Superpowers, Stress, Ben Franklin’s Nails

“I’m not stressed beyond the stress induced by telling you how stressed I am.” – House

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The Boy took this selfie.  Not sure what he was upset about.  Maybe it was the stock market? 

I think too much.  I know, I know, it hurts.  The Mrs. tells me I should just relax and not think so much.  But perhaps my superpower is that I think about the future, so to not think about the future would be like Superman® not flying or Aquaman™ not . . . talking to fish, or whatever it is that he does.

To me, the future is a set of probabilities, branching at intervals.  And what I can do is imagine branches from decisions in the past reaching into the future, starting at the single, solid limb of now, and moving forward, getting smaller, as larger probabilities stay thicker, but smaller possibilities branch out into tiny limbs.

The tiny limbs are real, though, and they represent things that can happen based upon both the choices made today as well as some element of chance (either random or not).

As we’ve discussed in the past, Taleb taught us that all probabilities and all risks aren’t equal (LINK).  And Seneca said it’s always easier for things to come crashing down than to hold them together (LINK).

 

But we are active in creating our future.  I can place myself (mentally) in that future to understand what that situation looks like.  I can imagine a future where I cooked a cherry pie.  I can then map it out and see what I can do now to make a better then.  Like buy whipped cream for the top.  And I can imagine a future where we’ve all forgotten about Warrant:

Is it wrong that sometimes I sing the lyrics “She’s a hairy guy?”  I swear this isn’t about Jenner.

My Superpower is a little like chess, but with more showering than the last chess tournament I was in.  Also, the variables are not as well-known as chess, but in most cases I’ve done really well with at work and at life with this ability, though I cannot yet hover or make adamantium claws spring out from my knuckles, which would be even better superpowers than fish-talking.

But when we finally get to a decision point, most of the time it’s like coming home to a place I’d already been on my imaginary branch so I’m generally not surprised.

One advantage to this power is that I look at the risks around me on a regular basis and try to figure out ways around them, measures that mitigate them, or better yet, insurance that I can get that allows someone else to take the risk (insurance is not always an Allstate® product, sometimes it’s a contract where somebody else owns a risk, which can often be gotten for asking).

Of the things I do at work (besides being snarky and obscure), this is probably the best one.  Way better than my coffee consumption skill, though I’ve been told that’s legendary.

And frankly, I like the pressure when the ball is in my hand and I have the ability to think, to perform and to achieve.  I like the odds on me performing well, because I think like this:

 Diz ſagent uns die wîſen, ein nagel behalt ein îſen, ein îſen ein ros, ein ros ein man, ein man ein burc, der ſtrîten kan.

-Freidank (Which is a dude’s name.) via Wikipedia

I know, a knee-slapper, right?

The English version of that is:

The wise tell us that a nail keeps a shoe, a shoe a horse, a horse a man, a man a castle, that can fight. – Now a translated Freidank, still via Wikipedia

And, know that Freidank lived in 1230 A.D., long before Ben Franklin collected a version in his book “The Way to Wealth” that most of us are more familiar with:

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.

Thinking this way is stressful, but not the bad kind of stress, but rather the excitement, the exhilaration of having a real problem, a meaningful problem to be solved.  Are there exciting challenges?  Sure!  Are there horrible, frustrating setbacks?  Also, sure.  But when everything comes together and we light up the cigars to celebrate, it more than makes up for anything “stressful” along the way.

A Stanford® professor (LINK) has been doing research and agrees.  “Good” stress is . . . not bad for you, and, in fact, may help you perform at your peak.  It’s a challenge.

That same article noted that stress was bad mainly if you thought it was bad.  If you thought it was okay, exciting, just a challenge?  It tended to not have the bad long-term consequences we associated with stress: the heart attacks, the stress hormones, the late night peanut butter and tuna sandwiches, etc.

But for me, the downside of this thinking was still this thinking.

I can see bad things.

My job (in many cases) has been literally looking at the worst case and pulling back from there.  I once looked at tornado frequency in the Midwest, and made a half-hearted attempt to quantify the likelihood of civil war changing our government (this was only for about six months of my career, but it was an interesting six months).  Since that was my job and I got paid to do it, it tended to bleed over into home life, so I thought about worst case scenarios even when I was off the clock, and related them to myself and my family.  The upside?  The last time we needed duct tape, paracord, a socket set, and a knife on a family trip (this really happened) we had it in the emergency kit in the trunk.  I only wish I had packed the goatskin – we could have used that.

So I think.  It used to be worst at night when I was ready to go to sleep.  The possibilities would branch out and I would end up going down decision/probability trees (of my own personal life) and, being night and all, often end up in some dark places.  I’d start with, say, needing to pay the mortgage, and then end up penniless and panhandling to pay for new shingles after a storm that never happened.  Yeah.  Silly.  Now I play the radio so other people think and I can listen – it distracts me so I don’t end up on paranoid rabbit trails.

The downside of this is that thinking down chains of causation, I used to build up a big amount of worry in a hurry about personal stuff.  It’s not that I’m scared of the future, it’s that the future can be so uncertain – understanding that a risk exists doesn’t tell you very much about the risk.  For that, experience and mathematics are key, but we’ll have that on a Monday post some week.

One thing leads to another, and I ended up with?  Stress.

Not the good kind.  I’d worry about aspects of my future that were difficult to control.  Research indicates that the key to removal of stress in life is having control.  In psychological speak, believing that most outcomes depend on things that you can do and control is called an “internal locus of control” and is just a fancy way to show that you like having the ball in your hands on a 4th and five with 30 seconds left on the clock.  You believe you control your own outcomes.

So I turned parts of that into challenges.  I challenged myself to have enough money so that I didn’t have to worry about next week’s mortgage, or even next year’s mortgage.  I took my money stress and put it in my hands, and thankfully had the opportunities to make sufficient money that I’m not scared about tomorrow.  I did my best to take what was a (bad) stress and turn it into a good pressure to achieve.

Tough times along the way?  Yeah.  But way more wins than losses.

I think that’s why it’s exhilarating to quit a job – it’s the ultimate demonstration of control when you can move to a situation where you think you’ll be happier.

I think that (in part) is what Jordan Peterson means (LINK) when he says “clean your room” – take control of some facet of your own life so that you feel you’re able to fix your own situation before you burn out.

I’ve switched from being fixated at looking down long dark halls and now I see the light coming in from the side rooms.  And I like to think that I take some time to play there – because on a long enough timeline, all of our mortality rates are 1.0.

And I’m committed to taking control and ownership of my issues.  Like Mark Twain said, “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”  And, as I noted on an earlier post, that’s at least part of what keeps me writing.  I’m taking control, taking the garbage out, and making sure I have enough nails.

Somebody might need that horse after all.  Better yet?

Let’s saddle up Ben.

For heaven’s sake, if you’re really stressed out, go see a doctor, not an Internet humorist!

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

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

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Even Bigfoot appreciates the climate in Margaritaville.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warren Buffett has done okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alone, however, P/E tells you nothing.

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

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

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

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

Simple, right?

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

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

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

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

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

What about . . . Tesla?

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

And Honda?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source- mycomicshop.com

Profitability

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

Leverage, Liquidity and Source of Funds

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

Operating Efficiency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

“We shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” – Dunkirk

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A marker of the change from Conquest to Commerce.  Hey, we have Porto Rico!

