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“Yes Mr. Hill, testosterone can jump start puberty, but I don’t give radical hormone therapy to young boys who happen to be mediocre at dodge ball.” – King of the Hill

Okay, that meme came together really well.  Or maybe Jack and Peewee were separated at birth?

Pugsley is currently experiencing what every teenage boy has experienced since there were boys – TOTP teenage onset testosterone poisoning.  The symptoms are many:  extreme idiocy.  A sudden lowering of voice.  Unexplained hairiness.  Armpit smell.  Showers longer than the Crimean War.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think 11-14 is the critical age for children.  This is the defining age where they begin to rebel.  They’ve turned from nice, sweet children into little monsters who have determined that they have feelings but have no regard for the feelings of others – in a word, all middle school age children are psychopathic.

Although irritating, it is a passing phase, as long as the parents stick to their guns.  I have seen children become middle-school aged tyrants whose parents tremble as they approach.  It’s not a pleasant sight, and the wreckage of their lives is equally unpleasant when they first impact a world that doesn’t care that momma always cut the crust off of their sandwiches.  I’ve had occasion to see that karma train show up a in a spoiled child’s life, and I always enjoy watching the fireworks more than a virtuous person should.  Sue me.  I’m human, although my ex-wife might disagree.

At some point natural selection by impact with Kia® will kick in.

Recently, I’ve been sticking to my guns with Pugsley.  It’s not really hard, you just don’t give in to them when you’re right.  Pugsley had his most recent attack of TOTP just the other day.  I sent him to his room.  After composing himself (and issuing an apology) he and I ended up outside, and he was sweeping the last leaves of autumn off the patio.

He stopped.  “Dad, I’d like you to give my phone back to me.”  His phone had been confiscated at least two months earlier for some infraction, and Pugsley had never managed to string enough “good” days together to get it back.  If truth be told, my criteria was probably a bit arbitrary, as well – I’m not particularly a fan of preteens having phones.

John Wilder:  “First, keep sweeping.  You can work and talk.  Second, why on Earth would I do that?  I had to send you to your room today.  What does that tell me about your overall behavior?  What’s in it for me?”

He raised his hand, as if dealing with a velociraptor that was one hamburger short of a Happy Meal®.  “Hear me out.  I want you to give me the phone back.  So you can take it away if I misbehave.”

“Okay, you have my attention.  I’m listening.”  This was interesting thinking.

Then the monologue started.  “Okay, listen.”

I stopped him.  “Don’t start a sentence with okay.”

“Okay.  I mean,” Pugsley Paused, a bit flustered, “right.  So . . .”

“You don’t need to start a sentence with ‘so’ – just say it.”

I was enjoying this.

“If I have my phone, you have an effective punishment.  I know what you want.  You want for me to do my chores without nagging.  I get it.  You want for me to do them daily.  You want me to stop back talking, and to stop being a jerk.”

“Go on – what about grades?”  It was obvious he’d been paying attention when I talked.  It was also obvious he’d been thinking.

“All at A minus or better.”

“What about quality?”

“If it doesn’t meet your standards, take the phone.”

It was well rehearsed, and was logical.  If he messed up?  The phone would go away.  If he did well?  I would pay for the phone bill.

“Okay.”

Pugsley did a fist pump.  “The Art of the Deal . . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I hear he’s selling this revised edition at school.

In short, he would give me everything I wanted for the price of a phone.  I even have a signed contract.  It’s like reverse Satan – I give him his soul in exchange for a cell phone.

And what, exactly, did I extract?

• His mastery of his testosterone-besotted self so he could maintain self-control and unleash the Pocket-Hulk® (which is what we called him when he got mad and was a tiny Pugsley).
• Discipline – I wouldn’t have to nag him about the chores. He has to start his own motor.
• Long term thinking – he also agreed to link a minimum grade to the phone – and keeping an A minus means planning to do your work and doing it every time it’s due.
• Standards – he agreed that work would be fully done. Well done.  By my standards – not “good enough.”

