Truth – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

The Wilder Guide to Self-Reinvention

“Ultimately, anybody could crash on an island like this, and the idea of being surrounded by strangers and getting to reinvent yourself in some way is sort of readily identifiable.” – Lost

The NFL® has an obscure rule that players cannot own ducks or geese. Those are called “a personal fowl.” (all memes as-found)

Sometimes I’ve felt like I’m stuck in a sequel nobody asked for.

Same plot, same villains, same scriptwriters, same predictable ending where the hero, me, ends up in the same place where the movie started. All of it happened, and all of it changed nothing.

Reinvention sounds like one of those self-help buzzwords peddled by people with suspiciously not-grey hair, perfect teeth, and look like they smell vaguely of Lemon-Scented® Pledge™.

Me? I’ve lost most of my hair, have okay but not perfect teeth, and more often smell of cigar than citrus. I’m not selling you anything. Except songs. And you can listen to all of those for free. But if reinvention is done well, it changes everything, which should be no surprise because it’s in the name.

I’ve reinvented myself a time or two. Switched careers, changed habits, even moved across state lines once. It’s never as glamorous as the brochures promise. I have never yet experienced a slow-mo training montage with Eye of the Tiger blasting in the background. More often it’s like grinding through a B-movie script where the director keeps yelling “Cut!” because I flubbed the line again.

Plot twist: it was really Freddy Kruger™ that killed Martin Luther King, Jr. After all, he had a dream . . .

In the changes I’ve made, however, I have learned more than a few things. First, real reinvention demands a brutal assessment of what’s True, Beautiful, and Good and how that differs from what I see in the mirror. People, me included, want to believe pretty little lies whenever they can. Real assessment is required.

If it isn’t hitting at least three out of three of the True, Beautiful, and Good criteria, why bother? I try to take stock without mercy.

Is it True?

Does it square with reality, or am I kidding myself?

Is it Beautiful?

Does it create something worthwhile, or is it just pumping out more plastic widgets for the landfill?

Is it Good?

Does serve a higher purpose, or is it just vanity?

If the answer’s a resounding “meh,” to any of these three, it’s not worth the effort. If I lie to myself here, the whole reinvention turns into a farce.

Would you like three alternative punchlines?

Hollywood peddles a different script, of course. Change is always Good™, wrapped in a rom-com bow. Picture the uptight stuffed-shirt. Khakis pressed, 401(k) maxed moping through life until a random crazy hot chick crashes in.

She’s got purple hair, a tattoo of a dreamcatcher, and a backpack full of “experiences.” She drags him to a rave in the desert, teaches him to juggle fire and smoke weed, and poof, he’s ditching the corner office for a food truck.

Roll credits, cue the indie soundtrack. This is celebrated as a modern goal.

Reality check: I’ve crossed paths with more than a few random crazy hot chicks.

Positive contributions? Slim to none. All the experiences rhyme, though: a whirlwind of chaos, pain, and stories that start with “So there I was…” and end with lawyers or bail money.

Random crazy hot chicks didn’t reinvent me, they just rearrange the furniture in my life until nothing fits.

Real change doesn’t need a manic (or maniac) minx catalyst.

She keeps sending mixed messages.

It just needed me to stare in the mirror and decide the current plot sucks.

Change itself?

That’s the bonus, the change is immediate.

Change happens now, effects come with time. Flip the switch.

Boom, reinvented. The results take time. The bigger the change, the more patience required for the results.

That’s why urgency is my ally. Time multiplies effort like compound interest, and the old saying goes: When’s the best time to plant a tree? The best time to start is 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

Silly me, I would have thought the next best time would have been 19 years ago, but maybe I missed that day in Arbor Academy.

The message, though, is clear. Act now, act deliberately. Not in a panic but with a purpose. Delay, and I’m just leaving Future Me a bigger debt.

Which brings us back to the noun. The what. I had a boss that would always slow me down with this one simple question: “What do we want the outcome to be? Start with the end in mind.” Again, the criteria for me is simple. Is it True, is it Beautiful, is it Good?

Also, how I frame the change dictates the ending and the success or failure. Any change that constantly demoralizes me is doomed. If I have an end state in mind, and I’m not there, I’m failing. Right?

