Category: I.Q.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Preparing For The Commissar

“Ottoman, there’ll be no Justice of the Peace for you, just a big piece of justice.” – The Tick

6:30 is the best time.  Hands down.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

April had increased violence.    None that I could see was from the Right, which appears to still be stunned that the Leftists are actually doing all of the things that they promised that they would do.

I’m holding April at 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.  If I were betting?  July or August will take us to a 10.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) only creeping up at around 700 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Chauvin And Justice – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index –  Leftists Destroy GATE – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

Chauvin And Justice

Derek Chauvin, a former officer with the Minneapolis Somalia by St. Paul Police Department, was convicted on three counts (at least two of them mutually exclusive) after minimal jury deliberation.  There are many articles that talk about the injustice of the decision.  I wasn’t in the jury room so I can’t say too much about the decision.  I guess my only question is how much fentanyl does one have to consume before it becomes listed as a suicide if three times a fatal dose isn’t enough?

The fate of those two men, Floyd and Chauvin, tells us a tremendous amount about the justice system in the country.  But the Derek Chauvin trial showcases a much bigger agenda involving the justice system.

What is the message that was issued to every police officer in Minnesota and in almost every Leftist-controlled state?

Don’t do your job.  If you do, and you take down the wrong junkie, you’ll be fired.  If you’re lucky.  Instead, just show up.  If you want to arrest someone, just make sure that they’re not people you can get in trouble for policing.

Well, it’s not like the Unitarians believe anything.

The goal is:  cops cease to police.  If cops cease to police, the justice system will simply break down.  I’ve covered multiple times why the justice system is the cornerstone of Western Civilization.  The justice system is a stroke of genius that takes vengeance from the hands of individuals, and puts it into the hands of a “just and impartial” system.

Is the “just and impartial” system flawed?  Certainly.  But the thing that’s required is the faith in the system, even though it has flaws.  If we believe that justice is real, it keeps the scourge of vengeance at bay, even when there are occasional lapses.

Perhaps that’s what the jury was thinking.

Perhaps.

But the message to them was clear.  The demonstrations.  The dead pig’s head on the defense expert witness’s (former) front yard.  Maxine Waters agitating the local community to “keep the pressure on.”

Thus, the verdict.  This is a single case, about two men whose lives intersected.

Long term though, the goal isn’t about this case, the goal to remove the cops.  This will destroy the “just and impartial” system.  That’s clearly the plan now.  Look at recent “protests” in Portland and Plano.  The police are there to protect the protesters and put in jail any who resist the protest.  And if a mob shows up at a house and damages it?  If the mob points weapons at those who protest?

The only crime will be self-defense.

But this removal of police is in the script.  This is act one.  This will:

  • Increase crime, because the police are being pressured to not do their one job: arrest criminals.
  • Increase actions of vengeance, because the criminals aren’t being punished.
  • Vigilantes, of course, will be punished far more harshly than the criminals.

What happens when crime increases and vigilantes increase?

A solution from the Left will arise.  They won’t call them Political Commissars, but they will be.  Social Justice Police?  Equity Enforcement?

I hear that mummys like wrap music.

The “just and impartial” system, then envy of the non-Western world, will soon be gone.

All by plan.

And who will be left to look to?  The Left.

Violence And Censorship Update – Turbo Magnum Edition

Item 1:  Rudy Giuliani is a high-profile political figure in the Untied (yes, that’s intentional) States.  He also looks like he smells like a combination of gin, Vicks-Vap-O-Rub®, hair cream, and mothballs.  But Rudy is also a lawyer, specifically the lawyer for President Trump, representing him in several different matters.  This is important since an attorney’s work is uniquely privileged – an attorney provides guidance through the legal system for people who aren’t familiar with it.  It’s like when The Mrs. explains to me that other people are human beings that have things called “feelings” that I should pay attention to.  Pfft.

The attorney-client privilege isn’t absolute, the privilege doesn’t cover ongoing fraud, attempts to intimidate witnesses, destruction of evidence, et cetera.  But it’s a really big deal.  It’s one of those protections that was put in place so everyone can trust the system, even those the system is attempting to punish.

Recently Rudy’s office was raided, and not by the St. Pauli Girl t-shirt squad to give him an atomic wedgie followed by tequila shooters.  Rudy’s a political figure, but he’s also a lawyer.  That should be an amazingly high hurdle to stop a raid, but in 2021 America, it isn’t.  Just like Chauvin’s conviction – Rudy’s raid was meant to suppress speech and protection that the Left doesn’t agree with.

A truck of Vicks Vap-O-Rub® wrecked during rush hour last month. There was no congestion for a week.

Imagine if it had been Podesta or Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton or even Satan getting raided during the Trump administration?

The howl from the Left would have been deafening.  And, yes, the Church of Satan members voted 99%+ for Biden.

Item 2:  Nick Fuentes is a twentysomething (22) kid that runs something called America First™ which is a political movement focused around views of the Right – he even makes fun of the pure economic conservatism of Turning Point, USA®.  Nick used to be on YouTube®, but they banned him.  And so did most private apps where he could make money or get publicized on.

Libertarians and Leftists will agree:  it’s a private company and the terms of service matter, not the Constitution.  I’ve made my arguments about that, and had some good ones with friends who are as impartial as I can find.

But.

Nick Fuentes was put on the No-Fly list recently by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.  The Federal Government’s No-Fly list.  The worst that I could say about Nick (from what I’ve seen) is that he’s annoyingly smug.

Smug is not a crime.  The sole reason that Nick could be on the No-Fly list?  He says things people in government don’t like.

This is not a “bake my gay cake bigot” moment.  This is the unfettered use of government power to destroy ideas.  Sure, the FBI spied on Martin Luther King.

Think they’re not looking at you and me?  Laugh at the wrong meme?  Hope you can drive.

Item 3:  I track the website traffic and where it comes from to Wilder, Wealthy and Wise©.  Okay, I don’t do it personally.  Some nameless small gnomes that live inside of computer chips count the visitors to this place.  Whatever.  They don’t ask for vacation.

A small (but significant) number of visitors to this site came from Google®.  Millions?  No.  But thousands every month.  By any stretch of the imagination, this site is easily in the top 20 most-linked to site on the Internet about Civil War 2.0.

And these are quality links from pretty popular sites.

But I don’t show up on Google® under that search.  I can understand that.  But what if I look for the entirely novel phrase (my own invention thanks to Cory Hamasaki, R.I.P.) Civil War Weather Report?

I get links about weather during the Civil War.  I once got links to current weather forecasts for Gettysburg, PA from Google™.

If I go to DuckDuckGo®?  With that phrase, I’m number one.  With Civil War 2.0?  I’m still in the top results.  I get more hits from DuckDuckGo™ many weeks than I do from Google™.  DuckDuckGo® has 0.5% market share.  Google® has 92.26%.

