Health – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Thanksgiving Thanks, 2022

“Two men are dead! This is not the time for petty sibling squabbles. That’s what Thanksgiving is for.” – Psych

I knew an Irishman who used to sell lawn chairs. I’ll never forget Paddy O’Furniture.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I would share a few things that I’m thankful for. These are in no particular order.

I’m thankful that almost every single one of my problems is self-inflicted, and has a clear way to solution. I am where I am because of who and what I am, and I can change everything I don’t like, when I want to.
I’m thankful for being with The Mrs., because either of us with other people would be just an unending misery for them. I believe the Geneva Convention specifically lists being married to either The Mrs. or to me as a Crime Against Humanity.
I’m thankful for Elon Musk and the amusement he creates by stirring the pot. Do I think he’s on our side? But I think he irritates enough of the people who hate us to make me laugh, nearly daily.
I’m thankful for friends. I have a Polish friend who is a sound tech. And a Czech one, too. And a Czech one, too.

Or if I opened a trampoline in Prague, would the Czechs keep bouncing?

I’m thankful for standard time. Daylight savings time is the tool of the Devil.
I’m thankful for the “ringer and vibration off” switch on cell phones. And I should use it more. There’s something to be said for uninterrupted focus time. When going out to dinner, we often ditch our cellphones at home. This leads to this crazy thing called “talking to each other.”
I’m thankful that The Boy is home from Midwestia State U (located right next to Wassamatta U) and that he and Pugsley talk for hours when they’re together. A loyal brother can be the closest friend as you move through life.

I recently bought a toilet brush. Long story short: I’m going back to toilet paper.

I’m thankful that I got up late today, and that I’m writing this early.
I’m thankful that, right now in this place and time, my family is safe, and we are together. This is why Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday: there isn’t the stress from presents, merely a time to give thanks and be together.
I’m thankful for decongestants. I’d tell a joke about me having a virus, but I’m worried you might spread it.
I’m thankful that I live in a time that has the greatest access to knowledge of any place and any time in history, allowing me to read the thoughts of the greatest men who ever lived and the ideas that influenced our civilization and showed us what truth is, almost at a whim. Oh, and there’s also CNN®.
I’m thankful for cheese.

A Pomeranian puppy looked Medusa in the eye – he became pomegranite.

I’m thankful for living in a time and place where starvation is unknown, though the Left keeps wanting to put it back into play.
I’m thankful that The Mrs. talked me into buying the chair that I sit in to write these posts. I had to get rid of my old recliner. Me and my old recliner? We went way back.
I’m thankful for beer. It actually made one of my friends smarter, you know, Budweiser©?
I’m thankful for hard exercise, where when I’m done, I know I’ve given it my all. I try to use the workout the actors who played the Marvel® superheroes use, but I get Thor just thinking about it.

I accidentally hit my Nokia® with a hammer, and took it to Best Buy™ so the Geek Squad© could fix it. Best Buy® said they don’t work on hammers.

I’m thankful that the WD-40© fixed the front doorknob. I promise this really worked – it’s non-friction.
I’m thankful that Pugsley and The Boy are sons I can be proud of, strong and with their own opinions for their own reasons, and with exactly the character that I had hoped for. It wasn’t easy, and no matter what I do, German children will always be kinder.
I’m thankful for Ma and Pa Wilder, who, though gone, helped me become the man I am today. There was a time when I had a difficult relationship with them: when I was born, I didn’t talk to them for two years.
I’m thankful to have lived through some of the most interesting times in human history, and having seen amazing advances in technology. And Chia Pets®.
I’m thankful for the first sip of hot coffee on a cool morning. I’m thankful for the last sip of coffee on a hot day. I guess words cannot espresso how much I like it.

What was the subtitle for War and Peace? Tsar Wars.

I’m thankful for the troubles I’ve had in life, because those have made me better. When I was young, Ma Wilder called me a pirate when I was learning the alphabet, since I always got lost at C.
I’m thankful for the talents that I was born with, because those gave me capacity. In fact, I have one talent that I’ll brag about: I can always tell what’s inside a wrapped present. It’s a gift.
I’m thankful for winter. Winter is the time of year when things are quiet, and I can think. Sometimes I work on math, which makes The Mrs. say that I’m cold and calculating.
I’m thankful that I don’t have regrets, and go to sleep soundly. I often sleep without pajamas, which seems to bother them at work.

And I’m thankful to spend time with you folks every week. Happy Thanksgiving!!

Defeat? Never.

“Okay you people – sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning, and if we’re not back by dawn? Call the president.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I hear that Rob Halford became an eastern monk, which I guess makes him a Buddhist Priest.

