Category: Lame Repost

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

Video games never made me want to hurt people.  Working with people did that.

This particular lame repost is because I got tied up on another project today, and this seemed appropriate given the election cycle.  My project was only a little bit productive, and that’s fine by me.  Fresh content on Wednesday!  

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the West in the 1970’s.  Bezmenov told everything he knew to the CIA, and was set up in Canada.  He did several interviews which are available on YouTube®, which I’ll link to in a bit.  Most recently, Call of Duty®:  Black Ops Cold War™ brought Bezmenov back into the public consciousness by cutting in clips of his interviews in.

You can watch it below.  It’s only a minute or so.

During interviews, Bezmenov made the quote that only 15% of the KGB’s activity was tied to James Bond® stuff.  Their primary goal wasn’t to find out which parts of an F-15E jet fighter were made out of titanium and which parts were made out of paper-mâché.

Matching the United States in weapons systems was important, but it wasn’t number one.  Besides, the KGB generally had a spy class of ideological communists built into numerous classified projects.  Bezmenov said that 85% of the KGB’s efforts were spent in destroying culture in the West.

Why fight an actual war, if you can get your enemy to become you?

Bezmenov even set out the mechanisms that they were in the process of using.  It wasn’t a complicated process, and it was just four steps.  They called this process, “active measures” and it was nothing less than subverting the ideology that made America great.

The first step was Demoralization.

Demoralization is based around removing the moral framework of the country you’re attacking.  The easiest way to do this is to co-opt the education system.  Bezmenov said that this took 15-20 years, but his number was low.  First, the educational institutions needed to be captured.  The people who train the teachers, the people who are the “guiding lights” in educational theory must buy into Marxism.

I don’t have a direct measure of the ratio of Leftist to Rightist in those that teach education, but I’d imagine it’s no less than journalism, which is at 20:1.  It may exceed history, which is 33.5:1.  Regardless, the educational academy is now firmly in the hands of the Left.  This leads to the production of teachers in a Leftist pedagogy (fancy word for teaching), with bad Leftist theory sometimes even enshrined into law.  No Child Left Behind?  Yes, that was bad.  Common Core appears to be worse.  Here’s one example:

Yes, this is really what they tried to teach little kids.  From the Heartland Institute.

I have to wonder if the idea is that such simple things like addition and subtraction can be made so complicated that parents won’t be able to teach them to their children.  In essence, it’s a way to further sever the ties between parent and child, while strengthening the ties between child and state educator.

Certainly, not all educators are Leftists.  Here in Modern Mayberry, there are a few, but I think we likely have a more healthy balance.  But there are those who look at the remote classes from COVID-19® as a potential threat to their attempts to indoctrinate children:

Is Demoralization 100% complete?  Not as long as we have those pesky parents standing up for the customs, culture, ideas, and values of the West.  Is it complete enough to take over society?

Maybe.

The goal of Demoralization is a lot of what we see now on the streets of Portland or Seattle or any other major Leftist city.  Bezmenov described the end product of Demoralization as:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

In other words?  Leftist robots.

Destabilization is the next step.  This is the destruction of the systems that define the country.  The economy.  Social relations.  Defensive systems.

In the last few months, the economy has been put into the most precarious state within living memory.  The United States is more divided politically, ideologically, linguistically and ethnically than at any time in history.  Naval vessels ram freighters.  Senior officers are fired due to ideology.  Women are brought into combat operations despite proof that their inclusion lowers fitness for mission.

Bezmenov said that Destabilization took two to five years.

Destabilization leads to Crisis.  Crisis in this system is necessary to get people to accept a new government, new systems, and to give up the old system.  There’s been a great deal of experience in creating Crisis by the Left.  Think the Color Revolutions that have taken place all over the world, from Georgia to Ukraine to Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

What does Crisis look like in the United States?  How about open violence encouraged by receptive District Attorneys that refuse to prosecute?  Does it look like the dollar losing 7% of its value in three months?

Crisis leads to promises by the Left.  High minimum wages.  Free healthcare.  Guaranteed basic income from the government.  “Equality” in housing, in education, in policing.

Are the promises real?  Of course not.  The promises are whatever it takes to get enough support for the Left so they can take control.

If we are not in the Crisis, you can certainly see it from here.  Ideally, for the Left, Crisis leads to control, or Normalization.

Normalization is the end game.  It’s consolidating the country under the Leftists.  It’s the creation of new institutions.  In the Soviet Union and in China, it consisted of killing farmers and replacing them with people from the cities and expecting these collective farms will feed the nation.

