Category: Civil War

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Issue 12: Censorship and COVID-19

“You were going to bed hungry, scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I’m the one who stopped that. You know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It’s a paradise.” – Avengers: Infinity War

CLOCK

After several years of looking, I found a book on Amazon® about how clocks work.  It’s about time.

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

The clock didn’t move this month for the third month in a row.  That’s good.  But I see pressure building up quickly.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Steps On the Way to Revolt – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Real Story: Economic Collapse – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Here are the links to the previous issues:  Issue One (LINK), Issue Two (LINK), Issue Three (LINK), Issue Four (LINK), Issue Five (LINK), Issue Six (LINK), Issue Seven (LINK), Issue Eight (LINK), Issue Nine (LINK), Issue Ten (LINK), and Issue Eleven (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

April was a big month for censorship.  Like a toddler in a Toys’r’Us™, Facebook® and YouTube© decided this was the month to crack down on speech they didn’t agree with.  And that speech was from the Left.  Just kidding.  It’s never a crackdown on the Left.  Who did they go after?

Well, David Icke was shut down.  I like listening to David Icke, because I sincerely think that he believes that shape-shifting reptilian aliens run the governments of the world.  As in Queen Elizabeth II is a secret lizard lady.  That is WWE© level of conspiracy, and it sure makes 40 minutes of treadmill time go faster listening to it.  But now, he’s gone.  His sin?  Nothing to do with lizards.  Nothing to do with the Queen.  No, Mr. Icke committed the sin of breaking the party line on COVID-19.

ALIEN

When WHO makes David Icke look reasonable.

In fact, any YouTube® video that puts forward an opinion that differs from the World Health Organization (WHO) will be removed.  Do it too often?  Your channel is banned.  For life.

I must admit that I am a sinner in committing heresy against the WHO.  In May, 2019, I did a frighteningly good post (The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again) about their silliness in describing “Burnout” and “Gaming Disorder” as new plagues that were going to destroy mankind.  To quote me at the time:  “When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer.”  Yup, that’s probably enough for the YouTube® ban hammer.

But now it seems that having an opinion different than the WHO is enough to bring the full weight of Leftist censorship down.  There were several doctors that disagreed with the WHO, and they were shut down, even though the WHO’s opinion on COVID-19 has been proven wrong again and again and again.  And that is scary.  The WHO (and the CDC, who I skewered in the post (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy)) have proven to be little more than government agencies that have lost their primary mission in a race to pander to news outlets to secure funding.

Facebook™ announced it was not only trying to get rid of COVID-19 “misinformation” by deleting posts, but also was actively censoring people trying to use it to organize “end the quarantine” events.  That was chilling.  You may or may not agree with these protests, but the idea of peacefully petitioning government is a clear right.  Libertarians and (increasingly) Leftists will make the argument that “Facebook® is a private company and can do whatever they want.  Nanner-nanner.”

But know them by their works.  They want your data.  They want to market you as a product.  A compliant product for them to sell.  And, it appears, snitch on you if you are a bad-thinker.

WATER

He only needed a sip.  Zucculents are excellent at storing water and can thrive in areas with dry climate.

Likewise, the Unz Review (LINK) got kicked off of Facebook®.  Ron Unz’s website is a hotbed of controversial thought that’s not afraid of challenging almost any opinion:  I’ve read a lot there I disagree with.  The owner of the site, Ron Unz, does not stand behind every article published – it would be impossible because many of them are 100% contradictory to each other.  But, even though I disagree with a lot I’ve seen there, I’ve learned a lot there that I never would anywhere else.  I’m surprised Unz lasted this long on Facebook™.

Where does this censorship take us?  Nowhere good, since after the first censorship, taking down the next site becomes easier and easier.  It’s for the public good, after all.  Can’t have people thinking unapproved thoughts, right?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

April was a difficult month for the economy, and that shows up in the graphs.  I don’t think that May will be quite as bad, but I’ve been wrong before.  I did, however, try to spend significant time on selection of the bikini pictures to accompany the graphs, since I want to at least reach the journalist integrity of the New York Times®.

Violence:

VIOF

Up is more violent.  Violence had been down because everyone is stuck in the basement.  But now the end of quarantine is near, and people will become violent if it isn’t lifted soon.  I expect big upticks in June, July and August.  I think May will be fairly mellow, and might be the last mellow month for ages.

Enjoy it.

Political Instability:

POLF

Up is more unstable.  Instability is down – having the field reduced to two likely candidates for the November election helps calm people, plus people are advised not to make sudden moves around Joe Biden, since his predator instinct could kick in and he might give you a good sniffing.  Instability will go up if Biden falters or starts drooling oatmeal during an interview.

Economic:

ECOF

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The graph speaks for itself – I had to search through a LOT of bikini photographs to find one that fit with a plunge like we’ve seen.  I expect April to be better.  But not by a lot.  I’ll likely change the basis of this one or add an entirely new one next month – this is an instantaneous graph to measure mood, and we should start to look at cumulative numbers to measure how screwed we are.  Upside?  One more bikini graph.

Illegal Aliens:

BORF

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Down.  Until Mexico’s economy collapses. Then what?

Economic Collapse – The Real Story

When I first started the weather report, one criticism was that we would never see Civil War 2.0 while things were good economically.  And I admitted that this is true.  As a people I can see limited acts of disobedience, but not outright insurrection while the economy is good.  Full bellies and full bank accounts don’t lead to fighting in the streets.

The economy is in free fall.  That’s not an overstatement.  There has been no month as bad in the world economy as April, 2020, at least not in my life.  Unless you’re in your 80’s or better, this is the worst economic month of your life, too.  To find such a disaster in the United States, you’d have to go back to the 1930’s, at least.

FED

The goat entrails have spoken!  The cure is yet more debt and money printing!

As I’ve mentioned before, a strong economy could take this sort of shock.  Our economy isn’t strong.  Let’s take New York City.  What does it produce?  Debt, real estate sales, insurance companies, financial irregularity, the stock market, and national “journalism” that at best is as biased as a Kennedy mother bailing her kids out of jail.  If New York City were to disappear tomorrow, the only thing from NYC the Wilder Family would miss is the television show Impractical Jokers®.

Yet New York City controls the money flows in the country.  It also controls the bets made on wheat production and pork prices.  NYC produces nothing, but acts as a tax on those that actually produce.  In 1947, the proportion of the economy devoted to Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (F.I.R.E.) was about 10%.  In 2017, it was 20%.  And we do need a certain percentage of our economy devoted to moving money around, but the point of our economy isn’t moving money, it’s making things and feeding people.  Oh, and doing taxes.

Are we richer because of what comes from New York?  Are we more stable?  Does making another loan to a big corporation so they have enough debt on their books so a New York financier can’t buy them with their own money make us better off?  Is it better because the dollars aren’t backed by anything other than a printing press?

NYC

Hey, that might make a good movie.

In that same time period, manufacturing dropped from 25% of the economy to 11%.  Does that make us better off, when critical goods are made an ocean away?  Does that make us more stable and able to weather a crisis?

As the economy collapses, it’s collapsing because it has been hollowed out for decades.  I will say that studies show, before 1980, Democrats were strongly focused on keeping the manufacturing and construction industries strong, since the unions that dominated that sector were lock-step voters for the Democrats.  But, when a shiny new toy of being paid by the big banks plus being able to bring in a whole new class of voters (legal immigrants and illegal aliens) got too big, the Democrats dumped manufacturing and construction.

This collapse has been decades in the making.  It won’t be done quickly.  And it just might provide the pain to slingshot us into Civil War 2.0.

Links

LINKS

All are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

“Because there’s no crying in baseball! No crying!” – A League of Their Own

WILDER

Wash this.

As we contemplate the wreckage of the economy and the cracks in our culture, I return to that question that many of us have been thinking of:

What happens next?

By next as in next week, well those patterns are short term. Just like the stock market has spent most of the last ten years going up, some weeks were down. The overall aggregate of those weeks was up. Until it wasn’t. The short term direction of the market varied, but like China’s expanding sea claims or my expanding waistline, the long term trend did not.

