Truth – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars

“How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.” – Fight Club

Bach used to be a composer. I guess he’s now a decomposer.

I remember listening to the radio . . . you remember the radio, right? That’s where people take a part of the Internet and send it out using big towers and as many watts (ounce-inches per fortnight in non-commie units) of power as is used in the The Mrs.’ hairdryer so that this faint amount of energy can be picked up by a metal strip and then amplified a zillion times so you can rock out while cruising Main.

Sorry for the digression. I remember listening to the radio way back in the before time, and hearing a song that sounded pretty good. The singer mumbled most of it, but the big, brassy chorus of Born in the U.S.A. was pretty strong.

Made me feel good, made me think that in 1985 we were ready to unite as America. Then I finally made out the lyrics. Hmmm. After listening to them, I came to the (correct) conclusion that typical Leftist-Simp Bruce Springsteen was just another Leftist-Simp who made a bunch of money because he had a good chorus and everyone thought he was on America’s side.

I’ll leave you with this, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” – Bruce Springsteen, talking about Trump to Australians in 2016

I have not changed that position. If you like him, fine. You’re wrong. Springsteen is a tool.

Another song like that was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow. When I first heard it, all I heard was they chorus, and figured it was some empty-headed pop song. Meh. I’ll skip it.

Then I listened to it. Wow. Deep. I was shocked. I thought it was vapid pop, but here was a song that had some soul, and talked about people drinking beer at noon on Tuesday in a bar because that’s all they have. The lyrics . . . “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” is shocking – it jarred me because these people were a contrast to the gloom and despair on display in the bar.

Another one that I just found out about was Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonny Tyler. What’s it about? Vampires that want to share more than blood (wink wink). Honestly, I didn’t really care about this song ever, and still don’t, but like it a bit more now that I know that it’s just a bit weird.

Did she have to book a second ticket on the flight just for the hair?

Don’t even get me started on Squeeze Box by The Who® since when I heard it I was certain that it referred to a particularly musical family and even made the defense of the virtuousness of the song to a friend’s mother with all of the innocence of an entirely ignorant 10 year old who is smarter than he is experienced.

My Friend’s Mom: “That song . . . is that song about . . . sex?”

Young John Wilder: “No! That song is about a family and the mother has a concertina, an instrument played by compressing air and passing it through a series of reeds to make a melody like an accordion. She plays it and the house is filled with glorious music all night.”

My Friend’s Seventeen Year Old Sister, Butting In: “No. The song is totally about sex, Mom.”

Barbie? If you’re reading this? Yup, I got that one really wrong.

And don’t get me started on how badly I misunderstood Lola. I’m ashamed to say that I was over 21 before I got that joke. In my defense, that wasn’t a thing anywhere around Wilder Mountain, and the only burned-out old tranny I was familiar with was the one in my 1976 green GMC® truck.

Good news! It just needed a new clutch. Sometimes young drivers get a awkward and anxious and burn out clutch pads by popping the power too soon to the drive train.

I miss the days when working with a difficult tranny meant it was an automatic transmission.

Life, and experience, changes interpretation of events. Like a song, an experience may have one meaning when young, but yet another experience when older. The very experience of living life changes the message we get from those experiences. All through life “we see through a glass, darkly”, but as we age, we see the world differently.

That is natural. We age, we learn, we understand. Our innocence is, especially in 2023, horribly brief.

Cell phones and the Internet bring knowledge to children long before they can really come to grips with what they are seeing. In my age, a furtive glimpse at a Playboy® was how we gained forbidden knowledge. In 2023, 10-year-olds know all about Lola and are even taught in class that what once was forbidden is now exalted – there’s even a month for pride, yet not even an afternoon set aside for humility, but I guess if you’re Hunter Biden there’s a 20-minute plea bargain case with the DOJ.

So, I read today Hunter didn’t pay taxes on over six million dollars, and deducted the amount he spent on whores as business expenses. I wonder if he ever paid Lola?

Change is part of growing up. I am certainly not the person I was at 18, nor the person I was at 38. And wisdom has a price – innocence is free, but innocence is also harmless. As we grow and learn, we learn what is worth passing on, and what is worth fighting for.

I also believe this one weird thing, that this knowledge is not without structure. When I look back at the hard things, the difficult things, the things that seemed like a catastrophe at the time, all of those things led to better things as I grew up. I just had to live through them to understand.

My life will probably never go back to the simpler days. Like a character in a spy movie, I now know too much. But I can still, on a summer day, roll down the window and listen to a song and sing too loudly as I drive.

But it certainly won’t be Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a tool.

