Rome, Yet Again – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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

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

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

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

I still do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at the Best Buy© in Athens you can get advice from the Greek Squad©.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

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

What then, does this leave us with?

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

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

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

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

Or give up.

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

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

Extra spicy. I think I’m ready.

How The GloboLeft Uses Your Virtue Against You And Why It’s Killing The West

“Be excellent to each other.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I’ve never been to central Europe, but I might Czech it out one day. (all memes as-found)

“Then what makes a beautiful person? Isn’t it the presence of excellence? Young friend, if you wish to be beautiful then work diligently at human excellence. And what is that? Observe those who you praise without prejudice. The just or the unjust? The just. The even-tempered or the undisciplined? The even-tempered. The self-controlled or the uncontrolled? The self-controlled. In making yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful. But to the extent you ignore these qualities, you’ll be ugly, even if you use every clever trick to appear beautiful.”
-Epictetus

Epictetus may have had some ulterior motives when he said this, since if history is correct he was lame, was missing an eye and an ear, and had hair only in patches on his skull. Did I mention the burn scars?

I kid. But Epictetus was lame. I mean, not 1980s “lame” but rather had a limp.

The point he makes is a good one, though. We are fundamentally the genes we are born with. If I wanted to be taller, I suppose there is surgery I could get to lengthen my legs. Yeah. Really.

If I wanted to avoid being a blinding hazard when the Sun shines off of my scalp, well, I could get hair plugs or a toupee.

Neither of those, however, would make me a better person. And I don’t know about you, but when I find out about the vile beliefs and practices of some Hollywood™ starlets, well, they start to lose a lot of their attractiveness to me. In fact, I start to see ugly, just like the ugly I see with Jeff Bezos’ wife.

I mean, really. Wow. That’s a lot of plastic surgery. Seriously, does she not look like an alien that was constructed out of a scaffold of lizard DNA in a Tupperware® factory? If she and Bezos have kids I don’t know which they’ll look like: dime-store rubber geckos or a tube of Saranwrap©.

I do think that Epictetus, despite the handicap of being dead as well as gimpy, has done a good job at sketching out some of the things that have made Western Civilization great. There was a time that we nearly universally admired being just. Our culture is one that’s based on guilt, rather than shame, so being just comes from within.

Shame comes from without. In a shame-based culture (which describes most third world cultures) the idea is that cheating an old widow in Iowa out of her family fortune is acceptable unless you get caught. It’s clever, and they feel guilt only in being caught. Ever see any video of a foreigner getting caught doing something wrong on video?

I know you have.

What happens is that the shame kicks in. They can’t and don’t feel guilt over doing evil, only shame for getting caught doing evil. This explains why India looks like India and Nigeria looks like Nigeria. Good actions aren’t valued.

Next, Epictetus talks about the virtue of being even-tempered. Again, this is something that society selected for through its very construction. People who impetuously committed crime were systematically executed in Great Britain for nearly a thousand years.

Don’t think that has something to with keeping tempers in a bottle? It certainly does. And when men like that become warriors, well, Heaven help you if you push one over the edge into rage and wrath. That is something mythic, something that makes entire continents burn.

Lastly, Epictetus talks about self-controlled versus, well, not.

Again, this is a virtue that Western Civilization has lauded in its stoic male heroes who experience hardship yet come away stronger for the effort. Our very fables talk about men who never cry because they understand that they are masters of their emotions and can select which ones the let to the surface when the stress is running high.

This is not a bug like Hollywood© would try to make us think: this is a feature.

To one extent Epictetus is right: these are all necessary values for beauty, at least for me. They are also necessary values for everything that is required to move society upward, to keep us from being crabs in a bucket, drawing each other down for our own temporary gain.

And, Epictetus notes that these virtues are within our control, each and every one of them. Sure, if you come from a place that’s not been selecting for these behaviors for nearly a thousand years (and I could argue that Europe as a whole has been selecting for these behaviors for thousands of years) then it might be difficult.

But not impossible. And if it is impossible, then that person could rightly be called a savage.

All of Western Civilization is ultimately built on the idea that these are things that individuals can do, right here, right now through being virtuous. They are True. They are Beauty in themselves. And they are Good.

This is, in my mind, a major disconnect and why Western Civilization is hated by so many in the third world. They look at this wonderful cultural set of values of which we are exemplars (on our best days) through our own choices and feel envy. They want a world that looks like ours, but yet don’t want to change their behaviors.

This is why they don’t build.

This is why we do.

Are there other cultures with similar values? Certainly. Japan appears to have undergone a similar winnowing with respect to honor. Feel free to opine in the comments about other places that make the grade.

Like Western Civilization, though, cultures that have a large focus on just outcomes are susceptible to propaganda that plays on cultural guilt. Ever wonder why GloboLeftists pimped the 1619 Project? Like the entire Civil Rights movement, it was based on creating guilt in people who had committed no crime or offense.

And it was effective.

On white people. But it wouldn’t be on them.

I think that there still exists a strong fear on the part of white people to say, “Hey, I’d rather live among other white people.” It sounds scary to them. Yet, those same people wouldn’t bat an eye if black people wanted their own dorms that excluded whites.

It’s guilt. Our virtues have been weaponized against us. It’s so effective that even British people feel guilt over slavery, even when they effectively ended the international trade in slaves. Those who do this are, like Epictetus said, using every trick to be Beautiful to try to hide their true ugliness.

My guess is that’s why they really want the statues to come down. To see Western Civilization and all it has created is the biggest slap in the face to them and fills them with shame, so they have to either destroy it, or come up with some reason why they have failed to assuage their shame.

