Valhalla – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths

“Well, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era. l would be surprised if the affiliates were concerned about the lack of an old wooden ship, but nice try.” – Anchorman

politicalspectrum

So, I guess that my “Secretly Wants To Live in a Post-Apocalyptic Society” secret is out of the bag? I guess I need more dehydrated food. And scotch.

(Part II of this series is posted at: The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar)

There are some posts where I know exactly what I want to say, and how I want to say it. Often, those are fairly well scripted, either with a handwritten first draft or a set of researched bullet points. I’ll expand those into the full post. Those are nice. The structure has been created. The post flows out.

Some topics are topics that are well planned out (I actually plan the blog topics about three months out) and fit. Some topics just hit me with a blast of inspiration and nearly write themselves.

And some are difficult. Very difficult – they occupy headspace I know that I’m going to write about them, but the issue is so difficult that I want to make sure it comes out how I want it to come out, that it doesn’t inadvertently come out in some sort of ham-handed way. This is one of those. I’m sort of pleased with the results – it came out the way I wanted it to come out, just like the ending to Breaking Bad, or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s last optometry appointment – he still doesn’t need glasses, yay!

Don’t know a great way to put this, but we’re (in the United States, and in Europe, though my read there is much murkier) heading towards civil war. In Europe, civil war means dissolution of the EU and (likely) expulsion of large numbers of immigrants. But I’m not European, so I won’t go too far speculating about them.

I’m not sure if it will be a decade off or longer, but I put the arrival of this war as soon as 2024, and as late as 2032. Not really any longer than that. What would stop it is a prolonged, total war that would challenge the very existence of the United States. External threats and an external enemy are the best way to create unity (and second term for a president named “Bush”). And that’s not good, because a prolonged war always leads to extremes, and we have extreme weapons – in that way, a civil war might be the best-case scenario. But I digress – back to civil war.

Why? Again, this won’t be exactly the same civil war as THE Civil War – there are some facets that will rhyme, but others that won’t. The major theme is division. And what better way to show that than with . . . maps.

Here’s a map from Colin Woodward and Tufts University, and Brian Stauffer, depicting the 11 cultures that they contend make up the United States:

11nations

So, there’s this. Accurate? I would personally draw a line between those who like Star Wars® instead of Star Trek™. Those people are awful.

And it’s not just culture, the Woodward/Tufts map is pretty accurate at predicting where we are today politically. Here is a map of the Clinton/Trump 2016 vote count:

vote-by-nation-2016

The redder you are, the more Trump. The overlay of the Woodard/Tufts map is clear. These cultures are significant, and real, and explain NASCAR®, country music, and the inexplicable popularity of PEZ®.

And I think I’ve graphically made my case for there being a division. But how significant is it? Well, research shows that it’s pretty one-sided. Liberals (at least young ones) are significantly more close-minded than conservatives:

civilwarstats

Yes, you read that right. 45% of liberals would be uncomfortable with a roommate with opposing political views. 12% of conservatives would be uncomfortable. I guess this means that liberals don’t like diversity?

In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar was ordered back to Rome. Quite specifically, he was ordered to leave his army, the 13^th Legion (Legio XIII, Gemina, or “Twins”) beyond the border of the Rubicon river, which was considered the northern border of Rome. He didn’t, and then spawned a civil war that (ultimately) led to the end of the Roman Republic and Caesar being proclaimed Emperor. To this day we celebrate this event by ordering salads in Caesar’s name.

geminaxiii

The last time the 13^th Legion was active, I think they got in line in front of me at Arby’s® in Boulder, Colorado after a Van Halen© concert. Man, when 4,000 people are in front of you in line, you’d expect they’d run out of roast beef. They did. Thankfully they had lots of panda and koala bear left. They also ran out of Horsey Sauce L. They claimed they ran out of horses.

So we have divisions that are significant, enduring (these divisions aren’t new), and deep. Yet for decades we haven’t had a problem. Why are we at the Rubicon?

Well, we were ethnically much more uniform than today. The United States in 1965 (at the time of a major change to immigration policy) was 85% white. Now? 62%. That’s a pretty significant change, and one that impacts politics. Again, cultural divisions lead to war. And the easiest division is what you look like. I know that people like to fight and will pick any old reason to fight. Religion in Northern Ireland (Protestants and Catholics), football in California (Raiders™ vs. 49er’s©), and really important stuff (Star Wars© vs. Star Trek™). People will fight each other to the death because we don’t like each other’s hats. Historically, multi-cultural societies . . . fail. Spectacularly. (Again, this is not an indictment of any individual group, just a reading of history.)

But civil war in the United States is . . . very singular. The Civil War was built upon philosophical differences (with very human consequences). Issues involved in the Civil War include slavery, states’ rights, and Northern industrialism versus Southern agrarianism. But one of the underlying causes might just be that map of the 11 cultures shown above. The Northern states were built on the Puritan ethic. They make up the Boston/New York corridor and the swath heading west from that. The Southern states were built upon scoundrels – the Irish malcontents and Scottish reivers that immigrated later. They’re the ones that make up Greater Appalachia.

So what will cause a civil war in the United States?

The first thing is the philosophic divisions listed above. The desire for the freedom of individual determination is still strong in the Deep South and in Greater Appalachia and the Far West. That hasn’t changed. The Puritans in Yankeedom and the Left Coast still very much want to make their values the only values that matter. Note the graph above that shows relative discomfort with diverse exhibited by liberals. Ouch!

These groups have hated each other since the 1600’s. And it will never go away, especially as long as the New England Patriots® keep winning Super Bowls™. The two sides have never spoken the same language. The time that both North and South united? After the Civil War, the North (magnanimously) allowed the South to keep their heroes (Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis) and they were transformed into American heroes rather than insurrectionist traitors. Not a bad trade.

There were places that held out – the first celebration of July 4^th after the Civil War in Vicksburg was on July 4^th, 1945. Admittedly, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4^th after a horrific siege and devastating defeat for the Confederacy. It took 80 years and winning not one, but two world wars for Vicksburg to celebrate national unity on a regular basis on July 4. These divisions remain to this day.

But what else will cause this war?

The Fourth Turning – it’s time. Here’s a previous post (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) that explains this timing in more detail. The last generation to have experience the horror associated with total war, with the mobilization of the entire economy of the United States to defeat a foe is . . . dead. The youngest boys that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day are 95 today. They control nothing.

Our leadership, our population has no connection to those that saw the horrors of a continent ripped apart by war. They led our nation (and all of the nations of the West) and their actions were held in check by the horrors that they had seen. Now their experiences no longer temper the actions of the leaders (and desires of the people) to avoid apocalyptic levels of violence.

Let’s continue with economics – I’ve discussed before that the current economic practices have a time limit (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck). One cause of civil war (not necessary, but certainly an exacerbating cause) is economic collapse. When people have more to lose than to gain, they won’t fight. As Janis Joplin said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” And when people are ruined? They fight. See the French Revolution (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be).

Economics will be a trigger, but not the underlying cause of division listed above.

So, we have a civil war. What’s the end look like?

