October 2019 – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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

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

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

From Issue Number One:

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

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

Front Matter

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

Violence and Censorship Update

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

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

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

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

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

Response to Z-Man

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

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

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

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

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

And you thought Thanksgiving at your house was tense.

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

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

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

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

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

Which explains why we’re in our current mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated Civil War II Index

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

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

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

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

Pretend I made a graph and this is it.

John Mark/RamZPaul Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

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

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

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

From Ricky:

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

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

From last spring:

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

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

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

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

Also from Ricky, variations on a theme:

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

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

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

And also from Ricky:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s what she said.”

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

Except.

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

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

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

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

I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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