Open Thread For Debate Liveblog, Plus A Prediction Of How It Will Go

“I would not presume to debate you.” – Star Trek II:  Wrath of (Prose and) Khan(s)

Clothing optional.  No, I really don’t want to know.  Really, I don’t.

It’s 2020, and the first debate, so let’s have a little fun with it.  Starting tomorrow at the beginning of the debate, you’re invited to a live debate party.  If you’re here on Wednesday morning, this counts as the Wednesday morning post.

Where?  Here.  On this post, right in the comment section.  Just be here when the debate starts and refresh the page every so often, and comment away!  No ID required and no cover charge, but there is a two-drink minimum.

The Mrs. has tentatively agreed to join in and may even be interested in having some wine during the festivities, so you can expect my stuff to be extra good.  The rules are fairly simple.  Join in, and comment as we roast marshmallows on the bonfire of Western civilization.  The funnier the better, but do please try to keep it PG-13 and don’t make me edit out stuff.

Because I will.

How do I think the debate will go?

Probably something like this:

Chris Wallace:  Good evening.  Per the rules that both of you approved, Vice President Biden will be allowed to occasionally bellow out the names of people that are dead, but that he thinks are still alive.  President Trump will be allowed to yell two words with strange emphasis whenever they pop into his head. 

The first question is for you, Vice President Biden.  How do you like doing soothing things, like painting?  Do you like other art projects?

Vice President Biden:  C’mon man!  I remember back when I worked in the chimichanga factory back in Delaware while running drugs for the Juarez Cartel.  This poor little girl, who was just as smart as a white girl, would want to touch the golden fuzz on my neck, right here . . . .

President Trump:  HUN-tEr CrackHEAD.

Vice President Biden:  Well, Fat, I was in the Senate back in 1840, and let me tell you that Henry Calhoun wouldn’t have had crack, because Lincoln didn’t invent that thing, you know, the toy . . .

Chris Wallace:  Lincoln Logs®?

President Trump:  UkraiNIAN corrupTION.

Vice President Biden:  C’mon, it was back when I had my first Buick.  It was a 1953, I think, bought it from John Travolta back when he was a ghost-man.  You know about the ghost-men, right?  Only come at night, crawl up your leg, leave a hell of a mess?

Chris Wallace:  Thank you Vice President Biden.  President Trump, can you explain how the 1963 IRS laws concerning tax treatment of hotel properties in Barbados after an earthquake are impacting Russian-Chinese relations?

President Trump:  Yes.  You see, HUN-tEr Bi-DEN was very sad in his dealings with his brother’s ex-wife – you know he married her, yes?  And then HUN-tEr had some sort of stripper baby.  Very sad.  Very disrespectful.

Vice President Biden:  Marlena Dietrich!  Is she here tonight?

President Trump (to Biden):  You work for me.

Vice President Biden:  What?  No, I don’t.  I quit that job.  C’mon.  Want me to bust you in the chops behind the gym?  I’ll show you who knows how to do pushups because . . . you know the thing.  I’ve gone on too long.  God bless Ruth Vader Gilbert and Sullivan.  Helluva Broadway show, let tell you that.  Full of sparkly toasters and ham.

President Trump:  You see?  Lock him up.

Or maybe it won’t go like that.  It’s 2020.  All bets are off.  I’d suggest a drinking game based upon Joe Biden saying “C’mon”, losing his place, visibly showing the signs of a meth overdose or brain aneurism or saying two hundred thousand.  One drink for each ad hominin attack on Trump.

For Trump, you’d take a drink every time he says two words and pauses, nodding knowingly, uses the word “Hunter”, uses the word Chin-a, or insults Joe directly with a “Sleepy Joe” or “Chinese Joe” type insult.

Finish your glass if Joe Biden suggests pushups.  Finish the bottle if Joe does a pushup or tries to physically attack Trump or his adult diaper leaks.  Also finish the bottle if anyone from CNN says anything other than, “decisive victory” for Biden.

See you at the debate!

Fear And Loathing In Modern America

“There is nothing so deranged as a man in the depths of an ether binge.” – Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I hear an angst-filled teen robot is called a sigh-borg.

Artificial Intelligence may be taking us down the path to Civil War.

How?

Artificial Intelligence is upon us.  To be clear, there’s little likelihood that A.I. in 2020 is conscious in any way that would be recognized by a human even though it has exceeded human ability in things like “playing” chess and “not forgetting to pick up Pugsley at school for three hours in winter.”  A.I. doesn’t need to be conscious to be amazingly useful.  Even in its limited form it is already important to the economy, and becoming more important every year.  Here are some ways that A.I. impacts us here and now:

  • Shipping – from individual route selection to package delivery schedule, no single package is managed by an individual until the UPS guy pulls it off of the truck and walks to your door. The rest of it is scanned and the delivery path is optimized by computer as the delivery guy drops it at the wrong house.  I wonder why my neighbors needed all that latex and baby oil?
  • Shopping – Amazon™ (or any other retailer I purchase from with consistently) knows my buying patterns as well as I do. Is it super accurate at picking things that I’d to buy?  Yes and no.  I went to the site to give an example of a ludicrous suggestion.  And I bought a book instead.  (Darn you Allie!  Whatever you do, don’t go to her website and read it (LINK) the hilarious chapter from her new book because then you’d blame me if you bought it.)  Then I went back to Amazon® to look for a bad purchase suggestion and bought yet another book.  So, it beat me tonight.

I hear even A.I. is having to deal with LGBT stuff – they keep talking about trans-sisters.

  • Banking – three years ago I got a text from my credit card issuer – they thought a purchase charged to the card was fraudulent. It was.  The A.I. was smart enough to realize that I probably wasn’t in Chicago at 4 A.M. on a Monday morning buying $300 sneakers.  And, no, Amazon® didn’t recommend them to me.
  • Advertising – the websites I go to feature personalized ads meant to match my interests, but yet no human ever made the decision of what ads to place there – it was all based on the profile they’ve built of me. This might explain why they assume I need binoculars, dehydrated “survival” food, duct tape, a machete, and a subscription to “Sour Patch Kid®” candy of the month club.
  • Job Search – résumés of job seekers are submitted based on A.I. recommendation to be read by the A.I. that the hiring company bought to read them.   People are being rejected for jobs by computer programs.  I suppose it’s better than the future when unemployment claims are kept low by use of the Terminator® HRBot 3000.