Breakup.

I don’t think that the things that have held us together as a nation will continue to hold us together. What values do we have in common anymore? It seems like . . . none. Let me elaborate. I could do a post on each of these (and likely won’t – other people cover this on a regular basis, so unless I have a Wilder take, I won’t):

Guns
Abortion
r versus K (r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people))
Economic Freedom
Role of Absolute Morality
Definition of what is an American
Globalism versus Nationalism
Cultural Relativism
Judicial Activism
Does Evil Exist?

We don’t speak the same language at all, anymore. Even though I have friends that don’t (at all) agree with me politically, I fear that they aren’t the norm. The end state isn’t 11 countries. It’s probably (at least) four. I can see a Heartland State, an East Coast, a West Coast, and a Northern Mexico. Los Angeles will be Mexico. Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle will be East Coast. The Boston/Manhattan/DC corridor will be East Coast. Northern Mexico will be as shown as El Norte.

But on the bright side? Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t need glasses!!! How awesome is that?

Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings

“I thought I alone considered your boyfriend a narcissistic moron, but the whole galaxy does.” – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Tribe begins its annual war, an ancient rite known as “dodge ball.”

What if we’ve been looking at mental health . . . all wrong? This may be the most interesting thing you read all month, maybe all year. But that’s just what a narcissist would say . . .

I was thinking the other day (a dangerous thing to do, I know, thinking is something to be left to those that work at universities and in congress) and had an idea. Maybe (some) mental illness has a purpose. I’ll explain, but first I have to explain Dunbar’s Number, which, of course, is named after Kim Kardashian. I’m kidding. Dunbar’s Number is named after Caitlyn Jenner.

Robin Dunbar, British Psychologist, looked over the size of the human neocortex (not Neo-Cortez, who would take over the Neo-Aztec) and after playing with a particularly plump and pleasant neocortex, decided that brains just might have something to do with how humans relate to each other. The neocortex is actually the newest (in a biological sense) portion of the brain, and allows humans to do complex things, like talking, snorkeling, and making microwave ramen.

Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? Because people are tough to deal with. And it takes time to deal with people, rather than strangle them.

One potential reason that the “Dunbar” number for people could be higher than predicted is language. Whereas other primates have to use non-verbal cues like body-slamming them, people, after the advent of language, can talk to each other so they can explain why they are body-slamming you. For that reason, especially when dealing with modern (the last 12,000 years or so) humans, I favor a Dunbar number in the 250 range.

There is some validity to the number. Anecdotally, I’ve been involved with a company that had two divisions in the same area. One had 120 or so employees. The other? It had far greater than 500 employees. I observed that the smaller division operated as a single unit. Every employee knew every other employee – and they knew about their families, their hobbies, and their history. Did that consume time? Sure. You couldn’t just go over to talk with one of them – the entire social greeting took at least 10 minutes. You had to catch up. And that’s the way that close relationships work – you can’t just say “hi” and walk on, you have to catch up with each other. That explains why when I come home, The Mrs. wants to talk and stuff. We’re engaging in a practice that’s at least thousands of years old.

The larger division had broken up into various factions based on job functions. These factions looked like little tribes – each had a leader, an agenda, and they fought against each other regularly, often over nothing. And each of these fights ended up hurting the company. Gore-Tex® found the same thing – they built buildings for 150 people. When the building filled up? They built a new one. They tried to keep the trust, the positive aspects of the tribes predicted by Dunbar from spilling over into intertribal warfare that happens at larger group sizes.

But ancient tribes didn’t have kid’s soccer, and FaceBorg®, and the myriad of connections that occur outside of work. So, the Gore-Tex™ number is smaller than the “actual” tribe size. Again, 250 seems about right.

So what does this have to do with mental illness?

Well, for a tribe to survive over time, while most members would be able to act as general “tribal” members most of the time (i.e., hunting, gathering) there would also be the need for specialist skills and attributes. Situations the tribe might encounter (and overall group cohesiveness) require different talents.

Let’s take schizophrenia. It’s prevalent in about 0.4% of the population. It often manifests with being able to hear things that aren’t there, see things that don’t exist, and believe in a reality that others can’t see.

Sounds like a Shaman to me. Every good tribe needs one, right? Well, 0.4% is 1 person out of 250. I got goosebumps when I did that calculation – the number seemed like a nice fit for the theory right off the bat.

Okay, what about another common mental condition? Anxiety. Anxiety is found in about 10.6% of the population. So, in our tribe of about 250 we’d have about 26 planners. 26 people worrying on a daily basis about how the whole tribe would die. These people are a pain in the butt, but this ability to dream up a constant set of disasters that the tribe could anticipate and avoid has huge survival value. In today’s world, not so much. Back 8,000 years ago? This was an amazingly important skill.

About 6 of our 250 tribe would be obsessive-compulsive. Mainly older folks. I can see the meticulousness compulsion of the older, wiser tribal member being infectious – and leading to greater spread of learning throughout the tribe. There are certain things you have to do right, you have to double check (think food poisoning) or else the tribe will die. Having these super process-driven people might have been quite a help.

About 6 would of the tribe would be paranoid. Again, like planning, it serves a purpose – but in this case the paranoia is about what other groups are doing and thinking. Very helpful to have someone looking for the hints that the tribe will be attacked from outside. Or, from inside. Are you threatening me?

Narcissism? About 1%. Only so much room for leaders. This would have about 2 of them in the tribe.

Psychopath/Sociopath? About 1.2%. So, 3 bold, direct, mean leaders of raiding parties/war parties. It takes a village to kill another village.

Pictured: Psychopath. I like the cut of his jib!

Outside of oral history, our hypothetical tribe had only one way to pass on information about required roles and how to do them – genetics. Genetics matter – many of these conditions are at least partially inherited, making it more likely that the leader was . . . the son of the leader. The shaman was . . . the son or daughter of the last shaman.

This genetic tendency to replace the leader with the leader is (likely) the source of the concept of hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility. And, genetically, those people were likely the best leaders around at that time, and they kept breeding . . . so, there was (at least for a while) some good reason to think that the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs might be pretty good choices for kings. They were bred to be kings. Now: perhaps a bit too much cousin-lovin’ (LINK)?

So, yeah, all of the roles required for a self-sufficient band are built within our genetic profiles – but some of them aren’t valued so much in our current society – we don’t need a half-dozen war-band leaders in every high school. And, as far as I know, this is an idea I developed (more or less) independently. Which is also something a narcissist would say . . . hmmm.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps. And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

DNA Testing, Cousin Lovin’, and Khannnnn!

“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys

I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?

So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.

The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.

How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.

The results are:

Europe West 40%
Great Britain 24%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
Scandinavia 17%

Low Confidence Regions

Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
Iberian Peninsula < 1%

None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.

What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.

The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:

Population
South Asian	–
Caucasus	4.89
Southwest Asian	1.56
North Amerindian + Arctic	0.57
Siberian	–
Mediterranean	9.72
East Asian	–
West African	–
Volga-Ural	7.66
South Baltic	13.09
Western European	26.41
North Sea	36.10

Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:

For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!

