Illegal Immigration: It’s a Pyramid Scheme

“If you’re trying to extort us because we are immigrants, we know the law.” – Taken

If you would like a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our lives, please press 1 for English. (All memes today are as found.)

As I look to the vast, teeming hordes of illegals washing on to our shore daily, I ask myself, what rational nation would make it easy for hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to easily enter the country each month, every month, for the entirety of the Biden administration?

Some have claimed that as many as 11 million to 13 million of these fighting-age men are entering the country every year.  That’s a total of nearly 40 million in the three and a half years since Biden assumed the office.  Of military aged men.  Who won’t be in the military.  At least not our military.

It has even gotten to the point where the normies that tend to vote left (not the committed GloboLeft, mind you, but the normies who voted for Biden) have come to realize, “No, this is too much.”

It’s gotten to the point where other immigrants have said, “No mas.”

It’s gotten so bad that Joe Biden, he who Executive Ordered out of existence Trump’s border strategy in the first forty minutes after he took the oath, had to pretend it was the Republicans who were against border security last month.

Oh, and a few minutes after that he then offered immediate legal status to 500,000 spouses of illegals.  It must be wonderful to be a GloboLeftist and have the memory of a goldfish.

Of course, one of the main reasons the GloboLeft want to haul in illegals over the border is that most people who are illegals want free stuff, and most immigrants in general (not all, but in general) have come from countries where a higher degree of socialism is the norm.  Plus, many don’t speak the language, so they’re left to whatever the local GloboLeftist “Community Organizer” tells them for political beliefs. 

But, perhaps, another reason that the GloboLeft wants so much immigration is debt. If you look at average debt in the United States, it’s at $104,000.  Even Gen Z is getting on the debt train:  the average Zoomer debt is about $30,000, even though the oldest Zoomer is 26.

Average illegal (or legal) immigrant debt load?  Zero.

The opportunity then appears:  load the illegals up with loans at silly high interest rates.  Keep in mind, they have crappy credit, so a 20% interest rate to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place seems like a good deal.  Illegals also have, generally, lower reading comprehension and less experience with the debt-industrial complex, so renting to buy a tv, a car, furniture (rent to own!) which makes it look like the immigrant is actually adding to the economy rather than subtracting from it.

And they are subtracting from it:  medical care, schooling, infrastructure, housing, and criminality all pile on.  While American might have become a third-world hellhole all by itself (which I doubt) illegals are a pyramid scheme.  The scheme requires more and more illegals to take on the debt and consooom the resources.

The solution to all of these problems brought on by the immigration?  GloboLeftists want to import yet more illegals to solve the problems caused by all of the previous illegals.  The endpoint of this is disaster.  It ends up destroying the countries, no, nations, that were insane enough to practice this importation.  A nation, like Ireland, filled with Irish people ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish.  A Moroccan born in Ireland is no more Irish than a mouse born in a stable is a horse.

No, Ireland then ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish, and then it becomes a country, and it will never be the same.  I think the Irish have figured this out, as they’ve been pushing back on the GloboHomoElite as of late.

Several years ago, I was listening to NPR™ before I gave up on it entirely – it was probably 2016.  This was an out-and-out propaganda piece, and I realized it at the time.  In this snippet, the child of Iranian parents that had lived in California had moved to Copenhagen.  He was quite upset that his daughter (born in California) was not considered to be Danish.

Well, she’s not.  She never will be.  Persian?  Sure.  Danish?  Never.  At best, a resident.  Her children, three or four generations hence?  Maybe so, as soon as they are named Viggo or Alfred or Clara or Freja.

These changes have consequences that range far deeper than just the economic.  England was a country made for the English, and that’s how it works.  The customs and attitudes of India or Pakistan?  Well, import enough of that, and England won’t be England.

America is not Ireland – I’m of Scots-Dane-English extraction, and no Scot, Dane, or Englishman would claim me as anything but their very distant kin, which I understand.  But I am more than three generations American, so I have no other home, no other place that is mine.

And just like England was made by and for the English, America was made by and for the Americans.  Whoever is coming across the border is not an American, but someone who is actively destroying America.

None of the GloboLeftElite care that this will ruin all of the nations of the West economically or demographically.  As an anon put it,

“They’ll destroy it all, all of society, for a lifetime of personal hedonism and debauchery, funded off of the suffering of billions.”

I’m not sure that’s right.  The forces of the GloboLeftElite do like their pleasures, but many of the foot soldiers of the GloboLeft simply want to watch it all burn.  They don’t care, particularly, to see anything grow in its place, just so long as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are destroyed.

Destruction, though it may be easy, and though it may be very common in the coming years, will not be the final say.  In the end, since the beginning of man, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good have proven to come back alive, again and again, even when the night seemed the darkest.

