Big Thoughts – Page 77 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold

“After the First World War, Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive. He wasn’t alone. He had close to a thousand followers when he died. They conducted rituals up on the roof, bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world.” – Ghostbusters

Well, he has a point. I think I need to post this to my timeline!

Previous posts in this series include:

This is part five of a multipart series. The rest of them are here: (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo )

The story to date: Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided. He’s bicycled and walked until he’s only 60 miles from home, 58 hours after the EMP.

He’s just witnessed a Camaro pulling onto the road after hearing two shots in a farmhouse, and it was headed straight toward him.

EMP +2, 2:30 PM, 58 miles from home

The Camaro was half a mile away. Hiding seemed like a good idea, but I looked to either side of the road there was no cover for 100 yards, and the camouflage poncho I was wearing consisted of dark greens and browns – it would be of no use against the straw yellow dead grass in the ditch here.

I stood motionless and waited. I didn’t have long to wait.

The Camaro pulled to a stop in front of me.

The driver turned off the engine and soon enough a brushed nickel revolver was pointing at me out of the open window. The thought entered my mind that he was holding the gun in his left hand, and maybe he wasn’t a good shot left handed. But then I looked at the barrel again. For whatever reason, the hole in the gun barrel looked as large as the full moon. Betting that he would be a lousy shot with his left hand seemed like a lousy bet.

“Hands outside of the poncho.”

I slowly raised my arms to the side.

“Alright. Hands above your head. Lock your fingers together. Slowly.”

I complied. It’s not like I can run faster than a slug from the hand cannon he was holding, and, besides, I didn’t have anything to fight back with other than the cheap Chinese multi-tool that I had previously kept in my car as part of my emergency kit.

“Got a gun?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Millerville,” I replied.

“And where did you start?”

“Meridian.”

“You mean north of the Interstate Meridian? That’s almost 200 miles away.” He paused. “How’d you get here so fast?”

“Bicycle, and then feet.”

“Impressive. What did you see?”

“Can I put my hands down?”

“No.”

I sighed. “Not much. On the first day I just biked due south. The next? Due east. Not a lot of people on the roads I picked. I got shot at by the interstate running south from the City and lost my bike, but crossed under the Interstate on the railroad bridge. Since then, I’ve been walking east.”

I still hadn’t seen the driver’s face – the sunlight reflected off of the car windshield. I heard a single, humorless laugh. “Unarmed. Sixty miles from home. I should just shoot you out of mercy. Hell, I bet you haven’t even eaten since this started.”

The humorless laugh again.

He continued, “Okay. Since you’ve obviously figured out that nothing electrical works anymore you understand, probably better than most, that civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

His arm withdrew back into the car, and I was relieved to see pistol disappear.

“For what it’s worth, the people in the farmhouse ahead are dead. And I did kill them. I’m the sheriff in this county, and I’ve been, well, taking out the trash today. There are some people who will just be trouble, and they were pretty high on the list.

“If you really are going to Millerville, you should be armed. There’s at least one pistol in there. Probably some food. So, go. If I ever see you around our peaceful community again? I’ll shoot you, too. Now walk on over to that fence, and turn around and face the other direction until I drive off. Good luck.”

I complied. The engine on the Camaro roared back to life. I heard the engine rev up and then the sound of the exhaust was up and over the little hill, lessening in volume continuously.

When I got to the farmhouse, the front door was open to the 1930’s or 1940’s era home. There were two bodies on the couch in the front room, a man and a woman. They looked to be in their early forties. Both were dead. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a dead person – it had been at a funeral, my mom, I think. Years. And here were two dead people, dead less than an hour. They had entrance wounds, center mass of their chest. There was surprisingly little blood, but I imagined the back of the couch was a mess. I wasn’t going to check.

Was the driver of the Camaro really a sheriff? I had no idea. I had no idea what these people had done. A grudge, a score to settle? Or?

It didn’t seem to matter to him to leave a witness alive, but in the end, he probably doesn’t care. The chances of him seeing me again were nearly zero, and if the world ever did come back, the chances of him seeing me as a witness in court against him would also be effectively zero – I’d imagine the slowly cooling bodies in the next room wouldn’t matter to anyone left alive. There’d be no one to press charges.

I’m embarrassed that I headed straight for their kitchen.

I skipped the refrigerator – it had been cold, but the power had been off for days. They had a pantry, of sorts, behind a floral patterned curtain. I looked around the kitchen – it was a mess. Open containers of food on the counter. Trash overflowing the trash can. Dirty dishes everywhere.

In the pantry were an array of cans. Corn. Creamed corn. I hated creamed corn. But it never sounded so good to me. Carrots. Peaches. Some pasta.

I looked around the mess on the counter. Can opener. Hmm.

There was an electric can opener, but there wasn’t a manual one on the counter. I looked through the drawers, and couldn’t find one. I remembered I had my cheap Chinese multitool – it didn’t have one, either. But it did have a punch. I put the punch up against the metal lid of the can, and smacked it with the base of another can. Success – a small hole. I repeated on the other side. Another hole. Since these were peaches, I decided that I could just start by drinking the juice.

It was the best thing I’d ever had in my life, sticky sweet, and tasting of summer.

I finally found a hammer in another drawer, and used it and my multi tool to poke a lot of holes in the can. I used the needle nose pliers on the multitool to rip the small bridges of metal up, until I had a hole big enough to get an actual peach out with a fork I found in a drawer.

They were amazing.

When I got to the second can of corn, I cut my finger on the ripped up lid, deeply. I dripped blood on the floor as I went to the bathroom and found some topical antibiotic and a bandage.

I wondered how long until a tube of Neosporin® would be worth more than gold. I guessed that the answer was that it already was. After wrapping up my finger, I looted the medicine cabinet, dumping everything into my bag – nobody would be making more medicine anytime soon.

As I walked back toward the kitchen to finish the corn, I saw an actual Leatherman® multitool on a dresser in a bedroom. I checked – it had a can opener. I went back to the kitchen. Slowly, but steadily I opened the next can of food.

It was about 10 minutes after I finished eating, while I was looking for guns and ammunition, that the pain hit my abdomen. I doubled over as waves of pain hit me. I almost didn’t make the toilet before . . . well, before I needed to get there. But I did make it.

After scrounging around, I found an old .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol – how old? It looked like it might have been old enough to have served with Patton in World War Two. There were twenty-odd rounds of ammunition and two magazines – a perfect match. I also found some really old rifles in a closet, but no ammunition for them.

But in the hall closet? The mother lode. A sleeping bag and a small tent.

I put enough food into the bag for three days. I hoped that would be enough to get me home . . . .

I left the house. Maybe if I were a better person, I’d have buried the couple on the couch. As it was, I was thinking more of me than them. I headed east. And I kept walking.

### (Until Next Week)

My guess is as we enter the third day, people are starting to get a little crazy, and not ex-girlfriend crazy, but Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre® crazy. Our current society is built upon lots and lots of information, along with lots and lots of luxury. I define luxury here as “stuff that’s not required to live.” Day three will bring a deficit of both. As the snow storm pounds the East Coast and they have an epic battle to just stay alive. In the Midwest? Sparsely populated, and (during this story) unseasonably warm.

This meme was found here (LINK).

What goes through someone’s head when the Sun is shining, the weather is nice, but the car won’t work, the stores are closed, and there is absolutely no information coming from anywhere? Nothing good. And this will be combined with declining supplies at home.

The average house has less than three days’ worth of food on hand. The average store has less than three days’ worth of inventory. But the stores are closed. On day one, some people are out of diapers. On day three? Half the people are out of food. And none of them know what is going on. On day four? We’ll get to that next week.

This meme was found here (LINK).

The reaction of the “sheriff” was an interesting one. First, he wanted to know about what our hero had seen. His communication channels are nearly certainly down, and getting any kind of information would be helpful in protecting his town. Also, it looks like, he’s figured out that things will never return to normal. That’s another unsettling thing – people won’t go after witnesses. Why would they? Authority is simply gone.

Would a sheriff proactively go after the bad guys after TEOTWAWKI – “taking out the trash” as he called it? Maybe. A good sheriff would know the troublemakers, the ones likely to cause trouble. A good sheriff would know which people got off on a technicality. And even a good sheriff might have a grudge.

Would scores be settled? As to old vendettas being settled – that’s a certainty. People are pretty good at keeping grudges, and there are some actions that are kept in check only by the threat of prison. On day one, you’d see this behavior – scores being settled – in any medium to large size city. On day three? That city would be tearing itself apart. Small, rural areas wouldn’t see that behavior that soon. We all know each other. To a certain extent, the Wilder family is still the new guys on the block, and we’ve lived in this house for a decade.

Regardless, as the sheriff said: “Civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

Medicine now appears as a first time topic. We take the current miracles of our age, antibiotics, antibiotic creams, and sterile bandages as commonplace. And they are. They’re also amazingly inexpensive. However, in the past this wasn’t the case. A simple cut on a finger if it resulted in infection, could lead to death.

Lastly, people are used to eating consistent amounts of food daily. After intermittent (involuntary) fasting, digestive systems will change. Yeah. A small detail. And maybe I’ve already said too much about that.

Yeah. Digestive systems are icky.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” – Herbert Stein

“Something’s the matter. Something sinister and something grotesque. And what’s worse is that it’s going on right here under my very nose.” – Blackadder Goes Forth

It’s amazing that one very short role was so iconic it cemented Ben Stein’s Hollywood career – he’s now known as Economics Lecturer to the Stars. He taught Miley Cyrus everything she knows about pole-dancing while nearly nude and its impacts on global trade due to dynamic trade imbalances in an information-driven economy.

