Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“Shake, a hoax is a humorous or malicious deception. And this is clearly not that.” – Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Okay, I’m sick. I had written one scathing bon mot after another in my head today about this subject. But I’m sick. I’m going to bed after I post this. Instead, we’ll have a fill in the blank caption contest. Let’s keep it PG, folks.
“And pruned the hedges of many small villages.” – Three Amigos
Amazing what happens when you find the world is corrupt . . . .
GameStop®.
In a world filled with COVID-19 shutdowns and Internet sites where you can download nearly any game ever made for low prices, it seemed like a sure thing that GameStop™ would fail. Except . . . people liked going. The profits weren’t through the roof, and the business model was older. Heck, the last time I was in a GameStop™ was over eight years ago, and about half the shelf space was pop-culture memorabilia and nerd toys, not games.
I owe 1000 games times $1,000 dollars. I owe my friends, collectively, $1,000,000.
Ooops.
Musk is no fan of short sellers since they tried to destroy Tesla® a few years ago.
This is what the hedge funds did. And since (I believe) some of them are what is known as a “market-maker” they have 21 days to come up with those games (shares). 21 days is forever, so don’t worry about those billionaires – most of them are still billionaires – they just will have to wait until next month to buy that second volcano island death lair.
At one point, one of the r/wallstreetbets early investors in the short squeeze was up $48,000,000. That’s not a typo.
With a short, there’s a lot of power as the price goes up. The Hedge Fund Leech that runs the hedge fund starts to get nervous, and adds to the buying pressure as he tries to buy stocks to “cover his short.” This actually increases the price, sometimes causing it to go upward. A lot upward.
If that was all that happened, it would have been an amusing story. Wall Street Leeches get one-upped by message-board posters. Ha ha!
Huh. And they invest big dollars for that privilege. How much money have they given Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury? A lot.
Whose side is Joltin’ Janet on? Not yours.
Last week on Thursday and Friday the powers that be told the markets to “shut down” the Internet Freedom Party raid on the financial leaches. In fact, several articles extolled how the Hedge Fund Leeches were the real heroes.
I’m feeling so sorry for him!
It’s a big game, but you and I are not supposed to play. You’re supposed to buy shares in your 401K so the Hedge Fund Leeches can take your money and collude with each other to own the economy. The free market is, in principle, a great thing. People buy and sell. The market allows the prices to be shared by all.
Also, people forget this: there were Hedge Funds on the other side of the deal. Vampires don’t need prices to go down, they can also make money when prices are going up.
Who knew that Karen ran the SEC?
No. Big players distort prices, they sell and buy options to make money on stocks that they intend to dump for short term profits after manipulating the markets. That this financial vampirism actually destroys companies, jobs, and communities?
And they will call you anything to make a buck.
Who cares? Not the Wall Street Hedge Leeches. Here’s Tucker Carlson with a discussion about one Wall Street Hedge Leach destroying an entire town in Nebraska. For a few million bucks. They would do that to you, your family, and everyone you know for a 2% return.
If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.
None of this is financial advice, you hosers. So, take off, eh. All of the memes are “as found” on the Internet.
“You’re semi-evil. You’re quasi-evil. You’re the margarine of evil. You’re the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.” – Austin Powers
I heard that Kim Jong Un was evil because he had no Seoul.
Evil.
Several of my posts have been about Evil recently. I use the capital E because, in my conception of the world, Evil is a force. I know your mileage may vary, but I think that today’s post can benefit you regardless of your belief system. Stick with me on this one. I brought cookies and juice boxes for halftime.
Well, it turns out that for me, when I read about these categories it made Evil easier for me to see. It also made the progression of Evil easier for me to understand. And if I could better see Evil and understand Evil, I could anticipate Evil. Most importantly, I could try to avoid personally being Evil.
And that’s why I thought this was worthy of a Friday post, where I normally write about health. What could be healthier (for your mind, if not your soul) than not being Evil?
The first form of Evil is one that most often came to mind when I thought of Evil, and that is Luciferian Evil. Describing this type of Evil is easy: “If it feels good, do it.”
What feels like the United States but isn’t? Washington, D.C.
If that sounds familiar, the entire decade of the 1960s and most of the 1970s was dedicated to exactly that phrase. Regardless of social conviction, regardless of taboo, regardless of the impact upon society, the idea was to live for yourself. How else would you explain disco music?
In theory, that’s a great idea. (Not disco, but living for yourself.) In practice, however, living only for yourself has an amazing cost. I’ll admit that I know this because, at one phase of my life, I thought that this was just fine.
Oh, not in the way of stealing things, or breaking things, but in the realm of personal relationships. Let’s just say I had a large number of girlfriends, some of whom may have had self-esteem issues. We’ll leave it at that.
Doing what feels good at the expense of the context of a traditional relationship has consequences. In the end, it feels empty. Lust is never as good as love, though it was easier to find at 11:30 on a Friday night.
I don’t have a problem with low self-esteem, considering how awesome I am.
Living life just for pleasure ended up making me feel lonely and empty and nihilistic – the very partnership that a stable traditional marriage brings was what was avoided. But, you know, it felt good. That makes it okay. Right?
Well, no. That’s what makes it Evil. When I gave that up? Life became better.
The second type of Evil is more Evil than the first one. Dr. Bruce Charlton (LINK) referenced it as Ahrimanic Evil*. (Dark Brightness (LINK) had the excellent original post I read and the link to Charlton’s site.)
Ahrimanic Evil requires Luciferian Evil to open the door. “If it feels good, do it” seems to lead to “everyone should follow the value system of the material world and globalist systems. It’s for their own good.” That coercion is Ahrimanic Evil.