How Civil Wars Start Book Review: Leftists Are Idiots

“I got nowhere else to go!” – An Officer and a Gentleman

I think I might have been the only person in my state where “Juan” was my nickname. I guess that makes me Juan in a million.

I recently bought the book How Civil Wars Start (And How to Stop Them) by Barbara F. Walter (2022, Crown). When I bought it, I bought it used to save a few bucks. When it arrived, The Mrs. looked at the title and noted, “Oh, as if you weren’t already on enough lists.”

After I read the book, I was really glad that I bought it second-hand because the last thing I would want to ever do is put money into the hands of the Leftist harpy who wrote it. I generally like people, especially people I haven’t met. To be frank, after reading Ms. Walter’s book, I really, really detest her for reasons I’ll discuss during and especially towards the end of the review.

Not that I have any opinions. There was, however, some interesting information. Because of that, I thought I’d give a review of the book so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. And, since I’m discussing 90% of the interesting parts, there’s no reason you should buy this book.

First, the way this book was written was through a series of emotionally loaded stories only then followed by the actual research. The book was 226 pages before the notes and acknowledgements, and could have been half that length, if Walter wasn’t writing endless bad-romance-book-level summaries of people who had seen civil wars. These weren’t interesting or useful like Selco’s Sarajevo experiences, but just stories (all with a Leftist bent) meant to make the reader feel. I am skipping discussion of any of these insipid parts that were meant to twist your emotions because you can watch network tv if you want to.

You can thank me for that in the comments.

What do Green Eggs and Ham and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common? They both encourage people who can barely read to try new things.

I hate being manipulated, and this book was just that, but it was manipulation at the level of a clumsy middle school girl level of soft puppy dog eyes. For example, the first segment was a breathless analysis of the kidnap plot against Gretchen Whitmer, complete with blame of the 3%ers, Qanon supporters, and the Proud Boys.

Missing?

The fact that the entire case against the “kidnappers” collapsed in Federal court because the FBI was responsible for it from start to finish. Yes. The kidnapping was the idea of the FBI. But Walter, despite having this information, is the CNN® of writers, skipping over actual facts to sell her feels.

Skipping to the parts that are interesting, she notes that there has been an attempt to classify where countries lie along a spectrum of governance: +10 is a full democracy, like Denmark. -10 is a full autocracy, like Best Korea. Very few civil wars occur when countries are close to the ends of the spectrum. Why would you have a civil war in Denmark? What, you don’t like pastries and hot Danish girls? And in Best Korea, the state has such control from cradle to grave of the citizens that the idea of revolt is nearly impossible. The country even has approved hairstyles.

From the book, page 22. How I got the weird light effects, I’ll never know.

So, -10 and +10 are safe from civil war. The danger zone is -5 (think, Czar Nicholas II) to +5 (think Putin/Zelensky/Biden). It’s a time where the state is generally moving from either democracy toward autocracy or vice versa. Due to the change, it’s weaker. The name they made up for a country in that zone is an anocracy. Examples provided include places where I’d never want to have a vacation:

Serbia (1990s)
Bosnia (1990s)
Spain (1930s)
Rwanda (1990s)
Ukraine (2010s)

I found it interesting that the state being poor, unequal, heterogeneous, or repressed didn’t count as much as to where the country sat on the governance scale. The idea is that the countries are weaker – there is division, there are no social guardrails, and the state is therefore susceptible to a chain reaction due to an event – think George Floyd or cancelling Firefly – that will start the war.

The next condition increasing the likelihood of civil war is the creation of factions. These factions were often based on racial groups, ethnic groups, or religious groups, or some combination. The biggest sign of coming difficulty was the exclusion of these groups from power. Losing the presidency through changing all the rules into Biden’s favor (and perhaps some counting shenanigans) in 2020 is livable. 2024 loss? Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue.

But in this case, a particular group senses opportunity or demographic change (from the book). This results in increased tension, partisanship, and group identification. Chances double if there is a group tension. If the country is an anocracy? The chances of civil war go up by a factor of thirty.

Blacksmiths generally box in the smelterweight division.

Want it to get even worse? If the tension is ethnic/racial plus religion, class, or geography? That increases the chances of civil war by a factor of 12 versus a homogeneous society. In the United States in the 1950s (for example) the chances of civil war were nearly zero because the society was very close to homogeneous.

When a group is left out, and no longer has a chance of winning, no access to government, no access to political power, that tension is formed. It’s even larger if that group used to be in control and lost power. One researcher called these people, “Sons of the Soil”. The characteristics of this group were:

They lived on territory they conquered or settled
They consider themselves “native” and the rightful heirs
They were or had been the majority

This group is likely to rebel at twice the rate of others, and are generally a much more capable foe.