Of course, all of the Leftists burning Kenosha and Portland think that they’ll be the ones in charge.  In the new Socialist Utopian States they’ll be the ones who will write poetry and conduct gender reeducation camps, right?

This poetry comes from Seattle, I believe.  Plans are now in full view.

No.  The reality is that they’ll be most likely to be put up against the wall and shot or sent to the convenient leisure gulags.  Why?  They will be disillusioned when the actual power structure emerges.  The reality of every communist paradise in history is that the intellectuals are shot first, especially the intellectuals that are communist.  Why?

Dissent is a thing of the past.

Here are Yuri Bezmenov’s ideas, in his own words:

“Shiver me timbers Philip. At this rate I’ll never get to my Kraft dinner.” – South Park

I defeated my school’s chess champion in two moves.  Guess football and wrestling came in handy.

I apologize for the Lame Repost, but by the time I got to sit down to write, without even the start of a first draft, it was 11pm, and the morning comes early.  So, please enjoy this Lame Repost from back in 2021.

Last week Remus, the late proprietor of the Woodpile Report came up in the comments.  Mike in Canada (one of Canadians that the triumphant armies of the right, good, and true will spare when we kick off Operation Leafblower:  The Cleansing Of The North, which is scheduled right after we finish Operation American Commie And Collaborationist CEO Helicopter Drop) made this comment:

“If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would it be?  Remus. I would have given a great deal to have met him and had a conversation.  I miss him very much. . . Tuesday mornings just aren’t the same now.”

That hit a nerve with me, for several reasons.  The first time any of my posts received any notice of any kind was on his site.  I’ll admit, I asked him to read it via email.  And he did read it, and posted it on one of his weekly musings.  Then, we emailed each other back and forth several times.

I still have his website bookmarked.  I can’t really bring myself to delete it, because I read it weekly for years even before I was featured on it.

I miss him very much, too.

Remus was very special to many readers and writers, primarily because it was obvious:  he was a reluctant warrior.  Like many of the posters here, and many of the blogs I frequent, he wanted no part of this.  He wanted peace, but circumstances kept dragging him back in.

In my case, I wanted to post funny stories and make fun of the events of the day while mixing in whatever wisdom I could scrape from the ages.  Oh, and add in some bikinis.  Why?

Because they’re bikinis.

Duh.

I watched a two-part series about the bikini.  It was very revealing.

But Mike’s question remained:  who would I want to have dinner with.  Remus is a wonderful answer, but I excluded him and other commenters/fellow bloggers from my list.  Also, I excluded dead family members, and religious figures and, of course, Deity.

Why?  Well, I’m the one writing this post.  My youngest experience (this really happened) with Jesus was when I was coloring a picture of him in Sunday School.  I colored him purple.  The nice Sunday School teacher said, “Johnny, Jesus wasn’t purple.”

My rejoinder?  “Well, he’s God, so if he wants to be purple, he can be purple.”

The Sunday School teacher sighed.  So, yeah, I haven’t changed.  Besides, I’m sure Jesus could drink me under the table if He chose to, purple or not, so it’s not fair including Him on the list.

That being said, I have several categories.  The first is, who, in history, would I like to have dinner with?

George S. Patton, Jr.

Since the age of five, I’ve been fascinated with Patton.  How fascinated?  So much so that my high school history teacher ordered a documentary film on him for our US History class, just for me.  When the lights went down and the projector started and his baby picture showed up even before the title showed – I yelled, “Patton!”

Yup, this was the picture.

My history teacher smiled.

Sure, Patton wasn’t fighting the best the Germans could throw at him.  Sure, he had intelligence information from Enigma knowing what the Germans would do (sometimes before they knew) but he was hip-deep in the intrigue and politics that created the postwar world.

He didn’t know all the dirt but he knew a lot of it.  Plus, the man knew a good cigar and a bad commie from a thousand miles away.  Dewey couldn’t defeat Truman in 1948, but I bet George S. Patton could have rolled over him like a Sherman tank.

Imagine the world with Stalin staring down Patton at the start of the Cold War.  Commies in the State Department?  They’d be hanging from lamp poles, and Patton would have led the columns of tanks entering Red Square when Stalin had used his one and only atomic bomb.

Stalin’s grave?  It’s a communist plot.

This wouldn’t be any silly single-course dinner.  This would be a full-on dinner that would last for hours and end with cigars and brandy on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean on a cool autumn night.

Besides, who would pick better food or cigars for a dinner than Patton?

Who would I skip?

