Truth – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have

“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2

I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™. They are watchdogs.

Time.

Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.

The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.

Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.

Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.

Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.

Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle: being riddled with bullets.

We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.

My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.

But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!”

He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.

Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it.

Three clowns were eating a cannibal. One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”

Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.

I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.

There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.

Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.

The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is . . . difficult.

Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.

And yet . . .

Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.

They did not see that coming.

Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.

Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.

Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.

Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.

I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:

Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.

I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.

I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.

Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift.

Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count.

Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.

How Single Suburban Soccer Moms Are Killing The Country

“Train yourself to let go . . . of everything you fear to lose.” – Star Wars, Episode III

Childhood is like being drunk. Everyone remembers what you did but you.

I’ve written a lot about fear, and how negative it is. But fear is a very potent persuasion technique. Fear motivates people to action. Heck, I had a fear of elevators, but I took some steps to avoid it.

That’s why it’s used. David Frum (press “S” to spit) recently wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, How to Persuade Americans to Give Up Their Guns. I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to drive traffic to this screed. That just encourages them to pay Frum to write other crap when he’s not sleeping in the warm chest cavity of the “conservative” money laundering schemes think tanks.

In the end, David takes his Canadian* sensibilities to tell the benighted Americans that they should be horribly afraid of guns. Guns are scary! I believe, in technical terms, they are so scary that they make Frum wee a bit in his pants.

I guess we know Frum’s favorite drink: pop.

Policy Exchange, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, Weasel Hair Added By Wilder

In the end, who, exactly was Frum writing this article to?

Well, let’s eliminate who he wasn’t writing to, first:

He wasn’t writing to you. He wasn’t writing to me. If you’re a regular here, it’s nearly a lock that you’re at least sympathetic to the idea that the Second Amendment provides, in clear language, an individual right to own and carry weapons of war. And we don’t wee our pants about it.
He wasn’t writing to the Left. They don’t need to be convinced. The Second Amendment is probably the biggest single impediment to their plans (see: Australia).
He wasn’t writing to rural folks. We have so many guns that our guns have guns.
He wasn’t writing to urbanites. Most people deep in the hive are already Leftists.
He wasn’t (for the most part) writing to guys. Guys (generally) like guns, and are generally less in favor of restricting them. Women, for instance, are 30% more likely to support restrictions on standard size magazines.

Single Suburban Soccer Moms have such high double standards.

What does that leave? Suburban women, specifically Single Suburban Soccer Moms. Frum even admits as much in the article – he references both Mothers Against Drunk Driving® (MADD©) and Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America™ (MDAFGSIA®). No, I didn’t make that last one up. It’s what happens when the wine aunt tries to come up with a catchy name and everyone is so blitzed on the white zin that they don’t tell her, “Oh, Mabel, that is an awful name.”

But, yeah, the weasel-faced Frum was trying to manipulate the SSSM, because they’re often the swing voter in elections. And, they make decisions based on fear, unlike me. I like my emotions like I like my beer. Bottled.

MADD© and MDAFGSIA™ are an excellent example of fear being used to manipulate Moms. Did MADD™ do some good? Certainly. But even the founder thought they went too far and quit in 1985 because MADD©, founded to stop drunk driving, became (in her words) “neo-prohibitionist”.

That has been the problem: fear drives decisions which then result in laws that take away freedom.

The SSSM has been the most reliable target of the “if it only saves one life!” and the “what about the children?” level of logic. And that’s what has led us to the path we’re on today.

As Yoda taught us: fear leads to hate. Who does the Left hate now?

People who won’t take “the jab”. Not everyone, of course. BIPOC seem to be exempt from this hate, so it’s pretty much people who like freedom and people on the Right. I’m surprised there isn’t a group called Mothers Against Icky Infected People Not Doing What I Say (MAIIPNDWIS).

It’s healthy to eat dried fruit. I’m just raisin awareness.

Really, where we’re at is hysteria. Remember how the ‘Rona crisis started – grainy videos of people walking down the street in Wuhan and collapsing, apartments being welded shut to keep the residents in, and Chinese denials that there was any issue. It was just like the first four minutes of the average Hollywood® “plague destroys mankind” movie that has been made dozens of times since 1950.

Is the ‘Rona real? Certainly. It does have a body count, though I think the one being reported has been artificially inflated.

So it is real. I’ve had it. And it seems to kill people somewhat randomly, though in very, very small numbers as a percentage of those who catch it and are captured in the statistics (I’m not).

And the perfect way to beat the fear drum so that Single Suburban Soccer Moms forget the clown show exit engineered by Biden. The specifics of the “vaccine” mandate don’t matter as much as the process, which never changes:

Suck at leading.
Have bad poll numbers.
Make use of either an existing or contrived “scary” situation.
Come down hard on the “scary” situation: propose something that takes away rights, if possible. The Leftist base will be fine with it, and it will engage the SSSM crowd.

Oh, and I forgot: always pass the buck.

This is what passes for Leftist leadership. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, said the quiet part that you’re not supposed to say out loud: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” If there wasn’t a crisis, the Left would invent one. Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was one. The Keystone pipeline from Canada is another. These are manufactured to enrage and engage people on the Left.

But the crisis had to be a specific one: a crisis that could engage the SSSM brigade. As the de facto swing voters, political policies are determined by how the fears of this group can be exploited. COVID-19 is just one example. Why do you think images of little kids in cages were trotted out to show how actually enforcing immigration law was mean? Me, I only get upset when I see a hamburger bun in a cage – that means it was bread in captivity.

I bought a knife that can almost slice five baguettes of bread at once – but it’s only a four loaf cleaver.

Since there is nothing a SSSM loves more than safety, they’ll vote for it every time. And it doesn’t matter if liberty is on the line – the SSSM essentially views government as her spouse and protector.

