Lame Repost – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny

“Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!” – Animal House

On this blog recently someone commented, “When I was a kid, people used to say that ‘It’s a free country,’ but they don’t say that anymore.” I tried it out the other day. The response? “It hasn’t been a free country in a while.” I turned him into the FBI for that kind of hate think.

Again, this is a repost from back in 2020, partially because I’m going to add it on the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report page, and partially because it seemed a good fit as we keep sliding down.

I was driving around and one of the videos that was in my suggested list was about “America’s Cold Civil War.” This isn’t a review of the video, but it brought up some interesting points. The one I want to make clear to every single person that loves freedom in the United States is: if you’ve ever seen a movie about that rag-tag elements of a group fighting a foe that has nearly utterly defeated them, it’s us. We are the Wolverines.

I get to be Charlie Sheen, mainly because he’s still alive. I think.

I don’t mean to say that to create a feeling of defeat – far from it. But the first step in dealing with a situation is understanding reality. And reality is very simple today. At a minimum, the Left has coopted the following elements of culture in the United States – they have been, over time, “converged” into Leftism:

The K-12 educational system.
Colleges and Universities.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The psychological establishment.
The American Medical Association.
All mainstream news media.
All mainstream entertainment media.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

This isn’t an accident, it’s entirely by plan. And not only by plan, it’s by a plan that was entirely shared. From Verified Communist Traitor® Herbert Marcuse, in his book Counterrevolution and Revolt (bold added):

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.

I could prove all of the above Institutions have been converged through the Long March Through the Institutions and will probably discuss a few of these in the future, because I could do a post on each one. Heck, maybe it would be a great book, but only if I could figure out how to pair hot chicks and communist propaganda.

East German girl swimmers bench pressing 300 pounds in 1976 is completely normal.

But if you doubt me, you have Google® (itself converged) and you can easily verify list above even through the Leftist-bias that’s now on that search engine. I’ll leave you with one more question: why else would Fortune© 500® corporations sign a manifesto saying profits were less important than social goals if Leftists weren’t in control? Because there were extra doughnuts in the breakroom and they were feeling generous?

In almost any context, these organizations reflect the values of the Left, not of the Right. I specifically don’t use the label conservative here – the conservative movement has utterly failed in the United States (to quote absolutely everyone) to conserve anything. We live a country where adults telling four year old boys that being a girl is okie-dokie (and vice-versa) aren’t thrown directly in prison for a decade or more (after a trial, of course) for child abuse. The goals of the above organizations would be cause for mass revolt if they had been publicized in 1990, but now, despite no vote, no public acceptance, each point of the Left has been accepted as the new normal.

And telling a boy that he’s a girl? Oh, wait, that’s brave. Sorry.

Despite all of that, this is not a post about giving up. Screw that. Each day makes me more independent, not less, more wanting to tell the truth.

And if you’re reading this, no one is done here. Freedom is always the underdog. I really wish we’d just stop waiting until 2:00 in the fourth quarter to start playing.

I remember seeing a film in Social Studies in High School about the Korean War. In the black and white film, almost all of Korea had been lost. The film ended right at what is known as the Pusan Perimeter, right where the North Korean Army was about to kick freedom off of the Korean peninsula, forever. It was tough watching that film.

But then we learned what happened next: MacArthur led the naval invasion of Inchon and turned the tide of battle, leading a combined United Nations® force that cut off the North Koreans. This turned the course of the war, and in the process helped to create the free country of South Korea that is a world leader in technology, bad music videos, and wealth creation today.

Spoiler alert: we tied.

Our Pusan Perimeter is now. I had a great boss once upon a time, he would continually remind me, “John, start with the end in mind,” which is #2 of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As I look at the state of the Right back in 2016, we were at the Pusan Perimeter. As we as a nation blindly stumble toward Civil War II, I can’t predict the outcome, but I can see the full range of outcomes.

We’ll go from best case to worst case for people who love freedom. Although there are variations, I think I’ve captured all of the big picture end games below.

I named operation Aesop after the Raconteur Report’s Aesop. You can read him here (LINK).

Operation Aesop: Total victory.

What it is: The Right wins. Traditional society is restored. Mothers and fathers in committed relationships are again honored. A Constitutional republic of limited government replaces the democracy of unlimited power. The United States is unified. Think of it as a return to the 1950’s, but with color TV and microwaves.

What it takes: Oh, not much more than the bloodiest war in the history of the country. The only way this results in victory is as Von Clausewitz wrote about in On War: [Accomplishing . . . ] “three broad objectives, which between them cover everything: destroying the enemy’s armed forces; occupying his country; and breaking his will to continue the struggle.”

That’s what happened in the first Civil War. That’s what happened to the Germans and Japanese in World War II. The concept of continuing was even more horrific than the concept of trying to continue to fight. It’s total capitulation. This is actual war until the enemy is not capable of continuing. Not talking heads on a television show. Not voting. Not discussion. Not a “mission accomplished” after five weeks moving across Iraq where the “will to continue the struggle” is still clearly intact.

Outcomes: Some freedoms we see now would be curtailed. Political discourse would be constrained. But teenagers would be pretty polite, again. And you wouldn’t really have to worry about the border.

I’m related to Patrick Henry, or so my aunt told me. I like to imagine Patrick getting a bit tipsy and writing mean letters to Madison about how short Madison was and how Dolly might want to give up on the chew.

Operation Founding Fathers: 50 Independent States.

What it is: A return to base principles. Originally, the United States was conceived as just that, independent free States. The majority of decisions to be made were to be made at the state, and not the Federal level. Each state was to be free to make decisions. Texas could be Texas. California could be Venezuela. Vermont could be stoned. The free decisions of free States was allowed. The free movement of free peoples was likewise allowed. This is returning to that state.

What it takes: Leftist thought is built around the universal adoption of their principles. Individuals in society cannot be left to make decisions, so this is a hateful outcome to the Left. I recall discussing politics with a Leftist when I was younger. The Leftist thought I was on the Right. That, at least they could deal with. When I identified as a Libertarian®? The look of disgust was clear – the Left hated Libertarians™ more than they hated the Right. The Right was merely amused and not threatened by Libertarians©. Maybe it was the Star Wars® shirts and poorly trimmed beards?

That taught me one thing: the thing the Left hates the most is . . . freedom. Liberty. In many ways the Left would rather lose a shooting war and be subjugated to the views of the Right than to be allowed to turn Seattle into the Siberia of the PacNorthwest.

The only way this can take place outside of warfare is a Second Constitutional Convention. I think that alone would lead to a shooting war from the Left and a complete revolt from all of the Leftist institutions shown above. But we can dream that the Second Constitutional Convention would turn out well. If we did it, oh, in the next year. The clock is ticking on this being a viable outcome. It’s probably time to do it now. As in, well, now. Conservatives (not the Right) seem to feel that everything is going to come out fine, so until the wolf is at the door, I don’t think they’ll move an inch.