That’s what I see with the United States as a whole. Over the short term, things go up and down, but the long term stresses in the system keep building up. A brick building having foundation problems will build stress, until the bricks and mortar both snap in a line under tension, just like Joe Biden snaps when people move too quickly around him because of Crimean War flashbacks.

One major tension: people have been concerned about the national debt since before I’ve been alive. Why? The silly idea seems to be that “having an unpayable mountain of debt” might be a bad thing since you have to pay all of that back just to be broke. It’s only money, right? But the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now larger than at any time since the end of World War II. At that time the United States had mobilized to spending nearly 90% of Federal dollars on military spending items. That level of debt, 110% of the GDP, existed before COVID-19 gave us a gut shot. What will it be after all of the Chinese Virus spending? 120%? 150%?

At least with World War II we got cool tanks and games like Axis and Allies®. In the last bailout all we got was a bigger penthouse for CEOs like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase. You might remember Dimon’s tone-deaf Christmas cards like the one he sent out below in 2013. Sure, people are allowed to send out glaringly condescending tennis-ball filled Christmas cards while they spend enough money to pay off your mortgage on a lunch trip to Switzerland for their dog. But to celebrate their wealth after having been the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008? That’s just tacky.

I guess Dimon’s Christmas card is nearly as neat as 49,324 Sherman tanks, plus twenty-three aircraft carriers, and a zillion movies, at least some of which had Clint Eastwood. Okay, I’ll take that back. Having Clint Eastwood World War II movies is even more important than the ultimate comfort of a billionaire banker. There. I said it. Go ahead and judge me.

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

KELLY

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

At some point, there’s a mathematical limit where debt actually matters. After World War II, the United States dealt with debt through a crazy plan: paying it back, while growing the economy. As we stand right now, with the exception of spending enough on defense to cause the Soviets to collapse, we’ve gotten very little out of that debt. It’s like the nation has since 1990 gone on a spending binge like a six year old with addled on sugar with Mom’s credit card, ending up with a pile of Amazon® packages and next-day Prime® diabetes.

Outside of the economic mess which would have gone off at some point with our without the WuFlu, we’re a nation divided politically. The split has been getting worse and worse through time. People have cut off relations with relatives because of political differences that would have made for amusing table discussions even a decade ago. The creeping socialism that’s been winding its way through society since FDR’s New Deal used the Great Depression to introduce sweeping social changes that wrapped themselves around the national brainstem is now fresh again, back like Nic Cage on a bad sequel.

The idea of infinite benefits from a magical printing press is as old as any fairy tale, and we share it with our children every year – he’s called Santa Claus. But lots of people don’t believe in Santa Claus. Why?

Because Santa’s not real.

Santa can’t exist as he violates a fundamental law of the universe – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL, as Pournelle and Niven would have said. Heck, the one thing the Soviets in a gulag and hard-core libertarians agree on is: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. No wonder my kids came back so tough after a week at Ayn Rand Preschool – you had to have the will to take the bottle.

SOCIALIST

People in socialist countries are the only ones who envy the high tech that the Amish have.

These tensions – the financial system collapse tension plus the political division tension – don’t lead to a good outcome. It’s been noted by commenters here and elsewhere that as long as things are good and bellies are full, people won’t revolt. But if you were saving for a rainy day, look outside: it’s pouring.

As I see it, there are three major ways this situation plays out – and none of them end up with 2030 being “business as usual” anymore.

First alternative: the Left takes over. Just like in Virginia, the Left will spend about 20 minutes before they decide to implement their entire basket of changes. I don’t think that this is likely. The reason is that at this point I don’t think the Right will go gently onto that goodnight. They have realized that gun rights “compromises” include only taking rights away. The Right is not keen to compromise on any rights, which is why the recent push-back came against the Coronavirus-related state shutdowns. If the Left tries this, there will be some level of anarchy. And we all know how many anarchists it takes to change a lightbulb: none. Anarchists have never changed anything.

Second alternative: the states Balkanize. The entire experiment breaks up. The Right isn’t interested, for the most part, in controlling what goes on outside of their state, and would be quite amused to watch New York and Los Angeles figure out that the things that make their lives good, like food and gasoline, all come from places they don’t like made by people who don’t like them. Pretty soon they’d be trading Netflix® subscriptions for potatoes. The reason this is a solution of the Right is because Red State people want their freedoms and to be left alone to grill. This is a difficult outcome – splitting up the states seems to fall along party lines, but lots of Blue states have a Red ring around them, and lots of Red states are covered in Blue dots.

The Third, and in my mind an increasingly likely alternative is an American Caesar.

The Roman Republic officially started in 509 B.C., but at the beginning wasn’t much more than a high school audio-visual club with dominion of around six neighborhood blocks until about 282 B.C. It was at that point when the Romans finally took over most of the other tribes in the local area and began to vie for domination of the Mediterranean against Carthage for Blockbuster® franchise rights.

PRICE

“I hate it when they price just one dollar over. Seems so, disloyal, right Brutus?”

The Roman Republic was fed by expansion. At the time when Caesar became a de facto emperor, Rome controlled not only modern day Italy, but most of Spain, Portugal, Greece, a lot of the northern coast of Africa, France, Belgium, and the Balkan area. Does a republic or a democracy expand? Yes – whoever thought a democracies don’t start wars was as deluded as Joe Biden when he recently denounced President Lincoln for the way he’s handling the polio epidemic.

The Roman Republic lasted until Julius Caesar created and took the throne as dictator after political intrigue. He stepped into a situation where his political enemies were out to get him, and had passed a law to strip him of his troops. Politically and popularly, Caesar was already famous – he had written Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was a bestseller that described his military exploits. It was popular in Rome, and meant at least partially as propaganda to the common people to sidestep the Senate and official media. Sound familiar?

Caesar knew that his political enemies had a trap set for him when he returned – he was certain they’d strip his titles and wealth from him, but, he had an army that was more loyal to him than it was to Rome. When he led Legio XIII (the 13th Legion) across the Rubicon River, Caesar legendarily said, “The die is cast.” By law, Roman Consuls gave up command at the Rubicon, some 200 miles north of Rome, which was probably about a hard 10-day march over the good roads at Rome. The Senate heard that “Julius is coming,” and got out of there faster than your Leftist friends when it comes time to split the bill for lunch.

Although things were politically precarious at that point, this was the big step. Rome tipped into a civil war. Caesar won, and the people were, generally, pleased, mainly because salads were popular back then. That’s why a few years after Caesar was assassinated, Augustus Caesar was able to take the title – the people were wanting to end the political nonsense, even if it meant a kind of tyranny: this wasn’t the first nor the last time this deal would be made. The people of Rome at that point didn’t want to elect a leader – they wanted an end to the chaos. If the result was an Emperor? So be it.

CAESARD

Spoiler, Caesar died. It would have been much worse if he had continued as a vegetable – let us mourn him.

So far, the leader of the United States has been (more or less) elected through legal means. The Electoral College itself is a great bulwark against fraud – it’s hard to fake enough votes because the dead voting in Chicago alone won’t do it. You’d have to have recounts in cemeteries in dozens of states.

With the jobless increasing 22 million in four weeks, chaos is on the way once people can leave their basements. Unless COVID-19 interrupts, I expect actual riots at the Democratic Convention, especially if they forget the Tupperware® they keep Biden in. Given how much economic activity has already cratered in the United States – total credit card spending is down nearly 30% since last year, but the rent for the store is the same. Businesses won’t be hiring anytime soon, and there’s no way that this will be a sharp recovery.

That economic and political turmoil that we’ll see in the next few years is ripe for a hero, a savior to come forward. Will this new leader look like the old Caesar? No, certainly not. Certainly this savior will be someone that many people know, and look up to.

Tom Hanks?

