Hedonism Leads To Nihilism

“Shut up and pay attention to me, Bender.  Look, I love life and its pleasures as much as anyone here, except perhaps you, Hedonism Bot.  But we need to be shut off.  Especially you, Hedonism Bot.” – Futurama

One thing I learned in high school – always date homeless girls.  It doesn’t matter where you drop them off.

I know that lots of people had it rough in high school, that they felt that they didn’t fit in.  They felt as awkward at Whoopi Goldberg at a bris.

Not me.

I’m not bragging, really, it was just how it worked out for me.  I had a great time in class, a great time in athletics, had great friends from nearly every walk of life.  Heck, I even had hair back then.

I was also really lucky with the ladies.  Thankfully there were no small number of girls with daddy issues in town, a drive-in movie theater, and a pizza place.  Of course the pizza was not entirely necessary for a seduction, but a guy gets hungry.  Seducing girls burns up calories.

Let’s add in the last element of hedonism:  beer.

There was a bar where if you had the $5 cover charge, you were of drinking age as long as you weren’t stupid enough to wear your letter jacket.  I should know, because I got in when I was 16.  I went in with my friend’s (who was of drinking age) license.  He was four inches taller than me and was probably sixty pounds less than me.  I wasn’t fat, he was just skinny enough to fit down the barrel of a 12 gauge and not touch the sides.

I dived off the stage at an Oktoberfest party.  I went krautsurfing.

Yes.  At 16 I thought it was a good idea to sneak into a bar holding the license of someone who resembled me only in the fact that they were another human male who had blonde hair and blue eyes and in only those ways.  And that same person who barely resembled me was also walking in with me.

I had no idea what sort of ludicrous story I would tell them if they asked.  “Oh, sorry, I thought I was another person?”  No.  “Oh, when I was at his place I accidentally put his license in my wallet and hid my own license?”  Hmm.  “I was fighting with my multiple personality disorder and physically split into two people?”

Thankfully, the place was nearly empty and the bouncer never asked me for an ID, just took my $5 and stamped my hand.

I saw a drunk caveman walk home once.  It was a meanderthal.

Apparently, I made enough of an impression that night that they never once carded me, ever.  After one night, I was a regular and knew most of the people that worked there by name.  Not so amazingly, about half the people from my social circle made the same discovery, and on a random Friday night, it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen juniors and seniors in the place.  Of course in 2022, the Safety Police would probably summarily execute the owner and the staff, but this was a kinder, gentler, drunker time.

It was life on easy mode.  Plentiful girls with dubious morals.  Cheap beer.  Great success in nearly everything I tried.  I’m not saying I peaked in high school, no.  Heck, I’m not even sure that I’ve peaked yet.  But it was easy.

One thing I did was try to connect emotionally with those frolicsome fräuleins of my hometown.  That seemed (in many cases) like a lost cause.  One night while sitting under the moonlight in the Wonderful Wildermobile, between hickie sessions, I looked up at the Moon and said to my girlfriend at the time, “It’s amazing to look up at that, and think how much smaller it is than the Sun.  How much smaller the Earth is than the Sun.  It’s a fantastic Universe we live in.”

Her response?  “The Sun is larger than the Earth?  No way!!!!”

Okay, our relationship was over pretty shortly after that comment.  And that also changed me.

I bet my old girlfriend thinks Starbucks® is a currency that aliens use.

I had an epiphany.  I was living a life of hedonism.  And although I had a life of pleasure, there seemed to be a lack of meaning.  I had everything that every guy on the football team could desire.

But I felt empty.  Not dead inside, but empty.  I felt that the things I was doing were, while extremely physically pleasing, were devoid of meaning.  It was like being Hunter Biden without being a Biden, smoking crack (or meth), and getting money from anonymous donors for my retarded attempts at painting to try to influence my dad.

I’m betting that this is the first time Scotty and scotch were used to explain nihilism.

The feeling of empty was a tough one.  It helped me see how someone can go from that feeling of empty in the face of pleasure to a feeling of nihilism.  I looked up the definition of nihilism, and came up with more definitions than I had girlfriends in high school.

I’ll give this one, which I found after looking at a dozen (many contradictory) definitions on the Internet:  “as the view that nothing we do, nothing we create, nothing we love, has any meaning or value whatsoever.”  That is the one that mirrors the emptiness that I felt.

It is the inherent danger of a life that borders on the libertine.  What matters if life is so easy?

Thankfully, I’m glad I caught that as early as I did.  I can see easily of how falling down the rabbit hole of hedonism could lead to nihilism.  As I got older, I realized that, whatever definition used, nihilism is the worst of philosophies, and the worst of the human condition.

Even though the Universe is large, and there have been countless years since the start, and, perhaps, countless years until the heat death of the Universe, we matter.

What happens in this world does matter.  We have meaning.  And fighting the good fight for Good over Evil does matter.  Life and meaning are built not in the pleasure, but in the struggle to be better, to do more, to be more, and to add value because we were here.  Those are the stories worth telling – they are the ones that will be sung around campfires in 100 years.

I hope Aaron Burr didn’t name his son Tim.  It would have been awkward to look for him if he ever got lost in a forest.

Never give up, because what we do here matters.  What you do here has value.  Even as we stare at the vastness of a Universe that no one can comprehend, it matters that we are here.  And it matters what we create.

