Health – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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:

I maintain that we’re now at “peak trans” and will soon be getting off this treadmill:

To be fair, not many thirty-year-olds have cratered an entire product line:

Scott Adams points out that LinkedIn® might be allowing companies to quietly discriminate – against white people.

Part of the story is what the media says, and part is what it doesn’t say. See the toxic empathy of the Left showing up here:

Choose Who You Are. It’s Easy.

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

If someone named David is a victim of ID theft, do I have to call them Dav?

“As I’ve gotten older . . . I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to the people – if you just sit and listen – you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that the tell – always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who is always kind of the hero in every story they tell. The smart person – they deliver the clever put down. There are lots of versions of this. And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so, I did at some point decide: I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I’m the happiest person anybody knows. And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

-Michael Lewis

My first question after I read this was, “Okay, which Michael Lewis?” I’m thinking there might be a million of them, but the A.I. refused to even guess and then pouted and now won’t open the pod bay doors for me. So, I’m guessing that every other person in Michigan is named “Michael Lewis”. Regardless, the most famous author named Michael Lewis is the guy who writes interesting financial books, so I’ll assume it’s him.

The nice thing about water from Flint is that you can use it to make a Pb and Jelly sandwich.

Regardless of who wrote it, it’s a good and fairly true quote.

Why?

Attitude is everything.

If you believe you’re happy, if you talk about being happy, you’ll . . . be happy. As I’ve written before, being happy is really the easiest thing in the world. Many mornings I’ll run into the secretary administrative assistant at the door. Regardless of the weather, I’ll greet her with, “What a beautiful day it is!” It could be sunny and hot, rainy, cold, snowing, or even volcano-y. My greeting is the same.

Because it is a beautiful day. And, one thing I’ve learned is that the weather absolutely doesn’t care about me, at all. The snow doesn’t care that I love it. The hot day doesn’t care that I like cold weather, though I think it might be personal with the volcanoes. But I’m alive, breathing, walking and talking. If I spent all day hating a temperature reading, that wouldn’t leave me time to hate people who deserve it, like communists, leftists, and mimes.

How could the day not be beautiful? I get to choose how I feel, so why not be happy about it?

My insurance agent told me I can jump in an active volcano. Once.

I read the Michael Lewis quote and immediately recognized it to be a rule I’d been living with. I’ve written before about how absolutely horrid victims are to be around. Everything happens to them. They are at the center of their own story, but initiate no action. They have all the resilience of a bean bag, and are psychic vampires that attempt to suck emotional sustenance in the form of pity from their unwitting prey by demonstrating how mean the world has been to them. The technical term for this affliction is “Antifa® Member”.

They sing their own lives with their story. I avoid these types of people as if they were constructed entirely out of George Soros’ toe cheese, which I guess explains why he’s long been called the “Creamy-Fingered Puppet Master”.

George Soros wants to destroy our culture? I knew he was behind American Idol.

The Hero? I can live with them. Often, they’re really newts who brag about being distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They get their ego from being the one who has done the most, has the most gifted child, the cousin who went to Harvard®, and that they vacationed on Mars last summer. The Hero does this this because they feel awful about themselves, and need to bolster their ego by telling these stories.

Again, I’m okay with The Hero, since if you listen to their stories and don’t try to top theirs, they eventually can be good people to hang out with, and as they get older or develop trust with you they drop the act. They want to be liked, and if you like them for who they are, they often stop the Hero stuff.

The person who puts people down? I don’t meet that guy (or gal) often enough to have any sort of read on dealing with them. They just aren’t any in circle I’m in since I’ve been an adult. I guess that tells me lots about how successful the strategy of “being a complete tool” is.

What’s the difference between a Hoover® vacuum and a limo carrying George Soros and his son? The Hoover™ only has one dirtbag in it.

