Purpose – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Citizen Vigilante: A Movie For Our Time

“Remember: I do this for you, until you learn to do it for yourself.” – Citizen Vigilante

Since the main character was an American fighting invading rapists in Europe, could this movie have been called Alien Vs. Predator? (all memes as-found)

First, I promise I’m not planning on making this a movie review blog. If you’ll note, most of the movies I’ve individually reviewed either show the best of what we can be as a people or the propaganda that has been inflicted on the world for decades. Now, we’re into a third case: a movie that’s reviewed because of its immediacy.

I once left a positive Yelp® review at the DMV noting how helpful and customer-service focused they were. The manager fired everyone.

I first heard about Citizen Vigilante this week on X®. What I heard, resonated. Here’s a quote from the titular (hehehe) character from fairly early on in the movie:

Who we are and what we do has ramifications in our lives, and in the lives of everyone around us, hm? You don’t understand? All right. Pay attention, let me explain this to you. If you get onto a bus and you don’t pay your ticket, if you go to the movie theater, if you grab a banana at a grocery store and you don’t pay, eventually, the cost of everything will go up. If ten percent doesn’t pay, the cost will go up ten percent to cover the loss, and that’s not fair. You might not understand this, but think about it. I’m sure you’ll come to the right decision.

I’m sure that this resonates with 99% of the regular readers here. This is the philosophy that separates a high-trust civilization from a low-trust civilization. This one attitude, that you pay for what you take, that wealth is earned into existence, not cheated from another is what has made the West and every other civilization that follows this, great.

And high home prices and long commutes are the price we pay to avoid living around “civilized” society.

I have been saying for years on this blog and even longer in person that the purpose of the justice system is to keep people from taking justice into their own hands, and it appears that Europe has reached the breaking point. Uwe Boll, who I’ve really not been familiar with before this, made this movie.

He wrote it, directed it, and financed it. It’s not a big budget Hollywood© film, but it’s a labor of his heart. Boll was originally going to title this movie Dark Knight, but Warner Brothers© sent a cease and desist, so he had to compromise there. Does he bow to political correctness here and there?

Sure, but in minor enough ways that I’m not going complain. However, I’m going to make a bold statement: this film is more red-pilled than Death Wish. It is garlic to Hollywood’s© vampire.

I am extremely smart: I have a theoretical degree in physics.

The genius of Boll is that by doing it himself, he could put up a big middle finger to the people that would silence him and write and film any damn thing he wanted. And Germany has done so, not giving the film a rating, which means I think that you can legally own it, but I don’t think you can legally buy it or sell it.

Why ban it? The violence isn’t all that bad. The singular sex scene isn’t anything to write home about. No. The Powers That Be think this movie is dangerous.

Based on history, I think this decision will make kids want to watch it even more. I’ll admit, it made me want to watch it more than the other crap Hollywood© is putting out.

As I wrote earlier, it’s low budget. The “me-too” crusade made the actor Armie Hammer effectively radioactive, so I don’t think he was doing much nor do I think he cost a lot. Hammer is, however, perfect in the protagonist role in this film. If he signed up for a low salary and a percentage of the gross profits, well, he’s certainly a happy man. It was released on June 19, and Citizen Vigilante has already grossed over $67 million dollars by Tuesday. This was at a reported cost of somewhere around $9 million to make the film, though I cannot vouch for the accuracy of any of these numbers: the source was “crap I found on the Internet”.

But I think they’re making money, which is good because some people have had a hard time finding work.

I left my job to pursue a dream of working in archeology. My career is in ruins.

The movie is also short, clocking in at 89 minutes (in metric, that’s 8.9 decahours). That’s good. It left me wanting more, rather than leaving me thinking, “that’s it?” or thinking, “man, this movie is dragging along”. It was just as long as it needed to be and the conclusion is satisfying and it had one line in it that had me howling with laughter, but maybe that will just be me.

I’m not going to spoil the line, and please don’t in comments.

I’m also not going to spoil the plot. It’s not a complicated one, and not surprising in any fashion.