Back when I was in high school, I started a quest. It would probably be a trivial quest in today’s world with the Internet, and tens of millions of songs available all from a single search. However, back when I was in high school, the only people using the Internet were computer nerds at colleges or places like Los Alamos sharing nuclear bomb design info and ASCII porn.

Is this how Los Alamos beat the Soviets?

There was exactly one rock and roll radio station that reached the lofty heights of Wilder Mountain, and it was a good three-hour drive from where I lived. Heck, the nearest record store was a 45-minute drive. But I heard a song . . . and loved it.

I had no idea who the artist was. All I knew was that it had guitars that sounded like jet fighters coming in for an attack (metaphorically) and a heavy metal singer with pipes to growl low and also hit the high notes.

This was not helpful. My bumbling attempts to hum the song to the record store clerk probably sounded like a toddler attempting to instruct an Albanian goat herder on how to repair a Junkers Jumo-004 on an ME 262. My incoherent rambling eventually convinced the store owner that I could probably be sold a lot of records on my quest to find the goofy song.

What happens when a plane full of Leftist lands? The Jet turns off but the whining continues.

She was right. On one particular winter day, I bought two cassettes. Memo to the young: a cassette was an attempt to put a part of the Internet on a skinny magnetic tape and take it with you. Sort of like WIFI but with a really, really low transfer rate that cost over $7 for 42 megabytes.

I listened to one of the cassettes on my forty-minute drive to Stately Wilder Manor. I don’t recall what the first cassette was. It was okay. The song I was looking for, however, wasn’t on it.

When I got to Wilder Mountain, I decided to listen to the other cassette. Pa Wilder wasn’t home. It was November, and snow was falling gently across the valley, as I looked toward the volcanic cone that dominated the view above the mountains that surrounded the valley.

I put in the cassette. I hit play.

A single guitar hit an E note that crunched and then was followed by 41 seconds of guitar solo that made my brain implode. The first second was enough, the next 40? Pure passion. My father’s stereo, which before that day was primarily concerned with playing Dean Martin and Johnny Cash, must have been surprised.

I know I was. Then? Another driving song, this time about a sentient A.I. encased in an orbiting surveillance satellite.

The two satellite dishes on my house got married. The ceremony was awful, but the reception was amazing.

What? I was in heaven. The cassette was Judas Priest, the album? Screaming for Vengeance.

The theme of the music was unabashedly masculine. It was fueled by testosterone and optimism and defiance. It was, in short, everything I loved in life.

What was my ethos at that time? Full speed. Every moment in life. When I played football, I played football. Every ounce of my being was focused on the next play. The cleats digging into the turf, the snap as the center delivered the ball to the quarterback, my sudden sprint, and the exquisite feeling of my shoulder pads digging into that quarterback’s belly as I impacted him at full speed. Life was a game to be played at full speed. When a football game was over, win or lose, the idea that I would have left anything of myself or held back an ounce of myself? I never felt that after a single game.

Win or lose. Everything I had.

And that was the ethos. My focus was on doing everything that I could humanly do during the game. If we won? Excellent. If we lost? There was no room for regret since I had done every single thing I could for the team.

Amazingly, here that was, in music.

This music and most of the music I have loved since then was fueled by one concept – it was fueled by the idea that, in this life, there are winners, and there are losers. But there are no victims. I was responsible for my preparation. I was responsible for my effort. I was responsible for me.

If I won? Wonderful. If I lost? Yeah, it stung. But if I gave it my best, and lived up to my own values, I still won.

I took a survey of what soap people used in the shower. 95% of them told me to get out.

Again, winning was and is important. But a loss of a single day was nothing. Winning could and would come. And I would live my life, on my terms.

Have I been cheated? Yes. Have I been wronged? Yes. Did I stand toe to toe with my boss and tell him that I wouldn’t sell my honor and principles to him for any reason?

Yes. And did I pay a price?

Duh.

Do I regret it? Not for a minute. Not for a second.

There are moments in life, where honor and values will be tested.

Heck, that was in this music, too.

In this world we’re living’ in, we have our share of sorrow
Answer now is don’t give in, aim for a new tomorrow

Also in the music? Questions of deep philosophy. The eternal battle between Good and Evil. Oh, yeah, and hot chicks.

Eventually, this changed and fell out of fashion. I think it was Bush. Or maybe raising the drinking age to 21. Or maybe drugging generations with lithium and Adderall®. Or maybe the new “zero tolerance” lifestyle, where fighting for Good and being right still resulted in a suspension.

Or maybe all of that.

Kurt Cobain was depressed at 13. Guess that was his midlife crisis.

