Living Forever, The Uncomfortable Way

“Cannibalism is one thing, but increasing longevity by eating human flesh….” – The X-Files

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I’m not going to tell an AARP® joke:  they’re all pretty old.

David Sinclair isn’t a medical doctor, but he’s got a laboratory at Harvard© Medical School.  That’s the real Harvard®, not the Haarvard™ School of Witchcraft and Legal Studies I started a few years ago.  It was accredited by Madame Kim’s Korean Restaurant (located under the Vance’s Bowl-a-Rama in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  One of my students turned me into a newt.

But I got better.  (R.I.P. Terry Jones)

Anyway, Sinclair actually teaches at the real Harvard© and not my scam internet school beloved privately held institution of learning.  Dr. Sinclair is not a medical doctor, but is instead a PhD, which is troubling to me now – there was no real reason he should have checked me for breast cancer.  And do most of those checks really take an hour?  But as I watched a video of him chatting about the future, it struck me:  he looks just like Christian Slater.

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He may look a lot like Christian Slater, but the good Doctor Sinclair looks sheltered.   I mean, who doesn’t have a three day cocaine, heroin, and tequila binge resulting in assault on a police officer and three months in the slammer?  Oh, only Christian?   

Anyway, Dr. Sinclair is mainly interested in longevity.  When I say mainly, he’s done research on longevity since the 1990’s.  Currently, he feels he has the reason that we age:  as we get older, our cells forget what it is that they should be doing.

What, a cell can forget?  How does that work?

DNA is a long strand in a cell.  How long?  If you stretched out a DNA strand, it would be (by most calculations I’ve seen on the Internet) over six feet long.  Obviously, just like Tom Cruise, your cells aren’t six feet long.  Therefore, the DNA has to be wound up to fit inside a cell.

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Remember, sharing DNA with those you share DNA with can have consequences.  Just ask the governor of Virginia!

In a really neat trick, it’s not the just the DNA that determines what a cell does, it’s the way that the DNA is wound up in little knots to fit in the cell.  Since every cell has the same DNA, it’s not the DNA that determines what a cell does:  it’s how the DNA is coiled in a cell that defines what that cell does.  That available information on the coiled up bits of DNA is what makes a cell a nerve cell.   Or a skin cell.  Or, for you lucky people, a hair follicle.

Wait, that’s not true.  I have hair.  It’s just in my ears.  What gives?

The answer is simple.  The skin cells had the DNA originally coiled up to be skin cells.  But after a while, the winding became . . . not as good in a few of them, so skin cells decided that they wanted to start a hobby:  making hair.  So places that didn’t have hair in my 20’s, now have hair.  Just not where I wanted it – sure I feel the wind blowing through my hair still, but now it’s my back hair.

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Fun Fact:  Lloyd’s of London® will not insure the Kardashian family against Velcro©.

Sinclair thinks that part of the key to having humans live to be 170 or longer is in resetting that mechanism so the DNA coils up correctly in the cell.  He suggests the reset might be possible, but it involves viruses, PEZ®, and painters scaffolding.  I kid.  Except for the viruses.  Dr. Sinclair has several theories on how this reset can be done, and, yes, one of them includes a virus.  Some of them involve drugs or supplements.  I’m not planning on selling supplements here (though I hear that can be lucrative if you’re in talk radio) but you can look up his advice on supplements.  Remember, he’s not a doctor, at least not the medical kind.

But he does have some advice that’s certainly (mostly) free to pursue, and probably harmless:

  • Be cold. Apparently The Mrs. is right that the air conditioning should be set at 54°F in the summer, since being cold appears to activate mechanisms that reduce inflammation.  We also keep Stately Wilder Manor cold in winter.  Sometimes when your author is writing in winter I actually rub two verbs together to keep warm.
  • Be hot. Not like supermodel hot, but actually physically warm.  If you’re both, you probably get bonus points.  Saunas have been documented to lower blood pressure and much lower death rates.  I don’t have a sauna, but I have a hot tub (I keep it warm by burning $100 bills) and I’m in it 4 or 5 times a week.  I can’t keep it at 175°F like the Finnish people do, but I imagine that 104°F is close enough.
  • Work out.   This isn’t news, since this has been done to get people healthy since at least the time of the Roman Empire.  But it appears that higher intensity workouts, stressing the body increases the body’s aging defenses.  Sinclair suggests high intensity interval training.
  • Fast. This actually saves you money, since you’re not spending money on food when you do it.  I wrote a bit about fasting here (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) and think it’s something that I think would benefit most people.  Fasting appears to lower blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and lower inflammation.  The downside?  You’re fasting.
  • Don’t eat so much protein. This is the tough one.  Sinclair noted that too much protein causes lower levels of NAD – heh hehe heh heh, he said “NAD” – and NAD is a nucleotide called “nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide” that decreases as you age.  NAD is one of Sinclair’s main keys to aging.  But I like steak.  I’m not sure that I want to live to 170 without steak.  Plus, if I’m not supposed to eat carbs, and now not supposed to eat protein, what’s left?  Sticks of butter covered in grass clippings?

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Not only do you have to set your cake on fire, you can’t eat it.

Again, those are (mostly) free to do, and in some cases put money back in your pocket.

Observationally, the things on the list are things that suck.  We want to be at comfortable temperatures, sitting on the couch with chocolate and steak smeared faces.  We want to live in malls, comfortable and cocooned against all discomfort.  But longer life appears to be triggered by being uncomfortable.  Since you’re not happy when you’re uncomfortable, that means time goes more slowly.  So not only do you live longer, it also feels like you’re living longer.  You might live to 170, but it feels like 1,700 years.

But what about the other things that kill you besides growing old?

In the past week, it looks like (fingers crossed) there’s a breakthrough against cancer.  Despite cancer being utterly curable in mice for, oh, decades, this particular cure uses the body’s own immune system to eat the cancer cells.  I’m betting this has about 1 chance in 10 of working, but that’s better news than any cancer news in recent memory.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to not need this, though.

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Remember, the Supreme Court is just regular court with sour cream and tomato.

If we cure cancer and aging, we’re home free, right?

Well, there are still things like dementia, liver failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and heart disease.  Certainly following Dr. Sinclair’s suggestions will help with some of these, but it’s not likely it will help with all of them.  I’m not trying to be pessimistic here, but solving all of the body’s problems isn’t as easy as jumping in the hot tub with a supermodel or avoiding steak.

For a long life to be worth it, it should be one where I don’t live from year 70 to year 140 as a rambling, dementia cursed old man.  And Dr. Sinclair’s dad, who is now 80, has been following Sinclair’s advice and is still quite active.

Or was it Dr. Sinclair’s advice after all?  It could have been Christian Slater.  And always remember my motto:

Shoot now, ask Christian Slater.

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Here’s a video of Dr. Sinclair, if you want to check either my facts or the Christian Slater resemblance.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Alternative Investments

“Well that’s fantastic.  A really smart decision, young man.  We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand it’s gone.” – South Park

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I’ll have you know there are at least three things that you can use an empty potato chip bag for.

I was reading Bison Prepper (LINK) (and you should, too) last week when Lord Bison mentioned that stocking up on things that you used regularly as consumables was a survival strategy.  It is.  Beyond that, it’s also an investment strategy.

In the world of investment, when you buy a stock thinking the price is going to go up, it’s called “going long.”  If you were to buy Apple® stock thinking that the world hadn’t had enough iPhones®, iPads©, or iCrap™, you would be “going long.”  For this strategy to pay off, when you finally decided to sell Apple©, it would have to be worth more than when you bought it.  Buy low, sell high.

Duh.

