Category: Significance

Purpose, Virtue, Starlets, And Inexplicable Comments About Italy

“I disagree with what you said about the underlying theme of chapter eight in this book. It’s really not about man’s struggle with double-sided tape. It’s a metaphor for the Mesopotamian social hierarchy during the Bronze Age.” – Homestarrunner

The easiest way to get gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals?  Kleptomania.

One theme I keep returning to in this blog is purpose.  I have a friend (you’re shocked, I know) and we talk from time to time.  One observation that he’s made is that they’ve done studies of people who have won medals in competitions like the Olympics®.  You’d think that the person who was happiest was the person who won gold.

It’s not.  It’s not the person who won silver, either.

It’s the person who won bronze.

Third place?  Well, they know it wasn’t a fluke that they didn’t win.  There is that “second place” guy who pops that illusion bubble.  But they made it to the big show, and, heck, they’re third.  Not bad!

Bronze is the Libertarian Party of medals.

The person who wins silver is usually very, very unhappy.  Why?  Every minute of the day they have to wonder:

  • What if I had worked just a little harder each day?
  • What if I had listened to my coach?
  • What if I hadn’t spent the night before the Olympic© finals at the strip club drinking tequila shooters with Crystal and Svetlana?

Little things like that begin to nag at them.  Plus they get Brady Cake:

Tom Brady is so old . . . he won his first Super Bowl® while the world was still in Standard Definition.

So, gold medal winners should be happy, right?

Some really aren’t happy.  They’ve climbed the mountain.  They’ve spent, in some cases, tens of thousands of hours in practice at the highest level.  They’ve skipped going to parties when others were having fun.  They lived, in some cases, like monks to climb to the greatest levels of human performance.

Some of them get there and ask . . .

  • Is this all there is?

Those folks who ask that question were working for the wrong purpose.  Their idea wasn’t to be the World PEZ® Flicking Champion, it was someone else’s idea.

So they went with it.

Don’t say this three times fast.

You can see those folks, especially a few years after the Olympics®.  They’re the ones that are on the third DUI or are the 4’6” gymnast that looks like they’ve swallowed a refrigerator.  Which, I will say, does make tumbling easier.  If you call rolling “tumbling.”  Meghan McCain does, especially if it’s toward a buffet.

So, what about those people who win a gold medal and are just fine?  What’s different?

They have purpose.  Their sport was only a part of their purpose, and was only a part of what drove them.  They are centered, and the biggest part of their purpose isn’t achievement.  Achievement is a byproduct.

The folks who win and don’t self-destruct have a purpose, and a purpose rooted in virtue.

To be clear, very, very, very clear:

  • Virtue does not guarantee victory. At all.

Virtue (and a purpose rooted in virtue) just makes victory bearable.

Why do so many early twentysomethings mentally implode when they achieve fame and stardom and immense wealth?  That’s an easy question – they find themselves in a world with no real restraints.  The real question is why don’t more starlets become headlines?  I’m pretty sure Miley Cyrus isn’t in a good mental place.

In Europe, she’s known as Kilometery Cyrus.

In one respect, not being wealthy and famous is a great substitute for willpower:  you can’t end up dead in a hotel room in Thailand surrounded by heroin, empty take-out boxes of food, bottles of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and vats of industrial-strength skin cream if you have to get to your steady job.

A mortgage and car payments have probably saved a lot of dads uncomfortable phone calls from the Italian Government as to why their 22-year-old was found “improving” the Sistine Chapel painting.  Thankfully, back then they charged the fines in something called “lira”, which is just like money but is instead made of colorful Christmas wrapping paper.

An aside, things to trust Italians on:

  • Food.
  • Wine.
  • Car body design.

Things not to trust Italians on:

  • Anything you need tomorrow.
  • Anything electronic or electric.
  • Anything where the oil or engine coolant is supposed to stay on the inside.
  • Anything remotely resembling fiscal discipline.

Italians are great at soccer – you change sides halfway through.

And, apparently, never trust John Wilder to wander off on a tangent on a Friday post.  I’ll get back to virtue and purpose, and promise not to wander too far again this post.

I’ve written several posts about Virtue.  It’s been a common theme.  Here are a few:

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python

Ben Franklin and his Thirteen Virtues

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

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

So, have a purpose.  Live your virtue.  And when you have high achievement, when you win the gold, when you achieve amazing business success?  You’re ready to deal with it.

I’ve heard of a village in Africa where they’re dealing with a drought and thirst.  I hope they “Get Well Soon.”

But let’s say that you don’t win the gold.  You don’t have amazing business success.  Virtue allows you to be ready to deal with that, too.

Or you could just win a bronze medal and have a mortgage?

Nah, go for the virtue.  You’ll eventually pay the mortgage off.

Studies Show: Hanging Around Victims Sucks

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

Someone in London is stabbed every 37 seconds.  Poor guy – he’s got to be getting tired of that.

One of the greatest sources of trouble in my life has been . . . victims.  You know the type.  They never create the situation they’re in.  Every bit of trouble that the victim has ever had has been somebody else’s fault.  Pa Wilder was the first to tell me to not find faults – he was horrible at geology.

I’ve even dealt with relatively well-off victims.  They had nice houses, but the houses could have been so much nicer if only they weren’t being kept down.  People have done them wrong.  Generally, if you listen long enough, you’ll hear the list of every bad thing that happened to them.

And I mean “happened to” since nothing, no matter how small or large, is ever their fault.  Even if they’re lazy, they’ll say that’s not their fault – they’ll say it walks in the family.  As a general rule, when I find a victim, I steer as far away from them as possible.  They’re dangerous in several ways.

If you’re not aware of what they’re doing, their attitude can be poisonous.  They’re the guy at work who complains that the company they work for makes a profit and that their share is never enough.  I avoid them because if I’m not part of their pity-party, soon enough I’ll be in the crosshairs as someone who has done them wrong.  As we’ll see – that’s a dangerous place to be.

What does a vegan zombie eat?  Graaaaains. 

Yesterday I read about a study that was released in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.  No, I don’t have a subscription, but I did read about it here (LINK).  The study defined a character trait that the researchers named Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV).  TIV was defined as “an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships.”

TIV?  Sounds like living with an intolerable martyr to me.