No. Remember the montage. Starting the montage is the success. You’ve gotta have a montage.

Seriously, though, my mind rebels against endless punishment. Why should I keep showing up if every step feels like defeat? For me, I often measure effort rather than outcomes. Build a habit of study, and not measure myself against the end. Even a little progress (if the change is big enough) is what I’m looking for. Patton put it perfectly: “A good plan executed now is better than a perfect one executed later.”

My dudes, attitude is everything.

There are exceptions: any positive reinvention that energizes me? That’s the winner. It creates a feedback loop: my effort sparks momentum, my momentum delivers wins, my wins fuel more energy. These can even be bits of the montage, if you will.

Quick wins? I grab them whenever I can. I’m wired for routine. Once a habit locks in, it’s tougher for me to break than to keep. Like autopilot, I set the course, and it flies itself. Your mileage may vary, but for me, momentum is king. Get the ball rolling, and inertia works for me, not against.

I’ve learned to not wait for a muse. She’s probably off with that random crazy chick anyway. Just consistent action.

At its core, reinvention isn’t about morphing into someone else. It’s honing the best of who I am, aligned with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Brutal honesty spots the flaws, urgency launches the fix, energy sustains the burn, and time polishes the gem. When it clicks? It’s worth every sweat drop, every dawn patrol, every skipped shortcut.

Whenever I am at a crossroads I always stare into a bowl of rice, hoping to find a grain of truth.

I’m beginning to think the only bad ending is the one where I don’t change. Oh, and all of the Disney® movies since 2017 or so. They all suck.

Great Replacement?

Race, Culture, IQ, and Truth

“What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 60? Your Honor.” – Better Call Saul

I have never seen a picture that is more Swedish than the one above. Whatever could the issue be?

Picture this: You’re at a family reunion, and Uncle Bob is still insisting in 2025 that the Vaxx is “safe and effective” and the only reason you don’t agree is that you don’t “trust the science”. Everyone chuckles, pats him on the back, and passes the stuffing wondering if Bob is going to eat through is mask. Harmless, right? Remember, Bob gets a vote even though his relationship with the Truth is probably pretty tenuous.

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are important. They’re foundational to finding out things that are beneficial to society and, if you’re me, also things that are in-tune with God’s plan.

For decades, at least, the GloboLeft has been attempting to control the Narrative on everything from climate Armageddon (remember, the Arctic will be ice free by 2015!) to gender as a spectrum that includes, somehow, people putting on suits and pretending to be animals.

But the crown jewel of their obfuscation Olympics®?

The ironclad link between race, intellect, outcomes and cultures. Why did they bury it under six feet of reinforced concrete?

Simple: because admitting this torpedoes their “all cultures are equal” fairy tale. Remember, the “Globo” in GloboLeft means that everything is the same, everywhere, right? If they admit there are differences, poof: there goes the vote farm. Even more, it gives the TradRight rationale to exclude endless hordes of foreigners whose languages, cultures, and norms are more alien to our nation than creatures from the planet Zantar.

Ahh, France.

Let’s start with the basics, because facts don’t care about pronouns or participation trophies.

IQ, that dusty old metric the smart set loves to hate, is rocket fuel for a successful life. On the individual level, folks clocking above 115 rake in 20-30% more dough over a lifetime, snag better jobs, and even divorce less. Higher IQ means more planning.

But let’s zoom out to nations. There, we find that IQ is a GDP cheat code. Countries averaging 100+ IQ (think Japan at 106) boast per capita incomes north of $40,000, while those scraping 80 or below (hello, sub-Saharan squad) limp along at less than $2,000.

A one-point bump in national IQ? That equates to a 7.8% GDP boost. Smart nations are wealthy nations.

Mohammed, what a fine Danish name!

Now, the electric fence the GloboLeft guards with tasers: Racial IQ gaps. In the US, Japanese and Chinese are at 106, whites are average 100, Hispanics are half a standard deviation down around 90-93, and blacks are at 85, a full standard deviation below the norm.

These hold steady across decades, tests, and tweaks for socioeconomic fairy dust. The same script holds for criminality: FBI’s 2024 tallies show blacks (13% of population) accounting for 51.3% of murder arrests.

