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Actual Johnny Carson Joke:

Carnac The Magnificent, holding envelope to his head to divine the contents:  “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Carnac The Magnificent, opening envelope and reading contents:  “Give three reasons you should name your baby Al.”

How do you determine love?  I mean, if you put your wife and your dog in the trunk of your car, who is happier to see you in two hours when you let them out?

Why do we do it?  I mean, I’m the funniest writer on the Internet, so I know why I do that.  But why do we do all of this?  You know, the life stuff?

Life is difficult.  It’s an uphill slog, and the ending (of the life part) is predetermined.  Yet we keep picking up one foot and putting it in front of the next.

Why?

Because it’s who we are.  It’s what we are.

We have lived in the most prosperous civilization that’s ever existed.  In most Western countries, we have many, many more people afflicted with diseases because of too many available calories, rather than too few.

That’s a rarity in human history.  In medieval France, peasants would essentially spend the whole winter in bed together, shivering, trying to minimize calorie loss in a simulation of hibernation.   Now?  It’s Cheetos®, PEZ™, elephant rides and pantyhose for everyone.  We are in a civilization characterized by excess.

That may not always be the case.

I wish they made pantyhose that don’t rip, because now everyone in the bank has seen my face.

I’ve read a book or two, and one that really hit me was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.   It’s by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  I think I come close to pronouncing his name correctly, which might make me sound pretentious.  But if you read Solzhenitsyn, it’s not pretentious at all.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is just that, a day in the life of a guy named John (Ivan means John).  This particular John is in prison.  Why?  He was captured by the Germans during World War II.  Anyone captured by the Germans who wasn’t suffering from life-threatening wounds was considered a traitor to the U.S.S.R.

Denisovich was not only in prison, he was in the GULAG.  It’s all capitalized because, like NATO, it’s an acronym.  In this case, GULAG is an acronym for a series of Russian words, Гла́вное Управле́ние Лагере́й that I imagine sounds like a cat choking on a hairball made of fiberglass and cheap vodka when pronounced correctly.

See, that’s not pretentious!

This particular book is very, very short.  Solzhenitsyn uses his language with economy, yet to me he creates a story that’s like a joke.  It’s not clear what he’s talking about until the very last page, and (for me) it hit me like a ton of bricks.  It’s like if M. Night Shyamalan wrote it with a particular twist.

You’ve already read Solzhenitsyn.  See?  You’re not pretentious.

I recommend it unreservedly.  I bought it at a garage sale, and I gave it to the foreman of a crew who was putting in cinder blocks.  That makes sense in an M. Night Shyamalan way, too, but you have to read the book.  Here’s one place I saw a copy (LINK).  I’d give you mine but I’d have to track down a retired bricklayer with a bad back.

The message I took away from this book is that life isn’t about grand moments.  And, as I mentioned some time ago, life isn’t about comfort, either.  Life is much more than that.  In the book, Denisovich takes outlandish pleasure at what we would consider bare minimums.

That gave me perspective.  Again, that’s not the insight grenade I took from the book, but it’s close.  When is the last time you really thought about the salad you were eating, savoring the crisp crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the Caesar dressing, and the hard, yet yielding texture of the Parmesan cheese?

Each and every bite is a taste no king or potentate could have had out of season.  I can have it every Tuesday.  Or Thursday.  Or any other day ending in y.

I know it was a bad joke.  Everyone romaine calm.

In many ways, I often overlook the luxury I’m surrounded by.  I can get a fresh tomato in the depths of winter, and when I bite into it feel the taste of a spring day erupt.  I’d add in red roses in winter, but The Mrs. knows where the rose bush grows if she wants a few.

Our world is filled with unimaginable convenience.  Our world is filled with unimaginable abilities to entertain and distract.  Like I said earlier:  our world is filled with excess, but it might not always be.

In Solzhenitsyn’s world, well, a luxury is an extra ration of rough bread made from poorly milled grain.  Solzhenitsyn knew what he was talking about:  he spent years in a GULAG for saying in a letter to a friend during the war that Stalin wore granny-panties.  Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was a mild criticism.

In a letter.

So, off to GULAG.

In the GULAG, Solzhenitsyn got cancer.  Ouch.  He survived.  And, when Nikita Khrushchev was leading the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn actually got to publish some of his critical commentaries on communism.  Why?  Khrushchev wanted to remove every bit of the stain of Stalin from the U.S.S.R., so Solzhenitsyn was his guy.

The Soviets made the best bread in history – people would wait in lines for days for a single piece.

That didn’t last long.  In most cases, commies want to show the world (and their own citizens) that no one can escape.  Sadly for them, Solzhenitsyn was too famous to pop into prison, and too outspoken to leave among the citizens.  That sort of thing happens when you win the frigging Nobel Prize.

So?

