Christmas 2023 – Looking Back

“It’s like Christmas at the Kennedy Compound.” – The Simpson’s Movie

What happens if you hallucinate and see a psychologist?

I was going to write a story about one of my Christmas experiences, but instead I thought I’d write about more than just one.  Since my only boss at this blog is you, dear reader, I thought you wouldn’t mind.

So, for this Christmas, I’ll share some of the Christmas memories I have of my family while growing up.  Why?  Because those Christmas memories are the strongest in the young, but our understanding of Christmas as well as our experience of Christmas changes as we age.

The very first Christmas memory I recall as a child was of sneaking out of my bedroom, late at night on Christmas Eve.  As an adopted child, I might have been looking for firearms or an exit so I could exit if these adoptive parents wanted me to do chores or something.  Or not.  I was four.  Long after everyone had gone to bed, filled with excitement, I got up and headed towards the fireplace where I had been told Santa would be dropping off presents.  I recall seeing Santa, putting presents in the stockings, his back to me.  Or it might have been an alien.  I was four, so it was probably just a dream.  Or maybe Ma and Pa Wilder put something extra in my eggnog so I “slept well”.

That would have been an uncomfortable parent-teacher conference for them, “Hey, he’s thirty and in the fourth grade, but he sleeps well.”

Jeff Bezos doesn’t sleep naked – he sleeps with pajamazon.

The next year, when I was five, I recall that there were presents under the tree.  Of course, I was drawn to them like the Colorado Supreme Court is drawn to crack cocaine.  Being five and having the coordination of Joe Biden biking, I stepped right one of the presents that was meant for me.  The result?  My foot tore right through the wrapping paper, revealing to me what the gift from Uncle McWilder was. It was awesome:  a tool belt, complete with real tools including a flashlight, screwdriver, and metal pliers.  Immediately, I imagined putting the belt on and helping Pa Wilder fix things, like the sink.

Our sink had never been broken to my knowledge, but if it ever did break, I had a pair of real metal pliers and all the tools a five-year-old could imagine would be necessary to fix a sink.

We never did fix a sink, though I believe I did an unsanctioned fieldstrip of an Electrolux™ vacuum cleaner.  Note:  I still have the pliers.

I once bought a three-foot long ruler at a yard sale.

I don’t recall a particular present from first grade, but I do recall sitting at dinner.  Being an idiot, I announced to Ma and Pa Wilder (who I think had stopped drugging my food by now) that there was no Santa.  My brother, John Wilder, kicked me savagely under the table.

“Ow!  Why did you do that???”

“You idiot, now they won’t give us presents for our stockings!”

I’ve written about second grade before, here:

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

In third grade, we had moved to Wilder Mountain.  We were in a very small place while the rest of Stately Wilder Manor was still being constructed.  Ma Wilder decided to make wine, which involved really good, thick balloons.

My brother John and I decided to play a strange version of volleyball using one of the really thick wine balloons over the small pine tree Ma Wilder had made since we were living in a house the size of Hunter Biden’s sense of morality.  Good times.

In fourth grade my brother John Wilder was proven wrong, as my parents really went all out filling our socks.  In addition to several G.I. Joes®, my brother and I got wind up cars that, when they hit something, all of their body panels flew off.  I had no idea that kind of toy existed.  What was best?  The surprise.

What crayon is in charge of answering the phone?  Yellow.

In fifth grade my parents had said we weren’t going to get any presents.  It was part of a deal – they were going to buy some new snowmobiles, and because of the expense, those would be our Christmas presents.  To be fair I was fine with that – a snowmobile is just awesome.  But, my parents lied, and on Christmas Day we found lots and lots of presents under the tree.  What were they?  Boardgames, galore.  Everything from Mousetrap® to Clue™ to giant checkers.

The present I remember most from sixth grade was one from my brother – he got me the cassette version of Alice Cooper’s album, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.  An odd Christmas present?  Sure.  But I’ll never cry.

Welcome to my lunchline . . .

Seventh grade brought probably one of the most peaceful Christmas Days from my youth.  I recall on Christmas Day quietly doing a Star Wars™ jigsaw puzzle.  If ever there was a day where there wasn’t a single problem, no strife, nothing but a completely happy time spent with my family growing up, this was the day.

The biggest present I recall for Christmas in my eighth grade year was a Nerf® football, which my brother and I promptly took and threw in the driveway for hours on an unseasonably warm Christmas Day.

As a freshman, my brother and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for Ma and Pa Wilder.  One gift I saw was a towel.  It wasn’t just any towel, but one that had metal snaps and the Everlast® logo.  It looked like boxer’s trunks when you wrapped it around your waist.  This was the era of Rocky™, and I told my brother, “Man, that’s cool.”

He said, “Yes, it is.  I like it, and I’m buying it, for me.”  I was only slightly disappointed, since he had the money, and I didn’t.  Imagine my surprise on Christmas morning when I unwrapped his present to me and found . . . the towel.

I named my pet rock “Rocky” – not because it’s a rocky, but because it has trouble speaking.

When I was a sophomore, all the varsity wrestlers shaved our heads.  Why?  I have no idea.  We were in high school.  Ma Wilder took great amusement in this, and, for Christmas, she made me a knit hat in my high school colors.  The hat was ludicrously long, and perfect in every way.

My junior year was the last year that my brother was with us before he got married, so, in a sense, it was the last, close family Christmas.  Pa Wilder could see the nerd in me, and my present that year was an HP-15C programmable calculator that used reverse Polish notation (RPN).  Back then, HP™ had no equal.

My senior year, I recall that Pa Wilder gave me a metal puzzle – one that he had given all of his friends that year.  Made of brass, it wasn’t a hard puzzle, but I still have it, a memory of the last Christmas before college.

