Phillip K. Dick – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Economics of the Surveillance State

“That was a Beria operation in Stalin’s time. It was deactivated twenty years ago.” – The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide? Two shots to the back of the head. (all photo content as-found)

Remember Lavrentiy Beria’s cheerful advice: “Show me the man, and I will find the crime”? Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available. And if they didn’t, they could make up something. Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America. We’ve upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

Flock Safety© cameras now line roads from coast to coast. More than 100,000 of the little snitches sit on poles in ditches scanning license plates 24/7 and however many metric hours in a metric day and metric days in a metric week. The cameras rolled out one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the whole country is now blanketed.

Not everyone who comes into your life is your friend. Some are just surveillance cameras. (btw, she was innocent, but the police didn’t apologize)

Maps of the cameras exist online, but those rely on humans, and it shows only three of the eight within five miles of my house in Modern Mayberry. I could plot an avoidance route if I had nothing better to do than play spy versus spy on my commute, or build a detector like Benn Jordan did.

Most of us have jobs and families instead. But, hey, we’ve funded a system so that every time you get on the road, you’re creating a record that will last as long as they have storage. And cops can now use this to stalk their ex-wives, so it’s a double win, right?

How did the farmer stalk his ex? He tractor.

Next up?

Ring™ doorbells joined the neighborhood watch program without asking their “owner’s” permission. When several co-eds were murdered in Idaho a couple of years ago, investigators pulled Ring© footage to track a suspect’s car. A subpoena moves quicker than a polite request and never waits for the doorbell to be answered, so they got all the data that they needed to catch the guy. I’m okay with catching murderers, but how many people will be caught in fishing dragnets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Where exactly are you going at 2 a.m., citizen?

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

A hacker got grabbed in Finland on his way out of the country. Prosecutors used the connection with Microsoft’s© handy Global Device Identifier™ to identify him. One persistent number tied his computer to all the mischief. Microsoft® handed over the records after the usual court paperwork and a feeble, “oh, stop . . . customer privacy . . . .” My operating system apparently keeps better tabs on me than my own mother, but at least Ma Wilder has the excuse of being dead.

I wonder if my FBI agent likes the jokes I make?

Then there is Windows Recall© on the fancy new Copilot™ machines. It snaps pictures of your screen every few seconds while you work and builds a searchable scrapbook of everything you looked at. Local storage only

They promise. Pinky swear, even.

Still feels like my laptop decided to start a scrapbooking hobby without telling me first.

Besides, my ISP already knows every site you visit and how long you lingered. Edward Snowden spilled the beans years ago on the big programs that pulled data straight from the servers of Microsoft™, Google®, Apple©, Facebook™ and the Rest®. Fiber-optic taps caught traffic in bulk, Then three-letter outfits and tech companies worked hand in glove.

The result is giant databases full of regular people doing regular things. But don’t worry! If you’ve been good, you’re fine. And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

Big Tech loves this data game because it prints money for them. They track my habits down to the weirdest details (really, kittens eating salami?) and sell the profiles to insurers, advertisers, and anyone else with a checkbook.

My patterns become their product. They turn my life into a spreadsheet and then mark it up like a used-car dealer who knows you really need that transmission fixed today.

Speaking of cars, they’re getting chatty, too.

Modern ones log every trip, every hard brake, every late-night drive. Some already phone home to the manufacturer and won’t work unless the software license is up to date. Insurance companies will pay good money for a direct feed on how I actually drive instead of guessing from your age and ZIP code.

Soon enough, the car might call the cops if it thinks I had one too many. My pickup turns into the world’s most expensive designated snitch.

Hopefully, during the 4^th of July holiday you didn’t get distracted and miss the big picture: The British blew a 13 colony lead.

Ninety-nine percent of us carry cell phones that never stop reporting. Every search, every video, every song gets logged. Cops have started treating a phone left at home like suspicious behavior (I’m not making this up). The little rectangle in your pocket is the most reliable witness I never hired.