But I started this post by writing about consumables.  What’s the deal?  Those aren’t investments, right?

I recalled reading another article a few years ago about a financial writer showing up on the Tonight Show™ with Johnny Carson, so I looked for the interview and found it – a whopping 200 people had watched it, even though it had a glimpse of Susan Sarandon while she was still cute and before her eyes popped out of her head like they were trying to escape.  The writer that Johnny was interviewing was Andrew Tobias.  Johnny said in passing:  “I like how you said that if you had $1000, you should invest in tuna.”

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I was really shocked when he said, “Sit on it.”

Tobias responded:  “If you want to make 40% tax free on $1000 you can . . . if you buy tuna fish . . . and shaving cream on sale, and get a case discount.”  The audience didn’t laugh – they were living in pretty uncertain times and the advice was serious.

Andrew Tobias posted this clip on YouTube®, and was really irritated with himself – since his jacket was buttoned it looked like he was forming a human air scoop as he sat down with Johnny.

Back when this clip was filmed was in the late 1970’s, and the economy was in trouble.  The interest rate was high – a mortgage (if you had great credit) would charge you really high rates, between 10% and 14% . . . compared to a tiny 4% or so today.  Inflation for nearly everything you could buy was running around 10%.

The entire key to making this odd investment strategy work is that you have to buy things that you’ll actually use.  Sure, Wal-Mart® sells five-gallon troughs of flaming pickles soaked in Cheeze® Ballz™, but will you actually eat that?

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It was even worse when she flipped off people we passed.

What’s a list of things that most people buy that this would work for?

  • Tuna (and long shelf life canned food) – especially good if you need to keep your mercury intake up.
  • Shaving cream and razors – buy extra if your wife is a Kardashian or you’ll look like you’re married to a Chia Pet™.
  • Various condiments – mustard keeps forever, and can be used to slow Kardashian hair regrowth.
  • Laundry soap – I have to keep this on the list, my hands are Tide®.
  • Paper goods – I’ll make a toilet paper joke, since I’m on a roll.
  • Wheat, rice, and other grains (properly stored)
  • Honey – They’ve found 5000 year old honey that is still edible, so it probably gets the nod as the most stable food ever. Plus it’s really handy to have local honey if you’re in Russia – I hear it’s made there by cagey bees.
  • Ammunition – Don’t be like JFK and have this be the last thing on your mind.

Now, you should be smart about this – if your family won’t eat cans of clams, buying them when they’re super cheap won’t really help you because then you have cans of clams that no one will eat, until there’s a food drive, and then you give them the clams.  If this sounds oddly specific, well, we don’t have canned clams anymore.  Likewise, if you decide to grow a beard, six cases of shaving cream suddenly become worthless until you decide to shave again.

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The Mrs. didn’t buy the line, “But she looked so lonely, like she could use a good home.”

And don’t be nutty.  If you live in a tiny house, putting several thousand cubic feet of tuna and wheat might not be the greatest idea.  Unless you like sleeping on cans of tuna.  There’s a limit.  When Tobias gave that advice, he suggested that it could be used for $1000 worth of stuff.  Today that translates into about $4,500 worth of stuff, if the inflation calculator is to be trusted.  That’s certainly a lot, and would translate into 20 or so tons of wheat, but you’d probably have to stack hide some of it under the bed.

One dangerous point:  if you buy something, like, say, wine and get a 10% case discount, it doesn’t really help your cause if you drink the wine twice as fast.  Or if when you see a Ding-Dong®, you immediately rip open the silvery plastic sleeve and try to suck out the “cream” filling until you are sitting in the corner in a sugar coma.  So you might want to reconsider stocking up on things where your self-control will turn a savings into a disaster for your liver or waistline.

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9 out of 10 doctors recommend water over alcoholic beverages for health reasons.  The other doctor is from Flint, Michigan.

In the 1970’s, you could do this strategy with nearly anything since prices were going up on everything, as long as you didn’t have to borrow the money – interest rates on credit cards were 18%.  As opposed to the 18% today.  Hmmm.

Regardless, if you have high-interest debt, get rid of it.  The sooner the better.  The future is uncertain, so getting rid of debt is a certain way to be in better financial shape.

In the last decade, inflation is most prominent in two things that you can’t collect like tuna:  health care and college tuition.  Oh, sure, you could pre-injure yourself, but who has the time?  Likewise, you could avoid steep college tuition hikes by sending your three year old to college, but that would make congress unhappy.  They hate competition that’s smarter than them.

The best information that I can find is that 401k plans returned an average of 7% for the last five years.  Better than a jab in the eye with a sharpened terrier, and probably still a smart thing to do.  I have one.  The beauty of mine is that my company kicks in an instant match – and whatever match I get is an immediate return – if the company matches dollar for dollar, it’s an immediate 100% return.  If it “only” matches $0.50 on the dollar, it’s still an immediate 50% return.  I’ll pay taxes on it after you begin to pull it out, assuming that it hasn’t been confiscated by Bernie Sanders to fund his “waterslides for the poor” initiative.

But the 401k immediate return is hard to say no to.

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For me?  I’ll take belt sanders over Bernie Sanders any day.

But I can easily make 30% to 40% return tax free on toilet paper, if i buy it on sale, and in bulk.  And I’ll never pay taxes on that return.  It’s just free money – again, assuming I don’t have any debt.

If I have a mortgage of $100,000 at 4%, and I pay it off, I’ll make a $4,000 return before taxes.  Not bad, but after taxes, it’s really as low as $2,000 depending on the rest of my income.  But if I get a sweet deal on non-dairy gluten-free vanilla creamer, I get all of the money I save.

There is one other advantage of putting some of your money into stuff that you’d use – you’re making yourself more resilient.  If the dollar (the United States one, not one of the phony dollars they use in places like Zimbabwe or Philadelphia) were to weaken, you have investments in things other than dollars.  I heard a story of a German boy who got a gold coin as a tip while working at a hotel.  After the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, that same German boy was able to buy the same hotel for that same gold coin.  Of course then it became a target for B-17 bombers, but who’s keeping score?

Oh, yeah.  Everybody.  Except the French – they’re waiting for their record to improve.

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A French border guard was questioning a German.  “Occupation?”  “No,” replied the German.  “Just visiting.”

The idea that I’m trying to convince you of is that you should think of your average daily purchases as if they were investments – because they are.  It’s not only stocks, bonds, precious metals and a 401k that are investments – what you buy on a day to day basis and how much you pay for it can also be an investment.

The other thing that many people overlook when they think of investments is their time.  How are you spending yours?  You can, like me, spend your time in a PEZ®-addled haze, watching Bojack Horseman™ on an endless Netflix© loop, or you can spend it productively, making yourself better.  That’s tax free, too.

Remember, investment means more than stocks and bonds.  It’s the things you buy, the way you spend your time, and avoiding B-17 bombers by not buying German hotels.

Virginia: How We Got Here, In Four Levels

“I’m branching out from self-loathing and self-destruction.” – House, M.D.

INCEPTION

How does Leo avoid getting his girlfriend pregnant?  Conception.

As I sit writing on the eve of the potentially fateful protest in Richmond, a reasonable question to ask is “How did we get here?”  Like Inception©, there are several levels of answer to that question, each deeper than the last.  Ah, Inception™.  Leonardo DiCaprio really had a dream job in that one.

The highest level answer is, “because an election was lost.” 

And this is true.  A single election has completed the transformation of Virginia’s government from one where there was representation on both sides to one that is under sole control of the Left.

