Daily Stoic Day 1: What Things Are Truly In My Control?

 Truly in my control? Next to shit is truly in my control. If you really sit down and think about it. Next to nothing is actually in your control. You can't control your kids, you can't control your family, you can't control your house, you can't control your pets, you can't control much of anything except of course for yourself...and then there's a whole lot about yourself that you can't control.

Can you control the color of your skin? Nope, not really, I mean you can hit a tanning booth and control it to a point, or go all C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man on us, and control it that way, but you really can't control it. Can you control the color of your hair? Not without chemical intervention you can't. You can't control the color of your eyes. 

I can't control these god damned fruit flies that seem to keep getting in to my bathroom no matter what I do. You can't control what Donald Trump is gonna tweet next, and would you really want to? I mean, you'd ruin all the fun. You can't control what Joe Biden is going to say next, and who would want to stop that senile old bastard from talking, its too funny.

The fact of the matter is that you can't control much. The only things that you can control is what you do. What you say. What you think and how you feel. That's it. That's all you get to control. Doesn't matter who you are. I suppose if you work your way into some position of power you get to control some things. If you're an army general sure you can bark some orders and some troops will move around a board, but that doesn't mean that any of them have any real respect for you. Its simply a rank has its privileges thing. All you've really got is what you say, what you think, what you feel and what you do. That's as far as your control extends. After that, it ends. Rather abruptly.

Now I don't know how your typical army general would feel about that fact, but I kinda think its pretty liberating. Makes things a lot easier to sort out. If you can actually separate the two. The things you control from the things you don't. That's the tough part. I'm a boss at work. There's a lot of times I tell someone to do something and for whatever reason it doesn't get done when I want it done and I get my panties in a twist. Now, I told them to do it. Which I control. They didn't do it. Which much to my annoyance, I don't control. But I want to believe I do so I get pissy. Which is the exact wrong answer. I don't control what they do. I can't, unless I hold their hands through every minute of their day, which would defeat the purpose of having staff in the first place. I have to give up that control.

Can you control your spouse. Ask someone who's been cheated on. The answer is a resounding no. Hell no, even. Not a chance in holy hell can you control another person. Ask any parent of toddlers and/or teenagers. You don't control those lunatics, you can only hope to contain them. So what the hell do you do with this utter lack of control?

Love it. Relish it. Embrace it.

Its one of the greatest gifts you could ever be given. Its perfect freedom. The freedom to say, all I can do is what I can do and what happens after that is what it is and is beyond my control. Its the ability to honestly look at a situation and if you can say, I have done, said, thought and felt all I could do, say, think and feel, and what will be, will be and it will be what it will be.

What I can control I have. What I can't control can kiss my ass...is a beautiful way to look at life.

We Had The Blue & The Gray, Now We've Got The Red & The Blue...

Maybe I'm nuts, okay, I am. But maybe I'm reading this situation entirely wrong but we've got political upheaval throughout the country. We have a six block section of a major city that has been taken over by armed fucking hippies and all the cops have been pushed out.

We have shootings, riots, looting and protests galore and there's a pandemic going on to boot. This is the most fun we've had in years!

I'm not going to lie, I really do wish I lived back home in Chicago right now, because I would've found a way to insert myself into this melee by now. I'll admit it probably wouldn't have worked out well for me and anyone else in the immediate vicinity, but so it goes.

But that brings me to my current thoughts. No one is in any mood to compromise at all. I mean not even a little bit. One side wants the police and pretty much every other institution of the United States to be defunded and/or dismantled and something much more...shall we say "socially aware" in its place. While the other side wants the US military to be loosed upon the citizens of this country, weapons free. 

The lines are pretty well drawn folks. Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other. Will this end up tearing our country apart? I don't think so. I don't really think they've got the energy or the staying power required to pull something like that off. But for the sake of argument let's say that they did how does something like that look?

How do you divide the US? Into to dirty hippies and gun nuts?

Here's a link to a blog that came up with some really stupid maps (in my estimation)

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/us-red-blue-partition-plan?rebelltitem=6#rebelltitem6

I think you'd have to do some relocation, whether anyone likes it or not. You'd have to pick a side. Do you want to be red or blue you'd have to pick and in order to make it so that neither side would have a monopoly on good weather or bad we're going to split it going north and south so each side gets a coast and each side gets a Disney. But either way, pick one and you're moving.

Just eyeballing the map it looks to me like the border would be just west of Louisiana in Texas straight up through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. The NFL would be divvied up into East and West and the Superbowl would be played in each countries respective capital in alternating years.

