August 2020 – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Friday Books, Because I Said So

“It’s the most pointless book since How To Learn French was translated into French.” – Blackadder The Third

I finished three books during the quarantine. That’s A LOT of coloring.

Books.

I had a great-grand boss (three levels up in the company) once upon a time who was fairly philosophical in an industry not at all noted for philosophy. One day he showed up in my office, unannounced. We sat and talked for several hours about history and corporate strategy and got along very well. It probably didn’t hurt my career with that particular company.

One thing that my great-grand boss said during that meeting always stuck with me. I’m not sure if it was a quote that was original to him or not, but the quote was, “there is a way that minds can speak to each other through the ages. Books.” I thought that was pretty powerful, nearly as powerful as when The Mrs. mentioned she was going to kill off some of the characters in the book she was writing. The downside is that The Mrs. is writing her autobiography.

Books have been with us for thousands of years, but the earliest books were just a taking spoken word and carving it into a stone or writing it on papyrus or parchment. The true development of the written word came later, where complex ideas that transcended conversation were formed. The medium truly changed the message. The image of a frontier boy, book in one hand and plow in the other was formed. Heck, when I was working gathering with Pa Wilder I remember reading a book on anti-gravity, which was really hard to put down.

On the plus side, I did get a book.

We are on a journey as a world to becoming post-literate. We can still read, but the idea of developing longer, more complex ideas and widely sharing them has gone a bit the way of an endangered species. The ideas that were formerly expressed in literature seem to be passing by the wayside in many ways. The last time I picked up a Time magazine at the doctor’s office, it seemed like I was reading a magazine written for not-so-bright kids.

Is this on purpose?

But for me, books were a formative experience. They remain a part of my life. I had another post planned for tonight, but decided I’d throw out a few books that just came to mind. Were these the best books I’ve ever read? No, this isn’t a best-of list. But, arbitrarily I added some rules: the books have to be at least 20 years old, and no author gets more than one. It’s obvious I love The Lord of the Rings (Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths) since I wrote about that last week, so it’s not on the list.

It’s mainly a list of books I just want to talk about today. Why? Because. So there. Feel free to toss the ones you want to add in the comments.

The Starship that can’t pay back a student loan? The Millennial Falcon.

One of the first books that came to mind was Starship Troopers. Robert A. Heinlein was a favorite author of mine growing up – he wrote a series of “juvenile” books in the 1950’s that I think are his best work. And of those? Starship Troopers is my favorite. I read it in junior high, and it was thrilling and thought provoking. Mobile Infantry? An amazing concept.

Starship Troopers isn’t the parody movie of the 1990’s. Nope. It’s a real discussion of the tension in the world between liberty and responsibility. It’s a discussion of honor. It’s also a depiction of a world where there is, dare I say, a spirit of nationalism? It doesn’t have Heinlein’s later squishy and retrospectively creepy, um, “free love” ideas. I’ve made both Pugsley and The Boy read it, as I’ve made them read the next three books on this list.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley was one my seventh grade teacher gave me to read. If she were still teaching in 2020, she would probably be shot for that. Huxley could see the future of conformity – the idea wasn’t that we ever had to ban books, we could just make them irrelevant by replacing them with amusements and intoxicants.

Into this world, Huxley injects a free radical – a handsome blonde individual that was born free and has awareness that the average citizen doesn’t have: John the Savage. Hmm. It’s almost like John was wilder?

Nah.

Anyway, the book for me was haunting. I got to the end, and had to do a full stop. And re-read. Then I got it.

Most babies are born at womb temperature.

I think that Brave New World was what we were living through in the United States from, say, 2000 until 2017. It’s a template for control through amusement. But what happens when the state runs out of other people’s money to spend? That’s the next book.

1984, by George Orwell. I read this one in eighth grade. I can recall reading about the rats while sitting in class on a warm spring day. Many people don’t know that Orwell was a committed socialist until he ran into actual communists during the Spanish Civil War, and at that point he was disgusted and repelled by what he saw. When exposure to actual communists makes you anti-communist, what does that tell you about the reality of communism?

Nah. Antifa® is sure it will work this time.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. The original movie was kind-of awful in many ways. The 2000-ish miniseries was okay. I’m sure it will be butchered in the latest adaptation that’s due out soon. But the book remains the book. It was enjoyable, but when I read it, it was confounding – it seemed like every decision the protagonist (Paul Atreides) made, I would have made the opposite decision.

The story is fairly rich in plot, and has truly wonderful villains. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was pure evil, but a smart, cunning evil. I always thought that Orson Welles would have been perfect for the role, since Baron Harkonnen was really fat, and Orson Welles had already eaten Ohio just to prepare for this role.

