Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: the very rich are different

This is a contribution from a friend of the blog.

If I Were A Rich Man …

“Dear God, you made many, many poor people.
“I realize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor.
“But it’s no great honor either!”
-Fiddler on the Roof

There is an old – and very cynical remark – that the very rich are different from the average person – they have more money.  Which is true.  But what isn’t encompassed in that rather sardonic bon mot is just what having vast wealth can do for you.  Being wealthy offers opportunities that are, perhaps, not always understood by the poor.

If you’re a rich man, you can buy a house for cash.  You do not have to worry about taking out a mortgage, let alone paying it back.  If you’re a rich man, you can buy a car for cash and afford comprehensive insurance, as well as everything from the very latest gadgets to basic maintenance.  You do not have to worry about taking out a loan or meeting payments.  If you’re a rich man, you can afford lawyers and accountants and everything else you might need to smooth out any little problems you may encounter.  NHS waiting lists?  Go private and be assured of the best of care.  Even being accused of a terrible crime – with a slam-dunk case against you – can be mitigated with expensive lawyers and cash shovelled around like snow.

If you’re a poor man, you do not have these options.  If you want to buy a house, you have to take out a mortgage – and the bank will start talking tough if you miss a payment.  If you want to buy a car, you need another loan – and you can’t afford comprehensive insurance beyond the (legally-required) third-party insurance.  You have to struggle with tax and suchlike on your own and, if you are picked up by the police, you can’t afford to post bail, let alone hire a lawyer.

Indeed, in some ways, the paragraph above is optimistic.  If you don’t earn enough to qualify for a loan, you have to rent – and that eats up your disposable income.  A car accident, even one that wasn’t your fault, can fuck up your life … and God help you if you need medical treatment.  Even in Britain, with the NHS, waiting lists are so long that you might expire before you see a hospital.

If you’re rich, you are insulated from the world.  You can afford to live in a gated compound, with round-the-clock security patrols.  You don’t have to worry about thugs on the street or terrorists, not when you’re secure.  You can cope with almost anything just by throwing money at it.  You can even weather the consequences of your own stupidity if you try.

Imagine two people – Richie Rich and Polly Poor – who get into a car accident.  Both of them are unharmed – and it was a genuine accident, so neither of them are threatened with arrest – but their cars are beyond immediate repair.  And they both have an important engagement in an hour.

Richie Rich calls his insurance firm.  They send him a replacement car and a breakdown truck.  He takes the car and drives to his engagement.  By the time he gets home, the insurance firm has decided that the car is a write-off and offered to let him keep the loaner.  Richie Rich decides he wants to upgrade and takes the money instead, then purchases a new car.

Polly Poor doesn’t have insurance.  The remains of her car are impounded until she pays a fine, which she cannot pay.  She has no way of getting to her engagement until a passing motorist takes pity on her and drives her most of the way.  But by the time she gets there, she’s terribly late.  Her boss gives her the sack.  When she gets home, she discovers a whole series of bills she cannot even begin to pay …

Being rich, in short, offers security from the outside world.  It also offers power.  If you’re rich, people like Hillary Clinton will hunt you up for donations.  You’ll have influence, which you can turn into power.  (The song I quoted above includes a line about just that.)  People like Bill Gates and Donald Trump wouldn’t have anything like the influence they do, let alone power, if they didn’t have money.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’ve gone mad with power!
“Of course I have.  You ever tried going mad without power?  It’s boring.  No one listens to you!”
-The Simpsons Movie.

I’m sure some of you are thinking by now that I’ve turned into a raving socialist, if not a communist.  Horror of Horrors!  Trust me – there is a point to this.

Being rich also offers more options than are available to the poor.  Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to move in a hurry.  Being rich, you don’t have loans or anyone who would have to sign off on your move.  You can just buy a house somewhere else and go there, hiring movers to assist with your possessions.  Or, if you have to leave really quickly, you can just rent an AIRBNB for a couple of months while you hunt for a new place to live.