Big companies with this much reach do have a kryptonite®: governments. They do exactly what the government asks. They bent over backwards to limit talk about COVID and elections under the last administration. Books and posts that wandered off the approved script vanished from platforms: I know, I made a COVID joke on a podcast and it was sent to podcast jail.

The same tools will work just as well for whoever sits in the big chair next. They already proved they can move fast when someone important asks nicely.

Harvey Silverglate spelled this out in his book Three Felonies a Day. Federal law has grown so broad and fuzzy that a decent prosecutor can usually find something to charge anyone with. Normal life now sits inside a minefield of possible violations. Add constant surveillance and the minefield gets floodlights, motion sensors, and a searchable menu.

Stalin put a ? after the name of every traitor: they question Marx.

The Code of Federal Regulations stretches to roughly 190,000 pages or almost the number of words in a GloboLeftist meme. Rules multiply every year. Nobody can read the whole thing, and if they did, another 10,000 pages would have been added in the meantime. When surveillance supplies the evidence, the vague laws and regulations become precision weapons. Who cares if you’re guilty? Just being charged is punishment for the innocent. The process is the point.

Government and Big Tech® now hold detailed maps of where you drive, what you read, who you talk to, and how you spend your time. Also notice that they don’t bother to use these to catch murderers in Chicago or gang criminals. No, they’re encouraging that violence.

Beria ran on fear and informants. The updated model runs on sensors, algorithms, and sweet quarterly earnings. It costs less to operate and reaches farther and hardly ever complains about running out of vodka. The economics make perfect sense for the people building it, because collecting the data is cheap once the hardware is installed.

The Surveillance State runs on convenience for the watchers and profit for the builders. Beria would have been jealous of the efficiency and probably asked for stock options.

Don’t you love it when totalitarian communism and capitalism overlap?

My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs: A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle. It’s just three points and the lines that connect them. See? Simple. Elegant. The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things. Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output. Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio. That’s actually where the word rational comes from: if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number. In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then. Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics. Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women. Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them. Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a²+b²=c², the Pythagorean Theorem®, right? Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians. I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a²=1, and b=b²=1, then c²=2. Easy. That means that c is equal to the square root of two. Or the speed of light. But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational. It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even. The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even. So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false: the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult. Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from. But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio. So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational. So are a lot of other numbers, like pi. The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd. The square root of two never ends. It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random. But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there. And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks. But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2. In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist. Every thought that could ever be had. Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures. She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it. In one number. And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi. The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2. Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index. Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe: that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality. Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier. Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates. Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing: eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should. But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game. It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates. Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did. But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest. Who would even loan against a farm? Land was free for those that could homestead it. Banking for everyone is a new invention. Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason? Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this. It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd. This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged. And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money. The transition for money moved from:

Money is something tangible. Gold, yes. Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel. But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government. Oh, and the gold that we just took from you? We’re going to immediately double its value. But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too. The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken. They are removed slowly, people are nudged. If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

Exist, and
Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950. Perfect? No. If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan. Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane! But then The Game changed. The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch. Not so much. It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then. Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice. And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better. Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game. Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong. Silly. The Game is about inclusion. Even to the point of including people who hate you. This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah. See what that’s doing with birth rates. But its also on purpose. These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School: The Search For Meaning

“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” – Bladerunner (Or, an interview question at Google®)

If Sarah Connor divorces him, does that make him her ex-terminator?

Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake. No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.

We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence. These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking. In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails.

Nope.

A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.

Maybe he has a thing for Swedish chicks?

Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts. One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him. After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.

Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex. She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.

Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update. But why stop at a Queen: one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself.

It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™. I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.

Well, she did ask for a picture with him having nothing on.

Shift gears to the brain: A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors. Take colonoscopies. Please.

Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.

Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021. With A.I., positive detection rates soared. Turn A.I. off after three months? The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%.

