Purpose – Page 13 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

When Times Are Tough, First, Sharpen The Saw

“You have personal habits that would make a monkey blush.” – Red Dwarf

I know a lot of broken pencil jokes, but they’re all pointless.

Stephen Covey made roughly a bazillion dollars with his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which at least makes his marketing pretty effective. I read it back in the early 2000s when I found a copy sitting on a shelf in an office when I started a new job. This was lucky for me, since I could never find the self-help section at the library. The librarian just would say, “Well, if I told you where the self-help section was, that would defeat the purpose.”

I couldn’t name most of the 7 Habits unless I cheated with Duckduckgo®, but I do remember the last one of the seven: Sharpen the Saw.

You might think that this would be a reference to Jason or Michael Meyers, but no. In the book he relates a story about Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked if he were to race to cut a tree down, how he would do it. “Well first, I would sharpen the saw, and then I would hire the neighborhood kid to do it and then I would invade the South,” Lincoln replied.

Talk about a one-trick pony.

How many Amish people does it take to change a light bulb? None.

But Covey picked up on this idea: if you’re not sharp, you’re not at your best. You can look at that through several dimensions, and include things like fitness, but you know how to get in shape. That answer is simple – even if you don’t want to do it.

The dimension of sharpness that I want to write about is mental. I know how to exercise to get fit, but if I’m so burned out that I don’t have the motivation to do it, I simply won’t.

The first level of control I do is to control the intake of my mind.

Around 2016 I went full-stop on listening to NPR® radio. NPR™ had always had a lefty slant, but in 2016 they went Full Throttle Leftist. The conclusion that I came to is that if I felt like shouting at the car radio that the host was wrong, I should probably just stop listening to them.

And I did. The reason I did wasn’t that I was afraid of the facts – no. I embrace finding out when I’m wrong. The reason was that the opinion that had always been in the backseat of the car became the driver. And I don’t like the opinions of Leftist NPR© hosts unless they’re midgets: the midgets always know what’s up.

Cats kill more birds than windmills. Heck, I can’t recall the last time I heard of a cat killing a windmill.

The Mrs. relayed to me that some journalism schools were now teaching that journalists should be, rather than impartial reporters on a story, a good journalist should actively intervene in favor to further Social Justice narratives.

My site isn’t a news site. My site is generally an opinion site – your opinion and my opinion. We can all have them, and as long as we agree to that, it’s fine. But NPR® began peddling opinion as fact, and editorializing during straight news stories, “discredited” and “false” were used as modifiers in news, as in “Fauchi debunks the false and discredited idea that people should wear masks,” a week before Fauchi says you need to wear six masks.

NPR® was harshing my mellow without giving me anything that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

The next level of control is to rest.

If I’m going all out, working and blogging, I might average five hours of sleep Sunday through Friday morning. That’s probably not enough. I play catch-up on weekends, but that’s not quite enough. A few weeks ago I decided I wouldn’t go in to work until after lunch on Friday.

It was glorious. I started the weekend with a full tank and that Friday was amazingly productive.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I have a list of things I have to get done. I do often live with a sleep deficit, but I do try to at least monitor it. I did find a scientific test on sleep deprivation online. It told me how much sleep I needed: just five minutes more.

And Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He decides what time it is.

The third thing I like to control is chaos.

Okay, I can’t control chaos. But I can control what I care about. I can prioritize. I can plan. I can make lists.

Make lists? How does that help?

I find that when I’m feeling whelmed, that just making a list turns a chaotic list of things to do into something I can attack. And sometimes, I just pick something I can do, something I can complete from the list, and just do it even if it’s not the most important thing.

A shopping center burned down – nothing left but Kohl’s®.

The best catalyst for action is . . . action. When I start getting things done, more things get done. Then things begin to disappear from the list as I cross them off.

At the end of the day, I feel good. Things are done. Sure, some aren’t, but finishing tasks and crossing them off the list makes me happy.

The fourth thing I do is step away. Turn off the chaos by connecting with other people. By reading. By writing.

There is always the danger in distraction. If done too often, it is simply running away.

But a moment to pull back, reflect, and work with the important connections in my life? That’s keeping the reason I face the chaos in perspective. I do those things for the people I love, for principle, or because it’s virtuous and has meaning.

Reading? That’s how I get ideas. That’s how I hit the reset button by focusing on other ideas.

Writing? That’s how I work through ideas. When I put it in writing, I begin to understand where the holes are in my thinking. Then I research. Then I get closer to the Truth.

Again, done too often, it’s an escape, not a refresh.

When the aquatic mammals escaped from the zoo, it was otter chaos.

Finally? I pray.

YMMV, but prayer does wonders for me. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” except when he said it, it came out more like, “Livet kan kun forstås baglæns, men det skal leves fremad,” and it probably sounded like Søren was gargling a mouthful of small wet frogs.

