Civil War – Page 26 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote

“Now, you see all these red flags? Trouble spots. Southeastern Asia. The Caribbean. The Congo. I’ll give you one guess as to who’s responsible.” – Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

I look much better after I’ve had a cup of coffee. And after I’ve found my axe.

I know that you, gentle reader, have thoughts about guns that are probably pretty similar to mine, so I’d like to take you on a short walk through history, specifically the history of politics and psychiatry. I promise, it will make more sense than the lyrics to the Manfred Mann song Blinded by the Light. What the hell is a go-cart Mozart, and why is he checking out the weather chart, anyway?

The history of psychiatry is tied directly to the political.

I have seen a person suffering from schizophrenia to such a degree that they were sure that MTV® video stars were stealing songs directly from their brain and that they were also a surgeon who regularly performed operations on world leaders and stored their organs in the freezer for safe keeping.

If no one has ever told you that there are human organs belonging to world leaders in their fridge in a completely matter-of-fact “would you like a glass of water” voice, well, all I can tell you is that my first thought was one of complete disbelief that I had heard them right. Yes, I asked for them to repeat that statement. Twice.

I walked over and checked their freezer. Thankfully the only things in it were some frozen pizzas and ancient ice cubes. I assure you I was talking to their shrink that afternoon and they were involuntarily committed by 5PM. They were helped, and after being put on some appropriately industrial levels of anti-psychotic medication, did okay enough to be released back into the wild. As long as they stayed on their meds.

I know that there are actually crazy people that really need help.

But I also know this: psychiatry is still the most politically abused medical profession.

Okay, if Depp isn’t crazy, why does he keep starring in movies like this?

Examples of political abuse of psychiatry? There are many. When I mentioned this topic to The Mrs., she immediately said, “the Soviet Union.” And that’s the example I thought of first, too. The Soviets systematically used diagnosis of psychological disorders such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia” to put people who didn’t like Marxism into mental institutions. And, no, those diagnoses aren’t lame jokes – those were really Soviet-era diagnoses.

How many were caught up in the psychological gulags?

We really don’t know since those records are still secret, but in 1978 at least 4.5 million Soviet citizens were listed as having mental health problems. In 1988, perhaps thinking that they might face their own version of Soviet Nuremburg Trials for Crimes Against Humanity, Soviet leaders had over 800,000 thousand patients removed from the list of the mentally ill. Paperwork error, surely?

Okay, with all those red flags, how did they not see the collapse of communism coming?

Did the Soviets condemn thousands with false diagnosis? Nearly certainly. Hundreds of thousands? Very likely.

Millions?

Probably. Think of it, millions of people falsely diagnosed with a mental illness due to political beliefs and sent to asylums and work camps. Certainly some were executed.

The Soviets allowed ownership of smoothbore weapons for hunting. Except when they didn’t. Which was most of the time. Oh, and the definition of sweet summer child is: a person who doesn’t know the hardships of winter, often used when someone has no experience with a particular (stressful) thing, which may describe a generation that rhymes with perennial.

Okay, it was just the Soviet Union, right?

No. Cuba did the same thing. There is evidence that China is still doing it, and likely on scale similar to that of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the World Psychiatric Association took the lead in investigations. Oh, they didn’t? The World Psychiatric Association pretty much ignored it and said that people associated with Falun Gong are nuts and that putting them in asylums run by the state security apparatus (not the medical directorate) was perfectly normal?

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest . . . and if you haven’t see the movie, you should, it’s a lighthearted comedy and perfect for a first date.

Okay, that’s just China. Thankfully this would never happen in the United States.

Oh, it did?

Sure. In the 1920’s dissidents (like one who protested the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) were put into asylums. In the 1960’s members of the American Psychological Association smeared presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the press by diagnosing him. But that wasn’t political, right?

Thankfully it isn’t happening now.

Oh, in 2012 a whistleblower with the NYPD was railroaded on mental health? Ouch. But New York is corrupt.

It would never happen based on political motives, right?

Dinesh D’Souza, author and filmmaker on the Right was convicted of a crime based on giving too much money to a political campaign. He admitted he was wrong. The Federal Judge involved in the case sentenced D’Souza not only to prison, he sentenced D’Souza to years of mental health counselling despite a licensed psychologist saying that D’Souza was just fine mentally.

So, yes. Psychiatry is a political weapon. It’s not like the Left has sentenced political opponents to chemotherapy, but I hear that they’re working on it.

Yes, this is a common sense way to use psychiatry!

This corrupt branch of medicine is the background of the Red Flag Laws.

The idea is that we’ll create laws to remove rights from people without due process, with the presumption that individuals should lose a right guaranteed by the Constitution®. A single accuser, with no evidence can result in gun confiscation to a law-abiding citizen. Sadly this already happens – people with contested domestic restraining orders (a standard tactic in divorces nowadays) lose their rights, although I’ve heard of people fighting these orders and winning – at least there is a pretense at due process.

The claim that the ability to strip people of rights won’t be abused is laughable. In every country that’s been infected by psychiatry, it has been twisted to meet political ends. Yes, there are crazy people. I’ve seen one as I related above. And, if you did a brain scan, there is a physical basis for schizophrenia. It’s real. It is a medical condition. But remember, these are the same psychiatrists that would diagnose me as nuts if I believed I was be five years older than I really am, but are perfectly fine with children younger than the age of five claiming they are a different sex than their genetics have made them.

Po-tay-to, Po-gender reassignment surgery for children is normal-to.

Furthermore, the medical profession as a whole is maybe a bit, well, mental*. In one study it was claimed that 50% of female doctors could be diagnosed with a mental disease. I wonder again why my ex didn’t take up medicine? (*Aesop LINK excluded, unless pimp-slapping in the comments section is classified as a mental disorder.)

Oh, and psychologists have nearly the highest rates of suicide of any profession. Yes, any profession, including the people who make balloon animals in Mauschwitz Disneyland® for chubby children with hands sticky from chocolate ice cream. Perfectly stable. And this is also the same profession whose international governing body (WPA) was just fine with political repression in the name of psychiatry.

Besides being oppressive, the Red Flag laws would not have helped in latest shootings – these people lawfully and legally got their rifles. But they will form the basis for taking away guns for . . .

Conspiracy Theories – Believing anything other than the Official Narrative® will become a basis for exclusion of lawful firearms ownership, despite the fact that throughout history, many conspiracy theories have been proven true. Google® MKULTRA. That happened. But the FBI® is now warning that you are a danger if you don’t believe the Official Narrative©.
Antisocial Behavior – Ever not want to hang around people? You’re antisocial, and that’s dangerous, citizen. No AR for you!
Websites Visited – Going to unapproved sites? Thinking unapproved thoughts? Glockblock™!
Comments Made When You Were 16 – Wow, did you really say that maybe the Crusades weren’t all bad? No pew-pew for you, hater.
Not Believing in the Easter Bunny Socialism – Well, I think I covered that above.

The irony is this will have the impact of keeping people away from mental health professionals. This will keep people from seeking help when they’re a little depressed, because the consequences of having a “health record” might prevent them from future opportunity – the only safe way to live life would be to stay away from health professionals – and not answer certain questions your M.D. might have for you with a polite BFYTW when asked why you’re not answering. Oh, but that probably puts you on the antisocial list.

Texas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they certainly got some things right once upon a time.

Psychiatry is on pretty iffy ground in many cases already. As an experiment, a group of doctors sent people to a psychiatrist with one symptom – they heard a voice. No other symptom. They were perfectly normal, mentally healthy people. In one case, the person was committed to a mental health facility (as I recall) for several weeks with zero symptoms. I tried to look it up, but, surprise, most Google® searches right now link commitment to . . . violence. Even that’s not a comfortable thought.

Soviet mental health nurse. Not shown: tenth guard, who is now an inmate.