Sir John Glubb had the unfortunate luck to be born with a name that is most frequently associated with near-drowning experiences, but from his title of “Sir” it looks like he did okay.  He first was commissioned as an officer in the British Army in World War I (World War I was the one without the Japanese).  After that, like the United States, he spent the next 30 years meddling in the affairs of the Middle East.  He first went to Iraq, then was in charge of the fighting force of Jordan.

No, not Michael Jordan’s personal army of ninja warriors, they’re called the JNB, or Jordan Ninja Brigade, but something called the Arab Legion of Jordan (the country) that was considered for a time the most effective army in the region.

Eventually Sir Glubb and King Hussein of Jordan came to an agreement Sir John would stop coming to work and the King would stop paying him.  Glubb retired to England where he did a LOT of writing.  What brought Sir Glubb to my attention was one essay, called The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.  You can download the .pdf here (LINK).  It’s pretty straightforward.  I’d first read this several years ago, but was more recently reintroduced by a link from The Patrick Henry Society (LINK).

As we’ve discussed before, there are others that predict history on a cyclical basis (Fourth Turning LINK), and there are various ways to look at a significant societal change, from the articles on the Roman Empire (LINK), how Collapse Happens: Seneca’s Cliff (LINK), to a general theory of the Collapse of Complex Societies (LINK).  These are interesting stories:  life goes on day after day in a continual sameness until . . . everything changes.

Now, that’s not to say that everything changes all at once.  We study the French Revolution in school (or at least I did) and went from the:

  • French Revolution to the
  • Terror to the
  • Rise of Napoleon to the
  • Fall of Napoleon to
  • Friday the 13th Part II Rise of Napoleon to
  • Napoleon III, Final Chapter

It takes (at most) a week to go through that period of history.  And it’s pretty exciting stuff, if presented well.   An entire stable society is tossed into an upheaval that results in massive change.  And when confined to a school desk it seems that if you lived in France, that all of this change was happening at warp speed!

But the Bastille was stormed in 1789, and Napoleon died in exile in 1821.  The events we covered in a week played out over 32 years, which is more than a generation.  If you were born in 1789, you could have fought at Waterloo with Napoleon.  This change would have seemed natural to you if you were in France, and the only way you can observe it (beyond freshman world history class) would be to take time to look at the events of the world in a bigger-picture way.

So, Glubb, being fired and all, spent his time in study of the rise and fall of the world’s empires.  (All quotes that follow, except where noted, are from Glubb’s essay.)

However this may be, the thesis which I wish to propound is that priceless lessons could be learned if the history of the past four thousand years could be thoroughly and impartially studied.

-Glubb

Glubb then pulls out a table and points to start and end dates for several empires and makes the assertion that empires have a maximum lifespan of about 250 years.

Empire Span
Assyria 859-612 B.C. 247
Persia 538-330 B.C. 208
Greece 331-100 B.C. 231
Roman Republic 260-27 B.C. 233
Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 180 207
Arab Empire A.D. 634-880 246
Mameluke Empire 1250-1517 267
Ottoman Empire 1320-1570 250
Spain 1500-1750 250
Romanov Russia 1682-1916 234
Britain 1700-1950 250

Okay, my criticisms first.

  • He’s cherrypicking Western Civilization and the Middle East. What about Japan?  China? The Disney Empire?
  • How did he pick the dates? There is a degree of subjectivity there.
  • He totally had to make up something to explain Rome. Rome doesn’t really follow his 250 year model.

That being said, you could make an argument that his dates are sorta right.  And he produces anecdotal evidence to back up his assertions in his text.

Likewise, Glubb notes that these durations appear to be roughly tied not to technology (it varied) communication speed (varied widely for the world-spanning British Empire and the Greek Empire), or contiguous nature of the empire (see Britain again).

I can even (sort of) support his dates on the cases I’m familiar with.  Everyone would agree that the British Empire was gone by 1970.  1960?  Probably most?  1950 might be a bit early.

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Possibly, this statue knows (nose?) that he doesn’t help Glubb’s thesis. 

So, if this 250 maximum life (*Rome Not Included) isn’t related to technology or geography, Glubb reasoned it was related to human longevity, and his theory was that it represented 10 human generations.  Differing generations of people in the empires reacted in different ways based upon their experiences in the progression of empire.  He even broke down the empire’s phases:

  • The Age of Pioneers/Outburst: In the US, Glubb argues, the age of the Pioneers was spent conquering the continent. Other places, a dominant culture takes over the nation.  This is the era of television shows involving guns and bears.
  • The Age of Conquests:  Immediately after the energy of the Outburst, the nation forms a military that leads to conquest. Television?  Guns, no bears.
  • The Age of Commerce: On the newly conquered land, per Sir John, every factor is in place for massive expansion of commerce as new systems are established and older trade barriers fall. The proud military traditions still hold sway and the great armies guard the frontiers, but gradually the desire to make money seems to gain hold of the public. Television? Not much.  It’s like an accounting show.  Some railroad robber baron shows.

The ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and devotion to duty are still in evidence. The nation is proud, united and full of self-confidence. Boys are still required, first of all, to be manly, to ride, to shoot straight and to tell the truth. (It is remarkable what emphasis is placed, at this stage, on the manly virtue of truthfulness, for lying is cowardice, the fear of facing up to the situation.

  • The Age of Affluence: All the commerce leads to wealth. Television:  Soap Operas and shows involving women in bikinis.  The wealth leads to a change in values:

The first direction in which wealth injures the nation is a moral one. Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men. Moreover, men do not normally seek to make money for their country or their community, but for themselves. Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. Education undergoes the same gradual transformation. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country.

  • The Age of Intellect:  few great schools are the hallmark of the early Empire. By the Age of Intellect, every Podunk town has a community college.  Television:  Community.  And the effect isn’t good:

Thus we see that the cultivation of the human intellect seems to be a magnificent ideal, but only on condition that it does not weaken unselfishness and human dedication to service. Yet this, judging by historical precedent, seems to be exactly what it does do. Perhaps it is not the intellectualism which destroys the spirit of self-sacrifice:  the least we can say is that the two, intellectualism and the loss of a sense of duty, appear simultaneously in the life-story of the nation.

  • The Age of Decadence:  This passage I found striking in Sir John’s essay: The word “celebrity™” today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius.  Certainly Johnny Depp would be a celebrity in any age, right?  Television here?  Men in bikinis.

The characteristics of the Age of Decadence is given particular emphasis by Glubb:

  • Defensiveness: (Here Glubb means the country doesn’t care about duty or honor, just keeping luxury and comfort.)
  • Pessimism
  • Materialism
  • Frivolity
  • An influx of foreigners
  • The welfare state
  • A weakening of religion

Decadence is due to, per Glubb:

  • Too long a period of wealth and power
  • Selfishness
  • Love of money
  • The loss of a sense of duty

I’d argue that Glubb’s reasons for Decadence are subject to argument, but they’re not out of the question. I’d argue to add the increasing coddling of children so that we don’t ever let them experience true hardship, at any costs. My parent’s playground had a merry-go-round that cut a kid’s legs off when he fell down.  My playground put planks over the spot where he fell through.

My kids?

Soft fluffy pillows are under the swings, and games like tag are unapproved, whereas games like competitive sitting while quiet are looked on with approval by the school’s cadre of lawyers.  I could take live ammo to school and once found a live tear gas grenade on school property.  Today’s kids?  Plastic knives are out of the question.

But I think that there are few who would argue that the United States isn’t (currently) the biggest empire the world has ever seen.  The United States has 800 military installations in 70 countries. The United States has convinced the world to use the dollar as the world currency.  When Nixon took us off of gold-dollar convertibility (a “temporary” measure) it amounted to the United States being able to tax the entire world.