Going through this, it’s interesting (to me, at least) to see the changes over time as I moved from greedy excitement to looking for meaning and peace.  This year?  Not sure I’m getting a present at all, and I’m certain I don’t need one.  I’m also not sure if there’s going to be a Monday post, I’ll give myself permission to skip it if we’re having a good time here at Stately Wilder Manor.

I hope your Christmas is a wonderful one, and brings you peace and meaning as well.

On Winning The Big Fight

“If I owned a company, my employees would love me. They’d have huge pictures of me up on the walls and in their home, like Lenin.” – Seinfeld

And how do we get rid of communists?  We Oxycute™ them!

We’ve talked about the bigger picture recently.  The bigger picture includes Elite Overproduction and The Wealth Pump.  What we haven’t discussed so much is how the Left subverted so many of our institutions.  I think we have the why down pretty well, but let’s go to the “how” of the situation.

It starts with Vladimir Lenin:  “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.”

Yup, Lenin said that.  Or at least someone typed that he said that.  I mean, someone besides me.  And when Lenin said it, it was probably in Russian and I imagine he needed a breath mint, because I always imagined he’d smell like cabbage and B.O.

How does Stalin drink water?  GULAG, GULAG, GULAG.

Regardless, Lenin’s idea was to propagandize kids from the start.  And, in the Soviet Union, he could get away with that because the Soviets had the secret police and the bravado and the people thought they were at their mercy.  I think Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn said it best:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking:  What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?  Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If . . . if . . .  We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

In the United States we were entirely different – there has yet to be a secret police that could act with impunity against Enemies of the State.  Oh, sorry, forgot about Ruby Ridge and Waco and January 6 protestors and the ATF and FBI.  I guess we do have one, but ours is on a shorter (for now) leash since they still have to pretend that the Constitution exists.

I’d tell an ATF joke, but I can’t compete with their supervisors.

But to get to where we are now, things had to start to rot.  The rot in America really started in academia, specifically colleges.  And, the colleges that were targeted were the education departments of the colleges.  Why?

Here’s Lenin’s statement again:  “Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.”

Now, in my experience, teachers generally start teaching when they’re in their early 20s and stop sometime after they become petrified wood.  I think my kindergarten teacher was born in the late Triassic, but my first-grade teacher was maybe 22.

If you’re a Lefty in a rural farm school district, you’re not going to get away with much, especially if the other teachers are all married and religious conservatives.  But over time, bureaucracies always swim Left.  I recall the first really Leftist teacher that showed up at my school.  She was fresh out of college, and was a substitute.  She went on a long rant about income redistribution and lots of other commie talking points.

Someone said I make too many graphs, but I know where to draw the line.

Since it was middle school and she was a substitute, she got about as much respect from the students as Joe Biden would if he guest-hosted Jeopardy!, which is zero.  “You know, you have to answer the question in the form of a question like my dead son, who was in the military did.”

These teachers had to bide their time, move into the administration, and slowly build a majority.  Of course, this didn’t happen all at once, it evolved.  And once it evolved, it did what Leftists always do:  they radicalized themselves more and more until only the most Leftist idea survives.  I was blessed to have “conservative” and left-leaning teachers, but no real Leftists.

But in the big cities and in Blue State?

Lenin would be proud.

But that’s only a part of it.  Pop culture is important, too.  I recall reading once that because Fonzie in Happy Days said, “The Fonz don’t go to sleep without sweet smelling teeth,” that toothbrushing doubled among the 8- to 14-year-old set.

I fell in love with some blood, but it was all in vein.

Propaganda works, and the younger you get the kid, and the more hours that you have with the kid, the deeper the hook sets.  That’s where television came in.

Before the big cable invasion, before the Great Fragmentation of the streaming services and multitudes of video sharing services, there was the Big Three.  CBS®, NBC™, and ABC©.  These three dominated the airwaves, and produced content that was beamed directly into the brains of Americans from when they got up to when Pa Wilder turned off the TV after watching the 10:30 weather.

In between, it was filling brains with Leftist propaganda.  Norman Lear (who just died) was one of the biggest proponents of Leftist propaganda on television, and made tens of millions.  It really was Lear who made me question if the ideas of freedom and nationalism that I’d had since I can remember could ever be funny, or if the only humor could come from the Leftist perspective.

Of course, I know now that the brainwashing didn’t hold, and that we’re actually a lot funnier than the Left because our humor is based on Truth, and the only way that they’re funny is when they set up a construct.  In order to poke fun at the Right, they had to construct an Archie Bunker and use him as their strawman.  And Norman Lear created him.  And had shows that showed that stronk womens don’t need no man (On Day At A Time).

Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.

Those shows weren’t aimed at parents – they were aimed at kids, so Norman could pump his Leftism into their brains when the teachers were off duty.

Norman made millions attempting to destroy everything that made American culture strong, and when Reagan was elected, Norman took is tens (if not hundreds) of millions and tried to continue on building a cultural subversion mechanism, People for the American Way©, which, even now, funnels money to Leftists.

This subversion took decades, of course, and it brought us to where we are.

Thankfully, the tide is turning.  Home schooling is great for counteracting Leftism impact on kids and more people are opting for it.  Places like Modern Mayberry don’t care much for Leftism in schools.  The media chokehold the Left had forever is weakening – they can’t channel our minds on just three channels for 12 hours a day.

Let’s look at the other side:

“Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a state of free men that won’t yield to tyranny.”

Do we want to win?  We have to show up.  With our children.

The Good News? It’s Up To You.

“Winners always want the ball when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

People keep wondering if the Bowling Alley Killer will strike again.