The single scariest thing to me is watching a human mind erode – what was once a rational human disappears. It’s what makes (to me) zombies scary. They look like humans. They used to be a normal human. But that rational human being is now gone, replaced by someone who has no real tie to reality while the external form remains.

I realize that there is a time and a place for psychiatric care.

But psychiatrists are already owned by the Left. The Left sees you as crazy already. The Left views your dissent from their agenda as a mental disorder, one punishable by death, if need be.

I’ll leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is really pictured above while in the gulag: “I’ll take Solzhenitsyn on Gun Control for $1000, Alex. Oh, look – the Daily Double®!”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [They] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If . . . if . . . we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Social Security Won’t Sink Us. But The Ship is Still Going Down.

“Here comes an overweight cat with dollar signs for eyes and a hat that says “Social Security” pouring a bucket that says “Alternative Minimum Tax” over a sad Statue of Liberty holding a “democracy” umbrella.” – Family Guy

There’s this joke I heard about Social Security, but no one will get it.

When I was in junior high, our history class ended up with a long-term substitute teacher, Miss Vargas, for over a month. Most substitute teachers just handed out word-search puzzles where you tried to pick out names of conquistadors, Thanksgiving foods, conquered Mayans, and famous cats that belonged to the Mayflower Pilgrims. Since Miss Vargas had us for weeks, however, she actually had to teach. Thankfully, she had a lesson plan.

Not an original. I could not resist.

She was a nice substitute teacher so our class didn’t beat up on her that much. We could tell, however, that, whatever her degree was in, it wasn’t history. Given the time and place I was going to school, it seemed like she was likely a chemically-damaged refugee from the 1960’s, and likely a former Leftist hippy. Since we had caught her on some (rather) basic mistakes about American history, we weren’t shy about questioning the things she said.

Not to mention when Abraham Lincoln “freed the penguins, dude” after signing the Treaty of Ghent at Woodstock. At least class was interesting.

The lesson (at some point) took us to the New Deal. The format of the homework should be familiar to anyone who was in school when mimeographs were a thing (look it up). There was a term, and then the student was supposed to write down the definition. It was a fancy way to force eighth graders to learn to skim texts for key words written in bold.

But the smell . . .

One of the terms was Social Security. I dutifully looked through the text until I found the boldface words Social Security. In it was the definition that it was (more or less): An insurance program founded to provide benefits to retired and disabled people.

The teacher, not feeling like grading the homework, decided to go through the definitions with us. After Social Security she wrote on the board, A program created to redistribute wealth in the country.

With all of the righteous indignation an 8^th grader who had fully consumed the Kool-Aid® of the Official Story™ of the Government-Approved© textbook, I proceeded to correct Miss Vargas.

She didn’t back down, and maintained that was the purpose. Obviously, the event was significant enough that I still remember, and as I grew older I realized that, well, the burned-out hippy was right. Social Security is a wealth redistribution scheme. Heck, you can tell the program is socialist – it’s right there in the name.

The program was started in the depths of the Depression and rewarded those who hadn’t paid in with benefits they hadn’t earned. I’d whine more, but that happened 80 years ago, so it’s like Madonna complaining about her virginity – that ship sailed a LONNNNNNNG time ago – nearly as long ago as when the Japanese bombed the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria at Pearl Harbor. I know that you’re expecting that this is some sort of rant about how Social Security needs to be taken down because it’ll wreck the economy. It isn’t a rant, and Social Security won’t wreck the economy.

According to the latest data I could find (there’s probably newer, but 2013 was close enough and I’m travelling) but an average couple, making an average wage paid in about $600,000 in Social Security taxes during their career and would receive roughly $600,000 in benefits – the system was in balance. Of note, it’s kind of cute because the graphic assumed it was a man married to a woman and not an immigrant trans-porpoise which I understand is now required in California, as long as the porpoise signs a pledge to drive a Prius® and not to use straws.

Ahh, nostalgia for simpler times.

Social Security was roughly in balance in 2013, and could be put back into balance fairly easily with minimal effort, even though we’re facing a demographic bulge as the boomers retire. As long as we can convince them all to take up chain smoking and they decide that anti-chemo is the new anti-vax, we’re fine. Theoretically, there are the accumulated savings that Social Security has had during all of those years it was in surplus, but the reality is that all of those funds are just IOUs from Congress sitting in a filing cabinet in West Virginia in a converted National Guard Armory behind Buddy’s Chicken and Black Lung Shack®. Doris has the key.

It might look nice, but it still smells like the DMV and low motivation.

Yeah, the money going out of Social Security has already exceeded the money going in to Social Security, but it’s manageable. A few tweaks to the tax, and a few tweaks to the benefit (two-for-one coupons at Burger King™ instead of money every other month) and it will work out. Social Security, despite being a piggy bank continually raided by Congress for my entire life, won’t hurt us, at least not by itself.

That’s the good news. I fully expect that if the only major obligations that the government had were defense, transgender reassignment surgery, and Social Security, we’d be fine. Heck, even welfare for dachshunds that can’t find a job because of terrier privilege wouldn’t break us. Even if Congress approved the Ocasio Cortez Guided Missile©, which is designed to approach every target from the Left, has a warhead that does nothing but make babbling sounds, and costs a billion dollars a missile, we’d be fine.

What will break us?

Medicare® and Medicaid™.

Those are the M&M®s that will crater our financial system.

From the 2013 data, the average couple could will pay in about $110,000 in taxes during their lifetime for Medicare, but will take out nearly $400,000 in benefits. Where does that benefit come from? I’d say our tax dollars, but let’s you and I be real – not one dime of deficit spending has ever come out of your pocket or mine directly in taxes. It’s all borrowed into existence at this point.

I was going to save this graph for Halloween, since it’s scarier than most zombie movies.

From this projection, you can see that by 2024 Medicare plus Social Security will make up 12% or so of the GDP. Add in 2% for Medicaid costs, and you’re up to 14% of the GDP. Add in 4% for the projected interest payments due on the national debt, and that’s 18%, folks. That leaves 2% at most for all of the rest of the spending on the economy before we run out of tax dollars. But the rest of the spending (on things like defense) generally runs about 10% of GDP. Through the magic of math, that means that we’ll need another 10% of GDP. Just raise the taxes, right?

Even during the “90% tax rate” 1950’s, the proportion of the GDP taken in taxes wasn’t any higher than today and resulted in more loopholes than there are bacon-wrapped shrimp at a congressional lobbyist’s party.

That means the Federal government spending alone will consume 30% of the GDP, of which at least 10% will be deficit spending. Given a projected GDP of $26 trillion in 2024, that is an annual deficit of $2.6 trillion. The deficit this year is projected to be $1 trillion or so, which is more money than some people make in their entire lifetime, so imagine one 2.5 times larger.

Through some sort of magical incantation worthy of Houdini’s proctologist, money has been pulled out of somewhere (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) and hasn’t created massive inflation. Yet. I guess that in Zimbabwe they managed to just print money like we’re doing now to get out of the problem.

See, you too can be a trillionaire!

So, in the end, Miss Vargas was right. Social Security was the start of a program that will do a great job of income redistribution, from a wealthy and prosperous society, to a society where everyone can be a trillionaire, and a good nickel cigar only costs a few hundred billion dollars.

Thankfully Lincoln posed for this after getting back from Woodstock and before he retired to Gettysburg to make movies with George Lucas.

China – What’s the deal?

“What does that mean? ‘China is here.’ I don’t even know what the hell that means.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Had enough Mongols? This is how you avoid Mongols, unless the 9^th Circuit says you have to let them in.

I’ve had my eye on China for quite a while. It knows why.

Anyway, China has in the past 50 years transformed itself from an example of the nation your parents warned you about: “See, eat your peas and study hard, you don’t want to be like China,” to a country competing for prime representation in the International House of Pancakes®. Okay, I made that up. I don’t even know if they have Frosted Flakes™ in China, let alone pancakes©.

