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.

Life At the Margin, Jeff Bezos, and Milking Peeps

“Jeff Bezos wet his pants!”

“I did not – it was apple juice from before.” – The Simpsons

robojeff

I hear she ordered more toilet paper through the Jeffbot™ while they were out at Sonic®.

The margin is where life gets interesting.

  • Eating: It’s not the first bite of chocolate cake that gets you fat, it’s the last.
  • Booze: It’s not the first sip of alcohol that gets you drunk.
  • Driving: It’s not the first 65mph that gets you the speeding ticket.
  • Elections: It’s not the first 49% of votes that get you elected.
  • Safety: It’s not the base load that a bridge can carry that keeps you safe.

Life is interesting and gets more interesting at the margin.  When you think of margin, you may think of a soft, buttery spread that will kill you with trans fats.  That’s margarine.  No, the margin is the edge of the piece of paper, the difference between inside the envelope and the outside.  The margin is evident all around us if we take the time to look.

But, you say, “John Wilder, this is Wealthy Wednesday, what does the margin have to do with money?  And, I’m not stupid.  I know the difference between butter and margarine.  One is made from the milk of Peeps®, and the other comes from spiders.  But I do forget which is which.”

peeps

Be careful to milk the Peeps™ and not the Chihuahua.

This is Wealthy Wednesday, and margins fit right in.  When you think about finances, the impact of the margin is especially noticeable.

Businesses depend upon the margin.  Let’s take a construction company – when building, say, a new love nest for Jeff Bezos, the first dollars the company receives must cover costs.  There is the cost for the concrete, for the plywood, for the anti-ex-wife minefield.  Each and every cost associated with building the Alexa® enabled Love Shack Fire 2000™ must be paid before there’s any profit.  The only dollars that contribute to profit are the marginal dollars, the last dollars to hit the books.  That’s why a building contractor will fight like a velociraptor in a bag of laser pointers for that next dollar.  If a contractor got 9% profit for the Bezos Wealth Reduction Chamber© and asks for 1% more, to Bezos it’s just 1%, and he just lost $65,000,000,000 anyway, so that 1% sounds pretty small.  But to the contractor, it’s a 10% increase in profit, which is huge.  Getting 5% more for Jeff’s Carnal Cottage of Whole Foods Knowledge©?  That’s 50% more profit.

When corporate profits are up by 1% of revenue, that can create (in the example above) an increase of profits by 10%.  Profits are set at the margin.  Our economy is powered by the margin.

pushback

I guess that means the orbital laser system is out, too?

Taxes are set at the margin, too.  The top tax rate is 37%, which means that every dollar (once you’ve made $500,000) you only get to keep 63%.  That 37% in taxes?  It’s burned ritually in Washington D.C. every Summer Solstice.  They used to sacrifice a virgin congressman as well, but they swear they don’t have any of those anymore, not since Jeff Bezos visited.  But you pay more in taxes as you earn more money.

It equally applies to an individual’s income.  The most important dollar I make is the marginal one – that last dollar is the one that can be saved, spent on margarine butter or anything I want.  The first dollars are spoken for, they have to go to pay the mortgage, to feed two always starving children, to buy electricity.  But the last dollars are freedom itself.  The margin provides growth, to the extent that it exists.  If there’s a negative margin?  You’re eating your savings, or, worse, living on credit.

The margin also applies to what you do in life.  You can put in minimal effort, and be average or a little bit below average.  Or, you can work harder to push the margin, and be great at what you do.  As I get older, I’ve become convinced that talent can be a curse – it makes life easy.  Easy is not your friend. Easy provides good results with minimal effort.  That’s akin to jogging through life while everybody else has to practice sprinting.  Eventually dedication overcomes talent and they sprint past you to live on the margin, where all the nice things are.

margin

But if you have extra effort and talent?  You can live on the margin.  You can create the margin.

So, go create the margin.  It’s easier than squeezing Peeps© to make margarine.

American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America

“Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by International Communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

2r300d

There are times when you write something that you think is important, and you want to get it right.  This is one of those times.  I hope you find this post worthwhile.

A few weeks ago, a very good friend sent me an article.  The article intrigued me, and I began to research the background of the article.  What I found was stunning.  The article itself is this (LINK), from Time® magazine, you don’t have to click – I’ll summarize it below.  Time™, I’ll note, very appropriately has a red border but they haven’t added the hammer and sickle yet.  Yet.

I found this article disturbing, but it really matched with the research that I’d done up to this point.   There is a cultural shift of the Left, and the Left is moving ever farther, ever faster left.  I wrote about that here (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg), which is probably what made my friend send the link.

I read Tayari Jones’ Time® magazine piece.  I found it to be an example of the outcome of the most brutal form of programming and child exploitation that I’ve seen recently, though I will admit that I try to shy away from Disney® movies.  In short, her parents were Black Nationalists (Her description, not mine.  “Black Nationalists” refers to a group that wants to either repatriate to Africa or to carve out a separate nation for blacks in the United States.) that convinced a five-year-old that Gulf Oil© was responsible for killing black children in Africa so much so that the child, Tayari, would not ride in a car fueled by Gulf Oil® to the zoo.  The piece ends with simplicity.  All to the Left is joyous and moral.  All to the Right is evil death.

Should we celebrate our tolerance and civility as we stanch the wounds of the world and the climate with a poultice of national unity?

Jones wants to further divide us, or destroy those who don’t and won’t conform to her (undefined) viewpoints.  Also, the last time the word “poultice” was used out loud was by Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies.  But her title says it all, “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground.”

That led me to wonder more about the author – what was going on in her head that led to this article?  What are her ultimate goals?  Featured prominently in the article was the Soweto Uprising, a 1976 confrontation between black students and the police, which appears in hindsight to be an unplanned 4th Generation Warfare (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means) offensive.  I hit Wikipedia to learn more.  Then, there it was, the missing link.

“No Middle Road,” an essay by Joe Slovo is listed as influential in the communist African National Congress (ANC) at that time.    The original title of the article by Jones, as enshrined in the URL, is telling:  “Moral Middle Myth.”  Obviously they are connected.  Again, from Jones:

I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse.

Okay.  Now you have my attention.  We have a person actively preaching division and implied violence whose suppressed essay title echoes an influential essay from 1976.  My next question was simple:  Who the heck was Joe Slovo?

Joe Slovo was communist, born Yossel Mashel Slovo in Soviet Lithuania who moved to South Africa with his family when he was eight.  Slovo was a deeply loyal communist who admired Stalin.  He was exiled from South Africa for 27 years and spent that time launching and orchestrating terrorist strikes in South Africa while abroad.  His operations included bombings of civilians.  Slovo did have some spare time to oversee the murder and execution of people thought to be traitors to the cause, often through putting a tire around their neck, filling it with gasoline, and setting it on fire.  The nickname for this practice was “necklacing.”  Now Slovo didn’t actually do these things himself, he merely planned them and was in charge of the organization that made them happen.  See?  His hands are clean.

commie

Slovo was such a leftist, the only thing he on the right of is this picture.

Slovo had to be an influence on Tayari Jones.  Understanding the influences can be important, besides, Tayari Jones didn’t mention exactly what she wanted done with those she opposes.  Maybe the essay she was influenced by would?

I decided to look for it on the Internet, where I can find out what was on TV on NBC® on a Sunday evening in June of 1983.  I spent more time than I’d like to admit spend sifting through Marxist websites, looking for the essay.  I went to the second page of Google© results.  Exhaustive research, indeed.  I even found where Marxists who had previously posted a copy were looking for a copy to post.  It’s like the document had been purposely scrubbed from the web.  Odd – once information hits the web, it normally flies free and multiplies.  Not this.