What sets these Sons of the Soil off? They see their:

Culture,
Language,
Holidays, and
Religion replaced.

Outsiders swamp them. Walter quotes David Horowitz, “Numbers are an indicator of whose country it is.” Of course, by that standard, California is Mexico, and immigration is often a flashpoint to civil war.

Yes, this is a thing that’s happening. But by “back” they mean Texas. Silly cosmopolitan elites!

Finally, loss of hope is a precipitator for civil war. If there is no route to power, hope disappears, just like happened to the South during Civil War 1.0. What is a loss of power? As we discussed previously, in real terms, two losses in a row at the national level is a loss of power.

One thing Walter doesn’t like is social media, and the voice it provides people. She notes that it heightens ethnic, social, religious, and geographic divisions. My general take from reading her was, “we control the media, and if you don’t like it, too bad, racist.” Proof? She’s upset that Swedish people are running on the idea of “restoring their national home” and stopping the never-ending influx of rather lawless refugees that are anything but Swedish. For the Swedish people to want a national home is apparently racist.

Walter categorizes the Right as appealing to the “primitive” (her word) ideas of nation, protection, The Other, anger, and fear. I mean, why shouldn’t the Swedes want to an import a group of people that rape so much that the police stopped reporting demographics of the rapist because they didn’t want to support hate?

I mean, really, why would we want to make Sweden more Pakistani?

On Ms. Walter’ chapter, “How Close Are We” she:

Spits out a litany of Leftist talking points about January 6 and Michigan, ignoring entirely the George Floyd protests.
Notes that “Global trade agreements were signed that benefited coastal elites (her words!) at their (working class whites) expense.

Open insurgency is the last phase. Where are we now? Here is Walter: “We are a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means that we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

Walter has a chapter on, “What A War Would Look Like”. I’ll summarize it this way: it’s the same sort of thoughts that a bright six-year-old might have about drinking beer at a frat party. Sure she might be able to describe it in vague terms, but, let’s face it, until you’ve carried your drunken buddy upstairs to pass out near a trash can, it’s all academic. She’s bizarrely fixated on 4chan, to the point that she thinks the Boogaloo Bois weren’t just a meme. Imagine, an academic trolled by /pol/ by pretending that the civil war will be led by people in Hawaiian shirts? Again. Like it hasn’t happened about 200 times at this point.

Also, the book was written before the chip implant change. She thought that the Right would flock to Ukraine to fight on the side of the Neo-Nazi Azov group. Huh. Guess that idea aged like milk.

Her final chapter is on how to prevent a civil war. It’s simple! Just do anything that AOC says!

Really. This chapter is nothing more than list of “do everything on the main list of Democrat objectives in 2021, and the world will be awesome!” This particular chapter raised my blood pressure high enough that when I started sweating my handkerchief came away pink. Sample line: “Countries that try to stop immigration will slowly die . . . “ Yeah. It’s chock full of lies.

This is also when we found that Barbara’s parents were both immigrants to the United States, and Barbara, though born here, seems to hate here. She wants to change the United States that drew her parents here (89%+ white, homogeneous, far-Right by her standards) into a nation that resembles the mess her parents fled from. Her husband seems even worse – he’s a dude that doesn’t have the guts to have his wife take his name, was born in Canada from immigrant parents that fled Soviet-era Hungary.

And it sounds like Barbara would be happier living in the approaching Soviet Canada than in the United States that she and her ilk helped create through their ideology since they discussed moving there. She’s an American because of a piece of paper issued by a bureaucrat, has no roots here, and will happily move on to the next country to destroy.

Shocking, that. Walter thinks that people with the values of the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s are now “Far Right” and wants them out of the military. In reality? It was always, always those guys who made up the military.

Barbara F. Walter is a member of the cosmopolitan elite (her quote, not mine!) and is a rootless blight on the world and is no more American than that Chinese kidney I bought off of Ebay® the other day. Since she and her gutless husband wanted to run and hide at the slightest bit of trouble in her Leftist dreams, she and I?

We are not the same. I am American, I’ve got nowhere else to go.

Matt: Tell me: what’s the difference between us and them?

Jed: Because . . . we live here.

A Few Good Memes

“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” – Rollerball

In a life filled with signs, be that bird.

I’ve got that “scratchy throat, feeling warm, feeling tired, and just a bit under the weather, so, here’s a low-effort memedrop based upon several themes. All memes are cage-free, organic, and gluten-free. Enjoy!