They booted him.  Stripped him of his citizenship.  He lived in the United States until 1994.  Famously, he predicted the future of the United States in an address to Harvard® that he’d be lynched for today.

How cool was the address?  It contains these lines:

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism.  Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

Read The Whole Thing: (LINK)

What irritates me the most is that on a long weekend when I was a kid, I probably could have gone, met the man, and bought him a beer.  If I could write just once the wisdom that Solzhenitsyn gave in just that one speech I could go to my end a happy man.

Was it a missed opportunity in not just getting in my car and driving to find him?  (I even had a copy of his book at that time.)  If I regretted things, I’d regret that I never did buy Solzhenitsyn a beer and gave Gorbachev a wedgie.

Okay, I’d like to give both of them wedgies.  Atomic wedgies.

Solzhenitsyn later moved back to Russia, his citizenship restored, and they gave him a nice house.  Spoiler alert:  he didn’t do it for the house.

He did it because, as he said in his speech to Harvard©:

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage.  No one on Earth has any other way left but – upward.

This is why we do it.  This is why we put that one foot in front of the other.

“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.” – Solzhenitsyn

It’s who we are.

It’s what we are.

Anybody need Doritos®?  Oh, and remember, Solzhenitsyn outlasted the Soviets.

“No, I quite approve of terror, arson, murder, any tool that serves the revolution.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

The Russian Revolution had big goals:  they aimed for the Tsars.

In last week’s post about the Woke Military driving out the obviously patriotic Lt. Colonel Lohmeier (Woke Military Kicking Out (More) Officers), I replied in the comments:

“I hope that they start recruiting from mental institutions, prisons, and inner-city Minneapolis.”

This was actually an attempt at a joke – it’s a riff on a line from Baseketball, the 1998 Zucker Brothers/Trey Parker/Matt Stone movie which is a staple around our house on Saturday nights.  The original line from the movie is:

Continued expansion diluted the talent pool, forcing owners to recruit heavily from prisons, mental institutions, and Texas.

When they film a post-apocalypse movie in Detroit, they have to use CGI to repair buildings.

I didn’t use Texas, because I like Texas and Texans, so I picked Minneapolis because I think it’s on its way to becoming a quaint “Detroit on the Mississippi” where the primary source of amusement is Thunderdome Friday nights.  Large Marge, a frequent commenter, called me on this quip (edits only in formatting):

A)  Military recruits from prison

I am a former Corrections Officer.
I worked at three penitentiaries . . . including a max.

Some of the most intelligent individuals are prisoners.  The most intelligent of them are organized and exceptionally efficient in the use of violence and intimidation.

Although better people than me might question their primary loyalties — gang/club? or Constitution? — I would expect them to continue to hone their adaptive skills in a military setting.

In fact, I would anticipate them quickly establishing a hierarchy and running the joint in no time… while eliminating slackers.  Anybody they cannot eliminate, they recruit.  No middle ground, no spectators.

Two of my ‘adopted’ sons are also Corrections Officers.  Both are Marines, one was a SEAL.  Intelligent, competitive, dedicated, observant.

Ask around, you may discover your assumptions to be the opposite of reality.
And assumptions can get somebody hurt.

B)  Military recruits from inner-city slums

Happens daily.  Pigment is no guarantee of inbred stupidity or ineffectiveness, however, it is a guarantee of tribal acceptance.

Anybody not in the tribe is prey:

If you are alone, they are five.

If you are five, they are a faceless two hundred in a spontaneous leaderless non-thinking swarm . . . they act, then disperse into nothingness.

Similar to recruits from prison, these folks are effective at violence and intimidation.
Just do not expect complex thought processes resulting in traditional long-term ‘White Collar’ crimes.
Complex planning is not required for crimes of opportunity.

C)  These A and B elements are not exclusive.

Expect cross-overs.

Flyers can ruin your afternoon.

Large Marge is, of course, right in every respect.

The first point is that the general attitude is that all of the Left is represented by the soy-boy weakness we see from the Left’s poster children.  It is not.

I love being around people like this.  I know that I can easily take their wallets and buy myself something nice with their parent’s money.

Leftism is about power, not rule of law.  What does that sound like?  It sounds like a gang hierarchy.  In truth, that describes the rise of most Leftist groups as they head for absolute power.

Need an example?  Joseph Stalin was a bank robber.  He was a kidnapper.  He ran extortion and protection rackets.  Undoubtedly he was a murderer before the Soviet Revolution ever began and he could update his rookie numbers into the big leagues.

Stalin was a thug.  When the Revolution started, he assumed a military command position and rose to prominence because:  he was ruthless and brutal.

Of course, the mincing idiots in the Alberta Young Communist League won’t be anything but grease between underneath the tank treads of the real Leftists.  If they were all that we faced?  The Revolution would be over as soon as the microwaves ran out of power to heat up the chicken tendies the Alberta Communist Party uses for food.