And, no. Not all black people are low IQ murderers. Thomas Sowell exists.

But the Truth is that there is a substantive and real distance when viewed in aggregate. And it causes huge difficulties: low IQ correlates with impulsivity, poor planning, and a higher “screw the consequences” factor.

Bring this up, thought, and the responses are, “You’re racist!” even though the facts are stubborn and won’t go away. When confronted that these are persistent facts, the GloboLeft throws their Hail Mary: “But muh root causes! Poverty! Systemic racism! Colonialism’s ghost! 1619!”

And look what happens of you challenge the Narrative. Watson said, [he was] “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, where all the testing says, not really”.

It’s empathy porn, a verbal defibrillator to flatline any talk about the real facts. Sure, environment nips at the edges. Malnutrition might ding 5-10 IQ points, but when was the last time you saw a skinny poor person? Malnutrition isn’t a factor. Adopted black kids in white homes lag by a similar amount, the SAT scores from black kids from families at the highest income levels are lower than the SAT scores from white kids at the poorest levels.

This ain’t excusing; it’s enabling. Treating 30-year-olds like toddlers with excuses robs them of agency. If we’re gonna nanny them via EBT (Entitled Belly Timers) or Section 8 (Subsidized Shackles for the Aimless), fine. But adults get adult rules and toddlers get toddler rules. How about: no voting if you’re on the dole? SNAP’s 41.7 million users are 37% White, 26% Black, 16% Hispanic.

Why let chronic takers tank the makers?

This isn’t cruelty; it’s consistency. Benefit takers will always vote for people who promise more benefits. And, it’s a voluntary condition. Want to vote? Get off the benefits for two years.

Oh, wait . . .

The next lie, though is that all cultures are interchangeable widgets. We can swap them all like IKEA parts, and voila: Utopia!

Spoiler: Nope.

Cultures aren’t blank slates; they’re downstream from the people who make them. Those people are downstream from their genes. India’s a case study in spicy chaos: 1.4 billion souls with an average IQ ~82.

The result?

A subcontinent of smog-choked streets, bribe-fueled bureaucracy, and a GDP per capita scraping $2,500. No one’s fleeing Toronto for Mumbai. Now, Trudeau set Canada on a curry bender: they imported 500,000 Indians yearly, turning Tim Hortons® into Pooh Hut™.

The point was missed. If you replace every Canuck with a subcontinental clone you don’t get Canada 2.0 that’s short, brown, and with no upper body strength, you get a frozen New New Delhi.

A society of polite hockey lovers?

Nah, just more potholes, poop in the streets, Singhs driving trucks into innocent families, and power cuts.

And bringing their best? The top IQ in the United States (everyone above 130) is about 4.8 million people. But India?

India has an average IQ of 82? Their 130+ IQ club shrinks to 0.02% a population of only 299,000 Indians. The United States outproduces India 16-to-1 in geniuses, despite the headcount handicap.

Why import mediocrity when we’ve got homegrown innovation?

The world already has an India, why clone it in Cleveland?

Same script for Somalia’s sequel in St. Paul or Haiti’s remix in Springfield. Flood Minnesota with 100,000 East Africans (IQ ~68-70 nationally), and watch lutefisk disappear to some sort of piracy and theft – oh, wait, they’re already running scams?

Maybe they’ll start a dating app? They could call it OK Stupid.

Politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream from race. The latter is a taboo subject, but it’s True.

Shoehorning Somalis into the Land of 10,000 Lakes doesn’t Americanize them, it Somali-fies the lakes.

Truth demands we say the unsayable: America’s not a global hostel. Those 8 billion “Americans who haven’t arrived yet”? If America is an idea, they can have their ideas over there.

We’re a nation of pioneers, not parasites; inventors, not importers. The GloboLeft’s borderless fever dream erodes that, swapping high-trust hardware stores for low-IQ hawala bazaars. Result? Balkanized basket cases, where “diversity” means dialing 911 in five languages.

Look at the hate . . . one might call him a racist. Me? My new immigration policy would be “9 or 10? Let her in!”

I’m advocating adulthood: face facts, fix what’s fixable, and quit pretending that we can make a hot dog bark because it has the word “dog” in its name.