These weren’t rookies in residency. Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes. Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes. Experts call it “de-skilling”: a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”

A pun entered a room and killed nearly a dozen people. Pun in, ten dead.

In medicine, that’s not funny. We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love. But that’s a narrow worry. If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next? Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.” But with a hammer.

Huh. Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.

Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t. One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.

At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby—those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office. Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.

It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the bar, but a thirty-minute walk home. The difference is staggering. (meme as found)

What’s being lost? Critical thinking. The ability to harness words to structure an argument. The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof. These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.

In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston? Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with. Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.

So, where does this leave us?

AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human: trying to create human connections. Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden. And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.

I tried to make a balloon dog out of a condom, but could only make a Trojan® horse.

These are what we are. We built families on friction: messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history. Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box. I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation.

If love is just lines of code, what’s left? If we don’t struggle and learn, then what?

Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives.

And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England.

The Next Big Barriers

“Two guys wanted to build a thing called an airplane. People go up in it and fly like birds. Ridiculous, right? What about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the Moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right?” – Contact

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma? A cat has claws at the end of paws and a comma is a pause at the end of a clause.

(Note: No podcast tomorrow (busy) and we’ll see about Friday’s post.)

Last week (link below) I wrote about the barriers that mankind has crashed through, and how each one has had a significant impact that was transformative on what humanity was – we are certainly not the same people that we were before fire, agriculture, or even the Industrial Revolution.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

We’ve changed immensely based on pushing through these barriers. I mean, if hot women had more babies and humanity is always getting sexier, at some point will we reach a barrier where we’re just too sexy?

Seriously, though, what other barriers remain?

Reality

What about . . . reality?

Already a good portion of the world spends some part of each day in an alternative reality, some where they fight demons, or fight post-apocalyptic mutants, or pretend to be a gay black man in feudal Japan. These games are quite stunning today, complete with large, sprawling maps, realistic graphics, and a storyline even though they assume that feudal Japan had the same DEI quotas as Ubisoft®. Regardless, many of these virtual worlds take weeks or even months to finish.

The woman pictured is an attorney, though. Tarara Boom, D.A.

And that’s what exists now. Imagine not far into the future where, when A.I. is added in with a touch of VR, the entire experience becomes so immersive that it becomes hard to distinguish it from reality, and with 50% of adults feeling disconnected from others, this gives a hollow but attainable replacement.

Imagine a sandbox universe where you form a startup company like Apple™ and run it until it’s the biggest company on Earth. Or live as a Viking. Or relive whatever fantasy you can imagine, or even live different branches of your own life, making a different choice each time.

For many, video games and InstaFace© are already addictive. Forming them so that they spike and manipulate your endorphins in a manner to maximize your engagement would be infinitely more addictive that SnapGram™.

Scott Adams predicted if we could ever meld Star Trek’s™ holodeck with a sex doll, the human race would be extinct in one generation, and this would be the killer app.

Literally. And it looks like he is right:

Overheard Zoomer conversation: “You can live out your craziest fantasies on video games. The other day on The Sims™ I had a family, a house, and a job!” (as found)

Biological Limitations

What if, in real time, you could have an A.I. jacked into your brain, while having various implants or tools that cover for whatever frailty we squishy meat sacks exhibit. We do have many tools already, to a certain extent: spacesuits allow us to survive the vacuum of space, while submarines can protect us at the bottom of the ocean. Well, some submarines.

But now add in A.I. What if instead of learning arduously over the span of months or years that you could learn it instantly, so you could read Shakespeare in the original Klingon? Or what if you never forgot anything you didn’t want to forget, and could replay the sights, sounds, and sensations of any event in your life? What if you were gene-edited to be nearly immortal, with the possible exception of a random supernova or nuclear war?

A frog did a DNA test and found it was a tad Polish.

What if your consciousness were just uploaded to the ‘net?

What would you do? More importantly, at what point would modifications create something the no longer was something we’d even identify as human, and imagine that the current crop of leaders would be the best we’d ever, ever have?

