Category: Purpose

Erasing the West: Step by Step

Groucho:  Now, Columbus sailed from Spain to India, looking for a shortcut.  Chico:  Oh, you mean strawberry shortcut? – Monkey Business

columbus

Columbus sailed his ships, the Niñteñdo, the Piña Colada, and the Santa Fe to the new world and then bravely tried to repel the landing Pilgrims.  Or so I seem to remember.

Christopher Columbus was one of the first that they came for.  Columbus was easy pickings, really.

Columbus lived and died five hundred years ago, nearly as long as it seems the Democrats have been trying to get Trump out of office.  Columbus was an Italian before Italy was a nation, so getting support for Columbus isn’t all that easy.  Besides, Columbus was an Italian working for the Spanish, which I imagine involved enough hand gestures to make eye protection necessary as far away as France.

But Columbus was the first hero that they came for because he represented something that the Left hates:  Western Civilization.

In reading through several columns on why Columbus is bad, none of them focused on things that Columbus did, with the exception that he was too harsh to Spanish colonists, and some of the worst allegations were probably written by his mortal enemy, Agent Smith.  No, most of the things that the writers blame on Columbus were based on events that were a result of the clash between Western Culture and the culture that previously existed in the Americas.

None of the articles noted that the people living in the Americas at the time were far more barbaric than anything brought to them by Europe – the Aztecs and Mayans and other tribes enslaved, murdered, and exploited each other on a scale that almost puts Sesame Street® to shame.  The only real crime Columbus was guilty of was showing Europe how to get to a continent that was so technologically backward and immunologically compromised that it could be captured by half a dozen guys with swords and horses.  It was like a flock of kittens in a room full of metal-bladed box fans, except the kittens had a better chance.

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I want to resurrect the Aztec religion and start sacrificing vegans.  That’s not a typo.

The war against Columbus isn’t about Columbus – it’s about a hatred for Western Civilization as a whole.  The war is a desire to erase culture.  Each time it occurs, it follows a similar path:

  • Choose someone who is a cultural hero, preferably a primary face of the development of Western Culture. The person should be, ideally, revered.  I mean, not as revered as me, but revered.
  • Pick the worst things that they ever did, even if their life was otherwise a paragon of virtue. Note that it’s okay if what they did was socially acceptable back in the time and place it was done – the worst thing they ever did should be the only thing used to characterize the person.  Jefferson founded a University, wrote the Declaration of Independence, and was President?  You know he got caught double parking his buggy once?
  • Never let up. Even if it comes out that (like in the case of Columbus) nearly every bad thing said about the guy was written by his mortal enemy, ignore it.  Keep vilifying him, and blame him for every single consequence of everything he ever did, even if it happened after he died.  It’s like blaming George Washington for Mount St. Helens because it erupted in the state of Washington.

One particular consequence of Columbus making his journey is that the United States exists.  Yeah, he never made it to any part of what makes up the United States today, but he showed the Europeans who finally got around to colonizing what eventually became the United States the way to get here.  Western Culture came, and expressed itself in a unique way:  American Culture.

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If George Washington were alive today, he would probably spend most of his time scratching at his coffin lid.

In the case of the United States today, one common claim by Leftists is that there is “no American Culture.”  I’m certain that fish don’t know that they’re swimming in water, either.  But that is certainly a lie.  American Culture doesn’t seem like it exists because it is all around us in the United States, and happens to be one of our biggest exports while also being our biggest draw.

Overall, American Culture has been responsible for creating more technology and prosperity than most cultures that have ever existed.  Has it done stupid things, things with negative consequences for millions of people around the world like set loose Adam Sandler or Bruce Springsteen?  Certainly.  But on balance, the world has been made much, much better by Western Civilization and the United States.

But the Left cannot abide by nations like the United States or, especially, Western Civilization.  Both of these stand in the way of the Left – they are structures that impede the ability of the Left to control every aspect of your life, to create a logic and history that only agrees with what the Left says.  It’s because they exist, they want to destroy them.  Very directly they want to destroy your culture.  They hold your values as obstructions.  They want to disintegrate your family so your loyalty belongs to the Left.  And they want to see you dead so that your ideas will die with you.

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Stalin:  There is no “I” in team, but there is “U” in gulag.

All of that starts with values and culture.  To attack that, not only do they attack the culture of today though the infiltration of Leftist ideas (How To Spot Propaganda In 2020, Featuring Stonks) but also through the vilification of the past.  What has been attacked?

  • Statues – of Columbus, of Civil War leaders, of Lewis and Clark. They will not be done until every traditional American Hero is gone.
  • The National Anthem – Bouncy© (that’s her name, right?) and Jay C™ were at the Superbowl® on Sunday. They sat during the National Anthem to protest the unfair nation that provided Jay C© with his meager billion dollar fortune.  Heck, you can’t even raise a private navy with that pittance.
  • Borders – Chants of “No Border, No Wall, No USA at All” are fairly subtle. I just wish I could figure out what they meant.

There are steps in the cultural erosion that we’ve seen so far, and the biggest attack has been against the Idyllic Decade, the 1950’s.  The 1950’s were the last decade before everything went wrong.

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Followed by the Jell-O® salad course, naturally.

It’s been attempted by the media, by movies, to re-write the 1950’s, just as the attempt to tear down Columbus started.  Why attack the 1950’s?  Because it was the high point in the life of the American family.  Things were good:

  • Postwar prosperity led to nearly universal employment.
  • The wages of a single man were enough to support a family and raise children.
  • Less than three percent of children were born to single mothers.
  • Violent crime was less than half of today’s crime rate.
  • The salary gap between a high school graduate and a college graduate has tripled since 1965.
  • Boy Scout participation is half of 1950’s – and that was before the BSA folded to political correctness and saw a free-fall in membership.
  • Kiwanis membership is half of 1950’s numbers.
  • Church attendance in the 1950’s was nearly 90%. Now?  Less than 40%.

Thank heavens Netflix® subscription numbers are up, since today 41% of children are born to unmarried mothers.  Or there might be a correlation here . . . .

But what can you expect when reality is inverted in just the same way that the legacy of Columbus, skilled navigator, was inverted?

Family is now seen as bad.  Rather than being a supporting structure that helps a child learn right from wrong via loving parental support and instruction television and movies would have you believe that family is  a stifling, controlling, patriarchy that just doesn’t want you to be the individual snowflake you were meant to be.  I mean, that’s what you’d think if you got your information by watching television or movies.

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The best part?  No limit on cats!