How?

We used to send them dollars that we printed up, in exchange for cool stuff, like iron ore, oil, and other raw materials.  They took these dollars that we just made up.  Profit margin for the government?  100%.

Nowadays, printing up those dollars is just too painful and expensive.  We now just exchange electronic information so that electronic dollars that we create are shipped via the Internet to other countries.  And, for whatever reason, everybody agrees that this is a good deal, and they keep sending us stuff, like cars and other finished products.  But, we have our standards.  We still make our own PEZ®.

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PEZ®, it’s what does a body good.  Like Brawndo©, which has what plants crave.

So, I’d call the United States an empire, both economically and militarily.  And while the world has benefited from the peace, the United States has benefited economically to an unprecedented degree.

And if you look at the points that denote Glubb’s Decadent stage of empire, I’d say that there is empirical, scientific evidence for at least six of the seven points.  Now it should be noted that Glubb noted these points in other civilizations as well.  He noted that in the Arab Empire, Arabs becoming a minority in their own capital and women studying for and being allowed in what they considered traditionally male professions, like being lawyers.

What happens on the other side of Empire?

It seems like Britain is still there.  They went through a very rough patch as the British Empire crumbled. Economic output dropped, and children were required to wear gloves without fingers, be grubby and put soot on their ruddy cheeks.  But as it adjusts to a new role in the world.  At the start of World War II (the one with cool tanks) the Royal Navy had 1400 ships, and it was the largest navy in the world.  Now Wikipedia claims they have less than 70.  And most of those are used to haul lime, rum, and fish and chips to their sailors.  And, as of this writing, the Royal Navy has zero aircraft carriers.

And, it’s understandable, their empire, like Paula Abdul’s career, is over.

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This is what a Royal Navy Ship of the Line looks like in 2017.

I think that, economically, Britain has gotten a temporary reprieve due to the North Sea oil reserves, plus their sales of merchandise related to Lady Di.  Otherwise, I think that their trajectory remains on a downward arc.  Recently I read a story that indicated that infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) was in pretty bad shape outside of London, which would again be indicative of the end of empire constrained resources can no longer support the infrastructure created at the peak of empire.

What does this portend for the United States?

If the Roman model is in play, we’ll end up with a Caesar:  a ruler that will follow many of the previous forms of government, but also be a more despotic ruler.  The courts and legislature will exist to support him.  A leader of this type would reinvigorate and replace the current pessimism, materialism and frivolity with a renewed focus on maintaining and expanding the power of the empire at the expense of freedom and liberty. After a rough patch, most people will be okay with this.

Good points?  Cool buildings and triumphal arches.  Bad points? Purges of people who believe that President for Life Carl XV isn’t tall enough.

It’s possible that we head the other way, the soft slipping into fractured irrelevance that other empires (like Britain and Spain) have undergone.  The bigger cracks would be the fall of the currency into irrelevance . . . be like how, in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike went bankrupt: “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” At least we have all that cool stuff we got from China, right?

There would be big disconnects on the way down, but then long periods of uninterrupted economic and social malaise.  But the end of empire isn’t horrible.  At least we’ll send our version of The Beatles® to the new empire.  My bet is that it will be into the new world capital of our Canadian Overlords.

Greater Ottawa, anyone?

High Carbs, Harvard, Insurance, and Avoiding Doctors

“Undercover insects?  Talking iguanas?  This isn’t a research station, it’s a three ring circus.  You should charge admission.” – Star Trek, Voyager

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Pugsley bravely researching a high-carb diet. The Sugar Research Foundation® thanks him for his bravery!

In 1967, a member of the Board of Directors of the Sugar Research Foundation® (yes, that was a real thing) published a statement that noted there were significant flaws in studies that linked high sugar consumption to heart problems.  The Sugar Research Foundation© paid for the work that went into backing up the statement.  No problems, right?

Perhaps the Official Song of the Sugar Research Foundationâ„¢?

The statement came from (in part) the Chairman of Harvard®’s Public Health Nutrition Department, and was published as research in the New England Journal of Medicine©.  From what I’ve read, his position at the Sugar Research Foundation™ and their funding of the study wasn’t mentioned.  Surely no bias from a Harvard© man?

This study resulted (at least partially) in the Low Fat/High Carb craze, and increasing amounts of obesity and heart disease.  So, to recap history:

  • 1967: Carbs Good
  • 1972: Atkins – “Not so fast.”
  • 1978: Carbs Good
  • 1981: Atkins – “Really, dudes, you’re wrong.”
  • 1980’s and 1990’s: WE SAID LOW FAT.  Oh, and bread works like sugar, so have as much sugar as you want.  A Milky Way® is like six pieces of bread.  Or a potato.
  • 1999: Atkins – “Dudes, not working.  Chill and have a steak.”

I could keep going.

Is it just me, or does medical research follow the model shown in the video?

Right now it seems as though the tide has finally turned in Dr. Atkins favor, probably for good, though the Wikipedia for “Atkins Diet” reads like the ghost of the Sugar Research Foundation® lurks over it to this very day.

Let’s think about cows.  Hmmm, first time I’ve ever written that sentence.

Prior to being turned into tasty steaks, cattle are taken to a feedlot, which is just that, a lot where they feed the cows.  A lot, as in mass quantities.  A cow will enter the feedlot weighing 700-800 pounds, and exit 400 pounds heavier in 4 months.  That math is easy – 100+ pounds a month (that’s like 6,000 kilograms an hour).  What do they feed the cows?  Lots of high energy grain, combined with a little bit of protein and a little bit of fat.  And they gain massive amounts of weight.

Had Harvard™ (a location where they seem to be confused) just checked the Hereford (a cattle breed) heifers (a specific cattle descriptor) then they would have known that it’s clear how to make someone gain weight, and it’s precisely the diet he suggested is better than Grandma’s steak and eggs.

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What cows might look like to a Chairman of Harvard®’s Public Health Nutrition Department.  At least they’re mammals?

Let’s talk about salt.  Here are two headlines about salt consumption health effects from August, 2017:

  • High Salt Diet Can Double Risk of Heart Failure
  • Pass the Salt: The Myth of the Low Salt Diet

There are Similar debates on statins (do they do anything but mess with your muscles OR are they a miracle?), B vitamins (generally good for you OR increase risk of cancer) and eggs.

Eggs used to be a miracle food.  Then, in the 1970’s?  Evil death in the full shell.  Now?  The kind of cholesterol in an egg isn’t the kind of cholesterol in your body.  Eggs are eggsactly what a body needs!  Today, anyway.

This has led me to two conclusions:

  • Journalists will write up anything for a Friday deadline if it gets them to Bennigan’s© faster so they can have a Bloomin’ Onion® and a scotch and soda before going to the fedora store. (I may have messed this metaphor up, but I’m working on a Friday deadline . . . .)  If they read the medical studies, most of them don’t remotely have sufficient background in biology or statistics to understand it, because the tough math tests at journalism school allow them to take their socks off so they can use their toes for counting.
  • Medical research is (shudder) even worse than journalism about medical research.

I’ll concentrate on the last point.

Doug Altman wrote an article for The BMJ.  What is The BMJ?  It used to be called the British Medical Journal, but the password got hacked and it was renamed by a group of 12 year old boys.