It may sound like I’m lazy and want him to clean the house while I type amusing anecdotes into the computer.  And I am lazy.  But if Pugsley can learn self-control, discipline, long term thinking, and high standards from my slothful life?

I call that a win-win, and maybe the best deal either of us will ever make.  Besides, I want him to be successful so he has lots of money so he can choose a nursing home for me that’s not based on Game of Thrones.

I hear the pudding is to die for.

“I can easily understand why it should puzzle you that a person of my intelligence, I.Q. 207 super genius, should devote his valuable time chasing this ridiculous road runner . . .” – Road Runner

Besides, her last test came back negative.

When I was growing up I recall reading a short story that was, to me, particularly horrifying.  In the story, a group of colonists arrives at a planet light years from Earth.  All is going well – the planet is habitable but not inhabited.  The colonists set the ship down and begin to prepare the planet for people.  And they begin making babies to inhabit the planet, but in the usual way, not using space robot wombs or anything.

But, there is something wrong with the babies.  They are ugly.  And stupid.  And grow quickly, hitting puberty at about age four.  The scientists work frantically trying to figure out what is causing the problem.  Is it some alien virus?  Something to do with the journey itself?  They come up with no good answers, but in their searches determine that the children really look more like a human ancestor from millions of years in the past than modern humans.

Uh-oh.

Then they get the bad news.  Earth sends them a message (from six years in the past) that all human babies on Earth are now being born ugly and stupid, too.  Earth thinks that the colony is the last hope for smart humans, so they have to make it succeed.

Oops.

One of the colonists gets a bit philosophical, and compares humanity to locusts, who often stay in a less aggressive form for decades, and then burst out in the big, hoppy flying plague across thousands of square miles, devouring everything in their wake.  Humanity’s true form, reckons the colonist, is the fuzzy stupid pre-humans, and once humans spread among the stars, it made sense to get stupid again so that we didn’t destroy ourselves.  In the end, all that’s left on the new planet are the pre-humans.  And the wolves.  The colonists released the wolves so that the pre-humans would have something to select off the stupid pre-humans, so they could get smart again millions of years in the future.

Depressing.

The name of the story is The Locusts by Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes, and it was published in 1979 and was nominated for a Hugo® award.  This story has bounced around my mind since I first read it, though I had forgotten even the author until I was assisted by some fine folks on Twitter®.  It is available in Larry Niven’s anthology N-Space, which is probably where I read it for the first time.

The story got me thinking about the concept of how civilization influences intelligence.  And other questions:  how important is intelligence?  Is it better to be intelligent or not?  Would my I.Q. be higher if I did it in metric?

But maybe the most basic of all of these questions is:  what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to process information quickly with sufficient working capacity to create useful connections with previous information.  Intelligence really is measurable by I.Q. tests, and, oddly, is predicted by reaction times – the smarter you are (in general) the quicker your reaction times.  It’s as if the brain pathways move faster for smarter people.  Sadly for those that like to make fun of smart people, the reality is that they’re generally healthier and have a pretty good ability to communicate if they want to.  Generally.

Subliminal advertising is illegal, but what about subcranial?

The way to think of intelligence is that it’s like your height.  Your DNA at the moment of birth determines what your maximum height will be, unless your environment screws it up.  You can’t study yourself taller.  You can’t “think and grow tall.”  No matter how much you stretch every day, your maximum height is your maximum height.

Intelligence is like that, too.  Studying doesn’t help your I.Q., but it does increase your capacity within that maximum intelligence.  No matter how bright the puppy and how often you work to teach it to talk, it’s never going to read quote any Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet.  Your dog is a philistine.  But just as environmental factors can stunt your height, environmental factors can make you . . . not as smart, which is why Doritos® took most of the lead out of their Nacho Cheese and Lead© flavored chips.  Most of it.  How can you have lead-flavored chips without any lead?

