Category: Health

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

GBAKGA

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.

KA

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.

KING

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.

CODKAR

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.

DREDD

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.

GRUNSIDE

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.

AOC

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.

HYPOC

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.

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.

KGA

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

LEATHER

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.

STACEY

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.

CUTU

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?

GRETA

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.”

NAILEDIT

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.

FREE

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:

ACKBAR

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

DIE

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 8th 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.

funeral

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.

TERM

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.

HARALDY

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.

arsmeme

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.

NORSING

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

JOBICIDE

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.

JETSKI

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)

VALENTINE

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.

WACO

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.

REGULATE

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.

WARNING

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.

GULAG

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.

EQUALITY

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.

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet.  Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang.  Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

OPTIM

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist.  I don’t really think I am.  I am certain that I am going to die.  I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind.  Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead.  And the last six weeks our lives?  Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters?  Not me.  Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up.  The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned.  Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient.  For he that is so wants nothing.

SENECA

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets.  I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant.  Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college.  Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome.  Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service.  Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either.  Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work.  I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work.  I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans.  In winter.  After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  How bad was that particular plague?  It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died.  Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

GERMAN

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too.  But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder.  Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all.  That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure.  Sometimes you win.  Sometimes you lose.  There’s virtue in neither of these.   There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death.  All of us will fail.  Suffering?  Yeah, that’s going to happen, too.  To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live.  You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around.  There is no particular way your life “should” turn out.  Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad.   Was there luck in there, both good and bad?  Sure, but not as much as you might think.

BIGMAC

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad. 

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for?  Deal with it.  And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering.  You have electricity.  You have Internet.  You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating.  And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too.  You know, while you’re up.

PJBOI

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca.  Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses.  Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

  • I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
  • I’m too busy. Good news!  After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
  • I don’t know how to do ______.   Unless it’s differential equations.  Then just do what the book says.  Nobody really understands differential equations.
  • Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today.  What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

EXCUSE

Groundhog Day:  COVID-19 and The Long Now

“I was in the Virgin Islands once.  I met a girl.  We ate lobster.  Drank piña coladas.  At sunset we made love like sea otters.  That was a pretty good day.  Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?” – Groundhog Day

DOCU

It’s Quarantine Day.  Again.

Groundhog Day is one American film where the word “treasure” isn’t used lightly.  It features Bill Murray in his last collaboration with Harold Ramis – a duo that together made the funniest movies in the world for more than a decade.  But there’s something different about Groundhog Day:  mixed in with the comedy is a story of personal consequence you don’t see in Ghostbusters or Stripes.

The movie also features a suicide with a groundhog driving a pickup off of a cliff ending in a fireball.  Harold Ramis had originally written Groundhog Day to be a typical Bill Murray comedy.  Murray wanted something deeper and more meaningful.  Together that tension created a thoughtful movie about a weatherman who takes a bath with a toaster.

If you are one of the three people on planet Earth who haven’t seen it (I exclude people from France, for obvious reasons) I’ll give you a short synopsis:  Bill Murray plays a self-absorbed weatherman who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for Groundhog Day.  Again.  The weatherman has done this silly segment for the television channel he works at again and again, and he’s not happy.  The entire concept of doing a trivial public event to amuse groggy morning television viewers having their morning coffee is something he feels is as meaningless to him as trying to teach Paris Hilton to read.

HILTON

Paris Hilton got tired of a man knocking on her door all night.  She finally let him out.

Bill Murray’s character and the television crew don’t make it out of town before the roads close because of a snowstorm.  When Murray wakes up after spending another night in Punxsutawney, he finds he has to live that very same Groundhog Day over again on an endless loop.  The movie’s cue that Murray character is stuck in the same day?

The time on the clock radio flips to 6:00AM with a click.

The radio starts playing the same song to start each day.

It’s bad enough to have to live the same day again and again, but to turn it to a special kind of hell, the song every morning for the rest of his life is:  Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”

CHERN

After Cher spent time at Chernobyl, you could tell she was happy when she was wagging her tail.

The only variable is what Bill Murray’s character does during that particular version of his one endless day that has become his whole life.    When asked, Ramis said that Murray’s character probably spent “thirty or forty years” living the same day over and over again.  But not making love like a sea otter.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

Which is how I (and probably millions of others) feel right now.  Corona-chan has infected the county where the Wilder family lives at a rate 10 times less than the nationwide infection rate.  Even COVID-19 doesn’t seem to want to vacation in Modern Mayberry.  Perhaps it’s because of the human sacrifices we make to Opie, the Old One, at our Harvest Festival?  I keep telling the Chamber of Commerce that they should stop advertising that.  Let it be a surprise to our visitors!

The recent shelter-in-place orders that have popped up all around the country have changed everyone’s life.  I’ve written a LOT about the thermonuclear economic disintegration machine that’s munching at our GDP.  But, wait, there’s more.  It’s also the cause of the change in the routines of nearly everyone in the country.

vaca

I hear even pirates can’t take vacations, since ArrrrBNB® is closed, too.