But Søren was right. Life is tossed by uncertainty and fortune, good and bad, and no one is getting out alive. As I get older, I begin to understand, and see the structure, though I have enough wisdom to know how little I really know.

Prayer brings me peace.

Thanks for sharing in my saw-sharpening. I hope it wasn’t too dull.

The Fall Of Freedom In Australia In 16 Memes

“Your planet doesn’t deserve freedom until it learns what it is not to have freedom. It’s a lesson, I say!” – Futurama

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Ben Franklin

Note: Memes tonight aren’t original. Normally, Friday is less political. Tonight? Not so much. Events in Australia are moving quickly, so, here it is.

The reaction to COVID-19 by the Australian government has been about as rational and lucid as Joe Biden is in the morning. Or the afternoon. Or, well, anytime.

It’s that bad, it’s all of the logic of a sugar-addled toddler with a machete and a police force in a tank running over a disarmed people.

Australia has been the test case for total social control. You’d think that the independent Aussie spirit would make them resist.

No, not really. They gave the government ludicrous control. So, what did the government do? Jumped the shark. Or crocodile. Or whatever other poisonous or deadly animal that Australian Fonzie jumped over.

Yup, that’s right. The good ol’ government wants to have full access to everything Aussies say and do online. For safety, of course. There’s no way that they could abuse that, right?

Oh, wait, once you give them that control, it never stops. Here’s the next bit:

What does that mean?

This is a scene directly out of Orwell’s guidebook novel 1984. Forced to have an app. Forced to prove where you are so the government can track you. Only 15 minutes to comply, or the police will show up.

I can see the Democrats taking notes in the back . . .

It’s not all bad. If you spend enough time in your cell, you get privileges:

An hour!!! So generous. Perhaps they’ll let them make pruno and give them commissary privileges so they can buy some smokes. Until they ban smokes. I’m sure they have a plan if people rebel:

No, a real plan:

Yup, that’s closer.

But you might think that’s bad enough. It’s not even close.

Yup, things can get worse. Truckers wanted to protest the outrageous bans, rules, and mask mandate.

What did they do?

The truckers did it. But if you were an Australian, they tried to make it so you’d never know. The government shut down the traffic cams so you couldn’t see it. They shut down the truckers’ phones. They shut down their social media. They censored, in real-time, a revolt against the rules.

Well, if you want to know what I really think, I think [THIS CONTENT IS CENSORED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF AUSTRALIA].

Thankfully they haven’t designed concentration camps . . . oh.

My apologies. These aren’t concentration camps at all. They’re quarantine camps. (PM me if you want a larger copy, I have a 1.6MB version.)

As usual, /pol/ has a take on it:

When even a magazine as far Left as The Atlantic says you’ve gone too far, well, you may have gone too far:

Well, that’s bad. It gets worse. Even the Canadians are piling on:

Strangely, it’s almost like the world has been here before. When might that have been? Hmmm.

But Australians are still free, right?

Fear And The Consent Of The Governed, 2021

“This is a consent form to stick a wire into your brain. It’s important for hospitals to get these signed for procedures that are completely unnecessary.” – House, M.D.

When a dentist makes a mistake, it’s always acci-dental.

What I’ve seen from the Federal government recently is something unusual: fear.

The January 6 demonstration at the Capitol is exhibit A. A group of (mainly) unarmed civilians decided that they’d like to wander over to the Capitol to express their displeasure on what many feel is an election that was largely fraudulent. With the early ballots in California, I guess transvestites can commit mail fraud and male fraud.

Elections are supposed to be the safety valve in a society that has them. You voted, and if it goes your way, great. If it doesn’t, well, we’ll vote harder next time.

In theory, it’s a good system. Elections give the loser the thought that, “if we do better next time, we’ll beat ‘em.” That transfers emotions tied to losing into building a party to win the next time.

That assumes that the election is a fair one. Certainly, there have been elections in the past have been manipulated. There’s a reason that people make jokes about corruption and Chicago politics: over 150 Chicago politicians, employees and contractors have been convicted over the last 50 years. While you might think that Chicago would be dangerous with all of the graft and corruption, my friend says it’s not, and he should know. He’s a tailgunner on a Chicago school bus.

I had a friend who started drinking when the kids finally were back at school. Worst teacher ever.

One of the large benefits of the Electoral College system is putting up a firewall against fraud. Chicago could vote 100% for whatever Democrat was running for president, but the corruption would be isolated because it didn’t change the outcome except for that single state.

2020 was different. An unelected cabal worked to get states to change voting systems so that fraud was easier. They worked to get hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for their objectives. They distorted the public debate. And then they bragged about it (LINK).

For whatever reason, 2020 was the year that they decided that they had to win, whatever the costs, whatever the consequences. They weren’t going to let anything stop them.

