Health – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

We Already Know The Solutions

“Watch your top knot.” – Jeremiah Johnson

Bill Clinton thought Hillary would be a good president: “There’s no chance she’ll blow it.”

Alexander the Great is said to have solved the riddle of the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C. Whoever solved the Knot, the legend said, would rule all of Asia. Alexander took one look at the large and complex knot, pulled out his sword and cut right through it. I think Alexander was certain that he’d be successful and that no one would challenge his solution since he had, you know, an army with him. I guess you could say he was so confident that he was knot sure.

One of the things that I’ve seen fairly consistently in my life is that, like Alexander, I generally know the answer right when I see the problem. Some of them, like calculus problems, it took a lot of work to get the answer, admittedly, but there was no place when I said, “Well, if only the Federal government had a Federal Bureau of Solving Calculus problems, I’d be set.” No. I knew the only answer was for me to sit down and hack through that calculus problem until I had it solved.

Most problems in life are just that simple. Too hot in the living room? Get a fan. Turn the air conditioning down. Experiment to see how many cold beers it takes to make me feel cold. But I never think to act on that until I’m uncomfortable. When I’m slightly warm, I don’t go running for the fan, I just deal with it. But when I start to sweat?

Time to take action.

What does a hipster say to create peer pressure? “C’mon, man, no one is doing it!”

I think most people are like this, not just me. Sure, there are things I do when I anticipate a problem coming down the road to save myself the trouble. But like that room temperature slowly rising, at some point I look at the situation and note, “This must be dealt with.” But I always knew the solution.

The solution itself isn’t the issue. Most solutions are mind-numbingly clear. The level of frustration or fear or whatever motivating me just has to be high enough that I’m willing to take the action necessary to solve the problem. To be clear, I also have to believe that my action might work – if I think the air conditioner is broken, for instance, I won’t bother to go over to turn it on and will stick with the whole “drink a lot of really cold beer” idea.

The above paragraph contains all three of dead economist Ludwig Von Mises’ causes of Human Action. Von Mises said for anyone to take conscious action, for any action three things needed to be present:

A Vision of a Better State
A Path to That Better State
Belief That Following the Path Will Take Us to That Better State.

While I’m focusing on today is when we already know what we want, I’ll just noted that it doesn’t have to come in that order.

It turns out my chemistry teacher was right – alcohol is a solution.

On a personal level, I have to be uncomfortable enough from where I am and where I could be to initiate action. The Vision has to be sufficiently far from where I am for me to care. But, again, I generally know the solution, it just requires enough discomfort to create action. If my air conditioner isn’t working in December, that’s not a big deal. If it has failed in July, that’s where I’m willing to pay extra to see the repair folks show up on a Sunday afternoon because the liquor stores are closed then.

Other examples – I don’t paint my house when it’s a little faded, I might need to see some bare spots. I wait until the trashcan is maybe slightly more than full to take it out. But in each case the action isn’t in question. I always know the solution. It’s not a mystery.

It’s similar as a society. In a society, we all have the ability to act as individuals, but there is some minimum number of people that are required to take action. One group, the 3%ers, took their name from the idea that only 3% of the American Colonial population fought and won against the British. I’m not sure that 3% is correct; that’s irrelevant to the post.

Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.

Certainly, that’s a minimization, because if there hadn’t been broad support for the American Revolution anyway, it wouldn’t have happened. Rather, I am certain that group of fighters represented the symptom of a greater dissatisfaction.

Everyone on the side of the Revolution knew what had to be done. If you take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it certainly spells out the vision, and also spells out the reasons why it was important to take the action.

Of the signers, at least John Hancock had belief that the actions would work, since he signed his name so boldly and largely. And John Hancock never told a knock-knock joke. Why? Freedom rings, baby.

For each of the societal ills we see, the solution isn’t complex, it’s simple. We just haven’t had the guts to implement it. If mobs are ruling the streets of San Francisco or Chicago or Malmo, the solution isn’t to study the problem with a commission. The solution is to make crime much more uncomfortable than the reward for committing the crime.

I’m glad Godzilla® wasn’t Korean. That would have been Seoul destroying.

That solution to stopping crime will involve dead criminals. Oddly, it takes less to keep criminals in line than to stop criminality, but the solution almost always involves Rooftop Koreans and bar owners with very short shotguns and prosecutors that don’t prosecute good and honest people stopping crime.

If the problem is illegals flooding the southern border, the only actual solution is to make living in the United States a living hell for illegals. I assure you, if sufficient pressure was applied, the illegals would deport themselves in weeks.

Have an anchor baby? Fine. It goes into an orphanage or with foster parents. Illegals have to leave. Something tells me the parents will pack up the kids as they head out.

Brought here as a young child and the United States is the only country they’ve ever known? Not my problem. They have to go back.

Drugs? Simple solution. I’ll leave that one to you.

Illegitimate kids? Remove spousal support and child support and welfare. Illegitimate kids will cease in a year and the baby-daddy with 20 different baby-mommas will disappear while those baby-mommas cease to have sex randomly. Or, if they do? They have to suffer the consequences.