Normally, families go on vacations.  This year, I expect that most family vacations will consist of not taking vacations with the people you’ve been in the same house with for six weeks.  Will the NFL® play games to empty stadiums this year, so that 11 people not from Cleveland will play on the field against 11 people not from Tampa Bay?  I imagine that the NFL™ players might pay big money to get out of the house.  Will the local high school team play?  I think the local kids will play because the parents would pay big money to get them out of the house, but who can say?  It’s all up in the air.

All of the things that we normally take for granted are likewise up in the air – for many people that includes having a job.  Yet, with all that tension lots of us are living the same day, again and again.  But for me, it’s not the same day I’m used to.  Over time, I built up a schedule around work.  Get up at the same time every day.  Go to work, hit the gym for lunch, and then come home.  When we got home, the family would do something – often that would be going out for dinner.  On the weekends?  Visiting friends.  Eating Midwest sushi.  Pugsley’s frequent cross-country corn skiing tournaments.

All of those options are gone.

We had variety in our lives, and choices.  Want to drive two hours to go to a big city?  Sure.  We’d do that once every other month for a $9 hamburger (that’s -$26 in metric dollars).  We didn’t do it often, but we could do it.  We could still drive to the big city, but why?  To eat an expensive burger in our car?

BURGER

Oh, that’s the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion?  I guess the French don’t know what a $9 burger is.

So, the weekends have looked pretty much the same.  We goof around the house, have a nice Saturday dinner, sit on the deck, maybe play a game.  It’s fun, and it’s good family time.  But in doing that, we’re forced to confront each other.  Daily.  All the time.  Again.  In the same situation.  And even though we’re bombarded by daily news about the WuFlu and the reaction to it, the only real variable is how we interact in that particular day.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

A few weeks ago Pugsley and I were in Wal-Mart©.  We went through the checkout line and the clerk was a girl who had gone to high school with The Boy.  Small towns are great that way.  She had just started working at Wal-Mart® and even though she had known our family for years, she was surprised.  “Oh, having a cookout?” she asked as she looked at the hamburger, bratwurst and steaks on the belt.

“Yes.”

“I guess you’re learning to cook!”

Well, no.  Even Pugsley has been able to turn out a tasty dinner from scratch since he was about 10 or so.  And The Boy is now the grill master and does a fantastic job, even though I keep him out of the grill master’s secret beverages.  Who knew that the ice cold, golden bubbly elixir wasn’t the source of my grilling powers?

GRILL

What kind of burgers do adopted boys get?  Bison burgers.

The Mrs. has been the heavy lifter in cooking forever.  And although each of us has been cooking, The Mrs. gets tired of the male preference for “meat and bratwurst every night.”  I will admit that after a while The Boy and Pugsley both looked like they were suffering from withdrawal symptoms related to pizza roll and Taco Bell® depravation.

One big missing piece in my new “routine” is exercise.  Missing 40 minutes of treadmill time, five days a week?  Yeah, that’s easy to skip the discipline I built into my life on days when I’m not even bothering to wear pants.

It’s my fault.  I built that routine to make the discipline of daily exercise easy for me.  When I traveled for business, I had one that kept me exercising.  But now, when staying home is what I’m doing?  Have I built that routine?

No.  Not yet.  Like I said, it’s my fault.  And it’s especially my fault because I know how to build that routine.  The key is fairly simple.  I just need to do it.  Even though I don’t know if I’m going to even have a vacation, I do know where I’ll be tomorrow.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

A Hiking Trip Through The Coronavirus Economy

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

HIKING

You know, because I might be using hiking as a metaphor.

When I was younger, I did a lot of hiking.  So much so, that it was second nature to me – I can recall hiking up remote mountain trails when I was kindergarten.  If you take the average kindergartner, they are built to walk a trail, and their strength to weight ratio will beat any four wheel drive.  I guarantee you that unless you are in prime condition, your motor will run out before theirs will.

Before this weekend, the last time I went hiking was about four years ago, and it was quite a hike.  We went up and down and deep into the Rockies, at one point following old mining trails that were originally blazed by miners with mules looking for gold – I know because I found an ore cart still sitting on its rails up around 12,000 feet when I was 20.  I could tell it was a mining cart, because I found their deodorant underneath the cart, and everyone knows miners always pick Axe™.

On this trip, I was in good enough shape that one 18 year old rang the bell before I did, which is the kind of thing that makes an older man smile – he knows he still has “it.”  And I did still have “it,” unlike my hair.  I figure the group did over nine thousand feet up and nine thousand feet down over two days.  It was nice, though I will admit that at one point every muscle in my body cramped all at once, even the bottom of my foot, and that’s my arch nemesis.

SLEEP

My commute often doesn’t include pants.  Pants are for fancy, non-Corona time. 

This weekend, Pugsley, having had enough of the house, convinced me that we should go hiking.  Honestly, it was my idea, too, so I was thrilled when he got me up to go hiking.  Since the lockdown I hadn’t been to my usual gym, and on several days in the last six weeks the most strenuous part of the day had been rolling out of bed to go downstairs to my “office” on the loveseat where I’ve been working from home.  It’s also where I normally write these blog posts, so it’s a place which is already set up physically and mentally for productivity, except for the coffee, which was allllll the way upstairs.  And I spent all that energy being debunked.

