Civil War – Page 22 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Questions: Important For Llamas And Finding The Truth

“Have you calculated the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Sean Connery is a stickler for grooming. I was stuck in a burning building while he was using the extinguisher to keep a path open for me. Then he told me, “shave yourself!”

A few years ago I was meeting with a person that reported to me at work. I was asking a question with a yes or no answer. One thing that being in thousands of hours of corporate meetings has taught me is that if you ask an open ended question, people will talk. And talk. And talk. Even if they have nothing to say – those meeting room corporate doughnuts aren’t going to eat themselves.

So, a lot of my questions were phrased in the form of, “Do you know where the llama is?”

My company doesn’t use llamas except for unlicensed medical experimentation to find a cure for chronic nose picking, so in this case “llama” is really easier than referencing the “Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator” that we really make.

There are really only two answers:

“Yes, John Wilder, the llama is in the break room playing beer pong with Vladimir Putin.”
“No, John Wilder, I have no idea.”

Well, I guess we know what’s going to happen in July.

A pattern that I had noticed was that when the answer was “Yes, I know where the llama is,” people would just say, “Yes.”

Simple. We’re done. Move on to the next question.

But if people didn’t know where the llama was, what I mentally thought of as “The Story” started. The story had a million variants: “No, John Wilder, I don’t know where the llama is because it had sticky glands and we were out of llama soap and a friend came in from out of town and I just quit heroin and Vladimir Putin took off his shirt and making sweet talk to the llama last week.”

The Story is long. The Story isn’t really relevant.

People didn’t want to tell me “No.” If they had, and knowing where the llama was mattered, I could follow up with a question. Most of the time my question was, “Well, when are you going to find the llama?” Frankly, I’ve heard more excuses than Joe Biden has lost memories, so “Why don’t you know where the llama is?” was most of the time something I didn’t really care about. But they made the decision that I cared why they didn’t know where the llama was.

Never worry about food when you travel with llamas. Alpaca lunch.

I had one very bright employee, Bill Nothisrealname, that a recent college grad. He started to explain why he didn’t know where the llama was: he was winding up to tell The Story.

I stopped him.

“Bill, you were first in your class in high school, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then you went to college at Southern North Eastern Midwestia State, which is a pretty good school. Heck, I bet that you were in the top ten in GPA in your degree?”

“Yeah, I was in the top five of the class.”

I gestured at the offices up and down the hallway. “Bill, everyone here was at the top of their class in high school and graduated at the top of their class from college in a degree just as tough as yours. My boss, Boris. He’s as smart as a Vulcan that crossbred with a computer and has the personality to match. When he asks me a question, he wants me to answer that question. He’s no dummy.

“And Boris isn’t afraid to ask questions, either. He’s realized that even as a top executive in the company, he doesn’t and can’t know everything.”

Bill nodded.

I never really liked that Coppola movie, Alpaca Lips Now.

“Here’s what I think. When you were in third grade, you were smart. When the rest of the class didn’t know the answer, the teacher looked at you, right?”

“Yes.”

“And that didn’t change in high school. Or, for you, even in college. I think that you think you have to know the answer, because you were the smart kid. Bill, everyone, and I mean everyone here is that smart. You weren’t hired because you knew all of the answers – you were hired because you were smart, and had good character. Don’t be afraid to not know everything – asking questions is a sign of power. And . . . answer the question that was asked.

“Bill, do you know where the llama is?”

“No.”

But don’t-a worry – health is her new issue. She’s still all-in for Ollamacare.

I moved on to the next question. In this case, the llama wasn’t all that important, except as it related to teaching Bill that he didn’t need to know everything, and that asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of self-confidence. And if it sounded like the exchange was mean, it really wasn’t. Bill’s worldview was just a bit off. Besides, I knew that once Putin got his claws into a really pretty llama like this one, we wouldn’t see either of them until they’d ridden through the mountains together and hunted the Rocky Mountain Spotted Poodle – the only true sport for men.

The point is still valid. Whenever I’ve seen a good leader, that leader isn’t afraid to ask questions, and isn’t afraid to admit that they don’t know everything. Part of writing this blog is me answering my own questions. And I have to be right – you’re a tough but fair crowd, and you tell me when my participle is dangling.

Questions are important.