Why not?  You have the money, don’t you?

What all this tends to mean is that the very rich are insulated from the consequences of their own decisions.

I’ve noticed, when I’ve dealt with the top 10%, that they have a certain unconscious (and sometimes very conscious) arrogance.  If you happen to believe that £20’000 is small change, you’re not going to empathise with someone who doesn’t have a hope of making that in a year.  The cost of living is meaningless to someone who can afford it without batting an eyelash.  Saying that the poor should save seems to be good advice, for example, but it tends not to take into account the simple fact that the poor cannot save!  They have to spend every penny they earn just to keep their heads above water.

And move to a better area?  How?

No one in their right mind wants to live in a suburb infested with druggies, gangsters and other genuine deplorables.  No half-way decent parent would want to bring up children in such shitty surroundings.  But what happens if they cannot afford to leave?  Going somewhere a little more upmarket might be beyond them.  What happens then?

I wrote all this – in a blaze of fury – after reading an article in the Daily Mail.  George Clooney is apparently planning to move back to LA from Britain after the security situation in the UK deteriorated.  He fears for the safety of his wife and children.  How can you blame him?  If you’re a parent, your children are your first priority.  If you feel that life is unsafe where you are, you need to take them elsewhere.  What self-respecting father could do anything else?

What is maddening about this is the reason the security situation across Europe is deteriorating.  Migrants, terrorism … and spineless governments.  And Clooney was one of the very wealthy celebrities who urged Angela Merkel to throw open the doors and invite countless migrants into Germany.  Clooney and his fellows had the influence to ensure that their wish to feel good about themselves outweighed any commitment to the safety and security of the German – and European – population.  They pushed a narrative that preached helping refugees – and completely ignored the very real risks to national security.

But Clooney – and his fellows – are insulated from the consequences of their self-righteous stance.  Clooney has impressive security.  He and his family don’t have to worry about the sharp upturn in sexual assaults, murders and religious conflict in Europe.  They can – and, if this article is accurate, they will – simply move away.  How many others have the option to just leave?

Very few.  Picking up and leaving your home isn’t easy at the best of times.  Your job isn’t going to move, is it?  Nor can you get a new loan if you’re having problems paying the one you already have.  Even if you don’t have a loan or debts, moving to a new region might be tricky.  And what stops the migrants from coming after you?

The very rich are different from you and me.  It is always someone else who pays the price for their self-righteous stupidity.

Mailvox: behold, the mighty Gamma

There was something strangely familiar about Tuatha’s atheist Gamma-bragging about how he is the intellectual superior of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and everyone reading this blog:

The only thing needed to conclude lewis in nutshell, is that anyone who called himself an atheist because he hates god is a moron. Even tolkien could tell lewis was a birdbrain with his blatant and overuse of christian allegory that he regretted even trying to ‘convert’ him to christianity… Lewis was a fucking retard with no iota of a neuron in his tiny head. He was so stupid that he bought pascal’s wager-the absolute dumbest argument ever conceived-hook, line, and sinker. I know what the obese shit-for-brains said and wrote. I have read Mere Christianity beginning to end. His whole line of thinking is the worst sort of diabetic autism that I have ever seen outside of antifa and ‘brony nationalists’…. If I wanted I could easily go to oxford and get at least three positions there if I wanted without much effort.

Ah yes, it was this.

I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words.


You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands.


Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue.


But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it.


You’re fucking dead, kiddo.


Gammas. They never change. A million different variations, but always the same delusions of superiority.

The amusing thing is that, as is customary, the Gamma doesn’t even have his basic facts right. In the unlikely event he has read Mere Christianity as claimed, he has not understood it, because CS Lewis doesn’t base his apologetics on Pascal’s Wager. Even the passage that has been described as a “reflection of the basic premise of the argument” is not based on Pascal’s writings, but rather, the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
– CS Lewis

“If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
– 1 Corinthians 15:12-19

UPDATE: Nailed it. The Gamma is BUTTHURT beyond belief.