This is just what I've spit out in a stream of thought session. I'm actually going to put some thought into this and come back to this.

I Only Kneel For God, And I'm Not 100% On That Yet...

So much craziness, so much fun in the last few weeks. The entire world has lost its ever loving mind. And don't for one minute think I haven't loved the cacophony of it all. Its been fun. I've even been watching the news for goodness sake.

Protests, riots and looting oh my. The fabric of our society is falling down around us. BLM is demanding that the police departments be dismantled and holy jumping fucking shit balls some of these spineless politicians are actually listening.

Antifa is running rampant through the streets pulling down statues and vandalizing every monument they come across.

And then there's the knee thing. The take a knee thing. The kneel with us thing. The prostrate yourself for the sins of whoever the fuck thing. 

I can deal with all of it, right up to there. As much shit as I get from most people on my side of the political spectrum I can understand why black people are pissed about a lot of this stuff. Cops can be dicks. Lots of times they reserve a lot of that fuckery for black people. The slave thing, the segregation thing, the racism thing, I can see how that would have put them behind the 8 ball from the jump. Kinda like starting a 100 meter race from 200 meters away with a 100 pound weight around your neck. I can wrap my brain around that.

Police accountability for their actions? Easy one, anyone who is actually against that can no longer be taken seriously and most likely should be given a pacifier and put in a diaper.

These 4 who were involved in the George Floyd murder. Let the trial do what its supposed to do and give these guys the chance to explain to the court and everyone else exactly what the fuck happened and let the jury decide who is and isn't guilty of what, and when they do don't break anything because you don't like what they decided. That's called being an adult.

Now back to the knee thing. Fuck all of you and your take a knee. I won't kneel for you or anyone else. Unless you are holy and almighty blessed and coming down here to start the rapture or some shit I am not, nor will I ever kneel to you or any fucking body else. I don't care what you think it means, or what you think it accomplishes or what you think at all for that matter. To be as utterly American and cliche as I possibly can, if you really want me to kneel you better come heavy because I came into this world naked, bloody and screaming and I sure as shit do not mind going out that way too.

COVID-19, Drones, Wisconsin and Play Dates...

First things first watch this video:

Now that you've seen that. Let's talk about it.

Finance guru gets on TV and says that Chinese ways of enforcing their lock-down is perfectly legit because of the results. Classic the ends justify the means argument.

So, there's a concept in law that I think is a pretty big deal. Many times when you hear about evidence getting thrown out of a trial its due to the "Fruit of the Poison Tree" doctrine. Basically, that means that if evidence is found via illegal means and other evidence is found as a result of illegally obtained evidence, that is fruit of the poisonous tree and it is not admissible.

Now its a child of the exclusionary rule, and there are exceptions. But it is a pretty big part of our legal system used to discourage police from using unsavory means to obtain evidence. Making sure they know ahead of time that if they don't do it right, they won't be able to use it. Now I think we can all agree that preventing police from illegally obtaining evidence is a good thing.

The ends justifying the means is a pretty weak argument, for anything. But fear has taken over most people's heads nowadays. For the most part, people are scared of this disease. Perfectly rational fear. Fear is one of those nifty defense mechanisms we have that have helped keep us alive. Now where it goes off the rails is when people let fear dominate their rational mind. And there's been a shortage of rationality in this situation, in my humble opinion.

Next up, the drones. The scolding drones. If this isn't something that makes your skin crawl I don't want you as a reader. Drones flying around, watching everyone, and giving you government propaganda from the sky. I know we already live in a world that is essentially a surveillance state, but at least it was a little understated before. A security camera here, another in the stop light, they are everywhere but at least they try to make them as unobtrusive as possible so you don't have to have the fact that someone is watching you at the forefront of your mind every minute of the day.

This New Jersey town has decided to go right to having drones flying around telling people to disperse and social distance and whatever else. If that's not a dystopian wet dream I don't know what is. They've thrown all pretenses out the window and have gone all in on watching their citizens all the time, and not feeling the least bit self conscious about it.

And now we come to Wisconsin, and their lovely accent. No, their exceptionally even tempered police who came to tell this woman that she's in violation of the stay at home order because she sent her kid to another person's house to play with their kid. I don't know what the order in Wisconsin is, but do we really want to say that kids can't go play with other kids? Sure no gatherings of more than 10, I'll bite off on that. So you've got mom, dad, kid 1 and kid 2 so you're safely under the threshold.

