Communism – Page 29 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

You’re Not Alone

“Théoden King stands alone.” – Lord of the Rings

Google® is so biased they only ranked our Solar System one star.

Originally this was going to be an economic post (as is usual for Wednesday) about Crisis Capitalism and how this particular Crisis, like many others in the past will be used to concentrate wealth even more, perhaps with bikini graphs. Maybe the bikinis get smaller as the economy shrinks? At least that would bring some good out of the current crisis. Plus I’ll always be known as “the guy who made economics interesting at last.”

That post will have to wait until next Wednesday.

What hit me today was an onslaught of news. Not one story, but nearly every story I read was about deplatforming or attempting to silence alternative viewpoints to the conventional narrative as seen on TV. In rapid-fire, I saw stories about deplatforming of news and opinion outlets, deplatforming of individuals and doxing (making private personal information public of non-public figures) of pre-teens(!) for thoughtcrime.

Heck, there was even a Serbian soccer player (playing soccer for an American pro soccer team) that was fired (after he was made to apologize) for comments his wife made on social media. And his wife made those comments in Serbian. I guess that he should have done his manly best and kept her home without access to electronic media devices? Is the message that athletes should take away from this is that they should keep their women on a shorter leash?

Is this the Left telling men that they need to be more patriarchal and tell their women to be seen and not heard?

But his wife wanted to go anyway.

But the seemingly disjointed activities all had one purpose: to make you feel alone.

The biggest story is that Zero Hedge® was cut off from Google® advertising revenue. Since ZH™ is a for-profit company, this will hurt them. Why was it cut off? The story I saw indicated that it was because people commenting on the site were being less than politically correct. And, yes, Google® has the legal right to do this, unless they did it because Zero Hedge© is transgender.

No, I don’t have examples, but these are commenters, not ZH© staff. I jumped in to see the comment section on a typical post that I thought might be incendiary. Would all the comments be safe to repeat at work? No. Have I seen worse comments on Twitter®? Yeah, a lot worse. I’ve seen worse commentary on Yahoo® news stories.

Zero Hedge™ has already been banned “permanently” once by Twitter©, and then reactivated. The reason given was that Zero Hedge® had “doxed” a Chinese researcher . . . by publishing information that was already on the Wuhan Institute for Creating COVID Virology’s website. As of now? They’re unbanned. Twitter© called it “an error.”

But it’s clear that they have made someone angry.

How much will it Google’s deplatforming cost Zero Hedge©?

I have no idea.

Google® did give a four star rating to Chernobyl. They would have given it five, but the locals ran out of fingers.

I do know that The Federalist™, another website was threatened with Google® demonetization due to comments on articles like this one (LINK). The Federalist© just shut off comments entirely.

And that just might be the point.

Comments here are (generally) fairly unmoderated. I think that outside of auto-moderated comments, I’ve nuked only one or two comments out of thousands during the life of this blog. I am blessed with some of the smartest, most well read, and politest commenters on the planet. You’re also probably the most physically attractive commenters on any website in existence, and I bet you all have impeccable armpit hygiene to boot. But the comment section gives people a chance to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and get to know each other. It also is a little light on a dark Internet letting you know that you’re not alone.

Even the people who don’t comment benefit from the comments section. For each person who comments, at least 100 other readers don’t comment. But they read what you say. And it’s important to them, and lets them know that they’re not alone, either.

Then there’s Laura Towler.

Laura is a British YouTuber® who is on the Right. On June 6, she sent the following Tweet® and got the reply that follows it:

“Chuffed” is slang that means “happy as a poodle with a pudding pop.”

This all went international. The idea that a company would be so “brave” as to come out in favor of a group that is only supported to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the largest tech companies and most of the largest news companies is really risky.

To boot, Yorkshire Tea© then picked on a (nearly) unknown individual citizen. Brave, indeed – I’m sure that Laura is quite the power to be reckoned with given her 50,000 or so YouTube™ subscribers. And Yorkshire Tea® is so small, being the biggest selling tea in Great Britain (which made 5.5 billion tea bags last year).

It’s like Coca-Cola® decided to pick on some kid going to prom.

But it led me to ask this question: Did any of the companies that sponsor BLM even bother to go to the BLM website?

Outside of the cringing references to “comrades” and “collectivism” on the BLM website, they note that BLM wishes to:

“disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and “collectively” care for one another.
They also want to [free themselves] “from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

This is not the language of a civil rights program, it’s the language of a communist front masquerading as a civil rights program. And it’s not even Halloween yet, and I think that all of the cosplay conventions are on Coronahold.

What’s the best way to kill communists? Communism.

We’ve seen that at C.H.A.Z. and virtually every other protest activity that BLM is tied tightly to Antifa. Imagine that C.H.A.Z. wasn’t six blocks being held by armed Leftists, and instead was being held by a militia from the Right. I’d imagine we’d see National Guard Apache helicopters and the Seattle mayor calling for a neutron bomb strike to make the Hug Box of Seattle safe again.

I’m sure someone will bring up the Wildlife Refuge seizure by members of the Right in 2016. But 26 of the occupiers of the Wildlife Refuge were charged with felonies. Care to take bets on if the C.H.A.Z. occupiers will face any criminal charges? Any of them?

Ms. Towler was able to handle the media storm that followed, and not apologize. Heck, her Twitter® feed now cheekily shows “Disavowed by Yorkshire Tea©” as the lead line. That takes style.

But Laura knew she wasn’t alone, and has weathered international condemnation.

It doesn’t stop there.

Russians call their website censoring the Inter-nyet.

The classic (and very boring) movie Gone With The Wind, the television shows of COPS®, Live PD™, and an episode of (the very funny) Fawlty Towers that first aired on October 24, 1975 have since been either hidden or cancelled. Just like statues, these works of art define who we are as a people. And removing them makes us not more, but less.

Every person who has a statue made out of him has something in common with those works of art – they have faults, especially when viewed through the lens of the 2020s. And removing them or hiding them or tearing them down with mob violence is meant to make you feel alone.

If you’re against police corruption and militarization? You’re not alone.

