Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
I recall reading a story about several wives at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas. They were comparing cars – each of them had a new Mercedes® or similar luxury car. One of the wives, exasperated, mentioned their really wealthy friend, Martha, who drove around in an older car. “I wish I was as rich as Martha. Then I wouldn’t have to drive a new car.”
I know, I know, having to spend money to impress people is not a club I want to be in, but I find it interesting nevertheless. After all, I’m in an even more exclusive club: guys who want to be able to buy a pickup with a stick shift, a vinyl bench seat and rubber flooring instead of carpet. As nearly as I can tell from the domestic pickup truck market, this particular club has one member. Me.
The world seems to have gone into a mode that is based in luxury. A few years ago, I visited a friend, Dave. Dave had a new pickup truck. As we drove around on a fairly warm day, I noticed that my butt was getting . . . cold. That’s not something that normally happens to my butt by itself. It turns out his pickup truck didn’t have just have heated seats, it had climate controlled seats that also got cold.
I’m sure it has seats that cook you at 350°F or freeze you to -40°F.
I was amused – I didn’t even know that such a thing existed. I hadn’t had my butt chilled for my pleasure before, except for that one time in Amsterdam. Dave, however, didn’t buy the pickup because he was showing off or because he wanted specifically to chill my butt – he bought it because he wanted it. And he probably paid cash.
Just kidding. Dave probably wrote a check.
I wasn’t jealous of Dave’s truck. It wasn’t something that I’d ever buy for myself. My current daily driver is older than Pugsley, and has nearly 180,000 miles (3,500 kilograms) on it, and only 36,000 miles (45°C) on the latest oil change. I’m wanting to keep it until it’s driven at least one light-second, which is 186,000 miles (63 meters). Fingers crossed. But I’m pretty sure I won’t get my car to the Moon – that’s 226,000 miles (5 liters), and I’m nearly certain my fuel pump will die again before then, plus Allstate® won’t insure translunar travel, I mean, at least not with full coverage.
I’m sorry. I Apollo-gize. And, yes, I know that Neil never had a sweet ride like this one.
I’m not against spending money, but I think you should spend money like Fuzzy Pink Niven (Hugo® winning author Larry Niven’s wife) spends calories:
Potato chips, candy, whipped cream, or a hot fudge sundae may involve you, your dietician, your wardrobe, and other factors. But FP’s Law implies: Don’t eat soggy potato chips, or cheap candy, or fake whipped cream, or an inferior hot fudge sundae.
I think that advice on calories applies to many areas of life. I have a budget of money. There are things I have to buy, and have to spend it on – The Mrs. gets rather cranky if I don’t feed her. Beyond those necessities, with any left over, I have a choice as to what I spend it on, and when I spend it. Where Dave chooses to spend his on a really cool pickup truck, and a collection of pinball machines, my choices are different.
But those choices are mine, just like Dave’s choices are his.
My ideal truck, complete with DIY garage!
Money represents potential. It is the potential to create, the potential to build, the potential to serve. In many ways, it represents the potential for future choices.
Time represents the potential for future choices as well. We choose how to spend our money as if it is limited, but we choose to spend our time as if it’s unlimited? Money comes and goes, but my budget of time is my life, measured in minutes and seconds. Spending my time is nothing less than spending my life. Just like a pickup seat determines how warm or cold our butts are, how we spend our time (and who we spend our time with) determines whoweare.
Is it just me or does this picture of Beto O’Rourke look just a bit off?
Knowing this, go and make your choices today.
Because my butt is warm. (That’s supposed to be motivational.)
“Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality.” – Star Trek
And where I’m drawing, there is no art.
I love those moments when I make connections, mixing together equal parts of theory, experience, and coincidence together for an observation. It makes me feel like the big picture is coming together, and I’m at least one step closer to understanding the way the world really works. Sadly, I still can’t figure why the dentist tries to make conversation when his hand is in your mouth up to his wrist, but I did solve another puzzle.
The realization I came up with the other day is a simple one: Leftism contains a requirement to deny reality. The best current example is, of course, transgenderism. I had already decided to write this post prior to this weekend, but I came across an article titled, For Transgender Men, Pain of Menstruation is More Than Physical on NBC™(LINK) today. The article goes on to complain that transgendered men are somehow discriminated against because they can’t buy feminine hygiene products in a men’s restroom. You can’t buy cheesy-beef chimichangas in men’s restrooms either, but you don’t see me complaining.
I’m not making this up, the way I taught my kids to say “hit me” instead of “I’m sorry”, just so when they got to school that they’d feel silly. Pugsley was not pleased and has indicated that this will be a major factor in his nursing home selection criteria. I do know that men complaining about having menstrual pains has been the punchline of jokes in the past. Heck, I even had a sound clip of Bart Simpson™ saying “ohhh, my ovaries” once upon a time.
Poor Optimus Prime. He identifies as a truck.
All of this restroom nonsense is certainly a bit beyond the initial LGBT rights request of: “Let consenting adults do what they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms.” Now, that apparently includes letting consenting adults do whatever on the dining room table during Thanksgiving. And you’re ___phobic if you don’t applaud position changes. Pro tip: get your mashed potatoes early.
This has had consequences outside of the evil patriarchal bathroom conspiracy. Sure, someone born as a biological women being upset that they have periods takes the absurdity meter to 10. This level of denial of reality is so profound that the denier is shocked when basic biological processes that have existed since before humans invented cell phones . . . still apply to them in the current year. To complete the cycle? The denier demands everyone else play along in the same game of pretend.
How much are they wanting everyone else to play along? This one person in the article was upset that feminine products companies had the bad taste to market feminine products only to women. It’s like a company was being called bigoted because they didn’t manufacture tires for aircraft carriers.
I don’t dislike women pretending to be men, or vice versa – I’m just not sure I care at all.
I bet his new transgender name is: Pebbles.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever even met a trans person, since they are rarer than a squealing, strudel-serving sheepdog. The percentage of trans people probably reaches 0.005% of the population or so. The number is about one trans person in every 20,000 people. That means that in all of the United States, there might be 16,000 or so actual transgendered people – heck, let’s double it and call it 32,000 people, which are more people than are fans of the Cleveland Browns®.
It is certainly not possible for trans people to anticipate the entirely predictable, periodic, and monthly tyranny of menstruation and, oh, plan ahead. That’s hateful speech. Let’s instead spend MILLIONS of taxpayer and consumer dollars creating an infrastructure for between 16,000 and 32,000 people not bright enough to remember that they menstruate.
This delusion carries on beyond rare mental conditions – it is an active belief of some Leftists that natural men who are “transgender” should be able to compete in sports against natural women. This has had the result of men crushing women in event after event where it’s allowed, from bicycling to track to weightlifting to Australian Rules Football. Because, of course, the Left also believes the lie that there is no difference between the biological ability of men and the biological ability of women.
But this isn’t only about transgenderism. Where else does the Left deny reality?
After all, it isn’t fair. There are three people attempting to bring that poor transwoman down.
