Communism – Page 27 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Friday Books, Because I Said So

“It’s the most pointless book since How To Learn French was translated into French.” – Blackadder The Third

I finished three books during the quarantine. That’s A LOT of coloring.

Books.

I had a great-grand boss (three levels up in the company) once upon a time who was fairly philosophical in an industry not at all noted for philosophy. One day he showed up in my office, unannounced. We sat and talked for several hours about history and corporate strategy and got along very well. It probably didn’t hurt my career with that particular company.

One thing that my great-grand boss said during that meeting always stuck with me. I’m not sure if it was a quote that was original to him or not, but the quote was, “there is a way that minds can speak to each other through the ages. Books.” I thought that was pretty powerful, nearly as powerful as when The Mrs. mentioned she was going to kill off some of the characters in the book she was writing. The downside is that The Mrs. is writing her autobiography.

Books have been with us for thousands of years, but the earliest books were just a taking spoken word and carving it into a stone or writing it on papyrus or parchment. The true development of the written word came later, where complex ideas that transcended conversation were formed. The medium truly changed the message. The image of a frontier boy, book in one hand and plow in the other was formed. Heck, when I was working gathering with Pa Wilder I remember reading a book on anti-gravity, which was really hard to put down.

On the plus side, I did get a book.

We are on a journey as a world to becoming post-literate. We can still read, but the idea of developing longer, more complex ideas and widely sharing them has gone a bit the way of an endangered species. The ideas that were formerly expressed in literature seem to be passing by the wayside in many ways. The last time I picked up a Time magazine at the doctor’s office, it seemed like I was reading a magazine written for not-so-bright kids.

Is this on purpose?

But for me, books were a formative experience. They remain a part of my life. I had another post planned for tonight, but decided I’d throw out a few books that just came to mind. Were these the best books I’ve ever read? No, this isn’t a best-of list. But, arbitrarily I added some rules: the books have to be at least 20 years old, and no author gets more than one. It’s obvious I love The Lord of the Rings (Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths) since I wrote about that last week, so it’s not on the list.

It’s mainly a list of books I just want to talk about today. Why? Because. So there. Feel free to toss the ones you want to add in the comments.

The Starship that can’t pay back a student loan? The Millennial Falcon.

One of the first books that came to mind was Starship Troopers. Robert A. Heinlein was a favorite author of mine growing up – he wrote a series of “juvenile” books in the 1950’s that I think are his best work. And of those? Starship Troopers is my favorite. I read it in junior high, and it was thrilling and thought provoking. Mobile Infantry? An amazing concept.

Starship Troopers isn’t the parody movie of the 1990’s. Nope. It’s a real discussion of the tension in the world between liberty and responsibility. It’s a discussion of honor. It’s also a depiction of a world where there is, dare I say, a spirit of nationalism? It doesn’t have Heinlein’s later squishy and retrospectively creepy, um, “free love” ideas. I’ve made both Pugsley and The Boy read it, as I’ve made them read the next three books on this list.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley was one my seventh grade teacher gave me to read. If she were still teaching in 2020, she would probably be shot for that. Huxley could see the future of conformity – the idea wasn’t that we ever had to ban books, we could just make them irrelevant by replacing them with amusements and intoxicants.

Into this world, Huxley injects a free radical – a handsome blonde individual that was born free and has awareness that the average citizen doesn’t have: John the Savage. Hmm. It’s almost like John was wilder?

Nah.

Anyway, the book for me was haunting. I got to the end, and had to do a full stop. And re-read. Then I got it.

Most babies are born at womb temperature.

I think that Brave New World was what we were living through in the United States from, say, 2000 until 2017. It’s a template for control through amusement. But what happens when the state runs out of other people’s money to spend? That’s the next book.

1984, by George Orwell. I read this one in eighth grade. I can recall reading about the rats while sitting in class on a warm spring day. Many people don’t know that Orwell was a committed socialist until he ran into actual communists during the Spanish Civil War, and at that point he was disgusted and repelled by what he saw. When exposure to actual communists makes you anti-communist, what does that tell you about the reality of communism?

Nah. Antifa® is sure it will work this time.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. The original movie was kind-of awful in many ways. The 2000-ish miniseries was okay. I’m sure it will be butchered in the latest adaptation that’s due out soon. But the book remains the book. It was enjoyable, but when I read it, it was confounding – it seemed like every decision the protagonist (Paul Atreides) made, I would have made the opposite decision.

The story is fairly rich in plot, and has truly wonderful villains. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was pure evil, but a smart, cunning evil. I always thought that Orson Welles would have been perfect for the role, since Baron Harkonnen was really fat, and Orson Welles had already eaten Ohio just to prepare for this role.

Some people call me the spice cowboy, some call me the Duke of love, some people call me Muad’dib, because I speak of the sandworm of love.

This is the novel that really exposed me to the idea of resource constraints, and spice is certainly a thinly-veiled metaphor for oil. Can a lack of resources bring down an empire? Certainly – that’s why China is working so feverishly to set up systems that bring it all the resources it needs. And why we’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East.

Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. A mysterious space vessel shows up in the Solar System and is using the Sun to slingshot to a new trajectory. The astronauts sent to explore the vessel find lots of cool things, but no actual aliens, which remains part of the mystery.

I got this book when I was a kid of 10 or so. How? Some library sent us a catalog. Apparently, the Wilder Compound up on Wilder Mountain was viewed as so remote that they sent a list of books to us along with news that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected president. I put a checkmark by the three books I wanted and sent them the form, and they sent the books to me along with a prepaid return envelope and a new list of books I could check out.

Who paid for it? I have no idea, but they stopped doing it after two years or so.

The book? Not really great by the standards of today. The part that sealed the deal for me when I read it as a kid was the last line, which apparently was added in the very last revision. I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone read it in 2020, but when I was 11 years old and read it?

Magic.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. I remember this book because I devoured it in a single fall afternoon – the first book I picked up and didn’t put down until I was finished since my victory over the Cat wearing a Hat. Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang takes place after an apocalypse occurs and for (reasons!) the people decided to reproduce through cloning rather than the usual way. But a boy is born who isn’t a clone, and manages to, well, be human. It won a Hugo™. I just wish my nomination for a Hugo® would have gotten me a better place than sixth out of a field of five.

Oh well.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This is a deeply nerdy novel. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s fun. But it’s nerdy. Really nerdy. The novel revolves around codebreaking and looted WW II gold. It’s also the only novel on this list where The Boy and I met the author, twice. The first time, The Boy was seven, and I dragged him to an author reading.

The Viking longboats had bar codes on the side, so when they got home they could Scandinavian.