There are claims the “no significant voter fraud has ever been found” but I couldn’t find my butt if I never looked for it. And, it really, neither of them have been looked for. The idea that people are too stupid to be able to get an ID to allow them to vote, yet are required to get one to eat in a Burger King® in “post-jab” America is nonsense. Yet, it is the basis of Leftist philosophy: 100% control of the people the Left hates, and 100% acceptance of any conduct from the people the Left mines for votes.

If he gets enough across, he doesn’t even have to manufacture votes!

The childhood meme of “majority rules” isn’t correct, however. The idea of a Constitutional Republic was based on the idea that the majority is really often quite wrong and should be walled off from power like a four-year-old going for a wall outlet with a fork. The rights in the Bill of Rights were built on the idea of restricting the power of both the government and the majority.

Those restrictions were based on experience. The Founders had been through a war to overthrow a government that they felt had overstepped its bounds, and their reaction was one based on keeping all kinds of tyranny at bay.

It was a good idea. The idea of sovereign states was also a winner. It allowed the most control to take place locally, not nationally. Ideally, the Federal government was a weak creation. Of course, good things never last. The Federal government accrued power, but was still kept in check.

When the patriots told jokes, was that star spangled banter?

In part, this was due to the mathematics of violence. An individual American marksman with a Brown Bess rifle was the equal to (and sometimes better than) the typical British soldier or Hessian mercenary. They were, after all, fighting for their country. Couple that with the long supply lines of the British, and the American Revolution was the equivalent of their Afghanistan. Well, at least until they made it to the real Afghanistan.

This pointed out that any government of armed men exists only by the consent of the governed. That was a direct consequence of those mathematics of violence. In one well-documented case, the citizens of Athens, Tennessee took up arms in 1946 to stop an election from being stolen.

They relied on the ballot box.

Nah, just kidding. They brought machine guns and service rifles and threw Molotov cocktails and dynamite at the jail that was holding the ballots to prevent fraud. They won the election, and the fraud was so evident that I believe everyone just looked around and whistled and pretended that it never happened. I can’t find a record of any person going to trial for making sure the law was followed. Using dynamite.

If you date a girl from the zoo, be careful. She might be a keeper.

How would that play out in 2021? Don’t know. I’ll tell you after Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial.

But in 2021 we live in a society that was originally based on the idea of freedom and fair play.

I had a thought a few weeks ago. It nearly died of loneliness. It went, however, something like this: what percentage of a population would it take to simply stop society by withdrawing their consent?

I picked Modern Mayberry for the start, since it’s always best to start small. Let’s assume there are 10,000 people here for round numbers. 10% of the population would be 1,000. That’s certainly more than enough. 1% is 100. Is that enough?

It certainly outnumbers the police and sheriff’s department. So, yes.

Tyranny can’t stand 1% noncompliance, locally. How about nationally? If there were 80,000,000 on the Right (a number I think is low) then 1% is 800,000. Initially, I would have said that wasn’t enough. But last week we saw 70,000 some-odd Taliban roll up the 300,000 strong Afghani army in less time than it takes Leonardo DiCaprio to dump his starlet of the week.

Is 1% enough? Maybe. Is 5%? Certainly.

I do know this: the Taliban’s victory shows that the mathematics of violence haven’t changed much since 1776 or 1946. Despite the massive investment in tech and the ability of superpower-level tech to own a battlefield, the war isn’t conducted on battlefields anymore. It’s conducted street by street. House by house.

I hear that place was a Messerschmitt.

Perhaps the final piece of the puzzle is that “the jab” is being rejected by up to 30% or so of the armed forces. Will the military blink, or will the individual soldiers blink?

I don’t think the military will back off.

The Joint Chiefs have shown themselves to (mostly) be completely compliant with whatever Resident Biden wants. I imagine that many of those that will be subject to being drummed out will be some of the most skilled members of the military, and most committed to the cause of freedom.

The jab just might be the cleansing of the military for the Left, a final mechanism to find those who will follow whatever orders come down.

Why do this?

Because they’re afraid

What are they afraid of?

Losing the consent of the governed.

How far are they away from that?

Remember: Your Mission Isn’t Done

“Santa Maria! Captain, you cannot punish the crew like this. They will mutiny!” – Sealab 2021

The big problem with the French Revolution is that lots of folks lost their heads.

One winter, while hunting elk up on Wilder Mountain, we had, well, an issue. We were about fifteen or twenty miles in from the nearest pavement, and headed home.

It was overcast. It was lazily spitting snow, with a breeze that was slowly picking up. Looking to the west, where there should be a resplendent sunset, the sky was dark, heavy, and pendulous with brooding storm clouds that blotted out even a hint of the winter Sun.