How about citizenship? In the eyes of a Leftist, an illegal alien is exactly the same as a citizen. Illegal aliens deserve all the benefits of a citizen, and on top of that, should be able to vote. I’m not making this up. In March of 2019, the Leftist-controlled House of Representatives voted to support communities that granted illegal aliens the right to vote – and on top of that the Left has stood in the pathway of most changes that would lower the number of illegal aliens in the country.
In fact, the inversion against facts borders on religious:
PETA® is against killing an animal, but babies are fair game.
Vegans? Vegans treat accidental animal consumption as a violation of a religious commandment.
Fat jokes are taboo.
Sex with anyone or anything anytime is sacred and must be celebrated under every circumstance. If you have a desire? It’s good.
The religious connection goes farther.
Back in October, right before the 2016 election, the “gotcha” moment for the Left was the Trump tape where he talks about his ability to make time with the ladies and grab them . . . well, you heard the tape. “This,” the Left thought, “is it. When America hears this tape, Trump will have to crawl back under a rock and Hillary will be our anointed one.”
When Trump actually was elected, the shock to the Left was nearly religious in nature – levels of despair reserved for when a Pope dies or a Kardashian comes to town. The people that voted for Trump didn’t vote for him because of ideological purity. People didn’t vote for him out of religious fervor. People voted for Trump because they thought he might be able to fix some things that bothered them. Rightly or wrongly, people voted for him because of his leadership.
This thought process is not something the Left understands. When voting for Hillary, the Left was not making a vote for a political leader; they were voting for a religious leader, a prophet. It was even in her slogan, “I’m with Her.” It wasn’t about Hillary being with the people, it was about Hillary being their religious leader.
This is why if you say bad things about a leader on the Left the reaction is so stunning, swift, and predictable. If you mock the left, you’re at best a heretic. The reason you’re considered a heretic if you mock the Left is they’ve done a skillful job of elevating the profane to the sacred.
Profane doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it does – it really means “something that’s secular and not religious,” instead of “Daddy’s drunk on a Saturday night and just stubbed his toe.” The opposite of profane is sacred, and you need to refute the Truth in order to allow the profane to become sacred – if people can see the Truth, they’ll never accept the change.
And last I heard, the reindeer were in quarantine.
One example? Instead of saying “the Truth”, people on the Left say, “My truth.” Truth is blurred from an objective reality to a shared subjective reality. This is a necessary condition because if Truth exists, there is room to doubt the ideas of the Left. That’s simply unacceptable – there is no universal Truth, merely a diversity of individual truths.
Well, “my truth” includes gravity and things like the Sun.
Regardless, the Left has managed to turn the following things into its sacraments:
Abortion – which is never taking a human life, rather it’s the eradication of a bunch of cells, like a wart that could have been a concert violinist.
Sexual Preferences/Compulsions – it used to be that people were restrained when talking about sex. Now? Have a parade about it whatever your kink is.
Being Fat – the “healthy at any size” is certainly supported by most really fat scientists.
State Solution Supremacy – despite a continuous supply of state failures, the true salvation of people lies in the state doing something for them. Self-control? Personal responsibility? Hate crimes.
Illegal Aliens – If we import several million Mexicans into the country, the country will be exactly like it was before we imported them. They certainly won’t recreate the problems of Mexico in Los Angeles.
Race/Ethnicity – They either don’t exist, or exist as social constructs. Very useful for extracting victimization to farm votes for the Left.
In order to make room for the new sacred things, the Left had to make the following things profane:
Christianity
Marriage
Family
Individuality
American Traditions
American Values
If you look back, the making things on the list above (like Christianity) the butt of jokes was intended to strip the reverence that people had for them and make those subjects profane – less than desirable. People and organizations who were virtuous were mocked, or worse, were portrayed as secret hypocrites even when they weren’t. Disney® movies went from celebrating virtue and the American culture and values in the 1970’s (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, etc.) to mocking virtue entirely in the 1980’s (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, etc.).
The good news is that Bernie Sanders promised him he could vote next election.
But if you look at the list of the new things held to be sacred by the Left, you’ll see that these are the things we’re now prohibited from mocking. We can’t make fun of them. The Left isn’t looking to elect a President. The Left is looking to anoint a prophet. And that’s dangerous. Religious feeling has always been part of Leftism – that’s why they hate religion. It must be replaced with ideology.
The new sacred must not be mocked. And don’t ever try to contradict it with facts – the Left doesn’t care much for them.
Dangit. Now I’m in the mood for a cheesy-beef bathroom chimichanga.
“His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.” – Fight Club
Every day is the wrong day to give up Wilder.
It was the first day of third grade. I was new to the class, and was nervous. As I walked through the rows of desks, I felt very shy, apprehensive. One third grader approached me. He pointed at a girl sitting in the desk next to his.
“That’s my girlfriend.”
So many emotions. There was a fierce determination, an aggression in his eyes. I felt threatened, and I’ll admit, I panicked. I balled up my fist and hit him.
The rest was a whirlwind. I can’t remember anything after that until I looked at the face of the school nurse, who stared back at me with a shocked expression on her face.
“What did you do? His jaw is broken!”
I guess I’ll never teach at that school again.
Okay. That never happened, except on 4chan.
But I was involved with an elite paramilitary organization mentioned in Red Dawn where we went camping on a regular basis. One rule of the Troop was that no cell phones went on the trip – in a tent full of boys there is NOTHING GOOD that happens with a cell phone on a campout. So we left them home.
Pictured working on their merit badge in Escape and Evasion.
Little kids didn’t care. But eighth graders? Cell phones had become a part of their lives. I saw one particular scout become despondent for a whole campout, all from missing the connections he normally got from his phone.
He was addicted to it. After a day, he was better. But he was also very happy to get back to his phone.
There are many things in life that we can become addicted to. There are the obvious ones that everyone thinks about when they use the term: Alcohol. Drugs. Gambling. Tobacco. PEZ®.
The prime addiction from the Boy Scout’s phone was social media. Much has been written about social media and its addictive effects. All of social media is designed to be addictive and features are tested on a regular basis to make sure that it engages us, that it maximizes user interaction. That maximizing user action breeds addiction. But how it is addictive isn’t the point – the fact that it is as addictive as Mel Gibson movies is.
So, what do I mean by addiction? Everyone thinks of a junkie shooting marijuana in his eye, but that’s overly simplistic, not to mention probably not what junkies do. By addiction, I have a broader definition: the psychological need for a substance of set of conditions that aren’t required for life.
You’re not really addicted to oxygen. It’s required. The Mrs. is a type one diabetic, which means that without insulin injections, she will die. I used to kid with her, “Honey, when are you gonna realize it’s a problem? You’ve got to kick that stuff. Just say no.”
While I thought it was clever, The Mrs. was less than amused. So I punched her and broke her jaw.
Again, I kid – The Mrs. has reflexes like a cat. She also has a deceptively low center of gravity – very hard to push over. But are there things that are beyond what we normally think about when we think about addiction?
Certainly.