Perhaps, though, there is an alternative?

Maybe we could convince the SSSMs that, historically, governments have committed murder on the wholesale level. Maybe we could get them up in arms about that? Heck, I even have a name for it if they want to use it:

Mothers Engaged Against Tyrant Politicians Exploiting Everyone (MEATPEE)

Which is weird, because that’s exactly what I think David Frum probably smells like.

*Technically Frum got American citizenship in 2007 or so, but I think it should be revoked because he’s a tool

The Mrs. went to a lot of trouble to create an advertisement for the livestream on Wednesday at 9 Eastern. Here it is:

What’s To Worry? Only 11 Major Emergencies Right Now.

A question. What exactly is “total systems failure”? – Star Trek, TNG

Joe Biden doesn’t know the meaning of the word “failure” – dementia already got to that one.

Over my life, I’ve seen some things go well, and I’ve seen some things go bad. In many cases, I’ve seen them go spectacularly bad. In one particular example a zillion years ago, the ground was muddy.

Mud wasn’t that bad, right? Except that the railroad ties the diesel tank was sitting on sank in a bit too much. The 500 gallon diesel tank then tipped right over. Okay, you can clean diesel up, right?

But the tank nozzle fell on onto a hard object, which snapped it right off. The diesel began to pour out of the tank. What had the diesel tank fallen on? An oxygen cylinder from a welding rig. Snapped that nozzle off, too.

What luck!

So, now, I’m 40 feet away from pure oxygen being slammed into diesel fuel, and creating a fine mist of oxygen and diesel in the air.

That’s what’s generally known as a fuel-air bomb, if only it had an ignition source. Oh, and there was a red-hot air compressor exhaust pipe not 20 feet away.

I always stop my microwave at 0:01, so I feel like a bomb defusing expert.

It was weird, standing there in the mud as the diesel mist spread out. Everyone just stopped and stared. I didn’t.

I’ve always had this weird thing – whenever there’s an emergency my emotions shut down and I become focused on one thing only: the emergency. No fear, no hesitation, just action. It’s like the world becomes exceptionally clear. Time slows down. My mind focuses.

I yelled and pointed, “Turn off that air compressor. NOW!”

I’m not sure I’ve ever yelled louder before or since. The spell was broken. The guy near the compressor heard me above the engine and the hissing, and shut the compressor off.

Thankfully, the high-pressure oxygen wasn’t just pushing the diesel – it was also pushing the mud and water into the air, too. So it wasn’t just a thin mist of atomized diesel – it was a thin mist of atomized diesel, water, and mud.

That small bit of luck (which caused the problem in the first place) might have saved us all.

After the tank stopped hissing, they started cleaning up. Then, the emotions came to the forefront. I went back to my office and took a deep, deep breath, and let it out very slowly and cleaned the oil the thin mist had deposited on my glasses.

I had nearly become thin mist myself, but even then I still would have been more coherent than AOC’s understanding of economics.

I only make AOC jokes Ocasio-nally.

Often, there’s just a single path to success. It takes a lot of work to get everything working, all at the same time.

Failure isn’t that way. Often, just a single failure when almost everything is going right can cause a cascade of failure.

But we’re beyond that as a nation, and we’re beyond that as a world.

In my list, the items are sometimes causes, and sometimes effects of other causes on the list. It’s probably not as relevant today as to what caused the crisis, but what the effects of the crisis are. In many cases, the effects are wildly larger than the initial cause was. I mean, all she did was ask me if those pants made her butt look big.

For example, I think we can all agree that COVID is bad, but the loss of freedom caused by COVID has the potential to be much, much worse.

COVID – this is the grand-daddy of the current crisis, or more accurately, the spark that lit the fire of 2020. Many of the following issues are the result not of the virus, but from our reaction to it. At every step, it seems like the official response has been misguided, and has created innumerable knock-on effects. Just like eliminating warts with a welding torch, the cure has been much, much worse than the disease.

We knew COVID was dangerous right off the bat.

Inflation – This was going to happen even if COVID never showed up. In the last fifty years, the national debt has doubled just about every eight or nine years. Doubling is a great thing if it’s my bank balance. Doubling is not a great thing if it’s how much I owe, especially if I’m not doubling how much I make. But to add ten or so trillion dollars in six months? Yeah, that’s going to show up somewhere. And it’s now.
Supply Chain Issues – This was started by COVID, but is now exacerbated by inflation and international issues. Who knew that the United States manufacturing economy was almost entirely dependent upon chips from Taiwan? Who knew we could make trucks and tractors but we couldn’t make them run without those chips? Oh, and the cost of those chips is going to go up by at least 20%. Why? Because they can, and because they want to have a good cash balance in their accounts when they flee after China is done measuring the island to see if their stuff fits.

Taiwan gets in trouble because it has a Taipei personality.

Reserve Currency Status – As I’ve established before, the ability of the United States to just print money at will and have people in the Ukraine take it and send us steel slabs is like alchemy. We’ve even turned it more modern – we don’t bother to print the money, we just electronically wave it into existence. We send those digits to Ukrainians, and they give us stuff. If the Ukrainians and everyone else decide they don’t believe in magic? You know what they call a magician without magic: Ian.
Loss of Freedom in the “West” – I look at the news out of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia and think, “Seriously? You’re putting up with that?” And they do, mostly. The Aussies use drones to find people camping far from anyone so they can arrest them for not being under lockdown. I could go on and on about this topic (and will in the future) but Claire has a great summary here (LINK). This is especially weird to me, since here in Modern Mayberry life is, more or less, exactly like pre-‘Rona life. High school football game? Zero masks. Except for my duck. I bought him one. It fits the bill.
International Breakdown – Afghanistan is a sign to the world – the United States has no military ability, or at least no military ability that it’s able to use effectively. Leaving bases (and the main airport) under the cover of darkness while abandoning American citizens to the Taliban? What does Biden call that? I’d hate to see his version of failure, since it would likely involve him somehow figuring out how to crack the crust of the world open so he could sniff a little girl’s hair.