Just as Luciferian Evil removes the spirituality out of sex, Ahrimanic Evil removes the virtue out of sacrifice for society. If you’re against the soul-destroying, controlling, Chinese Social Credit system, what you’re really opposing is Ahrimanic Evil.
I hear that the unit of mass George Soros uses is the pentagram.
The soulless Yuppie of the 1980s became the architect of the Ahrimanic control structures of political correctness and cancel culture. Ahrimanic Evil wants you to live in pods and eat bugs and take the vaccine. Fun? Not on this Evil. It’s about the relentless and constant pursuit of material success.
It seems like, since 1990 or so, we’ve been living in a world based on materialism, denying the spiritual or natural component of human existence. The libertine (not libertarian) excesses of the 1960s and 1970s gave way in the 1990s to full-on materialism. If it’s good for the economy, it’s perfect. Free trade, open borders? Who cares about what the consequences are to society as long as the economic systems function?
I’ll admit, in the 1990s I was seduced by this model. I worried more about economic systems than I did about the social structure of the United States. Was I for NAFTA then? Yeah. What could go wrong?
A lot. It looks like Ross Perot was right. But during that time I was following the same model – I pursued my career as a top priority. Yup, I’ve tried to put that Evil behind me, too.
Want it, buy it, forget it.
The last stage that Charlton mentions is Sorathic Evil. It is the most evil of the three Evils.
Sorathic Evil requires the progress from Luciferian to Ahrimanic Evil in society. In practice, you’d think that having a global police surveillance state was the worst thing you could think of. You’ve seen all the films, right, and listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was (sort of) an attack on the Ahrimanic Evil they saw coming.
But what is this final Evil?
Destruction. Hate. Spite.
You’d think that Evil would be happy with the image, in Orwell’s words with this: “imagine a boot stamping a human face forever.” Total control, through the end of time.
Nope. That’s not enough. Sorathic Evil requires destruction. And, I’ll admit that I felt that way once or twice. It, like the lustfulness or materialism, is soul-destroying. After I released feeling that way, I felt immediately better, like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.
The end state of Sorathic Evil is despair. It is envy. It is the desire for the destruction of others for no other reason than you want them to be destroyed. But as we have seen recently, the destruction of others is not enough: Trump transgressed the Ahrimanic system, so Trump (and all who supported him) must be (in their minds) destroyed.
If it were just about justice, that would be simple enough – the absence of Trump was the win for the Left. After Obama ceased to be President, I ceased to care about him. Leftists, the current embodiment of Luciferian, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic Evil, want Trump and his supporters to suffer. If we all changed to their viewpoint today, it would not be enough.
I interviewed to be a mime once – but I didn’t get the job. Must have been something I said.
Imagine Cambodia times the Cultural Revolution times the Holodomor. Squared. That is the future the Left wants for us, and I’ll be writing about that for Monday’s post. And that is the Evil we face.
What they fail to realize is that is the future that they will also get for themselves if they are successful. There won’t be any Gender Studies Majors on the Central Committee. The Left would line up the Leftist professors to be shot far faster than the Right ever would.
The only way to feed the Beast is to make people suffer.
I’m not going to say I’m a great person. I regularly meet with and interact with people who are far better people than I will ever be. I will say, I try. But by having lived through and let go of these three types of Evil, I immediately felt better.
The other thing I’ve learned is that Good is stronger than Evil. Good fills the void, while Evil only brings additional hunger.
We’re not done.
This isn’t over.
*(As far as the terms Charlton references, you don’t need to follow the rabbit trail as to where he got the names for the Evils and points I’m making in this post. It gets a bit esoteric, and you can spend hours, days or weeks wandering down there, but Charlton points the way if you are interested. Beware, it’s filled with esoteric weirdness.)
Life has me trying to pack 32 hours into 24 today, so I’ll leave you with this blast from the past, the famous post that gave us bikininomics. New stuff on Friday.
“Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothing.” – Animal House
The future economic expansion is so bright, she’s gotta shield her eyes with a hat.
So, today I’d like to talk about economics. No, wait, don’t leave! I promise pictures of girls in bikinis if you stay!
Today’s economic idea is a particularly stupid one. Just about as stupid as when the Ming Dynasty tried to disarm Japan by buying all their swords. This really happened around 1432 A.D. (according to some experts) but was less successful than the Ming projected: the Japanese just made more swords – at least 128,000. Today’s stupid idea is called, “Modern Monetary Theory.” Epsilon Theory had an article on it (LINK), and I did some research and thought I’d give you a rundown on this horrible, horrible idea which smells worse than Johnny Depp’s sweat socks after a night running through a farm ditch in Utah. Don’t ask.
Okay, John Wilder, I’ll humor you if you promise bikini pictures. What is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?
This poor person is deprived by a Marxist economy, so poor she cannot afford proper clothing and is weak enough from hunger that she’s forced to crawl along the beach.
Here’s a bikini picture to prove that these will be the sexiest graphs in the history of economics. Now pay attention and I’ll explain Modern Monetary Theory. MMT is simple:
The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly nolimits to how much money government can create. Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold. MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway. So let’s go all in.” This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas. Not exactly. The credit card has a credit limit.
So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print. The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend. This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place. Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets: this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter. The implications are stunning. “Why not just pay for everything? The government can just print the money, right?”
Yes. She really said that. See, pure economic genius!
Yes, this is exactly the logic of a twenty-something girl who can’t figure out how to pay for an apartment, and wonders what fruit Froot Loops® are made of.
Bill Mitchell has a doctorate in economics, which shows you how easy it is to learn absolutely nothing while getting a doctorate, just as Ocasio-Cortez can demonstrate that an undergraduate degree in economics is essentially majoring in pure pre-barista. An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game. There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you. Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.
Genius.