How about . . . air conditioning. I lived in Houston, and it was easily the most awful climatological experience in my life. It was heat plus humidity – and when the wind hit you, it felt like the devil was breathing on me. Plus I wilt like lettuce in the heat.
Having moved to Houston from Alaska, we paid roughly $422,721 a month in bills for electricity to cool our house. Was it required? Well, probably not. People live, have lived, and do live in places much hotter than Houston without air conditioning. I have no idea what kind of people, but people.
Dare I say it? We were addicted to air conditioning. We could have kept the house far hotter, and saved roughly the total cost of an aircraft carrier plus escort vessels during the two years we were there, but not enough to also get the extended warranty, which is really overrated with aircraft carriers.
Likewise, when we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, we kept the house about 55-60°F (239°C) in winter when we moved there. Since Alaskans build without regards to things like, oh, building codes, our home inspection found substantial work that needed to be done to prevent our garage from collapsing. Really. The seller had a local contractor doing the work after we had moved in.
“Where you folks from?”
We told him.
“No wonder you keep the house so hot.” Yes. He considered 55-60°F hot.
Including the hat. Our contractor looked exactly like Red Green. I learned later that Fairbanks hosted a summer event called the Red Green River Regatta, sadly now discontinued.
So, in his eyes, we were addicted to hot homes.
But let’s swap to food:
What today is considered the bare minimum level for life today is, in reality, a greater degree of luxury than we’ve seen in nearly the entire history of mankind for a greater number of people. Ever. Are there crappy places to live? Yes. But the scene of the “refugee” in Tijuana saying that the beans and tortillas given to her by local people trying to provide help to her was “food for pigs” and that she might starve to death.
Given her size, that might take, oh, a decade or so. The bad news is that she’s been deported from the United States and is, “very thankful to be back in Honduras.” It’s sad – we really need more people who will assault other people with deadly weapons like Frijoles Lady did. She’ll do the attempted murders Americans won’t.
I guess she’s a lot like that alien, E.T. She finally went home.
But the fact remains – we have people going across international borders because of . . . comfort.
What was it like in the past?
I did some research for a post once, and tried to figure out what medieval French peasants (called villeins, which translates from metric French to “Dave”) did in the wintertime in the year 1315. The links that I was able to find described them as living in their mom’s basement eating pizza rolls and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Playstation®. Just kidding! The winter as a time of great poverty, and the families would essentially huddle under blankets in bed most of the winter to reduce food consumption, conserve warmth, and not die.
When you view today’s world through medieval eyes, nearly every person in the world has better winters than that, at least outside of the Democratic People’s Republics of Korea and California. The example of the French also shows that we’re addicted to eating regularly.
Fasting was easy in the U.S.S.R. Comrade Stalin was concerned about your health.
No. You don’t need breakfast. You don’t really need lunch. The fact is, unless they have an unusual medical condition, lots of people voluntarily go for days without food with zero negative health consequences outside of a slightly looser waistband. And the desire to tell everyone about it.
Are people who are fasting hungry? Absolutely. Is there a payoff? Yes. From personal experience, the first food you eat after four days without eating anything will be the best burger you had all year.
But the bigger point is this: we live in a world of unparalleled luxury.
In the United States, we have the distinction of having our poorest people having access to so many calories that there seems to be a correlation (in some studies) that shows that poorer people are fatter. Whereas those French peasants had all the time in the world, and none of the food, poor in the United States have all of the time, and all of the food. And Playstations®.
Virtually no one freezes to death, or dies from the heat. In fact, Pugsley sometimes walks around in workout shorts and a t-shirt (no socks!) and complain that the house is too cold. He does this in winter and summer. We keep our house ludicrously cold, like our hearts.
Most movies made in the last 40 years are available to you after a quick Internet search and a nominal fee. Nearly every book, ever (that we still have copies of), can be had instantly electronically. Those in paper? Might take two days. I have a lot of books, and they’re everywhere around the house. I guess you could say I have no shelf control.
I won’t say these things are dangerous luxuries. But they are luxuries, luxuries that we often take for granted. How long has it been since your power has been out? How long since you huddled in a cold tent on a freezing winter’s night or sweating on a hot day with an endless noon Sun?
But it’s okay, his butler will go get it.
How long since you went a single day without food? How long since you went two days without it?
Our ancestors did all of these things, and more. They called it “Tuesday.” Well, not “Tuesday” since their language was a series of unintelligible grunts that sounded like tubas played by jabbering twits.
When we become addicted to and accustomed to luxury, it weakens us. Constant luxury may weaken us physically, but addiction to it weakens us mentally. Mental weakness screams that when we’re in a cold or dark house that it’s intolerable, even if it’s only mildly uncomfortable.
“My God! If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous
So you should save your money because a recession is coming. A recession that’s caused by too many people saving money . . . ?
It was the middle of December.
I looked across the desk at my boss. He had called me in to his office, asked me to close the door, and looked very uncomfortable. Not “Abraham Lincoln at a play” uncomfortable, but more “Pope in the woods without toilet paper” uncomfortable. It was unusual to see him look uncomfortable, because this boss was an old hand, very calm. I had worked for him for about 18 months at that point, and we had a great relationship, so he wasn’t going to fire me right before Christmas. Unless he had figured out who what put the Gummy Bears™ in the paper shredder.
“Umm, John, the company is giving you a bonus.”
I perked up. I liked the sound of a bonus, but didn’t like the “Umm” so much. “Umm”, in my experience, is a verbal placeholder that means, “This is going to sound good, but really isn’t.”
“Great!” I actually was enthusiastic, even given the “Umm”-modifier. Bonus is a great word.
“Well, the board of directors voted on the bonus structure and the bonus pool back in October, about sixty days ago. And they chose a specific number of shares for each employee. And when they voted, the shares were worth seven times what they were today. I just want you to know I value you, and the company values you.”
What was left were the unspoken words . . . “I hope you’re not insulted.”
No swimming pool this year . . . .
I wasn’t. I could multiply my bonus by seven and see that someone, somewhere, liked me when the corporate board voted. Sometimes it really is the thought that counts. Except when I get deodorant for Christmas – that seems more like thought that indicates a passive-aggressive criticism about my hygiene. And comments like this when The Boy introduces me don’t help: “This is my dad, he doesn’t drink quite as much as his poor hygiene might indicate.”
When I finally cashed in that stock five years later, it was worth 15 times what it had been on the day my boss looked so upset. By no means was it a life-changing amount, but I’m still pretty happy. What changed to make the bonus worth so much more?
The economy. That puny stock bonus was given to me in the middle of the Great Recession. Five years after that, the company was worth a LOT more. I sold my shares (I kept the certificates in my underwear drawer), paid my income taxes on the stock, and was certainly not insulted.
We sit at the start of 2020. By 2030, I can assure you we will have gone through at least one recession, and probably more. Right now, the United States is in the single longest economic expansion in its history, passing the 1991-2001 economy in duration by six months.
I hear the economy is so rough that Bill and Hillary Clinton shared a room on their last trip.