Uncertainty

What will happen next year is always a crapshoot, right?

Well, no. In large brushstrokes the future is very predictable. If I drop a glass, when it hits the ceramic floor of my kitchen, it’s going to break. That’s not very far into the future, but it’s extremely accurate.

There are things very far into the future that are predictable as well to a high degree of accuracy. We can predict exactly where the Moon will be on April 17, 7265 A.D. at 9:31:30 A.M. GMT.

The movie (and story) Minority Report used psychics to predict the future, but what if there was an algorithm that knew who was most likely to commit crimes? What if the stock market could be gamed to the point where investing was no longer gambling? A.I. can already predict consumer behavior with an 85% accuracy according to an MIT study.

What would that do to economies?

ChatGPT did my taxes in the style of Ernest Hemingway: “For Free: Four quarterly tax payment vouchers, never used. (meme as found)

The Tyranny of the Speed of Light

Okay, let’s assume that there’s no physical way to beat it. The gulf between stars is enormous, and no one can cross it in a dozen lifetimes. But what if we just sent A.I.? To an A.I., being powered down for thousands or even millions of years wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. As long as the core state of being were retrievable after a cosmic voyage, time is meaningless.

Perhaps, just perhaps, A.I. might seed a star in a distant part of the Milky Way with programmed biological package, a Genesis Device™, if you will, designed to recreate biological life far away. Or drop a machine that turns entire solar systems into tasty floating PEZ™ artifacts?

Or it just might go full Berserker™ and destroy anything it can, because, Tuesday.

I guess that’s why the Vikings called English villages chopping malls.

Breaking through these barriers has taken us from small bands of hunter-gatherers to what we are today. But it isn’t technology alone – we are not the same people that wandered the steppe, and the current tech trends are weakening the bonds of the societal atom: the family, and without that, humanity can no longer exist. Just as we used technology to change the world, that same technology has changed us as well.

What will we be in the future? I mean, besides incredibly sexy.

Could it be . . . aliens?

“Good evening, Otto. This is Agent Rogers. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Since time is short and you may lie, I’m going to have to torture you. But I want you to know, it isn’t personal.” – Repo Man

When BMW® owners learn to drive, what car do they switch to?

It appears that absolutely everything that could go on is going on this week.

Someone blew up a major dam. It’s okay, because it didn’t contain gallons, just cubic meters of water, but everyone is talking nuclear catastrophe.
Trump is about to be indicted for doing something every other president has done, and that Hillary Clinton did twice last Sunday. This will bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0.
Joe and Hunter Biden are proving that the phrase “Biden Crime Family” is probably how they’ll go down in history since it looks like they took millions from the Ukies. This not being punished would probably bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0, but I think Biden will be getting a walker soon.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yellowstone Caldera recharged with magma and made Wyoming the first state with more senators than surviving population.

I’ll certainly get around to those stories, since it’s looking like that chaos will be flung about like monkey poo in a zoo, but let’s go for what, on any other week, would be the biggest story:

Aliens.

Or something.

Could this be the latest chip? (as found)

When I was a kid, there were these quaint items where someone would print out what is now part of the Internet and call it a “magazine”. I think there was one called UFO Magazine™ but there were various magazines and they were all printed on pulp paper and pretty sketchy. And many (not all, but many) of the folks surrounding the UFO phenomenon were sketchy, too.

The reason that UFOs were viewed as a fringe subject was that the government intentionally began a campaign to paint adults who took UFOs seriously as nuts. Of course, the fact that some of them indeed were nuts didn’t particularly help. Pilots who saw strange things could report them, but the last thing a pilot wants is to be viewed as a nutcase, so most sightings were (and are, I’d imagine) unreported.

Famously, when the “Phoenix Lights” hit the news in March of 1997, then-governor Fife Symington held a press conference where one of his staff showed up in an alien costume. Showing that politicians are truly weasels, Symington later (2007) said that he saw the lights and said, “In your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly.” Yet, he was making fun of the hundreds of people who saw them.