HANKS

Maybe President-for-life Tom Hanks? Nah, I hear he eats baby kittens.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean.  Apparently.  And my job is to sit and look at paintings.  So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting?  Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

SAVAGE

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women. 

The death of the United States as we know it is near.  COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian.  Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom.  Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death.  This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence).  That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires.  You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole.  Mr. Cole was an American painter.  I say “was” because he’s now dead.  This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848.  Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976.  Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State.  It’s the first picture up above.  Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes.  His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom.  In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough.  It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man.  This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

PASTORAL

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times.  Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one.  I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State.  Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization.  The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals.  The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture.  If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight.  This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan.  Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism.  It’s how it feels to be on the winning team.  Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable.  Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle:  “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!”  Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan.  After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general:  “Don’t fall for it!  It’s a trap!  There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier.  At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck.  The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

CONSUMM

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings.  Of course, I had to meme all over it.  And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power.  Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation.  Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®.  It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created.  While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success.  Virtue is replaced by vanity.  Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it.  Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

DESTRU

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set.  Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid?  Okay.  Not everyone.  But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence.  Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire.  Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®.  Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture.  Why?  Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society.  Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome?  I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears.  Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash.  The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits.  I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World.  Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold.  How much wealth?  So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do.  So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold.  After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War.  I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful.  But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so.  The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked.  It was really good.  Why was I shocked that it was good?  No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves.  Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears?  Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

DESOL

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth.  This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire.  The Empire is over.  The drama is over.  What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization.  It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were.  Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it.  Would the Roman Empire collapse?  Certainly.  Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse?  No.  But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome.  What was the first name of the United States Army?  Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her.  It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us.  There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well:  “Hard times breed strong men.  Strong men breed good times.  Good times breed soft men.  Soft men?  They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times.  But don’t fear.  This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

PEPPARD

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning.  The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday.  Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius.  As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind.  In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things.  I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties.  Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Livy

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition.  The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle.  Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired.  The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

APPIUS

Appius rallying the troops.  Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up.  Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?”  Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?”  Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough.  That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there:  of the remaining men, they drew lots.  One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit.  Why not ten out of ten?  There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.”  But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43.  If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

COLLAPSE

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million.  In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed.  For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%.  And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news.  Instead?  “Could have been worse.  At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks.  Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic.  And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.”  Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

BIDEN

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important.  Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down.  At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create.  Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt.  In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up.  Now!”

That won’t work, either.  You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy.  People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®.  Zero?  Nope.  But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

FIRED

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place.  Here’s a representative post.  The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK).  As you can see, Aesop has a plan.  The plan?  Probably not.  But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning.  We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left.  Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it.  Oops.  The Mrs. messed up.  She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction.  Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well.  There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery.  Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media?  Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

MISERY

You dirty birds.  I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®.  Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this.  I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies?  And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler:  fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy.  It won’t last until August.  I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same.  Small businesses are in really bad shape.  Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street?  Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners?  They don’t have anyone looking out for them.  They’ll get loans, sure.  But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant?  Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in?  Yeah.

That’ll help.  Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am.  Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat.  I’m not.  I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die.  That part will probably suck.  Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend.  Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have.  If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket.  Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

HOPE

Don’t hope.  Do.  And live.  Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead.  There.  You have it.  Deal with it and plan your life.  You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her.  She is there, waiting for us.

Submarines, Star Trek, and Economic Collapse

“But on the submarine, Boris wasn’t as cheerful as he could have been.” – The Bullwinkle Show

CRASH

If it’s a missile sub, you could say, “Okay, Boomer.”

In most submarine movies, there is a scene where the submarine is hit.  One of the forward compartments is being flooded, but the submarine can’t surface because the enemy destroyer is lurking on the surface like Nancy Pelosi lurking at the clinic where they reinject her with blood from the young.  The captain must make the fateful decision:  do I try to save the team in the forward cabin and perhaps lose the ship?  Or do I close the bulkhead door and assure the safety of the ship and the remaining crew?

Time is always of the essence.  When the movie is particularly well made, one of the people on the other side of the door is someone you know the captain cares about.  It’s often a nephew, or a new, innocent crew member that is doomed to death.  You can tell you’re supposed to like him, because he actually has a name; something like Ensign Timmy McFarmboy instead of Dead Crewman #3.

One memorable variant of this theme was in Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan™.  In that particular scene, Captain, Kirk doesn’t order Spock to go in the reactor room, Spock just does it to save the ship and crew from Ricardo Montalbán’s massive pectoral muscles.  “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” are among his last words to Kirk.  Thankfully, Spock has as many lives as a cat, and kept returning to Star Trek® movies because his agent couldn’t get him the lead role in Die Hard.

SPOCK

Spock said my mother was so fat, that she outweighed the needs of the many.

Presidents don’t generally have the luxury of behaving like captains of submarines or starships in the movies, especially in 2020.  The world of politics won’t allow it.  Political enemies keep attempting to frame both sides of the equation so that whatever happens, the president loses.

If he acts too soon in closing the bulkhead?  He’s being irresponsible – overreacting.  If he acts too late and loses the submarine?  He was fiddling while America burned.  Regardless of his decisions, each one will be held up to the scrutiny of the perfect knowledge that only the future will bring.

That’s the burden of the mantle of command:  you own the decisions.  I won’t second guess President Trump – I wasn’t in those rooms when the decisions were made.  I don’t have the facts that he does.  And I don’t have to take responsibility.

He does.

However, to continue to use the submarine analogy, the front compartment is flooding.  In many ways, the political opposition on the Left is thrilled:  they feel that they have a winning issue against Trump, even if it took a crisis that will either kill Americans or wreck the economy to do it.  Either is fine with them, which is a function of how polarized the country is now.

The crisis, however, is huge.  And it’s far more than Corona.

SHEEP

Easter sheep:  ready to wool the world.

I would bet that the reason that Trump said that he wanted the country to reopen for business at Easter was that he was given information about how the COVID-19 measures are wrecking the economy.  But I think the information he was given was overly optimistic.  I don’t think anyone told him we’d see 3.3 million initial jobless claims – no one expected that we’d see the largest numbers in history.  The expectation is that we’ll see another 6.0 million next week.  In a labor market of 160-some million Americans, that’s a 6%* unemployment increase.   (*edited for an incorrect figure and updated unemployment with 4/2/20 numbers)

In two weeks.

No, his advisers didn’t tell him that.

PAPER2

“We’re the first nation to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.” – Will Rogers

The personal pain and tragedy that level of unemployment represents is astonishing.  In previous posts, I told you the economic fallout would be Great Depression bad, but this is worse.  The Federal Reserve Bank is projecting 32% unemployment at the high end.  25% was the highest unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

At the height of the Great Recession in 2009, the unemployment rate hit 10%.  Total.  Not 10% additional two weeks.  The Great Recession is the biggest economic emergency that many people remember, and this is projected to dwarf it.

The jobs we’re already losing aren’t all low-paying jobs, either.  Oil has dropped in price to $20 and I don’t think it’s done dropping.  Oil production companies, the folks that drill the wells for the sweet, sweet oil?  They’ll be shedding jobs nearly immediately.  The average oilfield job pays $100,000 per year, but $20 per barrel won’t pay for $100,000 per year jobs.  Or pickup trucks.  Or houses.

The economy is crashing faster than at any point in recorded history.  Daily.  Based on JP Morgan’s™ recent estimates, it will be $4 trillion smaller (a drop of nearly 20% overall) this year.  That’s assuming that the economy returns to astonishing levels of growth in the last half of 2020.

I hope I’m wrong, but I consider an immediate rebound highly unlikely.

Why?

PLANE

Dear Diary, Today the stock market didn’t crash.

This is far worse than 2008 – at this point, it’s projected to be eight times worse.  At the maximum rate of growth the economy has seen in the last fifty years, it will take a decade to get back to where we are today.  That’s a decade of lower employment.  A decade of people having to do with less, not more.