It wasn’t a surprise to the Left.  On day one, the Left was ready to take advantage of their new power.  A slate of model gun control legislation topped their agenda.  Everything from banning semi-automatic weapons to requiring universal background checks to red flag laws was on the table.  Already several bills are moving through the legislature.  As of this writing, it appears the semi-automatic ban has been removed, but that won’t last long.

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Making guns illegal will stop all gun crime – that’s how we finally stopped everyone from doing drugs . . .

In addition to the anti-gun agenda, the Left is proposing a series of laws aimed at making sure that this is the final change of government that Virginia will ever see – I read about a bill that would move the governor’s vote from popular vote to a majority of the congressional districts.  As the districts will be gerrymandered, that assures a Leftist governor for ever and ever.  Also included was a provision to give Virginia’s electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote.  So, no popular vote for governor, and the people don’t get to vote for president at all.

Ain’t the Leftist version of freedom grand?

The second level is because the demographics of Virginia changed. 

I know that lots of people have arguments that “ENTER IDENTITY GROUP HERE” have more in common with the Right than the Left.  That might be true.  But the only group that reliably votes for the Right are people who might name their kids “Brandon” or “Logan” or “Sarah” or “Amanda.”  These people reliably want to vote for the traditions that created the United States, whereas many first, second, and even third generation citizens want to replicate the culture and country they left – including replacing the national currency with tortillas, which, the more I think of it isn’t that bad of an idea.

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A new study just came out that showed that people who want to commit murder just might ignore gun-free zone laws.

You might not like that it’s true.  You might have a fancy explanation why it shouldn’t be true.  But nevertheless, it’s true.  Immigration, urbanization, and being close to the Leftist center of power, Washington, D.C., has turned Virginia Left.

A third level is because it was planned. 

The election of Donald Trump was, perhaps, the single most traumatic thing to have happened to Leftists since, oh, the election of George W. Bush in 2004.  Which was nearly as traumatic as George W. Bush winning in 2000.  To think:  if only we had elected Gore president, polar bears would have not gone extinct.

What, polar bears are doing great?  Shhhhhh.

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Not all of the systems on the Titanic have failed.  The swimming pool is still full.

But the cumulative result of this trauma is a push towards deeper Leftism, plus a push to get all of the state legislatures they can for the Left before the next census (LINK).  Why?  To gerrymander all of the congressional seats they can.  Also on the agenda for a repeat of what went on in Virginia?  Texas and West Virginia.

Perhaps the deepest and most basic level is because Leftists hate themselves, and herd with other Leftists.

Certainly not all Leftists are exactly this.  I know a few people that are committed and are on the Left and are that way for the understandable, rational reasons.  People, who, for instance, think our health care system is crazy and think the solution is more government.  I think our health care system is crazy, and think that the solution is less government.  I can understand their motives.  They can understand mine.  We have good conversations; fun arguments that don’t result in a desire to set up a duel with sabers at dawn.  Dawn is much too early for a duel.  If I’m going to die, I at least want a nap first.

But there are Leftists that hate themselves, and I think this is most of them.  You’ve seen them – people who expend amazing amounts of emotion on behalf of other people, like the white liberals who got upset about Speedy Gonzalez and had him pulled from Cartoon Network®, despite his popularity in Mexico:  “He was like a superhero to us….”

Leftists don’t feel bad just for others.  Any comment you can make about a Leftist (or someone they feel protective over) is interpreted in the worst possible way.  It’s as if every time someone used the term “guy” or “buddy” and men got amazingly upset.  Even worse, if people got amazingly upset because we were called “guy” and decided that they would step in and protect us poor men and stop badthinkers from calling us “guy” and get anyone who said that hateword fired from work.

Secretly, the Leftists believe that the identity groups that they protect are inferior.  Why else would they need to protect them and think up new terms for perfectly good descriptive words like “handicapped” or “secretary”?  It’s not like if we called handicapped people something else they could, oh, walk again?

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I think I saw this flag burning on video, and one of the Lefties managed to burn himself when molten drops of plastic from the American flag they were burning fell on his wrist.  He said it was the same burning feeling he got when he thought about getting a job.

How bad is it?  This level of moral relativism and “there is no truth” required by modern Leftism actually makes the assertion that all cultures are equivalent.  Certainly not – especially in outcome.  If you were to compare the culture of Japan to the culture of North Korea, you can certainly determine that the cultures are different, and that the Japanese culture is superior in nearly every way a culture can be measured.

The Left has made the nonsensical claim that women are physically equivalent to men, which I’ve seen from the Left to justify men competing in (and beating) women in high school track events.  Deep down, they create this ferocious level of defense because they know that a man who says he’s a woman isn’t, but yet have to justify the insane idea that they are.

I blame the dames and broads.

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If only I had time to put Greta Thunberg’s face on this meme . . . .

And the Left hates everything good, and pure.  It hates the family.  It hates the way the wind would blow through my long locks of shiny hair, I mean, if I had hair.  And, even though the United States has done plenty wrong in its existence, it’s a shining beacon of hope that people risk their lives to get to.  Leftists hate the heritage of America.  They hate Western Civilization.  They hate tradition.  They hate rationality.  As I discussed last week, the Left idolizes the profane, and treats it as if it were sacred (Why The Left Can’t Handle Reality).

Individualism and individual achievement is their kryptonite®.  Why?  They are afraid that they are inferior, afraid that they cannot compete.  Bernie has to solve these problems, because our typical Leftist doesn’t think they can help themselves because he is a loser.  He also thinks that the Identity Groups are inferior, and could never compete.  Leftist philosophy is built on envy of those who are strong, and greed to take what they have made.

And Leftists are sure that they will be found wanting if judgement is ever made.  Why?  Because they feel they are inferior and are of no real value to society.  Thus reason, science, grades, objective tests (like I.Q. and SAT tests), and norms of behavior are to be avoided in schools.  If a child acts out in school?  It’s not because of lousy parents.  It’s not because the child has a mental or genetic defect that makes self-control impossible.  No.  It’s society’s fault.

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So, now you know where participation trophies come from.

Thankfully, all of the millions of dollars we’ve spent on trying to solve the problems of “society” have led to the best educated and behaved children on Earth.  No?  Hmmm.  Must be society’s fault.

Leftists, however, will do anything to protect their group.  When someone on the Right commits a foul against Political Correctness, even decades in the past, they are disowned.  Yet there is no behavior that any Leftist feels that they should be held accountable for – which brings us back to Virginia.

The current governor of Virginia has allegedly committed offenses against racial political correctness to the point that, if he were on the Right, he would be shot into the Sun and his family sent to exile in northern Canada where an old liberal would be sent ‘round to kick them every week.

Why would this be so?

I said that Leftists are herd animals.  All humans seek the company of other humans – it’s normal, and belonging is the most basic need outside of food, water and oxygen.  But Leftists seek safety in the herd.  Again, the concept of individuality is hateful to them, so the collectivist action mimics that of the herd.  The result is they’d never sacrifice a member until he was nearly dead – the biggest fear of the Left is that they’d be judged objectively.

The result of this is that the Left is dangerous due to this self-loathing.  They’re like people who feel themselves to be inferior always have been – vengeful, spiteful, and hungry for power so that they can finally be someone.

So, that’s how we got here.

The Best News of 2019? No Excuses.

“No.  That’s not fair.  ‘Cause I’m a victim, too.  Was a victim first, before him.” – Fargo (TV)

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Columbus learned quickly that even discovering a new continent wasn’t enough to hide from the student loan debt collectors.

In a previous post Global Obesity, Axel Rose, and at Least One Orphan Joke I talked about how the world and Axl Rose were both getting fatter, and pointed out some of the reasons for it.  In the comments, Ricky correctly noted that perhaps I’d skipped the biggest reason people were getting fatter:  they had to control what was going down their throat.