At least we know one group that Joe is willing to fight for.

Immigration – Millions of illegals have streamed over the borders like there was a Black Friday sale on. Does the Left require COVID vaccination for them? It’s not only illegal immigration, it’s legal immigration. In 2021 the United States has the largest proportion of newly arrived (first generation) citizens in history. Ever – as near as I can tell (based on things like MIT studies) something like 17% of the people in the United States weren’t born here. Some, I assume, are nice people. But how many can we take in before the United States ceases to be the United States?
Loss of Social Cohesion – This is an effect, but it’s got tons of causes. Changes in technology. Changes in demographics. Changes in beliefs. A group believing what nearly every (90%+) American did in 1990 or 1890 or 1790 would be considered a “potential domestic terrorist” today.
Increased Polarity – Partially a result of the Loss of Social Cohesion, but also a result of decades of indoctrination of teachers by Leftists.
Demoralization – I’ve sensed a greater degree of resignation that it’s “over”. It’s not over. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Moral Collapse – It seems like the current worldview is, “if it isn’t illegal, it’s moral.” And anything that was illegal? There’s a group trying to make it legal. Shoplifting? It’s fine in San Francisco.

In the fall of 2021, the situation for the world is dire. Some of the threads of this web were woven over 100 years ago, some this year. Together, though, they form a pattern that will be hard to escape.

Back when NASA® had a countdown that didn’t go . . . 6…5…4…3…2…1…LUNCH!

When the diesel tank fell on the oxygen cylinder, in most normal worlds I would have become a diffuse cloud of Wilder paste. Not that time. Even though the world would never be the same as it was before the diesel tank fell, my world didn’t end.

Life will be different. Some of the chaos listed above cannot be avoided: many bills will have to finally be paid.

Don’t cry for the civilization we lost.

Times of change like this have come before. Collapses have occurred. People carry on, and in some cases produce better, stronger civilizations than ever went before.

The world that emerges will be a new one. Let us make it a great one.

FYI: This will be the topic of a livestream with Mark and The Mrs. on September 1, 2021 at 9pm Eastern. It will be here: (Bombs and Bants Livestream).

Censorship: It’s Not Just For Government Anymore

“The Constitution? I’m pretty sure the Patriot Act killed it to ensure our freedoms.” – The Simpsons

When you do push-ups, are you just bench-pressing the Earth?

The First Amendment to the Constitution was pretty important to the Framers. That’s why they put it first. Duh. In a move that I think would irritate the Framers, this one has been pretty twisted over time.

Like any of the Amendments, when it twists, it’s twisted Leftward. I’ll give an unrelated example. Abortion was made to be legal by somehow twisting the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution:

Ninth: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Fourteenth: . . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In reality, the Ninth Amendment is probably one of the most ignored Amendments. Why? Because government wants power, and people having rights is the opposite of state power. But under the logic of Rowe v. Wade I should be smoke all the crack I want to and not be arrested. Oh, wait, Hunter Biden already did that . . . .

Okay, I didn’t have a great tag line, but I have a second meme:

The First Amendment packs a big punch, it secures the rights of American citizens for a whole bundle of things, but the one I’m focusing on today is that the government can’t abridge the rights of people to speak freely. You know, share ideas?

Leftists used to be all-in on the First Amendment. They used it to weasel in Marxist concepts into schools and other institutions. People on the Right ignored them. For (what they thought) was a good reason: every person with common sense could easily see that Leftism didn’t work. Besides, they had to go to work and not argue with smelly Leftist college hippies.

So, Leftism crept in, and eventually took over institution after institution, as we’ve talked about before. The response of the Right was always the same, “Oh, we lost colleges? College kids! They’re so fickle. They’ll come around when they get older.”

What’s the name of the statue in the Temple of Regret: the Coulda Would Buddha.

That’s a shortsighted argument. Where do teachers come from? Oh, yeah, colleges. Who do teachers have access to? Oh, yeah, all the kids.

One thing that has been shown throughout history, however, is that the soft lies and false promises of Leftism are mainly only useful against weak, wishful, and self-hating minds. The rise of talk radio after the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the prompt failure of nearly all Leftist radio hosts proves the point: they can’t win in a fair fight of ideas.

So, what should the Left do after taking over the various institutions in the United States?

Pull up the ladder.

Get rid of free speech.

But there’s that pesky First Amendment. What can you do?

What does free speech online and the square root of -1 have in common? They’re both imaginary.

The answer in 2021 is rather simple: use private companies to stifle speech that the Left disagrees with.

If I were to travel back to 2000 and tell myself that in 2021 we’d see:

A sitting President would be censored from the Internet,
Private companies would create systems to track your every move,
Google® (2000: Don’t Be Evil®) would suppress ideas, and
Differing opinions would be branded as false
The government would openly lie . . . oh, wait, they always do that.

I’d think that we were living in some sort of dystopia.

The Left always sold dystopias with these sorts of characteristics as the result of a religious-Right dictatorship. But, no. This is entirely Leftist.

The most recent example is the White House has “reached out” to Facebook® to have them censor content about COVID-19®. I would like to point out that time after time after time, the “official” narrative has been wrong.

I got an email saying I got a job at Facebook. No interview, they had all my details.

Horribly wrong. Remember the videos of those people dropping dead in China? Remember the videos of the apartment doors being welded shut like some kind of intro to a zombie movie? Seem silly now?

Yeah. Remember the “don’t wear masks” leading to “wear masks” to “maybe wear two or three masks”? Yeah, me too.