If you work at the prison library, it does have its prose and cons.

No, if the real Revolution starts, we’ll see the same here.  And the Left will recruit heavily from prisons.  How do we know this?  They’ve already started.

• California is planning on releasing 63,000 violent felons back onto the street.
• It is now a bigger crime to defend yourself in Leftist states than to rape or murder.
• Places like San Francisco have made shoplifting under $950 a “free pass” crime where there isn’t any punishment.

As I mentioned in the last Weather Report – the Chauvin trial wasn’t about Chauvin’s guilt – it was a planned political theater telling cops that the last thing they can do is attempt to arrest criminals.  Violent crime increase is the result.

Communist revolutions since the French Revolution have had the effect of bringing not the brightest and the smartest and the most virtuous to power, but the most bloodthirsty.  Stalin himself initiated purges to every possible threat to his authority for just this reason.

So, Large Marge is right on this point.  The people that the Left will put against America won’t be the weak that they put forward.  What they put forward will be determined by ruthlessness.  Say what you want about Stalin, but he wasn’t dumb.  And he wasn’t a nice cuddly grandpa – he left his own son to die in a POW camp during World War II rather than accept the offered trade for him.

Remember, Joe Stalin was great at carbon reduction.

The leadership of the Left will also be determined by another factor:  loyalty to the Cause.  One of the hallmarks of Leftism is promotion to leadership positions of people who would never have been able to reach a leadership position under the old regime.  A prostitute as commissar determining who of the town’s leaders gets shot for perceived past grievances?  Why not?

In fact, it has always been the practice to find those who have failed in life to promote to power in Leftist countries.  The idea is that competence is less valuable than loyalty, and those who owe everything in life to their devotion to the party are bound to be the most fanatical.

To me, it looks like the FBI office smells like cheap aftershave and burnt hair.

By the logic of the Left, Lt. Colonel Lohmeier had to be removed.  He was competent, but he wasn’t loyal, and never would be.  Why do that when there are dozens of Majors that you can promote who have seen the penalty for not being loyal?

On the Right, there is a desire for more incompetence in the forces that may be sent against the American people for the first time in over 155 years, but we may not get that.  The Majors that follow Lohmeier will likely be nearly as competent, but a whole lot more loyal.  That’s the official army.  Likewise, they’ll probably be working along with shock troops as bloodthirsty as the Leftists that performed atrocities in Paris in 1794, Russia between 1917 and 1933, China between 1949 and 1970, and Cambodia in the 1970s.

So, yeah.  My attempt at humor was just that, an attempt.  Large Marge is right.

This is a warning to all American people who love justice and the rule of law:  never, ever, underestimate your opposition.

(And, thank you, Large Marge, for catching my grammar errors so I can fix ‘em!)

“I mean, people should be envying us, you know.” – This Is Spinal Tap

A friend of mine has a really jealous wife.  She went through his calendar and wanted to know who May was.

In the second year of my career, I didn’t get a bonus.  I had gotten one the previous year, but by my second year I had done some great stuff, and managed to save the company quite a few dollars – as in several hundred thousand dollars.  Since I had gotten one the first year for, and I quote, “managing not to cause my computer to short out by drooling on it”, I was expecting even more money.

Nope.  Zero.  Nada.  Nil.  Empty set.  Biden’s brain.

Several of us at the company were all hired at the same time, and we compared notes.  Almost no one had gotten a bonus.  One person in the group did get one, but he wisely didn’t advertise it.  I think it was because he had good hair.  He still does.

Pavlov’s hair was really soft because he conditioned it.

Of course, I got together with another co-worker who also didn’t get a bonus, and we had (really) a pity-party.  It may or may not have involved more alcohol than it should have, as well as us complaining about a company that provided us more than enough money for a comfortable living, great benefits, and fun work.  It was exactly like two kids complaining that their parents were meanies.

One thing I’ve tried to do in my life is to understand when I’m mad, why I’m mad.  Was I being an idiot, or did I have a legitimate grievance?

In this case, I thought long and hard about it, and came to this conclusion:  I was securely and completely an idiot.  A self-absorbed one at that.  And just like a German sausage that’s been left out of the fridge overnight, I came to realize:  spoiled brats are the wurst.

Why?

Watching Willy Wonka makes me crave chocolate.  Perhaps I should avoid Breaking Bad.

I was angry because I wasn’t recognized as a special snowflake and given a pat on the head.  It was selfish.  Beyond that, it was silly.

From that point onward, I decided to have the following attitudes:

• If the place I work gives me something extra above my base salary for free, I’m going to take it and smile. It was more than I had before.  If you always expect zero, you’re rarely disappointed.
• If the place I work doesn’t give me something extra? Smile anyway.  Life is what it is, and being mad only upsets me, reduces my performance at work, and makes it less likely I’ll get something extra.
• Don’t worry at all about what someone else gets. It doesn’t matter.  At all.