I have never said the path is easy, and I’ve never said any of us will live to see the end of the tale, and I hate to give spoilers, but we’re not done.

Not even close.

The Truth, Neutrinos, Taylor Swift, And Otto Von Bismarck.

“I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?” – The Matrix

When I was a kid, I could walk into a 7-Eleven with just a dollar and walk out with a six pack of pop and three candy bars.  Now?  They have cameras everywhere.

I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general.  Why?  Because I said so.

The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails.  The Truth is, very often a grim thing.  I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined.  Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth.  I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.

That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits.  Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth:  The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.

Or something like that.  Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped.  But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.

What was Otto von Bismark’s favorite Queen song?  Under Prussia.

The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.  In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are . . . disturbing.

That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew?  What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong?   What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.

One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college.  I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water.  Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.

There are several things still functioning on the Titanic, for instance, the sinks still hold water.

And, it’s True.  Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people.  I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash.  I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.

That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional:  it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage.

But it comes down to friendships, too.  I once had a close friend at work.  I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed.  Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting.  Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.

She said, “Strip down, facing me.”  It wasn’t until the McDonald’s® cashier screamed that I figured out she meant my credit card.

Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions.  It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending.  This is better, even if the Truth is ugly.

Why?  Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better.  If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle.  Again.

That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth:  “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident.  Those “solutions” may even make things worse.  For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?

For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff:  housing and food.  How many illegals will that policy stop?

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem.  In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing.

Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.

The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever.  Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong.  Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”

It’s a powerful question.  If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong?  What’s the upside if I’m right?  We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear.  It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.

So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me.  I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional.  They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right.  By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.

Just kidding.

I’m really hoping this isn’t a spoiler for you Civil War buffs. 

The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth.  It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome.  Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead.

Stupid neutrinos.

The Internet Is Crappier. On Purpose.

“It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Google™, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine.” – The Simpsons

I’ve had millions of hits, but none of them from Best Korea.

Today I had to spend an hour searching for PEZ® dispensers honoring the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial.  Amazingly, despite the time I spent looking, no one that I could find has made a PEZ™ dispenser to honor this historic moment.  To me, it was amazing that Amber’s lawyers worked so long and hard to prove that Depp was utterly innocent.

Google™ used to be better.  I remember it wasn’t a little better, it was a lot better than it is today.

To be fair, I’ve mainly stopped using Google© as my search engine of choice.  Besides being horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite shills, they also have futzed with their algorithm so much that when I do a search for common phrases that are pretty unique to my site, I don’t show up on the first two pages.

Go figure.  I mean, horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite?  I might be able to deal with that.  But kill my search results?

They’re dead to me.

The FBI recently announced that Hillary Clinton’s laundry did itself.

Search had long been skewed by Google®, but the autistic programmers that originally put it all together really took that “Don’t Be Evil©” original mission statement to heart.  They wanted to create great search results.  They even went as far as to make sure there was a firewall between their search people and their ad people so that search was preserved.

Oh, sure, they put their thumb down as hard as they could to get Hillary selected in 2016.  Heck, one researcher thought that over 3,000,000 votes were impacted by their search results, alone.  Hmmm, Donald Trump is put on trial for forking over $130,000 to a tramp via a shady lawyer (yeah, he has horrible taste in people) but Google™ subverts their entire search platform in favor of a candidate?

No crime here.  Move along, citizen.

Regardless, the search engine was still pretty good.  As the newfound desire of the GloboLeftElite to clamp down on speech, starting about 2017, Google™ seemed to shy away from that.  Again, the search results in 2017 were pretty good.

If Elon Musk really does send thousands of people to Mars, he’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

But around 2019, the ad executives at Google™ decided that, perhaps, the search results were too good.  You can read an article about that here (LINK).

The problem was that if the search engine were too good, that meant fewer searches.  Fewer searches meant fewer ads.  Fewer ads meant less money.  The paradox was, the better Google™ got at search, the less money they made from ads.

The result was the same as at most businesses when money meets principles:  money wins.  Google™ searches were “encrapulated” so that they were crappier.  More irrelevant sites should show up in a search.  Oh, and the ads?  They weren’t getting enough clicks.  Solution?  Make it less visible that they’re ads – make them look like legitimate search results.

But I did not know that the IRS now accepts Apple® gift cards!

Indian scammers *love* this, since now they can buy an ad, redirect people to their scam website, and get the scam going.

In a recent example, I did a search for a fairly unusual phrase, put quotes around it, and hit “go”.  My quotation marks around the exact phrase I was looking for were utterly ignored.  The results were . . . entirely encrapulated.

I finally remembered where the quote came from, a website that was now dark, but that someone had resurrected it elsewhere.  Boom, there it was, the exact phrase (it was an article title) and I was in business.  Google™, however, had ignored my “quotation marks” and my

-ignore

-results

-with

-these

-words and instead gave me a mishmash of crap that still included the trash I tried to weed out.