And our love?  It perhaps has the greatest value of all, though it is rarely found in the bottom of a glass of beer, unless there’s a live band.

Did I mention they had live bands at the bar?

Choosing A Path In Life, 2022 Edition

“What’s all this talk I hear about you fooling around with the college widow? No wonder you can’t get out of college. Twelve years in one college! I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows.” – Horse Feathers

In this episode, Gilligan eats the last cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

The “traditional” path for students with good grades was to “go to college.”  Honestly, this was pretty good advice for a long time.  The number of high school graduates that went to college bounced between 40% and 60%, of course being higher during the Vietnam draft.  When my uncle was in Vietnam, he killed a dozen soldiers.  Next year we’re going on vacation to a different country.

Around 1974, however, the percentage boomed, with over 80% of high school graduates at least attending some college by 1978 or so.  The rationale was that a college education was a ticket to a better life.  Again, for the most part, the common wisdom was right.

But why?  In 1971 after a Supreme Court decision, companies could no longer use I.Q. tests for employee selection, they had to use something because, despite what the Simpsons™ might suggest, you really want smart people operating nuclear power plants.  Certificates and credentialism had always been nice, but now businesses desperately needed some way to select employees that were smart enough to do the job.

What did Three Mile Island say to Fukushima?  “Nuke, I am your father.”

Thus:  college degrees.  The more selective the college, the greater the ACT® or SAT™ score required to get in.  ACT© and SAT™ scores are actually a very good proxy for intelligence, so, graduate from a good school?  That shows a (likely) innate intelligence along with enough foresight and planning to defer satisfaction until the degree was granted.

In 1970, going to college at Harvard™ could be paid for with the (current 2021) equivalent cost of $22,000 or so a year.  Now it’s over $75,000 for the sticker price.  College prices went up because demand went up.  Harvard’s© prices went up more because they were more selective – it was harder to get in so they were a better sifter for I.Q., I mean, who would have guessed that Hawking had the same I.Q. as Evel Knievel?  I mean, they both loved ramps . . . .

But another factor was the increase in money available.  Politicians looked for ways to encourage people to go to college.  So, colleges increased prices to better soak up all of the student loan dollars available.  Getting students morphed from “here’s where our graduates work” to “here’s what our climbing wall looks like.”  Millions were invested to make a college more of a theme park than a serious place of learning.  They raised prices so high that during COVID, college even became the most expensive video streaming service.

Along the way, though, standards decreased to get more students in the door.  Not only was it easier to get in, inflation hit grades as well.  Right now, the average grade at Harvard© is an A-.  The average.

Harvard®, the vegan Crossfit™ of colleges.

Even now, though, Harvard™ is still a great rate of return for students.  It’s not the education, it’s who a student meets.  Harvard® is useful for the connections with wealth and power a student can make.  Get in good with the right family?  A student can become engaged with that class, though often there’s a cost.

Harvard® is still a good investment, even though it’s supposedly hard to get in.  Heck, I got in.  They don’t even lock most of their windows.

Some colleges are horrible investments.  Going to Podunk U in North Central BFE and majoring in Anthropology of French Basket-Weaving Poets?  Yeah, that’s also known as majoring in pre-barista.  But that student could have been a barista without rolling up $50,000-$75,000 in student loan debt.  And, if the student majored in philosophy, they can ask, “Why do people want fries with that?”

The Mrs. told me I needed to grow up.  I was speechless.  It’s hard to talk with 45 gummy bears in your mouth.

So, if I were giving general advice to a kid who was determined to go to college, I’d suggest that they avoid anything that someone can do over the Internet from Bangladesh.  I can hire 45 Bangladeshis for approximately half of a Slim Jim© an hour, so why compete against tens of millions?  Engineering is good, if you have the knack.  Medical fields are constantly in demand – I saw an ad here in Modern Mayberry for nurses.  Five-figure signing bonus – and that wasn’t $199.99, it was over $10,000.  That’s probably a good idea.  The short answer is that it’s not 1970 anymore.  A student can’t just do any degree – they have to major in something that will pay the cost of the college degree.

Is college a good idea?  Not for all of the 80%.  Probably, college is still a good idea for 40%, at most.

So, what about trades?

Just like college, the economics has been twisted there, too.  Just like supply and demand has tossed prices for college into the stratosphere, an oversupply of laborers has cratered the cost of many trades.  Except for carpenters who build stairs – they’re always thinking a step ahead.

Where did the labor come from?  Immigrants, illegal or not.  Entire construction trades in many parts of the United States are completely staffed by people who speak less English than Pepé Le Pew.  Whereas they often do great work, they are part of the reason that wages are stagnant in many trades.  Sure, in 2022 there are shortages everywhere putting an upward pressure on wages, but that’s a short-term event.

I had one plumber who was very polite.  When he looked at my sink he said, “I am at your disposal.”

Certainly, some trades are doing well.  Which ones?  Once again, those that require credentials and those that require citizenship.  Anything that lowers the competition.

Regardless, the time when most trade jobs had pensions has passed – many have the promise of . . . Social Security.  And in 1970, getting a job that supported a family just out of high school without a college degree?  It was possible.  Tough?  Certainly.  But possible.

It’s still possible today.  A small-town plumber in Modern Mayberry does pretty well, so well that he became a Christian missionary overseas – I guess he’ll bless the drain down in Africa.  The local HVAC guy makes a killing, too.  And power linemen?  They live in some of the nicest houses in town.