What about the kids? Yeah, heard it. Don’t care. It’s that sort of forced compassion that destroys nations, turns them into countries, and eventually leads to Balkanization.

I fell into the reupholstery machine at the furniture factory. I’m completely recovered now.

I’m right and every person reading this knows it.

The wonderful part is that these solutions will take place. Sadly, because the room is getting warmer, these solutions will take place only when the discomfort is so high that it will be unpleasant for all concerned.

And then, once again, the Gordian Knot will be solved.

Experiments 2023: Wilder Is The Guinea Pig

“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy hitting buttons randomly.” – Phineas and Ferb

At dinner sometimes I pretend to gag. My kids know it’s just another dad choke.

There’s a time for odds and ends, and Friday is as good as any since a lot of them are on the health side. These are sort-of random, and are around a central theme of experiments that I do to myself and some of the results. I’m not going repeat the one where I replaced my arms with animal limbs – that idea still makes me mad enough to rip up a car with my bear hands.

First: Humans have been taking drugs for at least 12,000 years. I have written (and stand by the idea) (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com)) that the reason that civilization was formed was so we could have beer. If you look at the artifacts found at Göbekli Tepe you’d find that one of them is a stone trough perfect for making beer, with residue from making beer. People have also been ingesting or smoking various things for millennia from coffee to mushrooms to the Devil’s Lettuce. Humans are drug using – it changes our mood.

I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week and he led off with an interesting comment. “Music is a drug,” because it alters our moods. I was working the other day with earbuds in and found myself really happy. Why? Music. It put me in a great mood and I was amazingly productive.

I hear wind turbines are big metal fans.

Adams is right, music acts like a drug. But there’s more: literature and television and Twitter™ I mean X© all fall into the same category. When I was dating in high school I also (accidently) found that horror movies were an amazing aphrodisiac for the girls I dated. Who knew?

I watched a LOT of horror movies on dates when I was in high school. I guess you could chalk that up to Pavlov’s libido.

I have made this point many times: be careful what you let into your head. It can act like a drug, and the wrong drug at the wrong time can be fatal. Choose wisely, and avoid things that make you feel despair.

Second: YouTube® recommended an 8-hour dreaming track that they promised would allow me to have lucid dreams. For those not aware, lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming, but you’re fully conscious. It’s an odd state – it’s not like being hypnogogic, where you’re in that twilight zone between being awake and being asleep. Nope, you’re dreaming but you’re fully conscious.

My boss said I was on the Dream Team! He also asked me to stop sleeping at work.

Sounds like something good, right?

The first night I tried it, The Mrs. reacted very negatively. “What on Earth were you playing last night? It gave me awful dreams.” I persisted for a few weeks. Normally, I go to sleep quite easily, and just like Epstein’s prison guards, I can sleep through almost anything. I still found it easy to go to sleep with the “music” but my dream quality really changed over several weeks. My dreams became incredibly dull. Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.

Aaaargh! I love dreaming when I’m a pirate, or hanging out with Tom Cruise having adventures or being asked by ZZ Top® to play bass at a concert because they were desperate. Those are good dreams. But being at work doing normal day-to-day crap?

It was awful. And I was conscious during the work dreams. Sometimes I’d end them, but end up going right back to work. In my dreams.

That was bad enough, but the final straw that ended this experiment for me was that I would wake up at 4am and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d be there hours, awake in bed. Or so I thought. In reality, I was dreaming that I was trying to get to sleep, but I was fully conscious. I figured this out one morning when my alarm went off during a dream about trying to get to sleep.

That was weird.

I cannot recommend this sort of “music”, unless you want to relive a boring day at the office without being paid for it.

After I stopped, within a week my old sleep patterns returned.

Third: I was the victim of a plagiarist this week. Oh, sure, I’ve actually seen that someone tried to make .pdfs of my posts and (maybe?) sell them a few years ago, but that isn’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about someone taking one of my posts and re-writing it, beat for beat, even using the same analogies.

I’m still mad at the guy who did it.

Surprise: It was me.

Sometimes I take notes (I used to use notecards, but don’t have the same set up, so don’t anymore) for posts. Other times? Walking around, or snoozing, and a post idea hits me. I’ll often work it out in my head, and then write it out.

Plagiarist? Their words, not mine.

I did the latter in this case. Then I saw an old post of mine getting traffic with a really similar name after I posted the piece I had just finished. I clicked on it, and it was amazingly similar – the algorithm that suggests posts based on the post I have up suggested it. That post was also four years older, so I guess my main defense was that I’d written somewhere north of 600 posts (nearly 750,000 words) and slept over 1300 times (1260 if you discount the lucid dreaming nights) since then.

Fourth: I’m really enjoying doing the podcast. This isn’t a commercial or anything, since if only one or two people listened I think we’d still be doing it because it’s fun. It’s a livestream now, but I think it’s pretty tightly produced, so we don’t end up with a lot of the awkwardness you’d expect with an amateur like Shawn Hannity. Nope, we’re professionals. Also, I’m thinking this makes us journalists. For legal reasons. You can watch it here (LINK).