I’ve heard it said that all of the economy is still there, waiting to be re-occupied.  But it’s not.  The stock market has dropped by a third.  How much of that was in the average person’s 401k?  Spending habits will change.  And the people who have been fired – will they come back to work for a company that fired them nearly immediately?  Will businesses start as usual the instant the stay-at-home orders are lifted?  Will oil zoom back up in price to $60 a barrel?

No.  Spending isn’t being deferred – in many cases spending is being cancelled right now.  If this goes on until May, that will be at least six weeks without the usual wages for millions of people, perhaps as many as 20 million people.  For the majority of households not capable of handling a $1000 emergency, what will happen to their spending profile?

And the people won’t be the same, either.

JOBS

Most of my jokes about unemployment don’t work.  Oh, except for the one about the unemployed classical musician.  He’s baroque. 

Think about that for a second.  Are people going to emerge like cave dwellers from the basement, and start consuming like they used to?  No.  They won’t have the money, having spent it all on toilet paper.  They’ve had bills.  Food.  Electricity.  Rent.  Sure, they’re not getting kicked out of their house or apartment during the crisis, but someone has to pay the rent at some point.

Corona has also hit economies all around the entire world.  As we speak, the world stock markets have lost trillions of dollars as well.  Sure, that impacted all of the Greek shipping tycoons who wanted to buy a yacht, but it also impact all of the people who were thinking of buying a new car this year.  Not only will demand be down in the United States, demand will be down globally.

For a decade.

If we’re lucky.

We sit at the crossroads of a country experiencing increasing polarity, year after year, and have just had the greatest financial catastrophe anyone living has seen.  The submarine is still taking on water, and the hatch isn’t yet closed.

Expect even more surprises.

Soon.

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool

BATSLAP

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?  You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.  Good times.  I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?  Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis™, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other – this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.  This is like the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.  Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?  It’s so nice and cheery.  The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

FRANZ

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar?  Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say “no.”  The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN™ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:  in the end, wolves really attacked.

DINOS

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.  It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.  The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.  It’s the spark that lights the fire.  When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards – The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.  It is disruptive.  It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.  In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.  COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.  Was it poised for a fall anyway?  Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:  what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

DISB

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction – COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

PANIC

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

HERO

Not all heroes are able to walk.  I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism – realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story – Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

CLIFF

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.  My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

EMPEROR

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

FIX

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

DISHWASH

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

If . . . Then . . . The Two Words That Allow You To See The Future

“And so, Arthur, we learned that gambling is bad and yet in a certain sense, isn’t life itself a gamble?  You can never be sure of anything.  Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic?  Not me, no sir, not me.” – The Tick (Animated)

coyote

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is most famous for his 2007 book The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  It’s a great book – I wish as many people read the book as bought it.  Then they might have at least understood why home prices plummeted faster than California’s self-respect in 2008-09.  Heck, if people would just retain a little bit of this book after they read it, they’d be better off than most MBAs.  The title of the book comes from Taleb describing Europeans touching down in Australia, and seeing something that they never thought possible:  a black swan.  All European swans are white.  Therefore?  All swans are white.

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his “Black Swan” events as having some important characteristics:

  • Black Swans are extremely rare. Standard techniques (like normal probability distributions) will never predict them.
  • Black Swans have huge consequences.
  • Everybody looks at the Black Swan event (after having gone through it) and concluded it was obviously going to happen.

I’ll throw out one other idea to mix with Taleb’s Black Swan concept – this one was from James P. Hogan’s wonderful 1982 book (that Hogan says helped topple the Soviet Union, and he might be right – LINK) Voyage from Yesteryear.  In this book, Hogan has a character talk about the difference between a phase change and a chemical reaction.  When you freeze water or melt ice, it’s just undergoing a phase change.  Warm the ice up, and you get water.  Make the water cold enough, and it’ll change back.

Phase changes are simple and reversible.  It’s only a matter of energy.  But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?  It’s never coming back.  Burning the paper is a one way trip.  It’s a chemical reaction that you can’t reverse.  Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.  It turns out they don’t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

CUSACK

In real life, John Cusack blocked me on Twitter®.  I probably deserved it.  I just wanted my two dollars.

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.  Same stuff, different day.  But the American Revolution?  That was a chemical reaction – after the war we could never go back to being British subjects – the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.  9/11 was another phase change.  Despite W’s desire that we “go on as normal” we never have been normal again and conventional ideas of privacy, freedom, independence, and self-governance are dead.

Oops.

All Black Swans are chemical reactions – they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the “way things were” it never happens – you can’t unburn the paper.  The change is a one-way event.  In one (for me) particularly striking story in The Black Swan, Taleb wrote that his relatives from Lebanon were still waiting for things to return to normal, even though it had been thirty years since the war had ripped Lebanon apart.  No, they weren’t crack dealers, and they weren’t alone.  Even as late as 2012, 76,000 people were displaced within Lebanon, waiting for things to get back to normal.

Wuhan Flu, COVID-19, is a Black Swan.  It’s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZ® famine of 1986.   This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.  When this is studied in classes in fifty years, the students will think it happened all at once, rather than unfolding, day-by-day over the course of a year.  In a week, we’ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.  It’s the new normal.  And yes, I said a year.  We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t last a decade.

waterloo

A woman born at the beginning of the French Revolution would have already had kids by the time Napoleon was booted off stage permanently after Waterloo.  But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

As I’ve written about before, the economy is facing a crisis that’s at least twice as big as the 2008 Great Recession.  The stage was set beforehand for a phase change – from functioning economy to recession and then back again.  Trump had really juiced the economy in an unusual way:  clearing out regulations.  Sure, he pumped money back via tax cuts, but those tax cuts were targeted toward non-millionaire types and businesses.  This was, perhaps, the most wholesome way to grow the economy – by people making money rather than by government choosing who got to win.  Bernie, I’m talking about you.

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.  Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.  But just like Wuhan isn’t really the flu, this economic upset really isn’t a recession – it’s far worse.  Dow® 8,000 or less isn’t out of the question on the downside.  Really.

It’s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.  I mean, more unusual than usual.  Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.  “Millionaires” were excluded.  Free health care will come on the table soon enough.  We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s going to happen.  And we will never go back to the way things were.  This isn’t a phase change.  Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just won’t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

TODDLER

Honestly, I don’t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-Its®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.  It was a lot of fun.  I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.  My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.  So, I guess that makes me sort-of a retired professional doomer.

And my thinking pattern developed a rhythm . . . If (generic disaster) happened, Then (outcome).

It was thinking about the outcome that was the most fun.  If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?  Well, based upon the statistics that I could find, it was an average wait of 500 years for a tornado to hit any given spot in the geographic region of the HQ.  Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, that’s not very often.  I tracked down and tried to figure out how much money the company would lose if it got hit by a tornado, volcano, hurricane and earthquake all on the same day – a Torcano Hurriquake™.  After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of payments that people owed us.  As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWs® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey Wallpaper® in a year.

BONUS

Hey, everybody who thinks exactly alike gets a bonus, right?

They didn’t think it was funny when I told them that a Civil War was 10 times as likely as a natural disaster shutting down operations.  When I showed them the math, they couldn’t argue, but they weren’t happy.  They didn’t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep – most of their systems already had offsite backups.  And no one was even slightly interested in shooting RPGs at the executives.

What the executives were interested in was things that they were used to, floods.  Torcanos. Hurriquakes.  Civil War?  I’m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.  “Just not credible.”

No Black Swan event is credible when you try to describe it to someone who is stuck in thinking normally.  Just like Taleb’s relatives looking for stability in Lebanon or me wondering when TSA will stop fondling my man parts, it’s not going to happen.  But describe trying to get on a flight in 2020 to an American in 1995?  They’d think it was a silly science fiction story.  If only we could convince the TSA to fondle Lebonese?

Which brings us back to COVID-19.  How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?  It’s difficult.  Their minds aren’t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.  But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.  They just don’t realize it’s like herpes:  forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.  The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess I’ll call it protein.  Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.  And they say that there isn’t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.  And they close during summer, last I checked – every summer.  But now?  School food is a must.  Here in Modern Mayberry, they’re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.  I think it’s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that we’re in trouble.  One of the brighter ones probably had the following thought:

If (Lunches are Free) Then (How Long Until They Become Free Community Lunches)?