Are there still paths for a young person in 2022?  Yes.  It’s far tougher than it was in 1970 for a kid today, though.  The traditional paths are difficult.

Now thank me I didn’t find a picture of Rosie in a bikini – I bet she has a hairy back.  Oops.  Sorry about putting that thought in your head.

The path, like the path between Scylla and Charybdis, is narrow.  On either side are monsters.  It’s sort of like being caught between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg – you’re always safer if you have a pocket full of hot pizza rolls to distract them.

Genie Out Of The Bottle

“Can’t stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.” – Serenity

I wonder if Putin got his doctorate in Russian political leaders?  If so, does that make him a Stalin grad?

As technology has changed, so has the information that is available to us.  Starting with radio, the ability of that technology to influence public opinion increased.  Radio was a voice in the night that broadcast the opinion of one to many.  Then, after the invention of FM radio, radio became stereo-typical.

Film increased the ability to spread messages, and in a much deeper way.  There is something about moving images coupled with sound that draws human attention and consciousness.  Measurements of human brain activity while watching television showed that the brain “shut off” while watching television, entering an alpha wave state – a state normally associated with resting.

It isn’t that way when talking, or reading.  Beta waves, associated with active thought processing jump back into play when we read.  In a very weird way, television puts us into a trance, where we receive and don’t think about the message.  If ever there was a way to put propaganda into the heads of everyone watching, television is your answer.  It also caused the problem of losing the controller.  I always found mine in some remote area.

Also, congratulations to drugs for winning the war on drugs.

In many cases, the idea wasn’t only to put propaganda into heads, it was also to entertain.  Why would I watch a television show that I didn’t like?  No, shows competed for market share, too.  If the propaganda was too strong, the show would fail.  But many of the messages of globalist, Leftist thought were still put into skulls relentlessly, slipped in as special episodes, or by painting ideas that violated The Narrative in the most negative light possible.

Even the news, though, was part of the same message, which we now call The Narrative.  The Narrative is strong.  Honestly, I am still finding elements of The Narrative that I believed to be true.  It’s more or less like The Matrix, but Elon Musk doesn’t keep forgetting that Keanu Reeves is the good guy.

Now here’s a narrative I could get behind. (meme not an original)

One example was that The Narrative that drove the United States both getting into and getting out of the Vietnam War.  It was the first war that was televised on a daily basis.  And, regardless of our recent fiascos, presidents dream of being a “War President” which gives them nearly unrivaled political power.

A case in point was the attack on the Twin Towers.  Whoever did it, the beneficiaries were George W., Lockheed-Martin®, and everyone who didn’t like the United States.  It’s unlikely that George W. would have been re-elected because of messy economy.  W. drove the “Left” every bit as insane as Trump did, and would have (no doubt) driven them to the same level of coordination to bring him down in 2004 as they spent on Trump in 2020.  Except?  9/11.

I think Sleepy Joe would love nothing more than the power and prestige that comes with a War footing in the country.  Or at least someone would.  Hence, Ukraine.

They asked Joe what he thought of this meme, but he’d forgotten Biden.

I don’t know exactly what the game is.  It appears that the Ukrainians are a lot less concerned about the Russians than we are, and that Joe is far more concerned about Russians crossing the Ukrainian border than the millions that he’s inviting to cross our border.

Why not?  If get gets the Russian Bear just grumpy enough, I think the calculus is, he can turn Putin into a figure to unite the country.  If Corona-chan couldn’t do it, well, trot out the (spins wheel) Russians.  And we’ll have a united country, and the whole economic mess will get solved when spending even more billions with weapons manufacturers!

First, we’re no longer a serious nation when it comes to anything military.  Yes, I know that we have a long, proud tradition.  But have you seen the military in 2022?

I had a friend that joined the Army and killed a lot of people.  He’s a horrible doctor.

Second, although the people of the United States were in favor of going to get Osama Bin Laden, the wars overseas soon became background noise.  Without a significant loss of Americans, say, a carrier battle group, there is little chance of getting the rank and file American citizens would support a war in Ukraine.  Outside of, say, loss of a carrier battle group.

And, finally:  What, exactly, is this about?  Ukraine and Russia are similar in the national corruption index scores – it’s not like Ukraine is remotely on par with Denmark or even Albania.  Yes, Albania is less corrupt than Ukraine.

A Russian wedding used to be called a Soviet Union.

Even the Ukrainian president, Zelinsky, told Biden to chill out on fanning the flames of war.  Russia has a long sense of paranoia, and isn’t interested in having NATO camp out right next door.  Honestly, I have no idea why we have troops in Europe in 2022, let alone trying to pull Ukraine into NATO just to irritate the Russians.

Oh, yeah, because international tension takes away from the intractable problems Joe has at home.

The problem that Joe faces is a simple one:  the old model of a single source delivering a single Narrative is gone.  Places exist all over the Internet the question The Narrative.  That’s crucial.  Heck, they’re even questioning The Narrative in Canada.

Politely, but they are.

From Trudeau:  “They only hate me because I’m black.”

And the Signal is getting out.  I have only listened to a few minutes of Joe Rogan.  It was okay, but not enough to keep me coming back.  But he’s irritated the gatekeepers of The Narrative.