It also turns out that intelligence is very, very important if you’re considering wealth.  Here is a graph showing the relationship between GDP and the I.Q. of various countries.   It’s based on 1998 data from Lynn and Vanhanen, but I doubt that 2019 data would be much different, except for China, which has quite a high I.Q. but a low 1998 income.  I’ll let you wander around the Internet for more information if you’d like, I’m not planning on writing about it here – I have to get to sleep tonight sometime.  I will admit I was as utterly shocked as anyone could be the first time I saw this data – my preconceived notion was that the average I.Q. of the world was more or less 100, which is clearly refuted by the following graph.

What’s the difference between getting into USC™ and being a wealthy nation?  To be a wealthy nation you have to have a good I.Q.

So at least one question appears to be answered – although you might end up being smart and poor, you’re never going to be dumb and rich.  Poor countries are poor because they’re not smart.  This answers my first question – is intelligence important?  Yes.  Intelligence in nations has been shown to be correlated strongly with lots of good things:  economic freedom, savings, self-employment, education, literacy, interpersonal trust, and long lives.  Low national I.Q. has been correlated with lots of things we don’t like:  corruption, murder, and big government.

I’ll throw out that high I.Q. nations also have more suicide and lower birthrates – the only two negatives that I saw in my (brief) review of the literature I could find.

The original starred Einstein® and Hawking™, but they argued after Einstein© said a radioactive cat had 18 half-lives and had to find new actors.

Next Monday I anticipate reviewing a new book on the subject of intelligence, At Our Wits’ End by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie.  Dutton and Woodley have worked on a disturbing theory . . . that you’ll have to wait until next week to hear more about.  But don’t expect any hairy pre-human babies.  Because nobody expects hairy pre-human babies.

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.” – Elf

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Normally when I do a health post I put my weasel words saying “I’m not a doctor” at the end of the post.  I mean, if you’re at this website the last thing you are is stupid.  You KNOW I’m not a doctor and I don’t prescribe drugs except on an amateur basis, and then it’s generally, “Pipe down about Ariana Grande masterminding the fake moon landing and have another beer.  Everyone knows that an Ariana Grande is actually a yeasty pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks©.”

However, in this case I’m not talking about yeasty, mediocre pop singers, I’m telling you that the Centers for Disease Control® (CDC™) is staffed by (at least some) idiots who really are doctors, well, the disclaimer should come up front.  So, here it is:  I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and take some damn responsibility for your own life and everybody knows that it was Katy Perry was the mediocre pop singer that masterminded the fake moon landing.

So hardcore she killed that Muppet® herself, just to show the other Muppets© how fearless she was.  Or was that G. Katy Perry?

Okay.  Now for the actual rant.

In its continual bid to be the ugly, smelly kid in class who stares at you just a little too long with the charisma of a damp goat, the Creepy Disaster Chumps© (CDC™) issued its annual holiday pronouncement of, “Hey, it’s Christmas, America.  Have a good time and we’ll talk after the New Year.  Sound good?”

No.  This is government, so of course you’re being warned against the civilization-ending threat of (I’m not kidding) raw cookie dough the by the Centers for Disease Control Cookie Dough Committee® (CDCCDC™).  Yes.  Raw cookie dough, that scourge of humanity that brought down the Incan Empire, the Ming Dynasty, and Johnny Depp’s career.

Of course raw cookie dough is bad for you, but not in the way the Citizen Drama Creators© (CDC™) thinks.  Raw cookie dough is bad for you since it’s loaded with carbs and sugar and tastes the way that I can only imagine heroin feels.  But cookies are tasty, and, even if you’re a low-carb cultist (I am), a cookie at Christmas is okay for you unless you inject the dough.  Protip:  if a syringe is large enough to inject a chocolate chip, it’s not gonna make it through airport security no matter what story you tell.