Music based on honor and testosterone and optimism eventually fell out of favor. I can even give you the date: September 21, 1991, when Nirvana launched Nevermind.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

That abomination of learned helplessness replaced this from Judas Priest:

Thousand of cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We’ve found the place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there
To ram it down, ram it down
Straight through the heart of this town
Ram it down, ram it down
Razing the place to the ground
Ram it down

One of these makes me feel like slitting my wrists. The other? Fills me with the idea that none of us are alone. We have power. We are . . . going to win, no matter what the damn odds are. Judas Priest is still touring. Kurt Cobain? Not so much. I guess it proves that one person can handle only so much Courtney Love.

Fast and furious, we ride the universe
To carve a road for us, that slices every curve in sight
We accelerate, no time to hesitate
This load will detonate, whoever would contend its right

I refuse to accept defeat. The idea is against every fiber of being in my body. I realize that I will not win every battle. And I am going to listen to music, and I am going to take in media that tells me the truth, but I shall never, ever, despair no matter how dire the situation. My family? They come from heroes. So does yours. Never, ever, give up.

I always took a piece of paper to a wrestling match. That way I could beat The Rock.

I’m not going to stop until I stop breathing. And I won’t relinquish my honor to any man. And I am responsible for every aspect of my life and my situation.

Oh, I did find the song I was looking for, a year later:

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming

But that’s another story, though the song remains the same.

Burning Your Way To Happiness

“No! Look, what’s the matter with you all? It’s perfectly simple: We have the fire drill when I ring the fire bell. That wasn’t the fire bell! Right?” – Fawlty Towers

At the pub, the owner told me I was drunk and needed to take the bus home. Turned out those are even harder to drive when you’re drunk.

It was a cold, February campout. It was also rainy, and also weather that most folks would call miserable. In fact, it was also the first campout that I was Scoutmaster.

I think the temperature, at its highest, was probably around 45°F. It froze at night. We put our tents up in the dark, and I snuggled deep into my sleeping bag.

The next morning, we had breakfast. One thing that I had changed since I became Scoutmaster was that the Scouts bought, cooked, and ate their own food. One thing I observed on previous campouts was when the kids and adults ate the same food, the adults wanted good food, and wouldn’t leave the kids alone. Me? I had no desire to eat chicken tartare, so I let the kids fix their own food, and I often cooked for the adult leaders.

I drew a picture of a criminal once. He looked pretty sketchy.

The plan for the day was fairly simple. 80% or more of the Scouts needed to get to First Class (a rank where a boy would know most of the things so they could survive a solo campout for a few days, if need be). We focused on First Class skills. One other thing I instituted is that the older Scouts were to teach the younger Scouts, for reasons that are probably obvious.

My job, mainly, was to drink coffee and take someone to the hospital if the hatchet got the best of them. At this campout, there was one Scout in particular who had very little skill at anything. One of the Scouts of higher rank ran him through building a fire.

Jack London aside, building a fire after a rainy night on a blustery, rainy day isn’t the easiest of things. And, to be fair, this Scout wasn’t the quickest on the uptake. But he worked at starting his fire for a really long time. More than an hour? Certainly. But he had dogged determination, and finally got his fire going.

“Okay,” I said, “You can put that one out now. That qualifies.”

“No, I want to keep it going.”

I hear arsonists do well on Tinder®. They have a lot of matches.

I was fine with that. It was his fire, and if he wanted to keep it going, I was fine with that. There was little chance of him burning down the soggy campground.

He kept the fire going through the night, feeding it, and teasing it along.

He made First Class, but I must point out, by the time he got the rank badge it wasn’t nearly as important to him as building that fire. He had acquired a skill. He could do more than he could before. He did not need outside validation. The achievement was part of him. He was proud of himself.

So often, we get tied up in feeling about things that are beyond our span of control. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”

I hear that Marcus Aurelius got the first weather report. “Hail, Caesar!”

I know that we are living in a world filled with tough situations. I would say this, if some outside event upsets you, go ahead and be upset. Until midnight.

Then, take control. Realize that what you can be and do is the important thing. As that Scout taught me, being fulfilled isn’t being surrounded by supermodels and driving a Lambo® while they softly nuzzle your neck and . . . where was I? No, that’s not fulfillment. Fulfillment is achievement.

Almost every single person reading this has the power to be better tomorrow at something. A skill. Bench pressing five more pounds. Learning Shakespeare in the original Klingon. Becoming a better carpenter. Finally trimming those nosehairs, or at least weaving them into an attractive scarf.

Me? I write, and try to get better. When I’ve written what I want, I don’t need anyone to tell me – I feel it inside.

And I’m okay.

Except in especially tragic situations, it is in our power to be better. It is in our power to improve. And through doing so, it is in our power to build internal strength. And we don’t need anyone to validate it.

Life is tough, and it’s even tougher when we try to take on every injustice in the world. Sometimes we just need to take a few minutes, and build a fire.

