Category: Valhalla

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

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Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”  The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®.  I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work.  Really.  Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines.  But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done.  And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee.  Speaking of  noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you.  Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen.  Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power.  This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike.  He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

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What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you?  It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy.  It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him.  His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis.  These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

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You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers.  The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me.  I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy.  If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful.  While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of:  waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . .  GET UP.  AND.  GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated.  They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power.  Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment.  He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

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Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life:  action is vital for you to be the best you.  You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action?  Probably the number one reason is our egos.  Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy.  Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life.  That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

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I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life.  That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail.  Ego wants to, above all things, not fail.  Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve.  Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded.  The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life.  Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

  • They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
  • They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
  • No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above.  They care about you and want you to feel better.  After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up.  That’s your ego.  Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again.   And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute.  Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it.  The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

embar

And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself:  how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior?  How many things have you avoided because of fear?  How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you.  Start today.  And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist.  But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are.  Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

universe

Some people think the Universe will last forever.  Silly people.  We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible.  A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®.  One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases.  This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law:  the second law of thermodynamics.  The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to.  At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows.  As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood.  After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours.  The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see.  The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire.  Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually.  Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning.  That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there.  The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

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Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem?  The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system.  It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day.  To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth.  With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar.  Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere.  Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water.  Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations.  Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star.  Not Nicholas Cage®.  Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too.  Salt deposits.  Sand dunes.  And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day.  And not only in the galaxy, but in your house.  In your carpet.  In your body.  In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain.  Without energy:

  • Your house will someday be a wreck.
  • Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
  • Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards.  You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard.  Life is a struggle.  If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things.  Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end.  Entropy will win.  Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have.  When you were six you knew this.  What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes?  People who went to work at a bank?  No.

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In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it.  They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought.  Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough.  A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for.  What are you going to do with your life?

braveheart

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt.  He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life.  Or you can struggle.  Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

pulp

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Four Questions That Describe The Meaning of Life

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python, Meaning of Life

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I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it.  Which is makes it even funnier.

I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving:  There are only four questions that are worth asking.  I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up.  So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?

I was worried that this was too simple.  I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions.  They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.

  1. What brought us here?
  2. Who are we?
  3. What is this place?
  4. Where are we going?

Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys.  Under my hat.  Again.  Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone.  Everyone except Johnny Depp.  He knows why.

But these are big questions.  As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.

What brought us here?

This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head.  It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit.  At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state.  All of them.  It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.

War

I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.

This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question.  Thankfully, it’s simple to answer.  All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:

  • All of human history.
  • All of physics.
  • How PEZ® was invented.
  • All of the history of the universe.

So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.

We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects.  One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000.  My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors.  I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me.  I’m pale.  I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.

That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight.  Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct.  Neanderthal was us.

So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised.  And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.

An example:

At CERN (where they smash atoms together like a tipsy celebutant celebrating that her parents purchased her way into USC™ smashes daddy’s Mercedes© into a mom’s parked Ferrari®) they recently celebrated, with campaign(!), that they had discovered a particle symmetry violation between anti-matter and regular matter.

physics

If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .

That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit.  The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter.  But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go?  This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter.  It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.

This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment.  It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does.  This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different.  But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down?  That was anti-magnetic?  That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?

Yes.  This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it.  Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.

Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.

Who are we?

I got this question down to three words.  See what a ruthless self-editor I am?  This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:

  • How the human body works.
  • How the brain works.
  • What consciousness is.
  • If people have souls.
  • Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
  • What health is.
  • Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
  • What motivates us.
  • Why we do the things we do.

I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?”  Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance.  Protip:  since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.

But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics.  Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.

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No, thanks, eyes are fine.  And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.

Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.

Except for the interesting ones.

What is this place?

Our surroundings are curious.  There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made.  How does all of it work?

  • What virtue is.
  • Where virtue comes from.
  • What societies work well for humanity.

This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made.  Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.

Where are we going?

This is the final question, the future.  The mysteries of the future are different.  The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability.  What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future?  This question is easy to answer if we just know:

  • The fate of ourselves.
  • The fate of our civilizations.
  • The fate of humanity.
  • The fate of life itself.
  • Physics (all of it), again.

I’ve mentioned religion twice.  Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it.  And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that.  Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label.  Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.

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Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?

But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.

So you never know what we’ll learn in the future.  And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.

Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.  I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel.  And I am immortal.” – Highlander

coffee

Or maybe it was the scotch that made him immortal?  When I drink scotch I’m bulletproof.

I once had a Grandboss (my boss’s boss) that once said, “Reading is the only way that you can know great minds across centuries.”  He was deeply philosophical and attempted to use that philosophy to improve business results, and also to use history as analogy for business conditions.  Prior to the movie 300 coming out, he was discussing the battle of Thermopylae and the courage of the Spartans to fight to the last man as a business analogy.  Needless to say, when you’re using a battle where every single solder dies as an analogy, business isn’t going all that well.

Grandboss also assigned On War (a treatise on war and strategy during the Napoleonic era) by Von Clausewitz for us to read.  I’m probably the only guy who actually did read it, and still have my copy.  Needless to say, I loved my Grandboss, and still send him cards on Grandboss day.  When I quit that job to take a new one, I told him first, and as a goodbye present?  I gave him a book.

My Grandboss was right, though – reading allows us to know great minds across centuries.  The nice thing is we can read the thoughts of dead Greeks like Epictetus.  Epictetus spent his entire life studying and living stoic philosophy, which was a pretty hard thing to do when you were a slave with a gimpy leg.  Epictetus eventually became free – we don’t know how, but I imagine he won the annual caddy’s golf tournament and got a scholarship from Judge Smails.

nothing

I bet Epictetus just wishes he wrote, “You’ll get nothing and like it.”