What’s a GloboLeftist’s most effective birth control? Their personality.

Will Hollywood™ make more of this?

I don’t know. I doubt it. Will Boll and Hammer? I hope so. I’d like to see more of this character. I recommend this movie, but keep in mind it’s not for kids.

So, if you want more things like this, buy it, don’t stream it for free. (JW note: after I wrote this, Uwe Boll put it up for free on X® for 48 hours, so, there’s that exception, which I believe Mr. Musk paid for out of his couch-cushion money. I think it will still be available until the end of 6/25/26. LINK)

If ten percent doesn’t pay, the cost will go up ten percent to cover the loss, and that’s not fair. You might not understand this, but think about it. I’m sure you’ll come to the right decision.

Teutoburg Forest And Immigration Policy

“What of Arminius?” – Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Ma Wilder yelled at me after I went jogging with Julius and Augustus. “Never run with a pair of Caesars!” (most memes as-found)

It was September 7, 9 A.D.

Like ducks, three Roman legions comprising 20,000 to 30,000 men under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus were looking to head south for the winter. Romans campaigned in the summer in Germany, and then went back across the Rhine for their winter camps where they, I don’t know, drank wine. Maybe the men of the XVII, XVIII, and XIX legions studied hard for their Roman Legionnaire test in hopes of getting a C after having V beers?

Anyway, this trip home for the winter, one of the officers advising Varus was a 27-year-old named Arminius. Arminius, likely the son of a German nobleman, had been taken as a hostage from a German tribe at around the age of 10. For 17 years, Arminius had been raised in Rome, gone to Roman schools, been given Roman military training, and was even raised to the social rank of Equestrian, the second highest social rank at the time.

Arminius, knowing the country, told Varus that he knew a shortcut back to the winter quarters. It would be easy, and they could make a side stop along the way to show some Germanic tribes that had been FA the FO part.

A shortcut and a smackdown: two problems with one solution.

All they had to do was skip the well-known and well-guarded path home and go through a forest or two. “And who doesn’t like a trip through the forest? It even has a cool name, the Teutoburg Forest.

“It’ll be the trip of a lifetime!”

Varus: “It’s scary in the forest.” Arminius: “You’re scared? I have to walk out of here alone.”

Now, moving 20,000 to 30,000 guys isn’t easy, and it was especially hard because rather than having a wide space to move through, the Roman column was likely over 10 miles long. Oh, and Arminius told Varus, “Hey, I’ll take all these German auxiliary troops and go get the rest of the guys to support you. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you some of my best guys who know the country. They’re totally not spies.”

While the Romans were in the long line, they were attacked by forest Germans. Not a lot, just enough tire out the Romans and damage their supplies. When this big snake of an army finally finished up for the day, they got to a strong fort that the first-arriving legionnaires had erected, making it a good, strong Roman erection.

Oh, and those totally not spies? They disappeared by the 9^th.

Shapes that commit crimes are often sentenced to prism.

Then it started raining. A lot. The Romans decided to try to escape by going forward. On muddy ground, where the only choice was walking right next to the forest or in the swamp. And the path was covered in trees that had been knocked down, slowing them down.

As this was an ambush, the Germans were well prepared, had cover, and even had made walls so they could attack the Romans without exposing themselves.

The result was a slaughter. There are a lot of details, but Varus ended up literally falling on his own sword in the approved manner for being such an idiot, though his head did make a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles-style trip back to Rome. The three legions themselves were shattered. I’d use the word decimated, but that would indicate that only one out of ten was killed. Nope, in this case Arminius and the Germans killed most of the Romans in battle, sacrificed the officers, and enslaved a few of the common troops.

It was all over by September 11.

Why was 10 scared? He was in the middle of 9/11.

This wasn’t where it ended, no. The Germanic tribes wiped out all Roman military presence east of the Rhine. This was a decisive victory and ended Rome’s desire to conquer the Germanic tribes as it had Gaul. It also led to this quote attributed to Caesar Augustus: “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Augustus was miffed. And Rome was miffed. But the Germanic tribes lived on.