Of course he was right.  If you’re overweight (and I include myself in that), it’s because PEBCAP.  PEBCAP means, of course, that the Problem Exists Between Chair And Plate.  And one rule I learned at my own expense is that there is no number of cookies that I can eat that will make me not want to have more cookies.

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Did Pavlov think about feeding his dogs every time he heard a bell?

Because although cookies are filled with enough sugar and carbohydrates to be banned by the United Nations as a poison illegal for use in modern warfare, they are tasty, tasty poison.

The intent of that post was to highlight some of the causes that were contributing to the global rise of obesity, plus make fun of Axl Rose.  In no way was it supposed to provide an excuse to give up and say, “Okay, that’s it.  I’m just going to live with being 500 pounds.  There’s absolutely nothing to be done about it.”  And if I choke to death on gummy bears, I hope that in my obituary it just reads, “John Wilder killed by bears.”

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What do you call bears without ears?  B.

It probably will surprise exactly zero regular readers when I say that in life, there are no excuses that are valid other than:

  • “I’m only five years old.”
  • “I’ve just been hit by an asteroid.”

And even if you are five years old, quit making excuses.  That mill isn’t going to run itself.

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The good news is that she just made foreman.

When it comes to nearly every circumstance you will ever face, your life will be better if you remember these four little words:

  • There are no excuses.

There are two corollary statements to that:

  • No one is coming to save you.
  • No one wants to hear you whine.*

Misery and blaming the world for your problems isn’t what anyone wants to hear.*  That’s not to say that people won’t help you.  They will help you.  And that’s not to say that people won’t listen to your problems.  They will listen.  But what people won’t put up with is you having the same problem for years at a time and you taking no action to fix it.  People won’t put up with you constantly blaming everything else but you for your problems.

drama

If you don’t like drama, don’t be executive producer of every episode.

Embedded in this is some great news.  Perhaps the best news that anyone will ever get:

You get to control your own life.  You get to make your choices.  You get to feel whatever you choose to feel.  You get to try your best.  And when you fail (not if, when) you get to try again.

And, you get to take credit it for it, and own it all.

*Except your ex.  They love hearing your pain.

Status, Money, and Bad Car Jokes

“Dude, where’s my car?” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

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I wonder if her Tiffany is twisted, too?

I recall reading a story about several wives at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas.  They were comparing cars – each of them had a new Mercedes® or similar luxury car.  One of the wives, exasperated, mentioned their really wealthy friend, Martha, who drove around in an older car.  “I wish I was as rich as Martha.  Then I wouldn’t have to drive a new car.”

It’s always fascinated me that there are people who feel that they have to spend money for appearances.  The Mrs. can vouch for that – it’s because of her vocal insistence that I spend money for deodorant, which I guess is like a Mercedes™, except Old Spice© is cheaper and costs much less to insure.

I know, I know, having to spend money to impress people is not a club I want to be in, but I find it interesting nevertheless.  After all, I’m in an even more exclusive club:  guys who want to be able to buy a pickup with a stick shift, a vinyl bench seat and rubber flooring instead of carpet.  As nearly as I can tell from the domestic pickup truck market, this particular club has one member.  Me.

The world seems to have gone into a mode that is based in luxury.  A few years ago, I visited a friend, Dave.  Dave had a new pickup truck.  As we drove around on a fairly warm day, I noticed that my butt was getting . . . cold.  That’s not something that normally happens to my butt by itself.  It turns out his pickup truck didn’t have just have heated seats, it had climate controlled seats that also got cold.

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I’m sure it has seats that cook you at 350°F or freeze you to -40°F.

I was amused – I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.  I hadn’t had my butt chilled for my pleasure before, except for that one time in Amsterdam.  Dave, however, didn’t buy the pickup because he was showing off or because he wanted specifically to chill my butt – he bought it because he wanted it.  And he probably paid cash.

Just kidding.  Dave probably wrote a check.

I wasn’t jealous of Dave’s truck.  It wasn’t something that I’d ever buy for myself.  My current daily driver is older than Pugsley, and has nearly 180,000 miles (3,500 kilograms) on it, and only 36,000 miles (45°C) on the latest oil change.  I’m wanting to keep it until it’s driven at least one light-second, which is 186,000 miles (63 meters).  Fingers crossed.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t get my car to the Moon – that’s 226,000 miles (5 liters), and I’m nearly certain my fuel pump will die again before then, plus Allstate® won’t insure translunar travel, I mean, at least not with full coverage.

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I’m sorry.  I Apollo-gize.  And, yes, I know that Neil never had a sweet ride like this one.

I’m not against spending money, but I think you should spend money like Fuzzy Pink Niven (Hugo® winning author Larry Niven’s wife) spends calories:

Potato chips, candy, whipped cream, or a hot fudge sundae may involve you, your dietician, your wardrobe, and other factors. But FP’s Law implies: Don’t eat soggy potato chips, or cheap candy, or fake whipped cream, or an inferior hot fudge sundae.

I think that advice on calories applies to many areas of life.  I have a budget of money.  There are things I have to buy, and have to spend it on – The Mrs. gets rather cranky if I don’t feed her.  Beyond those necessities, with any left over, I have a choice as to what I spend it on, and when I spend it.  Where Dave chooses to spend his on a really cool pickup truck, and a collection of pinball machines, my choices are different.

But those choices are mine, just like Dave’s choices are his.

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My ideal truck, complete with DIY garage!

Money represents potential.  It is the potential to create, the potential to build, the potential to serve.   In many ways, it represents the potential for future choices.

Time represents the potential for future choices as well.  We choose how to spend our money as if it is limited, but we choose to spend our time as if it’s unlimited?  Money comes and goes, but my budget of time is my life, measured in minutes and seconds.  Spending my time is nothing less than spending my life.  Just like a pickup seat determines how warm or cold our butts are, how we spend our time (and who we spend our time with) determines who we are.

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Is it just me or does this picture of Beto O’Rourke look just a bit off?

Knowing this, go and make your choices today.

Because my butt is warm.  (That’s supposed to be motivational.)

Why The Left Can’t Handle Reality

“Physical reality is consistent with universal laws.  Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality.” – Star Trek

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And where I’m drawing, there is no art.

I love those moments when I make connections, mixing together equal parts of theory, experience, and coincidence together for an observation.  It makes me feel like the big picture is coming together, and I’m at least one step closer to understanding the way the world really works.  Sadly, I still can’t figure why the dentist tries to make conversation when his hand is in your mouth up to his wrist, but I did solve another puzzle.

The realization I came up with the other day is a simple one:  Leftism contains a requirement to deny reality.  The best current example is, of course, transgenderism.  I had already decided to write this post prior to this weekend, but I came across an article titled, For Transgender Men, Pain of Menstruation is More Than Physical on NBC™(LINK) today.  The article goes on to complain that transgendered men are somehow discriminated against because they can’t buy feminine hygiene products in a men’s restroom.  You can’t buy cheesy-beef chimichangas in men’s restrooms either, but you don’t see me complaining.

I’m not making this up, the way I taught my kids to say “hit me” instead of “I’m sorry”, just so when they got to school that they’d feel silly.  Pugsley was not pleased and has indicated that this will be a major factor in his nursing home selection criteria.  I do know that men complaining about having menstrual pains has been the punchline of jokes in the past.  Heck, I even had a sound clip of Bart Simpson™ saying “ohhh, my ovaries” once upon a time.

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Poor Optimus Prime.  He identifies as a truck.