Or at least Neil Young.  Neil Young, who hasn’t had a headline since Nixon was in office, decided that he was so in favor of free speech that he’d pull his music from Spotify®, who sponsors Joe Rogan’s podcast.

It’s unlikely that Spotify™ will cave to Mr. Young, even though he’s now been joined by Joni Mitchell, Liza Minnelli, and maybe Wolfgang Mozart.  Of course, The Mrs. and I made fun of Mr. Young on our podcast.  When I checked on it the next day, I found that our podcast was gone.

There are fates worse than death.  (not my original meme)

The Mrs. had used a music bed for a parody commercial.  The music bed was one of Mr. Young’s songs.  The next day, we were pulled down for copyright infringement (no strike).  The Mrs. is getting ready to re-upload an edited version.  I really don’t think Mr. Young had anything to do with it personally.  So, our podcast hits dozens of visitors sometimes.  Joe Rogan hits millions.

They try to censor the small when we deviate, but the large they must take down, in public.  If the Canadian trucker protest were not so large, there would be a complete lack of news coverage.  As it is, the coverage will be small as they can make it, except to cover whatever trivial outrage can be manufactured.

I hear some of the protesters are semi-retired.

The important thing is, large or small, there is an alternative to The Narrative.  I try to be as honest as I can be in every single post.  In many cases what I say is slightly different from The Narrative.  Sometimes it’s a lot different.

And there are thousands of other voices out there, too, willing to defy The Narrative, in ways both big and small.  This is new.  Television and radio gave us the grand wave of propaganda that led to The Narrative being so powerful.  They’ll stop at almost nothing to stop us from seeing that the emperor has no clothes.

But it’s too late.  The signal is out.  It’s even covered in maple syrup sometimes.

Question:  how many trees did mankind have to suck before they found maple syrup?

Tomorrow, there will be a rare Tuesday version of Wilder Wealthy and Wise, just memes and examples of The Narrative being exposed.

Friday Memes

“The Mandela Effect has been an Internet meme for almost a decade. It’s always been called that.” – The X-Files

According to National Geographic™, 80% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on a map.  They’re really ahead of the news!

Got in fairly late tonight, so it’s memes for dinner for everyone.  Back to original content on Monday – these memes are “as caught” in the wild.  I’ll note that on the podcast side, apparently, Neil Young didn’t like us making fun of him, so we had our first podcast pulled down.  I hope Neil Young will remember, this blogger don’t need him around, anyhow.  Since they pulled him from Spotify®, I hope he does okay.  I hear that he’s going to concentrate on MySpace™.

 

Bikini Economics, Guns, and the Problem with Free Stuff

Attention – this is a repost from 2019, though still very, very valid.  Had a mechanical issue to fix around the house (stuff you don’t want to freeze) but that’s all (fingers crossed) fixed.  Regardless, no time for a new post.  Enjoy!

“Good job, isn’t it? Type something will ya, we’re paying for this stuff.” – Ghostbusters

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I like guns.  And butter.  Especially cocoa butter.  Admit it – you’ve never enjoyed economics more.

Economics means choices.

One choice presented by Marxist economics professors to hung-over sophomores in college is between “guns or butter.”  This is a classic economic model.  In it, a choice is presented:  produce guns for defense, or food for the people, or another shot of Jägermeister© before Calc 201.  I added the Jägermeister® for the sophomores.  No one should have to learn 3-space vector calculus sober.

The idea is that there is some balance where government can feed people just enough so that they can make guns for beautiful Marxist bikini soldiers to take over the world with love and kindness and AK-47s.  In this fable, once the world chooses peace (that means Marxism), guns will no longer be produced and the glorious workers will now luxuriate in a worker’s paradise.

These are the deep thoughts of a dimwitted socialist like Kamala Harris, or of an overly caring 11 year-old who is earnestly trying to solve the world’s problems.  But I repeat myself.

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Don’t be mean to Kamala.  She already enough difficulty explaining to her husband why she’s in the top results for “slept her way to the top” on a Google® image search (this is true).

Just because Marxists were wrong about economics doesn’t mean that economies that there aren’t economic choices to make.  There are.  The biggest actual economic choice to make is whether to spend the output of that economy on building additional productive capacity or on Free Stuff.

Building additional production is investment in the economy.  Sure, Leftists like to use “investment” as just another word for Free Stuff, but investment, by definition, produces a return.  In the case of investment in an economy, after the investment is done the economy produces more than it did before.  Instead of dividing a finite economic pie between guns or butter, the genius of investment is that it creates a bigger pie for everyone.  By definition, that’s a win, because it also means more guns for everyone!

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There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to lie.  If she’s holding an AK, it’s time to lie.

This was self-evident in Western Civilization during the Cold War.  We picked the strategy that we invest in our economies so that they became larger, and we’d defeat Communism by out producing them.  In order to do that, we increased freedom of the free market so that instead of handfuls of production bureaucrats and commissars guessing what should be produced, millions of free people experimenting in an open economy would make that choice.  The winners were selected by the market, and even when things like the Hula-Hoop® or Justin Bieber became wildly popular, industrial capacity was increased all across Western Civilization (and Japan, which had largely adopted all of the winning parts of Western Civilization).

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I would try to Hula Hoop©, but last time the neighbor called an ambulance because they thought I was having a seizure.