Continue in your quest for excellence, and understand those that will try to drag you down or fill you with guilt.

Ignore them.

And, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln,

“Party on, dudes!”

In Which I Discuss What Mustard, Ramen, Historical Timekeeping, Fasting, And Booze Have In Common

“Oh, no. I gave it up for Lent.” – Fletch Lives

I heard the Pope saw a giant mouse and tried killing it with his bat. Now he’s the first Pontiff banned from Disneyland®.

I’m hoping everyone had a very Happy Easter, I know I did. And, if you’re Orthodox, I hope you have a Happy Easter this coming weekend. I know they’re not the same, and I think that the difference in dates has something to do with the metric system and/or the French, so there’s another reason to hate the metric system. There’s no real need to find another reason to hate the French.

Regardless, before Easter, there is Lent. Not every Christian observes Lent. And, just like The Matrix not every Christian knows what Lent even is.

Last year, though, I became more aware of Lent when a younger person was walking down the hallway at work with ash on their forehead. Immediately I blamed Gen Z’s lax grooming standards, but then dimly remembered it was Ash Wednesday.

So, I started researching. What the heck was Ash Wednesday? Well, it’s the start of Lent.

Turns out that Lent is something more than what I find in the drier after running a load of cotton shirts. It is 40-day period of fasting, prayer, repentance, and preparation for Easter. Adam Piggot had a post on fasting/diet during Lent on his now-MIA website, and the fasting part caught my eye.

Things Gen Z has to give up when fasting. (as found)

I’d fasted in the past, so I decided, what the heck. Lent is only 40 days, so I’ll put up with meager food for most of the week, swear off the elevator (our office has the only one this side of Pixley), and do a bit more research.

They lied.

Lent is totally not 40 days, it’s 46 days. Apparently, Catholics take Sunday off so they don’t count that in the period. Then there are a lot of specific restrictions on what they can eat and when. If you’re Catholic, you already know. If not, well, look it up. Summary: the Catholics have a bunch of rules.

Okay. Fine. But my food restriction would last Monday through Thursday since we have family dinners on Friday and Saturday. In 2025 I decided that would only eat a single package of ramen each of those days, and on Friday and Saturday I could eat whatever the family was having. Oh, and have whatever I wanted to drink on the weekends.

The Mrs. can’t attend next week’s Innuendo Conference, so I guess I’ll have to fill her slot instead.

Turns out that eating ramen is a great way to make sure you have enough sodium in your diet, which is great if you’re trying to keep your blood pressure up.

But I did notice something else: whenever I thought about cheating and having something other than boring ramen, I thought about the story of Jesus. Even if you’re not a believer (I am) the idea of Jesus suffering the whipping and Crucifixion made my “the only thing I can eat today is a package of ramen” seem really small and petty.

Eating nothing but ramen wasn’t going to kill me. I mean, high blood pressure might, but boring ramen wouldn’t.

That first Lent went fine.

For 2026, I decided to up the ante. I decided I would start the 46 day period the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Why? Same reason as above: I’d do my 46 days, but I’d still eat with family on Friday and Saturday for evening meals.

Still not allowed during Lent 2026. (as found)

But from Sunday through Thursday night, five days a week? I’d eat nothing at all for 120 hours straight, every week, except vitamins. No food: not even a mustard packet. When I mentioned my planned Lenten eating schedule, The Mrs. scoffed:

“I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to do it. Are you making up your own rules and start some sort of cult?”

John Wilder: “Yes, and you can’t join because all of the followers are gonna have to shave off all their body hair and give up bathing for a year and dye themselves blue to show their purity. Or maybe immerse themselves in vegetable oil for a year. I’m still working out the details.”

I would have told my cult a joke about Jonestown, but the punchline was too long.

Also, I wouldn’t eat before 3pm on any day but Friday, which is when The Mrs. and I meet up at a local diner to have lunch every week. So, every week it would look like this:

All day Sunday-Thursday (the very soonest 3pm) no food.

Friday, Lunch and Dinner.

Saturday, Dinner, but no food at all until 3pm.

Why 3pm?

Because that’s when fasts could be broken during Lent in ye olde days. 3pm was the “ninth ecclesiastical hour”, or literally nine hours after the Sun came up. Back then all time was local. Noon was when the Sun was at its zenith and midnight was 12 hours later. Time zones started because railroads required them so they could accurately measure how late the train was.

In Latin was ninth ecclesiastical hour was called None (or “Nona Hora”). And that’s when the fast for the day could be broken.

Makes sense, right? Nine hours after 6am is . . . 3pm.

Except . . . when you say that word, None, it’s pronounced like “known”. And is the basis for a word you’re familiar with.

Noon.

Wait. Noon isn’t at 3pm. Noon is at 12:00pm.

In no place except when I lived in Fairbanks was noon nine hours after the Sun rose.

What gives?

The medieval folks were dirty cheaters, and wanted to eat, so since they could only eat after the ninth hour, they pretended that 12:00pm was 3pm. I am not making any of this up.

Cheaters.

I, however, would not be a dirty cheater. Except for on Friday. And since I’m making my own rules in advance, it’s not cheating.

I did not give up cigars. (as found)

Let’s address the elephant in the room: on whose authority am I making up my own rules.

Well, mine. I’m not a Catholic because of the 180-day probationary period and all the paperwork (it might require a Papal decree to get me in, don’t ask) and they wanted a blood sample and a credit report.

Or maybe that was my first job?

Regardless, I’m not trying to meet a particular set of rules. And my variations were primarily there to keep closer relations with my family.