Mailvox: Free trade and private debt

A college student asks if there is a link between the two:

Over the years in which the US has abolished trade barriers and enacted a multitude of international free trade agreements we have experienced a massive increase in trade deficits, national debt, as well as personal debt. I can see the obvious connection between free trade trade, trade deficit’s and national debt but is there a connection between free trade and the rising PERSONAL debt? If so what is this connection? Furthermore if we had trade barriers in place would Americans not still have rising personal debt as they instead spend the same amount on domestic products rather than international? 

There is certainly a correlation between increasingly free trade and private debt, but I doubt the relationship is a causal one. For one thing, the decline in private debt which began in 2008 was neither caused nor echoed by a similar decline in free trade.

The economic logic also doesn’t support a causal link. Private debt is mostly linked to big-ticket items such as homes and cars. Free trade in goods is mostly neutral on the former and negative on the latter with regards to debt. While the free movement of peoples would tend to increase debt, more people being able to take out more loans, that’s not going to alter the debt per capita rate much, for obvious reasons.

One of the major components of private debt is education-related debt, and that has nothing to do with free trade. So, I would say there is no meaningful link between free trade and private debt.

Mailvox: doomsayers

PA observes a familiar response:

The other day some doomsayer in the comments was huffing about how Infogalactic is “only” 1% different from Wikipedia and the features aren’t happening fast enough and blahblahblah. His line struck me as very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

This morning I remembered:

“Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, ‘What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, and burned ones at that?’ Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, ‘Yes, what they are building — if a fox goes up on it he will break down their stone wall!’ ”
– Nehemiah 4:1-3

Yup, that was it. Keep building that wall, brother. It looks awfully good to me.

They doubt. They jeer. They try to demoralize. Meanwhile, we simply continue building the planetary knowledge core.

Mailvox: awareness in Germany

A reader writes of his recent observations:

I live in the most left (and green) town I know and can conceive of in Germany. In this town there’s a district that’s known nationwide for how “green” it is. Everyone votes green or far left. That’s where I and my family have been living since the nineties.

My parents were practically communists just 5 years ago and when you talk to them about taxes or guns you might still get the impression that they are. For about 2 years they’ve been hitting a very different note when it comes to foreigners, though. Cologne might have had a big part in waking them up.

After that, my sister had a job application rejected because she isn’t like the rest of the staff, Turkish. They all got upset about that for half a week and I had to listen to my sister beginning her sentences with “I mean… You know I’m not a racist, but…” for that time.

Now a very close family friend (even more crazy, total hippie, believes in auras etc) has legal trouble with her Lebanese ex-boyfriend and they all talked about it at the dinner table when she was visiting for a night. All three of them are horrified the judge might rule against her because he’s a foreigner.

He kicked her out of her own house.

She went to the police, they asked him about it, he told them it’s his house, they left without asking for proof.

Among my friends, I’d wager 90% now spew out sentences that would have triggered themselves into fits of “RACIS RACIS RAAAAAACIS!” just 5 years ago and the other 10% are crazy SJW’s who no longer talk to me because of my Twitter account.

That’s a quotient, in a city of SJW’s to begin with, that I am very hopeful about.

The Alt-Right is inevitable because it is the only political philosophy based in reality. This is simply one more example of the process in action.

Mailvox: obsessions

BHB wonders why SJWs are always fixated on comparative popularity:

What is with these SJWs and obsession with blog rankings? First Scalzi and now Glyer. The next argument is going to be “the quality of the people who visit my blog are better than yours. The guy at the chinease click farm always calls me sir when I talk to him. No one ever calls me that! I bet your fans never call you sir!”