If you’re against excessive use of force by police? You’re not alone.

If you’re against rioting and mob violence? You’re not alone.

If you mock companies that virtue signal popular causes while avoiding tough issues like the near slave labor they use to produce goods that they offshored from American production? You’re not alone.

If you’re against globalism and collectivism? You’re not alone.

I’m not saying that the position of the Right is always the right position. There are times the Right has been wrong. But the positions of the Right aren’t based in hate – they’re based in a love of freedom, or family, or tradition, or nation, or a healthy desire to be religious.

If those things are important to you?

You’re not alone.

And if you suffer from paranoia, you’re not alone. There’s someone behind you.

If you want this nonsense to stop so you can see economic graphs featuring bikinis?

You’re not alone.

Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: Now For Use By The Right?

“I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the polarity flow through the gate.” – Ghostbusters (1984)

I haven’t figured out how to publicly indicate that I’m against protesting.

I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago, and casually mentioned Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals as a playbook that had been used by the Left back when they controlled very few of the country’s power centers. Top Hollywood® stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Sinatra were openly patriotic – it was the norm. Politics is one reason I think Frank Sinatra would hate 2020, and the other would be whenever he started coughing he’d think he had Crooner Virus.

But the Leftist rot had already started long before the 1960s. It started in academia. Sure, that seemed safe. Let the Leftists work quietly where they had little money. It was thought the most important decision made was what the professor’s wife would wear to the faculty dinner and the most important rumors were about that new cannibal professor, Hannibal Lecturer. But once it took root, Leftism spread from the colleges and out into the streets.

Alinsky started his quest to organize in the 1940s in Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune described his legacy this way:

“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky’s amusement.”

The Tribune was one of the few papers that were negative about Alinsky. By the time Rules for Radicals was published in 1971, the editorial departments of most newspapers had been taken over by Leftists that those “harmless” college professors had indoctrinated. Most newspapers applauded Alinsky by 1972 when they reviewed his book.

Professor Karen wants you to think for yourself, but will grade you based on her politics.

As I’ve documented in previous posts (some that include Stormtrooper® bikini shots and pictures of a lot of slave Princess Leia impersonators) You Are The Resistance, Plus? Lots of Star Wars Bikinis and American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny, the Left has taken control of the following sectors of life, not only in the United States, but also in most of the Western world:

The K-12 educational system.
Colleges and Universities.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The psychological establishment.
The American Medical Association.
All mainstream news media.
All mainstream entertainment media.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

Professor Warren now explains why free speech doesn’t apply to you.

One of the methods the Left used to obtain power was the vigorous application of Alinsky’s Rules. Here they are – along with my annotations:

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Most of the Leftist power is based on fear – fear of what they might do. That’s the reason the takeover of the media was so important to them – they use it to divide and minimize people on the Right so feel that they are as alone as a Joe Biden basement thought.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Which may explain the rioting and violence of the Left in the riots today. They’re not good at building things, but they sure can hit a plate glass window with a brick from thirty yards.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – The idea of the riots is to go beyond every expertise. It has been decades since a president had to deal with riots across the country, and even then, they weren’t all at the same time.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – For instance, Christians must be made to live up to Christian principles – that’s the example Alinsky himself used.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – Saturday Night Live® used to make fun of politicians on the Right and Late night comedians used to make fun of the Right and Left. Now? Only the Right is mocked, and (for reasons I’ve explained before Why The Left Can’t Meme) even then, poorly.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – Whatever it is, it should give them emotional payoff – the people crying at the Trump protests early on were an example – they enjoyed feeling the pain and rage. And as we’ve learned in 2020, who doesn’t love riots?
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Sit ins? That’s so 1960’s. Burning down Wendy’s®? That’ll teach them to, um, exist.
“Keep the pressure on.” – Ideally, it should be one event followed by another – don’t give your target a chance to think straight
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – Alinsky threatened to do things – all of the time. The word “threat” appears 38 times in Rules for Radicals. Often he would leak the threat of a plan, and never even have to do it as the opposition gave in to the threat alone.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Back to point 8 – think of things that can be kept up for a long, long time. Riots in the spring and summer nights can go on for months. In December in Minnesota? Not so much.
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – A great example of this is how BLM has kept the narrative moving about police violence against blacks, when the truth is, statistically, that blacks are shot less often than their level of police involvement would indicate, and whites are shot more But push it long enough?
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – The Left no longer does this – rather than have a constructive alternative, they want things like “removal of the systems of white supremacy” and “defunding of the police.”
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II and now Trump. It’s hilarious that they thought W. was the anti-Christ, and Romney was the Devil when they are now nearly saints of the Left.

Sometimes, you can hear the “Reeeeee” from here . . . .

But can the Right use the same playbook? Absolutely. And they are.

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – The Left is really afraid of the Right, and fear the most the Right creating a coalition in the same way the Left has. They will do anything to stop that. Sadly, we on the Right seem to be very, very picky on who is in the foxhole with us. A heretic on one point? The biggest power the Right has is in joining together.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Protesting violently isn’t in the Right’s DNA. We have jobs. Rioting isn’t in the Right’s expertise. Planning is. Communicating is. Through years of necessity, we’ve also learned to meet quietly.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – Memes are a good example. The Left ceased to be funny in 2004, and ceased to any sense of humor around 2012, so using memetic warfare is nearly as unfair as playing Twister® with a colorblind super model.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – /pol/, the politically incorrect part of 4chan, did exactly that when they posted signs around Seattle telling the homeless that CHAZ would have free food for them. “No borders” and “sharing” were in rules for CHAZ, so, they ran out of food on day two. Plus? It was hilarious – point 5.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – This, in part, explains why I write some of the things I do. It was particularly satisfying the day I saw one of my memes being made fun of by Leftists on Reddit®. They don’t fight back unless you’re over the target.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – I love poking fun at the Left, because I know that it bothers them. I enjoy it. Other things I see people on the Right enjoying are planning and organizing and communicating and moving away from California.
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Expecting things to go back to “normal” isn’t working for the Right. You can come up with other examples of these – but in large part the playbook needs to be re-written.
“Keep the pressure on.” – The closest that the Right has come to doing this is The Donald himself and his use of Twitter® as a continual agency of chaos. He pokes. He prods. He shakes things up and looks for advantage. He’s had Democrats so tied up in nots they said that Haiti was a paradise.
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – The Right hasn’t been very good at making threats or even having a cohesive plan.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Again, outside of Trump, there has been little pressure made on the Left, and next to no organized pressure on the mainstream Left. When has the idea of freedom of speech been used against the Left in an organized way on a college campus? This started with academia, and a good solution will leave college departments where the Leftists lurk defunded. Imagine a Grievance Studies professor having to look for a real job because they violated the campus speech code?
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – Opposition to illegal immigration is just one issue of the Right that, if it were pushed is a winner. There are others.
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – What is it that the Right wants? Do we know?
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Groundwork has been made with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her Leftist group, but the Left is expert at this – Justice Cavanaugh is a textbook study, even though they lost.