I finally found that the essay was included in a book, Southern Africa:  The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin/Pelican, 1976).  That’s the only place I could find it.  A seller on Amazon had a copy for less than $8, so I bought it.  It took weeks to arrive.  It was old – the pages were yellowing.  It also looked like a socialist’s mind:  it had never been opened.

What had I expected?  The usual Marxist language designed to be confusing and cult-like.

bafflegab

Whenever anyone talks like this?  They want you to nod and pretend you understand.

No.  Slovo was very clear in his writing.  Much of what Slovo writes are about conditions and history that are unique to South Africa.  And, reconstructing and solving the problems and historical injustices of South Africa, real as they were and are now, is far beyond this post.  But Slovo very clearly sets out a battle plan that is being used against the United States right now.

For instance, on page 118, Slovo states:  “To be born white means by definition to be born privileged . . . .” I hadn’t heard of the concept of “White Privilege” until 2014 or so, and then it was related back to an essay (White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) by Peggy McIntosh, who you can read more about here in this excellent essay on Quillette: (LINK).

The important idea is that McIntosh didn’t originate this divisive concept – Slovo wrote about it in his 1976 essay.  It may be even older, but this is the earliest reference I’ve found.  And Slovo specifically introduced it to open additional divisions in South Africa.

Slovo continues:  “. . . the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.”  In a further parallel with today, Slovo describes the history of struggle for liberation as “The Resistance” as he builds a case that his dreamed-of communist state can only be brought about via violence, which he calls “armed struggle,” rather than “killing people I don’t agree with, and also kids on my side, if we can get good pictures for the press.”

Slovo clearly expected and desired a war.  In the time he lived, Slovo completely misread what happened in the communist takeover in Vietnam and he was thinking that the Vietnamese had won a military victory.  They had not.  The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been defeated in almost every engagement.  The North Vietnamese won because they demoralized the United States and made the politicians feel the war was unwinnable – clearly a Fourth Generation warfare victory.

Ultimately the ANC realized, however dimly, that the deaths of black South Africans during the Soweto Uprising was their victory.  They won by appearing to be the victims.  And they won by creating a coalition of victims who would never feel that they could never be repaid for their pain – no reparations would ever be acceptable.

Page 205 contains the telling sentence:  “The struggle can no longer be centered on pleas for civil rights or for reforms within the framework of white dominance; it is a struggle for people’s power, in which mass ferment and the growing importance of the armed factor go hand in hand.”  Slovo worked to use the ethnic divisions in the country to create a situation where raw power would end up in the hands of the communists.

There we have it:  the end goal is not rights, or prosperity, or freedom, or liberty.  The end goal is naked power.

funnycom

Back to the United States, we find that could never happen here:

Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours.

Reparations for us are not only necessary because we are economically harmed, exploited and stolen from — while the violence against us is never acknowledged — but because in order for us to create and move work for Black liberation, it requires resources and MONEY. We live in a white supremacist capitalist world, so ain’t no spinning webs of lies around “money isn’t the answer.” It is because money and exploitation and power are interconnected concepts of violence. Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma.

We need housing, transportation, food, clothes, free space for meetings and work space; we need laptops, cell phones, encrypted systems for communication, solar power and LAND. Stop playing. Y’all really thought pulling up to the protest in your Hyundai was gonna be enough? Nah. You have to give us everything we need and more, because even if it means you go without — it doesn’t matter because that’s how we been living for 400+ years. Reparations will never be negotiable. So if you’re not willing to talk money, you are not here for #BlackLivesMatter as a movement or for us as individuals.

(H/T Liberty’s Torch (LINK)) Original that I tracked down is wearyourvoicemag.com.

I thought this quote was a parody until I found it at the website it was originally posted on.  It appears that she’s serious.  That’s from Ashleigh Shackelford, who seems really nice when talking to people that support her, as that passage above was a shout-out to her white supporters.  I left her spelling, emphasis, and capitalization intact.  Ms. Shackelford is the product of the same mentality of Marxist Joe Slovo and (I’m assuming) Marxist Tayari Jones.

As I wrote about earlier (Seneca’s Cliff and You), it’s far easier to destroy something than to make something.  In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight.  This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society.  Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.

MMback

He’s going to have to work awfully hard.

One thing we’ve seen – when this tactic works, ending it is difficult – look at the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  Once before in the comments on this blog people brought up the Irish Troubles and people started arguing about who was responsible in the comments.  On this blog.  In 2018.

I was certain that when the Soviet Union fell, that the world was safe.  In my mind, it should have been clear from the horrors of Cambodia, to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe winning their own freedom from oppression that the subject was closed.  Even if people couldn’t see that communism was evil, at least they could see that it didn’t work, right?

No.  Like Jason or Michael Myers communism keeps coming back.  It appears that, like Freddy Kruger, communism will keep going as long as people like Slovo, Jones, and Shackelford will fight and kill (even kill people on their own side) for power.  But only as long as there are people stupid enough to believe them.

Thankfully there’s no one like that in the United States.

aoc

 

Slovo grave picture:  Andrew Hall [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini

“I’ve never been great at conflict resolution.  Not without a blade, and several rolls of plastic wrap.” – Dexter

wings

I would say that the writing of this book is both Original and Crispy.  This was actually released for free in 2017 by KFC. 

I got home on Wednesday night and the aroma of baked chicken filled the house.  It smelled like Colonel Sanders® had developed a scented candle, and it was amazing.  I wanted to rub the smell under my arms, in my hair, and maybe on my pillow so I could smell it in my sleep.

I had just dropped Pugsley off for wrestling practice, and The Boy had just gotten back from his wrestling practice and had dropped in to grab his term paper to go meet with a study group before flying out of the house faster than a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch.  I am not at liberty to tell you what a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch is, but I assure you it is quite fast.

The Mrs. and I were left alone in the house, a rare enough occurrence, and The Mrs. pulled the hot, plump, greasy, piping-hot chicken thighs and legs from the oven, slowly, letting them linger and adjust to the kitchen air, their moist meat hidden only by the sheerest of skin.  Whew.  I’m getting goosebumps just reading that.

Given that Pugsley and The Boy were normally there for dinner, she’d made about forty-five pounds of chicken.  She had also made gravy and some sort of low-carb mashed cauliflower that was pretending to be potatoes.  I generally try to avoid mashed things that aren’t actual potatoes – I’d just as soon use the mashed cauliflower for drywall repair, or execute it for being an impostor.

“Food’s hot, come and get it.”  The Mrs. walked back with a single chicken thigh and some of the drywall spackle on her plate, covered with gravy.

“I’m fasting.”

“Okay.  Crap.  Now who’s going to eat all of this chicken?”

The Mrs.’ dog Emo looked hopeful and fat.  Her other dog, BWL (broccoli with legs, because he’s so stupid he’s nearly a vegetable) just looked confused.  Which is normal.

Wait, what?  Did you say fasting, John Wilder?

fastcult

Yeah.  On a lark, I decided to fast for two reasons.  The first one is that it tied into a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape.  I’m a strong proponent New Year’s resolutions – they’re a good sign that even when you’re as awesome as me, you have the amazing humility to realize you could be a bit more excellent.  Truth:  it would not hurt me to lose a few pounds, especially if there’s a good story to it and it was unusual and did NOT involve X-Acto® knives and a vacuum cleaner.  I’m not doing that again, at least not without more tarps and duct tape.

The second reason I decided to fast is that I can’t remember going more than, say, two days without eating.  Ever.  I’ve got an iron stomach, and even when I was sick as a small child I never missed more than a single meal.  Could I go longer?  I remember when The Mrs. and I were first married that The Reverend Al Sharpton© had declared a “hunger strike” to protest that he wasn’t getting enough media attention a bombing range in Puerto Rico.  The Mrs. and I were listening to the radio one day when it emerged that Al’s “hunger strike” included actual food whenever he was hungry.  So, immediately we christened it “A Hungry Strike” as in, “I sure am hungry, I could use a lot more soup.”  Imagine that line in Al Sharpton’s voice, it’s funnier that way.

