November 2021 – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We There Yet? (Part II)

“Brandon, come on, let’s go . . . Brandon?” – Brightburn

Midnight?

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve bolded both 9. and 10. That’s the lead story.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Making The Call, Part II? – Violence And Censorship Update – Models For The Future, It’s Personal – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – After Virginia – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 600 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

Making The Call, Part II?

Last month we spent time discussing whether or not the United States has met the international criteria for being in a civil war. The answer (in my opinion) is that we are close enough that it’s hard to tell. Some people are solidly on the “it’s already going” and some are not. One bit of criteria that was sent to me by a faithful reader – thank you 173d VietVet. Mike Shelby (Forward Observer) wrote up a short missive on this question (LINK) and came out on the “no” side.

That’s fair. He put forward some criteria, and I thought they’d be worth discussing this month. These four bullet points are direct quotes:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police)
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens)
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide)
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting)

My responses are in bold:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police) – Have you seen the police recently? They have equipment that most world militaries would love to have. Heck, our police even have stuff we didn’t leave for the Taliban. To require military action seems irrelevant.
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens) – The trend in our current generation of warfare explicitly uses the citizen as a belligerent, if not the main belligerent. In my mind, it is more than enough that the government aids and abets citizens to kill others. This is indisputably happening right now.
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide) – This is the best point of the bunch. The violence (at some point) must go both ways. Right now, it is observably one-sided, and is looks much more like a genocide.
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting) – Another valid point, but remember, in dirty wars, state sponsored combat looks like . . . crime. I do hope the violence level drops, but there is no sign of it now.

Again, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shelby, but the reliance on his past military background provides an analysis lens that I do not share and he perhaps parses the terminology a bit more finely than I would. Thankfully, there’s room for both of us to be right.

If A is for apple and B is for banana, what is C for? Explosives.

I’m not going to (besides the notes above) belabor the point. I don’t care if the gun that shoots me belongs to a private from Louisiana or a cop or a Mexican cartel gunman. I’m still dead. And if the government is encouraging, it’s either genocide or, if the fighting goes both ways, it’s civil war.

There is more from Mr. Shelby a bit later in this edition of the Weather Report.

Violence And Censorship Update

Not a lot to add to violence this month.

Censorship, continues in full force. At the beginning of the month, Congress had a Facebook® “whistleblower” as the main witness at hearings where . . . she said the big problem with Facebook© is that they don’t censor nearly enough.

What does the “p” in Facebook© stand for? Privacy.

Yup. That was the story. But then it came out that that the “whistleblower” spent last October making sure that information that could damage Joe Biden was censored from Facebook™. She was on the team that made sure that information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed.

I’m shocked, shocked that she was wanting yet more censorship from Facebook.

Applying for work at Facebook® is easy. They already have your details.

Since it’s November, I thought I’d remind everyone of a picture from last year. Consider it a stroll down memory-hole lane.

There was more fraud in the 2020 election than in a Thanksgiving Wilder Family Monopoly® game.

Again, if you want free and fair elections, it’s absolutely certain that you block windows so the public can’t view the vote counting in any way. Stalin said it well: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Models For The Future – It’s Personal

I mentioned above that we’d see more from the Forward Observer, and here’s an excellent article where he discusses the model of the Irish Troubles as a model for potential future difficulties. You can read it here (LINK).

Similarly, Mary Christine put forward a fictional piece at The Burning Platform in 2019. Those set as a fiction, it describes how conflict escalated from the political to a guerilla war in Missouri during the Civil War. You can read it here (LINK).

A third model to think about would be the Second Boer War, where the British defeated the Boer Republics and forcefully integrated them into British South Africa. Like the other two, this conflict was based on guerilla tactics. To defeat them, the British finally just started putting Boer civilians (women and children) into concentration camps with all the expected brutality and tragedy that is implied by that. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the camps.