When You Need A Friend . . .

“Dayman. Champion of the sun. Ahh-ahh-ahh. You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone! Dayman.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The Earth is covered over 80% by water, and most of it is not carbonated. The Earth is flat.

On a recent version of his podcast, Scott Adams said (I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up), “I’m giving it one year. Not two. I’m not going to live another year like this.”

Wow. I did hear that (in a later podcast) he reported that he changed his blood pressure medication and his mood improved, but am likewise too lazy to verify that, either.

To be fair, Scott has had a pretty bad year. He’s had health issues, relationship issues. How bad were they? At one point in his podcast this spring, he melted down and tore into a viewer in a greatly disproportionate way. It was like using a chainsaw to trim toenails. Sure, it’ll do the work, but it will leave quite a mess.

This was the big sign to me that Adams was under a lot of pressure.

After hearing me sing, the choir director told me I was a natural tenor. “Yes, John, stay ten or twelve feet away from a microphone.”

The point isn’t to diagnose Scott’s health or love life, but rather to point out that regardless of wealth (Adams is loaded) and options in life (he could live anywhere in the world he wants to, drive whatever car he wants to, and never worry about a bill ever again in his life), there is the possibility that someone you know needs a friend. Scott certainly does.

One of the things that we have seen decline over the past few decades are those institutions in society that were devoted to fraternity – the Elks, Masons, Moose Lodge, bowling leagues, Boy Scouts® etc., have all seen membership declines – some so much that they’ve folded up in many locations.

And in our club we eat the same thing for breakfast: Synonym Toast Crunch.

Over a decade ago, I was involved with Scouting™. We would have leader meetings, which I ran. I had an agenda, and we’d go through it in a rather business-like fashion. At the end of one of the meetings, another leader, Chuck, pulled out his new cell phone and was showing me its features.

After the meeting, as The Mrs. (she was a leader, too) and I got into the car, I said, “That was weird, Chuck showing me his phone after the meeting. Why do you think he did that?”

The Mrs. looked at me as one would look at a not-so-bright child, and said, slowly so my dim brain could comprehend . . . “Because . . . he’s your,” long pause, and then “friend.” She said friend slowly enough that it was about two seconds in length.

My friend asked if I could sleep with someone dead or alive, who would it be? I answered, “Obviously, someone alive.”

Of course, she was right. I had been so focused on the “business” side of running the Cub Scout stuff that I had forgotten entirely about the personal side. Chuck was my friend. Duh. But the lesson I learned was simple: friends really are out there. Chuck moved away, but I still call him once a year. And I do my best to stay in contact with friends that, in some cases, I haven’t seen physically in 15 years.

That network of friends is important, at least for me. While some people might go through life alone and do fine, I find that having a good network of friends helps me. I can get good advice. I can complain. I can share my journey. I can get good ideas. I can laugh. I can share my troubles.

I don’t go through life alone, and I’m stronger for it.

One of the joys of childhood was how easy it was to make friends. In many cases, we didn’t have anything in common but being the same age, but that was enough. Something about endless summers and going through similar difficulties was great for bonding.

I then started a camp to train kids needlework. It was sew in tents.

I think technology has had a big role in our current dislocation. Our televisions can now bring us nearly every movie from the last twenty years at a touch. YouTube™ has millions of videos on almost every topic. And don’t forget that friendship requires trust, something that is in shorter supply today than in years past. In the end, regardless of why, we can change that.

My request is this. Look around as you go about your day. Try to, as much as possible, spread joy to those that deserve it. And maybe even a little to some who don’t. A little. I know that most people who act like jerks are really jerks, but some are just going through a bad time.

Also? Find and make a new friend. This takes time and commitment. And trust. And there’s the fear of loss, too. But the wonderful thing about friendship is this: when it exists, it’s work that helps both people.

Hopefully Adams has found a friend. If not, I’d be glad to show him my phone.

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes. Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself. So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible. For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works. To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing. But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him. Every. Single. Point. He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected. “Show the whole thing,” was his response. Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others. His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years. Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony? I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems. I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper. It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper. But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too. One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet. To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that. Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it. This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel. Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that. In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t. The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions. He thinks this is the same. The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense. “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.” This is true. One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse. He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge. What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults. When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child. This is the result of parental dereliction of duty. Sure, there are some kids that are just bad. Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him. But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6^th gets a Congressional investigation. Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village. It takes parents. It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools. Kid failing? They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry. The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings. But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace. Is this intentional? The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks? Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

Smoking, Orphans, and the French

“Yes. Give him his cigarettes. It won’t be the nicotine that kills you, Mr. Bond.” – You Only Live Twice

An early but failed attempt at a cigarette advertisement as they ran out of orphans too quickly.