Back in 1994, Altman wrote an article for The BMJ called The Scandal of Poor Medical Research.  It’s behind a paywall, and I think it’s better if I just make up the content anyway.  Actually, Richard Smith gives a pretty good synopsis of the article in The BMJ Blog (LINK).  Much of the research was bad because “. . . of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods of analysis, and faulty interpretation.”  And, presumably, he thought that medical research had an ugly, fat mother, too.  And that’s the positive news.

It gets worse.  Career interests (like our Harvard Sugar Daddy) influence research.  And, to quote an article in The Lancet, “85% of medical research dollars are wasted.”  Presumably that ($240 billion in 2010) would pay for a lot of pantyhose and elephant rides.  I think in layman’s terms that means the researchers either evil, stupid, or evil AND stupid.

And remember, medical research isn’t Scottish . . . it’s crap.

So, medical research is horribly broken.  What about medicine?

My general theory when it comes to doctors is to avoid them.  I got sick for the first time in about eight years last month.  Rather than go into a doctor (respiratory thing that was moving into my lungs) for a prescription, I was able to log onto a website and talk to a doctor.  My wait time as I was sitting in my basement in a fever-induced cold sweat?   Five minutes.  Visit duration?  Five minutes.  Cost?  $60.  The amoxicillin that cured me?  $20.  Genius.

What about hospitals?  Don’t go there – people die there!  And my theory is backed up by data.

What does the data say?

That some facets of medical science are getting to be amazing:

  • Trauma medicine, such as treating car accident victims, firearms victims, et cetera has saved tens of thousands of lives.
  • Medical imaging has allowed better diagnosis, and antibiotics have saved millions.
  • Bandaids® are much more colorful and have cartoon images on them.

However:

More people are killed by doctors than by guns.  Not on a rate basis, on an absolute basis.  It appears that the best estimate that the Internet has of those killed in the United States accidently by their doctors is somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000.  Every year.  Since only about 10,000 deaths a year from guns are not suicides, that means doctors kill 25 to 40 times more people than guns every year.

Wow.  And I thought that Clint Eastwood was tough.

Young Doctors in Love, yup, the urine sample scene.  Bonus?  Sean Young before the crazy hit her.

I know, these are accidents, the people were sick, and some of them might not have made it anyway.  Sure.  But for numbers this big to exist there really is a problem in the system.  And I’m pretty sure that all of the things we’ve done over the last twenty years have made it worse, not better, with a medical system that pits insurance against doctor against malpractice attorney in a constantly escalating struggle of money and power.

Is there another model?  Sure.  Canada, with rationed care?

Also, there are places like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma (LINK).  They don’t take insurance, but they have a fixed price list on the Internet.  Need a pacemaker?  $11,400. (Average cost after Medicare?  $20,000+.)  Knee replacement?  $15,499.  (Average cost after Medicare?  Hard to tell.  Probably $10,000 to $15,000.)

Downside?  You have to visit Oklahoma.

I know that our current system of insurance was driven by government wage and price controls during World War II – you couldn’t offer someone more money to come to work for you, but you could offer them insurance and pensions.  Note that these are precisely the systems that are exploding right now and distorting our economy to the point where they are consuming more resources in both the private sector and the public sector.

The Mrs.’ solution?  Outlaw insurance.

It sounds better and better every day.  Have a steak while you’re waiting.

Note That John Wilder is NOT a doctor so for heaven’s sake, DO NOT follow my advice without talking to your doctor.  Or Shaman.  Or whatever groovy stuff you do.  Also, I am long a company that makes Statins, but they’re not gonna be helped by this article.  I don’t plan on selling it anytime soon since the yield is pretty good (this is NOT investment advice, I’m just sayin’ and disclosin’).  I don’t plan on taking any positions in any company over the next four or five days, and haven’t recently.

 

Jordan Peterson, Success, Bruce Campbell, and Roman Emperors

Discovery Channel© has Shark Week™, and at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise® we are lucky enough to have Dr. Jordan Peterson Week©.  This is the third of three posts on Dr. Jordan Peterson – his website is here (LINK). My first post on Dr. Peterson can be found here (LINK), and the second post here (LINK).

 

“Jamie, how many 29 year old record company presidents operate out of their mom’s trailers? Know what I’m sayin’?”- J-Roc’s Mom, “Trailer Park Boys”

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Oil Tank Dennis Quaid (playing Sam Houston) knows a little bit about Oil Tank success, starting his own Oil Tank country and all.

I had intended on just doing three posts this year on Dr. Peterson, but will probably do updates from time to time, since his ideas are stone-cold interesting and I think I could do six weeks of posts on those ideas without repeating myself, but if I did that we’d just have to hand over the reins to Jordan, and I own the domain name, and I don’t think he’d share the revenues.

Elon Musk almost always has something going on, too.

Monthly updates about these guys?  We’ll see.

(By the way, Elon, GOOD JOB dumping Amber Heard, she’s really not worth a Prius®, dude.  I’m telling you – she is trouble and likely a Terminator® sent by James Cameron from the future to mess with your Mars (LINK) plan.  You dodged a bullet!!!)

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Now a 100,000% better with no Amber Heard. (image, Wikipedia)

But this is Wealthy Wednesday, and Dr. Peterson has a lot to say about success (and, it seems, almost everything else), which is reasonable given the unreasonable amount of success that he’s had, especially recently.

Today we’re going back to those forty points that Peterson laid out on Quora (LINK) in response to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”  In the analysis on Truth last post (LINK), Dr. Peterson had 16 out of 40 points that related in some way to Truth (I know, we could quibble, was it 15 or 17, but why quibble, since we’re friends?).  Are there any of the 40 points that speak to success?

Yes.  Dr. Peterson speaks on things I consider to be huge when it comes to a deep, meaningful success that combines significance with economic success.  I mean, why would you want a Justin Bieber-level success if you could have success that mattered, like Bruce Campbell?

Bruce

A perfect gift for any occasion!

Peterson has several videos on YouTube® that directly tackle important personal development points that lead to success:  fear (and how to overcome it), the importance of having a routine, where to find the freshest and plumpest Pez®, and how success leads to even more success.  I encourage you to watch the videos.

But going back to the 40 points.  Many relate to behaviors (behaviours in Canada, eh) that lead to success.  These are quoted below (bold) with Dr. Peterson’s gracious permission.  My commentary follows.

  • Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. – There is always the opportunity to do things just for the moment, but when you work on what matters? That leads to long term success and value.  This means that, no, eating only appetizers doesn’t make a good dinner.  You need cake, too.
  • If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.   Do them so you how to do them.  Do them because they are meaningful.  Do them because it’s right.  Doing them just to be seen?  Yeah, we wedgied that guy in High School.  That’s the worst kind of smarmy dude.
  • Pay attention. Sorry, dozed off.  Oh, yeah.  People notice when you take them seriously, when what they say matters to you.  If you’re not present in the moment, those that are will notice.  And you’ll miss important things.  “Hang on, honey, I have to tell Google that they should lower their price to $750,000.  They want a million bucks!  Stupid college kids.”  (Yes, that really happened, and he did not get the deal.)
  • Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you. There is an implied Trustworthiness in this statement.  Be worthy of their trust.  Realize that Truth is not where you look, it’s where you find it.
  • Be careful who you share good news with. Bad bosses get jealous, and even good people get jealous.  Similarly, don’t appear too good to your boss.  A boss that’s intimidated by you is not generally a rational boss.  If you have to make that calculation, beware.  Likewise, sometimes your friends get a bit tired of hearing of an endless sea of victory.  Be real to them.
  • Be careful who you share bad news with. People who don’t like you (or to whom you just represent a tool) can use that news against you.  Similarly?  Don’t share your weaknesses.  Hey, Clark Kent – your boss does NOT need to know that you’re nearsighted and break out in hives every time you’re near a little kryptonite©.  Also, your bad news might be insignificant compared to someone else’s bad news.  Your very worst day might be better than the best day of the person you’re talking too.  “Oh, my, and the caviar was nearly off!  I made do, however,” won’t go too far if the other person can barely afford to pay their chauffer and their private pilot.
  • Make at least one thing better every single place you go. The right people generally appreciate this.  They see it, and it’s obvious.  If they don’t see it?  You know, deep inside, it was the right thing.  A guy was working really hard on making a concrete footer smooth.  I pulled aside his great-great-grandboss.  “You know that’s going to be buried, right?  I’m good if it’s a bit rough.  Heck, it’s really even better if the concrete is rough.  More friction.”  Boss’s response?  “It’s his work.  The man has pride in it.  I’ll let him own it.”  What a good answer.
  • Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. How many days do you want to spend being the you that isn’t the best you?  The first step is imagining.  Once you’re there, Von Mises (LINK) will take over.  If you see a better you, a path to get there, and believe that your action can take you there?  Nothing can stop you.  Unless you told your boss about the whole kryptonite® thing.
  • Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful. Good things will happen to you during your career.  Bad things will happen to you during your career.  People will step on you (if they can) to elevate themselves over you.  You’ll forget the contributions of great team members.  Focus on this:  You’re never as good as people think, or as bad.  You have had amazing help through your life.  “Don’t spend time hating the situation.  The situation doesn’t care.” (Marcus Aurelius, probably)

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Unknown Sculptor, Pierre-Selim (Self-photographed) [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why is it that when I wear a toga to work that they think I’m a little off?  Marcus rocked his!

  • Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. This implies that you’re going to get rid of the fear of failure.  If you try, really hard, and fail, what will happen?  Mainly, nobody notices, except you.  And you get stronger.  It has been my experience that the harder I work at something, the better I get.  And sometimes I achieve results that are beyond anything I ever could have expected.  And other things fail, but I learn a little bit more each time.
  • Maintain your connections with people. Outside of graffiti artists, The Mrs., and Keanu Reeves, most of us don’t work alone.  Most of us depend on others to make us better, make us stronger.  There’s a natural pull for certain people (introverts and those under stress) to pull back, mainly when they need other people the most.
  • Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement. The stupid form you just filled out?  Yeah, somebody had to design it, and they had a reason.  See if you can make the form better, after understanding why it even exists.
  • Nothing well done is insignificant. There is the possibility of beauty in the most mundane and base of tasks – cleaning a microwave oven can be significant, especially when it’s done well.  I can show you the fulfillment you will get from cleaning a microwave.  See you at my house on Saturday?  Only a minimal charge for this lesson.  (H/T M. Twain)
  • Dress like the person you want to be. True enough.  Some days I’m Homer Simpson.  I would just love to be involved in those wacky adventures!  Danger point:  If you work at a construction company and dress like an investment banker you will be mocked.
  • Be precise in your speech. Meaning is important, and certain people follow only concrete statements.  Precision in a concrete fashion is especially important to them – their brains don’t understand exaggeration for effect.  Likewise, when someone asks you a yes or no question?  Answer yes or no before you explain the answer.  They might not care why.  And precision in speech leads to truth.
  • Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Posture feeds directly into mindset and emotion, and in guys pumps testosterone up when done right.  Standing tall and strong like a superhero, hands on hips?  Yeah, you’ll feel like a superhero, and being a superhero is a great way to get important things done.  Especially if “things” is slicing up people with metal claws.
  • Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things. Bosses hate fear and like courage (good bosses).  They also understand risk.  They like it when you take appropriate
  • Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. There will be times when you will see something undone.  Do it.  It will be noticed.
  • Be grateful in spite of your suffering. Nobody likes a whiner or wants to spend time with a whiner.  Nobody wants to hear a whiner whine except his enemy.  Everyone suffers.  To repeat myself, your worst day is better than someone’s best day.  Act like it.

Dr. Peterson is doing more than writing about success, he’s quarterbacked creation of a software suite called “Self Authoring,” (LINK).  Note that I am not as of this writing date getting paid if you sign up.  I’ll let you know if that changes.

The concept behind Self Authoring is to work through issues – fix yourself – by revisiting and writing about events in the past that were particularly difficult for you or in some way may be holding you back.  Additionally, there’s a focus on writing a future as well to create a meaningful goal or set of goals to work for, sort of an anti-nihilism pill.

Bill Gates probably doesn’t need this.  Those who are able to be pretty clear of their past and are able to perform at a high level already based on solid future goals are probably not the target market, though Dr. Peterson did say that one driving factor in designing and creating this tool was from requests by companies for ways to help their high performing employees perform on an even higher level.

When people write about their painful past, people experience long term positive impacts (compared to a control group).  Likewise, another group constructed and wrote about their future, and had similar impacts (when compared to the control group).  I have theories about everything, but I wonder if confronting past trauma made them braver?  I wonder if it allowed them to really examine what happened in context and they were able to trace the impacts to their present state?

In the end, Self Authoring is consistent with Peterson’s maxim – you have to fix yourself.

I wonder if that’s part of the mission of this blog?  I know that Orthodixie (LINK) (another blogger from my past, an Orthodox Priest with a Carolina accent, and no, I’m not making that up) and I would talk about how blogging let us mentally, “take out the trash,” and how much better we felt after we’d gotten something out on paper, even something unrelated to the things that were bothering us.  I’ll probably give the Self Authoring program a try.  I’ll let you know how it works out . . . but get yourself a Priest as a drinking buddy if you can.  It always amused The Mrs. when I engaged him in theological debate after wine.

Me, I’m still cleaning on my room, making it a little better each day.  I know that The Mrs. is very much looking forward to me being done with that.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, Truth, and Even More Truth

This is the second of three posts on Dr. Jordan Peterson – his website is here (LINK). My first post on Dr. Peterson can be found here (LINK).  The third post can be found here (LINK).

“J-Roc raps about gangsters and guns, pimps and hos and Compton.  The guy’s not from Compton.  He’s a white kid from a trailer park.  He should rap about what he really knows which is living in his mom’s trailer eating peanut butter sandwiches.” – Trailer Park Boys

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When I think that society is too complicated, I then remember that I couldn’t even take this picture without the help of the millions of elven technicians that live in my camera.  Then I cry.

As a reminder, Dr. Peterson is a psychologist that teaches at the University of Toronto, but don’t hold that against him:  he seems to be one of the good Canadians at this point, though a bit fixated.

On what is Peterson fixated?  Dr. Peterson seems to be obsessed, and not with Pez® or Japanese tentacle pudding cups like a normal man.  No, Peterson is obsessed with the truth.  Earlier this year in response to a question on Quora, (LINK): “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Dr. Peterson didn’t come back with a 250 page book priced at $43.50 (I’m talkin’ about you, Dr. Tainter (LINK)) but rather a fairly simple 40 item list.  I’d suggest you go over and read it – it’s not bad.  My list would be different, but you’ll have to wait for a new post for my list – this post is all about Peterson.

I’ve often heard it said, if you want to know who someone is, just ask them.  I was reading an article on the web where these psychiatrists were attempting to figure out a test to give people to determine if they had narcissistic personality disorder.  The best test they’d yet determined was to ask them, “Are you a narcissist?”