These models all have several things in common, but what strikes me is the utter brutality in each of them and the sometimes-targeted attacks on non-combatants. Conflict of this type is marked by tragedy in a way that lasts for generations – it becomes and remains personal.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and our perception of violence is holding steady.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it ticked up this month again, mainly on inflation fears.

Economic:

Economic measures ticked upwards in October – despite my prediction that they’d drop.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels last three months, and this rate is 4x the rate from any previous year in the last four.

After Virginia

Virginia has scared the Left, badly. In their minds, Virginia had become a permanent Blue state – a Leftist outpost where statues could be taken down and Critical Race Theory could start along with hormone treatments for kindergartners.

Then they lost. Big time. And it wasn’t just a loss, it was a loss that was a psychological blow. Biden is in political free-fall, and is less popular than COVID-19.

The Left is realizing the hard truth: they won’t sweep into a victory, everywhere and forever. The comments section in Leftist areas?

Calling for a peaceful split. Previously, when winning, they wanted it all – they were sure they were going to win and establish a socialist paradise from sea to shining sea.

This was a sea change. They realize that the attitude of the Right is changing, and they realize that they’re managing to make Trump look good to the swing voters. Is a consensus building for a split?

Is this where we might beheaded?

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

From Sea To Shining Sea

Brooklyn 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1NR_DWUeKI

Brooklyn 2: https://twitter.com/i/status/1454903434046578688

Lancaster PA: https://youtu.be/-Ch2q0Gw5Vg

Washington DC: https://twitter.com/i/status/1447913542674522117

Chicago 1: https://twitter.com/i/status/1445784277807890436

Chicago 2:https://twitter.com/i/status/1445483216475885576

Minneapolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_6hA9PgICc

Mobile AL:https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1449214856138305536

Berkeley Campus: https://youtu.be/dYB9-o5QklE

Army Boot Camp: https://twitter.com/i/status/1449910120364879880

Marine Field Exercise: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10159949/Royal-Marines-commandos-force-troops-humiliating-surrender-training-exercise.html

Bad Guys…Guns…Good Gals

https://alphanews.org/78-instances-of-fully-automatic-gunfire-in-minneapolis-so-far-this-year/

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-is-killing-10000-black-americans-every-year-158601

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article255162407.html

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/more-women-especially-black-women-are-becoming-gun-owners-ownership-firearms/531-49622eec-5ac8-4793-ab89-cfa0213ebff4

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-winsome-sears-becomes-virginias-first-female-lieutenant-governor

Election Tidbits

https://twitter.com/GlennYoungkin/status/1448396312098050048

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/breaking-fulton-county-georgia-ordered-one-million-absentee-ballots-printer-days-2020-election-knowing-no-time-mail/

https://www.wtnh.com/news/politics/emails-released-to-news-8-show-a-flurry-of-confusion-over-mass-absentee-ballots-mailed-to-guilford-voters/

https://www.defendflorida.org/canvassing

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/secretary_raffensperger_calls_on_department_of_justice_to_investigate_allegations_of_fulton_county_shredding_applications

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/ap_news/gbi-chief-not-enough-evidence-to-pursue-gop-s-ballot-fraud-claim/article_edd11901-b7a1-524f-9815-6bedbdd4bc98.html

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/kline-zucks-bucks-were-illegal/

Secession – Thinking Nationally

https://link.medium.com/yNzD8Sxhzkb

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-md-rodricks-1010-civil-war-20211008-sy33rtzmind5vnsawrshjh2tw4-story.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-saw-americas-crackup-coming-in-2011he-says-its-worse-now

https://alt-market.us/in-a-civil-war-the-authoritarian-left-would-be-easily-beaten-but-it-wont-end-there/

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/09/a-new-confederacy-and-the-have-already-seceded/

Secession – Acting Locally

https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously

https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/california-secede-one-group-got-a-key-approval-last-week-to-try/

https://www.axios.com/atlantas-whitest-neighborhood-may-secede-7ae8755d-d378-4aa1-8534-f90faf029356.html

https://dnyuz.com/2021/10/22/bye-maryland-lawmakers-in-3-counties-float-a-plan-to-secede-from-the-state/