One of the freeing things about what’s going on in the world right now, especially with respect to the current breakdown of American (and perhaps Global) society is the fact that many are coming to one of the biggest realizations they’ll ever have:  most people don’t care about us, and there’s probably no one that’s going to come and save us.

I remember the first time I came to that conclusion, that it was all on me. – I believe I was a sophomore in college, and realized that to the college, I was just a number measured in GPA and how much I had to pay beyond what my scholarship paid for.  Sure, I had friends at school, and I do know that several professors liked me, but I was on my own.  Well, with the exception of student loans:  for a long time, I didn’t think I could ever figure out how to repay them.

Sink or swim, it was up to me.  It was a cold winter day.  I was having a beer with my roommate.  I remember at him and saying, “No one really cares about us, do they?”

“Nope.”

Like I said, this was good news.  I got to survive or thrive or fail based on my own efforts.  This realization was a winner – my GPA actually went up afterwards, and it wasn’t all that horrible to begin with, though I hear the minimum GPA needed to go to USC is $500,000.00.

What’s another name for an adoption center?  A stork market.

We are at that point in society as well.  Many of the legacy institutions that were created by our forefathers are no longer in the business of serving actual American citizens who love freedom and have no idea how to have a complicated Starbucks™ order.  Here’s a partial list:

  • Immigration: Right now, ICE is on the side of the illegals streaming across the border.  Not you.  You can apply this to most government (both federal and big city) agencies.  Disagree?  Ask the January 6 Protestors if they think they got a fair deal from the DOJ and FBI.  The only reason the FBI isn’t spelled KGB is because they don’t know Russian.
  • Most Colleges: I can post academic after academic engaged in the vilest hate speech.  Do they lose their jobs?    Because it’s directed at you and me, which is okay and is covered under policy 364.3.d.  But make a joke about a trans-GPA 4.0 student living in the body of a 2.0 student?  That’s not allowed.
  • The Military: The officers on the Right have been under attack since (at least) Obama.  Good luck being promoted if you don’t agree with the Left.  With things like illegal alien lesbian mom recruiting videos and mandatory Vaxxing, well, they’ve done their best to filter out people in the lower ranks, too.  Thankfully the most reliable fighting force in the history of the United States is vaxxed illegal alien lesbians.

Just wait until she wants to talk to the manager.

  • Most Government Schools: Yesterday, read a story about a history teacher that marked a student incorrect on the question, “All men have a penis (T/F)”.  Apparently, this is now indoctrination that is deemed worthy of history class where I recall spending a lot of time talking about George Washington’s penis.  Oh, wait, I never heard the word penis a single time in history, except when my teacher was talking about FDR.  Today?  They’re not on our side.
  • Mainstream News Media: Without the Internet, there would be very little division in the country because The Narrative is agreed to by almost all (including Fox™) news organizations.  Without the Internet, there would be exactly one opinion, and it would be presented in crayon.
  • Mainstream Entertainment: Why does Disney® make movies for kids that their parents find to be objectionable?  Because their investors don’t care – they have an agenda that goes beyond making money.

I could keep going on and on, but my laptop is running out of ink, and you already know all of this.

And, this is the good news:  these institutions aren’t going to save us.  They actively despise us and are doing everything they can to destroy us and erase us from memory.  I mean, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the people on the Right ever created?

Did you know the Monty Python theme was written by someone from the United States?  After all, nobody expects the American composition.

Like I said, that’s the good news.

Why?  Because, just like I discovered in college, it should change everyone’s mindset.  Our fate isn’t in their hands, but instead it’s in our hands.  When I see people like Andrew Torba building out GAB™, I know that he’s out of the victim mentality, and is building a future that doesn’t depend on the Left.  Vox Day is doing something similar with multiple initiatives, from his Arktoons® to Arkhaven Comics™ to Castalia House© (publishing) to Infogalactic© (Wikipedia® without the Leftist Overlords).

These institutions that people are actively creating show that they’re intent not on relying on the institutions that the Left has subverted, but instead on building their own.  In truth, that’s the first step.  The second is to make sure that the culture of each of these organizations that we’re creating is rooted in freedom and the ideology of the Right.  Why?

Because any institution that isn’t explicitly Right becomes Leftist over time, as John O’Sullivan’s First Law states.  O’Sullivan cited the ACLU™, the Ford Foundation© and the Episcopal Church.

Why?  Since Leftists aren’t good at creating much besides starvation and misery, they look to insinuate themselves into institutions that others have made.  And they don’t do it in a good way, building something new – no, they’re like termites, gradually eating away at everything they find until they end up destroying what they’ve infiltrated.

Do termites on a date order a table for two?

Then they blame those that built the institution they subverted in the first place for the failure.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

No, it’s time we take the future into our own hands and build the structures that we need.  Homeschooling is one bright example of how the Right has built something out of the ashes of public schools.  We’re building our own social networks, our own entertainment.

I want my ashes stored in a clear glass urn – I wonder if my family will like it?  Remains to be seen.

We don’t need the Left – or what they produce.

There’s a bright future ahead once we realize that no one is coming to save us.

All we have to do is make it.

The Jenga Economy

“Out of these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history.  One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

What do you call a man in debt?  Owen.

After 9-11, sales of the Jenga® game really dropped.

I’m not sure why, but in 2002 people had to play Jenga® the old-fashioned way – by stacking dishes in the sink.

But the game of Jenga™ is a pretty good analogy for our economy right now.  Jenga© is based on taking one piece from the lower part of the structure and putting it on top.  As the game progresses, everyone can see that the structure becomes weaker and more unstable.  The game always (at our house) ends the same way:  the tower, which now seems ridiculously tall, sways a little bit, becomes unbalanced, and topples.