And churches?  They’re evil.  They’ve gone from places where you meet and discuss and learn about God to places where you learn nothing but intolerance from sweaty red-faced pastors and priests who don’t really believe in God.  Oh, and these intolerant pastors and priests are all secretly sexually twisted, since anyone who believes in God and values must be, deep down, a deviant.

They pick the best features of the Leftists to showcase.  They pick the best features of the civilizations that Leftists created, and then claim that it really work next time, while sweeping the bodies under the rug.  They then pick the worst of their opponents and often stereotype them using their own worst tendencies.  They want you to feel guilt for the things your ancestors did, when living by the standards of the day, while feeling no guilt themselves for the direct pain caused by their actions and ideas in the world today.

But, despite hardship, Columbus had a dream.  He sailed west.

Statue or not – he was a hero.

Health Goals, Girls in Togas (and a Bikini)

“Trying is the first step toward failure.” – The Simpsons

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I want to get my face on a coin – that way I achieve my goal to help make change in the world.

One thing that I’ve decided to focus on even more in 2020 is my health.  Even if I followed all of Dr. Sinclair’s advice (Living Forever, The Uncomfortable Way), I’m still getting older although my immortality is working out so far.  In some respects I think that we might be in for some very interesting times in the next few years, so being in better shape than I am now would probably be a good idea.  Besides, as Pugsley gets older, taller, and stronger if I don’t do something he’ll wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to break you, little man.”

One way to do that is to keep my life under constant review.  This isn’t new, at all.  The Romans may be dead, but I contend that Roman philosophy dating from the first century A.D. is valid today.  Heck, current American civilization looks a lot like Roman life around that time.  In reading Seneca’s Letters, I saw a conversation where he described checking into a hotel, looking down from the room at the fitness gym next door.  A little later he described that the Romans had regulations on boat speeds in particular areas.  It was like California, but only 30% of the population in Rome were slaves.

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Romans on diets were happy when their togas went from L to XL. 

In particular, one of my favorite philosophers of the first century was Seneca.  Seneca was a stoic, but had managed to make a considerable fortune open a chain of all-night toga laundromats.  It was there that the togas were washed with water from the sea tides.  Occasionally, a batch of this water would get too stiff from the added starch used to flatten the togas so they weren’t wrinkled.  That’s where the Roman expression, “beware the tides of starch” comes from.

Okay, but what Seneca really said was:

“I will keep constant watch over myself and will put each day up for review.  For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives.  We reflect only upon what we are about to do.  Yet, our plans for the future descend from the past.”

– Seneca

Before I read that particular passage, I had bought a little Moleskine® notebook for just that purpose.  When I said, little, I mean it.  It’s really small – just a little larger than a 3×5 notecard.  It’s small enough I can fit it in my wallet.  I bought it for a very specific purpose:  to reflect on progress towards my goals, specifically my health related goals for 2020.

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Her parents even named her Annette.

Each day I write down several things:  how much and what I ate – if I ate anything (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water), how much I exercised, what weights I lifted and how many repetitions, my morning and evening weight, and whether or not I felt that aliens had put pods near my house that would turn into an exact duplicate of me if I dared fall asleep.  Those are a few of the things that go into the book, though not all of the things I put down.  It doesn’t take particularly long to write it down – just two or three minutes.

I find, for me, the process of writing this data down makes it more real somehow.  And it makes me jump on the scale on days I’d rather not (like after Thanksgiving) so I can get the data.  And collecting that data and writing it down is important.  It makes me face the cold, hard objective truth and holds me accountable in an equally objective manner.

So, I record what I’ve done, and how I’ve lived as it relates to my goals.  When I’m fasting, I write about that progress.  I also record how much I’ve slept, because even though I know that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, I also know that I’m probably not sleeping enough – though I would say that the passengers in my car seem to get unreasonably angry when I try to take a short nap.  “Are you trying to kill us?” they ask.

Worrywarts.  The road is practically straight.

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Sometimes I wake up grumpy – other mornings I let her sleep in.

Writing those experiences and activities down also help me celebrate victories – and holds me accountable for lapses.  It also sets up a feedback loop.  Nothing makes the next lunchtime session on the treadmill more focused than seeing that I gained weight the last week.  But present me certainly doesn’t want to make life worse for future me by setting future me up for a failure.  Writing things down changes outcomes.  I certainly don’t want to write down failures.  I mean, one time someone told me I tended to blame others for my failures.  He was right.  I guess I get that from my mother.

But in reviewing the past, and in reviewing my failures, I don’t, and won’t use past failures as a club.  I don’t allow them to poison my future.  Instead, I use failure as a lever.  Since I caused the failure in the first place, more than likely I can solve it.  Unless it involves communism.  Then you’re on your own – you should have seen the red flags.

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I’m hoping Kim declares war on his real enemy:  Twinkies®.

I also use this time to reflect on the things I did to take me towards my goals, and the things I did that take me away from them.  It sounds overly simplistic, but most people would be far healthier if they just made several small changes each day about what they eat, how much they work out, how much sleep they get, and what is the appropriate amount to pay for a hooker in Tijuana*.  $3.50 is probably a little low.

Weakness is powerful, so having to write down every time I make an error is one way make me more powerful.  It also strengthens the cause and effect relationship between my action and the outcome.  This further makes me accountable.  Dangit.

In a sense, this is (sort of) a sequel or companion piece to Wednesday (Focus is a Key to Life and Look a Squirrel!), and ties to focus.  You can have a plan, but if you don’t collect data and don’t analyze it regularly, you’ll never focus on it – it’ll be like an objective your boss gives you and then never mentions again – it simply will never get done.

  • If you write about it, you will focus on it.
  • If you measure it, you will manage it.
  • If your ego is against it, you’ll never measure it.

gob

“I’m a failure – I can’t even fake the death of a stripper.” 

I heard an interview with Penn Gillette, the Penn part of the illusionist duo Penn and Teller.  He was talking about his recent weight loss.  He mentioned what he thought his starting weight was, but then added, “I really don’t know how much I weighed at my heaviest, no one does.”  What he was stating is that his ego wouldn’t let him step on the scale at that higher weight – he simply didn’t want to know that answer.  It wasn’t until he’d started losing weight that his ego allowed him to start measuring.

And start managing.  And start tracking.

And start winning.

*I have never been to Tijuana, but I saw a Cheech and Chong movie once where the plot involved them making a van out of marijuana in Tijuana, so I feel I have some expertise.

Status, Money, and Bad Car Jokes

“Dude, where’s my car?” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

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I wonder if her Tiffany is twisted, too?

I recall reading a story about several wives at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas.  They were comparing cars – each of them had a new Mercedes® or similar luxury car.  One of the wives, exasperated, mentioned their really wealthy friend, Martha, who drove around in an older car.  “I wish I was as rich as Martha.  Then I wouldn’t have to drive a new car.”