The researchers found four factors that were pretty much always there with the insufferable losers:

  • Moral Elitism
  • Lack of Empathy
  • Need for Recognition
  • Unable to Stop Thinking About Their Problems

This wasn’t sometimes there – it was always there.  Imagine living a life where you were torn by these sorts of feelings on a consistent basis.  Certainly, I’ve written about it before – these traits are 100% the traits of . . . a Leftist.

What does it take to start a riot to destroy a city?  Certainty you are right.  Lack of empathy for those individuals that own businesses or property.  A need to be seen as being virtuous – they must be visible.

Congratulations!  You’ve made it through 343 months of 2020!  Only 11 more months to go!

And lastly, they cannot stop thinking about every little thing that has ever been done wrong to them which in the end causes them to be filled with nothing but hatred.  And hatred has been popular with the Left all year – it’s quite the rage.

Because they constantly felt like victims, the researchers found that the TIV idiots:

  • Were more likely to make another person suffer loss, even when it didn’t help them personally.
  • Felt more intense negative emotions, and
  • Felt entitled to behave in an immoral fashion.

Now, the last three bullet points are a lot more normal.  If someone broke into your house and stole your antique yak knickers, you’d probably experience each very one of those last three bullet points – they broke into your house – you want them to pay.  What’s not normal is this is the way that people who have TIV feel this way all of the time.

They’ll call him the Grim Sweeper.  (Not my meme – as found on the ‘net)

TIV isn’t just the hatred of people, it’s the hatred of all of the systems that those people created.  Ever notice that the victim class generally intensely hates the United States?

Why?

Because they want everyone to suffer loss, and they feel that any means whatsoever are justified, especially since they are morally superior.  They don’t want to watch the United States fail – they want to watch it burn.

But this victimhood isn’t just a hatred focused outside of self.  TIV is, at its core, the hatred of self.

Thankfully, there’s good news:

  • TIV is a choice.

I have and do maintain that many of the things about ourselves are entirely under our control.  Attitude is one.  We can always control the way that we feel about something.

I’m not saying they keep the thermostat control hot at my in-laws, but two hobbits came and tossed a ring into their living room.

The start of being a victim is allowing it to happen.  I was fortunate.  When I was feeling sorry for myself, my parents and brother absolutely wouldn’t allow it.  Was it tough love sometimes?  Sure.  But at least in the Wilder house, I was mocked mercilessly when I tried to play the victim.

That was one of the best gifts ever.  Because they wouldn’t let me be the victim, some of the results were:

  • I felt my destiny was in my own hands.  My actions help to create my future.
  • I was responsible for my own successes, along with the help I’d had.
  • More importantly, I was responsible for my own failures. This was generally a solo trip.  My successes generally had help – my failures were generally due to my own weakness.
  • Revenge was less important than getting better and winning my own game.

There were some downsides to this.  When everyone is playing one game, and you’re playing another sometimes people don’t understand your motivation.  If their goal is a brand new car, and your goal is no debt, you’re not playing the same game at all.  They see you driving a ten or fifteen-year-old car and think, “Weirdo.”

One of the best examples I ever saw of not being a victim was at a corporate training session.  We had discussed victimhood, and the trainer had a large metal pin-on button that said “VICTIM” on it.  When one of the participants in the training session leveled a (very valid) complaint about a company practice, the instructor tried to give that participant the “VICTIM” button.  The participant refused it.

I tried to steal his boots, but they wouldn’t fit me.   I guess those boots were made for Walken.

It was a great moment to watch.  The trainer didn’t know what to do, but it was clear to everyone in the class that particular participant was not a VICTIM.

But it’s easy to not be a victim:

  • Moral Elitism Understand that each of us falls short of our own moral goals.  Each of us.
  • Lack of Empathy Have empathy for your fellow man, but not a poisonous generosity that destroys civilizations.
  • Need for Recognition Understand that recognition is fickle.  It may be the best thing you ever do for mankind will be utterly unknown.  Be good with that.
  • Unable to Stop Thinking About Their Problems Give it a rest.  As Twain said:  “Drag your thoughts away from your troubles:  by the ears, by the heels, or any other way, so you manage it.”

Yes, sometimes bad things happen to us.

How long we wallow in victimhood, however, is entirely up to us.

Luck And (Sort Of) $20

“What’s this, then? ‘Romanes eunt domus’? People called Romanes, they go, the house?” – The Life of Brian

When Clint was taking pottery class, before he put his ceramics into the oven, he’d snarl:  “Go ahead, bake my clay.”

I went on a long-ish walk today.  Walking is fun, gets me outdoors, and allows me to feel the wind on my scalp.  Not that being bald is bad – when I was younger I used to play chess with bald old men at my hometown’s park.  It’s really hard to find 32 of them all at once, though.

I went on the same walk yesterday.  The thought came to my mind, hey, I’m going to find a $20 bill when I go walking soon.

And today?  As I had just finished 1.56 miles (still heading out) I looked in the ditch by the side of the country road.  Could it be?  Was it?

It was.

No, not another Bud Light® can.  It was my $20 dollar bill!  I’m not making any of this up.  Here’s a picture.

I got home and found that someone ripped the center pages out of my dictionary.  It went from bad to worse.

Now it’s not the worst thing I’ve found inert, piled in the weeds next to a crumpled Bud Light™ can – that would be the Ex.  But it wasn’t exactly a full $20 bill, either.

I sent a picture of it to my friend.  “Looks like you’ve got about $9.50 there, John.”

Yup.  It is a real $20 bill.  Just not a complete $20 bill.  And since you need to have 51% of a piece of paper currency to trade it in – it’s not $9.50, it’s $0.00, although I’m sure that in Pennsylvania (or Wisconsin, or Georgia or…), my 45% of a $20 dollar bill would magically transform at 3AM into a full 55%.

So, was I lucky?

Yup, I was.

Why would I deprive an Uber driver of a chance to take part in a marathon?

Although we talk about all of the right things to do with your money (or bullets, or gold, or PEZ®) one thing you have to factor in is luck.

Pa Wilder, generally, did it all the “right way” – saved money, owned his home free and clear for years, bought his cars with cash, and stayed out of debt.  About 25 years after he retired, he was broke – he had spent most of his savings, so my brother John (yes, my brother’s name really is John, too) kicked in and helped Pa along.  Pa didn’t spend it all on pantyhose and elephant rides – generally, he just lived a very quiet life.