“Why” simply doesn’t matter. Fighting the root cause has proven to be a lost cause. At our stage we have to deal with the symptoms.

The stakes are high. If we don’t embrace Truth, the United States will end up exactly like those low-IQ nations: begging for scraps while the elites jet around the globe. I mean, it won’t be jets because they won’t have enough people smart enough to make jets. But you get the point.

And Bob still gets to vote.

Wilder’s Fables: Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Oh, yeah, call the police. Tell them about the Spear of Destiny, the golden goose, the lost Ark. Enjoy your stay in the psych ward. I understand Thorazine® comes in vanilla now.” – The Librarian: Quest for the Spear

I bought one of my friend an elephant statue for his front room. He said, “Thanks.” I said, “Don’t mention it.”

In the OG version of The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, (the OG version of which is pushing 2600 years old) a greedy farmer finds a goose that pops out golden eggs, but instead of chilling with the steady bling, yo, he decides to open up the bird for a quick jackpot despite the goose giving him a new golden egg each day. Shockingly, there is no gold mine inside. Just goose guts. And a lesson no one ever seems to pay attention to.

In 1945, the West stood astride the world like an economic Applebee’s® with endless appetizers, its factories humming and the treasury brimming with gold. Literal gold, and some of it was even ours – I’ll skip my usual grumbling about FDR’s confiscation for another post. Some of the gold wasn’t, it was gold from our allies that had been given to the United States for safekeeping. Because, panzers.

But America was a far greater treasure than all the gold in the country. America at that time was the goose of golden prosperity. The United States was responsible for half of the world’s GDP, its assembly lines spitting out cars, steel, washers, sinks, and dreams of a better future. Add in the allies? It was a clear three-quarters of the world GDP, with only the Soviet Union, still bulging from the war steroids it took for a decade, being close.

And there’s not a big market for a used T-34/76. “One owner, very nice. Ignore red stains, please. Last owner not so careful at Kursk.”

Capitalists have it easy. They never have to spell bourgeoisie. (meme as found)

Allies flocked to the Western orbit. Some were spooked by the hordes of Soviet tanks, others were nudged by CIA coups, and then nudged again until they got it right. Most, however, was because Uncle Sam’s deal of bikinis and bourbon was sweeter than a Moscow winter and a Siberian GULAG. It was an empire, but it was an empire of alliance.

Fast forward to today.

The Soviets are long gone, and the goose isn’t dead, but it’s close.

The economy has been slowly strangled by a combination of bad policies and worse ideas, and none are deadlier than mass immigration.

To be clear: the wealth of the West wealth was no accident – things that produce wealth aren’t illiterate laborers, pools of oil, or uncut trees. Nope. The wealth producer, the golden goose was culture, not what Vox Day so eloquently described as “magic dirt.” By killing the goose, our future is becoming bleaker, and the GloboLeft is cheering the downfall.

Bruce Lee was fast, but his older brother Su-den was even faster.

The golden age peaked post-World War II, and the United States had a 20-year head start on the rest of the world while Europe and Asia rebuilt from rubble.

By 1973, though, the United States began to falter economically.

This wasn’t entirely from external foes, but at least partially from our own hands.

Four factors gutted the goose:

dumping the gold standard,
feminizing the workforce,
enforcing affirmative action, and
opening borders to unrelenting immigration.

The first three wounded us; the last is the mortal blow, changing our people, our culture, and our wealth. Let’s discuss the carnage.

Dumping the Gold Standard (1971): Nixon’s pen stroke cut the dollar loose from gold, turning money into Monopoly® paper. Oh, wait, there’s a limit to how much Monopoly© cash they can print. The median home price in 1973 was $32,500. Today, it’s $412,300. Without gold’s anchor, our wealth’s a mirage, and the goose’s eggs are plastic.
Feminization of the Workforce: The 1970s pushed women into offices, doubling labor supply but halving family focus. Birth rates tanked—2.1 kids per woman in 1973, 1.6 in 2023. Empty cradles mean fewer Actual American workers, and less innovation from the best workforce on Earth. The GloboLeft calls it “empowerment” when a woman has to leave the home for fifty hours a week in order to afford to pay for another woman to ignore her child by becoming a cubical Karen. Go figure.

