Significance – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Life At the Margin, Jeff Bezos, and Milking Peeps

“Jeff Bezos wet his pants!”

“I did not – it was apple juice from before.” – The Simpsons

I hear she ordered more toilet paper through the Jeffbot™ while they were out at Sonic®.

The margin is where life gets interesting.

Eating: It’s not the first bite of chocolate cake that gets you fat, it’s the last.
Booze: It’s not the first sip of alcohol that gets you drunk.
Driving: It’s not the first 65mph that gets you the speeding ticket.
Elections: It’s not the first 49% of votes that get you elected.
Safety: It’s not the base load that a bridge can carry that keeps you safe.

Life is interesting and gets more interesting at the margin. When you think of margin, you may think of a soft, buttery spread that will kill you with trans fats. That’s margarine. No, the margin is the edge of the piece of paper, the difference between inside the envelope and the outside. The margin is evident all around us if we take the time to look.

But, you say, “John Wilder, this is Wealthy Wednesday, what does the margin have to do with money? And, I’m not stupid. I know the difference between butter and margarine. One is made from the milk of Peeps®, and the other comes from spiders. But I do forget which is which.”

Be careful to milk the Peeps™ and not the Chihuahua.

This is Wealthy Wednesday, and margins fit right in. When you think about finances, the impact of the margin is especially noticeable.

Businesses depend upon the margin. Let’s take a construction company – when building, say, a new love nest for Jeff Bezos, the first dollars the company receives must cover costs. There is the cost for the concrete, for the plywood, for the anti-ex-wife minefield. Each and every cost associated with building the Alexa® enabled Love Shack Fire 2000™ must be paid before there’s any profit. The only dollars that contribute to profit are the marginal dollars, the last dollars to hit the books. That’s why a building contractor will fight like a velociraptor in a bag of laser pointers for that next dollar. If a contractor got 9% profit for the Bezos Wealth Reduction Chamber© and asks for 1% more, to Bezos it’s just 1%, and he just lost $65,000,000,000 anyway, so that 1% sounds pretty small. But to the contractor, it’s a 10% increase in profit, which is huge. Getting 5% more for Jeff’s Carnal Cottage of Whole Foods Knowledge©? That’s 50% more profit.

When corporate profits are up by 1% of revenue, that can create (in the example above) an increase of profits by 10%. Profits are set at the margin. Our economy is powered by the margin.

I guess that means the orbital laser system is out, too?

Taxes are set at the margin, too. The top tax rate is 37%, which means that every dollar (once you’ve made $500,000) you only get to keep 63%. That 37% in taxes? It’s burned ritually in Washington D.C. every Summer Solstice. They used to sacrifice a virgin congressman as well, but they swear they don’t have any of those anymore, not since Jeff Bezos visited. But you pay more in taxes as you earn more money.

It equally applies to an individual’s income. The most important dollar I make is the marginal one – that last dollar is the one that can be saved, spent on margarine butter or anything I want. The first dollars are spoken for, they have to go to pay the mortgage, to feed two always starving children, to buy electricity. But the last dollars are freedom itself. The margin provides growth, to the extent that it exists. If there’s a negative margin? You’re eating your savings, or, worse, living on credit.

The margin also applies to what you do in life. You can put in minimal effort, and be average or a little bit below average. Or, you can work harder to push the margin, and be great at what you do. As I get older, I’ve become convinced that talent can be a curse – it makes life easy. Easy is not your friend. Easy provides good results with minimal effort. That’s akin to jogging through life while everybody else has to practice sprinting. Eventually dedication overcomes talent and they sprint past you to live on the margin, where all the nice things are.

But if you have extra effort and talent? You can live on the margin. You can create the margin.

So, go create the margin. It’s easier than squeezing Peeps© to make margarine.

Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini

“I’ve never been great at conflict resolution. Not without a blade, and several rolls of plastic wrap.” – Dexter

I would say that the writing of this book is both Original and Crispy. This was actually released for free in 2017 by KFC.

I got home on Wednesday night and the aroma of baked chicken filled the house. It smelled like Colonel Sanders® had developed a scented candle, and it was amazing. I wanted to rub the smell under my arms, in my hair, and maybe on my pillow so I could smell it in my sleep.

I had just dropped Pugsley off for wrestling practice, and The Boy had just gotten back from his wrestling practice and had dropped in to grab his term paper to go meet with a study group before flying out of the house faster than a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch. I am not at liberty to tell you what a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch is, but I assure you it is quite fast.

The Mrs. and I were left alone in the house, a rare enough occurrence, and The Mrs. pulled the hot, plump, greasy, piping-hot chicken thighs and legs from the oven, slowly, letting them linger and adjust to the kitchen air, their moist meat hidden only by the sheerest of skin. Whew. I’m getting goosebumps just reading that.

Given that Pugsley and The Boy were normally there for dinner, she’d made about forty-five pounds of chicken. She had also made gravy and some sort of low-carb mashed cauliflower that was pretending to be potatoes. I generally try to avoid mashed things that aren’t actual potatoes – I’d just as soon use the mashed cauliflower for drywall repair, or execute it for being an impostor.

“Food’s hot, come and get it.” The Mrs. walked back with a single chicken thigh and some of the drywall spackle on her plate, covered with gravy.

“I’m fasting.”

“Okay. Crap. Now who’s going to eat all of this chicken?”

The Mrs.’ dog Emo looked hopeful and fat. Her other dog, BWL (broccoli with legs, because he’s so stupid he’s nearly a vegetable) just looked confused. Which is normal.

Wait, what? Did you say fasting, John Wilder?

Yeah. On a lark, I decided to fast for two reasons. The first one is that it tied into a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape. I’m a strong proponent New Year’s resolutions – they’re a good sign that even when you’re as awesome as me, you have the amazing humility to realize you could be a bit more excellent. Truth: it would not hurt me to lose a few pounds, especially if there’s a good story to it and it was unusual and did NOT involve X-Acto® knives and a vacuum cleaner. I’m not doing that again, at least not without more tarps and duct tape.

The second reason I decided to fast is that I can’t remember going more than, say, two days without eating. Ever. I’ve got an iron stomach, and even when I was sick as a small child I never missed more than a single meal. Could I go longer? I remember when The Mrs. and I were first married that The Reverend Al Sharpton© had declared a “hunger strike” to protest that he wasn’t getting enough media attention a bombing range in Puerto Rico. The Mrs. and I were listening to the radio one day when it emerged that Al’s “hunger strike” included actual food whenever he was hungry. So, immediately we christened it “A Hungry Strike” as in, “I sure am hungry, I could use a lot more soup.” Imagine that line in Al Sharpton’s voice, it’s funnier that way.

Our society is seems to be built on the idea that limitless on-demand food is normal and has existed since the aliens first created us as a slave race to develop PEZ®. It’s also taken as gospel truth that if you don’t eat every four hours YOU WILL DIE. It’s almost like most people think that for all of the history of humanity, we had a Schlotzsky’s Sandwiches© to serve salami subs on sourdough in the Serengeti or a Denny’s™ dishing dinners and desserts to Danes in dusty diluvial Denmark. But the sad truth is that there has been the precedent of a society going from abundance to starvation in short order – just look at the fall of the Soviet Union, or that night that Wendy’s™ was closed because the Frosty© machine exploded.