Then there was relative “B”.  They went from one cash shortage to another for almost their entire lives – not because of any sort of fault – they were frugal and worked hard.  In one particular cash crunch, they ended up having to sell cattle to pay an emergency bill.  Then, one day, a group of geologists came on to their land just as they’re ready to retire.  The oil company drilled a few wells and started sending them checks.

How much were all those checks worth?

Enough to allow them to get a bulldozer to push over the house they were living in.  Honestly, they didn’t need a bulldozer since the only thing holding the house together were mice holding hands with termites.

I enjoy testing microphone/speaker combinations.  Have any feedback for me?

And enough was left over to build an entirely new house.

It was . . . luck.

As humans, we plan.  We can’t help it.  And we observe patterns:  not getting married until you’re ready, finishing school, not getting divorced, saving money, being thrifty, and investing are things that generally lead to financial stability.

Choice of career is also important – there are few composers of 17th and 18th century-style music that are wealthy.  But for those composers that are?  If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.

But we should all take a step back and understand that the future isn’t based entirely on skill – it’s also based on luck.  And, yes, I know what you’re saying – the same thing I normally think – quoting Seneca (the dead Roman):  “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

I try to live my life by those words.

But there’s still just plain luck.

Did Romans kept fit by doing Pontius Pilates?

I am normally that lucky guy.  Seriously – I started writing down a list of incredibly good luck that I’ve had in my life.  It was a very long list.  If I took a hard look at the list, sure, some of it happened because I was clever enough, or fast enough, or strong enough, or just so very pretty – too damn pretty to die, some might say.

But some of those coincidences that happened to me were none of that.  The opportunities were so amazingly rare, and yet, there I was.  It’s not just me who has observed this.  A good friend once described me like this:  “John, if you were walking down the street and fell down into a pile of gum, you’d come back up with a $100 bill stuck to your forehead.”

Part of luck, however, is just understanding that some days are your day – nothing can go wrong.  And other days?  Nothing will go right, even if you’ve prepared wonderfully and meticulously.

Yes, I believe that Seneca is right, and you prepare as hard as you can for those days and seize the ever-loving snot out of those days.  So when it’s my day?  I try to push my luck as far and as fast as I can.  The Romans had this one sniffed out, too:  Fortis Fortuna adiuvat.  Fortune favors the bold.

What kind of aspirin do fortune-tellers take?  Medium strength.

When it’s not my day?  I just slooooooow down.

What I really have seen is that people who are in great moods have . . . the best luck.  Those same people often find opportunities where others don’t see them.

Maybe I’m just an optimist.  I think great things are going to happen to me, so, they do.  When I was out walking on the deck when it was raining and one foot slipped and I did the splits?  The kind of splits that you feel some muscle in your left leg streeeeeeeetch, and then feel that same muscle “give” because I haven’t bent like that since I was in high school?

Not lucky?  Right?

I can’t be sure.  Stretching my leg like a pretty, pretty ballerina sure fired me up to get walking to build that muscle back up.  And it’s working just after a few days.  And I found this neat $20 bill.

Or at least part of one.

Weird, huh?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: 56 Days To The Last Election Ever In The United States

“It appears we will be required to ignite the midnight petroleum, sir.” – ST:  TNG

It’s all fun and games until it hits midnight.  And we’re getting pretty close.

  1. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  2. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  3. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Open War.

We are at step 9.  Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight on the clock.  Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities.

In this issue:  Front Matter – What Is A Civil War? – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – 56 Days Until The Last Election – Links

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

What Is A Civil War?

Multiple comments that I’ve had, both in the comment section at the blog, as well as in email and even text message asked the question – what happens to the index this month.  The answer is that we’re still at a 9 out of 10.  The only thing remaining to take us to a 10 is a body count.  That’s because I’m using this (admittedly academic definition by Doyle and Sambanis in 2000) as my definition for the existence of a civil war:

  1. The war has caused more than 1,000 battle deaths. This war hasn’t yet done so.  Is 1,000 an aribitrary number?    This is the only criteria not yet met.
  2. The war represents a challenge to the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state. I think it’s clear that Antifa® and BLM™ want nothing less than the dismantling of the existing state and construction of a Marxist Utopia©.  The fact that they are aided and abetted by fellow travelers in district attorney offices, mayoral offices, and congressional offices doesn’t mean that they aren’t communist revolutionaries fighting against freedom from the inside.
  3. The war occurs within the recognized boundary of that state. This is an easy one.
  4. The war involves the state as one of the principal combatants. One of.  Not the only one.  Ask a policeman in Portland if they feel that they’re in control.
  5. The rebels are able to mount an organized military opposition to the state and to inflict significant casualties on the state. It states casualties, not deaths.  And that also makes this an easy one to check off.  Organization discussion is directly below in the Violence And Censorship Update.

 

I list all of the five criteria for a simple reason – to show that the only thing between us right now and a full blown, internationally recognized definition of civil war is the number of body bags we have yet to fill.  When I started this update last year, I was expecting things to move faster than you expected.  I did not expect things to move faster than I expected.

They have.

Violence And Censorship Update

Violence this month is obvious.  The killings have started.  Outside of the increasing violence tied directly to police standing down because they have no support which I talked about last month, bullets are now flying in the “mostly peaceful” protests.

Outside of the CHAZ murders, where two teenagers were killed, much of the violence has been peripheral.  I moved the index up to nine out of ten when killings became commonplace.  As near as I can tell, the killings directly associated with the Antifa™ and BLM® action is probably somewhere short of 100.

But two of those deaths are deaths that Antifa© cannot abide.  In Kenosha, I wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse’s clear self-defense shooting against both a pedophile and a wife beater, and alleged self-defense shooting against a person who was (by the film I saw) drawing down on him.  You can read it here – reviews say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’d suggest my signature on my divorce papers from my first wife was better (Have The Kenosha Riots Given The Right Our Rosa Parks?).

From my vantage point, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero.  But Antifa™ cannot let that stand.  At all.  It’s my estimate that out of rage, the killing in Portland as well as the attempted murder by car in Portland were “revenge” hits on people wearing paraphernalia of the Right.  If you read reports that break down the killing (HERE) and other experiences (HERE) in Portland, it becomes clear that Antifa® is using military discipline, and is broken up into a military command structure.  (H/T to Vox Day (LINK) and Mike at Cold Fury (LINK))

Antifa™ is a dedicated group.  They have undergone a brainwashing and are a religious cult – no Jim Jones Kool-Aid® drinking cultist could compete.  I wrote about that here (Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?), and stand by it.  Antifa® and BLM© stand against everything that has made America wonderful, rich, and prosperous.  And they are fanatics.

