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“The Moon Unit will be divided into two divisions:  Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.” – Austin Powers:  The Spy Who Shagged Me

There’s always that one kid who won’t smile in the team picture.

I was at a garage sale the other day when I came across a small leather-bound journal in a box filled with Tupperware®.  Embossed on the worn cover was a now faded and flecked NASA logo that had once been a solid, shiny gold.  In the lower right-hand corner I noticed, so faded they were barely visible, two initials:  N.A.  I flipped through and saw page after page of journal entries in what I assumed to be Neil Armstrong’s printed writing.  I quickly paid the $2.50 price on the orange sticker on the book.

Here are the journal entries:

7/14/69, 21:00:00 GMT

Countdown begins.  I will admit to being a bit excited.  A rocket launch is never a routine event.  They’ve kept us busy though, re-practicing procedures, re-reviewing maps of the Sea of Tranquility, and, for Buzz Aldrin, eating meals consisting entirely of re-fried beans.  He says it’s for luck.  Michael Collins continues to be . . . Michael Collins.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile.  Or blink.

7/16/69, 07:22:15 GMT

Last shower, shave and breakfast.  Collins doesn’t eat anything, stares blankly ahead – I guess that’s the way he deals with stress.  Buzz had 16 cups of coffee – I counted them – and about thirty eggs.  “For luck.”

Fun fact:  your car insurance may cover you if you’ve got a rental, but generally not if you leave the United States.

7/16/69, 13:00:00 GMT

Ignition of the main engines, then 17 long seconds later, liftoff as the Saturn V slowly moves past the tower.  The first stage burns for three minutes, total, and then stage two kicks in after a brief lull, and burns for nearly six minutes.  Two minutes later, we’re in orbit.  All of this is exactly as planned, exactly as written down in the procedures.  Eleven minutes for Apollo 11 to enter orbit.  That’s got to be a good omen.

For the first time in the mission, we’ve got some time to kill.  I can’t stop smiling.  Collins continues to stare directly ahead.  “Mike, are you doing okay?”

He slowly turned his head towards me:  “All of my systems are operating at nominal levels.”  He then turned his head back towards the controls.

Does he blink?  I’m interrupted by groaning coming from Buzz.

“Oh, man, I’m hurting.  I didn’t think about the pressure differential.”  He’s holding his stomach.

The pressure inside the Apollo Command Module, Columbia, is only 5psi, or the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.  At sea level on Earth, the pressure is 15psi, or three times as much.  We don’t pass out, because the atmosphere is 100% oxygen.

Apparently the food that Buzz ate is causing him discomfort.  A minute later, Buzz sighs.

It smells horrible.  I said, “Oh, Buzz, how could you?”  My eyes are watering.  Eggs and beans.  The smell is nearly incapacitating.

Even Collins jumped in, “My nasal sensors detect a significant increase in organic gasses in the atmosphere.”

Collins was rechargeable, thankfully.

Mission Control:  “Apollo, are you alright up there?  We have just monitored a significant increase in methane in the cabin?  If this keeps up, your atmosphere will become explosive.  Do you have a situation?”

Buzz sighs again.

7/16/69, 16:16:16 GMT

Translunar injection burn started – that’s the boost that gets us to the Moon.  Six minutes later, we’re on the way.  Thankfully Buzz’s extravehicular emissions end about an hour later and the atmospheric scrubbers manage to keep the atmosphere safe until Buzz is finished.

7/16/69, 16:56:03 GMT

While we’re on the way, it’s time to dock with the Lunar Module.  It’s in that last stage that boosted us to the Moon.  Buzz then gets an idea.

“Hey, let’s change the name of the Lunar Module from Eagle to something else.  How about we name it something funny, like Soviets Suck?”

I’m against this.  “Buzz . . . we can’t do that.  NASA already has the t-shirts printed.”

Buzz continues, “Okay, let’s vote on it.  All in favor?”  Only Buzz raised his hand.

Collins added, still staring straight ahead:  “This violates mission parameters.”

7/17/69, 00:04:00 GMT

We go on television four times over the next two days.  Collins follows the NASA script exactly, word for word.  Aldrin brings up his new product, Aldrin’s Hair Care for Men®, along with Aldrin Cola© and Aldrin Paste™, which I believe to either be toothpaste or silverware polish.  I think it must be toothpaste because he says it’s perfect for astronauts – “it’s zero cavity.”  NASA has a private radio conversation with him after the first time he promotes his products.

The long distance rates shut that particular business down.

We can hear his side of the conversation:  “What are you going to do, send NASA police up here and put me in NASA jail?  Ha!”

It’s about this point that Buzz starts to try to read over my shoulder as I write in this journal.  He pretends he’s not looking when I catch him.

7/19/69, 17:27:47 GMT

Lunar orbit.  We’ll spend about a day here while we get ready to go down to the Moon.  I’m starting to get a little irritated with Aldrin.  First, there’s the humming.  He won’t stop humming the theme to the Wild, Wild West®.  Then, there’s his ear hair.  Doesn’t he know that it’s there?  It’s this one, long, 2 inch hair coming out of his ear.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I swear I hear a faint whirring, as if from small electric motors and gears from Collins during sleep period.  Maybe it’s the space ship.  I hope it’s the space ship.

7/20/69, 17:44:00 GMT

Lunar Module undocked.  When we said goodbye to Collins, Buzz made a joke, “Hey, don’t go out joyriding while we’re gone!”  Collins said, “No.  I will be in rest mode while you are gone to conserve supplies.”  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Michael eat during the trip so far.