But what do we want when we have a victory?

Long term, I’m not sure Alinsky’s rules will be enough for the Right as we wander towards Civil War 2.0, but they’re a start, and they’re certainly fun. As I mentioned above, it has lost institution after institution to the Left, and many of those without even a fight. None of this will be quickly won, and the Right must begin to think in decades, and also look to make common cause with people who aren’t exactly fitting some sort of mental ideal for the perfect person on the Right, since they don’t really exists.

Back to the fun.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Tsunami Begins, But You Knew That

“If we can stop him, we shall prevent the collapse of Western Civilization. No pressure.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I liked the ticking of the clock I got from the pawnshop, but in the end it was a second-hand emotion.

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.

In the first issue of the Civil War Weather Report, I put together ten steps to a new civil war. I did not expect that on the one year anniversary of that first report we’d move from step 6 nearly to step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight.

We are very, very close. I debated internally more than a bit whether we were at an 8. or a 9. this month. I finally decided to stay at an 8., despite multiple jurisdictions doing everything but arming the rioting faction of the protest movement with automatic firearms and bullhorns that make them all sound like Gilbert Gottfried. It is clear we are at least an 8., and you will see in the graphs section that our Wilder Violence Index has reached new highs.

In this issue: Front Matter – You Knew Where This Was Going – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Balkans or Caesar Might Be The Best Case Scenario – 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.

You Knew Where This Was Going

The most popular posts on this site have been about the political state of the country. The Civil War Weather Reports aren’t my usual form of post, but have proven to be very popular. I’m sure it’s not just for graphs featuring bikinis. Well, at least not only because of the bikinis.

I think the reason these posts are popular is simple: many people could sense the fragile peak that it seems all of Western Civilization is perched on. Whether it is a conscious review of the surrounding culture or just a feeling in the pit of the stomach when confronted with an outrageous news article, something’s just not right. Society has been changing by increments over the years, but those changes are coming faster and faster and faster.

Claire Wolfe, the groundbreaking and iconic Freedom blogger said it very well at her place last week (LINK):

Each day I think I’ve processed the latest craziness enough to blog something coherent. Useful even. But then new waves of craziness wash over the world. I don’t know what to say. I can’t write good sense against the onslaught of the crazy. I don’t know how civilization is holding together under tsunamis of crazy.

But then, of course civilization isn’t holding together — and I’m not just talking about the one-two punch of totalitarian don’tleaveyourhouseism followed without pause by riotandlootallyouwantism.

Chains of rapid-fire events and chaos like this are not generally the friend of those that love freedom. The Russian Revolution promised:

Peace, through ending World War I,
Food, because Communists are well known to produce excess food,
Land, whereby peasants would get parts of land owned by the wealthy,
Minimum wages,
Maximum working hours,
Running factories by elected worker representatives and
Lots of other promises.

In the end, up to 12,000,000 people (mainly civilians) died in the civil war that followed, and the promises that were made were largely ignored. The Bolsheviks said and promised anything to get a force of disaffected behind them. Not sure if this sounds familiar to AOC fans?

Hey girl, are you the French Revolution? Because I keep imagining you sans-culottes.

I get a sense that the Left today is up to the same trick. They’ve “created” media events and have managed them to get power – political power and power in the street. Some of the Leftists may even be stupid enough to believe that there are magic economic levers that they can move to keep the promises they’re making. In reality, they really don’t care: it’s all about the power.

Lenin’s reintroduction into Russia and subsequent funding from foreign sources bring George Soros to mind. Soros continually funds groups in the United States that are directly opposed to actual freedom. The protesters and their associated rioters have a structure that has been funded and provisioned with everything from water and medical supplies to pre-staged bricks and gasoline. Not saying that George is funding those directly, but . . .

Free Speech: Endangered Species – WRSA is Down

“Uncomfortable silences.” – Pulp Fiction

Censor for the children! They shouldn’t think for themselves, right?

I originally was going to write a lighthearted post tonight about the economics of deflation, banking, and the Fed that shows that deflation is the thing that scares the Powers That Be the most right now. Who knows, there might even have been bikini economic graphs. I mean, the world loves humor about banking and economics, right? I hear it’s right up there with dentistry jokes.

But deflation is not what scares the Powers That Be. It’s information that scares them more than anything. What information? Anything counter to the Narrative.

Western Rifle Shooters Association (WRSA) was taken down on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Here’s the message from Concerned American, the proprietor of the site:

POST #1 WRSA REBOOT CYCLE
1955E 2JUN2020

That Would Be Called An “Indicator”

One of the early goals of all Red revolutions is the seizure or destruction of all information distribution outlets.

There is only one truth to the Communist: that day’s party line.

Woe unto those who do not adhere.

The second iteration of the Western Rifle Shooters Association (WRSA) blog, hosted by WordPress, was nuked today.

While it is a loss, it was a deliberate sacrifice of a player to increase situational awareness.

The Reds are on the move.

The prize is the former United States of America.

The Red cares not about race, except to the extent it can and is used to befog the naive about the Party’s real goals.

WRSA was, first and always, a freedom advocacy site.

