.

If my bank runs out of money? Well, the Fed will just lend them some. The FDIC is for amateur problems.

But lending money into a system where the primary problem is debt isn’t the solution, and it explains why things won’t just “start right up” after months where car sales are at 50% of last year, and airline flights are at 10% or less. The debt is the reason that the economy was able to fall so far, so fast. And you can’t loan more money to solve what is, at the core, a debt problem.

I do hope my close, personal friend Scott Adams is right. But I fear he’s wrong. But hey, we’ll always have those Olympic™ medals we won for rhythmic gymnastics.

COVID Nightmares: The Karen, The Mrs. Grundy, and the AWFL

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The Four Three Horsefaces of the Apocalypse. (Concept via JW, Photoshop via Pugsley, after an idea by Sergio Leone.)

“Okay, everyone, I’d like to welcome you all to this meeting of Karen Anonymous. Who would like to start?”

I raised my hand.

“Hi, I’m John, and I’m a Karen.”

The voices responded in unison, “Hi, John.”

“I’d like to tell you my story. Two weeks ago, my family ordered dinner. Due to the virus, we couldn’t go to the restaurant. They delivered. When they brought us the dinner, they forgot to bring the entrée for my son, The Boy.” I paused. “The Mrs. called them back and they said they would bring it. They forgot.”

Everyone in the room nodded. I could see the tension. This was fertile ground for a Karening.

“So, the following Friday, I suggested we order again from them. As The Boy was finding out what everyone wanted, he asked me if I wanted the Bigfoot roasted over moonrocks with a side of fried Dodo wings, which is my usual order. I told him, sure, it’s not like money is an object, but then I reminded him that they hadn’t brought his entrée the previous week. I told him we should get it for free.”

I looked at the rest of the KA members. I could see beads of sweat on a few brows. I could see a pulsating vein in the temple of one lady to my left.

If you’ve never seen a pack of Karens migrate, you don’t know true terror.

“The Boy said, point blank, ‘Dad, if you want to do that, if you want to call them up and tell them that, it’s fine. You go ahead and do that. But I won’t. You’re being a Karen about this.’ I was shocked. I asked him exactly how I was being a Karen, and he responded, ‘Dad, this is a small restaurant, not part of a big chain. The owner just bought it right before the virus hit. He’s being beaten up financially already. And now you want to bust his chops over an eight dollar chicken and rice dinner when we will never even notice eight dollars missing in our lives? No. I won’t do it.’

There were a few tears, and nods in the audience. I continued.

“Yes. I was being a Karen. I had lost perspective. And I was proud that The Boy called me on it. I realized right then: I don’t need to see the manager.”

Then they applauded, hugged me, and made me king of Lower Southeast Modern Mayberry.

What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it? That’s the last time the mailman will argue with me!

Okay, there isn’t a real Karen Anonymous, but The Boy really did call me out for being a Karen, and I was proud of him for doing so. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop wearing the crown around town.

Karen is pretty simple to explain, and in reality. We all know her. Her hairstyle alone tells us a lot. Karen wants things the way she wants them. And if she can’t have them her way? She’d like to see the manager.

That was me over The Boy’s entrée, which was the absolutely true part of the Karen Anonymous meeting. It didn’t matter that I was technically correct, as The Boy pointed out, in the bigger picture of the world I was absolutely wrong. The restaurant is small, locally owned, and has generally given us both great service and great food.

Is being a Karen morally wrong? No, not really. Karen is looking out for the best for her and her family, mostly. Would I like to be a husband to a constant Karen? No, it would be hard to decide who had to give birth to the kids.

Is it bad that the first thing I notice in this picture was the trigger discipline?

In the larger sense of things, Karens are harmless. Karens stop worrying about most everything after they’re happy. Sure, they might make noise, and they might be annoying FaceBook® friends, but if the manager has a designated employee to pretend to “fire” when Karens are on the warpath, Karens are happy. They rule their own little world. They have no real reason to mess with you, they just want things to go well for them.

Karen memes are peaking right now, so I feel safe in saying that we’ve reached Peak Karen™. Heck, I bet in a few years it will be safe again for middle-aged women to wear the “can I speak to the manager” haircut without fear of becoming an Internet meme.

The second personality type that the WuFlu has brought to the forefront are the Mrs. Grundys. Where the Karen is concerned about Karen, Mrs. Grundy is concerned about you.

Who is Mrs. Grundy?