The pieces then go everywhere, and we leave them on the floor for the herds of stray free-range toddlers in our neighborhood to eat.  We’re givers that way.

The economy (to me) looks exactly like a game of Jenga™, seemingly impossibly stretched out and tall.

Pro-tip on how to pick-up women:  lift with your legs, not your back.

Examples?

Well, let’s talk about when we turned money into cash.  The dollar used to be bound to actual, physical commodities – gold and silver.  I guess you could call it an either-ore situation.  Gold was always the preferred, but people who wanted looser money (i.e., inflation) fought to get silver in there, too.  In fact, silver was actually part of the money supply, making up a portion of many coins up until the 1960s when one Jenga© block was pulled and set on top.

Nixon pulled another when he ended the ability of foreign nations to bring piles of dollars and walk away with piles of gold.  He made the tower even shakier as he threw gold out, entirely as a standard.  The good news was that Americans could once again own gold.  The bad news was that dollars were no longer money – they were cash – not backed by anything.

And could be printed at will.  Another Jenga™ piece on top.  The tower becomes a bit wobblier.  And wobblier still as Nixon and Ford and Carter start printing.  I mainly blame Nixon, since he got the ball going, and it took the hand of Reagan reaching out to steady the tower, though that created the very deep 1982 recession.

What was Bob the Builder© called during a recession?  Bob.

Reagan, though, added his bit as well.  Sure, it made sense to try to spend the Russians into the ground – after the 1982 recession the economy came roaring back as The Wealth Pump started in earnest and the stock market soared.  But during this time, the market cheered as jobs left the United States.  In many cases, the jobs were subsidized by the country taking them.  They wanted to build up the industrial expertise so that they could make world-class products and were willing to pay for their economy and workers to learn how to do it.

Remember George H. W. Bush’s advisors saying they didn’t care if the economy made computer chips or potato chips?

Pepperidge Farms© remembers™.

Because it does matter.  Potato chips or computer chips don’t matter if you’re a banker making a loan, but if you’re trying to create the greatest value with the economy?  It sure as hell does matter.

One step closer to living in the Prime® Pod™.

On the government side, fiscal responsibility seemed to come back for a bit with Bill Clinton.  Now, don’t thank Bill – it was entirely based on Newt Gingrich stopping all the nonsense for a few years that primed the pump of the economy.  While Hillary is an ideologue, Bill was always in it for the hot chicks.  Sure, there were shenanigans, but the Jenga™ players were mostly playing it safe during that time period.

But when the recession hit in 2000?  George W. Bush really wanted to open the floodgates, so he started stacking as high and as fast as he could.  War helped him move a few Jenga™ pieces, and low interest rates in his “everyone who breathes should own a McMansion” policy fueled an amazing set of bubbles that ended up including housing, natural gas, crude oil, and what was left of my hair.

The path out of the Great Recession was a simple one.  Print more money.  People aren’t buying United States Bonds?  Heck, the Fed® can buy them now.  We can also pay Wall Street to launder all the bad debt and make sure that irresponsible bank vaults get filled to the top with cash.

Is it just me, or does Janet Yellin look exactly like Benny Hill?

Because, why not?

Obama took some Jenga™ pieces from the very bottom and put them up top because he wanted to get health care into the system.

Trump didn’t add too many blocks to the top of the board, at first.  Trump was mainly because he was focused on deals – immigration, trade, covfefe.  But he couldn’t make a deal with COVID.  His instincts were bad and his solution was just to stack more blocks up top by printing money and cramming it down people’s throats as fast as he could.

Biden doubled down on that strategy:  importing illegals by the truckload to paper over the economy that no longer serves its citizens, spending billions to “reduce inflation” and now nobody wants to buy the bonds.  Thankfully, the banks are scrambling to create weird new structures so they can pretend that the loan that they made at 4% isn’t costing them when they’re giving 5.5% on CDs.

Anyone else feel comforted that the banks have a really complicated strategy to avoid reality?

The tower is now, really, really tall.  And really, really shaky.

And these things never end slowly – they end either with mass social unrest, a big war, or both when the tower finally collapses.  And others have just given up.

When 4Chan is smarter than the Fed®.

For clarity’s sake, Hasbro™ (the owner of the Jenga® trademark) had nothing to do with this post.  I’m sure they’d rather people look at Jenga® and think about the 9-11 than have them look at Jenga® and think about our economy.

The Wealth Pump In America – Two Examples

“We wounded this place, it’s our duty to close her wounds, it’s the least we can do to show our gratitude for all the wealth she’s given us.” – Treasure of the Sierra Madres

Time is wealth – I found out that a fresher kidney costs more than one that’s a week old.  Also, never try to donate more than three at a time – they ask a lot of questions.

I read this week that the UN Climate summit (LINK) is offering food that included smoke wagyu burgers, Philly cheesesteaks, and BBQ at the summit.  This same summit is expected to tell people that they can’t have meat anymore because, you know, climate.  It’s almost like there’s a double standard . . .

The nice thing about spending the time reading books like Turchin’s End Times is that it gives a new filter to view the events that we’re seeing around us.  This filter, or model, is useful because it allows the events of the world to be reviewed in relation to the model.

Peter Turchin’s End Times: There Be Dragons Here

Turchin actually presented two major models:  Elite Overproduction, and The Wealth Pump.  While both are important to a civilization beginning to dissolve, the one I’d like to focus on today is The Wealth Pump.  Part of the wonderful part of a model, is that it can predict what’s going to happen, and explain the otherwise unexplainable.

Never get married on Mt. Everest – it’s all downhill from there.