All of this restroom nonsense is certainly a bit beyond the initial LGBT rights request of:  “Let consenting adults do what they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms.”  Now, that apparently includes letting consenting adults do whatever on the dining room table during Thanksgiving.  And you’re ___phobic if you don’t applaud position changes.  Pro tip:  get your mashed potatoes early.

This has had consequences outside of the evil patriarchal bathroom conspiracy.  Sure, someone born as a biological women being upset that they have periods takes the absurdity meter to 10.  This level of denial of reality is so profound that the denier is shocked when basic biological processes that have existed since before humans invented cell phones . . . still apply to them in the current year.  To complete the cycle?  The denier demands everyone else play along in the same game of pretend.

How much are they wanting everyone else to play along?  This one person in the article was upset that feminine products companies had the bad taste to market feminine products only to women.  It’s like a company was being called bigoted because they didn’t manufacture tires for aircraft carriers.

I don’t dislike women pretending to be men, or vice versa – I’m just not sure I care at all.

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I bet his new transgender name is:  Pebbles.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever even met a trans person, since they are rarer than a squealing, strudel-serving sheepdog.  The percentage of trans people probably reaches 0.005% of the population or so.  The number is about one trans person in every 20,000 people.  That means that in all of the United States, there might be 16,000 or so actual transgendered people – heck, let’s double it and call it 32,000 people, which are more people than are fans of the Cleveland Browns®.

32,000 bottle is a lot of Coca-Colas©  for me to have to drink in one day, but a group of 32,000 people in the United States is hardly the basis for public policy, or a good business basis for Gillette™ to alienate actual customers.  Aw, who am I kidding:  it certainly makes sense to change every bathroom in the United States and offer feminine products to women who want to use the bathroom with men.

It is certainly not possible for trans people to anticipate the entirely predictable, periodic, and monthly tyranny of menstruation and, oh, plan ahead.  That’s hateful speech.  Let’s instead spend MILLIONS of taxpayer and consumer dollars creating an infrastructure for between 16,000 and 32,000 people not bright enough to remember that they menstruate.

This delusion carries on beyond rare mental conditions – it is an active belief of some Leftists that natural men who are “transgender” should be able to compete in sports against natural women.  This has had the result of men crushing women in event after event where it’s allowed, from bicycling to track to weightlifting to Australian Rules Football.  Because, of course, the Left also believes the lie that there is no difference between the biological ability of men and the biological ability of women.

But this isn’t only about transgenderism.  Where else does the Left deny reality?

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After all, it isn’t fair.  There are three people attempting to bring that poor transwoman down.

How about citizenship?  In the eyes of a Leftist, an illegal alien is exactly the same as a citizen.  Illegal aliens deserve all the benefits of a citizen, and on top of that, should be able to vote.  I’m not making this up.  In March of 2019, the Leftist-controlled House of Representatives voted to support communities that granted illegal aliens the right to vote – and on top of that the Left has stood in the pathway of most changes that would lower the number of illegal aliens in the country.

In fact, the inversion against facts borders on religious:

  • PETA® is against killing an animal, but babies are fair game.
  • Vegans? Vegans treat accidental animal consumption as a violation of a religious commandment.
  • Fat jokes are taboo.
  • Sex with anyone or anything anytime is sacred and must be celebrated under every circumstance. If you have a desire?  It’s good.

The religious connection goes farther.

Back in October, right before the 2016 election, the “gotcha” moment for the Left was the Trump tape where he talks about his ability to make time with the ladies and grab them . . . well, you heard the tape.  “This,” the Left thought, “is it.  When America hears this tape, Trump will have to crawl back under a rock and Hillary will be our anointed one.”

When Trump actually was elected, the shock to the Left was nearly religious in nature – levels of despair reserved for when a Pope dies or a Kardashian comes to town.  The people that voted for Trump didn’t vote for him because of ideological purity.  People didn’t vote for him out of religious fervor.  People voted for Trump because they thought he might be able to fix some things that bothered them.  Rightly or wrongly, people voted for him because of his leadership.

This thought process is not something the Left understands.  When voting for Hillary, the Left was not making a vote for a political leader; they were voting for a religious leader, a prophet.  It was even in her slogan, “I’m with Her.”  It wasn’t about Hillary being with the people, it was about Hillary being their religious leader.

This is why if you say bad things about a leader on the Left the reaction is so stunning, swift, and predictable.  If you mock the left, you’re at best a heretic.  The reason you’re considered a heretic if you mock the Left is they’ve done a skillful job of elevating the profane to the sacred.

Profane doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it does – it really means “something that’s secular and not religious,” instead of “Daddy’s drunk on a Saturday night and just stubbed his toe.”  The opposite of profane is sacred, and you need to refute the Truth in order to allow the profane to become sacred – if people can see the Truth, they’ll never accept the change.

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And last I heard, the reindeer were in quarantine.

One example?  Instead of saying “the Truth”, people on the Left say, “My truth.”  Truth is blurred from an objective reality to a shared subjective reality.  This is a necessary condition because if Truth exists, there is room to doubt the ideas of the Left.  That’s simply unacceptable – there is no universal Truth, merely a diversity of individual truths.

Well, “my truth” includes gravity and things like the Sun.

Regardless, the Left has managed to turn the following things into its sacraments:

  • Abortion – which is never taking a human life, rather it’s the eradication of a bunch of cells, like a wart that could have been a concert violinist.
  • Sexual Preferences/Compulsions – it used to be that people were restrained when talking about sex. Now?  Have a parade about it whatever your kink is.
  • Being Fat – the “healthy at any size” is certainly supported by most really fat scientists.
  • State Solution Supremacy – despite a continuous supply of state failures, the true salvation of people lies in the state doing something for them. Self-control?  Personal responsibility?  Hate crimes.
  • Illegal Aliens – If we import several million Mexicans into the country, the country will be exactly like it was before we imported them. They certainly won’t recreate the problems of Mexico in Los Angeles.
  • Race/Ethnicity – They either don’t exist, or exist as social constructs. Very useful for extracting victimization to farm votes for the Left.

In order to make room for the new sacred things, the Left had to make the following things profane:

  • Christianity
  • Marriage
  • Family
  • Individuality
  • American Traditions
  • American Values

If you look back, the making things on the list above (like Christianity) the butt of jokes was intended to strip the reverence that people had for them and make those subjects profane – less than desirable.  People and organizations who were virtuous were mocked, or worse, were portrayed as secret hypocrites even when they weren’t.  Disney® movies went from celebrating virtue and the American culture and values in the 1970’s (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, etc.) to mocking virtue entirely in the 1980’s (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, etc.).

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The good news is that Bernie Sanders promised him he could vote next election.

But if you look at the list of the new things held to be sacred by the Left, you’ll see that these are the things we’re now prohibited from mocking.  We can’t make fun of them.  The Left isn’t looking to elect a President.  The Left is looking to anoint a prophet.  And that’s dangerous.  Religious feeling has always been part of Leftism – that’s why they hate religion.  It must be replaced with ideology.

The new sacred must not be mocked.  And don’t ever try to contradict it with facts – the Left doesn’t care much for them.

Dangit.  Now I’m in the mood for a cheesy-beef bathroom chimichanga.

Addictions – You Have Them. Now Laugh At Them.

“His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.” – Fight Club

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Every day is the wrong day to give up Wilder.

It was the first day of third grade.  I was new to the class, and was nervous.  As I walked through the rows of desks, I felt very shy, apprehensive.  One third grader approached me.  He pointed at a girl sitting in the desk next to his.

“That’s my girlfriend.”

So many emotions.  There was a fierce determination, an aggression in his eyes.  I felt threatened, and I’ll admit, I panicked.  I balled up my fist and hit him.