But after six weeks of not working out, how would I fare hiking?

Pugsley and I hit the trail.  It was a warm, but not hot, spring day.  In short?  It was a day perfect for a hike.  The grass was vibrantly green under a cloudless sky as we hit the trail.  As trails go, this one isn’t the most challenging that I’ve been on, but it certainly is aggressive.  And four years of rust was immediately apparent.  And we didn’t bring any snacks, though I’ve heard that zombies bring entrail mix when they hike.

We made it about as far as my legs were willing to go.  We weren’t out of the woods yet, but that’s the purpose of hiking, right?  It is clear to me that I need to go hiking with Pugsley again – the treadmill at the gym is no replacement for an actual mountain.  The next day I could feel the pain, but I knew I was getting stronger, since I was still alive.  And Nietzsche always said that, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.  Except for Ruffles®.”

GYM

All I need is a gym with a doughnut shop attached.

Getting stronger rarely feels good.  It involves aches and pains.  It involves discomfort, and moving your body in ways it may not have moved for a while.  In a “good” recession, this is what happens.  The economy sheds, often in very painful ways, companies that are no longer competitive and gets stronger.  That recession is the spur for changes within companies that allow them to survive.  Sentimentality goes by the wayside – the harsh blade of profitability determines what products will be built and what products will be discontinued.  Plus the bank helps lots of folks get back up on their feet, mainly by repossessing the car.

This, however, is no ordinary recession.  Entire industries are going to be destroyed.  I’ll pick just one for this post:  air travel.  Airlines and airplane manufacturers are facing the biggest, by far, challenge of their existence.  People are finally coming to the understanding that the last 45 days of their lives is the most momentous (so far) of nearly anyone alive.   With me, it came with the dawning realization of my receding airline.

TSA

Body cavity search, Mr. Wilder?

The solution of government to this recession is that of the zombie – prolonging the existence of a company far after its usefulness to the world has ended.  A great example is Boeing®.  Boeing™ used to be among the better designers and builders of aircraft in the world.  Recently, its reputation has suffered after it made a software change that resulted in crashes and the grounding of an entire airplane model, which might be the ultimate Boeing™ constrictor.  It has a loan fund earmarked for it and similar companies that sits at about $17 billion dollars.  I’m betting you and I couldn’t borrow in the way that Boeing© will.

And what about the airline industry as a whole?

  • Last year, on average, the TSA screened 2.7 million passengers a day.
  • Last week? Less than 100,000.
  • On an average day in 2019, there were 44,000 daily flights.
  • Last week? 8,000.

The airline industry is backed by $25 billion to pay employees that the Federal government is you and I are giving the airlines to pay employees until September.  I guess you and I were feeling generous that day, since my industry didn’t exactly get paid and yours probably didn’t, either.

BANDAID

At least this government solution isn’t bigger than the problem . . .

And though I generally like the idea of inefficient or corrupt companies failing, this economic tidal wave is different – whereas the normal recession is a very vigorous workout that makes the body stronger, this is more like conducting weight loss surgery with a chainsaw.  I’m sure the doctor is being gentle, but it’s still a chainsaw.  Good companies and bad will fall, large companies and small.

If the economy is normally liquid water in good times, then the government’s tendency to freeze market winners into place is turning the economy to ice.  But this economic collapse we’re seeing as a result of COVID-19 is a boiling pot of water.  It’s chaos.  Who will win?  Who knows?  Will useful, economically viable portions of the country be ripped away?  Certainly.  We can argue that bad companies will die, but this is economic Russian roulette.

RUSSIAN

And who said the Soviets weren’t innovators???

It has already happened, we just don’t have a real-time graph from Johns-Hopkins showing angry red bubbles of economic destruction on a county by county basis with a counter and a logarithmic graph of job losses to date.  We also don’t have a doctor talking about all of the regulations that will have to change so businesses can grow again and how business regulations people are used to will be gone forever in the “New Normal” that Coronavirus has brought for us.

Some industries will be gone for good.  I don’t miss flying, and had already given it up on all trips where it only saves me a few hours a few years ago.  What else is gone?  How about small movie theaters?  How long can they survive in a world where the movies have turned to crap that’s driven by a corporate model that values sequels and familiarity over originality and cleverness?  Will they be saved by movies that are created by a target audience of people around the world and are so culturally inert that they could be about kung fu warriors or Tom Cruise jumping off of a shiny building and all make equal sense?

CATS2

Human/CGI cats singing.  How could that be a flop?  Maybe the Coronavirus was the Earth saving itself from the Cats® movie?

Why are comedy movies dead?  Chinese people don’t think we’re funny and in our incredibly Politically Correct world, none of the jokes are allowed to be funny, anyway.  Besides that, the small town theater has already found it hard to compete with Netflix® and Amazon©.  Now the big Hollywood© studios have finally gotten first release on streaming.  How happy will Disney® be when they don’t have to share the profit with small town theater owners?  They’ll smile from mouse-ear to mouse-ear because Disney™ gets a big Federal bailout, and the theater owner doesn’t.