Now major search engines (Google©, Bing®, DuckDuckGo™) are giving only answers from the mainstream media, especially with certain topics – politics being one of them.  The beauty of the Internet, circa 2005, is that the mainstream media hadn’t figured it out, so great content with dissenting voices was given a huge platform.

If NPR™ started a metal band, would it be called, “All Things Dismembered”?

Remember when Google™ used to say, “About 1,242,400 matches”?  That’s gone.  Google™ has stopped showing the number of pages, no doubt after people figured out that only about 225 results are ever shown.

Of course, NBCNESPNPR© has a lot of money riding on being able to provide curated news to you for fun, profit, and control – so search engines censoring any idea that is contrary to The Message is their goal.  The major search engines seem to be on board with this.

This is also a major reason that comments are now dead on many websites, because giving the people who read the encrapified news are often embarrassed by that pesky Truth.  Why allow comments at CNN™, when someone can come and make The Message look silly with just a few words?

Pressure has been specifically put on several sites, including Unz™, where unregulated commentors have caused Big Search to blacklist them killing their traffic from search. Oops, BIPOClist them.  In the case of Zero Hedge™ (and The Federalist™), Google Ads™ were cancelled until they controlled their comments.

Yandex.com is better in many regards to Google©, even though it is Russian owned.  When I did a search on Google™ for “Civil War Weather Report” – I was buried so deep that I missed it as I went by – over thirty items in front of my pages, which have nearly that exact title.  On Yandex®?  I’m SEVEN of the top ten results, like I used to be back before 2020, when the big political censorship bug hit all of the major search engines.

What’s the difference between bigfoot and Amber Heard?  Johnny Depp never found bigfoot’s poop in his bed.

I guess that if I use Yandex© from time to time, well, then the FSB as well as the NSA will know that I’m searching for Amber Heard PEZ© dispensers.  I couldn’t find a set with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but I did find one set consisting of Jesus, Amber Heard, and Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, Micheal Cohen?  I guess they were in a set because they all got nailed on the cross.

Well, to be fair, two of them were nailed on the cross-examination . . . .

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet.  And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today.  That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities.  Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left.  Why?  Because being in a city is dependency.  If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally.  This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster?  A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific.  And where would they put all the street-poo?  Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them.  They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

  • Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
  • Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
  • Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
  • Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
  • Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
  • Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time.  People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower.  98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country.  Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads?  Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors.  Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it.  They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection?  God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols.  She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller.  It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are.  This is not a fluke:  John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this:  in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities.  Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not.  There’s one other missing factor:  religion.

Cities are more secular.  It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day.  Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man.  Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work.  I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff.  In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular.  However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular.  There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population:  they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from:  it certainly won’t be San Francisco.  And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it.  We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Scott Adams, Charles Murray, And Why The Government Doesn’t Like Families

“Well, I didn’t know you wanted to get involved with the discussion, Mr. Helper.” – Back to School

I thought nice things about Nancy when I heard that she said she helped blind children, but then I figured out she meant verb, not adjective.

A few weeks ago I was driving all over creation, so I had a chance to listen to a few podcasts as the miles of Upper/Lower Midwestia melted by over dashboard.  One of the podcasts was from Scott Adams.

One of Scott’s topics was about the concept of identity.  In dealing with young kids, say four or five, researchers were trying to figure out how to best motivate these snot-covered disease machines to help tidy up a room.  I must take a moment to note that forcing toddlers to replace hotel staff could potentially really help the bottom line of Marriott®, so I’m definitely for it.

Regardless, the researchers tried to ask the young kids to “help tidy up.”  This had the effectiveness you might imagine, as my experience has shown that the typical five-year-old has the attention span of Robin Williams on cocaine.

But then the researchers tried another tactic.  They asked the kids, “Are you a helper?”  That worked, and so did the kids.  They stayed on task for longer, and were apparently not as useless as they normally are.

I keep falling off of my bike – it’s a vicious cycle. (meme as found)

Adams finished up the segment.  He moved on to another topic, which was some random piece of GloboLeftElite propaganda that was circulating on CNN™ or MSNBCommunist©.  He then asked his audience, “Do you believe that?”

None of them did.  Scott then made the statement:  “You are immune to the propaganda of the Left.  Why?”

Various answers came back.

“Oh, let’s see, FakeName52 said, it’s because we’re smarter?  True, FakeName52, but that’s not it.  VirginiaFats says that it’s because we’re more rational?  True, but that’s not it either.”

Adams’ answer?

It’s the same thing as the toddler answer:  we’re immune to (lots of) the propaganda of the GloboLeftElite not because we’re smarter (we are) or more rational (we are) but because of who we conceive ourselves to be:  the lies of the GloboLeft become apparent when viewed through the filter of being someone who finds family important, for instance.