This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.

But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?

No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).

Huh?

Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.

If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!

Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.

Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).

But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.

And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).

Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.

Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.

“Sit down, John.”

Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.

Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.

I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.

Now I have to go see this.

But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.

Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:

“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?

Your Passion is Stupid

“No, not unpopular, they just have a more selective appeal.” – This is Spinal Tap

Okay, there’s a time when your passion of throwing big rocks in the river should be followed. That’s whenever you’re at the river.

Pop Wilder was a banker. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, John Wilder is the banker’s son, summers in Maine, winters in Switzerland. No. Summers in the forest cutting firewood in Colorado, winters in Colorado on snowmobiles fifty miles into the back country. Okay, winters were better than Switzerland, at least since the CIA stole the secret of the Swiss “hot chocolate” technology and weaponized it in Swiss Miss® cocoa packets.

On occasion, especially after a few bourbon and waters, Pop Wilder would get a bit melancholy. “John Wilder, you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, but don’t be a banker.” Although by any measure, Pop was successful. And he was passionate about his work. He left every morning before the Sun came up to open the bank. He got home two hours after the bank had closed. He unlocked the place and locked it back up. He never took more than 10 vacation days in any year, and I never saw the man take one day off due to being sick. (An aside: I’m stunned that’s the first time I came to that realization – I haven’t taken a sick day off since 2000. Wonder where that stubbornness comes from?)

Pop Wilder, you see, wasn’t the “snort cocaine off a stripper’s butt” type banker, but rather the “small town banker that drives a car to work that’s eight years old.” I think he might have not abused his power enough . . . I’m not sure. What’s the use of having power, if you don’t abuse it?

What always bothered Pop Wilder the most was when he had to explain to a person who wanted to borrow money that he wouldn’t lend it to them – he didn’t think the loan was based on sound collateral, or the borrower’s income wasn’t enough to cover their living expenses plus their debt. He was proud at the end of his career that he’d never had to foreclose on a single home. To him, the act of lending money was a moral event – you didn’t burden a borrower with more debt than they could pay.

That didn’t make the borrowers who he turned down happy. They were (understandably) upset that Pop had crushed their dreams, but in the process, he’d done them the biggest favor of their lives. In a weird way, his “no” had saved their financial future from the siren song (read The Odyssey or watch Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou (LINK) if you missed that reference) of their dreams and passions . . .

One of my favorite things to see is the garden variety successful person who’s being interviewed. Let’s pretend it’s me, since I’m rich and semi-famous:

Oprah: “What’s your secret, John Wilder? How did you get to the pinnacle of success and yet maintain those superb washboard abs?” (Oprah bites her lip. Perhaps I should have not worn such a tight shirt.)

John Wilder: “I followed my passion, Oprah. My passion is all consuming.”

Fade to Clip of Me Synchronized Snowboarding Off the Top of Mount Everest Accompanied by an Actual Yeti.

You’ve heard that, too: successful people telling you to follow your passion. I probably heard that two dozen times between high school and college. Follow your passion. Invariably it was by short salesmen who were in suits while I was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. And I was (really) thinking about going skiing or checking out the girl of the week. My passion did not and does not involve being an old man in a suit.

Hopefully you haven’t done followed your passion, because your passion is stupid, unless you are the ghost of Steve Jobs. Steve, you can follow your passion. Only you. Namaste.

I’m sorry to tell everyone else a simple fact: your passion is stupid. And my passion? My passion is stupid, too. Maybe even really stupid.

The Mrs. and I have been married roughly since the invention of dirt. We’ve thought about opening our own businesses several times, and even produced a business plan or two. All of them have been based on things we like, things we are passionate about. We’d discuss, fine tune, get the spreadsheets ready, and then decide if we were passionate about it. As you’ve hopefully read in the fine pages of this blog before – the best deals are the ones you don’t do. We’ve passed on most of the deals.

But one in particular we got all of our ducks in a huddle, got a small business loan application together, and went off to the local bank to ask for a small business loan with our spreadsheets and our plan and our proposals and estimates and projections. I didn’t go to the meeting – I was at work. But The Mrs. walked in, and the banker didn’t blink an eye before he got to his response. “No. Not now. Not ever. Please pretend we’ve never met.”

The Mrs. was upset when she got home. I shrugged, and we decided to carry on without opening that business. About a month or two later we read in the local newspaper about how someone had opened a business that was nearly exactly what we’d planned to open up. They did a detailed story on the place, nearly a full page, with color pictures. Amazing amounts of free advertising.

That business closed up before six months had passed. The banker who said “No” had saved us $55,000 of loaned money.

Oh. I get what Pop was doing. Rather than helping people live their passion, he was saving them from their passions.

The people who say that you should follow your passion are generally not passionate about the thing that they’ve done, whether it be roasting coffee beans or creating BookFace®. No. They’re passionate about success. They’re passionate about their business because it brought them success. It’s like pretending you like Tootsie Rolls Lollipops® for the outer candy shell. You don’t. You like the center.

And that’s the secret of success.

I am passionate about playing the guitar. I love to do it. Unfortunately, my guitar is as good as Johnny Depp’s personal hygiene or money management skills. So, of course, I devoted my entire career to playing bad guitar? NO. I suck at guitar. I will never be good at it. But . . . I do math and science-y things really well. I have the intuition on that stuff that Eddie Van Halen has for meth guitar. Maybe not that good, but I found that the combination of the math stuff and the science stuff and the planning stuff and the intuitive grasp of physical systems and processes (with a dash of normal human empathy) pops me into the top 0.1% (hint, that’s the only place the money is). That combination allows me to win where other people would lose (in certain situations). And in one instance the application of those skills allowed an IPO to go through that netted a company a billion or so dollars. Yay me!

And winning in situations like that makes me passionate about combining those skills. So, am I following my passion? Well, I’m following my success, which is a lot like following passion. Except following my passion would make me bankrupt because my guitar is only slightly better than my singing.

So it comes down to . . . what are you good at? I mean, really good at? Not what you’re passionate about. Let’s face it: you can be passionate about drinking bourbon, WWE, MMA or anthropology, but none of those things are helpful unless you’re part of the 0.1% AND you can figure out how to win/make money with that skill combination.

Can you make money with it? Most things you’re good at don’t pay any (really any) money at all. You’re in the top 0.001% of the world at trimming nosehair? No. Next. Your skill should translate into actual income. What does the best person in the world at what you’re good at make? Can you live on 1/10 of that?

Okay. You’re good at it. It’s a rare skill. You can make money at it. Good money. Now your challenge? Get better at it.

Most people take a decade or more of really hard work, over 10,000 hours, to become world class at a skill. Generally, the longer they execute the skill and the more they work at it, the better they become, peaking in their forties or fifties. These aren’t physical skills – those peak about 24, and take a big nosedive once you pass 30 or so, and if your skill is there, strike quickly – age will pull you away faster than you anticipate. What I’m talking about are mental skills that are honed by experience.

Passion? No banker will lend on that. They’ll lend on experience, skill, and excellence. Be passionate about those and the world will allow you to snowmobile in Colorado in winter . . .