In this era, the results are unpredictable.  If I work really hard on lifting weights?  I’ll get stronger.  But in the economy of 2020, either my arm might fall off, it might grow to world-class proportions in an afternoon.  There’s no way to predict because there’s no rational process determining winners and losers.

Regardless, I need to hit the trails with Pugsley more.  Even though I can’t predict the winners and losers in the economy in the next few weeks, months, or years?  I can predict that I need to be able to hit that trail a little harder.

You never know when that might come in handy.

ALTERNATE BONUS MEME:

CATS

Survival Mindset: City vs. Country. Bonus? Country Girls.

“I’m so tired of all of this traffic.  I just can’t wait to get out of Africa.” – Upright Citizen’s Brigade

trigger

Especially when I’m explaining.

When we moved to Alaska, we were moving from a mid-sized Midwestern city.  The town we were moving from was not big enough for an NFL® franchise, but also not nearly small enough for a letter to Penthouse© about my experiences with an entire college sorority when I was a naïve college freshman in my first week at a small Midwest college.

But this town was a big enough town that there was still a reasonable degree of anonymity.  If the person in the car next to me at the stop light was knuckle-deep up their nostril mining for mineral resources without even so much as an endangered species permit, well, the chances are I’d never see them again.  And if I did, I could practice a pre-Coronavirus version of social distancing, which involved awkwardly “spilling” 173°F coffee over the hand they had extended for a welcoming handshake.  I hope Grandpa forgave me after the burn surgery, but all he would do afterwards was waive that restraining order when I came over to say, “Hi,” and call the police.

He was such a scamp!

COWS

Sometimes when you sober up as a naïve freshman, you get udderly surprised.

Not too long after we moved to Fairbanks, The Mrs. had called me and asked me to pick up some canned bananas, sushi flavored ice cream with calamari chunks, and diet flavored peanuts (which turn out to be just a packet of salt) at Safeway™.  I managed to get them.  Did I mention that The Mrs. was pregnant with Pugsley at the time?

Anyway, after I got back into my car, I had to make a left turn to leave the Safeway© so I could head back to my house.  Not a problem – it was a two lane road I was turning on to, but it was 6pm in February in Fairbanks – the traffic was as sparse as original hair on Joe Biden’s head, and it was colder than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb, so at least the ice cream wouldn’t melt.

I was third in line to make the left turn.  The first turning car stopped, looked left, looked right, looked left and took his left turn.  Boom, off he went, never to be seen again.

Now, second in line, behind a minivan.  In front I could see the driver wasn’t looking left or right.  As a battleship sized (really) opening to turn left opened and closed in front of her, I could see that she was arguing with her kids, probably about how the mean blonde man shouldn’t have taken the last of the canned bananas.  Finally, when enough openings for the 7th Fleet to safely make a left turn had been there and left, my hand hovered over the horn.

I paused.

I took a deep breath.

SLED

I we got a mushing dog when we were in Alaska, but he identified as a she.  I guess it was a Trans-Siberian Husky.

What had I lost out of my life waiting behind this woman?  45 seconds?  I put it in perspective.  Was it worth it to add stress to a mother who was currently in a battle of wills with three junior high aged kids?  No.  I let out a sigh, and realized that getting upset about something small like this really was, was something I could let go of.  Forever.

Why be stressed?  I’d be home in less than 10 minutes anyway, and Alaska would still be in its own time zone, which was a decade earlier than the rest of the world.  I exhaled slowly.  Stress drained away.

The woman finally pulled out into an opening large enough to be considered an interplanetary distance.  I followed, right behind.  At the lights, she went straight.  I went straight.

And then I followed her for seven miles.  At the next right turn, she turned.  I followed.  At the next left turn?  I followed.  She turned down the secluded driveway that held four houses.  I followed.  She turned right one last time, and I didn’t follow, because she turned into her house.

Her house?  Right next to mine.

neighbor

Mainly we didn’t garden, we just raised our herds of mosquitoes.

Lesson learned.  Living in Fairbanks was tough enough.  No reason to make it tougher by being the jerk, especially when it’s a small place.

But the lessons learned from living in Fairbanks were bigger than that.  I had grown up in the country, so I generally never left the house without things like a blanket, jumper cables, a knife, good shoes, or yak-flavored fruitcake.  You never know when disaster will happen, and I’d seen Pa Wilder rescue some idiot flatlander at least once a year.

When you grow up in the country, you never know when or even if a car will come along.  I’ve driven mountain roads in winter where my tracks were the only tracks that had punched through 6 inch (7 meter) deep snow and I knew that if I went off the road, the only thing that would keep me alive was between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat.  You have a lot of time as you pick your way through a winding road to think of the things that should be in the car with you.  You also know the only thing that will save you is . . .

You.

2ND

Second place, Jack London Memorial fire building championship (LINK).  Link related.

I contrast this with living in an urban area.  Sure, there are dangers there, but those dangers are man, not nature.  Nature, in places like New York City, has been tamed to the extent that the only dirt you’ll see has been trucked in from miles away.  In an urban setting you are reliant on people to do everything for you.  Come get your trash.  Heat your house.  Wax and filet your Chihuahua.  In New York City, they even have a number to complain, 311.  In 2010, Wired (LINK) did an article and listed the complaints, graphing them.  What complaints were sent to this number?