It’s always fascinated me that there are people who feel that they have to spend money for appearances.  The Mrs. can vouch for that – it’s because of her vocal insistence that I spend money for deodorant, which I guess is like a Mercedes™, except Old Spice© is cheaper and costs much less to insure.

I know, I know, having to spend money to impress people is not a club I want to be in, but I find it interesting nevertheless.  After all, I’m in an even more exclusive club:  guys who want to be able to buy a pickup with a stick shift, a vinyl bench seat and rubber flooring instead of carpet.  As nearly as I can tell from the domestic pickup truck market, this particular club has one member.  Me.

The world seems to have gone into a mode that is based in luxury.  A few years ago, I visited a friend, Dave.  Dave had a new pickup truck.  As we drove around on a fairly warm day, I noticed that my butt was getting . . . cold.  That’s not something that normally happens to my butt by itself.  It turns out his pickup truck didn’t have just have heated seats, it had climate controlled seats that also got cold.

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I’m sure it has seats that cook you at 350°F or freeze you to -40°F.

I was amused – I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.  I hadn’t had my butt chilled for my pleasure before, except for that one time in Amsterdam.  Dave, however, didn’t buy the pickup because he was showing off or because he wanted specifically to chill my butt – he bought it because he wanted it.  And he probably paid cash.

Just kidding.  Dave probably wrote a check.

I wasn’t jealous of Dave’s truck.  It wasn’t something that I’d ever buy for myself.  My current daily driver is older than Pugsley, and has nearly 180,000 miles (3,500 kilograms) on it, and only 36,000 miles (45°C) on the latest oil change.  I’m wanting to keep it until it’s driven at least one light-second, which is 186,000 miles (63 meters).  Fingers crossed.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t get my car to the Moon – that’s 226,000 miles (5 liters), and I’m nearly certain my fuel pump will die again before then, plus Allstate® won’t insure translunar travel, I mean, at least not with full coverage.

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I’m sorry.  I Apollo-gize.  And, yes, I know that Neil never had a sweet ride like this one.

I’m not against spending money, but I think you should spend money like Fuzzy Pink Niven (Hugo® winning author Larry Niven’s wife) spends calories:

Potato chips, candy, whipped cream, or a hot fudge sundae may involve you, your dietician, your wardrobe, and other factors. But FP’s Law implies: Don’t eat soggy potato chips, or cheap candy, or fake whipped cream, or an inferior hot fudge sundae.

I think that advice on calories applies to many areas of life.  I have a budget of money.  There are things I have to buy, and have to spend it on – The Mrs. gets rather cranky if I don’t feed her.  Beyond those necessities, with any left over, I have a choice as to what I spend it on, and when I spend it.  Where Dave chooses to spend his on a really cool pickup truck, and a collection of pinball machines, my choices are different.

But those choices are mine, just like Dave’s choices are his.

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My ideal truck, complete with DIY garage!

Money represents potential.  It is the potential to create, the potential to build, the potential to serve.   In many ways, it represents the potential for future choices.

Time represents the potential for future choices as well.  We choose how to spend our money as if it is limited, but we choose to spend our time as if it’s unlimited?  Money comes and goes, but my budget of time is my life, measured in minutes and seconds.  Spending my time is nothing less than spending my life.  Just like a pickup seat determines how warm or cold our butts are, how we spend our time (and who we spend our time with) determines who we are.

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Is it just me or does this picture of Beto O’Rourke look just a bit off?

Knowing this, go and make your choices today.

Because my butt is warm.  (That’s supposed to be motivational.)

A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

Happy Penultimate Day 2019, and the Biggest Story of 2019: Society Unravelling

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing!  I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

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If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one.  I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.

If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations!  It’s Penultimate Day!  This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30.  Why Penultimate Day?  Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone.  We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone.  After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home. 

I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012.  As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar:  “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.” 

Or my translation may be off.  Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©.  Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.

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Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.

You can join in on Penultimate Day, too.  Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house.  Then, don’t buy one.  Finally:  eat Italian food.  Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.

My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year.  In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust).  The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.

In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.

The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year.  And it’s not just in the United States:

  • Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
  • Yellow Vest Protests in France.
  • Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
  • Impeachment.
  • Left and Right Polarity.
  • Your family at Thanksgiving.
  • AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
  • Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.

We know trouble is coming.  The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2.  How divisive is society today?  In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2:  Electric Boogaloo.  This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo.  This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2:  Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.

Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech.  Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®.  Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.

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Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798.  And it was glorious.

Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling:  an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities.  He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.

These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity.  What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?

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Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.

Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?  Mysticism.  Power.  Blood.  He was right.  1919 was crappy, but the 20th Century was about to get a whole lot worse.  He concluded:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yup.  Creepy.  And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.

Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another.  This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages.  There is more food now than at any time in history.  It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories.  It cannot be my hair.  My shiny scalp?  Sure.  Not my hair.

Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite).  Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.

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This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of.  And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .

In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast.  Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait.  Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting.  Right now!  Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.

What do Leftist want?  Complete control.  When do they want it?  Now.  Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump.  Nixon?  Conspiracy to commit a break-in.  Clinton?  Perjury.  Trump?  I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.

Trump is not a savior.  Trump is a symptom.  The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom.  And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.

The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left.  The Right just wants history to stop.  The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well.  The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what?  Things are going well.  Let’s burn it all down.”

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As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?

And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™.  The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism.  As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.

This is the context we see ourselves in today.  All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States.  We are splitting apart.

How does this end?  I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom.  America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t.  There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.

This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties.  Remember folks, you heard that here first.  But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.

Don’t Give Up Too Soon. And If You’re Breathing? It’s Too Soon.

“Will you relax?  You’ve got more paranoid fantasies than Stephen King on crack.” – News Radio

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See, I win.  I don’t read him once a year, and he doesn’t read me 150 times a year.

One of my favorite stories is about Stephen King.  When he was trying to get his novel Carrie published, he sent out the copy to quite a few publishers, and was rejected again and again.  Finally, one day he got the novel back, again.  Still, the novel was as rejected as Joe Biden application to teach at an ethics seminar.

He gave up.  Disgusted, King threw the novel into the trash and went to work.  His wife, Tabitha, pulled it out of the trash.  In one version of the story I read, spaghetti sauce from the garbage had gotten on the cover of the manuscript, so Tabitha typed a new one, and encouraged Stephen to submit it one more time.  He did.