People will call you lucky. Just smile and ignore the sweat.

Key Economic Indicator Higher Than Colorado Pot Smokers

(from http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/ on 10/31/17)

The Shiller P/E ratio is shown above.

What is it?

Shiller (who won an actual Nobel® Prize, not a fake one like I made in my 3D printer) analyzes the value of stock markets. One key metric he came up with was his Shiller P/E ratio – it reviews the price of the stock divided by its earnings, but rather than for a single stock Shiller looked at the largest 500 stocks on the US markets – the Standard and Poors (S&P) 500. It’s sort of a proxy for how big business is doing in America (and, to a lesser extent, internationally, since these stocks are very big and typically have significant foreign revenue). Read the above paragraph forty times if you’re having trouble sleeping.

Now you know what it is. Normally I’d be all snarky here and mention how it’s exactly the sort of straight line that Johnny Depp could walk on a Saturday night, but I’ll just leave this short post here.

You don’t need a Nobel™ to read this graph . . .

Warren Buffett’s Investing Secrets, F-Troop, and Amazing Bigfoot Investments

“Well if there were no Gods then anyone can do anything and nothing will matter. You could do as you like and nothing would be real. Nothing would have meaning, or value. So even if the Gods don’t exist, it still necessary to have them.” – Vikings

Even Bigfoot appreciates the climate in Margaritaville.

It was reported (quite a while ago) that Jimmy Buffett of “Margaritaville” fame and Warren Buffett of “Having All the Money” fame were related. However in 2007 they spit into a tube (well, separate tubes, one tube would be gross) and had their DNA tested. The results showed that if they were related, it was more than 10,000 years in the past, as Warren Buffett was related to Scandinavians and either Iberians or Estonians. Jimmy Buffett was related to the Dutch, sunscreen, tequila and salt.

I’ve always regretted that they weren’t related, since my ideal restaurant would be the Buffett Buffet™. All you can eat cheeseburgers (from Jimmy) and Coca-Cola® from Warren (who owns a large chunk of the company Coca-Cola™). The television screens would alternate between surfing, bartending shows, and a stock ticker.

But this post is all about Warren, and only slightly about Cheeseburgers in Paradise©.

Warren Buffett is smart. You don’t start with (relatively) small amounts of money and end up with billions by luck, unless you’re Mark Cuban, who is the only person on planet Earth who sold a company with 330 employees for enough stock to make him a billionaire. Thankfully he has a billion dollars, so he can hire people smarter than him. (Yes, he has more money than me, but, really – aside from being so lucky? He’d be a wonderful bartender.)

One data point in my favor in stating that Warren is smart would be that he graduated from the University of Nebraska at the age of 19, and then went off to Columbia (the college, not the country). Why Columbia (the college, not the country)? He knew that Benjamin Graham taught there. Ben Graham is known as the “Father of Value Investing,” and Buffett wanted to learn from him, and took his class. After finishing at Columbia, he wanted to go to work for Graham, but Graham said no. Buffett went back to Nebraska to be a stockbroker.

One day, Graham called and said that Buffett could come to work for him – he was being called up to the big leagues. The next day Buffett killed all of his customers (no witnesses that way) and went to New York to work for Graham. Okay, Buffet didn’t kill anyone. That we know of – this isn’t Game of Thrones.

So, when Buffett got the job with Graham, he learned a lot. Eventually Graham had enough money and wanted to spend the rest of his life on, well, whatever he wanted to spend it on (PEZ®, pantyhose and elephant rides?), so he shut the company down. Buffett was, by most standards, pretty well off, and decided he wanted to move back to Omaha and open his own value investing shop because he missed all of the corn and the corn smells. Buffett’s various ventures were pretty small – in 1990, his company (Berkshire Hathaway) was worth $7175. Per share. Recently that same share would cost over $260,000, and Berkshire Hathaway’s total value is over $440 billion dollars.

Warren Buffett has done okay.

He’s also known for being pretty frugal. I know you’re happy I added frugal to that last sentence, because otherwise you’d just think that I thought that Warren Buffet was pretty.

I personally think that this picture is pretty, even if Game of Thrones® has made dragons the good guys.

Warren has lived in the same house since the 1950’s, (it is a nice house, but not that nice), drives a car for years at a time (rumor is he bought a hail damaged one because it was cheaper), and recycles Pringles© canisters into air conditioning ductwork for his house and saves the trays for TV dinners to use to microwave Oscar Meyer® hot dogs.

Me? If I had as much money as he does, I’d probably buy a new car every time mine ran out of gas (I kid, I drive my cars forever (LINK)).

I was watching a video while exercising (I work out for only for you and I study for only for you, Internet!) and heard Warren state “ . . . if I could invest as a small investor today I think I could . . . I know I could make a 50% return.”

That was a pretty powerful statement, since I certainly count as a small investor by Mr. Buffett’s standards.

Why can’t he do that? He’s got billions of dollars he has to invest, so he has to do big deals. There are a lot of good deals you could do with a few million dollars, but very few good deals in the billion plus region. Turning the company’s $440 billion into $660 billion in a year is hard. He could turn $10 million in to $15 million in a heartbeat. Small deals are easier since there are so many of them.

Warren’s advice to investors is simple: buy a low overhead (low fees) index fund (an index fund is a fund that is created to match an index, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500). If you can’t do what he does and value invest, this is the best way to get a good return. And that’s good advice (in my opinion) for any small investor that doesn’t have the time to do the required research.

Let’s repeat that: Warren Buffett says you should buy an index fund.

But me? I know Warren didn’t get all of those Pringles® cans by investing in an index fund. What did Warren Buffett do to get really rich?

What research did Graham and Buffett (reminder: not Jimmy Buffett, but Warren Buffett) do prior to investing?

Good Leadership, Good Business – Graham and Buffett were looking for leaders that had experience, capability, and great integrity. Warren can call CEOs and talk to them and give them the sniff test. You can’t, so this is harder for you. The business also has to be a good one. (More on this later.)
Low Price to Earnings Ratio – The price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio) is how much you have to spend to get a dollar of the company’s earnings.

Before the 1980’s, the rule was a company that had a price to earnings ratio of over 20 was ALWAYS overpriced. But the rule back then was to take the P/E and subtract the current prime interest rate. Today the prime interest rate is ~1%, so using that old rule, a P/E of 19 would be acceptable. Right now it’s difficult to make a return on capital because so much money is flooding everywhere . . .

Why was the rule like that? It was assumed that you could either get returns from saving your money or from investing it. Currently there is no benefit from saving it with historically low rates, so the P/E has continually wandered higher.

Alone, however, P/E tells you nothing.

Low Price to Book Value – The book value of a company is how much all of its “stuff” is worth. In theory, if a company has a price to book value of less than one, you could buy the company (price), sell all of its stuff (book value), and come out ahead. In theory. If you have ever driven past a boarded up factory (and you have) you know that the book value just might be overstated.

Again, like P/E, Price to Book tells you nothing.