7/20/69, 20:17:39 GMT

The Soviets Suck Eagle has landed!  This is the first gravity we’ve had in days.  Aldrin immediately takes the opportunity to, umm, do things that are easier in gravity.  The Lunar Module doesn’t have a vent fan, but we will dump the atmosphere when it’s time for our EVA.  Which can’t come soon enough.

7/21/69, 02:56:15 GMT

First step on the Moon!  On one hand, it’s pretty exciting.  On the other, the responsibility is pretty big.  Buzz follows behind me after about twenty minutes.  He’s sulking – we rock-paper-scissored for the chance to go first, and he lost.  He always, and I mean always throws rock.  Speaking of which, it’s time to collect a few.

Heck, we can’t even do it since we’ve started using the metric system a little.    

7/21/69, 05:11:13 GMT

The walk on the Moon is complete.  We’re supposed to sleep, but we’re on the Moon.  Buzz tries to tell spooky stories, but I’ve heard the one about the hook on the spaceship door before.  He tries to make it scarier by thumping on the wall of the Soviets Suck Eagle.  I remind him that even though the wall is supposed to be tougher than a steel beer can, we left the duct tape on Columbia.

Thankfully we were AAA members.

We’re supposed to sleep.  Aldrin is laying down on the floor, and I’m propped up on the ascent engine cover.  Not really sleeping, neither is Buzz.  Finally Buzz stops humming the Wild Wild West® theme, only to start humming “In the Year 2525.”  This is not much better.

This was the number one song as Apollo 11 lifted off.  Even the Moon wasn’t far enough away to escape it.

“Neil, we need women astronauts.”

“Why, Buzz?”

“Those sandwiches aren’t going to make themselves.”

He’s not done.

“The next time I dump a girl, I know what I’m gonna say.”

“What, Buzz?”

“I need more space.”

Neither of us sleep at all that night, though I do come to the conclusion that there is no jurisdiction that I could be convicted in if I were to kill Buzz.

Yeah, I know.  I’m mad, too.

7/21/69, 17:54:00 GMT

Liftoff from the Moon!  Heading home.

“No, you’re upside down.”

7/21/69, 21:35:00 GMT

We’ve docked with the Columbia.  As we open the hatch we see that Michael Collins is in the same exact position that he was when we left.  It was as if he’d never moved.

“Welcome back, fellow humans.  Was your excursion enjoyable?”

Buzz responded, “It was like any spacewalk, Collins.  No pressure.  Get it?  No pressure!”

Collins stared blankly and then said, “I am not programmed to respond in that area.”

Getting back into the Columbia was pretty rough.  It smelled like swamp and wet dog, and that was after Buzz had already been gone a day.  Ugh.  Why did Aldrin choose so many space tacos and burritos for dinner?

7/22/69, 04:55:42 GMT

We fire our engine to return to Earth.  Two and a half days to home.  Did Aldrin really order refried beans with every meal?

If I my rice is too dry, do I put it in a bag of cellphones?

7/24/69, 16:50:35 GMT

Splashdown.  I never thought that smelling air would be so wonderful.  I couldn’t wait to open the hatch to the Columbia.  A deep breath with 100% less Aldrin.

7/24/69, 19:58:00 GMT

In quarantine – Collins, Aldrin and I are stuck here so we don’t start an epidemic of space pox.  I can certainly understand why we would want to quarantine aliens so they didn’t bring in epidemics of disease.

There was a two-drink minimum.

8/10/69, 20:00:00 GMT

Release from quarantine.  I’m outta here.  Maybe I shouldn’t share this journal, after all.  Perhaps it’s best if history remembers the official story . . . .

100% heroes.

Okay, yes, this was parody, or at least that’s what my law firm, Dewy, Cheatum and Howe suggests I say.  Outside of my supposition that Michael Collins is really a robot, none of this is true.  The Apollo astronauts represented the best of us in our nation at the time, men able to go into space, yet with enough humility to understand that their achievement was made possible by 400,000 other Americans working together to design everything from their underwear to the F-1 engines of the Saturn V to the food that they’d eat during the three weeks they spent in quarantine after returning to Earth.

An aside, they really did have problems with bad smells and space gas.  NASA even calculated to see if the gas would build up enough methane to cause the ship to explode.

“It could have imitated a million life-forms on a million planets. It could change into any one of them at any time. Now, it wants life-forms on Earth.” – The Thing

This bust is Seneca on one side, and on the other Socrates, all at a museum in Berlin.  Both guys are carved out of the same block of marble, which is kind of creepy and reminds me of The Thing.

Okay, it’s not creepy – it’s not like Joe Biden was involved.

“Think of those who not by fault of inconsistency but by lack of effort are too unstable to live as they wish, but only to live as they have begun.” – Seneca

What Seneca was saying was that you should strive, and you should persevere . . . but only up to a point.  Whereas you can start your career as a snake milker, there is no law that says you can’t finish your career as a Senior Kindle™ Evangelist.  It’s even easier to make that transition if you’re Jeff Bezos’ ex-brother in law.  It’s even easier than that if you have . . . special pictures of Jeff Bezos.

In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”  Even Churchill notes that at some point your life ceases being an inspiration for people to aspire to, and becomes a case study and example of ludicrous obsession.  Does that remind you *cough* of anyone *cough* Hillary *cough*?

I don’t know, maybe she lost because of an image thing?  Or was it because she was The Thing?

In your life, based on circumstance, you will find that a certain amount of flexibility is required.  Not necessarily “Soviet-bloc gymnast” level flexibility, but at the minimum “middle-aged, middle-school art teacher” flexibility.  The economy will change.  Jobs will change.  And as you age, your abilities will change.  This will make a career change not only likely, but inevitable for most people during their lives.

