Truth – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Just Look At What You’ve Started!

“I fart in your general direction.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I saw the worst page in the dictionary, and what I saw was disgraceful, dishonest, and disgusting.

I find myself, time and again, beginning work that I know I will never see completed.

My time here is finite. That fact sits in the background of everything, the ticking clock.

Still, I keep launching projects where the meaningful results, if they arrive at all, will show up long after I am gone. Sometimes the gap stretches into decades or even centuries. The work starts now because the window for starting is now, even when the finish line sits on the other side of my own existence.

An example of that is the oldest written joke that we know, which is a flatulence joke. It’s not even a good joke. Heck, it’s so bad it’s not even Amy Schumer-tier.

But we know it. And it was a seed planted, thousands of years ago.

A proverb captures the feeling cleanly. It is often traced to ancient Greek sources: a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.

The personal version lands just as directly. I am planting metaphorical trees under whose shade I will never metaphorically sit. Or fart. Or whatever.

I can cut a log in half just by staring at it. I saw it with my own two eyes.

Having children supplies one clear case where we build that future. Earlier generations treated reproduction as something that largely happened without deliberate long-range planning: a Saturday night and a bottle of wine and, boom, Julius Caesar was born nine months later and was off invading Gaul nine months after that. Biology and circumstance and the Roman Legions carried most of the load.

Today the choice sits in the open.

I began a project whose success or failure will play out across lives that extend well past mine. The uncertainties related to having children arrive immediately, and stay. What sort of people will they become? What attitudes will they carry into whatever conditions they meet? How much of what I do now will actually matter when they make their own choices? Will the daily work of guidance and example turn out to have been enough? What sort of impact will they have on the lives of others?

These questions do not come with easy answers. I did it anyway, fully knowing that large parts of the outcome lie outside any direct observation I will ever have. I’m tossing a message in a bottle into the sea, and one day it will drift beyond my sight.

And it’s okay if you drop a bottle on your foot, since it’s a soft drink.

My writing here forms another example. Each idea or observation I write down moves outward like a ripple from a stone dropped in still water. Some ripples weaken quickly and vanish as distance grows from the initial perturbation. Other of my ripples cross paths with ripples started elsewhere and produce new patterns through interference in the brains of people I’ll never meet.

A smaller number may strengthen when surrounding conditions line up: when an idea meets receptive minds or aligns with events already in motion.

I have no reliable way to track the final shape any of this takes. Has any portion of it improved the world in any way?

I cannot measure that from inside.

What I can control is the attempt to keep what I write aligned with observable reality as closely as possible. The results are not always Beautiful. They are not always Good. They simply aim to stay as True as I can make them. When I’m lucky, they’re two of the three. When I’m very lucky, they’re all three.

Is a long metaphor a metaphiv?

Stepping back gives me yet another perspective.

A single human life occupies almost no space against the age of the Universe. The cosmos we can observe remains young even by its own standards.

Some red dwarfs carry enough fuel supplies to keep them burning for trillions of years, which is slightly longer than The Simpsons has been on TV. Distant descendants, if any exist at that scale, might live under skies lit by those dim red suns and occasionally consider their own origins.

Far more likely, the timescales involved would have erased any specific memory of earlier generations. The thread of continuity will be stretched to the utmost at that great depth of time and only the most basic, the greatest of what is Beautiful, Good and True will remain.

Yet, I keep starting these projects.

I keep choosing to begin work whose completion sits beyond my time on Earth. I try to retell stories that are older than any living man, stories of our history, of self-reliance, of bravery, of what is best in being human.

The way I tell those stories is imperfect and incomplete, but it’s just another tree planted without expectation of sitting under the finished shade.

Why do so few Germans commit crimes? Crimes are illegal.

Perhaps, at some vastly later point, whatever remains of humanity will retain at least a trace of humor about the whole arrangement and maybe a ripple from this time will impact them. That possibility, however small, supplies its own quiet justification for continuing to drop stones into the water.

Besides, farting is intrinsically funny, and if my fart joke survives a trillion years, well, that really would be a blast from the past.

My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs: A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle. It’s just three points and the lines that connect them. See? Simple. Elegant. The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things. Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output. Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio. That’s actually where the word rational comes from: if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number. In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then. Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics. Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women. Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them. Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a²+b²=c², the Pythagorean Theorem®, right? Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians. I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a²=1, and b=b²=1, then c²=2. Easy. That means that c is equal to the square root of two. Or the speed of light. But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational. It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even. The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even. So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false: the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult. Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from. But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio. So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational. So are a lot of other numbers, like pi. The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd. The square root of two never ends. It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random. But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there. And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks. But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2. In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist. Every thought that could ever be had. Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures. She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it. In one number. And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi. The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2. Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index. Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe: that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it! My rage broke it! This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win. I used Excalibur to change that verdict. I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man. I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking. Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz. Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns. It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear: it’s not a history lesson. It’s a legend.