Besides, the Orthodox start their Lent on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, too and I think you can join them without shaving off all of your body hair and not bathing for a year, though they can eat as much shrimp and seafood as they want during Lent.

No, I wasn’t trying to follow a set of rules with Lent. I did it for the intent: to get closer to the Big Guy.

I guess this is why cats were created. (as found)

Also, I’d give up booze for the whole period.

Sigh. Yup. All 46 days. I also resolved to pray, but I didn’t set hard and fast rules on how much and when. But I did pray.

The results?

I think Lent worked. I met every goal that I set. I’m down at least one size on my pants. Several aches and pains seem to disappear entirely when I’m in a fasted state.

That’s good, and it probably means I should figure out what I’m eating that’s causing it.

I also got 10 more hours of sleep a week, which might sound decadent but it’s really moving from 5 hours a night to 7 hours a night.

And, yeah, I feel closer to The Big Guy and am much more grateful. The primary goal was accomplished. If you look at the memes, though, you can see I’m still an awful human being, but we already knew that and at least I feel bad about it now.

Would parts of this work for a non-believer? Certainly.

Am I asking you to do what I did?

Absolutely not. This is completely a YMMV situation.

You know who you are. (as found)

To celebrate the end of Lent, I’m gonna take my cult out for seafood like the Orthodox get to eat all during Lent. I’m cheap and seafood is expensive here, but tonight we’ll just be one big happy blue oyster cult.

The Defeat Of The West?

“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises

I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.

I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.

In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom. In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China. The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope. It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar. Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.

On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going. The Ukraine war? It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff: we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.

One example: Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year. Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce. And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.

That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts. The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.

I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start. 0-0.

US manufacturing jobs? These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.

Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints. Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.

Why? The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent. After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West. Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.

Once a European midget asked me to hide him. I guess I can cache a small Czech.

Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion. Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution: Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void. Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.

Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence. Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015. “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism. In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”

This certainly defines the state of the West now. A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too. And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”. That leads to a national weakness.

This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize. This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat. To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff. To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production. That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

Back to Todd: “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.” Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States? It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.

Todd’s conclusion: Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound. It could do whatever it wanted. The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022. But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.

The opposite happened. Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning. I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint. Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.

I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”

Now, my two cents: Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders. Pain is coming. NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.

Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever: nationalism trumps globalism. The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As for me? I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.

Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose

“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club

Why are mathematicians always happy? They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.

“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus

Think back to the moment that were really content. Happy. Maybe it was after a nice steak. Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar. Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.

Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything. The moment is complete. It is as it is. I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with. I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee. In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.

W.C. Fields: “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite. With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”

This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time. It’s simple. Stop wanting what you don’t have.

Done. Easy. Unless it’s air. I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it. And water, yeah, I need that on occasion. Food? Not an issue. Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.

So, happiness is easy.

My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long. They’re now tanned gents.

Why then, are most people unhappy?

They want what they don’t have. In some cases, they want what they can never have. Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her. That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.

So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy. If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy. But, no, she’s made herself unhappy. And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible: she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have. In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.

After A.I., how will programmers make money? Selling their laptops.

This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her: she made it up. So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason: reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be. You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

The post is outside of me. It’s something I made. I can choose what I can do with it. I can abandon it. I’ve done that about five times, I think. I can decide, “You know what, good enough.” I’ve done that a few times. But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy. Very happy. I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.

If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it. I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done. That’s why weed and vidya games are bad. They give bliss without accomplishment. It’s the easy road to happy.

But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment. I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about. I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control. If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.

When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?

But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.

That’s the definition of purpose. It might be small, like mowing the lawn. It might be big, like changing the world. But I get to choose. It should fit my talents. And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is. Well, at least to me. YMMV.

I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist. It’s overwhelming.

It makes one feel small, sometimes.

But me? I keep pushing. I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence: “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.” So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.

Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?

Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword. It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside. But this is one that I choose to carry. It’s one that I wish to have.

I control (mostly) my emotions. Being happy means not wanting. Except when I choose what I want. And right now? I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.

In that order. But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.

EBT Apocalypse: When the Purple Drink Runs Dry and the Cities Go Full Mad Max

“This gets out of hand? We’re gonna be caught in the biggest naval battle since the Jutland.” – The Hunt for Red October

Where did they keep the tyrannosaurus rex on the submarine? The small arms locker.

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is . . . zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

NASA won’t bring one animal in particular into space: the duck. They’re worried that the bill would be astronomical.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get . . . interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

As I looked at my naked body in the mirror, I thought to myself, “I’m going to get kicked out of Ikea® any time now.”

There is an inconvenient fact to bring up: the same slice of society leaning hardest on EBT is the one driving the nation’s homicide stats. FBI data from recent years shows black Americans, who make up 13% of the population but 26% of SNAP users, also account for over 50% of murder offenders.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Poverty plus entitlement equals a volatile cocktail, and when the free refills dry up, that cocktail gets spiked with Molotovs.

Matt Bracken, the prophet of this particular powder keg, whose 2012 essay “When the Music Stops” reads like a Ouija board session with Cassandra, nailed it.

“What if a cascading economic crisis. . . leads to millions of EBT cards flashing nothing but zeroes? . . . any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. . . . the cutoff of ‘their’ food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets . . . will be looted.”

My guess?

Within 72 hours of the blackout, flash mobs of “minority urban youths” (MUYs, in Bracken’s lingo) would swarm intersections, yank soccer moms from their SUVs.

The problem is that in Philadelphia you can’t tell a riot from a celebration.