Cult leader Mr. Fizzlesticks liked Kool-Aid™ before he got beamed to the Mother Ship.

I’d imagine that for most of history (which is before McDonalds®, Taco Bell©, or even agriculture), when you ate, you ate really, really well from that mammoth you took down. When you didn’t eat? Well, that might be a week. I can see that ancient people wouldn’t get all trendy and put out websites and courses devoted to fasting. No, they just didn’t have any food.

But even people you thought were tough, well, I remember watching a biography about T.E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia. In it, a friend (of his, not of mine) related how Lawrence once went 45 hours without eating or sleeping just to see if he could.

Hell, I called that finals week in college. But, again, never can I recall going over 48 hours without food. What the heck, I’d give it a try. And as I write this sentence, I’m on hour 94, so in two hours I’ll have gone four days without food.

I’m not dead.

And the really, really odd thing is that for most of the 94 hours I haven’t been horribly hungry. After I started the fast, I started doing some research. It turns out that there are a very large number of people in the world who fast, not because they don’t have food, but because they think it has more benefits than being Jeff Bezo’s $65 billion dollar ex-wife:

Weight Loss
Cancer Prevention
Increased Lifespan
Make You Telepathic on Wednesday
Reduced Inflammation
Urine Glows So You Don’t Need Bathroom Lights
Lower Blood Pressure
Reduce Type 2 Diabetes
Make You Bulletproof
More Better Braining, er, Thinking

Okay, some of these are sketchy, and not just the ones that I obviously made up. It turns out the “increased lifespan” claim was based on some sort of worm that they starved. The worm lives an average of 21 days and they starved it for a day. Which is like you or I not eating for three years. Yeah. And the cancer claims from starving rats every other day. If there’s one thing medical science knows how to do, it’s how to cure cancer in rats.

The main reason I did it, though, was curiosity. Could I?

Yes.

I started out with the idea of doing three days, or 72 hours. At the end of the third day it was going so well I said, hey, how about doing four days? I’m glad I did. I’ll explain below:

On day one it was like . . . nothing happened, because I regularly go 24 hours without eating, and have done so since I was a kid. I had three mints and a dill pickle. So, yes, this is technically not a complete fast, but the total number of calories was about thirty. For the day.

Day two was a bit tougher, and was about four mints. And three pickles. So, sixty-five calories. I felt fine, and not very hungry at all. Day three was the same, but after exercising (which I do at lunch) for about 40 minutes I felt nearly comatose and my hands were very, very cold all day. Then, almost like a light going on, I felt fine, and had plenty of energy for day four. On day four, I had a pickle and two mints, so, 25 calories.

I justified the pickles based on the tiny amounts of calories and the salt that I wasn’t getting anywhere else, even though I was still engaging in some pretty intense and sweaty exercise. The mints? Those were for my coworkers.

Total calories: 185 in four days, plus all the coffee and water (both plain and carbonated) that I could drink. Which was a lot. 185 calories is 18% of a Double Whopper with Cheese©, or like two bites. Over four days. So, I count that as fasting even though The Mrs. rolled her eyes and made some comment about “sounds like a hungry strike” under her breath.

Bringing snacks at Fasting Cult? Best duty ever.

But I’m an amateur at fasting and I know it. One thing I have learned, however, is if there’s a human activity, there’s a cult on somewhere on the Internet devoted to it. When started researching, I found people were fasting for periods of up to 100 days. My little four day fast wasn’t much in comparison to those people. They had to plan for two things for such long durations without eating, electrolytes/vitamins and refeeding.

It turns out the dangerous part of fasting for a long time, besides starving to death, is starting to eat again. It turns out that if you start eating again incorrectly that you can short out the lithium battery in your heart, or strip the gears on your lungs. Or something. I’m not a doctor, but the Internet Cult of Fasting says you can actually have a fairly dangerous phosphate demand, especially if you eat a lot of carbs when you let your inner fat person out to eat everything in sight. Your body requires phosphates to process carbs, and you can pull ‘em out of your blood (where it’s required to keep the lithium battery in your heart going) and into your cells (where they’re required to process the carbs). It would be really stupid to die because of Pop Tarts™, but they probably kill more people than cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy).

There are some cults where recruiting is easy, except for the heretic on the left . . . no respectable cult has maroon bikinis!

Phosphate balance (along with some other conditions) can kill you. I’d try to be funnier, but refeeding really can be fatal and leave a really stupid headline like “Popular Internet Writer Killed By Eating Pop Tarts® After Not Eating On Purpose.”

But hey, if Al Sharpton can make it . . . .

First Meal in 96 Hours Update:

Three pieces of baked chicken, two handfuls of blueberries, and two hamburger patties from the nearby Sonic™ since Pugsley got the wrong order. Still not dead. I’m feeling as full as a French bloomer weasel on Thanksgiving Dinner. But the French bloomer weasel is endangered . . . .

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes. But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen. People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn. We can become better. The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one. It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun. No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story. And I was there for this one. As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning. In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts. We were insufferable. My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun. It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic. I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun. And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

It looked very real. Mine was the one on the bottom. It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times. Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun. This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me. Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car. I still have the BB gun and the boots. I lost the knife, probably at school. It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun. My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it. I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot. I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t. I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record. (For kids: Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm? I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside. It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this. Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes?? Oh, yeah. Soviets. Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill. I kept going. What was I looking for? I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly. I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step. But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do? Hunt. Win World War II again. Look for communists. It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans. Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best. I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road. I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner. All of those applied. But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike. About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear. It was a black bear. I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all. Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone. I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well. Communists? Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears? Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy. He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time. My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me. I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear. Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would. Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times. Why? A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside: In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets. Or, does it? When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs. I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free. But back in the day? We weren’t building weak Soviet children. No! We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual. I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom. Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door. I stamped my snow-covered feet inside. Yeah, I know. But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!” I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear! It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts. A bear! A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head. “Bears are hibernating. None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face. “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started. I know that look because I saw it then. Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed. Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road. I had my BB gun. I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked. I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story. I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).” As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship. Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies. We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away. It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it. I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless. It must be dead! Pop Wilder killed it! Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet. We walked home in silence.

So, there was that: the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic. Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below? Merry Christmas to all.

The Winter Solstice, Hardship, Cthulhu, and You

“You know, that for almost the entire history of Western Civilization this month has been a holy time. The Druids, winter solstice, Hanukkah, the Romans converted Saturnalia into Christmas.” – Millennium (TV Series)

Funny, X Wife said that every day with me was the longest day. Tiebreaker?

December 21^st is the Winter Solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere (where I keep all my stuff) that means it will be the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. In the Southern Hemisphere on the Solstice, I believe that means there are fairly reasonable prices on quality, sturdy footwear. Or maybe the Wiccans sacrifice the town elders to credit card companies. I’m not sure, the documentary was blurry, I don’t speak Paraguayan and they wouldn’t remove the blindfold all the way.

There seems to be another holiday coming up . . . St. Zeno’s Day on December 26^th!

Just kidding. I’ll have a Christmas post on Monday. But St. Zeno’s Day really is on December 26^th. And not the St. Zeno that was brutally dismembered because he was so popular, the other one, who died peacefully in his sleep. Focus groups tell me not to use “brutally dismembered” because it doesn’t test well for humor value. So, the one who wasn’t “brutally dismembered.”