The problem is that Conservatives (again, not the Right) seem to think that the Left likes the Constitution. Since the Left gained the institutions I’ve listed above, the Left doesn’t care about the Constitution – the Left cares about power. Pure, unadulterated, 18 year old with a 12 pack of Coors Light™ behind the wheel of a 1969 Camero® power.

Outcomes: In many ways this is the best outcome, but in my opinion the most unlikely. This is the only outcome where we can still have the full freedom of political discourse and the full Bill of Rights. I’d love to turn over freedom to choose to a California that can choke itself to death on Leftist feelgoodism while a Rightist Arizona can deny admission to every illegal and return them via a trebuchet if they want to.

I was expecting more girls in bikinis from Bruckheimer, but this is a good start.

Operation Fort Sumter: Going our separate ways.

What it is: Secession. Splitting up. It’s not you, it’s me Oregon. The problem is that unlike in 1860, the dividing lines aren’t so clear. Then there was a line which, if everyone agreed, would have been fine for a split. The North could be the North, the South could be the South. Oops. Now it would be a county by county fight.

What it takes: Just like a psycho ex-girlfriend, if the Right tried to succeed in Texas, the Left wouldn’t accept it, and would demand tanks on the banks Red River by morning, which would be hilarious because tanks don’t float. Unless the secession were overwhelming in number of states, numbers of the armed forces, and nearly immediate, I see only a small path to a peaceful secession. For secession to stick, the Left and Right would have to feel that conquering the other side was more costly than trying to forge a peace.

Outcomes: If secession happened and was maintained, the United States would be irrevocably broken, unless it was re-stitched by a Caesar sequentially conquering the Balkanized United States. Maybe Caesar Pugsley Wilder the First?

Think they need a reason to send you to the Gulag? Sure they do! It’s Monday – that’s good enough.

Operation Gulag in The Dakotas:

What it is: This is the darkest timeline not only for our nation but for our world. And, amazingly, the only timeline (outside of a Second Constitutional Convention) that we can vote ourselves into. It is the Leftist takeover of everything. Although it is sold as a Denmark, in reality Denmark is capitalist with stronger social institutions because Denmark is, well, Danish and I think they put mayo on their fries. In the United States it will look much more like the U.S.S.R. – but not the basketcase 1988 U.S.S.R., but more like the 1932 “starve to death millions of citizens that Stalin doesn’t like” (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) U.S.S.R.

What it takes: Nothing. We keep going as it is. In less than 20 years, we will be in complete tyranny. The erosion of rights we have seen won’t continue in a linear fashion. It will accelerate.

Outcomes: 1984.

Now we know the stakes.

Big Brother is our friend! And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Total Recall: Looking Back On The COVID Crisis

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in? I didn’t even know sleep. It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn” – Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup. I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman.”

[Wilder Note: I’ve been meaning to dig this post out for a while, especially since something that WordPress did mangled a bit of the original with weird characters. I wrote it originally on March 25, 2020. This was meant as a prediction of what we’d see going through the ‘Rona. It has been wilder than even I would expect, and in many ways I think I undersold what we’d see. That being said, I’m not sure we’re done going through The Cliff phase and into Disillusionment. I’d love your feedback.]

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost. Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target. I call that a win-win. Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See? You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice. When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch. Good times. I do have a concern: The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR. I want to be treated as more than a sexual object. I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriere, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months. While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do. Certainly, we want to get this all behind us, in the rearview, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop. Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough. I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned? Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis. This provides way in which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the others this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.

This is like the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind. Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind? It’s so nice and cheery. The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar? Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis. It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I. Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say no. The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment. With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu? We don’t trust the media very much. Why? They don’t seem trustworthy. Example: when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist. When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN© and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf: in the end, the wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be. It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War. The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was. It’s the spark that lights the fire. When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards. The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently. It is disruptive. It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system. In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant. COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy. Was it poised for a fall anyway? Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts: what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it. When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch. Why? Habit, partially. But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person. It’s more inertia. You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction. COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu. But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States. Italy is locked down. In two weeks, we will know more. In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it. But the rules are new, and unknown. What to do? One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or? One could Panic. Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality. So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time? Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®? Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought? Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk. I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show. Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism. Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism is realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required. Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story: Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard. She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover. Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover. Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover. Why ration needles and sugar? To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part. To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going. Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK). Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners. My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy. Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order. In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did. Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff. I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff. Is it certain that there is one? No. But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there. I believe we will see it. The new normal will grow from events moving quickly. Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home-cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home-cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough. How deep will it go? As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows. The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so. Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense. 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments. The average monthly car payment is $800. Me? I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole. But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off. The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through. The second best restaurant didn’t survive. There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses. I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt. Overall loss to the economy? 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case? Sure. We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good. We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up. That’s the best case. And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is. If we’re lucky.

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck. We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over. Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal. Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope. The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be. Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves. The length of time Disillusionment lasts? Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff. Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly. Rebuilding the economy will take years. If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly? The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive. Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important. Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding. Dishwashers on the Internet. Amazing. My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time. Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her! They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)

“Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos® and masturbating does not constitute plans in my book.” – Breaking Bad

In a constantly downward spiral, Kermit finally found the downside in living his best life.

I thought I’d take a bit of a night off, here’s something that many current readers might not have seen . . . .

A few weeks ago my daughter, Alia S. Wilder was in town. We were in the middle of preparing dinner of steak, steak, and more steak for the grill when I saw Alia diving face first into a plate of cookies.

When she came up for air I asked innocently, “I thought you were on the keto diet?”

I did notice a mood change when I was on the keto diet: I got tired of cheese and my only joy in life consisted of watching television shows about murder.

“No, she said, “I’m living my best life.” I could even hear the italics in her voice. It’s amazing how well font choice carries in my kitchen. I think it’s the tile.

John Wilder: “Umm, what exactly does ‘my best life’ mean?” I thought I could tell by context, but I wanted to give her a chance to explain.

Alia S. Wilder: “It’s living your life by being who you are naturally. It’s doing what you want.”

I slowly shook my head. That’s exactly what I thought it was. Cue volcano erupting:

One of the nice things about being a parent is that you can be honest with your children when they are being utterly foolish. This was one of those times.

My first words were: “You know this is going to go into the blog, right?”

Is this why they hold the neighborhood block party when we leave for vacation?

I then started a tirade. As this was the second time that I’d met her boyfriend, you’d think I’d hold back to give a good impression that I was a nice, genteel father who wears cardigan sweaters and puts on loafers and talks to hand puppets as if they were real. You’d be wrong, and I tried the hand puppet thing, but one of my personalities thought it was creepy. No, Mr. Rogers© wasn’t here that night. I let loose with a full broadside worthy of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

I was a horrible pirate captain. They told me, “The cannon be ready,” and I responded “are.”

“You realize that’s the single stupidest piece of advice you’ve ever been given, right?” I continued, not even having gotten warmed up yet. “It’s the advice a teenager thinks up in the shower and then considers it a deep thought because, well they’re a teenager in middle school, and middle school age children are the single stupidest subspecies ever set loose on planet Earth.” I paused for breath. You need decent lung capacity if you’re going to go into full rage enhanced by spittle.