All things being equal?  I should get about 180 times the number of hits from Google™ as I do from DuckDuckGo©.  And it used to be about five times the traffic, if not ten times the traffic.  Not now.  Some days, I get more traffic from DuckDuckGo™.

The nosedive started in:  February, 2021, right after a certain person was inaugurated.

Hmmm.  I’m not the first site “de-tuned” by Google® and I won’t be the last.

Now all my devices use DuckDuckGo®.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is down slightly in April.  I was expecting it to go up, but I was also expecting Chauvin to be found not guilty.  The state-media propaganda of “homegrown terrorism”  drumbeat is ongoing, even as protester violence and inner-city violence is going through the roof.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability dropped this month.  I expect it to increase next month, but the Left keeps pushing for more control.

Economic:

I expected this number to be less positive.  It’s not.  As I predicted, April is the month that we find that inflation moves from a thought to a widely-felt reality.  What’s next?  It won’t be better.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for this time of year.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Leftists Destroy GATE

Gifted And Talented Education (GATE) is a pretty cool program.  The idea is that smart kids can work on material that challenges them.  That’s good.  Really smart kids, when bored, cause a lot of problems.  How else do you explain the Crusades?

But of course, the biggest problems in our country (sorry Aesop) seem to emanate from either D.C. or California.  The newest push is an “equity” focused math program.

The framework draft starts with the biggest lie published in the English language in 2021:

“All students are capable of making these contributions and achieving these abilities at the highest levels,” and, “evidence that shows all fifth graders care capable of eventually learning calculus, or other high-level courses , when provided appropriate messaging teaching and support.”

No.

Not at all.  And what the hell is “messaging teaching”?  Sounds like a crack-addled mail-order diploma-mill Doctor Of Education (looking at you, Jill Biden) theory.

Inequality is rampant in the human condition.  No matter how much I wish that I could be taller, I can’t think myself taller, and no amount of Social Justice Warrior Equity Cheerleading could make me taller.

No amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make me even a millimeter taller.

And no amount of teaching, even super-special “messaging teaching” can make a dumb kid smarter.  You can make a Lamborghini® out of duct tape and cardboard, but the only way it’ll make 50 miles an hour is if you drop it out of an airplane.

My parents told me I was a gifted child.  Turned out they meant that I was left on their doorstep in a box.

What this statement means is simple:  smart kids, according to the educational establishment in California, don’t exist.  They even say that explicitly:  “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”

Guess we’ll have to page Harrison Bergeron (LINK – read it if you haven’t – it’s short).

It’s trivial to prove that some people are talented and some are not – in fact, it’s fairly commonly known now that 60-90% of all of everyone’s attributes and abilities are inherited.  Everyone.  There is no mystical person who has attributes that are Play-Doh® in the hands of the schools or state.  Is it nature or nurture?

It’s nature.  Nurture can mess it up.  Nurture can get the best out of what’s there.  But you can’t get a ribeye steak out of a cat.

This denial of reality is 100% required by the Left, however.  The idea of anything be unequal is an idea they cannot accept, even when it’s real, which is why untrained women have to win fights against Navy Seals in movies, and why Leftists pretend that Caitlyn Jenner ain’t a dude.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much!!

READY ON THE RIGHT

 

 

READY ON THE LEFT

 

 

READY ON THE FIRING LINE

 

 

READY FIRE AIM

 

Equality: The god That Failed

“I’m sorry, Lisa, but giving everyone an equal part when they’re clearly not equal, is called what, class?” – The Simpsons

The kids said they wanted a cat for Christmas.  Normally we have ham, but I’m willing to give it a try.

In the early 2000’s I first came across the word, “meme” – and at that point, it didn’t mean just a funny picture of chubby cats lusting after cheeseburgers.  The original definition that I saw talked about a meme being an “idea fragment” that would travel virally through the consciousness of a group.  Essentially memes have a life based on transmitting themselves from mind to mind.

Examples of these simple mind viruses are all around us – we’ve been soaking in them since we were little.  We don’t notice them so much because they are a part of our culture.  What are some example memes out of the tens of thousands we’ve been exposed to?

  • Majority Rules
  • One Man, One Vote
  • One Nation, Indivisible
  • All Men Are Created Equal
  • Wilder Is The Funniest Living Human Political Writer

Each of those (except the last one, of course) is demonstrably false.

The majority only rules when the vote is counted fairly, and there have been plenty of minority rule situations because the majority didn’t have guns.  I’d say that the history of the world is the history of the majority not ruling.

One man, one vote?  Obviously, the creator of this idea had never been to Chicago, Milwaukie, Detroit, or Atlanta.  Most of those cities make the old Soviet Union look like Utah.

One nation, indivisible?  1860 proved that wasn’t the case.  Did it get undivisibled?  Well, yeah, but I’ve met plenty of people who are still sore about the War of Northern Aggression.  Sadly, all of them think that iced tea should have sugar in it.

OSHA inspectors only drink safe tea.

All Men Are Created Equal, though, is the meme that I wanted to write about in this post.  I know that what Jefferson and the committee were going for was that all people should have equal Natural Rights, and it probably tested well in focus groups.

And, I agree with the idea that all people should have the same rights, but even that is trivially shown to be false:  ask the people from three of the nations that have never visited this blog (North Korea, Cuba, and Iran) if that’s the case.  It’s also folly for Americans to fight to give those rights to other people around the world:  you don’t value anything that you don’t fight for yourself.

“All Men Are Created Equal” is a nice phrase, but believing it has caused more difficulty than any other meme for the people of the United States.  Why?

A conclusion this meme leads to is this:  if all people are equal, all groups are equal.  Again, all individuals should have the same rights, but why on Earth would we anticipate that all groups have equal abilities?  For example, the aboriginal peoples of Australia had been separated from the rest of humanity for 50,000 years.  Why would we expect them to have the same abilities as the Japanese?  Why would we expect that Native Americans would have the same abilities as Conquistadors from Spain since there were at least 30,000 years where they had nothing to do with each other?

Keep in mind, folks, it took less than a third of that time to make miniature poodles out of wolves.

How do you call a wolf with Stockholm Syndrome?  “Here, puppy dog!”

To be utterly clear:  I am not making the case that any particular group is better than another group.  There are people from every group on the planet that are nicer and better people than I am.  But why wouldn’t we expect them to be very different peoples?  I am personally so maladapted to life in the Outback that I would probably burst into flame and turn into a pile of dehydrated ash on day one.

But when I got off the airplane in Fairbanks at -30°F (-7m3), I have never felt more at home.  There was, for me, something inherently right about the taiga and the long dark nights that sang to my soul.  It resonated with me.  I wonder if having ancestors that were adapted to long, dark, cold winters had anything to do with that?

What did Vikings call English villages?  Chopping centers.

A second conclusion this meme leads to is:  if all people are equal, women are equal to men.