It’s all a consequence of their need to defend their current Narrative and is an aspect of their discredit-and-disqualify tactic. Comparative site traffic was a weapon that John Scalzi’s fans used to use to try to dismiss the significance of VP back in the 2012-2013 timeframe. They would claim that my criticism was nothing more than envy; “envy” is their standard response they utilize in order to avoid responding substantively to criticism. You see, it doesn’t matter what you say so long as envy causes you to say it.

Of course, once my traffic increased and it came out that Scalzi was exaggerating his traffic by a factor of 5+, they had to switch tactics while maintaining the Narrative. Since their rhetoric is all based on argumentum ad populum, they always need to find a metric, however convoluted, to claim that the numbers are on their side. That is why Donald Trump’s election (and, to a lesser extent, Bernie’s defeat in the Democratic primary) sent them into such disarray; because it is no longer possible for them to pretend that their positions are, in fact, more popular.

I never cared about my site traffic until 2013, when I understood how important it is to the SJWs. Now, of course, I wield it as an effective weapon against them. It absolutely sickens and demoralizes them to know how much bigger the traffic is here than at their own little blogs, or even worse, at the sites of their Narrative directors and role models.

One SJW once posted that the mere fact that I had more than 2,000 Twitter followers made him want to kill himself. I can only imagine how he feels now that I’m closing in on 20,000 on Gab and 30,000 on Twitter.

John Piper celebrates mudsharking

I have gradually come to believe that John Piper may be the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. There is not a single tragedy, there is not a single dyscivic or dyscivilizational trend that he does not celebrate as God’s will or good Christian behavior in his mealy-mouthed manner:

Fifty years ago, on June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court declared unconstitutional all state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. The case was called Loving v. Virginia. Mildred Jeter (who was black and Native American) and Richard Loving (who was white) were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C. When they returned to their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, they were arrested. They pled guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”

This is a court decision worth celebrating. But far more important than the legalization of interracial marriage in one nation is the fact that God’s revealed will for the world is not undermined but advanced when a man and a woman from different ethnicities marry in Christ. That is a startling and controversial claim in the face of diverse opposition to interracial marriage in our own day. (The following quotes appear in Bloodlines, pages 204–205.)

From the black community, one spokesman says, “Interracial marriage undermines [African-Americans’] ability to introduce our children to black role models who accept their racial identity with pride.”

From the white community, another spokesman says, “We are seeing the death of the American and his replacement with a non-European type. . . . White people . . . are going to have to struggle mightily to survive the Neo-Melting Pot. . . . Call it what it is: Genocide and extinction of the white genotype.”

From the white evangelical community, another says, “I would never marry a black. Why? Because I believe God made the races, separated them, and set the bounds of their habitation (Deuteronomy 32:8; Acts 17:26). He made them uniquely different and intended that these distinctions remain.”

Against all of these objections, I believe it is as important as it ever has been that Christians settle it in their minds that interracial marriage in Christ is not only a beautiful picture of Christ’s marriage to his church, but also a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the unity Christ achieved by his death and resurrection….

The freedom and the beauty and peace of interracial marriage is one ray of the glory of Christ that should be shining from this new humanity — this “chosen race” (1 Peter 2:9) — which Jesus Christ died and rose again to create.

That’s right up there with “Tornadoes are Christ’s fingers being dragged across the land.” I have no doubt whatsoever that this depraved man is going to end up by endorsing Islam as “a beautiful, glorious demonstration of Christ’s love for the Messenger of God, may peace be upon him”. Frankly, it’s a surprise that he hasn’t changed his position on women in the pulpit yet. If he lives another five years, I expect he will.

I have always been convinced that the Calvinists are absolutely and utterly wrong when it comes to theology. And every single time I read something John Piper has written, it underlines my opinion in that regard.