Narcissists seem pretty proud answering, “Yes, I am!  Because I’m so awesome!”

Nice.  So, with that in mind, let’s listen to Dr. Peterson.

Dr. Peterson’s first rule is:

Tell the truth. 

Simple.  I think we all learn to lie about stuff as soon as we learn about consequences.  We all start out as horrible liars, since being three years old doesn’t exactly pop us to the top of the “able to make up good, convincing lies” chart unless your parents are very, very stupid.

After playing with lies, if we are very, very, lucky we learn that lies are really, really bad.

I’ll tell you my story, because I’m just enough of a narcissist to think you might be interested.  Because I’m that interesting.

I’ve been divorced, and can attest that divorces are very expensive because they’re worth every penny.  My first wife and I didn’t have personalities that really matched very well.  To top that, neither one of us was very good at telling the truth to each other – it was like a US-USSR arms race where, instead of stockpiles of nuclear weapons, our Cold War involved an ongoing series of falsehoods aimed at one another.  She was relieved to move out.  I was relieved when she moved out and was replaced by Boris Yeltsin (for a short time).  It took tanks and a promise of vodka to get Boris out of the house long enough to change the locks.

Regardless, I could see the impact that lies and distrust had made in my life, and I made a personal vow that, no matter what I did in the future, I would always tell anyone in a future relationship the Truth.  No lies.   And I have told the Truth, regardless of the outcome to The Mrs. since we met.  One time I called home, late, while I was still at work.  I whispered into the mouthpiece, “Can’t come home right now.  Governor of the state is in the office right next to mine, surrounded by news media, talking to my boss.”

The Mrs. only reply was, “Okay.  See you when you get here.”

By this time, we’d been married almost eight years, so, based on my constantly telling the Truth during that time, plus during every interaction before we got married, I think I could have called up and said, “Honey, been picked up by a UFO, and they have Elvis and we’re going out for ribs and beer.  Be back before 11pm.”

This may or may not be what happened to me.

She might have believed that was what was really happening, but she would certainly have believed that I thought it was the Truth.

And this has paid off during my entire relationship with The Mrs., in dividends, though certainly she knows better than to ask my opinion on anything where she doesn’t really want a True answer.  Has it caused friction?  Very rarely.  It did today, because I told her my opinion, and was told (essentially) that she didn’t want that right now.  Sometimes Truth is not what we want.

But in every case, it has led to harmony and trust.  If you have a partner who always tells you the Truth, you know you have someone who is on your team, always.

But back to Dr. Peterson.

In response to the Question on Quora, he listed 40 points.  By my count, 16 of them (40%!) dealt directly with Truth.

Here they are, quoted with permission, with my commentary:

  • Tell the truth. Discussed above.  The core of Dr. Peterson’s points.
  • Do not do things that you hate. If I were to quote Shakespeare, I’d quote Hamlet here: “To thine own self be true.”  Oh, I guess I just did.  This is Truth to self.  Your hate (if everything else is set right) will be based on the dissonance of what you’re doing and your best self.  You’re avoiding Truth by doing things you hate.
  • Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act. Directly related to the above, the idea of having to tell someone, Truthfully, what you did prevents you from doing things you would be ashamed of.  Which would include eating a whole bag of Ruffles®, unless it saved an orphan in some way.
  • Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Again, this is more “Truth to self.”  As my coach in high school said, “Wilder, when you cheat on those pushups, you’re just cheating yourself.”  I kid.  I never cheated on pushups in high school.  I cheated on squat-thrusts.  But, when cheat yourself from the Truth of the meaningful, you end up with the never ending squat thrusts of the expedient.
  • If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things. I had a boss who was always seen doing things.  In reality, he mainly was responsible for ensuring we had a constant Internet connection, mainly by surfing for things that amused him.  But if there was a way to be seen by his boss doing the “right” thing?  He would move faster than a miniature poodle on a porkchop to get in the credit zone.  I’m pretty sure he’s never been happy, especially since his strategy is to always look good, but he has none of the skills to create great outcomes.  My corollary:  Do things, and be seen doing them.  You can have both.  But never stop doing things.
  • Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. Again, the theme of being Truthful to oneself continues.  But this is aimed at being Truthful to the long term you.  If you cheat that you, you’ll always have regrets, and probably termites, too.
  • Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. “Who says that fictions only and false hair become a verse?  Is there in truth no beauty?”  Okay, I stole that from the poem “Jordan (I)” by George Herbert, 1593-1633.  And that’s creepy, because I only learned the poem’s name or author tonight – to me it was just the title of a sub-par Star Trek episode (the one where Spock goes temporarily blind).  But outside of the creepy factor of researching a poem to find that it has the same name as the person you’re writing about, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.  The elegance of pure math.  The sudden discovery of a True thing.  The Wilder corollary to this one:  ugly things around your house steal your energy.  Fix them.
  • Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. Again, Truth to self.  I have seen people with amazing skills and talents just stop on their way upward – because they are afraid to fail.  I’ve done that myself, until a very visionary leader told me, after I’d explained what he wanted was hard to do, “Wilder, just do it.”  Nine times out of ten when he told me that, I achieved it.  The tenth?  He got fired.  But he got a severance package worth about $1.4 million.
  • Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement. There is truth in beauty.  There is also truth in the stable social constructs that have created wealth, peace, and Pez® for thousands of years.  Tear them down?  It’s easy.  But can you tear them down and put up something even better?  Probably not.  Can you make them better?
  • Make friends with people who want the best for you. Again, Truth is your primary commodity here.  Friends who want the best for and from you will tell you the Truth.  Others won’t.  One time I saw the head of operations for a company walk down the hall with about three feet of toilet paper trailing behind his waistband, top center behind, like a big, white, fluffy skunk tail.  Nobody else saw him.  I didn’t tell him when he walked out of his office, somewhat flushed and embarrassed.  He made small talk until he realized I wasn’t going to say, “Hey, saw your toilet paper tail and I’m going to tell everybody!”  And I didn’t tell the office.  He was a nice guy.
  • Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. How is it possible that you have the answer to world peace, and there’s a towel on the floor in your room?  Or your son hates you?    Thought so.  Fix the things around you so you understand the Truth required to fix the world about you.  I’m still working on cleaning my room, so, my advice is suspect.
  • Be precise in your speech. Precision in speech means . . . you say exactly what you say you mean.  Which is?    The Truth.  And if you go back to Orwell, removing words, or making them mean things they don’t removes the ability to even make certain arguments through language, so at some point the Truth isn’t even possible to utter anymore.
  • Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.  By not teaching Truth to your children you cripple them to find Truth on their own. And finding Truth by yourself is harder than finding a clean spot on Johnny Depp’s sink.  As smart as your children might be, they are not wise, and need you to guide them through Truth so they might find Wisdom, and through Wisdom enough money to pay for your retirement home some future day.
  • Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. We try to hide Truth from ourselves every day.  We look in the mirror and manage to not see what anyone else in the world can plainly see.  While there is no reason that you have to tell the world your deepest regrets, you should at least be able to see them and understand that they are True.
  • Read something written by someone great. Great people write Truth, that’s why what they write is great.  The more profound the Truth, generally, the simpler.  But a great writer can, in 200 pages, take you on a journey that wraps you around and through a path where you walk to Truth.
  • Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know. As much as we search for the Truth, we learn more every day.