That was when the problem hit. Pa Wilder, while driving over a “road” that was little more than a common path cut by four-wheel-drive vehicles over the course of decades of hunting and firewood gathering, drove over a small branch that had fallen in the road. Not a problem, right?

Well, it was a problem. In this case, the branch had the stem of a broken off limb, sticking straight up. Pa drove the GMC Jimmy® right over that sharp shard of limb.

In the span of a dozen or so feet, we had lost not one, but two tires. It penetrated the center of each tire, poking a hole the size of a half-dollar coin in each.

Amazingly, we had lost another tire already that day, already.

Ahhh, I remember this trip. Those were the Goodyears®.

We now had a four-wheel drive with five tires and three flats. In winter. As a blizzard approached and night was setting in. And all of this was in country where it could easily hit -40°F as night descended.

I bring this up to say that we had a mission. Our mission at that point in time was to get home. There were several challenges, and I’m pretty sure if most people were in the backcountry as a blizzard was descending that the last person they would choose would be a 12-year-old boy to be a guy on the team.

Which is sad.

Children can have missions. Children can face danger. Children can do important things. We forget that because we’re in a society that doesn’t give children important things to do, mostly. Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were as young as 14.

I hear the Russians just canceled their Penguin Army program. Now all they have left is Navy Seals.

To be clear: Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were 14. A midshipman is an officer. If you were unaware, the Royal Navy wasn’t a social club, and often those boys fought in wars. As officers.

So we forgot that boys can be given real, substantial responsibility. But there’s also the chance that we forget something else: that each of us is on a mission. And each of us has a role to play.

We currently are in a place where freedom is an increasingly precious and rare commodity. It’s not just in the United States – Trump may have said, “Make America Great Again” but down under they seem to be following the “Make Australia A Prison Again” plan. And Canada?

I love our Canadabros that come by regularly (Canada is the second-largest readership here), but Canada seems to be determined to become the Soviet Above the 49^th Parallel, led by that Tundra Trotsky, Trudeau.

Pictured in background: the only two Canadians Justin’s mother didn’t have sex with.

It seems like in this day and age we all have a mission. Just like 12 isn’t too young, 80 isn’t too old.

Frankly, we need all hands on deck. The size of the mission is the largest on the North American continent since 1774. I almost wrote that the idea was to preserve the Constitution and the Republic. Seriously, I’d love nothing more than to write that.

I’d love for that to happen. I’d love for us to come together. I’d settle for the laws to look like they did 90 years ago. Heck, even 70 years ago. That would be preferable to today.

A reversion, sadly, is impossible.

Whatever will come from tomorrow will not look like the past. It may be a shadow. The Holy Roman Emperors weren’t Roman. And the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Empire.

And I hear that soon enough he’ll be sending ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire, too. Can’t you just sniff the leadership?

Or it may be something entirely different.

I think it will be entirely different.

And that’s where you come in. Yes, you.

You have a mission to create a new nation here. It won’t look like what we have today – it simply cannot, since we have created a situation that is at the far end of stability, but more on that Wednesday.

I assure you, you play a part. The initial conditions of what happens are crucial to the final outcome. If George Washington had wanted to be King? If Thomas Jefferson had been a Martian Terminator Robot like the one that keeps triggering my motion detector lights at night even though the sheriff won’t believe me?

Things would be entirely different.

And you are important. Your actions in the next decade are critical to the creation of what will come after. Do we want a nation that will be based on slavery, control, and that eternal boot stamping on a human face?

I’d vote no. If you’re a regular here, I’m betting that’s your vote, too.

I think everything he wrote was Orwellian.

If so, let me shout as loudly as I can: You Are Not Done. This is Not Over. What is it that you can do to create a world where freedom beats slavery? What can you do to create a world where children can run free from the indoctrination of an all-powerful, all-regulating state?

There’s a lot.

Our nation was, thankfully, built on the consent of the governed. Most things that local government provides, we want. To quote Python, Monty:

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

To be clear: the Federal government does very little to make anything in the list above better, and often does a lot to make them worse. Except for the interstate highways. Those are actually pretty cool.

But I will tell you – you are the seed of the future of this country. You are the seed of the future of this continent.

Never cross a Scrabble® player. They’ll send you threatening letters.

You are the seed of the future of this world. It doesn’t matter how old you are. The time is coming, and coming quickly where great injustices will be attempted. And you are the seed to make what comes after better for humanity. Would the world rather live in 1950’s America or 1930’s U.S.S.R.?

The choice is stark.

Your mission is clear. How will you act to make your county, your state, your country one where free men can walk?

It’s up to you.

Back to the mountain.

For me, it was a game. That’s the advantage of being 12. Pa Wilder and my older brother (also named John due to a typographical error) and I wheeled the tires so we had two good ones in front. We locked in the hubs on the four-wheel drive.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive up a mountain path in a car with only two tires in a snowstorm as it got darker every minute. It doesn’t work very well. The flat back wheels couldn’t push the Jimmy® up the hill.