I continued. “Why is it stupid? Because people are awful. You’re awful. I’m awful. We have to work each minute to NOT do what we’d like, because what we’d like to do, if left only to our own desires is . . . also awful. You, me, every single one of us.”

I could feel the full rolling boil starting.

“Living my best life is the strategy of a three-year-old that wants to eat an entire box of Oreos® at one sitting and then lie about it and blame the poodle. Living my best life combines all of the worst ideas of abandoning duty, honor, and responsibility in only four words: ‘living my best life.’ Oh, I decided not to work today. I’m living my best life. I decided that I would rather spend my money on avocado-flavored non-fat organic vaping juice rather than baby formula. I’m living my best life. I don’t care if I offended you, I have to speak my truth when living my best life. Oh, I’m sorry Western Civilization, we can’t go back to the Moon and advance the human race to the stars because I’m busy shopping. I’m living my best life.”

What came to my mind during this tirade conversation were the words of the dead French scientist, mathematician, religious philosopher and part-time Uber driver Blaise Pascal:

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing that he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus, it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing that one is wretched.”

In this quote when Pascal wrote “wretched,” he meant, “of inferior quality; bad.”

Follow your nose, it always knows. Specifically all about pressure, mathematics, and designing a computer by the age of 19, in 17^th Century France.

Pascal didn’t think mankind was naturally awful, he knew that mankind was naturally awful: prideful, selfish, lustful, mean, and greedy. I’m not sure how Pascal got that idea, maybe he was picked on about nose size when he was in middle school. But he was correct. We’re inferior. But our greatness comes not from that obvious inferior quality, it comes from knowing that you’re awful, and then not being awful.

If we know that we’re awful, we can do something about it. If we think that being awful is okay, that we can live our best life, then it’s an excuse to be awful. In fact, it’s worse than that. Aleister Crowley wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which has been appropriated by the Church of Satan® and correctly interpreted to mean . . . do whatever you want to do.

Apparently living your best life allows you to dress like Dr. Evil on a regular basis.

One particular website (not gonna given ‘em a link, they’re the first one listed when you Google® “living my best life”) has a list, which includes the following gems of personally corrosive advice on how to live your best life (note, my comments are in italics):

Do what you want – let your inner three-year-old make all your decisions.
Speak your truth – not the truth, your truth since hearing the actual, real truth from other people might make you sad.
Practice sacred self-love – and everyone should celebrate you for your sacred self-love since you deserve to live your best life because you suffered so much because of your (INSERT VICTIM STATUS QUALIFICATION HERE).

Not all of the advice on the website was horrible, but most of it was shallower than the gene pool that produced Johnny Depp your typical congressman.

So, under this philosophy, if I’m fat, the problem isn’t that I’m fat and should have fewer cookies: the problem is the world is fataphobic.
If I think I’m a cat, the problem isn’t that I’m delusional: the problem is that the world is transspeciesphobic.
If I think that being an American has nothing to do with the values and norms of the last 300 years: the problem is your problem for being tied to the past.

When the cookies ran out, the monster came out.

So, in summary, living your best life is nothing more than permission to be the very worst person you can be. All that being said, Alia S. Wilder really does make some tasty cookies.

Negotiation: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

“We have been negotiating with men in UFOs for seven years. If we don’t get to Washington by Friday, the whole deal will be off.” – Real Men

Johnny Depp is sorry he doesn’t have Amber Heard immunity.

Elon has been negotiating for Twitter®, recently. I thought I’d dust off some old comments about negotiation that I had laying around. He is looking for a deal. In most of his career, his deals have been very much of the “there’s no way that will ever work” type of deal. He made $3billion off of PayPal™ and then risked it all on SpaceX®. That deal and his hair plugs have worked out very, very well for him, so I bet he’ll be able to close the Twitter™ deal.

So, I thought a post about negotiation was in order.

Why talk about negotiation now? As society changes, there are going to be many, many points where deals will be made. I can’t predict what deals will be available, but you’ll never know when you might need to swap some pickled yak funk for a tub of dingo chum. Mmm, fresh dingo chum.

I have observed that the people who get wealthy off of deals look at many more deals than they ever make. The last time I played poker (years ago), I played 30 hands for the evening. I won two. I walked out of the place with thirty bucks – I had started with twenty. I would have made more, but I kept trying to lose after a certain point so I didn’t walk out of my neighbor’s house $80 up. I would have considered that rude because it was the first time I played poker there.

Lots of bad deals, two winning deals.

That lesson leads to the zeroth rule, mainly because I realized I was done with the rest of them and am too lazy to renumber everything.

Rule 0: The Stakes

It’s easier to win or create great deals when the stakes are so small that you can think calmly and rationally. Hence: rich dudes (say, Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos) can make lots of small bets that were white-knuckle negotiations on the other side of the table. Jeff Bezos probably uses living human kidneys (still in the human) as table stakes at his poker games.

The Mrs. wanted to play strip poker, but I figured she just wanted to do laundry. So I folded.

Rule 1: BATNA

The first rule of negotiation is that you don’t have to end up with an agreement – you need to know your BATNA – Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In the poker example, I folded and was out a buck or two on each hand I walked away from. Several times in my life I’ve walked away from job offers because they weren’t right, and no amount of negotiation could have made them right.

Sometimes, (really most times) the best deal is no deal. Take my ex-wife. Please.

Rich people generally walk away from most deals. People like Warren Buffet could literally do almost any deal he wanted to do, since most companies are smaller than the available cash that Warren keeps in the sweaty folds of his skin. Buffet reminds me of the story about the guy on the golf course who kept talking about how much money he was worth. Another golfer, an old Texan, couldn’t stand it.

“How much are you worth, son?” asked the Texan.

“Fifteen million dollars,” the other golfer said, proudly.

The Texan responded . . . “Flip you for it.”

The question you have to ask is . . . what happens if you don’t come to an agreement?

If you’re Buffett, there’s no deal you have to make. But me? That’s a different story. Sometimes there are consequences from missing deals – sometimes significant.

One particular negotiation that I had to make involved negotiation over some land with a guy worth about $80 million bucks. That leads to rule 1A (yup, being lazy again).

A lion would never play golf, but a Tiger Wood.

Rule 1A: If you can help it, NEVER negotiate with someone worth $80 million because they don’t care, so there is no BATNA-level leverage. Unless the deal is ludicrously good for them, they have NO reason to even speak with you. Unless, your kid is in the same calculus class and football team as their kid, which my kid was. So, the rich guy talked with me.

He offered my company his land at ten times the going rate.

Our alternative as a company? It was spending several million more than his offer on another patch of land. We almost bought the other land, on principle, but my boss decided that he didn’t want to explain why he spent several million dollars because he had no leverage in a deal.

The rich guy? He literally wouldn’t have cared. Our deal, as awful as it was, was worth more than the average family makes in years, and was literally a favor because his kid went to school with my kid.