I bring it up because a) I can prove The Mrs. actually exists, and b) it’s something we have a lot of fun doing, and it’s creative and we mostly have our clothes on when we do it. As far as you know.

Fifth: I used to hang out with The Mrs. at lunch, but since her schedule changed, I don’t. Instead, I’ve packed off my laptop and tried to be productive wherever I am during lunch, and it saves mileage and I just don’t eat, so that’s a bonus, too. I’m writing this at lunch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far since I tend to do the first drafts and then when I get home later I do the research and edits and add the (bad) jokes.

Actual German joke: “Why are there so few crimes in Germany? Because it’s illegal.”

It may not sound like a big change, but it shaves hours off of my writing time, and those are hours that I can sleep instead rather than building up a big sleep debt and paying it off on the weekend. Plus, I’m fasting at lunch. In reality, when I went home I’d eat, but I find I don’t miss it at all.

I also think I might get a better overall quality since I’m writing during my most productive time, and editing and cracking jokes at my sillier times. We’ll see.

As always, YMMV.

Inversion of Values, Part 2: The Roman Empire

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

What’s black and white and red all over? A victim of an industrial accident at a newspaper printing press. (All memes today are as-found)

The inversion of virtues: I’ve written on this topic recently, but decided I needed to have another go at it. Part of the blogging theme is that my posts are limited in space. No one wants to read a 10,000-word post on PEZ™ on Friday morning as they drink their coffee.

Virtues make a civilization worth living in. I’d rather live in a poor civilization with great values than a rich one with poor values, and both of those sound better than what we’ve got going on now. And I’d suggest that our current free-fall is due to that loss of virtue.

What were Epstein’s last words before he committed suicide? “You don’t have to do this! I promise I won’t talk!”

Let’s compare values at the peak of Roman Civilization, the peak of Western Civilization, and what the Left is shoving down our throats right now. For instance:

Rome: Worshiped gods.
The West: Worshiped God.
The Left: Worship man (atheism) or the State.

See? Inversion. Who did the cultures idolize?

Rome: Worshiped heroes.
The West: Worshiped heroes and Saints.
The Left: Worship victims.

See, that’s not hard, and yet more inversion. What about sin?

Rome: Sin of hubris.
The West: Sin of pride.
The Left: Sin of privilege.

I’ll just quit making inversion comments, because this is a slam dunk. Who are the spiritual leaders?

Rome:
The West:
The Left: Professors, Leftie politicians.

Ideals?

Rome: Ideal was glory, excellence (Areté).
The West: Ideal was holiness, modesty, courage.
The Left: Social Justice, victimhood.

Ideal social class?

Rome: Warriors and those who served their fellow men.
The West: The middle class.
The Left: The lower class, victims, victims, victims.

Even a virtue, charity, has been turned from a voluntary act that provides spiritual growth in the terms of the classic West, to taxation to provide forced “charity” to the (often) undeserving.

I’m thinking I don’t want to know how my tax dollars are spent because I’m afraid all mine went to buy crack pipes in San Francisco.

This inversion bleeds over into all of society. “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

Wonder why they don’t read to old folks in nursing homes, or to the blind? Whenever I hear about that, my mind sees:

And then there are questions that are more difficult to answer:

Inversion, of course, shows up in the obvious things:

Jazz Jennings is a transgender person who feels no need to change with no sense of irony:

And their goal is that you will live and produce and that you should be okay with not being meaningful or having any joy, so live in the pod, and eat the bugs, wagie.

And we now have a Marine Corps who worries about people’s feelings. Perhaps they’ll land with Nerf™ guns so that they won’t have their feelings hurt.

But the pushback is well underway. Or overweigh:

But there’s a catch:

And I think this has broken the Left, mentally:

And the internal contradictions in their “victimhood” matrix are starting to show:

Canada has shown that it certainly can’t be trusted with the power of life and death:

The inversion has hit, but people (and maybe Higher Powers) are pushing back. And, I think we will win. Why? Because we’re so very pretty. And? PEZ®.

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working. So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny. We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader. But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them. Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid. I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting. Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
(Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes? His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from? Yup.

Everything.

Why? Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger. Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring. She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.” Me: “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know. It would make sense that it was. The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching. Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends. There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

Neil Armstrong’s Secret Moon Diary, Revealed at Last

“The Moon Unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

There’s always that one kid who won’t smile in the team picture.

(Repost from 2019)

I was at a garage sale the other day when I came across a small leather-bound journal in a box filled with Tupperware®. Embossed on the worn cover was a now faded and flecked NASA logo that had once been a solid, shiny gold. In the lower right-hand corner I noticed, so faded they were barely visible, two initials: N.A. I flipped through and saw page after page of journal entries in what I assumed to be Neil Armstrong’s printed writing. I quickly paid the $2.50 price on the orange sticker on the book.

Here are the journal entries:

7/14/69, 21:00:00 GMT

Countdown begins. I will admit to being a bit excited. A rocket launch is never a routine event. They’ve kept us busy though, re-practicing procedures, re-reviewing maps of the Sea of Tranquility, and, for Buzz Aldrin, eating meals consisting entirely of re-fried beans. He says it’s for luck. Michael Collins continues to be . . . Michael Collins. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile. Or blink.