I have a new personal record in the 100-yard dash. I’m up to 47 yards. (meme as found)

Affirmative Action (Duke Power, 1971, for example): Forcing quotas over competence, the Supreme Court’s decision diluted merit. Companies hired to check boxes, not build bridges. A 2022 study found 30% of firms reported lower productivity post-DEI mandates. 30%. If diversity is our strength, I’m not sure who “our” refers to when we’re forced to play diversity bingo.
Mass Immigration: Here’s the killing blow. Since 1973, legal and illegal immigration flooded the West. There were 2.5 million border crossings in 2024 alone and those are the numbers that they’ll admit to, which we know are low. Now add in the Islamification of Europe, where France is nearly a Caliphate and the Germans keep going to work in order to pay for the illegals that flocked to them. Most don’t integrate. Imagine the farce: Mexican banners at California ICE protests where they tried to stop ICE from arresting underage illegals busy in the process of harvesting illegal (federally) marijuana. Can we be honest and just admit that immigration is not at all about joining the West, it’s about exploiting it.

Imagine, it only took 44 hours for the police to completely clear Martha’s Vineyard of illegals. (meme as found)

Immigration, though, is the dealbreaker because it changes the people. And everything is downstream of who the people are: culture, politics, and even PEZ®.

In 1973, a near-minimum-wage earner could buy a median home for $32,500, which was about five times the average annual wage. Today, that median home costs a stunning $412,300, ten times the average wage.

Why? Illegals depress wages. Back in 1973, a high school grad could pull a great job in construction. But even since 1990, construction wages have dropped 15% in real terms.

Illegals also drain services: illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150 billion annually (FAIR 2024), siphoning wealth like a cuckoo bird stealing the nest for its own young rather than for those that built it in the first place.

If it takes a village to raise a child, I guess it takes a vineyard to raise a cat? (meme as found)

The GloboLeft insists “diversity is our strength,” but Pew’s 2019 study shows diverse communities have less trust. Many immigrants—legal or not—don’t assimilate and have no desire to assimilate. Ever. Many (not all!) second and third-generation Mexicans in California wave foreign flags because they’re only here for the gold, not the goose and, in fact, despise the goose.

Meanwhile, families, the nucleus of Western civilization, struggle. Low wages and high costs mean fewer kids—Europe’s at 1.5 fertility, which means that, pretty soon, the Swedish Bikini Team™ will have mustaches and be wearing burkas. As we often repeat, the future is there for those who show up.

The West’s prosperity had nothing to do with luck. It was culture.

Discipline, merit, family, forged in Athens, Rome, and 1930s Detroit. The GloboLeft’s dogma remains one based in hate for the West: open borders, DEI, and reviling of every bit of the culture that creates wealth.

They’d rather pluck the goose than protect it, and be happy with the result.

But the goose isn’t dead yet.

Bleeding? Yes.

In a state that’s getting worse every day? Also yes.

Is it worse than most people think? Absolutely. It is a dire point we find ourselves at.

But one thing I’ve seen when I read about Western Civilization is this: every time it looks bleak, and it looks like the flame of what we stand for is in danger of getting extinguished, people become firm and take that stand. And we win because we’re fighting, at the core, not for an economic idea but for the Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good.

I think, in part, it’s because it’s not magic dirt. It’s in us, and this rallying from near defeat is what makes us who we are, what drives us to make civilizations, to make the golden goose, again and again.

You know, that even inspires me. Almost gives me goose bumps.

The Emperor’s Old Lies: Breaking The Programming With Bikini Pic

“How will the emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?” – Star Wars

I remember a few years ago when the school called me and said my son had been telling lies. “Tell him he’s pretty good, because all of my kids have graduated.”

The Emperor’s New Clothes is an 1837 very short fable written by Hans Christian Anderson, and I’ll give a quick reminder of what the story is about, since if you’re like me, third grade was a long time ago, even if I had to repeat it three times.

In a kingdom obsessed with dressing like a Kardashian on crack, Emperor Vain McFancypants struts around changing his outfit ever hour. Yet, he’s craving the ultimate outfit.