(This is a retread, I have the sniffles tonight (and got started late). It’s from November of 2018, so, I wonder where the heart disease is going now that 12-year-old kids are having heart attacks?)

Heart attacks were unknown before 1900 – probably because 97% of people before 1900 died in surprise buffalo stampedes and dysentery on the Oregon Trail®.

But I recently learned something that fascinated me. Heart disease has plummeted during the last fifty years. Here’s the graph. I found it here (LINK), with a h/t to Mangun (LINK):

So, heart disease is plummeting. But I thought we were getting fatter?

Not good. There’s a lot of Oreos® and regret in that graph . . . .

According to the NIH, we are getting fatter. But we’ve (more or less) eliminated heart disease as a cause of death. Huh? I would have thought that heart disease would have increased during that time period abetted by a high-fructose corn syrup diet, increasingly sedentary lifestyle, Netflix®, the Internet, and reliance on every modern convenience. Oh, wait, that’s just me.

Not saying being fat is healthy – it’s linked to a large number of issues including very large pants. But not so much heart disease. So what changed between 1900 (effectively zero heart disease) and 1965 (when heart disease peaked) and today?

Cigarettes (graph is from the CDC).

Sure people smoked before 1900. Mark Twain smoked the equivalent of the population of Honduras in cigars every day. And people smoked pipes, often while cultivating manly mustaches that looked like creatures from an H.G. Wells novel. But cigarettes? Not so much, as cigarettes were French, and even back in 1900 no one liked the French. 54 cigarettes per year per person were smoked in the United States in 1900. In 1965, the peak year for heart attacks was also the peak year for cigarette smoking, when Americans smoked 4,259 cigarettes per person, per year. And they looked so very cool, except for the heart attacks. And the berets.

Also, Watson, an amazing fact: Kermit The Frog has the same middle name as Jack The Ripper. Not a coincidence I think . . . the game is afoot! Let’s catch a Muppet® murderer!

The difference between cigars (or pipes) and cigarettes is that no sane person inhales pipe or cigar smoke. Again, not saying that either of those things are particularly healthy, but it appears that pulling the chemicals from combusting tobacco into your lungs is a bad thing. I mean, not as bad as being an orphan, but bad.

Also, can an orphan eat legally in a family-style restaurant?

Could it be other things, like statins? Nope – they were late to the party, and there are significant debates about if they’re good for you at all. Aspirin may be a factor in the lowered death rates, but it really seems like smoking cigarettes . . . might be bad for you.

As usual, I am compelled by my lawyer to tell you I’m not a doctor, and that pesky court order requires me to tell you that I’m not allowed around pumpkin pie when there’s lighter fluid nearby, but my conclusion is probably pretty innocuous: don’t smoke cigarettes, unless you want to die early of a sudden heart attack and save more Social Security money for me.

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird. You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi. At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today.

I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive? (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery? He was dead.

I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything.

Deception: The Media Is Soaking In It

“Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a good start.” – Batman Begins

Thankfully he wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m certain that few had any idea of how the Internet would change the world. Oh, sure, some did. In one of the zillion versions of Ender’s Game (or the never ending stream of sequels) Orson Scott Card wrote about the Internet, in the 1980s, I think. In his version, people could make carefully reasoned arguments and other people would listen to them and be swayed.

Ha! Instead we have Twitter® with its 280 character limit, and meme warfare.

I actually don’t mind meme warfare being the place where ideas are injected into society, primarily because the Right memes pretty well, and the Left can’t meme at all.

That is, of course, what the Left is worried about. When the Internet began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s, it was a Wild West. It was first created, page by page, by people who were passionate about something. The programming was easy, and the hardest thing was to get noticed, since the search engines and directories were rudimentary. I used at least three, depending on what I was searching for, because one was good for technical stuff, one was good for “normie” stuff, and the last one, as I recall, wasn’t good for much at all.

On the Internet, you can be whatever you want to be, so why do so many people pick “stupid”?

Then came the Media®. At first, they didn’t really know how to use it, so they’d just put their written stuff out there, since video would swamp most dial-up connections. But everyone knew it was going to be big, which is why AOL© merged with Time-Warner™ even though all AOL® presented was just a single way to get to the Internet.

But the problem for the Media™ and .GOV was that the Internet had shattered their ability to carefully script a single narrative. It had also destroyed their ability to memory hole or gloss over big stories. Now those passionate people could chronicle entire events that the .GOV would rather you forget, or, better yet, never even know about. The carefully crafted defamation of everyone who believed in something outside of the Approved Narrative as a Conspiracy Theorist began to crumble.