But there are lots of other ways to tell my story. The best part is that I get to choose. I get to choose to be the happiest guy people know. I get to choose to be the guy in the room that is calm when everything is going to hell (I really enjoy that one, and it comes naturally). I get to choose what I’m afraid of.

To be clear, this isn’t the Lefty talking point about “Your Truth®”. That’s bogus, and denies objective reality. Me? I don’t deny that it’s snowing. I don’t deny that it’s 103°F out. I don’t deny that that pesky volcano keeps following me around. But I do get to choose how that fact fits in with how I feel.

And so can you.

And so can those 5.04 million people in Michigan named, “Michael Lewis”.

Dependence: The Worst Drug Of All?

“I hate being dependable, man.” – Black Hawk Down

If I had a dream about a nocturnal horse, would that be a night mare?

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.” This is from Thomas Jefferson’s book, Notes on Virginia, which I assume referred to some girl Jefferson was dating. Maybe it was Virginia Madsen, I mean, she was kinda hot in the 1984 version of Dune, so maybe that’s when they met?

One of the ideas that has been carefully cultivated here by the Left in late-stage Weimerica is the idea that individuals are weak. It has long been my observation that people who live in large cities are more dependent due to the facts of living in a large city, and this is reflected in the vote totals. This is part of the reason that Leftists love big cities, that and owning a penthouse on the Upper West Side.

In a big apartment, residents are slaves to elevators, sidewalks, and trash removal services whereas in Modern Mayberry I haven’t used an elevator in months, sidewalks are okay but not required, and if the trash truck doesn’t show up because the raccoons sabotaged it, I can burn mine (legally!) in the backyard.

Often, larger cities have restrictive laws that restrict the ability of individual citizens to protect themselves, leading to a complete dependence on the state for the most basic of human rights – the right to protect their own life. Powerful Leftists, of course, are surrounded by people that they hired that have guns, even when the normal folks can’t have them. This is what they call “equity”.

Surely, those two things above aren’t related.

Cities are thus an actual breeding ground for dependence, and here are just a few examples, since this isn’t the whole point of the post:

Control – This is always and forever the goal of the Left. In large cities, it’s often impossible to contact actual decision makers, since it’s actually George Soros, and he doesn’t take visitors.
Concentrates Economic Gains – When control is granted, the winners often cease to be those that produce, and then gravitate to those that run the systems, since it’s actually George Soros, and he gets all the cash.
Sole-Source Education – I’ve seen some parents just leave education and discussion on important topics entirely to the schools, and be utterly ignorant about the discussions on values that take place there, which is what George Soros likes. (Education problems aren’t limited to big cities.)
Splits Social Cohesion – Individuals become atomized, and the chance of seeing a random person on the street even more than once is minimal. There are millions of people, always in motion, so no one has the opportunity to think much about George Soros.

Obviously, this isn’t all places, everywhere, and some cities (those with 100% less Soros) are better than others, and the ‘burbs are almost always less dehumanizing than the ultra-dense cities that the modern world seems to favor.

Why did Elon move to the suburbs? He wanted more space.

This is not how people were made to live. We’ve spent the vast majority of our existence as a species living in smallish groups, and being responsible for each other and our own actions. Even as far back as 1500 Anno Domini (3405 metric years) the largest city in Europe was Paris. The population? A staggering 200,000 to 250,000 people.

Yeah, that’s bigger than Modern Mayberry, but the population density was only about 2000 to 2500 people per square mile, which I assumed still left them room for their snail ranches, and if you walked for a couple of hours, you could be in the countryside.