This final publisher, Doubleday©, loved Carrie.  They sent King an advance of $2,500, which he spent on a Ford® Pinto™ because he liked scary things.  But then the paperback rights netted King $200,000.  The novel and movie became hits, and paid for him to quit his job so he could focus on novel writing.  When asked what fuels his imagination, King actually said, “I have the heart of a little boy.  And I keep it in my desk drawer.”  But the real story is that King was exceptionally close to giving up.

King didn’t give up, and managed to give us some pretty interesting stories.  He probably has a net worth of $400 million or so based on his writing – all because Tabitha King pulled a manuscript out of the trash, and they sent it out to a publisher.  One more time.

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I tried to donate blood the other day, but they wanted to know whose it was.

I personally feel that King’s writing quality began to diminish significantly in 1992 along with his reduction in cocaine and alcohol consumption.  I gave up on him around 2005.  He’s like your friend that’s really only interesting when he’s wasted, like Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.

Despite this, Stephen King is undoubtedly a success story even though at this point in his life his Twitter® account looks like Jack Torrance© from The Shining™ after all work and no play have made him a dull boy.  I’m not in favor of King returning to his addictions and having someone convince him that a Democrat is president, but, you know he is 72.  How much could it hurt?

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Now, watch Stephen imagine a microwave filled with cocaine? 

The dead Danish thinker dude, Søren Kierkegaard, (English translation of Søren Kierkegaard:  “delicious pastry” – which I believe is the translation all Danish words), coined one of my favorite quotes that’s appropriate to this post:

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

Said in a different way, it makes sense looking backward to see how Stephen King’s success was built upon rejection.  Likely that rejection fueled him to get better, and by the time he “made it” he had been working for years to become an excellent writer.  It is also poetic that Stephen’s final success was made possible by someone who had more faith in him (Tabitha) than he did at that point.

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How much do you have to drink to imagine an alien clown in a sewer?

I first read the Kierkegaard quote in the mid-1990’s and began to understand:  the worst times in my life were the seeds for the best times in my life.  For instance:

I recall being in 8th grade at a wrestling tournament.  I weighed 145 pounds (14.5 kilograms – you just divide by 10 to convert), which in that time and place was heavyweight, or HWT.  The Mrs. and I refer to HWT as “hot water tank,” mainly because it’s amusing.  The wrestling tournament had been going all day that Saturday and on that cold February night it was dark outside – the windows that normally streamed light into the gym were pitch black, lending an air of importance.

There was a single match left:  the hot water tank championship.  It was me against (who else) another guy named John, in this case John Bishop.  Neither one of us was fat – we were both in pretty good shape.  And John Bishop was strong – very strong – he was 32 and in 8th grade.  But he slept well.

John and I went toe to toe for the entire match, each searching for an opening while being countered.  At the end of regulation, four and a half minutes of wrestling, the score was tied, 1-1.  Since this was a tournament, there would be no ties.

It was overtime.

In overtime, the three periods were short – 1 minute; 30 seconds; and 30 seconds. At the end of the second overtime period it was still 1-1, and the crowd was yelling, urging each of us on.  I had never felt such electricity at any sporting event, and here I was, caught up in the middle of it.  In that last period of overtime, in that last second before the match was done, John Bishop escaped.

I lost, 2-1.

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That was a tough match.  I still have the taste of Muppet® in my mouth.  Did you know they bleed blue?

The crowd actually came onto the mat afterwards, and there I was sitting on that same mat, exhausted.  I can still clearly recall sitting on the wrestling mat, surrounded by people congratulating John Bishop.

It was also the last match of the school year.  I had lost.  I had given it all I had, every fiber of my being, and I had lost.

My brother, John Wilder (yes, his real first name is John, just like mine) was there for the whole match.  He was in college and had spent the day in the gym watching me wrestle because he felt responsibility:  he’s the one that convinced me to try wrestling in the first place.

He sat down next to me on the pine bleachers as I unlaced my hand-me-down Adidas® wrestling shoes – his old shoes.  He put his arm around my shoulder.  He asked me to see the second place medal I had in my hand.  I gave it to him.  He looked at it, for what seemed like forever.

“You really earned this one.  John, I’ve never seen you wrestle better in my life.  I’m so proud of you.”

That moment could have been soul crushing.  It could have been a moment where I decided to give wrestling up.  Instead, that was a moment where I knew I could be better.  I knew deep inside of me, that I could do this, that this was part of who I was supposed to be.  I wasn’t crushed, I was filled with resolve.  Over the next four years I won a lot more wrestling matches than I lost, but that one loss in particular opened the door for all of the success that followed.

And the next time I wrestled John Bishop, less than a year later?  I pinned him inside of thirty seconds.

This has been a repeating pattern in my life when I look back.  Every time that I have been faced with adversity and failure, that failure was the seed for future success.  Losses in wrestling are, perhaps, among the most soul-crushing defeats a man can face.

On the mat there are only two men.  There is no place to hide.  There is no one else to blame if you lose.  It is you.  Only you.  I have seen grown men cry like they had spilled a beer when they lost a match.

As bad as losing a wrestling match is, a divorce is worse.  Even a divorce where both sides agree to part is a very difficult thing, and my divorce was no exception.  Divorces are hard.  They’re also expensive.  Why are they expensive?  They’re worth it.

But my divorce set the seed for eventually finding The Mrs., which led to The Boy and Pugsley.

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I enjoyed this movie.  It finally allowed Country Music to be complete – now the truck could leave the singer, too.

The second lesson is persistence.  In most cases, overnight success occurs after about ten years of diligent effort – thousands of hours of intense practice.  You’d assume that concert violinists, for instance, start with talent for the instrument.  You’d certainly be correct.  But what’s missing from the equation is practice.  The average world-class concert violinist practices more, not less than the average violin player.  A really good violinist still sounds like they’re strangling a cat, but maybe more slowly or something.

Talent gets you a ticket, but practice is a multiplier.  A necessary multiplier.  Einstein said his difficulties with math were much more than the average person – precisely because he was working at the far end of what was understood about mathematics at his time and place.

Finally, you still have to deal with reality.  At no point in my life would any amount of practice and study have made me a great basketball player – my skills aren’t there.  And that’s the point – when you’re going through life you’ll get clues that tell you which way to go.  The biggest clue?  Success.  Success is a guidepost – it tells you where you have relative skill.  Stephen King was continually published in pulp and nudie magazines at the time.  Not big money, but still an indication that he had ability, because everyone read Playboy© for the articles, right?

Find your successes.  Feed them.  Understand your failures and how you can use them.  Work harder than anyone else at becoming great.  And also keep in mind that one phone call, one text, one conversation in an elevator might bring it all together.

Then, in the end, you can look backward and understand.

Or just be a cranky old goat like Stephen King.