7/16/69, 07:22:15 GMT

Last shower, shave and breakfast. Collins doesn’t eat anything, stares blankly ahead – I guess that’s the way he deals with stress. Buzz had 16 cups of coffee – I counted them – and about thirty eggs. “For luck.”

Fun fact: your car insurance may cover you if you’ve got a rental, but generally not if you leave the United States.

7/16/69, 13:00:00 GMT

Ignition of the main engines, then 17 long seconds later, liftoff as the Saturn V slowly moves past the tower. The first stage burns for three minutes, total, and then stage two kicks in after a brief lull, and burns for nearly six minutes. Two minutes later, we’re in orbit. All of this is exactly as planned, exactly as written down in the procedures. Eleven minutes for Apollo 11 to enter orbit. That’s got to be a good omen.

For the first time in the mission, we’ve got some time to kill. I can’t stop smiling. Collins continues to stare directly ahead. “Mike, are you doing okay?”

He slowly turned his head towards me: “All of my systems are operating at nominal levels.” He then turned his head back towards the controls.

Does he blink? I’m interrupted by groaning coming from Buzz.

“Oh, man, I’m hurting. I didn’t think about the pressure differential.” He’s holding his stomach.

The pressure inside the Apollo Command Module, Columbia, is only 5psi, or the pressure at the top of Mount Everest. At sea level on Earth, the pressure is 15psi, or three times as much. We don’t pass out, because the atmosphere is 100% oxygen.

Apparently the food that Buzz ate is causing him discomfort. A minute later, Buzz sighs.

It smells horrible. I said, “Oh, Buzz, how could you?” My eyes are watering. Eggs and beans. The smell is nearly incapacitating.

Even Collins jumped in, “My nasal sensors detect a significant increase in organic gasses in the atmosphere.”

Collins was rechargeable, thankfully.

Mission Control: “Apollo, are you alright up there? We have just monitored a significant increase in methane in the cabin? If this keeps up, your atmosphere will become explosive. Do you have a situation?”

Buzz sighs again.

7/16/69, 16:16:16 GMT

Translunar injection burn started – that’s the boost that gets us to the Moon. Six minutes later, we’re on the way. Thankfully Buzz’s extravehicular emissions end about an hour later and the atmospheric scrubbers manage to keep the atmosphere safe until Buzz is finished.

7/16/69, 16:56:03 GMT

While we’re on the way, it’s time to dock with the Lunar Module. It’s in that last stage that boosted us to the Moon. Buzz then gets an idea.

“Hey, let’s change the name of the Lunar Module from Eagle to something else. How about we name it something funny, like Soviets Suck?”

I’m against this. “Buzz . . . we can’t do that. NASA already has the t-shirts printed.”

Buzz continues, “Okay, let’s vote on it. All in favor?” Only Buzz raised his hand.

Collins added, still staring straight ahead: “This violates mission parameters.”

7/17/69, 00:04:00 GMT

We go on television four times over the next two days. Collins follows the NASA script exactly, word for word. Aldrin brings up his new product, Aldrin’s Hair Care for Men®, along with Aldrin Cola© and Aldrin Paste™, which I believe to either be toothpaste or silverware polish. I think it must be toothpaste because he says it’s perfect for astronauts – “it’s zero cavity.” NASA has a private radio conversation with him after the first time he promotes his products.

The long distance rates shut that particular business down.

We can hear his side of the conversation: “What are you going to do, send NASA police up here and put me in NASA jail? Ha!”

It’s about this point that Buzz starts to try to read over my shoulder as I write in this journal. He pretends he’s not looking when I catch him.

7/19/69, 17:27:47 GMT

Lunar orbit. We’ll spend about a day here while we get ready to go down to the Moon. I’m starting to get a little irritated with Aldrin. First, there’s the humming. He won’t stop humming the theme to the Wild, Wild West®. Then, there’s his ear hair. Doesn’t he know that it’s there? It’s this one, long, 2 inch hair coming out of his ear.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I swear I hear a faint whirring, as if from small electric motors and gears from Collins during sleep period. Maybe it’s the space ship. I hope it’s the space ship.

7/20/69, 17:44:00 GMT

Lunar Module undocked. When we said goodbye to Collins, Buzz made a joke, “Hey, don’t go out joyriding while we’re gone!” Collins said, “No. I will be in rest mode while you are gone to conserve supplies.” Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Michael eat during the trip so far.

7/20/69, 20:17:39 GMT

The Soviets Suck Eagle has landed! This is the first gravity we’ve had in days. Aldrin immediately takes the opportunity to, umm, do things that are easier in gravity. The Lunar Module doesn’t have a vent fan, but we will dump the atmosphere when it’s time for our EVA. Which can’t come soon enough.