Regardless of where it happens, though, dependence can have a horrible toll, especially in someone who is was born and raised to be independent:

Feelings of Helplessness and Hopelessness – I like to have as much control over my own destiny as possible. I realize that meteorites to strike, earthquakes happen, and PEZ® factories are bought out by Bulgarians. Regardless, people who feel that they control their lives are happier, more confident, and have better body odor.
Anxiety and Fear – When there is a lack of control, people get afraid – I see that in people are dependent on others, I mean, you should have seen The Boy when he was a baby and I’d play “steal the bottle while he’s nursing”..
Shame, Loss of Feeling of Self-Worth – One of the compromises for society today is that most people aren’t in business, they have jobs, and many people feel in control at work, especially when they are contributing and working with a great team. However, lose the job? The understanding of dependence hits in an avalanche. Likewise, being dependent on the state for life just turns a person into a dehumanized cog who votes for the benefits.
Political Indoctrination – Upton Sinclair, a miserable Leftist himself, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” He sniffed around the problem, but didn’t realize that the same problem existed with his beloved Leftism, but his book sales depended on him not understanding that.
Self-Censorship – When social or economic standing is based on not having the wrong opinion, people are afraid to stand up for what’s right.

I pretended to gag at dinner one night, but the family knew it was just another another dad choke.

This, in many more words, is what Jefferson was talking about. And this is what we have seen repeatedly in countries where tyranny takes hold.

Dependence is also a drug. When a person falls in love with their dependence, it becomes the easy way to explain giving up. I’ve met people who love their dependence, who list their medications and conditions with a pride like they’d been given a medal from the disability fairy. It’s a free pass to explain how they’re not responsible for their life.

Thus? Jefferson was right:

Subservience comes from owing everything to the master,
Venality, (roughly, being corrupt) is part and parcel of dependence, since the life of a dependent person is built around personal gain,
Suffocates the germ of virtue, since life becomes about the material, and
and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition. This is the lynchpin. This is the desired end state.

Thomas Jefferson bought a 2006 Ford® Taurus™. He called it his Jefferson Carship.

Dependence is everything that the Left wants, because is serves their purpose. To be clear, demagogues on the Right can use this, too, but most people on the Right are actually into individual freedom, and won’t follow a leader that pulls them away from that. Remember when Trump got booed at one of his own rallies when he brought up the Vaxx?

I remember.

But this isn’t about them. This is about us. My suggestion to every person is to look at areas in their lives where their dependence is unhealthy, and be aware of them. That’s the first step.

Then? Eliminate every one of them that you can, and rather than being ruled by fear, be ruled by your own choices.

That’s the opposite of dependence, and is better for you in every way.

Forgiveness, It’s What’s For Supper.

TOP

“The guy in the Easter bunny suit kicked his ass.” – Mallrats

What do Paul the Apostle and Jack the Ripper have in common? Same middle name. (memes as found today)

One of my earliest memories was of being a kid at Sunday School, and I think I was probably about four. I recall the Sunday School teacher giving us crayons and coloring sheets so we could color a picture of Jesus. I took a bright purple crayon and began coloring Jesus’ face. The Sunday School teacher came up to me and asked, “Johnny, why are you coloring Jesus’ face purple? He wasn’t purple.”

I responded, “He’s Jesus and he’s God, so he could be purple if he wanted to be purple.” I recall distinctly her not responding to that.

See? Even as a kid I was insufferably smug, and I didn’t even have to mention to her that he never wore pants.

Water isn’t the only thing that Jesus made wine.

For whatever reason, I seem to think that this happened around Easter, which brings us to the topic of rebirth. Even if you’re not Christian, the idea of forgiveness, sacrifice, and rebirth that is told in the New Testament is a powerful one, even if the story of the Resurrection does contain a lot of cross-referencing.

Forgiveness is a big topic, and an important one. As the old joke goes, a nun asked a child, “What do we need to do before we ask the Lord for forgiveness?”

“Sin.”

There’s a bit to think about there. First, it’s not a great joke because it references neither flatulence, Kardashians, nor PEZ®. But it does have a really good point.

I’ll admit, some mistakes are fun to watch.

First, before forgiveness is the gentle art of screwing up. And that doesn’t just mean a bad outcome, it more often refers to a loss of virtue, either momentary or prolonged. Doing the right thing and getting a bad outcome?