Enter two shady tailors who decide that there is money to be made here. They tell the emperor that they can make the ultimate outfit for him, something that would make Madonna blush. Not only that, but the clothes are so finely woven that they’d be invisible to dumb people.

They “weave” invisible fabric, and the emperor, too proud to admit he sees nothing, agrees that it looks great. His court, a bunch of yes-men terrified of looking as dumb as a host on The View, rave about the nonexistent outfit. The tailors mime stitching, cutting, and fitting, while the emperor is basically walking around in his royal skivvies.

Deciding that everyone deserves to see this new outfit, the Emperor decides to have a parade so people can see how cool his new threads are. Come parade day, he struts through town, buck-naked but confident, flexing for the crowd. Townsfolk, brainwashed by hype and not wanting to look stupid, cheer like it’s the return of Elvis.

How do the seven dwarves welcome Snow White? “Heigh Ho.”

But then, a kid, immune to nonsense, yells, “Why is the emperor walking around naked? It’s not a good look, dad.” The crowd gasps, realizing they’ve been simping for a streaker. The emperor, red-faced but committed, keeps posing, and pretending because he doesn’t see a way out.

Imagine attending a company training session filled with bobbleheads from HR. One of them opens up with “diversity is our strength.”

A lone man raises his hand and says, “Actually, studies show diverse communities have less trust.”

Silence.

Then gasps. Someone faints. The HR bobblehead sputters, “That’s not in the script!”

Welcome to the Emperor’s New Lies. Here, objective truth is banned, and the narrative is supported at all costs, since without believing that the weavers of the narrative are infallible, everyone will see that the GloboLeft is more naked than Charity over at stage three.

Boy, the GloboLeft has really lost the plot – it’s now more offensive to talk about getting into Sydney Sweeney’s genes than about getting into her jeans.

What is their great effort? The GloboLeft and GloboLeftElite have spent decades weaving lies about race, diversity, and culture and even denying that the Truth, Beauty, and Good exist. Thankfully, Truth, Beauty, and Good can’t be stopped no matter how many HR manuals they throw at it.

The GloboLeft’s playbook is straight from Hans Christian Andersen. They’ve ruled objective reality off-limits. The game is simple:

deny the truth,
deflect the evidence,
obscure the problem,
then 404 their brains when cornered and forced to confront that The Narrative is a lie.

Let’s talk about something simple and non-controversial: black-on-white violence.

FBI’s 2023 crime stats don’t lie: blacks, 13% of the U.S. population, commit 54% of murders. Black-on-white violent crime is 15 times higher than white-on-black, per DOJ’s 2019 data.

Step one: GloboLeft denies it. “Crime’s colorblind!” they scream, ignoring the numbers.
Step two: when you shove the stats in their face, they say, “Data doesn’t show a problem.”
Step three: when you pin them down, they wave hands— “It’s systemic racism! We need to solve the root cause!” Never mind we’ve spent $33 trillion since LBJ’s Great Society, with black poverty rates barely budging (12.3% in 1965, 11.6% in 2023).
Step four: they 404—mental shutdown, change the subject, ban the badthinker from the Internet because they think every pit bull is the same as a poodle.

Every pistol looks like it’s Austrian to me. My doctor said I have Glock-oma.

But, this isn’t just about race. It’s the GloboLeft script for every inconvenient truth:

“Diversity is our strength”: Pew’s 2019 study says diverse communities have lower social cohesion and trust. Homogeneous societies like Japan score higher on happiness. Yet the GloboLeft pushes open borders, forced classroom integration, and ensuring that everyone has the right to be near white people, ignoring the chaos.

“White people are racist”: A 2021 YouGov poll found Western countries (U.S., UK) are the least racist globally—Asians and Africans score higher on bias. But, the GloboLeft calls anyone who notices a bigot.

“Whites are the majority”: Whites are barely 8% of the global population, yet built modern science, literature, industry, programming and, yes, PEZ©. The GloboLeft ignores this, painting whites as oppressors.

I’m writing a book about Nordic cultures, but I don’t know if I’ll make it to the Finnish.

