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I had four great years this year, in three disciplines: Character, education and aestethics/fiction.

Click the links to learn what you’ve missed. You can study me now or later, with the only difference being the Splendor you will have lost out on by insisting that I can’t teach you anything. No skin off my nose, either way – and my nose could spare some.

The whole of my year is summarized in that photo caption, and the summary is summarized in four short words:

Goodness breeds more good.

That sounds treacly and platitudinous, but in fact it’s a recapitulation of the demography of DISC:

Only Ds marriages reliably produce Ds or Sd offspring. In the absence of Ds civilization, all other marital strategies are self-extinguishing, over time. Ci, currently the social ideal, is suicidally infecund.

Another way of saying the same thing:

Goodness breeds more good because hope and love attract and retain, where fear and fascination imprison by incessant rejection.

And another:

Rancorous transactions do not recur, absent compulsion, so every new goodness is in part an accretion of accumulated past goodness.

There’s more, and I mean a lot of it, but you’ll either learn it or you won’t. I grow regardless.

Hope is family. Family is hope. I leave you with this poem, from Dusty, as a summary of everything I know that is worth knowing:

Poetry is leadership.
Leadership is love.
Love is family.
Family is hope.
And hope is poetry.

Happy New Year! Make the most of it.

By the rhythms of life imposed upon us by Earth’s climate, the Solstice is the time and the season for loving. Short days, and it’s difficult to work outdoors. Long nights, when there are better things to do than sleep – and better ways to stay warm. We are meant to mate this time of year – this so mom isn’t ready to harvest until after the rest of the crops are in.

Now you could tell her all that, and – who knows? – you just might get lucky.

Or you could bake her a cake, instead:

CHOCOLATE CHIP UPSIDE DOWN CAKE

(A Guyfood recipe, with everything in parentheses being irrelvant.)

(Guyfood is the bachelor style of cooking guys bring to their marriages. It consists either of routinized glorified dog food – frequently ‘prepared’ in the oven or microwave – OR of improvisational excellence – where excellence is defined as the perfect meal or perfect garbage.)

Step 1. Mix up a cake-mix cake.

(White, Yellow or Chocolate/DevilsFood – not Spice or Carrot or GuiltRiddenKaleCake. Follow the directions on the box. You can swap in applesauce and separated eggs, if you insist, but don’t get cute: It’s a cake. It consists of sugar and white flour. It’s never going to be health food.)

Step 2. Pour the batter into a sheet cake pan.

(A cake is a cake – and baking layers won’t get you more laid. Cupcakes offer a titrated dose of incipient permafat, but that seems like a lot of extra work to me. My take is that a Guyfood cookie is one giant sheet of a cookie that you divvy up with a pizza cutter.)

Step 3. Sprinkle evenly with one cup of miniature dark-chocolate chips.

(Buy the best and darkest chocolate you can afford. “Ghirardelli” is an Italian word that means “Now, baby.” You want the teeny-tiny ones, the size of a BB, not a bean. And you want to sprinkle them evenly because they’re headed straight down to the bottom from where you put them. Chocolate chips will stay put and melt in place in (more…)

I see things no one sees. I say things no one says. I do things no one does. Someday that will matter. For now, it just is. But when it’s Christmas, I write Christmas stories. This year I wrote a lot of them.

If you’re alone this Christmas or if you’re stuck in an airport or if you just have some time to read – have I got news for you.

This is Willie’s Christmas this year, in the order the stories appeared:

• Dusty: An elegy of hope and love. – How to get the hell out of Hades and rebirth humanity in Phoenix, where it belongs.

• How I got thrown out of Walmart at Christmas for unauthorized salesmanship. – A guide to buying your son some fatherhood for Christmas.

• Fifty Shades of Bubba: Christmas at The Sex Addiction Clinic of Misfit Celebrities. – Six degrees of diabolical, with all the names you know and love.

• Ladybug’s Christmas dismissal: “The best argument against women in the workplace? Women in the workplace.” – “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Like that, but with barflies.

• Blow Hard: How The Meshugonoph Grabbed Festivus. – ‘Die Hard’ by way of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ by way of ‘The Grinch.’ There’s a Master’s Degree worth of other literary and cultural references in there, among all the rude jokes. (Here’s a printable PDF rendition.)

• Cultivating oak trees – for Christmas: “Unbroken things can survive unbroken forever.” – A toddler teaches a Brophy Boy how to stay married forever.

Need even more Willie? Who doesn’t?

I wrote a lot of other stories this year, along with a lot of non-fiction. Besides Dusty, I have two (more…)

The Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories are fiction. I sometimes get pissed-off emails from people who don’t get that – when Willie is playing with real-world stuff they know about. But every Willie story is based hugely in real-world stuff. The best argument for de Vere is de Vere, and Willie tells you what he sees through my eyes.

Dusty is fiction, an allegory about family, but it draws on my real life – in Willie’s typical mix ’n’ match fashion. It’s a little book, just enough Willie. This scene is entirely made up, but it’s still a sweet reflection of my own mother and my relationship with her:

“I was thinking about when your mom came to Show Low.”

That was Adora on the phone, a lifeline. The sun was up behind me, but, still, she must have set an alarm to be with me. That’s what family does? That’s what Adora did, anyway.

“There was a snake, a rattler. We were out walking in the woods, me and Amanda and Megwyn. Meg couldn’t have been seven, but she was leading, like always. We came up on this big old Diamondback, spinning up dust and thoroughly outraged.”