Now, there is an argument about “fairness” but I’ve noted that fairness is entirely in the eye of the beholder.  It’s subjective, especially in an environment where raises and bonuses are based not as participation trophies, but as an actual reward for performance.

Yeah, her ears stick out and she has a list of previous boyfriends tattooed on her back.

In reality, every second I’ve worried about someone else’s situation is a second of my life that was as wasted as Kamala Harris sounds whenever she talks.  In fact, I’ve trained myself to not feel upset.  An example:  when I was in Texas, driving my (bought used) four-door mutant-ninja-turtle-green Taurus® and I saw a $120,000 Mercedes™ pull up alongside at a stop sign, I’d think:

• Nice car. Bet they haven’t paid it off.  I recall reading that something like 70% of people who own a Mercedes© bought them with a loan.  I assure you I owned my Taurus© free and clear.
• Okay, if they have paid their Mercedes® off, my Taurus™ was still far cheaper to insure.

I didn’t create these little mind games to elevate myself above them; that would be monstrous.  No, I created them to kill any momentary envy I might have.  I’ve been doing this for years now.  It’s almost second nature.

How has it worked?

World hunger and Mercedes® have a lot in common.  Princess Diana couldn’t stop either.

It’s worked really well.  Now, when I see successful people I don’t envy them a bit.  I try to learn more about them and how they got successful.  Success isn’t about a competition against other people, success is the result of being the best that I can be.  If I’m wallowing in self-pity or envy then there’s no way I can be the best that I can be, because I’d be spending too much time at Leftist protest marches.

I know that some groups advocate that “whatever you feel is natural, and you should totally go with it, dude.”  And that’s utter nonsense.  In most (not all – grief at the loss of a loved one comes to mind) cases I feel what I choose to feel.  That’s right.  I don’t have to feel whatever pops up into my brain.

I am responsible for my attitude.  I am responsible for how I feel.  These are not some alien being inhabiting my brain.  These are my choices.

I can feel envy.  I can feel self-pity.  And if I choose those feelings?  I’ll always, always be miserable.

Or I can reject those feelings, and feel pretty good about life.

Does that mean that I reject reality?

Certainly not.  But I have no idea about the context of most people’s lives.  To judge someone on a bonus, or a car?  Nope – it doesn’t make sense.

I judge people rationally.  By the size of their earlobes.

I spilled coffee on my keyboard.  Now there’s no escape.

And one bonus I got later was stock.  My boss apologized because they had authorized a certain number of shares, and the share price had gone down to $2 at the time he gave them to me.  It wasn’t a lot of money.

I said, “thank you,” and really meant it.

I later sold the stock at $40.

See?  Start with thankful.  Good things will follow, except for the hair.

I do miss that.

“I am taking comedy to the next level:  the extermination of all biological life on earth.” – South Park

How do you break up a fistfight between two blind guys?  Say:  “I’m rooting for the one with the knife.”

We’ve been doing serious stuff for a while, so I thought, on a beautiful spring day like today, it’s a perfect time to have class outside and relax.  Don’t worry – you won’t be graded on this one.  Probably.

I like comedy movies, which probably surprises zero readers.  Recently, comedies haven’t been all that funny, because to be funny, generally someone is made fun of.  That, in a serious world, is not allowed.  I believe it is a fact that it was easier to get sent to the Gulag in Soviet Russia over a your-momma joke than it was by actually spying for the capitalist pigs.

Authority can allow many things, but it cannot abide being ridiculed, even gently.  That’s why Saturday Night Live® mocked Trump mercilessly, but can’t poke fun at the most buffoonish Oval-Office-Occupant since Bill Clinton was mocked about cigars and a blue dress.

The last thing Bill said to Jeff Epstein?  “Hang in there!”

But movies endure.  They provide a picture in time of a reality and culture of the past.  Comedies are in short supply, too.  I even ran the numbers a while back that proved just that, but it’s late and I got home late so you’ll just have to trust me:  they really don’t make ‘em like they used to.

One thing about a great comedy:  when it really catches a moment, it is memorable.  We quote it again and again.  The best movies are like that.  So, in no particular order, here are some of the movies that I chose that represent the best of comedy.  Note that while I might have multiple movies from the same “creative source” that I love, I only picked one of their movies.

Except when I didn’t.

Here’s the top 15.  Why 15?  Because I said so.

One note:  as I said, the list is in no particular order – each of these is a classic in its own way, and why do I have to choose or rank between masterpieces?

A Night at the Opera – Some might like Duck Soup.  Some might like Animal Crackers.  For my fifth grade teachers, this was their particular nightmare:  a blonde hunched over five-foot tall fifth grader walking back and forth, pretending to smoke a cigar, and talking about why no one believes in a Sanity Clause.  No rooms?  Send up a hall.  This is my kind of Marxism.

Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like a banana.

Better Off Dead – John Cusack blocked me on Twitter® after he said some inane Leftist thing and I responded.  I don’t take it personally.  But Cusack starred in (my opinion) the best teen comedy ever. Savage Steve Holland (the person really responsible for the film) should have done so much more.  Now, where are my two dollars?

Baseketball – South Park was still new (and good) when this movie came out.  I’m (sort of) cheating on my own rule because this has Zucker involvement (see below) but this movie was a Trey and Matt movie at its core.  It’s hilarious and never gets old.  “Pretzel?  Made it myself.  Goes great with mustard.”

Big Trouble in Little China – John Carpenter and Kurt Russell in a list of the best comedies of all time?  Yeah.  This movie has everything.  Magic.  Trucks.  Cheesy special effects.  Great heroes.  Evil villains.  How did they get the comedic timing down so perfectly?  “It’s all in the reflexes.”

Galaxy Quest – This is the best Star Trek® movie since Shatner . . . played . . . the . . . part.  Period.

Monty Python and The Holy Grail – I first saw this movie, uncut, on PBS® on an 11” black and white television.  I was hooked.  This was my first exposure to Monty Python and made me realize that there were jokes that I couldn’t explain to anyone because they just wouldn’t get it.  That did hurt me, deep inside, but ‘tis but a flesh wound.

What did the actors eat while filming Monty Python movies?  Grail mix.

Ghostbusters – If Bill Murray had a greatest moment, this was it.  Some would say that his best movie was Groundhog Day, but I disagree.  This was the man at his absolute mastery of timing, wit, and charm.  But if you don’t like this list?  You only have 75 more to go.

Airplane! – It was rare to get Pa Wilder to go to a movie.  First, Ma had to drag him away from the woodpile.  Second, we had to drive two hours (I’m not making this up) to a picture show that he would go to (there were closer movie theaters, but Pa Wilder never went to them).  We went to see Airplane! one hot summer day.  I never saw Pa laugh louder or longer.  He loved every second, surely.  But don’t call him Shirley.

Office Space – Mike Judge convinced someone from a corporation to give him money to make a movie that utterly skewered the slow, meaningless death that is corporate life.  This movie made me want to stop going to work.  The Mrs.:  “Are you quitting?”  Me:  “No, I just don’t think I’m going anymore.”

Get out of that car.  Right meow.

Super Troopers – Broken Lizard® is the comedy group that produced this and their other movies, including that wonderful film, Beerfest.  But Super Troopers?  I have no idea what I expected, but I wasn’t expecting a chugging contest with bottles of maple syrup.  Pardon me, I have to go find a liter of cola.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure – I rented this movie from the VHS bin at the supermarket because I had no idea what it was, but it was only a buck.  Is it stupid?  Yes.  Is it funny?  Also yes.  It’s a teen comedy without anything but two idiots with a time machine.  Most triumphant!

Raising Arizona – Again, a rental.  Why did I pick it?  It was late on a Friday.  It was in stock.  Who was this Nic Cage guy?  The writing was crisp, the action scenes funny, and I had no idea how or where it would end.  Maybe it was Utah?

UHF – Of course I knew who Weird Al was.  Of course I knew this would be a movie as stupid as making a hot dog with a Twinkie® as a bun.  And I was right.  But this movie?  It’s drinking from the firehose.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High – There was never a movie that was more 1980’s about 1980’s teens.  The worst part of this movie was that it got Sean Penn’s movie career started.  The best part of this movie is that it convinced the world that Sean Penn was an idiot.  Have any problems with the plot?  Don’t worry.  My old man he’s got this ultimate set of tools.  I can fix it.

I tried to sew together small dogs and cattle.  It was a terrier bull idea.

Young Frankenstein – This was Mel’s best movie.  The Mrs. prefers Spaceballs, but, of course, she’s wrong.  Never has a movie so lovingly captured an entire era of film, and then had so much fun with it.    You could say he had a roll, roll, roll in ze hay . . .

As I look at this list, I noticed that the most recent movie on this list is Super Troopers, in 2001.  That’s two decades ago.  Sure, there have been some comedies that I’ve enjoyed since then, but none of them have been as, well, funny.  Anchorman was nearly a pick, but didn’t quite make my cut.  I’d rather re-watch any of the movies above than Anchorman again.

So, what did I miss?  What are your favorites?

“By Grabthar’s hammer, we live to tell the tale!” – Galaxy Quest

Three years ago my doctor told me I was losing my hearing.  I haven’t heard from him since.

Last week I touched base on Ludwig von Mises’ theory of human action that he wrote about in his book Human Action while probably not getting a lot of action.  I mean, he was writing all the time.