When deaf people go to court, is it still called a hearing?

That’s a pretty deep thought:  Who I am is more important to me than what I’m doing.  If I think of myself as more honest and trustworthy I’ll actually be more honest and trustworthy.  If I think of myself as a victim and incapable of dealing with the world, that’s also exactly who I’ll be.

Simple as.

And, if that was where my podcasting journey ended, that might have been good enough for a Friday post – it feels like that sort of topic, since it’s essentially a way to change the way I look at and interact with the world.  But the next podcast up was John Stossel interviewing Charles Murray.

Just like O.J. was best known for, um, one thing, Charles Murray is best known as the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book about I.Q. that touched a third rail by showing data that I.Q. is at least partially inherited.  Scandals!

If a cannibal doesn’t like eating brains, think his friends will give him a hand?

But before that he wrote a lot about government policy, even being quoted by Ronald Reagan from time to time.  Murray wrote about the interplay between government policy and outcomes, and one of the things that he found that bothered him the most is that all of the policies that give money to unmarried women had the consequence (intended?) of kicking the man out of the house.

The woman don’t need no man because .gov steps in and becomes the breadwinner.  Heck, the government is even better than an actual husband and father because the government never judges, always pays on time, and let’s the woman sleep with whoever they want whenever they want.

So, no father, no problem.  Right?

Well, not exactly.  Young boys look to fathers as role models, as someone that they’d like to be like.  Since Uncle Sugar is now the de facto father, that means that the only role models available to a young boy in a situation like that is, in the words of Charles Murray, “the worst possible role model:  the most aggressive and meanest person in their circle of friends.”

I built a model of Mount Everest and The Boy asked if it was to scale.  I said, “No, it’s to look at.”

We see the consequences of that all around us.  How many of the “youths” shooting up Chicago or Baltimore have a father at home?  Seven out of ten blacks (2018 data) were born out of wedlock.  No father, or a revolving door of fathers removes the role model the boy should have had.  The numbers for whites aren’t encouraging, either:  nearly three out of ten whites is now born out of wedlock.

This should be no surprise if you’re familiar with r/K selection theory.  I’ll give a quick explanation.  This will be a refresher for some, or you can read one of my previous posts here (link below) for more a more in-depth discussion.

r/K Biology And The Coming Cold Winter

r selection is the selection process followed by rabbits.  Rabbits live (generally) in an environment with large numbers of resources, so they have rabbit sex all the time.  They produce lots of little rabbits, and, for the most part, the rabbits have little involvement in raising all of their baby rabbits.  Rabbits also don’t particularly care who they mate with, there are no pair bonds.  Rabbits survive based on a numbers game.  In high resource environments, it’s about sex, all the time, with anyone and everyone.

When dentists get awards, they don’t give them trophies, just a little plaque.

K selection is different – it’s the selection process that wolves have.  Wolves often live in low-resource environments.  They pair-bond for life, and a huge amount of resources is expended in the long process of turning a wolf pup into an adult member of the pack.

Obviously, the environment for women right now favors r selection, and I can’t help but think that this is entirely on purpose.  That attack on the family seems to serve the GloboLeftElite’s agenda.  Families are the atoms of civilization, and to fundamentally transform civilization, the families have to be controlled first.

As for me?  I’m a helper.

The Post On Nihilism I’ve Been Working On (Here And There) For Weeks

“Think his nihilism got the best of him and he tried to kill himself?” – House, M.D.

Nietzsche couldn’t use pencils.  He thought they were all pointless.

A big danger is Nihilism.

It’s certainly one of the biggest dangers that society faces today.  As our society has become less religious, more urban, and has a greater and greater embracing of technology, people begin to ask:

Does any of this matter?  Do our values have any real meaning?

My answer to both of those questions is, of course, yes.  Values and virtues don’t become outdated.

But what is Nihilism?  Nietzsche defined Nihilism fairly simply:

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no thing in itself.  This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

To a Nihilist, nothing matters and everything that anyone can think of is true.  Read that sentence again, and tell me what I’ve missed in what’s ailing society at its foundation, right now, today.  To quote Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, if Nihilism is the “extinction of the individual, then this world and everything in it – love, goodness, sanctity, everything – are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any ultimate consequence, and the full horror of life is hidden from man only by the strength of their will do deceive themselves; and ‘all things are lawful,’ no otherworldly hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and suicidal dreams.”  I’m guessing he knew my ex-wife.

Observance to a religion gives a society many things:  purpose, values, unity, and stability, among others.  But a Nihilist would say that all religions have the same validity, just like all cultures have the same validity.

But that is observably false.