A Terminator makes a really bad sales clerk.  Whenever anyone asks where something is, they always say, “Aisle B, back.”

  • Journalism – simple stories such as football or baseball game descriptions have been written by A.I. for years. One could argue that any intelligence at the Washington Post® or New York Times™ has been artificial for decades.
  • Social Media – Twitter® and Facebook™ and YouTube© are carefully calibrated to maximize use engagement to maximize company profits. And they’re the companies that are causing all of the problems.

The easiest emotions to get engagement on are:  fear, outrage, and anger.  The reason is that it’s easier to make someone mad than it is to make their day better.  Sure, we love “I can has cheezburger” cat, but to get people to click you need to get them scared or mad.

What emotions do you think the A.I. amplifies?  Yup.

Fear, outrage, and anger.

It’s also sad when your navy can be defeated by asking it to identify which pictures contain a stop sign.

If A.I. has a profile of you that can select what t-shirt you’re most likely to buy, what else does it know?  Well, it knows what your ideological profile is.  It knows what stories resonate with that ideological profile, and will make you mad.  Then?  It shows them to you.

The motivation isn’t evil.  The motivation is entirely neutral.  The A.I. is there to make profits for Twitter©.  Since it makes money for employees and investors, people will stop you from turning it off (to paraphrase Scott Adams from a recent podcast).  Their 401k’s depend on the A.I. making money for them.  I think Glenda from Accounting would slit your throat if you killed the goose that made the golden 401k.  And the stock options!

But this A.I. behavior reflects back into human behavior even beyond Glenda from Accounting’s bloodlust for anyone who messes with her 401k.  A.I. is also making divisions show up in the country.

Let me give an example:

A.I. was great at feeding polarizing videos on YouTube™.  Up until a year or two ago, YouTube© was great at giving me a list of suggested videos that were farther and farther Right.  Then, the great purge started.  Content creators of any degree of popularity were banned, forever, if they were on the Right for no particular reason that YouTube© would share.  Alex Jones was among the first banned, which is strange because he’s like the WWE® of radio hosts.

Sean keeps his pistol in his library.  It’s for shelf defense.

The Right has stayed, from an ideological standpoint, in about the same place for the last 30 years.  The Left, especially since 2004, has moved wildly Left.

Was A.I. to blame for all of that Leftward movement?  No.  There are other factors at play – especially a demographic shift of population with a huge influx in immigrants that come from countries that are all further Left than the United States.  Why they want to escape their Leftist hell-holes and then vote for Leftism here is beyond me.

But A.I. certainly pushed people who were leaning Left, farther Left.

So, A.I. can change people by surrounding them with a nice, warm Leftist echo chamber.  In what might be worse, A.I. is likely no longer just changing people, it’s changing events because that echo chamber exists.

Let’s take St. Louis, when Mark and Patricia McCloskey defended their own property.  Most people who reviewed their actions who have a legal background have said everything they did was clearly lawful.

Except.

Not an original.  Is this all the Terminator that 2020 could give us?

An elected prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies.  What amount of A.I. inspired Twitter®-fueled hate-rage against the McCloskey family resulted in her having the courage to file the charges?  It feels like to me, that online rage influenced her in some fashion.  It probably doesn’t hurt that Ms. Gardner’s election was funded in part by George Soros’ foundations, but even one of Soros’ creatures knows they need to get votes in an election year.

To what extent is the decision of the District Attorneys around the country to release violent rioters aided by a compliant A.I. that feeds the idea that arsonists are, somehow, freedom fighters?  People on the Right generally shake our heads in confusion as blatant criminals are charged with only the most minimal of charges yet bail for Kyle Rittenhouse is set, in cash, at $2 million dollars?

If the goal of the Left was to destabilize the country, causing everyone to lose faith in the justice system is a great start.  But none of that is the goal of A.I.  It doesn’t care.  If an A.I. was programmed to make shopping carts, and turned the entire planet into a big ball of shopping carts orbiting the Sun, well, mission accomplished!  A.I.s simply do not care.

Meanwhile, use of A.I. tech helps Google™, Twitter®, and Facebook© reach record stock prices.  The big danger is that the forces of polarization and the actions that the various A.I.s unleash gets out of control.  It’s not like those A.I.s are designed to realize that they’re destabilizing an entire country in a way that might lead to the most destructive war the United States has ever been a part of.

But, hey, those guys at Twitter still have stock options, right?

Contrast: It Makes Your Life Worth Living

“Now we will destroy your leader, or at least make him keep hitting himself, unless you let us live in peace.” – Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends

What do you use to contrast different Scandinavian cultures?  A Sven diagram.

When I was a kid, the Wilder Family had a subscription to Reader’s Digest®.  Reader’s Digest™ started out in 1922 when a bored wounded World War I veteran started re-writing and condensing articles he read and combining them because there was no Internet.  It must have worked, because 40 years later Reader’s Digest© had a circulation of 23 million when the bored vet finally retired.

Regardless, the Internet was still didn’t have pictures of dancing cats when I grew up.  Not that it mattered – the thing that most closely resembled a computer within 100 miles when I grew up was the one that was used by Adam and Eve – an Apple®.  Their computer had a downside – one byte and everything crashed.

So, Reader’s Digest™ was something I read as a kid.

Reader’s Digest© version of Titanic:  “The boat sinks.”

It will probably not be surprising to any regular readers here, but the first things I read every month in Reader’s Digest® were the jokes and the humorous stories.  One, in particular, has always stayed with me, and I’ve quoted it before here.

It goes something like this:

One day a mother looked out in to her backyard and saw that her eight year old son, Timmy, was holding an empty can on his five year old sister’s head.  He was hitting the can with a rock.

“Timmy, what are you doing!”

The little girl replied, “It’s okay, Mom!  He’s almost done.”

There are multiple ways to create a humorous story, and this one (to me) is a classic story because it wraps at least three different methods of humor (familiarity, cuteness, and absurdity) up so very well.  But, in the best humor, there’s always a grain of truth.  And that may be why this simple story has stayed with me for decades.