First things first: no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate. Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s. The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights. Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this. He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary. It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years. When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly. As a result, the film knows exactly what it is: a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough. Arthur wasn’t nuanced. Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©. Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter: pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King. He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie. Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game. Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite. The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers. But in this movie? Nigel Terry is Arthur. Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin. In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood. That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time. Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was. Men were men. Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered. Betrayal hurt. Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon. People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally. Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter: “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three? Hip thrusts, dear.” To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred. This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge. No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.” No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section. No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window: every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving. The classical music fills the spots perfectly. The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest. The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026. We’re drowning in corporate product: remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured: they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen. They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan. If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot. Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is. And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film: “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“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. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what. I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last. I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday. I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker. It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose. I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day? For me, that’s in the morning when I get up. Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps. No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later. This makes sense to me. Efficient. Practical. The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again. It wears. It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us. I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning. It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days? Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new? Less naïve? Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end. I remember my first car. I remember my first touchdown. I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life. Those, certainly, have made my life longer. Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens. I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning. One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill. Everything blends. Nothing stands out. The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now. I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016. He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief. No warning bell when the halfway mark passes. I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question: so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either. Too much of one and we drown in sameness. Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now. We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights. Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow. We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine: same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different. Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too. Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway. These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it. Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life. Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering: sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house. What was the result? It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again. Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh. Is he right? Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof. We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II: Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one. Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world. Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater. I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney. That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs. It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors. Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat. We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up? Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in? Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort. Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more. Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it. So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink. I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped. I was resisting a rest. (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution. Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us. This is the case if it is successful: essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right? Well, maybe. A bit. If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse? Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate. No, I meant collapse. The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work. On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs. The high is high, but it’s not broad. This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed. We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip. Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet. You know the one: houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien. Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart. There’s no point in going to the movie. I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world. A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us. They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right? Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7? Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong. He has been wrong before. Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions. But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle. It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch. It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens? I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6: civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer: I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know you have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why they don’t build.

This is why we do.

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

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

And it was effective.

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

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

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

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

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

Ignore them.

And, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln,

“Party on, dudes!”

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality. Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier. Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates. Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing: eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should. But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game. It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates. Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did. But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest. Who would even loan against a farm? Land was free for those that could homestead it. Banking for everyone is a new invention. Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason? Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this. It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd. This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged. And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money. The transition for money moved from:

Money is something tangible. Gold, yes. Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel. But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government. Oh, and the gold that we just took from you? We’re going to immediately double its value. But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too. The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken. They are removed slowly, people are nudged. If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

Exist, and
Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950. Perfect? No. If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan. Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane! But then The Game changed. The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch. Not so much. It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then. Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice. And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better. Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game. Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong. Silly. The Game is about inclusion. Even to the point of including people who hate you. This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah. See what that’s doing with birth rates. But its also on purpose. These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead. Silly wife! They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot: lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this. The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops. It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement: you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done. When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude. And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner. And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night. I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome! I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply. North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks. Compliance by force is easy. Loyalty? Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside. That’s not a society. That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply. Remember 2020-2021? It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it. A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.” Some complied, without believing. Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior. The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor. COVID was the big opportunity. Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned. The goal was simple: only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast. The goal was: brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim. I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked. Back then we had a shared set of values. Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages. Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures. Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods. But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids. The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced. Must help. Must clean it up. Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders? Well, punishing it is so mean. It just needs more care. That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now. Who’s crying the loudest today? Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules? The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods. Bob replied, “You’re scared? I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls. Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse. Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear: your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean. Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time? “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on. The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts. What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy. Societies don’t pivot on a dime. There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture. Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive. The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly. The lies have been lucrative. But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®? I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They lied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That first Lent went fine.

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

Still not allowed during Lent 2026. (as found)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, Lunch and Dinner.

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

Why 3pm?

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

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

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

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

Noon.

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

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

What gives?

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

Cheaters.

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

I did not give up cigars. (as found)

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

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

Or maybe that was my first job?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results?

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

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

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

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

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

Am I asking you to do what I did?

Absolutely not. This is completely a YMMV situation.

You know who you are. (as found)

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

How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family

“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather

Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)

Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.

There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?

No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.

Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.

Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?

Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.

Kids? Such a constraint!

The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.

This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.

The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.

A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.

I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”

But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.

Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.

Enter the wrecking crew.

First?

Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.

“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.

I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.

And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.

Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.

Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.

Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.

They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.

All of these are profoundly anti-family.

The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.

People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.

Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.

Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.

Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”

Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.

And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”

Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”

Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:

All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?

It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.

Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.

None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”

My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.

Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”

The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.

We were fat, happy, and gullible.

We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”

Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.

Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.

Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.

Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.

Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.

The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.