Bad Self Help Ideas, A Naked Cat Fight, and Johnny Depp (In His Own Gravy)

“If you eliminate the third, fifth, and sixth letters, then it’s Red’s Digest, comrade.” – M*A*S*H

digest

Yes, Laura Ingalls Wilder is where I got my blogging name.  Long story.

My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest© as I was growing up.  For those unfamiliar with the magazine, it was a little bigger than a paperback book, and contained shortened versions of articles from other magazines.

TL;DR?  Reader’s Digest™ is like Reddit® for old people.

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Sometimes it really is aliens. 

Reader’s Digest™ also contains several pages of stories from readers, mainly jokes and humorous stories, or at least it did back the last time I read it, when I was just a kid, say 10 or so.  One of the stories has stuck with me since then.  It goes something like this:

One day a mother looked out the kitchen window and saw her children playing in the backyard.  She noticed that her son, about age seven, had a rock in his hand and was using it to strike the top of a soup can.  The can was being held in place by the woman’s five-year-old daughter.  What alarmed the woman was that the daughter was holding the can on top of her head.

“Timmy, stop hitting your sister!” yelled the mother.

The daughter replied, “It’s okay, Mommy, he’s almost done.”

Some of the details of the story might be wrong, but I remember the last line exactly.  It amuses me to this day, because I can see that, while uncomfortable as it may be to have a seven year old whacking at a soup can on top of your head with a rock, you can be certain you will feel better when they stop.

I listen to YouTube® on the drive to work.  Listen.  I used to watch it, but the pedestrians didn’t seem to like sharing the sidewalk, and Pop Wilder told me when I was first learning to drive to never swerve, it was dangerous.  I guess I’ll miss Grandma.  Pity about the will.  Anyway, the terms of my parole don’t let me watch YouTube® anymore.  We have strict judges in Modern Mayberry.

YouTube™ has autoplay, and since I’m driving, I wasn’t watching, and it’s played everything from videos on Stalin to videos on chainsaws to Alice Cooper® songs that he performed for a Philippino werewolf movie.  So this particular random video didn’t surprise me.  In the video, I heard a person talking about how they made their life better through “Negative Visualization.”

stalin

Stalin’s program was so effective, he made 20 million people disappear!  Just like food, this offer is not available in stores.

My first thought was that I had never heard that term and I was wondering if it was some sort of self-help video hosted by Stalin.  Once you get into the Stalin self-help videos, that’s a never ending video sink-hole.  Better Mental Health Through Collective Farming And Not Eating All That Decadent Food Like the Capitalists still gives me the shivers.

It turns out this video was entirely unrelated to Stalin, entirely bypassing the U.S.S.R. self-help craze currently so popular in California.  In this particular video, the presenter suggested you imagine that something horrible happened to your family, say, they were killed slowly in a fire, or were forced to go to a Cher™ concert.  He suggested that then you’d feel better when you realized that none of those horrible things happened to them.  His theory is that you’d love them more and appreciate them more after mentally throwing yourself through a daily tragedy.  What could go wrong?

Timmy, in other words, would stop banging the soup can on your head with a rock and you’d feel better.

I feel that Negative Visualization is a supremely stupid idea, at least for me.  I thought that if I started my day imagining tragedy in all aspects of my life, that my relationships fractured, that I became ill, that I became bankrupt, or that I had to give Johnny Depp a two hour sponge bath with tepid water, I would just be depressed.  So I tried it.  And I was right.  It was just depressing.  Instead of feeling better because my bathroom was Depp-free, the emotions of imagining a nude and smelly Johnny Depp in my bathtub was just gross, so I felt both depressed and unclean.

depptub

Is it just me, or do you think that this room smells like Dinty Moore Beef Stew®, expensive foreign alcohol made from bugs, and despair?  As a note, The Mrs. felt the caption should have used gravy instead of sauce.  Which do you prefer, Depp Gravy™ or Depp Sauce©?

Instead of Stalin’s Daily Devotion® I decided to go back to what I’ve done for most of my life:  just be grateful for what I have.  Today, in this moment I have it pretty good.  I have enough money to not worry for the next ten minutes.  I have a loving family that will pretend to be happy to see me when I get home tonight.  I have friends that I can call up and share the innermost details of my life with, so they can make fun of me behind my back.  And I’m healthy, losing weight consistently, and don’t have an immediate departure date from planet Earth.  Plus?  I just bought a bitchin’ 6.5 Creedmoor that I need to sight in.

My life is good.  Because you have a computer and you’re reading this, you have it good, too.  In fact, chances are pretty strong that you’re part of the dreaded 1%.

Don’t think so?  Don’t argue with Wilder.

I got into a Twitter® slapfight about just this subject.  The thing I have since discovered is that winning an argument on Twitter© carries the same prestige as beating a kitten in a knife fight, so I have (mostly) given it up, which is nice for the kitten.  The kitten was getting pretty tired of it, even though it had it coming.  Sir Flappy Knobkins knows why.

catfight

Cats may be quick, but I have a secret weapon:  I’ve mastered Laser-Fu.

But in this particular Twitter© slapfight, a gentleman from England was complaining about “the evil 1%”.  My response to him was, “dude, you ARE the 1%.”  He then preceded to deny that he was part of the 1%, because they were evil and owned private islands.  I then pointed out the minimum income to crack the top 1%:

$32,400 per year.

Yup.  If you make $32,400 a year, you’re in the top 1%.  But that’s looking at the whole world.  I could tell by the pause that the gentleman I was arguing with looked it up.  Then he responded, “Well, not that 1%.  I meant the really rich people.”  His entire persona was built around the idea that he was oppressed and his Tweets® were filled with envy.  I bet he’s fun at parties.

So my suggestion is this:  get up every morning and don’t imagine those you love being slowly, lovingly, caressed by Joe Biden.  No.  Get up and be grateful.  I know for a fact that many of you reading this blog are multi-thousandaires, so you have a lot to be grateful for.  Gratitude feels better than envy or being depressed any day.  And if something really is wrong?  Remember it will pass.  Eventually life gets tired, and stops hitting the can on your head with a rock.

canhead

Don’t pick a rock that’s too big.

Think how good you’ll feel when he stops!

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

“I respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles.  It’s much to risk.” – Braveheart

putinrisk

I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesn’t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.  Any slide.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Plastic ones.  Metal ones.  Forget tall ones.  I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.  Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.  And The Boy was even worse.  But there was no real reason for him to have any fear – I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.  At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).  The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.  The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?  At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.  Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Don’t fault a kid for being true to his school.

merryg

Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.  Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.  The Lunch Ladies® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.  They had to stop making that soup after the United States© ratified the Geneva Convention™ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.  Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).  The unsurprising answer to “How long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?” is: “Not very long.”

We did much better holding it against each other’s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.  To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesn’t exist, their brain isn’t developed enough for empathy.  Or maybe I was just a sociopath.  I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, I’m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.  We’d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.  When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.  As well as the air.  The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.  Who says near suffocation can’t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildling™ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so that’s right out.  A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a mother’s womb.  Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word “mother” from association with the word “womb” because it’s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid – I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.  What a baby!  You’d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

rappelling

Isn’t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.  But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.  That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.  And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.  This led me to an observation about The Boy.  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.

And it’s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.  Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older – for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic – so he left his lights on continually.  Again, I kid.  But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?  Nope.  Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.  When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and Oates® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.  I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.  Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldn’t do it.  “Well, it might get warm.  One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease Elves© that keep it at the right temperature.”  So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.  I guess he owed something to the Elves.  Stupid Elves.

casinorisk

It’s natural to not want to risk it all.  Unless you’ve been drinking.

As I’ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, I’ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.  Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what I’m now calling Wilder’s Rule of Risk:  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.  He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized “safety” over even minimal risks.  He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

monaco

Eyepatches.  I’ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.  Sadly?  Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks I’ve taken in my life have been measured.  I’ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.  The career choices I’ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security – they’ve been bets of winning versus winning more.  And when the stock market goes down?  I lose very little of my net worth.  Yay!  But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesn’t double.  I’m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

bondi

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?  I’ve won enough with the bets I’ve made that I’m playing life with house money now.  The question is, what if I’d dreamt bigger?  What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder Johns©?  Or Buffalo Wilder Wings™?  Yeah.  I do have a list of great ideas that I’ve had but never acted on.  Primarily because I’ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.  But is that always really safe?  Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often don’t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life aren’t risks, they’re certainties:

  • You will Did that rip the Band-Aid© off?  Oh, wait, I forgot that you’re the immortal one.
  • Taxes will go up.
  • Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.  You might have something to do with that.
  • Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.  But in the long run?
  • Systems you don’t expect to collapse, will. Like Medicare®, or Pringles©.  Imagine life without Pringlesâ„¢!
  • If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it won’t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, we’re all going to die!  Let’s give up.

Never!  But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.  They’re certain, but their timing isn’t:

  • The dollar will collapse.
  • We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. We’ll never run out of oil, what’s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
  • Star Wars® movies might be good again.
  • Global Warming© won’t doom humanity. Not even close.  It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.  Darn it.
  • An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.  (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Stein’s Law says:  If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.  Wilder’s Corollary:  But it might go on so long you can’t make a buck off of it failing.

cruise

Seriously, this may be from Risky Business®, but Tom’s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social Security©.  Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.  It’s short.  Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.  Hairy and risky.  But you have a choice.  You can be afraid and live in fear.  You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.  We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.  But we can’t.  The absence of risk is the absence of life.  The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life.  Life is struggle.  Life is fighting.  Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?  Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

Step two?  Don’t spend too long in the high jump pit.

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part Two

“Joe and Rita had three children, the three smartest kids in the world.  Vice President Frito took 8 wives and had a total of 32 kids. 32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the Earth.  So maybe Joe didn’t save mankind, but he got the ball rolling, and that’s pretty good for an average guy.” – Idiocracy

costcowild

It’s better than the “Girls Gone Wilder” picture featuring Kardashians.  They don’t shave nearly often enough.