We allowed this to guide our military spending, too.  Multiple companies competed to produce new jet fighters that were more capable, missiles that were more accurate.  The technical prowess of the military came not from a top-down dictate, but from the companies competing to produce better defense products.  Sure, some of them were horrible, but most of our equipment and doctrine was better than the Soviet stuff.  How much better?  Ask Saddam Hussein.

As the focus of our economy was growth, the economy grew.  How big did it grow?  It grew to the point where Reagan could consciously bankrupt the entire guns and butter Soviet economy through pretending that the Star Wars™ missile defense was going to make intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete.  The economy of Western Civilization was such a potent weapon because it harnessed the ingenuity of everyone through capitalist incentives and rewards.  The system of capitalism was so obviously successful that China®, Inc. decided to copy it for their economy and get rid of the silly Maoist collectivism.  Keep in mind, capitalism does not mean freedom.

Economies still have limits.  There’s a maximum amount of “stuff” that the economy can produce, and certainly there’s a limit based on sheer physics, if nothing else, though we’ve yet to see it.  The real choice isn’t guns or butter, it’s investment versus Free Stuff.  It used to be that money mattered, but that was in the time before Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) fans tossed bottles of Jägermeister© into Congress and told ‘em to spend as much as they wanted.

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If Venezuela had a dollar for every time giving out Free Stuff worked, they’d have zero dollars.  Oh, that’s exactly what Venezuela has.  Never mind.

What Free Stuff do the Leftists want to toss out?

  • “Free” Healthcare – for everyone. Including illegal aliens.  You might think that they don’t give it away now – they do.  A pregnant illegal alien show ups to have a baby?  You get to pay for that right now.  I guess the good news is you don’t have to change it’s diaper.
  • “Free” Daycare – for everyone. Why?  Because who could be better at raising your children than the state.  They do such a good job at the DMV.
  • “Free” College – for everyone.  That kid that sat behind you with his finger up his nose, who talked about how he wanted to ride a tyrannosaurus on Mars?  When he was a senior in high school?  Yeah, he gets free college, too.  Although riding a tyrannosaurus on Mars does sound cool.
  • “Free” Income – for everyone.  Why not give everyone $1000 a month for free.  It won’t distort the economy at all.
  • “Free” Reparations – not for everyone. People who were never slaves would get paid by people who never had slaves, for the sin of slavery.  Makes about as much sense as the rest of this list.
  • “Free” Housing – just not in the gated communities where Congressmen live.

Oh, and don’t forget regulations, since regulations is another way to give Free Stuff.  They take freedom from the economy and create winners and losers.  The Green New Deal is an example of this – the idea of the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment – it’s all about creating a socialist economy.  In the words of AOC’s advisor:  “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Regulations are used to change the economy.

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Take a look at all of the innovation spawned by Communism!

At some point Free Stuff will grow to encompass the entire economy leaving nothing for productive growth.  Ever notice that every Communist economy freezes at the technology level (outside of military technology) that existed when it went Commie?  Cuba is a great example, what with all of the vintage 50’s Ford® and Chevy© rust buckets and fine Soviet cars they have on the streets.  If only they would have waited until the 1970’s to go Communist they could have had Ford© Pintos™.  That would have made driving exciting!

The same thing happened in Venezuela.  PDVSA was a very profitable oil company before Hugo Chavez gutted it to provide Free Stuff to the Venezuelan people.  Now?  PDVSA is deeply in debt and incapable of producing as much oil as it did in 1998, despite having 77.5 billion barrels of reserves.

Yeah.  Free Stuff can make a country bankrupt.

The nice thing about this concept is that it also applies to individuals.  Every day each of us has a choice:  do we work to make ourselves better, or do we goof off?  The choice is an important one.

Do you invest time in increasing your capabilities every day?  Do your work to make yourself better?  I mean, really work?  Take Steve Martin’s advice – “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”  (“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”-Steve Martin Plus? A sniper joke.)

You have the choice.  And time is running out.  And I’m certain you can’t afford Free Stuff.

Ignoring Reality Catches Up With All Of Us

“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.” – Star Trek (The Cage)

After creating the Nile, God became a podcaster, “Check out my stream!”

Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

It’s a pretty simple definition, and it mostly works unless you have really persistent hallucinations.  Persistent hallucinations just like Philip K. Dick probably had.  This may explain a lot of his fiction and his fascination with reality.  And as for 2021, I’d say reality has great graphics, but horrible gameplay.

In 2022, though, we live in a world where reality seems to be split, and split along ideological lines.  One generally reliably Left member of the media (but I repeat myself), Bill Maher, just gave up on the fiction:  “It’s just gone on too long, nobody cares anymore.  I don’t want to live in your mask paranoid world anymore.  You go out, it’s silly now.  You have to have a mask, you have a booster, they scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas.  I’m not bananas, you are.”

Still not on your side.

With that, the cracks of reality on where we’re at with COVID have swung wide open.  There is the fiction that has the single, double, triple, and mega-vaxxed living in constant fear.  The Mrs. was reading the comments to me from some Lefties on a website she frequents.  One particular set of comments was of Lefties looking for test kits like they were looking for crack.  One commenter had consumed at least four instant kits (without a positive result) because they were certain that they had . . . the Rona.

I have no idea what induces that level of fear in a healthy person.  When one of them pointed out that they were consuming tests that could have been better used by people in nursing homes, this entirely common-sense idea was shouted down by a sea of Leftist fear.