I’m not sure if you know what they have in mind for people that don’t agree with them.  It isn’t pleasant.  The idea is that there is a pure society coming, and the way to get to that new society is to eliminate everything that doesn’t fit.  Which almost certainly includes you.  But don’t worry – they want to torture people to death to show the remaining people how wonderful the future communist utopia will be.  See?  You serve a purpose in their minds.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

July was generally better than June, which is like saying that World War I was “better” than World War II.  Let’s go to the graphs.  In general, I’ve used bikini graphs in the past.  Given where we are, I’m a bit more somber.  Here are the graphs, without bikinis.

Violence:

Up is more violent.  June pegged the scale of violence.  This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300.  It’s lower again this month despite clear assassinations by the Left.  Does that mean it’s less violent this month?  Certainly riots are down, but the measure is a measure of how people feel about the violence.  Since it’s so common now, it’s not spiking.  That is, in my opinion, very bad – we’re getting used to this nonsense.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability is down, slightly.  I expect September and October to be down more, since voting generally has a calming effect and all emotions are focused there.  After that?  All bets are off.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, are down slightly.  Again, we’re nowhere near the bottom.  I expect that to drop off in October.  Maybe to historic levels.  But I could be wrong?

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Oops!  This metric is now nearly at the highest it’s been in years.  As the Wuflu® hits Mexico, the Mexicans are deciding to head north again.

56 Days Until The Last Election

I firmly believe the United States has had stolen elections in the past.  But the nice thing about the Electoral College is?  It makes it really, really hard to steal an election.  Impossible?  No.  Hard?  Yes.

Every single person in every graveyard in Chicago, California, and Queens can vote for a Democrat, and it doesn’t matter.  The Electoral College adds legitimacy to an election by breaking corruption at the state lines.  That’s one reason the Left hates it.  It makes elections hard to steal.  In my state, my vote doesn’t really matter – my state will go for Trump even if every person in every grave, ever, votes Democrat.

Mail-in voting changes all of that.

Yes, this was one of my favorite original memes that I created, but a new version.  Still valid.

Stalin has been quoted as saying, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

It’s hard to cheat in a Red State.  You have to steal zillions of counties.  It’s easy to cheat in a Blue State – you just have to cheat in the big cities.  If everyone in Chicago voted Trump, Illinois would still go 60% for whatever Democrat was opposing him.  But with mail-in voting?

Examples I have seen show the party on the outside of the envelope.  How hard would it be to casually “lose” a few thousand votes from envelopes that had a big, fat, R on the outside?  Or a few thousand from precincts that consistently vote Right?  Not hard at all.  This is on top of demonstrated voter fraud in Left cities where poll workers were caught on camera dumping ballot after ballot into the box on election day.

If mail-in voting passes?  We’ve had our last election day.  From now on?  It’s selection day – selection of the candidate that the Left wants.

Thanks to the innovation of mail-in voting, you don’t even have to bring the corpses to the polls!  What else will modern technology come up with?

In a further, ominous sign, the Media® has been setting up the idea that Trump will win on election night in a convincing manner, but will lose as the mail-in ballots are counted.  This is particularly horrific.

If you knew which six counties you needed in close states, could you game the Electoral College?  Absolutely.  You could have boxes of ballots pre-staged in Philadelphia, or Milwaukee, or Cleveland to flip the results.  Simple.  Want Florida to turn blue?  Just found a box with 25,475 Biden votes in Miami.

Don’t think the Left wouldn’t try it.  They would do anything to win the election, since they’re contemplating electing a person who couldn’t navigate a corn maze with more than two stalks standing.

If mail-in voting is made the law of the land?  Expect that this is the final election, ever, that won’t be a simple selection of the candidate that best fits the desire of the Left.  Sure, there will be some token people on the Right elected, but they’ll mainly be people who believe in real conservative values, like only allowing 1,000,000 illegals in a year, and only allowing 7,000,000 people a year in on H1B visas, and restricting anything but a muzzle loading black powder rifle, like our founders intended.

Oh, wait, conservatives have conserved nothing!  They just pick the values from the Left from ten or twenty years ago, and defend those until the death.

LINKS

That’s a bad ending to a video game . . .

All are from Ricky:

MSM message: alt-Right continues the march to civil war….

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1316052/proud-boys-group-brawl-antifa-protests-kalamazoo-michigan/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1354432/portland-brawl-breaks-out-proud-boys-antifa-fight/

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/09/03/schmidt-trump-supporters-want-to-see-a-second-civil-war-in-this-country/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-incite-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/americans-sense-something-is-wrong-gun-sales-up-72_08272020

…a challenge that must be met with force…

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/08/18/berkeley-columnist-calls-for-violent-resistance/

https://www.dailycal.org/2020/08/12/this-war-cant-be-civil/

http://thesaker.is/will-hillary-and-the-dems-get-the-civil-war-they-are-trying-to-provoke/

…for abstract justice…

https://theweek.com/articles/931090/are-bread-riots-coming-america

https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/black-lives-matter-organizer-calls-chicago-looting-reparation/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting

…and with concrete action…

https://summit.news/2020/08/14/black-lives-matter-mob-demands-white-people-give-up-their-homes/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-blm-protesters-shot-homeowners-while-marching-through-rural-pennsylvania-town

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/battle-zones-america/

This revolution WILL be televised, as documentaries…

https://theduran.com/steven-turley-new-civil-war-being-fought-on-three-fronts-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-is-here-part-i-the-combatants-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-american-civil-war-part-ii-strategy-of-the-blues-video/

https://theduran.com/the-second-civil-war-part-iii-update-dr-steve-turley-largely-confirms-video/

https://theduran.com/the-utopia-of-democrat-activism-video/

…an unending stream of gripping short-attention-span clips from the front lines…

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1300955946521432064

(Scroll here for more video gems:) https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/