Well, they’re not.  In college, one of my friends was on the swim team.  He told me that pretty much every member of the men’s swim team could beat every world record held by women.  Every one.

But wade just a minute – our swim team was not good.  But yet, every one of them was better than the best woman swimmer that ever lived.  Yet, not a single member of the dude swim team could have a baby.

That is not equal, at all.

Men and women are different, have different skills, and have different abilities.  They are not, and never can be equal.  The difficulty that this leads to is that standards have been lowered so women can do physical things like “firefighter” or “soldier” without the concept that they simply cannot perform as well as a male.  But when it comes to “making babies” and “getting me a sammich” they knock it out of the park.

If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do they all have to drown?

The most common refrain is that “Well, the standards were too high to begin with.”  If the first defense is that we should have weaker and slower firefighters and soldiers to prove a political point, I’d assume that whoever made that argument wasn’t interested in saving lives or defending our nation.

“All men are created equal” also leads to a third conclusion:  if all people are equal, then all cultures must be equal.  Well, no, they aren’t.  At all.  Many cultures have produced wonderful things, yet in 2021 have utterly failed to produce first-world living standards for their people.

Hollywood® has done a wonderful job of marketing the ideas that:

  • The United States doesn’t have a culture.
  • Other cultures are heckin’ cute and valid.
  • Cultures in close contact and overlap don’t create any conflict.
  • Colonialism created conflict by drawing borders that put overlapping cultures in close contact.

Careful readers will note that points three and four just might contradict each other.

To dissect that the United States doesn’t (or didn’t) have a culture, well, fish really don’t know that they’re swimming in water.  When I look at the leader of China wearing a suit and tie that could have been tailored in New York or London, well, I realize that European culture is so very ubiquitous that cultures all over the planet have appropriated it.

That’s what Xi said.

That’s okay.  But it’s not okay to say that the United States doesn’t have a culture.

Are other cultures heckin’ cute and valid?  Sure.  But don’t assume that every culture produces the same results.  Does South American culture produce the same level of material prosperity?  No.

Can it produce happiness?  Sure.  I was in Santiago, Chile a while back.  The people there were happy, and were making out on a warm afternoon in the broad plaza that led to some large government building.  When I went out that night with some locals, the beer was cold, the dinner was wonderful, and everyone I saw was happy and safe.

Different.  Not equal.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think of examples where overlapping cultures cause conflicts.  No fair in picking Canada where the English and French overlap, and after one huge argument in the comment section a while back, you can bet I’m not going to mention Ireland.

Oops, too late.

Again, I’m not saying that “not equal” means inferior.  It means not equal.  It means different.

But to have the idea that all men are created equal?  That’s the insanity.

Virginia: How We Got Here, In Four Levels

“I’m branching out from self-loathing and self-destruction.” – House, M.D.

INCEPTION

How does Leo avoid getting his girlfriend pregnant?  Conception.

As I sit writing on the eve of the potentially fateful protest in Richmond, a reasonable question to ask is “How did we get here?”  Like Inception©, there are several levels of answer to that question, each deeper than the last.  Ah, Inception™.  Leonardo DiCaprio really had a dream job in that one.

The highest level answer is, “because an election was lost.” 

And this is true.  A single election has completed the transformation of Virginia’s government from one where there was representation on both sides to one that is under sole control of the Left.

It wasn’t a surprise to the Left.  On day one, the Left was ready to take advantage of their new power.  A slate of model gun control legislation topped their agenda.  Everything from banning semi-automatic weapons to requiring universal background checks to red flag laws was on the table.  Already several bills are moving through the legislature.  As of this writing, it appears the semi-automatic ban has been removed, but that won’t last long.

LION

Making guns illegal will stop all gun crime – that’s how we finally stopped everyone from doing drugs . . .

In addition to the anti-gun agenda, the Left is proposing a series of laws aimed at making sure that this is the final change of government that Virginia will ever see – I read about a bill that would move the governor’s vote from popular vote to a majority of the congressional districts.  As the districts will be gerrymandered, that assures a Leftist governor for ever and ever.  Also included was a provision to give Virginia’s electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote.  So, no popular vote for governor, and the people don’t get to vote for president at all.

Ain’t the Leftist version of freedom grand?

The second level is because the demographics of Virginia changed. 

I know that lots of people have arguments that “ENTER IDENTITY GROUP HERE” have more in common with the Right than the Left.  That might be true.  But the only group that reliably votes for the Right are people who might name their kids “Brandon” or “Logan” or “Sarah” or “Amanda.”  These people reliably want to vote for the traditions that created the United States, whereas many first, second, and even third generation citizens want to replicate the culture and country they left – including replacing the national currency with tortillas, which, the more I think of it isn’t that bad of an idea.

hands

A new study just came out that showed that people who want to commit murder just might ignore gun-free zone laws.

You might not like that it’s true.  You might have a fancy explanation why it shouldn’t be true.  But nevertheless, it’s true.  Immigration, urbanization, and being close to the Leftist center of power, Washington, D.C., has turned Virginia Left.

A third level is because it was planned. 

The election of Donald Trump was, perhaps, the single most traumatic thing to have happened to Leftists since, oh, the election of George W. Bush in 2004.  Which was nearly as traumatic as George W. Bush winning in 2000.  To think:  if only we had elected Gore president, polar bears would have not gone extinct.

What, polar bears are doing great?  Shhhhhh.

FRENCH

Not all of the systems on the Titanic have failed.  The swimming pool is still full.

But the cumulative result of this trauma is a push towards deeper Leftism, plus a push to get all of the state legislatures they can for the Left before the next census (LINK).  Why?  To gerrymander all of the congressional seats they can.  Also on the agenda for a repeat of what went on in Virginia?  Texas and West Virginia.

Perhaps the deepest and most basic level is because Leftists hate themselves, and herd with other Leftists.

Certainly not all Leftists are exactly this.  I know a few people that are committed and are on the Left and are that way for the understandable, rational reasons.  People, who, for instance, think our health care system is crazy and think the solution is more government.  I think our health care system is crazy, and think that the solution is less government.  I can understand their motives.  They can understand mine.  We have good conversations; fun arguments that don’t result in a desire to set up a duel with sabers at dawn.  Dawn is much too early for a duel.  If I’m going to die, I at least want a nap first.

But there are Leftists that hate themselves, and I think this is most of them.  You’ve seen them – people who expend amazing amounts of emotion on behalf of other people, like the white liberals who got upset about Speedy Gonzalez and had him pulled from Cartoon Network®, despite his popularity in Mexico:  “He was like a superhero to us….”

Leftists don’t feel bad just for others.  Any comment you can make about a Leftist (or someone they feel protective over) is interpreted in the worst possible way.  It’s as if every time someone used the term “guy” or “buddy” and men got amazingly upset.  Even worse, if people got amazingly upset because we were called “guy” and decided that they would step in and protect us poor men and stop badthinkers from calling us “guy” and get anyone who said that hateword fired from work.