You can clearly see the equilibrium required in an economy consisting entirely of tequila shooters and cocoa butter.
Why not make every dollar worth, oh, say $10? That way everyone could just add a zero to their bank balance? Doesn’t cost anything, right? And why not pay for every person’s medical care? We’re just making up the dollars as we go. While we’re at it, there are unemployed people. Why not pay your average unemployed art major to make Xir’s (a gender-neutral pronoun) armpit-hair sculptures each and every day?
Don’t cost nothing.
This is an amazing idea! Government can have it all! There is no limit to the amount government can spend because Tom Brady can make all the touchdowns he wants during a game. Yay, tortured grade-school logic!
There’s a corollary to this – Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates. There’s no need for inflation. Print the money. Prices won’t go up. MMT says we can spend ourselves into prosperity*.
*As long as you appropriately tax people to soak up excess money. Mitchell, in the fine print, says that we can spend up to the entire productive capacity of the nation on, well, whatever. When we get to that capacity, then we have to soak up the extra money with taxes. The taxes don’t really go to anything, we just use them to pull money out of circulation. Government still buys stuff with whatever money it prints. Taxes exist only as a sponge to soak up excess cash.
Two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction make a recession, and they’d also leave a nasty sunburn.
This puts the printing of money into the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the spending and taxation into the hands of Congress. Sadly, Mitchell never postulated putting adults in charge. Regardless, Congress never ever spends too much money and certainly wouldn’t structure taxes to be punitive against groups they don’t like. So, sober people like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have infinite spending ability. I’m sure, like Goldilocks, they’d get the porridge “just right.”
MMT will be the next economic pied-piper of the political class in Washington, and will probably be the torch carried by the next Democratic presidential nominee. It has no downside! Spend today because deficits don’t matter. Interest rates are 100% controllable. Only have to pay a few taxes, and we’ll have free prosperity for all.
We’ll just print the money. “You just pay for it.”
And, no one will have to be a barista! We can guarantee a living wage to each and every artist so that the United States can be the undisputed leader in the creation of sculptures made out of armpit hair.
There’s no reason this can’t work. Why, The Boy, when he was in kindergarten, came up with a system that was very similar. For whatever reason, his class had made “feathers” by cutting out feather-shapes out of different colors of construction paper. The Boy got into his Gummi-bear® addled kindergartner brain that these construction paper feathers were actually worth real money. He even had an exchange rate in mind – each feather was worth three dollars. He had three feathers, so, he demanded nine dollars. I tried to negotiate, but it was useless – he drove a hard bargain, what with the laying on the floor and crying.
But he made the same mistake that Karl Marx and MMT make.
GDP is proportional to the height of the girl in the bikini. That’s a basic economic concept.
You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item. So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture. It is that valuable.
Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree. An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more. It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange. It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work. And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want. Like coffee.
Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true. They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering. Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.
But “infinite free stuff” is sure a great line when you’re running for office. Worked out great in Venezuela….
“This is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind against me.†– Futurama
Twitter® Safety Council Warning: This meme has disinformation – this was not crack, Hunter Biden was smoking meth.
I get worried when I see Internet personalities come up with entirely new philosophical positions.  I generally roll my eyes and ignore them. I can recall reading details of a few “master systems†that could never work unless they were implemented by a group of autistic libertarians on a planet with infinite resources, free fusion power and access to unlimited deodorant.
Oh, wait, I just described Switzerland.
History shows, though, that one “master system†created by a group of guys actually worked. This is, of course, the United States. The United States was a 2.0 version – the original 1.0 Articles of Confederation apparently needed an upgrade to function. (There are those who say the 1.0 version was working just fine, but that’s another story.)
What kind of cancer was Jar Jar diagnosed with? Meesathelioma.
One remaining safeguard is Federalism. Federalism is the idea that the individual States aren’t simply a subdivision like a county or city, but are individually sovereign.
This is a really big deal.
The States have given up several of their rights by joining the Union, but certainly not all of them. One particular right that the several States retain is to protect the civil liberties of their citizens. It is perfectly legal for any State to protect its individual citizens from discrimination, especially discrimination by businesses.
My suggestion is this:Â since the Right controls a large number of States, and a large number of important States, why not use that power for the Right?
Here’s one suggestion:
States controlled by the Right should protect their citizens from discrimination based on their legal opinions – political or otherwise. We could start out with something simple, like making discrimination on social media illegal.
Okay, that’s not really simple. But it is something that we can do.
If the French army used Twitter, all you’d hear from them is “Retweet, retweet!â€
Here is my contention: large social media companies in a world where opinions are increasingly driven by them aren’t a privilege, they’re a right. And being excluded from them can swing elections. Uganda certainly thought so: they banned Twitter® and Facebook™ because (according to the Ugandan ruling party) they were taking sides in the election.
Yes, you got that right: Ugandan despots have a higher moral ground than Twitter® does.
“Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.â€
Any discrimination by censoring users with legal opinions is punishable by a $1,000,000 fine. Per occurrence. Every censored user could split the fine halvsies with the State. If I were to be particularly evil, I would suggest that this be done via administrative law, which takes it right out of the court system. They could only appeal to, for instance, the Texas Social Media Freedom Commission, where they’d learn that messing with Texans is a bad idea.
Censoring porn? Just fine, since it’s not appropriate or legal for every user to see. Censoring, real, actionable threats? Those are already illegal. So that’s fine.
Can an individual block other users that offend them? Â But no large social media company can.
Repeated violations open the social media companies up to punitive damages, which is where the big bucks start to show up. Punitive damages are often large enough to make billionaires take note.
Removal of the service from the State enacting these laws is evidence that every citizen has been deprived of their civil liberties. Therefore? The social media company owes a million dollars . . . per citizen.