The basics of Ludwig’s theory are pretty simple.  I’ll give a quick recap of the three requirements to human action.  There’s much more at last week’s post (A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom):

A Vision Of A Better State:  Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise® is the basis for rebuilding society after the collapse.

A Path To Get To A Better State:  Writing more.  Finally getting around to starting that cult – Wilderology©:  The Post-Apocalyptic Cult, With a Difference!™

A Belief That Action Will Really Lead To A Better State:  Elon Musk finally answered my voice mails!  Okay, it was a cease and desist letter from his attorney, but it’s a start.

Again, these requirements of Vision, Path, and Belief can show up in any order – although the example above starts with a Vision, that’s not required.  Most often, I’ve seen that’s the catalyst for action – a Vision – but sometimes it’s nothing more than a person with a talent and free time eventually coming across a Vision by accident.

This is the only way to explain ¡Jeb!

Jeb was a pallbearer at his dad’s funeral, so he could let him down one last time.

If the three elements of Vision, Path and Belief are there, action is nearly inevitable.  If even one is missing, action rarely happens.

One of the lines in the post seemed like a throwaway, but it was really a setup for this post.  Whereas that last post ended up pointing out that we as a nation are governed only by our consent, this post is a bit more practical – a tool kit – in solving problems when dealing with people.

The other tool kit, I mean.  Sure you can always get more cooperation with a .45 and a kind word than with just the kind word, but sometimes The Mrs. thinks the Glock® is a bit much when trying to convince Pugsley to take out the trash.

I put glue on my Glocks®.  I’m sticking to my guns.

The basis of this toolkit is simple.  If all three elements of human action exist, human action should follow.  Missing an element?  Just like von Mises while he was writing his book, no action.

Let’s break it down a little further when dealing with actual people:

Vision is vision.  However, if a Vision isn’t shared, people won’t be going in the same direction.  For instance, if my Vision of a clean bathroom looks like miles of gleaming chrome and sparkling porcelain where I would be proud to eat moist scrambled eggs off of any surface, that’s wonderful.

But if Pugsley’s Vision of a clean bathroom looks like a petri dish left in the steaming jungles of the Amazon during plague week and it’s okay the toilet is flushed on alternate Wednesdays (except during Lent) he and I may have the seeds for a conflict.

How do I fix that?  First, I have to communicate my Vision to him.  That may involve choking and yelling.  Choking for emphasis, and yelling because I want him to know why I’m choking him.  Then he knows the Vision is important to me.

Just kidding.  Normally, I’ll clean an area.  I point out that, “This is what I want.”  The primal part in his teenager brain not devoted to Chicken McNuggets®, driving, girls, and sleep then dimly understood my point.  He may not share my Vision (more on that later) but he certainly knows what it is.

Next comes Path.  For me, acting alone to clean a bathroom, is simple:  grab the stuff and clean.  There’s nothing that a liberal application of flame, kerosene, and bleach can’t take care of.  Oh, yeah, don’t forget the acid.  Gotta clean that toilet bowl.  My motto when cleaning Pugsley’s bathroom?

“If it bleeds we can kill it.”

For millions of years, the most dangerous predator the world had ever known was T. Rex.  Now it’s J. Biden.

But why would I act alone to clean a bathroom?  The Mrs. calls me “Juan De La Gator” and I try to live up to that.  I wouldn’t clean a bathroom by myself because . . . I live with a teenager.  Honestly, I don’t feel I should clean Pugsley’s bathroom at all, because . . . it’s his bathroom.  One of my cardinal rules as a parent is to never do work around the house that a kid could do.

It’s called building character.  (snicker)

The next question I have to ask myself is does Pugsley have the ability to do good work – does he have the talent for it and the ability to focus?  Yes, he does.  Talent for cleaning a bathroom to standards slightly above the third world (or France, but I repeat myself) isn’t rare.

Does he have the focus to do it?  Certainly.  I’ve seen him work like a monster to loosen a bearing on the lawnmower deck to fix it himself.  And this week he’s spent several hours not fixing (yet) the garbage disposal – I’m thinking he’ll bring that home tomorrow.  So, he has focus.

What deodorant do prospectors choose?  They pick Axe®.

Ability (and talent) and focus are the Path.  If he’s missing one of them, the path is incomplete.  If you ask an Albanian mall lawyer to fix a copier, all you’ll get is an incomprehensible series of grunts, some drool, and a floor hip-deep in toner powder.  The extent of the Albanian mall lawyer’s ability is to poke at the copier (breaking small plastic parts in the process) and make grunting, vaguely simian noises.

But as bad as they are at copier repair, if you need a parking ticket fixed, you can’t beat an Albanian mall lawyer.  They’re as feisty and cunning as starving midgets in a cage fight over a pork loin while armed with claw hammers.  Never underestimate the power of a claw hammer – it can also be a bus pass or a coupon for a free dinner.

What about ownership?