That’s where I came in. It was my job to take the winch cable, run up the hill, and loop the cable up the base of a tree. Pa would then use the combination of the winch and the two front tires to pull the Jimmy© up.

Tree by tree, cable length by cable length, we worked pretty flawlessly as a team to get the Jimmy™ to the top of the hill. Thankfully, for the most part it was downhill from there. Although Pa was driving on the rims, we got it home.

Don’t let the jack slip on your foot when you’re changing a tire. You might need a toe.

Was there danger? Certainly, there always is. We had snow, so we had water. Ma would have called the Sheriff not too long after dusk, and even though the mountains were a labyrinth of roads, people had seen us. We also had matches, hatchets, wool blankets, gasoline, and a mountain’s worth of firewood to keep us warm.

But we also had a mission. Each of us served our purpose, and we got home.

Pa was a bit raw about having to buy two new rims and three new tires for a day’s worth of not seeing any elk, though. For the record, I never saw a single elk when hunting with Pa. I’m telling you, that man knew how to hunt. Finding? Sometimes I think he just wanted a good drive in the woods and hike with his boys, teaching them about living. Teaching them about missions, and the part that they play, whether they know it or not.

In this life, we all have a mission, and we all play a part in it. I can assure you that your part is not done, because you’re above ground, breathing, and reading this.

I hate to repeat something so trite, but in this case, it’s true: you are not done. This is not over. And the whole world depends . . . on you.

It’s up to you. You will create the future.

So, go do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

Taco Bell® inspired outfits?

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

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

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

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

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

“Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

Yeah, divorce just STARTS the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

No, not prison.

But I still owed reparations payments to France.

Propaganda Attack: The Wilder Experience (Plus Bikini Ending)

â€œPBS, theÂ propagandaÂ wing of Bill and Melinda Gates.â€ â€“ The Office

I used to advertise that I catered to midgets, but the market was too small.

A curious thing happened last week.Â For the most part, I think most of the people who comment and interact with me are pretty much what they seem.Â Iâ€™ve had a few direct messages (email and whatnot) that seemed to be right out of the â€œFBI funds plot paid for by FBI and planned by FBI with equipment provided by FBIâ€ files.Â I told them point-blank that I assumed anyone sending me emails of that type were FBI and . . . they stopped sending me emails.

Huh.Â That was weirdly easy.

Then there are the people commenting for commercial purposes to promote their own websites.Â You can always spot those â€“ the comments have nothing to do with the post, and are often some sort of cut and paste word salad.Â If those make it through the spam filter I let the comments stay up, but donâ€™t interact with them.

Does anyone answer their e-mails?

Moscow Rules (no coincidences) would indicate that, at least several times, Iâ€™ve managed to irritate someone enough to knock the site off the net.Â With over 1,000 days of (more or less) continuous uptime, to get knocked off twice in one month probably indicates Iâ€™ve irritated the Junior AntifaÂ® LGBT Programmer Allianceâ„¢ enough that they script-kiddied the place.

But last weekâ€™s COVIDIOCRACY post was enough to ratchet up the attention, I guess.

Iâ€™m not sure how the comment/spam filter works.Â Probably programmers howl at a moonlit sky and throw Dungeons and Dragonsâ„¢ dice until they level up their dwarf.Â In reality, the programmers do choose parameters of known spam and then place those comments in a bin until people like me decide if theyâ€™re real or not.

The first comment to pop up, relatively early in the post was this one:

Iâ€™ll note a few things:Â the name, â€œlabratâ€ was chosen to give the impression that the person is engaged in science on a regular basis.Â Itâ€™s not bad, really.

The first paragraph was intended to be fawning (entertaining) but also an attempt to discredit my credentials.Â In reality, I have cheerfully acknowledged every error found in the blog, but there arenâ€™t all that many, even when I calculated the mass of anti-PEZÂ® required for near light-speed travel.

The idea, coupled with the name, was to convey legitimacy to them, while removing legitimacy from the post for the casual reader.

The rest of the post is a word salad thatâ€™s attempting to:

Toss a claim that Dr. Malone didnâ€™t invent the mRNA vaccine. Well, he didnâ€™t, but it looks like he had a very significant role in the development of the technology (LINK).Â Iâ€™ll let others sort that out.Â Is he a crackpot?Â Donâ€™t know.Â Didnâ€™t say so, either way.Â Regardless, Iâ€™m sure Malone knows more than â€œlabratâ€.
Say that viruses mutate.
Indicates that new data means new approaches. Like, lockdown (what number is this, three?) and I kid you not â€“ the CDCÂ® just said, â€œtwo more weeksâ€ to stop the spread.