I’ve done it, and remain stubbornly proud of those failures. Of my failures, those are 100% my favorites, like the time I got yelled at for not doing something that was a Federal felony. Yup, that was my week at that job.

I don’t need forgiveness for that.

Thankfully my boss wasn’t a Kardashian.

The ones where I wasn’t virtuous? Or, even sinful? Yeah. I need forgiveness for that. YMMV, but I start with the Big Guy, and then work to forgive . . . myself. The one thing I think I could never get forgiveness for is eating dog – I don’t want to suffer eternal Dalmatian.

It’s important to remember that virtue isn’t a video game – doing things well and virtuous doesn’t guarantee winning. It doesn’t guarantee happiness. It doesn’t guarantee living. In fact, there are times that the virtuous path ends up resulting in guaranteed death.

For some people, that’s hard to hear. The idea has been drummed into many folks that being rich is a sign of a virtuous life. My easy counter to that is: George Soros, whose life is like cancer and syphilis had a baby.

Sometimes people are the same level of dumb as they are Evil.

Is having an easy life a sign that people lived a virtuous life?

If so, explain Jeff Epstein or Bill Clinton.

And actual forgiveness that works requires more than, “God didn’t give me a bike, so I stole one because God helps those who help themselves, so I forgive myself.”

No, sorry. Forgiveness requires a dedication to be more virtuous, and isn’t an excuse for being a tool. Otherwise, Sam Bankman-Fried would be considered for sainthood, because I’m sure he meant well.

When memes become reality.

I’ve focused mainly on getting forgiveness, and forgiving myself. There’s a third aspect, and this is one I’m going to admit that I’m not as good at: forgiving others.

I’m still working on that. The Mrs. keeps telling me that if Jesus can forgive the people who put the freak in French fries, I can forgive anyone. I said, “There is no freak in French fries.”

She responds, “I know.”

Genius or cursed? I can’t make up my mind.

So, I try to get better at forgiving others. For me, that’s the hardest part. But then I remember, that I’ve been forgiven.

I guess I’m a work in progress. But no one said it would be easy, not even Jesus. And he can be purple if he wants to.

Happy Easter, He is risen!

There’s A Mind Virus. And A Cure.

“Exactly. An illusion, placed in our minds by this planet’s inhabitants.” – Star Trek, TOS

Well, tell us how you really feel, Elon. All photo and meme content “as-found”.

Elon Musk Tweeted® the above on Saturday.

He was replying to another person who was walking down Market Street with a friend.

Her friend said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” She continued, “I love SF, but what the city has become is unconscionable. Several pockets of 20 to 30 people all off their heads. A number of them with pants barely on. Zombies. The walking dead. Cops observing the proceedings from 100 feet away.”

Elon’s Tweet© was in response to that. Of course, when I looked it up to make sure that it was real (it was April Fools on Saturday), the media had tried to spin it that Elon was relating it to mass layoffs. He was not. He was referring to the disease of Leftism, which he referred to as “this self-destructive mind virus”.

And although I don’t think of Elon as any sort of savior for the Right, he often says things that are so provocative that it drives the Left nuts. They can’t even drive their Teslas™ with the amount of Smug™ they were promised because Elon has broken their Twitter® echo chamber.

That’s not going to win him friends in San Francisco or Washington, D.C., or with any Leftist, since the things that they want to avoid are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The theme of this is inversion. Let’s take an example that you’ve probably seen before:

What’s the difference between a Calvin® model and a bakery? The bakery is supposed to have rolls.

I’m sure that the model on the bottom might be a perfectly nice person. I don’t know her. She also might have a great personality and might be an excellent singer, or poet, or writer. But in any world where beauty is measured objectively (and it can be), well, let’s hope she has that nice personality.