Sometimes your alternative sucks. But we had one.

Another big mistake is buying into the frame of reference of the other party. If his opening position is that he’ll trade you a handful of magic beans for your two children, negotiating him down to just one child isn’t awesome negotiation (unless you really want him to take both). No, the deal is bad and probably isn’t worth negotiation.

Rule 2: Don’t negotiate against yourself.

I worked with a guy who I’ll call Moe (because that was his name) who was a genius at negotiation. We would drive around on company time and he would take me, the new kid at work, out to look at “jobsites”. This may or may not have involved beer on several occasions.

Sometimes, these trips would involve Moe’s personal shopping, as well. He was a golfer, and one time we walked into a golf shop and he asked about a specific club. He then proceeded just to walk around the store, and the clerk would follow him around, constantly lowering the price. The clerk was negotiating against himself, while Moe looked disinterested, and cut the price of the club in half without Moe saying a word. I tried the same tactic later that week at a furniture store – same result.

Rule 3: When you get to yes, shut up.

This one is pretty simple. I constantly tell that to Pugsley after I’ve agreed with his latest crazy scheme. “You got to yes, shut up. Keep talking and it might turn to no.”

I’ll just shut up now.

How do we know that aliens aren’t vegan and don’t do Cross-Fit®? Because they would have told us.

Rule 4: The deal isn’t done until the deal is done.

When I bought my first car from a dealer (which was a huge mistake in itself), I was surprised that negotiation wasn’t done. We had just negotiated price. Then there was financing. And undercoating. And floor mats. And add on maintenance contracts. And a timeshare in Bermuda. And about half a dozen other things. The deal wasn’t done until after another dozen “deals” were done where I had to say, “No” again and again and again. They tend to push these deals on me after hours of negotiation, when I was tired.

Rule 5: The more information you have the better you can understand what a good offer is, and whether to accept it.

Whenever you negotiate for a job, the employer has more information – how much they can offer for the job, and what other things they can do to sweeten the deal. One colleague I know started a job in management at a company after accepting their offer. Three months later, a new employee of his started, a new employee he had hired. The new employee had gotten a signing bonus: my colleague hadn’t. Heck, one time my boss offered to give me a bonus if I acted like a frog. I jumped at that opportunity.

Oops. He was forever upset about it, and it later cost him his job because he was always griping. Goes to show the moral of that old joke is right: Why did my chicken cross the road? The road betrayed him first.

Rule 6: Know what is important to the other party.

It might be money. It’s probably money. But it also might be looking good to their boss. Understand what they want, and then see how to best give it to them. It might be something simple like being able to leave early every other Thursday at 3pm. It might be that they won’t stop until you give them a coat made from bigfoot hair stained from a pigment derived from the colors Rudy Giuliani leaves on his towels.. Or maybe it might even be something unreasonable.

Rudy was my attorney on a speeding ticket once. He successfully got it pled down to second-degree murder.

Rule 7: If you live longer than age five . . . you will run into unethical negotiators.

They might lie. Which looks and sounds a LOT like bluffing. But it’s not, and you know the difference.

They might threaten. One salesman always talked about all the people that got fired for buying the competing product from his competitor. How did that affect me? It made me want to never buy his product (I’m contrarian that way – push me on fear and I never trust you).

They might try to impact the negotiation by “accidentally” letting information slip. Information carefully prepared to skew your decision or offer.

My best advice? Be honest. No one can cheat an honest man.

Always be ready to walk. Most of the time there are other deals.

Except for Elon. I think he’ll negotiate so hard against the Twitter® board that they’ll need tweetment.

Real Life isn’t exactly like Twitter™. Women seem to get upset if you follow them.

41 Things I Think I Know (2022 Revision)

“That’s a short list. That can’t be everyone you want to kill. Are you sure you’re not forgetting someone? – Game of Thrones

The Mrs. asked me to put ketchup on the shopping list. Now I can’t read it.

This is a revamp of an older post from way back in 2017. Are these fundamental rules? No. But between when I first wrote them and today I didn’t see much I’d change, except item 22.

Tell the truth. This will have the beneficial added benefit of changing your behavior so you’re not ashamed of what you do. The whole truth. Even about that. And that. People might not like you, but they’ll respect you. Except for the thing about the cat. Keep that to yourself – no one will understand.
Showing up on time is important. It shows respect. It is also is easy to track, if you’re a boss wanting to get rid of people. Even if you do a great job, you’ll be the first to go if you show up late. I guess that’s changed since the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions – everyone has stopped Russian.
Don’t give up. Sometimes break-out success means ten years of study and effort and of not giving up. Even Johnny Depp succeeded, which proves that anyone can.
There are no friends like those formed in youth. When you’re ten, there are no pretenses. The cruel calculus of testosterone and estrogen has yet to set in. Greed is not an issue.
Be nice. Life is already really hard enough for many people. Don’t be their villain, unless it pays really well, and even then, the karma is . . . tough.

One time I asked for a lobster tail at dinner. The waitress started, “Well one day this brave lobster . . . .”

When you speak, or write, or think, you own the space between the words. You have the ability to turn your words into something amazing, since infinite possibility lies between one word and the next. This is the one most people will ignore, but one of my most powerful things that I found out for myself.
Don’t continually do things you hate, or things that make you feel like a failure. Putting yourself in situations like that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also destroys your ability to naturally smell like musk and sandalwood.
Apologize. But only when you are wrong, which, if you regularly read this blog, is hardly ever. If you were not wrong, don’t apologize.
Be of value. If you don’t contribute, you’re part of the problem. Which problem? All of them.
Don’t make yourself into a victim. Almost everybody is where they are because of their choices. Own your choices, and own your outcomes. No one likes victims.

Jussie was just sent to prison. I hope he doesn’t beat himself up over that.

If you really are a victim? Act like you’re not. Because even if victimhood status is legit, see item 10. No one likes people who act like victims, even when they really are.
Opportunity is found where responsibility is neglected.
Solve someone else’s biggest problem: that’s the virtuous road to wealth. It’s also harder.
Remember, giving a gift creates a debt in the mind of the recipient. The larger the gift, the bigger the debt. And nobody likes someone they owe a lot of money to – giving large gifts can make people not like you.
If you don’t want to go to bed because you don’t want to get up tomorrow? Fix your life.
If you don’t want to get out of bed because you don’t want to live the day? Fix your life.
Have children and have them early. But only if you have a spouse. And can keep your spouse.
Cooking your own food is cheaper. And it gives time for conversation. Some of the best conversations occur around the barbeque grill and the deck late into the night.

I grilled for the board of directors once. It pleased the steakholders.