If (Free Community Lunches Exist) Then (How Many People Remember Typhoid Mary Was A Lunch Lady Cook who spent 30 years in prison isolation because she wouldn’t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

typhoid

If you cook them too long, they get all crunchy.

Schools are being closed.  This, in my opinion is good.  But If (Schools Close) Then (Are Daycares Any Safer?)  Your takeaway should be this question:  how long until daycares are closed?  If they can close the NBA, Then they can close daycares.  But I repeat myself.

What can you do?  The best time to prepare was last month.  The next best time to prepare is now.  I can’t tell you if you have enough cans of corn in your pantry.  And, no, that’s not a creepy metaphor referring to some orifice you may or may not have.  I mean actual corn.  Or tuna.  Still not a metaphor.  Or mayonnaise.  Whatever you normally eat, you have some extra, right?

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

If (Supermarkets Close) Then (what)?  The average supermarket used to have inventory for three days.  The average house, food enough for three days.   Add that up, and American is pretty close to being hungry.  What happens Then?  Martial law?  Food distributions?

If (Your Job Ceases to Exist) Then (what)?

That’s the key to preparing yourself, not only physically like those people building blanket forts with a semi-load of toilet paper in their basement as structural wall material, but also mentally.  To understand what’s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.  You have to let your mind make it real and run it to a logical conclusion.

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

TOM

Okay, not everything bad can happen.  I mean, cats with thumbs?  Silly.

When an idea makes sense, follow it through.  If so, Then what’s the consequence?  Don’t limit your thinking.  It’s a fun game.  Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminator™, and look how much fun that was.  But when you really think about it, you’ll look to see what happened in the past.  While the future won’t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.  The cause and effect of many things doesn’t change.

If we’re quarantining, Then we won’t drive as much.  If we don’t drive as much, Then we won’t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.  If we don’t use as much of that sweet, sweet, gasoline, Then the price of oil, refineries, and oil producing companies will drop and some will go out of business and lots of people will lose their jobs.  That’s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasn’t in my projections – I was expecting cake.  It wasn’t in the mindset of the people of the world.  Then it was.  So what happens next?  What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?  What changes will be permanent?

  • If you want to keep your doctors alive, Then how will you protect them from COVID-19?
  • If you want to save the people with the most future, Then how many over 40 will get one of the 60,000 ventilators? Besides me, I mean.
  • If your customers are being impacted, Then will they fail?
  • If your customers fail, Then who will pay you?
  • If government wants to control people and how they move, Then they’ll start using the tracking information from cell phones.
  • If the government tracks cell phones, Then why would they ever stop? About the time they stop touching your no-no areas so you can go to Cleveland?
  • If the clerk at Wal-Mart® tells you that “they” have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
  • If you hear from another Wal-Mart© employee that they are setting up special hours for employees to shop after the store is closed, Then will you pay attention?
  • If the government starts paying people just to breath, Then will they ever stop?
  • If I tell you that hope is not a plan, Then will you . . . plan?

We are in a Black Swan event, probably the biggest of your life, and 9/11 was no slouch.  Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.  But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.  The final exam is pass/fail.  And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, #10: Economy on the Brink?

“The reason I’m going to Santa Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.” – Wonder Woman (1978)

clock10

This year, International Woman’s Day was on Sunday, March 8, which is when we moved the clock to daylight savings time.  So now they’ll complain that they only get 23 hours for every day, while a man gets 24.

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

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row.  Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Virginia:  Imposing Costs – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona – Links

Welcome to Issue 10 of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), and Issue Nine is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Generally, this section reports on either violence or censorship:  it’s one of the other.  This month, it’s both.  We’ll start with Violence.  Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage – the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.  To be clear – this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.  Thankfully he was incompetent – driving wasn’t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

I’m amused when the Left talks about “Right Wing Extremist Violence®” because it’s generally either propaganda or a funding ploy by Lefty organizations to frack the pockets of liberal donors on the Coasts who want to be “doing something” to stop the Hate®.  At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you don’t believe me, I can point to a few congressman who were shot at (and shot) by a deranged Sanders supporter who might beg to differ.

antifa

The difference between a Leftist and a puppy is a puppy stops whining when it grows up.

As the country continues to unravel, I expect a significant uptick in violence from the Left.  If Bernie loses his shot at the presidency, I fully expect that the very first target will be the Democratic Party, with riots in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.  Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).  And with enough practice, sadly, Leftists might become proficient at hurting people other than their parents.

Moving on to censorship, Leftists should be pleased that censorship is still in fashion.  Because there isn’t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTube®, I can only report what I’ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.  Several Right-ish content producers were banned recently, and probably the most prominent one I know of is I, Hypocrite.

When I heard about the banning, I went to his Bitchute® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.  It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuber™ in a debate were wrong.  He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in a typical political debate except he admitted when he was wrong and his opponent had a strong point.

Now his voice is silenced.

YouTube© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content that’s favorable to the Right, like Sargon’s channel.  Sargon’s biggest offense?  Dunno, having a keen beard?  I can’t seem to find anything offensive.  But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

On the Twitter™ front, they recently permanently banned the news website ZeroHedge© for a tweet popularizing a story that the Coronavirus may have been a result of genetic engineering.  The most recent mainstream stories I’ve heard seem to confirm that’s an opinion that’s not out of the question.  So, a news story that’s (admittedly) fringe?  Instaban.  That may be one reason a “conservative” buyer is looking to shake up leadership at Twitter®.  I’m not certain that would change a thing, since most “conservatives” seem to care more about the opinions of the Left than either the truth or honest dissenting opinions to the prevailing Leftist opinions.  Crazier parties, right?

Virginia:  Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasn’t imposing costs on the Left.  Here’s what I said:

. . . no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that they’ll have to pay a price.  And, no, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.  But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, they’ll never change.  What are legal ways to influence them? 

  • First – make sure that they aren’t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.  Oh, and voters.
  • Second – go through their histories thoroughly. Don’t blackmail them – find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it – imagine what Ralph’s browser history looks like.  Isn’t that a public record? 
  • Third – make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northam’s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a Starbucks®?   What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
  • Fourth – remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within – they’ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so it’s a tactic that’s fair game.  But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted Sister® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

I’m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable. 

Well, someone did come up with a legal and peaceful way to make Virginia State Delegate Mark Levine, Leftist, uncomfortable.  Levine is the author of the bill to confiscate semi-automatic guns from law-abiding citizens of Virginia.  Brandon Howard, American, showed up in front of Mark’s house.  With a protest sign.  And a rifle.  Here’s a link to the story (LINK).

In no way did he use his rifle in a threatening fashion, but Howard did protest.

Delegate Levine’s panties got very much in a twist.  He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.  Levine was quoted by the article by saying that “. . . if they cannot prosecute him (Howard) because of the way our Virginia laws are, well then that’s the advantage of being a lawmaker.  I intend to come back to Richmond and introduce legislation to make sure that anyone who threatens a lawmaker at the point of a gun and says I’m coming to your home with a gun unless you change your mind on legislation.  I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levine’s sense of irony must be broken to not see how his sense of having his rights violated would result in him writing a law to enable cops with guns to stop citizens from peacefully protesting in a way that he doesn’t approve of.  The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that Mr. Levine is illiterate?

This will not be the last time that costs are imposed on the Left as they try to restrict rights.  Assume as the Right gets as sophisticated and as active as the Left in this type of work, it will increase rapidly.

Hank Curmudgeon left a link (LINK) to this guide last month and suggested I print out this figure and include it.  I’ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Insurg

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.  February was a kind month, but the seeds were set for turbulent months to follow.  In keeping with the journalistic standards of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, I’ll note that I did make sure that all pictures used resulted in no harm or mistreatment of any bikini, anywhere.