Again, a single meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization and here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).  Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part of the interview can be found at I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One.  The final part of the interview can be found below, and I’ll admit that cutting the interview down from 9,000+ initial words to the two published pieces was difficult, as you can imagine some great comments from Dr. Dutton had to hit the cutting room floor.  That makes me sad, but I hope you enjoy the gems below.

I heartily recommend the book, and get no compensation if you buy it.

As before, any errors in the interview below are solely mine.

JW:  Is there an optimum I.Q. level?

ED:  Well that’s an interesting question.  We touch on that in the book.  The problem is that high I.Q. isn’t inherently good.  What’s good from an evolutionary perspective is to survive.  If you are putting energy into having a large brain and having a large I.Q. that’s energy you’re not putting into being aggressive and having big muscles.  In certain ecologies that’s better for you to do that, to have the big muscles and the aggressiveness.  You’re actually less likely to survive – intelligence doesn’t help you.  You’ll die.  Intelligence is not selected for.  Intelligent genes will pop up by random mutation and they just won’t get selected for.  What’s happening now clearly is that there’s a negative correlation of about 0.1 among women between I.Q. and how many children you have and so what that inherently means is that there must be an optimum I.Q., because above the optimum you’re not having children.  There’s something to do with the environment-gene interaction.  That means you don’t breed.

JW:  So essentially you’re less fit for the environment . . .

ED:  They’re less fit for this zoo that we live in.  Even if we were living in a zoo there’s some evidence that very high I.Q. is a bad thing.  It correlates with things that are inherently bad in some ways like autism, being easily overstimulated, allergies, and not being very instinctive and therefore not really wanting to breed.  And if you’re an outlier in I.Q. you have difficulty talking to most people and dealing with them because you find them so stupid and facile.

JW:  One of the things I’ve noted from the data is that “higher I.Q.” [that’s in quotes] professions you end up seeing occupations like judge and engineer. There seems to be a cap of around 130 I.Q. or a little bit above 130 I.Q.  You didn’t see so many of that greater than 130 fraction showing up as judges, attorneys, or engineers.  In fact they ended up working in much less “high I.Q.” jobs . . .

ED:  As the I.Q. gets higher, the positive manifold between the different components of the I.Q. battery becomes weaker and as a consequence of that at the very high level they have very, very high g, very high intelligence, you can be absolutely crap at things which only weakly correlate with intelligence like social skill.  And this then will of course preclude you from climbing up the social hierarchy.  This is, I suspect, why the correlation between income and I.Q. is only about 0.3, 0.4.  With education it’s about 0.5.

JW:  Looking at the fate of civilization is as we head into winter, what are your thoughts on timescale?  Is there a minimum societal I.Q. beyond which the center cannot hold?

ED:  That’s hard to say because it’s never happened before in a way that we can measure it.  If you look in the book, we’ve got those graphs where we compare the collapse of our society, and the difference with us is that we’ve got so much further because of industrialization and we’ve got past the contraception.   What we know is that in terms of our linguistic I.Q., we’re back at the level that we were in about 1600.  That’s where we come back to from a peak [vocabulary] in 1850.  Now we’re back to 1600.  The factors that make that an overly simplistic comparison is that first, the standard of living was much worse in 1600.  That’s going to make people more violent and more impulsive.  Secondly, we’ve gotten high in extraversion – we’ve been selecting for extroversion for a long time, which makes people adventurous and risk taking.  So, we’re not like 1600 in that way, but that was when we were last at this level of vocabulary.  There has to be some clever person you could get to do mathematical modeling of how this works, we could calculate what the boost is to our behavior patterns by the level of, say, low child mortality.  We can probably calculate that.  Then perhaps we could make an estimate, ideally better than guesswork, but I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe my colleague Emil Kierkegaard.  I imagine he might be able do something like that.  Once I.Q. starts to decline at the genetic level, which is definitely happening, then this sets off an environmental decline as well.  It’s a cascade effect, a snowball effect, because once I.Q. is declining then you can’t teach kids as well, the teachers are of low quality, the conditions are of low quality.  Then you have this environmental effect so you will push things down quite quickly.

JW:  When you talk about the Flynn Effect being having the potential to have arisen from environmental factors that means it could go away within a generation.

ED:  Well yes, if you think about what the Flynn Effect is underpinned by, this capital that we’ve built up is almost like a catapult.  I was in an interview once, and the interviewer used this metaphor:  it’s like a catapult that’s given us momentum and once we run out of that that momentum means that we can just do these little micro interventions but there’ll come a point where that momentum will run out. And when that runs out then it will undo everything quite quickly because we simply won’t be able to do things that we used to be able to do in the past.  We can’t do Concord anymore or go to the Moon, but there’ll be other things we won’t be able to do, and so it’ll collapse quite fast. That’s why I suspect it’ll collapse into war quite fast.

JW:  Nothing can stop it because even if you have some sort of smart fraction left the vast majority of people have dropped so much.

ED:  Exactly. So it reminds me that this concept they talk about in global warming research of a global dimming.  They say that it’s pushing the temperature down.  It’s causing this effect which is which is actually keeping it less warm than it would be and that once that goes then the temperature will spike up very, very, quickly.  That’s the theory anyway.  There’s this idea that there’s this effect: all these micro innovations are creating this better environment where we can control more things which is masking the evidence that should be there of us getting stupider and stupider.  When that goes then the sudden stupidity will hit. If we were suddenly put in Darwinian conditions overnight, our inability to cope would be quite extraordinary in comparison to that of previous generations, even my grandparents’ generation, because we’re so totally protected from having to think.

JW:  When you look at altruism as a whole do you think that it might be the big enemy of intelligence?

ED:  It depends.  That’s quite a complex question because if we think about group selection then it was as a consequence of us having relatively high altruism and cooperativeness that we were able to develop farming.  And farming selected for intelligence, because it pushed out those that were too stupid to be able to farm, that had such short time horizons they couldn’t farm.  In a direct sense altruism was the friend of intelligence.  But then on another level you would argue well it’s altruism that’s stopping people from introducing eugenic policies, stopping people from getting rid of the welfare state which definitely promotes low I.Q. as my colleague Adam Perkins showed that there’s no question about that – it does cause people who are lower I.Q. to have more children, and stopping people from stopping low I.Q. immigration.  You could argue, perhaps, under Darwinian conditions maybe altruism is the friend of intelligence to some extent, because under Darwinian conditions we’re under group selection and the group that is internally altruistic although externally hostile will survive.  But once you get to non-Darwinian conditions then what tends to happen is that the levels of stress are so low that religiousness, which people become more religious when they’re stressed, the religiousness collapses and religiousness tends to promote ethnocentric attitudes that tends to promote focused altruism.  Your altruism is only focused on your own group and not to outsiders because they are the devil.  Once that collapses, then you have a generalized altruism and that would seem to be perhaps in an indirect sense the enemy of intelligence.  Actually, altruism does correlate with intelligence weakly.  People who are intelligent and who are altruistic because they are better able to reason through, not where you instinctively know how someone will feel that – that’s empathy, but they can reason through how someone else might think and they can solve social situations better.  Thus there’s a weak relationship between the between altruistic behavior and intelligence.

JW:  So for intelligence, perhaps an optimal level of altruism might resemble the Spartans then? [chuckles]  Entirely an in-group focus extraordinarily trusting of in-group, but even your own offspring are outgroup if they don’t meet your specifications.

ED:  Yes possibly. But the problem was with the Spartans was that it was taken to such an extreme and that they were almost like Nazi Germany. I mean they were they were so unfree that perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space for people to sit down and be creative.  Because part of being a genius and coming up with an original idea is that you have a moderately antisocial personality combined with very high I.Q. in an environment where it’s awfully conformist like that and those people perhaps didn’t cope well. So that there’s an optimum there as well. I’ve got a book that’s just come out called Churchill’s Headmaster:  The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and it does what it says on the tin.  It’s about Churchill’s prep school headmaster.  Anyone that knows anything about Churchill knows that his prep school headmaster was this evil sadist and I show that he’s not.  He’s actually a jolly nice chap and it’s Churchill that’s the evil sadist.  If Churchill had had more time with this headmaster then maybe he would have been molded into more of a gentleman.  Now that system of public schools like Eton was deliberately and consciously modelled on Sparta.  Everybody knew that Sparta was the way forward.  Plato said that the upper class should never know their parents.  It wasn’t as bad as that.  But for nine months of the year that you wouldn’t see your parents.  There was a degree to which the Victorians got the balance right because look at the growth of the British Empire.  It got the balance right.  It made basically militarized the upper class but it was sufficiently open to nonconformists that geniuses could develop.  I wonder if Sparta was just too far, too conformist.

JW:  Versus some of the ideas that came out of Athens.

ED:  Perhaps those ideas were ideas that came along once Greece was in decline.  That’s what happens. The best idea, the original idea, all that critical thinking . . .  that comes along in the autumn [of a civilization-JW].  Same with Victorian England. Science and whatever. It’s in the autumn of civilization that these things tend to flourish.

JW:  You mentioned that as well with Islam and Rome, that the best ideas came in their autumn.

ED:  That’s when you’re engaged in critical thinking, but by the end of autumn you’re critiquing everything and you take it too far and you destroy everything, including the things that hold society together like militarism and religion and . . . just everything.  Nothing is sacred.  When that happens then there will be people for whom things still are sacred.  We see this now with the Muslims who are more ethnocentric, more motivated.  So the desert tribesmen creates the city and it becomes decadent and the new desert tribesmen invades.  This is the problem we have.  I look at this in my new books Race Differences in Ethnocentrism and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers.

