Health – Page 23 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote

“Now, you see all these red flags? Trouble spots. Southeastern Asia. The Caribbean. The Congo. I’ll give you one guess as to who’s responsible.” – Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

I look much better after I’ve had a cup of coffee. And after I’ve found my axe.

I know that you, gentle reader, have thoughts about guns that are probably pretty similar to mine, so I’d like to take you on a short walk through history, specifically the history of politics and psychiatry. I promise, it will make more sense than the lyrics to the Manfred Mann song Blinded by the Light. What the hell is a go-cart Mozart, and why is he checking out the weather chart, anyway?

The history of psychiatry is tied directly to the political.

I have seen a person suffering from schizophrenia to such a degree that they were sure that MTV® video stars were stealing songs directly from their brain and that they were also a surgeon who regularly performed operations on world leaders and stored their organs in the freezer for safe keeping.

If no one has ever told you that there are human organs belonging to world leaders in their fridge in a completely matter-of-fact “would you like a glass of water” voice, well, all I can tell you is that my first thought was one of complete disbelief that I had heard them right. Yes, I asked for them to repeat that statement. Twice.

I walked over and checked their freezer. Thankfully the only things in it were some frozen pizzas and ancient ice cubes. I assure you I was talking to their shrink that afternoon and they were involuntarily committed by 5PM. They were helped, and after being put on some appropriately industrial levels of anti-psychotic medication, did okay enough to be released back into the wild. As long as they stayed on their meds.

I know that there are actually crazy people that really need help.

But I also know this: psychiatry is still the most politically abused medical profession.

Okay, if Depp isn’t crazy, why does he keep starring in movies like this?

Examples of political abuse of psychiatry? There are many. When I mentioned this topic to The Mrs., she immediately said, “the Soviet Union.” And that’s the example I thought of first, too. The Soviets systematically used diagnosis of psychological disorders such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia” to put people who didn’t like Marxism into mental institutions. And, no, those diagnoses aren’t lame jokes – those were really Soviet-era diagnoses.

How many were caught up in the psychological gulags?

We really don’t know since those records are still secret, but in 1978 at least 4.5 million Soviet citizens were listed as having mental health problems. In 1988, perhaps thinking that they might face their own version of Soviet Nuremburg Trials for Crimes Against Humanity, Soviet leaders had over 800,000 thousand patients removed from the list of the mentally ill. Paperwork error, surely?

Okay, with all those red flags, how did they not see the collapse of communism coming?

Did the Soviets condemn thousands with false diagnosis? Nearly certainly. Hundreds of thousands? Very likely.

Millions?

Probably. Think of it, millions of people falsely diagnosed with a mental illness due to political beliefs and sent to asylums and work camps. Certainly some were executed.

The Soviets allowed ownership of smoothbore weapons for hunting. Except when they didn’t. Which was most of the time. Oh, and the definition of sweet summer child is: a person who doesn’t know the hardships of winter, often used when someone has no experience with a particular (stressful) thing, which may describe a generation that rhymes with perennial.

Okay, it was just the Soviet Union, right?

No. Cuba did the same thing. There is evidence that China is still doing it, and likely on scale similar to that of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the World Psychiatric Association took the lead in investigations. Oh, they didn’t? The World Psychiatric Association pretty much ignored it and said that people associated with Falun Gong are nuts and that putting them in asylums run by the state security apparatus (not the medical directorate) was perfectly normal?

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest . . . and if you haven’t see the movie, you should, it’s a lighthearted comedy and perfect for a first date.

Okay, that’s just China. Thankfully this would never happen in the United States.

Oh, it did?

Sure. In the 1920’s dissidents (like one who protested the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) were put into asylums. In the 1960’s members of the American Psychological Association smeared presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the press by diagnosing him. But that wasn’t political, right?

Thankfully it isn’t happening now.

Oh, in 2012 a whistleblower with the NYPD was railroaded on mental health? Ouch. But New York is corrupt.

It would never happen based on political motives, right?

Dinesh D’Souza, author and filmmaker on the Right was convicted of a crime based on giving too much money to a political campaign. He admitted he was wrong. The Federal Judge involved in the case sentenced D’Souza not only to prison, he sentenced D’Souza to years of mental health counselling despite a licensed psychologist saying that D’Souza was just fine mentally.

So, yes. Psychiatry is a political weapon. It’s not like the Left has sentenced political opponents to chemotherapy, but I hear that they’re working on it.

Yes, this is a common sense way to use psychiatry!

This corrupt branch of medicine is the background of the Red Flag Laws.

The idea is that we’ll create laws to remove rights from people without due process, with the presumption that individuals should lose a right guaranteed by the Constitution®. A single accuser, with no evidence can result in gun confiscation to a law-abiding citizen. Sadly this already happens – people with contested domestic restraining orders (a standard tactic in divorces nowadays) lose their rights, although I’ve heard of people fighting these orders and winning – at least there is a pretense at due process.

The claim that the ability to strip people of rights won’t be abused is laughable. In every country that’s been infected by psychiatry, it has been twisted to meet political ends. Yes, there are crazy people. I’ve seen one as I related above. And, if you did a brain scan, there is a physical basis for schizophrenia. It’s real. It is a medical condition. But remember, these are the same psychiatrists that would diagnose me as nuts if I believed I was be five years older than I really am, but are perfectly fine with children younger than the age of five claiming they are a different sex than their genetics have made them.

Po-tay-to, Po-gender reassignment surgery for children is normal-to.

Furthermore, the medical profession as a whole is maybe a bit, well, mental*. In one study it was claimed that 50% of female doctors could be diagnosed with a mental disease. I wonder again why my ex didn’t take up medicine? (*Aesop LINK excluded, unless pimp-slapping in the comments section is classified as a mental disorder.)

Oh, and psychologists have nearly the highest rates of suicide of any profession. Yes, any profession, including the people who make balloon animals in Mauschwitz Disneyland® for chubby children with hands sticky from chocolate ice cream. Perfectly stable. And this is also the same profession whose international governing body (WPA) was just fine with political repression in the name of psychiatry.

Besides being oppressive, the Red Flag laws would not have helped in latest shootings – these people lawfully and legally got their rifles. But they will form the basis for taking away guns for . . .

Conspiracy Theories – Believing anything other than the Official Narrative® will become a basis for exclusion of lawful firearms ownership, despite the fact that throughout history, many conspiracy theories have been proven true. Google® MKULTRA. That happened. But the FBI® is now warning that you are a danger if you don’t believe the Official Narrative©.
Antisocial Behavior – Ever not want to hang around people? You’re antisocial, and that’s dangerous, citizen. No AR for you!
Websites Visited – Going to unapproved sites? Thinking unapproved thoughts? Glockblock™!
Comments Made When You Were 16 – Wow, did you really say that maybe the Crusades weren’t all bad? No pew-pew for you, hater.
Not Believing in the Easter Bunny Socialism – Well, I think I covered that above.

The irony is this will have the impact of keeping people away from mental health professionals. This will keep people from seeking help when they’re a little depressed, because the consequences of having a “health record” might prevent them from future opportunity – the only safe way to live life would be to stay away from health professionals – and not answer certain questions your M.D. might have for you with a polite BFYTW when asked why you’re not answering. Oh, but that probably puts you on the antisocial list.

Texas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they certainly got some things right once upon a time.

Psychiatry is on pretty iffy ground in many cases already. As an experiment, a group of doctors sent people to a psychiatrist with one symptom – they heard a voice. No other symptom. They were perfectly normal, mentally healthy people. In one case, the person was committed to a mental health facility (as I recall) for several weeks with zero symptoms. I tried to look it up, but, surprise, most Google® searches right now link commitment to . . . violence. Even that’s not a comfortable thought.

Soviet mental health nurse. Not shown: tenth guard, who is now an inmate.

The single scariest thing to me is watching a human mind erode – what was once a rational human disappears. It’s what makes (to me) zombies scary. They look like humans. They used to be a normal human. But that rational human being is now gone, replaced by someone who has no real tie to reality while the external form remains.

I realize that there is a time and a place for psychiatric care.

But psychiatrists are already owned by the Left. The Left sees you as crazy already. The Left views your dissent from their agenda as a mental disorder, one punishable by death, if need be.