Our society is seems to be built on the idea that limitless on-demand food is normal and has existed since the aliens first created us as a slave race to develop PEZ®.  It’s also taken as gospel truth that if you don’t eat every four hours YOU WILL DIE.  It’s almost like most people think that for all of the history of humanity, we had a Schlotzsky’s Sandwiches© to serve salami subs on sourdough in the Serengeti or a Denny’s™ dishing dinners and desserts to Danes in dusty diluvial Denmark.  But the sad truth is that there has been the precedent of a society going from abundance to starvation in short order – just look at the fall of the Soviet Union, or that night that Wendy’s™ was closed because the Frosty© machine exploded.

overlordcat

Cult leader Mr. Fizzlesticks liked Kool-Aid™ before he got beamed to the Mother Ship.

I’d imagine that for most of history (which is before McDonalds®, Taco Bell©, or even agriculture), when you ate, you ate really, really well from that mammoth you took down.  When you didn’t eat?  Well, that might be a week.  I can see that ancient people wouldn’t get all trendy and put out websites and courses devoted to fasting.  No, they just didn’t have any food.

But even people you thought were tough, well, I remember watching a biography about T.E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia.  In it, a friend (of his, not of mine) related how Lawrence once went 45 hours without eating or sleeping just to see if he could.

Hell, I called that finals week in college.  But, again, never can I recall going over 48 hours without food.  What the heck, I’d give it a try.  And as I write this sentence, I’m on hour 94, so in two hours I’ll have gone four days without food.

I’m not dead.

And the really, really odd thing is that for most of the 94 hours I haven’t been horribly hungry.  After I started the fast, I started doing some research.  It turns out that there are a very large number of people in the world who fast, not because they don’t have food, but because they think it has more benefits than being Jeff Bezo’s $65 billion dollar ex-wife:

  • Weight Loss
  • Cancer Prevention
  • Increased Lifespan
  • Make You Telepathic on Wednesday
  • Reduced Inflammation
  • Urine Glows So You Don’t Need Bathroom Lights
  • Lower Blood Pressure
  • Reduce Type 2 Diabetes
  • Make You Bulletproof
  • More Better Braining, er, Thinking

Okay, some of these are sketchy, and not just the ones that I obviously made up.  It turns out the “increased lifespan” claim was based on some sort of worm that they starved.  The worm lives an average of 21 days and they starved it for a day.  Which is like you or I not eating for three years.  Yeah.  And the cancer claims from starving rats every other day.  If there’s one thing medical science knows how to do, it’s how to cure cancer in rats.

The main reason I did it, though, was curiosity.  Could I?

Yes.

I started out with the idea of doing three days, or 72 hours.  At the end of the third day it was going so well I said, hey, how about doing four days?  I’m glad I did.  I’ll explain below:

On day one it was like . . . nothing happened, because I regularly go 24 hours without eating, and have done so since I was a kid.  I had three mints and a dill pickle.  So, yes, this is technically not a complete fast, but the total number of calories was about thirty.  For the day.

Day two was a bit tougher, and was about four mints.  And three pickles.  So, sixty-five calories.  I felt fine, and not very hungry at all.  Day three was the same, but after exercising (which I do at lunch) for about 40 minutes I felt nearly comatose and my hands were very, very cold all day.  Then, almost like a light going on, I felt fine, and had plenty of energy for day four.  On day four, I had a pickle and two mints, so, 25 calories.

I justified the pickles based on the tiny amounts of calories and the salt that I wasn’t getting anywhere else, even though I was still engaging in some pretty intense and sweaty exercise.  The mints?  Those were for my coworkers.

Total calories:  185 in four days, plus all the coffee and water (both plain and carbonated) that I could drink.  Which was a lot.  185 calories is 18% of a Double Whopper with Cheese©, or like two bites.  Over four days.  So, I count that as fasting even though The Mrs. rolled her eyes and made some comment about “sounds like a hungry strike” under her breath.

cult

Bringing snacks at Fasting Cult?  Best duty ever.

But I’m an amateur at fasting and I know it.  One thing I have learned, however, is if there’s a human activity, there’s a cult on somewhere on the Internet devoted to it.  When started researching, I found people were fasting for periods of up to 100 days.  My little four day fast wasn’t much in comparison to those people.  They had to plan for two things for such long durations without eating, electrolytes/vitamins and refeeding.

It turns out the dangerous part of fasting for a long time, besides starving to death, is starting to eat again.  It turns out that if you start eating again incorrectly that you can short out the lithium battery in your heart, or strip the gears on your lungs.  Or something.  I’m not a doctor, but the Internet Cult of Fasting says you can actually have a fairly dangerous phosphate demand, especially if you eat a lot of carbs when you let your inner fat person out to eat everything in sight.  Your body requires phosphates to process carbs, and you can pull ‘em out of your blood (where it’s required to keep the lithium battery in your heart going) and into your cells (where they’re required to process the carbs).  It would be really stupid to die because of Pop Tarts™, but they probably kill more people than cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy).

bikinicult2

There are some cults where recruiting is easy, except for the heretic on the left . . . no respectable cult has maroon bikinis!

Phosphate balance (along with some other conditions) can kill you.  I’d try to be funnier, but refeeding really can be fatal and leave a really stupid headline like “Popular Internet Writer Killed By Eating Pop Tarts® After Not Eating On Purpose.”

But hey, if Al Sharpton can make it . . . .

First Meal in 96 Hours Update:

Three pieces of baked chicken, two handfuls of blueberries, and two hamburger patties from the nearby Sonic™ since Pugsley got the wrong order.  Still not dead.  I’m feeling as full as a French bloomer weasel on Thanksgiving Dinner.  But the French bloomer weasel is endangered . . . .

Recessions, Depressions, Mullets, Coyotes and . . . Girls Drinking Beer

“Well, Eunice is depressed and Corinne is depressed and I was just debating whether or not to join them.” – Soap

economics2

Some things are better with beer.  Okay, that’s a lie.  Everything is better with beer.

Economic systems are nearly like a living organism, which makes them utterly unlike Nancy Pelosi, who is comprised of wholly of spare Abraham Lincoln parts from Disneyland’s® Hall of Presidents™ exhibit.  Like a living organism, economic systems start with raw materials and energy and produce products that people consume, like malls, bicycle-powered smoothie blenders, toddler grease, iPaws™ Apple® music for pets, and McDonalds® “food-based products.”  And like any living organism, economies grow, get sick, age, and eventually apply for Social Security.  When economies get sick?  We call that a recession.

How do economies end up in a recession? Describe it with a metaphor that incorporates cars, coyotes, Brad Pitt, and mullets.  (40 pts)

Economies have the potential to become unstable systems.

On a crisp, Christmas morning way back in time, I was driving due east on a straight, flat paved road.  It had snowed a few days before, and the county had been out with a snowplow and had opened up a lane.  On the parts of the road that had been plowed, a thin layer of snow had been compacted by passing tires into a very solid base.  It wasn’t slippery like ice, but it certainly didn’t grab on to a tire like dry pavement does.

But the plow didn’t clean off the entire road.  It left two inches or so of snow on the shoulders of the road on either side.  It was very, very cold, probably -20°F, and when it’s that cold and dry, snow behaves differently – after a few hours snow tends to become more compact, solid, and crunchy, almost like Angelina Jolie’s hair when I pet it when she’s sleeping, before she found me living in her attic and got that restraining order.

I was moving along at about 70 miles per hour – I figured that even if a sheriff pulled me over, he’d give me a Christmas morning break.  Nobody gets tickets on Christmas, right?  Without thinking I gradually drifted over onto that two inches of hard snow on the right shoulder.  Then?