Some people call me the spice cowboy, some call me the Duke of love, some people call me Muad’dib, because I speak of the sandworm of love.

This is the novel that really exposed me to the idea of resource constraints, and spice is certainly a thinly-veiled metaphor for oil. Can a lack of resources bring down an empire? Certainly – that’s why China is working so feverishly to set up systems that bring it all the resources it needs. And why we’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East.

Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. A mysterious space vessel shows up in the Solar System and is using the Sun to slingshot to a new trajectory. The astronauts sent to explore the vessel find lots of cool things, but no actual aliens, which remains part of the mystery.

I got this book when I was a kid of 10 or so. How? Some library sent us a catalog. Apparently, the Wilder Compound up on Wilder Mountain was viewed as so remote that they sent a list of books to us along with news that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected president. I put a checkmark by the three books I wanted and sent them the form, and they sent the books to me along with a prepaid return envelope and a new list of books I could check out.

Who paid for it? I have no idea, but they stopped doing it after two years or so.

The book? Not really great by the standards of today. The part that sealed the deal for me when I read it as a kid was the last line, which apparently was added in the very last revision. I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone read it in 2020, but when I was 11 years old and read it?

Magic.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. I remember this book because I devoured it in a single fall afternoon – the first book I picked up and didn’t put down until I was finished since my victory over the Cat wearing a Hat. Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang takes place after an apocalypse occurs and for (reasons!) the people decided to reproduce through cloning rather than the usual way. But a boy is born who isn’t a clone, and manages to, well, be human. It won a Hugo™. I just wish my nomination for a Hugo® would have gotten me a better place than sixth out of a field of five.

Oh well.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This is a deeply nerdy novel. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s fun. But it’s nerdy. Really nerdy. The novel revolves around codebreaking and looted WW II gold. It’s also the only novel on this list where The Boy and I met the author, twice. The first time, The Boy was seven, and I dragged him to an author reading.

The Viking longboats had bar codes on the side, so when they got home they could Scandinavian.

He acted like a seven year old. The Boy, not Neal. The next time I took The Boy to meet Neal Stephenson was when he was sixteen. The Boy’s favorite author in the world was at that time? Neal Stephenson. I made him apologize to Mr. Stephenson, who played along and said that he’d never recovered from The Boy’s previous antics.

Good times. If you like this book, Stephenson has several thousand pages of related books that are similarly Asperger-y .

So, what books do you want to add to the list and why?

How Bad The Economic Crash Really Is

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

HC pointed out this picture. How could I resist?

Last week it was announced that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States collapsed. If you’re not aware, GDP is simply a measure of how much PEZ® is produced in the economy of a country. Okay, it’s not just PEZ©, other (lesser) goods and services are included, too. Call it a rough guess at how well the economic machine in the country is working.

“Collapse” is a word that gets overused by the news media. They want to pump up your fear so you’ll click on their article and give them $0.000043 per click. They don’t make much money at $0.000043 per click, so they need a *lot* of clicks (87,209) to pay for their daily soy latte. The best way to get that many clicks? Either scare people, or provide nudity. Or, if you’re Kamala Harris, do both at the same time.

In this case, however, the use of the term “collapse” is entirely appropriate when 32.9% of the economy disappears. And that dismal number is after an unprecedented borrowing and spending. The US had a GDP of about $20 trillion in 2018. This year, so far, there has been about $5 trillion in extra spending and balance sheet expansion.

So, $10 trillion in half a year, reduced by the 32.9% lowering in GDP takes us to $7 trillion or so. That’s how big they’re saying the economy is. That’s bad. But if you subtract out the $2 trillion in “stimulus” funds that takes you down to $5 trillion.

Borrow a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Borrow a billion dollars, and you own the bank. Borrow $26.6 trillion dollars? You are the United States.

Even if NONE of the Federal Reserve’s® balance sheet where they sprinkled money into the stock market got added to the GDP figure, we’re talking a 50% reduction in the economy in real terms.

50%.

Half.

The economy isn’t an economy at this point – it’s a smoking crater. Well, it would be a smoking crater if there was enough money to pay for the smoke. Yet the Fed™ had pumped enough cash into the stock market to keep it at near record highs. Me? I avoided that and bought a warehouse full of chicken soup stock cubes. Now I’m a bouillonaire.