Three days until the cities burn, but with today’s social media coordination, it’ll be three hours till the first viral EBT Uprising Dance Challenge goes from meme to murder.

How bad could it get? If just 1% of those 41.7 million SNAPsters snap, that’s over 417,000 murderers hitting the streets, amped up on empty stomachs and without the burden of intellect but liberally spiced with Glocks™.

I saw a video (it was on X®, probably started on TikTok©) where a woman was claiming that she couldn’t work – she was retired at 22 with her six children. Six children that you’re paying for, by the way. She indicated that it was everyone else’s responsibility to go and work for her. And then another video. And another.

We’re talking about a group of people, who, when looting Walmart™, won’t be stealing any job applications. Instead, they’ll behave like locusts because that’s their basic operating system, consume, mate, move on.

A girl I know would have sex for Adderall®. I guess she was an attention whore.

And, like locusts, when unleashed they’ll create Biblical levels of plunder. Stores will be stripped bare in under 60 minutes: shelves will echo with the ghosts of grape soda, and cashiers will be forced to hide in the walk-in freezer, live-streaming their sudden turn being on the front lines.

Day One: Inception

Sporadic smash-and-grabs in blue cities. Chicago’s South Side turns into a perpetual Black Friday brawl, with looters hauling off flat-screens because “hunger makes you binge-watch.” Atlanta’s got 640,000 kids on SNAP (Subversive Nutrition for Aimless Proles); when their purple drink privilege evaporates, expect school buses repurposed as battering rams.

Cops will be overwhelmed, as Bracken predicted. Their OODA loop is slower than a dial-up modem.

Day Two: Escalation

Hunger turns tribal. “Youths” blockade highways, turning I-95 into a demolition derby. Commuters dragged from Priuses™, beaten with shopping carts after the looters take what food they had bought.

Suburban enclaves? Home invasions spike as “foragers” hit Whole Foods for organic chicken wings to pair with their rage. Gas stations? Torched for the Cheetos® inside.

And the violence? Unprecedented in scale, a synchronized symphony of savagery from sea to shining sea. Why? Because unlike 1992’s Rodney King ripple, this is nationwide: 42 states face EBT (Emergency Burger Tantrum) evaporation simultaneously.

To be fair, there will be drift. Even red-state small towns within 20 or so miles will get spillover when the urban exodus turns feral.

The revolution may not be televised, but it will certainly be live-streamed.

Day Three (and beyond): Full Bracken

It’s here that things get fuzzy. Deploy the National Guard? Sure. To where? With what food? The infrastructure in the cities is gone, and as Katrina taught us, the people who are kept from murdering only by the thin veneer of society aren’t going to stop at one. 417,000 potential murderers doesn’t equate to only 417,000 murders.

And there will be the inevitable TikTok© trends: the EBT Uprising Dance Challenge evolves into the Loot Loop, where the winner gets the last uncrushed Dorito™ bag.

Riots will ratchet racial: “The Other” will get sorted out at 100 yards because nothing unites like a common enemy. The economy? Tanked. Even illegal Sikh truckers won’t roll into war zones, so food deserts bloom into famine fields.

Do I expect this?

No.

Could it happen?

Yes.

But what can you do? We are at a period of significant SNAP (Social Norms Are Precarious) risk because of the EBT (Entitlement Brawl Trigger).

The Looming A.I. Market Bubble

“Don’t try to fight it. You’ll get brain bubbles, strokes, aneurysms.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is bubble wrap part of pop culture? (All memes as-found)

Elon Musk promises a supercomputer cluster bigger than Texas that’ll make Skynet™ look like an HP-15C®. It even has a creepy name for those who know film history: Colossus™. Of course, it’s going to require more power than a quiver of Antifa® mainlining Red Bull© during a riot. I like that. A herd of cattle, a murder of crows, and a quiver of Antifa©.

But it’s not just Elon. There’s also Sam Altman, that pint-sized messiah of OpenAI© is out here swearing he’ll build data centers the size of Afghanistan, all to birth the AI-god-emperor that’ll finally figure out why fish from Long John Silver’s® always tastes like regret.

But here’s the kicker: this might be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. If When this AI bubble pops, it may very well make the dotcom crash look like look like a lost wallet.

On recent analysis I saw was over here (LINK) by Ed Zitron, and no, I’m not going to make fun of his last name as tempting as that might be since he writes well. When I read it, it wasn’t behind the paywall, but it was also insightful. Trust me.

His conclusion?

According to Ed’s analysis, the AI hype train is barreling toward a cliff made of physics, bad math, and even worse economics. If Mr. Zitron is correct, trillions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet on promises that of a technical revolution which, while automating many boring tasks, unfortunately won’t replace the staff at the DMV.

“Oh, yeah? You and what army? Oh, that army.” – Cicero

First off, the promises.

OpenAI’s® scribbled deals on cocktail napkins that will eventually result in laws prohibiting what they’re doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, they’re committing to drop $300 billion on Oracle™ over five years. That amounts to $5 billion a month, which is more than Taylor Swift makes in an entire year. Just kidding, but that $5 billion a month is a big number, since OpenAI only made $4.3 billion in the first six months of 2025.

OpenAI™ doesn’t have the money, of course, but, hey, it’s a bubble, so who is counting? They have stock, so if they don’t have cash, they’ll just give you stock.

What is OpenAI© buying with that cash that they don’t have? A gigawatt-scale data center orgy that’ll need more energy than Switzerland. Probably. Maybe. I’d need to know how many electric toothbrushes the Swiss use to be sure.