I’ll leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is really pictured above while in the gulag: “I’ll take Solzhenitsyn on Gun Control for $1000, Alex. Oh, look – the Daily Double®!”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [They] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If . . . if . . . we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Defeating My Biggest Enemy: Me, Complete with Hairy Kardashians and Video Games.

“I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!” – The Empire Strikes Back™

Nah, I got an A. Got a perfect score on the final, plus I got to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate during winter break.

Ever think you could accomplish more? You can. Read on. It’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

When I was in college I took a course called Probability and Statistics, or as we referred to it at the time, Sadistics. During one lecture the instructor told the class a story about how a graduate student working on his Ph.D. was late to a class – so late that he’d missed the start of the lecture. The student saw two math problems on the blackboard. Thinking they were homework problems, he copied them down, and spent the weekend working on them. They were a little harder than usual, but he managed to finish them.

On Monday he returned to class, and showed the instructor his results. Turns out that the problems weren’t homework: these were two unproven theorems in statistics; unproven theorems that George Dantzig (the student) finished because he had no idea that they were too hard for him to do.

In Dantzig’s own words:

“A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, [his teacher] just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems up in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

At least he didn’t have to shag the professor, baby.

That’s a pretty good story, especially because it’s true and a great example of how much you can achieve when you’re too stupid to know that what you’re doing is impossible. It’s also a very good story to tell the boss the next time you’re late for a meeting at work, because his reaction will likely allow you time for independent exploration of all the employment opportunities this great nation has to offer.

So how do people sabotage themselves so they don’t achieve all that they could? How do they turn themselves into their own worst enemy? Today I’ll present three reasons. There are more, but what do I look like, a budget Tony Robbins?

I was wondering why that seminar only cost $14.98.

I think the worst is negative inner dialogue.

Ever make a mistake? Ever beat yourself up about it? Yeah, me too. But what I noticed is that when I beat myself up, I used to say things to myself that were meaner than any person had ever said to me in real life. Notice I said “used to” – I simply don’t put up with it any more. When I sense that inner beat down coming, I just shut it down.

If your best friend who has your best interests at heart wouldn’t say it to you, why would you say it to yourself?

Recently I read about a research study that indicated that you had more impact when motivating yourself if you encouraged yourself in the third person. Saying to yourself, “You’ve got this, John,” is much more powerful than, “I can do this.” Why? I have my guesses – it’s probably that you don’t want to fail when you’ve got some other person involved, so you dig that much deeper.

If that’s the case, how much more damaging is beating yourself up verbally in the third person? “I’m stupid,” versus “you’re stupid.” Think about it – and I advise you not to put up with your nonsense. Shut it down.

Yes, this happened.

Negative inner dialogue doesn’t help me, especially since whatever mistake I made was generally not even noticed by others. I hate to break this to you, but outside of your family, you’re less important than you think. People don’t notice the things you do all that much, and if they do? They don’t remember.

That may seem like a downer, but it’s really the opposite. It’s freedom, and another reason not to beat yourself up.

Next on the list? Belief that your goal is impossible.

Well, it isn’t possible, until you actually do it. Nobody had solved Dantzig’s theorems until he solved them. Heck, the Kardashians are too dumb to know they shouldn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars despite an utter lack anything resembling talent or a redeeming feature. Oh, unless you count their copious amounts of body hair. And I wouldn’t advise that you count their body hair, since that would take far too long. Plus? You’d get Kardashian grease all over you.

This is right before the hair covers them entirely in a protective cocoon so they can become giant genderless moth people.

I’ll note that nearly every time I was given an assignment that seemed impossible at work, I managed to crack the problem. What was off was my definition of impossible. I eventually ended up working for a boss that pushed me even farther. Nine times out of ten, he gambled and won. The tenth time? They fired him. Don’t feel bad for him – his severance package was about $2 million.

Finally, there’s not giving it all you’ve got.

This one is insidious. Here’s my example: in my career (the one that pays the bills, not this one) I’ve accomplished most things that I’ve ever wanted to do and have a whole batch of odd stories that I’ll maybe get around to telling someday. Does this mean that I aimed too low, that I didn’t push hard enough? Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve seen what some of the people at the top had to do to get there, and I like sleeping well.

It’s tough at the top. Everything is a tradeoff.

But here I can push myself, and sleep well. So, I write. I give that all that I’ve got, especially once I understood that I’d never get better unless I really pushed myself. And I can see results. I had a post that related to one I’d written back in 2017 that I was thinking of linking to. I pulled up the old post. I read it.

What made me happiest about the old post is: I’m better now than I was in 2017 – a lot better. How much better will I be if I keep pushing it, keep focusing on it for 20 hours a week for another decade? I have no idea. But we’ll see.

But I had my own George Dantzig moment before I ever heard his story:

I was in high school and a friend came over to my place. He and I sat down to play some video games, since we didn’t have a car. He went first. Normally on my first guy I’d score 10,000 or so. But my friend scored 50,000. I was amazed – I had no idea it was possible. So, my first guy up? 50,000 points. This was my best score ever.

I know – it looks exactly like a scene from The Empire Strikes Back©. But, trust me, this is really a video game.

What had been missing was belief. Seeing my friend play with no higher a skill level than I had do five times better than my best ever score flipped a switch. I believed. I could perform better than I ever thought possible.

But right now, it’s time:

Time to believe in yourself. Time to believe that your goal is possible. Time to work harder.

Go on, you’ve got this.

Stonewall Jackson, Patton, Wrecked Cars and Dealing with Fear

“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity

Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.

I had a Ford® Taurus©. Yes, that’s an admission of guilt. Even worse? It was a pale-lime green. I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair. After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays. But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.

As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display. Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question. The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office. I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on. After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.

I wanted it to show the thermometer.

Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.

I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia. I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®. I hesitated. What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French? Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?

Then I started to panic. Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric? I don’t even know how to drink in metric. Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink? How many metric days until Christmas? How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®? Perish the thought of being French and metric. That’s how we got Canada, after all. Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.

Sure, they look polite. But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.

The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together. That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers. If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways. Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.

An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.

Oops.

Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room. I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on. I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.

I’ve done stupider things. Some of them even when I was sober.

So, there I was sitting in my car. Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.

What? I came to my senses. It’s just a car.

I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely. And I got rid of the hesitation.

What led to the hesitation?

Fear. It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.

General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line. “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Not a bad way to get a nickname.

Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy. Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.

For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything.

So, why is fear so bad? What’s wrong with a little fear?

That’s simple: fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world. Period. I understand that’s a pretty bold statement. Can I back it up? Sure.

Let’s take envy. It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy. What causes envy?

Insecurity. Think Elon Musk feels envy? Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy. They’re not envious because they’re not insecure. They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt. All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.

That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera. It’s just another face of fear. And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.

Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?

Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery. But the concept is right. Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life. And fear is used to manipulate you. Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page. Here’s my analysis:

3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
25 were utterly useless.

I read the amusing stories. I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment. I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories. I skipped the fear manipulation stories. Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values. There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.

What’s the cure for fear?

Action. Press the button. Ask the girl out. Lift the weight. Press the button in your car. Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear. You will be stronger. You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear. And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.

Is fear useless? No. Fear can be used. Fear should be used.

General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

Fun fact: General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.

So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)

“Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos® and masturbating does not constitute plans in my book.” – Breaking Bad

In a constantly downward spiral, Kermit finally found the downside in living his best life.

A few weeks ago my daughter, Alia S. Wilder was in town. We were in the middle of preparing dinner of steak, steak, and more steak for the grill when I saw Alia diving face first into a plate of cookies.

When she came up for air I asked innocently, “I thought you were on the keto diet?”

I did notice a mood change when I was on the keto diet: I got tired of cheese and my only joy in life consisted of watching television shows about murder.

“No, she said, “I’m living my best life.” I could even hear the italics in her voice. It’s amazing how well font choice carries in my kitchen. I think it’s the tile.

John Wilder: “Umm, what exactly does ‘my best life’ mean?” I thought I could tell by context, but I wanted to give her a chance to explain.

Alia S. Wilder: “It’s living your life by being who you are naturally. It’s doing what you want.”

I slowly shook my head. That’s exactly what I thought it was. Cue volcano erupting:

One of the nice things about being a parent is that you can be honest with your children when they are being utterly foolish. This was one of those times.

My first words were: “You know this is going to go into the blog, right?”

Is this why they hold the neighborhood block party when we leave for vacation?