The only problem is I’m afraid I can’t think of a solution, neither myself nor my colleague Michael Woodley of Menie can think of an adequate solution to the problem of declining intelligence and so we are kind of resigned to this idea that it’s that there is an inevitable cycle.  It’s in the nature of things.  I was thinking that it could be something to do with human survival itself.  If we get too intelligent then we get too low in kind of basic instincts and violence and these kinds of things.

Therefore we can’t survive.  It’s like humanity somehow regulates itself, with the invention of contraception for example, such that intelligence never gets too high that humanity dies out.  You probably get this with other animals as well.  All of them are probably going to go in cycles. There are probably periods of time where frogs were more intelligent than frogs are now.  There was probably a period of time when frogs were less intelligent.  Not within a large range, for frogs.  I think it’s probably the same with humans.  Humans will go through these periods of high and low and ultimately the species survives.  That’s evolutionary perspective.  That’s the important thing.

Health, Wealth, and Chainsaw Hands

Captain Murphy:  Wait a minute, he gets eye beams, but I can’t get x-ray vision?

Sparks:  Okay, everybody gets x-ray vision.

Captain Murphy:  Yeah, and big chainsaw hands! – Sealab 2021

tats

Hail to the King, Baby.

Recently there was a fairly large windstorm across large parts of upper/lower Midwestia.  We live in a fairly calm region, but, it’s Midwestia – there are no mountains or even ambitious ant hills to slow down the wind once Global Warming® causes it to blow.  I am reliably informed that the entire Earth was sunny and 72°F (0.15°C) with no wind and gentle rainstorms before Global Warming©.

Despite all that, I also live on the slope of hill – which shelters us on the days the wind acts in ways entirely unapproved by several Congressional committees.  But this windstorm brought a very special wind.  One might call it a mighty wind.  Since it did damage all over Modern Mayberry, one might even call it a breaking wind.  Stupid Global Warming™.  I guess that they could even use it as a symbol of Global Warming®:  they could call it Breaking Wind©.

The Breaking Wind™ came at night, while I was asleep.  And make no mistake, I was really, really asleep, I’d been up late the night before, lovingly crafting these thrice-weekly missives for you out of Elven dreams and stud weasel chum, so I was exhausted.  The rest of the Wilder Family was up, doing whatever it is those people keep doing in my house which as far as I can see consists of making all that noise, leaving a trail of unidentified sharp plastic objects on the stairs, and a creating a continual kaleidoscope of weird smells.  What does a thirteen year old do, exactly, to make the hallway smell like bigfoot’s armpit after he ate a lot of asparagus, broccoli, and cabbage?

So, I was sleeping.  Soundly.  The Mrs. threw open the door to the room and turned the light on, which is how I like to be wakened at 1:15AM.

“You need to get up.  We just had a huge gust of Breaking Wind© hit the house and Pugsley says that there are trees down everywhere and possibly an attack of people from Ecuador.  It even pushed my stapler off the table.  The wind pushed the stapler, not the Ecuadorans.  I don’t think we need to worry about the Ecuadorans, they’re not even taking cover properly as they advance up the driveway.”  I may have mangled part of this, like I said, I was sleepy.

stapler

It’s that exact model, but the one that blew off the table is blue.  I’d work for a better joke, but I’m already up to my armpits in elven dreams and stud weasel chum.

The Mrs. had one window open on the windward side of the house, a two foot by three foot (16 meter by 27 liter) sized window.  Not very big.  But the gust had blown leaves and debris into the screen on the windows.  Not on to the screen – the leaves and other biological material had been embedded into the screen like rap fans attempting to leave a polka shindig.

I knew with winds that severe, it might be dangerous outside.  Very dangerous – heck, there could be branches even now getting ready to tumble out of the sky like a camera-seeking-Kardashian missile.  So dangerous.  Then I realized the best way to brave the wind, rain, and hazards of falling hairy women outside.

I’d send Pugsley.

He’s younger than The Boy, and we have less time invested in raising him at this point, so he’s the most expendable.

“Go check it out.  Take some pictures.”

I kid. It was just wet and I was in my footed Yoda® pajamas.

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The only appropriate use of Yoda© themed apparel.

Okay, I don’t really have footed Yoda© pajamas, but I still had a fantasy of being able to get back to sleep, and being soaking wet at 1AM would lower the odds that would happen.  I mean, under those conditions, sometimes it takes me minutes to get back to sleep.  Minutes!

Pugsley came back inside, thankfully Kardashian-free.  “A tree hit the house!”  I walked outside into the torrential downpour.  Nothing of the sort had happened.  A tree fell, but it missed the house.  So much for my housecat-like fantasy of not getting wet.

The next morning, we surveyed the property around the house.  Only one entire tree was down, but there were huge branches that had been ripped off several other trees, including a big branch off the apple tree in the front yard that nearly blocked the driveway.  Nearly.

The Mrs. was not enchanted with my “just wait a few years and they’ll rot away” strategy.  The Mrs. is not in favor of nature’s way, and I bet The Mrs. even doubts Global Warming®, even after having firsthand evidence of the Breaking Wind™.  The bright side?  I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw.

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You get more attention with a kind word and a chainsaw than with just a kind word.  Frankly, all you need is the chainsaw in that situation.

I had owned two chainsaws when we lived in Alaska, but I hadn’t cranked them since Bush 2 was in office, and they were “somewhere” in the garage.  Why two chainsaws?  Two is one, and one is none.  The last thing you want is to be 35 miles from home in the middle of getting firewood and have to stop because you have a broken chainsaw or if you need to have a duel with a grizzly bear.  It wouldn’t be sporting to not have two for a duel.  Also:  best way ever to die – having a chainsaw duel with a grizzly – not that I’m planning anything, but that’s really something for a tombstone . . . here lies John Wilder – Died in A Chainsaw Duel with a Grizzly.  My pallbearers would grow immediate beards from the testosterone oozing from my coffin.

I realize the frugal thing would be to spend the three hours required to get my two old chainsaws back up to speed, after spending the six hours to find them, but I was out of frugal.  Thankfully, Wal-Mart sells chainsaws.  Also, thankfully, I also had a good reason to buy one.  Since my chainsaw work would be around my home and there were no grizzly bears here, I could just go inside and get some iced tea if the saw went south.

Guilty admission:  I like running a chainsaw nearly as much as I like shooting.

When we lived in Alaska, we heated our home exclusively with firewood, getting massive amounts of firewood each summer.  But it’s been a lot of years and a lot of carbs since we lived in Alaska.  But I figured that Pop Wilder ran a chainsaw until late in his life, much to the consternation of the people running the nursing home.  If he did it, I certainly wasn’t too old.

chainsawfacebook

And his Instagram® is made from real grandmas.

But with my brand-spanking-new chainsaw I discovered that in three hours, I can cut more branches and trees than my two boys could move to the burn pile in eight.  And when you have a chainsaw in your hand, everything looks like a branch or tree that needs to be cut and added to the burn pile.  That may explain why the cat was scarce.

Oh, and in Modern Mayberry, whenever I want to burn my burn pile?

No permits?  No permission?  No problem.

It’s a thing we call freedom, baby.

But I come by my love of chainsaws, firewood, and the forest honestly.  Pop Wilder also heated his exclusively with firewood when I was growing up.  Cord after cord after cord of wood.  Pop was prepared, and needed to be:  the winters were often -40°F (-273.15°C) for an extended time.  So every summer weekend when Pop wasn’t working at the bank, it was off to the forest to make the forest a little less susceptible to forest fires.

I was the youngest, so I wasn’t allowed to run the chainsaw – they seemed to like the idea of me having two hands.  Pop Wilder and my brother, John Wilder (Yes, we have the same first name, for reals in real life.  My parents forgot about him once I was born and saw my magnificence and accidently named me John, too.) ran the saws.  They told me I had the easy job.  I got to pick the wood off of the ground, put it on the tailgate.  Once there was enough wood on the tailgate to stack in the truck bed, I’d hop up there and stack the wood in the truck in rows.  Then I’d hop back down and repeat the process until the truck was full.

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The Boy with the firewood we got in one weekend when we lived in Alaska.  It was a busy weekend.

Once we got home, Pop and my brother would go into the house to shower up and get some cold drinks.  Me?  I got to unload the truck, sweep out the truck bed, and finally go in to see my freshly washed father and brother having a snack and some cold lemonade.  Some weekends we’d get four loads of wood.

We were a fun family at parties.  Firewood?  Well, there’s split firewood.  Blocked firewood.  Kindling firewood.  Stacked firewood.  Piled firewood.  Fireplace firewood.  Stove firewood.  Burning firewood.  Firewood ashes.  Aspen firewood.  Pine firewood.  Birch firewood.

And that’s all we know about firewood.

But one thing was certain – cutting, loading, splitting, and stacking firewood is great summer exercise.  It’s not bad exercise in the winter, either, bringing the wood in from the piles to the house.  In Alaska, not only was it great exercise, we figured it saved us about $1000 a month in fuel oil – in January it was regularly -55°F (-7,000,000.15°C), and if the house was 65°F (4.15°C) inside, there was a 120°F temperature difference between outside and inside.  And we were living in a log cabin.  Holy Dehumidifiers, Batman!  We kept a pot of water boiling on the wood stove continually.

I was in great shape then.  Now?  I’m 14 years older, and I’ll admit even though I now had The Boy and Pugsley hauling the blocks of wood and branches, I was more than a little sore the next day.  That was okay, because when I got finished with the all the hard chainsawing work?  I was soaking my sore muscles in the hot tub while Pugsley and The Boy worked on hauling wood to the burn pile.  From time to time I made encouraging noises.  I’m sure that they appreciated that.  Thankfully they were on hand to get me some cold beverages.

I mean, the hot tub is sweaty work, right?

No staplers were injured in the creation of this post.

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Dependence, Freedom, and Toddler Hammer Fighting

“I’ve been kidnapped by K-mart!” – Ruthless People

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I love George, going out of his way to join the English for breakfast and all.