Let’s take a look at the first strategy:  feminism.  This came on board starting as far back as the 1800s.  Why?  It was good business.  More women making financial decisions meant more customers.  To this day, that’s the case – women make more purchasing decisions than men.

Mission accomplished.

The next idea was to mobilize women into the workforce.  It took two world wars where women went from making babies to making welds on Liberty Ships to test the theory.  In the 1950s, though, those darn women went back to homes, and were making babies in the biggest baby making event the world ever saw.

That wasn’t good for business, and, thus feminism.

Chuck Norris had COVID.  For breakfast.

Feminism has had a long, horrible past.  In modern-ish times, the biggest example was the Spanish Civil War.  The first things the commies did was make abortion legal and to abolish marriage.  Oh, sure, they killed a lot of priests and nuns, but the focus was on splitting apart the family.

Why?

So women could be more productive in the economy.  This is the weird place where The Wealth Pump and commies are in complete agreement:  women shouldn’t be at home making babies, women should be at work making PowerPoints® and tractors in Glorious Tractor Collective Number 171.  Women aren’t loving members of a family, who have the job of creating compassion in their families while the men instill duty and honor.

Nope.  There are decades of propaganda convincing women that being a mother just wasn’t enough – it was beneath them.  The latchkey generation (mine) was based on the thought that Moms should do whatever and find themselves because . . . reasons.  Although my parents didn’t divorce, millions of other families were ripped apart by that abomination.

When stoners divorce, do they get joint custody?

Yes.  Divorce is bad.  Sometimes it is justified, and that requires fault.  But no-fault divorce made it a game show based around fun and prizes for women – they still initiate 80-90% of divorces.  Combined with the government welfare for women using a uterus as a clown car, this creates a society of children who have no real family.  Also?  They have no real sense of duty or honor.

But, hey, we have tons of women who are making wonderful PowerPoints® on how to exclude white guys from jobs without looking like they’re excluding white guys from jobs.  And those women weren’t making babies.  Certainly, The Wealth Pump requires cheap labor, so that brings us to:

Immigration.

The hordes of immigrants that have been coming to this country, both legal and illegal have been in unprecedented numbers.  The American public overwhelmingly is done with this level of immigration – they don’t want it.  Why was Trump’s three-word slogan – “Build the wall” so effective?

Because people want a damn wall.  In many places, they look around at their country and see it doesn’t resemble at all the country they were born in, and they’re tired of it.

The wall might work.  China built one, and they have nearly zero illegal immigrants.

Yet, it continues.  The Democrats crave it like a junkie craves whatever junkies crave after heroin.  I think they crave drooling, which would explain why they like Joe Biden.

The Republicans have and continue to be the “sure, but not so much” party since, well, forever.  Reagan signed in the first big amnesty in the 1980s.  Why?  Because the wealthy folks demanded it.

Why?

Because all the women were making PowerPoints® doing whatever it was that women did in business in the 1980s, The Wealth Pump demanded this:  cheap labor.  Women had been cheap labor, since they could run typewriters while the men did the real stuff.  But when women wanted to move up the corporate ladder and computers allowed people other than women born with the typing-gene to type, The Wealth Pump demanded that we have cheaper labor.

Thus?

Rather than pay a slightly higher wage to people picking strawberries, it was way easier to have illegal people pick lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries.  They couldn’t complain, or they’d get booted out of the country.  Rather than pay actual Americans to pick (or invent picking machines) it’s much easier to have a labor class in this country with no ties to this country and work for less.

Gardening is complicated – someone suggested I try manure on my strawberries, but, ugh, I’m sticking with whipped cream.

Except these Wealth Pump-encouraged people also get free health care for their children, free schooling for their children, and career paths that receive priority over the people born here.  When you add it all up, these actually end up sucking much more money out of the system than they provide in economic benefits to the country.  This analysis doesn’t even come close to adding in the societal costs in lower trust and increased crime.

Here we have the ultimate irony of The Wealth Pump – it creates more wealth for the operators, while it sucks the money out of the entire country.

But, hey, Bezos has a new tramp with lips so inflated that he could use her to transport Amazon™ packages if he inflated them with helium and a yacht that can land his helicopter.  And eat all the beef he wants, even though it’s time for you to get in the pod and eat the bugs.

I mean, it’s your duty to those that benefit from The Wealth Pump.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – 11 Months Until Election 2024

“I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

The 2024 election results are in.  I mean, the Democrats already have them written down . . .

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume V, Issue 7

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Countdown To 2024 – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Alien Army – 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 820 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

Countdown to 2024

Oh, that shirt is just so very last year!

Elections are busy things.  The one thing that both parties do is that they try to heighten the sense of importance of each election.  I’m certain that, for every presidential election during my conscious lifetime I’ve heard the following statement:

“This is the most important election in history.”  Some are more important than others.  But would much have changed if Bush I would have defeated Clinton?  Probably not much at all.  Would things have been different if Al Gore had been elected in 2000?  No.  Would things have been much different if the other candidate had won in 2004, or 2008, or 2012?

No, not really.  In most of those cases the differences between the candidates were so small that there really wasn’t a difference.  How different would Romney’s first term be than Obama’s second term?  Not a mitten’s worth of difference.

But then we get to 2016.  Trump as a candidate would never have been electable before 2016.  But by 2016, it was enough – the majority of the American Right was done with the system, and candidates like ¡Jeb! were seen as what they really were:  jokes.

In the most shocking part of his presidency:  Trump actually tried to keep his campaign promises, even the ones official Washington didn’t like.  The result?  Absolutely everything possible was done so he could not be re-elected.  The silly thing is that had they left him in office, people would have been tired of Trump by 2024 and be ready (my guess) for a sharp turn Left.