Get Woke, Go Broke: Hallmark Limited Edition

“I hope you don’t mean that.  You’d feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn’t have a family.” – Home Alone

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I’m so woke I started a Green Lives Matter chapter after watching Shrek®.

When The Boy was very small, say four years old, we’d snuggle together and watch television together on Saturday mornings.  One thing we watched on a regular basis was the Hallmark® channel.  Sometimes I’d make pancakes.  It was fun as only a Saturday with your kids can be.

Most often, we’d watch an episode of the High Chaparral® and then an older family movie – movies like Old Yeller™ or The Cat from Outer Space©.  The Boy did note that air traffic control must have been difficult in Never Neverland because of all of the fuel emergencies.  Get it?  Never land?  I kill me.

I’m too young to have seen High Chaparral™ as anything but reruns, but watching it with The Boy was great.  The plots involved good guys and bad guys – tales of honor.  Tales of family.  Tales of manly courage.  Every one of those lessons was one that I’d like to have imprinted on The Boy’s brain.  Sure, maybe I’d have a winter morning nap through The Cat from Outer Space®, but I never slept through High Chaparral©.

Okay, how could you nap after that theme music?

At this point I don’t remember if they stopped showing High Chaparral™ before or after we moved to Alaska, but I did know that in Alaska we didn’t have the Hallmark™ channel, so it didn’t matter anyway.  And it’s been a few years since Pugsley needed babysitting on a Saturday morning.

Needless to say, I have pleasant memories of the Hallmark® channel.  However, in the last week Hallmark® did the craziest thing.  First, a commercial was approved showing two women lip-locking in a commercial about weddings during a family movie where little kids might be watching.  This provoked outrage in the Traditional Religious community, and they complained to Hallmark©.  Following that outrage, Hallmark™ then pulled the commercial, and apologized for showing it.

All said and done?

No.  Within about 48 hours of pulling the commercial, Hallmark® then said they’d be fine with showing that commercial, and their earlier statement saying that they made a mistake by saying that they’d made a mistake was a mistake, so they apologized for apologizing earlier.  Then, at great expense, they redid their apology using llamas.

This was not entirely a surprise:  the CEO of the television portion of Hallmark©, William J. Abbott, said in a November 15 podcast he doesn’t personally view Christmas as a religious holiday.  He probably doesn’t consider churches religious places.  And those T-shaped things that people put on the walls and wear as necklaces?  Just art.

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I swear, with those eyes he looks like some kind of herd animal.  It’s not like he’d be easily swayed like a member of a herd of sheep . . . oh, wait.

Regardless of what you think about gay people, they comprise 1-2% of the population – add in bisexuals, (which, let’s admit it, they’d like) and you get up to 4% or so.  I’m willing to bet that a whopping 0.001% of gay women watch Hallmark®, and probably nearly 0.0000001% of gay men.  Hallmark™ has decided to appeal to a constituency that consists of about a dozen people in the United States and let them determine what commercials are on the Hallmark© channel.

Let’s face it:  regardless of how you or I feel about gay folks, they don’t watch the Hallmark® network.  They won’t watch the Hallmark© network even if it meets every one of their demands because they already have six networks specifically dedicated to gay lifestyle issues.

Why would Hallmark™ fold and apologize about apologizing for their apology?

Because Hallmark© is woke.  Christmas isn’t a religious holiday according to their CEO, silly.  It’s about mass consumption of consumer goods.  That was the real message of Christ, wasn’t it?  I think it was in the Sermon on the Mall Food Court as written in the Gospel of Commerce, 3:16 where Jesus said:  “Oh, ye who purchase goods and services in my name shall dwell in large houses with great credit forever.  Forget not, thy shipping shalt be free for all who order over $50 of these holy goods in a single shipment.  Amen.”

Hallmark© isn’t the first business to make this calculation.  It won’t be the last.

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Silicon Valley is good at getting woke, especially since aliens don’t need sleep.

I started my first boycott of a business back in 2001 or so.  The CEO of Levi Strauss™ came out against private gun ownership.  I was naïve enough that I actually wrote him an email protesting his policy.  At the time, I was a corporate home-office drone who wore Dockers® (a Levi Strauss© product) like they were yuppie heroin.  I put my money where my mouth was:  the last Levi Strauss™ product I have ever purchased was in 2001.

Another example of this illogical behavior was Star Wars®.  The final Star Wars™ movie opens today.  I won’t be purchasing a ticket.  Why?  The Force Awakens.

For the record, I have no problem against strong female characters.  Ripley® in Alien© and Aliens™.  Sarah Connor™ in Terminator©, Terminator 2®, and the very underrated Sarah Connor Chronicles™.  I could go on, but that’s enough.

Rey© in Star Wars™?  An awful character.  But a woke character.  It was so important to a Disney® executive to take Star Wars© in a feminist direction that they didn’t care about story.  They didn’t care about plot.  All they cared about was creating a woman that had no weaknesses, no struggle.  In great fiction, the entire point of the journey of a hero is to struggle and overcome weaknesses and character flaws to find virtue and victory.

Somehow, in a quest for the perfect woman, Disney® forgot Star Wars© was about watching the journey of the hero and thrilling with him (or her) as they grew.  Ripley™ grew – look at her character arc from the only two movies that character was in, Alien® and Aliens©.  Ripley™ went from a competent but flawed second officer to a woman who overcame her fear and took on a xenomorph queen using an exoskeleton loader.  Don’t know about you, but I thought that was pretty hot, even when she was Zuul.  Okay, especially when she was Zuul.

Rey™?  Rey™ was perfect from the first scene, and could use the Force© and a Light Saber© better than a person who had studied them for years the very first day she tried.  Why?  Showing any weakness from a woman is obviously misogyny and part of a patriarchal plot.  Character development?  Nah, that’s for people who aren’t woke.

What has being woke cost Disney®?  A lot of money.  The Star Wars® movies keep bringing in less and less at the box office.  And, as Aesop wisely noted – their theme park Galaxy’s Edge© at Disneyland™ cost over $1billion dollars, and, if videos I’ve seen are correct, is an enormous flop.  The longest line was at the bathroom.  I’d imagine the Disneyworld™ version won’t cost much less, so they’ve invested $2billion in a franchise that has exactly one successful element since they bought it from George Lucas:  baby Yoda®.

Probably billions in profits have been sacrificed by Disney®, all at the altar of being woke.

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If John Wick© and Kermit™ had a baby.

Other companies have done it, too.  Gillette® featured commercials that demeaned the major purchasers of its products:  men.  Nike™ decided that Colin Kaepernick was the best face that they could put forward, and ended production of shoes featuring the Betsy Ross flag because Colin thought it was racist.  Chick-Fil-A®?  Dead to me.