Violence:

violf

Up is more violent.  Violence remains steady.  My prediction?  Peaks in June-July-August as political violence coming from the Left peaks.  That may make a strange graph, but I’ll do my best to find a fitting match in a bikini if and when it happens.

Political Instability:

politf

Up is more unstable.  Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month.  Expect increased instability as we move to November, with August being secondary peak during and after the conventions, and bikini’s flash red.

Economic:

econf

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators began to turn in February.  Based on the way this index is calculated, it does not yet show the impact of the free-falling stock market, which (as of this writing) is limit-locked down on the early futures, with oil collapsing to the $30’s.  Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

borderf

Down is good, in theory.  This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  One would assume we’re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.  And those aren’t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

It’s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.  Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.  The second part is hating each other – and we already have that in place.  What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the Twinkies® and Ho-Hos™ and Strawberry Starburst Piña Coladas© that our sticky fingers and sugar addled brains can pay for with our nearly maxed out credit cards.

But then enters Coronavirus:

Ooh, my little viral crop, my viral crop
When you gonna give me quarantine, Corona
Ooh, you make my economy stop, my economy stop
Got stop the production line, Corona

Never gonna wash, cough it up, such a dirty hand
I always buy the TP, hoard the food that is canned
My, my, my, aye-aye, whoa!
M-m-m-my Corona

corona

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.  I guess he has the knack.

As I write this on Sunday evening, March 8, 2020, the stock market has already tripped a stop-loss trigger before opening.  Oil prices are collapsing.  The Everything Bubble is imploding.

What’s next?  If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon.  Businesses collapse.  Banks?  They’re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.  This is, for some reason, referred to as the free market.

Economic recessions can happen when the economy has been growing too quickly, too long, or both.  Sometimes they end just because it was time.  Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.  Corona has the ability to be that event, and even if the economy was in peak condition, Corona could have started a recession.

Given a recession, the political landscape will be in turmoil.  On the Democrat side, I’m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination – that’s the conventional wisdom – and I dearly hope that’s right.  A hard Leftist leading a country in times of economic trouble always provides the worst solutions, and always prescribes more of the same solutions when they don’t work – it’s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didn’t work.  It’s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isn’t really certain what planet he’s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.  President Trump’s recent tweet that “Biden will be tough to beat” was the 2020 version of “don’t throw me in that briar patch.”

joe

And that’s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

That’s my take – but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, it’s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.  Give it two months.  Then we won’t have to predict, we’ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt – this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

link

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.  Probably intentionally.  But they can’t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.  Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

Progressive Magazine is worried that Ed Asner is worried about people on the Right having guns.  Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

Daily Dot revisits Electric Boogaloo, adds even more stupid than NBC.

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.  Good read.

Vox Magazine thinks Identity Politicsis awesome.  But only for the Left, not for the Right.

Salon is ecstatic that Bernie is a symbol of people turning hard Left.

Must read:  Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

What is an American?  Hint:  no one can agree.

The Week talks about Ross Douthat having a stupid opinion about the divide in America in a new book review.

Socialists hate the Democrats.  See, I told you.

Auntie Beeb writes about Sanctuary Counties in Virginia, still butthurt about 1776.

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

 

The Siege of Waco and the Deep State

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police.  One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (New One)

ATFRAID

Don’t worry, Leftists, all those people at Waco were here legally.

The Waco Siege started 27 years ago.  It started as a raid by the ATF – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  The ATF was formed after the Gun Control act of 1968.  In researching the ATF, I was amazed that its history consists of nothing more than an unending series of scandals and heartache visited upon (mainly) people with no criminal intent who had no idea that they were violating some extremely technical law.  And that’s on a good day.

How bad is the ATF?  Here’s what a Senate subcommittee said:  “Based upon these hearings it is apparent that ATF enforcement tactics made possible by current federal firearms laws are constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible.”  From that, it actually got worse.

The ATF was involved (besides Waco) in the Ruby Ridge disaster (which netted a body count that included a 14 year old boy and a mother holding a baby) as well as operation Fast and Furious where guns were intentionally illegally sold to Mexican drug criminals.  It’s okay selling guns to drug cartels because Fast and Furious was named after a Vin Diesel movie, and who doesn’t like him?

It appears that most of the actually useful things that the ATF does revolve around databases that attempt to match weapons to crimes.  Keeping close to computer screens and away from actual A, T, and F might be a good idea, since they’ve lost (in just one audit) over 76 firearms, plus hundreds of laptops.  Oops.  Too much A?  And this is the group that revers Elliot Ness and the famous Untouchables as their forefathers.

donut

Looks like the Deputy Director really wanted to win the pie eating contest with the FBI, so they hired Karen.

In an existence consisting of repugnant, objectionable, and odious events the Waco Siege is probably their crowning achievement.  Waco is certainly the worst single thing the ATF has ever done.  The fact that it’s not the only bad thing people talk about when they bring up the ATF tells you just how incompetent they are.

What did the ATF do that was so bad at Waco?

They launched a military-style raid against a church, the Branch Davidians, for no real discernible crime other than being a great target for a raid that could get publicity right before Congressional budgets were set.  Oh, and ATF agents knowingly lied in order to get military support, indicating that there were illegal drugs at the church when there was no evidence at all.  And this is just for starters.

On the morning of the attack, the agents shot the dogs, then engaged in a firefight with the members of the church.  The ATF says they didn’t shoot first.  The surviving Branch Davidians say the ATF did shoot first.  Since the ATF was recording the raid for use in public relations, it seems odd that they don’t have footage of that.  Almost as if the tapes were . . . conveniently lost?  Nah.

The ATF may be evil, but they make up for it partly by being incompetent.  After 45 minutes of exchanging gunfire with the Branch Davidians, the ATF asked for a do-over, since they had shot all of their ammunition.  The church allowed and honored a ceasefire when they could have easily killed every single ATF agent as they tried to withdraw.  But the folks in the church didn’t.  Once the threat of attack had passed, they let the agents leave in piece.  Did I mention that the Branch Davidians called 911 when they were first attacked?

knocking

ATF agents are notoriously bad at knock-knock jokes.

The Waco Siege then spiraled into a circus.  The press, FBI, and the Texas National Guard all showed up.  When a group of moms and kids surrendered, the moms were immediately arrested and the kids placed in state custody, which made the remaining kids not want to leave.  Funny, that.  The FBI hostage negotiators sent in a camcorder so the Davidians could show they weren’t being coerced into staying.  The FBI refused to allow the tape to be given to the media.  Why?

It might make people sympathetic to the Branch Davidians, which wouldn’t do because the FBI needed them to be the villain.

During the standoff, the FBI continually ramped up the stress through lights at night, and horrible sounds during the day – which is probably a questionable strategy when dealing with an end-of-the-world cult.  The FBI then decided that broadcasting “This is not an assault” over a loudspeaker while using a tank to demolish the structure and pump in flammable tear gas.  If that’s not an assault, I’m not sure what is, especially since there are infrared recordings that may show muzzle flashes on the morning of the attack – muzzle flashes of people outside shooting into the compound.   Apparently, this sort of behavior isn’t an assault – it’s just the non-threatening way that FBI agents normally great each other.

attack

I will warn you, the FBI can leave a mess.

Malcolm Gladwell tallied the forces in his article for the New Yorker:  “Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the FBI assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history:  10 Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, 668 agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, 15 U.S. Army personnel, 13 members of the Texas National Guard, 31 Texas Rangers, 131 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, 17 from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and 18 Waco police, for a total of 899 people.”  Those were just the ground forces – there were helicopters and other flying surveillance, too.

The Siege ended in tragedy after the tanks went in – a total of 76 dead in that final “not an assault.”  The church members perished horribly in a fire that may or may not have been started by the government.

I don’t want to give the impression that the leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, was a hero.  He clearly wasn’t.  Outside of his taking wives that were very young (though still within Texas marriage age at the time, per the Sheriff), Koresh had the opportunity to end the standoff without tragedy.  That still doesn’t absolve the government, because if Koresh felt he wouldn’t get a fair deal, it looks like he was right.