The first thing I like to question is myself. Scott Adams says that two people might watch the same event and give it entirely different meaning – he calls it watching two movies on one screen. An example is Trump: Leftists think that everything, and I mean everything he does is comprised of a pure evil that requires he eat a live puppy every day. There’s even a name for it: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The symptoms include being triggered, literally shaking, wandering around in a circle muttering, “impeach . . . impeach . . . impeach.” Thankfully, many sufferers have found work as extras on The Walking Dead.

That’s one movie. There’s a second group that views Trump as a genius God Emperor who is sixteen steps ahead, playing 11-dimensional chess. This group thinks that the riots are perhaps his crowning achievement since he can use the riots to . . . ummm, I’m not sure what. I bet that plan shows up soon.

Both groups are wrong. My experience is you can talk to the God Emperor crowd, but the TDS sufferers just can’t discuss Trump. At all.

How much of my reality am I allowing to be filtered? How much am I deluding myself? These are the questions I repeatedly ask as I look for Truth.

Or you could just take their lunch money and buy yourself something nice.

The second question are my sources. People write all sorts of things, and on the Internet I can find a theory that all of the Challenger space shuttle crew survived the explosion and are still living today. Why? Because the Earth is flat. Really, that’s what they believe. There are also people who believe that the world is run by reptilian aliens who run the banks.

Of course those are absurd. The Internet is so questionable when it comes to facts that I’ve even seen Internet reports that I have hair. But how many shades of truth do we believe in each day without checking? I know that I’ve been shocked when I do research for Wilder, Wealthy and Wise that it’s not what I know that shocks me: it’s what I know that isn’t right. Who knew kittens couldn’t fly, even if you used a really big slingshot to give them a good takeoff?

The next question are my viewpoints. How many are wrong? In some cases I have taken years to figure out what I think about a subject, because I just hadn’t figured out the right way to look at it: I just don’t have a mental or moral model that fits it properly. I ended up being a ping-pong ball. There were good points on each side. How do the pros and cons line up?

When I was younger, I was more of a pure libertarian, even sometimes a Libertarian. I believed that if McDonalds™ wanted to sell me a hydrogen bomb and I had the cash, I should be able to order a McNuke®. As I get older, maybe not. And I now think that young children shouldn’t have guns: they’re much more effective using a crew-served weapon like a heavy machine gun or a mortar since they can overcome their inherent weakness by working together. If only a six year old could lift artillery shells….

My militia may be small, but they work for chocolate milk.

The final question is what can I learn from others? And I can only do that by asking questions – and having the humility to listen to the answers, no matter how stupid they are. I kid. I really have learned a lot by listening instead of talking.

So, anybody know where the llama is? Did another one fall in love with Putin?

The Rule of Law: It’s not just for breakfast anymore.

“You used the law and a badge to heal that scar on your neck.” – Hang ‘em High

I would recommend him as a lawyer, but he told the judge he ate my appeal.

About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king by the name of Urukagina developed the first known civil laws. They certainly weren’t the first laws, but they are the first ones we have written proof of. Perhaps the biggest mystery of Urukagina is how he got through middle school with a name like Urukagina.

Law is the bedrock of human civilization. If we don’t have rules we all (more or less) agree to, we can’t live together. Sometimes the laws are complex: I’ve heard that it’s a law that you have to turn on your headlights if it’s raining in Sweden. I’m not sure how am I supposed to know if it’s raining in Sweden, so I guess I’m quite the rogue when choose to live on the edge and drive without my lights.

Sadly, everyone can see what happens when laws break down. The riots that started in Minnesota are an example that won’t be forgotten soon. The breakdown that started in Minnesota is currently still spreading across the United States. That’s not good. In my opinion, the only good riot is three dyslexics.

Laws are like money – they’re a virtual system. They exist only because we all agree that they exist – the same way that East Germany disappeared as soon as people stopped being afraid of it. As soon a majority of people in an area stop believing in them, laws are as worthless as Johnny Depp’s liver on the black market.

Johnny Depp told David Letterman he never watches his own movies. What a lucky guy.

The anti-police-violence riots were based on a winning argument that could have resonated all across the political spectrum – not allowing the police to use excessive force. Had the protesters brought out the cases of LaVoy Finicum and Daniel Shaver as additional examples, I think they would have been surprised at the support they got. Instead? They rioted, burned, and all they got was a free t-shirt from Target® and enough looted liquor to fuel the protest for the next night. Can’t go looting without a nice Natty Light®.

