Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Life Insurance? Nah, They Can Suffer.

Dot: I’m sure you have the life insurance squared away?
Ed: Have we done that honey? We gotta do that honey!
Dot: You’ve got to do that H.I.! Ed’s got her hands full with this little angel.
H.I.: Yes, ma’am.
Dot: What would Ed and little angel do if a truck came along and splattered your brains all over the interstate?

-Raising Arizona

Is it just me, or was it Transformers® who started the trans debate with whole “robots identifying as trucks” thing?

A long time ago, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert®, came up with a handy, short guide to finances. His quip was, “I’d write a book of financial advice, but it would only be one page long.” I wrote about it before, but that was two years ago and this will be funnier. The nice thing is that his list of financial advice is simple, and applicable to most people in normal times (from, say 1950 to 2020):

Make a will.
Pay off your credit cards.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
Fund your 401k to the maximum.
Fund your IRA to the maximum.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
Put six months’ worth of expenses in a money-market account.
Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, or tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

I don’t carry life insurance – I want to die just as I was born – as a burden to my family.

I think, for various structural reasons, normal times won’t continue, but I’ve blogged about that more than once. We’re seeing inflation accelerate (10 Years (or less) To A $10 Big Mac – How To Explain Inflation To Your Friends) and we are, perhaps, getting ready to party like its 1859 again. So, yeah. It all might be going to hell, but it could also be much better than my worst projections, and some of the above might matter. Yeah, I know, this is like having a mortician say, “But on the bright side….”

My insurance company is dependable – every month since I’ve had my policy they’ve sent me a bill.

So far, I’ve accomplished most of the things on the list above by Mr. Adams. When I’ve varied from the suggestions, I’ve actually suffered financially – Scott is a pretty shrewd fellow, and he’s certainly more successful financially than most people. For instance, if I had kept more money in the market, I would be that much more heartbroken when Netflix™ costs $12. Not $12 a month, but $12 for the whole company.

Being wrong in my case is okay – I’m in pretty good shape financially – I was able recently to add meat to the Hamburger Helper® (I’m not saying it was hamburger, and what neighborhood will miss a cat or two?), so not being 70% in the stock market has been okay. I’m able to sleep better at night and not worry.

Sadly, Hamburger Helper™ only works if the hamburger wants help.

But one thing on Mr. Adams’ list above that isn’t on mine anymore: life insurance. Sure, I take the company life insurance policy because it’s cheap super cheap, and if I were to pass away, The Mrs. would get the princess-ly sum of $500,000, which in the year 2029 will buy you a pack of illegal vaping juice. I hope (on any given day) that I’m worth more alive than dead to her.

Besides, if anything suspicious happened to me, she’s an author and her Internet browser history looks a list of creepy websites the Zodiac Killer was too scared to go to. The Mrs. could be 100% innocent, but it would still be difficult to explain why she’d spent several weeks researching “undetectable poisons to kill your bald husband with.” Wait. That’s just a bit too specific.

Mental note: eat only what The Mrs. eats. Also: wear a helmet.

The purpose of life insurance is simple – it’s not a lottery – it’s a mechanism so that if the breadwinner was to die early, the family could be financially secure without the income they provided. But what financial security does my family need to provide for? The Boy is off at college, and with his scholarships I think he pays tuition, room and board in pocket lint and beef jerky wrappers because it doesn’t cost very much to go to Bob’s State University and Discount Amateur Asbestos Mine if you do really well on the ACT®.

Pugsley will in a few short years be off at college, too, and that’s it. Our last financial challenge. We’re in good shape for that today. Also, if I were to die, the major source of weird family expense goes away. The Mrs. is unlikely to spend nearly as much as I do on hobbies like ham radio. I know that no one was more shocked than I was to find out that you couldn’t use a store bought ham. I think you have to get a fancy farm raised ham.

If a pig eats ham, that must make a really good radio?

So if I passed on, then what? The Mrs. would have to get by on our nest egg, which should work great as long as she doesn’t’ have any fancy needs, like electricity. My need for life insurance now is nearly zero.

But it wasn’t always so.

When I was younger, I actually bought the greatest amount of life insurance the company offered. The nice thing about life insurance is that it’s one product that’s priced appropriately – when you’re youngest, it’s cheapest. And when you’re older, it costs more. When I was young, I wanted to make sure that the family had its needs taken care of. I don’t recall it ever costing much more than $30 a month, and that was for $2 million or more.

That was good. When The Boy was first born, we didn’t have much as far as savings and we had almost two decades to plan for. And we had no idea if he would get scholarship after being dropped on his head all of those times. Now? We can afford to go bowling whenever we want. And we can get some of that fancy box wine when company comes over. And our risks as a family have dropped significantly.

Think of box wine as juice boxes for adults.

Frankly, I never needed life insurance at all. It was a product I was paying for that did me absolutely no good. I would never see a dime of return. Silly people I live with, wanting to be protected.

But in 2019, what would I add to Scott Adams’ list?

Live in a safe place. Think about population density when you determine safety. Be there and be part of the community. If the place is too big to recognize people in the stores regularly? It’s probably too big. Be there sooner rather than later.
Have food. Start with a month’s worth – nobody thinks you are crazy for having a month’s worth of food. More is better. Farming areas are nice – people are generally friendly, and they make the food.
Be able to get water. Clean water is good, but there are ways to make water clean.
Know what you can’t live without. If it’s PEZ® or insulin or fabric softener, know and either save it up, or learn how to do without. I regularly shame The Mrs. pancreas to try to get it to produce insulin. No luck so far.
It teaches you what you need and don’t need faster than anything.
What would you add?
Did I mention PEZ™?

Leftism is a Religion, and Kipling is the Cure

“Remember, we can’t question the mores of the natives.” – The Man Who Would Be King

Our main weapons are . . . oh, sorry. I triggered Briana by saying “weapon.” To the safe spaces!

I had a subject picked out for today – despite your thinking that I might think up these topics in a booze and PEZ® induced haze on the spur of the moment by throwing Velcro®-covered toddlers* at a “Wilder Post Idea” mat placed on the wall to come up with humorous combinations of idea, I don’t. Maybe I should – it actually sounds like a lot of fun, except, well, having to be around toddlers. The upside would be throwing them.

No, dear reader, I try to map out these posts at least two weeks in advance using the much less amusing no-toddler-involved pen and notecard method. I then do notes and research at least a few days in advance. But last week I looked at my notes for the post I had planned. It’s a big, complicated, ambitious post, so I’d been working on those notes for more than a week.

It’s not ready yet.

Thankfully, I have toddlers, Velcro© and a wall I have a list of ideas for posts written on notecards that I keep in several notecard boxes. I’ve got several hundred ideas, depending on the category. In truth some of them are little more than crude sketches in in crayon. In reality, these are not second-rate ideas – they’re just ideas that I haven’t gotten to yet. And I pulled this one out of the box:

It means: “Leftism as a religion.” It’s obvious, right?

You may or may not have a religious beliefs – I do. I don’t bring up my religious beliefs on this blog as religious concepts for the purpose of discussing religion – I’m not the guy who would be good at that. I try to stick with religion and how it relates to society. With the exception of the immediate cultural references and political figures of our time, I aim to make a lot (50%?) of these posts timeless – something someone could pick up in 20 years (or 200 or 2000), and still get a chuckle and a bit of wisdom out of while wondering just who the hell Johnny Depp was, and why does the Great Bard of The New Dark Ages™, that handsome devil John Wilder keep writing about him.

But in 20 years (or 200, or 2,000), Leftism will still be seen as a religion.

I think religion is built into us, biologically. In 2012, the best scientific research on this was:

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.” (LINK)

Okay, is it just me that thinks that it’s funny that the guy who studies brains and religion goes by the name of “Brick”?

As Brick says, most people have a religious inclination. Some folks who read this blog are atheists – and I’m not here to try to convert them. The ones that are here are the cool kind of atheist who, most often, don’t hate people who have religion. They are, for lack of a better term, libertarian atheists – they don’t care if you believe. Just leave them out of it. On average, however, people want to believe in something. Our brains are hard-wired for it.

And that’s why Leftism appeals as religion – it’s an effective way to drum up a group, and nearly 70% of atheists are Leftist in the United States. So, Leftism cloaks itself as a rational, political movement, but it’s really a religion: a religion as weird and deformed as Bernie Sanders’ aorta. Let me explain:

Religion is a relationship between man and a higher power. The deformation present in Leftism is that man is that higher power. Look at the statues to Lenin, Stalin, and the posters of Fidel and Hugo Chavez. Man has replaced the higher power – man is the object of worship. Let’s dig a little deeper.

