Health – Page 21 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

You Get To Choose Your Mood. Why Not Be Happy? No Assembly Required.

“Smile and smile… I don’t trust men who smile too much.” – Commander Kor, Star Trek (TOS)

When Pugsley was little, he was excited that about his birthday. “Daddy, I have a birthday coming up and I’ll be this many old!” Then he held up four fingers. The police still don’t know where they came from.

Smile.

Shhh. Don’t argue.

Smile.

Do it for, say, thirty seconds.

I’ll wait.

(Really, I mean this. Smile. Thirty seconds, look at a clock if you have to. Everybody do it.)

Feel better?

You do.

I’m not sure what kind of day you’re having. But smiling makes you feel happier. There’s a study I could link to, but I’m pretty sure all of you know how to use the Internet, so look for it if you want.

Doesn’t matter if you look it up or not. Smiling makes you feel better. Smiling is good for you. Smiling changes your mood. Change your mood? Your output is better. Not only more, but better.

Once upon a time, I had a job at a company that was failing. Not because of me, but because they had spectacularly failed on some business that they were doing. How spectacularly? They were losing millions of dollars. Some work that I was involved with was likewise losing money, but in this case only a few thousand dollars.

My Boss pulled me into his office. This is a real conversation, not one I made up.

Boss: “John, do you know what position the company is in?”

John Wilder: “Sure. Two of our divisions have lost enough money that we are in danger of becoming bankrupt.”

Boss: “Well, then, why are you so happy? The company is in trouble. People have noted that you’re too upbeat.”

When I get sad I cut myself. Another piece of cake.

I was being told that I was being too happy and positive in the workplace. How do you even respond to that? Rip and tear your clothes and cry? Sacrifice pigeons and stray raccoons to some ancient Sumerian god? Gather up a group of warriors and go raid a competitor and steal their business so you can hear the lamentation of their women?

Willkommen to das Hötel Kalifornia.

I sort of understand what my Boss was getting at. You don’t whistle, hum, crack a beer, and then sing Sammy Hagar songs at a funeral, even if there are headbangers in leather picking a three lock box. But I sort of didn’t understand it, either. How on Earth do you turn the business around, how do you make things better if you’re gloomy and you’re certain you’re going to die?

You don’t.

This week, a post at a great blog, Tempest in a Teardrop (LINK) mentioned St. Philip Neri. I hadn’t read about him before. I certainly hadn’t met him, since he died in Anno Domini 1595, which was about when your mom was finishing high school.

Neri’s quote that impressed me was: “A joyful heart is more easily made perfect than a downcast one.” It would be a conceit of the highest measure to think a single sentence I ever wrote would be quoted 400 years from now (though in my dreams I imagine there will be thousands of young students getting their degree in Wilder Wisdom Studies in the year 2356), but Neri absolutely nailed it with this line.

I wanted to be a standup comedian, but with Coronavirus? Now they’re all inside jokes.

You have a choice. Be mad. Be sullen. Be angry. Be filled with wrath. Give up. Be jealous of those who have it better.

That’s five of the seven deadly sins (The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?). Eat seven bacon cheese burgers and think about your neighbor mowing the lawn in a bikini and you’re up to the full seven. I mean, assuming your neighbor would look good in a bikini.

You don’t have to feel that way. At all. Ever.

Smile when you feel down.

When I was in college I had the opposite experience. I had one particular professor, one of the most fun professors ever. He was Swiss, and had been a mercenary in the 1950’s, and had done everything. I was his student, and when I was in grad school, I was his Teaching Assistant. His advice, coming between puffs of cherry-smelling smoke from his pipe?

“Keep smiling, John.”

Smiles are contagious, so my state says I should wear a mask.

If you did what I said earlier, and smiled, you felt better. And you should do it as much as you can. If you have a choice to be happy, why wouldn’t you choose it?

There are other hacks as well.

Sigh. A deep sigh. You will feel your tension lower. Actual clinical studies that I think I read about show that this lowers blood pressure. I feel better when I sigh, and I also stop sweating blood, which I think means my blood pressure is lower.

Another trick:

Stand like a superhero, chest thrust forward, hands on your hips. There’s a reason the artists draw it that way – it makes you feel confident. Powerful. Competent. I can recall falling asleep at night in a pose just like Superman™ flying – one hand out, the other back, and one leg up.

If Superman® and Batman© had a baby, what would it be? Adopted.

I woke up feeling great! But, of course, my liver didn’t have the mileage on it that it does now. I still sleep like that most nights. However, if you stand like a superhero? You’ll feel like one.

If you ever listen to Scott Adam’s videos, “Coffee With Scott Adams” he starts them with a Simultaneous Sip. To participate, all you need is a beverage in a container, and you sip when he says go. It’s a dopamine hit to the brain, which he says will “make everything better.” And it works. You feel better when you participate. Heck, I feel so much better that I often won’t even start listening unless I can do the Simultaneous Sip.