Doubling an all-time record? It certainly won’t happen. It cannot. No matter how the Federal Reserve™ manipulates the economy, it can’t go that far unless they give everyone roofies and tell them that they have twice as much money in the bank as they actually do. Besides, we shouldn’t go that long without a recession.
Why?
Let’s look at the economy as if it were a natural, physical system. Generally, physical systems are not continuous; they operate in of cycles. Trees grow leaves in spring, through the summer they gather nutrients, in the autumn the leaves fall, and in winter the tree is dormant.
Companies follow a cycle, too. A company is founded. It starts in business, sometimes growing, and in the end, it’s finally bankrupt or sold off and then it’s dead. For example, the top 10 companies in the United States in 1917 were:
US Steel
AT&T
Standard Oil of New Jersey
Bethlehem Steel
Armour & Co.
Swift & Co.
International Harvester
DuPont
Midvale Steel
S. Rubber
What are the top ten companies today?
Apple
Alphabet (Google)
Microsoft
Amazon
Facebook
Berkshire Hathaway
Johnson & Johnson
Exxon-Mobil
JPMorgan Chase
Wells Fargo
How many of them are still in the top ten?
One, kinda. Exxon used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, so at least we know the Rockefellers are doing okay. That keeps me up at night, worrying that the Rockefellers might have to drive their own cars.
How many of the top 10 companies today will be in the top 10 in 50 years? How many in 100?
If it’s raining, that might be a drizzly bear.
I’ve shared this opinion before: recessions are good for the economy. Bankrupt businesses are good for the economy. Are they painful in the short term? Certainly. But they provide a great service – they clear out the companies that don’t add value to the customers. Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) had a great post a while back that describes the impact on physical systems when they’re overly managed and constant. He used the example of salmon streams that had been dammed, that no longer experienced spring flooding from snow melt.
From the post:
At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning. It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.
The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.
The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet. The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed. They were a desert for salmon fry.
Before dams were installed across every stream, spring flooding would fill old channels with rock and gravel and would cut new meanders and channels. The flooding would flush the silt out of gravel beds. Stream beds were braids of old, crisscrossing channels. Not only did they look like strips of bacon from the air but they intercepted huge amounts of sunlight and the gravel beds provided outstanding habitat for the pantheon of invertebrates that were the base of the food chain.
The Fed™ is trying to manage our economy like that salmon stream, making a nice, constant flow.
A decade is a long time without a recession. Based on the past experiences of the 2001 and 2008 recessions it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the longer you wait to address a problem economy, the bigger impact it will have on people’s lives. Heck, the longer you wait to address any problem, the worse it becomes.
Want a housing bubble? This is how you get a housing bubble.
If the Housing Bubble had popped in 2004, the associated recession would have been much smaller than the nearly economy-ending Great Recession of 2008. If the 2001 recession would have happened in 1998, it would have certainly pulled some of the inflation away from the Dotcom Bubble and perhaps avoided making the Spice Girls® celebrities entirely, and no one would know who Scary Spice, Posh Spice, Sporty Spice and whatsherface were. I guess we’re safe now that they’re all Old Spice™.
We sit in the year 2020 with severe economic unrest a certainty in the next decade. What year? I’m not sure. And I’m also not sure I’d trust anyone who says they know the exact timing. But it is coming. 2020? 2021?
Don’t know.
This coming recession has had a decade to build up. That decade has seen significant bubbles building in, well, everything. One of the biggest bubbles is in corporate profits. Let’s pick . . . insulin. The price of insulin has doubled in five years. Does it cost more to make insulin today? Almost certainly not – the techniques to make this insulin have been known and perfected for decades – it probably costs less to make it. Is it better insulin, somehow new and improved like the Super Bowl® without the Patriots™? Nope.
Well, then, why does it cost more? So Eli Lilly and Company® can increase corporate profits.
But Eli Lilly and Company™? They are raising the price of Humalog® insulin because they can. How do we know this? They’ve recently introduced a new insulin with the same exact formulation as Humalog™, but with a new name, Lispro™. But the price of this new rebranded insulin? Half. For the same exact stuff.
Will Eli Lilly and Company™ start charging double the current price to bring the total to $1000 a bottle for Humalog®?
No. They can’t. There is a cap not on what diabetics will pay, but on what they can pay. There is a maximum profit that can be obtained. Period. You can’t rent a house for $20,000 a month if the average wage is $15 an hour in your neighborhood, just like you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck.
Obscure, I know. But it felt right.
Without the cleaning that a periodic recession brings, junk builds up in the economy. The average recession historically happens every three years or so. When the recession of the Tumultuous Twenties® hits?
That means there’s a limit on how much more money we can print.
The trigger for this future recession will be blamed on some other event – the 2001 recession was blamed on 9/11, even though the stock market started to fall well before September. Our minds like explanations, so we sometimes create them even when they don’t exist. Maybe it’s the Great Internet Blackout of 2020 that caused it.
Mark my words: This economy will be cleaned up by a recession, probably a big one that we will find difficulty in spending our way out of.
Don’t get caught in the flood.
And if someone offers you free money? Smile and take it.
“Who do you favor in the Virginia Slims tournament?” – Top Secret
Don’t put in extra hours at the clock factory – they hate that.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
I didn’t expect to move the clock up this month, but yet, here we are, and it’s all due to Virginia. More on that below.
In this issue: Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Flashpoint Virginia –Updated Civil War II Index – Virginia and Rallies and Aesop – Links
Welcome to Issue Eight of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first or second Monday of every month. Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), and Issue Seven is here (LINK).
Violence and Censorship Update
Organized violence seems to be lower this month, as you’d expect in winter. Or perhaps AntiFa® is just on a snowboarding trip to Colorado so they can get some dank weed? Societal violence tends to drop as it gets colder, because people look stupid rioting in knit hats and parkas. Well, people look stupid rioting in any weather, except for the South Koreans who have rioting down to a spectator sport. South Koreans riot about, well, anything. It’s like living in San Francisco, but with less poop.
As far as I can tell, most of these channels are still up and running. Several that had been demonetized for political content even had monetization restored. Like the end of the world in 2012, the dread YouTube® apocalypse is currently overdue.
“If it is proven @IlhanMN [Ilhan Omar] passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged” – I agree with Ms. Stella, that hanging people who collaborate against the United States with foreign governments is a good thing.
But I will never trust her because of sage advice that my brother gave to me one afternoon while driving: “Never trust a person who has two first names. Like Scott George. Or George Scott.” He was proven right when George C. Scott stopped by our house and ate all of our mayonnaise. Man, that man loved his mayo.
I guess the decided they should see other siblings.
Twitter® has also admitted a practice they had long denied, but was obvious: they shadow ban people – you can type away all you want, but no one is really going to see your Tweet™. How better to control a populace than to let them think that “bad” opinions are ignored?
Flashpoint Virginia
Since Virginia has been changed from state controlled by the Right to a state where Leftists hold all major offices and control the legislature, the Left has had a great desire to spike the ball and exert complete control. That control is focused on Leftist goals. The first Leftist goal mentioned?