Ben Stein is an odd person. Lawyer. Economic commentator. Writer. Actor. Inventor of the phonograph. But his father Herbert Stein was pretty spiffy, too. Herbert was an economist who headed up the Council of Economic Advisors for President Nixon and President Ford.

But that isn’t interesting. Or at least interesting to anyone not named “Stein.”

However, in 1976 he said something very interesting:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

So silly, so obvious. So profound.

But what can’t go on forever?

Well, in the big scheme, almost everything. The Universe even has an expiration date. Unless there is are some pretty significant physical laws to the contrary that we have yet to find, all indications are that the Universe will keep expanding for a very long time. Like, for all of time. Forever. The Universe has moved on from the hot, incandescent birth where even light couldn’t exist to the relatively short period of now where we have stars and planets and Amazon® Echoes™ and such.

Eventually, because the Universe is continuing to expand, the galaxies will move so far apart that we won’t be able to see other galaxies at all. At somewhere around 100,000,000,000,000 years from now on February 13, late in the afternoon, the last star visible from the Milky Way® will burn out. That’s okay. The Sun will only last another 7,500,000,000 years or so. And the Earth will be gone billions of years before that. And that sucks, because I keep all my stuff here.

Eventually, even black holes evaporate. And under some theories even protons, the building blocks of everything we think of as matter, might decay. This proton decay would render normal matter obsolete. The implications of this are stunning. Making even a rudimentary PEZ™ dispensers would be impossible unless you made it out of pure ultra-dense neutronium, and even Amazon can’t ship a PEZ© dispenser that weighs 100 billion tons for free, even if you do have Prime®.

And at that point? It’s all gone. Nothing left but a very thin, diffuse mist of subatomic particles existing at a very cold temperature, where no more thermodynamic reactions are possible – known romantically as the Heat Death of the Universe. It’s like the Universe was the shower, and all the hot water was gone because your kids are incapable of taking a shower of less than an hour’s duration.

Ginsburg is never gonna carpool with anybody but Sotomayor again.

So everything has an end, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton’s twin needs for political power and chardonnay. Oh, and maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been rumored to have uploaded her consciousness to a small robot that she fashioned out of an old Sony® laptop and a Roomba© vacuum cleaner. Okay, to be honest, I started the Ginsburg rumor, because it would be really amazing if all of the members of the SCOTUS did that. I therefore declare personal ownership of the concept of RoboJudge©, including animation rights, but I would be willing to trade the Mongolian comic book rights for a beer right about now . . . .

Speaking of Heat Death, I found the following graph at RStreet.org (LINK):

Ohhhh, pretty bumps! If this was a roller coaster, what would happen next?

I actually drew this graph out on paper (back to the 2006 Dow levels) on a really slow work day one winter when I worked in Fairbanks, calculating what the Dow-Jones Industrial Average would be if it were in constant dollars. I even used data on the Consumer Price Index, and did all the math, and sacrificed a chicken, which is required in economics to make sure the results are right. Anyway, what’s interesting to me is that this graph shows the result of asset prices in a “forever low” interest rate environment.

I never, ever, would have guessed that this would have been the outcome of the Fed’s policy of printing money like a toddler drools to cover the massive spending and deficits of everyone who’s been president this century. I would have guessed that we would have had massive inflation, and an economy that would make the socialist paradise of Venezuela feel happy that they could stand in line for two days to get the free half cup of sawdust to eat.

Instead, we have Netflix®, a soaring asset base, and tacos on Tuesday.

I think I missed two things:

In a unipolar world, where we have the biggest and most intimidating armed forces the world has ever seen, everybody feels safe to use a dollar. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does the popularity of Twilight®. How intimidating are our armed forces? So intimidating that literally no power on Earth would ever consider taking us on in a conventional war. We’ve spent so much money on awesome military stuff that we’ve made World War II tactics impossible to use on us. So people around the world use dollars. It’s the next iteration of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. And he who has the gun, has the gold. Just ask governments that tried to sell oil in their own currencies – I won’t use real names, let’s just call them Kuamar Mhadafy and Haddam Sussein.

This soaks up a lot of cash. Piles of it. And, better yet? Everyone in the world is willing to sell us actual physical stuff in exchange for electronic transfer of codes that say they have dollars. We don’t even have to print new dollars anymore!

Oh, and I’m sorry to have mentioned Twilight. If it helps, at least it’s not 50 Shades of Grey.

The other thing I missed is that banks just sat on huge deposits of cash to make their depleted balance sheets look better. They could just deposit the money at the Fed. I think we all agree that this was a better idea than just lending $2.7 million to absolutely anyone who wanted a house, even if “anyone” was a 12 year old buzzed on Pixie Sticks™ and the house was a cardboard box in the alley behind an all-night waffle and pizza restaurant.

But keeping that sort of balance is hard. Eventually the money starts to leak back into the economy – Chinese folks purchase Vancouver from the Canadians. Then the Canadians get excited because they can take their maple-syrup covered hands and spend the recycled American dollars on comic books and pantyhose from the United States. End result? Those dollars leak back.

And into stocks. And other assets. Some observers have said that, in addition to the high prices on the stock market, we also have a bubble in absolutely everything. But back to the stock market:

So, given that we’re at historically high valuations for a stock market . . . is it real? Can it sustain this high level?

Bueller, Bueller, anyone?

The Search for Meaning Might Drain Your Bank Account

“They haven’t said much about the meaning of life yet.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

So, is the meaning of life having a super sweet car like this? If so, would having a Bat Cave be like double extra meaning? If so, count me in!

One tragedy of our current culture is lower amounts of social interaction leading to meaning.

So what do I mean by meaning?

Meaning is significance. Meaning is working on something important. Meaning implies actions that change the world for the better, or at least change someone’s life for the better. Ideally, this work is something that you are uniquely suited to do and that you’re good at, but those things aren’t absolutely necessary. The idea is that you have some way that you can actively change the world for the better. And you don’t have to paint the world to make it better, because the world is really big, and it would take a very long time to paint it, kind of like my house exterior, which, at last count, has taken me 10 years to paint, mainly because I haven’t started yet.

But meaning takes time. And it takes persistence. And sometimes it takes money.

Those things can be difficult, especially if you’re lazy like me.

So where can you get meaning?

Your job. A job is a good and admirable place to find meaning, and ideally yours is such a place. But it probably isn’t. Some people, like those at the IRS, actually have a job that implies they will make others angry with no real discernible benefit to society. How about being a prison guard? Tough duty. And how many jobs are, well, just plain BS? If you have one of those or aspire to one of those, you’re in luck! There’s an entire web page dedicated to generating job titles for you! (LINK) Chances are better than even that your job is just that – a job. It’s a job that people pay you to keep doing rather than a saintly crusade to save the planet. Hey, at least you get paid, right?
Your family. This is a great place to get meaning. But if you’re a dad like me, your main job is to produce independent and tough children who view the world as a challenge that they want to beat. It’s like you light a bottle rocket and then . . . off it goes. After you’ve done lit the fuse, well, it’s gone. And it doesn’t need you anymore – it has a purpose and a path. I apologize to anyone who really desires to make dependent children who are needy basket cases, but that’s not the way we roll at Casa Wilder. So, by definition, my children need me less each and every day.

What are the alternatives if you don’t get meaning at work, and need more than family can provide?

In the United States we used to take part in civic organizations to do meaningful work, or at least drink and smoke cigarettes, pipes and cigars while we pretended to do meaningful work. Or smoke and talk drunkenly about the meaningful work that we really, really intended to do. But those civic organizations really did accomplish a lot – from scholarships to the foundation of hospitals and clinics to funding zoos and draining swamps to get rid of disease-carrying mosquitoes. And our forefathers accomplished all of that with a hacking cough and a buzz on.

Sadly, one last civic organization I attended spent more effort complaining about other members of the organization that weren’t there than it did changing the world. And they didn’t even drink. I don’t go to meetings anymore, though I did suggest beer would be good at the meetings. If we’re not going to do something to help humanity, at least we should drink, right? I don’t smoke, but I’d be willing to learn, if it helped. Alas, this sober and smoke-free organization does little to change the world.

As a nation, our civic participation is down overall – the book Bowling Alone recounts how membership in groups that meaningfully participate at the local level of communities is . . . down. Rotary. Lions. Boy Scouts. Knights of Columbus.

It even reaches from structured clubs to bowling leagues. Bowling leagues? Well, the author used that data to show that social interaction was down across the board. The overall number of bowlers is up, but the number of participants in bowling leagues is down. We’re bowling, but we’re only bowling with people we already know. We’re not using any sort of social energy to meet other people and forge new friendships and relationships that strengthen the civic core. But at least you can drink and bowl.

If I was a cynic, I’d say the system was designed to do decrease civic participation – if we’re not actively making our community better ourselves, well, we can leave it for government to do. Government likes this a whole lot. Things that used to done by ordinary citizens in the community, say, being on the volunteer fire department, can now be replaced by professional firefighters who get paid. Government wins both ways – the fire department employees like to get paid and vote for the people that pay them, and government has assumed another duty that it must tax for. A win-win!

Unless you’re the guy paying taxes.