He acted like a seven year old. The Boy, not Neal. The next time I took The Boy to meet Neal Stephenson was when he was sixteen. The Boy’s favorite author in the world was at that time? Neal Stephenson. I made him apologize to Mr. Stephenson, who played along and said that he’d never recovered from The Boy’s previous antics.

Good times. If you like this book, Stephenson has several thousand pages of related books that are similarly Asperger-y .

So, what books do you want to add to the list and why?

How Bad The Economic Crash Really Is

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

HC pointed out this picture. How could I resist?

Last week it was announced that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States collapsed. If you’re not aware, GDP is simply a measure of how much PEZ® is produced in the economy of a country. Okay, it’s not just PEZ©, other (lesser) goods and services are included, too. Call it a rough guess at how well the economic machine in the country is working.

“Collapse” is a word that gets overused by the news media. They want to pump up your fear so you’ll click on their article and give them $0.000043 per click. They don’t make much money at $0.000043 per click, so they need a *lot* of clicks (87,209) to pay for their daily soy latte. The best way to get that many clicks? Either scare people, or provide nudity. Or, if you’re Kamala Harris, do both at the same time.

In this case, however, the use of the term “collapse” is entirely appropriate when 32.9% of the economy disappears. And that dismal number is after an unprecedented borrowing and spending. The US had a GDP of about $20 trillion in 2018. This year, so far, there has been about $5 trillion in extra spending and balance sheet expansion.

So, $10 trillion in half a year, reduced by the 32.9% lowering in GDP takes us to $7 trillion or so. That’s how big they’re saying the economy is. That’s bad. But if you subtract out the $2 trillion in “stimulus” funds that takes you down to $5 trillion.

Borrow a million dollars, and the bank owns you. Borrow a billion dollars, and you own the bank. Borrow $26.6 trillion dollars? You are the United States.

Even if NONE of the Federal Reserve’s® balance sheet where they sprinkled money into the stock market got added to the GDP figure, we’re talking a 50% reduction in the economy in real terms.

50%.

Half.

The economy isn’t an economy at this point – it’s a smoking crater. Well, it would be a smoking crater if there was enough money to pay for the smoke. Yet the Fed™ had pumped enough cash into the stock market to keep it at near record highs. Me? I avoided that and bought a warehouse full of chicken soup stock cubes. Now I’m a bouillonaire.

The solution to our economic crisis from the Left is to keep sending checks to everyone. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the Weimar Republic mentality. “We can print money and send it to people, that’s all we need to have a functioning economy.” It’s the post-economy economy. All we have to do is make PowerPoints® for each other and wait for our Leftybux payments and then we can go down to the grocery store where the food mysteriously appears each month.

Wish someone would have mentioned that.

If we were going to just send money to a few people to pay for their rent, it would probably work out okay. We’ve been printing money for years and giving welfare based on debt for fifty years. Heck, hundreds of people in town are getting unemployment right now, I even know some. I guess I finally have some friends with benefits. But that’s not good for the economy.

The result is stunningly predictable. As I said before, we’d see deflation, and then inflation. Deflation isn’t universal. Some parts of the economy are working, some aren’t. Inflation has shown up first in food and things people need. Eventually, even toys, say balloons, will show inflation. Inflation will show up later everywhere.

But not yet.

What is showing up is that people in the rest of the world are starting to do the same math that I did up above. How many years can a country’s primary production be debt and expect the rest of the world to ignore that? Well, in the last six months, gold is up 30% and silver is up nearly 50%. Part of that is to be expected – uncertainty driver up precious metal prices.

The Mrs. was yelling at me last night. Thank heavens! That reminded me we were out of duct tape.

In the last two months, however, the United States dollar has dropped by 5% versus a basket of currencies called the USD index. That means that people are liking the USD less, because they see the weakening of the economy. It’s bad enough that my tattoo of $100 bills on my hips is now a waist of money.

It’s tempting to think that all the stuff is there to restart the economy. And in many cases it is just sitting there. The restaurant that closed down is still physically there. The stoves and ovens are there. The refrigerator is still there. But the need for it isn’t there. People have less money to go out and eat, so there’s less of a need for restaurants. Heck, even our best fancy restaurant with a pork theme had to close. I’ll miss Swine Dining.

A growing economy is a virtuous cycle – new business spawns new business. A shrinking economy is a vicious cycle – each job lost at that restaurant has ripples further down the economic chain – the waitress can’t make rent if she doesn’t have a job that generates tips.

Banks have stopped (in many cases) loaning money. Why loan cash you have into an environment where interest rates are at 3.3% in an uncertain economy? Vox Day pointed out this disturbing story showing a collapse in bank lending (LINK).

Yes, collapse is the right word. I’ve long been on record that the economic system of debt-based welfare could only last for a certain amount of time. I had picked 2026 or 2027 before it folded up the tent, and given that markets can stay irrational for a long time due to inertia, pushing into the 2030’s was reasonable.

I had an irrational fear of a speed bump. But I’m getting over it.

Watching a complex system fail always provides unexpected consequences. The system has been headed toward failure for years. Without the extraordinary efforts of 2008, it probably would have collapsed then. I think it was far closer to collapse than most people were aware.

The downside of putting off a system failure is that the pressure from the underlying causes keeps building up. When it inevitably finally does fail, it fails spectacularly, and much worse than if failure had happened earlier. When huge failures happen, sometimes civilization doesn’t recover for hundreds of years.

We have seen, again and again, the concept of systems becoming irrelevant. Sometimes, it’s technology that makes them irrelevant the way that the combination of the Internet and Wal-Mart® has destroyed tens of thousands of small stores. The Black Death altered the economic balance of Europe, and destroyed feudalism while kick-starting the Renaissance.

I hope Covid-20 is different than Covid-19. I hate plague-rism.

What will our current crisis lead to? The end of Globalism? A world without debt? Free PEZ?

It’s hard to say. But the birth of any new civilization is painful.

Not as painful as having to admit they want a soy latte, but painful.

Evil, With Hobbits And Ring Wraiths

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings

After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits. That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.

I’m probably in the minority on the following thought: there is actual evil in the world. The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.

Psychological problems.
Different cultures.
Bad parents.
No parents.
Being my ex-wife.

But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.

I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.

Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free. It was good. Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading. In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie. But then I was off to middle school.

I stumbled across Tolkien again. He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was: The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep. Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.

Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.

I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.

I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring. The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.

Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times. He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:

“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”

A Nazgûl floats into a bar. The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’

In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now. The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.

In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots. Murder rates are up in those cities. Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty. That doesn’t make the news.

Why?

The riots are described as peaceful protests. To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year. They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values. And what about all of the uprooted lives?

That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating. Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.

Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.

I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits. This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.

Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant. The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.

I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.

Yes, I believe True Evil® exists. The joy for me is, knowing that True Evil™ exists, I am also sure that True Good© exists, too, even though destroying the One Ring turned Frodo into a hobbitual drinker. I’ll turn it back over to Tolkien for one final quote:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”

Oh, sure, Tolkien can write. But can he meme?

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres

I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.

Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:

Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.

Why do I bring this up?

If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.

This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”

“Move.”

I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.

“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”

“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.

Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.

I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.

“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”

The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.

My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.

“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”

After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.

That’s what scared The Mrs.

I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.

Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.

And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.

The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.

This is a true statement.

If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.

The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.

And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.

Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.

Riots, Misplaced Virtue And The Parasite Class

â€œDon’t worry. Many women learn to embrace thisÂ parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with otherÂ parasites.â€ – House

But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder.Â I guess it was a nervous tick.

I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima.Â This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E MartsÂ®.Â They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time.Â This makes sense â€“ those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.

Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world.Â Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine.Â Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.

Thatâ€™s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isnâ€™t so good in an environment filled with Twinkiesâ„¢, Rufflesâ„¢, and two-liter Cokeâ„¢ bottles.

What got me thinking about all this?

What do you call it when a diabetic wonâ€™t follow directions?Â Insulince.

Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange.Â Iâ€™m certain Iâ€™m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so donâ€™t blame him for this piece. Â For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind.Â One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination.Â Here it is, in Joeâ€™s words:Â â€œBiologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution. Â Their reasoning is thus: many featuresÂ in isolationÂ are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features thatÂ inÂ isolationÂ are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.â€

If youâ€™re not reading Joeâ€™s stuff, you really should be (LINK).Â Heâ€™s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny.Â His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.

Is evolution overkill?Â Did it defeet the porpoise?

As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it â€“ rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.

Society is made up of individuals, so I thought Iâ€™d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy.Â When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:

Altruism
Empathy

These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States.Â Theyâ€™ve been common in other places, too, but Iâ€™m going to focus on America. Â These traits were the basis for and result of a â€œhigh-trustâ€ society.Â A high-trust society is one where most interactions arenâ€™t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law.Â Where I live, thereâ€™s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down.Â Itâ€™s just something we do.

I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.

Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasnâ€™t a government program â€“ people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them.Â This had a benefit â€“ it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt.Â It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.

Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s.Â The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:

It turns the act of charity into taxation.Â Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes.Â Last time I checked, if I decided I didnâ€™t want to support â€˜charityâ€™ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years.Â This removes all virtue for taking part in charity.Â Forced charity isnâ€™t charity, itâ€™s extortion.

Thatâ€™s bad enough.

But it gets worse.

Crabs donâ€™t donate to charity.Â Theyâ€™re shellfish.

The second thing that forced charity does?Â When a person gives another person help, theyâ€™re often grateful â€“ itâ€™s human working with human.Â When a government agency gives that same person help, theyâ€™re resentful.Â Why?Â There is no end to the needs an individual has â€“ and when government doesnâ€™t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment.Â Letâ€™s face it â€“ nearly every government welfare program sucks â€“ itâ€™s just enough to get by in ratty conditions.Â Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.

Add in the impersonality of the cities.Â Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers.Â Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees.Â Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.

Stir.

The result is chaos.Â The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society.Â Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved:Â as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.

What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?

Whoever had â€œgo crazy in an orgy of destruction and violenceâ€ fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.

Is it riot season or COVID season?Â I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.

I thought a bit about how AntifaÂ® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matterâ„¢ grew.Â The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow.Â Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, theyâ€™ve increased the growth rate.Â In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.

Why?

Though born of misdirected virtue, AntifaÂ© and BLMÂ® have their own traits.Â They contribute nothing to society.Â Theyâ€™re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people.Â In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.

Thereâ€™s a word for an organism living in this niche.Â The name for that organism is parasite.

It becomes increasingly likely that Antifaâ„¢ and BLMÂ® will leave city after city economically destroyed.Â Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now?Â Portland?Â Seattle?Â The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.

Well, now that AntifaÂ® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it?Â

The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation â€“ criminals arenâ€™t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges.Â Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class.Â If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances.Â Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply canâ€™t be allowed.

Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they donâ€™t kill the host.Â The mosquitoes I fed tonight didnâ€™t kill me â€“ just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so.Â But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.

Meaning: Do It Right.

“Bender, it has come to my attention that this company has been paying you to do nothing but loaf around on the couch.” – Futurama

I gave The Mrs. a dictionary for our first anniversary. I wanted to give her something with a meaning.

Imagine you’re between 16 and 24. You live in a country (Great Britain) that has a robust social safety net. Your parents are doing okay. Not millionaires, but doing okay. The U.K. has a huge safety net if you can’t work, or don’t want to work. For instance, in London you can have:

Council flats (apartments) – in U.S. English: subsidized or (nearly) free housing.
Free crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies) delivered by singing Welshmen in chimney sweep attire.
Free Dr. Who™ costumes, though they only come in the sizes of “elfin” and “aircraft carrier”.
X-Box® games delivered at no cost via the luminiferous information aether (Internet).
A majority Pakistani population.
Free healthcare, including funds for Cockney coal-miners to blast and carve your teeth into pleasant looking shapes.
A zero effort, zero risk life.

At least 1,500 citizens of Great Britain turned their back on this life of shabby luxury to go live in a land without air conditioning, bangers and mash, Top Gear™, and cell phone reception for the opportunity to become bloodthirsty Junior Assistant Jihadis in the ISIS® organization.

Why?

I’ve heard that ISIS has a new name. WASWAS.

At least partially because life had no meaning for them – they weren’t accomplishing anything, and they knew it. Carl Jung observed this problem in the early twentieth century. Jung’s observation was made as religious belief was waning in Europe, and as people there were continually centralizing themselves in cities that became larger and larger. Jung saw that the loss of a belief system that allowed them to have a higher purpose in any setting – large or small, was devastating.

Also, Jung saw that this was coupled with the anonymity and lack of true community of large cities. To put it bluntly, for 99%+ of people living in a city, the city doesn’t care if you are there. Your contribution to the whole is diluted to the point of meaninglessness, like the guy in the BMW® factory that installs turn signals. Jung had ideas as to the result of this situation:

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power. It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.

Did you hear about Carl’s daughter? She was a little Jung, too.

In modern society, the numbers of people are huge when compared to the historical setting that mankind has experienced through time. I wrote a somewhat related post here (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings). Modern people have, at least a bit, developed ways to replace the meaning of religion and the belonging that only occurs in small bands:

Sports teams. This allows achievement by proxy. Your team wins, even though exactly one player out of 50 are from the state the team is in? You won! Your quarterback gets traded next year? He’s dead to you. Logical? Effective? Yes.
Video games. Video games are a form of artificial achievement. You achieve a pre-programmed victory designed to manipulate you into feeling good. Designers of video games have turned this into a stunning skill, making successive video games more immersive. And despite this immersion, it doesn’t make kids more violent – I rarely lose a fistfight with a sixth grader.
Work hard, do well, feel good. It’s a simple enough equation. It’s also one of the most real and most wholesome things on this list. Especially if you are a mummy – they aren’t evil – they just got a bad wrap.
Consumeproduct culture. No, that’s not a typo. What is a consumeproduct culture? It’s one that replaces shopping for meaning. Did you find a new Brad Pitt® flavored toothpaste to buy? Great! It shoots endorphins into your brain that make you feel you’ve achieved something. But it wears off, and you’ve got to find Johnny Depp shaped vitamin C gummis and buy them tomorrow to feel okay.
Politics. Just like sports teams, cheering for your side allows you to feel good when you win, and bad when you lose. The current Leftward polarization of the Democrats is very tied into this. How many Leftists does it take to change a lightbulb? 2500 to protest, and none of them working to change anything.
Mind altering substances. Cocaine. Alcohol. Marvel® movies. These allow you to escape just for an hour or two. Oddly, the common denominator in all of this? Robert Downey, Jr.

I just got back from my heroine dealer. I got Wonder Woman®, She-Ra™, and Black Widow©.

I’m not saying that these coping mechanisms are evil, or harmful. Some, like working hard, have huge societal and personal benefits unless you’re working for an evil company. Others, like politics? Not so much, especially the Leftist variety. Again, Carl Jung saw the rise of Leftism in his life and correctly described its rise in these two quotes:

Such people are very likely to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as having the power they as individuals lack.

If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte.

So, the “British” ISIS-Bois sashayed to Samarra and moseyed to Mosul out of their comfortable council flat life. They did this because they felt no meaning in Great Britain. Great Britain was a country that they and their ancestors had no hand in building. They and their ancestors didn’t really contribute to Great Britain in any significant way. They knew that they were no more British than I am Martian, and won’t be until their great, great, grandchild is named Nigel and has horrible teeth.

What’s red and bad for your teeth? A brick.

Therefore, they weren’t assimilated enough to move their search for meaning to Manchester United®, so might as well go and kill some people down in the Middle East. This is just another example that soccer is an evil game devised by aristocratic European women so that they could play it while their husbands did the dishes. (Apologies to Mike Judge)

This isn’t just a crisis of the ISIS-Idiots. This is a crisis that faces mankind in general. Many of the spiritual, social, and political ills the world faces right now stem directly from the minimization of religion and the urbanization of population.

Big cities are dehumanizing. Do you know a person on your city council? Do they know you by name? Do you have their cell phone number in your cell phone? Do you have proof that they plagiarized in high school? Do you know what happened at Uncle Tom’s cabin, and what’s down in the wishing well? Would they pay attention if you called them on a Tuesday afternoon?

This is the norm in Modern Mayberry.

Does it make sense for any person to live in a city where these things are not true? Does it make the citizens of Dallas better off to have a city of a million people where their voice is so diluted that they are just one among millions, feeling no control?

My doctor says I should take meds for my schizophrenia. But look who doesn’t get lonely during quarantine – this guy!

Adding to the frustrations is that most decisions are made not at the local level in those massive cities, but at the national level where hiring a stupid person isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature. In the United States, most regulations that impact people on a day-to-day basis aren’t made in the Modern Mayberry office.

Nope.

Most regulations are made far away in Washington – and not the good Washington where the volcanoes and earthquakes will eventually eliminate all the Leftists. This results in one-size fits all regulations that meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. Why does the EPA design wood stoves for use in Alaska? Can’t the Alaskans be left alone to figure that out?

These rules do more than frustrate individuals. The confine those that could become great. Could a company like Apple® be founded today? I don’t think so they would be crushed by regulations – they would have to remain as an open sauce company. My next door neighbor, who runs a small farm bank, told me that starting a small bank from scratch today would be nearly impossible. The small has been eliminated, the middle is discouraged, and only large companies can compete.

The result is that people on all sides are done with the current system. On the Left, there is a desire for what only could be called a Marxist revolution because the state isn’t powerful enough. On the Right? There’s a feeling that the United States became a little too centrally powerful around 1843.

I side with the Right.

What civilization had the best tattoos? The Ink-ans.

We have learned that the solutions from the Left, in the end, provide only death and tyranny. The “British” people who went to join the jihadis were fans of death and tyranny in their own way. The rioters of BLM are fans of death and tyranny, as well. As mentioned many times, that path is the path of destruction. The Left wants to destroy our civilization, the Right wants to build civilization.

On the Right, I’d suggest leaving the cities. Outside of the danger we’ve seen recently, like Mars, cities ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. Find your Modern Mayberry. Meet your neighbors. Build relationships.

Find meaning from something more than an Amazon® shopping cart.

Ohh! Did you see that Lighting Deal®?

Capitalism and Crisis

“Four-alarm fire in downtown Moscow clears way for glorious new tractor factory. And, on lighter side of news, hundreds of capitalists soon to perish in shuttle disaster.” – Airplane II, The Sequel

I know how they feel. When my alarm goes off late – I end up Russian all morning.

Capitalism is a great system for allocation of winners and losers in an economy. It does this more or less automatically, because the transactions are voluntary on both sides. If I want weasel snouts and have money, and you have weasel snouts and want money, as long as we can come to an agreement, we both win. Nothing better than a warm weasel snout on a cold night.

Capitalism is good at creating rewards for those win-win transactions. Because it’s good at that, capitalism is probably the best creator of abundance the world has ever known outside of Bernie Madoff. Capitalism is also set up to be very compatible with those on the Right.

Transactions are based on free will and free exchange of goods, even transactions for things like natural gas. Here in Modern Mayberry, if I don’t want natural gas, I can cut firewood and burn it to heat my home. My insurance company would probably prefer me to get a fireplace first.

But natural gas is amazingly cheap because, thanks to capitalism-inspired innovation, it’s abundant. I would be foolish to try to heat water in my house over a wood stove in summer when I can spend the $12 or so a month for hot showers. I choose that because of free will, and also because I don’t want The Mrs. killing me in my sleep. I think that was one of the things on her list before she accepted my marriage proposal – “Does he sleep heavier than me?”

Veganism is like socialism. They’re both fine, unless you like eating.

Capitalism has positive incentives – make someone else happy with the transaction, and you win. If you do it in a significant enough way? You can win bigly. If you don’t win bigly? You can at least do better than your parents.

That has been the fuel of what we’ve called the American Dream, the idea that you could have your own struggle and the outcome is determined largely based on your effort, along with a bit of luck. Heck my boss gave me a raise yesterday. He said he wanted my last week here to be happy.

The United States has been a place of abundance for the last 75 years. Have there been recessions and setbacks along the way? Certainly. Has there been poverty? Absolutely. I like to do my best to fight poverty, but I’ve found the homeless aren’t very good at wrestling.

Where can you hear songs about poverty? Singapore.

One of the things that has been proven by President Johnson’s attempt to make a “Great Society” is that, despite trillions in .gov spending on poverty, it will always be with us. Even before Johnson’s “Great Society” program, the poverty rate had dropped to below 15%. That’s why a Mercedes-Benz® and poverty are the same: Princess Diana couldn’t stop either of them.

Since 1966, poverty has bounced around between 11% and 15%. Perhaps, in some fashion, these programs have prevented higher levels of poverty during recession? It is certain, however, that we didn’t even have an official poverty measure until 1959.

The structure of the economy, however, began to change. A typical factory job, obtainable with a high school degree, provided enough money for a house, car, and necessities for a family. Note I said job – wives working was something that happened before the kids were born and after they were in school, at least in the growing middle class. The middle class has learned that, while money can’t buy happiness, poverty can’t buy anything.

Even though a typical family is now supported by a working husband and wife, things had been good. At least some of the additional wages from both spouses working went to an upgraded lifestyle – capitalism was more than happy to provide new things to buy with the income, like Zima® wine coolers and Dan Fogelberg™ CDs. Capitalism had taken us from the scarcity and hunger of the Great Depression to abundance and humongousness of actual obesity caused by an abundance of cheap, excess calories.

Although it’s trivially easy to prove that communism is nearly certainly the most evil system ever devised on the planet, capitalism has its faults, too: Capitalism has no soul. It is a blind force that will sell you anything, even if it’s something bad for you. Taken to an extreme, capitalism will provide more than just immoral items, it will provide things that are illegal. And never mix Islam with capitalism – they don’t like profit jokes.

Capitalism also provides incentives to manipulate. Advertising does a wonderful service when it makes us aware of new products that can help us, but advertising can manipulate desires, like Edward Bernays’ propaganda campaign to convince women (who didn’t smoke at the time) that smoking cigarettes was exciting and fashionable. Now? Type “women smoking” into Google®, and you’ll get 810,000,000 matches.

Another fault of capitalism is that it produces products that are designed to fail. Want your iPhone® to last five years? Good luck with a battery that lasts only three. Apple™ did one better: it made software changes that slowed older iPhones™ down. Why? To get you to buy a new iPhone©. I did click on one of those, “You just won an iPhone®” pop-ups. Thankfully, it was just a virus.

It could be yours, for only 36 payments of $375,221.43.

Making your products bad isn’t new. Lightbulbs, when initially manufactured, lasted too long. A cartel devised a standard that made sure that light bulbs were constantly failing. Why? So you would have to buy more. Another example?

Two words: printer ink.

Those failures of capitalism, however, are a symptom of abundance. People can afford those things, so companies do whatever they can to get as much of their money as possible.

I fear our economy may be slipping into scarcity. Not next week, not next month. But as we see increased tensions, the possibility of prolonged outages of things we take for granted are likely. Higher rates of unemployment are likely, too.

There is a sign that the government attempting to prop up the economy is starting to create disastrous distortions. From today’s news, this story (LINK) describes how the Federal Reserve’s® pumping of trillions of dollars into the system is having the effect of blowing bubbles in the economy. Color me surprised.

Abundance of the “one income for a family” type is gone for many professions, if not most. If the Fed™ decides that it wants to keep blowing bubbles with trillions of dollars just made up on the spot, the result will be inevitable: a currency reset.

People will blame this on capitalism. I won’t. The condition we find ourselves in is the result of decades of currency manipulation. You can’t print money forever without an impact. What we will be left with is a contracting economy. What system works best in an economy that’s getting smaller, not larger?

I know what will be sold – communism. The reason people keep falling for this one is in times of difficulty is that they believe that it will solve their problems. The reality, every single time, is that communism will end in murder, scarcity, and hunger – it’s like a game of Russian roulette, but in this game a few hundred million die. But, hey, maybe this time?

Unemployed leather workers have nothing to hide.

Capitalism has been the only reliable way to deal with economic crisis in the past. The incentives it provides minimized the hunger and the pain of the Great Depression. But it’s not the “capitalism” we see today. The people of the United States in the 1930s helped each other, and capitalism was a way to run the economy, not the highest moral good.

Was it a massive Federal program that saved people during the Great Depression? For the time during the Great Depression, the spending of the Federal government tripled compared to years before the Great Depression. In my reading, the Federal government enacted thousands of policies, many contradictory to each other. Unemployment was still 14%+ when World War II started. The war clearly ended the Great Depression.

But people helped each other back then during the Depression – Great Grandpa and Grandma McWilder even took in kids from families that couldn’t afford to raise them. The United States was a far more united place, and the shared morality was more than a shared economic morality, like we see today. Did you get aid only if you were moral and upright, or a widow?

If you get to choose what Hell to go to, pick the communist one. It will be out of coal and molten sulfur.

Yup. If you could work, you were expected to work. But yet, in 1950s America before the advent of our current bouquet of welfare programs, did citizens let people starve?

No.

The best answer is capitalism, but a smaller, more local, and more moral version of it. Nearly every problem we have in the United States was created by increasing power in a large central state and huge metropolitan areas.

More on that in Friday’s post, where we’ll talk about how the problems created by modern life are more than economic.

Why The Left Fears The Right, And Why The Right Will Win

“Oh, haven’t you noticed? We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300

When I was a five or so, my parents had horses. One of the horses had a foal (baby horse for you city folk), and Pa Wilder brought the foal and the mare (momma horse) into the barn – it was brutally cold, and the barn was much warmer. They brought me down to see the foal. It was young and awkward as new horses are.

Inside the stall was a series of closely spaced rails in a square, about four feet by six feet.

I asked, “What’s that for, Pa?”

“Well, when the foal is in here, he’ll find that he can’t walk across the bars. His hooves won’t quite fit. That will train him so he won’t do that when he gets older.”

Even at five, I had seen cattle guards and knew cows wouldn’t try to cross them. But here was a horse.

From Library of Congress.

“Won’t he try to jump over the cattle guard, Pa?”

“Some horses, the smart ones, will figure out and a cattle guard won’t work on them. But most don’t. Heck, you can just paint parallel lines on an asphalt road and some horses won’t try to cross them.”

The little training bars were a device, a device to train the horse that he was in a prison made up of parallel bars on the ground. In that, the horse restricted his own freedom.

In the last post (Money, Power, Politics, and Soros), I discussed the difference between Money and Power. I actually finished most of the last post before I wrote the conclusion. Money and Power as described through most of the post were entirely materialistic concepts. Ending it with just that discussion wasn’t right, since the theme of my writing is often to balance the material with the concepts of spirit and virtue. We live in a material world, but the reason we live is for a purpose greater than this moment.

Freedom isn’t important to either Money or Power; Freedom is actually the enemy of both Money and Power. Throughout most of recorded history in the West, when either Money or Power get too out of balance, there is a backlash, and Freedom eventually wins.

It has for thousands of years.

And it will again. I firmly believe that the destiny of the West is in the hands of those who love Freedom, especially in the United States.

Why?

The Left is utterly afraid of the Right. Though they put forward a great front – they are shaking. The American people on the Right compose the largest potential army in the history of the world.

The numbers:

There are at least 400,000,000 guns in private hands in the United States by one estimate. That seems right.

There are 800,000 or so cops. Assume they have two guns each. Heck, assume they have three. Round up. Three million guns. The Military in the United States owns about 4.4 million guns. Round up. That’s a total of less than 10 million guns in the hands of the United States government or other governmental authorities. And that assumes that they stand with the government, which is questionable at best.

Assume only 35% of the American public owns guns, a number I think is very low. Call it 100,000,000 people. Assume that those owners skew mostly Right – 80/20? That’s 80,000,000 on the Right. Let’s do 80/20 again on those that will not stand for a communist uprising in the United States. That’s 16,000,000 Americans ready to stand in the breach. The largest army in the history of the world (so far) were the United States armed forces in 1945: 12,000,000 Americans under arms.

I’ll state it again: American people on the Right have the potential to compose the largest army in the history of the world. Period.

People on the Right, men and women, also have more and better training for field conditions. I’d put The Mrs. up against most people on the Left if it came to a rural setting, because Leftists have no idea that trees are even made of wood, and I doubt that many on the Right will want to make the Stalingrad mistake and get caught in the cities as Leftists consume themselves. How many people on the Right have their homes on the market to escape from Minneapolis? From Seattle? From any of dozens of cities where they know that they no longer belong?

I have no idea. But they’d be fools to stay.

And even though we have the numbers on our side, there’s more good news. We don’t even need overwhelming numerical superiority:

How many apostles peacefully changed the religion of Europe?
How many Spartans defended all of Western Civilization at Thermopylae?

“But John,” you say, “most all of the people in your examples died for their cause.” Yes, they did. And we remember them for that, because they changed the world. Thousands of years before Robert Heinlein said it, they knew the truth of his quote: “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

Besides, everyone is going to die. Is it better to be a Leonidas or a St. Peter?

Obviously, it is.

Don’t be like Ephialtes (LINK).

We outgun the Left. We have Truth, capital T, on our side. The other day Vox Day had this inspiring clip at his blog (LINK).

It was a good clip, and one I’d forgotten. So we watched the movie again tonight – it’s one that could not be made by Hollywood® today. That clip also makes the point I tried to make earlier much more eloquently than I ever could.

The Black Riots Lives Matter riots are demoralizing to people of good character. This is intentional. The riots are meant to make you feel alone. The riots are meant to make you feel that the Right has already lost.

The Right has not lost.

How did the Modern Sporting Lawyer make you feel?

That’s why he and his wife are condemned. That’s why they have vowed to cancel him, to make an example of them, to find a way to charge them with crime. They are the opposite of demoralization.

The Modern Sporting Lawyer and his wife drive the Left crazy. Here, their desire to destroy as a senseless mob was turned back by only two people.

Can you imagine if the Right was united? I can.

The corollary is obvious: quit fighting each other in the right. Stop. People don’t believe in your exact brand?

You can’t stand Libertarians? You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day? That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom? The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?

Too bad.

We are in the same foxhole. Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other. Now. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.

How do you know if you’re with us?

We like building statues, not tearing them down.
We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.
We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.
We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”
We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.

And that is the difference. The Left is bitter. The Left is seething. The Left is angry.

Why? Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners. They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person. But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.

The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left. They see themselves as weak. Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness. But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good. They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate. The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.

The Right rejects that. All of it.

Sex isn’t a virtue, chastity is a virtue. Sex isn’t evil, but making it the focus of your life is no different than any other addiction – it is a vice. But which of those does the Left celebrate? Inside, they know that it’s wrong, and that also fills them with self-hate.

Because of that hate, and seek to make the Right weak like them. How? By demoralizing the Right, by taking virtues and attacking them while publicly celebrating things we use to call sin. By coming up with never ending list of impossible demands and nonsensical redefinitions of the English language on an ever more frequent basis. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has recently been excommunicated from the Left for being brazen enough to indicate that women might be, well, women.

The Right has built Western Civilization, and built it with a compassion for the weak. That makes the Left hate the Right even more. They seek to make us doubt our morals and virtue: everyone is racist, every historical figure is fatally flawed. That is justification enough in the minds of the Left to tear down everything that has made their prosperity and wealth transfer possible. The Left makes no real art, just caricatures of the genius that has gone before, photographs of Christ soaking in urine. The Left is a parasite that, failing to create, destroys.

But those games won’t work anymore. The Right is strong. The Right is virtuous. The Left seeks to build nothing because that is the province of the Right. And to the Left, those who are strong and build statues to the virtues of flawed men are evil.

Was Columbus perfect? No. Did he open up a New World? Yes. How many people in Mexico City would prefer to revert to the charnel house of the Aztecs? Some, but every hand that goes up will belong to a member of the Left.

The Right is not evil. We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands. Why? Because they could never build it. The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.

Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.

I don’t think we will win.

I know we will win. We are the foals that recognize the painted lines on the asphalt for the lie that they are. We are the horses that realize that they have the strength to jump over the cattle guard that we used to think was our prison.

From Library of Congress.

I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall. We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history. The Right doesn’t know its own strength. But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.

We will win. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. Maybe not even in the next decade. And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis. We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.

And we will make it better.

And we will win.

We always have.

What is your profession?

I rarely ask people to share these posts, but if you have people you know are feeling down – please do.

Money, Power, Politics, and Soros

“What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?” – Dilbert

My superpower is hindsight. But I can see that won’t help us now.

When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, sometimes my dad would take me on his business trips. They were always to the same city – the capital city of our state. It was hours away, so it was quite an adventure. Where I grew up there was exactly one elevator (in a two story building at the college) and one escalator (at the JCPenny®) building within a 130 mile radius from town. We were so isolated that our Democrats were against communism all the way into the 1990s.

Did I mention I grew up in the sticks?

Pop Wilder was a small town banker, and sometimes the meetings in Capital City were at the Big Banks®, which were inevitably in huge skyscrapers. It was quite a thrill going up into those buildings. I’d sit in the lobby on the 20^th floor, reading science fiction while Pop did whatever it was he was there for in the meeting room. One bank in particular amazed me because the bathroom, on the 30^th floor, had a full length clear window – you could stand up and pee and stare out at the city below. There is probably a joke about Big Banks™ in there. I’ll let you fill in that particular blank – this is a family blog.

These trips were fun.

I kept getting checks from the banks during the COVID-19 social isolation – the kept leaving me a loan.

But one trip, we went to visit the majority owner of the bank that Pop Wilder ran. I recall this trip rather vividly, since we didn’t go to one of those gleaming towers. Pop pulled the car into a strip mall. Not a nice strip mall, but a dingy one in a sketchy area of town. Pop never talked about why he was having those meetings, so I wasn’t exactly sure why we were there. Perhaps he was going to sell me for a kid that didn’t keep his room in a condition that was specifically listed as containing elements of a war crime as defined by the United Nations?

Pop and I went up to one of those unmarked doors you see sometimes – just a steel door with a small diamond of glass about head high. You could tell it was a classy area, because the glass was the kind with the wire mesh inside. There was a buzzer next to the door, and Pop pressed it.

A voice answered, “Who is it?”

“Pop Wilder.” The lock on the door made an angry buzzing sound and Pop pulled the door open. We went up a flight of stairs – this particular strip mall doorway led to a second floor.

The Mafia chemist wanted the brake lines to rust – that way it would look like an oxidant.

I hadn’t seen any mob movies at the age of 12, but after watching them when I got older, the office had that feel. Run down. Dingy. Like the world had passed this neighborhood by on its way to making those gleaming towers that were miles away in the downtown area.

A secretary (they were called that, back then) didn’t say much more than, “He’s waiting.”

I walked into the office with Pop. The office had a feeling that I associate with movies from the 1940s or 1950s – dark, smoky paneling, a thin, worn carpet. Even the desk was ancient, but not in the “oh, cool antique” way, but in the “early prison work camp warden furniture” way.

The man Pop was planning to meet sat behind the desk. He didn’t get up as we entered. His only acknowledgement that we were there was a glance, like an annoyed man staring at what was on the bottom of his shoe. He looked, and I kid you not, exactly like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. So I’ll call him that. After reviewing information on the Internet, I’d estimate his age at that time as about 85.

Pop Wilder: “Hello, Mr. Potter. This is my son, John. I mean, my other son, John.”

Pop didn’t really say that, but it amuses me to write it, since my older brother’s name was John as well. I guess he was Juan one, and I was Juan two.

Mr. Potter’s gaze fell upon me. It wasn’t pleasant. Normally, when I met an adult, they at least pretended to be interested and would ask some questions and make small talk. Not Mr. Potter.

“Hi,” I said, more to break the silence than anything.

He never said a word to me. Pop Wilder handed me the keys to the car, and said, “You can go wait outside, son.” That was fine with me – I had a book.

Bad puns? That’s how eye roll.

Mr. Potter, as I mentioned, was the majority owner of the bank that Pop ran. Pop and his brother owned a fairly small amount of the shares, but Mr. Potter owned the vast majority of the bank. From snippets between my parents in those conversations that last the length of a childhood, it turns out that Mr. Potter was far more than an angry bank owner working from a shabby office. He was actually a kingmaker in state politics. He was a Democrat, and no one got “the nod” unless he approved. He had spent decades of his life building up connections with every important person in state politics.

In today’s terms, the big, shining gleaming banks had Money, billions of dollars. This was the sort of Money that Mr. Potter didn’t have. Sure, Mr. Potter had millions back when millions meant something, but Mr. Potter also had raw, naked Power. Want to be governor? He couldn’t guarantee it, but he could probably make sure it didn’t happen if you made him mad.

Money and Power are different things – most people equate them, but it’s not really so. Elon Musk has Money, but he certainly lacks Power. Yes, there’s another fill in the blank joke in there about Tesla™ and power. If Elon Musk had Power? They wouldn’t have closed his car factories due to WuFlu. Power is where the governor would have found some way that the factories were found to be “essential” businesses. Real power is when the governor does what you want before you even ask.

Elon Musk has Money, but as only one out of 157 or so billionaires in California, he doesn’t have Power. But he does have $46 billion dollars*, so don’t feel bad for him. *That’s because it’s mainly in stock – a big Tesla™ crash, and it could be discharged. See, I finally made that electrical joke.

Soros was going to organize a riot of amputees, but he was worried it would get out of hand.

George Soros, on the other hand, only has a listed net worth of a little over $8 billion dollars. But Soros has invested heavily in politics. He’s created and funded a vast network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that drive politics globally. How many connections does Soros have? According to Discover the Networks (LINK), which looks to understand who funds all of the Leftist organizations, Soros is associated in one way or another with 210 organizations that are hard Left. How hard Left? How about “Catholics for Choice”? It’s like I created a group called “Muslims for Bacon”.

But $8 billion. That seems low. Can you plot a Leftist overthrow on the cheap? Not at all. Soros has spent a staggering $32 billion on his foundations since 1984, including a recent transfer of $18 billion to his Open Society Foundation®. Heck, it once took Jeff Bezos a whole month to make that kind of money.

George Soros is just like that Mr. Potter I met, but on a global scale. Just a single one of his initiatives is active in over 120 countries in the world.

I heard that George Soros is the Lucky Charms™ evil twin – he’s tragically malicious.

What drives that kind of raw lust for Power? I mean, it must mean something to Soros, since he’s given away tens of billions of dollars to get it. Soros gives us a clue in his own words in a book he wrote about his favorite subject, himself: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.” It’s no wonder that Soros looks like the evil Emperor from Star Wars™.

And what drove Mr. Potter? I have no idea. It wasn’t luxury – his office reminded me of the chief psychiatrist’s office at the asylum that all of those movie serial killers break out of. Notoriety? He had a very sparse Wikipedia page a decade ago – it’s gone. So not that. Philanthropy? Nope, none I know of.

I am always concerned about the motives of people who seek Power over others. Is it ego? Is it insecurity? Is it a genuine desire to help others?

Always remember what Mao said: “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.” You can have Money, but when Josef Stalin has the NKVD pick you up, you’ll learn quickly the difference between Money and Power.

Soros has evil lessons with Satan every week. I have no idea what Soros charges.

While mentioning Money and Power I’d be leaving out one very important part of the equation if I just kept in terms of those two material concepts.

There is at least one other type of Power – and that’s Personal Power. You can call it Spiritual, you can call it Virtue, or you can call it a dozen other names it goes by. It’s the Power that comes from standing up for what’s right despite the storms that will come. It’s telling your boss, “no” when he asks you to do what you know is unethical. It’s standing up when everyone else in the world seems to be against you, but you know that you’re right.

I’d take that Power over any Power that Mr. Potter ever had. And Soros? He may gain the whole world, but he’s already lost his soul.

Charles Peguy said, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” I think this was sometime before his last quote, “Germans, what Germans?” at the opening of the Battle of the Marne during World War I.

Tyranny seeks Money and Power. Yet?

Freedom keeps winning.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Year Down The Road

Count de Monet: “It is said that the people are revolting.”
King Louis XVI: “You said it! They stink on ice.”
–History of the World, Part I

When I copy in these big clocks into my posts, it’s a huge paste of time.

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

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight. I didn’t move to step 9. last month because last month, violence was just happening. This month? Violence is being commonly justified by local and state authorities. When protesters a mob tore down a gate to access private property in St. Louis, which set the stage. When the Modern Sporting Lawyer™ and his wife pulled out firearms to protect themselves, the sane world cheered.

Yes, I recycled this one. Couldn’t resist.

That’s why a District Attorney vowed to find something, anything to charge this couple with. The one thing the mob cannot stand is decent, armed people standing up to the mob. The politicians have made the mob and know that it must be fed.

The fact that CHAZ/CHOP was allowed to exist, with the rampant lawlessness of the mob in charge for weeks was another sign. We are very, very close to open warfare.

I stole the clock metaphor from the (Leftist) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists©. It’s a good metaphor, because it creates an immediacy. And I can and will go backwards if events justify it, though at this point it seems like no one wants to go backwards.

In this issue: Front Matter – A Year Down The Road – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

A Year Down The Road

I started the Weather Reports a little over a year ago because I could see the changes coming faster and faster. I’ve been concerned about the economy since I read The Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) back around the year 2000. When you look at all of the trends – social, economic, political – I could see trouble on the horizon. If you want some in-depth thought on how The Fourth Turning is progressing, Jim over at The Burning Platform (LINK) is your man.

The 2007 housing price collapse wasn’t a surprise to me. When I bought my house, I was (fortunately) in the position to negotiate with my employer that they’d cover any loss on sale if I moved for them. As house prices were going up, up, up . . . they agreed. And why not? It wouldn’t cost them a dime.

It did. My house dropped 20% in price between when I bought it and when it finally sold two years after I moved out. I don’t give myself genius points for this, but when they offered me a loan that was nearly ten times my salary? With no income verification?

Yikes.

The tensions we face aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re not anywhere near their peak. Those same social, economic, and political factors have gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years.

Is anything out of the question?

Will one more year down the road have as much change as we have seen in the last year?

Why wouldn’t it?

Are you ready for that?

Violence and Censorship Update

In the previous posts, it has been either violence or censorship that’s shown up in a month. This month? We get both. I’ll start with censorship.

What’s out? Statues. Toppling statues is censorship – censorship of the past. George Orwell described it well in his book, 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”

No bit of American history is safe, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt to “American Pioneers”, Spanish explorers, and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yup. All have to go. And not by vote, not by decision, but by the raw power of the mob.

An episode of the British television classic Fawlty Towers has been removed because of offensive language, and the wind has done gone with Gone With The Wind, which had to be shuttered “temporarily” so that (pulls answer from hat) people won’t be offended.

So, history has been judged to be insufficiently woke.

Right now the media is so woke, it’s like they took NoDoze® with coffee and meth to get ready for their Gender Studies final.

YouTube® just concluded its next round of purges. Dozens of large channels with millions of views are now gone. The biggest personality banned was Stefan Molyneaux, philosopher and badthinker. His crime? Not sure. People think it’s because he has had guests (scientists) on in the past that indicate that there might be group differences in cognitive ability. Oops – can’t discuss that idea in 2020.

Among other channels that YouTube® suggested for me and that I listened to from time to time was The Iconoclast, a British guy on the Right who advocated for lower immigration into Great Britain. Now? Gone. Plus? A major newspaper published a story on The Iconoclast’s identity. In 2020, having the wrong views means going without a job.

But that’s not violence, right?

On Reddit®, I heard that over 2000 subreddits were banned. I had been to several of the banned subreddits in the past, and was a bit surprised. One of them, r/consoomers was specifically set up for self-improvement and rejection of globalist commercialism. A little politically incorrect?

Yup.

Now gone. Another dead subreddit is r/The_Donald. It’s crime? Can’t be sure. I think it was too popular, with over a million subscribers. And a group of a million people who like Donald Trump? Triggered!

Reddit™ made rule changes as well. They initially rolled out this new rule for commenting:

“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority….”

After someone got on Wikipedia and figured out that, for instance, men are in the minority since there are more women in the world, the rule on protecting people from hate wouldn’t apply to people who were misogynist. Oops. They changed that rule.

But it sure showed what they were intending.

This is the biggest month of censorship against the Right in, well, ever. I expect it to get worse. The idea that Donald Trump could be re-elected is mind poison for the Left. Leftist fetishize politics as a religion – Trump is the ultimate demon. They will do everything and anything so that he isn’t re-elected.

Share this meme and help a Leftist lose sleep so they can stay woke.

I’d spend more time updating you on the violence of the past month, but it’s probably easier to update you on the places that weren’t violent. Modern Mayberry was one. Here, we watch the news and see the world falling apart, and it’s like there’s another country out there.

There is. It’s just waiting to be born.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

June has been the worst month so far – economic, violence, and political instability are all in bad shape. It’s so bad that even the illegals don’t want to sneak across the border.

Violence:

Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement. I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June. I was almost right, and now June has pegged the scale. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. Yes, the Y-axis label shows 350, but that’s because I didn’t notice until I’d put the graph together and it’s 3AM.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall. I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December. I expect more instability heading into November, and may make some changes to the inputs next month.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again. I’m hoping this is the worst that we’ll see, but I expect a market crash this month (July) or next.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is at a five year low for this time of year.

LINKS