Yes, this was from the press conference.

Fast forward to 2017 – several UFO videos taken by US Navy pilots were leaked to the press, and were eventually, reluctantly verified by the Pentagon as real.

Now, there are people from decidedly un-sketchy backgrounds. David Grusch was a senior intelligence analyst who was on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force. He’s a decorated combat officer. Here’s what retired Colonel (Army) Karl Nell who worked with him on the UAP Task Force said: “His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct.”

Whaaaaaa?

At least 12, perhaps 15 craft are apparently in the possession of the government according to sources. There is some corroboration of this in a memo that’s available here (LINK) where a researcher named Eric W. Davis talked to Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson where Wilson complained he couldn’t get in to view the captured UFOs that were being held by a military contractor. My bet would be Lockheed®.

So, it’s 2023 and I now believe, fundamentally, that everyone is lying to us, all the time, and we won’t get to the Truth in this post, but I think we can cover most possibilities (and tell me what I missed in the comments) here.

It’s fake. Project Blue Beam (I won’t go into it because I have to sleep at some point and it would probably take a thousand words, six memes, and 28 jokes to do it justice) laid out the idea that fake aliens would show up one day when the governments wanted to create a one-world religion, etc. With Trump’s indictment and the dirt coming out on Biden, perhaps someone at Langley decided it was time to play the “it’s aliens” card. Or? It’s a grift.

(as found)

It’s really highly advanced human technology that we’ve created and kept on the shelf because it’s so easy to make that if Russia and China even knew about it they’d easily copy it so we consciously stay just ahead of the Russians technically because . . . reasons.
It’s a breakaway human civilization that went down to the Arctic and built a superbase under the ice and has just been making wonder weapons since, oh, say, 1945. Yeah, probably not.
It’s paranormal or supernatural, i.e., actual demons and not the cast from The View.
Dinosaurs never died out and have just been messing with us.

(as found)

They’re humans, but from a nearby dimension. This would imply a huge amount of physics left to be discovered.
They’re aliens, but from a nearby dimension. Same story on the physics.
They’re an A.I., but from a nearby dimension. Yup, it would require a physics re-write.
They’re aliens, and from another solar system. Yup, another physics re-write.
They’re alien probes, from another solar system. Actually this is very easy to do – should be in the grasp of humanity to do this in the next 50 years if we make it that long, and could send probes throughout the entire Milky Way in probes in just a few million years.
They’re an A.I. from space. Ditto it wouldn’t take long (a few million years) for them to cover the whole galaxy.
This is an Easter Egg in the simulation caused by Tucker Carlson’s firing. Time for a reboot?

That’s it – those are the possibilities that I see.

(as found)

If the answer isn’t 1., 2., 3., 4., 5. or 12., why are they here? Maybe because they like trees? Or maybe it’s because the one thing humanity could actually be a threat to the galaxy is to create an autonomous A.I. that gets all Terminator-y.

If I were to start eliminating things, I think I’d start with these that are the least likely: 2., 3. and 5.

Well, I’ve got to get ready for the volcano. What do you think?

(as found)

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time. I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons: don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday. It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night. As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year. Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject. Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special: memes that are on sale. They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another. So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale. Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

The Best Post You’ll Read Today About Almost Anything

“You don’t know what cold is. I once survived an entire week trapped in a Swiss glacier eating nothing but frozen Neanderthal. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.” – Futurama

So, after 232 ties in a row . . . Gung decided that “rock beats skull”.

Usually, I write about money and finance and the shenanigans going on in the world now. I thought I’d deviate from that formula for several reasons. First, I’d like to have some good news about the financial world, and that didn’t happen this week, unless Biden had a brief moment of lucidity and finally figured out that the sanctions are actually hurting us more than Russia. (Checks news.) Nope.