One thing we do know is that Epictetus did was spend a lot of time thinking about virtue and vice.  We’ll spend more time on virtue on Monday’s post, but Epictetus came to the conclusion that the following things were neither vice nor virtue:

  • Wealth
  • Health
  • Life
  • Death
  • Pleasure
  • Pain

As wealth and health are at least two nominal themes of this blog (this is Friday, so I’m stretching it and saying this is a health post) it might seem a bit hypocritical that I spend time talking about health and wealth and then quote a dead lame Greek that says that neither of those are virtuous.  But I would argue that my message on wealth is that true wealth is in having few needs (Seneca, Stoics, Money and You), and although I prefer pleasure to pain, I recognize that a pleasure repeated too often is a punishment (Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick).  And we also know that health is more controllable by our choices today than Epictetus did.

qwho

Immortal and omnipotent.  And good on the mariachi trumpet.

Heck, I even got challenged by an Orthodox priest friend on whether or not learning for learning’s sake was, in a religious context, a vice.  If so, there goes most of my Monday posts.  The priest and I (as I recall, over a BBQ lunch) came to the conclusion that learning for learning’s sake was maybe a vice.  Since he was also a fan of learning for learning’s sake, if it was a vice we were both guilty.

Going back to Epictetus’ list, Life and Death are on it as being neither virtues nor vices.  I’m not sure about you, but I really prefer Wealth to Poverty, Health to Illness, and Life to Death.  Epictetus felt the same way – it was okay to have preferences with the understanding that neither condition is, in itself, virtuous.  I finally came to understand that while not virtuous, death is required for life.  Oddly, I thank Bill Clinton for this realization.

It was during the Clinton presidency that I first looked around at the national leaders for both parties and thought, “Jeez, what a bunch of bozos.”  Both sides were stupid or corrupt.  Some were stupid and corrupt at the same time (looking at you, ghost of Ted Kennedy, I’ve imagined you’ve been plenty warm this winter).  Back then I was a capital-L libertarian, and could see that both sides had as primary goals the restriction of freedom on their agenda in addition to being incompetent.

Beyond that, they were . . . awful.  Spineless.  They were tools of groups with different names but the same objectives – objectives that mostly didn’t favor you or me.  Throw into this mix that one day at lunch I was thinking about immortality and the implications of living forever, which was spurred on by eating a tuna fish sandwich which might have been as old as Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D.

bubbaho

Elvis will never die.  Mobility?  That might be an issue.

If people were generally immortal?  Our birthrate would plummet – 200 year old women have very few kids.  As for me, I’d have plenty of time so rather than putting things off until next week, I’d put stuff off until next century.  But the worst consequence?

Bill Clinton would forever be an elder statesman, always trying to increase his (and Hillary’s) power for all of eternity.  Our current batch of elected officials would be about the best we’d get, or maybe the only ones we’d get.  Senators and congresscritters already stay in office until the only way to keep them alive is though that experimental technique that turns them into zombie-like creatures that feast on living human flesh like Nancy Pelosi, or immortal robots like the Ruth Bader-Ginsbot™ 3000.

Thankfully, we live in a world where things die and the world moves on – just like a cell in a human body ceases to exist so new cells can take over.  We have a name for immortal cells – cancer.  Just like cells pass away, so do we to leave this world to the youth.  I didn’t say death is “good” – just that it serves a purpose.

laz

Okay, this is one boy who loved his mother.

Part of that purpose is focusing us on the here and now:  in this way we don’t lose sight that life is precious and fleeting, like sedation dentistry.  Perhaps the most precious thing we have is the shared time with those who have meaning to us (like your friendly blogger).  But for those who have left us, honor them with the virtue that they helped you obtain.  Be glad you had a part of their life, and had a chance to witness their virtue and learn from their vices.  Look at how they have changed you, made you better so that they live on through their influence on you.

Lastly, for heaven’s sake, write something down.  It’s the only way that someone can know your mind when you’re gone, unless they check your browser history.

How I Got Into Debt, Trench Warfare, and an End of the World Cult You Can Believe In

“Well, if you don’t like that, try some Archduke Chocula.” – Futurama

franzmeme

After World War One, the phrase, “Happy as a Hapsburg in Serbia” fell out of favor, as did the “Hair Smile” style of mustache.

I’ve already told the story about digging out of debt.  In retrospect, it seems to me that all of those stories end up sounding the same:  “I weighed six hundred pounds, my kitchen floor was covered in dirty dishes and cat food, and I had $3.7 million in debt until I found Wildernetics© and the First Church of PEZology™.  Look at me now!”

flammen

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part One).  These are from a soldier’s joke newspaper, The Wiper’s (a mangling of Ypres) Times, produced for soldiers by soldiers that found an abandoned printing press.

I know my methods can solve everything, but today I had a crazy idea.  How about spending some time talking about how I got into debt in the first place?  I know that might cut into the revenue of the Wildernetics© End of the World Cult and Take-Out BarBeQue Restaurant®, but I figure you might come back for the brisket.  It’s very tender.

I’ll quit teasing.  How did I get into debt?  First a little.  Then all at once.

Let me rewind a whole marriage.  As regular readers will know, The Mrs. was not the first, but she is the final spouse.  My first marriage was an example of a series of escalating poor mutual decisions where each side seemed to lack a brief moment of sanity to back out before anyone got hurt, sort of like the run up to World War I.  Even before Archduke Franz Ferdinand proved that .380 ACP was a useful round against Hapsburgs and their notably gelatinous bones, World War I was inevitable.  Before I said “I do” everything was in place for the trench warfare of future divorce.

ditch

Okay, I apologize for this joke.  I think it violated the Geneva Convention.

But, rewinding.  After graduating college I got married and got a starter job, which is to say I had a job that just barely paid the bills.  Nearly exactly.  In fact, after working at the job for a few months, we were exactly (most months) at zero.  We weren’t saving any money yet, but we also weren’t in the red.  Success.  My credit card limit was 10,000 . . . Siberian Lira.   This was equivalent to a whole bright and shiny quarter.  This helped me stay debt free.

Then came the table.

optimism

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Two), this one is for James.

We had a dining room table.  It wasn’t great, and the chairs that came with it were a bit ratty – the vinyl arms had been slammed into the table often enough that it looked like a pack of rabid Chihuahuas had spent their lives sitting on the chair seats and gnawing on the arms.  I imagine them growling and chewing in unison as they sat around the table, like Viking Chihuahua rowers.  Most all of our furniture was second hand or gifted, but the table really was the biggest eyesore.

unread

Okay, this one isn’t mine, but I couldn’t resist.