Tacitus records that in 15 A.D., when the Roman military commander and father of future Roman Caesar Caligula, Germanicus, visited the Teotoburg Forest battle site that there were “bones scattered across the ground” along with “fragments of weapons and limbs of horses”. Oh, and human heads, nailed to tree trunks.

Augustus used to prank his praetorian guard by pretending to choke on his food. It’s an old gag.

I came away from thinking about this battle with several ideas. The most important one was Arminius himself. Despite being given nearly every advantage that Roman society had to offer, Arminius was never Roman. He was brilliant, he was exceptional enough to be given military leadership, and he had spent seven more years as a Roman than the ten he had as a German.

But there was no amount of Rome that would make Arminius less German. And, rightly, Arminius is a hero to Germans.

That forest was really full of Germans that day. You could say it was krauted.

But he’s also a warning to Americans.

As I look to the United States today, I see a country that is fragmented in many ways that Rome wasn’t at the time. How many more soldiers like Major Nidal Malik Hassan, who killed 14 people and shot 32 others trying to kill them are in the armed forces?

It’s not just moslems, though, it’s every single person inside our borders that is against the traditional Western values that made the nation is a potential Arminius. Every business leader that loots America and hollows it out for their home nation is a potential Arminius. How is it legal that an Indian CEO of Microsoft© fired thousands of Americans at the same time he hired his countrymen in nearly exactly the same number on H-1B visas to fill those jobs?

Never forget what they really think of us.

Arminius is a hero to Germans, at least the ones that don’t speak Arabic at home. But he’s also a warning to all of Western Civilization that taking the advice of foreigners or people with a primary allegiance against you and who want to take you into dense dark forests is still a pretty bad idea. I’m C percent sure.

Platoon: Movie Propaganda And Serial Killer Jokes

“Now, I got no fight with any man who does what he’s told, but when he don’t, the machine breaks down. And when the machine breaks down, we break down. And I ain’t gonna allow that in any of you. Not one.” – Platoon

Syphilis, AIDS and a Timeshare: what’s difference? You can get rid of syphilis.

I saw Platoon in the theater when it came out.

I watched Platoon, and left the theater as the credits rolled.

I was filled with Raisenettes®, yet exhausted with no desire to ever watch that movie ever again. But last weekend it showed up in the “movies you might like to watch” and since The Mrs. hadn’t seen it, we started watching it. Only I finished, since she fell asleep while on patrol and was caught in a firefight with some NVA regulars. But I finished it.

Again.

As a movie, Platoon looks and feels like a slice of reality coming from the “nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding” me who has never been to Vietnam nor been in a foxhole with Charlie Sheen. I’ve seen many films shot on bigger budgets that don’t feel nearly as real as Platoon. I imagine that part of that is because the writer/director, Oliver Stone, actually did serve in Vietnam as a ground-pounder and this movie is certainly based on his actual experiences there.

I have a lot of thoughts about Vietnam, but this post isn’t about Vietnam. This post is about what the movie Platoon really was: propaganda to make you hate America and traditional American values in 1986.

Let’s start with the time that this movie came out: 1986.

1986 was part of Reagan’s Morning in America. The GloboLeft hated that because the GloboLeft loved the Soviets. I mean, they also love illegal immigrants, but they really love the Soviets. 1986 was also the year of Top Gun, which was the top grossing movie of the year.

My friend the physicist said that he’ll only play volleyball in a vacuum with perfect spheres.

Why was Top Gun the highest earning film of the year even though it wasn’t that great of a movie?

Because people loved America. And yes, I liked Top Gun, but you’ve got to admit it didn’t really have a plot. Top Gun: Maverick at least had a plot.

I digress.

Back to the “people love America” thing. Hollywood© had changed since Reagan was there. When Reagan was there, Hollywood was subversive, but it didn’t hate absolutely everything about America.

Now a majority of Hollywood© did. So, it created one of the most effective propaganda movies of all time, Platoon. I must admit, the message of the movie makes Trotsky look like a patriotic America and Charlie Sheen look morally upright.