Graffiti.  Consumer complaints.  Traffic signals, damaged and overgrown trees, dirty conditions, chlorofluorocarbon recovery, problems with taxis, illegal building uses, property taxes, noise, and rodents.

In a rural world, graffiti is solved by talking with the neighbor boy’s dad.

  • Traffic signals? If you see three in a day, you’re doing something wrong.
  • Consumer complaints? Don’t shop there anymore.
  • Damaged trees and overgrown trees are solved with a chainsaw. Which also might solve the graffiti, if you know what I mean.
  • Illegal building uses? What’s that?  When cousin Kaiden uses your barn to make meth?
  • Property taxes? Call the county commissioner.  He lives down the road apiece and you know that Wanda is NOT his cousin.
  • Rodents? You do have a barn cat, right?  And if by rodents you mean coyotes, that’s what the .223 is for.
  • Chlorofluorocarbons? The pigs eat those, right?

With a few exceptions, all of those issues are taken care of by rural residents themselves.  The other things don’t even exist.  Chlorofluorocarbons?  Sounds like Bigfoot to me.  Unless you mean sweet, sweet Freon®, which is necessary to keep the sushi ice cream cold.

godzilla

Godzilla was flipping houses before it was cool.

I remember reading the Wired® article when it came out, incredulous that city dwellers would call the government and bother them with such petty things.  In my mind, this call-in number over shallow inconveniences almost seemed like an experiment in conditioning people to be helpless when nearly all of these problems could easily be solved with either small arms or artillery.

In a rural setting, you’re prepared to save yourself.  In an urban setting, you’re waiting for someone to save you.  And in an urban setting, you’re anonymous.  Do you think people would act like such fools on Black Friday if they had to face those same people the next day?

No.  Good heavens.  Want to see a polite Black Friday?  Come to Modern Mayberry.  We have to live with each other, and performing Brazilian ju-jitsu over a Spongebob Squarepants™ 50-piece socket set is just not something you can do and still nod and smile at the Dairy Queen® afterwards.  Heck, it’s not like it was the Hello Kitty® smoker, right?

One of the stories that presents the biggest case for learned victimhood in cities is that of Kitty Genovese.  Kitty was a bartender coming home from work one night in March in 1964.  She was murdered.  Some accounts say that dozens of people heard her murder, which lasted half an hour.  Apparently there were one or two calls to the police, but no one came.  At least one person that heard it said, “I just didn’t want to get involved.”  Did I mention that happened in New York City?  Yeah.  It did.

Contrast it with this:

When I was driving in Fairbanks, I saw a car by the side of the road.  It was -50°F outside, and it was a January night.  The car was obviously stuck.  I stopped, and rolled down the window.  The other car did the same, and I found myself talking to a (maybe) sixteen year old girl, plainly embarrassed that she’d run off the road.

John Wilder:  “You okay?  Got someone coming?”

Unknown Teen Driver:  “Yes.  It’s all fine.  I just wish everyone wouldn’t keep stopping!”  They say that no man is an island, but to me it’s ironic that you’re more on an island in the sea of humanity that is New York City than you are in an isolated island of sub-arctic tundra in the snow on a rural road in Fairbanks, Alaska.

JUNE

I kid.  I only saw it snow once in June in the two years I lived there.

The other day I was at one of the nine stoplights (in the entire city of Modern Mayberry) and was thinking about some wonderful blog topic and not really paying any attention to the light.  The light turned green.  My car was as immobile as Bernie Sanders’ love of communism.  There were two cars behind me.  Pugsley, however, said, “Dad, get the lead out!  Are you waiting for a special color of green?  Are you waiting for it to grow vines and pull you through the intersection?”

None of the cars behind me honked.

When it comes to community cohesion, where would you rather be?

Okay, probably not behind me.

Essential Decisions: Coming to a Town Near You

“They call it a panic room.  I know that’s a difficult concept for you, because for you, every room is a panic room.” – Monk

TP

I hear that the Australians have really started hoarding toilet paper – they are superstitious about problems down under.

What’s essential?  Right now, there are hundreds of Federal bureaucrats asking exactly that question.

That scares me.

Why?  The Federal government could cause an ice shortage in Antarctica if they were given a mandate to make more ice, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll make the right decisions.  It should probably scare you, too.  When Hurricane Ike hit Houston, we were there.  Here are some examples of the great competence that was on display from our Federal, state, and local governments:

  • Radio telling us to go the FEMA website for crucial information. During a power outage.  Where cell phones weren’t working.  So, I assumed we were to access the FEMA website psychically.
  • Radio telling us to go and bail out “first second responders” because they didn’t have food or water, because no one can plan for a Hurricane in Texas, right?
  • FEMA water showing up over a week later after power was nearly completely restored. Oh, and you could get one case.  In contrast, a local radio station had a semi-load of bottled water delivered for distribution in only two days.

america

Okay, I may have yelled at a hurricane like this during Hurricane Ike after a wee bit of wine.  No flag.  But there was a bathrobe and it was after midnight.  Does that count?