These are just a few hacks that immediately change your mood. Yes, I understand sometimes these might not help. More than a dozen years ago, I had a back problem that made sitting horribly uncomfortable. When I walked, it was fine, but when I sat? Excruciating pain.

I tried the ancient Chinese needle treatment for back pain. The heroin worked best.

In my case, the solution to the pain was the body, again. I started working out (especially my torso) and the back pain has been gone for (fingers crossed) nearly 13 years. But if you want to feel better, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t?

Check your mood.
Check your posture.
Check your surroundings.
Check your attitude.
Check the things you are allowing into your mind.

You own your mind. It does what you say. You own your feelings. They are what you allow them to be.

Me? I try to practice relentless reality optimism.

I’m gonna die. That tells me I have to hurry in the things I do. I don’t have time to waste.
I’m gonna fail. That will tell me things I can do better next time.
I’m tired. That means I’ve been working as hard as I can.

I want every component of my body to be absolutely used up on the last day of my life. I’d like the organ people to look at me and say, “Nope, nothing for us. Unless we can transplant the smile.”

Smile.

Hold it.

Now you don’t have excuses. Go and do it, whatever it is as long as the stakes are high enough.

I had to cut my last duck out of my life. He was addicted to quack.

Clock is ticking. And failure is just a teacher to make you better.

Oh, and the company that was failing? Because of some changes I made in dealing with their major client, they managed to get over two hundred million dollars in business when they were near bankruptcy, generating millions in profits after I left them. They’re still around today.

I guess smiling pays off, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most Progressive thing about Joe Biden is his dementia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the direct quote:

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

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

His final paragraph is the most chilling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parker Crutchfield did not approve of this image.

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

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

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

And Michigan, seriously? What are you guys thinking?

Don’t Run Out The Clock On Life.

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

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

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

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

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

In Europe they call it 30.48cm ball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does this translate off the field?

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

Are You Running Out The Clock?

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

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

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

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

That’s not a win.

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

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

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

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

The beauty of the world.

The paragon of animals.

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

Then Will followed up with this:

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

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

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

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

My vacuum has Roomba®-tiod arthritis.

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

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

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

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

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

How will you make a difference today?

Meaning: Do It Right.

“Bender, it has come to my attention that this company has been paying you to do nothing but loaf around on the couch.” – Futurama

I gave The Mrs. a dictionary for our first anniversary. I wanted to give her something with a meaning.

Imagine you’re between 16 and 24. You live in a country (Great Britain) that has a robust social safety net. Your parents are doing okay. Not millionaires, but doing okay. The U.K. has a huge safety net if you can’t work, or don’t want to work. For instance, in London you can have:

Council flats (apartments) – in U.S. English: subsidized or (nearly) free housing.
Free crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies) delivered by singing Welshmen in chimney sweep attire.
Free Dr. Who™ costumes, though they only come in the sizes of “elfin” and “aircraft carrier”.
X-Box® games delivered at no cost via the luminiferous information aether (Internet).
A majority Pakistani population.
Free healthcare, including funds for Cockney coal-miners to blast and carve your teeth into pleasant looking shapes.
A zero effort, zero risk life.

At least 1,500 citizens of Great Britain turned their back on this life of shabby luxury to go live in a land without air conditioning, bangers and mash, Top Gear™, and cell phone reception for the opportunity to become bloodthirsty Junior Assistant Jihadis in the ISIS® organization.

Why?

I’ve heard that ISIS has a new name. WASWAS.

At least partially because life had no meaning for them – they weren’t accomplishing anything, and they knew it. Carl Jung observed this problem in the early twentieth century. Jung’s observation was made as religious belief was waning in Europe, and as people there were continually centralizing themselves in cities that became larger and larger. Jung saw that the loss of a belief system that allowed them to have a higher purpose in any setting – large or small, was devastating.

Also, Jung saw that this was coupled with the anonymity and lack of true community of large cities. To put it bluntly, for 99%+ of people living in a city, the city doesn’t care if you are there. Your contribution to the whole is diluted to the point of meaninglessness, like the guy in the BMW® factory that installs turn signals. Jung had ideas as to the result of this situation:

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power. It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.

Did you hear about Carl’s daughter? She was a little Jung, too.