It was shot out of the saddle today by an arm of the Communist enemy propaganda machine.

Their attack did not kill WRSA.

Nor did it kill a single one of its followers.

The totalitarian bastards really can’t stop the signal.

Take heart, not just in this tiny skirmish but in the overall struggle to save the West, from WRSA’s final masthead:

“This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

― Winston Churchill

Forward.

I think he might need some Chapstick®.

His older blogsite is here (LINK). I don’t know if he’ll be posting again there, but I can certainly bet he’s not done. He built the 127,000^th most popular website in the United States, before WordPress® nuked his paying subscription from orbit without explanation.

This is an example of the desire on the Left to make the First Amendment irrelevant. You can say anything you want, but if they won’t let you say it where people will hear you, does it matter? Another way to say that is, “If a blogger memes in the forest, will anyone LOL?”

The libertarian take on censorship by corporation is a fairly solid version of “if it’s a private company, they can do what they want.” Frankly, it’s a view that I subscribed to a while back. But a while back, Twitter® also tried to humorously advertise itself as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” And they still are big fans of free speech. Well, they’re fans of free speech, as long as you are on the Left. James Woods popped out the following tweet last year:

Woods was banned until some flunky at Twitter™ removed the offending Tweet® for him.

I started out on Twitter™ to try to build an audience for this blog. It worked, sort of. I’m not sure that I caught many long term readers there, but it gave me enough hits to keep me writing and not giving up until a real audience built. Concentrating on writing more better might have been part of building an audience as well. And maybe adding bikini graphs didn’t hurt.

Okay, here’s one.

But I noticed over time that my voice was “turned down” on Twitter©. Tweets® that got tons of impressions (78,000 for one!) dropped off to just a few as my voice was progressively (word choice not an accident) muted. By then, I didn’t have to trick people to come to the blog with free candy. I did know, however, that something that Twitter™ had done lowered the number of people who got to share in my nuggets of wisdom.

Twitter© isn’t just a fun thing anymore. Yes, it’s a private company. But it has developed into a public square. Do I advocate government control of Twitter™? Not really. But censoring people based on political viewpoint is wrong, especially when James Woods gets banned but the Islamic Council of Iranian Chowderheads makes threats about sinking the Navy of United States. Iran is being responsible, but James Woods is the terrorist?

An early version of the Trust and Safety Council.

To ban someone is no longer a private affair – it effectively removes their opinion (and a lot of uncomfortable facts) from the public stage.

And that’s wrong. Freedom of speech isn’t about supporting popular opinions, like all of the “brave” companies like Apple™ that have tossed up a pride flag or Sony® black square as their profile picture. That’s not brave.

Apple© and Sony® protesting the child and slave labor that manufactures their games and gizmos in an unending series of 12 hour days, 28 days a month? Now that would be brave, especially since they hired those companies.

Facebook™ is a similar beast. I use Facebook© only very sporadically, say, four times a year. But the rest of the world seems to use it. To ban Alex Jones? It’s like banning the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment™ because people might think the wrestling matches are real.

But at least I hear the benefits are good.

I cannot hold WordPress® to the same standard as platforms like Twitter™ and Facebook©. There are other places that provide hosting. I do, however, find fault with WordPress®. If bakers have to bake a wedding cake for gay people, yes, WordPress™ should have to host a blog of someone who is an advocate for freedom.

Where do I find a nice profile icon for that?

Well, there it is. I really wanted to write that post on fractional reserve banking. Next Wednesday, I promise. I know you can’t wait. You say you come here for the bikinis, but I know it’s really all about the economic analysis.

Your one job? Be a good person.

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Tightpants aims to misbehave.

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

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

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

That job is to be a good person.

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

So, be a good person. That’s it.

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

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

No editing required.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brought to you by the Minnesota Vistor and Tourism Bureau.

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

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

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

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

Jim West.

But make sure you get your sweeping done first.

Healthcare, Unemployment, and Soviet Nails

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.” – Firefly

But that’s not as bad as the unemployed jester: he’s nobody’s fool.

As I looked at the headlines today, two of them jumped out at me. The first was this (capitalization same as the original):

82% WANT MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS . . . . (LINK to actual study)

As usual, there are some misleading bits behind the headline. If you clicked through the fluff pieces (several times) to the actual study on the stimulus checks that I linked to, it really says that 82% want stimulus checks as long as the government is mandating a shutdown. That’s a lot more reasonable, since it’s not asking for that money, you know, forever. Except in Michigan, where I believe governor will keep the economy in shutdown mode until scientists develop immortality.

So, the headline was misleading, and people didn’t want the money forever. That made me happy. Until I read the real story embedded in the study and saw this statistic:

74% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats agree that we should move to a universal health care system.

Stick a fork in it, folks, like a doughnut around Stacey Abrams, it’s done. If the numbers in that study are correct, regardless of how you or I might feel about it, nationalized health care in some form is now probably just a matter of details and whose name goes on the package.

At least the Washington Post can explain that unusual eclipse on the East Coast now.

I could spend a lot of time talking about how and why we got here, including discussion of how the system we have is just like Michael Moore: it incorporates the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of socialism. But I won’t. This battle, I think, is effectively lost. A shrewd candidate for president will make this a centerpiece of his campaign, and the only difference will be if the final version is called TrumpTreatment© or BidenBenefits®.

Obamacare has served the only purpose it was designed for: it is the capstone of a series of Federal mandates since the 1980s that have served to make the costs of healthcare in this country so incredibly high that literally anything is better than the status quo. Healthcare in the United States doesn’t in any way mimic a free market, except in plastic surgery and laser eye surgery. Those costs have gone down because insurance generally doesn’t pay for them and doctors have to actually compete. I guess the other nice thing about being a plastic surgeon is that they get to see new faces every week.

Healthcare should remind everyone of the mantra of the Left: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This crisis has been made through successive actions of the Left to make hospitals have to charge responsible people for every drug addled meth and crack head and pregnant illegal alien that drools or waddles their way into the emergency room. But there’s enough blame for everyone, since the corporatist wing of the Republican party has taken action to ensure that insulin makers can charge Americans six times the cost for a life giving drug (insulin) in the United States as compared to our neighbors to the North.