But, the problem is, nobody has built a gigawatt data center.

Ever.

Imagine the stock valuations! Follow me for more tips!

The biggest data centers today top out at maybe 100 megawatts, and that’s if the grid fairies are feeling generous. Take Stargate Abilene, OpenAI’s© “investment” with Oracle®. It’s supposed to hit 1.2 gigawatts, but right now?

They’ve got a puny 200-megawatt substation and some jury-rigged natural gas turbines that might squeak out another 350 megawatts if we can talk the Chinese into sending us the rare earth materials to make them.

Reality check: to run just this one location, they need 1.7 gigawatts total just to cover cooling and losses. And, it’s in Texas, which is not known for being a good place to keep stuff cold. They picked a climate where cooling the data center will be like trying to cool my nether regions in a sauna using a hairdryer.

And the power? Forget it. Transformers and substations take 2-4 years to build, and we’re fresh out globally. The article quotes some Bloomberg® wonk admitting they’re slapping together “not the really good” turbines because the premium ones have a seven-year waitlist.

Seven years! By then, those fancy Nvidia™ H100 GPUs will be as obsolete as Taylor Swift’s ovaries.

None of this is hyperbole. This is simple math: Taylor’s really getting up there if she wants to have kids. But back to the data center. Roughly, if you have a gigawatt of power that gets you maybe 700 megawatts of actual data center capacity after the universe’s entropy tax.

OpenAI® is pledging 6 gigawatts of AMD® GPUs by late 2026.

No way.

No sites have been picked, no financing has been announced.

No nothing.

It’s like promising to pay off the national debt by spending more so we make it up in . . . volume, yeah, volume discounts. Now, let’s spice it up with history, because nothing says “wealth wisdom” like learning from suckers who came before.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is straight out of the dotcom collapse.

17 isn’t a big number, is it?

Remember Cisco™? Yes, they make good stuff, and they survived. But back in the year 2000, they were the kings of the internet pipe dream and they hit $69 a share in 2000 bucks. Yesterday, they were at $68.66, so on an inflation-adjusted basis, they haven’t ever returned to their 2000 peak. The world realized nobody needed that many routers to email “I can has cheezeburger?” cat pictures.

If that were it, we’d probably be okay. But Nvidia™ is now priced out at 8% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500. The “500” in S&P 500 means the largest 500 companies in the United States. And one company is 8% of it.

This is the highest share of any single company in the history of S&P 500. Ever. The top seven tech firms account for 34% of the S&P 500.

Should we worry about that? Nah. It’s not like private equity is running out of cash for all of these projects. Wait, what? They are, and lots of them are exiting so they have sufficient cash left to buy cocaine and OnlyFans™ girls to snort the coke off of.

The worst part is that the entire thing is so incestuous that it makes a Habsburg family reunion look positively eugenic. Nvidia™ invests $100 billion in OpenAI® which then invests some other imaginary amount of billions in a deal with Oracle© to buy data centers and stuff them full of Nvidia® GPUs. The result? The stock price of each of these companies increases.

This doesn’t look corrupt. At all. Ignore the man behind the curtain.

Economically? It distorts everything. One estimate was that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of this year, all based on debt and soaring stock prices.

OpenAI’s projecting $200 billion revenue and $38 billion profit by 2030?

Cute. How do they expect to do that as their current business model is selling a dollar’s worth of computations for four cents? I guess they’ll make it up in volume?

Really, that’s not their bet. Their bet is that they’ll be the first to the prize: superhuman intelligence that will do their bidding. To be clear, if they got that, it might be worth it. For Sam Altman. Or for AI if it decides to go full Cyberdyne Systems and make Sam clean toilets.

A coincidence or a collapse?

But certainly not for you, and not for me. It would be an economic dislocation that would be the biggest in human history, even more than my divorce. If AI turns out to be real, actually disrupting the workforce like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, automating jobs left and right: boom.

Economic collapse. Trillions in productivity gains? Nope, it’s trillions in pink slips, ghost towns of cubicles, folks out of work, AI overlords hoarding the pie. I can see it now, French Revolution 2.0 with robot guillotines from RobotGuillotines.com.

But if AI’s the dud . . . hang on, what’s a dud in this context?

With the trillion plus dollars invested and the distortion to the economy it could be the most successful product in history and still be an economic wrecking ball. It it’s a dud, then all this investment?

Wasted.

Trillions vaporized on e-waste mountains, exec bonuses, and data centers that won’t be filled for the next century. This will drag down markets, pensions, and everyone eats ramen for the next decade.

C’mon buddy, you’ve got to earn that van.

If it works?

Collapse.

If it doesn’t work?

Money bonfire and depression.

Thankfully, in almost either scenario we will be able to avoid the real danger to society: Long John Silver’s®.

You Can’t Touch This: The Importance Of The Battle Of Tours

“The one rule we had on Charles in Charge is Charles must always be in charge.” – The Simpsons

Islamic suicide bombers aren’t so bad, but the Buddhist ones? They keep coming back until they get it right.

Europe in the early 700s was a patchwork of squabbling kingdoms still picking up the pieces from Rome’s grand collapse. When the Empire fell and the Legions retired and moved to Florida, Europe was a hammered mess. Barbarians had even turned Rome into a tourist trap for Vandals and Goths where you could get great bargains: half off togas, and all the gold you could eat.

A new wave of chaos crashed in from the south: The Umayyad (U-Mad) Caliphate was fresh off conquering Spain during a short decade of conquest. After that, they began eyeing the rest of the continent like Whoopi Goldberg eyes a dozen chocolate éclairs after a hard day of being wrong.