In modern society, the numbers of people are huge when compared to the historical setting that mankind has experienced through time. I wrote a somewhat related post here (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings). Modern people have, at least a bit, developed ways to replace the meaning of religion and the belonging that only occurs in small bands:

Sports teams. This allows achievement by proxy. Your team wins, even though exactly one player out of 50 are from the state the team is in? You won! Your quarterback gets traded next year? He’s dead to you. Logical? Effective? Yes.
Video games. Video games are a form of artificial achievement. You achieve a pre-programmed victory designed to manipulate you into feeling good. Designers of video games have turned this into a stunning skill, making successive video games more immersive. And despite this immersion, it doesn’t make kids more violent – I rarely lose a fistfight with a sixth grader.
Work hard, do well, feel good. It’s a simple enough equation. It’s also one of the most real and most wholesome things on this list. Especially if you are a mummy – they aren’t evil – they just got a bad wrap.
Consumeproduct culture. No, that’s not a typo. What is a consumeproduct culture? It’s one that replaces shopping for meaning. Did you find a new Brad Pitt® flavored toothpaste to buy? Great! It shoots endorphins into your brain that make you feel you’ve achieved something. But it wears off, and you’ve got to find Johnny Depp shaped vitamin C gummis and buy them tomorrow to feel okay.
Politics. Just like sports teams, cheering for your side allows you to feel good when you win, and bad when you lose. The current Leftward polarization of the Democrats is very tied into this. How many Leftists does it take to change a lightbulb? 2500 to protest, and none of them working to change anything.
Mind altering substances. Cocaine. Alcohol. Marvel® movies. These allow you to escape just for an hour or two. Oddly, the common denominator in all of this? Robert Downey, Jr.

I just got back from my heroine dealer. I got Wonder Woman®, She-Ra™, and Black Widow©.

I’m not saying that these coping mechanisms are evil, or harmful. Some, like working hard, have huge societal and personal benefits unless you’re working for an evil company. Others, like politics? Not so much, especially the Leftist variety. Again, Carl Jung saw the rise of Leftism in his life and correctly described its rise in these two quotes:

Such people are very likely to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as having the power they as individuals lack.

If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.

So, the “British” ISIS-Bois sashayed to Samarra and moseyed to Mosul out of their comfortable council flat life. They did this because they felt no meaning in Great Britain. Great Britain was a country that they and their ancestors had no hand in building. They and their ancestors didn’t really contribute to Great Britain in any significant way. They knew that they were no more British than I am Martian, and won’t be until their great, great, grandchild is named Nigel and has horrible teeth.

What’s red and bad for your teeth? A brick.

Therefore, they weren’t assimilated enough to move their search for meaning to Manchester United®, so might as well go and kill some people down in the Middle East. This is just another example that soccer is an evil game devised by aristocratic European women so that they could play it while their husbands did the dishes. (Apologies to Mike Judge)

This isn’t just a crisis of the ISIS-Idiots. This is a crisis that faces mankind in general. Many of the spiritual, social, and political ills the world faces right now stem directly from the minimization of religion and the urbanization of population.

Big cities are dehumanizing. Do you know a person on your city council? Do they know you by name? Do you have their cell phone number in your cell phone? Do you have proof that they plagiarized in high school? Do you know what happened at Uncle Tom’s cabin, and what’s down in the wishing well? Would they pay attention if you called them on a Tuesday afternoon?

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

Does it make sense for any person to live in a city where these things are not true? Does it make the citizens of Dallas better off to have a city of a million people where their voice is so diluted that they are just one among millions, feeling no control?

My doctor says I should take meds for my schizophrenia. But look who doesn’t get lonely during quarantine – this guy!

Adding to the frustrations is that most decisions are made not at the local level in those massive cities, but at the national level where hiring a stupid person isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature. In the United States, most regulations that impact people on a day-to-day basis aren’t made in the Modern Mayberry office.

Nope.

Most regulations are made far away in Washington – and not the good Washington where the volcanoes and earthquakes will eventually eliminate all the Leftists. This results in one-size fits all regulations that meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. Why does the EPA design wood stoves for use in Alaska? Can’t the Alaskans be left alone to figure that out?

These rules do more than frustrate individuals. The confine those that could become great. Could a company like Apple® be founded today? I don’t think so they would be crushed by regulations – they would have to remain as an open sauce company. My next door neighbor, who runs a small farm bank, told me that starting a small bank from scratch today would be nearly impossible. The small has been eliminated, the middle is discouraged, and only large companies can compete.

The result is that people on all sides are done with the current system. On the Left, there is a desire for what only could be called a Marxist revolution because the state isn’t powerful enough. On the Right? There’s a feeling that the United States became a little too centrally powerful around 1843.

I side with the Right.

What civilization had the best tattoos? The Ink-ans.

We have learned that the solutions from the Left, in the end, provide only death and tyranny. The “British” people who went to join the jihadis were fans of death and tyranny in their own way. The rioters of BLM are fans of death and tyranny, as well. As mentioned many times, that path is the path of destruction. The Left wants to destroy our civilization, the Right wants to build civilization.

On the Right, I’d suggest leaving the cities. Outside of the danger we’ve seen recently, like Mars, cities ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. Find your Modern Mayberry. Meet your neighbors. Build relationships.

Find meaning from something more than an Amazon® shopping cart.

Ohh! Did you see that Lighting Deal®?

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.