However, the protesters managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Most of the time, when cops are presented with that awful decision to pull out their gun and shoot, it’s justified. But the larger injustices are the ones we see when police do things that, if you or I were doing them, would put us in jail. Rather than engaging others with that simple and powerful point, they protested entirely through the lens of race. The protests escalated into riots. The violence and property damage have ironically made the case for the use of significant force in putting down the riots.

They were never serious about protesting against police violence.

It’s lucky for those that like living in a stable society that people generally like laws. They want to know where they stand and have a predictable society. Research has shown that people have an innate sense of justice – it’s something that we appear to have been born with. When the legal system works, it makes the Karen inside each one of us happy. We generally want people who do bad things to be punished. We want innocent people to go free. And we want Whoopi Goldberg to develop a decade-long case of laryngitis.

Looks like Minnesota picked the wrong week to stop snorting glue.

We’ve had good laws and bad laws during the time humanity has been on Earth, but regardless, the law represented a standard. The only reason that we grant the state a monopoly on the use of force is that we trust that the state is just as bound by the law as the people are. There’s a satisfying symmetry in that.

That shared submission to judgement based on law is what makes the law work in the first place. If a random citizen commits a crime and is punished, a member of the police committing the same crime should receive the same punishment. If a citizen commits a crime and a politician commits that same crime, the politician should receive the same punishment. Even if the law isn’t fair, it should be equally applied.

The cries of “drain the swamp” from the Right are a recognition that this really isn’t so – a politician or Federal bureaucrat can commit crimes that would send you or I to jail and never have to worry. There is ample evidence that there isn’t a single system of justice – there are three. One group follows the rules as best as they can, but could still be found guilty of obscure crimes. I just hope that if I’m ever in that position I have a great lawyer. A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.

If I lied in testimony before Congress, nice Federal attorneys would seek to take away my voting rights by making me a felon as they did with Roger Stone. If former CIA chief John Brennan does it? Well, it appears nothing happens. That’s the sort of immunity you get when you’re in the club.

In a rare moment of clarity for the FBI, Peter Strzok was fired. Don’t worry – he’s suing to be reinstated with back pay.

People have lost trust; that’s where we’re at as a nation. There appear to be three systems of law in the United States:

one for the favored elite, where they are untouchable,
one for police, where (sometimes) crimes are never investigated,
and one for everyone else.

It’s not that the favored elite have great lawyers and can use them to avoid being convicted. The favored elite is never even charged with a crime. Hillary Clinton admittedly broke laws, and the FBI further pointed out that she had broken laws. Charging her, however, was just not something that they wanted to do. They know how enemies of Hillary end up. Heck, 2 out 3 presidents that were impeached were impeached for embarrassing Hillary.

For all I know, the systems for the elites have been in place as long as the elite has been in place. But now it’s visible. Ford had to pardon Nixon so he wouldn’t be prosecuted. Obama appears to have gotten a hall pass from Attorney General William Barr – pardon not required. Congress is much the same: Charlie Rangel evaded Federal taxes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. At least.

Any member of the non-elite class would have been sent to jail. Obama is buying mansions; Charlie retired from Congress. Oh, Charlie got “censured” which I guess makes it all better. And Obama is stuck living with Michelle.

She might be mad that an immigrant took her job?

The Deep State is similar – members of the FBI can do pretty much whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t make the other elite folks unhappy. I talked to a former Federal banking regulator once who mentioned that the only real trouble he could have gotten into was if he tried to be tough on a big bank. Otherwise? He could have stayed there for years, doing not much of anything. The Deep State first and foremost protects its own.

Like the elite, the police have a different process, too. You or I would get arrested, but a cop gets to have his behavior examined administratively. By his buddies on the force. This is where the case is reviewed by the people who hired him to see if there was a violation of policy. Most of the time officers are cleared.

If you or I shot an intruder into our homes, we couldn’t just grab a group of people in our families to check to see if they thought we did the right thing. Nope. There would be independent review by a District Attorney to see if our actions were justified. If our actions were not justified? We would be charged with a crime. I hope my lawyer thinks I’m a penguin when going for bail – then he can tell the judge I’m not a flight risk.

Penguins don’t go to England – they don’t like to be that close to Wales.

I can absolutely understand the need to give officers benefit of the doubt, and I think a jury generally does. But if an officer can say “I was in fear of my life,” on the stand, it ought to work for me, too. I think the system with police accountability is broken. But I think it’s easier to fix than the problems with the elite.