I saw Lenin pick his nose the other day – I always knew that communists had no class.

The components of a religion are:

A belief system that doesn’t require proof.

It’s taken on faith. Leftism doesn’t require any more proof than is in Hillary’s chardonnay. Every single Socialist or Communist government has resulted in thousands to millions of deaths, and all of them fail, either Soviet-style, Cuba-style, or Venezuela-style over time. Ask an ardent socialist or communist, and they really will tell you that socialism in Venezuela would have really worked if only it had been given a chance. I guess 10,000,000% inflation (per year) in a country with the greatest oil reserves in the world is a sign of a successful, functioning socialist economy.

There are (in most religions) demons – a power opposing the higher power.

Just as people are the higher power in Leftism, people are also the demons. It’s the unbeliever (people like you and me) that is causing difficulty. Leftism is great at finding and identifying scapegoats to point at to proclaim that they are the cause of all problems, Stalin and Mao were awesome at that(In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!). Most commonly, it’s people who are successful. In Leftist terms, people are successful only because they are taking the success that rightfully belongs to the victim class. Communism is great at finding villains, and great at finding victims, too. Sadly, it runs out of the money of the villains.

There is a method of salvation.

The method of salvation for a Leftist is joining the Left. It is becoming versed in the various High Holy Words of Leftist Salvation such as privilege, Climate Change© (formerly Global Warming™, the 1%, racist, social justice, assault rifle, greed, change, economic justice, fascist, and progress. No actual change in personal comfort is required – taking a private jet to transport Leo and his starlet of the week to a Climate Change® conference is okay, as long as Leo keeps repeating that fossil fuels are evil. I mean, a Leftist donates one kidney, he’s a hero. When I donate ten? They called me a monster.

There are sins – rules that cannot be broken.

You would think that most actions that were counter to the High Holy Words of Leftist Salvation would be wrong and would brand you a sinner. That’s wrong! You can falsely claim a person of another race put a noose around your neck when you went to Subway®. It’s sad that you then have to hire immigrants do it, because it’s a job American’s won’t do. Or falsely claim that a person of another race cut your dreadlocks. Obviously, these are racist acts, but there is to be no punishment for them, because being a racist isn’t a sin, as long as you are a believing Leftist. Being rich because you’re an evil capitalist isn’t even a sin. There is only one true sin: heresy (see below).

There is heresy.

This is the ultimate sin. Thinking a thought counter to the ideals of the Left is bad, and itself punishable by re-education in a Leftist government. But to dare utter a thought that’s counter to one of the catechisms of the Left? That is the ultimate sin: heresy. Wrongthink. Thoughtcrime. But it’s okay if you’re not from this country. You can ignore all of the above, because it’s wrong to judge an immigrant on a moral basis. I mean, what could go wrong with marrying your sister?

I’m worried about a cat and chardonnay shortage in 2023.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that the people on Wall Street care about me any more than your average communist. But thieves and people on Wall Street (but I repeat myself) only want my money. Leftists want my money and my soul, The Mrs.’ soul, and the souls of my children in exchange for power. I keep wondering . . . what’s the catch?

I used to enjoy engaging in light argument for fun with people who disagreed with me politically. It was nice. I learned a lot. I learned where my arguments were weak. I learned where I was wrong. And when I was wrong, I admitted it, gave them the point and moved on. It was fun – a great way to be exposed to new ideas and learn. One two hour argument with me being pro-Second Amendment arguing with a friend who was against gun ownership ended . . . when I asked him if he had a gun. He started laughing, and admitted he had what CNN® would call an arsenal. He was having fun with me for two hours. But I learned.

I don’t do that in person anymore. If a friend who is Leftist brings a point up, mainly I’ll ask questions. I don’t argue. Friendly light arguments have gone from an enjoyable conversation to one where true emotion is unleashed and the person on the Left gets angry. Heresy, you know. So, I ask questions. I don’t try to make points – I listen, and ask what the solutions should be. But interjecting Wrongthink? It simply won’t work.

That, primarily, is the difference between the Right and the Left. The Right is confident enough that history has shown that the answers of the Right, though brutal, are effective (Kipling, Gods of The Copybook Headings, and It’s Different This Time). The answers of the Right will return, not because they are ideologically pure, but they are the only methods known that actually work. I’ll leave the word last to Kipling*.

*No toddlers were hurt in the writing of this post or the associated poem.

I spent several hours trying to fix the kipling on my car today with Pugsley. Turns out it was just a corroded battery terminal.

Gods of the Copybook Headings,

By Rudyard Kipling, 1919

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Original of Crayon drawing by “My daughter Teresa” [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] via Wikipedia Commons.

And, no, I don’t have a daughter named Teresa.

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

“Nothing leaves alive.” – Dreamcatcher

See, now Darth Vader® has no regrets. Except for being in Episode III.

I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there. I’ll explain. It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.

I have made many mistakes in my life. Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.

Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes. There have been consequences to these. Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences. A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24 . . . medium-sized. Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.

The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those. Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake. Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short. But all stung. The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding. I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention. Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.

Staaaaaart again . . . .

To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have. If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem.

But I don’t regret it. None of it. Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures.

Why?

Life is a one-shot deal. And life is a ratchet. It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back.

Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though. If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret. Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.

My biggest fear is having a heart attack during a game of charades.

If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself. Fear of . . . what? Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed. Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing: regret is for losers. I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a Democratic presidential debate. Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.

Me? I’m still holding out hope for a pyramid.

Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things? I can’t imagine doing it. I refuse to let regret rule me. And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me. Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why. Deal with the consequences? Certainly. But regret? No.

Let’s go down the “top five” list:

Not living a life “true to yourself”? I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal. That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact. If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty. The good news? Anyone who reads this blog is neither.

Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”? That’s also nonsense. A soul thrives on doing good work that matters. Doing good work excellently is hard. The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters. Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be. If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing. The good news? Change now. You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.

I got fired from the calendar factory. They get really mad when you take a day off.

Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”? Wow. This is the weakest on the list, so far. Number one: do you have feelings that matter? Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too. Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve. I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs. I get to choose. If I feel slighted by something silly or petty? I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling. Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing. Your feelings are often stupid.

I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard. But it’s really not. The people you care about, that care about you, are there. They always have been, they always will be. I don’t Facebook® much – why? I call my friends, on an actual phone. I text my friends. Am I often the one that calls first? Sure. Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while? Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us? Maybe. But I make quite a few phone calls. And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back. A few you can share with.

Also, as a single guy it was easy to make friends. Lots of girls I asked out wanted to be friends.

Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.” Happy is easy (All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)), being significant is hard. It requires hard work while being true to yourself. It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist. Friends? The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.

I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it. I know, I know, it’s too late for them. And this is the list of people who had regrets. People like me? I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life. Not one. In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets? No. More clam chowder, please,” guy.

The Boy made me some fake ramen noodles this summer – it was an impasta.

To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I’m not blameless. It’s not that I was always right. Not one of those things is true. But I have done the most important thing I can think of: When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t (Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood) do that thing again. I cannot change the past. But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake? Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive. The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.

And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow. If you have regrets? Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose.

The alternative? Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly.

BONUS SOUP MEME! I made too much soup meme by accident. Enjoy.

10 Years (or less) To A $10 Big Mac – How To Explain Inflation To Your Friends

â€œYou want the solution toÂ inflation? Â Hi, friends. Â Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re loweringÂ inflationÂ not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.â€ â€“ Used Cars

Tom Brady isnâ€™t alone â€“ Lance Armstrong will do anything to his ball to win, too.

I drove to Burger KingÂ® for lunch for the first time in a long time.Â I donâ€™t eat lunch most days to stay in shape, and I keep reminding The Mrs. that spherical is a shape.Â On the days that I do eat lunch, itâ€™s hard to beat Chick-fil-aâ„¢ – theyâ€™re fast, theyâ€™re polite, the restaurants are clean, and they put massive amounts of heroin in the chicken â€“ there is no other way to explain how addictive those stupid chicken sandwiches are.Â I generally prefer beef to chicken, but the people at Chick-fil-aÂ© are wizards.

Iâ€™m still waiting for them to offer a Steak-fil-aÂ® sandwich.Â Mmmm, now thatâ€™s probably worth a stoning!

Anyway, I ordered a burger, fries, and a drink. Â The price for the meal?Â Nearly $10.Â American dollars â€“ not that wrapping paper they use in Justin Trudeauâ€™s country.Â I remember back when a sit down lunch at a restaurant was available for a shiny nickel could be had for less than $5.Â $10 for a burger, fries and an iced tea?