7/21/69, 02:56:15 GMT

First step on the Moon! On one hand, it’s pretty exciting. On the other, the responsibility is pretty big. Buzz follows behind me after about twenty minutes. He’s sulking – we rock-paper-scissored for the chance to go first, and he lost. He always, and I mean always throws rock. Speaking of which, it’s time to collect a few.

Heck, we can’t even do it since we’ve started using the metric system a little.

7/21/69, 05:11:13 GMT

The walk on the Moon is complete. We’re supposed to sleep, but we’re on the Moon. Buzz tries to tell spooky stories, but I’ve heard the one about the hook on the spaceship door before. He tries to make it scarier by thumping on the wall of the Soviets Suck Eagle. I remind him that even though the wall is supposed to be tougher than a steel beer can, we left the duct tape on Columbia.

Thankfully we were AAA members.

We’re supposed to sleep. Aldrin is laying down on the floor, and I’m propped up on the ascent engine cover. Not really sleeping, neither is Buzz. Finally Buzz stops humming the Wild Wild West® theme, only to start humming “In the Year 2525.” This is not much better.

This was the number one song as Apollo 11 lifted off. Even the Moon wasn’t far enough away to escape it.

“Neil, we need women astronauts.”

“Why, Buzz?”

“Those sandwiches aren’t going to make themselves.”

He’s not done.

“The next time I dump a girl, I know what I’m gonna say.”

“What, Buzz?”

“I need more space.”

Neither of us sleep at all that night, though I do come to the conclusion that there is no jurisdiction that I could be convicted in if I were to kill Buzz.

Yeah, I know. I’m mad, too.

7/21/69, 17:54:00 GMT

Liftoff from the Moon! Heading home.

“No, you’re upside down.”

7/21/69, 21:35:00 GMT

We’ve docked with the Columbia. As we open the hatch we see that Michael Collins is in the same exact position that he was when we left. It was as if he’d never moved.

“Welcome back, fellow humans. Was your excursion enjoyable?”

Buzz responded, “It was like any spacewalk, Collins. No pressure. Get it? No pressure!”

Collins stared blankly and then said, “I am not programmed to respond in that area.”

Getting back into the Columbia was pretty rough. It smelled like swamp and wet dog, and that was after Buzz had already been gone a day. Ugh. Why did Aldrin choose so many space tacos and burritos for dinner?

7/22/69, 04:55:42 GMT

We fire our engine to return to Earth. Two and a half days to home. Did Aldrin really order refried beans with every meal?

If I my rice is too dry, do I put it in a bag of cellphones?

7/24/69, 16:50:35 GMT

Splashdown. I never thought that smelling air would be so wonderful. I couldn’t wait to open the hatch to the Columbia. A deep breath with 100% less Aldrin.

7/24/69, 19:58:00 GMT

In quarantine – Collins, Aldrin and I are stuck here so we don’t start an epidemic of space pox. I can certainly understand why we would want to quarantine aliens so they didn’t bring in epidemics of disease.

There was a two-drink minimum.

8/10/69, 20:00:00 GMT

Release from quarantine. I’m outta here. Maybe I shouldn’t share this journal, after all. Perhaps it’s best if history remembers the official story . . . .

100% heroes.

Okay, yes, this was parody, or at least that’s what my law firm, Dewy, Cheatum and Howe suggests I say. Outside of my supposition that Michael Collins is really a robot, none of this is true. The Apollo astronauts represented the best of us in our nation at the time, men able to go into space, yet with enough humility to understand that their achievement was made possible by 400,000 other Americans working together to design everything from their underwear to the F-1 engines of the Saturn V to the food that they’d eat during the three weeks they spent in quarantine after returning to Earth.

An aside, they really did have problems with bad smells and space gas. NASA even calculated to see if the gas would build up enough methane to cause the ship to explode.

Choose. But Choose Wisely.

“Yeah, yeah, it came in the shape of a bottle? We’re from the Kingsman tailor shop in London. Maybe you’ve heard of us.” – Kingsman, The Golden Circle

During COVID they said I needed to wear a mask and gloves to go shopping. They lied. Apparently I needed clothes, too.

There was a time in my life when I had to make a choice. It was a dark time for me. Let me give some background. Please, everyone pretend that there’s a swirling motion and fuzzy stuff as we go back in time . . . to a land before cell phones and Google®.

In my first semester at college, I did pretty well. I studied for a few hours and got a 3.4 at a college that had the reputation as being the toughest one in the state. Life was good. I believe that I spent more time with Coors Light™ that semester than I spent studying calc, physics, or chemistry.

My second semester wasn’t the same.

In my first three tests (within the first two weeks of the semester) I got three Fs. These were the first three Fs I had ever gotten in my life on tests.

Ever.

They asked me to describe failure in two words. I replied, “I can’t.”

They weren’t horrible Fs, but the percentages were all in the 50s, except for physics 2 which was in the 40s. To be fair, the average score for the physics 2 test for all students was in the 50s – physics 2 was a designated “weed out” course.

Right before spring break, I had midterms. I didn’t know the scores that I had gotten on the next tests, but spring break was not fun. I had a full ride scholarship, and it required that I keep my grades above a certain GPA for both semester and cumulative to keep the scholarship.