Is there hope for our system? Perhaps. But unless the rule of law can be made to be truly impartial, we’re going to be in for a rough time.

It could be worse. It could have been me who was named Urukagina.

Your one job? Be a good person.

“Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?” – Flight of the Phoenix

Well, at least someone gave this post two thumbs up.

My older brother, John Wilder (our parents were notoriously uncreative), got a job at a motel when he was in college. His duty was to sleep in the apartment above the front desk, and if anyone wanted a room late at night, to get up out of bed and check them in. Technically, he got paid to sleep on the job. When I try to explain that’s what I’m doing to my employer, they seem to think it’s a violation of company rules. They won’t even listen when I explain I won’t be sleepy on the job if I just sleep on the job.

Go figure.

One day the owner of the motel was looking for someone to do an extremely important job: sweep the parking lot every Sunday. As I had heard of a broom, my brother put in a good word for me, and I ended up with my first official job. As I don’t recall quitting, they might be irritated at me because I haven’t been in to work in decades.

This was a job that I was well suited for, since I was willing to work for the one-ish hour a week (on Sunday) sweeping up the parking lot. I even had a time card, and got paid minimum wage. So early each Sunday morning I’d get on my ten speed and bike down to the motel and sweep the parking lot.

My bike kept trying to kill me, though. It was a vicious cycle.

The best part wasn’t the few bucks after tax that I made, but rather sitting down with my older brother and having breakfast in the office. I timed it so that I’d be done sweeping so we could watch a television show on TBS® together: The Wild, Wild West. I’m pretty sure I saw my first episode ever in that motel office.

By the time my brother and I watched it on the 12” screen in the office, The Wild, Wild West was decades old. And yet it was better than anything on prime time television. The Wild, Wild West, if you haven’t seen it, was Robert Conrad starring as secret agent James West in the 1870’s Western United States, complete with science fiction gadgets.

The villains were ludicrous. One episode featured obviously rubber cobras. And in one fight scene, Robert Conrad’s pants split wide open and they just kept filming – they were on a schedule, you know. On top of that, the costumes resembled nothing ever worn by an actual human in any place and during any period in human history.

Silly? Certainly. But why was the show good enough that I planned getting up early to watch it?

It’s because the character James West (and his fellow secret agent, Artemus Gordon) were good. West was a hero. He was smart. He could fight. He had wit. He laughed in the face of death. And if he had a weakness, it was for a lovely lady.

We’ll pretend that Will Smith took 1999 off. There can be only one Jim West.

Why was James West’s contemporary, Captain Kirk so popular? He was a cut from the same mold as West.

A boy needs a hero to look up to, who models virtue and strength. And you could do much, much worse than either James West or Captain Kirk. For some reason, the values of the networks changed, and The Wild, Wild West was cancelled (like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies) in 1970 even though they did great in the ratings. Hmm.

It was like there was a social agenda . . . .

As time has gone on, many of the “heroes” in movies and television are given “depth” cheaply by making them either morally weak or having the system they work for be compromised in some way. When a hero sneaks by like Mal Reynolds on Firefly, well, the system takes care of him pretty quickly.

Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.

Culture is, of course, upstream from politics. Culture is in part created by those heroes we are given to worship. Where do those heroes come from? Well, I mentioned James West, but I recall being pretty psyched about the Founding Fathers when I was a kid. Dad got pretty mad after the third cherry tree.

Our political reality is therefore created in part by media (now a tool of the Left) and academia (also a tool of the Left). And now the Founding Fathers are, instead of being revered for attempting to create a whole new type of country are regularly bashed in schools.

This attempt of the Left to steer culture obscures the real message. As a human, we have one (and only one) job.

That job is to be a good person.

It’s that easy. We waste a lot of time and effort wondering what it is we should be doing, when the answer is laughingly simple. You can’t control your height. You can’t control your intelligence. You can’t even control society. What can you control? Your actions and attitudes.

So, be a good person. That’s it.

The Left tries to obscure that simple truth because it has to. The Left doesn’t want you to be a good person. The Left wants you to be a Leftist. When I look at the memes from the Left, I’m astonished by two things:

They’re horribly unfunny, and
They’re based on a big wall of text.

No editing required.

The Lefty memes aren’t funny because funny requires truth. I wrote about that recently in The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition. When truth is strangled, humor disappears which is why tyrants will kill comedians before they kill dissidents. Humor is one of the most potent weapons of truth.