Pugsley’s Grandma knitted him three socks for Christmas. Why?  We told her he had grown another foot.
Of course not. Aunt Erma’s knitting board isn’t a general-purpose board. It’s focused on a single topic. Social media that’s really small (less than 10,000 daily users?) can ban whoever they want. They are not really impacting the national agenda. Social media with over a million daily users that’s not focused around a specific topic?
They can only ban users that violate the law with the content that they posted.
Oddly enough, we could make some of the same arguments the Left does. Recently, an A.I. was able to, based on photographs alone, determine with 75% accuracy who was on the Right and who was on the Left. We can make being on the Right a protected characteristic.
Being on the Right might not be a choice. So, if a baker has to bake a gay cake, Twitter® has to host people who have a problem with that.
I think this is, at least partially, why marijuana legalization has been so successful in the States that have legalized it: it is granting additional rights to citizens and businesses. The Federal government knows that it is on thin ice when it wants to regulate commerce that takes place entirely within a State.
But the Internet doesn’t take place entirely within a State, right?
No. But we’re not trying to regulate commerce. We’re protecting the civil rights of our citizens. And Twitter® and Facebook™ are attempting to market our citizens for money. They’re engaging in commerce to everyone in the State by offering their free service. So, if they exclude people (or mute people) because they don’t like their opinion?
It is simple: Facebook® needs Texas more than Texas needs Facebook™.
What’s the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Jean Luc Picard? Picard didn’t sell Data
So, if you’re with me, start working at the State level to get these protections of our essential freedoms in place. Talk to your State legislators – heck, I’m willing to bet that some readers are State legislators, so let’s get this going.
The place to fight for freedom isn’t only at the Federal level – in fact, the best place to fight for freedom might be at the State level.
“Dad, you’re, you’re twisting my words! I meant burden in its most positive sense.” – Frasier
In Rambo® 7, Rambo™ fights arthritis.
News stories are like sheep they arrive in flocks as part of a lambush. One flock of stories this week was about, and I quote, Toxic Positivity. Just like another bogeyman, Toxic Masculinity, the Left seeks to take something good and turn it into something to be seen as bad.
The basic idea of the stories is this:
Positive people make it hard for people to be sad or defeatist.
Because people can’t express their sadness or defeat, they feel even sadder and more defeated.
Therefore, the people who tried to cheer them up are evil. Oh, wait, the Left doesn’t acknowledge such an old-fashioned concept as evil. It has to be “toxic.”
Positivity is good. Is it a universal cure-all? Absolutely not. When Ma Wilder died (more than two decades ago), the last thing I wanted was someone to crack a joke or try to make light of the situation. I was grieving. I was not interested in anyone putting the “fun” in funeral.
It’s normal to grieve when a parent dies. But wallowing in that grief for too long doesn’t help anyone. If I had stayed in that grief?
That’s despair, and despair is evil. Not toxic.
Evil. Despair eats into the soul.
Moses was a high-tech prophet – he was the first to use a tablet.
That was my first reaction when I read this story: whoever is behind it is evil.
Why?
Life is tough, really tough. People that we love die. The economy has hit millions directly and is looming over many, many more.
Heck, if I wanted to, I could spend this entire post writing about things that were horrible in 2020 and 2021. But I’m not going to, because, even when things are pretty tough, almost every person reading this has a life that’s better than 99.99% of every person that has ever lived, even on your worst day.
The four stages of Santa:
1. You believe in Santa.
2. You don’t believe in Santa.
3. You are Santa.
4. You look like Santa.
Objectively, my life has been fantastic, as has the life of The Mrs. and the rest of my family. Have bad things happened to us? Sure. But we don’t dwell on them, because that’s despair.
One thing that’s critical for me when I’m having a bad day is being around someone positive to bring me up and out of my sadness. It’s critical because if you let it, sadness will turn into self-pity. And self-pity is a hole with no bottom.
Joe Biden has indicated he wants to put chips in the brains of United States Citizens. What kinds of chips? “Well, you know the thing, sour cream and onion, maybe.”
So why are there people preaching against Toxic Positivity? I can only think of two reasons:
There are a group of people who actively like feeling bad about themselves. As I’ve established before, this group tends to be (but is not exclusively) Leftist. Positive people are a mirror that they don’t like to see: a mirror of what kind of person they could be if they weren’t such miserable wretches.
Oops, there’s only the one group.
The alternative to positive people is . . . negative people.
I avoid negative people like I avoid personal hygiene. Why? Because every day I live or work around negative people, it feels like my life is slowly being sucked away. Negative people are emotional vampires. The sort of defeatism that they spew out is as infectious as Madonna® before her monthly penicillin shot.
I hear mummies are into wrap music.
Negativity can poison a workplace: it’s the guy at work who is always sure that someone else has it better, that some other group is the favored group, and that whatever raise they get is never enough. Then one person in their team is recruited – they begin to see that their group are always getting a bad deal, treated unfairly, having to work harder than others.
Strong people can avoid this self-identified victimhood. However, I’ve seen good people sucked in and become unhappy in a great job, merely because they felt that someone else, somewhere else, had it better than they did.
The biggest weapon against that attitude: being positive. That’s why I write so often about it. I think that 95% of the way I feel on an average day is entirely in my control. No, it doesn’t apply at a funeral or on other dark days. But most days?
At my funeral, my friend promised to say, “bargain,” and that means a great deal.
I choose to be happy. I choose to enjoy my life. I choose to be positive. I choose to try to uplift those around me. Do I acknowledge that times might be rough? Sure.
But the answer isn’t giving up, and taking our ball home. The answer is to work harder, get better, and never give up.
“Well, Saddam owed us money.†– Arrested Development
What does Superman® dry off with? A Tow-El.