This is a denial of reality.  COVID has killed quite a few people, but it’s no Black Death.  Everyone in my family has had it, and for us it ranged from two or three days in bed (The Mrs.) to an afternoon of fever (me).  I’d go so far as, having had it, to bet that millions of people have had it and don’t even realize it.  For two years, these people have managed to live every moment dripping in abject fear.

How a Leftist imagines a trip to COSTCO®.

Beyond the impact of the fear, there’s the impact of the Vax itself.  There is more than sufficient anecdotal evidence that the mRNA shots have significantly more complications than any vaccine ever delivered.  No one can say what the long-term implications are.  With any luck, the negative health impacts are over more quickly than the protections offered by the shot, but there are no guarantees.

Especially not a guarantee from the manufacturer.  Hmmm.

The “adverse health impacts”, of course, are being denied as well.  But such an overwhelming amount of data leads to even the monolith of “jab good, deniers bad” being breached at an official level.  The current shot does nothing against the current strain of COVID, and it appears the current strain of COVID leaves those that get it immune to certain other forms of COVID.

Huh.  It’s almost like the virus is attenuating like, oh, every virus, ever and becoming progressively more infectious and less lethal.  Even Bill Gates is ready to call this one over.

We know that Bill Gates didn’t invent COVID – none of his other products come up with new versions this frequently.

This isn’t the only reality the Left is denying.  It’s not even the most important reality that is being denied.

What’s falling apart, that Leftists say isn’t?

Well, the economy, but I’ve been on and on about that, so I’ll give you a rest.  Besides, Wednesday is a better day for bikini economics.  For whatever reason, Biden owns the economy now.  In this, I’ll give him a pass.  He’s like the last player in a game of Jenga® where you know the tower is going to go, but he’s gotta try to make it one peg higher.  More on that later.

Our border.  The character of a country is in its people, and so is the success.  I do believe that the traditions of our great nation led to the great prosperity that we had.  That, and having thousands of nuclear warheads.  Yeah, having great traditions is nice, but having the ability to obliterate anyone who disagrees with you never hurts.

Regardless, there’s a group that actively says that the United States, “has no culture” which is like a fish wondering what water is.  The fact is that the culture of the United States was so successful and pervasive that people didn’t recognize its influence because it is literally everywhere.  Is American culture perfect?  No.  But it certainly has remade the world, in some ways for the good, in others for the not so good.

I killed an Australian spider with my shoe.  I’m glad he wasn’t big enough to carry both of them.

But if you replace the people, you’ve replaced the culture, and the Magic Dirt won’t make them prosperous.  Just like if you replaced the Japanese with (spins wheel) Argentinians, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore, you can’t replace Americans with (spins wheel) Japanese and expect anything but another Japan.

The Left somehow thinks the thousands of people in the medical professions (doctors, nurses, administrators, etc.) are magically going to be replaced when they refuse the Clotshot®.  No.  These are skilled positions requiring education and practical training.  Replace these professionals with idiots like me, and you’d end up with every solution being amputation.  They don’t call me “John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon” for nothing.  It did cut down on the owies my kids brought me, though.

Our relationship with each other.  At every level this is breaking down.  That’s not fair.  At every level, people are being pushed apart.  On a racial level, everyone is being taught that, even when there’s no intent, one group of people is awful and the other is blameless.

One of the most pernicious things that can be done is to create a victim class.  No matter what happens, they are told, they have no responsibility.  If they behave badly, well, it couldn’t be helped.  Why not?  Well, something happened three hundred years ago, you see.

It’s nonsense.  I know Scott Adams has been taking a few lumps recently, but a while back he had a thought experiment I felt was interesting:  what would happen if you asked an alien about the situation of blacks in the United States and if reparations were owed.  If the alien looked over the situation, Scott seemed to think that it might say, “Well, comparing your life span, material goods, and general standard of living compared to if you had stayed in Africa, you probably owe the white people.”

Women drinking coffee.  My three favorite things.

Probably not a popular idea to float in 2022, but the constant stream of victimhood replacing any sort of rational assessment will end up doing only one thing:  tearing us further apart.  Which is just what Leftists want.

We are on the road to many reckonings.  From the looks of them, they won’t be delivered sequentially.  I tend to think the big trigger will be the economy, but regardless of the trigger, there comes a point where, regardless of what we believe, reality will set in.

I hope it doesn’t have too much Kardashian.

Fasting: Why Not?

“Your brain, for example, is so minute, Baldrick, that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open there wouldn’t be enough inside to cover a small water biscuit.” – Black Adder Goes Forth

Cows don’t make sounds after they run out of milk.  Udder silence.

One of the main battles that the United States is losing is to . . . fat.

There are plenty of reasons for this.  The first is that we have a culture where billions of dollars are made by corporations to sell stuff.  What stuff?  Stuff that tastes good.  I don’t fault them for that – they’re responding to incentives.  People want nachos covered in cheese and steak and sour cream and . . . dang, now I’m hungry.

That’s one reason.  The other is that we live in a culture that’s obsessed with food.  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” say people whose paychecks are tied to everyone eating breakfast.  And, meals are more than just consuming calories – they’re also social occasions.  People get together to feast – not about the food, but about the sharing, or close-quarters combat as it’s known at our house.

And you thought I was going to ask what he wants on his omelet.  Easy.  One with everything.