This was inflation in action.Â Clearly you can see that the government rate of inflation â€“ official truth â€“ shows that inflation is low, at between 0.7% and 3% over the last decade.Â But how true is that number?

The government does something interesting contortions when it measures inflation â€“ it fudges the number.Â When the government comes up with the inflation number, the government looks at things people buy â€“ say, a computer.Â Since computers have gotten roughly a zillion times faster over the last forty years, the government assumes that weâ€™re getting a zillion times more computer for our money.Â In one sense thatâ€™s true â€“ my computer today has more memory and is far faster than any computer Iâ€™ve ever owned and is demanding a living wage, free healthcare, and a right to vote.

But in another sense, my computer isnâ€™t a zillion times better.Â Iâ€™m using it for a word processor.Â Sure, the program is better today than in 1995, but itâ€™s maybe 10% better, which is a metric smuckfestÂ© away from a zillion percent better.

Likewise, if I were to play a game that would have been impossible to play back in 1995, itâ€™s not 500% better.Â There were great games in 1995 â€“ DoomÂ® would like a word with anyone who disagrees.Â Sure, the richness of the games in 2019 is better, but Alia S. Wilder gave The Mrs. a copy of a video game that came out in 2002 for Christmas 2019.Â The Mrs. was thrilled â€“ the storytelling, she said, held up really well.

Itâ€™s not only computers, but other products like cars â€“ add an air bag that I didnâ€™t ask for?Â That increases the â€œvalueâ€ to the government guy doing the calculations even though I never asked for one and itâ€™s never helped me even a little bit.Â All in all, computers have been deflating in price according to the government.Â This helps to offset some of the hugely inflationary items like healthcare and education.Â But Iâ€™m not sick, and Iâ€™m done with school.Â Whatâ€™s a more realistic gauge of inflation?

Hamburgers.Â One of the best gauges is the Big MacÂ® index:

If this graph is right, a Big Macâ„¢ will cost $10 in 10 years.Â Or it will be made from spare Swedish people â€“ and if you are what you eat, weâ€™ll all be the victims of this policy.Â

Graph source, Seeking AlphaÂ® (LINK).

Big MacÂ© hamburgers are made across the country and the same twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun has been made for decades with little variation from Portland, ME, to Portland, OR.Â Indeed, theyâ€™re made across the world and are one gauge of the value of local currency used by The Economistâ„¢ to judge the relative purchasing power of local currency.

The cost increase weâ€™ve seen in a Big Macâ„¢ is substantially higher than inflation.Â And itâ€™s not because itâ€™s a premier burger on the market â€“ in almost any city you can find a better burger than a Big MacÂ© so itâ€™s not like McDonaldsÂ® can increase the profit on a Big MacÂ© because people will not take a substitute.Â Nobody goes to McDonaldsÂ® for excellent food â€“ they go there because of self-loathing because the food is generally consistent.Â Heck, your humble author even went there today for research for this article.Â You can get a McChickenâ„¢ for a McDollarÂ©, but McDonaldsÂ® doesnâ€™t include any McHeroinâ„¢.

So, youâ€™re telling me that when Congress is out of money it can just write itself a check and deposit it?

Even before McDonaldsÂ®, the United States was no stranger to inflation, just like my waistline.Â During the Revolutionary War the Continental Congress authorized $241,552,780 of money to be issued â€“ I still wonder what the $780 was for â€“ Washingtonâ€™s NetflixÂ® subscription?

There were 2.8 million Americans during that time period and letâ€™s assume that two out of five Americans was working (women stayed home, and kids werenâ€™t required to report to the fish gutting plant until age five) for cash that would be nearly full yearâ€™s wages FOR EVERYONE WORKING based on the sources I could find.

The Continental collapsed in value â€“ thatâ€™s where the phrase, â€œnot worth a Continentalâ€ (which is strangely absent from Urban DictionaryÂ®, the must be behind the times) came from.Â After the United States was finally formed, the Continentals were allowed to be redeemed â€“ for 1/40^th of their face value in United States bonds.Â Iâ€™m sure this made everyone who had Continental currency thrilled that they had gotten rid of the King.Â At least in Great Britain they had Universal Healthcare and free ocelots in every pot.

The currency collapse of the Continental at least had an echo in the Constitution.Â It led directly to the addition of the following clause: Â â€œNo State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.â€ Â That sounds pretty simple.

Yet.

The Constitution lists the things the government is allowed to do.Â Despite reading it again and again, there is absolutely no power listed for the Federal Government to issue money.Â None.Â Paper money issued before 1863 was primarily issued by private banks, and the value of a paper dollar actually varied, typically dropping if the state was kinda bad at regulating banks or if the state was far away.Â The value of a gold coin didnâ€™t vary because gold is gold ().

I think the Michigan $3 bill would have been more popular if they had put Scarlett Johansen on it, so I put her over the picture of the cow.

When writing this post I ended up writing a LOT about how the government took over the power to create money during the War of Northern Aggression Civil War and the evolution of a single national currency â€“ United States Notes, and then decided it read more like a snarky term paper for Macroeconomics 201, which I already passed back when a Big MacÂ® was as cheap as my ex-wife.Â So I cut it out.

TL;DR:Â The story is one of increasing Federal control and centralization of both money creation and supply.Â The biggest change was when Franklin Roosevelt confiscated the gold of the American people and made it illegal to own more than five ounces of bullion or coins.Â The reason?Â Roosevelt wanted to print more money for his alien masters so they would restore the power of walking to his withered limbs, though they betrayed him and turned him into a flightless waterfowl.Â Or was that the Twilight ZoneÂ®?Â Anyway, the real reason was that by law the Federal Reserve had to have 40% reserves in gold on the money it printed.Â Back in 1933 apparently they pretended that laws actually applied to people in power.

But Roosevelt stole the gold.

Presto!Â More gold for the Fed!Â There were several high-profile cases where people were prosecuted for owning gold to keep the masses in line.Â Immediately after taking the gold, Roosevelt raised its price by 40%.Â He had, effectively, devalued the dollar with a stroke of a pen.Â This immediately made everyone in the United States who had money poorer, which, I hear, is exactly the cure for an economic depression.

And thatâ€™s inflation:Â making money worth less.Â What people didnâ€™t realize was that by taking the gold, Roosevelt took away the only constraint on printing money.Â 145 years after the Constitution was written, that pesky â€œgold and silverâ€ clause was gone.Â Thereâ€™s no way that this turns out bad, right?

Too bad they already had enough air guitarists.

Nixon took the next logical step â€“ he removed any constraints on printing by revoking the gold standard â€“ the dollar was now backed by nothing.Â Ford, dimly realizing it didnâ€™t matter, made gold legal to own again since after forty years it ceased to be considered money by people.Â Gold was a curiosity.Â Silver had been dropped from Americaâ€™s coins in the 1960â€™s as a â€œcost saving measureâ€ â€“ so Americaâ€™s money was based on a promise.Â A promise made by Nixon.

We now live in an era where itâ€™s considered virtuous to have a slight inflation of 2% or so a year.Â Benjamin Franklin spotted this con over two hundred years ago when he noted that the inflation of the Continental dollar had been a tax to pay for the Revolution.Â Inflation is just that, itâ€™s a tax.Â Itâ€™s a silent one.Â You still have the same $100 bill you had last year.Â Nobody stole $2 from you.Â Except that they did, and they bought themselves something nice, like salaries for everyone at the EPA when you werenâ€™t looking.

The government takes money through taxation.Â It also takes money through inflation â€“ and itâ€™s been slowly stealing the savings of every American for nearly 90 years.

The Fed ruins all the best bikininomics graphs.

Source (LINK)

It feels funny, because many of you have read this before, some of you have read this message 100 times.Â Maybe, just maybe the Big MacÂ® can be worth something as inflation picks up speed.Â Perhaps when a Big MacÂ® costs $10 someone might notice?

Nah.Â Itâ€™ll be fine.

The Best Monopoly Game For Your Leftist In-Laws

“World Socialism will be achieved peaceably. Our military role is strictly defensive. Is that understood?” – Octopussy

A capitalist, a socialist, and a communist were meeting up. The socialist was late. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “I was standing in line for sausage. The capitalist asked, “What’s a line?” The communist asked, “What’s sausage?”

When I was a kid, say, younger than sixth grade, I loved to play Monopoly® at Thanksgiving. It was great – it was simple to understand, and it involved buying properties to make money from the other players. My Mom and Grandma would play along. The fun part for young-me was that if you played the game right and got lucky roles you could reduce the other players to bankruptcy and evict them from your house. I’ll miss Mom.