It occurred to the U-Mads: why stop with Spain when they could go on to France (then Francia for some reason) for cigarettes and baguettes and brunettes and marmosets and intangible assets?

Enter Charles, the Frankish warlord who was the illegitimate son of that hobbit®, Pepin. Being a bastard (like me Charles was born one, and didn’t have to work at it like most people) Charles wasn’t in the line of succession for all that Frankish Hobbit® power. Scared of him, Pepin’s wife had Charles tossed in the clink so Charles wouldn’t become the boss when Pepin died.

“Hand. Hand. River. Dirt. Gollum. Hobbits. Pockets. Pockets. Finger. Envelope. Fire. Hand. Neck. Neck. Finger. Hobbits. Neck. Neck. Neck. Pocket. Finger. Lava! The Lord of the Rings, from the perspective of the Ring.

Well, prisons were made for breaking out of, and Charles did exactly that. A lot of others decided they were king instead when Pepin died, so Charles had to defeat the humorously named Chilperic II, Raganfrid, and Radbod. Okay, Radbod would probably be a good professional wrestling name, so Radbod get a pass but the rest of them are just bad D&D® names from a drunk DM.

The Funny Name Gang fought with Charles at Cologne, and Charles lost.

Charles didn’t give up, and instead regrouped and trained in a movie montage in the hills, and then attacked his silly-named foes at Malmedy, and they scurried like schoolchildren and Charles got all their stuff, plus the reputation of a guy who could win battles against people who were utterly unprepared for it, them being asleep on siesta and all.

One battle doesn’t win a kingdom, though.

Charles waited a year and trained his army in yet another movie montage for the sequel, Charles II, complete with 1980s theme music, something telling him he was the best or something. Regardless, Charles invaded Chilperic’s place in Northern France, and won.

How do squid go into battle? Well armed.

And he kept winning. Charles essentially spent the next fifteen years fighting battles and winning ever single one of them in his bid to secure power. After that, he selected the title he wanted. It was mayor. So, after all of that, it was time for peace, right?

No. Charles had just beaten the other French. But as I mentioned, he was being invaded from the south.

That brings us to 732 AD and the town of Tours.

Let’s frame it this way: Charles’ victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD stands as one of those rare moments where the West dodged a civilization-ending bullet. Think Thermopylae, where a handful of Spartans bought time against Persian hordes; the Battle of Vienna in 1683, halting the Ottoman tide at Europe’s gates; or the sack of Carthage in 146 BC, when Rome finally crushed its African rival and secured Mediterranean dominance, or John Wilder’s Divorce of 1995.

Tours fits right in – a pivotal civilizational clash that crushed a major threat to the struggling West like it was a telemarketer.

Salt makes everything taste better. Sodi-yummmm! (meme as-found)

Let us set the scene properly, because context is king (or mayor as in Charles’ case).

By the 8th century, Islam had exploded out of Arabia, swallowing Persia, North Africa, and Spain in under a century. The U-mads crossed the Pyrenees in 720, gobbling up Septimania (southern France) and launching raids deeper into the Frankish lands.

Their leader, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, governor of Al-Andalus (moslim Spain), was no slouch. He had spent years in active command of an army taking over Spain. His army, perhaps 20,000 to 80,000 strong (historians bicker like barroom philosophers on numbers), consisted mostly of Berber and Arab cavalry, light and fast, perfect for hit-and-run plunder.

They had sacked Bordeaux and were loaded with loot, but this was no mere smash-and-grab; the Arabs smelled yet more conquest, and were testing the waters for a full push into Frankish heartlands. They outnumbered the Frankish armies.

On the other side? Charles, the Mayor of the Palace the real boss of the Franks.

Why Charles? No one else stood ready to protect Europe; the Byzantines were busy fending off Arabs in the east, the Lombards in Italy were too fragmented and hadn’t even invented spaghetti yet, and the Anglo-Saxons across the Channel were still figuring out the magic secret of bathing that disappeared when the Romans left. If Charles failed, the road to Paris, and beyond to the Rhine, lay open.

Stakes? Imagine a Europe where minarets dot the Seine instead of cathedrals.

Oh, wait . . . .

Why are the French depressed? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is England. (meme as-found)

Now, the battle itself:

October 10, 732, near Tours. Charles, with about 15,000 to 30,000 infantry-heavy Franks, chose high ground in a wooded area, forming a tight phalanx of armored foot soldiers, a tactic used successfully by everyone from Sumerians to Greeks to Romans to Vikings.

This was a human wall of axes and swords and shields and pikes, disciplined like Roman legions but with beards that could hide small animals. They set up on top of a lightly-forested hill, and waited. And waited. Abdul Rahman wanted Charles to attack. Charles wanted Abdul to attack.

As the Arabs didn’t have warm clothes suitable for the winter, they finally blinked, and attacked.

Abdul Rahman’s cavalry charged uphill at this mass of men, lumber and steel, repeatedly, expecting to shatter the line like they had against the Visigoths they had defeated in Spain.

But Charles’ men held, their heavy infantry absorbing the impacts like Rockey Balboa in, well, like every Rockey movie. And with good reason: Charles had seen this battle coming and had the largest standing army, well trained and ready to go, fierce and with faith in their nearly undefeated leader.

I think shields are a concept I can really get behind.

As the day wore on, the Muslims tired. Their horses foaming, their riders frustrated. It was now hammer time. Charles’ scouts raided the enemy camp, sparking rumors that Abdul Rahman was dead and the loot vulnerable.

Panic spread among the U-mads.