….and an explosion of editorials…

https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/02/rowland-civil-war-real-possibility/5690696002/

https://themichiganstar.com/2020/08/28/commentary-in-kenosha-the-seeds-of-civil-war/

https://greensboro.com/rockingham_now/opinion/ending-the-civil-war/article_a2f83f72-eaef-11ea-88b4-e7bcbc8a60ec.html

https://signalscv.com/2020/09/jonathan-kraut-an-undeclared-civil-war-in-america/

https://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/singer-promoting-a-new-civil-war-in-america/article_399450b1-7aee-5a47-abd1-8555b616d0cf.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/portland-killing-trump-caravan-civil-war-20200830.html

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/kenosha-trump-kyle-rittenhouse-portland-antifa-20200901.html

https://www.newspressnow.com/opinion/editorials/stop-a-civil-war-before-it-starts/article_57576526-e7d3-11ea-a6c0-f31f4893dc90.html

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/08/20/thursdays-headlines-armed-for-the-civil-war-edition/

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://www.independent.com/2020/06/14/an-american-civil-war/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-kenosha-wisconsin-unrest-violence-shooting-20200826-m3e7zcqg7faxxou2xhqywmsobe-story.html

And as one (now-dead) Antifa guard claims to have fired the latest shot heard ’round the world…

https://www.insider.com/portland-shooting-suspect-said-saw-civil-war-coming-2020-9

…a newspaper founded during the last Civil War won’t be around to cover any new one…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/09/04/trump-and-stars-and-stripes-attacking-american-icon-column/5706859002/

Don’t Run Out The Clock On Life.

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

RIPLEY

Why haven’t aliens been here more frequently?  They saw the reviews – one star.

One of the benefits of living in Modern Mayberry is that there are no shortage of places where you can contribute.  After being assistant peewee coach for The Boy’s football (the one men play, not the game for socialist European women) I volunteered to be head coach for Pugsley’s team.  The first season, I was less than spectacular.  And saying I was less than spectacular is being generous.

Let me be clear – when you’re coaching third and fourth graders who can’t even calculate the orbital dynamics of the planet Mercury because they don’t know relativity and keep getting the wrong answer using Newtonian mechanics, it’s the coaching.  The kids are, more or less, equally inept and equally talented.  You put the big kids on the line and the fast kids as backs and receivers and wonder what to do with the small, slow kids.

As a first year coach?  I was like a small, slow kid.  I’m not sure we won a game my first year.  That wasn’t the kids; that season was on me – it was all my fault.  I’ll admit I have faults, and so will The Mrs.   The Mrs. says I have two main faults – that I don’t listen and some other one.

REFS

In Europe they call it 30.48cm ball.

I remember the first game of my second pee-wee football season as clearly as if it were yesterday.  The offense was on the field.  We had just made a first down.  There was a minute and twenty seconds (seventeen metric minutes) left on the clock.  I did the math – thirty seconds a play, four downs . . . and they were out of time outs.

Wait a minute, I thought.  We were up by five points.  If we just ran three plays and didn’t fumble the ball and let them score a touchdown – we would win!

All we had to do was run out the clock.  Our only enemy was time.

I told the quarterback to just kneel down when the center hiked the ball to him.  For a second, he looked confused – we had played the whole game being aggressive on offense, and we’d racked up 28 points.  Then it clicked in his head – he was a really smart 4th grader.  All he had to do was not fumble.

He had figured out what caught me almost by surprise:  we just had to run out the clock.  Spoiler alert:  we won.  Running out the clock in a football game is a valuable strategy.

EX

I was going to tell another football joke, but it had an offensive line.

How does this translate off the field?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post – I use a planner.  Some of the things that are on my daily to-do list are straightforward.  Plan to take over the world.  Remember to feed the kraken.  But I recently added one:

Are You Running Out The Clock?

You might think that’s a weird thing to think about every day when you go into work, and maybe it is.  In the crazy, deflating and inflating economy of 2020, a job might be something that’s required for survival.  But a job also might be something you’re going through the motions on and running the clock, and your life out every day watching the seconds tick away until 5pm.

Now, don’t get me wrong – if it’s important to get money to live, fulfillment isn’t the goal – feeding the family is first.  In 2020 and 2021 jobs will be hard to find, so if you’re bored but have a family to feed – FEED YOUR FAMILY AND STAY UNTIL 5PM.

JOB

I quit my job at the helium plant – I will NOT be spoken to in that tone of voice.

But what happens when a job or your life becomes another exercise in running out the clock and you don’t have to worry about feeding the family?

That’s not a win.

Humans were made to be the most multi-purpose machine in the history of the planet.  We’re essentially the Swiss Army® animal.  Where other animals inhabit a specific niche or even several niches on the planet, humans alone have consciously gone from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the moon.  We can run, swim, climb, think and even make new elements while we try to figure out how to harness the power of a star.  We can then rip atoms apart just for fun, and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  And all of this before breakfast.

WILL

You know that in freshman English William at least got a B on the Romeo and Juliet section. 

Then we can write a sonnet, or, as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man.  How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.  In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel.  In apprehension how like a god!

The beauty of the world.

The paragon of animals.

Humans are amazing.  Shakespeare really got that.  If I live my entire life, I’m not sure I can string together six sentences that are so amazing and so understand just how amazing a creature humans are.

Then Will followed up with this:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Four hundred years ago, the Bard was ahead of me.  It’s amazing to be human.  We have great capabilities.  But then?  Hamlet goes and decides he wants to run out the clock.

But we’re not made for running out the clock – that’s why Hamlet is a tragedy.  Hamlet was only thirty years old.  He had grown weary of life, and he didn’t even have the excuse of having met my ex-wife.

We don’t get a deposit back for bringing our bodies back in great condition after we’re done with them.  Let me be clear:  we have a one use rental on these things.  You need to use your body and your life like you stole it.  My left hip hurts at least once a month.  A lot.

SOA

My vacuum has Roomba®-tiod arthritis. 

Good.  I popped it out coaching those peewee football players.  If I get arthritis there?  It’s like a gray hair in my beard – I’ve earned it.  I want the coroner to look at my body at the end and say:  “I’m glad he’s not donating these organs.  He used all of them up.  How do you wear out a bellybutton?  This guy did.”

I’ve seen a “running out the clock” mentality in my own family.  When Pa Wilder started to get older, one thing I noticed is that his life seemed to revolve not around achieving, but around existing.  He walked.  He ate.  He watched TV.  He took his medications.