Chaos.

I’d been moving down the road, but now everything was spinning.  The car kicked up a cloud of snow as it spun, and all I could see was white.  The car kept spinning.  Now it was up on two wheels, and I could feel that the car was tilted at about a 45 degree angle.

And the car kept spinning.

As suddenly as the car had started spinning, it slowed rapidly and stopped.  But it was still only supported by the two wheels on the driver’s side.  As the spinning stopped, the car hesitated with the wheels paused above the pavement, like a coyote running off of a cliff.  Gravity finally won out over rotation, and the passenger wheels slammed back to the ground, dropping three or so feet.

coyote

I’m not impressed.  I’ve survived worse.

The car stalled.  The defroster was still on, spraying a mist of powdered snow into the interior of the car.  Every window of the car was covered on the outside with a thin coating of powdery snow.

I opened the door and got out.  I had been travelling east, but the car was pointing due south toward a three-strand barbed wire fence.  I looked west, where I’d come from.  A very complicated set of tire tracks described the arcs and whirls my car had made as it pirouetted several hundred yards en pointe to where it sat.  The car had continued to follow the very straight road.

skyhawk

This is the same model, more or less, mine came with optional mullet enhancing. 

Know that feeling you get when you just missed death by ounces and fractions of a degree and your system is flooded with adrenaline?  It feels good.  Much better than being dead.

I brushed the snow off the outside windows – the entire car was covered in a fine powder.  I let the defroster melt the snow that had blown inside though the defroster.  I got back in.  I drove on.  I needed to find a poker game or a lottery ticket or an honest lawyer – no use wasting a lucky day like that one.

That spin out, though, was the automotive equivalent of a bad recession.

Everything was going along fine.  Sure, it looked stable.  And, as long as nothing changed, it was stable.  But when one little variable changed, in this case the friction on two tires on one side of the car, the illusion of stability vanished in a cloud of rotating snow that looked like the an Olympic™ figure skater trying to drill herself into a television announcer contract.

That’s generally the case with the economy.  Everything looks fine.  It’s moving along.  Then?

  • Interest rates spike, or
  • Someone sticks a pin in a Dow-Jones voodoo doll, or
  • Bubbles pricing in stock that people paid way too much for I bought become apparent, or
  • It becomes obvious that nobody needs a seventh iPhone®, or
  • Housing prices suddenly do the impossible and go down.

What happens then is the economy comes out of the spin, looks around, and starts moving again.  Sure, it was close to disaster but it turns out that, just like the car, the economy is okay.  We can start the ignition and keep rolling down the road, our collective mullets blowing in the wind.

mullet

Okay, this is probably the first time you’ve seen a mullet used in an economics metaphor.  You’re welcome.

Everything in the world was fine.  The factories are still there, the people are still there, and all we need to do is have enough confidence to start buying Johnny Depp® movies again, and we’ll be okay.  After a few years, we’ll forget that we’re headed down a snow packed road and spin it out again.  No real harm, no fouls.  And the recessions actually perform a service – a good recession causes poorly managed businesses to fail, and leaves room for well-managed businesses with great products to grow like a well-oiled mullet.

But what causes an economy to fail?  Describe it using a pickup truck for extra credit. (40 pts)

Time went on, and I traded out my car for a used pickup.  It had seen better days, but I was convinced it was solid.  It was making a rattling noise, and I was going to take it to a friend’s house so we could look at it, and it was again around Christmastime.  Sensing a theme?

As I drove down the interstate, the passenger in the car made the comment, “I’m not sure that this pickup is reliable.”

“Reliable?  This old truck is solid.  It’ll last for a decade!”  With that comment, I brought my fist down on the dash to show how solid the truck was.

Whatever sense of irony is buried in the universe activated in that second.  There was an explosion, a flash, and a 12 foot diameter cloud of grey smoke.  A piston rod came apart and shot down through the engine and the oil pan and onto the road below me at the speed of light – I think they found it in Australia when it came up through the ground and up into orbit.  All of the engine oil dropped onto the highway in less than a second.  Every red light on the dashboard lit up.  Oddly, the engine lasted exactly two more miles to a parking lot where I began to walk to a pay phone, which was a thing that existed before cell phones.

selfdestruct

This is not the same Jeep®, but looks pretty similar.  Except for the “exploded” part.

Those were the last two miles I ever drove that pickup.  It was dead.

Whereas even large recessions like the Great Depression are hiccups of a functional system (I can get in my car and drive off), this failure was deeper.  The system was broken.

What breaks an economic system?

  • Lack of people.
  • Lack of knowledge.
  • Lack of raw materials.
  • Lack of energy.
  • The French.

These are factors that will cause a civilization to fail, completely and utterly.  Let’s take them one at a time:

Lack of people.  Like any country, Rome encountered problems.  To fix the problem, the Romans made rules.  But, like Congress today, the rules that the Romans made . . . caused more problems.  Solution?  More rules.  Which led to more problems.  Eventually, it was so bad that the Romans had to make a law that the firstborn son had to have the same job as his dad.   This was fairly unpopular – eventually the people wandered away, which was also illegal, but by this time all the soldiers had walked away, too.  Other causes of depopulation include disease (like Ebola, LINK), bombs, and starvation.

But we still have the recipe – we can make more people if we need to.  One civilization may end, but another one is just a hundred years away, or 40 if you’re in Utah.

Lack of knowledge.  The secret of making concrete was lost for nearly 1500 years with the fall of the Roman Empire.  Knowledge of how to make plumbing out of lead, pyramids, Viking sunstones, and William Shatner’s hair have been lost and found again.  While these didn’t kill civilizations, they certainly contributed to the inability to quickly remake them to their previous glory.

We can experiment, though, and learn again.  As long as we learn to skip the lead plumbing this time and keep it in the paint chips that toddlers eat, where it belongs.

Lack of raw materials.  Ireland was deforested to make ships for the British Navy.  Ireland may have fewer trees, but certainly the British Navy was able to become even stronger.  There was a report issued in 1900 noting that the United States would run out of trees by 1920 because so many were required to make railroad crossties. The ability to treat them with creosote to make them last for longer was developed.  Heck, nowadays some railroad crossties are even made out of concrete, since we found that recipe again.

Humanity has regularly found substitutes for raw materials throughout history.  Soylent Green anyone?

soylent

I like the Bald Eagle and Panda Dip® best, myself.

Lack of energy.  300 years ago if your civilization was running out of energy that meant you didn’t have enough oats to feed your horse or your mule or your peasant.  Probably in that order.  Now with a global economy that produces trillions of dollars in food, products, and sweatpants each year running out of energy is something else entirely.  The fate of mankind is the fate of energy – coal, oil, renewable or nuclear.  It’s so important that I’m working on a series of posts on just that subject.  It is the single most important non-political question in the history of humanity.  This makes Climate Change® look like the kiddie pool, so much so that I’ve been working on a post (posts?) on just this question, which I’ll finish sometime before oil goes to $100 and Justin Bieber is elected president.

Without energy we would have all of the economy of 1420’s mud-hut dwelling Frenchmen.  Which brings us to:

The French. 

Well, we have to blame someone else.  They were convenient.

What’s next?  Summarize your previous answers.  Incorporate girls drinking beer. (20 pts)

I fully expect that there will be a recession within two years, and at this point I think the recession will be a lot like my car spinning out – it will be a recession that doesn’t expose structural weaknesses in the economy, but it will be significant.  Reliable?  This old truck economy is solid.  It’ll last for a decade!

economicgirl

Truth, and Eight Types of Lies

“Would you prefer a lie or the truth?” – V for Vendetta

thetruth

Never let Jack into your house.  When he leaves the deli drawer will be empty, you’ll have to burn your seat cushions, and your cat will be pregnant.