It would have been perfect for them.  But, no.  It is clear and undisputed (and even bragged about) that the Left changed the laws in the country to make ballot harvesting and voter fraud easy.  When that wasn’t enough, they had to hide the counting and count ballots that the laws of several swing states indicated were illegal ballots.

Expect a replay in 2024.

There are more allegations, and more than enough smoke to know that there were fires in places that were crucial to Biden.  This created an outpouring of emotion far greater than any normal election would have – it made people feel that, indeed, this was the last stop.

It might have been.  However, we can see (as we’ve seen around the world in places like Great Britain and Ireland) that the draconian laws that are passed explicitly against the interests of the actual citizens shows that voting harder isn’t changing anything.

So, 2024 is eleven months out.  Is this the most important election of our lives?  Probably not.  Does it have the likelihood of being the most divisive election since 1860?

Yes.

Not even Kennedy can knock him down at this point.

Violence and Censorship Update

Back during the pandemic, ivermectin was ridiculed as “horse paste”.  I’m not suggesting it has anti-cancer properties, but this oncologist is.  Why isn’t that news?

A deranged trans person shot up a bunch of kids, waking people up and, in my opinion, set up the disgust that has led to the brand destruction of Bud Light™.  The manifesto of the killer was secret.  Why?  Was it because it showed a deep hatred for white people?  Regardless, it’s a “safety” concern of a Leftist mayor who wants to track down those that may have leaked it.  Why did they have to leak it, when there will be no trial, and there are no co-conspirators?  Oh, yes, censorship of dangerous information.

Her Accidency, the barely verbal Governor of New York, announces that New York no longer agrees with free speech.  At least against certain groups.

Neil the no longer Young is boycotting X®.  In other news, Neil the no longer Young is still alive.

Musk’s X® platform is the subject of an advertiser boycott, but advertisers are okay with Insta© serving up much more objectionable content.

Related:

In the “I’m leaving and I’m going to yell at you why” and no one cares file, there’s this:

Not in the United States, but, it’s weird with all the hate speech laws in Euroland, that Azad Talukder (a fine Irish name!) is not indicted for one wishing death on people speaking out against being stabbed.

Related, from Ireland, showing why the Second Amendment is important if you like the First Amendment:

I’ve got a lot more, really, but this is enough.  Violence is up (record numbers of murders in many US cities), and censorship is hitting a feeding frenzy.

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again.  But not as bad as last month, thanks to winter and lower gas prices (one of the factors).

Here’s what building back better looks like:

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:

Violence is down slightly.  Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is up.  I expected more by December, but, hey, it’s shopping season.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back up again this month.  I expected more of a downturn in November, and was wrong, instead seeing it whipsaw back up.  Lower gas prices and giving up in Ukraine are (probably) partial drivers.

Illegal Aliens:

Another one of the biggest numbers, ever, in the history of the country, record for November.  For all time.  Why not tax them like El Salvador?  Oh, wait, those illegals are headed to the United States.

Alien Army

I had this down as a topic several weeks ago, so the recent date on the picture below just shows how fast this one is moving:

The aptly named Dick Durban has said the quiet part out loud:  since the Biden has made the primary source of the volunteer armed forces dry up by, well, hating the white people who have turned out in droves for it throughout history, the numbers have gone down.  How far down?  Far enough that instead of a brave Latina with two lesbian mothers in Air Force HR, they now are showing white guys doing macho things like jumping out of helicopters.

But they really don’t want white guys back.  They want a different group:  illegal aliens.  Why?  Think a kid from Conroe, Texas is going to shoot on a crowd of civilians at a bread line?

Nope.  But if it’s an ex MS-13 guy from Mexico who only knows the United States as a source of revenue, I think the answer is then drastically different.  When the head of the Department of Homeland Security wants to ignore his job since he probably can’t define the word “Homeland” and just give up and let anyone here stay, you know you have a problem.

Ireland has recently shown it has the same problem, but worse with politicians actively saying things that would be hate speech in Ireland unless spoken about the actual Irish.

This is another step towards open warfare on the legacy Americans.  And another step towards Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730672536071938087

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730528857172619399

https://twitter.com/i/status/1728511136117543187

https://twitter.com/i/status/1726830295515877729

https://twitter.com/i/status/1724668651838767519

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730536906998313465

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12797119/NC-southeast-raleigh-high-school-stabbing-dead.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12797245/Chicago-robbery-rifle-woman-video-police-suspects.html

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1721541510523437338

 

One Guy

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1722729642262433947

https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/metro/woman-threatened-by-homeless-mugger-wishes-vigilante-didnt-use-gun/

 

Body Count

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/us-beef-prices-hit-record-high-nations-cattle-herd-expected-shrink-through-2025

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12628299/birth-rate-america-fertility-fallen-disaster.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/24/1215152734/after-the-dobbs-decision-birth-rates-are-up-in-states-with-abortion-ban-states

https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/students-missing-school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-teacher-shortage/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12776889/Oregon-overdoses-skyrocket-decriminalize-drugs-heroin-meth-cocaine.html

https://www.statista.com/chart/19920/us-veterans-from-another-country/

https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/metro/2516-nypd-cops-head-for-exits-so-far-in-2023-pension-data/

https://ammo.com/articles/gun-ownership-by-state

https://twitter.com/Risemelbourne/status/1729337006914990526

https://www.aussie17.com/p/new-zealand-government-data-administrator

https://vigilantnews.com/post/turbo-death-from-turbo-cancers-were-in-trouble-says-dr-ryan-cole

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/surge-young-people-deaths-insurance-industry/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12754341/nuclear-war-attack-silos-deaths.html

 