Be tough when you have to be. To be kind when toughness is required results in tragedy.
A pleasure repeated too often becomes a punishment.
Beware of ignoring public opinion. Public opinion resulted in witch burning, the guillotine and Hula Hoops ®. You can be on the other side, but understand there may be consequences.
Don’t see conspiracy when simple laziness, plain stupidity, or normal greed would explain the situation just as well. Removed after living through 2019, 2020, 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.
Schools used to be run by school boards. Now they’re run by unions and lawsuits. None of these groups have the students in mind.
You don’t win ‘em all. Deal with it.
You are the sum of your experience, your intellect, your body, your surroundings, and the people you interact with. You also control your own change. So, get up. The you of today isn’t ready for tomorrow unless the you of today is changing to meet those challenges.
Betrayal of trust is an indication of character. Never trust someone who betrays you. Forgive? Perhaps. Trust again? Never.
Real personal changes don’t happen unless an emotional experience occurs. The bigger the change, the more significant the experience needed.

What’s worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? Getting shot.

You have your shot. Would have and could have don’t exist. (Unless the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics is correct, in which case all things happen, so have another beer.)
The best (and maybe only) way to win at gambling is to own the casino.
No matter how awesome your idea, it has no value unless you make it real. This takes risk, execution, and work. Which is a lot more difficult than talking about your wonderful idea.
Unless your boss is a good boss, being younger and smarter than him won’t impress him, it will make him jealous or fearful. Neither of those things are good.
Having a boss that makes less money than you is also not good. Envy is a powerful emotion.
Know the strengths and weaknesses of your (biological) parents. You’re not too much different than them. At best, you can avoid their weaknesses. At worst, you’ll follow every one of their downsides.
Tip well, if you can afford it. Waiting on tables is tough work. And if you do tip well? They’ll remember you and take care of you. It’s nice to show up and find the right bottle of wine waiting for you.
You’re not going to win the lottery. Unless it’s the one that Shirley Jackson wrote about. (LINK)
If you’re traveling in winter, travel on the top half of your gas tank. It doesn’t cost any more.
Keep your napkin in your lap while at the dinner table.
Always use deodorant. And if in doubt? Have a breath mint, too.
Keep in touch with people who have helped you, so you can help them. And because you’re a person.
If you have too much stuff, your stuff will own you. Except books. You can have as many of those as you want. And ammo.
The only way that you can know another person across centuries is to read what they’ve written. Have you written anything worthy of reading by your great-great grandchildren? No? Get to work.

What’s the name of the Grim Reaper’s dog? Snuffles.

You’re going to die, and we all die alone. Understand that the only person with you throughout your life is . . . you. Be prepared to keep yourself and those you love alive in any emergency you can imagine. Our time will come when it comes, but there’s no reason not to push it back as far as you can.

Bikini Economics, Guns, and the Problem with Free Stuff

Attention – this is a repost from 2019, though still very, very valid. Had a mechanical issue to fix around the house (stuff you don’t want to freeze) but that’s all (fingers crossed) fixed. Regardless, no time for a new post. Enjoy!

“Good job, isn’t it? Type something will ya, we’re paying for this stuff.” – Ghostbusters

I like guns. And butter. Especially cocoa butter. Admit it – you’ve never enjoyed economics more.

Economics means choices.

One choice presented by Marxist economics professors to hung-over sophomores in college is between “guns or butter.” This is a classic economic model. In it, a choice is presented: produce guns for defense, or food for the people, or another shot of Jägermeister© before Calc 201. I added the Jägermeister® for the sophomores. No one should have to learn 3-space vector calculus sober.

The idea is that there is some balance where government can feed people just enough so that they can make guns for beautiful Marxist bikini soldiers to take over the world with love and kindness and AK-47s. In this fable, once the world chooses peace (that means Marxism), guns will no longer be produced and the glorious workers will now luxuriate in a worker’s paradise.

These are the deep thoughts of a dimwitted socialist like Kamala Harris, or of an overly caring 11 year-old who is earnestly trying to solve the world’s problems. But I repeat myself.

Don’t be mean to Kamala. She already enough difficulty explaining to her husband why she’s in the top results for “slept her way to the top” on a Google® image search (this is true).

Just because Marxists were wrong about economics doesn’t mean that economies that there aren’t economic choices to make. There are. The biggest actual economic choice to make is whether to spend the output of that economy on building additional productive capacity or on Free Stuff.

Building additional production is investment in the economy. Sure, Leftists like to use “investment” as just another word for Free Stuff, but investment, by definition, produces a return. In the case of investment in an economy, after the investment is done the economy produces more than it did before. Instead of dividing a finite economic pie between guns or butter, the genius of investment is that it creates a bigger pie for everyone. By definition, that’s a win, because it also means more guns for everyone!

There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to lie. If she’s holding an AK, it’s time to lie.

This was self-evident in Western Civilization during the Cold War. We picked the strategy that we invest in our economies so that they became larger, and we’d defeat Communism by out producing them. In order to do that, we increased freedom of the free market so that instead of handfuls of production bureaucrats and commissars guessing what should be produced, millions of free people experimenting in an open economy would make that choice. The winners were selected by the market, and even when things like the Hula-Hoop® or Justin Bieber became wildly popular, industrial capacity was increased all across Western Civilization (and Japan, which had largely adopted all of the winning parts of Western Civilization).

I would try to Hula Hoop©, but last time the neighbor called an ambulance because they thought I was having a seizure.

We allowed this to guide our military spending, too. Multiple companies competed to produce new jet fighters that were more capable, missiles that were more accurate. The technical prowess of the military came not from a top-down dictate, but from the companies competing to produce better defense products. Sure, some of them were horrible, but most of our equipment and doctrine was better than the Soviet stuff. How much better? Ask Saddam Hussein.

As the focus of our economy was growth, the economy grew. How big did it grow? It grew to the point where Reagan could consciously bankrupt the entire guns and butter Soviet economy through pretending that the Star Wars™ missile defense was going to make intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete. The economy of Western Civilization was such a potent weapon because it harnessed the ingenuity of everyone through capitalist incentives and rewards. The system of capitalism was so obviously successful that China®, Inc. decided to copy it for their economy and get rid of the silly Maoist collectivism. Keep in mind, capitalism does not mean freedom.

Economies still have limits. There’s a maximum amount of “stuff” that the economy can produce, and certainly there’s a limit based on sheer physics, if nothing else, though we’ve yet to see it. The real choice isn’t guns or butter, it’s investment versus Free Stuff. It used to be that money mattered, but that was in the time before Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) fans tossed bottles of Jägermeister© into Congress and told ‘em to spend as much as they wanted.

If Venezuela had a dollar for every time giving out Free Stuff worked, they’d have zero dollars. Oh, that’s exactly what Venezuela has. Never mind.

What Free Stuff do the Leftists want to toss out?

“Free” Healthcare – for everyone. Including illegal aliens. You might think that they don’t give it away now – they do. A pregnant illegal alien show ups to have a baby? You get to pay for that right now. I guess the good news is you don’t have to change it’s diaper.
“Free” Daycare – for everyone. Why? Because who could be better at raising your children than the state. They do such a good job at the DMV.
“Free” College – for everyone. That kid that sat behind you with his finger up his nose, who talked about how he wanted to ride a tyrannosaurus on Mars? When he was a senior in high school? Yeah, he gets free college, too. Although riding a tyrannosaurus on Mars does sound cool.
“Free” Income – for everyone. Why not give everyone $1000 a month for free. It won’t distort the economy at all.
“Free” Reparations – not for everyone. People who were never slaves would get paid by people who never had slaves, for the sin of slavery. Makes about as much sense as the rest of this list.
“Free” Housing – just not in the gated communities where Congressmen live.