But then, just an hour later, this comment showed up to be moderated:

Itâ€™s . . . the same post.Â But now itâ€™s â€œhankâ€, which makes me think of either Bocephus or Hank Hill:

I guess all your rowdy friends can be there on Monday Night if you donâ€™t criticize Barak Obama.

Under a different guise, â€œj-labâ€ started commenting on random posts.Â Same quotes.

Then, another one.Â Why this one?Â I think it was a hello from the bot-master.Â On another website I called him out as being up and active during the time businesses would be open from India to the Eastern Mediterranean.Â His comment, â€œNamaste!â€

And, finally, these two from the last 12 hours.

I bet those people are fun at parties.

I backtracked the I.P. addresses from the comments.Â Just to let you know, I never do that with average comments.Â Frankly, Iâ€™m just not interested where most people are posting from, Iâ€™m just glad youâ€™re here.Â But I did backtrack these.Â Where did the comments come from?Â Atlanta, Georgia.Â Canada.Â Japan.

They didnâ€™t really come from those places.Â All of the comments came from a proxy.Â Those locations were just where it popped out into the â€œtrackableâ€ Internet.Â It would likely be trivial for fed.GOV to track them, but for me, thatâ€™s where the rabbit hole ends.

But itâ€™s enough.

The end result is simple.Â I write about the coming Civil War?Â Yawn.Â I write about forced inoculations of experimental mRNA technology that appears to have little to no actual beneficial use.Â What?Â What do you mean?

In the Pfizer trials, there were 15 deaths from mRNA injected folks.Â There were 14 deaths in the control group.

No.

Beneficial.

Effects.

The â€œjabâ€ might have horrific implications for humanity.Â Iâ€™ll probably hit some nightmare-level (and very low probability events) on Fridayâ€™s post.Â Again, itâ€™s very possible that the #clotshot might only hurt a few tens of thousands of people, and not be some sort of dystopian science fiction movie backstory.Â Vaccines have been pulled for much less harm than has been reasonably attributed to the mRNA shot:

Before swine flu met Jesus it was swater flu.

So why push it so hard?Â Iâ€™m not sure.Â Governmental power?Â Pharmaceutical profits?Â Covering their tracks by removing the â€œcontrol groupâ€?

Regardless, all of the power, profit, and cover-up goes away with one simple trick:

The Best Post You’ll Read About COVID This Week: COVIDIOCRACY (with bikini ending)

“Quite frankly, we have had some very reliable intelligence reports that quite a serious epidemic has broken out at Clavius, something apparently of an unknown origin. Is this in fact what has happened?” – 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’m not against all Gene therapy.

Note 1: none of the memes for this post are original (most all of my regular post memes are), these are “as found” on the Internet. I don’t think that there are any major inaccuracies, but, as always, engage in critical thinking.

Note 2: this isn’t medical or life advice. You have to assess your own situation and make your own choices.

I was wandering through the Internet this week when this little gem of information caught my eye:

When I caught a bacterial infection, the doctor told me I was a man of culture.

The “jab” (which is not a vaccine, more on that in a bit) had proven not to decrease the rate of infection. Nope. The #clotshot looks like it turns those that have taken it into super-spreaders. They have the ability, if infected, to spread even more of the disease to other people.

Think about that for just a second: the “vaccinated” are very likely making the “normal DNA” population less safe. It’s a paradox. But at least they don’t get it themselves, right? Well, in the immortal words of Aesop: natzsofast . . . .

So, this gives a whole new meaning to Royal Navy “carrier”. Something tells me they should have seen this one coming.

It has become abundantly clear that the “jab” is (at best) only moderately effective. I have had the ‘Rona. The Mrs. tested positive for the antibodies, and when she was sick she was helpfully coughing directly on me all night. It’s not as bad as licking a doorknob at a bathroom hobos use, but it’s close.

The symptoms for me were mild. A bit of a coof, and a fever of around 99°F for about four hours. For The Mrs.? Worse, but not the sickest I’ve ever seen her.

For me, a fever of 99°F is something that happens about once a decade, at most. I last took a sick day in 2001 or so, so I’ve generally been fairly healthy. The flu in 2012 was much, much worse for me, but that’s only because I let it get in my lungs. I guess it was swine flu, so I should have had some oinkment.

Blofeld: “Mr. Bond, I’ve poisoned your glass with the measles vaccine. Now you have autism.” Bond: “That’s fine, Blofeld, I’ve disassembled your doomsday device and organized the parts by size.”

CORONA is real. But when you look at the statistics, it is a disease that simply doesn’t hurt young people. By young, I mean less than 40. So, when I see Internet harpies screeching that they don’t want their kids to DIE!!! because of selfish “unvaxxed”, what I see are people who probably dress their precious snowflake up in bubble wrap before they are allowed to go play in a playground that has been designed by dozens of engineers over thousands of hours to be safe in any conceivable circumstances.