Vote Count

https://forwardmajority.org/battlegroundvoterproject/

https://uncoverdc.com/2023/10/31/georgia

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1723057416873681020.html

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1723057416873681020

https://twitter.com/KevinKelton2?t=msfw1gf0DGhmKR7YTiILIw&s=03

https://uncoverdc.com/2023/11/09/elector-challenges-in-georgia-voter-intimidation-or-civic-duty

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/going-expose-everything-mike-lindell-says-georgia-voting-machine-ruling-opened-door-no

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/voting-machines-georgia-lawsuit/2023/11/12/id/1141994/

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F11%2F16%2Fnebraska-gov-jim-pillen-warns-vague-deceptive-abortion-ballot-initiative%2F

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/abortion-rights-groups-seek-ballot-measures-9-states-2024-rcna125177

 

Civil War

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/15/texas-secession-texit/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/texit-progress-secession-question-expected-appear-2024-texas-primary-ballot

https://www.davisenterprise.com/news/bob-dunning-secession-fever-hits-el-dorado-county/article_2c1c6894-8fe5-11ee-878b-734d7888a050.html

https://time.com/6222633/second-civil-war-us-how-to-avoid/

https://unherd.com/2023/11/inside-the-american-redoubt/

https://www.realclearpennsylvania.com/articles/2023/11/15/the_parties_have_irreconcilably_different_visions_for_america_992964.html

https://thewire.in/world/us-fascistic-violence-civil-war-election-2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/black-humor-in-venezuela-communist-fat-camp

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-magic-moment/

Peter Turchin’s End Times: There Be Dragons Here

“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist

I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures.  I mean, why knot?

(Complete review in one post)

I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin.  I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.

Her book was bad.  Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.

Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough.  This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.”  To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can.  A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).

The XXX Files are a completely different subject.

His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse:  Elite Overproduction.  In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are.  Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power.  Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.

Turchin breaks down political power into four types:

  • Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this.  Think AntiFa® or .
  • Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
  • Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
  • Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.

Where do psychics shop?  The Seers® catalog.

In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power.  The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else.  In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast).  In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race.  Why?  Bored, I guess.  Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine.  But I repeat myself.

The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs.  That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin.  Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.

Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.

I once saw a baguette in a cage.  I guess it was bread in captivity.

Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.

There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.

So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown.  What else leads to problems?  Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person.  Another term for this is Bidenomics.  Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.

To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump.  Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable.  In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily.  The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats.  Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.

The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb!  To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.

I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”

Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes.  Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.

These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so.  This is in line with Strauss and Howe The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb.

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023.  American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion.  It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce.  We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world.  Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia.  While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.

Me?  I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.

I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire.  The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.  No bucks?  No Buck Rodgers.

Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today:  America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people.  As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.

Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes.  Whare are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?

  • Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration?  It’s perfect to keep wages down.
  • What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals?  Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh.  There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
  • Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.

This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.

That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given.  While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump.  Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion.  Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior?  They have such high double standards.

As noted above, per Turchin, the pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously.  As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college.  That’s probably the right number.  Now?  According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100.  This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees.  Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs.  Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition.  This would lower Google’s® profits.  This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action.  Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about a post back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society.

Stability: On A Scale Of Zero To Drunken Uncle, How Bad Is The United States?

Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States.  People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

  • Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies.  Men want a mate.  However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society.  Out of wedlock babies?  A scandal.
  • Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs.   Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
  • Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
  • Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us!  (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration.  I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general.  Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite.  The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal.  It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now?  Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book:  “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”  Whoa!  That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud:  something wicked this way comes.  We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming.  And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump.  It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time.  Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men (sic) were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . .  But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . .  Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme.

Again, wow.  I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups.  Who runs Bartertown?  Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government?  If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me?  You’re soaking in it.  A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002.  Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative . . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes . . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter.  The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent.  There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies.  Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Yup.  They’re not listening.  They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country.  That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra:  “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™?  It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business.  Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who.  (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists?  They make teeth straight and white.

A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything.  I think it was Farmer Geddon.

I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming.   Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at:

  • Every elite scrambling for position,
  • Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
  • the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:

There Be Dragons Here.

How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin.  “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.”  Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter:  “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.”  He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.

Give Turchin his props:  he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics.  I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.

This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like.  Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.

But back to power structures.  Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier.  I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy.  That’s what it is, really.

Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy.  It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power.  At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”

Honesty.

I love it.

I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts.  It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them.  We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least.  Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.

I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks.  That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today.  Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas.  But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.

End of digression.  Back to the book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road?  “Am I being detained?”

The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore.  Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.

This doesn’t happen gradually.  It happens when the University closes.  As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant.  The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

 

Who will lead that war?  Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry.  Why from the Elite?  They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly.  Examples from our history?

George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.

Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump.  I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990.  Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.

Astrophysicists started a radical protest group:  Black Matter Lives.

From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”.  Turchin notes that:  “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”

They want to stop the signal.  But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned:  you can’t stop the signal.

Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns?  It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government.  This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle:  it makes you a more compliant consoooomer.  And if they get the 2nd Amendment, the 1st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.

This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one.  The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.

Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.”  Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago.  Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased.  Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.

I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better.  And recovers from his dementia, too.

Who else have they attacked?

Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media.  Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”

Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.

Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.

What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?

  • In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
  • In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
  • “The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
  • 75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
  • In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
  • 60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”

Grim.  Really, really grim.

We are at the brink of a civil war.  I’ve been saying that for years now.  One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming.  They left 25 years too soon.

Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard.  I can tell you the future in some instances.  If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die.  It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now.  Just as my family saw the European war that would be known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.

It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.

I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine.

Here be dragons.

I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such.  Why?  Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.

Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.

It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.”

Turchin brings it home.

If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, even though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.