For four thousand years, China looked inward. Only conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchu, the 20^th Century was a succession of weak leaders until the communist takeover at the hands of Mao Zedong. Mao seemed content to play with the Chinese people and the Chinese economy like a Doberman’s chew toy until his death in the 1970’s.

AOC will never be a doctor – she’s committing political Mao-practice.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked around at the huge Doberman spit-covered collectivist mess left by communism, and decided that something had to change. After visiting the United States, he decided that China needed way to get convenient chocolate milkshakes like that one Jimmy Carter got him at McDonalds®, and began reforming the economy based around market lines. You know, capitalism.

Capitalism worked amazingly well at saving a communist economy. Shocker!

The collective ingenuity of over a billion Chinese coupled with capitalist incentives and totalitarian controls has led to growth. The economy of China in 2019 is 91 times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng’s reforms began. Some before and after pictures become relevant at this point:

Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

What China has effectively done is make its citizens nearly 100 times richer since Star Wars® first came out. Perhaps more impressive is the amount of expertise that has been imported to China. By making first cheap junk in the 1980’s to radar detectors in the 1990’s to iPods® in the early 00’s to iPhones™ today, China has imported not only the technical know-how of cutting edge technology is design, it understands better than any other country in the world on how to build most things.

See, I told you I wasn’t exaggerating much. Two day shipping really changed their lives.

An engineer in California (who may or may not even be an American) designs the iPhone©. In China, they figure out how to build it. That know-how isn’t in a manual, it’s built up in thousands of mistakes that require solutions to produce a finished product. All of those solutions are known by the workers and engineers in the factory, and used to make production lines that much faster.

In this way, China has traded lots of cell phones for zillions of dollars that we just printed up out of thin air, sure, but it’s also trained itself on how to be an industrial superpower.

Industrial. But what about military?

No. China has seen our military and has no ambition that it can in the near future compete with American military power. Unlike the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Congress, China has no desire to fight World War II again. While the United States has fought in numerous conflicts in the last fifty years, China has fought in exactly one, an incursion into Vietnam back before Reagan was president. The Chinese make the Italians look like Patton with Pizza.

So, rumor is that they also have a tricycle attack brigade, but they were at nap time.

If I were Chinese President Xi Jinping, I would have no illusions about my military. Even if it fielded better tanks and planes than the United States, it still would come up short because outside of games of Call of Duty®, the Chinese military has no experience.

Instead: “China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare. These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare…” (United States Army Special Operations Command, 2014)

In particular, China has focused on trade. In the last five years, China has started an international cooperation scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has led to (so far) agreements with over 68 countries. The stated objective of BRI is that it is meant to produce closer ties and stronger trading arrangements between China and the rest of the world.

See, need some place to keep my stuff – Mom’s basement is full.

BRI consists of at least a trillion dollars of planned Chinese spending, and by spending, I mean loans. China will loan countries money to develop infrastructure – pipelines, roads, harbors, PEZ® mines, railroads, industrial parks, electric power grids, and airports to better move people and goods throughout the world. Certainly China won’t take advantage of the loan conditions if a country has trouble repaying it?

Actually, so far not really. In only one case has China seized assets, and the rest of them it has either renegotiated debt payments or forgiven them entirely.

So what is China doing?

It came to me one night while I was thinking about the blog and just drifting off to sleep. Thinking about this like a banker looking to gain leverage wasn’t the right framework. China isn’t building this trading network to compete with the United States. China is building this framework for life without the United States. BRI replaces our markets, and replaces what we’re shipping to them. But there’s more.

When you look at what China has, it is people, industrial capacity, and ingenuity. China needs raw materials. It’s short on food. It needs oil. By making inroads into Africa, China has started new mines, run by Chinese administrators and Chinese miners. China has built, using Chinese laborers and Chinese steel, new railroads in Kenya.

And all of this BRI stuff isn’t paid for in dollars. China has seen that the United States has managed to pay for debt in dollars it printed. If China can be the dominant country, it can pay for things in Kenya with Chinese money printed by China itself, rather than have to make iPhones® and send them to iNdiana© in exchange for dollars.

Perhaps it’s just the economy of the United States that China expects will be gone?

Beyond that, closer economic ties with a country that could dominate your economy certainly isn’t dangerous, is it? They’d never use their influence to change your laws, or influence your movies, right?

Set from the 2010 remake of Red Dawn before China demanded they not be the villain. Hmmm.

Belt and Road graphic (pre-meme) By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561

Stonewall Jackson, Patton, Wrecked Cars and Dealing with Fear

“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity

Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.

I had a Ford® Taurus©. Yes, that’s an admission of guilt. Even worse? It was a pale-lime green. I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair. After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays. But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.

As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display. Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question. The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office. I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on. After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.

I wanted it to show the thermometer.

Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.

I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia. I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®. I hesitated. What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French? Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?

Then I started to panic. Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric? I don’t even know how to drink in metric. Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink? How many metric days until Christmas? How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®? Perish the thought of being French and metric. That’s how we got Canada, after all. Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.

Sure, they look polite. But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.

The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together. That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers. If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways. Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.

An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.

Oops.

Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room. I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on. I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.

I’ve done stupider things. Some of them even when I was sober.

So, there I was sitting in my car. Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.

What? I came to my senses. It’s just a car.

I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely. And I got rid of the hesitation.

What led to the hesitation?

Fear. It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.

General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line. “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Not a bad way to get a nickname.

Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy. Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.

For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything.

So, why is fear so bad? What’s wrong with a little fear?

That’s simple: fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world. Period. I understand that’s a pretty bold statement. Can I back it up? Sure.

Let’s take envy. It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy. What causes envy?

Insecurity. Think Elon Musk feels envy? Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy. They’re not envious because they’re not insecure. They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt. All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.

That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera. It’s just another face of fear. And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.

Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?

Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery. But the concept is right. Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life. And fear is used to manipulate you. Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page. Here’s my analysis:

3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
25 were utterly useless.

I read the amusing stories. I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment. I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories. I skipped the fear manipulation stories. Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values. There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.

What’s the cure for fear?

Action. Press the button. Ask the girl out. Lift the weight. Press the button in your car. Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear. You will be stronger. You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear. And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.

Is fear useless? No. Fear can be used. Fear should be used.

General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

Fun fact: General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.

So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links

â€œHave you any idea how successfulÂ censorshipÂ is on TV? Don’t know the answer? Hmm. Successful, isn’t it?â€ â€“ Max Headroom

11:45pm â€“ fifteen minutes to midnight.Â Yes, itâ€™s subjective, and itâ€™s based on the countdown, published last month (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming).Â Weâ€™re still at CivCon 6 – People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.Â Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.

In this issue:Â Front Matter â€“ Censorship Updateâ€“ John Markâ€™s Video and Criticism â€“ Updated Civil War II Index â€“ Who Benefits? â€“ Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the second issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.Â These posts will be a bit different than the other posts here at Wilder Wealthy and Wise â€“ they will consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War II.Â My intent is to update these on the first Monday of every month.

John Wilkes Paintbooth (Idea via user Miles Long at The Burning Platform)

There has been a pretty significant interest in Civil War II â€“ it has generated more emails to me than any other topic Iâ€™ve written about, with a great number of links to relevant information that youâ€™ll see below.Â Itâ€™s also resulted in about a dozen book suggestions, and Iâ€™ve bought or downloaded every one of your suggestions.Â I havenâ€™t had time to read even 10% of the books yet, but I can tell the suggestions are rock solid.Â Thank you.Â Please feel free to contribute more suggestions of links or books either in the comments below or directly to me at movingnorth@gmail.com â€“ I wonâ€™t use your name (from e-mails) unless explicitly given permission, and I wonâ€™t directly quote your email unless explicitly given permission, but I may quote my answers in a way that doesnâ€™t violate your privacy.

Censorship Update

Why is censorship an issue in Civil War II?Â Censorship is a measure of how those in power (either political or economic) fear an idea and how polarized they have become.Â Most censorship in the past had been based on the sexual content of the book or movie.Â Now itâ€™s based on ideas that are dangerous.Â Which ideas?Â Depends on the day.