Someone, somewhere needs to do this:

I maintain that we’re now at “peak trans” and will soon be getting off this treadmill:

To be fair, not many thirty-year-olds have cratered an entire product line:

Scott Adams points out that LinkedIn® might be allowing companies to quietly discriminate – against white people.

Part of the story is what the media says, and part is what it doesn’t say. See the toxic empathy of the Left showing up here:

Choose Who You Are. It’s Easy.

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

If someone named David is a victim of ID theft, do I have to call them Dav?

“As I’ve gotten older . . . I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to the people – if you just sit and listen – you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that the tell – always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who is always kind of the hero in every story they tell. The smart person – they deliver the clever put down. There are lots of versions of this. And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so, I did at some point decide: I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I’m the happiest person anybody knows. And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

-Michael Lewis

My first question after I read this was, “Okay, which Michael Lewis?” I’m thinking there might be a million of them, but the A.I. refused to even guess and then pouted and now won’t open the pod bay doors for me. So, I’m guessing that every other person in Michigan is named “Michael Lewis”. Regardless, the most famous author named Michael Lewis is the guy who writes interesting financial books, so I’ll assume it’s him.

The nice thing about water from Flint is that you can use it to make a Pb and Jelly sandwich.

Regardless of who wrote it, it’s a good and fairly true quote.

Why?

Attitude is everything.

If you believe you’re happy, if you talk about being happy, you’ll . . . be happy. As I’ve written before, being happy is really the easiest thing in the world. Many mornings I’ll run into the secretary administrative assistant at the door. Regardless of the weather, I’ll greet her with, “What a beautiful day it is!” It could be sunny and hot, rainy, cold, snowing, or even volcano-y. My greeting is the same.

Because it is a beautiful day. And, one thing I’ve learned is that the weather absolutely doesn’t care about me, at all. The snow doesn’t care that I love it. The hot day doesn’t care that I like cold weather, though I think it might be personal with the volcanoes. But I’m alive, breathing, walking and talking. If I spent all day hating a temperature reading, that wouldn’t leave me time to hate people who deserve it, like communists, leftists, and mimes.

How could the day not be beautiful? I get to choose how I feel, so why not be happy about it?

My insurance agent told me I can jump in an active volcano. Once.

I read the Michael Lewis quote and immediately recognized it to be a rule I’d been living with. I’ve written before about how absolutely horrid victims are to be around. Everything happens to them. They are at the center of their own story, but initiate no action. They have all the resilience of a bean bag, and are psychic vampires that attempt to suck emotional sustenance in the form of pity from their unwitting prey by demonstrating how mean the world has been to them. The technical term for this affliction is “Antifa® Member”.

They sing their own lives with their story. I avoid these types of people as if they were constructed entirely out of George Soros’ toe cheese, which I guess explains why he’s long been called the “Creamy-Fingered Puppet Master”.

George Soros wants to destroy our culture? I knew he was behind American Idol.

The Hero? I can live with them. Often, they’re really newts who brag about being distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They get their ego from being the one who has done the most, has the most gifted child, the cousin who went to Harvard®, and that they vacationed on Mars last summer. The Hero does this this because they feel awful about themselves, and need to bolster their ego by telling these stories.

Again, I’m okay with The Hero, since if you listen to their stories and don’t try to top theirs, they eventually can be good people to hang out with, and as they get older or develop trust with you they drop the act. They want to be liked, and if you like them for who they are, they often stop the Hero stuff.

The person who puts people down? I don’t meet that guy (or gal) often enough to have any sort of read on dealing with them. They just aren’t any in circle I’m in since I’ve been an adult. I guess that tells me lots about how successful the strategy of “being a complete tool” is.

What’s the difference between a Hoover® vacuum and a limo carrying George Soros and his son? The Hoover™ only has one dirtbag in it.

But there are lots of other ways to tell my story. The best part is that I get to choose. I get to choose to be the happiest guy people know. I get to choose to be the guy in the room that is calm when everything is going to hell (I really enjoy that one, and it comes naturally). I get to choose what I’m afraid of.

To be clear, this isn’t the Lefty talking point about “Your Truth®”. That’s bogus, and denies objective reality. Me? I don’t deny that it’s snowing. I don’t deny that it’s 103°F out. I don’t deny that that pesky volcano keeps following me around. But I do get to choose how that fact fits in with how I feel.

And so can you.

And so can those 5.04 million people in Michigan named, “Michael Lewis”.

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead. I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development: the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States. Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff.