Money.
What is it?
Really, the truth is money is anything we accept as having value that we can trade for something else. Cigarettes have been used for money. Cowrie shells were used in China for money nearly 4,000 years ago. Booze has often been used for money.
I read an article back in 2013 that bottles of Tide® were being used to trade for drugs in New York City, so you know that there are plenty of insane. Heck, I hear the Germans are even raising money online through Krautfunding.
Ideally, money has some sort of scarcity attached to it.
Gold has a historic role as money. You can cut it up into very, very tiny pieces, and you have lots of tiny pieces of gold. It hasn’t changed – you can melt it back into a single bar again, having lost nothing. You cut up a dollar bill into very tiny pieces? You have a pile of gerbil cage fluff.
Gold is nice. So is silver.
But, like anything, there are problems.
I found a little gold once while prospecting – it was a minor success.
Well, generally always the same problem. Government.
I’ve mentioned Rome before, because it’s a great illustration of what happens when government designs money.
At the beginning, Roman silver coins were, well, actually silver. The problem with silver coins is that you can’t make silver show up out of thin air. Oh, wait, if you’re a government, you can. The Imperial Romans managed to maintain enough restraint that their silver coins were over 90% silver for a little over 150 years after Empire.
After that, the percentage of silver in the coins declined rather quickly.
So did the Roman Empire.
Interestingly, where it took Rome 150 years, it took the United States 142 years for the same thing to happen: from 1792 (when the Coinage Act was passed) to 1934 (when Roosevelt confiscated United States silver and gold). History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
Sure, there were silver coins produced after 1934, but silver coins were (largely) discontinued as United States currency in 1965. (*There were exceptions for dollar and half dollar coins in selected years. That ended in 1976.)
As soon as the non-silver coins were minted, the silver coins began to disappear from circulation. Gresham’s Law states the simple fact: bad money (non-silver coins) drives out good money (silver coins).
But it’s had an impact on people’s thought processes as well: they have (largely) stopped thinking about gold and silver as money. Want proof?
Yup. When Mark Dice offered people either a King Size® Hershey’s™ chocolate bar or a 10 ounce silver bar, everyone chose the candy bar. As bad money replaced good, people stopped even thinking about silver as money.
The money supply today is fiat money. I’ve written about that before – it means that our money is entirely made up. No silver backing, no gold backing, the only backing is the faith of the people who accept it. Oh, and several thousand nuclear weapons, if you’re talking about the United States dollar.
The next step from that are the cryptocurrencies.
Those are entirely a mathematical concept, though Ricky has noted in comments that this mathematical construct can cost upwards of a million dollars in power a day. Bitcoin is currently at $33,000. Four days ago? $40,257.
Used with permission.
Is Bitcoin a bubble? Will it go to zero? Will I go to $500,000?
Honestly, I have no idea. I would have bet against it going to $40,000.
Gold hasn’t performed as well as stocks over the same period – creative people added more value than a motionless metal.
Stocks are today at a valuation that is (by my reckoning) insane. They can stay that way longer than I can bet against them.
Bitcoin? Who can say? I think its primary role right now is to indicate bubble tops.
Bonds? Who wants to buy bonds at nearly zero interest rates?
This is probably one of the more difficult times to invest in my lifetime – risks are very high, but returns don’t seem to have kept up.
First role of 2021? Don’t talk about 2020.
We seem to be, everywhere I look, near to a breaking point in our systems – economic, political, and social. Who knows, maybe we’ll be back at cowrie shell money by 2030.
But I think I’d prefer the booze, since I don’t smoke and, well, if you have booze do you really need clean clothes?
“Treat the cause, not the symptom!” – The Rocky Horror Picture Show
No change this month. We’ll see what January brings . . .
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.
We remain in the gray zone between step 9. and step 10. I will maintain the clock at 2 minutes to midnight. Last month I indicated that there was a chance to move the clock back if authorities took Leftist violence seriously.
Looks like I was too optimistic.
Previously, I stated that the only thing keeping the clock from ticking to full midnight is the number of deaths. I put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) 600 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.
But as close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute.
In this issue: Front Matter – Symptom, Not The Cause – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Harper’s Ferry 2.0 – 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, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.
Symptom, Not The Cause
The Left has many errors in perception. Many of these errors are ‘own goals’ – the Left doesn’t know what the Right is thinking because they’ve managed to short-circuit the feedback mechanisms created by the Founding Fathers. As Sarah Hoyt puts it so eloquently (LINK):
For years I’ve told the left that when they used fraud to win, they’d broken the feedback mechanism. It didn’t mean their ideas were winning, that people agreed with them, or that they were safe. It was the equivalent of breaking the fire alarm and thinking they were safe from fires.
If you asked the average Leftist, I think most of them would say that Trump was the cause of the situation that we as a nation find ourselves in. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Trump is a symptom. Trump is, in many ways, a skilled communicator. He uses media to bypass gatekeepers and those that would interpret him to speak directly to the people. Could he have had tens of thousands of people chanting “Build The Wall” or “Lock Her Up” if those people didn’t believe that in the first place?
Of course not.
Trump found the messages that resonated with a very large group of Americans that had been bypassed by both the media and the political process for decades and gave them a voice. Does he believe in those messages?
I have no idea. I am not a mind reader. But Trump became a mirror of a large group of voters to show them that, yes, he heard them. And, yes, he’d fight for them. The degree that he actually followed through is debatable.
But back to the voice of the voters: People wanted to “Build The Wall” not because they hated the people coming across the border, but because borders matter. If everyone from Japan (for instance) moved to California, you wouldn’t have Californians: you’d just have more Japan. Americans, rightly, want to live in America. They’re not afraid of change, they just want the inevitable changes to be American, and not Japanese (for example).