After a while Monopoly™ became not a game I looked forward to, but one I dreaded at Thanksgiving. Why? The game goes on forever, and the biggest determiner to who wins isn’t great playing ability – it’s luck. It’s like playing Candyland© with houses. So, I guess in that respect, it’s like owning real estate in California. Also, at Thanksgiving I decided that eating enough tryptophan-drenched turkey to knock me on my sorry Thanksgiving butt was more fun, and the couch was as soft as the Cowboy™ defense. But that was before Monopoly© Socialism™.

But is it a gluten and conflict-free toilet paper made in a sustainable carbon-neutral factory?

Through whatever mechanism that Amazon© uses to track my purchases, it decided that I might be interested in a copy of Monopoly™ Socialism® as well as the tree-free-vegan-bamboo toilet paper. I’m sure the toilet paper is carbon neutral, but I was more interested in the game, but sadly, Monopoly© Socialism™ was out of stock. Amazon™ assured me it would be back in stock soon enough. Part of the charm for me were some of the (actual) questions that other purchasers asked on Amazon®:

Do I have to wait in a long line for the privilege of purchasing this game, like a breadline in Venezuela?
Is the board waterproof so Progressive tears won’t ruin it?
Are there rolling blackouts? Do the players get to eat zoo animals?

With purchasers asking those questions, I knew I was in with my people. I hit “add to cart” and it was on its way. It arrived last Wednesday.

Before candles, what did socialists use for lighting? Electricity. Which might explain why there were no utilities on the board.

The box was smaller than the usual Monopoly© box – the reason being that instead of just folding up the game board into halves, it folded up into quarters. No biggie. I thought that we’d keep the board game on a shelf, and perhaps pull it out next month to Make Thanksgiving Uncomfortable Again©, but Pugsley saw it, and convinced The Mrs. that we should play it on Saturday night. As it didn’t look like learning the rules wouldn’t require an advanced degree in game design nor require the Supreme Court to weigh in on disputes, I agreed.

I hear that after Ginsburg is gone, Leftists are worried that the decisions will be Ruth-less.

I have only one piece of advice when it comes to playing Monopoly® – do not allow The Mrs. to be the banker – she cheats. I’m not making this up. The Mrs. cheats gleefully and more-or-less openly (though she thinks she’s being sneaky) after a few glasses of wine. It wasn’t three rolls into the game that I saw The Mrs. had been pilfering from the bank’s funds. But The Mrs. obviously hadn’t been listening when I read the rules – the game is based on socialism, so you don’t win by having the most money. You win by “helping” in the most projects, things like the “Rise Up” collective bakery. If you help, you can put one of your Virtue Signal* tokens on the project while the community fund donates to the project.

*The game does not call these tokens Virtue Signal tokens, but the idea is to openly and publicly have other people pay for something that makes you look virtuous, so, to-may-to, to-mah-to.

A Marxist, a Socialist, and a Communist tried to get into a bar. The bouncer kicked them out after checking their IDs – “Come on back when you’re 21, guys.”

Money comes from the collective. The game starts with 1848 dollars in the community fund, since the Communist Manifesto™ was published in 1848. There is absolutely no reason to use one dollar bills in the game, so they tossed them in just for that joke so you can have 1848 dollars. Nice touch.

I said the game starts with that much money in the community fund. Every individual player starts with an socialist approved equal amount of zero dollars, so it was easy to see that The Mrs. was in a full on cheat when I saw she had a little pile of currency snuck back. How does the game go if players don’t have money? Easy. If you don’t have money to buy property start a project or pay a fine, it comes from that initial pile of 1848 dollars, which gets replenished when you pass “Go” and get your living wage of 50 dollars, and you put in five for the community.

It’s not like that happened. We didn’t make it all the way back to Go. None of us even made it all the way around to Go.

The game ends either when a single player wins by playing all of their Virtue Signal tokens. The game also ends when all of the 1848 dollars of community money is gone. And if you run out of the 1848 dollars? You lose. Heck, everyone loses.

1848 dollars doesn’t last long. And we’re not good socialists, so we all lost.

That loss, I think, is the underlying message of the game. In socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people’s money to spend and everyone loses. The game cost me $19.99, and it will be worth it to bring it out during Thanksgiving to be slightly more interesting than whatever snoozefest is going on in Detroit®. It’s not like we wanted to talk to the Leftist side of the family anyway, right?

I think if there Batman©-type Virtue Signal™? It would have Justin Trudeau’s face. I mean, without makeup.

But you can’t buy the game for $19.99. It seems like Hasbro® has stopped making it. Why? I don’t know, and it’s useless to speculate if it sold out or if Hasbro™ folded to political pressure. If you want to buy it on Amazon™ now, it’s selling for (cheapest price with free shipping) about $45, though it looked to be a bit cheaper elsewhere. After playing the game, I certainly can’t recommend it at that price, unless you really want to trigger your Leftist neighbor/friend/relative.

Maybe we should start calling Facebook™ and Twitter© Socialist media?

The reviews by purchasers at Amazon© are very positive, and they’re by verified purchasers. The negative reviews, however, aren’t by verified purchasers, and one of them is obviously by someone who never even bought the game.

The reviews by websites on the Internet weren’t really reviews. They were a listing of complaints that Monopoly® Socialism© didn’t accurately portray socialism. I’m thinking that the talent of these people has been wasted – where were they when they could have been complaining that Marvel® movies don’t accurately portray superpowers or that Breaking Bad© isn’t a realistic view of teacher insurance policies in the Albuquerque Public School System?

It was as if this minor and humorous critique of socialism in the form of a board game had to be beaten back because the one thing that Leftism cannot stand is . . . being made fun of. My favorite line from a review was this one where the reviewer almost (but not quite) achieves self-awareness:

Reading between the lines, the game’s designers are saying that with no incentive to work nothing gets done.

Somehow, that was intended as a dig against the game designers. But it turns out that it’s an accurate representation of reality. If there is no incentive to work, nothing gets done. Period.

The simplest version of that statement is, “if you don’t’ work, you don’t eat.” I’m pretty sure the reviewer (who has written thousands of posts for a clickbait site) would probably not show back up to work if they stopped paying him – he wouldn’t keep writing what the boss said if he couldn’t pay the rent or buy soy milk and chicken tendies.

Socialism looks great on paper. Unless that paper is in a history book.

It’s clear this game isn’t a real take on socialism, because the end of the game doesn’t feature a failed government, a population in near-starvation, shattered lives, and a blasted economy that will take a generation or more to heal. In our house, the game ended up with a second bottle of wine, a different game, and a nice evening.

The one negative review that’s correct is this one, and it’s mine: Socialism is a silly basis for a game, because everyone always loses. And that’s why Monopoly® Socialism™ caused so many Leftist panties to twist: because it got it 100% right.

The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Meat Being Murder

“All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say ‘Yo Goober! Where’s the meat?’ I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don’t win friends with salad.” – The Simpsons

Oh, sorry. I meant a double BACON cheesemurder.

When we lived in Alaska, we got tickets to drive into Denali National Park one year. On that particular weekend, The Mrs. was feeling under the weather so she decided to send The Boy (then a freshly-minted kindergartner) and I instead while she stayed home with Pugsley, who had yet to be grounded, being all of 16 . . . months. I stopped for gas, and decided to get some road food for us since this was our first “just the guys” trip.

I grabbed some beverages, some chips, some candy, and, on the wall behind the cash register I saw some jerky. The brand name was Alaska Jack’s®. It was a clear plastic package of jerky with a gold foil label. The picture on the label was of an old Alaska gold miner, a grizzled old timer wearing buckskin, with a beard and a fur hat. I bought it.

The Boy had never seen jerky before. He stood alongside me at the cash register and looked at the stringy dried pieces of meat in the plastic bag and turned it over. He looked up at me.

“What is it?” He was clearly puzzled.

“Meat. Dried meat,” I responded.

He took another look at the picture of Alaska Jack™, “What kind?”

A long pause.

“Human?”

I bring this (very true) story up because a recent study indicates that a food that mankind has been eating for nearly all of its existence is . . . wait for it . . . not bad for you. Meat has been a staple food for mankind since our grimy, dim ancestors with questionable hygiene first took a bite out of a dead critter and asked, “hey, Ugg, this is pretty good, but do you have any ketchup or A-1®?”