Also Scott Adams?  “There’s nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.”

As I exercised this week, I was listening to Coffee with Scott Adams (of Dilbert© fame).  I’ve listened to his podcast and once or twice he’s featured a theme I just published.  No, I don’t think he’s reading here, but if he really is thinking along the same lines as me, he should probably consider professional help.

There was one phrase that hit me this week:  memories are built from contrast.

That stopped me in my tracks, and immediately made me think about the old Reader’s Digest® story.

Contrast.  That’s the key.  Like beer, Contrast is both the cause of and solution to all of our problems.

Scott Adams’ point was that when you have a long series of crappy days, the good one stands out.  If you spent all day in abject misery having to rub oil on Joe Biden’s hairy back moles, and had five minutes in a hot tub eating ice cream while angels tickled your feet?  Those five minutes would be wonderful, assuming you got to wash all the Biden back oil off of your hands first.  The contrast of those five minutes with the rest of the day would make them a wonderful memory.

Joe Biden would love to have memories. 

Contrast is also the father of Envy, which I seem to recall is a bad thing.  I recall that at one company I worked at, the CEO’s pay was openly mocked (in public, to other employees) by a person that I knew was making six figures – he thought it was shameful that the CEO made so much (high six figures) while he made so little (low six figures).  I knew the CEO.  The CEO wasn’t a rocket surgeon or even a brain scientist, but yet the CEO was making big money.

So?  The guy who was complaining had a pretty good job, and a pretty good life.  But he didn’t make as much money as the CEO.  That Contrast, that Envy, worked against him.  It made him unhappy for no real reason.

Part of the magic of Contrast is how you focus on it.  Had the employee in the example above focused on how well he had it, perhaps he’d think like me:  I want the CEO to make gobs of money, so when they look at my pay they think, “wow, he created so much value, and he makes so little money.”  In that way, Contrast can work for you.  Contrast is your friend, but only if you let it be.

But I hear the CEOs of pretzel companies are the most twisted.

Life would not be possible without Contrast.  Every single process that we understand is built on thermodynamics.  Thermodynamics is just a fancy way to say that “energy moves.”  And the Contrast between hot and cold drives power plants, cars, light bulbs, and every bit of energy used by every cell in your body.  Don’t like thermodynamics?

Move to another Universe.

Outside of being the gears that move the planets around the stars and allow the fusion reactions that warm those planets, Contrast is also what drives Virtue.  Bravery versus cowardice.  Modesty versus pride.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

One time, when living in Texas, I was trimming a hedge.  I decided to increase the difficulty (and try to get a higher score from the Romanian judge) by trimming the hedge while standing on a fire ant hill.  Fire ants are called fire ants for a reason, and it isn’t because their hearts are fully of loving fire.  One time one SINGLE fire ant bit me on my hand and a friend looked at the resulting swelling and said, “That looks like one of those things an alien will pop out of.”

Fire ants seem to bite simultaneously – all at once, regardless of where they are on your body.  Non-psychopathic ants, like the ones I grew up with, would just bite you whenever.  Not fire ants.  They want to have dozens and dozens of them on you when they all decide to chomp down and inject an alkaloid poison that has cytotoxic, hemolytic, and insecticidal properties.  That’s 95% of the venom.  The other 5% of the venom contains proteins that create an allergenic reaction in animals.

That’s a lot of syllables that mean that fire ant venom is a finely tuned combination of chemicals that are made of hate and spite.

Some people think it’s the vibration that they react to, as I said up above, I think it’s just that the ants are psychopathic.  27 ants bit me at the same time.  I know, because I counted each bite.

Ouch.

I jumped.  I jumped so hard that I thought that I pulled a hamstring.  I have no idea why they call it a hamstring.  Me?  I’d call it a thighcep instead of a hamstring.

Anteaters never get Coronavirus – they’re already filled up with ant-y bodies.

The hamstring pain went on for months.  It was fine when I walked, but when I sat down?  My hamstring was like an electric rod jammed down my left leg, and not in the good way.  A guy I worked with finally said to me, “John, that’s your back, not your hamstring.  Same thing happened to me.”

It was my back.  I started doing some exercises to build my back muscles and core muscles.  In a week all of the pain went away.  After three months of excruciating pain, I was finally pain free.  It was like Madonna® had never been born.

That was a Contrast that was wonderful.  The pain hasn’t come back, and it’s now been a dozen years.  And I’ve moved very, very far away from fire ants.  If you’ve ever had pain for an extended period that went away?

The Contrast is delicious.  It’s like there’s a can on top of your head, and someone stopped hitting it with a rock.

So, if you’re driving yourself crazy with Contrasts, especially Contrasts that don’t matter?  Take the advice that my older brother always gave me.

“Stop hitting yourself.”

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened.  I’m kidding, of course.  I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living.  Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race.  For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President.  By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored.  Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump.  His other advantage is, well, you know.  You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind.  Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open:  21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day.  Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

  • Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
  • Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
  • Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
  • New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

  • Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
  • News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
  • Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
  • Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
  • Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward.  It won’t be.  Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire?  A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states.  A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later.  But has anything about 2020 been best case?  The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth.  In reality, the tension has been building for four years.  In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt.  We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable.  This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good.   This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral.  I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic.  In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week.  I ignore most of them.  Today?  I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate.  You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses.  Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability.  The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral.  Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it.  It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California.  Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%.  California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants.  The result?  The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money?  You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times.  They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

The Silenced Majority: How The Left Censors The Right

“You can’t stop the signal.” – Serenity

Joe Biden wants to win, so his kids can get jobs closer to home.

Sometimes my jokes are greeted with silence.  You could hear a pun drop.

Nixon famously used the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” during a speech in October of 1969.  Leftists were demanding an end to the Vietnam War.  There were plenty of valid reasons to end the Vietnam War, but hating America wasn’t one of them.  This was a speech to the American people about just that – and Nixon knew that the people not out in the streets were with him.

But in 2020, we face a different world, but in the movie.  We still have a group of silent people who aren’t on board with the Left – and I believe them to be an absolute majority, or you and I both would be in a gulag right now.  But there is another group, a group that would speak, but can’t.