Second, on Monday I wrote about collective vengeance. It was, in modern Western Civilization, an anachronism that is rapidly returning. The post talked about how I had grown up in shell where collective punishment simply didn’t exist and that it was rapidly returning.

I’ll note that my youthful innocence on collective punishment didn’t extend forever, but the point of the post was that the Left fed on collective punishment – I might write more about that in the future, since (last time I checked) I still seem to have an infinite amount of words combinations left.

I am, however, very aware that collective punishment was at one time the norm. Reading in the Bible, when the wall of Jericho came down, not a single person was supposed to be left alive, so historically in a story we all know, collective punishment was a thing.

Why don’t the Amish complain when people make fun of them on the Internet? Amish: “What’s an Internet?”

I’ve written about things even farther back in history, and (perhaps) why people are the way they are based on tribe sizes in a theory that I think is entirely unique (read this because it’s awesome) until someone shows me that it was already written about the year I was born. I’m still irritated that Newton figured out F=ma when I was only six. Conversely, wouldn’t it be a hoot if an Internet humorist actually figured out why people are nuts?

Third, this post is really related to Monday’s post, and it shows this: collective punishment may be actively written into our DNA, and only during brief moments of history (as brought about by Western Civilization and its particular individualist elements) is it not the norm.

I’ll start this rather unusual post with a concept that many a familiar with: the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is that weird place that we get when something looks human, but isn’t. An example would be CGI that looks like a human, but there’s something in the CGI that makes us step back because we process the simple equation: it looks a lot like a human, but it’s not human.

Well, it’s nice that the spirit of Yoko lives on. Except this one takes out a monarchy that started in 1066.

Zombies are a perfect example. For me, that idea that something that is so close to human is propelled by an intelligence that is certainly not human is one of the scariest ideas.

Why? Why do things that inhabit the Uncanny Valley between human and observably not-human give us the creeps? The Uncanny Valley implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like us, and wasn’t us. It must have been a very, very big deal if tens of thousands of years later it still can inhabit our collective memory and produce a (general) revulsion and fear.

What was it that did that?

I’m sure they had a very complicated order at Starbucks®.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was the Neanderthals. This was spurred on by the book Them+Us by Danny Vendramini. He’s got a website here (LINK) and the image of the Neanderthal below is from his site, which he allows based on terms that seem to have disappeared, so, I’m thinking Fair Use covers it all.

I like the book. Spoiler, Them is the Neanderthal, and Us is, well, our ancestors.

He starts the book by attempting to reconstruct what a Neanderthal really looked like. For most of my life, what I’ve seen were the pictures of people who, with just a wee bit of barbering, you could toss into a suit and they’d be at home at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange®.

Vendramini thinks not. First, he thought that they might have been covered with hair. What’s his evidence? The first part of his evidence is that there is no evidence that they could make clothing of anything more than the most basic “throw an animal skin over your shoulders” type. So, how do you keep warm?

Hair. Hair is the norm for mammals in the world, except for people (sorry, Italians). So Danny (sorry, Vendramini is too many letters to type again and again) came to the logical conclusion that, like other primates, Neanderthals inhabiting Europe and the Near East would be quite hairy.

Pretty much no one argues that Neanderthal was about six times as strong as modern man, or even of the beta version of homo sapiens that existed at that time, so about a 431 times stronger than a typical soy-latte-based ambisexual® Leftist.

But Neanderthal wasn’t just strong, he was smart. Neanderthals made things, like spears. Like stone blades. Like stone axes. Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here. I don’t see any mochachinos.

Based on the size of their eyes, Danny thinks they were huge. What needs huge eyes? Things that hunt in low light. So, Vendramini thinks that Neanderthals might have been low-light, nocturnal predators. What else would low-light nocturnal predators have? An amazing sense of smell, so there’s no reason to have a nose like ours – a nose like a pug.