Secretly, the Leftists believe that the identity groups that they protect are inferior.  Why else would they need to protect them and think up new terms for perfectly good descriptive words like “handicapped” or “secretary”?  It’s not like if we called handicapped people something else they could, oh, walk again?

youtube

I think I saw this flag burning on video, and one of the Lefties managed to burn himself when molten drops of plastic from the American flag they were burning fell on his wrist.  He said it was the same burning feeling he got when he thought about getting a job.

How bad is it?  This level of moral relativism and “there is no truth” required by modern Leftism actually makes the assertion that all cultures are equivalent.  Certainly not – especially in outcome.  If you were to compare the culture of Japan to the culture of North Korea, you can certainly determine that the cultures are different, and that the Japanese culture is superior in nearly every way a culture can be measured.

The Left has made the nonsensical claim that women are physically equivalent to men, which I’ve seen from the Left to justify men competing in (and beating) women in high school track events.  Deep down, they create this ferocious level of defense because they know that a man who says he’s a woman isn’t, but yet have to justify the insane idea that they are.

I blame the dames and broads.

whiteleft

If only I had time to put Greta Thunberg’s face on this meme . . . .

And the Left hates everything good, and pure.  It hates the family.  It hates the way the wind would blow through my long locks of shiny hair, I mean, if I had hair.  And, even though the United States has done plenty wrong in its existence, it’s a shining beacon of hope that people risk their lives to get to.  Leftists hate the heritage of America.  They hate Western Civilization.  They hate tradition.  They hate rationality.  As I discussed last week, the Left idolizes the profane, and treats it as if it were sacred (Why The Left Can’t Handle Reality).

Individualism and individual achievement is their kryptonite®.  Why?  They are afraid that they are inferior, afraid that they cannot compete.  Bernie has to solve these problems, because our typical Leftist doesn’t think they can help themselves because he is a loser.  He also thinks that the Identity Groups are inferior, and could never compete.  Leftist philosophy is built on envy of those who are strong, and greed to take what they have made.

And Leftists are sure that they will be found wanting if judgement is ever made.  Why?  Because they feel they are inferior and are of no real value to society.  Thus reason, science, grades, objective tests (like I.Q. and SAT tests), and norms of behavior are to be avoided in schools.  If a child acts out in school?  It’s not because of lousy parents.  It’s not because the child has a mental or genetic defect that makes self-control impossible.  No.  It’s society’s fault.

participation

So, now you know where participation trophies come from.

Thankfully, all of the millions of dollars we’ve spent on trying to solve the problems of “society” have led to the best educated and behaved children on Earth.  No?  Hmmm.  Must be society’s fault.

Leftists, however, will do anything to protect their group.  When someone on the Right commits a foul against Political Correctness, even decades in the past, they are disowned.  Yet there is no behavior that any Leftist feels that they should be held accountable for – which brings us back to Virginia.

The current governor of Virginia has allegedly committed offenses against racial political correctness to the point that, if he were on the Right, he would be shot into the Sun and his family sent to exile in northern Canada where an old liberal would be sent ‘round to kick them every week.

Why would this be so?

I said that Leftists are herd animals.  All humans seek the company of other humans – it’s normal, and belonging is the most basic need outside of food, water and oxygen.  But Leftists seek safety in the herd.  Again, the concept of individuality is hateful to them, so the collectivist action mimics that of the herd.  The result is they’d never sacrifice a member until he was nearly dead – the biggest fear of the Left is that they’d be judged objectively.

The result of this is that the Left is dangerous due to this self-loathing.  They’re like people who feel themselves to be inferior always have been – vengeful, spiteful, and hungry for power so that they can finally be someone.

So, that’s how we got here.

It’s A Big World – Big Enough For Success

Certainty of death.  Small chance of success.  What are we waiting for?” – Lord of the Rings

hannibal.jpg

It’s almost as much fun as when I get the USB in on the first try.

Two pennies.

But I’ll come back to that.

One day, Aesop over at the Raconteur Report (LINK) had linked to one of my posts.  The result whenever that happens is quite a bit of traffic – the Raconteur Report is pretty popular.  I thanked him in the comments section over at his place.  His response?  Something on the order of, “No problem.  It’s a big Internet.”

His reaction was typical of every rich, confident and successful person I’ve met.  They want to help other people, and they want to see them succeed.  I think part of that is the desire for a legacy.  When you’ve already earned more money than you’ll ever spend in a lifetime (or have millions and millions of pageviews), you have to have other goals.

libtax.jpg

Really rich people have iPhones® and both kidneys.

In my life, I’ve had the good fortune to know quite a few people that were very, very, successful.  The really rich people I knew who had built their own businesses had a surprising similarity:  they wanted to help others become successful.  Each one of them gave some of their time to do so.  They had determined that success was something not to be hoarded, but to be shared.  They wanted more people in the club, because those cigars made of $100 bills won’t smoke themselves.  At one particular career crossroads, I spent some time with one of these friends, charting a path forward (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman).

This blog is at least partially a result of discussions I had with my wealthy friend.  This first three years have gone (more or less) according to plan.  Next?  Well, after I get my underground volcano lair running and staffed with henchmen, you’ll see.  It’s hard to find good henchmen nowadays, and even harder to insure them – the actuarial tables show a high rate of workplace-related injuries when henching.

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But think of all of the pension plan savings!

My friend died not long after I started writing, and certainly before I had any lasting success.  He was an early encourager.  I had a few other business ideas, and I ran the ideas past him.  He was encouraging, but his encouragement wasn’t in order to make a buck:  his success was me being successful.  Like most good teachers, he didn’t tell me what to do, he asked questions, very good questions, like:

  • How big is your potential audience?
  • How do you connect with them?
  • Why did you lick your finger and put it in my ear?

Rich guys have figured out a secret – helping other people to be successful doesn’t make a rich person poorer.  Let me explain:

The average home swimming pool is something like 20,000 or 30,000 gallons of water.  Let’s use 30,000 gallons since I already did the math with that number.  The economy is $21.3 trillion, per year.  Let’s imagine that $21.3 trillion economy is represented by the water in the pool.  How much water represents $1,000,000?

It’s 1/5 of an ounce.  A shot of whiskey would be the equivalent of $15 million.  1/5 of an ounce is really small – let me give you another comparison.  What weighs the same as 1/5 of an ounce of water?

Two cents.  Or, as I started this post, two pennies.

You can take millions from that pool every year and no one would ever notice – like I said, this is $21.3 trillion annually.  I hate to be all cheerleader-y, but it’s true – even now we live in an era of amazing abundance.

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And they said Mittens didn’t have the common touch.