The Boy Scouts of America™?  Yup.  In 1973, the membership was 4.5 million boys.  In 2020, I’m betting the membership is down to 1.4 million or less, even though the population of the United States is up by 50%.  The biggest and steepest declines?  After it got woke.

One Angry Gamer has a large list of similar failures (LINK).  The list has 13 major video games that failed due to wokeness.  Movies and television?  21 examples.  And dozens of businesses, magazines, and other examples of failure.  The most amusing part of his page (which is littered with advertisements) is that it was advertising failed woke shows like Star Trek: Discovery®.  One Angry Gamer was getting money from those that were being criticized on the page.  Genius.

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Remember, not everything is a failure.  The Titanic pool is still filled!

Not every business that gets woke goes broke.  Even though they won’t get another dollar from me, Nike®, Levi Strauss©, and Gillette™ are doing fine.  They make billions in revenue.  I can’t promise Disney® won’t make another dollar off of me, since they have a scheme to annex interstellar space and charge viewers for looking up at the night sky.  But I’ll avoid giving them money every chance I get.  They might not notice on their bottom line, but I will be able to hold my head up.

So, why are companies willing to fail or at least forego billions of dollars in profit, destroy cultural narratives that have been decades in the making, and wipe out institutions that have served real virtue and objective good for over a hundred years?

It’s not their money.

But I do have good news.  I found that High Chaparral® is still being broadcast.  It’s not on Hallmark™.  But I’m pretty sure that The Boy would object to being snuggled on the couch to watch it, him being in college and all.

But he still likes pancakes.  Who doesn’t?

Oh, yeah.

Feminists.

It’s A Big World – Big Enough For Success

Certainty of death.  Small chance of success.  What are we waiting for?” – Lord of the Rings

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It’s almost as much fun as when I get the USB in on the first try.

Two pennies.

But I’ll come back to that.

One day, Aesop over at the Raconteur Report (LINK) had linked to one of my posts.  The result whenever that happens is quite a bit of traffic – the Raconteur Report is pretty popular.  I thanked him in the comments section over at his place.  His response?  Something on the order of, “No problem.  It’s a big Internet.”

His reaction was typical of every rich, confident and successful person I’ve met.  They want to help other people, and they want to see them succeed.  I think part of that is the desire for a legacy.  When you’ve already earned more money than you’ll ever spend in a lifetime (or have millions and millions of pageviews), you have to have other goals.

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Really rich people have iPhones® and both kidneys.

In my life, I’ve had the good fortune to know quite a few people that were very, very, successful.  The really rich people I knew who had built their own businesses had a surprising similarity:  they wanted to help others become successful.  Each one of them gave some of their time to do so.  They had determined that success was something not to be hoarded, but to be shared.  They wanted more people in the club, because those cigars made of $100 bills won’t smoke themselves.  At one particular career crossroads, I spent some time with one of these friends, charting a path forward (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman).

This blog is at least partially a result of discussions I had with my wealthy friend.  This first three years have gone (more or less) according to plan.  Next?  Well, after I get my underground volcano lair running and staffed with henchmen, you’ll see.  It’s hard to find good henchmen nowadays, and even harder to insure them – the actuarial tables show a high rate of workplace-related injuries when henching.

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But think of all of the pension plan savings!

My friend died not long after I started writing, and certainly before I had any lasting success.  He was an early encourager.  I had a few other business ideas, and I ran the ideas past him.  He was encouraging, but his encouragement wasn’t in order to make a buck:  his success was me being successful.  Like most good teachers, he didn’t tell me what to do, he asked questions, very good questions, like:

  • How big is your potential audience?
  • How do you connect with them?
  • Why did you lick your finger and put it in my ear?

Rich guys have figured out a secret – helping other people to be successful doesn’t make a rich person poorer.  Let me explain:

The average home swimming pool is something like 20,000 or 30,000 gallons of water.  Let’s use 30,000 gallons since I already did the math with that number.  The economy is $21.3 trillion, per year.  Let’s imagine that $21.3 trillion economy is represented by the water in the pool.  How much water represents $1,000,000?

It’s 1/5 of an ounce.  A shot of whiskey would be the equivalent of $15 million.  1/5 of an ounce is really small – let me give you another comparison.  What weighs the same as 1/5 of an ounce of water?

Two cents.  Or, as I started this post, two pennies.

You can take millions from that pool every year and no one would ever notice – like I said, this is $21.3 trillion annually.  I hate to be all cheerleader-y, but it’s true – even now we live in an era of amazing abundance.

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And they said Mittens didn’t have the common touch.

Yes, I know, the economy is awful for some people.  Certainly, we’re faced with significant structural issues that will be challenging for years to come.  But the ocean is still huge.  The opportunities out there are amazing.  Yes, it’s possible to make $1,000,000 a year.  Heck, I went on Facebook® one time, and saw some guys that graduated about when I did.  One of them had a successful restaurant.  The other?  Sold a successful business and was going to retire.

And, no, these weren’t Stephen Hawking-smart guys, heck, they didn’t even have wheelchairs.  They didn’t even have amazing, unique business ideas, one has a restaurant, the other a small manufacturing business.  They were average guys who worked very hard, and failed and failed and failed and then succeeded.

Why don’t more people make a million, or at least a few hundred thousand?  Most often, we limit ourselves.  I’ve written before that I don’t think that most people use even one tenth of their capability, and the reason for that is that they:

  • Are too cautious – they never take any risks. For many folks, this works fine.  Being a dentist has a better average payout than winning the lottery.  But, you have to live with being a dentist, dude.
  • Don’t believe in themselves – caution is one thing, but I have seen people limit themselves because they don’t believe in their own talent. And to think that Kamala Harris didn’t believe enough in her best
  • Stuck in a mindset that success only happens to other people, and that the only success they will ever have will come when other people allow it.
  • Afraid of failure – failure can be awful, debilitating, and soul crushing. Oh, wait, that’s my ex-wife, not failure.  Failure’s bad, too.
  • Afraid of effort – success starts with, and ends with, work. And having parents that have fifty million dollars.
  • Have pants filled with raw liver – men who have pants filled with raw liver have had very little influence over world events, historically.
  • Don’t have a goal – if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. This was, from time to time, my problem.  I’d achieve a goal, and then?  Shrug and say, “What next?”

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Hey, at least she has experience.

I’ll admit, the first time one of my posts really hit big, it was featured by Remus at the Woodpile Report (LINK).  I was happy, but almost apprehensive, like a dog that finally caught a car.  What the hell do I do now?  I was ringing up more views in a day on a single post than the entire blog did in the first nine months of existence.  My apprehension:  Was it good enough?  Was there enough content on the site to keep readers?  What the hell do I do with this car?