“Women have no disadvantage in sports”: Transgender men dominate women’s sports whenever they compete against real women. “Lia” Thomas won the NCAA swimming title in 2022, despite swimming that would be mediocre for a male. Biology is real, but the GloboLeft calls it transphobic.

“No biological intelligence differences exist”: Decades of IQ studies (e.g., Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) show consistent group differences, shaped by 70,000 years of differential adaptation in every climate on the planet. And, the GloboLeft would say that the only thing that was exactly the same across humans everywhere is the brain.

“Whites aren’t native to the U.S.”: A Muslim born in London to Pakistani parents claims “native British” status, but whites born in America aren’t? The GloboLeft says only brown people get homelands.

Where’s the capital of Zimbabwe? In a Swiss bank account.

“All cultures are equal”: If so, why do millions flee India, Mexico, and Nigeria for the West? Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Index ranks them 93, 126, 145 out of 180. I guess the West’s not perfect, but it’s also not Lagos.

The GloboLeft’s narrative isn’t about truth—it’s about control. They need you to buy the Emperor’s invisible clothes to keep power. Admitting black crime stats, diversity’s costs, or biological realities risks their house of cards. So they lie, deflect, and allow their brains to lock up, hoping you’ll shut up.

Why?

Because the West is built on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. From Athens’ logic to Edison’s bulb, we thrived by facing reality. The GloboLeft has a different dogma where there is no objective reality. This crumbles under scrutiny. They’ve spent $33 trillion on “root causes” since 1965, yet crime is up, trust is down, and borders are sieves. Their narrative is a scam, like selling a VCR in 2025 and calling it cutting-edge.

A 2024 Rasmussen poll found 68% of Americans reject “diversity is strength”: they now see the Emperor’s old lies for what they are. Gen Z’s waking up, especially the boys, sharing memes that cut through The Narrative. Every stat, every study, every viral post chips away at their narrative.

The West’s waking up, and it’s not asking permission. And it’s not pretending to see clothes that aren’t there.

We Already Know The Solutions, We Only Lack The Will

“Because I saved your whatever-it-is that was safely hidden before you dropped a Hellfire missile on it.” – The Mummy (2017)

Google™ is female. It won’t even let me finish a sentence without making suggestions.

I’m stuck in a conference room that smells like stale donuts and broken dreams.

Okay, that sounds like a detective novel that ends up with the hot dame double-crossing the private dick over the insurance money and a bottle of bourbon, but that’s not this post. Really, it’s just a business meeting and the meeting is done. But since everybody in the building knows each other, the meeting is in the lingering phase where we’re solving all the problems of the world.

Apropos of nothing, I say, “You know, 37% of the elderly have been taken advantage of by foreign scammers.” I have no idea if this is true, but it’s very specific. I pause. “That means that there are 63% who are still available to be scammed, so if we’re not millionaires, it’s our own fault.”

How did we clear bingo parlors in North Vietnam? B-52.

The reality though, really does piss me off. Americans lost $12.5 billion in 2024. These aren’t just Nigerian princes with emails littered with the comical spelling errors, no they are also slick Mumbai call centers with intense marketing campaigns. I had heard an estimate (that I can’t find) indicating that upwards of 80,000 Indians worked in these call centers, all laughing as they entice American grandmas to go to Target™ to get gift cards.

It actually does make me quite mad.

I lean forward, fed up.

“The solution is and always has been dead simple. The NSA has these call centers mapped down to their curry orders and can tell you the last time Gupta changed his underwear. They know where they are. Trump could launch a BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile carrying 1,000 pounds of high explosive tomorrow into a call center. Turn it into rubble. Get on TV and say, ‘Another missile is on the way. Shut down the scam call centers.’

“When they don’t, another missile hits. Trump gets back on the TV. ‘Another one tomorrow. And the day after? We shut India off of the Internet and satellite communications. We mine the harbors. Your choice.’ The world would be stunned. The calls would stop.”

One of my friends said, “Well, that escalated quickly.”

No, it didn’t. It was and is the obvious solution. It could stop tomorrow if someone had the spine.

I hate it when my friend tells me about going to chiropractic school. Too much backstory.