I then started a tirade. As this was the second time that I’d met her boyfriend, you’d think I’d hold back to give a good impression that I was a nice, genteel father who wears cardigan sweaters and puts on loafers and talks to hand puppets as if they were real. You’d be wrong, and I tried the hand puppet thing, but one of my personalities thought it was creepy. No, Mr. Rogers© wasn’t here that night. I let loose with a full broadside worthy of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

I was a horrible pirate captain. They told me, “The cannon be ready,” and I responded “are.”

“You realize that’s the single stupidest piece of advice you’ve ever been given, right?” I continued, not even having gotten warmed up yet. “It’s the advice a teenager thinks up in the shower and then considers it a deep thought because, well they’re a teenager in middle school, and middle school age children are the single stupidest subspecies ever set loose on planet Earth.” I paused for breath. You need decent lung capacity if you’re going to go into full rage enhanced by spittle.

I continued. “Why is it stupid? Because people are awful. You’re awful. I’m awful. We have to work each minute to NOT do what we’d like, because what we’d like to do, if left only to our own desires is . . . also awful. You, me, every single one of us.”

I could feel the full rolling boil starting.

“Living my best life is the strategy of a three year old that wants to eat an entire box of Oreos® at one sitting and then lie about it and blame the poodle. Living my best life combines all of the worst ideas of abandoning duty, honor, and responsibility in only four words: ‘living my best life.’ Oh, I decided not to work today. I’m living my best life. I decided that I would rather spend my money on avocado-flavored non-fat organic vaping juice rather than baby formula. I’m living my best life. I don’t care if I offended you, I have to speak my truth when living my best life. Oh, I’m sorry Western Civilization, we can’t go back to the Moon and advance the human race to the stars because I’m busy shopping. I’m living my best life.”

What came to my mind during this tirade conversation were the words of the dead French scientist, mathematician, religious philosopher and part-time Uber driver Blaise Pascal:

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing that he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus, it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing that one is wretched.”

In this quote when Pascal wrote “wretched,” he meant, “of inferior quality; bad.”

Follow your nose, it always knows. Specifically all about pressure, mathematics, and designing a computer by the age of 19, in 17^th Century France.

Pascal didn’t think mankind was naturally awful, he knew that mankind was naturally awful: prideful, selfish, lustful, mean, and greedy. I’m not sure how Pascal got that idea, maybe he was picked on about nose size when he was in middle school. But he was correct. We’re inferior. But our greatness comes not from that obvious inferior quality, it comes from knowing that you’re awful; and then not being awful.

If we know that we’re awful, we can do something about it. If we think that being awful is okay, that we can live our best life, then it’s an excuse to be awful. In fact, it’s worse than that. Aleister Crowley wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which has been appropriated by the Church of Satan® and correctly interpreted to mean . . . do whatever you want to do.

Apparently living your best life allows you to dress like Dr. Evil on a regular basis.

One particular website (not gonna given ‘em a link, they’re the first one listed when you Google® “living my best life”) has a list, which includes the following gems of personally corrosive advice on how to live your best life (note, my comments are in italics):

Do what you want – let your inner three year old make all your decisions.
Speak your truth – not the truth, your truth since hearing the actual, real truth from other people might make you sad.
Practice sacred self-love – and everyone should celebrate you for your sacred self-love, since you deserve to live your best life because you suffered so much because of your (INSERT VICTIM STATUS QUALIFICATION HERE).

Not all of the advice on the website was horrible, but most of it was shallower than the gene pool that produced Johnny Depp your typical congressman.

So, under this philosophy, if I’m fat, the problem isn’t that I’m fat and should have fewer cookies: the problem is the world is fataphobic.
If I think I’m a cat, the problem isn’t that I’m delusional: the problem is that the world is transspeciesphobic.
If I think that being an American has nothing to do with the values and norms of the last 300 years: the problem is your problem for being tied to the past.

When the cookies ran out, the monster came out.

So, in summary, living your best life is nothing more than permission to be the very worst person you can be. All that being said, Alia S. Wilder really does make some tasty cookies.

Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

“I’m simply seeking to inspire mankind to all that is intended.” – Constantine

See the lengths I will go to in order to deliver top-quality humor three times a week?

Sometimes you find treasures in odd places. Back in 2007, I was working a nightmare job. The days were hectic, filled with emergency after emergency, wailing, and general disarray. And then I had to commute to work. Okay, home life was generally pretty good, but work really was a nightmare. One positive thing I did, though, was clip and print things that I found to be inspiring. No, not a lot of clippings like I’d finally found the missing connection between the Rothschild family and why there are no purple M&M’s®. No, when I found these quotes there were just a few – maybe less than a dozen.

Here’s one of the quotes I found in the clippings:

“If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn’t have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the guy with a positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive. Simple as that.” – Gordon Smith, Retired Green Beret Command Sergeant Major

Training, preparation, skill and Ruffles® are all wonderful things. I recommend them all, especially if they are cheddar-flavored. The quote above, however, exactly mirrors my own feelings and experience. Stated bluntly:

Attitude matters.

I don’t have that tie, though, and haven’t worn one regularly since ‘08.

I’m a long time reader of Scott Adams dating back into the mid-1990’s. He’s most famous for Dilbert, but he has written books and blogged for decades about everything from management to life skills to persuasion. Daily, Scott Adams writes his goals 15 times (LINK). Why 15? I don’t know. But Adams has reported that it produces amazing results for him, and he’s lived a pretty amazing life. It might also have something to do with him being a genius who works really hard and tries lots of things. Nah. He must be a beneficiary of the structural capitalist patriarchy and the reason people love Dilbert is only due to white privilege. That explains everything, if you’re in Congress.

How the goal writing produces results is probably unimportant – in my opinion the most likely idea is that if you’re focused on a goal, you’ll notice connections, clues or opportunities that would normally pass you by. The focus on the goal, the attitude that you can achieve something great changes the way you look at every aspect of your day. I know that when I believe I can succeed, I seem to keep finding ways to actually make it happen.

It might seem that it’s magic, writing down what you want 15 times a day and having coincidences show up that lead you to your goal. But, perhaps, the magic is just in you – seeing farther and deeper than you normally would is the magic. Having a goal changes you. Having the attitude that you can achieve your goal changes you so you can see the path more clearly.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”

I guess it wasn’t just college papers Creepy Joe plagiarized . . .

We’ve all been around negative people. I’ve had to work with them. I’ve had to manage them, and once I even had to work for one – he was my first supervisor after I graduated college. There was nothing that was good that ever happened to or around him. He’d had a leg injury and was now stuck at a desk job when he really, really hated desk jobs. Enter: happy, enthusiastic, wisecracking, young college graduate (still with hair at that time). I think he wanted to tie me up in a burlap sack weighted down with stones and toss me in the pond behind the office. Frankly, I can see why.

This clip is super short, and from the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes. Haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes? You have your weekend assignment – it’s from back when movies were fun and not remakes.

Negative People:

Exhaust me.
Don’t accomplish much.
Take the last cup of coffee without making more.
Tend to make themselves a victim of whatever happened to them.
Infect the entire team with negativity and sometimes herpes.
Seem to get energy from talking about their pain and how the world is unfair to them.
Shoot down bad ideas. And good ideas. Any ideas, really.
Find a dark cloud in every silver lining.

I had a professor in college who had one piece of advice for me: “Keep smiling, John.” I took his advice. For most of my life, I’ve kept smiling. Even on bad days at work, I’ve kept a good attitude because most of the time, circumstances don’t care if you’re mad at them. The circumstances continue to exist just the same.

Not everyone agrees with me. On one particular job I actually received feedback that I was too cheerful. I guess being a mortician isn’t a job for everyone.

Okay, I’ve never worked as a mortician, but one of my bosses really did tell me I was too cheerful. But if I could be a mortician that hired Terminators®? I wouldn’t call that a dead-end job.

In most things in life I expect good outcomes, and generally I get them. That’s not unique to me. Throughout the history of humanity most times and most days have been good. Has there been war as long as we can look back into history? Yes. We’ve been fighting each other even before we were fully human. I imagine, though, we’ve been telling each other fart jokes for just as long. The human race has watched sunsets over the Arctic, the Serengeti, and the Atlantic and had pretty good days. An iPhone® isn’t required, but without an endless stream of Disney® live-action remakes, is life really worth living?

Nah, I like making them.