Yikes. Do you mean there are consequences for my actions?

For the first time in my life, I was looking real failure in the face. It was the long, dark, Kobayashi Maru of the soul.

I got 8 out of 10 on my driver’s test. Two jumped out of the way.

I sat on the hood of my car at the end of spring break for a few hours at an Interstate rest stop under the gentle spring Sun, still hours away from the school. I figured I had two options:

Go back to school and tough it out. Nine more weeks of hell, and no promise that I’d do any better than I had done in the first nine, but if I did, it would mean studying harder than I ever had studied anything, except those times I studied the rare illicit Playboy® that came into my hands.
Drive north. It was before there was much of a border, and I could just drive into Canada, get a knit hat. I already knew the language, I could say “aboot” and “take off, eh” as well as anyone. I had a Visa® with a $500 limit, and a car that was owned free and clear, I had half a can of Copenhagen®, and I was wearing sunglasses. I could drive to Saskatchewan and become a lumberjack. Yes, this was my backup plan, even though I’m not sure Saskatchewan even has trees.

After a long time thinking, I . . .

There are several strategies in life, just like there are several strategies in a supermarket. Oh, sure, I could shop like everyone normally does here in Modern Mayberry and cover my nipples in yogurt while I’m in the dairy aisle (because nipple yogurt is free here), but I’m not talking about the shopping part, I’m talking about checking out.

The first option is to pick a line and stick with it, even if the lady in front of me has 43,238 coupons and price matches every item on the sale flyer from the competing grocery store and ends up getting $983,365.55 worth of groceries for $1.98 plus a raincheck for sour cream. For the nipples, you know, if you’re allergic to the yogurt.

What’s the most important culture in the world? Agriculture.

Okay, that’s not a great option, because every other line in the grocery store will cycle 43 times while the lady does one checkout and the clerk silently fantasizes about going home for a few gallons of gin.

Option 2 is a different one. In this one, I could flit from line to line like a politician being:

against gay marriage during election season
to being for gay marriage in special circumstances when election is comfortably far away
to being silent before election season
to sponsoring mandatory hormone treatment for toddlers because toddlers can’t consent to choosing their gender.

Yeah. While that might get a politician lots of money and votes, it just gets me moving from a stopped line to a moving line that stops as soon as I get in it and I don’t even get appointed as an ambassador to the Swedish Bikini Team.

I sold my Swiss watches to a friend in Mexico. Adios, Omegas!

Option 3, however, is probably the sanest one. Look around for the best line. If the coupon lady gets in, or there’s a price check, or the clerk is obviously on some sort of depressant medication because they’re not at home drinking a few gallons of gin, move to the next best line.

In my career, I jumped lines a couple of times. My first job was into an industry that was in the middle of a slump in the region I lived. So, I jumped. In this case, I jumped to an entirely different industry, and had a pretty good career. When that industry slumped, I jumped again, and then jumped back.

All of the jobs were basically related, except if you looked at them from the inside – they were all different. The combination of those experiences led me to a career that turned out to be a pretty good one, though there is the possibility that if I had jumped one fewer time, it would have been even more lucrative.

Or not. I might have ended up as a clerk who was missing their evening gin. I’m not going to worry that I might have done better if I had or hadn’t jumped a line, because life is far too short for that type of regret.

Also?

I’m going to try to not let the choices I’ve made in the past make me too timid. As many of the readers here, there are likely more years behind me than ahead, and it’s far too early to stop trying to kick a dent in the Universe, which in itself requires risk. I may win, I may lose, but I’m still in the game.

Looking back, I’m fairly happy with the progression that developed from my choices. And it’s because I stayed in line at the first opportunity to jump: college.

I made a paper airplane that wouldn’t move. I guess the problem was that I used stationary.

Back to that Interstate rest stop, far away in time and space . . . . (imagine the swirly thing again)

After a long time thinking sitting on the hood of my car on that warm spring day so many days ago, I decided that I could pack up my stuff and go up to Saskatchewan any time to be a lumberjack, even at the end of the semester if things didn’t work out. I could also take the time to learn if there were trees there or if I would have to fight the beavers for maple syrup so I could be strong when the wolves come.

But I only had one shot to try to see if I could dig myself out of the hole that I had made for myself.

I did. I got two Cs and a D – the best-looking D (and still the only D) that I’ve ever had in my life. My scholarship was safe. The semester after that one was okay, and then every semester after that I got great grades. I had learned that I could come back from failure, and though I changed lines later a time or two, I decided to see if this line would move for me because I was only risking failure, and only risking nine more weeks of my life. The line moved.

In life, pick your line. Move when you need to. And realize that the choice is yours.

33 Things To Think About On A Friday

“I didn’t know there was a no train list.” – Archer

If you would like a list of ways technology has made life worse, press one for English.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a list post, so, why not?

Here are some things I think:

The struggle is important. If every day were placid and peaceful and there was no want, life would become dry and boring, and we would choke on our luxuries. The Garden of Eden could never last.
When I come home my dog is always happy to see me, but then I remember he also gets happy sniffing the cat’s butt and chewing on furniture.
Risk is important, too. Judging good risks and bad risks mainly comes from taking bad risks. Avoiding all risk is perhaps the worst risk.
They say a penny saved is a penny earned, but it really takes a few million to buy enough crack and prostitutes to make Hunter happy.