I call them the Silenced Majority.

I write about the first type of the Silenced Majority almost every month in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  Why?  The amount and type of censorship tells you a lot about how far a country has fallen towards a Leftist totalitarianism.

Also the Left:  It puts the sanitizer on its skin, or else it gets quarantine again.

The vanguard of this behavior has come from Silicon Valley.  YouTube® has been the great censor, keeping dogma from Leftist organizations but banning content from only moderately Right of center sources.  But there is one way that YouTube© is like the United States government – both break their own rules.

The libertarians and Right-libertarians make the point that these are “private companies” and that free speech doesn’t apply.  Sure.  That’s what the cashier at the Burger King drive-through keeps telling me.  But it’s not just Facebook®, Twitter™, and InstaSnap©.  It’s also Gofundme.

Jason Blake, the guy in Kenosha who got shot while allegedly stealing a car with kids in it from a woman he allegedly raped, has a Gofundme® of nearly $2.3 million dollars.  Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old whose previous brushes with the law included being in a youth crime prevention organization, was prevented from having a Gofundme® at all because self-defense is the scariest thing in the world to the Left.  You don’t need Papa and Mama Government when you can protect yourself.

Hmmm.

Living with the systems of the Left is difficult.  Discover® recently said it won’t process payments going to Gab®, the free-speech alternative to Twitter™.

Twitter® has banned the term “treason.”  Now it’s supposed to be “undocumented foreign supporter.”

Why?

Does it matter?

The Left has co-opted the media.  And it’s not just from wild-eyed people on the far-Right.  On my YouTube™ feed a video showed up from a (as far as I can see) balanced, centrist journalist.  Like a real journalist, who has news Emmy® awards and everything.

The video was about Antifa®.  This video was so good that I subscribed to her channel, along with 67,000 other people that week.  That’s rare – I think I’m subscribed two three or four total YouTube® channels.  Total.  It was that good.  And it was fair.

She got a million hits on that video.  People are fascinated about Antifa™, and they want to learn more.  To have the opportunity to learn about it from an unbiased journalist with credentials?  What a hit!

Until YouTube™ shadowbanned it.

What’s a shadow ban?  It’s tuning the search and recommendation algorithms so they don’t point to specific content.   She’s got a great example in the video below where she searches for her exact video title with her name . . . and, well, she’s not the number one hit, I’ll tell you that.

You can search her channel for the vidya on Antifa®.  The first one hit over a million people.  This one  was at less than 15,000 (LINK).

For whatever reason, Antifa™ is a sensitive subject for the Left.  They don’t want people knowing about the group that’s responsible for riot after riot all across the country.  The FBI® has joined them, with the Director noting that Antifa™ isn’t an organization, it’s an ideology.  I wonder if he wear Stalin PJ’s?

YouTube™ will, if they bother to answer it at all, blame it on the algorithm, expecting us normies to not understand that every single algorithm is written by a human.  Or at least an autistic person who they pay with chicken tenders.

Fox News™ doesn’t have that excuse.  Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was on some news show on Fox®.  Newt was shut down for mentioning that George Soros funded the campaigns of dozens of far-Left District Attorneys.  Fat George is proud of this.  He’s bragged about this.

But Newt mentioning this?  Forbidden.  Fox News© shut him down.  Cold.  Don’t take my word for it, watch it here (LINK).  It’s less than a minute.

It’s like the computer chip that Fox™ HR put into their heads started putting electroshocks into their brainstems.

What subjects can’t you even mention anymore?  Antifa® and George Soros, certainly.  How many others?

The second type of Silenced Majority are people who don’t speak.  Why?  Fear.  They live in fear because a person on the Left can make the most outrageous claims and have job security.  Heck, job security?  Make outrageous claims in some organizations and you’ll be rewarded.

“All White people are racist.”  Yup.  You can say that and not get fired.  Heck, in some companies you’re required to say it.  You can work in academia and call people who disagree with you “subhuman” on Twitter® and pray for their extermination.  As long as the people you’re insulting are on the Right, of course.  Your punishment for that?  Enjoying your tenured position and taxpayer-funded job.

After I asked my astrophysics professor how stars died, he responded, “Overdose, usually.”

But saying something simple and factual like, “The autopsy report on George Floyd showed that he was as high as my electric bill in summer after I left all of the windows open, the AC set on 60°F (8,675,309°C. or “Jenny” degrees), the oven open and set at ‘broil’, and a pack of 37 blenders running continuously for a month.”

Factually, that’s correct.  George Floyd was so high you can see his footprints on the Moon.  George Floyd nearly certainly killed himself with drugs.  But could you say that at the typical workplace that has offices and desks and HR?

I was amazed at how many people are offended by breastfeeding.  Heck, I was just trying to bond with my dog.

Sure!

But if you offended someone?

Then you’d be fired.  And then HR would whisper “fillintheblankaphobe” every time you tried to get a reference.  Good luck finding work after that, right?

And, yes, the idea isn’t that you said something offensive, it’s that you offended someone.  That’s the standard.  And in 2020, every single Leftist is looking to be offended.  Wear a Trump 2020 hat?  I’m sure that you’ll say something to upset some Leftist burrowed into your organization.  They’re watching.  Understand they don’t want justice, they want Social Justice, which to them means you being fired.

There are dozens of other, equally factual comments you could make that would get you fired.   Cisco Systems® fired several people after diversity training.  What did they do?  Well, on was fired for saying “All lives matter.”  So you can be sure that whatever those people said was the worstest evar!

I Googled® cigarette lighters, and got over 56,000,000 matches.

Another example?  James Damore was fired from Google®.  Why?  He questioned the “ideological echo chamber” at Google™.  Since (for now) it’s illegal to fire an employee in California for their political ideology, it’s likely that Mr. Damore walked away with a big pile of cash – but he’s the exception, not the rule.

The idea of the Left is to take us from the Silent Majority to the Silenced Majority.  They don’t want anything to spoil their “ideological echo chamber” because the one thing that Leftists cannot tolerate is competing ideas, especially competing ideas that work.

Nixon had this one right.  He wasn’t alone, at least not then.  But you’re not alone now.