Say what you will, but the Aztec people had a great motto:  “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

I’ll cherry pick an example:  Aztecs.  The Aztecs were a bloodthirsty, cannibal, slaving religion.  When their ancestors escaped up north, they became known (later) as the Anasazi, and were so hated that they managed to get a huge coalition of all the other tribes together to unite to kill them, probably because having cannibals as neighbors is horrible for property values.

We live in a nation where academics and the news media are trying to normalize everything from cannibalism to “minor-attracted persons” to men pretending to be women.  The only, and I mean only, way that this sort of normalization attempt occurs is because the GloboLeft are a group of nihilists that don’t have any fixed beliefs, at all.  They were HATING former FBI Director James Comey before Trump fired him.  Then, in the span of a single day, they were converted to loving him.

“Comey was always the good guy.”

We were always at war with Eastasia.

When Amy was a child, she said she wanted to go into comedy.  Well, no one is laughing now.

If horrible religions like the Aztec religion can result in murder, wholesale slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, imagine how much worse it is to have no religion at all?  Now, it becomes open season on anything.  The Mrs. likes to talk about an article she read once (maybe it was back when we subscribed to Reason?) about the author attending a Washington, D.C. dinner party.

The conversation went something like this . . . .

“Well, of course Africa is a problem, and probably has 200,000,000 too many people.  I think that it can be solved, though, by withholding food supply.”  This wasn’t a politician, but probably a GloboLeft academic or regulator.

The author confronted the GloboLefty:  “You’re casually talking about starving 200,000,000 people to death?”

Apparently, the GloboLefty didn’t really like it when it was phrased that way, but when he could hide behind pretty words that disguised the real meaning of what he was saying, well, he was good with it.

I was going to donate my clothes to starving people in Africa, but I decided not to.  If my clothes fit them, they’re definitely not starving.

The French Revolution was, perhaps, the very first example of this sort of extreme Nihilism, where the idea was not a war on man, but an organized war on God, Himself.  Mankind has certainly had its share of civil wars and genocides throughout history, but the French Revolution was something entirely new – the desire of an idea, Nihilism, to remake an entire nation and discard every idea from the past.

To a Nihilist or a GloboLeftist (but I repeat myself) I am nothing.  You are nothing.  We are not even worthy of consideration as humans.  We are beneath contempt.  To quote Rose again, “The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.”  In the words of V.I. Lenin:  “. . . there will be no way of getting away from it, there will be nowhere to go.”

Really.

Should the Russian Revolution be renamed the Tsar Wars?

The greatest horrors (that’s “horror” – I’m not talking about Madonna) in the history of humanity have been brought about by GloboLeft governments while being run not by atheists, but by antitheists.  Period, and that’s verifiable by actual numbers.  The end stage of this is the Nihilism we see around us now:  The Nihilism bent only on destruction.  The French Revolution started it, but you can see it daily at work

As I’ve said again and again, I believe we will win, because we stand for something and to win they have to kill us all.  Every single one of us.

They can’t.  After 74 years of trying, the Soviets couldn’t erase Religion and the values it provides.  Today, only 13% of Russians are atheists.  Infecting everyone with Nihilism is really, really hard.

My doctor said I should drink more wine.  He actually said, “less beer”, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines.

Why am I so certain we’ll win?  Because we’ve been winning for at least 2000 years, and that won’t stop now.  I do believe in Truth.  And I know others to, too.

That’s all it takes to win.

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior.  Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails.  Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations.  It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were?  In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this?  The book in question is A Farewell to Alms:  A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.  How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

  • Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results.  (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me)  After a bit, I finally found it.
  • On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor.  Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all?  Guess you’d better start picking favorites.  In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why?  The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever.  Houses (if they even  had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.”  The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler:  “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor.  Great Britain was no exception.  There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor.  The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids.  But the poor kids also die more often.  This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy:  the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up.  Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close.  It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close.  The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows.  Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life.  And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless:  marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft.  Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft.  And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors.  It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down.  It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK).  To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy.  So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.

Forbidden Opinions: The GloboLeft Versus The Beautiful

“Look, there is light and beauty up there, that no shadow can touch.” – The Return of the King

I’m trying to improve my double entendres.  But it’s not easy.

This is the last in the series about the GloboLeft’s war against the Good, Beautiful, and True, at least for now.  We’re down to Beautiful.  Why did I do them in the order of True, Good, and Beautiful?  Because they’re not really in order, and they each complement the other.  Or maybe I have a problem with authority – who can say?

Which one of the three is best?  Each of them.  They all work together.  That is why the GloboLeft fights these so very, very hard.  Their typical pattern is to pick a value, and then pick its absolute opposite, and then celebrate that.  To pick from Monday’s post:  why to they look at men dressed as women and call them women?  Because that’s the opposite, and it must be celebrated.