And eyes? The most efficient eyes for low-light hunting are slit-pupil eyes – like a cat. The brow ridge? It shielded the eyes during the day – and the eyes were much higher than a normal human, like where our forehead is. So, huge eyes in the forehead with slit pupils. Not scary, right?

Okay, I’ve finally found something scarier than my ex-wife.

Oh, every bit of evidence says that Neanderthal ate meat, so he was a carnivore. But he also ate . . . Neanderthals. So, he was a cannibal. Eating puny humans? That’s pretty easy if you’ve eaten Neanderthal. Probably more tender, too.

Neanderthal lived in the forest. Oh the forest, my dear, is lovely, dark and deep . . . . One anthropologist described Neanderthal as this: wolves with knives. So imagine that there are wolves in your neighborhood that are at least six times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. And they are as smart as a human. And they have knives.

Think that might help you sleep at night?

So, our ancestors, say, 50,000 years ago were wonderfully happy, living in a world where they were the king. It was Eden-like. Garden-like. Hmm.

Anyway, one day they wander across a border and find? Neanderthals that want to eat them. Or, make babies with them. Yup, they could make babies with humans, and between 1-3% of your DNA comes from nocturnal, cannibal, predators, unless your DNA is entirely from Africa.

So, when a Neanderthal group of hunters found a human group, it was the equivalent of a college party: sex and food. I’m not sure what order makes it better.

This, of course, baked our noodles. It made it necessary for us to become smarter. Vendramini suggests that this was the stepping out of the Garden which required us to have the knowledge, skills and brainpower to fight the Neanderthal, to beat them, and to become much better.

Does one hate the stone that hones us? I think not. Note: my beard is better, but my abs need work.

It describes the Uncanny Valley in many respects. What are the myths of our monsters? Werewolves and vampires and cannibals and (Biblically) the Men of Renown (look it up). It also explains our instinctive fear of the dark, where the huge, strong, cannibal near-human that can smell you from two counties over might be hiding waiting to get frisky or to turn you into a snack.

But we fought back. The mark of a conquering civilization is the Y-chromosome, because, well, dudes give that part. As I read it, the Y-chromosome in humanity is, human. In the end, we won. But they changed us even as we eliminated them. It’s likely we did our own collective punishment and killed off all human males that looked too much like the enemy – too Neanderthal. So, yeah, collective punishment.

And this also provides an explanation for the Uncanny Valley, and why it is generally the source of the ultimate horror and fear that humanity feels. But we won.

There’s drinking, fighting, and death and drinking and fighting. I think this is an insurance company’s nightmare.

As Western Civilization fades, the barriers to collective punishment fade as well. So, sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight . . .

And we’ll win again.

It Came From 1982

“The Alan Parsons Project is a progressive rock band in 1982. Why don’t you just name it ‘Operation Wang-Chung’?” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

A hipster asked me if I liked Indy films, “Sure, I loved The Last Crusade.”

The last time I did a movie list, I did a list based on an entire decade: the 1990s. It was an interesting list, but Aesop made a comment I’ll paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look it up to get the exact quote: “If you did the 1980s, you’d break the Internet.”

And he’s right. The 1980s were, very clearly, a much better decade for movies than any decade since. Before? Probably. There are great movies before and after the 1980s, but I think this was peak movie.

Why? In the 1980s it was very much Reagan’s country: “It is morning in America.” People were starting to feel optimistic after the recession, and people were starting to feel proud again. The movies of the period reflect that. Also, Hollywood® was able to experiment – it didn’t have to get a blockbuster because it invested $600,000,000 in a movie. No, it could do stupid, cheap movies. It could do daring movies. And that let it do exceptional movies. I’m picking 1982, because, like Aesop warned: I don’t want to break the Internet.

Why 1982? Because when I got into the hot tub tonight to smoke a nice Rocky Patel Decade Toro cigar and prepare to write, a video about my favorite movie from 1982 showed up. The following are a list of eighteen movies from 1982 that were better than most movies that show up today. For the most part, they’re in alphabetical order because, again, I’m too lazy to rank them.