The Lefty memes have to rely on a large blocks of text because half of the meme is required to try to refute reality and re-define it. If you’ve ever heard an actual Leftist talk, half of it is redefining terms: boy used to mean boy, but now it’s an entire spectrum which might indicate that boy means boy on Monday, but when it’s time for the state track meet, boy means girl. Sometimes.

If you want to watch real Olympic®-level verbal gymnastics, watch a Leftist try to define “racism” – it’s a hoot. For bonus points, see if you can get them to read the dictionary definition.

That’s the good news. Your job, being a good person, is so simple it’s hard for even the Left to mess up. But I bet they could come up with a 600 word meme to describe that “good” is only “good” if it results in more Leftist votes and the abolition of private property.

I wish that I could promise to you that if you were a good person, you’d be rewarded. That would be a lie. Being good doesn’t guarantee a tangible reward, or even that you will succeed, or even be liked and admired in your time.

I’m not sure I can promise a leprechaun will deliver them, though.

Likewise, being bad doesn’t guarantee punishment. Heck, some research indicates that 4% of Chief Executive Officers of companies are psychopaths. If you think long enough, you can come up with several names of people who are downright evil, but seem to be thriving.

The other bad news is that being good is hard work. First, you have to figure out what good is. Society isn’t necessarily a help here. As I write this, The Boy is watching livestreaming rioting and property destruction across multiple cities. When I try to calibrate the whole good/bad thing, I’m not sure that looting a Target® or burning a Hyundai© serves much of a purpose.

Being good isn’t about being good for today, either. I could easily ruin a child by making life too easy, or not holding them to high standards. Would it result in a happy child now? Sure. But every parent knows that short term success builds children into monsters who end up burning a Target™ or a Hyundai®.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.

To be good, a moral code and the courage to follow it is required. Christianity is the one that built the West, and you could do worse – you rarely hear of Amish drive-by shootings, since everyone can hear the clip clop of the horses from pretty far away.

The Romans (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) had a well-developed system of virtue thousands of years ago and spent a lot of time working to figure out how to be good – that’s pretty close to the basis of the Stoics. Making it up your own individual code as you go can lead to rationalization and relativism. If it feels good, it may not be good – a lot of bad things feel very good at the time.

But generally, if it feels bad, it nearly always is.

Be a good person. Ask yourself: WW(JW)D? No, not John Wilder.

Jim West.

But make sure you get your sweeping done first.

Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©): Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people. That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine. However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position. I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule. Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad. At least, any evacuation of people. The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad. At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right? I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad: Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality. Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer. When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured. So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent. And he was consistent throughout decades. Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people. All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old. It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up: government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem. Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do. From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980. Those farmers had grown up in a different world: when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends. City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason. Want to build a dam on your own property? Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t. Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land? It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you. Endangered species? Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules. In 2020? There are roughly 180,000 pages. Of rules. That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States. My two are promulgate and trout. And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages. Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules? I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

required to do or
prohibited from doing or
free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government: everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time. Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time? That’s how amateurs operate.

Government regulations: keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government. That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period. More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century. It’s almost governments could use a warning label. Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology. The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place? Generally, four things.

An Economic Crisis
A Governmental Power Vacuum
A Civil War
The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising. Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason. They were also the reason a word was invented: Democide.

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen. It doesn’t matter why. It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you. It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers. It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not. It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians. It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa. So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing. And Mao? Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK). It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned: abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies. The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around. Did I say hanging? Sorry, poor choice of words.

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000. But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942. A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle. These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew. I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now? Hmm. No reason.

None at all.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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?

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

All are from Ricky this month . . . enjoy!

California to be a Republic Again (Zero Hedge) and (Bloomberg)?
The Lone Star Nation? (The Atlantic)
Of Two Minds: The American Divide
Michigan’s Civil War (NBC) and (CBS)
Raw Story: Soft Civil War
Rights are suspended: (Twitter), (Concord Monitor), (Military Times), (New Republic)
Leftists Congressmen move to begin attack on gun ownership (USA Today), (Ammoland)
And removing gun rights at the states (NPR)
Red Dawn, Revisited (Paste)
COVID-19 is a recruiting tool for the Far Right? (NBC), (VICE), (Medium), (The Grio), (Angrywhitemen)
Real time boogaloo data (Telegram)
Domestic terrorism??? (Memri), and (Raw Story)
Zerohedge: New Feudalism?
Yahoo: Lockdowns into 2021??
Civil Unrest: (Zerohedge), (Law Enforcement Today)
Food Banks: (Politico), (Time), (Zerohedge on National Guard at Food Banks)

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

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

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.