Mrs. Grundy is Karen’s great-great-grandma who entered the English language in 1798. Mrs. Grundy is obsessed with the rules. The smaller and more petty and more obscure and meaningless, the better. But if it were just Mrs. Grundy following the rules, that would be okay. No. It’s worse. Mrs. Grundy wants you to be observant to the rules, and has appointed herself judge, jury, and executioner. Me? I say before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way you have his shoes and you’re a mile away.

The judge told me I was in court for drinking and kissing women. I don’t think he was pleased when I said, “Excellent! When do we start?”

Your grass is ever so slightly too tall? Mrs. Grundy is calling the Home Owners’ Association (HOA). But more likely, Mrs. Grundy is running the HOA. She’s and her fellow Grundys are the first to try to be appointed to the HOA and the only ones who care enough to want to be in a cycle of continual judgement over their neighbors.

Why? It’s likely that they’ve never had real power in life, so seeing the next door neighbor paint his house an unapproved shade of tan gives them the shiver of pleasure in anticipating the pain that they’ll cause their neighbor. But they’ll wait until he finishes, first.

Is it easy becoming a Grundy? Sure. Heck, I was taking a walk in the city where I work (Modern Mount Pilot) and almost Grundifyed myself. I was taking a walk during my lunch break, and saw a guy in an SUV pull up to a dumpster at a baseball field. He popped his trunk and began dumping his garbage into the dumpster.

I had a moment where I managed a bit of indignant outrage, but then realized: it wasn’t my city, it wasn’t my ballfield, and for all I knew the city was fine with what he was doing. He certainly wasn’t dumping his trash all over his front yard or in the road. I calmed myself, but I could easily see how one gives in to the Grundy side.

I’ll give in to the Mrs. Grundy side when my badge shows up in the mail.

Mrs. Grundy has been such a feature of culture that she’s a fixture of Western culture. C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Dickens, Barnum, Chesterton, Joyce, Heinlein, Jack London, and even P.G. Wodehouse have all referenced her in their writing. And now her crowning achievement of recognition: I mentioned her.

Whereas the Karen just wants the world to fit her expectations, Mrs. Grundy is far worse. Mrs. Grundy wants the world to follow the rules, which she conveniently knows better than anyone else.

Karens don’t want to wear a mask. Mrs. Grundy wants to see you executed for not having one, preferably after the torture of, say, having to listen to Miley Cyrus describe quantum physics. Thankfully, Mrs. Grundy, however is only dangerous if you live in that small circle of control where she can stamp her puny feet and shake her wrinkled fists in rage. Which is normally within 200 feet (37°C) from where she is at any given time.

But then there’s the last one: The AWFL. AWFL stands for Affluent White Female Liberals. And if Karen is annoying and self-centered, and Mrs. Grundy is the would-be tyrant, the AWFL is the Queen of the Left.

It’s also how many times she had to watch the Sesame Street® episode on the letter “O” before she realized that was her middle initial.

What’s an AWFL?

She’s a 30 year old Yale graduate in Woman’s Studies who marches against white privilege hand in hand with her Harvard husband who works in investment banking while their surrogate-born child is in the care of their illegal Guatemalan nanny.
She writes letters to the congressman she knew back in prep school about the lack of government spending for poverty while wearing a $380 sweatshirt that was hand embroidered in Pakistan.
She sends her kids to a private school for a “better education” than they could get in the local integrated school, and lives in a gated neighborhood to keep out undesirables.

A prototype AWFL is the Governor of Michigan.

Yes, this really happened.

Gretchen Whitmer outlawed, based on Corona (and I’m not making up any of this):

Driving a car between two houses you own. Because COVID-19 hides in vacant houses and might slit your throat because it hides behind the door with a knife to ambush you when you come in.
The Gretch said that grocery, pot, liquor and abortion stores could stay open, but buying plants was forbidden. Because having an abortion while stoned is a right, but growing food in a garden is a privilege.
Kayaks? They’re ok, liberals like those and they allow you to buy those cute outfits like Stacey has, and you look so Motorboats? A sure sign of the viral apocalypse.
And science certainly shows that fishing and hunting is the number one way that COVID-19 is transmissible. It’s proven science according to YouTube®.

As I said, I think we we’ve hit Peak Karen. Karen is harmless, and fun to make fun of. But when I see her show up all over the place at the same time? Yeah, that meme is a month from being a Doge.

Keep Doge alive!