Regardless of why civic participation is down, it is down. The reasons might form a future post. And that removes a very significant opportunity to be, well, significant. Thankfully there are other outlets. Me? I write this blog. I know it’s seen by nearly every person on the planet right now. Okay, okay, it’s not. But traffic is heading that way. At current growth trends in the year 2371 everyone on Earth will be doing nothing but reading my blog six hours a day. Which is as it should be. Then I will be officially meaningful.

However, there are other outlets besides writing that are preferred by other people:

Gaming. I think I’ve told this story before on the blog, but keep in mind, when I originally wrote it I was getting about 1/10th the traffic I’m getting now. So, if you’ve heard this story before, pretend you haven’t, because I’m going to tell it even better this time:

In the 1990’s, I remember watching the HBO™ series Dream On. In this series, a newly single guy in New York had numerous adventures. Since it was on HBO®, many of the adventures involved scantily clad females. Or completely naked females. But I turned away from the set and read my Bible during those naughty, naughty scenes. Thank heavens the VCR was recording.

The main character had an office job in New York. He also had a secretary, Toby. She was written as a nearly worthless secretary with an attitude. In one particular episode, she does nothing but play a video game on her work computer. You could do that before the Internet and the IT department tracked every keystroke.

The game involved a supermarket. Toby started the episode as a stock boy in the game. Then she worked her way up to bag boy a few scenes later. Then, cashier. Then a few scenes later? Produce manager.

Finally, at the very end of the episode, she yelled:

“I DID IT!”

“I’m the MANAGER!”

“Of a supermarket . . . that doesn’t exist . . . .”

With each phrase, her emotions changed. At first, joy in achievement! Secondly, a questioning voice . . . a manager. Finally, her voice got very small. She realized her accomplishment was really no accomplishment. It lacked meaning.

If you like games, if you like escaping in them, that’s fine, more power to you. But remember, they’re not really a substitute for actual achievement. Plus, this is Wealthy Wednesday – how much money do you want to spend on games, anyway? And how much time do you want to spend on them? Yeah, I know, I spent two hours today. But . . . umm, I’m sure I had a good reason.

Consumption. Yes, this is Wealthy Wednesday, and as such we finally have to get around to this.

Consumption is used as a replacement for actual significance and achievement. It’s even encouraged. Why does it work?

Where else can you go, hunt for something, find it, and then get it. It’s certain to work, every time. You can’t fail. Yet you get the opportunity to experience the flush of success, the dopamine rush from having found and purchased what you were looking for. And if you bought it off the Internet, you get a second rush when the little brown box from Amazon shows up*.

That purchase gives the same feeling as accomplishing something that has actual meaning, and there’s none of the work and none of the uncertainty. It almost doesn’t matter what the thing is. It could be shoes. It could be books. It could be lightbulbs. It could be PEZ® dispensers. As long as it’s something that you can actually do, your brain can take this stimulus and turn it into a replacement for actual achievement.

And it has been culturally jammed into our heads – we’re not who we are, we are the sum total of what we own. We are our car. We are our house. We are our slacks. We are our PEZ® dispensers. This consumption has replaced civic virtue. It has replaced the Lions Club. It has replaced the Rotary, the Kiwanis, and the Knights of Columbus, but unlike those groups, you can do it alone, at night, downstairs in your underwear, after a few beers. At 2AM, feeling like you haven’t lived up to your potential in life? If you’re tired of being the manager of a supermarket that doesn’t exist, well, perhaps you can check in at Amazon.com® to see what you can buy to fill the achievement and meaning-sized hole in your heart?

This post is about wealth – and the first requirement of being wealthy is that you don’t spend thousands of dollars on useless crap to replace meaning in your life. Especially if you don’t have the cash to spend. If you don’t have the cash to buy that new truck and you buy it anyway? Now you have debt. And the debt removes your peace of mind and you go in search of more meaning, so you buy the boat. And you and your wife have to work for years of your life to pay for it all.

That’s okay, it’s not like you can become a slave to your own consumption based on your search of meaning, is it?

Nah. I’m sure that doesn’t happen.

*I refuse to say how I learned this.

TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo

“She’s the last of the V8 Interceptors.” – Mad Max

So, the only perfect car after the apocalypse is a V8 Interceptor, right? But what does insurance cost after the end of the world as we know it?

EMP +2, 2PM, 60 miles from home.

I could hear the big V8 engine coming about a mile away.

And that was good, because I had no idea who was driving it. As much as I’d have loved to hitchhike home, I had the gut feeling that anyone putting that much gas into the engine had a purpose in mind that didn’t involve taking me home.

I broke for the ditch on my right, and the dubious cover of the small tree beyond – the only cover for 40 yards.

I was still wearing the camouflaged poncho – it was nearly uncomfortably warm, even on a 50°F day. But it had the benefit of not being orange. I got behind the tree, got low, and stayed still.

Forty seconds later a 1960’s era Camaro topped the small rise and blew past me on the road, loudly.

As the high pitch dopplered into a low pitch as it passed me and moved away I guessed that the owner had taken considerable liberty with the state laws that governed noise reduction – the car was loud, uncomfortably loud. And it didn’t slow down – whether or not it had seen me hiding behind the shrub. Where ever they were going, whatever they were doing, it didn’t involve me.

That was good.

After a minute, I got up, and started walking again, east, following the Camaro.

Walking is boring. Boring, boring, boring. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, was also quite a philosopher – and in what was probably a pretty dismal day he wrote the following: “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.” It’s not exactly what he said – he was French, but it’s close enough.

But the boredom was alternating with apprehension. My family was miles away, and I had no idea what was happening with them. The good news: they had been at home. If it weren’t winter, they would have slept through their alarms, since their alarms were all electronic, and most of them were hooked directly to the Internet, and none of that was coming back soon. But since it was winter, someone, probably my wife, had woken up when it got cold in our bedroom. And knew something was wrong.

They were smart, though, and I imagined that they would have figured out pretty soon that the lights were gone for good. At least I hoped they would. We had actually spent time talking about it, more as a thought experiment, a “what would you do if” conversation on the deck on the mild spring and fall evenings. My apprehension was like my apprehension about being on the road – my sons and wife would be fine, except for . . . other people. Like the people in the Camaro. Random people who had needs, desires, or bad blood.

Borehension? Apprehendom? Not sure there was a word for it. But I kept going, one foot in front of the other down the road.

The third emotion I felt was hunger.

I’m not sure that I’d ever really been hungry, in my entire life. I was only on the second day of this trip, and I hadn’t eaten. The emergency food rations in my backpack – 6000 calories – were five years old. I’d never rotated them. And they’d been kept in the trunk of my car on 110°F days during five summers.

What causes food to go bad? Heat, light, and age. My trunk had given them two out of three. When I opened the package, what wasn’t hard as a rock was rotten.

I threw it away before I got hungry so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat it. It was heavy, and it was useless.

I couldn’t remember when the last time I had gone a day without food. It was probably a few years ago. But there hadn’t been many of them. Now I was on my second day without food, and I had probably been burning 10,000 calories a day between biking, walking, and shivering at night in the cold.

But this part of the Midwest was nice for walking. It was flat, and the roads ran straight – unless there was a river, lake, or hill, the roads went due north and due south, and there was one nearly every mile. And I needed to head due East, so I kept going East.

And my feet hurt. I worried about getting blisters. If I had to finish this on foot, which looked likely at this point, blisters were my biggest enemy. Outside of people I didn’t know. Like the guys in the Camaro.

As I crested the next small rise I saw another farmhouse about a half mile off. The Camaro was there.

I stopped and sat down, off the road, back into the ditch to watch. No reason to highlight my silhouette against the ridgeline.

Two gunshots. Separated by about fifteen seconds.

A minute later, two people got walked out of the house and got into the Camaro®, and started it up with a load roar. They backed up, and then the tires threw out gravel as the driver gunned the engine, fishtailing as they straightened out the car onto the main road.

Headed straight back toward me. And I had no illusions. They were armed. And their intentions weren’t good.

And I was a witness.

Meanwhile, in the big city to the north . . .

Tim looked out and saw that three houses in the next block were on fire. He had gone to help, but all he could do was stand outside with neighbors that he’d never talked to as everything they owned burned. He’d thought about inviting them to his house, but, again, he didn’t know them. Maybe their next door neighbors would invite them in. Or maybe there was an empty house they could stay in, until things returned back to normal.

He and his wife, Arlene, had some firewood, and had kept the house warm that first night, but now the firewood was low. They mainly used the fireplace on Saturday nights, only. And that was for atmosphere.

Tim had walked the half mile to the supermarket, and saw that it was closed. But it wasn’t closed. The windows had been broken out, and walking through the sliding doors that had been permanently pulled open, and nothing but darkened chaos inside. Tim didn’t see a single item on the shelves, as far as he could see. Nothing. The store was empty.

Tim walked back home. Not a car on the streets. At his front door, he called out, “Arlene-ee, I’m home.” No answer.

His next door neighbor, who he had stood with as his house burned, came down the hall.

“Can I help you?”

### (Until Next Week)

I typed in “Cover, Concealment, and Camouflage” into my browser. What popped up? The first link was Crosman®, the BB and pellet gun manufacturer. On their page, they have copied the USMC Marine Rifle Squad Field Manual. I guess I love these guys now. Oh, who am I kidding. I already have a pellet pistol and rifle from them. Here’s their link (LINK).