The rest was a whirlwind.  I can’t remember anything after that until I looked at the face of the school nurse, who stared back at me with a shocked expression on her face.

“What did you do?  His jaw is broken!”

I guess I’ll never teach at that school again.

Okay.  That never happened, except on 4chan.

But I was involved with an elite paramilitary organization mentioned in Red Dawn where we went camping on a regular basis.  One rule of the Troop was that no cell phones went on the trip – in a tent full of boys there is NOTHING GOOD that happens with a cell phone on a campout.  So we left them home.

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Pictured working on their merit badge in Escape and Evasion.

Little kids didn’t care.  But eighth graders?  Cell phones had become a part of their lives.  I saw one particular scout become despondent for a whole campout, all from missing the connections he normally got from his phone.

He was addicted to it.  After a day, he was better.  But he was also very happy to get back to his phone.

There are many things in life that we can become addicted to.  There are the obvious ones that everyone thinks about when they use the term:  Alcohol.  Drugs.  Gambling.  Tobacco.  PEZ®.

The prime addiction from the Boy Scout’s phone was social media.  Much has been written about social media and its addictive effects.  All of social media is designed to be addictive and features are tested on a regular basis to make sure that it engages us, that it maximizes user interaction.  That maximizing user action breeds addiction.  But how it is addictive isn’t the point – the fact that it is as addictive as Mel Gibson movies is.

So, what do I mean by addiction?  Everyone thinks of a junkie shooting marijuana in his eye, but that’s overly simplistic, not to mention probably not what junkies do.  By addiction, I have a broader definition:  the psychological need for a substance of set of conditions that aren’t required for life.

You’re not really addicted to oxygen.  It’s required.  The Mrs. is a type one diabetic, which means that without insulin injections, she will die.  I used to kid with her, “Honey, when are you gonna realize it’s a problem?  You’ve got to kick that stuff.  Just say no.”

While I thought it was clever, The Mrs. was less than amused.  So I punched her and broke her jaw.

Again, I kid – The Mrs. has reflexes like a cat.  She also has a deceptively low center of gravity – very hard to push over.  But are there things that are beyond what we normally think about when we think about addiction?

Certainly.

How about . . . air conditioning.  I lived in Houston, and it was easily the most awful climatological experience in my life.  It was heat plus humidity – and when the wind hit you, it felt like the devil was breathing on me.  Plus I wilt like lettuce in the heat.

Having moved to Houston from Alaska, we paid roughly $422,721 a month in bills for electricity to cool our house.  Was it required?  Well, probably not.  People live, have lived, and do live in places much hotter than Houston without air conditioning.  I have no idea what kind of people, but people.

Dare I say it?  We were addicted to air conditioning.  We could have kept the house far hotter, and saved roughly the total cost of an aircraft carrier plus escort vessels during the two years we were there, but not enough to also get the extended warranty, which is really overrated with aircraft carriers.

Likewise, when we moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, we kept the house about 55-60°F (239°C) in winter when we moved there.  Since Alaskans build without regards to things like, oh, building codes, our home inspection found substantial work that needed to be done to prevent our garage from collapsing.  Really.  The seller had a local contractor doing the work after we had moved in.

“Where you folks from?”

We told him.

“No wonder you keep the house so hot.”  Yes.  He considered 55-60°F hot.

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Including the hat.  Our contractor looked exactly like Red Green.  I learned later that Fairbanks hosted a summer event called the Red Green River Regatta, sadly now discontinued.

So, in his eyes, we were addicted to hot homes.

But let’s swap to food:

What today is considered the bare minimum level for life today is, in reality, a greater degree of luxury than we’ve seen in nearly the entire history of mankind for a greater number of people.  Ever.  Are there crappy places to live?  Yes.  But the scene of the “refugee” in Tijuana saying that the beans and tortillas given to her by local people trying to provide help to her was “food for pigs” and that she might starve to death.

Given her size, that might take, oh, a decade or so.  The bad news is that she’s been deported from the United States and is, “very thankful to be back in Honduras.”  It’s sad – we really need more people who will assault other people with deadly weapons like Frijoles Lady did.  She’ll do the attempted murders Americans won’t.

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I guess she’s a lot like that alien, E.T.  She finally went home.

But the fact remains – we have people going across international borders because of . . . comfort.

What was it like in the past?

I did some research for a post once, and tried to figure out what medieval French peasants (called villeins, which translates from metric French to “Dave”) did in the wintertime in the year 1315.  The links that I was able to find described them as living in their mom’s basement eating pizza rolls and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Playstation®.  Just kidding!  The winter as a time of great poverty, and the families would essentially huddle under blankets in bed most of the winter to reduce food consumption, conserve warmth, and not die.

When you view today’s world through medieval eyes, nearly every person in the world has better winters than that, at least outside of the Democratic People’s Republics of Korea and California.  The example of the French also shows that we’re addicted to eating regularly.

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Fasting was easy in the U.S.S.R.  Comrade Stalin was concerned about your health.

No.  You don’t need breakfast.  You don’t really need lunch.  The fact is, unless they have an unusual medical condition, lots of people voluntarily go for days without food with zero negative health consequences outside of a slightly looser waistband.  And the desire to tell everyone about it.

Are people who are fasting hungry?  Absolutely.  Is there a payoff?  Yes.  From personal experience, the first food you eat after four days without eating anything will be the best burger you had all year.

But the bigger point is this:  we live in a world of unparalleled luxury.

  • In the United States, we have the distinction of having our poorest people having access to so many calories that there seems to be a correlation (in some studies) that shows that poorer people are fatter. Whereas those French peasants had all the time in the world, and none of the food, poor in the United States have all of the time, and all of the food.  And Playstations®.
  • Virtually no one freezes to death, or dies from the heat. In fact, Pugsley sometimes walks around in workout shorts and a t-shirt (no socks!) and complain that the house is too cold.  He does this in winter and summer.  We keep our house ludicrously cold, like our hearts.
  • Most movies made in the last 40 years are available to you after a quick Internet search and a nominal fee. Nearly every book, ever (that we still have copies of), can be had instantly electronically.  Those in paper?  Might take two days.  I have a lot of books, and they’re everywhere around the house.  I guess you could say I have no shelf control.

I won’t say these things are dangerous luxuries.  But they are luxuries, luxuries that we often take for granted.  How long has it been since your power has been out?  How long since you huddled in a cold tent on a freezing winter’s night or sweating on a hot day with an endless noon Sun?

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But it’s okay, his butler will go get it.

How long since you went a single day without food?  How long since you went two days without it?

Our ancestors did all of these things, and more.  They called it “Tuesday.”  Well, not “Tuesday” since their language was a series of unintelligible grunts that sounded like tubas played by jabbering twits.

When we become addicted to and accustomed to luxury, it weakens us.  Constant luxury may weaken us physically, but addiction to it weakens us mentally.  Mental weakness screams that when we’re in a cold or dark house that it’s intolerable, even if it’s only mildly uncomfortable.

When we can meet adversity and understand that what won’t kill us, that being away from the Twitter®, Instagram™, and Facebook© might actually be good for us, and that sweating all day in a hot house without air conditioning is just tolerable discomfort?

Then we win.

Recession? Nah, It’ll Be Fine.

“My God!  If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

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So you should save your money because a recession is coming.  A recession that’s caused by too many people saving money . . . ?

It was the middle of December.