Almost immediately after the first catastrophic attack by the ATF, the involved agents started writing reports on what happened.  And were stopped even though writing reports doesn’t allow them to use what is apparently their only skill – bungling operations and getting people killed.  Someone from Washington, D.C. noticed that the agents were writing things that could be used by the Davidians to prove themselves innocent, which must violate some sort of ATF policy.

Thankfully, the evidence remaining from the fire was at least carefully cataloged so Americans could have faith that the justice system would produce a fair result?  No.  The entire site was bulldozed within two weeks after the fire, destroying valuable evidence.

Evidence?  Why would you need that?

peewee

His courthouse is in the basement of the Alamo.

I mentioned that I was going to write about Waco to The Mrs.  We discussed it for a while, but she opened with, “Well, I guess that’s another list you’ll be on.”

We continued to talk about it.  Her position was that Waco started the Right/Left split in the country.  From one standpoint, she was correct.  If you look at the Pew® data from back in 1994 (LINK), we weren’t that split as a country, but by 2017 the split was in force.  Waco happened right at the front of the polarization of American politics.

voice

I blame the vegans, ruining Thanksgiving with their stupid tofu turkey.

The Mrs. and I continued discussing the Waco Siege.  We both agreed that Waco was also the most blatant display of the Deep State back before the year 2000, and she felt it was the blow that really split the country.  How so?

  • The search warrant for the raid was based on multiple lies.
  • The Branch Davidians had phone lines cut with the outside world so they couldn’t plead their case except through the FBI.
  • Evidence was “lost” including physical evidence as well as video evidence.
  • Agents writing routine reports after the failed first raid were stopped from creating reports because their stories didn’t match and the government didn’t want to provide evidence that the Branch Davidians could use to be found innocent. Innocence is for government agents, silly.
  • Stories of agents never actually matched with each other, being inconsistent as late as 6 years after the raid.
  • Physical evidence (as was available) contradicted agent testimony or suggested agents may have lied.
  • In the end, every charge that could be brought against the survivors was brought, but there were no charges brought against a single Federal agent. Perhaps 9 (from the data I could find) ATF personnel either retired early (presumably with full benefits and honors) or were “under scrutiny” which probably means that they wouldn’t get promoted again for a year or two.
  • There were lasting career consequences, though: one FBI leader was demoted from a very high position, and the rest of his life was horrible.  Just kidding.  He moved from one high paying executive job in the private sector to another.
  • Leftist Senators (most prominently Charles Schumer) bent over backwards to justify what the ATF did during the Senate hearings on the Siege. I can say this with confidence:  Chuck Schumer is the ATF of the Senate.

The parallels to the Deep State today are similar:

  • Hillary Clinton can intentionally violate the law related to storage of classified information. No charge.
  • The FISA affidavit that started the Mueller investigation could be based on . . . lies. No charge.
  • Andrew McCabe could lie to Congress. No charge.
  • John Brennan could lie to Congress. No investigation.
  • Roger Stone could lie to Congress. No investigation.  Just kidding.  Hammered as if by the fist of an angry god, and convicted of a crime.
  • General Flynn made non-consequential misstatements of fact when he was in a “friendly chat” with FBI agents. No charge.  Just kidding.  Hounded like he had stolen Satan’s bra and convicted of a crime.

Certainly I could come up with more examples.  But the point is clear – the Deep State protects itself first.  Members can commit murder, and there will be no charges.  Members can lie to cover each other and be immune.  Members can destroy evidence without consequence.  Members can get in the 10 item only line with 12 items.  No consequences.

stapler

When I think about why the Deep State would go so far to protect its own, my first question is, why?  You see this as a regular fixture with almost any member.  Some of those being protected aren’t important.  The on-scene director at Waco – why protect him?

The answer is fairly simple:  these people know things.  They know of the activities that the Deep State wants to hide.  They’re the ones who know the real secrets, both on you and me but more importantly on each other.

Why could Waco not be ended peacefully?  Because it would give Koresh a victory.  And a victory, no matter how small would, they felt, make them less powerful, less respected.  There is a reason that the ATF and FBI posed in pictures on the still-smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound.  There is a reason that after the fire took down the Branch Davidian flag, the ATF raised an ATF flag at Waco.

ATF

Nothing says reasonable like a selfie on top of ashes!

That reason is the Deep State’s deepest desire.  What does the Deep State want?

Power, both personal power, and power to the organizations they serve.  Make no mistake, the Deep State is partisan, and loves all of those who like state control.  Why else would they militarize a Federal Bureau that was less effective than Soviet situation comedy writers?  You could look into the sneering, mocking weasel face of Peter Strzok while he was giving testimony to Congress and see it in his eyes.  Contempt.  Contempt for those that weren’t of his Deep State pedigree, and a smugness borne of the thought that there was nothing that could ever be done to him.

derp

Would you trust this man with your secrets?

He had become like the hero of the ATF, Elliot Ness.

He was Untouchable.

The Revolutionary: A Wilder Review

“We, the soldiers of The National Liberation Front of America, in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country, have struck a fatal blow to the fascist police state.  What better revolutionary example than to let their president perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.” – Escape from New York

MAORIT

Rittenberg and Mao.  One of them was working for his country at the time.

Two weeks ago, Concerned American over at Western Rifle Shooters Association (LINK) posted about a documentary, The Revolutionary.  His request was pretty simple – “Find it.  Watch it.  Tell us about it.  Any takers?”

I raised my hand.  Here we are.  As you read this, I suggest one little thought:  would a Leftist takeover be any different in the United States?

The film opens with a shot of a library, filled with books with Chinese ideograms written on the spines.  Finally, the hand of an elderly man pulls Mao’s “Little Red Book” – Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung from the stack.  That elderly man, Sidney Rittenberg, then announces with gravity that Mao was a “great hero and great criminal.”

The Revolutionary is a documentary about Sidney Rittenberg and his time in China.

Sidney who?

Sidney Rittenberg was born in Charleston, South Carolina to a wealthy and politically powerful family.  Rittenberg went to college at the University of North Carolina.  The documentary doesn’t mention graduation (he didn’t), nor does it mention that he became a committed communist while at college (he did).  His first work was as a union organizer.  What union?  Apparently all of them.  Rittenberg recounts that one paper described him as:  “an alien element who is here spreading class hatred.”

I’m surprised he didn’t get shirts made.

rittenarm

“I don’t always fight for my country, but when I do it’s not really for my country.”

Sadly for the Chinese people, Rittenberg was drafted and sent to Stanford to learn Chinese for the U.S. Army.  After being sent to China with the Army, Rittenberg did the usual thing soldiers do and stayed and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1946.  The film hints that Rittenberg made contact with communists as soon as he could after reaching China, so he might have been playing for both sides at once.

After joining the Chinese Communist Party, RIttenberg acted as a liaison and translator with the U.S. Army in the area – even translating the Laurel and Hardy movies that the Army brought (I’m not making this up) for Mao to watch.  Per Rittenberg, Mao told him that he wanted to show the world that “China could be civilized and democratic,” which I’m betting Mao thought was the central message of most Laurel and Hardy films.

In his first real taste of actual communism (versus the imaginary unicorn communism Rittenberg made up in his head) as Mao was about to take over Beijing and consolidate final victory on the Chinese mainland in 1949, Rittenberg was arrested because Stalin cabled Mao that Rittenberg was a spy.  This may be the only thing (besides dying) that I ever was happy that Stalin did.

attack

The Chinese version of Swan Lake has a slightly different ending and involves a steel mill.

For the next five years Rittenberg was in prison, and his account of this time in the documentary is filled with self-congratulation that he was a fine, faithful communist even in his jail cell.  Offered the chance to go home to the U.S., Rittenberg declined and studied for five years in his jail cell until Stalin died and he was released.  During the time he was in prison, the communists actively purged countless people on the losing side of the Chinese Civil War, and lost hundreds of thousands fighting Americans in Korea.  These were down from the 11,000,000 or so killed during the Chinese Civil War, so it almost seems like Mao was getting tired of killing Chinese.