Cover is what protects you from being shot, like a log, a tank, or hiding behind your mom – to be clear, not my mom, but your mom. Concealment is what protects you from being seen, like a log, a tree, a hill, or hiding behind your mom. And Camouflage is the use of manmade and natural material to avoid being seen, like incorporating brush to break up your outline, or using mud or charcoal to make sure your face doesn’t shine, or using camouflage clothing to blend in. Your mom is awful camouflage, since she can be seen from space, and everyone stares at her because she’s so big.

But when moving through territory where you’re a stranger, or, you just don’t want to be seen? Concealment and camouflage are critical. Except they won’t work for your mom – she couldn’t hide behind a hot air balloon. But your momma didn’t read Pascal.

Guess this was before Facebook®?

Pascal really did say something like the quote in the story. He really was quite a philosopher – his book, Pensees, published in 1670 (read it here for free), showed that even back then mankind had a tendency to want to distract themselves so that they didn’t have to think about their actions. “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.” Yup. We do.

Back then? Books were the distractions. Then plays. Music. Radio. Television. Comic books. Video games. The Internet – Facebook®, Twitter©, SnapCat™, and MySpace®. Everyone’s still on Myspace®, right? And don’t forget work. Anything so you don’t have to think about yourself, the consequences of your actions, and if you’re doing the things that follow your values, or, if religious, the values of your religion.

Yeah, tough.

Now imagine being in the culture where we are surrounded by Weapons of Mass Distraction on a continual basis. And then they’re all gone – except for books and comics.

What will that do psychologically to the survivors? I mean, you’ve lost everything, but the biggest thing you’ve lost is the ability to forget yourself. I imagine depression and suicide will be pretty popular – people who will end themselves rather than confront themselves. I sure hope you all like that quote when I put it on Facebook® complete with a cat or a bikini girl sitting on a 1960’s Camaro©!

And, yup. A 1960’s era Camaro® has no systems to be impacted by an EMP.

Imagine, all of these things will work after an EMP.

Americans, for the most part, haven’t felt hunger since the Depression®. There isn’t a lot of evidence that many Americans died during the Depression™ due to hunger, but there were plenty of people that were hungry, but even then few people died due to malnutrition.

To clarify how pampered we are as a society: a day or two after Hurricane Katrina, my wife and I were watching the coverage of that unfolding tragedy. Someone on CNN® got on the air and said that PEOPLE WERE EATING PEOPLE IN THE SUPERDOME® DUE TO HUNGER. Now, like I’ve said before, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a day without food. But to go full cannibal after two or three days? What?

I mean, if I was really hungry . . . maybe . . .

NO!

NO ONE EATS SOMEONE AFTER THREE DAYS WITHOUT FOOD. NO ONE.

I mean, unless that was a normal thing for them from before.

But we are so very used to a normal flow of calories that it’s difficult for anyone to conceive of going a day without food. What about a week? Two weeks?

After an EMP that would certainly happen people will get hungry. And that’s not unusual during human history. During the Medieval times, what did the peasants do? Drink and party all winter? No. They huddled in cold houses under blankets after eating the bare minimum to survive the winter. They hardly did anything all winter long. Because they were peasants. And it sucked. And their wifi was really slow, too. But they didn’t get blisters. Just kidding, they got lots of blisters, because they were peasants.

Blisters are horrible, and can cause fatal infections if not properly treated. Thankfully our protagonist has extra socks, disinfectant, and Neosporin® if he gets a blister. But they will ruin his progress if they get too bad. But he can count on his neighbors to help, right?

Well, not necessarily. How well do you know your neighbors? I was sitting outside tonight making sure The Boy didn’t inadvertently crush himself as he changed the oil in the Wildermobile®. He was using jack stands under the front axle for the first time, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t mess up. Thankfully, I only had to offer two or three life-saving tips, and three or four car-saving tips.

What showed up while I watched him work?

A neighbor dog. A sweet terrier with a flowered collar and a Denver Broncos® bandana. Which of my neighbors liked the Broncos®? They’re not a team in favor, here. It wasn’t my new neighbors to the north. Maybe the new ones to the northeast? Sadly, even here in rural Upper South Midwestia, I don’t know my neighbors well enough. Modern life seems to be set up to separate us – we have little time between work and kid sports and kid clubs and everything else.

We’ll see what happens to Tim, but it’s not likely that he’ll be with us too long. He seems woefully unprepared. Like your mom.

Computers and Privacy: Pick One.

“Ma’am, please calm down. Your CD tray is not a cup holder. I cannot help you clear your browser cache. No, I’m not in India.” –Strongbad

You’d think they’d have learned about incognito browsing back in the Middle Ages.

I have no illusions of having any privacy when it comes to computers. None. The only computer that’s safe is one that has never been connected to the Internet. And if that were the case, how would you then get all the cat pictures on the computer?

Be true to your cat. It will wait until you’re dead before eating you. But it won’t wait too long.

The only safe computer is one that’s not connected to . . . anything.

Sound paranoid?

Check out this article on Bloomberg (THE BIG HACK). I’m probably not paranoid enough. And I’m certain you’re not paranoid enough.

That article is really long, but it shows, step by step, how the Chinese managed to put hardware on computers that specifically bypasses all of the security protocols. If this hardware is on your computer? The only reason that they haven’t blackmailed you is that you’re not worth it to them to have their technology exposed. It’s amazing – the chip that they put on that allows this to happen is smaller than your Mom’s patience on a hot day when the air conditioner is out. And they made it small enough so it doesn’t even show up on the board – they put it in between layers of fiber on the printed circuit board.

This chip allows them to have access to whatever they want to on the system or reprogram it on the fly.

So, no. The Chinese won’t blackmail you because they’d rather keep listening to everything. And I mean everything. How many motherboards in the Pentagon were made in China? Yeah. It’s big.

It could be worse. It could be your wife.

But it’s not just the Chinese. We’re doing it to ourselves, as well. The National Security Agency has built a data center. This data center has over 1.5 million square feet of storage, and will use 65 megawatts of electricity, and will use 1.7 million gallons of water a day for cooling. It’s estimated that it will have storage of over a dozen exabytes (according to ZME Science, five exabytes is equivalent to all of the words spoken by human beings – ever) of storage. If this sounds like Bill Gates’ guest house, well, you’re right.

But in this case this storage will be on real-time internet surveillance. And as we’ve seen in the past, the NSA and the other three-letter agencies don’t really care about pesky things like the laws that prevent them from putting Americans under surveillance. Nah. That’s for amateurs.

This data center requires massive numbers of servers. How many of them were made in China?

There is no privacy. Our government might not even be able to keep its secrets . . . secret. What chance do you have?

None.

The implications?

Imagine a Supreme Court nominee in the year 2050. The nominee is 50 – and has spent almost their entire life online. Imagine further . . . the browser history from when they were 14 showing up? Sound silly? It certainly isn’t – not after the last month’s bit of nonsense in the Senate. I’m surprised they didn’t discuss fart jokes the nominee made in 1982. Oh, wait, THEY DID.

Back to 2050:

“I see, Mr. Nominee, that in the year 2014, at the age of, what, 14? At that age you seemed particularly fascinated with oil-covered girls wearing bikinis. How can you defend that in light of our desperate oil shortage and the man-made global cooling? And bikinis were outlawed several years ago as hate clothing, I must remind you. Did 14 year old you have NO IDEA of the pain you would cause the future? I respectfully ask the committee chair to put some more coal in the stove? We have to get more precious CO₂ into the air to hopefully warm our atmosphere.”

And there’s a further rumor (I have no idea if it’s true or not) that one particular Supreme Court Justice changed his vote on the constitutionality of Obamacare due to blackmail obtained from his electronic records. A rumor, I must stress. But not something I made up (Link) like that story of how Bret Kavanaugh and I broke into that ancient Egyptian site and found the Ark of the Covenant®. Yeah, it was really the Arc of the Covenant™, which contained the geometry homework of Moses.

So, if you’re true to yourself, you’ll never go on a daytime talk show.

I became convinced that computers were fundamentally insecure due to Ben Franklin’s old adage: “Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.”

Computers give their greatest value to us when we link them together. The Internet is just that – linked computers, talking to each other, and sharing information. And most of it is super important, too! Like what the Kardashians did this week. Or where Ben Affleck is at this current moment (and if he’s sober). And how Russians have a campaign against Star Wars™. Not the space-based missile defense. The movie.

But all kidding aside, the networking of information systems has allowed amazing amounts of information to be shared across the world, allowing us to be more well informed. Or, if you spend actual Internet time on the Kardashians, more entertained. This communication has made our systems more efficient, and has allowed us to negotiate better, to learn new skills taught by people thousands of miles away. But connectivity and value creation comes at a price.

The ways that computers can be compromised is amazingly large:

Hardware Exploits – As described above. This is fairly new. Makes you wonder about how our fighter jets would perform if we ever went up against China? Might just fall out of the sky?
Viruses – These won’t stop, and will get cleverer as time goes on, and more systematically destructive.
Day One Vulnerabilities – These are errors in the operating system that allow bad guys to get in to the system. They’re everywhere.
Backdoors – These are pre-programmed into operating systems so that folks like the (cough) NSA (cough) can get in anytime they want. They could likely watch me type this in real time. But they can come on over and chat with me while I do it. If they bring the beer.