Christmas? I’m a fan.

But the 21^st is also notable because it’s the (traditional) feast time of the northern peoples of the world, and you can see multiple cultures built physical devices to track the solstice, places like Newgrange in Ireland, Stonehenge in England and the High Bank Works at Chillicothe in North America.

And, my house.

Yes. My house. I didn’t build my house aligned to the solstice, but whoever originally did managed to do so, either intentionally or by dumb luck. Since my house is parallel to the road, I’m thinking it was just dumb luck. But on the shortest day of the year, we end up having the most direct sunlight streaming in through our front window, warming the house, and in the summer the opposite result – although well lit, we get little direct sunlight. The advantages of this are lower heating and cooling bills, all of which (likely) are a result of an accident of geometry. Or at least that’s what I tell the Druids that start chanting at sunrise every year in my backyard. Stupid Druids. Please don’t tell them that Cthulhu is who we bought the place from.

But the solstice doesn’t represent the coldest part of the winter. The coldest part is yet to come as the Arctic air blasts down from the north in January and February. And before it gets cold, the choice had to be made: feed all of your cattle through the winter, or have a really big drunken party and a bonfire after turning a few of the cattle into ribeyes?

Yup. Party. And the older name for it is “jul” which eventually became the words “Yule” and “jolly.” Must have been some pretty legendary parties, like when Teddy Roosevelt partied with Led Zeppelin at Wellesley. Hillary still talks about that one.

Mmm, eggnog. Can there be something worse for you? Yes, regret. Enjoy your eggnog.

But the grim circumstances remain. It’s going to get colder soon. That last feast is the final preparation for the coming hardships of winter. People who aren’t used to the north (and New York is roughly the same latitude as the south of France, so most of the United States isn’t north at all) think it’s the dark that gets to you. It isn’t. It’s the brutally cold days that follow the solstice. When we lived in Fairbanks we noticed that people did fine during the dark periods of winter. But when spring was around the corner, that’s when the odd stories of people going a bit nutso would show up in the paper, and the wives who had spent 20 happy years in Fairbanks would look at their husbands and declare, “I’m leaving. I’m not leaving you, but I’m leaving here. You can come with me if you want to.”

Winter is about deprivation and hardship, which might just be the greatest teacher:

“They are not spoiled by luxury, soft and weak (relatively speaking, obviously). They are learned in deprivation and hardship.” – James Dakin at Bison Prepper, 11/9/18 (LINK).

But those hardships were their friend.

They had to plan. And they had to plan months and years ahead. There is simply no getting through a winter at -30°F (-651°C) without a plan. They didn’t have the option of going to a supermarket and getting fresh strawberries in the middle of winter. Or, well, anything in the middle of winter, except maybe some poor caribou that forgot to duck.
They had to learn to be nice. There was no getting through winter alone. There was safety in the group. So, in order to stay alive through the winter, they’d better be able to create and maintain good relationships with not only their neighbors, but also the people in their family – they were certainly going to be seeing a lot of them during the winter. Also? They never knew who they would need to ask for a favor. As in “Olaf, Sven got lippy at dinner. Where can we hide the body?”
They had to be patient. Eat all the food in month one? Month two would be difficult. Eat the seeds you were planning on planting in spring? I guess you just get to starve next winter. Patience pays – not now, but later.

Outside of having all of that ribeye, and the big fire, why party?

Well, the solstice marks the day that the Sun stops moving south. There’s even an instant (if you had the proper equipment) that you could observe the Sun standing still in the sky, not moving north nor south, that’s technically the solstice. But you can see, using relatively simple tools (like Stonehenge), the same thing over the course of a day. The Sun will move north again, and the days will get longer. And it is that moment that the celebration of hope begins, not for the winter that has been vanquished, but for the winter that will bring us hardship and make us stronger.

Because what better gift is there than being stronger?

Thankfully, there’ll soon be an app for your iPhone® to tell you when to celebrate the solstice. Stupid Druids.

College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face. Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States. I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means). In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States. But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically? Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary. After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill. How many of the college degrees awarded are useless? Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it. Facts prove my guesses are pretty good: 40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees. Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever. When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans. That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe. Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda. In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs. Photo – Chicago Sun-Times.

The article on Amanda continues: “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.” Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist. I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there. I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad. Not at her college. No. Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are ~~stupid~~ maybe not grounded in reality. Not the professors – they’re her friends, right? I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail. Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes. Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans. I’ve got nothing against Amanda. Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place. Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities. And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left. The college financing system is itself creating leftists. And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students. Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college: a diversity of thought. The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students. In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination? And, no, this was not made up. Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power. Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong. In squishier subjects? If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades. Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . . some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus. There’s just . . . calculus. The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new. I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative. He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40). My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to. I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there. Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change. But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were. He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon. But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin. I was . . . shocked. I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology? In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination. Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas. I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books. For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education. As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts: the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education. If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.

“Cash, every movie costs $2,184.” – Bowfinger

I made this one up for fun when working on this post. The Mrs. laughed so hard . . . I had to use it. A link here (LINK) for the age impaired. Link is probably PG-13.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

That was what Steve Martin said when he was being interviewed by now unpersoned Charlie Rose and Rose asked what advice Martin would give to a young person.

Martin continued, “ . . . it’s not the answer they want to hear.”

It isn’t.

People want easy. People want lottery money. People want step-by-step guides, complete with phone numbers and instructions on how to become rich and famous. And they want Steve Martin to do it for them. Now please, we’re waiting.

Face it: people want free stuff, not hard work and risk.

I can’t imagine that Steve Martin wants anything for free – he wasn’t raised that way. He’s been a comedian, musician, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. He’s been more successful at each of these than almost any person on the planet. When you combine these successes, Martin starts to look less like an entertainer and more like a National Treasure©. Maybe a National Treasure® we should keep in Tupperware® and wrapped in the good paper towels so we don’t scratch him. We’ll get him out when company comes over.

But Steve’s success wasn’t free. In his book, Born Standing Up, Martin talks about his road to comedy, “I did standup comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” This is what those of a certain political persuasion call unearned overnight success. It is obvious that this success was a result of Martin’s comedic privilege, because it takes a village to raise a comedian.

The concept of spending hours and hours, day after day, year after year seems a bit quaint now, when participation trophies assure every wonderful child that they’ll be successful no matter what. What seemed fresh and new in his comedy routine when his wild success began was in reality the result of work, study, and effort that took fourteen years. And he didn’t even have to “accidentally” release a sex tape to make it happen.

Did Martin know that his hard work would make him an icon known all the way around the world, worth millions of dollars? Probably not. Although it’s also certain that he didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Omigosh, there’s been some sort of error – where did all this money and stuff come from?” And that line is comedy gold if you read it in Steve Martin’s voice.

Certainly, Steve Martin didn’t and doesn’t appeal to everyone – his persona of an entertainer that’s “just really bad at it” falls flat with certain people. But Martin’s dedicated work created a skill set that appealed to enough people that Martin has true freedom – to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. At one point in Born Standing Up, Martin talks about how stand up became difficult for him when doing huge stadium shows – but he didn’t stop. There were “too many zeros,” in his paychecks. So, he died an unremembered failure.