At some point discipline broke.  I know how silly it sounds to say that now, but back then, month after month of not buying anything but actual necessities takes more discipline than Elizabeth Warren around a tribal gathering.  Eventually I gave in.  We bought the table.  Using debt.  Back then, individual stores would give you amazing credit limits just to buy their crap.  They gave us more than enough credit to buy that table, and with the money I saved from shipping the Chihuahuas back to Denmark, I figured we’d be money ahead.

fireworks

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Three).

The table was only $500, but the difference between having no debt (outside of a mortgage) and having debt, even a small one, was a huge psychological hurdle for me.  It’s like having a doughnut when you’re doing low carb.  “I got weak had one doughnut, so I might as well have, say, 36.  And do you have any whipped cream I could just guzzle straight from the can?  I broke my diet, and don’t want to waste it.”  Pretty soon other nice to have things showed up, very few of which I still own today.  But I had crossed that mental barrier from peace (debt free) to war (spend away!).  Suddenly, the credit card companies realized I had debt, and immediately wanted to lend me more money.  My credit limits tripled.

I hope that this doesn’t sound like I’m blaming The Ex.  Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I was fully complicit.  Ultimately the debt grew faster than my wages.  This led to the idea of grad school:  I could get free tuition plus be a paid graduate assistant.  Would it work?

Sure.  There were also student loans.  Free money!  Oops.

bellgas

Okay, let’s all admit that Nachos Bellgrande® is NOT a war crime.

gas

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Four).

There were some places along the way that I could have gotten off the merry-go-round.  When I sold that first house to move for a new, post-grad school job, we’d made a stunning 40% profit in three years.  It would have more than paid off a good chunk of my student loans.  Nope, that would have made too much sense.  We did pay down a little debt and bought a new house, putting down the minimum down payment.

But most of the money was just spent.  About this time I also had one of the worst ideas I’d ever had in my life.  The Ex and I were always arguing about money, and about the thermostat – I knew that 50°F in winter and 90°F in summer were reasonable temperatures, but The Ex disagreed.  Well, if she had to pay the bills, she would certainly understand how tight money was.  Right?

No.

We had a different view of not only household temperature, but the idea that one should pay monthly bills, well, monthly.  I didn’t figure this out for three years, by which time I owed enough money to qualify as a third world country, but one of the nice, mainly atrocity-free ones.  Mainly.

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Taco Bell® inspired outfits?

Debt is like George Washington’s description of fire, it’s an amazing tool, but a fearful master.  My advice is to pay all of your bills in full, monthly.  I know that the people who own your debt disagree.  Why?  They want you to have debt, as much as you can pay.

I had a friend (since passed away in an accident) who I called Batman© on this blog (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman).  He had one particular investment that was worth about $12 million – a series of apartments.  He had paid the apartments off before they were even built by selling future property tax credits to other businesses.  Yeah, that kind of friend.

But he viewed his tenants as slaves (his term), who went to work daily so they could send him money every week.  I heard him use exactly that phrase to describe them.  He liked his tenants, and was a good landlord.  However, he knew the score:  when they went to work each day, they went to work so they could pay him.

And Batman was a good guy and he taught kids that debt was a form of slavery of ordinary people to wealthy guys just like him, not that they always listened.

My marriage to The Ex?  That particular marriage is proof of the old Henny Youngman joke:

“Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

peaceinourmeme

Yeah, divorce just STARTS the argument.

The day she moved out was one of the happiest days for both of us.

I was still digging myself out of debt when I met The Mrs.  As our relationship blossomed, I thought it was only fair to tell her of the debt that I had.

“The Soon To Be The Mrs., I have something to tell you.  You might want to sit down.”

The Soon To Be The Mrs. looked shaken.  She sat.  I told her about my debt.  She laughed.

“Is that all?  I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

No, not prison.  But I still owe reparations payments to France.

Mortality, Bill Murray, Art Lessons, and Avatar

“Two years he walks the earth.  No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.” – Into the Wild

haystack

I’ve left a map.

“That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s an unusual thing for The Boy to say when discussing death.  In this case, my death.

First, some context.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m going to die.  I have no desire to die anytime soon, mind you, but I realize that it’s something that, statistically, happens to 100% of us.  Not 99%.  Not 99.999%.  Not even 99.9999999999%.

100%.

I think the human mind has developed safeguards to distract itself from facing this inevitability, primarily so we don’t spend our days in a corner sobbing uncontrollably when we’re young, muttering, “What is it all about?  Why do we even try?  What if I never meet Bill Murray?”  However, there comes a time in life when you begin to understand that death will come.  If I am statistically average, this fate is decades away and again, I’m not particularly interested in hurrying it along.

I’m not sure the exact moment I made peace with the idea of death.  It might have been when I was stuck watching a DVD of Avatar®.  That will make anyone long for death, so that was probably it.

avatard

I kept waiting for Papa Smurf® to show up during Avatar©.  Or the movie to be good. Neither of those things happened.

As luck would have it, Pop Wilder lived to be quite old, and was in generally very good physical health throughout his life.  At the end he was taking in more calories in pill coatings than food, but he was in good enough shape to walk for miles.

His physical health was fine.  What happened to Pop Wilder was that he started forgetting.  Perhaps the biggest blow was that, at the end, he had forgotten me entirely.  I’m fairly certain that the last few times that I saw him he had no recollection of me.  His eyes were blank – worse than blank.  When he looked at me he had the wariness one reserves for a stranger or a congressman.

I had been prepared for this – it was obvious that his memory loss was increasing exponentially each time I saw him.  I think that the last time he really knew that I was his son was several years before he passed on.  And that was okay.  I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, but I will say that I had said everything that I needed to say to Pop before he lost his memory.  I was at peace.  Again, not easy, not happy, but at peace.  I understood that there was nothing that man nor medical science could do for him, so there was no reason for anger.