One video I watched while climbing on an infinite staircase to nowhere showed a screening method for value stocks that was alleged to have come from Warren Buffett:

Pick the Price to Earnings ratio,
multiply it by the price to book value, and
if the number was less than or equal to about 30,
the stock was a candidate.

Simple, right?

It is (and it’s overly simple). Because what stocks have low P/Es and low Price to Book?

Great, Undervalued Companies in Great Markets and
Failing Businesses in Crappy Markets.

How do you tell the difference? Sometimes you don’t. Buffett will go on at length, if you let him, about all of the failures he’s had in picking companies. But he had a consistent strategy that he followed for years that obviously resulted outstanding returns. And he didn’t pick only small companies – Coca-Cola® was one of the companies he picked that produced amazing gains for Berkshire Hathaway.

So, how does a company like Berkshire Hathaway measure up on the value score?

It has a P/E of 20, and a Price to Book of 1.5. This would result in a score of about 30, so it would be within Warren’s window. According to Warren, Warren is a value! Also, Berkshire Hathaway has a credit rating better than (really) most countries.

What about . . . Tesla?

Tesla has never made any money, so its P/E is infinite. Its price to book is 12, so, 12 times infinity is . . . still infinity. Probably not a Buffett candidate?

And Honda?

Honda, maker of the best-selling electric car has a P/E or 8.6. It has a price to book of 0.77. That means it scores an amazing 6 or so on Warren’s scale. Wow!

So, let’s also look at a company that no one understands, Amazon:

It has a P/E of 120. A price to book of 20. That’s an astonishing 2400. Again, probably not a “buy” rating from Buffett.

But is Honda a good buy right now? Or not?

The only way to tell is to go back to Buffett’s first point. But you and I can’t call up the CEO of Honda and expect to get real answers. Warren probably could.

But we have help fortunately: Joseph Piotroski, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago came out with a list of criteria that are objective and that anyone can find in the annual report of any publically traded company and named it the F-Score, which I really hope was based on the 1960’s show “F-Troop.” I’d go through the list, but it’s much easier to pop up a link. So here’s the (LINK) to Piotroski’s criteria.

I think that Agarn was a horrible value investor . . . did you see the episode where he traded the blankets for a handful of small marbles that were supposed to bring Custer back from the dead?

Source- mycomicshop.com

Profitability

Return on Assets (1 point if it is positive in the current year, 0 otherwise);
Operating Cash Flow (1 point if it is positive in the current year, 0 otherwise);
Change in Return of Assets (ROA) (1 point if ROA is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
Accruals (1 point if Operating Cash Flow/Total Assets is higher than ROA in the current year, 0 otherwise);

Leverage, Liquidity and Source of Funds

Change in Leverage (long-term) ratio (1 point if the ratio is lower this year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
Change in Current ratio (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
Change in the number of shares (1 point if no new shares were issued during the last year);

Operating Efficiency

Change in Gross Margin (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);
Change in Asset Turnover ratio (1 point if it is higher in the current year compared to the previous one, 0 otherwise);

The lower the F-Score, the crappier the company.

And it, when combined with the screen above the Piotroski F-Score produced a return 7.5% higher than any other Value Investing test. So, does Honda suck or not?

I don’t know. But I’m going to check with the help of Dr. Piotroski.

But the biggest failure in Value Investing is to allow your emotions to rule. Markets are driven by emotion: Elon Musk is awesome, so I’ll buy Tesla!!!!!

Tesla might be awesome, but there are way too many Tesla fans for the price to be rational. Part of finding value in the market is understanding that you want to buy at the lowest prices. When are the lowest prices? “When blood is running in the streets.” When people have given up. When people are running scared. At that point, amazing companies can be picked up at incredible values.

In April of 2000 I was thinking of buying Microsoft®. I had generally been a pessimist, but, at a certain point, I was finally ready to give up being a pessimist. I was talking to a broker and then . . . the Dotcom Bubble burst. If I had bought Microsoft© back then? It would have taken thirteen years to be at breakeven. And that’s not including inflation, which ate away at the buying power of the dollar.

But can I still get a Cheeseburger in Paradise? Sure! Jimmy Buffett will even have a Margarita with you if you have the proper parrot apparel. But don’t expect Warren Buffett to pay for it. But he will take your discount coupons so he can use them to get some suits he bought in 1983 altered.

John Wilder has no positions in any stock mentioned, and won’t take any for the next week or so, until he can calculate the F-Score of Honda. Especially Tesla – he’s not buying that though he loves Elon. John Wilder is NOT a financial advisor. And he’s had wine tonight. Don’t trust him.

Eclipse, Game of Thrones, Chili’s Restaurant

“Or we could stare at an eclipse while screaming at it!” – Upright Citizens Brigade

This picture of the Sun’s corona is courtesy of The Boy, the number 8, and the letter W.

Like millions of other Americans within a short drive, The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and headed for destiny. (For the record, millions of Americans didn’t pile into my car. They got into their own cars.)

Actually, it was a Marriott© instead of destiny, but I hear those things can be related. This was no ordinary Marriott®, rather it was one strategically placed within 90 minutes or so of the Path of the Great American Eclipse, which would snatch from us, momentarily, the Suns Life Giving Yet Deadly rays.

We had packed our Solar Viewing Glasses, which we had gotten for free a week earlier at our local library. “We” is really The Boy, who I had to threaten with the immediate torture of being pulled from the Matrix through restriction of his use of any device invented since 1907 should he not comply. “Later” seemed to be built into his answer. Take away his Tweeter® or his BookFace©? Yeah, that would be like amputating a limb.

A week out at the library? Plenty of eclipse glasses were freely available. Three days out? None. Again, people do NOT plan. It seems like that when it’s bright and sunny out, even when they know that winter’s coming, they don’t put up extra food or even minor emergency preparations. After you’re observed people long enough, you learn that most of them . . . don’t learn. (But not you, dear reader, who likely have an IQ high enough to give a normal person a nosebleed due to altitude sickness.)

The Mrs. was skeptical when I tried to get hotel reservations a scant week before, but Marriott gleefully set up the reservation. Originally, she was going to accompany us, but the day before we were to leave for the hotel, we took a nap, and she slept through the time when she was supposed to take the dogs to the kennel for boarding. The Mrs. sighed . . . happily. I’m not sure she was at all excited about an eight hour trip into the deepest uninhabited part of Upper-Lower Midwestia just to not see the Sun.

The Boy, Pugsley and I planned (prior to leaving) on when and how we were going to leave on our great adventure.

My plan was that I wanted to get there so I had about 90 minutes to eat dinner prior to Game of Thrones (spoiler – Ned gets decapitated at the end of season one). Pugsley, however, had configured some sort of alternate reality that involved us getting there at 3pm. The Boy bought into this alternate reality and stubbornly wore his backpack starting two hours before I started packing.

Keep in mind, The Boy is nearly 17.

I think both The Boy and Pugsley were excited. The Boy was even more excited when I tossed him the keys. He drove us from Stately Wilder Manor to dinner, and then to our hotel. My daughter, Alia S. Featherbottom (nee Wilder) was going to meet us, but forgot we were coming as she fell into a pit of Dungeons and Dragons®.