Charlie Sheen drew the line at cocaine.

What, then, was the message?

Traditional American values suck. Almost* every leader was shown to be either out of touch, incompetent, sycophantic, or evil. In one scene almost* all of the leadership of the titular (heh) platoon was in a barracks. It wasn’t fun. It looked like your grandpa’s poker night with his old smelly friends, ruled over by the despotic and disfigured Satan of our story: Staff Sergeant Barnes.

This is an effective scene. Your brain subconsciously looks at pretty things and thinks that they’re good. The opposite holds true as well. Barnes is established and reinforced as the antagonist. He is, for this movie, Evil personified.

Wait, what? This is a war movie, aren’t the enemy supposed to be the bad guys? Not for a large chunk of Hollywood©. Remember Hanoi Jane Fonda? They hated America and wanted communism.

The Vietnamese in this movie aren’t the bad guys, they’re just some sort of natural occurrence, like the weather. Put the story on a boat and replace the Vietnamese with a storm and it’s the same movie.

But, move to the cool kid bunker! They had dope! They had cool music! They were doing cool and groovy things! No leadership here, at all, except for cool and groovy dope-smoking Sergeant Elias.

Elias isn’t the protagonist, the protagonist is the character played by Charlie Sheen, who might as well have been called Pvt. Nobody as cardboard as he is, since he only takes one action in the entire movie. No. Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, is Jesus. His betrayal and final death scene with his arms outstretched as if on the cross is heavy-handed. Even young me got that.

If only I can die with such symmetry!

And, in this movie, Jesus was cool and smoked pot. Dafoe would play Jesus in another movie two years later: The Last Temptation of Christ. This was back at a time when the Catholic Church actually managed to be against something other than being against people saying mean things about rapefugees.

But I digress. Again.

The movie is clear. Barnes, who represents traditional American society and traditional American values, is bad. Elias, who represents stoner culture, is good.

When you analyze propaganda, another questions to ask is, “Who is it aimed at?”

Charlie Sheen was the stand-in for the target, the person the audience is supposed to identify with. In several masterfully shot scenes, I felt like I was in Private Sheen’s place. That’s effective film making. Sheen is early wave Gen X.

This makes sense, since Gen X was the target.

Early, Atari© Xers like myself were the primary ticket purchasers of R-rated movies at the time Platoon came out. It’s where we took our dates on a Friday night, and young men were the primary decision makers when it came to selecting a movie to see.

Platoon was demoralization aimed straight at Gen X. Here is what it was saying:

“Reagan making you feel good? Perhaps a bit too good? Enjoyed Red Dawn or Top Gun? Well, white people are awful, except for the stoner socialists who hate America. Those are the real good guys. And Hollywood©. Hollywood™ loves you.”

Imagine how surprised Jeff was when he committed suicide! (meme as found)

Hollywood© does not love you. But they loved this movie with the heat of a thousand sons. Nominated for seven Academy Awards®, it won three, including best picture and best director. Hollywood© loved this movie. So did critics. And it did well at the box office, finishing up third for the year, behind the previously mentioned Top Gun and the heavy period drama that was Crocodile Dundee.

I bought two tickets to it, so my $10 was in the $138,530,565 that it’s credited with.

When I finished watching it, I wanted to take a shower because in the end, the character I’m supposed to identify with, Pvt. Cardboard, kills the stand-in for America: Sergeant Barnes. On purpose. Murder. Demoralization.

Again, I didn’t have the words to describe nor the wisdom to understand the propaganda at play in the film. I just know that I felt revolted.

What does a serial killer do when he finds Waldo®? Wears Waldo™.

But now I see what was going on through clear eyes.

Maybe it was because I didn’t have any Raisenettes™?

Just Look At What You’ve Started!

“I fart in your general direction.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I saw the worst page in the dictionary, and what I saw was disgraceful, dishonest, and disgusting.

I find myself, time and again, beginning work that I know I will never see completed.

My time here is finite. That fact sits in the background of everything, the ticking clock.