I believe in Truth.  Objective, verifiable Truth.

Gravity works.  100% of the time.  When I toss my keys on the table they never fall off the side and shoot up toward the ceiling, unless it’s after 3AM in Australia, and only then if Australia’s had a lot to drink.  When the Earth rotates so I can no longer see the Sun, the next morning the Earth will have rotated so I can again see the Sun, provided we killed all the groundhogs.  See, simple true things.

There really is Truth.  Are some things not certainties?  Sure.  There are things that are governed more by probability, and at the quantum level there may be events that exceed our understanding, but none of those things say that Truth doesn’t exist.

Somewhere a campaign against Truth started.  The big proponents of it during the last century were a group of (mainly) French philosophers who had day jobs as postmen that smoked a lot of cigarettes while wearing berets and scowling and thus became known as the Postmodernists.  But digging back further in time, the French got this idea from that German, Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche went hopelessly slobbering Daffy Duck® insane by the time he was 44, so, of course he was a great role model for the French philosophers. “Truth doesn’t exist?  Can you tell us more?  What does purple taste like?”

download

Rumors were that the mustache remained sane.

The concept that “there is no Truth” is infectious and has become the herpes of philosophy.  Mankind only dabbled with it once, but we just can’t get rid of it.  Anti-Truth has successfully taken over a pretty big chunk of our education system.  An example:

I saw a tweet on Twitter® on Saturday night from a college professor.  She noted that she couldn’t get a classroom to admit that rape was wrong.  From the students:  “Other cultures may have different views.  You can’t always say that what we [the enlightened students] consider rape is really rape in another culture.”  Rape wasn’t a Truth.

When the professor made the statement that the United States didn’t have a “Rape Culture”, however, the class exploded.  How could the teacher make such a statement?  Thoughts so muddled can only come from those that reject Truth.  Thankfully, all of those kids majoring in Pre-Barista (Miles, see, I told you I would steal it) can argue Truth while they make Pumpkin-Spice non-fat decaf lattes for doctors’ wives.

barista

But that brings us to Lies.  I think I’ve established that Truth exists, so that must mean that there are Lies.

What kinds of Lies are there?

I came up with eight kinds of Lies.  I’ll be the first to admit that there is subjectivity in my categories, and that I might have missed some, but I’ll assert that 99% of the lies you will ever encounter will fall into one of these categories:

  • Direct Lies – these are the Lies of a five year old, or a Congressman. But I repeat myself.  These are simple:  “I didn’t steal the cookie.”  “I didn’t touch the intern.”
  • Lies You Tell Yourself – The mirror is an amazing device that allows me to completely miss how I really look. I saw a picture of myself the other day, taken from fifty feet away.  “Oh, crap, that’s me!  Where did my hair go?  Oh, yeah, my ears.  At least I can braid those luscious locks.”  My mirror doesn’t lie, it just reflects photons.  TLEBME – The Lie Exists Behind My Eyes.  This lie makes me think of Bobby Burns and the end of his poem, To a Louse:  “O, wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us.”  Burns could not spell, and was Scottish.  But I again repeat myself.  But Burns was awesome in understanding that, when viewed from outside, we’re neither as noble as we think we are or as interesting.  Except for me.

burns

  • Lies of Omission – Leaving out a word or two makes all the difference. Heck, sometimes just inflecting the wrong word is a lie.  “No, dear, those pants don’t make your butt look big.”  Another way to inflect that sentence is, “If you grow into your butt you will be eight feet tall.”  See how a small change just in word inflection changes the whole meaning of the sentence?  Regardless, omitting important details can turn a statement into a lie.
  • Lies of Word Choice – Love or hate Trump, you have to admit he is the single most entertaining politician of the last 100 years. But whenever Trump says anything, the Press™ (looking at you, New York Times® and Washington Post™) has to editorialize even the most mundane news story:  “President Trump today made the unfounded claim that water is wet.”  Want proof?  A Google® search of “Trump unfounded” led to 2.3 million hits.  Google© search of “Obama unfounded” led to 1.1 million hits.  But, if you look at the first page, it’s all “Trump’s unfounded statements about Obama” type stories.  Exclude Trump from the search results?  400,000 hits, and EVERY SINGLE result on the front page is a defense of “unfounded” attacks against Obama.  Any time you see the word “Unfounded” know that you are being lied to.  It’s the “I love you” of political journalism.

unfounded

  • Lies of Vagueness – this is putting together a statement that can be filtered by the user to mean whatever they think it means. “I believe children are good,” might be a statement that reflects a belief that children are wonderful and full of hope and possibility.  It also might mean that they’re tasty when cooked to medium with ketchup.  I am coming to believe that Jordan Peterson is perhaps pretty good at this method of mendacity, even though I have reviewed him positively in the past.  I’m now of the belief that I reviewed what I thought he said, rather than what he really meant, which nobody may really know.  These are tougher to sift through – and require study.  Beware of the vague.
  • Lies of Exaggeration – it’s been a decade since Al Gore predicted an ice-free (summer months) Arctic in 5-7 years. Yeah, about that, the Danish Meteorological Institute says no ice trend at all in the last 12.  You tried, Al.

gore

  • Lies of Timing – ever wonder why you’re hearing a story at a particular time and place? Perhaps manipulation is to blame?
  • Lies of Confusion – Marxists are the worst/best at this. They toss together salads of multi-syllable words that they’ve self-defined to the point of nonsense.  An example from the Web:  “Here is where the Marxist claim for the explanatory superiority of a class analysis comes into the mix, and the distinction between oppression and exploitation becomes crucially important.”    Words.  Meaning?  They’re trying to cloud it – they use unusual words defined in mysterious ways to divorce you from Truth.  Listen long enough?  Pretty soon you become convinced that Venezuela is the true Socialist Worker’s Paradise and you’re being oppressed by your boss because he won’t let you FaceBook® all day on your phone because you have to make nonfat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes for doctors’ wives.  That wouldn’t happen in Venezuela!

But I’ll toss one other thought out there:  If you believe that a lie exists, which no rational person would argue against, then you must agree that truth exists.

And if there’s truth?  There’s Truth.

Oh, and there go my keys floating by . . . Australia must be drinking again.

Wombstyles of the Rich and Famous, Sexy Handmaids, Insurance, and Insulin

“Don’t listen to him, man.  The insulin, it made him crazy.” – Con-Air

unibrow

How do you tell the number of Kardashian women in a room?  Add the eyebrows and mustaches and divide by two.

Health care is important to people – both as individuals (Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough), Readers Write: Early Retirement, Health Care, Canada, and Averting A Ben Affleck Marathon) and to Americans as a group.  It has become so critical that I think that its current level of mismanagement will sink the country within 15 years (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck), or (more likely) lead to a drastic reduction in overall care for the people who don’t live like The Rich and Famous.  But I have popcorn, I’ll probably have the weekend free, and it should be pretty fun to watch, so why not enjoy?

What led to this observation?

Kanye West and Whatever Kardashian have three kids, which surprised me – I always thought that the Kardashians reproduced like a virus – infecting their host cell and then making it explode with millions of copies of Kardashians that go on to infect other cells.  I guess not, and even my second guess – reproduction through egg-laying was wrong.  Kardashians reproduce just like a normal human does.

Or, maybe not?

I found out about the West/Kardashian reproductive habits not because I follow them on the news or have a link to their Amazon® Echoâ„¢ – my Amazon© Echo® eavesdropping is generally limited to listening in on Tom Hanks – he’s much more interesting than you might imagine.  No, the West/Kardashian pregnancy was front and center on Google News Wednesday morning and they won’t allow me to install a Kardashian blocker on my work computer.