It does, however, appear that raw cookie dough can make you ill in rare circumstances.  You see, in the United States, one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella.  20,000 eggs?  It would take 64 years at 6 eggs a week to get to 20,000.  Cooking, thankfully, kills salmonella – so it’s 64 years of raw or undercooked eggs.  Clearly, this is an unacceptable risk.  Your eggs should all be cooked to the consistency of a leather thong.

You were thinking something else!  So was I.  There are places you just don’t want to go on Google®.

But wait!  The Chowder Disco Cowgirls® (CDC™) reminds us that cookies contain raw flour, too.  Raw flour?  Is that a thing?  Yes!  In fact, 63 people in the United States were made ill by raw flour in 2016.  63!  It’s an epidemic!  Soon these people will become raw flour zombies and the streets (okay, one really small one lane street) will be filled with them and their insatiable desire for raw flour.

Thankfully, I’m betting that Grandmothers everywhere will still be handing the rich, doughy beaters covered with cookie dough off to the greedy fat hands of toddlers (it’s really the only way to get their iPhones© away from them) for a sticky, sugary treat.  From there, the cookie dough/saliva mix creates a compound stronger than diamond plated steel that instantly bonds itself at the molecular level to any surface, which explains why it is still stuck to the bottom of the Wilder kitchen table after fifteen years.

If I were him, I’d hide.  Katy Perry is looking for something to wear to the Oscars®.  And it’s between Cookie Monster© and Oscar the Grouch™.

But as a society, what does that say about us if we’re that afraid of . . . cookies?  According to one study I read, the lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid are 1 in 250,000, which is still higher than your odds of meeting someone who works for the Department of Motor Vehicles that has a sense of humor.

The number of verified deaths from eating raw cookie dough that I found was . . . one.  Out of 300,000,000, people, this equates to a risk of 1 in 3.8 million over a 78 year lifetime.  But let’s pretend that one person a decade dies from eating raw cookie dough.  You’re still 4,500 times more likely to die falling out of bed.  But the Chronic Doom Cherubs® (CDC™) have yet to weigh in against the scourge of pillow-topped mattresses ravaging our land.

I then went against all of my better instincts and did the one thing a blogger should never do:  I researched.  The origin of the Centers for Dingo Carnage© (CDC™) is actually a noble one.  During World War II, the United States decided that we wanted to kill the enemy and not let malaria spoil all the fun, and got pretty good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  Fun fact:  the atomic bomb was originally designed to kill mosquitos but was abandoned because it couldn’t be made to fit into a spray can.

Modern Mosquito Hunting Techniques.

But all good wars end, and here were a bunch of bona fide mosquito-killing ninjas who were good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  The government decided that we could use those guys to stop malaria in the United States.  They went straight to work, and malaria was all but eradicated by 1951, only four years later – in 2018 the paperwork alone for starting the project would take a decade as the Friends of Malaria sued in federal court to stop the eradication of the endangered mosquito.  But living in a less enlightened era, they eradicated malaria and everyone was pretty okay with that.  So, they disbanded the agency, and put people to work doing other productive things.

No, I’m kidding!  Once government builds a hammer, after they run out of nails they keep using it on the dishes and drywall.  It worked great on the nails, right?  Maybe we need a committee to develop stronger dishes?

The newly named Communicable Disease Center (this name is real, and is the original word salad that gave us the CDC™ initials) became a solution in search of a problem.  We expected the Koreans or Chinese (or someone) to spray us with biological agents.  So, the CDC® said, “Hey, we can fix that problem that we just made up.”  Thankfully, they’ve never had to do anything significant on that front.