And they can’t stop the signal.

Friday Movies. Because I Said So.

“A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” – Patton

Patton hated fighting against the German fighting tank. No one likes the Peter Panzer.

Last month I did a post on books. The response was amazing, and had lots of comments from folks that aren’t regular commenters. It also cost me about $50 in books that are now on my shelf and in the “to read” pile. And I thank you folks for that. Now I won’t get through my “to read” pile until 2254.

To follow up, I thought I’d bring up movies. Manly movies. This summer, Pugsley and The Boy and I spent several nights watching Man Movies. These were movies that I selected that exhibited manly virtues. I’ll go through some of them below.

I’ve selected movies that are greater than 17 years old. Why? Because of the second movie on the list. Otherwise it would be 20 years, and that’s a long time. My friend drove a limo for 20 years, and now in this economy has nothing to chauffer it.

One question I’ll answer about each one is does the movie pass the three criteria of the Bechdel Test? The Bechdel Test was devised by (really) 1980’s lesbian women to use as a criteria on what movies to watch. I’m not very optimistic that good Man Movies will pass this test:

  1. The movie has to have at least two women,
  2. who talk to each other,
  3. about something other than a man.

And no, none of these movies are about the invention of braille, even though I’ve heard that’s a great feel-good movie.

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First up:

Patton

Patton was my favorite movie the first time I watched it. How old was I? I was still in the PJ and Saturday morning cartoon set. As long-term readers might have guessed, I have a passion for history. General Patton (because of the movie Patton) is a primary reason I developed that love.

Patton also has a personal connection to the Wilder family. Pa Wilder was yelled at personally by General Patton. It turns out that Pa had been sent with orders to deliver supplies to a unit that didn’t exist. So, he’d stop and ask where the (I’m making this up) 551st Infantry Division was. There was no 551st Infantry. The United States Army was purposely trolling any spies that were in France. When Pa Wilder ended up at Patton’s 3rd Army and asked for the 551st, Patton yelled at Pa and then took all of the supplies. And all of the trucks. All of them. Pa Wilder and his company had to hop a ride to get back to Paris.

I walked in and The Mrs. was yelling at the TV: “Don’t go into the church, you moron!” She always gets emotional at our wedding videos.

I’m surprised Patton didn’t tell Pa and his Company to grab their M-1’s and hoof it to Bastogne.

(Note for newer readers who can do math: Ma and Pa Wilder adopted me after the wolves who raised me on Wilder Mountain decided I was too wild for them to continue having me around. Pa Wilder would be grandpa age, since I’m firmly a Gen X kid.)

One night this summer The Mrs. went to bed fairly early. I realized that neither Pugsley nor The Boy had seen Patton. The movie is nearly three hours in length. I expected that they’d watch a few minutes of it, pat me on the head for my love of this outdated movie, and move on.

Nope. They sat, riveted. When they had to go to the bathroom? “Hey, Dad, pause it, please.”

Does Patton pass the Bechdel Test? No. The only women I recall in the movie are a Garden Society that Patton gives a speech to. They have no lines. Would Patton be stronger if there was some subplot involving a young and brave female supersoldier who could fight even better than all the men because she’s the bestest ever?

Of course not.

I had trophy for winning a limbo competition, but it was stolen. How low can you get?

What Patton does, though, is inspire. He was a fountain of bravery and strength. He was probably the best fighting general the United States had in Europe. Patton’s sense of determination and destiny? The stuff of legend. Patton won Oscars® for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Most Manliest Movie Ever Made Up To 1970.

Not a second is wasted. The Boy and Pugsley finished the movie with me around 2AM on a Sunday morning. Good times.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World

I first watched this movie with The Boy when he was very young. Master and Commander tells the tale of fictional Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s surgeon as they sail on adventures during the Napoleonic wars before the French started surrendering every month when the power bill came in.

If you’re sad that you have never sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, remember, neither has the Titanic

The stunning thing about this movie is that it’s 100% Manly, even though it was made in 2003. The ship is crewed by men. They try to kill French men, who are in turn also manly. The only women seen in the movie are some native women who bring supplies to Captain Aubrey’s ship, the H.M.S. Surprise. Bechdel Test? Fail.

The rest of the movie?

Combat. Strategy. Honor. Tons of honor: there’s even a suicide done for the sake of honor.

And also a responsibility. In one scene, a 14 year old is left in command of the H.M.S. Surprise. The honor and responsibility are not lost on him: a continuing theme of this movie is the responsibility of command. Sure, if you’re the Captain you get the biggest bedroom on the ship. But the cost of that is responsible for every man on the ship, and even the ship itself.

The cinematography is amazing – and the H.M.S. Surprise is a real sailing ship. The movie didn’t make a bunch of money at the box office. That’s okay. At least they made it.

Russell Crowe plays Captain Aubrey. It’s his best role in any movie I’ve seen him in.

Zulu

The Battle of Rourke’s Drift is one of those, “did this really happen?” history moments. Several thousand Zulu warriors (3,000? 4,000?) attacked a small mission in South Africa in 1879. Who was left to defend it? About 150 troops, but only 120 of them were able to fight.

And who was in charge? An engineer. Lt. John Chard, who was described later as, “one of the most unambitious and ugly men” that particular general had ever met. That general had to award him the Victoria Cross (VC), which is the highest award Great Britain has for bravery. Smells like envy to me since the general never earned a VC himself. Also, 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to soldiers at Rourke’s Drift. That’s not 1% of every Victoria Cross ever awarded.

But it’s close to 1% of all of them. Ever.

I did find a great new machine at the gym – it does everything: Chips. Cookies. Candy bars.

The 1964 movie Zulu is about that battle. It’s fairly unique in that the leader of the Zulu warriors attacking the British soldiers is played by the grandson of the Zulu chief who actually did attack Rourke’s Drift. Stanley Baker and Michael Caine play Lt. John Chard and Lt. Gonville Bromhead. Yes. That’s a real name. Someone actually named their child Michael.

Why is this movie great?

Well, it obviously fails the Bechdel Test, since there are zero conversations between women about anything.