Now, as a general note, we don’t let Pugsley (12) watch Game of Thrones. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone who has watched the show. Tonight? Single hotel room? He sat and watched Galaxy Quest with headphones on. Although The Mrs. and I normally sit and watch the show together, in this case she and I texted back and forth during the episodes. Here is an example exchange:

The Mrs.: “There’s more walking in this episode than in The Lord of the Rings.”

Me: “At least they’re not singing.”

After that I poured my heart and soul into (yet another) post about how stupid NASA is (LINK), but even I am beginning to feel a bit guilty – picking on NASA is a lot like hitting a kitten. The Boy helped by doing my thermodynamics calculations.

I had carefully selected our site. It was about fifteen miles from the nearest town, and it was on a nice corner where the line of totality exactly passed over. It was perfect. The only problem?

Clouds. They were everywhere. I pulled out my cellphone and had the path of the totality map up. On another cellphone I had the cloud cover map. I reviewed first one phone and then the other, cross referencing one map to the other, sort of like Columbus if he was having trouble getting 3G on the Santa Maria like I was out in the cornfields. At least he had WIFI when the Pinta hit Hispaniola, right?

Plotting one map against the other while The Boy drove, I made a decision. The GPS said to turn right. I told The Boy, “Turn left.”

With that, we moved off plan. We had gone rogue, chasing bits of blue sky.

We navigated farther west, and soon, bluer patches of clear sky were NOT obscuring the Sun. We were getting closer . . . finally we stopped in a small town park.

We pulled into position about 40 minutes before the eclipse.

The park was filled with nice, friendly people. Which makes sense. These are the type of people who are intellectually curious, and were patient enough to drive hours to a small town for a two minute eclipse. These weren’t troublemakers.

The eclipse itself was sublime. The Sun was a fat crescent, a slim crescent, and then it was gone. There were some light clouds, but they weren’t a major eclipse of the eclipse. We had chosen our site very well.

My biggest personal surprise about the eclipse was that it didn’t go completely dark – I guess I had expected that. Venus was very visible in the sky, but the clouds surrounding us (35 miles away) were still lit by the Sun, and that lighting left me feeling like I was under the world’s largest sunshade, which I guess that I was.

My picture of the Sun’s Corona. I prefer Negra Modelo myself.

It had been an oppressively hot and humid day. The temperature dropped a bit during the eclipse, and that brought out thick clouds as the water vapor in the air condensed out. We got in The Wildermobile and The Boy started driving us towards home. The worst traffic jam we saw took place at a T intersection about 30 miles south of totality, and it was about a mile of politely and patiently driven cars that took us about ten extra minutes to get through. The traffic apocalypse foretold by Nostradamus did not emerge.

The above fiberglass squirrels were all over this town, and every squirrel I saw was painted differently, but all of them had eclipse glasses on. Who says Midwesterners don’t know how to party?

The Boy drove us back down to a Chili’s® restaurant 90 miles south of totality. It looked like it was closed, with zero cars in the parking lot. I jumped out to check the door, it was open, and they were open. We ordered food, and the waitress said that there had only been one table that had been there for lunch. Apparently, your willingness to eat at Chili’s™ is some sort of predictor for you to go to see an eclipse.

The Boy drove home, and I slept most of the way.

Most of the way.

On the way back I mused on the events of the day – we had seen a solar eclipse – our first total solar eclipse, and I was reminded of something I heard Tony Robbins say: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy experience.”

I guess my takeaway is: “Being nice doesn’t get you Eclipse Viewing Glasses, but angry threats do.”

Life on Earth, Supervolcanos, NASA, and Tom Petty

“I must have started drinking again, because the woman who tried to activate a supervolcano with a giant fork is standing here, and you’re all acting like it’s a potluck.” – Warehouse 13

A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.

“The world was a web.”

This wasn’t the quote from a Tom Petty song. These were words that would echo through my head for two decades.

I started to write a novel back a long time ago. It started with those words.

I still have it somewhere, buried in a backlog of data on one of my computers, right next to a resume that I first entered into a computer on . . . WordPerfect© (yes, that was a word processor before Corel® ate it). I’m sure they still sell dozens of copies of it a year.

And the novel itself? Oh my. I’m sure that if it ever saw the light of day someone would name an award in its honor for the worst novel of the year.

But . . . “The world was a web.”

There are words that haunt you through your life, and this sentence haunts mine, just like wondering how it felt while the Roman Empire was ending (LINK). I have been, since as long as I can remember, really fascinated by the unravelling of society. Once I went to the Wikipedia entry for “Apocalyptic Novels” and just nodded. I’d read nearly all of them. (I just revisited the page, and it’s all filled with editorial stuff, so, much less useful. I won’t link it.)

But the late author James P. Hogan (I read most of his stuff) wrote a novel called “Voyage to Yesteryear.” It’s a good one, though out of print, but to me, it had a fairly stunning philosophical analogy.

We as humans think a lot (and live with) more or less reversible processes. I put ice in the freezer, it freezes. And then it melts. Though once upon a time, I don’t think that there was anything at all in physics that would have predicted that the ice would have floated on the water (most frozen liquids sink – if you freeze gasoline, the frozen stuff drops to the bottom), but it turns out it’s pretty important, especially if you’re a fish. You can stay in the nice liquid water while the ice freezes above you, which, I imagine is important to a fish.

But the second discussion from the novel is that some changes are irreversible – if you burn your laptop in your charcoal grill, there is simply no thawing it out afterwards to get your keyboard to not look like a bunch of charred Doritos®, or get back all of those downloaded pictures of Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones® or all of your Tom Petty MP3s. Those are gone, dude.

The fire (presumably from a dragon?) goes beyond the phase change represented by freezing and thawing. The physical structure has been changed to the point that it’s not remotely recognizable. And you can’t go back. There’s no way to find all the carbon atoms that baked off your display and combined with oxygen and put them back in the screen, let alone the same place in the screen that previously held them.

It’s gone, dude. And even the Roman Stoics (LINK) knew this prior to Rudolf Clausius coining the term “entropy,” which led indirectly to the U.S. Civil War through a series of humorous translation errors that made Abraham Lincoln think that Clausius was making fun of his big hat.

But let’s go back four score years (that’s 80 years, for those who are used to the metric system) from that hatastrophe. What happened then? Besides Ben Franklin being in the prime of chasing every young lady who could spell “yes” there seemed to be this revolutionary event. Pardon. Revolutionary event. Like the American Revolution.

If a president being elected every four years is a phase change from ice to water and back again, the American Revolution was burning King George’s laptop and then going after the glowing hard drive with a sledgehammer. In a real and literal fashion there was no way to go back. Instead of a political phase change, you had political chemical reaction – there was simply no way to go back from what the Founding Fathers had done. They changed the way the entire world viewed government with the result that today almost every nation in the world where you can order a Big Mac® has emulated to the greatest extent possible the precepts of the American Revolution. McDonalds® and Thomas Jefferson© changed it all.