I guess I have to add another two reasons people fail is that they are:

  • Are afraid of success – I’ve seen people self-sabotage because the very idea of succeeding scared them. Their solution?  Screw up.
  • Feel unworthy of success – likewise, people who don’t feel worthy will actively avoid situations where they are successful.

I’ve been lucky throughout most of my life to not be afraid of success, but driven to achieve it, maybe a bit too much.  My wife says this is one of my personalities.  There is easy-going Juan DeLegator, but this one she just calls The General.  The General doesn’t care what time it is.  The General doesn’t care if you’re tired.  The General wants results.  Now.  I imagine it’s just as pleasant for everyone around me as it sounds, but, honestly, I enjoy it.  Plus?  The General gets results.

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A personal hero, plus he shows up every Christmas to remind me of the true spirit of Christmas:  maneuver warfare.  The neighbors will never try to sing carols here again.

My idea is that what I accomplished yesterday was fine, but what I’m going to accomplish tomorrow better beat it.  I have worried from time to time that the best post I’ll ever write is in the past.  Then, however, I’ll put together a post that I like so much that I find it hard to go to sleep afterwards because I’m so excited about what I just wrote.  I’m sure that someone is going to laugh, or learn, or both.

It is a big Internet.  It’s also a huge economy.  And to go out and make more money is, generally, easy.

But success isn’t necessarily only measured in money.  There’s also other things.  Like food and cars and cable television:  the things that money buys.

Oh, okay, fine.  There’s also family.  And community.  And faith.  The same principles apply there, as well.

See what you made me do?  The General is not amused.  But he’s just pitching in his two cents.

34 Random Thoughts About The Economy, Money, and Jobs

“Well, Saddam owed us money.” – Arrested Development

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Maybe I should get more sleep.

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and the next few weeks will be busy.  Now that The Boy is off at college and no longer engaged in half a dozen activities, we’re down to just having to chase Pugsley around.  Not so busy that there won’t be a full slate of posts – those are planned for the next few weeks, barring a change based on current events or me being distracted by shiny objects.

Today, though, I thought I’d change it up a bit, so here are a few random thoughts on business, economics, and wealth.

  1. The last economic crash was about a housing bubble. The next economic crash will be about our “everything” bubble where money flows faster to chase smaller and smaller returns.
  2. The biggest thing to crash after the next bubble pops will be money. It’s never fun when the value of money drops to zero, since having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant – not much happens at the beginning, but by the end everyone is yelling and screaming and covered in blood.
  3. The next economic crash will be the biggest in our lives.
  4. Or not. I’ve been wrong before.
  5. But I still think 2025 will be interesting.
  6. Most jobs don’t require thinking nowadays – they are a set of procedures and rules based on the lowest common denominator employee. The best jobs like this are at the DMV, which at least allow you to be mean and unpleasant, plus government benefits.
  7. Jobs that don’t require thinking can be paid at the lowest possible wage. If you’re lucky enough to be hired at Old MacDonald’s farm, I hope you can rise to the C-I-E-I-O position, but you’ll have to be out standing in your field.study.jpg
  8. Businesses that do things immorally don’t automatically fail because they do things immorally – many immoral and even evil businesses flourish. It’s only in the movies that the good guys always win.
  9. When I gave career advice to The Boy, I advised him to build expertise and skills in things that couldn’t be done over the Internet or by an outsourced employee working in a country where the native language consists only of vowels, grunts, and humming noises but yet has 355 terms for “waddle”.
  10. Always be worth more to your company than your company is paying you.
  11. “What have you done for me lately?” is a good and fair question from any boss.
  12. The second mouse gets the cheese in the trap. No, I’m not going first.
  13. If it’s choosing between money and honor, choose honor. The bills might be more difficult to pay, but at least you can look yourself in the mirror.  Until the power company cuts the electricity.
  14. Seriously though, choose honor.cat.jpg
  15. It’s the risk that you don’t take that you’ll regret. But you only hear successful people say that.
  16. Never build a business on what you love, since no one cares about medieval Norse poetry. Build a business on what you do that other people love and will pay for.  You’ll learn to love it.
  17. Capitalism works great to allocate spoils in an expanding market. Capitalism fails in a contracting one.  There’s nothing easy about the transition.
  18. Being short of money and optimistic about the future is better than having lots of cash and being pessimistic.rain.jpg
  19. Money can’t make you happy, but you can avoid most of life’s miseries by having a few hundred thousand dollars. Not every one of life’s miseries, but most of them.
  20. Whenever anyone says it’s not about the money, it’s really about the money.
  21. Whenever anyone says cost is no object, you can expect that statement to be proven false once the estimates arrive. Make them pay in advance.
  22. The reward for work well done is more work. This is actually a pretty good deal – we tend to buy video games built around this same premise.
  23. The rewards aren’t linear – the closer to the top, the greater the rewards. But you have to fight the big boss at the end before you retire.
  24. Great bosses are rarer than you might imagine. Most bosses are okay.  Some are awful.
  25. The worst kind of boss is a weak boss. They will praise you when you don’t deserve it and sell you out when you don’t.
  26. Teamwork makes it easy to blame someone else.
  27. In America, when two men meet, they ask “What do you do?” Too often we equate ourselves with “what we do,” while forgetting we get to choose who we are.  Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you are stuck being Johnny Depp.question.jpg
  28. If you find yourself dreading the alarm clock and not wanting to go to work you go anyway. It’s your job.  If it’s too much?  Find another job or retire.
  29. True story: a friend of mine had a sister that decided to retire one day when she was about 30.  She was shocked when the checks stopped coming, she seemed to think that when you retired, the company had to keep paying you.  I think she’s a Bernie® voter now.
  30. Me? I’m trying to start thinking about retirement before my boss starts thinking about my retirement.pounds.jpg
  31. When I was first hired into a job, I heard a statistic that 70% of a typical workday for a typical employee was unproductive. I was shocked that the figure was so high.
  32. Now, after working for years, I’m shocked that the figure is so low. I tried to come up with jokes about lazy people, but they just won’t work.
  33. Meetings often happen just because they’re on the schedule. Look like you’re paying attention and don’t sleep, no matter how quickly it makes the meeting go.
  34. I had a friend who worked at the Unemployment Department who got fired. He still had to show up the next day.

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean that you have character.” – Pulp Fiction

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When the bugman began to hate . . .

There was a time after She Who Will Not Be Named was forever banished from Stately Wilder Manor, but before I met The Mrs.  Yes, your host, the John Wilder was single.  Can you believe I didn’t beat the ladies off with a stick?  I mean, the restraining order and all . . . well . . . the less said about that the better.