I know it says â€œUpdateâ€ but this is really the first version, so technically the first â€œupdateâ€ will be next month.Â There has been more censorship in the United States in the past year than at any point in my adult life.Â This level of censorship is more frightening than anything Iâ€™ve ever seen, except for the latest Democratic presidential debates.

YouTubeÂ© is the real star of censorship in June.Â Comedian/journalist Steven Crowder has been a long-time YouTubeÂ® broadcaster who is generally on the mainstream â€œRightâ€ side of the political world.Â He likes guns.Â Doesnâ€™t like abortion.Â He is not extreme in any real sense of the word.Â But as a comedian, one of the things he does regularly is mock people.Â Which people?Â Everyone.Â I wonâ€™t go into the details (you can look it up) but a group of Leftists decided Crowder should be banned from YouTubeâ„¢ since he made a lispy-Leftist journalist who is an ethnic and sexual minority feel bad.

YouTubeÂ© responded to this contrived moral outrage by making it so Crowder couldnâ€™t get money from YouTubeÂ® ads â€“ oddly this increased Crowderâ€™s income as thousands of people bought merchandise directly from Crowderâ€™s company.

End of story?Â No.

Soon enough, YouTubeâ„¢ will consist of nothing more than makeup videos, BuzzfeedÂ®, and whatever else the New York TimesÂ© says is okay.

Forty other channels were either banned, demonetized, or had videos deleted.Â I wonâ€™t go so far as to say that these channels are all mainstream like Steven Crowder, they arenâ€™t.Â But I am not aware of any content that called for violence or did anything more than spread â€œdangerous ideas.â€Â In a crowning bit of irony, YouTubeÂ® censored a video where a Googleâ„¢ (owner of YouTubeâ„¢) executive talked about how GoogleÂ© wouldnâ€™t allow another â€œTrump situation.â€Â This was presumably via using their ability to manipulate what search results people see when they use Googleâ„¢.

TwitterÂ® had also purged significant figures on the Right, most prominent among them James Woods, who has since given up on the platform after multiple bans despite having over 2,000,000 followers.

Letâ€™s take Amazon, who in 2010 said that â€œAmazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.â€Â This was a fairly absolute position, especially since Amazon was defending selling a pro-pedophilia book.

Not so much now.Â Amazon has now banned dozens of books, and created entire categories of products that cannot be sold.Â Â You canâ€™t get a Confederate flag t-shirt from Amazon, but you can certainly get a Stalin shirt.Â This is despite the fact that Stalin killed (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) more people in one year â€“ 3.9 million â€“ than the total number of slaves in the United States in 1850 â€“ 3 million.Â Sure, it sucked to be a slave.Â But it was certainly worse to be a slave to communism that was starved to death.

With apologies to Arthur (LINK), whose tagline I mangled for this one.

I tried to come up with a list of censored things, but even the censored things seem to be mainly censored.Â Orwell would be proud.

John Markâ€™s Civil War 2 Video and Criticism

This video was suggested by several of you, including Shinmen Takezo who suggests you listen to all of John Markâ€™s videos.Â Iâ€™ve seen this one, and plan to watch the others when I have a spare minute.

I think Mr. Mark is spot on with commentary that Trump is the last Republican president that will be elected.Â I wrote about this back in November of 2018(Trump: The Last President?).Â It has a click-bait-y title, which might explain why it went viral and got over 120,000 pageviews on Zero HedgeÂ©.

John Mark reviews an article purportedly written by a â€œRed Teamâ€ (bad guy) member of a war game where the Right revolts against the government and the Left.Â My response is in italics, or braille if you donâ€™t clean your screen very often.

First Vulnerability:Â The electrical grid is dispersed and easy to take down into most cities because it is impossible to guard.Â The front wonâ€™t be against just the Right, it will also be against their own (Leftist) cities.

I agree.Â The United States is built as a free society, and so is all of our infrastructure.Â It is devastatingly vulnerable.Â In one of the links below, youâ€™ll see how a $0.02 match took down a $20,000,000 bridge.Â And that was on accident.

Second Vulnerability:Â 30% will revolt.Â Most on the Right have guns.Â There are 400 million guns, 8 trillion bullets in the United States â€“ most in the hand of the Right.Â Ten million strongly on the Right.Â Tanks and airplanes donâ€™t matter as much as the Left thinks. Â Â There might be 2 million in the United States military, and over 60% voted for the Right.Â There are 20 million former military.

Total would be about 2 million available forces for revolutionary suppression (including civilian police), if the active military did not revolt.

I agree.Â The people, especially former military, on the Right can do whatever they want.Â Tanks and airplanes didnâ€™t win World War II on the Eastern Front â€“ the winning weapon was the mortar and the rifle â€“ anti-personnel weapons.Â The Soviets also accomplished it only by throwing millions of bodies into combat.Â Bodies that will be tough for the Left to get outside of conscription.

I think thereâ€™s an Uber joke in here somewhere.

Third Vulnerability:Â The Left lives in consuming cities, the Right lives in the land that produces food and stuff.Â The concentrated cities of the Left produce a lot of porn and girls with daddy-issues, but not much food.

I agree.Â They are vulnerable, though the porn and Facebookâ„¢ drought might be tough on some.

Where do I disagree?Â

The Ultra-Violent and Nukes.

Sure, we know the StarbucksÂ® Socialists and Latte Lenins wonâ€™t fight.Â Why wouldnâ€™t the government take MS-13 and arm them and turn them loose to â€œmake examplesâ€ of small downs, one after another?Â If they were losing, they would certainly do that.Â And they could scrape together a pilot and a nuke or two to take down a rebel capital city.Â If they were losing, they would.Â Â Â Â

The Right could make a reasonable partisan force, especially when you look that probably 50% to 75% of the military would defect and train people on the Right, bringing along a nice batch of weapons (think grenades, C4, etcetera) to the farm to teach the rest of the football team.Â I donâ€™t think Jed would need to teach the boys to shoot, and I think theyâ€™d learn to use that mortar and grenade launcher that he â€œliberatedâ€ from the Marines very quickly. Â

Logistics and Geography

The Left can be resupplied via air and ship.Â â€œEmergencyâ€ supplies would head into coastal cities and sustain them forever, though Denver would fall soon enough.Â Would Russia supply the heartland while the Chinese supplied the West Coast?Â I have no idea â€“ I think theyâ€™d do what.Â Regardless, France would soon surrender.

Also, I think there would be a nearly immediate media clamp down.Â Â The media supports the Left, no matter what.Â They would parrot the Leftist line until the studios were taken from them by force.

I think that this is far too optimistic, but I also think the odds are lower the more time passes.

Civil War Index:

Hereâ€™s the state for this month.

Economic:Â +10.42.Â Unemployment is the same â€“ interest rates took a huge drop, and the Dow was (slightly) up.Â Increasing economic is good.

Political Instability:Â -46%.Â I think that the start of the debates and the poor poll numbers of â€œany democratic candidateâ€ against Trump has calmed the Left politically by a lot.Â Lower instability is good.

Censorship:Â Originally this was going to be a candidate index.Â Sadly, thereâ€™s no data.Â How scary is it that you canâ€™t find good data on censorship?

Interest in Violence:Â Up 7% this month.Â Not horrible, but not good.

Illegal Aliens:Â Up 24% last month to 144,000.Â 144,000 is more than have been deported since Trump got into office.Â This shows increasing instability south of the border, or lower fear of deportation.Â Both are bad.

Eventually these will be graphs, but a graph with one point is . . . boring.Â Maybe in August.