Einstein.  He looks like he smells like cheese, and not in a good way.  Also he seems like he’d be sort of like that guy who mumbled to himself in the back of the class and rocked back and forth.

Honorable Mention:

Isaac Newton.  Isaac Newton did more in any three years of his life than 99.999% of humanity will ever do in a full lifetime.  Me?  I want to understand what he learned about things other than physics, which are largely lost to history.  Downside?  I’d need to record it all because I’d want to hear it again and again.  Other downside?  How can you compete with that hair?

Okay, both Brian May and Isaac Newton have doctorates.  Only one of them had groupies.

Who would I like to get into a (no weapons) fight with?

Alexander the Great.  I’m pretty sure that 18 year old me could dust the floor with 18-year-old Alexander the Great.  Check that.  I’m certain I could take him.  But if I lost?

“Yeah, I remember the time that Alexander the Great just barely beat me.”

For me, it’s a no-lose situation.  For him?  My first thought was it would be pretty embarrassing.  But, after thinking about it, if Alexander lost a fight to someone who came from 2400 years in the future just to kick his butt?  Also a cool story.

Seriously, Alexander would be toast, though.

Who would I skip?

18-year-old Chuck Norris.  I don’t have a death wish.

Honorable Mention:

18-year-old Genghis Khan.  I hear he was tough, but it might be worth it.  While a challenge, since 8% of the men living in the former Mongol Empire are his descendent I’d get to say, “Who is your daddy now?” to millions of dudes.  Me?  I’ll turn Genghis Khan into Genghis Khannot.

Genghis was tough as a child.  I remember when he took his first steppe.

Discarded: 

Karl Marx.  It would be like hitting a fat, slow and stupid bug, and give me zero satisfaction.  And it wouldn’t stop communism, even if I gave him a swirlie and an atomic wedgie.  Someone would come along and write the “something for nothing” manifesto.

Have a (few) beer(s) with:

Ben Franklin.

I think Ben knew all the dirt on all the founding fathers.  If not, I think he would have an excellent collection of ye olde fart jokes.  Failing all of that?  Rumor has it he was quite funny when toasted.  Plus, he was rich enough to buy really good wine.

Who would I skip?

Any Kennedy.  Never drink with a Kennedy.  Any Kennedy.  And never, ever, drive with a Kennedy.

But if Teddy was driving, he would have drowned.

Honorable Mention:

Andrew Jackson.  Skinny as a rattlesnake and twice as mean.  He’d probably take you to strange bars that weren’t on the map because they were in someone’s basement or on their back 40 that you’d have to shoot your way out of.  Since Andrew Jackson was invulnerable to weapons like Wolverine®, just stand behind him.

Who would I like to be on a long airline flight with?

This one was hard.  When I used to be on long flights, I pulled out my book as a shield to not talk to the person next to me.  Who would I want to be stuck next to for four to six hours as I jetted across the country.  There’s only one answer:

Elvis.

Okay, just kidding, since he would probably eat my in-flight meal.  He’d want my hunk-a hunk-a airplane nuts.  The tough part of this answer is that you’re going to be trapped with this person for hours.  So, if they’re a jerk?  Yeah.  Hours of that.  So, I think I’d choose Mark Twain.  Worst case is that he’d tell you stories.  Best case?

He’d tell you stories.  Some of them might even be true.  And it would be fun to fight alongside Twain after some Stewardess told him he couldn’t light up an epic stogie in flight.

Who would I like to choose but I’m afraid he’s a jerk and I’d end up hating a legend?

Steve Martin.  I love Steve Martin’s work, and think he has a lot of genius and wisdom behind it.  That being said, being famous for, oh, nearly fifty years just might have jaded him to people.  Maybe.  And I’d hate to think that a national treasure like Steve was a, well, jerk.  Plus I bet Twain could take out a stewardess with a single punch.

Honorable Mention:

Quentin Tarantino.  I know he’s a jerk, but I think I’d love to argue with him for six straight hours when he couldn’t escape.  That sounds sort of fun.  And if he was a real idiot?  I bet I could make him smell my unwashed clothes from the trip.

Who under no circumstances would I want to be on an airline flight with?

Gilbert Gottfried or William Shatner.  Gottfried for obvious reasons, and Shatner because every time he’s on a flight something is on the wing trying to rip the engines out.

Don’t worry – William Shatner would never run a criminal enterprise.

All of that being said?  I think Mike is right.  I think Remus would have been a wonderful dinner companion.

Who are your choices, and (for more fun) what categories did I miss?  One category I drew a blank on was “who would I like to work for” and then I thought of Jesus again.

He would know when I was goofing off.