I hadn’t, however, realized the impact it had on The Boy.  The Boy saw the same things that I did, and knew that Pop Wilder was no longer the grandfather he knew.  The Boy could sense that Pop Wilder wasn’t present anymore.  Perhaps this is the most basic element of horror – watching a human transform from the person you know very well into a person you don’t know at all.  It’s implicit in every horror transformation story from vampire to werewolf to zombie.  Seeing it when you are young hits you even harder.  That transformation is made more terrifying because you didn’t even know it was possible.

Fast forward to Saturday, six days ago.  We were driving home from an event, and I mentioned that there were some things I wanted to see from him in the next twenty or thirty years.

“Don’t dawdle.  I don’t want to have to wait to die when I’m ready to die.”

It was really meant as a joke.  The look on The Boy’s face as he drove, though told me he was thinking about it.  Deeply.

“I saw what Grandpa Wilder went through.  That was tough.”  Pop Wilder had passed on years ago.  “I like your idea better.”

“My idea?”

“Yeah.  The one where you’re going to go off into the woods with just your .30-06 and enough supplies to live.  Or die.  That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s true.  I had shared with The Boy my thoughts that, should I be judged to be terminal, or if it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, that rather than lingering, undergoing chemotherapy, or having to sit through another Avatar© movie, I’d sling my rifle and enough physical supplies that if I worked at it and was skilled, I could live.  Until, of course, I couldn’t.  It would be an adventure.  Maybe I’d keep a diary.  That would be some great blogging from beyond the grave.  I could even sketch memes in pencil.

deer

See, drawing is easy!

“I hope that you’d drop me where there are bears.”

“Why?”

“Well, one might attack me and I could fight back with a knife.  It would at least allow me to go out of this life like I came into it – screaming and covered in blood that wasn’t mine.”  Okay, I stole that joke.  At least The Boy thought it was original.

He laughed.

But the point was a clear one.  I know that I certainly couldn’t have dropped Pop Wilder into the forest – that certainly wasn’t anything he had ever asked for.  Watching him decline, however, was tough.  In my mind he will always be 45, at the height of his business acumen, personal physical power, and filled with the vitality that kept him always going.  When I think of him, that’s the man I see.

I can’t square the conception of my future as one that ends in a nursing home, surrounded by the never ending too warm room and hollow echo of footsteps on beige vinyl tile and antiseptic smell of hospital grade cleansers.  No.  The frozen morning’s icy touch on my cheeks, the sound of the wind rushing up the snow covered valley, and the harsh smoke of a campfire.  That has a better feel.  A truer feel.

An adventure to cap off an adventure, my next day of life dependent upon my wits and the cold steel of my knife and rifle.

owl

If there or no bears to fight, I’m sure I can pick on an owl to fight to the death.  Plus?  Owls are easy to draw – only two steps.

I’m not sure that walking away into the woods will happen – there are certainly plenty of things that would prevent this from being my destiny:  obligations and events beyond number, that chance to hang around and become drinking buddies with Bill Murray.

But right now?  This adventure continues.  It’s time to make the most of the next few decades . . . there’s only so much time.

Get busy.

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

bear bbgun

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes.  But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen.  People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn.  We can become better.  The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one.  It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun.  No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story.  And I was there for this one.  As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts.  We were insufferable.  My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun.  It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic.  I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun.  And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

daisy

It looked very real.  Mine was the one on the bottom.  It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times.  Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun.  This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me.  Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car.  I still have the BB gun and the boots.  I lost the knife, probably at school.  It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun.  My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it.  I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot.  I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t.  I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record.  (For kids:  Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm?  I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside.  It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

sears

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this.  Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes??  Oh, yeah.  Soviets.  Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill.  I kept going.  What was I looking for?  I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly.  I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step.  But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do?  Hunt.  Win World War II again.  Look for communists.  It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans.  Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best.  I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

reddawn

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road.  I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner.  All of those applied.  But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike.  About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear.  It was a black bear.  I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all.  Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone.  I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well.  Communists?  Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears?  Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

wilderbear

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy.  He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time.  My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me.  I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear.  Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would.  Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times.  Why?  A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside:  In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets.  Or, does it?   When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs.  I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free.  But back in the day?  We weren’t building weak Soviet children.  No!  We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual.  I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom.  Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door.  I stamped my snow-covered feet inside.  Yeah, I know.  But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!”  I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear!  It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts.  A bear!  A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head.  “Bears are hibernating.  None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face.  “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started.  I know that look because I saw it then.  Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed.  Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road.  I had my BB gun.  I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked.  I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story.  I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).”  As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship.  Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies.  We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away.  It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it.  I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless.  It must be dead!  Pop Wilder killed it!  Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet.  We walked home in silence.

So, there was that:  the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic.  Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below?  Merry Christmas to all.

Christmas

Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg

“That’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

argue

Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.

Wilder Note:  Normally, Friday posts (for the last 70 or so weeks) have been devoted to health topics.  I figure why not make everyone feel thoughtful right before the weekend, rather than guilty on a Monday for eating a whole cake and two tubs of Betty Crocker® frosting on Saturday night while drinking enough chardonnay to dull the pain from having lost that stupid election to that stupid guy from New York.  Oops, too personal?  Anyway, as the TEOWAWKI series has gone from one post to maybe weeks and weeks of posts (in outline) that I realized I’d put a topic on the back burner that I really want to write about and it really fits the “big ideas” Monday slot that’s now been invaded by the End Of The World, well, Fridays had to give.  So until The End Of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTEOWAWKI – top, that Internet!), Friday posts may or may not be related directly to health for the next few months.  This one isn’t.

Here are the links to the TEOWAKI posts (for now):

Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:

I’ve written before about how it seems that our culture is unraveling around us at an increasing rate.  You can see those posts here:

Is there any data to back up these theories?

Yes.

I originally thought that the Pew Research Center primarily did research into the sounds that kids made while using finger guns.   These are sounds like Pew, Pew, Pew, Bang-Bang, and Rat-a-Tat-Tat.  I was informed that finger guns are now illegal because they can be easily concealed and have far too large of an ammunition capacity, needing to be reloaded only when “making a shotgun loading sound” would be cool.