Federal response is good for, oh, responding late and poorly to any real event.  And why did I call government people “second responders” up above?  Because they are generally the second (or later) person to respond to any crisis.  In most cases, you’re the first responder.  Fire at your house?  It’s you and your trusty extinguisher or cell phone.

Bad guy in your hallway?  First responder is you, because the average police response time in the United States is ten minutes.  Then?  They’ll generally not run into the house like Rambo on steroids, they’ll come in slowly so they can go home that night.  It’s not unlikely that you’d be alone with that robber for fifteen minutes after you made the call to 911.

Do you think you’ll have time to take selfies with the burglar?  Maybe share photos of your kids and amusing anecdotes?  The old saying is right:  when seconds count, the second responders are minutes away.

burglar

One burglar stole all my lamps.  I was upset, but I was also delighted.

It’s not that I dislike the government, I think their inefficiency is cute and endearing in the same way that dealing with a young child is.  If government were actually efficient at anything that would scare me.  The government (at every level) is horrible at coordination and planning, as illustrated by my examples above, with the exception of taxation, where money is on the line – they won’t even give fishermen a break on their net income.    Individuals that are motivated by profits, however, are exceptional at planning and fixing bad situations.  Plus, do you really want to be 100% reliant on government for anything important (besides national defense)?

Let’s take an example:  food lines are a constant theme of Socialism.  I know Bernie Sanders says, people lining up in lines for scarce food, “is a good thing.”  But in capitalist systems, the food waits for you, in abundant variety.  Why?  So people can make a buck.  That’s why we have more than one kind of beer, and one kind of ketchup.  Heck, in the local Wal-Mart® there are like 8 different kinds of Heinz™ ketchup in five different sizes.  The market works to satisfy you, in ways great and small.  Especially if covering yourself in ketchup is what satisfies you.  Mmmm, jalapeño-ranch ketchup.

smooth

I got some Heinz™ ketchup in my eye, and now I don’t need glasses anymore.  My optician said that Heinz®-sight is 20/20.

The profit motive is at work even during this COVID-19 panic.  I heard this week an amazingly Good Thing.  At work, I heard we were waiting for some widgets and some polishing compound for a racknpinion molecule, and heard that there was no shipping on some of the stuff we wanted.  None.  Every single truck that normally shipped gizmos and lefthanded-transaxle wax was being put into hauling food.

That’s a lot of trucks.  As confirmation of this, The Boy went to go retrieve his things from his dorm, college having been cancelled for the End of the World®, and noted that there were huge numbers of trucks moving on the interstate.  The Boy estimated there were probably 150% of the number of trucks he normally sees, and this was on a Saturday.  State Troopers were entirely absent.  Even the cops want the food to move.

hillary

So, next time you get pulled over, just roll down your window and start a nasty dry cough.  I’m betting the lights go off and the trooper heads out . . .

This was accomplished not by bans.  Not by government edicts .  Just, “the people are scared and want more food?  Give it to them.”  This is easy because there’s plenty of food in the system.  The corn that’s being turned into Tostitos® was grown with sunlight from 2019.  Next year’s Tostitos have yet to be planted.  Rice?  We have tons.  Fuel?  As I told you several weeks ago – it’ll be the cheapest in the past 20 years.  Taking inflation into account, it may be the cheapest in history, so cheap you’ll be able to start bathing with gasoline instead of tap water, like Jeff Bezos does to clean grease from his moving parts.

You can shut down some parts of the free market because they’re non-essential – we did that in World War II.  My folks tell stories of rationing of sugar and sewing needles and tires.  And at some point those semi-trucks hauling the radishes and rutabaga and rhubarb and redfish will need new tires.  They’ll need oil changes, and wiper fluid, and the drivers will need coffee and meth.

And farmers must farm, and ranchers must ranch, and people must be ready to pick the pizza rolls from the pizza tree when they are ripe.  Someone has to milk the mice.  But farmers live for that, so as long as they have gallon milk jugs, they’ll keep filling them.  Economic incentives are still working.

The longer we go on with “nonessential” businesses being closed, the more businesses will become essential.  In Modern Mayberry, we regularly close down non-essential businesses.  It’s a day we refer to in our local dialect as “Sunday”.  On Sunday, if Wal-Mart® or a fast food restaurant doesn’t have it, you’re not getting it.  That was one of the bigger changes in moving here from bigger cities – businesses close down on Sunday, and the hours aren’t all that long on Saturday.  Most businesses close at 5pm.

So, we live with non-essential shutdowns all the time.  It’s hard to argue that the steak restaurant is essential to the public, though it’s certainly the opinion of the waitress and the owner that it’s essential, but even they agree to close it down on Sunday and Monday.

SUNDAY

It’s the first five days after Sunday that are the always the hardest.

In a true governmental paradox where bureaucrats live on a different planet than the rest of us, schools are closed but daycares remain open.  Having the grimiest, most germ-laden creatures on Earth (first graders) congregate for seven hours at school is wrong, but having those same infested viral fermentation pots play together for eleven hours at a daycare is okay.