I frustrate my children a lot.  A lot.  Here’s an example from 2018:

The Boy, Pugsley, and I are out shooting.  Fun times.  Heck, here’s even a description of that particular day (12 Strong Movie Review, Exploding Tide Bottles, Rifles, and Significance).  When we finally got home, it was nearly dark.  I handed The Boy a cleaning kit and the AR-15 and .22 we’d been shooting.

“Clean these.”

I didn’t explain how.  I gave a short lecture on ammunition safety and “always treat it like it’s loaded” and “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” and “don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill,” and “never trust a liberal with your rifles.”  I even checked the rifles to make sure they were empty.

I handed The Boy a cleaning kit, and walked away.

“How do I do this?”  He was talking to the back of my head as headed down the hall.

“You figure it out.”  I heard The Boy’s long-suffering sigh as I went into my bedroom.

Ten minutes later I was walking back through the dining room and was pleased to see he’d already disassembled the weapon.  Ten minutes later when I walked back through he was putting the finishing touches on a cleaned and lubricated AR-15.  I gave it a look, cycled the action.  Smooth.

The Boy had done a good job.  I told him so.  He looked proud.

blunder

Dads.  We just love to share the work . . . 

I know that when I tossed that task to him with little information, he was irritated.  That makes sense – we’re all that way.  I also knew that it probably took longer than it would have if I would have done it myself.  It certainly took longer than it would have if I would have spent the time going step by step, leading The Boy through cleaning the rifle.  It wasn’t really efficient.

But if I wanted efficiency, I wouldn’t have taken either The Boy or Pugsley shooting.  I would have done it all myself, the shooting, the cleaning, all of it.  But because my goal is to teach my children that there’s no shortcut, and the only way out is through I took them.  They were the point of the whole trip.  Their struggle was the goal.  Their prize?

Independence.

Sure, we’re dependent upon a lot of things.

And those are all reasonable things to be dependent on.  I guess.  But there are some things that are much more corrosive to the soul.  Most of them are self-explanatory, some less so.

  • Parental handouts.
  • Government handouts.
  • The opinions of other people.
  • Alcohol.
  • Anti-PEZ®
  • Paychecks.

I’m against being dependent upon those things, and I want to make sure I make my kids strong so that they’ll have that reserve of strength when something unexpected happens.  You never know what’s going to come at you, because life is like a weightlifting toddler, short and hard.  I guess you could say I went to the Charles Darwin School of Parenting:

John Wilder:  “The child will eat if it has the will to eat.”

The Mrs.:  “But it’s only three hours old.”

John Wilder:  “Why do you coddle it so?  Do you want to make it weak?”

darwin

I’m probably the only person who thinks toddler hammer fighting would be funny.  But I think it’s really funny.

But the approach has paid dividends for those children that survived.  I turned control of the mowing of the yard for Stately Wilder Manor over to Pugsley some time ago.  It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he knows much more about the mower than I do.  My role in the house has been changed from decision maker to provider.  Pugsley tells me what he needs for the mower, and I get it.  He fixes it.  Pugsley has even re-wired one of the safety systems on the mower – when you get off the mower, it’s supposed to kill the engine as soon as your butt leaves the seat.  Not anymore.  Pugsley has defeated that safety device.

I’m hoping it doesn’t defeet him.  I’d hate to have throw him a block of wood and a knife so he could whittle himself some wooden feet.  When it comes to my kids, I’m attempting to use everyday situations to create radical independence.  I’m a fan of the old Robert Heinlein maxim:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I expect my children to be able to do all of that.  If I can help them be competent, I may or may not have been a good parent, but I’ll have met my own goal.  One of the proudest moments of my life to date was when my eldest child, Alia S. Wilder and I were arguing about her college major, Medieval French Basket Weaver Equity Studies.  Her response to me?

“Listen, Pop, it’s my degree, it’s my choice, and I’m paying for it, every cent, so if you don’t like my major, tough.”

Game, set and match: Alia.  That’s the sort of independence that makes a parent proud.  I suppose I could have paid for her school.  But last time she was down to visit, she thanked me.  “You know, by you letting me find my way, it means more.”

I then told her, “I’m proud of you.”  She cried.  Then we had a Lifetime® TV moment and some International Coffee™ or whatever it is they advertise on Lifetime©.

mow

I mean, seriously.  Straight lines, people.

The other side of the coin, however, is the conscious creation of dependence.  This is commonly achieved by using manipulation, guilt, low self-esteem, anxiety, and fear.  I’ve seen it done to people.

Fear is the key.  Some parents hobble children, in a conscious or sub-conscious attempt to keep them dependent.  The downside is that this dependence creates resentment.  How many times do people, when given something for nearly nothing complain that you’re not doing enough?  Since 1964, the welfare system has cost taxpayers more than three times the total cost of all wars that the United States has ever fought.  All wars – every single one of them.  Yet poverty hasn’t gone down at all, and the people in poverty hate those they are dependent upon.  They know that they are indebted, and they are both slaves to the system, as well as haters of the system.

Once you’ve got a grievance, it’s never enough.  Someone always has it better, so why don’t you deserve what they have?  This is the consequence of free stuff.  A trip to Wal-Mart® might cost you $221.32 if you pick up the two-fer bag of charcoal, but free stuff costs you your soul.

phenry

“Give me liberty or give me medicare?”

It’s ironic that the surest form of enslavement occurs not with a whip and a lash (though I imagine those really suck, because outside of bondage clubs on the East and West Coast, not a lot of sane people like that stuff) but with voluntarily accepting kindness.  Generosity.  Free stuff.

You’ll notice I put paycheck into that list up above, too.  For those almost every one of my readers, the paycheck isn’t a problem.  You work hard.  You pay your dues.  You’re compensated fairly.  You go home without a chip on your shoulder, without blaming the rest of the world for your job.  Beware:  once a person starts feeling like they’re a victim, that someone owes them that check, they’re deep into the free stuff zone.

It’s as true today as when Pop Wilder repeated it to me again and again when I was growing up, “What you work for matters to you.  If you have to spend your own money, you’ll take care of it.  Because it’s yours.”  The most costly thing I could ever give them . . . is free.

I paid attention.  I hope my kids have.  And if only I could get The Mrs. to give up that weakness of hers, insulin.  She should “just say no.”

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One

“Number one, we’ve got this guy, Not Sure.  Number two, he’s got a higher I.Q. than any man alive.  And number three, he’s going to fix everything.” – Idiocracy

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This will be the only meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilizationand here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).  Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part (of two, I believe) of the interview is below.  I heartily recommend the book, and don’t pretend to be unbiased about my opinions – I sent Dr. Dutton a copy of the transcript prior to publishing and he made very few edits, mainly corrections of typographical errors as a result of the transcription.  How embarrassing is that, right?  I’ll note that any errors in the interview below are mine.

John Wilder (JW):  What led you to the study of genetics, civilization and intelligence?  

Dr. Edward Dutton(ED):  Serendipity, really.  I was interested in religion.  I did a Theology degree and Religious Studies doctorate.  And then I got to know various people that were studying intelligence such as Richard Lynn. And it was through them, reading their research that the importance of intelligence dawned on me, and the importance of genetic factors.

When I did my degree, every Humanities department in the U.K. 20 years ago, a bit less, said everything is about environmental causes. You don’t even look at genetic causes at all.  When I did my doctorate I mentioned something about this to my thesis advisor and he said something along the lines of, “Oh well no that’s good. You don’t need to think about that. That’s what scientists think about: you’re anthropology and religion.” It’s as if he was saying, “You know . . .  you just have to produce something within the bounds of the dogmas of the Church. You know it’s not up to you to think outside those.”  It was a bizarre thing to say and I didn’t really realize the full significance of what he was saying at the time, until much later. He was exactly saying:  “You don’t think outside the tent you know, dangerous thinking.”

A lot of the theories that I was espousing and that I was writing didn’t make sense and I could never quite put my finger on why they didn’t make sense. Why was it that some people were more religious than others when the environment seemed to be the same?  Was it just coincidence?  Was it just some minor alteration in the environment?

And of course, I realized that when I discovered that there was a strong genetic component to religiousness, about 40 percent of the variance:  then suddenly everything started to make sense, everything I experienced when I was an undergraduate at the Christian Union. You have Campus Crusade for Christ in America. You’ve heard of them?

JW:  Yes. 

ED:  A little bit like that, evangelical group on campus and the university I was at, Durham, which is a kind of mini-Oxford really.  There were loads and loads of them – a third of my corridor – 15 people, in my first year were fundamentalist Christians.  Fundamentalist by English standards, not by American standards.  What was so interesting was that there was this certain social demographic.  Understanding the genetics of it made it make sense and this made me question more things that I’ve been told. And suddenly I came across intelligence research and that’s how it happened.  And then I started meeting other people that were researching the same thing and getting to know other people.  And then you realize you’re actually researching something genuinely interesting.  It’s controversial and it’s a bit taboo but that’s in a sense, that’s what makes it interesting.

JW:  That’s what really shocks me about the [subject of intelligence], is the controversy.  Because as you lay out very well in your book, going back into the 18th century. [Even then] it was clearly thought that this would be the case, that within humanity, intelligence would be selected for.  In the 1950s [C.M.] Kornbluth wrote about it in the short story The Marching Morons (LINK – you can read the story here) almost exactly word for word.  The movie Idiocracy laid it out as well.  So number one it makes sense. Number two it’s been thought of before.  So what’s driving this controversy?

 

ED:  Well I guess it’s the fact that since the War [World War II – JW] anything that relates to genetics has become taboo.  Once that’s happened then people can virtue signal and thus attain status by making it even more taboo and more taboo and more taboo. And so they can find whole new areas that they can make taboo in order to virtue signal and you end up with a situation where these Humanities departments are basically just teaching dogma – teaching quasi-religious dogma rather than anything that’s scientific. And you’ve had this split between the Humanities departments and social science departments and the science departments, although even the science departments are infected by this. But it’s less easy to become infected because they are more quantitative. They have objective standards.