Quote From a Failed Candidate to be The One:Â â€œIs the Red Pill gluten free?Â Also, is it vegan?â€

One measure I thought was pretty good was from Anonymousse over at The Burning Platform:Â â€œOne good metric may be the spread between political poll projections and reality/results. Iâ€™m thinking that gauges just how â€œfreeâ€ people feel about saying versus what they do. Something Iâ€™ve noticed widening over the years.â€

Iâ€™d like to do this one, but the data points are just too far apart.Â This would be useful information over the course of a decade, but wonâ€™t be much use monthly.Â I think Anonymousse is right â€“ people donâ€™t feel good about sharing if theyâ€™re going to vote for an â€œunpopularâ€ candidate on the Right, severely skewing the polls.

What do I mean by unpopular?

We were on vacation two years ago, and decided to stop at a national monument.Â We got out.Â The plates on our car are from a very red state – my county went 85% for Trump.Â As we got out of the car to stretch our legs and see the monument, we spied a guy birdwatching.Â He put his binoculars on our car.Â He was about 150 feet away.

Birdwatch Bill, yelling:Â “Who’d you vote for?”

John Wilder, being sassy, yelling back:Â “Starts with a T!”

Birdwatch Bill, muffled:Â “Ashshof.”

John Wilder:Â “What?”

Birdwatch Bill, with anger, yelling:Â “You heard me, A****le.”Â It rhymes with tadpole.

I was stunned, I mean, I donâ€™t deny being a tadpole, but I didnâ€™t think you could see it from 150 feet away.Â The Mrs. was in theÂ bathroom, and I’m thankful that she didn’t hear him, since she would have broken him like a twig – she handles my light work.

After saying that, Birdwatch Bill scurried and jumped in his car, and sped off.

After hearing that story, The Mrs. was adamant that we not move to that state, even when I had a job offer there, even though I think sheâ€™d like to hear Birdwatch Billâ€™s yelp as she gave him a nuclear wedgie.

Who Benefits?

Whenever I see something that doesnâ€™t make sense, I try to understand what could possibly be causing it.Â When conditions are better for minority racial and ethnic groups than ever in the history of the country, and the agitation increases, I have to ask, who benefits?Â When the push for segregation comes from, not the Right but the Left, I ask, who benefits?

When I see us moving on a seemingly certain path towards war, I have to ask, who benefits?Â Probably more on this in a future post.

Links From Readers:

Obviously I only stand by 100% of my own writing.Â Here is some interesting stuff sent in by readers.Â Feel free to take some of the burden off of Ricky, and send me more.Â And if you send it in an email, please let me know if I may credit you.

See, a chain link photo in the â€œLinksâ€ page.Â Iâ€™m witty that way.

Thomas Chittumâ€™s Civil War TwoÂ – Iâ€™m not finished with this one yet, but very interesting.Â A 178 page .pdf file â€“ this was listed by “Mark” at The Burning Platform.

Photos of Bosnia during and after their civil war from â€œMygirlâ€¦maybeâ€ over at The Burning Platform.

Update on the State of Jefferson vs. New California from user â€œMartelâ€™s Hammerâ€ at The Burning Platform.

Who is behind Antifa?, via AC at The Burning Platform.

From Ricky:

Pentagon prepping for civil unrest?

Review of the risk of civil unrest (presentation).

Peter Turchin predicts violence in 2020.

France and Social Unrest â€“ Tied to Loss of Family and Religion

Perhaps my favorite link from Ricky â€“ the Partisan Conflict Index â€“ worth watching.Â

Brazos reminds us that there is precedence for using the troops against American civilians.Â

User â€œMN Steelâ€ reminds us that the damage a single match can do.

From my E-mail:

First is a blog I often read, Metallicman on what liberals have in store for conservatives.Â Not pretty.Â

And more from Ricky!

This one from an Australian perspective.

NY Magazine â€“ wondering if it isnâ€™t time to split up.Â My add (from HBOÂ®) was for the series Divorce.Â Hmmm.

From the Federalist, again about â€œdivorceâ€ of the United States.

From other emails . . .

A great article from Mary Christine over at The Burning Platform, looking at Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War and how partisans will form â€“ will Civil War Two look more like the personal fights along the Kansas and Missouri borders?

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

“You’re the one that’s collapsing. Been sitting at that contraption for twenty-two years. It’s time you tried a girl.” – The Addams Family

It is related to the post. I promise. That makes it literature, so you have to like it. It’s sophisticated and swanky.

This series of posts was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky. This is Part Two. Part One can be found here (Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I).

Let’s – again – state the basic thesis in Ricky’s words:

“I’m right there with you that collapse is coming to our house of cards because of the way they were dealt. But after all of the individual survival dramas play out, survival ultimately depends on a community rising from the ashes. And the glue of a community is ultimately the deals made between its individuals. And money is the encapsulation of those deals.

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money. On what it is, and how it works.”

Last time we looked at the financial history of the United States up until the Civil War. The first Civil War, not the next one (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), I mean.

Just a few generations after the Revolutionary War, in the 1860’s, both halves of the United States defaulted on currency during the Civil War. The North defaulted on gold redemption in 1863, and the South printed Confederate currency like they were trying to make the Founding Fathers look like that one sailor that stayed in his bunk reading the Bible when the Seventh Fleet hit Sydney. My father-in-law swears that’s what he did, and no one with an Australian accent has shown up claiming to be The Mrs.’ long-lost sister.

Okay, after the Civil War, the United States is at least done with defaulting, right? I mean, we started up the Federal Reserve Bank™ in 1913 to stop these sorts of shenanigans, so that must have worked?

No. If the Federal Reserve ever pretended to have the mission of maintaining the stability of the dollar, it failed like one of Oprah’s diets.

Ricky sent this one. It’s perfect, with the exception that it doesn’t contain girls wearing bikinis. I think . . . we can do better. I think . . . we can Make Economics Sexy Again!

See, fixed that for you, Ricky. Graph is now 1000% better, unlike our currency. You can see her toes are pointed down into the sand, which shows that the value of the dollar is lower. Also, if I can point your attention to the years between 1950 and 1965 you can see what an amazing, um, time span that was.

In 1933, the United States had $4 billion in gold. Sadly, it owed $22 billion in gold that it would have to pay off in just a four years.

Solution?

Make owning gold by your own citizens illegal, and make them hand it in on penalty of going to jail if they don’t. After you’ve got those dollars, redefine the dollar so that it’s worth a lot less. Presto! You’ve stolen all the gold and then made the resulting “dollars” that your citizens have worth a lot less. Then you can give your cheaper dollars to other governments in payment. It’s like being Enron®, but with 100% less jail time, so it’s exactly like being a Kennedy.

So, yeah, I’d call that a default, too.

Finally in the 1970’s, the French decided that they could wake up from their wine and cigarette haze long enough to see that the United States was way short on the amount of gold necessary to pay all the debts that Johnson and Nixon created to get elected.

Defaulting on your currency is like a divorce: once is a mistake, twice is a trend, and by the third time….maybe, just maybe, it’s you. The French decided to be sneaky, and took all of their dollars, showed up at the bank, probably with a baguette under each arm, and requested gold. The United States essentially said, “Umm, we didn’t think that you thought we were serious about that. OMG, LOL!” and stopped giving anyone gold in exchange for their dollar. My scoring: yet another default.

Since August 15, 1971, the United States dollar is backed by our sterling record of fiscal responsibility, along with thousands of nuclear warheads. As Pop Wilder always used to say, “You get farther with a kind word and a sophisticated professional military and thousands of nuclear warheads than you do with just a kind word.”

I would my own discovery, the John Wilder Rule of Sexy Economics™: “You get more attention with bikini girl economics graphs than with just economics graphs.”

As careful study of this graph will show, the glorious years of 1970 led to the bare times to follow and a sensitive employment time in the early 1980’s. Unemployment never looked so good.