There are also some amazingly unhealthy ideas out in society.  One of them is “healthy at any size.”  That’s provably false, yet now we see models who wouldn’t fit in a semi.  Or a semi-trailer.  Flatbed.

I understand the idea not to bully people who are overweight, but the idea of idolizing them and holding this condition out to be virtuous is damaging.

Losing weight is, though, astonishingly simple to do.  As the math shows, simply eat less than what your body burns.  Simple as.

The problem is that requires willpower.  And the other problem is that food today is often very calorically dense:  a single McDonalds milkshake can have as much as 700 calories.

So, nothing but problems, right?

Muslims won’t go to McDonalds® anymore.  The go to Burka King™ now.

No, not at all.  There are many solutions.  When I was younger, all I had to do was amp up the exercise and I could drop weight amazingly quickly.  Now that my knees seem to be coated internally with sandpaper after that first mile, that solution is a bit more difficult.

One thing that works very well for me is something a bit more radical:  not eating.  It’s amazing, because this particular diet costs nothing.  There are no pills or powders to buy.  There is no special club to join.  Just don’t eat.

For how long, twenty minutes?

No.  There are several strategies.  One is just eating one meal a day – the nerds call this OMAD.  Only eat once a day.  And, honestly, that has always worked just fine for me, and was a pretty easy habit to get into.  I don’t lose weight just eating one meal a day, but I don’t gain it, either.

And the meal isn’t breakfast.

And who made this?  Where’s the bacon?

There is an even more radical idea – actual fasting, for days at a time.  Now, I’m not a doctor, but there are actual doctors who recommend this.  Jason Fung is one.  Fung’s story is a simple one.  He had diabetics showing up for treatment due to failing kidneys.  Fung is a kidney specialist.

They told Fung that the only thing to do for these folks was to help them along.  They’d die (eventually) from the complications due to diabetes.  Fung rejected that, and started experimenting with fasting.  And, of course, all of his patients drink all of the water, coffee, or tea that they want.

It worked.  He actually increased positive outcomes for his patients.  Again, I’m not a doctor and if you want to consider this, well, don’t say “the internet humorist seemed to think it was a good idea.”  No.  You go see a doctor or whatever it is you do to make medical decisions.

Last time I was in the hospital it was because I was confused about what the Dyson© Ball™ cleaner was for.

Me?  I stumbled upon this a few years ago.  It works for me, pretty well when I keep up with it.  For me, what I do to lose weight is just not eat between, say, Sunday and Friday.  I will tell you that if you’re not eating for 140 or so straight hours, you tend to notice it.

Oddly, the feeling I feel is mostly not hunger, but rather the idea that I should be eating.  And when I’m fasting if The Mrs. cooks up something especially tasty that smells wonderful, it does make me really, really want to eat.

Am I completely willpowerful?  No.  I do “cheat” during the fast.  Pickles have (for instance) nearly zero calories, and are salty.  When I’m not eating, I’m not getting electrolytes (which, I hear, plants crave) and so salty pickles solve two problems at once.

Business lunch?  How about a side salad that’s just lettuce and tomato?  Vinegar or mustard as a dressing turns that into about . . . 20 calories.  I really don’t sweat it on a fast day if I consume less than 100 calories.  And, if I break that (I haven’t so far) I don’t consider it a loss – I just pick back up and keep going.

My ex-wife was so bad that she’d make a cannibal order the house salad.

This month (so far) I’ve done three fasts:  one was four days, one was five and a half, and the one I’m on right now is (as I write this) 128 hours on the way to at least 140.  From personal experience, the first day is the easiest, the second day is the worst, and after that they’re okay.  I stop when I do to eat with family on Friday and Saturday.

So, yeah, fasting means not eating.  And it sucks.  But there are bonuses at the end.

The first time I ever did an extended fast I ended it with a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.  That soup was the best I’ve ever had in my life.  The second bonus is that my stomach shrinks over five days.  It takes only a small amount of food to make me feel full.  Finish a steak dinner?  Nope.  Can’t do it.  Just not enough room.

Of course, there’s also the other benefit – the scale.

And with the experience I’ve gained new perspectives.  Whenever I see a story on the news about, “Local man stuck in car for three days, survived on Taco Bell® Fire Sauce™ packets,” I know that’s a joke.  The average person in the United States is already walking around with decades of Taco Bell© already strapped to their bodies.

Taco Bell® is like DNA.  Just four ingredients combine to make infinite combinations.

When it comes to prepping, the same lesson applies.  Whenever I see lists of things to go into bug-out bags, I always see food listed.  After fasting, I know the truth – unless there’s a medical condition that requires food, it can safely be skipped in almost every bug-out bag, unless it’s planned for use for over a week.

So, nationally we have a problem.  The answer is simple:  stop eating so much.  For me, though, I’ll be the happiest man in the county around dinner time tomorrow.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

What decongestant does the Federal Reserve© ban?  Sudafed™.

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India.  The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this:  Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead.  The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!”

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news.  Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish:  Tarp City) and looting them.  What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch.  Amazon® packages.  Best Buy™.  Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails.  Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them.  They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online.  Except for books.  And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast.  There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant.  Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in?  It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas.  Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks.  Oh, they have?  Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so!  Oh, wait, it’s completely so.  Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time.  You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000.  In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard.  They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No!  They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it!  They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws.  They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever.  (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility.  The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right.  No, farther right.  Yes, farther. 