There was one particular woman who had caught my attention.  One evening, I introduced her to my friend who I’ll call Jim, mainly because his name is Jim.  Oops – I think I’ve said too much.  Now everyone will know who he is.  If only Jim weren’t such a rare name!

“What did you think?” I asked Jim.

Ever the good friend, Jim said, and this is an exact quote:  “What do you two have in common besides your eyes and her butt?”

They say that for a statement to really hurt, it has to be true.  Jim had delivered the Atomic Wedgie of Truth®.  He was, of course, correct.  And you should be so lucky to have friends that will tell you the truth as bluntly and completely as Jim.  The relationship between the woman’s butt and my eyes ended soon thereafter.

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A friend of mine went to the hospital because of a wedgie – sadly, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 dorkiness.

Not only is character important in dating, it was pretty important to a company I worked for once upon a time:  I was one of the employees lucky enough to be trained in behavior-based interviewing.  The basic idea of behavior-based interviewing is that people, like the official results of Jeffery Epstein’s autopsy, don’t change very much.  Therefore, the best way to get an actual prediction of the candidate’s future behavior is to understand the candidate’s past behavior.  Then we were taught how to interview so they would share relevant situations so we could understand the candidate really well.

If the interview technique is done right, it doesn’t feel like an interview, it feels like casual conversation.

I was horrible in my first few interviews, as in scaring the candidate because he thought the company hired robotic androids that only appeared to be human.  Thankfully, there was a feedback system from the candidates, and my boss gave me some tips based on it.  He told me that it was okay to blink and breathe while conducting an interview, and that wouldn’t be perceived by the candidate as weakness.  I took a risk that he was right, and the candidates stopped shaking so much during the interviews.  I guess staring unblinkingly directly into their eyes nonstop during the interview is a bit creepy, so I allowed myself no fewer than three blinks per minute.

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I really messed up this interview.  They asked me if I was a people person.  I answered, “Yes!  I am a people!  Or is they go great with mustard a better answer?”

But if you do anything several hundred times, you can get pretty good at it unless you’re Nicholas Cage acting in a movie.  It (really) did bug the candidates that I could take notes without looking down at my notepad.  It’s not a great superpower, but I decided to keep that quirk going, since it was a sign of dominance that I could use to weed out the weak.  And I eventually ended up interviewing hundreds of new graduate applicants – heck, I even used the behavior-based interviewing techniques on The Mrs. the night we met to see if she had any of the character, um, difficulties that led to the untimely departure of She Who Will Not Be Named.

The Mrs. didn’t have those flaws.

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So, on one blind date the girl said she was a huge country fan.  Me:  “Well, I like Russia, too.”

The thing that surprised me the most was that interviewees would tell me the most incredible things – like how they’d lied to people.  How they’d stolen from their employer.  How much they felt the world was out to get them.  By the way, if you lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1998 and never figured out who shaved your pig, dyed it blue, and dressed it like Dolly Parton, I think I might know the guy that did it.  Don’t worry – he told me it was mostly consensual.  Except for the perfume.

The interviewing system was based almost entirely around character.  The company I was working for considered good character the most important factor in what constituted a good employee.  More than once I heard, “You can teach a good person to do their job, but you can’t teach a bad person to be good,” from my boss.  Then he’d shake his head and look at me with a sad, defeated expression on his face.  Of course I didn’t blink.  I had to show him the respect due the alpha of the pack.

But there were employees who actually possessed good character there, too.  As an example, one employee I know was attempting to find some financial information that was relevant to his job.  Somehow in working through the company computer network he stumbled upon the check writing software.

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Thankfully the money is headed her way from that Nigerian prince. 

Yes.  My friend found the software that would have allowed him to write himself a check for $50,000,000.  No human would have seen the check – it would have been printed on company check stock, signed with a dot-matrix signature, popped in the mail, and delivered directly to my friend’s house.  The company had billions (really) in the bank.  It wouldn’t have been immediately caught.

My friend called me over and showed it to me.  It was a moment I was in awe.  This company had huge piles of money in various bank accounts.  I realized that just a few keystrokes could end up making my friend an overnight millionaire, at least until the audit found a few missing millions.  In a situation that would tempt some people, my friend calmly picked up the phone, called accounting, and let them know they had a really big problem.  And he didn’t do it from a beach in Brazil while sipping some drink that comes with an umbrella.  But not flaming.  That’s for tourists.

That’s good character.

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Climate science has taught us that science demands seriousness.

The company actually had a list of traits they were looking for.  What did they consider good character?  Humility was on the list, as was honesty and a few other things people generally think are representative of virtue, as I wrote about Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue.  There are a lot of things that change about people, but absent a significant psychological event (and sometimes not even then), their character doesn’t change.

That brings me to this statement:  the most important part of parenting is helping to build character.  I think I’ve established that character is important, so when is it important?

I think that the primary focus of parenthood is guiding children through one critical age range:  middle school, from the ages of around 11 to, say, 14.  Did you go to grade school with someone who was pretty cool, only to watch them become a complete dirtbag in high school?  I know I did, and the time that they went downhill was in middle school.

The ages of 11 to 14 are where kids are first practicing at being adults, and are in the process of crystallizing the character that will define them for the rest of their lives.  They’re understanding being really hurt and rejected for the first time, how to deal with defeat.  What love is.  What their values are.  How to deal with victory.  They’re understanding what true friendship and loyalty really is.  They’re finally (thankfully) understanding what deodorant is, though generally just a few weeks too late.

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Knowing how to relate to Pugsley is everything.

And they’re deciding if they want to reject virtue and turn to the Dark Side© evil.  Sorry, but Disney® has trademarked that phrase, along with all jokes related to mice, intellectual property abuse, and and ducks.  And, yes, I understand that some percentage, say 70%, of character is flat-out genetic in nature.  There are families of dirtbags that have been dirtbags for 100 years.  If you think about it, you’ll know who I’m talking about.

As I mentioned before, I even used the techniques I learned from interviewing in the blind date that eventually netted The Mrs.  When I finally took The Mrs. over to meet Jim and his family, Jim approved.  “You guys seem great for each other.”

Perhaps Seneca, writing back in 60 AD or so (back when your Momma was just 50 years old), said it best:

Each person acquires their own character, but their official roles are designated by chance.  You should invite some to your table because they are deserving, others because they may come to deserve it.”

When you are evaluating people to be your friend, your mate, or your employee, character is primary.  Great butts are secondary, in the end.

Get it?  Butts?  In the end?

I kill me.

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