People say it’s a small world, but I know I certainly wouldn’t want to paint it. And in that small world where communication had drastically lowered the time for information to come out, and also made it harder for the information to be erased. The Genie of information, once out of the bottle, couldn’t be put back in.

Does anyone know what an ink blot test is? I Googled® it, but only found pictures of my parents yelling at me.

The Wild West continued. Google® had a corporate slogan of Don’t be Evil® and Amazon™ would sell most any book that was it was legal to sell. And the established Media© and .GOV still had no real understanding of how to control what people see and hear and remember. The Internet was built to be decentralized, and hard to control.

I think, from what I see so far that the strategy has been to do at least five things:

Throw Lots of Content Out

Oddly, even though the major news sources keep firing journalists, they keep making more stuff. What kind of stuff? Clickbait, really. Stories with little informational content, stories about celebrities, top 10 lists of best/worst/etc. (fill in the blank). These aren’t news – they’re entertainment. Heck, one browser I have on my phone has (it looks like) computer-generated compilations of posts from Reddit®. The idea is to distract. And if the algorithm is good enough, heck, maybe that person will forget what they were looking for in the first place.

Marginalize and Trivialize

This is one that’s carried on from the past. If I had written a post about MK-Ultra (where the CIA essentially acted like the worst possible mixture of Jeffrey Dahmer and the DMV) in the 1960s, it would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” at best. The idea isn’t to contradict, it’s to hit the person making the accusation with personal attacks, and make it sound like they’re a nutcase. And when the facts come out? Minimize them – make them sound unimportant, “Oh, that tear gas we used at Waco? Well it may be flammable, but only in super-high concentrations. We won the war. Go back to sleep.”

So, Alex Jones was right again, eh?

Control Discussion

How many people that you interact with are . . . real?

I’ve recently gotten robocalls that are very sophisticated, so much so that they nearly get through the uncanny valley of sounding right. But what if the sound wasn’t an issue? In a Twitter® comment it isn’t. It is known that a significant percentage of Twitter® users are bots – programmed to interact. Why would anyone go to that level of trouble? Because they want to sell you something – an ideology, a candidate, or PEZ™. They’re also useful to make it seem like there’s a consensus.

People are wired as pack animals, and generally want to be a part of the group, to not be left out. Plus, a group of bots can drown out viewpoints and ideas and bury them in a sea of text. On a related note, how many conversations are taking place on the Internet that are nothing more than one bot talking to another?

Control Access

Most people come to this website either directly or from other blogs. The web search traffic I get is amazingly low – most days less than 3% of my traffic. That’s new. I used to get more traffic from search engines (20%+) but after July or so of 2020, Google™ shut the valve, and traffic dropped. Likewise, I know that this site is banned by corporations. Why? Maybe my ideas are considered to be . . . dangerous.

A related question is this: just how many website hits does Google® really have? I searched for Civil War Weather Report and noted I wasn’t on the first page. I jumped ahead to page 18. If you’ll note, on an earlier page, Google© claims that there are 34,800,000 results. But when you get to page 18, well, there are only 174 results. I know I’ve written nearly 40 Civil War Weather Reports. Funny that I didn’t see ‘em all in this list . . .

Note that Amazon®, which for a long time would not ban any legal book, now bans hundreds if not thousands of books merely because Amazon™ disagrees with their ideas.

Just Keep Lying

It seems to work for the FBI, Bill Clinton, and the CIA, so why not expand it to the Media®? That’s just what they do. These pictures will help illustrate the problem:

So, in the end, it has been established that the Media© wants to control you. The only remaining question so that we can put the pressure where it needs to be is this: who controls the Media™?

Unplug Yourself From Things That Drain You. And Kardashians.

Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. – The Matrix

Okay, it’s not great. The other one was, “What do you get when Keanu Reeves does ‘shrooms? Neo-sporin.” See, I saved you from that.

Unplug yourself.

I mean, don’t stop coming here. That would be silly, because you definitely want to associate yourself with someone who has the amazingly good hygiene and stellar good looks that I do. I mean, unplug yourself from places that make you mad.

Consciously, most of my posts, while letting you know the unvarnished Truth with a capital T* (*really, as best as I know it), are meant to poke fun at it. It might make you think about things that you really don’t want to think about. I understand. I’m still sorry about that Kardashian meme.

Honestly, dating a Kardashian would be like dating a wookie®.

Well, obviously not that sorry.

Back to the Truth.

Most people that I talk to have an Agent Smith (from The Matrix, not that pesky ATF guy who keeps asking if the stuffed dog I have is filled with Tannerite, because, let’s face it, the only thing that ATF agents love shooting more than kids is dogs) moment.