After all, what can be a more beautiful picture of Christianity than white women working to support their black husbands – 98 percent of whom do not financially support their mixed-race children – when they aren’t strangling or beating them to death? A reader writes of learning that a former college girlfriend recently enjoyed the freedom and beauty and peace of paying the toll:

Witnessing the blueprint of the problems often discussed in this corner of the web unfold in person is sobering. Looking back, as a mid 20’s guy who wasn’t redpilled until my senior year of college, and as even more so as a recently converted Christian: the immensity of how truly evil those forcing this upon the world are has finally hit me. A true modern liberal fairy tale. Happy ending and all. Upper middle class white woman goes to college, does well at first, but the school has the exact effect its intended to have. A corrosive concoction of drugs and dick lead to her having to leave and live at home her junior year. I lost touch with her for about two years, but I actually caught up with her a few months before this and she had more or less gotten her act together. But alas, past actions have consequences in the present. And in this reality sleeping with a historically violent black whose concept of forensic science leads him to believe leaving his underwear in the washing machine after a rape-murder is sufficient cover leads to the well-documented results.

Can’t you just feel the rays of the glory of Christ shining from that new humanity?

Mailvox: the bitter generation

An Xer explains why Generation X is bitter and cynical:

As an X-er, I faithfully followed nearly all the advice given by my boomer parents, and it got me diddly-squat. Gradually I came to understand why: Nearly all the advice they gave me would have been terrific advice for someone with a typical boomer life trajectory, when mistakes could easily be erased and every tree looked like it would grow to the sky. Taking on ruinous debt for a fuzzy degree just so you’d have a diploma with your name on it was probably great advice in the 1960s and 70s. Buying more house than you really needed or could reasonably afford would have been a killer investment strategy in 1982. Everything boomers did was a dumb gamble that improbably succeeded, and they never wondered why; they just accepted it as a convenient law of nature. To this day, I still get these kinds of useless tips from my boomer parents, though by now I’ve learned to ignore them.

This is the great theme of the boomers’ life: They could always take a lot of wild, irresponsible chances on everything, because nearly every bet they made seemed to pay off handsomely, at least within their lifetimes. The completely predictable and obvious long-term costs were always way, way over the horizon — a problem for somebody else. The bill, if it ever came due, would be paid by their posterity, and who cares about those losers? They don’t even like the Beatles, and they’re too whiny and lazy anyway.

Which leads to the root of their endless narcissism. Many boomers believe the incredible advantages they enjoyed were not hard-won gains of previous generations that could easily be squandered, but the inevitable fruits of their own virtuous awesomeness. It never occurred to them that they were both the beneficiaries of and the caretakers for a fragile legacy, and that an economy where anyone with a pulse who was willing to bust their ass could enjoy a solid middle-class life was a historic anomaly that had to be carefully safeguarded. No, it was all just a well-deserved reward for boomers because of their own industriousness and moral goodness. Those whiny kids could have the same thing if they’d just work harder, is how boomers see it.

The cynicism of us X-ers comes from the fact that we grew up really believing this stuff, so finding out it was a lie was kind of a rude awakening. We fully expected that following the rules and ticking the right boxes would automatically give us the exact same life our parents had enjoyed, and we didn’t even have a hint that it might not be true. It also stings because, as another commenter alluded to, X-ers are old enough to have actually seen and gotten a taste of that vanished world; our younger cohorts know it only second-hand. They never lived through it, so the loss doesn’t feel as bitter for them.

I’m not bitter about it, but I, too, was somewhat snake-bit by Boomer cluelessness about the changing world. When I wanted to drop out of college halfway through my sophomore year to sell my 16-bit, 8-channel, stereo 44 KHz sound card that an engineer and I already had working in both hardware and software, my parents aggressively lobbied for me to “stay in school” and “get my degree” because, as every Boomer knew, college degrees are so important. Which, in retrospect, made absolutely no sense in light of how they wanted me to continue working for my father’s company after graduating, which I’d already been doing every summer.