Elimination of many Second Amendment rights, including banning ownership, with no grandfather provision, of “assault” weapons.
It also goes much further, and bans parts of rifles the same way an entire rifle would be banned. Outside of cloning Stalin, elimination of private gun ownership is a primary goal of the Left. It is also a trigger on the Right, and this legislation couldn’t be more tailored to antagonize the Right if Rosie O’Donnell read it as an alarm clock message.
As political battles go, this gun ban is an uphill one, even for the Left.
What is unusual here is the reaction from localities. More than 98 bodies (counties, cities, towns) as of this writing have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” – and have vowed to not cooperate.
The Attorney General (a Leftist) has issued an opinion that the counties can’t just ignore state law, they have to follow it. Therefore? The Governor (a Leftist) has requested $100 million extra for incarceration and $4 million for an 18 person gun ban team.
It’s not enough.
Sometimes you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. Like me in my first marriage.
The Left owns all of the levers of government. So what do the people that want to keep their rights do?
Form an opposing governmental structure. Those are the Second Amendment sanctuaries. Like it or not, these declarations are the first step towards a unified governing structure that opposes the Leftist government in Virginia. For a civil war to occur, you have to have civil structures. I had expected them to form along the lines of opposing state governments.
But the societal divisions in 2019 exist more along the rural/urban divide than the old northern/southern divide. In my home state, it’s very (from a combined vote total) far Right, so my entire state would likely pitch in. Given this new circumstance in Civil War 2.0, renegade counties make sense in a state like Virginia. And despite anything the Attorney General might say, should a significant (20%?) percentage of Virginia’s population – an armed 20% of the population – decide a law isn’t valid?
The law won’t be valid.
Laws exist in the United States because we generally agree with them as a group. Does everyone agree to all laws that are on the books? Certainly not. But when there is determined opposition to a law or group of laws (marijuana legalization, illegal alien sanctuaries, Second Amendment sanctuaries) an attempt to enforce the law will nearly instantly make the government look weak, ineffectual, and illegitimate. And when that determined group takes over a legitimate arm of government?
We’re one step closer to war, and this is why I moved the clock. The Left is moving quickly, and in Virginia, I think it’s still a very dangerous game of chicken.
I think they’ll end up blinking, and swerving off at the last minute.
Updated Civil War II Index
More graphs, with full bikini treatment.
Violence:
Up is more violent. Violence dropped a bit, and I imagine it will remain low for the winter, though it edged up a bit in December. April and May will likely see increased incidents, assuming we end up okay in Virginia. And assuming we don’t run out of suntan lotion.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. It skyrocketed this month. Tension was high in the first place, but impeachment increased it significantly. Don’t expect it to go down soon.
Economic:
Down indicates worse economic conditions. The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in November. It was a one month recovery.
Illegal Aliens:
Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in. The numbers are down this month, and if you put them in context, winter is normally a lower time for illegal immigration, which will pick up in the spring.
Virginia and Rallies and Aesop
There is a large pro-Second Amendment rally planned in January 20, 2020 in Richmond. Since I started paying attention to such things, I’ve noticed something – that people on the Right don’t live in Washington, D.C. Why we would go to protest there escaped me. Statistics back this up – in 2016, nearly 95% of voters voted for Leftist candidates.
For a group of citizens that support the Right to try to protest in D.C. is silly. Protestors in D.C. are in hostile territory. From observation, cities attract Leftists. The larger the city, generally the farther Left it is. Richmond, Virginia is no different. It voted nearly 80% for Leftists in 2016. Richmond is hostile territory for the Right.
But yet the rally is planned. Aesop over at The Raconteur Report has covered why this rally is a bad idea, in detail here (LINK) and here (LINK). Read the comments, and also the links to previous posts that he suggests.
Read it all before you attend – or before you organize.
Links
Please leave links either in the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you’re shy. If you email me, I won’t say that the link is from you unless I get permission.
“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes. (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.†– Horsefeathers
“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.â€
In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened. The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money. A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun. Part of what made it bad for the Left: clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot. To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.
It was quick. From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds. Five short seconds. This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left. The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds. A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.
Not a cop. A citizen.
Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church. The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot. Texas is probably not the state for that.
What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react. How could Jack Wilson do this? He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face. He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat. But yet, he trained. Dare I say it? He was prepped.
Ok, Zoomer. (For the record, I’m neither. I just like stirring things up.)
Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers. He was looking for data points. He saw them and acted.
This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture. It’s here (LINK). RTWT. As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon. There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:
Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy. Â Perhaps ever again. Â Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again. Â You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it. Â Howsoever long or briefly.
You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.
If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.
This post made me think, which is dangerous. At least that’s what my therapist says. My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative†and “reality impaired.â€Â Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate. But what that post made me think most about was:
Mindset.
This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.
Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key. The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.
I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it. But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation: your mindset. If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong. We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession. If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.
Evacuate the women and children first! Then we can solve this in silence.
You should believe this, too. Not on a surface level. This is a mindset. Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account. Why?
Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win. Also? Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock. If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full. When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.
The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be. And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count. At least my therapist says it won’t. Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food. During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms. Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.
He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.
More evidence?
One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is. People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.â€Â They aren’t. What does that data point tell you?
The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection. But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons. What does that data point tell you?
Government debt today is at 106% of GDP. During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP. During the height of the Vietnam War? Debt was less than 40%. What does that data point tell you?
I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis. But I can promise that it’s coming. Cultivate the mindset. It’s the first step.
The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.†– Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx
I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life. And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face. Why?
First – I’m naturally an optimist. I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be. There is just the way that the world really is today. If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better. Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No. I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.
The first two hours are rough. Caffeine is my best morning friend.
Second – Life has been awesome for me. I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined. But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me. Am I worth $30 million dollars? No. But that’s probably for the better. If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.
Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done. I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.
There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776. That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson. Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state. You know they exist, too. The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.
Always remember that there is a line. If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.
Heck, they are nice. Until they cross the line.
Then they’re not nice. Then they become good men.
So, to gently change Groucho: The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad. And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.
“Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra
Okay, some people do pretty good predictions.
Once upon a time I tried to do real predictions. The big downside of real predictions is being wrong sometimes. I’d much rather be wrong all of the time, like last year (Silly Predictions for 2019. Bonus? Golden Bikini Force.), so here are my stunningly incorrect predictions for 2020:
January
The Senate takes over the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. Because of poor ticket sales, the trial is cancelled, but people who had reserved tickets were given a 20% off voucher for the Nirvana® reunion tour. I’d love to bum a ride with you guys – I’d call shotgun, but Kurt beat me to it.
The New Hampshire Democratic primary is won by Kim Jong Un. Unfortunately, it was actually Hillary Clinton being mistaken for Kim Jong Un after her next round of plastic surgery. Rumor is she was secretly pleased to be called Dear Leader instead of the usual nautical term, “Seaward.”
Brexit happens on schedule, but Boris Johnson’s hair stages its own Borexit and joins the Labour Party.