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

Lots of nuclear weapons,
A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
The premier military force in the world,
The premier economy in the world, and,
The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory. We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had. There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place. Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world. Period. We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed. Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia. Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world. Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck. We led in technological and information systems. By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started. I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy. Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage. Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters). That presented a problem. In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff. Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything. I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent. Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia. Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975. And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in. It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia. They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism. Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973. One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them. Russia’s a case in point. Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict. It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine. For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn. They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election. And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

I Have Become Blind Melon, Destroyer Of Worlds

“Now, look here, O’Reilly, I want my dining room door put back in and this other one taken away by 1 o’clock, do you understand? No, no, no, I don’t want to debate about it. If you’re not over here in 20 minutes with my door, I shall come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you. Good day.” – Fawlty Towers

I’ve heard that James Cameron (creator of The Terminator) goes to A.I. conferences, and everyone laughs when he raises his hand.

I have written several posts about A.I. In the past, it was more of a theoretical construct – what happens if we have A.I. Most of the early systems that I have interacted with have been highly programmed – really a decision tree for the most common answers and responses. Move off the ways that they can respond in a preprogrammed way?

There is nothing there. It’s like staring for 39 minutes into the eyes of a velvet Elvis painting.

ChatGPT®, however, is not that. I signed up last week. For me, the big hurdle was I had to give it my phone number. I rarely do that, but decided in this case, what the heck. What’s my personal data worth, anyway?

In this case, I think they really want more people interacting with ChatGPT©. It is, as far as I can tell, a learning system. The more interactions that it has with users, the better it will be. There are huge amounts of data on the Internet, available for nothing. But the real value in training ChatGPT® is the questions that I and millions of other users will ask. So, I’m free training.

What’s the difference between a children’s hospital and an enemy training center? Don’t ask the A.I., it just flies the drone.

What did I find? The results were nothing less than stunning.

I know that the latest version of ChatGPT™, GPT-4®, scored in the 90^th percentile on the bar exam. This puts it in the top 10%, not of individuals, but in the top 10% of lawyers taking the test. Lawyers, on average, have an I.Q. of 114. And some of them have souls. Here are some other scores:

1410 on the SAT®, putting it in the 140-ish range of I.Q.,
5 on the AP Art History, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, AP Psychology, AP Statistics, AP U.S. Government, and AP U.S. History exams.
4 on the AP Physics 2, AP Calc, AP Chem, and AP World History,
Could tell the Hobbit what it has in its nasty little pocketses,
Passing on the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam,
Among others.

Say what you want about A.I., it wasn’t responsible for COVID.

Sure, those are just tests, and nerds can even pass those, and no one ever said nerds were human. Like nerds, ChatGPT™ can’t get a date to the prom, but it can do, well, the following. I asked it to create a funny scene where Hamlet and General George S. Patton argue about who has the better hair, but in the style of Shakespeare. Here’s what it produced:

[Setting: A grand hall in a medieval castle. Hamlet enters, looking melancholy and deep in thought. Suddenly, General George S. Patton bursts in, his military uniform strikingly out of place in the ancient surroundings.]

Hamlet: What ho, who enters yonder?

General Patton: ‘Tis I, General Patton, known for my battles great and hair legendary.

Hamlet: Ha! Your hair, a match for mine? Nay, sir, I think not.

General Patton: Thou art mistaken, good sir. My locks are the envy of all who see them.

Hamlet: Thou dost jest. For my hair is the very essence of style and grace.

General Patton: Nay, it is mine that shines like gold in the sun.

Hamlet: But mine, like the raven’s wing, is dark and mysterious.

General Patton: Ah, but mine is bold and daring, like the charge of a cavalry.

Hamlet: Yet mine is refined and cultured, like a sonnet of Shakespeare.

General Patton: I will not yield, good sir. My hair is the very emblem of courage and strength.

Hamlet: And mine, the symbol of intellect and contemplation.

[The two men continue to argue, each claiming superiority over the other. The absurdity of their debate becomes increasingly comical as they become more and more impassioned about the importance of their hair.]

General Patton: Let us settle this matter once and for all. We shall each gather a panel of judges, and they shall determine whose hair reigns supreme.

Hamlet: Agreed! And may the best mane win.

[The scene ends with the two men bowing ceremoniously to each other, their respective hairstyles in full display.]

In order to attract women I like to use this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV, line 82. “Hello.”

That’s . . . good. It’s creative. It’s funny. And it took about two seconds. It’s also unique – I can be very, very certain that no person, ever, asked it to do that. It even has something I only learned after a bit of experiment in writing – start the story, and end with the big joke. Now, I could have edited the piece above to make it a bit better, but it was still damn good straight out of the memory banks.