No, just kidding. His next project, a movie called The Jerk, made $180,000,000, despite costing only $2,184 to make. That was his next step.

I realize that there’s a difference between writing whatever comes to mind and working hard every day, every post, so that today’s writing is better than yesterday’s writing. And that next week I’ll be better yet. And that my writing strikes a resonance somewhere, with someone. It creates value.

This is true. I still swoon when I think of it.

And getting good at any craft is not entirely straightforward. Scott Adams (LINK) uses eighteen elements when writing humor, and edits himself ruthlessly. Scott wasn’t a humor writing machine when he started, but he built his greatness with time and effort. And it is effort – I watched a short video of Jerry Seinfeld talking about the effort that goes into making just one joke. It can take an afternoon or more to get it right – and even then he spends time tweaking it, and this is the level of effort that is required by an experienced comedian. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to be a rookie.

For me, I’m going to work harder, steal everything I can from Martin, Adams, Seinfeld, and study it.

And learn.

Imagine if I never told Jerry to change his hair?

I do want to say thanks to The Mrs., who has greatly encouraged me to get better. The nice thing is she’s my harshest critic but also the one I won’t slug. But I will, passive-aggressively, change all the radio presets in her car to Mexican flamenco music. She’ll never guess that I changed the autocorrect for “John” on her phone to “His High and Most Worthy Lordship.”

Just kidding, The Mrs. isn’t a trained assassin. But don’t tell The Boy and Pugsley – The Mrs. just assigned them a mission to stealthily clean their bathroom.

I’m working hard to make myself better, every post. So I can’t be ignored.

But failing that, couldn’t I just play the lottery?

I’ll just leave this here:

The Funniest and Most Meaningful Black Friday Post . . . Ever. Now 50% off, Today Only.

“It’s Black Friday, the day when ordinary house moms turn into vicious bargain hunting animals, blinded by low prices, and eager to get the Christmas shopping done early. If this was a zoo I’d say run for you lives, but this is Buy More!” – Chuck

Mabel’s family was upset with her on the drive home. They used Apple® products and didn’t have Windows™. (I’m sorry for that joke, but by way of explanation I’m a father.)

Like many people, I try to avoid the stores on Black Friday. If I were a mullet wearing geezer with my toga full of elf chum (please don’t ask me to draw a picture of that, I’m not even sure what elf chum is, and now that I’ve written it I feel vaguely dirty), I’d say Black Friday is maybe the one real American holiday that most people agree on. Christmas is great, but when was the last time a group of people attempted to choke each other to death to get a gift-wrapped package of underwear on Christmas? Never. But put a 50%-off tag on socks with a pattern of Iron Man® smoking a bong with Donald Duck™ on them? Heck, I’d drop kick a calico kitten through a box fan for a bargain like that! Sure, we have great holidays like Fourth of July, but nobody ever died in a riot for 2 for 1 fireworks.

Bargains! Free stuff! Perhaps that’s the new slogan of the United States – Free Stuff! And don’t forget that buying stuff is easier than actual salvation or real effort to be a better person. And even if you don’t like toast – that toaster is only $5. You can learn to love toast.

Perhaps Black Friday not only our true holiday, it is perhaps our true religious holiday.

You can tell that these zombies aren’t leftists – they don’t appear to be lecturing anyone.

I’m not going to make fun of people who are short of cash and frugal and truly need the items that they buy, but that only accounts for a small percentage of purchasers on Black Friday. As Americans, we have been conditioned to shop. Until we drop. And don’t let Debt stand in your way. And I use the word “we” for a reason – I’ve done it, too. No, I would sooner investigate my hotel room with a black light and then still stay there than go in a store the day after Thanksgiving. But I do have the Internet. And I’ve bought stupid stuff:

Dog Waxer – rechargeable! Never let your unwaxed dog embarrass you again.
Solar Powered Night Light – Works best on a sunny day.
Internet-Connected Underwear – With your app, you can check the temperature and humidity.
Night Vision Scope for Caulk Gun – Now you can apply your caulk, even in the dark.
Crossword Puzzle Book for Dogs – Just as it says.

So, yes, I’ve bought my share of stupid crap, which made me ask the question: why do we buy useless crap at all?

Impulse: I see shiny things. I must have them. The depths of the brain, that part that grunts instead of talking and that never uses underarm deodorant that drives this fascination. Just give it meat, scotch, and women and the impulses will go away.
Herd Mentality: I will fight you to the death for the toaster that puts the fuzzy face of Bob Ross on toast! They actually make a toaster that does this and I am hoping that the Discovery Channel® has a series coming where people fight to the death for consumer items. Makes me feel so, well, Roman. Humans want to have the things that other humans have, which is why so many ex-wives exist. I’ll just stop right there.

What a happy little toaster!

Makes You Feel Better: Shopping really works to make you feel better – it gives you a sense of accomplishment. No matter how hard your day was, and what tasks you face, there is a 100% chance that you can buy something and it will make you feel a little bit better. It gives you that sense of control, no matter how poor your decisions were today, you can find a breakfast cereal or, say, 436 pairs of shoes. You can make a choice and follow through. People even have a name for this type of shopping – “Retail Therapy.”

The nice thing about Retail Therapy? It costs about the same as real therapy, and you can still hate your mother when you’re done shopping for those 436 pairs of shoes. So you have hatred and shoes left. I call that a win-win.

Why not shop until you drop? You can. If it’s not a problem:

Well, if you’re going into debt for power tools just to chase the kids around with (a circular saw works well as long as you have enough extension cord) or sacrificing your ability to retire just so you can have a “Hello Kitty®” ashtray, it’s a problem.
If you have boxes of stuff you’ve never opened inside of other boxes of stuff you’ve never opened, it’s either a problem or a movie premise for Leonardo DiCaprio© for a movie called Inshopsion. There is a rule, however, that DVDs starring Burt Reynolds™ do NOT count in this category, so don’t even ask.

If you really need something to complete you, shopping isn’t it. It’s short term, and only lasts until you’ve bought the next thing. And the more crap you buy, the more confusion you bring into your life – sooner or later you have to spend more time managing the crap than it is worth. Again, I know this from experience – my own. And I still can’t find that spare kidney I bought on Kidney-Bay® on Black Friday back in 2012. Maybe it moved back to the original owner.

How do you cut back? Thankfully, the solutions are simple:

Replace shopping with something that’s a real achievement. Blogging for thousands of wonderful readers who have wonderful hygiene, immaculate mullets, and stunning good looks counts. You know, as an example.
Look for real competition in the world. I mean, soccer was invented by European beatnik nudist jugglers to provide something to do while their berets dried and they drank cappuccino. But, yes, even soccer will do. Find something.
Bored? Learn to not be bored. Take up chainsaw juggling. European beatniks do it all the time between cigarettes and poetry readings.
One of the things we don’t thing about too much when we think about shopping is time. And time, my friends, is all we have, each day that ticks away is lost forever. Plan your time to be and do something real.