And you just can’t go back. You can morph into something different, but you can’t go back. There are some ideas that are so radical, so amazingly simple that once they pop out – they hold the attention of almost everyone who hears them. The American Revolution was one such thing – you could never turn back after that.

Unless you hit reset. I was leafing through the Internet as The Boy piloted our car up the road for a short road trip – I alternated between reading and a light nap. The light naps were ended with (small) bursts of adrenaline when our cars trajectory was different than my half-snoozing mind expected. It’s like Dad radar. Even asleep I was looking for that change we could never recover from.

On article popped up during the ride about the Yellowstone Volcano, and how NASA was developing a plan to stop it.

Reread the sentence above. I’ll wait.

NASA has become convinced that a massive volcano is of greater threat to humanity than asteroids. I mean, both would ruin your day, but Yellowstone seems to pop off a continent cleansing burst every 600,000 years or so (last one 630,000 years ago) and some folks with a LOT of time on their hands at NASA are convinced that they should be the ones that handle it.

What NASA thinks might be in the volcano.

They’ve even advanced plans on how to stop it. And, I’ll admit that saving the lives of upwards of two billion people might even be considered a laudable goal in some circles. But not me.

It’s not the saving all of those people that I object to. I’m probably neutral on that, unless one of them is me. Then I become a raving supporter.

I don’t give NASA any slack. If it doesn’t involve activities that directly get humanity to Mars, I’m thinking that they should just close up shop and give the money to Elon Musk (LINK), who actually seems to be interested in space exploration.

But even worse, it appears that NASA is letting people write stuff that have NO understanding of math: the NASA plan involves pumping water (which is not exactly in huge supply in the Rocky Mountains) into the magma chamber and to extract the heat. Which has how much to do with NASA’s mission? Zero. Maybe less.

Here’s the latest mission I could find:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

So, if this involves trying to cool hot coffee so you can drink it faster by adding an ice cube or two, I’m on board. Takes a few minutes, doesn’t distract NASA from their actual day job.

But in this case the coffee is 11,500 cubic miles of coffee. At 1300˚F to 2400˚F. And NASA wants to cool that. With water.

Okay, I’m pretty sure that drug testing isn’t required to work at NASA. But the amount of heat we’re talking about is simply staggering. At a depth of five miles (that’s 8km to the “people who use money that looks like Christmas paper, and also happen to use metric”) to the top of it, keep in mind that this magma pocket sends pockets of superheated boiling water five miles through rock. The amount of energy is stunning – almost as much energy as a D.C. NASA bureaucrat with a liberal arts degree uses to avoid doing work on a typical Tuesday.

First, the good news!

I won’t bore you with all the mathy stuff, since The Boy and I figured it out. It’s not hard, it’s just thermodynamics done in hotel room on three sheets of hotel room note paper.

Let’s say you had to cool the Yellowstone magma chamber. Latest number that I had on how big it was? 11,500 cubic miles.

Cubic miles. Drive from Seattle to Los Angeles. That’s 1137 miles. Do it 10 times. Next to a mile high wall of magma. Or just once. Next to a ten mile high wall of magma. That’s a mile thick.

Hmmm.

But, let’s pretend we can cool that 52,800 foot high wall with water. Where do we get it?

Well, the Colorado River is a big one. Let’s pump all of that to Yellowstone to cool it down. I’m not going to bore you with even more thermodynamics, but you have to heat the water, and then add even more heat so it boils. (I actually saw one billion dollar business venture implode because they didn’t know you had to add the extra heat to make it boil).

At the current flowrate of the Colorado River, it would take 435,843 years to cool the lava.

I know that NASA seems to not math very well anymore, but, given past rates, Yellowstone would have exploded at least one more time, if not two. And the people in Los Angeles would have to go nearly a half of a million years between bottled-water drinks.

And that’s the good news – that only half a million years of concerted effort beyond anything the world has ever seen will maybe stop one human extinction.

But some scientists worry that the addition of the cooling water might turn the magma chamber brittle – increasing the likelihood that Yellowstone would explode in a big catastrophe. And that’s the good news!

Second – the bad news.

But that’s really not the point. There are a whole host of things that are much more likely (given the last 100 years or so) than a 600,000 year periodicity (like Yellowstone has) volcano to mess with our world.

But most folks look at this risk incorrectly – there’s a probability of occurrence, but also a severity related to the risk. Low probability events occur everyday, but they have low severity. I might lose yet another hair on my head, never to return. But the impact? Not very big.

An asteroid the size of Dallas heading towards, well, anywhere at 50 miles per second? Bad day. For everyone. Yet heart disease is more likely to kill me than the kinetic impact of an asteroid.

As catastrophes go, that’s pretty bad. But research (dating back 15 years or so) on genetics of humanity indicate that it’s likely that 70,000 years ago after the supervolcano Toba lit off, only 2,000 humans remained. Not on Toba. Anywhere.

We were that close to the lights going out on us forever.

These big, nonlinear events are very low probability, but they have a huge impact, and may impact the ability of the human race to appreciate Tom Petty.

Think aliens like Tom Petty? They should. But who can account for taste?

Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars

“Actually, they theoretically can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and process that into providing fuel for man’s space flights. Ostensibly, turning Mars into a giant gas station. So it’s a . . . yeah. We live in an amazing time.” – Breaking Bad

The featured picture above the title is of the Saturn V. It’s longer than a Harry Potter novel. This picture shows the engines from the main stage of the Saturn V. About 275,000 horsepower for all five engines, you can totally tell by the lens flare! But it got over two miles per gallon of kerosene used (TRUE)!

This is the third and final part of Elon Musk Week® (sort of like Shark Week©, but with 100% less Discovery™ channel). An annual feature? Maybe!

Part 1 is here (LINK) where we take apart Tesla®, and Part 2 is here (LINK) where we understand Elon’s Matrix® plan.

I first read about Elon in (probably) 1977 or 1978. Oh, sure, you’re saying, that would have made him six or seven years old, and at least a continent and two hemispheres away from me. My only response is, “so what?”

When I was a kid, I lived fifteen miles from the town I went to school in. My house was the farthest away on the school bus line, so I was the first to get on in the morning (7:15, every morning) and the last to get off (4:30, so I missed F-Troop). I could stare out the big picture window and see the bus a mile away – Ma Wilder taught me it would be rude to keep the bus driver waiting – and out I would go to be there waiting when the big yellow bus pulled into my driveway.

For about two hours a day as the bus stopped to pick up and then let off children, I could either stare out at the mountain scenery, or I could drop with Johnny Rico and The Roughnecks into Klendathu. Or I could visit Trantor, first with Hari Seldon, and then later with The Mule. Or ride Sandworms on Arrakis with Paul Atreides. Or be shocked at the mysteries when we Rendezvoused with Rama. Or finish all the science fiction anthologies at the middle school library by the middle of my seventh grade year.