Dangit.  He already does.

“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2

I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™.  They are watchdogs.

Preface:  I got home very late, so, here’s a Lame Repost.  See you with a great new post on Monday.

Time.

Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list.  Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.

The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control.  Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially.  We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.

Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power.  We have used technology to shrink the world.  The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days.  Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.

Now?  The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.

Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom.  We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.

Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle:  being riddled with bullets.

We can see at night.  We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.

My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance.  Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.

But time remains fixed.  It flows only one way.  And it is the most subjective of our senses.  Even Pugsley notices it:  “This summer was so short!”

He’s in high school.  That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.

Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was.  Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life.  For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more.  It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%.  For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years.  1/8 versus 1/20?  It’s amazingly different.  We don’t perceive life as a line.  We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives.  Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases.  When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily.  New words.  New thoughts.  New ideas.  That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing.  They don’t realize that I can reattach it.

Three clowns were eating a cannibal.  One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”

Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents.  Ever drive a new route somewhere?  When I do it, I have to focus my attention.  It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.

I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years.  I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.

There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive.  Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.

Work is similar.  Over time, we gain experience.  Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them).  But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.

The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims.  I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life.  Finding a new one is . . . difficult.

Life goes faster, day by day for me.  Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.

And yet . . .

Each day is still 24 hours.  I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.

They did not see that coming.

Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness.  I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life.  I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.

Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.

Does the flow of time vary?  Certainly.  But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.

Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.

I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:

Time is all we have – it is what makes up life.  We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life.  We have the hours we have.  The only difference is what we do with that time.

I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep.  That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.

I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.

Maybe I can settle for that definition of time:  a gift.  Each moment is a gift.

Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them.  Just make each moment count.

Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time.  It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.

“Here, here’s a machete, collapsible fishing pole, a few other odds and ends I stuck in there for you.” – Into the Wild

Pa Wilder said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” which was an odd way for him to tell me I was adopted.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

This will be and odds and ends post, so, be warned.

Normally by Sunday night one of four things is the case, and they are in descending order of preference:

1. I’ve written the general outline of the post either earlier in the day, on Saturday, or on Friday. Last week, for instance, I started writing with a “near publish” draft that only needed a few more jokes and meme creation.
2. I’ve got written notes on what I’m going to write about. This works, because writing is just taking notes vivifying them through the addition of 3,000,000 volts of electricity with the help of Igor.
3. I’ve been working on the post in my head for a day or three. I might miss on a few ideas or points, but I’m generally okay about getting most of them in there.
4. I develop a strong idea that I want to write before it’s time to start writing. This is dangerous, because I’ve written somewhere near 1,000 posts, I might have written it before.  I actually had to go to a Lame Repost once because this happened and it was 1am and I was not gonna write another.

Now, that’s my order of preference.  One several occasions, I was frustrated with what I had written, thought, “Pffft, close enough,” and hit the go button.  Those have been, more often than not, some of the most popular posts.  I assure you, before I hit the go button, I have no idea if the post will elicit commentary or not.

When I met The Mrs. she said, “Let’s exchange numbers,” and I responded, “Won’t that just confuse people trying to call us?”

So, I sat down.  No idea.  Normally I keep a bank of those, and there was one really good one, but I’m saving that for the next Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  I thought about a Lame Repost, but I sifted through several candidates, and none of them felt right.

I do have several ideas, but each of them would take in several hours of research.  Why so long?  Because I’ve learned one very important truth:  I have to have my facts right to write for this crowd.  If I make an error in logic or fact, I’m called on it.

I appreciate that – it’s made me work to be better.

But to hit on a topic what will require a few hours of work to get up to proper speed on is one I typically don’t want to start at 10:28pm on a Sunday.  I’ve done that before, and finishing when the Sun is coming up sucks, because it will mean I’m going to be tired all week long.  I might even have given that a shot tonight, but last week I was under the weather and was dragging just a bit.

How many ants does it take to rent an apartment?  Ten ants.

As in:  drastically better in one night.  One night, go to bed feeling awful.  Next morning?  Felt like I could chew rebar and spit nails.  Metaphorically, I mean.  My teeth aren’t nearly as strong as steel.  Except for the one.

But the dragging had a backlog effect – the ideas I normally jot down during the course of a week just didn’t make it to paper or electrons, since I didn’t really have any.  On almost every day I have tons of ideas, but the last week, blah.  Thanks, virus.

Okay, that’s how the dog ate my homework.