I won’t say that on my worst day there was a bright spot. The worst day of my life just sucked from 2pm until I finally fell asleep in bed. Honestly, it wasn’t much better the next day, but there were a few bright spots showed up. And more the next. And every day since then has been better than that day.

I mentioned magic above, and magic also happens on my worst days. Every one of my very bad days was the start of the time when my life started to get better, and it seemed the worse it was, the better it would eventually be. My best times have come from my worst times. One example was my divorce. The reality is that no matter how bad the marriage was, divorce is difficult. But as difficult as it was, it was the start of the next phase in my life, my marriage to The Mrs.

The longer, and the deeper the dark night of the soul, the bigger the positive that’s eventually come out of it for me.

If I ever were to get involved with the funeral industry, I’d tie the shoelaces of the deceased together in the coffin. That way if we ever had a zombie apocalypse, it would be hilarious. See, I even made zombies cheerful.

I spend time thinking about the future, and about dark possibilities not so much because I’m a gloomy guy sitting in the basement – but because it’s fun. However, in thinking about those possibilities I am prepared, at least a little more, for the uncertainty of the future. I’m cheerful, but I can see reality and know that there is danger ahead.

As I read the news I see a specter of a dark foe bent on creating a world that few of us want to see, one built out of fear and control. It’s even scarier because that foe wants you and I to think that it’s winning, so we will give up and it can win by default. Don’t. As long as people long for freedom, as long as we have each other and a dream of a better day where mankind keeps reaching for the stars, we have light. But in this time of seeming darkness, even a small light burns brightly.

If I were to give advice this Friday it’s this: be of good cheer. Be a spark in the darkness to help others. Understand that, until the last moment of your life, you have the ability to change the world for the better, to help create that better future for all of us.

Or, failing that, there’s always Ruffles®, Netflix©, beer and the couch.

Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires

“What kind of cruel charity charges orphans $500 to eat dinner?” – News Radio

The Mrs. seems rather narrow-minded about certain donations.

Before Pop Wilder passed away, I would go to visit him on a regular basis. After graduating from college, almost all of my trips and time off from work (when we didn’t stay home) was spent visiting Pop at our ancestral homeland in the mountains around Zorro Falls. I called the trips to go visit Pop “Obili-cations” because I felt obligated to go to see him on my vacations. Sure, I had a choice on how to spend those 10 days of vacation a year, but I also knew that the number of hours I’d ever get to spend with him were like the collective I.Q. of Congress: finite and rapidly shrinking.

To me, these trips were important. I figured* that I had spent over 99% of the hours I’d ever spend with Pop already. I had 1% or less of those hours left. These hours were precious and few. Given that perspective, I didn’t really mind spending every vacation day going to see him up at Zorro Falls. Now that I’m a father, I’m very glad I made those trips since it now gives me the excuse to guilt my own children into doing the same thing.

While we visited, I’d often go to church with Pop on Sunday mornings. Pop had lived within thirty miles of Zorro Falls his entire life. This church we’d go to was the same small church where we went when I was a child. It was the same church where, as a five year old, I had colored Jesus’ face bright purple during Sunday School one Sunday morning.

Sunday School Teacher, leaning to look at my coloring page: “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t really purple, right?”

Young Johnny Wilder: “He’s God. He can be any color he wants to be.” I never even bothered to look up at her. I was busy coloring the Apostle Matthew’s skin in silver, having finished with Jesus. It was only years later that I realized that Matthew had been a Terminator™ sent back from the future to stop Jesus from giving birth to John Conner®. Now, at last, the Bible made sense!

Jesus could also be a Terminator© if he wanted to be and if he could obtain the rights from James Cameron. I think that would have made the Crucifixion even more interesting . . .

Sunday School Teacher had no response to my stunningly brilliant “purple Jesus” logic, but did tell Ma Wilder. Ma Wilder got years of mileage out of that story, though I wish she wouldn’t have told it to the guys on my wrestling team.

But back to the story: I was on an obli-cation, and I met Pop at his place and went to the church with him. We sat down in the pew right up front since Pop claimed that the artillery during his European vacation in the 1940’s hadn’t been particularly good for his hearing. Sissy.

The Pastor began his sermon. Now, I always really liked that Pastor – he had been friends with the family for years. He had officiated at Ma Wilder’s funeral. The topic of his sermon that day was charity.

I am a strong believer in charity. I think that there are few things that are better for the human soul than giving freely of one’s time or money to help another worthy person. Maybe Ruffles® or Ding-Dongs© are close, but they’re still not quite as good as charity.

I look back on my life and feel really good about the times I was able to help someone. I recall stopping at a convenience store while travelling for business. I was looking for a book store, because I’d just finished the novel I was reading. The clerk told me that, “This is Chicago, nearest book store is . . . twenty miles that way, at the mall.” He then did something unusual. He looked me in the eye, and pointed at a tiny redhead, maybe 19, standing by a car in the rain, very out of place in the mean streets of south Chicago. “She needs your help, man.”

Unlike a vegan, I can change a flat tire.

Her tire was flat. She was trying to go to meet her fiancé at the airport. He was coming home from Iraq that night.

“Can you help me?”

I changed her tire in the rain. She didn’t have an umbrella, but she did have a poster board that she held over me while I changed the tire. As I tightened up the last lug nut, I stood up. “Okay, you’re good to go.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“No, ma’am. That’s not why I did it. Go see your fiancé.”

I still feel good when I tell that story. And I’m not telling it to brag – any person reading this blog could have and would have done the same – I’m no more virtuous than any of you. But I am happy that I was there that night, to help that young girl get to the gate and throw her arms around her man as he came back from combat. The act of charity probably helped me more than it helped her – I know I remember it, but I’d bet she doesn’t. The fairy tale ended with her at the gate. The supporting characters (me, for instance) were lost in the arms of her man, details that won’t make the final version of the story she has told her children.

Which is how it should be.

Anyway, I agreed with the pastor when talked about charity. Helping people is good. But then the pastor continued, “And let us pray that Congress will act to give money to these poor people.”

He lost me right there.

Is it just me or does Jesus look a lot like Bruce Springsteen? I guess he is The Boss, after all.

I know that it’s probably a sin to be really, really pissed off in church, but there I was, in the second row, angry. And it’s probably a double-secret sin to be really, really pissed off at the Pastor. Thankfully, the church had just had a new roof installed so I was shielded from immediate lightning strikes from on high. And, if I’m being honest with you Internet, if a “stray” lightning bolt was going to hit me, it would have hit me far sooner than that day – being irritated with a Pastor is probably pretty low on my list of sinful behavior. Thankfully, Christianity has forgiveness embedded into it, because I certainly need it.

But why did I get so angry at the nice Pastor? Charity, when done by an individual is enriching. It helps both parties. It helps me. It helps tiny redheads with flat tires. It is an act that transcends – a willing gift to someone who will never be able to repay the gift to the giver.

Charity, when done by the government breeds resentment on those taxed. If they don’t want to participate in this charity, men with guns will come and take them to prison. Government forced charity breeds resentment of that very charity.

Billions, trillions? Doesn’t matter. It’s just other people’s money.

Government charity also breeds resentment by the recipient. Why didn’t they get more free stuff? It leads to bad incentives – why work when you’d lose the government benefits? The final straw is it destroys the dignity and independence of those that receive it. And if the program is set up poorly, it actually provides a disincentive for people to get or remain married. Government charity is certainly worse on the recipient than on the (unwilling) giver even though both of them come to hate the systems.

True charity makes two winners, government charity just manages to create anger and division. Government charity is the epitome of a program designed by Democrats – it takes a great goal (we all like the concept of charity) and turns it into a bureaucratic mess enforceable only through coercion and penalty.

If it stopped there with just that mess, it might be survivable.

Government has now opened these incentives to any person who can cross our border. Get across, and get free healthcare. Free food. Free housing. Need a cell phone? A ticket to Des Moines? We can help. Approximately four billion people would like to live in the United States because their countries suck. They can’t get nearly as much free stuff, and they’ve heard of the economic miracle of the United States.

Charity is like working – it’s great when other people do it!

This version of “charity” has created a group of millions of angry, unwilling donors, while at the same time creating millions of resentful, angry recipients. Thankfully, there is no reason we can’t have a billion resentful, angry recipients living in the United States tomorrow.

Sounds like another successful government program. Yay!