Yes, I know, the economy is awful for some people.  Certainly, we’re faced with significant structural issues that will be challenging for years to come.  But the ocean is still huge.  The opportunities out there are amazing.  Yes, it’s possible to make $1,000,000 a year.  Heck, I went on Facebook® one time, and saw some guys that graduated about when I did.  One of them had a successful restaurant.  The other?  Sold a successful business and was going to retire.

And, no, these weren’t Stephen Hawking-smart guys, heck, they didn’t even have wheelchairs.  They didn’t even have amazing, unique business ideas, one has a restaurant, the other a small manufacturing business.  They were average guys who worked very hard, and failed and failed and failed and then succeeded.

Why don’t more people make a million, or at least a few hundred thousand?  Most often, we limit ourselves.  I’ve written before that I don’t think that most people use even one tenth of their capability, and the reason for that is that they:

  • Are too cautious – they never take any risks. For many folks, this works fine.  Being a dentist has a better average payout than winning the lottery.  But, you have to live with being a dentist, dude.
  • Don’t believe in themselves – caution is one thing, but I have seen people limit themselves because they don’t believe in their own talent. And to think that Kamala Harris didn’t believe enough in her best
  • Stuck in a mindset that success only happens to other people, and that the only success they will ever have will come when other people allow it.
  • Afraid of failure – failure can be awful, debilitating, and soul crushing. Oh, wait, that’s my ex-wife, not failure.  Failure’s bad, too.
  • Afraid of effort – success starts with, and ends with, work. And having parents that have fifty million dollars.
  • Have pants filled with raw liver – men who have pants filled with raw liver have had very little influence over world events, historically.
  • Don’t have a goal – if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. This was, from time to time, my problem.  I’d achieve a goal, and then?  Shrug and say, “What next?”

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Hey, at least she has experience.

I’ll admit, the first time one of my posts really hit big, it was featured by Remus at the Woodpile Report (LINK).  I was happy, but almost apprehensive, like a dog that finally caught a car.  What the hell do I do now?  I was ringing up more views in a day on a single post than the entire blog did in the first nine months of existence.  My apprehension:  Was it good enough?  Was there enough content on the site to keep readers?  What the hell do I do with this car?

I guess I have to add another two reasons people fail is that they are:

  • Are afraid of success – I’ve seen people self-sabotage because the very idea of succeeding scared them. Their solution?  Screw up.
  • Feel unworthy of success – likewise, people who don’t feel worthy will actively avoid situations where they are successful.

I’ve been lucky throughout most of my life to not be afraid of success, but driven to achieve it, maybe a bit too much.  My wife says this is one of my personalities.  There is easy-going Juan DeLegator, but this one she just calls The General.  The General doesn’t care what time it is.  The General doesn’t care if you’re tired.  The General wants results.  Now.  I imagine it’s just as pleasant for everyone around me as it sounds, but, honestly, I enjoy it.  Plus?  The General gets results.

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A personal hero, plus he shows up every Christmas to remind me of the true spirit of Christmas:  maneuver warfare.  The neighbors will never try to sing carols here again.

My idea is that what I accomplished yesterday was fine, but what I’m going to accomplish tomorrow better beat it.  I have worried from time to time that the best post I’ll ever write is in the past.  Then, however, I’ll put together a post that I like so much that I find it hard to go to sleep afterwards because I’m so excited about what I just wrote.  I’m sure that someone is going to laugh, or learn, or both.

It is a big Internet.  It’s also a huge economy.  And to go out and make more money is, generally, easy.

But success isn’t necessarily only measured in money.  There’s also other things.  Like food and cars and cable television:  the things that money buys.

Oh, okay, fine.  There’s also family.  And community.  And faith.  The same principles apply there, as well.

See what you made me do?  The General is not amused.  But he’s just pitching in his two cents.

Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

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The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today.  Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend?  I guess we all have our little weaknesses.  And dogs follow me.  Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years.  I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now.  It’s nice.  If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what?  We can still restart the conversation where we left off.  It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming.  Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty.  That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest.  Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend.  Or a co-worker.  Or a relative.  Or someone you just met.  Or your UPS® delivery guy.  Oh, wait.  Most people don’t like honest.  But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends.  He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money.  They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless.  This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

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Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping.  I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not.  The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family.  My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep.  I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing.  He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family.  He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years.  So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder:  “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for.  You’re financially secure.  You can quit your job anytime.  Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit.  Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk:  “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder:  “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk:  “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder:  “No.  If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it.  You have to do something.  Physically start it.  This weekend.  I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it.  I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

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Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

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How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true.  I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head.  That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me.  See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have.  It’s being too clever.  It’s thinking.  How do I know?  It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing.  If I think about doing something, it will never get done.  I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago.  It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old.  But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done.  Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes.  It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

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Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that.  But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about.  To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that.  I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night.  It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee.  Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time.  I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance.  It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

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In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right?  But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby.  But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours.  I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm.  A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available.  I’m writing.

The Mrs.:  “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.”  There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend.  But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that.  “Important?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  I can see that what you’re writing about is important.  People need to hear it.  So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk:  “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder:  “That’s silly.  You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life.  Pick out something you like to do, and do it.  But figure out how to make it important to other people.  You like to woodwork, right?  You say you never have time to do it.  Do it this weekend.  Film it.  Put it up on YouTube®.  I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all?  I think because he feels he’s supposed to work.  That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done.  The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps we need to justify what we do.  Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

  1. Don’t tell everything you know.

Success?  My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful.  Their life is really good.  I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts.  If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting!  They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

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Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow.  “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.”  The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously.  This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high.  I looked around for cameras.  Aha!  There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener.  They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected.  Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

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Also?  Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic.  He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**.  I had trained.  I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©.  I put it in my palm.  Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate.  In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place.  I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth.  Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane.  The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts.  I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education.  My heart, despite all of the training began to race again.  The door knob turned.

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Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake.  She stopped.  She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny.  This is gross.  There is lint in this marshmallow.  And bits of string.  And, is that a BB?  This won’t do, this won’t do at all.”  Drat.  I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught.  I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record.  Ruined!  And all at the age of five.  Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all.  Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.”  She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

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It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born.  Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success.  And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime.  I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool.  And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first.  They then followed these kids for 40 years.  Yes.  40 years.  Here’s a (LINK).  Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

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The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened.  Enough vodka works, too.  Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear:  they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it.  Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me.  Yes.  In kindergarten.  That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes.  We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties.  Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill.  The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

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Ahhh, Darwinian fables.  They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future.  If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences.  I want the marshmallow now, dangit!  The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow.  There might not even be a second marshmallow.  Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life.  I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance.  On my life.  I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance.  Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

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It’s a project car, honey.  The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD.  You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death.  Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself.  In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all.  Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular.  I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet.  I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.”  If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today.  But life is a balance.  If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke.  Those are two extremes.  Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts.  You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily.  Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box.  Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y.  And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow.  But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it?  Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow.  Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****.  But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®.  The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that.  It looks cool.”  To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow.  I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows.  Otherwise Harvard© will.