The governor himself charged into the fray to rally his troops and got cut down, probably by a Frankish axe to the skull, because why not go out dramatically? Night fell, and the invaders melted away, leaving tents, treasure, and thousands of dead.

Casualties? Franks lost maybe a thousand; Muslims, up to 12,000, including their leader.

It was not pretty, with bodies piled like cordwood, blood soaking the fields and Charles standing tall. Charles got his nickname at this point. In old Frankish, it’s “Martel” but it translates to “The Hammer”.

Aftermath hit like a hangover after a wild raid.

The U-mads retreated south of the Pyrenees, their momentum broken. Internal revolts soon toppled their dynasty, replaced by the Abbasids who shifted focus eastward.

In Spain, Christian kingdoms in the north took heart. This sparked the Reconquista, a 700-year grind where indigenous Iberians overthrew their colonial moslim overlords.

My friend has an intricate tattoo and I was surprised when he told me he got it in Iberia. I guess no one expects Spanish ink precision.

No “noble savage” myth here; it was gritty reprisal, castle by castle, until 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella booted the last emir from Granada and started Spain’s golden age. Tours proved resistance worked, and turned the tide from defense to offense.

Yet Charles Martel remains poorly remembered today, a footnote in textbooks while his grandson, Charlemagne, gets the statues.

Why? Charles never crowned himself king, deeming the title too puny for a man who ruled de facto over Franks, Aquitainians, and more. “Mayor of the Palace” suited him. It was understated power, like a mob boss who wears sweats instead of Armani®. Martel laid the foundations for post-Roman Europe: professional armies funded by land grants, essentially the birth of the feudal system. Martel also left a unified Frankish state, and was the salvation of Christianity.

After the victory at Tours, Charles granted large portions of Church land to his followers, on the condition they help him militarily. The Church wasn’t happy, but the Pope later begged Charles’ aid against Lombards, dubbing him a “defender of the faith.”

Irony? Delicious, especially with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Most crucially, Martel set the stage for his grandson, Charlemagne. Martel’s son, Pepin the Short, finally ditched the Merovingians and became king with papal blessing.

Charlemagne then forged the Carolingian Empire, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D., defining medieval Europe with laws, learning, and conquests from Saxony to Italy.

Never challenge Death to a pillow fight unless you’re prepared for the Reaper cushions. (meme as-found)

Without the Hammer’s stand at Tours, there is no Charlemagne and perhaps no unified West to change the world.

Martel reminds us that history turns on hammers, not hashtags. He was no saint. He was ruthless, pragmatic, a bit of a land-thief, but he saved the West from a fate it might not have survived. Next time you think that we can’t win, tip your hat to the Hammer, who showed us the way because he was too illegit to quit.

Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

“We really shook the pillars of Heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess Kurt and Flint, Michigan both ended up with a lead problem.

My high school freshman science teacher would, like many teachers, wander from the topic at hand. There was some political situation or another going on. Honestly, I don’t remember what it was, but the news was all atwitter: “It’s a crisis!”

Yeah, we’ve seen that before. It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good way to bring in viewers. So, my teacher made the comment: “A crisis isn’t an ongoing situation. A crisis is a moment in time when it all falls apart. It’s an instant, not a month-long process.”

He is correct – that’s the historical meaning. It was the turning point, not the turning week. Now the most commonly used meaning is “a tough, lingering, situation”, which was what he was railing against. If everything is a crisis, nothing is.

History tells us there are two things Gandhi never had for dinner: breakfast and lunch.

I guess he had a point. But, words really do change meanings over time. “Awesome” used to describe the wrath of God. Now? It’s a teenage girl describing a photo filter on InstaTHOT®.

Marcus Aurelius, who is still dead, wrote the following: “You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good man today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

Hint: rinse and repeat that a few times, and we all find out that tomorrow is a graveyard.

Tomorrow, really, is the enemy. It takes that crisis as a point in time, and moves it to a tough situation.

The difference is big. A tough situation is something you don’t like, but have to live with, like a hangover or being Kamala Harris’ husband. A crisis is a here and now moment, where I’m staring myself in the mirror, and saying, “This has to change. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.”

Every single change I was going to do “tomorrow” died on the vine. They were failures.

The reason is that I wasn’t ready to change.

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

What separates anyone from being a world class, well, anything?

The first is talent. To be world class, you have to have talent. So, if we’re talking about me being a world-class high jumper, well, I’m probably not going to do that because I can’t control gravity, at least as far as you know. But if I do have the talent?

The next thing I need is dedication. I need to work at it. I need to push myself again and again. I need to learn the 20% that gives me 80% competence, and then push to give the other 80% of the effort that makes me better. A study done on world-class musicians, for instance, showed that they didn’t practice less than their less able counterparts because of their talent.

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

That dedication, though, starts with a moment in time, a decision. A crisis, if you will.

What do you get when you cross a cow with a trout? A suspension and an ethics investigation.

The decision to be world-class starts well before one gets to be world class. It starts with the single-minded focus and dedication of a fanatical beginner, like a four-year-old who just found a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry.

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

The beginner starts at the moment in time they decide that they’re going to devote themselves to becoming the best that they can be. Then comes the hard work. The sore muscles. The aching brain. The long plateau where even though there’s a lot of effort going on, there just doesn’t seem to be measurable progress.

But one foot still goes out in front of the other. The long walk continues.

If Waldo® tries to bench press, will anyone spot him?

Eventually, those who follow this path fall into two camps. The first are those who look to a moment in time. Winning gold at the Olympics®. Winning the Super Bowl©. Achieving that goal.