Here is a Peterson theme:  Truth in a Post-Modernist context is always relative and always the product of the culture that created it.  It ceases to be objective Truth, and becomes a relative truth.  From the points above, you might predict that Peterson would reject Post-Modernism because it denies the very existence of Truth.  And you would be right.

The battle lines are set: Modernism vs. Post-Modernism and the very existence of Truth.

What amazes me is that it is clearly explicable in our world that there are objective facts that are True, yet in a Post-Modernist viewpoint, nope, not so.  Therein lies the ultimate fight between Peterson and Post-Modernism – Peterson is on the side of Truth, and his opponents deny that Truth even exists.

There are too many points, too many places where Truth is not the relative product of a culture to even begin to argue that truth doesn’t exist.  (If you must have an example:  there is a force we call gravity that causes mass to clump together.  Truth.  Gravity is not a social construct.  There are cultural Truths as well, but I’m not going to open that can of worms with this post.)

So, I’ll allow that the narcissistic side of my personality is pretty sure that you’ve enjoyed this, but the Truthful side knows that you did.

As for me?  I’m with Dr. Peterson.  Go with the Truth.  It’s a winner.

Jordan Peterson, Being Healthy, Slaying Dragons (where legal)

“Why don’t you get a life Rick? Why don’t you go to community college like Julian here? Hey, I got a good idea. You could teach, ‘Living in a Car and Growing Dope 101.’” – Trailer Park Boys (Which, in the editor’s opinion, are another Canadian menace)

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William Shatner and Pugsley.  Pugsley was thrilled.

Discovery Channel© has Shark Week™, and we here at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise© have already had Elon Musk Week™ (LINK).  Given the great response to Elon Musk Week®, my editor (me) has assigned my writing staff (also me) and my graphics staff (again me) to Jordan Peterson Week™.  This is the first post in the series.  My second post is here (LINK).  And my final post is here (LINK).

Jordan Peterson is fascinating to listen to, and you can certainly do that, unless you live in 1995 or Arkansas, where video isn’t yet a part of the Internet.  YouTube has devoted a massive amount of computer disk space to cover the hours and hours and hours of Dr. Peterson’s fascinating lectures.  How much disk space?  Almost enough to cover 30% of The Simpsons episodes, or 571,231 hours.

I kid.  But Dr. Peterson is exceptionally popular despite the fact that some of his videos are an hour or two long, and the typical attention span is measured in fifteen second chunks, and he’s still popular tells you he’s saying something pretty important.  Heck, Dr. Peterson is Canadian and despite that, people take him seriously.

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You know who else is Canadian?

There is quite a lot of information content in his videos – they’re very dense, and often he will drop an amazingly wise bit of information and leave me to back the video up whilst I’m Stairmastering® with my hands and face covered in yogurt to catch his point again.  Why are my face and hands covered in yogurt?  To keep the cucumber slices in place, silly!

Peterson drops a truth grenade in every video.  In one, he indicates that most of his psychological practice cases don’t have any sort of a mental issue.  No real psychotherapy is required.  No years of sitting on a couch discussing cigars or tunnels and their meaning.  Nope.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?  Audio only, but a classic.  I had this on cassette when I was a kid and it all went WAY over my head.

Dr. Peterson indicated that most problems were problems in living.  He brought up six areas where he would gently (or not so gently) counsel his patients to “get a life.”

“Get a Life” must be a course they teach in Canada.

Peterson indicates that there are six areas where his patients need to focus on getting a life (interpretations past the bold are mine, not Dr. Peterson’s):

  • Friends/Intimate Relationships – These are crucial relationships, and it seems (LINK) that the earlier they are formed, the stronger they are. I guess we hadn’t learned to pretend to be something we’re not, so those relationships are more authentic.  Everyone I went to High School with knows what well developed sense of self I have (though they called it “egomaniac”) and I don’t have to pretend to be humble (important in not scaring a boss to death).
  • Being a Part of a Career/Dominance Hierarchy – Having a career is important, in that it provides a sense of significance to what you’re doing. You have the opportunity, each day, to jump in and do your very best within the confines of a social network that doesn’t require BookFace® (unless you work at BookFace©).  Dominance Hierarchy is a term used by Peterson a lot.  This is driven by the notion that it is hardwired into us by a lot of years of biology and evolution.  In the past, (pre-monogamy) most human males didn’t get to mate and leave an offspring (think harems).  This (depending on your mileage) may have left a LOT of angry males only marginally attached to society, and a bargain of monogamous, single marriage in return for angry unmated males not rioting and breaking everything.  So, want to be the most dominant person in the room?  Sure you do.  Like a love for gluten, it’s hardwired.  And studies have shown that this is important (LINK).  Please remember, however, all the recent retirees that have this as their primary purpose and expire six months after retirement.  This can be a dangerous solo focus.
  • Have a Schedule/Routine – Pick a time, any time, and get up at that time, all the time. Every day.  This stabilizes your body’s innate circadian rhythm, which has a direct relationship on your mood.  Hmm, I’ve worked to make this better, but . . . (LINK)
  • Eat Something in the Morning – Dr. Peterson talks about a nice woman who only ate ¾ of a cup of rice every day and was starving herself. My breakfast looks a lot like dinner.
  • Personally Regulate Drugs and Alcohol – Peterson said “regulate” but by context he meant personally regulate. His other comment, “especially alcohol.”
  • Have a Spouse/Family – Family is important. Besides creating another group of people that should have your back no matter what, it also provides an anchor in time.  It is a link to the past from your parents.  It is a link to the future from your children.  And, it’s a link to BookFace® if you do it wrong.

Dr. Peterson said that being solid in three or four of these was absolutely necessary to by psychologically thriving.  I imagine that an extreme stress on any one of these by itself (think the retirees mentioned above) can be a pretty debilitating experience.  Keep in mind, also, that these presuppose a normal life in good times in Western Civilization, and not times that would make Dr. Maslow grin with the grim anticipation of NOBODY winning at his self-actualization game (LINK).

Looking at the list I can see from my personal experience that having three of these going for you is crucial to not being a neurotic moron appearing sane.  When times were tough at work?  I leaned on family and on friends.  When I was going through my divorce a zillion years ago?  I threw myself into work and leaned on friends.

What else does Dr. Peterson say?

Lots.

One big one is “Clean Your Room.”

And it’s not a metaphor.  It’s literal.  The act of cleaning your room – of making your place tide – provides a basis of stability.  It’s also symbolic – it’s hard to argue that you know the solutions to all of the world’s problems and need to organize a protest when you can’t even keep your room clean.  The simple symbol of slaying the tiny dragon (that’s a metaphor, unless you live in Westeros and are plagued by actual tiny dragons) of chaos in your life shows that you can be conscientious enough to actually get something done.  And you get a boost when you’ve actually achieved something.  Hey, I haven’t won the Nobel® Peace Prize™ (now on stick!) but, by golly, I don’t have to step over a rack of magazines to get to my bed!  Your work leads to something besides futility.

That last part is important.  I once had a conversation with a friend at work where we talked about the different ways that people view tasks:

“John, you and I get up in the morning and think, yup, I have got to shave this morning.”  He rubbed his chin for emphasis.  “Those guys,” he gestured in the direction of the group we were talking about, “get up in the morning and look in the mirror and think, ‘You know, I’m going to have to shave every day.  Every single day for the rest of my life.’”

And life can seem like that – a bit of constantly encroaching chaos.  Maintaining the discipline of cleaning your room keeps that sense of being a victim of life at bay.  “I can’t clean the room – I don’t have time,” and “I’ll get to cleaning the room on a long weekend.”  Those are statements of someone who has voluntarily made themselves a victim, and, really, is avoiding the truth.  Even five minutes a day, over time, will lead to a clean room.