But he ceased doing anything of meaning.  He ceased fighting.  I’ll admit, people deserve a rest from time to time.  But even in old age, even if disabled, and even if depressed – you can do something.

There is no time in your life where you can’t matter.

Running out the clock isn’t a goal – unless it’s a peewee football game.

How will you make a difference today?

Why The Left Fears The Right, And Why The Right Will Win

“Oh, haven’t you noticed?  We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300

TRUTH

When I was a five or so, my parents had horses.  One of the horses had a foal (baby horse for you city folk), and Pa Wilder brought the foal and the mare (momma horse) into the barn – it was brutally cold, and the barn was much warmer.  They brought me down to see the foal.  It was young and awkward as new horses are.

Inside the stall was a series of closely spaced rails in a square, about four feet by six feet.

I asked, “What’s that for, Pa?”

“Well, when the foal is in here, he’ll find that he can’t walk across the bars.  His hooves won’t quite fit.  That will train him so he won’t do that when he gets older.”

Even at five, I had seen cattle guards and knew cows wouldn’t try to cross them.  But here was a horse.

CATTLE

From Library of Congress.

“Won’t he try to jump over the cattle guard, Pa?”

“Some horses, the smart ones, will figure out and a cattle guard won’t work on them.  But most don’t.  Heck, you can just paint parallel lines on an asphalt road and some horses won’t try to cross them.”

The little training bars were a device, a device to train the horse that he was in a prison made up of parallel bars on the ground.  In that, the horse restricted his own freedom.

In the last post (Money, Power, Politics, and Soros), I discussed the difference between Money and Power.  I actually finished most of the last post before I wrote the conclusion.  Money and Power as described through most of the post were entirely materialistic concepts.  Ending it with just that discussion wasn’t right, since the theme of my writing is often to balance the material with the concepts of spirit and virtue.  We live in a material world, but the reason we live is for a purpose greater than this moment.

Freedom isn’t important to either Money or Power; Freedom is actually the enemy of both Money and Power.  Throughout most of recorded history in the West, when either Money or Power get too out of balance, there is a backlash, and Freedom eventually wins.

It has for thousands of years.

And it will again.  I firmly believe that the destiny of the West is in the hands of those who love Freedom, especially in the United States.

Why?

The Left is utterly afraid of the Right.  Though they put forward a great front – they are shaking.  The American people on the Right compose the largest potential army in the history of the world.

The numbers:

There are at least 400,000,000 guns in private hands in the United States by one estimate.  That seems right.

There are 800,000 or so cops.  Assume they have two guns each.  Heck, assume they have three.  Round up.  Three million guns.  The Military in the United States owns about 4.4 million guns.  Round up.  That’s a total of less than 10 million guns in the hands of the United States government or other governmental authorities.  And that assumes that they stand with the government, which is questionable at best.

Assume only 35% of the American public owns guns, a number I think is very low.  Call it 100,000,000 people.  Assume that those owners skew mostly Right – 80/20?  That’s 80,000,000 on the Right.  Let’s do 80/20 again on those that will not stand for a communist uprising in the United States.  That’s 16,000,000 Americans ready to stand in the breach.  The largest army in the history of the world (so far) were the United States armed forces in 1945:  12,000,000 Americans under arms.

I’ll state it again:  American people on the Right have the potential to compose the largest army in the history of the world.  Period.

People on the Right, men and women, also have more and better training for field conditions.  I’d put The Mrs. up against most people on the Left if it came to a rural setting, because Leftists have no idea that trees are even made of wood, and I doubt that many on the Right will want to make the Stalingrad mistake and get caught in the cities as Leftists consume themselves.  How many people on the Right have their homes on the market to escape from Minneapolis?  From Seattle?  From any of dozens of cities where they know that they no longer belong?

I have no idea.  But they’d be fools to stay.

And even though we have the numbers on our side, there’s more good news.  We don’t even need overwhelming numerical superiority:

  • How many apostles peacefully changed the religion of Europe?
  • How many Spartans defended all of Western Civilization at Thermopylae?

“But John,” you say, “most all of the people in your examples died for their cause.”  Yes, they did.  And we remember them for that, because they changed the world.  Thousands of years before Robert Heinlein said it, they knew the truth of his quote:  “You can have peace.  Or you can have freedom.  Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

Besides, everyone is going to die.  Is it better to be a Leonidas or a St. Peter?

Obviously, it is.

Don’t be like Ephialtes (LINK).

We outgun the Left.  We have Truth, capital T, on our side.  The other day Vox Day had this inspiring clip at his blog (LINK).

It was a good clip, and one I’d forgotten.  So we watched the movie again tonight – it’s one that could not be made by Hollywood® today.  That clip also makes the point I tried to make earlier much more eloquently than I ever could.

The Black Riots Lives Matter riots are demoralizing to people of good character.  This is intentional.  The riots are meant to make you feel alone.  The riots are meant to make you feel that the Right has already lost.

The Right has not lost.

How did the Modern Sporting Lawyer make you feel?

STLOU

That’s why he and his wife are condemned.  That’s why they have vowed to cancel him, to make an example of them, to find a way to charge them with crime.  They are the opposite of demoralization.

The Modern Sporting Lawyer and his wife drive the Left crazy.  Here, their desire to destroy as a senseless mob was turned back by only two people.

Can you imagine if the Right was united?  I can.

The corollary is obvious:  quit fighting each other in the right.  Stop.  People don’t believe in your exact brand?

You can’t stand Libertarians?  You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day?  That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom?  The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?

Too bad.

We are in the same foxhole.  Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other.  Now.  If you’re not with us, you’re against us.  And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.

How do you know if you’re with us?

  • We like building statues, not tearing them down.
  • We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.
  • We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.
  • We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”
  • We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.

And that is the difference.  The Left is bitter.  The Left is seething.  The Left is angry.

Why?  Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners.  They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person.  But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.

The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left.  They see themselves as weak.  Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness.  But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good.  They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate.  The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.

The Right rejects that.  All of it.

Sex isn’t a virtue, chastity is a virtue.  Sex isn’t evil, but making it the focus of your life is no different than any other addiction – it is a vice.  But which of those does the Left celebrate?  Inside, they know that it’s wrong, and that also fills them with self-hate.