(as found)  My take?  There are two sexes, two genders, and about a million fetishes.  I mean, I have a logic fetish – I can’t stop coming to conclusions.

Beauty is the last of the three that we’ll discuss, but it figures in so much of what we see in our lives today, especially since everything that’s ugly is now celebrated, and there is an active attempt to remove beauty from public life.

A GloboLeftist would try to convince you that beauty is subjective.

It is not.  Back when people were allowed to experiment on human babies, they’d show babies pictures of pretty things and ugly things.  Babies reacted positively to pretty things (and people!) and negatively to ugly things (and George Soros).  It is a part of us.  And we know it when we see it.

So, here are some of the statements that the GloboLeft actually believes:

GloboLeftists believe that every female is stunning and brave.

Not so much with males, since they don’t like the patriarchy.  Or something, not sure what, but it’s still okay to make fun of dudes.  This is one where they’re specifically talking about female (which includes, bizarrely, transexuals) beauty.

Here’s an example:  Lizzo is just as beautiful as (insert actually attractive actress here).  I wasn’t originally aware of what a Lizzo even was, until I saw a video of her playing a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison.

(meme as found) Where do you find the scariest part of the internet?  HTTP Lovecraft.

Wow.  She (at that point) looked to weigh about as much as a World War II Iowa class battleship.  And she wore a skintight leotard.  There isn’t enough eye-bleach in the world.  It looked like a potato (Lizzo) with a crystal toothpick.

Another example:  Zendaya was named one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world.  I’ll admit that she’s a middling character actress with a range of emotions that go from “irritated” to “thinking about talking to my doctor about my inability to have regular bowel movements.”

10 most beautiful women in the world?  She wouldn’t have been in the top 10 in my senior class.  Plus, I think she’ll fill out and look like a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears® before she’s 35.  The good news is I don’t think she’ll go full Lizzo-potato.

I know which choice I’d McMake.  (meme as found, so my criticism is not unique)

The GloboLeftists believe that all art is valid and beautiful.

There are so many different ways that humans work to create beauty that it’s hard to catalog them all.  But I’ll start with architecture.  Sure, I don’t live in a city, but lots of people do.  Here’s one made by actual humans in Copenhagen versus a nameless, faceless, commieblock.  Which is more beautiful?  Which makes you feel more human?  Which would contain more PEZ®?

I worked with an Asian who dipped Copenhagen.  His name was Mr. Chu.

And then there’s music.  We started the 20th Century with Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1908) moved to I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1963, 55 years later.  What came out 57 years later?  Wet Ass Pussy.

Sure, Take Me Out to the Ballgame doesn’t mention virtues, but it’s innocent.  I Want to Hold Your Hand shows a little intent.  But Wet Ass Pussy?  It’s beyond crass and replaces Beauty with it’s very opposite.

Likewise, literature (mainstream) has gone downhill.  I’ll pick science fiction.  Why?  I’ve been reading that since I could read.  Around 2010 I had the idea that I’d outgrown science fiction, that I was older, jaded, and the genre didn’t have anything for me anymore.

I then picked up one of the old books I’d loved as a kid.  It was still awesome.  I hadn’t changed, the genre had become ugly.  And that’s coming from a Hugo®-nominated (really, this is true, under a pseudonym) author.  But there are still great novels out there.  And maybe one of those authors will (hint) post links to his stuff below.

No, the Beauty still exists in literature, but the GloboLeftElite that controls the mainstream press wants to make it ugly.  That’s the same reason that movies are sucking now, and actresses often look like a burlap sack filled with doorknobs.  The movies are no longer meant to exult in what’s best in us, to show and celebrate virtues.  Nope.  Movies are there to sell the opposite of the values and the opposite of Beauty.

Speaking of movies, Disney® apparently is forcing video game creators to make characters ugly.  From Overlord DVD (a YouTube® channel) comes the news that a new Star Wars® video game is . . . ugly.  The rumor is that Disney© is requiring that the studio make the characters that way.  Why?

(as found at Overlord DVD’s channel)  “Fugly girl, come out to play . . . Fugly giiiirrrll, come out to pla-ay.”

Disney© isn’t doing this to make money.  There must be another purpose.

I could go on and on, but at some point I need to hit the hay.  Here are more examples, and you no doubt could make a very, very long list where Beauty has been replaced by ugly recently:

  • Painting contests, won by an actual chimpanzee.
  • Celebrating every family structure except ones with mothers and fathers,
  • Natural foods versus slop – I think nacho cheese is probably made in a refinery out of Vaseline and yellow crayons, but I can’t prove this.

The end process is to pick a value, invert it, with the goal of subverting the actual value.  The best news is this:  The True, the Beautiful, and The Good are going to win.

How do I know this?

Even the GloboLeft knows the True, the Beautiful, and the Good when they see it.  They just hate it.