When it comes to mowers and garbage disposals at our house – Pugsley “owns” those.  He decided to fix those, and my support has been mainly moral (“Did you want to see the assembly instructions before you try to fix it yourself, Columbus?”) and financial (“Yes, we can order a new seal since that one is ruined now”).  Let’s be real:  when people own the systems they’re working on, and own the results, they put a part of themselves into those systems.  The results matter to them.

Ownership matters.

If Pugsley owns the results, things get fixed.  The Mrs. bought him a new shower rod for his bathroom.  “Come here, Dad.  Hold this.”  I played Statue of Liberty if instead of Liberty she was really the Statue of Installing Shower Curtain Rods.  My job was a simple job.  He was done with me in fifteen seconds.

Lastly, there are incentives.

For me, the incentive is a clean bathroom.  If I do the minimal job as Dad, for Pugsley the incentive for him is doing just enough minimal work so I leave him alone.

Minimal equals minimal.  The real win is when his incentive isn’t to shut me up, but his incentive is to clean the bathroom because it’s important to him – and he gets to look at it and say to himself, “I did that.”

Not all math jokes are hard.  Just sum.

As a father, dealing with incentives is easy.  There’s always the last resort:  “Hand me your phone and your car keys.”  It’s the claw hammer of incentives – and one I don’t want to use.  It always works, but when I get to that point I know that I haven’t done my job of creating ownership, which internalizes incentives.

Going back to our model:  Ownership and incentives are the Belief, the final key.

So:

• Vision=Vision (after it has been communicated and shared)
• Path=Ability, Talent, and Focus
• Belief=Ownership and Incentives

It’s not a perfect correlation, but it’s close.  When you look at something that’s not working when you’re dealing with people, think about this model.  Most often when there’s a problem that I’ve found it has been with either Incentives or Vision, but each of these can be broken.

Sure, Human Action is just a model but it’s an important tool, just like a hammer.  And to everyone who has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

And for every problem?

There’s a cage match with claw hammers.

“But thanks to recent advances in stem cell research and the fine work of Doctors Krinski and Altschuler, Clevon should regain full reproductive function.” – Idiocracy

I saw my math teacher using graph paper. I’m suspicious. I’m sure he was plotting something.

In the United States, winter is near. And it all has to do with biology . . .

I didn’t like high school biology – the class. The dating was just fine. Not that I didn’t have a good teacher, I had a great teacher. She was obviously passionate about biology.

I love science, but biology seemed so . . . pointless. It was a lot of learning the proper names for things (stamen and pistil are two vaguely naughty flower parts that I recall) and learning how a flower worked was so much less interesting to me than learning about the floating fusion reactor that powers our solar system.

High school me decided that biology wasn’t a real science because math wasn’t involved. Bacteria multiply by dividing. How silly is that?

No, biology was just endless classification of things into groups. It was like Rainman developed a class.: “Yeah, definitely Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Definitely.” Besides,

For me, the most interesting part of the biology class was that my lab partners were two cheerleaders. They gleefully did the frog dissection with a morbid fascination that was almost creepy. I just sat back and watched and made bad sketches in my lab book while a basketball cheerleader wielded the scalpel like a bobby-socks wearing samurai in a short skirt and school-color saddle shoes.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process. But . . . to use the word “dissecting” means the frog (or joke) in question is already dead. The right word choice would be “vivisecting,” which is the equivalent of dissecting, but with the animal (or joke) still very alive. With this in mind, I probably should say, ” Explaining a joke is like vivisecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process.” See what I did there? I took the common phrase: ” Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process,” and I vivisected it.

As I’ve gotten older, I realize that there are interesting aspects to almost any subject, even cheerleaders. As I said earlier, when I was younger, my biology interests mainly involved attempts at field experimentation with cheerleaders. Decades later biology came back up in my intellectual wanderings in settings that didn’t involve double features at the drive-in.

This time my study of the convergence of biology and economics explained to me why half of the US population can’t talk to the other half – and can’t even understand the other half.

It starts with a wolf.

There is a bleak, windswept plain in Alaska. Off in the distance, the wolf pack follows a caribou herd, as it has for the better part of a week. The pack acts as one. A lone wolf in the deep winter in the north is a dead wolf.

The female wolves – smaller, quicker – herd and harass the caribou on the sides, keeping the caribou moving to the west, away from the cover of the trees. The older males push through the center, finally selecting the small group of caribou that they will take.

This also describes a grandpa when he sees a man-bun.

The older males use their superior muscle to attack. The young wolves and pups follow along, sometimes play-fighting among each other, but more often imitating the adults. The play will turn to hunting as they watch, learn, and get older.

As the caribou comes down, the males feed first. Eventually, the pups feed. It’s been a week, and they’re hungry, and a wolf after a kill will sometimes eat twenty percent of its body weight in meat. The alpha male and alpha female of this pack are mated for life and will stay mated until the male dies in three years from an infection due to a broken tooth, but today they have food.