I’d prepared a bunch of my notes before I read the recent story in The Atlantic titled, “Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.”  It’s worth a read, since it appears it was written by their one non-communist writer.  One great quote from the article is from Alex Dias Ribeiro, who is a retired Formula 1 race car driver:

“Unhappy is he who depends upon success to be happy.”

Alex retired from driving in 1979 at the age of 31, never having finished higher than second place in a major race.  I’d make fun of Alex, but he’s certainly done better than I have in Formula 1 racing, where I’m not really sure my butt would even fit into a Formula 1 race car.  But I totally am a better blogger.  What, he has 38,000 Facebook® followers and has devoted his life to being a humble Christian pastor?  Does he floss as often as I do?

He does?  Dangit.  He has perfect teeth.  At 70.  Crap.

Alex’s commentary and early retirement age are the point of the article:  some abilities decline with age.  As much as a forty-year-old man might identify as a twenty-year-old, he isn’t.  Alex understood that at 31 he was past his peak as a driver and has dealt with it with far greater humility and grace than, well, me.

What do you mean that bragging about your achievements when you were in high school is  after, well, 22?

I’m sure they’re all totally impressed that I knew all the lyrics to that brand-new Bon Jovi album, Slippery When Wet.

As anyone who is older than 25 knows, physical ability goes down with age.  This decline is not linear.  Think of physical ability as your hairline.  Ever see a seventy year old with a thicker head of hair than when they were forty?  I mean, unless it’s Joe Biden?  Nope.

He says that being around young people keeps him young.  I think he means young doctors?

My physical ability declines with age.  Shower drain clogs caused by my hair decline with age.  Does that mean everything is diminished as I age?  Nope.  I have a luxurious, flowing mane of ear and back hair.  Sadly, I can feel the wind blowing through my back hairs, and all it takes for me to feel that air flow is the breeze from a bathroom fan.  The good news is that I can now knit myself a sweater entirely made of myself.  Well, I could if I could knit.  And if I lived in California.  I think that they’d make me move out of the county if I did that kind of creepy “back hair sweater knitting” in Modern Mayberry.

The good news is one other thing happens as you age – mental abilities change.

When you’re young, you have a greater amount of “fluid intelligence.”  Fluid intelligence is the fuel for innovation.  It’s what makes a five year old with a screwdriver take apart a $300 digital camera (yes, that really happened, and I let him live).  Fluid intelligence is the cause of new theories, the skill to solve novel problems, the ability to unhook a bra with only one hand.  Fluid intelligence seems to peak at or just before the age of 30.

The article further references a couple of examples that illustrate the problem of declining fluid intelligence:  Back before computers and high-speed imaging, an umpire was an umpire and the only difference between one umpire and another umpire was how fat they were.  Now, Major League© umpires can be objectively and scientifically graded.  Did that fast ball catch the corner of the strike zone?  Was that curveball really just outside?  Unlike in 1950, this can be checked in 2019.

Statistics show the best home plate umpires are, on average, about 33 years old.  The worst home plate umpires average about 56 years old.  It may not be a coincidence that the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers is 56, which is an oddly specific number.  I guess fastballs over the plate at Yankee® Stadium are just another bit of air traffic.

You can trust them!  Communism will surely work this time!

Hang on, old people – don’t pack your bags and get ready to board the trains for the new “Sanders-Cortez Leisure Camps” just yet.  There’s another type of intelligence – crystallized intelligence.  This intelligence is based around taking the information that you know and combining it (plus new facts) to form a synthesized view of the world.  That’s a whole lot of syllables that just mean one simple old word:  wisdom.  The best news is that crystallized intelligence doesn’t decline until senility hits.  Wisdom is accessible until you’re drooling.

This explains why rockstars in their seventies play music they wrote when they were twenty or thirty.  Writing music requires fluid intelligence.  For example:  Aerosmith hasn’t written a new song since well before Steven Tyler started looking like your poorly aging lesbian aunt.

(S)he was lead-off hitter in the softball league that consisted entirely of stray cats that (s)he kept in the garage.  They did win the championship, which was a bouquet of catnip and chardonnay.

Signs of decreasing fluid intelligence:

• Your VCR clock is constantly blinking 12:00.
• Interruptions tend to make your mind wander . . . oh, look, a baby wolf.
• You still have a VCR.
• You have no idea why you came into the kitchen.
• You don’t really care that the VCR is constantly blinking 12:00 because the last time you tried to fix it you changed all the menus to Mandarin and had to wait for a 10 year-old to fix it.
• Why am I in the kitchen again? I swear, I had it figured out last time.
• You leave stickers on your laptop, because you’ll be getting a new one in the next eight years, so why bother?
• Was it ice? A beer?  Eggs?  No, I’d have to cook eggs.  Oh, that’s it!  I left ramen® in the microwave!

If your dream is to be a groundbreaking theoretical physicist in your sixties?  I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen.  But teachers, historians, and bloggers all rely on crystallized intelligence.  Innovation is not going to happen, but thinking deeply and combining new and old facts and ideas will happen.  It’s recognizing that you’ve seen the patterns in society before.  It is wisdom, which consists of rubbing your chin and saying . . . “What were you thinking when you decided to try create a musical comedy about the Ferguson riots?”

Wisdom is asking that one additional question before you bomb Iran.  It’s why the framers of the Constitution put a minimum age on being President – you have to have wisdom to do the job.  Honestly, at my current age I think the Constitutional minimum is too low.  Thirty five?  No.  I’d put the minimum at forty five, unless they had no idea who a Kardashian was.

My brother and I were talking about on the phone about a decade ago.  The organization he was working at had just hired a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for their billion-dollar organization.  The new CFO was 30.  My comment to my brother was, “Thirty?  Are they nuts?  He’s not ready.  He has the wisdom of a houseplant.  He has the insight of an ice cube.”