If the first headline wasn’t bad enough, the second headline was:

68% Of Unemployed ‘Eligible For Payments Greater Than Lost Earnings’ . . . . (LINK to study, and not three layers of journo-fluff)

This is one with which the extended Wilder family has some experience. Alia S. Wilder was recently working from her home composing Mongolian throat-singing mix tapes for the black market. Normally she does this in an office, but due to BatFlu, she was sent to work from home. Her boss called and told her they were temporarily shutting down the business.

The cat then told me, “Snitches get stitches.” I had no idea he was closely watching health care policy.

Since the market they serve of throat-singing aficionados was entirely shut down by Corona-chan, it was a logical business move to make. Alia S. Wilder was also one of the first people to get called back. Good? Well, yes. But she had to take an income cut to do so, since her job pays less than unemployment insurance plus the $600 a week that Uncle Sugar was kicking in.

I was proud of her that her complaint level was exactly zero: she was roaring and ready to get back to work. Those mix tapes won’t make themselves, after all. But how many people would just love to stay home and collect the WuFlu bucks? Get paid for doing nothing? It must be that “new normal” that people keep talking about.

I actually understand the reason people would like free money, and would prefer to stay home and eat nachos and smoke weed on Gram-gram’s couch rather than deliver pizzas. However, the $600 a week bump sets up bad incentives: I read one story of a guy who needed pizza delivery dudes, and no one would take the job because unemployment paid so much more. I can see that, given the horrible hiccup in the economy, why the government would want to print lots and lots of money encourage consumption, but the increased payments have essentially raised the minimum wage to somewhere between $20-$25 just to break even with current unemployment payments. How much more would you have to pay people to actually work?

For markets to work, there needs to be some sort of connection between supply and demand. If you pay people $1000 a week, how many will think that working for $1200 a week is a good idea? Not many. And I’m willing to bet that if the economy is as bad as I think it is, the Federal government will continue the payments for longer than the current end date in July. During the Great Recession, the Federal government continued unemployment insurance for 100 weeks. Two years.

What kind of distortion will that have on the labor market?

Yes, this happened on a CNN special last week.

In thinking about this story, I was reminded of an old story that I heard about the Soviet Union:

There was a Soviet nail factory. In the factory, the communist leaders from Moscow called and told the manager, “Make sure you increase production of nails! You must increase the tonnage for Comrade Stalin!”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make very, very large nails this month.”

Accordingly, the factory had a record production month in tons of nails produced. The communist leaders printed a picture of the factory manager receiving an award. But soon enough, the leaders in Moscow realized that not a lot of people needed nails that weighed two pounds each. The communist leader called the manager back. “The tonnage was good. But this month, make more nails for Comrade Stalin.”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make many very, very, small nails this month.”

Not my translation. The KGB spy school told me to pretend I don’t speak fluent Russian.

I wasn’t able to verify the basics of this story, but I did find the accompanying cartoon which at least hints that the Soviets themselves were aware that something was broken in their system. And I did find a story about a Soviet plant that made a machine to help make tires. They developed new technology that allowed the machine to make tires much faster, but refused to make it.

Why?

Then they would make fewer machines. In a market-based economy the company would celebrate their new, better machine and use it as a selling point to beat their competition. But in this case, the incentives were to make more machines rather than make better machines.

This is the primary failure mechanism of socialist systems. They have bad incentives. I read once that in Great Britain that people ring up the ambulance to take them to the doctor. Why not? It’s “free,” right?

Once a “free” system takes hold, however, it will never leave until the economy collapses under all the “free” money and “free” services. Why? People become dependent on free things. If you want to make someone dependent on you? Give them things. Proof?

Ever hear your parents say, “My house, my rules?” Giving is a form of control.

I think the last person I saw driving this windowless van was named Bernie.

Freedom comes from saying “no” to free things, but I have the sense that people are going to be saying yes to free stuff.

Always think back to what Admiral Ackbar says at a time like this:

The Leftist War on Culture: Comedy Edition

â€œIÂ wokeÂ up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.â€ – Anchorman

I hear William Shatner hates one pie:Â Pe-Khaaaaaaan.

I like movies.Â And I like television.Â Up until recently, I used to read a lot of fiction books; now I read a lot more non-fiction.Â Together, along with the news we read and the Internet sites we visit, this defines the core of our mythology, our legends, and our shared experiences outside of religion.

When The Mrs. watches movies she likes to watch them for characters â€“ how people react and change based on the circumstances that they encounter.Â That seems to fascinate her, probably because The Mrs. is a human.Â Me?Â I like to watch movies for new ideas and new information.Â Billions of people have fallen in love, but how many have thought of a new idea?Â Ideas catch my interest, which might explain The Mrs.â€™ cute nickname for me:Â Soulless Human-Looking Robot.

But movies today, frankly, suck.Â Theyâ€™re awful.Â Not all of them, mind you, but a big majority.Â Seeing a good one is rare enough today that it actually surprises me when I see one that I like.Â For the most part, what passes for a â€œgoodâ€ movie is just one that doesnâ€™t actively disappoint me.Â The Mrs. rarely goes to movies, and even before Coronavirus made NetflixÂ® the king of media, she just stopped going to movies in about 2014 or 2015.

I had to stop talking to a friend who said that NetflixÂ® was the cheapest streaming service.Â I just canâ€™t be around a Huluâ„¢-cost denier.

About that time was another event:Â the functional disappearance of an entire movie genre: Â the comedy.Â What happened to comedy?Â Since the year 2000, there have been a total of 45 comedy movies that have grossed over $100 million (in adjusted 2000 dollars) at the box office.Â The last comedy to hit this threshold was in 2015.Â So, the numbers prove it â€“ comedy is currently deader than a Clinton opponent.