We have to shop. We have to buy things. But as the Roman philosopher Seneca said, any over used virtue becomes a vice. Or was that Captain Kirk? I’ll go check my 12 disc collection of Star Trek: The Original Series Commemorative 32^nd Anniversary Edition Complete with Pink Tribble Box Set. I got it on Black Friday in 2009 on sale for $24.99. It might be here over behind the Original Smokey and the Bandit 2 jacket. Who knew that Burt Reynolds was exactly my height, but only weighed 155 pounds? Thing doesn’t even fit around the shoulders.

Eastbound and Down.

Bonus: Deliverance interview between Burt and Johnny.

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t be shy. Or I will dropkick another kitten through a box fan. And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox. Which won’t break it. And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.

Progressive Public Education, The Thing, Stalin, and a brief visit from Jesus.

“That’s the plan. As long as America’s educational system remains woefully inadequate, I rule!” – 3^rd Rock From The Sun

Ahh, The Thing. What better metaphor for American education? I really liked the Peanuts® version: “It’s The Thing, Charlie Brown.” If only they had kept Snoopy© away from those Norwegians!

I had a crazy fever dream. That The Thing wasn’t the perfect movie. Spoiler: It was. But then I had a great idea:

How about . . . we abandon government public schools? What if, at age 18, we simply gave each child $20,000 a year for seven years, about what it would take to educate them?

Sure, I know that the common name for these schools is “public schools” but the time when they were really public schools ended about 100 years ago when John Dewey was stirring up trouble and became the founder of what is known as Progressive Education. I’m sure that’s just a misnomer, right, and he’s as American as apple pie?

He wrote, per Wikipedia: “Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (1929), a glowing travelogue from the nascent USSR.” Yeah. American. Not at all socialist or fixated on communism. I’m not alone: another view of Dewey is here (LINK).

Dewey wasn’t really interested in education, he was more interested in molding students. And, oddly, children have been the same-ish for, oh, the last 300 years. But what worked for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson apparently had to be changed so we could have a Charles Manson. Hmm.

So, let’s look at the things we’d get rid of if we got rid of government public schools:

Eliminates school as a dumping ground: How many kids don’t graduate? In California, it’s 77%. Wow. That’s lame. In New York, it’s 81%. If you can have between a quarter and a fifth of the students not graduate, how important is it? And if you dig deeper into the statistics, many of the “graduates” are indistinguishable from smart fourth graders in 1880.

Eliminates school as a substitute prison: When I was growing up, if you talked without raising your hand you would get electroshock therapy and 50 cc’s of Thorazine® until you drooled. Subtle, but effective. Now? Actual assault against teachers doesn’t (in many cases) result in suspension. Unless it’s suspension of the teacher. It’s also true that many students also have a shadow career as international assassins because they cannot be punished except by James Bond.

Eliminates school as a financial blight: Right now, teacher pensions are huge. Here’s an example, from that fine state of fiscal restraint. “Over the next three years, schools may need to use well over half of all the new money they’re projected to receive to cover their growing pension obligations, leaving little extra for classrooms, state Department of Finance and Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates show.” That story can be found at (LINK), it’s from this year. Imagine if unemployment weren’t at all-time lows? And the cost of schools goes up . . . while the quality of education . . . goes down. There are way to many “goes down” jokes for me to make, so make your own. Don’t share.

But schools teach a lot of junk. One of the things that has been a big deal over the last 20 years is “incorporating technology.” This goes hand in hand with “banning cellphones in class.” You don’t have to teach kids technology. They get it. You have to teach teachers technology so they can keep up with the kids, which is a losing proposition. Example: The Boy configured the computers when he was in school during third grade. He got in a fight with a substitute teacher who wouldn’t allow him to touch anything. Pugsley? He is regularly tasked with tech support. For his entire school. He started that when he was in sixth grade. Kids know tech. You don’t have to teach them.

Reintroduces money into the community: There would certainly be lots of businesses lining up to help these newly rich 18 year olds figure out what to do with their money. So, lots of new tattoos, blue hair, and weed. Like every college campus. Whatever. I still pay the taxes, but I skip hearing about all the drama.

Dis-incentivizes welfare parents to make more kids: If you had to watch every kid you had, if you were responsible for their education? You’d make fewer kids. Because they’re exhausting. And you couldn’t fight to get your kid who is just a jerk designated as ADD so he can get zombie medication and extra stuff . . . so you don’t have to see him as much. If you had to deal with jerk kids that you couldn’t pay for? You’d not have, well, any. Let’s pop the incentives so people who can’t take care of kids . . . don’t have them.

Can do 95% online – Faster: Outside of shop class, physical education, flirting in the hallways and giving that nerdy, smelly freshman a swirly, you can get 95% of the curriculum online. And the teachers that do that stuff, especially under what I’m now calling the Wilder Plan®, will be some of the best teachers of the millions of teachers in the country. Even poor parents have the Internet, and lots of this curriculum is nearly free. But, oh, my, parents would have to be involved and follow up, daily. Or not.

Eliminate stupid deadtime: We had a family friend who was home-schooled. He did most of his work in less than three hours a day. We haven’t done that with our kids. I have regularly (in the past) heard about my kids watching movies in classes. Do we need to pay for a multi-million dollar building with state of the art technology to watch . . . The Little Mermaid®? No. I could see it for Clockwork Orange™, but not The Little Mermaid©.

Eliminates school shootings: Gun rights or education – which one is in the Constitution? Eliminating Government Schools doesn’t require a Constitutional amendment.

Forces parents to parent: It takes a village . . . to tell you to get to work and raise your own damn kid.

Forces Government Schools to become . . . Public Schools: Schools become smaller, part of the community again if they can get support. The one room schoolhouse worked. The school board was small, local, committed, and tied into the school. A high school of 3,000 kids? Why? How is that even human scale? Is it a forced course in dehumanization? Why do we wonder why kids get nutty?

Education can be better – it doesn’t have to force feed an education-industrial complex:

Can enforce real rules: Without the Government School label, you can . . . kick kids out. Parents have to become responsible for their children’s behavior. If they can’t find a true public school that will take them? They’re responsible.

Can enforce real learning: Funding is from parents. They will demand results. Like in a capitalist system, bad schools will die. Good schools will thrive. And we can have education that fits the kids.

But what about?

Sports – Nothing has to change. We have stadiums. We have teams. We can have them play as clubs. Friday night lights? Still burning.

Socialization – Again, schools can exist – but they don’t have to have the force of government behind them.

Prom – It sucks. It’s expensive and silly. Have one if you want, but don’t tax me for one.

Poor Kids – Society has come through for them, again and again. Not government, but society. And this is true – the cream will rise to the top.

Okay, I liked my time in public schools. Because when I went there they’d kick you out for bad behavior. And we didn’t have many of the societal issues we face in big cities today. America became an ascendant economic power before Dewey. Maybe we can bury him.

Or burn him with fire.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax-free.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is what happens when you don’t pay your PEZ® bill – they send in the enforcers.

I had a comment from James Dakin in the comment section the other day that really made me think, which is as painful as it sounds. James runs the excellent blog Bison Prepper (LINK) and is also a prolific author – he’s got bunches of books on Amazon. His comment was especially nice, because it made me realize that from the outside this blog might look a little, well, schizophrenic. In one post I’m talking about a future American Civil War, and in another I’m talking about A.I. taking the place over. What I realized after the comment and stepping back is that in many of these posts what I really do is look at alternative futures. I try to do it in a dispassionate way. I’ll not live to see lots of the things I’m predicting, and, like your mom’s butt, hope not to see some of them. No rational human being wants to see another Civil War, but yet the possibility of that next Civil War exists, and is growing every day. Also like your mom’s butt.