And then they insist to replace the ground under the safe playground equipment with crushed rubber pellets that would safely allow Jeff Bezos to land on them if he jumped from orbit.

Oops, sorry. Jeff Bezos hasn’t been to orbit.

But the statistics are clear: your kid is safe, at least from COVID-19.

Never get involved with a cult of mimes. They’re capable of unspeakable acts of violence.

Here at the end of July, 2021, though, the drumbeat of COVIDIOCRACY has reached a new high. I was over at Phil’s place (LINK) and made a comment. The comment was about the coming mandate to force everyone to get “the jab” or lose their government job. This was the wife of a .GOV employee or contractor. She asked me what she should do. My response was simple – without knowing lots of intimate details of her life, there was no way I could answer.

When you don’t need a prion disease to have your brain turn into sponge.

Nearly immediately, my response was jumped on by a shill – obviously a paid propagandist. It was interesting that the only hours they were posting were when it was 8:30AM in India to when it was about 6PM in India. I’m not saying it was India. It could have been someone really late to the office in China or really early to the office in the eastern Mediterranean.

Phil had attracted paid foreign agents to his site to pop up propaganda. Propaganda for the “jab”. If it were good for you, wouldn’t that be self-evident by now?

Let’s look at the huge push on the “vax”:

Coordinated media attacks to encourage it.
Pedo Joe announcing that he’s going to make Fed.GOV take the shot.
Coordinated attacks by shills on influential blogs and /message boards/.

Sure, you could say that it’s all about Pfizer’s® Pfrofits™, but it’s only a few measly billion that they made this quarter. That’s not to say that Pfizer© isn’t Pcorruptly® attempting to manipulate the media:

The vaccine, though, might be dangerous. I was talking with a friend and described it as “an untested genetic manipulation.” He said that was too strong, and it sounded kinda crazy to say it that way. Honestly, that was a fair criticism, and I especially appreciate those: it’s a good friend that tells you when they think you’re nuts. But:

My gut instinct might have been right. DNA changes? That can’t have any bad impacts, can it?

I guess it can. And this is where the #clotshot becomes a crime. Any healthy person under 40 is much more likely to die of the mRNA treatment than COVID. There has been quite a run on heart attacks of healthy young men who were injected.

But even after this, the push for the injection is intensifying:

But why would you trust a government and a media that has consistently lied to you about the ‘Rona?

And they’ve completely expressed how they feel about anyone who has a different opinion:

Certainly, they’ll return your freedom to you after COVID is banished, right?

Be Goofus, not Gallant.

The Mrs. and I have discussed it. We are not getting the #clotshot. If this is an experiment, we’ll happily remain in the control group. I’ve had the ‘Rona, so I identify as immune.

But, in the end, you have a choice. You can submit to have a literally Biblical restriction on your life,

Or, you can take another track. If enough people choose freedom, we’ll never have to worry for a minute. You must remember – they’re more afraid of you than you should be of them.

See, it ends with a bikini!

Emotional Bank Accounts – Another Form Of Wealth

“I’m yours, Lurch. My heart. My soul. My bank account.” – The Addams Family

If it’s 2% milk, what’s the other 98%?

I generally try to be an upbeat person. I’ve got good reason to be. So far, at least, most of the worst things in my life have led to most of the best things in my life. And it seems the worse the initial event is, the better the final outcome.

The track record is pretty good. I’m optimistic. Heck, with a small thermonuclear war, who knows how good things will get for me!

Optimism is one of my personal keys to life. And it’s key to my relationships.

One thing I’ve learned (besides the fact that cats float but don’t like it) along the way is this: what I get out of my relationships is just like my job or any other aspect of my life. The more that I put into the relationship, the more that I get out of the relationship.

“I have become Fluffy, Destroyer of Worlds.”

Stephen Covey called this the Emotional Bank Account®. I put the little ® there in this case because Stephen Covey ® almost everything under the Sun.

The idea of the Emotional Bank Account™ is simple: every relationship that you have is one where you’re either doing the things that build the relationship or doing things that cause the relationship to fade faster than Johnny Depp’s career.

A ramen noodle warehouse burned down. Dozens of dollars in inventory were destroyed.