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work.  Everyone not making big bucks?  Inflation is eating the raises of most people.  So who’s winning?  I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff.  Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless.  Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless.  Who owns things?  Rich people.  They’ve done very, very well.  Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars.  Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh?  Honestly, it’s not a stock:  it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something.  Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff.  Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why?  Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up?  No.  You sell a meme.  And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers.  We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either.  Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.

Biden’s Bad Year

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.” – Airplane

Jill caught Joe chewing on electrical wires, so she had to ground him.

Joe Biden is having his worst week in office.  In fact, so far his time in office has been an utter string of failure that makes the whole farce looks like it’s on purpose.  Let’s just look at the catalog of mess (not in order) that he’s created/made worse since last January.

I thought that Biden was in denial, but from the picture, looks like he was in the Suez.

  • In March, that cargo ship blocked the Suez Canal. Not Biden’s fault (probably) but I think Kamala might have been driving.
  • Increased inflation so it is now at multi-generation highs. Biden has successfully turned the economy into the number one fear of Americans.  I guess that’s one way to solve the COVID crisis.
  • International embarrassment about fleeing Afghanistan in the middle of the night. Certainly, we should have left, but we left like a fat man sneaking away from the dessert bar with a full plate.
  • Announced a mandate for workers at companies with over 100 employees to force-vax as a last-ditch effort to get support, only to have the Supreme Court deny it. This actually was to his benefit, except that it makes him look weak politically.  Or like an old man with dementia.
  • Actually got in place a requirement for health care workers paid by Uncle Sugar to be force-vaxxed. While it might seem like a political win, the fallout from the health care systems will be very dark indeed – expect emergency levels of personnel shortages coming soon.

How does a pirate set up his Bluetooth speaker?  Parrot with his phone.

As I’ve mentioned before, Biden has made himself as popular as morning-after-tequila breath.  People actually would rather have that volcano that just exploded near Tonga as president, since it would certainly do less damage to the country.  A tornado?  That would be a huge improvement on Biden – at least the tornado stops destroying after a while.

In previous years, I would have asked the question, how could it get worse?  But since I asked that question about 2020 “How could 2021 be worse?” I’ve learned to stop tempting fate since I don’t want a plague of Leftist vampires with electric cars to appear suddenly as the Sun goes nova.  So, I don’t want to push my luck.

With good measure.  Biden’s problem is that . . . he has nothing but problems.  I had a boss once who said, “Nothing succeeds like success.”  What he meant by that was that when things were going well, if you could keep them going you could end up in a virtuous circle.  Things just got better and better, and the momentum led from one victory to the next.

Little known fact:  you don’t need a parachute to skydive.  You need a parachute to skydive twice.

Success leads to success.  Does failure lead to failure?  Absolutely.  Joe Biden’s life is a patchwork of failure that somehow has led to him to the most epic failure of all politicians since Louis XVI said, “Nah, you can ignore them.  The peasants never do anything.”

But failing politicians are like failing businesses.  They’ll do almost anything to try to turn things around.  Businesses will borrow increasing amounts of money while promising increasingly ludicrous deals.  Politicians will . . . do exactly the same thing.  Except with a politician, they’ll toss in war as a bonus.

That’s just what Joe is doing.  Why would we want to increase the size of NATO by one Ukraine?  I have no idea.  But right now, I have no idea why NATO exists.  The Warsaw Pact and Stalin are both long gone, so who, exactly, are we worried about attacking Europe?

And why would we care about Ukraine enough to do, well, anything?  When Putin took the Crimean peninsula over, I was surprised – surprised he didn’t control it already.  But, again, why would we care?  I personally wouldn’t care if Guatemala took over Nicaragua, but that would be far more relevant to the United States than Ukraine is.  I see no role for the United States in any of these issues, but I’m not a politician looking to score popularity points like Joe.

I’m glad I wasn’t born in Ukraine.  I don’t speak a word of Ukrainian.

Additionally, though, Biden is playing the war card inside the United States, defining over 80,000,000 Americans as “terrorists” that the FBI just hasn’t organized terror plots for.  I do hear that the 2022 New Year’s Resolution of the FBI is to make their plot planning just a little less obvious.  The big advantage here is the government can time their schemes so they get all the Federal holidays off.

In one sense, Trump should be happy he isn’t in office:  the economy is was cooked for 2021 no matter what happened.  The aftermath of the COVID-19 shutdowns combined with the currency faucets spraying cash everywhere was bound to create an additional economic catastrophe.  That was baked into the cake already.

But Biden took that situation and made it worse.  The biggest mistakes were (and are) the Federal stimulus bills that have directly led to the inflation we’re seeing today.  You can only pour so much money into an economy until it shows up everywhere.

And it’s about to get spicy for Biden, the Federal Reserve® has signaled that they’re more than fine with abandoning Biden, too.  The only real cure for an inflating currency is to dry it up through higher interest rates.

If you had a dollar for every time you thought about me . . . you’d think about me more often.

The higher interest rates will (eventually, and if the rates are high enough) reduce inflation.  But the cost includes lowered prices on things people need to borrow money to buy, like houses.  So, while interest rates make borrowing more expensive, housing prices will drop, while rents stay high, and inflation remains.

Joe’s approval rate is 33% now.  What will it be when that perfect economic storm hits?

I bet that week will be even worse.