My brother’s comment:  “But John, he’s really smart.”

A year later that CFO had flamed out and had gone, umm, more than a little nuts and they had to fire him.  My brother related several friendly conversations he had with the CFO where the CFO sounded borderline paranoid-schizophrenic.  The CFO wasn’t really crazy, though.  The position had just been too much for him to handle mentally.  It had been unfair to put him in a position where he had such responsibility so young, with so little wisdom.

The focus of life is different after fluid intelligence drops – it has to be.  You won’t have a sixty year old winning many high school track meets, but you won’t have any decent life advice coming from little Benny Shapiro, either.

Something tells me Shapiro . . . is no Seneca.  Unless he grows an extra head.

Seneca bust photo:  Marcus Cyron [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

“Well, I don’t think it’s officially called bubble bath if the bubbles happen accidentally, but whatever, Shawn.” – Psych

I’ve heard that bubbles can get bigger forever, and that fingers never happen.

This is the latest reader request post – I don’t think I have another one in the hopper – if I missed one or if you have a topic you’d like to see, please hit me up either in the comments or via email at movingnorth@gmail.com, but remember that the NSA® is like Santa – they know who has been naughty and who has been nice.  Unlike Santa, however, the NSA™ is real.  Not sure about whether or not they jiggle like a bowl of Jell-O® when they laugh.  Guess it depends on how good the Federal wellness program is?

Lathechuck posted in the comments of a recent post (Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival, with Wonder Woman, Bigfoot, Johnny Carson, Stalin, and a Bond Girl.) following gem – “Favorite topic to see explained: how mortgage payments are independent of interest rates.”

Housing is an emotional issue for most people.  It’s the reason that realtors say “it’s not a house, it’s a home,” and advise people selling houses to bake cookies so that fresh-baked cookie smell permeates the house and also suggests that you remove the corpses from the fridge prior to a showing.  Very few people want to open a fridge in a house they’re thinking about buying and see even a single severed head staring back at them, let alone three!  I think it’s the “not blinking” that puts people off?

I guess that’s what I get for buying Marilyn Manson’s old house.

Yeah, it’s odd when a picture of Marilyn Manson discussing Joe Biden touching him suddenly makes the post less creepy.

I’ve never seen people get more upset than being involved in a negotiation over the purchase of a house – it becomes personal, and ceases being a business transaction.  And when people take things personally, people get emotional.  When people get emotional, people get stupid.

“How could he say that about my home?”  Yeah, I know you raised your kids there/did the tile in the bathroom yourself/became a self-taught expert on shaving and tattooing baboon crotches.  Honestly, I don’t care as long as you take all the baboon hair with you.  The more I know about you, the less I like your house, because how will it ever become my house, especially if I’m still finding baboon hair in three years?

Our realtor advised us that, given that we have about several thousand pounds worth of books, our house would sell much better if we weren’t in it.  I would wager that we have the most comprehensive library in Upper Lower Midwestia on several topics (none of which involve tattooing baboons).  To be 100% honest – the Wilder family has never, not once, sold a house that we were living in.  We are far too odd, and the skeleton on the front porch seems to be a bit off-putting.  Real conversation we had once:

New neighbor, enthusiastically:  “Nice Halloween decorations!”

The Mrs.:  “Halloween?”

The Mrs. took this picture one day while I was at work when we lived in Houston.  The statue got broken by a dog after we moved to Modern Mayberry.  Response?  We have a new statue, but we keep it inside.  Yes. I have a bigfoot statue in my living room.  Who would buy a house from a family that had a bigfoot statue in their living?  Nobody.  You just can’t forget crap like that.

Realtors try to actually increase your anxiety with sales patter.  One technique that salespeople used on me when I was young was to magnify the importance of the decision way out of proportion.  “This will be the most important financial decision that you’ll ever make . . .”

That’s a lie.  The most important financial decision you’ll ever make is your choice of spouse – and the next most important financial decision is your choice of career.  The third most important financial decision you’ll make?  Paper or plastic.

As I got older, I wondered about why a salesman would try to inject a scary thought like that in the middle of a negotiation.  Shouldn’t they be trying to make me calm and happy with the decision?

No.

The sales process is entirely about emotional manipulation.  Salespeople are actively trained in creating mind-games to sway your emotions.  It’s what they do.  There are entire manuals on the Internet devoted to the process of managing the way a buyer feels through every step of the car buying process.  And salesmen go through it dozens of times a week.  The average buyer goes through it a few times a decade.  Who do you think is better at it?

I don’t know what the name of this emotion is, but I’ve felt it.  Also, this emotion goes well with a nice Chianti and some fava beans.  Plus?  I really enjoyed writing this caption.

Realtors do the same thing.  The incentive for the Realtor™ taking you from house to house while you tangle their seatbelts isn’t to put you into the best possible house for you at the best price.  Your Realtor© isn’t your friend, they’re a salesman.  Their incentive is to sell a house.

The incentive for the Realtor® listing a house for a client isn’t to get them the best possible price.  The incentive for the Realtor© to sell their house.  Quickly, if possible.

The buying realtor and selling realtor split a six percent commission.  So, if you have a house that you want to sell for $300,000 and the realtor can sell it more quickly for $250,000, they’ll try to get you to price it for $250,000.  Why?  A certain $7,500 now is preferable to maybe getting $9,000 later.  The extra $50,000 to them isn’t irrelevant, it’s an impediment to them getting a commission this month.

Other advice you’re given is that “interest rates are low, it’s the best time to buy.”  Based on history, interest rates today are very low – nearly a record low.  But how does that impact the price of a house?