But neither soldier really wants to command. Both of them (in real life) were described as wanting to smoke pipes and fish rather than work hard. Chard assumes command because he has to – he became a Lieutenant first.

The only way to win against 33 to 1 odds? Discipline. And the British soldiers showed it in abundance. They fought smartly, as a group. The movie is well paced, and Stanley Baker and Michael Caine tear up the screen. There are some historical inaccuracies, but it’s a movie, not a documentary.

Why is it manly?

Duty. Ingenuity. Unwillingness to give up.

The Thing

Since there are no women at all in The Thing (1982), it becomes the fourth out of four movies to fail the Bechdel Test. I’m thinking that 1980’s lesbian women probably aren’t good judges of movies I’ll like based on a criteria that has nothing to do with what makes a good movie. Good thing the Oscars® are joining them and demanding that arbitrary criteria are included in selecting the Best Picture Oscar™!

Chuck Norris was abducted by aliens. Once. That’s how we know that UFOs aren’t real.

The Thing was never in danger of winning an Oscar®. It’s a gore-fest John Carpenter movie. And it’s wonderful. If you don’t like horror movies – it’s not for you. But in this movie, Kurt Russell does his best Clint Eastwood imitation for the duration of the film and starts the movie by pouring scotch into a chess computer because it beats him.

The basic plot is that a small group of men are cut off from the world in Antarctica. Antarctica means “no bears.” Arctic means, from the Greek word, arktos, which means “bear.” Antarctica means the opposite, which would be no bears. But Kurt Russell has a manly beard that would make any bear claim him as their own.

The Thing is a great movie.

There is suspense. Just like evaluating a member of Congress, there is that moment when you have no idea who is good and who is bad.

But there is also the manly moment – when Kurt Russell stands up and decides he’s going to stop the alien. Is it because he’s a good guy? Yes. He decided fairly early in the movie that he was probably going to die, but that he would sacrifice everything so that a shape-shifting alien wouldn’t be able to escape Antarctica and become Billary Clinton.

The Thing again returns to the theme of being a man: Liking humans more than aliens. Willing to fight to the last to stop those aliens. Adapting to extreme changes in reality during the span of days.

I have a much longer list, but those are the four that made the cut for a very short list.

Your suggestions?

Magic and Money: More Related Than You Think

“It was the most amazing magic trick I’ve ever seen.” – The Prestige

Mimes aren’t magicians, they just have obstacle illusions.

This is a post about finance.  It’s an awesome one, so bear with me.

I’ve always been a bit of a ham.  When I was in third grade, I got up and did impressions and sang a song.  This was in front of the entire school on talent night, Kindergarten through Senior, and all their parents.  My impressions were horrible.  My singing was worse.

The next year, I got to play a drunken uncle in our fourth grade play.  I’m not making that up.  I had a flask and everything, and the teacher pinned the neck tie of my costume up over my shoulder, since drunks apparently can’t wear a tie properly.  However, you can bet that I delivered my lines with the best drunken slur a fourth grader can muster.

It was another time and place, where we could make jokes with the idea of being funny.  If they did a play like that today, I’m sure that the school district would be shut down, burned, and exorcised from Twitter™ and Facebook®.  I mean, the parents in the play were a man and a woman played . . . by a boy and a girl.  And they were married. And they didn’t have tattoos.

Sacrilege!

The floor collapsed during the fourth grade play.  I guess I was going through a stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, I lived pretty far out on Wilder Mountain.  The nearest kid to my house lived nine miles away.  The nearest McDonalds™ at that time was a two hour car trip.  So, a trip to a magic store was entirely out of the question.  But then came college.

Where I was still a ham.

In college, I was living near Capitol City, and they did have a magic store.  So, I bought three magic tricks.  All three were fun, because they were professional grade, and if you had the mechanical dexterity to open a beer can, you could do very professional, close up magic.

One was a coin trick.

COVID shut down the mint?  It makes no cents.

It’s still my favorite trick.  I haven’t done it in years, but it’s fun to do.  First, I’d show the person I’m doing the trick with (we’ll call them “Mark”) two coins – a United States $0.50 coin, and a Mexican 50 centavo coin.  Then, I put the coins into their right hand.  By the time the coins are in their hands, it’s not a half dollar and a 50 centavo piece – it’s now a half dollar and a United States $0.25.

I’d then ask Mark to put one coin in each hand, while his hands were behind his back, so I can’t see them.  Once each hand has a coin in it, I ask them to hold their hands straight out in front of them.  I’d then guess where the $0.50 piece was.

That wasn’t the trick.

Then, regardless of if my guess was correct, I’d bet them something (say, a Coke® or a beer – remember I was in college) that they couldn’t show me the 50 centavo piece.

They’d smile, and then open their hand, and then show me the quarter and look amazed that it wasn’t the 50 centavo piece.

Except the first few times, it didn’t work.  At all.  It’s not that I messed up the trick, one hand had $0.50 in it, and one hand had a quarter.  But the first few times I did the trick, the Mark immediately recognized that it wasn’t the 50 centavo, and knew it was a quarter.

Well, that sucks.

You have no idea how long this meme took.

But then I thought back – at the magic store where I’d bought the trick, the salesman performing the trick had said, “notice how much smaller the 50 centavo piece is than the half dollar.”  I tried that the next time I did the trick.

Perfect.

Mark, merely by my suggestion, had developed the mental image that the 50 centavo piece was small.  Every time I’ve done the trick using that phrase, and I mean every single time, ever, it worked like a charm.  Without saying “notice how much smaller . . .”?  Over half the time the person could tell that the second coin was a quarter.

The next refinement was the reveal.  Remember when I told the Mark to hold his hands out front, and I’d guess which hand had the fifty cent piece in it?  Amazingly, 90% of people put the half dollar into the same hand.  Which hand?  I’m not giving up all of my secrets.

I would, on purpose, guess the wrong hand after telling Mark not to show me the coins, right or wrong.

They’d smile and tell me I was wrong.  They felt awesome – they’d beaten the magician.  Obviously, the trick was going wrong.

All part of the plan.