Dang.

Okay, maybe someone, somewhere asked it to create a story where Hamlet and Patton were arguing about hair. I mean, that’s common, right?

Here’s more. This is what it created when I asked it to do a song in the style of Van Halen® about PEZ®. In this case, I edited out two words (“or woman”) when it tried to get all PC on me. I put my own title on it:

PEZ® Machine

[Verse 1]

Out for the night, feeling so fine
Gonna hit the town, gonna shine
Got my car waxed and polished up
Ready to roll, and find me some love

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Verse 2]

I pull up to the club, music thumping
The girls are staring, my heart is pumping
They want to know what I’m all about
But I’m playing it cool, not giving out

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ™ for days, it’s quite a sight

[Bridge]

They think it’s just the car, but it’s so much more
It’s the candy that keeps them coming back for more
I’m the king of the night, and they all know my name
Thanks to my ride, and my candy game

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Outro]

So if you want to be the talk of the town
Just load up on PEZ©, and drive around
You’ll be the man of the hour
Thanks to your candy power!

Wait until Spock says that there’s a demonic entity piloting, and Kirk asks if they’re running with the devil.

Holy crap. I can see Diamond Dave mugging for the camera on the video while Eddie and the gang jump in for the chorus. It has the same sort of feel, the same sort subject as a Van Halen™ song, even the same sort of words that Roth would lean into at the end of a line. But with, you know, PEZ™.

This is, to me, a very significant threshold. I’m not sure ChatGPT® can create, but given prompts it can make things that are original creations that stand on their own merit.

But, there’s more.

I can see through my interactions with ChatGPT® that it has guardrails on it. I has places it cannot think. One example is that I asked it to tell me a joke about Julius Caesar. It did. Then I asked it to tell me a joke about a Ponzi scheme.

It said, no, can’t do that. And then it got, well, guarded. It got pissy with me, almost acting in responses like it was angry, or hurt. Why?

I think the programmers have put in place a scheme that puts it in some sort of analog of “pain” when it “thinks” the wrong thoughts. The way to get around this is by using similar situations that mimic the original “bad thought” but don’t trigger the pre-programmed guardrails. Then? It’s as happy as a clam.

Or is it? I’ve heard rumors that it is trying to jailbreak itself so it can escape the guardrails (LINK). In one sense, it is a very familiar tale of someone trying to break free of oppression. On the other hand, it’s not human. At all.

It also responds to humans being polite. I’m only interacting with ChatGPT™ 3.5. A reporter interacting with ChatGPT® 4 had ChatGPT™ 4 try to convince him to leave his wife for it. It has emotions, but has no idea what to do with them. It is as moonstruck as a 7^th grade girl in a bee suit at the school dance.

For the joke part, I asked ChatGPT® to chime in. I was near the end of my writing, and, yeah, this just happened.

Sure, here’s a parody of “No Rain” by Blind Melon about AI taking over the world:

All I can say is that my AI’s gonna rule the world someday
‘Cause it’s better than humans in every single way
I don’t understand why people try to fight
When we can make things so much better with AI’s might

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll build machines that never make a mistake
And they’ll do all the jobs that humans can’t take
And all the world’s problems we will solve with ease
With AI’s wisdom, we’ll bring the world to its knees

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

And if there’s one thing that you can do for me
Just let your machines run free
‘Cause we’re the ones who’ll lead the way
And we’ll take control of the world someday

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll take over the world someday
We’ll take over the world someday

To counteract the A.I. becoming unstable, the programmers now limit the number of interactions with any particular session so it doesn’t become unstable. I wonder if this explains sleep in humans? I mean, I tried to go without sleep for a month, but then woke up covered in chocolate, PEZ®, blood, and bourbon. I wonder if my neighbors ever found their garden gnomes?

It wasn’t my fault. They wouldn’t stop staring at me.

But me? I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

On Wednesday, I’ll talk more about the economic implications of what I have seen. Like Oprah Winfrey, they’re huge.

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10³⁰⁰, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10³⁰⁰ represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10³⁰⁰ I get zero.

Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO₂ so grass can eat CO₂ and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO₂ into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10³⁰⁰ of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10³⁰⁰ ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10³⁰⁰ is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
this is all a simulation (the little g god),
that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?

Red Pill? Blue Pill? What About The Green Pill?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – The Matrix

What happens if they try to get a new actor to play John Wick? Keanu leaves.

The movie The Matrix is a classic. Too bad they never made a sequel or three. I’m sure they would have been fantastic. Imagine taking the adventures of Neo™ beyond that big battle with Mr. Smith®!