Since Trump took office, he’s shown what spine looks like (with the exception of the Epstein papers). His border policies, travel bans, and tariffs weren’t just talk he did what he promised and got a rare federal budget surplus in June due to them. This is unlike every other empty suit before him who campaigned on “tough on (drugs, crime, illegals)” then promptly developed amnesia on day one in the Oval Office.

Our problems: drugs, terror, illegals, scams, and more all have simple fixes. The only thing missing is the will to implement the solution.

We’ve got a laundry list of messes, and the solutions are the first thing you’d think of if you weren’t a spineless bureaucrat.

Drug Trafficking: Cartels pump fentanyl across the border, killing 100,000 Americans yearly.

Solution: Deploy the military to the border, treat cartels as enemy combatants. Drone strikes with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles slamming into stash houses or cartel overlord’s haciendas, streamed live by the White House at the top of each and every hour for a week, and I imagine that getting drugs across the border will be the least of the concern of what remains of the cartels.

Repeat as necessary.

Remember, for an orphan, any back of chips is “family sized”.

Terrorism: A stronger immigration screening policy and 9/11 would never have occurred.

Solution: Denaturalize radical aliens and ship them home. Make Somalians in Minnesota Somalians in Somalia again, and then sink any boat leaving Somali. Deport or detain without apology.

Illegal Aliens: Millions of illegals cost taxpayers $150 billion annually—schools, hospitals, welfare. Their foreign culture and zero desire to assimilate pushes the country onto the path of Civil War.

Solution: Arrest the CEO of any company employing illegals. Sentence for the C-Suite? A year for each illegal employed. Create Wilder’s Square Mile: a square mile, fenced camp on the border with Mexico. Illegals found will be dropped off there until processed, like an AirBNB® with no Wi-Fi. The border with Mexico is open, so they can leave if they want to. If the illegals don’t leave? Seize all of their assets – bank accounts, sneakers, cars, houses, anything they own is forfeit. End sanctuary cities with federal troops. One mayor in custody for insurrection, others comply.

I opened a sanctuary for large marine mammals: Habitat for Huge Manatees.

Is all of this Constitutional?

Well, most of it, probably. Thomas Jefferson set the precedent in 1801. Barbary Pirates, Muslim slavers and pirates from North Africa raided U.S. ships, enslaved sailors, and demanded tribute from our new nation. Jefferson, fresh in office, said “Enough, bitches.” Or something like that. But he had a secret weapon: Article II, Section 2 makes the president commander-in-chief to protect American interests.

Jefferson sent the USS Constitution to blast Tripoli’s ports, no Congress needed, and the Marines get a line in their song. By 1805, the pirates begged for peace, “Please, just don’t send more of those Marines!”

All of the above echo Jefferson: act fast, hit hard, protect the Actual Americans. The Constitution’s fine with it; only spineless elites disagree.

Why then, do these problems persist?

Here’s the dirty secret: the elites don’t really want to solve these problems. The solutions aren’t hard, literally your first instinct, the first thing you think of is the thing that will work.

Drugs? Blow up a cartel. Terror? Sink a boat. Illegals? Deport ‘em, jail anyone who employs them. Scams? Missiles to Mumbai.

So, why aren’t these problems solved? In some cases, it’s because politicians are gutless and don’t want to anger India. I don’t care much about what India thinks, but that’s another post.

In other cases, there’s a collusion of the darkest motives of our political system. Illegals? The Chamber of Commerce crowd wants cheap labor to pluck chickens and make beds, wanting the TradRight to not take action. The GloboLeft love that the illegals swarm to states that vote Blue, and increase the number of members of Congress that come from, say, California.

My friend’s ex-wife asked if she could stay with him because she’s afraid because a stalker has been coming to her house. She’s going to save him quite a bit in gas money.

The dame walks into my office – she’s got a pair of thirty-eights, and a pistol, too. I could smell perfume that cost more than I made in a month as she walked in.

“John Wilder, I hear you’re a P.I. who . . . solves problems.”

“I sure am, sweetheart.”

I mean, I’ve found that you can solve almost any problem in the world with only three BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile carrying 1,000 pounds of high explosive.

Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

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

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

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

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

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

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

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

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

And then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

Stoics, A Bikini, Families, And The Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love that.

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

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

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

I mean, why would I do that?

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, he’s dead.