Mrs. Grundy? I’m on a solo quest to bring her back as a meme. Mrs. Grundy makes society worse for all of us.

But the AWFL?

The AWFL is probably the single most dangerous thing in society today, and Whitmer is the Ur-AWFL. And if you repeat “Ur-AWFL” fast enough, you can sound just like a Muppet®. But Whitmer isn’t a Muppet™. She has power. She has money. She has control. And she’s not alone. Even in a crisis, Whitmer’s ideology overwhelms actions that could actually be reasonably put in place to save lives.

And that’s AWFL.

Of the three? I’ll take Karen any day.

Healthcare, Unemployment, and Soviet Nails

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.” – Firefly

But that’s not as bad as the unemployed jester: he’s nobody’s fool.

As I looked at the headlines today, two of them jumped out at me. The first was this (capitalization same as the original):

82% WANT MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS . . . . (LINK to actual study)

As usual, there are some misleading bits behind the headline. If you clicked through the fluff pieces (several times) to the actual study on the stimulus checks that I linked to, it really says that 82% want stimulus checks as long as the government is mandating a shutdown. That’s a lot more reasonable, since it’s not asking for that money, you know, forever. Except in Michigan, where I believe governor will keep the economy in shutdown mode until scientists develop immortality.

So, the headline was misleading, and people didn’t want the money forever. That made me happy. Until I read the real story embedded in the study and saw this statistic:

74% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats agree that we should move to a universal health care system.

Stick a fork in it, folks, like a doughnut around Stacey Abrams, it’s done. If the numbers in that study are correct, regardless of how you or I might feel about it, nationalized health care in some form is now probably just a matter of details and whose name goes on the package.

At least the Washington Post can explain that unusual eclipse on the East Coast now.

I could spend a lot of time talking about how and why we got here, including discussion of how the system we have is just like Michael Moore: it incorporates the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of socialism. But I won’t. This battle, I think, is effectively lost. A shrewd candidate for president will make this a centerpiece of his campaign, and the only difference will be if the final version is called TrumpTreatment© or BidenBenefits®.

Obamacare has served the only purpose it was designed for: it is the capstone of a series of Federal mandates since the 1980s that have served to make the costs of healthcare in this country so incredibly high that literally anything is better than the status quo. Healthcare in the United States doesn’t in any way mimic a free market, except in plastic surgery and laser eye surgery. Those costs have gone down because insurance generally doesn’t pay for them and doctors have to actually compete. I guess the other nice thing about being a plastic surgeon is that they get to see new faces every week.

Healthcare should remind everyone of the mantra of the Left: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This crisis has been made through successive actions of the Left to make hospitals have to charge responsible people for every drug addled meth and crack head and pregnant illegal alien that drools or waddles their way into the emergency room. But there’s enough blame for everyone, since the corporatist wing of the Republican party has taken action to ensure that insulin makers can charge Americans six times the cost for a life giving drug (insulin) in the United States as compared to our neighbors to the North.

If the first headline wasn’t bad enough, the second headline was:

68% Of Unemployed ‘Eligible For Payments Greater Than Lost Earnings’ . . . . (LINK to study, and not three layers of journo-fluff)

This is one with which the extended Wilder family has some experience. Alia S. Wilder was recently working from her home composing Mongolian throat-singing mix tapes for the black market. Normally she does this in an office, but due to BatFlu, she was sent to work from home. Her boss called and told her they were temporarily shutting down the business.

The cat then told me, “Snitches get stitches.” I had no idea he was closely watching health care policy.

Since the market they serve of throat-singing aficionados was entirely shut down by Corona-chan, it was a logical business move to make. Alia S. Wilder was also one of the first people to get called back. Good? Well, yes. But she had to take an income cut to do so, since her job pays less than unemployment insurance plus the $600 a week that Uncle Sugar was kicking in.

I was proud of her that her complaint level was exactly zero: she was roaring and ready to get back to work. Those mix tapes won’t make themselves, after all. But how many people would just love to stay home and collect the WuFlu bucks? Get paid for doing nothing? It must be that “new normal” that people keep talking about.

I actually understand the reason people would like free money, and would prefer to stay home and eat nachos and smoke weed on Gram-gram’s couch rather than deliver pizzas. However, the $600 a week bump sets up bad incentives: I read one story of a guy who needed pizza delivery dudes, and no one would take the job because unemployment paid so much more. I can see that, given the horrible hiccup in the economy, why the government would want to print lots and lots of money encourage consumption, but the increased payments have essentially raised the minimum wage to somewhere between $20-$25 just to break even with current unemployment payments. How much more would you have to pay people to actually work?