The strange reason that this is happening is that comedy movies just arenâ€™t funny anymore.Â Itâ€™s not that Iâ€™ve lost my sense of humor:Â objectively the movies arenâ€™t funny.Â Audiences have largely abandoned them.Â America clearly has an appetite for humor, there were 45 comedy films that that made over $100 million between 2000 and 2015, but the numbers keep dropping over time:Â comedy movies used to take in about 20% of the box office.Â In 2019, comedy was down to 6.6% of the market.

So, why are comedies not funny anymore?Â The audiences havenâ€™t changed:Â teenage boys are still teenage boys.Â So, it must be the movies.

When you look at the movies, theyâ€™ve gone from broad comedies that focus on making people laugh to either comedies that are created to push a particular viewpoint or comedies that depend on getting humor from extremely explicit sexual content.Â Certainly, there are good sexy jokes â€“ remember youâ€™re reading a post from the person who invented bikini economics graphs.Â But, like anything, thereâ€™s a line.Â And Iâ€™m not alone in being happy that Zack and Miri Make a Porno could have just as easily been titled Zack and Miri Make No Money since it did so poorly at the box office.

Another reason is that comedy is dangerous to the Left.Â To paraphrase a J. Michael Straczynski and Neil Gaiman Babylon 5 script, â€œComedians say serious things and get a laugh, politicians say silly things and people take them seriously.â€ Â Â At some level, great comedy is about telling a truth, but an uncomfortable truth.Â Thatâ€™s the reason that Stalin didnâ€™t allow real humor in the Soviet Union.Â Itâ€™s the same reason that Jerry SeinfFeld said he wonâ€™t do comedy shows at colleges â€“ the woke crowd wants to hear humor, but only the jokes they find politically acceptable, regardless of the truth.

Obligatory Stalin Joke:Â One day Stalin decides to go to the cinema in disguise and hear what people are really saying about him.Â When the newsreel comes on the audience stands up and applauds each time he appears on the screen. Stalin is pleased. Modestly, he himself remains seated. After a few moments the man next to him leans over and whispers:Â â€œMost people feel the same way you do Comrade, but youâ€™ll be safer if you stand up.â€

Sadly, the failure of comedies seems to apply to movies as a whole now â€“ the movie industry growth has been stagnant since 2012 or so.Â I think itâ€™s tied back to the same reason, Leftists feeling that movies should be explicit carriers of Leftist politics.Â Movies can have a point, but they have to have the politically correct point.Â They can be poignant or uplifting, but only in a Leftist-approved way that involves someone saying, â€œBut Iâ€™m a lesbianâ€ during the movie, though most of the time the other patrons tell me to shut up.Â Movies are crafted so they donâ€™t allow the audience to come to conclusions outside of those approved by Hollywood and the globalist Left.

And itâ€™s been getting worse.Â By most measures, the last three Star WarsÂ® films have been the worst of the franchise.Â Sure, The Force AwakensÂ® got big box office numbers, but that was primarily because people were so excited to see a new Star Warsâ„¢ film that they would have spent money to go see ChewbaccaÂ® having lice combed out of his hair for three hours.

There was a movie about ChewbaccaÂ® making vases out of porcelain.Â It was called Hairy Potter.

But Star WarsÂ® became something different after DisneyÂ© bought it.Â It became woke.Â The main character was a girl.Â Iâ€™m okay with that.Â But in this case, the girl had powers far in excess of, well, anyone.Â After merely touching a lightsaberÂ® and never having trained with it, she defeated a man who had trained with one for years.

Yeah.Â I would rather have watched the Wookieâ„¢ be de-loused.

To cap off The Force Awakens, a thoroughly uncharismatic group of characters with no chemistry defeated yet another Death Starâ„¢ in a way that was so memorable I canâ€™t recall it.Â Heck they might have unplugged it for all I remember, but I certainly do know that Luke SkywalkerÂ® didnâ€™t drop a torpedo into a reactor exhaust. Â Â When I left the theater after The Force Awakens, I was done with Star WarsÂ®.Â For good.Â What had generally been a dependably fun series of movies was gone.

But having a series of movies is now the norm.Â Movies had become a batch of either remakes of old movies or movies in a franchise.Â Since 2000, 119 movies (at least) have been released as part of a franchise.Â 23 of those are MarvelÂ® franchise movies.Â And, Iâ€™ll admit that in many instances those franchise movies have been entertaining.Â But after 23 movies, I think weâ€™ve reached Peak Marvelâ„¢, since theyâ€™re quickly becoming woke, too.Â The final straw for many will probably be Thor, who is reportedly going to be replaced by a woman, and IronmanÂ®, who will be replaced by Nic Cage in a suit he made out of old Coors Lightâ„¢ cans.

Understand â€“ itâ€™s not enough to create a new character, the Left wants to destroy existing characters by replacing them utterly:Â 2016â€™s Ghostbusters is another example.Â I think these changes are because Hollywood simply cannot help itself.Â For the longest time they were content to make money while slowly changing culture to the Left.Â Now?Â The message that seems to be seeping in is that there is a need to pay for the sins of humanity even if it costs the studio money.Â Who should pay for those sins?Â Well, not the filmmakers.Â Really, itâ€™s just the people they donâ€™t like.

Donâ€™t forget, celebrities are just like us!

And why?Â There has been a push to replace the dominant culture in the United States.Â That includes replacing old taboos with new ones that reflect the new culture the Left is seeking.Â The main idea is that you can do anything and there should be no repercussions.Â This especially includes sex, where the purely physical has been raised to the level of the sacred and there is no whim that shouldnâ€™t be not only tolerated, but celebrated.Â This also includes career choices, where every Grievance Studies graduate with no discernible skills should be given a living wage, complete health care, and the respect that they feel that they deserve, paid for by you and me.

This is really an infantilizing of the culture:Â itâ€™s the promotion of the idea that whatever urge you have should be indulged.Â The Mrs. described it as a culture of spoiled children with daddy issues:Â the fault is with their boss.Â Or their boyfriend/girlfriend.Â Or their parents.Â Or society.Â Itâ€™s never their fault.

In this instance, itâ€™s easier to blame a Civil War general or a Founding Father than to blame themselves for their condition.Â The result?Â Pull down a statue, and complain about Thomas Jefferson.