So, that’s a little bit about money along with some recent history. Looking at all of history, though, I’d say what happens with money depends upon the kind of collapse we expect to see. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll break collapses into three sizes. Why these three sizes? As of the time of writing I’m a bit thirsty, and the local convenience store only has three drink sizes. Here they are:

Medium: The definition of a Medium failure includes monetary easing. It could also include a default that may cause economic hardship, but doesn’t impact the government of the country or the ability of a country to issue its own currency. This describes all of the defaults of the United States.
Large: This involves the complete destruction of a currency. Common examples are Weimar Germany or modern-day Wakanda© In both cases, the currency imploded as the major engineering problem of the day was how to print more money, faster (hint: the Germans only printed on one side to double press production). In Germany, the change led complete dissolution of society and a rebuilding under . . . well, Literally That One Guy Nobody Can Mention. In Zimbabwe, it led to complete destruction of the currency and eventual loss of power for the guy who had been President for as long as Zimbabwe had been Zimbabwe.
Big Gulp®: This is the complete destruction of the economic as well as political system. Rome, long laboring under a fiat currency, finally imploded and left behind a smoking crater that took hundreds of years to fill. Thankfully, refills are only $0.29 with purchase of the official mug!

So what happens to an individual in one of these failures?

In a Medium Failure, you can keep your currency, if you like it, but what cost $100 a few years ago probably costs $1000 now. Everybody adapts and you can generally go about your business, but you’re poorer and not at all happy, and it looks a lot like the Housing Bubble of the 2000’s. Another analogy: it’s like you were forced to spend way too much time with my ex-wife.

The Housing Bubble can be seen pretty clearly here. Somewhere. Keep looking. You have my permission.

In a Large Failure, ultimately the currency is toast. Your money is gone. But the country will restart the economy using either a new currency, or just by adopting an outside currency that’s moderated by someone marginally more adult than you. Zimbabwe’s unofficial currency is the United States dollar, but there aren’t enough of them to go around, so many people use mobile currency that’s (more or less) run by cell phone companies. When your cell phone company has a much better record of fiscal restraint than your government? Yikes.

A Big Gulp© Failure is social collapse. The biggest one in recent Western history is Rome. The Roman Big Gulp® was so big that it spawned collapse after collapse in nation after nation as Rome shrank away from areas it could no longer afford to protect or govern. Great Britain is an example of the collapse. After the last Roman Legion left people buried their money . . . and never dug it up. Why?

The silver content of Roman coins in the late Empire consisted of waving a bit of silver over the top of the molten metal before a coin was made. Rome had gone full fiat. Roman coins, in the absence of Roman troops, were worthless. Money itself was abandoned, and barter was the key, when local bandits and warlords didn’t just take what they wanted.

You want a worthless currency? This is how you get a worthless currency..

How do we get to these collapses, and how likely are they?

Medium Failure: I think that there may be as high as a 70%-90% chance of a Medium Failure hitting the United States in the lifetime of the average reader. The challenges we will face with medical care (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck) and the possibility that the politicians won’t resist the lure of free money promised by Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Read the articles at the link. They were written by a cool guy I know, but before he really focused on getting better.

As a reminder of how close this might be to happening, a penny costs about $0.02 to make, so to get your two cents worth only costs a penny now, and that’s after they took out all the copper. The copper alone in an old (pre-1979) penny is nearly $0.02. It would cost about $0.04 to make a copper penny today. A nickel costs $0.06 to $0.08 to make. A dollar in pre-1964 silver coins is worth $10.60 at the time of this writing, which tells you that we’ve really already failed at keeping the value of our money up.

Ricky points out some interesting alternatives to currency in some of the supporting links he sent. Just like Zimbabwe leaned on cell phone providers to be less insane and more trustworthy than the government, Facebook® is betting that its new currency, named the libra (LINK) will be less insane than the dollar, and has the added bonus of having the word “bra” as part of its name. Honestly, I would have thought that Facebook™ would have denominated its currency in selfies and named it the lookatme.

Student loan debt makes you feel like you can’t afford much clothing, and you’re between a rock and a hard place. And very fit and tan and covered with oil.

Large Failure: Large failures are big. I mean, it’s in the name “Large.” It generally comes after really horrible financial malfeasance for years. Our current medical payment system (which is really bad) will, if not fixed, lead to a large failure. Other notable large failures? The start and end of the Soviet Union. North Korea. Nationalist China. The country is still a country, and, with outside help and a new government, can, after a generation emerge from chaos.

I think there’s as high as a 40-50% chance this will happen within the lives of the average reader.

Big Gulp© Failure: What would lead to a modern Big Gulp™-Level, end of Rome type event? Nuclear war. Running out of hydrocarbons. Meteor impact on George Clooney’s ego. Catastrophic disease. Reuniting the Spice Girls®. Regardless of the cause, I could easily see a failure of this magnitude ending 90% of the human lives on the planet.

Big Gulp® failures might last 1,000 years, since the last one lasted 500 years. That means, since the time of Christ, Western Civilization was in a Big Gulp™ failure for 25% of the time. Still – it only happened once. I’d give a likelihood of 5-10% of this occurring within the lifespan of the average reader. Pray some of the Spice Girls© have bad tickers.

Okay, these aren’t the Spice Girls™, but their ascending height from left to right is the perfect way to show that whatever lines are on this graph are going up from left to right. I assume the thing going up is bad.

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

Gasoline is priced in goats.
Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
$100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

So, Ricky, there it is, Part I and Part II. See you in Stockholm to pick up our Nobel Prize™!

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival, with Wonder Woman, Bigfoot, Johnny Carson, Stalin, and a Bond Girl.

“So you really think Morgan thinks I have a racial bias? This is so unfair. I would’ve marched on Selma if it was on Long Island.” – Seinfeld

I’ll have to admit, when I was doing this meme, I forgot where I was going with it. Which was appropriate.

This post is the result of a reader request by frequent commenter and occasional photo contributor 173dVietVet, and I’m glad to do it because it keeps me away from plumbing. I had actually already started my notes for another topic (you’ll see it next Friday and it will be amazing, if I have enough beer before I start writing) when he suggested that I post about the interplay of Cognitive Dissonance, Normalcy Bias, and Survival.

This post sounded like way more fun than re-plumbing the drain line under my sink (this is true). Despite the protestations of The Mrs. that we need a silly old sink in the kitchen I dug right into the topic, especially since Friday is typically health day and this topic is broad enough to cover both personal health and the broader issues related to disasters and living through crisis that have recently become a theme here.

Maybe . . . it may have been a way for 173dVietVet to see if I’m not a computer mind sent from the future to influence the United States in 2019 to make more PEZ® workers for our PEZ© mines. Who can say? Regardless, 173dVietVet (and the other 10,000 people who will read this), here it is.

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive Dissonance is the state of holding two opposing ideas in your mind, or of having beliefs that run counter to your actions. The best example I ever ran into in real life was when I was at a convenience store and two Spandex®-clad bicyclists came in – helmets still on, complete with wrap-around sunglasses and smelly padded butt shorts. One of the guys was loudly criticizing every item the other guy picked up. Trust me, the guy was loud enough that everyone in the store could hear him. I was NOT eavesdropping like I do with the neighbors on a Saturday night.

“No, you can’t drink that, man. Fructose will kill you, after it makes your children sterile.”
“Dude – the bleached flour in that is empty calories. It will screw up your metabolism and make the Martians attack.”
“Ah, man – that jerky has nitrates. Really bad for you. Also, no one has ever loved me.”

Then he got up to the counter.

“I’ll have this, and . . . a pack of Marlboros®.” He looked at his bicycling buddy. “Yeah, man, I know.”

That’s Cognitive Dissonance in action. I was buying Copenhagen® and Cheddar Ruffles™ at the same time, so my ability to criticize was pretty limited. I’ve since given up the Copenhagen©, but you can rip those Cheddar Ruffles® from my cold, dead, orange fingers.

If you get tired of Soylent Lays®? You can just gnaw on a neighbor! Spoiler: in the movie, companies were making food from people. But apparently it was tasty. Mmmm, tasty people.