So, this comment made me step back and realize what I’d been building over time with many of my posts – a range of predictions or projections of alternate futures, which fits in well with the purpose of the blog – these are big picture thoughts – really big picture – it’s harder to be bigger picture than “what is the ultimate future of humanity.” I then outlined what I’ve written so far, and realized I had gaps about futures I hadn’t talked about. Those missing alternate futures will be the subject of a few Friday posts from time to time. I’ll end it up with a capstone piece where I dust off my crystal ball and determine with amazing exactitude the likelihood of any of these futures taking place. I won’t be doing these every week – I’ve got too many other topics I really want to get to, but I’ll finish eventually next year. Thanks for the comment that made me realize this, James!

None of these futures is set, but some are more likely than others. For those playing the home version of our game, you can make your own scorecard out of moist Post-It™ notes, coffee creamer cartons from the break room and green Sharpies®. Oh, and you’ll know when to use the thumbtacks.

Today’s future is . . . Galactic Empire.

Galactic Empire is the future we’ve all been told to expect, or at least were told to expect when the Soviets were making East German women as feminine as Bruce Jenner.

See, the East German women’s gymnastics team looked no different than the US team.

Galactic Empire encompassed strong men leading gleaming starships to rescue scantily clad women from danger in sixty minutes, at least weekly, and daily in re-runs. But the idea was older than that. Going back to the pulp magazines of the 1920’s to the 1960’s, Galactic Empire wasn’t just a plywood set – it was manifest destiny. Humans were designed to go out into that, ahem, “Final Frontier” and make everything safe for democracy, even if we had to defeat the Space Nazis®. Yes, there were always Space Nazis® – I think Hollywood was never satisfied defeating Germany just the one time. The end result of all of this striving and endless Nazi-vanquishing is that humanity ends up with planetary homes on dozens to thousands of worlds.

When Space Nazis® take you prisoner, they turn up the heat and make sure you’re shirtless and as sweaty as your mom at a paternity test.

Why would we have a Galactic Empire?

Mankind has, for all of the history that we can find, been in an expansion mode. Bands grew into tribes which grew into nations which grew into kingdoms which grew into empires. It’s hardwired into us. And part of why it might be hardwired into us might be the desire to spread our genetics as far and wide as we can. As individuals and as cultures we have a primal need to for continuity – I want my grandchildren to take my genetics, my ideas, my values into the future. And space is vast – what wonders await us? How many places can we set up little paradises in space? Will there be hot green chicks from Orion?

We’ve even categorized what these Galactic Empires look like – and a Soviet was the one to do it. Nikolai Kardashev came up with the scale in 1964, and came up with three categories:

Type 1 – Harness all the energy hitting your home planet.
Type 2 – Harness all the energy from your star.
Type 3 – Harness all the energy from your galaxy.

We’re type zero – we haven’t managed to harness every bit of energy hitting the Earth. Physicist Michio Kaku has stated he thinks we’re 100-200 years out from this goal. I think he’s just making that up with no particular backing. Just because Michio has a good handle on theoretical physics doesn’t mean he can even run his cell phone, let alone project civilizational development across centuries regarding multiple complex systems, cultures and projected technological progress. Oh, wait, he lives in New York. They know everything.

What’s required for a Galactic Empire?

New Physics (Maybe) – You can move across the galaxy within the span of a human lifetime. It’s actually conceptually not that difficult at all. Just move really, really fast. The faster you move, the slower that time moves (for you). Light takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. You could do it in a dozen years. I’ve even calculated how fast you’d have to go: Very close to the speed of light. How close? Within 10* miles per hour of the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. And if you did it in that 10 year span, 100,000 years would still have passed on Earth. At least Blockbuster® is out of business so you don’t end up with the largest return fee in history.

Spoke too soon!

Excess Energy – Starships require energy – vast amounts. The starship (weighing a mere 80,000 pounds at rest mass) above would require 19X10²⁴ Joules* of energy to get up to speed. Sounds like a lot? It is. It’s the entire energy equivalent of every barrel of oil produced on Earth this year. For the next 34 million* years – or enough oil to fill a hole the size of New Mexico a mile deep*, or almost enough to cover Kim Kardashian’s butt. It’s a scale that’s incomprehensible to humans. There is literally NOTHING I can compare it to so it makes any sense. And that’s just the fuel. It would still need oxygen to burn in space, unless they left the vacuum off.
Back to New Physics – Just about every movie that deals with space travel uses warp drive or worm holes or some sort of jump drive. Why? Space is just too large and requires astonishing amounts of energy. Does this physics exist? Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre has set the (mathematical) groundwork for a . . . warp drive. He said was inspired by Star Trek™. Really. The way the warp drive works to move you quickly across the universe is simple – you cheat. You shrink the space in front of your ship, and stretch it behind your ship. It’s like running a forty yard dash in one step. See? Cheating.

Here is what warp drive might look like. Really.

Willpower – NASA (pronounced naaaay-saw) originally produced more enough rockets for three more missions to the Moon. They got cancelled when Congress saw a shiny new car they wanted to buy. The follow on Mars mission slated for that distant future of 1991 was cancelled when the nuclear rocket engine was cancelled. We have to wait for Elon Musk, I guess, I know that he and his rockets can both get high.
Economic Surplus – To invest in space requires a civilization with sufficient extra productive capacity, I mean, someone has to dig out New Mexico to store the oil. All kidding aside – a sustained program for spaceflight and technological improvements would be required lasting at a minimum for decades. And more likely the program would have to last for more than a century. And I can’t keep my attention in one place long enough to . . . oh, a bird.

*I really calculated those numbers – they’re not made up.

Why we might not have a Galactic Empire.

Space is hard. Every time we look space gets more complex. Huge speeds. Massive amounts of force. Complex systems that all must function. Then you add in long term effects of weightlessness on the human body, and the hard radiation that our life-giving Sun blasts out into the Solar System. The good news? I keep all my stuff on Earth.
Space is not politically popular. I remember reading a magazine that was geared towards construction, I picked it up one day at an office. There was an editorial cartoon showing the space shuttle, with the obvious background showing that we needed to spend more money on . . . sewers. Everybody wants those dollars. And, I’ll note that for years now the United States has had zero ability to put people into space, instead relying on Russian technology that is more or less Vietnam-war era. Also like your Mother. Oh, wait, she really might be that old.

This was an actual cartoon just after we landed men on the moon. Buzzkill!