Not only have we been eating meat forever, there is evidence that we have been cooking meat for perhaps a million years, which is almost enough time to make a brisket tender. It is certain we’ve been cooking meat for 400,000 years, and man has been having backyard BBQ’s on a regular basis for 250,000 years. So, color me shocked that science shows that the cooked meat we’ve been eating for at least 20,000 generations of people is . . . good for you.

The next part will be really shocking: meat has changed less in human history than nearly any other food we eat today. Broccoli looks nothing like broccoli 3,000 years in the past. Corn? You wouldn’t recognize it even 1,000 years ago. The wild spaghetti plant? Yup. Similar – wild spaghetti looks just like rice. Heck wild elbow macaroni wasn’t grown until Benjamin Franklin first cross-pollinated a piece of fettucine with a water pipe in 1321.

Yeah, a cow is different today – it’s bigger and juicier, but the meat is the same. Sweet, sweet, cow meat. Heck, I’m making me hungry now.

Given that science is advancing so quickly, I’ll expect to see these headlines soon: “Water is Wet, New Studies Show” and “Scientists Say: Possible Link Between Sex and Babies Showing Up Nine Months Later” and “New Research Says Ben Shapiro’s Voice Makes 95% of All People Want to Choke Him Until He Passes Out, Take His Money, Buy Themselves Something Nice.” If you have any money left over, I’m looking for some cool PEZ® dispensers.

I’ll admit science has some mysteries. I can’t understand how a cat got a taste for tuna, since I’ve yet to see a deep sea fleet of cats in the wild fishing for them.

Why do people always say they’re having a tuna fish sandwich? Is there a tuna bird or tuna cow I’m unaware of?

What may amuse me the most is that several of the headlines noted that this finding was “controversial” and that you needed to read another article to see “What the Meat Study Didn’t Say.” The old conventional view that Meat is Bad® simply cannot be allowed to be refuted.

I heard about a new Emo pizza – it cuts itself. Okay, on that train to hell, I’ll take an aisle seat, please.

The sad truth is this emo-angst-fest is another example of how science, once perverted via either large corporate interests or by Leftist indoctrination, becomes an instrument not of knowledge but of propaganda. Case in point – in one of the articles about the incredibly shocking finding that meat is both tasty and healthy, the New York Times® said, “An extensive study confirms that red meat might not be that bad for you. But it is bad for the planet, with chicken and pork less harmful than beef.”

I guess the New York Times© can’t figure out that t-a-s-t-y isn’t spelled h-a-r-m-f-u-l. Silly New York Times™. I’ll throw some real controversy out there: ribeye kicks bacon’s butt. There. I said it. And I stand by it.

But what is this nonsense all about? In the immortal words of Joe Bob Briggs (LINK),

This means they’ll do anything to avoid simply putting together a bunch of plants and vegetables in a healthy stew/salad/whatever and labeling it as “Healthy Stew/Salad/Whatever.” They want you to think it’s meat. The vegetarians want to consume it as a meat. You don’t need to go to those lengths, though, because we already have a food group that satisfies that need. It’s called, uh, meat.

That’s in response to Impossible Burgers®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat©, Soylent Meat™ or whatever. The push is to take meat and replace it with either:

Mutant cow stem cells cultured in a vat of despair, or
A “plant based protein” mixture which I resent on principle because when you eat plants, you’re eating what my food eats, and that’s just not right, or
Bug burgers. Bug burgers. or,
The food that will turn us all into Wendigos.

Okay, a Wendigo is a Native American term for what happens to a person when they cultivate a taste for human flesh, it’s based on the tale of a lost hunter who, in a moment of intense hunger, eats his dead buddy. After that? He turns into a giant emaciated partially human creature, whose greed knows no bounds. Sure this sounds like Miley Cyrus or Johnny Depp, but in the Native American tale it was probably a little less scary.

This explains a lot.

The War on Meat brings together the Global Warming™ Cultists, PETA® zombies, and, well, the Leftist Cannibal Brigade©. Okay, I made the Cannibal Brigade™ up, but it’s not far from being true (LINK):

Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Söderlund reportedly said he believes eating human meat, derived from dead bodies, might be able to help save the human race if only a world society were to “awaken [sic] the idea.”

Greta loves eating people to save the planet, but she draws the line at clowns. She says they taste funny.

I’m pretty sure that calling anyone from Sweden a scientist anymore is stretching the definition of scientist to its breaking point. Magnus Söderlund might have a cool first name, but he’s not a scientist, he’s a political hack who is deluded to such an extent that he thinks eating people is a good idea that he can share. In public. He has that opinion, and he’s not worried about people with large nets taking him off to a padded room where he can’t hurt anyone anymore.

Hey, at least he’s not the only one. At the recent town hall of Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY, at last we got a level-headed answer on what we have to do to save the climate:

The hilarious part when I watched this clip was that Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY had the opportunity to say what 99.999999% of people on the planet would have said: “No, that’s clearly insane,” missed her chance. She simply said that there are a lot of different ideas on how to save the planet. This is the equivalent of her pulling a three year old up on stage to protect her from a cream pie in the face.

All of this is based on the ideas of eating plants (Ewww®), bugs (Still Better Than Plants©), cultured cells (Still Better Than Plants©), or human jerky (only good if it it’s the kind from the Alaskan convenience store) is better than having a steak or a burger. The Left is trying to infringe on the Zero Amendment, so an unrestrained and over-the-top response is required. What is the Zero Amendment?

“A meatless People being a Danger to a Free State; Congreth thall maketh no law to infringe on the Rights of the People to have great gobbets of meat, with rivers of grease running down their chins after a great feast, with the meat done preferably medium rare.”

Okay, if even plants aren’t completely vegan, why are people? Oh, because of the Prius®-smug factor. Sorry. My bad.

My solution to the whole problem is rather easy. Since meat is now healthy, I suggest this modest proposal:

Trans-Meat.

Meat shall now be identified as a plant, so vegetarians can eat it. Cows shall now be identified as bugs, so hippies can eat it. Meat shall now be identified as a collection of cells, so Elon Musk can eat it. Cows, pigs and chickens shall now be identified as human, so the Swedes can eat them. And so they can vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY.

Thankfully, Alaska Jack© has already shown us the way.

I once heard that a woman from New York went into a store and was upset about wool sweaters. “We shouldn’t kill sheep for their wool!”

The salesman responded: “Ma’am, nobody kills sheep for their wool.”

Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood

“Well, if you want to knock on wood, there’s plenty of that about.” – Space: 1999

And astrology teaches us that 9 planets and thousands of stars have spent billions of years lining themselves up just to let me know that “my energy will flourish in quieter surroundings” today.

I remember sitting in the classroom – the window faced to the south, and it was a cold winter morning. It was sixth grade and I was covered with more insulation than a flamingo in Canada, since the eighty-year-old steam heating system in the school was as reliable as Bernie Sander’s heart. For whatever reason, the teacher was talking about the phrase, “knock on wood.” I think she was doing what she referred to it as “teaching” but I guess we all have our quirks. Regardless, I remember it well. She said that the origin of the phrase “knock on wood” came from the Greeks.

Apparently, the teacher said, the gods really liked to mess with people’s hopes and dreams. If they heard that something was going well for you they would go out of their way to stop you, much like the Clintons if you know about Jeffery Epstein . . . maybe I should just stop there. The idea of saying “knock on wood” was to confuse that practical joker Zeus or make one of him think you were crazy, so that Zeus would just ignore the gibberish that you were saying.

I liked that explanation, at least enough that it stuck with me this far.

I hope she’s not offended. Knock on wood.

When I looked on the Internet, I wasn’t able to find a confirmation of that story. Wikipedia® says that the most likely explanation was ancient German folklore about touching wood to appease the druid tree-spirits. When I looked a little deeper into the Wikipedia© debate page where the nerds discussed what should be on the page, there was more than a bit of confusion among the editors, including one who just kept talking about his imaginary Japanese anime pillow-wife and whether or not you were still a virgin if you had kissed someone who was not a virgin.

You leave Isemi Kukikemi alone! If we had listened to her and John Bolton-san, we would be attacking Iran right now instead of trying to bring our troops home.

The concept and phrase of “knock on wood” or “touch wood” is widespread enough that it appears in cultures from Iran to Brazil, but is mainly centered in European nations. I’ll admit – I use the phrase to this day, probably weekly. In a pinch I’ll use a plastic countertop to replace actual wood. It’s covering particle board, right?

I think that “knock on wood” is just part of a wider body of superstition that’s deeply rooted inside our collective consciousness, and if we didn’t have superstitions, we’d invent them, like I invented that clever superstition to never to shave off all of my body hair and drive backwards naked with a cat while drinking plastic-bottle scotch – unless it’s on vinyl bench seats, then it seems to work out okay.