It’s obvious that the one thing missing during the entire ‘Rona event has been good information. Every bit of it has been bleached, sanitized, and become subject to partisan polarization.

But “CDC Accepted Facts®” have been proven wrong again and again. So, why is sharing an opinion that differs from the Currently Accepted Truth™ subject to censorship? Because it is clear that Leftists are quite willing to shut down meaningful conversation in this country when it goes against whatever it is that they believe today.

That’s the plan. The plan is not just for COVID-19©, but for every fact, forever. And the “fact checkers” are people who hate the Right with every fiber of their being. Just go to Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia® page, and do a search for “laptop.” One entry. No mention of, you know, the pictures of him zonked out smoking crack.

That’s another form of censorship, one Winston Smith would be proud of. And, sure, Wikipedia© isn’t the government, and Facebook™ could ignore it when the President asks them to effectively censor people the government doesn’t like. It’s okay when a private company does it, right?

The Constitution isn’t magic. The only way that it works is if people actually demand that the government follow it. If not? Bit by bit it will be twisted into (sometimes) the opposite of what it says, in plain language.

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still a hearing?

There isn’t anything magical about the Supreme Court, and nothing in the Constitution gives them the right to be the ultimate decision makers as to what it means. It was written in plain language for people like you and me. Thomas Jefferson felt that every branch of the government was co-equal in being able to decide that an act of government was un-Constitutional.

Not saying that I’m the expert, but I think Thomas Jefferson just might have been in the room when some of the important decisions were being made.

The Constitution is a piece of paper, but it’s also a contract, a contract among men for the way that they will be governed. I’d add that the ultimate decision makers on the Constitution aren’t the Supreme Court, but the Several States, and, ultimately, the People.

And that’s what scares the Left. If they have to shut the People up, it’s because they’re scared.

Which is just what the Framers expected.

The Command Economy, Coming Soon To A Nation Near You

“Mr. Sulu, lock phasers on target and await my command.” – Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

Kim Jong Un and Dominos Pizza® share one thing: both can deliver a crispy Hawaiian in thirty minutes or less.

At the end of the Roman Empire, laws had to be passed to keep the place going. Some of the laws were normal, like huge taxes complete with people to come break your kneecaps if you didn’t pay the tax. Some of the laws were a last-ditch attempt to keep the Empire going – the Romans were having difficulty developing technology because they couldn’t do algebra. Whenever the Romans tried to solve for X, they kept coming up with 10.

Okay, enough math jokes for one paragraph. The real problem was that laws always have unintended consequences. When those unintended consequences pop up, what’s the obvious thing for a lawmaker to do?

Well, they don’t call them lawrepealers, they call them lawmakers, so they make another law. And that new law has unintended consequences, too. Why? Because every law has unintended consequences. If you’re a lawmaker, what’s your solution?

Yet more laws. It’s like trying to fix a fraudulent election system by voting, but that was what the Empire did – pass more laws. Expecting politicians to fix actual problems is like expecting the iceberg to fix the Titanic.

It got so silly that they had a law that if you were a farmer, your son had to be a farmer, too, so that Rome had enough farmers. It wasn’t just limited to farmers, it was any old occupation. If dad did it, junior had to do it, too. The reason that they did that is because farmers were headed to the cities where the welfare was better, and just walking off the farms.

I wonder if that had any lasting consequences?

What we’re seeing now in the United States is something sadly similar. A law is passed, and it has horrible consequences. The solution? More laws.

Taxes are simple that way. Who gets taxed?

That’s simple! People who don’t have their congressmen’s cell phone number on speed dial get taxed, that’s who.

Why are Sherlock Holmes’ taxes so low? He’s an expert at deduction.

In order to not tax the people congressmen know, congressmen have to write increasingly complicated laws to create increasingly complicated regulations that then result in complicated interpretations which become as legally binding as the law that led to the regulation that led to the interpretation. Whew.

Why so complicated? Because if it were simple, everyone could take advantage of the tax code like it was one of Harvey Weinstein’s dates.

The result?

Jeff Bezos had at least two years that he paid zero taxes between 2006 and 2018. Good job, Jeff and the legions of tax attorneys you hired!

Me? I have to make do with TurboTax™, which sadly won’t talk to congressmen on my behalf.

The result of all of these laws isn’t just cronyism, where bald, Bond-villain wannabees like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates save money so they can take their hideous goblin-looking girlfriends out on dates while their ex-wives slave away with only billions of dollars to show for their decades of devotion, which is quite a bit of money. Some people work an entire year and don’t make $50 billion dollars.

I wonder if she enjoys his company. Or his companies?

Tax law isn’t the only problem, and it isn’t even the worst problem. The worst problem is the Command Economy.

What’s a Command Economy? Essentially, it’s when the government decides that all of those natural economic laws that follow from generally free commerce that have worked throughout mankind’s existence are useless. The result?

Men, top men mind you, decide who wins and who loses in the economy. It’s like Jeff and Bill not paying taxes because legislators are lining up to do what they want, but worse. It’s more like a transsexual bodybuilder having a prostate infection prior to the women’s weightlifting competition in the Olympics®. We all know that’s not pretty.

What is the result when people try to plan the economy?

Disaster. I’ve talked again (LINK) and again about the Soviet attempts at a planned economy. It never works well. People respond to incentives, and no single person (or even a bureau of people) is as smart as the collective decisions of millions of citizens.

Perhaps the most tragic story is that of China, which I’ve also written about before (LINK). There, anything that Mao said, or that Mao’s advisor’s thought he said, became immediate law. The result was the starvation of millions. Ask AOC, and she’ll tell you, “That wasn’t starvation, that was simply involuntary food restriction, silly. It was for their own good.”