Spoiler alert:  Not at all.

In theory, Rittenberg could be absolved of culpability in those deaths and the treason of supporting a government at war with the United States.  But after Stalin died, Rittenberg was released.  And after showing such loyalty by staying in prison, he was admitted to the “real” Communist Central Party.  He was on the inside.

How far inside?  In a country where hot running water was nearly unknown, he had it.  He had a driver and car at any time of the day or night.  If he wanted entertainment?  He had tickets to any shows.  Vacation travel.  And, he noted he was, “paid better than Mao.”

Rittenberg’s first crime, at least as shown in the documentary, was in 1957.  It was at that point where Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend” scheme unfolded.  Mao, in theory, told people to argue about what would be best for China and let the best ideas win.  Rittenberg admiringly notes that Mao, “with great artistry,” coaxed anyone who had a different opinion than Mao to speak it.  Then like a vengeful junior high cheerleader, after Mao knew who his enemies were, he crushed and ruined them.

lmao

Who says Mao doesn’t have a sense of humor?

One person who worked with Rittenberg in the Radio Beijing propaganda section during the “Hundred Flowers” was the daughter of the founder of Goldman Sachs®.  This unnamed daughter fought for the civil rights of those being crushed by Mao, and challenged Rittenberg.  Hadn’t Rittenberg fought for civil rights in the United States?

He had.

But she just didn’t get it, said Rittenberg.  Apparently civil rights were to be fought for before power was achieved.  After gaining power, civil rights weren’t something to fight for – they were a negative.  But Rittenberg got it.  Rittenberg described taking part in “struggle sessions” where people – his friends – were denounced, beaten, and berated.  Often, Chinese would commit suicide rather than be the subject of a struggle session.

Rittenberg’s second crime was in the Great Leap Forward.  I wrote (a bit) about the Great Leap Forward here:  In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!.  This was Mao’s attempt to modernize the Chinese economy to match the industrial output of China to that of Great Britain within fifteen years.  The idea was that food production would exponentially increase, and that, from small steel forges in the backyards of peasant huts, steel would be made to match the output of a first world producer of steel.

But the Chinese had a problem.  How on Earth could they get that much iron and steel so quickly?

Easy!

Melt your pots.  Melt your pans.  Melt your plows and tools.  And while you have all the men working at melting down useful items, leave the fields to the very young and the very old.  Call the death toll due to famine as 40,000,000.  This brings Mao’s total up to 51,000,000.

Oops.  But he’s not done yet.

grtlp1

Spoiler:  there wasn’t a Chinese spaceship during the Great Leap Forward.  Also?  No Lucky Charms®.

This led to the largest famine in world history.  When this was pointed out to Mao by one of his trusted lieutenants, Peng Dehaui, Mao had Peng placed under arrest – later (during the Cultural Revolution) Peng was beaten so badly his back was splintered.  Taking constructive criticism might not have been at the top of Mao’s skill set.

But that’s not how Rittenberg sees it.  “Everybody lied.”  Rittenberg said that the lies started at the bottom, and the leadership farther up was “deceived.”  Certainly lower level officials gave the numbers Mao wanted to see.  They knew the alternative.

pretend

They also pretended to make steel.

For Rittenberg to blame the peasants and low level officials for lying is pretty much the “she had a short skirt on and I couldn’t help myself” level of defense – the defense of a man who knows that he was corrupted by luxury and ideology.

I’ll note here that for the last 2,000 years, China has led the world in killing Chinese.  The cumulative total for the various civil wars and fights dwarfs any other conflicts in the world.  And Mao killed more than Chinese than any person in history.

But a catastrophe as bad as the Great Leap Forward hurt even a near-deity like Mao.  He lost tremendous amounts of power as sane people tried to get the economy working again so that the Chinese would be a little less accomplished at killing Chinese.

Mao would have none of it – by far he was already the best killer of Chinese in history, and there was no way he was going to let up as long as he was alive.  He created Sidney Rittenberg’s next, and probably worst crime:  the Cultural Revolution.  I wrote (a little) about that, too:  Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be.

To put the Cultural Revolution in perspective, it was really just a way for Mao to regain power.  Essentially, he told the youth that it was, “right to rebel” and to oust those that ran the communist government because they presumably weren’t good enough communists.  What was a bad communist?  Someone who was against Mao.

cultbomb

The nuclear spinach helped the most.

This is where Mao’s Little Red Book made its appearance.  Everyone had one.  Everyone HAD to have one.  What did it mean?  Whatever you thought, unless Mao said different.  Teenagers and college students were told to take control of their institutions, and they did, forming what they called the Red Guard.  But there were lots of different Red Guard organizations, and they often fought each other for no other reason than they had different opinions on the best way to support Mao.  Think of it as Lord of the Flies, but running Congress and every public institution.

Oops.  Too late.

At the least, hundreds of thousands died, with every kind of atrocity listed from cannibalism to baby-killing, all in the name of Mao.  The high range of the death toll was 20,000,000, which would take Mao’s total to over 70,000,000.  And Sidney Rittenberg was right in the middle of it.  He gave speeches to these Red Guards supporting them since that was, according to him, “my role to play.”

SIDNEY

Sidney gave speeches to every size crowd, from 100,000 at a stadium, to 12 people at a Denny’s™ grand opening.

Rittenberg was a prime figure in the start of the Cultural Revolution, he knew of the violence.  He knew of the murders, the suicides, the atrocities, and the ruined lives.  In his words, he “made feeble protests . . . against it.”  But he gave up, rationalizing that, “ . . . revolution is not like having guests to dinner . . . not gracious, not gentle.”

Rittenberg knew what was going on.  He related a story where one group of Red Guards captured and tortured rival Red Guard members.  They tortured them, and recorded the screams of the tortures.  Why?  So they could play them to their members to “harden” them.  Rittenberg knew that about shopkeepers killed.  Teachers stabbed.  All of this occurred while the army and police were told to keep their hands off and let the Red Guards do as they pleased.

Rittenberg knew that millions were being murdered.  One military leader told him that, “more soldiers were killed in the Cultural Revolution than in any campaign in China’s history.”

DINNER

Yes, Rittenberg knew this was going on.  And he willingly went along with it.

Eventually, if you play with dictators, you’ll eventually end up on the wrong side of them.  Rittenberg did.  At this point in the documentary, The Mrs. noted that, “it was too bad they didn’t put a bullet in his head.”  She’s cuddly that way.  But she’s not wrong.  Instead they stuck him in solitary, and let him out after Deng Xiaoping took control after Mao died.

Since it looked like there wasn’t much country left to loot and they stopped killing Chinese by the bucketful, and finding his luxurious lifestyle gone, Rittenberg felt his job in China was done and took his wife and family and moved to the United States.  He was only there for 60,000,000 of the 71,000,000 deaths that occurred during Mao’s time.

Several of the scenes of the documentary were shot in Rittenberg’s house, I assume.  The house was beautiful – lake or oceanfront beautiful, and contained a dining room set that probably cost thousands of dollars.  How did a poor communist afford it?

After coming back to the United States, he sold his Chinese connections to the highest corporate bidder, and charged millions.  After taking part in activities that destroyed millions of lives, he lived the last forty years of his life in luxury, apparently unburdened by self-reflection of an odious, treasonous, treacherous, and pathetic life that brought tragedy to so many.  Not that I’m judgmental.  To me, the most chilling part is how the one person he didn’t blame for the horror that was Chinese communism was, well, him.

At the end of the documentary, he has a rare moment where he reflects that maybe he would have been better just going over and helping the Chinese and teaching English, and not being a leader in the Chinese Communist Party.

“But I didn’t want that.”

And neither do the would-be Rittenbergs that are present here in the United States today.  They want the power.  They don’t mind the body count.

The Revolutionary, 2013, 1 hour and 32 minutes, is streaming now on Amazon® Prime™.