The next thing I said was, “I bet you a beer Coke™ that you can’t show me the 50 centavo piece,” and then they opened their hand to see an ordinary quarter?  After seeing the quarter, I’d ask Mark to open the other hand where they’d see a normal fifty cent piece.  They were always amazed when I did it right, but in order for the trick to work, I had to say the right things.

The trick paid for itself in, um, beverages and things.  And the Mark didn’t mind – Mark was amused, and I got paid a small fee for that amusement.

But the things that sold the trick wasn’t the mechanics and metal, it was what I was saying, and how I was saying it, and, even being intentionally wrong was part of the final sale.  You can buy this trick yourself, for about $12 – search “Scotch and Soda Trick” on Amazon.

You’re welcome.

But what does this have to do with money?

A lot, actually.

His version of Purple Rain was awful.

Number One – People who sell stuff know how to sell.  Like my magic trick, salesmen do trial and error to learn what works.  If you buy a car every five years from a dealer, and they have contact with 30 customers a week, who has the upper hand?

If you’re listening to a politician who’s spent his entire life just getting elected, what likelihood to you have of understanding their real character and values?  They probably don’t remember them themselves.  If you’re buying a car, a house, or even a burger at McDonalds, they know the game.  There’s a reason that every well-trained McDonalds© employee asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

They know the game.  McDonalds® knows that a potato costs them pennies, but a basket of fries can go for $3.  Profits may be fleeting, but the pant size increase is forever.

One of the tricks that Bernie Madoff used with his customers was to dress very frugally.  Despite the fact that he was stealing billions ($20 billion by the best estimate I found), he knew the game better than his Marks.  He also was selective with clients – he wouldn’t accept just anyone.  No, you had to apply and be approved.  You had to know someone.

Number Two – Knowing the trick is everything.  When I did the coin trick, only I knew what was coming.  It was all scripted, and I knew exactly what the outcome was going to be.  When I asked people to let me guess which hand the coin was in, they thought that was the trick.  No, the trick was that there was no fifty centavo piece.  But because I created the structure, I knew where the trick was.

That’s a tremendous advantage.  I can use that knowledge to create a scenario where I can manipulate emotions to get the reactions and responses I want.  Why?  I control the conditions.  I control the reveal.

What sorts of tricks are out in the world?

  • “No money down.”
  • “I never got your text.”
  • “Yes, I’ll hold your beer, there’s no way this could go wrong.”
  • “No interest for the first six months.”
  • “Housing prices always go up.”
  • “CNN – The Most Trusted Name in News.”

Number Three – Things are rarely as they seem.  Mark saw only what I wanted him to see during the trick, and I carefully made sure by closing his hand around the coins after I put them there.  Then I told him to not let me see when he put the coins in each hand.  Why?  Because I didn’t want him to see what was really going on.

One of the biggest illusions that most people don’t recognize is that our money is entirely made up.  The $ and € and ¥ and £ only have meaning because we give them meaning.  The United States dollar has no backing other than . . . the promise to trade it for a dollar.  That’s it.  And people keep playing the game even though the Federal Reserve™ tells them the dollar will be worth less every year.  On purpose.

Oh, and the Federal Reserve©?  It’s not Federal, and it doesn’t have a Reserve.  Discuss.

Generally, people didn’t believe that the government had a super-secret plan to eavesdrop on all electronic communications from anyone.  Then Edward Snowden showed . . . they have a plan to monitor all electronic communications, everywhere.  When Snowden joined Twitter® he soon had more followers than the National Security Agency.  That’s okay, the NSA follows everyone.

I knew there was a reason my computer has a sticker that says “Intel Inside.”

Number Four – It’s super easy to suggest things to people.  This shocked me.  One time Scott Adams mentioned that in a line at a copier, if you have to make a copy, all you have to do is have a reason to jump the line.  He suggested, “Hey, can I cut in front of you?  I have to make a copy.”  Note that making a copy is exactly what everyone else was doing, but the request, coupled with a reason, seemed to work.  No matter how stupid the reason.

  • Yes, there’s a reason you want ice cream.
  • What, you thought that was impartial?
  • “The Arctic will be ice free by 2013,” – Al Gore.  Hmm.  Trust me.  Next time it really will be.
  • Asking them to do you a small favor. Oddly, this creates a pattern where people are much more likely to do a big favor for you later.  Oh, while you’re at it, hit the subscribe button.  Don’t cost nothin’.
  • Never trust a flatterer.  I had a boss that, one month after he joined the company, wrote a performance review that would have made me think that I needed to apply for the job of Messiah.  Except in my case it made me never trust him.  I was right.
  • Peer Pressure. People like to do what other people consider acceptable, since being socially acceptable is important.  If everyone is doing it, well, I should, too.  I went against the grain, and now Wal-Mart® insists that I wear pants from now on.

Number Five – The person proposing the bet may not have your best interest at heart.  In the example above, I ended up getting a few beverages.  The person involved got an equal exchange.  No one was ever mad – if they had been, I’d have told them to ignore the bet.

But.

I used the name “Mark” for a reason.  It’s what conmen (ever notice that the Politically Correct Police don’t object to that one?) call the object of their scam.  I’ve even been at carnivals where a guy running a game called out, “hey, Mark” to someone walking by to try to get them to break a balloon and win a poster of Gillian Anderson.  Only five dollars a dart!

I wonder if the aliens believed in her?

There are probably a few other examples that I could bring up, but it’s late, and I have to go practice not singing.  Bonus points if you can tell what two impersonations I did in third grade in the comments.

See, I told you this post would be awesome.

The Great Exodus And Continued Attack Of The Left

“Murder, arson, terror, I’ll agree to anything that gives us power. Power! And we can’t have power if we compromise. Even though it takes years, terror and power.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

Hmmm, ever notice that people started worrying about Global Warming® when the Soviets collapsed? I guess they missed the Cold War.

We’re in the middle of the biggest changes that we’ve seen in the country since World War II or the Great Depression. After WWII, the cities filled up. Coming back from the war, soldiers found that far fewer farmers were needed. Dorito® farmers were also impacted, even if they had a cool ranch.

The centralization of the cities offered the chance to work at huge manufacturing facilities. This was driven as United States took the industry developed to build Sherman tanks and other weapons of mass destruction and converted them to building cars and washing machines. Clarification – they didn’t convert the Sherman tanks into washing machines. But I kinda wished they had – the spin cycle would have been cool, and it probably would only have taken 150 gallons of gasoline per load.