For markets to work, there needs to be some sort of connection between supply and demand. If you pay people $1000 a week, how many will think that working for $1200 a week is a good idea? Not many. And I’m willing to bet that if the economy is as bad as I think it is, the Federal government will continue the payments for longer than the current end date in July. During the Great Recession, the Federal government continued unemployment insurance for 100 weeks. Two years.

What kind of distortion will that have on the labor market?

Yes, this happened on a CNN special last week.

In thinking about this story, I was reminded of an old story that I heard about the Soviet Union:

There was a Soviet nail factory. In the factory, the communist leaders from Moscow called and told the manager, “Make sure you increase production of nails! You must increase the tonnage for Comrade Stalin!”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make very, very large nails this month.”

Accordingly, the factory had a record production month in tons of nails produced. The communist leaders printed a picture of the factory manager receiving an award. But soon enough, the leaders in Moscow realized that not a lot of people needed nails that weighed two pounds each. The communist leader called the manager back. “The tonnage was good. But this month, make more nails for Comrade Stalin.”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make many very, very, small nails this month.”

Not my translation. The KGB spy school told me to pretend I don’t speak fluent Russian.

I wasn’t able to verify the basics of this story, but I did find the accompanying cartoon which at least hints that the Soviets themselves were aware that something was broken in their system. And I did find a story about a Soviet plant that made a machine to help make tires. They developed new technology that allowed the machine to make tires much faster, but refused to make it.

Why?

Then they would make fewer machines. In a market-based economy the company would celebrate their new, better machine and use it as a selling point to beat their competition. But in this case, the incentives were to make more machines rather than make better machines.

This is the primary failure mechanism of socialist systems. They have bad incentives. I read once that in Great Britain that people ring up the ambulance to take them to the doctor. Why not? It’s “free,” right?

Once a “free” system takes hold, however, it will never leave until the economy collapses under all the “free” money and “free” services. Why? People become dependent on free things. If you want to make someone dependent on you? Give them things. Proof?

Ever hear your parents say, “My house, my rules?” Giving is a form of control.

I think the last person I saw driving this windowless van was named Bernie.

Freedom comes from saying “no” to free things, but I have the sense that people are going to be saying yes to free stuff.

Always think back to what Admiral Ackbar says at a time like this:

The Funniest Post You’ll Read About Life and Death, Featuring Vikings.

“I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” – Fight Club

I don’t want to be killed by a large sneeze, though. I don’t want people saying I bit off more than I could achoo.

As a culture, at least in the developed West, fearful of death. We hide from it to a degree that I’m not sure most of us are aware of. How could we be aware? Like our browser history, we’ve spent so much time and effort hiding it from public view.

I noticed a pattern in my life. First, when I was young, we went to funerals. Those funerals were where we buried my grandparents. As I got older, I started going to a lot of weddings as friends tied the knot, and funerals dropped to nearly zero. But as I get older, I’m seeing more funerals again. Most recently, it was for The Mrs.’ grandfather. Her grandfather was a crew chief on B-17’s for the 8^th Army Air Force. He was buried in the same Army olive drab uniform that he’d worn in World War II.

Funerals are, and should be, a time for reflection. When I looked a little at the big picture, in modern America most people rarely see dead people unless it’s in a hospital bed or at a funeral. Sure, there are exceptions. Cops, soldiers, people in medicine, and morticians see them all of the time outside of those limited settings, but those people are a pretty small percentage of the population.

When I pass away, I don’t want a fancy funeral. One like this is fine.

I was half-watching a movie, perhaps in the 1990s, so I’m a little shy on details. The movie was set during the Great Depression, and the husband had died. The wife had prepared the body and it was sitting ON THE DINNER TABLE for people to come and see for the visitation. Okay, not sitting. But the husband’s corpse was stretched out where they ate their fried okra and possum sushi or whatever it was people ate during the Depression.

What the heck? “Surely they didn’t really do that,” I said. There was an older person in the room who had lived through the Depression. He corrected me. “Surely they did. Funeral parlors were for rich people. And what are you gonna do, put him on the floor?”

Wow. I guess the old saying of “dust bunnies don’t mix with the dead” is true.