The Only Thing You Need To Read Today: Wilder’s End Times Book Review: The Face Of The Crisis And The Aftermath

“If that’s the end of time, I got a front row seat with a big tub of buttered popcorn and a greasy half-live chicken leg.” – Anchorman 2:  The Legend Continues

A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything.  I think it was Farmer Geddon.

I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming.   Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at

  • Every elite scrambling for position,
  • Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
  • the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:

There Be Dragons Here.

How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin.  “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.”  Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter:  “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.”  He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.

Give Turchin his props:  he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics.  I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.

This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like.  Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.

But back to power structures.  Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier.  I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy.  That’s what it is, really.

Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy.  It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power.  At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”

Honesty.

I love it.

I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts.  It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them.  We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least.  Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.

I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks.  That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today.  Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas.  But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.

End of digression.  Back to the book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road?  “Am I being detained?”

The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore.  Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.

This doesn’t happen gradually.  It happens when the University closes.  As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant.  The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

Who will lead that war?  Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry.  Why from the Elite?  They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly.  Examples from our history?

George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.

Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump.  I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990.  Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.

Astrophysicists started a radical protest group:  Black Matter Lives.

From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”.  Turchin notes that:  “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”

They want to stop the signal.  But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned:  you can’t stop the signal.

Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns?  It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government.  This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle:  it makes you a more compliant consoooomer.  And if they get the 2nd Amendment, the 1st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.

This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one.  The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.

Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.”  Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago.  Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased.  Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.

I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better.  And recovers from his dementia, too.

Who else have they attacked?

Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media.  Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”

Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.

Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.

What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?

  • In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
  • In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
  • “The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
  • 75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
  • In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
  • 60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”

Grim.  Really, really grim.

We are at the brink of a civil war.  I’ve been saying that for years now.  One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming.  They left 25 years too soon.

Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard.  I can tell you the future in some instances.  If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die.  It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now.  Just as my family saw the European war that would known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.

It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.

I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine.  I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such.  Why?  Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men, and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.

Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.

It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.”  Turchin brings it home.  If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.

End Times Review, Part 2 – Defining the Dragon

“Right.  We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.  Murder, crime, poverty?  These things don’t concern me.  What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.” – Fight Club

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior?  They have such high double standards.

A general note:  The Civil War 2.0 Weather Report would normally be on Monday.  Due to getting this post finished, it will likely be next Wednesday before the CWWR comes out.  It will still be wonderful and fresh as daises on a fresh daisy ranch.  I will also (likely Tuesday?) post a combined version of this book review stitched together, so we’ll have a very rare Tuesday post.  I’m doing that so that if someone wants to read it from start to finish, well, there it is. It will be slightly different for continuity and error correction. 

When last we left the impending disaster of the 21st Century, we were talking about Turchin’s theory that Elite overproduction was a primary driver in causing societies to disintegrate like records of voter irregularities in swing states in 2020.

The pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously.  As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college.  That’s probably the right number.  Now?  According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100.  This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees.  Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs.  Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition.  This would lower Google’s® profits.  This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action.  Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about stability a few posts back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society.  Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States.  People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

  • Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies.  Men want a mate.  However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society.  Out of wedlock babies?  A scandal.
  • Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs.   Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
  • Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
  • Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us!  (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration.  I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general.  Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite.  The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal.  It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now?  Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book:  “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”  Whoa!  That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud:  something wicked this way comes.  We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming.  And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump.  It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time.  Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . .  But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . .  Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme, but this meme is as-found.

Again, wow.  I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups.  Who runs Bartertown?  Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government?  If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me?  You’re soaking in it.  A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002.  Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes.. . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter.  The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent.  There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies.  Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Proof in a graph that voters don’t matter, since Brexit was about immigration.

Yup.  They’re not listening.  They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport, and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country.  That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra:  “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™?  It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business.  Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who.  (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists?  They make teeth straight and white.

Part three of this review hits on Monday.  And it’s a doozy – you won’t want to miss it.

The Funniest (And Most Enlightening Book Review You’ll Read This Year) End Times by Peter Turchin, Part 1

“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist

I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures.  I mean, why knot?

I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin.  I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.

Her book was bad.  Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.

Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough.  This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.”  To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can.  A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).

The XXX Files are a completely different subject.

His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse:  Elite Overproduction.  In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are.  Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power.  Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.

Turchin breaks down political power into four types:

  • Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this.  Think AntiFa® or the “new” Army.
  • Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
  • Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
  • Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.

Where do psychics shop?  The Seers® catalog.

In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power.  The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else.  In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast).  In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race.  Why?  Bored, I guess.  Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine.  But I repeat myself.

The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs.  That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin.  Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.

Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.

I once saw a baguette in a cage.  I guess it was bread in captivity.

Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.

There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.

So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown.  What else leads to problems?  Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person.  Another term for this is Bidenomics.  Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.

To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump.  Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable.  In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily.  The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats.  Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.

The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb!  To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.

I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”

Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes.  Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.

These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so.  This is in line with Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb:

End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence

It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023.  American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion.  It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce.  We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world.  Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia.  While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.

Me?  I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.

I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire.  The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.  No bucks?  No Buck Rodgers.

Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today:  America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people.  As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.

Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes.  What are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?

  • Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration?  It’s perfect to keep wages down.
  • What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals?  Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh.  There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
  • Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.

This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.

That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given.  While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump.  Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion.  Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?

Thus ends the first part of this review.  More to come.  I’m not sure if it will be one or two more posts, but we’ll get through it.

I’m a trained professional.  Unlike paint-chip-eating Barbara F. Walter.

(FYI, when I get this finished I’m posting a link to it at Turchin’s blog.  He’s got a better book contract, but I’ve got more readers.)