You should take a moment to be petrified. If a snake like that wants you dead, you’re dead. He’ll be dead, too, starved to death in a few days for having wasted all his venom on vermin, but you’ll be dead in minutes, not days. Meanwhile, there is a tiny mammal locked somewhere in your brain who knows without reason to be terrified of snakes.

“Your mom was about to wet her pants, but Megwyn calmed her down just like that. She said, ‘Just take it easy. We’re too big for him to swallow. He just wants us to get out of his way.’”

I said, “That’s just exactly right.”

“Of course it is, but until then Amanda saw Meg as a kid. Suddenly she was the grown-up, and your mom was the kid.”

I smiled at that, smiled at the windshield, smiled at the road. “I’ll bet she saw (more…)

A few days ago, I batted out a moral ranking of the ‘guests’ at The Sex Addiction Clinic of Misfit Celebrities:

• Garrison Keillor – harmless
• Charlie Rose – clueless
• Donald Trump – mendacious
• Matt Lauer – opportunistic
• Harvey Weinstein – predatory
• Bill Clinton – diabolical

You can quibble about the personalities and their offenses, and I truly don’t care. The point is there are gradations to the kind of behavior we’re condemning, differences in motivation that tell us what is going on.

DISC it: We’re going to find C and I in huge abundance among true offenders, obviously: Both are poorer at reading inbound displays, and hence are more likely in general to faux pas-in-full in social encounters. But C and I are much more likely to treat other people as tokens in a game, too: To see an individual human being not as the present and momentary instantiation of his entire life, but simply as a sale or a fare or a deal or a trick – or a “free” gumball.

Everything that rational people could plausibly object to comes down to predation: Deploying force or fraud (in the form of guile) to induce behavior the victim would not otherwise have chosen. Much of what is being #MeToo’d about amounts either to clumsy courtship or unwelcome conversation – but, of course, women can make anything trivial. In any case, anything short of actual predation should be ignored. That’s the only way adult-babies will learn how to act like adults.

But the motivation of that actual predation matters, because it illuminates the intoxicating, addicting illusion-of-omnipotence that undergirds all socially-abusive behavior: Predation is not about sex. It’s about power. Not even power over the person, directly, but power over the inconquerable laws of nature that say one lion should never be able to enslave another.

Ultimately – and aboriginally – C and (more…)

I think every working stiff in America should file a sexual-assault grievance every time some floozie shows up to work dressed to incite working stiffies. She’s hitting you first. Fight back.

If a skirt shows leg above the knee, standing or sitting, report it.

If arms are visible above the elbow, write it up.

Shoulders? Back? If you’d look hard to see it from behind your sunglasses on the beach – it’s an act of sexual aggression.

Snazzy shoes? They’re meant to make you look at her legs. High heels? Her calves and butt. If you see something, say something.

Is she wearing a long necklace or a broach? She’s flaunting her tits, so she can flail you with them later. Tell HR.

All jewelry on a woman is sex-parts advertising: She’s drawing your eyes to what she thinks is most ogle-worthy. Don’t take the bait, but do report the baiting.

Red outfit or accessory? Eye magnet. Form-fitting clothing? Grope magnet. Perfume? Rape magnet. She’s violating your nature as a man. Speak up.

And don’t forget to remember: Past offenses count, but only your memory of them counts, and the injury was to your feelings, not to anything that can be measured from the outside.

Got three specific grievances? That’s a hostile work environment: You are being asked to labor against a company-endorsed tide of deliberate sexual temptation.

The “Fighting Words” legal doctrine says that, when you persistently taunt a man into punching you, you’re the the bad guy. I don’t know that judges will want to talk about tortious fornicative displays, but that’s what’s going on when a slutty dresser comes to work.

Report the bitch. She’s not just disrupting the workplace, she’s a walking land mine self-programmed to destroy careers, marriages and families. Be a hero and rid the job site of toxic femininity.

Most women who work outside the (more…)

This started as a private conversation, but I’m taking pieces of my part of it public, because it’s of general interest. Our topic:

What do I have against crypto-currencies?

Start here:

I’ll be dead before this plays out, I expect, but I think crypto-currency is essentially latifundial in its objectives. Wealth is stuff people want and the means to obtain more of it, fixed and intellectual capital. Crypto scales our current state of securitization, putting punters at an even further remove from real values, even as the would-be Dukes of the new latifundia lay in for a world without trade, where not even gold-in-hand can proxy for wealth. It’s the Bell Boys coming to Wall Street, and it will be funny right up until it’s catastrophic.

We batted thing around a little, and I circled back here:

Plausibly I’m not being fair. I have no invested wealth, and my interest in Bitcoin is strictly as more of the daily comedy that is news. And, obviously, I could be madly wrong: I’ve been mocking Bitcoin from three digits to five.

Latifundia means large farms in Latin. It’s how the equestrian classes planned for and survived the fall of Rome. These became the political entities of the Dark Ages – tiny fiefdoms controlled by one man but farmed and defended by dozens or hundreds. As with TV stations today in tiny countries, the source of political power was the granary in the castle: The Duke defends everyone’s food, but rebels starve.

My take is that the modern-day equestrian classes are preparing their own modern latifundia, converting their securities to real wealth, using securities bubbles to gull the marks. Bitcoin is just part of that, target-marketed at the lesswrong.com kind of intellectualoid who cannot conceive that he could ever be in error. The perfect con is the one the mark begs to get in on.

As for how to invest, I think every kind of after-market securities investing is rent-seeking – demanding compensation for no added-value – (more…)