You can see how serious that interest rates are by the expression on Candy’s face.  You certainly don’t want to be caught underwater on an expensive house, or without $1 bills when she’s pole dancing a bit later on the main stage.

Now for boring math:  If you bought a house for $250,000 at 4%, your monthly payment would be $1,194 (before taxes and insurance).  I hear the entire state of California laughing at that sales price, since most of them had to give up all of their spare organs like kidneys, nostrils, or eyes just to qualify for a down payment.  Guess I won’t mention that in Modern Mayberry you can get a 4,000 square foot (16,000,000 square meter) riverfront house on 3 acres for that amount of cash.  I’m not kidding.  It’s a nice house, nicer than mine.

Okay, we all agree that $250,000 for 4,000 square foot house sounds like a great deal, but what would your house payment be at 8% interest?  $1834.  Ouch!  That’s an extra $640 per month!  Outrageous!  Will Bernie Sanders save us?

See?  Communists can even make drinking suck.

No, because Bernie lives in fantasy land.  But for grins, let’s pretend that you bought that house at 4%.  Four years later, the interest rate pops back up to 8%.  Time to sell because your psycho soon-to-be ex-wife entered a less than honorable relationship with Johnny Depp.  Let’s assume that the average wage where your house is will support that $1,194 per month payment.  How much can you sell your house for at 8% to attract a buyer at that payment?

About $160,000.

That’s a net loss of $90,000.  If you absolutely had to sell the house, you’d be out that $90,000, and some people work a whole month and don’t make that much money!

Does the same principle apply when interest rates are going down?  Sure.  I had a house for sale when the interest rate dropped by 3% over a weekend.  Weird – I think the Federal Reserve ate a bunch of marijuana brownies and slept with the cast of Cats®.  I went from no lookers in a month to three full price offers in a single day, netting me a 50% profit on the house.  That might explain why the drop in interest rates from the late 1990’s (about 8%) to the 6%-ish number of the early 2000’s helped inflate the Housing Bubble that almost ate the economy.

If low interest rates raise home prices, high interest rates make house prices drop – it’s that simple.

But the story doesn’t end there.  Homeowners are generally voters, so lawmakers like to do things homeowners like.  Examples include:

• Making homes harder to build by putting in silly restrictions. San Francisco is a prime example of this strategy, having regulations that strictly prevent higher density development.  Lower supply?  Higher cost.
• Property tax caps. These insulate homeowners from market price increases at the expense of newer homeowners.
• Giving homeowners a free massage near election time.

Legislators realize that people who don’t want homes might want them and might one day be voters, so they have (in the past) put in place laws that:

• Prohibit lenders from not lending to people with bad credit. Certainly no consequences to that idea.
• Provide loans that are easier to qualify for with sketchy qualifications (FHA). As a recipient of two FHA loans, I guess I’m okay with the government guaranteeing massive amounts of money to people just out of their teens, because young people make the very best  Go Sanders 2020!  Am I right, fellow young people?

Listen to Mr. Pink when you have a decision to make – he’s such a young hep cat.  Tippecanoe and Tyler too!  Just noting, there aren’t many blogs making jokes about the election of 1840.  For that sort of cutting edge comedy, you’ve got to come here.

Politicians want housing prices to go only one way – up.  As prices go up, people who want to buy houses have a few choices:

• Suck it up and pay the big bucks,
• Commute from some distance just inside the orbit of Mars to get a lower price, which has the effect of raising prices in the new housing subdivision on Phobos,
• Rent, or
• Move to a city or state that doesn’t cost as much.

Believe it or not, there are places that don’t cost as much as California, with odd little names like “the People’s Republic of Washington” or “the Oregon Soviet People’s Collective” that you can move to.  Readers of this blog would be better advised to move to states that are not actively governed by Che Guevara’s Ouija® board.  Oddly, they are known as “red” states.

Actual Che quote:  “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”  Looks like he was triggered before triggered was a thing.  But he did it ironically.

In Modern Mayberry, I’m thinking that Chateau Wilder has probably decreased in value by 10% to 20% since we bought it.  Yikes!  But the decade I’ve lived here, the total I’ve paid in mortgage payments plus an assumed 20% depreciation is less than three years in a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco.  Oh, the torture, having to live on five acres with a lake for a decade rather than three years in a one bedroom.  I feel so deprived.

I bought a house, not an investment.  If you’re trying to invest, the best buy will be a neighborhood that’s going to be popular in the future in an area where wages are going up, so you need a crystal ball and there’s still risk involved – but it is a great way to get rich quick.  Buying in a recession is great, especially if you know the future.  Many a small fortune has been made in real estate, and some of these small fortunes were initially large ones.

Selling is easier:  sell into low interest rates in high demand, high wage areas.  Also?  Avoid Detroit.

Yes, making fun of Detroit is like kicking a puppy.  In my defense it’s a really, really, ugly puppy.

Beware if you’re buying in a hot market at low interest rates and if you’re planning on selling quickly.  You just might get caught.  Not that we’ve seen that before.

“There is no promise you can make that I can trust.”  The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers

Anyone seen my hobbits?  I know I left them here.  Or maybe the name was similar?

Note:  I’ve had a tremendous number of emails since the Civil War post.  If I haven’t gotten back to you, I will shortly.  Thanks!!

On Friday and Saturday, The Mrs. and I took The Boy and Pugsley off to the nearby Big City for the weekend.  The Boy and Pugsley had a 10 hour class, split between two days.  That left The Mrs. and I to ride around the town.  The Mrs. and I had lived in Big City years ago, so Big City was familiar, even though 8 miles of what had been vacant farmland when we moved away had been converted to strip malls, chain restaurants, big box stores, and the rest of the standard commercial establishments that make up nearly every generic copy of Big City in the Midwest.  The farms had character.  Each was different.  This?  This was as featureless and bland as Bernie Sanders’ forehead covered in mayonnaise and Monkee’s® music.