Stalin and Mao: still a better love story than Twilight.

Why did people starve to death? Because the incentives of productivity were destroyed. It has even happened on this continent when the Pilgrims showed up. Their first idea was that everything would be held in common – they even wrote it down in the Mayflower Compact. So, regardless of who gardened, everyone shared equally in everything. What could be more Christian than that?

Mutual starvation, apparently.

Two years after the foundation of the Plymouth Colony the Pilgrims dumped their Mayflower Compact on the Ash Heap of History. People could farm and keep the stuff they grew and do with it whatever they wanted. The result? The harvest of 1623 was the best harvest the Pilgrims had, until the next year when they produced even more. The Chinese have dumped all the crazy Mao stuff, and have used the incentives of the free market to quickly pull amazing numbers of people out of poverty. The Chinese people say they don’t mind the associated total state political control, but the CCP noted back to the people, “I don’t recall asking your opinion on anything. Back into the kitchen!”

The secret ingredient in creating real prosperity remains the same: private property. Duh.

But people never learn.

Never mix math and booze: don’t drink and derive.

I fear we’re at the brink of the next, tragic, Command Economy. Of course, I’d love to blame this on the Left, but at least on this one? It’s been a mutual suicide pact leaping towards a controlled economy.

Bill Clinton is the unlikely hero here. Realizing his only path for re-election after his wife’s failed attempt at socializing medicine was to govern from the center, he did just that. He stopped being a water carrier for the economic Left and stuck to cigars and interns for his amusement.

Clinton is a critically flawed man, but his true allegiance was power, and realizing that the path to it was one of moderation, he followed it – at least in the laws he signed. Bush II wasn’t so inclined, he never met a person whose money he didn’t want to spend. W’s abuse of the economy started with “compassionate conservatism” and continued through massive bribes of additional Medicare funding to buy his re-election. Just as Clinton drove Right to get re-elected, Bush drove Left.

Obama? Socializing medicine in a way that’s obviously not something that can be paid for in the long term is his legacy. Otherwise, he mainly just continued W’s budget shenanigans, but with his friends winning. Of course, why not. They had his cell number.

I’d love to tell you that Trump was in some way different, but Trump has one strength – making a deal. The laws of physics and economics are, sadly, not negotiable. Biden? Who knows what he thinks. He certainly doesn’t. But the idea of opening the checkbook has been continued (by someone) under Sleepy Joe. I just got a check from .gov. It was for “advance payment of child tax credit.”

What’s this?

Bread and circuses. Flooding the economy with cash in the idea that not only votes can be printed by the millions, but prosperity can be printed, too.

Political Tip: it’s okay to use your family members as political props, just remember, don’t use them as Halloween props.

The result is going to be predictable: the inflation that’s currently occurring will be an “unintended consequence” of the spending today. The reactions will be simple, and wrong.

“Let’s fix prices.”
“Let’s mandate higher wages because of higher prices.”
“Let’s give more money to those who need it most.”
“Let’s give a tax credit for alternative energy.”
“People. We have a lot of them. Could we turn them into food? Chuck-fil-a®, anyone?”

All of these ideas sound good (except Chuck-fil-a™, unless they have good dipping sauces), but all of them are wrong. The distortions that resulted from FDR’s New Deal® still reverberate in our economy today. Social Security alone has lifted trillions from the economy and removed the incentive to save for retirement.

Just like so many of the siren songs of socialism, Social Security sounds super. People who get it say, “I paid in for it, so I earned it.” Well . . . no. The benefits far outweigh the contributions. Social Security is really just income redistribution from the young to the old. But hey, it sounds good, right?

Other distortions, as I said, are on the way. We’ve seen this song and dance before. Can’t sell at NY strip for more than $12 a pound? Welcome to a new cut of meat – the Missouri Strip. Or the Ohio Strip. Of course, the reaction from government at this late stage will be to imprison people who attempt to get cheeky by getting around the laws.

What’s the hardest thing about being vegan? Keeping it to yourself, apparently.

That’s what governments do when they are starting to lose control. They come down in force on those who thumb their noses. Look at the charges levied against the January 6 protesters: they’re unjust. Why are they unjust? Because the more frightened a government is, the more it overreacts.

The reaction in the economy will be similar. The idea that we can ignore thermodynamics and select an energy source without consequence is one that will be chosen. Ideology will attempt to trump physics. Instead of being hungry for food, if a Command Economy takes over, we will first hunger for power.

Of course, Leftism has caused nothing but hunger whenever (and that’s not an exaggeration) tried. Want a diet plan that always works? Communism is a sure bet.

Why can I be so sure in making that prediction? When the Romans tried a Command Economy, it failed. Those farmers, whose sons were supposed to take their place?

Those Roman sons walked away from the productive farms, because the price, their freedom, was too high.

In the end, economics always wins over ideology and bad math. Always. Generally, though, a lot of tragedy precedes it.

Let’s just hope this isn’t coming soon to a farm near you.

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it. Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin? Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals. The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England. Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years. I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears. The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy. And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that. NO! Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral. Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime. Or the lifetime of your child. Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation. Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral. One motivational mistake is to aim too high. When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners. Third place isn’t so bad. Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage. They did really well. Were they close to winning it all? Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal. But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place. If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better. So, third isn’t so bad. They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him: what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week? What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room? The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night. Second place is tantalizing. It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates. Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist? It depends. In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right? But what happens when the dog finally catches the car? What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history: Buzz Aldrin. It will all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class. He went to the USMA at West Point. He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did. He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing. What was it?

Oh, yeah. He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool. But there appears to be a downside to that. It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up? Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up. That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake. Imagine: Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked. Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes. Then a month passes. Then a year passes. The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew. How do you move forward? How do you top yourself? I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes. Dang. That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped. He had fame. He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle. Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars. Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate? The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk. He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars. He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision. You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him. Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars. A worthy goal for mankind. A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity. He had found his cathedral.