JW:  The War. I think that is a good point because I certainly think had an impact. But in the 1950s, for instance, going back to the C.M. Kornbluth story The Marching Morons – no one even batted an eye when that was published up in the 1950s.

ED:  I think it’s a slow process. It probably sped up in the 60s.  In the 60s, late 60s there was a linguistics expert.  He did this study of linguistics and variation between classes and he showed that working class people, he didn’t dare look at intelligence, because by then that was taboo.

But he talked about the way they talk, and he said the working class people talk to their children in a qualitatively different way from middle class people and their way of talking, the working class people, doesn’t encourage the kids to think.  Whereas middle class people they talk to them more and they ask them questions and they use higher order vocabulary and it encourages them to think. And so you end up with this growing gap in achievement between the classes.  The researcher was just pilloried for that, just for that, and that wasn’t even touching on intelligence overtly.

When my mother was at university in the 70s, Marxism was de rigueur so on that you just couldn’t discuss intelligence differences between classes.  That was out.  And so I think it started with the War. As these crazies, these leftist equality cult kind of ideologies, become more and more powerful then intelligence research has become more and more difficult to pursue in a reasonable environment and particularly then with regard to issues such as race and sex and less so perhaps, class now.  But even so there was a British psychologist, Adam Perkins, who wrote something he didn’t even look at intelligence – he daren’t look at it – he looked at personality.   He showed that there’s a different modal personality between classes and that it’s highly genetic and he was absolutely pilloried for that.  People at the academic journals refused to review his book, The Welfare Trait, I cited it in At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means For the Future.  And just for that.  As you may have read in At Our Wits’ End, we went further and we said, “look it’s intelligence that underpins this.”  It’s become awfully taboo and you get brave people occasionally like Herrnstein and Murray in 1994 who came out with The Bell Curve and you get this strong reaction because it’s cognitive dissonance.

People have taken on a religion, really a kind of quasi-religion, which they know on a certain level is not empirically accurate or at least they can’t prove it. And when you confront them that triggers them and they go a bit mad.

JW:  I think part of it is the framework that we’ve been set up with. One of the things I noticed where I was doing some early research, for me, on intelligence is when I went to Wikipedia.  I looked at intelligence of nations versus national wealth.  Wikipedia had a table of national I.Q.s and I was shocked.  I was just utterly shocked because I had had this assumption that, you know, plus or minus let’s call it 10 points, that everybody would lay out the same given that IQ isn’t a function of schooling, it’s a function of raw intellectual capacity. But yet here this table that laid out something that was very different and it led to Dr. Lynn (I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations) but now I go back to Wikipedia and that table is completely gone.

ED:  Wikipedia is increasingly corrupted by the left.  That’s the terrible thing about it, it’s increasingly the go-to source for students.  There are lazy academics, they think, “I’ve got to do an article (for a journal – JW)” and they’re told in their peer review, put something in on, let’s say, intelligence. What they’ll do is go to Wikipedia and the things that are cited in Wikipedia will then be cited by them without citing Wikipedia.  But then that means that the leftists that are controlling Wikipedia are literally influencing proper academic knowledge.

JW:  The [National I.Q.] table is gone and there’s a map there, and the map that shows various gradations of color indicating the average I.Q. in various nations.  And I thought to myself, I thought, well you know if there is a problem with Dr. Lynn’s data then why wouldn’t you go and get better data?  But no one seems to have done that.

ED:  They have.  There’s a colleague of mine, David Becker, he’s a spunky German fellow.  And his website is View on I.Q. (LINK) and he has redone all of Lynn’s calculations.  Lynn was an elderly man (he’s eighty-nine now) and he was elderly man even when he did [his original work] and there’s various mistakes.  [Becker] redid it and he put all the information online so if anyone wants to have a go at it and say it’s inaccurate they can see exactly what’s been done, exactly what the maths is.  He [Becker] found that the correlation between Lynn’s calculations and his was something like point nine eight.

It’s constantly updated so whenever our research group discovers a new I.Q. study we put it on.  I’ve just got new I.Q data today from South Sudan, for example. I’m going to write up a study probably sometime this week on this I.Q. data, and it’s looking like the IQ is like 60. [JW note:  View on I.Q. indicates the global average I.Q. is 82.  Scary.]

viewoniq

This map is from View on I.Q. (linked above).  You can see one that is quite similar on Wikipedia.

JW:  When you look at society as a whole the first example in your book was the Concord, and the irony is a couple of weeks previous to that I had written in my blog about the SR71 jet, which was 18 months between funding and flying, and I don’t think we could do it within six or seven years today.

I just I just found that stunning that we’d lost that capacity.  Then I thought about something I’ve thought about for actually more than a decade. If you look at the American Founding Fathers, you had a George Washington, a John Adams, a Ben Franklin, and a Thomas Jefferson all born about 1750.  That same year as your 1750 A.D. maximum societal I.Q. [as discussed in the book]. And these people came from a population less than that of San Antonio.  I hate to say it but if you compare them to the politicians available today, I mean . . .

ED:  No I don’t think Trump is a Thomas Jefferson.  He has many qualities about him but he’s not exactly Thomas Jefferson. No that’s true.  The I.Q. was obviously higher. And I suspect, I don’t know if this can be provable, but I would suspect that perhaps at that time the I.Q. of America was perhaps even higher than the I.Q. of England because you were under more intense selection pressure so you have these people that went to Jamestown, you had entire populations that just died out.  You were under selection pressure. I would say you were under group selection with the Native Americans and so on which we weren’t to the same extent in Europe.

JW:  There was an additional selection, not selection pressure but self-selection for people who are adventurous enough to strike out across an ocean.

ED:  Yes, that’s true and openness correlates with I.Q. at 0.3.  So you have that element as well.  Voluntary migration is correlated with I.Q.  You’ve got that probably the religiousness of the Americans in comparison to the British . . . you are more religious than us even now. Your attendance rate at church on Sundays is about 40 percent.  In England it’s about 7 percent. And I think that that’s no coincidence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s a genetic legacy.  That’s one of the things that harsh selection selects for . . .  is ethnocentrism and thus religiousness because religiousness often goes in parallel with ethnocentrism.

I think the founding Americans were a select British population. You don’t want to be British. But you are. And therefore you can’t help having certain British characteristics but they’re select characteristics of the population from which you came. But I think you’re quite right. I think it’s because what you’ve got is the difference in the average I.Q. and the smart fraction. That’s quite a separate issue.

And you get some societies such as Japan where the average I.Q. is high but the standard deviation is narrow.  And so even though they have an average IQ that’s higher than us they have a smaller smart fraction than us. They don’t have many outliers.  That’s why we’re ahead of them in terms of innovating the Industrial Revolution, because they just don’t produce geniuses. We Europeans do.  So there’s two elements to it.

There’s the smart fraction and then there’s having sufficient organization of the population to be able to do something massive like the moon landing or the Concorde which is undermined by having a low average I.Q. lots of little things going wrong. So in India . . .  they’re very clever they’ are some very clever people in India. India is so genetically diverse. India has a smart fraction it has some people who are very inventive and can do brilliant things. But the problem is that the I.Q. of the country is so low that it is very difficult for them to achieve something that’s complicated where you can rely on everything going exactly right. Whereas Japan could definitely do something like that, but the problem is it probably wouldn’t have people that would innovate the inventions.

More next Monday . . .

The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water

“I need food, food to be strong for when the wolves come.” – Conan the Barbarian

communist fasting

Communist humor is like food:  not everyone gets it.

Normally I’d end a post like this with a warning, but this week I’ll put the warning straight up front.  I’m a freedom blogger with a side order of humor.  I’m not a doctor, except in my role as John Wilder – Civil War Surgeon to His Children®, Remover of Splinters and Super-Gluer® of Grievous Wounds.  The following advice has worked flawlessly for me and for thousands of others.  There may be some medical reason that it might not work for you.  As always, I suggest you go see a doctor, even though I’m pretty willful and just skipped that step entirely.  I’m not on any medications, so it’s hard to screw up medications that aren’t there.

I think, in all seriousness, this is one of the more important personal health posts I’ve written for anyone who wants to lose weight, which from the statistics is most of the United States.  As far as I can see, the biggest weight loss issues people normally face (besides your mother) are:

  • The diet isn’t working.
  • Okay, it’s working. But it’s working slooooooowly.
  • Wait, it didn’t work this week at all.
  • I’m not sure why, but this week I gained
  • Is it just me, or can everyone gain weight on a box of McDonalds® fries?
  • Wine or Beer or Chocolate Shakes or Twinkies® don’t have that many calories, right?
  • I just walked half a mile! I need to reward myself with a Double Whopper©.  Yes, with cheese.

I’m going to make a pretty bold statement:  I can fix every one of the issues above with one simple trick that doesn’t involve Marx, Lenin, or Castro.

Just stop eating.  Fast.  Not fast as in “quickly” but fast as in fasting:  not eating.

That’s it.

  • No books.
  • No seminars.
  • No cash payments to TV promoters.
  • No special food to buy.
  • No 1-800 phone numbers.
  • No special Internet offers.
  • No counting calories.
  • No communist dictators.

Thus, there’s very little profit opportunity in a business like this.  A cynical person might point out that the diet industry in the United States is worth about $70 billion every year, and the cost of being overweight rings in a tab of (my guess, based on decade-old numbers) of nearly half a trillion dollars in health care costs.  That cynical person might also note that it’s certainly not in the interests of people who are making hundreds of billions of dollars because a problem exists to actually fix that problem.

But imagine:  Just not eating . . . would save the United States $70 billion, and that’s just for starters.  It would also save a lot of money on food.  But more on that later.

fastingmeditation

When people say “listen to your body” I wonder if they’re schizophrenic or puppeteers, since those are the only people I know who talk to a body part.