Comments – normally I run a few rules that have (probably) cost the blog on the Google® counter – I mainly let people share most ideas they want to share in the comments.  Do I agree with all of the ideas?  No.  I don’t even agree with myself from week to week, and I certainly would love to have a heart-to-heart with John Wilder from a decade or two ago.

The comment moderation software is strong.  I have no idea how to de-tune it farther than it is.  In most cases, I can see the comments for moderation.  In some cases, I can’t, and the machine buries them, sometimes so far deep that I don’t find them unless I spend time in the moderation software.

That’s not a Crocodile Dundee reference . . . THIS is a Crocodile Dundee reference.

The comments I leave moderated (when I find them, often these go straight to the spam filters) are generally personal attacks that don’t add to the debate.  Oh, and the debate?  If commenters are talking to each other, I rarely step in.  It’s a food fight, and I’ll let it play out.  All I ask is that we attack ideas, not people.

Except the GloboLeft.  Make fun of them however you want.

That’s it for tonight – odds and ends over.

“Well, I don’t care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.” – Futurama

I love my step ladder, but it’ll never be my real ladder.

Lame repost today, I was about halfway through the usual post, but then everything got delayed, and then I got a book on the topic that I’m reading so the post will be better.  It’ll keep until next week, but as a bonus, I think Monday’s post will be great.  See you then!

It was March of 2005.  I remember it fairly well.  It was when we were living in Alaska.  The move had been a big risk for The Mrs. and I – moving north across the better part of a continent for work.  I was fortunate to have a good boss and good co-workers.

It was there that I had what I would normally call an epiphany, but epiphany seems too strong.  A realization?  Maybe.  Regardless, to me, it seemed profound.

The Space Between The Words . . . it was a throwaway line by a guest on a radio show that The Mrs. and I were listening to on KFBX, the local AM station.  But sometimes a phrase sticks with you, and this one stuck with me like the phrase “floozy crotch snout” sticks to Kamala Harris.

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

Yup, real quote.  Her real words are better than almost any meme.

Regardless . . . The Space Between The Words.  It seemed as insignificant as Hunter Biden’s willpower until in that hypnogogic state between wakefulness and sleep I thought about it . . . The Space Between The Words.

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

My realization was that The Space Between The Words isn’t made of silence.  It is far from that dead and sterile nothingness that silence implies.

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

For me, that space is infinity.  It is the engine of creation itself.

I wrote “The Space Between The Words” down on a piece of Post-It® note and taped it to my computer monitor.  I still have that piece of now-faded pale yellow paper stuck in a book I carry with me every day.  To me, it is a touchstone and a personal reminder.

Why does it matter to me?

When I am talking, (or doing public speaking, which I do 10,000% more often than I want to do and potentially 20,000% more than the audience wants me to do) if I ever get flustered, I can just stop.  I can pause.  I realize that I can tap into The Space Between The Words, that creative power that allows me to choose whichever of the thousands of words I know as the very next one.  I get to choose that next phrase.  I get to choose the way the conversation can go.  I get to create the possibilities with only the choice of my words.

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

If I choose well, I can turn a simple conversation into something meaningful.  One of the powers of words is that, when applied correctly, is that they can become something transformative.  A simple conversation can change a person’s life forever.  Especially if it’s on tape – just ask Richard Nixon.

My buddy and I got a huge contract to make toy vampires.  There’s only two of us – I have to make every second Count.

The choice of words is, as I mentioned before, the power of creation.  I don’t claim to own that power.  Again, the word I would use isn’t that I came up with the idea or invented the concept I’m describing now.  I just discovered something that I’m sure many others before me knew was there, just like I discovered that someone was keeping a list of all of my jokes in a dad-o-base.

I won’t claim to be a great or charismatic public speaker.  I’ve had my moments.  But I do know that I’ve changed at least one or two lives through things that I have said, and I do know that I’ve said more of what I mean with greater clarity when I allowed The Space Between The Words to guide me.

I bet no one expected that meme.

Likewise, when I write, I don’t claim to be a great writer.  I do, however (when it’s not 3am!) try to carefully edit what I write so that it has the meaning I want to share.  Sometimes I don’t get there.  Sometimes, when writing one of these posts, the content takes a sharp turn, and I let it run.  I know that the full idea I was trying to get out will get born, eventually.

Or it won’t.

That’s the beauty of The Space Between The Words.  Even when writing, it is there.

And, to a certain extent, it has changed me.  I’m no longer afraid to stop, to pause, and to collect.  In one sense, that vast galaxy of creation that I feel I’ve tapped into is something much greater than I will ever be, especially if I keep losing weight.

I wonder what other planet worms exist on . . . otherwise why do we call them Earth worms?