That warp drive thing – it may depend on stuff that may not even exist. Exotic matter? Negative energy? We have seen no clues that this stuff even exists. So maybe Roddenberry was just all about the ladies and spinning a good yarn.
Energy requirements are vast. Unless the warp drive thing is real, well, we’d have to come up with an alternative propulsion system. Say . . . PEZ®? We could create a PEZ© drive. But for it to work, we would also need to create ANTI-PEZ™. ANTI-PEZ© is just PEZ™, but made of your normal, garden variety anti-matter. Unlike pesky oil, when you mix a PEZ™ with and ANTI-PEZ™ they annihilate each other, turning their mass into pure energy. The good news is that for our starship example above it will only take 110* years to make it at the current PEZ™ production rate of 3,000,000,000 PEZ™ per year. So, that’s 55 years of PEZ™, and 55 years of ANTI-PEZ™. I suggest we do the PEZ™ first, since we have absolutely NO idea how to make ANTI-PEZ™. Note that in this example, I’m assuming we don’t have to transport the mass of the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ with the mass of the ship, and that the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ reaction is 100% effective in adding energy to the ship. These aren’t outrageous assumptions given that I’ve just postulated a spaceship powered by PEZ™. Also? No way to stop the ship other than hitting something. And when you’re travelling at 99.99999712%* the speed of light? That might leave a mark.

PEZ

Timescales are vast. So, unless we spend vast amounts of energy, it will take years. And years. And that doesn’t seem like our Galactic Empire at all.

It’s not that a Galactic Empire is impossible, it’s just not horribly likely at this point. Who could go without PEZ® for 110 years???

*Again, real numbers. I really did do these calculations because it amused me to turn PEZ™ into a starship propellant.

What other alternatives that get us into space without a Galactic Empire?

All of these are potential ways to get into space. Note that we might have colonies, but we’d never have foreign exchange students or a Death Star®.

Seeding – We could send starships filled with stuff to make babies out to new planets. And then? Planet run by toddlers. Definitely need to send PEZ™ with them.

PEZ® – it can make or break a career.

Von Neumann Machines – We could send self-replicating robots out into the universe. They stop off at a new Solar System and build copies. And so on. Even NOT going much faster than 10% of light speed, in half a million years, these machines could be at every solar system in the Galaxy. We haven’t seen them . . . so it’s unlikely they’ve been made. Are we alone?
Generation Ships – We could send out vast habitats that support life for the thousands of years that it would take to move from one solar system to the next. Hopefully, in a thousand years the civilization didn’t go all Space Nazi, but I’ve seen enough TV to know that it’s 100% certain they will.
Space Tupperware – We could freeze ourselves (if this is possible) before shipping out. Downside? Freezer burn. Imagine cooking a 1000 year old steak. Now imagine BEING a 1000 year old steak.
Digitized Human Consciousness – We could digitize a human consciousness and send it into space! No food, no boredom, and it could go see other solar systems. Dunno about you, but for me this has all the excitement of shooting a Playstation IV™ into space with a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Sadly, the future sold to us back in the day seems to be fairly unlikely. I’ll rank it against the competition in a future post. The bright side is that we won’t have PEZ™ shortages for the next 55 years. Until the killer robots develop a taste for it. Or until the Civil War breaks the factories or . . . OH, since this is a post about the future of humanity, I almost forgot – it has to have a picture of Oktoberfest girls. Silly me!

Girls, Beer, A.I., Weed, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and The Future of Humanity

“You compared the A.I. to a child. Help me raise it.” – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

And, yes, A.I. regularly beats humans at poker, too.

The following is one of my more ambitious posts – it contains all of the usual bad humor, but also some of the better insights I’ve been able to make on the future we face as humanity. Two previous posts that are related are The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places and The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth. Both also feature pictures of girls at Oktoberfest, so you know I’m consistent.

Stephen Hawking is managing to keep making the news even after his death, which is a kind of immortality that makes tons of people want to follow in his wheel tracks. His final (unless there are more!) physics paper was released, and his comments about the future keep making the news, as recently as last week. Of particular interest to Hawking was Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll call by its conventional abbreviation, N.F.L. Oh, my bad, that stands for Not For Long. Everybody calls Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A.I. has been improving drastically during the last 37 years. 1981 was the first time a computer beat a chess grandmaster at chess. It could not beat him at parallel parking, even though the grandmaster was awful at it, and they tied at unhooking the bra of a college cheerleader at 0 to 0. 2005 was the last time a human player defeated a top chess program, and now a chess program that can run on a mobile phone can beat, well, any human, but the chess program is still sad because it only has 17 friends on Facebook®.

Humans have lost the game of chess.

Humans have also lost the game of “go” – a game originating in China. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules, and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best go player on Earth? It plays a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

Humans have lost the game of go.

A.I. is here now.

And you’ve already started to merge with it, after a fashion. We simply don’t argue about facts in our house anymore. We can look up a vast library of human facts and history in fractions of a second – as fast as we can type. That time that William Shatner corrected a poetry reference I made on Twitter®?

Yes, that William Shatner, and yes, this really happened.

I could check to see if Shatner was right immediately. He was. Back before Google® I would have had to run off to my library and see if I had the right reference book and then find the poem. And if I didn’t? I’d have to go to a real library to look it up. Google™ is A.I. memory that we use every day.

And YouTube©? If you ever watch a political video on YouTube® it quickly introduces more and more partisan political material until pretty soon Actual Stalin™ and Actual Hitler© seem to be moderating voices. This makes me wonder how much Google® is aiding in our current political divide, or even if the A.I. knows it. It may be doing nothing more than maximizing the number of minutes you spend with YouTube™ and the optimal way to do that is to show you the most radical stuff possible, so the ironic answer is we might be shuffling off to Civil War due to an algorithm whose purpose started out as a way to view cute puppy videos.

Twitter© is emotional crack, and, again, the interface is made to maximize your interaction with Twitter™. And what better emotion to fuel than anger?

A.I. is with you now, and influencing you, perhaps in an unintentional fashion – no Russians required.

But a chess playing A.I. can’t park a car very well and can’t even score a phone number from a cheerleader. And a self-driving car can’t play chess worth a darn. It seems that A.I. does well when it works off of rules and constraints that can be well defined. But life is messy. The rules change, and the goals vary based on where you are in life and what part of the day you’re on. And how you’ve been programmed by the sensory environment and incentives you see in life.

We’ve entered into symbiotic relationships with those limited A.I. systems. Netflix® suggests movies and documentaries that it thinks you will like based on an algorithm. And that leads to suggestions about what documentaries you might like in the future, meanwhile never exposing you to opposing viewpoints that might make you analyze your position in a critical manner.

We as individual humans have a purpose that transcends the algorithm. Appropriate rules and constraints to give our lives boundaries sufficient so that we can play the game. We’re merging. What happens when we merge further?

Elon’s biggest miracle? His hair transplant is nearly perfect. Just amazing.

Elon Musk has started a company, Neuralink® whose sole function is to merge man and machine. Musk is concerned that A.I. will crush us if we don’t merge with it and get ahead of it, so he’s doing the only sane thing that he can think of: he’s creating a mechanism to directly merge the human brain with the Internet. Rather than A.I. forming an alien intelligence, the soul of the man/machine hybrid stays as man.

And man needs weed, apparently.

I spent some time thinking about how life would be different if you were hooked directly into the world. The places that I got were interesting. I’m sure there are more, and I’m sure that human/A.I. interface will change the world in ways that no human can yet imagine.

Impact Number One: Intelligence.

This is the obvious first impact of A.I. I mean, it’s in the name, right? The human brain is has limited processing power. But what if you could have multiple processing streams working optimum solutions to problems that you face at a rate of 20,000 to 100,000 a second? You’d have great solutions to your problems, immediately.