“Lock Her Up” wasn’t just about Hillary – it was about the groups of politicians that served themselves and the state instead of voters. Why are the Clintons swimming in hundreds of millions in cash when they came into office as thousandaires? Why are the Obama family wondering which mansion to stay in each week rather than budgeting for a once a year family vacation?
Corruption. It wasn’t just Hillary, it was (and is) virtually every politician in Washington.
That’s what Leftists don’t understand – the movement Trump gave a voice to won’t go away regardless of what happens to Trump. The underlying causes aren’t getting better, they’re festering because the feedback mechanism is broken.
Violence And Censorship Update
The Capitol was stormed, but you know the details on that one. December had numerous violent protests by the Left, but only the Capitol having unscheduled visitors received major press coverage. Rationale?
Twitter® was, by far, the biggest way that Trump evaded the mainstream media lock on news selection and interpretation. Trump could speak directly to the American people without being a newscaster using the words “unfounded” every other word. He had sent 57,000 Tweets™ since he was on the service.
Not only was Trump censored, but I heard that the top 35% of his supporters were also censored. Journalist John Robb put it very well:
Bottom line: expect more, much more, censorship in the coming year.
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 lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.
Violence:
Up is more violent. The public perception of violence dropped drastically during November, and dropped again in December. January? Too soon to tell.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. Instability dropped significantly in December. January – will it bring conclusion, or more tension?
Economic:
The economic measures took a small setback this month. I’d expect January to show a minor uptick.
Illegal Aliens:
Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Numbers of illegals being caught is rising again from a record November to a record December – the floodgates are opening.
Harper’s Ferry 2.0
In October of 1859, ever photogenic John Brown and 22 of his best friends decided that the time was right to trigger a slave uprising in the South. Their idea was to capture the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal and then – well, the “and then” part wasn’t exactly clear to anyone but Brown. His plan was that he would kidnap slaves locally, and then give them guns as part of a great army.
The slaves he kidnapped ran away from Brown, having no desire to take part in his plan. In the end, most of John Brown’s men were either shot by the United States Marines that retook the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal or were executed after a trial. Ironically, it was the actions of Robert E. Lee that stopped the locals from hanging Brown on the spot and allowing him to be taken for a trial.
This was the last major incident that happened before Civil War 1.0, and greatly divided the country: half saw John Brown as a (sort of insane) leader that was working for good even though people died in the raid. The other half saw him as a treasonous criminal and a threat to their way of life.
I think that the way that people think of the storming of the Capitol last week has exactly the same polarity. They went to go protest at the Capitol, found that they could (more or less) waltz in and claim the place. Having done so, they were like a terrier that caught a Ford F-150® pickup. “What the heck do I do now?”
Some see it as a (sort of silly) show to our government that the government exists at our pleasure, and that even the walls of the Congress, located in one of the most Leftist strongholds in the nation, is not safe. They see a group of people protesting an election that they feel was decided by fraud. They feel this way honestly and sincerely.
Others see it as treason against the nation and actions to prevent a president from being confirmed. They feel that their cause is just, since, even though there might have been irregularities in voting (50% of Biden voters think the election was stolen) that it’s okay. They think: “Trump will be gone, and the Electoral College is silly, since popular votes are what democracies do, anyway.”
Regardless, this is an action that won’t be repeated. The State is scared that it was tested and found to be so vulnerable. They won’t make this mistake again – even now thousands of troops are pouring into Washington D.C.
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much!!
From Ricky: “My self-imposed cut off for this batch of links is the GA Senate Race and the Congressional acceptance of the Electoral votes. Who the hell knows what is about to happen next.”
ON THE EVE OF DECIDING CONTROL FOR THE SENATE AND PRESIDENCY:
“The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed. But in the year of the Shadow War, it became something greater: our last, best hope for victory. The year is 2260. The place: Babylon 5.” – Babylon 5
Why did 2020 cross the road? To get to the other cyanide.
This year we didn’t celebrate our traditional Wilder family holiday, Penultimate Day. What does Penultimate Day entail?
Well, you drive south for two hours or so. Then you go to Best Buy® and, under no circumstances do you buy a cell phone. But you must look at cell phones. Then, after not buying a cell phone, you go to Olive Garden® and have some nice pasta.
This celebration started (I think) in 2011 or 2012, I think. The Mrs.’ cell phone (a Blackberry®!) was going south. We drove to the nearest cell phone store that was tied to our carrier, which was a Best Buy™ about two hours from us. We got frustrated attempting to figure out the deals after the phone clerk wheeled out a surgical gurney to take out part of my intestines. I told him, “No way!”
“Really? You need to look at the contract closer. It’s in the appendix.”
We gave up on buying a phone.
Then, frustrated at our lack of being able to find a phone, we gave up and decided to have dinner.
Hobbits always use vibrate on their phones – they don’t want the ring to give them away.
And then we drove home. It was impossibly silly, driving a total of four hours to go to not buy a cell phone. And we did it on December 30. So, I made the joke that since the New Year was a made-up holiday, why not make up our own? Thus Penultimate Day – the next-to-last day of the year – became an official Wilder holiday.
Over the years, we took Penultimate Day seriously. There were one or two exceptions where we skipped Penultimate Day, primarily because Pugsley or The Boy had a sports event. That is, of course, acceptable. The goal of Penultimate Day is to do something fun together as a family.
We stuck to celebrating Penultimate Day. Why? Because it was fun, it was silly, and it was ours.
What’s the only pasta you can get during COVID-19 lockdown? Macaroni and sneeze.
Instead, we slept in late, played a few games, and more-or-less relaxed the entire day. Our contribution to the economy of the United States? We had a nice dinner The Mrs. cooked for us at home, used some natural gas to fire our heater, and spent about $3 in electricity for lighting the place. That was it. Our participation in the economy on December 30, 2020 was probably less than $20, total.