*By my spreadsheet, I had spent half the time I was ever going to spend with Pop Wilder by the age of eight. By the time I went off to college, I had spent about 94% of the hours I would ever spend with Pop. If I had moved back to the same town, or gone into the family business of firewood polishing together, obviously that would have been a different story. I’m only trying to note that these hours with family are precious, and are gone much faster than you might imagine. Feel free to use this to make your children feel guilty.

For your coloring enjoyment. Or colouring in Canada, eh.

Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival, with Wonder Woman, Bigfoot, Johnny Carson, Stalin, and a Bond Girl.

“So you really think Morgan thinks I have a racial bias? This is so unfair. I would’ve marched on Selma if it was on Long Island.” – Seinfeld

I’ll have to admit, when I was doing this meme, I forgot where I was going with it. Which was appropriate.

This post is the result of a reader request by frequent commenter and occasional photo contributor 173dVietVet, and I’m glad to do it because it keeps me away from plumbing. I had actually already started my notes for another topic (you’ll see it next Friday and it will be amazing, if I have enough beer before I start writing) when he suggested that I post about the interplay of Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival.

This post sounded like way more fun than re-plumbing the drain line under my sink (this is true). Despite the protestations of The Mrs. that we need a silly old sink in the kitchen I dug right into the topic, especially since Friday is typically health day and this topic is broad enough to cover both personal health and the broader issues related to disasters and living through crisis that have recently become a theme here.

Maybe . . . it may have been a way for 173dVietVet to see if I’m not a computer mind sent from the future to influence the United States in 2019 to make more PEZ® workers for our PEZ© mines. Who can say? Regardless, 173dVietVet (and the other 10,000 people who will read this), here it is.

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive Dissonance is the state of holding two opposing ideas in your mind, or of having beliefs that run counter to your actions. The best example I ever ran into in real life was when I was at a convenience store and two Spandex®-clad bicyclists came in – helmets still on, complete with wrap-around sunglasses and smelly padded butt shorts. One of the guys was loudly criticizing every item the other guy picked up. Trust me, the guy was loud enough that everyone in the store could hear him. I was NOT eavesdropping like I do with the neighbors on a Saturday night.

“No, you can’t drink that, man. Fructose will kill you, after it makes your children sterile.”
“Dude – the bleached flour in that is empty calories. It will screw up your metabolism and make the Martians attack.”
“Ah, man – that jerky has nitrates. Really bad for you. Also, no one has ever loved me.”

Then he got up to the counter.

“I’ll have this, and . . . a pack of Marlboros®.” He looked at his bicycling buddy. “Yeah, man, I know.”

That’s Cognitive Dissonance in action. I was buying Copenhagen® and Cheddar Ruffles™ at the same time, so my ability to criticize was pretty limited. I’ve since given up the Copenhagen©, but you can rip those Cheddar Ruffles® from my cold, dead, orange fingers.

If you get tired of Soylent Lays®? You can just gnaw on a neighbor! Spoiler: in the movie, companies were making food from people. But apparently it was tasty. Mmmm, tasty people.

Another example? An attorney that goes to church. Normally lawyers burst into flame upon entering a Holy Place, but I heard California filed a restraining order against God, and the Ninth Circuit upheld it. Last I heard, God is has appealed to the Supreme Court®. Sadly, he might lose, since he doesn’t have any lawyers in Heaven to represent him.

Like anything, Cognitive Dissonance goes from mild (our bicycling smoker in the example above) to extreme (pretending Trump® isn’t president because you don’t like mean old Cheeto™ man). In the middle is anyone who liked the latest Star Wars™ movies. Or are they in the middle? They might be the sickest of all of us.

In doing research about this topic, I found that studies of Cognitive Dissonance had different origins for different peoples. It turns out that Cognitive Dissonance in European-descended people is driven by the concepts of shame and guilt. Shame, in this case, is the feeling brought out by violating a group norm. Mental values based in Shame are built around what other people will think of you. Guilt is violating an absolute right and wrong. Everyone on the planet could be dead, and you’d still feel Guilt.

In East Asians, Cognitive Dissonance was only built around Shame. Guilt didn’t play a part in it. If everybody on Earth died? You’d be free at last! I have no other data on any other ethnicities, so don’t ask. I’m thinking the researcher did the study in Chinese restaurant in North Dakota.

Some other odd things I discovered about Cognitive Dissonance:

Initiations and hazing – people who are subjected to rough rites of initiation actually have increased commitment to the group hazing them. I guess the lesson here is, don’t skimp. Rent the goat. And get the extended insurance plan on the goat. You know why.
People highlight the positives of the choice they made … after they made the choice, not before. Rationalization is a way to smooth over Cognitive Dissonance, and also explains why I justify the late night tipsy Amazon.com purchases to The Mrs. Everyone needs a life size Bigfoot® statue, right?

The Mrs. took this picture after we bought Bigfoot One. I had this statue until The Mrs.’ dog ate it. Then I bought another one, but I keep it inside. Sadly, this is a true story. Bigfoot deserves to be free.

Essentially, when your brain is faced with the contradictions that spring from Cognitive Dissonance, it has (as far as I can tell) four choices:

Change a belief,
Change an action,
Pretend our actions don’t make us big fat hypocrites, or
Ignore it all and get a cookie.

Orwell even talked about it in his future history novel 1984. A great example of Cognitive Dissonance in action was the way that supporters minimized Bill Clinton’s horrible behavior in the Lewinski mess. (Actually it was Clinton’s mess, but this is a family-friendly blog.) And mainstream Republicans were no better in the whole “invade Iraq” mess, for absolute fairness. Supporters, like hazed college freshmen pledging Omega, seem to like politicians more when they lie to them.

Go figure.

If you haven’t seen Animal House®, that makes me die a little inside. It’s the Star Wars™ of anti-Cognitive Dissonance movies.

Okay, that’s Cognitive Dissonance. What’s Normalcy Bias?

First, Normalcy. Really? Did we really need that word? I guess I’ll allow it. Guys, the English language has 171,476 words according to the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, and your ‘umble ‘ost only knows about 45,000 of them. Unless your new word involves ways that aliens have sex in clown costumes in a vacuum while in orbit over Mongolia on a Tuesday? There’s probably already a word for it.

Second, what is Normalcy Bias? Normalcy Bias is just a belief that things are going to return to “normal” at some unspecified point in the future, often through the actions of some unspecified savior, like Johnny Carson returning from the dead and eating the livers of all of the current late night hosts while they were still alive. Oh, wait, that was a dream I had the other night. Never mind.

The answer is no, not funny at all.

Third, I think that Normalcy Bias is just a subset of Cognitive Dissonance. Here are some examples:

Underestimating the probability of a flood hitting your house. This is not a personal example – I’ve checked FEMA flood maps on every house I’ve ever bought – before I bought them. I remember talking to a friend who thought I was lying when I told him that. Right now? If a flood takes out my house, I’m expecting to see a little old man with an Ark.
Underestimating disaster impacts. FEMA is really good at this – in the middle of Hurricane Ike, FEMA was on the radio. Thankfully, we had a crank-radio and were able to get the vital advice that lists of available FEMA services were . . . on the Internet at FEMA.gov. Telling people with no power (and no cell service) to go to the Internet to get the latest updates. Yay, FEMA! Why don’t you suggest direct brain transfer?
The Roman citizens in Great Britain standing on the pier and waving goodbye to the last Legion in Rome as it went off to put down an uprising of those pesky Gauls. The Romans will be back soon, right? Things will be normal again? Right? (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse)
King Arthur’s legend that he’ll return to save England – it’s just one example of the hidden and secret king that will return one day to Make England Great Again. Assuming any English are left when Arthur gets back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about Normalcy Bias in his book The Black Swan. He describes the belief that his family had that things would “return to normal” in Lebanon, even after it was ripped apart by civil war between 1975 and 1990. They talked about how they’d be able to return, and how things would . . . return to normal.

When Taleb wrote this, this was a picture that was taken in Lebanon – 2006. I’m not thinking this is a great place for long term real estate growth. Unless you have quite a large number of Trident® missiles – 3 out of 4 despots recommend Trident© if you chew missiles.

I think that Normalcy Bias is pretty deep seated function of the human brain – I see too many examples, both in my own thinking and in my observations of others to believe that it’s abnormal.