However, that's not the thing that bothers me the most. Its not even the fact that these cops are talking to this woman like she's a complete imbecile. Or that they're saying Orwellian things like, "Your uncooperative actions will be documented" Its the fact that one of her neighbors called the police on her. Not because she's cooking meth in her trailer. Not because she's running an underage brothel out of her trailer. Not because she is illegally imprisoning illegal immigrants and forcing them to watch Seinfeld reruns. No, they called the cops because her kid went to another kids house.

Something like this happened somewhere before, I saw it in an old newsreel somewhere. I wish I could've understood it better but the narration was in German.

Danger Close....

Whence one is dealing with close air support or CAS in a war zone, danger close means just that the danger is mother fucking close. Or the bombs and/or projectiles they are going to be hurling at some target coordinate is too close to friendlies for comfort. Always remember, friendly fire isn't.

So someone at work got this COVID-19 bullshit. Luckily she's already bouncing back from that shit. Now that in my current life is the definition of danger close. I mean I walked right by her on a daily basis.

What do you do with this information? I suppose you could panic. I suppose you could hide in your house and not do anything for the rest of your life but if you're like me that's not really appealing. I'd rather get this shit and die than sit in the house not getting near another person for the rest of my life. I mean how long can this go on? I understand there's a new virus and its killing people. Of course if you pay attention to the news you'd probably think that a quarter of the world's population has already taken a dirt nap from this stuff. If I'm not mistaken the last numbers I heard was

• Total cases: 213,144
• Total deaths: 4,513

For the statisticians in the room, that's 0.001% of Americans have bucked the kicket from this thing. Currently, some of the most dire projections have the death toll from this thing at 240,000 Americans. Now do NOT get me wrong, I am not minimizing the suffering of the families hit by this thing. But if 240,000 Americans die from this that's exactly 0.07% of the population. That would put it at the third leading cause of death in the country. Behind heart disease and cancer. Now heart disease and cancer are not (to the best of my limited knowledge) not something that you can catch. Heart disease you're either born with or you develop over the course of a lifetime of poor decisions. Cancer, again from what my pea brain retains, is in all of us, it just depends on whether it metastasizes or not. If I'm wrong about that stuff let me know.

Anyway, back to this Coronavirus shit. I think the damage its doing in what its turning us into is going to be far greater than the death toll from the actual sickness. Jobless claims are through the roof, unprecedented levels. The fed went so far as to project 32% unemployment. The Great Depression unemployment rate was 24.9%. So, my logic says that we are going from a viral outbreak that could kill a small fraction of the population, to a economic calamity that will kill just as many if not more, just in different ways.

Obviously, I could be wrong, I've been wrong before. The question that I have is this, is slowing the spread of this virus worth the years of economic struggle and the economic damage that many Americans will NOT recover from?

Just Another Day In The Shitshow...

The government is always an easy target for ridicule. Always, and for the most part I understand it. Hence the shitshow in the title. For the most part the government is a shitshow. Now where I start to get a little perturbed is when the ire is directed at the people who work for the government.

I'm not exactly sure what a bureaucrat is so I looked that shit up. Here's what Google hit me with.

Bureaucrat: an official in a government department, in particular one perceived as being concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people's needs.

The vast majority of government workers aren't that asshole. Are some of us, absolutely. Are some of you assholes? When dealing with government employees the majority of you are assholes. 

For the most part government employees have thankless jobs. The pay is mediocre, benefits are good and for anyone concerned with security in the jobs its a good spot. All in all I'd say the good outweighs the bad. I mean, with this coronavirus shit going on and everything being closed I'm worried that there are going to be a whole lot more mouths on the breadline coming up here soon.

In any case, the point of this here is to try to separate the government from the employee. Mostly because there's not a whole helluva lot the employee can do about the bureaucracy. Its just not in their job description.

Moving right along. I'm waiting patiently for the coronavirus to spread like wildfire through my place of employment. I work in a prison. Its a really big petri dish of dirty motherfuckers who as soon as this thing gets in there its going to fly through everyone in a flash. The worst part about it is, we can't shut it down. I mean if you work at Staples or Best Buy, they can literally just shut those places down and in a couple weeks or months when we get a handle on this thing then its back to normal. I'm in a situation that regardless of the state of the handle, I've gotta work. So first off, I can say that's a good thing because I don't have to worry about not getting paid.

But I'm a little nervous, but then I remember how my brain really works and honestly and I'm only speaking for me here, no one else. I do not wish what I'm about to say to become standard practice. The doctors and scientists on TV say that much like chicken pox, once you get the coronavirus you'll be immune to it for a period of time, or you'll have a resistance to it.