Oh, and don’t forget regulations, since regulations is another way to give Free Stuff. They take freedom from the economy and create winners and losers. The Green New Deal is an example of this – the idea of the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment – it’s all about creating a socialist economy. In the words of AOC’s advisor: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Regulations are used to change the economy.

Take a look at all of the innovation spawned by Communism!

At some point Free Stuff will grow to encompass the entire economy leaving nothing for productive growth. Ever notice that every Communist economy freezes at the technology level (outside of military technology) that existed when it went Commie? Cuba is a great example, what with all of the vintage 50’s Ford® and Chevy© rust buckets and fine Soviet cars they have on the streets. If only they would have waited until the 1970’s to go Communist they could have had Ford© Pintos™. That would have made driving exciting!

The same thing happened in Venezuela. PDVSA was a very profitable oil company before Hugo Chavez gutted it to provide Free Stuff to the Venezuelan people. Now? PDVSA is deeply in debt and incapable of producing as much oil as it did in 1998, despite having 77.5 billion barrels of reserves.

Yeah. Free Stuff can make a country bankrupt.

The nice thing about this concept is that it also applies to individuals. Every day each of us has a choice: do we work to make ourselves better, or do we goof off? The choice is an important one.

Do you invest time in increasing your capabilities every day? Do your work to make yourself better? I mean, really work? Take Steve Martin’s advice – “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” (“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.)

You have the choice. And time is running out. And I’m certain you can’t afford Free Stuff.

You’re Not Alone

Got home late, and feeling a bit under the weather. Got 90% through a new post, but then the tired hit. The good news? I’m way ahead on next Friday’s post!

“Théoden King stands alone.” – Lord of the Rings

Google® is so biased they only ranked our Solar System one star.

Originally this was going to be an economic post (as is usual for Wednesday) about Crisis Capitalism and how this particular Crisis, like many others in the past will be used to concentrate wealth even more, perhaps with bikini graphs. Maybe the bikinis get smaller as the economy shrinks? At least that would bring some good out of the current crisis. Plus I’ll always be known as “the guy who made economics interesting at last.”

That post will have to wait until next Wednesday.

What hit me today was an onslaught of news. Not one story, but nearly every story I read was about deplatforming or attempting to silence alternative viewpoints to the conventional narrative as seen on TV. In rapid-fire, I saw stories about deplatforming of news and opinion outlets, deplatforming of individuals and doxing (making private personal information public of non-public figures) of pre-teens(!) for thoughtcrime.

Heck, there was even a Serbian soccer player (playing soccer for an American pro soccer team) that was fired (after he was made to apologize) for comments his wife made on social media. And his wife made those comments in Serbian. I guess that he should have done his manly best and kept her home without access to electronic media devices? Is the message that athletes should take away from this is that they should keep their women on a shorter leash?

Is this the Left telling men that they need to be more patriarchal and tell their women to be seen and not heard?

But his wife wanted to go anyway.

But the seemingly disjointed activities all had one purpose: to make you feel alone.

The biggest story is that Zero Hedge® was cut off from Google® advertising revenue. Since ZH™ is a for-profit company, this will hurt them. Why was it cut off? The story I saw indicated that it was because people commenting on the site were being less than politically correct. And, yes, Google® has the legal right to do this, unless they did it because Zero Hedge© is transgender.

No, I don’t have examples, but these are commenters, not ZH© staff. I jumped in to see the comment section on a typical post that I thought might be incendiary. Would all the comments be safe to repeat at work? No. Have I seen worse comments on Twitter®? Yeah, a lot worse. I’ve seen worse commentary on Yahoo® news stories.

Zero Hedge™ has already been banned “permanently” once by Twitter©, and then reactivated. The reason given was that Zero Hedge® had “doxed” a Chinese researcher . . . by publishing information that was already on the Wuhan Institute for Creating COVID Virology’s website. As of now? They’re unbanned. Twitter© called it “an error.”

But it’s clear that they have made someone angry.

How much will it Google’s deplatforming cost Zero Hedge©?

I have no idea.

Google® did give a four star rating to Chernobyl. They would have given it five, but the locals ran out of fingers.

I do know that The Federalist™, another website was threatened with Google® demonetization due to comments on articles like this one (LINK). The Federalist© just shut off comments entirely.

And that just might be the point.

Comments here are (generally) fairly unmoderated. I think that outside of auto-moderated comments, I’ve nuked only one or two comments out of thousands during the life of this blog. I am blessed with some of the smartest, most well read, and politest commenters on the planet. You’re also probably the most physically attractive commenters on any website in existence, and I bet you all have impeccable armpit hygiene to boot. But the comment section gives people a chance to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and get to know each other. It also is a little light on a dark Internet letting you know that you’re not alone.

Even the people who don’t comment benefit from the comments section. For each person who comments, at least 100 other readers don’t comment. But they read what you say. And it’s important to them, and lets them know that they’re not alone, either.

Then there’s Laura Towler.

Laura is a British YouTuber® who is on the Right. On June 6, she sent the following Tweet® and got the reply that follows it:

“Chuffed” is slang that means “happy as a poodle with a pudding pop.”

This all went international. The idea that a company would be so “brave” as to come out in favor of a group that is only supported to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the largest tech companies and most of the largest news companies is really risky.

To boot, Yorkshire Tea© then picked on a (nearly) unknown individual citizen. Brave, indeed – I’m sure that Laura is quite the power to be reckoned with given her 50,000 or so YouTube™ subscribers. And Yorkshire Tea® is so small, being the biggest selling tea in Great Britain (which made 5.5 billion tea bags last year).

It’s like Coca-Cola® decided to pick on some kid going to prom.

But it led me to ask this question: Did any of the companies that sponsor BLM even bother to go to the BLM website?

Outside of the cringing references to “comrades” and “collectivism” on the BLM website, they note that BLM wishes to:

“disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and “collectively” care for one another.
They also want to [free themselves] “from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

This is not the language of a civil rights program, it’s the language of a communist front masquerading as a civil rights program. And it’s not even Halloween yet, and I think that all of the cosplay conventions are on Coronahold.

What’s the best way to kill communists? Communism.

We’ve seen that at C.H.A.Z. and virtually every other protest activity that BLM is tied tightly to Antifa. Imagine that C.H.A.Z. wasn’t six blocks being held by armed Leftists, and instead was being held by a militia from the Right. I’d imagine we’d see National Guard Apache helicopters and the Seattle mayor calling for a neutron bomb strike to make the Hug Box of Seattle safe again.