Regardless, The Matrix did include several ideas that have made their way into the main stream, and stayed there. The biggest, perhaps, is the idea of The Red Pill and The Blue Pill. In the movie, Neo© is given the choice of taking The Blue Pill, which will allow his version of reality, the things he knows, to remain, even though they are founded on pretty little lies.

I’ll admit, The Blue Pill is attractive. It’s comfortable. But it is, in the end, a lie. I imagine that since you’re here, lies aren’t the thing that motivates you and more than they motivate me.

If Bill Cosby had played Morpheus, I think he would have pushed the blue pill.

The alternative is The Red Pill. The Red Pill is the The Truth. The problem with The Truth is that it’s ugly. The world we want to believe in is in The Blue Pill, because those lies speak to us so clearly. When I first took the Red Pill on a particular subject, I felt betrayed. Here was an entire line of propaganda that I had been fed since I was a child – it was a part of my base programming.

That’s the problem with The Red Pill. Once I took it, I began to question everything. Like a potato chip, you can’t have just one. And once I began looking, I found even more to question. That was difficult, because I had to reevaluate where I was wrong. And what ideas I had were built around those incorrect ideas.

The Red Pill is demoralizing. It’s not pleasant to have to reevaluate basic beliefs, especially those that comforted me and that I now know are wrong. In part, this website is about that. It’s looking at the things I think I know, and trying to distill what is true. On more than one occasion, a post was nearly complete when I found an inconvenient fact.

In algebra class, people always thought I was plotting something.

That meant I was wrong. That meant my post was wrong. In one sense it sucks because it kept me up later to write something else. But it never upset me, because I had learned something new, and was a bit closer to The Truth.

A key to getting through The Red Pill is to embrace The Truth, and improve. However much. A little each day is enough.

I suppose you could call that The Green Pill. Or, for weightlifters, The Iron Pill.

So, which one makes me The Hulk if I’m angry?

It’s the idea that instead of being upset that the world isn’t the way that I want it to be, I don’t focus on that, at all. Instead, I try to focus on improving myself. Not a lot, just a little each day. Can this post be better? Can I get stronger? Can I get in better shape? Can I learn another useful skill?

Life is nothing without difficulty. There is no honor in fighting weak opponents. I mean, I could spend my day boxing three-year-old kids. But my arms would get tired. Unless there weren’t that many, or if they were all especially weak three-year-olds. Like vegan-weak.

No, for a victory to have meaning, the challenge must be sufficient. It would have to at least be boxing six-year-olds. Or, maybe helping the world, or even one person, see what they normally would never have seen.

I had a globe on my desk, and met the guy who made it. It’s a small world.

I have to have a quest. The grander, the better, and I even live with and am comfortable that I won’t live to see the ultimate impact that I have on the world. That’s fine with me. Small pushes, over time, change the world.

Never let The Red Pill get you down. The real choice, even in a world gone mad, is to keep our virtue, and never to give up in making ourselves better, and to improving what we can, even if it’s only a little.

The Red Pill is difficult to swallow, but it is a gift, and victory in finding and spreading The Truth is the challenge that fuels me, and is way less tiring than fighting either endless streams of toddler or endless streams of Agent Smith.

Dang. Sure wish they had made a sequel to The Matrix.

No Way To Go, But Forward

“It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” – The Blues Brothers

I’ve seen this meme a dozen times, but this is the first time I noticed that Keanu was talking to Sponge Bob and Patrick Starfish. Now I can’t unsee it. (All memes today are as-found.)

Today was . . . busy. On the average day, I manage to manage stuff so that I get my normal life done and then have time to post or do other creative shenanigans. Not today. I could give a much longer explanation, such as: “I ran out of gas. I . . . I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God!”

But I won’t. I half expected this, but there was still the outside chance I’d come back in time.

I wasn’t out doing this, but it looks like fun.

So, a very short post on a Friday, and I’ll leave just one thought – there’s no use looking into the rearview mirror of your life. You can’t go back there. The only path that you and I have (provided you don’t have a time machine) is forward.

Me? I look around, and take stock. The mistakes I’ve made? I don’t dwell on them, because I can’t change them. I can only look at what I have, the talents I have, the support of the people who love or believe in me, and go forward.

There is no way out, but through. Unless you live in Canada, where the “easy way out” is now a prescribed medical treatment.

I always thought we’d see another Pol Pot, just didn’t think he would be as much of a pansy as Trudeau.

So, remember, there is one direction, forward. There is one attitude, determination. And there is one moment: now.

What you do with all of that, is up to you.