I may be the last person who doesn’t pay bills online. I also don’t bank online. When my identity got compromised (The Lighter Side of Identity Theft) I actually signed up for Lifelock®. The folks at Lifelock™, when I got compromised again, noted it was good. Online banking was the source of a lot of tragedy that they’d seen.

So in a world where everything is offensive to someone, and everyone’s secrets aren’t really secret, how can we have a civil society?

Have no shame. It seems to work for the Kardashians.

Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde

“I don’t need a receipt for a doughnut, man. I give you the money, you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought doughnut.” – Dr. Katz

This is how I imagine dogs imagine the end of the world.

Bringing you up to speed: our hero has been trying to get home after an EMP – bringing about what is known as The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or The Stuff Hits The Fan (TSHTF). The first day on the road went pretty well. But, you know, that can’t keep up, can it?

Previous posts are:

The next day?

EMP + 1, Noon. 111 miles from home.

Sound, at sea level, travels at about 1125 feet per second.

The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is about 3,200 feet per second. And from a hunting rifle, say, a .30-06? It travels about 2,800 feet per second.

Those numbers explain why I heard a soft splat on the asphalt in front of my bike wheel, then the buzzing sound of the bullet tumbling end-over-end in a ricochet off the ground before I heard the report from the rifle that fired the bullet.

If I had enough sensitive timing equipment, I could have even given a pretty good estimate of how far away the shooter was.

The average reaction time for a human to a stimulus that they’ve been waiting for is about a 0.25 seconds. But when you’re in a car? Some studies say 1.5 seconds. Others say 2.5 seconds. All I can say is that as soon as I realized that someone was shooting at me I hit both the front and rear brakes as hard as I could. I think I was going about 20 miles per hour. I probably pulled too hard on the front brake – the wheel locked and I went tumbling over the top of the bike, at least partially sideways, onto my right shoulder.

I tucked and rolled as I hit the asphalt, my backpack whipping me up in the air as I rolled up on and over it. Rolling was better than sliding, and far better than holding my arm out and having my shoulder dislocated.

I came to a stop, my bike somehow in front of me. It must have flipped over me and slid on the road.

My front bike tire jerked and popped, and then I heard another shot.

Adrenaline filling my system, time seemed to slow down. I could see two immediate options – first, slip into the ditch near the road and get the hell out of here. Second? Play dead.

The second shot into the bike made that decision easy – they weren’t shooting to warn. They were shooting to kill. Thankfully they were lousy shots.

And the day had been going so well.

The first day’s ride had been great and mostly uneventful. This morning I’d woken up with the Sun, but was so very sore, especially my butt. I folded up my tarp, Mylar blanket, and poured some water on the fire. My Lifestraw worked, and I filled up water bottles from a (barely) flowing creek bed by taking successive mouthfuls in and spitting them into the bottle. It wasn’t exactly hygienic, but it was also unlikely that I’d give myself Ebola, cooties, or zombie plague. The water was cool, but tasted . . . a bit off. I trusted that the Lifestraw’s guarantee was good, even though it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to collect it wasn’t.

For the second day, I was averaging over 20 miles per hour. The wind was at my back. I could see smoke rising from where I thought the big city was, and wondered how bad things were getting there. Thankfully, I was a good 40 miles south of the big city. But when I was getting ready to cross under the Interstate a half mile east, and then my friend, the lousy shot, changed my plans.

And I was here in this damn ditch.

Thankfully the two-lane road that I’d been on was lined with trees on either side. I got up, ran into the hedgerow and then out of the trees and into a pasture that was blocked from view of the overpass. I pulled a camouflage rain poncho out of my pack – it was probably better visual cover than the orange t-shirt I was wearing, and started running back east the way I’d came. There weren’t any shots, but the thought crossed my mind that they might be sending someone out to check on me.

I didn’t intend to be there when they got to my bike. I did recall seeing another small creek about half a mile back. I trotted in the pasture until I got there. I noticed my legs were itching, and looked down. Evidently I’d jogged through a batch of stick tights, and my jeans and socks were covered in at least three different types of them: devil’s claw, cocklebur, and burr-grass.

No time to deal with that now. I kept going.

I followed the stream bed, attempting to keep my feet on the flat sandstone slabs in the creek bed. As I got a half a mile away, I stopped. I’d built up a lot of heat under the plastic poncho, and I pulled it off. I then took the multi-tool from my pack and started pulling the stick tights out of my pants. Eventually I gave up and took the pants and socks off so I could pull all of them out. It took about 20 minutes, and I heard no pursuit, but that didn’t surprise me.

I imagined that whoever shot at me wasn’t going to follow very far. They’d made their point. I wondered what had caused them to behave that way? My only guess was that they were pretty close to the city, and that someone had decided to do a joy ride in an older car that still worked after the EMP, and had brought the city fathers together in a posse to protect the approaches to the town.

I got finished with sticker duty, and it was now about 2pm. I kept following the riverbank south, until I hit a railroad – which was headed due east. Right where I wanted to be going. If followed the railroad tracks, walking briskly, until I saw the Interstate. The Interstate crossed over the railroad, and then the railroad crossed over the last big river between here and home. I decided not to linger on the highly visible railway – I decided to keep jog as fast as possible under the Interstate and over the river.

Nothing. Today. Tomorrow? I imagine a bright boy at the city that was defending the Interstate would see this as a vulnerability that they’d have to solve and place a fire team to cover the bridge.

As it was, I made it past the bridge, and kept walking on sparsely populated farm roads well into the night. I avoided the two medium-sized towns, and then about 2AM, decided make a small fire about two miles from the nearest farmhouse in a small grove of trees and sleep.

I was exhausted. I was, I guessed, 75 miles from home. I missed the bike very much – I’d be four or five hours from home, at most. Now? A day? Two days of walking?

That seemed like forever, especially on a day where I’d been shot at the first time in my life. What would happen next? I slept, and the rough ground wasn’t an issue. I was exhausted.

### (Until Next Monday)

I’ve never been shot at. But one thing that I’ve been told is, “don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re ready to shoot at them.” I think this would be the rule in a catastrophic collapse, and also in the event that we have the long, slow collapse or civil insurrection I’m actually expecting. Eventually, we’ll get there if things go south.

But why did we get in the story to the point where people, namely your protagonist, were getting shot at so quickly?

My thoughts are that being close to a big city when things collapse is like having a Martian death-ray pointed at your head. People in big cities are barely under control when the economy is booming, the benefits are flowing, and the cops are out in force. The cops won’t be at work long during a collapse scenario – they’ll be protecting their family, not yours – that’s backed up by recent experience during hurricanes like hurricane Katrina.

John Wesley, Rawles wrote about this and uses the metaphor of “The Golden Horde.” Yes, I know there’s an odd comma in there, and no, it’s not a typo. It’s the way Mr. Rawles chooses to do his name – ask him, not me. Anyway, his quote on the subject from his blog (LINK) is:

As the comfort level in the cities rapidly drops to nil, there will be a massive involuntary outpouring from the big cities and suburbs into the hinterboonies. This is the phenomenon that my late father, Donald Robert Rawles–a career particle physics research administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories–half-jokingly called “The Golden Horde.” He was of course referring to the Mongol Horde of the 13th Century, but in a modern context. (The Mongol rulers were chosen from the ‘Golden Family’ of Temujin. Hence the term “The Golden Horde.”) I can remember as a child, my father pointing to the hills at the west end of the Livermore Valley, where we then lived. He opined: “If The Bomb ever drops, we’ll see a Golden Horde come swarming over those hills [from Oakland and beyond] of the like that the world has never seen. And they’ll be very unpleasant, believe you me!”

And I think that Mr. Rawles is right. And the operative distance where the Golden Horde will show up? About a half a gas tank. That’s, on average, how much will be in a tank. So, if you’re more than 150 miles from a major city, that’s a start. I cannot stress enough that this is the biggest threat that anyone can conceive of during a collapse.

Most people aren’t 150 miles from a city. And the people 40 miles due south of the big city, in this case several hundred thousand people? They’ll get hit early, and hard. In this fictional state, they’re also armed. You won’t be coming down the Interstate to get them. The tractors will pull cars to block the exits, and nothing will get off the Interstate alive. Country boys aren’t necessarily great at long shots of 500 yards plus, but they will learn very quickly. And they won’t waste ammo on warning shots. The dead body in the road will be the warning. Or they could just post a sign that says “no PEZ® this exit” – that might work as well.

So why did they shoot at fictional me? They probably got a dose of the Golden Horde early. And a dose of people coming to your town with no good intent would make you distrust almost everyone you didn’t personally know. The closer you are, the more intense the outbound pressure will be. And normal people living in the cities will do almost anything once they realize the old rules are gone and the new ones won’t be coming back. I think it will take longer in the suburbs where the nuclear family with the 2.1 kids feel that they have too much to lose and will be certain that the old times will be coming back.

When they lose it, and start hiking or driving out? Ouch.

But more about that next Monday, probably. Or the Monday after that. But definitely probably next Monday.

I have a knapsack in every car that I drive over 20 miles from home. In each of these knapsacks I have a Lifestraw®. I have no idea if they work well, other than the Internet, which says that they’re pretty good. But the nice thing is that they’re $20, which allows me to have three of them for $60, and that’s less than a single water filtration pump. Of which I also have three four. Water is important. It’s not as good as beer, wine, or whiskey, but it’s still important.