Let’s talk about something more interesting:  me.  I wanted to wait to write this post until I had some pretty significant results – I wrote once before about fasting, and it was going well then.  How about now?

  • I’ve lost more than 20% of my body weight since January 1, 2019.
  • I feel great.
  • The average weight loss is about 1.5% a week.
  • The weight loss is consistent.
  • The weight loss is maintained.
  • I have to shorten my belt every week or two.
  • The ghost of Stalin is wondering how I did it.

Again, I’d say that fasting costs nothing, but that wouldn’t be true.  Fasting has saved me lots and lots of money, which will become apparent when I describe how I’m doing it below.

One other thing – I gave up drinking alcohol (beer, wine, etc.) as my weight loss progresses with the exception of two major milestones.  I figured that, besides motivation, giving up alcohol during my weight loss would be good because alcohol is the source of at least two things:  empty calories and bad decisions.  Besides, you can’t sit around on the back deck with a Budweiser® and claim you’re fasting.  Well, you can, but you’d be using Senate-level honesty.

So what exactly did I do?  I stop eating Saturday night most weeks.  Then I eat again from Friday at lunch until Saturday night.  In any given week, my window to eat is about 36 hours long.

Does it require willpower?  Yeah.  But it’s not a frightening level of willpower where I have to face the gom-jabbar or anything.  I think the biggest change for me has been breaking the conditioning of “you have to eat” that’s pretty prevalent.  I’ll listen to people saying “you have to eat” when I’m wearing size 32 jeans.  Until then?  Nope.

gomwilder

I know that the two of you who got this laughed.

Did I drink anything?  Sure.  Water.  Tea.  Coffee.  Club soda.  No diet soda – I’ve read that it stimulates and insulin response, and that’s the exact opposite of what we wanted.  Besides, I think diet soda tastes like I imagine antifreeze tastes.  Your mileage may vary.

So no eating anything?  Okay, I’ll come clean.  The first few weeks I had breath mints, but then I read the label and did the math and now I don’t have them at all unless I have a business meeting and don’t want to have bad breath that can melt a conference table.  Sugar free doesn’t mean calorie free.  I also brush my teeth twice as often.

I also cheat with dill pickles.  At 10 to 20 calories per day, it wasn’t much, and the pickles replaced salt I sweated out while exercising.  Yes, every day that I could get to the gym at lunch I would exercise.  It did two things – it burned a few extra calories, but after a workout I’m never hungry, so the afternoons are hunger free.

What is a typical week like?

Sunday is always great.  Generally no hunger at all.  Generally no food at all, either.  Not even the pickles I cheat with.

fastingdinner

And cleanup is a breeze!

Monday is normally pretty good.  I might have five calories of pickles.  Or ten.

Tuesday is the toughest day.  I believe what’s happening here is that my liver is all out of glycogen, a sugar that is stored in the liver for emergency use.  Any food in my digestive system is long gone.  That means that on Tuesday the body has to switch over to using fat.  By Tuesday night I’m feeling pretty good.  My energy levels are actually higher on Tuesday night than Tuesday morning.  Tuesday is the only day I feel really hungry.  The rest of the time, when I think I’m hungry, I’m really just . . . conditioned to be eating.  When I really sit back and examine if I’m hungry, the answer is almost always “no.”  Except on Tuesday.

You guessed it – if I get horribly hungry I have a few small dill pickles.

Wednesday and Thursday look pretty much the same as each other – my energy levels are up even though I’ve gone 72+ hours without any food.  There’s a strong focus and mental acuity that seems to emerge about this point.  It’s entirely likely that this account’s for Shakespeare’s quote from Julius Caesar, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”  I have no idea if Cassius ate pickles.

Thursday about midnight (when I’m writing this blog) I often go upstairs and cook some broth and/or have some cheese.  Total calories are about 40 (about the same as eight mints) but it seems to make sense to have this as a gentle kick-start for the digestive system.  The of all food I’ve consumed during the fast would probably be less than 100 calories, and certainly less than 200 calories, and almost never any sugar.  It’s like I’m a fashion model, but without the cocaine!

fastingbikini

Mmmmm, water.

Friday is FOOD DAY!  I’ll eat at lunch – say 11:30 or so, though one particular Friday I was feeling so good that I skipped going to lunch right away and pushed it off entirely until nearly 2pm.  My longest fast is about five and a half days.  I might go longer, just for grins, but five and a half days a week is worth a weekly weight loss of more than 1.5% of my body weight every week.

The weight loss is wonderful, but the other payoff is significant:  on Friday, the food is amazing.  The taste of crisp lettuce and tomato on a burger . . . gives me shivers.  The Chick-Fil-A® nuggets become a banquet.  One Friday I had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon.  No king ever had such wondrous flavors hit his palate.  One of the reasons I’ve grown to love fasting is that food tastes so much better.  I guarantee you that after going 100 hours without food, you will enjoy and savor food more than you ever have in your life.

waterglass

Did you notice the big lunch buffet behind the lunch?

Food (mainly) tastes better, more flavorful, richer.  That is, food that is closest to being “natural” – processed junk is not appealing on day five of a fast.  One Friday I had a concession stand pretzel with concession stand cheese for lunch.  I threw half of it away – the pretzel tasted like paste and the cheese like a chemical byproduct meant to poison some of the horrible fist-sized spiders that only live in Australia.  I never would have imagined throwing food away after not eating for five days, but then again, I never would have pictured not eating for 134 hours.

The other effect I notice at the end of a fast is that my stomach is small.  I simply cannot eat as much as I used to eat.  I’m often full before I can finish a “normal” portion size at the local restaurant.  And if I try to eat three “normal” meals?  I get uncomfortably full.

So what do I eat during the 36 hours?  Anything I want to.  No limits on portions or content, with the previously mentioned exception of the wine and beer.  Why no wine and beer?  As I mentioned, there are a lot of bad decisions in those bottles, but also because I love a good glass of wine with a steak or a beer while I’m at the barbeque grill.  These are motivation for success.  It’s that simple.

closers

It’s also breakfast, the most important meme of the day.

I know that this diet might sound extreme, but I’ll counter that our current culture is probably a LOT more extreme than this diet.  Where in history has mankind had such a surplus of food?  There is no point in history that we’ve been as heavy as we are today, and that’s more extreme than fasting.  But let’s rewind:

A mammoth hunter back in 20,000 B.C. couldn’t jump into his Fred Flintstone® car and go down to the 7-11© to pick up a Slurpee™ when he was hungry.  Instead he’d carve into the mammoth that he and Ug got the previous week.  Oops, they ate it all.  Now they couldn’t exactly go down to Mammoth-Mart© and pick up some steaks, they had to go find one.  That might mean days of hunting, and it might mean that Fred and Ug might have to focus on the hunt.

One thing that’s for sure, the body would want to provide them with energy but not eat into the muscle needed for hunting.  Thus it would pull high-quality energy from the source created just for that purpose – fat.  Fat serves a very useful purpose in animals – future energy storage for times when it’s needed.

Metabolic slowdown has been observed to be much more of an issue with reduced calorie diets – your body understands that there’s food, but just not as much as it would like.  It reacts by lowering temperature and going into a semi-hibernation.  But when the body has no food?  Energy is actually required, so it provides it as needed.  It’s often that my best and most energetic workout of the week is on Thursday after fasting for over 100 hours.

mammoth

Gym fees were waived if the mammoth stomped on you.

Do I have to workout while fasting?  No, many people don’t.  But every calorie burned in a workout while I’m in a fasted state is a calorie of fat.  So if you do a 500 calorie workout five days in a fasted state, that’s 2500 calories.  Of fat.  A pound of fat is 3600 calories, so you’ve burned about 0.7 pound (500,000 kilograms) of fat for a fairly short workout.  Add that up?  In ten weeks that’s 7 pounds (3.2 grams).  Not bad – there are entire diets that don’t provide that kind of predictable success that I’ve experienced with just one aspect of my new lifestyle.

Yes, lifestyle.  When I started, my goal was to get to a weight that I had not too long after college.  Now?  My new final goal is to get back to my college weight.  I can see that fasting some duration each week (One day?  Three days?  I’m not sure.) will be a part of maintaining that goal weight – and it won’t be a burden, I actually like fasting after having done it.  It’s obvious to me that the things I tried before didn’t work because they weren’t simple.

This is simple.

DrEvilFasting

Okay, Dr. Evil may not be a real doctor.

Fasting is also something that Dr. Fung (LINK) has said he’s used to cure (yes, cure) type II diabetic patients.  As a kidney doctor, he got to see patients that had progressed pretty far toward death.  Dr. Fung noted that he was pretty frustrated being told that the only thing that he could do was make these patients comfortable until they died.  There was no cure.

Fung didn’t accept that.  Type II diabetes is a disease that’s related to lifestyle.  It’s really part of a bigger condition known as metabolic syndrome.  He began treating his patients with fasting.  The farther gone they were, the longer the fasts – in some cases 14 days.  He noted (and many subsequent studies have confirmed this) that fasting made them better.  It increased insulin sensitivity, and that was huge.

Insulin plays many roles in the human body – I believe I recall doctors had found at least 40 regulatory influences from insulin, but I can’t find that article right now, but did find a full dozen important things it does.  But (if you have a functioning pancreas) two important features are that it allows your body to admit sugar to cells for use.  That’s important.  But in type II diabetes a resistance is formed and more and more insulin has to be released to transport the sugar into the cell.

Uh-oh.

Insulin also signals your body to build and store fat.  So you’re using sugar poorly, but also being signaled to store more fat.  Thus?  Your metabolism is screwed up and your body wants to make more fat out of the sugar in your system.  So Dr. Fung came up with the idea to just stop type II diabetics from eating.  And it worked like a charm.