I looked across the desk at my boss.  He had called me in to his office, asked me to close the door, and looked very uncomfortable. Not “Abraham Lincoln at a play” uncomfortable, but more “Pope in the woods without toilet paper” uncomfortable.  It was unusual to see him look uncomfortable, because this boss was an old hand, very calm.  I had worked for him for about 18 months at that point, and we had a great relationship, so he wasn’t going to fire me right before Christmas.  Unless he had figured out who what put the Gummy Bears™ in the paper shredder.

“Umm, John, the company is giving you a bonus.”

I perked up.  I liked the sound of a bonus, but didn’t like the “Umm” so much.  “Umm”, in my experience, is a verbal placeholder that means, “This is going to sound good, but really isn’t.”

“Great!”  I actually was enthusiastic, even given the “Umm”-modifier.  Bonus is a great word.

“Well, the board of directors voted on the bonus structure and the bonus pool back in October, about sixty days ago.  And they chose a specific number of shares for each employee.  And when they voted, the shares were worth seven times what they were today.  I just want you to know I value you, and the company values you.”

What was left were the unspoken words . . . “I hope you’re not insulted.”

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No swimming pool this year . . . .

I wasn’t.  I could multiply my bonus by seven and see that someone, somewhere, liked me when the corporate board voted.  Sometimes it really is the thought that counts.  Except when I get deodorant for Christmas – that seems more like thought that indicates a passive-aggressive criticism about my hygiene.  And comments like this when The Boy introduces me don’t help:  “This is my dad, he doesn’t drink quite as much as his poor hygiene might indicate.”

When I finally cashed in that stock five years later, it was worth 15 times what it had been on the day my boss looked so upset.  By no means was it a life-changing amount, but I’m still pretty happy.  What changed to make the bonus worth so much more?

The economy.  That puny stock bonus was given to me in the middle of the Great Recession.  Five years after that, the company was worth a LOT more.  I sold my shares (I kept the certificates in my underwear drawer), paid my income taxes on the stock, and was certainly not insulted.

We sit at the start of 2020.  By 2030, I can assure you we will have gone through at least one recession, and probably more.  Right now, the United States is in the single longest economic expansion in its history, passing the 1991-2001 economy in duration by six months.

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I hear the economy is so rough that Bill and Hillary Clinton shared a room on their last trip.

Doubling an all-time record?  It certainly won’t happen.  It cannot.  No matter how the Federal Reserve™ manipulates the economy, it can’t go that far unless they give everyone roofies and tell them that they have twice as much money in the bank as they actually do.  Besides, we shouldn’t go that long without a recession.

Why?

Let’s look at the economy as if it were a natural, physical system.  Generally, physical systems are not continuous; they operate in of cycles.  Trees grow leaves in spring, through the summer they gather nutrients, in the autumn the leaves fall, and in winter the tree is dormant.

Companies follow a cycle, too.  A company is founded.  It starts in business, sometimes growing, and in the end, it’s finally bankrupt or sold off and then it’s dead.  For example, the top 10 companies in the United States in 1917 were:

  • US Steel
  • AT&T
  • Standard Oil of New Jersey
  • Bethlehem Steel
  • Armour & Co.
  • Swift & Co.
  • International Harvester
  • DuPont
  • Midvale Steel
  • S. Rubber

What are the top ten companies today?

  • Apple
  • Alphabet (Google)
  • Microsoft
  • Amazon
  • Facebook
  • Berkshire Hathaway
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • Exxon-Mobil
  • JPMorgan Chase
  • Wells Fargo

How many of them are still in the top ten?

One, kinda.  Exxon used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, so at least we know the Rockefellers are doing okay.  That keeps me up at night, worrying that the Rockefellers might have to drive their own cars.

How many of the top 10 companies today will be in the top 10 in 50 years?  How many in 100?

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If it’s raining, that might be a drizzly bear.

I’ve shared this opinion before:  recessions are good for the economy.  Bankrupt businesses are good for the economy.  Are they painful in the short term?  Certainly.  But they provide a great service – they clear out the companies that don’t add value to the customers.  Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) had a great post a while back that describes the impact on physical systems when they’re overly managed and constant.  He used the example of salmon streams that had been dammed, that no longer experienced spring flooding from snow melt.

From the post:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning.  It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet.  The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed.  They were a desert for salmon fry.

Before dams were installed across every stream, spring flooding would fill old channels with rock and gravel and would cut new meanders and channels.  The flooding would flush the silt out of gravel beds.  Stream beds were braids of old, crisscrossing channels.  Not only did they look like strips of bacon from the air but they intercepted huge amounts of sunlight and the gravel beds provided outstanding habitat for the pantheon of invertebrates that were the base of the food chain.

The Fed™ is trying to manage our economy like that salmon stream, making a nice, constant flow.

A decade is a long time without a recession.  Based on the past experiences of the 2001 and 2008 recessions it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the longer you wait to address a problem economy, the bigger impact it will have on people’s lives.  Heck, the longer you wait to address any problem, the worse it becomes.

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Want a housing bubble?  This is how you get a housing bubble.

If the Housing Bubble had popped in 2004, the associated recession would have been much smaller than the nearly economy-ending Great Recession of 2008.  If the 2001 recession would have happened in 1998, it would have certainly pulled some of the inflation away from the Dotcom Bubble and perhaps avoided making the Spice Girls® celebrities entirely, and no one would know who Scary Spice, Posh Spice, Sporty Spice and whatsherface were.  I guess we’re safe now that they’re all Old Spice™.

We sit in the year 2020 with severe economic unrest a certainty in the next decade.  What year?  I’m not sure.  And I’m also not sure I’d trust anyone who says they know the exact timing.  But it is coming.  2020?  2021?

Don’t know.

This coming recession has had a decade to build up.  That decade has seen significant bubbles building in, well, everything.  One of the biggest bubbles is in corporate profits.  Let’s pick . . . insulin.  The price of insulin has doubled in five years.  Does it cost more to make insulin today?  Almost certainly not – the techniques to make this insulin have been known and perfected for decades – it probably costs less to make it.  Is it better insulin, somehow new and improved like the Super Bowl® without the Patriots™?  Nope.

Well, then, why does it cost more?  So Eli Lilly and Company® can increase corporate profits.

I like profits.  I think that profits are good for society for a number of reasons.  They allocate funds to effective businesses during competition.  If the McDonald’s® in your town sucks?  Go to the local Burger King©.  Effective management and good products are rewarded.  Bad management is punished, all without anyone having to lift a finger.  That’s the beauty of capitalism – everyone votes on which businesses get to stay in business, every day.

But Eli Lilly and Company™?  They are raising the price of Humalog® insulin because they can.  How do we know this?  They’ve recently introduced a new insulin with the same exact formulation as Humalog™, but with a new name, Lispro™.  But the price of this new rebranded insulin?  Half.  For the same exact stuff.

Eli Lilly and Company© didn’t do this in the past, but they do it now because investors demand not only profit, but profit growth.  How long is this sustainable?  Not forever.  But it’s a great example of how in 2020, instead of just a housing bubble, we have a bubble in corporate profits.  We have a bubble in money (which is the only way to get to negative interest rates).

Will Eli Lilly and Company™ start charging double the current price to bring the total to $1000 a bottle for Humalog®?

No.  They can’t.  There is a cap not on what diabetics will pay, but on what they can pay.  There is a maximum profit that can be obtained.  Period.  You can’t rent a house for $20,000 a month if the average wage is $15 an hour in your neighborhood, just like you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck.

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Obscure, I know.  But it felt right.

Without the cleaning that a periodic recession brings, junk builds up in the economy.  The average recession historically happens every three years or so.  When the recession of the Tumultuous Twenties® hits?

It will hit hard.