I made fun of trees once, I guess that was a knock on wood.

I think the reason for this is that life is complex, and so much of the future is uncertain. When I watch the financial talking heads, they exhibit the same behavior. “The market is down 2% on news that Elon Musk had creamed corn as a side dish for lunch.” The market is sometimes down because . . . the market is down. It doesn’t need an actual reason since the pressure on the stock market is made up on many days of an essentially random mix of buying and selling. Sometimes a bit up, sometimes a bit down.

But no one would watch the financial news if they said, “The market is down 2% because the market is down 2%.” In many cases, until the market gets built up so high that it can’t sustain itself anymore (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population), the market just fluctuates.

This just in, the market is down because of (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) trade problems with Greenland.

When I was in college I was chatting with a friend about economics lecture he had just seen. A student getting his doctorate in economics was presenting his dissertation to the class. The student was excited when he explained that he had taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average® since 1929. He had removed all of the variation from the market.

“When you remove the all variation from the market data, it turns out it’s . . . constant!” According to my friend the economist seemed very pleased with himself.

My friend raised his hand and asked, “Umm, isn’t everything a constant if you remove all variation?”

Oops. My friend was right – my weight has been absolutely constant if you remove all of the weight I’ve lost and all of the weight I’ve gained. Heck, using that statistical analysis, I’m still at my birth weight. My friend reported that the expression on the grad student’s face looked like he had just swallowed a whole frog after it had been rolled in Johnny Depp’s dryer lint after Johnny dried the cotton diaper he wore when he oil wrestled Nicolas Cage.

I was at dinner last night with Nic Cage. We had steak. The waitress came by – asked him if he wanted garlic bread. He said no. I was shocked – I heard he never turned down a roll.

So, we’re in the middle of October, the ultimate time of superstition. Oddly enough, some of the greatest stock market crashes have happened in October, from the Panic of 1907, the Crash of 1929, Black Monday in 1987, and the Crash of 2002. October was pretty bleak in 2008 as well, as you might remember. Overall, the stock market has gone up about 0.2% (on average) in October since 1950.

As I’ve noted before, markets are systems, and periodic crashes are actually helpful – they lead to removal of inefficient and failed companies that are producing products that can’t compete. The longer and higher the market goes, in general, the greater the correction when it comes. It’s been over a decade since there has been a significant market pullback. It’s up 325% since then.

But like housing prices, markets never go down, right?

Knock on wood.

I’ll leave you with this: It’s the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, and it’s relevant. Also relevant? It’s not “I never had to knock on wood,” it’s “I never had to; knock on wood.” This song was playing on the radio the night I picked up The Mrs. for our first date, and was playing when I dropped her off after the date. A good omen. Knock on wood.

Civil War II Weather Report #5: Drumbeat Along Bikini River

“It means we’ll find allies on every side. Look at them, the poor wretches are just waiting for someone to lead them in revolt.” – Flash Gordon

When I was a bartender a ghost of a dog with a missing tail showed up after we closed. I had to kick him out. We didn’t re-tail spirits after hours.

From Issue Number One:

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.

In this issue: Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Response to Z-Man –– Updated Civil War II Index – John Mark/Ramzpaul Interview – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to Issue Four of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are a bit different than the other material at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II, on the first Monday of every month. Issue One is here (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), Issue Two is here (Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links), Issue Three is here (Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links), and Issue Four is here (Civil War II Weather Report, Issue 4 – Violence, Censorship, and Beach Volleyball).

Violence and Censorship Update

Censorship and violence rhyme. Okay, maybe they only rhyme in Urdu, and then only if you’ve been drinking, but when you get one, you generally get the other. And now? Ideas are being regularly censored. Let’s look at one tiny example that I came up with off the top of my head:

I went to Google™ and typed in “google changing votes” and nine of the top ten results were all how that was a “false,” “bogus,” and “wrong” theory based on “Trump Cranking the Crazy to 11.”

Wow. Certainly Google® is unbiased, right? Well, just to check, I went to Bing©. Yeah, I know that Bing™ is the ugly step-puppy of search engines, but what does it say when I type in “google changing votes”? “Google and Big Tech bias hurts democracy.” “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election.”

My friend? Hell, I’m not even sure that Zuckerberg is human.

Huh. It’s almost like there’s a bias. Censorship consists not only of stopping publishing, but in 2019, censorship includes showing people only the facts and ideas that are “safe” – you don’t have to cut off access to the content unless it’s really popular and spreading. All you have to do is bury the content in the irrelevant, and stamp down on it so it never has the chance to become popular.

Response to Z-Man

There is a blogger (quite a bit more popular than yours truly) known as the Z-Man, who operates the Z-Blog. He posts frequently, and posts on a variety of interesting content. If you haven’t visited, I’d suggest you give him a try – he has unique views on a lot of subjects. I’ll warn you: he’s not as funny as I am, but then again who is? Okay. Steve Martin. And Dave Berry. And . . . I want to stop playing this game.

On September 18, the Z-Man published a post titled “Thoughts on Civil War.” It’s here (LINK). For a TL;DR, I’ll throw in his concluding paragraph:

When you start to puzzle through it, the probability of an old fashioned civil war is close to zero, while armed rebellion is in the single digits. Things will have to change a lot for the conditions to be right. On the other hand, a new type of rebellion, one suited for the age and the sorts of people unhappy with the system, is increasingly likely. Middle-class mom giving company passwords to rebel hackers is a likely scenario. The revolution of the future will be low-grade and mostly non-violent.

See? Not a single joke in there. I’m definitely funnier.

On the Right, we tend to quibble a bit about definitions of things. One common one is what a modern civil war in the United States will look like. It’s unlikely to involve cannon and massed men and horses unless the ghost of Confederate Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart picked a fight with the ghost of his father-in-law, Union Major General Philip St. George Cooke over who lost the remote and it spilled back over into Virginia again.

And you thought Thanksgiving at your house was tense.

Will there be armed conflict? Earlier on in the post, Z-Man makes the points that there is no need for the Left to revolt. They already own the institutions, so why would the Left revolt? The biggest threat, he felt, was from white suburban dudes. Those were precisely the people who are kept in debt, and absent a significant economic dislocation, they wouldn’t risk anything in today’s world.

That’s not really the case. At the Bundy Ranch hundreds of people showed up to stop the Bureau of Land Management from taking Bundy’s cattle. Was this something I loaded up the Wildermobile® and took the streets to help with? Nope.

In retrospect we should not be surprised when things we make collapse. Docks for instance, but they mainly fail due to pier pressure.

Hundreds of people did, however. With rifles. As I looked at the pictures, I was surprised to see not only young men, but women, too. And even more so, there were older men. I’d expect that some of the men in camo had never been in the service, but I’d expect that many were. The fact that Bundy was able to round up this many people to quite literally put their lives on the line for his cattle was surprising to me.

What surprised me the most was the number of old dudes with white hair out there. While it wasn’t “nothing but old guys” there were plenty of people who were taking social security but were slinging an AR or a six gun and weren’t afraid to die. I’m sure that they’re happy they didn’t die because none of them were married to my ex-wife, but they had seen how the Federal Government dealt with women and children at Waco. They weren’t dumb. They knew what the stakes were. And they still stood there in an act of open rebellion against the government – a position the Left would call treason, since the Left views people as serving government, hence rebellion against government is treason. The Right views the government as serving people, and open warfare against the will of the people is treason.

Which explains why we’re in our current mess.

I absolutely think that Z-Man is right, and we’ll see people throwing “sand in the gears” at various places when the rebels get Mom’s password. Last year at this time I was skeptical – an active Civil War II represented a stage that was important enough to talk about, yet such a departure from the past it seemed unlikely that we would we see it. We been stable for a long time as a country.

I’m still not certain that we will see a Civil War, but as I trace the developments of the last year I have become convinced that, while not inevitable, Civil War II is likely, and likely to be messy and filled with atrocity. I think that it’s likely enough that I decided to publish this monthly update, which provides a way for me to view over time the ratcheting up of anger in the country.

It’s not been pretty – escalating violence, and escalating rhetoric. Don’t count on your neighbor saving you, however. And don’t count on pulling your pocket copy of the Constitution stopping the Leftists like a crucifix to a vampire when they show up at 3AM to take your guns. Heck, your pocket copy of the Constitution won’t even work at 2PM when they show up at your work to take you into custody after a few of the 3AM gun collection parties go poorly. As is commonly quoted at Western Rifle Shooters Association (LINK), “Your Constitution won’t save you.”