Again. Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers. Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up. But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that. Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building. You start building something more important than you. I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching. Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure. Neil didn’t really say. He seemed happy that the attention had passed. My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong. And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one: have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build. Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through. Make it something that you can care about. Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts: you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

Welcome To The Unravelling

“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread. See what it unravels.” – The X-Files

I imagine the guy who decided to use Velcro™ on shoes said, “Why knot?”

Well, that struck a nerve.

I’m never sure when I hit “post” how what I’ve written will be taken. Some of the things I’ve written that I’ve felt were really good don’t have much of an impact. I’m not complaining – when I’ve finished writing a post it feels like my soul is a bit lighter – like I’ve accomplished something more than turn oxygen into carbon dioxide for the day.

One clue that a post will be popular is when the post appears to write itself. That was the case with my last post. When I finished, I was in bed two hours earlier than normal. I normally go to sleep when the cows wander back into the field, because that’s pasture bedtime.

The reason, I think, that post was so popular is because I just had the good fortune to write what many other people were thinking.

This is because we’re unravelling. We just don’t have words for it. It’s not just as a nation, it appears to be all of Western Civilization.

What the media would have people believe is that there is a great, monolithic consensus. Prior to the Internet, that might have been achievable. There was only One Acceptable Opinion, and it was presented to you live, in living color on three networks. The local paper (generally) also had some version or other of the One Acceptable Opinion.

Elvis Presley’s last big hit? The bathroom floor.

That meant that stories could disappear from the public view fairly easily. Ruby Ridge? I heard of that story on a local talk radio station. The person who was telling the story, honestly, sounded crazy. Here they were talking about this crazy story of a man being framed and then Federal agents killing his family.

The guy really did sound crazy. Here he was, telling a story that I hadn’t heard of.

Crazy. It sounded like a conspiracy theory.

The government used to be considered a trustworthy source by, well, everyone. Looking back, I’m pretty certain the government never did tell us the Truth. But the important thing was everyone believed the One Acceptable Opinion.

After her boyfriend went missing in the forest, what conspiracy did Barbie® believe in? Kentrails.

Oh, sure, there were failures now and then. When Tail Gunner Joe pointed out, rightly, that the State Department and Hollywood® were filled with commies, people were upset.

Leftism was generally viewed as bad. It was so obvious that Stalin was a bad guy that even the New York Times® couldn’t hide it, as they had swept the human cost of the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver Medals) under the rug two decades earlier.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

The way the Left did that is they went to their normal playbook. How do you trump logic and facts? A plain appeal to emotion:

“Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” was how they went after Senator Joe McCarthy. They tried to make his dogged pursuit of Leftism appear to be an unhinged attack against ghosts.

But McCarthy was . . . right. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was shown that Joe was right about the scope and scale of Soviet infiltration. Where? Everywhere Joe had said. McCarthyism was just what you and I would call, “Telling the truth.”

Again, McCarthy was right. Leftism had infiltrated the Federal government. Stalin had better progress reports on the atomic bomb than those that were given to Truman. There’s a reason we celebrate Juneteenth around my house.

Why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cross the road? Because they were never on your side. (meme: not original)

Leftism has burrowed inside of our country. For decades. When Reagan was shot we couldn’t watch it on TV. There were no televisions in our classrooms. But some teachers had radios and instead of listening to a lecture on social studies, we sat and listened to the news on a tinny AM radio.

Would President Reagan live? No one knew. All we knew was that he was in the hospital.

One kid, whose parents were Leftist professors at the local college, said, simply, “I hope he dies. Maybe then the Senate will choose Ted Kennedy as Vice President.”

The split we see now isn’t new. It’s been festering in our country for decades.

I could come up with example after example. But if I were to try to create a scenario where people would be on each other like Karens on a manager, I couldn’t create a better scenario than what I see today:

Multiple cultures forced together in small spaces.
Actual propaganda presented as nightly news.
Dogs and cats, living together.
An Internet where people can check facts for themselves.
A demonization of the Culture that created the place.

My fat parrot just died after a long illness. It’s a huge weight off my shoulder.

I actively don’t believe anything I hear anymore. For months, Google®, Facebook™ and Twitter© would ban anyone who said that the ‘Rona came from a lab in China.

Ban.

Now, that’s the current One Acceptable Opinion. The previous version has been tossed by a Winston Smith-type person into the memory hole. But we remember.

And now we know that the entire “conspiracy theory” smear tactic was created, explicitly, so people wouldn’t ask questions. Wonder what really happened to JFK? Dunno. There are still nearly 500,000 pages yet to be released.

Not words. Pages.

I guess everyone knows how Kennedy died. That one is a no-brainer.

But does that really matter? Kennedy is dead. What really matters is that the Feds created the entire idea of mocking people who believed in anything other than the One Acceptable Opinion. Think the COVID-19 mRNA treatment is as sketchy as sharing a needle with Johnny Depp?

You’re a conspiracy theorist. You must not believe in sCiEncE! There is One Acceptable Theory. Anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil.

But now in 2021, we have the Internet. In 1982, or in 1952 this might have worked. The sheep would go back to grazing.

Now?

It’s just more energy to help the country unravel as the One Acceptable Theory is just like the famed Emperor Who Had No Clothes.

Is there anything left to unravel?

The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden

“It’s perfect. We traded one nuked civilization for another.” – Battlestar Galactica.

Bill Murray wasn’t cast as Thor by Marvel®. They figured that no one likes an electricity Bill.

I had an utterly different post planned. It was so funny that the laughing that it would induce would have caused your ribs to exit your body. It was a post so funny, it was dangerous. Comedy, as they say, is not always pretty. I try to do those posts on Fridays. Why?