Being a product of my time, I hadn’t really thought about that at all. Dead people? Call a professional. Very nice and tidy and nothing but a bill that you can pay by check or credit card.

But when you look back at life in the 1930s and before, I guess there was a reason that people had little graveyards on the farm: they were used to dealing with death and couldn’t pass the duties required by death to someone else. Who else was going to do it? You couldn’t hire it out like today. Our ancestors knew what we have now forgotten. Just as birth starts a life, death ends it. I heard a statistic from the CDC® that life has a nearly a 100% mortality rate.

I will say I’m in favor of the new congressional cheese support bill. Count me as pro-volone.

Close physical contact with our dead relatives used to be the norm, not the exception. For them, death was a part of life. My mother-in-law was doing genealogy of her family. For the most part, genealogy is not horribly interesting to me unless there’s a story. Just knowing that I had a great-great-great-great grandpa called Duncan McWilder back in 1788 doesn’t tell me a lot. Was he a scoundrel? Why did he hop the boat to America? Was it for better Internet?

I did jump on the Mormon database and at least someone thinks I am the great²⁹ grandson of Harald Hardrada, who had a notoriously bad day in 1066 A.D. when he forgot to put on his armor when going up against the English. At least Harald has a story. After one of Harald’s vacations in Bulgaria, he got the nickname “Bulger-burner,” which is probably a lot funnier of a nickname if you’re not from Bulgaria.

And I hear that dead Viking Scrabble® players go to Vowel-halla.

Okay, that was a digression. I’ll see if I can’t get off at the right exit this time. Anyway, my mother-in-law was doing genealogy. One particular male relative had three or four wives. Polygamy? No. His wives kept dying in childbirth or from some plague that we can fix with a shot or thinking that arsenic and lead were what made makeup good, or wearing asbestos corsets and radium jewelry. People were acquainted with death in a real and up-close manner in the Victorian era.

Sad clowns don’t wear arsenic makeup, they use frown-dation instead.

I think that as we isolate ourselves from death, we start to pretend that it doesn’t exist. In some cases, people like Ray Kurzweil are attempting to figure out how to stop aging and live forever. Failing that? Ray is planning on being frozen into a corpse-sicle for later defrosting and infinite life. My bet? People will be able to live longer, but they won’t be able to live forever, because testing immortality drugs takes forever. And everyone is doing it: a guy outside of Wal-Mart® was selling immortality supplements, and it looked like a scam, so I called the cops. They were aware – they arrested the guy last year, in 2000, in 1968, and even, they said, back as far as 1880.

Ray may be able to squeeze a few more years out, but I thing that physical immortality isn’t something that we’ll see. At least not in my lifetime. Sorry, but immortality jokes never get old.

Even though life is part of death, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. But we don’t have to fear it, either. Very few of us will get to choose the time and place of our death. But we have the choice as to what we are going to do tomorrow to make this a better world – to do things that matter.

If a Viking is reincarnated, is he Bjorn again?

Heck, if I was immortal, I’d probably never get around to doing things that matter, since there’s always another tomorrow.

Until there’s not.

Just like Harald Hardrada, there will be a time and place when we’ll die. But Harald was a smart Viking, and he knew he wouldn’t drown. He knew that you could lead a Norse to water, but you can’t make him sink.

So, get going. And don’t forget your armor.

Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©): Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people. That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine. However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position. I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule. Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad. At least, any evacuation of people. The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad. At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right? I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad: Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality. Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer. When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured. So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent. And he was consistent throughout decades. Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people. All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old. It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up: government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem. Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do. From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980. Those farmers had grown up in a different world: when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends. City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason. Want to build a dam on your own property? Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t. Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land? It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you. Endangered species? Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules. In 2020? There are roughly 180,000 pages. Of rules. That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States. My two are promulgate and trout. And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages. Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules? I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

required to do or
prohibited from doing or
free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government: everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time. Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time? That’s how amateurs operate.

Government regulations: keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government. That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period. More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century. It’s almost governments could use a warning label. Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology. The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place? Generally, four things.

An Economic Crisis
A Governmental Power Vacuum
A Civil War
The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising. Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason. They were also the reason a word was invented: Democide.

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen. It doesn’t matter why. It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you. It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers. It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not. It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians. It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa. So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing. And Mao? Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK). It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned: abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies. The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around. Did I say hanging? Sorry, poor choice of words.

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000. But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942. A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle. These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew. I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now? Hmm. No reason.

None at all.