I read that Christmas spending was down this year, to $851 from $976 in 2019. That’s a drop of 13%. But this is Monday, not Wednesday when we talk about economics. On Monday, we talk about the big picture.
But 13% is a huge drop-off. And when you add in all of the activities that people aren’t doing? I imagine it was even more. The big picture? Economic contraction increases instability.
I wrote in 2019’s Penultimate Day that we were entering a period of chaos, where entire edifices that we used to stand behind would crumble. Now, we sit in 2021, and a majority of the people who voted in the national election think it was rigged.
2020 was a mess, but it looks like we got to get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain.
2021 will certainly start out like a mess. January is going to be chaotic. Regardless, I’m optimistic about 2021 – not because I’m insane, but because I know what starts the upward rise: the upward rise starts after you’ve fallen and hit bottom. While we around the world have fallen and are headed toward the bottom, the biggest lesson is this: bring something back up with you.
That’s the question for today: what can we bring back up with us?
Understanding that the world can change around you in an instant. One moment, the world was normal. The next? Lockdowns, the destruction of an economy.
Understanding where your vulnerabilities are. Food? Toilet paper? What can you do to fix them?
Knowing that your job is not “safe” – the entire economy isn’t safe. Be prepared for more dislocations. What skills are you working on?
These are important realizations. In 2021 and for the foreseeable future, complacency will not be your friend. Constantly question your assumptions. Constantly try to understand your side, but also periodically ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” Try to understand the other side of the issue, too.
You may or may not be wrong, but questioning (not doubting, but questioning) yourself is key to deep understanding. Hold your own beliefs up to the same scrutiny you use on opposing beliefs.
Thankfully, hindsight is 2020. Or did I get that backward?
As I wrote on Friday, I’m not sure that 2021 will be a great year, but it will be a birth year for the next phase of what happens to our society. What’s probable this year?
Unemployment continues, and likely gets worse. Ideas of a quick rebuild will be crushed. People at the bottom end – twentysomethings and service workers – are already hoisting a white flag.
Society will become even more fractured. Left and Right are guaranteed to be further apart in 2021 – the way this presidential election has gone is sure to inflame both sides, no matter what happens.
The very mechanisms that we normally see as protecting society will continue to erode. People on the Right who are defending the “thin blue line” will become aware that many (not all!) of the police will do whatever the people signing their checks tell them to do. This is not the year to be a cop in Portland, Oregon.
People will continue to flee California and large Leftist cities in a locust-like plague. They will not leave their Leftist ideas behind.
The debt of the United States will continue to climb. My bet? We add another $4-5 trillion this year. That doesn’t include personal debt and business debt. The idea that printing money is better than earning it will continue and probably increase in 2021. This idea will only stop when events force it to stop.
But as I said in the introduction to Friday’s post, I remain weirdly optimistic that, even given all of these trends, this will be a year that we will look back on and say, “That was the year that things changed.” Certainly, 2020 was a year that will likely be looked on as the start of the crisis. 2021 will be looked at as the year that the seeds of the new are planted.
How can I better describe it?
1776 is they year that most people associate with the birth of the United States. What most people forget is that it wasn’t until 1787 that the Constitutional Congress was held. Likewise, it wasn’t until 1789 that George Washington was sworn in as our first President. That was thirteen years after 1776 – thirteen years where there was war, economic failure, and finally a coming together over a very unique document.
Change takes time.
What did Washington say before his men got in the boats to cross the Delaware to attack the British? “Get in the boats.”
So, if I’m right, people will look back on 2021 and say, “That was when things turned around.”
And the good news is, Penultimate Day or not, you’ll be there for it. Again, I never said it was going to be easy. It will likely be the complete opposite of easy.
Jack Nicholson gave us a Colonel of truth in that movie.
Living in the country has advantages. One of them is being able to conduct experiments into nuclear fusion without a license. Oops. Did I say that out loud?
The other is that I can make a bonfire the size of Delaware. Why would I want to do that? Just like making my own fusion reactor, why wouldn’t I want to do that?
In my case, the next-door neighbor and I have trees that regularly need to be trimmed, or, as I mentioned in a story (A Tree Fell On My House, But I Have A Chainsaw) a while ago, just plain fall down onto my house. We haven’t burned the pile for about three years, so I figured it was time to get rid of prime snake habitat and burn it all down. Winter is the best time for a ludicrously large fire, so we decided tonight was the night.
Now lighting deadwood on fire sounds easy, but this time it was fairly difficult. We were nearly getting ready to give up, go inside, and let the pile smolder out when a section caught. Admittedly it was on the fifth bottle of charcoal lighter fluid, so I guess persistence pays off.
If I ever become an island castaway, I’ll set up a flaming signal on the beach: it’s the shore fire way to get attention.
Within five minutes we had a conflagration pouring tornado-like flames thirty feet into the sky. There is a moment when, after unleashing that fire, I realized it was utterly beyond our control. It was burning fuel so fast that branches suspended five feet about the base were burning with a bright bluish-gold flame. Sparks were shooting 60 feet into the air on an updraft of hot air that would make Maxine Waters blush.
Thankfully, I could release that sweet, sweet CO2 back into the air to Make Siberia Warm Again.
I liked that, because an immense, hot fire burns quickly, and I wanted it to be a boring pile of coals and hot ash before I went inside. It was – within ten more minutes (seven liters) the fire had consumed 70% plus of its fuel and it was perfect for toasting marshmallows – from forty feet away.
We heard sirens sounded like a fire engine in the neighborhood, but we didn’t go and look – showing up at a neighborhood fire with marshmallow roasting sticks is bad form here in Modern Mayberry.