Because of that hate, and seek to make the Right weak like them.  How?  By demoralizing the Right, by taking virtues and attacking them while publicly celebrating things we use to call sin.  By coming up with never ending list of impossible demands and nonsensical redefinitions of the English language on an ever more frequent basis.  Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has recently been excommunicated from the Left for being brazen enough to indicate that women might be, well, women.

ROWLING

The Right has built Western Civilization, and built it with a compassion for the weak.  That makes the Left hate the Right even more.  They seek to make us doubt our morals and virtue:  everyone is racist, every historical figure is fatally flawed.  That is justification enough in the minds of the Left to tear down everything that has made their prosperity and wealth transfer possible.  The Left makes no real art, just caricatures of the genius that has gone before, photographs of Christ soaking in urine.  The Left is a parasite that, failing to create, destroys.

But those games won’t work anymore.  The Right is strong.  The Right is virtuous.  The Left seeks to build nothing because that is the province of the Right.  And to the Left, those who are strong and build statues to the virtues of flawed men are evil.

Was Columbus perfect?  No.  Did he open up a New World?  Yes.  How many people in Mexico City would prefer to revert to the charnel house of the Aztecs?  Some, but every hand that goes up will belong to a member of the Left.

The Right is not evil.  We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands.  Why?  Because they could never build it.  The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.

Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.

I don’t think we will win.

I know we will win.  We are the foals that recognize the painted lines on the asphalt for the lie that they are.  We are the horses that realize that they have the strength to jump over the cattle guard that we used to think was our prison.

PAINT

From Library of Congress.

I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall.  We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history.  The Right doesn’t know its own strength.  But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.

We will win.  Maybe not this year.  Maybe not next year.  Maybe not even in the next decade.  And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis.  We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.

And we will make it better.

And we will win.

We always have.

What is your profession?

I rarely ask people to share these posts, but if you have people you know are feeling down – please do.

The Funniest Post You’ll Read About Life and Death, Featuring Vikings.

“I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” – Fight Club

DIE

I don’t want to be killed by a large sneeze, though.  I don’t want people saying I bit off more than I could achoo.

As a culture, at least in the developed West, fearful of death.  We hide from it to a degree that I’m not sure most of us are aware of.  How could we be aware?  Like our browser history, we’ve spent so much time and effort hiding it from public view.

I noticed a pattern in my life.  First, when I was young, we went to funerals.  Those funerals were where we buried my grandparents.  As I got older, I started going to a lot of weddings as friends tied the knot, and funerals dropped to nearly zero.    But as I get older, I’m seeing more funerals again.  Most recently, it was for The Mrs.’ grandfather.  Her grandfather was a crew chief on B-17’s for the 8th Army Air Force.  He was buried in the same Army olive drab uniform that he’d worn in World War II.

Funerals are, and should be, a time for reflection.  When I looked a little at the big picture, in modern America most people rarely see dead people unless it’s in a hospital bed or at a funeral.  Sure, there are exceptions.  Cops, soldiers, people in medicine, and morticians see them all of the time outside of those limited settings, but those people are a pretty small percentage of the population.

funeral

When I pass away, I don’t want a fancy funeral.  One like this is fine.

I was half-watching a movie, perhaps in the 1990s, so I’m a little shy on details.  The movie was set during the Great Depression, and the husband had died.  The wife had prepared the body and it was sitting ON THE DINNER TABLE for people to come and see for the visitation.  Okay, not sitting.  But the husband’s corpse was stretched out where they ate their fried okra and possum sushi or whatever it was people ate during the Depression.

What the heck?  “Surely they didn’t really do that,” I said.  There was an older person in the room who had lived through the Depression.  He corrected me.  “Surely they did.  Funeral parlors were for rich people.  And what are you gonna do, put him on the floor?”

Wow.  I guess the old saying of “dust bunnies don’t mix with the dead” is true.

Being a product of my time, I hadn’t really thought about that at all.  Dead people?  Call a professional.  Very nice and tidy and nothing but a bill that you can pay by check or credit card.

But when you look back at life in the 1930s and before, I guess there was a reason that people had little graveyards on the farm:  they were used to dealing with death and couldn’t pass the duties required by death to someone else.  Who else was going to do it?  You couldn’t hire it out like today.  Our ancestors knew what we have now forgotten.  Just as birth starts a life, death ends it.  I heard a statistic from the CDC® that life has a nearly a 100% mortality rate.

TERM

I will say I’m in favor of the new congressional cheese support bill.  Count me as pro-volone.

Close physical contact with our dead relatives used to be the norm, not the exception.  For them, death was a part of life.  My mother-in-law was doing genealogy of her family.  For the most part, genealogy is not horribly interesting to me unless there’s a story.  Just knowing that I had a great-great-great-great grandpa called Duncan McWilder back in 1788 doesn’t tell me a lot.  Was he a scoundrel?  Why did he hop the boat to America?  Was it for better Internet?

I did jump on the Mormon database and at least someone thinks I am the great29 grandson of Harald Hardrada, who had a notoriously bad day in 1066 A.D. when he forgot to put on his armor when going up against the English.  At least Harald has a story.  After one of Harald’s vacations in Bulgaria, he got the nickname “Bulger-burner,” which is probably a lot funnier of a nickname if you’re not from Bulgaria.

HARALDY

And I hear that dead Viking Scrabble® players go to Vowel-halla.

Okay, that was a digression.  I’ll see if I can’t get off at the right exit this time.  Anyway, my mother-in-law was doing genealogy.  One particular male relative had three or four wives.  Polygamy?  No.  His wives kept dying in childbirth or from some plague that we can fix with a shot or thinking that arsenic and lead were what made makeup good, or wearing asbestos corsets and radium jewelry.  People were acquainted with death in a real and up-close manner in the Victorian era.

arsmeme

Sad clowns don’t wear arsenic makeup, they use frown-dation instead.

I think that as we isolate ourselves from death, we start to pretend that it doesn’t exist.  In some cases, people like Ray Kurzweil are attempting to figure out how to stop aging and live forever.  Failing that?  Ray is planning on being frozen into a corpse-sicle for later defrosting and infinite life.  My bet?  People will be able to live longer, but they won’t be able to live forever, because testing immortality drugs takes forever.  And everyone is doing it:  a guy outside of Wal-Mart® was selling immortality supplements, and it looked like a scam, so I called the cops.  They were aware – they arrested the guy last year, in 2000, in 1968, and even, they said, back as far as 1880.