Still, I keep launching projects where the meaningful results, if they arrive at all, will show up long after I am gone. Sometimes the gap stretches into decades or even centuries. The work starts now because the window for starting is now, even when the finish line sits on the other side of my own existence.

An example of that is the oldest written joke that we know, which is a flatulence joke. It’s not even a good joke. Heck, it’s so bad it’s not even Amy Schumer-tier.

But we know it. And it was a seed planted, thousands of years ago.

A proverb captures the feeling cleanly. It is often traced to ancient Greek sources: a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.

The personal version lands just as directly. I am planting metaphorical trees under whose shade I will never metaphorically sit. Or fart. Or whatever.

I can cut a log in half just by staring at it. I saw it with my own two eyes.

Having children supplies one clear case where we build that future. Earlier generations treated reproduction as something that largely happened without deliberate long-range planning: a Saturday night and a bottle of wine and, boom, Julius Caesar was born nine months later and was off invading Gaul nine months after that. Biology and circumstance and the Roman Legions carried most of the load.

Today the choice sits in the open.

I began a project whose success or failure will play out across lives that extend well past mine. The uncertainties related to having children arrive immediately, and stay. What sort of people will they become? What attitudes will they carry into whatever conditions they meet? How much of what I do now will actually matter when they make their own choices? Will the daily work of guidance and example turn out to have been enough? What sort of impact will they have on the lives of others?

These questions do not come with easy answers. I did it anyway, fully knowing that large parts of the outcome lie outside any direct observation I will ever have. I’m tossing a message in a bottle into the sea, and one day it will drift beyond my sight.

And it’s okay if you drop a bottle on your foot, since it’s a soft drink.

My writing here forms another example. Each idea or observation I write down moves outward like a ripple from a stone dropped in still water. Some ripples weaken quickly and vanish as distance grows from the initial perturbation. Other of my ripples cross paths with ripples started elsewhere and produce new patterns through interference in the brains of people I’ll never meet.

A smaller number may strengthen when surrounding conditions line up: when an idea meets receptive minds or aligns with events already in motion.

I have no reliable way to track the final shape any of this takes. Has any portion of it improved the world in any way?

I cannot measure that from inside.

What I can control is the attempt to keep what I write aligned with observable reality as closely as possible. The results are not always Beautiful. They are not always Good. They simply aim to stay as True as I can make them. When I’m lucky, they’re two of the three. When I’m very lucky, they’re all three.

Is a long metaphor a metaphiv?

Stepping back gives me yet another perspective.

A single human life occupies almost no space against the age of the Universe. The cosmos we can observe remains young even by its own standards.

Some red dwarfs carry enough fuel supplies to keep them burning for trillions of years, which is slightly longer than The Simpsons has been on TV. Distant descendants, if any exist at that scale, might live under skies lit by those dim red suns and occasionally consider their own origins.

Far more likely, the timescales involved would have erased any specific memory of earlier generations. The thread of continuity will be stretched to the utmost at that great depth of time and only the most basic, the greatest of what is Beautiful, Good and True will remain.

Yet, I keep starting these projects.

I keep choosing to begin work whose completion sits beyond my time on Earth. I try to retell stories that are older than any living man, stories of our history, of self-reliance, of bravery, of what is best in being human.

The way I tell those stories is imperfect and incomplete, but it’s just another tree planted without expectation of sitting under the finished shade.

Why do so few Germans commit crimes? Crimes are illegal.

Perhaps, at some vastly later point, whatever remains of humanity will retain at least a trace of humor about the whole arrangement and maybe a ripple from this time will impact them. That possibility, however small, supplies its own quiet justification for continuing to drop stones into the water.

Besides, farting is intrinsically funny, and if my fart joke survives a trillion years, well, that really would be a blast from the past.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: All It Takes Is A Spark

“All it took was a spark.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

That Asian lady on TV says to donate anything that doesn’t spark joy. Who is going to take all these illegal aliens?

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VIII, Issue 1

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement. Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Sparks and Ignition – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Why Is It . . . ? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Sparks and Ignition

I’ve been covering the UK as a part of the Violence and Censorship Update to the Weather Report as long as I’ve been doing it. The reason is simple: it’s a country that has a similar culture and is facing similar problems and it can be instructive. It also might be the Spark.