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.

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.

“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 13^th 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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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 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 20^th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64^th 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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

“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?

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.

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

â€œYou had aÂ dishwasher box to sleep in?Â I didn’t even know sleep. Â It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.â€ â€“ Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.Â I replied, â€œDunno, depends on if you are trying to kill BatmanÂ®â€

â€œGreat, now itâ€™s the end of the world and we canâ€™t get a new dishwasher,â€ 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.Â Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.Â I call that a win-win.Â Besides, AmazonÂ® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

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

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.Â When it was lunchtime, I wasnâ€™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.Â Good times.Â I do have a concern â€“ The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, â€œnice buttâ€ so Iâ€™m thinking of bringing this up with HR.Â I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.Â I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriÃ¨re, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.Â While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people donâ€™t change all that much, even though circumstances do.Â Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, Iâ€™ll stop.Â Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.Â I donâ€™t want you to think Iâ€™m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?Â Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisisâ„¢, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other â€“ this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.Â This is like the KÃ¼bler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.Â Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?Â Itâ€™s so nice and cheery.Â The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

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

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.Â 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.Â Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say â€œno.â€Â 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.Â With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?Â We donâ€™t trust the media very much.Â Why?Â They donâ€™t seem trustworthy.Â Example: Â when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNNÂ® says itâ€™s racist.Â When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNNâ„¢ says itâ€™s a wise and prudent move by Chinaâ€™s benevolent leadership.

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

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

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

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

Iâ€™m not sure heâ€™s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.Â 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.Â Why?Â Habit, partially.Â But thereâ€™s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesnâ€™t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isnâ€™t a coping strategy, and itâ€™s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.Â Itâ€™s more inertia.Â Youâ€™re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isnâ€™t, part of your mind isnâ€™t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction â€“ COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.Â But that isnâ€™t explained by the reactions weâ€™ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.Â Italy is locked down.Â In two weeks, we will know more.Â In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

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.Â But the rules are new, and unknown.Â What to do?Â One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?Â One could Panic.Â Panic is easier, and doesnâ€™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.Â So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile youâ€™ve accumulated over time?Â Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain DewÂ®?Â Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you donâ€™t know what to do or have any independent thought?Â Â Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

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

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.Â Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.Â Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism â€“ realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.Â 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 itâ€™s the right thing to do.

There was a family story â€“ Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.Â She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.Â Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Why ration needles and sugar?Â 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.Â To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasnâ€™t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we arenâ€™t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch NetflixÂ® unless weâ€™re keeping vital industries going.Â Hereâ€™s a link to Aesopâ€™s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).Â Read it all.

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

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.Â Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.Â In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didnâ€™t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.Â Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, thereâ€™s The Cliff.Â I wrote about it here: Senecaâ€™s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.Â Is it certain that there is one?Â No.Â But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like itâ€™s there.Â I believe we will see it.Â The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.Â Already at Wilder Redoubt, weâ€™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 weâ€™ll see The Cliff soon enough.Â How deep will it go?Â As Iâ€™ve mentioned before, no one knows.Â The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.Â Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.Â 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.Â The average monthly car payment is $800.Â Me?Â Iâ€™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.Â But the businesses that employ those people arenâ€™t much better off.Â The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.Â The second best restaurant didnâ€™t survive.Â There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this wonâ€™t just be for small businesses.Â I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.Â Overall loss to the economy?Â 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?Â Sure.Â We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.Â 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.Â Thatâ€™s the best case.Â And thatâ€™s just in the United States.

Iâ€™m not kidding, thatâ€™s how deep The Cliff is.Â If weâ€™re lucky.

Something, something, Dark SideÂ®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.Â We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.Â Disillusionment sets in when things donâ€™t snap back to normal.Â Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.Â The more government â€œhelpsâ€ during this phase, the worse recovery will be.Â Roosevelt â€œhelpedâ€ so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they canâ€™t help themselves.Â The length of time Disillusionment lasts?Â Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.Â Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.Â Rebuilding the economy will take years.Â If we do it right, weâ€™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?Â The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.Â Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.Â Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

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