Another example? An attorney that goes to church. Normally lawyers burst into flame upon entering a Holy Place, but I heard California filed a restraining order against God, and the Ninth Circuit upheld it. Last I heard, God is has appealed to the Supreme Court®. Sadly, he might lose, since he doesn’t have any lawyers in Heaven to represent him.

Like anything, Cognitive Dissonance goes from mild (our bicycling smoker in the example above) to extreme (pretending Trump® isn’t president because you don’t like mean old Cheeto™ man). In the middle is anyone who liked the latest Star Wars™ movies. Or are they in the middle? They might be the sickest of all of us.

In doing research about this topic, I found that studies of Cognitive Dissonance had different origins for different peoples. It turns out that Cognitive Dissonance in European-descended people is driven by the concepts of shame and guilt. Shame, in this case, is the feeling brought out by violating a group norm. Mental values based in Shame are built around what other people will think of you. Guilt is violating an absolute right and wrong. Everyone on the planet could be dead, and you’d still feel Guilt.

In East Asians, Cognitive Dissonance was only built around Shame. Guilt didn’t play a part in it. If everybody on Earth died? You’d be free at last! I have no other data on any other ethnicities, so don’t ask. I’m thinking the researcher did the study in Chinese restaurant in North Dakota.

Some other odd things I discovered about Cognitive Dissonance:

Initiations and hazing – people who are subjected to rough rites of initiation actually have increased commitment to the group hazing them. I guess the lesson here is, don’t skimp. Rent the goat. And get the extended insurance plan on the goat. You know why.
People highlight the positives of the choice they made … after they made the choice, not before. Rationalization is a way to smooth over Cognitive Dissonance, and also explains why I justify the late night tipsy Amazon.com purchases to The Mrs. Everyone needs a life size Bigfoot® statue, right?

The Mrs. took this picture after we bought Bigfoot One. I had this statue until The Mrs.’ dog ate it. Then I bought another one, but I keep it inside. Sadly, this is a true story. Bigfoot deserves to be free.

Essentially, when your brain is faced with the contradictions that spring from Cognitive Dissonance, it has (as far as I can tell) four choices:

Change a belief,
Change an action,
Pretend our actions don’t make us big fat hypocrites, or
Ignore it all and get a cookie.

Orwell even talked about it in his future history novel 1984. A great example of Cognitive Dissonance in action was the way that supporters minimized Bill Clinton’s horrible behavior in the Lewinski mess. (Actually it was Clinton’s mess, but this is a family-friendly blog.) And mainstream Republicans were no better in the whole “invade Iraq” mess, for absolute fairness. Supporters, like hazed college freshmen pledging Omega, seem to like politicians more when they lie to them.

Go figure.

If you haven’t seen Animal House®, that makes me die a little inside. It’s the Star Wars™ of anti-Cognitive Dissonance movies.

Okay, that’s Cognitive Dissonance. What’s Normalcy Bias?

First, Normalcy. Really? Did we really need that word? I guess I’ll allow it. Guys, the English language has 171,476 words according to the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, and your ‘umble ‘ost only knows about 45,000 of them. Unless your new word involves ways that aliens have sex in clown costumes in a vacuum while in orbit over Mongolia on a Tuesday? There’s probably already a word for it.

Second, what is Normalcy Bias? Normalcy Bias is just a belief that things are going to return to “normal” at some unspecified point in the future, often through the actions of some unspecified savior, like Johnny Carson returning from the dead and eating the livers of all of the current late night hosts while they were still alive. Oh, wait, that was a dream I had the other night. Never mind.

The answer is no, not funny at all.

Third, I think that Normalcy Bias is just a subset of Cognitive Dissonance. Here are some examples:

Underestimating the probability of a flood hitting your house. This is not a personal example – I’ve checked FEMA flood maps on every house I’ve ever bought – before I bought them. I remember talking to a friend who thought I was lying when I told him that. Right now? If a flood takes out my house, I’m expecting to see a little old man with an Ark.
Underestimating disaster impacts. FEMA is really good at this – in the middle of Hurricane Ike, FEMA was on the radio. Thankfully, we had a crank-radio and were able to get the vital advice that lists of available FEMA services were . . . on the Internet at FEMA.gov. Telling people with no power (and no cell service) to go to the Internet to get the latest updates. Yay, FEMA! Why don’t you suggest direct brain transfer?
The Roman citizens in Great Britain standing on the pier and waving goodbye to the last Legion in Rome as it went off to put down an uprising of those pesky Gauls. The Romans will be back soon, right? Things will be normal again? Right? (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse)
King Arthur’s legend that he’ll return to save England – it’s just one example of the hidden and secret king that will return one day to Make England Great Again. Assuming any English are left when Arthur gets back.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about Normalcy Bias in his book The Black Swan. He describes the belief that his family had that things would “return to normal” in Lebanon, even after it was ripped apart by civil war between 1975 and 1990. They talked about how they’d be able to return, and how things would . . . return to normal.

When Taleb wrote this, this was a picture that was taken in Lebanon – 2006. I’m not thinking this is a great place for long term real estate growth. Unless you have quite a large number of Trident® missiles – 3 out of 4 despots recommend Trident© if you chew missiles.

I think that Normalcy Bias is pretty deep seated function of the human brain – I see too many examples, both in my own thinking and in my observations of others to believe that it’s abnormal.

During a crisis, that’s a problem. The biggest dangers in a crisis are:

Not accepting that the world has changed, maybe forever. People who change their world view soonest . . . win. An example: I was driving and saw a car pulled over on the side of the road. The driver had obviously just wrecked his BMW®. He was wandering around, dazed. “My BMW® . . . it’s wrecked!” He was distraught. I said to him, “Man, forget about the car – your left arm has been severed!” He became even more upset. “My God,” he screamed, looking down at the place his arm should have been, “Where is my Rolex©!” Okay, that didn’t happen. But I’m allowed to dream.
Not realizing or believing that changes could happen. This happens before the crisis, and the result is that you’ve never planned. Not having planned, you’ve got no preparations. The best cure for this is nearly getting caught up in a disaster. My daughter, Alia S. Wilder, recently found out that her house was in a zone that could be flooded. Even more oops? She had zero preparations. Being evil, I didn’t give her answers. I asked questions. “Oh, so you bought a month’s worth of food. Good. How much water to you have?” Her eyes were really opened to the huge vulnerabilities that she had. I slept well that night, even though I had to shower to get the evil off of me.
Thinking that other people share your values. They don’t. I assure you that there is no neighborhood in Modern Mayberry I would be afraid to be in at any time of the day or night. If you carry that same lack of awareness to, say, Chicago, the results might be less than optimal. Monday’s post will be about the implications of this logical fallacy. The sooner you internalize this, the better.
Failing to practice. Just as having the neatest nickel-plated 1911 with laser sights and the chainsaw attachment won’t help you if you don’t practice, if you don’t practice your disaster response from time to time, it won’t help you, either. You won’t be able to find your preps. They’ll be in the wrong spot. Or, worse yet, your child moved them and the mice got into your rice, the parakeet got into your wheat, and your dehydrated food has been mildewed. That’s a bad day. But it’s a much better day if none of the steers got into your beer.
Thinking that someone else will save you. They won’t. This is why I hate the term “first responders.” It puts the responsibility for a crisis on the wrong person. If someone is breaking into my house – I am the first responder. If Pugsley cuts deeply into his thumb while whittling, I am, again, the first responder. In any real crisis, the “first responders” have probably missed many of the issues I’ve listed above. During Hurricane Ike, I heard one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard – pleas from the radio announcer to bring food, gasoline, generators, and water to . . . the “first responders.” The “first responders” weren’t an asset. They were a liability that couldn’t even save themselves. I’m not bragging, but the Wilder family was at home, eating steak. We had enough food for weeks. Again, The Mrs. and I were the first responders. Mmm. Steak.
Not realizing the implications of changes. In apocalypse movies, one typical means of comic relief is the former banker/stockbroker/boss who, in a fit of self-important pomposity, asks, “Do you know who I am?” Immediately this character (who you’re not supposed to like), gets his ego shot down as either the hero or bad guy shows him that the rules have changed. One humorous version of this is in the underrated Kevin Costner flick The Postman, when he meets Tom Petty. The Postman says to Tom Petty, “I know you, you’re famous.” Petty replies, “I was. Kinda.” At the end, Tom Petty asks Costner, “Are you The Postman?” Costner nods. Petty says, “I’ve heard of you. You’re famous.” It was a brilliant way to turn that trope on its head, and pointed out a lesson we’ll talk about in a minute in item 1 of the list below. I guess that depends on your reading speed.
Not adapting to the reality of the changes. This is a little different than number six. A great example is the Kulaks that I wrote about recently. When Stalin came to power they thought they could negotiate with him since they were the economic engine of the U.S.S.R. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t. Score Stalin: 20,000,000, Kulaks: 0. A less sinister version of this is when you flip a light switch during a blackout, and a second later feel like an idiot, thankfully Stalin’s ghost doesn’t send you to the Gulag for that.