The outcomes are unpredictable.  The Federal Reserve© interest rate is ~1.5%.  Back in the 1990’s, it averaged 5.75%, so the Fed™ had the ability to lower rates to stimulate the economy.  That mechanism is gone.  What’s left, printing money?  Tax collections are down due to tax rate cuts.  This is a good thing.  But government spending is up, too.  Add them together, and we’re looking at deficits of a trillion dollars a year or more . . . forever.  We’ve already slipped into Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).

That means there’s a limit on how much more money we can print.

The trigger for this future recession will be blamed on some other event – the 2001 recession was blamed on 9/11, even though the stock market started to fall well before September.  Our minds like explanations, so we sometimes create them even when they don’t exist.  Maybe it’s the Great Internet Blackout of 2020 that caused it.

Mark my words:  This economy will be cleaned up by a recession, probably a big one that we will find difficulty in spending our way out of.

Don’t get caught in the flood.

And if someone offers you free money?  Smile and take it.

Civil War Weather Report #7: All Eyes on Virginia

“Who do you favor in the Virginia Slims tournament?” – Top Secret

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Don’t put in extra hours at the clock factory – they hate that.

  1. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  2. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  3. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

I didn’t expect to move the clock up this month, but yet, here we are, and it’s all due to Virginia.  More on that below.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Flashpoint Virginia –Updated Civil War II Index – Virginia and Rallies and Aesop – Links

Welcome to Issue Eight of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), and Issue Seven is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Organized violence seems to be lower this month, as you’d expect in winter.  Or perhaps AntiFa® is just on a snowboarding trip to Colorado so they can get some dank weed?  Societal violence tends to drop as it gets colder, because people look stupid rioting in knit hats and parkas.  Well, people look stupid rioting in any weather, except for the South Koreans who have rioting down to a spectator sport.  South Koreans riot about, well, anything.  It’s like living in San Francisco, but with less poop.

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The Korean beef riots?  Udder madness.

YouTube® announced a change in the terms and conditions for video creators that would go into effect December 10, 2019.  The major change (of concern) was that YouTube© announced that they would delete accounts that, in YouTube’s™ sole opinion, weren’t commercially valuable.  There were several creators that I watch on a semi-regular basis that were quite upset – this was proof that YouTube™ was coming after them.  Several refuse to put controversial videos on YouTube® at all now – they save those videos for other sites, like Bitchute©.

As far as I can tell, most of these channels are still up and running.  Several that had been demonetized for political content even had monetization restored.  Like the end of the world in 2012, the dread YouTube® apocalypse is currently overdue.

Switching to Twitter©:  their most notorious purge in the last period was Danielle Stella, a candidate for congress running against that paragon of virtue, Ilhan Omar.  Stella’s offense?  She tweeted:

“If it is proven @IlhanMN [Ilhan Omar] passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged” – I agree with Ms. Stella, that hanging people who collaborate against the United States with foreign governments is a good thing.

But I will never trust her because of sage advice that my brother gave to me one afternoon while driving:  “Never trust a person who has two first names.  Like Scott George.  Or George Scott.”  He was proven right when George C. Scott stopped by our house and ate all of our mayonnaise.  Man, that man loved his mayo.

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I guess the decided they should see other siblings.

Twitter® has also admitted a practice they had long denied, but was obvious:  they shadow ban people – you can type away all you want, but no one is really going to see your Tweet™.  How better to control a populace than to let them think that “bad” opinions are ignored?

Flashpoint Virginia

Since Virginia has been changed from state controlled by the Right to a state where Leftists hold all major offices and control the legislature, the Left has had a great desire to spike the ball and exert complete control.  That control is focused on Leftist goals.  The first Leftist goal mentioned?

Elimination of many Second Amendment rights, including banning ownership, with no grandfather provision, of “assault” weapons.

It also goes much further, and bans parts of rifles the same way an entire rifle would be banned.  Outside of cloning Stalin, elimination of private gun ownership is a primary goal of the Left.  It is also a trigger on the Right, and this legislation couldn’t be more tailored to antagonize the Right if Rosie O’Donnell read it as an alarm clock message.

As political battles go, this gun ban is an uphill one, even for the Left.

What is unusual here is the reaction from localities.  More than 98 bodies (counties, cities, towns) as of this writing have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” – and have vowed to not cooperate.

The Attorney General (a Leftist) has issued an opinion that the counties can’t just ignore state law, they have to follow it.  Therefore?  The Governor (a Leftist) has requested $100 million extra for incarceration and $4 million for an 18 person gun ban team.

It’s not enough.

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Sometimes you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.  Like me in my first marriage. 

The Left owns all of the levers of government.  So what do the people that want to keep their rights do?

Form an opposing governmental structure.  Those are the Second Amendment sanctuaries.  Like it or not, these declarations are the first step towards a unified governing structure that opposes the Leftist government in Virginia.  For a civil war to occur, you have to have civil structures.  I had expected them to form along the lines of opposing state governments.

But the societal divisions in 2019 exist more along the rural/urban divide than the old northern/southern divide.  In my home state, it’s very (from a combined vote total) far Right, so my entire state would likely pitch in.  Given this new circumstance in Civil War 2.0, renegade counties make sense in a state like Virginia.  And despite anything the Attorney General might say, should a significant (20%?) percentage of Virginia’s population – an armed 20% of the population – decide a law isn’t valid?

The law won’t be valid.

Laws exist in the United States because we generally agree with them as a group.  Does everyone agree to all laws that are on the books?  Certainly not.  But when there is determined opposition to a law or group of laws (marijuana legalization, illegal alien sanctuaries, Second Amendment sanctuaries) an attempt to enforce the law will nearly instantly make the government look weak, ineffectual, and illegitimate.  And when that determined group takes over a legitimate arm of government?

We’re one step closer to war, and this is why I moved the clock.  The Left is moving quickly, and in Virginia, I think it’s still a very dangerous game of chicken.

I think they’ll end up blinking, and swerving off at the last minute.

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs, with full bikini treatment.

Violence:

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Up is more violent.  Violence dropped a bit, and I imagine it will remain low for the winter, though it edged up a bit in December.  April and May will likely see increased incidents, assuming we end up okay in Virginia.  And assuming we don’t run out of suntan lotion.

Political Instability:

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Up is more unstable.  It skyrocketed this month.  Tension was high in the first place, but impeachment increased it significantly.  Don’t expect it to go down soon.

Economic:

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Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in November.  It was a one month recovery.

Illegal Aliens:

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Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in.  The numbers are down this month, and if you put them in context, winter is normally a lower time for illegal immigration, which will pick up in the spring.

Virginia and Rallies and Aesop

There is a large pro-Second Amendment rally planned in January 20, 2020 in Richmond.  Since I started paying attention to such things, I’ve noticed something – that people on the Right don’t live in Washington, D.C.  Why we would go to protest there escaped me.  Statistics back this up – in 2016, nearly 95% of voters voted for Leftist candidates.

For a group of citizens that support the Right to try to protest in D.C. is silly.  Protestors in D.C. are in hostile territory.  From observation, cities attract Leftists.  The larger the city, generally the farther Left it is.  Richmond, Virginia is no different.  It voted nearly 80% for Leftists in 2016.  Richmond is hostile territory for the Right.

But yet the rally is planned.  Aesop over at The Raconteur Report has covered why this rally is a bad idea, in detail here (LINK) and here (LINK).  Read the comments, and also the links to previous posts that he suggests.

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Read it all before you attend – or before you organize.

Links

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Please leave links either in the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you’re shy.  If you email me, I won’t say that the link is from you unless I get permission.

From McChuck.

From Glenda.

From Bob.

From Vote Harder, over at The Burning Platform:

From Ricky:

 

A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.