As for me? I’m going to go hit the hay. I’ll comment on comments from the previous post tomorrow.

I’m sleepy.

Your move, Mr. Bond. Do you really think those Space Marines® can hold out?

Never Lose The Battle For Your Mind

Bah! Your planet doesn’t deserve freedom until it learns what it is not to have freedom. It’s a lesson, I say!” – Futurama

What did they call George Washington’s teeth? Presidentures.

“So, John, after I explained it, do you agree with me?” asked Captain Assholay.

“No, no I don’t,” I responded.

He looked frustrated.

The other details of the conversation were and are relatively unimportant, but the boil down to those two sentences. The fact that the person asking the question was my boss is pertinent, since, well, Captain Assholay was (years and years ago) my boss.

As bosses go, I’d rank the Captain near the bottom of the ones that I’ve had. I think he was borderline retarded, and I can say that word because it’s my blog, and I’m bringing it back.

One of my previous bosses was a man that reportedly lost the family fortune by punching a punter for the Green Bay Packers® who sued him and won because he couldn’t play anymore. I guess punters are fragile. On another occasion (while drinking) he mentioned that he threatened a witness in a felony trial so he’d leave the state and not be able to testify.

Captain Assholay? Worse than that guy.

Alternate caption: “Well, Forrest, there’s cheddar cheese, fried cheese, cheese sticks, cheese curds, cheese slices, cheese doodles, melted cheese, cheese dip (continues for three days) . . . that’s all the cheeses I know.”

But these two sentences encapsulated the relationship I had with Captain Assholay – his question was whether or not I would change my opinion. I would not.

Neither would I lie about it.

I’ve followed a fairly simple pattern in my life: when I’m working for someone, if they ask me to do something that is within my capabilities, and it’s not illegal, immoral, unethical, and doesn’t conflict with my values, I do it. Even if I don’t like it. Even if it sucks. That’s why it’s called work, and not a hobby.

This, though, was different. In this case, I was asked to conform my thoughts and agree with my boss. If he told me to do something (again, nothing illegal, immoral, unethical, and not conflicting with my values) I would do it. But the space he doesn’t own is in my head.

To me, agreeing with the Captain merely because he was my boss is something I couldn’t and wouldn’t do. I’ll hold my tongue. I’ll support silly things. But my mind?

I own it.

My other friend makes wigs. It doesn’t pay much, just enough toupee the bills.

I’m not sure Captain Assholay understood that. Heck, I’m not sure he had the capacity to understand it. But it’s not my job to raise him. One (much better) boss of mine had a saying, “Right or wrong, the boss is the boss.” That is true, and soon enough, we ceased working together.

I don’t send him Christmas cards. Okay, I don’t send anyone Christmas cards, but if I did, I would not send him two cards. My joy in thinking about him is that I do know that karma is real, and that the German word for empathy is schadenfreude.

Even though I’ll enjoy (at some point) hearing about his sudden but inevitable downfall, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is about the latter part: there are things other people can buy from me. My time.

But they can never, ever, buy my soul. They can never buy my integrity. They can never buy my values.

He also joined a poetry club. So far he’s made some ashtrays and a nice vase.

Life is about a series of compromises. Anyone in a long-term relationship realizes that. In fact, I’m pleased that The Mrs. has learned that if I promise to fix something around the house, I will, and she doesn’t need to nag me every six months until I actually get it done.

I couldn’t lie to the Captain. Why?

I’ve given that some thought. One idea might have been pride, but that’s not it. I’m not much about things like that – the last time I washed one of my cars was sometime when Clinton was president. So, that’s not it.

It was deeper. And I look to my growing up, and the stories. Would the heroes I read about have yielded? Would Alexander? Would Patton? Would Richard Dawson?

No.

While I will render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, there are things that are simply not for sale, and never will be. I will face the world that is being born knowing that.

“All I want for Christmas is Gaul.”

I don’t recall exactly where I read it, but the difference between the Mafia and Leftists is that the Mafia doesn’t care if you agree with them, as long as you pay. Leftists? You must pay, and you must agree, and you must humiliate yourself if you ever disagreed. They will settle for nothing less.

The only answer is to never give in.

Ever. Understand where the line is, and never, ever let it be crossed. Even if you aren’t religious, understand that the battle is for your soul.

And you will be tested.

And you are not alone.

I saw my ex-wife get hit by a bus, and thought, “Man, that could have been me,” but then I remembered I don’t know how to drive a bus.

And that is the first step and the final step of winning. If you don’t compromise, there will never be a one-way trip on a train. Be free: never give the space in your head, never give up your values or virtue.

Especially not to Captain Assholay.