I emailed a copy of the Constitution to a friend. I was hoping the NSA would finally read it.

As we have seen from previous Leftist Singularities (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), once a Leftist movement is started, the killing only ends when a leader, (Stalin or Mao, for instance) kill everyone to the left of them. The Right has seen this, the Right understands this.

As I’ve stated since the start of the Weather Reports, the next step is establishing or taking over a governing structure. While that may take several years, from what I’ve seen it’s coming. When Federal power is overturned by a governmental structure, who overturns it? Hint: think marijuana.

Updated Civil War II Index

Economic: +3.84 this month, +4.43 last month. Plus is good. Unemployment is slightly down – interest rates were slightly down, and the Dow was only slightly down. I expect that October will be ugly in the markets, which will drag this down. But I’ve been wrong before.

Political Instability: -13% last month, -50% this month. Boy, did I blow this prediction. Here was my comment last month. “As we get closer to the election, I would anticipate that political instability will continue to decrease as focus goes on to the candidates and away from tearing down the systems.” Oops. Every metric took a nosedive this month. Every. Single. One. A cynic would say that the Democrats can’t field a candidate that could beat Trump so they decided that they wanted to stage a coup in the open.

Interest in Violence: +13% this month, compared to +8% last month. This is a smaller increase than I expected. A related metric showed a big peak after El Paso, dropping nearly immediately.

Illegal Aliens: Down 28% last month to 64,000 (month over month). That sounds great, but it’s still 50% higher than last year. Maybe we need snakes and alligators?

Pretend I made a graph and this is it.

John Mark/RamZPaul Interview

John Mark made an appearance in the second edition of the Weather Report. There was some commentary that his video was, umm, a tad unrealistic. But he is thinking about the problems that we’re facing. RamZPaul is like Cher or Meatloaf in that he’s a singer has one name. He’s a pretty constant “vlogger” who produces frequent and fairly short six to ten minute videos. But on the weekend? Pull out the stops. He has a program called “Happy Homelands” where he interviews people. Recently, he had John Mark on. The video is above.

The video clocks in at two hours, and is fairly interesting, although if you’re a constant reader of sites like mine, there will be a lot of overlap. Rather than give a review, I thought I’d just share some of the ideas that I found interesting that were in the video or were inspired by the video. Note – this video will disappear off of YouTube® after a while – RamZPaul will be pulling it down after a while because he won’t keep his content up too long – YouTube™ appears to periodically purge creators for videos they created years in the past even if those videos met the Terms of Service®. Yup. 1984 was supposed to be a novel, not be part of the Google© Employee Handbook.

Next step is creating a governance structure for the Right. Governors?
Focus of the Left is currently an Internet ban plus hate and idea police. They’ve won – they want to crack down.
The problem with the Right is people wait for a permission slip to revolt – they want for the other guy to swing first, even when they are surrounded and outnumbered.
Trump really surprised the Left. They thought they had finished history – that they would rule forever after Obama. Trump proved the Silent Right and Libertarian Center existed.
The Right has nowhere else to run to. The United States is it. We can’t retreat. If we lose the United States, it’s effectively over.
Does John Mark take off his helmet when he showers?
The Left has replaced class communism with race and gender communism.
Related: the only commonality of race and gender based communists is they hate white capitalist guys more than they hate each other. If the Left gets power, a strongman will be required. Why? I read an article today where a gay person was complaining that a bisexual shouldn’t be allowed in LGBTQWERTY+ “safe spaces” if they were currently in a heterosexual relationship. Yeah, you can’t make this up. The Constitution won’t save them either if American Lenin ever gets put in charge.

Pop Wilder says nobody shot at him during the war, but he was with people that were being shot at. No, really, that’s what he told me, which is probably the ultimate Dad Joke.

If you’ve got a spare few hours and are interested in the topic, give the video a look. Like with any link, the only person I agree with 100% . . . is me. And sometimes I don’t even agree with me. So there.

Links

Here are the links – please leave your nominations for next month in the comments below or toss me an email if you’re shy:

https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america

From Tom Chittum (yes, that Tom Chittum) who notes – “watch the video” – it’s only five minutes, but if you thought I was pessimistic, wait until you see what the Pentagon thinks:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-21/american-apocalypse-governments-plot-destabilize-nation-working

From Ricky:

Hedgeless Horseman at Zero Hedge is convinced there will be another Civil War. Here is his latest missive dated today on the topic.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-09-17/civil-war-2-electric-boogaloo-deplorables-vs-socialists

From last spring:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-22/pre-reading-war-america

I have found his various articles over the years about “introduction to rifle ownership” to be very interesting.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-30/well-regulated-militia-being-necessary-security-free-state

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-18/political-power-grows-out-barrel-gun-mao-tse-tung

Also from Ricky, variations on a theme:

https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/

https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-american-militia-movement-a-breeding-ground-for-hate-is-pulling-in-cops-on-facebook/

https://www.revealnews.org/article/american-cops-have-openly-engaged-in-islamophobia-on-facebook-with-no-penalties/

And also from Ricky:

http://www.unz.com/chopkins/trumpenstein-must-be-destroyed/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/30/after-trump-invokes-civil-war-people-twitter-mockingly-rush-sign-up/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/rush-limbaugh-america-is-in-the-middle-of-a-cold-civil-war

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/civil-war-on/

Bad Bosses, Part 2: Action Heroes, Guns, and Explosions

“Your boss is a woman? Now this is a strange bank.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

In order to dress for success they tell you to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. So I found out where my boss shopped for clothes. I’d see what they wore, and then wear the exact same outfit the next day. My boss at the time, Marji, thought that was just a little weird since horizontal stripes weren’t at all flattering on me.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to get to the end of writing your post and finding . . . it’s too long. It’s a blessing because if I can break it into two posts, hey, I’ve already got my next post written, which might get me to bed by 2AM instead of the usual. The curse part is that the post has to have a natural break between part one and part two – thankfully this one did. The other curse part is that I actually look forward to writing a post – and the one I had planned for Friday will have to wait a week. But it’s gonna be funny. Part 1 is here: Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft, and part 2 is below.

It’s been my experience that all good bosses look the same, since they are all clones of me, or at least the “me” in that first performance review (JW note: it was described in the last post, and it was a really good performance review). And I’ve had plenty of bosses in my career – in one two-year period I went through five bosses, and I am averaging a new boss every sixteen months over the years of my career.

Based on my experiences, the traits of good bosses that I’ve had are listed below. Good bosses are:

Concerned about doing their duty for their company. They display loyalty – they do their job.
Good at setting clear expectations on behavior and expected work outcome. You know what you’re supposed to be doing.
Never smelling of grilled onions.
Able to create an environment where honest questions are encouraged.
Good at providing the tools, time, and space the employee needs to get work done.
Available to do children’s magic shows for birthday parties.
Honest with employees, and give clear feedback meant to help them improve.
Quick to recognize that mayonnaise is not a French musical instrument.
Courageous – the truth is the truth, and they’ll share that up and down the line and damn the consequences.
Reluctant hold a knife to the secretary’s administrative assistant’s neck.
Genuinely concerned about the employee.
Treat people (generally) fairly.

It’s always a shame when you have a great boss and he breaks a leg and has to be put down.

There are times I’ve managed to screw up most of the rules I’ve listed above when I was a boss – that’s why I was able to list them off the top of my head – you remember your mistakes. But you learn from them, too: One of the biggest compliments I got was when I was leaving a job for a new company. The Chief Operating Officer came in to say goodbye and told me, “I hope you’re going to be supervising people at your new job.” Maybe he wanted the new company I was leaving to join to fail, but I took it that he appreciated my efforts to learn and be better as a boss and wanted to pass that legacy on to other companies through people like me. You’re right. He wanted me to mess up that other company.

I imagine this every time I walk into work and use the remote to lock the doors to my car without looking.

Notice I didn’t mention charisma as a requirement to be a good boss. You don’t need to be an Elon Musk to be a great boss – and I’ve heard he’s not a particularly good boss unless you’re his weed dealer. Notice that I didn’t mention intelligence – in some instances really high intelligence works against you as a supervisor since it can make it more difficult for you to communicate well. Would I rather have a smart boss or an honest one? Would I rather have a smart boss or a courageous one? Would I rather have a smart boss or one that didn’t constantly smell of grilled onions?