During a crisis, that’s a problem. The biggest dangers in a crisis are:

Not accepting that the world has changed, maybe forever. People who change their world view soonest . . . win. An example: I was driving and saw a car pulled over on the side of the road. The driver had obviously just wrecked his BMW®. He was wandering around, dazed. “My BMW® . . . it’s wrecked!” He was distraught. I said to him, “Man, forget about the car – your left arm has been severed!” He became even more upset. “My God,” he screamed, looking down at the place his arm should have been, “Where is my Rolex©!” Okay, that didn’t happen. But I’m allowed to dream.
Not realizing or believing that changes could happen. This happens before the crisis, and the result is that you’ve never planned. Not having planned, you’ve got no preparations. The best cure for this is nearly getting caught up in a disaster. My daughter, Alia S. Wilder, recently found out that her house was in a zone that could be flooded. Even more oops? She had zero preparations. Being evil, I didn’t give her answers. I asked questions. “Oh, so you bought a month’s worth of food. Good. How much water to you have?” Her eyes were really opened to the huge vulnerabilities that she had. I slept well that night, even though I had to shower to get the evil off of me.
Thinking that other people share your values. They don’t. I assure you that there is no neighborhood in Modern Mayberry I would be afraid to be in at any time of the day or night. If you carry that same lack of awareness to, say, Chicago, the results might be less than optimal. Monday’s post will be about the implications of this logical fallacy. The sooner you internalize this, the better.
Failing to practice. Just as having the neatest nickel-plated 1911 with laser sights and the chainsaw attachment won’t help you if you don’t practice, if you don’t practice your disaster response from time to time, it won’t help you, either. You won’t be able to find your preps. They’ll be in the wrong spot. Or, worse yet, your child moved them and the mice got into your rice, the parakeet got into your wheat, and your dehydrated food has been mildewed. That’s a bad day. But it’s a much better day if none of the steers got into your beer.
Thinking that someone else will save you. They won’t. This is why I hate the term “first responders.” It puts the responsibility for a crisis on the wrong person. If someone is breaking into my house – I am the first responder. If Pugsley cuts deeply into his thumb while whittling, I am, again, the first responder. In any real crisis, the “first responders” have probably missed many of the issues I’ve listed above. During Hurricane Ike, I heard one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard – pleas from the radio announcer to bring food, gasoline, generators, and water to . . . the “first responders.” The “first responders” weren’t an asset. They were a liability that couldn’t even save themselves. I’m not bragging, but the Wilder family was at home, eating steak. We had enough food for weeks. Again, The Mrs. and I were the first responders. Mmm. Steak.
Not realizing the implications of changes. In apocalypse movies, one typical means of comic relief is the former banker/stockbroker/boss who, in a fit of self-important pomposity, asks, “Do you know who I am?” Immediately this character (who you’re not supposed to like), gets his ego shot down as either the hero or bad guy shows him that the rules have changed. One humorous version of this is in the underrated Kevin Costner flick The Postman, when he meets Tom Petty. The Postman says to Tom Petty, “I know you, you’re famous.” Petty replies, “I was. Kinda.” At the end, Tom Petty asks Costner, “Are you The Postman?” Costner nods. Petty says, “I’ve heard of you. You’re famous.” It was a brilliant way to turn that trope on its head, and pointed out a lesson we’ll talk about in a minute in item 1 of the list below. I guess that depends on your reading speed.
Not adapting to the reality of the changes. This is a little different than number six. A great example is the Kulaks that I wrote about recently. When Stalin came to power they thought they could negotiate with him since they were the economic engine of the U.S.S.R. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t. Score Stalin: 20,000,000, Kulaks: 0. A less sinister version of this is when you flip a light switch during a blackout, and a second later feel like an idiot, thankfully Stalin’s ghost doesn’t send you to the Gulag for that.

It always cracks me up that AntiFa© thinks they won’t be the first people sent to the camps. Loyalty? The commies can work with that. Being disloyal to the country that provides the framework for your material success? Gulag first. But you get to choose the top bunk. Yay!

Every single point I’ve made above can kill you, given the right circumstances. If I were evil, like an ancient emaciated grizzled she-demon direct from Hell, or Madonna® (I’m sorry, I repeat myself) I’d just leave you here to twist in the wind, stuck in a never ending cycle of Cognitive Dissonance and Normalcy Bias that spirals into a black hole of self-despair that ultimately leaves you as a tweeker midwife sitting in a ripped-up vinyl booth in an Ecuadoran Dairy Queen® with no Blizzard™ machine, delivering Ecuadorian children for leftover chicken tenders. And there’s no gravy in Ecuador. I think that’s because the toilets circle the other way. Maybe.

But I’m not that mean. Well, I am that mean, but I’m still begging for working for that Nobel® Peace™ Prize©, or maybe a lousy MacArthur Award™, so I’d best pretend to be a loving, caring human being. Besides, no body? No crime. Right? That’s what my lawyer keeps telling me. I hope he’s right.

I know what you are asking, “John Wilder, how can I learn to make comedy jokes like you?” See? You’re dead in a disaster already! A disaster is no joking matter, unless it happens to someone else. But, following are some preventive (the word preventative, while in the dictionary, has that stupid extra “ta” in the middle and I refuse to engage with a single ta – two ta’s only) steps that you can take to, well, live. And these steps apply to both a disaster and your life. In the end, your life is a disaster. I’m not judging, but if you treat your life like a metaphorical disaster, you’ll be healthier and more prepared.

Humility: Know what you don’t know. As Aesop (LINK) perspicaciously quoted Donald Rumsfeld the other day: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” People liked to bag on Rumsfeld, mainly because they were jealous of his mad dancing skills and that he bested John Cusack in an arm-wrestling contest once so he could win the chance to date Demi Moore. This was before she began to resemble beef jerky, so it was worth it at the time. Regardless, this is a great quote on humility. Know what you don’t know. Either learn it, or compensate for it.
Prepare Generally for General Disasters: Most things you can prepare for are the same, or at least rhyme like poetry used to rhyme before cigarette smoking smelly people in black berets with low-testosterone face hair (high testosterone for the females, which looks about the same) ruined it. Hitler’s ghost won’t re-start World War II, and Abraham Lincoln’s ghost won’t be around to start Civil War II, but human needs don’t change all that much, regardless of what disaster you face. You have to eat. You have to have water. You have to have Internet. Oh, wait – sorry. Water is optional now, according to the WHO (The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again). You can quote me on the following: A multi-tool is a crappy tool. Unless it’s your only tool. And it weighs less than your tool kit. Never expect that preparations will be exact replacements of what you really need. But as long as you have Internet, it’s all good, right?
Do Things That Take You Out Of Your Comfort Zone: No, this isn’t an excuse to try to convince you into a Multi-Level-Marketing© scheme to strain your friendships by selling a product that ultimately is the object of a 60 Minutes™ investigation (this happened to my ex-wife, for reals). Take a different road to work. How well do you know the lay of the land in the ten miles around your house? How well do you know your neighbors, I mean, reciprocally? The telescope views don’t count no matter how hot she is. Imagine you had to do without electricity. Do without it for a night. Two nights. Spend a night in a tent in the back yard. Go camping. Eat a burger . . . without fries. Your routine is your enemy, except for the lifting and healthy bits. Change it up.
Practice with your tools: Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said tools. Okay, Beavis, knock it off. If it’s a pistol. If it’s a chainsaw. If it’s a hammer. Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said hammer. Practice with it. 80% of your proficiency will come for 20% of your effort, unless you’re me trying to learn guitar, because that’s just hopeless. Become mediocre now, when there’s time, that will help with number one, up above. At least then you’ll know what you don’t know.
Play “What if?” mind games: I do this all the time. Sometimes I end up in crazy stupid places – as in the entire world is gone and leaves just me and the cast of The Breakfast Club and the cast of Who fighting over who gets the last deodorant stick in the world and Sophie Marceau is the only one who can save me. Okay, that’s not really productive. But when you think about what could happen, you become mentally prepared if it does happen.

Sophie is the one on bottom. James Bond® is the one on top. I guess I might need to explain that to the folks in California. I’m just worried that the next movie might have Jeanette Bond, who has never even been to England at all. Because what’s more British than that?

So, there it is. I guess I have a sink to fix. 173dVietVet, how did I do?

Also, if you have a pet topic, toss it out, either in the comments or at my email at movingnorth@gmail.com. I won’t promise that I’ll do it, but your odds are good. 100% as of this writing. If I don’t do it, it’s not you, it’s that I think I’d suck at it.