In a religious sense, it feels like I’ve come into a brief (and unworthy!) contact with Logos – a deep universal well that I can only see dimly.  Not Legos®, but Logos.  Legos™ just hurt your foot when you walk down the hall in the dark.

In my experience, The Space Between The Words contains wisdom.  The Space Between the Words contains creation.  The Space Between The Words contains . . . redemption.

Listen for it – I assure you there is no silence there between the words.  There is no self-doubt.  It is calm.  It is patient.  It is Good.  And, for me, it has certainly been worth keeping that Post-It® note around.

FYI – a repost – my take from a year ago.  Thoughts?

“No, I quite approve of terror, arson, murder, any tool that serves the revolution.” –Nicholas and Alexandra

I wonder if this came as a peasant surprise to the nobility?

The worm has turned on Biden.  Pardon me if I say that this is right on schedule.  Trump document frenzy made the Left drool like Amy Schumer when she’s near a cake or AOC when she’s near a new coloring book.  To get Trump, the Left would do anything.  Anything.

In a very real sense, just as the Left views abortion as a sacrament, the destruction of Trump is a religious goal, as he is the manifestation of their supreme Evil being.

This is nothing new.  Remember when George W. Bush was president?  His politics were, essentially, as controversial as lukewarm dishwater.  But the hate flew strong.  Until he started showing up in group hot tub photos with Bill and Hillary and Barack and Mooshell.  Then he was no longer the Prince of Darkness, instead just a fuddy-duddy old man who chose wrong.

I’m really glad I couldn’t find the hot tub photos.

Biden, though, is in as bad a shape politically as he is mentally.  Joe was (s)elected for the job because he has never really stood for anything in particular, so he’ll stand for anything at all.  Even his “memories” are false half the time, talking about things that never happened so that he looks the best to whoever he’s talking to at the moment.

The perfect candidate.

Who is in control then?  One would first point to the Chief of Staff, but that person just quit.  It’s clear that half of his appointees have little to no competence at anything – I’m fairly certain that only one or two of them could pass the probation period making pizzas at Chuck E. Cheese™.

Kamala says her body is a temple.  Everyone is allowed in.

So, I’m not at all sure who is running the show, but we all know it’s not Joe.  And whoever is running the show is done with him.  Will they force him to step down?  Maybe.  It would be chaotic, and risky.  Replacing kneepads as Veep would require a majority vote – of both the House and the Senate.  Since the Republicans hold the House, this would not necessarily be an easy choice.

Even if Joe survives (politically) to 2024, the only reason to have him run again would be for the amusement factor.  It’s also clear that the person who will eventually replace Joe is not Kamala.  Oh, sure, she might do that until the next election if Joe’s forced to resign, but “they” will make sure that she’s not allowed to do anything of particular importance.  Maybe she could do coloring books with AOC.

Someone asked her why the chicken crossed the road.  She said, “It’s because of corporate greed!  Chickens should not be forced to lay eggs – the eggs should lay themselves!”

The danger is the weak leadership combined with the political polarization and the hidden nature of those who are actually running the government.  This seems to me to be very similar to the period before the French Revolution.

• A weak leader,
• Massive governmental debt leading to economic crisis,
• A significant rural/city divide,
• A significant atheist/religious divide,
• Political polarization fueled by agitators, and
• Silly clothing styles.

One of the interesting things to me are those agitators.  They were clearly in place at the time of the French Revolution since the Leftist (the French Revolution is where the name “Leftist” came from) pamphlets that appeared “spontaneously” and the large number of inflammatory newspapers that were designed to fuel the Revolution, primarily in Paris.

I tried to tell a guillotine joke, but I always mess up the execution.

The effort was too large and too well coordinated to be an accident.  Was Marat, the lizard-skinned angry little toad of a man the leader?  Was Robespierre?

In the end, it didn’t matter.

The Revolution gave way to the Terror, where (thankfully) Robespierre and Marat were finally executed.  They had to be executed, since, once any Leftist revolution starts, it keeps moving Left in great gouts of blood until someone has the gumption to kill everyone that’s to the extreme Left.  Stalin learned that lesson, and purged Trotsky along with millions of others.

The end result has almost always been the same as what happened in France.  Tired of the nonsense coming from the anarchy they accepted a new Emperor, this time one named Bonaparte rather than Bourbon.

What position would Quasimoto play at Notre Dame?  Probably halfback.

The playbook is the same, and it seems to follow the same parameters over time.  Understand that as the statues were pulled down from Notre Dame, and as it was transformed from a church into the “Temple of Reason” that we’re seeing the same things today.  The Left removes the past, because nothing can come before – they see this as a cleansing, the ability to return to “Year Zero”.