Again?

Women are best when they’re being women, not crappy imitations of men.
Men are best when they’re being men, and masculinity isn’t toxic.
If the glass is half empty, there’s probably room for some vodka.
The biggest fights are over the smallest things. A trillion-dollar budget shortfall? No one on Earth can even understand it. The neighbor’s lawn being an inch too tall? That’s a fight.
If men are strong in the balance of power, civilization endures. If women are strong in the balance of power, civilization is imperiled, in the end for lack of children.
If Life give you lemons, look Life right in the eye and say, “I want beer instead.” Life should know better by now.

If you put root beer in a square glass, do you just get beer?

Moderation is good, because there should be balance in life.
Moderation is bad, because there is power in passion, and no progress was made by anyone being reasonable.
Both 11. and 12. are true.
They say money can’t buy happiness, but it bought Hunter Biden so many laptops he forgot where they all were.
I find the most peaceful sleep I have is when the thunder is blasting out a constant tattoo against the night sky, the worst when it is utterly silent.
All things must end. This is good. Without an end, there is no new beginning.
That thing about all things must end? I forgot revolving doors.

That door hit me as I got out. It was a pane in the butt.

Success is often more damaging than failure.
As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forwards, but understood in reverse.” The worst things in my life have always led to the best things in my life.
Corollary to 19., if you don’t have a plan to go somewhere, you won’t go anywhere. If you have a plan, you might not end up where you thought you’d be, but at least you’ll be moving.
Corollary to 20., I might be lost, but I’m making good time.
Corollary to 21., don’t just follow your dreams, chase them until they file a restraining order.
Of course the game is rigged. What’s bothering you now is the idea that they’ve stopped pretending it isn’t.
They say, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” What could be closer than locked in the crawlspace?

I wish I had a wine cellar with an elevator. That would lift my spirits.

A large part of the last few decades has been spent in trying to convince Americans that their culture is entirely based in commerce and pop culture. That is not true – the values that built America rely on neither.
What are you doing today to make sure that today matters?
Kindness is free. So is sarcasm. I found out that one of these works better at funerals than the other last week.
As I’ve said before, happy is easy. Not being bored is easy. Standing up for something that matters is the most important thing.
One of the saddest things about today’s society is that young people find more challenges in the virtual world than in reality. When reality catches up to them they won’t be prepared.
Jenga® would be more interesting if the pieces exploded when the tower fell.
Beauty exists. Truth exists. Goodness exists. Those who would rule you would blind you to those simple facts.
It’s called work because they pay you to do it. If it were always fun, it would be a hobby.
I think Elon Musk has a lot of hobbies. And ex-wives.

If Musk started making robot lawnmowers, would he call them E-Lawn®?

If you have a choice about your attitude, be positive. Enjoy the moments you can, and you can enjoy most of them.
You have a choice about you attitude. Sometimes it’s your only choice.

Self-Experimentation And Leisure

“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade

I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat. She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.

Seth Roberts is dead. I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014. He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley. Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.

What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself. He even wrote a paper about it (LINK). It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood. I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.

In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.

Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.

The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:

Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire. Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things. He noted that these included:

Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it. Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things. I think the BLM® riots might count here.

I can’t wait for their final show. Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?

Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way. The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.

It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up. He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians. They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world. Darn it for those guys. And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.

I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.

Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials. It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him. He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself. He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously. Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter? Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.

Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life. To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall. To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment. And most of them have worked well. 20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep. Now? I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.

Someone asked me what my dream job was. “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”

How long did that take? Years. An experiment here that worked. An experiment that didn’t. I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep. I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby. It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow? Is it a blanket? No, it’s Slumberman™.

My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful. For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.

This was a 100% solution. Every time, it worked. No theory. No real reason. And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.

Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems. And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.

People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.

But most of my life is in my hands. I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are. If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.

So, is self-experimentation good? Yeah, mostly. I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.

Reason 453 Why The Right Is Sane, And The Left Is Nuts

“John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.” – Demolition Man

What happens when you put a zebra in the lion cage? Well, me? I got fired from the zoo.

On Monday I put together a post on how toxic empathy is destroying the world. Really, it is. That was, however, just one, small bit of the picture. To go a little deeper, we have to understand the pathology of the most wretched hive of scum and villainy. No, I’m not talking The View®. Okay, I’m not talking The View™ exclusively, I’m talking about the minds of Leftists.

Jonathan Haidt is a PhD in something or other. To be an academic, they all have to write stuff down, and have other academics pretend to read it. If enough academics pretend to read it, then they can write books that the cosmopolitan elite buy and put on their bookshelves so other members of the cosmopolitan elite can see that they have the same virtuous books on the shelf.