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

“Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
“Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want. But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof! Ha, to die for! That’s a health joke. (Photo by: Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs. Burnout is defined as:

Energy depletion or exhaustion,
A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on. I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man. But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks. For reals? If this was the last moment of my life? I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog. And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation. Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

Also 1872: “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out. Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game? I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time. I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with. There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting. But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also: Why a year? Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.” Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)? I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®. But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left. The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO. It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important. WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration. And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

HIV/AIDS,
Malaria,
Tuberculosis,
And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK). If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing. Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter. But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very. Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning. I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay. Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual. If you’re a jerk? You’ll be kicked out of the pool. And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag? The Muslims were told to pound sand. Oops? Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination? I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss. But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden. If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property. I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad. I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout? Video games? These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you. Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists. I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit. Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency. Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars). Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week. He’s right. (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way? Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer. I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve. Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

Real aside: when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom. I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Arete, Excellence, and Clowns Gone Bad

â€œAim small, miss small.â€ â€“ The Patriot

â€œOwning a nuclear weapon means never having to say youâ€™re sorry.â€ â€“ John Wilders Book of Quotes:Â Cannibal Soup for the Soulâ„¢Â For reals, Iâ€™m thinking about publishing a book of collected essays from this blog, and thatâ€™s the title I want to use, and thus the â„¢.Â Itâ€™s MINE!

One of my professors at college had very, very precise printed block letters.Â One day we were talking and he brought it up, especially since my own writing was, shall we say, a challenge to read.Â I think I was his Teaching Assistant at that point in graduate school

My professor:Â â€œOne day, I was in my forties, I just decided that every single letter that I wrote was going to be perfect.Â Absolutely perfect.Â So, from that moment, no matter how slowly I had to write, I was going to be the best.Â I took a month and just focused on printing my letters perfectly every day.Â After a month, it was habit.â€

Being 20, I missed the significance of this, and only on reflecting now do I realize what my professor was really saying:

â€œWilder, you may have written something great.Â You may have written something awful.Â I just canâ€™t read it.â€

How bad was my hand writing? Â When I was in sixth grade, my teacher required every essay or book report to be in cursive so we could practice our handwriting at the same time we produced a book report.Â My teacher pulled me aside.Â â€œJohn, please print your essays.â€Â She had come to the (correct) conclusion that my handwriting was less decipherable than cuneiform texts, and that her only hope of ever grading one of them was for me to print it or for her to go back to graduate school and learn the ancient secrets of my people:Â Those Who Have Crappy Handwriting.

She let me just print my essays and book reports.

It was a big deal to me and I felt free after that.Â I hated cursive.Â I even remember the book that I was doing the report on:Â Farmer in the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein.Â My teacher had no idea what the book was about, and actually had me read the report to her twice so that she was certain that I wasnâ€™t making it all up on the spot.Â The skill of reading my own handwriting helped me:Â if I could read my own handwriting, I could read anything.

Printing?Â That totally worked for me.Â I actually do it to this day, but I prefer typing. Â Itâ€™s quicker, but printing simple block letters works.

This is, supposedly, a receipt from a slave sale back in ancient Babylon.Â Imagine having to write a receipt out in clay, make a copy, and then put it in an oven.Â The drive through at their McDonaldsÂ® must have been slooooooow.

In thinking back to my professorâ€™s writing self-improvement plan, I realize it wasnâ€™t random, it was a process.Â The first step was, by far, the most important:

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number One:Â Raise Your Standards

If youâ€™re trying to write a perfect upper case E, a sloppy E or a tilty E just wonâ€™t do.Â And maybe your first E wonâ€™t be perfect, but I assure you it will be better than the E you wrote when you werenâ€™t concentrating on it.Â It isnâ€™t easy.Â Itâ€™s slow.Â Itâ€™s frustrating.Â But once youâ€™ve changed your standards internally, a crappy E is something you wonâ€™t tolerate.Â Youâ€™ll notice it and it will drive you nuts.Â Every E becomes a challenge in perfection.

When you change your standards, your standards change you.Â Iâ€™m sure someone else has said that before, since there have been roughly 105 billion people that have lived since 50,000 B.C., so if Iâ€™m one human in a million, there are 105,000 others just like me who have lived.Â Thankfully, we donâ€™t all live in the same city

But the whole â€œWhen you change your standards, your standards change youâ€ line? Â I came up with it myself.Â I wrote it as my own original thought and realize it might be my most profound thought today, even if Descartesâ„¢ or AristotleÂ® or Judge JudyÂ© said it first.Â Thankfully, Iâ€™m in luck, I had another original thought today:Â balsa wood would not make a good salad topping, either in chunks or shredded.Â Feel free to discuss.

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number Two:Â There Are No Shortcuts

Okay, I know thatâ€™s not original.Â I recall a joke about a person who wanted enlightenment and inner peace.Â And they wanted it right now!

Some Random Dude told the Dalai Lama the following joke:Â â€œHow does a Buddhist like his pizza?â€

The Dalai Lama: â€œI donâ€™t know.â€

Random Dude:Â â€œOne with everything.â€

The Dalai Lama:Â â€œI donâ€™t get it.â€

The above is supposedly true.Â In my imagination the Dalai Lama responded with:Â â€œOkay, I know a better one.Â Two lesbian surveyors and a horse walk into a bar . . . .â€

Getting better at anything is hard work.Â It turns out that those who are the very best at, for instance, playing violin, practice more than people who arenâ€™t as good.Â Practice is absolutely necessary to creating excellence.Â But the practice that works best is the practice that happens when you are right at the edge of your abilities.Â Itâ€™s when youâ€™re practicing at that edge that this weird blend of focus and trance takes over.Â Iâ€™m sure that thereâ€™s a word for it, but in my mind itâ€™s this state where the sense of self disappears.Â Perhaps the best word would be transcendent â€“ when Iâ€™m there I lose track of time.Â I donâ€™t think about the practice of writing a perfect E.Â I am the practice of writing a perfect E.Â I am excellence.Â With an E.

The management guru Tom Peters! (he likes to put exclamation! points! behind! everything!) wrote a column that I read in 1999.Â Tom Peters! was travelling, and decided that Tom Peters! was going to start running.Â His column stuck with me.Â Tom Peters! noted, more or less, that he was a very slow runner, but there was absolutely nothing preventing him from practicing like a world-class runner.Â He could push himself to his limits.Â Tom Peters! didnâ€™t have to wait to train like a world-class runner.Â Tom Peters! could do it right this minute.

Like my professor, last month I decided Iâ€™d improve my writing.Â Sure, I can read it and the NSAÂ® canâ€™t, but I decided Iâ€™d give it a shot.Â I focused every day when putting my daily to-do list together to make each letter perfect, each E a combination of right angles, as straight as I could make it.Â Amazingly I got better.Â I also noticed this â€“ even when writing a simple to-do list, I could be transcendent. Â I could lose myself in a quest to be excellent.

I think, in part, our world today seeks to trivialize the search for excellence.Â The Greeks nailed this in what they called Arete.Â Catherynne M. Valente described it like this:

The word I love is Arete.Â Â It has a simple meaning, and a complicated meaning.Â The simple one is:Â excellence.Â But if that were all, weâ€™d just use Excellence and I wouldnâ€™t bring it up until we got to E.Â Arete means your own excellence.Â Your very own.Â A personal excellence that belongs to no one else, one that comes out of all the things that make you special and different . . . . It could be anything in the world . . . .Â Itâ€™s even harder to get that good at it, because nothing, not even being yourself, comes without practice.

Arete also has the additional meaning of living up to your potential, fulfilling your purpose.Â I think many things about the way society is organized today serve to sever us from Arete.Â Television and movies make you a character in someone elseâ€™s Arete.Â You replace the feeling of excellence from actual achievement with psychologically experiencing someone elseâ€™s Arete.Â Some video games are like that as well, though certainly many require a great degree of skill.

And, yes, the highest and best use of some people is to play video games.

But much of modern work today is built around processes and defined procedures.Â The idea isnâ€™t that you do work with Arete, the idea is that you do mediocre work consistently.Â And you can do that work with people who have an I.Q. of 85 or 90.

Replacing Arete with processes and procedures lowers liability and provides consistency.Â Itâ€™s why people go to McDonaldsâ„¢ – not many people think of it as their favorite food, but itâ€™s inexpensive, consistent in quality, and fast.