Thankfully the world will be blessed with what it needs most, an additional celebrity child.   This birth, however, will be special.  Whatever Kardashian is not using her own womb, but is renting one for her baby.  There will be tons of tests, probably a minimum ACT® score, and payment for services rendered.  I’m sure it will all be wonderfully legal.

mother's day

Different people celebrate differently.

Furthermore, this is the second child of the West/Kardashian hive that will be born via surrogate.  Now, Internet, I did open up and read an article about this, all for you.  You really must appreciate the sacrifices I make, this was worse than many horror novels I’ve read.  Whatever Kardashian told a thoroughly gruesome description of a previous birth complete with details that I would not tell to a priest during confession, were I Catholic.  Heck, I remember when I was younger and would go to confession just to brag, but this Kardashian story wasn’t bragging, it was gagging.  I do NOT recommend that you read about it if you’re at all squeamish.  Let me rephrase – I don’t recommend you read it at all.

I can understand the desire for more children.  I understand she alleges that her doctor says she shouldn’t carry another one.  But when Whatever told the scandal sheet entertainment magazine that she really found it convenient to outsource the breastfeeding of her child, I was as stunned as a kitten in a quantum physics class.  Here is the class divide in America – a princess grown woman deciding to hire a commoner another grown woman to create and nurse her offspring.  Maybe I wasn’t too far off with the whole virus analogy.  Heck, they could even hire a surrogate father to help the surrogate mother raise the kid.

I looked up what this would cost, and it’s probably at least a quarter-million dollars to have a surrogate deliver your kid in California, but that’s probably the entry level cost.  I’m willing to bet that the Kardashian/West family has a great number of requirements, like having the surrogate mother eat the Royal Kardashian Jelly while she’s pregnant so it smells like a Kardashian when it’s born and therefore won’t be eaten by the other Kardashians at birth.  I even imagine they pay her to live with them for up to another year to nurse the child, and likewise restrict her diet and activities.

handmaid

I’m sure this is how Margaret envisioned the costume.

The Handmaid’s Tale was a novel from the 1980’s by Margaret Atwood.  In it, Atwood raises the ever so certain prospect that evil Christians were going to institute a Christian theocracy and force women to wear red outfits and have babies for powerful men.  I suppose this has parallels the popular allure that zombies have for kids, but for liberal women, but it amuses me the situation has come to pass as an actual Hollywood scheme and nobody seems to mind.

I have a lot of sympathy for childless couples who resort to surrogate mothers for one reason or another, and (really) are generally supportive of new babies being brought into the world – babies are our future, unless the robots take over, in which case I welcome our new robot leaders (who can look this up in my blogging history, and then they will know I always wanted them to take over).  Also, the surrogate market appears to be (kind of) based on the free market – how much will you pay for another woman to bear your children?  I’m also willing to bet that free market competition has brought the prices of surrogate mothers down over the years, especially at that clinic at the unmarked door behind the Dairy Queen® in Encino.  Whether or not bringing a fourth child into this world via surrogacy is ethical, well, that’s beyond this post.

But what isn’t beyond this post is that the medical system is still broken.  Basic procedures and medicine (like insulin, or Epi-Pens®) have increased in prices drastically, even though cost of production has dropped.  Somehow, the market has completely failed.  Humalog™ (a form of insulin made from elf tears) was $21 a bottle back in 1995.  It’s now $225 a bottle.  That’s 1071% in 20 years.  Based on that growth rate, in 2037 it’ll cost $2,400 a bottle.  At some point it will become cheaper to kidnap elves and chain them in your basement for their precious insulin tears.

insulin

I think the solution is a drastic one:  make prescription drug coverage via insurance illegal.  Once the market takes over, prescription drug prices really will come down.  The alternative?  Make importing prescription drugs into the United States legal.  In Canada, a vial of Humalog® is $50.  The price discrepancy isn’t the free market at work – it’s a controlled market where Congress™ and the FDA© have managed to create billions in additional profit for drug makers.  At your expense.

Medicine is broken.  Burn it down.

I do find it odd that the Kardashians met their latest surrogate at an unmarked door behind a Dairy Queen® near the Taco Bell© in Encino (okay, I do listen to their Amazon® Echo™).  I would have thought they would have had better insurance than that.  Nah.  I’m sure it’s legit.

Silly Predictions for 2019. Bonus? Golden Bikini Force.

“Wait till my real crystal ball gets here.  I’ll show you I can predict things, you dumb ol’ turkey brain.” – Beverly Hillbillies

2019

Okay, I did real predictions last year.  They weren’t fun.  This was more fun.

I was thinking about writing a post dealing with collapse of civilizations as brought about either through hard physical limits or via failure of financial and governance systems.  But I hadn’t done the research that I wanted to do and was too tired to make stuff up, so you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday for that post.  Instead, you get:

Stunningly Specific Predictions for 2019

January:

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will become the first member of Congress in history to wear pink unicorn yoga pants to a swearing in and will commit a gross breach of House decorum when caught sticking her bubblegum under her chair. Further, she will explain that socialism means “cute rich Kennedy boys for everyone to date” in an editorial she writes for Tiger Beat® which is later picked up by the New York Times©.
  • The New Horizons space probe, having passed Ultima Thule, will discover the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein cunningly hid in the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Pluto. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains this makes sense, as there are “no Kurds in the Milky Way.”
  • Ted Nugent is named as Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, and performs guitar solos during Senate confirmation hearings in response to all questions by Senators. Nugent is confirmed 89-3 after his second encore.  Kid Rock is confirmed as Secretary of (Sweet) Homeland Security.

canada

February:

  • Donald Duck® will be the next victim of the #metoo campaign, when it is alleged that he walked into Minnie Mouse’s™ dressing room without his pants. Donald Duck’s™ defense that he “never wears pants” is largely ignored.  Porky Pig™ currently fighting extradition from Yemen.
  • People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will declare a steak and bacon exemption on their ban on eating animals. “We had steak and bacon on a sandwich that was supposed to be free-range tofu, and we were shocked at how really good this was and how quickly our anemic arms developed the strength to lift more than a soy latte.  We are so sorry that we ever told people not to eat steak.  And bacon?  This stuff is delicious.  We’d issue a longer statement but we have a lot of catching up to do.  Yay, ribeyes!”
  • Robert Mueller concludes his investigation into Russian Collusion and submits his report to Rod Rosenstein. Mueller is given a C- for his work and told, “You can do so much better, Robert, I expect more than this level of effort.”  Mueller is passed to the next grade.  Mueller notes in his defense that he “wrote the entire report during first hour on the day it was due, so a C is actually pretty good.”

ford

March:

  • Christine Blasey-Ford will demand additional Congressional hearings with Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh, claiming to have found unwanted notes saying, “Do You Like Me? Check Yes□ or No □  If you are my girlfriend I won’t tell that you were eating paste,” on her desk while giving testimony to the Senate in October.  Kavanaugh’s spokesman will respond, “Nuh-uh.  Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
  • The 731st Gender will be discovered and announced. It is described as an unusual sexual attraction to teak side tables with white lace doilies.  This will bring the number of preferred Gender Pronouns up to 2,432.
  • Canada invaded. Resistance minimal.  Sarah Palin confirmed as “Queen in the North” by the Senate, given dominion over everything north of Wisconsin.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau captured, his Eyebrow still at large.

truebrow

April:

  • Ruth Bader-Ginsburg will announce that she has transplanted her brain into an immortal 2000 foot (2 meter) tall android body, and will henceforth be known as RoboJustice Ruth Bader-Ginsbot 2000™. She still smells vaguely of mothballs and carries hard butterscotch candies in her purse.
  • Sauron nominated to fill vacancy left when RoboJustice Ruth Bader-Ginsbot 2000© declares herself the supreme voice of justice on Earth, going on rampage to destroy climate change.

sauron

May:

  • RoboJustice Ruth Bader-Ginsbot 2000® will be destroyed by the Japanese Defense Force acting in concert with Godzilla on the outskirts of Tokyo. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will participate in the defense of Tokyo using his golden-bikini clad “Workers Girl Force,” which distracts Ginsbot long enough for Ted Nugent, riding atop a white stallion, to play a killer guitar solo while Godzilla dismisses her case.  With prejudice.
  • The Boy graduates from High School.
  • Government still shut down, but everyone forgot, what with the Ginsbot attack. Most positions and programs eliminated.

kimtroops

June:

  • The DNA of the 37 Democratic Presidential Candidates is mixed in a secret lab in Bulgaria, and the result is slightly more Native American than Elizabeth Warren and results in the creation of a 732nd It also has the hair of Biden, the hips of Hillary, and the lower jaw of O’Rourke.  It immediately gains the support of 47% of the electorate despite walking in a shambling manner, and making a shallow sucking sound each time it takes a step.  It is unable to communicate except through a deep, mournful moan.  It is known as Democraticus, but goes by “Dave.”
  • “Dave” defeats Bernie Sanders in every debate held in June. Dave triumphs via physical combat.  The debates have the benefit of being short, especially the last one, effectively ending the Sanders campaign and his ability to floss.
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated in Sarajevo. Trudeau’s Eyebrow spotted leaving the scene.

July:

  • Paris burning, again.   Macron, realizing that the French can go totally overboard, heads to a secret hideout on a volcanic island in the Pacific.
  • Trudeau’s Eyebrow partners with former French President Emmanuel Macron to form the League of Deposed Heads of State. They are soon joined by Zombie Chairman Mao and his henchman, Ché

August:

  • The DOW-Jones Industrial Average will drop 3400 points during August.
  • Royal Family of Britain to revive beheading: “Really tired of Meghan Markle’s crap.”  Tickets sell out in record time.
  • Richard (Dick) Nixon cloned and mass produced, but is miniaturized to 12” tall for environmental concerns. During August, you can get one with a $5 footlong at Subway®.  Yeah, not the joke you were expecting . . .

meghanhead

September:

  • September to be cancelled by general agreement.

October:

  • The DOW-Jones Industrial Average will drop another 5000 points during October.
  • President Trump will declare an economic emergency, and will appoint Ted Nugent as Special Economic Czar. Nugent forms the “Cat Scratch Economic Prosperity Plan,” which consists of him playing Cat Scratch Fever in a loincloth nonstop until the market begins to rise.  Market gains back all losses in five hours, interest rates drop, and student costs to go to college (except for books) drop by 50% in the same time period.  Loincloth nominated for Nobel® Economics Prize.
  • Trudeau’s Eyebrow bombing plot will be thwarted by Wal Mart© clerk. “We came within a hair’s breadth of having that bomb go off.”  Police now concerned that Macron will wear Trudeau’s Eyebrow and become the Unibrow Bomber.

November:

tofurkey

  • Health care problems all solved! It turns out it was simple all you had to do was . . . oh, I don’t want to spoil this for you.  You’ll see.
  • Thanksgiving saved as you remember to take the turkey out on time. Still moist.  Now your mother-in-law can’t complain.  About that, at least.

December:

guitarofhonor

  • President Trump presents Ted Nugent with the Congressional Guitar of Honor for saving Tokyo and the economy.
  • RoboJustice Ruth Bader-Ginsbot 2000™ crawls up from the thick mud of Tokyo Bay, having reconstituted herself into her new form, a submarine of nuclear fire and justice, and joining forces with the Deposed Heads of State. The Ginsbot offers Macron a “whole quarter” to massage her corns.
  • Trudeau’s Eyebrow laughs menacingly as 2019 comes to an end.

 

Markle Picture via Northern Ireland Office [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust

“Gentlemen, question mark?  Put it on the penultimate, not on the diphthongic.  You want to brush up on your Greek, Jamison.  Well, at least get a Greek and brush up on him.” – Animal Crackers

penultimate

I got a new camera.  Not at Best Buy®.  I mean, I took the picture at Best Buy©, but I got the camera elsewhere.

We had another wonderful Penultimate Day this year.  The origins of Penultimate Day are shrouded in mystery, lost to the ages in the murky past before recorded history, way back in 2012.  On December 30, 2012, sensing that the world wasn’t really going to end as the Mayan calendar expired, The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and drove two hours to buy cell phones.  Stupid Mayans, if only they could have managed the whole end-of-the-world I wouldn’t have had to go shopping.

But I did have to go shopping.  Our cell phone carrier doesn’t have a store within 100 miles, so we decided to make a day of it.  The first time we’d bought phones, we’d bought them at a Best Buy®, so we went back to Best Buy© to look at new ones.  We didn’t find something cheap what we wanted.  We decided to keep our “has an actual keyboard” Blackberries for another year or two.

After not buying a cell phone, we ate dinner at Olive Garden™.  We had joked on the way back that December 31 was the “ultimate” or last day of the year.  We used the word “penultimate” to describe December 30, since penultimate means “next to last” and has even more syllables and sounds really nerdy.  Thus, December 30 became Penultimate Day.

We’ve celebrated Penultimate Day in proper fashion five or six times now.  I think one year a snow storm might have made the trip our pilgrimage impractical, but we did go again this year.

So, to recap, Penultimate Day requires:

  • Get in the car
  • Travel two hours
  • Go to Best Buy©
  • Whatever you do: Do not buy a cell phone
  • Eat at Olive Garden™

I would like to have Penultimate Day replace New Year’s Day – I’ve never seen the attraction in a holiday that celebrates the obsolescence of millions of calendars and the shared hangover of people who spent the night getting sweaty, drinking Jägermeister©, and saying “woo” in crowds still and have no idea how they ended up in that alley with Johnny Depp, a juicy oven-warm ham, gravy, and that gun.

Some Penultimate Day observations over the years:

Best Buy™ is largely irrelevant and more so every year.  Best Buy® sells physical copies of movies, which is like putting a little bit of the Internet on a DVD® and selling it, making it more inconvenient to find when you want to watch it at 11PM.  They sell music, which is quaint.  Why buy music when I live in a universe where Pugsley’s phone did a Bluetooth© connect to The Mrs. car and we listened to whatever song we could think of on the way home, all thanks to YouTube®?

We introduced Pugsley to Dread Zeppelin on the way back home.  What’s not to love about Led Zeppelin® music sung by an Elvis™ impersonator to a reggae beat?

We left Best Buy© without purchasing anything and passed the fourth test of Penultimate Day.  No cell phone purchased.  Thankfully, the Gods of Corporate Provenance placed the Olive Garden™ pretty close to the Best Buy®.  I guess lots of people who don’t buy cell phones like Italian.  We got a table immediately and from the beginning I noticed that the service was excellent, which must mean the economy isn’t doing so well.

Wilder’s 80th Rule of Economics states that the primary effect of a great economy is horrible waiters at corporate chain restaurants.  Great waiters get hired to sell stocks or become corporate lawyers or become the district manager for a PEZ™ distribution company.  When the economy starts to stall?  Great waiters show back up and the bad ones are sent to the Cool Whip® refineries.  I’d rather have great waiters than more corporate lawyers, and remember, someone has to pump the raw Whip from deep underground and refine it into precious Cool Whip™.

The food at Olive Garden™ has gotten better every year.  Sure, it’s corporate chow whose primary virtue and charm is consistency, but at the rate of once or twice per year it’s pretty tasty.  But just before I left the restaurant, I noticed a black and white photo of a little Italian market along a crooked little road between buildings in the restroom.  I would have taken a picture of the photo to show you, Internet, but my probation decorum prohibits me from pulling out a camera in a public bathroom.  Like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Never trust a man with a camera at a urinal.  Nothing good can come of that.”

market

The picture I saw was kinda like this one.