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-canada-health-public-health-idaho-0d2015c826bb01a2cd04b31254c870c5

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/10/10/civil-war-trending-on-twitter-after-comment-made-by-trump-supporter/?sh=3c6d9b0b1853

https://www.laconiadailysun.com/news/state/lawmaker-wants-new-hampshire-to-declare-independence/article_d2717e73-5b7b-55b8-a8b3-aa7a45da9bf2.html

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/voters/should-the-2022-ballot-include-a-vote-on-new-hampshire-seceding-from-the-united-states/poll_fc16f69e-161c-11ec-8c39-b318093e8de3.html

https://www.amazon.com/Break-Up-Secession-Division-Imperfect-ebook/dp/B07X9PWSVG

https://www.amazon.com/American-Secession-Looming-National-Breakup-ebook/dp/B07N94RL11

Secession – Everybody Calm Down

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/no-were-not-more-divided-than-we-were-during-the-civil-war/

https://www.governing.com/now/is-america-in-a-cold-civil-war-not-at-all

https://www.sunjournal.com/2021/10/10/rich-lowry-national-divorce-is-a-poisonously-stupid-idea/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443

https://www.silive.com/news/2021/10/its-dangerous-for-pro-trumpers-or-anybody-else-to-want-to-secede-from-the-united-states-opinion.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043401926/russia-expert-fiona-hill-there-is-nothing-for-you-here

Secession – The Least Of Our Worries?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10154745/The-pace-China-moving-stunning-Americas-No-2-ranking-military-officer-said.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moment-biden-casually-committed-ww3-over-taiwan-last-nights-town-hall

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/secret-chinese-philosopher-lessons-for-america/

https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/

https://dokumen.pub/america-against-america.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

Change: Start Small

“I’m a man, but I can change. If I have to. I guess.” – The Red Green Show

It’s amazing to me how little people change. It’s the same process, but the clothes are just so tiny.

Change.

It’s inevitable. The only choice I have is whether change is intentional or whether it’s not intentional.

The reason for wanting to change varies, especially with the change. In most cases, it’s because something in my life isn’t working. My plan on only paying for power once every three months? Turns out the electric company isn’t good with that.

Or, if it is working, it’s awful. Ever have a job that is awful, that sucks your life out minute by minute and leaves it on a moist puddle on the floor? Yeah, me too. And that’s a sign for a change.

For whatever reason, the biggest difficulty most people have with change is starting it. Scott Adams of Dilbert® fame had this advice – even though it’s written as a quote I’m paraphrasing: “If you want to do something, just do the very smallest thing. If you have to move your hand move your finger. Your smallest finger. The smallest muscle in the smallest finger.”

People who speak more than one language are considered more attractive. Unless the language is Klingon.

It’s amazingly good advice. Once physical movement starts, even the smallest of movements, it’s easier for the chain to start. I have unconsciously done a variation of this technique for years. Whenever I have to clean a room, I pick a place. I almost always start with a corner.

It’s very, very easy to clean out one foot in either direction from a corner. Then, when the corner is perfect, I move a foot outward from the corner in both directions. And then further. And further. You might ask, “Well, how dirty does John Wilder let a room get that he has to start in a one-foot by one-foot section?”

I live with rodeo clowns. Okay, now that The Boy is in college, rodeo clown. Even though the chaos distortion field in our house is down to a single teenager-sized bubble, I’m still amazed that the door isn’t always open with tumbleweeds and vermin-like opossums and Leftists constantly drifting through.

So, yes, I start with a corner and build-out. It’s the easiest way. Plus, when the corner looks great it creates a contrast with the rest of the room. Then all I have to do is make the rest of the room look like the corner.

I never drink when I clean. I’m a dry cleaner.