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I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature.  If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me?  I don’t like marshmallows all that much.  Except on ‘smores®.  And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

 

*The Matrix.  Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger.  If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me.  Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.  Really?  Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope.  You can figure this one out.

Success, Luck, and Sexy Bill Gates

“Seriously, I don’t get it.  What, do you shoot luck lasers out your eyes?  It’s just hard to picture.  And certainly not very cinematic.” – Deadpool 2

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Yup.  I sure feel that way when I accidentally tell the ticket taker “I love you, too” after she says, “Enjoy the movie.”

One novel I recall reading back when I was in a kid in junior high was Ringworld by Larry Niven.  Niven’s fiction has always been great because when he thinks about a subject, he thinks about that subject deeply, and spins off great ideas faster than a nudist nursemaid on nitrates.

In the case of Ringworld, the main idea was about taking all the matter in a solar system and putting a big ring around it.  This would have about three million times the surface area of Earth, so if you were kinda bored and needed a weekend project to add a little bit of space to your place, building a ringworld might give you enough room so you didn’t need to rent one of those 8×10 storage units.  That might save you $30 a month!

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I’ll warn you, if your gym teacher makes you do a lap, it might take several hundred thousand years.

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Another view of the Ringworld in motion.

Outside of that huge idea of building solar-system-scale structures, Niven had a dozen others in just that one book (and he did it in other books, too) that made it especially mind bending for a young teenager to read.  One of the ideas was about luck.

In the future that Larry Niven had constructed, parents were limited to the number of children they could have, but you could have an extra child if you won a lottery.  Teela Brown’s parents won that lottery, and so on – for five generations.  In this case, Niven speculated that there might be a gene that made you lucky, and her character was brought into the novel with that genetically-based luck as her superpower, which helped move the plot along in an interesting way.

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I hear religious cannibals only eat Catholics on Friday.

The idea (like a lot of Niven’s other ideas) stuck with me for a while.  I know that there are people who think that the concept of “luck” is magical thinking.  Me?  I think that to discard luck as a concept in a Universe as vast as ours describes an unwarranted degree of certainty about how things really work.  In fact, when talking with people, I often say, “I’m the luckiest person you know.”  I really think that I am a pretty lucky fellow.  Some would even call me a jolly.  And good.

“He is lucky who realizes that luck is the point where preparation meets opportunity,” was an unattributed saying in a 1912 edition of The Youth’s Companion.  That’s a great definition, and it is one that firmly puts you in control of your destiny – most “overnight sensations” work, very hard, for years before success hits.  It’s a concept I sell to my kids frequently because the last thing I want is to allow them, for a single second, to feel like they’re victims of life.  That gives them an excuse not to perform – and they’ll need to pay for my nursing home, and I want them to be able to afford one with pole dancers.

But we need to face an unpleasant truth:  like Teela Brown, some people are just luckier than others.

Can you back that up, John Wilder?  Yes, yes I can.

  • People are born with different abilities – attractiveness, speed, strength, intelligence, cunning. It’s only on rare occasions that a rogue like me is born with all four.  Er, five.
  • Many crucial events in history have swung on luck – Lee’s invasion of Maryland was stopped at Antietam in 1862 because a corporal of the 27th Indiana Volunteers found Lee’s invasion plans in an envelope wrapped around three cigars.
  • Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because his bacterial slide was accidently infected with a fungus – a penicillin producing fungus.

Talent is normally distributed – it follows a bell curve – most people have average talent, while some have amazing talent.  Most people (in the looks department) aren’t 10’s – they’re 5’s, which is, after all, average.  But variable amounts of talent don’t account for the huge differences in success some people see.  Bill Gates wasn’t the smartest man born in 1955.  Bill Gates wasn’t the hardest working man born in 1955.  Bill Gates wasn’t the man born in 1955 with the richest dad.

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Virus free is good too, Bill.

But Bill Gates was smart, hardworking, and had a rich dad.  And he developed a good system.  But he was also the guy who was in the right place at the right time to help create the personal computer business.  The luckiest moment of Bill Gates’ life?  When IBM© was negotiating with Bill for DOS© for their PCs, and the CEO of IBM said, “Oh, is that Mary Gates’ boy’s company?”  Turns out the CEO of IBM® was on the board of the United Way™ with Bill’s mom.

Lucky.

Luck plays a role in your life.  If you’re born well, that’s a good start.  If you pick the right major at the right time?  That’s another step on the way.  Get associated with the right things at work?  A business that is just the right one at just the right time?  Soon enough you’re the CEO.

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Lucky Charms® are also part of a complete breakfast, but then again so is a spoon, which is also inedible.

I’m not saying that the CEO is unworthy, but I do think that those who rise to the top should understand that there’s a role for luck as well.  Scientific American (LINK) even has an article where a mathematical simulation of talent plus luck equals the creation of the unequal distribution of outcomes we see in the world today where vast amounts of wealth are owned by a small number of people.

Is an unequal distribution an unfair outcome?  No, mainly because people make the individual choices that lead them to their fates – very few people are forced to their position in life.  If I had made several different choices in my life, could I have been the CEO of a major company?  With luck, sure.  But I’m sure that whoever got the job is doing fine, as am I, plus I don’t have to live in a big city and wear a tie more than once a year.

And what about lucky breaks that go way beyond probability?

Yup, I think those happen, too.  But that’s a future post.  If you’re lucky.

Scholarships to Avoid, and . . . College Isn’t the Best Idea for Everyone

“Now if Eb needs a diploma, he should go to college so he can become a vegetarian.” – Green Acres

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Please, calm down.  Show me where Bernie tried to touch you.

The Mrs. and I were off to Midwestia State (Home of the Fighting Red-Crested Yaks©) on Saturday to move The Boy into the dorms.  The reality is that he had left hours before us and was unpacked by the time we got there and had already managed to flirt with the girl working the dorm desk and lock himself out of his own room for the first time.  I saw the look in the eyes of dorm desk girl – “cute, but still a dorky freshman who locks himself out of his room two hours after getting a key.”

I was actually shocked they still had keys – I was expecting that they’d be subjected to retinal checks to get back in their rooms.  Until I heard that the floor had a shared bathroom.  A co-ed shared bathroom.  Imagine being in the midst of a growler when the girl of your dreams drops on by to leave the kids off at the pool?  I’ve been married forever, and I like to pretend that’s not something The Mrs. does – at all.

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I was surprised.  I was unaware that the diet of Deadpool® was entirely comprised of burning tires.

The Mrs. and I were there, really, for The Mrs. and not The Boy at all.

When The Mrs. had talked about The Boy moving away, it had started off with a matter-of-fact statement about “. . . when we drop him off at college.”