I guess daycare workers need better unions.

But reasonable people could work together and come up with a definition of what’s essential.  My job isn’t.  Not today.  In a few months?  Maybe, but probably not.  In a few years?  Yeah, somebody needs to do it, for sure.  And most jobs, even within essential industries aren’t essential.  HR?  Let them work from home, or better yet, work from Nome or the bottom of the ocean for the next year.

Heck, I’d be surprised if productivity of home workers wasn’t greater than working in a traditional office setting.  I had read a statistic when I was starting off at work after college, and it said that up to 2/3 of the average office worker’s day was wasted.  But how do office workers waste time?  I had one boss who would just pull up a chair and talk.  For sometimes two hours or more.  About, well, whatever.

Before you snicker, around the same time I read a statistic that said something like 40% of industrial repairs fixed the wrong thing.  But it’s hard to take a steel smelter home to fix it, unless you sneak it out in your big lunchbox.

Anyway, we’ll soon be seeing what government bureaucrats feel is essential.

I’m just hoping it involves beer . . . .

If . . . Then . . . The Two Words That Allow You To See The Future

“And so, Arthur, we learned that gambling is bad and yet in a certain sense, isn’t life itself a gamble?  You can never be sure of anything.  Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic?  Not me, no sir, not me.” – The Tick (Animated)

coyote

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is most famous for his 2007 book The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  It’s a great book – I wish as many people read the book as bought it.  Then they might have at least understood why home prices plummeted faster than California’s self-respect in 2008-09.  Heck, if people would just retain a little bit of this book after they read it, they’d be better off than most MBAs.  The title of the book comes from Taleb describing Europeans touching down in Australia, and seeing something that they never thought possible:  a black swan.  All European swans are white.  Therefore?  All swans are white.

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his “Black Swan” events as having some important characteristics:

  • Black Swans are extremely rare. Standard techniques (like normal probability distributions) will never predict them.
  • Black Swans have huge consequences.
  • Everybody looks at the Black Swan event (after having gone through it) and concluded it was obviously going to happen.

I’ll throw out one other idea to mix with Taleb’s Black Swan concept – this one was from James P. Hogan’s wonderful 1982 book (that Hogan says helped topple the Soviet Union, and he might be right – LINK) Voyage from Yesteryear.  In this book, Hogan has a character talk about the difference between a phase change and a chemical reaction.  When you freeze water or melt ice, it’s just undergoing a phase change.  Warm the ice up, and you get water.  Make the water cold enough, and it’ll change back.

Phase changes are simple and reversible.  It’s only a matter of energy.  But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?  It’s never coming back.  Burning the paper is a one way trip.  It’s a chemical reaction that you can’t reverse.  Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.  It turns out they don’t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

CUSACK

In real life, John Cusack blocked me on Twitter®.  I probably deserved it.  I just wanted my two dollars.

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.  Same stuff, different day.  But the American Revolution?  That was a chemical reaction – after the war we could never go back to being British subjects – the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.  9/11 was another phase change.  Despite W’s desire that we “go on as normal” we never have been normal again and conventional ideas of privacy, freedom, independence, and self-governance are dead.

Oops.

All Black Swans are chemical reactions – they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the “way things were” it never happens – you can’t unburn the paper.  The change is a one-way event.  In one (for me) particularly striking story in The Black Swan, Taleb wrote that his relatives from Lebanon were still waiting for things to return to normal, even though it had been thirty years since the war had ripped Lebanon apart.  No, they weren’t crack dealers, and they weren’t alone.  Even as late as 2012, 76,000 people were displaced within Lebanon, waiting for things to get back to normal.

Wuhan Flu, COVID-19, is a Black Swan.  It’s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZ® famine of 1986.   This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.  When this is studied in classes in fifty years, the students will think it happened all at once, rather than unfolding, day-by-day over the course of a year.  In a week, we’ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.  It’s the new normal.  And yes, I said a year.  We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t last a decade.

waterloo

A woman born at the beginning of the French Revolution would have already had kids by the time Napoleon was booted off stage permanently after Waterloo.  But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

As I’ve written about before, the economy is facing a crisis that’s at least twice as big as the 2008 Great Recession.  The stage was set beforehand for a phase change – from functioning economy to recession and then back again.  Trump had really juiced the economy in an unusual way:  clearing out regulations.  Sure, he pumped money back via tax cuts, but those tax cuts were targeted toward non-millionaire types and businesses.  This was, perhaps, the most wholesome way to grow the economy – by people making money rather than by government choosing who got to win.  Bernie, I’m talking about you.

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.  Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.  But just like Wuhan isn’t really the flu, this economic upset really isn’t a recession – it’s far worse.  Dow® 8,000 or less isn’t out of the question on the downside.  Really.

It’s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.  I mean, more unusual than usual.  Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.  “Millionaires” were excluded.  Free health care will come on the table soon enough.  We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s going to happen.  And we will never go back to the way things were.  This isn’t a phase change.  Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just won’t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

TODDLER

Honestly, I don’t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-Its®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.  It was a lot of fun.  I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.  My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.  So, I guess that makes me sort-of a retired professional doomer.