So, starting with changing just one thing makes a lot of sense. Changing just one thing out of your life is easy. I mean, after O.J. Simpson stopped killing people, well, the world opened right up for him.

I’ll give a personal example. I generally avoid video games. I played them (from time to time) when I was younger. But then I saw an episode of a television show, Dream On.

The secretary, Toby, was horrible. She generally ignored her job, but on one episode, she spent the entire game playing a video game at work. It was a virtual supermarket.

She started as a bagboy. Ten minutes into the episode, she was yelling, “Clean up on aisle three!” and had been promoted to cashier. A while later, she was manager of the produce department.

The episode was nearly over, and then Toby had beat the game, “I did it! I’m the manager! Of,” long pause, voice falling, “a supermarket,” voice moving down to a whisper, and filling with despair, “that doesn’t exist.”

The most common occupation to put a person in the hospital? Paramedic.

That had a big impact on me. Winning a video game was, well, hollow. I gave them up (mostly) for years and years and years. Then I found one that hooked me. Yeah. Sure, when I conquered the world, I was conquering a world that didn’t exist but . . . the complexity. Good times.

But . . . it was taking six hours of my life a week. Honestly, life is wrapped so tight that those six hours are straight off the top – I’m swapping sleep for world conquest. So, I decided in September to stop. So far I’ve gained about fifty hours of my life back. Did I sleep during that time? Sure, some. But the change was significant.

And it was positive.

It wasn’t a big change, but it was a change. Will I play the game again? Sure I will. It’s really fun. But I’ll pick and choose when I’m going to give that sleep up.

So, starting a change is one thing.

The next? Keeping up with it. There has to be a reason. Mark Twain said it very well – “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

I hear Shania Twain named her child Choo Choo.

The biggest thing people worry about is failure. And it should be a big deal. But dealing with the consequences of failure? Get up and start again. Like Mark Twain also said, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

It’s okay, he eventually got down to smoking just a single cigar a day, but he noted, “it was the size of a crutch.” Plus? Every single day of his life, he got to be him. So, big cigars and being Mark Twain?

Sounds like a win to me.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school. I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses. Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good. A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster. The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax. However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax: Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff. We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax. They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce. This increases the price. In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability. In practice, I’ve seen both. Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition. Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children. Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills. And those were the good jobs. “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners. So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes. Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me? That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave. They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box. There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded. I’m raisin awareness. But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes. Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme. It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses. At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years. But, hey, books for blind kids, right? It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit! Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us. What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored. The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria. Since then? Everything they focus on gets worse. So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes. People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously. It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well. They touch every physical item in the economy. If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it. It’s a tax on people who have to commute. It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls. The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too. A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply. But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks. Why are they in short supply? Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made. Does that make Ford® happy? No. The shortage tax doesn’t help them. About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax: inflation. It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day. The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell. Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom. In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy. As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom. I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax. It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over. Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®. Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going? Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those? Well, Biden still has three more years.

Masque Of The Red Death, 2021 Version

“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.

Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner. It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner. Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth. The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.

It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.

Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago. Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it. Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs. (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people. It just takes timing. You should try it.)

But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?

When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .

The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference. There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever. How to make that better? Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.

As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today: The Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:

Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside. Spoiler alert: it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party? Death.

The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.

Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.

What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?

Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up. Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it. Nurses and doctors? Not taking it.

The result? Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities. Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.

Oops.

I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview. “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.

In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates. If you need an ambulance ride, you get one. It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.

Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands. Why? Pilots don’t want “the jab” either. Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.

Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.

The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
Inflation? Happening everywhere, and with everything.
Political collapse? FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.

Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.

As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic. This isn’t the script for a happy ending. This is the script for a collapse.

I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades. Those ripples are here and now. Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.

Energy? More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity. But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.

He must be fun at parties.

I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding. While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward. This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story. That’s where Death joined the party. To me? That sounds creepy.

I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death. I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner. At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.