So, instead of selling 200 million dollars worth of sound cards more than two years before Media Vision did with a vastly inferior product, I now have a BS in Economics with a second major in East Asian Studies and a minor in History. None of which has ever profited me so much as a single dime.

The responsibility, of course, is mine. It’s on me, not them. I should have ignored their advice, dropped out, and ploughed ahead to pursue the opportunity while the window was open. But I didn’t, because I trusted what I assumed was their greater experience and wisdom and because it is always easier to take what passes for the normal path in one’s social circle. And that is why Generation X is so little inclined to pay any heed to Boomers now. We listened to them and we took their advice in our youth, and now we see how doing so led us astray.

Mailvox: this church is not dead

A reader emails to confirm that the Southern Baptists are not necessarily impressed by proposed SBC resolutions:

I am member of a Southern Baptist church in Arizona, a small church whose pastor delivers spiritually meaty sermons with isn’t afraid to tell people unpleasant truths.  Your articles on the resolution directed against the Alt-Right and nationalism had me worried, as I have no desire to see my church or those like us converged.  I went to church today praying for the right words to talk to my pastor about this issue.

After the sermon, my fears have been quelled, as shades of the Alt-Right were present throughout it.  Our pastor talked about nations, not about some vague global community.  He spoke in favor of using mockery against the enemies of God and the modern false prophets.  He warned against letting political correctness stop us from defending the Gospel.  He even used the words “I don’t care” in regards to those who disagree with him on national-spiritual matters, which brought a smile to my face.

I don’t know how this resolution will play out and what it means for Southern Baptists as a whole, but I do know now that we aren’t all lost. Thank you for the community you provide at your blog.

Remember, no matter how bad things get, the battle isn’t over and there is no reason to accept defeat. Only two numbers matter, 2 and 12. Because one plus one is three and all we need are twelve.

Mailvox: disproof vs positive claim

RS asked about tariffs and wages:

In your second presentation on Free Trade you said that Hazlitt was erroneous in claiming that tariffs would reduce wages in America and you pointed to the fact that wages have reduced since 1973 event though tariffs have largely been eliminated. In any event, I think that the reduction in wages for American workers since that time is due to the large scale importation of foreign workers which seems orthogonal to tariffs.

It is false to claim that tariffs reduce wages. While it is true that the two primary reasons for reduced American wages are a) twice as many women working than before and b) the importation of foreign workers, the fact is that reduction of tariffs has not increased wages. Perhaps more to the point, wages in China have risen from 445 CNY to 67569, most of this prior to the relaxation of tariff rates in 2010.

It is difficult to separate the various effects, but the point is that we do not see the inverse tariff/wage relationship upon which Hazlitt in part bases his case.

Meanwhile, DH found himself troubled by the thoughts my previous Darkstream raised:

Your recent dark-stream is quite thought provoking. I had difficulty putting my mind at rest enough to fall asleep until way past my usual bedtime. The points you made resonate with me as true, however the argument is left begging for more.

Your reaction to comments stood out as thought provoking as well. While I do not consider myself to be particularly bright on an absolute scale, I have no idea what my I.Q. is. I find it does not require a great deal of intelligence to be frustrated with and isolated from most of those around me.  I relate to your frustration, though I wish it didn’t keep you from completing your thoughts.

Even if we could distill all the best aspects of every “ism” into one best of all “isms”, it would not be accepted upon pain of death either by the elites or their devoted subjects.

The point that I am making is not that communism is good or desirable. It is merely that global free markets and individual sovereignty is incompatible with the survival of both nation and family. It is not an accident that so many globalists are childless individuals with unusual family situations; even the modestly successful expat communities tend to be mostly populated by rootless transients upon whom one can hardly expect to successfully build a society, let alone a civilization.

What passes for global society is intrinsically parasitical, if not downright predatory, and therefore cannot possibly serve as a sound foundation in itself. Globalism requires that cows first transform themselves into wolves, and then, after that impossibility is successfully accomplished, learn to eat grass.