People are alive today because Dr. Fung had this idea.  Let that sink in.

Am I saying that it can cure you?  Dr. Fung thinks so.  But he also cautions that certain diabetic medications can be dangerous and need close monitoring so you don’t die, or something.  Blah blah blah.

vapesulin

I hear they’re going to start vaping Cheetos® soon.

But I’m not on any medications, so this seemed like a slam dunk.  I even spent $30 for a cheap-o blood sugar monitor to see if there was anything that would show up.  Nah.  Boring, which just means that my liver and pancreas are doing the things they’re supposed to do.

But the other meters in the house, the scale and my belt have certainly been heading in the right direction.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve saved a lot of money.  When you only have two lunches and two dinners a week, you don’t spend as much on groceries and hardly anything on restaurants.  Also, the fam doesn’t tend to go out to dinner when I’m fasting.  I’m certainly okay with going out, but I think they feel guilty.  So there’s that money saved, too.  Oh, and the wine and beer.  Not buying any of that saves money.  And we all know that mixing Amazon® and beer lead to purchases of solar string lights and ceramic garden gnomes because “those might look good on the deck.”  The worst part is trying to explain to The Mrs. exactly what I was thinking . . .

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have saved thousands of dollars by fasting.

This will likely be the last post on fasting until I’ve reached my primary goal and learned what I have to do to stay there, forever.  And I’ll only post that if it’s interesting.

In addition to the Doctor Fung reference, the sub-Reddit on fasting is a wealth of information – mainly good information, but you should do your own research:

Here’s a link to the Reddit on fasting: /Fasting

Here’s a link to a Reddit thread showing my results aren’t unique:  Reddit /Fasting Dude

Here’s a link to about a guy who fasted for over a year:  Scottish Fasting Dude

 

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

“Well, they’re wrong.  You are creative.  You are damn creative, each and every one of you.  You are so much more creative than all of the other dry, boring morons that you work with.” – The Office

unemployment

Hmm, you’d think the road sign outside of the office might be a hint?

A good friend of mine works out in Silicon Valley, and related a (fairly) short story about being a hiring manager after the dotcom bust – he works in the dreaded Human Resources Department.  Somehow a gentleman with a Ph.D. in multiplexing signals on fiber optics got a job interview with him.  This particular job interview was fairly short.  My friend said, “Umm, we’re looking for a mechanical engineer.  With no experience.  Why would you be looking for a job with us?”

“I’m looking for anything.  Anything.”

“I hope you saved your money,” my friend thought.  What he said was:  “We’ll be in touch.”  That’s what recruiters say when you’re in their office and they’re really tired of the stink of failure and hope that it won’t wear off on them.  They especially don’t like getting it on their shoes.

The economy is in a constant state of change, and has been since 1800 or so.  Joseph Schumpeter, the dead economist, is credited with coming up with a name for this – Creative Destruction.  That’s an academic foul for two reasons:  First, some other dead economist else came up with the idea.  Second, yet another dead economist, a different one this time, used the name before he did.  So, like Columbus, he got credited for something someone else did.  The nice thing is that you can spend your spare time wondering what you can do with a dead economist.  I like to drag mine out at Christmas and decorate him with little graphs, sort of like Martha Stewart.

martha

I like to add cinnamon to my economist.  Makes him smell more festive.

Whoever first used the name is unimportant.  Like I said, he’s dead.  But the idea of Creative Destruction originated with Karl Marx.  Karl came up with the idea (by observing economics in the 19th Century) that existing production and existing productive forces were periodically destroyed by the economy.  This was a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution.  Innovation among clever people kept changing the world.  First the loom replaced weavers.  Then the factory replaced artisans.  And finally the PEZ® dispenser replaced scores of servants that would unwrap and gently place the PEZ© in your mouth while wearing fancy-schmancy servant clothes (including white gloves!) after executing a perfect curtsy and pulling the PEZ® off the silver tray with hand-crafted PEZ™ tongs.

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

pezgirlz

I can only afford a single PEZ®-maid.  Talk about frugality.

This change in production had the side effect of making lots of weavers, craftsman, and PEZ™-maids unemployed.  The transition was difficult, and it very much was a First World Problem.  It’s not like goat herders in Botswana become unemployed when a goat factory comes online – no.  There’s no factory for goat herding, at least not yet.  And, for the record, I have no idea if there are goats in Botswana, and I don’t care enough to Google® it, and, honestly, have only the basic knowledge that Botswana is somewhere near where people get Ebola and you can’t get decent Internet.  That’s enough knowledge about Botswana for me.

firstworld

The above is an example of a First World Problem and a good example of Creative Destruction – I kept one cell phone for six years, and had museums calling me to see if they could have it. 

Even though Creative Destruction was (and is) a First World Problem, and even though this Problem has created more wealth than any other system in the history of humanity (poor people in the United States today have better nutrition and entertainment available to them than Roman Emperors did) it still sucks when the Creative Destruction Fairy picks your job to be the one that gets axed.  Marx echoed this and predicted Silicon Valley when he wrote that capitalism grows “ . . . by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”  Strangely, that also describes my high school dating career.

But I digress.

Silicon Valley is built on just quote from Marx in the paragraph above.  The concept of “business disruption” is exactly what Silicon Valley does best.

Cabs?  Let’s disrupt it with Uber™.  This refinement will allow people to have cheaper cab rides.  Oh, and the money will be more concentrated, and the “cab drivers” will be paid less.  Nearly every business model out of Silicon Valley is based on this disruption – from consumer goods (Amazon®) to communication (Apple©) to “friends” (Facebook™).  If you look at the most successful companies the world has ever seen, each of them was founded on the destruction of an old economic paradigm.  The more fundamental and important the paradigm, the larger the success.

It’s like the economy is a game, and the more fundamental the rules violation, the bigger the payoff – say for example you were the only guy in the NFL® that recognized that there was no rule preventing you from using an axe however you wanted during a game.  My guess is that you’d have a pretty good pass rush if you did that – and sacking the quarterback would be permanent.

inigo

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

Marx felt that Creative Destruction, over time, would lead to people that “produce” losing all of their money to people who were merely financiers.  And, if you look at it, he’s right.  The financial sector produces less (directly) but finances all of this disruption.  If you’ve been a reader of this blog for very long, I’m certain that you won’t be surprised by my conclusion:  just because Marx was right in understanding disruption, don’t for a second think that I agree with him on his solutions.

Similar to Darwin’s theory, capitalism requires competition.  The stronger business survives.  Islands of the economy free from competition (government sponsored monopolies – like electric companies, or government sponsored businesses – like electric cars) don’t generally provide innovation.  Elon Musk must be some sort of weird innovator, because in one sense he’s disrupting the undisruptable – government monopolies on electric cars and space launch systems.

But Marx was no Musk.  Marx’s solution is simple.  Charge people what something costs to make, rather than for what value it provides – which means that every worker, for instance, makes the same wage.  Rip the production from the hands of the owners and give it to people who don’t innovate.  Free the economy from ruinous competition.  Power to the people!  Oh, and a totalitarian government to enforce it all because people don’t work the way that Marx imagines they do.

Creative Destruction is real.  But in the end, this replacement of old versus new generally increases the overall wealth in society.  I’m not speaking of the virtual importation of slave labor and environmental degradation through “free” trade agreements that are derived in secret and written on thousands and thousands of pages.  No.  But actual free trade among equals generally makes everyone wealthier. And the reality is that regardless of what controls a (fairly) free government puts in place, disruption is going to happen.

marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to your mother.

So what can you do about it?  Get a Ph.D. in fiber optics?  Well, my friend was right.  If it pays enough that for the short time it’s extraordinarily valuable, sure.  But that’s like hitting a career lottery.  If I were to give advice to a younger person, I’d say something a bit different.  I’d suggest that you look to careers that minimize the ability of Creative Destruction to ruin your Friday.

Let’s look at bad career ideas:  number one on my list of “sounds good but it’s really stupid” is software engineer.  Any career that pits me against a billion people in India and a billion people in China is a bad career.  Remember, if you’re one in a million in China, there’s a thousand other dudes just like you.  The numbers are really bad – and they don’t even have to come to the United States to compete with you.  Heck, they can pay recent grads $5,000 a year.  So they can hire at least a dozen people to do what you do.  Those are not good odds.

So, a good quality of a Creative Destruction-resistant job would be that it has to be local, or has some sort of license requirement that prevents everyone in Shanghai from applying.  Lawyers, doctors, and engineers have gotten the licensing-thing down.  It’s been so successful that some states even apply it to nail polisher-people (whatever the term is for that).

crashtest

New openings daily!  And that’s just in your skull!

Construction is has a lot of the attributes required, but it seems like Honduras has moved here to do that for us.  So that’s kinda out.  But it does point out that a job that requires actual citizenship might be a good thing.  Teaching would fall under that designation, but so much of teaching today is following a set curriculum that’s based on a set of tests that the process itself is rigged against deviation.

That may be part of the point.  Today Creative Destruction’s plan is to replace you with the lowest cost alternative, like:

  • An App
  • An Algorithm
  • A Process
  • A Batch of Cheap People Working Remotely
  • Artificial Intelligence

Avoid jobs where you can be easily replaced.  I’m not going to sit here and make a huge list and rank it and put a likelihood that you’ll be a victim of Creative Destruction in the future.  I’m not that psychic, unless I’m following my strict broccoli and chocolate diet.  No.  But I’m betting you can start to come up with your own list.

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

Blogger!  Heck, the pay may be zero, but you can always work for the fame, glory and sweet, sweet PEZ®!

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

“Never give up, never surrender.” – Galaxy Quest

reeducate

Originally I’d intended or the interview with Dr. Dutton, co-author of At Our Wits’ End which I reviewed in two parts (Review Part One At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization, Review Part Two At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)) to be here – I’m still working on the transcription.  It’s not done because the raw transcript is over 10,000 words, and family came in from out of town unexpectedly via parachute assault, and we were poorly defended.  I should have the interview complete by next Monday’s post.