Which brings up another point – if your life is on the line, redundancy is key. “Two is one and one is none,” is the phrase most commonly used among preppers. And it makes sense. You’re entering an environment where every preconception you had about life has been shattered. Constitutional rights? Probably not a big selling point for the Warlord Trevor from Brentwood. Having several ways to get water makes sense.

I actually have one of those camouflage ponchos mentioned above in each of my packs. I bought them for about $16, and they were pretty thick stuff. My theory if you’re using the emergency bag is you’re either wanting to be seen (most likely) or not wanting to be seen (EMP level stuff). The ponchos are good. They have multiple purposes. And when you put them on, you’re invisible!

Okay, you’re not invisible. But when you properly use camouflage, you’re horribly hard to see. I can attest to being shocked during a paintball game when a camouflaged friend stepped out of a tree and I had NO idea he was there. And he was 20 feet from me. And I was looking for him. Camouflage, properly used, is like magic. And they are really good at keeping you dry.

Which is good, but invisible would be better if people were shooting at you.

Heck, invisible would be awesome most days. Then I could sneak into the snack room at work and not feel guilty about eating a whole donut, rather than cutting one in half. Who am I kidding? I don’t feel guilty about taking the last cup of coffee. Why would I feel guilty about taking the last doughnut? It’s JUNGLE RULES!

Bigfoot, Aliens, Farrah Fawcett, and the Guide to Real Inner Peace

“I have droppings of someone who saw bigfoot.” – Futurama

I think this happened to me in the summer of 1982, but I don’t remember when, or where I was. Pictured (green abductor): Brett Kavanaugh.

I was staring straight up at the ceiling in my bedroom, under the seven* heavy quilts that made the -40°F nights comfortable in my unheated** bedroom, every muscle tense. This was what terror felt like.

I had seen him, or at least his glowing red eyes, on the small hill that was visible 1,175 feet from my bedroom window. And I knew that he was headed toward me. I knew that he had seen me.

I couldn’t see him headed toward me since I was too scared to look out the window, but I knew his inhuman, ground-devouring strides would be taking him to my window soon enough. And then? What would he do?

I gradually fell asleep, as the adrenaline drained from my nine-year-old bloodstream. I remember wondering as I dozed off how exactly I knew that the hill was exactly 1,175 feet from my back window, and then I remembered. Google® Maps™.

Okay, I didn’t know that it was 1,175 feet from my window until just now when I measured it on Google® Maps©. But it was uncomfortably close.

What, though, was it?

It was bigfoot. I had been reading a UFO magazine that day. The UFO magazine had several helpful facts for me:

Bigfoot was, in fact, not a creature from Earth at all. Bigfoot was an alien.
Bigfoot was a psychic alien.
Bigfoot, the psychic alien, had glowing red eyes.
Bigfoot was known to inhabit the hills near where I lived. Since I lived in the hills – the exact hills the little gray and white map in the pulp UFO magazine had shaded as “high bigfeet activity areas associated with alien psychic bigfeet that will probably kill, dismember, and eat wee John Wilder in his sleep, and if he’s lucky, in that order.”
Okay, the graph didn’t say they would kill, dismember and eat people, but it did talk about increasing incidents of violence against people.

So, I was a little tired when I went off to school the next day. Thankfully, I also concluded that the glowing red eyes might have been something else, like a reflection in the window. Or maybe that was a memory that psychic bigfoot put into my nine-year-old brain?

Really, it had been quite a long time since I was allowed to be scared, specifically since the night when I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door at 2AM and Pop Wilder made it clear that my presence was no longer requested at 2AM waking him up because I was scared. At that point, I became more afraid of what Pop Wilder would do to me versus anything a psychic bigfoot could do. Besides, I was sure Pop Wilder was real.

Alien psychic bigfeet? Not so sure that they existed.

Farrah kept me safe from the bigfeet. And made me feel real funny when I was 13.

Honestly, after this one night of terror I didn’t give bigfoot a whole lot of thought. My focus shifted to girls, where huge feet and lots of hair wasn’t exactly a selling point for me.

Words only a teenage male bigfoot would type into Google®.

So, I grew up. Then one day, I heard the words again . . . Alien Psychic Bigfoot.

The Mrs. and I were travelling across country, and listening to a radio program as we drove through a cool high desert night. A guest was on talk radio, patiently explaining that he was a bigfoot researcher, but more specifically, a bigfoot researcher that had the theory that bigfoot wasn’t a critter, it was, instead, a some sort of alien creation, just like in the UFO magazine from my youth.

But it gets better.

You’d think that the biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers would be skeptics? No.

The biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers is . . . bigfoot researchers that have a different theory than them.

So, if you’re in the “bigfoot is just an animal that we haven’t found conclusive evidence for yet” camp then your biggest enemy is the “bigfoot is a psychic alien” guy.

And vice versa.

This makes me laugh, inside. But it’s a truism of life. When people believe in something, their biggest enemy isn’t someone who doesn’t believe, it’s someone who believes, but just a little bit differently than them, most often over something that doesn’t have any real bearings on the truth of their belief.

I was talking about a particular Christian denomination with a friend.

He asked, “Are they dunkers or splashers?” Dunkers are those that baptize by immersing the baptized into water, while splashers use a Papal-Approved® Super-Soaker™ to baptize.

I replied, “I have no idea.”

“It’s important, you know.”

And that’s always amused me – the biggest fights are about the smallest things, often with the people that are closest to you in belief.

So I guess that’s the thing that I learned when alien psychic bigfoot held me in its hairy loving arms: love one another – it’s the only way to get to a true inner and outer peace. Except for the “bigfoot is just a critter we don’t have proof of” people – don’t love them. They’re awful.***

To be clear, I do not claim to have seen a real bigfoot. I also do not claim to have seen a UFO, except the band, UFO, and them only on YouTube®.

*Yes. Seven is an excessive number of quilts. It was also quite warm.

**The bedroom was unheated because I turned off the electric baseboard heaters, and, in an escalating war with Ma Wilder, I eventually flipped the breakers off. Eventually she got the message. I like/liked it cold. I even had the windows cracked sometimes when it was below zero. I was an awful child.

***Just kidding. I don’t really care. My current bet is they’re both wrong.

Seven Deadly (Financial) Sins, Together For The FIRST TIME!

“Deserves got nothing to do with it.” – Unforgiven

Actually not my favorite Clint Eastwood movie. That would be Outlaw Josey Wales, or ANYTHING he did in the 1970’s. But I do know my limitations . . . .

When it comes to my life, I’ve made mistakes, like convincing George W. Bush to attack Iraq. I should have remembered – never get involved in a land war in Asia. But those mistakes aren’t the ones we’re discussing today. Today . . . we’re discussing the Seven Deadly Financial Sins, at least after I put on some spooky music to scare you into never sinning. Oh, I did discuss the Actual Seven Deadly Sins, and you can read that post here (The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?).

We’ll start with the worst sin:

Debt

Is debt a sin or the result of sinning? I’m not going to sit and argue it – these aren’t really sins you go to Actual Hell for anyway. You just go to Financial Hell. So, I’m calling Debt a sin. And I’m calling it a result of sin. It’s the “Y” of Sin – sometimes a vowel, sometimes not.

Debt is really, really bad for individuals.

Why?

With debt, you get what you want, now. Like a brand new Corvette®, or a rare 1621 A.D. PEZ® dispenser originally whittled by Galileo while he was in prison for stealing cable television. I’m sure that was the best deal I’ve ever made, only had to pay $500 for it!

But now you have the object of your desire. And you have to pay for it. That’s not a problem. You only borrowed $50,000 for the Corvette™, right. You’ll pay (for a seven year loan) about $680 a month at 4% interest. Not bad!

But of that, your first payment will contain around $170 in interest, money that you’re paying the bank, every month. $1,800 in interest in the first year. The total interest you’d pay in this situation is $7,400 over the life of the loan.

Now let’s say you buy a house for the average price in the country, $200,000. Your payment on a 30 year loan would be a little more than $1000 for principle and interest, with a whopping $750 of that being interest in the first month. In the first year? About $8,800 in interest payments alone.

Sure, you have a house and a car, but you’re paying nearly $1000 a MONTH just to borrow the money in the early parts of the loan.

How much income would be required to fund this? Your tax rates will vary, but I’ll assume your tax rate leaves you with about 70% of your money after you’ve paid all of your taxes.

$17,000 in pre-tax income would be required . . . just for your interest payments. Toss in the principle, the taxes and insurance?

$50,000 in pre-tax income to pay for taxes, insurance, and the full payments. Some people work a whole week and don’t make that much money!

If you make the median family income of $59,000, you have the princely sum of $9,000 before taxes ($6,300 after taxes) a year to buy absolutely everything else in your life.

“Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.” – Robert A. Heinlein

Is there a place for debt? Sure. Businesses use it to expand. Families use it to create a reason to divorce. Or buy a really cool PEZ® dispenser.

The least bad debt? Mortgage debt.

Worse? Credit cards.

Worst? Student loan debt or money you owe to mobsters. But I repeat myself.

Have I sinned? Yes, I have. But that day in January of 2001 when I paid off my last non-mortgage debt except for student loans?

Priceless. And marriage harmony went up 41.7% that day.

Fear

Had I continually invested all of my spare cash into the market, say in a nice S&P 500 fund? The cash that’s sitting in the bank, gathering only a little interest?

I’d be retired today. Smoking nice cigars and drinking good scotch. With an airplane. A cheap one, but an airplane.

Dang.