I had responded with, “Why would we need to go up there to drop him off?  He seems to be perfectly capable of carrying a few boxes to an elevator.  It’s not like we’re dropping off Stephen Hawking.”  This was, apparently, not the thing to say to a mother getting mentally ready to cope with her eldest son going off to college.  It doesn’t help that The Mrs. is also staring down the added mathematical certainty that her youngest child, Pugsley, will likewise be moving out within a handful of years.

She responded with:  “Of course we’re going.”

If you can put “icy” into a tone, this one was nearly at absolute zero.  I saw the molecules in her exhaled breath stop vibrating as they fell to the carpet and form a nice Ice-9 frost (look it up).  I could see that we’d be driving the hours required to get to Midwestia State (Home of the Whimsical Crotch Goblins®) the day the dorms opened.

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When I met Stephen Hawking, he told me that there are an infinite number of universes out there, and maybe even one where I was funny.  I responded, “Here’s a great joke:  Stephen Hawking walked into a bar.”  That one really made him mad.  Now I have to live in this Universe, where Kardashians aren’t fast food workers.

I can understand how The Mrs. felt.  It’s almost always a melancholy time when a child moves out, unless that child is Johnny Depp, in which case his parents were happy to be able to announce to their friends that their house was now aerobics-free as Johnny was now doing Pilates of the Caribbean.  I’m sorry.  I’ll admit that there were uneasy questions floating through my mind.  I thought the questions were about him, but in reality after reflecting, I realized the questions were really about me:

I thought the questions were:  “Is he ready?  Does he have the tools to go out into the world?  Will he make the right judgements?”

It sounds like those questions were about him, but they’re not.  Those questions are really about me.  A more truthful way to write them is:  “Did I prepare him?  Did I teach him enough so that he’ll be competent and safe?  Is he a good man?”

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The only thing I’m sad about is that he thinks steak tastes like chicken.

I think college is a good idea for The Boy, and I’ll get back to his specifics a bit later after Morpheus is done with him.

But I don’t think college is for everyone, and I think it’s really a horrible idea for some people.  I learned this from my association with a youth group.  I was discussing the future with one young, bright kid – he was a junior at the time, I think.  I asked him what his plans were.

“I’m going to become an electrical lineman.”  An electrical lineman is the guy who fixes the big wires on the electrical poles so you can charge your iPad© and watch Netflix® – it’s like a superhero who can chew Copenhagen®.  It’s technical work – you have to be smart.  It’s physical.  And most line failures happen during big storms.  So when your power goes out for an hour?  It’s a lineman who’s out fixing it in the rain or snow or ice or thunderstorm or temporal rift.

I stopped.  I was getting ready to give him my “you need to go to college” speech, but hesitated.  This young man had thought about it.  He loved being outside.  He hated paperwork.  He was very smart.  The average hourly wage for an electrical lineman is $30 an hour for a journeyman.  With overtime, he could be making $100,000+ a year in just a few years and live in an area near Modern Mayberry where most of the nicest houses are available for $200,000 or less.

It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.

Being an electrical lineman also offered some other benefits:  it’s not a career that you can do online.  You have to physically be there.  This is nice, so you don’t have to compete with a two billion or so people in China and India like you might if you were being a computer programmer.

This job has another advantage – it requires just enough certification that it shuts down people who would randomly try it, mainly because no matter how crispy the body is electrical companies hate to pay to have them removed.  But the young man in question wouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens, either.

Being a lineman has a third advantage:  it is a basic service that you can’t outsource.  You can ship a factory nearly completely overseas – I’ve heard of just this happening – but the electrical infrastructure required to run the United States has to be in, well, the United States.

One final advantage:  you can start your own company, buy your own truck, and work the hours you want as a contractor to bigger electrical companies.  It’s a business where if you want to be a contractor or an entrepreneur, you can be without too much difficulty investment.

The nice thing about working with kids is they often teach you things, too.  The standard advice you give a bright kid with good values is go to college.  This is clearly the wrong advice for many kids.

A kid growing up today will face more challenges in employment than any generation in history.   Competition will take place in ways that I never had to consider during my career.  And this is after automation removed thousands of jobs from factories as machines replaced skilled workers.  In this new revolution, expertise from “knowledge workers” will be replaced by algorithms and databases that allow, for instance, computers to diagnose skin cancer at a 95% correct rate, versus an 87% success rate by actual human dermatologists.  I know it sounds bad for the human dermatologists, but I got a 0% correct rate since all I would do is look at the picture and say, “ewww, gross.”  Let’s see a machine beat that.

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Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.

I’m not sure that there is, in the future, a truly safe job or career to go into, unless we experience Lord Bison’s Deep Fried Econopocalypse® (and if you’re not reading The Bison Prepper, you really should be (LINK)) and then the guy who makes costumes out of leather and football shoulder pads has probably got a good career ahead of him.   Owning a scrapbooking store?  Maybe not so much.

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Okay, I was going for Mad Max Mel, but this works.  I hear they worked out their differences and went to Hooters® afterwards.  Man, Jesus can put down the wings and Coors Light©.

What are the attributes of a safe job?  I mean, assuming Mel Gibson doesn’t show up at your house tomorrow?

  • Local – If you can’t do it over the Internet, that cuts out billions of people from getting that job.
  • Certifications Required – A job, like the lineman example, isn’t something that should be done by just anyone – it requires a minimum intellect as well as training and experience. Many medical jobs are similar.  I hate the way that we have, in my opinion, over-certified our world.  But you can use that to your advantage.
  • Other Bars to Entry – It used to be that you could give applicants for jobs an IQ test, weed out those that weren’t smart enough, and be fairly sure that you were getting someone who was at least smart enough (or not too smart) for the job. Now?  You have to use something that works like an IQ test, like a college degree.
  • Hard to For A Machine to Do – Blogging.   That’s hard for machines, right fellow humans?  I have been told that 93.2% of you like to hear that.

But there are ways that even “safe” jobs might be at risk:

  • Carpenter: Carpentry, in many cases, requires no certification – any illegal aliens have taken many of these jobs in certain areas.
  • Teacher: Why do we need all of these teachers?  We can get a YouTube® lecture up, and have a teaching assistant give the standardized test.
  • Store Associate:   Check out the product features on the Internet – seriously stop.  You’re not my supervisor.  Leave me alone!
  • Checkout Clerk: Self-service checkouts are pretty common now.  I refuse to use them, period, but I can see that I’m rapidly becoming a minority.
  • Johnny Depp’s Sinus Cavity Cleaner: Okay, this one is really a safe job.

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Okay, I’ll admit, she’d be perfectly acceptable working picking strawberries or in some sort of insect control responsibility. 

But there are other problems.  I maintain that too many people go to college.  In 1959, only about 45% of high school graduates went to college, and only 70% of students graduated from high school.  That’s a little less than a third of the US population.