This is a simple and important concept. In my career I’ve worked in lots of different office environments and seen lots of different characters that quickly developed an overdraft situation with me:

The Complainer: There’s a problem with everything, in the view of a Complainer. It’s like working with Goldilocks, but the porridge is never, ever the right temperature. There is no topic that isn’t complained about. Heck, if they were the manager of the Tesla® plant, they’d complain that the place smelled musky.
The Helpless: Helpless people simply cannot do any particular task, and need help each and every time they do it. If you allow it, they’ll pawn off as much of the task to you as they can, each and every day. What’s the name for a collective parasitical group of people like this?
The Woe-Is-Me: This is a perennial victim. Everything in their life that’s bad? They’re not responsible for it. How bad is their life? They have to shop at Wal-Martyr®.
The Untrustworthy: Think you’ve told them a secret? Soon enough the entire office knows. And untrustworthy people who use marijuana are worse. They’re guilty of high treason.
The Emergency Room Doctor: Everything has to be done now – it’s all urgent. And there’s a sense of criticality about even the most mundane tasks. I mean, if your parachute doesn’t open, why panic? You’ve got the rest of your life to fix it.

Those people are draining. Don’t be one of them. How do I know this? Once I was going through a rough patch, and was slipping into Woe-Is-Me. I could sense from my friends that I had ridden that pony a little too long, or maybe I needed to up my deodorant game. I decided to stop complaining.

Then The Mrs. complained that I don’t buy her flowers. I have no idea when she started selling them.

I decided that if I had a problem worth complaining about, I’d deal with or shut up. Even my best friends have a max tolerance level for dealing my emotional complaints. The Mrs. is even more direct. When I whine, her only comment is: “And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?”

Oddly enough, though, I found that (in most circumstances) when I’m a positive person, people like to see me around more. They ask me for help. They offer help. My account balance is full.

It’s not just at work. It’s not just my friends. It’s my family, too. If every interaction that I have with them is negative, people aren’t exactly happy when Pa comes home.

Hopefully, this knife joke wasn’t too edgy.

Being a positive, productive, trustworthy person? When times are good, it’s important. When times aren’t good?

Maybe even more important. And when we talk about wealth, being surrounded by good, trustworthy people is wealthy, indeed.

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it. Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin? Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals. The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England. Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years. I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears. The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy. And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that. NO! Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral. Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime. Or the lifetime of your child. Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation. Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral. One motivational mistake is to aim too high. When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners. Third place isn’t so bad. Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage. They did really well. Were they close to winning it all? Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal. But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place. If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better. So, third isn’t so bad. They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him: what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week? What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room? The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night. Second place is tantalizing. It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates. Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist? It depends. In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right? But what happens when the dog finally catches the car? What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history: Buzz Aldrin. It will all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class. He went to the USMA at West Point. He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did. He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing. What was it?

Oh, yeah. He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool. But there appears to be a downside to that. It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up? Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up. That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake. Imagine: Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked. Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes. Then a month passes. Then a year passes. The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew. How do you move forward? How do you top yourself? I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes. Dang. That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped. He had fame. He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle. Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars. Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate? The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk. He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars. He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision. You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him. Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars. A worthy goal for mankind. A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity. He had found his cathedral.

Again. Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers. Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up. But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that. Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building. You start building something more important than you. I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching. Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure. Neil didn’t really say. He seemed happy that the attention had passed. My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong. And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one: have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build. Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through. Make it something that you can care about. Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts: you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

The Greatest Game

“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn

I have a friend who has a trophy wife. It wasn’t first place.

I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys. I have always raised my own children by a simple rule: if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were. A related rule was: if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something. Especially if it made my life easier.

Five-year-olds can do drywall. I mean, through the tears, that is.

Obviously, this got mixed results. The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older. When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM. Right into the house.

Live and learn. Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet. Was I irritated he ran a car into our house? Certainly. But, independence has costs.

Learning is never free.

I promise to stop using police-related puns. I’ll give them arrest.

When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting: most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft. Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them. It made sense. We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.

In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple: building a fire. To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever. One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour. In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire. Finally, he got it going.

Me: “Okay, good job! You can put it out now.”

He didn’t. It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered. And, for him, that was true. He kept that fire going for hours.

There was a fire at Goodwill® today. No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.

I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me. In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life. When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge. He didn’t need a medal. What did he need?

Nothing. He had struggled for an hour to make that fire. His reward wasn’t anything outside of him. His reward was the skill. In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.

Give that a thought. Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt. I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic. The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.

When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.

A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal. They don’t need outside affirmation. They are who they are.

Arnold was a great gardener. They called him the Germinator.

That’s the rule of the Greatest Game. Struggle. Learn. Master. Repeat.

Missing? A trophy. Why is it missing? It’s simply not necessary.

We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle. I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss. Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere. The calories to feed a person are plentiful.

So why are video games popular?

They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat. Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.

Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human. To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time. The game has to be worth playing.

No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse. He broke all of the Commandments at once.

I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines. Our technology has changed our culture. Our culture has changed our roles in society.

These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology. Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on. That led to independence.

The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t. He was free to succeed, or free to fail.

What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.

We’re still here. We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there. Each day we have the chance: Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.

Me? I’m still learning to make a fire or two.