We stopped at one fast food restaurant for a snack while we waited for the boys to finish class for the night.  We ate for a bit, and then I got up to get more iced tea.  I walked back to the table.

“Now that’s why I’m glad we don’t live here anymore!”  The Mrs. was furious.

Confused, I looked around, and back at the table.  Nothing seemed to be amiss.

“Okay, umm, why?”

“That little kid,” she gestured at a little blonde guy of about 10 who was busy running around the table near his parents, “just ran between your chair and the table.”    I had only slightly pushed my chair back in when I went to go get tea, but there was less than a foot between my chair and the table.

He also had a pretty cool boomerang that he kept throwing at me, but I never could quite catch it.

As far as indiscretions go, it wasn’t up there with armed robbery using a chicken as a weapon, but the point was made.  These parents were letting their kid run wild in a fast food restaurant.  We never saw that behavior in Modern Mayberry.  We’d figured out the “why” of that fairly soon after we moved there.

People here in Modern Mayberry don’t have the option of anonymity.  If I cut a person off in traffic, it might be the principle of the school.  If I am a jerk to a clerk at Wal-Mart®, we’ll hear about it, because the clerk knows someone I know.  Who?  I’m not sure.  But in a small town, there’s someone in common.

In Modern Mayberry?  You have a reputation.  Your family has a reputation.  People aren’t horribly nosy here, but word spreads.

When I was young, I liked the concept of libertarianism, enough to even join the Libertarian party and vote for people who had zero chance of being elected.  It wasn’t too bad – you could always see that you were one of the 10 or so votes the candidate got on election night.  The idea of Libertarianism is simple:  Go do (more or less) what you want.  Don’t hurt other people.  Enjoy.  Repeat.  Libertarianism is really just individualism on a large scale, but with more Star Wars® t-shirts and fewer showers.

I never had braces.  But I also never raced across a field to give a beat-down to the British.

The United States was (more or less) founded on this type of individualism, though I have no idea how Ben Franklin smelled, and I think he was a Star Trek© fan instead of Star Wars®.  Liberty was one of the few things that all of the members of the Constitutional Convention could agree upon – the folks from Massachusetts weren’t entirely sure about the folks from Georgia, and vice versa.  But if Massachusetts would promise to leave Georgia pretty much alone, Georgia figured they could at least try to make it work.

This lasted until 1860, but that’s another story.  Spoiler:  Massachusetts won’t take, “It’s not you, it’s me,” for an answer.

Thankfully, the American people also had a built-in safety valve – they could move West at any time their neighbor (or state!) annoyed them.  This added, especially in the Midwest and Mountain areas, a strong sense of, “Leave me alone, you’re not my supervisor.”  People would move into an areas with a weak government that couldn’t do much for them.  It also couldn’t ask much of them.

First two seasons of Archer were pretty good.  I wouldn’t go much past that.  Not for kids.

Individually was the norm, if I can get away with saying that, and the individuality was, like a hipster convention, nearly identical from one person to the next.  Generally, as long as behavior was circumscribed by the predominant values of the time, it was all good.  The values that were both required by and created by that streak of individualism were:

• Fair Play – that there were rules, and, generally we were all expected to abide by them. Sure, rich people got a better deal, but even they were not completely above the law.  I don’t care if you are my supervisor – you’re not cutting in line.
• Meritocracy – the best person generally got the job, generally got the promotion. Was there nepotism?  Was there political favoritism?    But those words still have negative connotations.  And when smart people get hired into a family business, they know that the goofy, entitled son will get the corner office before they do.  But if your kid has the highest GPA?  They’ll be valedictorian.
• Personal Restraint – Just because it’s illegal doesn’t make it moral. And just because you have the right, doesn’t require you to do it.  Either by guilt or by shame or by good common sense, Americans had generally shown the prudence to show restraint.
• Generally Accepted Norms – One of the lessons that I’ve shared with my kids is a simple one: where politeness fails, laws follow.  The one guy in the subdivision decides he wants to recreate Jurassic Park®-level vegetation in his front yard will mow because his wife doesn’t want to catch abuse from the other wives as they sacrifice puppies to Gorto or play cards or whatever women do when men aren’t around.
• Faith in Fellow Citizens – If your car breaks down on a lonely night in winter, it’s likely that the next person who passes by will stop and to help. The colder it is, the lonelier it is?  The more likely they are to stop.  They feel safe in stopping, because of the next point, an obligation to stop.
• Sense of Community – On Friday night, the local football stadium will be filled. People will know where you sit, and you’ll see familiar faces every game. You know the owner of the restaurant you go to every Friday.  The auto repair place knows the names of your kids, as does the barber and the dentist.  The superintendent of schools has sent you handwritten notes, at least one of them good.

Yes.  These are generalizations, and I could certainly generate examples of when we didn’t live up to these values in the United States in the past.  But these values are, generally, the rules that we have to all follow to make things work in a high trust society:  recognized property rights, independent courts, and faith in our elected officials.  You don’t trespass, because that’s old man Smith’s place.  Yeah, the judge likes to drink a bit too much on Friday, but he sentenced the robbery suspect to 10 years and didn’t charge the shopkeeper who shot him up.  And Sheriff Buford sends your kid a certificate, just for graduating high school.

Actually, we’re pretty welcoming, as long as you don’t send paratroopers first.