I’m sure someone will bring up the Wildlife Refuge seizure by members of the Right in 2016. But 26 of the occupiers of the Wildlife Refuge were charged with felonies. Care to take bets on if the C.H.A.Z. occupiers will face any criminal charges? Any of them?

Ms. Towler was able to handle the media storm that followed, and not apologize. Heck, her Twitter® feed now cheekily shows “Disavowed by Yorkshire Tea©” as the lead line. That takes style.

But Laura knew she wasn’t alone, and has weathered international condemnation.

It doesn’t stop there.

Russians call their website censoring the Inter-nyet.

The classic (and very boring) movie Gone With The Wind, the television shows of COPS®, Live PD™, and an episode of (the very funny) Fawlty Towers that first aired on October 24, 1975 have since been either hidden or cancelled. Just like statues, these works of art define who we are as a people. And removing them makes us not more, but less.

Every person who has a statue made out of him has something in common with those works of art – they have faults, especially when viewed through the lens of the 2020s. And removing them or hiding them or tearing them down with mob violence is meant to make you feel alone.

If you’re against police corruption and militarization? You’re not alone.

If you’re against excessive use of force by police? You’re not alone.

If you’re against rioting and mob violence? You’re not alone.

If you mock companies that virtue signal popular causes while avoiding tough issues like the near slave labor they use to produce goods that they offshored from American production? You’re not alone.

If you’re against globalism and collectivism? You’re not alone.

I’m not saying that the position of the Right is always the right position. There are times the Right has been wrong. But the positions of the Right aren’t based in hate – they’re based in a love of freedom, or family, or tradition, or nation, or a healthy desire to be religious.

If those things are important to you?

You’re not alone.

And if you suffer from paranoia, you’re not alone. There’s someone behind you.

If you want this nonsense to stop so you can see economic graphs featuring bikinis?

You’re not alone.

Debt, Trench Warfare And An End Of The World Cult You Can Believe In

Had some (planned) other things come up, so one from the vaults that many of you might not have seen . . .

After World War One, the phrase, “Happy as a Hapsburg in Serbia” fell out of favor, as did the “Hair Smile” style of mustache. Or is that Herr Smile?

I’ve already told the story about digging out of debt. In retrospect, it seems to me that all of those stories end up sounding the same: “I weighed six hundred pounds, my kitchen floor was covered in dirty dishes and cat food, and I had $3.7 million in debt until I found Wildernetics© and the First Church of PEZology™. Look at me now!”

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part One). These are from a soldier’s joke newspaper, The Wiper’s (a mangling of Ypres) Times, produced for soldiers by soldiers that found an abandoned printing press.

I know my methods can solve everything, but today I had a crazy idea. How about spending some time talking about how I got into debt in the first place? I know that might cut into the revenue of the Wildernetics© End of the World Cult and Take-Out BarBeQue Restaurant®, but I figure you might come back for the brisket. It’s very tender.

I’ll quit teasing. How did I get into debt? First a little. Then all at once.

Let me rewind a whole marriage. As regular readers will know, The Mrs. was not the first, but she is the final spouse. My first marriage was an example of a series of escalating poor mutual decisions where each side seemed to lack a brief moment of sanity to back out before anyone got hurt, sort of like the run-up to World War I. Even before Archduke Franz Ferdinand proved that .380 ACP was a useful round against Hapsburgs and their notably gelatinous bones, World War I was inevitable. Before I said “I do” everything was in place for the trench warfare of future divorce.

Okay, I apologize for this joke. I think it violated the Geneva Convention.

But, rewinding. After graduating college I got married and got a starter job, which is to say I had a job that just barely paid the bills. Nearly exactly. In fact, after working at the job for a few months, we were exactly (most months) at zero. We weren’t saving any money yet, but we also weren’t in the red. Success. My credit card limit was 10,000 . . . Siberian Lira. This was equivalent to a whole bright and shiny quarter. This helped me stay debt-free.

Then came the table.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Two), this one is for James.

We had a dining room table. It wasn’t great, and the chairs that came with it were a bit ratty – the vinyl arms had been slammed into the table often enough that it looked like a pack of rabid Chihuahuas had spent their lives sitting on the chair seats and gnawing on the arms. I imagine them growling and chewing in unison as they sat around the table, like Viking Chihuahua rowers. Most all of our furniture was second-hand or gifted, but the table really was the biggest eyesore.

Okay, this one isn’t mine, but I couldn’t resist.

At some point, discipline broke. I know how silly it sounds to say that now, but back then, month after month of not buying anything but actual necessities takes more discipline than Elizabeth Warren around a tribal gathering. Eventually, I gave in. We bought the table. Using debt. Back then, individual stores would give you amazing credit limits just to buy their crap. They gave us more than enough credit to buy that table, and with the money I saved from shipping the Chihuahuas back to Denmark, I figured we’d be money ahead.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Three).

The table was only $500, but the difference between having no debt (outside of a mortgage) and having debt, even a small one, was a huge psychological hurdle for me. It’s like having a doughnut when you’re doing low carb. “I got weak had one doughnut, so I might as well have, say, 36. And do you have any whipped cream I could just guzzle straight from the can? I broke my diet, and don’t want to waste it.” Pretty soon other nice-to-have things showed up, very few of which I still own today. But I had crossed that mental barrier from peace (debt-free) to war (spend away!). Suddenly, the credit card companies realized I had debt, and immediately wanted to lend me more money. My credit limits tripled.

I hope that this doesn’t sound like I’m blaming The Ex. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I was fully complicit. Ultimately the debt grew faster than my wages. This led to the idea of grad school: I could get free tuition plus be a paid graduate assistant. Would it work?

Sure. There were also student loans. Free money! Oops.

Okay, let’s all admit that Nachos Bellgrande® is NOT a war crime.

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Four).

There were some places along the way that I could have gotten off the merry-go-round. When I sold that first house to move for a new, post-grad school job, we’d made a stunning 40% profit in three years. It would have more than paid off a good chunk of my student loans. Nope, that would have made too much sense. We did pay down a little debt and bought a new house, putting down the minimum down payment.

But most of the money was just spent. About this time I also had one of the worst ideas I’d ever had in my life. The Ex and I were always arguing about money, and about the thermostat – I knew that 50°F in winter and 90°F in summer were reasonable temperatures, but The Ex disagreed. Well, if she had to pay the bills, she would certainly understand how tight money was. Right?

No.

We had a different view of not only household temperature, but the idea that one should pay monthly bills, well, monthly. I didn’t figure this out for three years, by which time I owed enough money to qualify as a third-world country, but one of the nice, mainly atrocity-free ones. Mainly.

Taco Bell® inspired outfits?

Debt is like George Washington’s description of fire, it’s an amazing tool, but a fearful master. My advice is to pay all of your bills in full, monthly. I know that the people who own your debt disagree. Why? They want you to have debt, as much as you can pay.

I had a friend (since passed away in an accident) who I called Batman© on this blog (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman). He had one particular investment that was worth about $12 million – a series of apartments. He had paid the apartments off before they were even built by selling future property tax credits to other businesses. Yeah, that kind of friend.