When you look at fires, they need three things: oxygen, fuel, and a spark. If I could extend the metaphor a bit, air would be the discontent in a population. It’s always around, and doesn’t cause a fire by itself. Anyone can be mad.

But the amplification, the fuel, is when people communicate their discontent. It’s why an absolute communication blackout occurred on those that were in any way skeptical of the governmental response of COVID or supportive of the obvious fact that the 2020 election was stolen.

Amplification, the fuel, was there when the George Floyd riots occurred.

They were planned. Oh, sure, not George in particular, but any video would have spread. After four years of Trump, the GloboLeftElite and GloboLeft activists were so angry that they wanted something, and any event on video that could be made to be the Spark would be amplified.

So, discontent plus amplification plus event = revolt.

It’s happening now in England. And in Ireland. The first relates to the murder of an 18 year old British university student, Henry Nowak, by a foreign invader. Can Brits have knives? Not without a liosense, guv’na. But if you’re a sikh you can. And one of them used that knife privilege to ventilate young Mr. Nowak. The spice on this already outrageous event?

They coppers were handcuffing Nowak as he died.

Nowak: “I’ve been stabbed.”

Evil Cop: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Why evil? The coppers took the word of the sikh murderer that Mr. Nowak had, “Done a racism,” and handcuffed the bloodless hands of Mr. Nowak. The murderer or his family then hid the murder weapon, and stole Mr. Nowak’s phone, either for gain or to suppress evidence.

The next case is still developing: another foreign invader in Belfast was subject to oppression because he was arrested after being caught sawing the head off of an Irishman. Silly Irish! They should know that it’s illegal for them to be caught having their heads sawed off. That must have inconvenienced the poor refugee.

These are Sparks. White protests have been the result, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first that you’ve heard of either of these events, since news has been clamped down tight: they want to remove the fuel from the event. It can’t spread!

The result is that they’re trying to keep this from spreading.

The discontent is real. And the oxygen level that is starting to build up in the room is the fact that, as the economy falters for the young, they’re now seeing the wealth pump in action as countries try to bring in cheaper labor from overseas to replace skilled young British and American citizens. Zoomer disaffection is real, and their complaints are legitimate: 8 out of 10 jobs went to foreigners in the United States since 2020.

80%.

They are the oxygen level that keeps rising, and that’s the level that the GloboLeftElite wants to keep down at any cost.

What they want is to get rid of you.

When I started writing the Weather Reports eight years ago, I thought that Civil War 2.0 would be ideological.

It won’t be.

Violence and Censorship:

Stealing a country’s mythology is censorship, and you can see that in effect with the movies. At some point people will realize this is just forced humiliation.

Turks gave us a cool new name:

I guess making fun of Indians is off the menu, as Poop World Order was banned from X not long after this.

And when you brainwash white women, murder follows:

Oh, and women judges. Don’t forget them.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal. But California will keep trying.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers though Iran is starting to show in the index..

And why isn’t giving jobs to aliens over qualified Americans legal?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down this month. The attempted assassination last month didn’t even flutter the number, which tells you how far down the road we are.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month. We’ll see what the Karmello verdict brings.

Economic:

The economy took a minor drop two months ago, but then completely recovered. For now.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started.

Why Is It . . . ?

That Syria doesn’t want Syrians and India doesn’t want Indians?