What really got to me about that picture (the one I saw, not the one sort of like it above) was that there was no one in it, but that lots of food from the market was out in front, for anyone to take.  And there was no one around to watch the food.  It got me to thinking, what kind of society builds that kind of trust, to leave food outside where anyone could steal it with only a tiny chance that they’d be caught?

Coming from where we live in Modern Mayberry, there is great degree of societal trust.  It seems like once a month Pugsley or The Boy leaves the garage door open all night long – I can tell because there’s no way that all of the junk in there is mine – our neighbors must come and put extra tools and tarps and motorcycles on the floor.  The Mrs., after several years, has managed to convince me that unlocked cars aren’t much of an issue, either.  I do lock the front door to our house – I especially don’t trust thieves at night – they know that you’re home and are prepared to be violent.  Thankfully, in our town guns outnumber people by a 2:1 margin, so the occasional murder is about passion or drugs and not random violence.

I mentioned the picture to the family as we drove home.  We talked about trust in society.  The Mrs. had a great observation:  “Not long after we moved to Modern Mayberry, everybody knew who we were and what our business was.  In a town that size, there’s no way that you can be a bad person and people not know about it.”

She’s right.  There is crime.  You generally know who was responsible.  They’re generally caught, and generally sentenced to fair sentences, though I will say the latitude for self-defense when you’re being robbed at gunpoint is amazingly high – you don’t want to rob an armed house if people are home unless you don’t want to see how Game of Thrones® ends because, you know, early exit from breathing.

In Modern Mayberry there’s an amazing amount of agreement on ethics, religion, and the law.  That provides the backbone for Societal Trust.  Societal Trust is important – it provides:

  • Trust in neighbors to not steal
  • Trust in business partners to meet their end of the deal
  • Trust in government to be fair
  • Trust in media to be unbiased
  • Trust in elections to be honest

No, Modern Mayberry isn’t a paradise where all of these things are true.  But our government isn’t big enough for big corruption.  Neighbors don’t steal, but the kid three blocks away does, and we know who he is.  And the ladies who count the ballots take it seriously and are sincere when they thank you after having handed you your “I voted” sticker.  In high trust societies, things are easier, life is better.  People will stop and help you if you have trouble.

The size of Modern Mayberry is small, the residents have been around forever.  People are a known quantity.  Trust isn’t at the level of “When you’re here, you’re family™” – no, that level of trust is saved for Olive Garden®.  But people in Modern Mayberry do and will pitch in to help their neighbors.

olive

Behold the saturated beauty of the Olive Garden© logo.  Worship it!

I had always thought that there was anonymity in cities.  But when I spent some time in a Chicago for work I saw that it wasn’t that way at all.  The neighborhoods were tightly grouped, at least on the South Side.  The Polish?  They maintained the Polish neighborhood.  Supermarket signs were in Polish.  The Italians?  They had a neighborhood that was next to the Polish neighborhood.  Nobody crossed the street between the neighborhoods.  There was a wall, but it was invisible, and each side patrolled their own side.  If you were Polish or Italian, you knew better than to cross the line.  They managed to find harmony though minimizing cultural friction along ethnic lines, the same way most modern suburbs divvy up the land based upon economic lines.  But that’s not enough.  Some leakage across boundaries is inevitable, and some areas fracture within ethnic lines.  That’s why Chicago has such a high murder rate.

Trust consists of finding points of agreement.  In my first Penultimate post (last year) I talked about what I felt was the biggest story of the year for 2017.  In this post?  The biggest story for 2018.

We are unraveling.  Our trust is fine here in Modern Mayberry.  It’s probably good in most of the suburbs.  Heck, most of the localities and neighborhoods across the country are fine.  2018, however, has shown the greatest division in at least the last 150 years building nationally.  Here’s a previous post on this:  Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

But what will bring back our trust nationally when we don’t even agree that we should all throw off our shackles, drive to Best Buy© on December 30th and exercise our right to not buy a cell phone and then eat corporately-designed Italian food?  Unify the United States:  replace New Year’s Day with Penultimate Day, a far superior holiday!

Health, Sexy Hot Water Heaters, and Elven Cultural Appropriation

“Gentlemen, as you all know, a reservoir is composed of water.  Except the part that holds the water.  Which is made of concrete.” – Green Acres

elfcry

You should be ashamed!   (Found on Pinterest)

“You understand that it’s healthier to take cold showers.  The data is clear.”

The Mrs.:  “I don’t care.”

“Cold showers stimulate weight loss, increase alertness, and improve your immune system.”

The Mrs.:  “I don’t care.  And I don’t like it that you’re implying that I’m a fat, diseased, dullard.”

“But, cold showers lower stress and ease depression?”

The Mrs.:  “No.  You can’t talk yourself out of buying a water heater.  We’re getting one today.”

The old hot water heater had stopped being automatically functional.  We discovered that Christmas morning.  And by “we” I mean The Mrs.

“Got bad news.  I think the water heater is out.  Shower was cool, like maybe the heater turned off 12 hours ago.”  My shower was cold, too.  Not “glacier on Everest” cold, more like, “implying that my wife is a fat, diseased, dullard” cold.

The heater would still light, but it would go out after about 20 or 30 minutes.  And as much as I don’t respect Pugsley’s time, it seemed a bit much to ask Pugsley to go and relight the burner every 20 minutes for the next six years.  Unless I chained Pugsley in the mechanical room, you know, for his own convenience.

But the heater going out was probably a faulty thermocouple.  A thermocouple is a magical device made of elves that pokes the fire dragon inside of the water heater to let him know that the pilot light is still going so the dragon doesn’t spew unignited natural gas fire breath inside the house and make it go all Mount Doom.  That appears to bother Allstate®, since my policy specifically excludes damage due to any Hobbit-related conditions.  Strict, but I understand the business reasons for it.

water

Wait, this is a picture of Pugsley’s room . . .

I could tell my dragon-poking-fire-elf (thermocouple) had failed because he was singed, and his hands shook noticeably as he drank my scotch.  He was used up.  A thermocouple replacement is about $18.  I think they’re that cheap because they’re made out of Chinese elves nowadays.  The water heater is 14 years old, and, like a child, they have to be replaced at around that age.  Since the previous owner installed it without a pan underneath it, when it failed we’d first notice when it started soaking everything in the house like a poodle with a bladder condition.  Oh, sure I could put a pan under this one, but by that point I’d have to unhook it and do 90% of the work of replacing it.  And then I’d have to buy a new one next year.

machines

If we don’t allow illegal alien elves, who will power our iPhones?

So I replaced it.  There was yelling, there was cursing, and then we finally got to the store to buy one.

I wasn’t expecting a cold shower on Christmas, I wasn’t expecting to buy a new water heater.  But a lesson in health and life is:  If you can’t control the situation, embrace it.  So, I gave the water heater a big embrace as The Boy lifted it over the edge of the drip pan.

Life is a series of unplanned events.  I once read a quote by Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”  And life is very much like that – nobody expects a broken water heater on Christmas.  Since I saw the Heating and Air Conditioning Repair van outside a neighbor’s house yesterday, I’m betting they didn’t expect to wake up at 40°F in their house this morning.  Guess they have elf problems, too.  It’s a stereotype that elves don’t want to work after Christmas, but, really, let’s face the fact – the stereotype exists for a reason.

The new water heater is installed.  And heating water.  Don’t call it a “hot water heater”, because if the water was hot, why would I need to heat it?   I’ll admit I did call one model a hot water heater while shopping.  But in that case, it was a really sexy water heater.  Just check out the nameplate:

sexyplate

I’m too sexy for my heater, too sexy for my heater, too sexy per square meter!

Sadly my family is now unhealthier, stuck as it is without the benefits of cold showers – the increased alertness, lower stress and depression.  We are stuck with perfectly warm water for bathing, showering, and cooling down singed elves.