My cleaning method is to pick a spot on an area, and then make that area perfect.  Then, the area adjacent to my “perfect” area looks . . . awful.  My favorite spot to start in the kitchen is the microwave.  The Mrs. chides me because, “Who is going to come visit our house just to look to see how clean our microwave is?”

Well, nobody.  But the microwave is truth.  Regardless of who sees it (or doesn’t see it), the microwave is now clean.  And I know the truth.

And this week, each morning before work I’ve cleaned on the master bathroom about three minutes.  In two weeks, that’ll be half an hour.  That I’ll never notice, partially because zombies on The Walking Dead have a greater self-awareness than I do when I first get up in the morning, plus their breath smells better.  But I’ve done something a bit different.  I’ve started the day having slain a tiny dragon; starting the day with a win.

And that’s legal in my state, as long as I have a permit.

Join me for more of Dr. Jordan Peterson on . . . Monday.  Get a life.  Or slay a dragon.

Eclipse, Game of Thrones, Chili’s Restaurant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep in mind, The Boy is nearly 17.

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

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

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

Me:  “At least they’re not singing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We pulled into position about 40 minutes before the eclipse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the way.

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

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

Life on Earth, Supervolcanos, NASA, and Tom Petty

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

DSC04285A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.

“The world was a web.”

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

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

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

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

But . . . “The world was a web.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reread the sentence above.  I’ll wait.

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

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What NASA thinks might be in the volcano.

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

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

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

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

Here’s the latest mission I could find:

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

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

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

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

First, the good news!

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

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

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

Hmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second – the bad news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Columbus, Eclipse, and Used Car Negotiations

“Now there’s a girl who gives the word ‘hippy’ a whole new meaning.  Move over, Mama Cass!  Move out of the way, sweetie.  You’re blocking my light.  Is it an eclipse?  No, Edwina’s in the room.” – Absolutely FabulousDSC04293

This is the dolphin that Bonnie Raitt Tyler will ride when she sings “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

On March 1, 1504, Christopher Columbus was in the middle of really difficult negotiations.  Columbus was looking for the native inhabitants of the island we now call Jamaica (I believe they called it “home”) to provide him free food, and work for him in repairing his wormy old boats day and night.  In return, he was offering nothing.

Not a great negotiating position.

Columbus did have one advantage: he carried an almanac with him, and knew that there was going to be a lunar eclipse.  A lunar eclipse is really valuable if you have no idea where you’re going (or even how big the world is) like Columbus.

Why?

During a lunar eclipse, as long as you’re on the night side of the Earth, you see the Earth’s shadow start to block the light from the Sun shining on the full Moon.  And that happens for everyone at the same time – even if you’re in London, or in Spain, or in . . . Jamaica.

And that’s valuable, since, clocks in 1504 are really crappy.

It’s really easy to tell how far north or south you are on the Earth.  You can measure with just a quick sighting on a star.  But telling how far east or west?  Not happening, unless you know what time it is.  And since you know EXACTLY when the lunar eclipse starts, you know, at that point, exactly what time it is.

Knowing that, you if you measure the time from the eclipse to dawn, you know exactly how far east or west you are.

But Columbus had a different plan.  He told the natives he was going to take away the Moon, or, rather God was.  He made a big deal of praying.  When the Moon was in shadow, Columbus knew exactly how long the eclipse was going to last – and it was a really tense 45 or so minutes that Columbus timed out with an hourglass.  Tense for the natives.

Columbus said he’d prayed, and then told the natives that, hey, God was gonna put the Moon back in the sky.  But you’d better help us out.

Don’t make God angry.

The native Jamaicans complied, since if you’re negotiating with really no bargaining power, it’s nice to have a full range of supernatural powers at your disposal . . .

But that was a lunar eclipse.  And the eclipse that’s going to hit Monday is a solar eclipse – the Moon will totally block out the Sun only for a thin, moving swath of the United States.

nasa_eclipse_map

But, this is a Friday post, and it’s really supposed to be about health.  So, how do you combine health and the eclipse?

Don’t stare at the Sun.  See, that was simple.  But on Sunday every news story will mention that.  And Bonnie Raitt Tyler.  Who will be droning about wanting Bright Eyes to turn around in some boat somewhere.

I swear, this is the creepiest video every made.  Altar boys with glowing eyes flying through the air?  Check.  Conan looking dudes with furry loincloths?  Check.  Bonnie Raitt Tyler.  Check.  Yeah, creepier than Ozzy singing “Bark at the Moon” in Illinois during the eclipse.

So, don’t stare at the Sun.  It’s not that hard.

Well, kinda?  Isaac Newton, the scientist who formulated the laws of motion, of optics, and who invented calculus just to disprove a baseball trivia question about the infield fly rule, once stared at the Sun with one eye until he could only see reds and blues.  His eye recovered, but he experienced after images for months.

But even though the Smartest Man Who Ever Lived got better, I wouldn’t bet on you getting better.  There was even story about a guy who, since 1960-whatever, was still blind in one eye from staring at that eclipse back when Kennedy was still chasing starlets.

And there’s no reason for it nowadays since large numbers of eclipse glasses were/are available for free, or for a buck or two if the library is somehow toxic to you.  Unless you buy fake ones, which the news also seems to be upset about, or maybe the journalists are just reaching for something.  Nah.

Hint – if they spelled ‘eclipse’ wrong on your eclipse glasses and you can see your living room at night through them, those are bad signs.

I think that China has been preparing eclipse glasses for us since February 26, 1979, so they really are/were everywhere.

February 26, 1979 is the last time that a total eclipse passed over even part of the US.  Where I was at the time was only 83% covered, but, for some reason, I got sent to the office (which required me to go outside, since the art building was kept at a reasonable and safe distance from the main building) during the eclipse.  Since school administrators didn’t want to have to explain the whole “entire school is blind” phenomenon that might accompany a middle school during an eclipse, all of the classes were kept in session.  It was weird being out there, alone, even when I wasn’t under the path of totality.  The light was . . . different.  And, yes, I snuck a peak at the Sun.  Quickly.

If you’re under the path of totality (and only during totality) you’re okay to look straight up.  Pull off the glasses and enjoy the cool day as the Moon completely obscures the Sun’s healthful yet deadly rays and the stars peak through the day.

But that’s not the only health challenge on the day of the eclipse.  At least one group is claiming that a rogue planet, obscured only by the Sun’s healthful but yet deadly rays, will smack straight into the Earth during the eclipse.  What a coincidence!  What are the odds!  I’ve heard of being late, but it’s over four years since the world ended the last time in 2012.

I know, it seems unlikely, but you have to admit that one planet smacking into another at fifty miles per second would probably be a day where there might be some larger, “being crushed by a rogue planet” health problems showing up.  I imagine school bus routes would even be delayed the next day.

But, there might be a small chance that you can take advantage of the eclipse.  Let’s say you’re negotiating with the most poorly informed car salesman in the United States on Monday in Salem, Oregon who has NO idea that there’s going to be a total solar eclipse.

At 10:18AM Pacific Daylight Time, that’s when you should start with the hardball negotiation on that used Hyundai®.  Tell him you’ll bring back the Sun’s healthful yet deadly rays if he gives you a free fill-up.

Worked for Columbus.

Note:  John Wilder is not even a TV Doctor. DON’T STARE AT THE SUN!