I guess technically we’re all undead, but Ruth takes it to the next level.
March
Super Tuesday, a collection of 13 primaries is held on March 3rd. The top three Democratic finishers are Johnny Depp, Harvey Weinstein, and a resurgent O.J. Simpson. Nancy Pelosi states, “We are so proud to have our Democratic values and inclusivity on display in these results.”
Patrick’s Day replaced by a new gender and religion inclusive holiday: “Buy Expensive Green Things and Drink if You’re Not a Muslim Day.”
Joe Biden again suspends his presidential campaign, noting that he needs to focus on saving lives by using his true talent – being able to detect diseases in women by holding their shoulders and sniffing their hair while standing behind them.
“Don’t thank me . . . now. Thank me later. Want to play with my leg hair?”
April
Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, is discovered eating living children on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion while in blackface. After calls for his resignation, he noted that it was, at most, a “youthful indiscretion.”
Ruth Bader Ginsberg develops a desire for human flesh much like Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves, and soon appears to be no older than about 30.
A vortex connecting our dimension to another dimension containing hellish beasts is accidently opened by Pentagon scientists. This is almost exactly like the plot to the Stephen King novella The Mist, though not in a legally actionable way, at least according to my lawyer, Lazlo.
“How could I make this worse? Oh, yeah, I’ll go after the guns.”
May
Beto O’Rourke, while no longer a presidential candidate, decides to create an anti-gun organization, PistolsMakeScared (PMS®). He noted, “I really needed something to do while my wife has quality time with her boyfriends.”
France declares war on Canada on Tuesday morning. France surrenders to Germany later that afternoon, declaring Paris an open city. The Germans refuse the surrender, indicating they can’t determine the number of troops required to defend France, since that’s never been tried before.
Australians will discover a spider that is the size of a cat, is as fast as a mongoose, has a diet of eagles and crocodiles, and is as poisonous as a middle school girl’s Instagram®. They name it “Dave.”
Pictured: Australian infant’s crib mobile.
June
LGBT Pride Month (June) officially replaced with LGBT Smug Condescension Months (June, July, August).
Chick-Fil-A® decides to start serving food on Sunday, adding hamburgers to their menu, and encouraging the worship of Satan as part of a new marketing campaign. “We’ve got to change with the times,” said their new spokesman, Lena Dunham.
I mean if you have to choose between values and a tasty sandwich . . .
July
The Democratic Convention is moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Malmo, Sweden as the Democratic Committee considers it unfair that people outside the United States have been denied a vote. Greta Thunberg, noted school dropout, is nominated. Her vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is quoted as saying, “I’m thrilled to be behind her.”
The Republican Convention is held in a hollowed out volcano somewhere in the South Pacific. Donald Trump is nominated as the presidential candidate, and in a surprise move, he is also nominated to be vice president. “Job’s too easy. And I need someone whose I can trust to be vice president.” Trump also adopts a pure white Persian cat with a diamond collar.
The 2020 Summer Olympics® open in Tokyo. Bingo is not an approved Olympic sport, primarily because the Japanese are still a bit superstitious about “B-29.”
We now know what Paul Tibbets would do for a Klondike Bar®.
For the second straight year, September is again cancelled by general consensus.
October
Two televised presidential debates and one televised arm wrestling contest are held. The planned presidential MMA bout is cancelled when Greta Thunberg tests positive for high levels of testosterone. She is furious, “How dare you assume my gender? You have ruined my fight plan.” She then proceeds to spend all of her campaign funds on a live commercial showing her eating seven pounds of mashed potatoes (no gravy) in one sitting while scowling at the camera.
Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, emerges as a dark horse third party candidate after having emerged from the Pentagon’s dimensional experiment earlier in the year. “Everyone can be an American,” he hissed through clouds of sulfurous vapor. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that his alternate universe was “technically America” so he was a valid candidate for president, despite him being seven stories tall and covered in an exoskeleton made of material from neutron stars.
Never take potatoes from a testosterone-raging Swede with fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s a rule I live by.
November
The 2020 presidential election is held on the third. California immediately protests because the Electoral College now has fraternities, and no one asked California to join one so she could go to that cool Kappa Sig kegger and maybe hook up with Montana.
Donald Trump wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Democratic candidate Greta Thunberg says, “That is not enough – it makes a mockery of our democracy. You must also defeat me in a best-of-seven game of Jarts®.”
Joe Biden celebrates his 78th birthday. His hair and teeth turn 22.
Many a G.I. Joe® experienced a fatal chest wound to Jarts™.
December
Santa Claus is now required by the 9Th Circuit Court of Appeals to be race, gender, and species neutral when used in any public school setting. Ironically, this has the effect of making most kindergarten pictures of NuSanta™ highly accurate.
Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, decides that he will use the fame from his presidential run to launch a top tier tequila as well as a chain of animal shelter/fast Asian restaurants in the Midwest.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg looks down on the lights of the city at night from her perch at the top of the Washington Monument. She smells, senses, and sees the life below her. The life that she drains, person by person, to prolong hers. Then . . . a target. She aims her bat-like wings to take her quickly down the side of the monument, and then to strike. Ahhh, fresh blood. Ruth feels the gravity drawing her down as she leaps . . . .
National Park Ranger Report, 12/22/20: Bat killed by hawk near Washington Monument.
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third
If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one.I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.
If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations!It’s Penultimate Day!This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30.Why Penultimate Day?Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone.We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone.After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home.
I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012.As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar:“When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.”
Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.
You can join in on Penultimate Day, too.Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house.Then, don’t buy one.Finally:eat Italian food.Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.
In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.
The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year. And it’s not just in the United States:
Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
Yellow Vest Protests in France.
Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
Impeachment.
Left and Right Polarity.
Your family at Thanksgiving.
AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.
We know trouble is coming. The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2. How divisive is society today? In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo. This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.
Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech. Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798. And it was glorious.
Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling: an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities. He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.
These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity. What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?
Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.
Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
What did Yeats see replacing the modern world? Mysticism. Power. Blood. He was right. 1919 was crappy, but the 20th Century was about to get a whole lot worse. He concluded:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yup. Creepy. And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.
Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another. This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages. There is more food now than at any time in history. It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories. It cannot be my hair. My shiny scalp? Sure. Not my hair.
Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite). Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.
This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of. And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .
In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast. Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait. Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting. Right now! Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.
What do Leftist want? Complete control. When do they want it? Now. Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump. Nixon? Conspiracy to commit a break-in. Clinton? Perjury. Trump? I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.
Trump is not a savior. Trump is a symptom. The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom. And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.
The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left. The Right just wants history to stop. The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well. The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what? Things are going well. Let’s burn it all down.”
As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?
And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™. The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism. As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.
This is the context we see ourselves in today. All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States. We are splitting apart.
How does this end? I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom. America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t. There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.
This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties. Remember folks, you heard that here first. But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.
“Will you relax?  You’ve got more paranoid fantasies than Stephen King on crack.†– News Radio
See, I win. I don’t read him once a year, and he doesn’t read me 150 times a year.