Eventually, the CDC™ also got bored and distracted enough sometime during the 1960’s that they led the effort eradicate smallpox, and even someone as cynical as I am about government agencies have to give them a golf clap for that one.  To this day the CDC™ and the Russians have the last two samples of smallpox in the world, and the CDC™’s is stored in the fridge next to the guacamole and that Wal-Mart® chicken salad that Carol left in there last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong:  The CDC™ has a legitimate role as a coordination center for communicable diseases, and protecting the United States from diseases originating all around the world – 70% of the tuberculosis cases in the United States are from people that weren’t born in the United States.  And Ebola or its yet-undiscovered cousin lurking in the rainforest (hopefully they get that pesky jungle cut down soon) has the potential to be devastating in our high mobility society complete with populations concentrated in megacities across the planet.  Like an asteroid strike, this is a very high consequence event that will impact us in the future.  World War One killed as many as 20 million people.  The Spanish Flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, or between 3% and 5% of the world’s population, in 1918 and 1919.

Yikes.  Yeah.  Somebody needs to be working on that.

And somebody should also be working on protecting us from bioterrorism, but I strongly doubt it’s the CDC™.  The CDC™ is the only agency I know of that’s managed to misplace smallpox in their other pants, along with the keys to the CDC™ golf cart.  Oh, and the CDC™ also exposed their own employees to anthrax, and not just the heavy metal band.  Since these things really happened, we need to make sure an adult is at the wheel.  And, please Comic Distribution Clowns® (CDC™), no more comic books about zombies.  If there is anything with less soul than a comic book about zombies by a government health agency, it might be a government health agency warning us about eating cookie dough.

Readers of this blog know I’m all for people being prepared.  But the CDC®?  Zombies™?  Please leave the misleading and incomplete preparedness information to FEMA™.    

So, by all means, please have the charisma of a wet goat the CDC™, avoid the consequence of minimal personal responsibility involving infinitesimal risk, and just tell your grandchildren “no” when they want to lick the beater after you make sugar cookies.  I’m not sure that kids of today would even notice – recess at school nowadays consists of “competitive sitting quietly,” “standing quietly and motionlessly near the wall,” and “counting the days until a government-based Christian theocracy turns women into harems for Trump supporters.”  That sounds so much more fun than playing tackle football in the fifth grade on a rock covered field and having snowball fights.  And actual fights.  I sure missed out as a kid.

Yes, it’s a retread.  But it’s a sexy theocratic retread. 

This certainly isn’t the case of a government agency that’s looking for publicity by making outlandish claims to scare people about risks that are less likely than being killed by lighting?  Nah.  Government is here because it loves you!  Or because government needs something to do between drinking yeasty Ariana Grande lattes and faking moon landings.

Not mine, but funny.

“So you listen to me and you listen well.  Are you behind on your credit card bills?  Good, pick up the phone and start dialing!  Is your landlord ready to evict you?  Good!  Pick up the phone and start dialing!” – The Wolf of Wall Street

So, this is how I viewed the world when I was in college.  Free money!  What could go wrong???

It started as an innocent dinner conversation.  One thing about our dinner conversations – they’re not normal.  We might discuss topics as diverse as financial impacts of currency devaluation on the Roman Empire, or what food makes Pugsley toot the most.  It turns out its pretty much any food, he claims, except for ice cream from Dairy Queen® and Cheetos® and whatever else he’s eating at the time.

But this night The Boy piped up.  “Hey, Dad, I was thinking about getting a credit card.”

Being that he’s 18, he’s and adult and that’s his right.

“What credit card were you thinking of getting?”

“Well, one company sent me an application . . .”

“So, if you were going to buy a car, would you just drive down the street and just buy the first one you saw?”

Long pause.  My dad logic was a laser-guided missile.

“Well,” he replied, “I really don’t know much about credit cards.  Can you help?”

I can.  And I promised I would.

So here it is:

The first thing a young person should know about credit cards is that they are evil.  Not evil in the sense of being a direct minion in the service of Satan® that slowly creates global warming just so it can barbeque endangered species over oil from the tar sands in Canada™.  No, credit cards are worse.  Besides, have you ever eaten slow-cooked panda with bald eagle sauce?  Or fried whale?