I had a boss that gave sage advice: never give your boss bad news on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning. I figure that people need a palate cleanser going into the weekend, and try to provide a bit of fun. And this post that I had planned? It would have been banned by the Geneva Convention as a Weapon of Mass Hilarity.

Sadly, that post might now be lost to history, since I have to replace it with this one. Normally, my posts are created weeks in advance and focus tested against a cross-section of laboratory badgers who have no spleens. Why no spleens? They tell me that’s important, something about we don’t need no spleenin’ badgers.

But no, the Occupant-in-Chief decided to make the single most irresponsible statement ever made by someone who was sworn in as President since Richard Nixon said, “What’s the worst that they can do to me?”

I don’t want to be accused of taking Biden out of context (not that there’s much of a chance of that) but here’s his quote, to the most accurate degree I can find:

“Those who say the blood of patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government, if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

First, Biden is as articulate as a fourth-grader with fetal alcohol syndrome who’s just smoked a bowl of Hunter Biden’s crack. And, yes, his Fraudulency has a son who smokes crack with hookers and takes videos of it. This is a thing that really happens. Of course, the response from the Left is to say Putin is corrupt.

Sorry. I’ll try to stick to the topic.

Second, that’s also the same logic as a fourth-grader with an extra chromosome or three who’s just huffed a can of sparkly gold spray paint. Abraham Lincoln made the obvious response fairly well:

“All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Lincoln was wrong about a lot of things. He was right about a lot of things, too. He is correct about this:

“As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Joe Biden could have the armies of the united States get him a drink by force from any river in this land. But Joe Biden and all the armies of the united States couldn’t hold the length of the Missouri or the Mississippi for a single day by force.

The armies of the united States number some 1.3 million men oh, wait people oh, wait, xim/xers. Add in the Reserves? Let’s round WAY UP and call it three million. Total.

There are three million males in Missouri. I pick Missouri only because they recently decided they’re going to tell the Feds to attempt to compact a very large object into a very small space when it comes to firearm laws.

Go, Missouri.

Not all of the three million males in Missouri would be on the side of freedom, since there are always some disgusting gelatinous slugs of humanity that will side with Evil over Truth. But there are enough. And don’t tell me that neighboring states wouldn’t flow in.

No, Mr. Biden. The only one who needs F-15s and nuclear weapons for control is you, you disgusting pile of fake hair, fake teeth, Alzheimer’s degraded brain, who gets his only Father’s Day card encrusted in cocaine dust and whore DNA.

The united States governs only, let me make this clear, only by consent of the governed. As citizens, we’re generally pretty good. But we are horrible, horrible at taking instruction from tyrants. It’s in our DNA.

No, literally. This is not an exaggeration. My family line came across an ocean to tame a continent. That was their resume. That was their job description as they rocked back and forth on little wooden boats in the midst of Atlantic storms. We didn’t come here because we were weak. We came here to fight and die and bleed and make this land our own.

We came here because we were strong.

We came here because we yearned for freedom.

Mr. Biden, your butt-sniffing and shoe-licking parents and your degenerate sons and personal weaknesses are abhorrent to every fiber of my body. Mr. Biden, you are disgusting. Mr. Biden, your forefathers were horrible. Mr. Biden, you and your weaknesses represent everything wrong with this country, and everything that has led to where we are today.

How dare you threaten me?

To threaten me is to threaten Duncan MacWilder of the Clan MacWilder, who came here before this was a country.
It is to threaten Hans Wilder, who came here to leave tyrants behind in Europe before World War I.
It is to threaten my forefathers who died hewing a civilization out of this continent with their blood and sweat and toil and dead babies so lazy writers like me could exist.

The deal we made in 1776 is the same one we have today, Bucko. We are here because we have certain inalienable rights.

Mr. Biden, you want to threaten me with jet fighters? Mr. Biden, you want to threaten to use nuclear weapons against your own citizens?

We didn’t come here for that. We didn’t die here for that. We didn’t bury our sons and daughters on dusty plains and hills and hallows across this country, building it with our blood for that.

Reparations? We paid for that in blood in places you have long forgotten, like Manassas Junction. Everyone I’ve ever been able to research on any part of my family has been someone who made the united States better.

Every.

Single.

One.

We taught Eisenhower (really). We built farms. We built bridges 150 years ago that still exist today. We built infrastructure that serves tens of millions of people – this is not an exaggeration. We built railroads across mountains that mountain goats couldn’t cross. We took trains up those mountains when the snow was 20 feet deep. With our kids.

Just for fun.

We raised and nurtured children and taught them freedom.

Our blood is in this soil. Our children are buried here as payment from sea to sea.

My blood is in this soil. My forefathers weren’t evil. They were Big Damn Heroes. Odin and Thor and Jesus would be proud of them for their courage.

Did other people build this land as well? Sure. But Wilder blood is spread here from the Mayflower to today.

I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Duncan MacWilder would have said:
I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Patrick Henry would have said (distant relative, according to an aunt):
I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Hans Wilder would have said:

No.

And, to mark the first time I have ever used this word on this blog? Each and every one of them would have added:

Fuck you, Mr. Biden.

Bring your jets. Bring your nukes. The only way you have to dislodge us off this continent we conquered with our blood and sweat and buried kin is to kill us all. We will never give up. We will never surrender. This will not die with me. Or my children.

You will never defeat us. Never. Our blood is here. Here we make our stand. We can go to no other country for freedom. We can go no further to a distant frontier. Despite what you will try to do with us, despite the injustices you will visit on us, we will win. We will mock you, and your grave will be pulled up and your bones used by our children for their amusement.

We will smile, and nod.

We did not choose this. We do not want this.