I’ve successfully predicted 11 of the last three recessions. That may not be the most useful talent I have. I will note that I at least come by it honestly. One set of great-great-grandparents decided that they wanted to get out of Germany because they saw the increasing militarism in society and figured that war was coming, so they’d get out before it got bad.

They left Germany in 1880, 34 years before World War I and assimilated the heck out of themselves – one of them was Eisenhower’s grade school teacher – how American was that?

I’ve said before that being right too early is the same as being wrong, but in this case? I have all of my cash. And my great-great-grandparents avoided the mess that was post World War I Germany, where, I hear, the Internet was horrible.

Greed

Okay, I did play with some great stocks during the teens. Several of them doubled within a month of me buying them. And I kept riding some of them right into the ground. I turned $20,000 into $40,000 into $5,000. Which will be a great tax write off, when I finally sell it. Will someone please cue the sound of a forehead repeatedly hitting a desk?

Waste

In a recent post, I mentioned that the most expensive food is the food you don’t eat. I’ve done the math: when we go out to eat at Taco Bell®, we spend around $40. How much steak does $40 buy? A lot. How much steak gets wasted around the Casa Wilder?

Zero.

And we can’t eat steak every day. I mean we could, but we can’t. But when we have to throw out food, I feel horrible. Maybe it was the way that Great Grandma McWilder would talk about how fortunate we were to NOT BE STARVING when I wasn’t finishing lunch.

And Great Grandma McWilder came through the Depression on the “nearly having to eat your shoes” side, so she knew how to put a guilt on you. And waste was the sin that she preached against daily. In her house, it if had any use? She’d save it and use it. Thankfully she didn’t die in her sleep and eat me (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).

That would have been one big waste of an amazing blogger . . . .

Lust

I think the most evil word in the English language is “deserve.”

“You deserve a nice car.”
“You deserve health care that someone else pays for.”
“You deserve that stereo – you work so hard.”

When raising my kids, I wouldn’t allow them to use that word. When you do, you create a foundation for your desire for an item, which in Actual Sin terms would be Lust.

Needs

Modern life has increased the level of needs that we have in an amazing fashion. If you look at the following list:

Electricity
Internet
Phone Service
Mobile Phones
Natural Gas
Multiple Cars for a House
Cars
PEZ®
Air Conditioning
Netflix©
Facebook™
Faster Than Light Travel
Wireless Keyboards

None of those things were invented before last Thursday.

Okay, they were here last Thursday. But how many on them didn’t exist before 1990? Before 1950? Before 1900?

These things aren’t needs. They’re nice – some of them amazingly nice. You can live amazingly well without them, as humanity did forever before 1900.

Reassess your needs** – not only of the services above, but of anything that doesn’t make your life better. Half the games that are available on the smart phone are designed to sell you or sell something to you. Either way? You lose. Except for Candy Crush®. That’s just fun*.

*I have never played Candy Crush™.

**If you don’t want to have electricity and your wife disagrees, it would amuse me if you used me as a source. It would NOT amuse me if she came to my house to complain.

Sloth

I’d write more about this . . . but I’m just not feeling it.

Just kidding.

Don’t ignore your money or financial situation if you’re lazy, like me. I put in place systems so I wouldn’t forget to pay bills monthly.

It’s a secret, but I’ll tell you because, you know, we’re cool, right?

It’s a calendar.

Pay your bills on time.

Otherwise?

You get what you deserve, which will be penalties, fees, and interest. You can use deserve in this case. Because you deserve it.

Sinner.

TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!

“I thought I was prepared. I knew the theory, I . . . reality’s different.” – Interstellar

Heh heh. During the hurricane we were in, I think we gained weight.

This is part III of a series of life after an Electromagnetic Pulse Takes down much of the electronics that form the systems that allow us to live our lives in the relative luxury we have today . . . part I is here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You) and part II is here (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)). As always, comments on inaccuracies are welcome – I’ve learned quite a bit about our systems writing these, and love getting the feedback to make them more realistic.

Okay, back to the story . . . our hero has realized that an EMP has occurred, secured transportation, and is heading home.

THE TOWN HAD BEEN quiet as I had pedaled through. Not many people are out at 3am, and almost none of them are happy about it. In a town this size, I bet there wasn’t more than one cop on duty when the power went away.

The wind was at my back, and a pretty stiff one today. It was okay. The road was clear of traffic and there’s a stillness when you’re going the same speed as the wind. It’s odd – you are travelling at 20 miles per hour (same as the wind), but there is not a hint of wind. It’s also nice, because when you bicycle in cool air, your feet and hands get very cold. Because you’re going with the wind, you can hear much better than someone just standing outside in the wind – your senses aren’t supernatural, but it certainly feels that way.

South out of town with the north wind at my back, I thought about the trip ahead. I’d become so used to using either my phone for a map or the GPS that I knew there wasn’t one in the car. It had been a long time since I’d seen a map in a convenience store. Heck, it had been a long time since I’d seen a magazine in one. But the trip ahead was fairly simple – head south and then head east. That was where home was.

There was one big city between here and home – hundreds of thousands of people.

And that was the danger. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t planes falling from the sky. It was people. And there were, probably, about a million between me and home. The last thing I wanted to do was to go through them, even if I could do it today before things became really chaotic.

My bet was that I could head south and then loop around to the east. From memory, there weren’t many people at all along that route, and if I could make 120 miles or so, I could turn east.

And it was mostly quiet.

For the most part, all of the little towns I passed through might have a gas station and a small diner, but the route I was on was pretty unpopulated.

About hour two, or forty miles according to the mile markers, I heard a low rumbling off to the east. I pulled the bike to a stop and looked. A small, bright orange spot was visible on the horizon, with a thick, black cloud beginning to form above it.

I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink. Nice thing about the day being cool was the water was cool, too, about 60°F.

I wondered for a second on what could have caused the explosion on the horizon. I vaguely recalled that there was a crude oil refinery off in that direction. Yeah, that was probably it. Refineries are run very efficiently, and lots and lots of automated valves and switches and such allowed them to run with only a few people. But all of those were electronic. Looks like something failed.

As I watched, in fairly quick succession I saw two more fireballs. I straddled my bike and waited. About a minute and a half later, I heard the twin rumbles from the new explosions. Fifteen miles? Twenty? Certainly far enough that I don’t have to worry about hazardous vapors on this trip. I put the bottle back in my pack and continued pedaling. There are things I can fix and things I can’t. Exploding refineries after an EMP were definitely in the latter category.

Most of the small towns had forgettable names and were so small that I was through them in three or four blocks, and they looked mostly deserted, though I did see smoke from quite a few chimneys. The strength in this area, at least, is that most of the actual homes (versus the trailer homes) were built back before piped in natural gas, before electricity. They’d be warm, as long as the inhabitants had wood to burn. Of course, there’d be house fires as chimneys not used in decades were used by people who’d not used a fireplace or woodstove in as many decades.

At last I came to a big enough city that I’d heard the name before. It looked to be a mile or so on a side. I decided it was a city that was big enough that I didn’t want to risk going through it.

I decided to skirt it to the east – it looked like the most of the city was to the west of the road that I was on, so, a quick detour a mile west might be all that I needed to do.

After going a mile east, I turned south again. A mile later? I was staring at a dead end, caused by a river.

It was noon. I had two options. I could head back to the city, where I was reasonably certain that there was a bridge, or I could head farther east, where, in sparsely populated country like this I might not see another bridge for miles.

I decided to chance the city. It was small, I told myself, and a lone guy on a bicycle wasn’t much of a threat, right? Although my legs were getting a bit tired (I hadn’t biked in three years) I felt a surge of adrenaline as I neared the city. I got up speed. It turned out this road entered the city right at the bridge. There were a few people at the bridge, but no physical barriers or any sort of road block. There were a few shouted questions “Hey, what’s going on out there?” as I went by, but that was all. I just smiled and waved.

I noticed some of the men were armed, but nobody raised a weapon toward me as I headed away from the town.

I kept on going south without further incident. I headed east, more or less directly toward home after I’d gone about 120 miles south. No hypotenuse for me. Straight south, then straight east.

I turned east in another quiet, small town. I pedaled with the mild evening wind for about an hour until I came to a small streambed.

It was secluded, three miles since the last house, and there were trees all around the stream. Good. I found firewood, plus a small, secluded grassy patch. I got some small sticks, and piled up some of the sandstone from the creek bed for a fire ring. I pulled out my knife and turned one stick into a “fuzz stick” – a lot of small, shallow cuts into the stick, leaving the wood together so that it looked like a fuzzy stick when done. If you don’t have paper – it’s a great way to start a fire since it has so much surface area. I also gathered handfuls of dried, dead grass (easy to find in February!) and added in some very small sticks.

If you don’t have lots of matches, make each one count. Spend the time preparing to make the fire before you strike the match. And I had no idea if I could even make it home in three days. A big snowstorm might set me back for days, or weeks. And how many matches did we have at home? It was time to save them all.

The small fire was nice. I’m not sure if it was the light or the warmth, but it was pleasant, unlike my butt, which was very sore, and I’m sure I’d feel fire in my legs tomorrow. As I went to sleep that night in my makeshift tarp-tent, I was completely unaware that this would be my last completely peaceful day until I got home.