Most of the time, the cause of a really bad boss is due to their fear, namely fear of getting fired or fear of missing a promotion or fear of missing a rung on the corporate ladder. If that were to happen? He couldn’t afford to pay for the “hot stone massages” his wife was getting from Günter, her “masseuse.” However, sometimes you get bosses that are so strange they remind you of Cousin Eddie®:

One boss I had actually lived in his office, as in slept there every night five or six nights a week. He claimed to be a member of a biker gang, and told stories of holding a person upside down from a bridge as the gang gently convinced him to be out of state so he couldn’t testify at an upcoming trial. He told about buying a girlfriend a “little car” to convince her to have an abortion. And the time he broke a bottle to use as a weapon because “The Indian” was trying to knife him.

This might not be a completely faithful adaptation from the original story.

And as a boss, whenever I needed help, or a risky event was about to occur, you could count on him to be three states away. As bad bosses go, he wasn’t horrible, since after I convinced him that if I looked bad, he looked bad, he had my back when we talked to corporate. Working for him was a really weird nine months. Normally I throw in a joke or an exaggeration in my descriptions – but in describing this boss? Nope. That all happened.

To be clear, with the exceptions listed above, almost all of the rest of my bosses have been great people who were of good character and really interested in helping me develop as a person and as an employee. But where all good bosses are similar, bad bosses are often unique:

The Seagull – The Seagull is a boss that gets a new job every year or two. Why? Because he flies in, makes a mess, and stays until he’s kicked out. Miller was a Seagull. Keep good notes for the aftermath.
The Shadow – Whenever anything important happens, they’re gone. Whenever you have a question? They deflect. Literally, it’s like not having a boss at all, or at least a boss that will make a decision. You will have a boss if one of your choices goes wrong, however, because the Shadow will quickly (and correctly) point out that he never told you to do such a thing!
The Burnout – The Burnout peaked twenty years ago, and is mad and bitter. His back hurts. You make too much money. He wants to retire, but has to wait another year for Medicare™ to kick in. Until then? He wants to inflict as much pain as possible on the office because he wants everyone to hurt as much as his back does.
Captain Ahab – Captain Ahab is great because he has a vision. Companies love Captain Ahab leaders because they become obsessed with obtaining a vision. The upside? Your mission is clear, Ahab makes sure you have everything you need. And you will work 80 hours a week to accomplish it. These aren’t 80 hour weeks of playing Minesweeper®, no, every minute is fully used because (Spoiler Alert) that Moby Dick isn’t gonna spear itself. Ahab doesn’t care about your family, at least during work hours.

He then tried to hypnotize the people in the meeting using a pocket watch. The work was rough – 90 hour weeks for months on end, but we got free coffee and he’d buy us catered dinner if we had to work past 9pm. On a Saturday.

The Sphinx – You’re always guessing. The Shadow won’t give you any sort of answer, but The Sphinx won’t tell you what he wants, but you can be sure that The Sphinx will tell you if it’s wrong. Generally loudly and when other people are around.
The Politician – The Politician cares about only one thing – does it look good? If it looks good and is immoral or illegal? Who cares? The Politician is most commonly heard saying “perception is reality.” The Politician always dresses carefully – almost as good as his boss. The Politician seeks constant movement. They can avoid being blamed for messes they make, but will loudly point out the mess they inherited in their new job. Your value to a Politician begins and ends with you being useful to them. Otherwise? You don’t exist.

Your defense if you have a bad boss in almost every case if you want to keep your job is the same: do your best at work. Work hard, and don’t break the rules or the law. Be nice. And if it sucks too much? Get a new one.

While traditionally thought of as a good boss, Washington had a few buttons you didn’t want to press, although he did light up Ye Olde Twitter® to piss of Adams: “King George . . . Washington. Verily that soundeth goode.”

One other note: if every boss working at a company is a Bad Boss, one of two things is going on:

The Bad Boss is what they really want. Unless you can make it work, you have to leave. Sooner or later, the messes a Bad Boss makes will stick to you.
It may be you. I know that there have been times in my career when my attitude wasn’t optimal. It’s probably the boss. But always leave room and examine that the real problem isn’t you.

Okay, I’m now officially sick of Mack the Knife. But I still don’t feel bad. And if you’d like to share a bad boss below, feel free.

Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft

“Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” – Office Space

“That’s what she said.”

I had just gotten the greatest performance review of my life. It was outstanding in every way. My boss (let’s call him Miller, it goes with the song) went on and on about how I was a stunning example of every possible good quality a person could have, and how I was universally loved, admired, and generally made women fertile just through a fleeting glance, and made men better than they thought they could be through the slightest example. If the company needed someone to walk across a pond, on the top of the water, John Wilder was your guy.

For about a second, I bought it. Flattery works because your mind really wants to believe all those nice things. It’s like a horoscope, keep using nice adjectives, and you’ll find one that the person is already predisposed to agree with.

Then I thought about it – this guy Miller, my new boss, has been with the company about a month. He barely knows where his office is and he’d only visited my office once. For him to write a performance review like this? I didn’t believe it. As much as I’d like to think of myself in such glowing terms, I rejected his flattery.

Beyond mentally rejecting his praise as an attempt at manipulation, I also made the mental note never to trust Miller.

Why?

Anyone who will be quick to praise will be quick to condemn. Besides, when I looked at him while he was smiling, he only smiled with his mouth – never with his whole face. He was smiling because he was “supposed” to be smiling, not because the smile was genuine. During those smiles Miller had the dead, flat eyes of a predator, like he was attempting to see if you were fooled and really believed the smile.

I never did meet Miller’s wife – I think her invisibility suit worked pretty well.

I was careful to document every conversation with him. Always trust your gut, people, unless your gut says socialism is a good deal. If your gut says that, remember: never go full Bernie.

I worked pretty far away from the company headquarters, where Miller’s office was. I set up weekly calls to keep him informed on what I and my team were doing. I’d done this in the past for my previous bosses. These calls allowed them to understand what we were doing, and digest it for top management if they needed to.

Except.

Except I found out from a colleague that during these meetings, most of the time Miller was shopping for things online, teaching himself to play the banjo, translating Garfield® into cuneiform (did they even have lasagna in ancient Sumeria?) or, in general, not paying any attention to what I was saying. My colleague noted that Miller generally wasn’t listening at all.

Normally, that’s not a problem, I ran had been running my end of things for years, and after a few years you get used to the usual problems – and are expected just to handle them. But my boss had a boss – call him my Grandboss. When my Grandboss wanted to know about some aspect of what I was doing, he’d ask my boss, Miller. Since Miller had literally no idea (despite weekly written reports and the phone call mentioned above) what I was doing, he did the simple thing: he made it up.

Most of the time, it worked fine. My Grandboss generally had an idea of what was going on, even if the specifics were a bit off. But when the results my boss made up promised didn’t happen? The Grandboss got mad. Very mad.

So mad, in fact, that my Grandboss called me up one day and was yelling. I explained, calmly, the real situation and the plan, and that seemed to calm him down. He checked up a few more times to make sure what I said was really happening, and then went away. But the troubles with Miller continued. Our conversations became a random affair – one day he would be polite. The next day, he would be literally yelling over the phone. What had started out as a bad feeling based on that too-good-to-be-true performance review had morphed into a full-blown sitcom level bad boss.

I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

I had one or two advantages – first, I had been at the company much longer and had several well-placed friends, and second, I wasn’t a deceitful sack of weasel meat. I’m certain that my boss was lying based on my informants at headquarters, and I’m equally certain that the things Miller was saying weren’t very positive. It’s been several years, and my career is still recovering from his “help.”

I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Miller got fired. “But, you can’t fire me! You don’t even know what I do!” were his comments as they took away his keys and allowed him to pop his personal possessions in a box and gave him a complementary cement bag (for the weight, dear). And, he’s right – the Internet sure won’t surf itself.

As near as I can tell, the company didn’t skip a beat in his absence. I’ll also admit that on the day he got fired, I had one of the best workouts of my life. The entire time I worked out that lunch, I just listened to Mack the Knife on a loop for 45 minutes of the best treadmill time I’ve ever put in. I smiled every second. Why Mack the Knife? I have no idea. I rarely listened to it before, and haven’t listened to it even one time since that day until tonight. As I write this, it’s on a loop in the background.

It may be a song from a Marxist play written by a Leftist, but it makes me happy that it made so much money – after the Marxist author died. Also? The most upbeat song about multiple murders. Bonus trivia: Lotte Lenya, mentioned in the song, played Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

As you can see, she’s the perfect Bond® girl for 2019.

I’ve tried to feel bad about feeling so good because Miller was fired. Even years later, it’s still a pleasant memory. Yeah. I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do.

Okay, the choice was a single post that was twice as long as this, or this broken into two parts. I chose two parts. Next part is on Friday.