So guess what I want to do? Yep, let's get it over with. I distinctly remember as a kid, and I'm about to show my age here, but when I got chicken pox my mom called the doctor and the doctor said, stick him and his brother in the same bed for the next couple weeks until they've both recovered. Get them both out of the way now so you don't have to do it one at a time. Then a couple days later my aunt and uncle brought my cousins over to get it too. 

In any case, the virus so far, seems to kill old people and people with preexisting conditions. So if you are a reasonably healthy person chances are pretty damn good you're going to make it and then the antibodies will be in you to fight that shit off. They can even use your blood, plasma and other material to help research into finding a cure or a vaccine. So as for me, let's roll the dice. At least if I was immune for a period of time I could not be walking around on eggshells recoiling in terror every time someone so much as sneezes.

And I could help science...win win all around. Steven Covey would love me.

Corona Crazy...

I couldn't resist jumping back in and throwing my two cents out for this COVID-19 insanity that is continuing unabated and actually seems to be accelerating.

I figure most of the people, if any, who read this blog are at least moderately intelligent and even if you're not, you do have an attention span of more than a few seconds which places you solidly in the top 10% of all humans on the planet. So, now that I've made reading this take more than 15 seconds I can rest assured that all the dip shits have lost interest and I can start talking about this thing.

So, someone is going to have to explain to me why, W-H-Y did the panic item of choice become toilet paper? What in the fuck is the big deal with toilet paper? I mean, I get it you want to have a clean booty hole. No problem with that. But is it really something that we all have to hoard now because everyone is scared that Coronavirus is gonna get you and you're going to need 3000 times the typical amount of TP?

By the way, so far as I have read explosive diarrhea is not one of the symptoms of this thing, and (I know some may find this disgusting) but typically the bathtub or shower is right next to the toilet so if you do run completely out of toilet paper, just jump your ass in the shower and rinse that shit off.

What else, so this panic buying shit got under my skin quick. I work for a prison system. And we need to buy soap, disinfectant and hand sanitizer for the petri dish that is every prison and jail throughout the country. And all of a sudden, you can't buy this shit anywhere. Not in the little bottles, not in big bottles, I couldn't even get the shit in 55 gallon drums. So some douchebag has a 55 gallon drum of purell in his garage that he might use a tenth of in the next 5 years and I can't get it in a prison where its really needed.

And then, the profiteers. Price gougers and Capitalists of Opportunity or whatever you want to call this litter of missing chromosome fucktards that need to be set on fire in a dumpster behind a Dollar General outside of Fort Polk, LA.

Then there's this guy...https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/technology/matt-colvin-hand-sanitizer-donation.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

I mean at least he donated the shit, to get out of a price gouging charge to be sure, but once you read the article it says that someone threatened his wife and children. Threatened to kill them. So, the guy is a douchebag, and he should get hit for this shit. Maybe a few months in jail could be appropriate, or make him refund all the money he did make on Amazon. He already had to eat all the money he spent on the rest of the stuff. Kill his Amazon account, make him volunteer at a homeless shelter, hell make him be the guinea pig for the coronavirus vaccine.

But don't threaten the man's wife and kids. Especially the kids. The wife, she's an adult, she probably should've told her douchebag husband how people were going to respond to this. But given that the guy originally went to the press to say he couldn't sell the stuff on Amazon, the guy is obviously either a complete psychopath or an absolute fucking moron.

The craziness continues. Everyone has to stay in the house. Don't go to work if you don't have to. Essential workers that work in one state and live in another may have to start showing ID and authorization to cross state lines. The government is exercising powers it has to direct private industry production. And all sorts of other fun things.

Okay, forgive me for being "that guy" but am I the only one who is even remotely concerned with the government having the power to tell me that I have to stay in the house? Government's don't normally do too well with giving power back once they get a hold of it. Just saying.

I get it, the virus and flattening the curve and people are stupid and on and on it can go. I don't disagree with the logic behind all this shit. I'm just a little concerned when its all going to end. How long can we keep this up before collectively we just have to say, "You know what, fuck it, I'd rather get sick and I'd rather people die than have to live like a shut in and do nothing but watch movies and eat ramen noodles till the end of days" There's already reports in Europe of people basically ignoring social distancing and the governor of Florida had to get involved in shutting the beach down for spring break.

All I'm saying is there's only so long that these restrictions can be tolerated. All non life sustaining businesses are closed...what follows that? The most crushing unemployment rate the country and probably the world has ever seen. It will take generations to recover from it. Hopefully, that's not how this all goes down.

Anyway, I'm done for now. Please argue with me. I enjoy the stimulation. Lord knows there isn't much else to do right now.