This may be the first time this sentence has been written in English:  “You haven’t eaten until you’ve eaten panda.”  Goes great with ketchup.  Tastes like chicken.

Wait, where were we?  Oh yeah, why are credit cards evil?

Mark Twain had the answer:  “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

Yeah, the credit card company was pretty excited when I bought that original picture of Cats Playing Poker.  Who knew there would be no market for that??

Let’s conduct an experiment that shows how 18 year olds feel about money.  Pretend you’re 18.  For the average adult, one fifth of scotch should do to start the simulation.  Now, let’s pretend your net worth is, oh, some paperback books, t-shirts you got in high school for band camp, and empty tubes of acne medication you planned on turning into an attractive art piece.  Now, stare at your phone a lot.

Now, some nice person has offered to allow you an amazing opportunity.  He sounds nice, but he’ll let you to spend money you don’t have.  He’ll even give it to you in advance.  You’re a good guy.  You deserve this, right?

And for every second that you carry that credit card in your wallet, well, your struggle is to not spend money.  You have it, it’s available.  But you’re 18, and at the peak of hormonal activity in your body.

So, after you’ve spent a Friday night on a crazed PEZ®, pantyhose and elephant ride binge, well, now you have a bill staring at your face for all of that crazed fun.  But, hey, elephant rides, right?  And the bill is approximately every cent that you would make in the next year of your life, if you didn’t have to spend money on stuff like rent, food, gas, and, well, more elephant rides.

The second thing an 18 year old should know about credit cards is that you can’t really have one:

You’re 18.  With no job.  You’re in luck!

In 2009, Congress passed a law that says you can’t have a credit card unless you can pay for it.  Yes.  Banks were giving 18 year olds credit lines even though they had no income.

But after 2009?  Congratulations!  You’re a winner!  You can’t have a credit card.

In what could be seen as the barest hint of morality coming out of Washington, this bill passed with the support of both Republican’ts and DemocRATs.  Yay!  But is it just me that worries that the stuff that gets support of both parties is the scariest?

Anyway, The Boy can get a credit card limit that matches his documented income.  Both of which are zero.

Unless . . . I cosign.

What is a cosigner?

Robert Mueller would call a cosigner an unindicted co-conspirator.  You sign your name to the credit card so your kid can buy pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides, but you get no pantyhose, PEZ™, or elephant rides.  And if your kid can’t pay for the cool party?  You pay.

Queue a sad trombone playing.

Note that a co-signed credit card does nothing to help your credit rating.  What’s a credit rating?  It’s a mathematical formula that computes the ability of the banks to squeeze you between two blocks of concrete and extract gold.  The bigger the number?  The more gold they can squeeze out of you, if you start talking back to them.

So, human sacrifice is really in the terms and conditions of every credit card company and on a cosigner they make you live without a kidney or liver.  Just letting you know.

The third thing to know is that you don’t have to worry, the second you turn 21, the banks will be glad to lend you all the money you want that you can’t afford to pay back:

Yes.  When I was in college, there were hot chicks in scanty clothing that attempted to convince you to sign up for a credit card, with the insinuation that, you know, they’d ignore you later after you spent all of your cool credit cash on them.  Party!

And this will happen to you when you turn 21.

Why?

That temptation that I talked about, that constantly burning credit card in your pocket, whispering in your ear “buy me now”?  It is a tool.  It’s a tool with a purpose.

This is why credit cards are awesome . . . for those you have to pay money to.

I was talking with a friend who is a zillionaire.  He had hundreds of apartments in Dallas.  He looked at me and said, “You know, John, it’s like I have an army of slaves working for me every month.  I own the apartments.  They were paid for on the first day they were constructed through me selling government tax credits to third parties.  Then people move in.  And they have to work every day to pay me.”

I was stunned.  Here was a zillionaire, telling me that his tenants were . . . his slaves.  And he is right.  Any time a man is obligated to pay a debt, to work for another is a slave.