It turns out Pew does research on social and political trends, which is maybe more important than finger gun noises, but far less fun.  And political trends wasn’t even my second theory, which included fart and skunk smell research.  But Pew put together one report titled “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (LINK)” that’s especially relevant in describing what’s going on in American life today.  The excellent blog Epsilon Theory (LINK) had a post that referenced the Pew Report, which is how I found it, and it fit perfectly with the posts we’ve been doing about the dissolution of the American political scene, though I think we come to different conclusions on what will ultimately happen.

Imagine how happy I was to see yet more proof of my theory that everything is falling straight apart and that millions of Americans will, within my lifetime, be engaged in bloody civil war!

Let’s start with the big graph.  It tells (broadly) the story.

pewpewpew

1994

In 1994, sure we had differences, but mainly we had more in common than divided us.  Going through the numbers, Democrats and Republicans broadly agreed that illegal immigration was, well, illegal and was a thing to be stopped.  Also about this time, Bill Clinton got punched in the teeth when he lost the House of Representatives by trying to go too far left too fast.

Bill’s response was to take the position of the Republicans and the position of the Democrats and steer between them.  Republican points that were really popular, like making welfare recipients work?  Adopt it.  There was a vast overlap in the center – the overlap between Republican and Democrat is significant.  The results of this policy were also pretty significant – this tension actually restrained government spending for the first time since Andrew Jackson made Congress personally count out every expenditure in piles of nickels on the Senate floor.

I remember being at a political rally for Democrats at around this point in time (1994, not during the Jackson administration).  It was a big rally – Carrie Fisher was there with the Democratic candidate in question.  So was I – with a sign for the Republican opposition.  We didn’t go into the rally, but stood on one side of a driveway while a small group of Democrats stood on the other side.  There were 50 to 100 in either group.  We yelled at each other, each making fun of the other’s candidate, but the yelling was light hearted and humorous.  Everyone had fun.  I think I saw Carrie Fisher’s leg.

At that point in time, there was more extremism on the right than on the left, but even that wasn’t pronounced.  With the defeat of Evil Communism, well, life was good.  Heck, a guy named Francis Fukuyama even said that The End of History was at hand.  Western liberal democracy would be the final form of government in a more peaceful world where capitalism was pretty significant feature.

2004

Not too far past 9/11, Americans had something that kept them unified – war.  It appears that several people skipped reading Fukuyama’s book.   At this point, a feeling of cohesion in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was still evident, W reluctantly called legitimate.  Americans are actually politically closer than in 1994, but now more extreme leftists than extreme right wing folks.  When Bush beat Kerry?  Meh.  No protests.  No outrage.  Bush personified the center.  But the far left wing was growing.

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2017

Democrats have all scampered left.  Far left.  Republicans have moved right certainly, but not nearly as far as the Democrats have moved left.

How bad is it?

pewthree

97% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.  95% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat.  Yes, there’s still overlap, but rapidly we’re nearing the point where we don’t even recognize the same facts.  Imagine how little regard there is for the opinions of the other side.

And it’s worse with the media.  As a whole, they’ve been leftists since . . . forever.  But now?  Not only do Republicans represent less than 7% of journalists, the places where journalists work and live are in big cities where people wearing Make America Great Again hats are shot on site.  Or they would be if the leftists currently believed in individual, rather than state gun ownership.

The media are ideologically leftists, and live in cities where they might not even see a Republican in a day.  They work in a bubble (leftist journalists) and live in a bubble (leftist cities and often states) and have no conception that people on the right exist.  This explains why, on election night, the media was stunned that Trump won.  They didn’t even try to hide their bias and dismay.  Rachel Maddow alone cried enough tears to create minor flooding in the basement of the broadcast building.

There is simply very little the median Democrat has to say to the median Republican beyond “give me your stuff”, and little the median Republican has to say to the median Democrat other than “no, there aren’t 621 genders and 627 on Saturday night.”  They don’t even speak the same language and in some cases this is literally true.

Part of the shift has come because the composition of American has changed.  First and second generation immigrants are now roughly 25% of voters, a far higher proportion than at any time in history.  And 70% of immigrants are leftist, compared to 18% that tend toward the right.  This makes sense – most immigrants come to the United States from countries that are far to the left of the United States.  I remember listening to the radio where a left-wing journalist was gushing with enthusiasm that a communist (literally and self-described) woman from India had been elected to the Seattle city council.  When you talk about foreign influence on politics, well, the immigrants that are here legally have distorted politics and added to the overall polarization.  This explains why the right has fought back so strongly – they (correctly) sense that the immigration desired by the left will disenfranchise (forever) their entire political ideology.  If Hispanics voted on for the right, Republicans would have put forth the Everybody’s Really An American plan and the Democrats would have put forth a bill to mine the border with giant radioactive scorpions on either side of the 500 foot deep pit.

It also explains why so many Democrats (and Independents) have (quietly) defected to the Republican side.  The party is moving away from them.

And the extreme left turn of the Democrats explains why Alexwhatshername Occasionally-Cortez, who is running on an actual and explicit socialist platform is the future of the Democratic party, not an outlier – this is the type of person that will win primaries as the Democrats float left.  And I think the Republicans will continue to float farther right, which, in time, will make Trump look like a moderate.

cortez

What happens when/if the next leftist gains the White House?

Whiplash on every conceivable policy, but with a side order of vengeance.  And a system like that will produce, rather inevitably, an economic dislocation, a government crackdown.  A step too far.

This will be the spark.

And there will be war.  If the United States weren’t so divided, the war could be external as politicians looked to focus people against the outside to reunify the country.  But for now, we couldn’t even agree on a common enemy.  So our enemy will be . . . us.

But, hey, cake is out of the oven!  Who wants cake?  I even have some spare tubs of frosting . . .

Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You

This is Part I, click here for Part II.

“Get her?  That was your plan, Ray?  Get her?” – Ghostbusters (1984)

DSC04204

Texans have a plan for hurricanes – and they’re pretty sure they haven’t seen any little ole storm that can beat them.