The solution to our economic crisis from the Left is to keep sending checks to everyone. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the Weimar Republic mentality. “We can print money and send it to people, that’s all we need to have a functioning economy.” It’s the post-economy economy. All we have to do is make PowerPoints® for each other and wait for our Leftybux payments and then we can go down to the grocery store where the food mysteriously appears each month.

Wish someone would have mentioned that.

If we were going to just send money to a few people to pay for their rent, it would probably work out okay. We’ve been printing money for years and giving welfare based on debt for fifty years. Heck, hundreds of people in town are getting unemployment right now, I even know some. I guess I finally have some friends with benefits. But that’s not good for the economy.

The result is stunningly predictable. As I said before, we’d see deflation, and then inflation. Deflation isn’t universal. Some parts of the economy are working, some aren’t. Inflation has shown up first in food and things people need. Eventually, even toys, say balloons, will show inflation. Inflation will show up later everywhere.

But not yet.

What is showing up is that people in the rest of the world are starting to do the same math that I did up above. How many years can a country’s primary production be debt and expect the rest of the world to ignore that? Well, in the last six months, gold is up 30% and silver is up nearly 50%. Part of that is to be expected – uncertainty driver up precious metal prices.

The Mrs. was yelling at me last night. Thank heavens! That reminded me we were out of duct tape.

In the last two months, however, the United States dollar has dropped by 5% versus a basket of currencies called the USD index. That means that people are liking the USD less, because they see the weakening of the economy. It’s bad enough that my tattoo of $100 bills on my hips is now a waist of money.

It’s tempting to think that all the stuff is there to restart the economy. And in many cases it is just sitting there. The restaurant that closed down is still physically there. The stoves and ovens are there. The refrigerator is still there. But the need for it isn’t there. People have less money to go out and eat, so there’s less of a need for restaurants. Heck, even our best fancy restaurant with a pork theme had to close. I’ll miss Swine Dining.

A growing economy is a virtuous cycle – new business spawns new business. A shrinking economy is a vicious cycle – each job lost at that restaurant has ripples further down the economic chain – the waitress can’t make rent if she doesn’t have a job that generates tips.

Banks have stopped (in many cases) loaning money. Why loan cash you have into an environment where interest rates are at 3.3% in an uncertain economy? Vox Day pointed out this disturbing story showing a collapse in bank lending (LINK).

Yes, collapse is the right word. I’ve long been on record that the economic system of debt-based welfare could only last for a certain amount of time. I had picked 2026 or 2027 before it folded up the tent, and given that markets can stay irrational for a long time due to inertia, pushing into the 2030’s was reasonable.

I had an irrational fear of a speed bump. But I’m getting over it.

Watching a complex system fail always provides unexpected consequences. The system has been headed toward failure for years. Without the extraordinary efforts of 2008, it probably would have collapsed then. I think it was far closer to collapse than most people were aware.

The downside of putting off a system failure is that the pressure from the underlying causes keeps building up. When it inevitably finally does fail, it fails spectacularly, and much worse than if failure had happened earlier. When huge failures happen, sometimes civilization doesn’t recover for hundreds of years.

We have seen, again and again, the concept of systems becoming irrelevant. Sometimes, it’s technology that makes them irrelevant the way that the combination of the Internet and Wal-Mart® has destroyed tens of thousands of small stores. The Black Death altered the economic balance of Europe, and destroyed feudalism while kick-starting the Renaissance.

I hope Covid-20 is different than Covid-19. I hate plague-rism.

What will our current crisis lead to? The end of Globalism? A world without debt? Free PEZ?

It’s hard to say. But the birth of any new civilization is painful.

Not as painful as having to admit they want a soy latte, but painful.

Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings

After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits. That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.

I’m probably in the minority on the following thought: there is actual evil in the world. The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.

Psychological problems.
Different cultures.
Bad parents.
No parents.
Being my ex-wife.

But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.

I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.

Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free. It was good. Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading. In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie. But then I was off to middle school.

I stumbled across Tolkien again. He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was: The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep. Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.

Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.

I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.

I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring. The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.

Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times. He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:

“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”

A Nazgûl floats into a bar. The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’

In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now. The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.

In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots. Murder rates are up in those cities. Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty. That doesn’t make the news.

Why?

The riots are described as peaceful protests. To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year. They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values. And what about all of the uprooted lives?

That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating. Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.

Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.

I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits. This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.

Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant. The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.

I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.

Yes, I believe True Evil® exists. The joy for me is, knowing that True Evil™ exists, I am also sure that True Good© exists, too, even though destroying the One Ring turned Frodo into a hobbitual drinker. I’ll turn it back over to Tolkien for one final quote:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

Oh, sure, Tolkien can write. But can he meme?