One of the themes and concerns I see on a continual basis in my wandering around the web is that we are living in the endgame of a society.  Dutton and Woodley quoted Charles Murray discussing the eerie way that we get the sense “. . . that the story has run out.”  There is a sense of national exhaustion.  It’s hard to do things.  It’s like we have become a nation of teenage boys on summer vacation with no summer job.

As a nation, the United States built a continent-spanning railroad in about six years, mainly by hand, with the only explosive available being black powder.  I don’t know about you, but that just seems like so much work when I could be in my basement eating Cheetos® and playing Fallout™ instead.  California, at least, has the right idea.  They have been spending billions of dollars on a high speed railroad to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco.  This project was started in the 1990’s, so it must be nearly complete now.  Oops.  They’re pretty sure this high speed rail line will never be built, likely due to the high concentration of Cheetos© and video games in the state.

train

From a societal standpoint we seem to be at or near the point of no return, headed in the wrong direction on multiple fronts.  It’s not just the inability to tackle or construct big things.  Heck, the Empire State Building was designed in weeks and built in a little over a year.  Freedom Tower in New York City?  Over seven years of construction, and that doesn’t include the years of design that had to take place before anyone was even bribed.

wtc

It’s not just railroads and buildings that seem to be headed the wrong direction:

  • Political Violence. Wearing the wrong hat will get you fired – the Left has Hataphobia©.
  • We all know that the bad math is eventually replaced by firing squads, but like winning the lottery, we get to dream first.
  • Pink?  Purple?  Are you an anime character?
  • Bad tattoos. You’re gonna have to live with that tattoo sleeve when you’re in the rest home and have to explain to the kids changing your bedpan how cool Justin Bieber® was.
  • Constant remakes of television shows and movies that weren’t that good in the first place. Why won’t they remake some quality television, like Hogan’s Heroes®?

It’s easy to give up.  In fact, every bit of the media challenges us to give up our values.  We’re told we should celebrate children being pumped full of hormones after they make the brave and courageous decision at the age of seven that biology was a mistake and they’re really DeeAnn instead of Dean.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a seven year old to find the remote control around my house.  Trust them with decisions about pumping chemicals into their body that will utterly change the future?  Sure.  Makes sense.

blue

The politics of the media have reversed:  it used to be that free speech was celebrated.  Now?  Free speech is celebrated, but only if the free speech in question follows the values of the elite.  For a brief moment in time, platforms like Twitter® really were able to amplify voices that cared about values.  Now?  Those voices will be silenced from those platforms.  From financial systems.  From jobs and eventually housing, if the Left can manage it.

I’ve seen this world-inversion where every value that was known to be good and true is vilified and every value that was known to be evil is celebrated.  It’s at this time I really need to pause and remind our viewing audience that the central tenant of Christianity isn’t “Do what thou wilt.”  That’s an utterly different religion with a boss who smells like sulfur with shiny horns and a pitchfork.  Except in Clown World™, “do what thou wilt” is the single highest value.

Alright John Wilder, you’ve convinced me and depressed me.  Why should we bother to continue?

It’s simple.  We should continue because it’s what we’re born to do.  Going gently onto that goodnight?  If you’re reading this blog, that’s not your style.  And despite what media is trying to convince you – what is good and right is not finished.  That’s why they’re so desperately attempting to use the media at this point – to create despair.  Despair is the main tool of evil – it causes us to curl up like we’ve been eating too much soy and give up without a fight.

reboot

Don’t give in.

How should we continue?

We continue by living our daily lives and living them unashamedly.  Living them devoted to what is good and true.  By having wonderful children.  By teaching those children the values that we know are true.  By teaching them to discriminate between good and evil, and how to choose good.  By being good role models.  By being fit.  By being prepared for the tougher times ahead.

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We continue because that’s what we do.  I do think that times in the next decade will be tougher than the times a decade or two decades before.

That just means we’re lucky.  Calm seas don’t make good sailors.  Easy lives don’t make moral men.

But I will get that transcript done before next week, paratroopers or not.

Fat Logic: Choosing to be Fat

“I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.”- South Park

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These girls are only 250,000 Twinkies© away from being good Marxists.

It was 6:35 A.M. around the Wilder house.  The Wilders are not morning people.  Left to our own, we would soon start going to bed at 5 A.M. and getting up at 2 P.M.  I know it’s not the way the rest of the world works, but it’s the way that we’re wired.  How do you tell a true Wilder baby?  Sleeping until noon on day two home from the hospital.

Wilders do, however, realize that the rest of the world is on this whole “getting up at 6 A.M. and going to bed at 10 P.M.” even though we aren’t.  We deal with it, but at 6 A.M. our collective family I.Q. is lower than a two week old bowl of linguini, or of congress.  We’re just not smart at 6 A.M.

“WHERE IS MY TRACK UNIFORM?”  This was from Pugsley.  He had about five minutes to get ready to leave to meet the bus that was going to take him to the track meet.   He was yelling.  Namely, he was yelling at his older brother:  “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?”

Being Dad, I was amused.  This was a learning opportunity.  I stopped Pugsley.

“Pugsley, stop.  If you want to know who is responsible for your track uniform, go into the bathroom.  Face the sink. And look up, into the mirror.  It’s that guy.”  Pugsley found his uniform.  He got to his track meet.  He actually threw his shot put for a personal record that day and got a medal.  All was well.

But the bigger point was this:  somewhere around middle school there’s a switch in the brain that comes on full force.  It does this automatically.  It’s a very simple setting.  It’s a universal setting.  It’s a setting that implants an idea straight to the brain, “it’s not my fault.”

Building personal responsibility, from my observation, takes place in early adolescence, around the ages of 13 through 15.  It requires an actual family – a “strong, brave single mother” can’t do it, and in my opinion our culture of divorce weakens the role of the father.  Mothers represent love, caring.  Fathers represent justice, and rules.  To make a decent child, you need to have both.  And to have both?  You require a mother and a father.

But personal responsibility is the first lesson that’s required for civilization.  Personal responsibility is a core concept for society.  Personal responsibility drives the basic social interactions that make life easy.  Personal responsibility makes contracts enforceable.  Personal responsibility is the very lubrication of society.  When it drops away, so does society.

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I’ve recently found a subreddit (a subgroup on the website Reddit that’s focused on a particular topic) that describes this lack of responsibility very well – it’s here (LINK).  It’s called Fat Logic.  The brilliant and brutal idea of the group is that you find people who will go to any lengths to self-justify being fat.  And not a little over weight, but in many cases “have to buy two seats on an airplane” fat.

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In my mind there’s a huge difference between the mindset of being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane, and being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane and COMPLETELY BLAME SOCIETY FOR THE INJUSTICE AND FATAPHOBIA.  Yes.  There are actual, living and breathing people like that.  And the things they say are skewered brilliantly on Fat Logic.

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A note:  I’m on a journey to reach my goal weight.  For the record, I’m not attempting to gain weight.  I need to lose a few pounds (as of today I’m halfway to my goal).  But I recognize that my weight is my responsibility.  It’s not genes.  It’s not chemicals in the environment.  It’s not that my mother failed to buy me comics when I was a kid.  It’s the Ruffles® Cheddar and Sour Cream chips I ate for the past five years.

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Me, dieting with cookies in the house.

In other words:  it’s because I’ve eaten too much.  And that is the story of every fat person on Earth today.  Losing weight isn’t necessarily easy, but it is simple, and I’ll go through that in more detail next week.  Thankfully, I’ve cracked that code.

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The Fat Logic Subreddit, however, is the best motivation I’ve ever seen for losing weight.  It takes the comments (like you see on this post) and points out the failed logic that people self-generate to maintain their illusion that being fat enough that asteroids orbit you is okay.  I’d be willing to bet that Reddit will ban this subreddit sooner rather than later – being truthful seems to be the fastest way to get banned from the Internet these days.

Intuitive

Fat Logic introduced me to two concepts I’ve never heard of, namely HAES (Healthy At Every Size) and Intuitive Eating.

HAES is devastating.  It removes the link between weight and health.  Certainly, being underweight is unhealthy as well, but HAES takes that fact and multiplies it into a logic bomb pointed at anyone who dares suggest that being morbidly obese isn’t totally the way that they should go through life.  HAES people hate any sort of objective measurement.  Like weight.  Or daylight.  Or money.

Intuitive Eating might be worse, but that’s like taking a pick between Stalin© and Mao™.  Intuitive Eating means exactly that – eating whatever you want in whatever quantities you want.  So, if you have a dozen doughnuts?  Eat them all if you want to.  It’s exactly the sort of diet that you’d get if you put three year olds in charge of dinner every night.  And we all know that three year olds are the perfect judges of what’s healthy.

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Fat logic is a collection of . . . lies.  But they’re the worst kinds of lies – lies we tell ourselves to justify what we want.  Want another Twinkie®?  Sure, have one.  Have two, if that’s what your intuition tells you.  There’s no problem – you are healthy no matter what size you are.  Except for your joints, your pancreas, your liver . . . oh, I could go on, but that’s not the point.  The point is that Intuitive Eating and Healthy At Every Size are simply Marxism® for fat people.

Marxism©, at its heart, is a religion based upon envy.  Even in the highly unrealistic case that morbidly obese people don’t envy skinny people, they still can’t wrap their heads around . . . I swear I’m not making this up . . . thin privilege.  Yes.  Being thin is a sin.

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Thankfully this sin can be overcome by the penance of embracing Marx, HAES, and Intuitive Eating.  Heck, if you’ve got that down, why bother going to track?  I’ll just skip the responsibility lessons with Pugsley – then he could intuitively eat his way to 600 pounds.  He’d be healthy there, right?

Sure.  Healthy At Every Size.