And my thinking pattern developed a rhythm . . . If (generic disaster) happened, Then (outcome).

It was thinking about the outcome that was the most fun.  If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?  Well, based upon the statistics that I could find, it was an average wait of 500 years for a tornado to hit any given spot in the geographic region of the HQ.  Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, that’s not very often.  I tracked down and tried to figure out how much money the company would lose if it got hit by a tornado, volcano, hurricane and earthquake all on the same day – a Torcano Hurriquake™.  After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of payments that people owed us.  As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWs® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey Wallpaper® in a year.

BONUS

Hey, everybody who thinks exactly alike gets a bonus, right?

They didn’t think it was funny when I told them that a Civil War was 10 times as likely as a natural disaster shutting down operations.  When I showed them the math, they couldn’t argue, but they weren’t happy.  They didn’t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep – most of their systems already had offsite backups.  And no one was even slightly interested in shooting RPGs at the executives.

What the executives were interested in was things that they were used to, floods.  Torcanos. Hurriquakes.  Civil War?  I’m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.  “Just not credible.”

No Black Swan event is credible when you try to describe it to someone who is stuck in thinking normally.  Just like Taleb’s relatives looking for stability in Lebanon or me wondering when TSA will stop fondling my man parts, it’s not going to happen.  But describe trying to get on a flight in 2020 to an American in 1995?  They’d think it was a silly science fiction story.  If only we could convince the TSA to fondle Lebonese?

Which brings us back to COVID-19.  How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?  It’s difficult.  Their minds aren’t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.  But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.  They just don’t realize it’s like herpes:  forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.  The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess I’ll call it protein.  Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.  And they say that there isn’t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.  And they close during summer, last I checked – every summer.  But now?  School food is a must.  Here in Modern Mayberry, they’re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.  I think it’s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that we’re in trouble.  One of the brighter ones probably had the following thought:

If (Lunches are Free) Then (How Long Until They Become Free Community Lunches)?

If (Free Community Lunches Exist) Then (How Many People Remember Typhoid Mary Was A Lunch Lady Cook who spent 30 years in prison isolation because she wouldn’t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

typhoid

If you cook them too long, they get all crunchy.

Schools are being closed.  This, in my opinion is good.  But If (Schools Close) Then (Are Daycares Any Safer?)  Your takeaway should be this question:  how long until daycares are closed?  If they can close the NBA, Then they can close daycares.  But I repeat myself.

What can you do?  The best time to prepare was last month.  The next best time to prepare is now.  I can’t tell you if you have enough cans of corn in your pantry.  And, no, that’s not a creepy metaphor referring to some orifice you may or may not have.  I mean actual corn.  Or tuna.  Still not a metaphor.  Or mayonnaise.  Whatever you normally eat, you have some extra, right?

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

If (Supermarkets Close) Then (what)?  The average supermarket used to have inventory for three days.  The average house, food enough for three days.   Add that up, and American is pretty close to being hungry.  What happens Then?  Martial law?  Food distributions?

If (Your Job Ceases to Exist) Then (what)?

That’s the key to preparing yourself, not only physically like those people building blanket forts with a semi-load of toilet paper in their basement as structural wall material, but also mentally.  To understand what’s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.  You have to let your mind make it real and run it to a logical conclusion.

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

TOM

Okay, not everything bad can happen.  I mean, cats with thumbs?  Silly.

When an idea makes sense, follow it through.  If so, Then what’s the consequence?  Don’t limit your thinking.  It’s a fun game.  Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminator™, and look how much fun that was.  But when you really think about it, you’ll look to see what happened in the past.  While the future won’t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.  The cause and effect of many things doesn’t change.

If we’re quarantining, Then we won’t drive as much.  If we don’t drive as much, Then we won’t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.  If we don’t use as much of that sweet, sweet, gasoline, Then the price of oil, refineries, and oil producing companies will drop and some will go out of business and lots of people will lose their jobs.  That’s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasn’t in my projections – I was expecting cake.  It wasn’t in the mindset of the people of the world.  Then it was.  So what happens next?  What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?  What changes will be permanent?

  • If you want to keep your doctors alive, Then how will you protect them from COVID-19?
  • If you want to save the people with the most future, Then how many over 40 will get one of the 60,000 ventilators? Besides me, I mean.
  • If your customers are being impacted, Then will they fail?
  • If your customers fail, Then who will pay you?
  • If government wants to control people and how they move, Then they’ll start using the tracking information from cell phones.
  • If the government tracks cell phones, Then why would they ever stop? About the time they stop touching your no-no areas so you can go to Cleveland?
  • If the clerk at Wal-Mart® tells you that “they” have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
  • If you hear from another Wal-Mart© employee that they are setting up special hours for employees to shop after the store is closed, Then will you pay attention?
  • If the government starts paying people just to breath, Then will they ever stop?
  • If I tell you that hope is not a plan, Then will you . . . plan?

We are in a Black Swan event, probably the biggest of your life, and 9/11 was no slouch.  Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.  But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.  The final exam is pass/fail.  And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.