The result is that you get a society where people can work together, voluntarily.  Things like park boards and school boards and town councils and county supervisors are the most effective forms of government, and have the most impact on a typical person’s life.  The Sheriff is more important than people in Washington, because the Sheriff is actually accountable, and has to live with the people he’s protecting.  He also knows when not writing a ticket is the right answer.

However, when societies are built on nepotism, separatism, egos, immorality, or freeloading, that trust disappears.  The Sheriff won’t arrest a murderer because he’s a cousin.  Or of the same faith.  Or of the same race.  Cars are stolen with regularity, because everyone believes that anyone who is wealthy isn’t to be admired and emulated, but hated.  Why?  Because the only way to get ahead is to cheat.  And anyone who has more than you has cheated, right?

High trust societies produce wealth.  Polite children.  People who act honorably.  They have stable governments with an emphasis on rights for common men.  People pay their taxes, and act together.

Low trust societies are characterized by poor social trust.  High theft rates.  Low wealth.  Their governments are often stable, because they’re collective and totalitarian.  At least the election results aren’t in doubt.  How can you doubt an election where the winner gets 98% of the vote?

Is it ironic that someone who hated capitalism died on Black Friday?

The truth is that you can’t combine a low trust society and a high trust society.  The values of a low trust group in a high trust society will destroy the high trust society after time.  Why?  You can’t win a game of cards when everyone else is cheating.  You can’t have peace when another country has declared war on you.  In a war of values, the lowest common denominator wins.

Our car ate up the miles between Big City and home.  We finally crossed the last little creek and headed up the hill, past the farm that flooded every other spring, and heard the familiar crunch of gravel under our tires as I stopped near the mailbox.  The mailbox was open, and had probably been open since Saturday, but our mail was still there.

We were glad to get home.

Mall pic by Dj1997 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall-Hu Totya  via Wikimedia, [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

One of the things I love most about writing this blog is finding out when I’m wrong.  Yes, I know that’s a well with no bottom, but I’ll describe it thusly:  The Boy and I were sitting out in the hot tub tonight talking.  He brought up how angry he was that there had to be a Federal law passed to prevent discrimination against Vietnam veterans.

We don’t live in a “safe” house.  Any opinion is open for challenge.  Any opinion.

“Do you want to know what I think about that?”

He paused.  He wasn’t looking for the “right” answer.  That’s a recipe for being intellectually and emotionally gutted and left to dry in our house.  “I guess so.”

“Why do you hesitate?”

“Well, now I know that after we discuss it, I’m going to look at all of it through different eyes.  You’ll bring a perspective to it that I hadn’t thought about.”  I could see on his face that he both liked and hated it.  It was like an itch.  It sucks being itchy, but it feels so good when you scratch, unless you’re like my Uncle Harold and are itchy because the Moon Men were talking to him through the television.  Again.

I’m not sure I messed with The Boy’s mind too much during this particular conversation.  We had a discussion that the Vietnam War certainly wasn’t lost by the military.  I described the Tet Offensive to The Boy.  During the Tet Offensive an all-out assault was launched in multiple locations in South Vietnam against both American and South Vietnamese targets.  The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the enemy (Viet Cong and NVA) as they were soundly defeated by a factor of at least ten to one and failed to achieve any useful military objective.

Back during the Vietnam War, the only real sources of information were: word of mouth, the local paper and the television news – websites with unapproved thoughts simply didn’t exist.  Leftist propaganda on the Tet Offensive and was poured into the minds of the American public by a willfully complicit media, led by Walter Cronkite.  I’d call him a Leftist prostitute, but they didn’t have to pay him extra.  Let’s just call him, “easy,” since apparently he’d do his duty for the Left for a coke and a burger.

What Walter said just wasn’t so, but there was no voice to contradict him.  That being said, this post isn’t a defense of the Vietnam War as an appropriate policy, and it isn’t attacking it, either – I’m not opening that particular bag of angry housecats tonight, and it’s not important for the point of this post.

Rather, tonight’s post is an example of just that conversation that I had with The Boy – I started writing on a completely different topic, and, after research, decided I was either wrong or more research would be necessary to make sure I was right.  Maybe that topic will show up as a future post, but it won’t be today.  Too many inconvenient facts that have (once again) made me rethink what I was going to say.

The world is funny that way – facts don’t always match preconceived notions.  Honestly, that’s one of the joys of writing this blog – finding out things that I think, that just aren’t so, and finding out more about the way the world really works.

Back in the day, The Mrs. did the news on a radio network, she wrote her own copy, and selected stories, and put it all together for broadcast at the top and bottom of every hour.  Even though we lived in a state where basketball was popular, The Mrs. didn’t cover it on the news – at all.  She covered football and hockey, but never ran news about basketball.  This was on a radio network, listened to by (probably) hundreds of thousands of people, daily.

Subtle?  Certainly.  Probably nobody noticed that there were no basketball scores on the radio – heck, if they were basketball fans they probably knew the scores already.  But it impacted me – someone controls what stories made the radio news.  Therefore, someone controls the stories that make the national news.

Did The Mrs. have a political agenda?  Not really.  Did Walter Cronkite?  Certainly.  If there was any doubt, his later quotes (you can look them up) showed him to be firmly on the Left, and firmly in the camp of a one-world government.

When you watch the news, ask yourself two questions about every story:  “Why are they showing me this now?” and, “What are they not telling me?”

It was intentional that I brought up Tet on Memorial Day weekend when talking with The Boy.  I had an agenda.  He needs to know the sacrifices that were made by our troops and others, and to know, certainly, that there are forces that actively oppose freedom.  Thankfully, there have been plenty of brave men who fought on the side of freedom.

But far too many died.  This our day to remember them.

“I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.”- South Park

These girls are only 250,000 Twinkies© away from being good Marxists.