The fourth thing you need to know is that debt is enslavement, but enslavement on steroids:

A lease, like a credit card, is a debt.  But a credit card allows you to buy pleasure now for future labor.  But it’s not an even trade.  Every month, the debt gets more added to it.  That debt is interest.  That means that for every elephant ride you charge to your credit card, you have to pay an elephant ride, 25,000 PEZ™, and two pairs of pantyhose.

You have to pay your purchase back, plus more.

When you buy a house, if you can’t afford to pay in cash, you get a loan that’s called a mortgage.  Mortgage is from the Latin root, meaning “Morty” and “Gauge” – so it’s a gauge of how many people named Morty that can live in your house.

Not to get heavy, but, you know, sometimes it’s worth it?  Oh, not really?

Just kidding.  It the Latin root for “mort” is death.  And “gage” is pledge.  Yeah.  A death pledge.  Happy thought, right?  Back in the day you were pledging your life to pay back the loan.  At least they were honest, then – you would die rather than not pay this money back.  But at least you have a pool, right?

The fifth thing you need to know is that credit cards can be a weapon to fight back:

I have in many years, paid for every single Christmas present with rewards from my Visa© card.  Yay!  Credit cards give cash back bonuses for spending with them.  The idea is that you spend money on the card.  They make money when you spend it via extortion fees from the people who sell you stuff.  Buy PEZ® online?  Get cash back.  Buy 25 Macanudo™ cigars online?  Burn the enemy’s crops.  Heck, Mark Twain used to smoke 300 cigars a month.

But what did that guy ever accomplish?

The sixth thing you need to know is that credit cards only make sense when they make sense:

I was married before I met The Mrs.  It was a mixed marriage.  I was human, she was Klingon®.

Just sayin’

How much would you pay to be rid of a Klingon™?  Well, as Henny Youngman asked . . . “Why are divorces so expensive?”

His response:  “They’re worth it.”

After my divorce from She Who Will Not Be Named, I was in debt.  My student loans.  My death pledge mortgage.  The debts from the marriage.  I consolidated them into four credit cards.  The total was enough to allow me to have gone to the Super Bowl® on a private jet with 2/5ths of the Spice Girls® as companions.  But all I had was a bill.

Well, maybe I’d pass on all of the Spice Girls®.  (Shudder)

It was paid off three years later.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to wash Spice Girl© off of me.

The seventh and final point is this:

Credit cards are like fire:  helpful when you are in control, but like ice cream and Cheetos®, a fearful master.

And, for extra credit:

I hate to ask this question, but I must:  how much could we achieve as a civilization if we abandoned debt.  Paid it off.  Bought houses with cash.  Paid up front?

What if interest was illegal?

What if no one was a slave to debt?  What if our country paid our bills, in full, every month?

Everyone who reads this blog knows I’m a fan of capitalism.  Of freedom.  Of Western Civilization.  I’m not sure that interest is required for any of these.

Discuss.  A Macanudo® to the best response . . . or some PEZ®.  Your call.

“Yes.  I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch

A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime.  You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight.  Proof of a flat Earth!

I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory.  The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove.  The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).

The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”

Yes.

Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat.  And this theory has been gaining followers globally.

Did you see that, globally?  Heh.  I crack myself up.

Anyway.

And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.

The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away.  Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away.  Seems legit!  What about the South Pole?  The South Pole isn’t.  It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth.  And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.

So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)?  The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS.  And satellites?  Totally fake.  There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!

Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself).  And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.

Like I said – these theories are fascinating.  Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors.  Not really sporting.

I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away.  But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years.  The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.

To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years.  To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career.  Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.

But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego.  Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK).  Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid.  They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.

Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”?  Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested.  If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.

And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour?  Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth.  It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).

See, they are moving fast to stay stationary!  If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.

Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct.  It obviously isn’t.  But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable?  In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.

(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)

So, why?  In some cases faith.  The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages.  In some cases reasoning.  The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him.  He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth.  Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.

But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.