Honestly, Arete is why I write this blog.Â When a good theme hits and Iâ€™m writing, I cease being.Â I am the blog.Â I am living a transcendent moment.Â I am Arete.Â Â Modern life takes us from that with process-driven jobs.

I described this post to The Boy while we enjoyed the hot tub tonight.Â The best conversations happen in the hot tub.Â No phones, no television, just discussion.Â The Boy immediately brought up Fight Club.Â Fight Club might be my favorite movie, primarily because of the amazing amounts of TruthÂ© that pop up in it.Â The Boy reminded me of an early scene in the movie, where the protagonist had a job that sucked his soul, but he could make his own Arete by making the perfect home by buying the perfect furniture from Fight Club Ikea.Â The thing missing from our soul today is simple:Â we want to be excellent, but the structure of modern society is pulling us away from Arete.

Are we willing to trade in our Arete for the perfect furniture?Â Are we willing to trade in our Arete for a video game?

Canâ€™t you just smell the Arete coming from the cube farm?Â No, thatâ€™s the smell of coffee.Â And despair.

I donâ€™t know about you, but Iâ€™m not.Â And if you looked at my to-do list?Â Itâ€™s much better this month than last month.Â Excellence is something we can do every day.Â We can become transcendent in our tasks, no matter how lowly â€“ if your task in this minute is to clean the floormats of a funky French fraternityâ€™s ferret using your fingers, lose yourself in it.Â Do the best job you can possibly do.

This Wilder, Wealthy and Wise post is brought to you by the word Arete, the letter E, and the number e.Â (The number e thing is a math joke.)

Stop Making Yourself Unhappy, Unless It Involves Green Alien Women Doing Sexy Dances

“Bob, it won’t kill you. But it will make you very sore.” – Real Men

I promise, I try to have a point on alternate weeks.

The difference between what reality actually is and the way that you think reality should be can make you crazy. It’s not unusual – I think it’s the way we’re wired as humans. We have a big brain, and we can imagine things. I, for instance, can imagine a world in peace where people just leave me alone, taxes don’t exist, and Joseph Stalin and communism are as hated as Britney Spears and the IRS.

Yeah. I can imagine it. But I won’t hold my breath. Some of the stuff the world throws at me makes me pretty mad, if I allow myself to sit and think about it. You’ll notice I used the word “allow” – because that’s what it is – allowing myself to dwell on something that makes me mad. Honestly, I’ll admit it: sometimes I go online just to find a story that makes me angry, probably because it’s a substitute for a pacemaker that doesn’t require electricity. So, yes, anger keeps my heart beating on alternate Wednesdays when I run low on coffee.

The sad part is that most anger is a wasted emotion. Most of life just is. Nothing you can do can change it. On many things trying to change it is even worse than the original problem. We started out with a Depression in 1930, but ended up with a World War. See? Not a real good trade. Oh, wait, we got the space program out of it.

However, I’ll also tell you that you just can’t ignore everything in life and just say mañana, as attractive as that may sound at 5AM on a Monday morning. So, you can’t care about everything, but you also can’t ignore everything. It sounds like a paradox, like how the Kardashians became famous for being famous, but give me a second to explain. I’m a trained professional.

For me, it comes down to having a list of criteria.

Does it matter? In reality, most things really don’t matter one way or another. If they’re out of strawberry topping for your hamburger, it doesn’t matter. You might remember tomorrow, but you certainly won’t remember next week. You won’t remember when you’re 80. Rule of thumb? If you won’t remember it next year, it isn’t important.

Does your action make a difference? You may be a Flat-Earther© and believe that everyone on Earth should move away from the horribly illogical heliocentric model that has no evidence behind it. No matter what actions they take, they won’t make a difference. I mean, because they’re nuts.

Is it a matter of principle? Not everything is. Giordano Bruno (Jordan Brown in English) is a dead Italian who got burned at the stake due to heresy on February 17, 1600, at the age of 52-ish, so you know he pissed somebody with a cool hat off. The funny thing is that if you go to the Wikipedia page on Bruno, it makes him look like Carl Sagan crossed with Barack Obama. He questioned all Christian dogma (which makes him the darling of the Left) while arguing for an infinite Universe and used the Copernican model of our Solar System to predict that there would be planets around other stars. Genius!

But Wikipedia skips gently around the fact that he didn’t like Christ – he liked Hermes, and was a fan of reintroducing Egyptian gods. Today, he’s revered as a Gnostic saint. And, really, if anyone starts the name of their sect with a silent “G”, do we really want give them any gcredence? I thought gnot.

Even though Bruno picked a really stupid thing to die about, at least he had some pretty fierce words to say to people who thought they could tell him what to do:

It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the number of fools.

Jordan Brown, er, Giordano Bruno seems to think pretty highly of his own opinion. But the sentiment is a good one. One I’ll buy, unless it’s about running out of strawberry topping for my hamburger. That’s probably not a hill I’m willing to die on. Unless they were out of ketchup, too.

I bought Giordano’s book, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and started to read it. After I realized that it would take me two years of study of ancient Egyptian mythology, ancient Greek mythology, astrology, and 16^th Century European politics to decipher it, I decided to read a book where aliens wanted to drop a meteorite on Earth instead. At least I understood that the aliens wanted to come to earth because they liked our women as much as we do.

No, not hot alien girls. But, in a pinch that’ll do.

But Giordano has a point – there is a place where principle wins above all. It may not be this hill we’re willing to die on, but we have to be willing to die on some hill, even if we can’t win. If you’re not willing to die on that stupid hill where it’s a beautiful, pointless, stupid gesture? You’re not fully human, and would probably sell me out for a pack of Juicy Fruit® gum. For your sake, I hope you know where your hill is, or can find it. Even (shudder) if it involves astrology. Jesus, Bruno was an idiot.

The alternate view is that the future belongs to those that show up, so, pick that hill carefully. Giordano picked his. And he really did die on it. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have kids, but he did show up for the future, in the most potent way possible: with his ideas. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t kill Stalin or Lenin. Nope. I’d kill Marx – he was a fat guy who never had a job and was probably smelly because he couldn’t properly clean out his bodily crevices in Victorian England, but his ideas . . . his ideas have killed millions. But more about those tools on Monday.

By the way, finding a stupid name like Jordan Brown (sorry, dude) could sound so much like someone who commanded a tank division, I looked up John Wilder in Italian, and it would be Giovanni Feroce. Which is really badass. But it’s not Latin, which would probably sound something like Giovannius Maximus Feroci. Yeah. Like commander of a tank, designed by Ferrari® to fight grizzly bears. I can deal with that. Except Italians can’t seem to keep the oil on the inside of the engine.

The Boy put this together. He does indicate that he works for Ramen®. His favorite is beef, but he will do chicken. Shrimp? You’re not making any friends there. Stick with land animals.

Here are the zones:

Zone 1: This is the most important zone: you can change it. It matters. It’s a matter of principle. This, with no humor added, is the definition of the hill you can die on.

Yes, it’s a Microsoft® Office™ meme. No, I’m not proud about it.

Zone 2: You can change it. The best definition of this is “It’s the principle of the thing.” It’s not important. This is the Zone inhabited by Karens.

And my real readers would never complain.

Zone 3: It matters. It’s a matter of principle. But you can’t change it. I think this is what Twitter® accounts are for? Also? Maybe sometimes this is a good hill to die on, too.
Zone 4: It’s a matter of principle. And it doesn’t matter. And you can’t change it. I think this is the MySpace© of issues.
Zone 5: It matters, you can change it, but it’s not a matter of principle. So, you know, get up and mow your lawn. Or at least stay off mine.
Zone 6: It matters, you can’t change it. Ignore it. Triggered people live here, and I know you don’t want to live like Trigglypuff.

I remember when the word “triggered” had nothing to do with people unable to contain emotions just because someone said something naughty. But I also remember when dudes didn’t win girl’s high school track meets.

Zone 7: You can change it. It’s not principle. It doesn’t matter. This sounds a lot like FaceBook®. If you use it, keep in mind you’re keeping Zuckerberg in sippy cups while he sits on his high chair.

Thankfully Congress got him a sippy cup.

Inadvertently, I seem to have come up with actual advice that might help you if you’re sane enough to follow it. Who knew? Nah, who am I kidding? Go nuts. Literally. It seems to work for AntiFa®.