The future does not repeat, exactly.  The Russian Revolution wasn’t the same as the French, but they certainly rhymed.  As I look to weak leadership, polarization, economic difficulty, and Amy Schumer, I see the same conditions that existed back in 1789.

I’m still interested in who is going to benefit . . . if there’s less Amy Schumer, then everyone.

“We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.” – Marge Simpson

Okay, I used this last year. But, really, fizzy toots is a holiday classic.

(repost today, family time, etc.)

Thanksgiving morning I was in bed, in that half-slumber that I slip into when there’s no danger that I have to go to work.  The Mrs. stirred next to me.

When’s the turkey going to be done?”

John Wilder:  “Yeah, babe, when is the turkey going to be done?”

The Mrs.:  No, I mean it.  I have some other things I need to cook. When will the turkey be done?”

John Wilder:  “Ohhhhh, I haven’t put it in the oven yet.  I thought, as much as you were making six other dishes, that you were gonna do the turkey, too.”

This was, of course, a stupid idea.  I have cooked the turkey every year, ever, since we’ve been married.  Everything else (except pumpkin pies) has been The Mrs.   Why would I assume that The Mrs. was going to cook the turkey?

I have no idea.  But I did.

We Wilders are night owls, when allowed to go feral unconstrained by the tyranny of work, so having a dinner at supper time (or a supper at dinner time) would just be fine.   Since we bought everything we’d need for dinner yesterday, I knew we’d be fine:   no last-minute trips to stores for us, and that was good.

Reprinted with permission, now 50% off!

Because I hate going to the store, especially anytime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I hate it so much, that when I was (much) younger, I’d do all of my shopping for presents during a two-hour period on Christmas Eve.  But yet, there are people who look forward to Black Friday, which to me is the sort of hell I imagine that H.P. Lovecraft reserved for Beto O’Rourke, except Beto’s hair would be on fire and he would have surgically attached flippers instead of arms.

Black Friday is a day that some people look forward to.  While I don’t share in their enthusiasm, I can understand it.  There is something about shopping that makes people feel good, unlike the turkey tartare I tried to serve the family on Thanksgiving.  Who knew you had to thaw the turkey before sticking it in the oven?

Shopping is of vital importance to businesses they want to capture as much of your money as possible.  They study ways to arrange merchandise so it is most attractive, to create advertisements that engage with your psychology to drive you to purchase, and purchase from them.  If you look at shopping as a science, shopping has been studied by economists, business majors, and psychologists more thoroughly than I studied Cindy Crawford’s, umm, charm, in my younger days.

Remember, actresses are different than models – actresses can read.  Also, I don’t know if I can fit an actress in the basement freezer.

Again, I don’t begrudge people who are on a tight or fixed budget that are attempting to get a good deal – that would be heartless.  But yet, isn’t Black Friday based at least in part in . . . greed?

The idea of getting a 65-inch 4K Philips ® television for $78 when it normally retails for $448 is the essence of Black Friday.  $10 Crock© pots with a $10 mail-in rebate are Black Friday.

If you buy three Rose Tico figures, you’ll spike worldwide sales by 3000%, and give Disney ® hope that Star Wars:   The Ruse of Soywalker © will be successful!

Why do we get such satisfaction over buying things?

• It is wired into us – once upon a time, we were hunter/gatherers. This is similar – shopping is gathering.  Hunting is still hunting, which is good.  Work?  Work is where men go to avoid gathering and think about hunting.
• Shopping distracts us from our problems. If we’re worried or sad? Retail therapy can be cheap if you have inexpensive tastes.  But when the shopping is done – if you have a real problem like having surgically attached flipper arms, they’re still there.
• In today’s world, there are a lot of people that live lives that are marked by a nearly complete lack of control. They’re controlled by spouses at home, bosses at work, and the number of choices that the own are small.  Shopping gives them a sense of control.

There was a hurricane this year named Karen.  Managers everywhere quaked with fear.