And reading wasn’t confined to just bus time. There were only three channels of television available (no one ever counted PBS, unless Monty Python was on) an half the time nothing interesting was on. So, if I had built all the model kits around (the usual condition – they didn’t last long) and it was too cold to go hiking or fishing, I always had a book ready to read. And Ma Wilder said I had to go to bed, but she never said I had to go to sleep . . . my parents bought me a reading lamp that clipped on my headboard for my tenth birthday.

But I remember reading the Hugo®-winning “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” by Robert A. Heinlein fairly clearly – it wasn’t on a bus, but on the couch by a crackling fire on a cold (-20˚F) winter’s day. And that’s when I met Elon Musk.

(source, Wikimedia)

Delos David Harriman (better known as D.D. Harriman) is the billionaire who decides to go to the Moon. Why?

He envisions a new economy – an opening of the Moon is the first step to opening the Solar System to humanity. Rather than living in a world which with a fixed horizon, D.D. realizes that getting off this rock is the only possible positive future of humanity. But getting there is possible, and only takes will.

To quote Harriman:

“In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics.”

Contrast with Musk:

“Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame.”

And how was Harriman going to do it?

“I’ll hire the proper brain boys, give them everything they want, see to it they have all the money they can use.”

Contrast this with Musk:

“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

And I could go on and on about the similarities but the one thing I know is this:

Musk read the same stuff I did when he grew up.

Musk knows D.D. Harriman. Just like I did, Musk admired D.D. Harriman. However, Musk has become D.D. Harriman.

And for that, my hat is off to him. D.D. Harriman is much more important than Tony Stark®.

And Harriman was willing to do absolutely anything to open space to humanity, convinced it was too important to leave to governments and bureaucrats. Harriman manipulated stock, forged fake space-diamonds, and extorted advertising dollars from soda companies.

Musk feels the same way. Musk formed SpaceX™. Musk got involved in Tesla®. One is his passion, one (even though he believes in the mission) is there to fund his passion. Make no mistake: Musk has created more applied rocket engineering faster than any person in history except maybe Von Braun (though Bezos is giving him a run for his money and has super-cool biceps for an old man).

Why not NASA? Isn’t it their job?

During the 1960’s, NASA had a mission. It was going to get three guys to the Moon, by the end of the decade. Lots of engineers worked lots of long hours and made it happen. In July of 1969, NASA dropped the mic after “One Small Step” and walked off the stage. Mission done!

Well, almost fifty years on from that date, and six of the twelve men who walked on the Moon are now dead. During the middle? NASA developed one (anemic) space launch system – The Space Shuttle, whose sole purpose appeared to be to construct the International Space Station. Why construct it? So the Shuttle had a place to go, silly.

And now we have no space launch systems available to us except through the Soviets, er, Russians, and . . . Elon’s SpaceX™, which currently plans to have a manned launch of its Dragon/Falcon taking place in early 2018. The first manned Orion flight? Maybe 2023. Maybe.

Why is NASA so sick?

The original group they hired were engineers. Their job? Get into space, get onto the moon. Then they fired most of them, but kept enough to send out a fairly constant stream of unmanned probes as well as lame manned space missions. But during the 1970’s they also hired a lot of administrators. And people who had no connection in any respect to a spacecraft, or science, or aeronautics.

Except for brief bursts of public interest when something worked really well (Viking and Voyager) or when something worked really poorly (Challenger and Columbia), NASA has reached an irrelevance in national policy. NASA appears to only be important when it comes to funding large amounts of money to projects that take place in certain Congressional Districts in certain strategically important states. In Houston they love NASA, or at least NASA dollars. Efficiency? Progress? Why would you need those things? Heck, we can have astronauts but not have spaceships!

These are the depths that NASA has fallen to showcase its technical bankruptcy: it has a division called the “Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.” This division produced 5,000 braille books about the eclipse for the blind.

These are the official shot glasses of the Manned Spaceflight Center. At least it’s one way to blast off?

I am not opposed to a company doing this – I’m not even opposed to a government agency producing books in braille, especially those that aren’t available on audio. But I am opposed to NASA doing it. Why?

NASA’s mission is:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

Nothing at all in there about getting blind people books about an eclipse. Nothing close, so this is a symptom of a system that has gone beyond dysfunctional to trivial. A dysfunctional system (or in this case, organization) just can’t get anything done. A trivial organization works on everything. It invents steps where none need be, make-work (like the books), bureaucracy (credentials for everyone!), and hurdles (did you file the right form?) until Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy is achieved:

From Jerry Pournelle himself:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

I think that in NASA they actively look for jobs that they can do that are:

NASA could spend time and effort designing a new hypervelocity spaceplane, but that’s hard! And someone could get hurt, and that would be bad publicity. And we know that we as a society will only allow people to be put upon the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT (Saturn V) if it’s totally safe! Otherwise, it’s an outrage!

So, faced between making a new launch system that might help get people into space OR putting together a braille book? Let’s go with the book. It’s A. Easy and B. Safe.

These are the official flip flops of the Manned Spaceflight Center. They look Safe, unless you blow out your flip flop and step on a pop top and cut your heel and have to cruise back home. It’s okay, because there’s booze in the blender and you have the Official Manned Spaceflight Center shot glasses.

The only way to avoid the Iron Law and the A. Easy and B. Safe people is to have a personality that keeps focus on the goal.

And since NASA administrators don’t go in and fire everyone in NASA not involved in the mission, you can be certain that they’re fine with . . . whatever the heck it is that NASA is doing.

How is SpaceX® Different?

Elon Musk is a laser of focus on getting spacecraft into the air. People at SpaceX® want to work long hours, and if you look at jobs on their website, it notes that long hours, working evenings and weekends are probably going to be a thing for you. And, want to get fired? Talk about part of your “mission” at SpaceX® being producing coloring books on planetary nebulae.

Sounds like old Harriman himself, “. . . sweet talk them into long hours – then stand back and watch them produce.”

Some Libertarians HATE Musk because of the government subsidies that have driven money to Tesla® and even SpaceX©. I can understand that, especially if their goal is less government. Heck, I’d like less government. But even though Musk has to go through roundabout ways to get only a portion of NASA’s funding, he’s running circles around them on talent recruitment, technology development, and actual results. We have a choice if want to really get into space. Elon appears to be the only winning answer (unless Bezos is holding back on a few aces).

Musk could fly people in space tomorrow, if they’d let him. NASA is six years out. Six years out.

What does Musk plan to do in the next three? Send a capsule (unmanned) to Mars.

I’d be surprised if Orion ever actually flies people. NASA seems incapable of spaceflight, and, really incapable of anything more complicated than Twitter. But if Orion ever flies, I imagine that in orbit the Orion astronauts will get to see Elon’s butt pressed firmly against the window of his Mars Transfer Ship (Red Dragon 11) as he gives them a full moon (pardon) as a parting gift as he heads to Mars.

It’s a long trip to Mars. I imagine that Elon might take a book or two along with him for the trip. Probably not “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” But maybe Dune, or Starship Troopers.

What would D.D. Harriman read?

I’d like to think he’d bring my blog . . .

Hey, everyone (including you, Elon) you can subscribe, and it gets sent out directly when I hit the publish button.