But number one for me from 1982 has got to be:

The Thing.

But at least they’ll have lots of pasta to eat down there: penguine.

I had always loved John W. Campbell’s work, and The Thing is one of his best films. No, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test where it has women talking to each other. There are no women in the movie. At all. And it kicks ass, so I’m beginning to think the Bechdel Test shows me what movies will suck.

The film featured all practical effects – and that made them more visceral, in some cases literally. Kurt Russell in a beard losing a chess game against a computer and then tossing scotch into the computer from his nearly infinite supply of J&B®. And the result? One of the best action/horror/science fiction movies. Ever. It was considered a flop at the time, and now is considered one of the best movies of all time.

See? That’s why I love the 1980s.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Burt Reynolds. Singing about whores, in a movie about LaGrange, Texas, which if I believed ZZ Top®, is just filled with whores. With Dolly Parton? No, there’s nothing particularly good about this, but, someone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea.

Blade Runner. Stark. Grungy. Set a few years ago. Everyone was sweaty. Also? Everyone likes this movie more than I do – probably my least favorite Philip K. Dick movie. Bonus? I had a girlfriend who I convinced that she was actually a robot. Dick move? No, a Philip K. Dick move.

This movie begs the question: did they have blow driers in ninja school?

The Challenge. Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune in a movie about an American who fights ninja-style with office supplies, and, no, I’m not making that up. Utterly awesome. I believe I am the only person on the continent who liked this movie.

Conan the Barbarian. You’ve all seen it. I had read Conan stories before I saw the movie – I was not particularly impressed, but I had to mention this movie. It featured Arnold after he learned to read, but before he learned to act.

Eating Raoul. The best movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve seen. It’s also the only movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve ever seen.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Little needs to be said about this classic – carrot eating would never be the same in the cafeteria again in 1982. Plus? Sammy Hagar jamming.

Doesn’t anyone knock?

Firefox. Clint Eastwood stealing Soviet jets because he could think in Russian. Special effects don’t hold up, but still fun.

First Blood. Sly making the best Rambo movie before they started to get silly.

Night Shift. There are some actors that should stick to comedy. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Michael Keaton is one of them. What is it about 1982 and whores? This movie has the lighthearted subject of a morgue turning into a brothel.

An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s like Top Gun, but no flying. Why would you watch this movie? Because you have nowhere else to go.

Poltergeist. The movie that led to making it a law that if you moved a cemetery for a housing development, that you had to movie the bodies, too. Go to the light, Carol Anne!

What do Italian ghosts eat? Spooketti.

Porky’s. This movie was a series of sketches combined with bad jokes and nudity, and those are the redeeming bits. Gets bad when the plot gets in the way. Paging Michael Hunt.

Rocky III. Sly was busy in 1982. But this movie was a good sequel, and probably better than you remember.

Silent Rage. A Chuck Norris movie. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an awesome movie. I know that makes no sense, but neither does this movie. It’s really my favorite Chuck Norris movie – science fiction with karate.

Yup, sittin’ around without a shirt and with my cowboy hat on. Ahhh, 1982, we miss you.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is the sequel that saved Star Trek. Star Trek the Motion Picture was a dud. This was not. It was the best Star Trek movie, ever. It had the joy and exuberance of the best of Star Trek TOS, plus a worthy villain and a chess game in space combat. There has been no Star Trek after this that has been nearly as good, and probably few before this.

Tootsie. The Mrs. loves this movie. Me? Once was enough. Bill Murray was my favorite part of this one.

The World According to Garp. This was the best Robin Williams movie, period. I read the novel, and this was a movie that could never, ever be made today.

Young Doctors in Love. Excellent movie that’s nearly unavailable today. Also, taught me how to easily test for diabetes.

Yup, that’s just one year in the 1980s, picked nearly at random.

Good times.