But he viewed his tenants as slaves (his term), who went to work daily so they could send him money every week. I heard him use exactly that phrase to describe them. He liked his tenants and was a good landlord. However, he knew the score: when they went to work each day, they went to work so they could pay him.

And Batman was a good guy and he taught kids that debt was a form of slavery of ordinary people to wealthy guys just like him, not that they always listened.

My marriage to The Ex? That particular marriage is proof of the old Henny Youngman joke:

“Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

Yeah, divorce just STARTS the argument.

The day she moved out was one of the happiest days for both of us.

I was still digging myself out of debt when I met The Mrs. As our relationship blossomed, I thought it was only fair to tell her of the debt that I had.

“The Soon To Be The Mrs., I have something to tell you. You might want to sit down.”

The Soon To Be The Mrs. looked shaken. She sat. I told her about my debt. She laughed.

“Is that all? I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

No, not prison.

But I still owed reparations payments to France.

The Way The Constitution Dies

This is a repost, but one that has some meaning to me on the start of Memorial Day weekend. Please, all of you be safe.

Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence. As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us. My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America. It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area. Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily. Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before. I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did. They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade. These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal. Bastogne. Chosin Reservoir. Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944. His sister was a friend of my father. As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math that I would later learn, though he was doing it decades before I was born. He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18. No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name. Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism. The value of the Constitution. The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church. Those boys who traveled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving. The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny? Yes.

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when. A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built. There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms. These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years. It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens. Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population. A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American. 10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night. The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there. I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by. She spoke no English. One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?” I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.” It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States. I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers. Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom. This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark. I love England. I love Denmark. I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee. Or Amerikansk in Denmark. My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English. They wouldn’t be Danish. They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.” Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish. I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria. One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060. The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp. These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity. They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government. Division is the strength of these politicians. “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?” “Abolish ICE.” “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.” “Living wage for all.” “Common sense gun laws.” Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take. They don’t get any of this from their family, either. Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did. It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution. It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text. On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all. But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four. Change that number? Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything. It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it. The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

The Post That Gave The World Bikini Economics: Why MMT Is A Bad Idea.

Life has me trying to pack 32 hours into 24 today, so I’ll leave you with this blast from the past, the famous post that gave us bikininomics. New stuff on Friday.

“Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothing.” – Animal House

The future economic expansion is so bright, she’s gotta shield her eyes with a hat.

So, today I’d like to talk about economics. No, wait, don’t leave! I promise pictures of girls in bikinis if you stay!

Today’s economic idea is a particularly stupid one. Just about as stupid as when the Ming Dynasty tried to disarm Japan by buying all their swords. This really happened around 1432 A.D. (according to some experts) but was less successful than the Ming projected: the Japanese just made more swords – at least 128,000. Today’s stupid idea is called, “Modern Monetary Theory.” Epsilon Theory had an article on it (LINK), and I did some research and thought I’d give you a rundown on this horrible, horrible idea which smells worse than Johnny Depp’s sweat socks after a night running through a farm ditch in Utah. Don’t ask.

Okay, John Wilder, I’ll humor you if you promise bikini pictures. What is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

This poor person is deprived by a Marxist economy, so poor she cannot afford proper clothing and is weak enough from hunger that she’s forced to crawl along the beach.

Here’s a bikini picture to prove that these will be the sexiest graphs in the history of economics. Now pay attention and I’ll explain Modern Monetary Theory. MMT is simple:

The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create. Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold. MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway. So let’s go all in.” This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas. Not exactly. The credit card has a credit limit.

So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print. The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend. This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place. Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets: this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter. The implications are stunning. “Why not just pay for everything? The government can just print the money, right?”

Yes. She really said that. See, pure economic genius!

Yes, this is exactly the logic of a twenty-something girl who can’t figure out how to pay for an apartment, and wonders what fruit Froot Loops® are made of.

Bill Mitchell has a doctorate in economics, which shows you how easy it is to learn absolutely nothing while getting a doctorate, just as Ocasio-Cortez can demonstrate that an undergraduate degree in economics is essentially majoring in pure pre-barista. An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game. There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you. Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.

Genius.

You can clearly see the equilibrium required in an economy consisting entirely of tequila shooters and cocoa butter.

Why not make every dollar worth, oh, say $10? That way everyone could just add a zero to their bank balance? Doesn’t cost anything, right? And why not pay for every person’s medical care? We’re just making up the dollars as we go. While we’re at it, there are unemployed people. Why not pay your average unemployed art major to make Xir’s (a gender-neutral pronoun) armpit-hair sculptures each and every day?

Don’t cost nothing.

This is an amazing idea! Government can have it all! There is no limit to the amount government can spend because Tom Brady can make all the touchdowns he wants during a game. Yay, tortured grade-school logic!

There’s a corollary to this – Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates. There’s no need for inflation. Print the money. Prices won’t go up. MMT says we can spend ourselves into prosperity*.

*As long as you appropriately tax people to soak up excess money. Mitchell, in the fine print, says that we can spend up to the entire productive capacity of the nation on, well, whatever. When we get to that capacity, then we have to soak up the extra money with taxes. The taxes don’t really go to anything, we just use them to pull money out of circulation. Government still buys stuff with whatever money it prints. Taxes exist only as a sponge to soak up excess cash.

Two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction make a recession, and they’d also leave a nasty sunburn.

This puts the printing of money into the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the spending and taxation into the hands of Congress. Sadly, Mitchell never postulated putting adults in charge. Regardless, Congress never ever spends too much money and certainly wouldn’t structure taxes to be punitive against groups they don’t like. So, sober people like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have infinite spending ability. I’m sure, like Goldilocks, they’d get the porridge “just right.”

MMT will be the next economic pied-piper of the political class in Washington, and will probably be the torch carried by the next Democratic presidential nominee. It has no downside! Spend today because deficits don’t matter. Interest rates are 100% controllable. Only have to pay a few taxes, and we’ll have free prosperity for all.

We’ll just print the money. “You just pay for it.”

And, no one will have to be a barista! We can guarantee a living wage to each and every artist so that the United States can be the undisputed leader in the creation of sculptures made out of armpit hair.

There’s no reason this can’t work. Why, The Boy, when he was in kindergarten, came up with a system that was very similar. For whatever reason, his class had made “feathers” by cutting out feather-shapes out of different colors of construction paper. The Boy got into his Gummi-bear® addled kindergartner brain that these construction paper feathers were actually worth real money. He even had an exchange rate in mind – each feather was worth three dollars. He had three feathers, so, he demanded nine dollars. I tried to negotiate, but it was useless – he drove a hard bargain, what with the laying on the floor and crying.

But he made the same mistake that Karl Marx and MMT make.

GDP is proportional to the height of the girl in the bikini. That’s a basic economic concept.

You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item. So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture. It is that valuable.

Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree. An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more. It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange. It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work. And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want. Like coffee.

Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true. They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering. Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.

But “infinite free stuff” is sure a great line when you’re running for office. Worked out great in Venezuela….