• Instant satisfaction is built into shopping. Why wait for later, when you can have it now (or in 36 hours with Amazon© Prime?  Rather than wait for what your goal is, you can have some smaller thing now.  And it’s certain.  Who cares if it derails your longer term plans?
• Shopping for neat things floods your brain with serotonin like an autistic clown with a firehose. Serotonin stabilizes mood, so if you’re depressed, shopping can make you feel better, and you don’t need a prescription for Xanax ®.
• Shopping resolves boredom. Kids doing well in school, job going well, no financial problems and relationship with spouse is fine?  So boring.  Hey, let’s spice life up by shopping for things we don’t need!
• When we lived in Alaska, we would go to auctions because it was fun. Every so often some family would say, “that’s it!” and decide to move to the Lower 48. Thus?  I bid $70 on a table saw that I could have bought for (drumroll) $70  yes, it was a pretty crappy saw. Why?  Scarcity.  People were bidding, and, well, I won.  And scarcity is the true key to Black Friday.  Only seven fruitcake-toasters at $92 off the retail price of $292?   I must have one!

Most vices, when kept in check, aren’t a problem.  But Black Friday seems like a drug that’s designed to take advantage of the various satisfactions listed in the bullet points above.  Thankfully, there are other cures.

We live in a society where most of the basic needs are easily met for most people, at least for now.  Yes, you might not have a 65” LED television that doubles as a tanning bed.  But nearly everyone has food.  Nearly everyone has power, heat, and access to a library.  How else could people spend those same hours and minutes that would otherwise be spent in a WWE®-level fight over an inexpensive radium-powered popcorn popper and a coal-powered flashlight?

In breaking news:  Coroners report that Jeff Epstein was injured at a Black Friday sale.

They could write.  They could visit a sick family member.  They could face digestive difficulties because Dad put the frozen turkey in the oven.  They could play cards or board games and have family fun.

Oh, wait:  that describes the Wilder family.  I really should have realized that putting a turkey filled with ice into the oven wasn’t my best idea . . . .

Axis and Allies ®, anyone?  I have Pepto ®.

“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.” – Norman Schwarzkopf

“Nothing leaves alive.” – Dreamcatcher

See, now Darth Vader® has no regrets.  Except for being in Episode III.

Repost from 2019, got to be a bit later than expected.

I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there.  I’ll explain.  It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

I have made many mistakes in my life.  Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.

Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes.  There have been consequences to these.  Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences.  A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24 . . . medium-sized.  Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.

The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those.  Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake.  Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short.  But all stung.  The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding.  I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention.  Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.

Staaaaaart again . . . .

To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have.  If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem.

But I don’t regret it.  None of it.  Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures.

Why?

Life is a one-shot deal.  And life is a ratchet.  It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back.

Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though.  If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret.  Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.

My biggest fear is having a heart attack during a game of charades.

If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself.  Fear of . . . what?  Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed.  Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):

1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing:  regret is for losers.  I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a Democratic presidential debate.  Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.

Me?  I’m still holding out hope for a pyramid.

Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things?  I can’t imagine doing it.  I refuse to let regret rule me.  And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me.  Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why.  Deal with the consequences?  Certainly.  But regret?  No.

Let’s go down the “top five” list:

Not living a life “true to yourself”?  I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life.  I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal.  That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact.  If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty.  The good news?  Anyone who reads this blog is neither.

Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”?  That’s also nonsense.  A soul thrives on doing good work that matters.  Doing good work excellently is hard.  The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters.  Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be.  If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing.  The good news?  Change now.  You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.

I got fired from the calendar factory.  They get really mad when you take a day off.

Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”?  Wow.  This is the weakest on the list, so far.  Number one:  do you have feelings that matter?  Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too.  Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve.  I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs.  I get to choose.  If I feel slighted by something silly or petty?  I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling.  Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing.  Your feelings are often stupid.

I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard.  But it’s really not.  The people you care about, that care about you, are there.  They always have been, they always will be.  I don’t Facebook® much – why?  I call my friends, on an actual phone.  I text my friends.  Am I often the one that calls first?  Sure.  Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while?  Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us?  Maybe.  But I make quite a few phone calls.  And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back.  A few you can share with.

Also, as a single guy it was easy to make friends.  Lots of girls I asked out wanted to be friends.

Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.”  Happy is easy (All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)), being significant is hard.  It requires hard work while being true to yourself.  It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist.  Friends?  The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.

I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it.  I know, I know, it’s too late for them.  And this is the list of people who had regrets.  People like me?  I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life.  Not one.  In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets?  No.  More clam chowder, please,” guy.

The Boy made me some fake ramen noodles this summer – it was an impasta.

To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care.  It’s not that I’m not blameless.  It’s not that I was always right.  Not one of those things is true.  But I have done the most important thing I can think of:  When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t (Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood) do that thing again.  I cannot change the past.  But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake?  Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive.  The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.

And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow.  If you have regrets?  Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose.

The alternative?  Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly.

BONUS SOUP MEME!  I made too much soup meme by accident.  Enjoy.