In 2016, 84% graduated from high school, and 70% of those went to college.  That’s nearly 60%.  If you break down the math, almost twice as many people are going to college as a percentage of people in the United States.  There are only two possible conclusions:  either people have gotten smarter, or college has gotten easier.

Me?  I’m betting that college has gotten easier, since if you poke around a bit you can find that the average grade given to students at Harvard© is an A-.  It might just be my opinion, but the only thing competitive about Harvard® might be how much a parent has to pay to get a student accepted.

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See, if you build a new building on campus – not a bribe – call it Skank Hoe Hall.  But having your skank daughters get in because you’ve bribed a coach?  Yeah, that’s a bribe. Allegedly.

I’m pretty sure that the economy has no need of many of these college graduates in any role other than cashiers at Billy Bob’s Wiggle Striptease Hootenanny©.  Many of the degrees granted are not really economically valuable – 5% of degrees, for instance, are in “fine or performing arts.”  Last time I checked, we here in Modern Mayberry had our quota of mimes filled at our historical demand of zero mimes and there was a bounty on any mime caught within 5000 yards (3 meters) of the county courthouse.  There just aren’t very many jobs available in “fine or performing arts” to justify 5% of college students getting a degree in that field.  Thankfully, many of them have experience in their true field, food service.  I hear that Florida will have a degree in Pre-Barista© next year, so there’s hope yet.

One thing I did note in the hour I spent sifting through the data is that many degrees are more helpful, and, potentially more stable.  Health and medical sciences accounted for 10% of graduates, and those jobs are hard to replace with a machine.  You have to have people helping people.  Robots can diagnose, but at least for now, a doctor has to do the cutting, and a nurse the nursing, until Arnold Schwarzendoctor 2000™ arrives.

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That’s a realllllllly long thumb.

I would speculate that we have twice as many people going to college as necessary, and we could replace the expense and time wasted at college for many people simply by allowing employers to give IQ tests.  Yes, doctors and nurses need school.  But we have approximately 1,000,000% more anthropology degrees than required to maintain our civilization, and an infinite amount of Women’s Gender Studies degree recipients than required.

I advised The Boy on how he could take what he enjoys doing, and turn it into something useful.  Don’t compete with billions of people – find ways that you can provide higher value services to people in ways that have to be local and are hard to reproduce.  I think he has a pretty good plan.

Given the accelerating pace of change we’ve seen in the last two decades, I imagine that anyone starting a career in 2020 may have to make multiple changes during their life.  From what I’ve seen so far, I think The Boy is well prepared for school and the changes that he’ll see in life.  I think he’ll do fine.  It’s time to let that eagle fly.

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Unless it’s Putin’s Eagle.

Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Unlike a vegan, I can change a flat tire.

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

“Can you help me?”

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

“How much do I owe you?”

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

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

Which is how it should be.

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

He lost me right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like another successful government program.  Yay!

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

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

Arete, Excellence, and Clowns Gone Bad

“Aim small, miss small.” – The Patriot

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“Owning a nuclear weapon means never having to say you’re sorry.” – John Wilders Book of Quotes:  Cannibal Soup for the Soul™  For reals, I’m thinking about publishing a book of collected essays from this blog, and that’s the title I want to use, and thus the ™.  It’s MINE!

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

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

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

“Wilder, you may have written something great.  You may have written something awful.  I just can’t read it.”

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

She let me just print my essays and book reports.

It was a big deal to me and I felt free after that.  I hated cursive.  I even remember the book that I was doing the report on:  Farmer in the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein.  My teacher had no idea what the book was about, and actually had me read the report to her twice so that she was certain that I wasn’t making it all up on the spot.  The skill of reading my own handwriting helped me:  if I could read my own handwriting, I could read anything.

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

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

In thinking back to my professor’s writing self-improvement plan, I realize it wasn’t random, it was a process.  The first step was, by far, the most important:

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number One:  Raise Your Standards

If you’re trying to write a perfect upper case E, a sloppy E or a tilty E just won’t do.  And maybe your first E won’t be perfect, but I assure you it will be better than the E you wrote when you weren’t concentrating on it.  It isn’t easy.  It’s slow.  It’s frustrating.  But once you’ve changed your standards internally, a crappy E is something you won’t tolerate.  You’ll notice it and it will drive you nuts.  Every E becomes a challenge in perfection.

When you change your standards, your standards change you.  I’m sure someone else has said that before, since there have been roughly 105 billion people that have lived since 50,000 B.C., so if I’m one human in a million, there are 105,000 others just like me who have lived.  Thankfully, we don’t all live in the same city

But the whole “When you change your standards, your standards change you” line?  I came up with it myself.  I wrote it as my own original thought and realize it might be my most profound thought today, even if Descartes™ or Aristotle® or Judge Judy© said it first.  Thankfully, I’m in luck, I had another original thought today:  balsa wood would not make a good salad topping, either in chunks or shredded.  Feel free to discuss.

Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number Two:  There Are No Shortcuts

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

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Some Random Dude told the Dalai Lama the following joke:  “How does a Buddhist like his pizza?”

The Dalai Lama: “I don’t know.”

Random Dude:  “One with everything.”

The Dalai Lama:  “I don’t get it.”

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

Getting better at anything is hard work.  It turns out that those who are the very best at, for instance, playing violin, practice more than people who aren’t as good.  Practice is absolutely necessary to creating excellence.  But the practice that works best is the practice that happens when you are right at the edge of your abilities.  It’s when you’re practicing at that edge that this weird blend of focus and trance takes over.  I’m sure that there’s a word for it, but in my mind it’s this state where the sense of self disappears.  Perhaps the best word would be transcendent – when I’m there I lose track of time.  I don’t think about the practice of writing a perfect E.  I am the practice of writing a perfect E.  I am excellence.  With an E.

The management guru Tom Peters! (he likes to put exclamation! points! behind! everything!) wrote a column that I read in 1999.  Tom Peters! was travelling, and decided that Tom Peters! was going to start running.  His column stuck with me.  Tom Peters! noted, more or less, that he was a very slow runner, but there was absolutely nothing preventing him from practicing like a world-class runner.  He could push himself to his limits.  Tom Peters! didn’t have to wait to train like a world-class runner.  Tom Peters! could do it right this minute.

Like my professor, last month I decided I’d improve my writing.  Sure, I can read it and the NSA® can’t, but I decided I’d give it a shot.  I focused every day when putting my daily to-do list together to make each letter perfect, each E a combination of right angles, as straight as I could make it.  Amazingly I got better.  I also noticed this – even when writing a simple to-do list, I could be transcendent.  I could lose myself in a quest to be excellent.

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

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

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

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

But much of modern work today is built around processes and defined procedures.  The idea isn’t that you do work with Arete, the idea is that you do mediocre work consistently.  And you can do that work with people who have an I.Q. of 85 or 90.

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

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

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

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

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Can’t you just smell the Arete coming from the cube farm?  No, that’s the smell of coffee.  And despair.

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

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