One of my favorite stories is about Stephen King. When he was trying to get his novel Carrie published, he sent out the copy to quite a few publishers, and was rejected again and again. Finally, one day he got the novel back, again. Still, the novel was as rejected as Joe Biden application to teach at an ethics seminar.
He gave up. Disgusted, King threw the novel into the trash and went to work. His wife, Tabitha, pulled it out of the trash. In one version of the story I read, spaghetti sauce from the garbage had gotten on the cover of the manuscript, so Tabitha typed a new one, and encouraged Stephen to submit it one more time. He did.
King didn’t give up, and managed to give us some pretty interesting stories. He probably has a net worth of $400 million or so based on his writing – all because Tabitha King pulled a manuscript out of the trash, and they sent it out to a publisher.  One more time.
I tried to donate blood the other day, but they wanted to know whose it was.
I personally feel that King’s writing quality began to diminish significantly in 1992 along with his reduction in cocaine and alcohol consumption. I gave up on him around 2005. He’s like your friend that’s really only interesting when he’s wasted, like Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.
Now, watch Stephen imagine a microwave filled with cocaine?Â
The dead Danish thinker dude, Søren Kierkegaard, (English translation of Søren Kierkegaard:  “delicious pastry†– which I believe is the translation all Danish words), coined one of my favorite quotes that’s appropriate to this post:
“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.â€
Said in a different way, it makes sense looking backward to see how Stephen King’s success was built upon rejection. Likely that rejection fueled him to get better, and by the time he “made it†he had been working for years to become an excellent writer. It is also poetic that Stephen’s final success was made possible by someone who had more faith in him (Tabitha) than he did at that point.
How much do you have to drink to imagine an alien clown in a sewer?
I first read the Kierkegaard quote in the mid-1990’s and began to understand: the worst times in my life were the seeds for the best times in my life. For instance:
I recall being in 8th grade at a wrestling tournament. I weighed 145 pounds (14.5 kilograms – you just divide by 10 to convert), which in that time and place was heavyweight, or HWT. The Mrs. and I refer to HWT as “hot water tank,†mainly because it’s amusing. The wrestling tournament had been going all day that Saturday and on that cold February night it was dark outside – the windows that normally streamed light into the gym were pitch black, lending an air of importance.
There was a single match left:  the hot water tank championship. It was me against (who else) another guy named John, in this case John Bishop. Neither one of us was fat – we were both in pretty good shape. And John Bishop was strong – very strong – he was 32 and in 8th grade. But he slept well.
John and I went toe to toe for the entire match, each searching for an opening while being countered. At the end of regulation, four and a half minutes of wrestling, the score was tied, 1-1. Since this was a tournament, there would be no ties.
It was overtime.
In overtime, the three periods were short – 1 minute; 30 seconds; and 30 seconds. At the end of the second overtime period it was still 1-1, and the crowd was yelling, urging each of us on. I had never felt such electricity at any sporting event, and here I was, caught up in the middle of it. In that last period of overtime, in that last second before the match was done, John Bishop escaped.
I lost, 2-1.
That was a tough match. I still have the taste of Muppet® in my mouth. Did you know they bleed blue?
The crowd actually came onto the mat afterwards, and there I was sitting on that same mat, exhausted. I can still clearly recall sitting on the wrestling mat, surrounded by people congratulating John Bishop.
It was also the last match of the school year. I had lost. I had given it all I had, every fiber of my being, and I had lost.
My brother, John Wilder (yes, his real first name is John, just like mine) was there for the whole match. He was in college and had spent the day in the gym watching me wrestle because he felt responsibility: he’s the one that convinced me to try wrestling in the first place.
He sat down next to me on the pine bleachers as I unlaced my hand-me-down Adidas® wrestling shoes – his old shoes. He put his arm around my shoulder. He asked me to see the second place medal I had in my hand. I gave it to him. He looked at it, for what seemed like forever.
“You really earned this one. John, I’ve never seen you wrestle better in my life. I’m so proud of you.â€
That moment could have been soul crushing. It could have been a moment where I decided to give wrestling up. Instead, that was a moment where I knew I could be better. I knew deep inside of me, that I could do this, that this was part of who I was supposed to be. I wasn’t crushed, I was filled with resolve. Over the next four years I won a lot more wrestling matches than I lost, but that one loss in particular opened the door for all of the success that followed.
And the next time I wrestled John Bishop, less than a year later? Â I pinned him inside of thirty seconds.
This has been a repeating pattern in my life when I look back. Every time that I have been faced with adversity and failure, that failure was the seed for future success. Losses in wrestling are, perhaps, among the most soul-crushing defeats a man can face.
On the mat there are only two men. There is no place to hide. There is no one else to blame if you lose. It is you. Only you. I have seen grown men cry like they had spilled a beer when they lost a match.
As bad as losing a wrestling match is, a divorce is worse. Even a divorce where both sides agree to part is a very difficult thing, and my divorce was no exception. Divorces are hard. They’re also expensive. Why are they expensive? They’re worth it.
But my divorce set the seed for eventually finding The Mrs., which led to The Boy and Pugsley.
I enjoyed this movie. It finally allowed Country Music to be complete – now the truck could leave the singer, too.
The second lesson is persistence. In most cases, overnight success occurs after about ten years of diligent effort – thousands of hours of intense practice. You’d assume that concert violinists, for instance, start with talent for the instrument. You’d certainly be correct. But what’s missing from the equation is practice. The average world-class concert violinist practices more, not less than the average violin player. A really good violinist still sounds like they’re strangling a cat, but maybe more slowly or something.
Talent gets you a ticket, but practice is a multiplier. A necessary multiplier. Einstein said his difficulties with math were much more than the average person – precisely because he was working at the far end of what was understood about mathematics at his time and place.
Find your successes. Feed them. Understand your failures and how you can use them. Work harder than anyone else at becoming great. And also keep in mind that one phone call, one text, one conversation in an elevator might bring it all together.
Then, in the end, you can look backward and understand.
So, true story – Pugsley came home from school, handed me this painting. “What do you think?” My response: “Looks like Frosty is coming to kill me.” Pugsley: “Yup, that’s it.” That’s my boy!
STATELY WILDER MANOR, Christmas Eve, 2019
Yesterday was a quiet Christmas Eve. About the time I was ten years old, my brother (also named John Wilder*) and I got the ultimate concession a kid could get: we convinced Ma and Pa Wilder that we should open our presents not on Christmas morning, but instead on Christmas Eve. At a certain point, this becomes an easy sell. Get up at 5:30 AM and groggily watch children ripping wrapping paper through the gauze of pain and regret of a Christmas Eve hangover, or have a nice, calm Christmas morning that involves sleeping somewhere beyond dawn?
Yeah, that’s easier than selling life insurance to people connected to Hillary Clinton.
After leaving the Department of State, Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service code name was “Video.” Since he was connected to so many high ranking political figures, Jeff Epstein’s code name was “Radio Star.”