So, they dress up a potato and celebrate it playing a flute.  This is their best play.

We’ve got this.

Forbidden Science: The GloboLeft Versus Truth

“Archeology is not an exact science.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

I failed my medical school test because of nerves.  The right answer was bones.

It has become clear that the GloboLeft has become truly Soviet in the way that they view that basic reality must conform to their ideology.  Their ideology isn’t based in any sort of reality – it’s based instead on the equivalent of a child’s wish list for the way that they’re really, really like the world to be.  And if they wish it enough, it must be true, or they’ll hold their breath until it is.

Here are a few ways that the “I f***ing love science” crowd get more wrong than the Vaxx:

They believe that there are no significant personality and physical differences between men and women.

They really believe this.  To be fair, if all they had to deal with were GloboLeft troglodyte women and pencil-neck Antifa® dudes, that might be an assumption that might make sense.

If they really buy into this, (and they do) then the transification of the world starts to make sense.  If anyone feels like they’re a woman, then, boom, they’re a woman.  Actual women then become “uterus havers” or some other such nonsense.  That’s not made up – I don’t even have to write jokes with their newspeak silliness.

How is this easily provable?  The under-15 boys’ team in Dallas beat the U.S. Women’s World Cup® team.  Yup, the very same team that featured the pink-haired piece of beef jerky Megan Rapinoe.  Yet, this is ignored because . . . reasons.  Back when I was in college, one of my friends was on the (very average) Division 2 college swim team.

Cinderella was awful at soccer – she kept running away from the ball.

“Yup, beat a world record tonight,” he said as he came back into the house we lived at after practice.  I did a double take.

“What?”

“Yeah, the woman’s world record.  Everybody on the team can beat it.”

The consequences of this are many, but it’s clear to see that if this isn’t checked, there won’t be any reason to have sports where actual women compete.

So, there are physical differences.  And personality?  Woman have been charged with being the nurturing caregivers for children since forever.  I could list all the differences here, but that would be a post all by itself.

The GloboLeft indicates that biological race has no basis in fact, despite the evidence becoming clearer and clearer every year that this is very much the case. 

One meme I saw on the Internet was an organ donation organization asking for more organ donors that were black and Hispanic.  I believe it was on InstaFace®, but wherever it was, the organ donation organization was immediately swamped by people calling it racist because, “all organs are the same.”

What’s the worst thing to hear during open heart surgery?  Anything.

No, they aren’t.  It’s not that a black person has to have a heart from a black person, but the chances of a match go up tremendously when the donor is of the same race.  Mixed race people, especially, have difficulty in getting organs that match.

And this should surprise no one.  Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior.  Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails.  Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations.  It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were?  In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

Is another term for a mattress a “loaf of bed”?

How has that changed them?  And, how could a professor think to share that information in the Cancel Culture?

The GloboLeft believes that people are blank slates, and not dependent for 50-80% on genetics for their personality, sense of humor, and intelligence. 

The Wilder Family is a fun one, but I can certainly see the interplay of the genetics from The Mrs. and I in our children.  I have the unique opportunity to have been adopted, but I did manage to meet my biological father later in life, when I was an adult.  There was no subject that I was interested in that we couldn’t discuss, in depth.

I had never met the man, yet his personality contained no surprises.

If they genetically engineer pigs, will we get CRISPR bacon?

Absolutely there is a place for nurture in the world, but the numbers are showing that most 100% biological siblings share much more than nurture – we’ve all seen those news stories about twins raised separately that have the same job, same hairstyle and often very similar wives.  The Minnesota Study on twins reared apart showed that the twins showed generally were the same as twins raised in the same household in terms of personality, interests, and attitudes.  The twin study came up with about a 50% nature score, though observationally it’s more than that.

Again, the GloboLeft can wish all that they want, but the facts don’t follow their ideology.  In the end, Truth always wins out.  But the GloboLeft doesn’t like the Truth.  I guess that’s why the listen to NPR® and CNN™.

Read The Funniest And Best Post You’ll Read On Regret In The Next 431 Hours

“Everything depends upon speed, and the secrecy of his quest.  Do not regret your decision to leave him, Frodo must finish this task alone.” – LOTR:  The Two Towers

A burglar stole all my lamps.  I should be mad, but I’m de-lighted.

People rarely change.

Perhaps the only thing that makes people change is an intense, emotional, experience.  Nearly dying is one of those.  Losing a land war in Asia is another.  Having a loved one pass away is yet another.  How we react to those intense moments in life can be significant.

Why is this important?

For the most part, you are who you are.  As I started this off, by observation I’ve seen that most people don’t change very much, at all, throughout their lives.  There are several friends that I have known for decades that I only talk to every few years.  Why don’t we talk more often?  Not much has changed – we’ve gotten to the point in life where those bright and technicolor moments of childhood and young adulthood are behind us.