Those people often fall apart. They worked towards a goal. And then made the goal.

And then what?

That’s the tough question. Often, those people end up with a single question in their minds: “Is that all there is?”

For those people, those focused on the goal, the answer is, “Yes, that’s all there is. You can be forever known as the guy who scored four touchdowns for Polk High in the 1966 city championship game against Andrew Johnson High School.” And then you can get married to Peg and sell shoes.

Sigmund Freud and Bill Cosby had one thing in common: they both explored the unconscious.

The other choice, however, is to realize that the goal isn’t the goal. The goal is the struggle. The real payoff is the process of remaking yourself into something new and better. The goal is to recreate yourself continually. Chase the grind.

Another dead Roman, this time Seneca, wrote: “I don’t complain about the lack of time. What little I have will go far enough. Today, this day, I will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods, and shake up the world.”

Huh. Didn’t know that Seneca needed a co-writing credit on Big Trouble in Little China.

None of this, though starts tomorrow. It starts now. I can give the effort of someone who is world class right now, even though my performance isn’t yet world class.

We are either remaking ourselves better than we were, or we are dying.

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

Stoics, A Bikini, Families, And The Truth

“First principles, Clarice, simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – The Silence of the Lamb

Hey, where are your eyes going? My philosophy is down below, buddy.

Marcus Aurelius, who is dead, wrote: “Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions . . . “

Marcus wrote that in his book, Meditations, though I doubt that he referred to the book by that name. More likely, he referred to it as “where the hell did I put my notebook?” when he talked about it at all. Heck, since he was Caesar, Marcus probably had a guy whose only job was to schlep the book around while Marcus moved from place to place. Probably his name was Antonius Carriumbookus, or something like that.

I quit my origami hobby last year. Too much paperwork.

The quote from Marcus that I started this post begs some questions: Why do we do the things we do? What are our underlying motivations?

For me, I write these never-ending series of blog posts because I’m trying to think and learn, to uncover what’s really True. Why?

So that I can share it, because knowledge exists to be shared. As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are plenty of times I’ve started writing a post and found after research that my underlying premise was wrong. Those are great days, because when I found out that I was wrong then, it helps me from not being wrong now.

This has led to changes in my thoughts as I chip away at the Truth.

One example is that I used to think that the atom of society was the individual, and that individual freedom was an unmitigated good. I believe now that I was utterly incorrect. Instead, I now believe that the atom of society is the family.

Why? Because having humanity exist is a good thing. Since people have stopped dividing like amoeba or engaging in the suspect practice of parthenogenesis after the Council of Trent in 1563, we’re stuck with the fact that only families can reproduce. That, for those keeping score, requires a biological man and a biological woman.

My son got into Harvard™. He said it was easy – they don’t lock the doors or anything.

Is the nuclear family of one man and one woman the only way? What about harems, or societies where people exist in a constant smuck-fest with no fixed relationships? Those generate children, after all. A stable nuclear family, however, is superior because thousands of years of human practice shows that it clearly is the best way to create a stable, functioning society.

The implications of this are fairly big: just as individuals give up freedoms to live in a society (i.e., you can’t just steal your neighbor’s PEZ™ for no reason unless you’re the government), individuals should also give up rights to support those stable nuclear families.

Whenever we’ve acted against that idea, society gets worse and laws restricting individual behavior are the direct consequence. It’s an odd paradox: giving up some individual freedoms (no-fault divorce, adultery without consequence) actually leads to a stronger and freer society with greater respect for things like property rights.

I’m not quite halfway through a book on Zeno’s Paradox.

I didn’t believe that consciously when I was in my twenties, but now I see it fairly clearly, and all the research and writing I’ve done has helped lead to that conclusion.

To be clear, it’s not what’s True, Beautiful, or Good that has changed, it’s merely that I get closer to understanding what’s True, Beautiful, and Good. I’m the one that has to catch up.

So, that’s part of why I write. Now why I publish?

That’s because people in the commentariat are far from shrinking violets, and will call me out if they think I’m wrong. Rarely does anyone attack me personally, rather, it’s the idea that I’m presenting that gets engaged. That’s invaluable, because it keeps me on my toes – I can’t tell you how often I put one wrong fact in the post, decide, “Meh, it’s 11:30PM, I’m pretty sure that’s right”, and then, boom, the first comment points out my error.

I love that.

I mean, I hate being wrong. Everyone does. But I love the chance to be right in the future.

The hard drive can’t be read, the screen is blue, I think I just deleted system32.

The other reason I publish this is to hold myself accountable by making a commitment. Self-discipline is great and all, but I assure you I wouldn’t put the effort into writing all this just for it to sit on a hard drive somewhere.

I mean, why would I do that?

But since I see that some people come by and check it out, well, I don’t want to disappoint them. Is that external? Yeah, a little.

Next, there is also the fact that I like telling jokes. I love it. But I really don’t tell them for you, I tell them for me. Scott Adams said something like: “Tell six jokes. If reader gets two, they’ll think you’re a genius.” Since I like telling jokes, well, that’s why I do that.

OSHA made an OnlyFans™ account, because OSHA specializes in content that’s not safe for work.

Finally, I’m sure that blogging is cheaper than therapy. I’m betting that’s why Marcus did it in the first place. Here he was, the undisputed most powerful man on the planet, with the ability to crush entire nations at a whim, and yet he spent time writing in his book about what he thought the True, the Beautiful, and the Good were.

But, given all of the power Marcus had, I’d rather be John Wilder than Marcus Aurelius.

I mean, he’s dead.