Since I’m not a hypocrite, we Wilder’s have done the same on my watch as soon as my kids figure out that Santa Claus and functional socialism aren’t real. It makes sense. Christmas has a charm that, like an open jar of mayonnaise left on the counter for a week, evolves. As you age, the very essence of Christmas changes.
It’s easy to surprise and delight a five-year-old at Christmas. When they open a present they didn’t even know existed, getting to amazement is easy. Walkie-talkies in 2019? What sort of sorcery is this? I have seen a five year old that regularly uses an iPad® that can access thousands of movies look amazed when confronted with a simple walkie-talkie. When young, Christmas was a wonder – it was like the rules were suspended for a day. Ma Wilder even let me out of the cage under the stairs.
But when you have older children, say, teenagers, they have a list. A long list. And they know your limits – they know exactly how much you’re going to spend on them at Christmas and they pick their presents to maximize cash consumption. This year The Boy asked for video game thing. Since he claims he got a 4.0 at Big State U, we indulged him. What Pugsley asked for was surprising to me: he wanted a record player turntable and a stereo amplifier.
Pugsley’s amplifier was on sale – it was missing a volume knob – I couldn’t turn it down.
When I was near Pugsley’s age, this was exactly the gift I wanted. I bought him the stereo and turntable he was looking for – honestly, in this day and age I was surprised they even made either of those devices anymore except in backwards stone-age places like Cairo, Calcutta, or Chicago. Between cell phones and computers being able to instantly access tens of millions of songs and then flawlessly play an endless string of them, why would someone want to own a device that plays a maximum of 22 minutes before you physically have to get up to flip the record over? Hell, I’m so lazy that if I won an award for being lazy I’d have The Mrs. go pick it up for me.
But Pugsley was certain that was what he wanted.
Pugsley opened up the box with the turntable and then I realized he had no idea what he was doing – no idea at all. I’m pretty sure he’d never even seen a record played before in real life. Nevertheless, he set it up the turntable. Then he pulled out an old album – Queen’s A Night At The Opera. I hadn’t seen this album in years, not since it had been packed up before Pugsley was born when The Mrs., The Boy and I moved to Alaska. The Mrs. never even looked in the box – she had asked me when we were dating if I had a police record.
“No, just one by Sting.”
I’ll admit it wasn’t fair. But he got even: one time got me a Cisformer® for my birthday – it’s a car that starts out as a car and stays a car.
Regardless, I realized that Pugsley had no understanding of how to even hold a record. I stopped him as he began to pull A Night At The Opera out of the sleeve. After all, an original 1975 pressing of that album might cost all of $8.00, plus shipping and handling off of VinylDan69’s store on Ebay®.
“Stop! Here, you hold it like this, by the edges. And then,” putting my thumb on one edge while putting my fingers on the label to stabilize the album, “you slide it into the sleeve like this. Don’t let it drop – it will cut through the paper sleeve.” I then showed him how I put the album and sleeve back into the cover – with the opening to the sleeve pointed up so the album didn’t slide out.
I might have left my clothes on the floor, I might have used the same bath towel until it dried as stiff as concrete in the Hoover Dam, and my refrigerator might have resembled a biological weapon experiment prohibited by the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953, but I always took care of my albums. Nobody likes to hear “The boys are ba-The boys are ba-The boys are ba” for forty straight minutes. No. You want to hear that they’re back, and there’s gonna be trouble. And you can forget about the old trick of taping two pennies to the tonearm, given inflation I’d have to put about $0.50 up there.
Pugsley caught on quickly, and put the record on the player. He picked up the tonearm, and gently placed it on the record. It started to slide immediately across the face of the record, quickly, towards the center.
“It’s skating! Did you take the cover off of the needle?” The answer, of course, was no. Soon enough the needle cover was removed, and Pugsley had a fully functional stereo.
I even hear that the band Europe has a new record out – The Vinyl Countdown.
He took the turntable and amplifier into his room and connected them to a set of Sony® speakers old enough that the rubber around the speaker cones had cracked and deteriorated to a fine black powder. As I rubbed powder grains between my fingers, I thought that if the powder was hydrated it might reanimate into my ex-wife’s soul, and nobody wants that.
But those Sony® speakers were old: I think they once belonged to Pa Wilder. He gave them to me sometime after Sinatra passed on. It’s at Christmas that I reflect on what kind of a father Frank Sinatra was – if you were bad, no ice in your drink.
I followed Pugsley back and watched as he put an old 45rpm single of mine on the turntable. He gently set the tonearm down on the edge of the record. It hissed and popped – a sound I hadn’t heard in decades. Then this mighty classic of Western Civilization started playing:
Yes, that’s Eddie Murphy singing the “Norton” parts.
Pugsley looked at me, puzzled, as if waiting for some explanation for the audible abomination emanating from his Christmas present. Yes, A Night At The Opera was my brother’s record. But this fine Joe Piscopo song? Yeah. I spent actual cash money to buy it. I checked to see if maybe this was the B-side. Nope. On either side was the same song: The Honeymooner’s Rap. I had spent money, intentionally, to buy this song.
I was at a loss. How do you explain to a middle school kid that the song was a 34 year old parody of a television show that was cancelled 64 years ago? And, a television show (The Honeymooners) that I’d only seen one episode of, ever?
Nah, too much backstory. Plus I’m trying to get him to be wise with his money. I shut up.
Pugsley: “Dad . . . this song is so,” he paused, and I imagined him looking for an adjective that wouldn’t be offensive to me on Christmas Eve. “90’s,” he concluded.
John Wilder: “80’s.”
Pugsley: “Whatever.”
I left him to discover music written by obscure musicians who had long since developed careers in real estate or the food service industry. Oh, Steven Tyler, who now plays a lesbian aunt on the Big Bang Theory®. I think.
Well, at least Aerosmith® taught me how to cook Chinese food. I can now wok this way.
Christmas 2020 is decidedly anti-frenetic. Yes, Pugsley was attempting to get everyone into the room earlier in the day on Christmas Eve so we could open presents, but he was calm about it – not uncontrollably shaking like a Chihuahua on a chalupa.
The rule is that the youngest Wilder distribute the presents from under the tree. Pugsley did so. It’s also been the rule that the youngest Wilder gets to open presents first. Not this year. “Okay, Dad, you go first,” ordered Pugsley.
They did a brain scan of her: “Coffee. Coffee. Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee. Coffee.”
Christmas day will be calm, too. We’ll have turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy. I’m pretty sure that we don’t have any plans at all. Not having little ones, we’ll get up when we get up, check the news, have some coffee, and turn the oven on to cook the turkey. The Mrs. already made George Washington’s egg nog (Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE), so I don’t even have anything to complain about.
Where’s the Christmas wine? I’m not getting up anytime soon.
Merry Christmas, one and all!
*Yes. My brother and I have the same first name, for reals. As we were born seven years apart, my parents had apparently forgotten they had another child when I arrived eleven years later, so I stole his name. That’s okay. I also managed to ruin several of his dates, end one of his relationships, wreck his car, and throw up on his school clothes one night. So I guess that makes us even.