No, the Agent Smith moment I have with friends goes like this: I talk about facts. They nod. I talk about actual events. They nod. Then I bring up a premise that is inescapable: “So, we agree gravity exists.” Nod. “And I’m holding a coffee mug over a 1,000 foot (4.3 Celsius) cliff.” Nod. “And if I drop it, it will fall down, and shatter into a million pieces, and it will never be able to be put together again.”

Then Agent Smith takes over the conversation. “Well, I don’t want to think about that.” The conversation is over. There is a step that they cannot take. It’s like me trying to convince them that a constant diet of candy corn, Twinkies®, fried Snickers® bars, and drinking the fluid from a chocolate fountain that 359 kindergarteners have been putting their booger-soaked fingers into isn’t a good diet.

This is what happens when you follow the USDA food pyramid.

I recall having a conversation several years ago with a guy on the Left. “Yes, John Wilder, I agree. Massive immigration is destroying every one of the values in our country. But strawberries might be more expensive if we didn’t allow them in.”

My response was rather simple, “So, you, a guy on the Left, wants to pay people less so you can have cheaper strawberries? Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay people more, pay less than 1% of what you make in a month to pay Americans enough to give you strawberries?”

Agent Smith took over his mind. “Umm, well, I don’t understand those things very well.”

I took him to the ledge, but he refused to look over.

But, hey, he saved $0.35 this week.

That’s the Truth. And, I assure you, the Truth is your friend.

What is Truth? Step on a scale. Look down. The number is the Truth. Try to pick up a weight. If you can, you can. That is Truth. The Iron never lies. The scale never lies.

I was working with a person who noted I had lost some weight. He asked me, “How can I lose weight?”

My response was simple: “Weigh yourself. Every day. The scale doesn’t lie.”

The look on his face was amazing. I think he wanted me to tell him, “Believe in aliens, bigfoot (bigfeet?) and the Loch Ness Monster, drink seven shots of Hershey’s® chocolate syrup ever night, and you’ll lose 27 pounds a week.” When I told him to weigh himself, his face fell.

He didn’t want the Truth. And I didn’t follow up with, “By the way, I also rarely eat between Saturday night and Friday,” because that would bake the gourd of most people. They don’t want to know that losing weight sucks, that it requires amazing work and walking into the house at night after work and telling The Mrs., “No dinner for me, I’m fasting.”

I’ve been doing this whole Intermittent Fasting thing. Bums me out. I did it at least nine times today.

People want pretty lies. Yet, the healthiest thing for them is the Truth. Just before I started writing this, Frequent Commenter Ricky emailed me a story that said that, per FDA guidelines, water could not be labeled as, “healthy”. So, enjoy all the Gatorade®, Pepsi™, and Coca-Slop© that you want. It doesn’t have fat in it, so, according to bad science dating back to before I was born, it’s better for you than water.

Nope, the Truth sucks. People are awful. Bad guys win – a lot. People get old. And then they die. All of us die. And, the FDA lies. But, most of you come here regularly. Can you handle the Truth? Yup, you can. And you seek it. I think most of you understand that.

But there is a group of people who are trying to demoralize you. The easiest way to win a battle, per George S. Patton, Jr., is to make the enemy afraid of you. Yet, they wouldn’t have to do any of this if they had won.

They haven’t won. They are desperate to win, yet you and I remain, stubborn, like islands in the middle of a hurricane. We live. We persist. And we will win. That’s what scares them the most.

Why am I so stubborn? I’m not telling you.

So, when you see something that makes you feel like all is lost, remember, that’s them whispering in your ear. The want you to think that you can’t win, even though everything that is right, beautiful, and True is on your side. When you see this sort of demoralization?

Turn it off.

Don’t go back. Not because you’re afraid of opposing viewpoints, but because you refuse to have your emotions manipulated. Never, ever, let Agent Smith inside. Seek the Truth. It’s there. Unless it’s a Kardashian that isn’t hairy.

That’s a lie.

Yes, Your Leftist Friends Are Mentally Ill. You’re Not. Share This Post With Them To Trigger Them.

“Snap out of it! You’re Krusty the Clown! One of Look Magazine’s Hundred Most Promising Clowns of 1958!” – The Simpsons

I told Pugsley that Aristotle taught us that, “We are what we repeatedly do.” So I told him I was his mother.

A Dutch dude named Erasmus of Rotterdam (who died in 1536) made a famous quote that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, namely, “In regione caecorum rex est luscus.” Presumably, Erasmus said this before he died. I was going to follow this up with a joke about the Dutch, but then I looked at my site statistics, and found that the Netherlands is number 5 on the countries that come to visit here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise.

So, my conclusion is this: people of the Netherlands are amazing people who have impeccable taste in fine writing and I’d be glad to give them all a free bikini wax, but I’m pretty sure that they’re so tall, blonde, disciplined and perfectly proportioned that they’ve trained their bodies to not grow hair where they don’t want it. Go Netherlands!