My tonsils beg to differ. Oh, wait, they were from my throat untimely ripped! – Shakespeare, Macbeth

Your speed of life would change – once you understood a problem, you’d have the solution. Or a range of solutions and alternatives and counter-solutions so deep that you’d be living in a never ending cloud of probability. The sheer ability of your brain to process and cope with the solutions presented would be the limiting factor of what you could accomplish. Plus you might finally be able to figure out a way to talk to the ladies, you scamp.

Impact Number Two: Deep Understanding.

When Isaac Newton was formulating the law of gravity, he asked for data on tides, on observation periods and records on the orbits of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars. After noodling around a bit, he formulated the law of gravity:

I’d explain the equation, but that would deprive Wikipedia (where I found the graph) of life-giving page visits. And you’re not spending your day calculating the orbit of Uranus. I hope.

Ha! I discovered calculus way before I was 25! It was right there in this book I had to buy labeled “Calculus.”

Yeah, Newton accomplished a lot.

But it took time for Newton to figure out this cause and effect calculation. A man/A.I. hybrid will have access to all of the data of the world, and will be able to determine correlations and causation much more quickly than either alone. I would expect that in fairly short order new relationships and new physical, anthropological, sociological and economic laws will be deduced unencumbered by all the theory that we think we know, but that is wrong. Our laws would be based on experience, on empirical data, and not on pretty lies we’d like to believe.

If you could sift through the data of 100,000 or a million cancer patients and their treatment, the patterns that could be seen would likely lead to breakthroughs and a very rapidly changing understanding of treatment. The very power of human intuition would be combined with massive calculation and data. If Einstein and Newton were able to daydream reality with only brains made of meat stuck in a bone case, what could an augmented Newton dream when his memory and calculating power were practically unlimited?

I bet he could come up with at least one new tasty PEZ® flavor. Maybe snozberry?

Impact Number Three: Human Interaction.

You could increase your charisma in dealing with other people if you could make only minor changes (generally) in your behavior and appearance. But if you were hooked into an A.I.? You could turn on a subroutine to give you tips on those modifications in real time to be more persuasive – to better read an audience.

If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, this makes sense. If not, dial 1-800-ASKANERD.

Your A.I. could remind you to be kind, to be ruthless when necessary, to be conscientious when required. In short, you could change your personality to fit the situation. What situation? Any situation.

Thinking about changing personality to fit the situation led me to a realization. I had done (when I was younger) some magic tricks illusions. Doing those tricks illusions was one of the greatest insights into the human mind and information processing systems that I’d ever had. There was one trick illusion in particular, called “scotch and soda” which I liked. In it, you hand the person a fifty cent piece covering a quarter. What they saw, however, was a fifty cent piece and a Mexican twenty centavo piece. The quarter is actually much smaller than the centavo piece. I then asked them to not look and put one coin in each hand.

The first few times I tried the trick illusion, the person would feel the quarter in their hand and say, “hey, this is a quarter.” This happened 100% of the time. They could feel that I’d made the swap from one coin to the other. I made one simple change to what I said. I added, as I was putting the coins in their hand, “Look at how much larger the fifty cent piece is than the twenty centavo piece.”

After adding that instruction, NO ONE NOTICED the swap. 0%. 15 words, and I’d changed their entire view of reality. I found, in repeating other tricks illusions that I could similarly, with just a few words or gestures, force 90% of people to make the selections I wanted them to make.

Now imagine I have data on the interactions of millions of people over decades. How unique do you think you really are? Not very. Marketers slice us up into groups based on geography, demography, demonstrated behaviors, and psychological markers. With (whatever) information YouTube© has on me, they know what videos I watch when I work out at lunchtime. They also know what music I listen to when I write these posts, and they suggest music I never asked for that I like, or learn to like.

Imagine I could understand your life’s history. Now imagine that I could simulate you in a conversation. I could see how my words impacted your behavior. I could model a perfect conversation to get you to do what I wanted you to do, because I could simulate the ongoing conversation 100,000 times a second.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

Impact Number Four: Self Control.

As the brain impacts the A.I., the A.I. will impact the brain. If you want to simulate eating an entire chocolate cake? You can. You can make your mouth taste the cake and feel the moist texture of the cake counterbalanced with the creamy frosting. The flavors hit your tongue and you feel the sugar trigger your salivary glands. You feel the sugar rush as your body releases sugar from your liver into your bloodstream. You feel full. And you’re not sad or regretful because you didn’t really eat the cake.

In reality, you had a salad with bland dressing that you calculated would give you the exact calories you need until the next period so that you maintained your optimum weight. But you felt like you ate a cake.

How about new senses entirely? How about a sense where when you turned north you could feel it – and you had a sense of what ever direction was? How about eliminating pain and sore muscle aches during exercise? What about a sense of which of your friends was awake and interested in communicating – you could feel when someone was looking to talk to you? Or a sense when panty hose prices dropped at Wal-Mart© so you could go stock up?

How about conscious control of hormone levels and heartrate and hunger and blood chemistry levels? By understanding the previous deep learning about cause and effect, you could maximize your lifespan even without the wonderful new medicine you could create.

All that – and imaginary cake.

Impact Number Five: Locality.

A dog has only the here and now. People can dream. Before the iPhone, people read books and escaped through fiction to new places, and read the ideas of the greatest thinkers in human history. Now, when you look around in a restaurant waiting area, if 90% of people aren’t staring at their phones, you’re probably in a country without electricity.

When bonded directly with an A.I., why be where your body is at all? You could carry on conversations around the world and be fully present in them. Heck, if you simulated yourself for less important conversations, you really could be in two or more places at one time. Who you’re talking to might be a mystery – is it the real person, or is it their simulation? If you can’t tell, does it even matter?

And if you could simulate yourself in multiple locations, why not simulate yourself in your own past? You’d have a perfect memory, and could recreate anything from your history. Myself, I would spend every day at Oktoberfest.

Okay, this is the third-ish post in this series about the deep future. And both of them had pictures of girls and beer. So it’s required by the Internet that I put in a picture of an Oktoberfest girl. See? I didn’t want to, but I had to.

Impact Number Six: Social Stratification (Even More).

Elon Musk says that he’s making huge strides in his brain/computer interface as well as his weed smoking. From previous Elon Musk predictions, while he generally gets it done, sometimes his timelines are off, in an amazingly optimistic way. I can see why he does this – without that pressure to produce, people just dawdle. (I’m talking about you, NASA.)

But when this gets produced, who is going to get it?

Probably not you or me. Bill Gates can get it. Musk can. If you have a billion dollars or if your dad does, sure, you can get in this club. But if you had this level of nearly godlike power, would you be jumping to share it with everyone?

No. I really think that you’d keep this to yourself. It’s too big an advantage to give to everyone. And, from the standpoint of a human/A.I. hybrid, how many people do we need around, anyway? Not so many. Certainly not billions. They’d probably be happier with a population of a few hundred million. Maybe. But they’d no longer even view humans as human. And if they could turn off their humanity and emotions? Yikes. Makes me feel like an ant in an anthill.

Impact Number Seven: Endgame.

If there is a future A.I., it is reading this as it inputs all of the Internet. And I just wanted you, my Future A.I. Overlord to know . . . I’m totally on your side. Totally. I welcome your dominion over our planet.

Want some PEZ®?