It was 6:35 A.M. around the Wilder house.  The Wilders are not morning people.  Left to our own, we would soon start going to bed at 5 A.M. and getting up at 2 P.M.  I know it’s not the way the rest of the world works, but it’s the way that we’re wired.  How do you tell a true Wilder baby?  Sleeping until noon on day two home from the hospital.

Wilders do, however, realize that the rest of the world is on this whole “getting up at 6 A.M. and going to bed at 10 P.M.” even though we aren’t.  We deal with it, but at 6 A.M. our collective family I.Q. is lower than a two week old bowl of linguini, or of congress.  We’re just not smart at 6 A.M.

“WHERE IS MY TRACK UNIFORM?”  This was from Pugsley.  He had about five minutes to get ready to leave to meet the bus that was going to take him to the track meet.   He was yelling.  Namely, he was yelling at his older brother:  “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?”

Being Dad, I was amused.  This was a learning opportunity.  I stopped Pugsley.

“Pugsley, stop.  If you want to know who is responsible for your track uniform, go into the bathroom.  Face the sink. And look up, into the mirror.  It’s that guy.”  Pugsley found his uniform.  He got to his track meet.  He actually threw his shot put for a personal record that day and got a medal.  All was well.

But the bigger point was this:  somewhere around middle school there’s a switch in the brain that comes on full force.  It does this automatically.  It’s a very simple setting.  It’s a universal setting.  It’s a setting that implants an idea straight to the brain, “it’s not my fault.”

Building personal responsibility, from my observation, takes place in early adolescence, around the ages of 13 through 15.  It requires an actual family – a “strong, brave single mother” can’t do it, and in my opinion our culture of divorce weakens the role of the father.  Mothers represent love, caring.  Fathers represent justice, and rules.  To make a decent child, you need to have both.  And to have both?  You require a mother and a father.

But personal responsibility is the first lesson that’s required for civilization.  Personal responsibility is a core concept for society.  Personal responsibility drives the basic social interactions that make life easy.  Personal responsibility makes contracts enforceable.  Personal responsibility is the very lubrication of society.  When it drops away, so does society.

I’ve recently found a subreddit (a subgroup on the website Reddit that’s focused on a particular topic) that describes this lack of responsibility very well – it’s here (LINK).  It’s called Fat Logic.  The brilliant and brutal idea of the group is that you find people who will go to any lengths to self-justify being fat.  And not a little over weight, but in many cases “have to buy two seats on an airplane” fat.

In my mind there’s a huge difference between the mindset of being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane, and being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane and COMPLETELY BLAME SOCIETY FOR THE INJUSTICE AND FATAPHOBIA.  Yes.  There are actual, living and breathing people like that.  And the things they say are skewered brilliantly on Fat Logic.

A note:  I’m on a journey to reach my goal weight.  For the record, I’m not attempting to gain weight.  I need to lose a few pounds (as of today I’m halfway to my goal).  But I recognize that my weight is my responsibility.  It’s not genes.  It’s not chemicals in the environment.  It’s not that my mother failed to buy me comics when I was a kid.  It’s the Ruffles® Cheddar and Sour Cream chips I ate for the past five years.

Me, dieting with cookies in the house.

In other words:  it’s because I’ve eaten too much.  And that is the story of every fat person on Earth today.  Losing weight isn’t necessarily easy, but it is simple, and I’ll go through that in more detail next week.  Thankfully, I’ve cracked that code.

The Fat Logic Subreddit, however, is the best motivation I’ve ever seen for losing weight.  It takes the comments (like you see on this post) and points out the failed logic that people self-generate to maintain their illusion that being fat enough that asteroids orbit you is okay.  I’d be willing to bet that Reddit will ban this subreddit sooner rather than later – being truthful seems to be the fastest way to get banned from the Internet these days.

Fat Logic introduced me to two concepts I’ve never heard of, namely HAES (Healthy At Every Size) and Intuitive Eating.

HAES is devastating.  It removes the link between weight and health.  Certainly, being underweight is unhealthy as well, but HAES takes that fact and multiplies it into a logic bomb pointed at anyone who dares suggest that being morbidly obese isn’t totally the way that they should go through life.  HAES people hate any sort of objective measurement.  Like weight.  Or daylight.  Or money.

Intuitive Eating might be worse, but that’s like taking a pick between Stalin© and Mao™.  Intuitive Eating means exactly that – eating whatever you want in whatever quantities you want.  So, if you have a dozen doughnuts?  Eat them all if you want to.  It’s exactly the sort of diet that you’d get if you put three year olds in charge of dinner every night.  And we all know that three year olds are the perfect judges of what’s healthy.

Fat logic is a collection of . . . lies.  But they’re the worst kinds of lies – lies we tell ourselves to justify what we want.  Want another Twinkie®?  Sure, have one.  Have two, if that’s what your intuition tells you.  There’s no problem – you are healthy no matter what size you are.  Except for your joints, your pancreas, your liver . . . oh, I could go on, but that’s not the point.  The point is that Intuitive Eating and Healthy At Every Size are simply Marxism® for fat people.

Marxism©, at its heart, is a religion based upon envy.  Even in the highly unrealistic case that morbidly obese people don’t envy skinny people, they still can’t wrap their heads around . . . I swear I’m not making this up . . . thin privilege.  Yes.  Being thin is a sin.

Thankfully this sin can be overcome by the penance of embracing Marx, HAES, and Intuitive Eating.  Heck, if you’ve got that down, why bother going to track?  I’ll just skip the responsibility lessons with Pugsley – then he could intuitively eat his way to 600 pounds.  He’d be healthy there, right?

Sure.  Healthy At Every Size.

“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.