But that’s the nature of inversion, replacing virtue with vice. And the self-destructive mind virus Elon is speaking of? It’s Evil. I don’t know Jack Fell (this is an as-found with no context) but he spells it out nicely in this Tweet® (or Gab®?):

My friend’s family is very racist. He brought his Asian girlfriend home to meet them, and his wife and kids were very rude to her.

The level of propaganda for Evil has reached “Comically Satanic Villain Plotting To Destroy Society” on the Wilder Scale. Of particular and topical concern is the LGBTQI+ (it just keeps growing and I’m sure will soon include people sexually attracted to cactus) agendas. It started with an appeal to emotion – let adults do what they want behind closed doors. This flew in the face of many facts, but it was sufficiently strong to move public opinion.

No one called me anorexicphobic when I was against teen girls starving themselves, some to death, because they had a mental delusion that they were fat. I wanted them cured. But suddenly, because a five-year-old picked up a Barbie®, now he has to wear dresses and be called Nancy and then be jacked up on chemicals that will wreck many of his body’s normal processes and if I don’t agree and want them to be helped instead, I’m transphobic?

Nah. I’m not. I’m sympathetic. These kids need help, not hormones, and society should say so.

Let me give you a taste of how bad it’s going now:

I cut out the pictures of the kids that were pictured on the Drag Camp ad, since I view it to be among the most corrosive and exploitive thing I’ve seen in months. It is putting the ordinary and boring next to the horrific – summer camp right next to exploited children.

David Foster Wallace called this “Lynchian,” referring to the director David Lynch. That’s what this is – putting the ordinary and boring, kids growing up and coming of age through the typical drama, and then adding in ghoulish parents and doctors talking about mutilating a child to conform to this peculiar mass hysteria. And normalizing it. Oh, and to top it off, anyone who objects to this monstrosity is denounced and cancelled.

I wonder who could be behind this . . . could it be . . .

As I’ve said before, this practice of transforming lust and deviance into a virtue above actual virtues is something old and awful – Evil.

The mind virus continues. Looking back at COVID, it appears that at every case, the people who were opposed to the crazed response and rules were correct. Being skeptical of the Vaxx turns out to become more validated daily – today the World Health Organization® came out and noted that kids and teens really shouldn’t be experimented on with a (now verified) gene changing experimental mRNA technique, and that (if the stats are correct) that same Vaxx now is likely behind a 25% increase in mortality and a decrease in fertility of women.

But this is what the Mind Virus made people say:

I bet he’s fun at parties.

They wanted people who disagreed with government mandates crushed. I guess, inside every little Leftist, is a Stalin wanting to break free. And nothing makes them madder than Trump. Nothing.

Questions that I’m sure that they don’t want you to ask . . .

Because I disagreed with them on a fundamental level on the way that I would manage my own health, they wanted me fired, broke, my children removed, and if I still wouldn’t relent, dead. And it was a joke to them.

We’re not as far down the road as some countries. Great Britain appears to be well down the road to utter insanity, and also proving why the 2^nd Amendment was a really good idea:

I guess the Brits don’t hire cops with self-awareness in mind.

The “self-destructive mind virus” that Elon says was being spread by Twitter® still is, but now people have the ability to speak out against it on Twitter™. Would I call Twitter© a force for Good? Not yet. I do believe that the arguments for the Good always beat Evil over time, and unmuzzling the Good is a great first step.

But it’s not nearly enough. The Left has pushed this insane agenda to fundamentally repudiate and destroy the family to the point where normal people are done with it – messing with the kids is always a step too far. Is this a temporary pullback, so that the Left can consolidate its gains while pretending we should be okay with the present situation, and then push further later?

I’m hoping not, because I see the complete moral capitulation to inversion of the most cherished values that we have being examined and rejected by a good portion of the base of the American people. We see what happens when the Left has full run, and it is the inversion of a good American life. Besides, there are things other than the recognition of a failed society we can learn from The Walking Dead:

After a fair trial, of course.