Oddly, I think many of those folks would jump in a car and drive a day to help me if I told them I needed it and it was an emergency.  Now, I have no idea if they’d do it a second time if I just made up the emergency, or if the emergency was that I couldn’t find my car keys.

Yeah, there’s probably a limit.

But Jesus never bragged:  “For I speak not of my own Accord.”  John 12:49

One conversation I recently had with a friend was about those people we went to high school with that were either very ill or have already passed away.  As I look around to the people I know, it’s getting to the point where I’ll be going to more funerals than weddings.  That’s okay, I’m sure I can be the guy that puts the FUN in funeral.

When I talk to my friends, however, the things that brought us together rarely, if ever change.  That’s not to say that that things don’t happen in our lives, but the core of our being stays the same.  The character traits that made me admire them, or the personality quirks that made us laugh at the same jokes or love the same movies, or the shared experiences that bond us are still there.

I did a google search for “lost medieval servant boy” but it said, “this page cannot be found”.

Of course, everyone has tragedy in their life – experiencing the tough parts of life is what makes experiencing the best parts of life seem ever sweeter.  Part of getting older is getting that perspective so that I can look back and see which of the things that were so important to me twenty years ago are still important.  Some of them aren’t.  Those are the ephemeral things in life, like my favorite songs.

Oh, wait, I’m still stuck at 17 with those.  Darn.  But I will say that I certainly care a lot less about what people thing – I guess I’m becoming a curmudgeon.

Which is also okay, since I’ve also learned that most people don’t think about me very much at all.  That’s not a statement based on sadness – it’s a statement of reality.  Unless I was Donald Trump.  Then I’d live rent free in the minds of millions of GloboLeftists.

And she also falls way high on the Crazy axis and way low on the Hot axis.

I also know that, looking back, were there things I would go back and change, knowing what I know today?  Of course!  There is no fully human life that has ever been lived where mistakes weren’t made.  But spending even a single second of my life in regret, kicking myself, is a waste of that second, and an emotion that will lead to nothing but despair, which is certainly an advanced form of Evil.

Why?

The past is gone.  Unless someone develops a time machine or John McAfee successfully shows everyone how to drastically shift quantum worldlines, well, those major mistakes of the past are with us and will be with us until we shift off this mortal coil ourselves, moving from the washer to the dryer of life.

But we can’t let those events define us.  Sure, they can change us, and any significant emotional experience will change us.  Yes, we can work to atone for our errors.  But when we have the time, why not focus that emotional experience into something good?

“When you’ve fallen down, and you’re lying there on the ground, pick something up and bring it with you when you get up.” – John Maxwell

When I was faced with my last major setback, I tried to see what aspects of that setback were mine and mine alone.   Rather than spend time in regret or revenge, I really tried to focus on things that would make me better after the experience, not in anger or fear, but out of a desire to really get better as a person.

When a Venn diagram wants revenge, does it become a Venn dettagram?

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise is part of what came out of that experience.  The other part was I decided to file my teeth into little fangs.  That part didn’t work out so well.  Never file your teeth into little fangs.

My question and challenge to myself was to see what I could do to make myself and the world a better place.  Do I always do that?

No!  Of course not.

But I try.  My perspective has changed.  As much as I share about me in these posts, these posts are not about me.  These posts are, when I do a really, really, good job, about the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Back to regret:  I’ve got a simple question that I asked myself at my last big setback:  “What price am I willing to pay to hold on to feelings of regret rather than channeling that feeling into something that changes the world for the better or to repair the wrongs that I’ve committed?”

That’s really a powerful question.  I could have stayed with regret, which leads to despair, which leads to . . . nowhere.  Unless it’s channeled to make changes in me for the better.  My first marriage failed.  The result?  I resolved to never, ever lie to The Mrs.  So, in return, she never asks me “does this pair of pants make my butt look big?” because I’d have to answer, “no, it’s the butt that makes your butt look big.”

A friend of mine married a trophy wife.  Apparently, she didn’t win first place.

In one sense, it’s freeing.  But it’s a change I made that made me better.

I think that, in the end, our efforts to better ourselves, especially morally, are a very big part of why we’re here.  Human beings are really, really pathetic when they don’t have to struggle to achieve greatness.  I have the receipts on this:  Prince Harry, whose greatest trauma was that his brother once said something mean to him.  But he’s paying the price:  Meghan Markle.  Perhaps Harry should feel regret.

It’s been said that God gives his toughest loads to his strongest servants, and it has been my observation that this is really true, since most people are actually better than me.  Though I’m trying.

Again, people rarely change.  If you’re in the position to change, pick something up when you get up.

Unless it’s Meghan Markle.  You should leave that trash right in the gutter.