I’m pretty sure they have flying cars in the Netherlands now.

Anyway, what Erasmus was saying was originally in Latin, but Latin isn’t a dead language – it’s still Roman around. My initial translation was, “Near the gas station in the skanky part of town, never pick up women after 3am.” These are wise words, but what Erasmus really meant was, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

That’s one of those phrases that sounds really cool. In fact, I imagined being able to see in a country full of blind people. I mean, the only actor that would be able to play Batman would be Christian Braille. And, using my crazy superpower of sight, I’d be able to break into their houses at night and steal all of their PEZ®.

But that’s not the way it would work.

I would probably try to explain to them that I could see – a sense that they didn’t have at all. The concept of photons and colors and would sound crazy to them. In fact, they’d probably think I was crazy and come at night while I was sleeping and give me blanket parties or worse until I shut up or left.

In the modern world, it’s similar, but it’s what’s commonly referred to as “Clown World” where everything is inverted. Things that are beautiful are corrupted, and people are expected to applaud the bravery inherent in people reveling in the corruption. I’ll let Stonetoss lead the introduction of the topic at hand.

If you’re not familiar with what Stonetoss is writing about, there is a “teacher” in Canada who decided, apparently, to wear comically large and obscene fake breasts to shop class. How do we know they’re obscene? YouTube® banned them.

But, yet, these Z-cups are allowed because a “teacher” showed up to work wearing them, and the school board is apparently afraid to confront the dude. When a parent tried to bring the subject up, the local school board shut down the meeting rather than confront the amazing amounts of silicone (or foam rubber??) being paraded in their classrooms. In fact, they say it’s illegal to criticize the “teacher”.

In my assessment of the situation, there are two possibilities. The first is that the “teacher” is so mentally insane that allowing him to dress like this is similar to allowing him to claim that he’s made of string cheese and now has a mouse phobia. That’s the first possibility.

The second is that the “teacher” is gaming the system and seeing how far he can push things so he can get mental disability payments and not have to show up to work, or not be graded based on his job performance. I actually consider this more likely, but, hey, it’s 2022 so he just might be bonkers.

This was actually the plot to a South Park® episode where a teacher became more aggressively, explicitly gay in front of his students in an attempt (I recall) to get fired. Instead, the people celebrated his inappropriate behavior because of his bravery. So, yeah. Blame Canada. I’m sure that this is what the Canadian troops were thinking about when they hit the beach at D-Day, the freedom for shop teachers to don Z-cup fake breasts.

Women are, oddly, not at all good with this. Not all women, of course. I use The Mrs. as a sounding board for this sort of insanity, and she (more or less) notes that it’s offensive for (at least some) actual women to see men parading around pretending to be women. But Canada says it’s okay. And companies will ban you for “hate” if you dare to not say that this is completely normal.

In 2022, it’s now accepted that teachers indoctrinated in Leftist institutions should be allowed free access to your children. And there’s nothing bad that can come of that. Because teachers have shown themselves to be so stable.

The problem really does start with Leftism. I know I drone on and on about this, but it’s true. Leftism is a mental illness rooted in victimhood. How can I prove this? THEY TELL US THIS WHENEVER THEY CAN. It’s worse than being stuck in a room filled with vegans who do Crossfit®.

I sometimes think it’s a competition on how many mental illnesses that they can have, like they all want to be the Georgy Zhukov of mental illness and be the (she/they/them/it) with the most medals.

Part of the idea is that Leftists are incapable of harboring thoughts that are counter to their programming. Scott Adams found this out and after this cartoon strip, he was canceled from 77 newspapers.

Here are a few examples of why.

Yup. Martha’s Vineyard. Importing millions of people across the border is amazing, right? Well, no. Not when they show up in near the beach bungalows of the rich and famous. Obama lives on Martha’s Vineyard, and his house alone could have housed every illegal alien that was transported there. But, no.

They booted all the illegals in 44 hours. Who needs a wall when you invade the territories of Leftist lawyers?

But the damage of Leftism is real. It destroys families. And it stops families from even being made.

But it leaves some really important questions to be asked.

And it makes you wonder what Biden is really after, when it turns out that “Right Wing Extremism” is actually less deadly than riding lawnmowers. Really.

Seriously, though, this isn’t the battle the Left should push, because when real Right Wing Extremism hits? Continents burn.

I guess that works for me. I’ll continue to be a Right Wing Extremist.

And if they want Clown World, that’s fine. They can soak in it.

Me? I think this next picture works better than anything they can come up with.

Erasmus would certainly agree with me. And? Go Netherlands! You guys rock!!!! (Yes, I know Ariel is Danish, but you Danes have got to get your pageviews up.)