As such, a lot of it is garbage. Case in point? Actual people who are professors at colleges talking about girls with outies and boys with innies as if that was somehow “science”, forgetting that we’ve known about the x and y chromosomes since Nettie Stevens was studying worm sperm at an all-woman college and found the y chromosome. Then, in the 1920s, the improbably named Theophilus Shickel Painter determined how the x and y chromosomes made boys and girls. And none of this paragraph is made up. Sometimes, history writes the humor for me.

My XY chromosomes are awesome. They look great in a pair of genes.

So, Haidt had to write something, so he came up with Moral Foundations Theory. I’ll spare you the details because you have a search engine, and can read. Originally, they broke the foundations into five. I think they added a sixth, changed the name of one, and following it is like following a soap opera, since Haidt has to write more books to keep that sweet, sweet money coming in from people who buy copies of his book to look smart to the other members of the cosmopolitan elite, and it helps if he does TED® talks. Here are the original five, with rough definitions:

Care/Harm – this is really the empathy I discussed on a post (LINK) earlier this week. It is the real foundation for the toxic behavior of the Left. It’s a focus on a concern for the wellbeing of others, compassion, kindness, . . . sorry, fell asleep for a moment.
Fairness/Reciprocity – this is really based on the idea that people should have equal outcomes in the test I took, regardless of their contributions. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards that. As a friend once told me, “We can treat everybody equally, or we can treat everybody fairly. It’s not the same.” As shown in the graph below, this is sort of blended.
In-group/Loyalty – this is about dedication to your group, distrust of non-group, and self-sacrifice for one’s community. True patriotism is a part of this.
Authority/Respect – it’s a respect for hierarchy, duty, and traditions.
Purity/Sanctity – this is tied to religious sanctity, as well as some ideas or objects having an innate value and they are sacred. The flip side is a revulsion against dirty and degenerate things.

I hear he liked to vote by mail.

To be clear, I am not endorsing Haidt’s work uncritically. His is just one tool that we can use to slice the way the mind works via data to better understand ourselves, and how we as humans differ from one another. I took the test at yourmorals.org and determined that I am somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan. Not sure if anyone wants to know, but I have zero time for slackers, don’t care about hard luck stories, am more loyal than a Sardaukar, am huge into tradition, and my sanctity scores were really high. They added “proportionality” which meant, those who contribute, get rewarded, and that was very high, too.

I think this will surprise zero regular readers. I can imagine my FBI agent dutifully noting all this in my Permanent Record, though.

This, however, is not about me. Let’s take a closer look at what they did with the theory. In essence, they tested lots of folks along with their self-identified political leanings. The result is the graph below, which is enough for a TED® Talk:

So, I see 2chan and 5chan. Where is 4chan? Original by J. Haidt, CC BY-SA 4.0

Turns out that Leftists are fixated on empathy and on equity. They’re the kind of people that look at a pit bull that just ate an orphanage and say, “Awww, she’s such a sweety, I wonder what those orphans did to provoke her. We just need to give her one more chance – pit bulls are just as safe as any other dog.”

This is how the Left processes things – through those two small channels. Those are the filters they use, and every problem in the world is first filtered through a hazy gauze of empathy and equity. Why are there an unceasing horde of illegals surging through what used to be a border? The filter is, first, empathy – “They just want a better life,” and then equity, “Everyone deserves the life we have her in America.” As each one of my children will tell you, I find there is no word in the English language I despise more than the word, “deserve.” I guess it’s my inner Viking showing through.

Will Smith, what a giver, always helping comedians work on their punchlines.

On the other side, on what Haidt labels “conservatives, the values converge. The empathy and equity are tempered with tradition, group health, and respect for hierarchy. In this much, much healthier worldview, values are kept in proportion with one another, not in this maladjusted split that drives the far Left.

I’ll admit, my values have changed as I’ve gotten older – this is a normal process people go through. It’s crazy. It’s call wisdom. I have a few gray hairs, but I don’t pluck them out. I’ve earned every one of them. And I’ve lived long enough to see that the wheels of justice go slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. Me? I’m not sure anyone under 35 should be allowed to vote. But I also am in favor of Congresscritter’s kids being bussed to the front line in the event they send our troops off to fight.

Imagine the inauguration: “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voice suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

There are several lessons here:

Leftist really are crazy. Like a pit bull chewing through a school of orphans, I’m sure they mean well. They’re such sweethearts. But their morality is worse than Robert Downey Jr. and Charlie Sheen fighting over a pound of cocaine back in 1997. Oddly, Charlie Sheen was only arrested for being Charlie Sheen.
Keep life in balance. Me? Genghis Khan was, according to stories, a legendary horseman. That takes balance. That’s enough for me.
I appreciate The View©. Where else can you go to watch a segment called, “Should You Let Your Kids Go to the Mall” where the topic was debated between a transgender Eskimo and Muslim drag queen?

A Few Good Memes

“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” – Rollerball

In a life filled with signs, be that bird.

I’ve got that “scratchy throat, feeling warm, feeling tired, and just a bit under the weather, so, here’s a low-effort memedrop based upon several themes. All memes are cage-free, organic, and gluten-free. Enjoy!

Someone, somewhere needs to do this: