Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

“Then who is vice president, Jerry Lewis?” – Back to the Future

calhounmice

John B. Calhoun.  Not C.  B.

It’s rare when a real-life series of experiments showing a possible dystopian future for humanity captures the popular imagination.  It’s rarer still when it becomes the basis for a Newbery© award-winning book for children.  To get to the full trifecta of weird?  That novel was the basis for an animated movie that has a 96% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes®.

The experiment was John B. Calhoun’s Universe series which he did primarily for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which we’ll cover in much more detail below.  The book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  The movie?  The animated 1982 flick The Secret of NIMH.

nimh

Sure, you can turn a science experiment into a children’s movie, but try to go the other way JUST ONCE and you’ve committed Crimes Against Humanity.  Again.  Stupid International Criminal Court.

Yeah, it’s weird.  The only way it could get weirder is if Dr. John B. Calhoun had been visited during his rodent experiments by a time travelling Vice President John C. Calhoun to warn him about the impending Civil War . . . in 1865.  But from now on in this post, anytime the name Calhoun is used, it’s in reference to the scientist.  If I want to refer to Andrew Jackson’s Vice President?  We’ll just call him “Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.”

doccalhoun

The hair says psycho, but the eyes also say psycho.  Oh, wait, this is Vice President John C. Calhoun Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.

It’s strange when a scientist has less extreme hair than a Vice President, but not every scientist can be Doc Brown.  But Doc Calhoun didn’t invent time travel – he studied mice and rats.  What he set up was an artificial environment where there was no pressure to find food or water, and plenty of room for thousands of rodents.  In one experiment, Universe 25, Calhoun estimated that there was plenty of room for 3,840 mice to nest and live.  Imagine how many Pizza Rolls® you could make out of that 3,840 mice!

Calhoun created this mice paradise, and tossed in four lady-mice and four bro-mice.  They quickly paired off and started breeding.  After the first batch of mice-babies hatched from the mouse eggs, the population doubled every 55 days.  At day 315, the rate of growth dropped – the population “only” doubled every 145 days, and at day 315, things started to get . . . strange.

docbrown

Spoiler Alert!  He dies in 1850 as Secretary of State.

Dominant male mice had previously protected their harem of mice-ladies.  But when there were 600 mice?  It became difficult.  The mice-ladies had to fend for themselves.  The female mice became aggressive in self-defense.  They became solitary, and lashed out at their own young, often injuring them.  It was as if the higher population density was somehow more difficult to cope with without a male protecting them.

As the social structure dissolved, it led to violent, aimless females who didn’t know how to raise their young.  The male mice (that weren’t dominant) at this point became passive, and wouldn’t defend themselves when attacked.  Females that were outcasts and not reproducing just hid as far away from the main population as possible.  The outcast females would have gotten themselves a dozen cats and endless chardonnay, but, you know, they were mice.

d2

Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

Wikipedia describes what happened next in the following chilling phrase.  “The last surviving birth was on day 600 . . . .”  Rather than the 3840 mice Calhoun calculated could cohabitate in the Universe, the maximum population hit 2200 at day 600.

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

After in an earlier Universe experiment at this stage, Calhoun observed that the (non-dominant) male rodents split into three groups, which he attributed to them being forced out of the nest while still young:

  • Group 1 – Pansexuals – These would mate with anything at any age at any time.
  • Group 2 – The Beautiful Ones – These mice were fat, sleek, healthy, but wouldn’t interact, and were ignored. Since they didn’t fight, they weren’t scared.  Like Justin Bieber, they spent most of their time just grooming themselves.
  • Group 3 – Again, this group was pansexual, but they were violent, and would mate at all costs with anything, and would cannibalize the corpses of the young, even though there was plentiful food. I had been unaware that rodents had their own Congress.

But the end state was always the same:  an entire generation rejected by mothers, unable to exhibit normal behavior, ceased to reproduce.  Those few offspring that were born in this phase of the experiment were born to mothers that ceased to have maternal instincts.

Dr. Calhoun published his findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1973.  He had a catchy, upbeat title for his article:  Death Squared.  I think that it would be fair to say that he was creeped out by what he found during his experiments.  It’s not usual for a physician and scientist to quote that cheeriest of all Bible books, Revelation, but Calhoun did so multiple times in the article.

Thankfully, people aren’t mice, right?  Here’s a snippet from Death Squared containing Dr. Calhoun’s conclusions:

For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to a species extinction.  If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow.  Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation.  Their most complex behavior will become fragmented.  Acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked.  Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviors, so does ideational generativity for man.  Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species.

“Death of the species” means us, you and me.  And Universe 25 explains in vivid detail the horror of welfare, of plenty devoid of purpose, of societal breakdown brought about by parental neglect.  I wonder if there’s a graph that shows that welfare is horrible and leads to Universe 25, but with people?  There is:

d3

Amazing how we conduct an experiment on mice and worry about the ethical consequences, and then do the same thing with people just to get re-elected.  Thankfully, Universe 25 showed that Brave Single Mothers® are just as good as an intact family.  Oh, it showed the opposite?  Never mind.

Why does Jihadi John® leave London to go fight with ISIS™?  Because free food, poor upbringing, and crowded conditions without fathers and with abusive mothers don’t make good men; those conditions make monsters.  Men want to be tested.  They want challenges.  They want purpose, and if they can’t find a good one and have no moral backing, they’ll make a bad one.  Cheetos® and Red Bull© and X-Box™ or blood and steel and difficulty?

Blood and steel and difficulty.  It will win every time.

We have to have purpose, and mothers to nurture us, and fathers to teach us what is right and what is wrong.  And the city is maybe not the best place to live, unless you enjoy alienation.  And the extinction of humanity.

Or maybe we could just get some Ruffles™ instead of the Cheetos®.  I’m sure that will solve the problem, and we can just go get that at the store.

Photo of John B. Calhoun By Cat Calhoun – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

The Feminine Mistake

“Behind the stubble and the too prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing.  And it just slew me.” – Being John Malkovich

soldier

Maybe it’s good we guys aren’t more in touch with our feelings?

Last Monday’s post (American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America) provided ample evidence of the singular goal of communism:  power.  Raw, naked power.  In order to get this power, ripping apart the fabric of society to either foster or create ethnic strife is clearly on the table.

What else could socialists attack to destabilize Western Civilization?

The family structure itself.

The family structure is difficult to attack.  It is based on thousands of years of cultural evolution, and is inherently stable.  Recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different, the family structure plays to the strengths of each.  Mothers are warm and nurturing and like margaritas.  Men are stoic and strong and willing to die to protect the family and like beer.  Mothers depend on fathers to provide for the family.  Fathers depend on mothers to be faithful and care for the hearth.  The family structure is built on mutual interdependence.  Add in extended family, and a marriage is the atom of society.

marxmom2

Enter socialism.  To make it worse than just plain socialism, it was a French socialist, Charles Fourier, who coined the word feminism in 1839.  Fourier used feminism as a concept mainly to indicate that women should be able to have lots of sex without marriage, presumably with Charles.

But even a curmudgeon (say, me) will admit, feminism started admirably enough:  the idea that women should have at least some of the same rights to education as men.  It evolved to the more advanced concepts that women should be able to have custody of children after a divorce, own property, and eventually vote, with Iran(!) granting women the right to vote before it was granted in France, probably because Charles was still sore that his idea of “getting women rights so he could have sex” scheme didn’t work.

If it would have stopped there, it probably would have been fine.  Maybe.  But it didn’t.

Fast forward to 1960:  Women’s Liberation® was the next idea that attacked the West, and it was firmly led by Marxists such as Betty Freidan who wrote The Feminine Mystique, which made lots of bored middle-class suburban housewives upset, for some reason.  Mainly because things were too good?  Stupid patriarchy, feeding us and keeping us safe and creating a prosperous economy.  We’ll show them!

waves

But the 1960’s also provided a huge technological change through the availability of the birth control pill.  Add in other leftist and feminist goals achieved such as no-fault divorce, welfare for single women with dependent children, changing family court laws to favor women in child custody, alimony, universally legal abortion, and you have fundamentally changed the institution of the family.

Attitudes towards children changed drastically at this time – look at how children were viewed in cinema:  Rosemary’s Baby was literally the devil’s spawn.  The Exorcist was exorcising a little kid.  Damien from The Omen (again, the devil’s spawn) was yet another kid, and Michael Myers from Halloween starts the movie as an evil child.  Although Generation X was the first post-pill generation, it was also the genesis of the latch-key child, the child who was less important than mother’s career or her search for self, and a generation of children that were marked by parental strife in ways that their predecessors weren’t as the divorce rate peaked in the 1970’s.  No wonder children were shown as figurative monsters in this decade.

And it was all due to the success of feminism.

The previous contract between men and women was broken.  Women no longer relied on a man, in many cases it was sold that woman could break from her oppressive husband and have freedom with her new provider and husband-replacement:  government.  Government would enforce alimony.  Government would enforce child support.  It would provide housing and food for children.  Government could stay out late and drink too much and not even call and flirt with Stacy, that tramp.  There was no need to stay in a marriage that wasn’t fulfilling in every manner or even have a husband – or so the promises went.  Actual quote from that era:  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Be unhaaaaaappy?  Get a divorce.

divorcesper1000marriedwomen1

Source Dalrock (LINK)

And, yes.  There are valid reasons for divorce.  Unhaaaaaappy?  Not one of them, which is why no-fault divorce is so corrosive.

Many people didn’t fall for the trick, and stayed married.  My parents did, probably because they realized it would require both of them working together to beat some semblance of civilization into me.  Those stable marriages provided a much greater degree of prosperity and wealth than their divorced compatriots.  Stable marriages provided great role models for stable children that didn’t go to jail.  Stable marriage provided the anchor for civic life.  Thankfully, this wave of feminism crashed on the rocks of pornography – one group decided it was horrible exploitation and should be outlawed, and the other thought that it was an expression of womanly power and should be celebrated.  You can guess which group was cuter.

Leftism itself waned during this time, and one primary exporter of communism went out of business – the USSR.  And if that was the end of feminism, well, it had already greatly hurt the viability of Western Civilization, but maybe we can heal.  So, we’re done, right?

No.  In the last few weeks the work of communism feminism continues.

agree

The first thread is the 36 page guidelines of the American Psychological Association® (APA™) that seeks to classify traditional masculinity as a mental health problem.  It reads like a bad Marxist senior thesis from an elite liberal school.  Here’s an example from the report (LINK):

“Because of the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity ideology, some men shy away from directly expressing their vulnerable feelings and prefer building connection through physical activities, talking about external matters (e.g., sports, politics, work), engaging in “good-natured ribbing,” exchanging jokes, and seeking and offering practical advice with their male friends.”

Yes.  This is how males work.  This is how males form hierarchy.  This is why we aren’t known as women.

Wait, John Wilder, you’re telling me that men and women are different?  I have been clearly told that they are exactly the same.

Dear reader, it is clear that men are different.  Why else would Gillette© have an entire commercial telling men how awful we are, which happened just last week?  Clearly, we don’t have a commercial from Playtex™ telling women not to kill their kids by drowning them in a car which would be equally as valid, but it’s still not there.  So, men and women are different, in that men are evil.  Men are so evil that a razor company, which theoretically sells to men, can spend nearly two minutes telling men how awful they are.

How bad was the commercial?  This bad:

Gillette-meme

(H/T Bookwormroom LINK)

But at least The Woman’s March which happened this weekend is non-partisan, right?  Just seeking to help women, right?

Here are excerpts from their goals (LINK):

  • We believe that gun violence is a women’s issue and that guns are not how we keep our communities free from violence.
  • We believe it is our moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system. The rate of imprisonment has grown faster for women than men, increasing by 700% since 1980, and the majority of women in prison have a child under the age of 18.
  • We believe in Gender Justice. We must have the power to control our bodies and be free from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes. We must free ourselves and our society from the institution of awarding power, agency and resources disproportionately to masculinity to the exclusion of others.
  • Immigration reform must establish a roadmap to citizenship, and provide equal opportunities and workplace protections for all.
  • All workers – including domestic and farm workers, undocumented and migrant workers – must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage.

So, we have it.  Feminism is strong and growing.  Feminism is clearly leftist.  And not just a little leftist, but full blown Marxist.  There are other implications of feminism that are flowing through society now, but those will have to wait for a future post.  But feminism continues.

areyouopressed

Strangely, I didn’t see this list on the Women’s March website. 

Again, the idea is clear:  Create a victim culture.  Create alienation with the social norms that underpin Western Civilization.  Divide a nation.

The goal?

Power.

The irony?  In every single socialist paradise, from the USSR to Cuba to China, feminism isn’t tolerated.

Why?

Once they have power, they won’t share.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.  All competing pleasures will be destroyed.  But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” – 1984

American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America

“Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by International Communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

2r300d

There are times when you write something that you think is important, and you want to get it right.  This is one of those times.  I hope you find this post worthwhile.

A few weeks ago, a very good friend sent me an article.  The article intrigued me, and I began to research the background of the article.  What I found was stunning.  The article itself is this (LINK), from Time® magazine, you don’t have to click – I’ll summarize it below.  Time™, I’ll note, very appropriately has a red border but they haven’t added the hammer and sickle yet.  Yet.

I found this article disturbing, but it really matched with the research that I’d done up to this point.   There is a cultural shift of the Left, and the Left is moving ever farther, ever faster left.  I wrote about that here (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg), which is probably what made my friend send the link.

I read Tayari Jones’ Time® magazine piece.  I found it to be an example of the outcome of the most brutal form of programming and child exploitation that I’ve seen recently, though I will admit that I try to shy away from Disney® movies.  In short, her parents were Black Nationalists (Her description, not mine.  “Black Nationalists” refers to a group that wants to either repatriate to Africa or to carve out a separate nation for blacks in the United States.) that convinced a five-year-old that Gulf Oil© was responsible for killing black children in Africa so much so that the child, Tayari, would not ride in a car fueled by Gulf Oil® to the zoo.  The piece ends with simplicity.  All to the Left is joyous and moral.  All to the Right is evil death.

Should we celebrate our tolerance and civility as we stanch the wounds of the world and the climate with a poultice of national unity?

Jones wants to further divide us, or destroy those who don’t and won’t conform to her (undefined) viewpoints.  Also, the last time the word “poultice” was used out loud was by Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies.  But her title says it all, “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground.”

That led me to wonder more about the author – what was going on in her head that led to this article?  What are her ultimate goals?  Featured prominently in the article was the Soweto Uprising, a 1976 confrontation between black students and the police, which appears in hindsight to be an unplanned 4th Generation Warfare (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means) offensive.  I hit Wikipedia to learn more.  Then, there it was, the missing link.

“No Middle Road,” an essay by Joe Slovo is listed as influential in the communist African National Congress (ANC) at that time.    The original title of the article by Jones, as enshrined in the URL, is telling:  “Moral Middle Myth.”  Obviously they are connected.  Again, from Jones:

I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse.

Okay.  Now you have my attention.  We have a person actively preaching division and implied violence whose suppressed essay title echoes an influential essay from 1976.  My next question was simple:  Who the heck was Joe Slovo?

Joe Slovo was communist, born Yossel Mashel Slovo in Soviet Lithuania who moved to South Africa with his family when he was eight.  Slovo was a deeply loyal communist who admired Stalin.  He was exiled from South Africa for 27 years and spent that time launching and orchestrating terrorist strikes in South Africa while abroad.  His operations included bombings of civilians.  Slovo did have some spare time to oversee the murder and execution of people thought to be traitors to the cause, often through putting a tire around their neck, filling it with gasoline, and setting it on fire.  The nickname for this practice was “necklacing.”  Now Slovo didn’t actually do these things himself, he merely planned them and was in charge of the organization that made them happen.  See?  His hands are clean.

commie

Slovo was such a leftist, the only thing he on the right of is this picture.

Slovo had to be an influence on Tayari Jones.  Understanding the influences can be important, besides, Tayari Jones didn’t mention exactly what she wanted done with those she opposes.  Maybe the essay she was influenced by would?

I decided to look for it on the Internet, where I can find out what was on TV on NBC® on a Sunday evening in June of 1983.  I spent more time than I’d like to admit spend sifting through Marxist websites, looking for the essay.  I went to the second page of Google© results.  Exhaustive research, indeed.  I even found where Marxists who had previously posted a copy were looking for a copy to post.  It’s like the document had been purposely scrubbed from the web.  Odd – once information hits the web, it normally flies free and multiplies.  Not this.

I finally found that the essay was included in a book, Southern Africa:  The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin/Pelican, 1976).  That’s the only place I could find it.  A seller on Amazon had a copy for less than $8, so I bought it.  It took weeks to arrive.  It was old – the pages were yellowing.  It also looked like a socialist’s mind:  it had never been opened.

What had I expected?  The usual Marxist language designed to be confusing and cult-like.

bafflegab

Whenever anyone talks like this?  They want you to nod and pretend you understand.

No.  Slovo was very clear in his writing.  Much of what Slovo writes are about conditions and history that are unique to South Africa.  And, reconstructing and solving the problems and historical injustices of South Africa, real as they were and are now, is far beyond this post.  But Slovo very clearly sets out a battle plan that is being used against the United States right now.

For instance, on page 118, Slovo states:  “To be born white means by definition to be born privileged . . . .” I hadn’t heard of the concept of “White Privilege” until 2014 or so, and then it was related back to an essay (White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) by Peggy McIntosh, who you can read more about here in this excellent essay on Quillette: (LINK).

The important idea is that McIntosh didn’t originate this divisive concept – Slovo wrote about it in his 1976 essay.  It may be even older, but this is the earliest reference I’ve found.  And Slovo specifically introduced it to open additional divisions in South Africa.

Slovo continues:  “. . . the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.”  In a further parallel with today, Slovo describes the history of struggle for liberation as “The Resistance” as he builds a case that his dreamed-of communist state can only be brought about via violence, which he calls “armed struggle,” rather than “killing people I don’t agree with, and also kids on my side, if we can get good pictures for the press.”

Slovo clearly expected and desired a war.  In the time he lived, Slovo completely misread what happened in the communist takeover in Vietnam and he was thinking that the Vietnamese had won a military victory.  They had not.  The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been defeated in almost every engagement.  The North Vietnamese won because they demoralized the United States and made the politicians feel the war was unwinnable – clearly a Fourth Generation warfare victory.

Ultimately the ANC realized, however dimly, that the deaths of black South Africans during the Soweto Uprising was their victory.  They won by appearing to be the victims.  And they won by creating a coalition of victims who would never feel that they could never be repaid for their pain – no reparations would ever be acceptable.

Page 205 contains the telling sentence:  “The struggle can no longer be centered on pleas for civil rights or for reforms within the framework of white dominance; it is a struggle for people’s power, in which mass ferment and the growing importance of the armed factor go hand in hand.”  Slovo worked to use the ethnic divisions in the country to create a situation where raw power would end up in the hands of the communists.

There we have it:  the end goal is not rights, or prosperity, or freedom, or liberty.  The end goal is naked power.

funnycom

Back to the United States, we find that could never happen here:

Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours.

Reparations for us are not only necessary because we are economically harmed, exploited and stolen from — while the violence against us is never acknowledged — but because in order for us to create and move work for Black liberation, it requires resources and MONEY. We live in a white supremacist capitalist world, so ain’t no spinning webs of lies around “money isn’t the answer.” It is because money and exploitation and power are interconnected concepts of violence. Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma.

We need housing, transportation, food, clothes, free space for meetings and work space; we need laptops, cell phones, encrypted systems for communication, solar power and LAND. Stop playing. Y’all really thought pulling up to the protest in your Hyundai was gonna be enough? Nah. You have to give us everything we need and more, because even if it means you go without — it doesn’t matter because that’s how we been living for 400+ years. Reparations will never be negotiable. So if you’re not willing to talk money, you are not here for #BlackLivesMatter as a movement or for us as individuals.

(H/T Liberty’s Torch (LINK)) Original that I tracked down is wearyourvoicemag.com.

I thought this quote was a parody until I found it at the website it was originally posted on.  It appears that she’s serious.  That’s from Ashleigh Shackelford, who seems really nice when talking to people that support her, as that passage above was a shout-out to her white supporters.  I left her spelling, emphasis, and capitalization intact.  Ms. Shackelford is the product of the same mentality of Marxist Joe Slovo and (I’m assuming) Marxist Tayari Jones.

As I wrote about earlier (Seneca’s Cliff and You), it’s far easier to destroy something than to make something.  In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight.  This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society.  Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.

MMback

He’s going to have to work awfully hard.

One thing we’ve seen – when this tactic works, ending it is difficult – look at the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  Once before in the comments on this blog people brought up the Irish Troubles and people started arguing about who was responsible in the comments.  On this blog.  In 2018.

I was certain that when the Soviet Union fell, that the world was safe.  In my mind, it should have been clear from the horrors of Cambodia, to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe winning their own freedom from oppression that the subject was closed.  Even if people couldn’t see that communism was evil, at least they could see that it didn’t work, right?

No.  Like Jason or Michael Myers communism keeps coming back.  It appears that, like Freddy Kruger, communism will keep going as long as people like Slovo, Jones, and Shackelford will fight and kill (even kill people on their own side) for power.  But only as long as there are people stupid enough to believe them.

Thankfully there’s no one like that in the United States.

aoc

 

Slovo grave picture:  Andrew Hall [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust

“Gentlemen, question mark?  Put it on the penultimate, not on the diphthongic.  You want to brush up on your Greek, Jamison.  Well, at least get a Greek and brush up on him.” – Animal Crackers

penultimate

I got a new camera.  Not at Best Buy®.  I mean, I took the picture at Best Buy©, but I got the camera elsewhere.

We had another wonderful Penultimate Day this year.  The origins of Penultimate Day are shrouded in mystery, lost to the ages in the murky past before recorded history, way back in 2012.  On December 30, 2012, sensing that the world wasn’t really going to end as the Mayan calendar expired, The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and drove two hours to buy cell phones.  Stupid Mayans, if only they could have managed the whole end-of-the-world I wouldn’t have had to go shopping.

But I did have to go shopping.  Our cell phone carrier doesn’t have a store within 100 miles, so we decided to make a day of it.  The first time we’d bought phones, we’d bought them at a Best Buy®, so we went back to Best Buy© to look at new ones.  We didn’t find something cheap what we wanted.  We decided to keep our “has an actual keyboard” Blackberries for another year or two.

After not buying a cell phone, we ate dinner at Olive Garden™.  We had joked on the way back that December 31 was the “ultimate” or last day of the year.  We used the word “penultimate” to describe December 30, since penultimate means “next to last” and has even more syllables and sounds really nerdy.  Thus, December 30 became Penultimate Day.

We’ve celebrated Penultimate Day in proper fashion five or six times now.  I think one year a snow storm might have made the trip our pilgrimage impractical, but we did go again this year.

So, to recap, Penultimate Day requires:

  • Get in the car
  • Travel two hours
  • Go to Best Buy©
  • Whatever you do: Do not buy a cell phone
  • Eat at Olive Garden™

I would like to have Penultimate Day replace New Year’s Day – I’ve never seen the attraction in a holiday that celebrates the obsolescence of millions of calendars and the shared hangover of people who spent the night getting sweaty, drinking Jägermeister©, and saying “woo” in crowds still and have no idea how they ended up in that alley with Johnny Depp, a juicy oven-warm ham, gravy, and that gun.

Some Penultimate Day observations over the years:

Best Buy™ is largely irrelevant and more so every year.  Best Buy® sells physical copies of movies, which is like putting a little bit of the Internet on a DVD® and selling it, making it more inconvenient to find when you want to watch it at 11PM.  They sell music, which is quaint.  Why buy music when I live in a universe where Pugsley’s phone did a Bluetooth© connect to The Mrs. car and we listened to whatever song we could think of on the way home, all thanks to YouTube®?

We introduced Pugsley to Dread Zeppelin on the way back home.  What’s not to love about Led Zeppelin® music sung by an Elvis™ impersonator to a reggae beat?

We left Best Buy© without purchasing anything and passed the fourth test of Penultimate Day.  No cell phone purchased.  Thankfully, the Gods of Corporate Provenance placed the Olive Garden™ pretty close to the Best Buy®.  I guess lots of people who don’t buy cell phones like Italian.  We got a table immediately and from the beginning I noticed that the service was excellent, which must mean the economy isn’t doing so well.

Wilder’s 80th Rule of Economics states that the primary effect of a great economy is horrible waiters at corporate chain restaurants.  Great waiters get hired to sell stocks or become corporate lawyers or become the district manager for a PEZ™ distribution company.  When the economy starts to stall?  Great waiters show back up and the bad ones are sent to the Cool Whip® refineries.  I’d rather have great waiters than more corporate lawyers, and remember, someone has to pump the raw Whip from deep underground and refine it into precious Cool Whip™.

The food at Olive Garden™ has gotten better every year.  Sure, it’s corporate chow whose primary virtue and charm is consistency, but at the rate of once or twice per year it’s pretty tasty.  But just before I left the restaurant, I noticed a black and white photo of a little Italian market along a crooked little road between buildings in the restroom.  I would have taken a picture of the photo to show you, Internet, but my probation decorum prohibits me from pulling out a camera in a public bathroom.  Like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Never trust a man with a camera at a urinal.  Nothing good can come of that.”

market

The picture I saw was kinda like this one.

What really got to me about that picture (the one I saw, not the one sort of like it above) was that there was no one in it, but that lots of food from the market was out in front, for anyone to take.  And there was no one around to watch the food.  It got me to thinking, what kind of society builds that kind of trust, to leave food outside where anyone could steal it with only a tiny chance that they’d be caught?

Coming from where we live in Modern Mayberry, there is great degree of societal trust.  It seems like once a month Pugsley or The Boy leaves the garage door open all night long – I can tell because there’s no way that all of the junk in there is mine – our neighbors must come and put extra tools and tarps and motorcycles on the floor.  The Mrs., after several years, has managed to convince me that unlocked cars aren’t much of an issue, either.  I do lock the front door to our house – I especially don’t trust thieves at night – they know that you’re home and are prepared to be violent.  Thankfully, in our town guns outnumber people by a 2:1 margin, so the occasional murder is about passion or drugs and not random violence.

I mentioned the picture to the family as we drove home.  We talked about trust in society.  The Mrs. had a great observation:  “Not long after we moved to Modern Mayberry, everybody knew who we were and what our business was.  In a town that size, there’s no way that you can be a bad person and people not know about it.”

She’s right.  There is crime.  You generally know who was responsible.  They’re generally caught, and generally sentenced to fair sentences, though I will say the latitude for self-defense when you’re being robbed at gunpoint is amazingly high – you don’t want to rob an armed house if people are home unless you don’t want to see how Game of Thrones® ends because, you know, early exit from breathing.

In Modern Mayberry there’s an amazing amount of agreement on ethics, religion, and the law.  That provides the backbone for Societal Trust.  Societal Trust is important – it provides:

  • Trust in neighbors to not steal
  • Trust in business partners to meet their end of the deal
  • Trust in government to be fair
  • Trust in media to be unbiased
  • Trust in elections to be honest

No, Modern Mayberry isn’t a paradise where all of these things are true.  But our government isn’t big enough for big corruption.  Neighbors don’t steal, but the kid three blocks away does, and we know who he is.  And the ladies who count the ballots take it seriously and are sincere when they thank you after having handed you your “I voted” sticker.  In high trust societies, things are easier, life is better.  People will stop and help you if you have trouble.

The size of Modern Mayberry is small, the residents have been around forever.  People are a known quantity.  Trust isn’t at the level of “When you’re here, you’re family™” – no, that level of trust is saved for Olive Garden®.  But people in Modern Mayberry do and will pitch in to help their neighbors.

olive

Behold the saturated beauty of the Olive Garden© logo.  Worship it!

I had always thought that there was anonymity in cities.  But when I spent some time in a Chicago for work I saw that it wasn’t that way at all.  The neighborhoods were tightly grouped, at least on the South Side.  The Polish?  They maintained the Polish neighborhood.  Supermarket signs were in Polish.  The Italians?  They had a neighborhood that was next to the Polish neighborhood.  Nobody crossed the street between the neighborhoods.  There was a wall, but it was invisible, and each side patrolled their own side.  If you were Polish or Italian, you knew better than to cross the line.  They managed to find harmony though minimizing cultural friction along ethnic lines, the same way most modern suburbs divvy up the land based upon economic lines.  But that’s not enough.  Some leakage across boundaries is inevitable, and some areas fracture within ethnic lines.  That’s why Chicago has such a high murder rate.

Trust consists of finding points of agreement.  In my first Penultimate post (last year) I talked about what I felt was the biggest story of the year for 2017.  In this post?  The biggest story for 2018.

We are unraveling.  Our trust is fine here in Modern Mayberry.  It’s probably good in most of the suburbs.  Heck, most of the localities and neighborhoods across the country are fine.  2018, however, has shown the greatest division in at least the last 150 years building nationally.  Here’s a previous post on this:  Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

But what will bring back our trust nationally when we don’t even agree that we should all throw off our shackles, drive to Best Buy© on December 30th and exercise our right to not buy a cell phone and then eat corporately-designed Italian food?  Unify the United States:  replace New Year’s Day with Penultimate Day, a far superior holiday!

The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means

“Don’t worry, man.  Those aren’t narcs, they’re Las Emigras; you know, the Immigration Service looking for illegal aliens.” – Up in Smoke

crossback

Who knew that would be the impact of that one little change? (H/T me.me LINK)

The Caravan on our southern border is an expression of war, and it’s abetted by collaborators right here in the United States.  Or at least in Chicago, which I hear shares a border with the United States.

I’ll explain.

We live in an era dominated by 4th Generation warfare, and have been living in that era since Vietnam.  The “Caravan” of illegal aliens on the southern border of the United States is a concerted attack on the United States using 4th Generation warfare techniques.

Huh?  What the heck is 4th Generation warfare?

Don’t worry – I’ll explain.  I’m a trained professional member of Blog Club™, and the first rule of Blog Club™ is to mention your blog whenever possible – this thing won’t market itself.  Regardless, don’t try this at home or you might end up with and adverb slammed up your philtrum.  To understand what the 4th Generation is, let’s move back in time and understand the first three generations.  These descriptions follow concepts originally developed by William S. Lind (LINK).

In the 1st Generation of warfare, Lind picks the formation of the Treaty of Ghent as his starting point.  Or maybe it was the Simpson’s Treaty of Springfield and Shelbyville.  Regardless of what treaty it was, it essentially took warfare out of the control of small feudal lords and placed primary conduct of war in the smooth clammy fish-like hands of nation-states.  Since warfare back then consisted of cannons, very inaccurate muskets, and lots and lots and lots of dudes, the height of military strategy consisted of lines and masses of men moving to fight lines and masses of men.  It (sort of) made sense.  The muskets were crappy, so everybody shooting all at the same time was a good way to kill the enemy.  Besides, the cannons were inaccurate, too, and needed big targets to shoot at.  Napoleon was certainly the best general of 1st Generation warfare, but, you know, that whole “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” started with him.  He won lots of battles, but lost the war.  Twice.

napoleon

2nd Generation warfare showed up when machine guns and accurate artillery made standing up in huge masses of dudes a certain prescription to lose the battle and also lose all of your pesky taxpaying citizens who used to be alive.  The real innovation of the 2nd Generation was “hiding” from the machine guns and artillery.  The Civil War in the United States started as a 1st Generation war, and finished with aspects of the 2nd Generation.  The trench warfare during the First World War was the height of 2nd Generation warfare, proving to be an even better way to eliminate your own citizens than standing them up in a line.

dibs

Guess that’s a last tag with Todd.

ktinder

The Kaiser is still on Myspace.  Sad.

The 3rd Generation of war incorporated mobility and the idea that the most rapid gains were based on combining infantry, armor, artillery and air power into a war of motion and position.  The German Blitzkrieg, literally meant “lightning war”, which is probably a good description for the 3rd Generation.  The French had ended 2nd Generation warfare by perfecting it – they created the Maginot Line, a series of fixed fortifications.  This forced the Germans to invent an entirely new method of war to defeat it.

During and after World War II, the United States perfected this 3rd Generation warfare – learning every lesson that the Germans could teach.  And then spending trillions of dollars to perfect an armed forces that is perfectly designed to win World War II.  Again.

panzerfest

Those panzers won’t fuel themselves!

The 4th Generation of warfare started in the latter part of the Vietnam War.  4th Generation warfare strikes at the legitimacy of the state.  Tanks, bombs, and mobility don’t count.  The idea is to win the war without (necessarily) winning any battle.  Whereas the 1st Generation of warfare arrived with the nation-state, the 4th Generation arises as people around the world cease to identify as citizens and begin to primarily identify with tribal, racial, religious or cause-based allegiances.  And yes, you can make the argument that Julius Caesar faced the same sort of guerilla tactics when he invaded Britain, but he didn’t have PNN© (Parchment News Network) showing photographs of the slaughter.  Pics or it didn’t happen.

picts

H/T:  Weapons and Warfare (LINK)

What are some examples of 4th Generation warfare?

  • The Intifada: Palestinians use children to attack Israeli soldiers, hoping for an Israeli soldier to kill the children for an awesome photo opportunity.  Palestinian leaders then launch rockets and missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools, again hoping for as much of their followers blood to be spilled as possible.  Israeli victory depends on . . . not killing these kids.
  • Mogadishu: The warlords walked the streets, surrounded by women and children, again knowing that an American Marine is not going to shoot up non-combatants to get to a bad guy.
  • Antifaâ„¢: To the mother that left her kids out in Berkeley, could you come pick them up?  They’re beating up both Antifa® and the police.
  • The Caravan.

Wait, what?  The Caravan?

Illegal aliens strike at the heart of the nation-state.  If a nation isn’t allowed to control its borders, then how is it a nation?  And there is a group of people inside the United States that are collaborators with the invasion.  They deny that borders should even exist.  An example of tweets from #abolishborders:

  • Shooting teargas at women and children is not “border security”. It’s terrorism.
  • Guess it wasn’t enough for the U.S. government to throw children in concentration camps. This is beyond inhumane. All dirt is the same, and free movement is a human right.

Military force is ineffective against an invasion like the Caravan.  Scenes of violence against unarmed people on TV is powerful propaganda against the middle portion of the United States population that can be swayed to support the aliens.  Imagine the sympathy fest as weepy single moms emote on their way to drop off Brayden, Jayden, Hayden, Aiden and Kirk to their dad who lives in a one-room apartment above the pool hall hear the news on NPR®.  How sad!

Von Clausewitz talked about war being waged on three levels:

  • Physical – Breaking stuff and killing people and taking land.
  • Mental – Making the enemy think what you want them to think. Confusing them.
  • Moral – You have to believe that what you’re fighting for is right, just and correct.

Most military thinkers through the ages (including that French dude, Napoleon) feel that the moral level of war is the most crucial.  If you think what you’re doing is wrong and evil, it’s probably a good bet you’re going to lose.  And if the people back home think you’re evil?  Well, we have Vietnam where news that was looking to support a narrative convinced the majority of the American people that we were on the wrong side morally in the war.  So, we declared victory and left the communists to win.

What if you decide you’re the bad guy?

But there are 4th Generation collaborators on the inside of the United States right now.  A primary organizer of the Caravans is the United States based organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras.  Started by leftist Emma Lozano, this organization is also affiliated with La Familia Latina Unida (LFLU, “The United Latin Family”), and Ms. Lozano is virulently against the United States, noting, “We ride for freedom from our oppressors and we don’t say, ‘please, accept us, we are good workers,’ and make contributions, and wave the U.S. flag.  We know our history – half of the entire United States was originally Mexico.  We have every right to be here.”

According to an email obtained by the Washington Times:

Lozano told supporters that “we will march and run our own Latino independent candidate for president of the United States.” When a staffer for Rep. Gutierrez announced that the congressman wasn’t interested in running for president, Lozano responded that “we’re obligating him to run, we’re not asking him. We’re in a war and when you’re in a war you fight. We’re drafting him.”

You can find much more about Emma here (LINK) or through a casual Google® search.  Based on everything I can find about Ms. Lozano, I would expect that she’s in favor of a racially-based communism that results in the destruction of the United States as we know it and lots of free stuff for people she likes.  And lots of concentration leisure camps for the rest of us.  Free RV parking!

Ms. Lozano is a general in a 4th Generation war.  She is actively seeking to abolish the United States – by directly replacing its people with people that she likes better.  And these activists seek photo opportunities that allow them to establish moral superiority.  I watched footage where a Mexican police officer said (more or less, I’m going from memory):  “Please, please don’t put your women and children in front like this man,” pointing to an activist, “tells you to do.  It’s dangerous.  And he doesn’t care about you or your children.  I’m begging you, don’t put your children up front.”  Pueblo Sin Fronteras is certainly willing to sacrifice your children for a cool photo.

How an organization that encourages and abets breaking the law (Pueblo Sin Fronteras) can operate and not be indicted based on conspiracy charges is beyond me – if this were a right-wing organization I believe the organizers would have been taken to the International Space Station just so they could be shoved out of an airlock as a lesson to others that embarrassing the state is simply not an option.  I guess that I’m forced to conclude that Pueblo Sin Fronteras is doing exactly what government wants them to do.

These activists want pictures of children that were bloodied and killed at the hands of the United States government, and will stop at nothing to get them.  They want to break down the moral will of the United States so that open borders are allowed.  Rather than attempting to take over Dallas at the head of an army, they want to influence the families of the people who live in Dallas to surrender as they never would to what this really is:  a leftist invasion based on an ideology of open borders.

americaclosed

But the logic for open borders is easy to refute:

  • How many people would move to the United States if they could? The answer is:  several billion.  This is simply not realistic.  Where would we keep them?  Does California have a closet and a spare bedroom we don’t know about?
  • Moving all the Guatemalans here doesn’t make Guatemala better – it just makes the United States into Guatemala. Where I live, nobody locks their doors.  In Guatemala?  Locked doors aren’t enough.  You can even argue that, after a point, it does the people who move here no benefit as the system breaks down and the benefits they looked for disappear.  This may be the reason that California is the New Mississippi – the greatest poverty rate in the nation.
  • The values and cultural norms that made the United States great aren’t the values of the invaders. Conscious or not, invasion by an unassimilated alien culture leads to the destruction of the American culture and norms.  And the big value generation-device that our economy has been for 120 years ceases to work.  We become poor.

In order to win this war:

  • The aliens must be gently, firmly, and quickly be sent home.
  • We must stop supporting them with cash if they are here.
  • We must make life here so unhelpful that they voluntarily deport themselves.
  • We must not give their nations cash if they keep coming here.
  • We must stop cash flowing from individuals to their home country.
  • We can help their home countries to build industries and meaningful jobs.
  • If the people like, heck, we could come in and run the country for them since they seem to suck at running countries and we seem to be good at it. Is illegal immigration really the best argument for colonization ever?
  • We must win at the mental and moral levels.

We are in a war.  Are we ready to fight?  Because I don’t think that the 5th Generation of war will be quite as nice as the 4th . . . .

Civil War – The Necessary Conditions

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

leegrant2

I hear that Robert E. Lee was voted “Most Likely to Secede” in his West Point class.

A civil war is like a fire.  It consumes the energy and emotions of those around it and leaves destruction, desolation and debt in its wake – just like my first marriage.  But I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about civil wars and the necessary conditions for one.  After thinking about it, I’ve decided that a model for a civil war is fire.

firetriangle

For a fire to burn, it needs three things:  fuel, oxygen, and a spark which in turn creates the continuous burning reaction.  If you’re missing any one of those things, you simply do not have a fire.  An example – The Mrs. and I had a clay fireplace we used out on our deck (this was a long time ago – like during Bush II).  One day I was trying to start a fire in the fireplace, and the fire wouldn’t catch – the wood would just smolder – there was smoke, but no flame.  The reason for that was that the wood was a bit wet.  A-ha!  That’s okay.  I must have some charcoal starter liquid.  I looked in the garage.  All out.

But there was gasoline for the mower in the garage.

I poured just a tiny bit down the chimney of the fire place.  A tiny bit.  An itsy bitsy amount right onto the hot coals from the fire I’d been trying to make.  I looked down the chimney as I dropped a match into the pit.  Suddenly, a flame shot out of the chimney and washed over my face.  I had a beard at that time, and as the flame hit the beard it melted and burnt into kind of a single hair shell on my chin.  It smelled as good as burned blonde beard kebab.  Thankfully, no one was at home, so there were no witnesses when I took the scissors and chopped the welded chunks of congealed beard hair off.

It turns out that gasoline boils at a really low temperature, and when I poured the gasoline down the chimney, it landed on the hot wood that I’d been trying to burn and immediately turned from liquid into hot gasoline vapors.  The hot gasoline vapors were the fuel, fully mixed with the oxygen as they rose up the chimney.  All they needed was that spark, and all the energy stored in the hot gasoline vapors ignited at the speed of sound through the chimney in a de-beardifying whoosh.

But this is a model of Civil War not an ad for the use of flame as a shaving aid.  What allows a civil war to start?

  • Fuel – The differences in our opinions are shown pretty well in the most recent survey done by Pew, which is reproduced right below through the power of Internet sorcery. The Right is moving farther right.  The Left is moving farther left.  And in both cases the degree of overlap drops.  This increasingly small overlap between left and right means we’re not even talking the same language.  We look at the same picture, the same news story and react in entirely opposite ways.  The more fuel that builds up (generally) the greater the energy released when the fire starts.  Look to see a lot of hipster beards on fire.

pewthree

  • Spark – A spark is an event that’s bold, audacious, emotional, and one that means there’s no going back, things will never be the same again. These are often followed up by escalations, each one following the narrative of the split (the fuel for the fire) of the Godly and good us versus the evil baby-hating them:  shelling Fort Sumter; Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his Legions; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and that night that Donald Trump poured sugar into Hillary Clinton’s gas tank.

rubicon2

  • Oxygen – This is required for the fire to go – it feeds the chemical combustion. In this civil war/fire analogy, oxygen is symbolic of the opposing governmental structure.  In the Revolutionary War it was the Congress of the States that declared the war.  In the Civil War?  The Confederate States organized and met.  Even Caesar had at his disposal the governmental structure of the Legions that he commanded and the means to provide for them.  In all cases, a civil war needs a governmental structure to move from isolated insurrection to true war.

government

In 2018 I think there’s a lot of fuel built up – the division between Left and Right is increasing.  Twitter®, the Fake News (Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.) and the concentrated attempts to deplatform entire viewpoints (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) are examples.  The Left is even rioting against free speech – the very thing the Left rioted to allow in the 1960’s.

I think the fuel is currently pretty wet – it’s inhibited because people just have so much darn stuff.  Who wants to go down to fight Antifa© when you’ve got to get to work the next morning so you can earn money to make payments on your new F-150 and you’ve got beer in the fridge and Netflix® on the television, which is probably more fun than punching smelly hippies?

Even Antifa™ has to get home early so they can keep working at Starbucks® and Mom still has them on a curfew.  But make no mistake – they have no interest in finding common ground – they want to fight.  And they don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say.  From CNN:

“Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.”  So, other people’s speech is violence, and their violence is only speech?

antifa(H/T AR15.COM – warning, naughty words)

But a prolonged economic downturn will dry the fuel out quickly.  Janis Joplin taught us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (and that Bobby McGee could really sing the blues), and we won’t have Civil War 2.0 until people have nothing to lose.  The saving grace for many years has been the all the “stuff” that we have.  Before then we’ve had a fairly homogeneous population with (for the most part) deeply shared values.

We have sparks everywhere – from marches and riots to new laws and elections – things that drive both sides crazy.  These will intensify during an economic downturn, and will be played up in the press.  Conflict sells ads.

We are, however, missing the oxygen – the governmental structure that benefits from the war.  The current governing powers aren’t threatened by Antifa®.  They’re not really even threatened by Trump, since very few of his accomplishments will outlast his time in office – Supreme Court Justice appointments being a notable exception.  The swamp remains intact.  Government certainly isn’t threatened by the very far right, since two out of three Klan members (all, what, 1000 of them?)  are FBI agents or informants anyway.  And individual states have been more-or-less neutered since the Civil War changed the nature of the agreement between federal and state governments.

Civil war?  No.  Not unless the economy worsens, and not unless there’s a structure that benefits “the other side” – and who on Earth would benefit from a civil war in the United States?

aliens

Notes:

I am not the first use the fire triangle analogy when it comes to war – I found a reference to a Major Patrick Pascall who used a similar model in a 2009 paper to describe the insurgency in Iraq (LINK).  As far as I can tell, though, I’m the first to use it in this manner.  Yay, me!

Fire Triangle By Wikimedia User:  Gustavb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, snarky comments:  me.

Trump: The Last President?

“President Camacho: ‘Number one:  We’ve got this guy Not Sure. Number two: He’s got a higher IQ than any man alive, and Number three: He’s going to fix everything.’” – Idiocracy

lastpresidentbook

You never want to make the call too early.  By the way, in this book, there is a minor character (cabinet secretary) by the name of the name of the Last President was Pence.  Oooh, goosebumps.

Donald Trump may be the last President of the United States.

There will certainly be people that will follow him that will use the title, but their allegiance won’t be to the electorate as a whole – their allegiance will be only to the Left.  As we see in California now, the entire mechanism of state government has switched to a uniform Leftist government – the California Republican Party is as potent a political force as a group of twelve year old My Little Pony® fans at an MMA© event.

The Governor isn’t the Governor of California, especially when he won in a 57% to 43% victory.  The Governor is the Governor of the Left, and will represent the Left, not the electorate in general.  The swing vote, which has moderated elections nationally is absent in California.  The swing vote means that the most uninterested people have the levers of power.  That category of people simply does not exist in California.

Party leader?  Sure.  Governor?  Well, in name only.  In reality, the recently elected Governor is the Democratic Party leader.

Recently, we’ve had contests at the national level for President – the swing voter makes a difference.  Could McCain have won in 2008?  No, not really, mainly because no one liked him.  Could Romney have won in 2012?  Maybe, but it would have been like electing your middle school principal as President.  The fact that Trump did win in 2016 was relatively surprising to me.

Trump’s victory did expose part of the genius of the founding fathers.  Despite the popular vote being in favor of Clinton, Trump concentrated on and won the Electoral College.  The Electoral College isn’t a genius move because Trump won – the Electoral College was a guarantee of the essential promise of the Constitution to the States that the small states wouldn’t get dragged around like a St. Bernard’s chew toy (small states hate slobber), but it also provided a trap against voter fraud and a mechanism for nearly instant legitimacy of the elected President.  In order to cheat on a national election, you’d have to cheat in state after state after state.  Cheating in New York City or even statewide in Texas alone won’t do elect a fraudulent President.  And while it’s uncommon it’s not unheard of: Trump is the fifth President to be elected by winning the Electoral College without winning the popular vote.

But on election night 2018, Bill Kristol tweeted:

‘I’ve always disliked the phrase “demography is destiny,” as it seems to minimize the capacity for deliberation and self-government, for reflection and choice. But looking at tonight’s results in detail, one has to say that today, in America, demography sure seems to be destiny.’

I rarely agree with anything that Kristol has to say, so I think he might have been on Ambien™ when he tweeted that.  But he’s right.  And Bill Kristol being right makes me certain he was on Ambien®.  The Right faces a serious headwind in future elections.  A few data points:

  • Before the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, California was reliability Republican. After that law passed?  California dived quickly into the Leftist camp – the primary driver being the rise of first generation citizens being allowed to vote – a group that strongly skews Leftist, by 3 to 1 or more.  When I was a kid, California was a shining economic model of progress.  Now it’s a poster-child for income inequality and poverty.  So California’s got that going for it.

California

  • Florida has one major group that will impact future elections – newly-minted predominantly (5 to 1 Leftist) ex-felon voters approved by a Florida constitutional amendment just approved this election. 5 million ex-felon voters, which using extremely conservative math nets the Left 400,000 more votes.  Donald Trump won by 110,000 or so votes.  Additionally, we’ve seen that Florida is a mess after a close vote.  With lots of “ballots I just found in the pocket of my other coat,” if you know what I mean.  Wink, wink.

florida vote

  • Texas is moving Left.   Yes, Cruz beat Beto, but those demographics that Kristol talked about appear here strongly, and I wrote about it before (The Fall of Texas and the Coming One Party State).  Texas doesn’t turn Left in 2020 unless the economy really, really tanks.  Probably 2024.  Certainly 2028.  2032?  Expect posters to Stalin©.

texas

  • The economy. It ran on 0% interest rates for years.  Now that the Fed is attempting to raise rates?  At some point the party is over and the economy will hit a recession – probably before 2020.  If Trump is lucky?  A recession in 2019 would be good.  Like right away.  Presidents don’t do well running for re-election in the middle of a recession.  It’s like trying to lick a flagpole at -40°F (-40°C) – it’s embarrassing to be there and requires the fire department to save you.  Ask Jimmy Carter.

collapse

  • The process of drawing legislative voting districts to benefit your party is as old as the Republic. It even has a name, gerrymandering, named after Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts when they said the strange congressional district he created looked like a salamander.  Gerry+salamander=gerrymander.  Or maybe it was his wife, whose nickname was “Lizard Lips.”    Republicans have 33 governorships, so they’re getting pretty good at drawing districts that would make Gerry proud.  But the Left is using judges to undo the creative districting, which makes it rougher to gain a majority in the House of Representatives.

gerrymeme

Many of these changes are permanent and spread to other states.  Folks leaving California because it’s too much like California move to wonderful places such as where my brother John Wilder lives.  (There’s a longer version of why my brother’s name is John Wilder, but let’s just assume our parents weren’t very imaginative.  We at least have different middle names.)

What happens when they move there?  Well, being normal Californians, the first thing they do is get on the Homeowners’ Association boards, because people from California really like telling other people what to do.  My brother attended a meeting of his board one night.  Sage McUnicorn, who had recently moved from California, motioned that the new trash company collect recyclables every week.

My Brother John:  “Don’t they charge extra for that?”

Sage O’Smurf:  “Namaste, yes, but it is good for the planet.  It will help us protect Mother Earth.  It’s only a few hundred dollars a year.  Don’t we all love the Earth that much?”

My Brother John:  “You’re saying that you want to charge every person in this neighborhood extra money to pick up newspapers and plastics that the trash company just dumps in a landfill?  (That’s what the trash company was doing then. – JW)  How is it responsible to force another person to pay for your views?”

Sage MacRainbow:  “The oracles tell us that is how it is done.  Never pay for your own convictions.  That could get expensive!”

My brother’s argument actually swayed the HOA.  They didn’t end up with a recyclable fee.  But the point remains:  Californians who leave California because it is, well, California, want to move to new places to make them just like California when they get there.  It’s like when zombie bites you, but you get a lecture, too.

sip

I took this picture in California in February of 2016.  I hear now the water is recycled right out of the toilet to the water fountains.  I guess that’s why I only drank wine when I was out there. 

Trump in 2020 has headwinds against him.  In 2024, however, all of the demographic changes have continued another four years.  Texas may be as permanently left as California has become, and Florida may have joined it, if Florida can figure out how a pocket calculator works by then.  Without Florida?  Re-election looks grim even in 2020.

If every future election has a foregone conclusion, that leaves the President as a single party leader of the Left.  And in Washington D.C. the Left has been consistently more disciplined on voting, though they do tend to form circular firing squads on policy.  Given the thin Senate majority now, another decade of demographic change might allow truly uniform and consolidated power as all legislative bodies are captured along with the Presidency.  And at that point the United States is a de facto single party state, with a minority party that is just for show.  A list of single party states that look like this includes such human rights wonders and great vacation spots as Turkey, South Africa, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.  I mean, who wouldn’t love to live in those places?

Frankly, my favorite government is grid lock.  The government is best that can’t figure out what it wants to do because it’s fighting with itself, because it then manages through sheer incompetence to leave you alone.  Maybe that could be my slogan in 2024 – “Wilder, for the ineffective and confused government you deserve!”

Next Monday . . . we’ll look more how this sets up a Civil War.  But smile.  We have Netflix® now, right?

netflix

Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

“Zed?  Zed’s dead, Baby.” – Pulp Fiction

dead news

So if the Internet is a motorcycle and Bruce Willis is original thought, at some point . . . we should just go drinking and stop thinking.

How much of your news . . . isn’t news?  Turns out, a lot.

It starts out, for me, with a video on fiction writing:

The international-selling author Rob Kroese (buy his stuff, it’s awesome LINK) published a link to a YouTube (more about them later) video on Twitter®.  This video is below; it’s exceptional advice for writers of fiction.  In it, Trey and Matt point out that there simply must be causation in a story to make it pay off for the reader.  A story isn’t just a sequence of events that happen and are randomly connected via the conjunction “and” – no.  A story is a sequence where one event leads to the next, and there is causality.  It’s not “and” it’s “because.”  That’s the reason that Pulp Fiction is so awesome.  Tarantino sets up a sequence of well thought-out stories and makes you, the movie goer, unjumble them to discern the real causality that underlies the plot.  The genius is making you find the “because” and “therefore” of the film.  The best part is that it only becomes clear at the end of the film how it all works together.  Sure, it’s a one-trick pony thing to do, but it was masterfully done in Pulp Fiction, enough so Tarantino can still coast off that genius for decades.

Trey and Matt, please go back and watch early episodes of South Park©.  It’s not too late to Make South Park™ Funny Again:  #MSPFA.  Check out the guys from the Venture Brothers® – they manage to do it.  Especially all the Rusty Venture stuff.

Pulp Fiction is a movie where we were looking for causality to bring it all together for us.  However, Rusty Guinn, writer extraordinaire from the excellent site Epsilon Theory (LINK) made an outstanding connection.  He has for some time been talking about Fiat News.  Here it is in his own words (emphasis in the original):

The Washington Post is in the fiat news business. They are trying to influence our political process to their institutional benefit, just like the Wall Street Journal and every other mainstream media institution is in the fiat news business. The Washington Post is never a foe to a status quo American regime, regardless of which party is in the White House, as the regime bestows on them the authority to issue fiat news. Still, if you trust the Washington Post, you are no less a fool.

The fiat news business is booming. As a result, the counterfeit news business is booming, too. And if the history of fiat money and counterfeit money is any guide, we ain’t seen nothing yet. (LINK)

 

So the short version of this is:  a good story is poor news.  What makes Pulp Fiction great, what makes spy stories exciting is that narrative.  I don’t need that narrative with my news.  I don’t want to hear the newscaster come on the radio and say, “It’s 38°F outside (291°C) because global warming is FAKE NEWS.”  I also don’t want the newscaster to say, “It’s a scorching 102°F (-391°C) because TRUMP WANTS YOU TO DIE OF GLOBAL WARMING!”  Yet I hear similar stories about the weather all of the time.  “Hurricanes increasing because of global warming,” when I heard nothing of the sort about hurricanes declining because of not global warming in the relatively hurricane-free recent years.   Even weather events are co-opted for Fiat News.  Every story that can be remotely part of the narrative is brought in.

And before you complain about my temperature conversions, the metric system is for countries that haven’t put people on the Moon.  Nanner-nanner.

uncomfortable news

Oh, that’s where Fiat News comes from.

It’s especially stark where I live.  On my morning drive, I have the option of a radio station playing music from when Nixon was president, a station with programming from the American Family Network™ (Radio Free Jesus), and NPR™ (National Progressive Radio).  I opt for silence most days.  The bias in the reporting is like chewing on aluminum foil covered fingernails that just screeched on a chalkboard.  At least American Family Network© is open and upfront about their bias:  they are right leaning, and hate abortion, communism, Nancy Pelosi and any book written since Eisenhower was president.  There is zero pretense of a bias-free story.

NPR® is worse.  Whereas the American Family Network™ is open and honest about their bias, NPR© pretends that it is actual journalism.  A case in point:  on an NPR© segment during the program All Things (Leftists Agree With) Considered from a while back, there were two stories that ran in sequence.  The first one was a blatant attempt to drum up sympathy for people who had broken the law and were continuing to break the law to be in this country.  The second story was about how horrible a certain group was because there needed to be a law to stop their behavior (it involved guns, I think, and no one was hurt).  NPR™ was consistent in its narrative – an adherence to liberal principles, even in what were framed as news stories.  What was a crime, shouldn’t have been.  What isn’t a crime, should be.  In news segments.  NPR© won’t say it, but they hate Trump, also Trump, Republicans that aren’t the Most Recent Republican To Do Something Trump Didn’t Like, and also Trump.

bonniesnews

Bonnie thinks NPR® is news.  Don’t be like Bonnie.

And NPR© will interview right-wing politicians, and will ask them blazingly tough questions about their policies and positions and any inconsistency is ruthlessly followed up.  As it should be in an honest news organization.  But a left-wing politician?  The questions are all sympathetic, and the occasional vague answer to the equally occasional probing question is accepted without follow up.

NPR:  “But Senator, didn’t your bill allow a million deaths a year due to the unforeseen consequences of unlicensed PEZ® operations?”

Liberal Senator:  “Well, no, people die all the time.  PEZ™ deaths are a thing that happens.  But smokers, oh, my, and look at that shiny object!”

NPR:  “Very shiny, Senator.  Tell us, how is your cat doing?”

And ever notice that anything Trump says is “unfounded” whereas anything that a liberal says is, well, not burdened by an adjective?  It’s like when The Mrs. indicates that I smoked a cigar in the basement.  I reply “That’s an unfounded assertion!” while I make sure my cigar butt is safely thrown away.

unfounded

Yeah.

And I see this in print, too.  Especially now.  The hallmarks of this Fiat News are obvious now that they’re pointed out.  Like the Gimp, you can’t unsee them.

But you can count them.  And Rusty Guinn did.

fiatnews

Rusty (who I believe is no relation to the Venture family) started with a variety of news sites.  As a control, he selected several sites that aren’t news sites to use as a comparison.  Vox.com™, for instance, has a mission to explain the news.  It’s partisan.  And that’s okay.  It’s not a news site.  Neither is the National Review®.  Or the New Yorker©.  The biggest use of the “Fiat News” words (the list of words like but, because, therefore, is at Epsilon) was from Vox.  So Rusty set the Vox as a unit of measure.  One day, I hope, the Wilder will be a unit of measure.  A fundamental intrinsic value of the universe – it’s the measure of smugness that is so great that the ego cannot escape.  What kind of hole would that be called?  Hmmm.  Oh.  Please don’t say that in the comments.

But back to Rusty.  His amazing graph speaks for itself:

Updated-Chart

Why?  (And I can ask that because this isn’t a news site, and never has been, unless you’re as addled as an abacus adding algebra alumna from Alabama.)

Bias sells.  The Washington Post® and New York Times™ are published to serve highly liberal people in highly liberal environments – so liberal that every morning they have a privilege review and spank the person with the most privilege, unless that person likes spanking.  And then they don’t spank them.  The Post® and Times™ are abetted by a journalistic corps that is 95% or more left-wing and comprised of the children of liberals that weren’t smart enough to make it into law school.  The readers and journalists want to hate Trump.  They want to write and read how awful he is doing.  They want to hope that he’ll be impeached and then sent off to that hell that they feel he so richly deserves next week.  This week would be better, but they’d be willing to wait until next week.

royalewithcheesenews

Fox News® and Breitbart™ rely on the same principle, but to a different audience, namely the right-wing.  They want to hope that Hillary will be indicted next week and sent off to that hell that they feel she so richly deserves.  But they have jobs, so they can wait a month or so for the show, as long as it’s on YouTube®.

And all of it pulls in viewers on the Internet and television, and causes newspapers to be purchased.  Eyes and money flow to the business.  In short?

It sells.

It sells because people like to see that others mirror their bias.  They like feeling like part of that group (liberals more than conservatives, but that’s an r/K thing (LINK)).  And the more biased?  The better.  They want that emotion.  They want to feel that they are just, and someone will right the wrongs.  They want . . . to feel hate for the other side.  My journalism teacher from high school would punch me straight in the face if I were to write news stories with such bias.  And she likes me, even though she’s a liberal and knows that I have all of the sympathy of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun all rolled up into one.

I watch YouTube® videos while I work out climbing stairs on an unending staircase that Robert Plant assured me would lead to Heaven.  I’ll watch videos that pertain to my political interests some days when those stupid cats have stopped doing cute things because it’s a holiday.

narrative

But I noticed a trend.  If I was watching a right-wing video, pretty soon I was seeing that the next video up was further right-wing.  Further biased.  If I watched that, the list would pretty soon be in amazingly right-wing territory.  On the other side of the aisle, I imagine that someone who was watching a video on how free health care was good would, after a few iterations, be looking at YouTube© videos that supported Antifa™ as the neatest thing since Venezuelan Stalinism® and looking to create camps to re-educate corn farmers from Iowa into progressive Marxism® and collective farming.

Huh?

Yeah, YouTube® knows that emotions drive viewing.  And emotions are driven by extremes.  So its algorithm, purposefully or not, drives viewers to extreme viewpoints to get more video views.  The Pugh study on political views supports this (LINK).

The media is purposefully encouraging the split in our country.  Mainly for revenue and to sell papers, but also partially because they believe it’s the right thing to do.  Thankfully this always ends well, and as a commenter, GSS, on a previous post has noted, this division isn’t new – it’s occurred many times and may be the norm during the life of our Republic.

It’s not like a newspaper could take us to war, is it?

themaine

And if you liked today’s selection here are some more posts along the same theme.

Enjoy, even with dinner!

Ringo

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax-free.”  – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

pezpieceofaction

This is what happens when you don’t pay your PEZ® bill – they send in the enforcers.

I had a comment from James Dakin in the comment section the other day that really made me think, which is as painful as it sounds.  James runs the excellent blog Bison Prepper (LINK) and is also a prolific author – he’s got bunches of books on Amazon.  His comment was especially nice, because it made me realize that from the outside this blog might look a little, well, schizophrenic.  In one post I’m talking about a future American Civil War, and in another I’m talking about A.I. taking the place over.  What I realized after the comment and stepping back is that in many of these posts what I really do is look at alternative futures.  I try to do it in a dispassionate way.  I’ll not live to see lots of the things I’m predicting, and, like your mom’s butt, hope not to see some of them.  No rational human being wants to see another Civil War, but yet the possibility of that next Civil War exists, and is growing every day.  Also like your mom’s butt.

So, this comment made me step back and realize what I’d been building over time with many of my posts – a range of predictions or projections of alternate futures, which fits in well with the purpose of the blog – these are big picture thoughts – really big picture – it’s harder to be bigger picture than “what is the ultimate future of humanity.”  I then outlined what I’ve written so far, and realized I had gaps about futures I hadn’t talked about.  Those missing alternate futures will be the subject of a few Friday posts from time to time.  I’ll end it up with a capstone piece where I dust off my crystal ball and determine with amazing exactitude the likelihood of any of these futures taking place.  I won’t be doing these every week – I’ve got too many other topics I really want to get to, but I’ll finish eventually next year.  Thanks for the comment that made me realize this, James!

None of these futures is set, but some are more likely than others.  For those playing the home version of our game, you can make your own scorecard out of moist Post-It™ notes, coffee creamer cartons from the break room and green Sharpies®.  Oh, and you’ll know when to use the thumbtacks.

Today’s future is . . . Galactic Empire.

Galactic Empire is the future we’ve all been told to expect, or at least were told to expect when the Soviets were making East German women as feminine as Bruce Jenner.

pezeastmeme

See, the East German women’s gymnastics team looked no different than the US team. 

Galactic Empire encompassed strong men leading gleaming starships to rescue scantily clad women from danger in sixty minutes, at least weekly, and daily in re-runs.  But the idea was older than that.  Going back to the pulp magazines of the 1920’s to the 1960’s, Galactic Empire wasn’t just a plywood set – it was manifest destiny.  Humans were designed to go out into that, ahem, “Final Frontier” and make everything safe for democracy, even if we had to defeat the Space Nazis®.  Yes, there were always Space Nazis® – I think Hollywood was never satisfied defeating Germany just the one time.  The end result of all of this striving and endless Nazi-vanquishing is that humanity ends up with planetary homes on dozens to thousands of worlds.

pezstmeme

When Space Nazis® take you prisoner, they turn up the heat and make sure you’re shirtless and as sweaty as your mom at a paternity test.

Why would we have a Galactic Empire?

Mankind has, for all of the history that we can find, been in an expansion mode.  Bands grew into tribes which grew into nations which grew into kingdoms which grew into empires.  It’s hardwired into us.   And part of why it might be hardwired into us might be the desire to spread our genetics as far and wide as we can.  As individuals and as cultures we have a primal need to for continuity – I want my grandchildren to take my genetics, my ideas, my values into the future.    And space is vast – what wonders await us?  How many places can we set up little paradises in space?  Will there be hot green chicks from Orion?

We’ve even categorized what these Galactic Empires look like – and a Soviet was the one to do it.  Nikolai Kardashev came up with the scale in 1964, and came up with three categories:

  • Type 1 – Harness all the energy hitting your home planet.
  • Type 2 – Harness all the energy from your star.
  • Type 3 – Harness all the energy from your galaxy.

We’re type zero – we haven’t managed to harness every bit of energy hitting the Earth.  Physicist Michio Kaku has stated he thinks we’re 100-200 years out from this goal.  I think he’s just making that up with no particular backing.  Just because Michio has a good handle on theoretical physics doesn’t mean he can even run his cell phone, let alone project civilizational development across centuries regarding multiple complex systems, cultures and projected technological progress.  Oh, wait, he lives in New York.  They know everything.

What’s required for a Galactic Empire?

  • New Physics (Maybe) – You can move across the galaxy within the span of a human lifetime. It’s actually conceptually not that difficult at all.  Just move really, really fast.  The faster you move, the slower that time moves (for you).  Light takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy.  You could do it in a dozen years.  I’ve even calculated how fast you’d have to go:  Very close to the speed of light.  How close?  Within 10* miles per hour of the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second.  And if you did it in that 10 year span, 100,000 years would still have passed on Earth.  At least Blockbuster® is out of business so you don’t end up with the largest return fee in history.

blockbuster

Spoke too soon!

  • Excess Energy – Starships require energy – vast amounts. The starship (weighing a mere 80,000 pounds at rest mass) above would require 19X1024 Joules* of energy to get up to speed.  Sounds like a lot?  It is.  It’s the entire energy equivalent of every barrel of oil produced on Earth this year.  For the next 34 million* years – or enough oil to fill a hole the size of New Mexico a mile deep*, or almost enough to cover Kim Kardashian’s butt.  It’s a scale that’s incomprehensible to humans.  There is literally NOTHING I can compare it to so it makes any sense.  And that’s just the fuel.  It would still need oxygen to burn in space, unless they left the vacuum off.
  • Back to New Physics – Just about every movie that deals with space travel uses warp drive or worm holes or some sort of jump drive. Why?  Space is just too large and requires astonishing amounts of energy.  Does this physics exist?    Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre has set the (mathematical) groundwork for a . . . warp drive.  He said was inspired by Star Trek™.  Really.  The way the warp drive works to move you quickly across the universe is simple – you cheat.  You shrink the space in front of your ship, and stretch it behind your ship.  It’s like running a forty yard dash in one step.  See?  Cheating.

pezship

Here is what warp drive might look like.  Really.

  • Willpower – NASA (pronounced naaaay-saw) originally produced more enough rockets for three more missions to the Moon. They got cancelled when Congress saw a shiny new car they wanted to buy.  The follow on Mars mission slated for that distant future of 1991 was cancelled when the nuclear rocket engine was cancelled.  We have to wait for Elon Musk, I guess, I know that he and his rockets can both get high.
  • Economic Surplus – To invest in space requires a civilization with sufficient extra productive capacity, I mean, someone has to dig out New Mexico to store the oil. All kidding aside – a sustained program for spaceflight and technological improvements would be required lasting at a minimum for decades.  And more likely the program would have to last for more than a century.  And I can’t keep my attention in one place long enough to . . . oh, a bird.

*I really calculated those numbers – they’re not made up.

Why we might not have a Galactic Empire.

  • Space is hard. Every time we look space gets more complex.  Huge speeds.  Massive amounts of force.  Complex systems that all must function.  Then you add in long term effects of weightlessness on the human body, and the hard radiation that our life-giving Sun blasts out into the Solar System.  The good news?  I keep all my stuff on Earth.
  • Space is not politically popular. I remember reading a magazine that was geared towards construction, I picked it up one day at an office.  There was an editorial cartoon showing the space shuttle, with the obvious background showing that we needed to spend more money on . . . sewers.    Everybody wants those dollars.  And, I’ll note that for years now the United States has had zero ability to put people into space, instead relying on Russian technology that is more or less Vietnam-war era.  Also like your Mother.  Oh, wait, she really might be that old.

pezmoon

This was an actual cartoon just after we landed men on the moon.  Buzzkill!

  • That warp drive thing – it may depend on stuff that may not even exist. Exotic matter?  Negative energy?  We have seen no clues that this stuff even exists.  So maybe Roddenberry was just all about the ladies and spinning a good yarn.
  • Energy requirements are vast. Unless the warp drive thing is real, well, we’d have to come up with an alternative propulsion system.  Say . . . PEZ®?    We could create a PEZ© drive.  But for it to work, we would also need to create ANTI-PEZ™.  ANTI-PEZ© is just PEZ™, but made of your normal, garden variety anti-matter.  Unlike pesky oil, when you mix a PEZ™ with and ANTI-PEZ™ they annihilate each other, turning their mass into pure energy.  The good news is that for our starship example above it will only take 110* years to make it at the current PEZ™ production rate of 3,000,000,000 PEZ™ per year.  So, that’s 55 years of PEZ™, and 55 years of ANTI-PEZ™.  I suggest we do the PEZ™ first, since we have absolutely NO idea how to make ANTI-PEZ™.  Note that in this example, I’m assuming we don’t have to transport the mass of the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ with the mass of the ship, and that the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ reaction is 100% effective in adding energy to the ship.  These aren’t outrageous assumptions given that I’ve just postulated a spaceship powered by PEZ™.  Also?  No way to stop the ship other than hitting something.  And when you’re travelling at 99.99999712%* the speed of light?  That might leave a mark.

PEZ

pezstfuelmeme

  • Timescales are vast. So, unless we spend vast amounts of energy, it will take years.  And years.  And that doesn’t seem like our Galactic Empire at all.

It’s not that a Galactic Empire is impossible, it’s just not horribly likely at this point.  Who could go without PEZ® for 110 years???

*Again, real numbers.  I really did do these calculations because it amused me to turn PEZ™ into a starship propellant.

What other alternatives that get us into space without a Galactic Empire?

All of these are potential ways to get into space.  Note that we might have colonies, but we’d never have foreign exchange students or a Death Star®.

  • Seeding – We could send starships filled with stuff to make babies out to new planets. And then?  Planet run by toddlers.  Definitely need to send PEZ™ with them.

 pezfeldmeme

PEZ® – it can make or break a career.

  • Von Neumann Machines – We could send self-replicating robots out into the universe. They stop off at a new Solar System and build copies.  And so on.  Even NOT going much faster than 10% of light speed, in half a million years, these machines could be at every solar system in the Galaxy.  We haven’t seen them . . . so it’s unlikely they’ve been made.  Are we alone?
  • Generation Ships – We could send out vast habitats that support life for the thousands of years that it would take to move from one solar system to the next. Hopefully, in a thousand years the civilization didn’t go all Space Nazi, but I’ve seen enough TV to know that it’s 100% certain they will.
  • Space Tupperware – We could freeze ourselves (if this is possible) before shipping out. Downside?  Freezer burn.  Imagine cooking a 1000 year old steak.  Now imagine BEING a 1000 year old steak.
  • Digitized Human Consciousness – We could digitize a human consciousness and send it into space! No food, no boredom, and it could go see other solar systems.  Dunno about you, but for me this has all the excitement of shooting a Playstation IV™ into space with a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Sadly, the future sold to us back in the day seems to be fairly unlikely.  I’ll rank it against the competition in a future post.  The bright side is that we won’t have PEZ™ shortages for the next 55 years.  Until the killer robots develop a taste for it.  Or until the Civil War breaks the factories or . . . OH, since this is a post about the future of humanity, I almost forgot – it has to have a picture of Oktoberfest girls.  Silly me!

oktoberfest

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

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

ben stein

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

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

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

However, in 1976 he said something very interesting:

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

So silly, so obvious.  So profound.

But what can’t go on forever?

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

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

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

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

roboginsburg

Ginsburg is never gonna carpool with anybody but Sotomayor again.

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

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

Real-DJIA-46-to-18

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

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

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

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

I think I missed two things:

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

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

twilight

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

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

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

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

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

Bueller, Bueller, anyone?