This is part one of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana),  TEOTWAWKI Part IX: Home at Last, and the Battle of the Silo and TEOTWAWKI Part X: Gump, Wheat, and Chill: Now With 100% Less Netflix,and Last TEOTWAWKI – The Battle for Yona, Final Thoughts on EMP, How To Power Your Car With Smoke

I was at the hotel when it happened.  There wasn’t any noise, really.

It was night, in February.  Although a near-record blizzard was hitting the Northeast (it was called “SNOWPOCALYPSE II” in the New York Post), where I was in the Midwest was unusually warm – the night temperatures were forecast to be above 40F for the next week, not bad when the usual low for this time of year was 20F.

What woke me wasn’t a sound – it was, rather the opposite of a sound – a sudden silence.  The radio I had on in the hotel room (it helps me sleep) was off.  And I mean it was off – no power at all to the LED display.

The pale pinkish-yellow sodium vapor light from the parking lot poles was never really stopped by the blackout curtains of the hotel – it always crept around the corners and through the cracks.

It was gone, too.

The heater to the room was silent.

I looked at my wristwatch.  It had a button to illuminate the display.  I pressed it.

Nothing.

A blackout would explain losing the radio, losing the parking lot lights.  It wouldn’t explain the watch.

I picked up my cell phone, and pressed the button on the side to wake it up.

Nothing.

A blackout wouldn’t kill the batteries.

I wasn’t groggy anymore.  I guessed looking at the moon that it was about 4AM.  At this time of year, it would be about four hours before full sunrise.

I had been travelling for business and was a 252 miles from home.  I got dressed and opened up the window.  The interstate was dark – no lights.  The town that I was staying at – big enough for a Marriott™ because it was on the interstate – was dark.

It wouldn’t be long before dozens of people woke up.  And it wouldn’t be long until a few people came to the same conclusion that I had come to:  the electronics were gone – all of them.  Power wouldn’t be back on soon, if ever.

I had to get home before it started to get bad.  And that would be soon.  But how?  Well, the beginning of a plan was already starting to form in my head.

### (for now)

Honestly, I think that greatest probability collapse of America will come by degrees – more of an erosion than an earthquake.  I think of this slow collapse like Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens in The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways – gradually and then suddenly.”

“Gradually” is the world falling slowly into some sort of Blade Runner®-esque existence.  The decay is evident even now as “poop in the streets” has become a new normal in big cities, which occurs here in flyover country only during the Fourth of July parade as the horses (who are last in the parade for a reason) come through.  Then the streets are cleaned.  And then we don’t have poop in them.  I could keep going – lowered life expectancy, lowering IQ, but I’ll stop for now.

This post isn’t about gradually, this post is about “Suddenly.”

There exists, for the first time in history, the ability and civilizational structure to destroy civilization all at once.  Sure, we’ve had nuclear bombs since 1945 hanging over our heads, but we’ve upped the ante – we’ve created a civilization that is more prone to catastrophic failure than any in the past.  Gary North (you can find his free articles here LINK), a prominent warning voice about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem wrote many articles in which he pointed out the vulnerabilities associated with modern society.  He called the three prerequisites for maintaining our current civilization the Iron Triangle.  North defined the three legs of the triangle as electricity, telecommunications, and power:

Electricity

Electricity is first because it’s the most important.  Lose it?  It’s over.

Without electricity modern society is impossible.  From traffic lights to grocery stores, everything would just . . . stop.  No refrigeration.  No gasoline.  No air conditioning.  No cash registers.  No cell recharging.  No blinking inflatable Snoopy® in your yard at Christmas.

And as we saw in Japan after the earthquake, a nuclear power station needs power constantly to keep the nuclear-radiation stuff on the inside, and not on the outside.  And I’ve heard rumors that even starting a power generating station requires . . . power.  Hopefully the wind is blowing the electric windmills that day we lose power.

There are numerous countries on the planet that could lose power for weeks or months at a time with little to no change in lifestyle – these countries lose power for days at a time now, and have learned to cope.  Most developed countries would see anarchy within three days if the system went down.  In Chicago?  Even power isn’t enough to stop anarchy now.

But one requirement is that this power outage is not just a local phenomenon – if Switzerland lost power, well, who would notice?  But if people decided that they wanted the Swiss chocolates and the Swiss army knives and the Swiss hot cocoa, well, they’d pitch in and help Switzerland.  There exists a reserve capacity outside of Switzerland that’s big enough and well supplied enough that they could help the Swiss.

Likewise, when a hurricane hits Texas, well, I guess that’s a bad example because the Texans don’t need any of our damn help.

Loss of power to the entire continental United States?  Who could help us?  Most resources that could help would be an ocean away, assuming that they’re unaffected.  The happy projection if electricity was lost in the United States?  Half the population dead in a year.  The less-than-rosy projection (from a United States Congressional study) has 90% of the US population gone in a year.  And not “moved to Cleveland” gone.

What could possibly take the power down all over the United States?  Really, there’s just one candidate: an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

What is an EMP?  It’s like the Sun was rubbing its feet on the carpet, and then put its finger near you and gave you such a shock.  Except instead of a shock, it shoots charged particles at the Earth making pretty auroras.  And charges up the electrical infrastructure so much that the tiny electrical circuits in your smart watch, or car, or computer, or electrical power plant short out and become as useful as Play-Doh® after you left the lid off for three days.

Has this happened before?  Certainly.  The solar storm of 1859 was significant enough that it charged up the atmosphere enough that communication via telegraph wasn’t possible for a few hours – some telegraph operators reported being shocked by their telegraph lines.

Not a big deal, right?  No, not in 1859.  But a much smaller solar flare in 1989 took out all of the power in Quebec (part of America’s hat, Canada).  And if a solar flare similar in size to the 1859 flare happened today, it’s estimated that it would cost at least $2 trillion dollars (more than Johnny Depp spends on wine in an average month) to fix the damage in the United States alone.  Oh, and if you’re on satellite television, well, those would be gone due to the solar flare, too.

Another way to get a similar amount of damage is to explode a nuclear bomb above the United States.  This bomb wouldn’t cause any explosive damage – it would unleash x-rays, but rather than just bathing in the healthful x-ray light, the x-rays would smash into atoms in the atmosphere and cause a cascade of electrical energy.