Sure, there were lots of small manufacturing plants scattered across small towns everywhere – there are a few still operating in Modern Mayberry – but the big job creation was in the big cities. As factories have been offshored and closed down, many of the jobs that pulled people into cities have gone away. Cities in many cases (but not all) are now anchored by office jobs – things like finance, insurance, real estate and professional services. Which is nice, because they’ll need insurance after this year.

I’m going to protest the next riot by going out and buying a television.

As I predicted in past posts, we’re seeing the Fall of the Cities as people look around and ask themselves, “Why am I buying a 1,000 square foot two-bedroom house that costs a million dollars to live here?” It was a question I was asking even before the Wu-Flu©. But COVID-19 was the gasoline on the, er, bonfire of the cities that finally got the people living there to ask it, too.

  • First, it showed how cities are hotspots for spreading disease. Except during peaceful protests.
  • Second, work from home showed how few jobs needed to go in to the office every day to keep the large companies going. Why do you need to be in New York City working in a cubicle when you could do the same job from the middle of Missouri with a phone connection? One business I’ve heard of dropped its use of offices from five skyscraper floors down to two. And they don’t anticipate ever using those spare three floors again.
  • Third, it created economic chaos, unemployment, and uncertainty. This creates fear in the lives of people doing their work on a day to day basis. How will they pay for PEZ®? How will they get a job when millions are unemployed, and companies are failing?

My friend Dante was involved in PETA protests, but stopped. Dante’s in fur now.

  • Fourth, it separated people from each other in their daily lives. Even the masks, which (whatever their efficacy) are preventing normal human interaction in most cities. Some states have mandated that anyone outside of their house has to wear a mask. Not when within six feet of one another – just anyone who is outside. Additionally, people need to see each other’s faces – that’s how we bond and interact. People need people. Even the most introverted person needs human contact at some interval.
  • Fifth, the result of this was a moment in time that could be made into a crisis of crime and destruction. This allowed BLM® and Antifa™ an opportunity. And that opportunity wouldn’t be wasted.

Antifa® isn’t new – it’s been around since the 1930’s. It started in Germany under the name Antifaschistische Aktion, and was set up (surprise!) as part of the Stalinist wing of the German commies. Today in the United States, they use the exact same symbol, and exact same name, Antifaschistische Aktion.

I knew there were problems with Antifa™ in this black and white photo, but I couldn’t see the red flags.

The original organization started even before there was fascism in Germany of any significance. Fascism was defined by the commies as capitalist society in general. So, unless you’re a communist (and if you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re not) this means you. Antifa© puts the world into two buckets:

  • Good: Antifa© members.
  • Bad: Everyone else. And, honestly, they’re not so sure that some of the communists might not need some quality time in Spokane Gulag.

Antifa© has led riots across the country. They are systematically attempting to destroy the United States, and they’ve decided to start in the cities. And people are starting to move out. The patterns are varied. One YouTuber® I watch occasionally said he’s done with San Francisco. His wife had a successful business. Had. Now it’s folding up. He cited the figure that 1400 of 2500 street-level businesses in San Francisco were just gone.

What’s the difference between a gender studies degree and being homeless? About five years.

Now he and his wife are gone. They haven’t decided which “red state” they’re moving to but they’ve already left San Francisco. He did directly promise to leave his Blue State ways behind him. He has the recognition that it wasn’t an accident that San Francisco is a mess, rather it was the result of decades of bad decisions. Given that his job can be done anywhere he has an Internet connection, nearly every place in the United States is an option.

The same thing is happening in New York City. People are leapfrogging out of the cities to the suburbs. People in the suburbs are moving rural. They’ve seen what’s happening, and have decided they’ll take whatever real estate gains they can get, and go.

Now an additional crisis has been created:

As such, we’re witnessing a great migration of people out of the cities, and out of Blue States. But that’s not enough, is it? The goal isn’t to own the cities, the goal is to eliminate fascists. Which is everyone who isn’t in Antifa®. How better to do that then to create yet another crisis. It looks like that’s exactly what someone has done.

The fires spreading across the West? At least some of the fires burning all over the West were intentionally set – see various stories at the bottom. It appears that places like Facebook® are banning stories where anyone says that Antifa© is lighting the fire. So, no matter how it looks like it’s something exactly like what Antifa™ would do, and in locations where Antifa™ hangs out, and done by people who look like they could be on an Antifa® recruiting poster, it surely can’t be Antifa©, right?

The fires have been devastating – at least 600,000 people in Oregon have been placed under an evacuation order. Large numbers of these fires were caused, on purpose.

Sounds like a weapon of mass destruction to me . . . .

Old pic ctsy: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P046279 / Weinrother, Carl / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Fragility, Resilience, Or Antifragility?

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense.  Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords.  I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day.  In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile.  The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not?  Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II.  Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me.  After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile.  Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance.  But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up.  In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions.  It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points.  A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too.  More than once.  Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score?  Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles.  The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone.  My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away.  I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend.  And he was there for me when I got divorced.  The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile.  In fact, you move toward the next stage:  Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union.  Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery.  But the Soviet people fought.  And fought.  And fought.  Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure.  The Soviet Union had redundancy.  Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up.  And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union.  People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked.  The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender.  If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient?  That’s the focus on values.  Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile.  Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher.  It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger.  Vases don’t do that.  But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system.  When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger.  Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people.  Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men.  But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting.  The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth.  No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941.  The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile?  Well, start by being resilient.  Then?  Add learning.  If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them?  That’s a good start.  Capacity?  Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure.  Efficient systems are prone to failure.  The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn.  When one income goes away?  They system fails.  Unused money (savings) is redundancy.  It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks.  Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you.  This blog is one of mine.  And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little.  I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required.  One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe.  Nope.  My soul is in this.  Do I agree with everything I’ve written?  Of course not.  I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years.  I’ve learned.  Some of my views have changed as I have changed.  I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more.  But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me.  I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode.  It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode.  Resiliency is about persevering.  It’s not bad.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life?  Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.