It always cracks me up that AntiFa© thinks they won’t be the first people sent to the camps. Loyalty? The commies can work with that. Being disloyal to the country that provides the framework for your material success? Gulag first. But you get to choose the top bunk. Yay!

Every single point I’ve made above can kill you, given the right circumstances. If I were evil, like an ancient emaciated grizzled she-demon direct from Hell, or Madonna® (I’m sorry, I repeat myself) I’d just leave you here to twist in the wind, stuck in a never ending cycle of Cognitive Dissonance and Normalcy Bias that spirals into a black hole of self-despair that ultimately leaves you as a tweeker midwife sitting in a ripped-up vinyl booth in an Ecuadoran Dairy Queen® with no Blizzard™ machine, delivering Ecuadorian children for leftover chicken tenders. And there’s no gravy in Ecuador. I think that’s because the toilets circle the other way. Maybe.

But I’m not that mean. Well, I am that mean, but I’m still begging for working for that Nobel® Peace™ Prize©, or maybe a lousy MacArthur Award™, so I’d best pretend to be a loving, caring human being. Besides, no body? No crime. Right? That’s what my lawyer keeps telling me. I hope he’s right.

I know what you are asking, “John Wilder, how can I learn to make comedy jokes like you?” See? You’re dead in a disaster already! A disaster is no joking matter, unless it happens to someone else. But, following are some preventive (the word preventative, while in the dictionary, has that stupid extra “ta” in the middle and I refuse to engage with a single ta – two ta’s only) steps that you can take to, well, live. And these steps apply to both a disaster and your life. In the end, your life is a disaster. I’m not judging, but if you treat your life like a metaphorical disaster, you’ll be healthier and more prepared.

Humility: Know what you don’t know. As Aesop (LINK) perspicaciously quoted Donald Rumsfeld the other day: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” People liked to bag on Rumsfeld, mainly because they were jealous of his mad dancing skills and that he bested John Cusack in an arm-wrestling contest once so he could win the chance to date Demi Moore. This was before she began to resemble beef jerky, so it was worth it at the time. Regardless, this is a great quote on humility. Know what you don’t know. Either learn it, or compensate for it.
Prepare Generally for General Disasters: Most things you can prepare for are the same, or at least rhyme like poetry used to rhyme before cigarette smoking smelly people in black berets with low-testosterone face hair (high testosterone for the females, which looks about the same) ruined it. Hitler’s ghost won’t re-start World War II, and Abraham Lincoln’s ghost won’t be around to start Civil War II, but human needs don’t change all that much, regardless of what disaster you face. You have to eat. You have to have water. You have to have Internet. Oh, wait – sorry. Water is optional now, according to the WHO (The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again). You can quote me on the following: A multi-tool is a crappy tool. Unless it’s your only tool. And it weighs less than your tool kit. Never expect that preparations will be exact replacements of what you really need. But as long as you have Internet, it’s all good, right?
Do Things That Take You Out Of Your Comfort Zone: No, this isn’t an excuse to try to convince you into a Multi-Level-Marketing© scheme to strain your friendships by selling a product that ultimately is the object of a 60 Minutes™ investigation (this happened to my ex-wife, for reals). Take a different road to work. How well do you know the lay of the land in the ten miles around your house? How well do you know your neighbors, I mean, reciprocally? The telescope views don’t count no matter how hot she is. Imagine you had to do without electricity. Do without it for a night. Two nights. Spend a night in a tent in the back yard. Go camping. Eat a burger . . . without fries. Your routine is your enemy, except for the lifting and healthy bits. Change it up.
Practice with your tools: Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said tools. Okay, Beavis, knock it off. If it’s a pistol. If it’s a chainsaw. If it’s a hammer. Heh, hehe, hehehe, he said hammer. Practice with it. 80% of your proficiency will come for 20% of your effort, unless you’re me trying to learn guitar, because that’s just hopeless. Become mediocre now, when there’s time, that will help with number one, up above. At least then you’ll know what you don’t know.
Play “What if?” mind games: I do this all the time. Sometimes I end up in crazy stupid places – as in the entire world is gone and leaves just me and the cast of The Breakfast Club and the cast of Who fighting over who gets the last deodorant stick in the world and Sophie Marceau is the only one who can save me. Okay, that’s not really productive. But when you think about what could happen, you become mentally prepared if it does happen.

Sophie is the one on bottom. James Bond® is the one on top. I guess I might need to explain that to the folks in California. I’m just worried that the next movie might have Jeanette Bond, who has never even been to England at all. Because what’s more British than that?

So, there it is. I guess I have a sink to fix. 173dVietVet, how did I do?

Also, if you have a pet topic, toss it out, either in the comments or at my email at movingnorth@gmail.com. I won’t promise that I’ll do it, but your odds are good. 100% as of this writing. If I don’t do it, it’s not you, it’s that I think I’d suck at it.

Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.” – Anchorman

With apologies to Gary Larson, in my defense there are only so many John Brown jokes out there.

Way back in 1998, I ended up with one of the neatest jobs that I had – assessing risks to a major corporation. The Internet was new at work, and I was being paid to research potential disasters. It was so interesting and so much fun I felt guilty. In researching disasters and risk, I came across Y2K. For those that don’t remember, there was a concern that, as a result of programmers only using two digits to store year information in computers, that many computers and computer programs would cease to function when the calendar flipped over to 00.

There were multiple websites and personalities that were writing about Y2K, and one that I went to from time to time was Cory Hamasaki’s Y2K Weather Report. Hamasaki was a programmer (he has since passed away) and he had an inside perspective of the ongoing work that was required to keep the systems working. As a result of his insider knowledge he bought an AR, a lot of food, and spent New Year’s Eve at his remote cabin.

Obviously, the systems kept working.

Not my original. And I’m sorry.

We live, however, in spicy times, with the potential for them becoming even spicier (I got the Spicy Time meme from Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), which really should be on your daily reading list). I’ve written several articles about the potential for Civil War, and studied and thought quite a bit about it. As such, this is the inaugural edition of John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report. I anticipate putting it out monthly. This first issue will probably be a bit longer than later issues, since I’m putting the framework together and explaining the background.

I’m attempting to put together a framework that measures where we are on the continuum between peace and war. I’ll even try to develop some sort of measures that show if the level of danger is increasing or decreasing. Civil wars don’t happen all at once, and like a strong storm, they require the atmosphere to be right. A weather report is probably a good metaphor.

If you haven’t seen it, the guy with the trident was the weatherman in Anchorman. And when he has a trident? People die.

So, to review the future, let’s start by looking at Civil War I so we understand what happened, and what the potential differences are.

Civil War I was:

Based on philosophical differences – the views of the people, North and South were pretty similar, except that the Northerners were descended from Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and the Southerners were descended from the Norman conquerors that took England in 1066 but got booted out after having lost a war in England. Although the North and South were the same people, more or less, with the same heritage, there were enough differences to lead to a war. And it was a doozy.