I was named after Thomas Jefferson.Â He was named a very long time ago, so you were probably named after he was, too.

This spirit has even invaded books.Â I used to pick up a science fiction book at random in the book store and feel that there was a good chance that Iâ€™d be exposed to new ideas and have fun in the process.Â More recently, a lot of the books have become a slog.Â I wondered if it was me.Â I then picked up some stories written a few decades ago, and was pleased.Â It wasnâ€™t me.Â Those old stories had more ideas and fun in a typical paragraph than most novels do today.Â Today, the novels seem all about preaching and explaining how awful people are.Â Back then, even though we faced a daily threat of nuclear annihilation, those stories were more positive about mankind and our future than the ones I see today.

We are in the midst of a concerted effort by the Left to destroy the culture we live in and the values it stands for.Â Old writers, old statesmen, and old heroes are all being viewed through the lens of the new culture and the new values in an effort to destroy them for sins they never committed.Â The Left understands the stakes: Â until they destroy the old culture and values, they will be judged by the old standards.

And they know they will be found wanting.Â Especially their comedy movies.

Those are just awful.

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet. Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang. Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist. I don’t really think I am. I am certain that I am going to die. I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind. Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead. And the last six weeks our lives? Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters? Not me. Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up. The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned. Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient. For he that is so wants nothing.

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets. I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant. Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college. Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service. Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either. Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work. I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work. I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans. In winter. After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. How bad was that particular plague? It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died. Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too. But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder. Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. There’s virtue in neither of these. There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death. All of us will fail. Suffering? Yeah, that’s going to happen, too. To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live. You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around. There is no particular way your life “should” turn out. Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad. Was there luck in there, both good and bad? Sure, but not as much as you might think.

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad.

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for? Deal with it. And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering. You have electricity. You have Internet. You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating. And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too. You know, while you’re up.

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca. Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses. Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
I’m too busy. Good news! After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
I don’t know how to do ______. Unless it’s differential equations. Then just do what the book says. Nobody really understands differential equations.
Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today. What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

American Factory and Thoughts on the Future American Economy

â€œChina is here, Mr. Burton. The Chang Sing, the Wing Kong?Â They’ve been fighting for centuries.â€ â€“ Big Trouble in Little China

I mean, the camo looks so good, maybe they wanted to show it off?

I watched the documentary American Factory this weekend, and it seemed like a good jumping off point to discuss several topics â€“ globalization, employment, and JengaÂ®.Â In 2008, the General MotorsÂ® plant in Dayton, Ohio was closed during GMâ€™sÂ© bankruptcy.Â According to American Factory (now streaming on NetflixÂ®), 10,000 people in the Dayton area lost their jobs when the factory closed.Â In this current climate, Iâ€™m trying to come up with more unemployment jokes, but they all need work.

Fast forward to 2016, and a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass AmericaÂ®, started a new business making windshields for cars in the old GMÂ© plant.Â Fuyao bought the empty factory and spent on the order of $500 million dollars setting up the glass factory.Â Then Fuyao brought hundreds of Chinese supervisors over to start the facility and train the American workers.Â This makes sense â€“ you donâ€™t want to come across an ocean and have an employee like me when I sold used cars.Â One customer, looking at a minivan, asked me, â€œCargo space?â€

I answered, â€œCar no fly.Â Car go road.â€Â Obviously that didnâ€™t go very well.

One of these Chinese supervisors mentioned that he was committed to stay for two years.Â This was a father of two, and heâ€™d receive no extra pay for being away from his family.Â The Chinese supervisors were sleeping four to an apartment with furniture from the offices supplies aisle at Wal-Martâ„¢.Â Living with a roommate is tough.Â One roommate suggested I had schizophrenia.Â The joke was on him â€“ I didnâ€™t even have a roommate.

Poster from the documentary.Â Thatâ€™s it.Â No joke.Â Move along.

Clips from workers talking as they were just starting their work at Fuyao made it clear that the Fuyao jobs were nowhere near the pay of the GMÂ© jobs:Â At GMâ„¢, one worker made about $29 an hour in quality control until the plant closed.Â In the new Fuyao plant, she made less than $13 an hour.Â I talked to a local dog breeder about a summer job for Pugsley.Â She said that she only paid in expensive pure-bred puppies.Â Pugsley thought about it, and decided it was income-petable.

And the work is tougher than the GMÂ® work was.Â The temperature in some parts of the production area was 200Â°F, or about 63 kilograms.Â One worker spent over an hour a shift in ten minute increments in that heat in the furnace room, and the plant safety guy was trying to figure out how to keep him from overheating.Â But that level of heat had a plus side: Â during the filming I saw two hobbits throw a ring in the furnace room.

What surprised me was that the Chinese gave such access to the people making the documentary.Â They caught candid moments with the Fuyao founder, Cao Dewang, (called simply â€œChairman Caoâ€) throughout the documentary.Â There were moments where he was clearly doubtful, arrogant, or out of touch.Â We all have those moments, but most of the time billionaires try to avoid looking stupid in public.Â I mean, except Elon Musk.

I kid.Â I actually admire Mr. Musk, who seems to be able to do what NASA forgot.Â Fly people into space.

On starting the plant, production levels were described as â€œlowâ€ so Fuyao took the step of sending several of its plant supervisors to China.Â The clash of cultures was obvious at the start of the documentary, but it was during the sequence in China that really showed the difference in the way Americans and Chinese do business.

The conflict started at the first meeting.Â All of the Chinese business people were in suits. Â Most of the Americans were in jeans and t-shirts â€“ one of them was wearing a JawsÂ® movie t-shirt.Â In what was probably pretty embarrassing for the Americans, in the next scene you see them wearing Fuyao company logo polo shirts.Â How did that conversation go?Â â€œExcuse me, perhaps you would be more comfortable in a new company polo shirt and not your mustard-covered t-shirt advertising a forty year old movie?â€

But it was far, far beyond just the informal dress thatâ€™s common with line supervisors in a factory.Â One sequence showed all of the employees singing the corporate anthem.Â Another showed line production employees in a line, yelling out productivity slogans and propaganda like Marines responding to R. Lee Ermey when he was a drill instructor.