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month. Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/Katelyn_Caralle/status/2056134125564645790
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/2053284658322854271
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/2052414245124366422
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2054277602588946492

GOOD GUYS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4MHgjkdOKk
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2057508808067543268

ONE GUY
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2055736794474590660
https://x.com/BreannaMorello/status/2052013624516849961
https://ammo.com/research/defensive-gun-use-statistics

BODY COUNT
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Worlds-Fertility-Rates_Web_04272.jpg?itok=o-FNcmIC
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/10/christian-catholic-pastors-seminaries
https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2026/docs-admin3-26a.png
https://therabbithole84.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-in-medical-schools

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/Mezzie13603591/status/2053671751591006406
https://x.com/Smooth_Sailing0/status/2053575218484883476
https://i0.wp.com/jonathanturley.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HAcIMIXagAA3FuR.jpg?ssl=1
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/04/28/incredible-unstoppable-titan-of-terror-the-lobster-that-devoured-virginias-constitution/
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/05/09/the-gerrymander-debacle-in-virginia-leaves-the-democratic-party-with-a-dangerous-agenda/
https://nypost.com/2026/05/07/us-news/redistricting-after-scotus-decision-could-give-gop-edge-in-midterms/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jeffries-calls-half-dozen-democratic-states-start-aggressive-redistricting
https://alphanews.org/nearly-19000-people-used-vouching-to-register-to-vote-in-minnesota-on-election-day-2024/

CIVIL WAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJek-kc384w
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/05/09/trump-assassination-jokes-internet/
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/has-the-supreme-court-set-the-stage-for-a-new-civil-war/
https://www.thefp.com/p/thomas-massie-defeat-gop-primary-trump?hide_intro_popup=true
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5868969-tennessee-redistricting-memphis-lawmaker-secession/
https://mises.org/mises-wire/vote-harder-why-secession-only-answer-american-megastate
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/alberta-premier-stakes-political-future-on-canada-secession-vote
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/child-soldiers-mexico-bloodthirsty-civil-war/
https://www.investing.com/analysis/from-civil-war-to-economic-dominance-the-rise-and-decline-of-great-powers-200680817
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/how_the_american_system_reshaped_the_world.html

MEMORIAL DAY
https://x.com/HistorianUSA1/status/2057963073529414038

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?

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it! My rage broke it! This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win. I used Excalibur to change that verdict. I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man. I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking. Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz. Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns. It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear: it’s not a history lesson. It’s a legend.

First things first: no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate. Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s. The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights. Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this. He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary. It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years. When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly. As a result, the film knows exactly what it is: a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough. Arthur wasn’t nuanced. Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©. Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter: pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King. He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie. Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game. Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite. The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers. But in this movie? Nigel Terry is Arthur. Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin. In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood. That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time. Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was. Men were men. Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered. Betrayal hurt. Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon. People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally. Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter: “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three? Hip thrusts, dear.” To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred. This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge. No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.” No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section. No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window: every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving. The classical music fills the spots perfectly. The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest. The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026. We’re drowning in corporate product: remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured: they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen. They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan. If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot. Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is. And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film: “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites: A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury. It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish. I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible. But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive. (meme as-found)

Think about it. When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil? Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene? Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich. Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot. It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires. Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions: it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone. They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded. Why share when you don’t have to? And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty: they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for: you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us? We’ll get the consumer version. The good enough. Best Value® A.I.: the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions. It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I. The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead. The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions: one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of: talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer. A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb. Companies needed human brains. That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers. The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping: I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters. Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most. The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way. They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I. (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power. More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism: a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending. This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before. The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted. The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles. And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I. Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics. It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes. Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide. It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition: things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale. Yet.

Second, understand the game. The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech. The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty. No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way. If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal. Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that?? (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed. We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about? It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider. Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not. As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both? Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government? I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake. The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.

“Life’s short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” – Bloodhound Gang

Regardless, the people at his funeral will be called Paul-bearers.

I bought the book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was a kid. I still recall buying it as it was on one of the monthly trips we took to the book store when we ventured off of Mount Wilder. Ma Wilder was horribly indulgent when it came to books or other healthy creative outlets, like model kits. Books had an unlimited budget around the house, and she never particularly cared which books, as long as I was reading them. As such, at two or three novels a week from age 10 to 16, I read a lot.

I still do.

Dune was one of those. I read it before I started driving. I remember reading it in the time after finishing mowing Grandma Wilder’s lawn and before I was picked on a beautiful summer day decades ago. One thing that struck me is the description in the book of the planet Salusa Secundus. As a kid I mentally pronounced it “Salsa” Secundus, and, well, it is a pretty spicy planet.