A significant amount of effort is put into raising the pups, who, when they get older will split off and join other packs.

Wolves follow what a biologist calls “K” selection.

Based on their environment, wolves face significant pressure for resources every day. They live in environments at the sheer edge of habitability and have to cooperate to fight those environments daily in order to survive.

Their young have significant parental involvement and training. Due to the scarcity inherent in the environment, they must work together to live. They only have a few offspring, but they invest heavily in them. And a mother wolf will fight to the death to save a pup – the pack works together and is loyal to individual members.

Oh, yeah, Happy Easter!

Rabbits follow “r” selection. The “K” and the “r” originate as variables in an equation that you’ll never use, but here’s the link (LINK) if you want to stare at it. See, the biologists finally figured out a way to wedge some math in there!

r selection is the opposite of K selection in many ways. r selection depends upon having significant amounts of resources available. These resources make life easy, so strategies change.

Part of winning biologically in a resource-rich environment revolves around having the most number of offspring. So, have as many as you want. Really, r selection requires the rabbits to reproduce as quickly as they can so their genes spread far and wide.

Since resources are abundant, mating for life is silly. Mate with . . . whoever.

Whenever.

However.

As long as they have babies.

Two rabbits were being chased by a pack of wolves. They hid in a forest. One rabbit asked the other, “So, you want to keep running, or wait a few days until we outnumber them?”

Since a rabbit has lots of babies, each gets little attention, and the idea of a rabbit protecting offspring is unknown – rabbits run away, hoping the predator will eat their offspring and leave them alone.

Resources are plentiful, so there’s no real reason to work together. Not that the rabbits won’t hang out together and chill, it’s just that no rabbit that will ever inconvenience itself to help another rabbit.

Biologically, the rabbits avoid competition for resources – there’s no need.

The wolves focus on mating for life, but promiscuity is required for rabbits – rabbits are single parents. Rabbits are single parents who come to early sexual maturity early and have children young.

Wolves have to take part in competition, delay sex and are (mainly) monogamous in the wild. They have dual parents for raising their pups, a much longer time to sexual maturity and independence, and will fight to the death (if needed) for each other.

We see echoes of r/K selection in our society today. When the economy tanks? Divorce rate plummets.

As social spending goes up providing free resources? Sexual promiscuity in youth goes up. Single parenthood increases.

The number of children born to unwed mothers went from 3.8% in 1940 (before welfare) to 5.3% in 1960 to over 40% by 2008. The numbers stayed small as long as resources were limited, but once resources were free? Boom, many women become r-selected rabbits, which is paralleled only with the behaviors seen at the beginning of the decay of empires.

Which I covered back in 2017:

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

But at least a remnant of society remains K selected. K selection was the societal norm prior to the 1960s and the mass rollout of welfare. So, blue state/red state? Republican/Democrat? Left/Right?

Or r/K?

That’s where we find ourselves today. Our political divisions are so deep that they are expressed in differing biological strategies. When the biological strategy is rooted so deeply because it is supported by society, it becomes part of the definition of self, not something abstract.

What do you call a can that gets a college degree? A graduated cylinder.

How deeply does this go? Attacking a Christian’s religious beliefs is just fine. Attacking someone’s gender identification?

Heresy!

Only someone bad would question someone’s sexual choices! Time to pull out cancel culture! And if you don’t agree with the effect polygamy, bigamy, furries, and any other arrangement that people can devise to express their sexuality might have on society, you’re a fascist!

I imagine an unwed mother with eight children from seven fathers living on public support cannot understand (and may even look down upon) the married parents with 1.2 children and a perfect lawn. It’s a division that’s not rich/poor, but deeper.

What happens when the resources dry up, when the fields full of rabbity grass give way to the cold steppes of wolf-friendly tundra? Society changes – the ability to use surplus goods for r-selected people goes away. Societal attitudes change, too.

Watch conflicts around the world and think about . . . how many of them are simply due to a difference in r/K reproduction strategy? These conflicts inevitably move a society from abundance to scarcity.

The rabbits rule the spring, the wolves rule the winter.

And it’s getting chilly.

Good news, everyone!  Bombs and Bants is not dead, though we did take a few weeks off while The Mrs. and I fended off Ebola.  The better news is that I got a little goofed up and didn’t post links to the podcast a week or two when I should have so there are extra episodes!

Here they are.  As soon as The Boy sends me information, I’ll put up links to Bombs and Bants – we’re on the Apple Podcast thingy and Bitchute in addition to YouTube.

I think we’re getting better most weeks.  The Mrs. handles all the production, and is really getting the hang of it.  So, enjoy!

Edit:

(Here is the Solzhenitsyn Harvard Commencement Address mentioned in the vidya and comments)

I drink, I read, and I make bad puns.  What can I say?