### (until next Monday)

The first day after a catastrophe like this is bound to be filled with a tremendous amount of inaction – nobody will know quite what to do. Everyone will walk by the switch on the wall and flip it, expecting, believing that the light will come on. We’ve been conditioned for that. Ultimately, the vast majority of people will believe that things will return to normal, even when it’s clear that they never will. Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book The Black Swan about how his family talks about what they’ll do when Lebanon returns to normal, which at this point no one thinks will ever happen, even though the Civil War that tore Lebanon apart started in 1975, 43 years ago. Lebanon had been one of the most advanced countries on earth, but now large areas of the country are considered “no go” for almost anyone with a modicum of sanity. But people expect that one day . . . it will return to normal.

This is wonderful. If the lights are going to come back on, slaughtering that neighbor that played the music really loud (Bon Jovi? Really?) while you were trying to sleep is a bad idea. If the lights are done? So is that neighbor. Scores will be settled, especially if it involves Bon Jovi.

During that first day, people will begin to understand that maybe this catastrophe is different. Outside of every catastrophe that has hit the United States in history, this one isn’t regional. 90% of the unaffected population won’t be available to turn to for help, which happens today after a hurricane or volcano or Rosie O’Donnell-created earthquake.

A regional incident means that the region is going to be helped. A national or global event? You’re on your own. Every rule changes. Think you own that second house down by the lake? I think the family that moved into it might not care. And neither will the sheriff.

But there is one place where the time delay between civilization and Mad Max® level insanity is thinnest:

Modern cities.

Win a sports title in a modern city and you can be happy if only two people are killed and the arson is limited to a small area near downtown. The larger the city, the quicker the violence hits, and the more violent it will be. Google® “Selco” if you want to hear the grim stories from his survival in the cities during the Balkans War in the 1990’s. And those were cities that had spent years under the Communist® system with people who were used to working around failing systems. Imagine Baltimore when things go really bad?

Again, in a catastrophe like this – avoid cities and other people at all costs.

I hinted around that there are other infrastructure pieces that will have issues after an EMP. Refineries, pipelines, and power plants are absolutely dependent upon control systems that pull data from the boiling oil or high pressure natural gas and use it to make decisions. Many times those decisions are made at millisecond speed via computer without any input from a human required. And without those systems? At best, the pipelines and refineries and power plants won’t work. At worst? Systems that are used for safety won’t work. Normally, everything is designed to go to a safe state. But those safe states often rely on there being power, even battery power. There will be some failures in those safety systems. If we’re lucky, it just wrecks equipment, and not result in huge fireballs.

Nuclear power plants are a special case (and not in a good way), which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Oh, and the fuzz stick thing? It works really well.

Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg

“That’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Hmm, I’ll have what he’s having.

Wilder Note: Normally, Friday posts (for the last 70 or so weeks) have been devoted to health topics. I figure why not make everyone feel thoughtful right before the weekend, rather than guilty on a Monday for eating a whole cake and two tubs of Betty Crocker® frosting on Saturday night while drinking enough chardonnay to dull the pain from having lost that stupid election to that stupid guy from New York. Oops, too personal? Anyway, as the TEOWAWKI series has gone from one post to maybe weeks and weeks of posts (in outline) that I realized I’d put a topic on the back burner that I really want to write about and it really fits the “big ideas” Monday slot that’s now been invaded by the End Of The World, well, Fridays had to give. So until The End Of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTEOWAWKI – top, that Internet!), Friday posts may or may not be related directly to health for the next few months. This one isn’t.

Here are the links to the TEOWAKI posts (for now):

Now on to Friday’s first Big Ideas post:

I’ve written before about how it seems that our culture is unraveling around us at an increasing rate. You can see those posts here:

Is there any data to back up these theories?

Yes.

I originally thought that the Pew Research Center primarily did research into the sounds that kids made while using finger guns. These are sounds like Pew, Pew, Pew, Bang-Bang, and Rat-a-Tat-Tat. I was informed that finger guns are now illegal because they can be easily concealed and have far too large of an ammunition capacity, needing to be reloaded only when “making a shotgun loading sound” would be cool.

It turns out Pew does research on social and political trends, which is maybe more important than finger gun noises, but far less fun. And political trends wasn’t even my second theory, which included fart and skunk smell research. But Pew put together one report titled “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider (LINK)” that’s especially relevant in describing what’s going on in American life today. The excellent blog Epsilon Theory (LINK) had a post that referenced the Pew Report, which is how I found it, and it fit perfectly with the posts we’ve been doing about the dissolution of the American political scene, though I think we come to different conclusions on what will ultimately happen.

Imagine how happy I was to see yet more proof of my theory that everything is falling straight apart and that millions of Americans will, within my lifetime, be engaged in bloody civil war!

Let’s start with the big graph. It tells (broadly) the story.

1994

In 1994, sure we had differences, but mainly we had more in common than divided us. Going through the numbers, Democrats and Republicans broadly agreed that illegal immigration was, well, illegal and was a thing to be stopped. Also about this time, Bill Clinton got punched in the teeth when he lost the House of Representatives by trying to go too far left too fast.

Bill’s response was to take the position of the Republicans and the position of the Democrats and steer between them. Republican points that were really popular, like making welfare recipients work? Adopt it. There was a vast overlap in the center – the overlap between Republican and Democrat is significant. The results of this policy were also pretty significant – this tension actually restrained government spending for the first time since Andrew Jackson made Congress personally count out every expenditure in piles of nickels on the Senate floor.

I remember being at a political rally for Democrats at around this point in time (1994, not during the Jackson administration). It was a big rally – Carrie Fisher was there with the Democratic candidate in question. So was I – with a sign for the Republican opposition. We didn’t go into the rally, but stood on one side of a driveway while a small group of Democrats stood on the other side. There were 50 to 100 in either group. We yelled at each other, each making fun of the other’s candidate, but the yelling was light hearted and humorous. Everyone had fun. I think I saw Carrie Fisher’s leg.

At that point in time, there was more extremism on the right than on the left, but even that wasn’t pronounced. With the defeat of Evil Communism, well, life was good. Heck, a guy named Francis Fukuyama even said that The End of History was at hand. Western liberal democracy would be the final form of government in a more peaceful world where capitalism was pretty significant feature.

2004

Not too far past 9/11, Americans had something that kept them unified – war. It appears that several people skipped reading Fukuyama’s book. At this point, a feeling of cohesion in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was still evident, W reluctantly called legitimate. Americans are actually politically closer than in 1994, but now more extreme leftists than extreme right wing folks. When Bush beat Kerry? Meh. No protests. No outrage. Bush personified the center. But the far left wing was growing.

2017

Democrats have all scampered left. Far left. Republicans have moved right certainly, but not nearly as far as the Democrats have moved left.

How bad is it?

97% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican. 95% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat. Yes, there’s still overlap, but rapidly we’re nearing the point where we don’t even recognize the same facts. Imagine how little regard there is for the opinions of the other side.

And it’s worse with the media. As a whole, they’ve been leftists since . . . forever. But now? Not only do Republicans represent less than 7% of journalists, the places where journalists work and live are in big cities where people wearing Make America Great Again hats are shot on site. Or they would be if the leftists currently believed in individual, rather than state gun ownership.

The media are ideologically leftists, and live in cities where they might not even see a Republican in a day. They work in a bubble (leftist journalists) and live in a bubble (leftist cities and often states) and have no conception that people on the right exist. This explains why, on election night, the media was stunned that Trump won. They didn’t even try to hide their bias and dismay. Rachel Maddow alone cried enough tears to create minor flooding in the basement of the broadcast building.

There is simply very little the median Democrat has to say to the median Republican beyond “give me your stuff”, and little the median Republican has to say to the median Democrat other than “no, there aren’t 621 genders and 627 on Saturday night.” They don’t even speak the same language and in some cases this is literally true.

Part of the shift has come because the composition of American has changed. First and second generation immigrants are now roughly 25% of voters, a far higher proportion than at any time in history. And 70% of immigrants are leftist, compared to 18% that tend toward the right. This makes sense – most immigrants come to the United States from countries that are far to the left of the United States. I remember listening to the radio where a left-wing journalist was gushing with enthusiasm that a communist (literally and self-described) woman from India had been elected to the Seattle city council. When you talk about foreign influence on politics, well, the immigrants that are here legally have distorted politics and added to the overall polarization. This explains why the right has fought back so strongly – they (correctly) sense that the immigration desired by the left will disenfranchise (forever) their entire political ideology. If Hispanics voted on for the right, Republicans would have put forth the Everybody’s Really An American plan and the Democrats would have put forth a bill to mine the border with giant radioactive scorpions on either side of the 500 foot deep pit.

It also explains why so many Democrats (and Independents) have (quietly) defected to the Republican side. The party is moving away from them.

And the extreme left turn of the Democrats explains why Alexwhatshername Occasionally-Cortez, who is running on an actual and explicit socialist platform is the future of the Democratic party, not an outlier – this is the type of person that will win primaries as the Democrats float left. And I think the Republicans will continue to float farther right, which, in time, will make Trump look like a moderate.

What happens when/if the next leftist gains the White House?

Whiplash on every conceivable policy, but with a side order of vengeance. And a system like that will produce, rather inevitably, an economic dislocation, a government crackdown. A step too far.

This will be the spark.

And there will be war. If the United States weren’t so divided, the war could be external as politicians looked to focus people against the outside to reunify the country. But for now, we couldn’t even agree on a common enemy. So our enemy will be . . . us.

But, hey, cake is out of the oven! Who wants cake? I even have some spare tubs of frosting . . .