I was told to bring an extra jar of liquid cheese, in queso-emergency.

In Herbert’s description, Salusa Secundus was a hell world, horrible weather, murderous beasts, extreme temperatures, awful terrain. It was also the Emperor’s prison where he tossed away the worst criminals of his interstellar empire. “ . . . the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent.”

Yet, here was where the Emperor got his fanatical and tough warriors, the feared Hardeharhar. Oops, different book. I mean the Sardaukar®.

Why there? Well, if you could survive there, you could survive on any planet that a man could live on. And if you could make it though the gauntlet of prisoners trying to kill you, congratulations, you survived the initiation process.

The guards at Big Ben in London look tired! I guess they’re working around the clock.

The idea isn’t a new one. The Spartans had a similar story, as retold by Plutarch, who, despite his name, was not Mickey Mouse’s™ dog:

Another boy . . . when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him . . . hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered. When the searchers were gone . . . [his friends] chid him roundly, saying, ‘It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life.’ ‘No, no!’ said he, smiling, ‘it is better to die than to be detected in a base attempt at theft.’

Our teacher told us this story when I was in second grade. Yes. They told it in a somewhat different variation, but they were telling it to seven-year-olds. No trigger warning. No safe space. Just a story about a kid who was so tough that he’d let a fox eat his intestines rather than show weakness.

I think I have an idea where Herbert took his inspiration for the Hardeharhar from.

This is a story that resonates, and the deeper it resonates the truer it is. We don’t become strong by being bathed in rose water and sleeping on satin sheets and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ© every day, and sailors don’t become captains on calm seas.

We don’t become emotionally strong by never facing hardship.

We don’t become physically strong by sitting on a couch.

We don’t live lives of purpose without getting bruised. Any thing of purpose and worth that one might do will be opposed. Period. Either the odds are against it, the gods are against it, or other people are against it. Sometimes all three.

These are the good fights, if founded in the True, Beautiful and Good. These are the things that are worth the time and effort and pain. These are the things that my scar tissue prepared me for. A life that is based on something that Epictetus said:

Don’t you understand that amounts to saying that I would so prepare myself to endure, and then let anything happen that will happen?

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

That’s a strong statement. And in a life filled with challenges, it’s hard to understand sometimes why we faced the challenges we did, why we have the scars and bruises that we do. I think it’s because if they didn’t break us and they made us better prepared. Yeah, even Nietzsche was right a time or two, if you include his magnificent mustache.

What then, does this leave us with?

We have today. We have this moment. We have the amazing gift that we can do anything we wish to right now. We can make vows to change the world, we can dedicate (or rededicate) ourselves to fighting for what we know is True, Beautiful, and Good.

And that’s why we’re here. We’re not here for comfort. We’re not here for leisure. We’re not here for quiet. A quiet universe is a dead universe. A universe without conflict is a dead universe. A universe without purpose is a dead universe.

How much mass is in the universe? All of it.

We do not live in a dead universe. We’re breathing, fighting, aberrations, statistical flukes and inconvenient, stubborn fools fighting against entropy and common sense. We see the world and keep going, because, deep down, we have our choices, our reasoned choices that allow us to get up to fight another day.

Or give up.

Me? I choose to keep going, come what may.

Besides, now I’m hungry and am looking for chips and salsa.

Extra spicy. I think I’m ready.

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what. I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last. I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday. I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker. It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose. I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day? For me, that’s in the morning when I get up. Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps. No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later. This makes sense to me. Efficient. Practical. The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again. It wears. It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us. I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning. It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days? Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new? Less naïve? Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end. I remember my first car. I remember my first touchdown. I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life. Those, certainly, have made my life longer. Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens. I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning. One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill. Everything blends. Nothing stands out. The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now. I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016. He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief. No warning bell when the halfway mark passes. I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question: so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either. Too much of one and we drown in sameness. Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now. We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights. Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow. We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine: same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different. Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too. Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway. These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it. Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life. Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering: sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.