They were all out of bat.

One of the American supervisors (who had learned Chinese) was bad-mouthing his employees to a Chinese supervisor.Â To me, the American supervisor came across as someone who would do anything to make the Chinese like him â€“ he was a suck-up.Â After one negative comment about his own team, the Chinese supervisor said, â€œYou should all be united and concentrate your efforts.â€Â It was a subtle but nuclear insult â€“ the Chinese supervisor was slamming the American for not being united with his own workers.Â And the Chinese supervisor was right.

So, refresh the page.Â Am I still dead?

And working in China sounds as bad as Iâ€™d expected.Â Workers typically only get one or two days off a month â€“ a five day work week hasnâ€™t made it to China yet.Â The workers also work 12 hour shifts.Â The Chinese want their workers engaged in the company.

In fact, the American supervisors were there for the company annual Chinese New Year party, where the show was put on entirely by the employees.Â And as for engaged?Â There were several marriages performed at the company party.Â One of the Americans was so overcome with the sense of belonging around him that he was as emotional as a teenage girl watching Titanic.Â Me?Â I like my emotions like I like my beer.Â Bottled.

A quick trip through the Fuyao workers union (which is also the companyâ€™s communist party headquarters) showed that the division between company, country, party, and worker is non-existent.Â The Chinese are certain that they are superior to Americans â€“ several times in the film this is stated by Chinese people on camera.Â But they are also very proud of being Chinese â€“ when Chairman Cao was talking to his Chinese employees in America, he told that that no matter where they go, or where they are buried, that first and foremost they will always be Chinese.

China is nationalist, (mostly) ethnically homogeneous, and unambiguously pro-Chinese at the expense of everyone else on the planet.Â Work is for the government and the party.Â Why are the Muslims in China in reeducation camps?Â Because Islam isnâ€™t Chinese.Â China is a country built on unity and Islam isnâ€™t on the menu.Â And if youâ€™re not on board?

Literally.Â Â

Next, Fuyao fired the plant manager when production and profits were too low, but it was probably the lawsuits on safety that sent him over the top.Â The plant manager had been an American â€“ they replaced him with a Chinese guy.Â Iâ€™ve actually seen this in real life in one company I did business with.Â When things werenâ€™t going well, the owners fired the American and replaced him with a person from their country.Â I mean, if youâ€™re going to yell at the guy, you probably donâ€™t want to do it through a translator.

The documentary ended with increasing tensions ahead of a vote to bring in a union.

Iâ€™m torn.Â Nearly every union person Iâ€™ve ever worked with has been the opposite of what I see on television.Â Theyâ€™ve worked hard and with great skill.Â But to listen to a labor organizer for a union talk makes me feel nothing but that I want to keep one hand on my wallet.Â They have a sense of entitlement that seeks to make the worker feel that they are a victim, and to a certain mindset thatâ€™s an easy sell.Â One person who early in the documentary had been so thankful to have a job, any job, had now put himself in the role of a victim at a union meeting.Â Heck, in America we even have unions for pirates â€“ but their claims always end up in arrrrbitration.

As noted above, safety and adherence to American laws wasnâ€™t really a Chinese priority, at least at first.Â But with the union vote on the line, the Chinese gave a $2 per hour raise across the board and the Plant Manager committed to solving most problems in just one day.Â The plant workers voted to reject becoming unionized, by a 2-1 landslide.Â After that, the Chinese terminated several vocal union supporters, but since this wasnâ€™t China, that wasnâ€™t a literal termination.

Some thoughts that this movie brought out:

The Chinese like being Chinese, and like being around Chinese people. They donâ€™t have much use for everybody else on the planet except economically.Â Iâ€™m sure they keep visiting the United States to measure to make sure that their stuff will fit.
A factory worker used to be able to support a family as a sole breadwinner. The same can be said of the skilled trades.Â Immigration (illegal and legal) destroyed this because demand for jobs didnâ€™t increase, while numbers of workers did.Â â€œGreedyâ€ factory owners get blamed, but the reality is open borders means all jobs that donâ€™t require certificates or diplomas are under pressure from about several billion people willing to do it cheaper, especially if it can be done over the phone by â€œBobâ€ from Bangladesh.
Every union worker Iâ€™ve worked with has been awesome. Every union organizer Iâ€™ve ever seen on a documentary has reminded me of a conman.
This documentary showed the aftermath of the outsourcing of American manufacturing, a transition that has been ongoing since 1995.
The next economic transition is upon us. The new jobs that will be created are going to be quite a bit different than the ones disappearing.
The Mrs.â€™ Grandmother would offer her a shiny nickel to rub her corns. Thereâ€™s a job that wonâ€™t be taken away soon.
The documentary ended with discussions on how the Chinese were trying to automate the factory even more â€“ replacing workers with robots. It was less than thirty seconds of the documentary and the equivalent of writing something at the end of the essay that you wanted to write about but forgot.Â Given Chinese recent history with something as simple as eating bats, I imagine that automation will turn into automated killer robots that will kill all of humanity.Â But, hey, productivity is up!!!

I purchased some suspenders a few weeks ago.Â Pugsley immediately pounced.Â â€œWant me to get your varmint rifle, Pa?â€

Iâ€™d like to think that globalization is doomed, however I read a story two weeks ago about a surgical mask and protective equipment maker in Dallas.Â During the Swine Flu wave back in 2012, the owner had expanded capacity to meet with demand.Â What did the buyers do after the rush?Â They went back to sourcing from China.Â The owner was left with high unemployment insurance cost and new equipment that he had to pay for even though it was unused.

This time, the owner was more than happy to expand production, but heâ€™d only do it on a long-term contract.Â Last I heard?Â No takers.

But nah, Iâ€™m sure that weâ€™ll figure out that at least partially, globalization was what made our economy so fragile that a virus could cause it to collapse like a JengaÂ® game played by a drunk Michael J. Fox.

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

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

Wash this.

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

What happens next?

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

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

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

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

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

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

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

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

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

Because Santa’s not real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Hanks?

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