You and I might not even notice this cascading energy, but, again, the tiny circuits in your local power plant (depending upon the size of the pulse) might be fried.

Oops.

No power.

Telecommunications

Every transaction you do depends upon some form of communication – often via satellite, but also through the internet.  In a small example of how this communication is important, I witnessed a series of gasoline pumps going offline.  Across the nation.  These gas pumps were primarily located at small Mom and Pop convenience stores.  The stores were open, but if you showed up at the pump?  The pump just didn’t work.  The reason was fairly simple – the home base in the transaction, the company that provided the interface between the fuel pump and the payment systems, had gone bankrupt.  Shut the doors down.  The gas was there.  The credit card company was there.  The electricity was there.  But the last leg of the transaction – the communication link to bring it all together, pay the taxes, and order more gasoline – had ceased to exist.

And it’s not just convenience store fuel transactions.

The inventory management of stores like Wal-Mart® is highly efficient, as in it is highly mechanized.  If Wal-Mart® lost their ability to computer-manage their inventory?  They’d have no way to figure out how to move products to their warehouse, let alone deliver them to a Wal-Mart™.

In a real-life example, Maersk® shipping, which accounts for about 20% of the volume of containers shipped worldwide, had their computer system infiltrated.  Essentially their entire shipping information system became encrypted on their servers.  This resulted in them losing over $300,000,000 in a ten day period, as chaos occurred at computer-managed dock after computer-managed dock.  They were saved because a backup of the system wasn’t updated since the Internet was down in Africa when they normally synced the systems.  Folks from Europe flew down to Africa, took the computer back to Europe, and used its information as the seed to reboot 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in a 10 day period.

Costly?  Sure.  But this was likely just collateral fallout of stuff going on between Ukraine and Russia.  This points out that the systems that we have created for inventory management and logistics required to run civilization have the potential to fail.  Something actually targeted at telecommunications for these systems . . . could have been devastating.

What would it cost to lose the Internet for a day?

What if it went down for a year?

Banking

When I was a kid, it was still possible to go to a store while the register was broken and get a clerk to do the math on what was owed and take your check or cash.  Now?  I’m not sure that most retail employees are up to the math (who even does math anymore?) let alone trying to figure out how to do a transaction without the Internet.  And who, besides me, even carries cash anymore?

Banking is a system that exists only so long as we believe in it.  Banks are allowed (by law) to lend out all of the money in the bank except for 11% or so.  Thus they have a “fractional” reserve of cash, and they’re a fractional reserve bank.

If you have $100 that you put in the bank, chances are very good that they loaned out all but $11 of your money.  The other $89 is out earning them interest.  If you want your money, you can go back and get it, since the bank has the $11 from everybody else.  If everybody wants their money back at the same time?  Problem!  In actuality people will get paid, because each bank lends a bit of money to the Federal Reserve bank that they can draw on in emergencies such as a bank run.  That’s really the big idea behind the Fed, to stop a systematic failure of all of the banks like happened in the 1930’s during the Great Depression.

But in 2008-09, it nearly happened again.  Banking systems were shutting down.  The Federal Reserve and the Treasury pumped the system so full of cash to prevent a complete shutdown of the financial system as we know it.  Did it work?  Sure.  But Interest rates are at near record lows a decade after this intervention.

Are there other risks to the banking system?  Certainly.  And if it doesn’t work?  The bright side (such that it is) is a dictator could and would seize control and force the system to work for a while without banking, but the loss would be our freedom and the civilization that we now know, along with millions dead from the sudden inefficiencies in the system.

Why?

Why have we put ourselves at risk to the Iron Triangle?  Because the efficiency that it brings has made society freer and wealthier that it could be without the Iron Triangle.  The Iron Triangle squeezes efficiency out of the system, but an efficient system is a fragile one; one prone to failure.  If you think of all of the systems that you have double of (like lungs) it’s not a bad design, it’s that having a spare lung or kidney increases your chances of living longer.  Or, failing that, you could trade your kidney to your bank to pay off your loan . . .

So, next Monday I’ll pick up where we were back at the Hotel.

I really do have a plan.

The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar

“Who the hell is Julius Caesar?  You know I don’t follow the N.B.A.” – Anchorman 2

Pompey

This is Pompey, the opponent of Julius Caesar.  Yeah, there’s no second place in history for “nearly became emperor.”  Thankfully, there was first place for “widest head in history” which he won, hands down.  I mean, seriously, how could this guy buy glasses?

Last week’s post was the first prediction about the coming future of the United States.  You can read it here (The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths) and another good post about the life of empires is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence).  Breakup was the first, and in my mind, still the most likely scenario.  But it isn’t the only one – there is at least one other possibility worth considering.

As I referenced in the post, there was a moment where Julius Caesar stood upon the banks of the river Rubicon and thought about his future.  As he looked at the shallow river he considered the orders from Rome:  at the banks of the Rubicon he was to turn over command of all of his legions.  Julius had four legions under his command in his conquest of Gaul.  But as he stood on the banks of the Rubicon, only the 13th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) was at his back.

Rubiconbanks

Caesar at the banks of the Rubicon.  Some say he thought weighty thoughts about how he could best govern Rome.  I wonder if he was thinking about what was on TV, or if Brutus accepted his Facebook friend request?

To cross without them would, he feared, most certainly end with him being tried for political crimes (mainly the crime of being more popular than the sole remaining counsel, Pompey).  To cross without the army, then, might mean that his long career for the Roman Republic would end in dishonor.  In Gaul alone, his legions had faced over three million men, killed a million of them, and enslaved a million more – not a record that generally leads to disgrace, but a record that still irritates the French 2000 years later.

Legend recounts that as Caesar decided to cross the river and conquer Rome, as his horse’s hooves went into the shallow Rubicon he said, alea iacta esto, or, in a less-metric language, “Let the die be cast.”  And it was a gamble – he was outnumbered.

Caesar’s refusal to be a political pawn set him up to do what no other man on Earth could do – he conquered the most powerful nation on Earth.  He transformed the Roman Republic after a civil war, and created the Roman Empire with him as the leader.  The Roman Republic would never again exist.