You spiked the ball too soon. Maybe two generations into the future, they would go gentle onto that goodnight.

Too soon, Bucko.

Fuck you.

The Beauty Of The Red Pill

“Hey Samantha, don’t take the Red Pill!” – Grandma’s Boy

If my son wanted to be a fiction writer, I’d send him to college to study journalism.

Have you ever not asked a question because you already knew the answer, but were afraid to hear it? I’m willing to bet we all have. I try to leave occasional breadcrumbs here, especially during my Monday and Wednesday posts, but I’ve stopped short of leaving my posts in the forest near a witch’s house. Besides, I hear Hillary has security guards.

The Truth is shocking. Many times, the Truth isn’t pleasant. I remember coming to one unpleasant Truth realization in college: the college didn’t care if I did well or even if I graduated.

It hadn’t been like that in high school. But in college? I was just a number. It sounds silly to me now, but back then it was quite a realization for me. Gradually, more Truths started showing up in my life. In many cases, I denied them as long as I could, but they eventually became inevitable.

They call this the Red Pill, after the scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves gets a job painting pills red.

Never let Morpheus do the cooking at a Matrix cast barbeque. There’s a reason they call him Lawrence Fishburne.

Part of the problem with discovering Truth is that it can make you feel alone. Much of our society is based on covering uncomfortable Truth with pretty little lies. It has always been so, but in 2021 it’s at the very worst that it has been in the history of the United States. People were censored a year ago for telling what are now the (generally) accepted theories about CoronaChan.

The Truth is that we still don’t know where it came from, but vary from any generally accepted truth about COVID on YouTube® and you’ll be censored. Thankfully, YouTube™ is so committed to “truth” that they gave themselves an award for being so courageous about it. Really – there isn’t even a punchline.

Here’s another Red Pill: no one (and I mean no one) is coming to save you. No one (and I mean no one) is responsible for your actions but you. If you can’t save yourself, you’ll just have to depend on luck, which is a crappy strategy. There is no secret cabal of government good guys like Qanon® used to put in his cryptic message board posts. Q is not coming to save you.

I guess QANON was just another 4Chan teller.

Part of the problem with taking a Red Pill is that, once you’re finally awake and aware of how the world works, just like Ebola, you want to share it with people. That’s a bad idea.

The unfortunately named Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus made the silly quote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” and with the new Red Pill knowledge, you want to share it far and wide.

Sadly, Desiderius, the one-eyed man is not king.

As H.G. Wells wrote, the blind people can’t see what the one-eyed dude describes. They think him mad, and if they have a chance they’ll tie him down and remove that silly eye that keeps giving him all of those wild notions and that awful practical joke of leaving the plunger in the toilet. People will fight nearly to the death to keep a pretty lie alive, especially when the Truth is ugly.

I wrote a check to a charity for the blind, but I’m worried they’ll never see a penny of it.

But there is opportunity for an individual once the first real Red Pill hits. Seeking Truth becomes a habit. And you find that Truth exists in many, many more places than you might imagine. When I go to find Truth, I know one place I can find it very quickly.

Truth is in the Iron.

I started lifting again this week for the first time since COVID raised its head. I was stunned at how one of my standard lifts was half – HALF – what it had been 18 months ago.

That is Truth. The Iron is Truth.

Was it at all pleasant to find my strength had dropped that far, that fast?

Of course not.

But it is True.

I gave up on lifting cases of Pepsi® for exercise, it was just soda pressing.

I cannot hide from the Iron. I cannot cheat the Iron. The only things there in the weight room are the Iron, Gravity, and Me. The only thing that changes in that equation is me. I can’t blame the Iron. I can’t blame Gravity.

The Red Pill?

No one will make me physically stronger but me. And the only way I can do that is to wrestle against Gravity with the Iron. And, unless I am quite ill, it will always work.

And here is the hope. Here is where the Red Pill really begins to pay dividends.

I’m the one responsible for:

my physical state,
what I eat,
how I react,
what I say,
what I watch,
how I treat others,
my own Virtue,
who I am, and
where my life ends up.

I’m not responsible for who loves me. I’m not responsible for how much they love me. Those are the output. If I control every bit of input in my life, what happens, happens.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing more wonderful than that realization. It goes beyond winning and losing. It goes beyond the opinions of others.

The downside, of course, is seeing all of the pretty little lies and all of the attempted manipulation. Even worse: the attempts to numb minds, to distract, and to pretend that the new lie doesn’t contradict the last lie. The stunning thing to me is how many people will flitter from one contradictory opinion to another like butterflies in the Sun, with never a thought.

When I take responsibility for myself, I am a changed person.

I was born a male, I identify as a male, but according to Stouffer’s Frozen Lasagna®, I identify as a family of four.

That doesn’t mean the battle ever ends. The first struggle is, always, against myself. Why am I weaker?

I had weights at home, but didn’t lift.

Why?

Well, I could make any number of excuses, but none of them matter. I didn’t lift. That was it. So, my choice is simple: will I work to get better every week, or will I be complacent with where I am?

I asked the Iron a question. It told me the Truth.

Now, my choice is how will I answer?

I have only one answer. Sweat.

It’s never lonely when you’ve got Truth for a companion.

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic? Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929. According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends. I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose: it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too. When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin. The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well. Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up: whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization. Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife? Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape. A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them. If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke. If you want to destroy a civilization? Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011. That initial post I read back then is here (LINK). Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement. Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse. Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh. People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change. During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light. My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system. People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have. This rarely makes things better. Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems. And so on. It’s a chain reaction. To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock? Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
The First World War. The Russian Revolution. The Second World War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France.

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant. The French Revolution started in 1789. If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end. That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then. She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then. When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen. True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry? Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short. Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy. What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.