As I sat there beside the fire, I was thinking about Plato.
No, Plato isn’t Goofy®’s dog, that’s Pluto™. Which makes me wonder why a cartoon dog has a dog as a pet? Disturbing.
My computer password is FrodoKirkGoofyScoobyBugsSacramento – just like IT said – five characters and a capital.
What I was thinking about was the dead Greek guy, Plato. In many things, Plato was a complete idiot, but he wrote everything down, so we remember him. Diogenes the philosopher, it is rumored, loved making fun of Plato, especially by putting Icy-Hot™ in the nether regions of Plato’s toga.
But one thing that Plato left us with that was useful was his Allegory of the Cave.
The Allegory of the Cave is a fairly simple story. A group of people are chained in a cave so all they can do is stare at a blank wall. But behind them is a fire, which casts shadows on the wall. Not being able to see real, three-dimensional reality, the people stuck in the cave seeing nothing but shadows give names to the shadows.
I tried to come up with another philosopher pun, but I just Kant. And I Kant lose any more weight. Another Plato.
Their reality, knowing nothing else, are those shadows that they can see.
But one day, one of the people escapes. He leaves the cave, and upon looking around sees the rich tapestry of things that are not shadows. He sees colors. He sees trees. He might see a Taco Bell® depending upon where the cave is.
He finally experiences reality as you and I do, especially if he orders extra cheese on the Nachos Bell Grande®.
It must be a stunning information overload – countless things that he’s never seen before – remember, if it hasn’t cast a shadow on the cave wall, it doesn’t exist in his world.
Having friends in the cave, the escaped person goes back in. “Dudes, you have to see this. We’ve been wrong our whole lives – there’s a rich world out there. Nothing is as it seems to you. Come and see!”
In the kingdom of the blind, is the one-eyed man king?
No, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is considered, at best, crazy. More likely, however, the one-eyed man is viewed as a threat that must be eliminated. So is our escapee that returns to enlighten his friends.
No one wants to be robbed of their illusions. Many people don’t want to consider alternate viewpoints. The escapee will be shouted down by the rest of the captives. “Surely,” they say, “such a world cannot exist. If it did, I’d have to change my conceptions, and there are two things I never change, my underwear and my conceptions.”
What kind of pants do they wear in Plato’s cave? Yoga Tights? No. Stalac Tights.
The bad news is, to one extent or another, we’re all prisoners of the cave. We see misperceptions in our daily life, either of our own construct or as constructed for us.
Who would construct misperceptions for us?
Lots of people. Here are a few examples:
Harry Truman, on August 6, 1945, said: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base.” Well, sure. It was a militarily important city. And farms were militarily important because they made food that people might eat. And schools were militarily important because they educated children that could fight us. But that would be like saying, “San Francisco, an important American Army base.” (Note: I’m not saying I disagree with the decision, just that Truman’s statement was shady as a Netflix® show about dancing children.)
Don’t worry, in the sequel the Japanese take out Detroit.
Operation Northwoods: Essentially a plan from the Pentagon for our military to stage terrorist attacks in the United States while pretending to be Cubans as a justification to attack Cuba. Really. Here’s the Wikipedia® on that (LINK). Not Alex Jones. Wikipedia™.
The CIA performed illegal mind control experiments on American and Canadian civilians. Here’s the Wikipedia (LINK). Most of the documents were burned, so there’s no telling how many people were impacted. When I first heard of this, my response was that it was impossible. Nope. They did it.
Let’s pull the media in, too. The New York Times® “reporter” Walter Duranty wrote stories that there was no mass starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, despite knowing that millions were being starved to death on purpose. Duranty got a Pulitzer Prize™ for his lies – a prize that has never been rescinded. I wrote about that starvation here (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver Medals).
I could do dozens more where the government, academia, industry, or unions lied and most people believed them. I’ve written about those again and again – the 1960’s Harvard Sugar Study, anyone (High Carbs, Harvard, Insurance, And Avoiding Doctors)? If it was just statements from politicians that were lies that most of us believed? I don’t have enough electrons on my computer to store all of those.
Essentially, unless I get up and go outside of the cave I’m in, I’m sitting and watching those shadows on the wall. But when I do get up and go outside of that cave, I learn amazing things – all those things that are glossed over in history classes, and generally not easy to find, though they’re (for today) clearly documented on even Left-leaning sites like Wikipedia®.
But if someone would have told fifteen year old me that those things in the bullet points above were true? Would I have violently rejected that?
Absolutely.
Fifteen year old me wanted to believe in the government, wanted to believe that the press wasn’t hopelessly corrupt. Me in 2020 has seen too much.
If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, there is a scene where the protagonist tries to help his friend stop staring at the shadows on the wall of the cave. In the movie, there are sunglasses you can wear to see a different reality. The clip below from the movie, with Rowdy Roddy Piper playing the protagonist, and Keith David playing his reluctant friend who really, really doesn’t want to put on the glasses (some NSFW dialog):
Rowdy Roddy, rest in peace.
The bonfire in my backyard is now just some smoke and a few glowing coals, not enough light now to cast the amazing shadows that the thirty-foot flame made. But my television is going, showing a documentary where a gentleman is earnestly telling me about his particular trip outside the cave. If he’s right, it changes the world.
As does every trip outside the cave. But, I have my doubts that he’s right because the truth he’s presenting is so counter to mainstream thought, so I’ll keep doing my research. And learning.
Leaving the cave is scary, and it’s difficult. And I absolutely don’t promise that understanding reality a little bit better will make you happy – it’s very likely to have the opposite effect. But it will bring you one step closer to the truth.
Maybe you and I can finally figure out what those shadows really are.