At the time of Caesar’s ascension to becoming “dictator for life,” Rome had become a Republic ruled by a small number of families, including the Bushes and Clintons those of Pompey and Cicero.  Historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes in his book Caesar, Life of a Colossus (p. 378), that, “The Republic had become dominated by a faction who ignored the normal rule of law and particularly refused to acknowledge the traditional powers and rights of the tribunate.”

The empire that Caesar helped create removed the instability of the late Republic, and replaced it with a more stable structure that lasted another five hundred years.

vercingetorix

Here is a painting of Vercingetorix, a chieftain who united the Gauls, throwing down his arms at Caesar’s feet.  This was painted in the 1890’s in France, and there are numerous historical inaccuracies in the painting.  Among them:  it’s unlikely that Vercingetorix would have had such a stupid mustache, and Caesar always had his iPhone® at surrenders listening to “We Are the Champions” by Queen on a loop in his earbuds.

The transition from Republic to Empire was completed within 20 years’ time.  Caesar put all of the rules in motion for his last name to become a title – the Roman emperors became Caesars.  The title followed to the German king – Kaiser and the Russian Emperor – Czar.  Think about that – your last name becoming synonymous with being an emperor for 2,000 years . . . “Wilder John the First” has an awesome ring to it, right?

But this is the other possibility for the United States:  whereas breakup into multiple states is likely the longer we go, there is still the possibility of an American Caesar, especially if the crisis is within the next 10 years or so while some shred of commonality can be forced upon us.  Sure, we won’t call him (or, much much much much much much less likely, her) “Caesar.”  We’ll probably call them “President” and pretend that the “for duration of the (endless) emergency” part doesn’t exist.

klingonemperor

If we have a female American Caesar, she will probably look like the picture above.  Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite.  Oh, wait, she does bite.  And that’s not autographed to me – I found this one on the Internet.

And notice that I said forced.  The way we get to an American Caesar is through crisis – real or invented.  A currency one would do just fine, and I’ve pointed out that a currency crisis is inevitable here (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse) and here (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck), it would certainly bring the “need” for a strong, popular leader to take the role of power to save us all.  We almost ended up with one in 1932, but thankfully FDR gave out as World War II was nearing completion – if it had been a younger, more physically fit man?  Yeah, it scared the heck out of America.  That’s why we had a two term limit in place for Presidents before Roosevelt’s corpse was cool.

History shows that people give up freedom to someone who makes promises.  Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and well, here’s the map from Freedom House.  Most of the world’s population lives under what would be considered a dictator.  Very little freedom.

2017freedom

But never in the United States.  Why not?

  • Historically, the United States has been driven by a core desire for individual freedoms and liberty. Those freedoms and liberties were specifically written into the Constitution, despite several politicians of the day noting that no government would EVER try to take these freedoms away.  The Bill of Rights has been a firewall against government power.
  • Separation of powers is another key. The President can’t make laws, only Congress.  The President can just refuse to sign them.  And the Supreme Court has the ability to call into question the Constitutionality of all of those laws (Jefferson argued the President had those powers as well).  These divided powers were intended to prevent the Federal government from acting unjustly.
  • As a further (and much stronger) barricade against tyranny, the states had significant power: they appointed Senators.  Without the Senate, no new law could be made.  The states further had delegated to them all powers not specifically granted to the Federal government.

But those are weakening.

  • The Supreme Court has made decisions that create new categories of rights of people to have stuff (the old Bill of Rights prevented government from doing things, not granting people rights to stuff). And recent rulings generally allow the government to do pretty much what it wants in most cases.  We’ve gone from a limited Federal government to a Federal government that can choose the size of your toilet tank and define what features you MUST buy if you buy a new car.
  • Separation of powers is eroded. Congress writes the laws, but bureaucrats from government agencies run by the President write the regulations that implement those laws.  Page after page of regulation.  81,000 in 2015.  Stack one atop the other?  A three story building’s worth of paper.  With that many regulations, everyone is guilty.  Everyone has done something wrong.  To go back to a Roman, Tacitus:  “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
  • States in the United States are little more than counties since Senators become popularly elected. Senators are just Representatives (Congressmen) with longer terms, and they don’t represent the states at all.

So, the stage is set – a collapse of the walls that kept a dictator from gaining power.  Now all that’s needed is a set stage.  As I mentioned above, a significant crisis will set that stage.  Maybe it’s actual civil war, as noted in the previous post, which is driven almost entirely by economic difficulties.  People don’t fight in civil wars if they the major problem they have is whether to go to the mountains or on a cruise for vacation.  Civil wars happen when people have nothing left to lose.

And when people have nothing left to lose, Caesar will (possibly) emerge.  You won’t look at him like he’s the bad guy.  Political lines will disappear.  I was watching the Netflix® remake of Lost in Space.  Not bad, but there was one scene that was so unintentionally silly I laughed out loud.

Space eels were drinking the space fuel that the space ship needed to move away from being crushed.  Plus, the space eels looked like they could kill people, too.  The husband went down to the ship’s 3D printer to print out a gun to save the family from the space eels.

Mom had the codes to the printer, and it wouldn’t print out a restricted item (gun) unless she said it was okay.  Then she harangued her retired Marine husband that guns weren’t necessary to fight the space eels.

Okay, you can have staunch anti-gun principles, but the second a space eel is going to eat your kids?  You print a dozen guns.

Your priorities change immensely after three days without food.  You’d be just happy to have a strong leader who will protect you.  A leader who will feed you.  And you won’t worry so much if you can’t criticize him, especially if you have food.

trumplandpng

There was some comment that the maps from the previous post didn’t show the great amount of land that Trump won during the last election.  Here’s a different version, represented by area.  Future battle map for a new Caesar?  Asking for a friend.

You’ll look at him like he’s saving you, which he just might be doing.  He’ll have songs written about him.  And if he does a good enough job?  He’ll be remembered for 1,000 years.  If he does a bad enough job, he’ll be remembered that long, too.

When (if) he rises to power?  You’ll applaud.