Ray may be able to squeeze a few more years out, but I thing that physical immortality isn’t something that we’ll see.  At least not in my lifetime.  Sorry, but immortality jokes never get old.

Even though life is part of death, that doesn’t mean we have to like it.  But we don’t have to fear it, either.  Very few of us will get to choose the time and place of our death.  But we have the choice as to what we are going to do tomorrow to make this a better world – to do things that matter.

NORSING

If a Viking is reincarnated, is he Bjorn again?

Heck, if I was immortal, I’d probably never get around to doing things that matter, since there’s always another tomorrow.

Until there’s not.

Just like Harald Hardrada, there will be a time and place when we’ll die.  But Harald was a smart Viking, and he knew he wouldn’t drown.  He knew that you could lead a Norse to water, but you can’t make him sink.

So, get going.  And don’t forget your armor.

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

groucho.jpg

“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.

ok2.jpg

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.

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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Doing More Than You Ever Thought You Could, Now With Jokes to Offend Everyone.

“Master betrayed us.  Wicked.  Tricksy.  False.  We ought to wring his filthy little neck.  Kill him!  Kill him!  Kill them both!  And then we take the Precious . . . and we be the master!” – Lord of the Rings

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After this, I doubt he’ll help out and eat my homework anymore.

The Mrs. and I had a discussion – in one respect I think my personality disturbs her.  Okay, it’s more than one respect.  The Mrs. has a list of 73 items, but several of them have multiple parts.  Thankfully for you, this post is only about one.

A while back, The Mrs. was watching an episode of Arrested Development, and thought that there was a really funny segment so she shared it with me.  The setup is that George Michael has set up a fraudulent software company that he thinks is worthless, but has a really hot investor that wants to buy it.  Maeby is his cousin.

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Most investors look like Bernie Madoff, or Bernie Sanders, or um, I seem to be out of Bernies.

Maeby:  She’ll get all our liabilities, and then anything over two million, we get to keep.

George Michael:  I can’t do that to someone that I have feelings for.

Maeby:  So stop having feelings for her.

George Michael:  What?  Is that something you can do with people?

Maeby:  Yeah, once I learned how to do it with my parents, it was easy with everyone else.

It’s like a heart switch, you know?

Click.

I love you.

Click.

I love you not.

Click.

I love you.

Click.

I love you not.

Can’t you do that?

George Michael:  No, but in my defense, I’m not a sociopath.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS]

Maeby:  Click.

The Mrs. looked at me.  “Isn’t that funny?”

My response, which probably troubled The Mrs. a bit was, “Can’t you do that?”

The reality is I can’t do it with everyone.  Just like most people, I worry about those close to me when they’re ill.  Just like most people, I feel a great loss when those who are close to me pass away, and cry at their funerals.  At my funeral, I hope at least one person shouts in the middle of the eulogy, “Look . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . moving.”  I’ll have $100 in my jacket pocket waiting for you if you do that.

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Let’s put the Fun in funeral.  And the freak back in Ruffles®.  Because I’m out of freakin’ Ruffles™.

But I can do it with people who I trusted who betray me.  If you’re on my side, I expect you to be on my side.  It doesn’t mean that you have to agree with me, in fact, if I trust you and I’m wrong, I expect you to tell me I’m wrong:  I welcome my friends telling me when they think I’m wrong.  The greatest loyalty is truth – we save pretty lies for polite company.

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I told Jesus he should unfriend Judas on Facebook®.  Heck, Judas doesn’t even have hiking sandals.

And the closer you are to me, the greater the expectation of loyalty.  And the second that you betray me, that switch flips, click.  It’s not hate.  It’s not anger.  It’s . . . nothing.  You’re not dead – I would mourn that.  You’re dead to me, and I would rather not have you in my life than to have someone I don’t trust in my life.

Click.

I’m not 100% honest.  I wish I was, but I’m not.  I generally won’t lie, but I’ll certainly answer questions selectively because daily interactions with people require that sort of lubrication of unmentioned truth.  “Do these pants make my butt look big?”

“No.”  The unwritten truth?

“It’s your butt that makes your butt look big.”

The Mrs. has never asked me that question, and the reason is obvious.  I feel loyalty to The Mrs., and if she asked me that question, she’d better be prepared for the answer.

But the real question is can we tell the truth to ourselves?  I think the greatest betrayal can come not only from the outside:  I think that often we are the source of our own greatest betrayal.  I can be honest with those closest to me.  Oh, sure, I call it honesty, but they can’t seem to stop calling it “John’s being a jerk again.”

But can I be honest with myself?

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I think there is an actual Jerk Phonebook.  It’s called Twitter.  Yeah, I’ve been there a time or two.

I think that’s the difficult part.  Being honest with yourself is hard – I think that the brain is wired to make it difficult.  I was watching a YouTube® video where a psychologist was working with an anorexic girl.  He compared the size of his thigh to the size of the girl’s thigh.  She didn’t see any difference.  The psychologist jumped up on a table covered with paper and used a marker to outline his thigh with the marker.  He challenged the girl to do the same.

It was only then when she sat down on the paper and compared her leg’s width to the width of the leg of the psychologist that she saw how painfully thin her thigh really was – her brain interpreted the size of her leg to be much bigger than it was.  There was genuine surprise.  She wasn’t faking anything – it’s just that her perceptions were out of line with reality.

Watching that brought the question that still echoes in my mind.  How much of the perceptions of reality that you or I have are wrong?  What do our brains do to fool us about ourselves?  How far will our egos go to protect their sense of self?

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Freud:  Invented the Ego and the originator of “Your Momma” jokes.

How often do we betray ourselves?  How often does your brain tell you that you can’t go on, you can’t keep it up, that you can’t take another step?

Don’t believe it when it betrays you.  You can go on.  You can keep it up.  You can take another step.

Time after time, I’ve seen people accomplish things that there is no way that they should be able to do.  The problem wasn’t them – they accomplished it – the problem was my brain.  It said something was impossible that clearly could be done.

We fail because we don’t make our dreams larger.

It’s Friday.  Do something that you’ve always wanted to do but had thought impossible.  Make something great happen.  You can.

And the part of my brain that tells me I can’t do it?  The part of your brain that says you can’t do it?

Click.